HALL OF THE KNIGHTS AT THE HAGUE. BARONESS BERTHA VON SUTTNER. ANDREW CARNEGIE EDWIN GINN A COSMOPOLITAN CLUB PAGE 198 202 TREATIES OF ARBITRATION CONCLUDED FROM 246 Swords and Ploughshares IN CHAPTER I HISTORY OF THE PEACE MOVEMENT A BRIEF OUTLINE N 1860, millions of American citizens maintained that slavery was ordained of God, inevitable, a necessity for civilisation. No one of them or of their descendants maintains that view to-day. As the great task of the nineteenth century was to end man-selling, so the task of the twentieth century, says Andrew Carnegie, is to end mankilling, and the sceptics answer as before: "War is inevitable, it is bound up with human nature,' or, as a certain military officer writes in one of the magazines: "As the unoccupied reaches of the earth's surface grow smaller, competition between races and nations must inevitably increase in intensity, and war power, which is the ultimate form of competitive capacity, must exercise even greater influence in the future than in the past. Some people are still fooled by this pseudo-economic wisdom; but the period has passed when such dicta have weight except with visionaries who are blind to the meaning of history or to the new economics of the twentieth century. As, however, there are still many visionaries with facile pens, practical pacifists must patiently unravel the intellectual tangle in which vague definitions, half truths, guesses at history and ignorance of the new organic unity of economic interests have left many persons, despite their diplomas, degrees, and cleverness in mathematics, languages, and physics. A little survey of well-known historic facts may properly precede discussion and may recall to the reader that the peace movement was not born with the Czar's rescript nor cradled by a Carnegie Peace Endowment. We pass by the sublime, prophetic visions of Isaiah and Micah, the heavenly wisdom of the gospels, the centuries of early Christian non-resistance, when the Church grew apace until political power and prosperity degraded it, to the time of Dante's boyhood, when there appeared in the beautiful old city of Coutances in Normandy, a young lawyer, Pierre Du Bois by name. We know little of this student of Saint Thomas Aquinas, but we do know that before Dante's De Monarchia had presented the conception of peace through a world-empire he proposed an international representative organisation. He would have had a congress of princes institute a permanent tribunal of arbitration, composed of chosen judges, from whom six should be selected to try a case. Six hundred years later, |