ates shall be the enemy of all.

R. R.

_De Amsterdammer Weekblad voor Nederland_, January
24, 1915.

XII. OUR NEIGHBOR THE ENEMY

_March 15, 1915._

While the war tempest rages, uprooting the strongest souls and dragging
them along in its furious cyclone, I continue my humble pilgrimage,
trying to discover beneath the ruins the rare hearts who have remained
faithful to the old ideal of human fraternity. What a sad joy I have in
collecting and helping them!

I know that each of their efforts--like mine--that each of their words
of love, rouses and turns against them the hostility of the two hostile
camps. The combatants, pitted against each other, agree in hating those
who refuse to hate. Europe is like a besieged town. Fever is raging.
Whoever will not rave like the rest is suspected. And in these hurried
times when justice cannot wait to study evidence, every suspect is a
traitor. Whoever insists, in the midst of war, on defending peace among
men knows that he risks his own peace, his reputation, his friends, for
his belief. But of what value is a belief for which no risks are run?

Certainly it is put to the test in these days, when every day brings the
echo of violence, injustice, and new cruelties. But was it not still
more tried when it was entrusted to the fishermen of Judea by him whom
humanity pretends to honor still--with its lips more than with its
heart? The rivers of blood, the burnt towns, all the atrocities of
thought and action, will never efface in our tortured souls the luminous
track of the Galilean barque, nor the deep vibrations of the great
voices which from across the centuries proclaim reason as man's true
home. You choose to forget them, and to say (like many writers of today)
that this war will begin a new era in the history of mankind, a reversal
of former values, and that from it alone will future progress be dated.
That is always the language of passion. Passion passes away. Reason
remains--reason and love. Let us continue to search for their young
shoots amidst the bloody ruins.

I feel the same joy when I find the fragile and valiant flowers of human
pity piercing the icy crust of hatred that covers Europe, as we feel in
these chilly March days when we see the first flowers appear above the
soil. They show that the warmth of life persists below the surface of
the earth, that fraternal love persists below the surface of the
nations, and that soon nothing will prevent it ri