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THE WAR AGAINST WAR 
 
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA • MADRAS 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK ■ BOSTON • CHICAGO 
 DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
THE WAR 
 AGAINST WAR 
 
 AND 
 
 THE ENFORCEMENT OF PEACE 
 
 BY 
 
 Professor CHRISTEN COLLIN 
 
 CHRISTIANIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 WILLIAM ARCHER 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 
 1917 
 
K ^14.?.G>(. 
 
 COPYRIGHT 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 War 
 
 Introduction .... 
 I. Winter Solstice 
 II. Counting the Cost . 
 
 III. England and Germany 
 
 IV. England and Germany before the 
 V. The Attempt to supersede Kant 
 
 VI. The Great Superstition . 
 
 VII. An Answer to Professor Zorn 
 
 VIII. The Fate of Belgium 
 
 IX. Vive la France! 
 
 X. The Ford Peace Mission in Christiania 
 
 XI. The World War as a Shakespearean 
 Drama ..... 
 
 i>AeE 
 vii 
 
 19 
 36 
 57 
 67 
 
 94 
 109 
 
 131 
 137 
 144 
 
 156 
 
INTKODUCTION 
 
 The author of the following essays, Pro- 
 fessor Christen Christian Collin, holds an 
 eminent position among Norwegian men of 
 letters of to-day. Born in Trondhjem in 
 1857, he graduated in 1887 at the University 
 of Christiania, to the professorial staff of 
 which he at present belongs. Long and 
 frequent visits to France, Germany, and 
 England have familiarised him, not only 
 with the literature, but with the whole life 
 and thought of Western Europe ; and a 
 critical essay on Tolstoy shows that his 
 studies have not been confined to the West. 
 He was an intimate friend of Bjornstjerne 
 Bjornson during the later years of that great 
 poet's life ; and he has published the first 
 instalment of a richly-documented biography 
 of his friend. Among his other works of 
 
viii THE WAR AGAINST WAR 
 
 note may be mentioned a volume of Studies 
 and Portraits ; two volumes of essays en- 
 titled respectively The Man of Genius and 
 Winter Sohtice ; a volume of translations of 
 English poetry ; and an annotated edition 
 of The Merchant of Venice. 
 
 If ever there was a man of catholic 
 culture, Professor Collin is that man. His 
 specialty is literature, and in that field his 
 knowledge is all-embracing. He is as much 
 at home in the literature of Greece as in 
 that of Norway; we owe to him some of 
 the best and most penetrating Shakespeare 
 criticism of our time ; one of his first books 
 was a treatise on art and morals, in which 
 he showed a profound acquaintance with 
 modern French literature ; and if he has 
 occupied himself less with German literature 
 than with English and French, it is certainly 
 not for lack of knowledge. But men of 
 wide literary attainments are to be found in 
 all countries : Professor Collin's distinction 
 lies rather in the fact that his interests are 
 not confined to literature, but extend to 
 history and science — more especially to those 
 
INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 branches of science which bear directly upon 
 social welfare. He is familiar with the most 
 modern researches in the history of civilisa- 
 tion. Indeed literature is in his eyes merely 
 the most vital and significant of the docu- 
 ments with which the historian of civilisation 
 has to deal. But while he loves and studies 
 the past, it is on the future of mankind 
 that his thoughts are fixed with the most 
 passionate interest ; and he knows that if 
 the future is to satisfy any reasonable human 
 aspiration, it must be fashioned in the light 
 of science. Hence his wide reading in 
 biology and sociology, his vivid interest in 
 eugenics and in all movements for the 
 amelioration of social conditions. His 
 knowledge of the English and German 
 literature on these subjects may put many 
 an Englishman, and doubtless many a 
 German, to shame. In his latest book, for 
 instance, he has a long essay, on the biological 
 value of generous emulation, as opposed to 
 cut-throat competition, in which he shows 
 an amazing acquaintance with the history 
 of athletic sports, in England and elsewhere, 
 
X THE WAR AGAINST WAR 
 
 and discusses "pot-hunting" and "record- 
 compiling " with the same luminous intelli- 
 gence which he elsewhere brings to bear 
 upon the interpretation of Ibsen's Peer 
 Grynt or the elucidation of Shakespeare's 
 sonnets. 
 
 Professor Collin is above all things a 
 humanist, in the largest and finest sense of 
 the word. He is a believer in the power of 
 the human will to mould human conditions, 
 and a disbeliever in all the cowardly fatalisms 
 which make it their business to discourage 
 and deride valiant human effort. To indicate 
 the temper of his mind, I cannot do better 
 than place side by side two passages, 
 one from his earliest book, the other from 
 his latest. The^ first is from a reply to the 
 distinguished Norwegian novelist and poet, 
 Arne Garborg, who had come forward as 
 champion of the self-conscious, not to say 
 affected, decadence of the 'nineties. Pro- 
 fessor Collin wrote : 
 
 " This is what I understand by decadent 
 criticism : that which eludes and declines 
 all struggles of the moral will — that which 
 
INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 tolerates the morbid, as Garborg would 
 have us do, 'Art,' he says, 'has an in- 
 defeasible right to sing "sick" as well as 
 healthy songs. ... If the age is sick it 
 must sing sick songs.' This is good writing, 
 but scarcely good psychology. If the age 
 is sick, what we have to do is to fight 
 against the sickness — all of us who can. 
 And if the spiritual sickness of the age 
 manifests itself in poetry, here, too, we 
 must combat it ; here especially we must 
 attack it with all our might, for a 'sick' 
 poet may infect thousands. Precisely in 
 his capacity as poet he is enabled to spread 
 the seeds of disease, capsuled in winged 
 words, and borne abroad by an indwelling 
 energy." 
 
 The other passage, which is more relevant 
 to the immediate interests of to-day, shows 
 the same vigorous common-sense, the same 
 firm grasp of essential realities : 
 
 " I have become more and more confirmed 
 in my view of Norwegian National Defence 
 — for the moment, undoubtedly, our greatest 
 and most sacred interest. I believe that if 
 
xii THE WAR AGAINST WAR 
 
 only the party of Defence could agree upon 
 one point, namely, that the cause of Peace 
 and the cause of Defence are inseparably 
 bound up with each other, the resistance 
 of the opponents of Defence would in all 
 probability be broken. So long as we 
 have champions of Defence who believe in 
 war as a natural necessity for all time, so 
 long will the leaders of the Labour Party 
 go to the opposite extreme, and say, ' Under 
 no circumstances will we consent to the 
 killing of human beings ! ' " 
 
 The following essays are directed largely 
 to the vindication of this very sound 
 principle, as applied, not only to national 
 politics, but to the world-politics of the 
 future. 
 
 WILLIAM ARCHER, 
 
 London, iijth March 1917. 
 
I 
 
 WINTER SOLSTICE 
 
 StAVANSEK APTElfBLAD, 
 
 Christmas Eve, 1915. 
 
 Every year the Nobel Committee of the 
 Norwegian Storting awards the peace prize, 
 established by the high-minded Alfred 
 Nobel. What if it were this year, in 
 despair over its own helplessness, to make 
 an ironic award and offer the prize to the 
 originator of the Great War, as soon as he 
 comes forward to claim it ? It is so difficult 
 for the human understanding to grasp a new 
 truth without previous preparation, that 
 many people must first experience a fire 
 before they learn to insure against it. In 
 the same way a war without a parallel has 
 to decimate the chief nations of Europe — 
 
2 THE WAR AGAINST WAR i 
 
 fifteen to twenty million men, the flower of 
 the world's youth, must spend winter and 
 spring in ditches and deep holes in the earth, 
 whence in two parallel lines they have to 
 deluge one another with bullets and bombs, 
 or to blow one another up with mines ; 
 every day lifeless or mutilated bodies have 
 to be replaced by "fresh troops," whilst 
 wives and mothers, fathers and sisters and 
 children, suffer the pangs of anxiety and 
 uncertainty at home, and three or four 
 hundred millions of people live in a year- 
 long nightmare — in a word, that military 
 philosophy, according to which wars are 
 indispensable to the progress of the nations, 
 must, in actual practice, reduce itself to 
 absurdity — before there is any chance of a 
 reign of peace on earth. Thus, as it seems 
 to me, the above proposal might be justified. 
 And the Nobel Committee would certainly 
 not risk any misapplication of the funds 
 entrusted to them if they invited responsible 
 persons in each belligerent country to point 
 out, among their fellow-citizens, the man 
 who had originated the War. They would 
 
I WINTER SOLSTICE 3 
 
 all say, "None of us has done anything to 
 entitle him to that prize. This time you 
 must apply to the neighbour over the way." 
 
 Are we justified in imagining that this 
 World War signifies the end of the dark 
 period of modern history, the period before 
 the great winter solstice ? Will the period 
 to follow it be remembered by future genera- 
 tions as a turning-point in world-history, a 
 blessed Christmastide, when a new age of 
 sunlight was born ? Are there no means 
 by which we, who are now living, may 
 climb up some high mountain to watch for 
 the return of the sun, so that we may bring 
 the glad news down to the valleys, as was 
 the custom (a late Greek author tells us) 
 among the inhabitants of the far north, of 
 Ultima Thule, where the sun was invisible 
 for forty days ? 
 
 Shall the suffering of all these millions — 
 women often suffering more than men, the 
 non-combatants more than the combatants, 
 because they have none of the benumbing 
 tumult of the fighting-line, or the intoxicat- 
 
4 THE WAR AGAINST WAR i 
 
 ing rage of battle — shall the nameless suffer- 
 ings of ten or more nations become a 
 " suffering out of which there cometh forth 
 wisdom," according to the comforting words 
 of the Greek tragedian ? 
 
 Or, on the other hand, will this War only 
 be the first of a series of wars, of a new kind 
 of " scientifico-technical " wars, which will 
 not end until the marvellous precision of 
 the machinery of murder has reduced old 
 Europe to such poverty and impotence that 
 some coloured Power shall step in and 
 impose on us a peace without freedom ? 
 
 One of two things must happen, of that 
 there can be no doubt : either the nations 
 will make an attempt to settle all disputes 
 amongst themselves by means of right and 
 law, or one or more new wars will be pre- 
 ceded by such perfecting of murder-machines 
 that there will be a disproportion wide as 
 the mouth of hell between the human bodies 
 and the engines by which they are destroyed. 
 We may especially look for an enormous 
 development in the treacherous monsters of 
 the lower deeps and the upper air, which 
 
I WINTER SOLSTICE 5 
 
 will discharge explosives from such depths 
 below or such heights above that no means 
 of providing against them will be possible. 
 In addition, we may expect increased powers 
 of undermining streets and roads, or even 
 towns, tracts of land, and channels of 
 the sea. 
 
 In this War it is already becoming clear 
 that applied science has brought about a 
 crying disproportion between our means of 
 preserving, life and our powers of destroying 
 it. The engines employed are too huge 
 and too powerful for us when directed to 
 purposes of destruction. We have pressed 
 into our service the fundamental forces of 
 nature. They give us marvellous help in 
 productive work, but they also lend us the 
 strength of giants for destruction. The 
 contrast between building up and breaking 
 down is immensely greater than it used to 
 be. We must make our choice between 
 chaos and cosmos. The mechanical powers 
 are, for their part, terribly neutral. They 
 sell or lend themselves to use or to abuse, 
 with no discrimination. 
 
6 THE WAR AGAINST WAR i 
 
 It is we who must make the choice — the 
 choice between life and death. 
 
 How small and helpless is the human 
 body against the power of explosives ! One 
 solitary aeroplane dropping grenades or 
 incendiary bombs can spread terror in a 
 town of a million people. It was the 
 German army leaders who first tried these 
 terrorising tactics over cities like Antwerp 
 and Paris. I do not hold the whole 
 German nation responsible for this barbar- 
 ism, any more than for the remarkable 
 military device of taking civilian citizens as 
 "hostages," and sometimes shooting them 
 for what other people may have done, 
 without their knowledge or against their 
 wishes. But I wonder what German wives 
 and mothers would say if the War degener- 
 ated into a rivalry in terrorising the popula- 
 tion of great cities by air bombardments, and 
 if not only Paris and London, but also Stutt- 
 gart, Cologne, and Hamburg, or even Berlin 
 and Vienna, received frequent nocturnal 
 visits from swarms of vampire-like aircraft. 
 Will they wait till then before protesting ? 
 
I WINTER SOLSTICE 7 
 
 No one can tell how far both sides may 
 be able to carry the art of destruction, even 
 during the present War, if it should go on 
 for years. Aeroplanes and submarines will 
 be larger and faster. Mines on land and in 
 the water will go on increasing. The power 
 of destroying life and property will grow, 
 while human beings will decrease in number 
 and in strength. The machines, the lifeless 
 things, will more and more take the upper 
 hand. The powers of death will triumph. 
 I think, then, that any one who denies that 
 war between civilised nations will sooner 
 or later reduce itself to an absurdity and 
 a parody on "natural selection" under- 
 estimates the possibilities of technical 
 progress. 
 
 The machines, begotten by genius out 
 of natural science, confront us with a 
 dilemma. If the rest of our civilisation 
 does not keep pace with technical progress, 
 it will be our ruin. Our development will 
 be fatally lopsided if our statecraft, both in 
 foreign and domestic matters, does not attain 
 to the same level as our technical powers. 
 
8 THE WAR AGAINST WAR i 
 
 Not only in biology, but in sociology as 
 well, there exists what may be called a law of 
 correlation or "harmonious co-adaptation." 
 
 Lopsided development — I think we may 
 diagnose in these terms the malady of our 
 civilisation. 
 
 In biology, or the science of life, it is 
 accepted as a law of nature that if one 
 organ undergoes any considerable change, 
 the remaining organs must develop in a 
 corresponding direction if the whole organ- 
 ism is not to be weakened. Herbert 
 Spencer cites as an example of this the 
 Irish giant elk with its powerful antlers. 
 Such a towering frontlet and weapon of 
 attack could not be supported, and would 
 be of no use to the animal if, along with 
 this unusual growth of the horns, there did 
 not go a correspondingly powerful develop- 
 ment of other parts of the body, such as the 
 breast with its muscles and the foreleg. A 
 species of animals in which only one set of 
 organs increased in power, while the others 
 remained unaltered, would be doomed to 
 weakness and extinction. 
 
I WINTER SOLSTICE 9 
 
 There are, I believe, some naturalists 
 who hold that the Irish elk, in spite of an 
 admirable degree of harmonious adaptation 
 between the various parts of the body, was 
 nevertheless unable to develop the other 
 organs commensurately with the splendid 
 antlers. These weapons may therefore 
 have contributed to the extinction of the 
 whole species. 
 
 I am often reminded of the beautiful 
 skeleton of this Irish giant elk, which I 
 have mournfully admired in the Natural 
 History Museum at South Kensington, 
 when I consider what I am tempted 
 to call the gigantic frontlet and antlers 
 of European civilisation : its technical 
 apparatus and weapons. The marvellous 
 progress of natural science in the course of 
 the last four centuries has, in its practical 
 applications, outdone the most daring 
 dreams of the past. The last century and 
 a half, in particular, the time since James 
 Watt completed his steam engine in 1765, 
 may be called the period of natural science 
 and of machines. But social science and 
 
10 THE WAR AGAINST WAR i 
 
 its practical applications have hitherto been 
 very far from keeping pace with the advance 
 of natural science. 
 
 Both in theory and practice that side of 
 bur civilisation which is concerned with the 
 life of society has been very backward in its 
 development. It is only in our days that 
 science has attempted to take this province 
 under its control. Whilst in physics the 
 indisputable sequences of causation have 
 been established, which are admitted by 
 all, and have revolutionised the material side 
 of civilised life, it is only now that we are 
 beginning to discern or catch a glimpse of 
 the fundamental laws governing the life of 
 the human community : the laws of national 
 progress and decay. AH probability seems 
 to suggest that when the science of civilisa- 
 tion and society attains as high a level of 
 development as the sciences of physics, of 
 chemistry and, to some extent, of medicine, 
 then the practical results will be at least 
 as epoch-making in the sphere of social life 
 as they have been in that of technology 
 and of hygiene. In this direction we catch 
 
I WINTER SOLSTICE 11 
 
 a glimpse of the dawn of a new day. A 
 more and more certain knowledge as to 
 what promotes the growth of nations, and 
 what leads to debility and decadence, must 
 of necessity be for the life of the community 
 what modern physics and chemistry are to 
 all branches of our economic life, or what 
 medical science is to the preservation or 
 restoration of health. 
 
 If there exists a lofty outlook-point to 
 which we can climb, in order to watch for 
 the solstice of civilised life, it must be on 
 the highest level which the science of 
 society and civilisation has as yet attained 
 through the labours of many investigators. 
 The very recognition of the law above 
 alluded to, "the law of co - adaptation," 
 according to which the health of social life 
 depends on the various organs of culture 
 keeping pace with each other in their 
 growth, so that progress in one direction 
 may correspond with progress in all — the 
 recognition of this law, I say, justifies us 
 in hoping that the malady which has found 
 its pestilential outlet in the present War 
 
12 THE WAR AGAINST WAR i 
 
 may possibly be cured, if we can correct 
 the lopsided development which lies at the 
 root of it. 
 
 The deformity is of such a nature that 
 none can fail to see it. 
 
 The slaughter of other human beings in 
 order to seize their country is evidently a 
 form of statecraft characteristic of a low 
 level of civilisation ; and to apply to work 
 of such a low order the marvellously in- 
 genious and delicate instruments of science 
 is to be guilty of a glaringly discordant 
 mixture of high civilisation and barbarism. 
 When the flying - machine, of which the 
 Greeks dreamed in their most daring 
 moments of fantasy, and which Roger 
 Bacon, master of all the knowledge of the 
 time of the crusaders, declared to be a 
 practical possibility, but which yet required 
 many centuries to come to perfection — 
 when this latest marvel of science is em- 
 ployed to drop incendiary bombs upon 
 Notre Dame de Paris, or to kill and 
 mutilate civilians without the smallest 
 excuse in military advantage, it seems as 
 
I WINTER SOLSTICE 13 
 
 though the forces of nature itself shrieked 
 aloud to warn us of a deadly distortion of 
 growth. 
 
 Behind this practical barbarism there lies 
 an equally barbarous theory of the necessity 
 of sanguinary international struggles for 
 existence. As the Austrian Professor 
 Gumplowicz puts it : " Human communi- 
 ties have no conscience. All means are 
 good if they lead to the desired end." Or, 
 to quote another famous Austrian socio- 
 logist, Gustav Ratzenhofer : " Violence can 
 never be excluded from the domain of 
 politics." Or, again, the German Professor 
 Haeckel, the disciple of Darwin : " So 
 long as organic life continues, might will 
 go before right," for "a hard and ceaseless 
 struggle for life is the mainspring in the 
 purposeless drama of the world's history." 
 " The cruel and pitiless struggle for existence 
 which rages through all living nature, and 
 which must for ever rage ... is an undeni- 
 able fact." 
 
 One is almost tempted to believe that 
 certain people are rendered cruel by too 
 
14 THE WAR AGAINST WAR i 
 
 much learning. They must be pitiless in 
 accordance with a law of nature ! When 
 civilised states in their relations with each 
 other "do not behave better than savage 
 hordes," says Professor Gumplowicz, it is 
 because "they cannot but behave in such 
 a fashion." " The actions of savage hordes 
 and of civilised states are governed by a 
 blind natural law." 
 
 But this law of nature is a manifest 
 delusion. As our ancestors progressed 
 from the condition of small hordes and 
 tribes, constantly at war with each other, 
 so far as to found the states at present 
 existing, so we in our time can expand 
 the national states into a world-state or 
 federation. There is no natural law to 
 hinder us from continuing the process of 
 forming states. On the contrary, the 
 above-mentioned Yam. of harmonious adapta- 
 tion requires that we should as quickly as 
 possible adjust our statecraft to the scientific 
 progress of the time. The trade of the 
 world and the world-embracing means of 
 communication are inconsistent with the 
 
I WINTER SOLSTICE 15 
 
 division of humanity into mutually hostile 
 states, some of which (like Austria-Hungary 
 in the present War) prefer bloodthirsty 
 revenge to a judicial settlement of rights. 
 
