orsica and moves toward Central Europe. All too well does
Europe know its meaning. From north and south, from east and west, she
pours into the field the finest armies that the Old World ever saw.
Then she pauses. Europe grows tense with a nameless dread. The storm
cloud blackens, hovers lower, then bursts with all its fury through
the continent. For ten long years, at the command of an imperial
butcher, the soil is drenched with blood, the sky grows lurid from
burning Paris to burning Moscow, three million homes are draped in
black. Grand, indeed, and glorious! But Europe lost more than her
gorgeous standards, more than her ruined cities; she left her manhood
on those bloody fields.

We might extend the awful picture, but the story is the same, dread
tale of death for nations as for men. Is not this enough? Is it not
clear that this traitor to labor, this despoiler of ideals, this foe
to morality, is not the benefactor but the destroyer of nations? And
shall we not "here highly resolve" no longer to walk in this "valley
of the shadow of death," but to hasten toward the dawning of a
brighter, purer day? For in spite of pessimism, in spite of
scholarship, in spite of history, the day is

"coming yet, for a' that--
When man to man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that."

NATIONAL HONOR AND VITAL INTERESTS

By RUSSELL WEISMAN, Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio

First Prize Oration in the Eastern Group Contest, 1912, and Second
Prize in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May 16, 1912

NATIONAL HONOR AND VITAL INTERESTS

The day for deprecating in general terms the evils of war and of
extolling the glories of peace is past. Such argument is little
needed. International trade requires peace. International finance
dictates peace. Even armies and navies are now justified primarily as
agents of peace. Yet so wantonly are these agents looting the world's
treasuries that they are themselves forcing their own displacement by
courts of arbitration. The two hundred and fifty disputes successfully
arbitrated in the past century challenge with trumpet-tongued
eloquence the support of all men for reason's peaceful rule. To-day no
discussion is needed to show that if war is to be abolished, if navies
are to dwindle and armies diminish, if there is to be a federation of
the world, it must come through treaties of arbitration. In this way
alone lies peace; yet in this way lies the p