be non-military in character which explains the reluctance of very many
Americans to depart from their traditional policy of non-intervention.
With reference to that point it is surely germane to remember that the
America of 1914 is not the America of 1776; circumstances which made
Washington's advice sound and statesmanlike have been transformed. The
situation today is not that of a tiny power not yet solidified, remote
from the main currents of the world's life, out-matched in resources by
any one of the greater powers of Europe. America is no longer so remote
as to have little practical concern with Europe. Its contacts with
Europe are instantaneous, daily, intimate, innumerable--so much so
indeed that our own civilization will be intimately affected and
modified by certain changes which threaten in the older world.
I will put the case thus: Suppose that there are certain developments in
Europe which would profoundly threaten our own civilization and our own
security, and suppose further that we could without great cost to
ourselves so guide or direct those changes and developments as to render
them no longer a menace to this country. If such a case could be
established, would not adherence to a formula established under
eighteenth century conditions have the same relation to sound politics
that the incantations and taboos of superstitious barbarians have to
sound religion? And I think such a case can be established.
I wonder whether it has occurred to many Americans to ask why all the
belligerents in this present war are showing such remarkable deference
to American public opinion. Some Americans may, of course, believe that
it is the sheer personal fascination of individual Americans or simple
tenderness of moral feeling that makes Great Britain, France, Russia,
Germany, and Austria take definitely so much trouble at a time when they
have sufficient already, to demonstrate that they have taken the right
course, that they are obeying all the laws of war, that they are not
responsible for the war in any way, and so forth. Is it simply that our
condemnation would hurt their feelings? This hardly agrees with certain
other ideas which we hold as to the belligerents.
There is something beyond this order of motive at the bottom of the
immense respect which all the combatants alike are paying to American
opinion. It happened to the writer recently to meet a considerable
number of Belgian refugees from Brussels, all of them full of stories
(which I must admit were second or third or three-hundredth hand) of
German barbarity and ferocity. Yet all were obliged to admit that German
behavior in Brussels had on the whole been very good. But that, they
explained, was "merely because the American Consul put his foot down."
Yet one is not aware that President Wilson had authorized the American
Consul so much as to hint at the possible military intervention of
America in this war. Nevertheless there can be no doubt that these
"Huns," so little susceptible in our view for the most part to moral
considerations, were greatly influenced by the opinion of America; and
we know also that the other belligerents have shown the same respect for
the attitude of the United States.
I think we have here what so frequently happens in the development of
the attitude of men toward large general questions: the intuitive
recognition of a truth which those who recognize it are quite unable to
put into words. It is a self-protective instinct, a movement that is
made without its being necessary to think it out. (In the way that the
untaught person is able instantly to detect the false note in a tune
without knowing that such things as notes or crotchets and quavers
exist.)
It is quite true that the Germans feared the bad opinion of the world
because the bad opinion of the world may be translated into an element
of resistance to the very ends which it is the object of the war to
achieve for Germany.
Those ends include the extension of German influence, material and
moral, of German commerce and culture. But a world very hostile to
Germany might quite conceivably check both. We say, rightly enough,
probably, that pride of place and power had its part--many declare the
prominent part--in the motives that led Germany into this war. But it is
quite conceivable that a universal revulsion of feeling against a power
like Germany might neutralize the influence she would gain in the world
by a mere extension of her territorial conquests.
Russia, for instance, has nearly five times the population and very many
times the area of France; but one may doubt whether even a Russian would
assert that Russian influence is five or ten times greater than that of
France; still less that the world yielded him in any sense a
proportionately greater deference than it yields the Frenchman. The
extent to which the greatest power can impose itself by bayonets is very
limited in area and depth. All the might of the Prussian Army cannot
compel the children of Poland or of Lorraine to say their prayers in
German; it cannot compel the housewives of Switzerland or Paraguay or of
any other little State that has not a battleship to its name to buy
German saucepans if so be they do not desire to. There are so many other
things necessary to render political or military force effective, and
there are so many that can offset it altogether.
We see these forces at work around us every day accomplishing miracles,
doing things which a thousand years of fighting was never able to
do--and then say serenely that they are mere "theories." Why do Catholic
powers no longer execute heretics? They have a perfect right--even in
international law--to do so. What is it that protects the heretic in
Catholic countries? The police? But the main business of the police and
the army used to be to hunt him down. What is controlling the police and
the army?