 The science of society must be advanced to 
 an equality with natural science. As our 
 ancestors abolished wars between families 
 and clans, so must we abolish the devastat- 
 ing wastefulness of war between nations. 
 As our forefathers established "the King's 
 peace " within each country, so must we 
 establish peace for all Europe, or, rather, 
 for the whole world. 
 
 The technical instrument, by aid of 
 which we can achieve this end, has long 
 ago been planned and sketched out by 
 French, English, and German thinkers in 
 unison : a league or federation of aU 
 civilised states, with a common code of 
 laws, a common tribunal, and a common 
 military police - force, composed of con- 
 tingents from all the federated states. 
 
 The international tribunal's executive 
 power must be strong enough to deter 
 any individual state from opposing a judg- 
 
16 THE WAR AGAINST WAR i 
 
 ment once pronounced. But before having 
 recourse to the intervention of an armed 
 police, it might be possible to apply to a 
 recalcitrant state a stronger and stronger 
 economic pressure, through the breaking 
 off of postal communication and com- 
 mercial intercourse. 
 
 The authority of international law would 
 thus be at least as fully secured as that of 
 the law which regulates the relations of 
 individuals in each of the now existing 
 states. The age of international lawless- 
 ness would be over. If war should come, 
 it would take the form of a revolt against 
 law and order, a symptom of a malady 
 which it would be the duty of social 
 science to heal, and then to guard against 
 its recurrence. 
 
 The idea of a world-state of federated 
 nations is the greatest of the conceptions 
 of social science. Its realisation will mark 
 a new era in the life of humanity. With- 
 out its help, all technical inventions are in 
 the long run unfruitful, if not actually 
 calamitous. 
 
I WINTER SOLSTICE 17 
 
 But it is clear that no nation has a right 
 to assume in advance the blessings of 
 universal peace. So long as we live in an 
 age of international lawlessness, we must look 
 to our self-preservation with all our might. 
 The error of a great many of the friends of 
 peace has been that they have urged partial, 
 or even complete disarmament, before any in- 
 ternational peace-organisation was in exist- 
 ence, with a common military force at its 
 command, for the protection of law and right. 
 
 If American peace-lovers, in the critical 
 period before the War, had done their 
 utmost to secure the passing of a military- 
 service law, whereby an army of a million 
 could have been raised for the defence of 
 universal peace, then the United States of 
 the New World might have been able to 
 avert the European War by simply declar- 
 ing at the outset that they would throw in 
 their military force on the side of those 
 Powers who desired a settlement by legal 
 methods of the Austro-Serbian quarrel. 
 
 As it is, the great and proud people of 
 North America, to the number of about a 
 
18 THE WAR AGAINST WAR i 
 
 hundred millions, were forced, on account of 
 Mr. Bryan's passive love of peace, to look 
 on with folded arms at the crushing of 
 innocent Belgium, and at the bloodthirsty 
 revenge wreaked on the brave people of 
 Serbia, of whom, of course, only an infini- 
 tesimal few can have been accessories to 
 the crime of Serajevo. Nay more, not one 
 of the neutral nations has had the strength 
 or the courage to hasten to the help of the 
 Armenians, and stop the greatest and most 
 shameful blood -bath in the history of the 
 world. A whole nation fell among thieves, 
 but no compassionate Samaritan was to 
 be found. No greater ignominy has ever 
 befallen the white race. We are indeed 
 living in a dark period in world-history. 
 There are times when we cannot help 
 doubting if a solstice will ever come. But 
 human beings cannot live without hope. 
 
 The great ideas, the love of our kind and 
 the aspiration towards human brotherhood, 
 shine like stars in the darkest night. May 
 they guide us to that peak where a new era 
 shall swim into our ken ! 
 
II 
 
 COUNTING THE COST 
 
 TiDENs Tegn, 
 November 22, 1914. 
 
 We have recently read some marvellous 
 utterances by one or two of our Norwegian 
 authors. Knut Hamsun, according to a 
 Berlin telegram, writes that he is persuaded 
 that Germany will one day conquer England. 
 It is a necessity of nature. England is 
 an extremely decadent country, etc. etc. 
 This is precisely the same fanciful idea 
 which we have so often heard, especially 
 from Germans, with regard to France. 
 Sometimes it is " the Latin nations " which 
 are in a state of decadence^ — sometimes it 
 is France alone. Of late it has been 
 England. These fantasies have proved to 
 
 19 
 
20 THE WAR AGAINST WAR ii 
 
 be very strong, but, as we now see, decidedly 
 dangerous, incentives to gigantic German 
 armaments and schemes for German ex- 
 pansion. Ambition is stimulated by the 
 idea that one's rival is ripe for dissolution. 
 It is important that all the small nations 
 should be made to believe that England and 
 France will soon be played out, and that 
 it is Germany's turn to be the ruler of the 
 world. General von Bernhardi says that 
 "Germany's weaker neighbours in Europe 
 must be aroused to the conviction that 
 their independence and their interests are 
 bound up with Germany, and can best be 
 assured by the protection of German arms." 
 In the military circles of various countries 
 there seems to have prevailed an almost 
 unshakable belief in the unqualified superi- 
 ority of the German army — until the battle 
 of the Marne and the fighting of the past 
 months. The French have shown by their 
 achievements in war, as in peace, that 
 they are fully on an equality with the 
 most vigorous of nations. And as for the 
 English, I think Hamsun should inquire of 
 
II COUNTING THE COST 21 
 
 the Prussian Guard, whether bitter experi- 
 ence has not taught them new and more 
 correct ideas about England. It is very- 
 possible that, in the report drawn up by 
 the Great General Staff, Herr Hamsun has 
 not found any account of how the French 
 and English drove back the victorious 
 German army in the giant battle of the 
 Marne. But does he not see that, for a 
 Norwegian author, practically ignorant of 
 England, to speak of a whole nation like 
 the British as being in a state of "rapid 
 decline," and to assert his " firm conviction 
 that, some day, Germany will become 
 England's master," is a monstrous foolish- 
 ness, and a boundless ingratitude towards 
 the country which stood by Norway in her 
 hour of danger, in 1905, when we gained 
 our complete independence? Is Herr 
 Hamsun not aware that for that reason 
 both German and Swedish writers call 
 Norway " England's vassal," and that there 
 are certain Germans who are openly dis- 
 cussing the consolidation, after peace is 
 restored, of the Scandinavian peoples in a 
 
22 THE WAR AGAINST WAR ii 
 
 " Baltic Union," or even in an " Empire of 
 Sweden" — an enforced unification which 
 would prove infinitely more oppressive than 
 that of 1814 ? 
 
 Another author, who now and again likes 
 to give a holiday to his excellent intelli- 
 gence, declares that it is England that has 
 kindled this universal conflagration ! He 
 must, then, attribute to England a chivalry 
 unparalleled in the history of any country — 
 that of refraining from precipitating a war 
 until the very summer when the widening 
 of the German Kaiser-Wilhelm-Canal was 
 completed, and it was fully available for 
 modern warfare. It would have been very 
 self-sacrificing, moreover, to bring about a 
 war just in the very year when the German 
 sea-power stood on a more equal footing 
 with the English than had ever before been 
 the case, or than, according to English 
 calculations, it ever again would be. For 
 England had taken measures to place 
 herself, from next year onwards, in a better 
 position with regard to warships than that 
 in which she stands this year. To instigate 
 
II COUNTING THE COST 23 
 
 a war the year before France had had time 
 to carry into effect her decision as to the 
 three years' service — before the Belgians, 
 after the passing of their new compulsory 
 service legislation, had been able to create 
 a strong force for the protection of their 
 neutrality — and before Russia had com- 
 pleted her new military railway system on 
 her western frontier — this would have been 
 madness on England's part. 
 
 The War began, as we know, with the 
 presentation by Austria-Hungary to Serbia 
 of an ultimatum which must inevitably either 
 lead to war, or force Serbia to acknowledge 
 herself the vassal of the Danubian Monarchy. 
 Two days' grace was the time-limit granted 
 to Serbia for making her utterly humiliating 
 submission. At the expiration of that 
 time, Austria- Hungary instantly began the 
 War — with the approval of Germany. "We 
 gave Austria-Hungary a free hand," said 
 the German Government. 
 
 The War would either have been pre- 
 vented, or limited to a bloody revenge on 
 the part of Austria-Hungary for the double 
 
24 THE WAR AGAINST WAR ii 
 
 murder at Serajevo, if Russia, as the pro- 
 tector of the Southern Slavs, had chosen 
 to accept a very much deeper humiliation 
 than that inflicted on her in 1909, when 
 Austria-Hungary, in open violation of a 
 treaty, annexed Bosnia with its Serbian 
 population, and Herzegovina — a barefaced 
 act of violence towards the Southern Slavs. 
 At that time Russia was still too much 
 enfeebled by her defeat in the war with 
 Japan to nxake effective protest ; and 
 Austria-Hungary's policy left Serbia proper 
 untouched. Now, however, in the summer 
 of 1914, Serbia was presented with an 
 ultimatum which was so immoderate and 
 so insulting to a people with any sense of 
 honour, that it is impossible to conceive 
 that experienced statesmen could have 
 launched it, except with the express 
 intention of bringing about a war with 
 Russia and her allies. This year all the 
 stars were more propitious towards Germany 
 and Austria than they had ever been before, 
 or were likely to be again. This year 
 Russia was not yet fully prepared, France 
 
II COUNTING THE COST 25 
 
 was in the same position, England was 
 still without compulsory military service, 
 Belgium was utterly unready — Krupp's 
 guns, which had been ordered for Antwerp, 
 could now be brought there by a German 
 army, to bombard the city's defences 1 
 
 Thus the dual murder at Serajevo, the 
 revenge taken by criminal fanatics for the 
 murder of a people, afforded a reasonably 
 good pretext. For years everything had 
 been prepared, and now or never the moment 
 had come. If any one in Berlin had still 
 hesitated, "Fat Bertha" had powers of 
 persuasion which were quite irresistible. 
 Before this new military engine the fortresses 
 of Belgium and Northern France would 
 fall like card-castles. It was scientifically 
 certain, it had been worked out beforehand 
 at Krupp's. The road to Paris, the road to 
 Calais, would lie open, Germany would 
 push on to the English Channel. A strip 
 of Northern France, and perhaps Belgium 
 as well, with the French colonies added to 
 the German, would make the great German 
 people the inheritors of England's world- 
 
26 THE WAR AGAINST WAR ii 
 
 power. Or rather it would make them a 
 power many times greater than England. 
 
 There is a wild grandeur in this enter- 
 prise which, to a certain degree, must compel 
 the admiration of world - history — at any 
 rate, if it is not disguised in sheep^s clothing. 
 MaxhBJJiian Harden was doubtless right in 
 thinking tlaaX~~£he superb self-sacrificing 
 courage of the German people would be 
 depressed, if now, as the War drags slowly 
 on, the monotonous, melancholy refrain 
 about " the war so shamefully forced on us " 
 continued to sound in their ears. Herr 
 Harden writes : " It is not involuntarily 
 and as though taken by surprise that we 
 have plunged into the vast hazard of this 
 war. We ourselyes^have willed it. Because 
 it was our right and our duty to will it." 
 Here, at least, is plain speaking. " We do 
 not stand before Europe's judgment -seat 
 or admit its jurisdiction. Our might shall 
 creat^ajtiew law in Europe. Germany is 
 striking. When she has won new domains 
 for her genius, the priesthoods of all the 
 gods will praise the good war." 
 
II COUNTING THE COST 27 
 
 "The good war" is, of course, the war 
 which makes the great German people the 
 leading power in the world. Why does 
 Harden hold such a war to be good? 
 Because the German people are the most 
 capable. It is to supplant the nations which, 
 according to a widespread German belief, 
 are crumbling to decay ; namely, the French 
 and the English. That war is good which 
 promotes what Darwin called "natural 
 selection," and Spencer "the survival of 
 the fittest." War is a judgment of God — 
 that is the philosophy so widely accepted 
 by Germany, which was professed even by 
 Bismarck and the great Moltke, and which 
 is now regarded in many circles as the 
 national religion. "War is holy," said 
 Moltke. "It has been instituted by God. 
 It is one of the great laws of the world." 
 "War is a biological necessity of nature," 
 says General von Bernhardi in his work 
 on Germany and the Next War, which 
 appeared in 1911. "War is the Ufe- 
 giving principle." "Everywhere the law 
 of the strongest prevails" — (a proposition 
 
28 THE WAR AGAINST WAR ii 
 
 already current among the Greek sophists) 
 —"the weak go under." "The strong, 
 ambitious man who wants to push his way 
 in the world, will by no means allow him- 
 self to be guided by the idea of right." The 
 German General declares Kant's peace 
 philosophy to be out of date. Kant is 
 superseded by Darwin — whose doctrines 
 have been far too generally studied in 
 Germany through the medium of Professor 
 Haeckel's rather coarse interpretation. 
 General Bernhardi quotes a work of Klaus 
 Wagner on War as the Creative Principle 
 of the World. The popular philosophy 
 which has of late been more and more widely 
 diffused over Germany may be described 
 as a sort of bastard between a falsely- 
 interpreted Darwinism and an Old Testa- 
 ment religion of war — the latter also 
 assuming a somewhat exaggerated form. 
 
 There is, I repeat, a wild grandeur in 
 this war conflagration which Germany, not 
 perhaps without some hesitation, has let 
 loose upon the world, after having made 
 all the scientific and technical preparation 
 
II COUNTING THE COST 29 
 
 for it with tremendous energy. It is no 
 trifle that is at stake. To say that it is 
 England's command of the seas and her 
 colonial empire is to understate the case. 
 Germany's chief reliance is placed on 
 the latest improvements in scientific war 
 material. The German military authorities 
 feel assured that they possess the best 
 machines. These, with the addition of 
 excellent officers and soldiers, should make 
 victory certain. " We_c arry on war ag^a- 
 great industry," exclaims Maximilian Harden 
 fnumphantly, as he thinks of the effect of 
 the great Krupp guns in Belgium. 
 
 " Poor Belgium ! " we neutrals exclaim. 
 Many Germans are more inclined to say, 
 "Happy Belgium, that is to have the 
 privilege of becoming German ! " Listen 
 to Maximilian Harden : " Never has th^ie 
 been a more righteous war, never^ struggle 
 which was more certain to conduce^ to the 
 happiness of the vanquished." Thus saith 
 the new German-Israelitish prophet. 
 
 With reference to Belgium, General von 
 Bernhardi in 1911 declared it to be "a 
 
30 THE WAR AGAINST WAR ii 
 
 question how far all political treaties can or 
 ought to be maintained. At the time when 
 Belgium was declared neutral, no one fore- 
 saw that she would demand and acquire a 
 large and valuable tract of land in Africa. 
 One may well ask the question (continues 
 Bernhardi) whether the acquisition of such 
 territory is not of itself {ipso facto) a breach 
 of neutrality : for a state, theoretically, at 
 any rate, exempted from all danger, has no 
 right to enter into political rivalry with 
 other states." 
 
 I am tempted to ask Knut Hamsun, who 
 is an authority on wit, whether this is not 
 a brilliant saying: Belgium, a state which 
 is exempted from all danger, theoretically 
 at any rate ! Is not this a witty remark 
 on the part of a German General who 
 knew that Germany's network of railways 
 had been laid down in preparation for an 
 invasion of Belgium, and had possibly some 
 faint conception of the plans of the General 
 Staff for a lightning march through Belgium 
 upon France, devoted to complete destruc- 
 tion ? Does it not seem as though the 
 
II COUNTING THE COST 31 
 
 General Staff were actually preparing the 
 German people for all eventualities ? 
 
 It would be interesting if Hamsun were 
 to devote a causerie to explaining to us all 
 the different ways in which Belgium has 
 herself violated her neutrality. It has 
 become too complicated for my compre- 
 hension. At the outbreak of the War, when 
 the Chancellor made his speech in the 
 Reichstag, Belgium had, according to him, 
 done nothing wrong whatever. But the 
 Chancellor professed to know that France 
 had determined to infringe the neutrality 
 of the little country I Why was no agree- 
 ment arrived at in time, as to the precise 
 way in which Belgium's neutrality was 
 forfeited ? All the different accounts of the 
 matter are enough to set any head but a 
 German's whirling. 
 
 General Bernhardi has always, at a pinch, 
 a philosophical principle in reserve. "The 
 conception of perpetual neutrality is utterly 
 opposed to the essential nature of a state ; 
 for a state can fulfil its highest moral pur- 
 pose only in competition with other states." 
 
32 THE WAR AGAINST WAR ii 
 
 The " permanent neutrality " of Belgium 
 being thus irreconcilable with the moral 
 purpose of a state, how can any one blame 
 another moral nation if it relieves Belgium 
 of the said neutrality ? 
 
 While discussing the subject of Belgium, 
 General Bernhardi remarks that " the 
 principle according to which no state can 
 interfere in the internal affairs of another 
 state conflicts with the highest rights of 
 the state as such." " No sovereign state can 
 renounce its right to intervene in the affairs 
 of another state should circumstances demand 
 it. Such cases may arise at any time." 
 
 " The right of conquest is generally 
 recognised," says General Bernhardi. "The 
 instinct of self-preservation must inevitably 
 lead to war and the conquest of foreign terri- 
 tory. The right is on the side, not of the 
 owners, but of the conquerors." " War gives 
 a correct biological settlement, because its de- 
 cisions rest on the inherent nature of things." 
 
 "Holmgang"^ (Duel to the Death) as 
 
 1 The combatants were put ashore on one of the " holms '' 
 or rocky islets of the Norwegian coast and left to fight their 
 quarrel out. 
 
II COUNTING THE COST 33 
 
 the highest international tribunal. The 
 battlefield as the Court of Justice, draped 
 in purple. Cannon for lawyers, Death the 
 Judge. Darwin's work on The Origin of 
 Species as God's new table of the law. 
 Ernst Haeckel the interpreter of this Holy 
 Scripture. If distinguished German generals 
 and professors are right, it is under this 
 new dispensation that we are henceforth 
 to live. 
 
 Generals and professors so closely con- 
 nected , as to be almost interchangeable. 
 Generals appeal to " biology " and swear by 
 the name of Darwin. Professors appeal to 
 war as the arbiter of right. I believe 
 history will regard it as an incomprehensible 
 fact that, at this time of day, an extra- 
 ordinarily gifted people which, through the 
 mouth of that Nestor of German philosophy, 
 the aged Professor Wundt, proclaims itself 
 the pioneer of scientific progress, should 
 place itself and other people under the 
 influence of a theory of life which may 
 even now be recognised as the outcome 
 of a vulgar scientific delusion. On most 
 
 D 
 
34 THE WAR AGAINST WAR ii 
 
 subjects modern German science stands, by 
 all accounts, well in the foremost rank of 
 progress, and on some it holds the leading 
 position. But on one subject, which happens 
 to be the most important, the science of 
 life and the science of human society, the 
 most influential and loud-voiced leaders of 
 German thought are encumbered with a dark 
 superstition — a belief in right as inherent in 
 the greatest military power, and in war as 
 the motive-power in life. 
 
 This War, the most terrible the world has 
 seen, is in no small degree the result of one 
 of the greatest scientific errors of all time, 
 fostered in several nations, but with the 
 greatest devotion in the land of learning, 
 among the people who plume themselves 
 on being ahead of all others in their science. 
 
 The German war -philosophy, according 
 to which Belgium, and even France and 
 England, can with perfect right be "crushed," 
 or expunged from the roll of free nations, if 
 the tide of war goes against them — this 
 philosophy which calls itself "biology," or 
 the theory of life — is not based on any 
 
11 COUNTING THE COST 35 
 
 actual scientific law, but on an error of 
 Haeckel's (amongst others), founded in its 
 turn on an error of Darwin's. It is thus 
 a delusion two stories high, and from its 
 outlook-tower generals and other scientific 
 amateurs guide the destinies of millions of 
 human beings — into the jaws of death. 
 
 And the irony of fate culminates in the 
 fact that the doctrine of the natural selection 
 of the fittest, in itself mistaken, and further- 
 more misunderstood, is leading, before the 
 eyes of all the world, to the selection by 
 the gods of death of millions of precisely 
 the strongest, healthiest men, the most 
 brimful of vitality, who die on the battle- 
 field or in the hospitals, leaving no life-fruit 
 behind them. The most unnatural selection 
 conceivable is thus being carried out on a 
 scale hitherto unknown, on the strength 
 of a superstition as to the law of natural 
 selection ! The Muse of History will build 
 with the skeletons of the fallen a symbolical 
 monument, higher than any "Siegesdenk- 
 mal," over the grave of this death -dealing 
 life-philosophy. 
 
