Now, we admire and praise as heroes Horatius, Leonidas, Joan of Arc, and General Foch and those others who have defended their countries against the attacks of the enemy, as we would admire a man who shoots a burglar or a murderer that attacks his family in the night. But those, whether kings, generals, or princes, who do the attacking and take life with no other excuse than to add to their power or wealth or glory, are no better than burglars who go forth with a gun and a blackjack to waylay, rob, and murder for the same purpose. War kills, war destroys, war costs millions of lives and billions of dollars--money that could be used to make us happy, instead of causing bitterness, suffering, misery, and unhappiness; blind men and cripples, widows and orphans. No one is better off, not even the winner. It is a terrible game, in which even the winner loses. And yet in the long run who knows? It may be the only way the world can grow! But this is certain: if wars do not end, they will be fought with something more deadly, more terrible than shot and shell. Sooner or later, some man of science will invent a disease more catching than the terrible plague, more deadly than the Black Death with which to attack the enemy. But if such a disease is let loose, once started it will spread from one being to the next till every one has caught it and died and no one will escape. Or he will invent a poison to poison the air we breathe that will spread like the wind or like wildfire in dry grass, and there will be no stopping it. The air that wraps the globe will be a sea of poison gas. Every thing that breathes will take only one breath, and every man, woman, and child, every beast of the field, every bird and flying thing will drop dead. Or he will invent something a million times more powerful than gunpowder or dynamite--something so explosive that when discovered by some Mr. Swartz it will blow him, his house, his town, his country, and the whole world to kingdom come--and that will be the end of this little spark off the sun. Perhaps you have looked through a microscope at what seem to be wars between germs. As germs might look up at the eye of the microscope through which we watch their life-and-death struggles, and wonder what is up above on the other side looking down at them, so we may look up at the blue eye of heaven above us and wonder what all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful being up there is watching our own life-and-death struggles here below. Our little world, which seems so immense to us, is really only a tiny speck, only one of countless other specks floating in space; it is like one of the tiny motes which you may see any time in a sunbeam that shines in at the window. Who has an eye so keen that he can count the moving motes in such a beam of light? Who would miss one such grain of dust if it should disappear? So this grain of dust we call the World and all of us who live upon it could vanish without ever being noticed!