Peace is a goddess only when she comes with sword girt on thigh. The ship of state can be steered safely only when it is always possible to bring her against any foe with “her leashed thunders gathering for the leap.” A really great people, proud and high-spirited, would face all the disasters of war rather than purchase that base prosperity which is bought at the price of national honor. All the great masterful races have been fighting races, and the minute that a race loses the hard fighting virtues, then, no matter what else it may retain, no matter how skilled in commerce and finance, in science or art, it has lost its proud right to stand as the equal of the best. Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable sin, and a wilful failure to prepare for danger may in its effects be as bad as cowardice. The timid man who cannot fight, and the selfish, short-sighted, or foolish man who will not take the steps that will enable him to fight, stand on almost the same plane. It is not only true that a peace may be so ignoble and degrading as to be worse than any war; it is also true that it may be fraught with more bloodshed than most wars. Of this there has been melancholy proof during the last two years. Thanks largely to the very unhealthy influence of the men whose business it is to speculate in the money market, and who approach every subject from the financial standpoint, purely; and thanks quite as much to the cold-blooded brutality and calculating timidity of many European rulers and statesmen, the peace of Europe has been preserved, while the Turk has been allowed to butcher the Armenians with hideous and unmentionable barbarity, and has actually been helped to keep Crete in slavery. War has been averted at the cost of more bloodshed and infinitely more suffering and degradation to wretched women and children than have occurred in any European struggle since the days of Waterloo. No war of recent years, no matter how wanton, has been so productive of horrible misery as the peace which the powers have maintained during the continuance of the Armenian butcheries. The men who would preach this peace, and indeed the men who have preached universal peace in terms that have prepared the way for such a peace as this, have inflicted a wrong on humanity greater than could be inflicted by the most reckless and war-loving despot. Better a thousand times err on the side of over-readiness to fight, than to err on the side of tame submission to injury, or cold-blooded indifference to the misery of the oppressed.