HE Organization of the

"T World" is the subject to

which a series of important weekly meetings is now being devoted in Boston. "The Federation of the World" is the subject of an important book just published in Boston. In the New England capital, where so many great movements have been born or fostered, the movement against militarism, which Gladstone. ten years ago rightly named "the most conspicuous tyrant of the age," has found at this time efficient voice and efficient pen. The Boston meetings have been arranged by the Good Citizenship Society, which well declares international duty to be a prime factor in all good citizenship to-day. The Boston book is by Dr. Benjamin F. Trueblood, whose lifelong labors in behalf of international order and fraternity have been so intelligent and untiring.

The importance of this subject of the better organization of the world, which was our theme in these pages in our Christmas number, has never been felt so deeply by thoughtful persons as it is felt to-day. Whatever the various feelings of various men concerning the events of the past year, it becomes clear and imperative to all that the civilized nations, whose industrial interests and trade relations are now so complex and manifold, and becoming more and more so with such rapidity, should be brought into closer and more organic legal and political relations. The methods of war do not befit the age; they are not adequate or proper methods for the settlement of international troubles and disputes. The time has come for civilization to take a great step for

in

ward. The feeling in Europe upon this subject is intense. The Czar's recent manifesto, calling for the decrease of armaments, is a memorable expression of this feeling. The coming international conference at the Hague will be a historic event. Its influence and results will be largely determined by the expression of public opinion in the various countries of Christendom. The response England is inspiring and most impressive. Not since the day of Gladstone's appeal for Bulgaria, twenty years ago, has there been seen in England a popular movement noteworthy as the present Peace Crusade, with great meetings in every city, the circulation by millions of the journal of the Crusade, War against War, and the words from the great leaders in Church and State. America should not be behind England in this great movement; and she will not be.

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In Boston a Peace Crusade Committee has been formed, at whose head stands Edward Everett Hale, and a weekly journal, The Peace Crusade, has been established as an organ of the movement, to be published for three months. The rooms of the committee are at 14 Bedford Street, and from this centre during these months the literature will be circulated and correspondence directed. The Boston meetings are held in Tremont Temple on Monday noons. At the opening meeting Dr. Hale spoke on "A Permanent International Tribunal." The further programme includes Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, on "Organized Labor's Contribution. to International Peace"; Rev. Lyman Abbott. on "International Brother

hood"; and a meeting in the hands of the women, to be addressed by Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer and others. Other meetings will undoubtedly follow. While these meetings are in progress in Boston similar meetings will be organized in other places in Massachusetts. It is hoped that in every large city there will be such meetings; earnest citizens everywhere have been asked by the Good Citizenship Society to act in the matter. The ministers of all the Massachusetts churches have been asked to make this momentous subject the theme of pulpit discourse. In the churches, in the press, and in every influential way, it is trusted that Massachusetts and New England will show that conspicuous interest in this commanding cause which they have so often showed in what most concerns the interest of mankind. The movement thus inaugurated here will quickly spread, we are sure, to the whole country; for throughout the country earnest men and women are feeling that it is the movement whose necessity and claim to-day are paramount. In New York and Philadelphia and Chicago leading men are already moving; and we are confident that before the conference meets at the Hague the expression of public opinion in America will be as widespread and impressive as it is in Europe.

Most impressive was the first of the meetings in Boston, on the first Monday in March. A thousand men and women gathered at that noon hour. Chorley's great hymn, "Give to us peace in our time, O Lord," was sung, from the noble little collection of a score of "Hymns for the Peace Crusade," which has been printed in a leaflet to serve the movement; and Dr. Hale gave his stirring address.

It was especially fitting and noteworthy that Dr. Hale should have been present at this first peace meet

ing and been its chief speaker. Three years ago (July, 1896) we devoted our editorial pages to a discussion of Dr. Hale's preeminent services in behalf of a permanent international tribunal. That was just after the great arbitration conference at Washington. At that conference it was remembered that in a sermon on "The Twentieth Century," preached in Washington half a dozen years before, Dr. Hale had outlined in clear and full detail the idea of a permanent tribunal as the rational substitute for the method of war in the world. His words were read by Senator Edmunds, the president of the conference, as a remarkable prophecy of the things for whose promotion the conference was assembled. Dr. Hale sat on the platform as his prophetic words were read. It is not improbable that he will live to see his prophecy far on the road to fulfilment. In England and everywhere where men are discussing the coming conference at the Hague, they are seeing and saying that the demand for disarmament must be accompanied by the demand for a regular international tribunal. Dr. Hale has kept on proposing this, with iteration and reiteration, on every occasion and by every means-the speech, the sermon, the magazine, the newspaper-during the last ten years. In this year of grace he has spoken oftener and with greater force in the interests of this cause than any other man in America-we had almost said than all other men. In a recent fortnight, travelling through large towns in the Middle States, he spoke, we think, every night, with a vigor and devotion, at threescore and fifteen, which put younger men to shame. On one Sunday he addressed in the morning a great congregation in New York, in the evening one as great in Philadelphia. On the Monday morning he was inspiring the Philadelphia editors to service, and one of them, Herbert Welsh, wrote:

