It has battened on apathy, unintelligence and helplessness such as surrender the judgment and volition of nations into a few hands; and has nullified rights and securities, such as are of inestimable value to the people and formidable to tyrants only.
It has threatened the results of a hundred martyrdoms and revolutions, and put in jeopardy those free governments which make possible still newer social conquests.
It has crushed under iron heels the uprisings of civilization itself.
Its Evils
It has poisoned intelligence.
It has turned the towers of art and science into new Babels, so that our philosophers, and men of letters, our physicists and geographers, our economists and biologists and dramatists, speak in strange tongues, and to hate each other has become a holy thing among them.
It has made were-wolves of neighboring peoples, in the imaginations of each other.
It has put its stamp upon growing boys and girls, and taught them to hate other children who have chanced to be born on the other side of some man-made boundary.
It has massed and exploded the causes of strife, fostering religious antagonisms and racial hates, inbreeding with the ugliest strains of commercialism, perverting to its purposes the increase of over-dense populations and their natural yearning for new opportunities for enterprise and livelihood.