dipping into this and that, fuddling myself with speculation.  How clear and bright the stream of the mind flows in those late hours, after all the sediment and floating trash of the day has drained off!  Sometimes I seem to coast the very shore of Beauty or Truth, and hear the surf breaking on those shining sands.  Then some offshore wind of weariness or prejudice bears me away again.  Have you ever come across Andreyev’s Confessions of a Little Man During Great Days?  One of the honest books of the War.  The Little Man ends his confession thus—­

My anger has left me, my sadness returned, and once more the tears flow.  Whom can I curse, whom can I judge, when we are all alike unfortunate?  Suffering is universal; hands are outstretched to each other, and when they touch . . . the great solution will come.  My heart is aglow, and I stretch out my hand and cry, “Come, let us join hands!  I love you, I love you!”

And of course, as soon as one puts one’s self in that frame of mind someone comes along and picks your pocket. . . .  I suppose we must teach ourselves to be too proud to mind having our pockets picked!

Did it ever occur to you that the world is really governed by books?  The course of this country in the War, for instance, has been largely determined by the books Wilson has read since he first began to think!  If we could have a list of the principal books he has read since the War began, how interesting it would be.

Here’s something I’m just copying out to put up on my bulletin board for my customers to ponder.  It was written by Charles Sorley, a young Englishman who was killed in France in 1915.  He was only twenty years old—­

ToGermany

You are blind like us.  Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land. 
But gropers both through fields of thought confined
We stumble and we do not understand. 
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each other’s dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate.  And the blind fight the blind.

  When it is peace, then we may view again
  With new-won eyes each other’s truer form
  And wonder.  Grown more loving-kind and warm
  We’ll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
  When it is peace.  But until peace, the storm
  The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

Isn’t that noble?  You see what I am dumbly groping for—­some way of thinking about the War that will make it seem (to future ages) a purification for humanity rather than a mere blackness of stinking cinders and tortured flesh and men shot to ribbons in marshes of blood and sewage.  Out of such unspeakable desolation men must rise to some new conception of national neighbourhood.  I hear so much apprehension that Germany won’t be punished sufficiently for her crime.  But