The advocate of peace points to the duel. There was a time when every man felt it his right and duty to settle his own quarrels. He was his own judge and his own sheriff. The result was so bad that law was created to enforce peace between individuals. The old condition survived in the duel, but in most countries this at last was brought under the authority of law. Private combat in its nature does not differ from public combat, and if one was eliminated by the creation of a law that was strong enough to forbid it, the other can be abolished by creating a still stronger law, powerful enough to restrain states as criminal law restrains individuals. Kant’s argument for perpetual peace ran like this, but he, in sympathy with Rousseau’s social contract theory, argued that the law that restrained individuals was the result of agreement between individuals; and he went further and argued that all that was necessary to secure perpetual peace would be for the states to agree to establish a league, or a federation, to enforce it. Now there was a fallacy in Kant’s argument that has a bearing on the subject immediately before us today. There is no reason to suppose that any state ever arose from an agreement of individuals. The ordinary process was growth out of several conditions. An enlarged family might become a state, or one tribe might conquer another and enlarge itself into a state. Kinship and force were probably the chief causes in producing the state; and reason seems to have played a small part. Similarly, law grew up, not as the result of reason, but as a body of tribal customs, reasonably interpreted by the wise men of the early state. There is, therefore, no analogy between the proposed method of forming a great super-state with its own body of law, the object of which is to restrain the states from going to war, and the method by which the early state was created. In fact, if one great nation were to conquer the rest of the world and impose its peace on all the world, as it would do, we should have a process more analogous to the origin of the early state. And that is one way of having peace. Within the last years it has seemed a horribly possible method; for if Mittel-Europa becomes a fact, it will have such predominating power that it is difficult to see what will stop its march to general authority. Pointing out Kant’s fallacy weakens his argument as such, but it leaves us in such a dilemma that we are prone to pronounce his suggestion worth trying as an escape from conquest by one great power. For if the world is tending toward unity through conquest, who can doubt that it would be better to anticipate the process, save a great sum of human suffering, and by agreement found the world federation which is the same result to which ages of war will lead us. That we could have such a super-state by contract is not to be doubted. It would be as possible as the creation of the United States of America by agreement.