THE FOLLIES OF SHAM PATRIOTISM
WHEN warfare is abolished, and men no longer peep at their foreign
neighbours over hedges of bayonets, there will be a number of less
important international absurdities to remove. Some three hundred
years ago, we discovered that the earth was a globe. To-day we are
appreciating that this globe is the property of the human race, and
that the friendly co-operation of all branches of the race is
extremely desirable. National efforts and sacrifices are undone by
international waste and disorder. We begin to perceive this, and the
most sober of us must look forward to a time when the scattered and
antagonistic elements of the race will agree upon some graceful design
of a City of Man, and unite in constructing it.
That familiar phrase, the Brotherhood of Men, sounds rather hollow in
the ears of many. I am avoiding pretty phrases and disputable creeds
and subtle philosophies--I am trying to keep in direct contact with
the realities of life--and therefore I do not use it. But the sincere
sentiment behind it, the feeling that we men and women do form one
large family in possession of an immense and infinitely fertile
estate, and that we will develop our property more advantageously for
each of us if we act as though we were brothers, can hardly be
challenged. The question of the exact expression of our relationship
to each other may be left to poets and scientists.
Those lighter shams of patriotism, which I shall describe in this
chapter as hampering the march of the race, will be recognised even by
men who, with Carlyle or Nietzsche, refuse the title of brother to
some of their fellows. We ourselves smile at them sometimes, and at
the cheerfulness with which we endure the grave inconvenience they put
on us; and they will certainly provoke the laughter of the scholars
who will some day learnedly discuss the question whether we men and
women of the twentieth century were or were not civilised. They have,
it is true, a much more serious aspect; they are important auxiliaries
of the war-god. On the whole, however, they are shams that we ought to
kill with ridicule and bury with genial disdain. They are practices or
institutions which we have plainly inherited from the barbaric past,
when men were slaves of tradition, kingly or priestly, and dare hardly
use their own intelligence on their own habits. In this age of ours,
when we are at last becoming the masters, instead of the slaves, of
our traditions, they are regarded by large bodies of men and women in
every civilised country as stupid, anachronistic, and mischievous.
In fact, there is here again no serious difference of opinion. One has
not to force one's way through some controversial thicket before one
can discover the correct path of reform. The way lies perfectly clear
before us, and we can enter it at any time when we have the collective
will to do so. One might again describe the proposal, not as a
"reform"--since many people instinctively shrink from the word
reform--but as a business proposition of the simplest and most
profitable character. I speak of those false and antiquated freaks of
patriotism which keep different groups of human beings speaking
different languages, using different weights and measures, wrestling
with each other's mysterious coinage, collecting each other's
stamps, and stumbling against the many other irritating diversities
which make one part of the earth "foreign" to another. It may seem
to imply some lack of sense of proportion to pass from so grave a
subject as war to these matters, but a very little reflection will
show how closely they are connected.
The first and most ludicrous of them is the stubbornness with which
each fragment of the race prides itself on having a language of its
own. This confusion of tongues has irritated and inconvenienced and
helped to exasperate against each other the various sections of the
human community for thousands of years, although we could suppress it
at will in half a generation. Millions of us have an acute and
constant experience of the absurdity of the system. In our schools,
where mind and body require the fullest possible attention during the
few years of training, we devote a large proportion of the time to
teaching children how the same idea may be expressed by half a dozen
different sounds. The higher the class of school, the more valuable
and skilled the teacher, the more time must be wasted in learning how
ancient Greeks and Romans, or how Germans and French and Italians,
have invented different sounds from ours for expressing the same
ideas. The slenderness of the protest one hears against this polyglot
system from educators themselves is amazing. They have, it is true,
begun to rebel in large numbers against the teaching of dead
languages, but comparatively few of them support the increasing demand
for that adoption of a common tongue which would do so much for the
advance of education.
Those whose parents did not happen to be wealthy enough in their youth
to send them to schools which have the distinction of teaching
"languages" are hampered in a hundred ways. If they travel, they
must pay sycophantic waiters and couriers to give them a dim
understanding of the human world through which they pass. Even in
their own country they cannot order a dinner at any well-ordered
restaurant without first studying a lengthy vocabulary of superfluous
sounds, or without practising a dozen little hypocrisies to conceal
their ignorance. In large colonial hotels, where hardly a single
person who does not speak English is ever found, one receives a
"menu" with the usual intimidating array of French phrases. "You
ought to supply dictionaries with this sort of thing!" said an angry
young squatter, taking a seat beside me in the Grand Hotel at
Melbourne, to the waiter. If you are travelling for business, or even
transacting business at home, you must have your foreign
correspondents and agents; and with their aid you follow dimly the
very interesting advances and experiments that are being made in your
department abroad. Our Governments must pay more heavily for
diplomatic and consular service. Our books and magazines make a parade
of foreign phrases which have not yet become as familiar as English.
