point--that the growth of the United States is a process that has no
precedent in the world's history; it is a new kind of occurrence. Such a
community could not have come into existence before, and if it had it
would, without railways, have certainly dropped to pieces long before
now. Without railways or telegraph it would be far easier to administer
California from Pekin than from Washington. But this great population of
the United States of America has not only grown outrageously; it has
kept uniform. Nay, it has become more uniform. The man of San Francisco
is more like the man of New York to-day than the man of Virginia was
like the man of New England a century ago. And the process of
assimilation goes on unimpeded. The United States is being woven by
railway, by telegraph, more and more into one vast human unity,
speaking, thinking, and acting harmoniously with itself. Soon aviation
will be helping in the work.
Now this great community of the United States is, I repeat, an
altogether new thing in history. There have been great empires before
with populations exceeding 100 millions, but these were associations of
divergent peoples; there has never been one single people on this scale
before. We want a new term for this new thing. We call the United States
a country, just as we call France or Holland a country. But really the
two things are as different as an automobile and a one-horse shay. They
are the creations of different periods and different conditions; they
are going to work at a different pace and in an entirely different way.
If you propose--as I gather some of the League of Nations people
propose--to push the Peace of the World along on a combination of these
two sorts of vehicle, I venture to think the Peace of the World will be
subjected to some very considerable strains.
Let me now make a brief comparison between the American and the European
situation in relation to these vital matters, locomotion and the general
means of communicating. I said just now that the United States of
America owe most to the revolution in locomotion and have felt it least.
Europe on the other hand owes least to the revolution in locomotion and
has felt it most. The revolution in locomotion found the United States
of America a fringe of population on the sea margins of a great rich
virgin empty country into which it desired to expand, and into which it
was free to expand. The steamboat and railway seemed to come as a
natural part of that expansion. They came as unqualified blessings. But
into Western Europe they came as a frightful nuisance.
The States of Europe, excepting Russia, were already a settled,
established and balanced system. They were living in final and
conclusive boundaries with no further possibility of peaceful expansion.
Every extension of a European state involved a war; it was only possible
through war. And while the limits to the United States have been set by
the steamship and the railroad, the limits to the European sovereign
states were drawn at a much earlier time. They were drawn by the horse,
and particularly the coach-horse travelling along the high road. If you
will examine a series of political maps of Europe for the last two
thousand years, you will see that there has evidently been a definite
limit to the size of sovereign states through all that time, due to the
impossibility of keeping them together because of the difficulty of
intercommunication if they grew bigger. And this was in spite of the
fact that there were two great unifying ideas present in men's minds in
Europe throughout that period, namely, the unifying idea of the Roman
Empire, and the unifying idea of Christendom. Both these ideas tended to
make Europe one, but the difficulties of communication defeated that
tendency. It is quite interesting to watch the adventures of what is
called first the Roman Empire and afterwards the Holy Roman Empire, in a
series of historical maps. It keeps expanding and then dropping to
pieces again. It is like the efforts of someone who is trying to pack up
a parcel which is much too big, in wet blotting paper. The cohesion was
inadequate. And so it was that the eighteenth century found Europe still
divided up into what I may perhaps call these high-road and coach-horse
states, each with a highly developed foreign policy, each with an
intense sense of national difference and each with intense traditional
antagonisms.
Then came this revolution in the means of locomotion, which has
increased the normal range of human activity at least ten times. The
effect of that in America was opportunity; the effect of it in Europe
was congestion. It is as if some rather careless worker of miracles had
decided suddenly to make giants of a score of ordinary men, and chose
the moment for the miracle when they were all with one exception
strap-hanging in a street car. The United States was that fortunate
exception.
Now this is what modern civilization has come up against, and it is the
essential riddle of the modern sphinx which must be solved if we are to
live. All the European boundaries of to-day are impossibly small for
modern conditions. And they are sustained by an intensity of ancient
tradition and patriotic passion.... That is where we stand.
The citizens of the United States of America are not without their
experience in this matter. The crisis of the national history of the
American community, the war between Union and Secession, was essentially
a crisis between the great state of the new age and the local feeling of
an earlier period. But Union triumphed. Americans live now in a
generation that has almost forgotten that there once seemed a
possibility that the map of North America might be broken up at last
into as many communities as the map of Europe. Except by foreign travel,
the present generation of Americans can have no idea of the net of
vexations and limitations in which Europeans are living at the present
time because of their political disunion.
