Better ask, How long will be continued that War System by which such a duel is authorized and regulated among nations?

When will this legalized, organized crime be abolished?

When at last will it be confessed that the Law of Right is the same for nations as for individuals, so that, if Trial by Battle be impious for individuals, it is so for nations likewise?

Their acceptance by any two nations would begin the work of abolition, which would be completed on their adoption by a Congress of Nations, taking from war its existing sanction.

Never before were all nations, even those separated by great spaces, whether of land or ocean, the daily and excited spectators of the combat.

The vast amphitheatre within which the battle is fought, with the whole heavens for its roof, is coextensive with civilization itself.

How feeble is language to depict the stupendous barbarism!

They could not have looked on while the brave gladiator was thus changed into a bloody hash; least of all could they have seen the work of slaughter done by machinery.

I do not know how it is, but one wholly forgets the danger one is in, and thinks only of the effect of one’s own bullets, rejoicing like a child at the sight of the enemy falling like skittles, and having scarcely a compassionate glance to…

One ceases to be a human being, and turns into a brute, a complete brute.

Women and children are roasted alive, filling the air with suffocating odor, while the maddened combatants rage against each other.

The duel now pending teaches the peril from continuance of the present system.

If France and Germany can be brought so suddenly into collision on a mere pretext, what two nations are entirely safe?

None, surely, except Disarmament, which, therefore, for the interest of all nations, should be commenced.

Prussia is now an acknowledged military power, armed “in complete steel,”--but at what cost to her people, if not to mankind!

Military citizenship, according to Prussian rule, is military serfdom, and on this is elevated a military despotism of singular grasp and power, operating throughout the whole nation, like martial law or a state of siege.

In Prussia the law tyrannically seizes every youth of twenty, and, no matter what his calling or profession, compels him to military service for seven years.

If this economical government, with education for all, subordinates the business of life to the military drill, other nations will find too much reason for doing the same.

Unless the War System is abandoned, all must follow the successful example, while the civilized world becomes a busy camp, with every citizen a soldier, and with all sounds swallowed up in the tocsin of war.

Montesquieu has not hesitated to declare that the peril to free governments proceeds from armies, and that this peril is not corrected even by making them depend directly on the legislative power.

The War System, always barbarous, is an anachronism, full of peril both to peace and liberal institutions.

An army is a despotism; military service is a bondage; nor can the passion for arms be reconciled with a true civilization.

The present failure to acknowledge this incompatibility is only another illustration how the clear light of truth is discolored and refracted by an atmosphere where the cloud of war still lingers.

The true state of Nature is not war, but peace.

Not only every war, but every recognition of war as the mode of determining international differences, is evidence that we are yet barbarians,--and so also is every ambition for empire founded on force, and not on the consent of the people.