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 
