24 Expansion and Peace 



War has been avoided ; but what of the national con 

 sciences that beheld such iniquity and withheld the 

 hand?" 



Peace is a great good ; and doubly harmful, there 

 fore, is the attitude of those who advocate it in terms 

 that would make it synonymous with selfish and 

 cowardly shrinking from warring against the ex 

 istence of evil. The wisest and most far-seeing 

 champions of peace will ever remember that, in the 

 first place, to be good it must be righteous, for unright 

 eous and cowardly peace may be worse than any 

 war; and, in the second place, that it can often be 

 obtained only at the cost of war. Let me take two 

 illustrations : 



The great blot upon European international mo 

 rality in the closing decade of this century has been 

 not a war, but the infamous peace kept by the joint 

 action of the great powers, while Turkey inflicted 

 the last horrors of butchery, torture, and outrage 

 upon the men, women, and children of despairing 

 Armenia. War was avoided; peace was kept; but 

 what a peace ! Infinitely greater human misery was 

 inflicted during this peace than in the late wars of 

 Germany with France, of Russia with Turkey; and 

 this misery fell, not on armed men, but upon de 

 fenceless women and children, upon the gray-beard 

 and the stripling no less than upon the head of the 

 family; and it came, not in the mere form of death 



