In these days greatly troubled by War, we may well speak of Peace. The word itself almost brings refreshment to our minds when the sky above us has been troubled by the sounds of our country’s preparation for war. I feel we are in one of the most critical periods of the world. For the moment, I presume that God alone, and those in the secrets of God, can see the end.

The kingdoms of the world must go forth to war if they want to spread; if they wish to be world-wide, they prepare quite consistently for world-war; and it might succeed. The great Pax Romana was essentially a peace based on war— the peace that came from the Strong Man Armed.

Peace has so many consoling qualities that it is constantly taken for an end. Peace should never be sought as an end. Disorder always results if we seek as an end what is only an effect.

When Our Blessed Lord sent out His apostles, He was commissioning a thing that was world-wide; not Religion, but the Religion; not just for a race, but for mankind as such; world-wide because it is to be One and Holy. Therefore this Kingdom of Christ offers, at once, Peace, and never the sword. Sometimes the sword has been used in defence of the Church. I do not know whether it was ever a very effective defence of the Church. In the Garden of Olives, Peter very naturally used the sword. It was quite a natural defence.

“Pax Christi in regno Christi.” It is difficult to make people realize the significance of this ideal even within the Catholic Church. But if we would propose this watchword to the outside world and make it a plank in the programme of Catholic Action, we shall meet with little more encouraging than a shrug of the shoulders, if not with positive rebuff. To many Catholics it is inconceivable that the Pope had in mind political peace between the nations, as well as religious peace based on the foundation of the common faith, when he proposed this watchword. They will not agree that Catholic doctrine and moral teaching should impose Christ’s command of peace as a duty upon the States of the world or that it has any political reference. To refute this error it must suffice to quote two papal pronouncements. Benedict XV writes in his Encyclical Pacem Dei (1920): “The command of Love among individuals found in the Gospels differs in no respect from that which should reign among States and peoples.” And the present Pope Pius XI declared in his first Encyclical: “It is a holy duty for peoples and governments to follow and use as a guide the teachings of Christ in both the internal and external aspects of their political life” (Ubi arcano, 1922). Nobody will underestimate the difficulties which lie in the way of a policy which is based on the principles of the Gospel. But the teaching of the Gospel, because it is opposed to the spirit of the world, is hard to follow always.

“Any nation,” the present Pope has said, “so mad as to contemplate war would be guilty of monstrous homicide and almost certainly of suicide.” There is, it would seem, a tendency to meet any proposal for the prevention of war and the promotion of peace with the argument that there is such a thing as a just war, and to leave it at that. There is a danger here of relapsing into the laissez aller attitude described by M. Maritain as “using the eternal truths as a pillow to go to sleep on.” To restrict discussion to the question of whether there can be a just war in the abstract is to invite unreality.

“There is such a thing as a just war.” For this position we have a formidable array of authorities, if we are to pin our faith to authorities; a formidable array of arguments, if we choose to take reason as our guide. “There is such a thing as legitimate self-defence, as legitimately helping the injured even by offensive warfare.” A proper authority, a just cause, a right intention, these are, according to St. Thomas, the three prerequisites of the just war. Can they not often and easily enough be fulfilled? In theory perhaps; in the hypothesis of two isolated States, in an isolated point of time, with clear-cut and indisputable aggression or injury on the one side and the impossibility of any defence or redress other than by war on the other. Such a state of affairs, however, in the world of to-day is, to all intents and purposes, impossible.

During the month of July, two conferences on international problems took place in London. Both were held in semi-privacy, but their importance was such that the organizers of the conferences have seen fit to publish the details of the speeches which were given on these occasions. They present an interesting study in comparison.

At Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs arranged a series of debates from May 29th to July 7th on the Future of the League, and succeeded in obtaining for this purpose the co-operation of some of the best known and most competent students of international affairs in England. The debates have now been published in book form and are invaluable for the large number of English students who cannot claim to the same competence as the personalities whose views are here expressed, but who seek to gain by their learning.

From the 3rd to the 6th of July, the Catholic Council for International Relations held a rather different kind of reunion. The general subject for conference was “The Part of Catholics in the Maintenance of the European Order,” and those who took part were Catholic writers and lecturers from many countries, with an international reputation for their ability in these problems. Their conclusions have already been published in the Catholic press, and a fuller account of the papers will be given in the next issue of the C.C.I.R. organ, A Catholic Survey. The present writer is indebted to the secretary of the C.C.I.R. for the use of notes on the papers before they appeared in print.

Lord Davies, indomitable apostle of international order, turns the Abyssinian fiasco to good account to reinforce his familiar plea for the creation of a tribunal of equity and an international police force. The latter remedy, it is true, has lost some of its pristine simplicity. Instead of an international air force coming fully fledged to life, it is conceived as the end of a process, “the organization of sanctions culminating in the establishment of an I.P.F.” The writer’s main conception of what is required to maintain peace in the future can be judged from the moral which he draws from the failure of the League to mobilize effective sanctions against Italy. “In order to rally world public opinion in support of the maximum penalties provided for in Article 16, both the moral and the material factors should have been brought into play, the former represented by an impartial tribunal charged with the task of recommending an equitable settlement to the Assembly, the latter by a Standing Board of Commissioners entrusted with the duty of co-ordinating sanctions in order to exert the most effective pressure upon the aggressor. Both these institutions were indispensable if it was intended to assert the rule of law.” Lord Davies sees that such a system—a supranational tribunal judging ex aequo et bono supported by adequate force—is impossible in the present condition of the League of Nations, which is little more than an association of Sovereign States. He therefore concludes that “the problem of the League is the problem of federalism,” and he urges that the League, beginning with the Federation of Europe, should develop into a Confederation, similar to the United States of America, having a Supreme Court and an executive authority “entrusted with a superiority of centralized force.”

