"THEORIES" FALSE AND TRUE: THEIR ROLE IN EUROPEAN PROGRESS.
The improvement of ideas the foundation of all improvement--Shooting
straight and thinking straight; the one as important as the
other--Pacifism and the Millennium--How we got rid of wars of
religion--A few ideas have changed the face of the world--The simple
ideas the most important--The "theories" which have led to war--The work
of the reformer to destroy old and false theories--The intellectual
interdependence of nations--Europe at unity in this matter--New ideas
cannot be confined to one people--No fear of ourselves or any nation
being ahead of the rest.
But what, it will be said, is the practical outcome? Admitting that we
are, or that our fathers were, in part responsible for this war, that it
is their false theories which have made it necessary, that like false
theories on our part may make future wars inevitable--what shall we do
to prevent that catastrophe?
Now while as an "abstract proposition" everyone will admit that the one
thing which distinguishes the civilized man from the savage is a
difference of ideas, no one apparently believes that it is a dangerous
and evil thing for the political ideas of savages to dominate most of
our countrymen or that so intangible a thing as "ideas" have any
practical importance at all. While we believe this, of course--to the
extent to which we believe it--improvement is out of the question. We
have to realize that civic faith, like religious faith, is of
importance; that if English influence is to stand for the right and not
the wrong in human affairs, it is impossible for each one of us
individuals to be wrong; that if the great mass is animated by temper,
blindness, ignorance, passion, small and mean prejudices, it is not
possible for "England" to stand for something quite different and for
its influence to be ought but evil. To say that we are "for our country
right or wrong" does not get over the matter at all; rather is it
equivalent to saying that we would as readily have it stand for evil as
for good. And we do not in the least seem to realize that for an
Englishman to go on talking wicked nonsense across the dinner table and
making one of the little rivulets of bad temper and prejudice which
forms the mighty river drowning sane judgment is to do the England of
our dreams a service as ill (in reality far more mischievous) as though
the plans of fortresses were sold to Germany. We must all learn to shoot
straight; apparently we need not learn to think straight. And yet if
Europe could do the second it could dispense with the first. "Good
faith" has a score of connotations, and we believe apparently that good
politics can dispense with all of them and that "Patriotism" has naught
to do with any.
Of course, to shoot straight is so much easier than to think straight,
and I suppose at bottom the bellicist believes that the latter is a
hopeless object since "man is not a thinking animal." He deems,
apparently, we must just leave it at that. Of course, if he does leave
it at that--if we persist in believing that it is no good discussing
these matters, trying to find out the truth about them, writing books
and building churches--our civilization is going to drift just precisely
as those other civilizations which have been guided by the same dreadful
fatalism have drifted--towards the Turkish goal. "Kismet. Man is a fool
to babble of these things; what he may do is of no avail; all things
will happen as they were pre-ordained." And the English Turk--the man
who prefers to fight things out instead of thinking things out--takes
the same line.
If he adopts the Turkish philosophy he must be content with the Turkish
result. But the Western world as a whole has refused to be content with
the Turkish result, and however tiresome it may be to know about
things, to bother with "theories" and principles, we have come to
realise that we have to choose between one of two courses: either to
accept things as they are, not to worry about improvement or betterment
at all, fatalistically to let things slide or--to find out bit by bit
where our errors have been and to correct those errors. This is a hard
road, but it is the road the Western world has chosen; and it is better
than the other.
And it has not accepted this road because it expects the millenium
to-morrow week. There is no millenium, and Pacifists do not expect it or
talk about it; the word is just one of those three-shies-a-penny
brickbats thrown at them by ignorance. You do not dismiss attempts to
correct errors in medicine or surgery, or education, or tramcars, or
cookery, by talking about the millenium; why should you throw that word
at attempts to correct the errors of international relationship?
Nothing has astonished me more than the fact that the "practical" man
who despises "theories" nearly always criticises Pacifism because it is
not an absolute dogma with all its thirty-nine articles water-tight.
"You are a Pacifist, then suppose...," and then follows generally some
very remote hypothesis of what would happen if all the Orient composed
its differences and were to descend suddenly upon the Western world; or
some dogmatic (and very theoretical) proposition about the
unchangeability of human nature, and the foolishness of expecting the
millenium--an argument which would equally well have told against the
union of Scotland and England or would equally justify the political
parties in a South American republic in continuing to settle their
differences by militarist methods instead of the Pacifist methods of
England.
Human nature may be unchanging: it is no reason why we should fight a
futile war with Germany over nothing at all; the yellow peril may
threaten; that is a very good reason why we should compose our
differences in Europe. Men always will quarrel, perhaps, over religious
questions, bigotry and fanaticism always will exist--it did not prevent
our getting rid of the wars of religion, still less is it a reason for
re-starting them.
