Page:The League of Nations (Grey, 1918).djvu/13

 Our minds cannot grasp it all. Thought is crushed by the accumulated suffering that the war has caused and is still causing. We cannot utter all that we feel, and if it were not that our feelings are in a way stunned by the very violence of the catastrophe, as physical nerves are to some extent numbed by great blows, the human heart could not bear up and live under the trial of this war. Great must be the effect of all this: greater after even than during the war on the working of men's minds, and on human nature itself; but this is not what I intend to urge here. I will urge only one point and one that is for the head rather than the heart.

We are now in the fourth year of the war: the application of scientific knowledge and the inventions of science during the war have made it more and more terrible and destructive each year. The Germans have abrogated all previously accepted rules of warfare. The use of poisonous gas, the firing from the sea upon open undefended towns, the indiscriminate bombing of big cities from the air were all introduced into the war by Germany. It was long before the Allies adopted any of these practices even as reprisals; but the Germans have forced a ruthless and unlimited application of scientific discovery to the destruction of human life, combatant and non-combatant. They have shown the world that now and henceforth war means this and nothing less than this. If there is to be another war in twenty or thirty years' time, what will