As our eagerness and our reluctance are not controlling factors in the situation, it is unwise to stress them too heavily. Yet we must think, at least some of us must; and it is well to think out as clearly as we can, not the relative advantages of content and discontent--a question which briskly answers itself--but the relative rightness. Emerson believed in the essential goodness of life, in the admirable law of compensation. Santayana believes that life has evil for its condition, and is for that reason profoundly sad and equivocal. He sees in the sensuous enjoyment of the Greek, the industrial optimism of the American, only a “thin disguise for despair.” Yet Emerson and Santayana reach the same general conclusion. The first says that hours of sanity and consideration come to communities as to individuals, “when the truth is seen, and the martyrs are justified”; the second that “people in all ages sometimes achieve what they have set their hearts on,” and that, if our will and conduct were better disciplined, “contentment would be more frequent and more massive.” It is hard to think of these years of grace as a chosen period of sanity and consideration; and the hearts of the Turk and the Muscovite are set on things which do not make for the massive contentment of the world. The orderly processes of civilization have been so wrenched and shattered that readjustment is blocked at some point in every land, in our own no less than in others. There are those who say that the World War went beyond the bounds of human endurance; and that the peculiar horror engendered by indecent methods of attack--poison-gases, high explosives and corrosive fluids--has dimmed the faith and broken the spirit of men. But Attila managed to turn a fair proportion of the civilized world into wasteland, with only man-power as a destructive force. Europe to-day is by comparison unscathed, and there are kinsfolk dwelling upon peaceful continents to whom she may legitimately call for aid. Legitimately, unless our content is like the content extolled by Little Ann’s mother; unless our shoes and stockings are indicative of God’s meaningless partiality, and unless the contemplation of our neighbour’s bleeding feet enhances our pious satisfaction. “I doubt,” says Mr. Wells sourly, “if it would make any very serious difference for some time in the ordinary daily life of Kansas City, if all Europe were reduced to a desert in the next five years.” Why Kansas City should have been chosen as the symbol of unconcern, I do not know; but space has a deadening influence on pity as on fear. The farther we travel from the Atlantic coast, the more tepid is the sympathy for injured France. The farther we travel from the Pacific coast, the fainter is the prejudice against Japan.