gh both countries whose flags were
raised over the field of battle, homes not to be numbered mourned in
soul-wrecking grief, for husband, father, son or brother who sank
beneath the foeman's steel or yielded life within the fever tent,
or who, surviving shot and malady, carries back to his loved ones a
maimed or weakened body. This, the result of war.

"Reduced to the smallest sacrifice of human life the carnage of the
battlefields, some one has died and some one is bereft. 'Only one
killed,' the headline reads. The glad news speeds. The newsboys cry:
'Killed only one.' 'He was my son. What were a thousand to this
one--my only son.'

"It was Wellington who said: 'Take my word for it, if you had seen
but one day of war you would pray to Almighty God that you might
never see such a thing again.' It was Napoleon who said: 'The sight
of a battlefield after the fight is enough to inspire princes with
a love of peace and a horror of war.'

"War, be thou gone from my soul's sight! I thank the good God that
thy ghastly specter stands no longer upon the thresholds of the homes
of my fellow countrymen in America, or my fellow beings in distant
Andalusia. When, I ask heaven, shall humanity rise to such heights
of reason and of religion that war shall be impossible, and stories
of battlefields but the saddening echoes of primitive ages of the race?

"And yet, while we await that blessed day, when embodied justice shall
sit in judgment between peoples as between individuals, from time to
time conditions more repellant than war may confront a nation, and to
remove such conditions as the solemn dictates of reason and religion
impose was as righteous and obligatory. Let the life of a nation or
the integrity of its territory be menaced, let the honor of a nation
be assailed, let the grievous crime against humanity be perpetrated
within reach of a nation's flag or a nation's arm, reiterated appeals
or argument and diplomacy failing, what else remains to a nation which
is not so base as to court death or dishonor but to challenge the
fortunes of war and give battle while strength remains in defense of
'its hearthstones and its altars'? War, indeed, is dreadful; but let
it come; the sky may fall, but let justice be done. War is no longer
a repudiation of peace, but the means to peace--to the soul peace a
self-sacrificing people may enjoy--peace with honor.

"A just and necessary war is holy. The men who at country's call
engage in su