TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

This is an age of unions. Not merely in the economic sphere, in the working world of unworthy ends and few ideals do we find great practical organizations; but law, medicine, science, art, trade, commerce, politics and political economy—we might add philanthropy—standing institutions, mighty forces in our social and intellectual life, all have helped to swell the number of our nineteenth century Conferences and Congresses. It is an age of Peace Movements and Peace Societies, of peace-loving monarchs and peace-seeking diplomats. This is not to say that we are preparing for the millennium. Men are working together, there is a newborn solidarity of interest, but rivalries between nation and nation, the bitternesses and hatreds inseparable from competition are not less keen; prejudice and misunderstanding not less frequent; subordinate conflicting interests are not fewer, are perhaps, in view of changing political conditions and an ever-growing international commerce, multiplying with every year. The talisman is, perhaps, self-interest, but, none the less, the spirit of union is there; it is impossible to ignore a clearly marked tendency towards international federation, towards political peace. This slow movement was not born with Peace Societies; its consummation lies perhaps far off in the ages to come. History at best moves slowly. But something of its past progress we shall do well to know. No political idea seems to have so great a future before it as this idea of a federation of the world. It is bound to realise itself some day; let us consider what are the chances that this day come quickly, what that it be long delayed. What obstacles lie in the way, and how may they be removed? What historical grounds have we for hoping that they may ever be removed? What, in a word, is the origin and history of the idea of a perpetual peace between nations, and what would be the advantage, what is the prospect of realising it?

The international relations of states find their expression, we are told, in war and peace. What has been the part played by these great counteracting forces in the history of nations? What has it been in prehistoric times, in the life of man in what is called the “state of nature”? “It is no easy enterprise,” says Rousseau, in more than usually careful language, “to disentangle that which is original from that which is artificial in the actual state of man, and to make ourselves well acquainted with a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never has existed and which probably never will exist in the future.” (Preface to the Discourse on the Causes of Inequality, 1753, publ. 1754.) This is a difficulty which Rousseau surmounts only too easily. A knowledge of history, a scientific spirit may fail him: an imagination ever ready to pour forth detail never does. Man lived, says he, “without industry, without speech, without habitation, without war, without connection of any kind, without any need of his fellows or without any desire to harm them ... sufficing to himself.”[2] (Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, 1750.) Nothing, we are now certain, is less probable. We cannot paint the life of man at this stage of his development with any definiteness, but the conclusion is forced upon us that our race had no golden age,[3] no peaceful beginning, that this early state was indeed, as Hobbes held, a state of war, of incessant war between individuals, families and, finally, tribes.

The Early Conditions of Society.

For the barbarian, war is the rule; peace the exception. His gods, like those of Greece, are warlike gods; his spirit, at death, flees to some Valhalla. For him life is one long battle; his arms go with him even to the grave. Food and the means of existence he seeks through plunder and violence. Here right is with might; the battle is to the strong. Nature has given all an equal claim to all things, but not everyone can have them. This state of fearful insecurity is bound to come to an end. “Government,” says Locke, (On Civil Government, Chap. VIII., § 105) “is hardly to be avoided amongst men that live together.”[4] A constant dread of attack and a growing consciousness of the necessity of presenting a united front against it result in the choice of some leader—the head of a family perhaps—who acts, it may be, only as captain of the hosts, as did Joshua in Israel, or who may discharge the simple duties of a primitive governor or king.[5] Peace within is found to be strength without. The civil state is established, so that “if there needs must be war, it may not yet be against all men, nor yet without some helps.” (Hobbes: On Liberty, Chap. I., § 13.) This foundation of the state is the first establishment in history of a peace institution. It changes the character of warfare, it gives it method and system; but it does not bring peace in its train. We have now, indeed, no longer a wholesale war of all against all, a constant irregular raid and plunder of one individual by another; but we have the systematic, deliberate war of community against community, of nation against nation.[6]

War in Classical Times.

In early times, there were no friendly neighbouring nations: beyond the boundaries of every nation’s territory, lay the land of a deadly foe. This was the way of thinking, even of so highly cultured a people as the Greeks, who believed that a law of nature had made every outsider, every barbarian their inferior and their enemy.[7] Their treaties of peace, at the time of the Persian War, were frankly of the kind denounced by Kant, mere armistices concluded for the purpose of renewing their fighting strength. The ancient world is a world of perpetual war in which defeat meant annihilation. In the East no right was recognised in the enemy; and even in Greece and Rome the fate of the unarmed was death or slavery.[8] The barbaric or non-Grecian states had, according to Plato and Aristotle, no claim upon humanity, no rights in fact of any kind. Among the Romans things were little better. According to Mr. T. J. Lawrence—see his Principles of International Law, III., §§ 21, 22—they were worse. For Rome stood alone in the world: she was bound by ties of kinship to no other state. She was, in other words, free from a sense of obligation to other races. War, according to Roman ideas, was made by the gods, apart altogether from the quarrels of rulers or races. To disobey the sacred command, expressed in signs and auguries would have been to hold in disrespect the law and religion of the land. When, in the hour of victory, the Romans refrained from pressing their rights against the conquered—rights recognised by all Roman jurists—it was from no spirit of leniency, but in the pursuit of a prudent and far-sighted policy, aiming at the growth of Roman supremacy and the establishment of a world-embracing empire, shutting out all war as it blotted out natural boundaries, reducing all rights to the one right of imperial citizenship. There was no real jus belli, even here in the cradle of international law; the only limits to the fury of war were of a religious character.

The treatment of a defeated enemy among the Jews rested upon a similar religious foundation. In the East, we find a special cruelty in the conduct of war. The wars of the Jews and Assyrians were wars of extermination. The whole of the Old Testament, it has been said, resounds with the clash of arms.[9] “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!” was the command of Jehovah to his chosen people. Vengeance was bound up in their very idea of the Creator. The Jews, unlike the followers of Mahomet, attempted, and were commanded to attempt no violent conversion[10]; they were then too weak a nation; but they fought, and fought with success against the heathen of neighbouring lands, the Lord of Hosts leading them forth to battle. The God of Israel stood to his chosen people in a unique and peculiarly logical relation. He had made a covenant with them; and, in return for their obedience and allegiance, cared for their interests and advanced their national prosperity. The blood of this elect people could not be suffered to intermix with that of idolaters. Canaan must be cleared of the heathen, on the coming of the children of Israel to their promised land; and mercy to the conquered enemy, even to women, children or animals was held by the Hebrew prophets to be treachery to Jehovah. (Sam. XV.; Josh. VI. 21.)

Hence the attitude of the Jews to neighbouring nations[11] was still more hostile than that of the Greeks. The cause of this difference is bound up with the transition from polytheism to monotheism. The most devout worshipper of the national gods of ancient times could endure to see other gods than his worshipped in the next town or by a neighbouring nation. There was no reason why all should not exist side by side. Religious conflicts in polytheistic countries, when they arose, were due not to the rivalry of conflicting faiths, but to an occasional attempt to put one god above the others in importance. There could be no interest here in the propagation of belief through the sword. But, under the Jews, these relations were entirely altered. Jehovah, their Creator, became the one invisible God. Such an one can suffer no others near him; their existence is a continual insult to him. Monotheism is, in its very nature, a religion of intolerance. Its spirit among the Jews was warlike: it commanded the subjugation of other nations, but its instrument was rather extermination than conversion.

The Attitude of Christianity and the Early Church to War.

From the standpoint of the peace of nations, we may say that the Christian faith, compared with other prominent monotheistic religious systems, occupies an intermediate position between two extremes—the fanaticism of Islam, and to a less extent of Judaism, and the relatively passive attitude of the Buddhist who thought himself bound to propagate his religion, but held himself justified only in the employment of peaceful means. Christianity, on the other hand, contains no warlike principles: it can in no sense be called a religion of the sword, but circumstances gave the history of the Church, after the first few centuries of its existence, a character which cannot be called peace-loving.

This apparent contradiction between the spirit of the new religion and its practical attitude to war has led to some difference of opinion as to the actual teaching of Christ. The New Testament seems, at a superficial glance, to furnish support as readily to the champions of war as to its denouncers. The Messiah is the Prince of Peace (Is. IX. 6, 7; Heb. VI.), and here lies the way of righteousness (Rom. III. 19): but Christ came not to bring peace, but a sword (Matth. X. 34). Such statements may be given the meaning which we wish them to bear—the quoting of Scripture is ever an unsatisfactory form of evidence; but there is no direct statement in the New Testament in favour of war, no saying of Christ which, fairly interpreted, could be understood too regard this proof of human imperfection as less condemnable than any other.[12] When men shall be without sin, nation shall rise up against nation no more. But man the individual can attain peace only when he has overcome the world, when, in the struggle with his lower self, he has come forth victorious. This is the spiritual sword which Christ brought into the world—strife, not with the unbeliever, but with the lower self: meekness and the spirit of the Word of God are the weapons with which man must fight for the Faith.

