They perceived the indolence of the English and Russians, they perceived their disregard of science and system, they could not perceive the longer reach of these greater races, and it seemed to them that the mission of Germany was to chastise and correct this laxity.  Surely, they had argued, God was not on the side of those who kept an untilled field.  So they had butchered these old ladies and slaughtered these children just to show us the consequences: 

 “All along of dirtiness, all along of mess,
  All along of doing things rather more or less.”

The very justification our English poet has found for a thousand overbearing actions in the East!  “Forget not order and the real,” that was the underlying message of bomb and gas and submarine.  After all, what right had we English not to have a gun or an aeroplane fit to bring down that Zeppelin ignominiously and conclusively?  Had we not undertaken Empire?  Were we not the leaders of great nations?  Had we indeed much right to complain if our imperial pose was flouted?  “There, at least,” said Mr. Britling’s reason, “is one of the lines of thought that brought that unseen cruelty out of the night high over the houses of Filmington-on-Sea.  That, in a sense, is the cause of this killing.  Cruel it is and abominable, yes, but is it altogether cruel?  Hasn’t it, after all, a sort of stupid rightness?—­isn’t it a stupid reaction to an indolence at least equally stupid?”

What was this rightness that lurked below cruelty?  What was the inspiration of this pressure of spite, this anger that was aroused by ineffective gentleness and kindliness?  Was it indeed an altogether evil thing; was it not rather an impulse, blind as yet, but in its ultimate quality as good as mercy, greater perhaps in its ultimate values than mercy?

This idea had been gathering in Mr. Britling’s mind for many weeks; it had been growing and taking shape as he wrote, making experimental beginnings for his essay, “The Anatomy of Hate.”  Is there not, he now asked himself plainly, a creative and corrective impulse behind all hate?  Is not this malignity indeed only the ape-like precursor of the great disciplines of a creative state?

The invincible hopefulness of his sanguine temperament had now got Mr. Britling well out of the pessimistic pit again.  Already he had been on the verge of his phrase while wandering across the rushy fields towards Market Saffron; now it came to him again like a legitimate monarch returning from exile.

“When hate shall have become creative energy....

“Hate which passes into creative power; gentleness which is indolence and the herald of euthanasia....

“Pity is but a passing grace; for mankind will not always be pitiful.”

But meanwhile, meanwhile....  How long were men so to mingle wrong with right, to be energetic without mercy and kindly without energy?...

For a time Mr. Britling sat on the lonely parade under the stars and in the sound of the sea, brooding upon these ideas.