“And how will you set your solemn league and covenant to work?,” Hornbeck enquired sceptically. I could make no reply until I had found more time to think; time, too, perhaps, to talk with my uncle Bertrand of the old Disarmament League and of the propaganda that issued from _Peace_ office before the war. When I told Barbara that, so far as I could see, my work was only beginning, I felt that in all likelihood the task before our generation would be to create a ‘will to peace’ out of the present disgust with war. If history was human nature repeating itself, there had been the same disgust at the end of every great war; but the memory of that disgust faded quickly. It was no match for the urgent plea that honour or security was at stake; no match for the cynical resignation of those who said that there always had been wars and always would be. “Of course you’re right to try,” was the utmost encouragement that I could win even from Violet, “but these Hague Conventions and things haven’t done much good, have they?” “No one has yet appealed to the rank-and-file,” I answered. “No one has appealed while the full horror of war was vividly remembered. No one has shewn the dumb millions of the world how much alike they all are, how they swim together and sink together. In all I’ve been reading these last few weeks I’ve been amazed by the sameness of conditions in all countries. If we can work on that till the sameness becomes a oneness . . .” In aiming at perspective for my second panel, I tried to set my own impressions and experiences of the war beside those of the cosmopolitan population that floated through Cannes in these first weeks of the armistice. When we had passed the stage of fancying that our individual histories were unique, I was more struck by the similarities of what I heard than by the differences. Necessarily, the islander and the continental must always disagree on foreign politics; and in Cannes I met for the first time the chronic terror that is begotten of land frontiers. “It’s all very well for you,” I was told by Italians, Greeks, Poles and Dutch: “You’re an island.” With allowance for this, I felt that the war had left on every country an almost identical mark. The Austrians and Germans whom I met in Monte Carlo, old journalistic allies—for the most part—, were as bitterly convinced that the war had been forced upon them as we in England were convinced that they had forced it on us; but, when we had agreed to differ, their description of the last four years in their own countries might have been applied, almost without a word changed, to England. There were, I discovered, idlers, _embusqués_ and adventurers of both sexes in all classes everywhere; and it was amusing, for one who thought of a German alternately as a sheep and a genius, to hear the tribute of Austria and Germany to our more than Teutonic docility and enterprise. France had her rapacious profiteers, Prussia her bloated munition-makers. The