The Lost Fruits of Waterloo

“I am sympathetically disposed, as my political activity shows, toward every idea which eliminates for the future a possibility or a probability of war, and will promote a peaceful and harmonious collaboration of nations. If the idea of a bond of nations, as suggested by President Wilson, proves on closer examination really to be conceived in a spirit of complete justice and complete impartiality toward all, then the imperial government is gladly ready, when all other pending questions have been settled, to begin the examination of the basis of such a bond of nations.”

This very guarded utterance means much or little, as the German rulers may hereafter determine. By offering impossible conditions of what they may pronounce “complete justice and complete impartiality to all” they may be able to nullify whatever promise may be incorporated in it. On the other hand, the sentiment, if accepted in a fair spirit and without exaggerated demands, may be a real step toward realizing President Wilson’s desires. If, for example, Germany should insist, as a condition for the formation of a “bond of nations,” that Great Britain give up her navy, or dismantle Gibraltar, while she herself retained her immense Krupp works and her power to assemble her army at a moment’s notice, it is hardly likely the demand would be granted. We can best know what Germany will do in this matter when we see to what extent she is willing to acknowledge that her war is a failure and that her military policy is a vast and expensive affair that profits nothing. Moreover, there is a slight sneer in the chancellor’s words, as though he does not consider the president’s idea entirely within the range of the diplomacy of experienced statesmen; and this is not very promising for the outcome – unless, indeed, the logic of future events opens his eyes to the meaning of the new spirit that the war has aroused.

Among our own allies the suggestion of our president has found a kinder reception. Mr. Lloyd George has announced his general support of the proposition, and Lord Bryce and others have given it cordial indorsement. It seems that if the United States urges the formation of a league of peace, she will have the coöperation of Great Britain. As to the position of France and Italy, the matter is not so clear. They probably are too deeply impressed by the danger they will ever face from powerful neighbors to feel warranted in dismissing their armies, unless the best assurance is given that Germany and Austria accept federated peace in all good faith.

As the contending nations approach that state of exhaustion which presages an end of the war, the question of such a peace becomes increasingly important. Everything points to the conclusion that the time has arrived to debate this subject. If the hopes of August, 1914, that Armageddon would be succeeded by an era of permanent peace are to be realized, they will not come without the serious thought of men who are willing to dare something for their ideals. And if they come out of the present cataclysm it is time to be up and doing. The sentiment that exists in this country, and in other countries, must be organized and made effective at the critical moment. There is nothing more dispiriting to the student of history than to observe as he reads how many favorable moments for turning some happy corner in the progress of humanity were allowed to pass without effort to utilize them. It has been a hundred years since the world had another opportunity like this that faces us, and if it is not now tried out to the utmost possibility, there is little hope that the next century will be as bloodless as the past has been, even with the present conflict included.

Every general war in Europe since the days of the Roman Empire has brought humanity there to a state of exhaustion similar to that which now exists. So it was with the Thirty Years’ War, with the wars inaugurated by Louis XIV to establish the predominance of France, and with the Napoleonic wars a century ago. Each of these struggles, it will be observed, extended to a larger portion of Europe than its predecessor; and it was because the common interests of nations were progressively stronger; for it was ever becoming so that what concerned one state concerned others. In the present war the interrelations of nations is such that Japan and the United States have been brought into the conflict, along with China and several of the smaller American states. If the conflict recurs in the future it may be expected to involve a still wider area.

There is evidence that in each of these struggles the humane men then living were filled with the same longing for permanent peace that many men feel today.[2 - See below, pp. 46–62 (#Page_46).] The feeling was especially strong during the last stages of the Napoleonic wars and immediately after they ended. Singularly enough it was strongest in Russia, due, however to the accident that an enthusiastic and idealistic tsar was ruling in that country. He had received his ideals from a French tutor who was deeply imbued with the equality theories of the revolution that swept over his own country. The tsar accepted them with sincerity and spent several years of conscientious effort in his attempts to have them adopted. More singularly still, they found their only sincere indorsement, among the rulers who had the right to indorse or reject, with the king of Prussia, who at that time was a very religious man. Most peculiar of all they found very strong opposition in England, where practical statesmen were in power. As I read the history of that day and reflect on what has been the train of events from the battle of Waterloo to the invasion of Belgium in 1914, it is hard to keep from wishing that a better effort had been made in 1815 to carry out the suggestion which the tsar urged on his royal brothers in Europe.

