“I was never a man who thought life simple; I had not a five-hundred word vocabulary wherewith I explained the primitive emotions of birth, hunger, adolescence, love, and death; no, life was always difficult and involved to me, but now in the evening of my own existence, serene and ordered as that evening turns out to be, it appears as a labyrinth beyond conception, with not one, but a thousand centres into which we successively stray. Difficult, difficult and heavy to shift are the blocks of which our mansion is built. Nor am I now speaking of social-political creeds which are to govern the world; I am speaking only of poor, elementary human beings, for, not having mastered the individual, I don’t attempt to discuss the system under which he lives. Big and little things alike go to our building; and if it was the war which first put the grace of humility into me, it is the sequel to a tale of plain people which has kept it there. “Oh, the humility of me! I cross my arms over my eyes and bow myself down to the ground like a Mussulman at prayer. There’s nothing like life for teaching humility to a man, nothing like life for shouting ‘Fool! fool! fool!’ at him till he puts his hands over his ears. It buzzes round our heads like a mosquito inside mosquito-curtains. Humility isn’t the gift of youth—thank God—for it takes a deal of buffeting to drive it into us. The war should have taught us a lesson in humility; a wider lesson, I mean, than the accident of defeat or victory, efficiency or non-efficiency. Let us ignore those superficial aspects of the war. What we are concerned with, is the underlying forces, the courage, the endurance, the loyalty, the development of a great heart by little mean men; all this, abstract but undeniable, unrivalled, the broadest river of human excellence that ever flowed. What then? Mistaken, by God! wrongheaded! an immense sacrifice on the altar of Truth which was all the time the altar of Untruth. Doesn’t it make you weep? All the gold of the human heart poured out, like the gold of the common coffers, in a mistaken cause. It’s barbaric; it’s more than barbaric, it’s pre-historic; it’s going back to the Stone Age. We can’t say these things now; not yet; not from lack of courage, but from a sense of tact: we’re living in the wrong century. It’s an outrage on tact to say to your century what will be self-evident to the next; therefore we continue to hate our enemy and love our country; mistaken ideals both.