# Popular Science Monthly/Volume 59/June 1901/The Blood of the Nation II

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* THE BLOOD OF THE NATION.
A STUDY OF THE DECAY OF RACES THROUGH THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT.—II. IN WAR.
By DAVID STARR JORDAN,
PRESIDENT OF LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY.
XXV. Not long ago I visited the town of Novara, in northern Italy. There, in a wheatfield, the farmers have plowed up skulls of men till they have piled up a pyramid ten or twelve feet high. Over this pyramid some one has built a canopy to keep off the rain. These were the skulls of young men of Savoy, Sardinia and Austria—men of eighteen to thirty-five years of age, without physical blemish so far as may be, peasants from the farms and workmen from the shops, who met at Novara to kill each other over a matter in which they had very little concern. Should the Prince of Savoy sit on his unstable throne or yield it to some one else, this was the question. It matters not the decision. History doubtless records it, as she does many matters of less moment. But this fact concerns us—here in thousands they died. Farther on. Frenchmen, Austrians and Italians fell together at Magenta, in the same cause. You know the color that we call Magenta, the hue of the blood that flowed out under the olive trees. Go over Italy as you will, there is scarcely a spot not crimsoned by the blood of France, scarcely a railway station without its pile of French skulls. You can trace them across to Egypt, to the foot of the Pyramids. You will find them in Germany—at Jena and Leipzig, at Lützen and Bautzen and Austerlitz. You will find them in Russia, at Moscow; in Belgium, at Waterloo. 'A boy can stop a bullet, as well as a man,' said Napoleon; and with the rest are the skulls and bones of boys, 'ere evening to be trodden like the grass.' 'Born to be food for powder' was the grim epigram of the day, summing up the life of the French peasant. Read the dreary record of the glory of France, the slaughter at Waterloo, the wretched failure of Moscow, the miserable deeds of Sedan, the waste of Algiers, the poison of Madagascar, the crimes of Indo-China, the hideous results of barrack vice and its entail of disease and sterility, and you will understand the 'Man with the Hoe.' The man who is left, the man whom glory cannot use, becomes the father of the future men of France. As the long-horn cattle reappear in a neglected or abused herd of Durhams, so comes forth the aboriginal man, 'the man of the hoe,' in a wasted race of men.
​XXVI. A recent French cartoon pictures the peasant of a hundred years ago plowing in a field, a gilded marquis on his back, tapping his gilded snuff-box. Another cartoon shows the French peasant of to-day, still at the plow. On his back is an armed soldier who should be at another plow, while on the back of the soldier rides the second burden of Shylock the money-lender, more cruel and more heavy even than the dainty marquis of the old régime. So long as war remains, the burden of France cannot be shifted.
XXVII. In the loss of war we count not alone the man who falls or whose life is tainted with disease. There is more than one in the man's life. The bullet that pierces his heart goes to the heart of at least one other. For each soldier has a sweetheart, and the beat of these die, too—so far as the race is concerned—if they remain single for his sake.
In the old Scottish ballad of the 'Flower of the Forest' this thought is set forth:
"I've heard the lilting at each ewe-milking Lassies a-lilting before the dawn of day. But now they are moaning, on ilka green loaning, For the 'Flower of the Forest' is a' wed away."
Ruskin once said that 'War is the foundation of all high virtues and faculties of men.' As well might the maker of phrases say that fire is the builder of the forest, for only in the flame of destruction do we realize the warmth and strength that lie in the heart of oak. Another writer, Hardwick, declares that 'War is essential to the life of a nation; war strengthens a nation morally, mentally and physically.' Such statements as these set all history at defiance. War can only waste and corrupt. 'All war is bad,' says Benjamin Franklin, 'some only worse than others.' 'War has its origin in the evil passions of men,' and even when unavoidable or righteous, its effects are most forlorn. The final effect of each strife for empire has been the degradation or extinction of the nation which led in the struggle.
