War does not so much tilt the balance as accentuate the difference.  One rich British landowner sneaks off to New York State to set up a home there and evade taxation; another turns his mansion into a hospital and goes off to help Serbian refugees.  Acts of baseness or generosity are contagious; this man will give himself altogether because of a story of devotion, this man declares he will do nothing until Sir F.E.  Smith goes to the front.  And the would-be prophet of what is going to happen must guess the relative force of these most impalpable and uncertain things.

This Braintree-Bocking boundary which runs down the middle of the road is to be found all over the world.  You will find it in Ireland and the gentlemen who trade on the jealousies of the north side and the gentlemen who trade on the jealousies of the south.  You will find it in England among the good people who would rather wreck the Empire than work honestly and fairly with Labour.  There are not only parish boundaries, but park boundaries and class and sect boundaries.  You will find the Bocking-Braintree line too at a dozen points on a small scale map of Europe....  These Braintree-Bocking lines are the barbed-wire entanglements between us and the peace of the world.  Against these entanglements in every country the new spirit struggles in many thousands of minds.  Where will it be strongest?  Which country will get clear first, get most rapidly to work again, have least of the confusion and wrangling that must in some degree occur everywhere?  Will any country go altogether to pieces in hopeless incurable discord?

Now I believe that the answer to that last question is “No.”  And my reason for that answer is the same as my reason for believing that the association of the Pledged Allies will not break up after the war; it is that I believe that this war is going to end not in the complete smashing up and subjugation of either side, but in a general exhaustion that will make the recrudescence of the war still possible but very terrifying.

Mars will sit like a giant above all human affairs for the next two decades, and the speech of Mars is blunt and plain.  He will say to us all:  “Get your houses in order.  If you squabble among yourselves, waste time, litigate, muddle, snatch profits and shirk obligations, I will certainly come down upon you again.  I have taken all your men between eighteen and fifty, and killed and maimed such as I pleased; millions of them.  I have wasted your substance—­contemptuously.  Now, mark you, you have multitudes of male children between the ages of nine and nineteen running about among you.  Delightful and beloved boys.  And behind them come millions of delightful babies.  Of these I have scarcely smashed and starved a paltry hundred thousand perhaps by the way.  But go on muddling, each for himself and his parish and his family and none for all the world, go on in the old way, stick to-your ‘rights,’ stick to your ‘claims’