Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 February 1894 — A MORAL QUESTION. [ARTICLE]

A MORAL QUESTION.

The war between Nicaragua and Honduras continues to furnish a market for gunpowder and the product of our gun factories and lead mines. This is an encouragement to our industries that is seldom thought of. We deprecate war, yet our inventors are constantly devising engines of destruction, and our factories manufacture them, and our workingmen get good wages for building them, and our “home market” is benefitted by the wealth thus drawn from semi-civilized nations who fight very much on the same principle that two bellicose roosters in a barn lot do —because it is their nature to. America leads the world in the manufacture of arms and all the munitions of war, and our pi*oducts find a ready sale for good, hard gold in Central America, Morocco, Turkey, Afghanistan, South Africa, Brazil, and other remote regions of the globe. Our scientific men make holiday excursions to the scene of hostilities to see how their new-fangled guns work. The millionaire proprietors of the factories endow colleges, build churches and found hospitals and great public libraries that will hand down their names to future generations as benefactors to the human race. It lia3 even been asserted that the Central American wars are constantly planned, fomented and encouraged by New York syndicates, who act on information furnished by • exiles from those' countries, and who are ever ready to furnish the “sinews of war" to a cause that seems to promise even a temporary success without any regard whatever to the principles that may be at stake, or the nltimate right or wrong that may be accomplished- Such a travesty on the inherent quality of right can be justified, of course, by the statement that if we don’t do it somebody else will. This is no doubt true, yet the many sides and numerous phases and ultimate results of a departure from the code of right as here set forth is certainly a question that ul-tra-moralists might well consider. Missionary efforts need not be confined to raising money to send a few Bibias to the heathen of far-off India

who have lived and died in ignorance and an assured faith for ages, while accessible countries are daily coming to our shores for the means wherewith to kill and slay their brethren on the land and sea.