Rousseau on War

INTRODUCTION

The two Essays here translated give Rousseau's views upon such subjects as the horrors of war, the means by which they may be reduced within measurable limits, the grounds on which (and on which alone) war may be justly undertaken, the possibility of abolishing it for all time, and a Federation of Europe as the only practicable, or indeed conceivable, means of loing so. All these are burning questions at the present day. And behind them all lies another question, not less burning at this moment: the rights of the small States, which Rousseau, as citizen of Geneva, regarded with passionate interest, and in preserving and multiplying which, as he held, lay the best hope for the future of Europe.

Mazzini excepted, no writer has thought so deeply over the problems, whether of home or foreign policy, which lie at the root of the public life of Europe; none has deeper or more fruitful suggestions to offer for their solution. At a time when the future of Europe for the next fifty years, and possibly for far longer, hangs upon the balance, no counsel of wisdom can safely be left unheeded; and we may well do' worse than turn back to the great thinker whose mind was for ever burdened with a sense of the misery which man has brought on man and for ever brooding over the possibility of lightening it.

Both Essays belong to the earlier period of his literary life: that on A Lasting Peace to 1756; The State of War probably to a few years earlier. The former, or rather the first (par of it (the Abstract), was published in 1761, about a year before the Social Contract; the latter, the manuscript of which is to be found among the great body of his papers in the Library of Neuchatel, was first published by M. Dreyfus-Brisac in 1896.1

The Essay on A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe falls into two parts. The first of these professes to be no more than an abstract of the long work on the same subject written by the Abbe de Saint Pierre about half a century earlier, and published in the year of the Peace of Utrecht. In reality, Rousseau has treated his original with the utmost freedom. The long introduction (pp. 39–49), in itself a brilliant historical essay, is all his own; in the list of the States admissible to a separate vote in the Federation, and even in the Articles of its constitution, he has made considerable changes. And throughout he has translated the wearisome details and ‘endless repetitions’ of Saint Pierre into broad principles of political prudence. There is, in fact, much more of Rousseau than of Saint Pierre in the whole performance. The second part, first published in the posthumous Edition of Rousseau's Works (Geneva, 1782), is avowedly an independent essay: a criticism of the scheme over which Saint Pierre had laboured through a great part of his valuable life.

The criticism turns solely upon the question whether the scheme is ever likely to be adopted. And on this point, Rousseau, whose judgment on matters of practical politics always leans to the side of caution, is under no illusions. The I scheme for a Federation of Europe, he says, is undeniably beneficent. In itself, it is perfectly practicable. It makes not only for the; Iwelfare of Europe, but also for the interest of! Wery State, large or small, contained in the European Commonwealth. Yet, for all that, it will never be adopted. The short-sighted selfishness of the kings and ministers who control the destinies of Europe may be trusted to see that it is not.

This leads naturally to that bitter attack upon kings and monarchy with which so much of the essay is taken up and which was but too well justified by the history of Europe during the two previous centuries. It was to receive a fresh justification from the Seven Years' War which began within a few months after it was written; and how many more during the time that has passed between that, day and ours? If Rousseau could come to life again at the present moment, he would recognise in at least one ruler, as he recognised (perhaps too easily) in Henry IV of France, a courage and constancy worthy of Sparta at her highest. But he would bate no jot of his scorn and loathing for the glaring injustice, the shameless cruelty, the unspeakable folly, which absolute power has once more been proved to breed in those who wield it.

In our own day, however, it has become apparent that nations may, under conceivable circumstances, be infected with the madness which was once thought to be the monopoly of monarchs. The poison of war is seen to have penetrated still more deeply than in Rousseau's time could have readily been thought possible. And, with this, it is manifest that the hope of finally abolishing war is indefinitely diminished. By a flash of insight, Rousseau himself, in later years, caught a glimpse of this possibility. When reminded that, with all his eloquence, he would never induce monarchs to adopt the scheme of a lasting peace, ‘Not I,’ was his answer; ‘but they will find themselves forced to it one day. Their subjects will perhaps at last get tired of shedding their blood for their diversion.’ ‘But, when the monarchs cease to fight, will not the nations still continue?’ ‘Much less so, I hope; for nations will fight only for their real interests, and for large ones, while kings do so from mere pride; because they are surrounded by men who love war, and because they always abuse the power entrusted to them.’1

The argument which lies at the root of the whole treatise may be stated very briefly. The first step, the misery and waste of war, will be disputed by none. Under present conditions—even' apart from the wanton barbarities practised by Germany—they are a hundred times greater than they have ever been before. And the waste of war, as Rousseau insists, is to be measured not only ‘by those who are killed, but by those who are not born’; as well as by the economic loss, the devastation of agriculture and industry, which is recognised, at least ‘from the lips outwards, by all.

