vituperation of the Hebrew prophets--those models for infinite mischief.

The extremist cases pass to the average case through insensible degrees.
We are all probably, as a species, a little too prone to intolerance,
and if we do in all sincerity mean to end war in the world we must
prepare ourselves for considerable exercises in restraint when strange
people look, behave, believe, and live in a manner different from our
own. The minority of permanently bitter souls who want to see
objectionable cities burning and men fleeing and dying form the real
strength in our occasional complicities.

The world has had its latest object lesson in the German abuse of
English and French as "degenerates," of the Russians as "Mongol hordes,"
of the Japanese as "yellow savages," but it is not only Germans who let
themselves slip into national vanity and these ugly hostilities to
unfamiliar life. The first line of attack against war must be an attack
upon self-righteousness and intolerance. These things are the germ of
uncompromising and incurable militarism everywhere.

Now, the attack upon self-righteousness and intolerance and the stern,
self-satisfied militarism that arises naturally out of these things is
to be made in a number of ways. The first is a sedulous propaganda of
the truth about war, a steadfast resolve to keep the pain of warfare
alive in the nerves of the careless, to keep the stench of war under the
else indifferent nose. It is only in the study of the gloomily
megalomaniac historian that aggressive war becomes a large and glorious
thing. In reality it is a filthy outrage upon life, an idiot's smashing
of the furniture of homes, a mangling, a malignant mischief, a scalding
of stokers, a disemboweling of gunners, a raping of caught women by
drunken soldiers. By book and pamphlet, by picture and cinematograph