Men who were opposed to spending a dollar to make a nation ready for the possibility of war were hailed as the advanced thinkers and the men worthy of the suffrage of the people; while those who contended human nature had not been changed, that a nation was simply the individual grown large and the jealousies, the covetousness and ambitions of governments would always make it possible for the strong to prey upon the weak and for the unprincipled under the guise of national necessity to attack their unprepared neighbours and therefore just as much as a city rests in confidence with the presence within it of a well-equipped police force, equally so the comfort and security of peace could be best maintained by a nation governed by right principles whose army and navy were ready to resist successfully any unjust assault upon its honour or integrity, were treated with pity, if not scorn, as still under the spell of benighted and barbaric days. "Peace and safety!" these were the pleasant words that lulled a pleasure-seeking and money-making generation into self-satisfied rest and the mirage of millennial days already arrived. Then, suddenly, like a bolt out of a clear sky, or the overflow in raging lava tide of an unsuspected volcano, the most stupendous, ghastly and brutally devilish war the world has ever known was on in all its fiendish fury, sweeping from England to the Euphrates and from the Rhine and Danube on the north to the glittering sands of Africa on the south, rolling its waves of blood and sending its sickening and indescribable horrors through those lands and among those people at one time constituting the four kingdoms to whom God had committed the rulership of the world; that region occupied by Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome and whose administration of world affairs is called "the times of the Gentiles." To-night ten millions of the world's flower of manhood lie rotting in their graves. Six millions of women and children have been starved to death. Women have been unspeakably ruined, children mutilated and flung as helpless debris upon the charity of strangers, suffering their orphaned estate and not knowing why.