Complete Works

who at one time went about (mostly in newspapers) preaching the gospel of the mystic sanctity of its sacrifices, and the regenerating power of spilt blood, to the poor in mind — whose name is legion.
    It has been observed that in the course of earthly greatness a day of culminating triumph is often paid for by a morrow of sudden extinction.  Let us hope it is so.  Yet the dawn of that day of retribution may be a long time breaking above a dark horizon.  War is with us now; and, whether this one ends soon or late, war will be with us again.  And it is the way of true wisdom for men and States to take account of things as they are.
    Civilisation has done its little best by our sensibilities for whose growth it is responsible.  It has managed to remove the sights and sounds of battlefields away from our doorsteps.  But it cannot be expected to achieve the feat always and under every variety of circumstance.  Some day it must fail, and we shall have then a wealth of appallingly unpleasant sensations brought home to us with painful intimacy.  It is not absurd to suppose that whatever war comes to us next it will not be a distant war waged by Russia either beyond the Amur or beyond the Oxus.
    The Japanese armies have laid that ghost for ever, because the Russia of the future will not, for the reasons explained above, be the Russia of to-day.  It will not have the same thoughts, resentments and aims.  It is even a question whether it will preserve its gigantic frame unaltered and unbroken.  All speculation loses itself in the magnitude of the events made possible by the defeat of an autocracy whose only shadow of a title to existence was the invincible power of military conquest.  That autocratic Russia will have a miserable end in harmony with its base origin and inglorious life does not seem open to doubt.  The problem of the immediate future is posed not by the eventual manner but by the approaching fact of its disappearance.
    The Japanese armies, in laying the oppressive ghost, have not only accomplished what will be recognised historically as an important mission in the world’s struggle against all forms of evil, but have also created a situation.  They have created a situation in the East which they are competent to manage by themselves; and in doing this they have brought about a change in the condition of the West with which Europe is not well prepared to deal.  The common ground of concord, good faith and justice is not sufficient to establish an action upon; since the conscience of but very few men amongst us, and of no single Western nation as yet, will brook the restraint of abstract ideas as against the fascination of a material advantage.  And eagle-eyed wisdom alone cannot take the lead of human action, which in its nature must for ever remain short-sighted.  The trouble of the civilised world is the want of a common conservative principle abstract enough to give the impulse, practical enough to form the rallying point of international action tending towards the restraint of particular ambitions.  Peace tribunals instituted for the greater glory of war will not replace it.  Whether such a principle exists — who can say?  If it does not, then it ought to be invented.  A sage with a sense of humour and a heart of compassion should set about it without loss of time, and a solemn prophet full of words and fire ought to be given the task of preparing the minds.  So far there is no trace of such a principle anywhere in sight; even its plausible imitations (never very effective) have disappeared long ago before the doctrine of national aspirations.  Il n’y a plus d’Europe — there is only an armed and trading continent, the home of slowly maturing economical contests for life and death and of loudly proclaimed world-wide ambitions.  There are also other ambitions not so loud, but deeply rooted in the envious acquisitive temperament of the last corner amongst the great Powers of the Continent, whose feet are not exactly in the ocean — not yet — and whose head is very high up — in Pomerania, the breeding place of such precious Grenadiers that Prince Bismarck (whom it is a pleasure to quote) would not have given the bones of one of them for the settlement of the old Eastern Question.  But times have changed, since, by way of keeping up, I suppose, some old barbaric German rite, the faithful servant of the Hohenzollerns was buried alive to celebrate the accession of a new