157. (1) It may be admitted that to describe war as 'multitudinous
murder' is a figure of speech. The essence of murder does not lie
in the fact that one man takes away the life of another, but that
he does this to 'gain his private ends' and with 'malice' against
the person killed. I am not here speaking of the legal definition
of murder, but of murder as a term of moral reprobation, in which
sense it must be used by those who speak of war as 'multitudinous
murder.' They cannot mean murder in the legal sense, because in
that sense only 'unlawful killing,' which killing in war is not, is
murder. When I speak of 'malice,' therefore, I am not using 'malice'
in the legal sense. In that sense 'malice' is understood to be the
attribute of every 'wrongful act done intentionally without just
or lawful excuse,' [1] and is ascribed to acts (such as killing an
officer of justice, knowing him to be such, while resisting him in a
riot) in which there is no ill-will of the kind which we suppose in
murder, when we apply the term in its natural sense as one of moral
disapprobation. Of murder in the moral sense the characteristics are
those stated, and these are not present in the case of a soldier who
kills one on the other side in battle. He has no ill-will to that
particular person or to any particular person. He incurs an equal
risk with the person whom he kills, and incurs that risk not for
the sake of killing him. His object in undergoing it is not private
to himself, but a service (or what he supposes to be a service) to
his country, a good which is his own no doubt (that is implied in
his desiring it), but which he presents to himself as common to him
with others. Indeed, those who might speak of war as 'multitudinous
murder' would not look upon the soldier as a murderer. If reminded
that there cannot be a murder without a murderer, and pressed to say
who, when a bloody battle takes place, the murderer or murderers
are, they would probably point to the authors of the war. It may be
questioned, by the way, whether there has ever been a war of which
the origination could be truly said to rest with a definite person
or persons, in the same way in which the origination of an act which
would be called murder in the ordinary sense rests with a particular
person. No doubt there have been wars for which certain assignable
individuals were specially blameable, wars which they specially
helped to bring about or had special means of preventing (and the
more the wickedness of such persons is kept in mind the better); but
even in these cases the cause of the war can scarcely be held to be
gathered up within the will of any individual, or the combined will
of certain individuals, in the same way as is the cause of murder or
other punishable acts. When A.B. is murdered, the sole cause lies in
some definite volition of CD. or others, however that volition may
have been caused. But when a war 'breaks out,' though it is not to
be considered, as we are too apt to consider it, a natural calamity
which could not be prevented, it would be hard to maintain that
the sole cause lies in some definite volition on the part of some
assignable person or persons, even of those who are most to blame.
Passing over this point, however, if the acts of killing in war are
not murders (in the _moral_ sense, the _legal_ being out of the
question) because they lack those characteristics on the part of the
agent's state of mind which are necessary to constitute a murder,
the persons who cause those acts to be committed, if such persons
can be pointed out, are not the authors of murder, multitudinous
or other. They would only be so if the characteristic of 'malice,'
which is absent on the part of the immediate agent of the act, were
present on their part as its ultimate agents. But this is not the
case. However selfish their motives, they cannot fairly be construed
into ill-will towards the persons who happened to be killed in the
war; and therefore, whatever wickedness the persons responsible for
the war are guilty of, they are not guilty of 'murder' in any natural
sense of the term, nor is there any murder in the case at all.
[1] Markby, _Elements of Law_, sec. 226.
158. It does not follow from this, however, that war is ever other
than a great wrong, as a violation on a multitudinous scale of the
individual's right to life. Whether it is so or not must be discussed
on other grounds. If there is such a thing as a right to life on the
part of the individual man as such, is there any reason to doubt that
this right is violated in the case of every man killed in war? It is
not to the purpose to allege that in order to a violation of right
there must be not only a suffering of some kind on the part of the
subject of a right, but an intentional act causing it on the part of
a human agent. There is of course no violation of right when a man
is killed by a wild beast or a stroke of lightning, because there is
no right as between a man and a beast or between a man and a natural
force. But the deaths in a battle are caused distinctly by human
agency and intentional agency. The individual soldier may not have
any very distinct intention when he fires his rifle except to obey
orders, but the commanders of the army and the statesmen who send it
into the field intend the death of as many men as may be necessary
for their purpose. It is true they do not intend the death of this or
that particular person, but no more did the Irishman who fired into
a body of police guarding the Fenian prisoners. It might fairly be
held that this circumstance exempted the Irishman from the special
moral guilt of murder, though according to our law it did not exempt
him from the legal guilt expressed by that term; but no one would
argue that it made the act other than a violation of the right to
life on the part of the policeman killed. No more can the absence
of an intention to kill this or that specific person on the part of
those who cause men to be killed in battle save their act from being
a violation of the right to life.
