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editorial and €iiy Cite Section of Rearst’s Sunday American, Atlanta,
battlefields, and dreadful the sorrow in the Bear!
of millions of mothers. I
But as we look up we should, like the man il
this picture, see THE BEAUTIFUL CITY, thl
wonderful future, the perfect world that will b«\
created by the men so hideously busy now.
True, we, in these bodies, may not see that city
or live in it. But we have no right to ask pity
because perfection, safety, peace and final happi
ness are not to be our lot.
The man who digs honestly, and builds un-'
discouraged, is, perhaps, happier in his struggle
than the man who lives safe in the finished struc
ture.
Happiness is found in the effort to create that
which is right, in “searching for truth.” The
great German, Lessing, expressed the thought
well:
“Did the Almighty, holding in His right hand
Truth, and in His left hand Search After Truth,
deign to proffer me the one I might prefer, in
all humility, but without hesitation, I should re
quest Search After Truth.”
If Almighty Power to-day offered us perfec
tion in one hand and struggle and the hard work
and the striving for perfection in the other, many
of the best of us would take the hand that offered
struggle.
As it is, the choice Is not with us.
We are better off than other human beings that have
struggled on this planet for the last five hundred thou
sand years.
We are not sold into slavery. The butchery of women
and children is no longer an amusement.
We are savage as nations, but we are civilized as
INDIVIDUALS.
Let us struggle and dig and build. BELIEVE IN ULTI
MATE CIVILIZATION, and when we are tired and
discouraged look off to the beautiful city that is to
come.
Copyright, 1914. b\ the bUr Cotnpaaj.
Great Britain Rights lleatrred
Standing in the Pit with His Shovel He Represents Humanity at Work.
He May Be Digging Graves for the Dead of Yesterday's Battle or the Foundation of a
Prison, hut He Knows That the Future Will Justify His Work.
He Looks to the City of Beauty Not Yet Completed, but TO BE Built, and He Believes in It.
And So Should We All Believe.
=1 HE great Creator we behold not;
a He veils Himself within His.own
| eternal laws. The skeptic sees
I their operation, but he beholds
H not Him. “Wherefore God?” he
cries. “The world itself suffices
And the piety of no Christian has
more than does this skeptic’s
SCHILLER.
And if you realize what they HAVE done
you will not doubt their power to conquer even
the horror of war.
strangled or starved to death in the Mamertine
prison. Tens of thousands of captives were
condemned to perish in gladiatorial shows.
Julius Caesar, whose clemency has been so
greatly extolled, ‘executed the whole senate of
Veneti; permitted a massacre of the Usipetes
and Tender!; sold as slaves 40,000 natives of
Genabum, and cut off the right hands of all the
brave men, whose only crime was that they
held to the last against him their town of
Uxellodunum.’ No slaughter in history is more
terrible than that which took place at Jerusalem
under the general who was called 'the delight
of the human race,’ and when the last spasm of
resistance had ceased, Titus sent Jewish cap
tives, both male and female, by thousands to
the provincial amphitheatres to be devoured
by wild beasts or slaughtered as gladiators."
grasp of a blind, delirious giant” has come upon
the earth.
But the man who thinks rightly knows that this
bloodshed and crime are part of the digging and
part of the building.
The man who builds the foundation must
have the courage to believe that the house will
rise where he digs. He who plants the seed must
believe that the tree will grow. And men who
are'here to plant civilization and just government
upon this earth must believe, unshaken in their
faith, that “Infinite Light and Reason” control
this earth and guide men.
This world needs faith, hope and belief in the
future. We need to" believe not merely as mar
tyrs believe in a future of happiness for saints
and damnation for sinners.
We must believe in the future of this planet
and of man ON this planet.
It is your duty who live here to look ahead and
see the wonders and the power that are to be.
The old man in this picture, condemned to hard
labor, drudging at his task, digging his pit, stop
ping for breath and to look at the beautiful city
still unbuilt, and believe in it, typifies the attitude
that WE ALL should take.
We are digging, toiling, and the city called
Civilization and Happiness is far away.
They are digging holes in Europe and piling in
the bodies, with arirfs and legs missing, pouring
oil on the dead mass of humans and setting fire
to the whole to prevent disease.
Unutterably horrible is such a sight.
But even as we see the dead piled into the
trenches, and the living in other trenches waiting
for death, and all the power of man concentrated
on murder, our attitude should be one of hope and
confidence.
The day IS coming, the city of light IS build
ing. Cur children shall see it though we may not.
Once all the work of the world was done by
slaves. A “free man” was one who did not work
and would not work.
The wisest of men believed that slavery was
necessary to civilization. But we have killed
slavery, and it will not come back to life. Wise
men now believe that war is necessary or inevit
able But we shall eventually kill war, and it will
not come back to life.
