n considered. And the horror of it all is
something more than our nerves will stand. The best brains and intellects
of Europe, the brightest and most promising youths, all the manhood
everywhere in Europe to be shrivelled and consumed in a holocaust like
this--it is such a reign of the Devil and Antichrist on earth that it must
be banished in perpetuity if civilisation and progress are to endure.
Never again!

UNEXPECTED WAR

How did we get into such a stupid and appalling calamity? Let us think for
a moment. I do not suppose it would be wrong to say that no one ever
expected war in our days. Take up any of the recent books. With the
exception of the fiery martial pamphlets of Germany, the work of a von der
Goltz or a Treitschke, or a Bernhardi, we shall find a general consensus
of opinion that war on a large scale was impossible because too ruinous,
that the very size of the European armaments made war impracticable. Or
else, to take the extreme case of Mr. Norman Angell, the entanglements of
modern finance were said to have put war out of count as an absurdity. We
were a little too hasty in our judgments. It is clear that a single
determined man, if he is powerful enough, may embroil Europe. However
destructive modern armaments may be, and however costly a campaign may
prove, yet there are men who will face the cost and confront the
wholesale destruction of life that modern warfare entails. How pitiful it
is, how strange also, to look back upon the solemn asseveration of the
Kaiser and the Tsar, not so many months ago (Port Baltic, July 1912), that
the division of Europe into the two great confederations known as the
Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente provided a safeguard against
hostilities! We were constantly assured that diplomats were working for a
Balance of Power, such an equilibrium of rival forces that the total
result would be stability and peace. Arbitration, too, was considered by
many as the panacea, to say nothing of the Hague Palace of Peace. And now
we discover that nations may possibly refer to arbitration points of small
importance in their quarrels, but that the greater things which are
supposed to touch national honour and the preservation of national life
are tacitly, if not formally, exempted from the category of arbitrable
disputes. Diplomacy, Arbitration, Palaces of Peace seem equally useless.

PROXIMATE AND ULTIMATE CAUSES

In attempting to understand how Europe has (to use Lord Rose