Think of the growing spirit of freedom and true democracy, of brotherhood and comradeship that are welding the world together in the bonds of humanitarian brotherhood; treaties between nations, federations of nations, world's fairs, the Red Cross movement, The Hague Peace Tribunal, arbitration instead of war, and agitation for the reduction of armies and navies.[D] [D] This was written prior to the breaking out of the war of 1914-15, when "hell was let loose in Europe." Yet I do not feel inclined to change one single line of what I then wrote. During 1915, I was engaged speaking daily to large audiences at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco--I estimate that I addressed not less than 300,000 people during that time. In many of these addresses I expressed my thoughts about the hideousness, the needlessness, the waste, the devilishness of war, with open frankness, and without a single exception my denunciations of the system of war were received with hearty applause. I refer to this merely as an index as to what I believe is the general thought of all intelligent people on the subject. All except war-mad and war-hypnotized people hate war and desire to see it abolished, and the higher standards of brotherly and amicable conference and equitable adjustment of difficulties take its place. That nations were urged into the European conflict is no proof that they love war. It is rather a proof that they hate war enough to die to make future wars impossible. This, I sincerely hope and confidently expect, will be the tendency of the result, if not an actually accomplished result. One has but to study the changes that have taken place in our civilization since Dickens began to write, for instance, to see how wonderfully the world has progressed. He wrote _Nicholas Nickleby_ to call attention to the horrible abuses existent in boys' boarding schools, where boys, who for any reason were desired out of the way at home, were put in charge of human fiends in the guise of "schoolmasters." Step-children, heirs who were in the way, natural children, and those whose parents had no natural affection for them, were put into these dens, and so cruelly abused that they often died; and at the best they dragged out their miserable existence afraid of what each hour of the day might bring forth and finding only in their troubled sleep the relief from the active cruelties they were made to bear. _Little Dorrit_ graphically pictured the horrors of the "prison for debt" system, and in the wonderfully painted character of Little Dorrit's father, Dickens showed how every human trait and feeling, every noble passion and emotion was dwarfed, twisted, distorted, and perverted by the action of this unnatural, cruel, and monstrous law.