XXIX. Greece died because the men who made her glory had all passed away and left none of their kin, and therefore none of their kind. 'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more,' for the Greek of today, for the most part, never came from the loins of Leonidas or Miltiades. He is the son of the stable-boys and scullions and slaves of the day of her glory, those of whom imperial Greece could make no use in her conquest of Asia. "Most of the old Greek race," says Mr. W. H. Ireland, has been swept away, and the country is now inhabited by persons of Slavonic descent. Indeed, there is strong ground for the statement that there was more of the old heroic blood of Hellas in the Turkish army of Edhem Pasha than in the soldiers of King George, who fled before them three years ago." King George himself is only ​an alien placed on the Grecian throne to suit the convenience of the outside powers, which to the ancient Greeks were merely factions of barbarians. In the late war some poet, addressing the spirit of ancient Greece, appealed to her
"Of all thy thousands grant us three To make a new Thermopylæ."
But there were not even three—not even one—'to make another Marathon,' and the Turkish troops swept over the historic country with no other hindrance than the effortless deprecation of Christendom.
XXX. Why did Rome fall? It was not because untrained hordes were stronger than disciplined legions. It was not that she grew proud, luxurious, corrupt, and thereby gained a legacy of physical weakness. We read of her wealth, her extravagance, her indolence and vice, but all this caused only the downfall of the enervated, the vicious and the indolent. The Roman legions did not riot in wealth. The Roman generals were not all entangled in the wiles of Cleopatra.
XXXI. 'The Roman Empire,' says Seeley, 'perished for want of men.' You will find this fact on the pages of every history, though few have pointed out war as the final and necessary cause of the Roman downfall. In his recent noble history of the 'Downfall of the Ancient World' ('Der Untergang der Antiken Welt,' 1897), Prof. Otto Seeck, of Greifeswald, makes this fact very apparent. The cause of the fall of Rome is found in the 'Extinction of the Best' ('Die Ausrottung der Besten'), and all that remains to the historian is to give the details of this extermination. He says 'In Greece a wealth of spiritual power went down in the suicidal wars.' In Rome "Marius and Cinna slew the aristocrats by hundreds and thousands. Sulla destroyed no less thoroughly the democrats, and whatever of noble blood survived fell as an offering to the proscription of the triumvirate." "The Romans had less of spontaneous power to lose than the Greeks, and so desolation came to them all the sooner. He who was bold enough to rise politically was almost without exception thrown to the ground. Only cowards remained, and from their brood came forward the new generations. Cowardice showed itself in lack of originality and slavish following of masters and traditions." Had the Romans been still alive, the Romans of the old republic, neither inside nor outside forces could have worked the fall of Rome. But the true Romans passed away early. Even Cæsar notes the 'dire scarcity of men.' "δεινήυ ὄλιγανθροπίαν.") Still there were always men in plenty, such as they were. Of this there is abundant testimony. Slaves and camp followers were always in evidence. It was the men of strength and ​character, 'the small farmers,' the 'hardy dwellers on the flanks of the Apennines,' who were gone.
"The period of the Antonines was a period of sterility and barrenness. The human harvest was bad." Augustus offered bounties on marriage until 'Celibacy became the most comfortable and most expensive condition of life.' "Marriage," says Metellus, "is a duty which, however painful, every citizen ought manfully to discharge."
"The mainspring of the Roman army," says Hodgkin, "for centuries had been the patient strength and courage, capacity for enduring hardships, instinctive submission to military discipline of the population which lined the ranges of the Apennines."
Berry states that an "effect of the wars was that the ranks of the small farmers were decimated, while the number of slaves who did not serve in the army multiplied." Thus 'Vir gave place to Homo,' real men to mere human beings.
With the failure of men grew the strength of the mob, and of the emperor, its exponent. "The little finger of Constantine was stronger than the loins of Augustus." At the end "the barbarians settled and peopled the Roman Empire rather than conquered it." "The Roman world would not have yielded to the barbaric were it not decidedly inferior in force." Through the weakness of men, the Emperor assumed divine right. Dr. Zumpt says, "Government having assumed godhead, took at the same time the appurtenances of it. Officials multiplied. Subjects lost their rights. Abject fear paralyzed the people, and those that ruled were intoxicated with insolence and cruelty."
"The Emperor," says Professor Seeley, "possessed in the army an overwhelming force over which citizens had no influence, which was totally deaf to reason or eloquence, which had no patriotism, because it had no country, which had no humanity, because it had no domestic ties." "There runs through Roman literature a brigand's and a barbarian's contempt for honest industry." "The worst government is that which is most worshipped as divine."
So runs the word of the historian. The elements are not hard to find. Extinction of manly blood; extinction of freedom of thought and action; increase of wealth gained by plunder; loss of national existence.
