The editorial and the offer of bees were both rejected by the careful editor. “I must stay strictly neutral,” was his timid excuse. At the very time I was writing, the Reverend Price Collier, a former Hingham preacher, was publishing a book called “Germany and the Germans,” in which he set forth the old theory of military preparedness as a preventive of war. Speaking of the German army (this was in 1913), he says: It is the best all-round democratic university in the world; it is a necessary antidote for the physical lethargy of the German race; it is essential to discipline; it is a cement for holding Germany together; it gives a much-worried and many-times-beaten people confidence; the poverty of the great bulk of its officers keeps the level of social expenditure on a sensible scale; it offers a brilliant example, in a material age, of men scorning ease for the service of their country; it keeps the peace in Europe; and until there is a second coming of a Christ of pity and patience and peace, it is as good a substitute for that far-off divine event as puzzled man has to offer. It is a minister of the Gospel who makes this profound observation. But it sounds like our present Secretary of War, a banker, and like our present Commanding General, a professional soldier. Here is sure proof that the human race cannot learn the essential things, and so, is doomed. But I wish I might try my bees. This old hoax of preventing war by preparing men to fight has been so often tried! And we are at it again. But no nation has tried my simple and inexpensive substitute of bees and plough-shares, and pruning hooks. They have tried, from time out of memory, to beat their swords and spears into garden tools, but a sword makes a mighty poor ploughshare. It has never been successfully done. The manufacturing process is wrong. It takes the temper out of good garden steel first to heat it in the fires of war. We must reverse the process: turn the virgin metal into garden steel first, and give every man a hoe, and a ploughshare, and a pruning hook; then he will never have need for sword and spear. III Instead of universal military training, I would advocate a hive of bees for everybody, or a backyard garden. A house should have both lawn and garden, even though the gooseberries crowd the house out to the roadside, where the human house instinctively edges to see the neighbors in their new pony-coats go by. Let my front door stand open; while over the back stoop the old-fashioned roses and the grape-vines draw a screen.