War Established by God 15 



a needful concomitant, we may at the same time hold 

 that such societies having been produced, the brutality 

 of nature in their units which was necessitated by the 

 process, ceasing to be necessary with the cessation of 

 the process, will disappear. 



Thus his final judgment is clearly rendered : 



From war has been gained all that it had to give. . . . 

 Only further evils are to be looked for from the con- 

 tinuance of militancy in civilized nations.^ 



No such qualifications disturb the conclusions of 

 the militarists. Shortly after Ernest Renan wrote 

 the passage cited above, Marshal vonMoltke wrote, 

 in a letter to BluntschU which has become famous : 



Perpetual peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful 

 dream. War is an element of the order of the world 

 established by God. The most noble virtues of men 

 are developed in it. . . . Without war the world 

 would stagnate and lose itself in materialism. 



The philosophy is held by statesmen as well as 

 militarists. In his book on Weltstadt und Friedens- 

 problem, Prof. Baron Karl von Stengel, a jurist 

 who was one of Germany's delegates at the first 

 Hague Peace Conference, has a chapter entitled, 

 "The Significance of War for the Development of 

 Humanity," in which he says: 



War has more often facilitated than hindered 

 progress. Athens and Rome, not only in spite of, but 



» P. 664. 



