The Colorado Statesman

Science Only Lisped Annihilation's Alphabet During the Great War
By HERBERT ASQUITH, British Statesman

If those who oppose the league of nations idea have any gift or faculty of imagination let them try to present to themselves the alternative. Let us suppose that a league of nations is, if not a baseless fabric, at any rate an impractical policy. What is to take its place?

Let us suppose that the nations go on in an unregulated competition--gamble would be a better word--of ambitions and resentments, with their necessary instruments on sea, on land and in the air. What will be the outcome after the lifetime of another generation has been spent and squandered in the race for international ascendency?

The experience of this war has made actual what was imaginable before. But there are or would be, if the old system were to continue, two new factors at work.

The first and most obvious is the unexplored and still incalculable effect of the harnessing of science to the chariot of destruction.

We have seen in these four years only the rudimentary application of methods and agencies unknown and undreamed of in the campaigns of the past. Science has in these matters not only not said the last word; she is still lisping the alphabet of annihilation.

If she is to be diverted from her humanizing mission of recreating our shattered resources and reviving our waste places and endowing and enriching our common life; if she is to be diverted for another twenty years into the further elaboration of the mechanics and chemistry of destruction, we may as well pray for the speediest possible return to the glacial epoch.

Better a planet on which human life has become physically impossible than one on which it has degenerated into a form of organized suicide.