We have at present an air charged with trouble; if we are not to shut our eyes, fold our hands, and drift, all that we do must be in the direction of improving our state of mind. But there is no way of improving a state of mind save by fertilizing it with the faith and good-will of a higher mind. Our machinery for doing this has failed us. Indeed, nationally speaking, we no longer have any such machinery. What more useful efforts, then, can we make than efforts in the direction of discovering a new machinery? And the finer the spirits, the broader the minds, we place in charge thereof, the greater power we give them, always subject to the safeguard of election, the more we may hope to emerge gradually from our sinister situation. ----- [6] Many think the war will alter all this. I only wish I did.—J. G. ON PEACE I THE WILL TO PEACE (From the _Daily Mail_, 1909.) I was walking in the district known as Notting Dale looking for signs of the Millennium, when I saw on a poster these words: “Why England and Germany must go to war.” I stood gazing at them in the company of a woman the worse for drink, a brutal-looking man, a consumptive boy, and a half-starved horse harnessed to a cart. With the exception of the horse, these persons were soon replaced by a little labourer with a very sad face, and a sick-looking woman, in a ragged shawl. When they, in turn, passed on, I was joined in front of the poster by three girls going home from work—the sound of whose laughter was like the snapping of dried sticks—and by a whisky-perfumed man with that peculiar, brazen look in the eye which is liable to sudden eclipse. These, too, stayed but a short time, and their places before the poster were filled by two youths in ragged clothes, with dun-coloured faces, and the stumps of cigarettes between pale lips. Their foot-steps and obscenity having died away, I was left alone with the poster and the horse. This horse’s ribs were conspicuous, and from the size of eggcup-shaped hollows above eyes covered with a bluish film, he had evidently laboured to the limit of his capacity. He was resting one thin leg—too hairless at the knee, too hairy at the heel. Two very young children came now, and, holding each other’s hands, flattened their noses against the poster in the shop window. One of them moved her feet continually as if her boots hurt her, while on the feet of the other were the wrecks of boots.