This is no argument, or faint-hearted appeal, for a premature or inconclusive peace. Truly the scourge of war is more terrible, more Apocalyptic in its horror, than even the most active imagination could have pictured. When the time comes to write down in every country a plain record of it, with its wounds and weariness, and flesh-stabbing, and bone-pulverising, and lunacies, and rats and lice and maggots, and all the crawling festerment of battle-fields, two landmarks in human progress will be reached. The world will for the first time understand the nobility, beyond all phrase, of soldiers, and it will understand also the foulness, beyond all phrase, of those who compel them into war. In these days God help the militarists! There will be no need to organise a peace movement; it will organise itself in all democratic countries, spontaneous and irresistible as a prime force of nature. It will still be necessary to arm against those who linger in the blood-mists of autocracy, just as civilised men provide against tigers and murderers and syphilis. But God help those who go preaching to mutilated veterans and stricken homes the gospel that war is a normal incident of the intercourse between nations, and an ennobling thing to be cultivated for its own sake! That by the way. Such is modern war, and knowing it to be such, there is not a man or woman of the Allied peoples, in uniform or out of it, but is ready to go through with it day after day and, if need be, year after year until the anti-human evangel of Berlin is down in the mud. That resolution, so unmistakable, is the supreme answer of democracy to the whole race of blood-and-ironmongers. They loved war, praised war, planned war; we loathed it, believed so little that a modern state would loose it on the world as even to neglect advisable precautions. And now the peace-workers have the war-workers by the throat, and are humbling them in their own picked arena. Despite Nietzsche and Bernhardi and the rest, democracy does not so soften men that they will not die for their ideals. They will do more than die, they will conquer.