The men who made that immense advance--the achievement of religious
toleration--possible, were not completely right and had not a
water-tight theory amongst them; they did not bring the millenium, but
they achieved an immense step. They _were_ pioneers of religious
freedom, yet were themselves tyrants and oppressors; those who abolished
slavery _did_ a good work, though much of the world _was_ left in
industrial servitude; it _was_ a good thing to abolish judicial torture,
though much of our penal system did yet remain barbaric; it _was_ a real
advance to recognise the errors upon which these things rested, although
that recognition did not immediately achieve a complete, logical,
symmetrical and perfect change, because mankind does not advance that
way. And so with war. Pacifism does not even pretend to be a dogma: it
is an attempt to correct in men's minds some of the errors and false
theories out of which war grows.
The reply to this is generally that the inaptitude of men for clear
thinking and the difficulties of the issues involved will render any
decision save the sheer clash of physical force impossible; that the
field of foreign politics is such a tangle that the popular mind will
always fall back upon decision by force.
As a matter of fact the outstanding principles which serve to improve
human conduct, are quite simple and understandable, as soon as they have
been shorn of the sophistries and illusions with which the pundits
clothe them. The real work of the reformers is to hack away these
encumbering theories. The average European has not followed, and could
not follow, the amazing and never-ending disputation on obscure
theological points round which raged the Reformation; but the one solid
fact which did emerge from the whole was the general realization that
whatever the truth might be in all this confusion, it was quite
evidently wicked and futile to attempt to compel conformity to any one
section of it by force; that in the interests of all force should be
withheld; because if such queries were settled by the accident of
predominant force, it would prove, not which was right, but which was
stronger. So in such things as witchcraft. The learned and astute judges
of the 18th century, who sent so many thousands to their death for
impossible crimes, knew far more of the details of witchcraft than do
we, and would beat us hopelessly in an argument on the subject; but all
their learning was of no avail, because they had a few simple facts, the
premises, crooked, and we have them straight; and all that we need to
know in this amazing tangle of learned nonsense, is that the
probabilities are against an old woman having caused a storm at sea and
drowned a Scottish King. And so with the French Revolution. What the
Encyclopaedists and other pioneers of that movement really did for the
European peoples in that matter, was not to elaborate fantastic schemes
of constitution making, but by their argumentation to achieve the
destruction of old political sophistries--Divine Rights of Kings and
what not--and to enable one or two simple facts to emerge clearly and
unmistakeably, as that the object of government is the good of the
governed, and can find its justification in nothing else whatsoever. It
was these simple truths which, spreading over the world--with many
checks and set-backs--have so profoundly modified the structure of
Christendom.
Somewhere it is related of Montaigne that talking with academic
colleagues, he expressed a contemptuous disbelief in the whole elaborate
theory of witchcraft as it existed at that time. Scandalised, his
colleagues took him into the University library, and showed him
hundreds, thousands, of parchment volumes written in Latin by the
learned men of the subject. Had he read these volumes, that he talked so
disrespectfully of their contents? No, replied Montaigne, he had not
read them, and he was not going to, because they were all wrong, and he
was right. And Montaigne spoke with this dogmatism because he realised
that he saw clearly that which they did not--the crookedness and
unsoundness of just those simple fundamental assumptions on which the
whole fantastic structure was based.
And so with all the sophistries and illusions by which the war system is
still defended. If the public as a whole had to follow all the
intricacies of those marvellous diplomatic combinations, the maze of our
foreign politics, to understand abstruse points of finance and
economics, in order to have just and sound ideas as to the real
character of international relationship, why then public opinion would
go on being as ignorant and mistaken as it had been hitherto. But sound
opinion and instincts in that field depend upon nothing of the sort, but
upon the emergence of a few quite simple facts, which are indisputable
and self-evident, which stare us in the face, and which absolutely
disprove all the elaborate theories of the Bellicist statesmen.
For instance, if conquest and extension of territory is the main road of
moral and material progress, the fundamental need which sets up all
these rivalries and collisions, then it is the populations of the Great
States which should be the most enviable; the position of the Russian
should be more desirable than that of the Hollander; it is not. The
Austrian should be better off than the Switzer; he is not. If a nation's
wealth is really subject to military confiscation, and needs the defence
of military power, then the wealth of those small states should be
insecure indeed--and Belgian national stocks stand 20 points higher than
the German. If nations are rival units, then we should benefit by the
disappearance of our rivals--and if they disappeared, something like a
third of our population would starve to death. If the growth and
prosperity of rival nations threatens us, then we should be in far
greater danger of America to-day than we were some 50 years ago, when
the growth of that power disturbed the sleep of our statesmen (and when,
incidentally, we were just as much afraid of the growth of that power as
we are now afraid of the growth of Germany). If the growing power of
Russia compelled us to fight a great war in alliance with the Turk to
check her "advance on India," why are we now co-operating with Russia to
build railroads to India?