The second step is perhaps less certain of acceptance. It is that, under existing circumstances, the perpetual recurrence of war is a thing natural and inevitable, and will continue to be so, so long as each State retains its. absolute independence of the others; so long, in Rousseau's language, as’ all of them remain to each other in the ‘state of nature.’ In forming themselves into the separate groups, known as States, men have, in fact, ‘done either too much or too little. They have put an end to private wars, only to kindle national wars a thousand times more terrible. They have given their love to their fellow-citizens, only to declare themselves the enemies of the whole race.’.

And, if this be granted, the third and last step follows of itself. The only possible way of removing the evil is to complete the work we have begun; to extend to international relations the bond we have already woven between individuals; to establish a Federation of peoples with power to impose a peaceful settlement of national disputes such as each of them already possesses for the settlement of private disputes among its members. So only shall we strike at the root of the evil. So only shall we abolish war, by blocking it at the source.

Thus by a reasoned and speculative argument Rousseau arrives at the conclusion which Saint Pierre had reached by experience and intuition. And the force of that argument depends not so much on any specific beliefs as to the ‘state of nature,’ in which Rousseau and the men of his time may easily have been mistaken, as upon the undoubted fact that nations do not recognise the obligations of mutual forbearance, of mutual respect and kindness, which are universally admitted, at least in theory, by individuals; that each nation lives habitually in a state of potential—too often of actual, if veiled—war against the others; and that, when once the sword is unsheathed, they necessarily throw off some of the primary duties of humanity towards each other and are only too likely, as the example of Germany shows, to throw off all of them together.

The remedy for this state of things, according to Rousseau's argument, is Federation. It is to establish a representative Court, or Parliament, which shall arbitrate in all disputes between the federated Powers and whose decisions shall, if necessary, be enforced by a federal army upon any Power which offers resistance to its will.

The sting of this, provision lies, beyond question, in its tail. If we could really be certain that a federal army, drawn as it is of necessity from the subjects of the federated Powers, would consent, from pure love of justice and humanity, to enforce the mandate of the federal Parliament; if the subjects of Britain, Germany, or Russia could really be trusted, in case of need, to draw the sword against their own countrymen and compel them to submit to the will of Europe; if they could even be trusted to stand aside while the subjects of the other Powers carried out the necessary work: then the argument of Rousseau would be unanswerable, and the problem, which for the last two centuries has baffled the best and wisest heads of Europe, would be satisfactorily solved. But what chance is there that this condition will be fulfilled? Frankly, it must sorrowfully be admitted, no chance whatever. Even less, if it be possible, in our day than in Rousseau's.

So far, the question has been argued purely on grounds of humanity and justice. Rousseau, however, was far too prudent to trust solely to these motives. He reinforces them at every point with an appeal to expediency and self-interest. It is, he urges, not merely the duty, but the manifest interest, of all to resist the aggression of one, or the conspiracy of two or three, against the liberties of the rest. And that interest is likely to become apparent to every Sovereign, directly the establishment of a Federal Court to decide where justice lies in every dispute, and of a federal army to enforce it, shall have cut off for ever all hope of lawless aggrandisement on his own part and all fear of lawless spoliation at the hands of others. How many wars, he asks, which seem to be purely aggressive are really protective in their ultimate origin and motive? How many Sovereigns who plunge Europe into bloodshed are really moved not so much by desire of gaining fresh territory as by the fear that, unless they weaken some powerful neighbour now, when they can catch him off Jhis guard, he will wait some convenient opening to fall upon them and rob them in the future? And if this is true of the principals who launch the war in the first instance, how much more is it true of those who join the struggle on either side, as seconds? Would they ever bestir themselves at all, unless they had reason to dread that the conqueror, directly he has disposed of his first enemy, will throw himself in the flush of victory upon another? or even, as Napoleon did in the case of Austria and Venice, that he will make amends to his vanquished enemy by presenting him with the land of a helpless neutral? Would not all these iniquities be averted, if every Power knew itself to be secure against the aggression of the others? Once guarantee them against all fear of illicit loss, and will there be any more thought of-illicit gain?

