So why shouldn’t business, which has been binding the world more closely together for centuries, be employed to protect the world against the waste and loss of war? Hague Conferences have sought earnestly for penalties that would save their Conventions from being treated as mere “bits of paper.” Penalties that every nation would be bound to respect could be enforced through economic pressure. The loss in trade would be small or great in proportion to the amount and duration of the pressure; but it would be at most only an infinitesimal fraction of the loss caused by war. THE WORLD COURT CAN BE ESTABLISHED The Chairman reminds me that my twenty minutes is expiring. So let me briefly refer in conclusion to that wonderful address made by Rabbi Silverman yesterday. In it he seemed to say that religion had broken down because the war had come. As he spoke I was reminded of going across Illinois a week ago this morning. I lifted the curtain of my sleeper berth and there in a little town we were passing through stood a church with the cross shining above it in a golden radiance across the great green stretches of the valley—a scene of peace. Then I thought how the cross and the temple and the mosque were looking down that very May morning in the valleys of the Vistula, the Marne and the Rhine on guns, on soldiers and armed camps—a scene of war. Then I thought that the other strong spiritual forces of the world had not been sufficiently powerful to bring wars to an end. In the great Public Library here in Cleveland and in the Libraries of all the warring nations are the works of Goethe and Schiller, of Hugo and Balzac, of Shakespeare and Milton, of Tolstoi and Turgenieff—all imperishable contributions to the world’s intellectual life, but still they have not ended war. Your orchestras as well as those of Paris, Berlin and London, play the music of Beethoven, Tschaikowsky, Berlioz and Haydn, and music is one of the most spiritual of the arts, but it has not ended war. Painting and sculpture are part of the common heritage of mankind but they have not ended war. Isn’t it possible that the world has depended too much on these spiritual forces? By that I mean, the world has not yet been brought to the stage of civilization by these forces where it can depend on them wholly to end war. The world has had churches and schools and libraries and galleries—but the world like this great city and this country and every other city and country needs a Court House. To my mind, all these spiritual forces have been working through the generations toward a time, toward this very time, when the world would be ready for a World Court. That Court is within our grasp. What is needed is to give it force and power through economic pressure that will compel its use and it will forthwith become a mighty bulwark of civilization, protecting the world from the waste and futility and the utter tragedy of war.