Loyola University Maryland - Evergreen / Green and Gray Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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4 THE LOYOLA ANNUAL War’s insatiable call has ever been, “SEND US THE BEST YE BREED.” None but the best, the virile, the self-sacri- ficing will face the perils and endure the hardships for a great cause. The best go first. The best stand in the fore-front, the best are the first to fall, the FITTEST do not survive. And, if nations rise, by the survival of the fittest, so by the same inexorable law there comes national reaction and decay, when the fittest are destroyed and the parentage of the nation is left to the inferior and the unfit. The law works both ways. If it is a ladder by which the nation may climb to the higher levels of physical fitness and moral character, by the same ladder the nation may sink to lower grades. Many causes conspired to the decay and the destruction of the nations of antiquity, but one abiding and persistent cause was the continual and relentless wars, whose records make up almost all there is of ancient history. The wars of the Caesars were the slaughter time of Rome’s choicest sons. So with France — not even to this day has France recovered from the awful loss of her best blood in the Napoleonic war. The best were taken from mid-life, then from old age, then from youth. “A boy can stop a bullet of the Russians as well as a man,” said Napoleon. And all the way to Moscow the flower of France was strewn and withered before it came to seed. And what of these UNITED STATES? What has been war’s loss to this republic? For a young and peaceful nation to spend more than 67 per cent, of its entire annual federal revenue on armanents and war debts is surely an appalling situation. But what of our loss in manhood, in moral fiber, in genuine patriotism? A generation and a half ago, in your one great war, more

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THE LOYOLA ANNUAL 3 than in personal combat, therefore the nations, like the indi- vidual, should rest the discussions of their difficulties upK n courts of justice, abolish their mighty duelling, discard their arms, and wisely stop their murdering and their wild race to bankruptcy. Bankruptcy, aye this we may well speak of. At a ratio simply appalling the resources of this nation, as well as every other, are being absorbed by the expenditures on armaments and by the interest on war debts. Were we capable of appre- ciating its enormity, we would be staggered by the fact that last year’s account for armies and navies for the civilized world reached $2,250,000,000. But there are other facts of war even more serious than its incurable folly or its intolerable burden. There is its irreparable loss. War debts are a bur- den, but the loss that has no gain to match is the wanton and uncompensated waste of the manhood of the nations. War wastes the hard-earned money of the people, but its waste of blood, its waste not only of the brave men who die, but its incalculable waste of the whole generation of possible heroes who ought to have been but are not — that waste is wild and prodigal— THAT WASTE NEVER CAN BE GATHERED UP AGAIN. That great American citizen, Benjamin Franklin, is quoted as saying, “There never was a good war or a bad peace.” But notwithstanding, history tells us, that men are loud in their talk of war’s compensations. They argue that the natio n makes progress through the sur- vival of the fittest. But in war the Law of Progress and Sur- vival is reversed. The fittest do not survive; in the competi- tions of peace, the weak, the cowardly, the unfit, go to the wall, but in the fierce testing of the men on the march and on the battlefield, it is the strong, the daring, the courageous who FALL.

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THE LOYOLA ANNUAL 5 than 600,000 men of the North and more than 400,000 of the South, 1,000,000 of the youth and strength and hope of both North and South, died on the Altar of Patriotism and left no breed behind. PERHAPS THE SACRIFICE WAS NECES- SARY—PERHAPS NOT— BUT AT WHAT A PRICE! Dare you yet face with open eyes the human loss in that one war? The loss to the North is beyond measure. Old men weep when they recall the lads in their tens and twenties, the thousands of them who marched out with them and never came back. To take the seasoned soldiers and men past their prime, was loss enough. But ours was the slaughter of the innocents in the bloom of their young manhood. And in them were slaughtered the sons of their heroism, who ought to have been with us today, but WHO NEVER V ERE BORN ! Ah, tlie effects present themselves before us like the ghost of murdered Banquo. We are solemnly casting into the sea the treasure of our peo- ple, the product of our hands, the fruitage of the sweat of our brow, and yet we cannot point to a single act, moral, intel- lectual or physical, wherein we may be justified. As we have seen, mankind yields to two great influences — the intellectual, which affects his judgment, and the moral, affecting his sentiment. The world has ever strongly em- phasized the first and too often minimized the second as being effeminate and intangible. It has been the intangible, my friends, sympathy, love, honor, patriotic devotion, high unsel- fishness which has left its impress in every step of progress in individual or world development. On no other basis can the brotherhood of man be estab- lished and maintained, on no other consideration can Inter- national Peace be assured. From the treaty of Ghent sprang the fountains of English speaking history. Since that day these two mighty rivers of