as well as of restoring injured rights! It is dreadful materialism, they say, to put honour in the scale with money. So men said in the clubs of London a century ago in defence of the duel, and we recognise in their pleas the lingering, more or less disguised, of a barbaric sentiment. Most of us recognise that same feature in this last apology for the duel of nations. If we can trust our individual honour to a mediocre magistrate or judge, or a still worse jury, we can certainly entrust our national honour to a group of the ablest and most impartial lawyers of the world. It is sheer distrust of justice to refuse it.
Here again history is wholly on the side of reform. Which of the great wars of the nineteenth century involved a point of honour that could not, with entire decency, have been submitted to arbitration? Was there such a point of honour in the Napoleonic wars? The Prusso-Danish? The Prusso-Austrian? The Italian? The American Civil War? The Franco-German? The Russo-Turkish? The South African? What point was involved in any of them that could not have been settled with far greater honour to the combatants and greater regard for justice by an impartial tribunal? In most cases they were really wars of aggression and expansion, like the war in which we are engaged. We may at least ask the men who hold that medieval idea of war to have—since they boast much of their courage—the elementary courage to say so.
There is no conceivable quarrel that cannot with
