AMERICA'S INTERNATIONAL IDEALS
even of slavery. It is a war-power; and when your country is actually in war, Congress has power to carry it on, and must carry it on according to the laws of war; and by those laws a country has all its laws and institutions swept by the board and martial law takes the place of them. Peace is essential to our prosperous or permanent freedom. Almost every republic in the world has fallen a victim to war; and if our liberties are ever lost, they will, in like manner be cloven down by the sword. The soldiers even of Washington, urged him in a moment of passion, to assume the sceptre; had he been almost any other man, he would have seized the occasion to raise for himself a throne upon the ruins of our nascent freedom; and though that incomparable man spurned the offer, yet, must war, become either habitual or frequent, bring on, sooner or later, such exigencies as will leave us at the mercy of some future Caesar or Napoleon." This may seem a little too radical an opinion, and yet so calm a judicial mind as that of Judge Jay uttered itself of the sentiment that "war has always been adverse to political freedom." Madison is very full and emphatic concerning the despotic tendencies of war. "Of all the enemies of public liberty," he says, "war is perhaps the most to be dreaded."
In a speech in the Reichstag on February 9, 1876, Bismarck made this significant statement: "The mass of the people has usually no inclination for war. The torch of war is lit by minorities, or, in absolute governments, by rulers or cabinets." If this is true—and it undoubtedly is—the people should be given more and more of a share in the power to decide rationally what war decides by force,—especially as it is also true, to quote Bismarck again, that "even a successful war" is "in
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