discussion on the basis of America's interest; and the test which I
would apply to the alternatives now presenting themselves is simply
this: What on balance is most advantageous, in the broadest and largest
sense of the term, in its moral as well as its material sense, to
American interest?
Now I know full well that there is much to be said against the step
which I think America should initiate. I suppose the weight of the
reasons against it would be in some such order as the following: First,
that it is a violation of the ancient tradition of American statecraft
and of the rule laid down by Washington concerning the avoidance of
entangling alliances. Second, that it may have the effect which he
feared of dragging this country into war on matters in which it had no
concern. Third, that it will militarize the country, and so, Fourth,
lead to the neglect of those domestic problems upon which the progress
of our nation depends.
I will take the minor points first and will deal with the major
consideration presently.
First, I would remind the reader of what I pointed out in the last
article, that there is no such thing as being unaffected by the military
policies of Europe, and there never has been. At this present moment a
campaign for greatly increased armaments is being waged on the strength
of what is taking place in the Old World, and our armaments are directly
and categorically dictated by what foreign nations do in the matter. So
that it is not a question in practice of being independent of the
policies of other nations; we are not independent of their policies.
We may refuse to co-operate with them, to have anything to do with them.
Even then our military policy will be guided by theirs, and it is at
least conceivable that in certain circumstances we should become
thoroughly militarized by the need for preparing against what our people
would regard as the menace of European military ambitions. This
tendency, if it became sufficiently acute, would cause neglect of
domestic problems hardly less mischievous than that occasioned by war.
In my last article I touched upon a quite possible turn of the alliance
groupings in Europe--the growing influence of Russia, the extension of
that influence to the Asiatic populations on her borders, (Japan and
Russia are already in alliance,) so that within the quite measurable
future we may be confronted by a military community drawing on a
population of 500,000,000 souls, autocratically governed and endowed
with all the machinery of destruction which modern science has given to
the world. A Russo-Chino-Japanese alliance might on behalf of the
interest or dignity of one of the members of such a group challenge this
country in some form or another, and a Western Europe with whom we had
refused to co-operate for a common protection might as a consequence
remain an indifferent spectator of the conflict.
Such a situation would certainly not relieve us from the burdens of
militarism merely because we declined to enter into any arrangement with
the European powers. As a matter of fact, of course, this present war
destroyed the nationalist basis of militarism itself. The militarist may
continue to talk about international agreement between nations being
impossible as a means of insuring a nation's safety, and a nation having
no security but the strength of its own arms, but when it actually comes
to the point even he is obliged to trust to agreement with other nations
and to admit that even in war a nation can no longer depend merely upon
the strength of its arms; it has to depend upon co-operation, which
means an agreement of some kind with other nations as well.
Just as the nations have by forces stronger than their own volition been
brought into industrial and commercial co-operation, so, strangely
enough, have they been brought by those same forces into military
co-operation. While the warrior and militarist have been talking the old
jargon of nationalism and holding international co-operation up to
derision as a dream, they have themselves been brought to depend upon
foreigners. War itself has become internationalist.
There is something of sardonic humor in the fact that it is the greatest
war of history which is illustrating the fact that even the most
powerful of the European nations must co-operate with foreigners for its
security. For no one of the nine or ten combatants of the present war
could have maintained its position or defended itself alone. There is
not one nation involved that would not believe itself in danger of
destruction but for the help of foreigners; there is not one whose
national safety does not depend upon some compact or arrangement with
foreign nations. France would have been helpless but for the help of
Britain and of Russia. Russia herself could not have imposed her will
upon Germany if Germany could have thrown all her forces on the eastern
frontier. Austria could certainly not have withstood the Russian flood
single handed. Quite obviously the lesser nations, Serbia, Belgium, and
the rest, would be helpless victims but for the support of their
neighbors.
And it should be noted that this international co-operation is not by
any means always with similar and racially allied nations. Republican
France finds itself, and has been for a generation, the ally of
autocratic Russia. Australia, that much more than any other country has
been obsessed by the yellow peril and the danger from Japan, finds
herself today fighting side by side with the Japanese. And as to the
ineradicable hostility of races preventing international co-operation,
there are fighting together on the soil of France as I write, Flemish,
Walloons, and negroes from Senegal, Turcos from Northern Africa, Gurkhas
from India, co-operating with the advance on the other frontier of
Cossacks, and Russians of all descriptions. This military and political
co-operation has brought together Mohammedan and Christian; Catholic,
Protestant, and Orthodox; negro, white and yellow; African, Indian, and
European; monarchist, republican, Socialist, reactionary--there seems
hardly a racial, religious, or political difference that has stood in
the way of rapid and effective co-operation in the common need.
