Of the motives of the philanthropists, we have little to say.  They are always respectable, and it is a pity that the world should be too wicked to appreciate them.  But those of the economists are open to remark, and the more so because there has been so much claimed for them.  They reduced everything to a matter of interest.  Peace, they reasoned, is for the welfare of all men; and, if an enlightened self-interest could be made to prevail the world over, war would be rendered an impossibility.  Wars between civilized countries have mostly grown out of mistaken views of interest on the part of governments and peoples.  Once enlighten both rulers and ruled, and make them understand that war can not pay, and selfishness will accomplish what religion, and morality, and benevolence, and common sense have failed to accomplish.  Cutting throats may be a very agreeable pastime; but no man ever yet paid for anything more than it was worth, with his eyes wide open to the fact that he was not buying a bargain, but selling himself.  Nations would be as wise as individuals, unless it be true that the sum of intelligence is not so great as the items that compose it; and when it should have been made indisputably clear that to make war was to make losses, while peace should be as indisputably profitable, there would be no further occasion to expend, annually, immense sums upon the support of great armaments, such as were not kept up, even in times of war, by the potentates of earlier days.  The reason of mankind was to be appealed to, and they were to be made saints through the use of practical logic.  Neighborhood, instead of being regarded as cause for enmity, was to be held as ground for good feeling and liberal intercourse.  Under the old system it had been the custom to call France and England ‘natural enemies,’ words that attributed to the Creator the origin of discord.  Under the new system, those great countries were to become the best of friends, as well as the closest of neighbors; and one generation of free commerce was to do away with the effects of five centuries of disputes and warfare.  England was to forget the part which France took in the first American war, and France was to cease to recollect that there had been such days as Crecy and Agincourt, Vittoria and Waterloo; and also that England had overthrown her rule in North America, and driven her people from India.  But it was not France and England only that were to enter within the charmed circle; all nations were to be admitted into it, and the whole world was to fraternize.  It was to be Arcadia in a ring-fence, an Arcadia solidly based upon heavy profits, with consols, rentes, and other public securities—­which in other times had a bad fashion of becoming very insecure—­always at a good premium.  Quarter-day was to be the day for which all other days were made, and it would never be darkened by the imposition of new taxes, by repudiation, or by any other of those things that so often have lessened the felicity of the fund-holder.