It is civilization that is being shot down by machine guns in Europe. That great German host is not made up of mercenaries, nor of the type of men that at one time composed armies. There are Ehrlichs serving as privates in the ranks and in the French corps are Rostands. A bullet does not kill a man; it destroys a generation of learning, annihilates the mentality which was about to be humanity’s instrument in unearthing another of nature’s secrets. The very vehicles of progress are the victims. It will take years to train their equals, decades perhaps to reproduce the intelligence that was ripe to do its work. The chances of the acquisition of knowledge are being sacrificed. Far more than half of the learning on which the world depends for progress is turned from laboratories and workshops into the destructive arenas of battle. It is indeed a war against civilization. The personnel of the armies makes it so. Every battle is the sacrifice of human assets that cannot be replaced. That is the real tragedy of this stupendous conflict. Perhaps it is better that the inevitable has come so soon. The burden of preparation was beginning to stagger Europe. There may emerge from the whirlpool new dynasties, new methods, new purposes. This may be the furnace necessary to purge humanity of its brutal perspective. The French Revolution gave an impulse to democracy which it has never lost. This conflict may teach men the folly of dying for trade or avarice. But whatever it does, it is not too much to hope that the capital and energy of humanity will become again manifest in justice and moral achievement, until the place of a nation on the map becomes absolutely subordinate to the place it occupies in the uplift of humanity. CONTENTS