The defeat of Napoleon was purchased at immense sacrifices. To the people of the day the most desirable thing in the world seemed to be a prevention of his reappearance to trouble mankind. They took the greatest care to keep his body a prisoner until he was dead; but they did not seriously try to lay his ghost. Probably they did not think, being practical men, that his spirit would walk again in the earth. They were mistaken; for not only has the ghost come back, but it has come with increased power and subtlety. In fact, it was an old ghost, and having once inhabited the bodies of Louis XIV, Augustus Cæsar, and Alexander of Macedon, as well as that of Napoleon I, it knew much more than the grave gentlemen who undertook to arrange the future of Europe in practical ways in 1815.

As we approach again the re-making of our relations after a world war, it is worth while to glance over the things that were done in 1815, to understand what choice of events was presented to the men of that day, and what results came from the course they deliberately decided to follow. Thus we may know whether or not the course proved a happy one, and whether or not it is the course that we, also, should follow. And if it is not such a course, we ought as thinking people to try to adopt a better.

We should always remember that the conditions of today are more suitable to a wise decision than the conditions of 1815. We have, for one thing, the advantage of the experience of the past hundred years. There is no doubt in our minds as to how the old plan has worked and how it may be expected to work if again followed. It led to the Concert of Europe and the Balance of Power, both of which served in certain emergencies, but failed in the hour of supreme need. Indeed, it is probable that they promoted the crash that at last arrived.

Another advantage is that we have today in the world a vastly greater amount of democracy than in 1815. The people who pay the bills of Mars today can say what shall be done about keeping Mars in chains; and that is something they could not do in 1815. It is for them to know all his capers, and his clever ways of getting out of prison, and to look under his shining armor to see the grizzly hairs that cover his capacious ribs; and having done this to decide what will be their attitude toward him.

It is not the business of an author to offer his views to his reader ready made. Enough if he offers the material facts out of which the reader may form his own opinions. That is my object in this book. I do not disguise my conviction that some of the fruits of the war that ended at Waterloo were lost through the inexperience of the men who set the world on its course again. Whether or not the men were as wise as they should have been is now a profitless inquiry. My only object is to set before the reader as clearly as I can the idea of a permanent peace through federated action, to show how that idea came up in connection with the war against Napoleon, how it was rejected for a concerted and balanced international system, what came of the decision in the century that followed, and finally in what way the failure of the old system is responsible for the present war. If the reader will follow me through these considerations, he will be prepared to examine in a judicial spirit the arguments for and against President Wilson’s suggested union of nations to end war.

As these introductory remarks are written, we seem to be girding up our loins again with the firm conviction that we cannot talk of peace until Germany knows she is beaten. The decision is eminently wise. But if it is worth while to fight two or ten years more to crush Germany’s confidence in her military policy, how much ought it not to be worth to make the nations realize that if they really wish to destroy war they can do it by taking two steps: first, end this struggle in a spirit of amity; and second, make an effective agreement to preserve that state of amity by preventing the occurrence of the things and feelings that disturb it. That is the task as well as the opportunity of wise men, who can govern themselves; and it is for their information that this volume is written which undertakes to point out “The Lost Fruits of Waterloo” and the conditions under which we may seek to recover them. It is not a book of propaganda, unless facts are propagandists. It is not a pacifist book, although its pages may make for peace, if God wills. It is only a plain statement of the lessons of history as they appear to one of the many thousands of puzzled persons now habitants of this globe who are trying to grope their ways out of this fog of folly.

CHAPTER II

EARLY ADVOCATES OF UNIVERSAL PEACE

Those who have tried to point the world to universal peace may be divided into two schools: one advocating a form of coöperation in which the final reliance is to be reason, the other looking forward to some effective form of common action behind which shall be sufficient force to carry out the measures necessary to enforce the common will. It is convenient to describe the former group as advocating a league of peace, since we are generally agreed that a league is a form of concert from which the constituent members may withdraw at will, and in which does not reside power to force them to do what they do not find reasonable. The second group wish to have a federation, if by that term we understand a united group in which exists power sufficient to preserve the common cause against any possible disobedient member. To form a league is easier than to form a federation. States are tenacious of sovereignty. The Swiss cantons, the Dutch provinces, and the original thirteen states of North America are the most striking illustrations of states that were willing to submit themselves to the more strenuous process of union. They acted under stress of great common peril, and their first steps in federation were short and timid; but none of them have regretted that the steps were taken. It was the good fortune of these groups of states that they were able to unite at the proper time and that their actions were not overclouded by the counsel of “practical statesmen” to whom ideals were things to be distrusted.

