Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay

This is an age of unions. Not merely in the economic sphere, in the working world of unworthy ends and few ideals do we find great practical organizations; but law, medicine, science, art, trade, commerce, politics and political economy—we might add philanthropy—standing institutions, mighty forces in our social and intellectual life, all have helped to swell the number of our nineteenth century Conferences and Congresses. It is an age of Peace Movements and Peace Societies, of peace-loving monarchs and peace-seeking diplomats. This is not to say that we are preparing for the millennium. Men are working together, there is a newborn solidarity of interest, but rivalries between nation and nation, the bitternesses and hatreds inseparable from competition are not less keen; prejudice and misunderstanding not less frequent; subordinate conflicting interests are not fewer, are perhaps, in view of changing political conditions and an ever-growing international commerce, multiplying with every year. The talisman is, perhaps, self-interest, but, none the less, the spirit of union is there; it is impossible to ignore a clearly marked tendency towards international federation, towards political peace. This slow movement was not born with Peace Societies; its consummation lies perhaps far off in the ages to come. History at best moves slowly. But something of its past progress we shall do well to know. No political idea seems to have so great a future before it as this idea of a federation of the world.

It is bound to realise itself some day; let us consider what are the chances that this day come quickly, what that it be long delayed. What obstacles lie in the way, and how may they be removed? What historical grounds have we for hoping that they may ever be removed? What, in a word, is the origin and history of the idea of a perpetual peace between nations, and what would be the advantage, what is the prospect of realising it?

The international relations of states find their expression, we are told, in war and peace. What has been the part played by these great counteracting forces in the history of nations? What has it been in prehistoric times, in the life of man in what is called the “state of nature”? “It is no easy enterprise,” says Rousseau, in more than usually careful language, “to disentangle that which is original from that which is artificial in the actual state of man, and to make ourselves well acquainted with a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never has existed and which probably never will exist in the future.” (Preface to the Discourse on the Causes of Inequality, 1753, publ. 1754.) This is a difficulty which Rousseau surmounts only too easily. A knowledge of history, a scientific spirit may fail him: an imagination ever ready to pour forth detail never does. Man lived, says he, “without industry, without speech, without habitation, without war, without connection of any kind, without any need of his fellows or without any desire to harm them ... sufficing to himself.”[2] (Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, 1750.) Nothing, we are now certain, is less probable. We cannot paint the life of man at this stage of his development with any definiteness, but the conclusion is forced upon us that our race had no golden age,[3] no peaceful beginning, that this early state was indeed, as Hobbes held, a state of war, of incessant war between individuals, families and, finally, tribes.

For the barbarian, war is the rule; peace the exception. His gods, like those of Greece, are warlike gods; his spirit, at death, flees to some Valhalla. For him life is one long battle; his arms go with him even to the grave. Food and the means of existence he seeks through plunder and violence. Here right is with might; the battle is to the strong. Nature has given all an equal claim to all things, but not everyone can have them. This state of fearful insecurity is bound to come to an end. “Government,” says Locke, (On Civil Government, Chap. VIII., § 105) “is hardly to be avoided amongst men that live together.”[4] A constant dread of attack and a growing consciousness of the necessity of presenting a united front against it result in the choice of some leader—the head of a family perhaps—who acts, it may be, only as captain of the hosts, as did Joshua in Israel, or who may discharge the simple duties of a primitive governor or king.[5] Peace within is found to be strength without. The civil state is established, so that “if there needs must be war, it may not yet be against all men, nor yet without some helps.” (Hobbes: On Liberty, Chap. I., § 13.) This foundation of the state is the first establishment in history of a peace institution. It changes the character of warfare, it gives it method and system; but it does not bring peace in its train.

