Such a peace is necessarily precarious, partly because armed force is useful for breaking the peace, partly because the national discrepancies, by which these current peace-makers set such store, are a constant source of embroilment.

What the peace-makers might logically be expected to concern themselves about would be the elimination of these discrepancies that make for embroilment.

But what they actually seem concerned about is their preservation.

A peace by collusive neglect of those remnants of feudalistic make-believe that still serve to divide the pacific nations has hitherto not seriously come under advisement.
Evidently, hitherto, and for the calculable future, peace is a relative matter, a matter of more or less, whichever of the several working conceptions spoken of above may rule the case.

Evidently, too, a peace designed to strengthen the national establishment against eventual war, will count to a different effect from a collusive peace of a defensive kind among the pacific peoples, designed by its projectors to conserve those national discrepancies on which patriotic statesmen like to dwell.
Different from both would be the value of a peace by neglect of such useless national discriminations as now make for embroilment.