Paramount in importance above everything else is the establishment and
maintenance of peace between nations. No remedies for disease, no rules
for healthy life will avail, if the arteries through which the
life-blood is pouring away remain open still or are only temporarily
closed and liable after a brief interval to burst out anew. The vitality
of the nation would be gone beyond recovery if another generation of its
best manhood were to be sacrificed and its materiall resources again
squandered to meet the necessities of a great war.

Every day that the War lasts forces on us more clearly the fact that
Science, not only natural science--physics and chemistry--but also the
scientific organisation of the State as an instrument of war, has so
developed the means of destruction as either to blot out humanity or to
leave the greater part of mankind in abject and bitter slavery to the
powers that can wield most effectively the instruments of death and of
torture, if war between the leading nations breaks out again after an
interval of seeming peace. How warfare has changed within living memory!
Five-and-twenty years ago the highest authority on naval construction
spoke with contempt of the submarine as a factor in war at sea. No one
then had solved the old world problem of aerial flight. Some of the most
distinguished men of science regarded the attempts which were then being
made as hopeless. It then seemed still to be a mere dream of poets.
Wireless telegraphy was only a matter of speculation, a thing which a
few only thought of as a possibility of the future. Man has indeed
plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge for his own destruction. What
may be the result of another quarter of a century of like advancement of
the knowledge of the means of spreading "death throughout the world and
bitter woe"? It may not be, as Dr. Murray Butler says, that the