Kant's "Eternal Peace."
BY EDWIN D. MEAD.
1795? just a century before the sudden excitement in
America over the Venezuelan imbroglio roused our people
as never before to a sense of their duty to establish a perma¬
nent system of arbitration to take the place of war in the
settlement of disputes among nations, Immanuel Kant pub¬
lished his great tractate on " Eternal Peace." It was the
most remarkable prophecy and program ever made of the
day
" When the war-drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furled
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world."
The prophecy was not forgotten by some of those who in
the April days went up to the Arbitration Conference at
Washington, the most important gathering which the world
has ever seen of men who were in earnest about having the
prophecy fulfilled. The name of Immanuel Kant was honored
there. But few perhaps remembered the wqrd'in his immortal
essay which seems a special prophecy of the part which our
republic seems destined to take in the promotion of the cause
in which the great philosopher was the pioneer and in behalf
of which these men from every quarter of the nation came
together. "If happy circumstances bring it about," wrote
Kant, " that a powerful and enlightened people form them¬
selves into a republic,—which by its very nature must be
disposed in favor of perpetual peace,— this will furnish a
centre of federative union for other States to attach them¬
selves to, and thus to secure the conditions of liberty among
all States, according to the idea of the right of nations; and
such a union would extend wider and wider, in the course of
time, by the addition of further connections of this kind."
It was a remarkable insight of Kant's that universal peace
could come only with the universal republic. The republican
constitution, he said, founded on the principle of the liberty
Reprinted from the Editor's Table of the New Erfffland Magazine, June, 1896.
This leaflet maybe procured for $1.50 per hundred copies, or $10 per thousand, from the
Peace Crusade Committee, 14 Bedford Street, Boston.
2
and equality of its citizens and the dependence of all on a
common legislation, is " the only one which arises out of the
idea of the original compact upon which all the rightful legis¬
lation of a people is founded. As regards public right, the
republican principles, therefore, lie originally and essentially
at the basis of the civil constitution in all its forms ; and the
only question for us now is as to whether it is also the only
constitution that can lead to a perpetual peace." Kant declares
that the republican constitution, having its original source in
the conception of right, does include the prospect of realizing
perpetual peace ; and the reason of this, he says, may be stated
as follows: " According to the republican constitution, the
consent of the citizens as members of the State is required
to determine at any time the question whether there shall
be war or not. Hence nothing is more natural than that
they should be very loath to enter upon so very undesirable an
undertaking; for in decreeing it they would necessarily be
resolving to bring upon themselves all the horrors of war. And
in their case this implies such consequences as these: to have
to fight in their own persons; to supply the costs of the war
out of their own property; to have sorrowfully to repair the
devastation which it leaves behind; and, as a crowning evil, to
have to take upon themselves at the end a burden of debt
which will go on embittering peace itself. On the other hand,
in a constitution where the subject is not a voting member of
the State, resolution to go to war is a matter of the smallest
concern in the world. For in this case the ruler, who as such
is not a mere citizen, but the owner of the State, need not in
the least suffer personally by war, nor has he to sacrifice his
pleasures of the table or of the chase or his palaces. He can
therefore resolve for war from insignificant reasons, as if it
were but a hunting expedition ; and he may leave the justifica¬
tion of it without concern to the diplomatic body."
It is certainly true that the development of the idea of inter¬
national arbitration has been coincident with the growth of
modern democracy. It was no accident which made the
United States and England the leaders of the nations in the
preaching and the practice of this principle ; and it was no ac¬
cident which brought about the conference at Washington,
looking to a permanent system of arbitration between these
two greatest republics in the world. It was the logic of Kant's
philosophy and of the nature of political things. Such a union
as it was the object of the Washington conference to bring
about will extend by the addition first of those other nations
which have advanced farthest in self-government or have be-
3
come republics in the sense in which Kant uses that term.
The republican constitution of Kant's thought is not to be
confounded with the democratic constitution. Self-government
is often better realized under monarchical than under demo¬
cratic forms. " Republicanism regarded as the constitutive
principle of a State is the political severance of the executive
power of the government from the legislative power. Despot¬
ism is in principle the irresponsible executive administration
of the State by laws laid down and enacted by the same power
that administers them, the ruler exercising his own private
will as if it were the public will. If the mode of government
is to conform to the idea of right, it must embody the repre¬
sentative system ; for in this system alone is a really republi¬
can government possible. Without representation, no govern¬
ment can possibly be any other than despotic and arbitrary.