In other states in periods of great distress from war men lived who dreamed of coöperation to promote peace, but their voices were too weak for the times. The most notable early advocate of this scheme was the Duke of Sully, if we may accept the notion that he wrote the work known as the Grand Design of Henry IV. In that plan was contemplated a Christian Republic, composed of fifteen states in Europe, only three of which were to have a republican form of government. They were to give up warring among themselves and to refer to a common council, modeled on the Ionic League, all matters of interstate relation that were of importance to the “very Christian Republic.” The only war this republic was to wage was the common war to expel the Turks from Europe. It was after Henry’s death that Sully published the plan with the assertion that his former master had formed it just after the treaty of Vervins, 1598.

Whether it was the work of king or duke, no attempt was made to put it into force. In 1598 Europe was in the throes of a long and hopeless struggle for religion. Cities were destroyed, men and women were butchered, and the safety of states was threatened. The Grand Design represents the reaction of either Henry’s or Sully’s mind against such a terror. It was a thing to be desired, if it could have been attained. One of the marks of peace that it displayed was the attitude it took towards the branches of the Christian faith. Complete tolerance was to exist for the three forms, Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism. This was a kind of idealism that was then unattainable; but in the course of time it has been achieved. I should not like to say the day will not come when the other side of the scheme, interstate peace, will also cease to be too ideal for realization.

The next important suggestion of union for peace was made by William Penn in 1693 in an Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe. At that time the Continent was racked with war – a result of the ambition of Louis XIV to raise France to a dominating position among the other nations – , the Palatinate had been devastated, and the will of the “Grand Monarch” was the dreaded fact in international politics. Penn realized that great sacrifices were ahead; for it was as true then as now that when a strong state rises to a position in which it can threaten universal rule, there is nothing for the other states but to combine and fight as long as they can.

Penn’s proposal was that the sovereigns of Europe should form a Great Diet in which all their disputes should be adjusted. If any state refused to submit to the judgment of the diet and appealed to arms, all the other states were to fall upon it with their armies and make it rue the course it had taken. Quaker though he was, he would have war to prevent war. His proposal made no impression on his “practical” contemporaries; but he was prepared for that. Men of his faith were used to “bearing testimony” in the expectation that “the world” would scoff. Although it was not included in the original folio edition of his works this essay remains to this day the best known thing he wrote. It is one of the most logical arguments for peace that we have.

From 1701 to 1714 was waged the War of the Spanish Succession, the last of the series of struggles in which Louis XIV wore out his kingdom in trying to make it supreme over its neighbors. It left France exhausted and miserable, and it had not realized the king’s ambition. In 1713, the year in which Louis was forced to accept the Treaty of Utrecht in token of his defeat, was published by the Abbé Castel de St. Pierre a book called Projet de Traité pour rendre la Paix Perpetuelle. Like the utterances of Sully and Penn, it was wrung out of the mind of the author by the ruin that lay around him. It differed from them in nothing but in its more abundant details. The abbé had taken many things into account, and the union of nations that he proposed was to do six important things.

1. There was to be a perpetual alliance of European rulers with a diet composed of plenipotentiary agents in which disputed points were to be settled amicably. 2. What sovereigns were to be admitted to the alliance was to be determined by the act of alliance, which was also to fix the proportion in which each should contribute to the common fund. 3. The union was to guarantee the sovereignty of the constituent states with existing boundaries, and future disputes of this nature were to be referred to the arbitration of the council. 4. States offending against the laws of the diet were to be put under the ban of Europe. 5. A state under the ban was to be coërced by the other states until it accepted the laws it had violated. 6. The council was to make such laws, on instruction from the sovereigns, as were thought necessary to the objects for which the perpetual alliance was created.

