ous, that are simply
necessary, unavoidable, as life, death, or judgment, wars where the
choice is to see right trampled out of sight or to fight for it, where
truth and justice are crushed unless the sword be grasped and used,
where law and civilization and Christianity are assailed by savagery,
brutality, and devilishness, and only the true bullet and the cold steel
are received in the discussion. These are the Peoples' wars. In them
nations arm. Generations swarm to their battle fields. They are
landmarks in the world's advancement. For victories in them men sing _Te
Deums_ throughout the ages. The heroes, who fell in them, loom through
the haze of time like demigods.

On the plains of Tours, when the Moslem tide, that swept on to overwhelm
in ruin Christian Europe, was met, and stemmed, and turned by Charles
Martel, and, breaking into foam against the iron breasts of his stalwart
Franks, was whirled away into the darkness like spray before the
tempest, the _Hammer-man_ did a work that day that, till the end of
time, a world will thank Heaven for, as _he_ thanked it in the hour of
victory.

And when his greater grandson, creator, guide, and guardian of modern
civilization, paced with restless, ever-present steps, around the
borders of that small world of light which he had built up, half
blindly, in the overwhelming dark, and with two-handed blows beat back,
with the iron mace of Germany, the savage assaults of Saracen and
Sclave, of black Dane and brutal Wendt, and smote on till he died
smiting, for order, and law, and faith, and so saved Europe, and, let us
humbly hope, his own rude but true soul _alive_! are not the thanks of
all the world well due, that Karl der Grosse was no non-resistant, but a
great, broad-shouldered, royal soldier, who wore the imperial purple by
right of a moat imperial sword?

There are wars like these, that, as the world goes, are inevitable. Some
wrong undertakes to rule. Some lie challenges sovereignty. Some mere
brutality or heathenism faces order, civilization, and law. There is no
choice in the matter _then_. The wrong, the lie, the brutality, the
barbarism _must go down_. If they listen to reason, well. If they can be
only preached or lectured into dying peaceably, and getting quietly
buried, it is an excellent consummation. If they do not, if they try
conclusions, as they are far more apt to do, if they come on with brute
force, there is no alternative. They must be met by force.