I think the question of hatred is one which calls for clear thinking at the present crisis in the world’s history. Many people imagine that when they have abused the Boche in round terms they have “done their bit” towards squaring the accounts of devastated France or Belgium. All that they have done is to feed and sustain the spirit which led in the first place to the devastations. Whatever enormities Germany may have committed during the war, the task of punishment is not the problem of supreme urgency which here and now confronts us all. What we are face to face with is the question as to whether civilisation as a whole can survive the blows rained on it. The responsibility of Germany for this state of affairs is at the moment less important than the rescue of civilisation from the brink of the chasm on which it is trembling. It is useless to go on saying that Germany must be punished or that Germany must pay, if in fact the actual policy pursued is calculated to involve conquerors and conquered alike in common ruin. At times it is difficult to avoid the gloomy conclusion that we are approaching the end of a cycle of history, and that a period of darkness and chaos bids fair to overwhelm a world incapable of saving itself. The economic and political condition of Europe is grave in the extreme. In every country wild forces are surging upwards, the peril of which lies in the absence of any powers of moral and spiritual counteraction. The strain of the war has swallowed up the spiritual reserves of the world, and its moral credit is not only exhausted but overdrawn. No nation ever went to war in a spirit more grave and more responsible than that in which the British people accepted the German challenge. The call to arms is invariably a great and inspiring moment. At such a time men and women realise that they are caught up and raised on the wing of ideals greater than themselves. But it is part of the evil of war that the longer it lasts the more black and the more bitter the spirit it breeds. From August 1914 and the hush of consecration which fell on the nation, to December 1918 and what was well described by a distinguished publicist as the “organized blackguardism” of the General Election, is a falling away in temper and standard almost unbearable to contemplate.