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and authorized by the people, must work together to form a Court of Conciliation, and determine its rules and methods of procedure.

The basis on which the Court is founded must (1) give equal liberty and status to all the political groups concerned, both small and great; (2) provide for economic expansion and economic restraint, and the exclusion of all legitimate grounds of unrest; (3) arrange for the settlement of disputes by arbitration; (4) start with the immediate reduction of armaments, and prepare for the ultimate extinction of all armed forces; (5) be universal in its range, embracing all nations that can be brought within its bounds; and (6) be worked so that it shall be manifest to all that it is impartial, holds the balance fair and even, inclines to no party or class or interest, but is mediatory, and reconciling all to one another in pursuit of the common good of the whole of the Commonwealths.

So worked, it will be magnetic. Each nation will wish to come in and share the ministry to the world's peace and happiness it will afford. It is a high ideal, and difficult to reach; but it is our palpable duty to undertake the task and actualize the ideal as far as we can.

Surely we have enough of the old system. It is a political order that inevitably sooner or later produces war; and, even when we are not actually fighting, we are living in what we call an "armed peace," which is fatal to social well-being, aggran

dizes the few, and pauperizes and debases the many; wastes not only the financial but the moral and spiritual resources of the nations; condemns men to be the slaves and tools of those who arrogate the right to control them; hinders the free and full development of the manhood of the individual; and blocks the way to the true progress of mankind. What we need is a system that makes peace as inevitable as war is now. The safety of the people is the supreme law, and that safety must be guarded against the intrigues of wild and unbalanced despots, the wiles of diplomatists, and the fevered ambitions of militarists, to whom war is meat and drink, and all in all.

Now, it is certain that America could not have taken its place by our side in this strife, after long and mature deliberation, had not our aims and objects been directed to that end. No people has done more for peace than the Americans. Year after year her most capable and illustrious citizens, lawyers and editors, preachers and statesmen, have met at the Mohonk Conference to devise methods of ending war. Millions of dollars have been freely given and spent in promoting that holy cause. No country has a literature on war, its causes, its evils, and its cure, surpassing in extent or in ability and practical value that which her sons and daughters have produced for the guidance of the world. In June, 1915, a League to Enforce Peace was formed in Philadelphia by 400 of the most representative

and influential men of the United States; and that League is, like the rest of the millions of America, heart and soul and will with us in this war, because it is a war to enforce peace, and to make peace eternal.

They know, and we know, that we are not fighting for fighting's sake, or for revenge, or to punish the authors of this war, or for territory or trade, or to interfere directly with the internal government of the Central Powers; but for universal peace, a "clean" peace, "secure" from war's alarms, anxieties and uncertainties, not dependent on the caprice of military powers, but the abiding peace our modern world must have to accomplish its God-given mission in these times.

VII

THE MORAL CONFLICT

By REV. ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN, D.D., LL.D.

ARLY two million Americans are under arms.

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Five hundred thousand are in France and

more are going every month. There is no audience in the United States which does not include those who have sons or other relatives in the Army or Navy. Seventeen nations are waging war and forty millions of men are in uniform. Battles have been fought not only in Europe but in Asia, Africa and South America. Northern France is in ruins. Belgium is a military prison. Every child in Poland and Serbia is said to be dead or dying. Syrians and Persians are starving. Armenians have been nearly exterminated by murder or privation. Black men in Africa have killed each other at the orders of white officers. Villages have been burned in the South Sea Islands. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, have sent their sons to die in the trenches of Flanders. One hundred and twenty-five thousand Chinese are in France. Four hundred thousand men of India are on the firing line. Japan,

China, and Siam have declared war. The scenes of ancient wars are again the scenes of conflict. Egypt is a military camp. Mesopotamia is a battle field. The wilderness of Sinai has once more seen marching men. The Mount of Olives and the Hill of Golgotha bristle with cannon. The streets of the Holy City resound with the tramp of armed men. Judea is seamed with trenches, and airships fly over the land where Hebrew prophets spoke and where walked before men the Son of God.

As for our part in this gigantic struggle, we have said through President Wilson that "what we demand in this war is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peaceloving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions and be assured of justice and fair dealing by the peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression." Never has a people entered a war in such an altruistic spirit. We love peace and hate war. We were not prepared for war. We are three thousand miles away from the scene of conflict. Our historic policy is to avoid entangling alliances with other nations. But in spite of these things, in spite of our knowledge of the horrors that war involves, we have entered the struggle; and we are unhesitatingly spending billions of money and giving up our beloved sons; and we say, as Martin Luther said at

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