The first, most distinctive thing about this conflict is the exceptionally searching way in which it attacks human happiness.  No war has ever destroyed happiness so widely.  It has not only killed and wounded an unprecedented proportion of the male population of all the combatant nations, but it has also destroyed wealth beyond precedent.  It has also destroyed freedom—­of movement, of speech, of economic enterprise.  Hardly anyone alive has escaped the worry of it and the threat of it.  It has left scarcely a life untouched, and made scarcely a life happier.  There is a limit to the principle that “everybody’s business is nobody’s business.”  The establishment of a world State, which was interesting only to a few cranks and visionaries before the war, is now the lively interest of a very great number of people.  They inquire about it; they have become accessible to ideas about it.

Peace organisation seems, indeed, to be following the lines of public sanitation.  Everybody in England, for example, was bored by the discussion of sanitation—­until the great cholera epidemic.  Everybody thought public health a very desirable thing, but nobody thought it intensely and overridingly desirable.  Then the interest in sanitation grew lively, and people exerted themselves to create responsible organisations.  Crimes of violence, again, were neglected in the great cities of Europe until the danger grew to dimensions that evolved the police.  There come occasions when the normal concentration of an individual upon his own immediate concerns becomes impossible; as, for instance, when a man who is stocktaking in his business premises discovers that the house next door is on fire.  A great many people who have never troubled their heads about anything but their own purely personal and selfish interests are now realising that quite a multitude of houses about them are ablaze, and that the fire is spreading.

That is one change the war will bring about that will make for world peace:  a quickened general interest in its possibility.  Another is the certainty that the war will increase the number of devoted and fanatic characters available for disinterested effort.  Whatever other outcome this war may have, it means that there lies ahead a period of extreme economic and political dislocation.  The credit system has been strained, and will be strained, and will need unprecedented readjustments.  In the past such phases of uncertainty, sudden impoverishment and disorder as certainly lie ahead of us, have meant for a considerable number of minds a release—­or, if you prefer it, a flight—­from the habitual and selfish.  Types of intense religiosity, of devotion and of endeavour are let loose, and there will be much more likelihood that we may presently find, what it is impossible to find now, a number of devoted men and women ready to give their whole lives, with a quasi-religious enthusiasm, to this great task of peace establishment, finding in such impersonal work a refuge from the