It is well to note that they have used the word should instead of shall.
The greatest difficulty in teaching truth is to remove the bias of false learning; for a firm conviction, once established in the mind, gives the mind a fixed set in a certain direction. This is strongly exemplified by the fact that persons who have been proselyted to a certain religious creed can seldom be made to change their faith.
We are what our opinions are. Our opinion shapes our destiny to its own bent. In short, a man is absolutely at the mercy of his opinion.
We have very little to do, however, with the shaping of our own opinion. That is mostly shaped by others. We go to church to have our opinion bent, or its present bent stiffened. We attend a lecture and get a new kink put into our opinion; we converse with our friends, and they dent our opinion; we read books and newspapers, learn something, and are swerved in the direction of our learning, especially in the direction of public opinion. Always and always, while we think that we are shaping our own opinion, we are having it shaped by others.
The estimable ladies of the Woman's Peace Party are merely parading like sandwich men, disporting a legend written on a board by the man higher up, with whom they believe it is most creditable to agree.
At the present time, the false teachings of the peace-propagandists have so proselyted public opinion that every public speaker, aspiring to popular favor, finds it easy, even with a weakling voice and a halting speech, to get his audience with him, and to win a reputation for eloquence and wisdom by prating the bromidial spielings of the peace-propagandists.
A great many men and women in this country hold the same false opinion that the ladies of the Woman's Peace Party hold. Possibly something besides the humiliation of this country by war may lead them into the light of understanding. War, however, will do it, and by their able co-operation with the forces of the future enemies of the country, they are hastening the advent of that war.
If we were to disarm, as these ladies advise, war would come upon us with consternate suddenness. Then, when they saw the desolation and the waste; saw their homes in flames; when they saw innocent citizens clumped in open spaces and shot down with machine-guns; when they saw little children, lean as shadows, starving everywhere; when they encountered insult and maltreatment at every turn; then all their womanhood would revolt and rise up with an altered mind.
Like the light that descended from Heaven on Saul of Tarsus, the light of the truth would descend on those ladies through the smoke of their burning homes—that armed preparedness against such a dread eventuality as war is the supreme of virtue, and its neglect the worst of crimes.
By their help that war is very likely to come, and if it does come, we shall find them, as the women of England, ministering angels in the hospitals of the wounded. We shall find them at the recruiting stations, urging enlistment. We shall find them fitting out their sons, husbands, and brothers for the front. We shall find them, as in England, training in the use of arms as a last emergency reserve. We shall find them, as in England, doing police duty, that the city guardians may go to the front. As the women of Carthage cut the hair from their heads to make bow-strings, so these very women of the Peace Party, as the women of England are doing, as the women of Germany are doing, will sacrifice their jewelry, and all their most precious possessions, to supply the sinews of war.