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BULLETIN

‘THE NEW PEACE MOVEMENT |
A Series of Addresses delivered in 1908-1909

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. By

’ William I. ‘Hull, Ph. D.,

roe of Histoty i in Swarthmore - ‘College; Author of ‘* The Two Hague
Conferences and their Contributions to International Law,’”’ ete. us

 

' SWARTHMORE, Peanebivenrs fs
_ Printed for the College a
1909 7
we vuaae® * 2 Ninth Month, 1909
The Bulletin is published auarterly iy ‘Swarthmore ‘coltese,. trom the
College Office, Swarthmore, Pa. . :

Entered as mail’ matter of the ' gecond- class, in accordance "with the
' provisions. of the Act of Congress of. July 16, 1894, . ‘
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE
BULLETIN

THE NEW PEACE MOVEMENT

oe
A Series of Addresses delivered in 1908-1909

By

William I. Hull, Ph.D.,

Professor of History in Swarthmore ie Author of ‘‘ The Two Hague
Conferences and their Contributions:to International Law,’’ etc.

A Contribution of the Department of History in Swarthmore
College to the Cause of International Peace and Justice

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SWARTHMORE, PENNSYLVANIA KON rer eettag
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Printed for the College éy O

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Vol. VII. No.1. Ninth Month, 1909 9 { :

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Press of
THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY
1006-1016 Arch Street
Philadelphia”

 
CONTENTS

PAGE
I. Tue New Peace Movement

A Prefatory Note.

II. ARBITRATION, BUT NoT ARMAMENTS
Annual Meeting of the Universal Peace Union,
Mystic, Conn., August 11, 1908;
Philadelphia Peace Association of Friends,
Twelfth St. Meeting House, November 10, 1908.

III. Internationa Pouice, Burt Not National ARMA-
MENTS

Westbury Quarterly Meeting Philanthropic Committee,
Brooklyn, N. Y., April 24, 1909; ©
Lake Forest University, ‘

Lake Forest, Ill., May 2, 1909.

IV. A Posrrive ProGRAMME FOR THE PEACE MoveE-
MENT

Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Peace Association,

Twelfth St. Meeting House, April 19, 1909;
Normal Park Baptist Church,

Chicago, Ill., May 2, 1909;
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Peace Committee,
Race St. Meeting House, May 138, 1909.

V. Tue Dory or Reticiovs Liserats Towards THE
Prace MovEMENT

sinaderaae hath dna-sraneh esa a aesol sake ashe cabuee Maas 31
First National Congress of Religious Liberals,
Philadelphia, Pa., April 30, 1909.
VI. Tue INFLUENCE oF Peace Powser Upon History... 37

History Teachers’ Assoc. of the Middle States and Md.,
University of Pennsylvania, March 13, 1909.

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4 CONTENTS

VIT. THe AMERICAN FLAG ....... ce eee eee ee eee 48

The Lane Technical High School,
Chicago, Ill, May 5, 1909;
Southern High School,
Philadelphia, Pa., May 17, 1909.

VIII. IncreasInc ARMAMENTS: PRo AND CONTRA...... 54

The Outlook Club,
Chicago, Ill., May 3, 1909.

IX. Tue Famity or Nations IN CONFERENCE AT THE

MTA GU Bivecs  iaeatsn cane atetan eaten auetad ta war'e a Uosmntaap al ose tecnbay ened 59
The Woman’s Club,
Lansdowne, Pa., October 28, 1908 ;
American Institute of Bankers,
Philadelphia Chapter, March 5, 1909;
State Normal School,
West Chester, Pa., March 11, 1909;
College Settlement Adult Club,
Philadelphia, Pa., March 28, 1909;
Wednesday Afternoon Club,
Sandy Spring, Md., March 31, 1909.
X. THe ADVANCE REGISTERED BY THE Two Haus
CONFERENCES: foci sie acciade. dane wise estniaue nie neoueieewle 59

Second National Peace Congress,
Chicago, Ill., May 4, 1909.
I. THE NEW PEACE MOVEMENT

The Peace Movement to-day is where the Anti-Slavery Move-
ment was in the early fifties of the last century.

At that period, the champions of slavery were aggressively
on the offensive, fiercely determined not only that slavery should
be maintained in more than all its former prestige and strength,
in the South, but that it should be extended indefinitely in the
West, and should wield the balance of power against the North,
in the affairs of the nation. And this campaign they carried
on in the beloved name of Union.

On the other hand, the radical opponents of slavery had
wrought out a vast body of fact and argument and senti-
ment,—economic, political, and moral,—against the system of
slavery wherever it was sheltered beneath the American flag.
And this campaign they carried on in the sacred name of
Freedom.

Between the two a political party was gradually crystallizing,
whose mission it was to concentrate by some practicable method
the anti-slavery fact and argument and sentiment upon first
one and then another bulwark of the slavery system until it
should fall utterly and forever. And the slogan of this party
was Freedom anp Union.

To-day, we see on the one hand a large and increasing body of
professional soldiers and sailors who are aggressively determined
that not only shall the armies and navies of the world be main-
tained in more than all their former prestige and strength, and
shall be indefinitely increased in size and “fighting effective-
ness,” but that they shall appropriate to their growth every
new device for man’s mastery over the depths of the sea and air,
the forces of electricity and the ever new and more destructive
agencies of chemical and physical science, and shall absorb an
enormously increasing share of the revenues and resources of
every civilized nation. And this campaign they carry on in the
lofty name of Justice.

On the other hand, the peacemakers of the world have accumu-
lated a vast body of fact and argument and sentiment,—eco-

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6 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

nomic, political, and moral,—in proof of the folly and wickedness
of warlike preparations as a means of insuring national defence,
and of warfare as a means of procuring international justice.
And this campaign has been carried on in the sacred name of
Peace.

Between the two there has grown up a large and increasing
body of men and women in every nation whose mission it is
to concentrate by some practicable method the peace fact and
argument and sentiment upon first one and then another of the
bulwarks of warfare until it shall fall utterly and forever. And
this campaign is carried on in the name of Peace anp Justice.

The method of the Pro-Slavery Party in the fifties was
Squatter Sovereignty and every constitutional and legislative aid
to the spread of slavery. The method of the Anti-Slavery Party
was Immediate Abolition without compensation. The method
of the Republican Party was Restriction of Slavery to the South,
and Gradual Emancipation there, or, if possible, said Lincoln,
Immediate Abolition with Compensation.

The method of the Militarists to-day is now and always a
More Powerful Navy and Army than any other nation possesses.
The method of the Pacifists is Immediate and Perpetual Aboli-
tion of Armaments. The method of the New Peace Movement
is International Courts of Law, the Limitation of Armaments
and their sole use as a genuine International Police Force.

In the fifties, the hot-heads on both sides of Mason and
Dixon’s Line precipitated a terrible civil war, in the course of
which,—not necessarily, by any means, because of which,—both
Freedom and Union came to their own.

‘It is inconceivable, to-day, that the hot-heads can stir up civil
wars over the question of Armaments; but it is as certain as the
sunrise that either with or without such war, the cause of Peace
and Justice will ultimately prevail.

The vast body of our people were caught up, in the fifties,
in a great campaign of education on the Anti-slavery Question.
On the one hand they were asked, first, Shall the Union and
slavery be preserved through the recognition of local self-gov-
ernment? On the other hand, they were asked, Shall slavery
be abolished even at the cost of the Union? The great majority
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN %

of them decided for both Freedom and Union, and the preserva-
tion’ of local self-government unsullied by the institution of
slavery.

The vast body of the people in every civilized land are being
asked to-day, on the one hand, Shall International Justice pre-
vail through enormous and competitive increase of national
Armaments? On the other hand, they: are being asked, Shall
International Peace be maintained by the abolition of Arma-
ments? The great majority of them will undoubtedly decide
for both Peace and Justice, and the conversion of national
armaments into an international police force.

The burning problem which presses for solution upon the
leaders of thought and conscience in every land to-day is, How
shall the happy conjunction of Peace and Justice be procured?

In the fifties, the peaceful solution of the burning problem of
Freedom and Union was abnormally and wickedly side-tracked
by the precipitation of a terrible civil war.

It behoves every good citizen to-day to see to it that neither
a series of terrible civil wars nor a succession of terrible inter-
national wars shall side-track the speedy and peaceful solution
of the impending issue of our day.

It behoves every good citizen to enter upon a candid, earnest
and thorough study of this question, not only because it involves
grave economic evils, nor because it threatens serious political
complications, but because the best that is within man, the
divinity that inspires humanity, demands that this problem shall
be settled in accordance with the eternal laws of right.

It behoves every good citizen to permit no glamor, false or
real, associated with warfare in the past; to permit no difficulty
or danger associated with the present solution of a problem
already strongly intrenched in national habit and daily increas-
ing in national menace; to permit no fears, fancied or real, of
attack from “enemies” in the future,—to retard or to swerve a
hair’s breadth from the path of right and righteousness the
determined, patriotic, wise and Christian effort to make Peace
and Justice prevail, now and forever, to the exclusion of war-
fare and the injustice which logically and inevitably follows in
its footsteps.
8 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

To assist, if possible, and in however small degree, in this
campaign of education, and especially to appeal to the candid
and earnest thought of conscientious men and women, the follow-
ing addresses have been delivered before various audiences, and
are now made available in print for those who read and reflect.

Swarthmore College, September, 1909.
II. ARBITRATION, BUT NOT ARMAMENTS*

President Roosevelt has been the fountain-head of most of the
streams of public interest pouring through our country during
the last eight years, but his advocacy of a great American
navy has added not only an element of public interest, but one
of great public menace as well. The championship of that
cause by Admiral Evans and Captain Hobson, or even by the
editor of that widely read weekly, The Outlook, is not nearly
so important as is its advocacy by our President. I am one
of the millions of Americans who have a profound respect for
President Roosevelt’s honesty of purpose and a genuine admira-
tion for his great abilities. I am also one of the millions of
Americans who deprecate many of his methods as President ;
and especially do I believe that his method of preserving inter-
national peace is radically wrong and terribly dangerous.

Gladly and gratefully I recognize the services rendered to
the cause of peace, in some ways, by the President. I do not
forget that it was on his initiative that the Hague Court of
Arbitration was called into beneficent activities. Nor do I for-
get that it was due largely to his initiative that the Peace of
Portsmouth was achieved, and the Russo-Japanese War brought
to an end. But it is precisely because of President Roose-
velt’s character and ability, and because of such services as these
which he has rendered to the cause of peace, that his champion-
ship of a great armament makes him the most serious menace to
the preservation of the world’s peace. He is, in fact, the Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of the peace movement. This is a serious
charge, but I believe that the following considerations will stb-
stantiate it.

European statesmanship for centuries acted in a half-hearted
or hypocritical way upon the old adage that the best way to
preserve the peace is to prepare for war. But it remained for
Bismarck, that man of blood and iron, to translate the old adage

*This address was published in The Advocate of Peace, Boston, and in The Frienda’
Intelligencer, Philadelphia.

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10 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

into a positive philosophy, and apply it in such a thorough-
going manner that he made of Prussia an armed camp. The
other continental countries of Europe followed as closely as
possible in the path marked out by him, and to-day we have the
spectacle of Europe bristling with bayonets and filled with the
din of warlike preparations and maneuvers, all in the great name
of Peace.

Across the English Channel this barracks philosophy of peace
has been translated into a big navy philosophy of peace, and it
has become a cardinal doctrine of British statesmanship that
Britain’s navy must be equal in fighting strength to the navies
of any other two powers.

Across the Atlantic the big navy philosophy of peace has been
adopted by Mr. Roosevelt and his school, and Britain’s “two-
power policy” has been translated here into a “two-ocean policy” ;
that is, the maintenance of fleets on both the Atlantic and
Pacific oceans able to cope with any fleet which may be sent
against them. In support of this new gospel of peace, mission-
aries from North Carolina and elsewhere are sowing the seed
which has been grown in the editorial gardens of The Outlook
and in Mr. Roosevelt’s fields of statesmanship.

The ablest exposition of this gospel with which we are familiar
is President Roosevelt’s address at the Naval War College in
Newport this summer. This address was not intended, as Mr.
Roosevelt said, for the naval officers in his audience, but was
intended as a message to the great body of American citizens.
And yet about three of its paragraphs were devoted to asser-
tions of the desirability of peace; while about three columns
were devoted to an exhortation of preparedness for war. Thus
it very forcibly reminded students of history of that jingle,
quoted so often in Seventeenth Century England, and which
became the fruitful parent of the well-known “jingo” school of
statesmen :

“We don’t. want to fight,
But, by jingo, if we do,
We’ve got the ships,
We've got the men,
We've got the money too.”
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 11
~The “big stick” of the President’s argument in this address
contained the following notches: First, we need a big navy in
order to enforce our immigration policy. If we desire to
restrict immigration from Italy, Bohemia, or Japan, we must
be ready to fight for it. Secondly, we need a big navy to enforce
the Monroe Doctrine. Thirdly, we need a navy so big that no
other nation will dare to attack us. And fourthly, we need a
big navy which, cutting loose from its country’s fortified ports,
may seek out its opponent and “hammer that opponent until
he quits fighting.”

Without dwelling here on the first two arguments, it may be
said of the first that the United States has found its. immigra-
tion policy in danger only when it has not lived up to the spirit
of its treaties with foreign nations, or when, for commercial
advantages, promises have been made to foreign nations whose
fulfilment would not have been in keeping with the genius of
our civilization. Of the second it may be said that long before
the Rooseveltian régime of naval expansion, the Monroe Doctrine
was enforced. For example, President Lincoln and President
Cleveland were successful in this direction, and were successful
in neither case because of the possession of a navy or threat of
war, but because of the enlightened public opinion which put a
brake upon the pugnacious governments concerned, in France,
in England, and in the United States.

The third argument is based upon that cheerful mediaeval
view of one’s neighbors as a gang of bandits ready to seize the
first opportunity of indulging themselves in warfare and
knavery. In view of the pacific development of modern public
opinion throughout the civilized world, and in view of America’s
geographical isolation and advantages of manifold number and
variety, this mediaeval view of the family of nations is on the
face of it so absurd that it makes the thoughtful inquirer suspect
that a sinister design may underly it. It is in fact a too
palpable reminder of those good old times when military despots
procured great standing armies by playing upon the fierce and
ignorant jealousies of their subjects.

Mr. Roosevelt’s fourth argument in favor of a great navy in
the interests of peace is a naive revelation of the true logic of
12 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

his position. The candid suggestion that our own fleets pur-
sue the peaceful and carpenter-like industry of “hammering,”
whilst our opponents are engaged in the warlike and savage
brutality of “fighting,” provokes an involuntary smile. But
this argument is no laughing matter to the genuine lover of
peace and arbitration. It constitutes the chip upon Uncle
Sam’s shoulder which foreigners are dared to knock off at their
peril.

The folly and the wickedness of enormously increasing arma-
ments may be illustrated in many ways. But over against the
four arguments noted above may be mentioned here the four
following: First, the economical burden of great armaments
has been proved by columns of statistics. The enormous sums
which are expended upon armaments, and which leave some
nations so poor when war comes that they are helpless to pursue
it to a successful conclusion, are patent to all. But the mis-
direction of labor and capital applied to such uses is especially
to be resented in a country whose natural resources are in such
need of development as are ours. The President’s conference
with the governors in regard to the preservation and develop-
ment of our natural resources, and his commission on the im-
provement of the condition of the American farmer, could be
very materially aided by diverting to them a portion of the
government’s military and naval appropriations, which have
increased to almost three-fifths of the total appropriations. The
present naval policy seems destined to result in each one
of the states of the union having as its namesake a man-of-war.
A short mathematical calculation would reveal the number of
miles of macadamized roads or the development in the educa-
tional system which might be procured in each state by foregoing
the honor of being presented with a naval leviathan as a name-
sake.

