Averted Evil.

"We must judge this war not by the good it will bring, but by the evil it has averted."

The words were found written on the margin of a book of poems taken from the body of a dead Australian soldier, who, in his dying, had accounted for six of the enemy.

It is an unfamiliar viewpoint. Our common attitude is to deplore the evils war has brought and to hope that some compensating good may be found when it has run its course.

But the soldier-philosopher, nearer to the horrors than any of us, sees the war as the averter of evil. Good it may bring; but that is speculative. Ill it has prevented; of that, as he writes in his trench with death and devastation around him, he feels assured.

Why? Because he knew the spirit of the thing he was fighting. He had seen Prussianism with its disguise of respectability removed. He had seen the lauded civilization of Germany stripped naked, and he thanked God in his soul that war had checked the spread of this thing by commerce and printed word, by subtle politics and subtler philosophy--had checked its peaceful permeation of the world's free nations before they had succumbed wholly to its spell.

How often we have wondered why Germany, who exercised so vast a sway in the marts and the cloisters of the world before the war, should have cast aside the method of gradual but sure triumph for the ruthless one of gun and sword.

Germany could not help herself. The Prussian spirit informed all her progress in trade, in science, in philosophy, and the Prussian spirit is that of violence. It was inevitable that it should at some time break through its respectable restraints and take its arrogant way of blood and fire. It chose the hour when it thought the milder manner had served its purpose. Nothing was made clearer by the propaganda conducted in this country than the belief of Potsdam that "kultur" had conquered in America and had paved the way for unhindered violence.

War has awakened us from our dream. The fascination of German efficiency and German philosophy no longer enthralls us. The peril that we in time, with other nations, might have been wholly "kulturized" is averted. This is one great service that the war has done the world. The Australian soldier realized it, and so felt justified as he fought his last hard battle to the end. --Chicago Evening Post