_Peace to the pacific_, that was the great message. For all others the great Teacher had but one prediction and that was "the distress of nations, ... men's hearts failing them for fear." Until civilization can grasp the truth that there can be no peace until there is among all nations a spirit of conciliation and a common desire of justice, the cause of peace can be little more than a beautiful dream. Hague conventions, international tribunals, and agreements to arbitrate, while minimizing the causes of war and affording the machinery for the pacific adjustment of justiciable questions, will yet prove altogether ineffectual, irrespective of the size of the parchment, the imposing character of the seals, or the length of the red tape, unless the nations which execute them have sufficient loyalty to civilization to ask only that which seems just and to submit any disputable question to the pacific adjustment of an impartial tribunal. I appreciate that some questions are not justiciable and cannot be arbitrated. The historic movements of races, like those of glaciers, cannot be stopped by mortal hands, and yet even these slow-moving masses of ice are stayed by an Invisible Hand and melt at length into gentle and fructifying streams. To create the universal state and to develop a spirit of paramount loyalty to it affords the only solution of this seemingly insoluble problem. History affords no more striking illustration of this fact than the present war. Each of the contending nations was pledged to peace. All of the greater ones were signatories to the Hague Convention, but as the chain can never be stronger than its weakest link, the pacific efforts of England, France, and Russia to adjust a purely justiciable question by negotiation and mediation wholly failed because Austria and Germany had determined to test the mastery of Europe by an appeal to the sword. The fundamental cause of the conflict was their lack of loyalty to civilization, due to a misguided and perverted spirit of excessive nationalism. Until with the slow-moving progress of mankind the greater unit of the Universal State can be created, it should be the common and equal concern of all nations, not merely to defeat this primitive appeal to brute force but to make impossible the recurrence of such an iniquitous reversion to barbarism. To do this, while any nation unjustly appeals to force, force is unhappily necessary, but there would be few occasions to repel force by force if there were sufficient solidarity in mankind to make it the common concern of the civilized world to suppress promptly and effectually any disturber of its peace.