Thinking people in all the civilized countries are asking themselves what the fundamental trouble with civilization is, and where to look for means of escape from the present intolerable conditions.  Christianity in nineteen centuries has afforded no relief.  The so-called mitigations of war are comparatively trivial.  The recent Balkan wars were as ferocious as those of Alexander.  The German aviators drop aimless bombs at night into cities occupied chiefly by non-combatants.  The North Sea is strewn with floating mines which may destroy fishing, freight, or passenger vessels of any nation, neutral or belligerent, which have business on that sea.  The ruthless destruction of the Louvain Library by German soldiers reminds people who have read history that the destroyers of the Alexandria Library have ever since been called fanatics and barbarians.  The German Army tries to compel unfortified Belgian cities and towns to pay huge ransoms to save themselves from destruction—­a method which the Barbary States, indeed, were accustomed to use against their Christian neighbors, but which has long been held to be a method appropriate only for brigands and pirates—­Greek, Sicilian, Syrian, or Chinese.

What Is Wrong with Civilization?

How can it be that the Government of a civilized State commits, or permits in its agents, such barbarities?  The fundamental reason seems to be that most of the European nations still believe that national greatness depends on the possession and brutal use of force, and is to be maintained and magnified only by military and naval power.

In North America there are two large communities—­heretofore inspired chiefly by ideals of English origin—­which have never maintained conscripted armies, and have never fortified against each other their long frontier—­Canada and the United States.  Both may fairly be called great peoples even now; and both give ample promise for the future.  Neither of these peoples lacks the “stout and warlike” quality of which Sir Francis Bacon spoke; both have often exhibited it.  The United States suffered for four years from a civil war, characterized by determined fighting, in indecisive battles, in which the losses, in proportion to the number of men engaged, were often much heavier than any thus far reported from the present battlefields in Belgium and France.  There being then no lack of martial spirit in these two peoples, it is an instructive phenomenon that power to conquer is not their ideal of national greatness.  Much the same thing may be said of some other self-governing constituents of the British Empire, such as Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.  They, too, have a better ideal of national greatness than that of military supremacy.