“And now, at the end of my work, I offer yet a new plan for ending war—­namely, that the friends of peace and justice shall insist on a demand that every declaration of war shall be regarded as a sentence of death by one people on another; and shall be made only after a full and formal judicial inquiry and trial, at which the accused people shall be fairly represented....  The meanest prisoner cannot be executed without a trial.  A declaration of war is the most terrible of sentences:  it sentences a people to be slain and mutilated, their women to be widowed, their children orphaned, their cities burned, their commerce destroyed.  The real motives of every declaration of war are unavowed and unavowable.  Let them be dragged into the light!  No war would ever occur after a fair judicial trial by a tribunal in any country open to its citizens.

“Implore peace, O my reader, from whom I now part.  Implore peace, not of deified thunderclouds, but of every man, woman, or child thou shalt meet.  Do not merely offer the prayer, ‘Give peace in our time,’ but do thy part to answer it!  Then, at least, though the world be at strife, there shall be peace in thee."[13]

That sounds uncompromising.  We cannot doubt that one of the main motives of Conway’s life was “War against War.”  He suffered for peace; he lost friends and influence for peace; we may almost say he was exiled for peace.  Those are the marks of sincerity.  He, if anyone, we might suppose, was a “Peace-at-any-price man.”  But let us remember one passage in an address delivered only a few months before his death.  In that address, on William Penn, given in April 1907 (he died in the following November), speaking of Mr. Carnegie’s proposal for a compulsory Court of International Arbitration, he said: 

“In order to prevent swift attacks of one nation on another without notice, or outrages on weak and helpless tribes, there shall be selected from the armaments of the world a combination armament to act as the international police....  Even if in the last resort there were needed such united force of mankind to prevent any one nation from breaking the peace in which the interests of all nations are involved, that would not be an act of war, but civilisation’s self-defence.  Self-defence is not war, although the phrase is often used to disguise aggression."[14]

Speaking with all respect for a distinguished man’s memory, I disagree with every word of those sentences.  An international police, directed by the combined Powers, would almost certainly develop into a tremendous engine of injustice and oppression.  The Holy Alliance after Napoleon’s overthrow aimed at an international police, and we want no more Holy Alliances.  I would not trust a single government in the world to enter into such a combination.  I would rather trust Satan to combine with sin.  Think of the fate of Egypt from Arabi’s time up to the present, or of Turkey controlled by the Powers, or of Persia