all who differed with them in the worship of the God of Love. Triumphantly they

wrote "In Solomon's Porch and in his temple our men rode in the blood of the

Saracens up to the knees of their horses."

 

History is an appalling tale of war. In the seventeenth century Germany, France,

Sweden, and Spain warred for thirty years. At Magdeburg 30,000 out of 36,000

were killed regardless of sex or age. In Germany schools were closed for a third

of a century, homes burned, women outraged, towns demolished, and the untilled

land became a wilderness.

 

Two-thirds of Germany's property was destroyed and 18,000,000 of her citizens

were killed, because men quarrelled about the way to glorify "The Prince of

Peace." Marching through rain and snow, sleeping on the ground, eating stale

food or starving, contracting diseases and facing guns that fire six hundred

times a minute, for fifty cents a day--this is the soldier's life.

 

At the window sits the widowed mother crying. Little children with tearful faces

pressed against the pane watch and wait. Their means of livelihood, their home,

their happiness is gone. Fatherless children, broken-hearted women, sick,

disabled and dead men--this is the wage of war.

 

We spend more money preparing men to kill each other than we do in teaching them

to live. We spend more money building one battleship than in the annual

maintenance of all our state universities. The financial loss resulting from

destroying one another's homes in the civil war would have built 15,000,000