agic tree
of life, could no more than stick its fingers in its ears as say,
"Oh, please, do _all_ stop!" and then as the strain grew intenser and
intenser set itself with feeble pawings now to clamber "Au-dessus de la
Melee," and now to--in some weak way--stop the conflict. ("Au-dessus
de la Melee"--as the man said when they asked him where he was when the
bull gored his sister.) The efforts to stop the conflict at any price,
even at the price of entire submission to the German Will, grew more
urgent as the necessity that everyone should help against the German
Thing grew more manifest.

Of all the strange freaks of distressed thinking that this war has
produced, the freaks of the Genteel Whig have been among the most
remarkable. With an air of profound wisdom he returns perpetually to
his proposition that there are faults on both sides. To say that is his
conception of impartiality. I suppose that if a bull gored his sister he
would say that there were faults on both sides; his sister ought not
to have strayed into the field, she was wearing a red hat of a highly
provocative type; she ought to have been a cow and then everything would
have been different. In the face of the history of the last forty years,
the Genteel Whig struggles persistently to minimise the German outrage
upon civilisation and to find excuses for Germany. He does this, not
because he has any real passion for falsehood, but because by training,
circumstance, and disposition he is passionately averse from action
with the vulgar majority and from self-sacrifice in a common cause, and
because he finds in the justification of Germany and, failing that, in
the blackening of the Allies to an equal blackness, one line of defence
against the wave of impulse that threatens to submerge his private
self. But when at last that line is forced he is driven back upon others
equally extraordinary. You can often find simultaneously in the same
Pacifist paper, and sometimes even in the utterances of the same writer,
two entirely incompatible statements. The first is that Germany is so
invincible that it is useless to prolong the war since no effort of the
Allies is likely to produce any material improvement in their position,
and the second is that Germany is so thoroughly beaten that she is now
ready to abandon militarism and make terms and compensations entirely
acceptable to the countries she has forced into war. And when finally
facts are produced to establish th