represents itself to the sufferer as an eternity. But there is also
another side to the matter. Instantaneous death in a great catastrophe
must be reckoned as mere euthanasia; and even short of this, the
attendant excitement has often the effect of an anodyne. In the
upshot, no doubt, such occurrences are rightly called disasters, since
their tendency is to cause needlessly painful death, under
circumstances, which in the main, enhance its terrors; but the
sufferings of the victims cannot be added together because they occur
within a limited area, any more than if they had been spread over an
indefinite tract of space. As for war, it increases the liability of
every individual who comes within its wide-flung net to intense bodily
and mental suffering, and to premature and painful death. Moreover, it
destroys social values which _can_ be added up. In this respect it
leaves the world face to face with an appalling deficit. But we must
not let it weigh upon us too heavily, or make it too great a reproach
to the Artificer of human destiny. For the soldier, like every other
sentient organism, is immured in his own universe, and his individual
debit-and-credit account with the Power which placed him there would
be no whit different if he were indeed the only real existence, and
the world around him were naught but a dance of shadows.

If there were a country of a hundred million people, in which every
citizen was born to an allowance of five pounds, which in all his life
he could not possibly increase, or invest in joint-stock enterprises,
though he might leave some of it unexpended--we should not, in spite
of the L500,000,000 of its capital, call that a wealthy country. Its
effective wealth would be precisely a five-pound note. Similarly,
given a world in which every one is born with a limited capacity of
sentience, inalienable, incommunicable, unique, we should do wrong to
call that world a multi-millionaire in misery, even if it could be
proved that in each individual account the balance of sensation was on
the wrong side of the ledger. It is true that if, in one man's
account, the balance were largely to the bad, he would be entitled to
reproach the Veiled Banker, even though five hundred or five thousand
of his fellows declared themselves satisfied with the result of their
audit. But if the Banker, in opening business, had good reason to
think that, in the long run, the contents would largely outvote the
non-contents, we