in quiet laboratories, in legislative halls, in courts of justice, and on the broad battlefields of productive labor.

The final outcome is, indeed, irresistible. Racial movements have mixed all peoples; the oceans have become the world's common highways; the air is filled with voices speaking from city to city and from continent to continent; an international postal system makes the world's ideas one; there is quick participation of mankind in the fruits of invention and research. We behold financial and economic enterprises world-wide in their outreach; we feel the force of social projects and social ideals that concern not one but every nation; and we are participating in missionary movements that affect not one but every race, and are changing the very face of nature itself. Our world is a world unified beyond all possible conception a century ago, and the world unity is a certain stepping stone to world peace.

The world never offered grander opportunity to the nations for leadership - not for leadership in military splendor, but for leadership in the sublime paths of peace. For the United States this call means not only opportunity but even obligation. Already this country has performed well her duty in fostering international arbitration. She has been a party to half of the cases where disputes between nations have been referred to the Hague Tribunal. Arbitration is performing its mission with more and more efficiency, yet each year the war budgets of the nations are increasing. The peace sentiment now demands a decrease of armaments, a conversion of the waste of war into the wealth of peace. To demonstrate that this is practicable is the immediate opportunity before us, our present obligation. What is our waste of war expressed

in terms of the wealth of peace? Notice! Two thirds of the cost of one dreadnought, like the mammoth Florida launched but yesterday, would erect and furnish a veritable palace for every foreign ambassador and minister of the United States, thus solving a perplexing problem of our diplomatic service. One twenty-second of the cost of one dreadnought would support for one year the entire force of the American Board of Foreign Missions in their work of proclaiming our gospel of peace. One half the cost of one dreadnought would erect and equip twentyfive manual-training schools, teaching the rudiments of a trade to forty thousand young people each year. The cost of two dreadnoughts would provide every state in the Union with a half-million dollars with which to save the juvenile delinquents from criminal courts and schools of vice behind prison bars. The cost of one dreadnought, wisely spent each year in the fight against tuberculosis, would make the white plague in a single generation a disease as rare as smallpox is to-day.

Where now we are erecting battleships and forts, it is for us to build libraries and schools. Where now we drain our treasuries in equipping men to fight their fellow men, it is for us to arm against the common enemy, disease. Where now we pour out our wealth before the pagan Mars, it is for us to devote our treasure to supporting the works of the Prince of Peace.

Such a victory for peace would make America not simply a world power: it would make her the world leader. Will we stop tagging at the heels of Great Britain and Germany and travel this broadening road in which we can be first? How humiliating to struggle along, a trailer in the military procession! How noble to set the

daring example of living up to the belief in peace! Will we say: "See our hands; we bear no bludgeons. Search us; we carry no concealed weapons. Militarism we have thrown to the scrap heap of practices discredited and vicious. We have stopped war's wanton waste of men and treasure; we rejoice in the growing wealth of peace ideals realized"? Thus shall we speed the steadily growing public opinion of the world, to the bar of which must finally come every nation which does aught to break or hinder the world's peace.

THE HOPE OF PEACE

By STANLEY H. HOWE, Albion College, Albion, Michigan

First Prize Oration in the National Contest held at Johns Hopkins University, May 5, 1911