molest her. During the sack of Troy, while Aeneas was wandering desperately among the flaming relics of his city, he espied the seductive cause of all that woe, cowering on the threshold of a temple, a silent, terror-stricken fugitive. To the beauty that had launched a thousand ships his anguish made him blind. The smoke of a world in ruins smarted in his eyes. Hot wrath possessed him. Though he knew there was no glory to be had from slaying a woman, it seemed to him "very stuff of the conscience" to end that hateful life. He clutched his sword. In the instant, his divine mother appeared to him, stayed his hand, and assured him that the real cause of the war was not Helen but the inclementia divum, the merciless will of the gods.
Many intellectuals look malignly upon nationalism as the baleful Helen of our recent international disaster. Through the smoke of the conflict they thought they heard an angel with vials of wrath crying: "There shall be no more flags!" As an act of the higher piety, holding nothing sacred which is less than Humanity, they dedicated themselves to the destruction in themselves and in others of all those complex beliefs and emotions which the waving flag of one's land stirs in the heart of the ordinary man. The war multiplied the number of refined young liberals, American, English, Jewish, French, Italian, who in the confidences of the midnight hour, aflame with the "higher piety,"