An elect people there was no longer: Israel had rejected its Messiah. Instead there was a complete brotherhood of all men, the bond and the free, as children of one God. The aim of the Church was a world-empire, bound together by a universal religion. In this sense, as sowing the first seeds of a universal peace, we may speak of Christianity as a re-establishment of peace among mankind.

The later attitude of Christians to war, however, by no means corresponds to the earliest tenets of the Church. Without doubt, certain sects, from the beginning of our era and through the ages up to the present time, held, like the Mennonites and Quakers in our day, that the divine command, “Love your enemies,” could not be reconciled with the profession of a soldier. The early Christians were reproached under the Roman Emperors, before the time of Constantine, with avoiding the citizen’s duty of military service.[13] “To those enemies of our faith,” wrote Origen (Contra Celsum, VIII., Ch. LXXIII., Anti-Nicene Christian Library), “who require us to bear arms for the commonwealth, and to slay men, we can reply: ‘Do not those who are priests at certain shrines, and those who attend on certain gods, as you account them, keep their hands free from blood, that they may with hands unstained and free from human blood offer the appointed sacrifices to your gods; and even when war is upon you, you never enlist the priests in the army. If that, then, is a laudable custom, how much more so, that while others are engaged in battle, these too should engage as the priests and ministers of God, keeping their hands pure, and wrestling in prayers to God on behalf of those who are fighting in a righteous cause, and for the king who reigns righteously, that whatever is opposed to those who act righteously may be destroyed!’ ... And we do take our part in public affairs, when along with righteous prayers we join self-denying exercises and meditations, which teach us to despise pleasures, and not to be led away by them. And none fight better for the king than we do. We do not indeed fight under him, although he require it; but we fight on his behalf, forming a special army—an army of piety—by offering our prayers to God.” The Fathers of the Church, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Ambrose and the rest gave the same testimony against war. The pagan rites connected with the taking of the military oath had no doubt some influence in determining the feeling of the pious with regard to this life of bloodshed; but the reasons lay deeper. “Shall it be held lawful,” asked Tertullian, (De Corona, p. 347) “to make an occupation of the sword, when the Lord proclaims that he who uses the sword shall perish by the sword? And shall the son of peace take part in the battle when it does not become him even to sue at law? And shall he apply the chain, and the prison, and the torture, and the punishment, who is not the avenger even of his own wrongs?”

The doctrine of the Church developed early in the opposite direction. It was its fighting spirit and not a love of peace that made Christianity a state religion under Constantine. Nor was Augustine the first of the Church Fathers to regard military service as permissible. To come to a later time, this change of attitude has been ascribed partly to the rise of Mahometan power and the wave of fanaticism which broke over Europe. To destroy these unbelievers with fire and sword was regarded as a deed of piety pleasing to God. Hence the wars of the Crusades against the infidel were holy wars, and appear as a new element in the history of civilisation. The nations of ancient times had known only civil and foreign war.[14] They had rebelled at home, and they had fought mainly for material interests abroad. In the Middle Ages there were, besides, religious wars and, with the rise of Feudalism, private war:[15] among all the powers of the Dark Ages and for centuries later, none was more aggressive than the Catholic Church, nor a more active and untiring defender of its rights and claims, spiritual or temporal. It was in some respects a more warlike institution than the states of Greece and Rome. It struggled through centuries with the Emperor:[16] it pronounced its ban against disobedient states and disloyal cities: it pursued with its vengeance each heretical or rebellious prince: unmindful of its early traditions about peace, it showed in every crisis a fiercely military spirit.[17]

For more than a thousand years the Church counted fighting clergy[18] among its most active supporters. This strange anomaly was, it must be said, at first rather suffered in deference to public opinion than encouraged by ecclesiastical canons and councils, but it gave rise to great discontent at the time of the Reformation.[19] The whole question of the lawfulness of military service for Christians was then raised again. “If there be anything in the affairs of mortals,” wrote Erasmus at this time (Opera, II., Prov., 951 C) “which it becomes us deliberately to attack, which we ought indeed to shun by every possible means, to avert and to abolish, it is certainly war, than which there is nothing more wicked, more mischievous or more widely destructive in its effects, nothing harder to be rid of, or more horrible and, in a word, more unworthy of a man, not to say of a Christian.”[20] The mediæval Church indeed succeeded, by the establishment of such institutions as the Truce of God, in setting some limits to the fury of the soldier: but its endeavours (and it made several to promote peace)[21] were only to a trifling extent successful. Perhaps custom and public opinion in feudal Europe were too strong, perhaps the Church showed a certain apathy in denouncing the evils of a military society: no doubt the theoretical tenets of its doctrine did less to hinder war than its own strongly military tendency, its lust for power and the force of its example did to encourage it.

Hence, in spite of Christianity and its early vision of a brotherhood of men, the history of the Middle Ages came nearer to a realization of the idea of perpetual war than was possible in ancient times. The tendency of the growth of Roman supremacy was to diminish the number of wars, along with the number of possible causes of racial friction. It united many nations in one great whole, and gave them, to a certain extent, a common culture and common interests; even, when this seemed prudent, a common right of citizenship. The fewer the number of boundaries, the less the likelihood of war. The establishment of great empires is of necessity a force, and a great and permanent force working on the side of peace. With the fall of Rome this guarantee was removed.

The Development of the New Science of International Law.

Out of the ruins of the old feudal system arose the modern state as a free independent unity. Private war between individuals or classes of society was now branded as a breach of the peace: it became the exclusive right of kings to appeal to force. War, wrote Gentilis[22] towards the end of sixteenth century, is the just or unjust conflict between states. Peace was now regarded as the normal condition of society. As a result of these great developments in which the name “state” acquired new meaning, jurisprudence freed itself from the trammelling conditions of mediæval Scholasticism. Men began to consider the problem of the rightfulness or wrongfulness of war, to question even the possibility of a war on rightful grounds. Out of theses new ideas—partly too as one of the fruits of the Reformation,[23]—arose the first consciously formulated principles of the science of international law, whose fuller, but not yet complete, development belongs to modern times.

From the beginning of history every age, every people has something to show here, be it only a rudimentary sense of justice in their dealings with one another. We may instance the Amphictyonic League in Greece which, while it had a merely Hellenic basis and was mainly a religious survival, shows the germ of some attempt at arbitration between Greek states. Among the Romans we have the jus feciale[24] and the jus gentium, as distinguished from the civil law of Rome, and certain military regulations about the taking of booty in war. Ambassadors were held inviolate in both countries; the formal declaration of war was never omitted. Many Roman writers held the necessity of a just cause for war. But nowhere do these considerations form the subject matter of a special science.

In the Middle Ages the development of these ideas received little encouragement. All laws are silent in the time of war,[25] and this was a period of war, both bloody and constant. There was no time to think of the right or wrong of anything. Moreover, the Church emphasised the lack of rights in unbelievers, and gave her blessing on their annihilation.[26] The whole Christian world was filled with the idea of a spiritual universal monarchy. Not such as that in the minds of Greek and Jew and Roman who had been able to picture international peace only under the form of a great national and exclusive empire. In this great Christian state there were to be no distinctions between nations; its sphere was bounded by the universe. But, here, there was no room or recognition for independent national states with equal and personal rights. This recognition, opposed by the Roman Church, is the real basis of international law. The Reformation was the means by which the personality of the peoples, the unity and independence of the state were first openly admitted. On this foundation, mainly at first in Protestant countries, the new science developed rapidly. Like the civil state and the Christian religion, international law may be called a peace institution.

Grotius, Puffendorf and Vattel.

In the beginning of the seventeenth century, Grotius laid the foundations of a code of universal law (De Jure Belli et Pacis, 1625) independent of differences of religion, in the hope that its recognition might simplify the intercourse between the newly formed nations. The primary object of this great work, written during the misery and horrors of the Thirty Years’ war, was expressly to draw attention to these evils and suggest some methods by which the severity of warfare might be mitigated. Grotius originally meant to explain only one chapter of the law of nations:[27] his book was to be called De Jure Belli, but there is scarcely any subject of international law which he leaves untouched. He obtained, moreover, a general recognition for the doctrine of the Law of Nature which exerted so strong an influence upon succeeding centuries; indeed, between these two sciences, as between international law and ethics, he draws no very sharp line of demarcation, although, on the whole, in spite of an unscientific, scholastic use of quotation from authorities, his treatment of the new field is clear and comprehensive. Grotius made the attempt to set up an ethical principle of right, in the stead of such doctrines of self-interest as had been held by many of the ancient writers. There was a law, he held, established in each state purely with a view to the interests of that state, but, besides this, there was another higher law in the interest of the whole society of nations. Its origin was divine; the reason of man commanded his obedience. This was what we call international law.[28]

Grotius distinctly holds, like Kant and Rousseau, and unlike Hobbes, that the state can never be regarded as a unity or institution separable from the people; the terms civitas, communitas, coetus, populus, he uses indiscriminately. But these nations, these independent units of society cannot live together side by side just as they like; they must recognise one another as members of a European society of states.[29] Law, he said, stands above force even in war, “which may only be begun to pursue the right;” and the beginning and manner of conduct of war rests on fixed laws and can be justified only in certain cases. War is not to be done away with: Grotius accepts it as fact,[30] (as Hobbes did later) as the natural method for settling the disputes which were bound constantly to arise between so many independent and sovereign nations. A terrible scourge it must ever remain, but as the only available form of legal procedure, it is sanctioned by the practice of states and not less by the law of nature and of nations. Grotius did not advance beyond this position. Every violation of the law of nations can be settled but in one way—by war, the force of the stronger.

