enerous, the weak, the ailing, in a word the less desirable, alone
possess some chance of escaping the carnage, for over twelve months a
sort of monstrous inverse selection has been in operation, one which
seems to be deliberately seeking the downfall of the human race. And
we wonder uneasily what the state of the world will be after the great
trial and what will be left of it and what will be the future of this
stunted race, shorn of all the best and noblest part of it.

The problem is certainly one of the darkest that have ever vexed the
minds of men. It contains a material truth before which we remain
defenceless; and, if we accept it as it stands, we can discover no
remedy for the evil that threatens us. But material and tangible
truths are never anything but a more or less salient angle of greater
and deeper-lying truths. And, on the other hand, mankind appears to be
such a necessary and indestructible force of nature that it has
always, hitherto, not only survived the most desperate ordeals, but
succeeded in benefiting by them and emerging greater and stronger than
before.

2

We know that peace is better than war; it were madness to compare the
two. We know that, if this cataclysm let loose by an act of
unutterable folly had not come upon the world, mankind would doubtless
have reached ere long a zenith of wonderful achievement whose
manifestations it is impossible to foreshadow. We know that, if a
third or a fourth part of the fabulous sums expended on extermination
and destruction had been devoted to works of peace, all the iniquities
that poison the air we breathe would have been triumphantly redressed
and that the social question, the one great question, that matter of
life and death which justice demands that posterity should face,
would have found its definite solution, once and for all, in a
happiness which now perhaps even our sons and grandsons will not
realize. We know that the disappearance of two or three million young
existences, cut down when they were on the point of bearing fruit,
will leave in history a void that will not be easily filled, even as
we know that among those dead were mighty intellects, treasures of
genius which will not come back again and which contained inventions
and discoveries that will now perhaps be lost to us for centuries. We
know that we shall never grasp the consequences of this thrusting back
of progress and of this unprecedented devastation. But, granting all
thi