§ 54. War is the contention between two or more States through their armed forces for the purpose of overpowering each other and imposing such conditions of peace as the victor pleases. War is a fact recognised, and with regard to many points regulated, but not established, by International Law. Those writers[58] who define war as the legal remedy of self-help to obtain satisfaction for a wrong sustained from another State, forget that wars have often been waged by both parties engaged for political reasons only; they confound a possible but not at all necessary cause of war with the conception of war. A State may be driven into war because it cannot otherwise get reparation for an international delinquency, and such State may then maintain that it exercises by war nothing else than legally recognised self-help. But when States are driven into or deliberately wage war for political reasons, no legally recognised act of self-help is in such case performed by the war. And the same laws of war are valid, whether wars are waged on account of legal or of political differences. [Footnote 58: See, for instance, Vattel, III. § 1; Phillimore, III. § 49; Twiss, II. § 26; Bluntschli, § 510; Bulmerincq, § 92.] [Sidenote: War a contention.] § 55. In any case, it is universally recognised that war is a _contention_, which means, _a violent struggle through the application of armed force_. For a war to be in existence, two or more States must actually have their armed forces fighting against each other, although the commencement of a war may date back to its declaration or some other unilateral initiative act. Unilateral acts of force performed by one State against another without a previous declaration of war may be a cause of the outbreak of war, but are not war in themselves, as long as they are not answered by similar hostile acts by the other side, or at least by a declaration of the other side that it considers the particular acts as acts of war. Thus it comes about that acts of force performed by one State against another by way of reprisal or during a pacific blockade in the case of an intervention are not necessarily initiative acts of war. And even acts of force illegally performed by one State against another, such, for instance, as occupation of a part of its territory, are not acts of war so long as they are not met with acts of force from the other side, or at least with a declaration from the latter that it considers the particular acts as acts of war. Thus, when Louis XIV. of France, after the Peace of Nimeguen, instituted the so-called Chambers of Reunion and in 1680 and 1681 seized the territory of the then Free Town of Strassburg and other parts of the German Empire without the latter's offering armed resistance, these acts of force, although doubtless illegal, were not acts of war. [Sidenote: War a contention between States.]