Our shopkeepers add twenty-five per cent. to the cost of our linen by
calling it "lingerie." ...
We are tormented in a hundred ways, yet we contemplate this absurd
muddle and waste with as resigned an air as if we still believed that
the Almighty had, in a fit of temper, created the confusion of tongues
at ancient Babel. So subtle and strong is the hold of custom on us
that we rarely even ask ourselves whether this is a wise or an
unalterable arrangement. We hear with indifference, if not with
amusement, of societies which propose to adopt one international
tongue in the place of this ridiculous confusion; we languidly picture
to ourselves little groups of long-haired faddists meeting in bleak
halls to attract our duller neighbours to the cultivation of one more
innocent enthusiasm. We have not time for these things. When a
sensible man has given adequate time to business and pleasure, he has,
he says, no hours to spare for these idealistic luxuries. Yet a
moment's serious reflection would show us that the sole aim of these
"faddists" is to make life _less_ crowded and laborious, to
lighten our business and add to our pleasure, to introduce
common-sense into a large part of our conduct. To such strange
contradictions and absurdities does this resolve to resist innovation
bring us.
Most people are, perhaps,--if they ever give a thought to the
matter,--under the impression that it is a mountainous and
impracticable task to introduce such a reform into the life of the
world. It is, on the contrary, one of the simplest and most
practicable reforms to which men could set their hands. It is even
less controversial a measure than the abolition of war. There are few
prejudices of our time which have not attracted the ingenuity of some
faddist or other; but this is one of the few. More emphatically here
than in the case of war, all that we need is the will of the majority
to change our anachronistic practice. When one regards the entirely
uncontroversial nature of the reform and the immense economy it will
entail, it is hardly unreasonable to hope that this will of the
majority may soon be secured.
I assume that, when we agree to direct our "Governments" to carry
out this elementary improvement of international life, they will
summon an international commission of philologists, educators, and
commercial men, whose business it will be to create a new language.
This step will not be taken until the voluntary movement for reform
has reached such proportions as to arouse the interest of politicians;
but in the end we rely on governmental action, as it is necessary to
reform schools and Parliaments. This international commission will, no
doubt, examine impartially such languages as Esperanto. Possibly these
existing international tongues will be found more complex than an
ideal language ought to be, and less attentive to the finer values of
speech. For the simple purpose of expression it is possible to create
a tongue far less complex than any in use in the civilised world
to-day: a tongue that could be learned in a few months even by the
untrained intelligence. It would proceed on the entirely opposite
principle to that of modern word-makers: the principle, for instance,
that changes "fireworks" into "pyrotechnics" (a piece of bad
Greek for good English), or "gardening" into "horticulture."
The use of this debased Latin and Greek in science has a certain
advantage under our present polyglot system, as it is an approach
toward international agreement, but it is making more onerous than
ever the burden of our languages. We want a simple means of expression
and intercourse, with a power of expanding to meet the advance of
thought and discovery without needing to run to such lengths as
"diaminotrihydroxydodecanoic acid." No existing national speech
would meet the purpose, least of all English; but it would be
advisable to have some regard to æsthetic interests in framing a new
language, and the old tongues would supply a good deal of material in
this regard. The success of the poet depends on qualities of words as
well as qualities of imagination, and we have no wish, like Plato, to
exclude poets from the ideal commonwealth. We should retain large
numbers of these short expressive words.
Great numbers of people hesitate in face of this proposal because they
feel that it is a very large innovation, however simple and
indisputable it is in principle. They contemplate such things as a
nervous child gazes on the sea from the steps of a bathing machine.
Intellectually, a few such plunges would be of incalculable service to
our generation. One can understand people hesitating before some
disputed economic or political scheme, but to shrink from adopting
plain and large reforms such as this is not a sign of health. We need
to purge our sluggish imaginations of their prejudices, to brace our
intellectual power, to take pride in our creativeness.
