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somewhat low even in hope. We are then in vision. There is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul is raised over passion. It seeth identity and eternal causation. It is a perceiving that Truth and Right are. Hence it becomes a Tranquillity out of the knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature; the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; vast intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel underlay that former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present and will always all circumstances, and what is called life and what is called death.

AMERICA'S LOVE OF PEACE1

JOHN HAY

I ESTEEM it a great honor and privilege to be allowed to extend to you the welcome of the Government and the people of the United States of America on this memorable and auspicious occasion. No time could be more fitting for this gathering of a parliament of peace than to-day, when at the other end of the world the thunder of a destructive and sanguinary war is deafening the nations, while here we are preparing to settle the question of a vast transfer of power by an appeal to reason and orderly procedure, under the sanction of a law implicitly accepted by eighty millions of people.

And as if heaven had decided to give a sign of deepest significance to the hour of your meeting, it coincides with the commitment to eternal peace of all that was mortal of our dear and honored co-laborer in this sacred cause. George Frisbie Hoar had many titles to glory and honor. Not the least of them was the firm and constant courage with which, through all his illustrious life, he pleaded for humanity and universal good will.

No place could be more suitable than this high-hearted city, which has been for nearly three hundred years the birthplace and the home of every idea of progress and enlightenment which has germinated in the Western World. To bid you welcome to the home of Vane, of Winthrop, and of Adams, of Channing and Emo son, is to give you the freedom of no mean city, to make you partakers of a spiritual inheritance without which, with all

1 Copyright. Reprinted from Addresses of John Hay by permission of the Century Company. This address was delivered at the thirteenth International Congress of Peace, Boston, October 3, 1904.

our opulence, we should be poor indeed. It is true that this great Commonwealth has sought, with the sword, peace under liberty. We confess that many wars have left their traces in the pages of its history and its literature; art has adorned the public places of this stately town with the statues of its heroic sons. But the dominant note of its highest culture, its most persistent spirit, has been that righteousness which exalteth a nation, that obedience to the inner light which leads along the paths of peace.

And the policy of the nation at large, which owes so much of its civic spirit to the founders of New England, has been in the main a policy of peace. During the hundred and twenty years of our independent existence we have had but three wars with the outside world, though we have had a most grievous and dolorous struggle with our own people. We have had, I think, a greater relative immunity from war than any of our neighbors. All our greatest men have been earnest advocates of peace. The very men who founded our liberties with the mailed hand detested and abhorred war as the most futile and ferocious of human follies. Franklin and Jefferson repeatedly denounced it — the one with all the energy of his rhetoric, the other with the lambent fire of his wit. But not our philosophers alone - our fighting men have seen at close quarters how hideous is the face of war. Washington said, "My first wish is to see this plague to mankind banished from the earth"; and again he said, "We have experienced enough of its evils in this country to know that it should not be wantonly or unnecessarily entered upon." There is no discordant note in the utterances of our most eminent soldiers on this subject. The most famous utterance of General Grant the one which will linger longest in the memories of was the prayer of his war-weary heart, "Let us have peace." Sherman reached the acme of his marvelous gift of epigram when he said, "War is hell." And Abraham Lincoln, after the four terrible years in which he had directed our vast armies and navies, uttered on the threshold of eternity the

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fervent and touching aspiration that "the mighty scourge of war might speedily pass away."

There has been no solution of continuity in the sentiments of our Presidents on this subject up to this day. McKinley deplored with every pulse of his honest and kindly heart the advent of the war which he had hoped might not come in his day, and gladly hailed the earliest moment for making peace; and President Roosevelt has the same tireless energy in the work of concord that he displayed when he sought peace and ensured it on the field of battle. No Presidents in our history have been so faithful and so efficient as the last two in the cause of arbitration and of every peaceful settlement of differences. I mention them together because their work has been harmonious and consistent. We hailed with joy the generous initiative of the Russian Emperor, and sent to the conference at the Hague the best men we had in our civic and military life. When The Hague Court lay apparently wrecked at the beginning of its voyage, threatened with death before it had fairly begun to live, it was the American Government which gave it the breath of life by inviting the Republic of Mexico to share our appeal to its jurisdiction; and the second case brought before it was at the instance of Mr. Roosevelt, who declined in its favor the high honor of arbitrating an affair of world-wide importance.

I beg you to believe, it is not by way of boasting that I recall these incidents to your minds; it is rather as a profession of faith in a cause which the present Administration has deeply at heart that I ask you to remember, in the deliberations upon which you are entering, the course to which the American Government is pledged and which it has steadily pursued for the last seven years. It is true that in those years we have had a hundred days of war - but they put an end forever to bloodshed which had lasted a generation. We landed a few platoons of marines on the Isthmus last year; but that act closed without a shot a sanguinary succession of trivial wars. We marched a little army to Peking; but it was to save not only the beleaguered

legations, but a great imperiled civilization. By mingled gentleness and energy, to which most of the world beyond our borders has done justice, we have given to the Philippines, if not peace, at least a nearer approach to it than they have had within the memory of men.

If our example is worth anything to the world, we have given it in the vital matter of disarmament. We have brought away from the Far East 55,000 soldiers whose work was done, and have sent them back to the fields of peaceful activity. We have reduced our Army to its minimum of 60,000 men; in fact, we may say we have no army, but in place of one a nucleus for drill and discipline. We have three-fourths of one soldier for every thousand of the population — a proportion which if adopted by others power would at once eliminate wars and rumors of wars from the daily thoughts of the chancelleries of the world.

But, fixed as our tradition is, clear as is our purpose in the direction of peace, no country is permanently immune to war so long as the desire and the practice of peace are not universal. If we quote Washington as an advocate of peace, it is but fair also to quote him where he says: "To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace." And at another time he said: "To an active external commerce the protection of a naval force is indispensable. To secure respect to a neutral flag requires a naval force organized and ready to vindicate it from insult or aggression." To acknowledge the existence of an evil is not to support or approve it: but the facts must be faced. Human history is one long, desolate story of bloodshed. All the arts unite in the apparent conspiracy to give precedence to the glory of arms. Demosthenes and Pericles adjured the Athenians by the memory of their battles. Horace boasted that he had been a soldier, non sine gloria. Even Milton, in that sublime sonnet where he said, "Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war," mentioned among the godly trophies of Cromwell "Darwen stream with blood of Scots imbrued." In almost every sermon and hymn we hear in our churches, the

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