Page:The League of Nations and the democratic idea.djvu/33

 last resort it is a question of human character and human wisdom.

The next European war, if it ever occurs, will surpass in horror anything that the world has known. It will be to this War as this War has been to the old wars of our fathers, which now seem but small things, strangely chivalrous and ineffective and almost merciful. A strong fear, if nothing else, will drive the nations of the world into some common refuge, as wild beasts in a flood will take asylum together and forget to fight. But let us not libel our own nature. We can, after all, rise to the call of higher emotions than mere terror. We children of men are, in spite of present appearances, something better and gentler than the tiger and the snake. And the War itself, which opened such an abyss of human cruelty, has revealed also heights hitherto undreamed of, not, merely of physical courage but of devotion and loyalty and self-sacrifice. The plain fact is that the men who are caught in the whirlpool of this War are too good for the life they now live. They are too good to be used for cannon-fodder, too good to be trained to drive bayonets into one another's intestines or stamp with nailed boots on one another's face. It is not only the pacifist and the eccentric who is craving in his heart for a gentler world. It is not only the thoughtful soldier, bent beneath a burden of intolerable suffering, who is torn by a long conflict between duties, in which he is forced to accept