schoolboy knows, they had their reward in long years of peace.

A half century rolled on after the appearance of Grotius's great book and the beginning of Fox's preaching, and this time another Englishman, a follower of Fox, the high-bred scholar and New World pioneer, William Penn, the founder of that Philadelphia, presented a scheme for "The Present and Future Peace of Europe." This plan was for a general alliance or compact among the different states of Europe to form a Diet or Congress of Nations. Unlike the Great Design of the French king's, this was the first scheme free from suspicion of ulterior motive and inspired purely by love of humanity. But still the nations were not ready.

The profoundest philosophic word of the eighteenth century about the great problem that made Franklin declare "there never was a good war nor a bad peace" was uttered by Immanuel Kant, the master mind of Germany, in his essay on Eternal Peace, published at the very time that our Constitution had made our little group of thirteen states already a world power. Kant's great insight was that the world's peace can never be permanently attained until the world is organised, and it can never be safely organised until its constituent nations have achieved self-government. In his day, any degree of representative government was the rare exception. Even Great Britain's House of Commons, so late as 1866, represented only one man in four. World organisation, had it

been possible in Kant's day, would have been chiefly a compact between monarchs, and the only peace obtained would have been that in which the mighty dominate the weak-a peace that portends slavery or revolution. In the period which has elapsed since the sage of Königsberg taught the world the secrets of the starry heavens and of the mind of man, as well as the principles of peace with justice, scarcely a single independent nation has been left which has not achieved, however feebly, some form of representative government. Even the immobile Orient has awakened, and the latent patriotism of China demands liberty and a republic. The world has witnessed a silent revolution in the minds of men more stupendous and far-reaching than perhaps all that the previous thousand years had wrought. The master minds of physics in the realm of invention have almost annihilated time and space and have brought reports to every breakfast table of yesterday's doings in Tokio, Melbourne, and Constantinople. No longer is it necessary to chronicle the words, "And still the nations are not ready, but must wait," for now the fulness of time has come, and world organisation becomes not only a possibility, but a practical necessity. Its prototype has been tested for nearly a century and a quarter.

When Washington, Franklin, Madison, and their great compeers, less than a hundred in all, sat down in that fateful summer of 1787 behind locked doors in Independence Hall in the City of Broth

erly Love to wrestle with their problem, they were helping to solve, all unwittingly, not their own problem alone, but that of the whole world. The group of thirteen quarrelsome colonies, bound by a rope of sand, seemed approaching dissolution. So tense was hostility between Connecticut and New York, for instance, due among other things to the latter's custom duties at her border line, that in one town the merchants banded themselves together to forbid any citizen carrying over merchandise into New York for a year, under penalty of paying two hundred and fifty dollars fine. The citizens of Maine and Georgia were much farther apart in sympathy than are those of Canada and New Zealand to-day. The sailboat and horsethe conveyances of Abraham and Alexander-and the little four-page newspaper were all that served as mediums between them. How little those bewigged giants of statesmanship, sitting in that classic hall, could realise how the little candle they were lighting was to become the great torch of liberty enlightening the whole world, throwing its beams to far Cathay and waking the myriads from slumber, lightening the gloom of suffering millions the world over, by showing where to find the key to unlock prison bars! They thought only of the task in hand; but, in solving the problem of creating a United States, they also showed the essential method of creating a United World. The glory of our government and our people is that, more than any other on God's earth, have they

been able to contribute to humanity the secret of attaining peace with justice. The latest critic of the Supreme Court, that most original feature of the mighty work which the Constitutional Convention created, has said: "In the only opportunity ever given the Supreme Court to prevent war, it failed." Is not the accusation false to history? Did the Court ever fail to do what it was created to do? Despite interstate quarrels, sometimes concerning boundary lines, vital interests, and honor, it has from the beginning settled quietly, one after another, the numerous differences arising between states which, unsettled, would have meant war. Forty-eight states from the Atlantic to the Pacific, containing now ninety millions of people, have had peace and justice around the border lines of each, notwithstanding the reckless riots, the murders, lynchings, and disorders that have disgraced civilisation within those borders. The one instance referred to as a "failure," when half the country was ready to rise in arms to overthrow the national government, was in the nature of the case one with which no court was meant to cope. The critic's further inference that The Hague Court would fail when tested on a serious issue, could apply only when, following the analogy, one half of the world should find itself fundamentally and bitterly opposed to the other half and should choose universal war rather than reason. If such an unthinkable insanity should ever wipe out civilisation, naturally The Hague

Court would fail, but only if it had once become the acknowledged arbiter between governments.

The year that opens the Third Hague Conference, 1915, will mark the centenary of the founding of the first Peace Society the world ever saw. When the New York merchant, David Low Dodge, established this first Peace Society, he made membership in a Christian church a pre-requisite to membership in his society; and the peace movement in America and England has been essentially a Christian movement ever since, though naturally, except at the beginning, it has made no such condition of membership. Almost invariably the Hebrews the world over are counted among the friends of peace, and on the continent of Europe the ablest of the free-thinkers are often found to be ardent pacifists. Following the leadership of David Low Dodge, the noble ancestor of illustrious descendants, and in the same year, the Massachusetts Peace Society was started in Boston by Noah Worcester and William Ellery Channing. In these days of international courts and conferences which seem to novices to have sprung up full-fledged in the last fifteen years, it is well for students to turn back to the heroes and pioneers who in New England thought out the methods of world organisation and international justice before the present actors in the world's great drama were born. They died before they saw the fruition of their toil and tears and hopes; but the statesmen who met at The Hague Confer