159. Is there then any condition on the part of the persons killed
that saves the act from having this character? It may be urged that
when the war is conducted according to usages that obtain between
civilised nations, (not when it is a village-burning war like that
between the English and Afghans), the persons killed are voluntary
combatants, and οὐδεὶς ἀδικεῖται ἑκών [1]. Soldiers, it may be said,
are in the position of men who voluntarily undertake a dangerous
employment. If some of them are killed, this is not more a violation
of the human right to life than is the death of men who have engaged
to work in a dangerous coal-pit. To this it must be answered that
if soldiers did in fact voluntarily incur the special risk of death
incidental to their calling, it would not follow that the right to
life was not violated in their being--killed. It is not a right
which it rests with a man to retain or give up at his pleasure. It
is not the less a wrong that a man should be a slave because he has
sold himself into slavery. The individual's right to live is but
the other side of the right which society has in his living. The
individual can no more voluntarily rid himself of it than he can of
the social capacity, the human nature, on which it is founded. Thus,
however ready men may be for high wages to work in a dangerous pit,
a wrong is held to be done if they are killed in it. If provisions
which might have made it safe have been neglected, someone is held
responsible. If nothing could make it safe, the working of the pit
would not be allowed. The reason for not more generally applying the
power of the state to prevent voluntary noxious employments, is not
that there is no wrong in the death of the individual through the
incidents of an employment which he has voluntarily undertaken, but
that the wrong is more effectually prevented by training and trusting
individuals to protect themselves than by the state protecting them.
Thus the waste of life in war would not be the less a wrong,--not the
less a violation of the right, which subsists between all members
of society, and which none can alienate, that each should have his
life respected by society,--if it were the fact that those whose
lives are wasted voluntarily incurred the risk of losing them. But
it can scarcely be held to be the fact. Not only is it impossible,
even when war is conducted on the most civilised methods, to prevent
great incidental loss of life (to say nothing of other injury) among
non-combatants; the waste of the life of the combatants is one which
the power of the state compels. This is equally true whether the army
is raised by voluntary enlistment or by conscription. It is obviously
so in the case of conscription; but under a system of voluntary
enlistment, though the individual soldier cannot say that he in
particular has been compelled by the government to risk his life,
it is still the case that the state compels the risk of a certain
number of lives. It decrees that an army of such a size shall be
raised, though if it can get the men by voluntary hiring it does not
exercise compulsion on the men of a particular age, and it sends the
army into the field. Its compulsive agency causes the death of the
soldiers killed, not any voluntary action on the part of the soldiers
themselves. The action of the soldiers no doubt contributes to the
result, for if they all refused to fight there would be no killing,
but it is an action put in motion and directed by the power of the
state, which is compulsive in the sense that it operates on the
individual in the last resort through fear of death.
[1] [Greek οὐδεὶς ἀδικεῖται ἑκών (oudeis adikeitai hekon) = there can
be no injustice to a person who has agreed to what is done to him Tr.]
160. We have then in war a destruction of human life inflicted on
the sufferers intentionally by voluntary human agency. It is true,
as we saw, that it is not easy to say in any case by whose agency in
particular. We may say indeed that it is by the agency of the state,
but what exactly does that mean? The state here must = the sovereign
power in the state; but it is always difficult to say by whom that
power is wielded, and if we could in any case specify its present
holders, the further question will arise whether their course of
action has not been shaped for them by previous holders of power.
But however widely distributed the agency may be which causes the
destruction of life in war, it is still intentional human agency. The
destruction is not the work of accident or of nature. If then it is
to be other than a wrong, because a violation of the right to mutual
protection of life involved in the membership of human society, it
can only be because there is exercised in war some right that is
paramount to this. It may be argued that this is the case; that there
is no right to the preservation of life at the cost of losing the
necessary conditions of 'living well'; that war is in some cases the
only means of maintaining these conditions, and that where this is
so, the wrong of causing the destruction of physical life disappears
in the paramount right of preserving the conditions under which alone
moral life is possible.