Ill 
 
 ENGLAND AND GERMANY 
 
 TiDENS TeGN, 
 
 April IS, 1916. 
 
 Germanophil writers who, like Dr. Sigurd 
 Ibsen and Herr Knut Hamsun, are inclined 
 to make British statecraft responsible for 
 this War seem to overlook the following 
 fundamental facts. 
 
 Certain great monumental lines may be 
 discerned in modern history, and seem to 
 stand forth more and more clearly as this 
 War proceeds. Four times in the course, of 
 more than three hundred years has a single 
 European state become so powerful and so 
 ainbitious that it has attempted to win 
 supremacy over Europe and thus to attain 
 to world-dominion : Spain under Philip the 
 
Ill ENGLAND AND GERMANY 37 
 
 Second, France under Louis the Fourteenth, 
 France under the "Brst., Napoleon, and, 
 finally, jgresent-day Gerniany;,„ Four times 
 have states of inferior military power joined 
 together in a great alliance to protect the 
 world from a new Roman Empire, founded 
 on conquest. 
 
 The rhythmic recurrence of this same 
 great movement in four different forms 
 gives to modern history a certain regularity 
 of aspect — though the regularity unfortun- 
 ately arises from the constant renewal of 
 the struggle between order and chaos. 
 
 The vision of Universal Monarchy, in- 
 herited from Roman times, has on three 
 separate occasions met with shipwreck, and 
 is now probably being shattered for the 
 fourth time. We may. assume with a 
 certain degree of probability that this time 
 will be the last. If so, what we are now 
 witnessing is the birth of a new era, at the 
 cost of unspeakable sufferings. 
 
 Each of these mighty wars, which have 
 made such deep and bloody gashes in the 
 life of the nations, is divided by about a 
 
38 THE WAR AGAINST WAR iii 
 
 century from its predecessor. When the 
 War that now devastates the Continent 
 broke out in the beginning of August 1914 
 it was a little over a hundred years since 
 Napoleon lost his crown for the first time 
 and"was sent to Elba, and it was fifteen or 
 sixteen months short of a hundred years 
 since the Peace of. Paris in 1815. A little 
 more than a hundred years before that the 
 Peace of Utrecht, in 1713, had erected^a 
 barrier against the ambitions of Louis XIV. 
 Rather more than a hundred years before 
 that again, Spain had been compelled_.to 
 concede an honourable peace to Englandjn 
 1604, and later, in 1609, to Holland. 
 
 In these wars, which have marked eras 
 in the history of Europe once in each 
 century, most of the belligerents have 
 played varying parts ; England alone has 
 been a constant factor, always on the side 
 of the defensive alliance. The British Isles 
 have, on account of their favourable position, 
 had the regulating influence of a fly-wheel. 
 At this moment the English, for the fourth 
 time, are putting forth all their strength 
 
Ill ENGLAND AND GERMANY 39 
 
 to help in preventing a single state from 
 becoming all-powerful. 
 
 England has on each occasion acted in 
 accordance with her own clearly understood 
 interests. But at the same time, whether 
 intentionally or not, she has acted in the 
 interests of the whole European family of 
 nations. The British have, to their own 
 advantage and to that of all, kept the way 
 open towards a far higher form of world- 
 state than any universal monarchy. 
 
 When one reads the Scotch philosopher 
 Hume's analysis of the benefits resulting 
 from a free rivalry between the civilised 
 nations of Europe, one gets an idea of the 
 importance to Europe of the fact that time 
 after time she has formed herself into a 
 defensive ring of states to prevent a single 
 great power from becoming supreme. One 
 may read, too, what one of Germany's 
 greatest historians, Professor Eduard Meyer, 
 wrote not many years ago of the conse- 
 quences of the fact that, after its victory 
 over Hannibal, the Roman Empire destroyed 
 the balance of power among the civilised 
 
40 THE WAR AGAINST WAR iii 
 
 states of that day. This turning-point 
 "implies first the stagnation of civilisation 
 and then its decline. The result of such a 
 state of things is a single great civilised 
 state, in which all national differences are 
 obliterated. This, however, implies the 
 abolition of political rivalry and of the 
 conditions that are vitally necessary for 
 culture. The stimulus to progress and to 
 the outstripping of competitors is lacking." 
 
 But are we to remain for ever in the 
 position of mutually warring states ? Will 
 it never be possible to satisfy that craving 
 for the Universal which found expression 
 in Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon ? 
 
 In my opinion we do nof understand 
 this tendency in European history, this 
 constantly recurring aspiration towards the 
 foundation of a universal monarchy, and 
 the constantly repeated defensive alliance 
 against this effort, unless we start from the 
 assumption that it is natural, not to say 
 inevitable, that nations full of life and 
 vigour should aspire to expand in the 
 direction of a world-state. A world-wide 
 
Ill ENGLAND AND GERMANY 41 
 
 union of states will inevitably come, sooner 
 or later. All technical and economic 
 development gravitates towards this goal. 
 The question is whether this world-wide 
 union is to be the result of conquest or of 
 voluntary association. 
 
 The choice lies between the old blood- 
 stained Roman way and the other way — 
 the way of federation — which was divined 
 by the genius of the Greeks of old, but 
 attempted with only intermittent success. 
 In the days of Charlemagne, and even later, 
 when Dante, in his blind enthusiasm for the 
 Romans, longed for a " universal monarchy," 
 the Pax Romana, in one form or another, 
 seemed the only possible form of world- 
 peace. But in the time of Shakespeare a 
 higher ideal dawns. King Henry IV. of 
 France has perhaps the honour of being the 
 first in modern times to outline the idea of 
 a European peace-alliance of fifteen states, 
 which was to form a " Christian Republic " 
 and to be governed by a council of sixty 
 representatives from the various countries. 
 Recent historians are, however, of opinion 
 
42 THE WAR AGAINST WAR m 
 
 that this idea was not conceived by the 
 King himself, but by his great adviser the 
 Due de Sully. In any case the idea was 
 French. 
 
 About the same time we meet in the 
 writings of Francis Bacon, Shakespeare's 
 contemporary, a kindred idea in the famous 
 and beautiful passage in the Novum Or- 
 ganum about the three sorts of ambition. 
 The first, which consists in a man's " desir- 
 ing to extend his own power in his native 
 country," is stigmatised as "vulgar and 
 degenerate." The second, which, says Bacon, 
 " has more dignity though not less covetous- 
 ness," consists in seeking to "extend the 
 power" of a country and "its dominion 
 among men." The third and last form of 
 ambition is "both a more wholesome thing 
 and more noble" than the other two. It 
 has for its aim "to establish and extend the 
 power and dominion of the human race 
 itself over the universe." ^ To such a 
 height had the spirit of man attained even 
 in the time of Shakespeare. 
 
 ' Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Bk. I. cap. 129. 
 
Ill ENGLAND AND GERMANY 43 
 
 Both in France and England, and possibly 
 in other countries as well, men had got so 
 far that they had discerned a way in which 
 the natural aspirations of the different races 
 towards the highest degree of development 
 could meet together in the great common 
 ambition — to promote mankind's " dominion 
 over nature" and the association of all 
 civilised peoples in an international union. 
 This ideal had, in a much more limited 
 form, hovered before the eyes of the Greek 
 city-states. After the discovery of the new 
 ocean routes to America and India, it took 
 the shape of a lofty vision which has 
 recurred to thinker after thinker, and will 
 undoubtedly seem less and less impracticable 
 as we come to realise that world-commerce 
 and the all-embracing bonds woven by the 
 progress of science demand a world-wide 
 reign of peace and law. There are only 
 two possible ways of realising this aim — a 
 worid-cohquering state or a union of free 
 nations. 
 
 The present World War is a struggle 
 between these two alternatives. No doubt 
 
44 THE WAK AGAINST WAR iii 
 
 there are to be found in Germany free- 
 souled men who would prefer a federation 
 of free peoples to a world - state under the 
 leadership of a " pan - German " ruling 
 caste. On the other hand there may be in 
 England, France, and Russia, many people 
 who would prefer the second to the third of 
 the three forms of human ambition defined 
 by Bacon. Conditions have, however, 
 developed historically in such a way that 
 if Germany and her allies should, in the 
 face of all probability, emerge victorious, 
 we should be far on the way towards the 
 Roman rule of a single " master - folk." 
 Even supposing that the present War was 
 not begun by Germany with the express 
 intention of founding a universal empire, 
 but only with a view to securing a large 
 part of the colonial dominions of France, 
 and later of England, yet the force of 
 circumstances would compel a victorious 
 Germany to attempt to incorporate as 
 much as possible of the European coast- 
 line, and to proceed from one conquest 
 to another, exactly as in the case of the 
 
Ill ENGLAND AND GERMANY 45 
 
 Roman Empire. Was it xiot Schiller who, 
 with reference to Shakespeare's Macbeth, 
 ^rbte that it is the curse of violent deeds 
 that they necessarily beget others of their 
 kind ? In order to escape an endless com- 
 petition in armaments, and the constant 
 threat of war, the German Empire would 
 necessarily seek to secure naval bases in all 
 seas. It could not content itself with such 
 insufficient power as that of the so-called 
 British "World Empire," of which the 
 greatest territorial areas are, practically 
 speaking, independent federated republics, 
 that can break away whenever they will : 
 Canada, Australia, and the South African 
 Union. 
 
 The Germans, with more than sixty 
 million German - speaking subjects in the 
 German Empire, and (before the War) 
 twelve million German-speaking people in 
 Austria-Hungary, immeasurably outnumber 
 each of their allies, the ten million Magyars, 
 an equal number of Osmanli Turks, the 
 Bulgarians, and the various Slav peoples in 
 the Danubian Empire. 
 
46 THE WAR AGAINST WAR m 
 
 The position is quite different in the 
 defensive Alliance. Here there is no one 
 nation which, with any show of reason, can 
 pose as the ruling people. It is only by an 
 alliance providing for equal burdens and 
 equal privileges that France and England, 
 Russia and Italy, can secure for themselves 
 industrial peace after a victorious world- 
 war. Even Russia, which, since the re- 
 surgence of the yellow races, has got a 
 very vulnerable Achilles -heel in the Far 
 East, will be much too weak to be able, in 
 the near future, to establish any world- 
 empire. It is only through federative co- 
 operation that France and England, Russia 
 and Italy, can hope to rise to renewed 
 prosperity after the colossal loss of power 
 in this War. 
 
 To talk of the next war as a war of life 
 and death between the British Empire and 
 Russia seems to me to be an attempt to 
 look into a future which is quite beyond 
 the range of vision. England and Russia 
 simply cannot do without each other's 
 support for a long time to come. The same 
 
Ill ENGLAND AND GERMANY 47 
 
 is true of the relations between England 
 and France. To count on any quarrel 
 likely to endanger the peace between these 
 two nations is to profess to understand 
 their interests better than they do them- 
 selves. We can already foresee pretty 
 clearly the enormous commercial intercourse 
 that will help to unite these two mighty 
 states. 
 
 The four great European Powers which 
 havd for the moment formed a ring for 
 mutual defence against the attempt of 
 the Central Powers to secure complete 
 supremacy in Europe, are just the same 
 great European Powers which, at both the 
 Hague Conferences, were ready to organise 
 all the civilised nations of the world into 
 an international Union. At both the great 
 Peaee Meetings at the Hague, it was 
 Germany which, with the support of 
 Austria-Hungary (and Turkey !), placed the 
 greatest obstacles in the way of the develop- 
 rrient of this peace movement. In 1911, 
 England and France were ready to conclude 
 compulsory arbitration - treaties with the 
 
48 THE WAR AGAINST WAR iii 
 
 United States in respect (so far as possible) 
 of all disputes. It was only the hesitating 
 and elusive attitude of the American 
 Senate which, on that occasion, prevented 
 President Taft from carrying through the 
 great American arbitration scheme, the 
 consequences of which might have prevented 
 this War. 
 
 It was, therefore, no more than a con- 
 sistent following-out of this policy that led 
 the same European Powers, before the out- 
 break of the War, to strain every nerve to 
 avert hostilities. All the facts agree in 
 bearing witness that the ring which was 
 formed against Germany and her Allies was 
 a defensive ring — a defensive league quite 
 similar to those which were formed against 
 Philip II., Louis XIV., and Napoleon. 
 
 Two or three Norwegian writers have 
 served up a re-hash of the German fable 
 which represents England as the true author 
 of the War. England, they say, made 
 a decisive war inevitable, or compelled 
 Germany to bring it about at a convenient 
 season, because England was contriving to 
 
in ENGLAND AND GERMANY 49 
 
 encircle, to hedge in, or even to " wall up " 
 the German people. The policy of England, 
 we are told, was to place a barrier to the 
 natural expansion of the German people. 
 This was actually the pretext by which 
 people in Germany, and especially the 
 military class, justified their preparations 
 for war. 
 
 The truth is, that it was not England, 
 but Bismarck, who obstinately opposed the 
 acquisition of a great German colonial 
 empire, while there was still sufficient " raw- 
 material territory" to be won. It was 
 not England but Bismarck who encouraged 
 France to seek compensation for Alsace- 
 Lorraine in the acquisition of territory 
 overseas. When Germany went about, and 
 set her course in the direction of colonial 
 expansion, England was induced to lend 
 Germany her support in acquiring her most 
 important colony. East Africa. England 
 has not prevented Germany from winning, 
 in the course of a comparatively short time, 
 overseas dominions of an area five times as 
 
 great as that of Germany itself. 
 
 E 
 
50 THE WAR AGAINST WAR in 
 
 France, and particularly the British 
 Empire, have certainly overseas dominions 
 of far greater extent. But it cannot be 
 England's business to undo the history of 
 Prussian policy. Prussia has sought and 
 obtained greater and ever greater extensions 
 of territory in Europe. Even in this War 
 the statesmen of the German Empire are 
 seeking, according to a recent utterance of 
 the German Chancellor, an extension of 
 power at the expense of other European 
 nations. England, on the contrary, has, 
 since Shakespeare's days, for three centvu-ies 
 and a half sought her expansion beyond the 
 seas. Can any Norwegian come forward and 
 demand that England's statesmen of to-day 
 shall remake the history of centuries ? Is it 
 suggested that England should share India 
 with Germany ? India does not want to be 
 shared. Is England to share with Germany 
 those "colonies " that are best suited for the 
 settlement of white men: Canada, South 
 Africa, and Australia ? These countries are 
 self-governing federated republics, practi- 
 cally independent of England, which can at 
 
Ill ENGLAND AND GERMANY 51 
 
 any time choose the German flag in place 
 of the British should they wish to do so. 
 This War shows that they prefer to hold 
 together with England — and this is the 
 case even with the South African Union, 
 which is governed by a majority of Dutch- 
 speaking Boers. So far from wishing to 
 belong to Germany, the Boers are in the 
 very act of conquering German East Africa 
 for the British and for themselves. 
 
 British and Dutch-British colonists have 
 the singularity of desiring to be ruled neither 
 by Germans nor by any other European 
 nation. They wish to be masters of their 
 own destiny. They are attached to England 
 because they know that they may expect 
 from the statesmen of that country the 
 utmost degree of respect for their rights 
 as free men. 
 
 Nor does India wish to become German. 
 The most enlightened Hindus know that 
 it is only a question of time for England's 
 self-governing colonies to be freely admitted 
 to a union on equal terms with the British 
 Isles, without any inferiority on either side. 
 
52 THE WAR AGAINST WAR in 
 
 The way will then lie open for the people 
 of India, as well as for those of Egypt, to 
 advance on the lines of their own civilisa- 
 tion to a similar position, or to become 
 independent states. Every one knows that 
 Great Britain and Ireland cannot restrain 
 India's more than three hundred millions, 
 if they are united in the will to form a 
 state for themselves. 
 
 The real truth is, then, that England- 
 owns ho world-empire in the old sense of 
 the term, which implied a military despot- 
 ism. The British Empire is irrevocably 
 embarked, through the growth of its con- 
 stitutent states, upon a course of progress 
 towards the highest form of international 
 organisation. The British colonists in the 
 United States, the people of the Star- 
 spangled Banner, set the example. As 
 a result of the epoch-making change in 
 the old colonial policy that has taken place 
 since 1840, Canada, Australia, and now, 
 last of all, the South African Union, have 
 developed into federated republics, though 
 they have not severed their political ties 
 
in ENGLAND AND GERMANY 53 
 
 with the British -Isles. Their relations have 
 become, to some extent, those between a 
 mother and her children who have grown 
 up and come to man's estate. Thanks to 
 the initiative of British colonists, a territory 
 four times as great as the whole of Europe 
 has been secured for the federative system 
 of organisation. 
 
 We have already got so far in the 
 direction of realising the great_ visions jof 
 William Penn and of Kant. Should the 
 War terminate satisfactorily for France and 
 England and their Allies, it is probable that 
 at least half the surface of the globe will 
 be united in a league with a common peace 
 policy. 
 
 I am amazed that highly enlightened 
 Norwegian writers are willing to let it 
 even be imagined that they believe it to 
 have been England's duty to set back 
 political development, and aid the German 
 Empire, already possessed of military pre- 
 dominance on land, to achieve, by the 
 acquisition of naval bases in various parts 
 pf the world, a naval supremacy as well. 
 
54 THE WAR AGAINST WAR in 
 
 which England, for her part, would neces- 
 sarily lose. To assert that it was England's 
 duty to help Germany to win a world- 
 dominion, which England herself does not 
 claim, and which the most enlightened 
 Britons regard as an antiquated ideal, 
 seems to me to be the height of absurdity 
 — more especially on the part of a Norwegian. 
 
 To prevent the strongest land power 
 from becoming the strongest sea power 
 was essential not only in the interest of 
 England but of all free peoples. Here 
 at home we may have the greatest 
 sympathy for the German people and 
 wish them all good, without wishing that 
 they should become the master - folk of 
 Europe, and even less that they should 
 win the world and at the same time lose 
 their own souL The Biblical warnings on 
 this point have not yet lost their force. 
 
 Before the great turn of the tide at 
 the Marne, we all saw how near Germany 
 was to winning the supremacy of Europe. 
 Even now (April 1916) the outcome of the 
 struggle is still trembling in the balance, 
 
Ill ENGLAND AND GERMANY 55 
 
 and the freedom and happiness of the 
 nations, great and small, are still at stake. 
 
 The question is not whether we shall 
 assign to the British or Germans, as a 
 whole, the higher place among the nations. 
 The question is whether we ourselves wish 
 to be a free people, which may at some 
 future time attain to an honourable place 
 in the Ijcague of the Nations, side by 
 side, it may be hoped, with Frenchmen 
 and Britons, and, after an interval, with 
 the Germans and all other peoples. 
 
 The considerable number of people 
 amongst us who have derived great advan- 
 tage from visits to Germany for purposes 
 of study, or who feel themselves closely 
 attached to good friends or relatives in 
 that country, will doubtless be able to 
 reconcile warm wishes for the German 
 people with a sincere hope that the op- 
 pressors of Belgium and Serbia will not be 
 successful in destroying the freedom of 
 other nations. 
 
 Already the victories of the Bismarck 
 period have without the least doubt led 
 
56 THE WAR AGAINST WAR in 
 
 to a decline from the lofty spirit of Beet- 
 hoven's days, and have in many quarters 
 supplanted Kant's categorical imperative 
 and will for the right with Nietzsche's 
 " will to power." 
 
 Triumph in disaster soon will merge ; 
 Prussia's sword will turn to Prussia's scourge, 
 
 wrote Henrik Ibsen in 1870. A continued 
 victory for the Prussian policy of power 
 would be a victory for the lower over the 
 higher form of German Kultur. Can any 
 Norwegian wish that millions of human 
 lives should be the price for the attain- 
 ment of such a deplorable result ? 
 
IV 
 
 ENGLAND AND GERMANY 
 BEFORE THE WAR 
 
 TiDENS TeGN, 
 
 April 20, 1916. 
 
 Those Norwegian writers who regard 
 England as responsible for the War do not 
 seem to have noticed that before the out- 
 break of the War British statesmen had 
 gone a very long way towards meeting 
 Germany's desire for expansion — so far, 
 indeed, that they may perhaps be said to 
 have shown themselves too confiding. 
 
