centuries has been especially true of progress out of the habit of war
toward the habit of peace. Events at the close of the nineteenth century
have been indeed deplorable; they were also deplored--and this is the
significant thing--more than such events were ever deplored before. The
body of protest against unnecessary and unrighteous wars becomes
steadily larger, bolder, and more outspoken; the public conscience is
more troubled by them; more and more men perceive their wastefulness and
wrong, and discern the more excellent way; and to-morrow the total of
protesting insight and morality shall be great enough to tip the balance
and hold the tempted, ruffling nation to self-restraint, respect for
others, and respect for civilization. There was much less war in
Christendom during the nineteenth century than during the eighteenth,
and there will be less during the twentieth century than during the
nineteenth. The steady and sure progress of the world is toward the
supplanting of the ways of greed and violence among nations by the
methods of reason, legality, and mutual regard. As one travels over
Europe, one is never far from some great battle-field. In Scotland one
remembers how half a dozen centuries ago one clan was continually
fighting with another, this group of clans warring with that, or all
were leagued together against one Edward or another advancing with his
archers from beyond the Tweed. The English armies fighting at Falkirk
and Bannockburn and Halidon were straightway--they or their
successors--in France fighting at Crecy and Poitiers and Agincourt. The
wars between England and France were interminable; and so were the wars
between France and other nations. There were civil wars and religious
wars and wars of succession; seven-years wars and thirty-years wars and
hundred-years wars. War was the regular vocation of nations, the
profession of arms the chief profession, peace merely an occasional
respite, in no sense to be reckoned on or presumed to endure as the
natural condition of things.

All this has been fundamentally changed. Europe bends under the burden
of her great armies and multiplies her costly battleships, and we say
that it is wasteful and barbarous; but the soldiers and ships are almost
never used. We grieve and blush at the shameful wars of subjugation in
our own time; but these wars were anachronisms, sporadic survivals of
courses common and universally approved three hundred years ago, when