we have to attack, let us consider the difficulties of a single
question, which is also a vital and central question in this forecast.
We shall not attempt a full answer here, because too many of the factors
must remain unexamined; later, perhaps, we may be in a better position
to do so. This question is the probability of the establishment of a
long world peace.

At the outset of the war there was a very widely felt hope among the
intellectuals of the world that this war might clear up most of the
outstanding international problems, and prove the last war. The writer,
looking across the gulf of experience that separates us from 1914,
recalls two pamphlets whose very titles are eloquent of this
feeling--"The War that will End War," and "The Peace of the World." Was
the hope expressed in those phrases a dream? Is it already proven a
dream? Or can we read between the lines of the war news, diplomatic
disputations, threats and accusations, political wranglings and stories
of hardship and cruelty that now fill our papers, anything that still
justifies a hope that these bitter years of world sorrow are the
darkness before the dawn of a better day for mankind? Let us handle this
problem for a preliminary examination.

What is really being examined here is the power of human reason to
prevail over passion--and certain other restraining and qualifying
forces. There can be little doubt that, if one could canvass all mankind
and ask them whether they would rather have no war any more, the
overwhelming mass of them would elect for universal peace. If it were
war of the modern mechanical type that was in question, with air raids,
high explosives, poison gas and submarines, there could be no doubt at
all about the response. "Give peace in our time, O Lord," is more than
ever the common prayer of Christendom, and the very war makers claim to