temporarily disturbs industrial life, interrupts quiet economic
development, brings widespread misery with it, and emphasizes the
primitive brutality of man. It is therefore a most desirable
consummation if wars for trivial reasons should be rendered impossible,
and if efforts are made to restrict the evils which follow necessarily
in the train of war, so far as is compatible with the essential nature
of war. All that the Hague Peace Congress has accomplished in this
limited sphere deserves, like every permissible humanization of war,
universal acknowledgment. But it is quite another matter if the object
is to abolish war entirely, and to deny its necessary place in
historical development.

This aspiration is directly antagonistic to the great universal laws
which rule all life. War is a biological necessity of the first
importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be
dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow,
which excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore all real
civilization. "War is the father of all things." [A] The sages of
antiquity long before Darwin recognized this.

[Footnote A: (Heraclitus of Ephesus).]

The struggle for existence is, in the life of Nature, the basis of all
healthy development. All existing things show themselves to be the
result of contesting forces. So in the life of man the struggle is not
merely the destructive, but the life-giving principle. "To supplant or
to be supplanted is the essence of life," says Goethe, and the strong
life gains the upper hand. The law of the stronger holds good
everywhere. Those forms survive which are able to procure themselves the
most favourable conditions of life, and to assert themselves in the