r Napoleon's
overthrow aimed at an international police, and we want no more Holy
Alliances. I would not trust a single government in the world to enter
into such a combination. I would rather trust Satan to combine with sin.
Think of the fate of Egypt from Arabi's time up to the present, or of
Turkey controlled by the Powers, or of Persia and Morocco to-day! But
the point to notice is that you cannot alter things by altering names.
The united force of civilisation brought to bear upon any nation,
however guilty, would be an act of war, however much you called it
international police. Civilisation's self-defence would be war. Every
form of self-defence by violence, whether it disguises aggression or
not, is war. For many generations every war has been excused as
self-defence of one kind or another. I can hardly imagine a modern war
that would not be excused by both sides as defensive. By making these
admissions--by maintaining that self-defence is not war--Moncure
Conway gives away the whole case of the "peace-at-any-price man," He
comes down from the ideal positions of the early Quakers, the modern
Tolstoyans, and the Salvation Army. They preach non-resistance to evil
consistently. Like all extremists who have no reservations, but will
trust to their principle though it slay them, they have gained a certain
glow, a fervour of life, which shrivels up our ordinary compromises and
political considerations. But by advocating civilisation's self-defence
in the form of a combined international armament, Moncure Conway
abandoned that vantage ground. He became sensible, arguable, uncertain,
submitting himself to the balances of reason and expediency like the
rest of us.

A certain glow, a fervour of life--those are signs that always
distinguish extremists--men and women who are willing literally to die
for their cause. I did not find those signs at the Hague Peace
Conference, when I was sent there in 1907 as being a war correspondent.
Such an assembly ought to have marked an immense advance in human
history. It was the sort of thing that last-century poets dreamed of as
the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World. It surpassed Prince
Albert's vision of an eternity of International Exhibitions. One would
have expected such an occasion to be heralded by Schiller's _Ode to Joy_
sounding through the triumph of the Choral Symphony. Long and dubious
has been the music's struggle with pain, but at last, in great
simplicity, t