Let me take a small but quite significant set of differences, the
inconveniences of travel upon a journey of a little over a thousand
miles. They are in themselves petty inconveniences, but they will serve
to illustrate the net that is making free civilized life in Europe more
and more impossible.
Take first the American case. An American wants to travel from New York
to St. Louis. He looks up the next train, packs his bag, gets aboard a
sleeper and turns out at St. Louis next day ready for business.
Take now the European parallel. A European wants to travel from London
to Warsaw. Now that is a shorter distance by fifty or sixty miles than
the distance from New York to St. Louis. Will he pack his bag, get
aboard a train and go there? He will not. He will have to get a
passport, and getting a passport involves all sorts of tiresome little
errands. One has to go to a photographer, for example, to get
photographs to stick on the passport. The good European has then to take
his passport to the French representative in London for a French visa,
or, if he is going through Belgium, for a Belgian visa. After that he
must get a German visa. Then he must go round to the Czecho-Slovak
office for a Czechoslovak visa. Finally will come the Polish visa.
Each of these endorsements necessitates something vexatious, personal
attendance, photography, stamps, rubber stamps, mysterious signatures
and the like, and always the payment of fees. Also they necessitate
delays. The other day I had occasion to go to Moscow, and I learnt that
it takes three weeks to get a visa for Finland and three weeks to get a
visa for Esthonia. You see you can't travel about Europe at all without
weeks and weeks of preparation. The preparations for a little journey to
Russia the other day took three whole days out of my life, cost me
several pounds in stamps and fees, and five in bribery.
Ultimately, however, the good European is free to start. Arriving at the
French frontier in an hour or so, he will be held up for a long customs'
examination. Also he will need to change some of his money into francs.
His English money will be no good in France. The exchange in Europe is
always fluctuating, and he will be cheated on the exchange. All European
countries, including my own, cheat travellers on the exchange--that is
apparently what the exchange is for.
He will then travel for a few hours to the German frontier. There he
will be bundled out again. The French will investigate him closely to
see that he is not carrying gold or large sums of money out of France.
Then he will be handed over to the Germans. He will go through the same
business with the customs and the same business with the money. His
French money is no further use to him and he must get German. A few more
hours and he will arrive on the frontier of Bohemia. Same search for
gold. Then customs' examination and change of money again. A few hours
more and he will be in Poland. Search for gold, customs, fresh money.
As most of these countries are pursuing different railway policies, he
will probably have to change trains and rebook his luggage three or four
times. The trains may be ingeniously contrived not to connect so as to
force him to take some longer route politically favoured by one of the
intervening states. He will be lucky if he gets to Warsaw in four days.
Arrived in Warsaw, he will probably need a permit to stay there, and he
will certainly need no end of permits to leave.
Now here is a fuss over a fiddling little journey of 1,100 miles. Is it
any wonder that the bookings from London to Warsaw are infinitesimal in
comparison with the bookings from New York to St. Louis? But what I have
noted here are only the normal inconveniences of the traveller. They are
by no means the most serious inconveniences.
The same obstructions that hamper the free movement of a traveller,
hamper the movement of foodstuffs and all sorts of merchandise in a much
greater degree. Everywhere in Europe trade is being throttled by tariffs
and crippled by the St. Vitus' dance of the exchanges. Each of these
European sovereign states turns out paper money at its own sweet will.
Last summer I went to Prague and exchanged pounds for kroners. They
ought to have been 25 to the pound. On Monday they were 180 to the
pound: on Friday 169. They jump about between 220 and 150, and everybody
is inconvenienced except the bankers and money changers. And this
uncertain exchange diverts considerable amounts of money that should be
stimulating business enterprise into a barren and mischievous gambling
with the circulation.
Between each one of these compressed European countries the movement of
food or labour is still more blocked and impeded. And in addition to
these nuisances of national tariffs and independent national coinages at
every few score miles, Europe is extraordinarily crippled by its want of
any central authority to manage the most elementary collective
interests; the control of vice, for example; the handling of infectious
diseases; the suppression of international criminals.
Europe is now confronted by a new problem--the problem of air transport.
So far as I can see, air transport is going to be strangled in Europe by
international difficulties. One can fly comfortably and safely from
London to Paris in two or three hours. But the passport preliminaries
will take days beforehand.
The other day I wanted to get quickly to Reval in Esthonia from England
and back again. The distance is about the same as from Boston to
Minneapolis, and it could be done comfortably in 10 or 12 hours' flying.
