Another point steadily maintained by the advocates of peace and denied by their adversaries has come clearly to light in these latter days, namely, that wars are instigated and brought to their culmination by certain influential men without the slightest reference to the people, to parliaments or to the choicest spirits of the nations. What has been decided upon by the powers that be, what has been mapped out by “Cabinets,” is promulgated as an accomplished fact, approved by the chorus of a servile press, and, if it can be made sensational, cheered by an enthusiastic mob. How necessary that every land should have a ministry of peace, an official organism representing the interests of peace, under whose protection that portion of public opinion which is averse to war might make itself heard. How essential an independent, ethically elevated press, conscious of the duty growing out of its power, the duty to guide the people in the way of unity, of conciliation, of a just consideration of both sides of a quarrel—in short, in the way of peace, the only way worthy of civilization and culture. The opposite is true. The political press, in a ponderous majority, is to-day a forge for the heating of the irons of war. Current events reveal the fact that our system is not being put in practice, but they reveal no flaws or contradictions in the system itself, for it has none. Without a flaw or contradiction it harmonizes with the law of evolution. The new age—with its advance in technical inventions (with especial reference to the possibility of the slaughter of masses), with its ties of international solidarity, its reciprocal economic interdependencies, its sublimated ethical requirements—has outgrown the system of war, and outgrows it more and more daily. This truth is set forth, as it were, in an object-lesson in the rush of action upon the stage of the world’s theatre. On the other hand, take the war in the Transvaal. What economic losses (to say nothing of the moral loss) to England and to the rest of the world has it involved; and the end of the war is not yet in sight, in spite of the fact that England outnumbers her adversaries ten to one. That war and the Chinese problem both show that the nations are being mechanically driven to the position which the advocates of peace have suggested as the only one that can be taken as a result of the exercise of free will and rationality, namely, coalition, surrender of secondary specific interests and contentions for the sake of a higher common interest, of culture and humanity, and the creation of a “world army.” The position into which the Powers are mechanically forced, which in its external form seems to adjust itself to the demands of the peace idea, is not yet permeated by the _spirit_ of the idea; not yet based upon the firm groundwork of institutions of peace. It is filled with militarism, confused with military projects and national antagonisms.