MATERIAL PROBLEMS MUST BE SETTLED FIRST
The developments of the Great War, up to date, do not hold out any hope that Idealism will be respected until the war is finished and the passions of the belligerents are cooled. It is evident that the practical and material problems must first be solved, leaving the ethical ones for later adjustment. It is to be feared, indeed, that the war will settle down not only into a ghastly conflict of blood and destruction, but also into one of retaliation and cruelty, in which all the laws of war hitherto recognized will be ignored and all international law will become a dead letter. The old Latin motto, Inter arma silent leges, is already construed more literally in practice than it was by the pagans of the pre-Christian era. Modern inventions of death-dealing machinery, poisonous gases and explosives, deadly air craft and submarines, have furnished an excuse to declare the former international rules for the conduct of war obsolete, and it is a question if this avowal will not become more pronounced as the war progresses. The world is confronted with the horrible possibility that war will come to mean actually, as it always has in theory, the denial of all humanity, all justice, all fairness, all chivalry, all mercy, and become a struggle to the death not a bit less brutal than that of the wild beasts of the jungle.