bloodshed, and have solved their social industrial problem in a less cataclasmic fashion. By cooperation, their commerce and merchant marine have been safeguarded, nourished, and promoted. They have also abolished slavery without bloodshed; their citizens can go practically all over the world with absolute assurance of protection; education has been developed more evenly, and, largely for that reason, a saner, more regular view of life has been developed.

The first Christians actually turned the other cheek. Of course, it is difficult for us to conceive of the spiritual influence of their sacrifice, and we can scarcely imagine the miraculous effect that it had in propagating and seeding love, charity, and forgiveness as the Gospel; and, hence, the endless circle, the endless tick of the pendulum that keeps time with the ceaseless flow of blood. Just as a Kentucky feud is considered primitive and barbarous, international strife. should not be considered majestic, dignified, and patriotic. Relics of barbarism result in polygamy, infanticide, legalized prostitution, capricious divorce, sanguinary and immoral games, infliction of torture, wars of rapacity, caste, and slavery.

What are the trials and ills of peace that we have to meet? They are hatred, fear, envy, ignorance, disease, poverty, and vice. War has never cured, or even alleviated these ills of man

kind; on the contrary, the conditions are the same. It does, as its defenders maintain, spur people on to action and to putting forth their entire energy; not for any glorious ideal, but to save their lives and to protect themselves from the ills that may be worse than even their direct imagination can picture. It makes them put forth their best spiritual, mental, physical, and material forces. Love is turned into hatred, hope into despair, faith into cynicism and perfidy; the constructive powers of the mind are turned into destructive channels, and the manhood of the race is killed by the thousands, and, in modern wars, by the million. Children, born and unborn, are sacrificed on the altar of hatred infinitely-more horrible than the blazing Moloch of the Charthaginian. Women are ravished, insulted, mistreated, and scorned. The men, who return, are maimed and deformed, and are but imperfect relics of the stalwart soldiers who marched forth to do battle. Generations of the future must bear the grevious burden of debt; for every dollar that they produce anywhere from five to forty per cent of it must be paid to wipe out the debt, and reduce the dreadful bankruptcy that war entails.

And in years to come, all this transient training of unwilling beings is but a bitter memory, and the weary hearts of the surviving but starved spirits turn to the growths of peace, with scarcely

an inkling of the lesson remaining in their minds and hearts. With diminished powers, with lost brothers untrained, more avaricious because of the sacrifice enforced, they turn to the world for another carnival of self-indulgence, and of vice and of virtue.

But in the glorious and demure corners of peace, calm and wishing souls are always found that strive in God's own home to bring forth the blooming flowers of the spirit. With bodily fatigue, intellectual rust, and spiritual desires they cast out seeds which weaken the Garden of Life.

Why, Billy, the war you fear is coming to Europe, is bound to send the pangs to the innocent and peace-loving. We must be drawn into it in a very little while, as we must fight for peace, and strive to establish harmony and understanding all over the world. As one nation we can have accord, but where every nation is seeking controlling power over the commerce of the seas, then how can we prevent the underhanded methods which one would condescend to use so as to gain a point.

War is a terrible thing, but if it helps the economic, commercial and human development of the world-it pays to burn, to kill, to slaughter, and, from the scenes of evil, thus allow the coming generation to benefit and advance. War is destructive, yet it leans toward the rapid up

building of architecture, literature, art, science, This country needs an

invention of all sorts.

awakening of some sort. I feel something is going to happen.

KITTY.

Dear Billy:

July 4th, 1914.

You need not write if you do not care to. You might be courteous enough to answer. I have been thinking that I might hurry you back to America before anything rash happens over there.

Anxiously,

KITTY.

July 1st, 1914.

Dear Kitty:

Our letters must be crossing in the mails. Can not understand your silence. If you knew how much I want to hear from you, you would write, write, write.

I love you,

BILLY.

Dear Kitty:

August, 1914.

War is raging in Europe. It seems to me it is a great economic outburst. I am a pacifist, and I feel that humanity is outraged.

I have felt, and continually insist, that a new reverence is essential to the cause of social reform. As long as men regard one another as they do now, that is, as little better than beasts, they will continue to treat one another brutally. Each strives by craft or skill, to make others his tools. There can be no spirit of brotherhood, no true peace until men come to understand their relation with God, and the infinite purpose for which He gave them life. As yet these ideas are treated as a kind of spiritual romance; and, the teacher who really expects men to see themselves and one another the children of God, is smiled at as visionary.

The reception of this plainest truth of Christianity would revolutionize society, and create relations among men not dreamed of at the present day. A union would spring up, compared with which our present fellowships would seem