States—mostly despotic States—have sometimes applied parts of this system of doctrine; but none have proclaimed it. The Roman conquerors of the world were not a scrupulous people, but even they stopped short of these principles; certainly they never set them up as an ideal; neither did those magnificent Teutonic Emperors of the Middle Ages, whose fame Gen. von Bernhardi is fond of recalling. They did not enter Italy as conquerors, claiming her by right of the strongest; they came on the faith of a legal title which, however fantastic it may seem to us today, the Italians themselves, and, indeed, the whole of Latin Christendom, admitted. Dante, the greatest and most patriotic of Italians, welcomed the Emperor Henry VII. into Italy, and wrote a famous book to prove his claims, vindicating them on the ground that he, as heir of Rome, stood for law and right and peace. The noblest title which these Emperors chose to bear was that of Imperator Pacificus.
In the Middle Ages, when men were always fighting, they appreciated the blessings of war much less than does Gen. von Bernhardi, and they valued peace, not war, as a means to civilization and culture. They had not learned in the school of Treitschke that peace means decadence and war is the true civilizing influence.
Great Achievements of Small States.
The doctrines above stated are, as I have tried to point out, well calculated to alarm small States which prize their liberty and their individuality, and have been thriving under the safeguard of treaties; but there are other considerations affecting those States which ought to appeal to men in all countries, to strong nations as well as to weak nations.
The small States whose absorption is now threatened have been a potent and useful—perhaps the most potent and useful—factor in the advance of civilization. It is in them and by them that most of what is most precious in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in science, and in art has been produced.
The first great thoughts that brought man into true relation with God came from a tiny people inhabiting a country smaller than Denmark. The religions of mighty Babylon and populous Egypt have vanished; the religion of Israel remains in its earlier as well as in that later form which has overspread the world.
The Greeks were a small people, not united in one great State, but scattered over coasts and among hills in petty city communities, each with its own life. Slender in numbers, but eager, versatile, and intense, they gave us the richest, most varied, and most stimulating of all literatures.
When poetry and art reappeared after the long night of the Dark Ages, their most splendid blossoms flowered in the small republics of Italy.
In modern Europe what do we not owe to little Switzerland, lighting the torch of freedom 600 years ago and keeping it alight through all the centuries when despotic monarchies held the rest of the European Continent? And what to free Holland, with her great men of learning and her painters surpassing those of all other countries save Italy?
So the small Scandinavian nations have given to the world famous men of science, from Linnaeus downward; poets like Tegnor and Björnson; scholars like Madvig; dauntless explorers like Fridtjof Nansen.