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“Implore peace, O my reader, from whom I now part. Implore
peace, not of deified thunderclouds, but of every man,
woman, or child thou shalt meet. Do not merely offer the
prayer, ‘Give peace in our time,’ but do thy part to answer
it! Then, at least, though the world be at strife, there
shall be peace in thee.”[13]

That sounds uncompromising. We cannot doubt that one of the main motives of Conway’s life was “War against War.” He suffered for peace; he lost friends and influence for peace; we may almost say he was exiled for peace. Those are the marks of sincerity. He, if anyone, we might suppose, was a “Peace-at-any-price man.” But let us remember one passage in an address delivered only a few months before his death. In that address, on William Penn, given in April 1907 (he died in the following November), speaking of Mr. Carnegie’s proposal for a compulsory Court of International Arbitration, he said:

“In order to prevent swift attacks of one nation on another without notice, or outrages on weak and helpless tribes, there shall be selected from the armaments of the world a combination armament to act as the international police…. Even if in the last resort there were needed such united force of mankind to prevent any one nation from breaking the peace in which the interests of all nations are involved, that would not be an act of war, but civilisation’s self-defence. Self-defence is not war, although the phrase is often used to disguise aggression.”[14]

Speaking with all respect for a distinguished man’s memory, I disagree with every word of those sentences. An international police, directed by the combined Powers, would almost certainly develop into a tremendous engine of injustice and oppression. The Holy Alliance after Napoleon’s overthrow aimed at an international police, and we want no more Holy Alliances. I would not trust a single government in the world to enter into such a combination. I would rather trust Satan to combine with sin. Think of the fate of Egypt from Arabi’s time up to the present, or of Turkey controlled by the Powers, or of Persia and Morocco to-day! But the point to notice is that you cannot alter things by altering names. The united force of civilisation brought to bear upon any nation, however guilty, would be an act of war, however much you called it international police. Civilisation’s self-defence would be war. Every form of self-defence by violence, whether it disguises aggression or not, is war. For many generations every war has been excused as self-defence of one kind or another. I can hardly imagine a modern war that would not be excused by both sides as defensive. By making these admissions–by maintaining that self-defence is not war–Moncure Conway gives away the whole case of the “peace-at-any-price man,” He comes down from the ideal positions of the early Quakers, the modern Tolstoyans, and the Salvation Army. They preach non-resistance to evil consistently. Like all extremists who have no reservations, but will trust to their principle though it slay them, they have gained a certain glow, a fervour of life, which shrivels up our ordinary compromises and political considerations. But by advocating civilisation’s self-defence in the form of a combined international armament, Moncure Conway abandoned that vantage ground. He became sensible, arguable, uncertain, submitting himself to the balances of reason and expediency like the rest of us.

A certain glow, a fervour of life–those are signs that always distinguish extremists–men and women who are willing literally to die for their cause. I did not find those signs at the Hague Peace Conference, when I was sent there in 1907 as being a war correspondent. Such an assembly ought to have marked an immense advance in human history. It was the sort of thing that last-century poets dreamed of as the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World. It surpassed Prince Albert’s vision of an eternity of International Exhibitions. One would have expected such an occasion to be heralded by Schiller’s Ode to Joy sounding through the triumph of the Choral Symphony. Long and dubious has been the music’s struggle with pain, but at last, in great simplicity, the voices of the men give out the immortal theme, and the whole universe joins in harmony with a thunder of exultation: