To determine the consequences of an historical episode, such as the
recent Peace Conference at The Hague, is not a matter for prophecy,
but for experience, which alone can decide what positive issues, for
good or for ill, shall hereafter trace their source to this beginning.
The most that the present can do is to take note of the point so far
reached, and of apparent tendencies manifested; to seek for the latter
a right direction; to guide, where it can, currents of general
thought, the outcome of which will be beneficial or injurious,
according as their course is governed by a just appreciation of
fundamental truths.
The calling of the Conference of The Hague originated in an avowed
desire to obtain relief from immediate economical burdens, by the
adoption of some agreement to restrict the preparations for war, and
the consequent expense involved in national armaments; but before its
meeting the hope of disarmament had fallen into the background, the
vacant place being taken by the project of abating the remoter evils
of recurrent warfare, by giving a further impulse, and a more clearly
defined application, to the principle of arbitration, which
thenceforth assumed pre-eminence in the councils of the Conference.
This may be considered the point at which we have arrived. The
assembled representatives of many nations, including all the greatest
upon the earth, have decided that it is to arbitration men must look
for relief, rather than to partial disarmament, or even to an arrest
in the progress of preparations for war. Of the beneficence of the
practice of arbitration, of the wisdom of substituting it, when
possible, for the appeal to arms, with all the misery therefrom
resulting, there can be no doubt; but it will be expected that in its
application, and in its attempted development, the tendencies of the
day, both good and bad, will make themselves felt. If, on the one
hand, there is solid ground for rejoicing in the growing inclination
to resort first to an impartial arbiter, if such can be found, when
occasion for collision arises, there is, on the other hand, cause for
serious reflection when this most humane impulse is seen to favor
methods, which by compulsion shall vitally impair the moral freedom,
and the consequent moral responsibility, which are the distinguishing
glory of the rational man, and of the sovereign state.
One of the most unfortunate characteristics of our present age is the
disposition to impose by legislative enactment--by external
compulsion, that is--restrictions of a moral character, which are
either fundamentally unjust, or at least do not carry with them the
moral sense of the community, as a whole. It is not religious faith
alone that in the past has sought to propagate itself by force of law,
which ultimately is force of physical coercion. If the religious
liberty of the individual has been at last won, as we hope forever, it
is sufficiently notorious that the propensity of majorities to control
the freedom of minorities, in matters of disputed right and wrong,
still exists, as certain and as tyrannical as ever was the will of
Philip II. that there should be no heretic within his dominion. Many
cannot so much as comprehend the thought of the English Bishop, that
it was better to see England free than England sober.
In matters internal to a state, the bare existence of a law imposes an
obligation upon the individual citizen, whatever his personal
conviction of its rightfulness or its wisdom. Yet is such obligation
not absolute. The primary duty, attested alike by the law and the
gospel, is submission. The presumption is in favor of the law; and if
there lie against it just cause for accusation, on the score either of
justice or of expediency, the interests of the Commonwealth and the
precepts of religion alike demand that opposition shall be conducted
according to the methods, and within the limits, which the law of the
land itself prescribes. But it may be--it has been, and yet again may
be--that the law, however regular in its enactment, and therefore
unquestionable on the score of formal authority, either outrages
fundamental political right, or violates the moral dictates of the
individual conscience. Of the former may be cited as an instance the
Stamp Act, perfectly regular as regarded statutory validity, which
kindled the flame of revolution in America. Of the second, the
Fugitive Slave Law, within the memory of many yet living, is a
conspicuous illustration. Under such conditions, the moral right of
resistance is conceded--nay, is affirmed and emphasized--by the moral
consciousness of the races from which the most part of the American
people have their origin, and to which, almost wholly, we owe our
political and religious traditions. Such resistance may be passive,
accepting meekly the penalty for disobedience, as the martyr who for
conscience' sake refused the political requirement of sacrificing to
the image of the Cæsar; or it may be active and violent, as when our
forefathers repelled taxation without representation, or when men and
women, of a generation not yet wholly passed away, refused to violate
their consciences by acquiescing in the return of a slave to his
bondage, resorting to evasion or to violence, according to their
conditions or temperaments, but in every case deriving the sanction
for their unlawful action from the mandate of their personal
conscience.
