Territories, once possessing an equivocal and turbulent independence, feel new power and happiness in peaceful association.

By a power of assimilation, in no nation so strongly marked, she has absorbed the various races and sovereignties once filling her territory with violence and conflict, and has converted them all to herself.

The many hostile principalities of England were first merged in the Heptarchy; and these seven kingdoms became one under the Saxon Egbert.

Thus has the tendency to Unity predominated over independent sovereignties and states, slowly conducting the constant process of crystallization.

The next stage must be the peaceful association of the Christian nations.

Everywhere Nature is busy with combinations, exerting an occult incalculable power, drawing elements into new relations of harmony, uniting molecule with molecule, atom with atom, and, by progressive change, in the lapse of time, producing…

But time and space, the great obstructions, if not annihilated, are now subdued, giving free scope to the powerful affinities of civilization.

At last, light, thrice holy light, in whose glad beams are knowledge, justice, and beneficence, with empyrean sway will combine those separate and distracted elements into one organized system.

In harmony with these are efforts of individuals, extending through ages, and strengthening with time, till now at last they swell into a voice that must be heard.

This gay and gallant monarch was little penetrated by the divine sentiment of Peace; for at his death he was gathering materials for fresh War; and it is too evident that the scheme of a European Congress was prompted less by comprehensive…

Even with this drawback it did great good, by holding aloft before Christendom the exalted idea of a tribunal for the Commonwealth of Nations.

I cannot close this brief record of a philanthropist, constant in an age when War was more regarded than Humanity, without offering him an unaffected homage.

If this project fails, it is not, according to him, because chimerical, but because men have lost their wits, and it is a sort of madness to be wise in the midst of fools.

As no scheme more grand, more beautiful, or more useful ever occupied the human mind, so, says Rousseau, no author ever deserved attention more than one proposing the means for its practical adoption; nor can any humane and virtuous man…

The philosopher was right in proposing nothing less than a reform of International Law.

A special league or treaty should be formed, which may be truly called a Treaty of Peace, having this peculiarity, that, whereas other treaties terminate a single existing War only, this should terminate forever all War between the parties…

A Treaty of Peace, tacitly acknowledging the right to wage War, as all treaties now do, is nothing more than a Truce, not Peace.

There may not be constant hostilities; but there will be constant fear of hostilities, with constant threat of aggression and attack.

Soldiers and armaments, now nursed as a Peace establishment, become the fruitful parent of new wars.

They must form one comprehensive federation, which, by the aggregation of other nations, would at last embrace the whole earth.

And this, according to Kant, in the succession of years, by a sure progress, is the irresistible tendency of nations.

To this end nations must be truly independent; nor is it possible for one nation to acquire another independent nation, whether by inheritance, exchange, purchase, or gift.

The philosophy of Kant, therefore, contemplated not only Universal Peace, but Universal Liberty.

The first article of the great treaty would be, that every nation is free.

Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.