ropean war! A sacrilegious conflict which shows a maddened Europe
ascending its funeral pyre, and, like Hercules, destroying itself with
its own hands!

And thus the three greatest nations of the West, the guardians of
civilization, rush headlong to their ruin, calling in to their aid
Cossacks, Turks, Japanese, Cingalese, Soudanese, Senegalese, Moroccans,
Egyptians, Sikhs and Sepoys--barbarians from the poles and those from
the equator, souls and bodies of all colors.[11] It is as if the four
quarters of the Roman Empire at the time of the Tetrarchy had called
upon the barbarians of the whole universe to devour each other.

Is our civilization so solid that you do not fear to shake the pillars
on which it rests? Can you not see that all falls in upon you if one
column be shattered? Could you not have learned if not to love one
another, at least to tolerate the great virtues and the great vices of
each other? Was it not your duty to attempt--you have never attempted it
in sincerity--to settle amicably the questions which divided you, the
problem of peoples annexed against their will, the equitable division of
productive labor and the riches of the world? Must the stronger forever
darken the others with the shadow of his pride, and the others forever
unite to dissipate it? Is there no end to this bloody and puerile sport,
in which the partners change about from century to century--no end,
until the whole of humanity is exhausted thereby?

The rulers who are the criminal authors of these wars dare not accept
the responsibility for them. Each one by underhand means seeks to lay
the blame at the door of his adversary. The peoples who obey them
submissively resign themselves with the thought that a power higher than
mankind has ordered it thus. Again the venerable refrain is heard: "The
fatality of war is stronger than our wills." The old refrain of the herd
that makes a god of its feebleness and bows down before him. Man has
invented fate, that he may make it responsible for the disorders of the
universe, those disorders which it was his duty to regulate. There is no
fatality! The only fatality is what we desire; and more often, too, what
we do not desire enough. Let each now repeat his _mea culpa_. The
leaders of thought, the Church, the Labor Parties did not desire war ...
That may be.... What then did they do to prevent it? What are they doing
to put an end to it? They are stirring up the bonfire, each one bringing
his