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Show 100 101 mg to the establishment of universal peace. The administration of national affairs which has just closed has to its credit more important results lexiking to international friendships than any preceding administration. Those which stand out most prominently are the successful eti‘ort of President Roosevelt in terminating the war between Russia and japan; the return to China of more than oneehalf of the twenty-four million dollars adjudged in our favor against that nation on account of the l‘ioxer uprising: the initiation for the call of the Second Hague Conference, and the consummation of at least twenty-three treaties of obligatory arbitration with other powers. Numerous other acts tending to international amity have made the administration of Mr. Roosevelt distinctively favorable to the great peace movement. notwithstanding his urgent effort for four battleships and a greatly enlarged navy. Yet in the face of these things the chief criticism made upon that administration is that it has fostered and encouraged mili- tarism. And. however sanguine our hopes for the future. how- ever strong our belief that we are growing out of the war habit, we must not overlook the fact that the passion for battle, the fas- cination for things military, is yet deeply fixed in the nature of man and cannot be uprooted or shaken off in a day. Nothing short of a long period of education. and continued agitation of questions such as we here discuss. will tend to lessen the hold which the god of war has upon mankind. While civilization has conquered many of the evils which obstructed its progress. it still strangely permits the spirit of mili- tarism to run riot in its midst The passion for war has so possessed the souls of men that the nations have throughout all ages sacrificed on its altars their richest treasures and their proudest sons. \Vealth which by diligent effort and burdensome toil of men and women has been carefully accumulated is by the power of government wrung from its owners to feed the battle's flame. Property and investments on which its owners relied for the hap- piness and comfort of old age are forced into those channels which produce indescribable suffering in the horrors of war. Money and men alike are fed to the insatiate god of battle, only to increase his clamorous demand for more. Of those slain in battle throughout the world‘s history the number is so vast that its meaning is incomprehensible to the mind of man. Fifteen billions of men, it is estimated, have thus perished since the world began. This is a greater number of people than all those who have occupied the world within the past six centuries. The number is so large that it staggers the mind, and the period covered is so long that we brush the statement aside as relating to past ages unconnected with our own. Yet in the last century, in the midst of Christian civilization's most benign influence, the lives of fourteen millions of men were sacrificed in war. The Napoleonic wars of nineteen years' duration are respon» sible for about eight millions, while, including those who died from wounds and disease incurred in service, something like one million may be attributed to our Civil War. Here were not only fourteen millions of men, but they were those who were the most nearly physically perfect. They were the flower of the nations and the pride of their families. If battles only consumed the criminals, if only the weak and the worthless were fed to their fires, the nation's loss in one important sense would not be so great; but so long as war claims the best blood of the nations, the very choice of the world's best manhood, leav- ing the weaker to survive and propagate their kind, there must necessarily come national degeneracy. "The final effect of each strife for empire," says David Starr Jordan, "has been the degradation or extinction of the nation which led in the struggle. Greece (lied because the men who made her glory had all passed away and left none of their kin and therefore none of their kind." In his address "The liloorl of Nations" he quotes many authors and historians to establish the proposition that nations degenerate or become extinct because of disastrous wars which destroy the nation's best men. "Send forth the best ye breed," he says is the call on either side, :\nd this call continues until one or both have grown so weak that further resistance is useles‘j until the battle has swallowed up so many of these best men that few remain to propagate the race. Greece. Rome, Carthage, Spain, l' pi and the Moors are given as illustrations of those nations which thus fell from their high Stations, never again to take their rank among the nations of the world. |
