I take back nothing of what I have written earlier in this book about our refusal as a nation to bring ourselves in this respect in a line with our Allies. Our consent is not even now completely whole-hearted. For seventeen months we did so refuse, and during that time not all the magnificence of our unparalleled voluntary effort was magnificent enough to banish from the minds of our Allies the consciousness, however politely they might conceal it, that we were lagging behind in the struggle for the freedom of the world. But while we lagged behind—great as our contribution was even then to the common cause—we were learning. Outside our own country we have seen the splendid courage of tiny states like Belgium and Serbia, as well as the wonderful soldier-like qualities of the huge national armies of France and Russia and Italy and Germany. From our own people (and from those others as well) we have learnt that priests and parsons and men of every profession and trade and class and condition, however insignificant we used to think them, can endure hardness as good soldiers, and that women, if they cannot fight, can (besides knitting socks, which was all that they were supposed to be good for before the war began) do almost everything else connected with the war which is commonly regarded as men’s work. Now that we have mastered these elementary principles we shall, if we let the war teach us all that it can, go on to the obvious corollary that no nation and no man and no woman has the right to despise another, and that pride and prejudice are the root of nearly all evil. The war itself is the strongest possible evidence of that truth. For it was the pride of Germany that made the war—not her fear of being strangled by the surrounding nations, not her need of finding colonies for her surplus population, not her desire for a place under the sun, not her passionate longing to ensure for the world the liberty of the seas, not even her jealousy of England, but her overweening pride.