coming, among progressive peoples, to be regarded merely as an accidental disturbance of that harmony and concord among mankind which nations require for the fostering of their domestic welfare.
Though the idea of preserving peace by general international regulation has had several exponents in the course of ages, no deliberate plan has ever yet been carried into effect. Indirectly, however, there have been many agencies which have operated towards this end. The earliest, known to history, is the Amphictyonic Council (q.v.) which grew out of the common worship of the Hellenes. It was not so much a political as a religious body. “If it had any claim,” says Freeman,[1] “to the title of a general council of Greece, it was wholly in the sense in which we speak of general councils in modern Europe. The Amphictyonic Council represented Greece as an ecclesiastical synod represented western Christendom. Its primary business was to regulate the concerns of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. The Amphictyonic Council which met at Delphi was only the most famous of several bodies of the same kind.” “It is easy, however,” adds Freeman, “to understand how the religious functions of such a body might assume a political character. Thus the old Amphictyonic oath forbade certain extreme measures of hostility against any city sharing in the common Amphictyonic worship, and it was forbidden to raze any Amphictyonic city or to cut off its water. As the only deliberative body in which most Greek communities were represented, its decisions were those of the bulk of the Hellenic people. It sank eventually into a mere political tool in the hands first of Thebes, and then under Philip of Macedonia.”
The so-called pax romana was merely peace within an empire governed from a central authority, the constituent parts of which were held together by a network of centralized authority.
The feudal system again was a system of offence and defence, and its object was efficiency for war, not the organized regulation of peace. Yet it had elements of federation within the bonds of its hierarchy.
The spiritual influence of the Church again was exerted to preserve relative peace among feudal princes. The “Truce of God” was established by the clergy (originally in Guyenne in 1031) to take advantage of holy days and festivals for the purpose of restricting the time available for bloodshed.
The “grand design” of Henry IV. (France), which some historians regard merely as the fantastic idea of a visionary, was probably a scheme of his great minister Sully to avert by a federation the conflict which he probably foresaw would break out sooner or later between Catholic and Protestant Europe, and which, in fact, broke out some fifteen years later in the Thirty Years' War.
The Holy Roman Empire itself was in some respects an agent for the preservation of peace among its constituent states. In the same way the federation of Swiss cantons, of the states of the North American Union and of the present German Empire have served as means of reducing the number of possible parties to war, and consequently that of its possible occasions.
Not only the number of possible war-making states but also the territorial area over which war can be made has been reduced in recent times by the creation of neutralized states such as Switzerland, Belgium, Luxemburg and Norway, and areas such as the Congo basin, the American lakes and the Suez Canal.
The “balance of power,” which has played in the history of modern Europe such an important part, is inherent in the notion of the independence and stability of states. Just as in Italy the common weal of the different republics which were crowded within the limited area of the peninsula required that no one of them should become so powerful as to threaten the independence of the others, so western Europe had a similar danger to counteract. France, Spain and the Empire were competing with each other in power to the detriment of smaller states. Great Britain and the Netherlands, Prussia and Russia, had interests in the preservation of the status quo, and wars were waged and treaties concluded to adjust the strength of states in the common interest of preventing any one of them from obtaining undue predominance. Then came the break up of what remained of feudal Europe and a readjustment under Napoleon, which left the western world with five fairly balanced homogeneous nations. These now took the place of the old heterogeneous areas, governed by their respective sovereigns without reference to any idea of nationality or of national representation. The leading nations assumed the hegemony of the west, and in more recent times this combination has become known as the “concert of Europe.” This concert of the great powers, as its name implies, in contradistinction to the “balance of power,” was essentially a factor for the preservation of peace. For a century back it has played the part of an upper council in the management of Europe. In all matters affecting the Near East, it considers itself supreme. In matters of general interest it has frequently called conferences to which the minor states have been invited, such as the West African Conference in Berlin in 1885, and the Anti-Slavery Conference at Brussels in 1889-1890, and the Conference of Algeciras in 1906. Meanwhile the concert has admitted among its members first in 1856 Turkey, later in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin the United States, and now undoubtedly Japan will expect to be included as a great power in this controlling body. The essential feature of the concert has been recognition of the advantage to all the great powers of common action in reference to territorial changes in the Near East, of meeting together as a council, in preference to unconcerted negotiation by the powers acting severally.
A departure of more recent origin has been the calling together of the smaller powers for the settlement of matters of general administrative interest, conferences such as those which led to the conclusion of the conventions creating the Postal Union, the Copyright and Industrial Property Unions, &c.
These conferences of all the powers serve in practice as a sort of common council in the community of states, just as the concert of the great powers acts as a kind of senate. We have thus the nucleus of that international parliament which idealist peacemakers have dreamt of since the time of Henry IV.'s “grand design.”
This brings us down to the greatest deliberate effort ever made to secure the peace of the world by a general convention. It was due to the initiative of the young tsar Nicolas II., who, in his famous rescript of the 24th of August 1898, stated that he thought that the then moment was “very favourable for seeking, by means of international discussion, the most effectual means of assuring to all peoples the benefits of a real and durable peace.” “In the course of the last twenty years,” added the rescript, “the preservation of peace had become an object of international policy.” Economic crises, due in great part to the existing system of excessive armaments, were transforming armed peace into a crushing burden, which peoples had more and more difficulty in bearing. He therefore proposed that there should be an international conference for the purpose of focusing the efforts of all states which were “sincerely seeking to make the great idea of universal peace triumph over the elements of trouble and discord.” The first conference was held in 1899, and another followed it in 1907: at the earlier one twenty-six powers were represented; at that of 1907 there were forty-four, this time practically the whole world. The conventions drawn up at the second conference were a deliberate codification of many branches of international law. By them a written law has been substituted for that unwritten law which nations had been wont to construe with a latitude more or less corresponding to their power. At the conference of 1899, moreover, a court of arbitration was instituted for the purpose of dealing judicially with such matters in dispute as the powers agreed to submit to it.
In the interval between the two Hague Conferences, Great Britain and France concluded the first treaty applicable to future difficulties, as distinguished from the treaties which had preceded it, treaties which related in all cases to difficulties already
- ↑ History of Federal Government in Greece and Italy (2nd ed., London, 1893), p. 97.
