A WAR NOTE FOR DEMOCRATS.

“The truth about the present fighting—­well, it cannot be rendered in words significant enough to shock into understanding the people who are looking in the newspapers now for stories of heroism, ’brilliant bayonet charges,’ and the rest of the inducements which sell stories of warfare, but tell us nothing about it.  Perhaps, indeed, there are no words for it.  I doubt whether the sincerest artist, finely sensitive, and with the choicest army of words at his ready and accurate command, could assemble the case.  The mind of a witness in France is not stirred; it is stunned.  One is speechless before the spectacle of men, not fighting in the way two angry men would fight, but coolly blasting great masses of their opponents to pieces at long range, and out of sight of each other, till a region with its wrecked towns and homesteads is littered with human bowels and fragments.  It is possible to value human life too highly, maybe.  But what profit, physical, moral, or economic, can be got from draining several nations’ best male generative force into the clay, I leave it to worshippers of tribal war-gods of whatever church, and to the military minds, to explain.  But unless the democracies of Europe, after settling this business, see to securing such a settlement —­whatever the governing classes desire—­that this Continental waste can never occur again, then one would have to admit human nature is too stupid and base to be troubled over any longer.”—­H.M.  Tomlinson, “English Review,” December, 1914, p. 75.

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PATRIOTISM!

“It would seem, then, that love of our country can flourish only through the hatred of other countries, and the massacre of those who sacrifice themselves in defence of them.  There is in this theory a ferocious absurdity, a Neronian dilettantism which repels me in the very depths of my being.  No!  Love of my country does not demand that I shall hate and slay those noble and faithful souls who also love their country, but rather that I should honour them, and seek to unite myself with them for our common good....

“You Socialists on both sides claim to be defending liberty against tyranny—­French liberty against the Kaiser, Germany liberty against the Tsar.  Would you defend one despotism against another? Unite and make war on both.  There was no reason for war between the Western nations; French, English, and German, we are all brothers, and do not hate one another.  The war-preaching Press is envenomed by a minority, a minority vitally interested in maintaining these hatreds; but our peoples, I know, ask for peace and liberty, and that alone.”—­From Romain Rolland’s pamphlet “Above the Battlefield,” Cambridge, 1914.

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NO PATRIOTISM IN BUSINESS!

The following leaderette is from the Glasgow Evening Citizen for the 15th of January:—­