# France Will Live Again*

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU

THERE will always be a great difference between subduing a multitude and ruling a society. Even if scattered individuals were successively enslaved by one man, however numerous they might be I still see no more than a master and his slaves, and certainly not a people and its ruler; I see what may be termed an aggregation, but not an association; there is as yet neither public good nor body politic. The man in question, even if he has enslaved half the world, is still only an individual; his interest, apart from that of others, is still a purely private interest. If this same man comes to die, his empire, after him, remains scattered and without unity, as an oak falls and dissolves into a heap of ashes when the fire has consumed it.

The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty. Hence the right of the strongest, ironically enough, is really laid down as a fundamental principle. But are we never to have an explanation of this phrase? Force is a physical power, and I fail to see what moral effect it can have. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will—at the most, an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a duty?

Suppose for a moment this so-called "right" exists. I maintain that the sole result is a mass of inexplicable nonsense. For, if force creates right, the effect changes with the cause: every force that is greater than the first succeeds to its right. As soon as it is possible to disobey with impunity, disobedience is legitimate; and, the strongest being always in the right, the only thing that matters is to act so as to become the strongest. But what kind of right is that which perishes when force fails? If we must obey perforce, there is no need to obey because we ought; and if we are not forced to obey, we are under no obligation to do so. Clearly, the word "right" adds nothing to force: in this connection, it means absolutely nothing.

Obey the powers that be. If this means yield to force, it is a good precept, but superfluous: I can answer for its never being violated. All power comes from God, I admit; but so does all sickness: does that mean that we are forbidden to call in the doctor? A brigand surprises me at the edge of a wood: must I not merely surrender my purse on compulsion; but, even if I could withhold it, am I not in conscience bound to give it up? For certainly the pistol he holds is also a power.

Let us then admit that force does not create right, and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers.

It will be said that the despot assures his subjects civil tranquillity. Granted; but what do they gain, if the wars his ambition brings down upon them, his insatiable avidity, and the vexatious conduct of his ministers press harder on them than their own dissensions would have done?

What do they gain, if the very tranquillity they enjoy is one of their miseries? Tranquillity is found also in lungeons; but is that enough to make them desirable places to live in? The Greeks imprisoned in the cave of the Cyclops lived there very tranquilly, while they were awaiting their turn to be devoured.

To say that a man gives himself gratuitously, is to say what is absurd and inconceivable; such an act is null and illegitimate, from the mere fact that he who does it is out of his mind. To say the same of a whole people is to suppose a people of madmen; and madness creates no right.

Even if each man could alienate himself, he could not alienate his children: they are born men and free; their liberty belongs to them, and no one but they themselves have the right to dispose of it. Before they come to years of discretion, the father can, in their name, lay down conditions for their preservation and well-being, but he cannot give them irrevocably and without conditions: such a gift is contrary to the ends of nature, and exceeds the rights of paternity. It would therefore be necessary, in order to legitimize an arbitrary government, that in every generation the people should be in a position to accept or reject it; but, were this so, the government would be no longer arbitrary.

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts. Finally it is an empty and contradictory convention that sets up, on the one side, absolute authority, and, on the other, unlimited obedience. Is it not clear that we can be under no obligation to a person from whom we have the right to exact everything? Does not this condition alone, in the absence of equivalence or exchange, in itself involve the nullity of the act? For what right can my slave have against me, when all that he has belongs to me, and, his right being mine, this right of mine against myself is a phrase devoid of meaning?

Grotius and the rest find in war another origin for the so-called right of slavery. The victor having, as they hold, the right of killing the vanquished, the latter can buy back his life at the price of his liberty; and this convention is the more legitimate because it is to the advantage of both parties.

But it is clear that this supposed right to kill the conquered is by no means deducible from the state of war. Men, from the mere fact that, while they are living their primitive independence, they have no mutual relations stable enough to constitute either the state of peace or the state of war, cannot be naturally enemies. War is constituted by a relation between things, and not between persons; and, as the state of war cannot arise out of simple

*(Continued on page 15)*

*Title ours; article from "Contrat Social," 1762.

