Introduction

The title comes from the sign of a Dutch inn, on which a graveyard was painted. Borrowing this ironic phrase, the seventy-one-year-old Kant set out a plan for lasting peace in the form of an international treaty. The 'preliminary articles' require that no treaty of peace secretly reserve matter for a future war, that standing armies be gradually abolished altogether, and that no state interfere by force in the constitution and government of another. The 'definitive articles' propose that the civil constitution of every state be republican, that the law of nations be founded on a federation of free states, and that cosmopolitan right be limited to conditions of universal hospitality. Peace, he holds, is not a natural state; it must be established. The book is regarded as the intellectual source of the League of Nations and the United Nations.