It has distracted our minds with the business of destruction and stayed the forward reach of the builders among men. It has conscripted physician and surgeon, summoning them from research and the prolongation of life to the patchwork of its wreckage. It has sucked into its blood and mire our most recent conquests over the elements—over electricity, and air and the depths of ocean; and has prostituted our prowess in engineering, chemistry and technology, to the service of terror and injury. It has bent our achievements in transportation into runways, so that neither volcanoes nor earthquakes, nor the rat-holes of famine, but only the plagues can match war in unbounded disaster. _Its Wrongs_ It has in its compulsory service made patriotism a shell, empty of liberty. It has set up the military independent of and superior to the civil power. It has substituted arbitrary authority and the morals of foot-loose men who escape identity in the common uniform, for the play of individual conscience, and that social pressure which in household and village, in neighborhood and State, makes for individual responsibility, for decency, and fair play. It has battened on apathy, unintelligence and helplessness such as surrender the judgment and volition of nations into a few hands; and has nullified rights and securities, such as are of inestimable value to the people and formidable to tyrants only. It has threatened the results of a hundred martyrdoms and revolutions, and put in jeopardy those free governments which make possible still newer social conquests. It has crushed under iron heels the uprisings of civilization itself. _Its Evils_ [Sidenote: It has poisoned intelligence.] It has turned the towers of art and science into new Babels, so that our philosophers, and men of letters, our physicists and geographers, our economists and biologists and dramatists, speak in strange tongues, and to hate each other has become a holy thing among them. It has made were-wolves of neighboring peoples, in the imaginations of each other. It has put its stamp upon growing boys and girls, and taught them to hate other children who have chanced to be born on the other side of some man-made boundary. It has massed and exploded the causes of strife, fostering religious antagonisms and racial hates, inbreeding with the ugliest strains of commercialism, perverting to its purposes the increase of over-dense populations and their natural yearning for new opportunities for enterprise and livelihood. It has not only shattered men’s breasts, but loosened the black fury of their hearts; so that in rape, and cruelty, and rage, we have ancient brutishness trailing at the heels of all armies. It has found a world of friends and neighbors, and substituted a world of outlanders and aliens and enemies. It has lessened the number of those who feel the joys and sorrows of all peoples as of their own.