e war. A union of the nations for the
purpose of preventing wars of aggression and conquest seemed to him the
most practical, if not the only, way of accomplishing this supreme
object, and he urged it with earnestness and eloquence in his public
addresses relating to the bases of peace.

There was much to be said in favor of the President's point of view.
Unquestionably the American people as a whole supported him in the
belief that there ought to be some international agreement, association,
or concord which would lessen the possibility of future wars. An
international organization to remove in a measure the immediate causes
of war, to provide means for the peaceable settlement of disputes
between nations, and to draw the governments into closer friendship
appealed to the general desire of the peoples of America and Europe. The
four years and more of horror and agony through which mankind had passed
must be made impossible of repetition, and there seemed no other way
than to form an international union devoted to the maintenance of peace
by composing, as far as possible, controversies which might ripen
into war.

For many years prior to 1914 an organization devoted to the prevention
of international wars had been discussed by those who gave thought to
warfare of the nations and who realized in a measure the precarious
state of international peace. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and of 1907
had been negotiated with that object, and it was only because of the
improper aspirations and hidden designs of certain powers, which were
represented at those great historic conferences, that the measures
adopted were not more expressive of the common desire of mankind and
more effective in securing the object sought. The Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, the Ginn, now the World, Peace Foundation, and the
American Peace Society, and later the Society for the Judicial
Settlement of International Disputes, the League to Enforce Peace, and
many other organizations in America and in Europe were actively engaged
in considering ways and means to prevent war, to strengthen the bonds of
international good-will, and to insure the more general application of
the principles of justice to disputes between nations.

The outbreak of the war and the dreadful waste and suffering which
followed impelled the societies and associations then organized to
redoubled effort and induced the formation of new organizations. People
everywhere bega