tives.

Not only, now, is the church essentially militant, but war has generally been essentially religious. Think of the innumerable wars that have had explicitly religious moIn ancient times wars were indistinguishably politico-religious. Romans fought for the Penates; Jehovah was primarily the Lord of hosts; even Athena always carried, not a scroll or a mask, but a spear and a shield! Think of the Holy Roman Empire, the Thirty Years' War, the wars of the Papal States, the wars of Philip II., the Crusades, the wars of Europe against the Turks, to say nothing of the great ethnic turmoils that redden the history of Asia. Was the French Revolution a religious or a political revolt? Who will say that the liberty our forefathers of the colonies fought for was a merely political liberty? In 1864, again, a million armed men were singing "Our God is marching on!" Lately we have heard talk of a possible "Holy War" on the part of Islam. Every Mohammedan war, for that matter, is a holy war. An infidel is, in their eyes, the one object in the world that deserves no mercy. But why look so far away? The Russians did not relax their fighting as long as the Czar was the "little father" in the holy Russian church; the Germans are fighting because they are sure of a "Gott mit uns." For France the war is, according to all reports, tantamount to a religious revival. And England trusts sincerely in a God who saves the King. The whole European conflict, as seen from the heart of any actual participant, is a "Holy War"! It may fairly be doubted whether any great war could possibly be carried on without that solemn religious conviction.

Yet one more comparison. It was pointed out above that, in the very respects in which ecclesiasticism and militaristic nationalism are alike (i. e., in their respect for and dogmatic assertion of arbitrary authority) they find their logical opposite in the spirit of Science. Rational science knows no authority whose deliverances are im

mune from farther testing and correction. Its conclusions are consciously tentative. It knows how to venerate its great men without canonizing their books. It can profit by the great past without fearing it. And this movement of modern science (the only great institution that is not inherently dogmatic, though even it has lately been accused of becoming so) is, remarkably enough for our present thesis, the only one that knows no national boundaries. There is no "French mathematics," or "English physics," or "German chemistry." While the German hosts were surrounding Paris in 1870, a professor in the University there was saying to his students, "I do not believe that patriotism has any concern whatever with science. . . .. Whoever permits himself the slightest suppression, the smallest alteration in the facts that are the subject of his research, from patriotic, from religious, or even from moral considerations, that man is not worthy to hold his place in the great laboratory in which honor is a far more indispensable title than skill." And now, while almost everywhere in the world prayers are being hurled like shrapnel to bring down pain and suffering upon the enemy, Professor Heinrich Morf, of Leipzig, tells his class: "There will be no change therefore in the scientific character of these lectures. Now, as heretofore, I will try to school your historic thinking to dispassionate conception and judgment of the things of the past and of foreign lands. Such scientific labor does not sunder, it unites. It teaches to perceive, to understand, and not to despise." Lagrange and Lord Kelvin and Ostwald, in so far as they are scientists, are international assets; and science is an international, or perhaps rather a supernational, affair. Thus it is not ecclesiasticism, but its logical opposite (so far as the basal question of dogma is concerned) that really stands for the elimination of prejudice and the harmony of spirit that make

war on war.

In conclusion: If "vital religion" be identified with

ecclesiasticism, with grim loyalty to fixed tenets, with the very institutionalizing of the dogmatic spirit - and this is obviously what is meant when appeal is made to decreasing church attendance, fading importance of creeds, and the passing of effective orthodoxy then war is not due to a waning of religion in the Occident. That kind of religious life which verges toward religiosity and crushes heretics and stones the prophets of everything new, that kind of religiousness furnishes the very arms and implements of strife; it gives conscience its excuse, and hate its ardor to burn the incense to Mars. But if religion be taken to mean a sense of the eternal importance of life, a profound desire to know God, and an unprejudiced interest in all honest efforts to know more about His boundless world of Reality, a sincere love of Truth,

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a respect for Duty, and a full joy in all the Beauty of the world, - then wars may be, and in very truth are, due to a lack of religion. The more of such religion in the world, the more of happiness and peace. And if such is not the peace the present world giveth, it is surely the kind it ought not to take away.

THE COST OF WAR

MUCH has been written of the vast cost of the

present War; its appalling expenditure of wealth of every description has been a frequent theme, the latent thought being very generally: What will become of the impoverished world when all is over, the powder all burnt, the vast war machinery either destroyed or "scrapped" for want of use?

Upon which there is one important and, I think, reassuring observation to be made. It relates to the nature of what is expended by the warring nations. We speak in awe-stricken tones of the vast sums of money and amounts of material wealth expended, and in those terms we lose sight of the real character of that expenditure: for what is really expended is that which for want of a better name I shall call labor power. The labor power of a nation is much like some fructifying stream that pours ceaselessly through it. Like the stream it may be utilized for many purposes; it may turn a mill or fertilize a field or it may flow on and away idle and useless. Probably in no nation is labor power used to the limit: there is always left a margin of unemployed labor; but the point of the observation lies just here- the labor power must, like the stream, be utilized at once: it is as evanescent as the stream, and flows away as quickly. It is a perishable commodity; it cannot be saved or stored for future use. Nor can it be borrowed by way of anticipation: there are no stores of it to be recklessly squandered, with the result of subsequent poverty.

It is undoubtedly true that labor power used for warlike purposes is largely withdrawn from the production of useful wealth, but such withdrawal only affects the production of non-essential wealth: the wealth essential

for bare living must not and cannot be diminished beyond a certain point. In fine, the transfer of labor power from useful to warlike production cannot rob the future, because, after all, much of the current labor power of a nation is normally devoted to the simple task of supplying daily recurring needs of food, clothing and the necessary repairs of fixed capital, such as houses, machinery and the like. These needs must be supplied more or less fully in war time as well as in times of peace. It is only the excess of labor power that is free to be expended on either war purposes or for the addition of new wealth, and it is only, therefore, in this portion of labor power that any losses of a permanent sort that trespass on the future can occur.

The great expenditures on the war come mainly from an intensive and extraordinary use of labor power. For the time being, such an application inflicts hardship on all concerned, depriving them of many wonted comforts and luxuries, but it does not leave the world permanently impoverished, save in two ways, either by diminishing the amount or the efficiency of future labor power, or by the destruction of fixed capital or its deterioration for want of the labor necessary to maintain its efficiency.

With these exceptions then, it is certain that the great waste of war is the waste of current labor power. There is no minimizing its disastrous effects; but they are strictly and only present effects: they do not and cannot draw on the future. We are often misled by our dealing with the subject in symbols of money, and lose sight of the fundamental facts not only that labor power is the real wealth we expend, but above all that it is a wealth which is not diminished by expenditure, that it has to be expended to be of any value, and at once. Its characteristic quality is perishableness: It must be used at once or not at all, and it cannot be exhausted by anticipation. The great quickening of labor power, therefore, expressed in an unusual produc