else; and nearly as many more wait but a summons to leave their homes and join the ranks.  And often it is said that we are on the eve of a universal war.  At the command of a few individuals, at the touch of a few wires, more than five millions of men in the very prime and glory of strength, armed as men never were armed since time began, will arise and will kill civilisation and thought, as both the one and the other have been slain before by fewer hands and less deadly weapons.  Is this reason, or is this law?  Passion rules the world, and rules alone.  And passion is neither of the head, nor of the hand, but of the heart.  Passion cares nothing for the mind.  Love, hate, ambition, anger, avarice, either make a slave of intelligence to serve their impulses, or break down its impotent opposition with the unanswerable argument of brute force, and tear it to pieces with iron hands.

Love is the first, the greatest, the gentlest, the most cruel, the most irresistible of passions.  In his least form he is mighty.  A little love has destroyed many a great friendship.  The merest outward semblance of love has made such havoc as no intellect could repair.  The reality has made heroes and martyrs, traitors and murderers, whose names will not be forgotten, for glory or for shame.  Helen is not the only woman whose smile has kindled the beacon of a ten years’ war, nor Antony the only man who has lost the world for a caress.  It may be that the Helen who shall work our destruction is even now twisting and braiding her golden hair; it may be that the new Antony, who is to lose this same old world again, already stands upon the steps of Cleopatra’s throne.  Love’s day is not over yet, nor has man outgrown the love of woman.

But the power to love greatly is a gift, differing much in kind, though little in degree, from the inspiration of the poet, the genius of the artist, or the unerring instinct and eagle’s glance of the conqueror; for conqueror, artist and poet are moved by passion and not by reason, which is but their servant in so far as it can be commanded to move others, and their deadliest enemy when it would move themselves.  Let the passion and the instrument but meet, being suited to each other, and all else must go down before them.  Few, indeed, are they to whom is given that rich inheritance, and they themselves alone know all their wealth, and all their misery, all the boundless possibilities of happiness that are theirs, and all the dangers and the terrors that beset their path.  He who has won woman in the face of daring rivals, of enormous odds, of gigantic obstacles, knows what love means; he who has lost her, having loved her, alone has measured with his own soul the bitterness of earthly sorrow, the depth of total loneliness, the breadth of the wilderness of despair.  And he who has sorrowed long, who has long been alone, but who has watched the small, twinkling ray still burning upon the distant border of his desert—­the