OREWORD

These orations are selected from hundreds of similar addresses spoken
in recent years by hundreds of students in American colleges. I
believe it is not too bold to say that they represent the highest
level of undergraduate thinking and speaking. They are worthy
interpreters of the cause of peace, but they are, as well, noble
illustrations of the type of intellectual and moral culture of
American students. Whoever reads them will, I believe, become more
optimistic, not only over the early fulfillment of the dreams of peace
among nations, but also over the intellectual and ethical condition of
academic life.

For the simple truth is that the cause of peace makes an appeal of
peculiar force to the undergraduate. It appeals to his imagination.
This imagination is at once historic and prophetic. War makes an
appeal to the historic imagination of the student. His study of Greek
and Roman history has been devoted too largely to the wars that these
peoples waged. Marathon, Salamis, Carthage, are names altogether too
familiar and significant. By contrast he sees what this history, which
is written in blood, might have become. If the millions of men slain
had been permitted to live, and if the uncounted treasure spent had
been economically used, the results in the history of civilization
would have been far richer and nobler. He notes, too, does this
student, that if the last decades of the eighteenth century and the
first decades of the nineteenth had been free from wars in Europe,
humanity would now have attained a far higher level of physical and
intellectual strength. The historic imagination of the student
pictures, as his reason interprets, such conditions. His prophetic
imagination likewise exercises its creative function. The student sees
nations to-day dwelling in armed truces and moving to and fro as a
soldiery actual or possible. He realizes that war puts up what
civilization puts down, and puts down what civilization elevates. He
reads the lamented Robertson's great lecture on the poetry of war, but
he knows also, as Robertson intimates, that "peace is blessed; peace
arises out of charity." The poetry of peace is more entrancing than
the poetry of carnage. To this primary element in the mind of the
undergraduate--the imagination--our great cause therefore makes an
appeal of peculiar earnestness.

To the reason of the college man, also, the cause of peace makes a
peculiar appeal through its simple logic.