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manifested under conditions of strife, the spirit of the hero is
fatal in the long run to the spirit of war. Notice, I beg you,
hat I speak of the spirit rather than of the institution of war.
I do so not because my faith will not allow me to contemplate
the disappearance of the institution, and that more rapidly than
those whose illusions have been rudely scattered by the outbreak
of the greatest war that the world has ever seen dare to imagine.
What this European conflagration has surely shown us is that
war can never be henceforth regarded as a problem to be considered
 in isolation from the conditions of which it is a part.
A pacifist, who from morning to night is at strife with his
neighbours and shrinks only from those ghastly manifestations
of its meaning, which mangle his own flesh and strip him of his
accumulated spoils, can never hope, and does not deserve to be
allowed to expect, to be shielded from “red ruin and the breaking
up of laws.” You and I are out for reconstruction, and we must
see to it that reconstruction goes right down to the heart of
things and involves that drastic reform in all human relations—
in the family, the industrial community, the world of commerce,
the fellowship of the sexes, the internal affairs of the State, of
which the brotherhood of nations is the highest and most perfect
flower, and which will antiquate what we call war because it has
dealt with its causes.
If we are to prepare ourselves for the healing work of
reconstruction, we must look into that future which lies beyond
the uncertain date when the last cartridge shall have been fired,
and which our minds seem almost too full with the pressing
concerns of to-day and to-morrow even to attempt to envisage.
But we must look back also behind the immediate circumstances
which plunged us in this appalling desolation. We have to ask
why it was that the world was suddenly faced with a crisis
which, however deeply they might abhor the thought, gave to
many of the nations no alternative but war; why to England,
as it then was, the only possibility, which she was free to
refuse, was not the maintenance of a noble peace, but only the
acceptance of a base and hypocritical neutrality. It is no answer
to say that a wild beast, a madman—use what term you will to
describe the nation and government with whom lay the immediate
responsibility —had broken loose in the midst of a civilized
Europe. The real question is, what was the value of that
civilization which could render such an outbreak possible ?
Why was it that at the fatal hour there was for none of us a
place of repentance ? It is when we begin to ask these questions
that the matter is driven home to ourselves. We believe firmly
in the justice—nay, the sacredness—of the cause which we
‘epfesent; and impartial history may abundantly attest our
claim and bear witness that, if Britain's sons and daughters at
home and beyond the seas had not vied with one another in a