But war brings forth the heroism of the soul; war tests the magnanimity of man. Sweet is the humanity that spares a fallen foe; gracious the compassion that tends his wounds, that brings even a cup of water to his burning lips. Granted. But is there not a heroism of a grander mold-the heroism of forbearance ? Is not the humanity that refuses to strike a nobler virtue than the late pity born of violence? Pretty is it to see the victor with salve and lint to his bloody trophy-a maimed and agonized fellowman; but surely it had been better to withhold the blow than to have first been mischievous, to be afterwards hu

mane.

That nations professing a belief in Christ should couple glory with war is monstrous blasphemy. Their faith, their professing faith, is "Love one another "; their practice is to-cut throats; and more, to bribe and hoodwink men to the wickedness, the trade of blood is magnified into a virtue. We pray against battle, and glorify the deeds of death. We say beautiful are the ways of peace, and then cocker ourselves upon our perfect doings in the art of manslaying. Let us then cease to pay the sacrifice of admiration to the demon-War; let us not acknowledge him as a mighty and majestic principle, but at the very best a grim and melancholy necessity.

But there always has been-there always will be-war. It is inevitable; it is a part of the condition of human society. Man has always made glory to himself from the destruction of his fellow; so it will continue. It may be very pitiable; would it were otherwise! But so it is, and there is no helping it.

Happily we are slowly killing this destructive fallacy. A long breathing time of peace has been fatal to the dread magnificence of glory. Science and philosophy-povera e nuda filosofia—have made good their claims, inducing man to believe that he may vindicate the divinity of his nature otherwise than by perpetrating destruction. He begins to think there is a better glory in the communication of triumphs of the mind than in the clash of steel and the roar of artillery. At the present moment a society, embracing men of distant nations - "natural enemies," as the old wicked cant of the old patriotism had it is at work plucking the plumes from Glory, unbracing his armor, and divesting the ogre of all that dazzled foolish and unthinking men, showing the rascal in his natural hideousness, in all his base deformity. Some, too, are calculating the cost of Glory's table; some show

ing what an appetite the demon has, devouring at a meal the substance of these thousand sons of industry-yea, eating up the wealth of kingdoms. And thus by degrees are men beginning to look upon this god Glory as no more than a finely trapped Sawney Bean-a monster and a destroyer a nuisance-a noisy

lie.

SAMUEL JOHNSON

(1709-1784)

T IS as unpardonable not to know Samuel Johnson in his various moods as an essayist as it would be to pretend to love his prose style as we may love that of Addison or Irving, Earle or Fuller. He was a great man, and in the eighteenth century a great writer. He will always remain a great man-virile, full of virtus, daring to be himself at any cost, including the actual experience of misery verging close on starvation; fierce in the assertion of his right to count for a unit in creation and not to be overborne by any one, gentle or common, noble or ignoble; yet under this fierceness so tender that from the depths of his sympathy for the suffering of others we may judge how deeply he himself must have suffered under

"The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes."

We can see his sensibility still more plainly when he writes Lord Chesterfield: "The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind." That rebuke, the proudest which struggling merit ever administered to the vanity of fashionable culture, we could not wish to have been other than it was. From the time Homer learned to describe the insolence of the suitors of Penelope at meals, by his own experience in living on scraps from lordly tables, to the Augustan Age when Horace and Virgil. were obliged to buy permission to become immortal at the price of the meanest sycophancy to power;- from the very beginning of literature until Teutonic individuality met the pride of aristocratic power in the Teutoburgerwald and with naked breast bore it backward,there was never the match of that reply from this plebeian son of John" to his lord. When in the time of Tacitus, the German ancestors of the remote and unknown English "John," who begot the original "Johnson," waded the Rhine bare-legged through broken ice, making their way towards Rome, they were preparing the world for the coming of this heroic soul, fitted by the anguish of deep and long-continued humiliation for the pride of this answer. To be "humble with the humble and haughty with the proud" is the highest of the merely human virtues, but it is truly assumed in the mythology of the race which produced the "Johnsons" that human virtues belong to "Midgard," - the "middle yard," a condition of

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