161. This argument, however, seems to be only available for shifting
the quarter in which we might be at first disposed to lay the blame
of the wrong involved in war, not for changing the character of
that wrong. It goes to show that the wrong involved in the death
of certain soldiers does not necessarily lie with the government
which sends those soldiers into the field, because this may be
the only means by which the government can prevent more serious
wrong; it does not show that there is no wrong in their death. If
the integrity of any state can only be maintained at the cost of
war, and if that state is more than what many so-called states have
been,--more than an aggregation of individuals or communities under
one ruling power,--if it so far fulfils the idea of a state, that
its maintenance is necessary to the free development of the people
belonging to it; then by the authorities or people of that state no
wrong is done by the destruction of life which war involves, except
so far as they are responsible for the state of things which renders
the maintenance of the integrity of the state impossible by other
means. But how does, it come about that the integrity of such a state
is endangered? Not by accident or by the forces of nature, but by
intentional human agency in some form or other, however complicated;
and with that agency lies the wrong-doing. To determine it (as we
might be able to do if a horde of barbarians broke in on a civilised
state, compelling it to resort to war for its defence) is a matter
of small importance: what _is_ important to bear in mind (being one
of those obvious truths out of which we may allow ourselves to be
sophisticated), is that the destruction of life in war is always
wrong-doing, whoever be the wrong-doer, and that in the wars most
strictly defensive of political freedom the wrong-doing is only
removed from the defenders of political freedom to be transferred
elsewhere. If it is difficult in any case to say precisely where,
that is only a reason for more general self-reproach, for a more
humbling sense (as the preachers would say) of complicity in that
radical (but conquerable, because moral) evil of mankind which
renders such a means of maintaining political freedom necessary. The
language, indeed, which we hear from the pulpit about war being a
punishment for the sins of mankind, is perfectly true, but it needs
to be accompanied by the reminder that this punishment of sin is
simply a consequence of the sin and itself a further sin, brought
about by the action of the sinner, not an external infliction brought
about by agencies to which man is not a party.
162. In fact, however, if most wars had been wars for the maintenance
or acquisition of political freedom, the difficulty of fixing the
blame of them, or at any rate of freeing one of the parties in
each case from blame, would be much less than it really is. Of the
European wars of the last four hundred years, how many could be
fairly said to have been wars in which either or any of the parties
were fighting for this end? Perhaps the wars in which the Dutch
Republics defended themselves against Spain and against Louis XIV,
and that in which Germany shook off the dominion of Napoleon. Perhaps
the more recent struggles of Italy and Hungary against the Austrian
Government. Perhaps in the first outset of the war of 1792 the French
may be fairly held to have been defending institutions necessary
for the development of social freedom and equality. In this war,
however, the issue very soon ceased to be one between the defenders
of such institutions on the one side, and their assailants on the
other, and in most modern wars the issue has not been of this kind
at all. The wars have arisen primarily out of the rival ambition of
kings and dynasties for territorial aggrandisement, with national
antipathies and ecclesiastical ambitions, and the passions arising
out of religious partisanship, as complicating influences. As nations
have come more and more to distinguish and solidify themselves, and
a national consciousness has come definitely to be formed in each,
the rival ambitions of nations have tended more and more first to
support, then perhaps to supersede, the ambitions of dynasties as
causes of war. The delusion has been practically dominant that the
gain of one nation must mean the loss of another. Hence national
jealousies in regard to colonial extension, hostile tariffs and
the effort of each nation to exclude others from its markets. The
explosion of this idea in the region of political economy has had
little effect in weakening its hold on men's minds. The people of
one nation still hear with jealousy of another nation's advance
in commerce, as if it meant some decay of their own. And if the
commercial jealousy of nations is very slow in disappearing, their
vanity, their desire apart from trade each to become or to seem
stronger than the other, has very much increased. A hundred and fifty
years ago national vanity could scarcely be said to be an influence
in politics. The people under one ruler were not homogeneous enough,
had not enough of a corporate consciousness, to develope a national
vanity. Now (under the name of patriotism) it has become a more
serious disturber of peace than dynastic ambition. Where the latter
is dangerous, it is because it has national vanity to work upon.
