well, in fact.  Perhaps I’ve learned how to live more wisely than I knew in the old days; perhaps again, I owe it to my old grandfather who lived (and enjoyed) ninety-four years.  I have walked ten miles to-day and I sit down as the clock strikes eleven (P.M.) to write this letter.

You will recall more clearly than I certain horrible, catastrophic, universal-ruin passages in Revelation—­monsters swallowing the universe, blood and fire and clouds and an eternal crash, rolling ruin enveloping all things—­well, all that’s come.  There are, perhaps, ten million men dead of this war and, perhaps, one hundred million persons to whom death would be a blessing.  Add to these as many millions more whose views of life are so distorted that blank idiocy would be a better mental outlook, and you’ll get a hint (and only a hint) of what the continent has already become—­a bankrupt slaughter-house inhabited by unmated women.  We have talked of “problems” in our day.  We never had a problem; for the worst task we ever saw was a mere blithe pastime compared with what these women and the few men that will remain here must face.  The hills about Verdun are not blown to pieces worse than the whole social structure and intellectual and spiritual life of Europe.  I wonder that anybody is sane.

Now we have swung into a period and a state of mind wherein all this seems normal.  A lady said to me at a dinner party (think of a dinner party at all!), “Oh, how I shall miss the war when it ends!  Life without it will surely be dull and tame.  What can we talk about?  Will the old subjects ever interest us again?” I said, “Let’s you and me try and see.”  So we talked about books—­not war books—­old country houses that we both knew, gardens and gold and what not; and in fifteen minutes we swung back to the war before we were aware.

I get out of it, as the days rush by, certain fundamental convictions, which seem to me not only true—­true beyond any possible cavil—­truer than any other political things are true—­and far more important than any other contemporary facts whatsoever in any branch of endeavour, but better worth while than anything else that men now living may try to further: 

1.  The cure for democracy is more democracy.  The danger to the world lies in autocrats and autocracies and privileged classes; and these things have everywhere been dangerous and always will be.  There’s no security in any part of the world where people cannot think of a government without a king, and there never will be.  You cannot conceive of a democracy that will unprovoked set out on a career of conquest.  If all our religious missionary zeal and cash could be turned into convincing Europe of this simple and obvious fact, the longest step would be taken for human advancement that has been taken since 1776.  If Carnegie, or, after he is gone, his Peace People could see this, his Trust might possibly