While our pacifists promote war by their teachings, they declaim against war and picture its horrors and calamitous results. One would naturally suppose that, appreciating what a terrible thing war is, they would take the most scientific and dependable means of safeguarding this country against such a calamity; but, as a matter of fact, they are doing everything in their power to abolish the one means that can safeguard us against war. With consistent inconsistency, they place the blame for war on the advocates of adequate armaments--the true peace-advocates and peace-makers and enemies of war, who are forefending us against war. The advocacy of armaments is construed by them as the advocacy of war; measures for peace are confounded with measures for breaching the peace. A curious phase of the matter is that many friends of armaments themselves make a similar mistake, and think that in defending armaments they are called upon to defend war also. As a matter of fact, war has no defense, except as a last resort. But when there is no other way, and when the maintenance of peace would be a greater calamity than war, then war is to be recommended as the lesser evil. It is, nevertheless, undeniably an evil, though a necessary one, just as a surgical operation is a necessary evil--but one which, if successful, results in such good as far to outweigh the evil. The peace sophists tell us that there has never been a good war or a bad peace; that always in war the best specimens of manhood have been slain, leaving the weak and unfit for breeding purposes. They tell us that the Napoleonic wars lowered the stature of the entire French nation by two inches. They tell us also that during all past ages war for plunder has been the principal business of mankind. The following arraignment of war by General Hiram M. Chittenden is a very fair sample of this method of reasoning: * * * * * "_Both in its restriction upon marriage and in its destruction of life war thus destroys the most precious seed and leaves the inferior from which to propagate. In proportion as wars are long continued, and draw heavily upon the population, these deleterious effects are apparent. The campaigns of Napoleon were a mighty drain upon the vigor of the French people. It has been held that the average stature of the French was thereby diminished by more than an inch. How much their intellectual and moral stature was shrunken by that debauchery of crime, who can say? The decadence of the Roman people was due more to the waste of its best blood in war than to the causes commonly accepted. War reverses the process of natural selection and, instead of producing the survival of the fittest, produces the survival of the most unfit._" * * * * *