Like the two preceding plans the abbé’s scheme was too strong to be rated as a league. It does not allow us to think that a state could withdraw at pleasure from the alliance; and it gave to the council the authority to lay taxes, make laws that were binding, and punish defiant members. It is noteworthy for the large amount of power it gave to the sovereigns, since the members of the council were their agents and acted only on instructions. Under the prevalent notions of the divine right of kings no other method of selecting the members of the council would have been considered in France, Spain, or Germany. On the other hand, the abbé’s scheme was less liberal in this respect than Penn’s, which provided that the wisest and justest men in each nation should be sent to the council. It was also a part of Penn’s plan that the council should be a really deliberative body, a parliament of Europe as truly as there was in England a parliament of the realm.

We have no evidence that the arguments of the good abbé made a profound impression upon any of the sovereigns upon whose favor the scheme depended. The Treaty of Utrecht was followed by a season of peace. So deeply wounded was Europe by conflict that it had no stomach for war during a generation. It was a time of great industrial prosperity in England, France, and Prussia. Walpole, the wise guardian of peaceful society, dominated the first of these nations, Fleury, also a man of peace, was for a large part of the time the guiding hand in the second, and Frederic William I directed the development of the third with a sure sense of economy and the efficient use of resources. At the same time Austria was under the direction of Charles VI, a peaceful monarch who had too many anxieties at home to think of wars against the Christian sovereigns around him. The small struggles that occurred were without significance; and it was not until 1740, when a new generation was on the scene, that Europe again had a period of general war, precipitated by an imaginative young king who could not resist the temptation to use the excellent tool with which his father had provided him. Out of the twenty years’ struggle that now followed, no new plan arose for a system of coöperation to secure peace, but one of the great philosophers of the time made a new statement of the Abbé St. Pierre’s plan, which served as a new proposition.

It was during the last years of the Seven Years’ War that Rousseau received the papers of the good abbé, with the expectation that he would prepare them for publication in a more popular form than the twenty-one volumes in which the author’s thoughts were buried. He eventually gave up the task, but he produced two short summaries, one of which was entitled Extrait du Projet de Paix perpetuelle de M. L’Abbé de Saint-Pierre. The “extract” proper was followed by a “judgment” in which Rousseau voiced his own views. He advocated the creation of a confederacy mutually dependent, no state to be permitted to resist all the other states united nor to form an alliance with any other state in rivalry with the confederacy. The scope of the central authority was defined, and there was to be a legislature to make laws in amplification of that authority, such laws to be administered by a federal court. No state was to withdraw from the union. Thus, Rousseau made his proposed confederacy rest on force. In his mind it was to be vitally efficient government, capable of doing all it was created to do.

All the plans I have mentioned contemplated the creation of a central authority strong enough to make itself obeyed. They implied, therefore, that each constituent state should relinquish a part of its sovereignty in order to form the federation. Now this was, as at the present time, a strong objection to the scheme. No one has met it better than William Penn, who said:

“I am come now to the last Objection, That Sovereign Princes and States will hereby become not Sovereign: a Thing they will never endure. But this also, under Correction, is a Mistake, for they remain as Sovereign at Home as ever they were. Neither their Power over their People, nor the usual Revenue they pay them, is diminished: It may be the War Establishment may be reduced, which will indeed of Course follow, or be better employed to the Advantage of the Publick. So that the Soveraignties are as they were, for none of them have now any Soveraignty over one another: And if this be called a lessening of their Power, it must be only because the great Fish can no longer eat up the little ones, and that each Soveraignty is equally defended from Injuries, and disabled from committing them.”

A quarter of a century later, in the beginning of the French Revolution, Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher, advocated the union of states in behalf of common peace, but he rested his argument on morality, not on force. There was to be a league of states, with a legislature and courts of justice, but the decisions were to be executed by the states themselves. He held that after the court gave a decision in a specified case and published the evidence and arguments, public opinion would be strong enough to enforce the judgment. By discarding force Bentham had the advantage of preserving the sovereignty of the states, a thing that is particularly esteemed by an Englishman. He is to be considered the first of a series of eminent peace advocates who look no further than a league of states bound together by their plighted word and relying on the weight of public opinion to coërce the individual states.

He had given his life to the task of fixing the sway of law in the minds of humanity, and it was a part of his general idea that a high court of justice, investigating a controversy, and exposing all the sides of it before a world of fair minded observers, would lessen the asperity of opposing passions so that the verdict of the court would be received as saving credit and honor to the party who had to yield. It is out of this attitude that our whole doctrine of arbitration as an expedient for escaping war has its rise, a doctrine of such importance in our general subject that no peace advocate would dare reject it wholly.

