Cambridge, of London and Manchester; men of the bench and of the bar, of the shop and of the factory; and they come freely and without conscription, from the simple compulsion of duty to their country and to humanity and to the Kingdom of God. There has been nothing in our annals to equal the splendour and magnificence of Britain's contribution to this gigantic effort to save the soul of the world.
Nor are the sacrifices made by the other belligerents on a smaller scale. Indeed, they are larger; and it is estimated that already four millions of our fellows have fallen on the battle-fields of Flanders and Northern France, killed or wounded: men of strong physique and disciplined will and brave spirit, who should have been the fathers of the new generation; but they are mown down like the grass of the summer fields, limiting the new race in its numbers, and marring it in its quality, disturbing the ratio between the sexes, and producing results, physical, economical, and moral, that will enfeeble and cripple the world for generations to come. Besides that, property has been destroyed already, to the value of one-quarter of the world's entire wealth; so that judging from the effects of other wars, it will take a hundred years of peace and prosperity to restore the property of the world to the conditions that existed prior to the opening of the furnaces of war. The nations are stupidly killing the customers they will need for their produce when they get back to the sanity of peace.
Moreover, no war ever had such measureless resources as this one. The inventions and discoveries of scientific men have reached their maximum output in the interests of wholesale slaughter, not only on land and sea, but also in the air. Organization has been carried to perfection. Entrenchments are in the mud. Little is seen and less told. Silence is a necessary weapon. The reporter is barred. Brilliance is impossible. The "grim spectacles," the glowing colours are all gone, and a dull khaki reigns over the whole titanic conflict. The powers of darkness, too, are abroad; for, as the Prime Minister said: "This is not merely a material, but it is also a spiritual conflict. Upon this issue everything that contains the promise and hope that leads to emancipation and fuller liberties for the millions who make up the masses of mankind will be found, sooner or later, to depend." It is an hour of spiritual crisis; it is a conflict of ideas of the State, its function and end; of the rights of small nationali-
