The nations of the Entente, including the United States, are now united in an effort to stamp out the curse of feudalism in Austria and in Germany—­a curse which has disappeared from all other parts of the civilized world.  They are united to crush the military spirit of conquest which exists among the war leaders of the Prussians.  They are pledged “to make the world safe for democracy” as President Wilson has said; to do away with the rule of force.  So long as the governments of Germany, Austria, and Turkey place the military power at all times above the civil power, so long will it be necessary to police the world.  There must be no repetition of the savage attack of August, 1914.  There was a time when many of us believed that some one nation, by disbanding its army and refusing to build warships, might set an example of disarming which all the world would finally follow.  It now is plain that there must be a “League to Enforce Peace” as Ex-President Taft and other American statesmen have declared.  The United States, Great Britain, Russia, France, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Serbia, Greece, together with Spain, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and other nations where the will of the people is the law, must unite in an alliance which will insist on arbitration as a means of settling disputes.

In 1870, Great Britain and the United States had a dispute which might well have led to war.  Instead of fighting over it, however, they laid their trouble before a court of five men, a Swiss, an Italian, a Brazilian, an Englishman, and an American.  This court, by a vote of four to one, decided against England, and England accepted the decision as final, although it cost her many millions of dollars.

The League to Enforce Peace must insist that each nation in the world maintain only a small force of soldiers, to be used as police for its own affairs, and there must be an international police to settle all differences between nations and to enforce the orders of the court of arbitration.  In time (no one knows how soon) the people of Germany and Austria will be freed from the military rule which now has the power to hurl them into war.  When that day arrives and they learn that they have been led astray by Treitschke and Bernhardi, who preached that war was a blessing to a nation and that only the powerful nations had the right to survive, they will know that “Thou shalt not kill” is just as strong a commandment today as when it first was uttered.

Sometime, nations will learn that other nations have the right to live, and that no country can wrong another through force of arms without suffering for it in the end.  In a blunted conscience, in the loss of the sympathy of the rest of the world, in a lessening of the Christ-spirit of doing good to others, the nation which resorts to force to gratify its own selfish ends, like the individual, pays the full penalty for its misdeeds.  It, was a great American who said, “The world is my country and mankind are my brothers.”