Page:Paul Samuel Reinsch - Secret Diplomacy, How Far Can It Be Eliminated? - 1922.djvu/26

 ulative diplomacy during the Nineteenth Century.

What then shall we say of the justification of wars brought about as a part of such a system; under which statesmen consider it quite natural to contemplate "preventive war" and to assume responsibility for wholesale slaughter because their plan of action seems to reveal a necessity for it. The idea of conscious planning, or striving to subject national and economic facts and all historic development to the conscious political will,–that conception of diplomacy is synonymous with the essence of politics and will stand and fall with the continuance of the purely political state. Manipulative, and hence secret, diplomacy is in fact the most complete expression of the purely political factor in human affairs. To many, it will seem only a survival of a hyperpolitical era, as human society now tends to outgrow and transcend politics for more comprehensive, pervasive and essential principles of action. We need not here rehearse the fundamental character of politics as a struggle for recognized authority to determine the action of individuals, with the use of external compulsion. Politics is a part of the idea of the national state seen from the point of view of a struggle for existence among different political organizations, in which