perfect honour be submitted to arbitration. And the ostensible ground of this colossal struggle which is now exhausting Europe—the satisfaction due to Austria for the assassination of the Archduke—was pre-eminently a matter for a tribunal. The frivolity and insincerity with which these grave issues are sometimes met are, to put it on the lowest level, costly. Speaking in a London club some time ago, I urged this substitution of arbitration for war. My opponent frivolously observed that he was not sure that a court of great lawyers would be cheaper than war, and there were some who quite seriously applauded. Yet Europe had then actually expended about £2,000,000,000 in the preliminary stages of its great war!
Wherever there is a considerable and deliberate reluctance to substitute arbitration for war, wherever these unsatisfactory pleas for war are put forward, we find a hypocritical concealment of real motives. If we would be practical we must candidly confront these motives, and we shall find that the most persistent and most dangerous of them is still the desire to gain territory. The spectacle of the decay of the Ottoman Empire and the apparent helplessness of the Balkan peoples had more to do with the militarism of European Powers than they were willing to admit. That source of temptation is now renewed, and most of the Powers have, or soon will have, all the territory they can reasonably desire. The further distribution of African territory could clearly be best controlled by an international
