instance, when a man who is stocktaking in his business premises
discovers that the house next door is on fire. A great many people who
have never troubled their heads about anything but their own purely
personal and selfish interests are now realising that quite a multitude
of houses about them are ablaze, and that the fire is spreading.

That is one change the war will bring about that will make for world
peace: a quickened general interest in its possibility. Another is the
certainty that the war will increase the number of devoted and fanatic
characters available for disinterested effort. Whatever other outcome
this war may have, it means that there lies ahead a period of extreme
economic and political dislocation. The credit system has been strained,
and will be strained, and will need unprecedented readjustments. In the
past such phases of uncertainty, sudden impoverishment and disorder as
certainly lie ahead of us, have meant for a considerable number of minds
a release--or, if you prefer it, a flight--from the habitual and
selfish. Types of intense religiosity, of devotion and of endeavour are
let loose, and there will be much more likelihood that we may presently
find, what it is impossible to find now, a number of devoted men and
women ready to give their whole lives, with a quasi-religious
enthusiasm, to this great task of peace establishment, finding in such
impersonal work a refuge from the disappointments, limitations, losses
and sorrows of their personal life--a refuge we need but little in more
settled and more prosperous periods. They will be but the outstanding
individuals in a very universal quickening. And simultaneously with this
quickening of the general imagination by experience there are certain
other developments in progress that point very clearly to a change under
the pressure of this war of just those institutions of nationality,
kingship, diplomacy and inter-State competition that have hitherto stood
most effectually in the way of a world pacification. The considerations