And let it be carefully kept in mind that it is not the absolute right
or wrong of the particular act, as seen in the clearer light of a
later day, that justified men, whether in the particular instances
cited, or in other noteworthy incidents in the long series of steps by
which the English-speaking races have ascended to their present
political development. It is not the demonstrable rightfulness of a
particular action, as seen in the dispassionate light of the arbiter,
posterity, that has chiefly constituted the merit of the individual
rebel against the law in which he beheld iniquity; the saving salt,
which has preserved the healthfulness of the body politic, has been
the fidelity to Conscience, to the faithful, if passionate, arbiter of
the moment, whose glorious predominance in the individual or in the
nation gives a better assurance of the highest life than does the
clearest intellectual perception of the rightfulness, or of the
expediency, of a particular course. One may now see, or think that he
sees, as does the writer, with Lincoln, that if slavery is not wrong,
nothing is wrong. It was not so clear half a century ago; and while no
honor is too great for those early heroes, who for this sublime
conviction withstood obloquy and persecution, legal and illegal, it
should be never forgotten that the then slave States, in their
resolute determination to maintain, by arms, if need be, and against
superior force, that which they believed to be their constitutional
political right, made no small contribution to the record of fidelity
to conscience and to duty, which is the highest title of a nation to
honor. Be it by action or be it by submission, by action positive or
by action negative, whatsoever is not of faith--of conviction--is sin.
The just and necessary exaltation of the law as the guarantee of true
liberty, with the consequent accepted submission of the individual to
it, and the recognized presumption in favor of such submission, have
tended to blind us to the fact that the individual, in our highest
consciousness, has never surrendered his moral freedom,--his
independence of conscience. No human law overbears that supreme
appeal, which carries the matter from the tribunal of man into the
presence of God; nor can human law be pleaded at this bar as the
excuse for a violation of conscience. It is a dangerous doctrine,
doubtless, to preach that there may be a "higher law" than obedience
to law; but truth is not to be rejected because dangerous, and the
time is not long past when the phrase voiced a conviction, the
forcible assertion of which brought slavery to an end forever.
The resort to arms by a nation, when right cannot otherwise be
enforced, corresponds, or should correspond, precisely to the acts of
the individual man which have been cited; for the old conception of an
appeal to the Almighty, resembling in principle the mediæval trial by
battle, is at best but a partial view of the truth, seen from one side
only. However the result may afterwards be interpreted as indicative
of the justice of a cause,--an interpretation always questionable,--a
state, when it goes to war, should do so not to test the rightfulness
of its claims, but because, being convinced in its conscience of that
rightfulness, no other means of overcoming evil remains.
Nations, like men, have a conscience. Like men, too, the light of
conscience is in nations often clouded, or misguided, by passion or by
interest. But what of that? Does a man discard his allegiance to
conscience because he knows that, itself in harmony with right, its
message to him is perplexed and obscured by his own infirmities? Not
so. Fidelity to conscience implies not only obedience to its
dictates, but earnest heart-searching, the use of every means, to
ascertain its true command; yet withal, whatever the mistrust of the
message, the supremacy of the conscience is not impeached. When it is
recognized that its final word is spoken, nothing remains but
obedience. Even if mistaken, the moral wrong of acting against
conviction works a deeper injury to the man, and to his kind, than can
the merely material disasters that may follow upon obedience. Even the
material evils of war are less than the moral evil of compliance with
wrong.
"Yes, my friend," replied to me a foreign diplomatist to whom I was
saying some such things, "but remember that only a few years ago the
conscience of your people was pressing you into war with Great Britain
in the Venezuelan question." "Admitting," I replied, "that the first
national impulse, the first movement of the conscience, if you like,
was mistaken,--which is at least open to argument,--it remains that
there was no war; time for deliberation was taken, and more than that
can be asked of no conscience, national or personal. But, further,
had the final decision of conscience been that just cause for war
existed, no evil that war brings could equal the moral declension
which a nation inflicts upon itself, and upon mankind, by deliberate
acquiescence in wrong, which it recognizes and which it might right."
Nor is this conclusion vitiated by the fact that war is made at times
upon mistaken conviction. It is not the accuracy of the decision, but
the faithfulness to conviction, that constitutes the moral worth of an
action, national or individual.