Once more, everything depends upon the security—or rather, upon a foolish king's, or a benighted nation's estimate of the security—provided by the Federation. And once more, the security—in a far greater degree, the security as interpreted by a neurotic monarch or his credulous subjects—is insufficient.

Again, so far it has been assumed that all Powers are acting, and may always be counted upon to act, in good faith. Allowance has been made for errors of judgment; for the far worse errors of malice and cunning no allowance has yet been made whatever. With the example of Frederick II and Napoleon, with the example of Francis Joseph and William II before us, is this a lair assumption? Is it one which will hold water for a moment? To this question there can be but one answer. And with that answer, once more the whole fabric falls in pieces.

This, indeed, is the conclusion of Rousseau himself. The real interest of all nations, he argues, will always be for peace, and for Federation as the sole means of securing peace. But their apparent interest will always lie the other way. As he says elsewhere, in a slightly different connection: ‘Men are led very seldom by their reason, and very often by their passions. It is easy to prove that the true interest of the despot is to obey the Law; that has been admitted for ages. But who is there that is guided by his true interest? Only the sage, if he exists. It follows that you assume your despots to be so many sages. My friends! you must allow me to tell you that you give too much weight to your calculations, and too little to the heart of man and the play of passion. Your system is excellent for Utopia; for the children of Adam it is worth nothing.’1

And if Rousseau felt constrained to admit this of the Europe of his own day, would he find any ground for a better hope in the changed circumstances of ours? There are two reasons which forbid us to think so. The balance of power within Europe has shifted, and shifted unmistakably for the worse. And a new source of perpetual disturbance has been added from without.

In the eighteenth century, Europe was a mosaic of independent, or semi-indegpendent, States. And their very multiplicity was, in no inconsiderable measure, a preservation against war. Since that time—and the process had begun before Rousseau's death—the whole face of things is changed. Poland has been swept from the map. Italy, then a medley of small and mostly unwarlike communities, has been united under one monarchy, not slow to draw the sword. The Ecclesiastical States, by habit averse from war, have been swallowed by one or other of the great military Powers. The Balkan communities, then drugged by the opiate rule of Turkey, have since wakened to a life which has been little else but a chain of deadly feuds: feuds capable, as we know to our cost, of plunging all Europe into war.

Many of these changes have assuredly been for the good: above all, the creation of that national spirit which, rightly directed, is as the breath of life not only to the communities concerned, but also to Europe as a whole. And we are not to lose faith in the principle of nationality, because it has been perverted to ends alien, and indeed contrary, to those which it legitimately seeks. It is not to be denied, however, that the general effect of such changes has been to concentrate power in the hands of some half-dozen Governments, half of them autocracies; to increase beyond measure the responsibilities which rest upon the shoulders of each; and, as an inevitable consequence, both to multiply the chances of collision between them and to aggravate the evils which result when the collision ends in war. No wars have ever been so murderous as those of the last century, from Napoleon's day to ours; none has ever been so desolating as that which has raged now for nearly three years from one end of Europe to the other.

It is with the causes, however, rather than the results of war that we are now concerned. And here it is but too evident that, by reducing the number of Powers, we have only increased the chance that they will fly at each other's throats. We have sharpened the rivalry between them. We have planed the way for any ill-conditioned Power among: hem to grasp at supremacy over the rest. This was so with Napoleon. It is so with the ring of unscrupulous gamblers who have led Germany to her doom. The enormous resources placed at the disposal of such a Power by the devilries of modern invention and by the machine of universal service have only gone to intensify this result.

Among the chief guarantees to which Rousseau trusted for preserving the perpetual 1 peace of Europe was the existence of a central 1 Power which, ‘being itself without either the will or the means to conquer others, is for that reason the chief obstacle to any design of general conquest on the part of others’: and that Power, the Germanic Body, ‘the bulwark not only of its own liberties but, in many ways, of the public Right of. Europe.’ What would he have said, if he had lived to see this bulwark of peace converted into a Islanding gage of battle? the sheep, after long training under the Hohenzollern shepherd, appearing in the new-born character of the wolf? Yet this is precisely the transformation which has taken place during the last fifty years. And, though at the time it passed unnoticed, the first beginnings of the process must be traced back to Rousseau's own day: to Frederick II and the exploits with which his model career began and ended, the seizure of Silesia and the first partition of Poland.

