“‘Our progress was like the old-time forays in Scotland two centuries ago.... We moved on from valley to valley ... burning, looting and turning out the women and children to sit and cry beside the ruins of their once beautiful farmsteads ... my men fetched bundles of straw. The women cried, and the children stood holding to them and looking with large frightened eyes at the burning house.... The people had thought we had come for refreshments, and one of them went to get milk.... We then set the whole place on fire. They dropped on their knees and prayed and sang, weeping bitterly the while. One of the poor women went raving mad. When the flames burst from the doomed place the poor woman threw herself on her knees, tore open her bodice, and bared her breasts, screaming, “Shoot me, shoot me, I’ve nothing to live for, now that my husband is gone, and our farm is burnt, and our cattle taken!”’” These foul deeds are samples of thousands. “War, is it?” says Dr. Walsh. “Be it war: then an army is a manufactory for cowards and a school for cowards.” “A war hero,” says the distinguished Roman Catholic Bishop John Spaulding,[204] “supposes a barbarous condition of the race; and when all shall be civilized, they who know and love the most shall be held to be the greatest and the best.” And Robert Ingersoll thus: “Every good man, every good woman, should try to do away with war, to stop the appeal to savage force. Man in a savage state relies upon his strength, and decides for himself what is right and what is wrong.”[205] “Nothing is plainer,” says Emerson, “than that sympathy with war is a juvenile and temporary state.”[206] Dr. John Fiske, historian and philosopher, makes the following observations on the slow grand march from brutality to brotherhood.[207] “For thousands of generations, and until very recent times, one of the chief occupations of men has been to plunder, bruise and kill one another. The ... ugly passions ... have had but little opportunity to grow weak from disuse. The tender and unselfish feelings, which are a later product of evolution, have too seldom been allowed to grow strong from exercise ... the whims and prejudices of militant barbarism are slow in dying out.... The coarser forms of cruelty are disappearing and the butchery of men has greatly diminished ... in the more barbarous times the hero was he who had slain his thousands.... And thus we see what human progress means. It means throwing off the brute inheritance, gradually throwing it off through ages of struggle that are by and by to make struggles needless. Man is slowly passing from a primitive social state ... toward an ultimate social state in which his character shall have become so transformed that nothing of the brute can be detected in it. The ape and the tiger in human nature will be extinct.”