muddle-headed English, Byzantine Russia may form what military
combinations they please: the one thing they cannot form is a Crusade;
and all attempts to represent this war as anything higher or more
significant philosophically or politically or religiously for our
Junkers and our Tommies than a quite simple primitive contest of the
pugnacity that bullies and the pugnacity that will not be bullied are
foredoomed to the derision of history. However far-reaching the
consequences of the war may be, we in England are fighting to shew the
Prussians that they shall not trample on us nor on our neighbors if we
can help it, and that if they are fools enough to make their fighting
efficiency the test of civilization, we can play that game as
destructively as they. That is simple, and the truth, and by far the
jolliest and most inspiring ground to recruit on. It stirs the blood and
stiffens the back as effectively and quickly as hypocrisy and cant and
humbug sour and trouble and discourage. But it will not carry us farther
than the end of the fight. We cannot go on fighting forever, or even for
very long, whatever Lord Kitchener may think; and win, lose, or tie, the
parties, when the fight is over, must fall back on their civil wisdom
and political foresight for a settlement of the terms on which we are to
live happily together ever after. The practicable conditions of a stable
comity of nations cannot be established by the bayonet, which settles
nothing but the hash of those who rely on it. They are to found, as I
have already explained, in the substitution for our present Militarist
kingdoms of a system of democratic units delimited by community of
language, religion, and habit; grouped in federations of united States
when their extent makes them politically unwieldy; and held against war
by the bond of international Socialism, the only ground upon which the
identity of interest between all workers never becomes obscured.