Some day, perhaps, a true history of the war will be written, and it will then be made plain how such conflict had been rendered all but inevitable by the ambitious schemes and machinations not of one Empire, but of several; by the piling up of huge armaments under the pretence of insuring peace; by the greed of commercialists; and by the spirit of jealousy and suspicion deliberately created by reckless speakers and writers on both sides; further, how, when the crisis arrived, the working-classes in all the nations concerned were bluffed and cajoled into a contest which to their interests was certain in any event to be ruinous. Then, the flame once lit, there followed in this country the clever engineering of enforced military service, rendered possible by the preceding Registration Act (disguised under the pretence of a quite different purpose), and by a number of illusory pledges and promises for the protection of conscientious objectors to warfare. The whole story, faithfully told, will be a long record of violence and trickery masquerading as “patriotism”; but what I am concerned with here is less the war itself than the brutal spirit of hatred and persecution which the war engendered. As a single instance of Cave-Man’s ferocity, take the ill-treatment of “enemy aliens” by non-combatants, who, themselves running no personal risks, turned their insensate malice against helpless foreigners who had every claim to a generous nation’s protection. “They are an accursed race,” said a typical speaker at one of the meetings held in London. “Intern them all, or rather leave out the _n_, and inter them all. Let the name ‘German’ be handed down to posterity, and be known to the historian as everything that was bestial, damnable, and abominable.” These would be words of criminal lunacy--nothing less--in the mouth of civilized beings, yet they are merely examples of things said on innumerable occasions in every part of our land. Great masses of Englishmen were, for the time, in a mental state lower than that of remote tribes whom we regard as Bushmen and cannibals. Perhaps the most curious feature of this orgie of patriotic Hatred was its artificial nature: it was at home, not at the front, that it flourished; and if those who indulged in it had been sane enough to read even the war-news with intelligence, they would there have found ample disproof of their denunciations. Half a dozen lines from one of Mr. Philip Gibbs’s descriptions would have put their ravings to shame. “Some of them [English wounded] were helped down by German prisoners, and it was queer to see one of our men with his arms round the necks of two Germans. German wounded, helped down by our men less hurt than they, walked in the same way, with their arms round the necks of our men; and sometimes an English soldier and a German soldier came along together very slowly, arm in arm, like old cronies.” Not much patriotic Hatred _there_.