Page:Great Speeches of the War.djvu/105

Rh us away into a world of hatred and murder and death; of waste and misery; of wholesale crimes ; and forces us to say with the Temanite: "How much more abominable and filthy is man, who drinketh iniquity like water? " It is the crime of crimes. It is ; and the pacifist hates war more than ever, now he is forced, in obedience to what he holds to be the call of God and of humanity, to enter into it and become an active supporter of it. He does not—certainly I do not—surrender one jot or tittle of the peacemaker's policy or rewrite a line of it. He does not apologize for his determined pursuit of peace up to the very last moment that there was the faintest chance of maintaining it; not he! he will wear no white sheet. He stands where he did, and as he did, as you may see in Prof. Gilbert Murray's book, How Can War Ever Be Right? who says:

We are now, as we were, advocates of national and international peace; not only not impenitent pacifists, but more resolutely than ever contending for peace, because we have now, in obedience to the clear call of duty, to back to the uttermost a war for righteousness, for freedom, for fidelity to the plighted word, for the sacredness of public law; in short, I say again, for the soul of the world.

And our faith in the real advance of peace through this war is justified; for never was the protest against war so 6