It may be cheering to assume that those who have been almost superhuman these last four years in one environment will continue to be almost superhuman under conditions the very opposite. But alack! it is not logical. On the other hand I think that those who have had this great and racking experience will be left, for the most part, with a real passion for Justice; and that this will have a profoundly modifying effect on social conditions. I think, too, that many of them will have a sort of passion for humaneness, which will, if you will suffer me to say so, come in very handy; for I have observed that the rest of us, through reading about horrors, have lost the edge of our gentleness, and have got into the habit of thinking that it is the business of women and children to starve, if they happen to be German; of creatures to be underfed and overworked if they happen to be horses; of families to be broken up if they happen to be aliens; and that a general carelessness as to what suffering is necessary and what is not, has set in. And, queer as it may seem, I look to those who have been in the thick of the worst suffering the world has ever seen, to set us in the right path again, and to correct the vitriolic sentiments engendered by the armchair and the inkpot, in times such as we have been and are still passing through. A cloistered life in times like these engenders bile; in fact, I think it always does. For sheer ferocity there is no place, you will have noticed, like a club full of old gentlemen. I expect the men who have come home from killing each other to show us the way back to brotherliness! And not before it’s wanted. Here is a little true story of war-time, when all men were supposed to be brothers if they belonged to the same nation. In the fifth year of the war two men sat alone in a railway carriage. One, pale, young, and rather worn, had an unlighted cigarette in his mouth. The other, elderly, prosperous, and of a ruddy countenance, was smoking a large cigar. The young man, who looked as if his days were strenuous, took his unlighted cigarette from his mouth, gazed at it, searched his pockets, and looked at the elderly man. His nose twitched, vibrated by the scent of the cigar, and he said suddenly: “Could you give me a light, sir?” The elderly man regarded him for a moment, drooped his eyelids, and murmured: “I’ve no matches.” The young man sighed, mumbling the cigarette in his watering lips, then said very suddenly: “Perhaps you’ll kindly give me a light from your cigar, sir.” The elderly man moved throughout his body as if something very sacred had been touched within him. “I’d rather not,” he said; “if you don’t mind.”