rved the recognition of special pages, sink into insignificance
before the struggles in Manchuria engaging half a million men on fronts
of sixty miles, struggles lasting for weeks, flaming up fiercely and
dying away from sheer exhaustion, to flame up again in desperate
persistence, and end--as we have seen them end more than once--not from
the victor obtaining a crushing advantage, but through the mortal
weariness of the combatants.

We have seen these things, though we have seen them only in the cold,
silent, colourless print of books and newspapers. In stigmatising the
printed word as cold, silent and colourless, I have no intention of
putting a slight upon the fidelity and the talents of men who have
provided us with words to read about the battles in Manchuria. I only
wished to suggest that in the nature of things, the war in the Far East
has been made known to us, so far, in a grey reflection of its terrible
and monotonous phases of pain, death, sickness; a reflection seen in the
perspective of thousands of miles, in the dim atmosphere of official
reticence, through the veil of inadequate words. Inadequate, I say,
because what had to be reproduced is beyond the common experience of war,
and our imagination, luckily for our peace of mind, has remained a
slumbering faculty, notwithstanding the din of humanitarian talk and the
real progress of humanitarian ideas. Direct vision of the fact, or the
stimulus of a great art, can alone make it turn and open its eyes heavy
with blessed sleep; and even there, as against the testimony of the
senses and the stirring up of emotion, that saving callousness which
reconciles us to the conditions of our existence, will assert itself
under the guise of assent to fatal necessity, or in the enthusiasm of a
purely aesthetic admiration of the rendering. In this age of knowledge
our sympathetic imagination, to which alone we can look for the ultimate
triumph of concord and justice, remains strangely impervious to
information, however correctly and even picturesquely conveyed. As to
the vaunted eloquence of a serried array of figures, it has all the
futility of precision without force. It is the exploded superstition of
enthusiastic statisticians. An over-worked horse falling in front of our
windows, a man writhing under a cart-wheel in the streets awaken more
genuine emotion, more horror, pity, and indignation than the stream of
reports, appalling in their monotony, of tens of tho