and he went forth to battle not
because it was religion, but because it was brave.

The world rolled on; war grew; it developed with the state; it became
an art; was studied--and now our cycle turns. It faces us as a custom
backed up by the centuries--deep-rooted, a consumer that yields no
returns and, what with our modern appliances, a terror to the hearts
of all the world. Men fought in the early ages because they thought it
was just; men fought in the Middle Ages because they considered it
brave; men of our modern age will banish war because it is a fallacy.

Do you know that to maintain our so-called prestige we spend seventy
per cent of our national income? Think of it! Seventy per cent to
maintain our present status and to prepare for the future! Think of
that awful drain; think, if applied in other channels, what good could
be done! We are proud of our battleship _Texas_. She is a noble war
dog; yet do you realize that if we had applied the money spent on her
in our own state we could have had one gigantic paved highway twice
the distance from El Paso to Galveston? We could have had two hundred
high schools, representing $75,000 each. We could have raised our
institutions of higher learning to a level with any of the East or
North. Fifteen millions gone for a floating war machine which in
twenty years will be a piece of rusted, useless iron; fifteen millions
for a sailing dragon who, each time one of her big guns speaks, wastes
the equivalent of a four-year college education for some
youth--$1700--for a single shot. Our war dogs sail the seas; our
soldiers parade our forts; and we look on and raise a joyous hubbub as
the nations of the world rush madly on, wasting themselves in the
race for military supremacy.

Have you ever considered yourself transported to some celestial
height, and there, from the regions of the infinite, allowed to view a
battle on earth? How foolish it must seem, these pygmies coming forth
to make war. See them as they charge and wound and kill! See brother
slay brother! See the wounded left to die! Hear the cries of distress,
and picture the grief that follows all! Men battling to conquer; men
assuming the prerogative of a god--how foolish, yet how serious! And
these artificial lines that men call boundaries, how punctiliously
they are guarded! "Take but a hundred feet, and we shall war with
thee." How foolish this too must seem when viewed from above--that we
should carry on war over e