Secondly, not only is the expense of building and maintain-
ing a warship (which is said to be equivalent to the endowment
and maintenance of a first-rate university, like Johns Hopkins)
to be deplored, but its folly is apparent when the said ship’s
short life of usefulness is considered. We are told that the
“life” of the best men-of-war is from twelve to twenty years;
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 18

and this means that every generation must not only build but
rebuild its fleet of warships. We are told also that ships of
the Dreadnought type are supremely valuable as fighters only,
and that they have no proportionate power of defence. Certain
it is that the invention of new devices of attack has made ships
of the very best known type obsolete within a very few years.
And if the present rate of development in the art of navigating
the air is maintained for a few years, the entire armaments of
civilized nations on land and sea will be worth, for fighting
purposes, an equivalent quantity of old junk. The folly of the
big-and-bigger-and-biggest-navy policy is apparent, also, when
we remember that a “big navy” or a big stick is only a rela-
tive term. We are told that in 1907 the United States achieved
second place in the list of naval powers, but that Germany and
Japan have been making frantic efforts to oust us from that
position. Our stick may be a big one when it is ten feet long,
while Germany’s or Japan’s is only five feet long, but when
theirs grows to ten feet, our stick will no longer be a big one.
If England is determined to maintain a navy equal to that of
any other two powers, and we are determined to maintain a fleet
on both oceans capable of coping with any which may be sent
against it, the old mathematical puzzle is revived of an irresistible
force meeting an immovable obstacle. Sensible men are there-
fore inquiring where this policy is to end.

In the third place, President Roosevelt's armament policy
invites the very evil of warfare which he deplores. He looks
upon his navy as merely a means of defence; other nations
inevitably regard it as a defiance and a menace. The very worst
feature of the big navy policy, then,—immeasurably worse than
its expense and its folly from the fighting point of view,—is
that it is the chief obstacle to the adoption of international
arbitration. Both reason and experience prove that it has this
disastrous result.

If in a “state of nature” my neighbor and I should desire
to establish a court for the adjudication of differences between
us, the worst possible method of procedure to accomplish that
end would be to equip our lawns with bulldogs, tigers, lions, and
all the animals of the jungle. If, for alleged purposes of

%,
14 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

defence, I were so to equip my lawn, my neighbor would inevit-
ably look upon me either as a hypocrite in pretending to desire
a court, or as a bully who did not intend to abide by the decisions
of a court. And if he were to follow my example and “defend”
his lawn in a similar manner, the results would be, not the estab-
lishment of a court, but such a fight as the jungle never saw.

At the first Hague Conference, Count Minster, of Germany,
and Admiral Fisher, of Great Britain, are reported to have
opposed Lord Pauncefote’s plan for a court of arbitration, for
the reason that, since Germany’s army and Britain’s fleet
were ready and able to crush their opponents on short notice,
it would be foolish for them to submit their differences to a
court of arbitration and thus to give their opponents time for
preparing their defence. When Ruy Barbosa, of Brazil, was
asserting against Mr. Choate’s court of arbitral justice the argu-
ment of the equality of sovereign states, there rolled beneath
his words and within the hearts of the representatives of other
smaller states the conviction that the United States was not sin-
cere in its attempt to establish a court of arbitral justice. With
the shadow of a constantly increasing navy behind our American
delegation, it was unable to overcome the sentiment of its oppon-
ents, expressed in private and not forgotten in public: “We do
not trust you, gentlemen.”

When trial by jury for criminal offences took the place of
trial by battle, the great reform was not accomplished by increas-
ing the weight of the armor, or lengthening the spears of Eng-
land’s citizens. The history of disarmament on the Great Lakes
between the United States and Canada, and of the limitation of
armaments on the frontier between Chile and Argentina, as
well as the story of the increase of armaments on the Transvaal-
Cape Colony boundary and in the Rhineland, are further facts
which show the foolishness and the failure of the attempt to
enforce arbitration by means of increasing armaments.

In view, then, of the plain lesson taught by reason and experi-
ence as to the inevitable and insuperable antagonism between
increasing armaments and increasing arbitration, it is an out-
rage that the activities of such associations as the North Caro-
lina‘Peace Association and of such “statesmen” as Captain Hob-
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN, 15

son should be permitted to handicap the work of such great
international statesmen as Mr. Choate and M. Bourgeois in
their efforts in behalf of arbitral justice.

Finally, the increasing armaments policy is bitterly resented
by millions of Americans because it is dethroning the ideal of
America as the Sir Galahad among nations. There was a time
when it could be truly said, and without a shadow of doubt or
suspicion on the part of the other members of the family of
nations, that our country’s strength was as the strength of ten
because its heart was pure. That ideal of the youthful, peace-
ful giant of the west, whose ports were without a gun, and
whose warships were designed solely to perform the police duty
of the seas, has been trailed in the dust before the nations, and
we are fast coming to be classed with those military despots who,.
from the time of Babylon and ancient Rome, have made a
desert and.called it peace.

When Madame Roland aes. fg guillotine during the
French Revolutionary Terror, and looked around her upon the
emblems—the “liberty caps” and “citizens’ costumes’”—of so-
called liberty, and upon the bodies and blood of the guillotine’s
victims, she exclaimed: “O Liberty, Liberty, what crimes are
committed in thy name!” And when the advocate of peace
by means of arbitration hears arbitration acclaimed by those
who are intent on the indefinite and enormous increase of our
army and navy, he may well exclaim, “O Peace, Peace, what
crimes are committed in thy name!”

Let us, then, before it is too late—before the poison in the
editorial columns of The Outlook, written and to be written,
has irretrievably entered into the blood of our nation,—let us
put an end in our new world to this pernicious peace philosophy
of the old world’s men of blood and iron; let us make right, and
not might, our motto; let us make justice, and not victory on
land or sea, our aim; let us make arbitration, and not arma-
ments, our method; and Jet us seek as our leader towards the.
goall. of sntennetienial pene: not the god of battles, but’ oe
Prince of Peace.
16 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Ill. INTERNATIONAL POLICE, BUT NOT NATIONAL
ARMAMENTS*

There is an analogy, that armaments are equivalent to police
forces, which is as prevalent as it is false and pernicious. It is
used constantly and effectively by the advocates of great and
ever-growing armies and navies. It steals for armaments all
the glory which is associated in the minds of civilized men with
that effective agent of civilization, the police force. It pre-
tends that just as a police force is the bulwark of cities against
thieves, assassins and anarchists, so is a great armament the
defence of the nation against criminal aggressors attacking it
from abroad. The object of police forces, we are told, is to
prevent and punish domestic crime, and that of armaments is
to prevent and punish international crime.

So powerful and plausible is this analogy that it is the chief
argument of militarists in the most civilized of nations; for
the greater the degree of civilization the more intense is the love
of law and order and the respect for the agencies which maintain
them. So inseparably associated in the minds of pacifists,
also, is the love of law and order with the desire for peace, that
this analogy, when loudly urged by their military opponents,
is sufficient to confuse their thought and even to silence for
a time their advocacy of peace.

Come, let us reason together as to its basis and justification.
Let us get closer to the two institutions, and consider their
fundamental differences.

They differ, fundamentally, in the first place, in the source
of their authority. A police force derives its authority from a
power which is supreme over both contestants; an armament
derives its authority from a power which is supreme over only
one of the contestants. A police force, in the punishment of
crime, and all other officials engaged in the administration of
justice, are under the authority of criminal courts, and perform
their duties only after a fair trial has been conducted, in which
the criminall has stood on an equal footing with his accuser.
It has been a principle of jurisprudence ever since Magna Charta

®T his address was written from memory and revised since its delivery.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 17

that every man is held innocent until he is proven guilly, that
he cannot be made to testify against himself, and that he can
be punished only after he has been found guilty by due process
of law, and in a court which is impartial towards both prosecutor
and defendant.

Compare this judicial process with an act of war. One
nation decides that another nation has injured it; this decision
is based frequently on false or misinterpreted evidence; even
where the evidence is good, the accused is given no chance to
rebut it, or to submit other evidence, in a court which is im-
partial towards both prosecutor and defendant; and no oppor-
tunity is given the defendant for appeal to a higher or less
partial tribunal.

When a nation has made up its own mind that it has been
injured, it launches its army or navy against its opponent; if
it is victorious, it is satisfied that justice has been done; if it is
defeated, it decides that injustice has triumphed. Let us, there-
fore, it says, become more powerful than our neighbors, in order
that we may always cause justice to prevail.

This is the old and impious doctrine, discarded within civilized
nations, that might makes right. It is the discarded method
of settling wrongs between individuals by appeal to the big
stick or to “trial by battle.”

But, says the militarist, the diplomatists and state depart-
ments of the two countries involved in the difficulty, are sup-
posed to sift the evidence in the case, and to decide the question
of right and wrong. True; but this constitutes no more of a
genuine court than would the opposing lawyers hired to conduct
a case between individual litigants. And while the intensely
partisan, because “patriotic,” diplomatists and statesmen are
arguing the case and striving to secure victory for their respec-
tive clients, the armed forces of the latter are straining at their
leashes and drowning the voice of justice by their baying, while
a “patriotic” people are demanding of their respective govern-
ments that “the flag shall not be lowered,’ that the foreign
“dago,” or “greaser,” or what not, shall not triumph. He who
remembers the Maine, needs not to be told how military and
popular clamor darkens counsel and prevents the diplomatists
18 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

and statesmen of two quarreling nations from conducting a
fair trial in times when mutual relations are strained, or,
indeed, even in the best of times. Senator Root, our late great
Secretary of State, has recently uttered some burning words
illustrative of this fact, and has made an urgent appeal to our
own people to remain cool and silent in times of international
difficulty, to demand justice, and not triumph, at the hands of
their agents, and to honor and reward their diplomatists even
though they bring home defeat of national claims. But what is
really needed to secure the essence, rather than the semblance of
law and justice, is something more than coolness and silence on
the part of the people, and even more than a muzzle and kennel
for the dogs of war; it is a genuine international court, on whose
bench neither party’s representatives are seated, and which will
sift all the evidence by legal methods and render a judicial
verdict, undisturbed by popular clamor and unaffrighted by the
shadow of armaments. This great institution has already loomed
above the nations’ horizon, and is even now within their grasp.
But that is another story; let us proceed with our examination
of the false analogy between police forces and armaments.

In the second place, when a verdict has been rendered, the
ministers of justice who execute it against an individual are
still the impartial agents of the law; they inexorably suppress
the aggrieved party’s attempt to secure vengeance or indulge
hatred against his enemy, and they enforce the sentence of the
court regardless of private wishes or demands, and regardless of
the nationality, color or creed of the condemned.

On the other hand, when a nation decides for itself that
another nation has wronged it, it sends against that nation its
own armed forces, and yet it calls them agents of justice. Not
only are these men filled with patriotic love of their own country,
intent on doing their utmost for it, animated by the blind senti-
ment of “my country right or wrong,” believing that their fame,
fortune and political preferment depend on what they can
achieve against their country’s enemy; but also they are often,
indeed inevitably, filled with their own national, racial or reli-
gious prejudice against the “dog of a Christian” or “the accursed
Turk,” the “American hog” or the “Spanish hell-hound.” Even
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 19

in civil wars, as we Americans know too well, the military
“ministers of justice” are filled with bitter hatred of their
former fellow-countrymen, the “Rebel” or the “Yank.”

Soldiers, of course, are sometimes used in aid of the police
to enforce law and order within the jurisdiction of the soldiers’
own country. At such times, they form in no true sense of the
word an army; but are an auxiliary of the police force, subject
to the same sovereignty and law to which those who threaten
violence are subject; and even when acting in this police capa-
city, they are rightfully, as we shall see, carefully circumscribed
by the civil authority.

Again, when a sentence is imposed and administered by
officers of the law, it is inflicted upon the guilty party, and is
designed to bear strict relation to the crime committed. In
warfare, the innocent suffer always, but the guilty may not only
escape the evils of the war, but may even prosper by it; while
the “indemnity” demanded, or the “satisfaction” secured, is
proportioned not to the offence, but is limited only by ability
to seize; or by “policy” in retaining. Under criminal law, it
is the man who has committed murder who enters the peniten-
tiary or mounts the gallows. In warfare, the leader of a mob
against resident aliens, or the promoter of a financial enterprise
in an alien country, may reap military, political and financial
reward, as the result of a successful war stirred up by his law-
less violence or chicanery; while thousands of soldiers, on both
sides, must lay down their lives, or their health and strength,
before the breath of battle or disease, and other thousands of
non-combatants must suffer from the anguish or want which
always accompany the most “merciful” of wars. “I know only
one thing which is more terrible than a victory on the field of
battle,” said one who knew whereof he spoke, “and that is a
defeat.” “War is hell,” said the most renowned of American
generals; but it is a hell whose tortures fall chiefly upon the
innocent.

The disproportion between the original offence and the satis-
faction exacted for it, in warfare, is one of the most impressive
lessons of history. “To the victors belong the spoils,”—all the
spoils they can get,—is a precept which has been acted upon
20 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

even by the most advanced of nations. England’s ally is threat-
ened by France, the Seven Years’ War occurs, and England
seizes and retains the Canadian and Indian empires. Spanish
sailors in Manila harbor fire upon American ships, and we seize
and retain the Philippines,—put an American “yoke” upon
them,—even though we had fought for the Filipinos to enable
them to throw off the Spanish “yoke.” And, when, having
exacted perhaps twenty times the amount of damages suffered
from China, we return to her a large part of our spoils, the rest
of the civilized world holds up its hands in amazement at such
Quixotic stupidity, or suspects that we are trying to ingratiate
ourselves with Chinese officials and merchants. Such are the
results of a system which is alleged to be merely an international
“police system,” designed to “punish” crime and enforce
“justice.”

In the next place, when we consider the respective weapons
and methods of a police force and of an army or navy, we recog-
nize another difference between them. In some European coun-
tries the policeman is armed with a sword; but the tendency of
the best nations is to arm him only with a club, in order that
he may do the least necessary amount of irreparable damage in
fulfilling his duty. He is taught the sacredness of human life,
and is made by rigid discipline to feel the utmost responsibility
for taking human life, being subjected to severe investigation
even in clear cases of self-defence, and being made to feel that
homicide is absolutely the last resort, and one which the best
policemen always find some means of avoiding. On the other
hand, the soldier and sailor are provided with the most perfect of
death-dealing devices procurable, and a corps of expert scientists
are ever busy in seeking more powerful explosives and more
effective projectiles. It is true that international law, thanks
largely to the two Hague Conferences, now prohibits the use of
certain means of injuring the enemy, and certain peculiarly
atrocious kinds of projectiles and explosives, such as “dum-dum
bullets” and asphyxiating gases; but it is also true that this
prohibition was secured by men of peace, in opposition to the
military spirit, and only after a long and bitter struggle with
most of the representatives of the world’s armies and navies,—
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 21

foremost among whom,—alas, that it should be true !—were the
naval and military representatives of the United States of
America. .

Again: Taught by centuries of military despotism, the peo-
ple watch with jealous eye the growth and power of their arma-
ments, and especially guard the civil power, as represented by the
policeman, from encroachment on the part of the military power,
as represented by the soldier. Even in a country: like ours,
where the government is by and for the people, and not by and
for the despot, the civil power in our cities, states and nation
believes, and acts upon the belief, that eternal vigilance is the
price of liberty from military domination. Our cities are
rightly jealous of soldiers of any kind coming to the aid of the
police; our states are right in dreading the intervention of the
standing army in aid of the police force or constabulary, and in
preferring a resort to the militia or “citizen soldiery,” which is
merely a development of the posse comitatus; and the founders
of our nation were right in placing the supreme command of the
army and navy in the hands of civil officials, the President and
Secretary of War. Under even these favorable auspices, and
bridled by such constitutional checks, the fighting spirit which
is alien to the true civilian’s character, but which is natural to
the professional soldier, makes itself manifest in times of pro-
found peace. Not only are the spirit and methods of courts
martial different from civil courts, but the attitude towards the
sacredness of human life differs radically in military and in
civilian circles. For example: A sailor was killed recently in a
boxing match on board a man-of-war lying off the Massachusetts
coast; the Massachusetts officials made a determined effort to
secure the murderer for trial in the State courts; but Federal
jurisdiction supervened; and the Naval authorities, “while
regretting that death should occur from boxing exhibitions in
the navy,” said that “no blame could be attached to any one
unless subsequent reports should disclose that the men should
not have been allowed to participate in such a contest because
either of them was physically disqualified to withstand the
ordeal.” A similar case occurred not long before in the army,’
on the Pacific Coast, where an enlisted man had died from the
22 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

results of a “battle royal,” that is, a boxing bout, and the army
authorities decided that “the man had' died in the line of duty,”
that is, that his slayer should remain unmolested. How neces-
sary is Congressional supervision and public opinion for curbing
this military attitude towards human life, even among the boys
who are being trained for our army and navy, has been made
manifest many times during recent years at West Point and
Annapolis. From the military point of view there is logic in
the contention that if soldiers are to defend the nation effectu-
ally in time of war by killing foreign enemies, they should be
allowed in the interests of military skill to kill each other in
time of peace. But the world is,awaking from its military
dream in which this kind of logic is valid.

