Neither of them manages to say the word which would synthesize their divergent views: namely, that no self-respecting people should support or tolerate as rulers, men who seek to gain national advantages by means not strictly fair, honest and even generous. That is the real key to the world's future peace. Kinglake's appeal to us not to hamper the government that represents us, and Tolstoy's appeal to us not to spend our lives in preparing to slay our fellow men, can both be met in that way, and, I think, in that way alone. For an ambitious young officer actually engaged in a war, related to the Commander-in-Chief, and favourably noticed by the Emperor, even _partially_ to express disapproval of war, was difficult; and Tolstoy has told me that, contending with his desire to tell the truth about things as he saw it, he was at the same time aware of another feeling prompting him to say what was expected of him. He, however, like the child in Andersen's story who sees that the king has nothing on, when every one else is in ecstasies over the magnificence of the monarch's robes, had the gift of seeing things with his own eyes, as well as a great gift of truthfulness. These were the qualities which ultimately made him the greatest literary power of his century; and in spite of his own hesitation and the Censor's mutilations, we may still read the description he then wrote of the truce in which the French and Russian soldiers hobnobbed together in friendship, a description closing with these words: White flags are on the bastions and parallels; the flowery valley is covered with corpses; the beautiful sun is sinking towards the blue sea; and the undulating blue sea glitters in the golden rays of the sun. Thousands of people crowd together, look at, speak to, and smile at one another. And these people--Christians confessing the one great law of love and self-sacrifice--seeing what they have done, do not at once fall repentant on their knees before Him who has given them life and laid in the soul of each a fear of death and a love of goodness and of beauty, and do not embrace like brothers with tears of joy and happiness. The white flags are lowered, again the engines of death and suffering are sounding, again innocent blood flows, and the air is filled with moans and curses. In _Sevastopol_, and in Tennyson's _Charge of the Light Brigade_ (with its rhymes about 'hundred' and 'thundered,' and its panegyric of those who knew it was not their business to think, and at whom 'all the world wondered'), we have two typical expressions of conflicting views on war: the view of a man who knew it from the classics and was Poet Laureate, and the view of a man who was in the thick of it, and whose eyes were connected with his brain.