By some sort of process there has been an increasing intuitive
recognition of a certain code which we realize to be necessary for a
decent society. It has come to be a sanction much stronger than the
sanction of law, much more effective than the sanction of military
force. During the German advance on Paris in August last I happened to
be present at a French family conference. Stories of the incredible
cruelties and ferocity of the Germans were circulating in the Northern
Department, where I happened to be staying.
Every one was in a condition of panic, and two Frenchmen, fathers of
families, were seeing red at the story of all these barbarities. But
they had to decide--and the thing was discussed at a little family
conference--where they should send their wives and children. And one of
these Frenchmen, the one who had been most ferocious in his condemnation
of the German barbarian, said quite naïvely and with no sense of irony
or paradox: "Of course, if we could find an absolutely open town which
would not be defended at all the women folk and children would be all
right." His instinct, of course, was perfectly just. The German
"savage" had had three quarters of a million people in his absolute
power in Brussels, and so far as we know, not a child or a woman has
been injured.
Indeed, in normal times our security against foreigners is not based
upon physical force at all. I suppose during the last century some
hundreds of thousands of British and American tourists have traveled
through the historic cities of Germany, their children have gone to the
German educational institutions, their invalids have been attended by
German doctors and cut up by German surgeons in German sanatoria and
health resorts, and I am quite sure that it never occurred to any one of
these hundreds of thousands that their little children when in the
educational institutions of these "Huns" were in any way in danger. It
was not the guns of the American Navy or the British Navy that were
protecting them; the physical force of America or of Great Britain could
not certainly be the factor operative in, say, Switzerland or Austria,
yet every Summer tens of thousands of them trust their lives and those
of their women and children in the remote mountains of Switzerland on no
better security than the expectation that a foreign community over whom
we have no possibility of exercising force will observe a convention
which has no sanction other than the recognition that it is to their
advantage to observe it.
And we thus have the spectacle of millions of Anglo-Saxons absolutely
convinced that the sanctity of their homes and the safety of their
property are secure from the ravages of the foreigner only because they
possess a naval and military force that overawes him, yet serenely
leaving the protection of that military force, and placing life and
property alike within the absolute power of that very foreigner against
whose predatory tendencies we spend millions in protecting ourselves.
No use of military power, however complete and overwhelming, would
pretend to afford a protection anything like as complete as that
afforded by these moral forces. Sixty years ago Britain had as against
Greece a preponderance of power that made her the absolute dictator of
the latter's policy, yet all the British battleships and all the threats
of "consequences" could not prevent British travelers being murdered by
Greek brigands, though in Switzerland only moral forces--the recognition
by an astute people of the advantage of treating foreigners well--had
already made the lives and property of Britons as safe in that country
as in their own.
In the same way, no scheme of arming Protestants as against Catholics,
or Catholics as against Protestants (the method which gave us the wars
of religion and massacre of St. Bartholomew) could assure that general
security of spiritual and intellectual possessions which we now in large
measure enjoy. So indeed with the more material things, France, Great
Britain, and some of the older nations have sunk thousands of millions
in foreign investments, the real security of which is not in any
physical force which their Government could possibly exercise, but the
free recognition of foreigners that it is to their advantage to adhere
to financial obligations. Englishmen do not even pretend that the
security of their investments in a country like the United States or the
Argentine is dependent upon the coercion which the British Government is
able to exercise over these communities.
The reader will not, I think, misunderstand me. I am not pleading that
human nature has undergone or will undergo any radical transformation.
Rather am I asserting that it will not undergo any; that the intention
of the man of the tenth century in Europe was as good as that of the man
of the twentieth, that the man of the tenth century was as capable of
self-sacrifice--was, it may be, less self-seeking. But what I am trying
to hint is that the shrinking of the world by our developed
intercommunication has made us all more interdependent.
The German Government moves its troops against Belgium; a moratorium is
immediately proclaimed in Rio de Janeiro, a dozen American Stock
Exchanges are promptly closed and some hundreds of thousands of our
people are affected in their daily lives. This worldwide effect is not
a matter of some years or a generation or two. It is a matter of an
hour; we are intimately concerned with the actions of men on the other
side of the world that we have never seen and never shall see; and they
are intimately concerned with us. We know without having thought it out
that we are bound together by a compact; the very fact that we are
dependent upon one another creates as a matter of fact a partnership. We
are expecting the other man to perform his part; he has been doing so
uninterruptedly for years, and we send him our goods or we take his bill
of exchange, or our families are afloat in his ships, expecting that he
will pay for his goods, honor the bill of exchange, navigate safely his
ship--he has undertaken to do these things in the world-wide partnership
of our common labor and then he fails. He does not do these things, and
we have a very lively sense of the immorality of the doctrine which
permits him to escape doing them.
