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. The conditions were almost as favourable for such
a change in 1816 as they are to-day, or will be in 1916, and it is
another grave point in the indictment of Christianity that it had no
inspiration to demand that change. The bishops of England no less than
the bishops of Rome were deeply concerned about the rise of democracy
and the spread of unbelief, and they joined with the monarchs in
enforcing a system of violent repression. For the larger and more real
need of Europe they had no feeling whatever, and militarism entered upon
its last and most terrible phase: the stage of national armies and of
means of destruction prepared with all the fearful skill of modern
science.

As the nineteenth century proceeded, humanitarianism attained clearer
conceptions and more articulate speech. The scheme of substituting legal
procedure for military violence was definitely put before the world. It
is not necessary, and would be difficult, to trace the earliest
developments of this idea. On the one hand, I find no claim that it was
put forward by representatives of Christianity; on the other hand,
literary research among the records of the early Rationalist movements
in this country has shown me that the idea was familiar and welcome
amongst them. No doubt the aversion of the Friends from bloodshed had
some influence, and we find representatives of that noble-minded Society
active in more than one of the early reform-movements. But, as far as I
can discover, it was Robert Owen who first definitely advanced the idea
of subst