tradition and training, just in proportion as its own mass, its own substantial self, is indifferent to, incapable of, ideals of any kind except when such ideals become a pretext for such exceptional bouts of recklessness and obstinate pugnacity as war calls forth and keeps up. Is not England at this moment (1918) still getting its sons killed off from sheer hatred of Autocracy? England which began this war, as the Tzar's ally!

Be this last point as it may, self-sacrifice has always been preached, painted in frescoes of Indian caves and golden pages of missals, sung in every Church, shown on the stage, and in poems and novels, as the one really lovely, the one truly satisfying, thing. And as self-sacrifice does really oftenest require certain noble energies and impulses, delicate tenderness and solemn steadfastness, which appeal (notice how they find expression in all music and even in architecture's uplifting and pacifying lines) to man's æsthetic longings, it seems natural and proper that mankind should applaud, enshrine in quite disinterested manner and moments, those potentialities of immolation to its wants whereof an abundant supply may, at some other moment, give less disinterested satisfaction to any or most of them. Do not misunderstand me: a supply, answering to a demand, not of this good result or that, requiring to be bought, perchance, at so heavy a price; but a supply of sheer willingness to pay that price, to become that ransom. Hence a reservoir, overflowing perpetually, of mere passionate capacity and longing for sacrifice of self without why or wherefore, such as floods the soul of Tolstoy's Besukhow when he buys a pistol to shoot Napoleon; and in more piteous way, the poor little girl in Ibsen's play, who shoots the Wild Duck and herself as unasked offerings to her grotesque family. Hence we are daily putting a halo, not round the deed which is useful, but round the deed which we believe may be useful and know for certain to be disagreeable and difficult to those who do it. We pay a mere fee to the surgeon who saves another's life; but it is "roses, roses, everywhere and myrtle mixed in the path like mad," it is flags and trumpets, and organ sound for the man who has victoriously exposed his own.

With the certainty of all unintentional, unconscious auto

matic processes, such admiration, such sanctification, such apotheosis acts as natural man's inducement to overcome in others the wholesome repugnance which he feels to sacrificing himself.

VI

But why should self-sacrifice have been thus indispensable ? Surely because something else has not been forthcoming. Something needing either to be done or refrained from; something needing to be understood, felt or imagined, something mankind, for one reason or other, has happened to be unwilling or unable either to do or to forgo; to understand, feel or imagine.

There is symbolical truth, although misinterpreted, in the religious notion that sacrifice, and especially self-sacrifice, is a ransom for Man's commissions and omissions. A debt has been incurred to other men, to Gods or God, to the Great impersonal Otherness we call the Universe, whose nature we lazily ignore, and whose statutes we violently infringe; and that debt is paid not by the individuals, oftenest dead and forgotten, nor the long-lapsed generations who have heaped it up; it is paid by someone else, an unwilling or willing victim, often an innocent one, occasionally a hero or a martyr.

The tithes have not been paid, the sanctuary of earth or of the mind has been defiled by pharisees and hucksters; Jesus must expiate upon the cross: Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi.

Neither are these debts always of the kind thundered at by prophets; they oftenest represent lack, not so much of righteousness, as of knowledge, good sense, lack of that other side of virtue called wisdom, without which virtue has all the effects of vice. Indeed the debts are often humble and humdrum, scarce noticeable save for their multiplication. The Augean Stables require a hero to plunge into their muck because, for centuries perhaps, both Kings and hinds have defaulted in the daily work of pail and besom, perhaps not understood (absorbed in their own grandeur or their wretchedness) that such things as pails and besoms could be invented, or

that accumulated dung stank and bred pestilence. Not only caverns of prehistoric men, but the world for ages after, and large parts thereof even nowadays, have been such Augean Stables, partaking of cesspool, kitchen-midden and ancestral sepulchre; and so far from being surprised thereat, we ought to wonder at anything swept and garnished having emerged. By which I mean, that we must not be hard on the past for having incurred so vast a debt, required such constant expiations and atonements on our part. But without being unduly hard even on our own poor selves, we might begin taking thought for these matters, and feel a little ashamed and impatient, not with our neighbours or forbears, but with our own selves practising or demanding self-sacrifice quite unsuspicious that self-sacrifice implies such unpaid debts, and that unpaid debts are consonant neither with our safety nor with our honour. For, to descend from high religious language (suitable to my evil Archangelic Puppet), sacrifice of others and sacrifice of self, and most particularly sacrifice of self accepted or claimed by others, are, however inevitable, deeds of waste, and constitute the measure of human maladjustments.

