Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 | Page 3

industry. One of the first duties of a peace society is to watch this doctrine, and hunt it down wherever they see it, as one of the great promoters of the pride and hardness of heart which make war seem a trifling evil. America can no more gain by French or German ruin than New York can gain by that of Massachusetts. Secondly, there is the mediaeval doctrine that the less commercial intercourse nations carry on with each other the better for both, and that markets won or kept by force are means of gain. There has probably been no more fruitful source of war than this. It has for three centuries desolated the world, and all peace associations should fix on it, wherever they encounter it, the mark of the beast. Thirdly, there is the tendency of the press, which is now the great moulder of public opinion, to take what we may call the pugilist's view of international controversies. The habit of taunting foreign disputants, sneering at the cowardice or weakness of the one who shows any sign of reluctance in drawing the sword, and counting up the possible profit to its own country of one or other being well thrashed, in which it so frequently indulges, has inevitably the effect not only of goading the disputants into hostilities, but of connecting in the popular mind at home the idea of unreadiness or unwillingness to fight with baseness and meanness and material disadvantage. Fourthly, there is the practice, to which the press, orators, and poets in every civilized country steadily adhere, of maintaining, as far as their influence goes, the same notions about national honor which once prevailed about individual "honor"--that is, the notion that it is discreditable to acknowledge one's self in the wrong, and always more becoming to fight than apologize. "The code" has been abandoned in the Northern States and in England in the regulations of the relations of individual men, and a duellist is looked on, if not as a wicked, as a crack-brained person; but in some degree in both of them, and in a great degree in all other countries, it still regulates the mode in which international quarrels are brought to a conclusion.
Last of all, and most important of all, it is the duty of peace societies to cherish and exalt the idea of law as the only true controller of international relations, and discourage and denounce their submission to sentiment. The history of civilization is the history of the growth amongst human beings of the habit of submitting their dealings with each other to the direction of rules of universal application, and their withdrawal of them from the domain of personal feeling. The history of "international law" is the history of the efforts of a number of rulers and statesmen to induce nations to submit themselves to a similar r��gime--that is, to substitute precedents and rules based on general canons of morality and on principles of municipal law, for the dictates of pride, prejudice, and passion, in their mode of seeking redress of injuries, of interpreting contracts, exchanging services, and carrying on commercial dealings. Their success thus far has been only partial. A nation, even the most highly civilized, is still, in its relations with its fellows, in a condition somewhat analogous to that of the individual savage. It chooses its friends from whim or fancy, makes enemies through ignorance or caprice, avenges its wrongs in a torrent of rage, or through a cold-blooded thirst for plunder, and respects rules and usages only fitfully, and with small attention to the possible effect of its disregard of them on the general welfare. The man or the woman and, let us say, "the mother"--since that is supposed to be, in this discussion, a term of peculiar potency--who tries to exert a good influence on public opinion on all these points, to teach the brotherhood of man as an economical as well as a moral and religious truth; to spread the belief that war between any two nations is a general calamity to the civilized world; that it is as unchristian and inhuman to rouse national combativeness as to rouse individual combativeness, as absurd to associate honor with national wrong-doing as with individual wrong-doing; and that peace among nations, as among individuals, is, and can only be, the product of general reverence for law and general distrust of _feeling_--may rest assured that he or she is doing far more to bring war to an end than can be done by the most fervid accounts of the physical suffering it causes. It will be a sorrowful day for any people when their men come to consider death on the battle-field the greatest of evils, and the human heart will certainly have sadly fallen off