"WHEN THE WAR IS OVER."

Free Lance, Volume XV, Issue 799, 22 October 1915, Page 8

"WHEN THE WAR IS OVER."

A Suggestion from " Chee=car=ger ! "

WHEN certain Yankee newspapers are not arguing that Britain is doomed to be "eternally chawed and smashed and wiped out" by the Huns, or dilating upon the sweetly philosophic and truly humanitarian tone of Mr. Wobblesome Wilson's excuses for swallowing German insults as if they were compliments, they love to discuss what is to happen "when the war is over."

What all really sensible people, not only in Britain and Germany—if any such people still exist jn Hun-land-r----but in the United ' States, are agreed upon, is that discussion of what is to happen after the war is just so much waste of time. When men aire, dying on the ..battlefields of Europe like flies, when all the world echoes the bitter cries of the wounded, when Armagad.den. itself seems fairly to have arrived, to prate of international relations, and how they should and miajht be. rearranged, is just so much Tom Fool talk. But the good American sucks his five cent "domestic," or chews his sickening mint-gum—and calmly reads such rubbish as the following choice sentiment — from the Chicago "Herald": — "Just as soon as the war is over, the nations of tie world really must qet together and agree upon an international system of logic." What in the name of George Washington, or Abe Lincoln, or Grover Cleveland, or even Ted Roosevelt, is the good of writing and publishing such stuff as this? "An international system of logic," forsooth! What- has logic ever had: to do with wars, the rumours of wars," and, above- all, the making of wars? The German professors no , doubt consider themselves to be the greatest logicians in the world, but what avail is logic where sentiment and greed and ambition and treachery and individual and national villainy in general govern the situation ? • * * * * If the Chicago '-'Herald" man were to spend an,hour or two in the trenches he would not recommend the study of logic to his countrymen. Hather would 'he come away a confirmed believer in the strongest navy that TJncle Sam can build so as to be prepared for that evil day with which the Berliners menace him when once "hateful England" is laid low. Logic indeed 1 Logic never won or lost a war and never will, and it is with the losing or winning of the war that we- are all concerned, not about what is to happen when the war is over.