The High Road and the Low Road to Peace

Abstract

O N THE first page of his great treatise Hugo Grotius remarks, as though it were an obvious fact, that "war is waged for the sake of peace." And we, with equal complacency, call the end of war a treaty of peace. Such habits of speech and thought are a tribute to the reasonableness of human aims but they raise the larger question of fact. Do wars lead to peace? Are our treaties the bases of peace, or are they but symbols of armistices? There are those who argue a priori that strife cannot breed peace. There are others who argue on the basis of what they call human nature that man does not fight for peace. There are still others who argue from current experience that whether war can lead to peace, it is not doing so now. All these arguments are more convincing to their preachers than to the bewildered hearers of many voices. The chief ground for this bewilderment of the common man is that, in a world where so many different theories may be right, it is useless to choose any. An appeal to facts is indecisive, for in this case it involves an appeal to the future, which is notoriously full of hopes and fears and which never comes. We are never sure that today ought to be the day of judgment, for tomorrow, we think, may possibly prove beyond doubt what today is hopelessly debatable. Thus we stumble from day to day, from generation to generation, from empire to empire, still hoping to learn from experience what we cannot prove from knowledge. For this blindness in human affairs I can propose no remedy. I do not know whether we are making peace or enduring an armistice. And I doubt even if time will tell, for history throws less light on such general questions than we think it does. History can teach anything and is continually being re-written for that very purpose. I conclude, therefore, that as a general proposition the question whether or not war is waged for the sake of peace is unanswerable. What particular persons gain or lose from particular wars, whether or not these persons anticipated the results, and whether they are satisfied or discontented with the outcome