The sense of numbers!”
For our Cause is the Cause of Right and Justice, Freedom and Civilisation. We are not out for personal gain, either in gold or territory. We have enough of both and to spare. We endure “the time of our lives,” and its wanton and wicked slaughter of the innocent, because we are fighting for all Humanity that it may never be so savagely tortured again. We are fighting for a surer, more impregnable Civilisation—one that cannot be pushed back a thousand years by the ferocious and blind stupidity of any temporary autocrat. Is it possible that there can be people of even average intelligence in the States and elsewhere that do not entirely understand this? The British intervention in the dastardly attack of Germany on Belgium and France was to protect and defend unoffending and peaceable peoples, and in this defence of others we have found Ourselves. We were beginning to lose ourselves among the dreary verbosities of theorists and agnostics and atheists and all the swarm of destructive insects which accompany a setting-in of decadence; we have discovered once again our true spirit, our old and valiant mettle, our pride and love of country, and all the mighty heart of resolution which has made the British Empire what it is. And we cannot but feel that the young and strong heart of America beats in tune with our own—that, despite financial interests and pro-German intrigues, Right and Justice prevail with the men and women of the United States as with the men and women of this “little isle set in a silver sea”—and that they very well know that they, too, must benefit by the clearance from the world of a monstrous Militarism whose ethics are opposed to every principle of Christian truth and human equity. A great, strong Faith is at the back of us all—a Faith which believes in the utmost triumph of Good over Evil—and this it is which inspires the women of Great Britain and gives them strength to part with their nearest and dearest, so that they endure “the time of their lives” without flinching, knowing that they who endure to the end shall be saved!
THE WORLD’S GREATEST NEED
AN APPEAL TO THE SANITY OF GOVERNMENTS ’Tis a mad world, my masters.—J. Taylor
What is the most urgent need of the world? What would stop war and ensure peace? What would push forward all that is highest and best in our civilisation, and cause men and women to realise that they are not created to brutalise, degrade, and destroy each other in sordid struggles for place and power, but that their purpose in living at all is to educate and uplift each other to noble aims and ends? The great Need stares us in the face at every point of social law and political government; it clamours in our ears and pushes its problem to the front of every question. What is it the world demands in every form of policy, legislation, and statesmanship? A simple thing—one would imagine it to be a natural thing—yet almost undiscoverable in any period of history—Sanity! Sanity, which means health of both brain and body; Sanity which recognises self only as a portion of the greater Whole; Sanity which knows instinctively that mankind must obey the laws of God or else suffer extinction; Sanity, which combines with reason and judgment a comprehensive sympathy for every unit of the human race in its struggle upward from the brute period to the highest realisation of intellectual and spiritual worth.
Judged from this point of view one may doubt, when reading history from its known or traditional beginnings, whether Man, taken in bulk, has ever been entirely sane. Something of the freak, the monster, or the only half human, seems to taint his blood, displaying itself in follies and excesses of the most violent or pitiful nature, which, when dispassionately narrated in the chronicles of centuries, show him to be a crank or a fool at the very time when wisdom might most be expected of him. Some few individuals, notable examples to the race, have stood out in splendid isolation as sane and self-sacrificing teachers and helpers of humanity; but, in the aggregate, from the very beginnings of what we are pleased to call “progress” down to the present day, the desire to trample upon each other and wallow in blood and slaughter seems to prevail with more force over the minds of men than the clearest arguments of reason. Nevertheless this desire is an insane impulse, and if we had any true perception of the laws of right and wrong, we should check it in its very first beginnings. Any man, any body of men, seeking to violate the peace and progress of the world should be dealt with by combined international forces of the Law and Medicine, not by armies—and should either be shot like mad dogs as incurable and dangerous, or imprisoned for life in asylums for the criminally insane. No one man or group of men can be considered in sound mental condition if their actions imperil the existence of their fellow-creatures.
Certain natural laws have been discovered, and proved by physiologists who make the subject their study, as to persons who may marry, and those for whom, through consanguinity or inherited disease, marriage is nothing less than a crime. In the “arranged” unions of royal houses these laws have been deliberately set aside with deplorable results. The mad dog of Europe, William of Hohenzollern, is the diseased product of several royal intermarriages, where human convenience and popular complaisance ignored the divine natural law; and as this law is one which prevails “unto the third and fourth generation” we have now a Monster-Abortion of conscienceless cruelty raging loose in the world, who ought to have been smothered in his cradle. There are plain rules of health and sanity which are for ever being disobeyed by civil and social convention; but because they are so disobeyed, we must not flatter ourselves that they do not recoil in vengeance upon the rebels. The Designer of this wonderful and complex universe is proved to be a vastly Mathematical Intelligence; everything great or small, down to a grain of dust, is balanced to the nicety of a hair’s breadth, and do what we will or may, we cannot alter the balance. Our futile efforts in such directions merely display insanity, of the type of an uncontrolled temper in a child which screams itself hoarse because it cannot reach fruit on a tree too high for it to climb. If, therefore, we would have sane peoples, with sane rulers to govern them, we should see to it that they are born and bred sanely, according to the laws of health and mentality which have existed among the “lower” animal creation since the foundation of the world. Every crime is an insane impulse. No healthily organised brain could contemplate the murder of a single individual, much less the wholesale slaughter of millions.
The Almighty has for ever had one gate of Heaven set ajar for humanity to peer within and push open a little wider with each succeeding generation—a gate opening to that fair pleasaunce of wisdom and beauty which we call Science. A great logician has written “The basis of all science is the immutability of the laws of nature.” Would that we remembered that “immutability” more often! Yet, while sane pioneers in medicine and surgery are patiently and devoutly following as best they can these complex but beneficent “laws of nature” for the saving of human life and the healing of human injuries, the insane section of the community have been and are still employing all their distorted energies of brain and hand in fiendish ingenuities of invention for weapons of war that shall destroy human life more quickly than it can be saved. And while thus engaged, other insane persons shout in the press and the market place wild warnings about “declining birth-rate,” reproaching unhappy women for their lack of duty in not producing sons for some future slaughter! The Car of Juggernaut was scarcely worse than this! To appeal for a multitude of births during the making of a multitude of guns, which mow down the flower of young manhood like corn, is an insult to bereaved mothers, making their vocation appear less valuable than that of the beasts of the field. For why should they bring forth and rear sons, only that they may go to their deaths at the bidding of this or that Government? The very proposition is an exhibition of stark staring lunacy, combined with a brutish lust of degradation and reckless destructiveness which could only emanate from deficient mental organisms.