or any engineer in charge of a going engine.

We are all, indeed, busy with the things that come to hand every day. We
are all anxious for a permanent world peace, but we are all up to the
neck in things that leave us no time to attend to this world peace that
nearly every sane man desires.

Meanwhile, a small minority of people who trade upon
contention--militarists, ambitious kings and statesmen, war contractors,
loan mongers, sensational journalists--follow up their interests and
start and sustain war.

There lies the paradoxical reality of this question. Our first inquiry
lands us into the elucidation of this deadlock. Nearly everybody desires
a world peace, and yet there is not apparent anywhere any man free and
able and willing to establish it, while, on the other hand, there are a
considerable number of men in positions of especial influence and power
who will certainly resist the arrangements that are essential to its
establishment.

But does this exhaust the question, and must we conclude that mankind is
doomed to a perpetual, futile struggling of States and nations and
peoples--breaking ever and again into war? The answer to that would
probably, be "Yes" if it were not for the progress of war. War is
continually becoming more scientific, more destructive, more coldly
logical, more intolerant of non-combatants, and more exhausting of any
kind of property. There is every reason to believe that it will continue
to intensify these characteristics. By doing so it may presently bring
about a state of affairs that will supply just the lacking elements that
are needed for the development of a world peace.