"Dr. Edward E. Hale, that knight-errant of all things good, and especially of prom

ising causes in present need of a defender, stepped into our editor's room last Monday morning with a word in behalf of a project to which he is devoting several months of his invaluable time. Dr. Hale, as everybody knows, is a lifelong reformer and enthusiast; but he does not suggest or press on their course things chimerical or that are without practical value. It is said of him that he has initiated or lent a hand to more good causes than any living man, and we can well credit the assertion. He is working now, in the evening of a long and most fruitful life, with all the enthusiasm of youth, and with a superb negligence of himself, for a great project that is just as sure to come as the twentieth century dawns-the establishment of an international law court. Just as certain as that the reign of law has spread its blessed influence over regions of human activity once dark and bloody with unchristian strife and discord is it that ultimately it will enter and control this last refuge of anarchy. The signs are evident that reason and justice and law will in this international realm supplant the awful arbiter that now determines too many national disputes and crushes to the earth whole peoples by the weight of military preparation. But Dr. Hale wants to bring that happy day to the world sooner than it will come if he and others stay foolishly content with the present. It is a day that he may not, and probably will not, live to see. All the finer, then, is the picture of this grand old man, at a time of life when most of us lose faith in the future, or at least wish to be free from its burdens, serenely putting on his harness afresh in the service of a great cause. Dr. Hale's example ought to make some strong men in this city feel very much ashamed of their infidelity to good causes, and of the misuse or lack of use of great talents and opportunities. But where he leads surely there will be many to follow; many who, like him, though loyal citizens of the United States, are in this respect willing to render obedience to the authority of the Russian Czar in trying to advance the sway of peace and law between nations. The cause which Dr. Hale represents is certainly as hopeful as that of antislavery seemed to be in England when Wilberforce, or in the United States when Garrison and Phillips, first advocated it. We wish Dr. Hale success in his pilgrimage, and we believe there are thousands among us who will esteem it a great honor to help him win it."

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It was a beautiful fatality by which Chorley's great peace hymn was set

years ago, and is still, we think, commonly sung, as it was sung at the opening of the first Boston peace meeting, to the music of the Russian Hymn. For we cannot forget that it is to Russia that we owe the inspiration of the great peace movement which is now sweeping over the world. It is not the only thing that civilization owes to Russia in this time. Deep in the Russian nature, deep within this great people pushing its way up from barbarism and tyranny to freedom and civility, there seems to be a strenuous and superb idealism. In that most nefarious and mischievous of poems, "The Truce with the Bear," Kipling has sought to strengthen in the English world a fundamental distrust of the Russian people. Russia is a treacherous bear, a bear trying to act like a man, but doing it treacherously, for a bear's purposes. We may perhaps at this time fairly ask ourselves the question, which is in the more hopeful condition, a bear that is trying to act like a man or a man that is trying to act like a bear. But we will not press the question. This at any rate is true. that the three men who in this time have done the greatest service for the world's greatest cause are all of them Russians, Tolstoi, Verestchagin and now the Czar. Of the Czar's sincer-' ity and deep earnestness in his proposals looking towards disarmament and the permanent peace of nations there can be no doubt in sane and noble minds; and those proposals are of a character likely to give them an epoch-making place in history. Of the sincere and earnest purpose of the Czar, as of his sagacity and farsightedness, we have noteworthy assurance at this moment in the words of our returning ambassador, Mr. Hitchcock; and the countrymen of Mr. Kipling-Englishmen and Americans alike are now his loving countrymen -will remember how clearly Gladstone saw that the habit of distrust of Russia was an insanity with Englishmen, the most mischievous insanity

in modern European politics, and how sedulously he sought during the last thirty years of his life to remove it. Earnest and sincere or not, the Czar's proposals are a call, and in response to that call the representatives of all the nations of Christendom will assemble in a conference which neither Russia nor any other power can dominate, for free consideration of the world's greatest curse and greatest hope.

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The curse of militarism rests like a paralysis upon every nation of Europe. England may feel it least, but how appallingly England feels it appeared in the discussion of the army and navy budget in Parliament on the very Saturday before the first Boston Monday meeting. Two hundred and forty million dollars was the estimate for British army and navy expenses for the next fiscal year. "You can't keep up a splendid a splendid empire for nothing," said Mr. Balfour, defending the appropriations. The treasury is at its wit's ends to devise fruitful forms of taxation, a tax even upon wheat and sugar, the staffs of life, being now meditated. The "bread tax" the newspapers begin to talk about.