And so there are certain things that are not done, certain lengths to
which even in war time we cannot go. What will stop the war is not so
much the fighting, any more than Protestant massacres prevented Catholic
massacres. Men do not fear the enemy soldiers; they do fear the turning
of certain social and moral forces against them. The German Government
does not hesitate for a moment to send ten thousand of its own people to
certain death under enemy guns even though the military advantage of so
doing may be relatively trifling. But it dare not order the massacre of
ten thousand foreign residents in Berlin. There is some force which
makes it sometimes more scrupulous of the lives of its enemy than of the
lives of its own people.
Yet why should it care? Because of the physical force of the armies
ranged against it? But it has to meet that force in any case. It fears
that the world will be stirred. In other words, it knows that the world
at large has a very lively realization that in its own interest certain
things must not be done, that the world would not live together as we
now know it, if it permitted those things to be done. It would not so
permit them.
At the bottom of this moral hesitation is an unconscious realization of
the extent of each nation's dependence upon the world partnership. It is
not a fear of physical chastisement; any nation will go to war against
desperate odds if a foreign nation talks of chastising it. It is not
that consideration which operates, as a thousand examples in history
prove to us. There are forces outside military power more visible and
ponderable than these.
There exists, of course, already a world State which has no formal
recognition in our paper constitutions at all, and no sanction in
physical force. If you are able to send a letter to the most obscure
village of China, a telegram to any part of the planet, to travel over
most of the world in safety, to carry on trade therewith, it is because
for a generation the Post Office Departments of the world have been at
work arranging traffic and communication details, methods of keeping
their accounts; because the ship owner has been devising international
signal codes; the banker arranging conditions of international credit;
because, in fact, not merely a dozen but some hundreds of international
agreements, most of them made not between Governments at all, but
between groups and parties directly concerned, have been devised.
There is no overlord enforcing them, yet much of our daily life depends
upon their normal working. The bankers or the shipowners or the makers
of electric machinery have met in Paris or Brussels and decided that
such shall be the accepted code, such the universal measurement for the
lamp or instrument, such the conditions for the bill of exchange and
from the moment that there is an agreement you do not need any sanction.
If the instrument does not conform to the measurement it is unsalable
and that is sanction enough.
[Illustration: ANTONIO SALANDRA
Minister of the Interior and President of the Italian Ministry
_(Photo from Bain)_]
[Illustration: JAMES W. GERARD
American Ambassador to the German Empire]
We have seen in the preceding article that the dependence of the nations
goes back a good deal further than we are apt to think; that long before
the period of fully developed intercommunication, all nations owed
their civilization to foreigners. It was to their traffic with Gaul and
the visits of the Phoenician traders that the early inhabitants of the
British Isles learned their first steps in arts and crafts and the
development of a civilized society, and even in what we know as the Dark
Ages we find Charlemagne borrowing scholars from York to assist him in
civilizing the Continent.
The civilization which our forefathers brought with them to America was
the result of centuries of exchange in ideas between Britain and the
Continent, and though in the course of time it had become something
characteristically Anglo-Saxon, its origins were Greek and Arabic and
Roman and Jewish. But the interdependence of nations today is of an
infinitely more vital and insistent kind, and despite superficial
setbacks becomes more vital every day. As late as the first quarter of
the nineteenth century, for instance, Britain was still practically
self-sufficing; her very large foreign trade was a trade in luxuries.
She could still produce her own food, her population could still live on
her own soil.
But if today by some sort of magic Britain could kill off all foreigners
the means of livelihood for quite an appreciable portion of her
population would have disappeared. Millions would be threatened by
actual starvation. For Britain's overseas trade, on which so large a
proportion of the population actually lives, is mainly with the outside
world and not with her own empire. We have seen what isolation merely
from two countries has meant for Great Britain. Britain is still
maintaining her contacts with the world as a whole, but the cessation of
relationship with two countries has precipitated the gravest financial
crisis known in all her history, has kept her Stock Exchanges closed for
months, has sent her Consols to a lower point than any known since the
worst period of the Napoleonic wars, and has compelled the Government
ruthlessly to pledge its credit for the support of banking institutions
and all the various trades that have been most seriously hit.
