The Allies did not help them to do so, because of their lust for bloody vengeance and their desire for the spoils of victory. The peoples shared the blame of their rulers because they were not nobler than their rulers. They cannot now plead ignorance or betrayal by false ideals which duped them, because character does not depend on knowledge, and it was the character of European peoples which failed in the crisis of the world's fate, so that they followed the call-back of the beast in the jungle rather than the voice of the Crucified One whom they pretended to adore.' And perhaps most important of all (though the clergy here just stand for the complacent mob mind; they were no worse than the laity), this:-- 'I think the clergy of all nations, apart from a heroic and saintly few, subordinated their faith, which is a gospel of charity, to national limitations. They were patriots before they were priests, and their patriotism was sometimes as limited, as narrow, as fierce, and as blood-thirsty as that of the people who looked to them for truth and light. They were often fiercer, narrower, and more desirous of vengeance than the soldiers who fought, because it is now a known truth that the soldiers, German and Austrian, French and Italian and British, were sick of the unending slaughter long before the ending of the war, and would have made a peace more fair than that which now prevails if it had been put to the common vote in the trenches; whereas the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of Cologne, and the clergy who spoke from many pulpits in many nations under the Cross of Christ, still stoked up the fires of hate and urged the armies to go on fighting "in the cause of Justice," "for the defence of the Fatherland," "for Christian righteousness," to the bitter end. Those words are painful to write, but as I am writing this book for truth's sake, at all cost, I let them stand.'[79] _From Passion to Indifference: the Result of Drift_ A common attitude just now is something like this:-- 'With the bitter memory of all that the Allies had suffered strong upon them, it is not astonishing that at the moment of victory an attitude of judicial impartiality proved too much to ask of human nature. The real terms will depend upon the fashion in which the formal terms are enforced. Much of the letter of the Treaty--trial of the Kaiser, etc.--has already disappeared. It is an intolerable priggishness to rake up this very excusable debauch just as we are returning to sobriety.'