Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association — John Shaqi
Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace AssociationIntercollegiate Peace Association
History
Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association
Intercollegiate Peace Association
Peace; War
"The crest and crowning of all good, life's final star is
brotherhood;
For it will bring again to Earth her long-lost Poesy and Mirth;
Will send new light on every face, a kingly power upon the race.
And till it come, we men are slaves, and travel downward to dust
of graves.
Come, clear the way, then, clear the way: blind creeds and kings
have had their day.
Break the dead branches from the path: our hope is in the aftermath.
Our hope is in heroic men, star-led to build the world again.
To this Event the ages ran: Make way for Brotherhood--make way for
man."
All great reforms have begun with "star-led" men and have moved from
individuals to groups and from groups to the nation. In every distinct
advance of the race prophetic persons have anticipated the trend of
the ages and have adopted new codes for themselves; the higher
morality has spread by agitation to include a larger group, and
finally it has become the policy of the nation. Thus slavery went, and
political equality came.
And thus war must go and peace must come. First, we find protest
against the killing of individuals by individuals. The duel fell into
disrepute and at last was forbidden by law. The carrying of weapons
became unfashionable and at length was made a crime. With the growth
of the moral sense, mutual trust took the place of armed neutrality.
The present situation is ready for the larger application of these
principles. The argument which abolished the carrying of weapons must
frown upon excessive national armaments. As the individual duel was
superseded by personal arbitration, so the national duel must be
superseded by national arbitration. The reason that maintains the
civil court for the settlement of individuals' disputes calls for a
higher court for the settlement of national disputes. Not alone among
men, not alone within states, but among the nations, right, not might,
must rule; not force, but justice; and written as the world's supreme
mandate, as the highest human law from which there may be no appeal,
must be the unshaken law of national righteousness.
Tennyson's words were accounted a poet's fancy when he wrote:
Till the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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