No, commercial envy is not a reason, rivalry in business is not a reason, need of expansion is not a reason. These are excuses only, not causes of war. There is no money in war. There is no chance of highway robbery in the byways of history which can repay anything tangible of the expense of the expedition. The gray old strategists do not care for this. It is fair to them to say they are not sordid. They care no more for the financial exhaustion of a nation than for the slaughter of its young men. "An old soldier like me," said Napoleon, "does not care a tinker's damn for the death of a million men." Neither does he care for the collapse of a million industrial corporations. Of the many forms of business and financial relation among men, none is more important than those included under the name of insurance. Insurance is a form of mutual help. By its influence the effects of calamity are spread so widely that they cease to be felt as calamity. The fact of death can not be set aside, but through insurance it need not appear as economic disaster, only as personal loss. Its essential nature is that of social cooperation and it furnishes some of the most effective of bonds which knit society together. As insurance has become already an international function, its influence should be felt continuously on the side of peace. That it is so felt is the justification of our meeting together to-day, as underwriters of insurance and as workers for peace. The essence of insurance, as Professor Royce observes, is that 'it is a principle at once peace-making in its general tendency and business-like in its practicable special application.... As a result of insurance, men gradually find themselves involved in a social network of complicated but beneficent relations of which individuals are usually very imperfectly aware but by means of which modern society has been profoundly transformed.' For life insurance, in general, is not personally selfish in its motive. It is essentially altruistic, the effort of the benefit of some person beloved who is designated as the beneficiary. For the benefit of this surviving person, the efforts involved in the payment of premiums are put forth, and the insurance companies and their underwriters constitute the machinery by which this unification is given to society. To all the interests of insurance, the lawlessness of war is wholly adverse and destructive. Insurance involves mutual trust and trust thrives under security of person and property. Insurance demands steadiness of purpose and continuity of law. In war, all laws are silent. War is the brutish, blind, denial of law, only admissible when all other honorable alternatives have been withdrawn--the last resort of "murdered, mangled liberty."