Page:The League of Nations and the democratic idea.djvu/7



MONG all the evil aspects in which War has revealed itself to our generation there is none more horrible or more widely felt than its enslavement of whole nations to the will of the few.

It is no part of my task to discuss the origins of the present War. The verdict of history is, in my judgement, already irrefutably pronounced;the War ^1914 was a war of ambition forced by the German Government upon an unwilling world. But my present purpose is to discuss the War merely as a fact, irrespective of any questions of its 'justice' or 'injustice' or the comparative degrees of guilt resting on this party or that. Whatever view a man may take of the origins of the War, it remains clear that millions of poor men in divers regions of the world have been dragged suddenly, and without any previous action of their own, into a quarrel which they neither made, nor desired, nor understood; and in the course of that quarrel have been subjected again and again to the