Turning now from the fundamental differences between police-
men and soldiers, from the point of view of the punishment of
crime, let us consider their equally fundamental differences from
the point of view of the prevention of crime.

In the first place, the history of jurisprudence proves con-
clusively that a properly constituted and administered judicial
system, including the police force, is a powerful deterrent to
the commission of crime. A just and impartial punishment
inflicted under the “majesty of the law” upon one criminal has
prevented many another potential criminal from becoming an
actual one; and it may be remarked, in passing, that capital
punishment, or the military punishment, is the least efficacious
of all in the prevention of crime. It is the fact that the criminal
has received an impartial, judicial trial, before his punishment
is inflicted, that creates a law-abiding attitude and habit even in
the minds of the criminally disposed.

On the other hand, a “punishment” inflicted by one nation’s
armed forces upon another nation, prevents the recurrence of
another “crime,” on that nation’s part, only until it becomes
able, or thinks it has become able, to commit it with impunity.
England seemed to have annihilated the power of France in
1763, but France merely waited for the next supposedly favor-
able opportunity to secure revenge, which came with the out-
break of the war of the American Revolution; defeated, or
“punished,” again in that war, France again, in less than ten
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 23

years, flew at her despoiler’s throat and strove with her in a con-
flict which lasted for nearly a quarter of a century. And so it
would doubtless have continued, had it not been for the shifting
of European politics and the rise of new and stronger enmities.

War does not “settle” things permanently, but it has the
reverse effect, and “stirs them up” worse than before. Defeated
nations have invariably strained every effort to become capable
of fighting their victorious enemies again or have used every
endeavor to form alliances with other nations against them.
Hence have arisen dual, triple, quadruple and grand alliances,
and the dreary wars for the “balance of power” which have
invariably followed.

Well, say the advocates of great armies and navies, if it is
not warfare which prevents international crime and more war-
fare, it is at all events preparations for warfare which have this
result. Hence, the growth of “two-power standards,” “two-
ocean bases,” and the like; hence also the launching of “Dread-
noughts,” equipment with maxim guns, lyddite, etc., etc. “If
you wish for Peace, prepare for War,” is the time-worn expres-
sion of this familiar philosophy. So time-worn is it, and so
great are the names associated with it, that its adherents cling
blindly to it, and when they find that facts are at variance with
it, why,—so much the worse for the facts. If it be found that
England with eighteen miles of warships, is in ever imminent
danger of war with Germany, then the fault is not with the
ships that have been built, but with those that haven’t been:
“Build eighteen miles more of warships” !

It is this philosophy which has made of Europe an armed
camp and filled the seas with men-of-war; it is this which caused
Japan to develop her navy and army with feverish haste and
attack Russia at a time opportune for victory; and it is this
which has caused a certain circle of Chinese statesmen to deter-
mine to develop China’s military resources, to seek a quarrel
with some Occidental state, say France, and to “beat her to a°
frazzle,” as Japan did Russia, in order that it might win the
respect of the Christian Occident.

‘When this feverish, panicky and endless competition between
the nations in building up armaments against each other is con-
24 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

sidered, the ludicrous fallacy of the analogy between arma-
ments and police in the prevention of crime is apparent. But
there is another fundamental defect in the analogy.

Police systems are leveled against the criminal and the would-
‘be criminal. Armaments are leveled against nations. That
view of other nations which looks upon them as a gang of con-
scienceless bandits is as false as it is ignorant and contemptible.
One goes to England and he finds a civilized people wrought up
to fever heat lest the faithless German, building more warships
than England has, should pounce down upon her. He goes to
Germany and finds an equally civilized people engaged with
feverish haste in “laying down the keels of Dreadnoughts” to
prevent the perfidious Briton from perpetrating crime upon the
Vaterland. When England increases her genuine police force,
the German does not multiply his; when the German police force
is increased, the Briton sleeps none the less peacefully. The
reason for this difference is that in the one case a genuine police
force is in question, capable of genuine prevention of genuine
crime; while in the other case a sham police force is demanded
for the alleged prevention of imaginary crime.

How fallacious is the analogy drawn between armaments and
a true police system, may be readily seen when one compares
the present system of national armaments with a system under
which all the world’s armies and navies, vastly reduced in size,
would form part of an international force, and would act
against any member of the family of nations only when it
received a warrant for so doing from an international court,
before which the delinquent member had been legally and im-
partially tried and sentenced. Such an armament would indeed
be a genuine police force both for the punishment and preven-
tion of genuine international crime and for the enforcement of
genuine international justice.

This is an ideal, to be sure, not yet realized. But its realiza-
tion is within the present generation’s grasp, and is being worked
and striven for by the world’s brightest intellects and truest
hearts. Meanwhile, let us not be misled by an analogy which
is both false and pernicious: which will not bear the light of
honest scrutiny, and which is retarding the realization of the
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 25

Twentieth Century’s highest and most practicable international
ideal. Let us sweep away the blundering fallacy that any
national armament, as an armament, is a police force; and let
us not permit its old-world, mediaeval shadow to retard the
dawning of the new day of righteousness andi justice.

Iv. A POSITIVE PROGRAMME FOR THE PEACE
MOVEMENT

More than three thousand years ago, when a young and feeble
nation, still in its nomadic stage of existence, was struggling
with the moral evils which encompassed it round about in the
wilderness of sin, Jehovah wrote with his finger upon tablets of
stone a code of moral law. This code which Jehovah’s servant,
Moses, brought to the people of Israel from Mt. Sinai’s cloud-
capped summit, numbered only ten commandments, but they
dealt with the fundamental failings and the primal passions of
mankind.  Polytheism, idolatry, irreverence, materialism,
murder, adultery, theft, false witness and envy, were pointed out
by God’s finger and denounced in words accentuated with
thunder and lightning from the desert mountain’s top.

These commandments have come rolling down across the
centuries and across lands and seas, and have become the basis
of every civilized people’s moral code. They have been rein-
forced in the individual’s conscience, too, by identical command-
ments written by God’s finger upon every individual soul.

That one among them which concerns this meeting most is
couched in four simple words: THOU SHALT NOT KILL. Kings,
legislators, judges, God’s priestly servants, the awful warnings
of conscience, and the tender pleadings of the better angels of
man’s nature, have sought with threats or tears to enforce this
command. Retaliation, the death feud, the wergeld, outlawry,
torture, transportation, life imprisonment, the death penalty,
have all come to the aid of social condemnation and the agoniz-
ing pricks of conscience, and have been leveled against the
world-old, world-lasting sin and crime of murder. It is one of
26 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

the burdens of humanity which must continue to be wrestled
with as inevitably as sparks fly upwards, and until the spirit of
man has become transformed by the spirit of God.

But what chiefly concerns us to-day is the fact that men in
their social capacity have refused to regard killing under certain
circumstances as murder. Homicide in tournaments, duels,
prize fights, at the stake, or on the scaffold, has been excluded
from the category of murder and been sheltered beneath the
“eode of honor” or the “majesty of the law.” And while all of
these illusions have been discarded, or are fading away in the
light of the Twentieth Century, there still remains with the
nations the belief that organized, state-supported killing, or
warfare, is not prohibited either by the law of Moses or the law
of Christ. Rulers have steadfastly refused to agree with
Lowell’s dictum :

“Ez fer war, I call it murder—
Ther you hev it, plain and flat;
I don’t want to go no furder
Than my Testyment fer that.”

And soldiers have steadfastly refused to respond to the Quaker
appeal to submit to fine and imprisonment rather than to
be led or forced upon the field of battle, to be shot down rather
than to shoot to death another human being, or to render on the
battlefield only those services which will mitigate rather than
increase human suffering.

So deeply rooted in tradition and education is the belief that
warfare is not murder, and that it is inevitable and unavoidable;
so determined and continuous are the enormously increasing
preparations for warfare in every civilized land in this Twentieth
‘Century of Christianity; so far are the nations in their politi-
cal capacities from living up even to the Mosaic command-
ment, that many devoted apostles of the Prince of Peace have
despaired of mankind’s ever reaching the goal of universal peace
and brotherhood.

The ten negative commandments of the early Hebrew leader
were supplemented nineteen centuries ago by two positive com-
mandments, one of which enjoined love for one’s neighbors: as
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 27

for one’s self; the Mosaic negative commandment, Thou shalt
not kill, was supplemented by Christ’s great positive command-
ment, Love thine enemy, do good to them that hate thee.

“Tf the world still justifies organized killing, or warfare,”
the despairing lover of peace exclaims, “if men have not yet
reached Mt. Sinai’s summit, how long will it be, O Lord how
long, before men and nations can attain to Mt. Calvary’s
heights?” There is probably no one of us here who has not
struck at times this note of discouragement and despair. Young
men and women, especially, whose patience is not that of the
older reformer, who have not learned from long experience how
slowly grind the mills of God, are peculiarly liable to believe
that no practical good can be accomplished for the cause of peace
by perpetually proclaiming the Mosaic command, Thou shalt not
kill, or by holding up Christ’s standard of Love thine enemy.

Meanwhile, a positive philosophy of peace is being offered to
the world and is supported by plausible arguments and powerful
appeals to human passions and ambitions. “If you desire peace,
prepare for war” says this philosophy, “pile up armament upon
armament, and cover the seas with Dreadnoughts; thus only
can you prevent those nations who desire war from carrying
out their fell design !”

Now, it is not merely the plausibility of this philosophy that
makes it appeal so powerfully to young and ardent minds; it
is rather the fact that it is a positive programme, and not a mere
negative commandment like the Mosaic one. It is true that
there is another positive philosophy of peace,—the gospel of
Christ, the gospel of love; but this is deemed too exalted for
human attainment this side of the millennium. It is true, also,
that William Penn in his Holy Experiment in Pennsylvania,
put this gospel into successful application; but Indian politics
account for this success, say some of the critics, while others
assert that it would be attainable on the world’s stage only if
all the world were Quakers.

Is there, then, no positive programme for the peace movement
which shall! supplement the Mosaic Thou shalt not kill, and’
which shall form an intermediate resting-place in the ‘world’s:
journey upward towards Christ’s goal of Love thine enemy? I
28 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

rejoice to say that there is such a programme, and I believe that
it, also, is in accord with Christ’s gospel.

This programme is one whose foundations were laid, and some
of whose parts were developed, by the two great Peace Con-
ferences held at The Hague in the summers of 1899 and 1907.
Its parts thus far developed are three in number, and are known
as international commissions of inquiry, mediation, and interna-
tional courts of arbitration.

International commissions of inquiry are based upon the
worldly wise advice, Investigate before you fight; and they are
justified by. Christ’s injunction and promise, Know the truth,
and the truth shall make you free. Their sole object and effort is
to ascertain the truth in regard to international disputes; and
they are so constituted and equipped that their inquiries may be
both thorough and impartial. They have been resorted to
already since the first Hague Conference in at least one notable
instance, the dispute between Great Britain and Russia in regard
to the Russian destruction of some British fishermen and fishing
boats off the Dogger Bank. A simple statement of the facts in
this case served to assuage the indignation of two great nations
and to prevent a probable war between them. Thus was strik-
ingly illustrated the truth of the saying, Investigate and you
won't fight ; while again was realized Christ’s promise, The truth
shall make you free——free from misunderstanding, prejudice
and passion.

At the Hague Conferences, the nations realized and solemnly
asserted the fact which has been so long struggling for accept-
ance in international law, that all the nations of the world are
members of one international family; and that it is not only
the privilege, but that it is the duty of any member of the
family to extend its good offices to other members between whom
a dispute may arise, and offer to mediate between them for the
peaceful solution of their dispute.

Not only was this done, but it was unanimously agreed that
the parties to the dispute should each select a member of the
family to act as their representative in endeavoring to secure a
peaceful adjustment of the difficulty; and in case such adjust-
ment cannot be secured and war should ensue, their representa-
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 29

tives should watch for and seize upon every possible Spposvanity
during the war for bringing it to an end.

By this positive and definite means of mediation and special
mediation, the nations have asserted their acceptance of what
is called in political phrase “the solidarity of the nations,” and
what is called by Christ “the brotherhood of man.” They have
acknowledged that they are, in a sense, their brother’s keeper;
and have recognized as a duty, which they have promised to ful-
fil, the apostle’s injunction: “If any man obeyeth not our word
by this epistle, note that man, that ye have no company with
him, to the end that he may be ashamed. And yet count him
not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother.”

Finally, the Hague Conferences have unanimously asserted
the desirability and utility of arbitration, have established
two international courts of arbitration, have recommended
another most promising one, have provided a complete and
helpful code of procedure for these courts, and have declared that
at least two classes of international disputes—those having to
do with the collection of contracted debts, and those having to
do with the capture of private property during warfare on the
sea—shall be submitted to arbitration.

In accordance with the principle thus laid down, there have
been negotiated within the last ten years scores of treaties
between various nations providing for the settlement of dis-
putes between them by the peaceful means of arbitration; and
in compliance with the practice thus provided for, there have
been four important international disputes tried and settled
before the Hague Court of Arbitration, and nearly a half-dozen
more have been made to enter upon the same peaceful path.
This method of settling disputes in the family of nations is also
marked not only by worldly wisdom and common sense, but by
compliance with Christ’s precepts as well. For it is in accord
with that method prescribed by Jesus to his disciples: “And
if thy brother sin against thee, go, show him his fault between
thee and him alone: if he hear thee,‘ thou hast gained thy
brother. But if he hear thee not, take with thee one or two
more, that at the mouth of two witnesses or three, every
word may be established. And if he refuse to hear them, tell
30 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

it-unto the church; and if he refuse to hear the church also,
let him be unto thee as the Gentile and the publican.”

One of the most encouraging facts about the rational and
Christian method of arbitration is that not a single member of
the family of nations,—not even Venezuela,—has “refused to
hear” the voice of justice when proclaimed by the arbitral tri-
bunal, or to abide by the arbitral award; still less has it been
necessary for the family to treat any of its members “as the
Gentile and the publican.”

Such, then, is the positive programme for the peace movement.
When we consider the reason and justice and solidarity which
underlie it; when we consider what has already been accom-
plished by it,—what a veritable revolution in international law
it has achieved; when we consider its great and fruitful promise
of increased usefulness in the future,——we may believe that,
in very truth, we live in the dawn of a new and glorious era.
It is true that across the sunny sky of this new era there lies the
shadow of enormous and increasing armaments. But there are
many signs that the reason and consciences of thinking men are
revolting more and more against the folly and the wickedness
of the draft and the dreadnought; and the strong and deter-
mined movement for at least the limitation of armaments is
bound to succeed. But, most encouraging of all, the realization
of what I have called the positive programme of peace, will.
remove the necessity or the excuse for armaments and will take
a long stride towards that happy day when swords shall be beaten
into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.

Meanwhile, in most international disputes, right shall take
the place of might; justice shall be sought, rather than victory;
and the Prince of Peace shall replace in the nations’ hearts and
temples their false gods of battle. Meanwhile, too, let us see to
it that, individually and collectively, we do all that in us lies to
make successful this Holy Experiment of our own day and
generation. Looking back as we do with justifiable pride and
gratitude to the principles and practices of William Penn and
the Quakers of the Olden Time, we should be unworthy of the
name which they have made illustrious,—we should be unworthy
of the name of Christians, did we fail not merely to sympathize
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 81

with, but to work actively and devotedly for, the carrying out
of this positive programme for the great and glorious and right-
eous peace cause of our time.

Let it be our duty and endeavor, then, to promote between
civilized nations that policy which William Penn practised: in
the Indian-haunted forests of Pennsylvania,—the policy not of
dreadnoughts, but of dread nothing, not of keeping our powder
dry, but of trusting in God. Let it be our task to secure
between the nations, in case of difference, a resort to commis-
sions of inquiry and to mediation, even as William Penn induced
the Swede, the Hollander and the Englishman, on the Dela-
ware’s banks, to settle many of their differences out of court by
having recourse to the friendly mediation of official arbitrators.
And, finally, let it be our high privilege to work with brain and
heart and soul for the realization in this our century of that
ideal which William Penn dreamed of two centuries ago,—
the ideal of an international court of arbitral justice. By so
doing, we shall be worthy of being known, not only as Pennsyl-
vania Friends, the heirs of William Penn, but as Peacemakers,
the children of God.

