Now that the attractive twilight glow has given place to a bleak grey light (whether or not of dawn I have no idea, but, if so, of a singularly unpleasant November dawn), I have begun to question, among other things, that comfortable belief. And, questioned, it seems to me to reveal at once certain lacunae and incongruities that make it appear extremely dubious and lead me to wonder that I ever accepted it so unthinkingly. For example, while, judging from the past, anything like a definitive history of the late war will probably not be written for two hundred years or so, from tendencies apparent even to-day it is already possible to predict that such a history will deal with the struggle coolly as the result of clear-cut national rivalries, largely economic. Thus history has explained earlier wars, and thus it is, as yet gropingly, preparing to explain this one. Now any man who at maturity lived through the period from 1914 to 1918 must be aware that such an explanation, however fully documented, will not be a complete and truthful explanation of the war. In retrospect the war will seem, from its results, to have been an inevitable, coldly logical affair; but the fact remains that it was not that, as we who witnessed it know. To begin with, many hundreds of thousands of young men went willingly into the war, though aware that they were going to almost certain death. That is simply not done in behalf of an economic conflict. A considerable proportion of those young men went to war because they believed with all their heart that they were to fight for an ideal. That final history will doubtless ignore their emotional attitude. To-day, when it is not yet possible to ignore the attitude, the tendency among interpreters of the war is to discount it as of no importance, to brush all these dead thousands aside as deluded--mere tools of the real forces that brought on the war. But unless one is to adopt the absurd belief that economic laws, nationalistic rivalries and so forth, are objective things with a life of their own, instead of what they obviously are--expressions of the minds of men assembled in groups, it is clear that if these thousands of young men were deluded they must have been deluded by some person or group of persons.