It is a reflection upon civilization that two nations, each so brave, heroic, and self-sacrificing, should, without their consent and by the miserable and iniquitous folly of scheming statesmen and diplomats, be plunged into a war, of which no man can see the end and which has already swept away the flower of their manhood. One great lesson of this conflict may be that no aggressive war ought to be initiated unless the policy of that war is first submitted to the masses of the people, upon whom the burdens in the last analysis fall and who must pay the dreadful penalty with their treasure and their lives. If the policy of this war had been submitted by a referendum to the Austrian and German peoples with a full statement of the facts of the Servian controversy, would they not have rejected a form of arbitrament, which creates but does not settle questions, convinces no one, and only sows the seeds of greater hatred for future and richer harvests of death? If the be-ribboned diplomats and decorated generals of the General Staffs at Berlin and Vienna had been without power to precipitate this war, unless they themselves were willing to occupy the trenches on the firing line, this war might never have been. * * * * * Nearly five months have passed since that summer day, when I passed through smiling harvest fields from the mountains to the Seine. The trenches, in which innumerable brave men are writing with their blood the records of their statesmen's follies, are filled with snow. The blackest Christmas Eve within the memory of living man has come and gone, perhaps the blackest, since in the stillness of the night there fell upon the wondering ears of the shepherds the gracious refrain of "Peace on earth, good will among men." On that night devout German soldiers sang in their trenches in Flanders and along the Vistula the hymn of Christmas Eve, "_Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht_." Was this unconscious mockery, an expression of invincible faith, or a reversion from habit to the gentler associations of childhood? The spirit of Christmas was not wholly dead, for it is narrated that these brave men in English and German trenches on this saddest of Christmas Eves declared for a few hours of their own volition a Christmas truce. "Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated The bird of dawning singeth all night long, And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad, The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike, So hallowed and so gracious is the time."