world democracies
defined militarism as an arrogant, or exclusive, professional military
spirit, developed by training and environment until it became despotic,
and assumed superiority over rational motives and deliberations.

This attitude was reflected in the conduct of the Kaiser, who, as
illustrative of the point, is quoted at the dedication of the monument
to Prince Frederick Charles at Frankfurt-on-the-Oder in 1891, as having
said, "We would rather sacrifice our eighteen army corps and our
forty-two millions inhabitants on the field of battle than surrender a
single stone of what my father and Prince Charles Frederick gained."

His speeches were filled with similar bombastic and extravagant
expressions which were the subject of international comment for many
years. Other countries besides Germany have maintained great armies, but
their maintenance has been but an incidental part of the general
business of the nation and there was no submerging of the spirit which
seeks and demands appropriate public ideals in government and action. So
that while other elements have always tended to produce friction between
neighboring countries, it was adamant, stubborn, military Prussianism
which asserted itself in the middle of 1914 and set the world afire.

Enough is known at this writing to show that the cost in lives, money,
morals and weakening of humanity as a whole, is staggering, and yet the
whole truth can not be realized for years to come. In our own great
struggle, which had for its object the liberation of the Negro, the
scars which our country received have not yet been entirely eliminated.
Portions of the country devastated by the soldiers still bear the marks
of the invasion, but what was lost in money and material things was made
up by the welding together of the two sections of the country. The Union
was made a concrete, humanitarian body of citizens. The battle was for
the right and liberty triumphed. And by the defeat of Germany liberty
again triumphs and the world is made a safe place in which to live.

And just as America fought for liberty in the stirring days of 1776, and
her peoples fought one another in the trying days of 1861-65, so America
was drawn into the World's War that the principles of liberty, for which
she has ever stood, might be perpetuated throughout the world, and that
an international peace might be established, which has for its purposes
the ending of such convulsions as have shaken th