[From "After Disarmament, What?" by Frank C. Doan, in Unity, Abraham Lincoln Center, Chicago, Illinois]

The most impressive thing to me, and the happiest omen, about the Conference at Washington on the Limitation of Armament is the amazing unanimity of the public mind in regard to the object itself of the Conference. It is not too much to say that the eyes of all the peoples of the earth to-day are turned toward Washington with anxious hope and eager expectation. These last days I have been searching back over past history for precedents; but nowhere do I find anything comparable to the present united movement of the peoples of the earth toward peace and good will. There have been great periods in the past, great and stirring times, times when a whole nation has been united in the defense of its borders and its liberties, as in the Wars of the Netherlands; periods when a whole class of people has been united against another class, as in the French Revolution; periods when men of autocratic power have combined to oppress and exploit the common peoples, as in the case of all the ancient autocracies from Rome to Russia; times when great masses of people of a certain religious enthusiasm have united in religious wars against whole masses of people of a different religious persuasion, as in the Great Protestant Reformation; and times when men of a military class have united in pressing their Bismarckian methods of culture on an unwilling civilian population, as in the case of Germany of yesterday. But never, so far as I can see, never in all history will you find all men, men of all classes and nations and races and of every conceivable political and religious opinion, united as they are to-day in the great cause of universal liberty and peace and good will.

Take our own country, for example. See how men and women of widely differing opinions and ideals are united to-day as never they have been before in the history of our American commonwealth. Women of social vision like Jane Addams, men of science like David Starr Jordan, men of military training and conviction like General Pershing, men of business sagacity like Otto Kahn, men of labor sympathies like Samuel Gompers and Eugene Debs—behold them all, forgetting their social and political and religious antagonisms of yesterday, united to-day in the one common hope, yea, the one common demand, for a fruitful outcome of the approaching Conference.

Nothing like this, nothing approaching this, has ever happened before to the human spirit on this earth!

The nearest approach to anything like this world-wide enthusiasm for a great common cause you will find in the days preceding the first Hague Peace Conference. But if you will read not the official but the semi-confidential reports of this Conference, as given, for example, in the auto-biography of Andrew D. White, you will come away, I think, from the reading with the feeling that the interest of the great commons of the earth, great as it seemed in the first moment of enthusiasm, was after all a rather listless and dilettante affair, and that the failure of the nations during the Great War to abide by the conventions and decisions of the Hague Conferences was in the last analysis the failure of the commons of the earth to arise as one man and demand their strict and scrupulous observance.

But to-day I seem to detect a new note, new and deeper, in the world's enthusiasm for arbitration and the methods of sweet reasonableness—a more imperative tone and a deeper sense of the sin and folly of the ancient arbitrament of war. The world's representatives at Washington may well feel that they are representing, yes, and responsible, not to a small handful of a self-seeking governing class at home but to the united spirit, the united hopes and fears and dreams of all the peoples of the earth. And whatever conference agreements are signed at Washington and made a part of the international law of the earth—perhaps we may dare hope that for the first time in history such agreements, backed up by the aroused and chastened public opinion of the commons of the earth, will be kept and held sacred through the coming days of world reconstruction. . . .

Peace! Yes, by all means, peace. But does that mean, as it did in the vision of Isaiah, that men, young men as well as old, shall henceforth sit around in a perpetual and soul-destroying indolence under their vines and fig trees? Does it mean that with war abolished men will be content to see all the other great evils of human life go unrebuked and unchecked over the face of the earth? If so, then I tell you peace, even peace, has been bought at too great a price!

William James sounded this warning some years ago. No one, as I happen to know, abhorred war more than this great American scholar and apostle of peace; no one was more aware of the human stupidities and follies that lead men into war; no one more acutely sensitive than he to the sufferings and horrors of war, this ancient tooth and claw method of settling international and interracial disputes. "Abolish war!" I can still hear him cry in effect. "By all manner of means abolish it. But be very sure in doing this great thing that you have ready for the youth of the world a 'moral substitute' for war—something that shall engage his loyalties and call for the courage which he now feels stirring within him when the war drums beat and he follows his flag into the jaws of death." . . .

Let us be sure that we put into the hearts of men the "flaming sword of the Lord," even the spirit of justice and righteousness and love in whose name and cause we are bidding men to lay down their arms! We are about to purge a man's hand of the stain of his brother's blood. Let us not fail to purge his heart of the stains of greed and ill-will and hatred which alone have made war a possible thing on this earth!

[Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, as quoted in The Christian Science Monitor]

For one, I devoutly believe the spirit of the world is such that we can trust to the good faith and the high purposes which the treaty I have laid before you embodies and enshrines. Agreements of this kind I know have often been made before, only to fail. But there has been a far-reaching change in the mental condition of men and women everywhere. That which really counts is the intention of the nations who make the agreement. In this hour of trial and darkness which has followed the war with Germany the spirit of the world is no longer the same. If we enter upon this agreement which rests only upon the will and honor of those who sign it, we at least make the great experiment and appeal to the men and women of the nation to help us sustain it in spirit and in truth.

[From an Address by Dr. Percy Dearmer before King's College, London, on "The Breaking of Barriers," as quoted in Public Opinion, London]

The recovery, I believe, has already begun. It is a spiritual recovery, a change in the spirit of the times, and it has begun in the world of thought, where all enduring revivals must begin. We see it in the fellowship which has grown up in their living memory among university teachers and in the realm of scholarship. We see it also in the new spirit among students and in the decay of partisanship (a necessary preliminary to any lasting spiritual revival) which is so admirably exemplified in the Life and Liberty and the Christian Student movements. It is the spirit that matters; it is ideas that alone accomplish great results. If we are active in the dissemination of ideas, we can safely leave their accomplishment to the near future. The spirit spreads from man to man, from set to set, from level to level, till a new conviction permeates to every class and unites the whole of society. . . .

Compartmental limitation is a blocking obstacle to truth; narrowness is a fatal weakness for the spirit of man, in the natural sciences and in the arts no less than in theology. The man who only knows his own subject, the man who does not coordinate it with other subjects, and who does not see that all aspects of knowledge can only find their unity, and therefore their truth, in the spiritual realm, is still a misleader of mankind.

[From The Pioneer]

From one of Peoria's leading journals is clipped the following:

"Peoria [Illinois], formerly the world's big distilling center, but ruined by prohibition, is by clearing-house reports one of the most steadily prosperous communities in the United States. Consider these clearing-house figures from Peoria:
Clearings for 1918. . . . . . . . . . . . .$249,507,480.74
Clearings for 1919. . . . . . . . . . . . . 260,439,834.78
Clearings for 1920. . . . . . . . . . . . . 281,528,228.93

"It seems that Peoria's thirteen giant distilleries kept right on, but instead of grinding corn for whisky and alcohol, and besotting millions of boozers, they are making yeast and other food products. The effect on Peoria's own population is marked. Is there another American city which can show it is doing more business now than it did in 1918 and 1919? The old distilling plants employ more men and expend more money than they did when the saloon was with us."

["The Christian Century," as Quoted in The Universalist Leader]

The old autocracy of parental discipline is gone, and happily gone. Few parents have either the knowledge or the discretion to rule their children in the manner once thought necessary. And the evil results of too lavish a use of authority in the earlier days was as conspicuous as the opposite evils of abandoned responsibility too often seen to-day. What is needed is neither the martinet sort of discipline practiced a generation ago, nor the lapse of all direction too much in evidence now. It is desirable rather that the relations of parent and child shall be those of comradeship and confidence. This is much more difficult than either of the extremes. But it is the only ground for the deeper sense of respect and obedience which a new and very wonderful generation of children is learning to accord to fathers and mothers who understand and sympathize.

[The Times, London, as quoted in Current Opinion, New York]

The dream of peace is deep in our hearts, and we have as it were, the moral assurance of having voted for it; so we lay the blame on our politicians if there is still trouble in the world. But peace cannot be arranged in accordance with what we wish or decide; it depends upon the whole tenor of our actions. Have we found, then, what the fundamentals of our conduct must be if peace is to be secured? Or are we daily and hourly making demands upon the world which are exclusive and must at last bring us into collision with other men? Do we tend, when the interest of our clan or our class is at stake, to assume that justice is on our side and that we must establish it by force if necessary? More generally, if peace and justice are incompatible, which are we to prefer, and why? These are only a few of the more obvious questions which arise when we begin to bring the idea of peace down out of the dream world, to distinguish the political from the Utopian peace. But by the time we have found candid answers for them, we shall have stopped thinking of peace as a thing evidently realizable but lost by the stupidity or hypocrisy of our leaders. We shall have found that there is no cleavage between us and them. We have them where they are to deal with a situation which we are making for them. . . . Right will grow as it is respected and will be discovered as it is applied; the true reciprocity of nations as of individuals, will be determined by concrete decisions given to meet concrete difficulties, as they arise.

[From The Congregationalist]

The peril of mistaken Biblical interpretation is that the expositor may be led to deduce from the sacred text only that which he wishes to find there. Too many persons think they are defending the Bible when they are only defending their own ideas, and are really misrepresenting that which the Bible teaches. The Bible has never been better understood than to-day.