Truly the question of the effect of war on character is vital. I had written here, in pre-war days, some observations upon it; but they seem to me now faint and platitudinous. We have had since then such widespread experience of the play of character faced with the dread calamity of the world-war, that it is too complicated to treat briefly. We are all saddened and wearied. So I leave it to the experience of the millions who know more about it from their own experience than I do. We need not wait for war to harden our fibre and stiffen our backs. Surely this can be done without wholesale demoralization and destruction. Are there not national evils to be fought? privations to be endured here in fighting vice, ugliness and disease, or in voluntarily participating in poverty? There is courage needed to stand against public opinion and to lead it, to sacrifice wealth and social repute if required. These things are what we must turn to for the exercise of the courage and unselfishness of the soldier. We want more strenuous asceticism of a form not so essentially unreasonable and destructive as war. It would entirely overload this chapter to give any idea of the vigour and number of the passages in _Fors_ which storm against war:--“storming” is generally the method, varied, as usual with this master of fancy and emotion, with stinging sarcasm and mocking raillery. The burden of his plea throughout is that “the game of our nobles and the gain of our usurers” is war.[105] “When you have got the Devil well under foot in Sheffield, you may begin to stop him from persuading my Lords of the Admiralty that they want a new grant, etc., etc., to make his machines with.... The fiend sees that he can blind you, through your lust for drink, into quietly allowing yourselves to pay fifty millions a year, that the rich may make their machines of blood, and play at shedding blood.”[106] “In this contest (of poor and rich) assuredly, the victory cannot be by violence; every conquest under the Prince of War retards the standards of the Prince of Peace.”[107]