Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/179

 for temporary advantage. You kept it because it did not suit your convenience to break it. If a treaty became no longer convenient to one party or the other—well, kings used to tear up treaties and feel very little necessity for apology or explanation. When Germany violated one of her most solemn treaties and invaded Belgium, she broke, really, no moral law. Do not believe that the cynical diplomats of the Entente Allies blamed her in their hearts. But peoples did blame her. The moral sense of individuals the world over rose against such an act; a man who behaved in this way counted himself out of society; why not a nation, too? The one fact which German propaganda could never explain away was the invasion of Belgium; it is perhaps the spiritual reason why Germany lost the war.

So we have already the moral basis for law between nations; at present, however, it is a force, not a power, because it has no machinery to make it useful. It is like the potential electricity going to waste in a mountain river. This force will not become power, will not turn wheels, run railroads and light cities, until you harness it—create for it some machinery.

We shall not strike at the root of wars until we organize fifty or sixty sovereign nations and self-governing colonies of the world somewhat as we organize individuals in a tribe or state or nation. In plain, human terms, they must get together, pass