According to the course of the war up to the present time, European peace seems to me nearer than ever before. We pacificists must only understand that unhappily the time was not yet sufficiently developed to establish peace by the peaceful way. If Germany, as everything now seems to make probable, is victorious in the struggle not only with Russia and France but attains the further end of destroying the source from which for two or three centuries all European strifes have been nourished and intensified, namely, the English policy of world dominion, then will Germany, fortified on one side by its military superiority, on the other side by the eminently peaceful sentiment of the greatest part of its people, and especially of the German Emperor, dictate peace to the rest of Europe, I hope especially that the future treaty of peace will in the first place provide effectually that a European war such as the present can never again break out. I hope, moreover, that the Russian people, after the conquest of their armies, will free themselves from Czarism through an internal movement by which the present political Russia will be resolved into its natural units, namely, Great Russia, the Caucasus, Little Russia, Poland, Siberia, and Finland, to which probably the Baltic provinces would join themselves. These, I trust, would unite themselves with Finland and Sweden, and perhaps with Norway and Denmark, into a Baltic federation, which in close connection with Germany would insure European peace, and especially form a bulwark against any disposition to war which might remain in Great Britain. For the other side of the earth I predict a similar development under the leadership of the United States. I assume that the English dominion will suffer a downfall similar to that which I have predicted for Russia, and that under these circumstances Canada would join the United States, the expanded republic assuming a certain leadership with reference to the South American republics. The principle of the absolute sovereignty of the individual nations, which in the present European tumult has proved itself so inadequate and baneful, must be given up and replaced by a system conforming to the world's actual conditions and especially to those political and economic relations which determine industrial and cultural progress and the common welfare. [Illustration: NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER _See Page 565_] [Illustration: ARTHUR VON BRIESEN _See Page 548_] The Verdict of the American People By Newell Dwight Hillis. _Dr. Hillis, who occupies the pulpit of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, made famous by the pastorate of the late Henry Ward Beecher, delivered the following remarkable sermon on the European War on Sunday, Dec. 20, 1914, choosing as his text the words: "From whence come wars? Come they not from your own lusts?"_