Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/830

 800 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

selves already struggle in diffuse, unobserved or latent form. For instance, if the economic advantage which the southern states of the American union had over the northern states before the Civil War, as a consequence of the slave system, was also the reason for this war, yet so long as no outbreaking antagonism arises, but there is nearly an imminent condition of the one por- tion of the nation as against another condition in another por- tion, this reason for conflict remains outside of the specific question of war and peace. At the moment, however, in which the situation began to assume a color which meant war, this itself was an accumulation of antagonisms ; of hatred, feelings, newspaper arguments, frictions between private persons, and on the borders, reciprocal moral equivocations in matters outside of the central- antithesis. The end of peace is thus not distin- guished by a special sociological situation, but rather out of some sort of real relationships within a peaceful condition antagonism is developed immediately, if not at once in its most visible and energetic form. The case is different, however, in the reverse direction. Peace does not attach itself so immediately to struggle. The termination of strife is a special undertaking which belongs neither in the one category nor in the other, like a bridge which is of a different nature from that of either bank which it unites. The sociology of struggle demands, therefore, at least as an appendix, an analysis of the forms in which struggle comes to an end, and which present certain special forms of reaction not to be observed in other circumstances.

The particular motive which in most cases corresponds with the transition from war to peace is the simple longing for peace. With the emergence of this factor there comes into being, as a matter of fact, peace itself, at first in the form of the wish immediately parallel with the struggle itself, and it may without special transitional form displace struggle. We need not pause long to observe that the desire for peace may spring up both directly and indirectly; the former may occur either through the return to power of this peaceful character in the party which is essentially in favor of peace ; or through the fact that, through the mere change of the formal stimulus of struggle and