The Hundred Years' Peace [17]
ferocious and total, effective safeguards were erected for the continu-
ance of peaceful business in wartime. Frederick the Great is on record
for having "by reprisal" refused, in 1752, to honor the Silesian loan due
to British subjects.* "No attempt of this sort has been made since," says
Hershey. "The wars of the French Revolution furnish us with the last
important examples of the confiscation of the private property of en-
emy subjects found in belligerent territory upon the outbreak of hos-
tilities." After the outbreak of the Crimean War, enemy merchantmen
were allowed to leave port, a practice which was adhered to by Prussia,
France, Russia, Turkey, Spain, Japan, and the United States during the
fifty following years. Since the beginning of that war a very large in-
dulgence in commerce between belligerents was allowed. Thus, in the
Spanish-American War, neutral vessels, laden with American-owned
cargoes other than contraband of war, cleared for Spanish ports. The
view that eighteenth-century wars were in
all respects less destructive
than nineteenth-century ones is a prejudice. In respect to the status of
enemy aliens, the service of loans held by enemy citizens, enemy prop-
erty, or the right of enemy merchantmen to leave port, the nineteenth
century showed a decisive turn in favor of measures to safeguard the
economic system in wartime. Only the twentieth century reversed
this trend.
Thus the new organization of economic life provided the back-
ground of the Hundred Years' Peace. In the first period the nascent
middle classes were mainly a revolutionary force endangering peace as
witnessed in the Napoleonic upheaval; it was against this new factor of
national disturbance that the Holy Alliance organized its reactionary
peace. In the second period the new economy was victorious. The
middle classes were now themselves the bearers of a peace interest,
much more powerful than that of their reactionary predecessors had
been, and nurtured by the national-international character of the new
economy. But in both instances the peace interest became effective
only because it was able to make the balance-of-power system serve its
cause by providing that system with social organs capable of dealing
directly with the internal forces active in the area of peace. Under the
Holy Alliance these organs were feudalism and the thrones, supported
by the spiritual and material power of the Church; under the Concert
of Europe they were international finance and the national banking
* Hershey, A. S.,
Essentials of International Public Law and Organization, 1927, pp.
565-9.