Among the numerous forces contributing to this evolution of international peace, the chief agencies have been, and still are, moral and industrial. These same forces are working to-day with cumulative effect.
Warfare is becoming more and more inconsistent with the ethical spirit of the times. Men may talk of the expenses, horrors, and devastations of war as paramount causes for the tendency to substitute arbitration; but antedating all other causes, underlying and strengthening all others, is the slowly changing social conscience which, as each generation passes, appreciates more fully warfare's inconsistency with justice and antagonism to right. This same cause found civilized society taking keen delight in the heathen barbarity of a gladiatorial combat, and has transformed and lifted it up to where it is horrified at a bull-baiting or a prize fight. It found human beings with absolute power of life and death over other human beings and has evolved the view that all men are created free and equal. It found individuals settling questions of honor by a resort to arms, and has substituted therefor a judge, counsel, and a jury. These three institutions—gladiatorial combats, slavery, and dueling—were no more regarded in their day as only temporary phenomena of social evolution than is war so regarded by military sympathizers of to-day; yet these have one by one been eliminated, and war is fast becoming as much out of harmony with the ethical spirit of this age as was each of the above out of harmony with the spirit of the age which dispensed with it, and the effort to demonstrate that war is just as dispensable is meeting with success. The teachings of Christ, who two thousand years ago announced the doctrine of human brotherhood and surrendered his life to make this doctrine effective, have slowly but surely wrought their leavening influence upon the source of all war; namely, the hearts of men. Warfare has for centuries been gradually yielding to this deepening consciousness and that it must eventually, if not soon, take its place beside the long-discarded gladiatorial profession, the outlawed slave trade, and the discountenanced custom of the duelist must be evident to any one who takes more than a superficial view of the great determining forces which shape human progress.
Besides moral forces, industrial forces were mentioned as a factor tending to the adoption of arbitration. During recent times, under the impetus caused by the relatively modern innovations of steam, electricity, and the press, this class of causes has been unusually effective. Industry has overstepped international boundary lines. Through the division of labor we are passing from the independence of nations to the interdependence of nations. International banking, transportation, and commerce, by establishing communities of interest in all parts of the world, are binding the peoples of the earth into one great industrial organization. As striking evidence of this development, more than one hundred and fifty international associations[4] and more than thirty-five international unions of states have been formed. The modern intricate system of communication is a veritable nervous system which, in the event of any local paralysis or upheaval, informs the entire industrial organism. The figure is no longer "the shot heard, round the world," but becomes "the pulse-beat felt, round the world." If Spencer's definition of patriotism—that is, coextensive with personal interests—is correct, the bias of patriotism cannot retard the progress of arbitration much longer, for patriotism will be a world-wide feeling, since personal interests are no longer restricted to nationality.
[4] "Annuaire de la Vie Internationale," 1910-1911, reports on 510.—Editor.
No, Herr Stengel, each passing year finds the causes which make for war weakened and the causes which make for arbitration proportionately reënforced. The skeptics are the dreamers and the peace workers are the practical men of affairs.
From the foregoing synopsis of the technical accomplishments of the modern peace movement to date, and from the effort to interpret their significance in the light of fundamental social characteristics and the present social attitude, I trust three things have become evident:
First. The movement for international peace through arbitration, far from being a mere bubble on the surface of society to be burst by the first war cloud which appears on the horizon, is a movement, centuries old, coincident with social evolution, deep-rooted in the very nature of a developing world-wide civilization.
Second. International peace through arbitration is not to be a ready-made affair, coming in on the crest of some wave of popular enthusiasm as was expected by many in 1899.
Third. Being an outgrowth of the natural laws of human development, a result so much deeper and more fundamental than political laws can produce, international peace through arbitration may be furthered, but cannot be accomplished, by legislation; may be delayed, but cannot be prevented, by the neglect to legislate. To undertake to hasten arbitration by forcing legislative proceedings beyond what the people will indorse, would be as futile as to turn up the hands of the clock to hasten the passage of time.
To those who can appreciate these facts there is no occasion for discouragement in the suspicious attitude manifested by the powers toward any definite step in the direction of unrestricted arbitration, apparently so inconsistent with their general pacific professions. "Rapid growth and quickly accomplished reforms are necessarily unsound, incomplete, and disappointing."[5]