Page:The world set free.djvu/287

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MARCUS KARENIN

rificed education, art, happiness and all its hopes of future welfare to follow the clatter of his sabre. The monstrous worship of that old fool's 'blood and iron' passed all round the earth. Until the atomic bombs burnt our way to freedom again. . . ."

"One thinks of him now as one thinks of the megatherium," said one of the young men.

"From first to last mankind made three million big guns and a hundred thousand complicated great ships for no other purpose but war."

"Were there no sane men in those days," asked the young man, "to stand against that idolatry?"

"In a state of despair," said Edith Haydon.

"He is so far off—and there are men alive still who were alive when Bismarck died," said the young man. . . .

§ 5.

"And yet it may be I am unjust to Bismarck," said Karenin, following his own thoughts. "You see, men belong to their own age; we stand upon a common stock of thought and we fancy we stand upon the ground. I met a pleasant man the other day, a Maori, whose great-grandfather was a cannibal. It chanced he had a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the two were marvel-

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