But if war is a scar on the nation's industry, it is likewise a blot on her ideals. Though this element of idealism at first seems visionary and impractical, it is one of the foundation stones of progress. The fixed gulf between what man is and what he knows he might be is the decisive factor in his advance. Ideals are the pulleys of the unseen, round which man throws his hopes and aims, by which he pulls himself across the chasm and into the larger life. To advance at all, man must have ideals--for himself, for his family, for his nation. But mark the effect of war on these ideals. In place of the ideal of peace--to serve men and uplift them--one is taught the ideal of war--to make himself the most widely feared of professional murderers. Instead of the ideal of peace--to make his family comfortable, happy, and prosperous--comes in the war ideal, by whose terms the family head deserts his own flock to kill other family heads for the eternal glory of the Stars and Stripes. As for his ideal of the nation's greatness, we have ample testimony that when bullets and cannon balls cone crashing through the splendid structure of his purpose, it speedily crumbles into an ignominious desire to hide himself behind the nearest tree. No; do not say that war builds up ideals; it tears them down and tramples them in the dust; aye more, it sets back crime itself where they should rightly stand. But if war so dethrones a nation's ideals, what may it not do to a nation's morality? Imagine if you can a million men, the core of the national power, turning themselves into machines to carry out blindly the schemes of leaders who may be right or wrong; schooled in the belief that manslaughter is manliness, that the rash courage of the brute is above the moral courage of a man; forgetful of the meaning of human life; thoughtless of a thing so common as death; heedless of its eternal consequences. No wonder Channing cried so bitterly: "War is the concentration of all human crimes. Under its standard gather violence, malignity, rage, fraud, rapacity, and lust. If it only slew men, it would do little. But it turns man into a beast of prey. Here is the evil of war, that man, made to be the brother, becomes the deadly foe of his kind; that man, whose duty is to mitigate suffering, makes the infliction of suffering his study and end." No, Mr. Roosevelt, for once at least you are wrong! We cannot believe that war builds up a nation. Rather will we believe those words of Herbert Spencer, more sweeping but far more true, "Advance to the highest forms of man and society depends on the decline of militancy and the growth of industrialism."