XXXII. So fell Greece and Rome, Carthage and Egypt, the Arabs and the Moors, because, their warriors dying, the nation bred real men no more. The man of the strong arm and the quick eye gave place to the slave, the pariah, the man with the hoe, whose lot changes not with the change of dynasties.
XXXIII. Other nations of Europe may furnish illustrations in greater or less degree. Germany guards her men, and reduces the waste of war to a minimum. She is 'military, but not warlike,' and this ​distinction means a great deal from the point of view of this discussion. In modern times the greatest loss of Germany has been not from war, but from emigration. If the men who have left Germany are of higher type than those who remain at home, then the blood of the nation is impoverished. That this is the case the Germans in Germany are usually not willing to admit. On the other hand, those competent to judge the German-American find no type of men in the Old World his mental or physical superior.
The tendency of emigration, whether to cities or to other countries, is to weaken the rural population. An illustration of the results of checking this form of selection is seen in the Bavarian town of Oberammergau. This little village, with a population not exceeding fifteen hundred, has a surprisingly large number of men possessing talent, mental and physical qualities far above the average even in Germany. The cause of this lies in the Passion Play, for which for nearly three centuries Oberammergau has been noted. The best intellects and the noblest talents that arise in the town find full scope for their exercise in this play. Those who are idle, vicious or stupid are excluded from it. Thus, in the long run, the operation of selection is to retain those whom the play can use and to exclude all others. To weigh the force of this selected heredity we have only to compare the quality of Oberammergau with that of other Bavarian towns, as, for example, her sister village of Unterammergau, some two miles lower down, in the same valley.
XXXIV. Switzerland is the land of freedom—the land of peace. But in earlier times some of the thrifty cantons sent forth their men as hireling soldiers to serve for pay under the flag of whomsoever might pay their cost. There was once a proverb in the French Court, 'pas d'argent; pas de Suisses,' no money; no Swiss, for the agents of the free republic drove a close bargain.
In Luzerne stands one of the noblest monuments in all the world, the memorial of the Swiss guard of Louis XVI., killed by the mob at the palace of Versailles. It is carved in the solid rock of a vertical cliff above a great spring in the outskirts of the city. A lion of heroic size, a spear thrust through its body, guarding in its dying paws the Bourbon lilies and the shield of France. And the traveler, Carlyle tells us, should visit Luzerne and her monument, "Not for Thorwaldsen's sake alone, but for the sake of the German Biederkeit and Tapferkeit, the valor which is worth and truth, be it Saxon, be it Swiss."
Beneath the lion are the names of those whose devotion it commemorates. And with the thought of their courage comes the thought of the pity of it, the waste of brave life in a world that has none too much. It may be fancy, but it seems to me that as I go about in Switzerland I can distinguish by the character of the men who remain those ​cantons who sent forth mercenary troops from those who kept their own for their own upbuilding. Perhaps for other reasons than this Lucerne is weaker than Graubünden, and Unterwalden less virile than little Appenzell. In any event, the matter is worthy of consideration, for this is absolutely certain: just in proportion to its extent and thoroughness is military selection a cause of decline.
XXXV. Holland has become a nation of old men, rich, comfortable and unprogressive. Her sons have died in the fields of Java, the swamps of Achin, wherever Holland's thrifty spirit has built up nations of slaves. It is said that Batavia alone has a million of Dutch graves. The armies of Holland to-day are recruited in every port. Dutch blood is too precious to be longer spilled in her enterprises.
XXXVI. Spain died of empire centuries ago. She has never crossed our path. It was only her ghost which walked at Manila and Santiago. In 1630, the Augustinian friar La Puente thus wrote of the fate of Spain: "Against the credit for redeemed souls I set the cost of Armadas and the sacrifice of soldiers and friars sent to the Philippines. And this I count the chief loss, for mines give silver, and forests give timber, but only Spain gives Spaniards, and she may give so many that she may be left desolate and constrained to bring up strangers' children instead of her own." "This is Castile," said a Spanish knight; "she makes men and wastes them." "This sublime and terrible phrase," says Lieutenant Carlos Gilman Calkins, from whom I have received both these quotations, "sums up Spanish history."
The warlike nation of to-day is the decadent nation of to-morrow. It has ever been so, and in the nature of things it must ever be.
