things if it were not for the exaggerated delusions of kind and difference, and the crack-brained “loyalties” arising out of these, that seem still to rule men’s minds.  Years ago I came to the conviction that much of the evil in human life was due to the inherent vicious disposition of the human mind to intensify classification.[See my “First and Last Things,” Book I. and my “Modern Utopia,” Chapter X.] I do not know how it will strike the reader, but to me this war, this slaughter of eight or nine million people, is due almost entirely to this little, almost universal lack of clear-headedness; I believe that the share of wickedness in making war is quite secondary to the share of this universal shallow silliness of outlook.  These effigies of emperors and kings and statesmen that lead men into war, these legends of nationality and glory, would collapse before our universal derision, if they were not stuffed tight and full with the unthinking folly of the common man.

There is in all of us an indolent capacity for suffering evil and dangerous things, that I contemplate each year of my life with a deepening incredulity.  I perceive we suffer them; I record the futile protests of the intelligence.  It seems to me incredible that men should not rise up out of this muddy, bloody, wasteful mess of a world war, with a resolution to end for ever the shams, the prejudices, the pretences and habits that have impoverished their lives, slaughtered our sons, and wasted the world, a resolution so powerful and sustained that nothing could withstand it.

But it is not apparent that any such will arises.  Does it appear at all?  I find it hard to answer that question because my own answer varies with my mood.  There are moods when it seems to me that nothing of the sort is happening.  This war has written its warning in letters of blood and flame and anguish in the skies of mankind for two years and a half.  When I look for the collective response to that warning, I see a multitude of little chaps crawling about their private ends like mites in an old cheese.  The kings are still in their places, not a royal prince has been killed in this otherwise universal slaughter; when the fatuous portraits of the monarchs flash upon the screen the widows and orphans still break into loyal song.  The ten thousand religions of mankind are still ten thousand religions, all busy at keeping men apart and hostile.  I see scarcely a measurable step made anywhere towards that world kingdom of God, which is, I assert, the manifest solution, the only formula that can bring peace to all mankind.  Mankind as a whole seems to have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing in thirty months of war.