When that international force has been firmly established it will
be time to consider what proportionate reductions in national armaments
can be prudently recommended. Until that glorious day dawns, no patriot
and no lover of his kind can wisely advocate either peace in Europe or
any reduction of armaments.
The hate-breeding and worse than brutal cruelties and devastations of
the war, with their inevitable moral and physical degradations, ought to
shock mankind into attempting a great step forward. Europe and America
should undertake to exterminate the real causes of the catastrophe. In
studying that problem the coming European conference can profit by the
experience of the three prosperous and valid countries in which public
liberty and the principle of federation have been most successfully
developed--Switzerland, Great Britain, and the United States.
Switzerland is a democratic federation which unites in a firm federal
bond three different racial stocks speaking three unlike languages, and
divided locally and irregularly between the Catholic Church and the
Protestant. The so-called British Empire tends strongly to become a
federation; and the methods of Government both in Great Britain itself
and in its affiliated Commonwealths are becoming more and more
democratic in substance.
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