[345] Zum Ewigen Frieden, 1795; Verkündigung des nahen Abschlusses eines Tractats zum Ewigen Frieden in der Philosophie, 1796: Sämmtliche Werke, Band VI. pp. 405-454, 487-498. [346] Idee zu einer Allgemeinen Geschichte in Weltbürgerlicher Absicht: Sämmtliche Werke, Band IV. pp. 141-157. [347] Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre, §§ 53-61, _Das Völkerrecht_: Sämmtliche Werke, Band VII. pp. 141-157. By Perpetual Peace Kant understood a condition of nations where there could be no fear of War; and this condition, he said, was demanded by reason, which, abhorring all War, as little adapted to establish right, must regard this final development of the Law of Nations as a consummation worthy of every effort. The philosopher was right in proposing nothing less than a reform of International Law. To this, according to him, all persons, and particularly all rulers, should bend their energies. A special league or treaty should be formed, which may be truly called a _Treaty of Peace_, having this peculiarity, that, whereas other treaties terminate a single existing War only, this should terminate forever all War between the parties to it. A Treaty of Peace, tacitly acknowledging _the right to wage War_, as all treaties now do, is nothing more than a _Truce_, not Peace. By these treaties an individual War is ended, but not the _state of War_. There may not be constant hostilities; but there will be constant fear of hostilities, with constant threat of aggression and attack. Soldiers and armaments, now nursed as a Peace establishment, become the fruitful parent of new wars. With real Peace, these would be abandoned. Nor should nations hesitate to bow before the _law_, like individuals. They must form one comprehensive federation, which, by the aggregation of other nations, would at last embrace the whole earth. And this, according to Kant, in the succession of years, by a sure progress, is the irresistible tendency of nations. To this end nations must be truly independent; nor is it possible for one nation to acquire another independent nation, whether by inheritance, exchange, purchase, or gift. A nation is not property. The philosophy of Kant, therefore, contemplated not only Universal Peace, but Universal Liberty. The first article of the great treaty would be, that every nation is free. These important conclusions found immediate support from another German philosopher, Fichte, of remarkable acuteness and perfect devotion to truth, whose name, in his own day, awakened an echo inferior only to that of Kant. In his "Groundwork of the Law of Nature,"[348] published in 1796, he urges a Federation of Nations, with a Supreme Tribunal, as the best way of securing the triumph of justice, and of subduing the power of the unjust. To the suggestion, that by this Federation injustice might be done, he replied, that it would not be easy to find any common advantage tempting the confederate nations to do this wrong.