intricate causes, seems to me a task for future historians. But a
lover of peace, confronted by the hideousness of war, does best to
try, if he can, to make plain what he means by peace and why he
desires it. I do not mean by peace an indolent life, lost in gentle
reveries. I mean hard daily work, and mutual understanding, and
lavish help, and the effort to reassure and console and uplift. And
I mean, too, a real conflict--not a conflict where we set the best
and bravest of each nation to spill each other's blood--but a
conflict against crime and disease and selfishness and greediness
and cruelty. There is much fighting to be done; can we not combine
to fight our common foes, instead of weakening each other against
evil? We destroy in war our finest parental stock, we waste our
labour, we lose our garnered store; we give every harsh passion a
chance to grow; we live in the traditions of the past, and not in
the hopes of the future.


5


And yet there is one thing in the present war which I do in my
heart of hearts feel to be worth fighting for, and that is for the
hope of liberty. It is hard to say what liberty is, because the
essence of it is the subjugation of personal inclinations. The
Germans claim that they alone know the meaning of liberty, and that
they have arrived at it by discipline. But the bitterness of this
war lies in the fact that the Germans are not content to set an
example of attractive virtue, and to leave the world to choose it;
but that if the world will not choose it, they will force it upon
them by violence and the sword. It is this which makes me feel that