THE MORAL EFFECT OF WAR

ONE of the most high-sounding pleas for war is that it develops manliness, the sturdy qualities, the noble sentiments of courage.

Advocates of disarmament are commonly referred to by the bellicose big-stickers as "old women," "mollycoddles," and "academic theorists."

Attention is now and hereby called to the fact that war has changed. Time was, perhaps, when knights struggled hand to hand and personal bravery and a noble contempt of life were the elements of the successful warrior.

Nowadays (see for instance Bernard Shaw's "Arms and the Man") battles are games of manœuvre, the deciding force being death-dealing machinery.

Instead of improving, the war business has steadily grown more barbarous. Ten days of battle on the Aisne have been richer in cruelty, savagery, and pure cussedness than all of Cæsar's campaigns put together.

Where is any romantic courage displayed in killing a hundred men with the exploded shreds of shell and the poisonous gases of a missile discharged at a distance of three miles?

Not the wrestling of man with man, but as pure murder as can be found in any slaughter house of Chicago or Kansas City is the advance of a column of infantry upon a row of rapid-firing guns.

War used to be contest. Now it is kill, kill, kill.

Nothing is to be spared. If a citizen snipes a soldier, take the burgomaster, the priests, and citizens out and shoot them against the wall.

If a city is objectionable raze it to the ground and spare not.

If an immemorial cathedral is in the way pulverize it.

What noble quality is displayed in sneaking up in a submarine to a cruiser and stabbing it with a torpedo as an assassin would knife his prey?

The troops, the young men who are "cannon fodder," are marched here and there simply as parts of a huge machine. Theirs not to understand. When they receive the word of command they are to advance and

be mowed down by iron hail or they are to retreat, falling dead in windrows under the pursuing fire.

The German army is reputed to be the most effective in the world, and that army places not so much emphasis on personal prowess as upon implicit obedience.

The highest ingenuity of man has been devoted to inventing colossal instruments of destruction. Every hideous and unspeakable device there is for the annihilation of men and the works of men is employed, powder, dynamite, lyddite, melanite, turpinite, and other hell concoctions.

A good old Irish fight in Tipperary, where all sail in, and the rule is "Wherever you see a head, hit it!" or a prize fight or a boys' bout at fisticuffs might possibly encourage "manliness" of a sort; but where two communities contend by blowing up houses with bombs, dropping explosives from balloons, or shooting shrapnel into each other the only "manly" qualities developed are viciousness, hardness of heart, disregard for human life, and abhorrent cruelty.

The crop of sheer moral depravity from this war will be enormous.

Wednesday, September 30, 1914.

REASONING

IF you would be a diplomat you must be very wise and know how to reason. Plain, ordinary reasoning will not do. You must learn the peculiar brand of cause and effect used by kings' counsellors and statesmen. For instance:

There are various questions to be settled by the European states, so that all may prosper, expand, and progress. Therefore, we will fall to killing each other. After we have butchered some hundred thousand hundredweight of human cattle, we can arrange these questions nicely.

Germany and England are both anxious to extend trade. Therefore let us pillage Belgium and devastate France.

France and Germany both want to rule in Alsace-Lorraine. Shall we let the inhabitants of the disputed provinces say for themselves under which flag they choose to do business? You're crazy! It is a much better way to fill ditches with riddled corpses, trample down

crops, and burn the factories of these provinces; this gives us such a clear view of the situation.

Austria and Russia equally are ambitious to boss the Slavs. Shall we let the Slavs say? Far be it from so! We shall mangle, maim, and kill a hundred thousand or so of nice young men. Only thus can we determine so knotty an issue.

There is some question as to which nation, Germany or France, has the better army and cannon. Shall we send experts out and take an inventory? Oh, no! The wisest way is to burn Belgium. By stabbing women, setting fire to cities, hanging old men up by the heels, blowing up bridges, and making bonfires of the gathered wheat of the Belgians, who are entirely innocent, we can gauge the matter much better.

The people of England, Germany, and France all want to make money, enjoy life, and live. The best way to secure to them these blessings is to tax the shirts off of them, make all the young men give two or three of the best years of their life idling and drilling in barracks, spend millions upon millions in making Krupp guns and giant battleships, and occasionally to shoot off all the powder we have accumulated and destroy myriads of