safety.

Christianity and civilization were walking hand in hand.

Christianity or that which professed to be Christianity had accepted
all the claimed benefits of civilization.

Rapid transit, the telephone, all the triumphs of applied science
were announced as the by-products of the Gospel. Even though the
churches were becoming more or less empty and the people were
turning away to other centers of instruction or enlightenment or
consolation or hope, preachers were everywhere and with great
insistence announcing that the world was growing better every day
and that we were rapidly approaching the purple and the gold of
millennial times. The hour was not far distant when the lion and the
lamb should lie down together. There was much talk about the
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. People were coming
together and having a better and more disinterested estimate of each
other. Religion was ceasing to be dogmatic and precise and becoming
more and more a profession that was free from restraint.

Christian ministers in the pulpit and supposedly wise men in the
counsels of the nations with optimistic utterance announced that the
days of barbarism had passed away, the brutality of war was at an
end. Men and nations would no longer adjourn their differences to
the field of battle. A magnificent palace of peace had been erected
in that country that had for centuries been the bloody ground where
Europe settled its political issues. In this splendid home of
arbitration the nations were to meet as friends and brothers and
calmly arrange and solve all matters that had hitherto kept them
menacingly apart.

War had become so abhorrent to what was called the Christian sense
of the nations that mothers were exhorted to banish from the
nurseries anything that might suggest the thought of war, such as
trumpets, drums or toy guns. So completely had the peace idea
pervaded the mind of the people, the idea that peace had come to
stay and nothing must be tolerated that would even hint at war, that
a soldier or a sailor wearing the uniform of his country was no
longer acceptable in a public place, were it a restaurant, a music
hall or even a church.

Men who were opposed to spending a dollar to make a nation ready for
the possibility of war were hailed as the advanced thinkers and the
men worthy of the suffrage of the people; while those who contended
human nature had not been changed, that a nation was simply the
individu