Here, at least, the way of the humanitarian is plain. Sermons on the brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God have been totally ineffective to prevent war and abolish militarism. There is something incongruous in the introduction into a modern peace-meeting of some clerical speaker who talks unctuously about the great promise and precept of Christianity. The meeting itself, being held nineteen centuries after the promise was made, is a sufficient indication of its futility. No progress was made or seriously attempted in the work of peace until a genuine human passion was substituted for that empty phraseology. The brotherhood of men was, in the Christian sense of that phrase, too abstruse and precarious a conclusion to be of use in such a struggle. The plain fact is that it was of no use, and is of no use to-day. There is, indeed, reason to think that we should make more progress if we entirely discarded figures of speech like "the brotherhood of men." The fact that we are all children of God, or children of Eve, or children of some Tertiary anthropoid, does not very obviously impose on us the duty not to take up arms in an international quarrel. The ultimate basis of morality is, as Schopenhauer said, sympathy, though in an advanced social order this sentiment approves itself to the intellect, and its requirements may be precisely formulated by reason. One is not sure whether there will not be more morality in the world when the word "morality," with all its mystic entanglements, is discarded, and we speak plainly of social law. Violence, the infliction of pain and injustice, is one of the most obvious infractions of social law, quite apart from any religious commandments. Its social evil is so obvious that the community has, at an early date in its development, elaborated a special machinery for restraining it, and has imposed penalties in this world, whatever it thinks about the next. There may be questions raised, and one can understand people who are confined to a religious environment feeling a genuine concern, about other sections of moral law; but it would be obviously absurd to think that a humanitarian ethic would fail here. There have been attempts in modern times to question the validity of ethical law altogether. In so far as this movement aims at stripping moral law of its mysticism and fearlessly investigating its traditional content, it is admirable and will grow; but in so far as these moral rebels would resent restraint of any kind, and pronounce the freedom of every individual impulse, they seem to overlook a factor of great importance--the impulse of retaliation. A pretty state of society we should have if such a theory were generally, or largely, carried into practice.