It is such quite simple questions as these, and the quite plain facts
which underlie them which will lead to sounder conceptions in this
matter on the part of the peoples.
It is not we who are the "theorists," if by "theorists" is meant the
constructors of elaborate and deceptive theorems in this matter. It is
our opponents, the military mystics, who persistently shut their eyes to
the great outstanding facts of history and of our time. And these
fantastic theories are generally justified by most esoteric doctrine,
not by the appeal to the facts which stare you in the face. I once
replied to a critic thus:--
In examining my critic's balance sheet I remarked that were his
figures as complete as they were absurdly incomplete and
misleading, I should still have been unimpressed. We all know that
very marvellous results are possible with figures; but one can
generally find some simple fact which puts them to the supreme test
without undue mathematics. I do not know whether it has ever
happened to my critic, as it has happened to me, while watching the
gambling in the casino of a Continental watering resort, to have a
financial genius present weird columns of figures, which
demonstrate conclusively, irrefragably, that by this system which
they embody one can break the bank and win a million. I have never
examined these figures, and never shall, for this reason: the
genius in question is prepared to sell his wonderful secret for
twenty francs. Now, in the face of that fact I am not interested
in his figures. If they were worth examination they would not be
for sale.
And so in this matter there are certain test facts which upset the
adroitest statistical legerdemain. Though, really, the fallacy
which regards an addition of territory as an addition of wealth to
the "owning" nation is a very much simpler matter than the
fallacies lying behind gambling systems, which are bound up with
the laws of chance and the law of averages and much else that
philosophers will quarrel about till the end of time. It requires
an exceptional mathematical brain really to refute those fallacies,
whereas the one we are dealing with is due simply to the difficulty
experienced by most of us in carrying in our heads two facts at the
same time. It is so much easier to seize on one fact and forget the
other. Thus we realize that when Germany has conquered
Alsace-Lorraine she has "captured" a province worth, "cash value,"
in my critic's phrase, sixty-six millions sterling. What we
overlook is that Germany has also captured the people who own the
property and who continue to own it. We have multiplied by _x_, it
is true, but we have overlooked the fact that we have had to divide
by _x_, and that the resultant is consequently, so far as the
individual is concerned, exactly what it was before. My critic
remembered the multiplication all right, but he forgot the
division.
Just think of all the theories, the impossible theories for which the
"practical" man has dragged the nations into war: the Balance of Power,
for instance. Fifteen or twenty years ago it was the ineradicable belief
of fifty or sixty million Americans, good, honest, sincere, and astute
folk, that it was their bounden duty, their manifest interest, to
fight--and in the words of one of their Senators, annihilate--Great
Britain, in the interests of the Monroe Doctrine (which is a form of the
"Balance of Power"). I do not think any one knew what the Monroe
Doctrine meant, or could coherently defend it. An American Ambassador
had an after-dinner story at the time.
"What is this I hear, Jones, that you do not believe in the Monroe
Doctrine?"
"It is a wicked lie. I have said no such thing. I do believe in the
Monroe Doctrine. I would lay down my life for it; I would die for it.
What I did say was that I didn't know what it meant."
And it was this vague theory which very nearly drove America into a war
that would have been disastrous to the progress of Anglo-Saxon
civilization.
This was at the time of the Venezuelan crisis: the United States, which
for nearly one hundred years had lived in perfect peace with a British
power touching her frontier along three thousand miles, laid it down as
a doctrine that her existence was imperilled if Great Britain should
extend by so much as a mile a vague frontier running through a South
American swamp thousands of miles away. And for that cause these decent
and honourable people were prepared to take all the risks that would be
involved to Anglo-Saxon civilisation by a war between England and
America. The present writer happened at that time to be living in
America, and concerned with certain political work. Night after night he
heard these fulminations against Great Britain; politicians,
Congressmen, Senators, Governors, Ministers, Preachers, clamouring for
war, for a theory as vague and as little practical as one could wish.
And we, of course, have had our like obsessions without number: "the
independence integrity of the Turkish dominion in Europe" is one. Just
think of it! Take in the full sound of the phrase: "the independence
integrity of the Turkish dominion in Europe!"
