Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill 1VTOT like that did war come to us. -- It did not assault our eyes, our ears, our nostrils (some day get Will Irwin to tell you of the smell of war). It did not come to us as a thing spurting blood and belching thunder. To us war came rather as something on paper, as a thing of documents, and statutes and refinements of international law, a thing of whereases and therefores. Moreover, the quibbling, the note writing, the refining of verbal distinctions, had been going on for more than two years. And war having come to us in this way, there was not in it the quality to stir our emotions. "Hag-decked City is Calm," said the headline in the New York Times on the day that President Wilson read his message. And the bloodiest thing that happened to us in connection with the war that day was recorded in headlines of the same size: "Senator Lodge Knocks Down a Pacifist." A ND, since the war came to us in -- that way, the question was, and at the end of a year still is, have we the imagination and that sympathy which in sensitive peoples can take the place of eyes and ears? Can we know war vicariously, through feeling for the Belgians and the French? Have we now the emotion of war? Are we really at war in our hearts? Have we felt "That leap of heart whereby a people rise Up to a noble anger's height?" Have we had the thing that is necessary to "stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage?" That is part of what is meant when people talk of a nation's "morale." Germany thinks we have not got it, and there are those among the subtle who believe that Germany has conducted herself during the past years with an eye to refraining from anything that would give us this lofty anger. For the theory is that without this emotion a nati...