Professor Hamlin accordingly takes up in a rapid survey and analysis each one of the six major wars through which the larger part of our total national expenditures have been devoured. He proceeds, like a skilful surgeon, without passion or partisanship, with a trace of sympathy for all groups and parties, in so far as all were alike victims of misunderstanding, ignorance of the facts, and hereditary prejudices and delusions. Save for the great common human characteristics which gleam out among all peoples and on both sides in times of calamity--the patience, the heroism, the self-sacrifice, the exceptional acts of magnanimity--he finds nothing whatever holy in a single one of our national wars, but rather the manifestation of every mean, cruel and cowardly trait which has ever debased human nature. He can discover in the case of no one of these wars any evidence that the body of the people or an intelligently informed majority in it, or even the government, had taken pains to assure themselves either of the justice or the necessity of going to war, or that their leaders were ever able to assign a just and sufficient reason and purpose compelling them to resort to war. Thus he brings to light, what every one ought by this time to know, that the Revolutionary War, far from being undertaken by the will of a free citizenry, was actually forced upon the American people by a small minority in the teeth of the earnest opposition of a highly respectable percentage of thoughtful citizens, while another large part of the colonists was quite indifferent to the issue. Professor Hamlin also makes clear that in all our wars, exactly as in those we usually reprobate, our people were presently found practising the same injustices, indignities, lying defamations, detestable acts of revenge, outrages on innocent women and children, upon the fears of which we had hastily assumed excuse for ourselves in rushing into war. In all our wars we have boasted of our American ardor for liberty. Professor Hamlin's book shows how every great war requires the most terrible form of slavery, namely conscription, in which the individual is stripped of the normal use of his conscience and judgment. In order to drive men to submit to this degradation the government itself, even in the hands of its "best" men, must resort to the employment of unscrupulous lying, reckless propaganda in abuse of the enemy, and the suppression of truth, of free speech and open-mindedness--in short, to a debauch of miseducation, and a general corruption of the whole population. Once in war, it never will do to let good be known of the enemy! War counts upon the plentiful outpouring of passion and hatred.