go a long way toward the abolition of war. A community of men
might be unwilling to renounce their right of fighting one another if
occasion arose, but they might still be willing to agree not to carry
arms or to carry arms of a not too lethal sort, to carry pistols instead
of rifles or sticks instead of swords. That, indeed, has been the
history of social amelioration in a number of communities; it has led
straight to a reduction in the number of encounters. So in the same way
the powers of the world might be willing to adopt such a limitation of
armaments, while still retaining the sovereign right of declaring war
in certain eventualities. Under the assurances of a world council
threatening a general intervention, such a partial disarmament would be
greatly facilitated.

And another aspect of disarmament which needs to be taken up and which
only a world congress can take up must be the arming of barbaric or
industrially backward powers by the industrially and artillery forces in
such countries as efficient powers, the creation of navies Turkey,
Servia, Peru, and the like. In Belgium countless Germans were blown to
pieces by German-made guns, Europe arms Mexico against the United
States; China, Africa, Arabia are full of European and American weapons.
It is only the mutual jealousies of the highly organized States that
permit this leakage of power. The tremendous warnings of our war should
serve to temper their foolish hostilities, and now, if ever, is the time
to restrain this insane arming of the less advanced communities.

But before that can be done it is necessary that the manufacture of war
material should cease to be a private industry and a source of profit to
private individuals, that all the invention and enterprise that blossoms
about business should be directed no longer to the steady improvement of
man-killing. It is a preposterous and unanticipated thing that
respectable British gentlemen should be directing magnificently
organized masses of artisans upon the Tyneside in the business of making
weapons that may ultimately smash some of those very artisans to
smithereens.

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 th