 In a work by Paul Rohrbach, entitled 
 The War and German Policy, which was 
 commenced some months before war broke 
 out, and was published after it began, the 
 esteemed German author asserts that, 
 
 57. 
 
58 THE WAR AGAINST WAR iv 
 
 after the settlement of the Moroccan crises, 
 England became much more accommodating 
 in her attitude to Germany. Rohrbach, it 
 must be remembered, is a German patriot 
 to the very core. He maintains the assertion 
 of England's " encircling " of Germany ; but 
 he points out that the " actual encircling " 
 decreased or ceased after 1911. Before the 
 outbreak of the War, Germany and England 
 had come at last to an understanding both 
 with regard to the Bagdad Railway and 
 also to the plans of German expansion in 
 West Africa. 
 
 "England," says Rohrbach, "no longer 
 makes any objection to the construction of 
 the Bagdad Line which she had so long 
 sought to hinder. The Bagdad Line is to 
 be built, and built with German capital. 
 For a time we ;had renounced our claims 
 to complete the last stretch of railway line 
 from Bagdad to the sea. We left that to 
 the English. . . . The English, however, 
 have now left to us the completion of this 
 part of the line also. The Bagdad Line 
 is to have its terminal harbour, not at 
 
IV ENGLAND AND GERMANY 59 
 
 Koweit, which lies within the English 
 sphere of influence, but at Basra, which is 
 indisputably Turkish. The works at Basra 
 harbour . . . are to be undertaken by a 
 company in which German capital is in 
 excess of English. North of the 31st 
 degree of latitude not a single English 
 rail will be laid, nor will any English 
 railway concession be applied for." So 
 wrote Paul Rohrbach immediately before 
 the outbreak of the War. 
 
 The same German colonial writer con- 
 tinues : " Among the foundations of the 
 G-erman-E?iglish understanding [I empha- 
 sise these words] we must also reckon the 
 fact that England agrees that we shall, 
 without any interference on her part, be 
 free to make use of any unobjectionable 
 and sound opportunity which may arise for 
 the extension of our sphere of interest 
 in Africa."^ He here alludes especially to 
 the possibility that Portugal, for financial 
 reasons, might be willing to sell to Germany 
 
 ' Rohrbach, Der Krieg und die deutsche Politik, 2nd 
 :Edition, pp. 83, 84. 
 
60 THE WAR AGAINST WAR iv 
 
 Angola, her valuable West African posses- 
 sion, with its seven million native inhabitants. 
 
 Paul Rohrbach remarks after the out- 
 break of the War that, " now that every- 
 thing is changed, there is no reason why 
 one should not state that the agreements 
 with England as to the limitation of our 
 sphere of interest in the East and in Africa 
 were completed and signed (the italics are 
 mine), and that it only remained to publish 
 them. Iri Africa English policy came a 
 surprisingly long way towards meeting us. 
 In Turkey not only was the question of 
 the Bagdad Line treated with very liberal 
 consideration from the German standpoint, 
 but also other matters connected with 
 it. The exploitation of the Mesopotamian 
 petroleum fields and the navigation of the 
 Tigris, which had up to that time been ex- 
 clusively in the hands of the English, were 
 now to be carried on jointly with Germany."^ 
 
 It is highly probable that the German 
 Chancellor, having obtained the above- 
 mentioned concessions from England, re- 
 
 1 Op. cit. p. 122. 
 
IV ENGLAND AND GERMANY 61 
 
 garded them as very important, and was, 
 for his part, averse from exposing Germany 
 to the risks of a world-war. If such was 
 the case, he must have been outvoted at 
 the Council Board at Potsdam on the 28th 
 of July by the " War Generals " who did not 
 wish to lose the chance, offered them by 
 the murder at Serajevo, of gaining the 
 colonies of France and a footing on the 
 English Channel — whence the prospect of 
 world -supremacy would lie open before 
 them. 
 
 The colossal development of Germany's 
 military power, as brought to light by the 
 War, and the untiring and gigantic prepara- 
 tion carried on through two generations, 
 make it easy to understand that the tempta- 
 tion was too great for men whose trade 
 was war, or preparation for war — men, some 
 of whom had won their spurs in 1870, and 
 who naturally did not wish to die before 
 taking a share in an undertaking which, 
 viewed from their standpoint, was one of 
 much vaster proportions. 
 
 The demon of predatory war took the 
 
62 THE WAR AGAINST WAR iv 
 
 War Generals up with him to the top of 
 a high mountain, from which he showed 
 them all the kingdoms of the world, and 
 said, " All this will I give you if you will fall 
 down and worship me." 
 
 ,It is because of this that most of the 
 people of Europe are now suffering — not 
 because England wanted to "encircle" or 
 "immure" the German nation. For the 
 Germans were not immured. Before the 
 War the whole world lay open to German 
 industry and enterprise and need for expan- 
 sion. England was the country which, on 
 account of her free -trade, and by the 
 example of her mechanical industries, had, 
 more than any other country, made it 
 possible for the German people to achieve 
 an unexampled economic advance. English 
 free-trade gave German goods free access 
 to the British Isles and to all the British 
 crown colonies, and too often permitted 
 German business men, under the sheltering 
 wall of the German tariff, to undersell the 
 English by what is called " dumping," which 
 can scarcely be considered as "fair play." 
 
IV ENGLAND AND GERMANY 63 
 
 In this manner Germany managed, by 
 opposing its high tarifF wall to England's 
 free -trade, to gain in certain cases a com- 
 mercial advantage, which perhaps helps to 
 explain the marvellously rapid growth of 
 German trade. Paul Rohrbach points out 
 that in 1890 the total of German imports 
 and exports was barely half as large as that 
 of England, whereas just before the War 
 they stood in the ratio of 21 to 27. In 
 all probability it may be assumed that in 
 the next decade Germany's world -trade 
 would have overtaken that of Great Britain. 
 So says Rohrbach. 
 
 Those amongst us who talk of England 
 having " walled in " the Germans should not 
 fail to take these facts into consideration. 
 
 The Director of the Bank of Germany, 
 Helfferich, who is now the German Minister 
 of Finance, had reckoned, before the War, 
 that the wealth of the German people had 
 increased up to something like 300 milliards 
 of marks (by later computation as much as 
 400 milliards), and that it was absolutely 
 greater than the national wealth of either 
 
64 THE WAR AGAINST WAR iv 
 
 France or England. The increase was from 
 6 to 12 milliards of marks a year. 
 
 The truth is that before the outbreak of 
 the War the Germans stood in an extra- 
 ordinarily favourable position. What they 
 required at the moment was immigrants 
 from abroad rather than new territory 
 for their own emigrants. They had in a 
 comparatively short time acquired a tract 
 of land beyond the seas, for the production 
 of raw material, five times larger than the 
 whole of Germany. They had also the 
 prospect of gaining more, with England's 
 consent, if Portugal, sooner or later, should 
 be willing to sell. To this was to be added 
 the splendid possibilities for commercial 
 expansion in the ancient Mesopotamia which, 
 by means of preponderatingly German 
 capital, could be changed from a desert 
 into a garden. Then, through the alliance 
 with Turkey, there would come an opening 
 for the employment of capital and for 
 colonisation in Asia Minor and Syria. And 
 there was nothing to prevent the German 
 people — if their leaders would but accept 
 
IV ENGLAND AND GERMANY 65 
 
 the great idea of union, the political legacy 
 of Kant — from sending an increasing pro- 
 portion of the surplus population of the 
 future to those countries which were under 
 a foreign flag, but where, in more than one 
 place, Germans might probably have become 
 so numerous that their language and their 
 Kultur would predominate. Thew ;ay to 
 world-power through peaceful industry lay 
 open before the GermamiatiQn^as_it"did to 
 few or none of the other TEuropean peoples. 
 
 What the War Generals didmust'there- 
 fore be characterised as a sin against the 
 German nation and against humanity — no 
 matter what may be the final issue of 
 the War. 
 
 The times of Philip II., of Louis XIV., 
 
 and to a certain extent even of Napoleon, 
 
 could advance as an excuse the fact that the 
 
 idea of the extension of free opportunity 
 
 for intercourse and settlement through a 
 
 union of National States into a World 
 
 State, was then still regarded as a distant 
 
 vision or a Utopia ; but it was quite different 
 
 after the two Peace Conferences at the 
 
 r 
 
66 THE WAR AGAINST WAR iv 
 
 Hague, and after the North American 
 Republic, under Roosevelt and Taft, had 
 taken the initiative in trying to establish 
 a binding league of arbitration, with a joint 
 defence of the right in the shape of a " world- 
 police." By rejecting this solution of the 
 problem, which had long ago been clearly 
 formulated by the Quaker, William Penn, 
 and by preferring the employment of the 
 huge German War Machine in the attempt 
 to achieve by force a new world-supremacy, 
 a comparatively small circle of influential 
 men have chosen a lower rather than a 
 higher form of ambition, and have brought 
 it about that no small part of God's 
 fair world — including Germany itself — has 
 become a place of weeping and gnashing 
 of teeth. 
 
THE ATTEMPT TO SUPERSEDE 
 KANT 
 
 TiDENS TeGN, 
 
 December 1, 1914. 
 
 There is to be found in the great literature 
 of Germany quite a small book that would 
 have saved Germany, and all the world as 
 well, from the horrors of the present War, 
 had its simple and lofty teaching been 
 followed. It is for our time, and for the 
 near future, perhaps the most valuable of 
 all original works in the German tongue — 
 yet it can be bought for twenty pfennig. 
 
 Based upon the thought and experience 
 ot a long life, it was written by Immanuel 
 Kant, Germany's greatest thinker, and one 
 of the most clear-headed men that this 
 
 67 
 
68 THE WAR AGAINST WAR v 
 
 world has ever produced. He was, in 
 addition, a man who had at heart the good 
 of all mankind. He himself believed that 
 he was partly of Scotch descent, a view 
 which is now contested from the German 
 side ; but he saw nothing to be ashamed of 
 in this, or in deriving instruction from the 
 philosophers of England and Scotland. Both 
 in the experience -philosophy of his early 
 manhood and in his later " criticism " he 
 broke with his German predecessors, to 
 associate himself with Bacon and Newton, 
 with Locke and Hume, and to conquer 
 new fields by going further than they did 
 towards the virgin snows of the highest 
 peaks. 
 
 The title of the little book in which he 
 expresses himself most strongly about peace 
 and war the old philosopher borrowed, not 
 without a twinkle in his eye, from the 
 inscription on a sign outside a Dutch inn, 
 where these words, " Zum ewigen Frieden " 
 —literally, "To the Everlasting Peace" — 
 were painted above a picture of a church- 
 yard I 
 
V KANT ON WORLD-PEACE 69 
 
 In this ironical sense it is not only the 
 ardent spirits of Holland, but every war as 
 well, that can bring countless human beings 
 to everlasting peace. This was, I suppose, 
 in Kant's mind as he smiled to himself over 
 what he calls in his preface "the satirical 
 inscription." He inquires playfully whether, 
 perhaps, it referred to princes and rulers 
 who are never tired of war, or only to 
 philosophers who dream the sweet dream 
 of peace. 
 
 It is as if the aged thinker, who from his 
 youth possessed practically all the empirical 
 knowledge of his day with regard to nature, 
 and who never ceased to observe and to 
 learn, wished to beg his readers in advance 
 to be good enough not to regard him as 
 too ingenuous. He, too, knew something 
 about life and its realities. He refers some- 
 where in this little book to those people 
 "who pride themselves on knowing men — 
 while they know nothing of Man, and what 
 can be made out of this product of nature." 
 In his eyes mankind stood lamentably low — 
 and wonderfully high. In the potentialities 
 
70 THE WAR AGAINST WAR v 
 
 of his being, in his aspirations and his divine 
 capabiUties, man was an immortal soul, free 
 in the midst of natural necessity, superior 
 to time and space, to all sense-experience, 
 towering upwards into a higher, a divine 
 reality. 
 
 We feel as though we ought to take off 
 our shoes when we enter the lofty edifice 
 of Immanuel Kant's thought, especially its 
 inmost shrine, the doctrine of the nature 
 of human freedom. Man is free and self- 
 determining, uhfettered by any natural 
 necessity, when he does his duty, does what 
 is right, apart from all considerations as to 
 the consequences. Then, in Kant's opinion, 
 man stands outside the mechanical laws of 
 natural continuity. He derives his power 
 from an inward spring, a sacred source, 
 from the ultimate deeps of the divine 
 nature. Man is then a sovereign entity, 
 bearing within himself the law of his own 
 will. 
 
 To do what is right — to order the lives 
 of men, of aU human beings, in accordance 
 with our will to the right — that is Kant's 
 
V KANT ON WORLD-PEACE 71 
 
 simple and noble rule of policy.^ Not the 
 " will to power " over others, the watchword 
 of Friedrich Nietzsche and the Prussian war 
 philosophers, but the will to righteousness, 
 shall rule on this earth. "Fiat Justitia, 
 pereat mundus" — this Latin maxim Kant 
 translates playfully, "Let justice be done, 
 even though all the rascals in the world 
 should perish." 
 
 This little book, which is hardly more 
 than a collection of notes, was published in 
 1795, in Kant's seventy-first year. As he 
 had often done before, he indicates the 
 plain and straightforward but steeply uphill 
 road towards everlasting peace : the gradual 
 federation of the nations into a universal 
 state, a league of free " republics," a " free 
 world-state," a nation of nations, a " civitas 
 gentium" — beginning with a small group 
 of free states, but ultimately including all 
 the states in the world. 
 
 An "all-embracing State of Mankind" 
 is to Kant, who was a clear-headed man, 
 no more improbable, Utopian or unpractical 
 
 ' " Politik/' meaning at once "policy" and "politics." 
 
72 THE WAR AGAINST WAR v 
 
 than the existing states, most of which have 
 been formed from previous smaller com- 
 munities. He saw no natural necessity 
 decreeing that the process of the forma- 
 tion of states should stop precisely at 
 the point represented by the Romanoff, 
 Hapsburg, and HohenzoUern empires. The 
 united will of free peoples might wish to 
 go further. 
 
 The will of Nature herself, according to 
 Kant, points in this direction, since she 
 binds the nations together in the bonds of 
 commerce, and thus of self-interest — a 
 thought that he found in the writings of 
 Hume and Adam Smith. The main point, 
 however, is that our sense of right, the 
 divine element in man, desires it. " What- 
 soever is right must be held sacred by 
 man," says Kant. "To this law all state- 
 craft must bow the knee," sooner or later, 
 whether it will or no. This was the opinion 
 of Germany's greatest philosopher, the son 
 of a Prussian artisan, one of nature's noble- 
 men, the teacher of Schiller and, to a certain 
 extent, of Goethe, and a leader in the paths 
 
V KANT ON WORLD-PEACE 73 
 
 of truth for all time and for all the nations 
 of the earth. 
 
 Kant built on foundations that had 
 been laid by German, British, and French 
 thinkers. In addition to Leibnitz — with 
 the exception of Kant, the greatest philo- 
 sophical genius Germany has produced — 
 may be named the English Quaker William 
 Penn, the son of an admiral, who in 1693 
 suggested a European Parliament and a 
 court of arbitration, a principle which he 
 had already put to practical proof, with 
 great success, in his English colony in 
 America, Pennsylvania. 
 
 After the War of the Spanish Succession, 
 with its many years of horror, the French 
 Abbd de St. Pierre put forth in a volumin- 
 ous work the idea of a European League 
 of States which should be strong enough 
 to secure peace and justice for all. The 
 English thinker, Bentham, proposed, in the 
 year of the French Revolution (1789), 
 "a general and permanent peace," to be 
 established by the aid of a common congress 
 and a common international tribunal. 
 
74 THE WAR AGAINST WAR v 
 
 Kant's little book followed in 1795. 
 Based on the foundation laid by the 
 work of many ages and nations, its free 
 and lofty point of view gives it even to 
 this day the air of a shining tower on 
 a far out-reaching promontory, which the 
 storms of time have not been able to 
 shake. 
 
 Kant, without doubt, knew the work of 
 the Abb^ de St. Pierre, and had been 
 influenced by such a peace-lover as Hume. 
 In my opinion, however, what gave him his 
 faith in the possibility of a more and more 
 comprehensive union of free states was the 
 establishment of the United States of 
 America. He admired the United States, 
 and he rejoiced in the French Revolution. 
 How would he have been confirmed in his 
 belief that a small union of free states 
 could, in the course of time, grow into 
 something much greater, could he have 
 known that the American Republic would, 
 in the course of less than 140 years, grow 
 from 13 states, with a total population of 
 less than 3 millions, to 48 self-governing 
 
V KANT ON WORLD-PEACE 75 
 
 states, with a population that now amounts 
 to 100 millions ! 
 
 In addition to this there is Canada, 
 another half-continent, forming a federation 
 of parliamentary free states, and also South 
 Africa and .the whole of Australia, a 
 continent of an area equal to three-quarters 
 of Europe. The whole British Empire is 
 developing by natural necessity in the 
 direction of a federation of free states. 
 Even for India, a continent in itself, with 
 70 different races and 118 groups of 
 languages, it is difficult to conceive any 
 desirable future except that of becoming 
 (perhaps with English as its common 
 language) a free union of free states, a 
 member of the world-wide alliance formed 
 by Britain and her colonies. China, too, 
 on January 1, 1912, became a republic by 
 the vote of delegates from fourteen Chinese 
 provinces — a step in the direction of a 
 federated free state, somewhat on the 
 American model. When one considers 
 that China, with its dependencies, is of 
 much greater extent than the whole of 
 
76 THE WAR AGAINST WAR v 
 
 Europe ; that another of the world's richest 
 regions, Brazil, which is nearly as large as 
 Europe, has since 1891 been a free federa- 
 tion made up of twenty self-governing states, 
 also on the American and British model ; 
 and that the United States and the British 
 Empire, which together represent a quarter 
 of the earth, are approaching nearer and 
 nearer to the conclusion of an agreement 
 for unlimited compulsory arbitration — no 
 one who is not determined to ignore the 
 facts of history can deny that the theories 
 of Kant and his predecessors have shown 
 themselves to be something quite different 
 from mere unpractical Utopias. About 
 half the nations of the earth have more or 
 less deliberately chosen the way which, by 
 logical and practical necessity, must lead to 
 the United States of the World. 
 
 I, for my part — perhaps differing in this 
 from German authorities — lay particular 
 stress on the fact that Kant based his 
 argument on the United States of America. 
 And I ask : Has not history already begun 
 to justify the old seer? According to 
 
V KANT ON WORLD-PEACE 77 
 
 Kant, the idea of federation was to develop 
 gradually. To this proposition the British, 
 through the development of their self- 
 governing colonies, have said "Yes." All 
 their Crown Colonies will also say "Yes." 
 China and Brazil say "Yes." Will it not 
 soon be time for old, self-satisfied Europe 
 to say a repentant, but at the same time a 
 joyful, " Yes " ? In every other part of the 
 world white and black people are to-day 
 looking with horror at Europe. All the 
 white men blush at her disgrace. It is 
 possible that bombs from the air or shells 
 from mortars may, in the course of this 
 War, destroy not only the Cathedral of 
 Rheims, which has not its equal in Germany, 
 but also the most beautiful Church in 
 Christendom, Notre Dame de Paris ; and 
 why not also Westminster Abbey and 
 other wonderful buildings that have come 
 down to us from the early days of Western 
 Europe, when civilisation again began to 
 make progress after the break of the Dark 
 Ages? Many of the monuments which 
 attract to Europe culture- pilgrims of all 
 
78 THE WAR AGAINST WAR v 
 
 colours, and from all the other continents, 
 may perhaps, at the end of this War, lie 
 in ruins. 
 
 Some people will then recall the witty 
 words which Kant, in one of his writings, 
 quotes from the gifted Scotch philosopher 
 Hume, and with which Kehrbach has 
 adorned the popular edition of Kant's 
 Essay on Peace. They are to the effect 
 that two nations at war with each other 
 are like two drunken men fighting with 
 bludgeons in a china shop. Not only will 
 they long bear the marks of the wounds 
 they inflict on each other, but they must, 
 into the bargain, pay for all the damage 
 they have done. 
 
