The Lost Fruits of Waterloo 5

The Lost Fruits of Waterloo 5

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