The war dominates this issue of The New Age, as it often does. The Battle of Gallipoli is lost, and it's not clear how Britain is going to extract its armies there. Bulgaria has joined the war on the side of the Central Powers, though The New Age underestimates Bulgaria. Bechhofer writes that the Russians are willing to make a separate peace to preserve the tottering czardom.
"War Notes" by pseudonym "North Staffs" is pretty interesting. Here's a chunk of text that caught my eye in an argument generally refuting Liberal tendencies to see everything in terms of progress toward democracy:
"In the first place, evolution in our sense of the word-that is, evolution towards democracy-is not only not inevitable, but it is the most precarious, difficult and exigent task political man has ever conceived. And, in the second place, far from it being the predestined path of every nation and race, only one or two nations have attempted to pursue it, while the rest deliberately and even, we might say, intelligently, pursue another path altogether as if that were progress, and are thus sincerely hostile to our own." (29).
Then we must turn to Beatrice Hastings, here reporting as Alice Morning. This is the way the world ends: with a brilliantly original thinker utterly discrediting half of humanity (a half that includes her) as being incapable of original thought. This has been a side of Hastings for years at this point. I'm going to be analyzing the trend in more depth in a paper I'm presenting at a conference next weekend, but the upshot is that Hastings is an original artist whose ideas went utterly unrecognized. Her turn against women in general is in part out of frustration with her lack of recognition, paired with her disillusion with the suffrage movement. At least there's a letter in the correspondence refuting her position.
I noticed that the ongoing Stendhal translations are now appearing with the translator identified as Paul V. Cohn, who (according to Google) also translated Nietzche. I'm curious whether the translations have been by him all along, when it seemed like it was Hastings doing that work for some time.
