angles her. This is part of the inevitable
program of war, for note that it is on the laboring men that the
dreadful claims of war must fall. Mark its course. A bugle sounds the
call to arms. From workshop, mill, and factory the laborers pour
forth; out go the men into a trade where plunder and robbery are a
means of livelihood; when pillage and slaughter wane, indolence
becomes the order of the day; commerce degenerates into
blockade-running by sea and marauding by land. How tame the life of
peace to this wild life of war! And all the time the love of toil is
fading from men's minds; at home the factory wheels are turning more
and more feebly, and when at last the sword is laid aside, there is
only "confusion worse confounded," for the channels of labor are
choked with men reared in habits of indolence or trained in the school
of vice. Before the scar on that nation's industry can finally be
healed, decades and perhaps centuries of peace must pass away.

But if war is a scar on the nation's industry, it is likewise a blot
on her ideals. Though this element of idealism at first seems
visionary and impractical, it is one of the foundation stones of
progress. The fixed gulf between what man is and what he knows he
might be is the decisive factor in his advance. Ideals are the pulleys
of the unseen, round which man throws his hopes and aims, by which he
pulls himself across the chasm and into the larger life. To advance at
all, man must have ideals--for himself, for his family, for his
nation. But mark the effect of war on these ideals. In place of the
ideal of peace--to serve men and uplift them--one is taught the ideal
of war--to make himself the most widely feared of professional
murderers. Instead of the ideal of peace--to make his family
comfortable, happy, and prosperous--comes in the war ideal, by whose
terms the family head deserts his own flock to kill other family heads
for the eternal glory of the Stars and Stripes. As for his ideal of
the nation's greatness, we have ample testimony that when bullets and
cannon balls cone crashing through the splendid structure of his
purpose, it speedily crumbles into an ignominious desire to hide
himself behind the nearest tree. No; do not say that war builds up
ideals; it tears them down and tramples them in the dust; aye more, it
sets back crime itself where they should rightly stand.

But if war so dethrones a nation's ideals, what may it not do to a
nation's morality? Im