The necessary distinction between law and ethics was drawn by Puffendorf,[31] a successor of Grotius who gave an outwardly systematic form to the doctrine of the great jurist, without adding to it either strength or completeness. His views, when they were not based upon the system of Grotius, were strongly influenced by the speculation of Hobbes, his chronological predecessor, to whom we shall have later occasion to refer. In the works of Vattel,[32] who was, next to Rousseau, the most celebrated of Swiss publicists, we find the theory of the customs and practice in war widely developed, and the necessity for humanising its methods and limiting its destructive effects upon neutral countries strongly emphasised. Grotius and Puffendorf, while they recommend acts of mercy, hold that there is legally no right which requires that a conquered enemy shall be spared. This is a matter of humanity alone. It is to the praise of Vattel that he did much to popularise among the highest and most powerful classes of society, ideas of humanity in warfare, and of the rights and obligations of nations. He is, moreover, the first to make a clear separation between this science and the Law of Nature. What, he asks, is international law as distinguished from the Law of Nature? What are the powers of a state and the duties of nations to one another? What are the causes of quarrel among nations, and what the means by which they can be settled without any sacrifice of dignity?

They are, in the first place, a friendly conciliatory attitude; and secondly, such means of settlement as mediation, arbitration and Peace Congresses. These are the refuges of a peace-loving nation, in cases where vital interests are not at stake. “Nature gives us no right to use force, except where mild and conciliatory measures are useless.” (Law of Nations, II. Ch. xviii. § 331.) “Every power owes it in this matter to the happiness of human society to show itself ready for every means of reconciliation, in cases where the interests at stake are neither vital nor important.” (ibid. § 332.) At the same time, it is never advisable that a nation should forgive an insult which it has not the power to resent.

The Dream of a Perpetual Peace.

But side by side with this development and gradual popularisation of the new science of International Law, ideas of a less practical, but not less fruitful kind had been steadily making their way and obtaining a strong hold upon the popular mind. The Decree of Eternal Pacification of 1495 had abolished private war, one of the heavy curses of the Middle Ages. Why should it not be extended to banish warfare between states as well? Gradually one proposal after another was made to attain this end, or, at least, to smooth the way for its future realisation. The first of these in point of time is to be found in a somewhat bare, vague form in Sully’s Memoirs,[33] said to have been published in 1634. Half a century later the Quaker William Penn suggested an international tribunal of arbitration in the interests of peace.[34] But it was by the French Abbé St. Pierre that the problem of perpetual peace was fairly introduced into political literature: and this, in an age of cabinet and dynastic wars, while the dreary cost of the war of the Spanish succession was yet unpaid. St. Pierre was the first who really clearly realised and endeavoured to prove that the establishment of a permanent state of peace is not only in the interest of the weaker, but is required by the European society of nations and by the reason of man. From the beginning of the history of humanity, poets and prophets had cherished the “sweet dream” of a peaceful civilisation: it is in the form of a practical project that this idea is new.

The ancient world actually represented a state of what was almost perpetual war. This was the reality which confronted man, his inevitable doom, it seemed, as it had been pronounced to the fallen sinners of Eden. Peace was something which man had enjoyed once, but forfeited. The myth- and poetry-loving Greeks, and, later, the poets of Rome delighted to paint a state of eternal peace, not as something to whose coming they could look forward in the future, but as a golden age of purity whose records lay buried in the past, a paradise which had been, but which was no more. Voices, more scientific, were raised even in Greece in attempts, such as Aristotle’s, to show that the evolution of man had been not a course of degeneration from perfection, but of continual progress upwards from barbarism to civilisation and culture. But the change in popular thinking on this matter was due less to the arguments of philosophy than to a practical experience of the causes which operate in the interests of peace. The foundation of a universal empire under Alexander the Great gave temporary rest to nations heretofore incessantly at war. Here was a proof that the Divine Will had not decreed that man was to work out his punishment under unchanging conditions of perpetual warfare. This idea of a universal empire became the Greek ideal of a perpetual peace. Such an empire was, in the language of the Stoics, a world-state in which all men had rights of citizenship, in which all other nations were absorbed.

Parallel to this ideal among the Greeks, we find the hope in Israel of a Messiah whose coming was to bring peace, not only to the Jewish race, but to all the nations of the earth. This idea stands out in the sharpest contrast to the early nationalism of the Hebrew people, who regarded every stranger as an idolater and an enemy. The prophecies of Judaism, combined with the cosmopolitan ideas of Greece, were the source of the idea, which is expressed in the teaching of Christ, of a spiritual world-empire, an empire held together solely by the tie of a common religion.

This hope of peace did not actually die during the first thousand years of our era, nor even under the morally stagnating influences of the Middle Ages. When feudalism and private war were abolished in Europe, it wakened to a new life. Not merely in the mouths of poets and religious enthusiasts was the cry raised against war, but by scholars like Thomas More and Erasmus, jurists like Gentilis and Grotius, men high in the state and in the eyes of Europe like Henry IV. of France and the Duc de Sully or the Abbé de St. Pierre whose Projet de Paix Perpétuelle (1713)[35] obtained immediate popularity and wide-spread fame. The first half of the eighteenth century was already prepared to receive and mature a plan of this kind.

Henry IV. and St. Pierre.

The Grand Dessein of Henry IV. is supposed to have been formed by that monarch and reproduced in Sully’s Memoirs, written in 1634 and discovered nearly a century later by St. Pierre. The story goes that the Abbé found the book buried in an old garden. It has been shewn, however, that there is little likelihood that this project actually originated with the king, who probably corresponded fairly well to Voltaire’s picture of him as war hero of the Henriade. The plan was more likely conceived by Sully, and ascribed to the popular king for the sake of the better hearing and greater influence it might in this way be likely to have, and also because, thereby, it might be less likely to create offence in political circles. St. Pierre himself may or may not have been acquainted with the facts.

The so-called Grand Dessein of Henry IV. was, shortly, as follows.[36] It proposed to divide Europe between fifteen Powers,[37] in such a manner that the balance of power should be established and preserved. These were to form a Christian republic on the basis of the freedom and equality of its members, the armed forces of the federation being supported by fixed contribution. A general council, consisting of representatives from the fifteen states, was to make all laws necessary for cementing the union thus formed and for maintaining the order once established. It would also be the business of this senate to “deliberate on questions that might arise, to occupy themselves with discussing different interests, to settle quarrels amicably, to throw light upon and arrange all the civil, political and religious affairs of Europe, whether internal or foreign.” (Mémoires, vol. VI., p. 129 seq.)

This scheme of the king or his minister was expanded with great thoroughness and clear-sightedness by the Abbé St. Pierre: none of the many later plans for a perpetual peace has been so perfect in details. He proposes that there should be a permanent and perpetual union between, if possible, all Christian sovereigns—of whom he suggests nineteen, excluding the Czar—“to preserve unbroken peace in Europe,” and that a permanent Congress or senate should be formed by deputies of the federated states. The union should protect weak sovereigns, minors during a regency, and so on, and should banish civil as well as international war—it should “render prompt and adequate assistance to rulers and chief magistrates against seditious persons and rebels.” All warfare henceforth is to be waged between the troops of the federation—each nation contributing an equal number—and the enemies of European security, whether outsiders or rebellious members of the union. Otherwise, where it is possible, all disputes occurring within the union are to be settled by the arbitration of the senate, and the combined military force of the federation is to be applied to drive the Turks out of Europe. There is to be a rational rearrangement of boundaries, but after this no change is to be permitted in the map of Europe. The union should bind itself to tolerate the different forms of faith.

