and had not the slightest quarrel, the one with the other, but who none-the-less obeyed the orders of their respective kings, and marched until they met, and at the word of command shot each other into corpses. Most of us will agree with Carlyle and Melmount that, viewed from the peasants' standpoint, this was unreasonable to the point of sheer folly.
But, if I understand Mr. Wells aright, he seems to elevate the reason of the peasant into something very like the "eternal reason" of Diderot and Rousseau. He apparently forgets for the nonce that Engels long ago pointed out that "this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized understanding of the eighteenth century citizen, just then evolving into the bourgeois." The difficulty that Mr. Wells will encounter in trying to bring human society into harmony with "eternal reason" is the impossibility of getting different classes of men to agree as to what is reasonable. No one outside of dolls' houses any longer believes in "eternal reason." Every man and every class has an ideal of what is reasonable, but these ideals vary. War is unreasonable to the peasant-target; it is also unreasonable to Melmount and Mr. Wells so far as they are representatives
