VOL. LXI.

Each war that comes along adds so much more proof-not a different kind, but so much more in quantity that the evil can never be changed in character. War is "the business of hell", as John Wesley said, and it cannot be made like heaven. It is "cruelty", as General Sherman declared, and the cruelty can never be taken out of it. It is "the business of barbarians", as Napoleon in a sane moment confessed, and when professedly civilized men engage in it, the barbarousness of it is not relieved but becomes all the more evident. Until warriors quit shooting, stabbing with the bayonet, throwing shrieking shells, rushing in furious charges, bombarding cities,-until the sinuous, lying arts of strategy are abandoned, and hate and vengeance are dead, war will remain in essence, so long as any of it remains at all, the same brutal thing that it has

No. 5.

always been. Take all these away, and you will have civilized war-out of existence.

A little while ago we were writing of the ghastly horrors on the shattered and burning Spanish warships at the battles of Manila and Santiago. But America shut her eyes and said it was all right because she had done it. Then came the story of the merciless mowing down of the Dervishes in the Soudan by General Kitchener's troops, and the wholesale killing of the wounded on the battlefield of Omdurman. A part of England, a very small part, confounded and humiliated, uttered a low cry of shame and protest. But that was all. England said it was all right, magnificent, glorious! It was done for righteousness' sake! And the low cry of shame and protest in which the voice of God was heard was stifled by the great cry of imperial selfishness going up throughout the land. It is hard to believe in God, to believe in civilization, to believe in anything good, in the presence of such exhibitions in His name. If God is in them, inspiring them,but He is not in them. He must be sought elsewhere. It is by other agencies, despised and rejected of men, that He is working out the foundations of His kingdom in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, and one of these days all these "glorious" American and British deeds of blood will be burned up as trash and never mentioned again to all eternity.

In the Philippines civilization has lost its intelligence, its conscience, its heart. It has reverted to pure barbarism. It is hard to look at the cold facts in the case, as they are becoming known through several channels, and not sympathize with the poor soldier,-out there against his will, doing deeds at the command of the government, of his "superiors", the blackness of which he will never be able to efface from his soul-who writes home to his family

The

that he is "ashamed that he is an American." war itself, brought on by a policy of aggression, is black enough, even if none of the reports are true about the killing of non-combatants, and the "taking of no prisoners." But the proofs of these deeds are too many and too circumstantial to leave any doubt about the essential correctness of the reports, except in the minds of those who are determined to see nothing but good in it all, even if the American forces kill all the natives and burn to ashes every village in the islands.

The whole story is an appalling one, and the time will come when America would give her right hand to be able to blot out the remembrance of the crime and dishonor of it. The chief degradation of it is not that of the men who under orders are killing prisoners, and non-combatants, burning every village they can get at, recklessly shelling every inhabited or uninhabited spot along the shore where a Filipino soldier is suspected to be in hiding. The real degradation is that of the spirit of a great and mighty nation which is too false to itself and too cowardly to rise up and confess the wrong and insist that it shall be at once righted, so far as that is now possible.

Roosevelt on the Strenuous Life. A friend writes us thus in reference to Governor Roosevelt's speech, delivered in Chicago on April 10th: "It seems to me that it is thoroughly tinctured with dangerous virus. Governor Roosevelt ought to have lived about five hundred years ago. He is a survival of the militant stage of civilization. . . . The whole spirit of his address is pernicious. It is dangerous to all the best interests to have such a man as this stirring up the militant passions of the youth of our land. Is it only in war and battle that there are chances of living a strenuous life? And, then, his advice to black-list the men who do not support militarism, who differ from his extravagant military schemes, is a most outrageous assault upon individual liberty, the right of free debate. It is the application of the policy of intimidation and boycott to our public life."

Nobody can deny that Mr. Roosevelt's Chicago speech was brilliant and in a way powerful. The adroitness of its appeal to the selfish passions, which are most easily aroused, was masterful. The enthusiasm evoked by it was of that wild kind which only such an appeal ever awakens. It was interlarded with enough excellent sentiments, enough exhortation to civic honesty and advocacy of "never wronging one's neighbor", to give it an enticing flavor of conscience. But, on the whole, it was one of the most mischievous speeches delivered in this country in recent years, as the writer of the letter above quoted from indicates.

They

In the first place, the whole speech was built up upon misrepresentation. The friends of peace are not preachers of "the doctrine of ignoble ease”, as he slanderously insinuates that they are. They do not "shrink from danger, from hardship or from bitter toil", nor do they advise others to do so. "Timid peace", "ignoble counsels of peace”, “prattlers who sit at home in peace", are expressions having no meaning when applied to them. Peace is not synonymous with laziness, sensuality, cowardice, fear. The friends of peace do shrink from butchering their fellowmen, from burning and laying waste property, from the promiscuous destruction of women and children, from the hatred and furiousness evoked by battle, from the loathsome pollutions of camp life, from the vulgarity and profanity of the mêlée of fighting which the Governor of New York knows all about, from crushing the hearts and hopes out of their fellowmen by the awful strain laid upon them and their homes by war requisitions. abhor these things as heroically as Mr. Roosevelt seems to welcome them. But they advocate, as earnestly as he or anyone else, "the necessity of working for a livelihood", of "carrying on some kind of non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in historical work-work of the type we most need in this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects most honor upon the nation." They go beyond this, and urge and practice, some in one way, some in another, heroic self-sacrifice for the good of others in every quarter of the globe. Not one of them advocates that we should "be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders, taking no interest in what goes on beyond." But they are opposed to the militaristic rot and gangrene also. They all shrink from contemning, misrepresenting, wronging, robbing other, even weak, peoples. They shrink from Quixotic "adventure", from conquest by violence, from the satanic practice of going about like roaring lions seeking whom they may devour. But they take the largest interest in their neighborsnot to ride boot and spur over them, but to help them and to respect and promote their rights. They are unwilling to "undertake the problem of governing the Philippines", not because of the "trouble and expense", but because it is unspeakably wicked to do it as it is being done. They believe in "playing a great part in the world", but they want this done in at least a half Christian and American way. Governor Roosevelt knows that what he says about those whom he styles "silly humanitarian prattlers who sit at home in peace" is the baldest misrepresentation. the baldest misrepresentation. He ought never to open his mouth about honesty again until he repents of this great slander on which his speech is built up.

