If for any reason whatever we fall short of victory —
and there is no half-way house between victory and
defeat — ^what happens to us? This. Every relation,
every understanding, every decency upon which civi-
lization has been so anxiously built up will go — ^will be
washed out, because it will have been proved unable to
endure. The whole idea of democracy — ^which at bot-
tom is what the Hun fights against — ^will be dismissed
from men's minds, because it will have been shown in-
capable of maintaining itself against the Him. It will
die; and it will die discredited, together with every belief
and practice that is based on it. The Him ideal, the
Hun's root-notions of life, will take its place throughout
the world. Under that dispensation man will become
once more the natural prey, body and goods, of his
better-armed neighbour. Women will be the mere
instrument for continuing the breed, the vessel of man's
lust and man's cruelty; and labour will become a thing



NEW WORDS SELF-DEFINED 91

to be knocked on the head if it dares to give trouble,
and worked to death if it does not. And from this order
of life there will be no appeal, no possibility of any
escape. This is what the Hun means when he says he
intends to impose Grerman KvUur — ^which is the Grer-
man religion — upon the world. This is precisely what
the world has banded itself together to resist. It will
take every ounce in us; it will try us out to the naked
soul. — ^RuDYARD KiPLiNG, Addrcss at Folkestone,
England, London Morning Post, March, 1918.
