It has benumbed our growing sense of the _nurture of life_; and at a time when we were challenging Reichstag, Parliament, and Congress with the needlessness of infant mortality and child labor, it entrenches a million youths with cold and fever and impending death. [Sidenote: It has violated humanity.] It has thwarted the chance of our times toward the _fulfilment of life_, and scattered like burst shrapnel the hands of the sculptors and the violinists, the limbs of the hurdlers and swimmers, the sensitive muscles of the mechanics and the weavers, the throats of the singers and the interpreters, the eyes of the astronomers and the melters—every skilled and prescient part of the human body, every type of craft and competence of the human mind. It has set back our promptings toward the _conservation of life_; and in a decade when England and France and Russia, Germany and Austria and Belgium, have been working out social insurance against the hazards of peace, it throws back upon the world an unnumbered company of the widowed and the fatherless, and of aged parents left bereft and destitute. It has blocked our way toward _the ascent of life_, and in a century which has seen the beginnings of effort to upbuild the common stock, has cut off from parenthood the strong, the courageous and the high-spirited. _Its Injuries_ It has in its development of armaments, pitted human flesh against machinery. It has wrested the power of self-defense from the hands of free-men who wielded lance and sword and scythe, and has set them as machine-tenders to do the bidding of their masters. [Sidenote: It has turned effort into destruction.] It has brought strange men to the door-sills of peaceful people; men like their own men, bearing no grudges one against another; men snatched away from their fields and villages where their fathers lie buried, to kill and burn and destroy till this other people are driven from their homes of a thousand years or sit abject and broken. It has stripped farms and ruined self-sustaining communities, and poured into a bewildered march for succor, the crippled and aged and bedridden, the little children and the women great with child unborn. It has razed the flowing lines in which the art and aspiration of earlier generations expressed themselves, and has thus waged war upon the dead. It has tortured and twisted the whole social fabric of the living. It has burdened our children and our children’s children with a staggering load of debt. It has inundated the lowlands of the world’s economy with penury and suffering unreckonable, hopelessly depressing standards of living already much too low. It has rent and trampled upon the net-work of world cooperation in trade and craftsmanship which had made all men fellow-workers. It has whetted a lust among neutral nations to profit by furnishing the means to prolong its struggles. It has blasted our new internationalism in the protection of working women and children.