Thus the soldier himself, while defending the old nationalist and
exclusive conceptions, is helping to shrink the spaces of the world and
break down old isolations and show how interests at the uttermost ends
of the earth react one upon the other.
But even apart from this influence, as already noted, America cannot
escape the military any more than she has escaped the commercial and
financial effects of this war. She may never be drawn into active
military co-operation with other nations, but she is affected none the
less--by a demand for a naval programme immensely larger than any
American could have anticipated a year since, by plans for an enormously
enlarged army.
That, it will be argued, is the one thing needed--to be stronger than
our prospective enemy. And, of course, any enemy--whether he be one
nation or a group--who really does contemplate aggression, would on his
side take care to be stronger than us. War and peace are matters of two
parties, and any principle which you may lay down for one is applicable
to the other. When we say "Si vis pacem, para bellum" we must apply it
to all parties. One eminent upholder of this principle has told us that
the only way to be sure of peace is to be so much stronger than your
enemy that he will not dare to attack you. Apply that to the two parties
and you get this result--here are two nations or two groups of nations
likely to quarrel. How shall they keep the peace? And we say quite
seriously that they will keep the peace if each is stronger than the
other.
This principle, therefore, which looks at first blush like an axiom, is,
as a matter of fact, an attempt to achieve a physical impossibility and
always ends, as it has ended in Europe on this occasion, in explosion.
You cannot indefinitely pile up explosive material without an accident
of some sort occurring; it is bound to occur. But you will note this:
that the militarist--while avowing by his conduct that nations can no
longer in a military sense be independent, that they are obliged to
co-operate with others and consequently depend upon some sort of an
arrangement, agreement, compact, alliance with others--has adopted a
form of compact which merely perpetuates the old impossible situation on
a larger scale! He has devised the "balance of power."
For several generations Britain, which has occupied with reference to
the Continent of Europe somewhat the position which we are now coming to
occupy with regard to Europe as a whole, has acted on this
principle--that so long as the powers of the Continent were fairly
equally divided she felt she could with a fair chance of safety face
either one or the other. But if one group became so much stronger than
the other that it was in danger of dominating the whole Continent, then
Britain might find herself faced by an overwhelming power with which she
would be unable to deal. To prevent this she joined the weaker group.
Thus Britain intervened in Continental politics against Napoleon as she
has intervened today against the Kaiser.
But this policy is merely a perpetuation on a larger scale of the
principle of "each being stronger than the other." Military power, in
any case, is a thing very difficult to estimate; an apparently weaker
group or nation has often proved, in fact, to be the stronger, so that
there is a desire on the part of both sides to give the benefit of the
doubt to themselves. Thus the natural and latent effort to be strongest
is obviously fatal to any "balance." Neither side, in fact, desires a
balance; each desires to have the balance tilted in its favor. This sets
up a perpetual tendency toward rearrangement, and regroupings and
reshufflings in these international alliances sometimes take place with
extraordinary and startling rapidity, as in the case of the Balkan
States.
It is already illustrated in the present war; Italy has broken away from
a definite and formal alliance which every one supposed would range her
on the German side. There is at least a possibility that she may finally
come down upon the Anglo-Franco-Russian side. You have Japan, which
little more than a decade ago was fighting bitterly against Russia,
today ranged upon the side of Russia.
The position of Russia is still more startling. In the struggles of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Britain was almost always on
the side of Russia; then for two generations she was taught that any
increase of the power of Russia was a particularly dangerous menace.
That once more was a decade ago suddenly changed, and Britain is now
fighting to increase both relatively and absolutely the power of a
country which her last war on the Continent was fought to check. The war
before that which Great Britain fought upon the Continent was fought in
alliance with Germans against the power of France. As to the Austrians,
whom Britain is now fighting, they were for many years her faithful
allies. So it is very nearly true to say of nearly all the combatants
respectively that they have no enemy today that was not, historically
speaking, quite recently an ally, and not an ally today that was not in
the recent past an enemy.
These combinations, therefore, are not, never have been, and never can
be permanent. If history, even quite recent history, has any meaning at
all, the next ten or fifteen or twenty years will be bound to see among
these tan combatants now in the field rearrangements and permutations
out of which the crushed and suppressed Germany that is to follow the
war--a Germany which will embrace, nevertheless, a hundred million of
the same race, highly efficient, highly educated, trained for
co-ordination and common action--will be bound sooner or later to find
her chance.
