p. 16 | What Makes for Peace?

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 10, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 50.

What Makes for Peace?

“What Makes for Peace?”—The New York World significantly asks this question, and continues:—

Which is likely to be the better promoter of peace—the “strong man armed” who goes about with pistols in his pockets and a big knife in his belt, proclaiming that he wants peace so much that he will kill anybody who interferes with him, or the man who diligently minds his own business, and trusts to law and justice to protect him and his rights?

Then referring to the constant claim put forth by certain strenuous statesmen in Europe, and latterly in this country, that the way to have peace is to prepare for war, the World remarks:—

It is precisely this theory put in practise which keeps Europe an armed camp, eating out the substance of the people to build great navies and to maintain large standing armies.

And it is true. Every peasant nearly carries on his back a soldier. Italy even now is on the very verge of collapse. Referring to the arbitration of the past, the World says:—

But in the last half century no nation has ever threatened us with war. The United States is a world-power by virtue of its ideas, its intelligence, its illimitable resources, and its unrivaled reserve of strength, not by reason of the little one-sided war with Spain or our new battle-ships. Liberty as exemplified in this great republic is the leaven that is raising the governments of the world to a higher plane, and safeguarding the rights of man. Enlightenment, industry, and commerce are the great peacemakers, not ships, and cannons, and gunpowder.

But America is well on her way in the retrograde movement past that station where she was one glorious beacon-light to the nations of earth. She reached her summit at the close of the great Civil War. Since that time human rights and individual rights, and the principles of civil and religious liberty have been on a decline. The gospel of greed and force, the union of Church and State, the division into classes, and the domination and enslavement of the individual by the machine have made amazing progress. The nation that was lighting the nations of the Wilderness of the Dark Ages is by her own retrogression turning them back to medievalism.