Sez I, “John Jones wuz aggravated.  Murders hain’t generally planned or committed in class meetin’s, and love feasts.”

“Well,” sez Josiah, scratchin’ his head, “it is different.”

But I sez, “How different, Josiah, they are both murders.”

Sez Josiah, “I guess I’ll go down to Grandpa Huff’s room and borry the World.”  But I kep’ thinkin’ on’t after he left about war and what it wuz.  Rivers of human blood flowin’ through ruined countries, follered by the horrible specters of pestilence, disease and famine, moral and financial ruin.  Acres and acres of graves filled with forms once full of throbbing life and hope and dreams of future happiness, cut down like grass before the mower.  Wives, mothers, sisters, sweethearts see the sun of their life’s joy go down in blackness, their heaven of love and happiness changed into a hell of misery by somebody’s quarrel, somebody’s greed and ambition.  How many of the common soldiers who make up the great body of the army know or care about the right or wrong of their cause.  They go into the fight like dumb-driven cattle, suffer and die and make their loved ones die a hundred deaths jest because they are hired to do it, hired to murder their fellow men, jest as you would hire a man to cut down a grove of underbrush.  They go out to this wholesale slaughter to kill or be killed, to meet all the black awful influences that foller the armies, go gayly to the sound of bugle and drum.

It is the common people who bleed and die, it is the hearts of the common people that are wrung; it is their wives and orphan children who have to struggle along and strive and die, or live and suffer by this cause.

And who can tell the moral, physical and financial ruin, the sickenin’ and terrible effects of evil habits formed there, the sin and woe that like a black cloud follers the army?  The recordin’ angel himself can’t do the sum till the day of judgment, not till then can he add up the broad, ever-widenin’ effects of evil and sorrow that follers a great war and that shall go on and on till time shall be no more.

Calm judicial eyes lookin’ back at this problem from the happy days when Peace and Love shall rule the world, from the era when Courts of Arbitration will settle national differences, will look back on the bloody godless warfare of to-day with more horrow than we do on the oncivilized doin’s of our savage ancestors.

It is strange, hain’t it, to think eighteen centuries of Christian teaching hain’t wiped the blood stains off the face of the earth, as it would like to?  Yes, indeed! our Lord’s words are luminous with Charity, Peace and Love.  But the vengeful black clouds of war sweep up between the nations and the Sermon on the Mount and hides its words so they can’t, or don’t heed ’em.

And I d’no what’s goin’ to be done.  I guess them that don’t believe in war must keep on givin’ in their testimony, keep peggin’ away at Public Opinion and constant droppin’ will wear away stun.