This holds good in large and rare, and what is more important, in small and common, matters. Children ought not to be neglected and require fishing out of ponds at the risk of a passer-by's life; nor houses to be so built and heated and lit that firemen have to be burnt to prevent their burning down; there ought to be no contaminated water producing cholera and self-immolation of doctors; nor, since I have used the word, contaminated husbands exacting self-sacrifice (à la Mrs. Alving) from over-virtuous wives; there ought to be no need for the heroism of the rescuing party or the lifeboat; mines and waves should be better dealt with, or men not induced to face their dangers for a few tons of coal or a catch of herrings. There is absolutely no reason, save mankind's stupid slavishness, why there should be an Instans Tyrannus and a corresponding pious victim braving his threats and wiles; there is no need for Marats and therefore for Charlotte Cordays; I mean that Marat should have remained an unread maniac in Grubstreet, and Charlotte an obscure happy young woman at home. Above all, in my humble opinion, there has been no

necessity save the indifference and prejudice of the various Nations, their smug scepticism of warning voices like Marcel Sembat's and E. D. Morel's, their self-satisfied or rapacious subservience to Kaisers and Krupps and Delcassés and the various exponents of National Honour and Sacro Egoismo, there has been no necessity, save mankind's being at any given moment precisely as slack and stupid as it happened to be, why there should not have been a League of Nations (or no need for a League of Nations!) once there were telegraphs and railways; no necessity why modern science and organization should have been applied to the preparation and carrying out of such sacrifice and self-sacrifice, well! as we have witnessed for four mortal years.

Peccata mundi. Sins of omission and commission, lack of wisdom paid for in waste of Virtue; all inevitable, since they have not been avoided. All paid for, expiated and usually in the inevitable foolish manner of making new debts of omission and commission for future men and women, heroes and martyrs, to expiate. I have admitted that since there are such maladjustments, such debts, there may require to be such vicarious payments. Neither would I give indifference, dishonesty, and heartlessness, by whom these debts have mainly been contracted, a plea for loading more self-sacrifice on others by refusal to share in it themselves. So much I would premise. But having seen this war, I would turn to those strong and generous enough for voluntary sacrifice, exhorting them not to waste their virtue, their sorely-needed generosity and endurance, from any such shyness or humility as shrinks from scrutinizing a duty before answering its call, which is often the call of other persons who happen not to be called upon themselves. If really useful, a difficult and painful renunciation will not lose in utility by being cleansed of the lazy acquiescence, false pride and weak imitativeness which so often result in more harm than the sacrifice results in good. If men are to do and die, for mercy's sake let them question why as thoroughly as possible; else some other men are sure to be required to do and die as a consequence of this blindness and haste. If people had questioned why, not only this war, but nearly, perhaps, every other modern war would have been spared us. Moreover it so

happens that the injunction to die (and, which the poet left out, also to kill) without asking why is essential only to warfare, not to other forms of human co-operation; in war there must be such unquestioning doing and dying on one side because there is unquestioning doing and dying on the other; but if both parties insisted on questioning, there might be a little killing by criminals or fanatics, but no more killing and being killed as an honourable trade, indeed as the most honourable of all trades.

However, whether or not people should as yet look at selfsacrifice very sceptically before accepting to accomplish it in their own persons, this much the war has shown: it is high time to insist as a rule of honour and decency upon one thing, namely, that all men and women should scrutinize with the most hostile scepticism any act of self-sacrifice before, on any score of ideals, programs or principles, they accept, they demand it, from others. We require to become thus sceptical of the rights of our own beliefs, just in proportion as we recognize those beliefs of ours, religious, political, or ethical, to be such that we ourselves would be sacrificed for them; since, as I have already pointed out, the willingness to sacrifice ourselves begets a willingness to sacrifice others to the same aims or standards. And to persons like so many in war time, who are thirsting for immolation of self, I would offer this little counsel of perfection: begin by sacrificing some of your belief in your own ideas, to the extent of not imposing those ideas on the conduct of others. For that also, though it never enters your heads, is also a sacrifice of self, and a useful and arduous one; since it is the sacrifice of what you care for more than your life, fortune, or children: the sacrifice of your most sensitive, most insidious and ruthless part of self.

VII

It may be that there still is, and will long be, the need for accepting, nay exacting self-sacrifice. But in that case do let us at least feel and show decent shame in the presence of such an ugly necessity, humbly confessing it to be the brand and badge