[89] Institutes of the Law of Nations (1884), Vol. II., Ch. XIV.
[90] John Stuart Mill holds that the multiplication of federal unions would be a benefit to the world. [See his Considerations on Representative Government (1865), Ch. XVII., where he discusses the conditions necessary to render such unions successful.] But the Peace Society is scarcely justified, on the strength of what is here, in including Mill among writers who have made definite proposals of peace or federation. (See Inter. Trib.)
[91] See what Lawrence says (op. cit., § 241) of neutralisation and the limits of its usefulness as a remedy for war.
[92] Montesquieu: Esprit des Lois, X. Ch. 2. “The life of governments is like that of man. The latter has a right to kill in case of natural defence: the former have a right to wage war for their own preservation.”
See also Vattel (Law of Nations, II. Ch. XVIII. § 332):—“But if anyone would rob a nation of one of her essential rights, or a right without which she could not hope to support her national existence,—if an ambitious neighbour threatens the liberty of a republic, if he attempts to subjugate and enslave her,—she will take counsel only from her own courage. She will not even attempt the method of conferences, in the case of a contention so odious as this. She will, in such a quarrel, exert her utmost efforts, exhaust every resource and lavish her blood to the last drop if necessary. To listen to the slightest proposal in a matter of this kind is to risk everything.”
[93] The difficulties in the way of hard and fast judgments on a complicated problem of this kind are convincingly demonstrated in a recent essay by Professor D. G. Ritchie (Studies in Political and Social Ethics, Sonnenschein, 1902). Professor Ritchie considers in detail a number of concrete cases which occurred in the century between 1770 and 1870. “Let any one take the judgments he would pass on these or any similarly varied cases, and I think he will find that we do not restrict our approval to wars of self-defence, that we do not approve self-defence under all circumstances, that there are some cases in which we approve of absorption of smaller states by larger, that there are cases in which we excuse intervention of third parties in quarrels with which at first they had nothing to do, and that we sometimes approve war even when begun without the authority of any already existing sovereign. Can any principles be found underlying such judgments? In the first place we ought not to disguise from ourselves the fact that our judgments after the result are based largely on success. ... I think it will be found that our judgments on the wars of the century from 1770 to 1870 turn very largely on the question, Which of the conflicting forces was making for constitutional government and for social progress? or, to put it in wider terms, Which represented the higher civilisation? And thus it is that we may sometimes approve the rise of a new state and sometimes the absorption of an old.” (Op. cit., pp. 152, 155.)
[94] See Fred. W. Holls: The Peace Conference at the Hague, Macmillan, 1900.
[95] The feeling of the Congress expressed itself thus cautiously:—“Messieurs les plénipotentiaires n’hésitent pas à exprimer, au nom de leur gouvernements, le voeu, que les Etats entre lesquels s’éléverait un dissentiment sérieux, avant d’en appeler aux armes, eussent recours, en tant que les circonstances l’admettraient, aux bons offices d’une puissance amie.”
[96] Esprit des Lois, XIII. Chap. 17. “A new distemper has spread itself over Europe: it has infected our princes, and induces them to keep up an exorbitant number of troops. It has its redoublings, and of necessity becomes contagious. For as soon as one prince augments what he calls his troops, the rest of course do the same: so that nothing is gained thereby but the public ruin. Each monarch keeps as many armies on foot as if his people were in danger of being exterminated: and they give the name of Peace to this general effort of all against all.”
Montesquieu is of course writing in the days of mercenary troops; but the cost to the nation of our modern armies, both in time of peace and of war, is incomparably greater.