In like manner, the decrees of an international tribunal might be enforced either by the creation of an international army or by calling upon as many of the nations as necessary to aid in coercing the non-law-abiding member of the international community.  Each nation is already armed and ready.

Whatever may be thought of the ultimate possibility of an international army, it must be evident that the principle of the posse must serve us at the outset.  An international army would always consist in part of members of the nation to be coerced, whereas, in selecting a posse those furthest in race and in sympathy from the offender might always be chosen, just as members of a hostile clan would make up the best posse to arrest a Highlander for sheep-stealing.

Moreover, the posse has been used internationally more than once, as when decrees have been pronounced by a general European Congress and some particular nation or nations have been charged with their execution.

When a frontier community that has been a law unto itself gets its first sheriff, the earliest visible result is not impossibly a sudden increase, instead of a decrease, of violence.  There is a war of the community, represented by the sheriff and the good citizens, against all the bad ones.  Even so it may be expected that among the first results of an effective agreement to enforce the decrees of an international tribunal, would be an exceptionally great and violent war.  Sooner or later some nation would be sure to take issue with an unpopular decree and refuse to obey it.  This would probably be one of the larger and more powerful nations, for a weaker power would not proceed to such lengths in protest.

Not improbably other nations might join the protesting power.  The result would be a war; it might even be the world war that we have been fearing for a generation.  It might conceivably be the greatest and the bloodiest war that the world has yet seen.  Yet it would be far the most glorious war of history, for it would be a struggle on behalf of law and order in the community of nations—­a fight to uphold that authority by whose exercise alone may peace be assured to the world.  The man who shudders at the prospect of such a war, who wants peace, but is unwilling to fight for it, should cease his efforts on behalf of a universal agreement among nations, for there is no general agreement without power to quell dissension.

This is not the place to discuss the details of an international agreement to enforce the decrees of an international tribunal.  It may merely be said that if the most powerful and intelligent communities of men that have ever existed cannot devise machinery to do what puny individuals have long been successfully accomplishing, they had better disband and coalesce in universal anarchy.

My object here is neither to propose plans nor to discuss details, but merely to point out that not the abandonment, but the systematization of violence is the goal of a rational peace propaganda, and that when this is once acknowledged and universally realized, an important step will have been taken toward winning over a class of persons who now oppose a world-peace as impractical and impossible.