What, of course, makes these fantastic political doctrines possible,
what leads men to subscribe to them, are a few false general conceptions
to which they hold tenaciously--as all fundamental conceptions are held,
and ought to be. The general conceptions in question are precisely the
ones I have indicated: that nations are rival and struggling units, that
military force is consequently the determining factor of their relative
advantage; that enlargement of political frontiers is the supreme need,
and so on.
And the revision of these fundamental conceptions will, of course, be
the general work of Christendom, and given the conditions which now
obtain, the development will go on _pari passu_ in all nations or not
all. It will not be the work of "nations" at all; it will be the work of
individual men.
States do not think. It is the men who form the states who think, and
the number of those men who will act as pioneers in a better policy
must, of course, at first be small: a group here and a group there, the
best men of all countries--England, France, Germany,
America--influencing by their ideas finally the great mass. To say, as
so many do in this matter: "Let other nations do it first" is, of
course, to condemn us all to impotence--for the other nations use the
same language. To ask that one group of forty or seventy or ninety
million people shall by some sort of magic all find their way to a saner
doctrine before such doctrine has affected other groups is to talk the
language of childishness. Things do not happen in that in human affairs.
It is not in that way that opinion grows. It did not grow in that way
in any one of the steps that I have mentioned--in the abolition of
religious persecution, or slavery, or judicial torture. Unless the
individual man sees his responsibility for determining what is right and
knowing how and why it is right, there will be no progress; there cannot
even be a beginning.
We are to an even greater degree an integral part of European Society,
and a factor of European Policy, than we were at the time of the Crimean
War, when we mainly determined it; and our theories and discussions will
act and re-act upon that policy just as did any considerable body of
thought, whether French political thought of the eighteenth century, or
German religious thought of the sixteenth century, even at a time when
the means of producing that reaction, the book, literature, the
newspaper, rapid communication, were so immeasurably more primitive and
rudimentary than ours. What we think and say and do affects not merely
ourselves, but that whole body politic of Christendom of which we are an
integral part.
It is a curious fact that the moral and intellectual interdependence of
States preceded by a long period, that material and economic
independence which I have tried recently to make clear. Nothing is more
contrary to fact than to suppose that any considerable movement of
opinion in Europe can be limited to the frontiers of one nation. Even at
a time when it took half a generation for a thought to travel from one
capital to another, a student or thinker in some obscure Italian, Swiss
or German village was able to modify policy, to change the face of
Europe and of mankind. Coming nearer to our time, it was the work of the
encyclopaedists and earlier political questioners which made the French
Revolution; and the effect of that Revolution was not confined to
France. The ideas which animated it re-acted directly upon our Empire,
upon the American Colonies, upon the Spanish Colonies, upon Italy, and
the formation of United Italy, upon Germany--the world over. These
miracles, almost too vast and great to conceive, were the outcome of
that intangible thing, an idea, an aspiration, an ideal. And if they
could accomplish so much in that day when the popular press and cheap
literature and improved communication did not exist, how is it possible
to suppose that any great ferment of opinion can be limited to one group
in our day, when we have a condition of things in which the declaration
of an English Cabinet Minister to-night is read to-morrow morning by
every reading German?
It should be to our everlasting glory that our political thought in the
past, some of our political institutions, parliamentary government, and
what not, have had an enormous influence in the world. We have some
ground for hoping that another form of political institution which we
have initiated, a relationship of distinct political groups into which
force does not enter, will lead the way to a better condition of things
in Christendom. We have demonstrated that five independent nations, the
nations of the British Empire, can settle their differences as between
one another without the use of force. We have definitely decided that
whatever the attitude Australia, Canada, and South Africa may adopt to
us we shall not use force to change it. What is possible with five is
possible with fifteen nations. Just as we have given to the world
roughly our conception of Parliamentary Government, so it is to be hoped
may we give to the world our conception of the true relationship of
nations.
The great steps of the past--religious freedom, the abolition of torture
and of slavery, the rights of the mass, self-government--every real step
which man has made has been made because men "theorised," because a
Galileo, or a Luther, or a Calvin, or a Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham,
Spencer, Darwin, wrote and put notes of interrogation. Had they not done
so none of those things could have been accomplished. The greatest work
of the renaissance was the elimination of physical force in the struggle
of religious groups, in religious struggles generally; the greatest work
of our generation will be elimination of physical force from the
struggle of the political groups and from political struggles generally.
But it will be done in exactly the same way: by a common improvement of
opinion. And because we possess immeasurably better instruments for the
dissemination of ideas, we should be able to achieve the Political
Reformation of Europe much more rapidly and effectively than our
predecessors achieved the great intellectual Reformation of their time.