V. THE DUTY OF RELIGIOUS LIBERALS TOWARDS
THE PEACE MOVEMENT*

In the olden days of chivalry, a noble family took for its
device the simple words, Noblesse oblige. In our English tongue
we interpret this to mean that noble birth or rank compels to
noble deeds. So full of high incentive was this pithy motto,
that it became the watch-word of noble men and women in every
land. I would fain apply it to-day to this Federation of Reli-
gious Liberals, as regards their duty towards the Peace Move-
ment of our time.

For if Religion be “the doing of the Word, and not the hear-

* This address has been published in the ‘‘ Proceedings of the First National Con-
gress of the Federation of Religious Liberals."”
32 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

ing of it only,” and if the Liberal be “he who looketh into the
perfect Jaw, the law of liberty, and so continueth,” then are
Religious Liberals doubly dedicated to the service of the Peace
Movement which has arisen so gloriously with the advent of this
Twentieth Century.

During centuries of human history, inhuman and incessant
warfare laid its devastating hand upon human lives and upon
the fruits of human toil, playing that réle in the history of the
world which appalling earthquakes play in the history of the
earth. But wars have become less frequent in our later cen-
turies, and those which have occurred may be likened to the
recurring but subsiding tremors of some great natural convul-
sion. Fortunately for mankind, wars are unlike earthquakes
in that they may be prevented. It seems inevitable that men
must look forward with what equanimity they may to the
destruction of San Franciscos or Messinas in the future; but,
thank God, the human earthquake of warfare can and shall be
prevented. And in this holy warfare against war, Religious
Liberals have a plain duty to perform.

When the medieval Church placed itself at the head of the
Crusades, a cry went up from Christendom, “To Jerusalem, to
Jerusalem! God wills it!” The enlightened consciences of men
in our day have recognized this old battle-cry to have been no
whit less foolish and pernicious than all the others uttered in
the names of the various gods of battle. But with the passing
of this and of many another wild and wicked illusion, the faith
of men still remains strong that there is a genuine holy warfare
to be waged on earth in which they in their religious capacity—
their churches militant—must enlist. As standard-bearers on
such fields of battle, the world has a right to look to Religious
Liberals; and as standard-bearers in the great Peace Movement
of our day, these must perform a two-fold task.

I have compared the warfare of our time to the subsiding
tremors of the military earthquakes which harassed the medi-
eval world; they are, properly speaking, reversions to the savag-
ery of primitive man, or evidences of the social atavism which
is not yet stamped out. Religious Liberals must see to it, in
the first place, then, that this atavism is stamped out.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 33

Again, men groping slowly through centuries of muddied
and sluggish thinking in regard to international relations have
caught a vision of the light of truth and have begun to devise
and establish means for settling their differences in a rational
and peaceful way. Religious Liberals must see to it, then, in
the second place, that this light of truth shall shine ever more
bright and brighter and that it shall speedily prevail over the
ignorance and sin which have darkened international dealings
in the past.

Let us examine a little more closely this two-fold task. In
their struggle against reversion to savagery, Religious Liberals
must insist that men shall deal honestly with their intellects
and consciences, and interpret the great Mosaic injunction, Thou
shalt not kill, to mean uncompromisingly and inevasively that
men must not take the lives of their fellow men under any pre-
text whatsoever. Besides that natural instinct of the brutes which
forbids them to seek by organized means to kill their own kind,
there must be sounded in the hearts of men the solemn and
insistent command of reason and morality: Thou, individu-
ally or collectively, shalt not kill thy kind. The torch which
shone from Sinai’s mount so many centuries ago must be kept
steadily burning and flashed from land to land and from soul
to soul, if civilization is to be kept from the abyss of savagery
out of which it has so painfully climbed. Be it the task of
Religious Liberals to prevent that torch from becoming dimmed
by the sophistry which denies that killing is murder provided
it be done on a large enough scale and by organized, state-sanc-
tioned means. Be it the task of Religious Liberals to prevent
that torch from becoming quenched in the casuistry which pre-
tends that the killing of men is justifiable because of the end
which is sought. Let Religion reject the so-called justice which
is pedestaled upon the physical and moral victims of warfare.
Let Liberals, convinced that even “to further Heaven’s ends they
dare not break Heaven’s laws,” deny the name of liberty to that
license which destroys human lives and causes untold human
misery, even though material prosperity or even moral progress
may follow in its train. Let them say to governments whose
function it is to administer law, ye shall not divest yourselves of
34 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

law beyond the territorial limits of your states and resort for
the accomplishment of your purposes to violence and force.
Let them say to the nations who demand great armies, They
that take the sword shall perish by the sword. Let them say to
the peoples who demand great and ever growing navies, pleading
that their warlike preparations are inspired solely by a love of
peace: Ye canot serve both the God of Warfare and the Prince
of Peace; for either you will hate the one and love the other,
or else you will hold to the one and despise the other. Let
them say to the false prophets who teach that if men desire
peace they must prepare for war: Ye cannot gather figs from
thorns nor grapes from thistles; and if ye sow the wind, ye shall
reap the whirlwind.

Above all, in this path of their duty, Religious Liberals must
see to it that their churches are cleansed of the abominations of
the dogs of war. There must be no Christianized Woden or
Judaized Moloch in the sanctum sanctorum of church or temple.
There must be no service of song or prayer or penance designed
to procure from the Father of All Mankind a victory on the
field of battle for some of His children and death and defeat for
others of them. No minister of God who professes to be about
his Father’s business must bless the martial banners of opposing
hosts, or send out soldiers from God’s holy altars to slay God’s
other children. The missionaries whom they send to foreign
lands must be taught that it is not to their country’s warships
cruising off the “heathen’s” coasts that they must look for their
strength and their protection. The heathen who are sought
to be converted to a better mode of life must not receive a Bible
from one hand and the menace of a sword from the other. To
Religious Liberals, if to any one on God’s earth, should be con-
fidently entrusted the duty of putting an end forever to the last
vestiges of that old method of conversion illustrated by Charles
the Great when he drove the Saxons by the thousand, at the edge
of the sword, into the baptismal waters. By Religious Liberals,
if by any one, must the missionary enterprise of the future be
inspired solely by the fearlessness of bodily death, by the for-
giveness of persecutors (“not knowing what they do”), and by the
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 35

entire rejection of any aid dependent upon the threat or the
reality of physical force.

There was a time, very recent in our country’s history, when
sections of the church defended, condoned, or bewailed the neces-
sity of, the institution of human slavery. To-day, there are
sections of the church which defend, condone, or bewail the
necessity of, human warfare. The call has come clear and
clearer to Religious Liberals, in whatever section of the church
they may worship, to denounce uncompromisingly the institution
of human warfare; to brush aside the shams and sophistries
which seek to hide in flaunting or flimsy phrase the whole dark
butchery of war; and to bid men divest their souls of fancied
fears which make them hug the iron chains of warlike prepara-
tions. It is one high mission of Religion to lead men to face
with confidence serene that Valley of the Shadow of Death into
which every mortal must some time pass; let it be the Religious
Liberals’ task to bid the nations pursue their paths through life
serene and calm, refusing to be terrorized by fear of the sub-
junctive; refusing to replace the rational and manly motto
of Dread Nothing by the hysterical one of Dreadnoughts, which
means in reality Dread Everything; refusing to die a thousand
deaths in fearing one; refusing to create an atmosphere of suspi-
cion towards this or that other nation; refusing to forge for
themselves the chains of their own slavery; refusing to place a
burden on their backs which shall bow them to the earth and shut
out from their vision not only the truth of heaven but also the
truth about their fellow men.

Let it be the Religious Liberals’ second duty as standard
bearers in the Cause of Peace, to lead men’s minds away from
warlike, brutal and foolish means of settling international dis-
putes, and towards the discovery and adoption of peaceful,
rational and Twentieth Century means. Throughout the gloom
of centuries of warfare, the advocates of peace have toiled faith-
fully but too often half-despairingly onward towards some far off
imagined day when law should take the place of violence in
international affairs, and heroic souls have cheered each other
by the cry, “There must be refuge! What good gift have our
brothers, but it came through toil and strife and loving sacri-
36 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

fice?” To our eyes, in the dawn of this Twentieth Century, has
come the clear vision of that refuge. We have seen the nations
twice assembled in conference at The Hague; we have seen
them acknowledging in word and deed the fact that they are
one single family, each member possessing inalienable rights and
bounden duties; we have seen them adopting great codes of law
which shall throw the mantle of scientific aid and of human
charity over the brutalities of war, and shall restrict the devasta-
tions of warfare on land and sea to narrow channels, protecting
from its havoc, as far as may be, the great world of peaceful
industry and progress. We have seen the corner-stone laid at
The Hague of a beautiful Palace of Peace, which is to afford
a home to institutions for the peaceful settlement of inter-
national disputes; for here will be housed the international
commissions of inquiry, the Permanent Court of Arbitration,
with its arbitral tribunals, Permanent Bureau and Administra-
tive Council, the International Prize Court and the Court of
Arbitral Justice,—all of which have been adopted or provided
for by the two Hague Conferences, and some of which have
already been put into beneficent activity.

Laying up all these things in our hearts, remembering them.
faithfully and hopefully, and praying God to be with us still,
lest we forget them, let it be our high privilege and bounden
duty as Religious Liberals to emphasize in the midst of war’s
alarums the great fact that there are available and mandatory
these peaceful and honorable means both of settling quarrels
and of procuring justice; let us exalt these means above war-
fare or preparations for warfare, as high as light is above dark-
ness, as heaven is above hell; let our voices in clarion tones
ring out above the fears and clamor of the thoughtless or the
ambitious the insistent cry, “To The Hague, To The Hague!
God wills it!” Let us suffer no sophistries as to righteous-
ness and honor being preferable to peace; but, backed by God’s
word and human experience, let us proclaim that peace is
righteousness, that peace and honor are now and forever one
and inseparable.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 37

VI. THE INFLUENCE OF PEACE POWER UPON
HISTORY*

Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, of the United States Navy
and member of the first Peace Conference at The Hague, has
written a book which the English-speaking world, in its lighter
moments of ease, greatly loves to read. This book is a glori-
fication of the part played in history by the British and Ameri-
can navies, and is entitled “The Influence of Sea Power upon
History.” I am informed that it has been reprinted twenty
times within nineteen years. It is true, as some advertising
pages in its back proclaim, that the War and Navy Departments
of the United States Government purchased one large impression
of it for use in the libraries of our army and navy, and that the
British Government supplied copies of it to the cruising ships
of the Royal Navy; and this, of course, accounts for a good
many of the copies that its publishers have disposed of. But
it is also true that the student of history and the general reader,
although not entirely agreeing with the British Admiral Tryon’s
verdict that “it is the best thing ever written,” have never-
theless accorded it a splendid market.

Captain Mahan, accordingly, has achieved fame, fortune, and
high position. So did Prince Metternich; and, like Metternich,
Captain Mahan is also a reactionary. It is true that as the
servant of a government of the people, by the people, and for the
people, on the eve of the Twentieth Century, Captain Mahan
has not had the golden opportunity for political reaction which
was afforded the Austrian minister in the palmy days of the
Holy Alliance; but in his day and in his way he has proved
worthy of his Qld World prototype.

For example: as a delegate of the United States Government
to the first Peace Conference at The Hague, in the year that
his glorification of sea power reached its fifteenth impression,
he was permitted to cast the vote of the United States delega-

* This address has been published in the “‘ Proceedings of the Fighth Annual Meet-
ing of the History Teachers’ Association of the Middle States and Maryland,” and in
the Advocate of Peace, Boston; a part of it, also. in the Friends’ Intelligencer; Phila-
delphia.
38 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

tion against the prohibition of the use of projectiles the object
of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.
The American and the British votes were the only negative ones
cast against this humane and progressive prohibition, which was
adopted by the twenty-four other delegations present. At the
second Hague Conference, the British Government gave in its
adhesion to this prohibition, and the Latin American Republics,
then represented for the first time, did the same. Thus, thanks
to Captain-Mahan’s action in 1899 and his continued influence
in United States naval circles in 1907, our country stands alone
among the world’s forty-five powers, on the reactionary and
inhuman side of the question of asphyxiating projectiles.

Again, in the first Hague Conference, Captain Mahan joined
forces with his army colleague, Captain William Crozier, to
cast the United States’ vote against the prohibition of the use
of “dum-dum” bullets, which had earned the reputation of
inflicting jagged and unnecessarily cruel wounds. On this occa-
sion, the British and Portuguese delegations were the only others
of the twenty-six present which cast negative votes, and of these
the British Government had the interest of the inventor and pro-
prietor in defending the obnoxious bullets. At the second Con-
ference, the British and Portuguese governments yielded to the
enlightened public opinion of the civilized world and gave in
their adhesion to the prohibition of 1899, and the Latin Ameri-
can Republics did the same; but the United States Government
still stands by its guns, or bullets, or Captain Mahan. Thus,
although “dum-dum” bullets were originally British chestnuts,
and although they have been pronounced worm-eaten by the
British themselves, our United States Government, thanks
largely to Captain Mahan’s reactionary principles, still insists
on pulling them out of the fire. Prince Metternich, intent on
plucking the princely power of the old régime from the ashes
of the French Revolution’s conflagration and opposing it to the
rising tide of popular sovereignty, would have had a warm
feeling of fellowship with our American Captain’s opposition
of asphyxiating gases and “dum-dum” bullets to the Twentieth
Century's rising tide of humanity and justice towards every
member of the family of nations.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 39

Again, Captain Mahan is one of the chief leaders in that
coterie of promoters of a Big Navy, some of whom insist that
this country shall have peace at any price, no matter how many
billions we may have to expend on “Dreadnoughts,” or how
many wars we may have to fight, to retain and protect it. But
the new-born and sigular doctrine of some of these promoters,
that enormously and indefinitely increasing armaments is the
best way to insure international arbitration, is frankly rejected
by Captain Mahan, whose naval commission has recently pub-
lished as axiomatic the assertion that there should be no check
or change of method in expanding from a state of peace to a
state of war. For “this is not militarism,’ the commission
argues; “ it is a simple business principle based upon the fact
that success in war is the only return the people and the nation
can get from the investment of many millions in the building
and maintenance of a great navy.”

Fortunately, this distinguished naval officer of ours was not
permitted to lay his frosty hand upon the Permanent Court of
Arbitration established in 1899 by such truly American repre-
sentatives as Andrew D. White and Frederick W. Holls, and by
such progressive international statesmen as Lord Pauncefote,
Count Nigra, Chevalier Descamps, and Léon Bourgeois. In
such company as this, Captain Mahan must have felt as much at
home as Metternich would have done in the midst of a circle com-
posed of Thomas Jefferson, George Canning, and John Quincy
Adams. On the other hand, he was undoubtedly fitted, as a
writer in the Fortnightly Review remarked,—a remark which
is also quoted in the back of his book on Sea Power,—he was
undoubtedly fitted “by nature as well as by training for the work
to which he happily turned his hand.”

This work included, among other things, as I have reminded
you, a book on “The Influence of Sea Power upon History.”
I need not review that book before this Association of History
Teachers, for, in common with thousands of our colleagues, most
of us have probably devoted many precious hours in exploiting
its pages before our classes. I desire here merely to point out
the ruling passion of its author and to indicate its place in his-
torical literature. As Captain Mahan in his reactionary inter-
40 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

nationalism reminds us of Prince Metternich, so in the themes
of his book he recalls Sir Walter Scott and Baron Jomini.

As the rise of industry in the cities of medieval Europe made
of the feudal castle a picturesque ruin and obscured the robber
baron in a mist of romantic glamor, so the rise of the Peace
Power to supremacy is converting the cavalry squadron into a
constable’s staff and the warship into a policeman’s club. Sir
Walter Scott has embalmed in literature for the amused interest
of posterity the jousts and tournaments of the days of chivalry ;
and Jomini and Mahan, taking their themes more seriously, to
be sure, because their proximity made them Joom the larger, have
recorded the strategy and tactics, the bulleting and butting and
buffeting of guns and bayonets, of rams and rigging. How we
are thrilled in the pages of Mahan by “the great smashing effect
of carronades,” or “the great penetrative power of long range
guns”; how breathlessly we pursue “the tactical uniformity of
action,” and “the attack by lee or weathergage” ; and how we are
led to marvel that a certain attempt should have been made to
“carry by boarding” instead of to “sink by ramming”!

