Page:Tyranny of Shams (1916).djvu/8

 generation to obliterate! Nor does this outpour of horror merely mean that one feature of our life needs reconsideration. We could not have retained this military machine, with its ever-present danger of an appalling calamity, if our minds were generally sane, alert, unclogged by shams.

One inquires how it is that a generation which boasts of its wisdom and humanity can retain this worst survival of barbarism, and one finds that the evil is connected with a dozen other evils and protected by a general mental debility. The habit of tracing this calamity to the peculiar criminality of another nation, and dwelling only on our own heroism and self-sacrifice in meeting this menace, is in itself a very grave danger. We may be entirely certain that, as long as we retain the military machinery for settling quarrels, there will be wars. How came the machinery to linger amongst us in the twentieth century? At once we light upon a dozen other disorders of our life. This remissness in civilising international intercourse argues a grave indifference to a most important task on the part of our political servants, and an equally grave absence of pressure and direction on the part of their supporters. It reveals a dangerously slovenly condition of our industrial world, a very serious defect in our educational system, a standing menace in the encouraged thoughtlessness of the mass of our people, a general flabbiness, haziness, and anæmia of what may be called the intellectual part of our public life.