The Evolution of Arms and Armor. 187 



the time the first pages of a philosophy under which of 

 necessity all fighting must end ; and at the very anvils of 

 war, with her monsters, brute and human, as smiths, has 

 been forging the weapons ever finer and finer that alone can 

 overcome violence, and which only the righteous and the 

 meek inheriting the earth can wield. And in all the 

 marvels of eastern magic is there anything more wonder- 

 ful, more unexpected, more beautiful, than the story that 

 not on a tree transplanted out of Paradise, or from a seed 

 sown in the gardens of sentiment and nourished in the hot- 

 house of the church, but on the rude stalk of war, rooted 

 in the dust of slaughtered myriads, spined and petaled 

 with the sharp points of tooth and claw, sword and bayonet, 

 and budding in the red of battle-fields, there should 

 bloom at last, in the midst of a hushed and waiting earth, 

 by strictly natural laws, the snow-white flower of universal 

 peace, the story that is told by Evolution in this chapter 

 of her great book entitled '* Arms and Armor " ? 



