The following Studies and Notes, made during the earlier period of the
present war and now collected together for publication, do not--as will
be evident to the reader--pretend to any sort of completeness in their
embrace of the subject, or finality in its presentation. Rather they are
scattered thoughts suggested by the large and tangled drama which we are
witnessing; and I am sufficiently conscious that their expression
involves contradictions as well as repetitions.

The truth is that affairs of this kind--like all the _great_ issues of
human life, Love, Politics, Religion, and so forth, do not, at their
best, admit of final dispatch in definite views and phrases. They are
too vast and complex for that. It is, indeed, quite probable that such
things cannot be adequately represented or put before the human mind
_without_ logical inconsistencies and contradictions. But (perhaps for
that very reason) they are the subjects of the most violent and dogmatic
differences of opinion. Nothing people quarrel about more bitterly than
Politics--unless it be Religion: both being subjects of which all that
one can really say for certain is--that nobody understands them.

When, as in the present war, a dozen or more nations enter into conflict
and hurl at each other accusations of the angriest sort (often quite
genuinely made and yet absolutely irreconcilable one with another), and
when on the top of that scores and hundreds of writers profess to
explain the resulting situation in a few brief phrases (but
unfortunately their explanations are all different), and calmly affix
the blame on "Russia" or "Germany" or "France" or "England"--just as if
these names represented certain responsible individuals, supposed for
the purposes of the argument to be of very wily and far-scheming
disposition--whereas it is perfectly well known that they really