Page:The War and the Future (Masefield, 1918).djvu/71

Rh There is a story of a young king of India, who became a leper whom no one could cure. An old man told him that if he went to a certain city and ate bread in a house where there was no sorrow, he would be cured. So he went to the city, and went into every house, but there was no house that had no sorrow, so he was not cured. "There was no house that had not one dead."

There is no house, poor or rich, in any of the countries now fighting in Europe that has not one dead, generally some quite young man.

Many great minds have brooded over war; most of the great minds of the world have taken part in war, and some have tried to understand it. No great mind has ever looked upon it as a good thing, though they see that sometimes in life outrageous, devilish evil can be checked in no other way. To most of them, Homer, Euripides, Shakespeare, Tolstoi, it is nearly the last, greatest and completest evil that can come into human life.

You all know how a fever comes upon the body. Poison must be introduced into it from outside, some living poison of germs; the body