That man's the best Cosmopolite Who loves his native country best. Part II PEACE _A.--INTERNATIONAL PEACE_ CHAPTER II LEAGUE OF NATIONS--THE NEED _Unless a nation, like an individual, have some purpose, some ideal, some motive which lies outside of and beyond self-interest and self-aggrandisement, war must continue on the face of this earth until the day when the last and strongest man shall look out upon a world that has been depopulated in its pursuit of a false ideal._--NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER. Paramount in importance above everything else is the establishment and maintenance of peace between nations. No remedies for disease, no rules for healthy life will avail, if the arteries through which the life-blood is pouring away remain open still or are only temporarily closed and liable after a brief interval to burst out anew. The vitality of the nation would be gone beyond recovery if another generation of its best manhood were to be sacrificed and its materiall resources again squandered to meet the necessities of a great war. Every day that the War lasts forces on us more clearly the fact that Science, not only natural science--physics and chemistry--but also the scientific organisation of the State as an instrument of war, has so developed the means of destruction as either to blot out humanity or to leave the greater part of mankind in abject and bitter slavery to the powers that can wield most effectively the instruments of death and of torture, if war between the leading nations breaks out again after an interval of seeming peace. How warfare has changed within living memory! Five-and-twenty years ago the highest authority on naval construction spoke with contempt of the submarine as a factor in war at sea. No one then had solved the old world problem of aerial flight. Some of the most distinguished men of science regarded the attempts which were then being made as hopeless. It then seemed still to be a mere dream of poets. Wireless telegraphy was only a matter of speculation, a thing which a few only thought of as a possibility of the future. Man has indeed plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge for his own destruction. What may be the result of another quarter of a century of like advancement of the knowledge of the means of spreading "death throughout the world and bitter woe"? It may not be, as Dr. Murray Butler says, that the strongest man will remain alone in a depopulated world. The strongest may succumb to the inventions for destruction and the survivors may be a few of those maimed or weakened by disease whom the storm has passed over as too obscure, of too little importance even for the messengers of Death to remember and to relieve from their misery. This is not rhetorical exaggeration. The weapons of offence regularly win in their race with the weapons of defence. Fortresses that took years to construct are shattered in a day. The ironclad is sunk by the torpedo.