The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain / Nineteenth Century Europe

by J. A. Cramb

Rome by war ends war, and establishes the Pax Romana within her dominions, Spain, Gaul, Africa, Asia, Syria, Egypt. Disregarding the dying counsels of Augustus, Rome remains at truceless war with the world outside those limits. St. Just's proud resignation, "For the revolutionist there is no rest but the grave," is for ever true of those races dowered with the high and tragic doom of empire. To pause is disaster; to recede, destruction. Rome understood this, and her history is its great comment.

To Islam the point at which she can bestow her peace upon men is not less clear, fixed by a power not less unalterable and high. Neither Haroun nor Al-Maimoun could, with all their authority and statecraft, stay the steep course of Islam; for the wisdom of a race is wiser than the wisdom of a man, and the sword which, in Abu Bekr's phrase, the Lord has drawn, Islam sheathes but on the Day of Judgment. Then and then only shall the Holy War end.

The Peace of Islam, Shalom, which is its designation, is the serenity of soul of the warriors of God whose life is a warfare unending. And Virgil—in that early masterpiece, which in the Middle Age won for all his works the felicity or the misfortune attached to the suspicion of an inspiration other than Castalian, and drew to his grave pilgrims fired by an enthusiasm whose fountain was neither the ballad-burthen music of the Georgics, nor the measureless pathos and pity for things human of the Aeneid—has sung the tranquil beauty of the Saturnian age; yet the peace which suggests his prophetic memory or hope is but the peace of Octavianus, the end of civil discord, of the proscriptions, the conflicts of Pharsalia, Philippi, Actium, a moment's respite to a war-fatigued world.

Passing from the ancient world to the modern, we encounter in the Middle Age within Europe that which is known amongst mediaeval Latinists as the Treva or Treuga Dei. This "Truce of God" was a decree promulgated throughout Europe for the cessation at certain sacred times of that feudal strife, that war of one noble against another which darkens our early history. It is the mediaeval equivalent of the Pax Romana and is but dimly related to any ideal of Universal Peace. Hildebrand, who gave this Truce of God more support than any other Pope in the Middle Age, lights the fire of the crusades, giving to war one of the greatest consecrations that war has ever received. And the attitude of Mediaeval Europe towards eternal peace is the attitude of Judaea, of Hellas, and of Rome.[[9]] This is conspicuous in Saint Bernard, the last of the Fathers, and three centuries later in Pius II, the last of the crusading Pontiffs, the desire of whose life was to go even in his old age upon a crusade. This desire uplifts and bears him to his last resting-place in Ancona, where the old man, in his dying dreams, hears the tramp of legions that never came, sees upon the Adriatic the sails of galleys that were to bear the crusaders to Palestine—yet there were neither armies nor ships, it was but the fever of his dream.

During the Reformation the ideal of Universal Peace is unregarded. The wars of religion, the world's debate, become the war of creeds. "I am not come to bring peace among you, but a sword." Luther, for instance, declares war against the revolted peasants of Germany with all the ardour and fury with which Innocent III denounced war against the Albigenses. War in the language and thoughts of Calvin is what it became to Oliver Cromwell, to the Huguenots, and to the Scottish Covenanters, to Jean Chevallier and the insurgents of the Cevennes. As Luther in the sixteenth century represents the religious side of the Reformation, so Grotius in the seventeenth century represents the position of the legists of the Reformation. In his work, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Universal Peace as an object of practical politics is altogether set aside. War is accepted as existent between nation and nation, State and State, and Grotius lays down the laws which regulate it. Similar attempts had been made in the religious councils of Greece, and when the first great Saracen army was starting upon its conquests, the first of the Khalifs delivered to that army instructions which in their humanity have never been surpassed; the utmost observances of chivalry or modern times are there anticipated. But the treatise of Grotius is the first elaboration of the subject in the method of his contemporary, Verulam—the method of the science of the future.

