It is an immediate purpose of the Peace Movement to make war a last resort, not the first one, in times of international differences. To this and every agency which tends to postpone action and give the blood time to cool, must contribute.
In civil life, there has been through the ages, a steady movement from violence to law, from the ordeal of private combat to the arbitration of the courts. In like fashion, we would extend and strengthen the parallel tendency among nations. Already arbitration is everywhere welcomed as a means of composing differences. Conciliation goes before arbitration and is a factor of equal importance. The very existence of an Arbitral Tribunal before which differences may be brought, itself insures that most differences will be adjusted without its agency. If war is really the last resort, very few nations will ever come to it, and the War System will decline through neglect, as of obvious uselessness.
But so long as the War System is in full force, there is always danger of war. So great an agency can never be fully under control. Its existence insures the presence of a powerful group of men, anxious to test its powerful machinery and impatient of civil authority. The War System is designed for war, defensive of course, but it is a maxim of war, as of football, that the best defense is to be the first to score.
As to the Arbitration treaties and the hundreds of disputes which have been settled for all time by the tribunals at The Hague, no verdict thus obtained has yet been rejected or opposed, and none is likely to be. The public opinion of the world would be as wholly opposed to the repudiation of an adverse verdict as it would be to the repudiation of a national debt. The verdict and the debt involve the same sanction of national honor.
The discussion as to the need of an international police to enforce decisions made at The Hague, is therefore wide of the mark as there can be no occasion for the use of force in such a connection.
It is becoming more and more evident in Europe that the greatest single asset of the Peace Movement is the success of the republic of America.
America is opposed to the War System. There is a much larger percentage of pacifists in the United States than in any other of the larger nations. For one thing, it is relatively easy to be a peace man in a republic. No criticism or obloquy attaches to it. But in Europe, the direction of least resistance is to follow the wake of the War System.
In spite of the unhallowed sums we have carelessly spent to build up a War System, we have none. We shall never have any. Should we pass under its yoke we should cease to be America. Even our admirals and generals do not belong to the War System. They are civilians in spirit, sometimes in disguise, but permeated with ideas of law and justice, a condition far removed from that of the professional war maker of the continent of Europe.
The impression of America as a great factor in international conciliation receives impetus with the celebration of the hundred years of Anglo-Saxon peace, with its lesson of the unguarded and therefore perfectly defended 4,000 miles of Canadian frontier. This impression has been strongly emphasized by the admirable skill by which President Wilson has up to the time of this writing, honorably avoided war with Mexico, a war which was considered inevitable in most political circles in Europe. While on the one hand the United States cannot have the secret treaty, the cherished tool of the War System since the days of Machiavelli, and while Democracy is a form of government fitted for minding one's own business, and for nothing else, it is recognized that the United States must and should take the lead in conciliation and in arbitration, as she is now taking the lead in furnishing means for a world-wide survey of the War System, and for the resultant propaganda for its abrogation.