WAR AND CIVILIZATION. 759 



enormous. We do not say they can not be overcome, that the die- 

 lectric can not be ruptured by some sudden and enormous rise of 

 potential ; but we do say and rejoice to say that the strain will 

 have to be enormous, and the circumstances fateful to the last de- 

 gree, before such a result is reached. 



We freely grant that, looking at the question theoretically, it 

 is very difficult to imagine the complete cessation of war or the 

 complete discontinuance of warlike preparations. De Quincey, in 

 his celebrated essay on War, took the ground first that war could 

 not be abolished, and secondly that it ought not to be abolished. 

 He regarded it, as he tells us, first as " a physical necessity, aris- 

 ing out of man's nature when combined with man's situation," and 

 in the second place as " a moral necessity connected with benefits 

 of compensation, such as continually lurk in evils acknowledged 

 to be such." War ought to exist, he further explains, " as a bal- 

 ance to opposite tendencies of a still more evil character, ... as 

 a counter venom to the taint of some more mortal poison." De 

 Quincey has developed and, as they say in French, " embroidered " 

 this thesis with his usual eloquence ; but we can not admit that 

 he has proved it, which after all is the principal thing. After dis- 

 missing the idea that wars have frequently had their rise in the 

 most trivial causes, such as quarrels of the boudoir or a king's ill- 

 humor vented in the first place on his foreign minister and by the 

 latter diverted to a neighboring nation, he states that the real 

 causes of war " lie in the system of national competitions ; in the 

 common political system to which all individual nations are un- 

 avoidably parties, with no internal principle for adjusting the 

 equilibrium of those forces, and no supreme Areopagus, or court 

 of appeal, for deciding disputes." He points out too, what is per- 

 fectly true, that war conducted by responsible powers according 

 to recognized rules is better than unregulated conflicts and re- 

 prisals along the frontiers of adjoining states ; but, unless we are 

 to assume that such unregulated conflicts could not be prevented 

 by the internal police of the respective countries, we can hardly 

 accept this as a valid argument for the necessity of war. In point 

 of fact such conflicts are prevented in this precise manner ; and 

 the frontiers of two neighboring civilized states enjoy in time of 

 peace just as much security and tranquillity as the rest of their 

 territories. 



More serious is the argument that war necessarily results 

 from the natural rivalries of states. De Quincey speaks of it as 

 " an instinctive nisus for redressing the errors of equilibrium in 

 the relative position of nations. Civilities and high-bred cour- 

 tesies," he adds, " pass and ought to pass between nations ; that is 

 the graceful drapery which shrouds their natural, fierce, and 

 tigerlike relations to each other. But the glaring eyes, which 



