tary expenditure, grouped under the title of the 'cost of past wars,' would of course be untouched. The interest upon war-debts, and the pension rolls would still remain.

Disarmament also would have a distinct bearing upon the future peace of the world. Sometimes the possession of powerful armaments might tempt nations to use them. It would be a very great thing to do away wholly, by general agreement, with many of those terrible engines which have been devised simply for the destruction of man. If in mythical times, as I have at another time said, a single one of our modern dreadnaughts or submarines had been seen upon the ocean, whoever should have destroyed such an enemy of mankind would have received the general applause of the world, as did the hero who slew the fabled Hydra. How immeasurably greater then would be the fame of him who should to-day make free our oceans, swarming with these monsters, and send them all to the bottom.

But there is extremely little likelihood of such a result. The portents of modern war have ceased to spread terror among a race which sets no limit upon its daring. If the old Hydra should come back in our time, and should appear to be more horrible than the other engines of destruction, it is likely that our munition-makers would at once take it up and attempt to reproduce great numbers of the monster, and our appropriation bills would doubtless supply suitable sums for their purchase. To carry out a sweeping disarmament would imply a radical change of view with regard to war, which would be very wholesome.

But we must guard against any illusions regarding the effect of a reduction of armament, extreme or otherwise, upon the likelihood of war. Such a policy would not go to the root

of the peace-problem. Neither reduction of armaments nor complete disarmament would furnish a sufficient solution.

Our country declared war in 1812, when it had practically no army at all. Cleveland sent his warlike Venezuelan message to Congress in 1894, when we were defenseless against England. France declared war against Germany in 1870, with hardly half the military strength that her adversary possessed. Time and again nations with relatively weak armaments have embarked upon war. For very many years the laws of England recognized only the militia, whose training was limited to fourteen days a year; and Macaulay, in his lively fashion, wrote of the concern of patriots at staking the independence of their country upon the result of a contest between ploughmen officered by justices of the peace and veteran warriors led by marshals of France. And yet England and her kings more than once took the chances and went to war. Nations will still have their differences, and under the present system they are likely to go to war to settle them, or to attain their ambitions, even if they all have weak armies and navies, or none at all.

War has become a matter largely of chemistry, and a nation might rely upon its superior laboratories in order quickly to blow up or poison its adversary. It might rely upon its superior proficiency in the art of flying, and its flocks of commercial air-planes would be at once available for warlike use. It requires no argument to prove that the military microbe, which has infected the blood of man for uncounted centuries, still persists. Unless nations shall provide some way to settle their controversies peaceably, they can be relied upon now and then to settle them by force. Thus, while a material reduction of armaments will

bring about a welcome saving, it will leave the general question of peace far from a final settlement.

It is indispensable that there should be an arrangement among nations to resort to some peaceful method of settling differences before taking up arms, and scarcely less necessary if they have no armaments at all than if they possess them.

The plan with which Mr. Wilson associated his name may have been far from perfect in all its details, but it was the noblest attempt at practical idealism that has ever been made by any statesman. It was evident that there must be some general and central agreement to outlaw war, and that the nations must band themselves together for that purpose, or that wars would happen in the future just as they had happened in the past. It was just as evident, also, that another general war, with the methods of warfare that have come in, as barbarous as they are destructive, might mean the obliteration of civilization, if not the extinction of the race.

It is objected that such an arrangement would infringe upon the sovereignty of nations. Precisely the same objection might be made against an agreement for the reduction of armaments. What more sovereign power is there in a nation, and what one is more necessary to its preservation than the power to arm? If by agreement it consents to put a limitation upon this power, it could as well be argued that it was limiting its sovereignty. But the right of a nation to shoot up the world and to endanger civilization should be limited, just as the right of an individual to shoot up the community in which he lives is limited.

a hation to do anything it may choose. In order to meet the requirement of such a claim, we should have international anarchy, when each nation would be subject to no law of nations, but only to its own will and to such self-imposed notions of righteousness as it might see fit to recognize and put in force. So long as the area of law is circumscribed within the boundaries of states, and separate aggregations of men do not come within its sway, we shall have a lawless universe. The right of collective bodies of men to murder, pillage, and commit piracy against their neighbors is no greater than that of the individual, and the assertion of such a right involves a brutal and barbarous conception of a nation, which should at once be brought to an end.

