They are responses, however, that make for health. Satire holds
the medicine-glass up to human nature. It also holds the mirror up in a
limited way. It does not show a man what he looks like when he is both
well and good. It does show a man what he looks like, however, when he
breaks out into spots or goes yellow, pale, or mottled as a result of
making a beast of himself. It reflects only sick men; but it reflects them
with a purpose. It would be a crime to permit it, if the world were a
hospital for incurables. To write satire is an act of faith, not a
luxurious exercise. The despairing Swift was a fighter, as the despairing
Anatole France is a fighter. They may have uttered the very Z of
melancholy about the animal called man; but at least they were
sufficiently optimistic to write satires and to throw themselves into
defeated causes.

It would be too much to expect of satire that it alone will cure mankind
of the disease of war. It is a good sign, however, that satires on war
have begun to be written. War has affected with horror or disgust a number
of great imaginative writers in the last two or three thousand years. The
tragic indictment of war in _The Trojan Women_ and the satiric indictment
in _The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms_ are evidence that some men at least saw
through the romance of war before the twentieth century. In the war that
has just ended, however--or that would have ended if the Peace Conference
would let it--we have seen an imaginative revolt against war, not on the
part of mere men of letters, but on the part of soldiers. Ballads have
survived from other wars, depicting the plight of the mutilated soldier
left to beg:

You haven't an arm and you haven't a leg,
You're an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg,
You ought to be put in a bowl to beg--
Och, Johnnie, I hardly knew you!

But the recent war has produced a literature of indictment, basing itself
neither on the woes of women nor on the wrongs of ex-soldiers, but on the
right of common men not to be forced into mutual murder by statesmen who
themselves never killed anything more formidable than a pheasant.
Soldiers--or some of them--see that wars go on only because the people who
cause them do not realize what war is like. I do not mean to suggest that
the kings, statesmen and journalists who bring wars about would not
themselves take part in the fighting rather than that there should be no
fighting at all. The people who cause wars