This in itself is enough to change the whole face of the problem and, as Rousseau himself would have admitted, to remove the keystone of his argument as to the impossibility of two or more Powers uniting for the destruction of the rest. Is it not manifest that, at any moment within the last thirty years, it has been open to Germany, seconded by her obedient servant, Austria, to declare war on Europe with a not unreasonable chance of success? Is it not equally manifest that, if she had had the wisdom—using the term in trie narrower and more serpentine sense—to pursue the policy of Bismarck and hold Russia in leading-strings, that chance would have been strengthened beyond all power of calculation? It may, of course, be true—and Rousseau himself has, in principle, anticipated the argument—that the material interests of Russia and Germany clashed too decisively for such an alliance between them ever to endure. But, in the uncertainty of all things human and with the likelihood that the skill of Bismarck, if so it had suited his purpose, would have been equal to the occasion, where is the statesman who, knowing what we now know of Germany, could have allowed his policy to be finally shaped by such an argument? Where is the man who could base his hopes for a lasting peace upon calculations so uncertain?

And if the internal balance of Europe has been altered for the worse since Rousseau wrote, what are we to say of the disturbing currents which have flowed in from without? All these may be summed up in one phrase, colonial expansion: a fruitful source of national jealousies since the discovery of the mariner's compass, but never so fruitful of these miseries as in the fifty years which preceded the present war. How large a share they may have had in kindling that war, will not be known precisely for many years to come. The secret is safely locked up in the Colonial Office and Chancellery of Berlin. But we know enough already to be sure that, at the least, they fanned the flames. We know, moreover, how poisonous their influence has been on the relations between the Powers of Europe ever since the words Colony, or Plantation, came to bear their present meaning. It is hard enough for nations to keep the peace when their own frontiers only are concerned. It is infinitely harder when each is grabbing at territory to which none of them, in strict right, has the smallest claim, five thousand miles away. The very distance, the very absence of assured right, only serve to inflame desires to which there is absolutely no limit. And every footfall in the marshes of Africa, or by the rivers of China and Mesopotamia, awakes a resounding echo in all the Cabinets of Europe. Britain, whose share of the world's surface is immeasurably larger than that of any other Power, must bear her full share of the blame. But, however the guilt is to be divided, there can be no doubt as to the existence of these. rivalries; and no doubt that few things, if any, have been more fatal to the peace of Europe.

The danger, it may well be, was less acute in Rousseau's day than it is in ours. But even then, as the Seven Years' War shows, it was acute enough. And it is perhaps the weakest spot in Rousseau's argument that he makes no reference to it whatever.

The conclusion of the whole matter is that, if it, was hard to establish a Federation or to secure a lasting peace for Europe in the eighteenth century, it is infinitely harder now. The elimination of small States, the heightened rivalry of the large States and the enormous concentration of military resources in the hands of their Governments have raised new obstacles to the attainment of these ends, within the bounds of Europe. The multiplication of colonial disputes, the shameless competition for the territories of the so-called ‘inferior races,’ have introduced what may not unjustly be reckoned a fresh element of discord from without. The apparent interests, the certain passions, of the Powers are more stiffly set against the realisation, of Rousseau's ideal than they were when he proclaimed it. And no man would have been so ready—although, in another sense, no man would have been so reluctant—to acknowledge this as Rousseau.

And yet, if the ideal is more impracticable now than it was then, it, or some approach to it, is a thousand times more necessary. If the apparent interests of the Powers are more than ever against it, their real interest is more plainly than ever in its favour. Never have the waste and brutality of war shown themselves in more hateful colours than during the last two years. Never have so many millions of men suffered, directly and palpably, from its ravages. For the first time in the history of modern Europe it has been, in the strict and literal sense, a war of nation against nation. Even the Thirty Years' War, with all the nameless brutalities of the Imperial armies and the Imperial Government in Bohemia, presents a different, and in some ways a less terrible, picture than this. And, whereas the conditions which marked the Thirty Years' War, the last and most odious of the religious wars, are little likely to return, the horrors of the present war are almost certain to repeat themselves in any conflict which may afflict Europe in the future. The only way to avoid them is to block the approaches to those wars from which they will inevitably spring.

The one sure and certain road to this end/as Rousseau said, is a Federation of all Europe. But, unless it is to be worse than useless, such a Federation must be founded on a solid base both of force and of good faith. There must be sufficient force to put down any rebellion that may be attempted; and there must be sufficient loyalty to make sure that it will be applied. Now, under present circumstances, the latter condition is just what can never be fulfilled. The flagrant violations of right and humanity, of good faith and common honesty, which have marked the conduct of Germany from the first day of the war, make it impossible to put any trust in her for the future. And, in the bitterness of defeat, she is not likely soon to recover the virtues which she has shamelessly renounced.

