The Chairman reminds me that my twenty minutes is expiring. So let me
briefly refer in conclusion to that wonderful address made by Rabbi
Silverman yesterday. In it he seemed to say that religion had broken down
because the war had come. As he spoke I was reminded of going across
Illinois a week ago this morning. I lifted the curtain of my sleeper
berth and there in a little town we were passing through stood a church
with the cross shining above it in a golden radiance across the great
green stretches of the valley—a scene of peace. Then I thought how the
cross and the temple and the mosque were looking down that very May
morning in the valleys of the Vistula, the Marne and the Rhine on guns,
on soldiers and armed camps—a scene of war. Then I thought that the other
strong spiritual forces of the world had not been sufficiently powerful
to bring wars to an end. In the great Public Library here in Cleveland
and in the Libraries of all the warring nations are the works of Goethe
and Schiller, of Hugo and Balzac, of Shakespeare and Milton, of Tolstoi
and Turgenieff—all imperishable contributions to the world’s intellectual
life, but still they have not ended war. Your orchestras as well as those
of Paris, Berlin and London, play the music of Beethoven, Tschaikowsky,
Berlioz and Haydn, and music is one of the most spiritual of the arts,
but it has not ended war. Painting and sculpture are part of the common
heritage of mankind but they have not ended war. Isn’t it possible that
the world has depended too much on these spiritual forces? By that I
mean, the world has not yet been brought to the stage of civilization by
these forces where it can depend on them wholly to end war. The world has
had churches and schools and libraries and galleries—but the world like
this great city and this country and every other city and country needs
a Court House. To my mind, all these spiritual forces have been working
through the generations toward a time, toward this very time, when the
world would be ready for a World Court. That Court is within our grasp.
What is needed is to give it force and power through economic pressure
that will compel its use and it will forthwith become a mighty bulwark of
civilization, protecting the world from the waste and futility and the
utter tragedy of war.