There were to be no more wars. The hopeful view, thus planted in infancy, that the wars of the 1860s were to be the world's last serious conflicts was not completely undermined in him until the first world war, in which Jerome served with the French ambulance corps. Just then, the suffragette movement was in full swing, and sex hatred had been added to the list. Michael Howard called his elegant recent essay The Invention of Peace, in order to emphasise that the idea of peace is no more than a couple of centuries old. Immanuel Kant's well known contribution was to argue that a peace of that kind would gradually and painfully be achieved as modern history worked itself out.
Armed conflict becomes highly probable.
President Abdurrahman Wahid is touring the disturbed province of Aceh this week calling for peace, but opposition leaders have refused to meet him. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are meeting near Washington, but in an atmosphere saturated with pessimism. No wonder, as one shrewd scholar puts it, that stocks in peace are low. The question that is hardest to answer is whether there has been a real advance in the science of peace, in the understanding of those intricate conditions to which Howard refers and in how to create those conditions, or whether we are riding toward yet another disappointment of the kind which Jerome's and later generations experienced. It is now sadly obvious that many of the peace settlements of the 90s did not wholly deserve that name.