modern Europe, would be thrust back into the primitive barbarities
of war, with its wholesale, senseless slaughter, its bayonet slashings
and disembowellings--"heroic charges" as they are called by the
journalists--and its gospel of hatred. So humanity was still beastlike,
as twenty centuries ago, and the message of Christianity was still
unheard? Socialistic theories, Hague conventions, the progress of
intelligence in modern democracy had failed utterly, and once again,
if this war came upon the world, not by the will of simple peoples, but
by the international intrigues of European diplomats, the pride of a
military caste and the greed of political tradesmen, the fields of
Europe would be drenched with the blood of our best manhood and
Death would make an unnatural harvesting. Could nothing stop this
bloody business?


4


I think the Middle Classes in England--the plain men and women who
do not belong to intellectual cliques or professional politics--were
stupefied by the swift development of the international "situation," as it
was called in the newspapers, before the actual declarations of war
which followed with a series of thunder-claps heralding a universal
tempest. Was it true then that Germany had a deadly enmity against
us, and warlike ambitions which would make a shambles of Europe?
Or was it still only newspaper talk, to provide sensations for the
breakfast table? How could they tell, these plain, ignorant men who
had always wanted straightforward facts?

For years the newspaper press of England had been divided over