It seems necessary every time I state my position to guard against the counterwords of wilful folly by reiterating that my disagreement with the peace-at-any-price men, the ultrapacificists, is not in the least because they favor peace. I object to them, first, because they have proved themselves futile and impotent in working for peace, and, second, because they commit what is not merely the capital error but the crime against morality of failing to uphold righteousness as the all-important end toward which we should strive. In actual practice they advocate the peace of unrighteousness just as fervently as they advocate the peace of righteousness. I have as little sympathy as they have for the men who deify mere brutal force, who insist that power justifies wrong-doing, and who declare that there is no such thing as international morality. But the ultrapacificists really play into the hands of these men. To condemn equally might which backs right and might which overthrows right is to render positive service to wrong-doers. It is as if in private life we condemned alike both the policeman and the dynamiter or black-hand kidnapper or white slaver whom he has arrested. To denounce the nation that wages war in self-defense, or from a generous desire to relieve the oppressed, in the same terms in which we denounce war waged in a spirit of greed or wanton folly stands on an exact par with denouncing equally a murderer and the policeman who, at peril of his life and by force of arms, arrests the murderer. In each case the denunciation denotes not loftiness of soul but weakness both of mind and of morals. In a capital book, by a German, Mr. Edmund von Mach, entitled “What Germany Wants,” there is the following noble passage at the outset: During the preparation of this book the writer received from his uncle, a veteran army officer living in Dresden, a brief note containing the following laconic record: “1793, your great-grandfather at Kostheim. “1815, your grandfather at Liegnitz. “1870, myself--all severely wounded by French bullets. “1914, my son, captain in the 6th Regiment of Dragoons. “Four generations obliged to fight the French!” When the writer turns to his American friends of French descent, he finds there similar records, and often even greater sorrow, for death has come to many of them. In Europe their families and his have looked upon each other as enemies for generations, while a few years in the clarifying atmosphere of America have made friends of former Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, and Englishmen.