is a thing too puerile as well as too appalling to be even considered.  And the horror of it all is something more than our nerves will stand.  The best brains and intellects of Europe, the brightest and most promising youths, all the manhood everywhere in Europe to be shrivelled and consumed in a holocaust like this—­it is such a reign of the Devil and Antichrist on earth that it must be banished in perpetuity if civilisation and progress are to endure.  Never again!

UNEXPECTED WAR

How did we get into such a stupid and appalling calamity?  Let us think for a moment.  I do not suppose it would be wrong to say that no one ever expected war in our days.  Take up any of the recent books.  With the exception of the fiery martial pamphlets of Germany, the work of a von der Goltz or a Treitschke, or a Bernhardi, we shall find a general consensus of opinion that war on a large scale was impossible because too ruinous, that the very size of the European armaments made war impracticable.  Or else, to take the extreme case of Mr. Norman Angell, the entanglements of modern finance were said to have put war out of count as an absurdity.  We were a little too hasty in our judgments.  It is clear that a single determined man, if he is powerful enough, may embroil Europe.  However destructive modern armaments may be, and however costly a campaign may prove, yet there are men who will face the cost and confront the wholesale destruction of life that modern warfare entails.  How pitiful it is, how strange also, to look back upon the solemn asseveration of the Kaiser and the Tsar, not so many months ago (Port Baltic, July 1912), that the division of Europe into the two great confederations known as the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente provided a safeguard against hostilities!  We were constantly assured that diplomats were working for a Balance of Power, such an equilibrium of rival forces that the total result would be stability and peace.  Arbitration, too, was considered by many as the panacea, to say nothing of the Hague Palace of Peace.  And now we discover that nations may possibly refer to arbitration points of small importance in their quarrels, but that the greater things which are supposed to touch national honour and the preservation of national life are tacitly, if not formally, exempted from the category of arbitrable disputes.  Diplomacy, Arbitration, Palaces of Peace seem equally useless.

PROXIMATE AND ULTIMATE CAUSES

In attempting to understand how Europe has (to use Lord Rosebery’s phrase) “rattled into barbarism” in the uncompromising fashion which we see before our eyes, we must distinguish between recent operative causes and those more slowly evolving antecedent conditions which play a considerable, though not necessarily an obvious part in the result.  Recent operative causes are such things as the murder