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America, however, does not have to cast her eyes across the sea to point morals upon the curse of militarism. It is a curse which threatens ourselves; the man who does not see it and is not spurred as an American and a lover of America to new devotion to the rational organization of the world is a fool and blind. Ideas and standards are confessed and are gaining headway in great circles of our people from which a year ago every man would have shrunk. Good men think various thoughts about the recent war with Spain. The President, the Secretary of State, and our Minister to Spain all felt it, as all have told us frankly, to be wholly unnecessary; that had the politicians and the people

exercised a reasonable patience and self-control, everything which we demanded and in the name of humanity had a right to demand could have been secured peacefully instead of by the horrors of battle and the waste of half a billion dollars. Other men think the war was inevitable. But think variously as men may about the recent war with Spain, it is hard to see how any American can look upon our present war with the people of the Philippines save with melancholy, horror and shame. Claiming to desire to help these people to independence and self-government, we have ruthlessly mowed down and broken the prestige and the power of that body of the people which alone had vitality and capacity to develop selfgovernment, which had waged long and heroic resistance to the Spanish oppression, and had demonstrated organizing talent of an order which commanded the respect and confidence of every democratic man. It is the blackest blot upon the pages of our history; and the American who, seeing it in white light, does not denounce it as a crime is not a patriot, not true to the republic and its ideals. The President has just declared in Boston that no instinct of imperialism lurks in the American heart. Yet even as we write, the chairman of the Congressional Committee on Appropriations, reporting how we have spent our half billion in the war, publicly repudiates for himself, and ventures the prediction that the next Congress will repudiate, the President's professed idea of giving the people of the Philippines the independence they desire. "We could not if we would," he says, "and we would not if we could, part with the territories acquired from Spain." This means one of two things-that we shall incorporate these territories into the republic or that we shall hold them subject to the republic. This last is "imperialism." There is no need to deal with the term gingerly; it simply means dominion over a

people whom we deny self-government-like the dominion of England in India; it makes no difference. whether the "imperialism" is exercised by an empire, a kingdom, or a republic, it is the same denial of selfgovernment to a people. The President protests that no thought of it lurks in the American heart; but the undeniable fact is that it is already on thousands of American lips, and worse things with it. The most influential newspaper in New England, which not a year ago execrated such doctrine, has recently declared that, remembering the struggles of the Poles, the Hungarians and the Irish, and our own struggle a hundred years ago, we cannot but understand and sympathize with the Philippine people in their struggle for independence, but that since this is counter to our interests we must suppress it. The same journal has also gone on to declare that, if the partition of China by the powers of Europe seems at any time imminent, we must not fail to be party to it, from the vantage ground of the conquered Philippines, and to seize our share, which share would be a territory with seventy million people. This doctrine does not simply "lurk in the heart," but is openly proclaimed in the home of Samuel Adams and Charles Sumner; and there is probably no other section of America where it is not proclaimed more. It is fatuous to deny these things; it is our duty to meet them like men. It is most fatuous of all not to see that what has given license and momentum to doctrines so opposed to the spirit of our American republic and to what we have all hitherto agreed to praise is the militarism of the year and the "headiness" resulting from spectacular and easily successful war. A year ago there was not a senator at Washington nor a boy in the schools. who would not, as matter of course, have referred to the partition of Poland a century ago, by the powers which preyed upon her, as a colossal crime. If it shall by and by appear

that, with phrases against "imperialism" and professions of zeal for selfgovernment on the lip, the government of this republic is really serving the programme of militarism and seizure and subjugation, permitting this America to swing into line with the hoary iniquities of the past, the historian of a century hence must summon stronger words than those which have served for the crime against Poland to characterize our crime; for we shall have sinned against greater light and have betrayed a greater trust. And in this thing let every one of us remember that plain word of Hosea Biglow's:

"Guv'ment ain't to answer for it;
God 'll send the bill to you."

For in a republic, "the government" is what we let it be. "We, the people of the United States," are the government of the government; and we, the people, must ultimately bear the praise or blame.

For our own part, we have faith in the American people and that their returning sobriety and common sense, to say nothing of their nobility, will quickly check the militarism which for the moment has got rein and impulse. The sharp criticism in Congress itself of the army and navy bills, and the considerable reduction of the estimates and proposals, is one sign of the returning sobriety; and the laughter at Cecil Rhodes's sober proposition that we should subjugate and annex South America is another. Laughter at such things will help on laughter, and shame as well, at propositions not quite so swollen. We believe that no political party will ever venture to face the American people in a general election with a programme of militarism. We believe that the popular heart will respond to the call which now goes forth for service in the cause of peace and the organization of the world; and we may remember with encouragement that