163. Our conclusion then is that the destruction of life in war (to
say nothing of other evils incidental to it with which we are not
here concerned) is always wrong doing, with whomsoever the guilt of
the wrong-doing may lie; that only those parties to a war are exempt
from a share in the guilt who can truly plead that to them war is
the only means of maintaining the social conditions of the moral
development of man, and that there have been very few cases in which
this plea could be truly made. In saying this it is not forgotten,
either that many virtues are called into exercise by war, or that
wars have been a means by which the movement of mankind, which there
is reason for considering a progress to higher good, has been carried
on. These facts do not make the wrong-doing involved in war any less
so. If nothing is to be accounted wrong-doing through which final
good is wrought, we must give up either the idea of there being such
a thing as wrong-doing, or the idea of there being such a thing as
final good. If final good results from the world of our experience,
it results from processes in which wrong-doing is an inseparable
element. Wrong-doing is voluntary action, either (in the deeper
moral sense) proceeding from a will uninfluenced by the desire to be
good on the part of the agent (which may be taken to include action
tending to produce such action), or (in the sense contemplated by
the 'jus naturae') it is action that interferes with the conditions
necessary to the free-play and development of a good-will on the
part of others. It may be that, according to the divine scheme of
the world, such wrong-doing is an element in a process by which men
gradually approximate more nearly to good (in the sense of a good
will). We cannot think of God as a moral being without supposing
this to be the case. But this makes no difference to wrong-doing in
those relations in which it is wrong-doing, and with which alone we
are concerned, viz. in relation to the will of human agents and to
the results which those agents can foresee and intend to produce. If
an action, so far as any results go which the agent can have in view
or over which he has control, interferes with conditions necessary
to the free-play and development of a good-will on the part of
others, it is not the less wrong-doing because, through some agency
which is not his, the effects which he intended, and which rendered
it wrong-doing, come to contribute to an ulterior good. Nor, if it
issues from bad will (in the sense explained), is it less wrong (in
the moral sense) because this will is itself, in the view of some
higher being, contributory to a moral good which is not, in whole or
part, within the view of the agent. If then war is wrong-doing in
both the above senses (as it is always, at any rate on the part of
those with whom the ultimate responsibility for it lies), it does not
cease to be so on account of any good resulting from it in a scheme
of providence.
164. 'But,' it may be asked, 'are we justified in saying that it
is always wrong-doing on the part of those with whom the ultimate
responsibility lies? It is admitted that certain virtues may be
evoked by war; that it may have results contributory to the moral
progress of mankind; may not the eliciting of these virtues, the
production of these results, be contemplated by the originators of
war, and does not the origination of war, so far as influenced by
such motives, cease to be wrong-doing? It must be admitted that
Caesar's wars in Gaul were unprovoked wars of conquest, but their
effect was the establishment of Roman civilisation with its equal law
over a great part of western Europe, in such a way that it was never
wholly swept away, and that a permanent influence in the progress of
the European polity can be traced to it. May he not be credited with
having had, however indefinitely, such an effect as this in view?
Even if his wish to extend Roman civilisation was secondary to a plan
for raising an army by which he might master the Republic, is he to
have no credit for the beneficent results which are admitted to have
ensued from the success of that plan? May not a similar justification
be urged for English wars in India? If, again, the establishment
of the civil unity of Germany and the liberation of Christian
populations in Turkey are admitted to have been gains to mankind, is
not that a justification of the persons concerned in the origination
of the wars that brought about those results, so far as they can be
supposed to have been influenced by a desire for them?'
165. These objections might be to the purpose if we were attempting
the task (generally, if not always, an impossible one) of determining
the moral desert, good or ill, of those who have been concerned
in bringing this or that war about. Their tendency merely is to
distribute the blame of the wrong-doing involved in war, to show
how widely ramified is the agency in that wrong-doing, not to
affect its character as wrong-doing. If the only way of civilising
Gaul was to kill all the people whom Caesar's wars caused to be
killed, and if the desire for civilising it was a prevailing motive
in Caesar's mind, so much the better for Caesar, but so much the
worse for the other unassignable and innumerable human agents who
brought it about that such an object could only be attained in such
a way. We are not, indeed, entitled to say that it could have been
brought about in any other way. It is true to say (if we know what
we are about in saying it) that nothing which happens in the world
could have happened otherwise than it has. The question for us is,
whether that condition of things which rendered e.g. Caesar's Gallic
wars, with the violation of human rights which they involved, the
interference in the case of innumerable persons with the conditions
under which man can be helpful to man (physical life being the first
of these), the _sine qua non_ in the promotion of ulterior human
welfare, was or was not the work of human agency. If it was (and
there is no doubt that it was, for to what merely natural agency
could the necessity be ascribed?), then in that ordinary sense of
the word 'could' in which it expresses our responsibility for our
actions, men _could_ have brought about the good result without the
evil means. They could have done so if they had been better. It was
owing to human wickedness--if less on Caesar's part, then so much
the more on the part of innumerable others--that the wrong-doing
of those wars was the appropriate means to this ulterior good. So
in regard to the other cases instanced. It is idle to speculate on
other means by which the permanent pacification of India, or the
unification of Germany, or the liberation of Christians in European
Turkey might have been brought about; but it is important to bear
in mind that the innumerable wrong acts involved in achieving
them--acts wrong, because violations of the rights of those directly
affected by them--did not cease to be wrong acts because under the
given condition of things the results specified would not have been
obtained without them. This given condition of things was not like
that (e.g.) which compels the castaways from a shipwreck, so many
days from shore, and with only so much provision in their boat, to
draw lots which shall be thrown overboard. It was a condition of
things which human wickedness, through traceable and untraceable
channels, brought about. If the individual promoters of wars,
which through the medium of multitudinous wrong-doing have yielded
good to mankind, have been really influenced by a desire for any
such good,--and much scepticism is justified in regard to such a
supposition,--then so much less of the guilt of the wrong-doing has
been theirs. No nation, at any rate, that has taken part in such wars
can fairly take credit for having been governed by such a motive. It
has been either a passive instrument in the hands of its rulers, or
has been animated by less worthy motives, very mixed, but of which
perhaps a diffused desire for excitement has been the most innocent.
