EARLY ADVOCATES OF UNIVERSAL PEACE
Those who have tried to point the world to universal peace may be
divided into two schools: one advocating a form of coöperation in
which the final reliance is to be reason, the other looking forward to
some effective form of common action behind which shall be sufficient
force to carry out the measures necessary to enforce the common will.
It is convenient to describe the former group as advocating a league
of peace, since we are generally agreed that a league is a form of
concert from which the constituent members may withdraw at will, and
in which does not reside power to force them to do what they do not
find reasonable. The second group wish to have a federation, if by that
term we understand a united group in which exists power sufficient to
preserve the common cause against any possible disobedient member.
To form a league is easier than to form a federation. States are
tenacious of sovereignty. The Swiss cantons, the Dutch provinces, and
the original thirteen states of North America are the most striking
illustrations of states that were willing to submit themselves to the
more strenuous process of union. They acted under stress of great
common peril, and their first steps in federation were short and timid;
but none of them have regretted that the steps were taken. It was the
good fortune of these groups of states that they were able to unite
at the proper time and that their actions were not overclouded by the
counsel of “practical statesmen” to whom ideals were things to be
distrusted.
In other states in periods of great distress from war men lived who
dreamed of coöperation to promote peace, but their voices were too weak
for the times. The most notable early advocate of this scheme was the
Duke of Sully, if we may accept the notion that he wrote the work known
as the _Grand Design_ of Henry IV. In that plan was contemplated a
Christian Republic, composed of fifteen states in Europe, only three of
which were to have a republican form of government. They were to give
up warring among themselves and to refer to a common council, modeled
on the Ionic League, all matters of interstate relation that were of
importance to the “very Christian Republic.” The only war this republic
was to wage was the common war to expel the Turks from Europe. It was
after Henry’s death that Sully published the plan with the assertion
that his former master had formed it just after the treaty of Vervins,
1598.
Whether it was the work of king or duke, no attempt was made to put it
into force. In 1598 Europe was in the throes of a long and hopeless
struggle for religion. Cities were destroyed, men and women were
butchered, and the safety of states was threatened. The _Grand Design_
represents the reaction of either Henry’s or Sully’s mind against such
a terror. It was a thing to be desired, if it could have been attained.
One of the marks of peace that it displayed was the attitude it took
towards the branches of the Christian faith. Complete tolerance was to
exist for the three forms, Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism.
This was a kind of idealism that was then unattainable; but in the
course of time it has been achieved. I should not like to say the day
will not come when the other side of the scheme, interstate peace, will
also cease to be too ideal for realization.
The next important suggestion of union for peace was made by William
Penn in 1693 in an _Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of
Europe_. At that time the Continent was racked with war--a result of
the ambition of Louis XIV to raise France to a dominating position
among the other nations--, the Palatinate had been devastated, and
the will of the “Grand Monarch” was the dreaded fact in international
politics. Penn realized that great sacrifices were ahead; for it was as
true then as now that when a strong state rises to a position in which
it can threaten universal rule, there is nothing for the other states
but to combine and fight as long as they can.
Penn’s proposal was that the sovereigns of Europe should form a Great
Diet in which all their disputes should be adjusted. If any state
refused to submit to the judgment of the diet and appealed to arms,
all the other states were to fall upon it with their armies and make
it rue the course it had taken. Quaker though he was, he would have
war to prevent war. His proposal made no impression on his “practical”
contemporaries; but he was prepared for that. Men of his faith were
used to “bearing testimony” in the expectation that “the world” would
scoff. Although it was not included in the original folio edition of
his works this essay remains to this day the best known thing he wrote.
It is one of the most logical arguments for peace that we have.
From 1701 to 1714 was waged the War of the Spanish Succession, the last
of the series of struggles in which Louis XIV wore out his kingdom in
trying to make it supreme over its neighbors. It left France exhausted
and miserable, and it had not realized the king’s ambition. In 1713,
the year in which Louis was forced to accept the Treaty of Utrecht in
token of his defeat, was published by the Abbé Castel de St. Pierre
a book called _Projet de Traité pour rendre la Paix Perpetuelle_.
Like the utterances of Sully and Penn, it was wrung out of the mind
of the author by the ruin that lay around him. It differed from them
in nothing but in its more abundant details. The abbé had taken many
things into account, and the union of nations that he proposed was to
do six important things.
