e
multitude. The call to the old watchwords of national pride and imperial
might thrilled the soul of a people of proud tradition in sea--battles
and land-battles. Appeals for the rescue of "the little nations" struck
old chords of chivalry and sentiment--though with a strange lack of
logic and sincerity Irish demand for self-government was unheeded. Base
passions as well as noble instincts were stirred easily. Greedy was the
appetite of the mob for atrocity tales. The more revolting they were the
quicker they were swallowed. The foul absurdity of the "corpse-factory"
was not rejected any more than the tale of the "crucified Canadian"
(disproved by our own G.H.Q.) or the cutting off of children's hands
and women's breasts, for which I could find no evidence from the only
British ambulances working in the districts where such horrors were
reported. Spy-mania flourished in mean streets, German music was banned
in English drawing-rooms. Preachers and professors denied any quality of
virtue or genius to German poets, philosophers, scientists, or scholars.
A critical weighing of evidence was regarded as pro-Germanism and lack
of patriotism. Truth was delivered bound to passion. Hatred at home,
inspired largely by feminine hysteria and official propaganda, reached
such heights that when fighting-men came back on leave their refusal
to say much against their enemy, their straightforward assertions that
Fritz was not so black as he was painted, that he fought bravely, died
gamely, and in the prison-camps was well-mannered, decent, industrious,
good-natured, were heard with shocked silence by mothers and sisters who
could only excuse this absence of hate on the score of war-weariness.

II

The people of all countries were deeply involved in the general
blood-guiltiness of Europe. They made no passionate appeal in the name
of Christ or in the name of humanity for the cessation of the slaughter
of boys and the suicide of nations and for a reconciliation of
peoples upon terms of some more reasonable argument than that of high
explosives. Peace proposals from the Pope, from Germany, from Austria,
were rejected with fierce denunciation, most passionate scorn, as "peace
plots" and "peace traps," not without the terrible logic of the vicious
circle, because, indeed, there was no sincerity of renunciation in
some of those offers of peace, and the powers hostile to us were simply
trying our strength and our weakness in order to