ition of war is the reform to which you should all
bend your lives and direct your prayers. Even now you have not learnt
your lesson. Your social order, your laws, your constitution, your
personal liberties, your lives and those of your children, are thrown to
the Juggernaut of war, and yet you continue your futile pursuit of
shadows. Without peace there can be no reform."

I have joined in the debate, I have heard all these voices. They are
familiar to me with the familiarity of the songs of our childhood. Their
sentiment is true, oh so true! yet so sadly inadequate. The reformers
are valiant and true, and every one has hitched his waggon to his pet
star. Happiest are those who do not encounter the cross-influence of
rival stars or see the irony of our human limitation of sight and
achievement. The blood-red cross of the crusader will stand no admixture
of colour. The soul dominated by one idea gains ground. Henri Dunant,
Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, General Booth, Josephine
Butler--these succeed by dint of their singleness of purpose. The
narrowness serves to concentrate the strength and accelerate the work.

The reformer may be bigoted and unreasonable, but he must be an optimist
whilst pursuing his object. He must believe in life and in the inherent
goodness of the earth. He must be a stranger to the dyspeptic melancholy
through which Carlyle saw the world as a "noisy inanity" and life as an
incomprehensible monstrosity. Macbeth is called to denounce life as "a
tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury," and "signifying
nothing." Macbeth must be shunned by the reformer as the monk repels the
visits of Satan in the desert. He must share the hopefulness of Sir
Thomas More. Utopia is possible here, now, and everywhere, though
execution is likely to be the penalty of too close application to
principles.

He must not fear the companionship of the crank. He had better recognize
that he is one. What is a crank? The dictionary is somewhat vague as to
the meaning. I find that the verb is unravelled as "bend, wind, turn,
twist, wind in and out, crankle, crinkle." The last two appeal to me
strongly. How I have crankled and crinkled over wrongs and horrors
which I have discovered on my little path! No crank can see his
crankiness at the time of crankling, though sometimes he sees it
afterwards. The crank is a person who holds views which to us seem
ridiculous. The man who first objected to cannibalism was a crank.