The general consciousness of this truth is witnessed by a common
phrase, which excludes from suggested schemes of arbitration all
questions which involve "national honor or vital interests." No one
thing struck me more forcibly during the Conference at The Hague than
the exception taken and expressed, although in a very few quarters, to
the word "honor," in this connection. There is for this good reason;
for the word, admirable in itself and if rightly understood, has lost
materially in the clearness of its image and superscription, by much
handling and by some misapplication. Honor does not forbid a nation to
acknowledge that it is wrong, or to recede from a step which it has
taken through wrong motives or mistaken reasons; yet it has at times
been so thought, to the grievous injury of the conception of honor. It
is not honor, necessarily, but sound policy, which prescribes that
peace with a semi-civilized foe should not be made after a defeat;
but, however justifiable the policy, the word "honor" is defaced by
thus misapplying it.
The varying fortunes, the ups and downs of the idea of arbitration at
the Conference of The Hague, as far as my intelligence could follow
them, produced in me two principal conclusions, which so far confirmed
my previous points of view that I think I may now fairly claim for
them that they have ripened into _opinions_, between which word, and
the cruder, looser views received passively as _impressions_, I have
been ever careful to mark a distinction. In the first place,
compulsory arbitration stands at present no chance of general
acceptance. There is but one way as yet in which arbitration can be
compulsory; for the dream of some advanced thinkers, of an
International Army, charged with imposing the decrees of an
International Tribunal upon a recalcitrant state, may be dismissed as
being outside of practical international politics, until at least the
nations are ready for the intermediate step of moral compulsion,
imposed by a self-assumed obligation--by a promise. Compulsory
arbitration as yet means only the moral compulsion of a pledge, taken
beforehand, and more or less comprehensive, to submit to arbitration
questions which rest still in the unknown future; the very terms of
which therefore cannot be foreseen. Although there is a certain active
current of agitation in favor of such stipulations, there is no
general disposition of governments to accede, except under very narrow
and precise limitations, and in questions of less than secondary
importance.
Secondly, there appears to be, on the other hand, a much greater
disposition than formerly to entertain favorably the idea of
arbitration, as a means to be in all cases considered, and where
possible to be adopted, in order to solve peaceably difficulties which
threaten peace. In short, the consciences of the nations are awake to
the wickedness of unnecessary war, and are disposed, as a general
rule, to seek first, and where admissible, the counterpoise of an
impartial judge, where such can be found, to correct the bias of
national self-will; but there is an absolute indisposition, an
instinctive revolt, against signing away, beforehand, the national
conscience, by a promise that any other arbiter than itself shall be
accepted in questions of the future, the import of which cannot yet be
discerned. Of this feeling the vague and somewhat clumsy phrase,
"national honor and vital interests," has in the past been the
expression; for its very indeterminateness reserved to conscience in
every case the decision,--"May another judge for me here, or must I be
bound by my own sense of right?"
Under these circumstances, and having reached so momentous a stage in
progress as is indicated by the very calling together of a world
conference for the better assuring of peace, may it not be well for us
to pause a moment and take full account of the idea, Arbitration, on
the right hand and on the left? Noble and beneficent in its true
outlines, it too may share, may even now be sharing, the liability of
the loftiest conceptions to degenerate into catchwords, or into cant.
"Liberty, what crimes have been wrought in thy name!" and does not
religion share the same reproach, and conscience also? Yet will we not
away with any of the three.
The conviction of a nation is the conviction of the mass of the
individuals thereof, and each individual has therefore a personal
responsibility for the opinion he holds on a question of great
national, or international, moment. Let us look, each of us,--and
especially each of us who fears God,--into his own inner heart, and
ask himself how far, in his personal life, he is prepared to accept
arbitration. Is it not so that the reply must be, "In doubtful
questions of moment, wherever I possibly can, knowing my necessary,
inevitable proneness to one-sided views, I will seek an impartial
adviser, that my bias may be corrected; but when that has been done,
when I have sought what aid I can, if conscience still commands, it I
must obey. From that duty, burdensome though it may be, no man can
relieve me. Conscience, diligently consulted, is to the man the voice
of God; between God and the man no other arbiter comes." And if this
be so, a pledge beforehand is impossible. I cannot bind myself for a
future of which I as yet know nothing, to abide by the decision of
any other judge than my own conscience. Much humor--less wit--has been
expended upon the Emperor of Germany's supposed carefulness to reject
arbitration because an infringement of his divine rights; a phrase
which may well be no more than a blunt expression of the sense that no
third party can relieve a man from the obligations of the position to
which he is called by God, and that for the duties of that position
the man can confidently expect divine guidance and help. Be that as it
may, the divine right of conscience will, among Americans, receive
rare challenge.