7

The Saturday Review
of LITERATURE

EDITORIAL BOARD

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY AMY LOVEMAN
ELMER DAVIS HARRISON SMITH

NORMAN COUSINS
Executive Editor

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY | Contributing
WILLIAM ROSE BENÉT | Editors

HARRISON SMITH
Publisher

Copyright, 1940, Saturday Review Co., Inc.

NOT RECRIMINATION
BUT RESOLVE

IT IS almost inevitable, in times such as these, to find scholars and writers turning back to history for a re-assembling and revaluation of the events leading up to the large-scale disasters which today are blasting away a substantial, perhaps fundamental, part of the structure of civilization. But even these investigations leave many questions unanswered—questions relating to the moral as well as physical unpreparedness of great nations and peoples, America included, in the face of grave dangers.

Archibald MacLeish places a large share of the blame upon the post-World War pacifist or semi-pacifist writers, of which he was one, whose works served to condition people against positive attitudes. Seeds of cynicism have been planted, he says, which have resulted in indifference among many people, especially the younger generation, toward moral values involved in the present war. Similar beliefs have been expressed by Walter Millis, who looks back and finds that the anti-war literature of the twenties and thirties, among which his own "Road to War" occupies a conspicuous place, has made the mistake of speaking of war in terms of absolutes, thus helping to seal the minds of people against changing conditions and changing events which make it clear that the evils of war are relative, and that the ultimate in evil may not necessarily be represented by mass murder on the battlefield but by mass slavery of men and ideas.

Along with these statements is the warning—implied in the case of MacLeish, explicit in the case of Millis—that America must accept and fulfill her obligations toward the reservations of moral values in the world, by force of arms, if necessary. This change of heart or attitude—call it what you will—not only by MacLeish

and Millis, but by a large number of other writers—may seem a paradox: the contradiction in fundamental philosophy between the MacLeish and Millis of, let us say, 1930, who were pro-pacifist, and the MacLeish and Millis of 1940, who are anti-pacifist.

And yet, there is no paradox, no contradiction, no inconsistency. The same motives which turned MacLeish and Millis and the others to the writing of pacifist literature until very recently are also behind their support of the fight against Hitlerism today. The least common denominator of their philosophies continues to be humanitarianism. The form may change—it was against war then and it is against barbarism now—but the substance remains the same. A Hemingway who cried out against the evils of war in "Farewell to Arms" picked up a gun and went off to war to fight the evils of something he felt was worse than war in Spain. In the World War liberals led the interventionist movement; in the years that followed they led the anti-war movement; today the trend seems to be returning to intervention again. Have the liberals changed sides? No; only targets.

But there are consequences of even a change in targets, as Mr. MacLeish has demonstrated. Many of those who are not old enough to remember the importance of moral factors contributing to our participation in the last war and who were nourished during their most formative years on books such as Hanighen's and Engelbrecht's "Merchants of Death," or Millis's "Road to War," or "Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front,"—each

of them an excellent work but each telling only part of the story—may have learned their lessons, as Mr. MacLeish fears, only too well.

Whatever the effect of our post-War literature, nothing can be gained now by continuous raking over of old coals. One of the disturbing developments in recent weeks has been an increasing tendency among writers to concern themselves unduly with blame-fixing; in many quarters the pointing of fingers has become a constant preoccupation. It would be unfortunate but perhaps characteristic of the American intellectual if he should allow the issue to become an end in itself, sublimating all thought and energy into polemics over the past, instead of bending himself to the problem at hand.

This is no time for recrimination. There is a big job to be done that needs doing quickly. The lightning, catastrophic successes of Nazism have shaken in many people their faith in the ability of America to maintain either the instruments or institutions of democracy. They have become confused, uncertain, intimidated. They must be told—even if the telling runs counter to the American worship of success—that success does not necessarily make right, any more than might makes right. They must be rallied around a re-definition of the meaning of human dignity, of the need to preserve a free interchange of ideas. A common ground must be cleared on which Americans can stand in unison and resolution.

Much of this job can be done by our writers, if only they will do it.

N. C.

For DuBose Heyward of Charleston

Died, June 16th, 1940

By Hervey Allen

HE will not see dark days to come
Whose shadow strikes the poet numb,
The twilight and the red eclipse
That stifles song behind the lips.

