active opposition to the proposed strike method for rendering war
impossible comes from the delegates representing the workers in arsenals
and dockyards. But there is no likelihood of arsenals and dockyards
closing in the lifetime of the present workers, and though the
establishment of peaceful methods of settling international disputes
cannot fail to diminish the number of the workers who live by armament,
it will be long before they can be dispensed with altogether.

[1] The Abbe de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743), a churchman without vocation,
was a Norman of noble family, and first published his _Memoires pour
rendre la Paix Perpetuelle a l'Europe_ in 1722. As Siegler-Pascal well
shows (_Les Projets de l'Abbe de Saint-Pierre_, 1900) he was not a mere
visionary Utopian, but an acute and far-seeing thinker, practical in his
methods, a close observer, an experimentalist, and one of the first to
attempt the employment of statistics. He was secretary to the French
plenipotentiaries who negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht, and was thus
probably put on the track of his scheme. He proposed that the various
European states should name plenipotentiaries to form a permanent
tribunal of compulsory arbitration for the settlement of all
differences. If any state took up arms against one of the allies, the
whole confederation would conjointly enter the field, at their conjoint
expense, against the offending state. He was opposed to absolute
disarmament, an army being necessary to ensure peace, but it must be a
joint army composed of contingents from each Power in the confederation.
Saint-Pierre, it will be seen, had clearly grasped the essential facts
of the situation as we see them to-day. "The author of _The Project of
Perpetual Peace_" concludes Prof. Pierre Robert in a sympathetic summary
of his career (Petit de Julleville, _Histoire de la Langue et de la
Litterature Francaise_, Vol. VI), "is the precursor of the twentieth
century." His statue, we cannot doubt, will be a conspicuous object,
beside Sully's, on the future Palace of any international tribunal.

It is, indeed, so common to regard the person who points out the
inevitable bankruptcy of war under highly civilized conditions as a mere
Utopian dreamer, that it becomes necessary to repeat, with all the
emphasis necessary, that the settlement of international disputes by law
cannot be achieved by disarmament, or by any method not involving force.
All law, even the law that settles