Great Britain is to-day among the leading nations of the
world the truest republic, according to Kant's definition, after
our own republic, because her people are most truly and com¬
pletely self-governed. There was never so conspicuous and
pitiful an instance of failure to distinguish between names and
realities as that of Secretary Olney's characterization of the
issue between England and Venezuela, in his correspondence
with the English government made public in December, 1895,
as a collision between monarchical institutions and the princi¬
ple of self-government. England and the United States, one
hemmed and hampered still by the spectre of a crown and the
social power of a hereditary aristocracy, the other shackled
and encumbered worse by a lawless plutocracy and consuming
mammonism, stand side by side as the great exemplars of repre¬
sentative government in the modern world ; and the logic of
history, we say, and of the profoundest political philosophy
decrees the establishment between these republics of the first
permanent system of international arbitration, with the sure
pledge and prospect that such a union will extend wider and
wider until it eventuates in the " universal cosmopolitical in¬
stitution " of Kant's prophecy.
It was almost a dozen years before the publication of
" Eternal Peace," in 1784, that Kant used this great prophetic
term, and confidently foretold the end of wars and the reign of
international law, in his essay on "The Natural Principle of
the Political Order, considered in connection with the Idea
of a Universal Cosmopolitical History." It is to be remem¬
bered that this essay appeared five years before the outbreak
of the French Revolution, and one year after the Treaty of
Paris recognized the success of the American Revolution, in
4
which Kant had taken so deep an interest. " Eternal Peace "
was published just after the peace of Basel had recognized the
French Republic, seeming to inaugurate a new era of peace in
Europe. The later essay was received with far the greater
interest at the time, 1,500 copies, we read, being sold in a few
weeks, and a second edition appearing the following year ; and
it is a celebrated essay, while the former essay is but little known
save by the special student of Kant. Yet this former essay is,
to our thinking, one of the most remarkable works ever writ¬
ten ; and, in the revival of interest in political speculation
which we are now happily witnessing, it is to be hoped that it
will at last receive that attention among ourselves which it
deserves. The work is much more than a political essay. It is
a work which may be compared, among recent works, with
Fiske's " Destiny of Man." It is a survey of the whole move¬
ment of nature and of human history, with a view to determine
the final end; and its spirit and outcome are singularly like
those of Mr. Fiske's treatise, which it preceded by a hundred
years. It sees clearly that a serious study of evolution tends
to the teleological principle, a study of the character and
destiny of man to the idea of God.
The following are the principal of the nine propositions
which Kant lays down, and to the unfolding and defence of
which his essay is devoted: " All the capacities implanted in
a creature by nature are destined to unfold themselves, com¬
pletely and comformably to their end, in the course of time."
" In man, as the only rational creature on earth, those natural
capacities which are directed toward the use of his reason
could be completely developed only in the species, and not in
the individual." " The means which nature employs to bring
about the development of all the capacities implanted in men
is their mutual antagonism in society, but only so far as this
antagonism becomes at length the cause of an order among
them that is regulated by law." "The greatest practical prob¬
lem for the human race, to the solution of which it is com¬
pelled by nature, is the establishment of a civil society uni¬
versally administering right according to law." " The problem
of the establishment of a perfect civil constitution is dependent
on the problem of the regulation of the external relations be¬
tween the States conformably to law; and without the solution
of this latter problem it cannot be solved." "The history of
the human race, viewed as a whole, may be regarded as the
realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a politi¬
cal constitution internally and, for this purpose, also externally
perfect, as the only State in which all the capacities implanted
5
by her in mankind can be fully developed." This is a remark¬
able body of doctrine. The essay throughout is instinct with
the principle of progress as the cardinal principle for the inter¬
pretation of history, a subject to which Kant a few years after¬
ward devoted a special essay. " The idea of human history,"
he says, "viewed as founded upon the assumption of a univer¬
sal plan in nature, gives us a new ground of hope, opening up
to us a consoling view of the future, in which the human race
appears in the far distance as having worked itself up to a
condition in which all the germs implanted in it by nature will
be fully developed and its destiny here on earth fulfilled. Such
a justification of nature — or rather, let us say, of Providence —
is no insignificant motive for choosing a particular point of
view in contemplating the course of the world. For what
avails it to magnify the glory and wisdom of the creation in
the irrational domain of nature, and to recommend it to de¬
vout contemplation, if that part of the great display of the su¬
preme wisdom which presents the end of it all in the history
of the human race is to be viewed as only furnishing perpetual
objections to that glory and wisdom ? The spectacle of history,
if thus viewed, would compel us to turn away our eyes from it
against our will; and the despair of ever finding a perfect
rational purpose in its movement would reduce us to hope for
it, if at all, only in another world."
