d violent war. Sooner or later some
nation would be sure to take issue with an unpopular decree and refuse to
obey it. This would probably be one of the larger and more powerful
nations, for a weaker power would not proceed to such lengths in protest.

Not improbably other nations might join the protesting power. The result
would be a war; it might even be the world war that we have been fearing
for a generation. It might conceivably be the greatest and the bloodiest
war that the world has yet seen. Yet it would be far the most glorious war
of history, for it would be a struggle on behalf of law and order in the
community of nations--a fight to uphold that authority by whose exercise
alone may peace be assured to the world. The man who shudders at the
prospect of such a war, who wants peace, but is unwilling to fight for it,
should cease his efforts on behalf of a universal agreement among nations,
for there is no general agreement without power to quell dissension.

This is not the place to discuss the details of an international agreement
to enforce the decrees of an international tribunal. It may merely be said
that if the most powerful and intelligent communities of men that have
ever existed cannot devise machinery to do what puny individuals have long
been successfully accomplishing, they had better disband and coalesce in
universal anarchy.

My object here is neither to propose plans nor to discuss details, but
merely to point out that not the abandonment, but the systematization of
violence is the goal of a rational peace propaganda, and that when this is
once acknowledged and universally realized, an important step will have
been taken toward winning over a class of persons who now oppose a
world-peace as impractical and impossible.

These persons disapprove of disarmament: and from the point of view here
advocated, a general disarmament would be the last thing to be desired.
The possible member of a posse must bear arms to be effective. Armaments
may have to be limited and controlled by international decree, but to
disarm a nation would be as criminal and foolish as it would be to take
away all weapons from the law-abiding citizens of a mining town as a
preliminary to calling upon them to assist in the arrest of a notorious
band of outlaws.

Again: a common objection to the peace propaganda is that without war we
shall have none of the heroic virtues that war calls into being. This
objection fails utterly