Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/124

Counter-Currents She must fight to preserve it, or sink into insignificance,—her glorious past as much a thing of memory as is the past of Rome.

For all these reasons the nations are spending their money on armaments, and spilling their blood on the battlefield. The sacredness of life is being violated; but is it life, or is it the moral worth of life, which we hold sacred? Life is a thing given us for a few years. Its only value lies in the use we make of it. Lose it we must, and very soon. But honour and duty are for all time. Why do we see a "soldiers' monument" in nearly every town of every state which fought for the Union? Not because these men lived, but because they died. What must it have cost Mr. Lincoln, whose heart was big enough for much suffering, to order from an exhausted country the last draft of half a million men! And why does an ingenious writer, like Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson, cudgel his brain to find abstract causes 108