It has been urged, however, that a higher organization of the nations,
the provision of a supreme tribunal issuing and enforcing judgments,
settling thereby quarrels and disputed rights, would produce for the
nations of the earth a condition analogous to that of the individual
citizen of the state, who no longer defends his own cause, nor is
bound in conscience to maintain his own sense of right, when the law
decides against him. The conception is not novel, not even modern;
something much like it was put forth centuries ago by the Papacy
concerning its own functions. It contains two fallacies. First, the
submission of the individual citizen is to force, to the constitution
of which he personally contributes little, save his individual and
general assent. To an unjust law he submits under protest, doubtless
often silent; but he submits, not because he consents to the wrong,
whether to himself personally or to others, but because he cannot help
it. This will perhaps be denied, with the assertion that willing,
intelligent submission to law, even when unjust, is yielded by most
for the general good. One has, however, only to consider the
disposition of the average man to evade payment of taxes, to recognize
how far force daily enters into the maintenance and execution of law.
Nations, on the contrary, since no force exists, or without their
volition can exist, to compel them to accept the institution of an
authority superior to their own conscience, yield a willing
acquiescence to wrong, when they so yield in obedience to an external
authority imposed by themselves. The matter is not helped by the fact
of a previous promise to accept such decisions. The wrong-doing of an
individual, in consequence of an antecedent promise, does not relieve
the conscience thus rashly fettered. The ancient warning still stands,
"Suffer not thy mouth to cause thy flesh to sin." For the individual
or the nation, arbitration is not possible where the decision may
violate conscience; it therefore can be accepted only when it is known
that interest merely, not duty, will be affected by the judgment, and
such knowledge cannot exist antecedent to the difficulty arising.
There is a further--a second--fallacy in the supposed analogy between
the submission of individuals to law, and the advocated submission of
states to a central tribunal. The law of the state, overwhelming as is
its power relatively to that of the individual citizen, can neither
bind nor loose in matters pertaining to the conscience. Still less can
any tribunal, however solemnly constituted, liberate a state from its
obligation to do right; still less, I say, because the state retains,
what the individual has in great part lost, the power to maintain what
it believes to be right. Many considerations may make it more right--I
do not say _more expedient_--for a man or for a nation, to submit to,
or to acquiesce in, wrong than to resist; but in such cases it is
conscience still that decides where the balance of justice turns
distinctly to the side of wrong. It is, I presume, universally
admitted, that occasions may arise where conscience not only
justifies, but compels, resistance to law; whether it be the Christian
citizen refusing to sacrifice, or the free citizen to subject himself
to unconstitutional taxation, or to become the instrument of returning
the slave to his master. So also for the Christian state. Existing
wrong may have to be allowed, lest a greater wrong be done. Conscience
only can decide; and for that very reason conscience must be kept
free, that it may decide according to its sense of right, when the
case is presented.
There is, therefore, the very serious consideration attendant upon
what is loosely styled "compulsory" arbitration,--arbitration
stipulated, that is, in advance of a question originating, or of its
conditions being appreciated,--that a state may thereby do that which
a citizen as towards the state does not do; namely, may voluntarily
assume a moral obligation to do, or to allow, wrong. And it must be
remembered, also, that many of the difficulties which arise among
states involve considerations distinctly beyond and higher than law as
international law now exists; whereas the advocated Permanent
Tribunal, to which the ultra-organizers look, to take cognizance of
all cases, must perforce be governed by law as it exists. It is not,
in fact, to be supposed that nations will submit themselves to a
tribunal, the general principles of which have not been crystallized
into a code of some sort.
