recrudescence of warfare.

Such an inquiry is manifestly the necessary first stage in any world
pacification. So manifestly that, of course, countless others are also
setting to work upon it. It is a research. It is a research exactly like
a scientific exploration. Each of us will probably get out a lot of
truth and a considerable amount of error; the truth will be the same and
the errors will confute and disperse each other. But it is clear that
there is no simple panacea in this matter, and that only by intentness
and persistence shall we disentangle a general conception of the road
the peace-desiring multitude must follow.

Now, first be it noted that there is in every one a certain discord with
regard to war. Every man is divided against himself. On the whole, most
of us want peace. But hardly any one is without a lurking belligerence,
a lurking admiration for the vivid impacts, the imaginative appeals of
war. I am sitting down to write for the peace of the world, but
immediately before I sat down to write I was reading the morning's
paper, and particularly of the fight between the Sydney and the Emden
at Cocos Island.

I confess to the utmost satisfaction in the account of the smashing
blows delivered by the guns of the Australian. There is a sensation of
greatness, a beautiful tremendousness, in many of the crude facts of
war; they excite in one a kind of vigorous exaltation; we have that
destructive streak in us, and it is no good pretending that we have not;
the first thing we must do for the peace of the world is to control
that. And to control it one can do nothing more effective than to keep
in mind the other side of the realities of war.