es; it will devour nations...."

White read this on the 9th of October, 1914. One crumpled evening
paper at his feet proclaimed in startled headlines: "Rain of Incendiary
Shells. Antwerp Ablaze." Another declared untruthfully but impressively:
"Six Zeppelins drop Bombs over the Doomed City."

He had bought all the evening papers, and had read and re-read them and
turned up maps and worried over strategic problems for which he had no
data at all--as every one did at that time--before he was able to go on
with Benham's manuscripts.

These pacific reassurances seemed to White's war-troubled mind like
finding a flattened and faded flower, a girl's love token, between the
pages of some torn and scorched and blood-stained book picked out from a
heap of loot after rapine and murder had had their fill....

"How can we ever begin over again?" said White, and sat for a long time
staring gloomily into the fire, forgetting forgetting, forgetting too
that men who are tired and weary die, and that new men are born to
succeed them....

"We have to begin over again," said White at last, and took up Benham's
papers where he had laid them down....

9

One considerable section of Benham's treatment of the Fourth Limitation
was devoted to what he called the Prejudices of Social Position. This
section alone was manifestly expanding into a large treatise upon the
psychology of economic organization....

It was only very slowly that he had come to realize the important part
played by economic and class hostilities in the disordering of
human affairs. This was a very natural result of his peculiar social
circumstances. Most people born to wealth and ease take the established
industrial system as the natural method in human affairs; it is only
very reluctantly and by real feats of sympathy and disinterestedness
that they can be brought to realize that it is natural only in the sense
that it has grown up and come about, and necessary only because nobody
is strong and clever enough to rearrange it. Their experience of it is
a satisfactory experience. On the other hand, the better off one is, the
wider is one's outlook and the more alert one is to see the risks and
dangers of international dissensions. Travel and talk to foreigners open
one's eyes to aggressive possibilities; history and its warnings become
conceivable. It is in the nature of things that socialists and labour
parties should minimize international obligations and nec