Numerous are the evidences of the derangements the war has created and left behind.  A few years ago a prize fight would not have been permitted in more than one or two states in the Union.  Now state after state is passing laws to permit prize fights to take place, and even the best society has given its sanction to this sort of sport.  Whether the state should permit prize fights is not the question.  The fact is, as everyone knows, that it is permitted on account of a psychology growing out of the war.  We content ourselves with saying it will never do to raise our boys as molly-coddles; they must learn to fight.

It is not alone murder that can be traced directly to the war psychology.  Robbery and burglary have rapidly increased, and much of this is due to the emotions of boys.  The robbing of country banks has grown to be almost a pastime, and often one or more participants in these raids is a returned soldier.

What should be done to meet these new conditions?  Common honesty, common sense and common humanity alike plainly show that a large part of the crimes of violence are due to the war.  Will hangings and life sentences stop them?  And, if so, is it right for organized society to ignore its responsibility and place it on the young men that they innoculated with the universal madness?  It is expecting too much to think that there is any process by which society can be made to think and feel.  Some day, however, when the war fever passes away crime will again take its normal place.

This phenomenon is not new in the world.  Everyone interested has noted it before.  It has followed all great wars.  War means the breaking up of old habits, the destruction of many inhibitions, which in the strongest civilization are only skin deep at the best.  It means the return to the primitive feelings that once ruled man.

The Napoleonic Wars left a long heritage of crime.  Every nation in Europe was affected by them.  Many years passed before the world grew tranquil.  Our Civil War brought its harvest of crime.  It was felt both North and South.  It was not confined to homicide but was shown in all sorts of criminal statistics, especially crimes of violence.

I do not write as a pacifist.  There is nothing in the constitution of man that makes pacifism anything but a dream.  Man is largely ruled by fear and hate, and it is not possible to imagine an individual or a race that under sufficient provocation will not fight.  Neither is it possible that nations will not always, from time to time, find the provocation sufficiently great.  Individuals and nations can philosophize and reason and make compromises when they are calm; but let them be moved by fear and hatred, and these emotions will sweep away every other feeling.  The conditions for war were ripe in 1914, and it was inevitable that America should be in it too.  This should not make one wish for war nor believe in war nor close one’s eyes to its horrors and results.  Much less should it prevent him from trying to do his part to restore sanity to the world.