The objections to St. Pierre’s scheme are, many of them, obvious. He himself produces sixty-two arguments likely to be raised against his plan, and he examines these in turn with acuteness and eloquence. But there are other criticisms which he was less likely to be able to forestall. Of the nineteen states he names as a basis of the federation, some have disappeared and the governments of others have completely changed. Indeed St. Pierre’s scheme did not look far beyond the present. But it has besides a too strongly political character.[38] From this point of view, the Abbé’s plan amounts practically to a European coalition against the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, we notice with a smile that the French statesman and patriot is not lost in the cosmopolitan political reformer. “The kingdom of Spain shall not go out of the House of Bourbon!”[39] France is to enjoy more than the privileges of honour; she is to reap distinct material and political advantages from the union. Humanity is to be a brotherhood, but, in the federation of nations, France is to stand first.[40] We see that these “rêves d’un homme de bien,” as Cardinal Dubois called them, are not without their practical element. But the great mistake of St. Pierre is this: he actually thought that his plan could be put into execution in the near future, that an ideal of this kind was realisable at once.[41] “I, myself, form’d it,” he says in the preface, “in full expectation to see it one Day executed.” As Hobbes, says, “there can be nothing so absurd, but may be found in the books of philosophers.”[42] St. Pierre was not content to make his influence felt on the statesmen of his time and prepare the way for the abolition of all arbitrary forms of government. This was the flaw which drew down upon the good Abbé Voltaire’s sneering epigram[43] and the irony of Leibniz.[44] Here, above all, in this unpractical enthusiasm his scheme differs from that of Kant.

Rousseau’s Criticism of St. Pierre.

Rousseau took St. Pierre’s project[45] much more seriously than either Leibniz or Voltaire. But sovereigns, he thought, are deaf to the voice of justice; the absolutism of princely power would never allow a king to submit to a tribunal of nations. Moreover war was, according to Rousseau’s experience, a matter not between nations, but between princes and cabinets. It was one of the ordinary pleasures of royal existence and one not likely to be voluntarily given up.[46] We know that history has not supported Rousseau’s contention. Dynastic wars are now no more. The Great Powers have shown themselves able to impose their own conditions, where the welfare and security of Europe have seemed to demand it. Such a development seemed impossible enough in the eighteenth century. In the military organisation of the nations of Europe and in the necessity of making their internal development subordinate to the care for their external security, Rousseau saw the cause of all the defects in their administration.[47] The formation of unions on the model of the Swiss Confederation or the German Bund would, he thought, be in the interest of all rulers. But great obstacles seemed to him to lie in the way of the realisation of such a project as that of St. Pierre. “Without doubt,” says Rousseau in conclusion, “the proposal of a perpetual peace is at present an absurd one.... It can only be put into effect by methods which are violent in themselves and dangerous to humanity. One cannot conceive of the possibility of a federative union being established, except by a revolution. And, that granted, who among us would venture to say whether this European federation is to be desired or to be feared? It would work, perhaps, more harm in a moment than it would prevent in the course of centuries.” (Jugement sur la Paix Perpétuelle.)

The Position of Hobbes.

The most profound and searching analysis of this problem comes from Immanuel Kant, whose indebtedness in the sphere of politics to Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau it is difficult to overestimate. Kant’s doctrine of the sovereignty of the people comes to him from Locke through Rousseau. His explanation of the origin of society is practically that of Hobbes. The direct influence on politics of this philosopher, apart from his share in moulding the Kantian theory of the state, is one we cannot afford to neglect. His was a great influence on the new science just thrown on the world by Grotius, and his the first clear and systematic statement we have of the nature of society and the establishment of the state. The natural state of man, says Hobbes, is a state of war,[48] a bellum omnium contra omnes, where all struggle for honour and for preferment and the prizes to which every individual is by natural right equally entitled, but which can of necessity fall only to the few, the foremost in the race. Men hate and fear the society of their kind, but through this desire to excel are forced to seek it: only where there are many can there be a first. This state of things, this apparent sociability which is brought about by and coupled with the least sociable of instincts, becomes unendurable. “It is necessary to peace,” writes Hobbes (On Dominion, Ch. VI. 3) “that a man be so far forth protected against the violence of others, that he may live securely; that is, that he may have no just cause to fear others, so long as he doth them no injury. Indeed, to make men altogether safe from mutual harms, so as they cannot be hurt or injuriously killed, is impossible; and, therefore, comes not within deliberation.” But to protect them so far as is possible the state is formed. Hobbes has no great faith in human contracts or promises. Man’s nature is malicious and untrustworthy. A coercive power is necessary to guarantee this long-desired security within the community. “We must therefore,” he adds, “provide for our security, not by compacts, but by punishments; and there is then sufficient provision made, when there are so great punishments appointed for every injury, as apparently it prove a greater evil to have done it, than not to have done it. For all men, by a necessity of nature, choose that which to them appears to be the less evil.” (Op. cit., Ch. VI. 4.)

These precautions secure that relative peace within the state which is one of the conditions of the safety of the people. But it is, besides, the duty of a sovereign to guarantee an adequate protection to his subjects against foreign enemies. A state of defence as complete and perfect as possible is not only a national duty, but an absolute necessity. The following statement of the relation of the state to other states shows how closely Hobbes has been followed by Kant. “There are two things necessary,” says Hobbes, (On Dominion, Ch. XIII. 7) “for the people’s defence; to be warned and to be forearmed. For the state of commonwealths considered in themselves, is natural, that is to say, hostile.[49] Neither, if they cease from fighting, is it therefore to be called peace; but rather a breathing time, in which one enemy observing the motion and countenance of the other, values his security not according to pacts, but the forces and counsels of his adversary.”

Hobbes is a practical philosopher: no man was less a dreamer, a follower after ideals than he. He is, moreover, a pessimist, and his doctrine of the state is a political absolutism,[50] the form of government which above all has been, and is, favourable to war. He would no doubt have ridiculed the idea of a perpetual peace between nations, had such a project as that of St. Pierre—a practical project, counting upon a realisation in the near future—been brought before him. He might not even have accepted it in the very much modified form which Kant adopts, that of an ideal—an unattainable ideal—towards which humanity could not do better than work. He expected the worst possible from man the individual. Homo homini lupus. The strictest absolutism, amounting almost to despotism, was required to keep the vicious propensities of the human animal in check. States he looked upon as units of the same kind, members also of a society. They had, and openly exhibited, the same faults as individual men. They too might be driven with a strong enough coercive force behind them, but not without it; and such a coercive force as this did not exist in a society of nations. Federation and federal troops are terms which represent ideas of comparatively recent origin. Without something of this kind, any enduring peace was not to be counted upon. International relations were and must remain at least potentially warlike in character. Under no circumstances could ideal conditions be possible either between the members of a state or between the states themselves. Human nature could form no satisfactory basis for a counsel of perfection.

Hence Hobbes never thought of questioning the necessity of war. It was in his eyes the natural condition of European society; but certain rules were necessary both for its conduct and, where this was compatible with a nation’s dignity and prosperity, for its prevention. He held that international law was only a part of the Law of Nature, and that this Law of Nature laid certain obligations upon nations and their kings. Mediation must be employed between disputants as much as possible, the person of the mediators of peace being held inviolate; an umpire ought to be chosen to decide a controversy, to whose judgment the parties in dispute agree to submit themselves; such an arbiter must be impartial. These are all what Hobbes calls precepts of the Law of Nature. And he appeals to the Scriptures in confirmation of his assertion that peace is the way of righteousness and that the laws of nature of which these are a few are also laws of the heavenly kingdom. But peace is like the straight path of Christian endeavour, difficult to find and difficult to keep. We must seek after it where it may be found; but, having done this and sought in vain, we have no alternative but to fall back upon war. Reason requires “that every man ought to endeavour peace,” (Lev. I. Ch. XIV.) “as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, all helps, and advantages of war.”[51] This, says Hobbes elsewhere, (On Liberty, Ch. I. 15) is the dictate of right reason, the first and fundamental law of nature.

Kant’s Idea of a Perpetual Peace.

With regard to the problems of international law, Kant is of course a hundred and fifty years ahead of Hobbes. But he starts from the same point: his theory of the beginning of society is practically identical with that of the older philosopher. Men are by nature imperfect creatures, unsociable and untrustworthy, cursed by a love of glory, of possession, and of power, passions which make happiness something for ever unattainable by them. Hobbes is content to leave them here with their imperfections, and let a strong government help them out as it may. But not so Kant. He looks beyond man the individual, developing slowly by stages scarcely measurable, progressing at one moment, and the next, as it seems, falling behind: he looks beyond the individual, struggling and never attaining, to the race. Here Kant is no pessimist. The capacities implanted in man by nature are not all for evil: they are, he says, “destined to unfold themselves completely in the course of time, and in accordance with the end to which they are adapted.” (Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, 1784. Prop. 1.) This end of humanity is the evolution of man from the stage of mere self-satisfied animalism to a high state of civilisation. Through his own reason man is to attain a perfect culture, intellectual and moral. In this long period of struggle, the potential faculties which nature or Providence has bestowed upon him reach their full development. The process in which this evolution takes place is what we call history.

