Page:Political and legal remedies for war.djvu/106

100 are often not solitary acts, or even lines, of action, so much as  new attitudes, principles, tendencies, aspirations, all of a somewhat indefinite kind, and incapable of very precise description in language, though none the less real and potent in fact.

It is a misfortune that hitherto, instead of War being regarded as an evil, in itself demanding distinct remedies, it has rather ranked as the handmaid of politics, and has even borrowed from the realm of national law the dignity and consecrated garb appropriate to the administration of public justice. In International Law, War is spoken of as its ultimate sanction, in spite of the anomaly that War is resorted to at the arbitrary will of any State which conceives itself to be injured, or in peril of injury, and, in this respect, finds a fitter analogy in the lynch-law of the half-civilized community than in the calm and impartial justice administered by the tribunals of a European State. Nevertheless, this mode of thought has undoubtedly qualified public opinion as to the true character of War, and has disposed people rather to find in it generally an engine of justice, than to denounce it as presumedly rife with nothing else than injustice and cruelty. It is treated too much as a remedy for evils, and too little as one of the greatest of all evils, for which remedies are urgently demanded.

Thus, the first step to be taken in finding a cure for War is to recognize it freely as a sign of bad health, and not of good; to make it a distinct object of public policy, not merely to avoid War for a time, but to hasten its extinction; to treat all international questions in the light of this urgent necessity; and to survey afresh the main points of customary contact with other nations, with a view of determining what beneficial changes of attitude and conduct can be introduced so as to bring about the desired end.

In the sections that follow, the main topics of international