engagement prevented him from
passing on the blessing of the Apostles to the battleship _Thunderer_.
Remember how he sent his wife as a substitute to occupy the Apostolic
position in the hope that the hand which rocks the cradle might prove
equally efficacious.

Against the pugnacity and courage which urge our rulers to send other
people to die for them, the claims of humanity, reason, and religion
have no effect. The new hope is that self-interest may succeed where the
motives that act upon most decent people almost invariably fail. Norman
Angell's appeal goes straight to the pocket, and his choice of that
objective inspires hope. If rulers can no longer plead that by war they
are advancing the material interests of their State, if it is recognised
that even a victorious war involves as great disaster as defeat, or even
greater (and it is remarkable that, in one of his latest speeches,
Moltke maintained that, next to defeat, the greatest disaster which
could befall any State was victory)--if it can be shown that, in a war
between great nations, trade does not follow the flag, but moves rapidly
in the other direction, then one of the pretexts of our rulers will be
removed, one veil of hypocrisy will be stripped off. To that extent the
hope of peace will have grown brighter, and that extent is large.

On the whole, it is the brightest hope that has lately risen--or the
brightest but one which we will speak of later on. I would only hint at
two considerations which may obscure it. Granted that in modern times
war-power or victory does not give prosperity; that the invader cannot
destroy or capture the enemy's trade; that his own finance is equally
disturbed; and that the most enormous indemnity can add nothing to the
victorious nation's actual wealth--granted all this, nevertheless, the
warlike, though vicarious, heroism of our rulers might not on this
account be restrained. In many, if not most, recent wars the object has
not been national aggrandisement, or even national commerce, but private
gain. We have but to think of the South African War, so cleverly
engineered in the gold-mining interest, or of the Russo-Japanese war,
where so many thousands died for the Russian aristocracy's timber
concessions on the Yalu. Or, as permanent incitements to warfare, we may
think of all the manufacturers of armaments, the enormous companies that
fatten on blood and iron, the contractors, purveyors, horse-breeders,
tailors, advertis