But the stumbling-block that Science had placed on the road to better days has been removed by Science herself. The sweeping conclusions attributed to that great man Darwin by pupils less great have been scrutinized; other experiments, such as he would have conducted himself had he been living, were tried, and their results added to our book of knowledge. Great results, indeed, and notable ones; it turned out that the explanation of transformism, of progress, of survival, was not to be found in a ceaseless war insuring the predominance of the fittest, but in quiet and peaceful adaptation to environment, to climate, and to circumstances. And we French are excusably proud to see that, for having unfolded those truths years before Darwin wrote, due honor is now rendered almost everywhere, and especially in America, to Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, author of the long obscure and now famous Philosophie Zoologique, 1809.
As for the undue multiplication of individuals, statistics unknown to Darwin have since shown that, whatever may be the case with beetles or fishes (and let them work out their own problems according to their own laws), there is, for man at least, no need of self-destruction to ward off such a periclass="underline" the general decrease of the rate of reproduction, so striking throughout the world, is all that is wanted, and in some cases is even more than is wanted.
War, therefore, is not our unavoidable fate, and that much of the road has been cleared: a long road followed amid terrible sufferings by mankind through centuries. The chief danger in times past, and partly still in our own, does not result from an ineluctable fate, but from the private disposition of men and of their leaders. And we know what for ages those dispositions were. Former-day chroniclers are wont to mention, as a matter of course, that "the king went to the wars in the season," as he would have gone a-fishing. People at large saw not only beauty in war (as there is in a just war, and of the highest order, exactly as there is in every duty fulfilled), but they saw in it an unmixed beauty. Men and nations would take pride in their mercilessness, and they were apt to find in the sufferings of an enemy an unalloyed pleasure.
Such were the feelings of the time. To none of the master artists who represented the day of judgment on the walls of Rome, Orvieto, or Padua, or on the portals of our northern cathedrals, did the thought occur to place among his fierce angels driving the guilty to their doom, one with a tear on his face: a tear that would have made the artist more famous than all his art; a tear, not because the tortures could be supposed to be unjust or the men sinless, but because they were tortures and because the men had been sinful. Dies iræ!
Artists belonged to their time and expressed their time's thought. The teaching of saints and of thinkers long remained of little avail. War, that "human malady," as Montaigne said, was considered as impossible to heal as rabies was—until the day when a Pasteur came. Yet protests began to be more perceptibly heard as men better understood what they themselves were and commenced to suspect that the time might come when all would be equal before the law. Nothing, Tocqueville has observed, is so conducive to mercy as equality.[253]
All those who, in the course of centuries, led men to the conquest of their rights can be truly claimed as the intellectual ancestors of the present promoters of a sane international peace: men like our Jean Bodin, who, while upholding, as was unavoidable in his day, the principle of autocracy, yet based his study of the government of nations on the general interests of the commonwealth, and who, in opposition to Machiavelli, who had called his book The Prince, called his The Republic. To Bodin, who protests against the so-called right of the strongest, have been traced some of the principles embodied much later in the American and in the French "Declaration of the Rights of Man."[254]
Such thinkers truly deserve the name of forerunners; such men as that great Hugo Grotius, whose ever-living fame was not without influence on the selection of his own country as the seat of the peace conferences of our day, and who, being then settled in France, near Senlis, dedicated to King Louis XIII his famous work on war and peace, so memorable for its denunciation of frivolous wars and wanton cruelties.[255]
Soon the names of those to be honored for the same cause became legion: men like Pascal, Saint-Pierre, the Encyclopedists, Kant, Bentham, Tocqueville, and many others.
Among Pascal's Thoughts is this memorable one, which forecasts and sums up much of what has since been or will be done: "When it is a question of deciding whether war should be waged, of sentencing so many Spaniards to death, one man only decides, and one who is interested. The decision ought to rest with an impartial third party."
A little later, that strange Abbé de Saint-Pierre was writing those works considered as so many wild dreams in his day and no longer read at all in ours. But if he were to return now, he would, according to one of his latest critics, feel not at all dismayed, but say: "This is all for the best; you need not study my works, since you have put in practise nearly all my ideas; there remains only my Perpetual Peace;[256] but, like the others, its turn will come."
If its turn has not come yet, great practical steps have surely been taken toward it, chief among them that move, so unexpected a few years ago, so dubiously wondered at when it occurred, and now so thoroughly accepted, that, as in the case of all great inventions, one wonders how things could go on before it existed: the calling of the first conference at The Hague by the Emperor of Russia, Nicholas II.
"The maintenance of general peace," read the Russian circular of August, 1898, "and a possible reduction of the excessive armaments which weigh upon all nations, present themselves in the actual situation of the world, as the ideal toward which should tend the efforts of all governments.... The ever-increasing financial expense touches public prosperity at its very source; the intellectual and physical powers of peoples, labor and capital, are, most of it, turned aside from their natural functions and consumed unproductively.... To put an end to those ceaseless armaments and to find means for preventing the calamities which threaten the entire world, such is the supreme duty which to-day lies upon all states."
When one man, then another, then another, had come and said: I can draw the lightning from the clouds; I can rise in the air; I can flash your words and thoughts to any distance you please; I can cure rabies by inoculating rabies; I can make you talk with your friend miles away; I can navigate a boat under the sea, scepticism had scarcely been greater than when the circular took the world by surprise. The issue seemed more than doubtful; many among the most sanguine barely hoped to succeed in preventing the absolute failure that would have killed such a project for generations.
Shortly afterward I happened to be in St. Petersburg and had the honor of being received by the Emperor. The conversation fell on the "Great Design," to give it the name used for the very different plan (implying coercion) attributed two centuries before to the French King Henry IV. I was struck by the quiet conviction of the originator of the new movement as to its ultimate results, and his disposition not to give up the plan if at first it met with difficulties and delays. Emperor Nicholas summed up his views with the remark: "One must wait longer when planting an oak than when planting a flower."
Longer, indeed, yet not so very long, after all. The first conference took place, and in it, I may say, the delegations of our two Republics presided over by such statesmen and thinkers as Andrew D. White and Léon Bourgeois, failed not to fulfill the part assigned to our democracies by their ideals and traditions. In spite of scepticism, that first conference reached an unexpected measure of success. Eight years later a second one was convened on the felicitous suggestion of President Roosevelt, and now the supposedly useless mechanism from dreamland has been so heartily accepted by mankind at large, all over the globe, that the approximate date for a third one has already been selected. Governments at first doubted that one would be of any use; now they want more.