Cannibalism was once universal on this planet,
and the wisest cannibal, lifting his bloody face
from the body of his victim, would have said:
“Cannibalism is necessary; there can be no sure
meat supply without it.” But we have got rid
of cannibalism—AND SO WE SHALL OF WAR.
War is horrible; but the war of to-day, on a
gigantic scale of killing, lacks absolutely the un
speakable viciousness of the war of ancient times.
Get here an idea of what war used to be be
fore the better character of man stamped itself
even upon professional international murder.
This quotation is from Lecky’s Map of Life:
“War, indeed, which is absolutely indispensa
ble in our present stage of civilization, has its
own morals, which are very different from those
of peaceful life. Yet there are few fields in
which, through the stress of moral motives,
greater changes nave been effected. In the
early stages of human history it was simply a
question of power. There was no distinction
between piracy and regular war, and incursions
into a neighboring state without provocation
and with the sole purpose of plunder brought
with them no moral blame. To carry the inhab
itants of a conquered country into slavery; to
slaughter the whole population of a besieged
town; to destroy over vast tracts every town,
village and house, and to put to death every
prisoner, were among the ordinary incidents of
war. These things were done without reproach
in the best periods of Greek and Roman civili
zation. In Rome the conquered general was
The right spirit feels, even in disaster, hap
piness and rejoicing in its refusal to consider the
disaster final or without remedy.
Many a man di^s the foundation, sees it cave
in, and digs again. A man plants a tree that dies.
He plants again.
The one does not say: “It is useless to dig
foundations; no house can be built.” The other
does not say: “It is useless to plant trees; they
will not grow.”
And men, even as they look on the war hor
ror, have no right to say: ‘ ‘ Civilization and peace
are impossible.”
They should say, as other men have said on
this planet during five hundred thousand years
of struggle: “We will try again, and never cease
trying.”
The faith that men need CAN move moun
tains, change mountains, and even CHANGE THE
VICIOUS TEMPERAMENT OF MEN.
We are like wild animals, if you choose. But
that is true of us now only as nations, not as in
dividuals. It was once true of us as individuals.
A man meeting another sprang at his throat as
the nations now spring at each other.
If you don’t know what men have accom
plished in the past you cannot discuss intelli
gently what they will do.
There is a picture of war as it used to be.
Churches may be destroyed in our day, individ
uals accused of cruel acts, defenseless people
killed in bombardment, but you cannot say that
we have not improved.
If war to-day were what it used to be, the men
and women captured in Belgium would have been
sent back to Berlin to be torn to pieces by wild
beasts in the public arena or compelled to fight
and slaughter each other to amuse the people.
The German officers captured by the French or
English would be taken to Paris or to London,
dragged through the streets with ropes around
their necks and butchered or starved to death.
The greatest of fighting heroes, excepting possi
bly Alexander and Napoleon, was Caesar. And
as noble a patriot as ever fought against odds
was Vercingetorix, leader of the Gauls.
The great Caesar dragged the conquered Gaul
through the streets, then locked him up to be
butchered. You cannot imagine the English King
treating the German Emperor in that way, or vice
versa. WE HAVE IMPROVED
Here, In the picture, YOU stand Young or old, you
are one among the early workers of civilization. This
I* the really barbarous age. For men KNOW BETTER
and still go t.o war.
The lion engaged In killing Is not barbarous, he
knows nothing else.
Our savage ancestors, strangling, butchering, hunting
each other, were not barbarians, THEY new nothing
else. WE ARE THE TRUE BARBARIANS.
You belong to a barbarous civilization. But you can
think ahead of your day, believe in the future, preach
your belief and, doing so, HELP HUMANITY.
That in which human beings believe they can accom
plish. An end of war will be an early accomplishment.
Despite the sneers of the cynics, the dull ignorance
of those who say, “It always has been and always must
be." despite the brutality that covers Europe with
blood, WAR WILL END, AND OF THOSE THAT ARE
ALIVE NOW SOME WILL LIVE TO SEE IT.
“Plato knew, and proclaimed with as much
decision as Comte on the other side, that there
could be no compromise; and that men must make
their choice, whether in this universe they were
living in the grasp of a blind, delirious giant, or
holding, as a child, the gracious hand, and look
ing up into the clear eyes of Infinite Right and
Reason.” JAMES MARTINEAU.
This is the day when men need the faith, the de
termined, intellectual courage that marks the real
think'ng. HUMAN being.
The world is a miserable place at this moment ;
jnany a frightened man and woman feel that ‘ ‘ the
Deep is the ditch of infamy that civilization
is digging, horrible the cries that rise from the
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