Verhaeren, however, was unmoved. He answered as follows: "If I hate, it is because what I saw, felt, and heard, is hateful.... I admit that I cannot be just, now that I am filled with sadness and burn with anger. I am not simply standing near the fire, but am actually amid the flames, so that I suffer and weep. I can no otherwise." He remained loyal to hatred, and indeed loyal to the hatred-for-hate of Romain Rolland's Olivier. Notwithstanding this grave divergence of view between Verhaeren and Rolland, the two men continued on terms of friendship and mutual respect. Even in the preface he contributed to Loyson's inflammatory book, _Êtes-vous neutre devant le crime_, Verhaeren distinguished between the person and the cause. He was unable, he said, "to espouse Rolland's error," but he would not repudiate his friendship for Rolland. Indeed, he desired to emphasize its existence, seeing that in France it was already "dangerous to love Romain Rolland." In this correspondence, as in that with Hauptmann, two strong passions seemed to clash; but the opponents in reality remained out of touch. Here, likewise, the appeal was fruitless. Practically the whole world was given over to hatred, including even the noblest creative artists, and the finest among the sons of men. CHAPTER VIII THE EUROPEAN CONSCIENCE As on so many previous occasions in his life of action, this man of inviolable faith had issued to the world an appeal for fellowship, and had issued it once more in vain. The writers, the men of science, the philosophers, the artists, all took the side of the country to which they happened to belong; the Germans spoke for Germany, the Frenchmen for France, the Englishmen for England. No one would espouse the universal cause; no one would rise superior to the device, my country right or wrong. In every land, among those of every nation, there were to be found plenty of enthusiastic advocates, persons willing blindly to justify all their country's doings, including its errors and its crimes, to excuse these errors and crimes upon the plea of necessity. There was only one land, the land common to them all, Europe, motherland of all the fatherlands, which found no advocate, no defender. There was only one idea, the most self-evident to a Christian world, which found no spokesman--the idea of ideas, humanity.