The Lost Fruits of Waterloo

by John Spencer Bassett

Fundamentally his position rests upon the reasonableness of his proposition: war is madness, brutality, useless waste of wealth and life, and the negation of civilization. It proceeds from the unnecessarily irritated state of the public mind. Reason demands that she be allowed to have an opportunity to exert her influence in a reasonable world over reasonable beings. Since law is the expression of the will of reasonable beings, let law be given the supervision of all the disputes which may possibly lead to war. How true all this sounds! And the preacher of peace says boldly that it is more worth while to plan, spend money, and take a chance in a great world effort to bring such a reasonable situation to pass than to go on planning, spending, and risking things in the efforts to make a system work that has ever led us around in a circle to the same old end, war and misery.

The advocate of peace points to the duel. There was a time when every man felt it his right and duty to settle his own quarrels. He was his own judge and his own sheriff. The result was so bad that law was created to enforce peace between individuals. The old condition survived in the duel, but in most countries this at last was brought under the authority of law. Private combat in its nature does not differ from public combat, and if one was eliminated by the creation of a law that was strong enough to forbid it, the other can be abolished by creating a still stronger law, powerful enough to restrain states as criminal law restrains individuals.

Kant’s argument for perpetual peace ran like this, but he, in sympathy with Rousseau’s social contract theory, argued that the law that restrained individuals was the result of agreement between individuals; and he went further and argued that all that was necessary to secure perpetual peace would be for the states to agree to establish a league, or a federation, to enforce it.

Now there was a fallacy in Kant’s argument that has a bearing on the subject immediately before us today. There is no reason to suppose that any state ever arose from an agreement of individuals. The ordinary process was growth out of several conditions. An enlarged family might become a state, or one tribe might conquer another and enlarge itself into a state. Kinship and force were probably the chief causes in producing the state; and reason seems to have played a small part. Similarly, law grew up, not as the result of reason, but as a body of tribal customs, reasonably interpreted by the wise men of the early state.

There is, therefore, no analogy between the proposed method of forming a great super-state with its own body of law, the object of which is to restrain the states from going to war, and the method by which the early state was created. In fact, if one great nation were to conquer the rest of the world and impose its peace on all the world, as it would do, we should have a process more analogous to the origin of the early state. And that is one way of having peace. Within the last years it has seemed a horribly possible method; for if Mittel-Europa becomes a fact, it will have such predominating power that it is difficult to see what will stop its march to general authority.

Pointing out Kant’s fallacy weakens his argument as such, but it leaves us in such a dilemma that we are prone to pronounce his suggestion worth trying as an escape from conquest by one great power. For if the world is tending toward unity through conquest, who can doubt that it would be better to anticipate the process, save a great sum of human suffering, and by agreement found the world federation which is the same result to which ages of war will lead us. That we could have such a super-state by contract is not to be doubted. It would be as possible as the creation of the United States of America by agreement.

Another argument of the peace advocate is that the old system by which the world was kept in equilibrium, the balance of power, has broken down, and cannot be trusted to preserve the peace of the future. Its chief characteristic was that several states mutually checked one another. If one manifested an intention that was alarming to the rest they combined to restrict the action of the aggressor. The several states were with regard to one another in a condition mobile enough to permit any state to shift from one side to another as the situation demanded. Now this condition no longer exists. There has developed a mid-continental alliance, apparently expecting to continue to act as one state for practical purposes, which in itself threatens to dominate Europe. To hold it in check calls forth all the united force of the other states and then success is obtained only through the greatest amount of preparedness. Such a condition is anything but the old system which was to work through balance and concert of action.

The central position of the Germans and Austrians gives them an immense advantage, if the world is to go on in its national rivalries. On the west lie the two nations who are today doing most to hold them in restraint, France and Great Britain. The former could never stand against Germany alone, and the latter is remote enough from the German frontier to make it improbable that her forces could reach that spot in time to prevent the Germans from gaining the initial advantage which, in a state of efficient preparation is the only military success that either side can hope to win. In the face of a strong and threatening Germany it would be very likely that these two nations would have to make a more than formal alliance. Even if that happened, it is possible that Germany would construe it as a threat and begin war.

The only other strong check on the central powers is Russia, now in a sad state of change. What her future is going to be is still problematic. It is a stupendous task for so large a nation, composed of landlords and peasants for the most part, to pass from an autocracy to a self-governing nation. It took France, a smaller country, from 1789 to 1879 to pass through the various changes and counter-changes by which she reformed her government into a republic. It is safe to say that in the Russian development the changes will come more rapidly, but it is not impossible that in this country a period of prolonged unrest is ahead. Under such circumstances Russia could hardly be counted on to give much aid to the Western nations who wished to restrain Germany. In fact, so fluid would be the state of her society that she might well become the victim of German ambition and contribute valuable parts of her empire to swell the resources of her aggressive western neighbors.

One insecure spot must be pointed out in this argument. It is the continuous close alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary. If that breaks down the whole argument fails. At the present time it is impossible to say what may happen in this respect. Much will depend on the new emperor of the Dual Empire. That he has a very difficult problem before him is without question. On one hand is the intense Hungarian aversion to absorption by Germany, on the other the passionate desire for union by the German people in the Dual Empire. It is supposed that the emperor does not favor absorption; but it seems certain that he is not able at this time to take an open stand against it.