forward-thinking men has been curiously and broadly blunted. Consider
our chiefest industry,--fighting. Laboriously the Middle Ages built its
rules of fairness--equal armament, equal notice, equal conditions. What
do we see today? Machine-guns against assegais; conquest sugared with
religion; mutilation and rape masquerading as culture,--all this, with
vast applause at the superiority of white over black soldiers!

War is horrible! This the dark world knows to its awful cost. But has
it just become horrible, in these last days, when under essentially
equal conditions, equal armament, and equal waste of wealth white men
are fighting white men, with surgeons and nurses hovering near?

Think of the wars through which we have lived in the last decade: in
German Africa, in British Nigeria, in French and Spanish Morocco, in
China, in Persia, in the Balkans, in Tripoli, in Mexico, and in a dozen
lesser places--were not these horrible, too? Mind you, there were for
most of these wars no Red Cross funds.

Behold little Belgium and her pitiable plight, but has the world
forgotten Congo? What Belgium now suffers is not half, not even a tenth,
of what she has done to black Congo since Stanley's great dream of 1880.
Down the dark forests of inmost Africa sailed this modern Sir Galahad,
in the name of "the noble-minded men of several nations," to introduce
commerce and civilization. What came of it? "Rubber and murder, slavery
in its worst form," wrote Glave in 1895.

Harris declares that King Leopold's régime meant the death of twelve
million natives, "but what we who were behind the scenes felt most
keenly was the fact that the real catastrophe in the Congo was
desolation and murder in the larger sense. The invasion of family life,