Present status and prospects of the Peace Movement

by Bertha von Suttner

[1]. Let it not be objected that a “man’s house is his castle,” and that interference with internal affairs is excluded with nations as it is with individuals. Massacres are not internal affairs. If one man throws down another in my neighbor’s house and is preparing to kill him, and the victim’s cries reach my ears, it is not a breach of the peace if I hasten to help him or call the police.

The possibility that all Culture-States can enter into an alliance, though contested by our opponents, has been proven in fact. Humanity is forced into solidarity by normal evolution along the lines of natural law. What the force of circumstances has brought about could have been accomplished by free will and design, and, so accomplished, it would have been more systematically done, and would have rested upon more secure foundations.

And now, no one has faith in the present casual and transient coalition, and many prophesy that the Powers will quarrel over China, and that the long-dreaded world-conflict will arise in consequence. This, too, is used as an argument against us. “A concert? Unanimity? The slightest disturbance unhinges it all. Rivalry is aroused. No one Power is willing to grant the other a privilege or an advantage. When the coalition campaign has reached its end, or even before that, conflicting interests will assert themselves and the European war will be upon us.”

True, that war will break out, if there be no forum for the settlement of chance contentions, a forum which, by common agreement, would adjust all differences. Everything goes to prove how necessary such a forum is. The sad fact that it is not as yet in operation surely does not militate, in the least, against the possibility or the utility of the establishment of such a tribunal. The foundation of it was laid at The Hague. That it is generally ignored demonstrates the fact that militarism struggles against an institution which would undermine war.

The question, “How in the world do you propose to prevent war in the face of the present upheaval in China?” has been thus answered by Dr. Benjamin F. Trueblood, Corresponding Secretary of the American Peace Society:

“We have been asked how we would have settled the present trouble in China without war. That is as if one were to ask how we would prevent a fire when the flames were already bursting from all the windows. The settlement of the trouble by us without war would have required, first of all, that it be turned over to us for settlement, or that the powers involved in it would agree conscientiously to follow, in their efforts at adjustment, the principles and methods which we might suggest. The utter impossibility of either of these contingencies in the case of the trouble with China shows the thoughtlessness of the question.

“The time to have begun the pacific settlement of the difficulty was many years ago. Given certain conditions, practices and beliefs, such as have for a long time existed in the relations of the other countries to China, and war or something like it was inevitable. No advocate of peace has ever been simple enough to imagine that war can be avoided when every condition leading to good understanding and peace has been neglected or trampled under foot.”

Another point steadily maintained by the advocates of peace and denied by their adversaries has come clearly to light in these latter days, namely, that wars are instigated and brought to their culmination by certain influential men without the slightest reference to the people, to parliaments or to the choicest spirits of the nations. What has been decided upon by the powers that be, what has been mapped out by “Cabinets,” is promulgated as an accomplished fact, approved by the chorus of a servile press, and, if it can be made sensational, cheered by an enthusiastic mob. How necessary that every land should have a ministry of peace, an official organism representing the interests of peace, under whose protection that portion of public opinion which is averse to war might make itself heard. How essential an independent, ethically elevated press, conscious of the duty growing out of its power, the duty to guide the people in the way of unity, of conciliation, of a just consideration of both sides of a quarrel—in short, in the way of peace, the only way worthy of civilization and culture. The opposite is true. The political press, in a ponderous majority, is to-day a forge for the heating of the irons of war.

Current events reveal the fact that our system is not being put in practice, but they reveal no flaws or contradictions in the system itself, for it has none. Without a flaw or contradiction it harmonizes with the law of evolution. The new age—with its advance in technical inventions (with especial reference to the possibility of the slaughter of masses), with its ties of international solidarity, its reciprocal economic interdependencies, its sublimated ethical requirements—has outgrown the system of war, and outgrows it more and more daily. This truth is set forth, as it were, in an object-lesson in the rush of action upon the stage of the world’s theatre. On the other hand, take the war in the Transvaal. What economic losses (to say nothing of the moral loss) to England and to the rest of the world has it involved; and the end of the war is not yet in sight, in spite of the fact that England outnumbers her adversaries ten to one. That war and the Chinese problem both show that the nations are being mechanically driven to the position which the advocates of peace have suggested as the only one that can be taken as a result of the exercise of free will and rationality, namely, coalition, surrender of secondary specific interests and contentions for the sake of a higher common interest, of culture and humanity, and the creation of a “world army.”

The position into which the Powers are mechanically forced, which in its external form seems to adjust itself to the demands of the peace idea, is not yet permeated by the spirit of the idea; not yet based upon the firm groundwork of institutions of peace. It is filled with militarism, confused with military projects and national antagonisms.