The gravest fact in the history of the last ten years is not the fact of war; it is the temper of mind, the blindness of conduct on the part of the millions, which alone, ultimately, explains our policies. The suffering and cost of war may well be the best choice of evils, like the suffering and cost of surgery, or the burdens we assume for a clearly conceived moral end. But what we have seen in recent history is not a deliberate choice of ends with a consciousness of moral and material cost. We see a whole nation demanding fiercely in one breath certain things, and in the next just as angrily demanding other things which make compliance with the first impossible; a whole nation or a whole continent given over to an orgy of hate, retaliation, the indulgence of self-destructive passions. And this collapse of the human mind does but become the more appalling if we accept the explanation that 'wars are caused by capitalism' or 'Junkerthum'; if we believe that six Jew financiers sitting in a room can thus turn millions into something resembling madmen. No indictment of human reason could be more severe. To assume that millions will, without any real knowledge of why they do it or of the purpose behind the behests they obey, not only take the lives of others and give their own, but turn first in one direction and then in another the flood of their deepest passions of hate and vengeance, just as a little group of mean little men, manipulating mean little interests, may direct, is to argue a moral helplessness and shameful docility on the part of those millions which would deprive the future of all hope of self-government. And to assume that they are _not_ unknowing as to the alleged cause--that would bring us to moral phantasmagoria. We shall get nearer to the heart of our problem if, instead of asking perpetually '_Who_ caused the War?' and indicting 'Capitalists' or 'Junkers,' we ask the question: 'What is the cause of that state of mind and temper in the millions which made them on the one side welcome war (as we allege of the German millions), or on the other side makes them acclaim, or impose, blockades, famines,' 'punitive' 'Treaties of Peace?'