 Alas ! there is no power on earth that 
 will be in a position to pay for or to make 
 good all that is being destroyed in this 
 War. Worse, much worse than the loss of 
 cathedrals and town-halls and libraries, is 
 the loss of all the invaluable " germ-plasm " 
 which is destroyed, all the unique highly 
 organised types of life which will now not 
 be perpetuated, and which it had taken 
 
V KANT ON WORLD-PEACE 79 
 
 millions of years of organic preparation to 
 bring up to its actual pitch of development. 
 A part of the divine creative process is 
 wasted for this world, through the folly 
 of men. 
 
 How did this madness come about ? 
 Kant's philosophy, inspired by the will to 
 right, supplanted by the " will to power " of 
 Friedrich Nietzsche, the gifted madman I 
 Clear heads replaced by clouded intellects ! 
 Men with sympathy for the whole world's 
 weal and woe replaced by those who, with 
 the utmost seriousness, say and sing, 
 " Deutschland, Deutschland iiber alles, 
 iiber alles in der Welt 1 " 
 
 " Nations, the individual nations, stand 
 above humanity," says Klaus Wagner in 
 his book on the War. " The motto of the 
 Germans must be 'Germany over every- 
 thing in the world.' " 
 
 "A great people needs new territory," 
 says the same author. "A great people 
 must expand over foreign soil, and with 
 sword in hand must drive out foreign 
 peoples. Where the native population does 
 
80 THE WAR AGAINST WAR v 
 
 not die out, it can be made a subordinate 
 caste or forced back into 'reservations.' 
 
 " War gives the capable nation room to 
 grow. ... If we wish to grow and to 
 develop we must recognise the necessity, 
 and acknowledge the eternity, of war." 
 
 So writes Klaus Wagner ; and the Leipzig 
 professor, Ernst Hasse, and General Bern- 
 hardi agree with him. Professor Hasse 
 who, for over a generation, has been a 
 teacher of young students at one of 
 Germany's greatest Universities, praises 
 Klaus Wagner's new " paean on War," and 
 agrees with him that Kant's peace philo- 
 sophy "is in conflict with natural science." 
 The professor quotes these words of 
 Wagner's : " War eliminates the weak and 
 the useless." It is essentially a form of the 
 struggle for existence which, according to 
 Darwin, selects those most fitted to survive. 
 
 "A paean on eternal war, a rapturous 
 and rousing cry for the strong, a death - 
 knell for weaklings, will roll echoing 
 through the world until the last day." 
 
 This victory- intoxicated trumpet - blast 
 
V KANT ON WORLD-PEACE 81 
 
 of Klaus Wagner's is quoted with admira- 
 tion by Professor Hasse ; and General 
 Bernhardi, too, refers with respect to the 
 same war-cry. The General does not fail, 
 moreover, to take up arms against Kant, 
 whose doctrine of union and peace conflicts 
 with nature's law of the struggle for ex- 
 istence. This philosophy of war is also 
 proclaimed in Germany, not only by 
 Bismarck and Moltke, but by Professor 
 Treitschke, General von der Goltz, and 
 many others. In Austria it finds special 
 favour with that country's two leading 
 sociologists, Ratzenhofer and Professor 
 Gumplowicz, who take their stand on 
 Darwin's theory of the struggle for ex- 
 istence. Bismarck did the same : " War 
 is a law of nature, it is the struggle for 
 existence in a more general form." 
 
 The leading political economists of Berlin, 
 Professors SchmoUer, Adolph Wagner, and 
 Max Sering, have also, in effect, adhered to 
 this war philosophy, as opposed to Leibnitz 
 and Kant, in their work on Handels- und 
 MttchtpoUtik (1900). 
 
82 THE WAR AGAINST WAR v 
 
 It is easier to understand the policy of 
 Austria - Hungary towards Serbia, and its 
 refusal to submit the quarrel to any kind 
 of mediation or arbitration, when one reads 
 in the writings of that highly respected pro- 
 fessor of sociology, Ludwig Gumplowicz, 
 that war between nations is a "necessity 
 of nature." Human societies have (accord- 
 ing to this professor) "no conscience. All 
 means are good if only they lead to the 
 goal." 
 
 Civilised nations conduct themselves in 
 this respect as brutally as the savage hordes 
 of primitive days. They cannot do other- 
 wise. " The actions of savage hordes and 
 of modern states are controlled by a blind 
 law of nature." 
 
 The Austrian professor refers with pride 
 to the fact that Prince Bismarck's organ, 
 in a series of leading articles, pronounced 
 "a very appreciative judgment" upon his 
 theory of society. 
 
 What a light it throws on the fate of 
 Belgium when one reads these words of 
 the German State-Professor, Ernst Hasse : 
 
V KANT ON WORLD-PEACE 83 
 
 " For nations the morality of selfishness 
 must take the place of that of altruism, 
 which is allowable in the intercourse of 
 individuals." 
 
 General Bernhardi also maintains that 
 the Christian commandment, "Love God 
 above all things and your neighbour as 
 yourself," cannot in any way apply to the 
 relations of one state to another. For 
 this would lead to a collision of duties. 
 " Christian morality is personal and social, 
 but it can, from its very essence, never 
 become political." "Never," says the 
 General, "can the teaching of Jesus be 
 quoted in opposition to a universal law 
 of nature." 
 
 Jesus, moreover, said that he came not 
 to bring peace, but a sword. Consequently 
 the General finds that one arrives at the 
 "same result" from the Christian stand- 
 point as from the standpoint of natural 
 science. 
 
 One can, at a pinch, understand why 
 the General welcomes the philosophy of 
 eternal wars of conquest. Its dissemina- 
 
84 THE WAR AGAINST WAR v 
 
 tion among professors is more remarkable. 
 I must admit that I had no idea how war- 
 like German professors could be. Even 
 the Nestor of German philosophy, the 
 highly deserving physiological psychologist 
 and " idealist," Professor Wilhelm Wundt, 
 while lamenting that war must be waged 
 against kindred England on account of 
 its "piratical attack" (!), writes thus of 
 Belgium : " How little in comparison need 
 we trouble ourselves about the Belgians, 
 who, in their foolhardy blindness, have once 
 and for all, in the eyes of the whole world, 
 demonstrated their unfitness to exist as a 
 state." Still more forcible and more crush- 
 ing is the wording of the original, "Die 
 Belgier, die in ihrer waghalsigen Verblen- 
 dung diesen Krieg nur gefiihrt haben, um 
 vor aller Welt endgiiltig ihre Existenz- 
 unfahigkeit als Staat zu beweisen." 
 
 So it was not to protect their peaceful 
 country and their liberty that they fought, 
 but only in order " endgiiltig " — for all time 
 and without right of appeal — to show 
 that Belgium ought to be swallowed up 
 
V KANT ON WORLD-PEACE 85 
 
 in Germany 1 In the face of such a bUnd 
 rage of power, such an " at^ " and " hybris " 
 as the ancient Greeks would have called it, 
 I cannot but find insufficient the explana- 
 tion by which my colleague, Professor Gran, 
 in the spirit of kindness and humanity, has 
 sought to excuse the utterances of Germans, 
 and particularly of German professors, 
 during this war.^ No, the main explana- 
 tion lies in the individual suggestion and 
 mass-suggestion which had been going on 
 for years before the war : in the supersti- 
 tion of conquest as a law of nature, fore- 
 shadowed by the Greeks and alleged to be 
 proved by Darwin, and in the twin-illusion 
 of the absolute superiority of the Germans 
 over the decadent English and French — 
 of the Germans as Nature's chosen people 
 in the struggle for existence. 
 
 This war philosophy was very far from 
 being universally dominant among German 
 men of learning. There are eminent 
 advocates of peace and adherents of 
 Kant, even among professors ! A group of 
 
 1 Mass-Suggestion during the World War. 
 
86 THE WAR AGAINST WAR v 
 
 extremely able jurists belonging to several 
 political parties desire to return to Kant, 
 and lament that the German Government 
 is, of all the powers of Europe, that which 
 most obstinately opposed the development 
 of the Hague Tribunal. " It was Germany's 
 resistance which brought to nothing_,the 
 proposed establishment of a universal Mh^- 
 toLtion - treaty in 1907." So declares an 
 eminent German jurist who is actually a 
 Prussian profg;ssor into the bargain — 
 though it is said that, as a punishment for 
 his Kantian peace doctrines, he has been 
 deprived of his right to act as an examiner.^ 
 An examiner of law students must not 
 inculcate Kant's doctrine of "the duty of 
 peace." 
 
 " The duty of war," on the other hand, 
 is the title of a whole chapter in General 
 Bernhardi's book. "It must," says the 
 General, "be clearly and definitely stated 
 that, under certain circumstances, it is not 
 only a statesman's right, but also his moral 
 and political duty to bring about a war." 
 
 ^ Professor Walther Schiicking of Marburg. 
 
V KANT ON WORLD-PEACE 87 
 
 According to Kant, it was a moral duty 
 to work for the abolition of war. General 
 Bernhardi knows better, "Efforts directed 
 towards the avoidance of war must be re- 
 garded not only as foolish, but as absolutely 
 imvioral [the italics are the General's], 
 and must be branded as wwwwthy of 
 humanity." 
 
 These are the words of a highly placed 
 ex-member of the German General Staff, 
 and one of the not too intelligent political 
 advisers who have exercised such a fateful 
 influence on the leadership of the great 
 German nation since Bismarck's dismissal 
 in March 1890. 
 
 It is not only in Germany that this war 
 philosophy meets with acceptance. It has 
 found its disciples in all countries — even 
 among us. But it is in Germany and 
 Austria - Hungary that it appears to have 
 won the widest support. But for this fate- 
 ful superstition of the necessity of war, it 
 is likely that the statesmen of Germany 
 and of Austria would of their own accord, 
 or under the pressure of public opinion. 
 
88 THE WAR AGAINST WAR v 
 
 have followed England's urgent advice, and 
 let the dispute with Serbia be decided 
 by mediation, in whatever peaceful and 
 equitable manner Germany herself might 
 suggest. 
 
 Up here in the North, Norwegian readers 
 will find the loudest echo of German war 
 philosophy in the able work of the Swedish 
 Professor Kjell^n, on The Great Powers} 
 Kjell^n quotes with sympathy German 
 authorities such as Hasse and General Bern- 
 hardi, but suppresses their most offensive 
 dogmas of power. This brilliant Swedish 
 professor enthusiastically supports a daring 
 German policy of conquest. He actually 
 eggs on and encourages Germany in this 
 direction. We can also find in Professor 
 Kjell^n's writings an echo of the tendencious 
 German underestimation and depreciation 
 of England and France. Both these 
 countries are on the down grade. Speak- 
 ing of France in a Japanese paper, some 
 unnamed writer says, " The kernel is com- 
 pletely rotten " (II) and this remark ex- 
 
 1 Published in 1906. 
 
V KANT ON WORLD-PEACE 89 
 
 pands, in the eyes of the lyrical Swedish 
 professor, until it becomes "the judgment 
 of the East." 
 
 Professor Kjelldn wishes for a " Greater 
 Germany." He holds that the natural 
 boundary of Germany towards the north 
 reaches as far as the Skaw, the northern 
 point of Jutland. Occasionally he con- 
 founds his wishes with facts, as when 
 he sees approaching an alliance between 
 Germany, China, and the United States (!) 
 against England, France, and Russia. 
 
 "The judgment of the East" — that a 
 whole nation of nearly forty million souls 
 is rotten to the very core ! Is Professor 
 Kjelldn, then, unaware that it is now 
 recognised as an elementary fact of biology, 
 doubtless as well known in Japan as in 
 Sweden, that science knows nothing of any 
 single French or German or English race, 
 not even of a Teutonic race, but that each 
 of these peoples is a composite of a very 
 large number of diflPerent races or "life- 
 types " ? — and further, that, in each nation, 
 strong and healthy types are found side by 
 
90 THE WAR AGAINST WAR v 
 
 side and intermingled with weak or diseased 
 individuals ? 
 
 Professor Kjell^n's off-hand and scientific- 
 ally unsound judgment with regard to 
 the French and English people is only 
 of value as evidence that the views of 
 the German power -politicians, which are 
 coloured to suit their wishes, have long 
 octopus tentacles which stretch into the 
 Scandinavian countries, more particularly 
 on the other side of the Swedish frontier. 
 In all probability, however, it is only a 
 very small minority in Sweden, and a still 
 more insignificant number in the two other 
 Scandinavian countries, who are ready to 
 condemn two of the foremost civilised 
 nations of the world — both, incidentally, 
 benefactors of the northern peoples — to 
 senility and decay. And what are the 
 grounds for this judgment? Nothing but 
 a reactionary sympathy with the political 
 system of Germany, which Bjornstjerne 
 Bjornson characterised as a "medieval 
 system," and for which, as early as March 
 1890, when Bismarck was dismissed, he 
 
V KANT ON WORLD-PEACE 91 
 
 prophesied a dark future. "Oh, what 
 difficult times lie before us," wrote Bjorn- 
 son on the occasion of Bismarck's fall.^ 
 
 According to Kjelldn : " More and more 
 numerous circles in Germany are imbued 
 with the conviction that the establishment 
 of Germany as a world-power cannot be 
 achieved by peaceful methods. It was 
 through ' blood and iron ' (Bismarck's 
 words) that Germany asserted its existence 
 on the European stage. It begins to be 
 evident that she must again have recourse 
 to blood and iron if she wishes to rise to the 
 position of a Greater Germany on the stage 
 of the planet. . . . The iron ring which is 
 closing tighter and tighter around her must 
 be burst by force." These and similar utter- 
 ances are inspired by the desire that Germany 
 should dare everything and should strike, 
 urged on by " the lust of planetary power 
 which is indispensable to world dominion." 
 
 ' He added, in a letter to his eldest daughter (published 
 by Gyldendahl, Copenhagen) : " I am afraid that the young 
 Kaiser will plunge into many errors which will strengthen 
 the hands of reaction, and may possibly bring Bismarck, or 
 at any rate his system, to the front again." 
 
92 THE WAR AGAINST WAR v 
 
 Imagine a Scandinavian writer seeking 
 to inflame a great nation's " planetary " lust 
 of power ! — preferring scientific and philo- 
 sophical nobodies like Bernhardi, Hasse, 
 Von der Goltz, or whatever they may call 
 themselves, to Germany's most inspired 
 thinkers, Leibnitz, Kant, and Herder, who 
 were peace philosophers all ! — attaching 
 greater value to reactionary German chau- 
 vinism than to the all-embracing universality 
 of the German Renaissance, of Goethe, 
 Schiller, and Beethoven, to say nothing of 
 Kant and Herder 1 
 
 " Seid umschlungen Millionen ! Diesen 
 Kuss der ganzen Welt," exclaims Schiller in 
 his wonderful ode A?i die Freude, that 
 poem of brotherhood which is the text 
 of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. " AUe 
 Menschen werden Briider," sings the chorus 
 in this matchless song of triumph, this most 
 sublime of German works of art, the greatest 
 tone-poem that mankind possesses. 
 
 And why is this lofty spirit, derived 
 from one of the noblest periods in the life 
 of the nations, to be superseded ? To what 
 
V KANT ON WORLD-PEACE 93 
 
 new and wonderful discovery are we to 
 attribute the fact ? To nothing else, as can 
 easily be shown, than to a fundamentally 
 false interpretation of Darwin's theory — a 
 theory which in itself was one-sided and 
 misleading. 
 
VI 
 THE GREAT SUPERSTITION 
 
 TiDENS TeSN, 
 
 August 10, 191S. 
 
 Take as frontispiece a small historical 
 picture : two young German lieutenants 
 riding at the head of the Prussian and 
 Bavarian troops, through the Arc de 
 Triomphe in Paris, and down the Champs 
 Elys^es to the Place de la Concorde, on 
 the 2nd of March 1871, shortly after the 
 new German Empire had been proclaimed 
 in the Mirror Salon in the Palace of the 
 Louis at Versailles. One of these two 
 lieutenants was — if I remember aright 
 — General von Bernhardi, who about forty 
 years later, in a well-written book, did all he 
 could to egg on the German Government 
 
 94 
 
VI THE GREAT SUPERSTITION 95 
 
 to seize the first favourable opportunity of 
 precipitating a settlement of accounts with 
 France, — a war, in which that country 
 "should be so completely crushed to the 
 ground that it could never again come in 
 our way." > 
 
 In the same year 1871, by a remark- 
 able coincidence, there appeared the great 
 scientific work The Descent of Man, by 
 Charles Darwin, in which book German 
 statesmen, professors, and generals, with 
 Prince Bismarck at their head, and Bernhardi 
 far in the rear, have all seen a rock -fast 
 foundation for the dogma of the justification 
 of wars of conquest. In the first of his 
 great works. The Origin of Species, Darwin 
 had outlined the idea of the struggle for 
 existence as the method of selecting the 
 fittest individuals to survive in the struggle 
 for food and mates, and to be the founders 
 of new species. But in this form Darwin's 
 theory was not yet quite adapted to serve 
 as a basis for a war philosophy : since 
 human warfare is not a struggle between 
 separate individuals. On the other hand. 
 
96 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vi 
 
 in his second great work above mentioned, 
 Darwin, in agreement with Walter Bagehot, 
 lays great stress on the observation that, for 
 the higher animals and for man, it is of 
 great importance to form combinations for 
 purposes of warfare. Thus we have the 
 struggle, not of man against man, but of 
 tribe against tribe, and state against state, 
 or even of one alliance of states against 
 another, as in the present War. 
 
 Never before, surely, has an apparently 
 epoch-making scientific " law " come to the 
 front at a time so pre-eminently convenient 
 for the conquerors in a great war. Did it 
 not seem as if Providence itself had inspired 
 Darwin with this work, which appeared 
 barely a week before the entry of the 
 German troops into Paris ? Little wonder 
 that, later on, Bismarck himself appealed 
 to Darwin's "law." Little wonder that it 
 was in Germany that Darwinism found its 
 most brutal interpretation through Haeckel, 
 Nietzsche, and many others. " Might takes 
 precedence of right, so long as organic life 
 exists," says Professor Ernst Haeckel, the 
 
VI THE GREAT SUPERSTITION 97 
 
 Nestor of German biology. " A cruel and 
 ruthless fight for existence rages, and neces- 
 sarily must rage throughout all living nature." 
 Little wonder that men like the great 
 organiser of victory, Moltke, should have 
 revived a sort of Old Testament religion 
 of war. "War is sacred, for it is a part 
 of God's world- order." Was not Prussia's! 
 victorious career, as expounded by Professor ; 
 Treitschke and others, and as taught in 
 every German school, a practical proof] 
 from history of the correctness of the new 
 war philosophy ? — Prussia's victorious career 
 ever since Frederick II., called the Great, 
 conquered Silesia, and brought about the 
 three -fold partition of Poland. General 
 Bernhardi says, in the work he began when 
 he was a member of the German General 
 Staff: " The Great Elector had aheady laid 
 the foundation of Prussia's power by success- 
 ful wars of his own choosing. Fi;;ederick 
 the Great followed in the footsteps of his 
 celebrated ancestor. ... Not one of the 
 wars in which he engaged was forced upon 
 him ; not one of them did he postpone as 
 
( 
 
 98 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vi 
 
 long as possible. It was always he himself 
 
 ,' who determined to attack so as to get the 
 
 / start of his opponents, and to secure for him- 
 
 / self the probability of a favourable result." 
 
 General von Bernhardi maintains that this 
 
 policy offeree, which he holds up as a pattern 
 
 for the Germany of to-day, "has changed 
 
 the whole scheme of human development." 
 
 William I. also, and Bismarck, this 
 German General declares, "brought about 
 with far-seeing statecraft " those wars which 
 have raised Germany to the position of a 
 first - class power. Thus it is evident that 
 General von Bernhardi and multitudes of 
 his countrymen regard the victorious career 
 of " steel-hard Prussia " as " an intervention 
 of Providence," to use an expression of the 
 General's. The God of Battles, the Jahveh 
 of the Old Testament, has become again the 
 tribal God of a conquering nation. " The 
 German people themselves have willed this 
 war. It will create a new law. And the 
 priests of all religions shall bless it." To 
 this effect writes Maximilian Harden. 
 
