that revelation. Whether it will be believed by a larger number of
persons a hundred years hence than to-day depends, I suppose, on whether
the nation will be in a more healthy condition than it is now. The chief
rival to Christianity is secularism; and this creed has some bitter
disappointments in store for its worshippers. I cannot help hoping that
the human race, having taken in succession every path except the right
one, may pay more attention to the narrow way that leadeth unto life. In
morals, the Church will undoubtedly have a hard battle to fight. The
younger generation has discarded all _tabus_, and in matters of sex we
must be prepared for a period of unbridled license. But such lawlessness
brings about its own cure by arousing disgust and shame; and the
institution of marriage is far too deeply rooted to be in any danger
from the revolution.
I have, I suppose, made it clear that I do not consider myself specially
fortunate in having been born in 1860, and that I look forward with
great anxiety to the journey through life which my children will have to
make. But, after all, we judge our generation mainly by its surface
currents. There may be in progress a storage of beneficent forces which
we cannot see. There are ages of sowing and ages of reaping: the
brilliant epochs may be those in which spiritual wealth is squandered,
the epochs of apparent decline may be those in which the race is
recuperating after an exhausting effort. To all appearance, man has
still a great part of his long lease before him, and there is no reason
to suppose that the future will be less productive of moral and
spiritual triumphs than the past. The source of all good is like an
inexhaustible river; the Creator pours forth new treasures of goodness,
truth, and beauty for all who will love them and take them. 'Nothing
that truly _is_ can ever perish,' as Plotinus says; whatever has value
in God's sight is safe for evermore. Our half-real world is the factory
of souls, in which we are tried, as in a furnace. We are not to set our
hopes upon it, but to learn such wisdom as it can teach us while we pass
through it. I will therefore end these thoughts on our present
discontents with two messages of courage and confidence, one from
Chaucer, the other from Blake.
That thee is sent, receyve in buxomnesse,
The wrastling for this worlde axeth a fall.
Her is non hoom, her nis but wildernesse:
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stall!
Know thy contree, look up, thank God of all:
Weyve thy lust, and let thy gost thee lede;
And trouthe shall delivere, it is no drede.
And this:--
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know
Safely through the world we go.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Times Literary Supplement_, July 18, 1918.
[2] Hearnshaw, _Democracy at the Crossroads_, p. 63.
[3] Miss M. Loane. Mr. Stephen Reynolds has said the same.
[4] Professor Hearnshaw quotes: 'Il y a opposition évidente
et irréductible entre les principes socialistes et les
principes démocratiques. Il n'y a pas de conceptions
politiques qui soient séparées par des abîmes plus profonds
que la démocratie et le socialisme' (Le Bon). 'Socialism
must be built on ideas and institutions totally different
from the ideas and institutions of democracy' (Levine). 'La
democratic tend à la conciliation des classes, tandis que le
socialisme organise la lutte de classe' (Lagardelle).
[5] A.D. Lewis, _Syndicalism and the General Strike_.
[6] _The Division of the Product of Industry_.
[7] _First and Last Things_ (pp. 148-9. Published in 1908).
PATRIOTISM
(1915)
The sentiment of patriotism has seemed to many to mark an arrest of
development in the psychical expansion of the individual, a half-way
house between mere self-centredness and full human sympathy. Some
moralists have condemned it as pure egoism, magnified and disguised.
'Patriotism,' says Ruskin, 'is an absurd prejudice founded on an
extended selfishness.' Mr. Grant Allen calls it 'a vulgar vice--the
national or collective form of the monopolist instinct.' Mr. Havelock
Ellis allows it to be 'a virtue--among barbarians.' For Herbert Spencer
it is 'reflex egoism--extended selfishness.' These critics have made the
very common mistake of judging human emotions and sentiments by their
roots instead of by their fruits. They have forgotten the Aristotelian
canon that the 'nature' of anything is its completed development (hê
phusis telos estin). The human self, as we know it, is a transitional
form. It had a humble origin, and is capable of indefinite enhancement.
Ultimately, we are what we love and care for, and no limit has been set
to what we may become without ceasing to be ourselves. The case is the
same with our love of country. No limit has been set to what our country
may come to mean for us, without ceasing to be our country. Marcus
Aurelius exhorted himself--'The poet says, Dear city of Cecrops; shall
not I pay, Dear city of God?' But the city of God in which he wished to
be was a city in which he would still live as 'a Roman and an Antonine.'
The citizen of heaven knew that it was his duty to 'hunt Sarmatians' on
earth, though he was not obliged to imbrue his hands with 'Cæsarism.'
