Casuists of the Bernhardi school of moral philosophy will further suggest that to discuss the ethical merits of the war is to start with a false premise that such a thing as international morality exists, and that when once the conventionalities of civilization are laid aside the leading nations commence and make war in a manner that differs only in degree and not in kind from the methods of Frederick the Great and Napoleon, and that these in turn only differed in degree from those of Alaric and Attila. According to this theory, the only law of nations is that ascribed by the poet to Rob Roy:
“The good old rule
Sufficeth them, the simple plan
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can.”
Does the Twentieth Century only differ from its predecessors in having a thin veneering of hypocrisy, or has there developed in the progress of civilization an international morality, by which, even though imperfectly, the moral conduct of nations is judged?
The answer can be an unqualified affirmative. With the age of the printing press, the steamship, the railroad, and the telegraph there has developed a conscience of mankind.
When the founders of the American Republic severed the tie which bound them to Great Britain, they stated that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
The Declaration assumed that there was a rule of right and wrong that regulated the intercourse of nations as well as individuals; it believed that there was a great human conscience, which rises higher than the selfish interests and prejudices of nations and races, and which approves justice and condemns injustice. It felt that this approval is more to be desired than national advantage. It constituted mankind a judge between contending nations and lest its judgment should temporarily err it established posterity as a court of last resort. It placed the tie of humanity above that of nationality. It proclaimed the solidarity of mankind.
In the years that have intervened since this noble Declaration, the world has so far progressed towards an enlightened sense of justice that a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” has proved an efficient power in regulating peacefully and justly the intercourse of nations. Each nation does at least in some measure fear to-day the disapproval of civilization. The time gives this proof in the eager desire of Germany to-day—despite its policy of “blood and iron”—to gain the sympathetic approval of the American people, not with the remotest hope of any practical coöperation but to avoid that state of moral isolation, in which the land of Luther now finds itself.
The Supreme Court of Civilization does exist. It consists of cosmopolitan men in every country, who put aside racial and national prejudices and determine the right and wrong of every issue between nations by that slowly forming system of international morality which is the conscience of mankind.