Bentham’s opinion was expressed in a stray pamphlet that made little impression in his time and has nearly escaped the notice of posterity. A more conspicuous achievement, and nearly contemporary, was an essay by Immanuel Kant, philosopher at Königsberg, in Prussia. In 1795 he published Zum ewigen Frieden, an outline for a league of perpetual peace. There was a time, he argued, when men lived by force under the laws of nature, each regulating his own conduct toward his neighbors, the strongest man having his way through his ability to overawe his associates. Then came the state and the rule of law, and with their arrival one saw the exit of personal combat. Kant applied the same argument to the intercourse of the nations, saying they were in a state of nature toward one another. He proposed to organize a super-state over them, with authority to bring them under a law prohibiting wars among themselves. He would assign a definite field of action to the new power, with the function of making laws in enforcing that authority, and it would have the necessary administrative and judicial officers. The law made by the united government was to be as good law for its own purposes as the law made by the individual states for their purposes.

Kant’s suggestion was closely kin to Rousseau’s ideas of the state, but he wrote at a time when the world, stampeded by the excesses of the Jacobins, was turning away from all the political theories that underlay the French Revolution. It had no use for the idea that government was the outcome of a social contract; and if this idea was not accepted for the state itself, how much less would it be accepted as a means of organizing the international state! The world suffered too much at the hands of Napoleon to like ideas that were responsible for the very beginning of the letting out of the waters. And this was especially true in Prussia, where the foot of the French conqueror was extremely heavy.

At the moment when Kant’s ideas were at the height of unpopularity came the young philosopher, Hegel, who announced a philosophical view of war that pleased the governing class of Prussia, bent on establishing a system of military training that would be sufficient for a redeemed country. He taught that war through action burns away moral excrescences, purifies the health of society, and stimulates the growth of manly virtue. This idea became the basis of much German reasoning, and it is not improbable that its defenders in trying to discern the virtues they argued for, were led to develop them. But in their enthusiasm they came to exaggerate these virtues into habits that were often mere manifestations of an exalted egoism. As to the claim that war burns up the effete products of society, it may be met by the undeniable assertion that it also burns much that is best. One does not burn a city to destroy the vermin that are in it.

The next attempt to bring about a system of coöperation to secure peace among the nations was the formation of the Holy Alliance, a futile attempt to apply principles like those just described, made by Alexander I, of Russia, at the close of the Napoleonic wars. It is considered at length in the chapter following this, where it finds its proper setting. The extremely religious spirit in which it was conceived was a drawback to success, but it is not likely that it would have fared better than it did fare, even if stripped of all its pious fantasy, since the world was not educated to its acceptance as a purely political idea.

At this stage one must notice the development of peace societies. Organized at first as local bodies they were drawn together into national organizations in the early decades of the nineteenth century. It was in 1816 that such a society was created in Great Britain, and in 1828 that the American Peace Society was formed out of local societies in the United States. In the same year was established at Geneva the first peace society on the Continent, the second being organized at Paris in 1841. The influence of such societies was weak for a long time; but within the past twenty years it has been much stronger.

One of the most striking examples of the prevalence of the peace idea in recent times is the growing use of arbitration as a means of settling international disputes. Another is the meeting of the Hague conferences to promote peace. The first was called by the tsar, Nicholas II, in 1899 and laid a broad outline of the work that such conferences ought to do. A second assembled in the year 1907, and a third was about to convene when the Great War began in 1914. The conferences devoted their strongest efforts to the reduction of armaments and the checking of militarism; but in each case they found the German Empire planted boldly across their path, and in this respect their efforts were futile. It is not to be doubted that the attitude of Germany contributed much to develop the widespread suspicion of that country which has been one of her handicaps in the present war.

The “peace movement,” as the totality of these activities is called, has thus gained strength, and it would seem that it must eventually prevail in public opinion. It received an important momentum in 1910, when Mr. Andrew Carnegie gave $10,000,000 to establish the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an organization which has contributed powerfully to the promotion of peace ideas. It acts on scientific principles, seeking to gather and publish such facts bearing on international relations, the laws of economics and history, and the science of international law, as will show in what respect war is to be removed from its hold on society.

