ssions,
the hidden reserves of destructive hate and cruelty in our common human
soul. In war all things are permissible. To murder, to maim, to
destroy, to deceive, to make hideous waste of fertile land, to cause
weeping and wailing amongst the innocent--these are the necessities of
warfare. They are the commonplace incidents of war. There are others. It
brings to the surface strata of human nature to which culture has never
descended. It explodes our humanitarian theories by a series of
well-directed mines. The ancient horrors of devices for the punishment
of the enemy are feeble competitors with our modern inventions. Our
poison gas, our burning oil, our metallic monsters that spit death on
the enemy and crush his fine defences, our flying bomb-throwers, all
show that we have not as yet succumbed to humanitarian or Christian
ethics. There have been some startling illustrations of the folly of
assuming that we have safely and irrevocably traversed certain stages of
human indifference. We shuddered at the revelations which called
Florence Nightingale to the Crimea; we now shudder at the heartless
carelessness revealed by Commissions and Reports. The triumph of Red
Cross organization, the mass of charitable and voluntary effort to
relieve suffering, the heroism and splendour of individual sacrifice,
soften, but do not reverse, the impression of a general humanitarian
debacle.

We may, of course, take shelter behind the jejune explanation that there
are two worlds with two moralities. One is war and the other is peace.
We may affectionately survey the hospitals and orphanages, the
institutions for the blind and the mute, the asylums and the charities
with which each belligerent country pays tribute to the virtues of the
merciful life. Whatever we do, we cannot dispel the darkness by a
frenzied denunciation of war. The monster is not outside ourselves; it
is created and sustained by the hardness of our hearts and the
obtuseness of our brains. The responsibility is ours in war as well as
in peace. Reformers of all ages have battled with the wickedness of the
world, they have stormed stronghold after stronghold of social iniquity.
Their failures are no less conspicuous than their successes. Human
nature is infinitely pliable and infinitely resistant.

Is it, then, all a matter of change and recurrence? Do culture and
morality grow like flowers in a garden, obedient to the will and taste
of the gardener, but destined to fad