Of course, the men and the ideals who actually fought the contest as distinguished from the men and ideals which precipitated it and determined its movements, fill gallant pages with their heroism and holy sacrifice.  For wars are fought by the young at the dictation of the old, and youth is everywhere humane and poetic.  Thus, if I may be permitted to quote from a book of mine recently published: 

“Our sons were bade to enter it as a ‘war to end war,’ a final struggle which should abolish the intolerable burdens of armaments and conscription.  They were taught to exalt it as a strife for oppressed and helpless peoples; the prelude to a new brotherhood and cooperation among the nations, and to that reign of justice which is the antecedent condition of peace.

“They did their part.  With adventurous faith they glorified their cause and offered their fresh lives to make it good.  Their sacrifice, the idealism which lay behind it in their respective communities—­the unofficial perceptions that they, the fathers and mothers and the boys, were fighting to vindicate the supremacy of the moral over the material factors of life—­this has made an imperishable gift to the new world and our children’s lives.  When an entire commuity rises to something of magnanimity, and a nation identifies its fate with the lot of weaker states, then even mutilation and death may be gift-bringers to mankind.

“But it is more significant to our purpose to note that the blood of youth had hardly ceased to run before the officials began to dicker for the material fruits of conquest.  Not how to obtain peace but how to exploit victory—­to wrest each for himself the larger tribute from the fallen foe—­became their primary concern.  So the youth appear to have died for a tariff, perished for trade routes and harbors, for the furthering of the commercial advantages of this nation as against that, for the seizing of the markets of the world.  They supposed they fought ‘to end business of that sort’ but they returned to find their accredited representatives contemplating universal military service in frank expectation of ‘the next war.’  They strove for the ‘self-determination of peoples’ but find that it was for some people, but not all.  And as for the cooperation among nations, Judge Gary has recently told us that, as a result of the war, we should prepare for ‘the fiercest commercial struggle in the history of mankind!’"[19]

[Footnote 19:  Can the Church Survive? pp. 14 ff.]

Is it not clear, then, today that behind the determining as distinguished from the fighting forces of the war there lay a commercial and financial imperialism, directed by small and powerful minorities, largely supported by a sympathetic press which used the machinery of representative democracy to overthrow a more naked and brutal imperialism whose machinery was that of a military autocracy?  Motives, scales of value, methods and desired ends, were much the same for all