In peace all the manifestations of life are individualistic. Eating, drinking, sleeping, and amusing one’s self are all actions in the interest of the preservation of the individual. Even the impulse of the preservation of the kind, or of propagation, is in the last analysis individualistic in nature. It is the aspiration to save at least one part of the individual from general annihilation. The child is the part of the parents which survives after the parents’ death. All the activities of man, even the noblest, partake of a certain egoistic element. The mother in sacrificing her life to save her child is unconsciously merely sacrificing the older part in order to save the younger part, of herself. But when the very existence of the individual is in jeopardy, when life itself is at stake, then all ideals centering in altruism are cast aside, and the Satanic cynic grins, muttering the Biblical verses: “Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. “But put forth thine hand, and touch his bone and his flesh, “And he will curse thee to thy face.” (Job ii, 4-5.) But all egoistic tendencies are silent in war. Here the individual is merely an insignificant little wheel in the huge war-machine. Here the individual counts for nothing, the nation for everything, the individual must perish that the nation may flourish ever after. Now, what is the modern nation, but an idea, what is the monarch in western countries or the flag, but a symbol? Men live as happy, as content, as free in London, Brussels, Paris, or Berlin. Ostend, e. g., would not materially change its mode of life, whether it is Belgian, French, British, or German. (The semi-Asiatic Russia naturally forms an exception. Anyone who has lived near the German-Russian frontier and has observed the sunny German village with its clean paved streets, lined with pretty large-windowed brick houses, all supplied with the modern urban comforts, where tidiness and cleanliness, light and well-being, happiness and prosperity dwell; and compared with this sunshine, only a hundred yards away, on the Russian side, has seen the dirty, streetless Russian village, with its windowless, straw-roofed, low, wooden shanties where man and beast live under one roof in squalor, filth, poverty and misery—and here it is where real civilization reveals itself, not in the borrowed, French mannerism in the palace of Petrograd—will not doubt for one moment that there is a vast difference between the life under a semi-Asiatic civilization and that under western civilizations. At this corner of the world, war is utilitarian as among the barbarians in ancient times. Here the Teutonic civilization is in war against the slavery of the knout.) But what are the western nations fighting for? They are fighting for an ideal; here men give their lives for a symbol.