VI THE GREAT SUPERSTITION 99 
 
 Let us look, for a moment, at the War 
 which the priests of the God of War are to 
 bless. Ten or twelve million human beings 
 are engaged in mutilating and slaying each 
 other with more and more marvellously 
 perfected machines and explosives. The 
 highest scientific and technical genius has 
 placed itself at the service of Death. The 
 chemist Nernst in Berlin, and other highly- 
 gifted men of science in many countries, 
 are doing their utmost to produce poison 
 gas and inflammable fluids of the most 
 deadly sort. Nations numbering collec- 
 tively several hundred millions of human 
 beings compete with one another in perfect- 
 ing the art of destroying life. Our old 
 Europe has at last brought her chemistry 
 and physics to such a high pitch of perfec- 
 tion that we can kill one another above 
 and below the water, on the' earth and in 
 the air, with the most perfect precision. 
 No longer individually but wholesale. We 
 can turn out machines for the mass-manu- 
 facture of human corpses. To such a 
 height has technical accomplishment risen 
 
100 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vi 
 
 that there is reason to expect that whole 
 districts of swarming cities may be wiped 
 out by men on a winged machine. Thus 
 the very latest devices of science are em- 
 ployed in the service of the same primitive 
 methods of procedure which obtained in 
 the "club law" of the cave-dwellers and 
 the jungle law of the great carnivora. It 
 seems as though our civilisation must be 
 suffering from some sort of deformation in 
 its development. Social science has been 
 outstripped by physical science. Even the 
 highly - developed art of healing, which 
 sorrowfully and solicitously awaits the 
 wounded and maimed as they are borne 
 away from the battlefield, testifies to the 
 fact that the edifice of science is like a lop- 
 sided tower, in tl;ie construction of which 
 the architects of society have hitherto failed 
 to keep pace with those of natural science. 
 A brilliant idea which hovered long ago 
 before the minds of the Greeks, and the 
 theory of which was developed by a succes- 
 sion of modern thinkers (such as William 
 Penn, Leibnitz, the Abb^ de Saint-Pierre, 
 
VI THE GREAT SUPERSTITION 101 
 
 and Kant), still remains at practically the 
 same stage of development as the steam- 
 engine in the time of Denis Papin : it has 
 already shown itself to be practicable, but 
 people in power do not yet believe in it. 
 Even those who do believe in it, for the 
 most part maintain an attitude of expect- 
 ancy, or at all events do not throw them- 
 selves with all their might into the task of 
 making the social invention a practical one. 
 International arbitration has been success- 
 fully employed eleven times in the course 
 of the decade which has followed the 
 establishment of the Hague Tribunal. But 
 to the leading German statesmen this un- 
 deniably labour-saving invention appears to 
 be applicable, at most, in the case of minor 
 disputes, and not in the case of such a great 
 conflict of interests as brought Serbia and 
 the Danubian Monarchy into collision. 
 Here it was necessary to fall back on the 
 blood-feud and the right of the strongest, — 
 even although it meant opposing 51 to 4J 
 millions. One of Germany's greatest jurists. 
 Professor Zorn of Bonn, although a man of 
 
102 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vi 
 
 Conservative leanings, has had the courage 
 to assert that it was unfortilnately Germany 
 that headed the intellectual opposition to 
 the Russian proposal to suspend all fresh 
 military preparations on land for five years, 
 and for at least three years at sea. It was 
 at the first peace Conference at the Hague 
 that Russia made this proposal. Professor 
 Zorn has lamented that, in 1899, Germany 
 at the outset refused to join in the establish- 
 ment of the Hague Tribunal. The German 
 authorities maintained that such ideas as 
 these were opposed to the Bismarckian 
 political traditions. It was only after the 
 greatest exertions that Zorn succeeded in 
 persuading the German Government to 
 abandon its opposition to the establishment 
 of a court of arbitration in any form. But 
 its jurisdiction remained only "facultative," 
 that is to say, dependent in each individual 
 case on the agreement of both parties to 
 make use of it. On account of Germany's 
 opposition, all idea of a binding arbitration 
 treaty between the Powers collectively had 
 to be abandoned. So wrote an eminent 
 
VI THE GREAT SUPERSTITION 103 
 
 German professor of International Law, 
 some few months before the outbreak of 
 the World War.^ 
 
 This I take to be a historical truth, 
 which will remain unshaken for all time. 
 The finely -inspired method of procedure 
 contemplated in the Kantian peace-policy — 
 a method which had now and again been 
 essayed with success even by the Greeks, 
 and which many of the ablest thinkers of 
 more recent times have regarded as a labour- 
 saving social appliance of far more crucial 
 importance than even the steam-engine — 
 did not harmonise with the traditions of 
 Frederick the Second's and Bismarck's 
 policy of power. Nor did it agree with 
 the misinterpreted Darwinism of Professor 
 Haeckel and many others. 
 
 At the first Hague Conference in 1899, 
 then, Germany definitely opposed even a 
 " facultative " or permissive arbitration court. 
 In 1907, at the second Conference, the 
 German statesmen had advanced so far 
 that the German representative, Baron 
 
 ' Professor Schiicking, in La Bevue Politique Internationale. 
 
104 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vi 
 
 Marschall von Biberstein, admitted that, in 
 1899, Germany had been on the wrong track. 
 But even now, Germany would not agree 
 to the first beginnings of a binding inter- 
 national arbitration treaty between all states. 
 Walther S chucking, an eminent German 
 professor of international law, has openly 
 declared that "it was Germany's opposition 
 which, in 1907, led to the failure of the 
 proposal for a universal arbitration treaty." 
 Professor Zorn admits that Germany formed 
 " the negative pole with regard to the idea 
 of arbitration " — and that although the pro- 
 posed treaty was only to concern "justici- 
 able " questions, and not questions of interest 
 or disputes which touched a nation's honour. 
 In more recent years, before the War, 
 a minority of German jurists strove bravely 
 and spiritedly for the revival of the mighty 
 ideas of the great golden age of Germany, 
 of the time of Kant and Schiller and 
 Wilhelm von Humboldt. It is a fact to 
 be remembered, that at all events a few 
 German jurists, such as Schijcking, Nippold, 
 and Von UUmann, maintained that Western 
 
VI THE GREAT SUPERSTITION 105 
 
 civilisation as a whole would be endangered, 
 if it proved impossible to found a Union of 
 Law between all civilised peoples, such as 
 had long ago been suggested by Kant and 
 Leibnitz. But opposed to the realisation 
 of this idea, there stood the adherents of 
 Prussia's policy of conquest, which, since 
 the days of Kant, had given Germany such 
 a dazzling outward show of greatness. 
 Professor Schiicking had declared (before 
 the War) that "the idea of right has had 
 to give place to the idea of might, among 
 the generation that has sprung up since 
 1870. The conception of international law 
 has little vitality in Germany." 
 
 In the year following the first Peace 
 Conference at the Hague, there appeared 
 in Germany a publication designed to be 
 widely circulated : Politics of Trade and 
 Politics of Power, issued by the leading 
 political economists of the University of 
 Berlin, headed by old Professor SchmoUer. 
 SchmoUer spoke slightingly of "peace 
 enthusiasts," and could see no possibility 
 of a legal arrangement between states. 
 
106 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vi 
 
 He openly predicted that the twentieth cen- 
 tury would be ushered in by violent warfare. 
 For Germany must — by force of arms if 
 necessary — "vindicate her place in the sun." 
 Trade policy must be a policy of power. " Be- 
 hind our merchants there must, in the last 
 resort, . . . stand the force of arms. Thus, 
 and not otherwise, is the world constituted." 
 Two things appear to me as clear as 
 daylight. The first is that behind the 
 proposition that "the world is thus con- 
 stituted," there lies the theory or dogma 
 that the legal settlement of conflicting 
 interests which has proved itself immeasur- 
 ably advantageous within the individual 
 state, can never be practicable between 
 states or nations. The process of state- 
 construction can never, according to the 
 dogmas of war philosophy, be carried any 
 further. In this matter, we must necessarily 
 remain, for all time, in the position of the 
 cave-dwellers, with this difference, that we 
 can kill or maim in a short time an infinitely 
 greater number of human beings, with more 
 and more murderous machines. 
 
VI THE GREAT SUPERSTITION 107 
 
 Mechanical, chemical, and medical science 
 is aHvancing. But the world can never, 
 in all time, get beyond the statecraft - of 
 Frederick II., or Bismarck, or Njapoleon ! 
 Any one who thinks of going further is 
 " an unpractical dreamer " ! The policy 
 of might, with its motto of "Blood and 
 Iron," has made Germany great. It must 
 be made still greater by the same policy. 
 It is much the same as if the English were 
 to say that no sort of steam-engine should 
 ever replace that which James Watt con- 
 structed with such good results. "Don't 
 talk to us of steam turbines or motors. 
 We have our long - established national 
 tradition." 
 
 This, then, is the first manifest truth. 
 Before the World War, a scientific and 
 political dogma was widespread in many 
 countries, and especially in Germany, to 
 the effect that, for all time, war is a 
 necessity of nature, and that any system 
 of international justice belongs to the 
 Utopia of enthusiasts. 
 
 The second thing which is as clear as 
 
108 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vi 
 
 daylight is this : that if, in any country, 
 such a conviction has estabhshed itself 
 among the ruling caste, not only is a 
 World War inevitable, but it also becomes 
 a patriotic duty to bring about such a war, 
 at the point of time best suited to the 
 exigencies of one's own country. This is 
 exactly the underlying idea in General 
 Bernhairdi's book, which — as far as I know 
 — did not meet with any sharp or definite 
 protest from other German Generals or 
 members of the German General Staff. 
 In the chapter headed " War as a Duty," 
 the author says : " the conception of com- 
 pulsoriness [' Aufgezwungensein ' is placed 
 by Bernhardi in inverted commas] can bear 
 various interpretations. It is not merely 
 outside enemies that may be considered as 
 forcing on war. Internal conditions or the 
 pressure of the whole political situation may 
 lead a statesman to consider war as being 
 imperatively forced upon him." 
 
VII 
 
 AN ANSWER TO PROFESSOR 
 ZORN^ 
 
 TiDENS TeGN, 
 
 October 20, 1915. 
 
 It is with pleasure that I welcome the 
 appearance in the Norwegian press of a 
 prominent German professor of jurispru- 
 dence, and his participation in that strife 
 which is even more world-embracing than 
 the World War itself — I mean in the war 
 about the War, in which mortars are of no 
 avail, and all nations great and small can 
 fight on equal terms. During the night- 
 mare of the war of violence, there is some 
 
 ' My article "The Great Superstition" called forth a 
 rejoinder, sent to " Tidens Tegn " by Dr. Philip Zorn, 
 Professor of Jurisprudence; well known as one of German/s 
 most eminent jurists, 
 
 109 
 
no THE WAR AGAINST WAR vii 
 
 relief in the thought that there is still a 
 magic circle within which brute force is 
 powerless. 
 
 In my article on "The Great Supersti- 
 tion," I sought to demonstrate that, before 
 the War, there existed in many countries, 
 and especially in Germany, a superstition 
 that war is a natural necessity in all ages — 
 not a necessary evil, springing from the 
 stupidity or predatory instincts of humanity, 
 but a beneficent natural necessity, an in- 
 dispensable condition for the progress of 
 nations ! 
 
 This superstition was accompanied, one 
 may say as a logical necessity, by the con- 
 ception of what General Bernhardi describes 
 as " The obligation to make War," when a 
 favourable moment occurs. Another and 
 no less logical result of the same supersti- 
 tion was the obstinate opposition, raised^by 
 the leading statesmen "of~Germany, to the 
 development of the Hague Tribunal into^ 
 compulsory' court for the safeguarding of 
 international law and of peace. 
 
 These were the fundamental ideas of the 
 
VII PROFESSOR ZORN 111 
 
 article in question, which Professor Zorn 
 
 has not been able at any single point to 
 
 refute. He cannot deny that he himself — 
 
 the strong Conservative, who had been 
 
 chosen by the German Government as their 
 
 legal representative at both the Hague 
 
 Conferences — he himself has expressed his 
 
 regret that the attempt to establish a 
 
 universal arbitration treaty was wrecked in 
 
 1907 by the opposition of the German 
 
 Government. "In the outpost - fighting 
 
 about this question Germany formed a 
 
 negative pole opposed to the ideas of 
 
 arbitration." Such was practically the 
 
 tenor of Professor Zorn's words — before the 
 
 War. Another famous German jurist. 
 
 Professor Schiicking, states that whilst the 
 
 German Press, under the influence of the 
 
 Government, represented the second Hague 
 
 Conference as a great triumph for German 
 
 diplomacy, Zorn, in his candid report, 
 
 showed that the obstinate opposition of 
 
 Germany, in all that concerned the main 
 
 object of the gathering, was the cause of 
 
 "the discussion ending in utter confusion." 
 
112 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vii 
 
 These last words are quoted from Pro- 
 fessor Zorn. Professor S chucking adds, on 
 his own account, that though at the first 
 Peace Conference, in 1899, a compromise 
 was successful in concealing the antagonism 
 between Germany and the other Powers, 
 in 1907, on the other hand, at the second 
 Conference, it was apparent that "we (the 
 Germans) were divided, as it were by an 
 abyss, from the other nations." 
 
 Professor Zorn says that he does not 
 intend discussing my article in detail, but 
 he maintains that " since 1870 the German 
 people have never desired anything but an 
 honourable peace, nor do they wish for 
 anything else at the present moment. Up 
 to the end of July 1914 no one among the 
 German people had any thought of war." 
 
 Professor Zorn adds, *' We do not dream 
 of any sort of supremacy ; we desire only 
 to live in peace and quietness, and labour 
 in our own country." 
 
 From these astounding utterances it 
 would seem as if Professor Zorn were living 
 in utter ignorance of what was going on in 
 
VII PROFESSOR ZORN 113 
 
 his own country. Perhaps, then, the Pro- 
 fessor may now hear for the first time 
 of the address presented on 20th of May 
 this year (1915) to the German Chancellor 
 — a " confidential " address which, how- 
 ever, could not be kept secret. I think 
 it was discussed in the Berliner Tageblatt, 
 if not in other German papers. It was 
 signed by an imposing number of German 
 Societies: by the "Agricultural League," 
 the " German Farmers' Association," by 
 the Central Committee of the "German 
 Farmers' Christian Association," by the 
 "Central Union of German Industries," 
 " The Industrial League," and " The Union 
 of the Middle Classes of the Empire." It 
 proceeded, in short, not from any working- 
 class organisation, but from associations 
 representing the well-to-do classes. What 
 did these people want from the German 
 Chancellor ? 
 
 N^othing less than that, after the victori- 
 ous end of the War, he should secure for 
 Germany Belgium and the Channel coast 
 of France as far as the mouth of the River 
 
114 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vii 
 
 Somme, as well as the coal and mining 
 districts in the north of France, and the 
 frontier fortresses of Belfort and Verdun. 
 Both in Belgium and northern France care 
 should be taken "that the management of 
 the most important economic undertakings 
 should be placed in German hands," and 
 that the native inhabitants should be pre- 
 vented from exercising any influence over 
 the German Imperial policy. 
 
 Thus, Belgium and a large part of 
 northern France are to be incorporated in 
 Germany, and in such a way that the 
 Belgian and French inhabitants shall not 
 obtain German suffrage, and shall be ejected 
 from ownership of the most important landed 
 property, factories, and houses of business. 
 
 As to the rich mineral districts in 
 northern France, the address bluntly 
 demands that "the middle-sized and large 
 properties shall pass into German hands, 
 the owners being indemnified, not by 
 Germany, but by France." In this way 
 Germany would acquire the property at a 
 remarkably cheap rate. 
 
VII PROFESSOR ZORN 115 
 
 From Russia, too, very considerable 
 stretches of territory are to be claimed, 
 where German industry and agriculture 
 may be promoted on the same principles as 
 those suggested for Belgium and northern 
 France, Here also the native inhabitants 
 are to be relieved of the burden of possess- 
 ing large and medium-sized properties and 
 large industrial enterprises. They are also 
 to be excused from taking part in the 
 government of the Empire. How easy life 
 is to be made for them ! 
 
 Of course it is not the lust of conquest 
 thaf animates these "GefrSan landowners 
 and leaders of industry — it is simply the 
 love of a lasting peace. They say so 
 themselves and, of course, no one can 
 doubt it : " We put forward these claims, 
 not from any policy of conquest, but 
 because only by attaining them can we 
 secure for ourselves that lasting peace 
 which is expected by the whole German 
 nation, as the reward of the sacrifices it 
 has made." And the love of peace is 
 reinforced by considerations of national 
 
116 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vii 
 
 honour. "The voluntary rehnquishment 
 of enemy country where so much German 
 blood has flowed, where there are so many 
 German graves, where our noblest sons rest, 
 would not be in harmony with that which 
 our country and our people expect from a 
 peace with honour." To give back tJieir- 
 country to the Belgians would, of courser- 
 be dishonourable 1 
 
 To this we must add the demand of the 
 same associations for a " Colonial Empire 
 capable of satisfying the many and varied 
 economic interests of Germany." But of 
 course no policy of conquest ! 
 
 We know that the German Labour party 
 has expressed itself against the demand for 
 extension of territory. On the other hand, 
 the leaders of the German National Liberal 
 party passed a resolution this summer in 
 which they demanded an extension of 
 Germany's boundaries on the east and on 
 the west, together with an overseas position 
 that will "ensure military and economic 
 security against future attacks," 
 
 We see, then, that the Germans are very 
 
VII PROFESSOR ZORN 117 
 
 far removed from perfect agreement as to 
 what they expect as the result of the War. 
 Professor Zorn, therefore, would do well 
 to give up speaking of the German people 
 as a unity. Though the Professor himself 
 may be a great lover of peace, and may 
 cherish the most profound respect for the 
 rights of other nations, it is useless to speak 
 on behalf of the German nation and say : 
 "We do not dream of any sort of supremacy ; 
 we desire only to live in peace and quietness, 
 and labour in our own country." It would 
 appear that in Germany there are a con- 
 siderable number of people who wish to 
 live in peac^ and quietness and labour in 
 other peoples country, after it has become 
 German by means of force and violence. 
 We may perhaps be allowed to inquire 
 why the eminent German jurist does not 
 attack the passion for conquest displayed 
 by some of his fellow-countrymen, rather 
 than undertake the useless task of persuad- 
 ing the rest of us that it is a "great super- 
 stition " to credit any one in Germany with 
 such desires ? It would be interesting also 
 
118 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vii 
 
 to know what meaning the Professor 
 attaches to the German Chancellor's recent 
 utterance in the Reichstag to the effect 
 that "the English policy which insists on 
 a balance of power between nations must 
 disappear." A similar remark, if I remember 
 rightly, was made by General Bernh ardi. 
 The Chancellor added : "This stupendous 
 World War will not re-establish things in 
 their former position. An entirely new 
 situation must ensue. Peace can only be 
 secured to Europe by a strong and inv^£^ 
 able Germany." Is the idea, then, that 
 Germany is to bestow upon us a new Pax 
 Romana ? 
 
 Any and every policy ot conquest may 
 be vindicated by the arguments by which 
 Professor Zorn defends the whole seri es of 
 wars which has made Prussia the creator 
 
 of the new German Empire. The Professor 
 says that " none of these wars were wars 
 of conquest in the ordinary sense of the 
 word." Their object was to secure "the 
 highest and most indispensable needs of the_ 
 German state." Such, then, was Frederick 
 
VII PROFESSOR ZORN 119 
 
 II. 's attack on Silesia, and the policy by 
 which he secured the threefold partition of 
 Polgnd 1 Such, too, in later years, the 
 seizure of Danish-speaking North Slggyig, 
 and of Alsace andJLorraine, whose popula- 
 tion wished to be French I What opinion 
 must we form of German legal philosophy 
 and German ideas of right when we find 
 one of the most famous German jurists 
 expounding to us when a war of conquest 
 is not a war of conquest, and defending 
 land -robbery on the plea of "supreme 
 political necessity " ? Is it Machiavelli, 
 and not the great Kant, whose spirit is to 
 govern the policy of the German Empire ? 
 
