What Price Peace?

A passionate 1920s plea for a world without war, written in the anxious years between the Great War and the gathering storms of the 1930s. Frederick J. Libby, a Quaker peace activist who directed the National Council for Prevention of War, mounts a sharp attack on the prevailing doctrine of "peace through preparedness", the idea that arming nations prevents conflict. He argues the opposite: that endless arms races create fear, waste resources, and make war more likely. Instead, Libby champions concrete alternatives: the World Court, the League of Nations, collective security, and the radical notion that disputes between nations can be settled through law rather than violence. He appeals to public opinion, to education, to the moral conscience of ordinary citizens. What makes this pamphlet haunting is its context, we know now that its hopeful arguments about international cooperation would largely fail by 1939. Yet the document endures as a record of what people believed was possible, and what they feared they were losing. For readers interested in the history of peace movements, the origins of international law, or the eternal question of how nations can stop killing each other.