Does peace mean progress? Is the disappearance of war a sign of
improvement or of decay? At a yet recent date learned men, their eyes to
their microscopes, were teaching us that among the various kinds of
living creatures they had studied, war was the rule; that where struggle
ceased, life ceased; and that, since more beings came into the world
than the world could feed, the destruction of the weakest was both a
necessity and a condition of progress. Struggle, war, violence meant
development; peace meant decay. And a bold generalization applied to
reasoning man the fate and conditions of unreasoning vermin. Since it
was fate, why resist the inevitable and what could be the good of peace
debates?
But the stumbling-block that Science had placed on the road to better
days has been removed by Science herself. The sweeping conclusions
attributed to that great man Darwin by pupils less great have been
scrutinized; other experiments, such as he would have conducted himself
had he been living, were tried, and their results added to our book of
knowledge. Great results, indeed, and notable ones; it turned out that
the explanation of transformism, of progress, of survival, was not to be
found in a ceaseless war insuring the predominance of the fittest, but
in quiet and peaceful adaptation to environment, to climate, and to
circumstances. And we French are excusably proud to see that, for having
unfolded those truths years before Darwin wrote, due honor is now
rendered almost everywhere, and especially in America, to Jean Baptiste
de Lamarck, author of the long obscure and now famous _Philosophie
Zoologique_, 1809.
As for the undue multiplication of individuals, statistics unknown to
Darwin have since shown that, whatever may be the case with beetles or
fishes (and let them work out their own problems according to their own
laws), there is, for man at least, no need of self-destruction to ward
off such a peril: the general decrease of the rate of reproduction, so
striking throughout the world, is all that is wanted, and in some cases
is even more than is wanted.
War, therefore, is not our unavoidable fate, and that much of the road
has been cleared: a long road followed amid terrible sufferings by
mankind through centuries. The chief danger in times past, and partly
still in our own, does not result from an ineluctable fate, but from
the private disposition of men and of their leaders. And we know what
for ages those dispositions were. Former-day chroniclers are wont to
mention, as a matter of course, that "the king went to the wars in the
season," as he would have gone a-fishing. People at large saw not only
beauty in war (as there is in a just war, and of the highest order,
exactly as there is in every duty fulfilled), but they saw in it an
unmixed beauty. Men and nations would take pride in their mercilessness,
and they were apt to find in the sufferings of an enemy an unalloyed
pleasure.
Such were the feelings of the time. To none of the master artists who
represented the day of judgment on the walls of Rome, Orvieto, or Padua,
or on the portals of our northern cathedrals, did the thought occur to
place among his fierce angels driving the guilty to their doom, one with
a tear on his face: a tear that would have made the artist more famous
than all his art; a tear, not because the tortures could be supposed to
be unjust or the men sinless, but because they were tortures and because
the men had been sinful. _Dies iræ!_
Artists belonged to their time and expressed their time's thought. The
teaching of saints and of thinkers long remained of little avail. War,
that "human malady," as Montaigne said, was considered as impossible to
heal as rabies was--until the day when a Pasteur came. Yet protests
began to be more perceptibly heard as men better understood what they
themselves were and commenced to suspect that the time might come when
all would be equal before the law. Nothing, Tocqueville has observed, is
so conducive to mercy as equality.[253]
All those who, in the course of centuries, led men to the conquest of
their rights can be truly claimed as the intellectual ancestors of the
present promoters of a sane international peace: men like our Jean
Bodin, who, while upholding, as was unavoidable in his day, the
principle of autocracy, yet based his study of the government of nations
on the general interests of the commonwealth, and who, in opposition to
Machiavelli, who had called his book _The Prince_, called his _The
Republic_. To Bodin, who protests against the so-called right of the
strongest, have been traced some of the principles embodied much later
in the American and in the French "Declaration of the Rights of
Man."[254]
Such thinkers truly deserve the name of forerunners; such men as that
great Hugo Grotius, whose ever-living fame was not without influence on
the selection of his own country as the seat of the peace conferences of
our day, and who, being then settled in France, near Senlis, dedicated
to King Louis XIII his famous work on war and peace, so memorable for
its denunciation of frivolous wars and wanton cruelties.[255]
Soon the names of those to be honored for the same cause became legion:
men like Pascal, Saint-Pierre, the Encyclopedists, Kant, Bentham,
Tocqueville, and many others.
Among Pascal's _Thoughts_ is this memorable one, which forecasts and
sums up much of what has since been or will be done: "When it is a
question of deciding whether war should be waged, of sentencing so many
Spaniards to death, one man only decides, and one who is interested. The
decision ought to rest with an impartial third party."
