World Peace today still has a lot of appeal. Andrew Carnegie like many Americans of his generation witnessed the Civil War, though he never fought in battle and instead helped run the Union railroads he was well aware of the devastation the war brought. If you want to get an idea about the impact of the Civil War on American consciousness read Faust’s The Republic of Suffering But the crucial factor is that Andrew Carnegie was a disciple of Hebert Spencer . Herbert Spencer was one of the most popular intellectuals of the 19th century and he along with T. H. Huxley played a more crucial role in promoting and defending the Theory of evolution than Darwin himself. Spencer was also the founder of Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism has been unfairly characterized by as proto-Nazism that promoted the “the poor be damned” and “might makes right” philosophy, when in fact the Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer believed that the high mark of evolution was that Victorian civilization that was moving away from violence. Rather than seeing the human race as evolving as evil selfish individuals that cut their neighbor’s throats and steal their wives to produce more aggressive selfish offspring Spencer and the Social Darwinists saw man as a social animal who though being driven by selfish desires had evolved to cooperate, this is pretty much the same idea Richard Dawkins has promoted ( The Selfish Gene). Herbert Spencer closely associated with people like John Stewart Mill and the Manchester Liberals and loathed people like Cecil Rhodes. Spencer opposed Imperialism because it was barbaric and held that Victorian civilization had a reach a point where more wealth could be created by industrialization, trade and cooperation rather than the brutal conquest of ancient empires. This is what Carnegie believed and this is also why Carnegie played a curial role in founding the American Anti-Imperialist League Before the outbreak of WWI many people thought that because the world was so globalized, and interconnected that none of the great powers would ever met again to do battle on the scale of Waterloo and Austerlitz. In 1910 Norman Angell a historian published a bestselling book, the Great Illusion which argued this; it was so popular many student groups emerged at English Universities to study this work and promote it… many of these same students would fight and die in WWI. Peace seemed possible for much of Carnegie’s lifetime.