While these present war-producing conditions last, we have to face them candidly and with as much good sense as we can command (which is for the most part only little!). We have to face them and make the best of them--though by no means to encourage them. Perhaps after all even a war like the present one--monstrous as it is--does not denote so great a deviation of the old Earth from its appointed orbit as we are at first inclined to think. Under normal conditions the deaths on our planet (and many of them exceedingly lingering and painful) continue at the rate of rather more than one every second--say 90,000 a day. The worst battles cannot touch such a wholesale slaughter as this. Life at its normal best is full of agonizings and endless toil and sufferings; what matters, what _it is really there for_, is that we should learn to conduct it with Dignity, Courage, Goodwill--to transmute its dross into gold. If war _has_ to continue yet for a time, there is still plenty of evidence to show that we can wrest--even from its horrors and insanities--some things that are "worth while," and among others the priceless jewel of human love and helpfulness. FOOTNOTES: [1] Some people take great pleasure in analysing White Books and Grey Books and Orange Books and Yellow Books without end, and proving this or that from them--as of course out of such a mass of material they can easily do, according to their fancy. But when one remembers that almost all the documents in these books have been written with a _view_ to their later publication; and when one remembers also that, however incompetent diplomatists as a class may be, no one supposes them to be such fools as to entrust their _most_ important _ententes_ and understandings with each other to printed records--why, one comes to the conclusion that the analysis of all these State papers is not a very profitable occupation. II WAR-MADNESS _September_, 1914. How mad, how hopelessly mad, it all seems I With fifteen to twenty million soldiers already mobilized, and more than half that number in the fighting lines; with engines of appalling destruction by land and sea, and over the land and under the sea; with Northern France, Belgium, and parts of Germany, Poland, Russia, Servia, and Austria drenched in blood; the nations exhausting their human and material resources in savage conflict--this war, marking the climax, and (let us hope) the _finale_ of our commercial civilization, is the most monstrous the old Earth has ever seen. And yet, as in a hundred earlier and lesser wars, we hardly know the why and wherefore of it. It is like the sorriest squabbles of children and schoolboys--utterly senseless and unreasoning. But broken bodies and limbs and broken hearts and an endless river of blood and suffering are the outcome. III THE ROOTS OF THE GREAT WAR[2] _October_, 1914.