ellow feeling is the more important and controlling.

We are not to deny or even to overlook the great results that have come
from war. Virile races have forced themselves to the front and have
impressed their stamp on society; the peoples have been mixed and also
assorted; lethargic folk have been galvanized into activity; iron has
been put into men's sinews; heroic deeds have arisen; old combinations
and intrigues have been broken up (although new ones take their place).
A kind of national purification may result from a great war. The state
of human affairs has been brought to its present condition largely as
the issue of wars.

On the other hand, we are not to overlook the damaging results, the
destruction, the anguish, the check to all productive enterprise, the
hatred and revenge, the hypocrisy and deceit, the despicable foreign spy
system, the loss of standards, the demoralization, the lessening respect
and regard for the rights of the other, the breeding of human parasites
that fatten at the fringes of disaster, the levying of tribute, the
setting up of unnatural boundaries, the thwarting of national and racial
developments which, so far as we can see, gave every promise of great
results. We naturally extol the nations that have survived; we do not
know how many superior stocks may have been sacrificed to military
conquest, or how many racial possibilities may have been suppressed in
their beginnings.

Vast changes in mental attitudes may result from a great war, and the
course of civilization may be deflected; and while we adjust ourselves
to these changes, no one may say at the time that they are just or even
that they are temporarily best. We are never able at the moment to
measure the effects of the unholy conquest of peoples who should not
have been conquered; these results work themselves out in tribulation
and perhaps in loss of effort and of racial standards through many weary
centuries. Force, or even "success," cannot justify theft.

But even assuming the great changes that have arisen from war, this is
not a justification of war; it only states a fact, it only provides a
measure of the condition of society at any epoch. It is probable that
war will still exert a mighty even if a lessening influence; it may
still be necessary to resort to arms to win for a people its natural
opportunity and to free a race from bondage; and if any people has a
right to its own existence, it has an equal right and inde