The Hague Congress, convened by the Tsar of Russia, looked forward to the day when war, and the causes of war, should be obsolete.

The Socialist Movement, a growing force in all industrial communities, stood for the same ideal, and for the international comradeship of the working class.

Law and medicine, science and scholarship followed suit; and every summer, in quest of health and change, thousands of plain citizens have crossed international frontiers with scarcely greater sense of change than in moving from province to province in a single State.

Commerce and industry, the greatest material forces of our time, have become inextricably international, and in the palpable injury in which a war would involve them some thinkers of clear but limited vision saw the best hope of averting a European conflagration.
And yet, throughout these two generations of economic and social development, the fear of war has never been absent from the mind of Europe.
Her emperors and statesmen have talked of peace; but they have prepared for war, more skilfully and more persistently than ever before in the history of Europe or of the world.

Almost the entire manhood of every European nation but England has been trained to arms; and the annual war budget of Europe rose, in time of peace, to over 300 million pounds.