telling us that we no longer fight duels; and need no longer wage wars. In
short, they perpetually base their peace proposals on the fact that an
ordinary citizen no longer avenges himself with an axe. But how is he
prevented from revenging himself with an axe? If he hits his neighbour on
the head with the kitchen chopper, what do we do? Do we all join hands,
like children playing Mulberry Bush, and say "We are all responsible for
this; but let us hope it will not spread. Let us hope for the happy day
when he shall leave off chopping at the man's head; and when nobody shall
ever chop anything for ever and ever." Do we say "Let byegones be byegones;
why go back to all the dull details with which the business began; who can
tell with what sinister motives the man was standing there within reach of
the hatchet?" We do not. We keep the peace in private life by asking for
the facts of provocation, and the proper object of punishment. We do go
into the dull details; we do enquire into the origins; we do emphatically
enquire who it was that hit first. In short we do what I have done very
briefly in this place.

Given this, it is indeed true that behind these facts there are truths;
truths of a terrible, of a spiritual sort. In mere fact, the Germanic power
has been wrong about Servia, wrong about Russia, wrong about Belgium, wrong
about England, wrong about Italy. But there was a reason for its being
wrong everywhere; and of that root reason, which has moved half the world
against it, I shall speak later. For that is something too omnipresent to
be proved, too indisputable to be helped by detail. It is nothing less than
the locating, after more than a hundred years of recriminations and wrong
explanations, of the modern European evil: the finding of the fountain from
which poison has flowed upon all the nations of the earth.