Whatever portion of humankind is chastened and quickened by this big field-war and sea-war, is the first fruits of a nobler race. Man has had countless and continuous opportunities of doing this purifying process to himself in privacy and peace; instead, he has consistently, with rarest exceptions, used his will to serve the lesser self, or deal with the lesser selves of other men. Now, in these years, every man who failed, will learn the lesson, because it will be forced upon him. If our wisdom is not so great and old as we hope, if we have in the long past thrown away our chances, then we shall surely go out and fare as the others fare now--in exactly the right proportion. Killing another doesn't work as a means of self-correction. Hereafter, I'm interested in correcting myself. There is very little outside work left to do. This is a commonplace, of course, yet it reminds me that the highest wisdom is something grandly simple and easy. Murder is an aggravated waste of both time and opportunity. Yet I am at peace with nobody, not even myself. Peace ought to be more intense than war, and until it is, we shall have to go through many wars to arrive at any kind of peace. Many slaveries is the price of freedom. One who fears will be brought up facing monster fears, until he learns next time that his personal fears were too petty to mention. One who has greed and envy will surely be made a pawn in a game of greed so colossal that perhaps, in a future time, he will have no interest in neighbourhood greeds, but will have learned to see and to desire the whole world. His greed has been stretched into a passion for dominion; and the most fascinating field for empire he will discover within himself. So wherever we stand, we can't lose out. We can choose to do good, better, best--but without choosing, nothing less than all right can happen. The brighter facts are that all these warring energies, whether of men or ordnance, are the force of one God, energies working out of the muddles men made. Man has disturbed the balance. Man now makes a sacrifice in order to restore equilibrium, to release the powers he misused. The greatest conceivable struggle must sooner or later come between the higher and lower nature of every living thing. Man is now preparing himself, collectively and individually, for this final conquest. His prime illusion seized him when he turned away from his own faults, to correct the faults of his brother. The secondary illusion is that the brother will not be able to care for his own faults. The third is that we must help our brother correct himself. The fourth is that if he won't do it himself, in the way we say, we will do it for him.