When at the outbreak of the war I published an article headed "The War That Will End War," at once Mr. W.L. George hastened to reprove my dreaming impracticability. "War there has always been." Great is the magic of a word! He was quite oblivious to the fact that war has changed completely in its character half a dozen times in half a dozen centuries; that the war we fought in South Africa and the present war and the wars of mediaeval Italy and the wars of the Red Indians have about as much in common as a cat and a man and a pair of scissors and a motor car--namely, that they may all be the means of death. If war can change its character as much as it has done it can change it altogether; if peace can be kept indefinitely in India or North America, it can be kept throughout the world. It is not I who dream, but Mr. George and his like who are not yet fully awake, and it is their somnolence that I dread more than anything else when I think of the great task of settlement before the world. It is this rather hopeless, inert, pseudo-sage mass of unbelievers who render possible the continuation of war dangers. They give scope for the activities of the evil minority which hates, which lives by pride and grim satisfactions, and which is therefore anxious to have more war and more. And it is these inert half-willed people who will obstruct the disentanglement of the settlement from diplomatic hands. "What do we know about the nuance of such things?" they will ask, with that laziness that apes modesty. It is they who will complain when we seek to buy out the armaments people. Probably all the private armament firms in the world could be bought up for seventy million pounds, but the unbelievers will shake their heads and say: "Then there will only be something else instead." Yet there are many ungauged forces on the side of the greater settlement. Cynicism is never more than a half-truth, and because man is imperfect it does not follow that he must be futile. Russia is a land of strange silences, but it is manifest that whatever the innermost quality of the Czar may be, he is no clap-trap vulgar conqueror of the Wilhelm-Napoleon pattern. He began his reign, and he may yet crown his reign, with an attempt to establish peace on a newer, broader foundation. His religion, it would seem, is his master and not his servant. There has been no Russian Bernhardi.