All great reforms have begun with "star-led" men and have moved from individuals to groups and from groups to the nation. In every distinct advance of the race prophetic persons have anticipated the trend of the ages and have adopted new codes for themselves; the higher morality has spread by agitation to include a larger group, and finally it has become the policy of the nation. Thus slavery went, and political equality came.
And thus war must go and peace must come. First, we find protest against the killing of individuals by individuals. The duel fell into disrepute and at last was forbidden by law. The carrying of weapons became unfashionable and at length was made a crime. With the growth of the moral sense, mutual trust took the place of armed neutrality. The present situation is ready for the larger application of these principles. The argument which abolished the carrying of weapons must frown upon excessive national armaments. As the individual duel was superseded by personal arbitration, so the national duel must be superseded by national arbitration. The reason that maintains the civil court for the settlement of individuals' disputes calls for a higher court for the settlement of national disputes. Not alone among men, not alone within states, but among the nations, right, not might, must rule; not force, but justice; and written as the world's supreme mandate, as the highest human law from which there may be no appeal, must be the unshaken law of national righteousness.
Tennyson's words were accounted a poet's fancy when he wrote:
Till the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
Yet the present year[1] will witness the fulfillment of that prophecy. Disarmament and arbitration will be considered this summer, not by agitators, not by theorists, nor yet prophetically by poets; but in June, at the invitation of our own President,[2] an actual international conference will assemble, a Parliament of the World, composed of official representatives of every nation of the globe. Thus we see the foregleams of an approaching day. The time is not far distant when war will glide into the grim shadows of a scarce-remembered past, when battles will pass into the oblivion of forgotten horrors. Then will society realize its dreams of a kingdom of heaven upon earth, where the barbaric lure of fighting will be lost; where no class lines may exist save those freely acknowledged by a common justice; where national egoism maintains no armies for conquest and no navies for aggrandizement; where economic resources are devoted, not to mutual physical destruction, but to splendid spiritual enlargement; where "every nation that shall lift again its hand against a brother, on its forehead will wear forevermore the curse of Cain"; and where, in the realization of a vast, racial brotherhood, is fulfilled the prophetic angel's song, "Peace on earth, good-will to men." Ruskin, the modern bard of peace, has sung:
Put off, put off your mail, ye kings, and beat your brands to dust—
A surer grasp your hands must know, your hearts a better trust;
Nay, bend aback the lance's point, and break the helmet bar—
A noise is in the morning winds, but not the noise of war!
Among the grassy mountain paths the glittering troops increase—
They come, they come!—how fair their feet,—they come that publish peace.
[1] The Hague Conference of 1907 is referred to.
[2] By the courtesy of President Roosevelt the official call for the Second Hague Conference was issued by the Emperor of Russia. Forty-four nations were represented.—Editor.