The Press of Europe and America is very busy discussing the lessons of
the diplomatic conflict which has just ended. And the outstanding
impression which one gets from most of these essays in high
politics--whether French, Italian, or British--is that we have been and
are witnessing part of a great world movement, the setting in motion of
Titanic forces "deep-set in primordial needs and impulses."
For months those in the secrets of the Chancelleries have spoken with
bated breath--as though in the presence of some vision of Armageddon.
On the strength of this mere talk of war by the three nations, vast
commercial interests have been embarrassed, fortunes have been lost and
won on the Bourses, banks have suspended payment, some thousands have
been ruined; while the fact that the fourth and fifth nations have
actually gone to war has raised all sorts of further possibilities of
conflict, not alone in Europe, but in Asia, with remoter danger of
religious fanaticism and all its sequelae. International bitterness and
suspicion in general have been intensified, and the one certain result
of the whole thing is that immense burdens will be added in the shape
of further taxation for armaments to the already heavy ones carried by
the five or six nations concerned. For two or three hundred millions of
people in Europe life, which with all the problems of high prices,
labor wars, unsolved social difficulties, is none too easy as it is,
will be made harder still.
The needs, therefore, that can have provoked a conflict of these
dimensions must be "primordial" indeed. In fact, one authority assures
us that what we have seen going on is "the struggle for life among
men"--that struggle which has its parallel in the whole of sentient
existence.
Well, I put it to you, as a matter worth just a moment or two of
consideration, that this conflict is about nothing of the sort; that it
is about a perfectly futile matter, one which the immense majority of
the German, English, French, Italian, and Turkish people could afford
to treat with the completest indifference. For, to the vast majority of
these 250,000,000 people, more or less, it does not matter two straws
whether Morocco or some vague, African swamp near the Equator is
administered by German, French, Italian, or Turkish officials, so long
as it is well administered. Or rather one should go further: if French,
German, or Italian colonization of the past is any guide, the nation
which wins in the conquest for territory of this sort has added a
wealth-draining incubus.
This, of course, is preposterous; I am losing sight of the need for
making provision for the future expansion of the race, of each party
desiring to "find its place in the sun"; and heaven knows what.
Well, let us for a moment get away from phrases and examine a few facts
usually ignored because they happen to be beneath our nose.
France has got a new empire, we are told; she has won a great victory;
she is growing and expanding and is richer by something which her
rivals are the poorer for not having.
Let us assume that she makes the same success of Morocco that she has
made of her other possessions, of, say, Tunis, which represents one of
the most successful of those operations of colonial expansion which
have marked her history during the last forty years. What has been the
precise effect on French prosperity?
In thirty years, at a cost of many million sterling (it is part of
successful colonial administration in France never to let it be known
what the colonies really cost) France has founded in Tunis a colony, in
which to-day there are, excluding soldiers and officials, about 25,000
genuine French colonists: just the number by which the French
population in France--the real France--is diminishing every six
months! And the value of Tunis as a market does not even amount to the
sum which France spends directly on its occupation and administration,
to say nothing of the indirect extension of military burden which its
conquest involves; and, of course, the market which it represents would
still exist in some form, though England--or even Germany--administered
the country.
In other words, France loses twice every year in her home population
two colonies equivalent to Tunis--if we measure colonies in terms of
communities made up of the race which has sprung from the mother
country. And yet, if once in a generation her rulers and diplomats can
point to 25,000 Frenchmen living artificially and exotically under
conditions which must in the long run be inimical to their race, it is
pointed to as "expansion" and as evidence that France is maintaining
her position as a Great Power. A few years, as history goes, unless
there is some complete change of tendencies which at present seem as
strong as ever, the French race as we now know it will have ceased to
exist, swamped without the firing, may be, of a single shot, by the
Germans, Belgians, English, Italians, and Jews. There are to-day in
France more Germans than there are Frenchmen in all the colonies that
France has acquired in the last half-century, and German trade with
France outweighs enormously the trade of France with all French
colonies. France is to-day a better colony for the Germans than they
could make of any exotic colony which France owns.
"They _tell_ me," said a French Deputy recently (in a not quite
original _mot_), "that the Germans are at Agadir. I _know_ they are in
the Champs-Elysées." Which, of course, is in reality a much more
serious matter.
And those Frenchmen who regret this disappearance of their race, and
declare that the energy and blood and money which is now poured out so
lavishly in Africa and in Asia ought to be diverted to its arrest, to
the colonization and development of France by better social,
industrial, commercial, and political organization, to the resisting of
the exploitation of the mother country by inflowing masses of
foreigners, are declared to be bad patriots, dead to the sentiment of
the flag, dead to the call of the bugle, are silenced in fact by a
fustian as senseless and mischievous as that which in some marvelous
way the politician, hypnotized by the old formulae, has managed to make
pass as "patriotism" in most countries.