But a partial Federation—a Federation with France and Britain, with Russia and Italy (and, as we are now entitled to add/the United States of America) for a nucleus—lies ready to our hand.1 And it may well be asked Whether such a Federation, however partial, may not be strong enough to serve the purpose in view. In answering this question, it is manifest that everything, depends upon the nature of the peace with which the war is concluded. Above all, it is necessary that no pains should be spared to remove the seeds of future conflicts. That principle, upon which Rousseau insists as the first condition of a general Federation, loses none of its importance when the Federation in view is, of necessity, no more than partial.

Now, apart from. Germany, it is clear that for the last hundred years the chief disturber of the peace of Europe has been Austria. She has had more opportunities for wrong-doing than Germany; and she has made use of them to the uttermost. The very existence of her disjointed Empire, based as it is upon the oppression of the subject races who, in fact, form the majority of her population,-is the very negation of all right and therefore an unfailing source of unrest, a fruitful seed-plot of strife and of injustice more hateful even than strife itself. And, from all the facts which have leaked through the ominous silence of a locked Parliament and a gagged Press, it is abundantly clear that Austria at any rate (in the narrower sense) is maintaining to the full the traditions of savagery established by the three generations of tyranny which have passed since the Congress of Vienna; and it is more than probable that, so far as Slavonia and Croatia are concerned, Hungary is following in her steps.1

The plain truth is that, from Bohemia eastwards to Galicia and from Galicia westwards to the furthest Slav outpost in Styria and Carinthia, there is no hope for justice, and therefore no hope for peace, until the last link which binds those provinces to Vienna and Budapest has been struck asunder, until the last official of the ‘Imperial and royal Government’ has been driven ‘bag and baggage’ out of the lands which a long experience has proved it to be wholly incapable of ruling. And when we think further of all the misery which Austrian intrigue, ever since the beginning of the Drang nach Osten, has brought into the Balkans, we are forced more irresistibly than ever to the same conclusion: there can be no peace for Europe until the Austrian Empire—the rule of the German and Magyar over Slav races (whether Pole, Czech, Croat or Slavonian)—has been utterly blotted out. Delenda est Austria: unless that be one of the chief conditions of the coming peace, the war will have been waged in vain.1 This is demanded by justice; it is a direct consequence of the principle, the freedom of the smaller communities, in the name of which the sword was unsheathed by the Allies. It is demanded also on the plainest grounds of expediency, as the one pledge which it is in our power to take for the future peace of Europe. For all purposes of aggression, Austria and Germany are one Power. Break up the Austrian Empire, and we have struck off the left arm of Germany. At one sitroke we have released three or four millions from enforced service in the armies of the Central Powers; in the hateful event of any future conflict, we have probably enlisted them on the side of the Allies. There, and not in any insensate scheme for the dismemberment of the German Empire or for the annexation of any distinctively German territory, a design as unjust as it is impossible of execution, lies the sole hope for the overthrow of Prussian militarism, the sole chance of making Germany once more, what she has not been for the last fifty years, a helpful member of the commonwealth of Europe.

These are sweeping changes. But they are changes demanded in the interest of peace; in the interest of freedom; in the interest of the oppressed races, whose cause counted for little or nothing with the men of Rousseau's day, and whose claims were but as a faint cry in the ear of Rousseau himself. The principle of nationality, ignored in the eighteenth century, woke to life in the upheaval of the Revolution and the incessant wars which followed. And, terribly as it has since been abused, it is the principle which, wisely interpreted, must be our main guide in the settlement that lies before us. Otherwise, we may be very sure that, after a short breathing space, the whole work will be to do again from the beginning.

As for the break-up of Austria, it has been the crying need of Europe since 1848; or, to speak more truly, since 1830. And if the statesmen of Europe had not stopped their ears, to the. warnings of Mazzini, it is probable that the task might have been accomplished with far less bloodshed sixty or seventy years ago than it is likely to be now. This is the price we have to pay for the long neglect of duty. And, so long as the duty is performed at last, we must not shrink from the sacrifice which our own cowardice has brought upon us.

The other main threat to the future peace of Europe is clearly to be found in the Balkans. And here the problem, always tangled enough, has been twisted and tortured, almost beyond hope of straightening, by the schemings and passions of the war. It is devoutly to be hoped that those responsible for the settlement will spare no pains to ascertain how the ground really lies, where are the best seeds of promise for the future and what are the conditions likely to be most favourable to their growth. The only way to do this is to take counsel with those few men who have given their life to a study of the problem and resolutely to reject the pleas of those—whether they speak in the name of Italy, of Russia, or of Britain herself—who have only selfish interests or hide-bound prejudices to serve. Disquieting rumours as, to pledges given in one quarter or another have been rife for the last year and more. It will be hard to forgive those who were guilty of making them, if such stories should turn out to be true.

