INTERNATIONAL PEACE MOVEMENT, The. A world-wide movement aiming at the abolition of war, more especially international war. While fighting has always been one of the chief occupations of mankind; while ideas of national greatness are largely associated with battles, campaigns and sieges; and while the heroes of poetry, history and monumental art are mostly famous soldiers; in modern times, nevertheless, the opinion has rapidly gained ground all over the world that war is a terrible evil which ought to be prevented as far as possible, and sooner or later to be done away with altogether. Some writers, notably in Germany, defend it as a biologic necessity, contending that it is a phase of the universal struggle for existence and hence a part of natures plan for securing race hardihood and keeping the growth of population within bounds. (See ). Others, again mainly Germans (particularly Prussians), even glorify it as the noblest of human activities, a divinely ordered means of preventing the inhabitants of the world from becoming effeminate, pleasure-loving and morally flaccid. To this argument, however, the opponents of war reply that co-operation is just as much a part of nature's law as fighting, and that inter-tribal slaughter is a human specialty virtually unknown to the lowers animals, among whom individuals attack and kill one another only for food. As for the moral benefits of war, moreover, it is urged that these come also from fire, flood, famine, earthquake and pestilence, which nobody thinks of listing among the good things of life; to a certain extent, also, good by-products come from dueling and private brawling, which almost everybody admits it is well to have got rid of.
Aside from the few extremists who extol
war as a good thing, and those at the other
pole who denounce it as the sum of all villianies
and something to be avoided at any cost, the
great mass of thoughtful men regard it as
indeed an evil, but as sometimes a necessary
and praiseworthy alternative to still greater
evils. They hold that slaughter and destruction
on a large scale, with all of the attendant
soldering and misery, constitute ethically the
most inhuman, rationally the most absurd, and
economically the most expensive mode of
settling international conflicts of opinion and
interest. Accordingly, they are working to bring
about a form of world-organization in which
the nations shall co-operate to abolish this
ancient scourge and at the same time find a moral
equivalent for its valuable by-products. In' the
year 1910 the well-known philanthropist, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, whose generosity rendered possible the creation of the great institution known as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, summed up the present-day attitude toward war by calling it “the foulest blot upon our civilization” — a characterization amply warranted by the colossal struggle of the World War, unless that struggle shall eventually prove to have been indeed a war against war.
This new attitude of aversion toward war
is a part of the great humanitarian movement
which set in shortly before the French Revolution. War violates the Rights of Man — the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Its immediate effect is the destruction on a large scale of life itself, which has come to seem more precious than it used to seem, and also of many of the values, both material and spiritual, which ennoble life and make it worth living. It replaces the orderly constructive processes of society with an orgy of destruction, treating the common man as mere cannon-fodder, while its immediate benefits fall to only a few leaders who get their reward in “glory” or increased wealth and power, that is, in the gratification of their vanity.