On what reasonable ground can Englishmen or Germans or Russians claim
that their several nations took part in the wars by which India was
pacified, Germany unified, Bulgaria liberated, under the dominant
influence of a desire for human good? Rather, if the action of a
national conscience in such matters is possible at all, they should
take shame for their share in that general human selfishness which
rendered certain conditions of human development only attainable by
such means.
166. (2) Reverting then to the questions which arose [1] out of the
assertion of a right to free life on the part of the individual man
as such, it appears that the first must be answered in the negative.
No state of war can make the destruction of man's life by man other
than a wrong, though the wrong is not always chargeable upon all the
parties to a war. The second question is virtually answered by what
has been said about the first. In regard to the state according to
its idea the question could not arise, for according to its idea
the state is an institution in which all rights are harmoniously
maintained, in which all the capacities that give rise to rights have
free-play given to them. No action in its own interest of a state
that fulfilled this idea could conflict with any true interest or
right of general society, of the men not subject to its law taken as
a whole. There is no such thing as an inevitable conflict between
states. There is nothing in the nature of the state that, given a
multiplicity of states, should make the gain of the one the loss of
the other. The more perfectly each one of them attains its proper
object of giving free scope to the capacities of all persons living
on a certain range of territory, the easier it is for others to
do so; and in proportion as they all do so the danger of conflict
disappears.
[1] [Above, sec. 156. RLN]
167. On the other hand, the imperfect realisation of civil equality
in the full sense of the term in certain states, is in greater or
less degree a source of danger to all. The presence in states either
of a prerogatived class or of a body of people who, whether by open
denial of civil rights or by restrictive laws, are thwarted in
the free development of their capacities, or of an ecclesiastical
organisation which disputes the authority of the state on matters
of right and thus prevents the perfect civil fusion of its members
with other citizens, always breeds an imagination of there being
some competition of interests between states. The privileged class
involuntarily believes and spreads the belief that the interest of
the state lies in some extension without, not in an improvement of
organisation within. A suffering class attracts sympathy from without
and invites interference with the state which contains it; and that
state responds, not by healing the sore, but by defending against
aggression what it conceives to be its special interests, but which
are only special on account of its bad organisation. Or perhaps the
suffering population overflows into another state, as the Irish into
America, and there becomes a source not only of internal difficulty
but of hostile feeling between it and the state where the suffering
population still survives. People, again, who, in matters which the
state treats as belonging to itself, take their direction from an
ecclesiastical power external to the state under which they live,
are necessarily in certain relations alien to that state, and may at
any time prove a source of apparently conflicting interests between
it and some other state, which under the influence of the hostile
ecclesiastical power espouses their cause. Remove from European
states, as they are and have been during the last hundred years, the
occasions of conflict, the sources of apparently competing interests,
which arise in one or other of the ways mentioned,--either from the
mistaken view of state-interests which a privileged class inevitably
takes, or from the presence in them of oppressed populations, or from
what we improperly call the antagonism of religious confessions,--and
there would not be or have been anything to disturb the peace between
them. And this is to say that the source of war between states lies
in their incomplete fulfilment of their function; in the fact that
there is some defect in the maintenance or reconciliation of rights
among their subjects.
