and Morocco to-day!  But the point to notice is that you cannot alter things by altering names.  The united force of civilisation brought to bear upon any nation, however guilty, would be an act of war, however much you called it international police.  Civilisation’s self-defence would be war.  Every form of self-defence by violence, whether it disguises aggression or not, is war.  For many generations every war has been excused as self-defence of one kind or another.  I can hardly imagine a modern war that would not be excused by both sides as defensive.  By making these admissions—­by maintaining that self-defence is not war—­Moncure Conway gives away the whole case of the “peace-at-any-price man,” He comes down from the ideal positions of the early Quakers, the modern Tolstoyans, and the Salvation Army.  They preach non-resistance to evil consistently.  Like all extremists who have no reservations, but will trust to their principle though it slay them, they have gained a certain glow, a fervour of life, which shrivels up our ordinary compromises and political considerations.  But by advocating civilisation’s self-defence in the form of a combined international armament, Moncure Conway abandoned that vantage ground.  He became sensible, arguable, uncertain, submitting himself to the balances of reason and expediency like the rest of us.

A certain glow, a fervour of life—­those are signs that always distinguish extremists—­men and women who are willing literally to die for their cause.  I did not find those signs at the Hague Peace Conference, when I was sent there in 1907 as being a war correspondent.  Such an assembly ought to have marked an immense advance in human history.  It was the sort of thing that last-century poets dreamed of as the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.  It surpassed Prince Albert’s vision of an eternity of International Exhibitions.  One would have expected such an occasion to be heralded by Schiller’s Ode to Joy sounding through the triumph of the Choral Symphony.  Long and dubious has been the music’s struggle with pain, but at last, in great simplicity, the voices of the men give out the immortal theme, and the whole universe joins in harmony with a thunder of exultation: 

  “Seid umschlungen, Millionen,
  Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!”

Surely at the Hague Conference, in the fulfilment of time, peace had come on earth and goodwill among men.  Here once more would sound the song that the morning stars sang together, when all the sons of God shouted for joy.

As loaders in that celestial chorus, I found about 400 frock-coated, top-hatted gentlemen from various parts of the world—­elderly diplomatists, ambassadors inured to the stifling atmosphere of courts, Foreign Ministers who had served their time of intrigue, professors who worshipped law, worthy officials primed with a stock of phrases about “the noble sentiments of justice and humanity,” but reared in the