as that at Omdurman, as if it were, as a matter of course, the divinely appointed way to civilize the world.

Admiral Schley does not have all the heroism of the Schley family. Miss Jessie Schley, his cousin (niece?) who went to Madrid in July on a mission of peace in behalf of the Woman's International Peace League, is, in our judgment, the braver "man" of the two. She was turned away by the Queen Regent and Premier Sagasta without a hearing, and probably supposed before she went that she would be. Her mission was

attended with the danger that being an American, though representing a French peace society, she would be treated. with disrespect if not actual violence at the hands of the Spaniards. But Jessie went on her mission of mercy into the enemy's country with the same courage and eagerness with which Admiral Schley went after Cervera's flying ships at Santiago. Besides this, the peace girl went to Madrid against the wishes of her father, who felt greatly grieved lest his daughter should bring reproach upon the name of the Admiral. Jessie is evidently a young woman of pure grit, and does not see why she may not win true fame in trying to save life rather than in killing and destroying. Since the the war closed Miss Schley has gone to Havana on relief work and has met the great Blanco himself. Commend us to this young lady, who has caught sight of the dignity and glory of the great movement which is by and by to do away with war and all its inhumanities. She will be heard from if she lives, and some day her name will probably be enrolled on that list of noble benefactors-Worcester, Ladd, Burritt, Allen, Richard, Pratt, Passy, von Suttner, Barton et al.-which will live long after men have ceased to be lionized because of the bloody deeds of war. much as saving men's lives is greater than destroying them, so much is Jessie Schley's heroism and service to humanity greater than that of her fighting relative. Who shall say that her going to Madrid accomplished nothing?

As

The Women's International Disarmament League, founded at Paris two years and a half ago, is carrying on a vigorous propaganda. Thousands of women all over the world are connecting themselves with the League. Many prominent persons are allowing it the use of their names as honorary members. A number of the Paris papers have noticed in long articles the work of the League. A copy of "La Jeune Fille," just come to our table, devotes four pages to an extended editorial discussion of the organization and work of the League. The editor sets forth the entire incompatibility of warfare with the principles and spirit of modern civilization, and, developing the idea of Jules Simon, declares that it is within the power of women to put an end to the whole barbaric business. "Woman never does anything, good

or bad, by halves. Therefore over the beautiful and noble cause which she has undertaken to defend hovers a ray of hope which will doubtless become at some distant time a radiant sun of triumph."

George T. Angell, in Our Dumb Animals, has the following vigorous characterization of Theodore Roosevelt. "There can be no doubt that Theodore Roosevelt with his ranch history, his warning to Yale students to beware of philanthropists, his praise of college foot-ball fights, and his regiment of cow-punchers and shooters with fighting qualities and reputations very similar to his own, has become a prominent figure in his political party. But to our mind, when compared with Washington, Lincoln, Grant and Sherman who said (what will go down through all history) "War is Hell," he seems only an honest bulldog, with very confused ideas of civilization, humanity and true patriotism, and very different from those noble Saint Bernards whose object is to save life, not to destroy it."

If it is to be remembered to Roosevelt's credit that he sent the message to Washington which aroused the nation to the horrible plight of the soldiers, are we to forget that he was one of the foremost of those whose crime it is to have rushed the nation into a needless and wicked war and brought on this horrible state of affairs? When Mr. Roosevelt, returned from the dreadful scenes about Santiago, before he had gotten off the boat, he shouted in high glee to his friends on the dock, "Oh, we had a bully fight!" And this is the man whom it is proposed to make governor of the great State of New York, and, worse still, who is now looked upon by many as the typical, ideal American! O tempora! O mores!

