events, the increase of such life would have had to cease thousands of years before the present era, so that none of those who are now shocked by the idea of war would ever have been born. For if there had been no death since life first stirred, far back in the depths of terrestrial time, then long ago, unless soon the growth of that life had ceased, there would have been no more room for vegetation, or for animals, for fishes, or for men. Nay, more since all life, other than that of vegetation, thrives on other life, ceasless starvation must have been the lot of all sentient things.

The dream of a planet, traversing space, deep laden with stirless and foodless masses of life, life sentient, life individual, piled in its myriad millions of units into mountains higher than Atlas-life doomed to endure through the æons because it cannot die-this dream exceeds in horror any vision which Dante ever imagined of the innermost hell.

The paradox, therefore, is true that in this globe of ours (as probably in all other worlds throughout space which life inhabits) death is the condition of the increase of life.

But of death war is the scythe. Throughout the periods of biological time war has been the road to food, and since man was developed, war has been the condition of human advance. Men may fear war as they fear death, and shudder as they hear war's footfall (never far removed) encompass the edifice of their house of national being. But as, despite its horrors, death is still essential to mankind, so also is

war.

Death and war, those grim twin brethren, ride the rush of this world's tide and put the bit in the mouth of

not spiritual but material, then, as we have just seen, this immortality will bring another kind of death-the death of physical increase. For in any limited sphere physical immortality and physical increase cannot co-exist. But

if in like manner we dared to conceive the cessation of war, then we must also conceive the cessation either of sin or else of human progress. For now defeat in war is the punishment of national unrighteousness, but, then, that punishment would cease. Where there was corruption, that corruption would continue; where there was oppression, that oppression would abide. Though infamy brought weakness, weakness would not bring overthrow. Though righteous dealing brought national strength, national strength would not bring national victory. Therefore if, while nations remain, war is to be abolished, then unless the degeneracy of peoples can also be prevented, "there shall be no more war" must mean "there shall be no more progress."

But suppose that we seek to conceive some distant date, some day still in the depths of coming time, when, through inter-marriage following intercommunication, all nations and all races shall have been merged into a single whole, when, throughout the bounds of our planet, one tongue is spoken, and nations make no more war because there are no more nations, would what is impossible now become possible then? Since in this our day the operative cause of war is international competition, would the removal of that cause remove war also?

man.

In

Europe great numbers of fighting men exist who are ready to die in battle for their creed. (These are they who believe in one God and in Mahomet as His prophet, and their faith is not waning, but increasing.) Therefore, though, while nations last, the present cause of conflicts must endure, the abolition of nations would not inevitably involve the abolition of war. such a distant time as that which we are here contemplating, the inhabitants of this world may have arranged themselves in divisions other than national, and, as now between nations, so then between those divisions, competition may produce war. So long as those conditions lasted, the machinery for securing ethical advance would remain. Because righteousness brings warlike efficiency, therefore in the majority of cases righteousness as now would triumph over its opposite. But if those conditions ended; if the possibility of war absolutely passed away; then, unless in the meantime human nature had radically changed, the upward march of human morality would terminate, because the terrific punishment which war provides for human degeneracy would be removed. In other words, war will cease to be a necessity only when corruption ceases to be a fact.

If this argument possess validity, then the deduction follows that while human nature remains what it is at present, war must retain its place beside death as a vital and essential part of the economy of God. The Lord of Hosts has made righteousness the path to victory. In the crash of conflict, in the horrors of battlefields piled with the dead, the dying, and the wounded, a vast ethical intention has still prevailed. Not necessarily in any given case, but absolutely certainly in the majority of cases, the triumph of the victor has been the triumph of the nobler soul of man. Though to this rule

history may furnish a thousand exceptions; though in history war has been made a thousand times over the instrument of cruel oppression and of diabolical wrong, yet in that great majority of instances which determines general result the issue of war has made for the ethical advantage of mankind. It must have been so; it could not be otherwise, because ethical quality has tended always to produce military efficiency.

With true insight, therefore, did Tennyson write of "The Battle-Thunder of God." He has made of war His instrument wherewith to subdue nations who have broken His laws, but those who would read the processes of His Courts in the ages of the past must take for their study, not generations, but centuries, and groups of centuries. They must survey time as from a mountain summit, and then in the vast horizon they can discern the flashing of His lightning and hear the rolling of that thunder of which the discharge has purified, from epoch to epoch, the atmosphere of the world.

