The broad material facts before us are plain enough.  It is the mental facts that have to be unravelled.  It isn’t now a question of “What thing—­what faculty—­what added power will come to hand, and how will it affect our ways of living?” It is a question of “How are people going to take these obvious things—­waste of the world’s resources, arrest of material progress, the killing of a large moiety of the males in nearly every European country, and universal loss and unhappiness?” We are going to deal with realities here, at once more intimate and less accessible than the effects of mechanism.

As a preliminary reconnaissance, as it were, over the region of problems we have to attack, let us consider the difficulties of a single question, which is also a vital and central question in this forecast.  We shall not attempt a full answer here, because too many of the factors must remain unexamined; later, perhaps, we may be in a better position to do so.  This question is the probability of the establishment of a long world peace.

At the outset of the war there was a very widely felt hope among the intellectuals of the world that this war might clear up most of the outstanding international problems, and prove the last war.  The writer, looking across the gulf of experience that separates us from 1914, recalls two pamphlets whose very titles are eloquent of this feeling—­“The War that will End War,” and “The Peace of the World.”  Was the hope expressed in those phrases a dream?  Is it already proven a dream?  Or can we read between the lines of the war news, diplomatic disputations, threats and accusations, political wranglings and stories of hardship and cruelty that now fill our papers, anything that still justifies a hope that these bitter years of world sorrow are the darkness before the dawn of a better day for mankind?  Let us handle this problem for a preliminary examination.

What is really being examined here is the power of human reason to prevail over passion—­and certain other restraining and qualifying forces.  There can be little doubt that, if one could canvass all mankind and ask them whether they would rather have no war any more, the overwhelming mass of them would elect for universal peace.  If it were war of the modern mechanical type that was in question, with air raids, high explosives, poison gas and submarines, there could be no doubt at all about the response.  “Give peace in our time, O Lord,” is more than ever the common prayer of Christendom, and the very war makers claim to be peace makers; the German Emperor has never faltered in his assertion that he encouraged Austria to send an impossible ultimatum to Serbia, and invaded Belgium because Germany was being attacked.  The Krupp-Kaiser Empire, he assures us, is no eagle, but a double-headed lamb, resisting the shearers and butchers.  The apologists for war are in a hopeless minority; a certain number of German Prussians who think war good for the soul,