killed, because men quarrelled about the way to glorify “The Prince of Peace.”  Marching through rain and snow, sleeping on the ground, eating stale food or starving, contracting diseases and facing guns that fire six hundred times a minute, for fifty cents a day—­this is the soldier’s life.

At the window sits the widowed mother crying.  Little children with tearful faces pressed against the pane watch and wait.  Their means of livelihood, their home, their happiness is gone.  Fatherless children, broken-hearted women, sick, disabled and dead men—­this is the wage of war.

We spend more money preparing men to kill each other than we do in teaching them to live.  We spend more money building one battleship than in the annual maintenance of all our state universities.  The financial loss resulting from destroying one another’s homes in the civil war would have built 15,000,000 houses, each costing $2,000.  We pray for love but prepare for hate.  We preach peace but equip for war.

      Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
      Were half the wealth bestowed on camp and court
      Given to redeem this world from error,
      There would be no need of arsenal and fort.

War only defers a question.  No issue will ever really be settled until it is settled rightly.  Like rival “gun gangs” in a back alley, the nations of the world, through the bloody ages, have fought over their differences.  Denver cannot fight Chicago and Iowa cannot fight Ohio.  Why should Germany be permitted to fight France, or Bulgaria fight Turkey?

When mankind rises above creeds, colors and countries, when we are citizens, not of a nation, but of the world, the armies and navies of the earth will constitute an international police force to preserve the peace and the dove will take the eagle’s place.

Our differences will be settled by an international court with the power to enforce its mandates.  In times of peace prepare for peace.  The wages of war are the wages of sin, and the “wages of sin is death.”

    —­Editorial by D.C., Leslie’s Weekly; used by permission.

CHAPTER IX

FORCE

    However, ’tis expedient to be wary: 
    Indifference, certes, don’t produce distress;
    And rash enthusiasm in good society
    Were nothing but a moral inebriety.

—­BYRON, Don Juan.

You have attended plays that seemed fair, yet they did not move you, grip you.  In theatrical parlance, they failed to “get over,” which means that their message did not get over the foot-lights to the audience.  There was no punch, no jab to them—­they had no force.

Of course, all this spells disaster, in big letters, not only in a stage production but in any platform effort.  Every such presentation exists solely for the audience, and if it fails to hit them—­and the expression is a good one—­it has no excuse for living; nor will it live long.