PEACE

The horrors of war are just now making a deeper impression than

ever on the popular mind, owing to the close contact with the

battle-field and the hospital into which the railroad and the

telegraph and the newspaper have brought the public of all

civilized countries. Wars are fought out now, so to speak, under

every man's and woman's eyes; and, what is perhaps of nearly as

much importance, the growth of commerce and manufactures, and the

increased complication of the social machine, render the smallest

derangement of it anywhere a concern and trouble to all nations.

The consequence is that the desire for peace was never so deep as

it is now, and the eagerness of all good people to find out some

other means of deciding international disputes than mutual

killing never so intense.

And yet the unconsciousness of the true nature and difficulties

of the problem they are trying to solve, which is displayed by

most of those who make the advocacy of peace their special work,

is very discouraging. We are far from believing that the

incessant and direct appeals to the public conscience on the

subject of war are not likely in the long run to produce some

effect; but it is very difficult to resist the conclusion that

the efforts of the special advocates of peace have thus far

helped to spread and strengthen the impression that there is no

adequate substitute for the sword as an arbiter between nations,

or, in other words, to harden the popular heart on the subject of

military slaughter. It is certain that, during the last fifty

years, the period in which peace societies have been at work,

armies have been growing steadily larger, the means of destruction

have been multiplying, and wars have been as frequent and as

bloody as ever before; and, what is worse, the popular heart goes

into war as it has never done in past ages.

The great reason why the more earnest enemies of war have not

made more progress toward doing away with it, has been that, from

the very outset of their labors down to the present moment, they

have devoted themselves mainly to depicting its horrors and to

denouncing its cruelty. In other words, they almost invariably

approach it from a side with which nations actually engaged in it

are just as familiar as anybody, but which has for the moment

assumed in their eyes a secondary importance. The peace advocates

are constantly talking of the guilt of killing, while the

combatants only think, and will only think, of the nobleness of

dying. To the peace advocates the soldier is always a man going

to slaughter his neighbors; to his countrymen he is a man going

to lose his life for their sake--that is, to perform the loftiest

act of devotion of which a human being is capable. It is not

wonderful, then, that the usual effect of appeals for peace made

by neutrals is to produce mingled exasperation and amusement

among the belligerents. To the great majority of Europeans our

civil war was a shocking spectacle, and the persistence of the

North in carrying it on a sad proof of ferocity and lust of

dominion. To the great majority of those engaged in carrying it

on the struggle was a holy one, in which it was a blessing to

perish. Probably nothing ever fell more cruelly on human ears

than the taunts and execrations which American wives and mothers

heard from the other side of the ocean, heaped on the husbands

and sons whom they had sent to the battle-field, never thinking

at all of their slaying, but thinking solely of their being

slain; and very glad indeed that, if death had to come, it should

come in such a cause. If we go either to France or Germany

to-day, we shall find a precisely similar state of feeling. If

the accounts we hear be true--and we know of no reason to doubt

them--there is no more question in the German and French mind

that French and German soldiers are doing their highest duty in

fighting, than there was in the most patriotic Northern or

Southern home during our war; and we may guess, therefore, how a

German or French mother, the light of whose life had gone out at

Gravelotte or Orleans, and who hugs her sorrow as a great gift of

God, would receive an address from New York on the general

wickedness and folly of her sacrifice.

The fact is--and it is one of the most suggestive facts we know

of--that the very growth of the public conscience has helped to

make peace somewhat more difficult, war vastly more terrible.

When war was the game of kings and soldiers, the nations went

into it in a half-hearted way, and sincerely loathed it; now that

war is literally an outburst of popular feeling, the friend of

peace finds most of his logic powerless. There is little use in

reasoning with a man who is ready to die on the folly or

wickedness of dying. When a nation has worked itself up to the

point of believing that there are objects within its reach for

which life were well surrendered, it has reached a region in

which the wise saws and modern instances of the philosopher or

lawyer cannot touch it, and in which pictures of the misery of

war only help to make the martyr's crown seem more glorious.

Therefore, we doubt whether the work of peace is well done by

those who, amidst the heat and fury of actual hostilities, dwell

upon the folly and cruelty of them, and appeal to the combatants

to stop fighting, on the ground that fighting involves suffering

and loss of life, and the destruction of property. The principal

effect of this on "the average man" has been to produce the

impression that the friends of peace are ninnies, and to make him

smile over the earnestness with which everybody looks on his own

wars as holy and inevitable, and his neighbors' wars as

unnecessary and wicked. Any practical movement to put an end to

war must begin far away from the battle-field and its horrors. It

must take up and deal with the various influences, social and

political, which create and perpetuate the state of mind which

makes people ready to fight. Preaching up peace and preaching

down war generally are very like general homilies in praise of

virtue and denunciation of vice. Everybody agrees with them, but

nobody is ever ready to admit their applicability to his

particular case. War is, in our time, essentially the people's

work. Its guilt is theirs, as its losses and sufferings are

theirs. All attempts to saddle emperors, kings, and nobles with

the responsibility of it may as well be given up from this time

forward.

