to prevent it is merely an unwise meddling with the universal law.
National entities, in their birth, activities, and death, are controlled by the same laws that govern all life—plant, animal, or national—the law of struggle, the law of survival. These laws, so universal as regards life and time, so unalterable in causation and consummation, are only variable in the duration of national existence as the knowledge of and obedience to them is proportionately true or false. Plans to thwart them, to shortcut them, to circumvent, to cozen, to deny, to scorn and violate them, is folly such as man's conceit alone makes possible. Never has this been tried—and man is ever at it—but what the end has been gangrenous and fatal. In theory international arbitration denies the inexorability of natural laws, and would substitute for them the veriest Cagliostroic formulas, or would, with the vanity of Canute, sit down on the ocean-side of life and command the ebb and flow of its tides to cease. The idea of international arbitration as a substitute for natural laws that govern the existence of political entities arises not only from a denial of their fiats and an ignorance of their application, but from a total misconception of war, its causes, and its meaning.
Homer Lea's thesis is emphasized in the introduction to his work, written by another American soldier, General John P. Storey:
A few idealists may have visions that with advancing civilization war and its dread horrors will cease. Civilization has not changed human nature. The nature of man makes war inevitable. Armed strife will not disappear from the earth until human nature changes.
"Weltstadt