168. This is equally true in regard to those causes of conflict
which are loosely called 'religious.' These do not arise out of any
differences between the convictions of different people in regard
to the nature of God or their relations to Him, or the right way of
worshipping Him. They arise either out of some aggression upon the
religious freedom of certain people, made or allowed by the powers
of the state, which thus puts these people in the position of an
alien or unenfranchised class, or else out of an aggression on the
rights of the state by some corporation calling itself spiritual but
really claiming sovereignty over men's actions in the same relations
in which the state claims to determine them. There would be nothing
tending to international disturbance in the fact that bodies of
people who worship God in the Catholic manner live in a state where
the majority worship in the Greek or Protestant manner, and alongside
of another state where the majority is Catholic, but for one or other
or both of these circumstances, viz. that the Catholic worship and
teaching is interfered with by the Protestant or Greek state, and
that Catholics are liable to a direction by a power which claims to
regulate men's transactions with each other by a law of its own, and
which may see fit (e.g.) to prohibit the Catholic subjects in the
Greek or Protestant state from being married, or having their parents
buried, or their children taught the necessary arts, in the manner
which the state directs. This reciprocal invasion of right, the
invasion of the rights of the state by the church on the one side,
and on the other the restriction placed by the sovereign upon the
subject's freedom, not of conscience, (for that is impossible), but
of expressing his conscience in word and act, has sometimes caused a
state of things in which certain of the subjects of a state have been
better affected to another state than to their own, and in such a
case there is an element of natural hostility between the states. An
obvious instance to give of this relation between states would have
been that between Russia and Turkey, if Turkey could be considered to
have been constituted as a state at all. Perhaps a better instance
would be the position of Ireland in the past; its disaffection to
England and gravitation, first to France, then to the United States,
caused chiefly by Protestant penal laws which in turn were at least
provoked by the aggressive attitude of the church towards the English
state. Whenever a like invasion of rights still takes place, e.g.
in the treatment of the Catholic subjects of Russia in Poland, in
the ultramontane movement of resistance to certain requirements
of the state among the Catholic subjects of Germany, it tends to
international conflict. And what is now a somewhat remote tendency
has in the past been a formidable stimulant to war.
169. It is nothing then in the necessary organisation of the state,
but rather some defect of that organisation in relation to its proper
function of maintaining and reconciling rights, of giving scope to
capacities, that leads to a conflict of apparent interests between
one state and another. The wrong, therefore, which results to human
society from conflicts between states cannot be condoned on the
ground that it is a necessary incident of the existence of states.
The wrong cannot be held to be lost in a higher right, which attaches
to the maintenance of the state as the institution through which
alone the freedom of man is realised. It is not the state, as such,
but this or that particular state, which by no means fulfils its
purpose, and might perhaps be swept away and superseded by another
with advantage to the ends for which the true state exists, that
needs to defend its interests by action injurious to those outside
it. Hence there is no ground for holding that a state is justified
in doing whatever its interests seem to require, irrespectively
of effects on other men. If those effects are bad, as involving
either a direct violation of personal rights or obstruction to the
moral development of society anywhere in the world, then there is
no ultimate justification for the political action that gives rise
to them. The question can only be (as we have seen generally in
regard to the wrong-doing of war), where in particular the blame
lies. Whether there is any justification for a particular state,
which in defence of its interests inflicts an injury on some portion
of mankind; whether, e.g., the Germans are justified in holding
Metz, on the supposition that their tenure of such a thoroughly
French town necessarily thwarts in many ways the healthy activity
of the inhabitants, or the English in carrying fire and sword into
Afghanistan for the sake of acquiring a scientific frontier; this
must depend (1) on the nature of the interests thus defended, (2) on
the impossibility of otherwise defending them, (3) on the question
how they came to be endangered. If they are interests of which the
maintenance is essential to those ends as a means to which the state
has its value, if the state which defends them has not itself been a
joint-cause of their being endangered, and if they cannot be defended
except at the cost of injury to some portion of mankind, then the
state which defends them is clear of the guilt of that injury. But
the guilt is removed from it only to be somewhere else, however wide
its distribution may be. It may be doubted, however, whether the
second question could ever be answered altogether in favour of a
state which finds it necessary to protect its interests at the cost
of inflicting an injury on mankind.
170. It will be said, perhaps, that these formal arguments in proof
of the wrong-doing involved in war, and of the unjustifiability
of the policy which nations constantly adopt in defence of their
apparent interests, carry very little conviction; that a state is
not an abstract complex of institutions for the maintenance of
rights, but a nation, a people, possessing such institutions; that
the nation has its passions which inevitably lead it to judge all
questions of international right from its own point of view, and to
consider its apparent national interests as justifying anything;
that if it were otherwise, if the cosmopolitan point of view could
be adopted by nations, patriotism would be at an end; that whether
this be desirable or no, such an extinction of national passions is
impossible; that while they continue, wars are as inevitable between
nations as they would be between individuals, if individuals were
living in what philosophers have imagined to be the state of nature,
without recognition of a common superior; that nations in short are
in the position of men judging their own causes, which it is admitted
that no one can do impartially; and that this state of things cannot
be altered without the establishment of a common constraining power,
which would mean the extinction of the life of independent states,--a
result as undesirable as it is unattainable. Projects of perpetual
peace, to be logical, must be projects of all-embracing empire.
