The Reign of Peace

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 18, 1871

The Reign of Peace.

AFTER the reader has perused the following article, he will be ready to agree with the writer that the reign of peace is not very near at hand. People are to raise the cry of peace and safety in the last days; and the surprising part of it is that they do it at the very time when the earth trembles with the tramp of armies and bristles with bayonets, which are ready for the fray. There is not, to be sure, as the writer says, the least cause for war; and this makes it all the greater anomaly that there is no hope of peace. Let us pray for the long-promised reign of righteousness soon to begin.

When one reads of the elaborate preparations which even the most civilized of European nations still continue to make for attacking their neighbors, or, as they all pretend, for defending themselves against their neighbors, one can hardly help feeling a good deal disheartened about the probability of our being able to find a substitute for war, as a mode of deciding international disputes. All the Continental Powers have greatly increased their armaments within the last thirty years. France increased hers greatly in 1867; Russia has greatly increased hers; and now England, the most peaceful, and best protected by nature of them all, is engaged in greatly increasing hers. What renders all this the more remarkable and the more depressing is, that it is the great triumphs of peace, such as the railroad and the telegraph, which make this increase necessary. The railroad and telegraph having rendered the transportation and concentration of troops easier, it has followed that every Government must have more troops to transport and concentrate. The result is that every Government has either put its whole male population under arms, or is in a fair way to do so, and we are having war after war in rapid succession, and wars as bloody and cruel as any the world has seen in any age.

The prospect looks all the gloomier when we come to consider what these wars and rumors of wars are all about. There is no more conflict of interest between the different European States than between the various States of the American Union. France has just as much reason, so far as money and comfort are concerned, for living in peace with Germany and Italy, as New York has for living in peace with New Jersey and Pennsylvania. No Frenchman or German would deny this; and there is no Frenchman or German who knows anything about the matter who does not think the American Confederation a blessing to all who live under it, if for no other reason, because it enables the political communities which compose it to do without standing armies, and reduces their disputes to the modest dimensions of lawsuits, capable of settlement by bill and answer. Why, then, in the name of common sense, one naturally asks, do not the European States let each other alone? If they have nothing to gain, as regards wealth or comfort, by fighting each other, why do they fight, and keep constantly ready to fight each other?

To this there is only one answer, and it is an answer which makes the prospects of Courts of arbitration look very gloomy; it is that they dislike each other, sometimes even hate and envy each other. Each wants to see the other humiliated. They do not speak each other's language; they do not like each other's manners, or cookery, and have a very low opinion of each other's character. Each thinks the others are constantly up to some kind of mischief. In short, the state of feeling between them is that which one often sees prevailing between neighbors in private life, and it is one which admits of no formal settlement. If Smith and his wife hate and envy Brown and his wife, and cannot bear to see them driving a carriage or putting up a green-house, what can any third party do to reconcile them? If they differ in opinion on some subject, on which exact knowledge is attainable, they may be set right; if they quarrel over a piece of property, or the construction of a contract, or the tracing of a boundary-line, nothing is easier than to call in an arbitrator, and apply either the rules of positive law or the principles of abstract justice to the decision of the controversy. But what can be done when Brown simply says he can't bear Smith, that he is an odious creature; or when Smith says that Brown's airs are a little too much, and that what he wants is to be taken down a peg or two? On such troubles we cannot arbitrate. When we meet a case like this in private life, we turn it over to a minister, as something to be prayed over, and are thankful if the parties keep their hands off each other. When such a state of things arises between nations it would seem as if there was nothing for it but to fight. For sixty-four years Prussia has hated France on account of Jena; now France will probably hate Prussia for sixty-four years more on account of Sedan and Paris—and so it goes on. If you tell them they ought not to hate each other, that the Bible says it is wrong, each will reply that that is very true, but that nevertheless the first chance it gets it will give the other a drubbing, to take the pride and impudence out of it and teach it how to behave. In short, in the matter of charity and forgiveness they feel very much as the poet Heine said he felt about forgiving his enemies. What he asked of Providence was, a modest cottage, with half a dozen of his enemies hanging to a tree in front of his door. He was ready to forgive them, but not till they were hung. The Prussians are ready to love Frenchmen, but only after having given them a severe beating, and after the Frenchmen have acknowledged themselves to be a vain, fickle, vicious people, in every way inferior to the Germans. The French, on the other hand, are willing to love the Germans after having captured Berlin, and after the Germans have acknowledged themselves to be coarse, stupid and gluttonous barbarians, in every way inferior to the French. Both will agree, too, to love and forgive the English, but only after having seized London, and levied a handsome contribution on it, and obtained from both Houses of Parliament a formal acknowledgement that a more perfidious, heartless, canting, and hypocritical nation than England never existed. This being the state of things, the reign of peace is evidently not very near at hand.—New York Paper.