Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 | Page 3

that one nation gains by
another's losses, and can be made happy by its misery; that the United

States, for instance, profits in the long run by the prostration of French,
German, or English 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
régime--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.