Part II

. Sect. I.) which is, he says, unmistakeably directed against the English constitution and certain temporary conditions in the political history of the country.

An internal constitution, firmly established on the principles of right, would not only serve to kill the seeds of national hatred and diminish the likelihood of foreign war. It would do more: it would destroy sources of revolution and discontent within the state. Kant, like many writers on this subject, does not directly allude to civil war[73] and the means by which it may be prevented or abolished. Actually to achieve this would be impossible: it is beyond the power of either arbitration or disarmament. But in a representative government and the liberty of a people lie the greatest safeguards against internal discontent. Civil peace and international peace must to a certain extent go hand in hand.

[73] St. Pierre actually thought that his federation would prevent civil war. See _Project_ (1714), p. 16.

We come now to the central idea of the treatise: (_c_) the law of nations must be based upon a federation of free states. (Art. 2.)[74] This must be regarded as the end to which mankind is advancing. The problem here is not out of many nations to make one. This would be perhaps the surest way to attain peace, but it is scarcely practicable, and, in certain forms, it is undesirable. Kant is inclined to approve of the separation of nations by language and religion, by historical and social tradition and physical boundaries: nature seems to condemn the idea of a universal monarchy.[75] The only footing on which a thorough-going, indubitable system of international law is in practice possible is that of the society of nations: not the world-republic[76] the Greeks dreamt of, but a federation of states. Such a union in the interests of perpetual peace between nations would be the “highest political good.” The relation of the federated states to one another and to the whole would be fixed by cosmopolitan law: the link of self-interest which would bind them would again be the spirit of commerce.

[74] See p. 128.

[75] This was the ideal of Dante. Cf. _De Monarchia_, Bk. I. 54:—“We shall not find at any time except under the divine monarch Augustus, when a perfect monarchy existed, that the world was everywhere quiet.”

Bluntschli (_Theory of the State_, I. Ch. ii., p. 26 _seq._) gives an admirable account of the different attempts made to realise a universal empire in the past—the Empire of Alexander the Great, based upon a plan of uniting the races of east and west; the Roman Empire which sought vainly to stamp its national character upon mankind; the Frankish Monarchy; the Holy Roman Empire which fell to pieces through the want of a central power strong enough to overcome the tendency to separation and nationalisation; and finally the attempt of Napoleon I., whose mistake was the same as that which wrecked the Roman Empire—a neglect of the strength of foreign national sentiment.

[76] Reason requires a State of nations. This is the ideal, and Kant’s proposal of a federation of states is a practical substitute from which we may work to higher things. Kant, like Fichte, (_Werke_, VII. 467) strongly disapproves of a universal monarchy such as that of which Dante dreamed—a modern Roman Empire. The force of necessity, he says, will bring nations at last to become members of a cosmopolitan state, “or if such a state of universal peace proves (as has often been the case with too great states) a greater danger to freedom from another point of view, in that it introduces despotism of the most terrible kind, then this same necessity must compel the nations to enter a state which indeed has the form not of a cosmopolitan commonwealth under one sovereign, but of a federation regulated by legal principles determined by a common code of international law.” (_Das mag in d. Theorie richtig sein_, _Werke_, (Rosenkranz) VII., p. 225). Cf. also _Theory of Ethics_, (Abbott), p. 341, _note_; _Perpetual Peace_, pp. 155, 156.

This scheme of a perpetual peace had not escaped ridicule in the eighteenth century: the name of Kant protected it henceforth. The facts of history, even more conclusively than the voices of philosophers, soldiers and princes, show how great has been the progress of this idea in recent years. But it has not gained its present hold upon the popular mind without great and lasting opposition. Indeed we have here what must still be regarded as a controversial question. There have been, and are still, men who regard perpetual peace as a state of things as undesirable as it is unattainable. For such persons, war is a necessity of our civilisation: it is impossible that it should ever cease to exist. All that we can do, and there is no harm, nor any contradiction in the attempt, is to make wars shorter, fewer and more humane: the whole question, beyond this, is without practical significance. Others, on the other hand,—and these perhaps more thoughtful—regard war as hostile to culture, an evil of the worst kind, although a necessary evil. In peace, for them, lies the true ideal of humanity, although in any perfect form this cannot be realised in the near future. The extreme forms of these views are to be sought in what has been called in Germany “the philosophy of the barracks” which comes forward with a glorification of war for its own sake, and in the attitude of modern Peace Societies which denounce all war wholesale, without respect of causes or conditions.

_Hegel, Schiller and Moltke._

Hegel, the greatest of the champions of war, would have nothing to do with Kant’s federation of nations formed in the interests of peace. The welfare of a state, he held, is its own highest law; and he refused to admit that this welfare was to be sought in an international peace. Hegel lived in an age when all power and order seemed to lie with the sword. Something of the charm of Napoleonism seems to hang over him. He does not go the length of writers like Joseph de Maistre, who see in war the finger of God or an arrangement for the survival of the fittest—a theory, as far as regards individuals, quite in contradiction with the real facts, which show that it is precisely the physically unfit whom war, as a method of extermination, cannot reach. But, like Schiller and Moltke, Hegel sees in war an educative instrument, developing virtues in a nation which could not be fully developed otherwise, (much as pain and suffering bring patience and resignation and other such qualities into play in the individual), and drawing the nation together, making each citizen conscious of his citizenship, as no other influence can. War, he holds, leaves a nation always stronger than it was before; it buries causes of inner dissension, and consolidates the internal power of the state.[77] No other trial can, in the same way, show what is the real strength and weakness of a nation, what it _is_, not merely materially, but physically, intellectually and morally.

[77] See the _Philosophie d. Rechts_, (_Werke_, Vol. VIII.)