A little later, that strange Abbé de Saint-Pierre was writing those
works considered as so many wild dreams in his day and no longer read at
all in ours. But if he were to return now, he would, according to one of
his latest critics, feel not at all dismayed, but say: "This is all for
the best; you need not study my works, since you have put in practise
nearly all my ideas; there remains only my _Perpetual Peace_;[256] but,
like the others, its turn will come."
If its turn has not come yet, great practical steps have surely been
taken toward it, chief among them that move, so unexpected a few years
ago, so dubiously wondered at when it occurred, and now so thoroughly
accepted, that, as in the case of all great inventions, one wonders how
things could go on before it existed: the calling of the first
conference at The Hague by the Emperor of Russia, Nicholas II.
"The maintenance of general peace," read the Russian circular of August,
1898, "and a possible reduction of the excessive armaments which weigh
upon all nations, present themselves in the actual situation of the
world, as the ideal toward which should tend the efforts of all
governments.... The ever-increasing financial expense touches public
prosperity at its very source; the intellectual and physical powers of
peoples, labor and capital, are, most of it, turned aside from their
natural functions and consumed unproductively.... To put an end to
those ceaseless armaments and to find means for preventing the
calamities which threaten the entire world, such is the supreme duty
which to-day lies upon all states."
When one man, then another, then another, had come and said: I can draw
the lightning from the clouds; I can rise in the air; I can flash your
words and thoughts to any distance you please; I can cure rabies by
inoculating rabies; I can make you talk with your friend miles away; I
can navigate a boat under the sea, scepticism had scarcely been greater
than when the circular took the world by surprise. The issue seemed more
than doubtful; many among the most sanguine barely hoped to succeed in
preventing the absolute failure that would have killed such a project
for generations.
Shortly afterward I happened to be in St. Petersburg and had the honor
of being received by the Emperor. The conversation fell on the "Great
Design," to give it the name used for the very different plan (implying
coercion) attributed two centuries before to the French King Henry IV. I
was struck by the quiet conviction of the originator of the new movement
as to its ultimate results, and his disposition not to give up the plan
if at first it met with difficulties and delays. Emperor Nicholas summed
up his views with the remark: "One must wait longer when planting an oak
than when planting a flower."
Longer, indeed, yet not so very long, after all. The first conference
took place, and in it, I may say, the delegations of our two Republics
presided over by such statesmen and thinkers as Andrew D. White and Léon
Bourgeois, failed not to fulfill the part assigned to our democracies by
their ideals and traditions. In spite of scepticism, that first
conference reached an unexpected measure of success. Eight years later a
second one was convened on the felicitous suggestion of President
Roosevelt, and now the supposedly useless mechanism from dreamland has
been so heartily accepted by mankind at large, all over the globe, that
the approximate date for a third one has already been selected.
Governments at first doubted that one would be of any use; now they want
more.
The word had been spoken indeed at the proper moment. The teachings of
philosophers and of experience, the outcome of revolutions, a more vivid
sense of equality among men imbuing them with mercy, according to
Tocqueville, had caused the seed to fall on prepared ground. We scarcely
realize, looking at it from so near, how great the movement thus started
has already become. The practical ideas put forth less than a dozen
years ago have progressed so much that more treaties of arbitration have
been signed between the first Hague Conference and now than between the
day of creation and that conference. I take, if I may be permitted to
allude to my own feelings, no small pride in having concluded the first
one, duly ratified by both countries, ever signed by the United States
with any European Power, and I was glad to thus continue an
old-established tradition, since, in the matter of treaties with the
United States, be they treaties of commerce, alliance, or amity, France
has been accustomed to take the lead among nations.[257]
Quicker, indeed, than was anticipated by the sower himself, the oak has
grown and the nations can rest under its shade. Several important
appeals have been made to the court of The Hague, the United States
taking the lead and giving to all the best example. Those experiments,
which most of the great Powers have already tried, have had manifold
advantages: they have shown that dangerous quarrels _could_ thus be
honorably settled; they have shown also that defects in the working of
the court exist and should be remedied.
Public utterances and circulars from Presidents Roosevelt and Taft and
from Secretaries of State Root and Knox have pointed out the importance
of trying to establish a permanent court, with judges ever present, paid
by the associated nations, selected from among men of such a high moral
standing as to be above influence of creed or nationality, true citizens
of the world, fit magistrates to judge the world.
In these views, the future realization of which the second conference
has insured, France heartily concurred, having indeed, during the first
conference, initiated an early preliminary move toward continuity and
permanence.
Given these more and more enlightened dispositions among governments, it
may seem that the work of a private society like this must needs be of
comparatively little import. The reverse is the truth. It has an immense
power for good, for it can act directly on the lever that moves the
world: public opinion. So powerful is such a lever that even in the
past, in times when men were not their own masters, public opinion had
to be reckoned with; such imperious leaders of men as a Richelieu or a
Napoleon knew it better than any one. _Opinio veritate major_, had even
cynically said the great philosopher Francis Bacon. But if opinion can
occasionally defeat truth, much better can it defend truth. With the
spreading of instruction and with an easier access to men's minds
through books, journals, public meetings, and free discussion, its power
against truth has been considerably diminished and its power for good
increased and purified.
