What is the most urgent need of the world? What would stop war and ensure peace? What would push forward all that is highest and best in our civilisation, and cause men and women to realise that they are not created to brutalise, degrade, and destroy each other in sordid struggles for place and power, but that their purpose in living at all is to educate and uplift each other to noble aims and ends? The great Need stares us in the face at every point of social law and political government; it clamours in our ears and pushes its problem to the front of every question. What is it the world demands in every form of policy, legislation, and statesmanship? A simple thing--one would imagine it to be a natural thing--yet almost undiscoverable in any period of history--Sanity! Sanity, which means health of both brain and body; Sanity which recognises self only as a portion of the greater Whole; Sanity which knows instinctively that mankind must obey the laws of God or else suffer extinction; Sanity, which combines with reason and judgment a comprehensive sympathy for every unit of the human race in its struggle upward from the brute period to the highest realisation of intellectual and spiritual worth. Judged from this point of view one may doubt, when reading history from its known or traditional beginnings, whether Man, taken in bulk, has ever been entirely sane. Something of the freak, the monster, or the only half human, seems to taint his blood, displaying itself in follies and excesses of the most violent or pitiful nature, which, when dispassionately narrated in the chronicles of centuries, show him to be a crank or a fool at the very time when wisdom might most be expected of him. Some few individuals, notable examples to the race, have stood out in splendid isolation as sane and self-sacrificing teachers and helpers of humanity; but, in the aggregate, from the very beginnings of what we are pleased to call “progress” down to the present day, the desire to trample upon each other and wallow in blood and slaughter seems to prevail with more force over the minds of men than the clearest arguments of reason. Nevertheless this desire is an insane impulse, and if we had any true perception of the laws of right and wrong, we should check it in its very first beginnings. Any man, any body of men, seeking to violate the peace and progress of the world should be dealt with by combined international forces of the Law and Medicine, not by armies--and should either be shot like mad dogs as incurable and dangerous, or imprisoned for life in asylums for the criminally insane. No one man or group of men can be considered in sound mental condition if their actions imperil the existence of their fellow-creatures.