When the duel and the prize-fight shall have found their
“gifted historians,” their literature also, the picturesque and
romantic account of thrust and parry, of upper cut and solar
plexus, will take its place beside the historical novel and the
histories of drum and trumpet, of topsail maneuvre and larboard
attack. .

Meanwhile, why is it that military and naval histories have
come to seem to us so much beside the mark? Captain Mahan,
in speaking of massed attacks upon the enemy’s fleet under
changing conditions of naval warfare, complains that “men’s
minds are so constituted that they seem more impressed by
transiency of the conditions than by the undying principle which
coped with them.” Now, Captain Mahan may feel entirely
reassured upon this point, in so far as the transiency of warfare
and the eternal principle of international peace are concerned.
Men’s eyes and ears are no longer blinded or deafened by powder
smoke or roar of guns; and they have detected through the
tumult and the shouting the great truth that the strongest
power in all this world, and the power beside which all other
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 41

means of regulating international relations fades into utter
insignificance, is the great combination of forces to which the
name of Peace Power may be applied. Captain Mahan dimly
realizes this fact and complains that “a peaceful, gain-loving
nation is not farsighted, and far-sightedness is needed for ade-
quate military preparation, especially in these days.”

Our modern eyes have certainly not that kind of farsighted-
ness; for how naive and childish now seem cavalry charge or
volley of grape shot on fields whose endless succession of har-
vests is momentarily disturbed by some “famous victory”; or
how we smile at the absorbed earnestness with which naval his-
torians dramatize the dancing of hostile fleets towards each
other, battering and banging in heroic abandon, coloring the
ocean waves with human blood, but all unconscious of the depths
of ocean across which ten thousand fleets have swept in vain.
And not only does militant man seem a puny pigmy when meas-
ured thus by Mother Nature’s forces; but how immeasurably
insignificant seems the war which he has stirred up as the means
of solving international problems, when compared with the great
forces, human and divine, which make up the power of Peace.

To our modern eyes, Captain Mahan’s kind of “history” has
two fatal defects. In the first place, it has given rise to a false
and pernicious philosophy of international relations. A certain
class of newspaper writers, misled by the spirit of Captain
Mahan’s “history,” are indulging in such distorted views of
international relations as are expressed: in the two recently pub-
lished paragraphs which follow. The Salt Lake Tribune ful-
minates as follows: “The Republic [Our Republic, of course],
triumphant, magnificent, bearing the olive branch of peace in
one hand and the rod of castigation in the other, standing for
humanity and justice throughout the world, will be the world’s
arbiter in time, and largely so from henceforth. And thus
justice will be made to prevail throughout the world, and the
arbiter of justice will be so strong, both on sea and on land, so
unassailable, that to attack him will be hopeless, and peace will
prevail because no hope of gain by going to war can possibly
be entertained. And that is the kind of peace that must come to
the world. A peace through the overwhelming 'majesty of the
42 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

American Republic that is so strong as to be completely able
to enforce it, and so just as to compel respect in that enforce-
ment.”

Again, a rear admiral of the United States Navy concludes
his account of the recent voyage around the globe as follows:
“T wish that I might stop with the words ‘peace’ and ‘good will’
as my closing expression, the lingering savor of which must
ever be most sweet to even the sternest warrior. But misunder-
standings must be avoided and prevented. We have fellow
countrymen just as conscientious, just as earnest, just as patri-
otic as any, who doubtless would ask in all sincerity: ‘If all
these love feasts be as described, why build more battleships?’
The answer lies in the teachings of history, in the inexorable
logic of past events. It would be futile to attempt here to
marshal all the axioms drawn from the world’s experience in
human nature. From the far-back days of the great Covenanter
comes to us the sagest of all advice: ‘Put your trust in Prov-
idence—and keep your powder dry.’ ”

In the second place, Captain Mahan’s “history” lacks per-
spective and true historical proportion, because it grossly exag-
gerates the trivial and the transient and asserts them to be the
most important and the eternal. It would put in the place of
the discredited drum and trumpet history, the equally discredit-
able siren and wig-wag history. Foot, horse, and dragoons
having been driven by modern writers from the fore-ground
of history into their relatively unimportant corners, where they
properly belong, Captain Mahan would have us substitute in
their place frigate, cruiser and torpedo-boat. But as teachers
of history, we protest against the gifts of any more false gods;
and having found the eternal verities and the truly important
in history, we will abide with them. And among these last, I
count first and foremost the Peace Power.

Within the limits of a brief paper, this Peace Power can be
hardly more than alluded to, or at most its outlines only may
be suggested. In this attempt I may be permitted, first, since
I have adapted the title of Captain Mahan’s book, to adapt also
a portion of its preface, merely substituting for his term Sea
Power the term Peace Power. His preface, then, would read,
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 43

in part, as follows: “Historians generally have been unfamiliar
with the conditions of peace, having as to it neither special
interest nor special knowledge; and the profound determining
influence of peace power upon great issues has consequently been
overlooked. The definite object proposed in this work is an
examination of the general history of Europe and America with
particular reference to the effect of peace power upon the course
of that history.” But I may not follow thus page by page
through Captain Mahan’s ponderous tome, although it must be
confessed that there is not much more of what is in very truth
“the general history of Europe and America” in its 541 pages
than might be put into a twenty minutes’ paper.*

Peace Power is embodied in many things. Christianity, the
moral code, literature, the drama, art, commerce, and the vast
congeries of forces which make up what is conveniently known
as economic internationalism, world’s fairs and congresses, an
enlightened public opinion, diplomacy, international law and
international institutions, are some of the agencies utilized by
this master power in human affairs.

Christianity, which has abolished slavery from all civilized
lands, made the family “the sacred refuge of our race,” tempered
the despotism of autocrats, idealized popular governments, uni-
versalized education, and exalted the dignity of labor, the worth
of the individual, the rights of children and the duty of woman,
has been a form of Peace Power which it would take hours to
expound and libraries to estimate. The song of Peace on Karth
which the angels sang when its founder was born, has rolled with
increasing volume down the ages and, despite militant the-
ologies and false philosophies of warfare, has become the great
chorus of humanity in which the din of arms has gradually
grown less and less.

As to the moral code: “History,” says Froude, “is a- voice
forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and
wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall,

*In this connection, I have been interested to observe that in Professor Robinson's
“History of Western Europe’’, the first 541 pages contain only about 70 which are
devoted to both Sea Power and Land Power, and these pages include all the wars of
Europe during fourteen hundred years of its most warlike period.
44 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

but the moral law is written upon the tablets of eternity.”
It is written, also, he might have added, upon the human
heart and is reflected more and more in human conduct. The
history of man is largely a record of the increasing sway of
justice and charity within the family, the tribe, the nation and
the world.

Literature, the drama, and art, although they have been per-
verted at times to exalt the barbarism of warfare, have been in
the main the obedient and potent agencies of peace. They have
made plain to the wayfaring man the great ideals of peace, and
enabled him who runs to read the fruitful lesson that even the
peoples beyond the mountains and beyond the seas are animated
by those ideals and are worthy of justice and love.

Economic internationalism, with its commerce in the luxuries,
comforts and many of the necessities of life, with its foreign
exchange and foreign loans, its commercial codes and means of °
intercommunication, has woven ever-strengthening ties that bind
the merchants, manufacturers and laborers of all lands together
in a community of interests which have made and are ever more
making powerfully for peace.

The concourse of the peoples in world’s fairs and congresses
of manifold variety has taught not merely the arts of life, but
has taught as well the duty and the method of an international
life based upon peace and justice. From the Congress of
Panama in 1826 to the second Hague Conference in 1907, there
were held 119 congresses in which various governments of the
world were officially represented; and during the same eighty
years there were held more than 700 unofficial international
gatherings.

Public opinion, which Ambassador Bryce has shown to be
the supreme power behind our American government, has not
only increased in its guiding and motive force within the vari-
ous nations, but has become an international public opinion, and
has been immensely strengthened and enlightened by the grow-
ing interchange of ideas and principles between the leaders of
thought throughout the world. On how many occasions and
with what beneficent results Peace Power has exerted a con-
trolling influence upon national and international action by
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 45.

means of this “redoubtable sovereign of public opinion,” would
be too long to tell. Suffice it to recall here the words of a dis-
tinguished Belgian statesman and international jurist, M. Beer-
naert: “There is no assembly to-day. which must not sit with
windows opened, listening to the voices from outside”; and to
remind you that even France and Germany have bowed to this
great international Peace Power and agreed to submit to peace-
ful adjustment a casus belli whose gravity makes the cause of
the War of 1870 pale into insignificance.

As to diplomacy: a distinguished American, who has recently
become a private citizen, said in a speech on the twenty-second
of February last, when he welcomed the home-coming of our
earth-girdling navy: “You, the officers and men of this for-
midable fighting force, have shown yourselves the best of all
possible ambassadors and heralds of peace.” Shades of Frank-
lin, the Adamses, Jay, Pinckney, Murray, Gallatin, Webster,
Lincoln, and all ye illustrious galaxy of ministers plenipoten-
tiary and envoys extraordinary who have adorned the annals of
this and other lands with the renowned victories of peaceful
diplomacy! Have your achievements been indeed forgotten
or eclipsed? No, I cannot believe it. For, when the prevalent
disease of Dreadnoughtitis shall have been operated out of our
body .politic, our historical judgments will swing back again
from this Mahanesque extreme, and we shall once more realize
that statesmanship is still better than a warship in international
diplomacy, and that the greatest diplomatic victories of the
past,—and there are thousands of them,—have been those which
preserved or restored peace between nations.

The glowing eulogies which jurists and publicists have lavished
for centuries upon the common, civil and statute law of civilized
lands, apply with peculiar force to international law as an agent
of Peace Power. The book which revealed to the world the
science of international law was written more than two centuries
and half ago; and yet of that book, which disclosed this form of
Peace Power then only in its infancy, Andrew D. White has said :
“Of all books ever written—not claiming divine inspiration—
the great work of Grotius on ‘War and Peace’ has been of most
benefit to mankind.” For, he adds, “it developed and fructified
46 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

human thought; it warmed into life new and glorious growths of
right reason as to international relations ; and the progress of rea-
son in theory, and of mercy in practice (promoted by it), has
been constant on both sides of the Atlantic.” If such words as
these may be truly uttered of the dawn of international law by a
careful scholar, what can be adequately said of this potent agency
of Peace Power as it has climbed to its noon-day splendor?
The number and variety of international institutions which
already exist are a source of wonderment even to the close stu-
dent of international affairs. The International Bureau on the
Slave Trade, in Brussels; the International Bureau of Weights
and Measures, in Berlin; the International Commission on Free-
dom of Trade through the Suez Canal, in Paris; the Interna-
tional Bureau of the Red Cross Movement, or of the Geneva
Convention, in Geneva; the International Institute of Agricul-
ture, which has recently held its first session in Rome; the Inter-
national Association of Chambers of Commerce, which met last
in Milan; the various international bureaus located at Berne,
including those for the Protection of Industrial, Literary, and
Artistic Property, Railway Transportation, Protection against
Phylloxera (supported by five powers), the Bureau of Tele-
graphy, with forty branches in as many countries, and: the.
Bureau of the Universal Postal Union, which is used and sup-
ported by fifty different postal administrations; the Interna-
tional Health Bureau, in Paris; the Bureau of the twenty-one
American republics, in Washington; the International High
Court of Central America, which has jurisdiction over differences
arising between the five contracting republics, and which has
just handed down its first two decisions on the claims of Hon-
duras and Nicaragua against Salvador and Guatemala; Inter-
national Commissions of Inquiry, one of which prevented a prob-
able war between Great Britain and the United States over
the Venezuelan Boundary Question, and another a war between
Great Britain and Russia over the incident of the Dogger Bank;
arbitral tribunals which have settled more than six hundred
international disputes since the foundation of our Union; the
Permanent Court of Arbitration, at The Hague, which has
already settled four important international controversies, and
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 47

to which the United States and Great Britain and Venezuela,
and Germany and France, have just referred sundry knotty
problems of long standing; the International Prize Court,
adopted by the second Hague Conference; the Court of Arbitral
Justice, which is now in process of establishment; the sixteen
conventions and six declarations adopted by the two Hague Con-
ferences; and the three score treaties of obligatory arbitration
negotiated by the nations since the first Hague Conference,—
more than a score of which are the work of a single great
Secretary of State, Mr. Elihu Root. Such is a partial list of
the economic, moral and legal institutions which the family of
nations has established for the expression and preservation of
the power of international peace and justice.

And such is a faint image of that Peace Power whose control-
ing influence upon past history it will take another generation
of historical writers adequately to record ; whose exclusive influ-
ence upon the future of international relations has already
dawned ; and whose faithful, enthusiastic and fruitful study will
engage the devoted attention of this and succeeding generations
of students and teachers of history.

Permit me, in concluding this prosy paper, to borrow the
poetic words of one of England’s poets, and to express in them
the thought which has inspired it:

The knights rode up with gifts for the king,
And one was a jeweled sword,

And one was a suit of golden mail,
And one was a golden Word.

He buckled the shining armor on,
And he girt the sword at his side;

But he flung at his feet the golden Word,
And trampled it in his pride.

The armor is pierced with many spears,
And the sword is breaking in twain;
But the Word has risen in storm and fire

To vanquish and to reign.
48 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

VII. THE AMERICAN FLAG

When I was a high-school boy in the city of Baltimore, Mary-
land, I took great pleasure in going down to Old Fort McHenry,
which stands on the edge of the city, overlooking the Patapsco
River and the city’s harbor. This old fort was the scene of
one of the battles in the war of 1812. And lying upon its
grassy embankments, beneath the shadow of the American flag,
I could dream to my heart’s content of the day when, according
to my school-history, the Boys of 1812 repulsed the British
fleet and saved Baltimore from capture by the Red Coats.

The study which stood out most prominently in my school
days was the history of the United States; but this “history”
was devoted almost exclusively to armed conflicts with Red
Skins, Red Coats, Mexicans and Rebels,—although to the south
of Mason and Dixon’s line we were carefully taught that the
last-named were not “Rebels,” but “Confederates.” As a result
of this kind of historical study, I saw in the American flag only
an emblem of warfare, a banner of victory over cruel and tyran-
nical invaders. “Maryland, my Maryland,” was a very familiar
song in my boyhood, and some “despot’s heel” seemed to be ever
trampling through the pages of my country’s history. Down
at old Fort McHenry, too, was waving the very same star-
spangled banner about which Francis Scott Key wrote his song,
as he lay, a hostage on board a British ship, thinking of the Fort
and wondering if it still held out in the dawn’s early light.

It is not strange, perhaps, that under these conditions I should
have received a grossly distorted impression of our country’s
history, and have seen in our country’s flag only the red blood °
of battle, the white badge of victory, and the starry blue of
heaven looking down upon deeds of military daring. But as
the years passed and I read better books and thought more about
the work which our forefathers had accomplished, I found
that the military pages in their history were not by any means
the brightest, and not even the most numerous or most import-
ant. I found sad blots on the pages which told of the Civil
War,—even of my Maryland’s share in it,—and of the Mexican
War and the War of 1812, and even of the Revolutionary War
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 49

itself. Of course, I never lost my veneration for the genuine
courage and the devotion to high ideals which many of the
Boys of ’76 and of the succeeding wars showed in their conduct
on battlefields. But I found that this courage and devotion had
been born and nourished in the daily paths of peaceful life,
and carried therice to battlefields by citizens who had become
soldiers for a very short period of their lives. And I found
that their fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers,—far more
numerous than they,—who remained at home engaged in quiet
industry, exhibited the same high traits of courage and devotion
in equal or greater degree, though in less conspicuous ways.
I learned, too, that the battlefields themselves were only the
relatively unimportant episodes, and not the great motive
forces, in our country’s history; for I found that the victories
of peace were not only far more numerous and important, but
illustrated in far more fundamental and more lasting ways the
courage and devotion which we love to associate preéminently
with the character of patriotic Americans. Thus I came to see
in our country’s flag, not the emblem of victory in warfare, but
the ensign of some of the best and noblest things that all of
humen history can show.

Let me tell you briefly this morning, as we look upon Old
Glory, flying here before us, of some of these great and noble
things which I have learned to see in the Stars and Stripes.

