Would it ever be given blood?
"Men of my generation have been brought up in this threat of a great
war that never comes; for forty years we have had it, so that it is
with a note of incredulity that one tells oneself, 'After all this
war may happen. But can it happen?'"
He proceeded to speculate upon the probability whether a great war
would ever devastate western Europe again, and it was very evident
to White that he wanted very much to persuade himself against that
idea. It was too disagreeable for him to think it probable. The
paper was dated 1910. It was in October, 1914, that White, who was
still working upon the laborious uncertain account of Benham's life
and thought he has recently published, read what Benham had written.
Benham concluded that the common-sense of the world would hold up
this danger until reason could get "to the head of things."
"There are already mighty forces in Germany," Benham wrote, "that
will struggle very powerfully to avoid a war. And these forces
increase. Behind the coarseness and the threatenings, the melodrama
and the display of the vulgarer sort there arises a great and noble
people.
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