d have adopted new codes for themselves; the higher
morality has spread by agitation to include a larger group, and
finally it has become the policy of the nation. Thus slavery went, and
political equality came.

And thus war must go and peace must come. First, we find protest
against the killing of individuals by individuals. The duel fell into
disrepute and at last was forbidden by law. The carrying of weapons
became unfashionable and at length was made a crime. With the growth
of the moral sense, mutual trust took the place of armed neutrality.
The present situation is ready for the larger application of these
principles. The argument which abolished the carrying of weapons must
frown upon excessive national armaments. As the individual duel was
superseded by personal arbitration, so the national duel must be
superseded by national arbitration. The reason that maintains the
civil court for the settlement of individuals' disputes calls for a
higher court for the settlement of national disputes. Not alone among
men, not alone within states, but among the nations, right, not might,
must rule; not force, but justice; and written as the world's supreme
mandate, as the highest human law from which there may be no appeal,
must be the unshaken law of national righteousness.

Tennyson's words were accounted a poet's fancy when he wrote:

Till the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

Yet the present year[1] will witness the fulfillment of that prophecy.
Disarmament and arbitration will be considered this summer, not by
agitators, not by theorists, nor yet prophetically by poets; but in
June, at the invitation of our own President,[2] an actual
international conference will assemble, a Parliament of the World,
composed of official representatives of every nation of the globe.
Thus we see the foregleams of an approaching day. The time is
not far distant when war will glide into the grim shadows of a
scarce-remembered past, when battles will pass into the oblivion of
forgotten horrors. Then will society realize its dreams of a kingdom
of heaven upon earth, where the barbaric lure of fighting will be
lost; where no class lines may exist save those freely acknowledged by
a common justice; where national egoism maintains no armies for
conquest and no navies for aggrandizement; where economic resources
are devoted, not to mutual physical destruction