diplomacy, it is probable that Cuba could have been saved from the
intolerable oppression of Spain without war. Now that the moral
pressure of the world's opinion is becoming so strong, and the Hague
tribunal stands ready to adjust difficulties, there is seldom excuse
for recourse to brute strength. The real cause of war lies far less
often in the moral demand that prefers righteousness to peace than
in the touchiness, selfishness, and resentments of nations, or their
desire for glory and conquest.

(4) War has, directly or indirectly, been the means of spreading the
blessings of civilization. Alexander's campaigns brought Greek culture
to the Eastern world, the Roman conquests civilized the West, the
famous Corniche Road was built by Napoleon to get his troops into
Italy, the trans-Siberian railway, the subsidized steamship lines of
modern nations, the Panama Canal, owe their existence primarily to
the fear of war. But today all lands are open to peaceful penetration;
missionaries and traders do more to civilize than armies. And if the
building of certain roads and railways and canals might have been
somewhat postponed in an era of stable peace, many more material
improvements, actually more imperative if less spectacular, would
certainly have been carried out with the vast sums of money saved from
war expenditures. Whatever good ends, then, war may have served in
the past, it is now superfluous, a mere survival of savagery, a relic
of our barbaric past, a clear injury to man, in ways which we shall
next consider.

What are the evils of war?

(1) We need not dwell on the physical and mental suffering caused by
war; General Sherman's famous declaration, "War is hell!" sums the