ryone than a continuation of the
war. Things were bad enough before, when the land forces were still in
a primitive phase of infantry, cavalry and artillery, and when the only
real race to develop monsters and destructors was for sea power. But the
race for sea power before 1914 was mere child's play to the breeding
of engineering monstrosities for land warfare that must now follow any
indeterminate peace settlement. I am no blind believer in the wisdom of
mankind, but I cannot believe that men are so insensate and headstrong
as to miss the plain omens of the present situation.

So that after all the cheerful amusement the sight of a Tank causes may
not be so very unreasonable. These things may be no more than one of
those penetrating flashes of wit that will sometimes light up and dispel
the contentions of an angry man. If they are not that, then they are the
grimmest jest that ever set men grinning. Wait and see, if you do not
believe me.

HOW PEOPLE THINK ABOUT THE WAR

I. DO THEY REALLY THINK AT ALL?

All human affairs are mental affairs; the bright ideas of to-day are the
realities of to-morrow. The real history of mankind is the history of
how ideas have arisen, how they have taken possession of men's minds,
how they have struggled, altered, proliferated, decayed. There is
nothing in this war at all but a conflict of ideas, traditions, and
mental habits. The German Will clothed in conceptions of aggression and
fortified by cynical falsehood, struggles against the fundamental sanity
of the German mind and the confused protest of mankind. So that the most
permanently important thing in the tragic process of this war is the
change of opinion that is going on. What are people making of it? Is it
producing any great common understandings, any fruitful unanimities?

No doubt it is producing enormous quantities of cerebration, but is it
anything more than chaotic and futile cerebration? We are told all
sorts of things in answer to that, things without a scrap of evidence
or probability to support them. It is, we are assured, turning people to
religion, making them moral and thoughtful. It is also, we are assured
with equal confidence, turning them to despair and moral disaster. It
will be followed by (1) a period of moral renascence, and (2) a debauch.
It is going to make the workers (1) more and (2) less obedient and
industrious. It is (1) inuring men to war and (2) filling them with a
passionate resolv