XXXVII. In his charming studies of 'Feudal and Modern Japan,' Mr. Arthur Knapp returns again and again to the great marvel of Japan's military prowess after more than two hundred years of peace. It is astonishing to him that after more than six generations in which physical courage has not been demanded, these virile virtues should be found imimpaired. We can readily see that this is just what we should expect. In times of peace there is no slaughter of the strong, no sacrifice of the courageous. In the peaceful struggle for existence there is a premium placed on these virtues. The virile and the brave survive. The idle, weak and dissipated go to the wall. If after two hundred years of incessant battle Japan still remained virile and warlike, that would indeed be the marvel. But that marvel no nation has ever seen. It is doubtless true that warlike traditions are most persistent with nations most frequently engaged in war. But the traditions of war and the physical strength to gain victories are very different things. Other things being equal, the nation which has known least of war is the one most likely to develop the 'strong battalions' with whom victory must rest.
​XXXVIII. What shall we say of England and her hundred petty wars 'smouldering' in every part of the globe?
Statistics we have none, and no evidence of tangible decline that Englishmen will not indignantly repudiate. Besides, in the struggle for national influences, England has had many advantages which must hide or neutralize the waste of war. In default of facts unquestioned, we may appeal to the poets, letting their testimony as to the reversal of selection stand for what it is worth. Kipling tells us of the cost of the rule of the sea:
"We have fed our sea for a thousand years. And she calls us, still unfed; Though there's never a wave of all her waves But marks our English dead." "If blood be the price of admiralty, Lord God, we have paid it in full."
Again, referring to dominion on land, he says:
"Walk wide of the widow of Windsor, For half of creation she owns. We've bought her the same with the sword and the flame, And we've salted it down with our bones. Poor beggars, it's blue with our bones."
Finer than this are the lines in the 'Revelry of the Dying,' written by a British officer, Bartholomew Dowling, it is said, who died in the plague in India:
"Cut off from the land that bore us. Betrayed by the land we find; When the brightest are gone before us And the dullest are left behind. So stand to your glasses steady, Tho' a moment the color flies, Here's a cup to the dead already And huzza for the next that dies!"
The stately "Ave Imperatrix' of Oscar Wilde, the last flicker of dying genius in his wretched life, contains lines that ought not to be forgotten:
"O thou whose wounds are never healed. Whose weary race is never run; O Cromwell's England, must thou yield For every foot of ground a son?
"What matter if our galleys ride Pine forest-like on every main; Ruin and wreck are at our side. Stem warders of the house of pain.
"Where are the brave, the strong, the fleet, The flower of England's chivalry? Wild grasses are their Minding sheet, And sobbing waves their threnody.
"Peace, peace, we wrong our noble dead To vex their solemn slumber so; But childless and with thorn-crowned head, Up the steep road must England go!"
We have here the same motive, the same lesson which Byron applies to Rome:
"The Niobe of Nations—there she stands, Crownless and childless in her voiceless woe, An empty urn within her withered hands, Whose sacred dust was scattered long ago!"
XXXIX. It suggests the inevitable end of all empire, of all dominion of man over man by force of arms. More than all who fall in battle or are wasted in the camps, the nation misses the 'fair women and brave men' who should have been the descendants of the strong and the manly. If we may personify the spirit of the nation, it grieves most not over its 'unreturning brave,' but over those who might have been, but never were, and who, so long as history lasts, can never be.
XL. Against this view is urged the statement that the soldier is not the best, but the worst, product of the blood of the English nation. Tommy Atkins comes from the streets, the wharves, the graduate of the London slums, and if the empire is 'blue with his bones,' it is, after all, to the gain of England that her better blood is saved for home consumption, and that, as matters are, the wars of England make no real drain of English blood.
In so far as this is true, of course the present argument fails. If war in England is a means of race improvement, the lesson I would read does not apply to her. If England's best do not fall on the field of battle, then we may not accuse war of their destruction. The fact could be shown by statistics. If the men who have fallen in England's wars, officers and soldiers, rank and file, are not on the whole fairly representative of 'the flower of England's chivalry,' then fame has been singularly given to deception. We have been told that the glories of Blenheim, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Majuba Hill, were won by real Englishmen. And this in fact is the truth. In every nation of Europe the men chosen for the army are above the average of their fellows. The absolute best doubtless they are not; but still less are they the worst. Doubtless, too, physical excellence is more considered than moral or mental strength, and certainly again the more noble the cause, the more worthy the class of men who will risk their lives for it.
