Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/841

Rh enormous. We do not say they can not be overcome, that the dielectric can not be ruptured by some sudden and enormous rise of potential; but we do say and rejoice to say that the strain will have to be enormous, and the circumstances fateful to the last degree, before such a result is reached.

We freely grant that, looking at the question theoretically, it is very difficult to imagine the complete cessation of war or the complete discontinuance of warlike preparations. De Quincey, in his celebrated essay on War, took the ground first that war could not be abolished, and secondly that it ought not to be abolished. He regarded it, as he tells us, first as "a physical necessity, arising out of man's nature when combined with man's situation," and in the second place as "a moral necessity connected with benefits of compensation, such as continually lurk in evils acknowledged to be such." War ought to exist, he further explains, "as a balance to opposite tendencies of a still more evil character. . . . as a counter venom to the taint of some more mortal poison." De Quincey has developed and, as they say in French, "embroidered" this thesis with his usual eloquence; but we can not admit that he has proved it, which after all is the principal thing. After dismissing the idea that wars have frequently had their rise in the most trivial causes, such as quarrels of the boudoir or a king's ill-humor vented in the first place on his foreign minister and by the latter diverted to a neighboring nation, he states that the real causes of war "lie in the system of national competitions; in the common political system to which all individual nations are unavoidably parties, with no internal principle for adjusting the equilibrium of those forces, and no supreme Areopagus, or court of appeal, for deciding disputes." He points out too, what is perfectly true, that war conducted by responsible powers according to recognized rules is better than unregulated conflicts and reprisals along the frontiers of adjoining states; but, unless we are to assume that such unregulated conflicts could not be prevented by the internal police of the respective countries, we can hardly accept this as a valid argument for the necessity of war. In point of fact such conflicts are prevented in this precise manner; and the frontiers of two neighboring civilized states enjoy in time of peace just as much security and tranquillity as the rest of their territories.

More serious is the argument that war necessarily results from the natural rivalries of states. De Quincey speaks of it as "an instinctive nisus for redressing the errors of equilibrium in the relative position of nations. Civilities and high-bred courtesies, "he adds," pass and ought to pass between nations; that is the graceful drapery which shrouds their natural, fierce, and tigerlike relations to each other. But the glaring eyes, which