What Price Peace?

Frederick J. Libby
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Additional copies of this pamphlet may be obtained from the National Council for Prevention of War 532 Seventeenth Street, N. W., Washington, D. C.
Issued January, 1925

Potential causes of war confront us on every hand. Peace has not come. Our military men tell us that getting ready for war is the way to peace. It is their duty to prepare the nation for war. This method, however, will not bring peace. It will only hasten another world war, and that would fatally weaken our white civilization.
To possess peace with justice and security, we must build machinery adequate to settle all international disputes that might cause war, and we must create behind the machinery a world opinion so strong that no nation will defy it. Small national armed forces theoretically can supplement world opinion, but the reliance must be on world opinion. Competitive armaments, the result of fear or ambition, must be progressively abolished by international agreement. International understanding and goodwill must be consistently cultivated beginning in the schools. The road to peace is a long uphill road.
For machinery we shall require a court for our legal disputes and a town meeting of the world for the rest. I favor immediate adherence to the existing World Court with the Hughes reservations. For the world town meeting, I believe that we should join the existing League of Nations with reservations on Articles X and XVI in order that we may avoid both legal and moral commitments to use either military or economic force. These seem to me to be the first two steps towards peace.
The third step is the outlawry of war. Since this will involve sacrifice of sovereignty in certain respects for the sake of peace, with a voluntary agreement to submit to the proper tribunal all disputes that threaten war, it requires a higher development of the will to peace than does the creation of the Court and League. It will fail if attempted as a political device to perpetuate the status quo . It can succeed only when the nations, and especially the great powers, are willing to be just, have a reasonable appreciation of one another’s problems, and are actuated by a fair degree of goodwill.