sible for the inception
of wars, and yet who suffer most by them, who bear the brunt of the
wounds, the slaughter, the disease, and the misery which are a necessary
part of them--to rise up and forbid them for ever from the earth? Let us
do so! For though few may follow and join with us to-day, yet to-morrow
and every day in the future, and every year, as the mass-peoples come
into their own, and to the knowledge of what they are and what they
desire to be, those numbers will increase, till the cry itself is no
longer a mere cry but an accomplished fact.

It is a hopeful sign that not only among bewildered onlookers and
outsiders but among the soldiers themselves (of the more civilized
countries) this cry is being taken up. Who, indeed, should know better
than they what they are talking about? The same words are on the lips at
this moment of thousands and thousands of French and English and German
soldiers,[30] and in no faint-hearted or evasive sense, but with the
conviction and indignation of experience. We may hope they will not be
forgotten this time when the war is over.

The truth is that not only was this particular war "bound to come," but
(among the civilized peoples) the refusal of war is also bound to come.
Two great developments are leading to this result. On the one hand, the
soldiers themselves, the fighters, are as a class becoming infinitely
more sensitive, more intelligent, more capable of humane feeling, less
stupidly "patriotic" and prejudiced against their enemies than were the
soldiers of a century ago--say, of the time of Wellington; on the other
hand, the horrors, the hideousness, the folly, and the waste of war are
infinitely greater. It is inevitable that these two contradictory
movements, mounting up on opposite sides, must at last clash. The rising
conscience of Humanity must in the end say to the War-fiend, "Get thee
behind me, Satan!" Never before have there passed over the fields of
Europe armies so intelligent, so trained, so observant, so sensitive as
those to-day of Belgium, France, England, and Germany. Some day or other
they will return to their homes; but when they do it will be with a
tale that will give to the Western world an understanding of what war
means, such as it never had before.

All the same, if the word _is_ to be "Never Again!" it must come through
the masses themselves (from whom the fighters are mainly drawn); it must
be through them that this consummation must be re