The moral and religious questions involved in war are not notably different in the greatest of all wars and in wars which are not quite so great. Most of them are involved in the ordinary administration of the criminal law by which an orderly community protects itself from its predatory members. Doubtless there will be social and political results from this war, but if other wars have not created a new heaven and a new earth, why should this one? The prediction that this war will produce great changes in the direction of democracy and of applied religion are probably well founded. But the war will act only as an accelerator. These changes have been going on for a long time; the movements for fifteen or twenty years before the war opened were very evident. Woman suffrage and prohibition seem impending, but they are not the products of this war: they had made great progress between 1900 and 1914.
None of the prophets betray any knowledge of history, or see things in any perspective. The great war is the first great cataclysm that they seem to be aware of, and they are rushing to and fro, like the Chaldeans, to find explanations of it, and to impress the public by their ability to forecast its consequences.
But when peace comes it will leave us face to face with greed and materialism, and an industrial system in which some men prosper and others do not, and an obligation to labor from which no important fraction of mankind can escape, and wants will multiply as fast as the means of satisfying them increase, and for the greater part of us the weekly pay envelope and the possibilities of a competence, and the demand from the other side of the world for the grain we produce, will continue to be our principal incentives to work.
Progress, intellectual and moral as well as material, has been made in the past, but the world has not taken great leaps ahead as the result of great wars, and still less has it changed the direction of its movement as the result of wars. The one thing of which the vastness of this war gives us a fairly good assurance, is that no nation will again be trained from infancy to old age to regard war as a high, holy and beautiful process of attaining its manifest destiny to rule the rest of mankind. For generations no statesman will purpose a war, and no monarch will again have the power of hurling his people at neighboring nations. If Germany fails in its present effort, neither Germany nor any other nation will repeat the experiment of 1914.