In early times, there were no friendly neighbouring nations: beyond the boundaries of every nation’s territory, lay the land of a deadly foe. This was the way of thinking, even of so highly cultured a people as the Greeks, who believed that a law of nature had made every outsider, every barbarian their inferior and their enemy.[7] Their treaties of peace, at the time of the Persian War, were frankly of the kind denounced by Kant, mere armistices concluded for the purpose of renewing their fighting strength. The ancient world is a world of perpetual war in which defeat meant annihilation. In the East no right was recognised in the enemy; and even in Greece and Rome the fate of the unarmed was death or slavery.[8] The barbaric or non-Grecian states had, according to Plato and Aristotle, no claim upon humanity, no rights in fact of any kind. Among the Romans things were little better. According to Mr. T. J. Lawrence—see his Principles of International Law, III., §§ 21, 22—they were worse. For Rome stood alone in the world: she was bound by ties of kinship to no other state. She was, in other words, free from a sense of obligation to other races. War, according to Roman ideas, was made by the gods, apart altogether from the quarrels of rulers or races. To disobey the sacred command, expressed in signs and auguries would have been to hold in disrespect the law and religion of the land.

When, in the hour of victory, the Romans refrained from pressing their rights against the conquered—rights recognised by all Roman jurists—it was from no spirit of leniency, but in the pursuit of a prudent and far-sighted policy, aiming at the growth of Roman supremacy and the establishment of a world-embracing empire, shutting out all war as it blotted out natural boundaries, reducing all rights to the one right of imperial citizenship. There was no real jus belli, even here in the cradle of international law; the only limits to the fury of war were of a religious character.

The treatment of a defeated enemy among the Jews rested upon a similar religious foundation. In the East, we find a special cruelty in the conduct of war. The wars of the Jews and Assyrians were wars of extermination. The whole of the Old Testament, it has been said, resounds with the clash of arms.[9] “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!” was the command of Jehovah to his chosen people. Vengeance was bound up in their very idea of the Creator. The Jews, unlike the followers of Mahomet, attempted, and were commanded to attempt no violent conversion[10]; they were then too weak a nation; but they fought, and fought with success against the heathen of neighbouring lands, the Lord of Hosts leading them forth to battle. The God of Israel stood to his chosen people in a unique and peculiarly logical relation. He had made a covenant with them; and, in return for their obedience and allegiance, cared for their interests and advanced their national prosperity. The blood of this elect people could not be suffered to intermix with that of idolaters. Canaan must be cleared of the heathen, on the coming of the children of Israel to their promised land; and mercy to the conquered enemy, even to women, children or animals was held by the Hebrew prophets to be treachery to Jehovah. (Sam. XV.; Josh. VI. 21.)

Hence the attitude of the Jews to neighbouring nations[11] was still more hostile than that of the Greeks. The cause of this difference is bound up with the transition from polytheism to monotheism. The most devout worshipper of the national gods of ancient times could endure to see other gods than his worshipped in the next town or by a neighbouring nation. There was no reason why all should not exist side by side. Religious conflicts in polytheistic countries, when they arose, were due not to the rivalry of conflicting faiths, but to an occasional attempt to put one god above the others in importance. There could be no interest here in the propagation of belief through the sword. But, under the Jews, these relations were entirely altered. Jehovah, their Creator, became the one invisible God. Such an one can suffer no others near him; their existence is a continual insult to him. Monotheism is, in its very nature, a religion of intolerance. Its spirit among the Jews was warlike: it commanded the subjugation of other nations, but its instrument was rather extermination than conversion.

From the standpoint of the peace of nations, we may say that the Christian faith, compared with other prominent monotheistic religious systems, occupies an intermediate position between two extremes—the fanaticism of Islam, and to a less extent of Judaism, and the relatively passive attitude of the Buddhist who thought himself bound to propagate his religion, but held himself justified only in the employment of peaceful means. Christianity, on the other hand, contains no warlike principles: it can in no sense be called a religion of the sword, but circumstances gave the history of the Church, after the first few centuries of its existence, a character which cannot be called peace-loving.