171. There is some cogency in language of this kind. It is true
that when we speak of a state as a living agency, we mean, not an
institution or complex of institutions, but a nation organised in
a certain way; and that members of the nation in their corporate
or associated action are animated by certain passions, arising out
of their association, which, though not egoistic relatively to the
individual subjects of them (for they are motives to self-sacrifice),
may, in their influence on the dealings of one nation with another,
have an effect analogous to that which egoistic passions, properly
so called, have upon the dealings of individuals with each other.
On the other hand, it must be remembered that the national passion,
which in any good sense is simply the public spirit of the good
citizen, may take, and every day is taking, directions which lead
to no collision between one nation and another; (or, to say the
same thing negatively, that it is utterly false to speak as if the
desire for one's own nation to show more military strength than
others were the only or the right form of patriotism); and that
though a nation, with national feeling of its own, must everywhere
underlie a state, properly so called, yet still, just so far as the
perfect organisation of rights within each nation, which entitles
it to be called a state, is attained, the occasions of conflict
between nations disappear; and again, that by the same process, just
so far as it is satisfactorily carried out, an organ of expression
and action is established for each nation in dealing with other
nations, which is not really liable to be influenced by the same
egoistic passions in dealing with the government of another nation as
embroil individuals with each other. The love of mankind, no doubt,
needs to be particularised in order to have any power over life and
action. Just as there can be no true friendship except towards this
or that individual, so there can be no true public spirit which is
not localised in some way. The man whose desire to serve his kind is
not centred primarily in some home, radiating from it to a commune,
a municipality, and a nation, presumably has no effectual desire to
serve his kind at all. But there is no reason why this localised
or nationalised philanthropy should take the form of a jealousy of
other nations or a desire to fight them, personally or by proxy.
Those in whom it is strongest are every day expressing it in good
works which benefit their fellow-citizens without interfering with
the men of other nations. Those who from time to time talk of the
need of a great war to bring unselfish impulses into play, give us
reason to suspect that they are too selfish themselves to recognise
the unselfish activity that is going on all round them. Till all
the methods have been exhausted by which nature can be brought into
the service of man, till society is so organised that everyone's
capacities have free scope for their development, there is no need to
resort to war for a field in which patriotism may display itself.
172. In fact, just so far as states are thoroughly formed, the
diversion of patriotism into the military channel tends to come to an
end. It is a survival from a condition of things in which, as yet,
the state, in the full sense, was not; in the sense, namely, that
in each territory controlled by a single independent government,
the rights of all persons, as founded on their capacities for
contributing to a common good, are equally established by one system
of law. If each separately governed territory were inhabited by a
people so organised within itself, there would be nothing to lead
to the association of the public spirit of the good citizen with
military aggressiveness,--an association which belongs properly not
to the πολιτεία [1], but to the δυναστεία. The Greek states, however
complete might be the equality of their citizens among themselves,
were all δυναστείαι in relation to some subject populations, and, as
such, jealous of each other. The Peloponnesian war was eminently a
war of rival δυναστείαι. And those habits and institutions and modes
of feeling in Europe of the present day, which tend to international
conflict, are either survivals from the δυναστείαι of the past, or
arise out of the very incomplete manner in which, as yet, over most
of Europe the πολιτεία has superseded the δυναστεία. Patriotism,
in that special military sense in which it is distinguished from
public spirit, is not the temper of the citizen dealing with
fellow-citizens, or with men who are themselves citizens of their
several states, but that of the follower of the feudal chief, or
of the member of a privileged class conscious of a power, resting
ultimately on force, over an inferior population, or of a nation
holding empire over other nations.
[1] [Greek πολιτεία (politeia) = constitutional government,
particularly a city-state, δυναστεία/ι (dunasteia/i) = narrow
oligarchy/ies Tr]
173. Standing armies, again, though existing on a larger scale now
than ever before, are not products of the civilisation of Europe, but
of the predominance over that civilisation of the old δυναστείαι.
