ently occupied the dignitaries at The Hague.
It inspired some of the most earnest pages of D'Alembert and of the
Encyclopedie. It drew from Voltaire some happy invective, affording
the opportunity of airing once more his well-loved but worthless
paradox on the trivial causes from which the great actions of history
arise. Saint-Pierre's ideal informs the early chapters of Gibbon's
History, but its influence disappears as the work advances. It charmed
the fancy of Rousseau, and, by a curious irony, he inflamed by his
impassioned argument that war for freedom which is to the undying glory
of France.[11]

Frederick the Great in his extreme age wrote to Voltaire: "Running over
the pages of history I see that ten years never pass without a war.
This intermittent fever may have moments of respite, but cease, never!"
This is the last word of the eighteenth century upon the dream of
Universal Peace--a word spoken by one of the greatest of kings, looking
out with dying eyes upon a world about to close in one of the deadliest
yet most heroic and memorable conflicts set down in the annals of our
race. The Hundred Days are its epilogue--the war of twenty-five years
ending in that great manner! Then, like a pallid dawn, the ideal once
more arises. Congress after congress meets in ornamental debate, till
six can be reckoned, or even seven, culminating in the recent
conference at The Hague. Its derisive results, closing the debate of
the nineteenth, as Frederick's words sum the debate of the eighteenth
century, are too fresh in all men's memories to require a syllable of
comment.

Thus then it appears from a glance at its history that this ideal of
Universal Peace has stirred the imagination most deeply, first of all
in the ages when an empire, whether Persian, Hebraic, Hellenic, or
Roman, conterminous with earth, wide as the inhabited world, was still
in appearance realizable; or, again, in periods of defeat, or of civil
strife, as in the closing age of the Roman oligarchy; or in the moments
of exhaustion following upon long-continued and desolating war, as in
Modern Europe after the last phases of the Reformation conflict, the
wars of Tilly and Wallenstein, of Marlborough and Eugene, and of
Frederick. The familiar poetry in praise of peace, and the Utopias,
the composition of which has amused the indolence of scholars or the
leisure of statesmen, originate in such hours or in such moods. On the
other hand, the criticism of