When I call this war a crime I use the word in its fullest and simplest sense, an evil act issuing from the deliberate choice of certain human wills. There is a sort of pietism, hardly distinguishable from atheism, to which war appears as a sort of natural calamity, produced by overmastering external conditions. You will hear people of this school of thoughtlessness chattering away as if the earthquake of Lisbon, the cholera outbreak of 1839, and the war of 1914 all belonged to the same category of evil. But the first was plainly beyond the reach of human power; the second was an evil imposed from without which might have been nullified by a wise organization of medical knowledge; and the third was, on the part of its authors, just as plainly a thing of deliberate human choice. Another type of mind, numerously represented, considers that it has settled everything philosophically when to war it has added the label “inevitable.” Everything is apparently involved in a sort of gelatinous determinism; everybody is somewhat to blame for everything, and nobody is very definitely to blame for anything. According to this notion because Germany is rather big, and the British Empire, France, Russia, Italy, and Austria-Hungary are also rather big, and because they all manufacture goods and sell them, the fabric of civilisation is to blow up in minute fragments from time to time under the explosion of an “inevitable war.” No casual connection is indicated. Before thought begins these two doctrines must be dismissed. War is not a calamity of nature, and there are no “inevitable wars.” Or rather the only war inevitable is a war against aggression, and aggression itself is never inevitable. If any fault has ever been urged against Belgium it was that of a too great and apathetic complacency. The average Englishman--bating the unreal fever-frenzy regarding Ireland--so little planned attack on anyone that events have proved his complete unpreparedness, an unpreparedness common and creditable to all the Allies. Russia wanted no war, Italy wanted none, Serbia, ravaged with disease, wanted none. Yet suddenly there was launched upon us this abomination of desolation.