Unless this war does help to bring about a lasting peace in the world, it is idle to pretend that it will have been anything else but a monstrous experience of evil. If at the end of it we cannot bring about some worldwide political synthesis, unanimous enough and powerful enough to prohibit further wars by a stupendous array of moral and material force, then all this terrible year of stress and suffering has been no more than a waste of life, and our sons and brothers and friends and allies have died in vain. If we cannot summon enough good-will and wisdom in the world to establish a world alliance and a world congress to control the clash of "legitimate national aspirations" and "conflicting interests" and to abolish all the forensic trickeries of diplomacy, then this will be neither the last war, nor will it be the worst, and men must prepare themselves to face a harsh and terrible future, to harden their spirits against continuing and increasing adversity, and to steel their children to cruelty and danger. Revenge will become the burden of history. That is the price men will pay for clinging to their little separatist cults and monarchies and complete independencies, now. The traffic and wealth of our great and liberal age will diminish, the arts will dwindle and learning fade, science will cease to advance, and the rude and hard will inherit the earth. The Warpath or the World State; that is the choice for mankind. This lesson of the submarine which destroys much and achieves nothing has ample support in history. There never was so blind a superstition as the belief that progress is inevitable. The world has seen the great civilization of the Western empire give place to the warring chaos of the baronial castles of the ninth and tenth centuries; it has seen the Eastern empire for 500 years decay and retrogress under the militarism of the Turk; it has watched the Red Indians, with rifles in their hands, grimly engage in mutual extermination. Is it still a blind world, doomed to blunder down again from such light and order and hope as we were born to, toward such another millennium of barbaric hates and aimless wars? That is no mere possibility; it is the present probability unless men exert themselves to make it impossible. It is quite conceivable that ours is the last generation for many generations that will go freely about the world, that will have abundance of leisure, and science and free speech and abundant art and much beauty and many varied occupations. We stand about in our old haunts and try to keep on with our old ways of living and speculate when the war will be "over," and when we shall be able to go back to everything just as it was before the war. This war and its consequences will never be "over," and we have not even begun to realize what it has cost us.