is one of the wonders of time. The drama or tragedy of evolution
has had many actors, some of them fearful and terrible to look upon, who
have played their parts and passed off the stage, as if the sole purpose
was the entertainment of some unseen spectator. When we reach human
history, what wasted effort, what failures, what blind groping, what
futile undertakings!--war, famine, pestilence, delaying progress or
bringing to naught the wisdom of generations of men! Those who live in
this age are witnessing in the terrible European war something analogous
to the blind, wasteful fury of the elemental forces; millions of men who
never saw one another, and who have not the shadow of a quarrel, engage
in a life-and-death struggle, armed with all the aids that centuries of
science and civilization can give them--a tragedy that darkens the very
heavens and makes a mockery of all our age-old gospel of peace and good
will to men. It is a catastrophe on a scale with the cataclysms of
geologic time when whole races disappeared and the face of continents
was changed. It seems that men in the aggregate, with all their science
and religion, are no more exempt from the operation of cosmic laws than
are the stocks and stones. Each party to this gigantic struggle declares
that he is in it against his will; the fate that rules in the solar
system seems to have them all in its grip; the working of forces and
tendencies for which no man was responsible seems to have brought it
about. Social communities grow in grace and good-fellowship, but
governments in their relations to one another, and often in relation to
their own subjects, are still barbarous. Men become christianized, but
man is still a heathen, the victim of savage instincts. In this struggle
one of the most admirable and efficient of nations, and one of the most
solicitous for the lives and well-being of its citizens, is suddenly
seized with a fury of destruction, hurling its soldiers to death as if
they were only the waste of the fields, and trampling down other peoples
whose geographic position placed them in their way as if they were
merely vermin, throwing international morality to the winds, looking
upon treaties as "scraps of paper," regarding themselves as the salt of
the earth, the chosen of the Lord, appropriating the Supreme Being as
did the colossal egotism of old Israel, and quickly getting down to the
basic principle of savage life--that might makes right.

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