At the risk of being called “Utopian” I would submit that the world is not so foolish as to allow that sort of thing to go on indefinitely.  It is, indeed, quite a recent human development.  All this great business of armament upon commercial lines is the growth of half a century.  But it has grown with the vigor of an evil weed, it has thrown out a dark jungle of indirect advertisement, and it has compromised and corrupted great numbers of investors and financial people.  It is perhaps the most powerful single interest of all those that will fight against the systematic minimization and abolition of war, and rather than lose his end it may be necessary for the pacifist to buy out all these concerns, to insist upon the various States that have sheltered them taking them over, lock, stock, and barrel, as going businesses.

From what we know of officialism everywhere, the mere transfer will involve almost at once a decline in their vigor and innovating energy.  It is perhaps fortunate that the very crown of the private armaments business is the Krupp organization and that its capture and suppression is a matter of supreme importance to all the allied powers.  Russia, with her huge population, has not as yet developed armament works upon a very large scale and would probably welcome proposals that minimized the value of machinery and so enhanced that of men.  Beyond this and certain American plants for the making of rifles and machine guns only British and French capital is very deeply involved in the armaments trade.  The problem is surely not too difficult for human art and honesty.

It is not being suggested that the making of arms should cease in the world, but only that in every country it should become a State monopoly and so completely under Government control.  If the State can monopolize the manufacture and sale of spirits, as Russia has done, if it can, after the manner of Great Britain, control the making and sale of such a small, elusive substance as saccharin, it is ridiculous to suppose that it cannot keep itself fully informed of the existence of such elaborated machinery as is needed to make a modern rifle barrel.  And it demands a very minimum of alertness, good faith, and good intentions for the various manufacturing countries to keep each other and the world generally informed upon the question of the respective military equipments.  From this state of affairs to a definition of a permissible maximum of strength on land and sea for all the high contracting powers is an altogether practicable step.  Disarmament is not a dream; it is a thing more practicable than a general hygienic convention and more easily enforced than custom and excise.

Now none of this really involves the abandonment of armies or uniforms or national service.  Indeed, to a certain extent it restores the importance of the soldier at the expense of machinery.  A world conference for the suppressing of the peace and the preservation of armaments would neither interfere with such dear incorrigible squabbles as that of the orange and green factions in Ireland, (though it might deprive them of their more deadly weapons,) nor absolutely prohibit war between adjacent States.  It would, however, be a very powerful delaying force against the outbreak of war, and it would be able to insist with a quite novel strength upon the observation of the rules of war.