The enormous destruction of human life, of nature, of art, in the past war has been altogether out of proportion to the military results achieved by either side. However true it may be to hold the Germans as primarily responsible for this destruction, in the first instance, yet it remains true that none of the contending forces can escape responsibility for the later developments of the struggle. Apart from Germany's undeniable guilt in starting the war, civilization as a whole must answer for the horror of its method. A piece of heavy artillery is equally destructive, whether it be cast at Essen or at Le Creusot; a Caproni aeroplane can carry as many bombs as a Gotha; the submarine was first employed in war by the Americans; the machine gun is an English invention. For all these devices of destruction we of the twentieth century, with our belief in purely material progress, stand guilty to-day; and the blood of our guilt has reddened earth already for over four years and may continue to do so for many generations to come. The past war before it came to an end had long ceased to be a contest between national ideals and had become a struggle between man and an inhuman, scientific, organized machine. And the machine was victorious. Just as the scientific spirit, conquering art before the war, led to the extravagances of Cubism and Vorticism so, since the war, it has attacked life itself; and made of national existence, no longer a problem of human bravery, resource and intelligence, but merely a problem of relative man-power and munitions. We have learned to speak of "man-power" as our books on physics speak of "horse-power." The task we, in the war, set ourselves was a grisly paradox; we proposed to save civilization, to undo a great wrong, by destroying the very basis of human life on which all civilization stands.