To man nature has given none of the perfect animal equipments for self-preservation and self-defence which she has bestowed on others of her creatures. But she has given to him reason and freedom of will, and has determined that through these faculties and without the aid of instinct he shall win for himself a complete development of his capacities and natural endowments. It is, says Kant, no happy life that nature has marked out for man. He is filled with desires which he can never satisfy. His life is one of endeavour and not of attainment: not even the consciousness of the well-fought battle is his, for the struggle is more or less an unconscious one, the end unseen. Only in the race, and not in the individual, can the natural capacities of the human species reach full development. Reason, says Kant, (Prop. 2, op. cit.) “does not itself work by instinct, but requires experiments, exercise and instruction in order to advance gradually from one stage of insight to another. Hence each individual man would necessarily have to live an enormous length of time, in order to learn by himself how to make a complete use of all his natural endowments. Or, if nature should have given him but a short lease of life, as is actually the case, reason would then require an almost interminable series of generations, the one handing down its enlightenment to the other, in order that the seeds she has sown in our species may be brought at last to a stage of development which is in perfect accordance with her design.” Man the individual shall travel towards the land of promise and fight for its possession, but not he, nor his children, nor his children’s children shall inherit the land. “Only the latest comers can have the good fortune of inhabiting the dwelling which the long series of their predecessors have toiled—though,” adds Kant, “without any conscious intent—to build up without even the possibility of participating in the happiness which they were preparing.” (Proposition 3.)

The means which nature employs to bring about this development of all the capacities implanted in men is their mutual antagonism in society—what Kant calls the “unsocial sociableness of men, that is to say, their inclination to enter into society, an inclination which yet is bound up at every point with a resistance which threatens continually to break up the society so formed.” (Proposition 4.) Man hates society, and yet there alone he can develop his capacities; he cannot live there peaceably, and yet cannot live without it. It is the resistance which others offer to his inclinations and will—which he, on his part, shows likewise to the desires of others—that awakens all the latent powers of his nature and the determination to conquer his natural propensity to indolence and love of material comfort and to struggle for the first place among his fellow-creatures, to satisfy, in outstripping them, his love of glory and possession and power. “Without those, in themselves by no means lovely, qualities which set man in social opposition to man, so that each finds his selfish claims resisted by the selfishness of all the others, men would have lived on in an Arcadian shepherd life, in perfect harmony, contentment, and mutual love; but all their talents would forever have remained hidden and undeveloped. Thus, kindly as the sheep they tended, they would scarcely have given to their existence a greater value than that of their cattle. And the place among the ends of creation which was left for the development of rational beings would not have been filled. Thanks be to nature for the unsociableness, for the spiteful competition of vanity, for the insatiate desires of gain and power! Without these, all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would have slumbered undeveloped. Man’s will is for harmony; but nature knows better what is good for his species: her will is for dissension. He would like a life of comfort and satisfaction, but nature wills that he should be dragged out of idleness and inactive content and plunged into labour and trouble, in order that he may be made to seek in his own prudence for the means of again delivering himself from them. The natural impulses which prompt this effort,—the causes of unsociableness and mutual conflict, out of which so many evils spring,—are also in turn the spurs which drive him to the development of his powers. Thus, they really betray the providence of a wise Creator, and not the interference of some evil spirit which has meddled with the world which God has nobly planned, and enviously overturned its order.” (Proposition 4: Caird’s translation in The Critical Philosophy of Kant, Vol. II., pp. 550, 551.)

The problem now arises, How shall men live together, each free to work out his own development, without at the same time interfering with a like liberty on the part of his neighbour? The solution of this problem is the state. Here the liberty of each member is guaranteed and its limits strictly defined. A perfectly just civil constitution, administered according to the principles of right, would be that under which the greatest possible amount of liberty was left to each citizen within these limits. This is the ideal of Kant, and here lies the greatest practical problem which has presented itself to humanity. An ideal of this kind is difficult of realisation. But nature imposes no such duty upon us. “Out of such crooked material as man is made,” says Kant, “nothing can be hammered quite straight.” (Proposition 6.) We must make our constitution as good as we can and, with that, rest content.

The direct cause of this transition from a state of nature and conditions of unlimited freedom to civil society with its coercive and restraining forces is found in the evils of that state of nature as they are painted by Hobbes. A wild lawless freedom becomes impossible for man: he is compelled to seek the protection of a civil society. He lives in uncertainty and insecurity: his liberty is so far worthless that he cannot peacefully enjoy it. For this peace he voluntarily yields up some part of his independence. The establishment of the state is in the interest of his development to a higher civilisation. It is more—the guarantee of his existence and self-preservation. This is the sense, says Professor Paulsen, in which Kant like Hobbes regards the state as “resting on a contract,”[52] that is to say, on the free will of all.[53] Volenti non fit injuria. Only, adds Paulsen, we must remember that this contract is not a historical fact, as it seemed to some writers of the eighteenth century, but an “idea of reason”: we are speaking here not of the history of the establishment of the state, but of the reason of its existence. (Paulsen’s Kant, p. 354.)[54]

In this civil union, self-sought, yet sought reluctantly, man is able to turn his most unlovable qualities to a profitable use. They bind this society together. They are the instrument by which he wins for himself self-culture. It is here with men, says Kant, as it is with the trees in a forest: “just because each one strives to deprive the other of air and sun, they compel each other to seek both above, and thus they grow beautiful and straight. Whereas those that, in freedom and isolation from one another, shoot out their branches at will, grow stunted and crooked and awry.” (Proposition 5, op. cit.) Culture, art, and all that is best in the social order are the fruits of that self-loving unsociableness in man.

The problem of the establishment of a perfect civil constitution cannot be solved, says this treatise (Idea for a Universal History), until the external relations of states are regulated in accordance with principles of right. For, even if the ideal internal constitution were attained, what end would it serve in the evolution of humanity, if commonwealths themselves were to remain like individuals in a state of nature, each existing in uncontrolled freedom, a law unto himself? This condition of things again cannot be permanent. Nature uses the same means as before to bring about a state of law and order. War, present or near at hand, the strain of constant preparation for a possible future campaign or the heavy burden of debt and devastation left by the last,—these are the evils which must drive states to leave a lawless, savage state of nature, hostile to man’s inward development, and seek in union the end of nature, peace. All wars are the attempts nature makes to bring about new political relations between nations, relations which, in their very nature, cannot be, and are not desired to be, permanent. These combinations will go on succeeding each other, until at last a federation of all powers is formed for the establishment of perpetual peace. This is the end of humanity, demanded by reason. Justice will reign, not only in the state, but in the whole human race when perpetual peace exists between the nations of the world.

This is the point of view of the Idea for a Universal History. But equally, we may say, law and justice will reign between nations, when a legally and morally perfect constitution adorns the state. External perpetual peace presupposes internal peace—peace civil, social, economic, religious. Now, when men are perfect—and what would this be but perfection—how can there be war? Cardinal Fleury’s only objection—no light one—to St. Pierre’s project was that, as even the most peace-loving could not avoid war, all men must first be men of noble character. This seems to be what is required in the treatise on Perpetual Peace. Kant demands, to a certain extent, the moral regeneration of man. There must be perfect honesty in international dealings, good faith in the interpretation and fulfilment of treaties and so on (Art. 1)[55]: and again, every state must have a republican constitution—a term by which Kant understands a constitution as nearly as possible in accordance with the spirit of right. (Art. 1.)[56] This is to say that we have to start with our reformation at home, look first to the culture and education and morals of our citizens, then to our foreign relations. This is a question of self-interest as well as of ethics. On the civil and religious liberty of a state depends its commercial success. Kant saw the day coming, when industrial superiority was to be identified with political pre-eminence. The state which does not look to the enlightenment and liberty of its subjects must fail in the race. But the advantages of a high state of civilisation are not all negative. The more highly developed the individuals who form a state, the more highly developed is its consciousness of its obligations to other nations. In the ignorance and barbarism of races lies the great obstacle to a reign of law among states. Uncivilised states cannot be conceived as members of a federation of Europe. First, the perfect civil constitution according to right: then the federation of these law-abiding Powers. This is the path which reason marks out. The treatise on Perpetual Peace seems to be in this respect more practical than the Idea for a Universal History. But it matters little which way we take it. The point of view is the same in both cases: the end remains the development of man towards good, the order of his steps in this direction is indifferent.

The Political and Social Conditions of Kant’s Time.

