The quality of patriotism is determined by what we desire for our
country, as the quality of friendship is determined by what we desire
for our friend. And this question—the question what it is that we desire
for our country—is of supreme moment to-day, because in the answer given
to it, whether by practice or in principle, are rooted the permanent
underlying conditions of war and peace.
Assuming then that what is true of principles is true of the
corresponding practice, whether or no the actors understand what they
are doing, I will ask you to consider with me three typical ideas
expressive of what men desire for their country, each of them bearing a
distinctive relation to the causes and customs of war, and to the
permanent basis of peace.
And in this consideration I hope that we shall also be elucidating an
interesting question in the history of recent thought. We shall see how
the splendid political philosophy of Germany a hundred years ago has
passed on the one hand into her intoxication of to-day, while on the
other hand, elsewhere, in face of a more liberal experience, it has
found a decisive completion in a human and democratic sense. The three
conceptions to which I refer have very much in common, and a great part
of the interest of our inquiry, and also perhaps a little practical
value which it might possess, depends on noticing very precisely the
points at which distinctions become blurred, and the ideas, mostly by
mere omission, are apt to slide into one another.
Let us make a beginning, then, with Hegel’s political thought, the
German thought of a hundred years ago. At that time the idea of a man’s
country, as focussed in the state, was a glorious vision, stimulated
largely by Greek conceptions and drawing something from English
constitutional experience; while in the existing reality of the Prussian
system there was little to catch the eye, and little power, therefore,
to narrow the outlook.
Now the essential point for us here to grasp firmly, if we wish to enter
into the truth of the matter and its adjacent fallacies, is that Hegel
means by the state, not the machine of government, but all that fulfils,
in the actual community, the individual’s mind and will. The individual
is supposed to see in it the form of life, and more than that, the
particular form of sentiment and volition, which his nation has so far
worked out for itself, and in which he, the private person, finds the
substance of his own mind, and what unites him with others. It includes,
of course, the ethical tradition of the society, with the observances
and institutions in which it is embodied and preserved; and more
especially it is identified with the general will as expressed in the
laws and the political constitution. The state, in short, is the ark in
which the whole treasure of the individual citizen’s head and heart is
preserved and guarded within a world which may be disorderly and
hostile.
One may naturally ask, where then does humanity come in, and how
recognize the claims of other nations and persons? This is exceedingly
important, but not difficult. Your country is held to express the whole
form of life for which you stand, and therefore, within that, your moral
attitude to humanity and the world in general. If you are an Englishman,
you probably object to slavery. But that attitude is not a thing of
chance, in which you stand outside your age and country. It is part of
the outlook at which, on the whole, England had at a certain time
arrived, and which came to individual Englishmen through their
participation in the national mind. Here is a point at which a slide
into fallacy is too possible. That moral view of the world which you and
your state stand up for is one thing. A moral view which considers only
your own and your state’s immediate interests is quite another thing;
but it is very easy to confuse the two, both in practice and in
controversy.
We have said enough to indicate the value which, according to such
ideas, the private individual, in theory or by practice, recognizes in
his state. Looked at in this way, our country, the state, is simply all
we have. Innumerable claims may come to us from outside, but they all
come through it and subject to it; just as they all come to us through
our own feelings and our own beliefs. Without the state we are nothing
and nobody. It is for us the vehicle of the value of the world. It
stands for our contribution to the general sum of what humanity has
achieved and what makes any life worth living.
So far what we desire for our country, our view of its mission, is to
achieve the very best we all are capable of becoming. But there is
another side to this same set of ideas.
Obviously, to fulfil this, its necessary mission, the state needs above
all things to be _strong_. Men who had lived through Napoleonic times
could have no doubt about that. Who indeed was to help a state if it
could not help itself? War, then, was the inevitable arbiter, and by the
test of war the state must stand or fall. Hegel is primarily appealing
to facts when he says that outside the several communities there is no
general will. As yet there could not be; for the general will _is_ the
will of a community, backed by its whole body, mind, and sentiment.
Thus, no one can possibly dictate into what demands separate states
shall throw their ultimate honour and self-assertion; and if in these
they conflict there is no ultimate solution but war. On one side, we
have seen, the state is akin to art, philosophy, and religion; it is
mind in a concentrated form. But between it and these other shapes of
mind there is the one fundamental distinction. The state is mind ‘in the
world’. It is not only our treasure, but it is the ark which carries our
treasure. ‘In the world’ right can only prevail through might. Strength
in war is therefore the first condition of the state’s fulfilment of its
function; and being the first condition, and a condition peculiar to the
state among the forms of mind, it is too easily taken as the aim and
whole upshot of the state. This again, as we shall see, is a point at
which one idea is apt to slide into another.
