Carlyle describes. The case seems complete. The justice of the indictment cannot be questioned. We turn from the passage and wonder where the militarist can hide his diminished head. But Carlyle has also written one of the most graphic historical biographies in our literature; the Life of Frederick the Great, one of the foremost soldiers of all time. In this great work, Carlyle devotes more attention to the Seven Years' War than to all the rest of Frederick's long life put together. Nor, in discussing his campaigns and battles does the biographer show the slightest sign of the horror and repulsion with which they ought to inspire him, judging from the extract above Even Carlyle, therefore, found it difficult to reconcile his views on war. Small wonder if those of us who are gifted with less piercing insight into the essence of things find ourselves confused when we survey the shifting values of these great moral and physical laws as applied to mankind in its corporate capacity. I challenge any right-minded man to consider the physical and economic aspect of war-the anguish, the sickness and the mortality which it brings to thousands of picked men, the privation and bereavement which it spells for hundreds of thousands of women and children, the destruction of cities, homes, crops and goods which it involves, the paralysis which it inflicts over a large area upon all normal and healthy activities, the evil passions which it arouses-without being possessed with a great and holy indignation that men should be so wanton and so wicked as to do these things. On the other hand reflection and experience bring home to us that physical and economic evils are not the only evils, or even the greatest that can assail the individual and the community. Is there in history or literature a nobler or more inspiring subject than that of a people

rightly struggling to be free? Is there a more contemptible object than that of a nation which has been enervated by peace and prosperity, and which tamely submits to the first conquering Vandal who comes along? So long as man and nature remain as they are, so long will the strong wage war upon the weak, and will, morally and physically, or economically enslave them. Which is the

worse fate-Slavery or Death?

Every race-aye and every individual-has sooner or later to face this question, and its corollary. "You must either suffer the one, or risk the other." So long as there is oppression there must be War.

The righteous indignation which we naturally feel as we think of the horrors of war must therefore be concentrated upon the aggressive belligerent. Yet even him we shall often find it difficult to condemn in cold blood. The aggressor is not always impelled by mere lust of conquest. More often than not he is driven to attack his neighbours by overwhelming economic or strategic necessity. The Goths who poured over the decaying outworks of the Roman Empire were themselves being forced out of Northern and Eastern Europe by the advance of the Huns from Central Asia. In modern times wars are waged to open new markets or to obtain an entrance to old ones. Many struggles, it is true, have been precipitated by the wanton vanity of kings and their mistresses. Carlyle says, for instance, with pardonable exaggeration, that the Seven Years' War took place in order that Madame du Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV, might revenge herself for an epigram. The very last-and in the universal opinion most ignominious-war in which Great Britain became involved, was engineered in a spirit of almost incredible levity by a few Jews in South

Africa and a handful of jobbers on the London Stock Exchange. But these wanton enterprises may on the whole be described as exceptional. Most wars, on analysis, will be found to have arisen from irresistible cosmic processes, which, under existing moral and social conditions, are almost as actively operative to-day as they have ever been.

Looked at from this point of view what is war but a phase of the pitiless struggle for existence that is going on in every part of the globe? When all is said and done I doubt whether it is in fact the most pitiless phase of that struggle. One of the loudest living apostles of peace is the multi-millionaire Andrew Carnegie-whose hobby is to scatter free libraries over the civilized world-than whom no one has played a mo more ruthless part in what Kipling calls "the savage wars of Peace."

According to a report recently issued by the Commissioner of Labour in the United States of America, 50,000 persons employed in the steel industry work twelve hours a day for seven days a week and some work eighteen hours a day while there is a steady tendency for wages to go down. That is the industry which has made Mr. Carnegie a millionaire, and from which he still draws the bulk of his prodigious revenues He is responsible more than most men for the miserable lot of these steel workers.

So that the man who denounces war so fiercely because it brings misery and destruction in its train has himself been the cause of as much misery and suffering as a dozen campaigns. Nay more, Mr. Carnegie has no objection to the employment of armed force when the ememy against whom it is employed are his own. workpeople. About twenty years ago there was a strike

in Pittsburg, the steel metropolis in which so many thousand men and women now toil from 12 to 18 hours a day in order that Mr. Carnegie may live in luxury. The strike was induced by those very conditions of hard work and low pay which stand revealed in the report of the Commissioner of Labour. Did Mr. Carnegie on that occasion approach his workmen and suggest that the differences between them should be referred to arbitration? Not he. He called on the Government for troops and shot down his toilers by the hundred. It will take a great many free libraries and other benefactions to wipe out the memory of that ruthless massacre. And more than one prominent advocate of the great cause of international disarmament has had almost as ugly an industrial record as Mr. Carnegie.

Let us compare for a moment the ethics of international with those of industrial warfare. The man who fights for his country is at least fighting for an ideal which he feels to be greater and holier than himself. He denies himself, he lives a hard and dangerous life, he learns the virtues of comradeship and obedience. In the last great issue he lays down his life—not for himself, but for his ideal. Is such a man to be pitied? I say no-not nearly so much as the man who, after dragging out a wretched existence as a steel-worker, without any high ideal to sustain and uplift him, perishes in the agony of starvation, or from one or other of the frightful diseases which dog the footsteps of modern civilisation. As Macaulay says in his famous linesTo every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late.

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds

For the ashes of his fathers

And the temples of his gods?

Life itself, under existing conditions, is and must be a war, in which all of us must sooner or later be forced into the firing line. We cannot avoid it, but we can do far better. We can fight in the spirit of the patriot soldier, who lays down his life in order that his country may be the gainer. So those of us whose fighting has to be done, not "in the field of proud honour," but in the office or the workshop or in some professional career, can do it in such a manner that it shall not have been done in vain.

are.

64

But let us come back to our subject the ethics of bloody campaigns and smitten fields. I said that these were inevitable so long as human nature and the conditions of economic and national survival remain as they But those of us who discern through the field glasses of Christianity that far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves " do not subscribe to the pessimistic view that we are doomed for ever to a state of things in which we must either kill or be killed. We see the slow but irresistible spread of the idea of the brotherhood of man and the solidarity of the race. We observe the growing distaste for war which is manifest in every civilised community, so that the chief of one of the greatest military nations, the German Emperor, is said to have a greater horror of war than any other living man. We note that even the fiendish inventions, ensuring an ever larger and speedier destruction of human life, which the mechanical genius of the age is perpetually putting on the market, tend to make war more and more ghastly, and therefore more and more repugnant to the civilized man. We find the humanitarian tendencies of the age asserting themselves in the direction of prohibiting explosive bullets, of sending out volunteer nurses and ambulance corps to the front, and