1. There was to be a perpetual alliance of European rulers with a diet
composed of plenipotentiary agents in which disputed points were to
be settled amicably. 2. What sovereigns were to be admitted to the
alliance was to be determined by the act of alliance, which was also to
fix the proportion in which each should contribute to the common fund.
3. The union was to guarantee the sovereignty of the constituent states
with existing boundaries, and future disputes of this nature were to
be referred to the arbitration of the council. 4. States offending
against the laws of the diet were to be put under the ban of Europe.
5. A state under the ban was to be coërced by the other states until
it accepted the laws it had violated. 6. The council was to make such
laws, on instruction from the sovereigns, as were thought necessary to
the objects for which the perpetual alliance was created.
Like the two preceding plans the abbé’s scheme was too strong to be
rated as a league. It does not allow us to think that a state could
withdraw at pleasure from the alliance; and it gave to the council the
authority to lay taxes, make laws that were binding, and punish defiant
members. It is noteworthy for the large amount of power it gave to the
sovereigns, since the members of the council were their agents and
acted only on instructions. Under the prevalent notions of the divine
right of kings no other method of selecting the members of the council
would have been considered in France, Spain, or Germany. On the other
hand, the abbé’s scheme was less liberal in this respect than Penn’s,
which provided that the wisest and justest men in each nation should be
sent to the council. It was also a part of Penn’s plan that the council
should be a really deliberative body, a parliament of Europe as truly
as there was in England a parliament of the realm.
We have no evidence that the arguments of the good abbé made a profound
impression upon any of the sovereigns upon whose favor the scheme
depended. The Treaty of Utrecht was followed by a season of peace. So
deeply wounded was Europe by conflict that it had no stomach for war
during a generation. It was a time of great industrial prosperity in
England, France, and Prussia. Walpole, the wise guardian of peaceful
society, dominated the first of these nations, Fleury, also a man of
peace, was for a large part of the time the guiding hand in the second,
and Frederic William I directed the development of the third with
a sure sense of economy and the efficient use of resources. At the
same time Austria was under the direction of Charles VI, a peaceful
monarch who had too many anxieties at home to think of wars against
the Christian sovereigns around him. The small struggles that occurred
were without significance; and it was not until 1740, when a new
generation was on the scene, that Europe again had a period of general
war, precipitated by an imaginative young king who could not resist the
temptation to use the excellent tool with which his father had provided
him. Out of the twenty years’ struggle that now followed, no new plan
arose for a system of coöperation to secure peace, but one of the great
philosophers of the time made a new statement of the Abbé St. Pierre’s
plan, which served as a new proposition.
It was during the last years of the Seven Years’ War that Rousseau
received the papers of the good abbé, with the expectation that he
would prepare them for publication in a more popular form than the
twenty-one volumes in which the author’s thoughts were buried. He
eventually gave up the task, but he produced two short summaries,
one of which was entitled _Extrait du Projet de Paix perpetuelle de
M. L’Abbé de Saint-Pierre_. The “extract” proper was followed by a
“judgment” in which Rousseau voiced his own views. He advocated the
creation of a confederacy mutually dependent, no state to be permitted
to resist all the other states united nor to form an alliance with any
other state in rivalry with the confederacy. The scope of the central
authority was defined, and there was to be a legislature to make laws
in amplification of that authority, such laws to be administered by a
federal court. No state was to withdraw from the union. Thus, Rousseau
made his proposed confederacy rest on force. In his mind it was to be
vitally efficient government, capable of doing all it was created to do.
All the plans I have mentioned contemplated the creation of a central
authority strong enough to make itself obeyed. They implied, therefore,
that each constituent state should relinquish a part of its sovereignty
in order to form the federation. Now this was, as at the present time,
a strong objection to the scheme. No one has met it better than William
Penn, who said:
“I am come now to the last Objection, _That Sovereign Princes
and States will hereby become not Sovereign: a Thing they will
never endure_. But this also, under Correction, is a Mistake, for
they remain as Sovereign at Home as ever they were. Neither their
Power over their People, nor the usual Revenue they pay them,
is diminished: It may be the War Establishment may be reduced,
which will indeed of Course follow, or be better employed to the
Advantage of the Publick. So that the _Soveraignties_ are as they
were, for none of them have now any Soveraignty over one another:
And if this be called a lessening of their Power, it must be only
because the great Fish can no longer eat up the little ones, and
that each Soveraignty is _equally defended_ from Injuries, and
disabled from committing them.”
