Émile Zola
I did not want to leave this letter unanswered. I wrote back:
Château de Harmannsdorf, December 13, 1893
Master:
Accept my sincerest thanks; your letter, containing the precious promise that you will work with all your heart for the reconciliation of the nations, has aroused the enthusiasm of our general assembly.
The fraternal embrace? Universal love?... You are right; humanity has not as yet got to that point. But it does not require mutual love (tendresse mutuelle) to give up killing one another. What exists to-day, and what the peace leagues are combating, is the system of a destructive, organized, legitimized hatred, such as does not in the last analysis exist any longer in human hearts.
There has been talk of late of an international conference, having in view a coalition against the danger of anarchy. Never will the foolishness of the present situation have been more glaring than when these representatives of states which are living together in absolute anarchy—since they acknowledge no superior power—shall deliberate around the same table on methods of protecting themselves against five or six criminal bombs, while at the same time they will go on threatening one another with a hundred thousand legal bombs!
Perhaps the idea might occur to them of saying: To unite in face of a common enemy, we must be reconciled; to defend civilization against barbarism, let us begin by being civilized ourselves; if we desire to protect society from the danger which the action of a madman may inflict upon it, let us, first of all, do away with the thousandfold more terrible danger which the frown of one of the mighty of the earth would be sufficient to let loose upon it; if we wish to punish the lawless, let us recognize a law above ourselves; if we wish to parry the blows of the desperate, let us cease to spend billions in fomenting despair.
But in order that the official delegates may use this reasonable language, they must have back of them the universal acclaim (la clameur universelle) to encourage them, or, better still, to compel them to do so.
The evolution of humanity is not a dream, it is a fact scientifically proved. Its end cannot be the premature destruction toward which it is being precipitated by the present system; its end must be the reign of law in control of force. Arms and ferocity develop in inverse ratio,—the tooth, the big stick, the sword, the musket, the explosive bomb, the electric war engine; and, on the other side, the wild beast, the savage, the warrior, the old soldier, the fighter of to-day (so-called safeguard of peace), the humane man of the future, who, in possession of a power of boundless destructiveness, will refuse to use it.