ranean fleet during the Napoleonic Wars, and medical reports upon the condition of the men. Nelson was a zealous advocate of fresh provisions at sea, and the papers just discovered give the actual number of oxen bought, how much beef they yielded, and the number of pounds of onions and other vegetables and of oranges and lemons supplied to the six thousand men that manned Nelson's ships. Beef cost about eight cents a pound, and wine about twenty-five cents a gallon. Apparently only a small quantity of salt provisions was consumed. There was one short outbreak of scurvy in the winter of 1804-5, when the Spanish market for provisions was temporarily closed, but in general the health of the men was uniformly good. The chief diseases, besides the scurvy already mentioned, were fevers and lung diseases. There was a good deal of rheumatism. Probably the feverish colds. reported were influenza. The highest number of sick cases at any one time was 268. The average was below 200, and the deaths on board ship were about one per cent per annum.

SELF-CONGRATULATION

been cruising the South Seas reports that it has discovered on an uninhabited island, the exact location of which has not been revealed, ancient sculptured rock, pottery, and stone implements bearing evidence of the existence of a hitherto unknown early civilization. The island is 'not very far distant from the Galapagos,' and according to one of the members of the expedition 'the objects found by the expedition may very possibly date back to the time when the island formed part of the mainland. It is covered with dense jungle, and in its centre is a mountain peak rising to a height of 1296 feet. The island is uninhabited by human beings, but about three hundred years ago it was the resort of buccaneers.'

'Why do they let such chaps into the Univer sity? I believe he studies.'- Arbeiter Zeitung

[MR. STEED, after serving as the correspondent of the London Times at Berlin, Rome, and Vienna, was foreign editor of that newspaper during the war, and its editor from 1919 to 1922. He is at present proprietor and editor of the English Review of Reviews.]

TEN years ago the British peoples throughout the world made war on Germany in defense of the neutrality of Belgium, which Great Britain was pledged by treaty to uphold. The struggle lasted four years and three months. It cost Great Britain some £8,000,000,000, while 9,000,000 tons of British merchant shipping were lost, nearly 1,000,000 British soldiers were killed, and more than 2,000,000 wounded. To-day many who suffered bereavement or hardship are asking whether these sacrifices were 'worth while'?

Such a question is not easily answered. The issue raised in August 1914 by German aggression upon Belgium-whose neutrality Prussia, like Great Britain, had guaranteed was not whether war was worth while but whether life, national and international, would have been tolerable had German lawlessness triumphed. To this question, at least, the answer is clear. Save at the cost of dishonor, of allowing the basis of civilized relationships to be destroyed, and of incurring ulterior peril more dire than the immediate danger, it was not possible for England to hold aloof. The choice, if choice there were, lay between war in

discharge of duty and peace in dereliction of duty.

From the outset, the action of Germany appeared to the people of this country as an unwarrantable crime, and our entry into the war as an act of justice. At Versailles the representatives of Germany were presently constrained to recognize the responsibility of their country and that of its allies for all the loss and damage resulting from a war brought about 'by the aggression of Germany and her allies,' while William II of Hohenzollern, formerly German Emperor, was publicly arraigned in the Peace Treaty 'for a supreme offense against international morality and the sanctity of treaties.' The Germans claim, however, that this assent has no moral value, since it was given under constraint, and they have long been engaged in seeking to prove Germany guiltless or, at worst, guilty only in the same degree as her enemies.

These efforts cannot succeed. No research has brought or can bring to light any fact of a nature to invalidate the cause for which the British peoples went to war. Nor is it possible to explain away the words of the German Imperial Chancellor to the Reichstag on August 4, 1914: "The wrong - I speak openly that we are committing we will endeavor to make good as soon as our military goal has been reached.' From that wrong all the rest proceeded. The endeavor to redress it was the supreme justification of the Allied cause. Had it gone unpunished, all possibility of vindicating the sanc

tity of treaties in future would have disappeared, and all hope of enthroning the reign of law above the rule of force in dealings between nations.

