onomic history; living is
earning a living. Is it necessary to ask how much of high emprise and
honorable conduct has been found here? Something, to be sure. The
establishment of world credit systems is built on splendid and
realizable faith in fellow-men. But it is, after all, so low and
elementary a step that sometimes it looks merely like honor among
thieves, for the revelations of highway robbery and low cheating in the
business world and in all its great modern centers have raised in the
hearts of all true men in our day an exceeding great cry for revolution
in our basic methods and conceptions of industry and commerce.

We do not, for a moment, forget the robbery of other times and races
when trade was a most uncertain gamble; but was there not a certain
honesty and frankness in the evil that argued a saner morality? There
are more merchants today, surer deliveries, and wider well-being, but
are there not, also, bigger thieves, deeper injustice, and more
calloused selfishness in well-being? Be that as it may,--certainly the
nicer sense of honor that has risen ever and again in groups of
forward-thinking men has been curiously and broadly blunted. Consider
our chiefest industry,--fighting. Laboriously the Middle Ages built its
rules of fairness--equal armament, equal notice, equal conditions. What
do we see today? Machine-guns against assegais; conquest sugared with
religion; mutilation and rape masquerading as culture,--all this, with
vast applause at the superiority of white over black soldiers!

War is horrible! This the dark world knows to its awful cost. But has
it just become horrible, in these last days, when under essentially
equal conditions, equal armament, and equal waste of wealth white men
are fighting white men, with surgeons and nurses hovering near?

Think of the wars through which we have lived in the last decade: in
German Africa, in British Nigeria, in French and Spanish Morocco, in
China, in Persia, in the Balkans, in Tripoli, in Mexico, and in a dozen
lesser places--were not these horrible, too? Mind you, there were for
most of these wars no Red Cross funds.

Behold little Belgium and her pitiable plight, but has the world
forgotten Congo? What Belgium now suffers is not half, not even a tenth,
of what she has done to black Congo since Stanley's great dream of 1880.
Down the dark forests of inmost Africa sailed this modern Sir Galahad,
in the name of "the noble-minded men of several nations,