Take another very simple truth that we will not face: that our arms do, and must do, the things that raise our passions when done by the enemy. Our blockades and bombardments also kill old women and children. Our soldiers, too, the gallant lads who mount our aeroplanes, the sailors who man our blockades, are baby-killers. They must be; they cannot help it if they are to bomb or blockade at all. Yet we never do admit this obvious fact. We erect a sheer falsehood, and then protect ourselves against admitting it by being so 'noble' about it that we refuse to discuss it. We simply declare that in no circumstances could England, or English soldiers, ever make war upon women and children, or even be unchivalrous to them. That is a moral premise beyond or behind which patriotism will not permit our minds to go. If the 'nobility' of attitude had any relation to our real conduct, one would rejoice. When, during the armistice negotiations, the Germans exacted that they should be permitted means, after the surrender of their fleet, of feeding their people, a New York paper declared the condition an insult to the Allies. 'The Germans are prisoners,' it said, 'and the Allies do not starve prisoners.' But one discovers a few weeks later that these noble gestures are quite compatible with the maintenance of the blockade, on the ground that Germans for their sins ought to be starved. We then become the agents of Providence in punitive justice. When the late Lord Fisher[93] came out squarely and publicly in defence of the killing of women and children (in the submarine sinking) as a necessary part of war, there seemed a chance for intellectual honesty in the matter; for a real examination of the principles of our conduct. If we faced the facts in this honest sailor-like fashion there was some hope either that we should refuse to descend to reprisals by disembowelling little girls; or, if it should appear that such things are inseparable from war, that it would help to get a new feeling about war. But Lord Fisher complains that the Editor of the paper to which he sent his letter suppressed it from the later editions of his paper for fear it should shock the public. Shock! You see, _our_ shells falling on schools and circuses don't disembowel little girls; our blockades don't starve them. Everybody knows that British shells and British blockades would not do such things. When Britain blockades, pestilence and hunger and torture are not suffering; a dying child is not a dying child. Patriotism draws a shutter over our eyes and ears. When this degree of self-deception is possible, there is no infamy of which a kindly, humane, and emotionally moral people may not prove themselves capable; no moral contradiction or absurdity which mankind may not approve. Anything may become right, anything may become wrong.