When the new international tongue is ready, a few years will suffice
to make it prevail over the older languages in the leading countries
which helped to set up the commission. It will become the one speech
of the school, the press, commerce, law, government, and, possibly,
the church. The travelling public will, as every Esperantist knows, at
once discover the advantage. The commercial world will find it a
splendid economy and a priceless boon to international trade. A man
will be able to travel from London to Tokyo with as little difficulty
as from Woolwich to Ealing; and it will be found that when the foreign
tongue, which so instinctively suggests to us the uniform of an enemy,
has disappeared, one of the worst obstacles to mutual good-feeling
will be removed. When the Englishman can talk to the Berliner with
perfect ease,--I assume that all beginnings of dialect would be
suppressed as mercilessly as weeds in a well-kept garden,--just as a
citizen of London now talks with a citizen of New York or Sydney, a
very dangerous chasm will be bridged. It is quite certain that the
calamitous attitude of modern Germany could not have proceeded to such
a dangerous pitch if the Imperialist and other literature which is
responsible for it had been intelligible to the whole of Europe. A few
students of particular aspects of German life were more or less
acquainted with it, and we refused to believe then. Now we discover,
to our amazement, that a neighbouring nation has for decades been
openly educated up to a pitch of unscrupulous aggression, and the
world has been threatened with an incalculable catastrophe. I am not
overlooking the real reasons for this development, but I say
confidently that it would have been impossible if a national
literature were not generally confined within the nation which
produces it.
In the school the advantage would be very considerable. Our
overstrained and bespectacled children would be spared several hours a
day of their school-work or home-work. The whole ancient and
modern-language section of the curriculum would be suppressed, and
this suppression, with other reforms which I will describe later,
would enlarge the teacher's opportunity of giving real education and
spare the pupil a great deal of devastating brain-fag. For the
education of older people the gain would be almost as great. A
Birmingham artisan could read the latest novel of d'Annunzio or
latest play of Hauptmann without the assistance of expert or inexpert
translators. All the older literature that is worth preserving would
be translated by specially qualified interpreters into the new tongue,
and the originals would then become the toys of leisured pedants. If,
as I suggested, a proper attention to word-values were secured in the
making of the new tongue, there is no reason why it should not express
poetical sentiments as gracefully and pleasantly as any existing
tongue.
Is there any Utopian element in this scheme? Most people will probably
recognise that the only bit of utopianism in it is the expectation
that the majority of any nation can be induced to adopt it. That might
seem to justify one in using impatient language about the wisdom of
the majority of us, but it is no reflection on the scheme itself. The
reformer, however, is ill-advised in reflecting on the intelligence of
his fellows. Carlyle's "twenty-seven millions, mostly fools,"
discovered in the end that all their follies, which he so vigorously
denounced in his _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, were more permanent and
accurate than his "eternal verities." It is usually want of
leisure or immediate profit which alienates the public from schemes of
reform. Possibly a scheme which so plainly promises more leisure to us
and a very considerable profit may hope to win attention. The reform
of spelling I, of course, take as an integral part of the scheme.
But this reform of international intercourse must take a more
comprehensive shape than the mere suppression of this confusing
plurality of tongues. It is just as foolish of us to maintain a
plurality of weights and measures, of coinage and postage-stamps, of
social and civic and juridical forms. Even if we confine our attention
to the leading civilised nations, we find in these respects a
confusion which outrages the elementary instincts of commercial life
and lays a monstrous burden of superfluous trouble on us all.
Travellers and business-men endure it year after year with the most
amazing patience. Men who would be fired to instant action if they
found a trace of such disorder in their domestic or commercial
concerns resign themselves to this colossal muddle of international
intercourse as calmly as if it were a providential and entirely sacred
arrangement. I remember once passing rather rapidly from Lucerne to
London, by way of Wiesbaden, Cologne, and Brussels: on another
occasion by way of Cologne and Amsterdam. The hours one has to spend
in calculating coinage (or lose the exchange-value), the worry
expended in struggling for stamps or dinners in the less familiar
tongues, the confusion of train-rules and street-usages and civic
regulations, reflect a system of chaotic disorder; to say nothing of
the "sizes" of boots or collars you need, the weight of tobacco or
fruit, and so on.