Now, what are the agencies which operate in producing the frame of

mind which makes people ready to go to war on small provocation?

It is at these the friends of peace must strike, in time of peace,

and not after the cannon has begun to roar and the country has

gone mad with patriotism and rage. They are, first of all,

the preaching in the press and elsewhere of the false and

pernicious doctrine that one nation gains by another's losses,

and can be made happy by its misery; that the United States, for

instance, profits in the long run by the prostration of French,

German, or English industry. One of the first duties of a peace

society is to watch this doctrine, and hunt it down wherever they

see it, as one of the great promoters of the pride and hardness

of heart which make war seem a trifling evil. America can no more

gain by French or German ruin than New York can gain by that of

Massachusetts. Secondly, there is the mediaeval doctrine that the

less commercial intercourse nations carry on with each other the

better for both, and that markets won or kept by force are means

of gain. There has probably been no more fruitful source of war

than this. It has for three centuries desolated the world, and

all peace associations should fix on it, wherever they encounter

it, the mark of the beast. Thirdly, there is the tendency of the

press, which is now the great moulder of public opinion, to take

what we may call the pugilist's view of international controversies.

The habit of taunting foreign disputants, sneering at the cowardice

or weakness of the one who shows any sign of reluctance in drawing

the sword, and counting up the possible profit to its own country

of one or other being well thrashed, in which it so frequently

indulges, has inevitably the effect not only of goading the

disputants into hostilities, but of connecting in the popular mind

at home the idea of unreadiness or unwillingness to fight with

baseness and meanness and material disadvantage. Fourthly, there

is the practice, to which the press, orators, and poets in every

civilized country steadily adhere, of maintaining, as far as their

influence goes, the same notions about national honor which once

prevailed about individual "honor"--that is, the notion that it is

discreditable to acknowledge one's self in the wrong, and always

more becoming to fight than apologize. "The code" has been abandoned

in the Northern States and in England in the regulations of the

relations of individual men, and a duellist is looked on, if not

as a wicked, as a crack-brained person; but in some degree in

both of them, and in a great degree in all other countries, it

still regulates the mode in which international quarrels are

brought to a conclusion.

Last of all, and most important of all, it is the duty of peace

societies to cherish and exalt the idea of _law_ as the only true

controller of international relations, and discourage and denounce

their submission to _sentiment_. The history of civilization is the

history of the growth amongst human beings of the habit of

submitting their dealings with each other to the direction of rules

of universal application, and their withdrawal of them from the

domain of personal feeling. The history of "international law" is

the history of the efforts of a number of rulers and statesmen to

induce nations to submit themselves to a similar régime--that is, to

substitute precedents and rules based on general canons of morality

and on principles of municipal law, for the dictates of pride,

prejudice, and passion, in their mode of seeking redress of

injuries, of interpreting contracts, exchanging services, and

carrying on commercial dealings. Their success thus far has been

only partial. A nation, even the most highly civilized, is still, in

its relations with its fellows, in a condition somewhat analogous to

that of the individual savage. It chooses its friends from whim or

fancy, makes enemies through ignorance or caprice, avenges its

wrongs in a torrent of rage, or through a cold-blooded thirst for

plunder, and respects rules and usages only fitfully, and with small

attention to the possible effect of its disregard of them on the

general welfare. The man or the woman and, let us say, "the

mother"--since that is supposed to be, in this discussion, a term of

peculiar potency--who tries to exert a good influence on public

opinion on all these points, to teach the brotherhood of man as an

economical as well as a moral and religious truth; to spread the

belief that war between any two nations is a general calamity to the

civilized world; that it is as unchristian and inhuman to rouse

national combativeness as to rouse individual combativeness, as

absurd to associate honor with national wrong-doing as with

individual wrong-doing; and that peace among nations, as among

individuals, is, and can only be, the product of general reverence

for _law_ and general distrust of _feeling_--may rest assured that

he or she is doing far more to bring war to an end than can be done

by the most fervid accounts of the physical suffering it causes. It

will be a sorrowful day for any people when their men come to

consider death on the battle-field the greatest of evils, and the

human heart will certainly have sadly fallen off when those who stay

at home have neither gratitude nor admiration for those who shoulder

the musket, or are impressed less by the consideration that the

soldiers are going to kill others than by the consideration that

they are going to die themselves. There are things worth cherishing

even in war; and the seeds of what is worst in it are sown not in

camps, barracks, or forts, but in public meetings and newspapers and

legislatures and in literature.