Ballet? Surely on them also, though in less pitying accents, and certainly with no future glory as compensation, will be pronounced a "not guilty." Since we must not deem it guilt on the part of those believing themselves, because others believe them, wise, if they prove as foolish as their victims. Still there is a difference. The poor virgins knew themselves to be ignorant of the world and its ways, whence indeed their trust in such untrustworthy guardians; whereas those guardians plumed themselves upon, sometimes trafficked in, the wisdom, the experience, the foresight which they lacked.

That is why (as Romain Rolland has suggested) our guides and guardians, moralists, philosophers, priests, journalists, as much as persons in office, stand to cut a sorry figure before posterity, singling out, as they do, one of themselves, e.g., the deposed and defeated Kaiser, as most convenient for hanging, but with no thought for some quiet Potter's Field suicide for themselves. Heaven forbid such a thought! The pachydermatous ones go on as heretofore, splash and tumble, rearing (scripturally) their rhinoceros horn. Those thinner-skinned and clearer-sighted no longer deny that however incommensurable the enemy's guilt, yet the ways even of the Nations confided to their guidance do show seamy sides inordinate greediness, furtive paying of blackmail, sharp practice, and rather disgusting symptoms of victory-let alone intoxication; horrible affairs, famine and anarchy in the future and already the present. Being thus distressed in their good taste and good feeling, these sensitive and sadeyed among (at least) this Nation's guardians, have made and duly published a dreadful yet not inconvenient discovery: that this war now barely over is not the war they wisely and virtuously inaugurated those four od long years ago. Its character has become debased, its motives and manners horribly transformed. Fighting (they point out) cannot fail to brutalize the best of us, particularly when the Enemy is a brute to begin with. Fighting is, after all, a form of contact, and we know you cannot touch pitch without being defiled. Also the imperative need of rapid, secret action, above all of absolute unanimity, puts an end (temporarily let us hope!) to self-government and self-criticism; and those

T

two purifiers once discarded, why, robbery, mendacity, oppression, corruption of all kinds, were bound to grow habitual. Evil passions have inevitably awakened in war: they have even required, for the attainment of victory, to be kept broad awake. As always, opportunity has tempted the best into sinful courses; ideals have been forgotten, base means ceased to be redeemed by noble aims; to put it plainly Militarism, Machiavellianism, the Balance of Power, and general grab, which we were fighting to extirpate from the earth's surface, have become dominant, both as a (regrettable) mode of compassing the victory of Righteousness, and likewise as that victory's first and most visible result. These melancholy realities they confide to us, conjuring us to put an end to them now the war is safely over. They even suggest that by a horrid irony of fate, the very youths whose self-sacrificing idealism led them exultant into the Purest of All Wars, happened, just because they were so ready to obey the call of duty, to be among the earliest casualties, the world being thus automatically mulcted of the needful minimum of the virtues indispensable to decent national existence. It is no longer the same war, these moralists have been sadly hinting for a few months past. It is no longer the right war. Not their war which, at this moment (January, 1919), is making the war's great aim a touch-and-go business; in fact, but for themselves and President Wilson (who two years ago had declared for peace without victory), an almost hopeless affair.

Thus do they sigh, and sighing, wash their (already so pure) hands. Sigh for the world and also a little for their own disappointment; since what a horrid fate for a moralist to find that his own beloved uniquely moral war has turned, well! somewhat less unique and moral. How cruel for those who boldly unsheathed the Sword of Peace to recognize that the instrument in question, having got out of order by overlong use, and somewhat infected with nasty germs (doubtless originating in the Enemy !), is no longer sharp and clean enough to surgeon Europe into perfect health.

II

Such is the lament of the War-Idealists. One feels for

them. It must be dreadfully disappointing to have to recognize one's own ewe lamb, one's pride and joy, in some painted, poisonous lady from out of Mrs. Warren's Establishment; or, if one is a German War-Idealist, in the bespattered, lapidated, starvation-fainting Gretchen of the pillory_where Germany now stands. But leaving those infatuated Enemy Peoples out of reckoning, all one's sympathies go forth to the sincere, the noble grief of one's own countrymen telling us that the war is no longer the same war. Until it flashes across one's mind that the Nations confided to their high-minded care are perhaps even more to be pitied than they. The poor innocents could not be expected to know that certain courses so attractive, nay ideal, have a way of landing those who take to them in situations and habits of a very different character: subterfuges and deceptions, blackmailing by ruffians, tampering with queer drugs, madness, suicide or merely residence in such houses and in such company as my Puppet Satan describes with perhaps puritanical over-emphasis. The Nations were not aware of what war might do with their bodies and especially with their souls. But how about their guides and guardians?

