"Most of my considered judgments are in the melting-pot."
"Bless my soul! I never expected to hear you say that. So are mine. The main question for all of us is this: will the country rise to this stupendous emergency? I suppose the mere mention of conscription gives you a fit?"
"I carry an open mind about it."
"You amaze me, Hamlin. We were both 'blue-water school' men."
"Yes. You use the past tense. I am humbly sensible that what I have felt and acted upon, principles and theories essentially rooted in peace and for peace, is of the past. I shall leave them there. The needs of the present are obsessing." He paused a moment; when he spoke again his voice held conviction: "Out of the darkness, I see light."
Sir Geoffrey asked eagerly:
"What light?"
"The light of a happier civilisation, of a broader and more sympathetic internationalism. The ashes of this conflagration may fertilise anew the whole earth. It must be so."
He had surprised Sir Geoffrey a moment back; it was the Squire's turn to surprise him. Hamlin expected a wail from the many-acred lord of the manor, a Jeremiad personal and embittered. Inevitably the men of large estates, with little outside their domains to support them, must suffer cruelly. It was difficult, indeed, to envisage the Squire of Nether-Applewhite without his shooting and hunting, with a much-reduced establishment, constrained to cheese-paring, entertaining wounded Tommies instead of county magnates. Sir Geoffrey answered as humbly as the Parson:
"God send it may be so, Hamlin. This is a war between autocracy and democracy; and I don't believe in democracies, as you know."