intense, vehement, and flaming and widespread as it is now. Never were the vigour and volume of denunciation of war so manifest; never were so many hearts troubled by its horrors; never was more opprobrium poured out on the false doctrines, inhuman policies, and un-Christian temper of war, as now. As The Westminster Gazette says: "The world no longer consents to evil." The "frightfulness" of this war, the murder of babies and women and other non-combatants, and the destruction of the most cherished treasures of art, never inspired such fiery hostility as within the last five months, Germany has a right to claim this superiority, that it has surpassed all the cruelties and barbarities of all the wars of the world, from the conflicts of the earliest savages down to this day. The repugnance created to the ideas, and to the methods of action, of the Germans is beyond imagining. Men are exasperated, and as long as the world endures it will not be forgotten.
Not even Germany can avoid being ashamed of the responsibility of creating the war, and she is so anxious to win a favourable verdict from neutral peoples that she has created a vast machinery, at immense cost of money and time and labour, to destroy the universal conviction of her demonstrated guilt.
Hence I believe that, as the wars of the Commonwealth cleansed the fields of England for the reception of the seeds of liberty, whose harvests we enjoy to-day; as the War of Independence was a factor of immense value in delivering the people of the United States of America from the kingly and bureaucratic despotism of that day, and establishing freedom and self-government; as the war between the North and South, not only saved the Union, but made it possible to give the negro a start to economic independence, education, and to full citizenhood along with those stranger peoples who pour like a great river through the democracy of the West, with its ever-widening life, so that it is the most wonderful creation on the planet, at present of the human spirit; so this European war will give the most powerful impulse to the Peace movement it has ever received, and set the whole world organizing itself for the establishment and abiding maintenance of universal peace. It will be the renaissance of the peace spirit.
But some of you will say, "All that is mere conjecture—the offspring of your habitual optimism." Very well. I will