A concrete instance, however, is always more comprehensible and
instructive than a general discussion. Let us therefore take the
incidents and conditions which preceded our recent war with Spain. The
facts, as seen by us, may, I apprehend, be fairly stated as follows:
In the island of Cuba, a powerful military force,--government it
scarcely could be called,--foreign to the island, was holding a small
portion of it in enforced subjection, and was endeavoring,
unsuccessfully, to reduce the remainder. In pursuance of this attempt,
measures were adopted that inflicted immense misery and death upon
great numbers of the population. Such suffering is indeed attendant
upon war; but it may be stated as a fundamental principle of
civilized warfare that useless suffering is condemned, and it had
become apparent to military eyes that Spain could not subdue the
island, nor restore orderly conditions. The suffering was terrible,
and was unavailing.
Under such circumstances, does any moral obligation lie upon a
powerful neighboring state? Or, more exactly, if there is borne in
upon the moral consciousness of a mighty people that such an afflicted
community as that of Cuba at their doors is like Lazarus at the gate
of the rich man, and that the duty of stopping the evil rests upon
them, what is to be done with such a case of conscience? Could the
decision of another, whether nation or court, excuse our nation from
the ultimate responsibility of its own decision? But, granting that it
might have proved expedient to call in other judges, when we had full
knowledge of the circumstances, what would have been our dilemma if,
conscience commanding one course, we had found ourselves antecedently
bound to abide by the conclusions of another arbiter? For let us not
deceive ourselves. Absolutely justifiable, nay, imperative, as most of
us believe our action to have been, when tried at the bar of
conscience, no arbitral court, acceptable to the two nations, would
have decided as our own conscience did. A European diplomatist of
distinguished reputation, of a small nation likeliest to be unbiassed,
so said to me personally, and it is known that more than one of our
own ablest international lawyers held that we were acting in defiance
of international law as it now exists; just as the men who resisted
the Fugitive Slave Law acted in defiance of the statute law of the
land. Decision must have gone against us, so these men think, on the
legal merits of the case. Of the moral question the arbiter could take
no account; it is not there, indeed, that moral questions must find
their solution, but in the court of conscience. Referred to
arbitration, doubtless the Spanish flag would still fly over Cuba.
There is unquestionably a higher law than Law, concerning obedience to
which no other than the man himself, or the state, can give account to
Him that shall judge. The freedom of the conscience may be fettered or
signed away by him who owes to it allegiance, yet its supremacy,
though thus disavowed, cannot be overthrown. The Conference at The
Hague has facilitated future recourse to arbitration, by providing
means through which, a case arising, a court is more easily
constituted, and rules governing its procedure are ready to hand; but
it has refrained from any engagements binding states to have recourse
to the tribunal thus created. The responsibility of the state to its
own conscience remains unimpeached and independent. The progress thus
made and thus limited is to a halting place, at which, whether well
chosen or not, the nations must perforce stop for a time; and it will
be wise to employ that time in considering the bearings, alike of that
which has been done, and of that which has been left undone.
Our own country has a special need thus carefully to consider the
possible consequences of arbitration, understood in the sense of an
antecedent pledge to resort to it; unless under limitations very
carefully hedged. There is an undoubted popular tendency in direction
of such arbitration, which would be "compulsory" in the highest moral
sense,--the compulsion of a promise. The world at large, and we
especially, stand at the opening of a new era, concerning whose
problems little can be foreseen. Among the peoples, there is
manifested intense interest in the maturing of our national
convictions, as being, through Asia, new-comers into active
international life, concerning whose course it is impossible to
predict; and in many quarters, probably in all except Great Britain,
the attitude toward us is watchful rather than sympathetic. The
experience of Crete and of Armenia does not suggest beneficent results
from the arbitration of many counsellors; especially if contrasted
with the more favorable issue when Russia, in 1877, acting on her own
single initiative, forced by the conscience of her people, herself
alone struck the fetters from Bulgaria; or when we ourselves last
year, rejecting intermediation, loosed the bonds from Cuba, and lifted
the yoke from the neck of the oppressed.
It was inevitable that thoughts like these should recur frequently to
one of the writer's habit of thought, when in constant touch with the
atmosphere that hung around the Conference, although the latter was by
it but little affected. The poet's words, "The Parliament of man, the
federation of the world," were much in men's mouths this past summer.