If America should by any catastrophe join Britain or any other nation
for the purpose of maintaining a "balance of power" in the world, then
indeed would her last state be worse than her first. The essential vice
of the balance of power is that it is based upon a fundamentally false
assumption as to the real relationship of nations and as to the function
and nature of force in human affairs. The limits of the present article
preclude any analysis of most of the monstrous fallacies, but a hint
can be given of one or two.
First, of course, if you could get such a thing as a real "balance of
power"--two parties confronting one another with about equal forces--you
would probably get a situation most favorable to war. Neither being
manifestly inferior to the other, neither would be disposed to yield;
each being manifestly as good as the other, would feel in "honor" bound
to make no concession. If a power quite obviously superior to its rival
makes concessions the world may give it credit for magnanimity in
yielding, but otherwise it would always be in the position of being
compelled to vindicate its courage. Our notions of honor and valor being
what they are, no situation could be created more likely to bring about
deadlocks and precipitate fights. All the elements are there for
bringing about that position in which the only course left is "to fight
it out."
The assumption underlying the whole theory of the balance of power is
that predominant military power in a nation will necessarily--or at
least probably--be exercised against its weaker neighbors to their
disadvantage. Thus Britain has acted on the assumption that if one power
dominated the Continent, British independence, more truly perhaps
British predominance in the world would be threatened.
Now, how has a society of individuals--the community within the
frontiers of a nation--met this difficulty which now confronts the
society of nations, the difficulty that is of the danger of the power of
an individual or a group? They have met it by determining that no
individual or group shall exercise physical power or predominance over
others; that the community alone shall be predominant. How has that
predominance been secured? By determining that any one member attacked
shall be opposed by the whole weight of the community, (exercised, say,
through the policeman.) If A flies at B's throat in the street with the
evident intention of throttling him to death, the community, if it is
efficient, immediately comes to the support of B.
And you will note this: that it does not allow force to be used for the
settlement of differences by anybody. The community does not use force
as such at all; it merely cancels the force of units and determines that
nobody shall use it. It eliminates force. And it thus cancels the power
of the units to use it against other units (other than as a part of the
community) by standing ready at all times to reduce the power of any one
unit to futility. If A says that B began it, the community does not say,
"Oh, in that case you may continue to use your force; finish him off."
It says, on the contrary, "Then we'll see that B does not use his force;
we'll restrain him, we won't have either of you using force. We'll
cancel it and suppress it wherever it rears its head." For there is this
paradox at the basis of all civilized intercourse: force between men has
but one use--to see that force settles no difference between them.
And this has taken place because men--individually--have decided that
the advantage of the security of each from aggression outweighs the
advantage which each has in the possible exercise of aggression. When
nations have come to the same decision--and not a moment before--they
will protect themselves from aggression in precisely the same way--by
agreeing between them that they will cancel by their collective power
the force of any one member exercised against another.
I emphasize the fact that you must get this recognition of common
interest in a given action before you can get the common action. We have
managed it in the relations between individuals because, the numbers
being so much greater than in the case of nations, individual dissent
goes for less. The policeman, the judge, the jailer have behind them a
larger number relatively to individual exceptions than is the case with
nations. For the existence of such an arrangement by no means implies
that men shall be perfect, that each shall willingly obey all the laws
which he enforces. It merely implies that his interest in the law as a
whole is greater than his interest in its general violation.
No man for a single day of his life observes all the Ten Commandments,
yet you can always secure a majority for the support of the Ten
Commandments, for the simple reason that while there are a great many
who would like to rob, all are in favor of being protected against the
robber. While there are a great many who would like on occasion to kill,
all are in favor of being protected against being killed. The
prohibition of this act secures universal support embracing "all of the
people all of the time"; the positive impulse to it is isolated and
occasional--with some individuals perhaps all the time, but with all
individuals only some of the time, if ever.
When you come to the nations, there is less disproportion between the
strength of the unit and the society. Hence nations have been slower
than individuals in realizing their common interest. Each has placed
greater reliance on its own strength for its protection. Yet the
principle remains the same. There may be nations which desire for their
own interest to go to war, but they all want to protect themselves
against being beaten. You have there an absolutely common interest. The
other interest, the desire to beat, is not so universal; in fact, if any
value can be given whatever to the statement of the respective
statesmen, such an interest is non-existent.
