It seems strange, perhaps, to talk of civilization in these dark days, when primitive passions and primitive methods have flung an ineradicable stain of blood across a whole continent. Yet only the coward will bend to temporary defeat, or ridicule, or pessimism. It is the task of the strong to turn disaster into triumph, and to frame a new international polity built on sure foundations. The diplomacy based on national antipathies must be made impossible by the new understanding of the criminal folly of provincialism, the new comprehension of nation by nation. For the true causes of the present war cannot be discovered in mere incidents of July and August. They go further back, and are rooted in ignorance, misconception, prejudice, selfishness. I do not wish to accuse or exonerate any of the countries that have turned Europe into a stage for the rehearsal of Christianity’s masterpiece, the rollicking farce _Hell on Earth_. There have been enough already to inflame racial resentments and flood the press with taunts and recriminations. Ours is a bigger and worthier task: to assuage, not to incense; to re-create order from chaos; to prepare the way for peace, and for what must follow peace. Recrimination is so useless now. We have to face the future: we cannot undo the past. We have learnt our lesson, surely, once for all: shall the spectre of militarism again loom devilishly through such a nightmare as Europe has endured for the last decade? Animosities and jealousies may die out: France has forgotten Fashoda, England has forgiven Russia for the blunder of the Dogger Bank. But the expectation of war, the preparation for war, the whole habit and incidence of militarism, must lead sooner or later to the clash. If the guns were not ready, if the nations had to be drilled and armed before they could be hurled at each others’ throats, there would be time for reflection, for the subsidence of passions, for the revival of dignity and decency. Militarism damns both the menacer and the menaced. All the nations have suffered from that curse, Germany, perhaps, the worst of all. The world has not yet forgotten Bismarck’s gospel of blood and iron, so relentlessly preached and practised. The inevitable results of the blood-and-iron doctrine, modernized as the dogma of the “mailed fist,” can be seen to-day in the cataclysm that has swept Europe. The pity of it, and the shame of it, that all the skill of all the statesmen of the great Powers could produce no better result than a continent divided into two armed camps, waiting for the slaughter that was bound to come!