"And you really begin to think," said Wilkins, "that there has been an
increase in violence and unreasonableness in the world?"
"My case is that it is an irruption," said Boon. "But I do begin to
see a sort of violence of mind and act growing in the world."
"There has always been something convulsive and extravagant in human
affairs," said Wilkins. "No public thing, no collective thing, has
ever had the sanity of men thinking quietly in a study."
And so we fell to discussing the Mind of the Race again, and whether
there was indeed any sanity growing systematically out of human
affairs, or whether this Mind of the Race was just a poor tormented
rag of partial understanding that would never control the blind forces
that had made and would destroy it. And it was inevitable that such a
talk should presently drift to the crowning human folly, to that
crowned Wild Ass of the Devil, aggressive militarism. That talk was
going on, I remember, one very bright, warm, sunny day in May, or it
may be in June, of 1914. And we talked of militarism as a flourish, as
a kicking up of the national heels, as extravagance and waste; but,
what seems to me so singular now, we none of us spoke of it or thought
of it as a thing that could lead to the full horror of a universal
war. Human memory is so strange and treacherous a thing that I doubt
now if many English people will recall our habitual disregard in those
days of war as a probability. We thought of it as a costly, foolish
threatening, but that it could actually happen----!