Mr. Samuel L. Hartman of Lancaster, Pa., contributes an article to the New Era of that city, in which he expresses doubt as to the justification of the severe charges of incompetency and neglect on the part of the war department in the conduct of the recent war. The sufferings of the soldiers he thinks may have occurred under the circumstances without the government necessarily being culpable. At any rate, he thinks the experience of the soldiers not worse than in the early stages of the Civil War. He quotes as follows Mary A. Livermore's description of the sufferings of the wounded during and after the three days fighting at Fort Donelson :

"But few of the wounded could be removed from the field while the fight lasted. There they lay, some two and three nights and days, uncared for, many freezing to death. Hundreds who fell in the beginning of the battle, where the ground was soft and muddy, were frozen into the earth, and it was necessary to cut them out of the ground when attention could be given them. In this deplorable plight they were taken to extemporized and unready hospitals, to which their removal was horrible torture, for the few ambulances and the wagons and carts impressed into service were of the rudest construction and generally lacked springs. In these the poor fellows

were jolted and pitched down the precipitous heights, where they had lain two or three days and nights, encased in their bloody and frozen uniforms. Any convenient shed, barn, house or church received them. They were laid on the bare floor, their wounds undressed, their frozen clothing unchanged, faint with loss of blood and extreme bodily anguish. Hundreds died miserably before relief came to them. The surgeons of the Government were few in number, and its medical supplies utterly inadequate to the occasion."

The closing up of the war is not so speedy a process as getting into it was. The peace protocol has been accepted by the Spanish Senate and Chamber of Deputies after stormy sessions in both bodies, and the acceptance approved by the Queen Regent. The peace commissioners have already arrived in Paris where the treaty of peace is to be drawn. This will take the month of October at least. The evacuation of Porto Rico and Cuba has begun, but it is likely to take several months to get all the one hundred thousand Spanish soldiers out of Cuba. The evacuation commissioners are not having a smooth time. Then the island is to be occupied by posts of United States troops until a Cuban government is set up. The first steps have already been taken for the gathering of a Cuban Convention for drafting a constitution. The United States volunteer army, what of it is left alive, is being mustered out, except so much as is needed to garrison "our new possessions." This garrison duty will require the services of about one hundred thousand men for some time. There is great dissatisfaction among many of the men at being retained for garrison duty when they volunteered only for the war against Spain. The Philippine problem is as big as ever. The peace commissioners are understood to have gone to Paris instructed to retain the island of Luzon. Spain's Commissioners it is reported will stand for the retention by Spain of the whole group. Meantime Aguinaldo and his followers, who are in possession of much of the Philippines outside of Manila, seem strongly determined to have a native independent government for the whole group. More regiments of soldiers have been sent to General Merritt, and still more are to be stationed at Honoluiu, against any need which may arise. The country has grown sick enough of the war, but the fruits of it-a larger army, growing taxes, perplexities and anxieties present and to come-it is compelled to gather. If the government insists on holding any part of the Philippines, the evil fruits will continue to ripen for many years to come.

Brevities.

The London Peace Society has collected and published in a pamphlet of twenty pages some of the most conspicuous utterances of Mr. Gladstone on peace and war. Copies may be procured for five cents of the American Peace Society.

George Jacob Holycake of England says that he was the first person to use the word "jingo," which he did on March 13, 1878, in a letter to the London Daily News. The "animal" existed, however, before Mr. Holycake named him.

W. D. Howells says: "I have come to see life, not as the chase of a forever impossible personal happiness, but as a greed for endeavor toward the happiness of the whole human family. There is no other success."

Queen Wilhelmina of Holland, who has just reached her eighteenth year, was crowned at Amsterdam on the sixth of September amid great rejoicings on the part of her subjects, "a nation small in numbers, but great in virtue of its strength of character," as she said in her address on taking the throne.

Pastor Otto Umfrid, of Stuttgart, Germany, whose activity in the peace cause knows no rest, has published a German People's Calendar, which he calls a Messenger of Peace. It is illustrated, and contains interesting and instructive matter on the subject of Peace.

Count Leo Tolstoï's seventieth birthday was celebrated in New York on the 8th of September by a dinner at the St. Denis Hotel. Representative literary men of New York and vicinity were present. A cablegram was sent to Tolstoï. In a letter of regret W. D. Howells wrote that Tolstoï's greatest word is " peace."

