Page:Political and legal remedies for war.djvu/59

Rh and reorganization of Germany are directly responsible for three Wars directed by Prussia against Austria, Denmark, and France.

With the single exception of the Wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars — an exception which can be easily accounted for — all these Wars were successful in vindicating, sooner or later, for the State, the internal changes of which seem to have led to the War, a superior political position, or in releasing it from fettering obligations by which its progress had, previously to the War, been impeded. It is impossible to question the fact that Prussia owes the eminent political position occupied by herself, and by Germany, to four or five Wars, extending over a century, in spite of her misfortunes in the Napoleonic period. The Kingdom of Italy has been created by War. Russia has gained more than she has lost by War. If quasi-civil Wars are taken into account, it is undoubted that the flourishing Kingdoms of Belgium and Holland, Greece, Switzerland, and the United States, in their reconstituted forms, are all the offspring of successful Wars.

These facts certainly raise a presumption that most of the Wars of the last century have been, in one sense of the word, necessary; that is, if no other mode of adjusting formal relationships and conditions of existence to the progressive elements of national life could be discovered, a choice must have been made in all these cases between War and national stagnation or extinction.

So far as recent history can throw any light on the investigation, it appears that one cause of modern European Wars is the struggling effort which a State is induced to make when its internal constitution or material resources are undergoing a rapid, progressive development, disproportionate to the pressure, of one kind and another, which the State suffers at the hands of surrounding States.