Read "Towards the Great Peace" by Ralph Adams Cram online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
[This lecture has been very considerably re-written since it was delivered, and much of the matter it then contained has been cut out, and is now printed in the Appendix. These excisions were purely speculative, and while they have a certain bearing on the arguments and conclusions in the other lectures, might very well be prejudicial to them, and for this reason it has seemed better to remove them from the general sequence and give them a supplementary place by themselves.]
The first reaction of the World War was a great interrogation, and the technical "Peace" that has followed brings only reiteration. Why did these things come, and how? The answers are as manifold as the clamourous tongues that ask, but none carries conviction and the problem is still unsolved. According to all rational probabilities we had no right to expect the war that befell; according to all the human indications as we saw them revealed amongst the Allies we had a right to expect a better peace; according to our abiding and abounding faith we had a right to expect a great bettering of life after the war, and even in spite of the peace. It is all a _non sequitur,_ and still we ask the reason and the meaning of it all.