s moral nature is the Hope of Universal Peace.

THE TASK OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

By HAROLD HUSTED, Ottawa University, Ottawa, Kansas, representing the
Western Group

Fifth Prize Oration in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May
28, 1914

THE TASK OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Age by age, civilization advances. Each successive era has contributed
that invention or accomplished that achievement which has placed
another round in the great ladder of civilization. The development of
many small states into powerful nations, and many wonderful
improvements in other fields, such as steam navigation, the railroad,
the telegraph, and wireless communication, crown the last as the
greatest of centuries in the history of the human family. It is
difficult to understand why the human mind, whence these mighty
inspirations originated, has been incapable of realizing that there
still remains the most degrading, the most deteriorating, the foulest
blot that ever disgraced this world--the killing of civilized men, by
men, as a permissible mode of settling international disputes. This
world can never attain its highest standard of civilization until this
one disgraceful blemish, called war, is obliterated. It is the
collective task of the people living in this twentieth century to
bring into reality the millennium of Tennyson,

Till the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furl'd
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.

The beginning of this social task, then, is the enlightenment of the
peoples as to the immorality, waste, and ineffectiveness of war. God
commanded, "Thou shalt not kill." Who shall presume to declare that
this precept was directed not to nations but to individuals only?
that one man shall not kill, but nations may? We are horrified at the
report of a single murder, yet, if viewed from the light of truth,
what is war but wholesale murder? What tongue, what pen, can describe
the bloody havoc of the battle of Gettysburg, where, between the rise
and set of a single sun, fifty thousand of our fellow men sank to
earth, dead or wounded?

What sentiment in human hearts which needs to be perpetuated sent rank
after rank, column after column, of blue soldiers against the
impregnable stone wall of Fredericksburg? And who will place the blame
for the carnage of Cold Harbor elsewhere than upon the folly of
misguided patriotism and cruel, selfish interests that made the bloo