The barges employed are big, roomy barges one hundred and twenty feet long, sixteen feet broad, and ten feet high. Care is taken to use only fairly new and clean barges which have been used in the conveyance of timber or stone or other clean and harmless cargoes. CHAPTER XXXVI WHAT WILL THE HORRORS AND ATROCITIES OF THE GREAT WAR LEAD TO? WAR, A REVERSAL TO THE PRIMITIVE BRUTE IN MAN -- THE SPREAD OF DEMOCRACY -- DECLINE OF THE WAR SPIRIT -- THE DAWN OF UNIVERSAL PEACE. In the mobilization of armies, in the appropriation of colossal funds and consequent imposition of intolerable taxes, in the disregard of the neutrality of lesser nations, in the “emergency measures” that tear apart a home to give its bread-winner to the reeking shambles--in all these phenomena original incentives quickly are forgotten, as though they had never been. What imperial chancellery now remembers, or now cares, that a sovereign’s nephew and his morganatic wife were done to death in an obscure dependency upon the Adriatic shores? Their hands and steel are at each other’s throats on that pretext, but they improve the occasion to settle all old scores that rancorous racial antagonism in an interminable blood-feud have created. War has thrown down the barriers of social restraint; it has abolished the delimitations of political adjustment; international decorum, propriety, all that is signified in the German tongue under the untranslatable name of “Sittlichkeit” are no more; landmarks set in place with a thankful sense of achievement and a pious aspiration are obliterated. None will deny to our heroes living, nor to those who after warfare rest in peace, the sublimity of their utmost pattern of devotion and of the sacrifice they made. But with all that selfless devotion implies and patriotism means, with all that the bugle sings or flaunting pennons inspire, with all that the sight of old and tattered battle-flags conveys, with all that the histories tell, with all the exemplary careers of conquerors that were not ruthless and armies that sang psalms and nations whose quarrel was just and kings who laid their crowns before the throne of God in prayer, and their laurels in the dust of the profoundest self-abasement--the nature of war is not changed.