Germany or the President of France, acting for their governments, to invite the nations to send representatives to consider the wisdom of forming such a league, the invitation would no doubt be responded to and probably prove successful.
The number that would gladly join such a league would be great, for the smaller nations would welcome the opportunity.
The relations between Britain, France and the United States to-day are so close, their aims so similar, their territories and fields of operation so clearly defined and so different, that these powers might properly unite in inviting other nations to consider the question of such a league as has been sketched. It is a subject well worthy the attention of their rulers, for of all the modes of hastening the end of war this appears the easiest and the best. We have no reason to doubt that arbitration in its, present optional form will continue its rapid progress, and that it in itself contains the elements required finally to lead us to peace, for it conquers wherever it is tried; but it is none the less gratifying to know that there is in reserve a drastic mode of enforcement, if needed, which would promptly banish war.
Notwithstanding all the cheering signs of the growth of arbitration, we should delude ourselves if we assumed that war is immediately to cease, for it is scarcely to be hoped that the future has not to witness more than one great holocaust of men to be offered up before the reign of peace blesses the earth. The scoria from the smoldering mass of the fiery past, the seeds that great wars have sown, may be expected to burst out at intervals more and more remote, until the poison of the past is exhausted. That there is to be perfect unbroken peace in our progress to this end we are not so unduly sanguine as to imagine. We are prepared for more than one outbreak of madness and folly in the future as in the past; but that peace is to come at last, and that sooner, much sooner, than the majority of my hearers can probably credit, I for one entertain not one particle of doubt.
We sometimes hear, in defense of war, that it develops the manly virtue of courage. This means only physical courage, which some animals and the lower order of savage men possess in the highest degree. According to this idea, the more man resembles the bulldog the higher he is developed as man. The Zulus, armed with spears, rush upon repeating rifles, not because unduly endowed with true courage, but because they lack common sense. One session or less at St. Andrews University would cure them of their folly. In our scientific day, beyond any that has preceded, discretion is by far the better part of valor. Officers and men, brave to a fault, expose themselves needlessly and die for the country they would have better served by sheltering themselves and living for. Physical courage is far too common to be specially extolled. Japanese, Russian and Turk, Zulu and Achenese
