“Every cannon here is wreathed in human viscera, spattered with human brains, and stands in a pool of human blood, if we only had eyes to see!” I said moderately. “Why, you talk like a pacifist!” said the old gentleman, forgetting his usual politeness to women. “I thought the unforgivable sin of the Germans was in forcing a war on a world that has outgrown war! If war is so hateful a thing, why complacently lay out to view its hideous instruments of torture?” “Because,” said my old friend with deep emotion, “because they have been instruments of righteousness!” (For the moment he had forgotten the nationality of the cannon about us.) “Have they?” I asked. “They’re German cannon, remember.” In spite of my feeling sick, I could not but laugh at the change in his expression. I went on, “Well, even if they had been sacred Allied cannon, they’d be instruments of torture all the same. I thought we were fighting to put such things on the scrap heap. Why don’t we have the decency to hide them from view? We don’t put the offal from our slaughter-houses on public view.” “Vegetarianism, next?” “Oh, no, I eat beefsteaks. But I don’t take the children to see the steers killed.” “Of course, I know,” said my old friend tolerantly, “that women have a traditional right to be illogical, but _really_.... Did you, or did you not turn your personal life upside down to do your share in this war? It would give me brain fever to feel two different ways about the same thing.” “See here,” I put it to him, “a man, crazy-drunk comes roaring down our street. Who _wouldn’t_ feel two ways about him? I certainly do. First, I know that society has been wrongly organized to permit any boy to grow up crazed with whiskey; and second, I know that my children must be protected, now, at this very minute. Shooting that man dead isn’t going to help the general situation at all. If we are not to have a perpetual procession of crazy-drunk men coming down our street (_and our own men among them_) we must change the organization of society by long, patient, and constructive efforts. In the meantime with the drunken man pounding on my door, if the police don’t do what is necessary, why, of course, I will throw a dishpan of scalding water down on him. But I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life making speeches about the dishpan.”