This is precisely in the spirit, we say, of the glowing final
pages of those most modern books, Mr. Fiske's " Destiny of
Man " and " Idea of God." Kant believes in Providence, in
God, in nature and in history, in the omnipotence of the right,
believes that the fact that a thing ought to be is the sure rea¬
son that it will be, that " what is valid on rational grounds as
a theory is also valid and good for practice," is the only thing
that is ultimately good for practice, and is inevitably bound to
be reduced to practice in due order.
The consideration of the rational law of progress here stated
brings Kant, in his essay on " The Principle of Progress," to
the idea of internationalism. He shows how the lawlessness
and caprice of individuals involve evils which alone are suffi¬
cient'to compel the establishment of the State; "and in like
manner," he says, "the evils, arising from constant wars by
which the States seek to reduce or subdue each other must
bring them at last, even against their will, also to enter into a
universal or cosmopolitical constitution." This may not, he held,
assume the form of a universal common wealth or empire under
one head, but of " a federation regulated by law according to
the right of nations as concerted in common." In this essay as
6
powerfully as in the earlier essay on "The National Principle
of the Political Order " and in " Eternal Peace " does he pict¬
ure the irrationality and monstrosity of war, and assure himself
that, just so surely as the world becomes republican, so surely
will war yield to arbitration and to federation. " When the
decision of the question of war falls to the people,"—it is the
same word-as that already quoted from "Eternal Peace,"—
"neither will the desire of aggrandizement nor mere verbal
injuries be likely to induce them to put themselves in danger
of personal privation and want by inflicting upon themselves
the calamities of war, which the sovereign in his own person es¬
capes. And thus posterity, no longer oppressed by undeserved
burdens, and owing it not to the direct love of others for them,
but only to the rational self-love of each age for itself, will be
able to make progress in moral relations. For each common¬
wealth, now become unable to injure any other by violence,
must maintain itself by right alone; and it may hope on real
grounds that the others, being constituted like itself, will then
come, on occasions of need, to its aid." There is no possible
remedy, he declares, against the evils of war but " a system of
international right founded upon public laws conjoined with
power, to which every State must submit, according to the
analogy of the civil or political right of individuals in any one
State." To all scepticism about this program and the allega¬
tion that it has always been laughed at by statesmen and still
more by sovereigns, as an idea fit only for the schools from
which it takes its rise, Kant answers roundly: " I trust to a
theory which is based upon the principle of right as determin¬
ing what the relation between men and States ought to be, and
which lays down to these earthly gods the maxim that they
ought so to proceed in their disputes that such a universal In¬
ternational State may be introduced, and to assume it there¬
fore as not only possible in practice, but such as may yet be
presented in reality."
Thus everywhere where Kant discusses political relations
does the great vision of internationalism and of universal peace
secured by law, just as peace is secured in the State because
justice is dependent on the court and not the fist, hover before
him. Leaving the essay on " Progress," we must, before re¬
turning to " Eternal Peace," turn once more to the pages of
" The National Principle of the Political Order," for the sake
of citing a noteworthy passage at which we have already
hinted, following one of his powerful arraignments of war as
wasting so ruthlessly the treasures which might be applied to
the advancement of enlightenment and the highest good of the
7
world, as burdening peoples with debts almost impossible to ex¬
tinguish, and as settling nothing finally and reliably, since
might never makes right and every unjust issue in war is the
sure seed of future war. So intimate have the political and
trade relations of nations become, he urges,— and how vastly
truer has the intervening century made it! — that every political
disturbance of any State becomes a disturbance of all, which
are thus more and more forced by the common danger to offer
themselves as arbiters. " In doing so," says Kant, with mar¬
vellous insight and impressiveness, "they are beginning to
arrange for a great future political body, such as the world has
never yet seen. Although this political body may as yet exist
only in a rough outline, nevertheless a feeling begins, as it
were, to stir in all its members, each of which has a common
interest in the maintenance of the whole. And this may well
inspire the hope that, after many political revolutions and
transformations, the highest purpose of nature will be at last
realized in the establishment of a universal cosmopolitical
institution, in the bosom of which all the original capacities
and endowments of the human race will be unfolded and de¬
veloped."
