e wonders of patience and wisdom have come to a world of men who
set the value of life in the power to act rather than in the faculty of
meditation. It has been dwarfed by this, and it has been obscured by a
cloud of considerations with whose shaping wisdom and meditation had
little or nothing to do; by the weary platitudes on the military
situation which (apart from geographical conditions) is the same
everlasting situation that has prevailed since the times of Hannibal and
Scipio, and further back yet, since the beginning of historical
record--since prehistoric times, for that matter; by the conventional
expressions of horror at the tale of maiming and killing; by the rumours
of peace with guesses more or less plausible as to its conditions. All
this is made legitimate by the consecrated custom of writers in such time
as this--the time of a great war. More legitimate in view of the
situation created in Europe are the speculations as to the course of
events after the war. More legitimate, but hardly more wise than the
irresponsible talk of strategy that never changes, and of terms of peace
that do not matter.

And above it all--unaccountably persistent--the decrepit, old, hundred
years old, spectre of Russia's might still faces Europe from across the
teeming graves of Russian people. This dreaded and strange apparition,
bristling with bayonets, armed with chains, hung over with holy images;
that something not of this world, partaking of a ravenous ghoul, of a
blind Djinn grown up from a cloud, and of the Old Man of the Sea, still
faces us with its old stupidity, with its strange mystical arrogance,
stamping its shadowy feet upon the gravestone of autocracy already
cracked beyond repair by the torpedoes of Togo and the guns of Oyama,
already heaving in the blood-soaked ground with the first stirrings of a
resurrection.

Never before had the Western world the opportunity to look so deep into
the black abyss which separates a soulless autocracy posing as, and even
believing itself to be, the arbiter of Europe, from the benighted,
starved souls of its people. This is the real object-lesson of this war,
its unforgettable information. And this war's true mission, disengaged
from the economic origins of that contest, from doors open or shut, from
the fields of Korea for Russian wheat or Japanese rice, from the
ownership of ice-free ports and the command of the waters of the East--its
true mission was to lay a ghost.