The United States has now five battleships in service. Five more are in process of construction. Contracts for three more, the Maine, the Missouri and the Ohio, have just been awarded. The new ships will cost about three millions each. Bids have also been accepted for building twenty-eight new torpedo-boats and torpedo destroyers.

The American Social Science Association which met at Saratoga the first week in September sent, "unanimously and enthusiastically," the following cablegram to the Czar of Russia: "The American Social Science Association unanimously hails the lofty purpose of your overture for a better understanding among nations and for better economic conditions for their peoples, and confides in its eventual success."

The fourteenth International Conference of the Young Men's Christian Association was held at Basel, Switzerland, beginning on July 6th. The Y. M. C. A. has now half a million members, in forty-four nations. In December last the British war-office made a return of all the veterans in the work-houses of England, and the number was 8,133.

Li Hung Chang has been dismissed from his post. of honor as a member of the Governing Council of China. This action is interpreted to mean the growth of British and the decline of Russian influence at the Chinese Court. Li has, since his visit to Europe, used his great influence in behalf of Russia.

Mr. Fearing-Gill of Paris has formed a FrancoAmerican Society, somewhat like the Anglo-American League in England, whose purpose it is to promote closer union between France and the United States.

Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, British Colonial Minister, with Mrs. Chamberlain has been visiting in this country at the home of his father-in-law Mr. Endicott, at Danvers, Mass. An informal reception was given Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain by the Danvers Historical Society on September 22. In the course of some remarks Mr. Chamberlain expressed himself as not very sanguine about a federation of the world, but as certain that an Anglo-Saxon federation is coming.

Dr. William A. P. Martin, who went from this country to China as a missionary forty years ago, and was for nearly thirty years president of the Pekin University, has just been appointed president of the recently established Imperial University of China. Dr. Martin is a strong peace man. He attended the Arbitration Conference held at Lake Mohonk in June, 1896.

The Baroness von Suttner, in an interesting article on the Czar's Peace Manifesto, in Die Zeit of Vienna, calls attention to the fact that the idea of peace has had several strong champions in Russia, notably Professors Besobrasow, Kapustin and von Martens at the University of St. Petersburg, Count Kamarowski at the University of Moscow and the eminent sociologist Novicow of Odessa.

The (Hicksite) Friends' Union for Philanthropic Labor presented, through a deputation of five of its members, on the 10th of September a memorial to President McKinley urging that he do all in his power, in the settlement of the problems left by the recent war, to keep the nation from entering upon a militaristic policy. The President received the deputation with great courtesy and expressed his conviction that "peace is the proper condition of nations," and that the increase of the standing army is to be deprecated," except for police purposes in the newly acquired islands.

Correspondence.

EDITOR ADVOCATE OF PEACE:

Dear Sir and Brother: I have been all my life instinctively or intuitively opposed to war, and took your excellent paper, the ADVOCATE OF PEACE, for a number of years, but I got out of the way of it about fifteen years ago and have not taken it since until my brother, W. L. Barnes of Ind., subscribed for and had it sent to me recently. I am pleased to see the improvement in its make-up since I took it. If the cause of peace has grown commensurately, it will soon be a power in the world. I have always worked for peace in church, in the I. O. O. F. Hall and through the local press, and am ashamed that I have not taken the ADVOCATE.

My intuitive aversion to war I have found to be logically right, and if right, I am logically led to oppose all coërcive government of man by man as my political ideal. I find that all government is based on war as implied. I am forced to the conclusion that absolute freedom of every individual to do as he wills, limited only by the like equal freedom of every other person, is right. I believe that whatever is right, is expedient, however such a state

ment may at first appear. I believe in doing to others as I would they should do to me, and doing not to others as I would not they should do to me. I am averse to being governed-how then can I govern others directly or indirectly? How can I vote for a law, unless it would displace other laws? One tax (on land values), one money (of paper), one Brotherhood of the race, free trade, free land and free men, is my political platform, so long as I vote at all. Free trade would eliminate much law and many officers. A single tax, on land values, would also eliminate many laws and officers.

