“Your national antagonisms, your cruel wars, and the immense sums wasted by you in maintaining millions of your people, trained for the sole purpose of slaughtering their fellows, we regard as the one most disgraceful relic of your former supremely barbarous state. While, by the process of social development, all your most cruel brutalisms have disappeared within the range of your higher civilization, the remaining one, of sending masses of your people into deadly combat for the settlement of political and religious questions, is retained for reasons which are not wholly in concurrence with our sense of right. In the first place, no element of justice enters into the arbitration of a question, whose settlement rests entirely upon the physical strength of the contestants; and all international settlements by this means are but temporary, when the winning party has not coincidentally a prevailing sense of justice in its favor. All your wars and battles, without a result on the side of equity and truth, have been fought in vain. Your bloody misjudgments of one century often are, and are ever like to be, reviewed and resubmitted to the same sanguinary and delusive arbitration in a succeeding one. In these brutal encounters you stain your hands and garments in the blood of your fellow men without remorse, because the wild instincts of your nature have never been suppressed in that particular direction. Those of you in authority, both civil and religious, have this to answer for. For the sake of a concurrence in the selfish schemes of your rulers, they have instituted a series of glittering rewards for the most skillful of their wholesale murderers and you have in that way been educated to honor most, those who could deal the heaviest blows. “We cannot take a survey of the motives which have instituted nearly all these sanguinary and dreadful encounters among you, without a sense of horror. Your civilization has witnessed only a single one of these terrible conflicts, wherein a purely humane question was involved. Your religions have not only been used to sanction this dire carnage, but have even themselves been participants in the slaughter of millions of your people. You are not yet freed from the savagery of your remote fathers, who, ages ago, entered those fierce contests between tribe and tribe, with strong personal interests in the outcome. The loss or gain of a battle meant to them either a share of spoils or probable torture and death. Yet you have kept alive this inclination to collective combat, when individual loss or gain seldom cuts any figure in the incentive which impels you to battle. And even beyond these physical encounters, your struggles of life appear, from our point of view, to be divided between defense and attack, like the beasts of prey which still linger on your borders.