e ethical spirit
of the times. Men may talk of the expenses, horrors, and devastations
of war as paramount causes for the tendency to substitute arbitration;
but antedating all other causes, underlying and strengthening all
others, is the slowly changing social conscience which, as each
generation passes, appreciates more fully warfare's inconsistency with
justice and antagonism to right. This same cause found civilized
society taking keen delight in the heathen barbarity of a gladiatorial
combat, and has transformed and lifted it up to where it is horrified
at a bull-baiting or a prize fight. It found human beings with
absolute power of life and death over other human beings and has
evolved the view that all men are created free and equal. It found
individuals settling questions of honor by a resort to arms, and has
substituted therefor a judge, counsel, and a jury. These three
institutions--gladiatorial combats, slavery, and dueling--were no more
regarded in their day as only temporary phenomena of social evolution
than is war so regarded by military sympathizers of to-day; yet these
have one by one been eliminated, and war is fast becoming as much out
of harmony with the ethical spirit of this age as was each of the
above out of harmony with the spirit of the age which dispensed with
it, and the effort to demonstrate that war is just as dispensable is
meeting with success. The teachings of Christ, who two thousand years
ago announced the doctrine of human brotherhood and surrendered his
life to make this doctrine effective, have slowly but surely wrought
their leavening influence upon the source of all war; namely, the
hearts of men. Warfare has for centuries been gradually yielding to
this deepening consciousness and that it must eventually, if not soon,
take its place beside the long-discarded gladiatorial profession, the
outlawed slave trade, and the discountenanced custom of the duelist
must be evident to any one who takes more than a superficial view of
the great determining forces which shape human progress.

Besides moral forces, industrial forces were mentioned as a factor
tending to the adoption of arbitration. During recent times, under the
impetus caused by the relatively modern innovations of steam,
electricity, and the press, this class of causes has been unusually
effective. Industry has overstepped international boundary lines.
Through the division of labor we are passing from the independence of
nati