For years, amid the world's rages, _we_ had peace. The only war we had, at all events, was one of our own seeking, and a mere playing at war. Many of us thought it would be so always. We believed we had discovered a method of settling all the world's difficulties without blows. The peace people had their jubilee. They talked about the advance of intelligence, and the softening power of civilization. They placed war among the forgotten horrors of a dead barbarism. They proved that commerce had rendered war impossible, because it had made it against self-interest. They talked about reason and persuasion, and moral influences. They asked, 'Why not settle all troubles in a grand world's congress, some huge palaver and paradise of speechmakers, where it will be all talk and voting and no blows?' Why not, indeed? How easy to 'resolve' this poor, blind, struggling world of ours into a bit of heaven, you see, and so end our troubles! How easy to vote these poor, stupid, blundering brothers of ours into angels, in some great parliament of eloquent philosophers, and govern them thereafter on that basis! Now, resolutions and speeches and grand palavers are nice things, in their way, _to play with_, but, on the whole, it is best to get down to the hard fact if one really wants to work and prosper. And the hard fact is, that Adam's sons are not yet cherubs, nor their homestead, among the stars, just yet an outlying field of paradise. It is a planet whose private affairs are badly muddled. Its tenants for life are a quarrelsome, ill-tempered, unruly set of creatures altogether. As things go, they will break each others' heads sometimes. It is very unreasonable. I can see that. But men are not always reasonable. It is not for their own interest. I can see that too. But how often does interest, the best and highest, raise an impregnable barrier against passion or even caprice? We must take men as they are, and the world as we find it, to get a secure ground for attempting the reformation of either. And as men are, and as I find the world, at present, I meet Wrong, and find it armed to resist Right. The Wrong will not yield to persuasion, it will not surrender to reason. It comes straight on, coarse, brutal, devilish, caring not a straw for peace rhetoric or Quaker gravity, for persuasion or interest. It strikes straight down at right or justice. It tries to hammer them to atoms, and trample them with swinish hoofs into the mire. Now what am I to do? To stand peaceably by and see this thing done, while I study new tropes and invent new metaphors to _persuade_? Is that my business, to waste the godlike gift of human speech on this mad brute or devil?