Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay
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.
[2] For the inconsistency between the views expressed by Rousseau
on this subject in the _Discourses_ and in the _Contrat Social_
(Cf. I. Chs. VI., VIII.) see Ritchie’s _Natural Right_, Ch.
III., pp. 48, 49; Caird’s essay on Rousseau in his _Essays on
Literature and Philosophy_, Vol. I.; and Morley’s _Rousseau_,
Vol. I., Ch. V.; Vol. II., Ch. XII.
[3] The theory that the golden age was identical with the
state of nature, Professor D. G. Ritchie ascribes to Locke
(see _Natural Right_, Ch. II., p. 42). Locke, he says, “has an
idea of a golden age” existing even after government has come
into existence—a time when people did not need “to examine the
original and rights of government.” [_Civil Government_, II., §
111.] A little confusion on the part of his readers (perhaps in
his own mind) makes it possible to regard the state of nature as
itself the golden age, and the way is prepared for the favourite
theory of the eighteenth century:—
“Nor think in nature’s state they blindly trod;
The state of nature was the reign of God:
Self-love and social at her birth began,
Union the bond of all things and of man.
Pride then was not, nor arts that pride to aid;
Man walk’d with beast, joint tenant of the shade;
The same his table, and the same his bed;
No murder cloath’d him, and no murder fed.”
[_Essay on Man_, III., 147 _seq._]
In these lines of Pope’s the state of nature is identified with
the golden age of the Greek and Latin poets; and “the reign of
God” is an equivalent for Locke’s words, “has a law of nature to
govern it.”
_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]
[4] Cf. _Republic_, II. 369. “A state,” says Socrates, “arises
out of the needs of mankind: no one is self-sufficing, but all of
us have many wants.”
[5] See Hume’s account of the origin of government (_Treatise_,
III., Part II., Sect. VIII.). There are, he says, American
tribes “where men live in concord and amity among themselves
without any established government; and never pay submission
to any of their fellows, except in time of war, when their
captain enjoys a shadow of authority, which he loses after their
return from the field, and the establishment of peace with the
neighbouring tribes. This authority, however, instructs them in
the advantages of government, and teaches them to have recourse
to it, when either by the pillage of war, by commerce, or by any
fortuitous inventions, their riches and possessions have become
so considerable as to make them forget, on every emergence, the
interest they have in the preservation of peace and justice....
Camps are the true mothers of cities; and as war cannot be
administered, by reason of the suddenness of every exigency,
without some authority in a single person, the same kind of
authority naturally takes place in that civil government, which
succeeds the military.”
Cf. Cowper: _The Winter Morning Walk_:—
“. . . . . . . . . . . . . . and ere long,
When man was multiplied and spread abroad
In tribes and clans, and had begun to call
These meadows and that range of hills his own,
The tasted sweets of property begat
Desire of more; . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Thus wars began on earth. These fought for spoil,
And those in self-defence. Savage at first
The onset, and irregular. At length
One eminent above the rest, for strength,
For stratagem, or courage, or for all,
Was chosen leader. Him they served in war,
And him in peace for sake of warlike deeds
Rev’renced no less. . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Thus kings were first invented.”
[6] “Among uncivilised nations, there is but one profession
honourable, that of arms. All the ingenuity and vigour of the
human mind are exerted in acquiring military skill or address.”
Cf. Robertson’s _History of Charles V._, (_Works_, 1813, vol. V.)
Sect. I. vii.
_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.
[7] Similarly we find that the original meaning of the Latin word
“_hostis_” was “a stranger.”
[8] In Aristotle we find the high-water mark of Greek thinking
on this subject. “The object of military training,” says he,
(_Politics_, Bk. IV. Ch. XIV., Welldon’s translation—in older
editions Bk. VII.) “should be not to enslave persons who do
not deserve slavery, but firstly to secure ourselves against
becoming the slaves of others; secondly, to seek imperial power
not with a view to a universal despotic authority, but for the
benefit of the subjects whom we rule, and thirdly, to exercise
despotic power over those who are deserving to be slaves. That