Ever since its foundation the League has been suffering from the circumstances of its birth. It was the offspring of a union between a utopian ideal to establish world peace and a cynical determination to enforce a military victory. This two-sided ancestry, typified in the attitude of Wilson and Clemenceau, has shown itself throughout its history. At some periods it has appeared vainly idealistic, at others hopelessly time-serving. By some the League is considered too ambitious, by others not ambitious enough. Those who believe it to be the only possible means of avoiding a general world war have not always been its best friends, while those who have been more sceptical about its possibilities of preventing war have often been the servants of peace. The reason for this is that the former base their arguments upon the idea of the League as it was designed to be, while the latter interpret the League as it is. The former have nearly wrecked their instrument, by putting it to too great a test, while the latter must content themselves with an unsatisfactory “I told you so,” while the policies of the various nations seem to be leading more and more to an ultimate disaster, and the institution, designed to bring greater reason into international politics, stands helpless and discredited. What is the reason for this political impasse? Is there no way out? Perhaps a few reflections on its past history will be helpful in the formation of a new attitude towards the League—for a new attitude must be found.

Peace is not a pause between two wars, like a rather long truce, nor is it a gift passively received and tranquilly kept. Peace must be won, be maintained and strengthened by effort, be defended against those who would disturb it. Peace is a continuous creation in which all share, each through the part he plays in social life.

Mr. Wickham Steed, in his recent book Vital Peace, a Study of Risks, has shown how peace has its risks as war has. There can be no life without risk.

The problem of the risks of life can be considered from three standpoints: the psychological, for each one of us; the national, for each State; the “communitary,” for a united group of States or for the international community in general. In life these various planes are interwoven.

The average upper-class young Englishman at Eton or Harrow cannot envisage a quiet life, made up of study and domestic cares, without the adventure of travel, work in the colonies, the army or politics. Sport is enticing to many, but sport for sport’s sake is worse than art for art’s sake; training in endurance for the sake of bodily agility without a sense of adventure would become a matter of professional exercise, to be despized. All do not feel this urge to adventure. The young working-man, brought up in a Labour environment, becomes a petit bourgeois; the young Communist is or wishes to be a fighter, and does not exclude, at least in theory, civil war. The upper- or middle-class boy tends to adopt a nationalist and conservative ideal.

Mr. Nicholson continues to show, towards the general reading public, that instructive patience which the permanent civil servant must show to his transitory chief. He carries on, in his biography of Dwight Morrow, that implicit instruction in the control of world affairs which he began in the trilogy on Lord Carnock, the Peace Conference, and Lord Curzon.

But his subject here is very different and very unexpected. There is no adumbration, in the story of Lord Carnock, the perfect English civil servant and statesman; in the story of that magnificent aristocrat and administrator, Curzon; no adumbration of the story of the American school-master’s son, who became partner in J. P. Morgan’s, Ambassador to Mexico, was close to being Secretary of State to Mr. Hoover, whose prestige, at the time of his premature death, aged 58, clearly foreshadowed the Presidency, and whom Mr. Nicholson feels bound to call “the completely civilized man.”

There is just one connecting link between this book and the preceding Trilogy, and it is the reason for Mr. Nicholson’s writing it. All four books praise men who sought to attain to a mastery of the technique of world affairs, who sought, in fact, to know the true state of things, who were determined to discard notions preconceived to the accurate, orderly, sympathetic knowledge of them, and who were confident that their intelligences were capable of mastering the jungle-like complexity that faced them. Otherwise, this book differs—by a world—from its predecessors. The scene swings from European Diplomacy to Transatlantic Commerce, from Petersburg to Pittsburg, from Whitehall to Wall Street.

There is little ease in a world so rich in forms and still in process, the end of which for every part is waste and death. Buds must break, maggots must breed, and man may not curse though his heart must break, and even at last his reason. This is not evil, for why should it be otherwise? The heart of the wise is where there is mourning: and the heart of fools where there is mirth.

Still the death of one is the birth of another; what is lost on the roundabouts is gained on the swings. The wiser heart will withdraw from mourning as well as from mirth, and without personal ache will consider the balance of loss and gain in the general scheme. Wherefore I left off and my heart renounced labouring any more under the sun.

Vain hope, for we are in the world and labour we must if we are to live, making and destroying, pleasing and hurting ourselves and others. So many things, and all so different: all can be at peace only when all are still. But all are moving, and better so. They cannot be still. A time of love, and a time of hatred. A time of war, and a time of peace.

Violence is inevitable. We are part of the world and needs must join in the making and the breaking: cut down our trees, kill our cattle, deny our friends. Be not over just.

Why, then, should we not fight and hasten the death of others to postpone our own?