If the Kaiser and the Crown Prince and the General Staff and the military caste and the Pan-German element created the army to use against other nations, in accordance with Bernhardi's alternative of "world domination or decline," and if all the professors and preachers and pamphleteers had taught the people that war was a high, holy, and beautiful thing, and--more particularly--that Germany could beat any other nation in a few weeks, and the armies would return loaded down with spoils and indemnities and title deeds to new provinces, and that "our good old German God" had specially deputized the German nation to overpower all the rest of the world, make German the universal tongue, and the primitive moral code of Germany the ethical law of the world, then we know precisely who is guilty of this war. But if the German army compelled the German Government to back Austria in an attack on Servia, and on its own account to invade Russia, Belgium and France, we are very much at sea about the place where the moral burden is to be laid. * * * * * The prophet is particularly prone to find the causes of the war in a material civilization, in our existing industrial system, and especially in greed. The prophet and the political orator are equally stern in their denunciation of greed. At a time when prophets were so accustomed to physical exercise that they could run ahead of Ahab's chariot, and in the absence of normal sources of supply, were fed by the ravens, their indignation at greed, their contempt for commerce, and their superiority to a material civilization, was free from incongruity. The modern prophet does not live on locusts and wild honey, nor is his wardrobe limited to a belt of camel's hair. His uncompromising denunciation of his age is somewhat impaired by the obvious fact that he has "some of the pork." The deliverances of the prophet on this class of themes are rather tiresome in their iteration, and distinctly irritating in their oblivion to history. There is no civilization that does not rest upon the possession and acquisition of property; there is no clime or time in which men have not worked for their living, and sought the means of buying the things which their tastes, coarse or refined, craved, in which there have not been rich and poor, and in which it has not been much pleasanter to be the former than the latter. The earliest social satirist, like the latest, berated the accursed greed for gold, and castigated his contemporaries for their love of luxury and their eager pursuit of money. It would seem as if the prophet might recognize that it is a very old sermon he is preaching, and familiarize himself with the extraordinary age of those evils of his own day which he feels it his mission to chastise.