Roman conquests civilized the West, the famous Corniche Road was built by Napoleon to get his troops into Italy, the trans-Siberian railway, the subsidized steamship lines of modern nations, the Panama Canal, owe their existence primarily to the fear of war. Many Germans were honest in their conviction that their Kultur was so superior to that of the rest of the world that its imposition, even by force of arms, would be of greater benefit to conquered provinces than the liberty and nationalistic ideals which it would supplant.

But this Kultur, if actually superior, could have won its way better by its inherent attractiveness than by force of arms. To-day all lands are open to peaceful penetration; missionaries and traders do more to civilize than armies. And if the building of certain roads and railways and canals might have been somewhat postponed in an era of stable peace, many more material improvements, actually more imperative if less spectacular, would certainly have been carried out with the vast sums of money saved from war expenditures.

(5) The only legitimate excuse for war is to preserve important human goods that would be lost by conquest or oppression; as when the Greeks at Marathon repelled the barbaric hordes of Asia, or when Charles Martel and the Franks checked the advance of the Saracens at Tours. Whether the loss of these goods would be a greater evil than the evils brought on by war it is almost impossible, in any given case, to prophesy in advance. In many cases the oppression would in time remedy itself without war, and the goods desired would be only partially or temporarily lost. In other cases the war of self-defense proves a losing one; and not only the goods whose loss was feared are forfeited, but other goods as well, that non-resistance would have preserved. The overrunning of England by Saxons,

Danes, and Normans successively was probably less of an evil than a war of defense carried to the point of practical extermination. If the American colonies had had a little more patience, they could have won the liberty they craved without war and separation from the mother country as Canada and Australia have done. If the United States had had a little more patience and tact and diplomacy, Cuba might perhaps have been saved from the intolerable oppression of Spain without war.

But, on the other hand, it is highly questionable if the goods we most prize - liberty of life, limb, speech, and belief, democratic self-government, and the rest—could ever have been won permanently for man without the heroic struggles of generations past. Certainly the great majority of Belgians and French men and women, Serbians and Montenegrins, Britishers and Americans, would rather lose everything else than their liberty and autonomy. So long as liberty-loving nations are ruthlessly trampled upon by aggressive neighbors, so long they will fight to the end for the right to live their lives in their own way, under their own flag. And so long will other liberty-loving nations leap to their rescue, without calculation of cost.

What are the evils of war?

(1) We need not dwell on the physical and mental suffering caused by war; General Sherman's famous declaration, "War is hell!" sums the matter up. Agonizing wounds, pitiless disease, the permanent crippling, enfeeblement, or death of vigorous men in the prime of life, the anguish of wives and sweethearts, the loneliness of widows, the lack of care for orphans - it is impossible for those who have not lived through a great war to realize the horror of it, the cruel pain suffered by those on the field, the torturing suspense of

those left behind. It is, indeed, a sad commentary on man's wisdom that, with all the distress that inevitably inheres in human life, he should have voluntarily brought upon himself still greater suffering and premature death.

(2) But the moral harm of war is no less conspicuous than the physical. It fosters cruelty, callousness, contempt of life; it kills sympathy and the gentler virtues; it coarsens and leads almost inevitably to sensuality. After a war there is always a marked increase in crime and sexual vice; exsoldiers are restless, and find it hard to settle down to a normal life. There is a permanent coarsening of fiber. Even the maintenance of armies in time of peace is a great moral danger. The unnatural barrack-life, the requisite postponement of marriage, the opportunity for physical and moral contagion, make military posts commonly sources of moral contamination. Prostitution flourishes and illegitimacy increases where soldiers are quartered; the army is a bad school of morals.1

Add to this indictment the stimulus to national hatreds caused by war, the inflaming of resentments and checking of international good will. The instinctive racial antipathies of the Balkan peoples have been immeasurably deepened by the recent wars on the peninsula. It will probably be many years before the people of Germany are looked upon again with cordiality and respect by the other peoples of the earth. The eventual brotherhood of man is indefinitely postponed by every war and rumor of war.

The interest in war also takes attention and effort away from the remedying of social and moral evils; it is useless to attempt any irrelevant moral campaign while a war is on. Jane Addams tells us, in Twenty Years at Hull House, that when she visited England in 1896 she found it full of social enthusiasm, scientific research, scholarship, and public spirit; 1 The American army in the Great War was exceptionally safeguarded.

while on a second visit, in 1900, all enthusiasm and energy seemed to be absorbed by the Boer War, leaving little for humanitarian undertakings. The Great War has incidentally forwarded certain social reforms, namely, those that have come to be recognized as increasing military or economic efficiency—such as the checking of the liquor traffic and of wasteful business competition. But other lines of amelioration have received a decisive check.

(3) A less obvious, but even more lasting, evil is that caused by the loss of the best blood of a nation. In general, the strongest and best men go to the field; the weaklings and cowards are left to produce the next generation. The inevitable result is racial degeneration. The decline of the Greek and Roman civilizations was doubtless in large part due to the continual killing-off of the best stocks, until the earlier and nobler breed of men almost ceased to exist. The effect of modern war is the exact opposite of that of primitive war, where all the men had to fight, and the strongest or bravest or swiftest survived; strength and valor and speed avail nothing against modern projectiles, and it is the stayat-homes who are selected for survival, in general the weakest and least worthy. War is the greatest of dysgenic forces, and undoes the effect of a hundred eugenic laws.

(4) The vast and increasing expense of war is a very serious matter for the moralist, because it means a drain of the resources that might otherwise be utilized for the advance of civilization. The Great War has left the world with a debt approaching three hundred billion dollars (before the war the world's debt was forty-four billions) enough money to have covered Europe and America with excellent roads, comfortable homes for every one, and given education and pleasant conditions of life to every man, woman, and child. Every shot from a modern sixteen-inch gun costs approximately a thousand dollars! Add to this

direct cost the indirect costs of war, not reckoned in the usual figures the loss of the time and work of the millions of able-bodied men, the economic loss of their illness and death, the destruction of buildings, bridges, railways, etc., the obstruction of commerce, the paralysis of industry and agriculture, the ravages and looting of armies, the mainten ance of hospitals and nurses, and then, finally, the money given in pensions or insurance. Add further the cost of the maintenance of armies upon a peace-footing - the feeding and clothing of the men, the building and maintenance of barracks and forts, of battleships and torpedo boats, of guns and ammunition, automobiles, aeroplanes, and the increasing list of expensive modern military appurtenances. Europe spent nearly two billion dollars a year before the Great War on its armies and navies- money enough to build four or five Panama canals annually. The entire merchant marine of the world was worth before the war but three billion dollars. More than this, over four million strong young men were kept under arms in Europe, a million more workers were engaged in making ships, weapons, gunpowder, military stores. Over a million horses were kept for army use. This money and these men, if used in the true interests of humanity, could have provided adequate clothing, food, and housing for every inhabitant of Europe.

What can we do to hasten world-peace?

There are powerful forces, which without our conscious effort have been making for the abolition of war: its growing cost; the extension of mutual knowledge, through the newspapers and magazines, through travel, through exchange professorships and Rhodes scholarships and all international associations; the growing sensitiveness to suffering; the spread of eugenic ideals; and the increasing interest in world-wide social, moral, and material problems. Other,