There is much to discourage in human history, - in the facts of human
life. The common man, after all the ages, is still very common. He is
ignorant, reckless, unjust, selfish, easily misled. All public affairs
bear the stamp of his weakness. Especially is this shown in the
prevalence of destructive strife. The boasted progress of civilization
is dissolved in the barbarism of war. Whether glory or conquest or
commercial greed be war's purpose, the ultimate result of war is death.
Its essential feature is the slaughter of the young, the brave, the
ambitious, the hopeful, leaving the weak, the sickly, the discouraged to
perpetuate the race. Thus all militant, nations become decadent ones.
Thus the glory of Rome, her conquests and her splendor of achievement,
left the Romans at home a nation of cowards, and such they are to this
day. For those who survive are not the sons of the Romans, but of the
slaves, scullions, the idlers and camp-followers whom the years of Roman
glory could not use and did not destroy. War blasts and withers all that
is worthy in the works of man.
That there seems no way out of this is the cause of the sullen despair
of so many scholars of Continental Europe. The millennium is not in
sight. It is farther away than fifty years ago. The future is narrowing
down and men do not care to forecast it. It is enough to grasp what we
may of the present. We hear "the ring of the hammer on the scaffold."
"Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.
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