This war is the greatest the world has ever seen. The vast size of the
armies, the tremendous slaughter, the loftiness of the heroism shown,
and the hideous horror of the brutalities committed, the valour of the
fighting men, and the extraordinary ingenuity of those who have designed
and built the fighting machines, the burning patriotism of the people
who defend their hearthstones, and the far-reaching complexity of the
plans of the leaders--all are on a scale so huge that nothing in past
history can be compared with them. The issues at stake are elemental.
The free peoples of the world have banded together against tyrannous
militarism and government by caste. It is not too much to say that the
outcome will largely determine, for daring and liberty-loving souls,
whether or not life is worth living. A Prussianised world would be as
intolerable as a world ruled over by Attila or by Timur the Lame.

It is in this immense world-crisis that England has played her part; a
part which has grown greater month by month. Mrs. Ward enables us to see
the awakening of the national soul which rendered it possible to play
this part; and she describes the works by which the faith of the soul
justified itself.

What she writes is of peculiar interest to the United States. We have
suffered, or are suffering, in exaggerated form, from most (not all) of
the evils that were eating into the fibre of the British character three
years ago--and in addition from some purely indigenous ills of our own.
If we are to cure ourselves it must be by our own exertions; our destiny
will certainly not be shaped for us, as was Germany's, by a few towering
autocrats of genius, such as Bismarck and Moltke. Mrs. Ward shows us the
people of England in the act of curing their own ills, of making good,
by gigantic and self-sacrificing exertion in the present, the folly and
selfishness and greed and soft slackness of the past. The fact that