“The praise of peace is proclaimed beyond need of other words, when men confess that the only possible justification of war is the establishment of peace.  Peace, we prize thee.

             “’But the better thou,
The richer of delight, sometime the more
  Inevitable war.’

“’Pasis imponero morem’—­to enforce the law of peace:  this, the sole moral argument which God and humanity allow for war.  O peace, welcome again to America.

“War—­how dreadful thou art!  I shall not, indeed, declare thee to be immoral, ever unnecessary, ever accursed.  No; I shall not so arraign thee as to mete plenary condemnation to the whole past history of nations, to the whole past history of my own America.  But that thou art ever dreadful, ever barbarous, I shall not deny.  War!  Is it by cunning design—­in order to hide from men thy true nature—­that pomp and circumstance attend thy march; that poetry and music set in brightest colors, the rays of light struggling through thy heavy darkness, that history weaves into threads of richest glory the woes and virtues of thy victims?  Stripped of thy show and tinsel, what art thou but the slaying of men?—­the slaying of men by the thousands, aye, often by the tens, by the hundreds of thousands.

“With the steady aim and relentless energy tasking science to its utmost ingenuity, the multitudes of men to their utmost endurance, whole nations work day and night, fitting ourselves for the quick and extensive killing of men.  This preparation for war.  Armies meet on the field of battle; shot and shell rend the air; men fall to the ground like leaves in autumnal storms, bleeding, agonizing, dying; the earth is reddened by human blood; the more gory the earth beneath the tread of one army the louder the revel of victory in the ranks of the other.  This, the actual conflict of war.  From north to south, from east to west, through both countries whose flags were raised over the field of battle, homes not to be numbered mourned in soul-wrecking grief, for husband, father, son or brother who sank beneath the foeman’s steel or yielded life within the fever tent, or who, surviving shot and malady, carries back to his loved ones a maimed or weakened body.  This, the result of war.

“Reduced to the smallest sacrifice of human life the carnage of the battlefields, some one has died and some one is bereft.  ’Only one killed,’ the headline reads.  The glad news speeds.  The newsboys cry:  ‘Killed only one.’  ’He was my son.  What were a thousand to this one—­my only son.’

“It was Wellington who said:  ’Take my word for it, if you had seen but one day of war you would pray to Almighty God that you might never see such a thing again.’  It was Napoleon who said:  ’The sight of a battlefield after the fight is enough to inspire princes with a love of peace and a horror of war.’

“War, be thou gone from my soul’s sight!  I thank the good God that thy ghastly specter stands no longer upon the thresholds of the homes of my fellow countrymen in America, or my fellow beings in distant Andalusia.  When, I ask heaven, shall humanity rise to such heights of reason and of religion that war shall be impossible, and stories of battlefields but the saddening echoes of primitive ages of the race?