The influences which have given rise to and keep up those armies
essentially belong to a state of things in which mankind--even
European mankind--is not yet thoroughly organised into political
life. Roughly summarised, they are these: (1). The temporary
confiscation by Napoleon to his own account of the products of the
French Revolution, which thus, though founded on a true idea of a
citizenship in which not the few only, but all men, should partake,
for the time issued in a δυναστεία over the countries which most
directly felt the effects of the revolution. (2). The consequent
revival in dynastic forms, under the influence of antagonism to
France, of national life in Germany. (3), The aspiration after
national unity elsewhere in Europe,--a movement which must precede
the organisation of states on a sound basis, and for the time readily
yields itself to direction by a δυναστεία. (4). The existence, over
all the Slavonic side of Europe, of populations which are only just
beginning to make any approach to political life--the life of the
πολιτεία, or 'civitas '--and still offer a tempting field to the
ambition of rival δυναστείαι, Austrian, Russian, and Turkish (which,
indeed, are by no means to be put on a level, but are alike as not
resting on a basis of citizenship). (5). The tenure of a great Indian
empire by England, which not only gives it a military character which
would not belong to it simply as a state, but brings it into outward
relations with the δυναστείαι just spoken of. This is no doubt a
very incomplete account of the influences which have combined to
'turn Europe into a great camp' (a very exaggerated expression); but
it may serve to show what a fuller account would show more clearly,
that the military system of Europe is no necessary incident of the
relations between independent states, but arises from the fact that
the organisation of state-life, even with those peoples that have
been brought under its influence at all, is still so incomplete.
174. The more complete that organisation becomes, the more the
motives and occasions of international conflict tend to disappear,
while the bonds of unity become stronger. The latter is the case, if
for no other reason, yet for this; that the better organisation of
the state means freer scope to the individual (not necessarily to do
as he likes, e.g. in, the buying and selling of alcohol, but in such
development of activity as is good on the whole). This again means
free intercourse between members of one state and those of another,
and in particular more freedom of trade. All restrictions on freedom
of wholesome trade are really based on special class-interests,
and must disappear with the realisation of that idea of individual
right, founded on the capacity of every man for free contribution
to social good, which is the true idea of the state. And as trade
between members of different states becomes freer and more full, the
sense of common interests between them, which war would infringe,
becomes stronger. The bond of peace thus established is sometimes
depreciated as a selfish one, but it need be no more selfish than
that which keeps the peace between members of the same state, who
have no acquaintance with each other. In one case as in the other
it may be said that the individual tries to prevent a breach of the
peace because he knows that he has more to gain than to lose by it.
In the latter case, however, this account of the matter would be, to
say the least, insufficient. The good citizen observes the law in
letter and in spirit, not from any fear of consequences to himself
if he did not, but from an idea of the mutual respect by men for
each other's rights as that which should be an idea which has become
habitual with him, and regulates his conduct without his asking airy
questions about it. There was a time, however, when this idea only
thus acted spontaneously in regulating a man's action towards his
family or immediate neighbours or friends. Considerations of interest
were the medium through which a wider range of persons came to be
brought within its range. And thus, although considerations of an
identity of interests, arising out of trade, may be the occasion of
men's recognising in men of other nations those rights which war
violates, there is no reason why, upon that occasion and through
the familiarity which trade brings about, an idea of justice, as a
relation which should subsist between all mankind as well as between
members of the same state, may not come to act on men's minds as
independently of all calculation of their several interests as does
the idea which regulates the conduct of the good citizen.
175. If the necessary or impelling power of the idea of what is
due from members of different nations to each other is weak, it
must be observed on the other hand that the individual members of a
nation have no such apparent interest in their government's dealing
unfairly with another nation as one individual may have in getting
the advantage of another. Thus, so far as this idea comes to form
part of the habit of men's minds, there ceases to be anything in the
passions of the people which a government represents to stimulate the
government to that unfairness in dealing with another government,
to which an individual might be moved by self-seeking passions in
dealing with another individual, in the absence of an impartial
authority having power over both. If at the same time the several
governments are purely representative of the several peoples, as they
should become with the due organisation of the state, and thus have
no dynastic interests of their own in embroiling one nation with
another, there seems to be no reason why they should not arrive at a
passionless impartiality in dealing with each other, which would be
beyond the reach of the individual in defending his own cause against
another. At any rate, if no government can ever get rid of some bias
in its own favour, there remains the possibility of mediation in
cases of dispute by disinterested governments. With the abatement of
national jealousies and the removal of those deeply-seated causes
of war which, as we have seen, are connected with the deficient
organisation of states, the dream of an international court with
authority resting on the consent of independent states may come to
be realised. Such a result may be very remote, but it is important
to bear in mind that there is nothing in the intrinsic nature of a
system of independent states incompatible with it, but that on the
contrary every advance in the organisation of man kind into states in
the sense explained is a step towards it.