Nor is Germany's isolation altogether complete. She manages through
neutral countries and otherwise to maintain a considerable current of
relationship with the outside world, but how deeply and disastrously the
partial severance of contact has affected Germany we shall not at
present, probably at no time, in full measure know.
All this gives a mere hint of what the organized isolation by the entire
world would mean to any one nation. Imagine the position of a civilized
country whose ports no ship from another country would enter, whose
bills no banker would discount, a country unable to receive a telegram
or a letter from the outside world or send one thereto, whose citizens
could neither travel in other countries or maintain communications
therewith. It would have an effect in the modern world somewhat
equivalent to that of the dreadful edicts of excommunication and
interdict which the papal power was able to issue in the mediaeval
world.
I am aware, of course, that such a measure would fall very hardly upon
certain individuals in the countries inflicting this punishment, but it
is quite within the power of the Governments of those countries to do
what the British Government has done in the case of persons like
acceptors of German bills who found themselves threatened with
bankruptcy and who threatened in consequence to create great disturbance
around them because of the impossibility of securing payment from the
German indorsers. The British Government came to the rescue of those
acceptors, used the whole national credit to sustain them. It is
expensive, if you will, but infinitely less expensive than a war, and,
finally, most of the cost of it will probably be recovered.
Now if that were done, how could a country so dealt with retaliate? She
could not attack all the world at once. Upon those neighbors more
immediately interested could be thrown the burden of taking such
defensive military measures as the circumstances might dictate. You
might have a group of powers probably taking such defensive measures and
all the powers of Christendom co-operating economically by this
suggested non-intercourse. It is possible even that the powers as a
whole might contribute to a general fund indemnifying individuals in
those States particularly hit by the fact of non-intercourse. I am
thinking, for instance, of shipping interests in a port like Amsterdam
if the decree of non-intercourse were proclaimed against a power like
Germany.
We have little conception of the terror which such a policy might
constitute to a nation. It has never been tried, of course, because even
in war complete non-intercourse is not achieved. At the present time
Germany is buying and selling and trading with the outside world, cables
from Berlin are being sent almost as freely to New York as cables from
London and German merchants are making contracts, maintaining
connections of very considerable complexity. But if this machinery of
non-intercourse were organized as it might be, there would be virtually
no neutrals, and its effect in our world today would be positively
terrifying.
It is true that the American administration did try something resembling
a policy of non-intercourse in dealing with Mexico. But, the thing was a
fiction. While the Department of State talked of non-intercourse the
Department of the Treasury was busy clearing ships for Mexico,
facilitating the dispatch of mails, &c. And, of course, Mexico's
communication with Europe remained unimpaired; at the exact moment when
the President of the United States was threatening Huerta with all sorts
of dire penalties Huerta's Government was arranging in London for the
issue of large loans and the advertisements of these Mexican loans were
appearing in The London Times. So that the one thing that might have
moved Huerta's Government the United States Government was unable to
enforce. In order to enforce it, it needed the co-operation of other
countries.
I have spoken of the economic world State--of all those complex
international arrangements concerning Post Offices, shipping, banking,
codes, sanctions of law, criminal research, and the rest, on which so
much of our civilized life depends. This world State is unorganized,
incoherent. It has neither a centre nor a capital, nor a meeting place.
The shipowners gather in Paris, the world's bankers in Madrid or Berne,
and what is in effect some vital piece of world regulation is devised in
the smoking room of some Brussels hotel. The world State has not so much
as an office or an address, The United States should give it one. Out of
its vast resources it should endow civilization with a Central Bureau of
Organization--a Clearing House of its international activities as it
were, with the funds needed for its staff and upkeep.
If undertaken with largeness of spirit, it would become the capital of
the world. And the Old World looks to America to do this service,
because it is the one which it cannot do for itself. Its old historic
jealousies and squabbles, from which America is so happily detached,
prevent any one power taking up and putting through this work of
organization, but America could do it, and do it so effectively that
from it might well flow this organization of that common action of all
the nations against any recalcitrant member of which I have spoken as a
means of enforcing non-militarily a common decision.
It is this world State which it should be the business of America during
the next decade or two to co-ordinate, to organize. Its organization
will not come into being as the result of a week-end talk between
Ambassadors. There will be difficulties, material as well as moral,
jealousies to overcome, suspicions to surmount. But this war places
America in a more favorable position than any one European power. The
older powers would be less suspicious of her than of any one among their
number. America has infinitely greater material resources, she has a
greater gift for improvised organization, she is less hidebound by old
traditions, more disposed to make an attempt along new lines.