Let me sketch out here what I conceive to be the essentials of a world settlement.  Some of the items are the mere commonplaces of everyone who discusses this question; some are less frequently insisted upon.  I have been joining up one thing to another, suggestions I have heard from this man and that, and I believe that it is really possible to state a solution that will be acceptable to the bulk of reasonable men all about the world.  Directly we put the panic-massacres of Dinant and Louvain, the crime of the Lusitania and so on into the category of symptoms rather than essentials, outrages that call for special punishments and reparations, but that do not enter further into the ultimate settlement, we can begin to conceive a possible world treaty.  Let me state the broad outlines of this pacification.  The outlines depend one upon the other; each is a condition of the other.  It is upon these lines that the thoughtful, as distinguished from the merely the combative people, seem to be drifting everywhere.

In the first place, it is agreed that there would have to be an identical treaty between all the great powers of the world binding them to certain things.  It would have to provide:—­

That the few great industrial states capable of producing modern war equipment should take over and control completely the manufacture of all munitions of war in the world.  And that they should absolutely close the supply of such material to all the other states in the world.  This is a far easier task than many people suppose.  War has now been so developed on its mechanical side that the question of its continuance or abolition rests now entirely upon four or five great powers.

Next comes the League of Peace idea; that there should be an International Tribunal for the discussion and settlement of international disputes.  That the dominating powers should maintain land and sea forces only up to a limit agreed upon and for internal police use only or for the purpose of enforcing the decisions of the Tribunal.  That they should all be bound to attack and suppress any power amongst them which increases its war equipment beyond its defined limits.

That much has already been broached in several quarters.  But so far is not enough.  It ignores the chief processes of that economic war that aids and abets and is inseparably a part of modern international conflicts.  If we are to go as far as we have already stated in the matter of international controls, then we must go further and provide that the International Tribunal should have power to consider and set aside all tariffs and localised privileges that seem grossly unfair or seriously irritating between the various states of the world.  It should have power to pass or revise all new tariff, quarantine, alien exclusion, or the like legislation affecting international relations.  Moreover, it should take over and extend the work of the International Bureau of Agriculture at Rome with a view to the control of all staple products.  It should administer the sea law of the world, and control and standardise freights in the common interests of mankind.  Without these provisions it would be merely preventing the use of certain weapons; it would be doing nothing to prevent countries strangling or suffocating each other by commercial warfare.  It would not abolish war.