The War Against War

IN recent years a famous millionaire has presented a more than princely gift to the cause of peace. His action has been significant, not only because it has shown that a hard-headed man of business considers that the abolition of war is a cause in which he may profitably spend millions, but because of the attitude of the man in the street. Not so very long ago a millionaire who gave money for the cause of peace would have been regarded by the average man as an amiable faddist, perhaps touched by senile decay, who was attracted to the dream of Universal Peace as another might be attracted to a Hospital for Consumptive Cats or a Society for the Promotion of Vegetarianism in Greenland. But Mr. Carnegie’s magnificent donation has to-day been generally received, quite seriously, as a noble effort toward the solution of a practical problem which is becoming acute.

There are, no doubt, special reasons why at the present time war, and the armaments of war, should appear an intolerable burden which must be thrown off as soon as possible. But the abolition of the ancient method of settling international disputes by warfare is not a problem which depends for its solution on any mere temporary hardship. It is implicit in the natural development of the process of civilization. As soon as in primitive society two individuals engage in a dispute which they are compelled to settle, not by physical force, but by a resort to an impartial tribunal, the thin end of the wedge is introduced and the ultimate destruction of war becomes merely a matter of time. If it is unreasonable for two individuals to fight, it is unreasonable for two groups of individuals to fight.

The difficulty has been that while it is quite easy for an ordered society to compel two individuals to settle their differences before a tribunal, in accordance with abstractly determined principles of law and reason, it is a vastly more difficult matter to compel two groups of individuals so to settle their differences. This is the case even within a society. Hobbes, writing in the midst of civil war, went so far as to laydown that the ‘final cause’ of a commonwealth is nothing else but the abolition of ‘that miserable condition of war which is necessarily consequent to the natural passions of men when there is no visible power to keep then in awe.’ Yet we see to-day that, even within our highly civilized communities, there is not always any adequately awful power to prevent employers and employed from engaging in what is little better than a civil war; nor even to bind them to accept the decision of an impartial tribunal they may have been persuaded to appeal to. The smallest state can compel its individual citizens to keep the peace; a large state can compel a small state to do so; but hitherto there has been no guarantee possible that large states, or even large compact groups within the state, should themselves keep the peace. They commit what injustice they please, for there is no visible power to keep them in awe. We have attained a condition in which a state is able to enforce a legal and peaceful attitude in its own individual citizens toward one another. The state is the guardian of its citizens’ peace, but the old problem recurs, — Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ?

It is obvious that this difficulty increases as the size of states increases. To compel a small state to keep the peace by absorbing it if it fail to do so, is always an easy and even tempting process to a neighboring larger state. This process was once carried out on a complete scale, when practically the whole known world was brought under the sway of Rome. ‘War has ceased,’ Plutarch was able to declare in the days of the Roman Empire; and though himself an enthusiastic Greek, he was unbounded in his admiration of the beneficence of the majestic Pax Romana, and never tempted by any narrow spirit of patriotism to desire the restoration of his own country’s glories. But the Roman organization broke up, and no single state will ever be strong enough to restore it.

To-day the interests of small states are so closely identified with peace that it is seldom difficult to exert pressure on them to maintain it. It is quite another matter with the large states. The fact that during the past half-century so much has been done by the larger states to aid the cause of international arbitration, and to submit disputes to international tribunals, shows how powerful the motives for avoiding war are nowadays becoming. But the fact, also, that no country hitherto has abandoned the liberty of withdrawing from peaceful arbitration any question involving ‘national honor,’ shows that there is no constituted power strong enough to control large states. For the reservation of questions of national honor from the sphere of law is as absurd as would be any corresponding limitation by individuals of their liability for their acts before the law; it is as though a man were to say, ‘ If I commit a theft, I am willing to appear before the court and will probably pay the penalty demanded; but if it is a question of murder, then my vital interests are at stake, and I deny altogether the right of the court to intervene.’ It is a reservation fatal to peace, and could not be accepted if pleaded at the bar of any impartial international tribunal with the power to enforce its decisions. The proposals, therefore, — though not yet accepted by any government,— lately mooted in the United States, in England, and in France, to submit international disputes, without reservation, to an impartial tribunal, represent an advance of peculiar significance.

