ARMED PEACE IS OUR PROBLEM
D., Charles E. Jefferson, D.
Armed Peace Is Our Problem By CHARLES E. JEFFERSON, D. D. In "Three Men Behind the Guns" The problem today, then, is not war but Armed Peace. He who stops to declaim against war is belated. War is...
...Militarism blights like a pestilential wind the higher life of nations, and eats like a gangrene into the vitals of civilization...
...The very sinew and bloom of humanity are going into this expanding establishment of gold braid and steel, and the end is not yet...
...The imagination is first dazed, and then paralyzed...
...At any rate the wealth of Christendom is being consumed...
...Something is going to break...
...When one scrutinizes for an hour the tables compiled by the statisticians showing the cost of Armed Peace, the mind is stupefied and the heart benumbed...
...Governments are today not only impoverishing the living, but hanging millstones of debt around the necks of generations yet unborn...
...The gold is flowing in a widening stream and to squander a people's money is to squander their blood...
...One thing is certain, the world cannot go on indefinitely in the direction in which it is now moving...
...The only figures used are millions and billions...
...All figures, after they pass a certain limit, cease to make a definable impression on the mind...
...All schemes of internal improvements are curtailed and embarrassed, and every program of social betterment is handicapped or postponed...
...I tremble when I remember that God is just," exclaimed an American statesman when he looked out across the tragedy of slavery, and well may any man who believes that nations, as well as individuals, are in the grip of inexorable moral law, tremble when he beholds the satanic heartless-ness with which the people of Christendom are being plundered and oppressed by the ever accumulative expenditures for the enginery of slaughter...
...A volume setting forth the cost of armies and navies reminds one of a book on astronomy...
...The house is being mortgaged that the foolery may go on...
...But in Consecrating itself to Armed Peace, many are beginning to wonder whether mankind has not jumped out of the frying pan into the fire...
...War is conceded to be hell, and by common consent is taboo...
...Guns are bought with borrowed money...
Vol. 6 • October 1914 • No. 42
