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Updated: June 5, 2025
The choice of Paris for the historic Peace Conference was an afterthought. The Anglo-Saxon governments first favored a neutral country as the most appropriate meeting-ground for the world's peace-makers. Holland was mentioned only to be eliminated without discussion, so obvious and decisive were the objections.
Its insertion would involve ourselves in a war we mean of "words, words, words." As a private opinion, we admit the argument of the defence; though it militates so strongly with passion and prejudice that its insertion would be the war-hoop for a whole community of peace-makers to break in upon our literary otium.
The main practical difficulty, with some at least of the peace-makers, is, how to carry themselves toward the undoers of peace, the disuniters of souls.
There were a college of ward-masters, a college of select men, a college of deacons, a college of ammunition, of fortification, of ship-building, all claiming equal authority, and all wrangling among themselves; and there was a college of "peace-makers," who wrangled more than all the rest together. Once a week there was a session of the board or general council.
They encouraged peace-makers, punished peace-breakers. They guarded the fundamental principle, 'ut sua tanerent', to the verge of absurdity; forbidding a freeman, without a freehold, from testifying a capacity not denied even to a country slave. Certainly all this was better than fist-law and courts manorial. For the commencement of the thirteenth century, it was progress.
'Ay, well, ye're a house full of women, and there's an astonishin' little scoldin' and quarrellin'. I should say, taking the cluster of you together, that the one at either end keeps the peace in the middle. Gwen laughed delightedly. 'You are right: Agatha and Elfie are the peace-makers, Clare and I the disturbing elements! What else? But Deb shook her head, and would say no more.
We do not bless the poor in spirit, but the self-confident; we do not bless the meek, but the proud; we do not bless the peace-makers, but those who urge us to prepare for war; we do not bless the reviled and the persecuted and the slandered, but those who revolt against injustice and tyranny; we do not approve the cutting off of the right hand, but admire the mailed fist; and it is only adding to the confusion to raise millions for war ourselves, and then to present a handsomely bound copy of the Beatitudes to our rivals.
Our text teaches this; so does philosophy, and the scriptures generally. Jesus Christ says, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." That is, they shall long enjoy it. "Blessed are the peace-makers for they shall be called the children of God." The fifth Commandment says, "Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."
We will take the great gift of friendship with a new sense of its beauty and sacredness. We will walk more softly because of the experience, and more than ever will tremble lest we lose it. For days after the reconciliation, we will go about with the feeling that the benediction of the peace-makers rests on our head and clings round our feet.
There were no self-conscious peace-makers; no worshippers of those two epicene idols: a God too much man, and a man too much God; no devotees of third-sexism, in the days of Waterloo and Gettysburg, when we had men's tasks to occupy us.
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