Extreme pacificists shrink from fighting evil with evil, hell with hell, and advise submission to outrage, or at least taking the risk of being forced into resigned submission. The believers in the religion of valor, on the other hand, proclaim that war is a good thing in itself, that it develops the best human virtues, invigorates a nation become flaccid through ease and luxury, and puts in command the strong, dominating spirit of a valid nation or race. What is the just mean between these two extremes? Is it not that war is always a hideous and hateful evil, but that a nation may sometimes find it to be the least of two evils between which it has to choose? The justifiable and indeed necessary war is the war against the ravager and destroyer, the enemy of liberty, the claimant of world empire. More and more the thinkers of the world see, and the common people more and more believe instinctively, that the cause of righteous liberty is the cause of civilization. In the conference which will one day meet to settle the terms of peace, and therefore the future conditions of life in Europe, the example of the American Republic in regard to armaments and war, the publicity of treaties, and public liberty, security and prosperity may reasonably have some influence. CHARLES W. ELIOT. Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 14, 1914. DR. ELIOT'S FIFTH LETTER. A Hopeful Road to Lasting Peace _To the Editor of The New York Times:_ The great war has now been going on long enough to enable mankind to form approximately correct views about its vast extent and scale of operations, its sudden interference with commerce and all other helpful international intercourse, its unprecedented wrecking of family happiness and continuity, its wiping out, as it proceeds, of the accumulated savings of many former generations in structures, objects of art, and industrial capital, and the huge burdens it is likely to impose on twentieth century Europe. From all these points of view, it is evidently the most horrible calamity that has ever befallen the human race and the most crucial trial to which civilization has been exposed. It is, and is to be, the gigantic struggle of these times between the forces which make for liberty and righteousness and those which make for the subjection of the individual man, the exaltation of the State, and the enthronement of physical force directed by a ruthless collective will. It threatens a sweeping betrayal of the best hopes of mankind.