There is no denying the beauty of the ideal, but there was apparent
also a disposition, in contemplating it, to contemn the slow processes
of evolution by which Nature commonly attains her ends, and to impose
at once, by convention, the methods that commended themselves to the
sanguine. Fruit is not best ripened by premature plucking, nor can the
goal be reached by such short cuts. Step by step, in the past, man has
ascended by means of the sword, and his more recent gains, as well as
present conditions, show that the time has not yet come to kick down
the ladder which has so far served him. Three hundred years ago, the
people of the land in which the Conference was assembled wrenched with
the sword civil and religious peace and national independence from the
tyranny of Spain. Then began the disintegration of her empire, and the
deliverance of peoples from her oppression, but this was completed
only last year, and then again by the sword--of the United States.
In the centuries which have since intervened, what has not "justice,
with valor armed," when confronted by evil in high places, found
itself compelled to effect by resort to the sword? To it was due the
birth of our own nation, not least among the benefits of which was the
stern experience that has made Great Britain no longer the mistress,
but the mother, of her dependencies. The control, to good from evil,
of the devastating fire of the French Revolution and of Napoleon was
due to the sword. The long line of illustrious names and deeds, of
those who bore it not in vain, has in our times culminated--if indeed
the end is even yet nearly reached--in the new birth of the United
States by the extirpation of human slavery, and in the downfall, but
yesterday, of a colonial empire identified with tyranny. What the
sword, and it supremely, tempered only by the stern demands of justice
and of conscience, and the loving voice of charity, has done for India
and for Egypt, is a tale at once too long and too well known for
repetition here. Peace, indeed, is not adequate to all progress; there
are resistances that can be overcome only by explosion. What means
less violent than war would in a half-year have solved the Caribbean
problem, shattered national ideas deep rooted in the prepossessions of
a century, and planted the United States in Asia, face to face with
the great world problem of the immediate future? What but war rent the
veil which prevented the English-speaking communities from seeing eye
to eye, and revealed to each the face of a brother? Little wonder that
a war which, with comparatively little bloodshed, brought such
consequences, was followed by the call for a Peace Conference!
Power, force, is a faculty of national life; one of the talents
committed to nations by God. Like every other endowment of a complex
organization, it must be held under control of the enlightened
intellect and of the upright heart; but no more than any other can it
be carelessly or lightly abjured, without incurring the responsibility
of one who buries in the earth that which was intrusted to him for
use. And this obligation to maintain right, by force if need be, while
common to all states, rests peculiarly upon the greater, in proportion
to their means. Much is required of those to whom much is given. So
viewed, the ability speedily to put forth the nation's power, by
adequate organization and other necessary preparation, according to
the reasonable demands of the nation's intrinsic strength and of its
position in the world, is one of the clear duties involved in the
Christian word "watchfulness,"--readiness for the call that may come,
whether expectedly or not. Until it is demonstrable that no evil
exists, or threatens the world, which cannot be obviated without
recourse to force, the obligation to readiness must remain; and, where
evil is mighty and defiant, the obligation to use force--that is,
war--arises. Nor is it possible, antecedently, to bring these
conditions and obligations under the letter of precise and codified
law, to be administered by a tribunal; and in the spirit legalism is
marked by blemishes as real as those commonly attributed to
"militarism," and not more elevated. The considerations which
determine good and evil, right and wrong, in crises of national life,
or of the world's history, are questions of equity often too
complicated for decision upon mere rules, or even principles, of law,
international or other. The instances of Bulgaria, of Armenia, and of
Cuba, are entirely in point, and it is most probable that the
contentions about the future of China will afford further
illustration. Even in matters where the interest of nations is
concerned, the moral element enters; because each generation in its
day is the guardian of those which shall follow it. Like all
guardians, therefore, while it has the power to act according to its
best judgment, it has no right, for the mere sake of peace, to permit
known injustice to be done to its wards.
The present strong feeling, throughout the nations of the world, in
favor of arbitration, is in itself a subject for congratulation almost
unalloyed. It carries indeed a promise, to the certainty of which no
paper covenants can pretend; for it influences the conscience by
inward conviction, not by external fetter. But it must be remembered
that such sentiments, from their very universality and evident
laudableness, need correctives, for they bear in themselves a great
danger of excess or of precipitancy. Excess is seen in the
disposition, far too prevalent, to look upon war not only as an evil,
but as an evil unmixed, unnecessary, and therefore always
unjustifiable; while precipitancy, to reach results considered
desirable, is evidenced by the wish to _impose_ arbitration, to
prevent recourse to war, by a general pledge previously made. Both
frames of mind receive expression in the words of speakers, among whom
a leading characteristic is lack of measuredness and of proportion.
