suddenly break up and crash to pieces without signs and wonders in the heavens and on the earth. Comets appeared to presage former calamities of far less magnitude. Here it would have seemed almost natural if the sun had been turned into darkness and the moon into blood. But no upheaval or protest of nature disturbed the amazing ways of humanity. Before a few months had passed the waging of war and the wholesale slaughter of man by man seemed to the average mind a thing incredible. After a few months had passed it seemed incredible that any other condition should obtain, and business became adjusted to war instead of to peace, with large profits. One day a white marble city is standing in magnificence and pride by the waters of a Southern sea, confident that it will never be moved at any time. The next it has been overwhelmed by volcano or earthquake, and is a scene of horror and desolation, with all who remain of its people crying aloud that God is dead. But turn a page in the chapter of time—flowers and growing things have caparisoned the wrecks of men's handiwork; children are playing among the ruins; all evidence of violence has gone; there is little remembrance, and still less regret, of what the city once was.
So was it with the experience of the European War. It was interesting to talk at the end with growing boys and girls who had forgotten the understandings of a now remote childhood, and had no picture in their minds of any condition of Society in which the world was not at war. Like the noise of the machines, in the testimony of the factory worker, which only become unendurable when they are silent; so humanity is still stunned, not by the noise, but by the silence, of the guns. In that great silence the whole story of those five years of uncertainty and madness appears but as a dream when one awaketh, or a tale that is told. You would think that the great magnitude of suffering and loss would alone charge the world of man's conscious experience henceforth with an atmosphere of irrevocable tragedy. But it is the property of pain that it is untransferable either in space or time. A man can be torn with