Not to confuse the point by modern instances, it is doubtless true ​that better men fell on both sides when 'Kentish Sir Byng stood for the King' than when the British arms forced the opium trade on China. No doubt, in our own country, better men fell at Bunker Hill or Cowpens than at Cerro Gordo or Chapultepec. The lofty cause demands the lofty sacrifice.
It is the shame of England that most of her many wars in our day have cost her very little. They have been scrambles of the mob or with the mob, not triumphs of democracy.
There was once a time when the struggles of armies resulted in a survival of the fittest, when the race was indeed to the swift and the battle to the strong. The invention of 'villainous gunpowder' has changed all this. Except the kind of warfare called guerrilla, the quality of the individual has ceased to be much of a factor. The clown can shoot down the hero and 'doesn't have to look the hero in the face as he does so.' The shell destroys the clown and hero alike, and the machine gun mows down whole ranks impartially. There is little play for selection in modern war save what is shown in the process of enlistment.
XLI. America has grown strong with the strength of peace, the spirit of democracy. Her wars have been few. Were it not for the mob spirit, they would have been still fewer, but in most of them she could not choose but fight. Volunteer soldiers have swelled her armies, men who went forth of their own free will, knowing whither they were going, believing their acts to be right, and taking patiently whatever the fates may hold in store.
The feeling for the righteousness of the cause, "with the flavor of religion in it," says Charles Ferguson, "has made the volunteer the mighty soldier he has always been since the days of Naseby and Marston Moor." Only with volunteer soldiers can democracy go into war. When America fights with professional troops, she will be no longer America. We shall then be, with the rest of the militant world, under mob rule. "It is the mission of democracy," says Ferguson again, "to put down the rule of the mob. In monarchies and aristocracies it is the mob that rules. It is puerile to suppose that kingdoms are made by kings. The king could do nothing if the mob did not throw up its cap when the king rides by. The king is consented to by the mob because of that which in him is mob-like. The mob loves glory and prizes. So does the king. If he loved beauty and justice, the mob would shout for him while the fine words were sounding in the air; but he could never celebrate a jubilee or establish a dynasty. When the crowd gets ready to demand justice and beauty, it becomes a democracy, and has done with kings."
It was at Lexington that the embattled farmers 'fired the shot that was heard around the world.' To them life was of less value than a ​principle, the principle written by Cromwell on the statute book of Parliament: 'All just powers under God are derived from the consent of the people.' Since this war many patriotic societies have arisen, tinding their inspiration in personal descent from those who fought for American independence. The assumption, well justified by facts, is that these were a superior type of men, and that to have had such names in our personal ancestry is of itself a cause for thinking more highly of ourselves. In our little private round of peaceful duties, we feel that we might have wrought the deeds of Putnam and Allen, of Marion and Greene, of our revolutionary ancestors, whoever they may have been. But if those who survived were nobler than the mass, so also were those who fell. If we go over the record of brave men and wise women whose fathers fought at Lexington, we must think also of the men and women who shall never be, whose right to exist was cut short at this same battle. It is a costly thing to kill off men, for in men alone can national greatness consist.
XLII. But sometimes there is no other alternative. It happened once that for 'every drop of blood drawn by the lash another must be drawn by the sword.' It cost us a million of lives to get rid of slavery. And this million, North and South, was the 'best that the nation could bring.' North and South, the nation was impoverished by the loss. The gaps they left are filled to all appearance. There are relatively few of us left to-day in whose hearts the scars of forty years ago are still unhealing. But a new generation has grown up of men and women born since the war. They have taken the nation's problems into their hands, but theirs are hands not so strong or so clean as though the men that are stood shoulder to shoulder with the men that might have been. The men that died in 'the weary time' had better stuff in them than the father of the average man of to-day.
Read again Brownell's rhymed roll of honor, and we shall see its deeper meaning:
Allen, who died for others, Bryan of gentle fame, And the brave New England brothers Who have left us Lowell's name; Bayard, who knew not fear. True as the knight of yore. And Putnam and Paul Pevere, Worthy the names they bore. Wainwright, steadfast and true, Rodgers of brave sea-blood. And Craven, with ship and orew, Sunk in the salt-sea flood. Terrill, dead where he fought, Wallace, that would not yield; Sumner, who vainly bought A grave on the foughten field,
But died ere the end he saw. With years and battles outworn; There was Harmon of Kennesaw, And Ulric Dahlgren, and Shaw That slept with his Hope Forlorn. Lytle, soldier and bard, And the Ellets, sire and son. Ransom, all grandly scarred. And Redfield, no more on guard; But Alatoona is won!
