tion was taken, and more than that
can be asked of no conscience, national or personal. But, further,
had the final decision of conscience been that just cause for war
existed, no evil that war brings could equal the moral declension
which a nation inflicts upon itself, and upon mankind, by deliberate
acquiescence in wrong, which it recognizes and which it might right."
Nor is this conclusion vitiated by the fact that war is made at times
upon mistaken conviction. It is not the accuracy of the decision, but
the faithfulness to conviction, that constitutes the moral worth of an
action, national or individual.

The general consciousness of this truth is witnessed by a common
phrase, which excludes from suggested schemes of arbitration all
questions which involve "national honor or vital interests." No one
thing struck me more forcibly during the Conference at The Hague than
the exception taken and expressed, although in a very few quarters, to
the word "honor," in this connection. There is for this good reason;
for the word, admirable in itself and if rightly understood, has lost
materially in the clearness of its image and superscription, by much
handling and by some misapplication. Honor does not forbid a nation to
acknowledge that it is wrong, or to recede from a step which it has
taken through wrong motives or mistaken reasons; yet it has at times
been so thought, to the grievous injury of the conception of honor. It
is not honor, necessarily, but sound policy, which prescribes that
peace with a semi-civilized foe should not be made after a defeat;
but, however justifiable the policy, the word "honor" is defaced by
thus misapplying it.

The varying fortunes, the ups and downs of the idea of arbitration at
the Conference of The Hague, as far as my intelligence could follow
them, produced in me two principal conclusions, which so far confirmed
my previous points of view that I think I may now fairly claim for
them that they have ripened into _opinions_, between which word, and
the cruder, looser views received passively as _impressions_, I have
been ever careful to mark a distinction. In the first place,
compulsory arbitration stands at present no chance of general
acceptance. There is but one way as yet in which arbitration can be
compulsory; for the dream of some advanced thinkers, of an
International Army, charged with imposing the decrees of an
International Tribunal upon a recalcitrant state, may be dismissed as