The history of the human race, viewed as a whole, Kant regards as the realisation of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution internally and externally perfect—the only condition under which the faculties of man can be fully developed. Does experience support this theory? Kant thought that, to a certain degree, it did. This conviction was not, however, a fruit of his experience of citizenship in Prussia, an absolute dynastic state, a military monarchy waging perpetual dynastic wars of the kind he most hotly condemned. Kant had no feeling of love to Prussia,[57] and little of a citizen’s patriotic pride, or even interest, in its political achievements. This was partly because of his sympathy with republican doctrines: partly due to his love of justice and peculiar hatred of war,[58] a hatred based, no doubt, not less on principle than on a close personal experience of the wretchedness it brings with it. It was not the political and social conditions in which he lived which fostered Kant’s love of liberty and gave him inspiration, unless in the sense in which the mind reacts upon surrounding influences. Looking beyond Prussia to America, in whose struggle for independence he took a keen interest, and looking to France where the old dynastic monarchy had been succeeded by a republican state, Kant seemed to see the signs of a coming democratisation of the old monarchical society of Europe. In this growing influence on the state of the mass of the people who had everything to lose in war and little to gain by victory, he saw the guarantee of a future perpetual peace. Other forces too were at work to bring about this consummation. There was a growing consciousness that war, this costly means of settling a dispute, is not even a satisfactory method of settlement. Hazardous and destructive in its effect, it is also uncertain in its results. Victory is not always gain; it no longer signifies a land to be plundered, a people to be sold to slavery. It brings fresh responsibilities to a nation, at a time when it is not always strong enough to bear them. But, above all, Kant saw, even at the end of the eighteenth century, the nations of Europe so closely bound together by commercial interests that a war—and especially a maritime war where the scene of conflict cannot be to the same extent localised as on land—between any two of them could not but seriously affect the prosperity of the others.[59] He clearly realised that the spirit of commerce was the strongest force in the service of the maintenance of peace, and that in it lay a guarantee of future union.

This scheme of a federation of the nations of the world, in accordance with principles which would put an end to war between them, was one whose interest for Kant seemed to increase during the last twenty years of his life.[60] It was according to him an idea of reason, and, in his first essay on the subject—that of 1784—we see the place this ideal of a perpetual peace held in the Kantian system of philosophy. Its realisation is the realisation of the highest good—the ethical and political summum bonum, for here the aims of morals and politics coincide: only in a perfect development of his faculties in culture and in morals can man at last find true happiness. History is working towards the consummation of this end. A moral obligation lies on man to strive to establish conditions which bring its realisation nearer. It is the duty of statesmen to form a federative union as it was formerly the duty of individuals to enter the state. The moral law points the way here as clearly as in the sphere of pure ethics:—“Thou can’st, therefore thou ought’st.”

Let us be under no misapprehension as to Kant’s attitude to the problem of perpetual peace. It is an ideal. He states plainly that he so regards it[61] and that as such it is unattainable. But this is the essence of all ideals: they have not the less value in shaping the life and character of men and nations on that account. They are not ends to be realised but ideas according to which we must live, regulative principles. We cannot, says Kant, shape our life better than in acting as if such ideas of reason have objective validity and there be an immortal life in which man shall live according to the laws of reason, in peace with his neighbour and in freedom from the trammels of sense.

Hence we are concerned here, not with an end, but with the means by which we might best set about attaining it, if it were attainable. This is the subject matter of the Treatise on Perpetual Peace (1795), a less eloquent and less purely philosophical essay than that of 1784, but throughout more systematic and practical. We have to do, not with the favourite dream of philanthropists like St. Pierre and Rousseau, but with a statement of the conditions on the fulfilment of which the transition to a reign of peace and law depends.

The Conditions of the Realisation of the Kantian Ideal.

These means are of two kinds. In the first place, what evils must we set about removing? What are the negative conditions? And, secondly, what are the general positive conditions which will make the realisation of this idea possible and guarantee the permanence of an international peace once attained? These negative and positive conditions Kant calls Preliminary and Definitive Articles respectively, the whole essay being carefully thrown into the form of a treaty. The Preliminary Articles of a treaty for perpetual peace are based on the principle that anything that hinders or threatens the peaceful co-existence of nations must be abolished. These conditions have been classified by Kuno Fischer. Kant, he points out,[62] examines the principles of right governing the different sets of circumstances in which nations find themselves—namely, (a) while they are actually at war; (b) when the time comes to conclude a treaty of peace; (c) when they are living in a state of peace. The six Preliminary Articles fall naturally into these groups. War must not be conducted in such a manner as to increase national hatred and embitter a future peace. (Art. 6.)[63] The treaty which brings hostilities to an end must be concluded in an honest desire for peace. (Art. 1.)[64] Again a nation, when in a state of peace, must do nothing to threaten the political independence of another nation or endanger its existence, thereby giving the strongest of all motives for a fresh war. A nation may commit this injury in two ways: (1) indirectly, by causing danger to others through the growth of its standing army (Art. 3)[65]—always a menace to the state of peace—or by any unusual war preparations: and (2) through too great a supremacy of another kind, by amassing money, the most powerful of all weapons in warfare. The National Debt (Art. 4)[66] is another standing danger to the peaceful co-existence of nations. But, besides, we have the danger of actual attack. There is no right of intervention between nations. (Art. 5.)[67] Nor can states be inherited or conquered (Art. 2),[68] or in any way treated in a manner subversive of their independence and sovereignty as individuals. For a similar reason, armed troops cannot be hired and sold as things.

These then are the negative conditions of peace.[69] There are, besides, three positive conditions:

(a) The intercourse of nations is to be confined to a right of hospitality. (Art. 3.)[70] There is nothing new to us in this assertion of a right of way. The right to free means of international communication has in the last hundred years become a commonplace of law. And the change has been brought about, as Kant anticipated, not through an abstract respect for the idea of right, but through the pressure of purely commercial interests. Since Kant’s time the nations of Europe have all been more or less transformed from agricultural to commercial states whose interests run mainly in the same direction, whose existence and development depend necessarily upon “conditions of universal hospitality.” Commerce depends upon this freedom of international intercourse, and on commerce mainly depends our hope of peace.

(b) The first Definitive Article[71] requires that the constitution of every state should be republican. What Kant understands by this term is that, in the state, law should rule above force and that its constitution should be a representative one, guaranteeing public justice and based on the freedom and equality of its members and their mutual dependence on a common legislature. Kant’s demand is independent of the form of the government. A constitutional monarchy like that of Prussia in the time of Frederick the Great, who regarded himself as the first servant of the state and ruled with the wisdom and forethought which the nation would have had the right to demand from such an one—such a monarchy is not in contradiction to the idea of a true republic. That the state should have a constitution in accordance with the principles of right is the essential point.[72] To make this possible, the law-giving power must lie with the representatives of the people: there must be a complete separation, such as Locke and Rousseau demand, between the legislature and executive. Otherwise we have despotism. Hence, while Kant admitted absolutism under certain conditions, he rejected democracy where, in his opinion, the mass of the people was despot.

An internal constitution, firmly established on the principles of right, would not only serve to kill the seeds of national hatred and diminish the likelihood of foreign war. It would do more: it would destroy sources of revolution and discontent within the state. Kant, like many writers on this subject, does not directly allude to civil war[73] and the means by which it may be prevented or abolished. Actually to achieve this would be impossible: it is beyond the power of either arbitration or disarmament. But in a representative government and the liberty of a people lie the greatest safeguards against internal discontent. Civil peace and international peace must to a certain extent go hand in hand.

We come now to the central idea of the treatise: (c) the law of nations must be based upon a federation of free states. (Art. 2.)[74] This must be regarded as the end to which mankind is advancing. The problem here is not out of many nations to make one. This would be perhaps the surest way to attain peace, but it is scarcely practicable, and, in certain forms, it is undesirable. Kant is inclined to approve of the separation of nations by language and religion, by historical and social tradition and physical boundaries: nature seems to condemn the idea of a universal monarchy.[75] The only footing on which a thorough-going, indubitable system of international law is in practice possible is that of the society of nations: not the world-republic[76] the Greeks dreamt of, but a federation of states. Such a union in the interests of perpetual peace between nations would be the “highest political good.” The relation of the federated states to one another and to the whole would be fixed by cosmopolitan law: the link of self-interest which would bind them would again be the spirit of commerce.

This scheme of a perpetual peace had not escaped ridicule in the eighteenth century: the name of Kant protected it henceforth. The facts of history, even more conclusively than the voices of philosophers, soldiers and princes, show how great has been the progress of this idea in recent years. But it has not gained its present hold upon the popular mind without great and lasting opposition. Indeed we have here what must still be regarded as a controversial question. There have been, and are still, men who regard perpetual peace as a state of things as undesirable as it is unattainable. For such persons, war is a necessity of our civilisation: it is impossible that it should ever cease to exist. All that we can do, and there is no harm, nor any contradiction in the attempt, is to make wars shorter, fewer and more humane: the whole question, beyond this, is without practical significance. Others, on the other hand,—and these perhaps more thoughtful—regard war as hostile to culture, an evil of the worst kind, although a necessary evil. In peace, for them, lies the true ideal of humanity, although in any perfect form this cannot be realised in the near future. The extreme forms of these views are to be sought in what has been called in Germany “the philosophy of the barracks” which comes forward with a glorification of war for its own sake, and in the attitude of modern Peace Societies which denounce all war wholesale, without respect of causes or conditions.

Hegel, Schiller and Moltke.

