rit struggles in many
thousands of minds. Where will it be strongest? Which country will get
clear first, get most rapidly to work again, have least of the confusion
and wrangling that must in some degree occur everywhere? Will any
country go altogether to pieces in hopeless incurable discord?

Now I believe that the answer to that last question is "No." And my
reason for that answer is the same as my reason for believing that the
association of the Pledged Allies will not break up after the war; it is
that I believe that this war is going to end not in the complete
smashing up and subjugation of either side, but in a general exhaustion
that will make the recrudescence of the war still possible but very
terrifying.

Mars will sit like a giant above all human affairs for the next two
decades, and the speech of Mars is blunt and plain. He will say to us
all: "Get your houses in order. If you squabble among yourselves, waste
time, litigate, muddle, snatch profits and shirk obligations, I will
certainly come down upon you again. I have taken all your men between
eighteen and fifty, and killed and maimed such as I pleased; millions of
them. I have wasted your substance--contemptuously. Now, mark you, you
have multitudes of male children between the ages of nine and nineteen
running about among you. Delightful and beloved boys. And behind them
come millions of delightful babies. Of these I have scarcely smashed and
starved a paltry hundred thousand perhaps by the way. But go on
muddling, each for himself and his parish and his family and none for
all the world, go on in the old way, stick to-your 'rights,' stick to
your 'claims' each one of you, make no concessions and no sacrifices,
obstruct, waste, squabble, and presently I will come back again and take
all that fresh harvest of life I have spared, all those millions that
are now sweet children and dear little boys and youths, and I will
squeeze it into red pulp between my hands, I will mix it with the mud of
trenches and feast on it before your eyes, even more damnably than I
have done with your grown-up sons and young men. And I have taken most
of your superfluities already; next time I will take your barest
necessities."

So the red god, Mars; and in these days of universal education the great
mass of people will understand plainly now that that is his message and
intention. Men who cannot be swayed by the love of order and creation
may be swayed by the thought of dea