A quarter of a century later, in the beginning of the French
Revolution, Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher, advocated the
union of states in behalf of common peace, but he rested his argument
on morality, not on force. There was to be a league of states,
with a legislature and courts of justice, but the decisions were to
be executed by the states themselves. He held that after the court
gave a decision in a specified case and published the evidence and
arguments, public opinion would be strong enough to enforce the
judgment. By discarding force Bentham had the advantage of preserving
the sovereignty of the states, a thing that is particularly esteemed by
an Englishman. He is to be considered the first of a series of eminent
peace advocates who look no further than a league of states bound
together by their plighted word and relying on the weight of public
opinion to coërce the individual states.
He had given his life to the task of fixing the sway of law in the
minds of humanity, and it was a part of his general idea that a high
court of justice, investigating a controversy, and exposing all the
sides of it before a world of fair minded observers, would lessen the
asperity of opposing passions so that the verdict of the court would be
received as saving credit and honor to the party who had to yield. It
is out of this attitude that our whole doctrine of arbitration as an
expedient for escaping war has its rise, a doctrine of such importance
in our general subject that no peace advocate would dare reject it
wholly.
Bentham’s opinion was expressed in a stray pamphlet that made little
impression in his time and has nearly escaped the notice of posterity.
A more conspicuous achievement, and nearly contemporary, was an essay
by Immanuel Kant, philosopher at Königsberg, in Prussia. In 1795 he
published _Zum ewigen Frieden_, an outline for a league of perpetual
peace. There was a time, he argued, when men lived by force under the
laws of nature, each regulating his own conduct toward his neighbors,
the strongest man having his way through his ability to overawe his
associates. Then came the state and the rule of law, and with their
arrival one saw the exit of personal combat. Kant applied the same
argument to the intercourse of the nations, saying they were in a state
of nature toward one another. He proposed to organize a super-state
over them, with authority to bring them under a law prohibiting wars
among themselves. He would assign a definite field of action to the new
power, with the function of making laws in enforcing that authority,
and it would have the necessary administrative and judicial officers.
The law made by the united government was to be as good law for its own
purposes as the law made by the individual states for their purposes.
Kant’s suggestion was closely kin to Rousseau’s ideas of the state,
but he wrote at a time when the world, stampeded by the excesses
of the Jacobins, was turning away from all the political theories
that underlay the French Revolution. It had no use for the idea that
government was the outcome of a social contract; and if this idea was
not accepted for the state itself, how much less would it be accepted
as a means of organizing the international state! The world suffered
too much at the hands of Napoleon to like ideas that were responsible
for the very beginning of the letting out of the waters. And this was
especially true in Prussia, where the foot of the French conqueror was
extremely heavy.
At the moment when Kant’s ideas were at the height of unpopularity
came the young philosopher, Hegel, who announced a philosophical
view of war that pleased the governing class of Prussia, bent on
establishing a system of military training that would be sufficient
for a redeemed country. He taught that war through action burns away
moral excrescences, purifies the health of society, and stimulates
the growth of manly virtue. This idea became the basis of much German
reasoning, and it is not improbable that its defenders in trying to
discern the virtues they argued for, were led to develop them. But in
their enthusiasm they came to exaggerate these virtues into habits that
were often mere manifestations of an exalted egoism. As to the claim
that war burns up the effete products of society, it may be met by the
undeniable assertion that it also burns much that is best. One does not
burn a city to destroy the vermin that are in it.
The next attempt to bring about a system of coöperation to secure
peace among the nations was the formation of the Holy Alliance, a
futile attempt to apply principles like those just described, made by
Alexander I, of Russia, at the close of the Napoleonic wars. It is
considered at length in the chapter following this, where it finds
its proper setting. The extremely religious spirit in which it was
conceived was a drawback to success, but it is not likely that it
would have fared better than it did fare, even if stripped of all its
pious fantasy, since the world was not educated to its acceptance as a
purely political idea.
