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THE Novemper 1, 1915 manufacture of munitions of war. The employees are required to continue to work the same as before. Other manufacturers and employers are forbidden by the Government to employ anyone who has been connected with these factories taken over by the Government unless the applicant has a full release by the Government. This is difficult to get. Canada and Australia are being drawn into the whirlpool and are losing their liberties, too. At the beginning of the war it was a question as to what the Canadians and Australians would do to help the mother country—voluntarily. All that condition is changed! Instead, the Government is discussing whether or not it will conscript Canadian and Australian young men and force them into the war. And so great is the change that has come over the people that the right of the mother country in this respect seems not even to be questioned by the majority. Over and beyond all this, the Government is taking a record of every individual in Canada and Australia, as well as in Great Britain, with full particulars practically including all of the individual’s affairs. This is called the War Census Act and recites: “Two things are certain—one, that we must continue to fight with every ounce of energy we possess; the other, that we can do this only by a complete organization of all our resources. By no other means can we continue this life and death struggle. * * * “Every pair of hands must be occupied. Every resource must be developed. Every citizen must give to the country in labor and money the utmost of his capacity.” As a further war measure personal liberty is being taken away under what is known as “The Defense of the Realm Act.” Under this Act the Government holds absolute contro! of the press and of the lives and liberties of all the people. A Briton may be arrested and imprisoned for a year or more without even knowing the charge against him or having any opportunity whatever to defend himself—the act of habeas corpus being set aside. This law, now operative in Great Britain, is being extended to the Canadians and Australians, who, apparently, will meekly submit to it. If any one had prophesied such a condition of things three years ago, he would have been counted a fool. Our Brethren are not anarchistic, surely. Undoubtedly they will seek to be subject to the “powers that be” as long as they be—except wherever their consciences might be impinged. Needless to say that in Germany and all the other nations at war conditions are much the same, or worse. How long it will be ere our own favored land shall become involved we know not. However, “Through all the tumult and the strife We hear the musie ringing; It finds an echo in our souls— How can we keep from singing”— that the King of Glory is at the door, and that his glorious empire of righteousness and truth is about to be ushered in! Well may we be content with whatever the Lord’s providences may mark out for us, knowing that all things will work together for good to those who love him—ealled ones according to his purpose! NATIONAL AMITY AFTER THE WAR Prof. Bertrand Russell, of Cambridge, England, quotes the German historian, Eduard Meyer, that “So far as one can foresee, peace will be only a short truce; England will use the first opportunity of beginning the fight again, better prepared, at the head of a new coalition if not the old one, and a long series of difficult and bloody wars will follow, until at last the definite decision is obtained.” Professor Russell proceeds: “Is it certain that these two uations will continue to fight and hate each other until one of them is utterly broken? Fortunately no country consists wholly of professors, not even Germany; and it may be hoped that more sanity is to be found among those who have not been made mad by much learning. For the moment, both countries are wholly blind to their own faults, and utterly fantastic in the crimes which they attribute to the enemy. A vast but shadowy economie conflict has been invented to rationalize their hostility which, in fact, is as irrational and instinctive as that of dogs who snarl and fly at each other in the street, The cynie who said, ‘Speech has been given us to conceal our thoughts.’ might well have added, ‘Thought has been given us to conceal our passions from ourselves.’ At least I am sure that this is true of thought in war-time. * * * “France and Russia each has its myth, for without myth no great national upheaval is possible. But their myths are WATCH TOWER (323 -324) different from ours, whereas the myths of England and Germany are all but identical. Each believes itself a great peaceloving nation, powerful, but always using its power to further worthy ends. Each believes that the other, with an incredible perfidy inspired by the basest jealousy, suddenly stirred up the war, after many years of careful preparation, military in the one case, diplomatic [and naval] in the other. Each believes that only the utter humiliation of the other can secure the peace of the world and the ordered progress of civilization. In each. a paeifist minority urves moderation in the use of victory is the indispensable preliminary to any future reconstruction. Each is absolutely confident of victory, and prepared for any sacrifice, however great, in order to secure victory. Each is unable to believe that the other is sincere in the opinion which it professes; its own innocence and the other’s guilt are as clear as noonday, and can be denied only by the most abject hypocrisy. “Both cannot be right in these opinions, and @ priori it is not likely that either is right. No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none wags ever so wicked as each believes the other. If these beliefs survive the war, no peace will be possible. Both nations have concentrated their energies so wholly on making war that they have rendered it almost impossible to make peace. In normal times civilized and humane people find a difficulty in believing that they do well to butcher each other. In order to overcome this feeling, journalists have filled the minds of their readers with such appalling accounts of the enemies’ crimes that hatred has come to seem a noble indignation, and it has grown difficult to believe that any of our opponents deserve to live. Yet peace, if it is to be real, must be accomplished by respect, and must bring with it some sense of justice toward rival claims. What these claims are, and what justice demands if they are to be reconciled, must be realized in some degree before the peace, if the peace is to heal the wounds which the war is inflict ge ing. . . “When the Germans, with their usual incautious explicitness, hade the announcement, ‘Our future is on the sea,’ most Englishmen felt, almost without conscions thought, that the Germans might as well have announced that their future lay through the death of England’s greatness and the starvation of our population. * * * “Because the apprehension was real and deep-seated, the hostility was rather blind and instinctive; although, in the region of conscious thought, the hopes of an understanding were not abandoned, yet in that deeper region out of which effective action springs, the belief in a future conflict had taken root and could no longer be dislodged. * * * “The Germans, in spite of their progress, their energy, and their population, are very inferior in colonial possessions, not only to England and Russia, but also to France. This seems to them unjust; but wherever they turn to try to acquire new colonies, England and England’s navy block the way, because of our friendship with France, or our sensitiveness about India, or some other interest in the complicated web of our foreign policy. “German aggressiveness, real and obnoxious as it has become, is the result of experience. Germany cannot, as we do, acquire colonies absent-mindedly, without intention, and almost without effort. When colonies were easier to acquire than they are now, Germany had not yet entered into the competition; and since Germany became a great power, it has been handicapped by naval inferiority and by the necessity of defending two frontiers. It is these accidents of history and geography, rather than innate wickedness, which have produced German aggressiveness. The aims of German policy are closely similar to those which we have always pursued, but its methods cannot be the unobtrusive methods which we have usually adopted, because such methods, in the circumstances, would achieve nothing. “Colonial ambitions are no doubt one reason why Germany has developed a navy; but another and more imperative reason is the necessity of safeguarding forcign trade. “In the time of Bismarck, Germany had not yet become a great, industrial nation; it was independent of foreign food, and its exports of manufactures were insignificant. Its industrial expansion dates from the introduction of the Bessemer process in 1879, by which its supplies of iron became possible to work at a profit. From that time onward, German industrial progress has been extraordinarily rapid; more and more, Germany has tended to become dependent, like England, upon the possibility of importing food and exporting manufactures. In this war, as we see, Germany is just able, by [5791]