Kant's " Eternal Peace," which has a somewhat scholastic
form, opens with a section containing several preliminary articles
of peace between States, such as: " No conclusion of peace
shall be held to be valid when it has been made with the secret
reservation of the material for a future war." " Standing armies
shall be entirely abolished in the course of time." "No na¬
tional debts shall be contracted in connection with the external
affairs of the States." "No State shall intermeddle by force
with the constitution or government of another State." The
reasons for these articles, touching the principal causes of war
in his own time as well as in ours, he elaborates at length. But
it is in his second section, devoted to the definitive articles of a
perpetual peace between States, that his three great construc¬
tive principles are stated. Those principles are : (i) that the
civil constitution of every State shall be republican ; (2) that all
international right must be grounded upon a federation of free
States ; and (3) that right between nations must be limited to
the conditions of universal hospitality. The balance of the
essay is devoted to discussions of the guarantee of perpetual
peace, the present discordance between morals and politics,
and the accordance of politics with morals according to the
transcendental conception of public right. The guarantee of
perpetual peace is furnished, Kant maintains, "by no less a
power than the great artist Nature herself"; and he surveys
8
again the course of evolution with all its struggles and antago¬
nisms, to show that just as individual men, with all their conflict¬
ing interests and inclinations, are forced out of a condition of
aloofness and lawlessness into the condition of a State, so
individual nations are being gradually forced toward arbitration
and federation by the sheer dangers and evils of the present
disorder, self-interest itself pointing the same way which moral¬
ity commands. To the objection of the practical politician,
that great reforms theoretically admirable cannot be realized
because men are what they are, Kant wisely answers that many
have large knowledge of men without yet truly knowing the
nature of man. The process of creation cannot be justified if
we assume that it never will or can be better with the human
race. Kant's cardinal position is that the pure principles of
right and justice have objective reality, and can be realized in
fact, that it is precisely our vocation to proceed about their
realization as fast as we apprehend them, and that failure to
do this is really opposed to nature and is dangerous politics.
" A true political philosophy cannot advance a step without
first paying homage to the principles of morals. The union of
politics with morals cuts in two the knots which politics alone
cannot untie." When men and States once make up their
minds to do their clear duty instead of being selfish and spe¬
cious, then things which seem hard will rapidly become very
simple. " Seek ye first the kingdom of pure practical reason
and its righteousness," is Kant's exhortation, " and then will
your object, the benefit of perpetual peace, be added unto you."
Self-government, a federation of free States, universal hos¬
pitality,— these are the features of Kant's great program.
" Every form of government which is not representative," he
declares, "is a spurious form of government." "For States
viewed in relation to each other" — thus he concludes his dis¬
cussion of federation — " there can be only one way, according
to reason, of emerging from that lawless condition which con¬
tains nothing but occasions of war. Just as, in the case of in¬
dividual men, reason would drive them to give up their savage,
lawless freedom, to accommodate themselves to public coercive
laws, and thus to form an ever-growing State of Nations, such
as would at last embrace all the nations of the earth." And
his final words in the section upon universal hospitality are
these : " The social relations between the various peoples of
the world have now advanced everywhere so far that a violation
of right in one place of the earth is felt all over it. Hence the
idea of a cosmopolitical right of the whole human race is no
fantastic or overstrained mode of representing right, but is a
9
necessary completion of the unwritten code which carries na¬
tional and international right to a consummation in the public
law of mankind."
The English Peace Society published a translation of
" Eternal Peace," by J. D. Morell, a dozen years ago. We
would suggest to our American Peace Society the circulation of
an edition of this little book in America at this time, when the
thought of our people is turned to the subject of international
arbitration more definitely than ever before. More recently
the essay has been translated, along with Kant's other popular
political essays, by W. Hastie, of Edinburgh, who had previously
translated Kant's " Philosophy of Law," and published in a
little volume (Edinburgh : T. & T. Clark) entitled " Kant's
Principles of Politics."* Besides "Eternal Peace," "The
Principle of the Political Order," and " The Principle of Prog¬
ress," already referred to, this volume also contains the essay
on "Principles of Political Right," written in 1793, which the
translator properly characterizes as the philosophical counter¬
part and ultimate expression of the American Declaration of
Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of
Man. " The one thinker," says Mr. Hastie, " who completely
understood the purpose and end of the whole movement," —
of the eighteenth-century revolutions, viewed as the culmination
of the political science of the centuries,— " and who was cap¬
able of giving it its profoundest and largest expression, was
Immanuel Kant."