Therefore, since as yet there can be, outside and above the several
states, no general will with a common heart and force, no
‘praetor’—judge representing power—but only at best an ‘arbitrator’, all
international laws, treaties, and usages are, at bottom, only agreements
of a number of particular wills, the wills of absolute independent
bodies. _So far_ nations are to one another, as older writers had said,
in a state of nature, like the supposed (but quite imaginary)
individuals before Society was invented. Hegel does not say that there
cannot be, and are not, humane usages, conventions, rules, and treaties.
The whole of international law rests on the principle that treaties are
to be observed. But behind all this there is the sheer fact of the
separate individual powers, each absolute in its limited area; so that,
at bottom, the whole fabric of international rules and customs is just
an agreement of separate wills, and not an expression of a single
general will. Ultimately, or fundamentally, each of these separate wills
is and must be determined by its own conception of its own welfare. This
is the difficulty I think in the way of leagues and federations in
favour of peace as suggested by Kant and by Norman Angell. They are
purely _de facto_. They do not rest upon the spirit of a solid
community; and every powerful league tends _ipso facto_ to raise up a
powerful counter-league against it, with grave risk of war.
It follows from this that there is a fundamental distinction between the
moral position of the private individual who works out the detail of his
duty on the basis of recognized rights within a previously ordered and
organized society, and that of the state, which has ‘in the world’ to
provide and sustain, at all hazards, the organized society within which
the individual is to live. The tasks of morals and of international
politics are different in principle, though the end to which they
co-operate is the same. The immediate task of morals is to live a life,
that of international politics is to provide a world within which life
can be lived.
The same distinction must be pushed beyond the difference of the tasks
into the difference of their possibility. For the private individual it
is fairly easy, in the main, at least to _know_ what he should do, and
what he should not. He lives within a scheme of recognized rights and
obligations; and, starting from his legal position and accepted duties,
he can tell whether he is behaving selfishly or generously, rudely or
courteously, kindly or unkindly. His lawyer will tell him his legal
rights; and it is for him to insist upon them or to surrender them. But
in principle the state has no such guide. It is not living out an
ordered life, within a recognized scheme. It cannot tell whether it is
being less than just, or merely just, or kind and generous. For it every
case is under altering conditions and new, and it is sole judge in its
own cause. A state may think that it is behaving with superhuman
generosity, while its antagonist may think it is behaving like a bandit.
There is no complete or detailed scheme and scale of conduct and
sentiment to operate as a norm of feeling and judgement. Of course this
language may seem exaggerated in face of the well-established usages of
international law, and the existence of treaties. But the difference we
have mentioned affects them all. _Ultimately_, to reiterate that
terrible adverb, which governs the whole argument, it is as we say. A
private person has the letter and spirit of his moral world to live up
to, and on the main lines and choices of life there is a wealth of
recognized obligations which, I do not say tell him what to do, but
certainly warn him what he is doing. A state is sailing a sea but
slightly charted, and what marks the charts do furnish are mostly recent
and depend on a revocable consent. As a supreme power, it has a
responsibility for every choice, of which no precedents nor external
recommendations can divest it. At every step it is making a new world.
Thus, in such an idea of patriotism as we have been describing, the
attitude to war is favourable on the whole. There is, it suggests, an
element in the world which is transitory and accidental, the element of
temporal life and temporal goods. It is natural and necessary that
accident should prey upon the accidental, and that contingent values
should thus be distinguished from substantial. War is the fiery test of
reality, and the maker of nations. ‘In the world’ accident is necessary
and has its good. Here is a striking passage; not a complete survey of
the question, but, I think, requiring consideration, and showing the
conviction embodied in the attitude we have tried to portray:
‘Of course, war brings insecurity of possessions, but this actual
insecurity is only a necessary movement. We hear from the pulpit so much
of the uncertainty, vanity, and fickleness of temporal things; but every
one thinks as he hears it, however touching may be the eloquence, “_I_
shall manage to keep what is mine”. But now if this uncertainty
confronts them in grim earnest in the shape of hussars with naked
sabres, then the touching spirit of edification, in the face of the very
thing it foretold, betakes itself to hurling curses at the victors. But
in spite of all, wars take place when the occasion demands it; the crops
grow again; and babble is mute before the grim iterations of
history.’[23]
Before leaving these ideas of a hundred years ago, it is worth while to
note the general temper of intellectual Germany in that great age. It
was full, no doubt, of self-assertion, not unbecoming to a nation
conscious of immense capacities. But it was sympathetic and receptive.
