INTRODUCTION BY PRESIDENT LOWELL

IF a quiet country town is visited by a desperado, or if a sudden fit of lawlessness breaks out, so that life and property are no longer safe, and there is no police force to cope with the situation, the normal American procedure is the formation of a vigilance committee. The indifferent are stirred to action, and even men who abhor violence and bloodshed are moved to arm themselves, until all good citizens join in force to support the committee, maintain order, and prevent breaches of the public peace.

The present war; with its millions of young men killed; millions more maimed for life; with the suffering of a still larger number of civilians, men, women and children; with the long stretches of land devastated as no land ever was before; with the ferocity and the cold cruelty which the contest has at times called forth; has set many men thinking earnestly and with a purpose. Advocates of peace, who had relied on the slow process of per

suasion and reason, have felt the need of more vigourous and speedy methods of procedure; while people who had not taken the fear of war seriously have been aroused to the danger and the results. They have seen that, with the control over the forces of nature in these later days, the destructiveness of war is greater even than had been imagined; and that, with the organization of all the resources of nations for the conflict, the suffering tends to be more widespread, the efforts of whole peoples more intense, and the ruthlessness of the struggle more pronounced.

The

Men are feeling that it is not enough to rely upon the gradual effects of a higher morality, and enlarged sympathy and better mutual understanding among the nations; but that when this war comes to an end something must be done at once to prevent such another holocaust of civilisation. sight of peoples who have reached the highest point of development yet known destroying one another, of mankind destroying itself, would be absurd if it were not tragic. Human society has a right to protect itself, by compelling, if need be, a nation to refrain from resorting to arms, and setting the earth afire, before its grievance has been brought before the bar of the world; and perhaps after

wards if its claim is manifestly extortionate and unjust.

With this conviction the League to Enforce Peace was organised in our country, and the plan has met with the approval of the highest officers of state in the leading countries of the world. The programme was drawn with a view to the minimum that would obtain the object of restraining war, and no attempt was made to lay down details or provide methods of procedure which must be determined by the representatives of the nations concerned when they meet for conference. The important thing for an unofficial body is to advocate the principle, not to draft a treaty.

This book has been written with that object. The author, as the reader will perceive, is an idealist who knows well the value of approaching an ideal by actual steps forward, rather than by dreams of a distant future based upon a radical change in human nature. He discusses how the existing forces have failed to prevent war, and why the prin ciple of compulsory international power is necessary and appropriate for the purpose. He looks at the subject from a somewhat novel standpoint, and makes many interesting observations in the course of his argument. All people who feel a real desire

to free mankind from war, who believe that civilisation is incomplete so long as wars like the present ravage the earth, will find themselves well repaid in reading this book.

PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR

THERE is little doubt that war as an institution will be hard put to it to find any defenders after this most stupendous and most sanguinary of all wars has run its dreadful course to the bitter end. We are no longer uncertain as to the attitude of the majority of men and women the world over concerning

Yon hideous, grinning thing that stalks
Hidden in music, like a queen

That in a garden of glory walks.

"War," writes Mr. Britling in a really remarkable letter to the father of his son's German tutor, "is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and kindliness of mankind. ... Massacres of boys! That indeed is the essence of modern war. The killing off of the young. It is the destruction of the human inheritance; it is the spending of all the live material of the future upon present-day hate and greed.' The German Crown Prince asks of his interviewer, "Have you had a chance to see enough of this dreadful business?

1 H. G. Wells: Mr. Britling Sees it Through.