And I said to myself: In hundreds of towns all over the country, people like this are standing before that poster, or passing by it. One third of the population are below the line of reasonable subsistence, another third are able by the constant employment of every energy to keep their heads just on that line. We are the richest country in the world, so that even in organised Germany conditions little better may very well be prevalent. This poster declares that England and Germany must go to war. And this poster is no joke, but the indication of a frame of mind. Moreover, I mused, credit for sincerity being due to all men until the opposite is proved against them, this frame of mind must be honest and founded on genuine fear—must be, in fact, the conviction of many, not only in this country, but in Germany. They contemplate a war between two nations, two thirds of whose respective populations are as yet barely able to make a living; a war that means wasting many hundred million pounds and the earning power of many hundred thousand lives; a war that will in six months cast on to the dust heap twenty years of social progress; a war that may well have no semblance of nobility, no great motto, no inspiring cause, but be a mere sordid struggle between two business communities, for so-called commercial ends; a war that may be unparalleled for cold-blooded horror and myopic puerility. And the poster speaks of this war as if it were inevitable! Where, I asked myself, can the people who thus think and speak have lived? Where have they kept their hearts, and brains, and eyes, and noses? Can they not see these millions of ghosts in their midst? Or do they think to fatten them by war? Do they think by war to cheapen the price of bread and coals, to spread education, to foster the growth of science and of the arts? Will they by war preserve the strongest males for the improvement of the human stock? Will they by war advance in any single way the slow process of humanizing a civilization which still produces in millions the beings who have been standing with me here before that poster? No—I thought—they will certainly reply: “War is an evil, but it is necessary; for the human race is divided into breeds, distinct from one another, and plunged into struggle from their births up. Only in each country’s jealous preservation of itself can we look for the welfare of the whole. There is no avail in dreams of peace; no use in preparation for it; men have always killed each other for their own advantage and always will; if they did not so kill their neighbours they could not themselves survive. Life is so conditioned; there is not enough for all. We know, therefore, that this war must come. We see it coming. We have fastened our eyes on it. We cannot get out of its way. We must offer ourselves up in holy sacrifice before this bloody, predestined monster.”