force. War is destructive: commerce is constructive. Every phase of war is of necessity conducted by methods which have no defense in morals. It requires the employment of spies, the use of falsehood, the ambuscade. Its greatest successes are achieved in getting the advantage of the enemy and striking him in the back. The art or invention of war consists in making each instrument of slaughter more and more effective, the advantage in the end falling to the gun of longest range, unless success is attained even under bad management by the yet greater incapacity of the enemy.
Commerce exists by the law of service. Its benefits are mutual. Its conduct demands probity and integrity. "The trust reposed in and deserved by the many creates the opportunity for the fraud of the few." War can only exist so long as the private soldiers are ignorant on the one side or the other. Had not the Confederate private soldiers in the civil war in this country been ignorant of the evil influence of slavery upon themselves they would not have fought in a war for the maintenance of slavery. If the conscript soldiers of Spain had not been kept in ignorance of the abuses of the rights of the Cubans by their own oppression at home, there would have been no cause for interference on the part of this country, and there could have been no war. When the men behind the guns in Germany become fully informed of their own rights, as they are rapidly becoming, they may cease to submit to the domination of the classes who carry the sword. The mediæval Junker who now assumes the powers of emperor will then become as helpless as his mediæval prototype, the knight in armor, became when gunpowder was invented. The brute rule of blood and iron will then give place to the intelligent rule of commerce and mutual service.
Taxes are collected at the barriers which part European nations from each other by duties on their respective imports to the amount of many hundred million dollars, and yet that revenue does not suffice to support the armies which except for those barriers to mutual service would not be required and could not be sustained.
As surely as the mental factor in production giving direction to the forces of Nature evolves increasing welfare, so surely will the brute force of war and the survival of the fighting instinct in man be suppressed by that spread of intelligence and common sense which is generated in the very conduct of commerce itself.
