Is there then, if we are confronted with such problems as these, anything to do except to stay prostrate, like Job, in darkness and despair, just enduring the stroke of sorrow? Is there any excuse for bringing before the world at such a time as this the delightful reveries, the easy happiness, the gentle schemes of serener and less troubled days? The book which follows was the work of a time which seems divided from the present by a dark stream of unhappiness. Is it right, is it decent, to unfold an old picture of peace before the eyes of those who have had to look into chaos and destruction? Would it not be braver to burn the record of the former things that have passed away? Or is it well to fix our gaze firmly upon the peaceful things that have been and will be once more?
4
Yes, I believe that it is right and wholesome to do this, because the most treacherous and cowardly thing we can do is to disbelieve in life. Those old dreams and visions were true enough, and they will be true again. They represent the real life to which we must try to return. We must try to build up the conception afresh, not feebly to confess that we were all astray. We cannot abolish evil by confessing ourselves worsted by it; we can only overcome it by holding fast to our belief in labour and order and peace. It is a temptation which we must resist, to philosophise too much about war. Very few minds are large enough and clear enough to hold all the problems in their grasp. I do not believe for an instant that war has falsified our vision of peace. We must cling to it more than ever, we must emphasize it, we must dwell in it. I regard war as I regard an outbreak of pestilence; the best way to resist it is not to brood over it, but to practise joy and health. The ancient plagues which devastated Europe have not been overcome by philosophy, but by the upspringing desire of men to live cleaner and more wholesome lives. That instinct is not created by any philosophy or persuasion; it just arises everywhere and finds its way to the light.
To brood over the war, to spend our time in disentangling its intricate causes, seems to me a task for future historians. But a lover of peace, confronted by the hideousness of war, does best to try, if he can, to make plain what he means by peace and why he desires it. I do not mean by peace an indolent life, lost in gentle reveries. I mean hard daily work, and mutual understanding, and lavish help, and the effort to reassure and console and uplift. And I mean, too, a real conflict—not a conflict where we set the best and bravest of each nation to spill each other's blood—but a conflict against crime and disease and selfishness and greediness and cruelty. There is much fighting to be done; can we not combine to fight our common foes, instead of weakening each other against evil? We destroy in war our finest parental stock, we waste our labour, we lose our garnered store; we give every harsh passion a chance to grow; we live in the traditions of the past, and not in the hopes of the future.
5
And yet there is one thing in the present war which I do in my heart of hearts feel to be worth fighting for, and that is for the hope of liberty. It is hard to say what liberty is, because the essence of it is the subjugation of personal inclinations. The Germans claim that they alone know the meaning of liberty, and that they have arrived at it by discipline. But the bitterness of this war lies in the fact that the Germans are not content to set an example of attractive virtue, and to leave the world to choose it; but that if the world will not choose it, they will force it upon them by violence and the sword. It is this which makes me feel that the war may be a vast protest of the nations, which have the spirit of the future in their hearts, against a theory of life that represents the spirit of the past. And I thus, with some seeming inconsistency, believe that the war may represent the hope of peace at bay. If the nations can keep this clearly before them, and not be tempted either into reprisals, or into rewarding themselves by the spoils of victory, if victory comes; if it ends in the Germans being sincerely convinced that they have been misled and poisoned by a conception of right which is both uncivilised and unchristian, then I believe that all our sufferings may not be too great a price to pay for the future well-being of the world. That is the largest and brightest hope I dare to frame; and there are many hours and days when it seems all clouded and dim.
6
We cannot at this time disengage our thoughts from the war; we cannot, and we ought not. Still less can we take refuge from it in idle dreams of peace and security; but at a time when every paper and book that we see is full of the war and its sufferings, there must be men and women who would do well to turn their hearts and minds for a little away from it. If we brood over it, if we feed our minds upon it, especially if we are by necessity non- combatants, it is all apt to turn to a festering horror which makes us useless and miserable. Whatever happens, we must try not to be simply the worse for the war—morbid, hysterical, beggared of faith and hope, horrified with life. That is the worst of evils; and I believe that it is wholesome to put as far as we can our cramped minds in easier postures, and to let our spirits have a wider range. We know how a dog who is perpetually chained becomes fierce and furious, and thinks of nothing but imaginary foes, so that the most peaceful passer-by becomes an enemy. I have felt, since the war began, a certain poison in the air, a tendency towards suspicion and contentiousness and vague hostility. We must exorcise that evil spirit if we can; and I believe it is best laid by letting our minds go back to the old peace for a little, and resolving that the new peace which we believe is coming shall be of a larger and nobler quality; we may thus come to appreciate the happiness which we enjoyed but had not earned; and lay our plans for earning a new kind of happiness, the essence of which shall be a mutual trust, that desires to give and share whatever it enjoys, instead of hoarding it and guarding it.
A wise and unselfish woman wrote to me the other day in words which will long live in my mind; she had sent out one whom she dearly loved to the front, and she was fighting her fears as gallantly as she could. "Whatever happens, we must not give way to dread," she wrote. "It does not do to dread anything for our own treasures."
That is the secret! What we must not do, in the time of war, is to indicate to everyone else what their sacrifices ought to be; we must just make our own sacrifices; and perhaps the man who loves and values peace most highly does not sacrifice the least. But even he may try to realise that life does not contradict itself; but that the parts of it, whether they be delightful or dreadful, do work into each other in a marvellous way.