Page:The Shield (Knopf, 1917).djvu/169



HE great war, which we did not want, but which we are conducting with intense fervour, exerting all our spiritual and material forces, has put before our consciousness and our moral sense the fundamental problems of our social and political organisation. Not in vain have the newspapers hastened to style this war a Fatherland War. The question of the Fatherland has suddenly acquired for us a peculiar keenness and significance.

The war has taken Russian society and the Russian people by surprise, but luckily it has come to us at the moment when the questions which were confronting us had already been settled both in our reason and conscience. The heroic labour of the Russian intellectual has not been in vain. And now what we have to do is not to argue and demonstrate, but to