When we read of guns that will carry a shell weighing a ton for over twenty-five miles which will, when it explodes, destroy everything within an eighth of a mile, and of guns less destructive that will carry over seventy-five miles, almost wholly destroying a church and killing sixty-five men, women, and children; when we read of bombs dropped from the sky, killing innocent women and children, hundreds of miles from the field of battle; of the terrible work of poison gases and of liquid fire; of battles above the clouds from which men fall to death in blazing air-planes, and of battles beneath the waves in which men sink in submarines to be suffocated to death; of an entire ridge being undermined and blown up by tons of dynamite, with an explosion heard nearly one hundred miles away and killing thousands: how can we believe that war is likely soon to become so terrible that men will not engage in it, if they are willing to do so now? Sir Gilbert Parker well says: "Guns have been invented before which the stoutest fortresses shrivel into fiery dust; shells destroy men in platoons, blow them to pieces, bury them alive; death pours from the clouds and spouts upward through the sea; motor-power hurls armies of men on points of attack in masses never hitherto employed; concealment is made well nigh impossible. These things, however, have but made war more difficult and dreadful; they have not made it impossible. They have only succeeded in plumbing profounder depths of human courage, and evoking higher qualities of endurance than have ever been seen before."
No, most people who are thinking about the subject to-day are agreed that wars will not end because of the destructive power of men, but through the constructive power of human feeling and intellect. When the great majority of men recognize, as so many do now, that as the world exists to-day, no nation can ever gain by a war of aggression, but that the nation at war loses her best, her young and strong, and has left only the old and defective who cannot fight, that she loses her industrial and commercial prosperity as well, and through these losses loses more than she can ever gain by conquest; when all nations realize that the destruction of great cathedrals like Rheims, of the beautiful town hall at Lille, of the unique Cloth Market at Ypres, and of a University like that of Louvain makes the whole world poorer beyond measure, then will men agree that no small group of men, and no single nation shall, in the future, be allowed to cause war; and then they will organize some power strong enough to prevent war.
Then will come the League of Nations to Enforce Peace, or the Parliament of Man of which Tennyson wrote in "Locksley Hall" seventy-five years ago. The poet seemed as in a vision to see the present World War with its terrors and its battles in the air. Perhaps his vision of the abolition of war and the federation of the world is equally true.
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder storm;
Till the war drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle flags were furled
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
