reeds, under penalty of being killed, have been
compelled to lay down their weapons and cease killing among themselves.
The scalp-talking Indian and the head-hunting Melanesian have been either
destroyed or converted to a belief in the superior efficacy of civil
suits and criminal prosecutions. The planet is being subdued. The wild
and the hurtful are either tamed or eliminated. From the beasts of prey
and the cannibal humans down to the death-dealing microbes, no quarter is
given; and daily, wider and wider areas of hostile territory, whether of
a warring desert-tribe in Africa or a pestilential fever-hole like
Panama, are made peaceable and habitable for mankind. As for the great
mass of stay-at-home folk, what percentage of the present generation in
the United States, England, or Germany, has seen war or knows anything of
war at first hand? There was never so much peace in the world as there
is to-day.

War itself, the old red anarch, is passing. It is safer to be a soldier
than a working-man. The chance for life is greater in an active campaign
than in a factory or a coal-mine. In the matter of killing, war is
growing impotent, and this in face of the fact that the machinery of war
was never so expensive in the past nor so dreadful. War-equipment to-
day, in time of peace, is more expensive than of old in time of war. A
standing army costs more to maintain than it used to cost to conquer an
empire. It is more expensive to be ready to kill, than it used to be to
do the killing. The price of a Dreadnought would furnish the whole army
of Xerxes with killing weapons. And, in spite of its magnificent
equipment, war no longer kills as it used to when its methods were
simpler. A bombardment by a modern fleet has been known to result in the
killing of one mule. The casualties of a twentieth century war between
two world-powers are such as to make a worker in an iron-foundry turn
green with envy. War has become a joke. Men have made for themselves
monsters of battle which they cannot face in battle. Subsistence is
generous these days, life is not cheap, and it is not in the nature of
flesh and blood to indulge in the carnage made possible by present-day
machinery. This is not theoretical, as will be shown by a comparison of
deaths in battle and men involved, in the South African War and the
Spanish-American War on the one hand, and the Civil War or the Napoleonic
Wars on the other.

Not only has war, by i