We need not wait for war to harden our fibre and stiffen our backs. Surely this can be done without wholesale demoralization and destruction. Are there not national evils to be fought? privations to be endured here in fighting vice, ugliness and disease, or in voluntarily participating in poverty? There is courage needed to stand against public opinion and to lead it, to sacrifice wealth and social repute if required. These things are what we must turn to for the exercise of the courage and unselfishness of the soldier. We want more strenuous asceticism of a form not so essentially unreasonable and destructive as war.
It would entirely overload this chapter to give any idea of the vigour and number of the passages in _Fors_ which storm against war:--“storming” is generally the method, varied, as usual with this master of fancy and emotion, with stinging sarcasm and mocking raillery. The burden of his plea throughout is that “the game of our nobles and the gain of our usurers” is war.[105]
“When you have got the Devil well under foot in Sheffield, you may begin to stop him from persuading my Lords of the Admiralty that they want a new grant, etc., etc., to make his machines with.... The fiend sees that he can blind you, through your lust for drink, into quietly allowing yourselves to pay fifty millions a year, that the rich may make their machines of blood, and play at shedding blood.”[106]
“In this contest (of poor and rich) assuredly, the victory cannot be by violence; every conquest under the Prince of War retards the standards of the Prince of Peace.”[107]
He quotes[108] from the _Daily Telegraph_ the following from its description of the capture of Paris: “Each demolished house has its own legend of sorrow, of pain, and horror; each vacant doorway speaks to the eye, and almost to the ear, of hasty flight, as armies of fire came--of weeping women and trembling children running away in awful fear, abandoning the home that saw their birth, the old house they loved--of startled men seizing quickly under each arm their most valued goods, and rushing, heavily laden, after their wives and babes, leaving to hostile hands the task of burning all the rest. When evening falls, the wretched outcasts, worn with fatigue and tears, reach Versailles, St. Germain, or some other place outside the range of fire, and there they beg for bread and shelter, homeless, foodless, broken with despair. And this, remember, has been the fate of something like a hundred thousand people during the last four months. Versailles alone has about fifteen thousand such fugitives to keep alive, all ruined, all hopeless, all vaguely asking the grim future what still worse fate it may have in store for them.”