Such is the drama of the war as I have seen it. How far it has gone,
when it will close and the curtain fall on it none of us can say. With
five millions already dead, twice as many wounded, one kingdom in ruins,
another desolate from disease, the larger part of Europe under arms,
civil life paralysed, social existence overshadowed by a mourning
that enters into nearly every household; with a war still in progress
compared with which all other wars sink into insignificance; with
a public debt which Pitt, Fox, and Burke (who thought £240,000,000
frightful) would have considered certain to sink the ship of State; with
taxation such as our fathers never conceived possible--what will be our
condition when this hideous war comes to an end?
It is dangerous to prophesy, but, as far as we can judge, the least of
the results will be that we shall all be poorer; that great fortunes
will have diminished and vast enterprises disappeared; that what remains
of our savings will have a different value; that some of us who thought
we had earned our rest will have to go on working; that the industrial
classes will have a time of privation; and that (most touching of human
tragedies) the old and helpless and dependent among the very poor will
more than ever feel themselves to be in the way, filling the beds and
eating the bread of the children.
Yet none can say. It is one of the paradoxes of history that after
the longest and most exhausting wars the accumulation of the largest
national debts and the imposition of the heaviest taxations, nations
have rapidly become rich. Although 1817 was a time of extreme distress
in these islands, England prospered after the Napoleonic wars. Although
1871 was a time of fierce trial in Paris, yet France recovered herself
quickly after the war with Germany. And though the Civil War in America
left poverty in its immediate trail, the United States have since
amassed boundless wealth.
So do the nations, generation after generation, renew their strength
even after the most prolonged campaigns. But beyond the economic loss
there will in this case be the physical loss of ten millions, perhaps,
of the young manhood of Europe dead, and ten other millions permanently
disabled, with all the injury to the race thereby resulting; and beyond
the physical loss there will be the intellectual loss in the ruthless
destruction of those ancient monuments which had linked us with the
past; and beyond the intellectual loss there will be the moral loss in
the uprooting of that sympathy of nation with nation which had seemed to
unite us with the future. As a consequence of this war a great part of
Europe will be closed to some of us for the rest of our natural lives,
and the world will contain more than a hundred millions fewer of our
fellow-creatures in whose welfare we shall take joy.