THE FINAL ARBITER "THE final arbiter," as the President of the United States said to the Emperor of Germany, is "the opinion of mankind." When you all get through slaying and burning, gentlemen of Europe, when your cannon have belched their last argument and the guns of your fleets have made their last red speech, when your armies have proved your case with their final charge, and when one of your two contesting forces lies prone and bleeding, then you will have to appear before the judge, you, both conqueror and conquered, will have to justify your deeds before that august and fateful "opinion of mankind," who shall give to each his penalty or his reward. Because you speak and the multitude obeys, because the people by companies of hundreds and of thousands march to do your bidding, do not be deceived, O Magnificencies! Before those myriads you must appear. Theirs is the ultimate tribunal. You talk of God. You appeal to His favor and pretend to do His will. Do you know where God is? He sits not, an oriental satrap, upon the throne of the spheres; He is down among the swarms of men. The tinsel of your royal courts is but absurd to Him in whose treasury worlds are but as dust. He laughs at your greatness. He is among those homes you have set on fire and whose young men you have heaped in the ditches of retreat. Those you call cannon-fodder are His sons. They will find out why peaceful noncombatants were stood against the wall and shot, why women were violated, why towns were ruined, why the weak were mutilated and the defenseless tortured; they will judge upon whom rests the blame of this hell-storm of beast ferocity that has swept away the civilization of Europe; and they, the People, whose other name is God, they will say to this man: "Enter thou into thy reward," and to that man, "Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire." The Day of Judgment is the Day of the People. God is not on the side of the heaviest bat talions; God is on the side of the ultimate Public Opinion. Who is the Son of God? He is the People. "Be wise now, therefore, oh, ye kings; be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when His wrath is kindled but a little!" Friday, September 18, 1914. RHEIMS How is the beautiful fallen! The joy of the eye and the wonder of the heart demolished, ground into the dirt by the boorish heel! The destruction of human life is frightful enough, but viewed from the angle of history and posterity it has its alleviation, in that all men must die, and war but wholesales and hastens the inevitable. In ten years from now as many men of the two armies would have died natural deaths as are slaughtered in battle. But not so with the cathedral. It can never be replaced. It has but one epoch; and when gone is gone forevermore. The supreme thing of beauty among all of man's handiwork, the Gothic cathedral is a joy forever. Centuries, not years, are hers. The more the gray arms of age envelop her the more beautiful she becomes. "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety." A thousand years render her more charming than when she stood snow-white, new from the builders' hands. Nothing reveals the irredeemable barbarity of war so much as the shelling of the Cathedral of Rheims. If there is one point upon which civilized and cultured people are supposed to differ from ancient Huns and Vandals, it is their regard for the works of genius. To batter down this hoary stone-dream was an act of spiteful savagery equal to that of the Gauls who knocked the noses off all the statues they found in Rome. It is not France that is wounded by this amazing act of vandalism: it is the whole world; it is civilization itself. For the Gothic churches no more belong to any one church or state, but to mankind. All the money No price can pay for this. in the world cannot replace it. liest thing about it was the clustered years, the brooding centuries. If its replica should be moulded of solid gold and set with all the gems of India it would be cheap and gaudy compared to the venerable stones now broken. The world of art and culture, all that stratum of humanity above the ignorant and brutish, is stricken with horror at this new proof of the utter viciousness of war. Again I say that, more than by the killing |