Many a pia mater has been stretched to aching in the past few years by thoughts of death and its harvest of human flower in first, fresh bloom. Mystics have tried to give death a symbolic significance; they would have us believe that it has or will have a repercussion in some occult way beneficent to the world and those who are allowed to tarry here. "What is this grave which the world was coming in its heart and in its daily practices to treat as final? May it not be that the answer of the whole world, which is busy with the question, will bring into being a new adaptation of living to dying--a new Death?" is the way one of them expresses herself. Were we concerned herein with death, either new or old, we might deny her premise any foundation, and reason therefore that any conclusion she might incline to draw must be false and misleading. The world has in its heart to-day a yearning for promise and proof of immortality such as its composite heart has never had. That Christianity as practised fails to satisfy that yearning, does not justify the allegation that the thinkers of the world have become materialists. Historians and critics who view the question from a biologic angle profess to see in war a contribution to our evolutionary progress: it kills many of the most virile, but it kills also the weaklings, actual and potential. The virile who remain push the weaklings to the wall, particularly in the procreative contest. It puts a premium on prowess and valor, and makes the race franker and braver, more resolute and more efficient; it uproots decadency; it sacrifices the grain to get rid of the tare; it plucks the flower that the thistle may be eradicated. The philosopher accepts it as a part of God's programme: some he allows to succumb to bullets, others to germs. The latter is the wise man, for he accepts things as they are, and at the same time tries to shape their course in a way that will give him and those he loves, which is all mankind, the greatest safety.