outstretched to the pitying God, they do well to cry, as in the ancient litany, 'Give peace in our time, O Lord!' Let the husbandman go forth in the furrow. Let the cattle come lowing to the stalls at evening. Let bleating flocks whiten all the uplands. Let harvest hymns be sung, while groaning wagons drag to bursting barns their mighty weight of sheaves. Let mill wheels turn their dripping rounds by every stream. Let sails whiten along every river. Let the smoke of a million peaceful hearths rise like incense in the morning. Let the shouts of happy children, at their play, ring down ten thousand valleys in the summer day's decline. Over all the blessed land, asleep beneath the shadow of the Almighty hand, let the peace of God rest in benediction! 'Give peace in our time, O Lord!'

And yet the final clause to, every human prayer must be 'Thy will be done!' There are things better far than peace. There are things more loathely and more terrible than, the horror of battle and 'garments rolled in blood.' Peace is blessed, but if you have peace with hell, how about the blessedness? A covenant with evil is not the sort of agreement that will bring comfort. A truce with Satan is not the thing that it will do to trust. There are things in this world, without which the prayer for peace is 'a witch's prayer,' read backward to a curse.

That is to say, whether peace is good depends entirely on the further question, With whom are you at peace? Whether war is evil depends on the other question, With whom are you at war? In one most serious and substantial point of view, human life is a battle, which, for the individual, ends only with death, and, for the race, only with the Final Consummation. The tenure of our place and right, as children of God, is that we fight evil to the bitter end. 'The Prince of Peace' Himself came 'not to send peace,' in this war, 'but a sword.'

We may venture, then, to say that there are some wars which are not all evil. They are terrible, but terrible like the hurricane, which sweeps away the pestilence; terrible like the earthquake, on whose night of terror God builds a thousand years of blooming plenty; terrible like the volcano, whose ashes are clothed by the purple vintages and yellow harvests of a hundred generations. The strong powers of nature are as beneficent as strong. The destroying powers are also creating powers. Life sits upon the sepulchre, and sings over buried Death through all nature and all time. War, too, has its compensations.

For years, amid the world's rages, we had peace. The only war we had, at all events, was one of our own seeking, and a mere playing at war. Many of us thought it would be so always. We believed we had discovered a method of settling all the world's difficulties without blows. The peace people had their jubilee. They talked about the advance of intelligence, and the softening power of civilization. They placed war among the forgotten horrors of a dead barbarism. They proved that commerce had rendered war impossible, because it had made it against self-interest. They talked about reason and persuasion, and moral influences. They asked, 'Why not settle all troubles in a grand world's congress, some huge palaver and paradise of speechmakers, where it will be all talk and voting and no blows?' Why not, indeed? How easy to 'resolve' this poor, blind, struggling world of ours into a bit of heaven, you see, and so end our troubles! How easy to vote these poor, stupid, blundering brothers of ours into angels, in some great parliament of eloquent philosophers, and govern them thereafter on that basis!

Now, resolutions and speeches and grand palavers are nice things, in their way, to play with, but, on the whole, it is best to get down to the hard fact if one really wants to work and prosper. And the hard fact is, that Adam's sons are not yet cherubs, nor their homestead, among the stars, just yet an outlying field of paradise. It is a planet whose private affairs are badly muddled. Its tenants for life are a quarrelsome, ill-tempered, unruly set of creatures altogether. As things go, they will break each others' heads sometimes. It is very unreasonable. I can see that. But men are not always reasonable. It is not for their own interest. I can see that too. But how often does interest, the best and highest, raise an impregnable barrier against passion or even caprice?

We must take men as they are, and the world as we find it, to get a secure ground for attempting the reformation of either. And as men are, and as I find the world, at present, I meet Wrong, and find it armed to resist Right. The Wrong will not yield to persuasion, it will not surrender to reason. It comes straight on, coarse, brutal, devilish, caring not a straw for peace rhetoric or Quaker gravity, for persuasion or interest. It strikes straight down at right or justice. It tries to hammer them to atoms, and trample them with swinish hoofs into the mire. Now what am I to do? To stand peaceably by and see this thing done, while I study new tropes and invent new metaphors to persuade? Is that my business, to waste the godlike gift of human speech on this mad brute or devil?

With wise pains and thoughtful labor, I clear my little spot of this stubborn soil. I hedge and plant my small vineyard. It begins, after much care, to yield me some fruit. I get a little corn and a little wine, to comfort me and mine. I have good hope that, as the years go by, I shall gather more. I trust, at last, my purple vintages may gladden many hearts of men, my rich olives make many faces shine. But some day, from the yet untamed forest, bursts the wild boar, and rushes on my hedge, and will break through to trample down my vineyard before mine eyes. And I am only to argue with him! I am to cast the pearls of human reason and persuasion at his feet to stop him! Nay, rather, am I not to seize the first sufficient weapon that comes to hand, unloose the dogs upon him, and drive him to his lair again, or, better, bring his head in triumph home?

It is true, there are wars where this parable will not apply. There are capricious wars, wars undertaken for no fit cause, wars with scarce a principle on either side. Such have often been king's wars, begun in folly, conducted in vanity, ended in shame, wars for the ambition of some crowned scoundrel, who rides a patient people till he drives them mad. And even such wars have their uses. They are not wholly evil. Alexander's, the maddest wars of all, and those of his successors, the most stupid and brutal ever fought, even they had their uses. Our war with poor Mexico, even Louis Bonaparte's, was not wholly evil.

But there are wars, again, that are not capricious, that are simply necessary, unavoidable, as life, death, or judgment, wars where the choice is to see right trampled out of sight or to fight for it, where truth and justice are crushed unless the sword be grasped and used, where law and civilization and Christianity are assailed by savagery, brutality, and devilishness, and only the true bullet and the cold steel are received in the discussion. These are the Peoples' wars. In them nations arm. Generations swarm to their battle fields. They are landmarks in the world's advancement. For victories in them men sing Te Deums throughout the ages. The heroes, who fell in them, loom through the haze of time like demigods.

On the plains of Tours, when the Moslem tide, that swept on to overwhelm in ruin Christian Europe, was met, and stemmed, and turned by Charles Martel, and, breaking into foam against the iron breasts of his stalwart Franks, was whirled away into the darkness like spray before the tempest, the Hammer-man did a work that day that, till the end of time, a world will thank Heaven for, as he thanked it in the hour of victory.

And when his greater grandson, creator, guide, and