All this is a portentous example of slavery to tradition, whether the
tradition be reasonable or no. We have not the slightest regard for
the historical development of this muddle and the peculiar folly of
retaining it in our generation. Our earlier ancestors measured their
woollens or their corn or their mead by the simple standards that are
apt to occur to primitive peoples. Even, however, where the same
standard occurred to, or commended itself to, different and remote
communities, its vagueness was fatal. "A thousand paces" (a
_mille_, as the Romans said) seemed a fair reckoning for long
distances, but the stretch varied, and we have Irish miles and German
miles and English miles and nautical miles. Our ounces and yards and
pints are as intelligent as most of the other things which the ancient
Briton invented, but, being British, they seem sacred to us. A hundred
years ago a far superior standard, the decimal system, was put before
us, but our fathers felt that it smacked of the French Revolution and
Napoleon and atheism. We smile at their prejudice, yet we have no
greater disposition to alter our unintelligent ways. The German would
be horrified at having to reckon his distances in kilometres. The
British lion, the French or German or Russian or American
eagle,--there is a marvellous love of that symbol of aspiration and
progress,--or the rising sun of Japan, must have its own system of
weights and measures and coins. Passing through a strip of Canada some
months ago I had, from lack of the local stamps, to entrust my post to
a kindly waitress; and was, of course, robbed. Of late years,
Australia has patriotically resolved to have its own coins, and has
fought parliamentary battles over its stamps.
The often-imagined visitor from another planet would not be so much
surprised at this extraordinary and costly muddle of patriotic shams
as at our faculty for progress in commerce and industry amidst it all.
We seem to be quite blind to the larger applications of our modern
doctrine of efficiency. Regarded as an economic system, which it
really is, the international arrangement of our civilised world is
full of crudities which are more worthy of a Papuan pedlar. The
contrast between the methods of a large Chicago store or a British or
German engineering-business and the methods we retain in far larger
and more important concerns will one day be a subject of amazement.
The evil of which I am speaking eats into the very heart of an
industrial and commercial system which prides itself on its order,
economy, and efficiency. Yet this comprehensive muddle is contemplated
almost without protest by business-men. If it were merely the leisure
hours of travellers which were dissipated in this abstruse study of
foreign tongues and coins and customs, we might merely deplore
proverbial vagaries of taste. But the abuse is immeasurably greater
than this; the advantage we should gain by this scheme of unification
can scarcely be calculated. One would think that the reform was really
difficult to achieve, or lay under the frown of some imposing school
of theologians or moralists or economists!
I omit from the list of perversities whatever is the subject of
serious economic controversy. Such things as national tariffs, for
instance. However arguable the question may be in England, even the
free-trader usually appreciates in such a country as Australia the
plea for a protective tariff. There is, at all events, a very serious
controversy on the general issue, and it would not be expedient to
include among plain reforms any scheme of universal free-trade or
universal protection. It is enough to point out that certain obvious,
stupid, and mischievous survivals of old conditions gravely hamper our
international intercourse. The prestige of our civilisation, as well
as a common-sense view of our interest, demand that we shall suppress
them. More disputable reforms may be considered afterwards. Our usual
method is, one fears, to discuss the more disputable reforms first.
It is difficult to conceive any plea being put forward on behalf of
these irrational old customs, but a sufficiently ingenious and
superficial apologist might claim that patriotism bids us maintain
them. There is no doubt that the work of reform will have to proceed
over the bodies of a number of the pettier patriots. No one can
suppose that the task of unification will be accomplished without
friction. German professors and Bulgarian politicians will protest
against this pernicious cosmopolitan spirit, this horrible wish to
denationalise us, this tampering with the sources of national energy.
Ardent Irishmen and Welshmen will form very talkative associations for
the defence of "the grand old tongue." Rival languages will be put
forward, and Esperanto will strain its hitherto respectable resources
in denouncing Volapük or the new official speech. French and English
and German savants will heatedly press the claims of ideal words in
their respective languages to be taken over, and pamphleteers will
discuss whether Herr Professor Doktor Schmidt did or did not
contribute more suggestions than Professor Smith. A higher criticism
of the new language will spread its pale growth like a parasitic
fungus.
What is patriotism? In the sense in which the word is still widely, if
not generally, understood, it stands for a sentiment that belongs
essentially to a pre-rational age and cannot survive unchanged in a
rational age. This does not mean that a rational age has no place for
sentiments; it means that the sentiments must not affront reason. We
cannot at once pride ourselves on being paragons of common-sense, yet
slaves to a sentiment which common-sense must not examine too closely.
