The extremist cases pass to the average case through insensible degrees.  We are all probably, as a species, a little too prone to intolerance, and if we do in all sincerity mean to end war in the world we must prepare ourselves for considerable exercises in restraint when strange people look, behave, believe, and live in a manner different from our own.  The minority of permanently bitter souls who want to see objectionable cities burning and men fleeing and dying form the real strength in our occasional complicities.

The world has had its latest object lesson in the German abuse of English and French as “degenerates,” of the Russians as “Mongol hordes,” of the Japanese as “yellow savages,” but it is not only Germans who let themselves slip into national vanity and these ugly hostilities to unfamiliar life.  The first line of attack against war must be an attack upon self-righteousness and intolerance.  These things are the germ of uncompromising and incurable militarism everywhere.

Now, the attack upon self-righteousness and intolerance and the stern, self-satisfied militarism that arises naturally out of these things is to be made in a number of ways.  The first is a sedulous propaganda of the truth about war, a steadfast resolve to keep the pain of warfare alive in the nerves of the careless, to keep the stench of war under the else indifferent nose.  It is only in the study of the gloomily megalomaniac historian that aggressive war becomes a large and glorious thing.  In reality it is a filthy outrage upon life, an idiot’s smashing of the furniture of homes, a mangling, a malignant mischief, a scalding of stokers, a disemboweling of gunners, a raping of caught women by drunken soldiers.  By book and pamphlet, by picture and cinematograph film, the pacifist must organize wisdom in these matters.

And not only indignation and distress must come to this task.  The stern, uncompromising militarist will not be moved from his determinations by our horror and hostility.  These things will but “brace” him.  He has a more vulnerable side.  The ultimate lethal weapon for every form of stupidity is ridicule, and against the high silliness of the militarist it is particularly effective.  It is the laughter of wholesome men that will finally end war.  The stern, strong, silent man will cease to trouble us only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of his apprehended foolishness.  Literature will have failed humanity if it is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the essential triviality at the head of the present war.  Not the slaughter of ten million men can make the quality of the German Kaiser other than theatrical and silly.

The greater part of the world is in an agony, a fever, but that does not make the cause of that fever noble or great.  A man may die of yellow fever through the bite of a mosquito; that does not make a mosquito anything more than a dirty little insect or an aggressive imperialist better than a pothouse fool.