"But wait," you say; "all this is theory and abstraction. We want matters of fact. Your case may be true as philosophy, but you have failed to ground it in example." So it is to history that our last appeal must be made, for, says Bolingbroke, "History is philosophy, teaching by example." Every decree of her stern tribunal is impartial and irrevocable. War the tonic or war the poison? She is the final judge. She will take you back, if you will, to her childhood days and point you out vast empires, owning the known world, Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Medes, and Persians, fearful fighters all of them. But no, not quite all either. On a sandy stretch of seashore, half hidden by the unwieldy empires around it, we see a timid, peaceful little people called the Hebrews; they alone, from all that mighty company, have stood the "wreckful siege" of thirty centuries. Watch its sinister movement down the ages and you will see the war cloud hover over Greece, and her republics melt to nothing in disunion and decay. It hovers over the Huns, and they suddenly sink from sight; over Islam, and its civilization crumbles faster than it grew; over Spain, and all the New World treasures cannot save her from decay. Finally, like the cloud no bigger than a hand, it rises from the island of Corsica and moves toward Central Europe. All too well does Europe know its meaning. From north and south, from east and west, she pours into the field the finest armies that the Old World ever saw. Then she pauses. Europe grows tense with a nameless dread. The storm cloud blackens, hovers lower, then bursts with all its fury through the continent. For ten long years, at the command of an imperial butcher, the soil is drenched with blood, the sky grows lurid from burning Paris to burning Moscow, three million homes are draped in black. Grand, indeed, and glorious! But Europe lost more than her gorgeous standards, more than her ruined cities; she left her manhood on those bloody fields. We might extend the awful picture, but the story is the same, dread tale of death for nations as for men. Is not this enough? Is it not clear that this traitor to labor, this despoiler of ideals, this foe to morality, is not the benefactor but the destroyer of nations? And shall we not "here highly resolve" no longer to walk in this "valley of the shadow of death," but to hasten toward the dawning of a brighter, purer day? For in spite of pessimism, in spite of scholarship, in spite of history, the day is "coming yet, for a' that-- When man to man, the world o'er, Shall brothers be for a' that." NATIONAL HONOR AND VITAL INTERESTS By RUSSELL WEISMAN, Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio First Prize Oration in the Eastern Group Contest, 1912, and Second Prize in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May 16, 1912 NATIONAL HONOR AND VITAL INTERESTS