Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/285

Rh civilized Powers have been composed by arbitration. And more than that. Every international dispute settled by arbitration has stayed settled, while during the same period some of the results of great wars have not stayed settled, and others are unceasingly drawn in question, being subject to the shifting preponderance of power. And such wars have cost rivers of blood, countless treasure and immeasurable misery, while arbitration has cost comparatively nothing. Thus history teaches the indisputable lesson that arbitration is not only the most humane and economical method of setting international differences, but also the most, if not the only, certain method to furnish enduring results.

As to the part war has played and may still have to play in the history of mankind, I do not judge as a blind sentimentalist. I readily admit that, by the side of horrible devastations, barbarous cruelty, great and beneficent things have been accomplished by means of war in forming nations and in spreading and establishing the rule or influence of the capable and progressive. I will not inquire how much of this work still remains to be done and what place war may have in it. But surely, among the civilized nations of to-day—and these we are considering—the existing conditions of intercourse largely preclude war as an agency for salutary objects. The steamship, the railroad, the telegraph, the postal union and other international arrangements facilitating transportation and the circulation of intelligence, have broken down many of the barriers which formerly enabled nations to lead separate lives, and have made them in those things which constitute the agencies of well-being and of progressive civilization in a very high degree dependent upon each other. And this development of common life-interests and mutual furtherance, mental as well as material, still goes on in continuous growth. Thus a war