differences. He would ask in astonishment how an intelligent and
generally humane race, a race which raises homes for stray cats and aged
horses, could cling to a system which, on infallible experience, plunges
one or more countries in the deepest suffering every few years. He would
learn that there has not been a war in Europe for a hundred years the
initial cause of which would not have been better appreciated and
adjudicated on by a body of impartial lawyers; and that, if the quarrels
had thus been submitted to arbitration, we should have saved (including
the annual military expenditure and the cost of the present war) some
three million lives and more than £15,000,000,000--since the end of the
Napoleonic wars. In answer to the amazement of this imaginary critic, we
could reply only that Europe has grown to regard the military system as
so permanent and unquestioned an institution of our civilisation that it
simply cannot imagine the abolition of that system.

For this incapacity, this widespread inertia, this blundering idea that
there is some serious intrinsic difficulty in the matter, the Churches
are responsible. If they had directed to war the smallest particle of
the ardent rhetoric they have poured on disbelief in dogmas which they
are to-day abandoning, the public mind would have awakened long ago.
There is no intrinsic difficulty in substituting arbitration for war.
There are technical difficulties which the great lawyers and statesmen
of the peace-movement have given ample promise of surmounting, but the
overwhelming obstacle is merely this--the peoples of Europe do not
insist on the reform. Of all the large problems which confront the
modern mind this is incomparably the simplest. We are hopelessly divided
as to the nature of the remedy for most of our social ills. Here the
remedy is acknowledged: the plan has been elaborated almost in entirety:
the international tribunal already exists, and awaits only its
executive, which the nations of Europe could supply to-morrow. It is the