Patriotism has two roots, the love of clan and the love of home. In
migratory tribes the former alone counts; in settled communities
diversities of origin are often forgotten. But the love of home, as we
know it, is a gentler and more spiritual bond than clanship. The word
home is associated with all that makes life beautiful and sacred, with
tender memories of joy and sorrow, and especially with the first eager
outlook of the young mind upon a wonderful world. A man does not as a
rule feel much sentiment about his London house, still less about his
office or factory. It is for the home of his childhood, or of his
ancestors, that a man will fight most readily, because he is bound to it
by a spiritual and poetic tie. Expanding from this centre, the sentiment
of patriotism embraces one's country as a whole.
Both forms of patriotism--the local and the racial, are frequently
alloyed with absurd, unworthy or barbarous motives. The local patriot
thinks that Peebles, and not Paris, is the place for pleasure, or asks
whether any good thing can come out of Nazareth. To the Chinaman all
aliens are 'outer barbarians' or 'foreign devils.' Admiration for
ourselves and our institutions is too often measured by our contempt and
dislike for foreigners. Our own nation has a peculiarly bad record in
this respect. In the reign of James I the Spanish ambassador was
frequently insulted by the London crowd, as was the Russian ambassador
in 1662; not, apparently, because we had a burning grievance against
either of those nations, but because Spaniards and Russians are very
unlike Englishmen. That at least is the opinion of the sagacious Pepys
on the later of these incidents. 'Lord! to see the absurd nature of
Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that
looks strange.' Defoe says that the English are 'the most churlish
people alive' to foreigners, with the result that 'all men think an
Englishman the devil.' In the 17th and 18th centuries Scotland seems to
have ranked as a foreign country, and the presence of Scots in London
was much resented. Cleveland thought it witty to write:--
Had Cain been Scot, God would have changed his doom;
Not forced him wander, but confined him home.
And we all remember Dr. Johnson's gibes.
British patriotic arrogance culminated in the 18th and in the first half
of the 19th century; in Lord Palmerston it found a champion at the head
of the government. Goldsmith describes the bearing of the Englishman of
his day:--
Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
I see the lords of human kind pass by.
Michelet found in England 'human pride personified in a people,' at a
time when the characteristic of Germany was 'a profound impersonality.'
It may be doubted whether even the arrogant brutality of the modern
Prussian is more offensive to foreigners than was the calm and haughty
assumption of superiority by our countrymen at this time. Our
grandfathers and great-grandfathers were quite of Milton's opinion,
that, when the Almighty wishes something unusually great and difficult
to be done, He entrusts it to His Englishmen. This unamiable
characteristic was probably much more the result of insular ignorance
than of a deep-seated pride. 'A generation or two ago,' said Mr. Asquith
lately, 'patriotism was largely fed and fostered upon reciprocal
ignorance and contempt.' The Englishman seriously believed that the
French subsisted mainly upon frogs, while the Frenchman was equally
convinced that the sale of wives at Smithfield was one of our national
institutions. This fruitful source of international misunderstanding has
become less dangerous since the facilities of foreign travel have been
increased. But in the relations of Europe with alien and independent
civilisations, such as that of China, we still see brutal arrogance and
vulgar ignorance producing their natural results.
Another cause of perverted patriotism is the inborn pugnacity of the
_bête humaine_. Our species is the most cruel and destructive of all
that inhabit this planet. If the lower animals, as we call them, were
able to formulate a religion, they might differ greatly as to the shape
of the beneficent Creator, but they would nearly all agree that the
devil must be very like a big white man. Mr. McDougall[8] has lately
raised the question whether civilised man is less pugnacious than the
savage; and he answers it in the negative. The Europeans, he thinks, are
among the most combative of the human race. We are not allowed to knock
each other on the head during peace; but our civilisation is based on
cut-throat competition; our favourite games are mimic battles, which I
suppose effect for us a 'purgation of the emotions' similar to that
which Aristotle attributed to witnessing the performance of a tragedy:
and, when the fit seizes us, we are ready to engage in wars which cannot
fail to be disastrous to both combatants. Mr. McDougall does not regret
this disposition, irrational though it is. He thinks that it tends to
the survival of the fittest, and that, if we substitute emulation for
pugnacity, which on other grounds might seem an unmixed advantage, we
shall have to call in the science of eugenics to save us from becoming
as sheeplike as the Chinese. There is, however, another side to this
question, as we shall see presently.
Another instinct which has supplied fuel to patriotism of the baser sort
is that of acquisitiveness. This tendency, without which even the most
rudimentary civilisation would be impossible, began when the female of
the species, instead of carrying her baby on her back and following the
male to his hunting-grounds, made some sort of a lair for herself and
her family, where primitive implements and stores of food could be kept.
