rom the general conflagration the FUTURE WHICH IS WITHIN YOU. To
each word of hatred uttered by the combatants, make answer by an act of
kindness and love toward all the victims. Let your simple presence show
a calm disavowal of errant passions; make of yourselves onlookers whose
luminous and compassionate gaze compels us to blush at our own unreason.
Amid war, be the living embodiment of peace. Be the undying Antigone,
who renounces hatred, and who makes no distinction between her suffering
and warring brethren.

"Jus Suffragii," London, May, 1915; "demain," Geneva,
January, 1916.

V

A WOMAN'S VOICE FROM OUT THE TUMULT[13]

A woman with compassion and who dares to avow it; _a woman who dares to
avow her horror of war, her pity for the victims, for all the victims_;
a woman who refuses to add her voice to the chorus of murderous
passions; a woman genuinely French who does not endeavour to ape the
heroines of Corneille. What a solace!

I wish to avoid saying anything which could hurt wounded souls. I know
how much grief, how much suppressed tenderness, are hidden, in thousands
of women, beneath the armour of a dogged enthusiasm. They stiffen their
sinews for fear of falling. They walk, they talk, they laugh, with an
open wound in the side through which the heart's blood is gushing. _No
prophetic faculty is needed to foresee that the time is at hand when
they will throw off this inhuman constraint, and when the world,
surfeited with bloody heroism, will not hesitate to proclaim its disgust
and its execration._

From childhood onwards our minds are distorted by a state education
which instills into us a rhetorical ideal, a compost of fragments torn
from the vast field of classical thought, revivified by the genius of
Corneille and the glories of the revolution. It is an ideal which
exultantly sacrifices the individual to the state, _which sacrifices
common sense to crazy ideas_. For the minds of those who have undergone
this discipline, life becomes a pretentious and cruel syllogism, whose
premises are obscure but whose conclusion is remorseless. Every one of
us, in his time, has been subjected to its sway. No one has better
reason to know than myself how terrible a struggle is required to free
the spirit from this second nature which tends to stifle the first. The
history of these struggles is the history of our contradictions. God be
thanked, this war--nay, it is more than a war, this convulsion of
manki