The British commonwealth--a very inclusive phrase in this connection--must form the core of the pacific league, if any, and British sentiment will have a very great place in the terms of its formation and in the terms which it will be inclined to offer the Imperial coalition at the settlement.
Now, it happens that the British community entered on this war as a democratic monarchy ruled and officered by a body of gentlemen--doubtless the most correct and admirable muster of gentlemen, of anything approaching its volume, that the modern world can show.

But the war has turned out not to be a gentlemen's war.

It has on the contrary been a war of technological exploits, reenforced with all the beastly devices of the heathen.

It is a war in which all the specific traits of the well-bred and gently-minded man are a handicap; in which veracity, gallantry, humanity, liberality are conducive to nothing but defeat and humiliation.

The death-rate among the British gentlemen-officers in the early months, and for many months, ran extravagantly high, for the most part because they were gallant gentlemen as well as officers imbued with the good, old class spirit of _noblesse oblige_, that has made half the tradition and more than half the working theory of the British officer in the field,--good, but old, hopelessly out of date.