And therein lie the factors of all troubles of organisation, and the tremendous internal difficulties of army or national construction. One man—or body of men—may plan to build well, but can only succeed if the material is good: if the material is bad, there results failure, with credit neither to the builder nor the material. And human character is material—the most delicate material great builders may know and direct, in war, or commerce—just so many human beings prone to be directed so far, and for the rest to rise or fall, in the world’s estimate, as our characters decide. But out of this mass of human character, out of these manifold qualities of a multitude, is formed the final whole which goes to mark the characteristics of an era of history, and a national greatness or littleness.
Like unto axe-men felling trees in a forest is the destructive hand of warfare. The land is depopulated of its finest timber, and that which will take a lifetime to replace.
Wholesale destruction reaches far beyond the actual crime of killing. It breaks the evolution of growth, retards or destroys the life-history of a species, and leaves, through the age it occurs in, an irreplaceable blank in the population and wealth of a country.
This is not the first war, nor has anyone in the present authority to state that it is the last. If war and the felling of our forests must be, it is well to cling stoutly to the old features of the race and cultivate, in place of the fallen giants, clean-limbed sturdy saplings of full-worthy quality to serve the generations of the future.
It will concern us greatly in the future to cultivate a race strong enough to endure the buffeting of great elements, and true and straight as the best of the race of the past. For the country will want a race that is fine-grained and sure-rooted, and fit to stand up against the stress of the many storms of a restless world’s brewing.
How little we are, we pawns of a universe: how far-reaching is war in the destruction of our plans! At the beginning of life it has picked us up in its whirlwind, from every stage of life, and left our poor ambitious castles in the air, tiny long-forgotten dust-heaps on the plain.
And yet we laugh and hide our sorrow, and go on, on our new-found task, our future now no farther ahead than we can see, and trusting in God that all will come right in the end.
We learn at the front and at home that nothing else matters, that nothing really counts in the greatness of a nation but clean, unshaken, sacrificing purpose, and ceaseless industry: worthless are all our little deceits and vanities, and greed of personal gain.
That nation will find religion and prosperity which holds on to the deeper lessons of war, long after war is over. To forget those lessons will be to sin against God and conscience, and the great silent grave-yard of our dead, who died that their nation might live.
NEED OF INDUSTRY