REVUES]: You ask me my view as to the possible success of the Universal Congress of Peace. I hold with Darwin that violent struggle is a law of nature which overrules all other laws; I hold with Joseph de Maistre that it is a divine law; two different ways of describing the same thing.

If by some impossible chance a fraction of human society — all the civilized West, let us suppose — were to succeed in suspending the action of this law, some races of stronger instincts would undertake the task of putting it into action against us: those races would vindicate nature's reasoning against human reason; they would be successful, because the certainty of peace — I do not say PEACE, I say the CERTAINTY OF PEACE — would, in half a century, engender a corruption and a decadence more destructive for