term I must call my mind was fixed upon my own affairs, not because they were in a bad posture, but because of their fascinating holiday-promising aspect.  I had been obtaining my information as to Europe at second hand, from friends good enough to come down now and then to see us.  They arrived with their pockets full of crumpled newspapers, and answered my queries casually, with gentle smiles of scepticism as to the reality of my interest.  And yet I was not indifferent; but the tension in the Balkans had become chronic after the acute crisis, and one could not help being less conscious of it.  It had wearied out one’s attention.  Who could have guessed that on that wild stage we had just been looking at a miniature rehearsal of the great world-drama, the reduced model of the very passions and violences of what the future held in store for the Powers of the Old World?  Here and there, perhaps, rare minds had a suspicion of that possibility, while they watched Old Europe stage-managing fussily by means of notes and conferences, the prophetic reproduction of its awaiting fate.  It was wonderfully exact in the spirit; same roar of guns, same protestations of superiority, same words in the air; race, liberation, justice—­and the same mood of trivial demonstrations.  One could not take to-day a ticket for Petersburg.  “You mean Petrograd,” would say the booking clerk.  Shortly after the fall of Adrianople a friend of mine passing through Sophia asked for some cafe turc at the end of his lunch.

“Monsieur veut dire Cafe balkanique,” the patriotic waiter corrected him austerely.

I will not say that I had not observed something of that instructive aspect of the war of the Balkans both in its first and in its second phase.  But those with whom I touched upon that vision were pleased to see in it the evidence of my alarmist cynicism.  As to alarm, I pointed out that fear is natural to man, and even salutary.  It has done as much as courage for the preservation of races and institutions.  But from a charge of cynicism I have always shrunk instinctively.  It is like a charge of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of disgraceful calamity that must he carried off with a jaunty bearing—­a sort of thing I am not capable of.  Rather than be thought a mere jaunty cripple I allowed myself to be blinded by the gross obviousness of the usual arguments.  It was pointed out to me that these Eastern nations were not far removed from a savage state.  Their economics were yet at the stage of scratching the earth and feeding the pigs.  The highly-developed material civilisation of Europe could not allow itself to be disturbed by a war.  The industry and the finance could not allow themselves to be disorganised by the ambitions of an idle class, or even the aspirations, whatever they might be, of the masses.

Very plausible all this sounded.  War does not pay.  There had been a book written on that theme—­an attempt to put pacificism on a material basis.  Nothing more solid in the way of argument could have been advanced on this trading and manufacturing globe.  War was “bad business!” This was final.