"You have to realize that while the Pacificists talk of the horrible ugliness of war and the necessity of establishing an everlasting world-peace, whiskered old ladies in hydropaths, dons on the _Morning Post_, chattering district visitors and blustering, bellowing parsons, people who are ever so much more representative of general humanity than we literary oddities--all that sort of people tucked away somewhere safe, are in a state of belligerent lustfulness and prepared--oh, prepared to give the very eyes of everybody else in this country, prepared to sacrifice the lives of all their servants and see the poor taxed to the devil, first for a victory over Germany and then for the closest, silliest, loudest imitation of Prussian swagger on our part (with them, of course, on the very top of it all) that we can contrive. That spirit is loose, Wilkins. All the dowagers are mewing for blood, all the male old women who teach classics and dream of re-action at Oxford and Cambridge, are having the time of their lives. They trust to panic, to loud accusations, to that fear of complexity that comes with fatigue. They trust to the exhaustion of delicate purposes and sensitive nerves. And this force-loving, bullying silliness is far more likely to come out on top, after the distresses of this war, after the decent men are dead in the trenches and the wise ones shouted to silence, than any finely intellectual, necessarily difficult plan to put an end for ever to all such senseless brutalities." "I think you underrate the power of--well, modern sanity," said Wilkins. "Time will show," said Boon. "I hope I do." "This man Osborn, whoever he may be, must be just a fantastic extremist.... I do not see that he is an answer to my suggestion that for the whole mass of people this war means graver thought, steadier thought, a firmer collective purpose. It isn't only by books and formal literature that people think. There is the tremendous effect of realized and accumulated facts----"