No men ever worked harder to educate themselves in the widest experience
of humanity than Goethe and his contemporaries. Their feeling is fairly
expressed in some verses addressed by Schiller to Goethe, on the
exceptional occasion of a play by Voltaire being performed at the Weimar
theatre. We see in them the delicate balance of self-assertion and
receptivity. Here is a rough version:
To home-born art this stage is consecrated,
No more are stranger idols worshipped here;
The laurel we display with heart elated
On _our_ poetic mount its growth did rear;
To art’s high fane, himself initiated,
Boldly the German genius has drawn near;
And on the track of Briton and of Greek
Has set his face a purer fame to seek.
The Briton and the Greek are Shakespeare and Aristotle, or perhaps the
Greek Tragedians. And the same types of experience, English and
Hellenic, were at work in the conception of patriotism we have
portrayed. It is not, Hegel says, emphatically, the mere occasional
readiness for extreme sacrifices. It is the recognition of the community
as our substance throughout all the detailed functions of life. We shall
further see the supreme value of this apparently prosaic view.
Now we need not add many words in explaining how this attitude of the
great time has degenerated into the creed of violence and self-interest
of which we hear to-day. It is essentially the passage of a large and
many-sided philosophical doctrine into the hands of ignorant and biased
amateurs, soldiers, historians, politicians.[24] Well, all philosophy is
dangerous, for it blinks no side of the truth, and any one of its
statements, taken by itself and with bias, may act as a mighty strong
wine or as a high explosive.
It is enough to recall the two points in the great German philosophy at
which we noted how readily one idea slides into another. One is where it
says that a state is and can be determined only by its own good. We
tried to explain that the thing is a truism. Its good is the form of
life and feeling which it has made and chosen, and includes its
relations to others. But if for good (Wohl) you read exclusive
self-interest, the thing is done. A great idea slides before your eyes
into the meanest of worldly maxims. So with the other point. As guardian
of a treasure, the state must be strong in war. But it is different when
you say that its strength in war sets it free to sully at its will the
treasure it has to guard.
To make these two transitions is the same thing as to drop out from the
conception of patriotism all that we said about the positive values of
which the state is guardian. In a huge country, intoxicated with its new
material prosperity, and even in the realm of intellect so busy with
myriad specialities as to be deafened to voices from without by the
clamour of its own contending schools, such a transition seems almost
natural.
But yet, when this transition is made, the public conscience, the
compass of the difficult voyage, is gone. Everything depended on its
recognition of the supreme values within its own good; and the change
leaves them as mere names for whatever can be effected by force. And
now, all the _de facto_ truths which the great philosophy conceded with
regard to international conventions return upon us with crushing force.
You can find parallels in Hegel, as we saw, for much of the language, e.
g., of the _Book of War_, about mere usages and conventions. The only
difference is that the national conscience—which makes Hegel say, for
instance, that Europe is in actual humane behaviour a single family—the
national conscience is now deleted from the theory.
So by mere omission and exaggeration, this great idea of patriotism is
totally perverted, and we are brought to the point that what a man
desires for his country is military supremacy to be used without scruple
in the promotion of its exclusive interest.
This was the second of the three attitudes or ideas of patriotism which
we meant to consider. We have observed how it might arise by a heated
and narrowed conception of the first, under the intoxication of new
achievements, leading to new temptations and ambitions.
But now, recurring for a moment to the philosophy of the great time, let
us consider a third expression of patriotism, to which it has given rise
in a wholly different atmosphere.
It was a conviction, held in common by the two forms of patriotism we
have been considering, that war is a necessary accident, arising out of
the very nature of the state as a separate sovereign power exposed to
accident, and therefore, something to which a state is liable because
and in as far as it is what a state should be. Now a great deal in this
idea may seem to us a truism. States _are_ particular independent
bodies, themselves sole ultimate judges of their differences and their
honour. No independent state (as Pericles said) _will_ brook an order
from another state; if it does, its independence is gone. And on such a
point there can be no arbitration. War _is_ the ultimate arbiter, and
therefore springs from this very nature of states; and it _does_ behove
states to be strong. And for war, as for all other evils and accidents,
there _is_ a good deal to be said. Each of them by itself is clearly a
thing to be fought against, but without any of them at all—well, life
would very soon generate new ones.
