ich has been done, and of that which has been left undone.

Our own country has a special need thus carefully to consider the
possible consequences of arbitration, understood in the sense of an
antecedent pledge to resort to it; unless under limitations very
carefully hedged. There is an undoubted popular tendency in direction
of such arbitration, which would be "compulsory" in the highest moral
sense,--the compulsion of a promise. The world at large, and we
especially, stand at the opening of a new era, concerning whose
problems little can be foreseen. Among the peoples, there is
manifested intense interest in the maturing of our national
convictions, as being, through Asia, new-comers into active
international life, concerning whose course it is impossible to
predict; and in many quarters, probably in all except Great Britain,
the attitude toward us is watchful rather than sympathetic. The
experience of Crete and of Armenia does not suggest beneficent results
from the arbitration of many counsellors; especially if contrasted
with the more favorable issue when Russia, in 1877, acting on her own
single initiative, forced by the conscience of her people, herself
alone struck the fetters from Bulgaria; or when we ourselves last
year, rejecting intermediation, loosed the bonds from Cuba, and lifted
the yoke from the neck of the oppressed.

It was inevitable that thoughts like these should recur frequently to
one of the writer's habit of thought, when in constant touch with the
atmosphere that hung around the Conference, although the latter was by
it but little affected. The poet's words, "The Parliament of man, the
federation of the world," were much in men's mouths this past summer.
There is no denying the beauty of the ideal, but there was apparent
also a disposition, in contemplating it, to contemn the slow processes
of evolution by which Nature commonly attains her ends, and to impose
at once, by convention, the methods that commended themselves to the
sanguine. Fruit is not best ripened by premature plucking, nor can the
goal be reached by such short cuts. Step by step, in the past, man has
ascended by means of the sword, and his more recent gains, as well as
present conditions, show that the time has not yet come to kick down
the ladder which has so far served him. Three hundred years ago, the
people of the land in which the Conference was assembled wrenched with
the sword civil and religious peace and national inde