Hegel, the greatest of the champions of war, would have nothing to do with Kant’s federation of nations formed in the interests of peace. The welfare of a state, he held, is its own highest law; and he refused to admit that this welfare was to be sought in an international peace. Hegel lived in an age when all power and order seemed to lie with the sword. Something of the charm of Napoleonism seems to hang over him. He does not go the length of writers like Joseph de Maistre, who see in war the finger of God or an arrangement for the survival of the fittest—a theory, as far as regards individuals, quite in contradiction with the real facts, which show that it is precisely the physically unfit whom war, as a method of extermination, cannot reach. But, like Schiller and Moltke, Hegel sees in war an educative instrument, developing virtues in a nation which could not be fully developed otherwise, (much as pain and suffering bring patience and resignation and other such qualities into play in the individual), and drawing the nation together, making each citizen conscious of his citizenship, as no other influence can. War, he holds, leaves a nation always stronger than it was before; it buries causes of inner dissension, and consolidates the internal power of the state.[77] No other trial can, in the same way, show what is the real strength and weakness of a nation, what it is, not merely materially, but physically, intellectually and morally.

With this last statement most people will be inclined to agree. There is only a part of the truth in Napoleon’s dictum that “God is on the side of the biggest battalions”; or in the old saying that war requires three necessaries—in the first place, money; in the second place, money; and in the third, money. Money is a great deal: it is a necessity; but what we call national back-bone and character is more. So far we are with Hegel. But he goes further. In peace, says he, mankind would grow effeminate and degenerate in luxury. This opinion was expressed in forcible language in his own time by Schiller,[78] and in more recent years by Count Moltke. “Perpetual peace,” says a letter of the great general,[79] “is a dream and not a beautiful dream either: war is part of the divine order of the world. During war are developed the noblest virtues which belong to man—courage and self-denial, fidelity to duty and the spirit of self-sacrifice: the soldier is called upon to risk his life. Without war the world would sink in materialism.”[80] “Want and misery, disease, suffering and war,” he says elsewhere, “are all given elements in the Divine order of the universe.” Moltke’s eulogy of war, however, is somewhat modified by his additional statement that “the greatest kindness in war lies in its being quickly ended.” (Letter to Bluntschli, 11th Dec., 1880.)[81] The great forces which we recognise as factors in the moral regeneration of mankind are always slow of action as they are sure. War, if too quickly over, could not have the great moral influence which has been attributed to it. The explanation may be that it is not all that it naturally appears to a great and successful general. Hegel, Moltke, Trendelenburg, Treitschke[82] and the others—not Schiller[83] who was able to sing the blessings of peace as eloquently as of war—were apt to forget that war is as efficient a school for forming vices as virtues; and that, moreover, those virtues which military life is said to cultivate—courage, self-sacrifice and the rest—can be at least as perfectly developed in other trials. There are in human life dangers every day bravely met and overcome which are not less terrible than those which face the soldier, in whom patriotism may be less a sentiment than a duty, and whose cowardice must be dearly paid.

War under Altered Conditions.

The Peace Societies of our century, untiring supporters of a point of view diametrically opposite to that of Hegel, owe their existence in the first place to new ideas on the subject of the relative advantages and disadvantages of war, which again were partly due to changes in the character of war itself, partly to a new theory that the warfare of the future should be a war of free competition for industrial interests, or, in Herbert Spencer’s language, that the warlike type of mankind should make room for an industrial type. This theory, amounting in the minds of some thinkers to a fervid conviction, and itself, in a sense, the source of what has been contemptuously styled our British “shopkeeper’s policy” in Europe, was based on something more solid than mere enthusiasm. The years of peace which followed the downfall of Napoleon had brought immense increase in material wealth to countries like France and Britain. Something of the glamour had fallen away from the sword of the great Emperor. The illusive excitement of a desire for conquest had died: the glory of war had faded with it, but the burden still remained: its cost was still there, something to be calmly reckoned up and not soon to be forgotten. Europe was seen to be actually moving towards ruin. “We shall have to get rid of war in all civilised countries,” said Louis Philippe in 1843. “Soon no nation will be able to afford it.” War was not only becoming more costly. New conditions had altered it in other directions. With the development of technical science and its application to the perfecting of methods and instruments of destruction every new war was found to be bloodier than the last; and the day seemed to be in sight, when this very development would make war (with instruments of extermination) impossible altogether. The romance and picturesqueness with which it was invested in the days of hand-to-hand combat was gone. But, above all, war was now waged for questions fewer and more important than in the time of Kant. Napoleon’s successful appeal to the masses had suggested to Prussia the idea of consciously nationalising the army. Our modern national wars exact a sacrifice, necessarily much more heavy, much more reluctantly made than those of the past which were fought with mercenary troops. Such wars have not only greater dignity: they are more earnest, and their issue, as in a sense the issue of conflict between higher and lower types of civilisation, is speedier and more decisive.

In the hundred years since Kant’s death, much that he prophesied has come to pass, although sometimes by different paths than he anticipated. The strides made in recent years by commerce and the growing power of the people in every state have had much of the influence which he foretold. There is a greater reluctance to wage war.[84] But, unfortunately, as Professor Paulsen points out, the progress of democracy and the nationalisation of war have not worked merely in the direction of progress towards peace. War has now become popular for the first time. “The progress of democracy in states,” he says, (Kant, p. 364[85]) “has not only not done away with war, but has very greatly changed the feeling of people towards it. With the universal military service, introduced by the Revolution, war has become the people’s affair and popular, as it could not be in the case of dynastic wars carried on with mercenary troops.” In the people the love of peace is strong, but so too is the love of a fight, the love of victory.

It is in the contemplation of facts and conflicting tendencies like these that Peace Societies[86] have been formed. The peace party is, we may say, an eclectic body: it embraces many different sections of political opinion. There are those who hold, for instance, that peace is to be established on a basis of communism of property. There are others who insist on the establishment throughout Europe of a republican form of government, or again, on a redistribution of European territory in which Alsace-Lorraine is restored to France—changes of which at least the last two would be difficult to carry out, unless through international warfare. But these are not the fundamental general principles of peace workers. The members of this party agree in rejecting the principle of intervention, in demanding a complete or partial disarmament of the nations of Europe, and in requiring that all disputes between nations—and they admit the prospects of dispute—should be settled by means of arbitration. In how far are these principles useful or practicable?

The Value of Arbitration.

There is a strong feeling in favour of arbitration on the part of all classes of society. It is cheaper under all circumstances than war. It is a judgment at once more certain and more complete, excluding as far as possible the element of chance, leaving irritation perhaps behind it, but none of the lasting bitterness which is the legacy of every war. Arbitration has an important place in all peace projects except that of Kant, whose federal union would naturally fulfil the function of a tribunal of arbitration. St. Pierre, Jeremy Bentham,[87] Bluntschli[88] the German publicist, Professor Lorimer[89] and others among political writers,[90] and among rulers, Louis Napoleon and the Emperor Alexander I. of Russia, have all made proposals more or less ineffectual for the peaceful settlement of international disputes. A number of cases have already been decided by this means. But let us examine the questions which have been at issue. Of a hundred and thirty matters of dispute settled by arbitration since 1815 (cf. International Tribunals, published by the Peace Society, 1899) it will be seen that all, with the exception of one or two trifling cases of doubt as to the succession to certain titles or principalities, can be classified roughly under two heads—disputes as to the determination of boundaries or the possession of certain territory, and questions of claims for compensation and indemnities due either to individuals or states, arising from the seizure of fleets or merchant vessels, the insult or injury to private persons and so on—briefly, questions of money or of territory. These may fairly be said to be trifling causes, not touching national honour or great political questions. That they should have been settled in this way, however, shows a great advance. Smaller causes than these have made some of the bloodiest wars in history. That arbitration should have been the means of preventing even one war which would otherwise have been waged is a strong reason why we should fully examine its claims. “Quand l’institution d’une haute cour,” writes Laveleye, (Des causes actuelles de guerre en Europe et de l’arbitrage) “n’éviterait qu’une guerre sur vingt, il vaudrait encore la peine de l’établir.” But history shows us that there is no single instance of a supreme conflict having been settled otherwise than by war. Arbitration is a method admirably adapted to certain cases: to those we have named, where it has been successfully applied, to the interpretation of contracts, to offences against the Law of Nations—some writers say to trivial questions of honour—in all cases where the use of armed force would be impossible, as, for instance, in any quarrel in which neutralised countries[91] like Belgium or Luxembourg should take a principal part, or in a difference between two nations, such as (to take an extreme case) the United States and Switzerland, which could not easily engage in actual combat. These cases, which we cannot too carefully examine, show that what is here essential is that it should be possible to formulate a juridical statement of the conflicting claims. In Germany the Bundestag had only power to decide questions of law. Other disputes were left to be fought out. Questions on which the existence and vital honour of a state depend—any question which nearly concerns the disputants—cannot be reduced to any cut and dry legal formula of right and wrong. We may pass over the consideration that in some cases (as in the Franco-Prussian War) the delay caused by seeking mediation of any kind would deprive a nation of the advantage its state of military preparation deserved. And we may neglect the problem of finding an impartial judge on some questions of dispute, although its solution might be a matter of extreme difficulty, so closely are the interests of modern nations bound up in one another. How could the Eastern Question, for example, be settled by arbitration? It is impossible that such a means should be sufficient for every case. Arbitration in other words may prevent war, but can never be a substitute for war. We cannot wonder that this is so. So numerous and conflicting are the interests of states, so various are the grades of civilisation to which they have attained and the directions along which they are developing, that differences of the most vital kind are bound to occur and these can never be settled by any peaceful means at present known to Europe. This is above all true where the self-preservation[92] or independence of a people are concerned. Here the “good-will” of the nations who disagree would necessarily be wanting: there could be no question of the arbitration of an outsider.

