As soon as civilised society realised that
it was necessary to forbid two persons to settle their disputes by
individual fighting, or by initiating blood-feuds, or by arming friends
and followers, setting up courts of justice for the peaceable settlement
of disputes, the death-blow of all war was struck. For all the arguments
that proved strong enough to condemn war between two individuals are
infinitely stronger to condemn war between the populations of two-thirds
of the earth. But, while it was a comparatively easy task for a State to
abolish war and impose peace within its own boundaries--and nearly all
over Europe the process was begun and for the most part ended centuries
ago--it is a vastly more difficult task to abolish war and impose peace
between powerful States. Yet at the point at which we stand to-day
civilisation can make no further progress until this is done. Solitary
thinkers, like the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, and even great practical
statesmen like Sully and Penn, have from time to time realised this
fact during the past four centuries, and attempted to convert it into
actuality. But it cannot be done until the great democracies are won
over to a conviction of its inevitable necessity. We need an
international organisation of law courts which shall dispense justice as
between nation and nation in the same way as the existing law courts of
all civilised countries now dispense justice as between man and man; and
we further need, behind this international organisation of justice, an
international organisation of police strong enough to carry out the
decisions of these courts, not to exercise tyranny but to ensure to
every nation, even the smallest, that measure of reasonable freedom and
security to go about its own business which every civilised nation now,
in some small degree at all events, already ensures to the humblest of
its individual citizens.
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