Literature Against War

IT is difficult to imagine a more patriotic service than the wide dissemination of the epoch-making arguments for disarmament and for the closer organization of the civilized world. This is what has been undertaken by means of a series of books published at nominal prices for the International Union, under the editorship of Edwin D. Mead. The first issue in the series is a translation of the sixth and concluding volume of Jean de Bloch’s exhaustive treatise on The Future of War.¹ This work, published originally in Russian, in six volumes, has thus far been known to the general public through this final volume alone, which is really an abridgment and summary of the entire treatise. No book written to advance the cause of peace has ever had placed to its credit such tangible, practical results. Its irrefutable array of statistics has influenced a class of minds hitherto quite impervious to the humanitarian plea for universal disarmament. It is primarily the moral, rather than the economic argument against war, that is emphasized in Charles Sumner’s three addresses: ² The True Grandeur of Nations (1845), the less famous but perhaps even more cogent War System of the Commonwealth of Nations (1849), and The Duel between France and Germany (1870). But however the emphasis upon different aspects of the great argument be shifted from decade to decade, no one can trace the record of the discussion for half a century — as he may easily do in the volumes now before us — without realizing how completely the development of civilization has justified Sumner’s main contention. Even since the Czar’s perusal of Bloch’s book led to the formation of the Hague Tribunal, history has been making itself rapidly. The jingo spirit that cries for costlier national armaments must needs shout more angrily than before, for the facts and laws of the world’s growth are ranged upon the side of international good-will. For a long time yet, no doubt, there will be politicians ready to sneer at the notion that mere books should influence national policy. Yet treatises like those of Sumner and Channing and Jean de Bloch have already demonstrated that they have not only morals but mathematics on their side, and they have forced the presentday champions of increased armaments into the uncomfortable rôle of apologists for an antiquated system.

B. P.