le the defenders of the _status quo_
evinced the crude instincts of the mere time-serving politician. That
the latter did not insure quiet, even the quiet of desolation, in
those unhappy regions, we have yearly evidence. How far is it now a
practicable object, among the nations of the European family, to
continue indefinitely the present realization of peace and plenty,--in
themselves good things, but which are advocated largely on the ground
that man lives by bread alone,--in view of the changed conditions of
the world which the departing nineteenth century leaves with us as its
bequest? Is the outlook such that our present civilization, with its
benefits, is most likely to be insured by universal disarmament, the
clamor for which rises ominously--the word is used advisedly--among
our latter-day cries? None shares more heartily than the writer the
aspiration for the day when nations shall beat their swords into
ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; but is European
civilization, including America, so situated that it can afford to
relax into an artificial peace, resting not upon the working of
national consciences, as questions arise, but upon a Permanent
Tribunal,--an external, if self-imposed authority,--the realization in
modern policy of the ideal of the mediaeval Papacy?

The outlook--the signs of the times, what are they? It is not given to
human vision, peering into the future, to see more than as through a
glass, darkly; men as trees walking, one cannot say certainly whither.
Yet signs may be noted even if they cannot be fully or precisely
interpreted; and among them I should certainly say is to be observed
the general outward impulse of all the civilized nations of the first
order of greatness--except our own. Bound and swathed in the
traditions of our own eighteenth century, when we were as truly
external to the European world as we are now a part of it, we, under
the specious plea of peace and plenty--fulness of bread--hug an ideal
of isolation, and refuse to recognize the solidarity of interest with
which the world of European civilization must not only look forward
to, but go out to meet, the future that, whether near or remote, seems
to await it. I say _we_ do so; I should more surely express my thought
by saying that the outward impulse already is in the majority of the
nation, as shown when particular occasions arouse their attention, but
that it is as yet retarded, and may be retarded perilo