The abolition of collective fighting is so desirable an extension of the abolition of individual fighting, and its introduction has awaited so long the establishment of some high compelling power, — for the influence of the Religion of Peace has in this matter been less than nil, — that it is evident that only the coincidence of very powerful and peculiar factors could have brought the question into the region of practical politics in our own time. There are several such factors, most of which have been developing during a long period, but none have been clearly recognized until recent years. It may be worth while to indicate the great forces now warring against war.

1. Growth of international opinion. There can be no doubt whatever that during recent years, and especially in the more democratic countries, an international consensus of public opinion has gradually grown up, making itself the voice, like a Greek chorus, of an abstract justice. It is quite true that of this justice, as of justice generally, it may be said that it has wide limits. Renan declared once, in a famous allocution, that ‘what is called indulgence is, most often, only justice ’; and, at the other extreme, Remy de Gourmont has said that ‘injustice is sometimes a part of justice’; in other words, there are varying circumstances in which justice may properly be tempered either with mercy or with severity. In any case, and however it may be qualified, a popular international voice generously pronouncing itself in favor of justice, and resolutely condemning any government which clashes against justice, is now a factor of the international situation.

It is, moreover, tending to become a factor having a certain influence on affairs. This was the case during the South African War, when England, by offending this international sense of justice, fell into a discredit which had many actual unpleasant results, and narrowly escaped, there is some reason to believe, proving still more serious. The same voice was heard with dramatically sudden and startling effect when Ferrer was shot at Barcelona. Ferrer was a person absolutely unknown to the man in the street; he was indeed little more than a name even to those who know Spain; few could be sure, except by a kind of intuition, that he was the innocent victim of a judicial murder, for it is only now that the fact is being slowly placed beyond dispute. Yet immediately after Ferrer was shot within the walls of Monjuich a great shout of indignation was raised, with almost magical suddenness and harmony, throughout the civilized world, from Italy to Belgium, from England to Argentina. Moreover, this voice was so decisive and so loud that it acted like those legendary trumpet-blasts which shattered the walls of Jericho; in a few days the Spanish government, with a powerful minister at its head, had fallen. The significance of this event we cannot easily overestimate. For the first time in history, the voice of international public opinion, unsupported by pressure, political, social, or diplomatic, proved potent enough to avenge an act of injustice by destroying a government.

A new force has appeared in the world, and it tends to operate against those countries which are guilty of injustice, whether that injustice be exerted against a state or even only against a single obscure individual. The modern developments of telegraphy and the press — unfavorable as the press is in many respects to the cause of international harmony—have placed in the hands of peace this new weapon against war.

2. International financial development. There is another international force which expresses itself in the same sense. The voice of abstract justice raised against war is fortified by the voice of concrete self-interest. The interests of the propertied classes, and therefore of the masses dependent upon them, are to-day so widely distributed throughout the world that whenever any country is plunged into a disastrous war there arises in every other country, especially in rich and prosperous lands with most at stake, a voice of self-interest in harmony with the voice of justice. It is sometimes said that wars are in the interest of capital, and of capital alone, and that they are engineered by capitalists masquerading under imposing humanitarian disguises. That is doubtless true to the extent that every war cannot fail to benefit some section of the capitalistic world, which will therefore favor it; but it is true to that extent only. The old notion that war and the acquisition of territories encourage trade by opening-up new markets, has proved fallacious. The extension of trade is a matter of tariffs rather than of war, and in any case the trade of a country with its own acquisitions by conquest is but a comparatively insignificant portion of its total trade. But even if the financial advantages of war were much greater than they are, they would be more than compensated by the disadvantages which nowadays attend war.

International financial relationships have come to constitute a network of interests so vast, so complicated, so sensitive, that the whole thrills responsively to any disturbing touch, and no one can say beforehand what widespread damage may not be done by shock even at a single point. When a country is at war its commerce is at once disorganized, that is to say, its shipping, and the shipping of all the countries that carry its freights, is thrown out of gear to a degree that often cannot fail to be internationally disastrous. Foreign countries cannot send in the imports that lie on their wharves for the belligerent country, nor can they get out of it the exports they need for their own maintenance or luxury. Moreover, all the foreign money invested in the belligerent country is depreciated and imperiled. The international voice of trade and finance is, therefore, to-day mainly on the side of peace.

