d need no longer wage
wars. In short, they perpetually base their peace proposals on the fact
that an ordinary citizen no longer avenges himself with an axe.

But how is he prevented from avenging himself with an axe? If he hits
his neighbor on the head with the kitchen chopper what do we do? Do we
all join hands, like children playing mulberry bush, and say: "We are
all responsible for this, but let us hope it will not spread. Let us
hope for the happy, happy day when he shall leave off chopping at the
man's head, and when nobody shall ever chop anything forever and ever."
Do we say: "Let bygones be bygones. Why go back to all the dull details
with which the business began? Who can tell with what sinister motives
the man was standing there within reach of the hatchet?"

We do not. We keep the peace in private life by asking for the facts of
provocation and the proper object of punishment. We do not go into the
dull details; we do inquire into the origins; we do emphatically inquire
who it was that hit first. In short, we do what I have done very briefly
in this place.

Given this, it is indeed true that behind these facts there are
truths--truths of a terrible, of a spiritual sort. In mere fact the
Germanic power has been wrong about Servia, wrong about Russia, wrong
about Belgium, wrong about England, wrong about Italy. But there was a
reason for its being wrong everywhere, and of that root reason, which
has moved half the world against it, I shall speak later in this series.
For that is something too omnipresent to be proved, too indisputable to
be helped by detail. It is nothing less than the locating, after more
than a hundred years of recriminations and wrong explanations, of the
modern European evil--the finding of the fountain from which poison has
flowed upon all the nations of the earth.

*II.*

*Russian or Prussian Barbarism?*

It will hardly be denied that there is one lingering doubt in many who
recognize unavoidable self-defense in the instant parry of the English
sword and who have no great love for the sweeping sabre of Sadowa and
Sedan. That doubt is the doubt of whether Russia, as compared with
Prussia, is sufficiently decent and democratic to be the ally of liberal
and civilized powers. I take first, therefore, this matter of
civilization.

It is vital in a discussion like this that we should make sure we are
going by meanings and not by mere words. It is not necessary in any
argument