al grown large and the jealousies, the covetousness and
ambitions of governments would always make it possible for the
strong to prey upon the weak and for the unprincipled under the
guise of national necessity to attack their unprepared neighbours
and therefore just as much as a city rests in confidence with the
presence within it of a well-equipped police force, equally so the
comfort and security of peace could be best maintained by a nation
governed by right principles whose army and navy were ready to
resist successfully any unjust assault upon its honour or integrity,
were treated with pity, if not scorn, as still under the spell of
benighted and barbaric days.

"Peace and safety!" these were the pleasant words that lulled a
pleasure-seeking and money-making generation into self-satisfied
rest and the mirage of millennial days already arrived.

Then, suddenly, like a bolt out of a clear sky, or the overflow in
raging lava tide of an unsuspected volcano, the most stupendous,
ghastly and brutally devilish war the world has ever known was on in
all its fiendish fury, sweeping from England to the Euphrates and
from the Rhine and Danube on the north to the glittering sands of
Africa on the south, rolling its waves of blood and sending its
sickening and indescribable horrors through those lands and among
those people at one time constituting the four kingdoms to whom God
had committed the rulership of the world; that region occupied by
Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome and whose administration of
world affairs is called "the times of the Gentiles."

To-night ten millions of the world's flower of manhood lie rotting
in their graves. Six millions of women and children have been
starved to death. Women have been unspeakably ruined, children
mutilated and flung as helpless debris upon the charity of
strangers, suffering their orphaned estate and not knowing why.

All the genius, the science and invention of man with poured out,
unlimited wealth, have been drafted to produce the most terrifically
destructive means of war. All the boasted progress and culture of
the preceding centuries were called upon to wage the contest until
it should affright even the participants themselves. Clouds of
poison gas filled the once sweet and vital air of spring time and
summer mornings. Human beings wearing hideous masks and looking like
other world monsters rushed in mad onslaught upon one another. They
burrowed in holes and trench