The present writer is one of this great majority.  He wants as far as possible to end war altogether, and contrive things so that when any unavoidable outbreak does occur it may be as little cruel and mischievous as it can be.

But it is one thing to desire a thing and another thing to get it.  It does not follow because this aspiration for world-peace is almost universal that it will be realized.  There may be faults in ourselves, unsuspected influences within us and without, that may be working to defeat our superficial sentiments.  There must be not only a desire for peace, but a will for peace, if peace is to be established forever.  If out of a hundred men ninety-nine desire peace and trouble no further, the one man over will arm himself and set up oppression and war again.  Peace must be organized and maintained.  This present monstrous catastrophe is the outcome of forty-three years of skillful, industrious, systematic world armament.  Only by a disarmament as systematic, as skillful, and as devoted may we hope to achieve centuries of peace.

No apology is needed, therefore, for a discussion of the way in which peace may be organized and established out of the settlement of this war.  I am going to set out and estimate as carefully as I can the forces that make for a peace organization and the forces that make for war.  I am going to do my best to diagnose the war disorder.  I want to find out first for my own guidance, and then with a view to my co-operation with other people, what has to be done to prevent the continuation and recrudescence of warfare.

Such an inquiry is manifestly the necessary first stage in any world pacification.  So manifestly that, of course, countless others are also setting to work upon it.  It is a research.  It is a research exactly like a scientific exploration.  Each of us will probably get out a lot of truth and a considerable amount of error; the truth will be the same and the errors will confute and disperse each other.  But it is clear that there is no simple panacea in this matter, and that only by intentness and persistence shall we disentangle a general conception of the road the peace-desiring multitude must follow.

Now, first be it noted that there is in every one a certain discord with regard to war.  Every man is divided against himself.  On the whole, most of us want peace.  But hardly any one is without a lurking belligerence, a lurking admiration for the vivid impacts, the imaginative appeals of war.  I am sitting down to write for the peace of the world, but immediately before I sat down to write I was reading the morning’s paper, and particularly of the fight between the Sydney and the Emden at Cocos Island.

I confess to the utmost satisfaction in the account of the smashing blows delivered by the guns of the Australian.  There is a sensation of greatness, a beautiful tremendousness, in many of the crude facts of war; they excite in one a kind of vigorous exaltation; we have that destructive streak in us, and it is no good pretending that we have not; the first thing we must do for the peace of the world is to control that.  And to control it one can do nothing more effective than to keep in mind the other side of the realities of war.