Page:Jay William Hudson - America's International Ideals (1915).djvu/13

 bers must perforce suffer through their own errors and thus all the more speedily learn to think intelligently and cautiously upon those issues upon which their happiness depends. The public school system of America is the greatest system of education ever devised. It came into being in order that a self-governing people should achieve the intelligence to think and act through reasoned convictions rather than prejudice and impulse. Far as America is from realizing the perfect ideal of Utopian dreamers, she comes nearer than any country of history to exemplifying what might be called an "age of reason."

America has not only insisted upon the reign of reason in national affairs, but in the great problems of international relations as well. For over one hundred years there has been a growing movement among American thinkers of international repute in favor of arbitration and adjudication as the true methods of solving the difficulties that arise between nations. Ever since 1815, when the first peace society of the world was organized in America, the sentiment in favor of the rational settlement of international disputes has gained more and more adherents among the masses of the people. To-day the American organizations that look toward the substitution of law for war are among the most influential and efficient in the world. America's leadership for the reign of reason in international affairs has been evinced nowhere more conspicuously than at the Hague Conferences. America's representatives to these Conferences were men who had attained a high place in the regard of the American people. To the First Conference were sent men of such signal eminence as Andrew Dickson White and Frederick W. Holls. To the Second Conference were sent Joseph H. Choate and Gen. Horace Porter.