ontier, and would leave communities exposed to the
ravages of brigands on land and pirates by sea. But for the most part,
Sumner's argument in favour of peace was sound. To-day all civilized
countries are coming to recognize war as a blunder, since questions of
justice cannot be settled by brute force.

When we consider that France is an armed camp, Germany and Austria
countries of bristling bayonets, that three years at the most critical
epoch of the boy's life are consumed in a camp exposed to all manner of
temptations and dangers, at the very time when the youth should be
mastering his trade or his profession, war seems the capitalization of
all the possible follies and wastes. The peasants of Europe plough, each
carrying a soldier upon his back. The brick-mason builds, but staggers
up the ladder with a heavier load than bricks,--the soldier upon his
back. The symbols of nations are still the lion, the eagle and the wolf.
Some political leaders even yet talk about the necessity of an
occasional war to put boys upon their mettle, as if invention, the
building of railways, the founding of cities, the fighting of economic
and social wrongs would not put a man upon his mettle! To put a German
on one side of a fence and a Frenchman on the other, and have one
peasant empty his shotgun into the bowels of the other is about as noble
as going out into a yard and shooting a Jersey cow. The best way to
protect a nation is to build boys into men, through the processes of
productive industry. Machine gun and dreadnought will soon be as
obsolete in the presence of arbitration and the court at the Hague as an
ox-cart is obsolete in the presence of a Pullman palace car.

Wendell Phillips once said that Lord Bacon had a right to lay his hand
on the steam engine and say to Watt: "This engine is mine; I gave you
the method." So Charles Sumner, after sixty-five years, has a right to
stand yonder at the entrance of the Parliament House of Peace, now being
completed in the capital of Holland, and say: "I laid the foundation
stones of this structure and started a war against war." This oration
of Sumner's on "The True Grandeur of Nations" made him a most unpopular
figure at home, but Europe soon called for his speech. It was translated
into many languages, two hundred and fifty-thousand copies were
published and sold, and for the time Sumner was the most talked of man
of the year.

Now the one man who was not on the defensive, who was no