that for a little while I was roused from my egotistical broodings
to wider interests. For it seemed that Germany and England were on
the brink of war.

Of all the monstrous irrational phenomena of the former time, war
was certainly the most strikingly insane. In reality it was probably
far less mischievous than such quieter evil as, for example, the
general acquiescence in the private ownership of land, but its evil
consequences showed so plainly that even in those days of stifling
confusion one marveled at it. On no conceivable grounds was there
any sense in modern war. Save for the slaughter and mangling of a
multitude of people, the destruction of vast quantities of material,
and the waste of innumerable units of energy, it effected nothing.
The old war of savage and barbaric nations did at least change
humanity, you assumed yourselves to be a superior tribe in physique
and discipline, you demonstrated this upon your neighbors, and
if successful you took their land and their women and perpetuated
and enlarged your superiority. The new war changed nothing but the
color of maps, the design of postage stamps, and the relationship
of a few accidentally conspicuous individuals. In one of the last
of these international epileptic fits, for example, the English,
with much dysentery and bad poetry, and a few hundred deaths in
battle, conquered the South African Boers at a gross cost of about
three thousand pounds per head--they could have bought the whole
of that preposterous imitation of a nation for a tenth of that
sum--and except for a few substitutions of personalities, this
group of partially corrupt officials in the place of that, and so
forth, the permanent change was altogether insignificant. (But
an excitable young man in Austria committed suicide when at length
the Transvaal ceased to be a "nation.") Men went through the seat