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CHAPTER FOUR On the Conversion of Rulers to Peace

The cry of reason has finally reached the throne. Rulers have begun to feel … that the real source of greatness does not lie in force and arms.

INTRODUCTION, P. 2.

Is it really true that because reason has reached the throne, rulers have finally recognized that they owe more respect to human life and that true greatness is not in force and arms? I would be only too pleased to adopt this flattering conviction, but I cannot prevent myself from having certain doubts. I imagine myself in the time when Filangieri wrote these lines, and cast my eyes forward over the next forty years. I see the Seven Years’ War end, but the War of the American Revolution soon begins. Joseph II threatens Prussia and attacks the Turks. Sweden launches itself rather foolishly against Russia. Poland is partitioned, and if this does not result in war, it is because the co-partitioners divide three against one. Finally, the kings of Europe form a coalition against France, which wants to give itself a free government. After ten years of ferocious combat, they are defeated, but then the French government gives up moderation and justice, and for another ten years the space from Lisbon to Moscow, and Hamburg to Naples, is again flooded with blood. Are these very satisfactory proofs of the empire of reason?

Nevertheless, there is an element of truth in Filangieri’s assertion, which he disfigures by his well-meaning but little-deserved compliments to power. As I have previously observed (chap. 2), the warlike system is in contradiction with the current state of the human race. The age of commerce has arrived, and the more the commercial tendency dominates, the more the warlike tendency must weaken.

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War and commerce are but two different means of arriving at the same end: possessing what one desires. Commerce is nothing but homage rendered to the strength of the possessor by the one who aspires to possession. It is an attempt to obtain by mutual agreement what one no longer hopes to conquer by violence. A man who was always the strongest would never entertain the idea of commerce. It is experience which shows him that war, that is to say the use of his strength against someone else’s, is exposed to various resistances and failures. This leads him to turn to commerce, a gentler and more certain means of engaging others’ interest in consenting to what agrees with his interest.

War thus precedes commerce. One is the impulse of an inexperienced desire, the other the calculation of an enlightened desire. Commerce should therefore replace war, but in replacing war it discredits it, and makes war odious to the world. This is what we see today.

The sole goal of modern nations is rest; with rest, comfort, and as the source of comfort, industry. War daily becomes more inefficient at attaining this goal. Its risks no longer offer, either to individuals or peoples, profits equal to peaceful work and regular exchanges. Among the ancients a successful war increased public wealth in slaves, tribute, and partitioned lands, while among the moderns a successful war infallibly costs more than it brings in.

The situation of modern peoples therefore prevents them from being warlike out of interest, and particular reasons, also derived from the progress of the human species and thus from the difference between periods, add to the general causes that prevent the nations of our day from being warlike by inclination. The new way of fighting, the change in weapons, and artillery, have deprived military life of what was most attractive in it. There is no longer a struggle against danger; there is only fate. Courage must be imprinted with resignation or consist of insouciance. One no longer feels that pleasure of will, of action, of the development of physical and moral faculties which made the old heroes, the knights of the middle ages, love hand-to-hand combat. War has thus lost its charm as well as its utility.

This means that a government which tries to talk about military glory today, and consequently of war as a goal, misunderstands the spirit of nations and of the times. Philip’s son1 would no longer dare propose to his subjects

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the invasion of the universe, and Pyrrhus’s speech to Cineas would seem the height of insolence or folly.2

Governments recognize truths as slowly as they can. Despite all their efforts, however, they cannot preserve themselves from the truth forever, and they have noticed the change that has taken place in the peoples’ temperament. They pay homage to it in their public acts and their speeches. They avoid openly confessing the love of conquest, and they take up arms only with a heavy heart. In this respect, as Filangieri observes, reason today has made its way to the thrones. But in forcing governments to change their language, has it, as it pleases the Italian philosopher to hope, enlightened the minds or converted the hearts of those whom chance has invested with authority?

I regret that I do not believe so, for I do not see in their conduct more love of peace. I see only more hypocrisy. When Frederick attacked Austria to take Silesia, he said he only wanted to uphold ancient rights to give his realm an appropriate size. When England exhausted its men and its wealth to subjugate America, it only aspired to return lost children to the protective laws of the metropolis. When it brought devastation to India, it only intended to oversee its interests and assure the prosperity of its commerce. When a coalition of three powers broke up Poland, their only purpose was to return to the troubled Poles the tranquility disturbed by their internal struggles. When those same powers invaded a France which had become free, it was the tottering thrones they proposed to prop up. When today they crush Italy and threaten Spain, it is the social order which demands their intervention. In all this, the word conquest is never pronounced. But is the people’s blood less likely to flow? What does it matter to them under what pretext it is shed! The pretext itself is at bottom nothing more than another insult.

Therefore, contrary to the over-confident Filangieri’s suggestion, we must not trust ourselves to reason’s influence on thrones, and to rulers’ wisdom to preserve the world from the plague of unjust or useless wars. The wisdom of the nation must take part. I said in chapter 2 how it should participate.