[227] D. Starr Jordan, The Human Harvest, 1907; J. Novikov, La Guerre et ses Prétendus Bienfaits, 1894, chap. IV; Novikov here argued that the selection of war eliminates not the feeble but the strong, and tends to produce, therefore, a survival of the unfittest.
[228] "The most demoralizing features in French military life," says Professor Guérard, a highly intelligent observer, "are due to an incontestable progress in the French mind—its gradual loss of faith and interest in military glory. Henceforth the army is considered as useless, dangerous, a burden without a compensation. Authors of school books may be censured for daring to print such opinions, but the great majority of the French hold them in their hearts. Nay, there is a prevailing suspicion among working men that the military establishment is kept up for the sole benefit of the capitalists, and the reckless use of troops in case of labour conflicts gives colour to the contention." It has often happened that what the French think to-day the world generally thinks to-morrow. There is probably a world-wide significance in the fact that French experience is held to show that progress in intelligence means the demoralization of the army.
[229] The influence of Syndicalism has, however, already reached the English Labour Movement, and an ill-advised prosecution by the English Government must have immensely aided in extending and fortifying that influence.
[230] Some small beginnings have already been made. "The greatest gain ever yet won for the cause of peace," writes Mr. H.W. Nevinson, the well-known war correspondent (Peace and War in the Balance, p. 47), "was the refusal of the Catalonian reservists to serve in the war against the Riff mountaineers of Morocco in July, 1909.... So Barcelona flared to heaven, and for nearly a week the people held the vast city. I have seen many noble, as well as many terrible, events, but none more noble or of finer promise than the sudden uprising of the Catalan working people against a dastardly and inglorious war, waged for the benefit of a few speculators in Paris and Madrid."
[231] J. Novikov, Le Fédération de l'Europe, chap. iv. Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour, chap. IV. While this is the fundamental fact, we must remember that we cannot generalize about the ideas or the feelings of a whole sex, and that the biological traditions of women have been associated with a primitive period when they were the delighted spectators of combats. "Woman," thought Nietzsche, "is essentially unpeaceable, like the cat, however well she may have assumed the peaceable demeanour." Steinmetz (Philosophie des Krieges, p. 314), remarking that women are opposed to war in the abstract, adds: "In practice, however, it happens that women regard a particular war—and all wars are particular wars—with special favour"; he remarks that the majority of Englishwomen fully shared the war fever against the Boers, and that, on the other side, he knew Dutch ladies in Holland, very opposed to war, who would yet have danced with joy at that time on the news of a declaration of war against England.
[232] The general strike, which has been especially developed by the syndicalist Labour movement, and is now tending to spread to various countries, is a highly powerful weapon, so powerful that its results are not less serious than those of war. To use it against war seems to be to cast out Beelzebub by Beelzebub. Even in Labour disputes the modern strike threatens to become as serious and, indeed, almost as sanguinary as the civil wars of ancient times. The tendency is, therefore, in progressive countries, as we see in Australia, to supersede strikes by conciliation and arbitration, just as war is tending to be superseded by international tribunals. These two aims are, however, absolutely distinct, and the introduction of law into the disputes between nations can have no direct effect on the disputes between social classes. It is quite possible, however, that it may have an indirect effect, and that when disputes between nations are settled in an orderly manner, social feeling will forbid disputes between classes to be settled in a disorderly manner.
[233] The Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743), a churchman without vocation, was a Norman of noble family, and first published his Mémoires pour rendre la Paix Perpetuelle à l'Europe in 1722. As Siégler-Pascal well shows (Les Projets de l'Abbé dé Saint-Pierre, 1900) he was not a mere visionary Utopian, but an acute and far-seeing thinker, practical in his methods, a close observer, an experimentalist, and one of the first to attempt the employment of statistics. He was secretary to the French plenipotentiaries who negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht, and was thus probably put on the track of his scheme. He proposed that the various European states should name plenipotentiaries to form a permanent tribunal of compulsory arbitration for the settlement of all differences. If any state took up arms against one of the allies, the whole confederation would conjointly enter the field, at their conjoint expense, against the offending state. He was opposed to absolute disarmament, an army being necessary to ensure peace, but it must be a joint army composed of contingents from each Power in the confederation. Saint-Pierre, it will be seen, had clearly grasped the essential facts of the situation as we see them to-day. "The author of The Project of Perpetual Peace" concludes Prof. Pierre Robert in a sympathetic summary of his career (Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Langue et de la Littérature Française, Vol. VI), "is the precursor of the twentieth century." His statue, we cannot doubt, will be a conspicuous object, beside Sully's, on the future Palace of any international tribunal.
[234] Jules de Gaultier, "Comment Naissent les Dogmes," Mercure de France, 1st Sept., 1911. Jules de Gaultier also observes that "conflict is the law and condition of all existence." That may be admitted, but it ceases to be true if we assume, as the same thinker assumes, that "conflict" necessarily involves "war." The establishment of law to regulate the disputes between individuals by no means suppresses conflict, but it suppresses fighting, and it ensures that if any fighting occur the aggressor shall not profit by his aggression. In the same way the existence of a tribunal to regulate the disputes between national communities of individuals can by no means suppress conflict; but unless it suppresses fighting, and unless it ensures that if fighting occurs the aggressor shall not profit by his aggression, it will have effected nothing.
[235] A.L. Guérard, "Impressions of Military Life in France," Popular Science Monthly, April, 1911.