The French, like their neighbors, are not interested in the Germans of
the Champs-Elysées, but only in the Germans at Agadir: and it is for
these latter that the diplomats fight, and the war budgets swell.
And from that silent and pacific expansion, which means so much both
negatively and positively, attention is diverted to the banging of the
war drum, and the dancing of the patriotic dervishes.
And on the other side we are to assume that Germany has during the
period of France's expansion--since the war--not expanded at all. That
she has been throttled and cramped--that she has not had her place in
the sun: and that is why she must fight for it and endanger the
security of her neighbors.
Well, I put it to you again that all this in reality is false: that
Germany has not been cramped or throttled; that, on the contrary, as we
recognize when we get away from the mirage of the map, her expansion
has been the wonder of the world. She has added 20,000,000 to her
population--one-half the present population of France--during a period
in which the French population has actually diminished. Of all the
nations in Europe, she has cut the biggest swath in the development of
world trade, industry, and influence. Despite the fact that she has not
"expanded" in the sense of mere political dominion, a proportion of her
population, equivalent to the white population of the whole colonial
British Empire, make their living, or the best part of it, from the
development and exploitation of territory outside her borders. These
facts are not new, they have been made the text of thousands of
political sermons preached in England itself during the last few years;
but one side of their significance seems to have been missed.
We get, then, this: On the one side a nation extending enormously its
political dominion and yet diminishing in national force, if by
national force we mean the growth of a sturdy, enterprising, vigorous
people. (I am not denying that France is both wealthy and comfortable,
to a greater degree it may be than her rival; but she has not her
colonies to thank for it--quite the contrary.) On the other side, we
get immense expansion expressed in terms of those things--a growing and
vigorous population and the possibility of feeding them--and yet the
political dominion, speaking practically, has hardly been extended at
all.
Such a condition of things, if the common jargon of high politics means
anything, is preposterous. It takes nearly all meaning out of most that
we hear about "primordial needs," and the rest of it.
As a matter of fact, we touch here one of the vital confusions, which
is at the bottom of most of the present political trouble between
nations, and shows the power of the old ideas, and the old phraseology.
In the days of the sailing ship and the lumbering wagon dragging slowly
over all but impassable roads, for one country to derive any
considerable profit from another, it had, practically, to administer it
politically. But the compound steam engine, the railway, the telegraph,
have profoundly modified the elements of the whole problem. In the
modern world political dominion is playing a more and more effaced role
as a factor in commerce; the non-political factors have in practise
made it all but inoperative. It is the case with every modern nation
actually that the outside territories which it exploits most
successfully are precisely those of which it does not "own" a foot.
Even with the most characteristically colonial of all--Great
Britain--the greater part of her overseas trade is done with countries
which she makes no attempt to "own," control, coerce, or dominate--and
incidentally she has ceased to do any of these things with her
colonies.
Millions of Germans in Prussia and Westphalia derive profit or make
their living out of countries to which their political dominion in no
way extends. The modern German exploits South America by remaining at
home. Where, forsaking this principle, he attempts to work through
political power, he approaches futility. German colonies are colonies
"pour rire." The Government has to bribe Germans to go to them; her
trade with them is microscopic; and if the twenty millions who have
been added to Germany's population since the war had had to depend on
their country's political conquest they would have had to starve. What
feeds them are countries which Germany has never "owned" and never
hopes to "own"; Brazil, Argentina, the United States, India, Australia,
Canada, Russia, France, and England. (Germany, which never spent a mark
on its political conquest, to-day draws more tribute from South America
than does Spain, which has poured out mountains of treasure and oceans
of blood in its conquest.) These are Germany's real colonies. Yet the
immense interests which they represent, of really primordial concern to
Germany, without which so many of her people would be actually without
food, are for the diplomats and the soldiers quite secondary ones; the
immense trade which they represent owes nothing to the diplomat, to
Agadir incidents, to Dreadnoughts; it is the unaided work of the
merchant and the manufacturer. All this diplomatic and military
conflict and rivalry, this waste of wealth, the unspeakable foulness
which Tripoli is revealing, are reserved for things which both sides to
the quarrel could sacrifice, not merely without loss, but with profit.
And Italy, whose statesmen have been faithful to all the old "axioms"
(Heaven save the mark!) will discover it rapidly enough. Even her
defenders are ceasing now to urge that she can possibly derive any real
benefit from this colossal ineptitude.
