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To be drunk with victory or dazed by defeat is to be particularly sensitive to the more brutal cries of war. The victor desires the full reward of good fortune, as Germany did in 1871; the vanquished nurses revenge, as France has done ever since the end of the struggle that found her so ill-prepared. Counsels of moderation are declared to be inadmissible until the status quo ante has been restored, and every force that makes for the spoliation of the simple by the worldly wise takes the field against common sense. The appeal of the dead is forgotten by all living save the woman whose mission it is to raise another generation for destruction; the lessons of history cannot be recalled by those who have never learned them.

Against all the difficulties outlined here, and many another that need not be set down, a small body of men and women, inspired by a great ideal, must labour in every country that has seen war or even realised its significance. They must speak and write in the face of fierce opposition and contempt, for war has swept away many of the landmarks they had already set up, together with many of those who had learned to regard them; they must face the truth that many a genuine altruist, shocked unutterably by the revelations of the war, is a little ashamed of his earlier altruism and anxious to forget its existence. They must be prepared for a certain coarsening of the nation's moral fibre, for a long-lived return to the more brutal outlook associated with the Napoleonic era. In some countries revenge will have become an article of faith, in others suspicion will be a no less dominant factor. The whole mental currency will have suffered debasement, and it will be difficult for some vices to be recognised as anything worse than virtues enforced upon a nation by the hazard of war.