Clear voice that sang in better days
Sea islands, or the mountain ways
Of simple lives whose mouths were dumb,
Not all the bells of your loved town
In solemn, silver requiem rung
Proclaim you silent. Each replays
The notes of songs that you have sung.

Into old streets the music falls
He made us hear again, recalls
With tears to many a troubled eye
The flash of life when we were young.

Sunlight and starlight be his crown,
The myrtles of his native town
Inwoven with the sound of bells
That from her steepes shatters down.

8

The Saturday Review

FRANCE WILL LIVE AGAIN

(Continued from page 7)

personal relations, but only out of real relations, private war, or war of man with man, can exist neither in the state of nature, where there is no constant property, nor in the social state, where everything is under the authority of the laws.

War then is a relation, not between man and man, but between state and state, and individuals are enemies only accidentally, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers, not as members of their country, but as its defenders. Finally, each state can have for enemies only other states, and not men; for between things disparate in nature there can be no real relation.

Furthermore, this principle is in conformity with the established rules of all times and the constant practice of all civilized peoples. Declarations of war are intimations less to powers than to their subjects. Even in real war, a just prince, while laying hands in the enemy's country, on all that belongs to the public, respects the lives and goods of individuals: he respects rights on which his own are founded. The object of the war being the destruction of the hostile state, the other side has a right to kill its defenders, while they are bearing arms; but as soon as they lay them down, they cease to be enemies or instruments of the enemy, and become once more merely men, whose life no one has any right to take.

The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest. If war does not give the conqueror the right to massacre the conquered peoples, the right to enslave them cannot be based upon a right which does not exist. There is a vicious circle in founding the right of life and death on the right of slavery, and the right of slavery on the right of life and death.

Even if we assume this terrible right to kill everybody, I maintain that a slave made in war, or a conquered people, is under no obligation to a master, except to obey him as far as he is compelled to do so. By taking an equivalent for his life, the victor has not done him a favor; he has killed him usefully. So far then is he from acquiring over him any authority in addition to that of force, that the state of war continues to subsist between them: their mutual relation is the effect of it, and the usage of the right of war does not imply a treaty of peace. A convention has indeed been made; but this convention, so far from destroying the state of war, presupposes its continuance.

JUNE 29, 1940

question on which there would inevitably be endless wrangling. One may be conscious, as one drives across country, that one is climbing on to rising ground, and yet lack the surveyor's instruments to judge the precise altitude of the surrounding summits. I prefer to focus your attention upon the undeniable groundswell of the land all about us.

Whether or not the very finest things that we produce are better than they used to be, we Americans are a distinctly more mature people, a more culturally enlightened people, than we were a generation ago; and we appear to be better off for the participation of the millions in cultural things that were once considered chiefly the affair of the few.

Whenever I hear anybody lamenting a supposed lack of authentic contemporary American masterpieces, I am tempted to quote to him those familiar lines of Arthur Hugh Clough's:

> In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!

> But westward, look, the land is bright!

We Americans are building for ourselves a culture adapted to our own land. And we are a more integrated nation, for the participation of the millions in cultural things that were once considered the affair of the few.

Frederick Lewis Allen is the author of "Only Yesterday," and the recently published "Since Yesterday," interpretive histories of the nineteen-twenties and thirties.

## THE AXE OF FASCISM

LION FEUCHTWANGER, author of "Paris Gazette" is in a concentration camp in Les Milles, Aix-en-Provence, according to word received by the League of American Writers from France just prior to the truce. For some weeks Feuchtwanger has been housed in an old factory in an area which the Nazis are reported to have bombed. A report received more recently from France indicates that Mrs. Feuchtwanger, too, was taken into custody shortly after her husband's arrest.

Professor Alfred Kleinberg, Sudeten German, and author of several books about German literature was killed recently by the Nazis in Karlsbad, his native city. Kleinberg was a member of the German Writers Union of Prague, and a literary critic of the Social Democratic paper, *Volkswille* in Karlsbad. For several years Professor Kleinberg was a member of the jury of the State Prize for Literature in the German Language of the former Czechoslovak Republic.

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