Italy struck at Turkey for "honor," for prestige--for the purpose of
impressing Europe. And one may hope that Europe (after reading the
reports of Reuter, _The Times_, the _Daily Mirror_, and the New York
_World_ as to the methods which Italy is using in vindicating her
"honor") is duly impressed, and that Italian patriots are satisfied
with these new glories added to Italian history. It is all they will
get.
Or rather, will they get much more: for Italy, as unhappily for the
balance of Europe, the substance will be represented by the increase of
very definite every-day difficulties--the high cost of living, the
uncertainty of employment, the very deep problems of poverty,
education, government, well-being. These remain--worsened. And
this--not the spectacular clash of arms, or even the less spectacular
killing of unarmed Arab men, women, and children--constitute the real
"struggle for life among men." But the dilettanti of "high politics"
are not interested. For those who still take their language and habits
of thought from the days of the sailing-ship, still talk of
"possessing" territory, still assume that tribute in some form is
possible, still imply that the limits of commercial and industrial
activity are dependent upon the limits of political dominion, the
struggle is represented by this futile physical collision of groups,
which, however victory may go, leaves the real solution further off
than ever.
We know what preceded this war: if Europe had any moral conscience
left, it would have been shocked as it was never shocked before. Turkey
said: "We will submit Italy's grievance to any tribunal that Europe
cares to name, and abide by the result." Italy said: "We don't intend
to have the case judged, but to take Tripoli. Hand it over--in
twenty-four hours." The Turkish Government said: "At least make it
possible for us to face our own people. Call it a Protectorate; give us
the shadow of sovereignty. Otherwise it is not robbery--to which we
should submit--but gratuitous degradation; we should abdicate before
the eyes of our own people. We will do anything you like." "In that
case," said Italy, "we will rob; and we will go to war."
It was not merely robbery that the Italian Government intended, but
they meant from the first that it should be war--to "dish the
Socialists," to play some sordid intrigue of internal politics.
The ultimatum was launched from the center of Christendom--the city
which lodges the titular head of the Universal Church--to teach to the
Mohammedan world what may be expected from a modern Christian
Government with its back to eighteen centuries of Christian teaching.
We, Christendom, spend scores of millions--hundreds of millions, it may
be--in the propagation of the Christian faith: numberless men and women
gave their lives for it, our fathers spent two centuries in unavailing
warfare for the capture of some of its symbols. Presumably, therefore,
we attach some value to its principles, deeming them of some worth in
the defense of human society.
Or do we believe nothing of the sort? Is our real opinion that these
things at bottom don't matter--or matter so little that for the sake of
robbing the squalid belongings of a few Arab tribes, or playing some
mean game of party politics, they can be set aside in a whoop of
"patriotism"?
Our press waxes indignant in this particular case, and that is the end
of it. But we do not see that we are to blame, that it is all the
outcome of a conception of politics which we are forever ready to do
our part to defend, to do daily our part to uphold.
And those of us who try in our feeble way to protest against this
conception of politics and patriotism, where everything stands on its
head; where the large is made to appear the great, and the great is
made to appear the small, are derided as sentimentalists, Utopians. As
though anything could be more sentimental, more divorced from the sense
of reality, than the principles which lead us to a condition of things
like these; as though anything could be more wildly, burlesquely
Utopian than the idea that efforts of the kind that the Italian people
are now making, the energy they are now spending, could ever achieve
anything of worth.
Is it not time that the man in the street, verily, I believe, less
deluded by diplomatic jargon than his betters, less the slave of an
obsolete phraseology, insisted that the experts in the high places
acquired some sense of the reality of things, of proportion, some sense
of figures, a little knowledge of industrial history, of the real
processes of human cooperation?
At present Europe is quite indifferent to Italy's behavior. The
Chancelleries, which will go to enormous trouble and take enormous
risks and concoct alliances and counter-alliances when there is
territory to be seized, remain cold when crimes of this sort are
committed. And they remain cold because they believe that Turkey alone
is concerned. They do not see that Italy has attacked not Turkey, but
Europe; that we, more than Turkey, will pay the broken pots.
And there is a further reason: We still believe in these piracies; we
believe they pay and that we may get our turn at some "swag" to-morrow.
France is envied for her possession of Morocco; Germany for her
increased authority over some pestilential African swamps. But when we
realize that in these international burglaries there is no "swag," that
the whole thing is an illusion, that there are huge costs but no
reward, we shall be on the road to a better tradition, which, while it
may not give us international policing, may do better still--render the
policing unnecessary. For when we have realized that the game is not
worth the candle, when no one desires to commit aggression, the
competition in armaments will have become a bad nightmare of the past.