The Lost Fruits of Waterloo. Bassett John Spencer
best known thing he wrote. It is one of the most logical arguments for peace that we have.
From 1701 to 1714 was waged the War of the Spanish Succession, the last of the series of struggles in which Louis XIV wore out his kingdom in trying to make it supreme over its neighbors. It left France exhausted and miserable, and it had not realized the king’s ambition. In 1713, the year in which Louis was forced to accept the Treaty of Utrecht in token of his defeat, was published by the Abbé Castel de St. Pierre a book called Projet de Traité pour rendre la Paix Perpetuelle. Like the utterances of Sully and Penn, it was wrung out of the mind of the author by the ruin that lay around him. It differed from them in nothing but in its more abundant details. The abbé had taken many things into account, and the union of nations that he proposed was to do six important things.
1. There was to be a perpetual alliance of European rulers with a diet composed of plenipotentiary agents in which disputed points were to be settled amicably. 2. What sovereigns were to be admitted to the alliance was to be determined by the act of alliance, which was also to fix the proportion in which each should contribute to the common fund. 3. The union was to guarantee the sovereignty of the constituent states with existing boundaries, and future disputes of this nature were to be referred to the arbitration of the council. 4. States offending against the laws of the diet were to be put under the ban of Europe. 5. A state under the ban was to be coërced by the other states until it accepted the laws it had violated. 6. The council was to make such laws, on instruction from the sovereigns, as were thought necessary to the objects for which the perpetual alliance was created.
Like the two preceding plans the abbé’s scheme was too strong to be rated as a league. It does not allow us to think that a state could withdraw at pleasure from the alliance; and it gave to the council the authority to lay taxes, make laws that were binding, and punish defiant members. It is noteworthy for the large amount of power it gave to the sovereigns, since the members of the council were their agents and acted only on instructions. Under the prevalent notions of the divine right of kings no other method of selecting the members of the council would have been considered in France, Spain, or Germany. On the other hand, the abbé’s scheme was less liberal in this respect than Penn’s, which provided that the wisest and justest men in each nation should be sent to the council. It was also a part of Penn’s plan that the council should be a really deliberative body, a parliament of Europe as truly as there was in England a parliament of the realm.
We have no evidence that the arguments of the good abbé made a profound impression upon any of the sovereigns upon whose favor the scheme depended. The Treaty of Utrecht was followed by a season of peace. So deeply wounded was Europe by conflict that it had no stomach for war during a generation. It was a time of great industrial prosperity in England, France, and Prussia. Walpole, the wise guardian of peaceful society, dominated the first of these nations, Fleury, also a man of peace, was for a large part of the time the guiding hand in the second, and Frederic William I directed the development of the third with a sure sense of economy and the efficient use of resources. At the same time Austria was under the direction of Charles VI, a peaceful monarch who had too many anxieties at home to think of wars against the Christian sovereigns around him. The small struggles that occurred were without significance; and it was not until 1740, when a new generation was on the scene, that Europe again had a period of general war, precipitated by an imaginative young king who could not resist the temptation to use the excellent tool with which his father had provided him. Out of the twenty years’ struggle that now followed, no new plan arose for a system of coöperation to secure peace, but one of the great philosophers of the time made a new statement of the Abbé St. Pierre’s plan, which served as a new proposition.
It was during the last years of the Seven Years’ War that Rousseau received the papers of the good abbé, with the expectation that he would prepare them for publication in a more popular form than the twenty-one volumes in which the author’s thoughts were buried. He eventually gave up the task, but he produced two short summaries, one of which was entitled Extrait du Projet de Paix perpetuelle de M. L’Abbé de Saint-Pierre. The “extract” proper was followed by a “judgment” in which Rousseau voiced his own views. He advocated the creation of a confederacy mutually dependent, no state to be permitted to resist all the other states united nor to form an alliance with any other state in rivalry with the confederacy. The scope of the central authority was defined, and there was to be a legislature to make laws in amplification of that authority, such laws to be administered by a federal court. No state was to withdraw from the union. Thus, Rousseau made his proposed confederacy rest on force. In his mind it was to be vitally efficient government, capable of doing all it was created to do.
All the plans I have mentioned contemplated the creation of a central authority strong enough to make itself obeyed. They implied, therefore, that each constituent state should relinquish a part of its sovereignty in order to form the federation. Now this was, as at the present time, a strong objection to the scheme. No one has met it better than William Penn, who said:
“I am come now to the last Objection, That Sovereign Princes and States will hereby become not Sovereign: a Thing they will never endure. But this also, under Correction, is a Mistake, for they remain as Sovereign at Home as ever they were. Neither their Power over their People, nor the usual Revenue they pay them, is diminished: It may be the War Establishment may be reduced, which will indeed of Course follow, or be better employed to the Advantage of the Publick. So that the Soveraignties are as they were, for none of them have now any Soveraignty over one another: And if this be called a lessening of their Power, it must be only because the great Fish can no longer eat up the little ones, and that each Soveraignty is equally defended from Injuries, and disabled from committing them.”
A quarter of a century later, in the beginning of the French Revolution, Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher, advocated the union of states in behalf of common peace, but he rested his argument on morality, not on force. There was to be a league of states, with a legislature and courts of justice, but the decisions were to be executed by the states themselves. He held that after the court gave a decision in a specified case and published the evidence and arguments, public opinion would be strong enough to enforce the judgment. By discarding force Bentham had the advantage of preserving the sovereignty of the states, a thing that is particularly esteemed by an Englishman. He is to be considered the first of a series of eminent peace advocates who look no further than a league of states bound together by their plighted word and relying on the weight of public opinion to coërce the individual states.
He had given his life to the task of fixing the sway of law in the minds of humanity, and it was a part of his general idea that a high court of justice, investigating a controversy, and exposing all the sides of it before a world of fair minded observers, would lessen the asperity of opposing passions so that the verdict of the court would be received as saving credit and honor to the party who had to yield. It is out of this attitude that our whole doctrine of arbitration as an expedient for escaping war has its rise, a doctrine of such importance in our general subject that no peace advocate would dare reject it wholly.
Bentham’s opinion was expressed in a stray pamphlet that made little impression in his time and has nearly escaped the notice of posterity. A more conspicuous achievement, and nearly contemporary, was an essay by Immanuel Kant, philosopher at Königsberg, in Prussia. In 1795 he published Zum ewigen Frieden, an outline for a league of perpetual peace. There was a time, he argued, when men lived by force under the laws of nature, each regulating his own conduct toward his neighbors, the strongest man having his way through his ability to overawe his associates. Then came the state and the rule of law, and with their arrival one saw the exit of personal combat. Kant applied the same argument to the intercourse of the nations, saying they were in a state of nature toward one another. He proposed to organize a super-state over them, with authority to bring them under a law prohibiting wars among themselves. He would assign a definite field of action to the new power, with the function of making laws in enforcing that authority, and it would have the necessary administrative and judicial officers. The law made by the united government was to be as good law for its own purposes as the law made by the individual states for their purposes.
Kant’s suggestion was closely kin to Rousseau’s ideas of the state, but he wrote at a time when the world, stampeded by the excesses