The answer to the question whether the war was worth while depends therefore, in some degree, upon the further question whether it has or has not strengthened international morality and discouraged or discredited lawless violence. If it has, the war was clearly as worth while as the action of the police who may suffer injury in apprehending robbers or murderers. If not, the efforts of the Allied peoples, their heroism, sufferings, and losses, might have to be, in this respect, accounted a tragic failure.

We are still too near to the struggle itself to see it in true perspective, too conscious of our fall from the high idealism that inspired the Allied peoples during the war to be sure that it was truly won, too bewildered by the complications of the peace for our faith to be clear-eyed, and too bruised to allow our more generous impulses free play. Moreover, there has crept into many minds a doubt whether, after all, our motives can have been quite as lofty and our conduct quite as noble as we thought they were. Since we fought for our own safety as well as for Belgium, why seek to surround our undertaking with a halo of holiness? And, since we derived some profit from the war, are our hands quite clean of gain'?

Dead specimens examined under the microscope in a laboratory cannot have the beauty of living organisms. Study of anatomy will not reveal the secret of life. The meaning of the war is not to be learned from the dissection of documents. It is enshrined in the hearts of those who know in what spirit hundreds of thousands of men went to fight and die for what they held right, and millions of men and women

worked with equal devotion. The passing of a phase of feeling does not render that feeling historically less real or detract from its virtue. One great gain of the war was that millions who had never before felt an exalted purpose felt it then, strove to attain it, and, despite disappointment, tenaciously believe in it still. This generation has seen and known and done things that future generations will envy. Men often risk their lives for an emotion in sport, in mountaineering, in seamanship- and are not accounted base or wholly foolish if they pay the price of their daring. The generation that fought the war dared greatly and wrought nobly. If the supreme sanction of its work be still outstanding, was its daring therefore foolhardy?

It is good, in these days of anniversary and of partial loss of faith, to return in spirit to August 1914, and to evoke in memory the ideals then cherished, the resolves then formed. Such evocation makes any doubt whether the people of this country would have quailed or flinched, had they then known the trials and disappointments in store for them, seem akin to blasphemy. True, the instinct which is the determining element of British conduct in times of stress warned them dimly that the freedom of their country, nay, its very existence, was at stake. But for some time they thought, consciously and conscientiously, that they were fighting chiefly for Belgium and the sanctity of their plighted word in the first place, and for France in the second. Not until the war had been long in progress did the British people fully realize that it was their own security as much as that of others which they were defending. At no time during the war did the feeling that they were fighting against a dangerous commercial rival sway their minds. Had they been asked to suffer

what they suffered, to pay what they paid, and to dare as they dared for any merely economic reason, they would have revolted against so mean an assessment of their ideals. Most Britons are vaguely, and many are intensely, religious in temperament. They need to believe in something. It is generally something that appeals to their sense of what is right. In August 1914 they held it right to fight in support of their country's pledge to Belgium and, secondarily, in support of their friends. That was all.

They did not then understand that, by making war on Belgium, Germany was helping to save the British Empire. Nothing, save a direct attack on = British territory, could so have roused their feeling; and even a direct attack might not have appealed as potently to the whole national conscience. It is a peculiarity of the British temperament that the defense even of vital interests is never so whole-heartedly undertaken as when that defense is also felt to be a moral duty. Had Germany respected the Prussian pledge to Belgium, the British Government might have hesitated to make war until the German fleet threatened or the German armies had actually captured the northern ports and coasts of France - and then it might have been too late to save either France or England. In any case the Government and probably the nation would have been divided. But once the Belgian issue was raised there could be neither doubt nor delay.

Some saw, indeed, that behind this moral issue lay not only a question of life and death for England and the Empire, but a struggle between two incompatible conceptions of civilization-between the Prusso-Napoleonic and the Christian, the Militarist and the Liberal. Far better, they felt, that 'England' that is to say, all the ideals of individual freedom and orVOL. 323-NO. 4185

dered liberty which had gone out from England through the centuries should perish in a fight to the death with the doctrines represented by Prussia and her prophets, than that she should purchase a dubious respite by standing aside or seeking an impossible compromise with them. Hence the almost joyous relief with which they learned that the die was cast and the battle fairly joined. The war became for them a crusade the more real, the more ennobling because it compelled them to search their hearts and to confess to themselves that, despite skepticism and frivolity, there were beliefs and loyalties for which they were ready to die.

