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Great Speeches of the War

us away into a world of hatred and murder and death; of waste and misery; of wholesale crimes ; and forces us to say with the Temanite: "How much more abominable and filthy is man, who drinketh iniquity like water? " It is the crime of crimes. It is ; and the pacifist hates war more than ever, now he is forced, in obedience to what he holds to be the call of God and of humanity, to enter into it and become an active supporter of it. He does not—certainly I do not—surrender one jot or tittle of the peacemaker's policy or rewrite a line of it. He does not apologize for his determined pursuit of peace up to the very last moment that there was the faintest chance of maintaining it; not he! he will wear no white sheet. He stands where he did, and as he did, as you may see in Prof. Gilbert Murray's book, How Can War Ever Be Right? who says:

"I have all my life been an advocate of peace. I hate war, not merely for its own cruelty and folly, but because it is the enemy of all the causes that I care for most, of social progress and good government and all friendliness and gentleness of life, as well as

of art and learning and literature. I have spoken and presided at more meetings than I can remember for peace and arbitration and the promotion of international friendship. I opposed the policy of war in South Africa with all my energies, and have been either out-spokenly hostile or inwardly unsympathetic towards almost every war that Great Britain has waged in my lifetime. If I may speak more personally, there is none of my own work into which I have put more intense feeling than into my translations of Euripides' Trojan Women, the first great denunciation of war in European literature. I do not regret any word that I have spoken or written in the cause of peace, nor have I changed, as far as I know, any opinion that I have previously held on this subject. Yet I believe firmly that we were right to declare war against Germany on August 4, 1914, and that to have remained neutral in that crisis would have been a failure in public duty.

We are now, as we were, advocates of national and international peace; not only not impenitent pacifists, but more resolutely than ever contending for peace, because we have now, in obedience to the clear call of duty, to back to the uttermost a war for righteousness, for freedom, for fidelity to the plighted word, for the sacredness of public law; in short, I say again, for the soul of the world.

And our faith in the real advance of peace through this war is justified; for never was the protest against war so
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