ed by it. It also brought wealth to many who would
therefore have regretted its sudden termination. This seems a hard thing
to say, but nevertheless it is true. The so-called "working-classes" had
developed an appetite for wealth and power that nothing could satisfy.
This appetite was being fed continually, but the more it devoured the
more voracious it became. Nor did the shameless profiteering of the
wealthy tend to allay it in any way. Protests against the war never went
beyond the passing of mere resolutions. Those who had sufficient
humanity and imagination to hate the war in its entirety and to suffer
from it, although not necessarily taking any part in it, were too few
and too scattered and isolated to take any effective action.

The extent to which a man can suffer is the precise measure of his
merit, and thus it was that our patriots and war-enthusiasts being
incapable, by reason of their grossness and vulgarity, of suffering in a
spiritual sense, were immune from the misery caused by the war and yet
it was they above all others upon whose support the continuance of the
war depended.

This was the terrible fatality. The more a man suffered from the war the
smaller was his control over it.

Everywhere, those who deserved to suffer did not suffer and those who
did not deserve to suffer suffered. And that was why the war went on.
Most people were so indifferent that it was impossible to talk to them
without anger. I could think of nothing else but the war. I could not
escape from its invisible presence. The streets and houses seemed the
immaterial creations of some dream, and somewhere behind them the
slaughter was going on, and amid the noise of the traffic the throbbing
of the bombardment was plainly audible.

Sometimes I felt an impulse to shout from the house-tops like a Hebrew
prophet and denounce this most wicked of generations. But the very
futility of the idea filled me with mortification.

Our enlightened twentieth century has no use for prophets. Christ
Himself would have been arrested as a pacifist or a lunatic if He had
spoken His mind in the streets of London. And the clergy would have
applauded the imprisonment of a dangerous "pro-German." The scribes and
Pharisees were more numerous and more powerful than ever before.

Particularly the scribes.

There never was in all the world an infamy as great as the infamy of our
war-time Press. A horde of unscrupulous liars and hirelings spat hatred
and