No man or woman who passed that test can really doubt whether the war was worth while. Notwithstanding all disappointments and the grayness of the present world, it was an experience that left traces too deep to be obliterated. Its greatness lay in its simplicity. The choice was plain. It had to be made forthwith. The issue was imperative. It could not be burked or avoided; and, while the war lasted, it remained clear. Without military victory there could be no hope of realizing the aspirations we cherished. Therefore the immediate object was victory. But with the Armistice came a more difficult question. Victory had been won; what should we do with it, how best turn it to account? And amid the divergence of opinions, the clash of interests, the ambitions and the passions of men and of peoples, unity of purpose was lost, attention was dispersed, fibres braced by the war grew slack, and disillusionment began.

It was hard to feel enthusiasm for Reparations, and harder still to learn the names and understand the doings and the desires of all the new peoples whom the war had redeemed, some of whom, moreover, seemed scarcely

worthy of their ransom. Three Empires had fallen. Was it worth while to have brought about their overthrow if a chaos of jealous little nations were to replace them? Besides, in Russia, in Hungary, and to some extent in Germany, in Austria, and in Italy, revolutionary forces had been let loose that threatened to turn upside down the whole structure of European society. Terrorism, massacre, and spoliation were certainly not among the objects for which the Allied peoples had fought.

Worse still, the Allied Governments disagreed progressively among themselves. The Paris Peace Conference was filled with unseemly wranglings; and though the Peace Treaty contained the Covenant of a League of Nations it was not exactly the League of which the Allied peoples had dreamed. Moreover, when the United States rejected the Treaty and refused to enter the League, the whole balance of the Peace was upset. The rosy hope that the war would be a 'war to end war' grew pallid. How, in these circumstances, could the masses of the people keep their faith and still believe that the war had been worth while?

In Great Britain the after-effects of the war were, in themselves, depressing. Crushing taxation remained, without the stimulus that had formerly made it bearable. Old families were impoverished and their mansions and lands passed largely into the hands of the 'new rich' who had made fortunes out of the war. Trade declined and unemployment grew. Prices stood high, and the dull struggle for bread left little time or room for the cultivation of nobler feelings. 'Advanced' political and social theories gained more and more adherents, while on the other hand large sections of the community lost their grip upon the political principles in which they had been

brought up and tended to look for safety to dictatorships and other forms of antidemocratic reaction. Parliamentary institutions, which had been relegated to a secondary place during the war, appeared to be sorely discredited. No clear voice, no plain creed appealed with convincing power to the popular conscience; and though Great Britain was spared the degradation of seeing a savage Communism — or its not less deleterious counterpart, savage Fascism-run riot among her people, her Government adopted during the struggle in Ireland methods that were the negation of every precept of just and enlightened rule.

Worst of all, a lack of political and social leadership began to be distressingly felt. A whole generation of men who would have been the natural leaders of the nation had been swept away in the flower of their age; and there was none to fill the void. The older men were too old and too tired to give leadership; the young men were too young and too unknowing to perceive whither they were going or whither they wished to go. The mechanical agencies developed by the war tended to obtrude a mechanical spirit into the works of peace and helped also to obscure the spiritual issues and to deaden the moral forces without which no perfection of mechanism could have availed to bring victory. Thus, from the crest of the wave of high endeavor and sacrifice, the nation slid deep into the trough of dejection and doubt.

It is not the very young who wonder whether the war was worth while. They have no standard of comparison, for they knew little or nothing of the world before 1914. It is the older folk whom misgivings assail. Yet they may with advantage ask themselves whether they would, if they could, put back the clock of time and return to the early months of 1914? Most of them