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After the WarTHE GREAT war has for some time been over: it is alreadyreceding into the near distances of the past. Around us is ablack mist and welter of the present, before us the face ofa dim and ambiguous future. It is just possible, however, to takesome stock of the immediate results of the war, although by nostretch of language can the world situation be called clear, for itis marked rather by chaotic drift and an unexampled confusion.The ideals which were so loud of mouth during the collision— mainly as advertising agents of its conflicting interests — arenow discredited and silent: an uneasy locked struggle of irreconcilableforces entangled in an inextricable clasp of enmity,but too weak or too exhausted to prevail against each otherand unable to separate, a bewildered opportunism incapable ofguiding itself or finding an issue is the character of the presentsituation. Humanity has the figure of a derelict with broken mastand rudder drifting on a sea still upheaved by the after swell ofthe tempest, the statesmen of the Supreme Council figuring asits impotent captains and shouting directions that have not theleast chance of useful execution and have to be changed frommoment to moment. Nowhere is there a guiding illuminationor a just idea that is at all practicable. A great intellectual andmoral bankruptcy, an immense emptiness and depression hassucceeded to the delirium of massacre.This is indeed the most striking immediate after result ofthe war, the atmosphere of a world-wide disappointment anddisillusionment and the failure of great hopes and ideals. Whathigh and large and dazzling things were promised us during thewar, and where are they now? Rejected, tarnished, dishonouredthey lie cast aside dead and stripped and desecrated on the bloodstainedrefuse heap that the war has left behind it. Not oneremains to us. The war that was fought to end war has been only