It is, I fear, true that national hatreds are in the main created and kept alive by the educated and upper classes. Working men and women throughout the world, absorbed as they are in daily toil and often preoccupied about the next meal, have no leisure for the cultivation of abstract sentiments. With a greater simplicity of outlook they take people and things as they find them and do not theorise about their faults. The scholastic attitude as regards hatred is an ironical commentary on some of the byways into which education is apt to stray. Professors--German professors in particular--are notorious for their bloodthirstiness. The ordinary fighting soldier, who has been over the top half a dozen times, is a man of peace compared with certain ferocious persons of academic distinction. The brandishing of quills has apparently a more permanently disturbing effect on character than the hurling of hand grenades. The man in the trench has, after all, a certain tie of fellowship with the man in the trench opposite. They are linked together by a common sense of duty fulfilled and of horrors equally endured. Each knows that the other is a man very much like himself, sick with the misery and dirt of the whole business, whose heart in all probability is yearning just in the same way for a wife, and home, and child. Men under these circumstances do not give themselves up to abstract hatreds. But among civilians, a man or woman’s gift of warlike talk is often in inverse ratio to any sort of personal capacity to shoulder the responsibilities of battle. Women are always apt to be more bitter than men because their measure of personal sacrifice in the war has been invariably less. They have seen their loved ones perish and the light of happiness quenched in their own lives. It is not easy for them to think steadily of the great ideals for which men died, and to realise that bitterness breeds a spirit which makes the fulfilment of such ends impossible. The case of the professors is even worse. In Germany the subservience of high academic authorities to the most abominable doctrines of the militarists was a grave and sinister feature in the history of the years preceding the war. The beating of tom-toms by men presumably of education goes a long way to justify the jibe of the “New Ignorance” applied to education by Mr. James Stephens. Education left to itself is just a force, and if it throws off the right sort of moral controls, becomes, as the whole history of latter-day Germany proves, a very dangerous force. Probably in Germany to-day there is no class more bitter, no class more full of hatred and the desire for revenge, than that of the professors. But a similar attitude may often be found among well-to-do people of all races, people who, whether or not they have been educated in the real sense of the term, have had the opportunities and advantages which spring from worldly status and prosperity.