Well, I am reconciled to living a long time now,—­much longer than I wanted to before this awful thing came to pass,—­just to see all the mighty good that will result from the struggle.  I am convinced, no matter what happens, of the final result.  I am sure even now, when the Germans have actually crossed the frontier, that France will not be crushed this time, even if she be beaten down to Bordeaux, with her back against the Bay of Biscay.  Besides, did you ever know the English bulldog to let go?  But it is the horror of such a war in our times that bears so heavily on my soul.  After all, “civilization” is a word we have invented, and its meaning is hardly more than relative, just as is the word “religion.”

There are problems in the events that the logical spirit finds it hard to face.  In every Protestant church the laws of Moses are printed on tablets on either side of the pulpit.  On those laws our civil code is founded.  “Thou shalt not kill,” says the law.  For thousands of years the law has punished the individual who settled his private quarrels with his fists or any more effective weapon, and reserved to itself the right to exact “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”  And here we are today, in the twentieth century, when intelligent people have long been striving after a spiritual explanation of the meaning of life, trying to prove its upward trend, trying to beat out of it materialism, endeavoring to find in altruism a road to happiness, and governments can still find no better way to settle their disputes than wholesale slaughter, and that with weapons no so-called civilized man should ever have invented nor any so-called civilized government ever permitted to be made.  The theory that the death penalty was a preventive of murder has long ago been exploded.  The theory that by making war horrible, war could be prevented, is being exploded to-day.

And yet—­I know that if the thought be taken out of life that it is worth while to die for an idea a great factor in the making of national spirit will be gone.  I know that a long peace makes for weakness in a race.  I know that without war there is still death.  To me this last fact is the consolation.  It is finer to die voluntarily for an idea deliberately faced, than to die of old age in one’s bed; and the grief of parting no one ever born can escape.  Still it is puzzling to us simple folk—­the feeling that fundamental things do not change:  that the balance of good and evil has not changed.  We change our fashions, we change our habits, we discover now and then another of the secrets Nature has hidden, that delving man may be kept busy and interested.  We pride ourselves that science at least has progressed, that we are cleaner than our progenitors.  Yet we are no cleaner than the Greeks and Romans in the days when Athens and Rome ruled the world, nor do we know in what cycle all we know to-day was known and lost.  Oh, I can hear