Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/256

 thing to be cultivated for its own sake! That by the way. Such is modern war, and knowing it to be such, there is not a man or woman of the Allied peoples, in uniform or out of it, but is ready to go through with it day after day and, if need be, year after year until the anti-human evangel of Berlin is down in the mud. That resolution, so unmistakable, is the supreme answer of democracy to the whole race of blood-and-ironmongers. They loved war, praised war, planned war; we loathed it, believed so little that a modern state would loose it on the world as even to neglect advisable precautions. And now the peace-workers have the war-workers by the throat, and are humbling them in their own picked arena. Despite Nietzsche and Bernhardi and the rest, democracy does not so soften men that they will not die for their ideals. They will do more than die, they will conquer.

So much is liminal; it lies across the threshold of any temple of peace that can be imagined. Until the objects for which the Allies went into the war are achieved it must go on, and we mean it to go on, regardless of any waste of life or substance. But there is another proposition just as basal against the ignoring of which the writer of this article enters his protest. No statesman has the right to change, behind the backs of the fighting men, the aim and purpose of the war. No government has a mandate to substitute markets for jus