British fishermen, which at a time not long past would have been very likely to set the guns of the interested Powers booming against each other without much ceremony—a case which even at this day some sincere friends of peace would have hesitated to class among those clearly fit for arbitration.
Truly, the pessimists who believe in war-ships and heavy battalions and not in the moral forces as the most potential factors in human affairs, have been strikingly belied by palpable events. The cause of peace has in its progress outstripped the forecast even of some of its leaders. We may well have faith in the enlightened intelligence and the moral sense of mankind, and in the ennobling tendencies of advancing civilization.
Indeed, there should be no doubt—and I trust there is none—of the speedy confirmation by the United States Senate of the arbitration treaties between this Republic and various Powers which are now pending before that body. There should be no doubt of it even if those treaties were less timidly limited in scope than they are. Let us have faith then—as we well may—that the day will come, and that our children, if not we ourselves, will see it, when the reference of any international dispute to the Hague Tribunal will seem as natural, as much a matter of course, as in private life the reference of a dispute about property to a court of justice is now; when any nation going to war without the extremest necessity, generally recognized, will stand dishonored in the estimation of civilized mankind, and when the spectacle of so-called “armed peace”—a spectacle which would seem ludicrous were it not so sorrowful—each Government watching with nervous anxiety every other Government that may add another battleship or battalion to its armed force, then following suit with hysterical haste, thus continuing and stimulating the ruinous competition and heaping burden after burden
