'Mr. Angell has received too much solace from the unwisdom of his critics. Those who have denounced him most vehemently are those who patently have not read his books. For example, he cannot properly be classed, as frequently asserted in recent months, as one of those Utopian pacifists who went about proclaiming war impossible. A number of passages in _The Great Illusion_ show him fully alive to the danger of the present collapse; indeed, from the narrower view of politics his book was one of the several fruitless attempts to check that growing estrangement between England and Germany whose sinister menace far-sighted men discerned. Even less justifiable are the flippant sneers which discard his argument as mercenary or sordid. Mr Angell has never taken an "account book" or "breeches pocket" view of war. He inveighs against what he terms its political and moral futilities as earnestly as against its economic futility.' It may be said that there must be some cause for so persistent a misrepresentation. There is. Its cause is that obstinate and deep-seated fatalism which is so large a part of the prevailing attitude to war and against which the book under consideration was a protest. Take it as an axiom that war comes upon us as an outside force, like the rain or the earthquake, and not as something that we can influence, and a man who 'does not believe in war,' must be a person who believes that war is not coming;[98] that men are naturally peaceable. To be a Pacifist because one believes that the danger of war is very great indeed, or because one believes men to be naturally extremely prone to war, is a position incomprehensible until we have rid our minds of the fatalism which regards war as an 'inevitable' result of uncontrollable forces. What is a writer to do, however, in the face of persistent misrepresentation such as this? If he were a manufacturer of soap and some one said his soap was underweight, or he were a grocer and some one said his sugar was half sand, he could of course obtain enormous damages. But a mere writer, having given some years of his life to the study of the most important problem of his time, is quite helpless when a tired headline writer, or a journalist indulging his resentment, or what he thinks is likely to be the resentment of his readers, describes a book as proclaiming one thing when as a matter of simple fact it proclaims the exact contrary. * * * * *