But we are told that the thing has all been settled by the last election; and Mr. Harvey, having referred to the little glory, at his own appraisal, with which we emerged from the war, declares that we are to have no part in the League. That, he tells us, was decreed by America by 7,000,000 majority. It must be conceded that, if we are to accept any part of the League, we are proceeding in that direction with impressive deliberation. Perhaps we are to come to it by way of the Pacific. But as to the significance of the sweeping majority, a distinguished and influential group of Republicans, headed by Mr. Taft, Mr. Hughes, and Mr. Root, told us before the election that the only way to enter the League was to have a Republican victory. Then, too, we must not overlook the fact that great race-groups were functioning and voting with reference to their fatherlands. No one can tell just what was decreed by the voters

Messrs. Hughes and Root, or the no league of Messrs. Johnson and Harvey.

After one of the tremendous tides sometimes following a heavy storm at sea, the waters reach heights before almost unknown, and it seems doubtful whether the old landmarks will ever again appear. But on the next day, perhaps, when the sun shines and the waters have gone back to the old level, the only result one can see of the farthundering upheaval is that there are scattered upon the sand some strange little creatures such as were never seen before, which have been thrown up from the nether realms and will disappear with the next tide. Even the familiar bones of some old wreck are still there, and, as if more widely to proclaim their uselessness, are even pushed up higher upon the sands.

In the same way, great results in politics are not apt to come to pass from what are called 'tidal waves.' Grandiloquent majorities sometimes indicate that the political atmosphere is seeking its equilibrium by a tempest, and that the settled current of popular opinion may ultimately blow in the opposite direction. The sweeping victory of Pierce, in 1852, for example, settled nothing, and a reaction set in which nullified his victory. Only the most commonplace results followed upon the triumphant election of the first Harrison. But Lincoln, chosen by a mere plurality, with the majority of all votes cast for other candidates, and Wilson, another plurality president, creeping in between Taft and Roosevelt, were linked with things that shaped destiny and shook the world. To borrow an instance from across the sea -the Kaiser has not yet been hanged, notwithstanding the astonishing victory of Mr. Lloyd George, with that among his assortment of issues, three years ago. Generally, anything has been settled by tidal waves except the thing about which the politicians have most fiercely declaimed.

If nothing is to be done by our country upon the peace-problem except a cutting down of armaments, the work of garnering the supreme result of the war will remain undone. When the fighting was ended, the almost universal opinion of the country would have found expression in the phrase so pathetically reiterated by President Harding on the return to the country of thousands of our fallen heroes: 'It must not be again.'

If, upon the day of the Armistice, President Wilson had declared that, in the treaty which he was to negotiate, he would not consent to our entering into any combination of nations to outlaw war, it is impossible to believe that, in that moment of victory, his declaration would not have been received with general execration. Of one thing we may be sure as a result of such a reversal, peace would have had champions new and strange, and there would have been a radically different cast appearing afterward in the rôles of the morning stars singing together for joy. But the issue was adjourned, and the pressing duty of the hour was put off. It seemed to become stale. Eternal debate took the place of action. Our memories became blunted, as year after year the grass sprang up anew on the French battlefields.

But the course to be taken is as clear before us to-day as it was two years or more ago. There is already formed a union of nations, of which, with scarcely an exception, all the nations of the Western Hemisphere are members except our own. Germany, it is understood, is willing to join when the right to do so shall be given her. Russia is at this time too dismembered and chaotic to speak with the voice of national authority upon any subject. In effect, America is the only part of the organized world that stands aloof. Let us make clear the conditions upon which we will

join hands with the civilized nations. The choice is clearly before us. We can show ourselves willing that the world should go on, as it has gone, exposed to the danger that some maniac may throw the brand that will wrap the universe in flames, and then we may marshal and consume our wealth, and drag our boys from their mothers, and with pæans of

patriotism send them to destruction; or we may play the part of reasonable creatures and unite with the rest of the world to make the thing measurably impossible by extending the reign of law over nations. Not to choose the latter course would be basely to array ourselves with the forces at war with civilization.

