both despotism and war; lest they should come
to realize all the horrors of the most outrageous crime possible to the
conception of human reason; the crime of war! War is such an
overwhelming calamity, that it is almost impossible to estimate the ruin
and the destruction which it has wrought! If the millions of lives and
the billions of treasure spent in the world's wars, had been employed in
protecting the people, in generating, rearing, sustaining and developing
them to the highest attainable point, this earth would now witness a
social millennium; where peace and prosperity, high culture and
harmonious brotherhood, would reign supreme!

"I rejoice, that I am permitted to prophesy its downfall! Long before
the close of the twentieth century, standing armies will disappear; war
will be at an end; the angel of peace will spread her white wings over
all the nations of the earth! This Crusade, is the beginning of the end!
For the encouragement of our Crusaders, I will indicate two causes,
acting from opposite directions, which will serve to hasten war's
dissolution.

"First: The competitive system, for centuries, has been war's chief
recruiting office. Under its reign, in the fierce struggle for
existence, it has kept up a perpetual warfare between man and man;
always the stronger against the weaker. When vanquished, the weaker as a
last resort, could and did, enlist as a soldier. Thanks to the
co-operative farm, spread broadcast by the Crusade; the early
substitution of the co-operative, for the competitive system, will make
the weak strong; make them financially independent! Soldiering as a
trade, is made possible by poverty! Whenever a people are emancipated
from the cringing slavery of want, naturally averse to being
slaughtered, they will rise en masse, and refuse to be apprenticed to
the brutal trade of killing their kind. Thus it will happen, that armies
will melt away and disappear, for the want of fighting men!

"Second: Strange as it may appear, the inventors of mighty engines of
war, of terrible explosives, of deadly missiles, each in turn, more
horribly destructive than the others; are all envoys of peace; that
sweet peace, which shall bring rest, renewed energy, and swift progress,
to all classes. Through the multiplied and combined efforts of these
inventors, the bloody and barbarous art of war, is fast becoming so
suicidal, and so financially disastrous to the nations of the earth who
have the misfortune