It must be added that this voice is not, as it might seem, a selfish voice only. It is justifiable, not only in immediate international interests, but even in the ultimate interests of the belligerent country; and not less so if that country should prove victorious. So far as business and money are concerned, a country gains nothing by a successful war, even though that war involve the acquisition of immense new provinces: after a great war, a conquered country may possess more financial stability than its conqueror, and both may stand lower in this respect than some other country which is internationally guaranteed against war. Such points as these have of late been ably argued by Norman Angell in his remarkable book, The Great Illusion, and for the most part convincingly illustrated. As was long since said, the ancients cried, Vae victis! We have learnt to cry, Vae victoribus!

It may, indeed, be added, that the general tendency of war, putting aside peoples altogether lacking in stamina, is to moralize the conquered. And to demoralize the conquerors. This effect is seen alike on the material and the spiritual sides. Conquest brings selfconceit and intolerance, the reckless inflation and dissipation of energies. Defeat brings prudence and concentration; it ennobles and fortifies. All the glorious victories of the first Napoleon achieved less for France than the crushing defeat of the third Napoleon. The triumphs left enfeeblement; the defeat acted as a strong tonic which is still working beneficently to-day. The accompanying reverse process has been at work in Germany: the German soil that Napoleon ploughed yielded a Moltke and a Bismarck, while to-day the German press is crying out that only another war — it has not the insight nor the honesty to say an unsuccessful war—can restore the nation’s flaccid muscle. It is yet too early to see the results of the Russo-Japanese war, but already there are signs that, by industrial over-strain and by the repression of individual thought, Japan is threatening to enfeeble the physique and to destroy the high spirit of the indomitable men to whom she owed her triumph.

8. The natural exhaustion of the warlike spirit. It is a remarkable tendency of the warlike spirit—frequently emphasized in recent years by the distinguished zoölogist, President David Starr Jordan — that it tends to exterminate itself. Fighting stocks, and peoples largely made up of fighting stocks, are naturally killed out, and the field is left to the unwarlike. It is only the prudent, those who fight and run away, who live to fight another day; and they transmit their prudence to their offspring.

Great Britain is a conspicuous example of a country which, being an island, was necessarily peopled by predatory and piratical invaders. A long succession of warlike and adventurous peoples — Celts, Romans, AngloSaxons, Danes, Normans — built up England and imparted to it their spirit. They were, it was said, ‘ a people for whom pain and death are nothing, and who only fear hunger and boredom.' But for over eight hundred years they have never been reinforced by new invaders, and the inevitable consequences have followed. There has been a gradual killing-out of the warlike stocks, a process immensely accelerated during the nineteenth century by a vast emigration of the more adventurous elements in the population, pressed out of the over-crowded country by the reckless and unchecked increase of the population which occurred during the first, three quarters of that century. The result is that the English (except sometimes when they happen to be journalists) cannot now be described as a warlike people. Old legends tell of British heroes who, when their legs were hacked away, still fought upon the stumps. Modern poets feel that to picture a British warrior of today in this attitude would be somewhat far-fetched. The historian of the South African War points out, again and again, that the British leaders showed a singular lack of the fighting spirit. During that war English generals seldom cared to engage the enemy’s forces except when their own forces greatly outnumbered them, and on many occasions they surrendered immediately they realized that they were themselves outnumbered. Those reckless Englishmen who boldly sailed out from their little island to face the Spanish Armada were long ago exterminated; an admirably prudent and cautious race has been left alive.

It is the same story elsewhere. The French long cherished the tradition of military glory, and no people has fought so much. We see the result today. In no country is the attitude of the intellectual classes so calm and so reasonable on the subject of war, and nowhere is the popular hostility to war so strongly marked. Spain furnishes another instance which is even still more decisive. The Spanish were of old a preëminently warlike people, capable of enduring all hardships, never fearing to face death. Their aggressively warlike and adventurous spirit sent them to death all over the world. It cannot be said, even to-day, that the Spaniards have lost their old tenacity and hardness of fibre, but their passion for war and adventure was killed out three centuries ago.

