be acquitted by posterity if, after a finer ideal has been suggested, we go back to writhing and biting in the slime. I am a plain American citizen, with no direct connection with this war, as innocent of having anything to do with starting it as the Kaiser is claimed by his upholders to be; yet I feel a sense of guilt. I am ashamed to look the young in the face; it seems to me that, in some way, we older folk have betrayed them in letting humanity come to such a pass; in tampering with the ways of thought and of belief which have let this thing be. This deification of biological man has not as yet gone with us so far as exalting the gospel of warfare; we cry out, when we see the logical outcome of ideas taught with such fervor through the last decades, against the German evangel of the mailed fist. Yet England too has her theorists teaching the biological necessity of war, that the fundamental laws which govern human conduct are the laws of brute force, the survival of the fittest in death struggle. America has been too profoundly influenced by Germany in educational matters, has sat too submissively at her feet, to escape. Accepting so many of the minor premises of her teaching, will not the major ultimately follow as a matter of course? It is Germany that has carried furthest this materialistic modernism, has perfected it. The word Germany has been a name to conjure with in swift denial if one but ventured to suggest the possibility of a spiritual interpretation of life. High intellectual achievement has been that of the Germany of these later years, but not the highest; she has kept the mailed fist upon the spiritual aspirations of mankind, and has made a treaty, on her own terms, with the human soul, with what loss of territory! We have not yet accepted the whole of this new evangel; we have doubts, mental reserves. Neither have we, in our period of enlightenment, made gain in developing those forces of mind and soul that would enable us to refute it. Man, from a purely biological point of view, indulging in the biological necessity of war in the year of our Lord 1915, is a sorry spectacle, but perhaps it is, as Mr. Shandy said, “no year of our Lord at all,” so progressive are we. Now that we make our swift leap backward many thousand years, we pause to wonder whether this means only a quickened pace in a direction already chosen. Of the achievements of the mailed fist the Neanderthaler man, barring a difference of weapons, would have been capable. How shall we escape this progress which is utter retrogression?