I proposed to the Handley Page Company that they should arrange this for
me. They explained that they had no power to fly beyond Amsterdam in
Holland; thence it might be possible to get a German plane to Hamburg,
and thence again a Danish plane to Copenhagen--leaving about 500 miles
which were too complicated politically to fly. Each stoppage would
involve passport and other difficulties. In the end it took me five days
to get to Reval and seven days to get back. In Europe, with its present
frontiers, flying is not worth having. It can never be worth having--it
can never be worked successfully--until it is worked as at least a
pan-European affair.
All these are the normal inconveniences of the national divisions of
Europe in peace time. By themselves they are strangling all hope of
economic recovery. For Europe is _not_ getting on to its feet
economically. Only a united effort can effect that. But along each of
the ridiculously restricted frontiers into which the European countries
are packed, lies also the possibility of war. National independence
means the right to declare war. And so each of these packed and
strangulated European countries is obliged, by its blessed independence,
to maintain as big an army and as big a military equipment as its
bankrupt condition--for we are all bankrupt--permits.
Since the end of the Great War, nothing has been done of any real value
to ensure any European country against the threat of war, and nothing
will be done, and nothing can be done to lift that threat, so long as
the idea of national independence overrides all other considerations.
And again, it is a little difficult for a mind accustomed to American
conditions, to realize what modern war will mean in Europe.
Not one of these sovereign European states I have named between London
and Warsaw is any larger than the one single American state of Texas,
and not one has a capital that cannot be effectively bombed by aeroplane
raiders from its frontier within five or six hours of a declaration of
war. We can fly from London to Paris in two or three hours. And the
aerial bombs of to-day, I can assure you, will make the biggest bombs of
1918 seem like little crackers. Over all these European countries broods
this immediate threat of a warfare that will strain and torment the
nerves of every living man, woman or child in the countries affected.
Nothing of the sort can approach the American citizen except after a
long warning. The worst war that could happen to any North American
country would merely touch its coasts.
Now I have dwelt on these differences between America and Europe because
they involve an absolute difference in outlook towards world peace
projects, towards leagues of nations, world states and the like, between
the American and the European.
The American lives in a political unity on the big modern scale. He can
go on comfortably for a hundred years yet before he begins to feel tight
in his political skin, and before he begins to feel the threat of
immediate warfare close to his domestic life. He believes by experience
in peace, but he feels under no passionate urgency to organize it. So
far as he himself is concerned, he has got peace organized for a good
long time ahead. I doubt if it would make any very serious difference
for some time in the ordinary daily life of Kansas City, let us say, if
all Europe were reduced to a desert in the next five years.
But on the other hand, the intelligent European is up against the unity
of Europe problem night and day. Europe cannot go on. European
civilization cannot go on, unless that net of boundaries which strangles
her is dissolved away. The difficulties created by language differences,
by bitter national traditions, by bad political habits and the like, are
no doubt stupendous. But stupendous though they are, they have to be
faced. Unless they are overcome, and overcome in a very few years,
Europe--entangled in this net of boundaries, and under a perpetual fear
of war, will, I am convinced, follow Russia and slide down beyond any
hope of recovery into a process of social dissolution as profound and
disastrous as that which closed the career of the Western Roman Empire.
The American intelligence and the European intelligence approach this
question of a world peace, therefore, from an entirely different angle
and in an entirely different spirit. To the American in the blessed ease
of his great unbroken territory, it seems a matter simply of making his
own ample securities world-wide by treaties of arbitration and such-like
simple agreements. And my impression is that he thinks of Europeans as
living under precisely similar conditions.
Nothing of that sort will meet the problem of the Old World. The
European situation is altogether more intense and tragic than the
American. Europe needs not treaties but a profound change in its
political ideas and habits. Europe is saturated with narrow patriotism
like a body saturated by some evil inherited disease. She is haunted by
narrow ambitions and ancient animosities.
It is because of this profound difference of situation and outlook that
I am convinced of the impossibility of any common political co-operation
to organize a world peace between America and Europe at the present
time.
The American type of state and the European type of state are different
things, incapable of an effectual alliance; the steam tractor and the ox
cannot plough this furrow together. American thought, American
individuals, may no doubt play a very great part in the task of
reconstruction that lies before Europe, but not the American federal
government as a sovereign state among equal states.
The United States constitute a state on a different scale and level from
any old world state. Patriotism and the national idea in America is a
different thing and a bigger scale thing than the patriotism and
national idea in any old world state.