In all these and like cases there has been a process of selective breeding, eliminating the soldierly stocks and leaving the others to breed the race. The men who so loved fighting that they fought till they died had few chances of propagating their own warlike impulses. The men who fought and ran away, the men who never fought at all, were the men who created the new generation and transmitted to it their own traditions.

This selective process, moreover, has not merely acted automatically; it has been furthered by social opinion and social pressure, sometimes very drastically expressed. Thus in the England of the Plantagenets there grew up a class called ‘gentlemen,’—not, as has sometimes been supposed, a definitely defined class, though they were originally of good birth, — whose chief characteristic was that they were good fighting men, and sought fortune by fighting. The ‘premier gentleman’ of England, according to Sir George Sitwell, and an entirely typical representative of his class, was a certain glorious hero who fought with Talbot at Agincourt, and also, as the unearthing of obscure documents shows, at other times indulged in housebreaking and in wounding with intent to kill, and in ‘procuring the murder of one Thomas Page who was cut to pieces while on his knees begging for his life.’ There, evidently, was a state of society highly favorable to the warlike man, highly unfavorable to the unwarlike man, whom he slew in his wrath. Nowadays, however, there has been a revaluation of these old values. The cowardly, and no doubt plebeian, Thomas Page, multiplied by the million, has succeeded in hoisting himself into the saddle, and he revenges himself by discrediting, hunting into the slums, and finally hanging, every descendant he can find of the premier gentleman of Agincourt.

It must be added that the advocates of the advantages of war are not entitled to claim this process of selective breeding as one of the advantages of war. It is quite true that war is incompatible with a high civilization, and must in the end be superseded. But this method of suppressing it is too thorough. It involves not merely the extermination of the fighting spirit, but of many excellent qualities, physical and moral, which are associated with the fighting spirit. Benjamin Franklin seems to have been the first to point out that ‘a standing army diminishes the size and breed of the human species.’ Even in Franklin’s lifetime that was being demonstrated on a wholesale scale, for there seems little reason to doubt that the size and stature of the French nation have been permanently diminished by the constant levies of young recruits, the flower of the population, whom Napoleon sent out to death in their first manhood and still childless. Fine physical breed involves also fine qualities of virility and daring which are needed for other purposes than fighting. In so far as the selective breeding of war kills these out, its results are imperfect, and could be better attained by less radical methods.

4. The growth of the anti-military spirit. The decay of the warlike spirit by the breeding-out of fighting stocks has in recent years been reinforced by a more acute influence, of which in the near future we shall certainly hear more. This is the spirit of anti-militarism. This spirit is an inevitable result of the decay of the fighting spirit. In a certain sense it is also complementary to it. The survival of non-fighting stocks by the destruction of the fighting stocks works most effectually in countries having a professional army. The anti-military spirit, on the contrary, works effectually in countries having a national army, in which it is compulsory for all young citizens to serve, for it is only in such countries that the anti-militarist can, by refusing to serve, take an influential position as a martyr in the cause of peace.

Among the leading nations, it is in France that the spirit of anti-militarism has taken the deepest hold of the people; though in some smaller lands, notably among the obstinately peaceable inhabitants of Holland, the same spirit also flourishes. Hervé, who is a leader of the Insurrectional Socialists, as they are commonly called, in opposition to the purely Parliamentary Socialists led by Jaurès, — though the Insurrectional Socialists also use parliamentary methods, — may be regarded as the most conspicuous champion of anti-militarism, and many of his followers have suffered imprisonment as the penalty of their convictions. In France, the peasant proprietors in the country and the organized workers in the town are alike sympathetic to anti-militarism. The syndicalists, or trade-unionists, with the Confédération Générale du Travail as their central organization, are not usually anxious to imitate what they consider the unduly timid methods of English trade-unionists; they tend to be socialistic and anti-military. The congress of delegates of French tradeunions, held at Toulouse last year, passed the significant resolution that ‘a declaration of war should be followed by the declaration of a general revolutionary strike.'

