Congress is a mirror. It merely reflects public sentiment. So long as the need for battleships and more battleships--for bigger and still bigger battleships--is constantly dinged into the ears of the people by the profit-takers from the government, just that long will public sentiment, and the legislation and appropriations that respond to it, be warped and one sided. Our navy will continue to be top heavy with dreadnoughts, and inadequate attention will be paid to the other things necessary for a symmetrically equipped and efficient naval defense. When private profits for building battleships shall have been eliminated, Congress will no longer skimp appropriations to man the battleships we now have, or for other naval equipment, in order to build more dreadnoughts. After this war, it ought to be possible to conduct to success a nation-wide, and possibly a world-wide propaganda to end forever the earning of dividends from human slaughter. That is the issue, bluntly and plainly stated, and those who profit by manufacturing the machinery of war must face it squarely. The time will come,--it is to be hoped it is near at hand,--when they will be held in the same estimation as are nowadays the pirates who forced their victims to walk the plank. Over-preparedness, as well as unpreparedness, may precipitate a war. The causes of the present European war were, however, more deeply rooted than that. It was inevitable that they would some day result in war. But the war would not have come at this time if Germany had not thought England unprepared. Nor would it have come if Germany had not been, as she supposed, invincible, because armed to the teeth by corporations like the Krupps that make war and the machinery for it the source of stupendous private profits and accumulated wealth. The growing temptation to create similar conditions in this country must be forever strangled. After the close of this war, the fields of battle in Europe must be cleared of war's devastations, and in the United States of America the field of industry must be cleared of all temptation for our merchants and manufacturers to become slaughterers by wholesale of human beings--murderers and manglers of whole battalions of their fellowmen--slayers of the fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons of millions of women. That is what they become when for money they furnish the means whereby it is done, or is to be in future done, by this or any other country.