Nations will learn that they cannot conquer other nations without losing their own liberty; that permanent confederations are their only means of preserving their independence; and that they should not seek power but security. Gradually mercantile prejudices will fade away; and a false sense of commercial interest will lose the fearful power it once had of drenching the earth in blood and ruining nations under the pretext of enriching them. When at last the nations come to agree on the principles of politics and morality, when in their own better interests they invite foreigners to share equally in all the benefits men enjoy either through the bounty of nature or by their own industry, then all the causes that produce and perpetuate animosities and poison national relations will disappear one by one; and nothing will remain to encourage or even to arouse the fury of war.
Organizations more intelligently conceived than those projects of eternal peace which have filled the leisure and consoled the hearts of certain philosophers, will hasten the progress of the brotherhood of nations, and wars between countries will rank with assassinations as freakish atrocities, humiliating and vile in the eyes of nature and staining with indelible opprobrium the country or the age whose annals record them.
Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet
Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1793)
June Barraclough, trans. (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 194-195.
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