The word had been spoken indeed at the proper moment. The teachings of philosophers and of experience, the outcome of revolutions, a more vivid sense of equality among men imbuing them with mercy, according to Tocqueville, had caused the seed to fall on prepared ground. We scarcely realize, looking at it from so near, how great the movement thus started has already become. The practical ideas put forth less than a dozen years ago have progressed so much that more treaties of arbitration have been signed between the first Hague Conference and now than between the day of creation and that conference. I take, if I may be permitted to allude to my own feelings, no small pride in having concluded the first one, duly ratified by both countries, ever signed by the United States with any European Power, and I was glad to thus continue an old-established tradition, since, in the matter of treaties with the United States, be they treaties of commerce, alliance, or amity, France has been accustomed to take the lead among nations.[257]
Quicker, indeed, than was anticipated by the sower himself, the oak has grown and the nations can rest under its shade. Several important appeals have been made to the court of The Hague, the United States taking the lead and giving to all the best example. Those experiments, which most of the great Powers have already tried, have had manifold advantages: they have shown that dangerous quarrels could thus be honorably settled; they have shown also that defects in the working of the court exist and should be remedied.
Public utterances and circulars from Presidents Roosevelt and Taft and from Secretaries of State Root and Knox have pointed out the importance of trying to establish a permanent court, with judges ever present, paid by the associated nations, selected from among men of such a high moral standing as to be above influence of creed or nationality, true citizens of the world, fit magistrates to judge the world.
In these views, the future realization of which the second conference has insured, France heartily concurred, having indeed, during the first conference, initiated an early preliminary move toward continuity and permanence.
Given these more and more enlightened dispositions among governments, it may seem that the work of a private society like this must needs be of comparatively little import. The reverse is the truth. It has an immense power for good, for it can act directly on the lever that moves the world: public opinion. So powerful is such a lever that even in the past, in times when men were not their own masters, public opinion had to be reckoned with; such imperious leaders of men as a Richelieu or a Napoleon knew it better than any one. Opinio veritate major, had even cynically said the great philosopher Francis Bacon. But if opinion can occasionally defeat truth, much better can it defend truth. With the spreading of instruction and with an easier access to men's minds through books, journals, public meetings, and free discussion, its power against truth has been considerably diminished and its power for good increased and purified.
You know this and act accordingly. Though doing so in your private capacity, you conform in fact to the instructions drawn by a masterly hand for the American delegates at the second conference at The Hague. In these instructions Secretary Root told the delegates never to forget that "the object of the conference was agreement, not compulsion," and that the agreements reached should be "genuine and not reluctant."
This is, undoubtedly, the road to follow, a road not yet smooth, nor cleared of its rocks and pitfalls. The dangers continue to be many. One of the dangers is of asking too much too soon and of causing nations to fear that, if they make any little concession, they will be led by degrees to a point where, being peacefully disarmed, their continuance as a nation will depend upon the will, the good faith and the excellent virtues of some one else. Another is to describe war as being such an abominable thing in itself, whatever be its occasion, as to cause that public opinion on which so much depends to rebel against the preacher and his whole doctrine.
Let us not forget that, even in the land of "Utopia," the country of Nowhere, in which every virtue of good citizenship was practised, and war held as a monstrosity, rem plane beluinam, all wars had not been abolished. Sir Thomas More informs us that Utopians make war for two causes and keep, therefore, well drilled. The causes are: First, "to defend their own country"; second, "to drive out of their friends' land the enemies that have invaded it."[258] We have waged in the past such wars and cannot pretend to feel repentant.
Such wars continue to be unavoidable to-day, and to deny this is only to increase the danger of a revulsion of feeling among well-disposed nations. What we may hope and must strive for is that, with the development of mankind, a better knowledge of our neighbors, an understanding that a difference is not necessarily a vice, nor a criticism a threat, with that better instruction which a society like this one is giving to the many, a time may come when that same public opinion will render impossible the two sorts of casus belli for which More deems war to be not only necessary but noble and virtuous.
No less dangerous is it to load war with all the sins in Israel, thus running the same risk of making people rebel not only against the preacher but against his very creed. When we are told by the pacifist that, owing to the wars of the early nineteenth century, only inferior people were left in France to perpetuate the race, we wonder how it is that she got a Victor Hugo, an Alexandre Dumas, a Louis Pasteur, sons of soldiers of Napoleon, all three. We wonder how, in spite of this supposed survival of "the weakest," that country got so many thinkers, philosophers, poets, artists, soldiers, explorers; how the venturous spirit of the former "coureurs de bois" awoke again in our days with such notable results in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere; how birth was given in our land to the inventors of the dirigible, the automobile, the submarine, photography, and radium; how the love of sport in the race has reappeared of late, as active as it had ever been in the remote times when football and cricket found in France their rough-hewn cradle.
Exaggeration will not help, but on the contrary surely hurt. Truth, if we follow her, is certain to lead to better times. She has already. Wars in former centuries lasted a hundred years, then they lasted thirty years, then seven years; and now, as disastrous as ever, it is true, but separated by longer intervals, they last one year.[259] You are about to celebrate a hundred years' peace with England; so are we.
That move toward truer, longer, perhaps one day definitive peace, has been prophesied long before our time, not merely by a dreamer like Abbé de Saint-Pierre, but by one who had a rare experience of men, of war, and of peace, and who, considering especially the influence of trade on nations, once said:
"Although I pretend to no peculiar information respecting commercial affairs, nor any foresight into the scenes of futurity, yet as the member of an infant empire, as a philanthropist by character, and (if I may be allowed the expression) as a citizen of the great republic of humanity at large, I cannot help turning my attention sometimes to this subject. I would be understood to mean that I cannot help reflecting with pleasure on the probable influence that commerce may hereafter have on human manners and society in general. On these occasions I consider how mankind may be connected like one great family in fraternal ties. I indulge a fond, perhaps an enthusiastic idea that, as the world is evidently less barbarous than it has been, its amelioration must still be progressive; that nations are becoming more humanized in their policy, that the subjects of ambition and causes for hostility are daily diminishing; and in fine that the period is not very remote when the benefits of a liberal and free commerce will pretty generally succeed to the devastations and horrors of war."