erstand now
less than ever. It carries the implication that because war has broken
out that fact disposes of all objection to it. The armies are at grips,
therefore peace is a mistake. Passion reigns on the Balkans, therefore
passion is preferable to reason.

I suppose cannibalism and infanticide, polygamy, judicial torture,
religious persecution, witchcraft, during all the years we did these
"inevitable" things, were defended in the same way, and those who
resented all criticism of them pointed in triumph to the cannibal feast,
the dead child, the maimed witness, the slain heretic, or the burned
witch. But the fact did not prove the wisdom of those habits, still less
their inevitability; for we have them no more.

We are all agreed as to the fundamental cause of the Balkan trouble: the
hate born of religious, racial, national, and language differences; the
attempt of an alien conqueror to live parasitically upon the conquered,
and the desire of conqueror and conquered alike to satisfy in massacre
and bloodshed the rancour of fanaticism and hatred.

Well, in these islands, not so very long ago, those things were causes
of bloodshed; indeed, they were a common feature of European life. But
if they are inevitable in human relationship, how comes it that Adana is
no longer duplicated by St. Bartholomew; the Bulgarian bands by the
vendetta of the Highlander and the Lowlander; the struggle of the Slav
and Turk, Serb and Bulgar, by that of Scots and English, and English and
Welsh? The fanaticism of the Moslem to-day is no intenser than that of
Catholic and heretic in Rome, Madrid, Paris, and Geneva at a time which
is only separated from us by the lives of three or four elderly men. The
heretic or infidel was then in Europe also a thing unclean and
horrifying, exciting in the mind of the orthodox a sincere and honest
hatred and a (very largely satisfied) desire to kill. The Catholic of
the 16th century was apt to tell you that he could not sit at table with
a heretic because the latter carried with him a distinctive and
overpoweringly repulsive odour. If you would measure the distance Europe
has travelled, think what this means: all the nations of Christendom
united in a war lasting 200 years for the capture of the Holy Sepulchre;
and yet, when in our day the representatives, seated round a table,
could have had it for the asking, they did not deem it worth the asking,
so little of the ancient passion was there left. The ver