Before the nations of the world the United States stands to-day in an unenviable light. It is a false light. Since the days of William Penn and Benjamin Franklin our people have led in much of the march upward from the slough of weltering strife. Many a stumbling block to progress we have removed from the rugged pathway, but for fifteen years our government has refused to touch the barrier of national honor and vital interests. England and France have now laid this duty squarely at our door. "It is a social obligation as imperative as the law of Moses, as full of hope as the Great Physician's healing touch." Let us here highly resolve that there shall be uttered a new official interpretation of national honor and vital interests, an interpretation synonymous with dignity and fidelity, sincerity, and integrity, and confidence in the vows both of men and of nations. "If we have 'faith in the right as God gives us to see the right,' we shall catch a vision of opportunity that shall fire the soul with a spirit of service which the darkness of night shall not arrest, which the course of the day shall not weary." THE EVOLUTION OF PATRIOTISM By PAUL B. BLANSHARD, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor First Prize Oration in the Central Group Contest, 1913, and in the National Contest held at Mohonk Lake, May 15, 1913 THE EVOLUTION OF PATRIOTISM Robert Southey has asked through the lips of a little child the greatest peace question that the world has known. He pictures a summer evening on the old battlefield of Blenheim. On a chair before his vine-clad cottage sat old Kaspar while his grandchildren, Wilhelmine and Peterkin, played on the lawn. Suddenly Peterkin from a nearby brook unearthed a skull and, running, brought it to Kaspar's knee. The old man took the gruesome thing from the boy, and told him that this had been the head of a man killed in the great battle of Blenheim. Then little Wilhelmine looked up into her grandfather's face and said: "Now tell us all about the war, And what they fought each other for." Here we have the central question in the problem of war. Why do men fight? Through the answer to that question lies the path to world-peace. Few men fight to-day for glory. Modern militarism has no place for Lancelots and Galahads. The glory of the regiment has absorbed the glory of the individual. Few men fight to-day to gain great wealth. The treasures that glittered before Pizarro do not tempt our soldiers. Material wealth is more easily won in factory or farm or mill. Few men fight to-day for religion. The conquest of religion has become a conquest of peace; the very ideal of peace is an end of religion itself. Glory, wealth, religion--these are no longer the causes of war. Then why do men fight? The answer is obvious. Men fight to-day for patriotism. Patriotism is the cause of war.