When the civilized peoples shall have reached the point of joining in a large federation, the time will have come when for evermore the storms of war shall have been lain. Perpetual peace is no dream, as the gentlemen who strut about in uniforms seek to make people believe. That day shall have come the moment the peoples shall have understood their true interests: these are not promoted by war and dissension, by armaments that bear down whole nations; they are promoted by peaceful, mutual understandings, and jointly laboring in the path of civilization. Moreover, as was shown on page 238, the ruling classes and their Governments are seeing to it that the military armaments and wars break their own backs by their own immensity. Thus the last weapons will wander into the museums of antiquity, as so many of their predecessors have done before, and serve as witnesses to future generations of the manner in which the generations gone by have for thousands of years frequently torn up one another like wild animals—until finally the human in them triumphed over the beast.
National peculiarities are everywhere nourished by the ruling classes in order that, at a given conjuncture, a great war may furnish a drainage for dangerous tendencies at home. As a proof of the extent to which these national peculiarities engender wars, an utterance of the late General Fieldmarshal Moltke may here be quoted. In the last volume of his posthumous work, which deals with the German-French war of 1870-71, this passage occurs among others in the introductory observations:
"So long as nations lead separate existences there will be dissensions that only strokes can arbitrate. In the interest of humanity, however, it is to be hoped that wars may become as much rarer as they have become more fearful."
Now then, this national separate existence, that is, the hostile shutting off of one nation from another, will vanish. Thus future generations will be able to achieve without trouble tasks that gifted heads have long conceived, and unsuccessfully attempted to accomplish. Condorcet, among others, conceived the idea of an international language. The late Ulysses S. Grant, ex-President of the United States, uttered himself this wise on a public occasion: "Seeing that commerce, education and the rapid exchange of thought and of goods by telegraphy and steam have altered everything, I believe that God is preparing the world to become one nation, to speak one language and to reach a state of perfection in which armies and navies will no longer be needed." It is natural that with a full-blooded Yankee the leading role be played by the "dear God," who, after all, is but the product of historic development. Hypocrisy, or perhaps also ignorance in matters that concern religion, is nowhere as stupendous as in the United States. The less the power of the State presses upon the masses, all the more must religion do the work. Hence the phenomenon that the bourgeoisie is most pious wherever the power of the State is laxest. Next to the United States, come England, Belgium and Switzerland in this matter. Even the revolutionary Robespierre, who played with the heads of aristocrats and priests as with nine-pin balls, was, as is known, very religious, whence he ceremoniously introduced the "Supreme Being," which shortly before had, with equal bad taste, been dethroned by the Convention. And seeing that the frivolous and idle aristocrats of France had been greatly bragging about their atheism, Robespierre regarded atheism as aristocratic, and denounced it in his speech to the Convention on the "Supreme Being" with these words: "Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a Supreme Being, that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime, comes from the people. If there were no God, one would have to be invented." The virtuous Robespierre had his misgivings concerning the power of his virtuous republic to cancel the existing social antagonisms, hence his belief in a Supreme Being that wreaks vengeance and seeks to smooth the difficulties that the people of his time were unable to smooth. Hence also was such a belief a necessity to the first republic.
One step in progress will bring another. Mankind will ever set new tasks to itself, and the accomplishment of the same will lead it to such a degree of social development that wars, religious quarrels and similar manifestations of barbarism will be unknown.
FOOTNOTE:
[228] "National and human interests stand to-day opposed to each other. At a higher stage of civilization these interests will coincide and become one."—v. Thuenen, "Der Isolirte Staat."