War has blighted Life.
War has brought low our conception of the preciousness of human life as slavery brought low our conception of human liberty.
It has benumbed our growing sense of the nurture of life; and at a time when we were challenging Reichstag, Parliament, and Congress with the needlessness of infant mortality and child labor, it entrenches a million youths with cold and fever and impending death.
It has violated humanity.
It has thwarted the chance of our times toward the fulfilment of life, and scattered like burst shrapnel the hands of the sculptors and the violinists, the limbs of the hurdlers and swimmers, the sensitive muscles of the mechanics and the weavers, the throats of the singers and the interpreters, the eyes of the astronomers and the melters—every skilled and prescient part of the human body, every type of craft and competence of the human mind.
It has set back our promptings toward the conservation of life; and in a decade when England and France and Russia, Germany and Austria and Belgium, have been working out social insurance against the hazards of peace, it throws back upon the world an unnumbered company of the widowed and the fatherless, and of aged parents left bereft and destitute.
It has blocked our way toward the ascent of life, and in a century which has seen the beginnings of effort to upbuild the common stock, has cut off from parenthood the strong, the courageous and the high-spirited.
Its Injuries
It has in its development of armaments, pitted human flesh against machinery.
It has wrested the power of self-defense from the hands of free-men who wielded lance and sword and scythe, and has set them as machine-tenders to do the bidding of their masters.