This apparent contradiction between the spirit of the new religion and its practical attitude to war has led to some difference of opinion as to the actual teaching of Christ. The New Testament seems, at a superficial glance, to furnish support as readily to the champions of war as to its denouncers. The Messiah is the Prince of Peace (Is. IX. 6, 7; Heb. VI.), and here lies the way of righteousness (Rom. III. 19): but Christ came not to bring peace, but a sword (Matth. X. 34). Such statements may be given the meaning which we wish them to bear—the quoting of Scripture is ever an unsatisfactory form of evidence; but there is no direct statement in the New Testament in favour of war, no saying of Christ which, fairly interpreted, could be understood too regard this proof of human imperfection as less condemnable than any other.[12] When men shall be without sin, nation shall rise up against nation no more. But man the individual can attain peace only when he has overcome the world, when, in the struggle with his lower self, he has come forth victorious. This is the spiritual sword which Christ brought into the world—strife, not with the unbeliever, but with the lower self: meekness and the spirit of the Word of God are the weapons with which man must fight for the Faith.

An elect people there was no longer: Israel had rejected its Messiah. Instead there was a complete brotherhood of all men, the bond and the free, as children of one God. The aim of the Church was a world-empire, bound together by a universal religion. In this sense, as sowing the first seeds of a universal peace, we may speak of Christianity as a re-establishment of peace among mankind.

The later attitude of Christians to war, however, by no means corresponds to the earliest tenets of the Church. Without doubt, certain sects, from the beginning of our era and through the ages up to the present time, held, like the Mennonites and Quakers in our day, that the divine command, “Love your enemies,” could not be reconciled with the profession of a soldier. The early Christians were reproached under the Roman Emperors, before the time of Constantine, with avoiding the citizen’s duty of military service.[13] “To those enemies of our faith,” wrote Origen (Contra Celsum, VIII., Ch. LXXIII., Anti-Nicene Christian Library), “who require us to bear arms for the commonwealth, and to slay men, we can reply: ‘Do not those who are priests at certain shrines, and those who attend on certain gods, as you account them, keep their hands free from blood, that they may with hands unstained and free from human blood offer the appointed sacrifices to your gods; and even when war is upon you, you never enlist the priests in the army. If that, then, is a laudable custom, how much more so, that while others are engaged in battle, these too should engage as the priests and ministers of God, keeping their hands pure, and wrestling in prayers to God on behalf of those who are fighting in a righteous cause, and for the king who reigns righteously, that whatever is opposed to those who act righteously may be destroyed!’ ...

And we do take our part in public affairs, when along with righteous prayers we join self-denying exercises and meditations, which teach us to despise pleasures, and not to be led away by them. And none fight better for the king than we do. We do not indeed fight under him, although he require it; but we fight on his behalf, forming a special army—an army of piety—by offering our prayers to God.” The Fathers of the Church, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Ambrose and the rest gave the same testimony against war. The pagan rites connected with the taking of the military oath had no doubt some influence in determining the feeling of the pious with regard to this life of bloodshed; but the reasons lay deeper. “Shall it be held lawful,” asked Tertullian, (De Corona, p. 347) “to make an occupation of the sword, when the Lord proclaims that he who uses the sword shall perish by the sword? And shall the son of peace take part in the battle when it does not become him even to sue at law? And shall he apply the chain, and the prison, and the torture, and the punishment, who is not the avenger even of his own wrongs?”

The doctrine of the Church developed early in the opposite direction. It was its fighting spirit and not a love of peace that made Christianity a state religion under Constantine. Nor was Augustine the first of the Church Fathers to regard military service as permissible. To come to a later time, this change of attitude has been ascribed partly to the rise of Mahometan power and the wave of fanaticism which broke over Europe. To destroy these unbelievers with fire and sword was regarded as a deed of piety pleasing to God. Hence the wars of the Crusades against the infidel were holy wars, and appear as a new element in the history of civilisation. The nations of ancient times had known only civil and foreign war.[14] They had rebelled at home, and they had fought mainly for material interests abroad. In the Middle Ages there were, besides, religious wars and, with the rise of Feudalism, private war:[15] among all the powers of the Dark Ages and for centuries later, none was more aggressive than the Catholic Church, nor a more active and untiring defender of its rights and claims, spiritual or temporal. It was in some respects a more warlike institution than the states of Greece and Rome. It struggled through centuries with the Emperor:[16] it pronounced its ban against disobedient states and disloyal cities: it pursued with its vengeance each heretical or rebellious prince: unmindful of its early traditions about peace, it showed in every crisis a fiercely military spirit.[17]