In the eighteenth century the singular work of the mild and amiable enthusiast, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre,[[10]] made a profound impression upon the thought not only of his own but of succeeding generations. Kings, princes, philosophers, sat in informal conference debating the same argument as has recently occupied the dignitaries at The Hague. It inspired some of the most earnest pages of D'Alembert and of the Encyclopédie. It drew from Voltaire some happy invective, affording the opportunity of airing once more his well-loved but worthless paradox on the trivial causes from which the great actions of history arise. Saint-Pierre's ideal informs the early chapters of Gibbon's History, but its influence disappears as the work advances. It charmed the fancy of Rousseau, and, by a curious irony, he inflamed by his impassioned argument that war for freedom which is to the undying glory of France.[[11]]

Frederick the Great in his extreme age wrote to Voltaire: "Running over the pages of history I see that ten years never pass without a war. This intermittent fever may have moments of respite, but cease, never!" This is the last word of the eighteenth century upon the dream of Universal Peace—a word spoken by one of the greatest of kings, looking out with dying eyes upon a world about to close in one of the deadliest yet most heroic and memorable conflicts set down in the annals of our race. The Hundred Days are its epilogue—the war of twenty-five years ending in that great manner! Then, like a pallid dawn, the ideal once more arises. Congress after congress meets in ornamental debate, till six can be reckoned, or even seven, culminating in the recent conference at The Hague. Its derisive results, closing the debate of the nineteenth, as Frederick's words sum the debate of the eighteenth century, are too fresh in all men's memories to require a syllable of comment.

Thus then it appears from a glance at its history that this ideal of Universal Peace has stirred the imagination most deeply, first of all in the ages when an empire, whether Persian, Hebraic, Hellenic, or Roman, conterminous with earth, wide as the inhabited world, was still in appearance realizable; or, again, in periods of defeat, or of civil strife, as in the closing age of the Roman oligarchy; or in the moments of exhaustion following upon long-continued and desolating war, as in Modern Europe after the last phases of the Reformation conflict, the wars of Tilly and Wallenstein, of Marlborough and Eugène, and of Frederick. The familiar poetry in praise of peace, and the Utopias, the composition of which has amused the indolence of scholars or the leisure of statesmen, originate in such hours or in such moods. On the other hand, the criticism of war, scornful or ironic, of the great thinkers and speculative writers of modern times, when it is not merely the phantom of their logic, an eidôlon specus created by their system, arises in the most impressive instances less from admiration or desire or hope of perpetual peace than from the arraignment of all life, and all the ideals, activities, and purposes of men.

Hence the question whether war be a permanent condition of human life is answered by implication. For the history of the ideal of Universal Peace but re-enforces that definition of war set forth above, as a manifestation of the world-spirit, co-extensive with being, and as such, inseparable from man's life here and now. In all these great wars which we have touched upon, the conflict of two ideas, in the Platonic sense of the word, unveils itself, but both ideas are ultimately phases of one Idea. It is by conflict alone that life realizes itself. That is the be-all and end-all of life as such, of Being as such. From the least developed forms of structural or organic nature to the highest form in which the world-force realizes itself, the will and imagination of Man, this law is absolute. The very magic of the stars, their influence upon the human heart, derives something of its potency, one sometimes fancies, from the vast, the silent, mighty strife, the victorious energy, which brings their rays across the abysses and orbits of the worlds.

What is the art of Hellas but the conquest of the rock, the marble, and the fixing there in perennial beauty, perennial calm, the thought born from the travail of the sculptor's brain, or from the unrecorded struggle of dark forces in the past, which emerge now in a vision of transcendent rapture and light? By this conflict, multiplex or simple, the conquering energy of the form, the defeated energy of the material, the serenity of the statues of Phidias, of the tragedies of Sophocles, is attained. They are the symbol, the visible embodiment of the moment of deepest vision, and of the deepest agony now at rest there, a loveliness for ever. And as the aeons recede, as the intensity of the idea of the Divine within man increases, so does this conflict, this agonia increase. It is in the heart of the tempest that the deepest peace dwells.