One might almost suppose them to have supposed that the particular thing called a European War would remain carefully unchanged like a man sitting for his portrait; keep itself faithfully, accurately, to their definition. Such suppositions are quite common to all of us ordinary human beings when, as the saying is, we turn wishes into horses. Unless obliged, we do not naturally face the notion of unpleasant change. Except Ronsard, who was evidently more bent on literature than on love, no lover ever thought of his beloved as a venerable and wizen grand-dame. And if fond Mothers do often see their baby boys as strong, successful men, it is always with the proviso that they return to confide their little knocks and scrapes at their mother's knee. In our affections we are all Joshuas, bidding the sun stop at whatever point in the Heavens is to our liking. The sun, however, does not stop, nor does anything beneath it. Except our poor, inorganic, dead-as-a-door-nail, definition. Now their definition of this war, they being those idealizing politicians and moralists

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whose disappointment commands our sympathy-their definition of this war was as a high, disinterested, pure, lovely, flaming humanitarian enterprise, a crusade. But the crusades, I mean the real ones, did not remain the Sir Galahad affairs of their vigil of arms. There were regrettable brutalities and rapacities, a systematic grabbing of loot, and of what we should nowadays call "concessions" and "protectorates "; also very queer adoptions (as was alleged against the Knights Templar) of the most questionable rites and heresies of the Pagans, let alone initial treaties with filibustering Doges and such like, necessary to get those astute persons to crusade with one. The crusades did not always remain the same crusades; each separate crusade did not remain the same crusade. Indeed, if there is a genuine fact which history shows (though she shows, thanks to Clio, very few genuine ones) it is, as for the rest the less glorious sciences of nature demonstrate, that nothing ever does, has, or can remain, the same. So why should this war? Indeed our guides and guardians are now busy setting forth how the change came about, could not fail to come about for a variety of reasons which they enumerate as I have paraphrased them in the foregoing note. They are most clearly cognisant of the psychological, sociological, political forces which have brought the war's moral, if not downfall, at least, slip. Only, as the lackey of Molière's Learned Ladies said about his experimental knowledge of gravitation "Je m'en suis aperçu étant par terre,"

Unluckily for one's sympathy with our guides and guardians, unfortunately likewise for the world, present and future, it is not merely they and their ideals that are par terre," with only President Wilson or the Social Revolution, as you prefer, to pick up the pieces. There are those guided, or shall we say? misguided, Nations also.

III

It is from no sentimental illusions about the purity and charm of Nations taken as wholes that I have made my Puppet Satan compare the various Belligerents to Virgins

entrapped, say rather, calmly, blunderingly conducted into the Establishment of Mrs. Warren. A student of the why and wherefore of art and imagination, as well as a dweller in several lands, I have long since parted with the natural habit of seeing the faithful portrait of any Nation in the works of its painters and poets. Likewise I have learned to understand, hence to restrain, the even more alluring tendency to credit the inhabitants of any country with the sublimity or charm of that country's landscape; these, like all private poetry and art, are dreams good to indulge, once we have recognized their beneficent and sacred dreamstuff. Apart from dreams like these, loving or hating any Nation as a Whole (one's own included) is surely loving the idiots, the ruffians, the presumptuous mediocrities; and similarly hating the saints and geniuses, the modest workers which every nation must contain. Nay worse; such wholesale preference and abhorrence implies our losing the sense of the enormous mass of possible and actual suffering and happiness which seems to be the one certain and supreme reality common to all aggregates of human beings. Which brings me to remark that it is their community, their union (though so little suspected alas !) in present agony and loss of future joy, which strikes me as the fact to be remembered about these belligerent Nations, instead of their inscrutable gradations of responsibility for it all. Indeed, what responsibility can there be (letting alone that responsibility shifts, passes from side to side, if pursued into historical origins), what true responsibility can there be in any existing nation, seeing that every nation is still made up, ninety-nine-hundredths of it, of men and women too overworked, and (adding the leisured hundredth) too obsoletely educated by Clio and her sham Greeks and Romans and Hebrews, to know what they are doing, or what is being done with them, while wars and the rivalries whence they spring are accepted as part of normal

existence.

In this sole reference, therefore, I do hold that all the peoples suffering and inflicting suffering (the starvation blockade is not yet raised! April, 1919) are innocent, though nowise admirable, victims of other victims; and makers of