For more than a thousand years the Church counted fighting clergy[18] among its most active supporters. This strange anomaly was, it must be said, at first rather suffered in deference to public opinion than encouraged by ecclesiastical canons and councils, but it gave rise to great discontent at the time of the Reformation.[19] The whole question of the lawfulness of military service for Christians was then raised again. “If there be anything in the affairs of mortals,” wrote Erasmus at this time (Opera, II., Prov., 951 C) “which it becomes us deliberately to attack, which we ought indeed to shun by every possible means, to avert and to abolish, it is certainly war, than which there is nothing more wicked, more mischievous or more widely destructive in its effects, nothing harder to be rid of, or more horrible and, in a word, more unworthy of a man, not to say of a Christian.”[20] The mediæval Church indeed succeeded, by the establishment of such institutions as the Truce of God, in setting some limits to the fury of the soldier: but its endeavours (and it made several to promote peace)[21] were only to a trifling extent successful. Perhaps custom and public opinion in feudal Europe were too strong, perhaps the Church showed a certain apathy in denouncing the evils of a military society: no doubt the theoretical tenets of its doctrine did less to hinder war than its own strongly military tendency, its lust for power and the force of its example did to encourage it.

Hence, in spite of Christianity and its early vision of a brotherhood of men, the history of the Middle Ages came nearer to a realization of the idea of perpetual war than was possible in ancient times. The tendency of the growth of Roman supremacy was to diminish the number of wars, along with the number of possible causes of racial friction. It united many nations in one great whole, and gave them, to a certain extent, a common culture and common interests; even, when this seemed prudent, a common right of citizenship. The fewer the number of boundaries, the less the likelihood of war. The establishment of great empires is of necessity a force, and a great and permanent force working on the side of peace. With the fall of Rome this guarantee was removed.

Out of the ruins of the old feudal system arose the modern state as a free independent unity. Private war between individuals or classes of society was now branded as a breach of the peace: it became the exclusive right of kings to appeal to force. War, wrote Gentilis[22] towards the end of sixteenth century, is the just or unjust conflict between states. Peace was now regarded as the normal condition of society. As a result of these great developments in which the name “state” acquired new meaning, jurisprudence freed itself from the trammelling conditions of mediæval Scholasticism. Men began to consider the problem of the rightfulness or wrongfulness of war, to question even the possibility of a war on rightful grounds. Out of theses new ideas—partly too as one of the fruits of the Reformation,[23]—arose the first consciously formulated principles of the science of international law, whose fuller, but not yet complete, development belongs to modern times.

From the beginning of history every age, every people has something to show here, be it only a rudimentary sense of justice in their dealings with one another. We may instance the Amphictyonic League in Greece which, while it had a merely Hellenic basis and was mainly a religious survival, shows the germ of some attempt at arbitration between Greek states. Among the Romans we have the jus feciale[24] and the jus gentium, as distinguished from the civil law of Rome, and certain military regulations about the taking of booty in war. Ambassadors were held inviolate in both countries; the formal declaration of war was never omitted. Many Roman writers held the necessity of a just cause for war. But nowhere do these considerations form the subject matter of a special science.

