I
have not to consider here a subject so remote from my immediate
interest, and will observe only that any act which hurts either an
individual or the social interest will as plainly come under a
humanitarian law as the practice of lying: acts which inflict no injury
and have been forbidden only on mystic grounds are not likely to remain
on the moral code of the future. But I am concerned here with a definite
issue, and need discuss general morality only in so far as that issue is
affected.
Here, at least, the way of the humanitarian is plain. Sermons on the
brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God have been totally
ineffective to prevent war and abolish militarism. There is something
incongruous in the introduction into a modern peace-meeting of some
clerical speaker who talks unctuously about the great promise and
precept of Christianity. The meeting itself, being held nineteen
centuries after the promise was made, is a sufficient indication of its
futility. No progress was made or seriously attempted in the work of
peace until a genuine human passion was substituted for that empty
phraseology. The brotherhood of men was, in the Christian sense of that
phrase, too abstruse and precarious a conclusion to be of use in such a
struggle.
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