The careless enthusiasm with which a great many people hailed the outbreak of war in 1914 swept the peace advocates into the background and was the occasion of some sarcasm at their expense. But as the struggle grew in grimness and horrors the advocates of peace on principle returned to their old position in public esteem, and have steadily gained on it. It seems undeniable that the war has done more to convince the world of the madness of war than many decades of agitation could do.

One of the manifestations of the rebound here mentioned was the organization in June, 1915, of “The League to Enforce Peace.” This society was created in a meeting of representative men assembled in Carpenters’ Hall, Philadelphia, the place in which the Declaration of Independence was adopted. Its principles are embraced in the following proposals: 1. A judicial tribunal to which will be referred judiciable disputes between the signatory powers, subject to existing treaties, the tribunals to have power to pass on the merits of the disputes submitted as well as on its jurisdiction over them. 2. The reference of other disputes between the signatory states to a council of conciliation, which will hear the cases submitted and recommend settlements in accordance with its ideas of justice. 3. If any signatory state threatens war before its case is submitted to the judicial tribunal or the council of conciliation, the other states will jointly employ diplomatic pressure to prevent war; and if hostilities actually begin under such circumstances they will jointly use their military forces against the power in contempt of the league. 4. The signatory states will from time to time hold conferences to formulate rules of international law which are to be executed by the tribunal of arbitration unless within a stated time some state vetoes the proposal.

The system of coöperation embodied in these proposals is not a federation, within the meaning that I have given to that term. It is what it pretends to be, merely a league. It seems to concede the right of a state to secede from the league at will. As to what would happen under it if a signatory state refusing to abide the decision of the tribunal or council of conciliation should attempt to withdraw and make war at once, we can have little doubt. In such a case the attempt to secede would probably be considered defiance and steps be taken to reduce the state to submission. Nevertheless it might happen that a state within the league, finding its action restricted so that it could not adopt some policy which it considered essential to its welfare, might proceed to withdraw in view of a line of conduct it intended to take at a later time. In that case it is difficult to see how the league could resist unless it was willing to take the position that it had a kind of sovereignty over all interstate relations, a position that involves more concentration than the form of the league seems to imply.

At this point in our inquiry into the subject of coöperation to secure universal peace an inviting field of speculation opens before us, but we must turn aside for the time, in order to consider various phases of the process by which the world has arrived at the crisis now before it. This chapter will serve its purpose if it gives the reader a view of the earliest suggestions of systems of common action and if it makes clear the differences between the two general plans that have been formulated, the league and the federation.

CHAPTER III

PROBLEMS OF THE NAPOLEONIC WARS

The career of Napoleon, which has long commanded the greatest interest, not to say enthusiasm, of students of history, aroused grave fears in the minds of most of the thoughtful men of his day who did not live in France. His design to conquer all his neighbors was most evident, and his apparent ability to carry it into execution caused him to be regarded as the embodiment of greed and insatiable ambition. Not since the days of Louis XIV had Europe felt such thrills of danger and horror. All its energy was called into play to withstand his attacks. Wars followed wars in a series of campaigns that ended after many years of extreme anxiety in his ruin, only when France had been worn out by his repeated victories. When he began his wars he was at the head of the best prepared nation in the world. He struck with sudden and vigorous blows against nations that were not united, defeating one after the other with startling effect. Their lack of preparation was most marked and was probably the most effective cause of his initial success. After years of conflict they learned how to oppose him. From his own example they learned the value of organization and method in fighting, and from their own disasters they at last acquired the sense of union that was necessary to give him the final blow that made him no longer a menace to their national integrity. It was not until 1815 that he was finally defeated and reduced to the state of ineffective personal power from which he had risen.

From the beginning of the struggle he was to his opponents the incarnation of all that was hateful in government. Few of the epithets now hurled at the kaiser were not as lavishly cast at Napoleon. He was tyrant, robber, brute, and murderer in turn, and it was pronounced a service to humanity to suppress him. In the beginning of the wars his pretensions were treated with disdain, but as his victories followed one another in bewildering rapidity, his power was treated with more respect, although there was no greater disposition to contemplate his triumph with complacency. As the struggle became fiercer, the other states than France began to think of some permanent form of coöperation for restraining him; and they even began to speculate on the possibility of some permanent arrangement by which the world might be saved from a recurrence of such a vast waste of life and treasure as was involved in the struggle. It was thus that suggestions were made during the Napoleonic era for abolishing war through international effort. For us, who are today burdened with the ruin of a similar but more stupendous struggle, these efforts have a special interest, and the space of a single chapter is none too much to give to their consideration.

