as are not worth not only one
human life, but not one hundredth part of all that which is spent upon
wars (in fighting for the emancipation of the negroes much more was spent
than it would have cost to redeem them from slavery).

Every one knows and cannot help knowing that, above all, wars, calling
forth the lowest animal passions, deprave and brutalize men. Every one
knows the weakness of the arguments in favor of war, such as were
brought forward by De Maistre, Moltke, and others, for they are all
founded on the sophism that in every human calamity it is possible to
find an advantageous element, or else upon the utterly arbitrary assertion
that wars have always existed and therefore always must exist, as if the
bad actions of men could be justified by the advantages or the
usefulness which they realize, or by the consideration that they have
been committed during a long period of time. All so-called enlightened
men know all this. Then suddenly war begins, and all this is instantly
forgotten, and the same men who but yesterday were proving the cruelty,
futility, the senselessness of wars now think, speak, and write only
about killing as many men as possible, about ruining and destroying the
greatest possible amount of the productions of human labor, and about
exciting as much as possible the passion of hatred in those peaceful,
harmless, industrious men who by their labor feed, clothe, maintain these
same pseudo-enlightened men, who compel them to commit those dreadful
deeds contrary to their conscience, welfare, or faith.

II

Something is taking place incomprehensible and impossible in its cruelty,
falsehood, and stupidity. The Russian Tsar, the same man who exhorted all
the nations in the cause of peace, publicly announces that,
notwithstanding all his efforts to maintain the peace so dear to his
heart (efforts which express themselves in the seizing of other peoples'
lands and in the strengthening of armies for the defence of these stolen
lands), he, owing to the attack of the Japanese, commands that the same
shall be done to the Japanese as they had commenced doing to the
Russians--_i.e._ that they should be slaughtered; and in announcing this
call to murder he mentions God, asking the Divine blessing on the most
dreadful crime in the world. The Japanese Emperor has proclaimed the same
thing in relation to the Russians.

Men of science and of law (Messieurs Muravieff