There are still tribes in Brazil which have not reached this first step
towards humanisation. But the instinct of hoarding, like all other
instincts, tends to become hypertrophied and perverted; and with the
institution of private property comes another institution--that of
plunder and brigandage. In private life, no motive of action is at
present so powerful and so persistent as acquisitiveness, which, unlike
most other desires, knows no satiety. The average man is rich enough
when he has a little more than he has got, and not till then. The
acquisition and possession of land satisfies this desire in a high
degree, since land is a visible and indestructible form of property.
Consequently, as soon as the instincts of the individual are transferred
to the group, territorial aggrandisement becomes a main preoccupation of
the state. This desire was the chief cause of wars, while kings and
nobles regarded the territories over which they ruled as their private
estates. Wherever despotic or feudal conditions survive, such ideas are
likely still to be found, and to cause dangers to other states. The
greatest ambition of a modern emperor is still to be commemorated as a
'Mehrer des Reichs.'
Capitalism, by separating the idea of property from any necessary
connection with landed estate, and democracy, by denying the whole
theory on which dynastic wars of conquest are based, have both
contributed to check this, perhaps the worst kind of war. It would,
however, be a great error to suppose that the instinct of
acquisitiveness, in its old and barbarous form, has lost its hold upon
even the most civilised nations. When an old-fashioned brigand appears,
and puts himself at the head of his nation, he becomes at once a popular
hero. By any rational standard of morality, few greater scoundrels have
lived than Frederick the Great and Napoleon I. But they are still names
to conjure with. Both were men of singularly lucid intellect and
entirely medieval ambitions. Their great achievement was to show how
under modern conditions aggressive war may be carried on without much
loss (except in human life) to the aggressor. They tore up all the
conventions which regulated the conduct of warfare, and reduced it to
sheer brigandage and terrorism. And now, after a hundred years, we see
these methods deliberately revived by the greatest military power in the
world, and applied with the same ruthlessness and with an added pedantry
which makes them more inhuman. The perpetrators of the crime calculated
quite correctly that they need fear no reluctance on the part of the
nation, no qualms of conscience, no compassionate shrinking, no remorse.
It must, indeed, be a bad cause that cannot count on the support of the
large majority of the people at the _beginning_ of a war. Pugnacity,
greed, mere excitement, the contagion of a crowd, will fill the streets
of almost any capital with a shouting and jubilant mob on the day after
a war has been declared.
And yet the motives which we have enumerated are plainly atavistic and
pathological. They belong to a mental condition which would conduct an
individual to the prison or the gallows. We do not argue seriously
whether the career of the highwayman or burglar is legitimate and
desirable; and it is impossible to maintain that what is disgraceful for
the individual is creditable for the state. And apart from the
consideration that predatory patriotism deforms its own idol and makes
it hateful in the eyes of the world, subsequent history has fully
confirmed the moral instinct of the ancient Greeks, that national
insolence or injustice (hybrist) brings its own severe punishment. The
imaginary dialogue which Thucydides puts into the mouth of the Athenian
and Melian envoys, and the debate in the Athenian Assembly about the
punishment of revolted Mitylene, are intended to prepare the reader for
the tragic fate of the Sicilian expedition. The same writer describes
the break-up of all social morality during the civil war in words which
seem to herald the destruction not only of Athens but of Greek freedom.
Machiavelli's 'Prince' shows how history can repeat itself, reiterating
its lesson that a nation which gives itself to immoral aggrandisement is
far on the road to disintegration. Seneca's rebuke to his slave-holding
countrymen, 'Can you complain that you have been robbed of the liberty
which you have yourselves abolished in your own homes?' applies equally
to nations which have enslaved or exploited the inhabitants of subject
lands. If the Roman Empire had a long and glorious life, it was because
its methods were liberal, by the standard of ancient times. In so far as
Rome abused her power, she suffered the doom of all tyrants.
The illusions of imperialism have been made clearer than ever by the
course of modern history. Attempts to destroy a nationality by
overthrowing its government, proscribing its language, and maltreating
its citizens, are never successful. The experiment has been tried with
great thoroughness in Poland; and the Poles are now more of a nation
than they were under the oppressive feudal system which existed before
the partitions. Our own empire would be a ludicrous failure if it were
any part of our ambition to Anglicise other races. The only English
parts of the empire were waste lands which we have peopled with our own
emigrants. We hauled down the French flag in Canada, with the result
that Eastern Canada is now the only flourishing French colony, and the
only part of the world where the French race increases rapidly. We have
helped the Dutch to multiply with almost equal rapidity in South Africa.
We have added several millions to the native population of Egypt, and
over a hundred millions to the population of India. Similarly, the
Americans have made Cuba for the first time a really Spanish island, by
driving out its incompetent Spanish governors and so attracting
immigrants from Spain. On the whole, in imperialism nothing fails like
success. If the conqueror oppresses his subjects, they will become
fanatical patriots, and sooner or later have their revenge; if he treats
them well, and 'governs them for their good,' they will multiply faster
than their rulers, till they claim their independence. The Englishman
now says, 'I am quite content to have it so'; but that is not the old
imperialism.