 Professor Zorn describes it as a great 
 superstition on my part to paint " a picture 
 of a war- and conquest-loving Germany, 
 which is exclusively influenced by the 
 Darwin-Haeckel theory of war and of the 
 extinction of the weakest." But I have 
 never said that Germany was exclusively 
 influenced by such ideas. Both in my 
 article in Tidens Tegn and in an essay in 
 Samtiden in the autumn of last year I 
 
120 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vii 
 
 have sought, on the contrary, to prove 
 that the great superstition as to the 
 natural necessity of war was not exclu- 
 sively dominant even among the leading 
 classes in Germany. Before the War 
 there swept over the country, not only a 
 strong movement in favour of the theory 
 and practice of war, but also an idealistic 
 counter-movement, headed by an important 
 group of eminent German jurists, who tried 
 to revive and continue Kant's efforts for 
 universal peace by means of a league of 
 free peoples. It was not I, but a member 
 of this group of German jurists — one of its 
 most liberal and high - minded members — 
 who said with profound regret that "the 
 conception of international law has haST 
 littlFvltality in Germany " since Bismarck's 
 time." "The idea of right has had to give^ 
 place to the idea of might among the_ 
 generation that has sprung, up since_1870.' 
 I hope that I shall not involve Professor^ 
 Walther Schiicking of Marburg in any 
 unpleasantness when I say that he uttered 
 these words a few months before the War. 
 
VII PROFESSOR ZORN 121 
 
 But I will add that at the same time he 
 expressed a cheerful confidence that of late 
 there had been a very marked improvement 
 in this respect. Among German jurists, at 
 all events, there had been, in Schiicking's 
 opinion, a great revulsion of feeling away 
 from Savigny and in the direction of Kant 
 and of the idealism of the great German 
 Golden Age. In my opinion there is no 
 more tragic feature in recent German 
 history than this, that the movement 
 against the war superstition came too 
 late, and was broken off just when it had 
 reached a stage of the greatest promise. 
 A German so patriotic as Walther Schiick- 
 ing would certainly never have deplored, 
 in an international periodical, the stiff- 
 necked opposition of the German Govern- 
 ment to the cause of arbitration, had he 
 not been able at the same time to assure 
 us of the great and gratifying change of 
 feeling. , 
 
 In order to understand fully such a 
 work as General von Bernhardi's book on 
 Germany and the Next War, it must be 
 
122 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vii 
 
 noted that it actually presupposes a German 
 peace movement, which Bernhardi attacks 
 with all his might. We gather the distinct 
 impression that, in 1912, he seriously feared 
 the growth of a peace movement among the 
 German people. He feared that if those 
 in power did not hasten to seize a favour- 
 able opportunity for bringing about an 
 " enforced " war,^ the peace movement might 
 in time grow too strong, and " slacken " and 
 enervate the German nation's impulse 
 towards the acquisition of world-power. 
 
 Is it not rather strange that in 1912 
 General von Bernhardi foresaw the possi- 
 bility that people might one day have to 
 discuss what was and what was not an 
 " enforced " war, and was keenly alive to the 
 fact that such an idea "might be regarded 
 in very different ways." Ah, yes ! how 
 many ideas there are that may be regarded 
 in different ways by Germans and by other 
 people ! We have already seen how a 
 professor of law can tell us without hesita- 
 
 * That is to say, a war forced upon Germany (Translator's 
 note). 
 
VII PROFESSOR ZORN 123 
 
 tion when a war of conquest is not a war of 
 conquest. 
 
 Professor Zom strongly disapproves of 
 my attaching any weight to General von 
 Bernhardi's book. "Most Germans first 
 heard of Bernhardi through wild newspaper 
 ravings about him which reached us from 
 the foreign Press." Later, Professor Zorn 
 speaks of this book as being "first brought 
 prominently to our notice through the 
 foreign Press." But, most esteemed Pro- 
 fessor, is not this rather strong ? The book, 
 if I am rightly informed, was published in 
 the spring of 1912 at the respectable price of 
 6 marks. Before the end of the year it had 
 passed into a fifth edition. If Professor 
 Zorn should reply that that is not a large 
 sale in proportion to the vast numbers of 
 the German people, I will add that such 
 was also General von Bernhardi's opinion. 
 Even before the end of 1912 he had, 
 according to the German paper Die Post, 
 pubUshed an abridged popular edition, 
 entitled Our Future. In noticing the new 
 issue, Die Post says that the original and 
 
124 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vii 
 
 fuller edition of the book was "received 
 with the greatest attention and interest in 
 political and especially in military circles." 
 The same paper adds that "the great bulk 
 of the book, and its consequent high price, 
 stood in the way of its becoming really 
 popular. But a popular hook it had to be." 
 The italics are those of the German paper. 
 "For the distinguished General's design 
 was not only to direct the attention of the 
 leaders, in political and military circles, to 
 ideas which, in this domain, are more or 
 less familiar, but to accustom the masses to 
 the thought that, within measurable time, we 
 shall be obliged to fight, and that therefore 
 we must, by all possible means, take care 
 that, in that event, all the trumps are in 
 our hand." Then the "German paper goes 
 on to show by quotations that General von 
 Bernhardi's opinion is that in all probability 
 a settlement with England can only be 
 brought about by means of a war, and a 
 war, moreover, with the whole Triple 
 Entente. 
 
 How, then, can Professor Zorn say that 
 
VII PROFESSOR ZORN 125 
 
 " up to the end of July no one among the 
 German people had any thought of war " ? 
 How can he insist that it was only foreigners 
 who attached any weight to General von 
 Bernhardi's book ? 
 
 Nor do I understand with what right 
 Professor Zorn can constantly speak of 
 what "the German people" wanted before 
 and during the War. In spite of its 
 discipline, the German nation is not a unit, 
 thinking with one soul and one will. Here 
 among us, as far as I am aware, no one 
 has ever accused the mass of the German 
 people of having willed this dreadful War. 
 Neither have any of us thought that either 
 Nietzsche, or Haeckel, or Bernhardi repre- 
 sents the great mass of the German people. 
 Of course not. 
 
 The German people did not want the 
 War. This we know from the fact, among 
 other things, that the chief organ of the 
 German Labour party, Vorwdrts, was un- 
 wearied, during the ten critlCSTHays before 
 the War, in accusing Austrian statesmen of 
 making the Serajevo murders a hypocritical 
 
126 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vii 
 
 pretext for stirring up war. The same 
 paper again and again attacked the majority 
 of the German Press for deliberately egging 
 Austria on. It appealed to the German 
 Emperor to maintain peace by agreeing 
 to the English proposal for solving the 
 difficulty by mediation. According to this 
 organ of the German Labour party (which 
 speaks for one-third of the German electors), 
 the peace of the world lay in the han ds of 
 the Emperor. He could " shake out peace 
 or war from the folds of his toga." The 
 German paper made these words of Sir 
 Edward Grey its own. 
 
 We know also from other indirect testi- 
 mony that the mass of the German people 
 did not desire a world war. Had this been 
 the case it would not have been necessary 
 to omit from the German White Book a 
 very important document. This was the 
 Russian Tsar's telegram of the 29th July 
 in which he suggested to the German 
 Kaiser the desirability of referring the 
 Serbian question to arbitration at The 
 Hague. The fact that knowledge of this 
 
VII PROFESSOR ZORN 127 
 
 proposal was withheld from the German 
 people points in the same direction as the 
 positive statements of the organ of the 
 Labour Party, indicating that the mass of 
 the German people, if they had been given 
 the choice, would most probably have 
 chosen a settlement in legal form rather 
 than a world war. 
 
 The maddest thing of all about the 
 colossal slaughter now going on is, in my 
 opinion, just this, that one of the most 
 industrious nations in the world — a nation 
 excelling in agricultural and manufacturing 
 pursuits, a nation of artists and men of 
 science — has been led, against its will, to 
 carry on against other no less industrious 
 and cultivated peoples a war of mutual 
 destruction, simply because a minority, 
 perhaps a relatively small minority, have 
 been betrayed, not by wickedness, but by a 
 frightful superstition, into willing the War. 
 
 Professor Zorn is indignant with me for 
 imputing this superstition to a part of the 
 nation ; but he should not forget that when 
 I speak of superstition, I am not only 
 
128 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vii 
 
 launching an accusation, but also pleading 
 an extenuating circumstance. If they were 
 not under the sway of superstition, the men 
 who refused to accept the Serbian, Russian, 
 EngUsh, and French proposals of arbitration 
 or mediation would be inhuman monsters. 
 
 I observe, indeed, to my astonishment, 
 that Professor Zorn maintains that, after 
 the murder of the Crown Prince, Austria 
 could not, consistently with her honour, 
 allow the question of the complicity of the 
 Serbian citizens in the murder to be tried 
 before an unprejudiced international tri- 
 bunal. Zorn says : " In this dispute, which 
 involved nothing less than a supreme point 
 of honour for the Austrian Monarchy, the 
 decision could only rest between Austria and 
 Serbia." This means that when Serbia would 
 not waive the right which every sovereign 
 state — even the smallest — possesses, of the 
 independent administration of justice with- 
 out the intervention of the officials of a 
 foreign country, the Danubian Monarchy, a 
 dual state with about 51,000,000 inhabitants, 
 was compelled, for the sake of its honour, to 
 
VII PROFESSOR ZORN 129 
 
 declare war against a small state of four 
 millions and a half ! I venture to think that 
 the great mass of the Austrian and German 
 people, had they been consulted, would not 
 have shared Professor Zorn's conception of 
 the honour of a great nation. 
 
 To ordinary people, who are not deeply 
 learned professors of jurisprudence, it seems 
 to be a flagrant wrong to make the whole 
 Serbian people responsible for a deed of 
 violence committed by an insignificant group 
 of criminal fanatics. 
 
 Even if every single Serbian were exter- 
 minated, the historical truth could never be 
 suppressed, that the alleged necessity for 
 avenging the Serajevo murder was^mere 
 pretext for declaring war, and that such a 
 pretext had to be resorted to because neither 
 the German nor the Austrian people as a 
 whole had any wish to kindle a world-con- 
 flagration. 
 
 "The supreme point of honour for the 
 Austrian Monarchy " — these words of Pro- 
 fessor Zom sound to me like the bitterest 
 irony. It may be that war demands the 
 
130 THE WAR AGAINST WAR vii 
 
 strictest of discipline ; but it is an evil thing 
 when the idea of honour can thus be turned 
 upside down at the word of command. 
 
 One cannot but think of the famous 
 saying of the Prussian King Frederick 
 the Second, surnamed the Great : " WTien 
 princes want to make war they do itj^n^^ 
 leave it to industrious jurists to come along_ 
 afterwards and prove that it was right," 
 
VIII 
 THE FATE OF BELGIUM 
 
 TiDENS TeGN, 
 
 Augvst 4, 1916. 
 
 It is a year to-day since Belgium undertook 
 the heroic defence of her right to rule her 
 own country, and to maintain the neutrality 
 she had pledged herself to observe. Belgium's 
 ulterior fate is still undecided. She has lost 
 treasures which can never be replaced, but 
 she has preserved the consciousness, for all 
 time, of having done her duty. The Belgian 
 people still possesses the most precious of 
 human treasures and one which no foreign 
 power will be able to destroy. 
 
 All the "small" nations at least must 
 pay their tribute to Belgium to-day. If there 
 
 131 
 
132 THE WAR AGAINST WAR viii 
 
 are any of the thinly -populated countries 
 which do not deeply sympathise with the 
 Belgians in the struggle forced upon them 
 in defence of their rights as a free nation, or 
 which do not dare to give expression to such 
 feelings, then they will have no claim upon 
 the sympathy of others should they be 
 attacked by a great Power. 
 
 It is with sorrow I observe that even 
 among us in Norway there have been fanati- 
 cal opponents of military service who have 
 maintained that the Belgian people, by de- 
 fending their country from attack and open 
 wrong, have committed " national suicide " ! 
 
 According to them, the brave people of 
 Belgium should have humbled themselves in 
 the dust in the face of superior force, and, 
 by so doing, have helped Germany to crush 
 France, and, as masters of Paris and Calais, 
 to destroy the freedom of Western Europe 1 
 "Laissez-faire k I'injustice!" They might 
 as well say that the Greek cities which, 
 during the Persian war, gave free passage to 
 the hosts of the Great King, and even guided 
 them on their way, were prudent "friends 
 
viii THE FATE OF BELGIUM 133 
 
 of peace," whilst Leonidas and his Three 
 Hundred committed " suicide." 
 
 A German historian of the good old 
 German type, Max Duncker, speaking of 
 the modern critics who have called the 
 heroism of Leonidas and his companions 
 a " piece of Quixotism " and a " useless 
 shedding of blood," says that " an utterance 
 of this sort merely proves that the speaker 
 has no conception of the moral forces which 
 shape the course even of war." We may 
 say of the Belgian self-defence what Max 
 Duncker says of the heroes of Thermopylae : 
 "If ever heroism was at the same time 
 wisdom, those qualities were assuredly 
 united in the achievement of Leonidas." ^ 
 
 Even now, on the anniversary of that 
 treacherous attack, we see the possibility 
 opening up before us, or rather rapidly 
 developing into a probability, that the 
 Belgians, after having gone through the 
 cruellest of ordeals, shall be established in 
 a place of honour among the small nations 
 of to-day — the place of honour due to the 
 
 1 Max Duncker, Griechische Geschiehte, vol. iii. pp. 256-257. 
 
184 THE WAR AGAINST WAR viii 
 
 nation which stood sentinel at the outer 
 gates of freedom for the peoples of Western 
 Europe, and which, at the utmost risk of 
 life, secured at once its own freedom and 
 that of other peoples, and helped to give a 
 new direction to the history of the world. 
 
 Who knows but that the capital of little 
 Belgium may one day be chosen to become 
 the centre of a Union of Right between 
 the nations, the seat of an international 
 tribunal, as a token of gratitude" for all 
 that the Belgian people has suffered in its 
 championship of international right and duty. 
 
 If the Belgians had evaded the duty 
 which they had undertaken, and had allowed 
 the German hosts to make their lawless way 
 to Paris and to Calais across the inviolable 
 soil of Belgium, and thus to build up a new 
 Roman Empire on the ruins of other states 
 small and great, then the remembrance of 
 that desertion of the colours at a decisive 
 moment in the history of the world would 
 not have made life brighter or nobler for 
 future generations of Belgians. Now, at 
 any rate, the people have saved their souls 
 
vm THE FATE OF BELGIUM 135 
 
 alive. It is conceivable that they may be 
 kept in subjection for years, or even for 
 generations, but their self-respect will 
 survive. This fortress will resist for 
 centuries, if need be, all the shells of all 
 the mortars in the world. 
 
 Even if we contemplate for Belgium the 
 very worst outcome of the War, still her 
 people have gained a victory which will live 
 through all the ages. In the hour of danger 
 and need they have done their duty. Sooner 
 or later the consciousness of this will over- 
 come every form of oppression and violence. 
 
 If it should prove that the Belgian people, 
 by their. Thermopylae-like defence of the 
 freedom of Western Europe, and by delay- 
 ing, for ten or twelve precious days, the 
 advance of the German armies, helped to 
 ihitiate_ a new epoch,_in the history of 
 civilisation, and if for that reason there 
 should arise in Belgium's capital the Palace 
 of Justice of the Great Union of Nations, 
 I can imagine that among the inscriptions 
 adorning its walls these words of Kant 
 would be found : " Two things always fill 
 
136 THE WAR AGAINST WAR viii 
 
 my mind with ever new and increasing 
 wonder and reverence : the star-sown sky 
 above me, and the moral 'law within me. 
 Neither of them is enveloped in darkness. 
 Neither of them must be sought for beyond 
 my range of vision ; I see both of them 
 before me and connect them by immediate 
 association with the consciousness of my 
 own existence. . . . The sight of the first, 
 with its countless multitudes of worlds, 
 brings to naught, as it were, my self-esteem 
 as a mere animal creature that must restore 
 the matter from which it is formed to its 
 own planet, itself only an atom in the world 
 of space. . . . The second, on the contrary, 
 emphasises my dignity as a conscious being, 
 infinite through my personality, wherein 
 the moral law reveals to me a life inde- 
 pendent of time and space." 
 
 By these words the greatest thinker of 
 the German race has adjudicated freedom 
 to the brave people of Belgium and the 
 right to be remembered with gratitude by 
 all the nations of the world. 
 
IX 
 VIVE LA FRANCE! 
 
 TiDENS TeGN, 
 
 Jidy 14, 1916. 
 
 On this fourteenth of July, when the flower 
 of the manhood of France is celebrating the 
 national festival in the trenches, some of us 
 at home here may remember the splendid 
 picture by Edouard Detaille in the Louvre 
 or the Luxembourg gallery in Paris, entitled 
 Le Reve. Above a regiment of soldiers 
 asleep in the open, with their arms piled in 
 pyramids, there hovers in the clouds a vision 
 of La Grande Armde of Napoleon, storming 
 victoriously up a height with colours flying 
 and eagles held aloft. 
 
 During this World War a nobler vision 
 
 137 
 
138 THE WAR AGAINST WAR ix 
 
 than this has hovered over the French 
 trenches, which brave young Frenchmen, 
 with their English and Belgian comrades, 
 have made into bulwarks for the liberties 
 and rights of nations, great and small — a 
 celestial vision of peace on earth, won by 
 indescribable sacrifices in a war against war 
 — the final struggle against aggression. 
 
 French homes, with their intimate inter- 
 course between parents and children, with 
 their gardens of climbing roses and creepers, 
 where the loved mother waters her flowers 
 or the young wife teaches her little boy or 
 girl to walk, and to talk one of the most 
 beautiful of all languages ; the cornfields 
 and vineyards of that fair and fruitful land, 
 tilled with untiring care and often with a 
 tenderness that suggests that the cultivators 
 share the old Persian belief that the earth 
 rejoices when luxuriant vegetation springs 
 from its soil and bears golden seed ; cheerful, 
 beauty-loving workshops and studios, where 
 hand and brain labour together on tasks 
 that delight the mind no less than the eye 
 — such a vision as this must often have 
 
IX VIVE LA FRANCE ! 139 
 
 hovered over the French trenches during 
 this frightful War. A dream of a land at 
 peace, of that France which shall be won 
 by Frenchmen in this war of defence — a 
 France that shall never again have cause to 
 dread attack, devastation, or mutilation — a 
 France that shall once more take the fore- 
 most place in the pursuits of peace, as in 
 the days of old when, after the long winter 
 of the Dark Ages, the French nation, 
 having regained its power of defence and 
 repelled its foes, led the way in the advance 
 of Western civilisation, with the songs of 
 the troubadours and linked dances on the 
 greensward, with new heroic lays and with 
 mystery -plays performed in the naves of 
 high- vaulted cathedrals — a France Uke that 
 of the time when the foundations were 
 being laid, when the peoples of Europe, 
 with the French at their head, again began 
 a forward movement after a thousand years 
 of decadence or stagnation, when Paris 
 became Europe's city of light, "la ville 
 lumi^re" as Victor Hugo called it, the 
 university city which, above all others, 
 
140 THE WAR AGAINST WAR ix 
 
 attracted from all lands both the young and 
 the old among those who sought for know- 
 ledge or who shed its light — a France in 
 which men again began to follow and 
 appreciate the soaring flights of the Greek 
 spirit, and, after having sat on the school- 
 bench with Aristotle and Galen, began 
 little by little to advance beyond the point 
 where the Greeks had stopped, by means of 
 independent and original research into the 
 great book of nature. This was the great 
 age of the battlemented burgess -towns, 
 when men who were strong at once for 
 work and for defence, won for themselves 
 peace in which to labour and to trade, 
 entered into bonds of commercial intercourse 
 with other industrious peoples from Norway 
 to India, and in many a place awakened in 
 peasants enslaved to the soil a new desire 
 and power to win their liberty. This was 
 the time when the civiUsing words of the 
 French language began to win for them- 
 selves the freedom of all other tongues, 
 and when the French Gothic buildings, 
 with their dizzy vaultings and their heaven- 
 
IX VIVE LA FRANCE ! 141 
 
 scaling towers, set men in all countries of 
 Europe piling stone upon stone in eager 
 emulation of the French style, so daring, 
 so graceful, and so lucidly logical. 
 
 That a similar time of regeneration shall 
 return after the war against war, "the 
 last of all wars," and that it shall be France 
 which, after having borne the brunt of the 
 great war of defence, shall be seen to have 
 made the greatest but also the most fruitful 
 sacrifices towards the foundation of a new 
 era — this I believe to have been the dream 
 that has lightened toil and allayed suffering 
 in the ranks of the French heroes. This 
 dream has raised the low roofs of their 
 dug-outs into lofty cathedral vaults, and 
 has filled them with the swelling organ- 
 music of the new age that is dawning. 
 
