XVIII. BIRTH CONTROL
INDEX




I


INTRODUCTION

From the point of view of literature, the Great War of to-day has
brought us into a new and closer sympathy with the England of the past.
Dr. Woods and Mr. Baltzly in their recent careful study of European
Warfare, _Is War Diminishing?_ come to the conclusion that England
during the period of her great activity in the world has been "fighting
about half the time." We had begun to look on war as belonging to the
past and insensibly fallen into the view of Buckle that in England "a
love of war is, as a national taste, utterly extinct." Now we have
awakened to realise that we belong to a people who have been "fighting
about half the time."

Thus it is, for instance, that we witness a revival of interest in
Wordsworth, not that Wordsworth, the high-priest of Nature among the
solitary Lakes, whom we have never forsaken, but the Wordsworth who
sang exultantly of Carnage as God's Daughter. To-day we turn to the
war-like Wordsworth, the stern patriot hurling defiance at the enemies
who threatened our island fortress, as the authentic voice of England.

But this new sense of community with the past comes to us again and