Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 21.pdf/537

 506

The Green Bag

of inevitability and destiny which in a different era would have been credited to Providence or the nature of things. Simmel, the great German sociologist, lays the causes of strife to "inherent irreconcilableness."34 Cousin says:— "War has its root in the nature of the ideas of different peoples, which being necessarily limited, partial, exclusive, are necessarily hos tile, aggressive, tyrannical. Wherefore war is necessary. We should not bewail this fact. For it is through war that progress is accom plished. If war is nothing less than the vio lent encounter, the collision of the exclusive ideas of different peoples, it follows that in a collision the more feeble idea will be destroyed by the stronger, that is to say, absorbed and assimilated by it. Now the stronger idea in an epoch is necessarily the one which is most in accord with the very spirit of that epoch. Each people represents an idea. The people that represents the idea most in accord with the general spirit of the epoch, is the people called to domination in that epoch. When the idea of a people has had its day, that people disappears, and it is well that it dis appears. But it does not yield its place with out resistance. Whence arises war."" "Would they [the pacificists] as Christian philanthropists and law-abiding citizens, have been satisfied to stand aside and contemplate the final trumph of the first Napoleon, of the French Commune, of Russian Nihilism, or of the Koran?"* It is this struggle for hegemony be tween peoples and ultimately, perhaps, between ideas, that is behind the great wars of the world in all time. And that such struggles are yet to come, Court or no Court, we have ample evidence. The imperialist and the jingoist may

lose caste, and the cultural forces of civilization may temper the brute forces of the world, and, in the phrase of Kant, teach man to think more highly of man, but the saying of Nietsche nevertheless remains true, that "war has always been the chief occupation of mankind" and that man semper ubique omnibus is a fighting animal. The very size of our armament and the ruinous burden it imposes may ultimately insure peace or even disarmament, but it is not likely, and it could not last. Perhaps Marshal Moltke is right in his belief that "war enters into the views and designs of Providence; it is a means for the people to fulfill their object on earth, a divine mission to retemper the edge of their manhood, and to keep them from falling into decay." Indeed, as one reads the history of the race and sees one civilization after another succumb to barbarian invader, it is not altogether absurd to suggest that there are still barbarian races in the world who might some day topple us over, if we disarmed. The "yellow peril" may be more real than we imagine. Only the placid Mediterranean separates Europe from a Continent peopled with millions upon millions of sleeping blacks of superior physical attainments. Who shall say that they may not in some dis tant and yet undreamed of hour awake and swoop down on Europe as the equally despised barbarians of the North swarmed down upon imperial Rome.37

Ill Let me for a moment also call your attention to the connection between our "Soziohgie, 335-6 (1908). uCours de VHistaire de la Philosophie, lect. ix. See also much the same argument by Lueder in Holtzendorff, Encyclopadie des Volkerrechts, IV, 54. I. 133.
 * Lorimer, Institutions of the Law of Nations,

Anglo-American advocacy of this project and Anglo-American legal and political thought. A The idea of such a Court is pre"See Sir Ian Hamilton, Staff Officer's Scrap Book, vol. I, pp. 168-8, 5-8, 14.