A picture of the chastened world.
The child turned from the strange, sad human beings to the fairies that played upon the peasant hearth. The child's mother had rushed forth into the twilight to find a vision or a memory or a breath of God. The old man and the old woman looked so long at each other in the darkness—that the soul of the son of their flesh stood for one healing instant between them. Thus the enduring figures of the Unseen reveal themselves to those who have suffered to the end.
The nations are but names to fight for. These battle-lines are for humanity's soul. If America is fighting for humanity, let it be with surgical calm and healing in her hands. Hate spoils everything.
The babe knows a room; the child knows a house and looks out into a street; the youth learns the street and then the city; the young man learns his country, but the man should learn the world. You can never be the great lover of America by hating the rest of the world; no human mind can see what is best, what is even good for America, when the interests of other countries are forgotten. No man's country ever suffered because he turned his love and service to the feet of humanity.
The few who brought the real American impartiality to the European war in the first months, found themselves in the midst of the most challenging chaos that ever reared its head to the light. Profound and tragic impressions followed each other. It became icy clear that the greater nations, as well as the pawns of the Balkans and the Levant, were puppets alike, churned together in a great planetary cleansing. Every partisan path was found to be increasingly crooked the farther one advanced—and a sheer descent at the last. Any national point of view used to dupe the people into greater destructive energy, proved in itself, no matter how sincerely offered, as short-sighted and ill-founded as the hatred of two soldiers who meet between trenches and discover, as they gore each other to death, that their only basis for hostility is a different colour of coat.
Studying Europe in those dark days, the unprejudiced eye was in danger of having some truths torn down with the host of illusions. It was hard to hold fast to the fact that there was anything magic or holy about nations at war. Indeed, they seemed entities formed of groups of greedy men who wanted their way—in the main, groups of leaders devoid of vision and the spirit of fraternity, and careless of the welfare of the people, quite the same as many great commercial organisations.... The real enemies of any people are groups of men who want things for themselves. The real issue of the war has nothing to do with entities of this kind, nor with alliances of such entities, but with the painful groping consciousness of the peasant mind—its slow and torturous awakening to the fact that royalty in its utmost pomp and glow does not enfold God.
The people must learn before they can be free. Hitherto they have been duped by the nations; and the nations are now being duped by each other; but there is a greater plan at work—using men and nations alike,—a plan to do away with boundaries and hatred and preying, to strike the spear from the hand of man and leave it free to help his neighbour, to establish democracy in the place of imperialism, and fraternity upon the solid footings of the earth in the place of separateness and strife.... The new volume of human spirit already has been opened. We felt it that night in Stonestudy before lights out,—the first beauty as of a song across still waters.