Now, among many delusions that this war has usefully dispelled is the delusion that there can be a sort of legality about war, that you can make war a little, but not make war altogether, that the civilized world can look forward to a sort of tame war in the future, a war crossed with peace, a lap-dog war that will bark but not bite. War is war; it is the cessation of law and argument, it is outrage, and Germany has demonstrated on the large scale what our British suffragettes learned on a small one, that with every failure to accomplish your end by violent means you are forced to further outrages. Violence has no reserves but further violence. Each failure of the violent is met by the desperate cry, the heroical scream: "We will not be beaten. If you will not give in to us for this much, then see! We will go further." Wars always do go further. Wars always end more savagely than they begin. Even our war in South Africa, certainly the most decently conducted war in all history, got to farm burning and concentration camps. A side that hopes for victory fights with conciliation in its mind. Victory and conciliation recede together. When the German--who is really, one must remember, a human being like the rest of us, at the worst just merely a little worse in his upbringing--when he finds he cannot march gloriously into Paris or Warsaw, then, and only then, does he begin to try to damage Paris and Warsaw with bombs, when he finds he cannot beat the French Army and the British fleet, then, and not till then, does he attack and murder the slumbering civilians of Scarborough and Dunkirk, and lies in wait for and sinks the Lusitania. If war by the rules will not bring success, then harsher measures must be taken; let us suddenly torture and murder our hated enemies with poison gas, let us poison the South African wells, let us ill-treat prisoners and assassinate civilians. Let us abolish the noncombatant and the neutral. These are no peculiar German iniquities, though the Germans have brought them to an unparalleled perfection; they are the natural psychological consequences of aggressive war heroically conceived and bitterly thwarted; they are "fierceness"; they are the logical necessary outcome of going to war and being disappointed and getting hit hard and repeatedly. Any military nation in a corner will play the savage, the wildcat at bay, in this fashion, rather than confess itself done. And since the prophetic Bloch has been justified and the long inconclusiveness of modern war, with its intrenchments and entanglements, has been more than completely demonstrated, this is the way that every war in the future is likely to go. Fair and open conquest becoming more and more out of the question, each side will seek to cow, dismay, and subjugate the spirit of the other, and particularly the spirit of the noncombatant masses, by more and more horrible proceedings. "What do you think of that?" said the German