peace.  We must cling to it more than ever, we must emphasize it, we must dwell in it.  I regard war as I regard an outbreak of pestilence; the best way to resist it is not to brood over it, but to practise joy and health.  The ancient plagues which devastated Europe have not been overcome by philosophy, but by the upspringing desire of men to live cleaner and more wholesome lives.  That instinct is not created by any philosophy or persuasion; it just arises everywhere and finds its way to the light.

To brood over the war, to spend our time in disentangling its intricate causes, seems to me a task for future historians.  But a lover of peace, confronted by the hideousness of war, does best to try, if he can, to make plain what he means by peace and why he desires it.  I do not mean by peace an indolent life, lost in gentle reveries.  I mean hard daily work, and mutual understanding, and lavish help, and the effort to reassure and console and uplift.  And I mean, too, a real conflict—­not a conflict where we set the best and bravest of each nation to spill each other’s blood—­but a conflict against crime and disease and selfishness and greediness and cruelty.  There is much fighting to be done; can we not combine to fight our common foes, instead of weakening each other against evil?  We destroy in war our finest parental stock, we waste our labour, we lose our garnered store; we give every harsh passion a chance to grow; we live in the traditions of the past, and not in the hopes of the future.

5

And yet there is one thing in the present war which I do in my heart of hearts feel to be worth fighting for, and that is for the hope of liberty.  It is hard to say what liberty is, because the essence of it is the subjugation of personal inclinations.  The Germans claim that they alone know the meaning of liberty, and that they have arrived at it by discipline.  But the bitterness of this war lies in the fact that the Germans are not content to set an example of attractive virtue, and to leave the world to choose it; but that if the world will not choose it, they will force it upon them by violence and the sword.  It is this which makes me feel that the war may be a vast protest of the nations, which have the spirit of the future in their hearts, against a theory of life that represents the spirit of the past.  And I thus, with some seeming inconsistency, believe that the war may represent the hope of peace at bay.  If the nations can keep this clearly before them, and not be tempted either into reprisals, or into rewarding themselves by the spoils of victory, if victory comes; if it ends in the Germans being sincerely convinced that they have been misled and poisoned by a conception of right which is both uncivilised and unchristian, then I believe that all our sufferings may not be too great a price to pay for the future well-being of the world.  That is the largest and brightest hope I dare to frame; and there are many hours and days when it seems all clouded and dim.