Federal union in the Third Peace Movement

In his address to the Banquet of the 1904 World Peace Congress in Boston, the American philosopher William James warned his audience to be under no illusion about the challenge they faced. Peace may have seemed the reasonable option, but “[r]eason is one of the feeblest of nature's forces,” especially in confrontation with “[o]ur noted enemy (…) the bellicosity of human nature” (James, 845 “The plain truth,” he observed despondently, “is that people want war. (…) War, they feel, is human nature at its uttermost. It is a sacrament. Society would rot, they think, without the mystical blood payment” (846) Warning that “[w]e do ill (…) to talk much of a universal peace or of a general disarmament,” he called on the delegates instead to “organise in every conceivable way the practical machinery for making each successive chance of war abortive. Seize every pretext, no matter how small, for arbitration methods, and multiply the precedents” (847)

For a movement that had spent much of the nineteenth century formulating seemingly impossible aspirations, the switch to a pragmatic approach was clearly a challenge. Still, of its three overarching goals, arbitration was the area where most progress was likely to be achieved.