agine if you can a million men, the core of the
national power, turning themselves into machines to carry out blindly
the schemes of leaders who may be right or wrong; schooled in the
belief that manslaughter is manliness, that the rash courage of the
brute is above the moral courage of a man; forgetful of the meaning
of human life; thoughtless of a thing so common as death; heedless of
its eternal consequences. No wonder Channing cried so bitterly: "War
is the concentration of all human crimes. Under its standard gather
violence, malignity, rage, fraud, rapacity, and lust. If it only slew
men, it would do little. But it turns man into a beast of prey. Here
is the evil of war, that man, made to be the brother, becomes the
deadly foe of his kind; that man, whose duty is to mitigate suffering,
makes the infliction of suffering his study and end."

No, Mr. Roosevelt, for once at least you are wrong! We cannot believe
that war builds up a nation. Rather will we believe those words of
Herbert Spencer, more sweeping but far more true, "Advance to the
highest forms of man and society depends on the decline of militancy
and the growth of industrialism."

"But wait," you say; "all this is theory and abstraction. We want
matters of fact. Your case may be true as philosophy, but you have
failed to ground it in example." So it is to history that our last
appeal must be made, for, says Bolingbroke, "History is philosophy,
teaching by example." Every decree of her stern tribunal is impartial
and irrevocable. War the tonic or war the poison? She is the final
judge. She will take you back, if you will, to her childhood days and
point you out vast empires, owning the known world, Babylonians,
Assyrians, Egyptians, Medes, and Persians, fearful fighters all of
them. But no, not quite all either. On a sandy stretch of seashore,
half hidden by the unwieldy empires around it, we see a timid,
peaceful little people called the Hebrews; they alone, from all that
mighty company, have stood the "wreckful siege" of thirty centuries.
Watch its sinister movement down the ages and you will see the war
cloud hover over Greece, and her republics melt to nothing in disunion
and decay. It hovers over the Huns, and they suddenly sink from sight;
over Islam, and its civilization crumbles faster than it grew; over
Spain, and all the New World treasures cannot save her from decay.
Finally, like the cloud no bigger than a hand, it rises from the
island of C