So runs the record, page after page:
"All such, and many another, Ah, list, how long to name!"
And these were the names of the officers only. Not less worthy were the men in the ranks. It is the paradox of democracy that its greatness is chiefly in the ranks. "Are all the common men so grand, and all the titled ones so mean?"
XLIII. North or South, it was the same. 'Send forth the best ye breed' was the call on both sides alike, and to this call both sides alike responded. As it will take 'centuries of peace and prosperity to make good the tall statures mowed down in the Napoleonic wars,' so like centuries of wisdom and virtue are needed to restore to our nation its lost inheritance of patriotism. Not the capacity for patriotic talk, for of that there has been no abatement, but of that faith and truth which 'on war's red touchstone rang true metal.' With all this we can never know how great is our real misfortune, nor see how much the men that are fall short of the men that ought to have been.
It will be said that all this is exaggeration, that war is but one influence among many, and that each and all of these forms of destructive selection may find its antidote. This is very true. The antidote is found in the spirit of democracy, and the spirit of democracy is the spirit of peace. Doubtless these pages constitute an exaggeration. They were written for that purpose. I would show the 'ugly, old and wrinkled truth stripped clean of all the vesture that beguiles.' To see anything clearly and separately is to exaggerate it. The naked truth is always a caricature unless clothed in conventions, fragments taken from lesser truths. The moral law is an exaggeration, 'The soul that sinneth it shall die.' Doubtless one war will not ruin a nation; doubtless it will not destroy its virility or impair its blood. Doubtless a dozen wars may do all this. The difference is one of degree alone; I wish only to point out the tendency. That the death of the strong is a true cause of the decline of nations is a fact beyond cavil or question. The 'man who is left' holds always the future in his grasp. One of the great books of our new century will be some day written on the selection of men, the screening of human life through the actions of man and the operation ​of the institutions men have built up. It will be a survey of the stream of social history, its whirls and eddies, rapids and still waters, and the effect of each and all of its condtions on the heredity of men. The survival of the fit and the unfit in all degrees and conditions will be its subject matter. This book will be written, not roughly and hastily, like the present fragmentary essay, still less will it be a brilliant effort of some analytical imagination. It will set down soberly and statistically the array of facts which as yet no one possesses, and the new Darwin whose work it shall be must, like his predecessor, spend twenty-five years in the gathering of 'all facts that can possibly bear on the question.' When such a book is written, we shall know for the first time the real significance of war.
XLIV. If any war is good, civil war must be best. The virtues of victory and the lessons of defeat would be kept within the nation. This would protect the nation from the temptation to fight for gold or trade. Civil war under proper limitations could remedy this. A time limit could be adopted, as in football, and every device known to the arena could be used to get the good of war and to escape its evils.
For example, of all our States New York and Illinois have doubtless suffered most from the evils of peace, if peace has evils which disappear with war. They could be pitted against each other, while the other States looked on. The 'dark and bloody ground' of Kentucky could be made the arena. This would not interfere with trade in Chicago, nor soil the streets in Baltimore. The armies could be filled up from the ranks of the unemployed, while the pasteboard heroes of the national guard could act as officers. All could be done in decency and order, with no recriminations and no oppression of an alien foe. We should have all that is good in war, its pomp and circumstance, the 'grim resolution of the London clubs,' without wars long train of murderous evils. Who could deny this? And yet who could defend it?
If war is good, we should have it regardless of its cost, regardless of its horrors, its sorrows, its anguish, havoc and waste.
But it is bad, only to be justified as the last resort of 'mangled, murdered liberty,' a terrible agency to be evoked only when all other arts of self-defense shall fail. The remedy for most ills of men is not to be sought in 'whirlwinds of rebellion that shake the world,' but in peace and justice, equality among men, and the cultivation of those virtues we call Christian, because they have been virtues ever since man and society began, and will be virtues still when the era of strife is past, and the 'redcoat bully in his boots' no longer 'hides the march of man from us.'
It is the voice of political wisdom which falls from the bells of Christmas-tide: "Peace on earth; good will towards men!"