It is a little difficult to reason respectfully against that sort of project. One is moved rather to add helpful suggestions in the same vein. As for example, that no hostilities shall be allowed to begin or continue except in the presence of a League of Nations referee, who shall be marked plainly on the chest and pants with the red cross of Geneva and who—for the convenience of aircraft—shall carry an open sunshade similarly adorned. He shall be furnished with a powerful whistle or hand trumpet audible above the noise of modern artillery, and military operations shall be at once arrested when this whistle is blown. Contravention of the rules laid down by the League of Nations shall be penalized according to the gravity of the offense, with penalties ranging from, let us say, an hour’s free bombardment of the offender’s position to the entire forces of the enemy being addressed very severely by the referee and ordered off the field. In the event of either combatant winning the war, outright by illegitimate means, it might further be provided that such combatant should submit to a humiliating peace, just as if the war had been lost. Unhappily war is not a game but the grimmest of realities, and no power on earth exists to prevent a nation which is fighting for existence against another nation from resorting to any expedient however unfair, cruel and barbarous to enforce victory or avert disaster. Success justifies every expedient in warfare, and you cannot prevent that being so. A nation, hoping to win and afterward make friends with its enemy or solicitous for the approval of some powerful neutral, may conceivably refrain from effective but objectionable expedients, but that is a voluntary and strategic restraint. The fact remains that war is an ultimate and illimitable thing; a war that can be controlled is a war that could have been stopped or prevented. If our race can really bar the use of poison gas it can bar the use of any kind of weapon. It is indeed easier to enforce peace altogether than any lesser limitation of war. But it is argued that this much may be true nevertheless, that if the nations of the world will agree beforehand not to prepare for particular sorts of war or if they will agree to reduce their military and naval equipment to a minimum, that this will operate powerfully in preventing contraventions and in a phase of popular excitement arresting the rush toward war. The only objection to this admirable proposal is that no power which has desires or rights that can only be satisfied or defended, so far as it knows, by war, will ever enter into such a disarmament agreement in good faith.