at abstraction, infinite in number, inarticulate in
suffering--the people who fought and paid for their own killing. The
man who could get the people to do this on the largest scale was the
greatest hero of all and the historian told us much about him, his
dogs, his horses, the magnificence of his attire.

Some day, please God, there will be new histories written, and they
will tell the story of the years from the standpoint of the people, and
the hero will not be any red-handed assassin who goes through peaceful
country places leaving behind him dead men looking sightlessly up to
the sky. The hero will be the man or woman who knows and loves and
serves. In the new histories we will be shown the tragedy, the
heartbreaking tragedy of war, which like some dreadful curse has
followed the human family, beaten down their plans, their hopes, wasted
their savings, destroyed their homes, and in every way turned back the
clock of progress.

We have all wondered what would happen if the people some day decided
that they would no longer be the tools of the man higher up, what would
happen if the men who make the quarrel had to fight it out. How
glorious it would have been if this war could have been settled by
somebody taking the Kaiser out behind the barn! There would seem to be
some show of justice in a hand-to-hand encounter, where the best man
wins, but modern warfare has not even the faintest glimmering of fair
play. The exploding shell blows to pieces the strong, the brave, the
daring, just as readily as it does the cowardly, weak, or base.

War proves nothing. To kill a man does not prove that he was in the
wrong. Bloodletting cannot change men's spirits, neither can the evil
of men's thoughts be driven out by blows. If I go to my neighbor's
house, and break her furniture, and smash her pictures, and bind her
children captive, it does not prove that I am fitter to live than
she--yet according to the ethics of nations it does. I have conquered
her and she must pay me for my trouble; and her house and all that is
left in it belongs to my heirs and successors forever. That is war!

War twists our whole moral fabric. The object of all our teaching has
been to inculcate respect for the individual, respect for human life,
honor and purity. War sweeps that all aside. The human conscience in
these long years of peace, and its resultant opportunities for
education, has grown tender to the cry of agony--the pallid fa