war at first hand? There was never so much peace in the world as there
is to-day.

War itself, the old red anarch, is passing. It is safer to be a soldier
than a working-man. The chance for life is greater in an active campaign
than in a factory or a coal-mine. In the matter of killing, war is
growing impotent, and this in face of the fact that the machinery of war
was never so expensive in the past nor so dreadful. War-equipment to-
day, in time of peace, is more expensive than of old in time of war. A
standing army costs more to maintain than it used to cost to conquer an
empire. It is more expensive to be ready to kill, than it used to be to
do the killing. The price of a Dreadnought would furnish the whole army
of Xerxes with killing weapons. And, in spite of its magnificent
equipment, war no longer kills as it used to when its methods were
simpler. A bombardment by a modern fleet has been known to result in the
killing of one mule. The casualties of a twentieth century war between
two world-powers are such as to make a worker in an iron-foundry turn
green with envy. War has become a joke. Men have made for themselves
monsters of battle which they cannot face in battle. Subsistence is
generous these days, life is not cheap, and it is not in the nature of
flesh and blood to indulge in the carnage made possible by present-day
machinery. This is not theoretical, as will be shown by a comparison of
deaths in battle and men involved, in the South African War and the
Spanish-American War on the one hand, and the Civil War or the Napoleonic
Wars on the other.

Not only has war, by its own evolution, rendered itself futile, but man
himself, with greater wisdom and higher ethics, is opposed to war. He
has learned too much. War is repugnant to his common sense. He
conceives it to be wrong, to be absurd, and to be very expensive. For