Besides failing to draw distinction between international and civil war, Admiral Mahan still further darkens understanding by confounding in one category all forms of repressive force. He asserts that the abolitionists of international war are practically saying, "It is wicked for society to organise and utilise force for the control of evil." Now only men like Tolstoi and his few followers hold that all use of physical force is wrong. Not one in fifty of the opponents of international war takes that view. But, just as they discriminate between the kind of war which an organised world can speedily end and civil war which it cannot thus prevent, so they distinguish between the use of a minimum of force necessary to achieve a judicial decision and the use of the maximum of force to settle questions irrespective of a judicial decision. The peace party believes in police; the latter's business in common civil society is, so far as it uses force at all, to use the least amount necessary to get a man before twelve disinterested jurymen and a judge, to have his case decided by law, after evidence has been given. The police have no right themselves to execute punishment, nor to beat any man who goes readily to court. Their usual task requires no exercise of force at all. They rescue the helpless from burning buildings and the motor-car, and they perform a thousand kindly, protective deeds. The militia is a state police, intimidating lynchers and rioters, but never pursuing and shooting a mob that disperses on the

reading of the riot act. Upon occasion, both police and militia may be forced to kill men who defy law and judicial procedure, if there is no way of getting them to court; but they do not set out to do this. Their type of force will remain so long as criminals exist; but a civilised community will permit no other type. Only uncivilised communities will much longer tolerate the international duelling called "war," which never aims to get a judicial decision and never provides for the equal weapons and "fair play" which is always demanded even in the duel between two individual combatants.

War is to be condemned, primarily, not because it means death and destruction, but because it never aims at justice and never achieves any measure of justice, except accidentally, incidentally, and partially. What attempts to secure judicial decisions do our costly dreadnoughts make? When those hundreds of thousands of young men, born four thousand miles apart, faced each other in Manchuria and on the Yellow Sea, where were judge and jury and witnesses? How many poor conscripts in every thousand knew why they were killing their brother man? Perhaps no fallacy is more widespread and dangerous than the idea that armies and navies are a "national police." True, they are occasionally called on for police functions, as when California and Jamaica earthquakes render assistance necessary. But food can be sent in vessels without inches of

armour plate, and this occasional activity of warvessels no more makes them a police force than the grocer's occasional fighting of a forest fire at the demand of the fire-warden makes him by profession a fireman. Probably battleships were once useful to protect us from Barbary pirates. But pirates are as dead as the Spanish Inquisition; and the men who once captured them sailed in little wooden ships. A genuine police aims always either at kindly, protective work or at getting with the minimum of force a criminal before a court of law. The police of one city never fight the police of another city. A navy is a tool of government which is created for the settlement of difficulties through the maximum of force, by dint of strategy and explosives, irrespective of justice. A navy exists simply that it may fight another navy. The police type of force, as President Eliot has pointed out, is vastly higher than the military type. An individual soldier may be nobler and braver than an individual policeman, but his work is to destroy and the latter's is to save. The soldier's task, though he be not responsible for it, has in history chiefly been to do openly on a large scale what the murderer and thief and "fire bug" do stealthily on a small scale. Man is the only animal that deliberately plans to destroy his own kind. Tigers kill sheep, but rarely other tigers; wolves, lions, snakes prey on other creatures for food but not on their own kind. Crafty and cruel man is the only created being that plans systematically to crush

and destroy his own race and trains his offspring to continue the process of extermination.

The abolitionists of war stand for justice as the paramount issue. The peace party makes no "mollycoddle" plea about hardship and pain; it has no craven fear of death. But it abhors, in this age of enlightenment, the beast's way of settling issues by tooth and claw and the devil's way of blowing up by treacherous mines the innocent victims of a government which votes to settle boundary-lines or questions of "honour" by explosives. But to Admiral Mahan this way is a valuable and reverend method of settling "those momentous differences which cannot be settled by arbitration." He finds in arbitration no practicable solution for various new racial and economic problems that are looming up portentously. He is much concerned over questions involving the national conscience, and says: "There is an absolute indisposition, an instinctive revolt against signing away, beforehand, the national conscience by a promise that any other arbitrator than itself shall be accepted in questions of the future." Why, we ask, should there not be an instinctive revolt to the only alternative to this that Admiral Mahan can suggest-namely, settlement of questions of conscience by explosives? Which is the more likely to settle any question justly, the body of judges, fallible to be sure, like all other mortals, but under oath and the eyes of the world carefully investigating evidence and rendering a verdict, or

an admiral who knows nothing of the points at issue, but knows only where to send torpedo-boats to destroy the most life and property? Which settlement, be it absolutely just or not, leaves the least rancour,--Bismarck's and Louis Napoleon's method at Sedan, or the commission's in London which settled the Alaska boundary? Admiral Mahan does not seem to concern himself about justice in these international affairs. He admits that war does not settle an ethical question. The impossibility of a nation being an impartial judge in its own case does not appear to affect him when condemning arbitration of the more important international difficulties. His principle, logically carried out, would in 1789 have prevented our thirteen quarrelsome colonies from agreeing, in their ratification of the Constitution, to the provision for reference of all interstate differences as to boundary lines, vital interests, and honour to a Supreme Court not yet appointed. Certain States had then more grudges against each other than the United States has with any foreign nation to-day. Yet their full consent to abide by the pledges of an unknown court has since that date kept the peace between one State and another.

Admiral Mahan's references to wars of religion in the past are irrelevant to the future. Such wars as may come will be chiefly for markets or territory or privilege. His assumption that questions of honour cannot be arbitrated is not held by the governments of Holland, Denmark, the five Cen