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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLI. No. 1058 



word which is loudly used by those who 

 speak for nations as units, that sham vir- 

 tue in the name of which crimes are com- 

 mitted by the privileged classes within each 

 nation and in the name of which hundreds 

 of thousands of honest and innocent citi- 

 zens of various nations are murdered or 

 crippled for life in the groundless and 

 senseless strife of nations, brought about 

 by the ambitions of unprincipled leaders. 

 Furthermore, international relations in 

 time of peace, which have an ethical ap- 

 pearance, are held together by flimsy ties. 

 International peace conferences, interna- 

 tional law, and peace treaties are merely 

 scraps of paper which are torn to shreds at 

 first sight of a bone of contention between 

 nations. 



In a previous section I insisted, and I 

 believe rightly, that intellectual growth 

 and activity are most important factors in 

 the development and growth of intrana- 

 tional morals. What is the value and in- 

 fluence of intellectual growth and activity 

 in international morals? Highly intellec- 

 tual, civilized nations fight one another with 

 a rage, a ferocity and with an intent to kill 

 as probably did their animal ancestors of 

 different strains or races, hundreds of 

 thousands of years ago. But different spe- 

 cies of another type of animals, let us say 

 dogs and cats, are probably fighting to-day 

 as their ancestors fought thousands of 

 years ago, that is, tooth and nail, the only 

 weapons at their disposal; their physical 

 agility, their promptly acting reflexes, the 

 finer developed senses and their remark- 

 able instincts did not help them in develop- 

 ing new weapons or new ways of fighting ; 

 they had no human intellect. But the hu- 

 man race ? We need not go back thousands 

 of years. It suffices to compare warfares 

 separated only by a hundred years. I need 

 not enter upon a comparison of the rage, 

 brutality and barbarity with which the 



wars are conducted; in this regard the 

 present war is surely not behind its prede- 

 cessors, and none of the cultured belliger- 

 ent nations are ahead of or behind the 

 others. Perhaps atrocities are at present 

 not so much a question of barbarity as of 

 success and eificiency — ^the idols of all 

 walks of modern life. But as to destruc- 

 tiveness of human life, that cardinal aim 

 in the war of nations, the progress made 

 in this comparatively short span of human 

 history is immense; it reads like a fairy 

 tale. From high in the air a human bird 

 directs you to turn a micrometer screw one 

 millimeter or two and a huge shell anni- 

 hilates hundreds or thousands of your 

 enemy. A small group of human fishes 

 bubble up in the vicinity of a huge levia- 

 than, a dreadnought, and in less than ten 

 minutes hundreds of men and millions of 

 dollars are forever at the bottom of the 

 sea. In a stretch of hundreds of miles, 

 hundreds of thousands of soldiers are 

 moved rapidly without a hitch from one 

 place to another where they are needed 

 most. The success is wonderful. In barely 

 eight months millions of people were killed 

 or crippled, perhaps as many more were 

 made homeless and driven into starvation 

 and billions of dollars borrowed and 

 wasted. And that astounding result was 

 not accomplished as in olden times, merely 

 by extraordinary physical force or en- 

 durance or by that virtue in which wild 

 beasts greatly excel men, the virtue of 

 physical courage; it was accomplished by 

 specific human ingenuity. Mathematics, 

 physics, chemistry and other theoretical 

 and practical sciences have made these aw- 

 ful results possible. In fact, practically 

 every kind of intellectual activity took and 

 takes a profound part in the bitter strug- 

 gle which now goes on among highly civil- 

 ized nations. Historians, philosophers, 

 literary men and others are busy contrib- 