The same tendency, though in a less radical form, is becoming international; and the great International Socialist Congress at Copenhagen has passed a resolution instructing the International Bureau to‘take the opinion of the organized workers of the world on the utility of a general strike in preventing war.’ Even the English working-classes are slowly coming into line. At a Conference of Labor Delegates held at Leicester last February to consider the Copenhagen resolution, the policy of the anti-military general strike was defeated by only a narrow majority, on the ground that it required further consideration and might be detrimental to political action; but as most of the leaders are in favor of the strike policy there can be no doubt that this method of combating war will shortly be the accepted policy of the English Labor movement. In carrying out such a policy the Labor Party expects much help from the growing social and political power of women. The most influential literary advocate of the Peace movement, and one of the earliest, was a woman, the Baroness Bertha von Suttner, and it is held to be incredible that the wives and mothers of the people will use their power to support an institution which represents the most brutal method of destroying their husbands and sons.

The anti-militarist, as things are at present, exposes himself not only to the penalty of imprisonment, but also to obloquy. He has virtually refused to take up arms in defense of his country; he has sinned against patriotism. This accusation has led to a counteraccusation directed against the very idea of patriotism. Here the writings of Tolstoï, with their poignant and searching appeals for the cause of humanity as against the cause of patriotism, have undoubtedly served the anti-militarists well, and wherever the war against war is being urged, even so far as Japan, Tolstoï has furnished some of its keenest weapons. Moreover, in so far as anti-militarism is advocated by the workers, they claim that international interests have already effaced and superseded the narrower interests of patriotism. In refusing to fight, the workers of a country are simply declaring their loyalty to fellow workers on the other side of the frontier, a loyalty which has stronger claims on them, they hold, than any patriotism which simply means loyalty to capitalists; geographical frontiers are giving place to economic frontiers which now alone serve to separate enemies. And if, as seems probable, when the next attempt is made at a great European war, the order for mobilization is immediately followed in both countries by the declaration of a general strike, there will be nothing to say against such a declaration even from the standpoint of the narrowest patriotism.

If we realize what is going on around us it is easy to see that the anti-militarist movement is rapidly reaching a stage when it will be able easily, even unaided, to paralyze any war immediately and automatically. The pioneers in the movement have played the same part as was played in the seventeenth century by the Quakers. In the name of the Bible and their own consciences, the Quakers refused to recognize the right of any secular authority to compel them to worship or to fight; they gained what they struggled for, and now all men honor their memories. In the name of justice and human fraternity, the anti-militarists are to-day taking the like course and suffering the like penalties. To-morrow, they also will be revered as heroes and martyrs.

5. The overgrowth of armaments. The hostile forces so far enumerated have converged slowly on to war from such various directions that they may be said to have surrounded and isolated it; its ultimate surrender can only be a matter of time. Of late, however, a new factor has appeared, of so urgent a character that it is fast rendering the question of the abolition of war acute: the overgrowth of armaments. This is, practically, a modern factor in the situation, and while it is, on the surface, a luxury due to the large surplus of wealth in great modern states, it is also, if we look a little deeper, intimately connected with that decay of the warlike spirit due to selective breeding. It is the weak and timid woman who looks nervously under the bed for the burglar who is the last person she really desires to meet, and it is old, rich, and unwarlike nations which take the lead in laboriously protecting themselves against enemies of whom there is no sign in any quarter.

Within the last half-century only have the nations of the world begun to compete with each other in this timorous and costly rivalry. In the warlike days of old, armaments, in time of peace, consisted in little more than solid walls for defense, a supply of weapons stored away here and there, sometimes in a room attached to the parish church, and occasional martial exercises, with the sword or the bow, which were little more than an amusement. The true fighting-man trusted to his own strong right arm rather than to armaments, and considered that he was himself a match for any half-dozen of the enemy. Even in actual time of war it was often difficult to find either zeal or money to supply the munitions of war. The Diary of the industrious Pepys, who achieved so much for the English navy, shows that the care of the country’s ships mainly depended on a few unimportant officials who had the greatest trouble in the world to secure attention to the most urgent and immediate needs.