Loyalty to that larger national family to which we belong: cordial and
generous support of its interests: sacrifice, if need be, for its just
ambitions: pride in its worthy achievements, even in its worthier
superiorities--these are useful and intelligible sentiments, and it is
not unreasonable to make a flag the visible symbol of these just
interests and achievements. But a blind and undiscriminating devotion
to flag or king, a glorification of our national family above others
in the roystering fashion of the Middle Ages, a refusal to ask if the
demands of our rulers are just or if the interests we are pressed to
support are sound and equitable, an obstinate pride in a thing because
it is British or German, whether it be wise or no--these are
sentiments entirely at variance with the best spirit of our age. We
may recognise that even the crude old patriotism has contributed much
to the advance of civilisation. This gathering of men into rival
national groups has forced the pace, and has at times developed noble
qualities. But we must admit also that the same patriotism has
inspired hundreds of unjust and stupid wars, and has maintained on
their thrones kings and queens who ought to have been dismissed with
ignominy.
The progress of civilisation does not entail the suppression, but the
refinement, of sentiment, as is very plainly seen in the supposed
implications of patriotism. When it is urged that these absurd
national diversities of speech and coinage must be sustained on the
ground of patriotism, we ask at once which sound element of patriotism
could demand such an anachronism? It is, surely, only the spurious
medieval sentiment that could dictate so utter an absurdity! Will the
interests of England be endangered because we remove a very serious
burden from its economic life and its educational activity? Shall we
be less prosperous, less happy, less respected, for correcting an
antiquated and foolish practice? These things, we may reflect, were
not stupid at the time when they were developed. The resolute patriot
may, if he wills, take pride in the relative ingenuity of the people
who invented them. Each separate national system was the outcome of
special conditions, and the slender commerce between the different
communities at the time they were developed did not require a rigorous
international standard. One bartered by the piece or the lump. But it
is sheer folly to ignore the modern transformation of international
life: to fancy that our unwillingness to exert ourselves, even for our
own advantage, may be ascribed to some lofty virtue.
It need hardly be said that I am not cherishing a dream of spreading
at once over the entire planet a uniformity of language and coins and
standards. The leading civilised nations might, within a few years,
adopt such a scheme; and a certain number of the smaller and less
advanced nations, which aspire to membership of the civilised group,
would probably accept the reform speedily enough. On the other hand,
the permeation of the lower races with our ideas would be a slow and
difficult process: a part of that general task of civilising the whole
race which we have sooner or later to confront. This difficulty does
not at all affect the advantage we should gain by adopting a scheme of
unification within the family of civilised nations, and it cannot be
pleaded as a reason for postponement. But all the reforms I have
hitherto discussed will, when they have spread over the more highly
organised countries, find a temporary check in this chaotic jumble of
peoples on the fringe of civilisation, and it may be useful to discuss
the principles which ought to inform our attitude toward them.
Our generation looks out upon these backward branches of the race, not
only with a finer sentiment and a stricter regard for principle than
any previous generation did, but with a very much clearer knowledge of
their meaning. We may, of course, be faithless to our principles in
cases: we may casuistically wrap a piece of frank buccaneering of the
old type in hypocritical humanitarian phrases. The general attitude
is, however, more enlightened, as these pieces of hypocrisy themselves
show. We may or may not hold the doctrine of universal brotherhood; at
least we understand the true relation of these more backward races to
ourselves, and we are in a much better position to determine our right
and our duties. We have advanced considerably since, little more than
half a century ago, a stern moralist like Carlyle could defend
black-slavery and denounce as "a gospel of dirt" the scientific
revelation which threw light and hope on inferior types of manhood.
The chief difference is that we now see the true relation of the lower
races to the higher. It is false to say, as Carlyle did, that some
races were created with higher gifts than others, and were therefore
divinely appointed as the master-races. The notion is as absurd as the
old and profitable legend of the laying of a primitive curse on Ham
and his black descendants. Difference of geographical conditions is
the chief clue to the unequal development of the various branches of
the race. I have in various works developed this theme and will not
linger over it here. You have at the start the same human material and
capacities in all the scattered groups. But some have been for ages
isolated from the stimulating contact of races with a different or a
higher culture, and this is the essential condition of advance. Others
have, by sheer chance, been so situated that they enjoyed this
stimulation in an extraordinary degree. On this principle we can
understand the birth of civilisation in that fermenting mass of
peoples which settled between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf
ages ago, and the direction of the advancing stream of culture, partly
eastward to India and China, but mainly in the more favourable
north-western direction.
