Peace and Mercy.

White Ribbon, Volume 14, Issue 153, 15 February 1908, Page 5

Peace and Mercy.

Ada Melvili.e Shaw, Evanston

Dr. Charles Richet, professor in the Medical Faculty of Paris, delivered an address at the annual banquet of the “ International Medical Association to aid in the Suppression of War.” In this trenchant discourse, Dr. Richet stated that for two bodies of men to spend daylight hours in killing one another, that nurses and doctors and friends may spend night hours in giving relief to the wounded “ is as rational as to start a conflagration during the day in order to pass the night in trying to extinguish it.” Slowly the world is coining to see that the differences settled by “ this stupid orgy of blood ” are differences still. An animal is victor by virtue of strength of horn or quickness of rending claw only so long as horn and claw retain their pristine vigour The leadership of the forest shifts with the shifting status of bone and muscle. And since no greater issue is at stake than the life of bone and muscle, the lock of horn and gash of claw is a wholly right and sufficient arbitrator. When the thought of the world was nearer the animal plane than it is to-day, when men contended for possession of things , possibly the “ stupid orgy of blood ” was no more stupid than the orgy’s motive and outcome. But when men contend for principles, though the ground be stained with red, the principles stand unchanged, and rebellious hearts—or mistaken ones —have learned nothing by mere pain to mere flesh. The prisoner of force but sulks and broods, waiting till physical opportunity shall return to him the physical victory wrenched

away. The writer recently visited a little child convalescing from a severe illness. His father had given him for playthings and bribes during his suffering a whip, a gun, a purseful of pennies. The little fellow s whole glad thought was to strike, to shoot, to possess—in other words, his first education is that might makes right, that the bird on the tree, the deer in the covert, the excess of sweets in the store, are his, since he has the means to possess them. Not yet six years old, he delights in stories of tight and

possession the outward and visible sign of victory that mocks*at the inward spiritual victory and the magnificence of principles understood, obeyed and struggled for in the realm of the appeal to reason and to conscience. The principle of conquest is written within the soul. Its first expression is animal expression. But a child-animal, since he is a child-soul, can be taught very early that he owns only what he holds otherwhere than in his tiny fist. The era of settlement of differences by reason is deterred or ushered in by parents in the education of their children. “If a boy strikes you, strike him back, but do not give the first blow,” is doubtful teaching. II the second blow, why not the first? " I urn to him the other cheek, was the Master s teaching —not a teaching of senile softness, but of the mighty principle that he who wins by blows wins nothing; he loses things high and holy. Think of it, fathers and mothers! Teach the boys that one glimpse of the shy deer in all the beauty of his free life is possession ; that to slay him is loss to hunter, to deer, to God’s world. Teach the sons that an unavenged blow is gain, that a denied appetite feeds noble desire. Teach that the tilings which are spiritual are eternal, and that eternal victories are gained in the spiritual realm and by spiritual means alone. — Union Signal.