In the Middle Ages the development of these ideas received little encouragement. All laws are silent in the time of war,[25] and this was a period of war, both bloody and constant. There was no time to think of the right or wrong of anything. Moreover, the Church emphasised the lack of rights in unbelievers, and gave her blessing on their annihilation.[26] The whole Christian world was filled with the idea of a spiritual universal monarchy. Not such as that in the minds of Greek and Jew and Roman who had been able to picture international peace only under the form of a great national and exclusive empire. In this great Christian state there were to be no distinctions between nations; its sphere was bounded by the universe. But, here, there was no room or recognition for independent national states with equal and personal rights. This recognition, opposed by the Roman Church, is the real basis of international law. The Reformation was the means by which the personality of the peoples, the unity and independence of the state were first openly admitted. On this foundation, mainly at first in Protestant countries, the new science developed rapidly. Like the civil state and the Christian religion, international law may be called a peace institution.

In the beginning of the seventeenth century, Grotius laid the foundations of a code of universal law (De Jure Belli et Pacis, 1625) independent of differences of religion, in the hope that its recognition might simplify the intercourse between the newly formed nations. The primary object of this great work, written during the misery and horrors of the Thirty Years’ war, was expressly to draw attention to these evils and suggest some methods by which the severity of warfare might be mitigated. Grotius originally meant to explain only one chapter of the law of nations:[27] his book was to be called De Jure Belli, but there is scarcely any subject of international law which he leaves untouched. He obtained, moreover, a general recognition for the doctrine of the Law of Nature which exerted so strong an influence upon succeeding centuries; indeed, between these two sciences, as between international law and ethics, he draws no very sharp line of demarcation, although, on the whole, in spite of an unscientific, scholastic use of quotation from authorities, his treatment of the new field is clear and comprehensive. Grotius made the attempt to set up an ethical principle of right, in the stead of such doctrines of self-interest as had been held by many of the ancient writers. There was a law, he held, established in each state purely with a view to the interests of that state, but, besides this, there was another higher law in the interest of the whole society of nations. Its origin was divine; the reason of man commanded his obedience. This was what we call international law.[28]

Grotius distinctly holds, like Kant and Rousseau, and unlike Hobbes, that the state can never be regarded as a unity or institution separable from the people; the terms civitas, communitas, coetus, populus, he uses indiscriminately. But these nations, these independent units of society cannot live together side by side just as they like; they must recognise one another as members of a European society of states.[29] Law, he said, stands above force even in war, “which may only be begun to pursue the right;” and the beginning and manner of conduct of war rests on fixed laws and can be justified only in certain cases. War is not to be done away with: Grotius accepts it as fact,[30] (as Hobbes did later) as the natural method for settling the disputes which were bound constantly to arise between so many independent and sovereign nations. A terrible scourge it must ever remain, but as the only available form of legal procedure, it is sanctioned by the practice of states and not less by the law of nature and of nations. Grotius did not advance beyond this position. Every violation of the law of nations can be settled but in one way—by war, the force of the stronger.

The necessary distinction between law and ethics was drawn by Puffendorf,[31] a successor of Grotius who gave an outwardly systematic form to the doctrine of the great jurist, without adding to it either strength or completeness. His views, when they were not based upon the system of Grotius, were strongly influenced by the speculation of Hobbes, his chronological predecessor, to whom we shall have later occasion to refer. In the works of Vattel,[32] who was, next to Rousseau, the most celebrated of Swiss publicists, we find the theory of the customs and practice in war widely developed, and the necessity for humanising its methods and limiting its destructive effects upon neutral countries strongly emphasised. Grotius and Puffendorf, while they recommend acts of mercy, hold that there is legally no right which requires that a conquered enemy shall be spared. This is a matter of humanity alone. It is to the praise of Vattel that he did much to popularise among the highest and most powerful classes of society, ideas of humanity in warfare, and of the rights and obligations of nations. He is, moreover, the first to make a clear separation between this science and the Law of Nature. What, he asks, is international law as distinguished from the Law of Nature? What are the powers of a state and the duties of nations to one another? What are the causes of quarrel among nations, and what the means by which they can be settled without any sacrifice of dignity?

