“Inevitable social and political measures claim obedience, which may be at variance with the spiritual and ethical conscience; but there comes in the question of necessity, apparent laws that contest with pure right and wrong; ... and as we must live, nothing remains but commerce; and commerce cannot be carried on without competition, and pushing the limits of our interests.  The result of competition can only be conflict—­war, unless some other outlet can be found.  Commerce will not supply this; its very activity, which is its health and life, will produce the ambition, envy, and jarring interests that will be fatal to peace....  The principle, Movement, must have its outlet, its safety valve.  This has always been war....  The goddess Trade, the modern Pandora, has in her box all the evils that afflict mankind....  How can Commerce, as understood by the principles of trade, abolish war?”

“The simple principles of right and wrong are easily defined,” and perhaps easily painted; “but the complexity of human affairs and legitimate interests, conducing to the activity demanded by the great law, Movement, makes some elasticity necessary, even where there is the most honest desire to be just.”

Thus, from his own words, we see how the painter transcends the politician; he is a stimulator, he gives hints, not instructions; he is commanding, imperative, but he does not show how, nor stay to devise ways and means.  He even perceives, as he thinks, that though the commands of his pictures, “Faith,” “Conscience,” and “Love Triumphant,” be given, yet they cannot be obeyed fully because of “Evolution” and “Destiny,” or as he calls it “Movement.”

To his intimate friends Watts, who was so introspective, often complained of “the duality of my nature.”  In the midst of affairs, financial or worldly, on questions of criticism, personal conduct and the like, the great artist was variable and uncertain.  Though humble and self-deprecatory to an extreme degree, he made mistakes from which he could escape only with great difficulty; and he suffered much from depression and melancholy.  This man, however, never appears in the pictures; when once in his studio, alone facing his canvas, Watts is final, absolute, an undisturbed and undistracted unity, conscious of that overwhelming “rightness” known to a Hebrew prophet.  Whatever Time or Death may have in store for him or any man, there riding swiftly above them is Judgment the Absolute One; whatever theories may be spun from the perplexed mind of the magazine writer about Expansion and Necessity, there sits the terrible “Mammon” pilloried for all time.  Indeed, he said his pictures were “for all time”; they were from the mind and hand of the seer, who, rising from his personality, transcended it; and as the personality of dual nature gradually fades away into the forgotten past, the Messenger emerges ever more and more clearly, leaving his graphic testimonies spread out upon a hundred canvases.