With the ‘Austrian State Corpse’ 1 decently buried and as stable a settlement as circumstances will admit of worked out in the Balkans-—with Germany therefore stripped both of her obsequious ally to the South and of her castle in the air in the near East—it is not beyond hope that the seeds of future war may be checked in their growth, if not altogether stifled; and that such disputes as arise may be composed either by friendly agreement among the present Allies, or by the fear of consequences which the sense of past miscalculations and the retribution that followed them is likely to breed among the Germans. It may, or may not, be expedient to recast the Alliance into a formal Federation. In either case, it is to be hoped that the nations concerned will for a long time to come be held together by the memory of a great danger surmounted and a great task accomplished in common; and that, in all difficulties which may occur, they will meet each other in a spirit of forbearance and in readiness to act with a single eye to the welfare of Europe.

If that be so, there will be a virtual, if not a formal, Federation; and within its bounds the Neutrals of the present war, who have suffered more both in apprehension and in actual loss than it is easy to realise, may sooner or later be willing to take their place. If the American Republic should indeed be willing to take part in the furtherance of the great work, the difficulties of carrying it through would be immeasurably diminished.

But a partial Federation is, after all, no more than a second best. And a general Federation must still continue to be the ultimate ideal of those who have at heart the well-being of the European commonwealth and desire to see it united by a spirit of loyal co-operation: each nation working out the tasks for which it is best suited by nature and training, each willing to learn of the others, and all contributing of their best to the common good.

To that Federation—or rather, to the ‘lasting peace’ of which it is at once the guarantee and the symbol—‘we must surely come at last.’ So said Fichte, a reluctant witness, if there ever was one. The confession was wrung from him at the end of a passionate plea for the ‘narrow-spirited nationalism’ of which, in the name and for the supposed glory of Germany, he was the fanatical apostle. And the conclusion, though reached by devious paths, is none the less—perhaps it is all the more—worthy of recording. A few years earlier, another and a greater German—the representative of all that was noblest and purest in the humanitarian movement of his time, the disciple, in this matter, of Saint Pierre and still more of Rousseau—had reached the same goal by a less erratic and a more honourable road. And of all the pleas for a Federation of Europe, Rousseau's alone excepted, the Lasting Peace of Kant is the most striking and the most cogent.

Will Germany always remain deaf to the appeal of her greatest thinker? Will she always remain the slave of her apparent interest, and never take courage to ask what it is that her real interest demands? So long as she retains her present form of government, so long as her Parliament is a mere name and her Emperor, with the military gang which controls him, to all intents an autocrat, there is no hope of amendment. But, once let that Government be discredited by defeat, once let Germany learn by a harsh experience that aggression is liable to recoil on her own head, may we not trust that the people will at last insist on taking the control of their own destiny, on renouncing the designs which have provoked the just enmity of half Europe? Her own rulers, at any rate, have long professed to fear the coming of that moment. If it conies, the day of a general Federation, the day of a lasting peace, may not impossibly be in sight.

[1]See Political Writings of J.Rousseau, Vol. I, pp. 364–396, and pp. 293–307.

[1]See Political Writings, I, p. 396.

[1]Letter to Mirabeau of July 26, 1767. Political Writings, II, p. 160.

[1]Rousseau himself had planned a work on Federation apparently leading up to a scheme for a partial Federation between the smaller States—and had at one time intended to include it in the Contrat Social. A fragment of this work was handed by him to a French friend, d'Antraigues, who destroyed it in a panic. See Political Writings, II, P. 135.

[1]It has been stated that, by the end of 1915, more than 2000 persons, including many women, had been executed on political charges in Austria-Hungary since the beginning of the war. The trial of M. Kramarcz, the Czech leader, will be fresh in every memory.

[1]The same principle covers, as it demands, the restoration of Alsace and Lorraine to France and the liberation of the Polish provinces now in the grasp of Prussia; and for precisely the same reasons. To discuss the future relation of Poland to Russia—or, indeed, any details of the Slav settlement, in its countless aspects—is manifestly beyond the scope of this sketch.

[1]The phrase is taken from a recent manifesto of the German Social Democrats.