le the world, not by force but by
dogmas like catholicity. Catholicity was an attempt to build a peace
pact on ideals, and big ideas, and sympathies. Islam also tries to serve
as a peace pact, but Moslem states have freely fought with each other.
Islam does not contain an adequate philosophy. Its theories of society
are theocratic and do not meet the actual facts and problems. If a union
of two or more states is made, even for the purpose of aggregating more
force for war, it will necessarily be a peace union when regarded from
within. A confederation is the highest organization yet invented for the
purpose of making a great peace union without interfering with domestic
autonomy. Norway and Sweden, Austria and Hungary, are states united in
couples under a rational peace pact. The former couple has been
disrupted; the latter is convulsed by quarrels between its members. The
United States is a great peace unit, with a rational peace pact as a
bond of union. It has gone through one great convulsion, from which it
issued with the peace pact greatly strengthened. It tends to become a
consolidated empire. This can be seen in the propositions to turn over
various subjects of domestic importance to the federal authority.
Happiness and prosperity have been due to the peace pact, valid over a
continent, with immunity from powerful neighbors. We now think that we
will renounce all this and go out after world power and glory so as to
be like the other nations.

+550. The instability of great peace unions.+ Now that we have the laws
of Hammurabi we can see that the Euphrates valley was organized into a
peace unit with a very complete and highly finished peace pact
twenty-five hundred years before Christ. All the ordinary cases of
discord and diverse interest were provided for under an elaborate system
of laws as good as that of a modern European state. The later states of
western Asia were involved in war by conflicting interests, ambition,
and jealousy until the time of Alexander the Great. The smaller states
were at last all submerged in the Roman empire. All the constructive
work has been overthrown again and again. Only within a century or two
has a structure been set up which has more stability, but it is all in
jeopardy now. A union of the existing groups could not be brought about
but by conquest, and that would mean very great wars, yet all are ready,
by virtue of their institutions and ideas, to merge in a confederation
in