It is singular that these plans should have found their most conspicuous supporters in the heads of the two governments most widely apart with reference to the popular character of their institutions. It was in autocratic Russia that one found the most advanced idea of dealing with the future, and in Great Britain, the most liberal of the great powers, that the most conservative design was held. Each plan was supported by the head of these two governments respectively, each ran through its own development while the armies were locked in deadly struggle, and each was debated with seriousness in the moment of victory when the statesmen of the winning powers met to arrange for the future relations of the states whose victories made them the arbiters of Europe.

The initiative was taken by Alexander I, of Russia. He was a man of the best intentions, and throughout the period with which we are now dealing he showed himself persistently favorable to views which, to say the least, were a hundred years ahead of his time. By temperament he was imaginative and sympathetic. In his personal life were irregularities, but not as many as in Napoleon’s, Louis XIV’s, or Talleyrand’s. He lacked the royal vice of despotism, and his escape from it was probably due to the influence of Fréderic César de La Harpe, an instructor of his youth, who arrived in Russia with his head full of the dynamic ideas of the French philosophers of the pre-revolutionary period.

While “liberty, equality, and fraternity” maddened France, long oppressed by the dull repression of the ancient régime, La Harpe was converting his royal pupil to the doctrine of the “Rights of Man.” So well was the lesson taught that a long series of encounters with the solid wall of Russian autocracy was necessary before the pupil ceased to try to do something to ameliorate the condition of his people. Historians have called Alexander a dreamer, but what is a man to do who is born a tsar and has the misfortune to believe in the doctrines for which we honor Lincoln and Jefferson? I am willing to call him impractical, but I cannot withhold sympathy from a man who tried, as he, to strike blows in behalf of the forms of government which makes my own country a home of liberty.

Alexander I came to the throne of Russia in 1801, anxious to carry out his liberal plans.[3 - For an excellent treatment of the events discussed in this chapter see W. A. Phillips, The Confederation of Europe, London, 1914.] In 1804, through his minister in London, he suggested to Pitt, the prime minister, a plan for settling the affairs of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon. France, he said, must be made to realize that the allies did not war against her people but against Napoleon, from whose false power they proposed to set her free. Once liberated she was to be allowed to choose any government she desired. From La Harpe he had imbibed a deep repugnance to the government of the Bourbons, and in all his future discussions of the subject he showed no enthusiasm for restoring that line to their throne.

One of the charges often made by the allies was that Napoleon overthrew international law. It was a part of Alexander’s plan to reëstablish its potency and to have the nations see to it that no future violations of it could occur. He also suggested that the firm agreement then existing between Russia and Great Britain should continue after the establishment of peace and that other great powers should be brought into it so that there should be a means of securing common action in affairs of mutual significance. At this time he had not, it seems, fully determined just what form of coöperation ought to be adopted, but in the suggestion of 1804 can be found the germ of all his later designs for permanent peace.

At that moment Pitt was looking for the renewal of the European war and he expected the formation of the great coalition of 1805, in which Russia, Great Britain, Austria, and Sweden undertook to defeat France. He did not dare, therefore, reject the tsar’s proposals outright. He gave approval to the suggestion in regard to the restoration of international law, but he qualified his sanction of the scheme for a future league of nations. Napoleon crushed, he said, it would be for the states to guarantee such an adjustment of European affairs as they should agree upon in solemn treaty. Looking into these two statements it is seen that the tsar had in mind the formation of some kind of league of nations, with well defined powers and duties, while Pitt looked forward to that kind of international coöperation which was later described by the term “Concert of Europe.” In the subsequent dealing of Alexander with the British leaders over this matter there was always this difference between them.

In 1807 Napoleon won the battle of Friedland over Russia and occupied a large part of the tsar’s domain. Then came the Treaty of Tilsit in which Alexander and Napoleon standing face to face came to an unexpected agreement to divide the accessible part of the world between them, Alexander ruling one half and Napoleon ruling the other. It is certain, however, that the tsar had in his mind that both he and his new ally would rule their respective halves in the spirit of La Harpe’s teaching. Napoleon baited his trap with no less attractive a morsel than self-government under a wise monarch in order to catch Alexander I.