But to those whom the exceptions to this law of God appal; to those who can see in former conflict only confusion and purposeless slaughter and evil often triumphant over good-to these the contemplation of the present working of the same law among mankind, as mankind now is, may well bring comfort and assuaging hope.

For, as always with great sequences of cause and effect, the vaster the scale the plainer the connection. As humanity gathers itself into larger divisions, the instances in which in war the unrighteous smite down the righteous must tend ever to become rarer and yet more rare. A small people, a State of limited extent and insignificant resources, even though of high military efficiency, must always have been exposed to overthrow by over

whelming numbers in a conflict with some greater foe or coalition of foes, even though these were of inferior military virtue to its own. But if in place of a small people we have a great one, and, instead of a little State, one of wide extent and immense resources, and if the people of this State possess military virtue of a high kind, then it is manifest that the probability of their being crushed by the numerical preponderance of inferior antagonists, if not altogether removed, becomes at least far less than in the former case. Moreover, as has been already partly shown, the relationship between righteousness of national life on the one side, and military efficiency on the other, is incomparably plainer in modern days than in earlier centuries, or, for the sake of example, let us say, eight hundred years ago.

Now, in wars between great peoples, vast and coherent organization is necessary to secure national victory. Now, immense armaments have to be created, and the power to produce and to sustain those armaments, and to inform them with the spirit of life, is the measure of the whole moral and economic capacity of a people. Moreover, such capacity must be developed on the lines on which human evolution is proceeding-that is to say, on the lines on which the Power behind phenomena is working-or else it fails of effect. For no nation which hides its talents in a napkin, no nation which has not energy and ability can either render efficient, or long support, the vast navies and armies of our time. Preparation for war is the enemy of sloth. Preparation for war is the dissolvent of apathy. Victory is the prize not alone of present self-sacrifice and present energy, but also of previous self-sacrifice and previous energy. Briefly, victory is the crown of moral quality, and therefore, while nations wage war on one another, the "survival

of the fittest" means the survival of the ethically best.

When we examine the past in the light of this truth we have already seen that some of the greatest movements among mankind bear witness to it. But I suggest that there is room here for a new science of history, and space for a new field of human thought. To look back through the vistas of the past upon the struggles of nations and the conflicts of States; to test the law that morality tends to bring victory by the knowledge which historians possess of the social conditions of warring rivals; to judge where and how far the rule has applied and where and how far it has failedthese are surveys calculated to widen the human mind by a new outlook, and to carry lessons vital to our modern world.

When in the fourteenth century the archers of England shot death into the ranks of the chivalry of France; when England alone among the peoples of Europe possessed an infantry which had predominant value in war, was not the prowess of those good English yeomen the direct product of a national life superior in its social state and in its moral quality to that of the French, or perhaps of any other European people of that day? If so, Crecy and Poictiers and Agincourt were the direct outcome of a higher military efficiency proceeding from a higher morale.

Again, when in Elizabethan days the Puritan mariners of our seaports laid the foundation of empire by vindicating at the cannon's mouth the freedom of the seas, was there not in those men, in their daring, in their initiative, in their stern energy, moral quality of a high kind of a kind higher than that of the Spaniard whom they vanquished?

These are but instances of that vast and as yet untrodden field of history in

which is to be sought the part which moral quality has played in determining the rise and the decline of nations, the moral impulse that has led to victory, and the moral decay that has preluded defeat.

But if study conducted on these lines would illumine the past. far more would it illumine the present. Why is it that now, when their material resources are greater far than any of which in recorded time any people ever boasted, the whole Anglo-Saxon race, alike in the British Empire and in the United States, is in visible peril of overthrow at the hands of rivals far poorer, in the case of Japan, and in that of Germany of dominions incomparably less rich and less extended? Because their women shrink from motherhood and their men from the practice of arms. And of both avoidances the cause is the same, namely, the absence of that spirit of self-sacrifice which is the very essence of spiritual life. If that spirit dominated England to-day, would Englishmen decline the first duty and the first privilege of all who are not serfs-the duty and the privilege of rendering themselves fit to defend that freedom which their manlier forefathers won for them and left to them? If Englishmen were worthy of that bequest, would they hide, as now, careless of the claims of Empire, behind their ships? And would they, while crouching thus, suffer-with a madness of folly to which history affords few parallels-the relative decline even of the very fleet which is their only safeguard, until, within three years from now, they must have either but a bare equality to Germany in the North Sea-twentyone British to twenty-one German Dreadnoughts-or else surrender the Mediterranean, and with it Malta, Egypt, and the route to the East, to the mercy of Germany's pledged allies?

