And for what were our children butchered, men makers of cruel law? By the Christ, I am glad no woman made the Christless code of war! Shirks and schemers, why don't you answer? Is the foul truth hard to tell? Then a mother will tell it for you, of a deed that shames fiends in hell:-- Our boys were killed that some faction or scoundrel might win mad race For goals of stained gold, shamed honors, and the sly self-seeker's place; That money's hold on our country might be tightened and made more sure; That the rich could inherit earth's fullness and their loot be quite secure; That the world-mart be wider opened to the product mulct from toil; That the labor and land of our neighbors should become your war-won spoil; That the eyes of an outraged people might be turned from your graft and greed In the misruled, plundered home-land by lure of war's ghastly deed; And that priests of the warring nations could pray to the selfsame God For His blessing on battle and murder and corpse-strewn, blood-soaked sod. Oh, fools! if God were a woman, think you She would let kin slay For gold-lust and craft of gamesters, or cripple that trade might pay? This quarrel was not the fighters':--the cheated, red pawns in your game:-- You stay-at-homes garnered the plunder, but the pawns,--wounds, death, and "Fame"! You paid them a beggarly pittance, your substitute prey-of-the-sword, But, ye canny beasts of prey, they paid, in life and limb, for your hoard. And, behold! you have other victims: a widow sobs by my side, Who clasps to her breast a girl-child. Men, she was my slain son's bride! I can smell the stench of the shambles, where the mangled bodies lie; I can hear the moans of the wounded; I can see the brave lads die; And across the heaped, red trenches and the tortured, bleeding rows I cry out a mother's pity to all mothers of dear, dead "foes." In love and a common sorrow, I weep with them o'er our dead, And invoke my sister woman for a curse on each scheming head. Nay, why should we mothers curse you? Lo! flesh of our flesh are ye; But, by soul of Mary who bore the Christ-man murdered at Calvary, Into our own shall the mothers come, and the glad day speed apace When the law of peace shall be the law of the women that bear the race; When a man shall stand by his mother, for the worldwide common good, And not bring her tears and heart-break nor make mock of her motherhood. The Way to Peace AN INTERVIEW WITH JACOB H. SCHIFF. One of the leading American financiers and noted philanthropist; founder of Jewish Theological Seminary and of Semitic Museum at Harvard University; a native of Germany and member of the firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., bankers. By Edward Marshall.