But a further question has been raised, and seems worth pursuing. Is not
a wrong done somewhere, when lives are sacrificed in war? Certainly it
is not murder, for it is not unlawful killing; but again, it is not
merely like an earthquake. It comes from human conduct somewhere and
somewhen. We may not be able to apportion the guilt of it, but it might
be worth inquiry whether the conduct could not be changed. Perhaps our
analysis has hitherto not gone far enough. _After_ differences have
broken out between independent sovereign states all we have said holds
good—the separate wills of separate bodies, the mere outward agreements
with no deep-seated impartial will and power behind them, the usages and
rules at the mercy of the individual conscience of states, which in some
cases appears to be an absent factor.
Well, but cannot we go further back? _Is_ it in the nature of states
that differences should constantly be arising between them? The state is
there to be the condition of organized good life for the inhabitants of
a certain territory. Is it a property of this function that different
states should be continually liable to be at variance? Is tendency to
war really a feature of states in respect of what they are as states? Or
is it not rather perhaps a feature of them in so far as they fail to be
states? To organize good life in a certain territory seems to have
nothing in it prima facie which should necessitate variance between the
bodies charged with the task in one place and in another.
When, in the light of this question, we look closer at the facts, what
stares us in the face is that the cause of external conflict as a rule
is not internal organization, but internal disorganization. The
quarrelsome man is not well organized in his mind; he is ill
organized—certainly in mind, probably in body. Plato indeed laid his
finger on the place, though you might criticize his explanation in some
particulars. The origin of war, he says, is when states become
internally diseased; the more they are distracted within, the more they
come into conflict without.
Let us think further of this. People who are satisfied do not want to
make war; and in a well-organized community people are satisfied. War
must arise from dissatisfied elements in a community; people who have
not got what they want within (or have it but are afraid of losing it)
and so look for profit or for security in adventures without. War
belongs to a state, then, ultimately, not in so far as it is a state,
but in so far as it is not a state.
All sorts of causes of dissatisfaction or alarm lead to external
conflict. There may be privileged classes directly interested in
resisting the better organization of the community; in maintaining, for
instance, an obsolete franchise and the power of a military caste. There
may be oppressed religious persuasions, oppressed nationalities,
provinces torn from the allegiance they prefer. All of these are likely
to throw their hopes and ambitions outside the state which formally
includes them, and to produce resentments against it in other groups.
Then, more subtle and more modern, there are the whole set of
restrictions upon human intercourse which depend on the idea that the
gain of one community is the loss of another. All of these make doubly
for war; they make privileges at home, which turn the mind of the
privileged class away from internal organization and towards external
aggression; and they make exclusions abroad, turning the mind of the
excluded classes to retaliation both in kind and by arms. Exclusion
reaches the climax of its vicious effect when it becomes an affair of
what I shall call for short ‘passive markets’—such, that is, as raise
the problem of the prior possession of uncivilized regions which the
white man can exploit at pleasure, and at pleasure close against others.
I must not pause to analyse at length the claims supported by that
blessed word ‘expansion’. So good a historian as Dr. Holland Rose[25]
seems to accept the increase of Germany’s population by 50 per cent. in
one generation as a sufficient reason for a vigorous expansion policy.
But surely we must distinguish between the duties really imposed upon a
state by such an increase with a view to organization of life, and the
adventures and exclusive exploitations for which it may be the pretext,
but which do nothing serious to aid the work of organization, while they
fill the world with monopolies and with terrors of aggression.
And again, it appears only just to remark, following for example a
recent article by Sir Harry Johnston,[26] confirmed in this respect by
Mr. Morel,[26] that when in a huge world-empire there is advocated a
policy of commercial exclusion directed against other countries, these
countries will anticipate being gravely prejudiced in their legitimate
foreign trade. Then follows the desire on their part to possess
themselves of exclusive markets, and unending fears and resentments are
bred on every side. That the practical and theoretical inspiration of
the policy so advocated had its source in some of the countries
threatened by it, would have made it, if carried out, an interesting
retribution, but would not have diminished its danger.
Surely, for the legitimate expansion demanded by increase of population
the ‘open door’ is the right and effective principle. It will meet both
the need of trade, and in the last resort, the need of space and
elbow-room for population. Under it no one’s expansion can be a threat
to any one, or produce monopolies which will hinder social organization,
and turn men’s minds to aggression. And it must also be noted that the
loss of citizen population, which is sometimes complained of, is not
really met by mere increase of territorial possessions. It is largely
due to the very military system which is relied on to remedy its
causes—in a word, to defective social organization, which lays unwelcome
burdens on the ordinary citizen, and even fails to utilize territorial
expansion as an outlet for population.
