§ 8
Your boy, as no doubt you know, dreamt constantly of such a world peace as this that I foreshadow; he was more generous than his country. He could envisage war and hostility only as misunderstanding. He thought that a world that could explain itself clearly would surely be at peace. He was scheming always therefore for the perfection and propagation of Esperanto or Ido, or some such universal link. My youngster too was full of a kindred and yet larger dream, the dream of human science, which knows neither king nor country nor race....
These boys, these hopes, this war has killed....
That fragment ended so. Mr. Britling ceased to read for a time. “But has it killed them?” he whispered....
“If you had lived, my dear, you and your England would have talked with a younger Germany—better than I can ever do....”
He turned the pages back, and read here and there with an accumulating discontent.