There is not a single statesman in Christendom today who would admit for
a moment that it is his desire to wage war on a neighboring nation for
the purpose of conquering it. All this warfare is, each party to it
declares, merely a means of protecting itself against the aggression of
neighbors. Whatever insincerity there may be in these declarations we
can at least admit this much, that the desire to be safe is more
widespread than the desire to conquer, for the desire to be safe is
universal.
We ought to be able, therefore, to achieve, on the part of the majority,
action to that end. And on this same principle there can be no doubt
that the nations as a whole would give their support to any plan which
would help to secure them from being attacked. It is time for the
society of nations to take this first step toward the creation of a
real community; to agree, that is, that the influence of the whole shall
be thrown against the one recalcitrant member.
The immensely increased contact between nations which has set up a
greater independence (in the way hinted at in my last article) has given
weight to the interest in security and taken from the interest in
aggression. The tendency to aggression is often a blind impulse due to
the momentum of old ideas which have not yet had time to be discredited
and disintegrated by criticism. And of organization for the really
common interest--that of security against aggression--there has, in
fact, been none. If there is one thing certain it is that in Europe last
July the people did not want war; they tolerated it, passively dragged
by the momentum of old forces which they could not even formulate. The
really general desire has never been organized; any means of giving
effect to a common will--such as is given it in society within the
frontiers--has never so far been devised.
I believe that it is the mission of America in her own interest to
devise it; that the circumstances of her isolation, historical and
geographical, enable her to do for the older peoples--and herself--a
service which by reason of their circumstances, geographical and
historical, they cannot do for themselves.
The power that she exercises to this end need not be military. I do not
think that it should be military. This war has shown that the issues of
military conflict are so uncertain, depending upon all sorts of physical
accidents, that no man can possibly say which side will win. The present
war is showing daily that the advantage does not always go with numbers,
and the outcome of war is always to some extent a hazard and a gamble,
but there are certain forces that can be set in operation by nations
situated as the United States, that are not in any way a gamble and a
hazard, the effect of which will be quite certain.
I refer to the pressure of such a thing as organized non-intercourse,
the sending of a country to moral, social, economic Coventry. We are, I
know, here treading somewhat unknown ground, but we have ample evidence
to show that there do exist forces capable of organization, stronger,
and more certain in their operation than military forces. That the world
is instinctively feeling this is demonstrated by the present attitude of
all the combatants in Europe to the United States. The United States
relatively to powers like Russia, Britain, and Germany is not a great
military power, yet they are all pathetically anxious to secure the
good-will of the United States.
Why?
It can hardly be to save the shock to their moral feelings which would
come from the mere disapproval of people on the other side of the world.
If any percentage of what we have read of German methods is true, if
German ethics bear the faintest resemblance to what they are so often
represented to be, Germany must have no feeling in the political sphere
to be hurt by the moral disapproval of the people of the United States.
If German statesmen are so desperately anxious as they evidently are to
secure the approval and good-will of the United States it is because
they realize, however indistinctly, that there lie in the hands of the
United States powers which could be loosed, more portentous than those
held by the masters of many legions.
Just what these powers are and how they might be used to give America
greater security than she could achieve by arms, to place her at the
virtual head of a great world State, and to do for mankind as a whole a
service greater than any yet recorded in written history, must be left
to the third and concluding article of this series.
III.
AMERICA AS LEADER.
In the preceding article I indicated that America might undertake at
this juncture of international affairs an intervention in the politics
of the Old World which is of a kind not heretofore attempted by any
nation, an intervention, that is to say, that should not be military,
but in the first instance mediatory and moral, having in view if needs
be the employment of certain organized social and economic forces which
I will detail presently.
The suggestion that America should take any such lead is resisted first
on the ground that it is a violation of her traditional policy, and
secondly that "economic and social forces" are bound to be ineffective
unless backed by military, so that the plea would involve her in a
militarist policy. With reference to these two points, I pointed out in
the preceding article that America's isolation from a movement for world
agreement would infallibly land her in a very pronounced militarist
policy, the increase of her armaments, the militarization of her
civilization and all that that implies.
There are open to America at this present moment two courses: one which
will lead her to militarism and the indefinite increase of
armaments--that is the course of isolation from the world's life, from
the new efforts that will be made toward world organization; the other
to anticipate events and take the initiative in the leadership of world
organization, which would have the effect of rendering western
civilization, including herself, less military, less dependent upon
arms, and put the development of that civilization on a civilist rather
than a militarist basis.