But, indeed, looking away from questions so vital and on which there can be little difference of opinion, we are apt to forget, when we allow ourselves to talk extravagantly of the future of arbitration, that every nation thinks, or at least pretends to think, that it is in the right in every dispute in which it appears (cf. Kant: Perpetual Peace, p. 120.): and, as a matter of history, there has never been a conflict between civilised states in which an appeal to this “right” on the part of each has not been made. We talk glibly of the right and wrong of this question or of that, of the justice of this war, the iniquity of that. But what do these terms really mean? Do we know, in spite of the labour which has been spent on this question by the older publicists, which are the causes that justify a war? Is it not true that the same war might be just in one set of circumstances and unjust in another? Practically all writers on this subject, exclusive of those who apply the biblical doctrine of non-resistance, agree in admitting that a nation is justified in defending its own existence or independence, that this is even a moral duty as it is a fundamental right of a state. Many, especially the older writers, make the confident assertion that all wars of defence are just. But will this serve as a standard? Gibbon tells us somewhere, that Livy asserts that the Romans conquered the world in self-defence. The distinction between wars of aggression and defence is one very difficult to draw. The cause of a nation which waits to be actually attacked is often lost: the critical moment in its defence may be past. The essence of a state’s defensive power may lie in a readiness to strike the first blow, or its whole interests may be bound up in the necessity of fighting the matter out in its enemy’s country, rather than at home. It is not in the strictly military interpretation of the term “defensive”, but in its wider ethical and political sense that we can speak of wars of defence as just. But, indeed, we cannot judge these questions abstractly. Where a war is necessary, it matters very little whether it is just or not. Only the judgment of history can finally decide; and generally it seems at the time that both parties have something of right on their side, something perhaps too of wrong.[93]

A consideration of difficulties like these brings us to a realisation of the fact that the chances are small that a nation, in the heat of a dispute, will admit the likelihood of its being in the wrong. To refuse to admit this is generally tantamount to a refusal to submit the difficulty to arbitration. And neither international law, nor the moral force of public opinion can induce a state to act contrary to what it believes to be its own interest. Moreover, as international law now stands, it is not a duty to have recourse to arbitration. This was made quite clear in the proceedings of the Peace Conference at the Hague in 1899.[94] It was strongly recommended that arbitration should be sought wherever it was possible, but, at the same time definitely stated, that this course could in no case be compulsory. In this respect things have not advanced beyond the position of the Paris Congress of 1856.[95] The wars waged in Europe subsequent to that date, have all been begun without previous attempt at mediation.

But the work of the peace party regarding the humaner methods of settlement is not to be neglected. The popular feeling which they have been partly the means of stimulating has no doubt done something to influence the action of statesmen towards extreme caution in the treatment of questions likely to arouse national passions and prejudices. Arbitration has undoubtedly made headway in recent years. Britain and America, the two nations whose names naturally suggest themselves to us as future centres of federative union, both countries whose industrial interests are numerous and complicated, have most readily, as they have most frequently, settled disputes in this practical manner. It has shown itself to be a policy as economical as it is business-like. Its value, in its proper place, cannot be overrated by any Peace Congress or by any peace pamphlet; but we have endeavoured to make it clear that this sphere is but a limited one. The “good-will” may not be there when it ought perhaps to appear: it will certainly not be there when any vital interest is at stake. But, even if this were not so and arbitration were the natural sequence of every dispute, no coercive force exists to enforce the decree of the court. The moral restraint of public opinion is here a poor substitute. Treaties, it is often said, are in the same position; but treaties have been broken, and will no doubt be broken again. We are moved to the conclusion that a thoroughly logical peace programme cannot stop short of the principle of federation. Federal troops are necessary to carry out the decrees of a tribunal of arbitration, if that court is not to run a risk of being held feeble and ineffectual. Except on some such basis, arbitration, as a substitute for war, stands on but a weak footing.

Disarmament.

The efforts of the Peace Society are directed with even less hope of complete success against another evil of our time, the crushing burden of modern armaments. We have peace at this moment, but at a daily increasing cost. The Peace Society is rightly concerned in pressing this point. It is not enough to keep off actual war: there is a limit to the price we can afford to pay even for peace. Probably no principle has cost Europe so much in the last century as that handed down from Rome:—“Si vis pacem, para bellum.” It is now a hundred and fifty years since Montesquieu[96] protested against this “new distemper” which was spreading itself over Europe; but never, in time of peace, has complaint been so loud or so general as now: and this, not only against the universal burden of taxation which weighs upon all nations alike, but, in continental countries, against the waste of productive force due to compulsory military service, a discontent which seems to strike at the very foundations of society. Vattel relates that in early times a treaty of peace generally stipulated that both parties should afterwards disarm. And there is no doubt that Kant was right in regarding standing armies as a danger to peace, not only as openly expressing the rivalry and distrust between nation and nation which Hobbes regards as the basis of international relations, but also as putting a power into the hand of a nation which it may some day have the temptation to abuse. A war-loving, overbearing spirit in a people thrives none the worse for a consciousness that its army or navy can hold its own with any other in Europe. Were it not the case that the essence of armed peace is that a high state of efficiency should be general, the danger to peace would be very great indeed. No doubt it is due to this fact that France has kept quietly to her side of the Rhine during the last thirty years. The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine was an immediate stimulus to the increase of armaments; but otherwise, just because of this greater efficiency and the slightly stronger military position of Germany, it has been an influence on the side of peace.

The Czar’s Rescript of 1898 gave a new stimulus to an interest in this question which the subsequent conference at the Hague was unable fully to satisfy. We are compelled to consider carefully how a process of simultaneous disarmament can actually be carried out, and what results might be anticipated from this step, with a view not only to the present but the future. Can this be done in accordance with the principles of justice? Organisations like a great navy or a highly disciplined army have been built up, in the course of centuries, at great cost and at much sacrifice to the nation. They are the fruit of years of wise government and a high record of national industry. Are such visible tokens of the culture and character and worth of a people to be swept away and Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey to stand on the same level? And, even if no such ethical considerations should arise, on what method are we to proceed? The standard as well as the nature of armament depends in every state on its geographical conditions and its historical position. An ocean-bound empire like Britain is comparatively immune from the danger of invasion: her army can be safely despatched to the colonies, her fleet protects her at home, her position is one of natural defence. But Germany and Austria find themselves in exactly opposite circumstances, with the hard necessity imposed upon them of guarding their frontiers on every side. The safety of a nation like Germany is in the hands of its army: its military strength lies in an almost perfect mastery of the science of attack.

The Peace Society has hitherto made no attempt to face the difficulties inseparable from any attempt to apply a uniform method of treatment to peculiarities and conditions so conflicting and various as these. Those who have been more conscientious have not been very successful in solving them. Indeed, so constantly is military technique changing that it is difficult to prophesy wherein will lie, a few years hence, the essence of a state’s defensive power or what part the modern navy will play in this defence. No careful thinker would suggest, in the face of dangers threatening from the East,[97] a complete disarmament. The simplest of many suggestions made—but this on the basis of universal conscription—seems to be that the number of years or months of compulsory military service should be reduced to some fixed period. But this does not touch the difficulty of colonial empires[98] like Britain which might to a certain extent disarm, like their neighbours, in Europe, but would be compelled to keep an army for the defence of their colonies elsewhere. It is, in the meantime, inevitable that Europe should keep up a high standard of armament—this is, (and even if we had European federation, would remain) an absolute necessity as a protection against the yellow races, and in Europe itself there are at present elements hostile to the cause of peace. Alsace-Lorraine, Polish Prussia, Russian Poland and Finland are still, to a considerable degree, sources of discontent and dissatisfaction. But in Russia itself lies the great obstacle to a future European peace or European federation: we can scarcely picture Russia as a reliable member of such a union. That Russia should disarm is scarcely feasible, in view of its own interest: it has always to face the danger of rebellion in Poland and anarchy at home. But that Europe should disarm, before Russia has attained a higher civilisation, a consciousness of its great future as a north-eastern, inter-oceanic empire, and a government more favourable to the diffusion of liberty, is still less practicable.[99] We have here to fall back upon federation again. It is not impossible that, in the course of time, this problem may be solved and that the contribution to the federal troops of a European union may be regulated upon some equitable basis the form of which we cannot now well prophesy.