paratively trivial. The recent Balkan wars were as ferocious
as those of Alexander. The German aviators drop aimless bombs at night
into cities occupied chiefly by non-combatants. The North Sea is strewn
with floating mines which may destroy fishing, freight, or passenger
vessels of any nation, neutral or belligerent, which have business on
that sea. The ruthless destruction of the Louvain Library by German
soldiers reminds people who have read history that the destroyers of the
Alexandria Library have ever since been called fanatics and barbarians.
The German Army tries to compel unfortified Belgian cities and towns to
pay huge ransoms to save themselves from destruction--a method which the
Barbary States, indeed, were accustomed to use against their Christian
neighbors, but which has long been held to be a method appropriate only
for brigands and pirates--Greek, Sicilian, Syrian, or Chinese.

What Is Wrong with Civilization?

How can it be that the Government of a civilized State commits, or
permits in its agents, such barbarities? The fundamental reason seems to
be that most of the European nations still believe that national
greatness depends on the possession and brutal use of force, and is to
be maintained and magnified only by military and naval power.

In North America there are two large communities--heretofore inspired
chiefly by ideals of English origin--which have never maintained
conscripted armies, and have never fortified against each other their
long frontier--Canada and the United States. Both may fairly be called
great peoples even now; and both give ample promise for the future.
Neither of these peoples lacks the "stout and warlike" quality of which
Sir Francis Bacon spoke; both have often exhibited it. The United States
suffered for four years from a civil war, characterized by determined
fighting, in indecisive battles, in which the losses, in proportion to
the number of men engaged, were often much heavier than any thus far
reported from the present battlefields in Belgium and France. There
being then no lack of martial spirit in these two peoples, it is an
instructive phenomenon that power to conquer is not their ideal of
national greatness. Much the same thing may be said of some other
self-governing constituents of the British Empire, such as Australia,
New Zealand, and South Africa. They, too, have a better ideal of
national greatness than that of military supremacy.

What are the real amb