I find, as I hope many other peace men have found, that laws imply obedience-disobedience implies a penalty-coërcion-as behind every command is hid in ambush, "if you don't, I'll make you." Obedience implies superiority and inferiority, both incompatible with equity. I believe with Jefferson, "That people that is least governed is best governed ;" and in "equal rights to all and special privileges to none." And with Spencer, who said, "The freest government is only the least objectionable government;" "Coercion can by no means be made equitable;" "The rule of many by the few we call tyranny-the rule of the few by the many is tyranny alsoonly of a less intense kind." Burke said in his "Free Society," "In vain you tell me that government is good and that I complain of its abuse. The thing, the thing itself is the abuse." W. E. Channing said, "Social order is better preserved by liberty than by restraint. Liberty would prove the best peace officer. The social order of lice, bears loud witness to this truth." New England without a soldier and almost without a po

Government is wrong.

But if it is right, war is right. War I know is wrong, therefore government must be wrong. What right has one strong man or many men to govern me to compel me to go to war, to murder my fellow-man, or to compel me to pay taxes to support men in war, and after their return as a pension? War is just as repugnant to me if waged by a majority of Americans as if waged by the Czar of Russia or the King of Spain. What difference does it make to me whether governed by one or a million men against my will? In both cases, might makes right.

I am just sixty-three years of age, and never owned a gun, never killed anything with a gun, never went to law, never asked for an office, never commanded in my family. I have lived almost a purely "anarchistic" life amid hindering environments and have no regrets for it, but, on the contrary, it is a source of great satisfaction, in my declining years, to know that I have lived an altruistic, "anarchistic," Christian life. I firmly believe from observation and experience that if all coërcion was abandoned, that mutual communism would immediately obtain. "Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness." "Government like dress is the badge of our lost innocence." "Society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government." So said Thomas Paine in his "Rights of Man."

War is a penalty-not only to the enemy, but to our own soldiers. Else why do soldiers sink their individuality, their independent manhood, and become an automaton? A soldier needs not and is not allowed to know any more than to obey a command. His reason is stultified. He is precisely in the condition of a convict in state penal institutions. All subjects of a government

The late war with Spain was worked up with the unspontaneity of a labored drama. It was not called for by the people, was earnestly opposed by disinterested thinkers who had the public ear, and the aversion of the evidently sincere President and Secretary of the Navy gave hopes of a peaceful settlement.

A remarkable series of fortuitous events strengthened the hands of the yellow journals and the Jingoes in Congress, beginning with the theft of the Spanish minister's private letter from the mails for publication, the still unexplained explosion which destroyed the Maine, and the carefully worked up speech of Senator Proctor, ostensibly in behalf of the starving reconcentrados who were soon to rue the Senator's friendship. All contributed to fire the heart of the nation and force the unprepared administration to instant war.

Like the Franco-Prussian War, initiated by a falsehood, our hostilities with Spain were hurried regardless of truth or national honor. In the light of to-day's knowledge of the Cuban insurrection and real character of the insurgents, of the eagerness of Spain to avoid fighting by generous concessions, of the brutal and blind delcaration of war by Congress regardless of preparation or season, the verdict of history must pronounce the inception of the struggle to be without justification.

It is the fashion to deprecate war in time of peace. Then the church dwells on the Beatitudes and especially blesses the peacemakers. The moralist quotes with approval General Sherman's dictum that "War is Hell," and Lowell's assertion that it is "murder." The economist demonstrates its wastefulness and the consequent increase of tax burdens, while the sociologist explains the direct relation between militarism and the poverty of the masses.

But the conspirators prevail. The reckless and noisy minority gains control of Congressmen by arts destructive to popular government, with no appeal to the suffrages of the people on a subject of gravest moment to the republic. The shock of arms is precipitated, and patriotism and the flag invoked to enforce support of the iniquity.

The game succeeds. The ministers of the church, with few exceptions, who zealously begged the President to avert war, experience a new baptism and proclaim the conflict a holy one.

"In religion

What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it, and approve it with a text
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament!"