The truth is that armaments are the

reflection of the national soul. The immense naval and military strength of Germany is the reflex of moral and social conditions better than our own. The excess of her birth rate over ours (and still more over that of France) is in itself the proof of that superiority. For the growth of her population involves not the production of degenerates, but of a sound and vigorous race. Patriotism, public spirit, frugality and industry are the essential moral factors which render possible the vast armed force which Germany wields. And in all these factors it must be admitted, with whatever shame and sorrow, that she surpasses England. Therefore, if in the gigantic process of international competition England fall before Germany-which fate may God avertthen that fall will follow from no other destiny than the destiny inwoven with the universal law which in this article I have attempted to set forth, the law that the higher morality tends to produce the greater military strength.

If in all these considerations any force be admitted to inhere, then clearly the duty of patriotism and of preparation for war is reinforced ten thousandfold. If what has been here advanced is sound, then from every pulpit in the land the voice of exhortation should be heard, urging every man and every woman to serve God in and through service to their country.

The discovery that Christianity is incompatible with the military spirit is made only among decaying peoples. While a nation is still vigorous, while its population is expanding, while the blood in its veins is strong, then on this head no scruples are felt. But when its energies begin to wither, when selfindulgence takes the place of self-sacrifice, when its sons and its daughters become degenerate, then it is that a spurious and bastard humanitarianism masquerading as religion declares war

Yet this cry of weakness is sporadic only and alters no world facts. War remains the means by which, as between nations or races, the universal law that the higher shall supersede the lower continues to work. From Great Britain and from the United States, whence the military spirit is passing away, this bleat of feebleness is now proceeding. But it is not heard among the two most energetic and efficient peoples now upon earth. It is not heard in Germany, and it is not heard in Japan. The wolf who has lost his teeth does not wish to fight, but the wolves whose jaws are still strong do not share his pious desire.

Even while this article has been penned, a new and astonishing outburst of sentimentality has been witnessed in the Anglo-Saxon world. President Taft has declared himself, according to report, in favor of the application of the principle of arbitration even to questions involving national honor and national independence. One single interrogation is sufficient to display the utter hollowness of this attitude. Is the President of the United States willing to submit the Monroe doctrine to such arbitrament? And if the award of the Jurists of the Hague Tribunal is given against him, are he and the people of whom he is the official chief willing to see, first the inhabitants of Japan, and, in sequent time, the myriads of China, pour into South America and Mexico, found States under their own flag, and establish an immense military organization on the land frontiers of unarmed, English-speaking North America? Nay, if the Japanese claimed, and the Court of Arbitration allowed, an unrestricted immigration of the yellow race into the Anglo-Saxon area, is this generation of United States citizens ready passively to submit? If

slaves already, and they deserve the doom which would inevitably be theirs, for they would be guilty of the greatest act of betrayal, alike of their forefathers and of their posterity, of which the annals of mankind record any trace.

But if, as is of course the fact, the people of the States, even though they appear to have lost all military instinct, are yet not so deeply degraded as to incur this gigantic infamy, then their refusal withdraws an entire continent from arbitral award, it denies to the yellow nations what to them seem their most natural and righteous demands, and it fixes the determination of the latter to achieve by war those great ends which in no other way can they possibly attain.

The real Court, the only Court, in which this case can and will be tried is the Court of God, which is war. This Twentieth Century will see that trial, and in the issue, which may be long in the balance, whichever people shall have in it the greater soul of righteousness will be the victor.

This single instance suffices to show the unutterable folly of all those in this country, or in the States, who imagine that, in any time to which the eye of living man can see, artificial agreements can arrest national growths.

But the full absurdity of this idea becomes revealed only when we reflect upon the nature of the considerations which alone must guide the Board of Jurists who are to decide the destiny of nations and the distribution of races upon earth. They will have to make that decision in accordance with the existing status quo and with bits of paper which are written treaties. But the status quo is the very thing which, in the case of America, the yellow race claims the right to smash. And in face of such a claim, the bits of paper are bits of paper and nothing else.