It is partly because men did not assume nobility in man, and were therefore unready to look for it or notice it, and therefore did not tell others of it when it did break forth, that we heard so little concerning the finest conduct of the soldiers of all the belligerent powers, friend and foe alike. Think of the sportsmanlike treatment of enemies while the fighting was still going on; the magnanimity that was taken for granted in individual relations between warriors; the countless deeds of mercy both within the area of hostilities and round about, both during and after the conflict; the half dumb, and wholly blind, belief of many a soldier that he was doing his utmost for an ideal cause; and do not forget the sincere response of the mass of the American people to the idealism of the “Fourteen Points.” Weigh all this, and then add to it the fact that war-makers cannot get their own people to fight without first deceitfully frightening them or artificially working up hatred by means of propaganda. Here, as in the case of the war-profiteer, we behold moral confusion, but on the whole a downward trend in our regard for our own qualities. Our returning soldiers, voicing the slogan “Treat ’em rough!” and applying it alike to former enemies and to citizens who made moral distinctions with respect to former enemies, gave us a hint of the extent to which belief in force as the arbiter of human relations was spreading. Taken simply and without qualification, this belief means, among other things, that men are bound to fight, and that when they fight they will be ruthless butchers on the field and smug profiteers at home. This is not quite true, but why do we constantly drift towards a belief that it is? Why do we not counteract it by bringing into the foreground the generosity that men actually exhibit, and even the fact that lower and higher motives are struggling within them? A war does not suddenly create such beliefs. They were here before 1914; they helped make the world-catastrophe possible, but they have now been accelerated by their own work. We now have the clue to certain incidents and phases of the peace-making. It was a peace-making only in the relatively superficial sense of pausing in the use of explosives. It was not reconciliation; it was external, not psychic; and it was external because all the peacemakers assumed that the conventionally accepted motives are fundamental in human nature and are to be dominant “world without end.” Underneath all the instability of the peace and all the insincerity of such measures as the mandates is a low conception of what we are, what we want, and what we are capable of becoming--a conception that was not created by the War.