They are, in the first place, a friendly conciliatory attitude; and secondly, such means of settlement as mediation, arbitration and Peace Congresses. These are the refuges of a peace-loving nation, in cases where vital interests are not at stake. “Nature gives us no right to use force, except where mild and conciliatory measures are useless.” (Law of Nations, II. Ch. xviii. § 331.) “Every power owes it in this matter to the happiness of human society to show itself ready for every means of reconciliation, in cases where the interests at stake are neither vital nor important.” (ibid. § 332.) At the same time, it is never advisable that a nation should forgive an insult which it has not the power to resent.

But side by side with this development and gradual popularisation of the new science of International Law, ideas of a less practical, but not less fruitful kind had been steadily making their way and obtaining a strong hold upon the popular mind. The Decree of Eternal Pacification of 1495 had abolished private war, one of the heavy curses of the Middle Ages. Why should it not be extended to banish warfare between states as well? Gradually one proposal after another was made to attain this end, or, at least, to smooth the way for its future realisation. The first of these in point of time is to be found in a somewhat bare, vague form in Sully’s Memoirs,[33] said to have been published in 1634. Half a century later the Quaker William Penn suggested an international tribunal of arbitration in the interests of peace.[34] But it was by the French Abbé St. Pierre that the problem of perpetual peace was fairly introduced into political literature: and this, in an age of cabinet and dynastic wars, while the dreary cost of the war of the Spanish succession was yet unpaid. St. Pierre was the first who really clearly realised and endeavoured to prove that the establishment of a permanent state of peace is not only in the interest of the weaker, but is required by the European society of nations and by the reason of man. From the beginning of the history of humanity, poets and prophets had cherished the “sweet dream” of a peaceful civilisation: it is in the form of a practical project that this idea is new.

The ancient world actually represented a state of what was almost perpetual war. This was the reality which confronted man, his inevitable doom, it seemed, as it had been pronounced to the fallen sinners of Eden. Peace was something which man had enjoyed once, but forfeited. The myth- and poetry-loving Greeks, and, later, the poets of Rome delighted to paint a state of eternal peace, not as something to whose coming they could look forward in the future, but as a golden age of purity whose records lay buried in the past, a paradise which had been, but which was no more. Voices, more scientific, were raised even in Greece in attempts, such as Aristotle’s, to show that the evolution of man had been not a course of degeneration from perfection, but of continual progress upwards from barbarism to civilisation and culture. But the change in popular thinking on this matter was due less to the arguments of philosophy than to a practical experience of the causes which operate in the interests of peace. The foundation of a universal empire under Alexander the Great gave temporary rest to nations heretofore incessantly at war. Here was a proof that the Divine Will had not decreed that man was to work out his punishment under unchanging conditions of perpetual warfare. This idea of a universal empire became the Greek ideal of a perpetual peace. Such an empire was, in the language of the Stoics, a world-state in which all men had rights of citizenship, in which all other nations were absorbed.

Parallel to this ideal among the Greeks, we find the hope in Israel of a Messiah whose coming was to bring peace, not only to the Jewish race, but to all the nations of the earth. This idea stands out in the sharpest contrast to the early nationalism of the Hebrew people, who regarded every stranger as an idolater and an enemy. The prophecies of Judaism, combined with the cosmopolitan ideas of Greece, were the source of the idea, which is expressed in the teaching of Christ, of a spiritual world-empire, an empire held together solely by the tie of a common religion.

This hope of peace did not actually die during the first thousand years of our era, nor even under the morally stagnating influences of the Middle Ages. When feudalism and private war were abolished in Europe, it wakened to a new life. Not merely in the mouths of poets and religious enthusiasts was the cry raised against war, but by scholars like Thomas More and Erasmus, jurists like Gentilis and Grotius, men high in the state and in the eyes of Europe like Henry IV. of France and the Duc de Sully or the Abbé de St. Pierre whose Projet de Paix Perpétuelle (1713)[35] obtained immediate popularity and wide-spread fame. The first half of the eighteenth century was already prepared to receive and mature a plan of this kind.

