What can we do to hasten world-peace?

There are powerful forces, which without our conscious effort are making for the abolition of war:  its growing cost; the extension of mutual knowledge, through the newspapers and magazines, through travel, through exchange professorships and Rhodes scholarships and all international associations; the growing sensitiveness to suffering; the spread of eugenic ideals; and the increasing interest in worldwide social, moral, and material problems.  But the epoch of final peace for man can be greatly accelerated by means which we may now note.

(1) We may stimulate counter-enthusiasms to take the place of the passion for war.  After all, the great war of mankind is the war against pain, disease, poverty, and sin; the real heroes are not those who squander human strength and courage in fighting one another, but those who fight for man against his eternal foes.  The war of man against man is dissension in the ranks.  We must make it seem more glorious to men to enlist in these humanitarian campaigns than in the miserable civil wars that impede our common triumphs. [Footnote:  Cf.  Perry, Moral Economy, p. 32; “War between man and man is an obsolescent form of heroism. . . .  The general battle of life, the first and last battle, is still on; and it has that in it of danger and resistance, of comradeship and of triumph, that can stir the blood.”  And cf.  President Eliot’s fine eulogy of Dr. Lazear, who died of yellow fever after voluntarily undergoing inoculation by a mosquito, in the attempt to learn how to stay the disease:  " With more than the courage and] Further, we should awaken interest in innocent devotion of the soldier, he risked and lost his life to show how a fearful pestilence is communicated and how its ravages may be prevented.”] excitements and rivalries-in sports, in industrial competition, in missionary enterprise.  A world’s series in baseball, or an intercollegiate football season, can work off the restless energies of many thousands who in earlier days would have lusted for war.  The revival of the Olympic games was definitely planned as a substitute for war.  And men must have not only excitements and rivalries, but real difficulties and dangers-something to try their courage and endurance and train them in hardihood.  For this we have exploration and mountaineering, the prosecution of difficult engineering undertakings, the attacking of corruption and the achievement of political and social reforms. [Footnote:  Cf.  W. James, “The Moral Equivalent of War” (in Memories and Studies), p. 287:  “We must make new energies and hardihood’s continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.  Martial virtues must be the enduring cement, intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built.  The martial type of character can be bred without war.  The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.”]