A Fatuous Dream by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jun 21, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 24.

A Fatuous Dream

By Editor

A Fatuous Dream.—The first of June a peace convention was held in London, at which Andrew Carnegie was one of the principal speakers. Yet the great journalist and publicist, William T. Stead, saw nothing in the convention to make for peace. Mr. Stead sees no light whatever in an international court which will compel peace; for how is peace to be compelled except by the use of those methods of slaughter which the peace advocates themselves condemn? Great eulogies were pronounced upon King Edward as the greatest of peacemakers, and yet Mr. Stead points out that King Edward himself always regarded as indispensable the building of Dreadnoughts. One of the speakers referred to German thought and expressed it as follows: "England is weakening they say; she shall soon have to throw up the sponge; let us keep up a little longer, and the game will be in our hands;" but Mr. Stead declares this is not true, for "John Bull will spend his last penny before he consents to lose his sovereignty of the seas, which is for him a matter of life and death." Lord Shaft declared at the convention that "the growth of the cost of armaments in the five great nations, France, Germany, Russia, England, and the United States, had gone up 20 per cent in the last ten years, and next year will reach a daily expenditure of a million pounds sterling." On the whole Mr. Stead counts the talk of peace as "a fatuous dream," and this too is about the way that the Scriptures characterize it.