The Grand Dessein of Henry IV. is supposed to have been formed by that monarch and reproduced in Sully’s Memoirs, written in 1634 and discovered nearly a century later by St. Pierre. The story goes that the Abbé found the book buried in an old garden. It has been shewn, however, that there is little likelihood that this project actually originated with the king, who probably corresponded fairly well to Voltaire’s picture of him as war hero of the Henriade. The plan was more likely conceived by Sully, and ascribed to the popular king for the sake of the better hearing and greater influence it might in this way be likely to have, and also because, thereby, it might be less likely to create offence in political circles. St. Pierre himself may or may not have been acquainted with the facts.

The so-called Grand Dessein of Henry IV. was, shortly, as follows.[36] It proposed to divide Europe between fifteen Powers,[37] in such a manner that the balance of power should be established and preserved. These were to form a Christian republic on the basis of the freedom and equality of its members, the armed forces of the federation being supported by fixed contribution. A general council, consisting of representatives from the fifteen states, was to make all laws necessary for cementing the union thus formed and for maintaining the order once established. It would also be the business of this senate to “deliberate on questions that might arise, to occupy themselves with discussing different interests, to settle quarrels amicably, to throw light upon and arrange all the civil, political and religious affairs of Europe, whether internal or foreign.” (Mémoires, vol. VI., p. 129 seq.)

This scheme of the king or his minister was expanded with great thoroughness and clear-sightedness by the Abbé St. Pierre: none of the many later plans for a perpetual peace has been so perfect in details. He proposes that there should be a permanent and perpetual union between, if possible, all Christian sovereigns—of whom he suggests nineteen, excluding the Czar—“to preserve unbroken peace in Europe,” and that a permanent Congress or senate should be formed by deputies of the federated states. The union should protect weak sovereigns, minors during a regency, and so on, and should banish civil as well as international war—it should “render prompt and adequate assistance to rulers and chief magistrates against seditious persons and rebels.” All warfare henceforth is to be waged between the troops of the federation—each nation contributing an equal number—and the enemies of European security, whether outsiders or rebellious members of the union. Otherwise, where it is possible, all disputes occurring within the union are to be settled by the arbitration of the senate, and the combined military force of the federation is to be applied to drive the Turks out of Europe. There is to be a rational rearrangement of boundaries, but after this no change is to be permitted in the map of Europe. The union should bind itself to tolerate the different forms of faith.

The objections to St. Pierre’s scheme are, many of them, obvious. He himself produces sixty-two arguments likely to be raised against his plan, and he examines these in turn with acuteness and eloquence. But there are other criticisms which he was less likely to be able to forestall. Of the nineteen states he names as a basis of the federation, some have disappeared and the governments of others have completely changed. Indeed St. Pierre’s scheme did not look far beyond the present. But it has besides a too strongly political character.[38] From this point of view, the Abbé’s plan amounts practically to a European coalition against the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, we notice with a smile that the French statesman and patriot is not lost in the cosmopolitan political reformer. “The kingdom of Spain shall not go out of the House of Bourbon!”[39] France is to enjoy more than the privileges of honour; she is to reap distinct material and political advantages from the union. Humanity is to be a brotherhood, but, in the federation of nations, France is to stand first.[40] We see that these “rêves d’un homme de bien,” as Cardinal Dubois called them, are not without their practical element. But the great mistake of St. Pierre is this: he actually thought that his plan could be put into execution in the near future, that an ideal of this kind was realisable at once.[41] “I, myself, form’d it,” he says in the preface, “in full expectation to see it one Day executed.” As Hobbes, says, “there can be nothing so absurd, but may be found in the books of philosophers.”[42] St.

Pierre was not content to make his influence felt on the statesmen of his time and prepare the way for the abolition of all arbitrary forms of government. This was the flaw which drew down upon the good Abbé Voltaire’s sneering epigram[43] and the irony of Leibniz.[44] Here, above all, in this unpractical enthusiasm his scheme differs from that of Kant.