with some that peace is
wholly bad. Even amid the horrors of peace you will find little shoots
of character fed by the gentle and timely rains of plague and famine,
tempest and fire; simple lessons of patience and courage conned in the
schools of typhus, gout, and stone; not oratorios, perhaps, but homely
anthems and rude hymns played on knife and probe in the long winter
nights. Far from me to 'sin our mercies,' or to call mere twilight dark.
Yet dark it may become; for remember that even these poor makeshift
schools of character, these second-bests, these halting substitutes for
war--remember that the efficiency of every one of them, be it hunger,
accident, ignorance, sickness, or pain, is menaced by the intolerable
strain of its struggles with secular doctors, plumbers, inventors,
schoolmasters, and policemen. Every year thousands who would once have
been braced and steeled by manly tussles with small-pox or diphtheria
are robbed of that blessing by the great changes made in our drains.
Every year thousands of women and children must go their way bereft of
the rich spiritual experience of the widow and the orphan."]

Sec. 5

Trade

I shall never forget the tones of hoarse satisfaction with which a
vendor of the _Evening News_ disturbed the twilight of a May evening in
London, triumphantly proclaiming a "Great Troop Train Disaster." I had
often noticed with what apparent joy the newspapers announced the
sinking of a British cruiser; with what entirely neutral delight they
welcomed or invented the report of Terrible Slaughter on either side.
But somehow that hoarse and rufous man with the loose lip remained in my
memory and became for me a type of one element in the population to
which war was not unwelcome; the journalistic element that lives by
exploiting the sadistic curiosity, the craving for mean excitements, and
all the gladiatorial instinct of the modern world.[18] It soon became
clear that the newspapers were not alone in the commercial exploitation
of war. They were not even the worst offenders. The publishers were
hurriedly producing volume after volume of faked memoirs badly written
by imaginary governesses. The production of spurious memoirs and
"autobiographies," even if they are skilfully composed, is always
grossly immoral; and of the specimens occasioned by this war one may say
that if they had been genuine it would have been possible to attribute
the low morality of some Germanic princes to the li