At this stage one must notice the development of peace societies.
Organized at first as local bodies they were drawn together into
national organizations in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
It was in 1816 that such a society was created in Great Britain, and in
1828 that the American Peace Society was formed out of local societies
in the United States. In the same year was established at Geneva the
first peace society on the Continent, the second being organized at
Paris in 1841. The influence of such societies was weak for a long
time; but within the past twenty years it has been much stronger.
One of the most striking examples of the prevalence of the peace
idea in recent times is the growing use of arbitration as a means
of settling international disputes. Another is the meeting of the
Hague conferences to promote peace. The first was called by the tsar,
Nicholas II, in 1899 and laid a broad outline of the work that
such conferences ought to do. A second assembled in the year 1907,
and a third was about to convene when the Great War began in 1914.
The conferences devoted their strongest efforts to the reduction of
armaments and the checking of militarism; but in each case they found
the German Empire planted boldly across their path, and in this respect
their efforts were futile. It is not to be doubted that the attitude of
Germany contributed much to develop the widespread suspicion of that
country which has been one of her handicaps in the present war.
The “peace movement,” as the totality of these activities is called,
has thus gained strength, and it would seem that it must eventually
prevail in public opinion. It received an important momentum in
1910, when Mr. Andrew Carnegie gave $10,000,000 to establish the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an organization which has
contributed powerfully to the promotion of peace ideas. It acts on
scientific principles, seeking to gather and publish such facts bearing
on international relations, the laws of economics and history, and the
science of international law, as will show in what respect war is to be
removed from its hold on society.
The careless enthusiasm with which a great many people hailed the
outbreak of war in 1914 swept the peace advocates into the background
and was the occasion of some sarcasm at their expense. But as the
struggle grew in grimness and horrors the advocates of peace on
principle returned to their old position in public esteem, and have
steadily gained on it. It seems undeniable that the war has done more
to convince the world of the madness of war than many decades of
agitation could do.
One of the manifestations of the rebound here mentioned was the
organization in June, 1915, of “The League to Enforce Peace.” This
society was created in a meeting of representative men assembled in
Carpenters’ Hall, Philadelphia, the place in which the Declaration
of Independence was adopted. Its principles are embraced in the
following proposals: 1. A judicial tribunal to which will be referred
judiciable disputes between the signatory powers, subject to existing
treaties, the tribunals to have power to pass on the merits of the
disputes submitted as well as on its jurisdiction over them. 2. The
reference of other disputes between the signatory states to a council
of conciliation, which will hear the cases submitted and recommend
settlements in accordance with its ideas of justice. 3. If any
signatory state threatens war before its case is submitted to the
judicial tribunal or the council of conciliation, the other states will
jointly employ diplomatic pressure to prevent war; and if hostilities
actually begin under such circumstances they will jointly use their
military forces against the power in contempt of the league. 4. The
signatory states will from time to time hold conferences to formulate
rules of international law which are to be executed by the tribunal of
arbitration unless within a stated time some state vetoes the proposal.
The system of coöperation embodied in these proposals is not a
federation, within the meaning that I have given to that term. It is
what it pretends to be, merely a league. It seems to concede the right
of a state to secede from the league at will. As to what would happen
under it if a signatory state refusing to abide the decision of the
tribunal or council of conciliation should attempt to withdraw and
make war at once, we can have little doubt. In such a case the attempt
to secede would probably be considered defiance and steps be taken to
reduce the state to submission. Nevertheless it might happen that a
state within the league, finding its action restricted so that it could
not adopt some policy which it considered essential to its welfare,
might proceed to withdraw in view of a line of conduct it intended
to take at a later time. In that case it is difficult to see how the
league could resist unless it was willing to take the position that it
had a kind of sovereignty over all interstate relations, a position
that involves more concentration than the form of the league seems to
imply.
At this point in our inquiry into the subject of coöperation to secure
universal peace an inviting field of speculation opens before us, but
we must turn aside for the time, in order to consider various phases
of the process by which the world has arrived at the crisis now before
it. This chapter will serve its purpose if it gives the reader a view
of the earliest suggestions of systems of common action and if it makes
clear the differences between the two general plans that have been
formulated, the league and the federation.