John Bassett - The Lost Fruits of Waterloo

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.