The moralist discovers and enlarges upon the ethics of

war, however silent he may be on the ethics of hell, which he so recently declared a synonym. It ceases to be murder when it carries the endorsing letters U. S. A. The economist can be pliant too. He now figures how small per capita the added burdens will be and magnifies the wealth and financial ability of seventy millions of Americans. The social student hastens to forget his objects of misery in his haste to manufacture new ones by the aid of shot and shell. The virtues of moral courage are decried and brute valor is exalted.

Then all the hidden atheism of a nation is brazenly revealed. An appeal to abstract principle is responded to with denial or ridicule. What is called " necessity" is held to override the moral law. Large and vague expressions become current coin. "Manifest destiny," "The logic of events," "Our duty to other nations," "We must not shirk responsibilities laid upon us," "The Lord's will must be accepted and we are not justified in declining his leading," a mixture of excuses for violating the Decalogue and blasphemy which vainly attempt to cloak a crime. Hypocrisy, the tribute which vice is said to pay to virtue, characterizes all these hollow pretences of altruism.

Behold a country that has had its century of dishonor with the Indians and its infamy with the negro, prating of its new-found duty to swarms of people of whose nature and needs it knows nothing! Admire the assurance of a people which shuts its doors against foreign commerce proclaiming the necessity of conquest for the sake of trade! Note the anxiety of a nation that bars out the Chinese, hurrying to annex whole populations of Asiatics! Think of a republic which jealously warns off foreign nations from the American continent, now claiming the right to hold dominion in the Philippines because Admiral Dewey destroyed a Spanish fleet in the harbor of Manila! What a spectacle is presented by a democracy, perplexed at its own miscarriage of self-government, undertaking with jaunty confidence to govern hordes of peoples in the tropics, alien in manners, traditions and habits to all that Americans hold dear!

To enter upon such a career as our Jingoes picture, we must renounce the principles which have made the country great. Imperial rule abroad necessitates imperial rule at home. No nation can have adjustable ethics, applicable alike to freedom and to the government of subjugated races. If it is right to deny suffrage to the governed people in the Sandwich Islands, it will not be long before, under the plea of necessity, suffrage in the United States will be curtailed and the right of the governed to choose their representatives denied. Already the Supreme Court, feeling the trend of imperial ideas, decides that the crime of Mississippi in disfranchising its citizens under false pretences is constitutional, thus disarming the criticism that we are defrauding our new Hawaiian fellowcitizens of their right to the ballot.

The war itself has settled no principles. They always remain to be settled by reason. Shooting men never yet converted them to right thinking. Our young men and the conscripted sons of Spanish mothers have been trying to blow each other out of existence. We ask, as Carlyle asked, when Englishmen and Frenchmen fought, "Had these men any quarrel?" and we adopt his reply: "Busy as the devil is, not the smallest. They lived tar enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so

wide a universe there was even, unconsciously, by commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! Their governors had fallen out, and instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot."

Let those who hold that the Civil War settled the right of the black men in this country to equal civil and political liberty, test the Southern atmosphere on the race question. Indeed, a stranger might infer that the South triumphed, so general has been the acquiescence of the North in the social and political fettering of the blacks by the shot-gun and State legislation.

Moreover, the present aggravated ills of the country are the direct legacy of the Civil War. Without it the protective tariff would long since have given way to the English system of revenue, towards which it was rapidly tending. The greenback and silver controversies would never have been born. The plutocracy which has assumed such alarming proportions had its genesis in army contracts, inflated prices and special privileges so easily obtained unnoticed amid the clash of arms.

When one assumes that the Revolutionary and the Civil wars were good ones, because certain benefits resulted, the question is begged. It is so easy to point to the seen and ignore the unseen. Moncure D. Conway has well said that without the Revolution this country would inevitably have obtained full political freedom without bloodshed. To-day, if one is asked where the best constitutional government exists, where public honor is most conspicuous, life securest, and justice most certain, the country of George the Third suggests itself before that of George Washington.

