The result would be only infinite rebellion, increasing taxation, tyranny, and trouble.

And of all nations why should we, a democracy, a land full of common people, want to rule any other people?

The only class profited by ruling an alien people is the king-and-noble class, the idlers riding upon the people's back. A democracy has nothing to gain by oppressing another nation.

Bluster and boast, kaiserly mailed fist, and Rooseveltian big stick, backed by high explosives and battle-mad mobs, is childish and cheap.

Pride and aggressiveness is the national road to hell.

Those king-qualities made the French Revolution. They brought on the collapse of the magnificence of Spain and Portugal, who once divided the globe between them. They caused England to lose the United States. They have kept Mexico poor and left her in perpetual revolution. They have done for poor old Austria. They have led Germany into her present position where, like Napoleon, she fights the world.

The road of pride, of rule lust, the way of kings and classes since the world began; it is paved with the dead bodies of the workers;

it is lined with roofless houses, where the skeletons of mothers and children lean against charred walls; along it trudge the bowed oafs, tax-burdened, cursed with king burdens, burning with those old king passions, aflame for

ever.

The people of America want no king virtues, such as pride, touchiness, inflamed sense of "honor," and the thousand symptoms of swollen ego.

We want schoolma'am virtues, gardener, farmer, blacksmith, merchant, bricklayer virtues; which are honesty, sobriety, industry, helpfulness, and a desire to serve the world and not to dominate it.

If we continue to bear ourselves with dignity, to make no armed preparation that shall belie our pacific protests, and to see that the braggarts, bullies, and champions of the mailed fist, who ape the royal noble gamecocks of a decadent civilization, are retired to private life, we shall surely come to that true greatness of nations, to a supremacy that incurs no envy, to the grandeur and leadership of service.

Wednesday, October 7, 1914.

THE PLACE OF WAR IN

EVOLUTION

It is helpful for one to get any event properly set in his world view. Every one must have some sort of philosophy, some theory of the universe, its design and intelligent purpose.

We have no more the medieval outlook, that view held by Dante or St. Bernard. We cannot be satisfied with the world conception of the ancient Norsemen, nor with that of the Brahman.

The modern idea is the result of the unfolding of the evolution of thought. The principal factors in its making were the Reformation in northern Europe, the Renaissance in Italy, the French Revolution, and the rise of modern science. To these may be added the appearance of America and American ideals upon the world's stage.

The significance of all these is that the world of men is a growing thing, that it is

slowly developing from imperfect conditions into a coherent, organized whole.

In this programme where does war come? The answer is, that war is a phase of evolution, a painful phenomenon incident to the passing of world thought from childhood into maturity, from competition to co-ordination.

The ultimate aim is that the whole earth shall be one homogeneous unit. It is impossible for progress to continue much further so long as mankind remains under isolated, jealous, and contending nationalities; just as it would be impossible for these United States to thrive if every state were sovereign and there were no central, national government.

Just why men must learn their lessons at the cost of so much violence and destruction no one can say. But it seems that is the only way humanity learns.

The destiny purpose of this war, therefore, is that the people shall be made to realize the terrible price of non-co-operation.

The end will be to bring the nations together. To save themselves from annihilation they must eventually secure some kind of unity of action.

Militarism, with its deep delusion of military preparedness, must show itself utterly unbearable.

The present vast conflict is one of the "growing pains" of humanity.

The abhorrent injustice of the old régime in France could not go without the bitter struggle of the revolution. Human slavery in America could not pass without the shedding of blood.

So the federation of the world cannot come by Hague conferences and academic discussions; the old order, where nations are armed camps directed by monarchies, is too deeply rooted in the passions and prejudices of the people to disappear without gigantic convulsions. There are some devils that go not out of man except they rend him.

But our children's children will read of this mighty ruck of destruction, with the same sentiments we now read of the French Revolution and the American civil war, and rejoice that the ends gained are as valuable to the human race as the means employed were fearful.

For this war is the terrible ploughing; the crop shall be the federation of the world and the disarmament of the separate nations.

Scientifically speaking, war is a phase in the change incurred by the evolution of mankind from heterogeneity to homogeneity. Friday, October 9, 1914.