Nor would we be unfair in this criticism:  We know that we, too, have failed, as you have, and have rejected many a Buddha, even as you have denied Christ; but we acknowledge our human frailty, while you, claiming super-humanity, scoff endlessly at our shortcomings.

The number of white individuals who are practising with even reasonable approximation the democracy and unselfishness of Jesus Christ is so small and unimportant as to be fit subject for jest in Sunday supplements and in Punch, Life, Le Rire, and Fliegende Blaetter.  In her foreign mission work the extraordinary self-deception of white religion is epitomized:  solemnly the white world sends five million dollars worth of missionary propaganda to Africa each year and in the same twelve months adds twenty-five million dollars worth of the vilest gin manufactured.  Peace to the augurs of Rome!

We may, however, grant without argument that religious ideals have always far outrun their very human devotees.  Let us, then, turn to more mundane matters of honor and fairness.  The world today is trade.  The world has turned shopkeeper; history is economic history; living is earning a living.  Is it necessary to ask how much of high emprise and honorable conduct has been found here?  Something, to be sure.  The establishment of world credit systems is built on splendid and realizable faith in fellow-men.  But it is, after all, so low and elementary a step that sometimes it looks merely like honor among thieves, for the revelations of highway robbery and low cheating in the business world and in all its great modern centers have raised in the hearts of all true men in our day an exceeding great cry for revolution in our basic methods and conceptions of industry and commerce.

We do not, for a moment, forget the robbery of other times and races when trade was a most uncertain gamble; but was there not a certain honesty and frankness in the evil that argued a saner morality?  There are more merchants today, surer deliveries, and wider well-being, but are there not, also, bigger thieves, deeper injustice, and more calloused selfishness in well-being?  Be that as it may,—­certainly the nicer sense of honor that has risen ever and again in groups of forward-thinking men has been curiously and broadly blunted.  Consider our chiefest industry,—­fighting.  Laboriously the Middle Ages built its rules of fairness—­equal armament, equal notice, equal conditions.  What do we see today?  Machine-guns against assegais; conquest sugared with religion; mutilation and rape masquerading as culture,—­all this, with vast applause at the superiority of white over black soldiers!

War is horrible!  This the dark world knows to its awful cost.  But has it just become horrible, in these last days, when under essentially equal conditions, equal armament, and equal waste of wealth white men are fighting white men, with surgeons and nurses hovering near?