egrity no longer have any substantial meaning. But statesmen think
and plan in terms of precedent; which comes to thinking and planning in
terms of make-believe, when altered circumstances have made the
precedents obsolete. So one comes to the singular proposal of the
statesmen, that the peace is to be kept in concert among these pacific
nations by a provision of force with which to break it at will. The
peace that is to be kept on this footing of national discriminations and
national armaments will necessarily be of a precarious kind; being, in
effect, a statesmanlike imitation of the peace as it was once kept even
more precariously by the pacific nations in severalty.

Hitherto the movement toward peace has not gone beyond this conception
of it, as a collusive safeguarding of national discrepancies by force of
arms. Such a peace is necessarily precarious, partly because armed force
is useful for breaking the peace, partly because the national
discrepancies, by which these current peace-makers set such store, are a
constant source of embroilment. What the peace-makers might logically be
expected to concern themselves about would be the elimination of these
discrepancies that make for embroilment. But what they actually seem
concerned about is their preservation. A peace by collusive neglect of
those remnants of feudalistic make-believe that still serve to divide
the pacific nations has hitherto not seriously come under advisement.

Evidently, hitherto, and for the calculable future, peace is a relative
matter, a matter of more or less, whichever of the several working
conceptions spoken of above may rule the case. Evidently, too, a peace
designed to strengthen the national establishment against eventual war,
will count to a different effect from a collusive peace of a defensive
kind among the pacific peoples, designed by its projectors to conserve
those national discrepancies on which patriotic statesmen like to dwell.
Different from both would be the value of a peace by neglect of such
useless national discriminations as now make for embroilment. A
protracted season of peace should logically have a somewhat different
cultural value according to the character of the public policy to be
pursued under its cover. So that a safe and sane conservation of the
received law and order should presumably best be effected under cover of
a collusive peace of the defensive kind, which is designed to retain
those national discrepanci