The notion that frequent war is a healthy tonic for a nation is scarcely
tenable. Its dysgenic effect, by eliminating the strongest and
healthiest of the population, while leaving the weaklings at home to be
the fathers of the next generation, is no new discovery. It has been
supported by a succession of men, such as Tenon, Dufau, Foissac, de
Lapouge, and Richet in France; Tiedemann and Seeck in Germany; Guerrini
in Italy; Kellogg and Starr Jordan in America. The case is indeed
overwhelming. The lives destroyed in war are nearly all males, thus
disturbing the sex equilibrium of the population; they are in the prime
of life, at the age of greatest fecundity; and they are picked from a
list out of which from 20 to 30 per cent. have been rejected for
physical unfitness. It seems to be proved that the children born in
France during the Napoleonic wars were poor and undersized--30
millimetres below the normal height. War combined with religious
celibacy to ruin Spain. 'Castile makes men and wastes them,' said a
Spanish writer. 'This sublime and terrible phrase sums up the whole of
Spanish history.' Schiller was right; 'Immer der Krieg verschlingt die
besten.' We in England have suffered from this drain in the past; we
shall suffer much more in the next generation.
We have fed our sea for a thousand years,
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead.
We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid in full.
Aggressive patriotism is thus condemned by common sense and the verdict
of history no less than by morality. We are entitled to say to the
militarists what Socrates said to Polus:
This doctrine of yours has now been examined and found
wanting. And this doctrine alone has stood the test--that we
ought to be more afraid of doing than of suffering wrong;
and that the prime business of every man [and nation] is not
to seem good, but to be good, in all private and public
dealings.
If the nations would render something more than lip-service to this
principle, the abolition of war would be within sight; for, as Ruskin
says, echoing the judgment of the Epistle of St. James, 'The first
reason for all wars, and for the necessity of national defences, is that
the majority of persons, high and low, in all European countries, are
thieves.' But it must be remembered that, in spite of the proverb, it
takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep
to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains
of a different opinion.
Our own conversion to pacificism, though sincere, is somewhat recent.
Our literature does not reflect it. Bacon is frankly militarist:
Above all, for empire and greatness, it importeth most, that
a nation do profess arms, as their principal honour, study,
and occupation. For the things which we formerly have spoken
of are but habilitations towards arms; and what is
habitation without intention and act?... It is so plain that
a man profiteth in that he most intendeth, that it needeth
not to be stood upon. It is enough to point at it; that no
nation, which doth not directly profess arms, may look to
have greatness fall into their mouths.
A state, therefore, 'ought to have those laws or customs, which may
reach forth unto them just occasions of war.' Shakespeare's 'Henry V'
has been not unreasonably recommended by the Germans as 'good
war-reading.' It would be easy to compile a _catena_ of bellicose maxims
from our literature, reaching down to the end of the 19th century. The
change is perhaps due less to progress in morality than to that
political good sense which has again and again steered our ship through
dangerous rocks. But there has been some real advance, in all civilised
countries. We do not find that men talked about the 'bankruptcy of
Christianity' during the Napoleonic campaigns. Even the Germans think it
necessary to tell each other that it was Belgium who began this war.
But, though pugnacity and acquisitiveness have been the real foundation
of much miscalled patriotism, better motives are generally mingled with
these primitive instincts. It is the subtle blend of noble and ignoble
sentiment which makes patriotism such a difficult problem for the
moralist. The patriot nearly always believes, or thinks he believes,
that he desires the greatness of his country because his country stands
for something intrinsically great and valuable. Where this conviction is
absent we cannot speak of patriotism, but only of the cohesion of a
wolf-pack. The Greeks, who at last perished because they could not
combine, had nevertheless a consciousness that they were the trustees
of civilisation against barbarism; and in their day of triumph over the
Persians they were filled, for a time, with an almost Jewish awe in
presence of the righteous judgment of God. The 'Persæ' of Æschylus is
one of the noblest of patriotic poems. The Romans, a harder and coarser
race, had their ideal of _virtus_ and _gravitas_, which included
simplicity of life, dignity and self-restraint, honesty and industry,
and devotion to the state. They rightly felt that these qualities
constituted a vocation to empire. There was much harshness and injustice
in Roman imperialism; but what nobler epitaph could even the British
empire desire than the tribute of Claudian, when the weary Titan was at
last stricken and dying:
Hæc est, in gremium victos quæ sola recepit,
humanumque genus communi nomine fovit
matris non dominæ ritu, civesque vocavit
quos domuit, nexuque pio longinqua revinxit?