And the real task before mankind is quite beyond the business of the fighting line, the simple awful business of discrediting and discouraging these stupidities by battleship, artillery, rifle and the blood and courage of seven million men. The real task of mankind is to get better sense into the heads of these Germans, and therewith and thereby into the heads of humanity generally, and to end not simply a war, but the idea of war. What printing and writing and talking have done, printing and writing and talking can undo. Let no man be fooled by bulk and matter. Rifles do but kill men, and fresh men are born to follow them. Our business is to kill ideas. The ultimate purpose of this war is propaganda, the destruction of certain beliefs, and the creation of others. It is to this propaganda that reasonable men must address themselves. And when I write propaganda, I do not for a moment mean the propaganda with which the name of Mr. Norman Angell is associated; this great modern gospel that war does not _pay_. That is indeed the only decent and attractive thing that can still be said for war. Nothing that is really worth having in life does pay. Men live in order that they may pay for the unpaying things. Love does not pay, art does not pay, happiness does not pay, honesty is not the best policy, generosity invites the ingratitude of the mean; what is the good of this huckster’s argument? It revolts all honourable men. But war, whether it pay or not, is an atrociously ugly thing, cruel, destroying countless beauties. Who cares whether war pays or does not pay, when one thinks of some obstinate Belgian peasant woman being interrogated and shot by a hectoring German officer, or of the weakly whimpering mess of some poor hovel with little children in it, struck by a shell? Even if war paid twelve-and-a-half per cent. per annum for ever on every pound it cost to wage, would it be any the less a sickening abomination to every decent soul? And, moreover, it is a bore. It is an unendurable bore. War and the preparation for war, the taxes, the drilling, the interference with every free activity, the arrest and stiffening up of life, the obedience to third-rate people in uniform, of which Berlin-struck Germans have been the implacable exponents, have become an unbearable nuisance to all humanity. Neither Belgium nor France nor Britain is fighting now for glory or advantage. I do not believe Russia is doing so; we are all, I believe, fighting in a fury of resentment because at last after years of waste and worry to prevent it, we have been obliged to do so. Our grievance is the grievance of every decent life-loving German, of every German mother and sweetheart who watched her man go off under his incompetent leaders to hardship and mutilations and death. And our propaganda against the Prussian idea has to be no vile argument to the pocket, but an appeal to the common sense and common feeling of humanity.