There is something amazing in the cool effrontery

with which Mr. Roosevelt throws the responsibility of the bloodshed now taking place in the Philippines upon those who opposed the ratification of the treaty with Spain unmodified-after having himself "done as much as anyone else to bring on the war" with Spain, and as Assistant Secretary of the Navy having determined upon an aggressive campaign of conquest in the Philippines while Dewey was still at Hong Kong. If his theory of national greatness be true, he ought, instead of berating them, to bestow the highest praise on whoever brought on the Philippine war, as it affords such splendid opportunity for the display of "manly and adventurous qualities". His contemptuous thrusts at those who he says brought on the war are wholly inconsistent with his exultation at the glorious prospect now before the country,-of preventing this nation from "standing as the China of the Western hemisphere,' by the adoption of the wicked and high-handed policy of the "great" governments who have not the least concern for China or her people except to humiliate and rob her, for their own greedy and ambitious ends. The whole speech is full of curious inconsistencies, which anyone may detect on the most casual reading, but which the Governor seems to have had no consciousness of.

It is easy to understand Mr. Roosevelt's impatient flings at the advocates of peace and humanity. He was simply building a platform for his glorification of war and adventure as means of what he calls "uplifting humanity". Here is the core of his speech. The strenuous life for which he pleads is, in its real meaning, a "warlike" and "adventurous" life. There is no greatness, no strength, without this. We must take our place with the nations that are making poor China their "door-mat", that are ruthlessly overrunning the world, stamping into the earth and annihilating native and weaker races, according to their own "commercial" and "glorious" will. This is the way to civilize and to become great!

We cannot do our "duty" in this regard in the way by which the nation has grown great and honorable in the past! The methods of peace must be flung to the winds! small military establishment!

No more boast of a

The navy must be greatly increased. Whoever opposes this, on no matter what high grounds of civilization and Christian principle, must be "hunted down" in the Congressional Record and elsewhere, and repudiated. The army must be enlarged, re-organized, given a "general staff" (état major they call it in Europe), and put to exercising in "grand manoeuvres" just like the great civilizing, liberty-giving armies of the Old World! The "renown" which is to come by extending civilization in this way is "the highest and finest part of national life"!

Roosevelt's symbol of the nation which is to be great is that of a knight with shield and sword (army

and navy) striding forth in search of adventure, of war and renown, stamping out all armed resistance in the lands which he has conquered, establishing the supremacy of his flag, over the heads of all opposition, even of lovers of liberty, and then proceding to administer the sacred trust which Providence has thrust upon him "with absolute honesty and with good judgment"! Nay, this fiery knight of conquest, who has begun his exploits in the same high-handed way as Spain began her career of "renown", is to keep from the territories which his "good sword" has won all the spoils politicians, unless he is "to tread the path which Spain trod to her own destruction"! Think of this heavenly proceeding, tacked on to the end of a series of events which have blown into white heat the latent instincts of every spoils politician from the Atlantic to the Pacific!

Inconsistency, absurdity, misrepresentation, unfaithfulness to American political and religious ideals cannot go much further than they went in this brilliant speech. One would have thought that an American audience, instead of going wild with enthusiasm over it, would have hung its head in shame and in dead silence at least have shown its disapprobation of such an insidious abandonment of the principles which led the nation up to its late heights of greatness and honor.

There is but one question now before the country, and that is whether the people will allow themselves to be further led astray by the seductive will-o'-thewisp of Christless power and worldly renown which has already been foolishly followed into the very edges of the swamp of death.

Military Government.

As a result of the war with Spain the United States finds itself at the present moment controlling, or trying to control, the Philippines, Porto Rico, Guam, Hawaii and Cuba, with an aggregate population of 12,000,000, without a single form of legally established civil government in any of these islands. What is worse, there seems no disposition to care anything about the matter, either on the part of Congress whose constitutional duty it is to provide governments for such of these territories as are already settled portions of the national domain, or on the part of the people as a whole who are constitutionally the real rulers. Even Hawaii, which was annexed, though as a war measure, yet nominally under the forms of law, was left by Congress without any authorized civil government, though the Hawaiian Commission recommended one several months before Congress adjourned.

The situation, then, is that five different bodies of people, in as many territories, with an aggregate population one-seventh as large as that of what was the United States of America a year ago, are under