“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”—Jesus of Nazareth

The sight of all Europe engaged in the most terrific conflict in the history of mankind is a heartrending spectacle. On the east, on the south and on the west the blood-lust leaders have flung their deluded millions upon unbending lines of steel, martyrs to the glorification of Mars.

We see millions of men taken from their homes, their shops and their factories; we see them equipped and organized and mobilized for the express purpose of devastating the homes of other men; we see them making wreckage of property; we see them wasting, with fire and sword, the accumulated efforts of generations in the field of things material; we see the commerce of the world brought to a standstill, all its transportation systems interrupted, and, still worse, the amenities of life so placed in jeopardy for long generations to come that the progress of the world is halted, its material and physical progress turned to retrogression.

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me!”

But this is not the worst. We see myriads of men banded together to practice open violation of the very fundamental tenets of humanity; we see the worst passions of mankind, murder, theft, lust, arson, pillage—all the baser possibilities of human nature—coming to the surface. Outside of the natural killing of war, hundreds of men have been murdered, often with incidents of the most revolting brutality; children have been slaughtered; women have been outraged, killed and shamefully mutilated. And this we see among peoples who have no possible cause for personal quarrel.

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me!”

To all human beings of normal mentality it must have seemed that the destruction of the Lusitania marked the apex of horror. There is, indeed, nothing in modern history—nothing, at least, since the Black Hole of Calcutta and some of the indescribable atrocities of Kurdish fanatics—to supply the mind with a vantage ground from which to measure the causeless and profitless savagery of this black deed of murder.

To talk of “warning” having been given on the day the Lusitania sailed is puerile. So does the Black Hand send its warnings. So does Jack the Ripper write his defiant letters to the police. Nothing of this prevents us from regarding such miscreants as wild beasts, against whom society has to defend itself at all hazards.

There are many reasons but not a single excuse for the war. When a man, or a nation, wants what a rival holds and makes a violent effort to enter into possession thereof, right and conscience and duty before God and to one’s neighbor are forgotten in the struggle. Man reverts to the brute. Loose rein is given to passion, and the worst appears. The fair edifice of sobriety and amity and just dealing between man and man, upreared by civilization in centuries of travail, is rent asunder, stone from stone. The inner shrine of the inalienable sense of human brotherhood is profaned. One cannot reconcile with any program for the lasting accomplishment of good and the victory of the truth, this fever of murder on a grand scale, this insensate madness of pillage and slaughter that goes from alarum and counter-alarum to overt acts of fiendish and sickening brutality, palliated because they are done by anonymous thousands instead of by one man who can be named.

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me!”

It is civilization that is being shot down by machine guns in Europe. That great German host is not made up of mercenaries, nor of the type of men that at one time composed armies. There are Ehrlichs serving as privates in the ranks and in the French corps are Rostands. A bullet does not kill a man; it destroys a generation of learning, annihilates the mentality which was about to be humanity’s instrument in unearthing another of nature’s secrets. The very vehicles of progress are the victims. It will take years to train their equals, decades perhaps to reproduce the intelligence that was ripe to do its work. The chances of the acquisition of knowledge are being sacrificed. Far more than half of the learning on which the world depends for progress is turned from laboratories and workshops into the destructive arenas of battle.

It is indeed a war against civilization. The personnel of the armies makes it so. Every battle is the sacrifice of human assets that cannot be replaced. That is the real tragedy of this stupendous conflict.

Perhaps it is better that the inevitable has come so soon. The burden of preparation was beginning to stagger Europe. There may emerge from the whirlpool new dynasties, new methods, new purposes. This may be the furnace necessary to purge humanity of its brutal perspective. The French Revolution gave an impulse to democracy which it has never lost. This conflict may teach men the folly of dying for trade or avarice. But whatever it does, it is not too much to hope that the capital and energy of humanity will become again manifest in justice and moral achievement, until the place of a nation on the map becomes absolutely subordinate to the place it occupies in the uplift of humanity.