First, I see a great and virgin continent, stretching from ocean
to ocean, and from the frozen lands of Canada to the semi-
tropics of Mexico. It is covered, over vast areas, with the forest
primeval; its only avenues and roads are Indian trails or the
paths of wild beasts; its only denizens are men still living in
upper savagery or lower barbarism, or the beasts of the forest
and the plain. Here and there, the Indian women have made
small gardens by the use of stone hoes, and a few beans, or
pumpkins, or Indian corn are raised to eke out the precarious
existence which is led in squalid huts grouped in transient vil-
lages.

And now only three centuries have passed,—which is but a
tiny span in human history,—and what a change have our
fathers wrought! The forests have been felled, the land
50 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

plowed, great crops of cereals and herds of cattle raised to feed
not only our own countrymen, but the world as well; the treas-
ures of the mine, the river and the sea have been exploited for
man’s use; railways, canals and highways penetrate to every
nook and corner of the continent; the mail wagon, the tele-
phone and telegraph bind every section of our people to each
other and the outside world; factories, homes, villages, a half-
dozen of the world’s greatest cities, have sprung up as if by
magic within a few score years or a single generation.

The first thing that I see in our country’s flag, then, is this
marvelous march of civilization—unparalleled in the world’s
history—across this vast and virgin continent; and accompany-
ing that march, I see the courage which enabled the pioneer to
face the peril of wild beast and brutish man, and the devotion
to high ideals which enabled the farmer and laborer of every
kind to endure the hardships of a toilsome, lonely and bare
existence. Even in these days of our prosperity and material
wealth, I see the same daring and persistent determination to
bend every force of nature to the use and comfort of man. And
united with this somewhat materialistic ideal, I see other and
higher ideals whose realization depends largely upon material
progress.

Education is one of those other ideals,—an education which
shall be extended to every boy and girl, no matter how poor or
lowly they may be, and which shall carry them, if they have the
capacity to utilize it, from the kindergarten through the uni-
versity. In pursuit of this ideal, the early colonists made the
school-house one of their very first buildings, statesmen of: a
later day have lavished the public land and public revenue upon
the public schools, and public-spirited citizens have given vast
sums of money to the promotion of lower and higher education
alike. Coupled with this ideal, is another one, that education
is to be provided for every boy and girl, not solely for the sake
of their own development and prosperity, but primarily that they
may become good citizens, capable and desirous of rendering’
helpful service to others in both their public and their private
life. It is this great two-fold educational ideal, of which I think
first, as I look upon the flag as it floats over school-house and
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 51

college. May the star-spangled banner wave over every school
building throughout our broad land, in city and country alike;
and may the scholars who assemble beneath it, see in it the best
things for which it really stands, and determine that as far as in
them lies those best things shall remain untarnished and undi-
minished.

Beside the school-house, the early colonists planted the meet-
ing-house or church; and, although there was a brief period of
religious persecution in some sections of our land, it soon became
a cardinal principle of our fathers that religion should be
fostered by assuring to it entire liberty. No so-called religious
wars, thank God, have disgraced our country’s history; and,
far from seeing in our flag the emblem of such warfare, I see
in it the palladium of religious liberty,— the emblem of free-
dom and protection to every form and manner of religious belief
which manifests itself in peaceful and unpernicious ways. Pro-
tection of the church and chapel, the synagogue, the meeting-
house of every kind, and promotion of the service of God and
his children, for which they stand: such is one of the brightest
stars in our flag’s constellation.

America, the home of the homeless, the refuge of the exile
and the outcast,—such is another of our great ideals. Thou-
sands and tens of thousands of emigrants from every clime and
nation have poured into our broad lands in an ever increasing
stream, finding homes for themselves and helping greatly to
develop the country’s resources. The reflection of this great
fact,—also unparalleled in the world’s history,—forms one of
the brightest stars or stripes in our country’s flag; and I have
never seen it waving in a city of some foreign land without
thinking of this world-hospitality for which it stands.

The successful inauguration of popular self-government,—
government of the people, by the people and for the people,—
this is another and one of the proudest pages in our country’s
history. Immigrant and native alike are enrolled in the ranks
of a common citizenship, and march together to the polls, where
heads are counted, and not broken as they are on battlefields,
and where the people decide for themselves who shall make their
laws and execute them, and usually indeed, what laws they shall
52 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

make. Your own great fellow-citizen, Abraham Lincoln, gave
expression to this ideal when he said that no man was good
enough or wise enough to rule over another man without that
other man’s consent. And although the people sometimes make
mistakes and follow the wrong leaders, we can still accept as
true another of Lincoln’s sayings, that though you can fool all
of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of
the time, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Is it
not a truly glorious inspiration to see in our country’s flag this
lesson which it was first to teach the modern world, that the
people can rule themselves and that on the whole they will rule
wisely and well? ;

Another political ideal which our fathers have realized, side
by side with that of self-government, is the ideal of Union.
Every township, city, county. and state, in our great continen-
tal domain, is ruled by its own people; and yet from Maine
to California, from Dakota to Texas, we are all united in a
single national government. This problem of e pluribus unum,
of making one out of many, of creating a strong national
‘government and at the same time leaving self-government in the
hands of the. people in their local communities—is one of the
most difficult political problems which the minds of men have
ever been called upon to solve. And yet how marvelously have
our fathers solved it! How strong are the forces which bind
our people together in the national Union, and how perfect is
the governmental machinery which has been provided for their
operation. In their presence, disunion has disappeared a dozen
times in our history; and in their presence, even the battlefields
of Vicksburg and Gettysburg dwindle into insignificance. The
stars and stripes themselves bear visible testimony to the tri-
umph of this great American ideal; for, while the thirteen
stripes commemorate the union of the thirteen original com-
monwealths, a new star is added to the field of blue for each
new state admitted to the Union, until at length there are forty-
six shining within its firmament.

It is the realization of the ideal of union in so marvelous a
way which gives us great hopes for the speedy realization of the
Jast American ideal of which I shall speak to you to-day. There
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 53

is meeting at the present time, in your great city of Chicago,
a National Peace Congress, to which have come representatives
from more than half-a-dozen other nations of the earth. The
sessions of this congress are devoted to the ideal of a fraternal
union between all the members of the family of nations; a
union in which law and justice shall take the place of force and
warfare, in which the smallest and the largest nation shall be
on the same terms of equality before the law of nations, as are
mighty Texas and Little Rhody in the presence of the American
Constitution. The inclusion of forty-eight commonwealths,
some of which are like mighty empires in themselves, within a
single political union; the enrolment within a single citizenship
of men of every kindred, tongue and people; the peaceful resi-
dence side by side of men from every land and clime; and the
maintenance of genuine local self-government ;—such are the
political triumphs achieved by our forefathers. And these tri-
umphs give a great hope and a great incentive to us, their
descendants, to strive with might and main to realize this last,
international ideal of which I spoke.

One of our great secretaries of state, John Hay, who first
became famous as a poet of your own state of Illinois, has
expressed the true American feeling in regard to warfare among
nations in these stern but wholly truthful words. “War,” he
said, “is the most ferocious and futile of human follies.”

It was this same great statesman, also, who, in his instructions
to our American delegates to the first Hague Conference, said:
“Next to the great fact of a nation’s independence, is the great
fact of its interdependence.”

International Peace and Interdependence: such are the foun-
dations upon which our ideal of internationalism must be
realized. What country is better fitted than the great, peaceful
Republic of the Western World, to take the lead in the realiza-
tion of this ideal; and what generation of American citizens
can be more bound than the present one by the benefits they have
received, to strive their utmost for its realization? Thanks to
the courage and devotion of generations of our ancestors, Ameri-
can history is rich indeed in the realization of high ideals, and the
American flag is radiant with the reflection of them. Let us see
to it that our generation shall not pass away without. redlizing
54 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

this great ideal of international peace and justice. And then our
children and our children’s children, pointing to the pure white
border which, in token of a flag of peace, shall surround the stars
and stripes, shall say: That is the emblem of International
Peace and Good Will, which our fathers strove manfully to
realize for themselves and for all the world, and which, like a
silver frame round a picture of gold, beautifies and hallows all
that is within, and makes doubly dear to us the dear old flag.

VIII. INCREASING ARMAMENTS: PRO AND CONTRA

The recent appropriation by the House of Representatives of
thirty million dollars for our navy is one of the many evidences
of a consistent and determined policy to expand our “sea-power”
as rapidly and as largely as posssible. Our essentially peaceful
nation has been induced within the last ten years to enter upon
that path of competition in creating great armaments along
which the terror-stricken nations of the Old World have been
laboring in breathless haste for more than a generation. And
with characteristic energy America has out-Europed Europe and
even out-Bismarcked Bismarck, in its preparations for solving
international problems by means of blood and iron.

Within the last ten years for which statistics are available
(1896-1906), the six great powers of Europe and Japan
increased their warlike expenditures about 145 per cent, and
the United States increased its same expenditures about 270
per cent. The first seven great powers are devoting about one-
third of their total annual appropriations to warlike prepara-
tions, and the United States is doing the same; while if we
include our pension expenditures we are devoting about three-
fifths of our enormous annual expenditure of more than a half-
billion dollars to paying the costs of war. Although the United
States spends now for warlike purposes only about five-ninths
as much as do the other great powers in proportion to popula-
tion, ten years ago it spent only three-ninths as much. During
the last ten years our government’s appropriations for army and
navy purposes have been more than three times as great as for
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 55

the preceding ten years, the increase having been more than
one billion dollars. This means that 250,000 miles of the best
macadam roads, at a cost of $5,000 per mile, could have been
built with the increase alone!

By dint of this disproportionate increase of expenditure, the
United States has secured’ second rank in the list of naval
powers and has stirred up its nearest competitors, Germany,
France and Japan, to supreme endeavor to overtake it; while
Great Britain, with its policy of maintaining a navy ten per
cent stronger than the combined navies of any other two powers,
has been spurred on to supreme endeavor to maintain its lead.
President Roosevelt has asserted that it is the duty of the
United States to maintain a fleet on both the Atlantic and
Pacific capable of coping with any fleet which may be sent
against them; while he has sent one of our fleets around the
world to show the world that it is not only a theory but a con-
dition which confronts it. In reply to our “two ocean” chal-
lenge to Great Britain’s “two power” policy, and our fleet’s
object lesson to Japan and all others whom it may concern, we
shall doubtless hear similar challenges from Germany, France,
and Japan, and receive return visits from their fleets and
Great Britain’s, And so the dance of death will go madly on,
and will doubtless grow ever wilder until—the people refuse to
be fooled into paying the pipers any longer. Meanwhile, what
are the arguments which have overcome the scruples and the
traditional sanity or “horse sense” even of Uncle Sam, and led
him also to venture with his Dreadnoughts into the terpsichorean
mazes? Well, here they are, as gathered from current litera-
ture and oratory,* and in reply to them are a few self-evident
facts. _

First, second, and third: not nearly so many men have been
killed in battle as people say and think; military men have not
provoked warfare to promote their own advantage; and the
wars which we have carried on were justifiable and necessary.
These arguments and the statements to which they are replies

* The sources drawn upon for these arguments are: President Roosevelt's speech at
Newport last summer; the debate in the House of Representatives, January 22, 1909;
and an article in The Chautauquan for December, 1908, by Colonel William Conant
Church, editor of The Army and Navy Journal.
56 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

are obviously outside the arena of present discussion. Let the
dead past bury its dead; let us face the living problems of the
present.

Fourth, we must build fleets and fortresses to protect our sea-
port cities, and maintain armies and forts to protect our inland
towns. The first Hague Conference unanimously agreed to pro-
hibit the bombardment by land forces of undefended places, and
the second Hague Conference unanimously extended the same
prohibition to naval forces and to armaments of the air; hence
“defence” is now an invitation to attack, while lack of defence
is as much of an immunity as is the neutralization accorded
during a generation to Belgium, Switzerland, and Luxembourg.

But, fifth, say the militarists: Although bombardment may
now be avoided, the landing of troops and invasion cannot be
prevented, unless forts, fleets, and armies are maintained and
strengthened. The second Hague Conference anticipated this
retreat of the militarists by providing, so far as invasion from
the sea is concerned, that the planting of submarine mines in
harbors shall not be considered as “defence”; hence, not only is
bombardment prohibited in such cases, but the protective char-
acter of such means is acknowledged and preserved. On the
other hand, the first and second conference provided several far
superior means both of avoiding the risk of invasion, by land or
sea or air, and of securing justice in international disputes.

Sixth, says President Roosevelt, a great navy is needed for
the enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine. At the second Hague
Conference, General Horace Porter’s great triumph in securing
arbitration for disputes concerning contractual indebtedness
removed the prime and almost only source of danger to the
Monroe Doctrine; while the recent phenomenal growth of Latin
America’s resources, and the equally phenomenal growth of the
civilized world’s public opinion against governmental land-grab-
bing, are much better and stronger preventives of danger to that
Doctrine from any source, than is Uncle Sam’s big stick. The
strength of the public opinion referred to is strikingly evident
in the Chile-Argentina and the Baltic and North Sea treaties.

Seventh, if we want to enforce our immigration laws and our
school customs against undesirable immigrants from China,
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 57

Japan, and Southern Europe, we must back them up by:a big
navy. Here, most emphatically, honesty would be the best
policy. If the genius of our people will not permit unrestricted
immigration, school attendance, etc., our government must not
make treaties embodying false or impossible promises, and our
people must forego commercial and other privileges in foreign
lands,—if such really be the necessary consequence of refusing
to make such promises.

Eighth, an increasing navy is necessary to protect the Philip-
pines. It is yet to be proven that the Philippines are in danger
now; and at any time when we fulfil our promise of giving
independence to them, the world will gladly accord them that
neutralization which has proved so effective and beneficent to
countries in the midst of Europe’s armor-burdened lands.

Ninth, we must “master the Pacific” by a larger navy, and
protect California from the “Yellow Peril” by a larger army.
Is it seriously proposed to wrest this “mastery” from the ten
other powers including Great Britain, Russia, and France, as well
as Japan, which are intimately concerned in it; or is the exag-
geration of Japan’s shadow upon the Pacific a mere ruse for
securing votes for a larger navy? Is the “Yellow Peril” on the
Pacific slope due to a genuine danger that “hordes of Japanese
soldiers can overrun the country within a fortnight”; or is it
due to the contagion of Lord Roberts’s recent terror lest a Ger-
man army should seize upon England? In short, the clamor for
armed defence is the result of real or pretended fear of dangers
which have been proved to exist only in the wily or terrified
minds of the advocates of a “big navy”.

The numerous other “arguments” in favor of increasing arma-
ments include such statements as these: The action of the
soldier in the performance of his sworn duty is not “murder”;
the army. and navy as training schools can make a return to the
state in actual commercial gain far in excess of their cost; the
time spent in “service under the colors” is fully compensated
for by an increase in working period due to physical training
and sanitary knowledge thereby received ; the building of arma-
ments employs labor and capital; etc., ete. Such statements are
as irrelevant or unproven as they are numerous, and are con-
tested only between rabid militarists and pacifists.
58 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

As for the arguments against increasing armaments, they are
equally numerous and some of them equally irrelevant or
unproven. There are some, however, which are unanswerable
and irresistible, because they are founded upon stupendous
masses of undeniable facts. Such are the economic expense, the
misdirection of labor and capital, the short “life” and speedy
“obsoleteness” of the “best and latest” devices for attack and
defence, the incessant and futile competition on the part of a
half-dozen of the great powers to secure and retain the biggest
stick, the excessive prominence given in the nations’ life and
thought to the virtue of physical force and the consequent eclipse
of moral ideals of justice and forbearance. Added to these, and
greatest of them all in present importance, is the fact that
increasing armaments are inevitably and insuperably antagon-
istic to increasing arbitration. The court of arbitra] justice,
for which the greatest of international statesmen the world over
are so gallantly struggling, finds its chief obstacle in the increas-
ing armaments promoted by national jingoes and misguided
voters. Voluminous proof from both reason and experience can
be and’ has been adduced in support of this statement. It is
too voluminous to be dealt with here; and this address is
restricted to the arguments advanced in behalf of increasing
armaments.

