will not rejoice--as men sometimes do--in the mere lust of domination
and violence. With their keen perception of the little things of life,
and the way in which the big things are related to these, they will see
too clearly the cost of war in broken hearts and ruined homes to allow
their men to embark in it short of the direst necessity.

And through the women I come back to the elementary causes and roots of
the present war--the little fibres in our social life which have fed,
and are still feeding, the fatal tree whose fruits are, not the healing
but the strife of nations. In the present day--though there may be other
influences--it is evident enough that rampant and unmeasured commercial
greed, concentrating itself in a special class, is the main cause, the
tap-root, of the whole business. And this, equally evidently, springs
out of the innumerable greed of _individuals_--the countless fibres that
combine to one result--the desire of private persons to get rich quick
at all costs, to make their gains out of others' losses, to take
advantage of each other, to triumph in success regardless of others'
failures. And these unworthy motives and inhuman characteristics again
spring obviously out of the mean and materialistic ideals of life which
still have sway among us--the ideals of wealth and luxury and
display--of which the horrors of war are the sure and certain obverse.
As long as we foster these things in our private life, so long will they
lead in our public life to the embitterment of nation against nation.
What is the ruling principle of the interior and domestic conduct of
each nation to-day--even within its own borders--but an indecent
scramble of class against class, of individual against individual? To
rise to noisy power and influence, and to ill-bred wealth and riches, by
trampling others down and profiting by their poverty is--as Ruskin long
ago told us--the real and prevailing motive of our peoples, whatever
their professions of Christianity may be. Small wonder, then, if out of