t Susan should be in the smoke of that
spreading horror brought it swiftly and vividly before me. I lived the
war from the first.

For years, with no felt discomfort to myself, I had been a pacifist. I
was a contributing member of several peace societies, and in one of my
slightly better-known essays I had expounded with enthusiasm Tolstoy's
doctrine--which, in spite of much passionate argument to the contrary
these troublous times, was assuredly Christ's--of nonresistance to evil.
I was, in fact, though in a theoretical, parlor sense a proclaimed
Tolstoyan, a Christian anarchist--lacking, however, the essential
groundwork for Tolstoy's doctrine: faith. Faith in God as a person, as a
father, I could not confess to; but the higher anarchist vision of
humanity freed from all control save that of its own sweet
reasonableness, of men turned unfailingly gentle, mutually helpful,
content to live simply if need be, but never with unuplifted
hearts--well, I could and did confess publicly that no other vision had
so strong an attraction for me!

I liked to dwell in the idea of such a world, to think of it as a
possibility--less remote, perhaps, than mankind in general supposed.
Having lived through the Spanish War, the Boer War, and Russia's war
with Japan; and in a world constantly strained to the breaking point by
national rivalries, commercial expansion, and competition for markets;
by class struggles everywhere apparent; by the harsh, discordant
energies of its predatory desires--I, nevertheless, had been able to
persuade myself that the darkest days of our dust-speck planet were done
with and recorded; Earth and its graceless seed of Adam were at last, to
quote Jimmy, "on their way"--well on their way, I assured myself, toward
some inevitable region of abiding and beneficent light!

_Pouf!_... And then?

Stricken in solitude, I went down into dark places and fumbled like a
starved beggar amid the detritus of my dreams. Dust and shadow.... Was
there anything real there, anything worth the pain of spiritual salvage?
Had I been, all my life, merely one more romanticist, one more
sentimental trifler in a universe whose ways were not those of
pleasantness, nor its paths those of peace? Surely, yes; for my heart
convicted me at once of having wasted all my days hitherto in a fool's
paradise. The rough fabric of human life was not spun from moonshine. So
much at least was certain. And nothing else was left me. Hurled from my