In view of the enormously increasing appropriations
demanded for increasing armaments, the burden of proof that
such armaments are needed lies upon their advocates, and these
have fallen very far short indeed of making good. They have
carried our Congress with them, it is true; but the Congress has
not gone half so far as they have striven to force and cajole it;
and we have not yet come to the end of the warfare against
battleships and armies as the arbiters of international justice.
Meanwhile the wiser advocates of great armaments will conceal
Mr. Hepburn’s recent argument that “those who favor an ade-
quate navy do so because they rocomuize the fact that the Ameri-
can people are a warlike people.” And the same gentleman’s
statement that “there is a passion for military glory in the
breast of all Americans” will be repudiated with indignation | and
contempt by all Americans worthy of the name.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 59

IX. THE FAMILY OF NATIONS IN CONFERENCE AT
THE HAGUE

This address having been made accessible in The Chautau-
quan for April, 1909, it seems unnecessary to reprint it here.

X. THE ADVANCE REGISTERED BY THE TWO HAGUE
CONFERENCES*

When Clio, Muse of History, shall take up her pen to pass
final judgment upon “The Advance registered by the two Hague
Conferences,” we know not now precisely what verdict she will
record. For now, close as we are to the toil and struggles of
the Titans who shaped and fashioned the institutions of those
Conferences, and breathlessly endeavoring as we are to catch up
with the full significance of the events which those institutions
have already ushered in upon a wondering world, it is inevitable
that we should see them only as through a glass and darkly.

Again, so far reaching through the realm of international
relations is the scope of the Conferences’ work, that to attempt
to estimate the advance registered by them is like an attempt to
estimate the results of the application of steam to industry or of
democracy to government. For already it is clear that the
Hague Conferences are to international law what the Industrial
Revolution of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries was to
human industry, or what the rise of the American Republic was
to human government.

But despite the difficulties of this task, it is natural and
fitting that it should be undertaken. For when the traveler
from some sunken valley climbs the winding path up a moun-
tain side towards its snow-capped: summit, and rests for a
moment from his toil upon some projecting headland, it is well
for him to look back upon the progress he has made and calcu-

* This address has been published in the ‘* Proceedings of the Second National
Peace Congress of the United States.” '
60 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

late from it the direction and if possible the distance of the path
which lies before him. And when a great nation like ours, in
its ascent from the Valley of the Shadow of Warfare up towards
the sun-lit summit of perpetual peace and justice, comes to such
a resting-place as is afforded by this National Peace Congress
in Chicago, it is just to the past and should be helpful to the
future, for it to estimate the progress it has made and to con-
sider its present position.

The civilized world, in common with our own country, has
made use of many: instrumentalities in its great ascent towards
international peace and justice; but the greatest of them all
I believe to have been the two Conferences at The Hague. For
these Conferences, like the great heroes or institutions of history,
embodied in themselves nearly all the forces, or were exponents
of nearly all the instrumentalities, which have been achieving
for the world its renowned victories of peace.

Among these forces I would mention, first, the international
solidarity which has superseded the superficial international
comity of the past. Assembled in the Hall of the Knights, in
the second Hague Conference, were the representatives of the
forty-four sovereign states which share between them the des-
tinies of practically all of the population and nine-tenths of the
territory of the earth. In the presence of the world thus
assembled for the first time in history in a single room was
solemnly and definitively proclaimed the great fact, fundamental
in international relations, that the nations form a single family,
each member possessing inalienable rights and bounden duties.
This ideal of an international family, long talked about and
dreamed of by international jurists, was embodied in the vari-
ous conventions adopted by the Conferences, was fully and freely.
expressed by many of the delegates, and has been borne in upon
the consciousness of the nations as never before. It has enorm-
ously strengthened the international esprit de corps, and has
accentuated as nothing else probably could have done the existence
and growth of that international public opinion which is already
the chief sanction of international agreements. The potency of
this decent respect for the opinions of the rest of the family was
shown in many striking instances. For example, it induced
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 61

Great Britain to adhere in 1907. to the two declarations which
it rejected in 1899, those, namely, prohibiting the use of “dum-
dum” bullets and of bombs whose object is the diffusion of
asphyxiating or deleterious gases. It induced Germany to accept
the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 1899, and to announce
its entire conversion to the principle and practice of obligatory
arbitration in 1907. It induced Spain and Mexico to adhere
to the Declaration of Paris of 1856, which prohibited priva-
teering. It induced China and Switzerland to adhere in 1907
to the laws and customs of warfare which they rejected in 1899.
It induced the nineteen Latin American republics to ratify in
1907, without question, the acts of the Conference of 1899, in
which they: were not represented. And, above all, it induced
thirty of the thirty-six small powers to accept the International
Prize Court, although the principle of its constitution was held
to violate the absolute equality of sovereign states. As indica-
tive of the spirit in which this Court was accepted by the small
powers, may be noted the words of M. Hagerup, of Norway,
who said that although his country’s merchant marine ranked
fourth among all the powers of the world, it would nevertheless
accept the eleventh place assigned it in the distribution of
judges.

The power of this redoubtable sovereign of international
public opinion was evident in countless other instances during
the Conferences; but enough of these have here been stated to
show that, behind the governments of the world in their dealings
with each other, there is the same irresistible power which
guides, checks and spurs onward the various governments in
their national affairs.

The old economic theory that one nation’s loss is another
nation’s gain, has long since been exploded. In diplomatic
transactions this theory has not yet been discarded; but at The
Hague, in the presence of common needs and common interests,
a clear view was caught of the fact which will be embodied in
some future conference that international solidarity requires the
observance of the rule of “each for all, and all for each,” and
that it will enable the gain of one member of the family to be
a genuine and permanent one only when that gain is based upon
a strict observance of the rights of all the other members.
62 ‘SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Turning to the great code of international law which was
incorporated in the sixteen conventions and four declarations of
the Conferences, we stand in the presence of the stupendous fact
‘that within our time and under our very eyes an event has tran-
spired which is comparable with the publication of the Twelve
Tables in ancient Rome or the compilation of the laws of our
Teutonic forefathers. For at The Hague was codified into
concrete international law a vast mass of international custom
which had been more or less vague, disputable, and unapplied.
More than this, the most daring innovations which have ever
been introduced into international law,—far more daring than
those which came from the hands of Hugo Grotius and the
master builders of the science.—were made authoritatively by
the official delegates of the nations at The Hague.

This great body of codified custom and new law, together with
the approximate acceptance of the principle of international
solidarity, has caused! the veritable revolution in international
law which has been already referred to, and has made the stu-
dent of that science feel himself to be in the presence of a new
heaven and a new earth. “To prove this, let facts be submitted
to a candid world.” The facts here submitted will be grouped
under the three headings: the alleviation of warfare’s horrors,
its restriction within narrow limits, and the means for its pre-
vention.

In the alleviation of warfare’s horrors, the Hague Conferences
have far surpassed the reforms accomplished or suggested by the
Conventions of Geneva of 1864 and 1868, the Declaration of
St. Petersburg in 1868, and the Declaration of Brussels in 1874.
For at The Hague the Red Cross Rules were applied for the
first time to warfare on the sea, and a careful revision and
development of them as applied to warfare on the land was
provided for in 1899 and accomplished in 1906; by the vote of
every government, except that of the United States, the Con-
ferences prohibited the use of bullets which expand or flatten
easily i in the human body, and of projectiles the object of which
is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases; they for-
bade the bombardment of undefended ports, towns, dwellings
or buildings, by artillery in the air, on the land, or on the sea,
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 68

and at the same time they permitted sea-ports to protect them-
selves against invasion by the use of anchored mines and yet,
as technically undefended, to remain immune from bombard-
ment by the invading ships. The Conference of 1899 adopted a
great code of sixty rules and regulations, some of which had
been urged during more than a quarter of a century, and all of
which are designed to prevent the evils of warfare from falling
upon peaceful non-combatants, and to alleviate the sufferings
of the soldier in the field and as prisoner of war. These rules
have to do with the means of injuring the enemy, with belliger-
ents, prisoners of war, spies, flags of truce, armistice, capitula-
tions, and the treatment of occupied territory. They are far
too numerous even to be mentioned in this paper, but their
importance may be estimated by the fact that Professor Zorn,
of Germany, has said of them that they alone would have made
the Conference of 1899 a remarkable success.

Turning next to the restriction of warfare and its evils to
the narrowest possible limits, we find marked progress in defin-
ing the relations of belligerents with neutrals, and in restricting
the scope of warfare between the belligerents themselves.

Heretofore, the belligerent has bestrode the narrow earth
like a Colossus, while petty neutrals walked under his huge legs
and peeped about to find the best means of avoiding his dis-
pleasure. So difficult and dangerous was the position of the
neutral in the last century that statesmen very often acted on
the policy that war with one or the other belligerent was pref-
erable to neutrality. We have changed all that in recent years,
and especially have the two Hague Conferences cribbed, cabined,
and confined the belligerent in many stringent ways.

The Conferences first gave their high and definitive sanction
to existing international custom which admonished belligerent
states to refrain from carrying on hostilities within neutral
territory, to abstain from making on neutral territory direct
preparations for acts.of hostility, to obey all reasonable regula-
tions made by neutral states for the protection of their neu-
trality, and to make reparation to any state whose neutrality it
may have violated. They then enacted a considerable body of
new legislation designed to emphasize and protect neutral rights
64 SWARTHMORE: COLLEGE BULLETIN

rather than neutral duties. So carefully. did they protect neu-
tral rights, and so strictly confine belligerent rights, that they
may be said to have fairly canalized warfare,—banked it within
definite and relatively narrow channels, and erected a system of
dykes as noteworthy as those which Holland has built against
the fierce North Sea,—for the protection of the great world of
peaceful commerce and industry from the devastating floods
of warfare which belligerents may. let loose against each other.

Among these devices of restriction and protection may be
mentioned the following. First, an unequivocal declaration of
war, stating its causes, must be issued before hostilities are com-
menced, and must be promptly announced to the neutral powers.
It is indicative of the unbridled condition of belligerents before
the Hague Conferences, that this primary restriction against
treachery towards the enemy and this common-sense recogni-
tion of neutral rights was established for the first time in 1907
in modern international law.

The most eminent juris-consults in the world, the members,
namely, of the Institute of International Law, had been wrest-
ling unavailingly with the knotty problem of the rights of
neutrals on land and sea for a generation. The Conference of
1907 solved a number of its phases. Upon the fundamental
assertion of the inviolability. of neutral territory, it forbade the
conveyance across neutral territory of troops or convoys of
munitions or provisions; it forbade the installation on neutral
territory of telegraphic or other apparatus designed to serve as
a means of communication with belligerent forces on land or
cea; it forbade the bringing of prizes into neutral ports, unless
under stress of bad weather or lack of coal or provisions; it for-
bade belligerents to increase in any manner whatever their
military or naval strength on neutral lands or waters; it forbade
an unlimited and too frequent renewal in neutral waters of bel-
ligerent food and fuel supplies; it forbade more than three
belligerent warships to come into neutral ports at any one time,
or to remain there more than twenty-four hours, unless the
neutral power concerned had made a different rule; it forbade
belligerent warships to follow an enemy’s warship, or an enemy’s
merchant ship, from a neutral port within twenty-four hours
after the latter ship’s departure.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 65

Not only did the Conference of 1907 assert the above rights of
neutral states, but some rights of neutral citizens residing within
belligerent territory were asserted by it as well. Concerning these
rights, international disputes are particularly frequent,.as Baron
von Bieberstein, of Germany, pointed out in the Conference;
and, as General Davis, of the United States, remarked, the pro-
tection of them is of vast importance in these days of wide inter-
national commercial operations which should be disturbed as
little as possible by warfare. As a result of the rules adopted
concerning them, neutral residents are protected not only against
the belligerent state in whose territory they reside or do busi-
ness, but also against the belligerent which invades that terri-
tory. The anxieties and hardships of resident aliens are dimin-
ished by the rule that they may not be punished by either
belligerent for lending money or contributing goods to the other
belligerent, nor for rendering police or civil services. The mili-
tary representatives of Germany and Austria emphasized “the
imperious necessities of generals in the field”; but the Confer-
ence adopted the above rules unanimously, as it did, also, the
rule that the rolling stock of railway companies coming from the
territory of neutral powers and owned by those powers or by
corporations or private persons, can be requisitioned and used
by a belligerent only in the case and to the extent that an imper-
ious necessity demands, and that it must be returned as soon as
possible to the country: of its origin; while neutrals may, if neces-
sary, retain and utilize, in compensation, such property coming
from a belligerent power. By this last rule is protected the
paramount right of neutral commerce to unrestricted railway
transportation; and by a further resolution it is made “the
special duty of the competent military and civil authorities to
protect in time of war the maintenance of pacific relations,
especially commercial and industrial relations, between the
inhabitants of the belligerent countries and those of neutral
states.” These rules, though few in number, are of great impor-
tance, since they not only lessen the danger of warfare caused by
disputes over neutral rights, but also circumscribe more aureowly
than heretofore the closed lists of combat.

Not only was the shadow of the belligerent Colossus upon the
66 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

land reduced by the Conferences, but he was given very positive
notice that he did not own the high seas, and could not use
them as he pleased in warring against his enemy. He was for-
bidden to use unanchored submarine mines, unless constructed
in such manner as to become harmless within one hour after
their control has been lost ; he was forbidden the use of anchored
mines which do not become harmless as soon as they break their
cables; he was forbidden to use automobile torpedoes which
do not become harmless when they have missed their aim; he
was forbidden to place submarine mines along the coasts and in
front of the ports of his enemy, with the sole purpose of inter-
cepting commerce; he was required to take every precaution to
protect peaceful navigation against submarine mines, and to
cause them to become harmless after a limited time, by remov-
ing them, guarding them, or indicating the dangerous regions
and notifying the other powers of them.

The advance registered by the Conferences in curbing these
modern demons of the sea may be appreciated from the fact
that three years after the close of the Russo-Japanese War, the
Chinese government was still obliged to furnish its coasting
vessels with special instruments to remove and destroy the
floating mines with which the belligerents had sown not only
the neighboring high seas, but China’s own territorial waters
as well; that, in spite of every. precaution, a very considerable
number of coasting ships, fishing boats, junks, and sampans have
foundered as a result of. striking these mines; and that more
than five hundred peaceful Chinese citizens, peacefully pursuing
their occupations, have suffered a cruel death from these dan-
gerous engines of warfare, while the lives of thousands of
passengers on the great Occidental liners have been in imminent
peril from them.

The further attempts to protect neutral commerce, by a more
restrictive definition of blockade, by abolishing or by closely
defining contraband of war, and by prohibiting the destruction
of neutral prizes, did not succeed in the Conferences ; but twenty-
six of the nations voted for the radical British proposition to
abolish contraband of war, and it was agreed that both bellig-
erent and neutral prizes. might be permitted by neutral: powers
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 67

to be sequestered within their harbors and thus saved from
destruction. The encouraging discussion of these long-standing
and knotty problems of international law resulted, also, in the
meeting of a Naval Conference in London, from December, 1908,
to February, 1909, in which ten of the leading maritime powers
participated, and in which agreements were arrived at very
much in accord with those foreshadowed at The Hague.

In confining warfare within as narrow limits as possible, the
Conferences did not devote their attention exclusively to. the
assertion of neutral rights, but protected the belligerents them-
selves as far as possible against each other.

Under the gallant leadership of Dr. White and Mr. Choate,
of the United States, twenty-one nations were induced to cast
their votes in favor of prohibiting the capture of the’ private
property of the enemy in warfare upon the sea; and although
this American proposition failed of adoption, it has been so
emphasized and popularized before the world that it will very
probably be adopted by the third Conference at The Hague, or
at least be agreed upon by the great majority: of the nations in
treaty between themselves. The first Conference forbade,
unanimously, the destruction or seizure of the private property
of the enemy in warfare on the land, unless ‘imperatively
demanded by the necessities of war, and in that case it shall
be paid for.

So great has become the conviction that the private property
of belligerents should be protected as much as possible, even in
warfare upon the sea, that the second Conference placed several
restrictions upon its capture. It required that due warning to
depart must be given to merchant ships which are found in the

-enemy’s ports on the outbreak of hostilities, or which enter them
or are captured upon the high seas in ignorance of the war; and
that if they do not or can not heed this warning, neither they
nor their cargoes may be confiscated, but may only be detained
until the end of the war, or requisitioned on payment of compen-
sation. The officers and crews of captured merchant ships are
not to be made prisoners of war, provided they promise not to
take part in. the war. Boats used exclusively for fishing. pur-
poses, and all’ ships (even warships) engaged in scientific, reli-
68 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

gious, or philanthropic missions were exempted from capture.
The mail matter of both belligerents and neutrals was made
inviolable, and must be forwarded with the least possible delay
in case the ship conveying it is detained or captured, And to
prevent a return to the old practice of privateering, which was
abolished by many. of the nations in 1856, as well as to. make
piracy more difficult, it was provided that merchant ships trans-
formed into cruisers in time of war shall acquire the rights and
privileges of warships only when placed under state control,
with a duly commissioned commander and a crew under military
discipline and conformable to the laws and customs of warfare.

