It is, indeed, so common to regard the person who points out the inevitable bankruptcy of war under highly civilized conditions as a mere Utopian dreamer, that it becomes necessary to repeat, with all the emphasis necessary, that the settlement of international disputes by law cannot be achieved by disarmament, or by any method not involving force. All law, even the law that settles the disputes of individuals, has force behind it, and the law that is to settle the disputes between nations cannot possibly be effective unless it has behind it a mighty force. I have assumed this from the outset in quoting the dictum of Hobbes, but the point seems to be so easily overlooked by the loose thinker that it is necessary to reiterate it. The necessity of force behind the law ordering international relations has, indeed, never been disputed by any sagacious person who has occupied himself with the matter. Even William Penn, who, though a Quaker, was a practical man of affairs, when in 1693 he put forward his _Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe by the Establishment of a European Diet, Parliament or Estate_, proposed that if any imperial state refused to submit its pretensions to the sovereign assembly and to abide by its decisions, or took up arms on its own behalf, "all the other sovereignties, united as one strength, shall compel the submission and performance of the sentence, with damages to the suffering party, and charges to the sovereignties that obliged their submission." In repudiating some injudicious and hazardous pacificist considerations put forth by Novikov, the distinguished French philosopher, Jules de Gaultier, points out that law has no rights against war save in force, on which war itself bases its rights. "Force _in abstracto_ creates right. It is quite unimaginable that a right should exist which has not been affirmed at some moment as a reality, that is to say a force.... What we glorify under the name of right is only a more intense and habitual state of force which we oppose to a less frequent form of force."[234] The old Quaker and the modern philosopher are thus at one with the practical man in rejecting any form of pacification which rests on a mere appeal to reason and justice.