lust, so draughty, so vague, so lean--but not before they have had time
to dower with the ah and wo of their infirmity a whole wretched "army
of grand-children." And yet this man of wisdom is on the point, in his
old age, of marrying once again, of producing for the good of his race
still more of this poor human stuff. You see the lurid significance,
the point of resemblance,--you see it? And, O heaven, is it not too
sad? For me, I tell you, the whole business has a tragic pitifulness
too deep for words. But this brings me to the discussion of a large
matter. It would, for instance, be interesting to me to hear what you,
a modern European, saturated with all the notions of your little day,
what _you_ consider the supreme, the all-important question for the
nations of Europe at this moment. Am I far wrong in assuming that you
would rattle off half a dozen of the moot points agitating rival
factions in your own land, select one of them, and call that "the
question of the hour"? I wish I could see as you see; I wish to God I
did not see deeper. In order to lead you to my point, what, let me ask
you, what _precisely_ was it that ruined the old nations--that brought,
say Rome, to her knees at last? Centralisation, you say, top-heavy
imperialism, dilettante pessimism, the love of luxury. At bottom,
believe me, it was not one of these high-sounding things--it was simply
War; the sum total of the battles of centuries. But let me explain
myself: this is a novel view to you, and you are perhaps unable to
conceive how or why war was so fatal to the old world, because you see
how little harmful it is to the new. If you collected in a promiscuous
way a few millions of modern Englishmen and slew them all
simultaneously, what, think you, would be the effect from the point of
view of the State? The effect, I conceive, would be indefinitely small,
wonderfully transitory; there would, of course, be a momentary lacuna
in the boiling surge: yet the womb of humanity is full of sap, and
uberant; Ocean-tide, wooed of that Ilithyia whose breasts are many,