It was Kant's intention to crown his philosophical achieve¬
ments by a " System of Politics," worked out in accordance
with the general principles of his philosophy; but he was
reluctantly compelled in his seventy-seventh year to abandon
this long-cherished intention. But the political essays which
he wrote, and which are now placed in the hands of the Eng¬
lish reader in such admirable form, indicate sufficiently what
the lines of his system of politics would have been. It is an
impressive fact that the interests of social and political recon¬
struction were those which in the closing period of his full life
chiefly engaged the greatest thinker of the modern world.
For that Immanuel Kant was. The general estimate of his
place held by philosophic men is, as expressed by Hutchison
Sterling, "that of the greatest German philosopher, greatest
modern philosopher, greatest of all philosophers, with the
usual exceptions of Plato and Aristotle." He revolutionized
philosophy. His contributions to physical science were hardly
# Since the above was written, the American Peace Society have published a translation
of " Eternal Peace," by Dr. Benjamin F. Trueblood. This may be procured of the society
(3 Somerset Street, Boston) for 20 cents per copy or $12 per hundred copies.
10
less brilliant and fruitful than his contributions to meta¬
physics. He was one of the greatest mathematicians and
astronomers of all time. To him, and not to Laplace, belongs,
as is now recognized by all scientific writers on astronomy, the
merit of' the origin of the nebular theory. Mr. Hastie is not
extravagant in saying that, had he never written anything but
his "Universal History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens,"
he would have ranked as the first of the modern evolutionists
and the founder of scientific cosmology. His work in ethics
was yet greater and more far-reaching in its results than his
work in physics. To quote Mr. Hastie again, referring to
Kant's later, practical works, " In all these works he shows
himself to be the universal philosopher of humanity, the great¬
est of the modern moralists, and the initiator of a new era of
political science." It is to Kant's greatness on this side that
men are now awaking as never before. The philosophers
have long been shouting, " Back to Kant! " This now begins
to be the cry of the politician and the humanitarian. " I have
not yet lost my feeling for humanity," were the great philoso¬
pher's last words. It was to humanity, to the State, to the
peace and federation of the world, that his last labors were
given. " By inclination," he once said, " I am an inquirer.
I feel all the thirst for knowledge and the eager unrest of
striving to advance, as well as satisfaction with every kind of
progress. There was a time when I thought all this could
form the glory of mankind; and I despised the rabble who
know nothing. Rousseau brought me to the right view. This
blinding superiority vanished. . I learned to honor men; and I
should regard myself as much more useless than the common
laborers, did I not believe that this way of thinking could com¬
municate a value to all others in establishing the rights of
mankind." .
It is the logic of events, of history and progress, which has
now brought the world, or has brought England and America,
to the necessity and the determination of practically and defi¬
nitely establishing the reign of peace and international law."
But it should be an inspiration and a reassurance to all who
are working for this high end in the two countries to know
that this is the logic, the prophecy, and the program of the
greatest philosopher of modern time. " England," says the
English translator of the political essays of Kant, which it is
the purpose of these pages to commend to the study of our
people, "has acted out the principles which Kant has thought
out and held up for universal imitation and embodiment; and
this holds even more literally of the New England of America.
11
In Kant the student will find the fundamental principles of all
the best political and social science of the nineteenth century,
the soundest exposition of constitutional government, and the
first clear adumbration of the great doctrines of federation
and universal law, which are now stirring in the hearts of the
peoples."
ETERNAL PEACE.
By Immanuel Kant. Translated by Benjamin F.
Trueblood, LL.D. 20 cents per copy, $12 per hun¬
dred copies. American Peace Society, J Somerset
Street, Boston.
RANTS PRINCIPLES OF POLITICS.
Containing Kant's Essays on "Eternal Peace," "The
Principle of Political Order," "The Principle of Prog¬
ress," and "Principles of Political Right." Trans¬
lated by W. Hastie. $i. Edinburgh : T. and T.
Clark. Sold by all booksellers. Sent, postpaid, by
Charles Scribners Sons, New York.
ORGANIZE THE WORLD.
CHARLES SUMNER'S MORE EXCEL¬
LENT WAT.
By Edwin D. Mead. Leaflets uniform with this on
Kant's "Eternal Peace." 3 cents per copy, $1.50
per hundred copies, $10 per thousand. Peace Cru¬
sade Committee, 14 Bedford Street, Boston.