It is not yet opportune to discuss in detail the exact method by which the nations of the world shall put the collective strength of civilization behind the purpose of civilization to do right, using as an instrumentality for peace such a world league. I have in the last chapter given the bare outline of such a plan. Probably at the outset it would be an absolute impossibility to devise a non-national or purely international police force which would be effective in a great crisis. The prime necessity is that all the great nations should agree in good faith to use their combined warlike strength to coerce any nation, whichever one it may be, that declines to abide the decision of some competent international tribunal. Our business is to create the beginnings of international order out of the world of nations as these nations actually exist. We do not have to deal with a world of pacificists and therefore we must proceed on the assumption that treaties will never acquire sanctity until nations are ready to seal them with their blood. We are not striving for peace in heaven. That is not our affair. What we were bidden to strive for is “peace on earth and good-will toward men.” To fulfil this injunction it is necessary to treat the earth as it is and men as they are, as an indispensable pre-requisite to making the earth a better place in which to live and men better fit to live in it. It is inexcusable moral culpability on our part to pretend to carry out this injunction in such fashion as to nullify it; and this we do if we make believe that the earth is what it is not and if our professions of bringing good-will toward men are in actual practice shown to be empty shams. Peace congresses, peace parades, the appointment and celebration of days of prayer for peace, and the like, which result merely in giving the participants the feeling that they have accomplished something and are therefore to be excused from hard, practical work for righteousness, are empty shams. Treaties such as the recent all-inclusive arbitration treaties are worse than empty shams and convict us as a nation of moral culpability when our representatives sign them at the same time that they refuse to risk anything to make good the signatures we have already affixed to the Hague conventions.