situation, but the man of principle has a more rigorous task. Some one
of those peoples is lying or is deceived, and, in the future interest of
mankind, it is imperative to determine and condemn the delinquent. There
is no such thing as an inevitable war, nor does the burden of great
armaments lead of itself to the opening of hostilities. It is certain
that on one side or the other, if not on both sides, there is a terrible
guilt, and it is the duty of Christian or any other moralists, whether
or no they belong to the guilty nations, sternly to assign and condemn
that guilt. It is precisely on this loose and lenient habit of mind that
the engineers of aggressive war build in our time, and we have seen, in
the case of neutral nations and of a section of our own nation, what
chances they have of succeeding. They have only to fill their people and
the world at large with counter-charges, resolutely mendacious, and
many will throw up their hands in presence of the mutual accusations and
declare that it is impossible to assign the responsibility. That is a
fatal concession to immorality, and we must hold that in some one or
more of the combatant nations the Churches have, for some reason or
other, acquiesced in a crime.

The plea is valid only to this extent, that the guilty nations in this
case were notoriously Germany and Austria-Hungary, and therefore one
cannot pass any censure on British Christians for supporting the war. I
have in other works dealt so fully with the guilt of those two nations
that here I must be content to assume it. The general and incessant cry
of the German people, that they are only defending their Empire against
malignant enemies, must be understood in the light of their recent
history and literature. No Power in the world had given any indication
of a wish to destroy Germany; there were, at the most, a few
uninfluential appeals in England for an attack on Germany, but solely on
the ground that it meditated an attack on England, and the accumulated