year's time, but they in no wise, I submit, constitute an
inseparable bar to the realisation of "that sweet dream," as Immanuel
Kant called it, of a "perpetual peace". The ideal is none the less
real because it cannot be at once put into practice; and had we to wait
another whole century, it would still be the duty of our movement to
stand by Kant and boldly set up the grand conception of an universal
peace as the goal for which all that is best among men is inevitably
making. Still, I trust that in our enthusiasm for ethic and for the
ideal of its master, we have not lost our heads and betaken ourselves
to Utopian impracticabilities. No ethical man could think of fixing a
limit within which a national disarmament must take place, and the
swords of the world beaten into ploughshares, any more than he could
name the date at which the millennium is to be introduced. But this
implies no insuperable, or rather, no serious, obstacle to our belief
that the ideal of universal arbitration, through the medium of a
congress of all nations, must in the future, near or distant, be
realised, because it is an ideal which is alone worthy of rational men.
And, moreover, the essential rationality of the ideal gives us a right
to demand that it should be recognised by all public men, by our
legislators who represent us, the Press which aims at reflecting the
life and thought of the age, the professors and masters who have the
care of our youth, and above all by fathers and mothers to whom tender
children are confided, and those men who assume the responsibility of
speaking to their generation in the sacred name of religion.

I say the ideal gives us the right to demand its recognition by men in
such positions of responsibility, and implies a corresponding
obligation on their part, no less than on our own, to labour seriously
for its speedy realisation. We are, every one of us, agreed that war
is essentially a cruel, barbarous, horribly vindictive and degrading
method of serving the interests of the sublimest thing known to man,
namely, justice. Wanton warfare, merely for the sake of fighting or
killing, or openly avowed oppression, can scarcely be acknowledged now
even by the most cynical of statesmen. The public conscience is become
too sensitive for that, so that some question of justice, or the
semblance of it, must be invoked in order to justify its unspeakable
barbarities. But what an outrage, the deliberate destruction of