But this is not the worst. We see myriads of men banded together to practice open violation of the very fundamental tenets of humanity; we see the worst passions of mankind, murder, theft, lust, arson, pillage--all the baser possibilities of human nature--coming to the surface. Outside of the natural killing of war, hundreds of men have been murdered, often with incidents of the most revolting brutality; children have been slaughtered; women have been outraged, killed and shamefully mutilated. And this we see among peoples who have no possible cause for personal quarrel. “_Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me!_” To all human beings of normal mentality it must have seemed that the destruction of the Lusitania marked the apex of horror. There is, indeed, nothing in modern history--nothing, at least, since the Black Hole of Calcutta and some of the indescribable atrocities of Kurdish fanatics--to supply the mind with a vantage ground from which to measure the causeless and profitless savagery of this black deed of murder. To talk of “warning” having been given on the day the Lusitania sailed is puerile. So does the Black Hand send its warnings. So does Jack the Ripper write his defiant letters to the police. Nothing of this prevents us from regarding such miscreants as wild beasts, against whom society has to defend itself at all hazards. There are many reasons but not a single excuse for the war. When a man, or a nation, wants what a rival holds and makes a violent effort to enter into possession thereof, right and conscience and duty before God and to one’s neighbor are forgotten in the struggle. Man reverts to the brute. Loose rein is given to passion, and the worst appears. The fair edifice of sobriety and amity and just dealing between man and man, upreared by civilization in centuries of travail, is rent asunder, stone from stone. The inner shrine of the inalienable sense of human brotherhood is profaned. One cannot reconcile with any program for the lasting accomplishment of good and the victory of the truth, this fever of murder on a grand scale, this insensate madness of pillage and slaughter that goes from alarum and counter-alarum to overt acts of fiendish and sickening brutality, palliated because they are done by anonymous thousands instead of by one man who can be named. “_Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me!_”