Any League of Nations aiming at stability now, would necessarily be a
league seeking to stereotype existing boundaries and existing national
ideas. Now these boundaries and these ideas are just what have to be got
rid of at any cost. Before Europe can get on to a level and on to equal
terms with the United States, the European communities have to go
through a process that America went through--under much easier
conditions--a century and a half ago. They have to repeat, on a much
greater scale and against profounder prejudices, the feat of
understanding and readjustment that was accomplished by the American
people between 1781 and 1788.
As you will all remember, these States after they had decided upon
Independence, framed certain Articles of Confederation; they were
articles of confederation between thirteen nations, between the people
of Massachusetts, the people of Virginia, the people of Georgia, and so
forth--thirteen distinct and separate sovereign peoples. They made a
Union so lax and feeble that it could neither keep order at home nor
maintain respect abroad. Then they produced another constitution. They
swept aside all that talk about the people of Massachusetts, the people
of Virginia, and the rest of their thirteen nations. They based their
union on a wider idea: the people of the United States.
Now Europe, if it is not to sink down to anarchy, has to do a parallel
thing. If Europe is to be saved from ultimate disaster, Europe has to
stop thinking in terms of the people of France, the people of England,
the people of Germany, the French, the British, the Germans, and so
forth. Europe has to think at least of the people of Europe, if not of
the civilized people of the world. If we Europeans cannot bring our
minds to that, there is no hope for us. Only by thinking of all peoples
can any people be saved in Europe. Fresh wars will destroy the social
fabric of Europe, and Europe will perish as nations, fighting.
There are many people who think that there is at least one political
system in the old world which, like the United States, is large enough
and world wide enough to go on by itself under modern conditions for
some considerable time. They think that the British Empire can, as it
were, stand out of the rest of the Old World as a self-sufficient
system. They think that it can stand out freely as the United States can
stand out, and that these two English-speaking powers have merely to
agree together to dominate and keep the peace of the world.
Let me give a little attention to this idea. It is I believe a wrong
idea, and one that may be very disastrous to our common English-speaking
culture if it is too fondly cherished.
There can be no denying that the British Imperial system is a system
different in its nature and size from a typical European state, from a
state of the horse and road scale, like France, let us say, or Germany.
And equally it is with the United States a new growth. The present
British Empire is indeed a newer growth than the United States. But
while the United States constitute a homogeneous system and grow more
homogeneous, the British Empire is heterogeneous and shows little or no
assimilative power. And while the United States are all gathered
together and are still very remote from any serious antagonist, the
British Empire is scattered all over the world, entangled with and
stressed against a multitude of possible antagonists.
I have been arguing that the size and manageability of all political
states is finally a matter of transport and communications. They grow to
a limit strictly determined by these considerations. Beyond that limit
they are unstable. Let us now apply these ideas to the British Empire.
I have shown that the great system of the United States is the creation
of the river steamboat and the railway. Quite as much so is the present
British Empire the creation of the ocean-going steamship--protected by a
great navy.
The British Empire is a modern ocean state just as the United States is
a modern continental state. The political and economic cohesion of the
British Empire rests upon this one thing, upon the steamship remaining
the dominant and secure means of world transport in the future. If the
British Empire is to remain sovereign and secure and independent of the
approval and co-operation of other states, it is necessary that
steamship transport (ocean transport) should remain dominant in peace
and invulnerable in war.
Well, that brings us face to face with two comparatively new facts that
throw a shadow upon both that predominance and upon that
invulnerability. One is air transport; the other the submarine. The
possibilities of the ocean-going submarine I will not enlarge upon now.
They will be familiar to everyone who followed the later phases of the
Great War.
It must be clear that sea power is no longer the simple and decisive
thing it was before the coming of the submarine. The sea ways can no
longer be taken and possessed completely. To no other power, except
Japan, is this so grave a consideration as it is to Britain.
And if we turn to the possibilities of air-transport in the future we
are forced towards the same conclusion, that the security of the British
Empire must rest in the future not on its strength in warfare, but on
its keeping the peace within and without its boundaries.
I was a member of the British Civil Air Transport Committee, and we went
with care and thoroughness into the possibilities and probabilities of
the air. My work on that committee convinced me that in the near future
the air may be the chief if not the only highway for long-distance
mails, for long-distance passenger traffic, and for the carriage of most
valuable and compact commodities. The ocean ways are likely to be only
the ways for slow travel and for staple and bulky trade.
And my studies on that committee did much to confirm my opinion that in
quite a brief time the chief line of military attack will be neither by
sea nor land but through the air. Moreover, it was borne in upon me that
the chief air routes of the world will lie over the great plains of the
world, that they will cross wide stretches of sea or mountainous country
only very reluctantly.