suspicious, irritable, with blood-shot eyes and dripping fangs, ready for the awful word.  England and France crouched watchfully over their bones, growling and wary, but gnawing industriously, while the blood of the dark world whetted their greedy appetites.  In the background, shut out from the highway to the seven seas, sat Russia and Austria, snarling and snapping at each other and at the last Mediterranean gate to the El Dorado, where the Sick Man enjoyed bad health, and where millions of serfs in the Balkans, Russia, and Asia offered a feast to greed well-nigh as great as Africa.

The fateful day came.  It had to come.  The cause of war is preparation for war; and of all that Europe has done in a century there is nothing that has equaled in energy, thought, and time her preparation for wholesale murder.  The only adequate cause of this preparation was conquest and conquest, not in Europe, but primarily among the darker peoples of Asia and Africa; conquest, not for assimilation and uplift, but for commerce and degradation.  For this, and this mainly, did Europe gird herself at frightful cost for war.

The red day dawned when the tinder was lighted in the Balkans and Austro-Hungary seized a bit which brought her a step nearer to the world’s highway; she seized one bit and poised herself for another.  Then came that curious chorus of challenges, those leaping suspicions, raking all causes for distrust and rivalry and hatred, but saying little of the real and greatest cause.

Each nation felt its deep interests involved.  But how?  Not, surely, in the death of Ferdinand the Warlike; not, surely, in the old, half-forgotten revanche for Alsace-Lorraine; not even in the neutrality of Belgium.  No!  But in the possession of land overseas, in the right to colonies, the chance to levy endless tribute on the darker world,—­on coolies in China, on starving peasants in India, on black savages in Africa, on dying South Sea Islanders, on Indians of the Amazon—­all this and nothing more.

Even the broken reed on which we had rested high hopes of eternal peace,—­the guild of the laborers—­the front of that very important movement for human justice on which we had builded most, even this flew like a straw before the breath of king and kaiser.  Indeed, the flying had been foreshadowed when in Germany and America “international” Socialists had all but read yellow and black men out of the kingdom of industrial justice.  Subtly had they been bribed, but effectively:  Were they not lordly whites and should they not share in the spoils of rape?  High wages in the United States and England might be the skilfully manipulated result of slavery in Africa and of peonage in Asia.