It must be borne in mind, however, that the exclusive policy advocated
within our Empire was decisively rejected, and the open door, the main
thing demanded by expansion elsewhere, was as decisively maintained.
Even territorial acquisition in tropical regions, though it has
practically been of little value to the increasing populations of
European countries, this country has not obstructed, and I hope and
trust that it will maintain its unenvious policy in this respect up to
the limits of possibility in the settlement after the war.
I have no right to lecture on economics, but the general principles
which I have been advocating, of absence of monopoly at home, and the
‘open door’ abroad, fall, I think, within the competence of a student of
politics. Restrictions on human intercourse are prima facie injurious,
and demand the very strongest justification if they are to be tolerated.
And on a kindred point, really beyond my competence, I will merely put a
question. Presupposing a sufficiency of external trade to pay for food
and raw materials, is not the home market the most important and the
most secure? When it is not so, is not the purchasing power of the most
numerous classes short of what it should be? And through directing the
minds of the leaders of trade to external adventure, is not such a state
of things a constant incentive to exclusive exploitation and to war?
I will end by summarizing as shortly as I can the conclusions which
follow from our argument—both what we must admit, and what we are
anxious to maintain.
(1) We must admit that states, in consequence of their separateness and
absoluteness, are so _far_ in a relation of nature to each other, though
this is mitigated by humane conventions and usages. If differences
arise, the ultimate arbiter is war, which is therefore necessary to the
function of states as now existing. While this is so, international
politics must differ from individual morality as maintaining a world
differs from living in one.
(2) We must admit that when, on this basis, it is attempted to secure
peace according to the rule _Si vis pacem, para bellum_, the project is
self-contradictory. As principles are the same for all parties, it
implies the condition of securing peace to be that of any two opponent
powers each must be at the same time stronger than the other. This
contradiction is the root of the race in armaments.
(3) We must admit that, on this basis, no league or federation _ad hoc_
can secure peace. Every such league must, sooner or later (being a mere
convention of separate wills) arouse a counter-league. Such
arrangements, I believe, are fertile of wars.
(4) We maintain that the fundamental root of peace lies in the
recognition that war belongs to states not in as far as they are states,
but in as far as they are not states; granted that their actual defects
to-day make the reverse of this appear to be the truth.
(5) We maintain that the patriotism which is the source of peace
therefore lies in a thorough everyday loyalty to the state as a means of
harmonious internal organization excluding privilege and monopoly, and
in our desire for our country of those supreme goods which are not
diminished by sharing. Trade and industry, though acquisitions of
material wealth, take on this character when conducted on an impartial
and rational basis. This view agrees with the great German philosophy in
its estimate of true patriotism, but goes further in analysing the
relation of such patriotism to the causes of war.[27]
(6) We maintain that in a group or world of states, possessed by such a
patriotism, and therefore organized so as to be free from causes of
resentment, and united in aims and methods which admit of harmony, it is
conceivable that a true general will (not a mere external convention)
might grow up which should be solidly supported by the body, spirit, and
sentiment of all the communities.[28] In such a case a genuine
international moral world would be created, and international politics
would approach more nearly to the nature of private morality, though
they could never be the same. In some respects, indeed, the state, as
more impartial, might maintain a higher standard than the individual, as
happens on occasion even to-day.[29]
(7) We maintain that the patriotism which is the desire for our country
of those supreme goods which are not diminished by sharing, is a
guarantee of a right estimate of values, and therefore of justice and
reasonable organization in dealing with wealth and power both at home
and abroad.
Such a patriotism, desiring and sustaining the perfection of the state
in its organizing functions as a state, is the only force which is
essentially directed to destroying the causes of war. Even those
intangible springs of hostility, the jealousy and vanity of nations,
cannot ultimately exist in the same world with such a patriotism.
This temper of mind offers the only prospect of a solid general will
including groups of states. As its expression, but not without it,
leagues of states for the enforcement of peace might do good service.
Its detailed operation in such a crisis as will confront the nations of
Europe at the close of the war, will consist in a sincere and
persevering effort to secure everywhere the removal of all such causes
of internal distraction as have been specified above.
By the merest accident in the world, the last word in this course of
lectures has fallen to me. And I feel irresistibly impelled to use the
opportunity, well knowing how inadequately, in making an appeal to you
in the spirit of a conviction which more and more possesses my mind.