THE world has long been seeking to solve the great problem of the maintenance of peace. War is as old as man; and he who wishes to limit its ravages may learn its most useful lessons from some rather old books - Thucydides, Demosthenes, Grotius, and our own Federalist. To the neglect of these lessons we may lay the carnage of the last seven years and the futile efforts to form a league of nations. If we would put aside our prepossessions, and study a few books that may be found in any good library, we might easily learn what may and may not be done to eliminate war. In the matter of preventing war, nothing is so absurd that it has not been advanced by some writer. What is most needed is a statement of the problem. We may safely assume, for the purpose of this study, that human nature is unchanging, though it varies greatly in different races, and that morality is stationary.

A sharp distinction must be carefully kept in mind between domestic and

international peace, and between civil and international wars. Much of the confusion and incoherence of thought about peace and war is due to our failure to make this distinction.

International war and civil or domestic war are separate and distinct phenomena. An international war is a contest between nations or states; a civil or domestic war is a contest between parts of the same nation or state. The character of the military operations is very much alike in both cases; but the political problems involved are as far apart as the poles. Nevertheless, we continually meet people in search of a formula that would have prevented the American Revolution and the Boer War, which were civil wars within the British Empire, and the great international war of 1914. No one with sufficient logic to distinguish these cases expects to find a specific for civil wars. There is none, except good government; but it is not infallible. We shall first consider civil wars.

It is a fundamental doctrine of free government, as stated by Mr. Lincoln, that any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, has the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits it better. This right is not confined to cases where the whole people may choose to exercise it, but extends to a majority of any portion of a people. Such a majority is justified, and never hesitates, in putting down a minority intermingled with it, as were the Tories in our own Revolution and the loyal Union men in the Southern Confederacy during the Civil War.

On the other hand, if parts of a state were permitted to secede without let or hindrance, it would soon be dismembered; and, if the rule prevailed generally, the world would be delivered to private war and chaos, as was Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries of the Christian era. The shades of night would descend upon the world. It is necessary to the existence of civilization that every state resist rebels with all its might rather than let itself be dissolved into innumerable small communities. War against rebels is justified by the great law of self-preservation. No one can gainsay the right of sovereignty to deny the right to revolt. 'We do not want to dissolve the Union,' said Mr. Lincoln on the eve of a great crisis in our national history; 'you shall not.'

In every epoch of human existence, civil wars have caused far greater loss of life than international wars. More lives were sacrificed in the Taiping rebellion in China, than in all the international wars in the period between Napoleon's victory at Marengo, June 14, 1800, and the Armistice of November 11, 1918. The greater number of the states of the world are prompted by domestic considerations in determining the strength of their armed forces,

although this fact, in regard to any particular state, is rarely recognized by statesmen in their public utterances. For obvious reasons the danger of foreign invasion is always alleged as the reason for appropriations for armed forces. Internal conditions in every European state make necessary a formidable army to preserve domestic tranquillity; and the armaments in North and South America are, with a few exceptions, determined by similar needs. In 1914 the armaments of about fifteen states exceeded domestic requirements by reason of armament competition.

Prior to the World War the strength of our army was fixed almost wholly by the requirements of domestic peace, and our military expenditures were largely caused by civil strife. The American Union was not saved by oratory. It was saved by the blood which dyed the slopes of Gettysburg; it was saved by the determination of the bravest of its people. The first generations of Americans after the Revolution pushed the right of revolution to the utmost limits; the generation after the Civil War appreciated the right of governments to exert their full strength to put down rebellion.

A majority of existing governments would be overthrown immediately by rebels if their armed forces were disbanded or seriously reduced, and all the newly established governments would face the same predicament. It is worthy of note that the strength of the British army has been determined in time of peace mainly by the necessity of keeping order in the dominions under the British flag; and that no government of France would face the possibility of a second Commune or a new French Revolution without the ready and loyal support of at least three hundred thousand men.

It is the duty of a state to maintain