m evil.

With the period of enlightenment that began shortly before the French
Revolution, the movement for peace was {220} accelerated. The ideas
that were once current only among philosophers began to spread among
considerable sections of the population. Gradually also pacifism
became rationalistic rather than religious or moral. War was attacked
not because it was evil in the eyes of God but because, like high
taxes, monopolies and tariffs, it was adverse to the economic interests
of nations and peoples. The growth of the doctrine of _laissez-faire_
and of free trade gave a new impetus to the pacifist movement. The
people of the world were looked upon as a myriad of human atoms, whose
welfare did not depend upon the power of the particular State of which
they chanced to form a part, but upon the free enterprise of each and
the unobstructed exchange of products among all these individuals. It
was held that the world would be better if there were no customs
barriers, and free trade on equal terms for all the people of the world
was predicted as a proximate consummation. There would then be no need
for wars or fleets or armies, which cost money and prevented the
progress of humanity. Wars were economically inadvisable. They did
not benefit the sovereign individual, and therefore could not benefit
the nation, which was merely a huge assemblage of individuals.

Like the religious and emotional pacifism which preceded it, this
rationalistic pacifism broke down through its sheer inapplicability to
the facts of life. While the philosophers of the French Revolution
were still proclaiming the advent of peace, the greatest wars until
then in all history were already preparing, and again when in 1851 at
the first World's Exposition in London men began to hope that the era
of peace had at last come, a long period of war was again imminent.
Never was there more talk of peace or hope of peace than in the years
preceding the great conflict of 1914. No wonder many advocates and
{221} prophets of war believe that peace is forever impossible.
"There," wrote the late Prof. J. A. Cramb, "in its specious and
glittering beauty the ideal of Pacificism remains; yet in the long
march of humanity across thousands of years or thousands of centuries
it remains still an ideal, lost in inaccessible distances, as when
first it gleamed across the imagination."[2] "Despite this hubbub of
talk down all the centuries war has continued--abs