The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1919-02-07

We have been fighting not only to make the world safe for democracy for this generation but to make it safe for all time. Therefore one of our objects must be to secure permanent safeguards for peace. In other words We must prescribe, as one of the final terms of peace, some other way than war for settling disputes between nations.
 President Wilson has laid down as the last and most essential of his fla nous fourteen terms of peace, the condition that there shall be a League of Nations to keep or enforce the peace.
 The war was a war on militarism, or the doctrine that might makes right, a war upon war, the supreme object being to replace war by law.
 For one thousand years We have developed what we have called inter national law, a system of tradition by which the intercourse of nations in the civilized group was supposed to be regulated. But this so-called in ternational law has had no police to enforce it. When cynical Germany came along it proved to be a rope Of sand. Chief in this traditional code was the sanctity of treaties and yet Germany disclosed that. to her, a treaty is only scrap of paper There will always be danger of such law breakers until there is a league of nations capable of enforcing the law. Civil law also would be a hoI- low mockery were it devoid of ma chinery for enforcing it other than for each individual to defend him. self.
 Conditions of War.
 We may justly blame the Kaiser and German militarisdc "'Kultur' for this war. But if We want to get rid of Kaiserism for good we must get rid of the soil out of which it grew, in other words destroy the conditions which can still make world wars possible or alluring.
 The essential conditions out of which modern wars spring, are two: CD the rapid growth of international intercourse, and CD the slow growth of international control over that in tercourse Intercourse without con troI means anarchy. This is the po- lticaI disease from which the world has been uffering-fnternatio an- archy.
 As to intercourse, the chance of war is enormously multiplied there by. We do not have war with the Planet Mars, for we have no inter- course, of any sort, with it. A gen eration or two ago Germany seemed almost as far away from and out ot contact with the United States as Mars, but today by the inventions which have bridged distances, we are within a, few days of Germany.
 As to the latter condition making for war, each of regulation. we do moi have war between New York and Brooklyn, or Illinois and Missouri Why? Certainly not for lack of con- tact, but because there exists ade- quate governmental machinery fol regulating this contact. There are plenty of disputes and there is abun- dant pugnacity but all the fighting is done in court or through other lega, processes.
 We can best realize all this if we reflect on the growth Of rapid trans portation. A century ago the nat uraI barriers of mountains, rivers and distance between the countries oi Europe separated them at least as widely as the Atlantic ocean now separates us from Europe, if not as widely as the Pacific separates us from Japan and China. But the railroad, steamship, telegraph. tele- phone and newspaper have virtually destroyed most of these barriers. This growth of transportation and communication, in the absence of ar equal growth of regulation, leads tt war and in three ways.
 CD By making of intermationa trade a great apple of discord, bone of contention, a prize for which tht
 -tsons eagerly and selfishly strive. (2) By increasing the chances Q | ricrioa or irritation Of all kinds. S'