matter up. Agonizing wounds, pitiless disease, the permanent crippling,
enfeeblement, or death of vigorous men in the prime of life, the
anguish of wives and sweethearts, the loneliness of widows, the lack
of care for orphans-it is impossible for those who have not lived through
a great war to realize the horror of it, the cruel pain suffered by
those on the field, the torturing suspense of those left behind. It
is, indeed, a sad commentary on man's wisdom that, with all the distress
that inevitably inheres in human life, he should have voluntarily
brought upon himself still greater suffering and premature death.

(2) But the moral harm of war is no less conspicuous than the physical.
It fosters cruelty, callousness, contempt of life; it kills sympathy
and the gentler virtues; it coarsens and leads almost inevitably to
sensuality. After a war there is always a marked increase in crime
and sexual vice; ex-soldiers are restless, and find it hard to settle
down to a normal life. There is a permanent coarsening of fiber. Even
the maintenance of armies in time of peace is a great moral danger.
The unnatural barrack-life, the requisite postponement of marriage,
the opportunity for physical and moral contagion, make military posts
commonly sources of moral contamination. Prostitution flourishes and
illegitimacy increases where soldiers are quartered; the army is a
bad school of morals.

Add to this indictment the stimulus to national hatreds caused by war,
the inflaming of resentments and checking of international good will.
Frenchmen still nourish a bitter animosity against the Germans for
the possession of Alsace and the occupation of Paris. The instinctive
racial antipathies of the Balkan peoples have been immeasurably
deepened by the recent wars on the peninsula. The eventual brotherhood
of man is indefinitely postponed by every war and by every rumor of