Excerpt from The Things Men Fight For: With Some Application to Present Conditions in Europe
I have written this book because I could not help it. No professional or other necessity calls me away from the tranquil field of art into the turmoil of modern strife. But who does not scorn tranquillity in a time like this? Into this titanic struggle my heart enters with all the passionate sympathy of which it is capable. Were I young and free to follow the heart's behests, I should long ago have found my place in the trenches or in a soldier's grave. I know what my colours would be.
But I am neither young nor free, and my lot is cast with a people who, although all unwittingly in the storm centre, has another and a more difficult task. It is theirs to awake to the fact that their isolation is gone forever, theirs to accustom themselves to the strange consciousness, half irksome and half exhilarating, of contact with growing peoples, theirs to learn the laws of growth and the logic of its inevitable pressure. As the chief custodian of the world's future peace, we must understand the nature of war. We shall not bridle its violence so long as we see in it only the tyranny of monarchs or the caprice of naughty nations. It is folly to parley with protoplasm. It is wicked to malign the intelligence and the integrity of peoples.
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