But we did not believe that the Great War impended. There would still be restricted wars here and there of course, but more and more they could be prevented. The human mind that had mastered nature’s way could master and control the ways of man. Economic interest would bring its resistless strength to bear against the mad makers of the wastes of war. A sensitive conscience would revolt against the cruelties of war. Reason, which had invented rules and agencies to keep the peace within the state, would devise tribunals and procedures to substitute a rational adjustment of differences for the arbitrament of war between states. The world has recovered from disaster before now, it will recover again. Presumptions that disappointed have been reexamined and brought into truer drawing. Expectation has been more broadly built, it will be more broadly built again. There is conscience in mankind, and the war has sublimely revealed it, as it has revealed also undreamed of survivals of faithlessness and cruelty. The presumption of rational control in human affairs has been foreshortened, but not painted out. In the background stand forth as grim realities, forces of fear, distrust, envy, ignorance, and hate that we had thought were ghosts. Conscience is as strong and as sensitive as we believed it to be; reason is as effective as we presumed; but the forces arrayed against them we now see are mightier than we knew. So now we ask, By what power shall conscience and reason be reinforced, and the surviving forces of barbarism be driven back? There is but one answer left, all others have been shot to pieces. Conscience and reason are effective when they organize material energies, not when they dissipate themselves in dreams. Conscience and reason must assemble, coördinate, and bring to bear the economic resources and the physical energies of the civilized world to narrow the area and to diminish the frequency of war. But how? General presumptions will not do this time. There must be a specific plan, concrete and practical; a specific preparedness, a specific method. And what is more, plan, preparedness, method must be drawn forth from the situation as the war makes and leaves it, not imposed upon it. They must be a composition of forces now in operation. There were academic plans aplenty for the creation of pacific internationalism before the war began. The bankers had invented theirs; the socialists, the conciliationists, and the international lawyers respectively had invented theirs. The free traders, first in the field, had not lost hope. It would be foolish to let ourselves think in discouragement that all these efforts to organize “the international mind” were idle. They were not ineffective. They did not organize the international mind adequately, much less did they reform its habits, but they quickened it; they organized it in part, they pulled it together enough to make it powerful for the work yet to be done.