UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



better. The German gospel of war, so assiduously 

 preached and so heroically practiced in our day, is 

 based upon the conviction that there is no true 

 growth for a nation except by the sword, that the 

 still small voice of love and good will must give 

 place to the brazen trumpet that sounds the onset 

 of hostile and destroying legions. 



Are the arts of peace seductive, and do they hasten 

 the mortal ripening of a people's character? Must 

 the ploughshares now be forged into swords and the 

 swords used to spill our neighbors' blood? The 

 current gospel of war is the gospel of hate and re- 

 prisal, of broken treaties and burned cities, of mur- 

 dered women and children, and devastated homes. 



What a noise politics makes in the world, our poli- 

 tics especially ! But some silent thinker in his study, 

 or some inventor in his laboratory, is starting cur- 

 rents that will make or unmake politics for genera- 

 tions to come. How noiseless is the light, yet what 

 power dwells in the sunbeams — mechanical power 

 at one end of the spectrum, in the red and infra-red 

 rays, and chemical power at the other or violet and 

 ultra-violet end ! It is the mechanical forces — 

 the winds, the rains, the movements of ponderable 

 bodies — that fill the world with noise; the chemi- 

 cal changes that disintegrate the rocks and set the 

 currents of life going are silent. The great loom in 

 which is woven all the living textures that clothe the 

 world with verdure and people it with animated 



108 