 On such a day as this Fourteenth of 
 July, which so many have to celebrate in 
 hospital cots, or in the charge against the 
 hurricane of fire from machine-guns or 
 cannon. Frenchmen may cheer themselves 
 with the thought that people far and near 
 accompany them with sympathy and good 
 
142 THE WAR AGAINST WAR ix 
 
 wishes in their struggle for the defence of 
 freedom and right. We too, in our country, 
 whose conception of freedom was gained 
 from France and England, and whose three- 
 coloured flag is a daughter of the tricolor — 
 we have not forgotten that, far back in the 
 Dark Ages, it was France that, with the 
 Truce of God, kindled the first glimmer of 
 light, and later on, through one of her great 
 statesmen, the Due de Sully, outlined the 
 scheme for a European Union of Peace. 
 Neither shall it be forgotten that it was a 
 Frenchman, the naturalist Lamarck, who 
 first elaborated in detail the great theory 
 of creative work, or the effective use of 
 the organs, as the principal cause of the 
 progress of life-forms — a theory which, in 
 modern re-statements, is relegating "the 
 struggle for existence" to the position of 
 a subordinate factor, and which will attune 
 itself to a new age of peace and co-operation 
 just as well as that of the "struggle for 
 existence " has seemed to fit that era of war 
 which is now being destroyed in its own 
 flames. 
 
IX ViyE LA FRANCE ! 143 
 
 Long live France, the champion of the 
 peace of the world, the peace of justice, the 
 peace of industry 1 Long live the people 
 of France, who are preparing the way for 
 a new and a brighter age for all nations. 
 
THE FORD PEACE MISSION 
 IN CHRISTIANIA 
 
 A LETTER TO THE "BERLINGSKE TIDENDE," 
 COPENHAGEN 
 
 Chbistiania, 
 Jammary 2, 1916. 
 
 The Norwegian winter gave the so-called 
 Ford Peace Mission quite an unusually 
 chilly reception. The bitter cold December 
 days of 1915 were a great contrast to the 
 day in May 1910 when Roosevelt delivered 
 his splendid oration in the hall of the 
 University, in acknowledgment of the 
 Nobel peace prize that had been awarded 
 to him. On that occasion the capital of 
 Norway extended a hearty and warm 
 welcome to the great American advocate 
 
 144 
 
X THE FORD PEACE MISSION 145 
 
 of peace, one of those who desire peace 
 combined with freedom. To-day, on the 
 other hand, Mr. Ford's confraternity met 
 with a distinctly wintry welcome, not only 
 from the weather, but from people in our 
 city, for the simple reason that we have 
 found it impossible to regard this expedition 
 as in any way representative of the great 
 American peace movement. 
 
 "Mr. Ford's Peace Expedition" proved 
 to be in fact — Miss Rosika Schwimmer's 
 Peace Expedition ! — paid for by Mr. Ford. 
 At the very first meeting, at the Norwegian 
 Students' Union, where I was present, 
 Mr. Ford's general secretary, Mr. Lochner, 
 explained that the whole undertaking was 
 due to an application made to Mr. Ford by 
 this Hungarian lady, after she had given a 
 series of lectures in Detroit. The plan for 
 this " American " expedition was worked 
 out over a year ago, here in Europe, by 
 Rosika Schwimmer, What that enterpris- 
 ing lady wanted from America was obviously 
 not the assistance of the most distinguished 
 advocates of peace in solving the peace 
 
146 THE WAR AGAINST WAR x 
 
 problem or hastening the end of the present 
 War, but rather financial help in the 
 execution of plans which had been matured 
 in Europe, and that by a lady belonging to 
 one of the belligerent nations. 
 
 The fact that American peace-brokers 
 placed themselves under the leadership of 
 a Hungarian or a German-Hungarian could 
 only cause amazement among all the 
 Christiania people who had heard or read 
 Ex-President Roosevelt's admirable Nobel 
 speech ;n Christiania on May 5th, 1910. 
 In returning thanks for the peace prize, 
 Roosevelt, with manly eloquence, expressed 
 the view which he had already sketched 
 in his Message as President of the United 
 States in 1904 : namely, that individual 
 states could not dispense with their present 
 military power of defence, until they had 
 organised themselves into a League of Peace, 
 which, in addition to having a common 
 tribunal, should also possess a common 
 world-police. In other words, as Roosevelt 
 expressed it in one of his later writings, 
 "the peace of righteousness" is the only 
 
X THE FORD PEACE MISSION 147 
 
 peace worth struggling for. But this can 
 be attained only when a sufficient number 
 of nations have agreed to " put might back 
 of right." The advocates of peace who cry 
 " Peace ! Peace I " without regard to justice 
 and righteousness Roosevelt compares with 
 crazy people who, during an epidemic of 
 brigandage and burglary in the city of New 
 York, should propose that the police should 
 cease all measures of repression, and leave 
 the robbers alone, even at the cost of letting 
 them retain their booty. 
 
 It can easily be understood that, among 
 pro-Germans in America, there are many 
 who would like to see an immediate termina- 
 tion of the War. Nor can we be surprised 
 that a Hungarian lady should find this a 
 propitious moment for travelling about at 
 American expense, and preaching peace. 
 But when Mr. Ford himself, and other 
 participators in his expedition (like Mr. 
 Schulzer), demand universal disarmament 
 before we have secured any international 
 union or any world-police, it is impossible 
 to regard this as the real peace program 
 
 L2 
 
148 THE WAR AGAINST WAR x 
 
 of enlightened America. Did not the 
 representatives of the North American 
 Republic, in a joint resolution of the whole 
 Congress in the spring of 1910, express 
 the view that the end to be aimed at must 
 be the formation of a common international 
 military power and a world fleet, for the 
 maintenance of universal peace ? Mr. Bar- 
 tholdt, too, and other prominent American 
 peace advocates, shortly after Roosevelt 
 had delivered his peace speech in Christiania, 
 urged the necessity of forming a military 
 world-police. 
 
 President Taft expressed himself in 
 precisely similar manner to a representative 
 of the Berliner Tageblatt in 1911. He 
 maintained that as soon as a sufficient 
 number of treaties for compulsory arbitration 
 had been concluded, it would be possible to 
 establish an International Tribunal, which 
 would have to be provided with a suitable 
 police-force to secure the execution of its 
 decisions. 
 
 Thus two Presidents, and the American 
 Congress itself, have expressed the opinion 
 
X THE FORD PEACE MISSION 149 
 
 that the estabUshment of an international 
 police-force, in conjunction with an inter- 
 national tribunal, must precede the suppres- 
 sion of the defensive forces with which at 
 present the individual states endeavour to 
 protect their freedom and their rights. 
 
 Other prominent American peace advo- 
 cates have expressed themselves in the 
 same sense. Nicolas Murray Butler, for 
 example, the President of Columbia Uni- 
 versity, did so in 1912. In Germany an 
 eminent professor of international law, 
 Walther Schiicking, has given his adhesion 
 to this view of the question. It is true 
 that he stands rather solitary among German 
 professors, though he is not entirely with- 
 out supporters. According to the Dutch 
 publication to which I am indebted for 
 most of this information, the idea of the 
 necessity of a world - police, thrown out 
 by Roosevelt in Christiania, has found 
 energetic and able supporters in Holland, 
 among whom are C. Van VoUenhoven, 
 Professor of Jurisprudence in Leyden, and 
 several other well-known men. 
 
150 THE WAR AGAINST WAR x 
 
 For this reason it is not very probable 
 that Miss Rosika Schwimmer's expedition 
 will meet with a wholly favourable recep- 
 tion at the Hague. The more so as she 
 has been there before, and on that occasion, 
 too, at a moment which seemed to have 
 been chosen as favourable to the interests 
 of that group of Powers to which she 
 is attached by the ties of race. We can 
 scarcely assume that the members of the 
 expedition, at so critical a conjuncture, 
 have forgotten the meaning of the expres- 
 sion " the psychological moment." 
 
 It is also worth mentioning that a leading 
 Finnish jurist. Professor Rafael Erich of 
 Helsingfors, has, in the German Journal 
 of International Law, given his adhesion 
 to Roosevelt's scheme for an international 
 police-force. Most remarkable, however, 
 is the support which the American peace 
 programme has found in England, and that 
 before the War. No less a person than the 
 British Foreign Minister, Sir Edward Grey, 
 in the House of Commons in February 
 1911, expressed his hearty sympathy with 
 
X THE FORD PEACE MISSION 151 
 
 the joint resolution which had been adopted 
 in the previous year by the American Senate 
 and House of Representatives. And in 
 March 1911, Sir Edward Grey, in the 
 House of Commons, definitely declared 
 himself in agreement with the idea that 
 the armies and the fleets of the various 
 nations should be reduced to an inter- 
 national world-police. 
 
 Here, then, we see that there is a great 
 American peace scheme which, even before 
 the War, had secured considerable support 
 in Europe, and which during the War has, 
 in all probability, obtained still more ad- 
 herents. For what the people of Europe 
 have most sadly lacked is precisely an 
 international police for the maintenance of 
 law and order. When we listened at the 
 Norwegian Students' Union to the vague 
 and indefinite peace talkers of the Ford- 
 Schwimmer expedition, we could not but 
 wonder that so many well-meaning American 
 men and women (apart from those who 
 travel in the interests of a single group of 
 belligerents) should come to Europe with 
 
152 THE WAR AGAINST WAR x 
 
 a peace programme which is obviously out 
 of date in America itself, and which would 
 not secure the liberty of either small or 
 great nations. Should they not rather 
 have endeavoured to diffuse knowledge of 
 the peace programme which to some extent 
 has its origin in America, and of which 
 ' America may be proud ? 
 
 It is interesting to remember that the 
 idea of a world-police for the safeguarding 
 of industrial peace and of justice was put 
 forward by Theodore Roosevelt after he 
 had himself filled, with great energy and 
 efficiency, the post of Police Commissioner 
 in the great city of New York. We 
 Norwegians may find it gratifying to recall 
 that the scheme found echoes in all civilised 
 countries after its exposition here in Chris- 
 tiania, and that the outward occasion for 
 the speech was the fact that the Norwegian 
 Nobel Committee, of which Norway's 
 greatest peace advocate, Bjornstjerne Bjorn- 
 son, was a member, had awarded the Nobel 
 peace prize to Roosevelt. 
 
 One of the ablest of the American 
 
X THE FORD PEACE MISSION 153 
 
 speakers at the meeting at the Norwegian 
 Students' Union, invoked, in a voice full 
 of emotion, the spirit of Henrik Ibsen, the 
 "great Norwegian seer" — little dreaming 
 that Henrik Ibsen, in and after 1864, so 
 far from expressing himself in favour of 
 disarmament or of non - resistance, in his 
 two greatest works. Brand and Peer Grynt, 
 ridiculed and scarified all the Powers which 
 did not rush to the assistance of Denmark 
 when she was overwhelmed by superior 
 force. 
 
 I cannot tell what Henrik Ibsen would 
 have said of the World War if he had 
 been alive to-day. But if he had ap- 
 proached it in a frame of mind similar to 
 that in which he poured forth his noblest 
 masterpieces, he could certainly not have 
 listened without indignation to Mr. Ford's 
 question : " What use were their defensive 
 preparations to Belgium and Serbia?" 
 Henrik Ibsen was of opinion that Denmark 
 derived immeasurably greater advantages 
 from her honourable defeat than did her 
 enemies from their victory, or the neutral 
 
154 THE WAR AGAINST WAR x 
 
 nations from their pusillanimous inaction. 
 I think that the Ibsen of Brand and Peer 
 Gynt would have received the disarmament 
 expedition with the question: "Why do 
 you not rather come forth with America's 
 contribution to that police of which some 
 of your manliest fellow-countrymen have 
 spoken ? " 
 
 It was extraordinary to hear one of the 
 members of the Ford-Schwimmer expedi- 
 tion declare : " We take up a position of 
 neutrality with regard to Belgium." When 
 this statement is taken in conjunction with 
 Ford's own remark that Belgium had gained 
 nothing by her defence (as if the issue of 
 the War were already decided, and as if 
 Belgium's action in delaying the German 
 advance on Paris were of no world-historic 
 importance 1), it is difficult to avoid the 
 conclusion that at any rate some members 
 of the expedition desire peace, even should 
 it be at the cost of the liberty of the 
 Belgian people. If this is indeed their 
 view, it shows no small naivete on their 
 part that they should have opened this 
 
X THE FORD PEACE MISSION 155 
 
 crusade for peace without freedom for the 
 small nations, precisely in the Scandinavian 
 countries. 
 
 In sum, I should not be surprised if the 
 Ford-Schwimmer expedition should suflFer 
 so much from the effects of the cold they 
 caught in Christiania, that they will not 
 recover until they have returned to the 
 peace of domestic life in America — and 
 Hungary. In this sense I wish the members 
 of the expedition an early peace. 
 
XI 
 
 THE WORLD WAR AS A SHAKE- 
 SPEAREAN DRAMA 
 
 The peace movement has — at least out in 
 the great world — grown many years older in 
 the course of a single year. It has gone 
 through experiences of the kind that sud- 
 denly turn a youth into a grown man. The 
 truth has been hammered in with projectiles, 
 and pumped in with poisonous gases, and 
 burned in with flaming liquids, that the 
 Labour leaders of the Western nations, along 
 with many other friends of peace, made a 
 terrible mistake when they imagined that 
 they could talk their way into a world peace, 
 or, at least, could secure it by merely hag- 
 gling over armament votes. Universal peace 
 is a wonderful boon, which must and will 
 
 156 
 
XI THE WORLD WAR 157 
 
 be attained, but it is not to be had for a 
 nominal price. That truth is now realized 
 in at least ten of the countries of Europe, 
 where it is written in letters of blood. 
 
 Every one now knows that it was not 
 enough that well-meaning and unsuspecting 
 British and French Labour leaders should 
 have gone to Germanyand shaken hands with 
 German socialists on the question of uni- 
 versal peace. These simple-minded people 
 have been brought face to face with the fact 
 that not a single one of the hundred and ten 
 Social Democrats in the German Parliament 
 raised his voice in protest when Bethmann- 
 HoUweg announced that Germany found 
 herself compelled to commit the wrong of 
 violating the neutrality of Belgium and 
 breaking her treaty obligations. Not one 
 of the many brave German Social Demo- 
 crats was at that juncture prepared to risk 
 his skin in defence of international right. 
 Scarcely one took up the unpopular attitude 
 of insisting that the Serbian difficulty should 
 be solved by mediation or arbitration. And 
 although their chief organ, Vorwdrts, im- 
 
158 THE WAR AGAINST WAR xi 
 
 mediately before the War, boldly asserted 
 over and over again that it was Austria- 
 Hungary that was seeking a pretext for 
 war, and maintained that Germany ought to 
 support Sir Edward Grey's pacific proposals, 
 yet when it came to the point, the party 
 executed a complete right-about-face. 
 
 The nations of Europe know now, by 
 dearly bought experience, that universal 
 peace cannot be secured unless millions of 
 strong men and women are ready at any 
 time to risk life itself, as soldiers and nurses, 
 in the defence of iriternational law and righL.. 
 Until this point is attained, even that proud 
 community of a hundred millions, the Free 
 States of North America, must stand as 
 impotent spectators of the most cruel wrong, 
 powerless to help the Belgians, powerle^ to 
 hel£ the Armenians. The history of modern 
 times has no more pitiable spectacle to show. 
 It is hard to say which is the more distressing 
 to contemplate : the Turks' attempt at the 
 wholesale murder of a nation, or a hundred . 
 million people looking quietly on, without 
 hastening to the aid of the unhappy victims. 
 
XI THE WORLD WAR 159 
 
 Perhaps something may be done — ^when it 
 is too late. Then every one will also be 
 forced to realise that there has been some- 
 thing very far wrong with the great peace 
 movement, inasmuch as it did not provide 
 beforehand for the organisation of millions 
 of young men and women, to fight for the 
 right. There must have been something 
 very much mistaken in the methods of the 
 Christian communities which failed to gather 
 the conscripts and volunteers of all peace- 
 loving and right-loving nations into an in- 
 vincible Crusader host, a new knighthood, to 
 do battle for the kingdom of righteousness 
 on earth. 
 
 In one country after another, men begin 
 to see that the friends of peace, through their 
 sins of omission, are in some degree to blame 
 for the present World War. They have 
 omitted to raise a sufl&cient military defence 
 against deeds of violence. England could 
 have compelled acceptance of Sir Edward 
 Grey's proposal of mediation or arbitration, 
 if, in addition to her mighty fleet, she had 
 had an army of millions. Belgium could 
 
160 THE WAR AGAINST WAR xi 
 
 have said " Hands off" if she had raised a 
 national army in time. It is probable that 
 most of the British Labour leaders now realise 
 that when, before the War, they opposed an 
 increase of armaments for the preservation 
 of peace, they saved their pence and let their 
 pounds go. They would not pay a high 
 enough insurance premium. But now they 
 and their people must pay a thousand times 
 more for the War, with all its horrors, than 
 they would have had to pay for peace with 
 all its blessings. 
 
 The peace movement has fallen pitifully 
 short of its aim because too many friends 
 of peace wished to secure universal peace at 
 too low a price. But suffering is a severe 
 schoolrnaster. Now more and more people 
 perceive that it is impossible to establish 
 universal peace without making the greatest 
 exertions to organise a League of Right, 
 with a common international army, a mili- 
 tary " world-police." Very significant is the 
 description of the new " League to Enforce 
 Peace," which was founded on 17th .July 
 of this year in the city of brotherhood. 
 
XI THE WORLD WAR 161 
 
 Philadelphia. Universal peace will be 
 secured not by disarmament but by joint 
 armament, not by breaking our weapons in 
 pieces, but by bringing them into a common 
 stock, for the use of a citizen army of all 
 nations, who will form a living bulwark for 
 the defence of one common code of laws 
 and one common tribunal. 
 
 • •.... 
 
 The present War bears witness to the 
 profound truth of William Shakespeare's 
 view of one of the main causes of human 
 tragedy. The way in which simple, un- 
 suspecting pacifism has played into the 
 hands of aggressive militarism, by opening 
 up a tempting prospect of world-conquest, 
 reminds one of the tragic results of guile- 
 less Othello's faith in "honest lago ," or of 
 did Duncan's confidence in Macbeth, or 
 of Lear's trust in his daughters, — their 
 innocent simplicity playing into the hands 
 of plotting treachery and cunning crime. 
 From this point of view the "greatest 
 of all wars" looks like a huge tragedy 
 on Shakespearean lines : Militarism and 
 
162 THE WAR AGAINST WAR xi 
 
 Pacifism acting in concert, and, in a most 
 weird way, celebrating the centenary of 
 one of the greatest of the world's poet 
 thinkers. 
 
 But there is also a brighter side to the 
 memorial medal which is being struck upon 
 the anvil of the War. The heroism of 
 Belgium, France, England and their Allies 
 reminds us of the fact that as the ancient 
 Greek draina was born during that war 
 of defence and deliverance which saved 
 European culture and made possible the 
 greatest outburst of creative energy which 
 the world has ever witnessed, in a similar 
 way the Shakespearean drama was born 
 during another war of deliverance and 
 defence which saved Western civilisation 
 from falling under the religious and military 
 yoke of a single state. 
 
 Four times in the course of less than 
 four centuries it has fallen to the lot of 
 the English, in league with other nations, 
 to avert the foundation of a universal 
 monarchy. For a fourth time, England is 
 helping to secure for Europe the free inter- 
 
XI THE WORLD WAR 163 
 
 play of separate and independent nations. 
 I cannot think of any more dramatic way 
 of celebrating a Shakespearean memorial 
 day than by acting once more upon the 
 stage of life a heroic drama similar to that 
 which William Shakespeare saw enacted 
 before his eyes, even as the British and 
 their Allies are doing at the present moment. 
 Commemorative festivals are shadowy and 
 almost futile, compared with the resuscita- 
 tion of the very soul of the great things of 
 the past. 
 
 CHBISTIAjnA, 
 
 July 24, 1916. 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.