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WAR ARMAMENT OWES.

CONCLUDED FROM PAGE 13.

to work to build the largest navy in the world. However, we set to work in the fashion. We laid down the keels for sixteen battleships, more I believe than have ever been planned for by any one nation at one time.

There are many reasons why this program was objectionable. In the first place the United States had become the creditor nation, and it seems very mean to take advantage of that fact, when other nations can not have their navies if they would. It is both ungenerous and lacking in magnanimity to utilize this moment to build a large navy.

Theft From Labor.

Huge expenditure for armament uses money which is much needed for other purposes. From all sections of the country we are receiving daily reports of distress due entirely to a serious situation of unemployment. There is a slump in our financial and industrial life, largely because there is a lack of credit which might be given to other nations who are ready to buy from us, if they had the money with which to buy. If an international credit, for instance, could be given to certain European nations who are now unable to buy the wheat and other necessities of life which we have in surplus in this country a circle of trade might be reinstituted and reinvigorated. To say on the one hand there there is no money to guarantee these international credits and on the other hand to spend preposterous sums on a navy without which we have gotten on very well hitherto, was obviously inconsistent.

Thirdly, there is the point of view of the women, which is not to be overlooked. All over the United States there are large organizations of women, some of them with millions of members, who took a strong stand against the increase of armaments so far as this country was concerned. They came without any qualification for the disarmament program.

Man's Combative Instincts.

I do not believe we will be able to quench war, the lust of battle, until we arouse other primitive and powerful human motives which we all possess but which during the past few years have been inhibited, suppressed as it were, during the very years that the combative side has been so very much stressed. Man has been on the earth in some shape or another for 1,500,000 years we are told, but masses of men fighting against other masses of men is a condition only about 20,000 years old. For a long time men lived in communities, in a gregarious and friendly fashion, and developed their skill more in the use of the tool than of the weapon; the weapon was for a long time only useful when men went out in search of food. During these remote times two things were developed. One was a great desire for a sense of security and that is a thing which war stresses; the other was a great desire to be assured against death by starvation. The tribe became responsible for those two things; to guard its members from dangers outside and later from other tribes, and also to secure for its members