Some of our public men and politicians must have spent tortured days and nights in those last days of July.  They, too, like the sinner at the mission service, must have seen the judgment of God approaching them.  Of what, avail now were their worldly ambitions and their jealousies?  They too had been smug in their self-complacency, hypocrites, shirkers of truth and stirrers up of strife, careless of consequences.  If only they could have their time over again!  Great God! was this war with Germany an unavoidable horror, or, if the worst came, was there still time to cleanse the nation of its rottenness, to close up its divisions and to be ready for the frightful conflict?

2

All things were changed in England in a day or two.  The things that had mattered no longer mattered.  The Arming of Ulster and the Nationalists, Votes for Women, Easier Divorce, the Craze for Night Clubs—­had any of these questions any meaning now?  A truce was called by the men who had been inflaming the people’s passion to the point of civil war.  The differences of political parties seemed futile and idiotic now that the nation itself might be put to the uttermost test of endurance by the greatest military power in Europe.  In fear, as well as with a nobler desire to rise out of the slough of the old folly of life, the leaders of the nation abandoned then-feuds.  Out of the past voices called to them.  Their blood thrilled to old sentiments and old traditions which had seemed to belong to the lumber-room of history, with the moth-eaten garments of their ancestors.  There were no longer Liberals or Conservatives or Socialists, but only Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen and Welshmen, with the old instincts of race and with the old fighting qualities which in the past they had used against each other.  Before the common menace they closed up their ranks.

3

Yet there was no blood-lust in England, during those days of July.  None of the old Jingo spirit which had inflamed great crowds before the Boer War was visible now or found expression.  Among people of thoughtfulness there was a kind of dazed incredibility that this war would really happen, and at the back of this unbelief a tragic foreboding and a kind of shame—­a foreboding that secret forces were at work for war, utterly beyond the control of European democracies who desired to live in peace, and a shame that civilization itself, all the ideals and intellectual activities and democratic progress of modern Europe, would be thrust back into the primitive barbarities of war, with its wholesale, senseless slaughter, its bayonet slashings and disembowellings—­“heroic charges” as they are called by the journalists—­and its gospel of hatred.  So humanity was still beastlike, as twenty centuries ago, and the message of Christianity was still unheard?  Socialistic theories, Hague conventions, the progress of intelligence in modern democracy had failed utterly, and once again, if this war came upon the world, not by the will of simple peoples, but by the international intrigues of European diplomats, the pride of a military caste and the greed of political tradesmen, the fields of Europe would be drenched with the blood of our best manhood and Death would make an unnatural harvesting.  Could nothing stop this bloody business?