CHAPTER XXIX
THE EUROPEAN WAR
War! The news caught at the heart of the world, and stopped it.
For a time the whole business structure of every nation on earth trembled, threatened to crumble into ruin, under this weight, to which it had been building from the beginning.
Greed, grasping selfishness, a policy of "each man for himself, against other men," these are the foundations on which nations have built up their commercial, social, industrial success. These are the things which always have led, and always will lead, to war, to the destruction of those structures they have built.
Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Russia, England, Japan, Turkey, Italy—one by one they crashed down into the general wreck. Everything good that the centuries had made was buried in the debris. The world rocked under the shock.
Here in America we read the reports in dazed incredulity. It could not be possible, it could not be possible, we said to each other with white lips—in this age, now, to-day—
For, living as most of us do, on the surface of