Nor can human wisdom determine, if the sufferings of four million bondmen were put in one scale and the curses entailed by the war which freed them in another, which scale would kick the beam. By the necessity of the close contact of the North and South the active principles of liberty would have been in time sure to eradicate the blot of slavery by a natural law, and what is settled by reason and conscience, or by economic necessity, leaves no devil's brood behind it. 66 Nothing can be settled that is not settled right," said Charles Sumner, and legalized murder makes no fixed solution. Always the debate must be reopened. "War fails, try peace; put up the useless sword," wrote Whittier, whose words are full of light and truth.

The abolitionists, early imbued with the spirit of nonresistance, declared throughout thei: agitation their purpose never to encourage the use of carnal weapons for the destruction of slavery. The power of truth through the spoken word they believed to be more potent than all the armies and navies of the globe. So Franklin's sentiment that "there never was a good war or a bad peace" has lived and will live by reason of its essential verity.

The

Because, in spite of war, civilization has sometimes gone forward on the powder cart, as Lowell said, it is no excuse for or justification of the drastic means. conflagration of a great city is an apparent benefit to workmen who are called to help in its rebuilding. The fact that the regenerated city surpasses the old is still no excuse for kindling the fire, although there are doubtless many clergymen who could find a text for the ethics of incendiarism if the popular sentiment demanded it. Good effects are pretty sure to follow from the reforms necessitated by a pestilential scourge, but to glorify the

cholera or the plague in consequence, as we glorify war, would be ridiculous, even though the bravery of nurses often exceeds the valor of the soldiers. Philosophically, of course, we have to recognize that war results from violating moral law, just as disease follows a disregard of sanitary laws, but obedience to the law and not war or disease is the single remedy and the price that cannot be evaded.

What influence can an association like this have upon the great question of peace? In the eyes of the American people, generally, this is an assembly of well-meaning but sentimental cranks, a crank being a person who is deluded enough to think that a principle is of most value when its application is needed. The majority of mankind pronounce that the very time for its absolute suspension.

Much more respectable is it to have the facility of changing front quickly. The president of a great university is in evidence. In time of peace he could affirm that "Jingoism was a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude. It meant bully and brute, and was foreign to American policy. American institutions should teach just the opposite doctrine-a doctrine that should be taught in the schools, through the periodicals and press of the country. We did not desire to carry to the people of the earth liberty by force of arms, but by teaching them the blessings of peace, liberty and self-government." When Jingoism prevailed and war began, from the same lips came the declaration that "the educated youth who loves his country does not stop to consider for what precise cause his country has gone to war," but goes in the spirit "with which a lover casts a rose at the feet of his mistress.' No wonder that the thought of Charles Sumner was a disturbing one to the speaker, and prompted his characterization of the argument of that noble address on "The True Grandeur of Nations" as "vicious.''

In the anxious days preceding the declaration of war with Spain, a well-known publicist protested that it would be a great mistake," and that when Spain was trying to satisfy us we forced war upon her; that while we are annexing to our body politic an open sore, we are making ourselves responsible for a population wholly unfit for the conditions of American life." The declaration of war came almost before the ink was dry, yet the same pen was facile enough to write an adjuration that "we give support to the war, not merely by passive acquiescence, but by throwing our hearts and hopes into the struggle-by aiding, enduring, wishing, praying for the success of the United States against Spain."

But we, who profess at all times to abhor war, believing that no change in circumstances can ever change the law of God, who fail to see why burning words of truth on April 20 were not true on April 21, because unprincipled demagogues at Washington consummated a nefarious scheme, can take no cognizance of these extenuating pleas for self-stultification. It is asserted that while we did not approve the entrance to an evil course, once being started on it we are bound to pursue it with vigor. This philosophy is calculated to sap the foundations of self-government. Men who assert this practically endorse the infamous doctrine, "Our country right or wrong."

The moralist cannot thus play fast and loose with sacred principles. Though one protest against and disapprove of a proposed robbery, although the plunder be promised to charity or foreign missions, yet to consent to it because