The most conclusive evidence of the growing regard for the
rights of private property, even in warfare on the sea, was the
establishment by the second Conference of the International
Prize Court. This court will remove the capture of merchant
ships still farther from the plane of piracy by permitting the
presumably. partial decision of national prize courts to be sup-
plemented by the probably less partial decision of an interna-
tional one, and will thereby emphasize the fundamental princi-
ple in international, as in national, law that a suitor shall not
be a judge in his own cause.

Coming thirdly, and lastly, to the measures adopted for the
prevention of warfare, we find in them the crowning glory of
the Hague Conferences. They represent in very truth the Magna
Charta of international law, and they embody. the chief hope
and the chief strength of the Peacemakers of the Twentieth
Century.

The first Conference was called to solve if possible the prob-
lem of increasing armaments, and the world jumped to the
conclusion that a foolish attempt was to be made to usher in
disarmament. This hasty conclusion almost discredited the
Conference in the eyes of practical people, but the proposition
for disarmament was not even alluded to. What was done, in
both Conferences, was to strike in upon the consciousness of the
nations the fact that in our day and generation the growth of
armaments on land and sea is increasing faster than the. growth
of population in great cities or the concentration of wealth, and
has brought every civilized land face to face with very grave
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 69

financial, industrial, political and international perils. Both
Conferences emphasized this fact in words of burning eloquence
and made a solemn appeal to the governments to study this prob-
lem thoroughly: and to find some solution of it before it pre-
cipitates a gigantic war whose prevention is the alleged reason
for armament increase. This appeal has not met, as yet, with
governmental response; but it is greatly to be hoped that under
the auspices of such Secretaries of War as Mr. Taft and Mr.
Dickinson,—whose proudest boast it is that they have been Sec-
retaries of Peace rather than Secretaries of War,—this great
and burning problem may be solved before it be too late.

Our day has seen growing up, side by side with armaments on
land and sea, the beginnings of armaments in the air. The
final result to war or peace of this new development of human
genius cannot yet be even guessed at; but both Conferences voted
that the world should be spared, at least until the end of the
next Conference, the expense, anxiety, and incalculable danger
connected with warfare in and from the air. It might help us
to appreciate the significance of this prohibition by reflecting
on the saving of wear and tear which would have followed upon
a prohibition of Dreadnoughts by the first Hague Conference.

The irresistible power of publicity, which has been exerting
its sway in such a remarkable manner in national affairs, was
applied by the Conferences to international affairs. After a
long struggle in the first Conference it was agreed that the
establishment of international commissions of inquiry is a “use-
ful” method of avoiding warfare, and in 1907 it was agreed that
this method is “desirable” as well. But it was so hedged about
with conditional phrases as to honor, vital interests, and cir-
cumstances permitting, that it was derided as mere pretense, or
as a sop to Cerberus. Nevertheless, it has already afforded
another proof of the duty and success of raising a standard to
which the wise and honest may repair; for, endorsed by the
Hague Conference and made readily applicable by the adoption
of a few simple rules of procedure, it has enabled the great
powers of Russia and Great Britain to settle speedily and peace-
fully the grave dispute concerning the Hull fishermen off the
Dogger Bank. Reason, as well as experience, proves that if a
70 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

thorough and impartial inquiry be made into international dif-
ferences, and if the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth be published, a decent respect for the opinion of mankind
and an aroused national and international public opinion will
compel “circumstances to permit” the peaceful settlement even
of differences in which “honor and vital interests” are involved.
“Investigate, before you fight,” was the demand of the Confer-
ences; “investigate, and you won’t fight,”—at least in nine times
out of ten,—is the verdict of recent history.

The agreement adopted by the Conference that powers in dis-
pute would have recourse to the good offices or mediation of one
or more friendly powers, before an appeal to arms, in case of
any serious dispute, and as far as circumstances permit, was
supplemented by the further statement that the signatory powers
consider it useful that one or more powers, strangers to the dis-
pute, should, on their own initiative, and as far as circumstances
permit, offer their good offices or their mediation to the- states
at variance with each other. The restriction of this agreement
by the phrase, “as far as circumstances permit,” was considered
an unfortunate one; but it was adopted because the Conference
did not desire to attempt more than the powers could reasonably
be expected to carry out.

When the principle embodied in these agreements is compared.
with the former jealous resentment of any “foreign interven-
tion” which dominated international relations before 1899, the
progress made by the Conference in the mere frank statement of
it is apparent. But when it is recalled that, inspired by it,
President Roosevelt extended the good offices of the United
States Government to Japan and Russia in their recent war and
that the Peace of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was the fortu-
nate result, the value of this feature of the Convention of 1899 is
greatly proven by an accomplished fact of vast historic import.

The desirability of a more frequent resort to this means of
avoiding or shortening a war was emphasized in the Conference
of 1907, which adopted the words, “and desirable,” to the former
statement that the powers consider good offices and! mediation
“useful.” This slight addition to the phraseology of 1899 may
not have directly the desired result of increasing the frequency
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 71

of good offices and mediation; but it at least emphasizes the
former statement that their extension, even during the course
of hostilities, shall not be considered by either of the parties to
the dispute as an unfriendly act. The consistent adoption of
this latter view, together with the growing conviction that the
interests of one are the interests of all in the family of states,
will increase the frequency of this means of preventing war
and! insuring justice.

A treatise on International Law, which is widely used as a
text-book in this country and in England, was written by Pro-
fessor Lawrence, of the Universities of Cambridge and Chicago,
and was published a few years before the meeting of the first
Hague Conference. That treatise devotes five pages out of 636
to a consideration of arbitration in all its phases, and these are
confined to a discussion of the possibility of concluding a treaty
for arbitration between Great Britain and the United States. A
Permanent Court of Arbitration for all the world, with its Per-
manent Bureau, Advisory Council, and Peace Palace at The
Hague, an International Prize Court, obligatory arbitration of
contractual indebtedness, and scores of obligatory arbitration
treaties between nations, to say nothing of a world-treaty of
obligatory arbitration, and a Court of Arbitral Justice, are
wholly. outside the imagination of this brilliant but antiquated
author, or are deemed so wholly imaginative and visionary as
not to deserve mention. We need seek no more striking evi-
dence of the advance registered by the two Hague Conferences
than this simple fact. For all of these extraordinary institu-
tions have been not merely dreamed of since 1899, but within the
brief span of eight years most of them have been put into actual
practice, and the remaining two have received the unanimous
endorsement and are within the determined acquisition of the
large majority of the nations.

A large number of international differences were submitted
to voluntary arbitration during the century preceding the Con-
ferences. But for the first time at The Hague, the nations
unanimously endorsed this peaceful and rational method of
settling differences, and even went so far as to declare that when.
a serious dispute threatens to occur between two or more nations
72 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

it is the duty of the other nations to remind the disputants that
an easy recourse to arbitration is open to them, and to advise
them, in the higher interest of peace, to resort to it. The asser-
tion of this duty was reinforced by the further statement that
the disputants shall consider such reminder and advice only as
an exercise of good offices and by no means an unfriendly act.

The advance registered by the Conferences in the direction of
obligatory arbitration may be recorded in the words of Baron
von Bieberstein, of Germany, who said in the second Conference:
“At the first Peace Conference, the German delegate declared
in the name of his government that experience in the field of arbi-
tration was not of a kind to permit an agreement at that time in
favor of obligatory arbitration. Hight years have passed since
that declaration, and experience in the field of arbitration has
accumulated to a considerable extent. The question has been,
on the other hand, the subject of profound and continuous study
on the part of the German government. In view of the fruits
of this examination, and under the influence of the fortunate
results flowing from arbitration, my government is favorable
to-day, in principle, to the idea of obligatory arbitration. It
has confirmed the sincerity of this opinion by signing two
treaties of permanent arbitration, one with the British govern-
ment, the other with that of the United States of America, both
of which include all judicial questions or those relative to the
interpretation of treaties. We have, besides, inserted in our
commercial treaties concluded within recent years an arbitra-
tional agreement for a series of questions, and we have the firm
intention of continuing to pursue the task in which we are
engaged in concluding these treaties. In the course of our
debates the fortunate fact has been mentioned, that a long
series of other treaties of obligatory arbitration have been con-
cluded between various states. This is genuine progress, and
the credit of it is due, incontestably, to the first Peace Con-
ference.”

Our great American Secretary of State, Mr. Elihu Root,
also, in his instructions to the United States delegation to the
second Conference, alluded to the many separate treaties of arbi-
tration between individual countries, and said that “this condi-
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN "3

tion, which brings the subject of a general treaty for obligatory
arbitration into the field of practical discussion, is undoubtedly
largely due to the fact that the powers generally in the first
Hague Conference committed themselves to the principle of the
pacific settlement of international questions in the admirable
convention for voluntary arbitration then adopted.”

The second Conference did not succeed in agreeing upon a
world-treaty of obligatory arbitration, but thirty-five of the
nations voted for such a treaty, and those who opposed it did’ so
on the ground that it might retard the growth of obligatory
arbitration treaties between the nations separately; while forty-
two of them declared their conviction that certain classes of
international differences are capable of being submitted to oblig-
atory arbitration without any restriction whatsoever.

The principle of obligatory arbitration was strikingly applied
by the second Conference in its adoption of the Porter Proposi-
tion, which requires the submission to arbitration of disputes
relating to contractual indebtedness before the use of force
for its collection is permissible. This was one of the greatest
achievements in the history of diplomacy, and reflects undying
lustre upon its chief advocate, our own illustrious general and
diplomatist, Horace Porter. The advance registered by it is
especially appreciated by Latin America; which has been too
often the prey of unscrupulous foreign promoters, and by our
own Republic, whose peaceful enforcement of the Monroe Doc-
trine is greatly facilitated by it.

The German proposition to establish an International Prize
Court electrified the second Conference by its novelty and sig-
nificance, but, despite the knotty problems of sovereignty and
equality involved in it, the Conference enthusiastically and,
with the exception of one vote, unanimously adopted it. The
establishment of an international high court of justice function-
ing as a court of appeal from national courts in cases of mer-
chant ships captured in naval war, was, for several reasons, one
of the second Conference’s most important achievements. It
is the first truly international court established in the history of
the world. Its decisions will be a fruitful source of maritime
law. It will remove a fertile cause of disputes between the
74 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

belligerents themselves, and between them and neutral nations,
and will thereby lessen the bitterness of wars once begun and
prevent the outbreak of others. The unanimous adoption (with
the exception of Brazil’s vote) of its method! of selecting judges,
will pave the way for the solution of the same question in regard
to the Court of Arbitral Justice. By supplying in time of war
a regular adjudication of one very important and delicate class
of international differences, it will serve as an inductive argu-
ment and give a strong impulse to the establishment of the
Court of Arbitral Justice for the adjudication of all classes of
international differences in time of peace. And, finally, its
establishment has already given rise to one important interna-
tional naval conference, that in London in 1908-1909, which
will doubtless be followed by others, designed to fill up the gaps
and strengthen the weak spots in the maritime law of nations,
and thus to afford the new International Prize Court a more solid
legislative foundation upon which to erect its structure of judi-
cial decisions and precedents.

The institution established by the Conferences at The Hague
which stands out pre-eminent in the mind of the nations, is
the Permanent Court of Arbitration. This pre-eminence is
deserved ; for, although this institution is not truly permanent
nor is it a genuine court, yet it is the pioneer of its race and has
already proved itself of incalculable utility, having settled four
important international differences and attracted six others into
the path towards peaceful solution. Like the Magna Charta
of England and the Constitution of the United States, it is the
corner-stone of the edifice of international law and justice which
will be erected in the future; while its establishment is a tangi-
ble evidence of the fact that national governments, whose duty it
is to enforce law and justice within their own territories, them-
selves recognize the eternal and universal validity of those
principles upon which their own reason for existence and claim
to allegiance are based. A national observance of international
law and obedience to international justice cannot fail greatly
to strengthen individuals’ observance of and obedience to
national law and justice. The advance registered, then, by the
Permanent Court of Arbitration and the admirable code of pro-
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN 75

cedure adopted for it, is of profound significance upon both the
national and the international scale.

_ The Court of Arbitral Justice, although not set in operation
by the second Conference, constitutes the International Prom-
ised Land of the world to-day. A truly permanent and a
genuine court, with a prestige based upon consecutive decisions
and a consistent interpretation of international law, was a great,
a path-breaking idea. The potency of great ideas in human his-
tory needs not to be argued. Now this idea, although abandoned
as impracticable by the first Conference, was introduced in the
second Conference only eight years later, explained, attacked,
defended, and almost unanimously accepted as both desirable and
practicable. Some of the ablest of international jurists col-
laborated in the task of advocating that idea and giving to it
form and substance. The concrete results of their labor were
adopted by the Conference and are published, not as a vermi-
form appendix, but as an essential annex to the Final Act.

Not only will the idea of such a court henceforth stand behind
the wrong of warfare, but it will inevitably rule the future.
The court itself, fashioned and wrought out in all but one of its
details, needs only an agreement as to the appointment of its
judges; and when this breath of life is breathed into it by any
number of the nations, it will at once spring into beneficent
activity. Its operation does not require unanimity among the
nations, as did so many other features of the Final Act of The
Hague; nor does it require even a two-thirds acceptance, as did
the Constitution of the United States; but the moment when two
or more powers agree upon the appointment of its judges, it
will open its doors for the pacification of disputes. Even though
constituted by only two powers, it will be known as the Court of
Arbitral Justice at The Hague, and, like a city set upon a hill,
it will eventually draw to it all nations seeking to escape the evils
of warfare.

It was greatly to be desired, of course, and it is still greatly
to be desired, that its operation should come as the result of
unanimous agreement. But even from this point of view it
should be noted that the Conference voted unanimously the
recommendation that the governments should adopt, not some
court, but this particular Court of Arbitral Justice, and put it
76 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

in operation as soon as they could agree upon the choice of its
judges.

Two great Americans, Elihu Root and Joseph H. Choate,
were the Moses and Aaron who led the second Conference into
the path towards this Promised Land; the Conference as the
result of infinite toil has led the world across the desert to the
Jordan; and now it is the growing hope of the civilized world
that Philander Chase Knox will be the Joshua who will lead it
across that one last river,—the difficulty, namely, as to the
appointment of the judges.

Looking back upon this brief summary of the work of the
two Hague Conferences, we must admit that the past at least
is secure. The alleviation and prevention of many of war-
fare’s former horrors, its restriction within narrow limits, the
protection of non-combatants and neutrals from its ravages, the
assertion of principles and the establishment of practices for
its prevention and for the enforcement of justice: such were the
great achievements of these two epoch-making events in the
world’s history. There they stand in all their undying lustre,
so that he who runs may see that they have afforded to the
peace-workers of our time a new and positive programme, on
which every true believer in international peace, of no matter
what complexion his belief may be, can find room and oppor-
tunity for labor, and whose realization will not only make
present armaments as obsolete as would a fleet of airships, but
will at last usher in a reign of law and justice within that No
Man’s Land of international relations.

When the traveler in some distant time shall stand beside
the Palace of Peace in The Hague, and shall look out over a
world in which the hoary forces of warfare have been perma-
nently diked within the channels of peaceful commerce, when he
shall hear the voice of international justice rolling forth to
every clime and corner of the world, and shall know that the
writ of the Court of Arbitral Justice runs freely and unques-
tioned from the mountains of Venezuela to the shores of the
Adriatic and the Golden Horn,—then will he clearly see what
our less seeing eyes can only dimly see: the full richness of the
harvest of peace and! justice that sprang from the seed which
the two Hague Conferences sowed.
_ It will be eetoemied a favor: if each’ alumnus: who.
changes his residence. will, notify. the Registrar, of his
new address, ‘Information from any source. that. will.
assist in, niaking - or keeping the Register of Graduates ,

complete will be appreciated.
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