hard-hearted people, thoughtless people, busy people, and cheerfully-minded people,-priest and Levite, masquer and merchantman, all agreeing to keep their own side of the way-the evil that God sends to warn us gets to be forgotten, and the evil that He sends to be mended by us gets left unmended."

This is just what has happened in reference to the gigantic evil of War. And consequently Europe at the present moment is an armed camp. We have widely lost even Huxley's "real and living belief in that fixed order of Nature which sends social disorganisation upon the track of immorality, as surely as it sends physical disease after physical trespasses." And because we have forgotten that moral laws are as irresistible as physical ones, we think it futile to allude to them. The bare truth being so disagreeable and derogatory, we conspire to ignore or to resent it. "Horribly stuffed with epithets of War," we boast and belaud its pomp and circumstance and glory, till we become prepared to bow in submissive awe and veneration before "the big wars that make ambition virtue." We extol the virility of races, and call upon War, instead of upon Work, to maintain it. We mistake arrogance for valour, and confound honour with revenge. Thus we come to be easily persuaded that "War is an element of order in the world," though order, freedom, civilisation itself, are War's natural prey. And in this twentieth century men are found to assert that War is "established by God," though even in the dawn of history it was understood that no Temple, however "magnifical," could be acceptable to the Almighty, if its builder had "made great wars and shed much blood upon the earth."

To such confusion are we brought by dilating only on the cost of War and armaments, their grandeur or

their futility, while we stubbornly refuse to confess their shame. Most of us seem rank materialists. Those who prate of the power of ideas, nevertheless laugh idealism to scorn. It would appear that only ideas about what is politic and expedient have revolutionary power: so Pilate and Caiaphas are to redeem the world! As our God is always with the big battalions and helpless without them, we hasten to transfer our worship. But now that an economic prophet has arisen to prove that this Divinity of Physical Force has somehow dropt the old power to win prestige or pelf, Dagon has fallen, and we worship we know not what.

Fortunately, however, for future generations, God lives, and the world moves, and man himself has been growing. Despite all materialistic set-backs, the great collective Conscience of civilised mankind has increased in sensitiveness and power of perception. It begins to realise as never before what actually lies behind the moving drama of armies and navies in action. In the soul of the people the fruitful idea is dawning that all the spectacular grandeur with which the idea of War is commonly associated is nothing but its outward visage, whether glorious or grim.

Between these thrilling phenomena and the black reality beneath, the vital distinction is beginning to be drawn. It is, however, a distinction which not a few familiar things are always tending to obscure. The popularity of a certain type of poetry and fiction, the pageantry of war upon the stage, the stirring strains of martial music,-all help to hypnotise the mind. On this account protest is sometimes made against the military display so conspicuous in every

great National Procession, when, moreover, some successful General is usually the cynosure of every eye. It seems, however, very doubtful if this kind of thing has any more harmful effect upon spectators than if it happened to be the custom for the picturesque old Yeomen of the Guard to come from the Tower to take part in a Lord Mayor's Show. As a Show, a fine regiment of soldiers is incomparable. They and their officers alike, as things are, may wholesomely represent not Defiance but Defence.

While the final appeal amongst civilised nations is to the savage arbitrament of Violence, soldiers and sailors, and the physical force they stand for, constitute a Power as necessary for Peace as for War. Nothing whatever is wrong about the soldier or the sailor, except that the evil régime under which the world is groaning compels their maintenance in ruinous numbers chiefly for hypothetical use. Their honoured and ancient calling has produced, from the days of Roman Cæsar and Saxon Alfred to those of Garibaldi, Gordon, and, may we not say ?-George V,^, character of the very highest kind. But no glamour of a great profession can avail to blind us, either to the inherent iniquity of War, or to the inexcusably trivial pretexts which have not seldom sufficed to set men of the most splendid spiritual gifts in battle array against each other.

Therefore it is that the people, who in days of peace bear most of the burden of preparing War, and in days of conflict most of the suffering in waging it, are daily more disposed to turn from all outward and visible appearances to the inward heart of the whole matter. And when mere outward symptoms thus begin to be

clearly distinguished from disease itself, cure is not far off. In this particular case, they are on the road to a recovery too long delayed, who grasp the certain truth that War itself-the real presence of the hideous god-is within the mind of man. When men further come to realise what the phenomena to which War's magic name is given, actually embody and express, the cure will be complete. For War is nothing less than the expression and embodiment of a people's passion, heated to the inhuman point which cries "Evil, be thou my good!

Now this confounding of good and evil, not Milton only but all men recognise as characteristically diabolic. Yet before public opinion in civilised lands ever drifts or plunges into War, this impious confusion must have obsessed the general mind. The German Chancellor would have us believe that the power of producing war has already passed from Kings and Governments to the people themselves. Whether that be so or not, it is certainly shifting in that direction. And Machiavellian subtleties do not appeal to the conscience of mankind. But what that conscience is perfectly capable of understanding is that nothing short of a devilish inversion of right and wrong can actually bring men to " cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of War." No other means, as Nietzsche tells us with neurotic joy, can so call into action " the deep impersonality born of hatred, the conscience born of murder and cold-bloodedness, the fervour born of effort in the annihilation of the enemy, the proud indifference to loss, to one's own existence, and to that of one's fellows," which were leading features of his insane ideal. (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, No. 477.)

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This hateful obsession, which is War's peculiar horror and impiety, human nature in its gradual upward evolution is beginning to face nude and bare. No longer, in exploring some fair city or traversing some fertile land laid waste by war, do men only lament the outward signs of ruin and desolation. Beneath every thought of the pain, the wounds, the carnage of "mortal-staring War," there stirs the ineradicable feeling of something more, and something worse. We reflect on the ravages of disease among the combatants with its ghastly record of mortality rivalling that from the sword, and still the nadir is not reached. Abhorrent and revolting as are these inevitable phenomena of a campaign, that which really sped the bullet and lit the fuse, that which underlies the whole inhuman drama, the invisible spirit of atrocious Evil masquerading as virtuous valour is seen to be more monstrous still. And the century-old warning of the great warrior-philosopher tears anew at our heart-strings: "The passions which break forth in War must already have a latent existence in the peoples."

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If then the essential root of War is Moral Evil; if the slow but sure advance of the much quoted average man to the point where War becomes impossible is a moral process; no proposal could well be more unscientific and illogical than to disconnect the peacecrusade from the powerful sanction of ethics and religion. On the contrary, we have to persuade men to face that side of the question which in fact constitutes the most cogent appeal to their reason and conscience.

"Man is surrounded with mighty powers of nature which he cannot comprehend or withstand: and amidst their beneficent