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Essay on Peace

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After a millennium of conflict and war—what chance of a millennium of peace? Some ten millennia ago civilization emerged in the Middle East, as the people of that area learned to till the earth and grow crops, thus opening the way to the ownership of land and the accumulation of wealth, and also to population growth and urban settlement. This new way of life created the potential for conflicts between towns and states and, later, between empires. This civilization brought warfare in its train.

While these new state structures was evolving, Christianity was becoming a predominantly European religion. And the power of that religion’s moral teaching, however much distorted by human failings of clergy and rulers, inspired an extraordinary …show more content…

Not, perhaps, in the short run. But I would be optimistic that over the century ahead peace and order under just such an international rule of law may also take hold gradually in other continents. For global public opinion, alerted and informed by the electronic as well as the printed media, has become increasingly hostile to the brutality of inter-ethnic and inter-state violence and to continuing gross breaches of human rights.

As we enter the third millennium, this should, I believe, become the key objective of public policy worldwide.

I believe it is the dove of peace, which, taking its aerial flight from the dome of the capitol, carries the glad tidings of assured peace and restored harmony to all the remotest extremities of this distracted land. I believe that it will be attended with all these beneficent effects. And now let us discard all resentment, all passions, all petty jealousies, all personal desires, all love of place, all hankerings after the gilded crumbs which fall from the table of power. Let us forget popular fears, from whatever quarter they may spring. Let us go to the limpid fountain of unadulterated patriotism, and, performing a solemn lustration, return divested of all selfish, sinister, and sordid impurities, and think alone of our God, our country, our consciences, and our glorious Union—that

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