A very different state of things prevails to-day. The existence of a party having for its watchword the cry for retrenchment and economy is scarcely possible in a modern state. All the leading political parties in every great state — if we leave aside the party of Labor — are equally eager to pile up the expenditure on armaments. It is the boast of each party that it spends not less, but more, than its rivals on this source of expenditure, now the chief in every large state. Moreover, every new step in expenditure involves a still further step; each new improvement in attack or defense must immediately be answered by corresponding or better improvements on the part of rival powers, if they are not to be out-classed. Every year these moves and counter-moves necessarily become more extensive, more complex, more costly; while each counter-move involves the obsolescence of the improvements achieved by the previous move, so that the waste of energy and money keeps pace with the expenditure. It is well recognized that there is absolutely no possible limit to this process and its constantly increasing acceleration.

There is no need to illustrate this point, for it is familiar to all. Any newspaper will furnish facts and figures vividly exemplifying some aspect of the matter. For while only a handful of persons in any country are sincerely anxious under present conditions to reduce the colossal sums every year wasted on the unproductive work of armament, an increasing interest in the matter testifies to a vague alarm and anxiety concerning the ultimate issue. For it is felt that an inevitable crisis lies at the end of the path down which the nations are now moving.

Thus, from this point of view, the end of war is being attained by a process radically opposite to that by which, in the social as well as in the physical organism, ancient structures and functions are outgrown. The usual process is a gradual recession to a merely vestigial state. But here what may perhaps be the same ultimate result is being reached by the more alarming method of over-inflation and threatening collapse. It is an alarming process, because those huge and heavilyarmed monsters of primeval days who furnish the zoölogical types corresponding to our modern over-armed states, themselves died out from the world when their unwieldy armament had reached its final point of expansion. Will our own modern states, one wonders, more fortunately succeed in escaping from the rough hides that ever more closely constrict them, and finally save their souls alive?

6. The dominance of social reform. The final factor in the situation is the growing dominance of the process of social reform. On the one hand, the increasing complexity of social organization renders necessary a correspondingly increasing expenditure of money in diminishing its friction and aiding its elaboration; on the other hand, the still more rapidly increasing demands of armament render it ever more difficult to devote money to such social purposes. Everywhere even the most elementary provision for the finer breeding and higher well-being of a country’s citizens is postponed to the clamor for ever-new armaments. The situation thus created is rapidly becoming intolerable.

It is not alone the future of civilization which is forever menaced by the possibility of war; the past of civilization, with all the precious embodiments of its traditions, is even more fatally imperiled. As the world grows older and the ages recede, the richer, the more precious, the more fragile become the ancient heirlooms of humanity. They constitute the final symbols of human glory; they cannot be too carefully guarded, too highly valued. But all the other dangers that threaten their integrity and safety, if put together, do not equal war. No land that has ever been a cradle of civilization but bears witness to this sad truth. All the sacred citadels, the glories of humanity, — Jerusalem and Athens, Rome and Constantinople,—have been ravaged by war, and in every case the ruin has been a disaster that can never be repaired. If we turn to the minor glories of more modern ages, the special treasure of England has been its parish churches, a treasure of unique charm in the world and the embodiment of the people: to-day in their battered and irreparable condition they are the monuments of a civil war waged all over the country with ruthless religious ferocity. Spain, again, was a land which had stored up, during long centuries, nearly the whole of its accumulated possessions in every art, sacred and secular, of fabulous value, within the walls of its great fortresslike cathedrals; Napoleon’s soldiers overran the land and brought with them rapine and destruction; so that in many a shrine, as at Montserrat, we still can see how in a few days they turned a paradise into a desert. It is not only the West that has suffered. In China the rarest and loveliest wares and fabrics that the hand of man has wrought were stored in the Imperial Palace of Pekin; the savage military hordes of the West broke in less than a century ago, and recklessly trampled down and fired all that they could not loot. In every such case the loss is final; the exquisite incarnation of some stage in the soul of man that is forever gone, is permanently diminished, deformed, or annihilated.

