against each other, but the striving will not be carried on to an
accompaniment of slaughter and torture. There are keen forms of
competition which, so far from being painful, give positive pleasure to
those who engage in them; there are triumphs which satisfy the victor
without mortifying the vanquished; and, in spite of the indiscreet
writers who have called forth this Essay, I hold that such harmless
forms of competition will take the place of the brutal strife that adds
senselessly to the sum of human woe. Our race has outgrown so many forms
of brutality, so many deliberate changes have taken place in the course
of even two thousand years, that the final change which shall abolish
war is almost certain to come. We find that about one thousand nine
hundred years ago a polished gentleman like Julius Caesar gravely
congratulates himself on the fact that his troops destroyed in cold
blood forty thousand people--men, women, and children. No man in the
civilized world dare do such a deed now, even if he had the mind for the
carnage. The feeling with which we read Caesar's frigid recital measures
the arc of improvement through which we have passed. May the improvement
go on! We can continue to progress only through knowledge; if our
people--our women especially--are wantonly warlike, then our action will
be wantonly warlike; knowledge alone can save us from the guilt of
blood, and that knowledge I have tried to set forth briefly. By wondrous
ways does our Master work out His ends. Let us pray that He may hasten
the time when nation shall not rise up against nation, neither shall
they draw the sword any more.

_December, 1886._