Terrible as are the wrongs that countless human beings have to suffer, when great military despotisms are adjusting by the sword their “balance of power,” and exhibiting their entire lack of balance of mind, still more terrible are the cruelties inflicted on the innocent non-human races whose fate it is to be involved in the internecine battles of men. In a message addressed to the German people, the Kaiser was reported to have said: “We shall resist to the last breath of man and of horse.” As if the horse could enjoy the comforts of “patriotism,” and were not ruthlessly sacrificed, like a mere machine, for a quarrel in which he had neither lot nor part! More suffering is caused to animals in a day of war than in a year of peace; and so long as wars last it is idle to suppose that a humane treatment of animals can be secured. Do the opponents of blood-sports, of butchery, of vivisection, wonder at the obstinate continuance of those evils? Let them consider what goes on (blessed by bishops) in warfare, and they need not wonder any more. “Do men gather figs from thistles?” It seemed as if some of our sages expected men to do so, if one might judge from the anticipations of a regenerated Europe that was to arise after the close of the war! Already we see the vanity of such prophesyings--of making a sanguinary struggle the foundation of idealistic hopes. Not all the wisdom of all the prophets can alter the fact that like breeds like, that savage methods perpetuate savage methods, that evil cannot be suppressed by evil, nor one kind of militarism extinguished by another kind of militarism. Hell, we say, is paved with good intentions; but those who assumed that the converse was true, and that the pathway of their good intentions could be paved with hell, have been woefully disillusioned by the event. There is a too easy and sanguine expectation of “good coming out of evil.” People talked as if Armageddon would naturally be followed by the millennium. But history shows that modern wars leave periods of exhaustion and repression. “Reconstruction” is a phrase now much in vogue, but reconstruction is not progress. If two neighbouring families, or several families, quarrel and pull down each others’ houses, there will certainly have to be “reconstruction”; but it will be a long time before they are even as well off as they were before. So it is with nations. The question is: Does war quicken men’s sympathies or deaden them? To some extent, both, according to the difference in their temperaments; but it is to be feared that those who are quickened by experience of war to hatred of war are but a small minority, compared with those who are rendered more callous.