Democracy Discipline Peace Author:William Roscoe Thayer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill PEACE How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace. Peace? What do you mean by Peace? Is i... more »t the desire of the weary, the hope of the heavy-hearted and bereaved? The dream of those who, baffled and misled and dejected by the strife and tumult of this world, look forward to another which shall redress the wrongs of this? Political peace, the opposite of War, the state which quenches the flames of War, we all know and understand. But Peace as an ideal of the soul, grows more and more remote. In most religions it seems to be nearly identical with the thought of the perpetuation hereafter of the dearest pleasures — including the pleasures of the affections and of worship — which men have. We learn very early that disappointments and cares, the commonplace lot of everybody, whether young or old, millionaire or mill- hand, prevent any of us from enjoying a life of Peace; but we never quite accept our doom. We feel instinctively that were this or that changed, a trifle perhaps, had we a little more money, or better health, or a more fortunate position, we might attain to Peace. During the last half-century, however, the men of science have tried to persuade us that there is and can be no Peace in the organic world, that the law of organic life is an incessant struggle for the survival of the fittest. The German doctrinaires, with the characteristic narrowness which makes them doctrinaires, seized upon this so-called law, transferred it from the animal world to man, and declared it to be the key to human history. From it they deduced their monstrous assertions that might makes right, that the strong shall enslave or exterminate the weak, and that War, not Peace, should be the normal state of man. I will not stop to r...« less