After the Napoleonic wars, at least, Europe was ripe for
such a reform. I do not mean that public feeling in Europe was prepared
for the idea. It would have met with a very considerable degree of
resistance, and would have generally been conceived as the dream of an
amiable fanatic. Such resistance makes the duty of the moralist or the
reformer all the more pressing, and it is merely amazing to hear the
earlier Christian clergy exonerated on the ground that the world was not
prepared to receive a message of peace from them. They did not try the
experiment because it did not occur to them, or because they were too
closely dependent on the monarchs of the earth to question the wisdom of
their arrangements. Europe was, in point of fact, quite ripe for the
change in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and there would
assuredly be no war to-day if the Churches had had the moral inspiration
and the moral courage to insist on it. The frontiers of the nations were
(except in the case of Italy and Poland) defined with a fair show of
justice, and the time had come to disband armies and submit any future
quarrel to arbitration: to retain only a small standing army in each
country for the defence of its colonial frontiers against tribes which
do not respect arbitration, or for the enforcement of the decisions of
the central tribunal.
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