This book is written to show the relation of war to the downfall of nations. The certainty that war leads toward racial decadence by the obliteration of the most virile elements, these being thereby left unrepresented in heredity, is becoming widely accepted as the crucial argument against the War System of the world, standing second only to the final argument of the human conscience that murder remains murder even when done on a gigantic scale under the sanction of the state and the blessing of the church.<br><br>The same topic is treated in two previous essays, the one originally delivered at Stanford University in 1899 and reprinted by the World Peace Foundation under the title The Blood of the Nation; the other read at Philadelphia in 1906, before the American Philosophical Society, at the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin, and bearing the title The Human Harvest. This last is published by the Beacon Press of Boston.<br><br>The present volume has been entirely rewritten.