of hate and the return of old comradeship. Still the estranged brothers
are at daggers drawn. Sometimes the evil done is so great and the
bitterness so keen that the old spirit can apparently never be restored;
but while there is any hope whatever the true heart will keep it alive
deep down, for it must be cherished and kept in mind if the whole beauty
of life is to be renewed and preserved for ever. It is so with nations
as with individuals. Once this is recognised we must be on guard against
a new error, which is an old error in new form, the taking of means for
end. The end of general peace is to give all nations freedom in
essentials, to realise the deeper purpose, possibilities, fulness and
beauty of life; it is not to have a peace at any price, peace with a
certain surrender, the meaner peace that is akin to slavery. No, its
message is to guard one nation from excess that has plunged another into
evil, to leave the way open to a final peace, not base but honourable;
it is to preserve the divine balance of the soul. It may be further
urged that we are engaged in a great fight; that to try to rouse in men
the more generous instincts will but weaken their hands by removing a
certain driving bitterness that gives strength to their fight. Whatever
it removes it will not be their strength. In a war admittedly between
brothers, a civil war, where different conceptions of duty force men
asunder, father is up against son, and brother against brother; yet they
are not weakened in their contest by ties of blood and the deeper-lying
harmony of things that in happier times prevail to the exclusion of
bitterness and hate. When, therefore, you teach a man his enemy is in a
deep sense his brother, you do not draw him from the fight, but you give
him a new conception of the goal to win and with a great dream inspire
him to persevere and reach the goal.


VI