the Great found an island without any seacoast. He could look
upon the Black Sea or the Baltic as a communication with the civilized
world; but one or the other must first be conquered. The hot-headed
King of Sweden pressed him to a Northern war, and, besides, the
Southern Sea was inhabited by barbarians. His original intention, it
is said, was to build his new capital on the Pontus, and that he even
had selected the spot. The one coast, indeed, is not much farther from
the centre of the empire than the other.

How would it have been had he built his St. Petersburg on the
beautiful harbor of Sebastopol, close to the paradisiac heights of the
Tschadyr Dagh, where the grape grows wild and everything flourishes in
the open air that is forced through a greenhouse on the Neva; where no
floods threaten destruction; where the navy is not frozen fast during
seven months of the year; and where steam power makes an easier
communication with the most beautiful countries of Europe than the
Gulf of Finland does?

What a city would St. Petersburg have been, did her wide streets
extend to Balaklava and did the Winter Palace face the deep blue
mirror of the Black Sea; if the Isaac Church stood at the height of
Malakoff; if Aluschta and Orianda were the Peterhof and Gatschina[43]
of the Imperial family!

THE PEACE MOVEMENT

TRANSLATED BY EDMUND VON MACH, PH.D.

[Professor Bluntschli had sent the manual of the Institute of
International Law to Count Moltke, and expressed the hope, in a letter
dated November 19, 1880, that it would meet with his approval. Count
Moltke replied as follows:]

My dear Professor:

You have been good enough to send me the manual published by the
Institute of International Law, and you ask for my approval. In the
first place, I fully recognize your humane endeavors to lessen the
sufferings which war brings in its train.

Eternal peace, however, is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream,
for war is part of God's scheme of the world. In war the noblest
virtues of man develop courage and renunciation, the sense of duty and
abnegation, and all at the risk of his life. Without war the world
would be swallowed up in the morass of materialism.

With the principle stated in the preface, that the gradual advance of
civilization should be reflected in the conduct of war, I fully agree;
but I go further, and believe that civilization alone, and no codified
laws of warfare, can have the desired result.