– Put Out More Flags –

believe that its economic gains are illusory. So, since it results in the torture and death of innocent and harmless people, he is not only of opinion that it should be outlawed, but looks forward to a day when the whole world will share his opinion. Common sense and common decency, he tells himself, must surely prevail.

In 1910 Pacifism was derided. All the wars in the memory of Englishmen had taken place outside their country, and could be followed with the eager but impersonal interest with which we now follow the broadcast of a cricket match. It was true that a few soldiers got killed, but this was just an occupational risk, cheerfully to be accepted in return for the adventure and the glory promised. If the civilians did think about war in the abstract, they told themselves that it was bracing, like corporal punishment and cold baths; and that, since it had been going on for thousands of years, it would probably be wrong, and would certainly be impossible, to stop it now. So Pacifists were dismissed as idealists, cranks, and, as likely as not, vegetarians.

In 1920 nearly everybody in this country was a Pacifist in theory, and millions of them were Pacifists in practice: that is, they were trying and hoping, by means of the League of Nations, to make an end of war. This change of opinion was due, and due only, to the experience of a war much more terrible than any that they had known, and much nearer home; a war which had cast its shadow over nearly every family in the land.

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