Men do not, of course, jump too hastily to conclusions merely by reason of their ruder sense of justice. There is involved also a certain obscure instinct toward art, toward rounding out and completing and closing a chapter. Paradox cheerfully says, not forgetting Oscar Wilde, that affairs in 1918-1920 were trying to conform to dramaturgy, that the war was trying to shape itself a good fifth act. But paradox is not needed, for few things are clearer than that centuries of literature were then indeed influencing the world’s attitude toward the peace and the treaty. Obscurely, again let it be emphasized, men had felt that they were witnessing, or acting, the vastest of dramas. The curtain, for them, rose sharply with the Austrian ultimatum and the invasion of Belgium. The sinking of the _Lusitania_, say, was the villain’s fatal blunder, which brought against him a fresh, powerful enemy. The odds then deserting him, he hazarded all on a single blow, lost, and came down in a fearful wreck with the spent world falling about him. Was it not due and natural that there should descend another curtain to hide the bloody stage, and that the lights should flash sharply on, and that the spectators should turn away, contented though somewhat subdued, to eat, drink, and make love, possibly commenting upon the actors and their art? Of course the peace on which the curtain fell had to be dramatically satisfying, the villain dead or prostrate and the hero in the ascendant. The sense of form must be served, the taste for melodramatic finality gratified. If the piece ended happily for the victors, justice had been done. Justice or melodrama? It is only in art, and that not always the truest, that things come out so right. History has no beginning, no middle, no end, but moves everlastingly in some dim direction of which mankind at least does not know the secret. Poets and dramatists may honourably pilfer from history such materials as they require, and may of course work them into forms more compact or conclusive than life itself. But history cannot be handled so masterfully, for one can never be sure at what point in it one is standing. When the _Lusitania_ went down, no one knew whether her loss opened the first act or the last. When America entered the war no one could be sure whether the fourth act of five or of fifty acts had ended. And no one could say that the peace absolutely concluded the drama. The business of the treaty was not to close the war but to open the peace, not to avenge those who died but to preserve those who still lived, not to crown events past with poetic justice, which belongs to the technique of melodrama, but to prepare for events to come by trusting to the higher and humaner justice which is less concerned with righting old wrongs than with trying to foresee and prevent new wrongs—the justice, let me call it, of plain prose. THE CORRUPTION OF COMFORT