ches, nor peace societies, nor alliances nor votes, can check its
course. Nothing, it seems, can save Europe from the fatal plunge into
the abyss of war. A shot on the Alsatian frontier, a plot hatched in a
Servian barrack-room, or a riot in the Armenian quarter of
Constantinople, may kindle a strife that may last, Von Moltke tells
us, for thirty years.

It is true that many alarms have proved false, but then it is the
steady strain that tells on the mood. It is pathetic to see on the
continent, how men fear to face the future. Public speakers dwell upon
the glories of former times. The churches seek to revive the spirit of
the Middle Ages. In schools there is immense interest in history,
archaeology, and the classics. The age yearns to lose itself in the
past, and delights in _genre_ pictures of the naive olden time, or of
life in remote valleys untouched by the breath of progress. No one has
heart to probe the next decade, to ask, "Where shall we be in ten
years,--in fifty years?" The outlook is bounded by the next Sunday in
the park or the theatre. The people throw themselves into the
pleasures of the moment with the desperation of doomed men who hear
the ring of the hammer on the scaffold. Ibsen, applying an old
sailor's superstition to the European ship of state, tells how one
night he stood on the deck and looked down on the throng of
passengers, each the victim of some form of brooding melancholy or
dark presentiment, and as he looked he seemed to hear a voice crying,
"There's a corpse on board!"

With the growth of armies has come a gloomier view of life. The vision
of the nations "lapped in universal law" has vanished, and the new
phrase, "struggle for existence," seems to sum up human history. War
has been raised to the dignity of a means of progress and killing has
been consecrated by biology. Not long ago three noted men, Count Von
Moltke, General Wolseley, and Ex-Minister Phelps, declared it vain to
hope for a time when wars should vanish from the earth. In Germany the
youth are filled with the brutal cynicism of Prince Bismarck. "Blood
and iron does it," said a Berlin divinity student to me. "You can no
more stop war than you can stop the thunderbolt when two clouds meet
charged with opposite electricities." "No," said another, "Europe has
too many people, too much pressure on the boundaries. There must be a
war now and then to thin them out."

With loss of faith in moral progress men have lost faith in