Thus an eminent citizen is reported to have said: "There is no more
occasion for two nations to go to war than for two men to settle their
difficulties with clubs." Singularly enough, this point of view
assumes to represent peculiarly Christian teaching, willingly ignorant
of the truth that Christianity, while it will not force the conscience
by other than spiritual weapons, as "compulsory" arbitration might,
distinctly recognizes the sword as the resister and remedier of evil
in the sphere "of this world."
Arbitration's great opportunity has come in the advancing moral
standards of states, whereby the disposition to deliberate wrong-doing
has diminished, and consequently the occasions for redressing wrong by
force the less frequent to arise. In view of recent events however,
and very especially of notorious, high-handed oppression, initiated
since the calling of the Peace Conference, and resolutely continued
during its sessions in defiance of the public opinion--the
conviction--of the world at large, it is premature to assume that such
occasions belong wholly to the past. Much less can it be assumed that
there will be no further instances of a community believing,
conscientiously and entirely, that honor and duty require of it a
certain course, which another community with equal integrity may hold
to be inconsistent with the rights and obligations of its own members.
It is quite possible, especially to one who has recently visited
Holland, to conceive that Great Britain and the Boers are alike
satisfied of the substantial justice of their respective claims. It is
permissible most earnestly to hope that, in disputes between sovereign
states, arbitration may find a way to reconcile peace with fidelity to
conscience, in the case of both; but if the conviction of conscience
remains unshaken, war is better than disobedience,--better than
acquiescence in recognized wrong. The great danger of undiscriminating
advocacy of arbitration, which threatens even the cause it seeks to
maintain, is that it may lead men to tamper with equity, to compromise
with unrighteousness, soothing their conscience with the belief that
war is so entirely wrong that beside it no other tolerated evil is
wrong. Witness Armenia, and witness Crete. War has been avoided; but
what of the national consciences that beheld such iniquity and
withheld the hand?
NOTE.--This paper was the means of bringing into the author's
hands a letter by the late General Sherman, which forcibly
illustrates how easily, in quiet moments, men forget what
they have owed, and still owe, to the sword. From the
coincidence of its thought with that of the article itself,
permission to print it here has been asked and received.
NEW YORK, February 5th, 1890.
DEAR GENERAL MEIGS,--I attended the Centennial Ceremonies in
honor of the Supreme Court yesterday, four full hours in the
morning at the Metropolitan Opera House, and about the same
measure of time at the Grand Banquet of 850 lawyers in the
evening at the Lenox Lyceum.
The whole was superb in all its proportions, but it was no
place for a soldier. I was bidden to the feast solely and
exclusively because in 1858 for a few short months I was an
attorney at Leavenworth, Kansas.
The Bar Association of the United States has manifestly cast
aside the Sword of Liberty. Justice and Law have ignored the
significance of the Great Seal of the United States, with its
emblematic olive branch and thirteen arrows, "all proper,"
and now claim that, without force, Law and moral suasion have
carried us through one hundred years of history. Of course,
in your study you will read at leisure these speeches, and if
in them you discover any sense of obligation to the Soldier
element, you will be luckier than I, a listener.
From 1861 to 1865 the Supreme Court was absolutely paralyzed;
their decrees and writs were treated with contempt south of
the Potomac and Ohio; they could not summon a witness or send
a Deputy Marshal. War, and the armed Power of the Nation,
alone removed the barrier and restored to the U.S. courts
their lawful jurisdiction. Yet, from these honied words of
flattery, a stranger would have inferred that at last the
lawyers of America had discovered the sovereign panacea of a
Government without force, either visible or in reserve.
I was in hopes the Civil War had dispelled this dangerous
illusion, but it seems not.
You and I can fold our hands and truly say we have done a
man's share, and leave the consequences to younger men who
must buffet with the next storms; but a Government which
ignores the great truths illuminated in heraldic language
over its very Capitol is not yet at the end of its woes.
With profound respect,
W.T. SHERMAN.