Such was the condition of England in 1914, when Prussia, now at last
armed to the teeth and secure of triumph, stood up before the world, and
solemnly, like one taking a sacrament, consecrated her campaign with a
crime. She entered by a forbidden door, one which she had herself
forbidden--marching upon France through neutralised Belgium, where every
step was on her broken word. Her neutralised neighbours resisted, as
indeed they, like ourselves, were pledged to do. Instantly the whole
invasion was lit up with a flame of moral lunacy, that turned the
watching nations white who had never known the Prussian. The statistics
of non-combatants killed and tortured by this time only stun the
imagination. But two friends of my own have been in villages sacked by
the Prussian march. One saw a tabernacle containing the Sacrament
patiently picked out in pattern by shot after shot. The other saw a
rocking-horse and the wooden toys in a nursery laboriously hacked to
pieces. Those two facts together will be enough to satisfy some of us of
the name of the Spirit that had passed.

And then a strange thing happened. England, that had not in the modern
sense any army at all, was justified of all her children. Respected
institutions and reputations did indeed waver and collapse on many
sides: though the chief of the states replied worthily to a bribe from
the foreign bully, many other politicians were sufficiently wild and
weak, though doubtless patriotic in intention. One was set to restrain
the journalists, and had to be restrained himself, for being more
sensational than any of them. Another scolded the working-classes in the
style of an intoxicated temperance lecturer. But England was saved by a
forgotten thing--the English. Simple men with simple motives, the chief
one a hate of injustice which grows simpler the longer we stare at it,
came out of their dreary tenements and their tidy shops, their fields