and certainly the occasion for legitimate warfare is becoming steadily rarer.  Nearly always the good aimed at could have been attained without the evils of war.  If the American colonies had had a little more patience, they could have won the liberty they craved without war and separation from the mother country-as Canada and Australia have done.  If the United States had had a little more patience and tact and diplomacy, it is probable that Cuba could have been saved from the intolerable oppression of Spain without war.  Now that the moral pressure of the world’s opinion is becoming so strong, and the Hague tribunal stands ready to adjust difficulties, there is seldom excuse for recourse to brute strength.  The real cause of war lies far less often in the moral demand that prefers righteousness to peace than in the touchiness, selfishness, and resentments of nations, or their desire for glory and conquest.

(4) War has, directly or indirectly, been the means of spreading the blessings of civilization.  Alexander’s campaigns brought Greek culture to the Eastern world, the Roman conquests civilized the West, the famous Corniche Road was built by Napoleon to get his troops into Italy, the trans-Siberian railway, the subsidized steamship lines of modern nations, the Panama Canal, owe their existence primarily to the fear of war.  But today all lands are open to peaceful penetration; missionaries and traders do more to civilize than armies.  And if the building of certain roads and railways and canals might have been somewhat postponed in an era of stable peace, many more material improvements, actually more imperative if less spectacular, would certainly have been carried out with the vast sums of money saved from war expenditures.  Whatever good ends, then, war may have served in the past, it is now superfluous, a mere survival of savagery, a relic of our barbaric past, a clear injury to man, in ways which we shall next consider.

What are the evils of war?

(1) We need not dwell on the physical and mental suffering caused by war; General Sherman’s famous declaration, “War is hell!” sums the matter up.  Agonizing wounds, pitiless disease, the permanent crippling, enfeeblement, or death of vigorous men in the prime of life, the anguish of wives and sweethearts, the loneliness of widows, the lack of care for orphans-it is impossible for those who have not lived through a great war to realize the horror of it, the cruel pain suffered by those on the field, the torturing suspense of those left behind.  It is, indeed, a sad commentary on man’s wisdom that, with all the distress that inevitably inheres in human life, he should have voluntarily brought upon himself still greater suffering and premature death.