You know this and act accordingly. Though doing so in your private
capacity, you conform in fact to the instructions drawn by a masterly
hand for the American delegates at the second conference at The Hague.
In these instructions Secretary Root told the delegates never to forget
that "the object of the conference was agreement, not compulsion," and
that the agreements reached should be "genuine and not reluctant."
This is, undoubtedly, the road to follow, a road not yet smooth, nor
cleared of its rocks and pitfalls. The dangers continue to be many. One
of the dangers is of asking too much too soon and of causing nations to
fear that, if they make any little concession, they will be led by
degrees to a point where, being peacefully disarmed, their continuance
as a nation will depend upon the will, the good faith and the excellent
virtues of some one else. Another is to describe war as being such an
abominable thing in itself, whatever be its occasion, as to cause that
public opinion on which so much depends to rebel against the preacher
and his whole doctrine.
Let us not forget that, even in the land of "Utopia," the country of
Nowhere, in which every virtue of good citizenship was practised, and
war held as a monstrosity, _rem plane beluinam_, all wars had not been
abolished. Sir Thomas More informs us that Utopians make war for two
causes and keep, therefore, well drilled. The causes are: First, "to
defend their own country"; second, "to drive out of their friends' land
the enemies that have invaded it."[258] We have waged in the past such
wars and cannot pretend to feel repentant.
Such wars continue to be unavoidable to-day, and to deny this is only to
increase the danger of a revulsion of feeling among well-disposed
nations. What we may hope and must strive for is that, with the
development of mankind, a better knowledge of our neighbors, an
understanding that a difference is not necessarily a vice, nor a
criticism a threat, with that better instruction which a society like
this one is giving to the many, a time may come when that same public
opinion will render impossible the two sorts of _casus belli_ for which
More deems war to be not only necessary but noble and virtuous.
No less dangerous is it to load war with all the sins in Israel, thus
running the same risk of making people rebel not only against the
preacher but against his very creed. When we are told by the pacifist
that, owing to the wars of the early nineteenth century, only inferior
people were left in France to perpetuate the race, we wonder how it is
that she got a Victor Hugo, an Alexandre Dumas, a Louis Pasteur, sons of
soldiers of Napoleon, all three. We wonder how, in spite of this
supposed survival of "the weakest," that country got so many thinkers,
philosophers, poets, artists, soldiers, explorers; how the venturous
spirit of the former "coureurs de bois" awoke again in our days with
such notable results in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere; how birth was given
in our land to the inventors of the dirigible, the automobile, the
submarine, photography, and radium; how the love of sport in the race
has reappeared of late, as active as it had ever been in the remote
times when football and cricket found in France their rough-hewn cradle.
Exaggeration will not help, but on the contrary surely hurt. Truth, if
we follow her, is certain to lead to better times. She has already. Wars
in former centuries lasted a hundred years, then they lasted thirty
years, then seven years; and now, as disastrous as ever, it is true, but
separated by longer intervals, they last one year.[259] You are about
to celebrate a hundred years' peace with England; so are we.
That move toward truer, longer, perhaps one day definitive peace, has
been prophesied long before our time, not merely by a dreamer like Abbé
de Saint-Pierre, but by one who had a rare experience of men, of war,
and of peace, and who, considering especially the influence of trade on
nations, once said:
"Although I pretend to no peculiar information respecting commercial
affairs, nor any foresight into the scenes of futurity, yet as the
member of an infant empire, as a philanthropist by character, and (if I
may be allowed the expression) as a citizen of the great republic of
humanity at large, I cannot help turning my attention sometimes to this
subject. I would be understood to mean that I cannot help reflecting
with pleasure on the probable influence that commerce may hereafter have
on human manners and society in general. On these occasions I consider
how mankind may be connected like one great family in fraternal ties. I
indulge a fond, perhaps an enthusiastic idea that, as the world is
evidently less barbarous than it has been, its amelioration must still
be progressive; that nations are becoming more humanized in their
policy, that the subjects of ambition and causes for hostility are daily
diminishing; and in fine that the period is not very remote when the
benefits of a liberal and free commerce will pretty generally succeed to
the devastations and horrors of war."
Thus wrote to Lafayette, on the 15th of August, 1786, that "citizen of
the great republic of humanity," George Washington.[260]
That practical results have been secured is certain; that better ones
are in store, if we act wisely, is no less certain. Mankind longs for
less troubled days, and moves toward this not inaccessible goal. Such is
the truth; and we may feel confident that, according to the oft-quoted
word of dying Wyclif, "Truth shall conquer."