At the present time all civilized countries are becoming keenly aware of the value of their embodied artistic possessions. This is shown in the most decisive manner possible by the enormous prices placed upon them. Their pecuniary value enables even the stupidest and most unimaginative to realize the crime that is committed when they are ruthlessly and wantonly destroyed. Nor is it only the products of ancient art which have to-day become so peculiarly valuable. The products of modern science are only less valuable. So highly complex and elaborate is the mechanism now required to insure progress in some of the sciences that enormous sums of money, the most delicate skill, long periods of time, are necessary to produce it. Galileo could replace his telescope with but little trouble ; the destruction of a single modern observatory would be almost a calamity to the human race.

Such considerations as these are, indeed, at last recognized in all civilized countries. The engines of destruction now placed at the service of war are vastly more potent than any used in the wars of the past. On the other hand, the value of the products they can destroy is raised in a correspondingly high degree. But a third factor is now intervening. And if the museums of Paris, or the laboratories of Berlin, were threatened by a hostile army it would certainly be felt that an international power, if such existed, should be empowered to intervene, at whatever cost to national susceptibilities, in order to keep the peace. Civilization, we now realize, is wrought out of inspirations and discoveries which are forever passed and repassed from land to land; it cannot be claimed by any individual land. A nation’s artproducts and its scientific activities are not mere national property: they are international possessions, for the joy and service of the whole world. The nations hold them in trust for humanity. The international force which will inspire respect for that truth it is our business to create.

The only question that remains — and it is a question the future alone will solve—is the particular point at which this ancient and overgrown stronghold of war, now being invested so vigorously from so many sides, will finally be overthrown,—whether from within or from without, whether by its own inherent weakness, by the persuasive reasonableness of developing civilization, by the self-interest of the commercial and financial classes, or by the ruthless indignation of the proletariat. That is a problem still insoluble, but it is not impossible that some already living may witness its solution.

Two centuries ago the Abbé de Saint-Pierre set forth his scheme for a federation of the states of Europe, which meant, at that time, a federation of all the civilized states of the world. It was the age of great ideas scattered abroad to germinate in more practical ages to come. The amiable abbé enjoyed all the credit of his large and philanthropic conceptions. But no one dreamed of realizing them, and the forces which alone could realize them had not yet appeared above the horizon. In this matter, at all events, the world has progressed, and a federation of the states of the world is no longer the mere conception of a philosophic dreamer. The first step will be taken when two of the leading countries of the world — and it would be most reasonable for those which have the closest community of origin and language to take the initiative—resolve to submit all their differences, without reserve, to arbitration. As soon as a third power of magnitude joined this federation the nucleus would be constituted of a world-state. Such a state would be able to impose peace on even the most recalcitrant outside states, for it would furnish that ‘visible power to keep them in awe’ which Hobbes rightly declared to be indispensable: it could even in the last resort, if necessary, enforce peace by war. There are other methods than war of enforcing peace, and these such a federation of great states would be easily able to bring to bear on even the most warlike of states, but the necessity of a mighty armed international force would remain for a long time to come. To suppose, as some seem to suppose, that the establishment of arbitration in place of war means immediate disarmament is an idle dream. At the recent Conference of the English Labor Party on this question, the most active opposition to the proposed strike-method for rendering war impossible came from the delegates representing the workers in arsenals and dockyards. But there is no likelihood of arsenals and dockyards closing in the lifetime of the present workers; and though the establishment of peaceful methods of settling international disputes cannot fail to diminish the number of the workers who live by armament, it will be long before they can be dispensed with altogether.

It is feared by some that the reign of universal peace will deprive them of the opportunity of exhibiting daring and heroism. Without inquiring too carefully what use has been made of their present opportunities by those who express this fear, it must be said that such a fear is altogether groundless. There are an infinite number of positions in life in which courage is needed, as much as on a battlefield, although, for the most part, with less risk of that total annihilation which in the past has done so much to breed out the courageous stocks. Moreover, the certain establishment of peace will immensely enlarge the scope for daring and adventure in the social sphere. There are departments in the higher breeding and social evolution of the race — some perhaps even involving questions of life and death — where the highest courage is needed. It would be premature to discuss them, for they can scarcely enter the field of practical politics until war has been abolished. But those persons who are burning to display heroism may rest assured that the course of social evolution will offer them every opportunity.