Ludwig Quidde Quotes
Every success in limiting armaments is a sign that the will to achieve mutual understanding exists, and every such success thus supports the fight for international law and order.
The security of which we speak is to be attained by the development of international law through an international organization based on the principles of law and justice.
Armaments are necessary - or are maintained on the pretext of necessity - because of a real or an imagined danger of war.
It will be sufficient to point to the enormous burdens which armaments place on the economic, social, and intellectual resources of a nation, as well as on its budget and taxes.
Thus, if armaments were curtailed without a secure peace and all countries disarmed proportionately, military security would have been in no way affected.
So long as peace is not attained by law (so argue the advocates of armaments) the military protection of a country must not be undermined, and until such is the case disarmament is impossible.
We pacifists have not ceased to point to the grave danger of armaments and to insist on their curtailment.
Limitation of armaments in itself is economically and financially important quite apart from security.
Pacifist propaganda and the resolutions of the parliamentarians encouraged such treaties, and toward the end of the nineteenth century their number had increased considerably.
Disarmament or limitation of armaments, which depends on the progress made on security, also contributes to the maintenance of peace.
The popular, and one may say naive, idea is that peace can be secured by disarmament and that disarmament must therefore precede the attainment of absolute security and lasting peace.
When distrust exists between governments, when there is a danger of war, they will not be willing to disarm even when logic indicates that disarmament would not affect military security at all.
The relationship of the two problems is rather the reverse. To a great extent disarmament is dependent on guarantees of peace. Security comes first and disarmament second.
Time and time again we have experienced efforts directed toward this popular and simple concept of securing peace by means of disarmament.
Lightly armed nations can move toward war just as easily as those which are armed to the teeth, and they will do so if the usual causes of war are not removed.
The following year, after I had prepared my draft, the Conference of the Interparliamentary Union at The Hague decided to set up a special commission to study the problem seriously.