e Prince of Peace' Himself came
'not to send peace,' in this war, 'but a sword.'

We may venture, then, to say that there are some wars which are not all
evil. They are terrible, but terrible like the hurricane, which sweeps
away the pestilence; terrible like the earthquake, on whose night of
terror God builds a thousand years of blooming plenty; terrible like the
volcano, whose ashes are clothed by the purple vintages and yellow
harvests of a hundred generations. The strong powers of nature are as
beneficent as strong. The destroying powers are also creating powers.
Life sits upon the sepulchre, and sings over buried Death through all
nature and all time. War, too, has its compensations.

For years, amid the world's rages, _we_ had peace. The only war we had,
at all events, was one of our own seeking, and a mere playing at war.
Many of us thought it would be so always. We believed we had discovered
a method of settling all the world's difficulties without blows. The
peace people had their jubilee. They talked about the advance of
intelligence, and the softening power of civilization. They placed war
among the forgotten horrors of a dead barbarism. They proved that
commerce had rendered war impossible, because it had made it against
self-interest. They talked about reason and persuasion, and moral
influences. They asked, 'Why not settle all troubles in a grand world's
congress, some huge palaver and paradise of speechmakers, where it will
be all talk and voting and no blows?' Why not, indeed? How easy to
'resolve' this poor, blind, struggling world of ours into a bit of
heaven, you see, and so end our troubles! How easy to vote these poor,
stupid, blundering brothers of ours into angels, in some great
parliament of eloquent philosophers, and govern them thereafter on that
basis!

Now, resolutions and speeches and grand palavers are nice things, in
their way, _to play with_, but, on the whole, it is best to get down to
the hard fact if one really wants to work and prosper. And the hard fact
is, that Adam's sons are not yet cherubs, nor their homestead, among the
stars, just yet an outlying field of paradise. It is a planet whose
private affairs are badly muddled. Its tenants for life are a
quarrelsome, ill-tempered, unruly set of creatures altogether. As things
go, they will break each others' heads sometimes. It is very
unreasonable. I can see that. But men are not always reasonable. It is
not for their own interest.