The ship of each nation sails a sea of incalculable currents and uncharted channels. Sailing that sea, may we have the eyes of sailors, lest our Fate leap upon us!
Who would not desire, rushing through the thick dark of the future, to stand on the cliffs of vision—two hundred years, say, hence—and view this world?
Will there then be this League for War, this cauldron where, beneath the thin crust, a boiling lava bubbles, and at any minute may break through and leap up, as now, jet high? Will there still be reek and desolation, and man at the mercy of the machines he has made; still be narrow national policies and rancours, and such mutual fear, that no country dare be generous? Or will there be over the whole world something of the glamour that each one of us now sees hovering above his own country; and men and women—all—feel they are natives of one land? Who dare say?
When the guns cease fire and all is still, from the woods and fields and seas, from the skeleton towns of ravaged countries, the wistful dead will rise, and with their eyes accuse us. In that hour we shall have for answer only this: We fought for a better Future for Mankind!
Did we? Do we? That is the great question. Is our gaze really fixed on the far horizon? Or do we only dream it; and have the slain no comfort in their untimely darkness; the maimed, the ruined, the bereaved, no shred of consolation? Is it all to be for nothing but the salving of national prides? And shall the Ironic Spirit fill the whole world with his laughter?
Or shall the nations take the first step in that grand march of real deliverance which will make the whole earth—at last—the islands of the blessed?
THE WHITEFRIARS PRESS, LTD., LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
Issued by William Heinemann.