Page:Germany Must Perish!.djvu/22

 can not or refuses to treat them as such, may it not come in time to depend upon the people, whose lives and liberty are at stake, to do so!

I have no desire that this work be considered as a means of encouraging war for this or any other nation.

As a human being I deplore war; as a civilized member of a civilized nation I hate it.

I hate war not alone for the sufferings, misery, tragedy and senseless waste which follows in its path, but even more because I consider it to be the still-unsevered umbilical cord which binds the moral and spiritual embryo of man to the physical womb of the beast-instinct. And I know that so long as that cord remains uncut social evolution and human progress must rest forever upon an impermanent and insecure basis. And too, that so long as war persists there will never come into being that world peace out of which, some day, a world confederation of nations will be born. For it is such a confederation which is the ultimate aim and absolute inevitability of the human race.

Peace! Hardly a man, woman or child lives who has not heard the word! Throughout the ages —17—