“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.... I have talked with Germans of the better kind.... You cannot have a whole nation of Christophes.... There also the true knighthood discovers itself.... I do not believe this war will overtake us.”
“I must go back to Germany and understand Germany better,” the notes went on.
But other things were to hold Benham back from that resolve. Other things were to hold many men back from similar resolves until it was too late for them....
“It is preposterous that these monstrous dangers should lower over Europe, because a certain threatening vanity has crept into the blood of a people, because a few crude ideas go inadequately controlled.... Does no one see what that metallic beast will do if they once let it loose? It will trample cities; it will devour nations....”
White read this on the 9th of October, 1914. One crumpled evening paper at his feet proclaimed in startled headlines: “Rain of Incendiary Shells. Antwerp Ablaze.” Another declared untruthfully but impressively: “Six Zeppelins drop Bombs over the Doomed City.”
He had bought all the evening papers, and had read and re-read them and turned up maps and worried over strategic problems for which he had no data at all--as every one did at that time--before he was able to go on with Benham's manuscripts.
These pacific reassurances seemed to White's war-troubled mind like finding a flattened and faded flower, a girl's love token, between the pages of some torn and scorched and blood-stained book picked out from a heap of loot after rapine and murder had had their fill....
“How can we ever begin over again?” said White, and sat for a long time staring gloomily into the fire, forgetting forgetting, forgetting too that men who are tired and weary die, and that new men are born to succeed them....
“We have to begin over again,” said White at last, and took up Benham's papers where he had laid them down....
One considerable section of Benham's treatment of the Fourth Limitation was devoted to what he called the Prejudices of Social Position. This section alone was manifestly expanding into a large treatise upon the psychology of economic organization....