The chief causes which induce men to massacre in all loyalty thousands of their brothers and to expose their own people to the most terrible misery, are the ambitions and jealousies of princes and their ministers.128 Similar views are expressed in the great Encyclopédie:—“La guerre est le plus terrible des fléaux qui détruisent l’espèce humaine: elle n’épargne pas même les vainqueurs; la plus heureuse est funeste. … Ce ne sont plus aujourd’hui les peuples qui déclarent la guerre, c’est la cupidité des rois qui leur fait prendre les armes; c’est l’indigence qui les met aux mains de leurs sujets.”129
121 Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, vi. 239, art. Erasme.
122 Ibid. ii. 463, art. Artaxata.
123 Ibid. i. 472, art. Alting (Henri).
124 Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, art. Guerre (Œuvres complètes, xl. 562).
125 Ibid. p. 564.
126 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, x. 2 (Œuvres complètes, p. 256).
127 Voltaire, loc. cit. p. 565.
128 Ibid. pp. 466, 564. For Voltaire’s condemnation of war, see Morley, Voltaire, p. 311 sq. I have availed myself of Lord Morley’s translation of some of the passages quoted.
129 Encyclopédie méthodique, Art militaire, ii. 618 sq.
However vehemently Voltaire and the Encyclopedists condemned war, they did not dream of a time when all wars would cease. Other writers were more optimistic. Already in 1713 Abbé Saint-Pierre—whose abbotship involved only a nominal connection with the Church—had published a project of perpetual peace, which was based on the idea of a general confederation of European nations.130 This project was much laughed at; Voltaire himself calls its author “un homme moitié philosophe, moitié fou.” But once called into being, the idea of a perpetual peace and of a European confederation did not die. It was successively conceived by Rousseau,131 Bentham,132 and Kant.133 But on the other hand it met with a formidable enemy in the awakening spirit of nationalism.
130 Saint-Pierre, Projet de Traité pour rendre la paix perpétuelle entre les souverains Chrétiens.
131 Rousseau, Extrait du Projet de paix perpétuelle, de M. l’Abbé de Saint-Pierre (Œuvres complètes, i. 606 sqq.).
132 Bentham, A Plan for an universal and perpetual Peace (Works, ii. 546 sqq.).
133 Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden.
The Napoleonic oppression called forth resistance. Philosophers and poets sounded the war trumpet. The dream of a universal monarchy was looked upon as absurd and hateful, and the individuality of a nation as the only possible security for its virtue.134 War was no longer attributed to the pretended interests of princes or to the caprices of their advisers. It was praised as a vehicle of the highest right,135 as a source or national renovation.136 By war, says Hegel, “finite pursuits are rendered unstable, and the ethical health of peoples is preserved. Just as the movement of the ocean prevents the corruption which would be the result of perpetual calm, so by war people escape the corruption which would be occasioned by a continuous or eternal peace.”137 Similar views have been expressed by later writers. War is glorified as a stimulus to the elevated virtues of courage, disinterestedness, and patriotism.138 It has done more great things in the world than the love of man, says Nietzsche.139 It is the mother of art and of all civil virtues, says Mr. Ruskin.140 Others defend war, not as a positive good, but as a necessary means of deciding the most serious international controversies, denying that arbitration can be a substitute for all kinds of war. Questions which are intimately connected with national passions and national aspirations, and questions which are vital to a nation’s safety, will never, they say, be left to arbitration. Each State must be the guardian of its own security, and cannot allow its independence to be calmly discussed and adjudicated upon by an external tribunal.141 Moreover, arbitration would prove effective only where the contradictory pretensions could be juridically formulated, and these instances are by far the less numerous and the less important.142 And would it not, in many cases, be impossible to find impartial arbiters? Would not arbitration often be influenced by a calculation of the forces which every power interested could bring into the field, and would not war be resorted to where arbitration failed to reconcile conflicting interests, or where a decision was opposed to a high-spirited people’s sense of justice? These and similar arguments are constantly adduced against the idea of a perpetual peace. But at the same time the opponents of war are becoming more numerous and more confident every day. Already after the fall of Napoleon, when there was a universal longing for peace in the civilised world, the first Peace Societies were formed;143 and the idea of Saint-Pierre, from being the dream of a philosopher, has become the object of a popular movement which is rapidly increasing in importance. There is every reason to believe that, when the present high tide of nationalism has subsided, and the subject of war and peace is no longer looked upon from an exclusively national point of view, the objections which are now raised against arbitration will at last appear almost as futile as any arguments in favour of private war or blood-revenge. There is an inveterate tendency in the human mind to assume that existing conditions will remain unchanged. But the history of civilisation shows how unfounded any such assumption is with reference to those conditions which determine social relationships and the extent of moral rights and duties.
134 Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation. Cf. Idem, Ueber den Begriff des wahrhaften Krieges.
135 Arndt, quoted by Jähns, Krieg, Frieden und Kultur, p. 302.
136 Anselm von Feuerbach, Unterdrückung und