It is never easy to think things out clearly and coldly.  But it is hardest of all in the crisis of a great war, when men’s minds are blurred by passionate emotions of sorrow, anxiety, and indignation.  Hence a time of war is the heyday of fallacies and delusions, of misleading hopes and premature disillusionments:  men tend to live in an unreal world of phrases and catchwords.  Yet never is it more necessary than at such a period, in the old Greek phrase, “to follow the argument whithersoe’er it leads,” to look facts squarely in the face, and, particularly, the great ugly outstanding fact of war itself, the survival of which democrats, especially in Great Britain and the United States, have of recent years been so greatly tempted to ignore.

People speak as if war were a new sudden and terrible phenomenon.  There is nothing new about the fact of war.  What is new about this war is the scale on which it is waged, the science and skill expended on it, and the fact that it is being carried on by national armies, numbering millions, instead of by professional bodies of soldiers.  But war itself is as old as the world:  and if it surprises and shocks us this is due to our own blindness.  There are only two ways of settling disputes between nations, by law or by war.  As there is as yet no World-State, with the power to enforce a World-law between the nations, the possibility of war, with all its contingent horrors, should have been before our eyes all the time.  The occasion of this war was no doubt a surprise.  But that it could happen at all should not be a surprise to us, still less a disillusionment.  It does not mark a backward step in human civilisation.  It only registers the fact that civilisation is still grievously incomplete and unconsolidated.  Terrible as this war is in its effect on individual lives and happiness, it ought not to depress us—­even if, in our blindness, we imagined the world to be a far better organised place than it actually is.  The fact that many of the combatants regard war as an anachronism adds to the tragedy, but also to the hope, of the struggle.  It shows that civilised opinion is gathering strength for that deepening and extension of the meaning and range of citizenship which alone can make war between the nations of the world as obsolete as it has become between the nations of the British Empire or between the component parts of the United States.

It was perhaps inevitable that British citizens in particular, removed from the storm centres of Continental Europe, and never very logical in their thinking, should have failed to realise the possibility of another great war, similar to the Napoleonic struggle of a hundred years ago.  For nearly half a century the great European States had been at peace:  and we had come to look upon their condition, and the attachment of their peoples, as being as ancient and as stable as our own.  We had grown used to the map of Europe as it had been left by the great convulsions