It is, therefore, no difference of aboriginal outfit, but a difference
in the chances of migration and situation, which accounts for the
cultural diversity of races. Yet we must not at once infer that any
lower race can, on this account, be drawn from its isolation and
lifted to the higher level. There is reason to believe that a race
loses its educability if it remains unprogressive for too long a
period. The physiological reason may be that the skull closes firmly,
at a relatively early age, over the brain in a people in which
expansion of brain after puberty has not been encouraged. Take the
three "lower races" of Australasia. The Tasmanian was one of the
oldest and least cultured branches of the human family, and he died
out within a century after contact with the whites. The Maori of New
Zealand is the most recent and most advanced of the three aboriginal
races. With the Polynesian, he is closely related to the European or
Caucasic race, and is certainly educable. The Australian black comes
between the two in culture and in the period of his isolation.
Australian scientific men who have made the most sympathetic efforts
to uplift the black tell me that they have failed, and the race seems
to be doomed.
These scientific principles have discredited the old legendary notions
about the lower races, but we must not as yet make dogmas of them.
Nothing but candid and careful experience will show which races are
educable and which ineducable. It is very probable that such peoples
as the wild Veddahs of Ceylon, the Aetas of the Philippines, the
Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, and some of the Central African groups,
will prove ineducable. Other races which have been considered
"savage" are already proving educable, either as a body or in
large numbers of instances. Many peoples have not been tested at all.
We are only just at the fringe of this vast and interesting problem.
In regard to the races which, after humane and thorough experiment,
prove entirely ineducable, the solution does not offer much
difficulty. Once their primitive habits are disturbed, and they begin
to live on a pension allotted them by the European nations which have
seized their territory, they gradually die out. A very good case may
be established by those writers who hold that races which cling
incurably to barbarism ought to be painlessly extirpated, or prevented
from multiplying. Such races as the Australian blacks are quite
familiar with a process of sterilisation which does not interfere with
their enjoyment of life. On the other hand, the life led by these
domesticated but ineducable savages is hardly worth preserving at all.
However, as they are disappearing, one need not press that point. The
claim of sane humanitarians, that we have no right to interfere with
their conditions and seize their territory, is quite unsound. The
human family has a right to see large fertile regions of the earth
developed. Who regrets to-day that the Amerinds were pensioned in
order to find room for Canada and the United States and Brazil and
Argentina? Who does not see the advantage of peopling Australia with a
fine and advancing civilisation of (eventually) twenty or thirty
million progressive whites instead of a few hundred thousand miserable
aboriginals?
At the other end of the scale we have, as I said, peoples who are most
probably or certainly educable. At a hazard one might instance the
Thibetans and Siberian Mongolians, the Koreans, the Maoris and
Polynesians, the Lapps (of the same blood as the Finns), and a large
number of Asiatic and African peoples. We must keep in mind the high
civilisation reached by the Amerinds of Peru, whereas their modern
descendants, the Quichwas, seem so negligible. In Africa there is a
vast amount of experiment and classification to do, and already the
pure Bantu races are furnishing scores of men who are susceptible of a
university education. I know several of them who are as competent and
well-educated as the average English university man.
Has the white race a duty ("the white man's burden") to attempt
to civilise the coloured races? I speak in general terms, of course.
It is sheer insolence to regard the Chinese or Burmese--one must not
mention the Japanese--as lower races. Now, speaking in the abstract,
as a matter of general moral principle, the white has no clear duty to
civilise the coloured races. The sentiment of brotherhood may inspire
a feeling of duty in some, but one cannot build firmly on that phrase.
It is, however, not an abstract ethical question. The white men have,
in point of fact, spread over the globe, and they are in a fair way to
occupy all the territory on which the coloured races (except the
Chinese and Japanese and Burmese) were settled. Only an attitude of
general unscrupulousness could ignore the obligation which this
seizure of territory implies. England and Germany have, for instance,
occupied the islands of the Pacific and made their inhabitants a
"subject race." They have done this, not only with a gross lack of
discrimination between the Polynesian (who is certainly educable) and
the much lower Melanesian, but with a quite cynical idea of the
"civilising" process. The work has been left to sailors and
travellers, who have decimated the population by spirits and syphilis,
or to the crudities of Christian missionaries. The joy of native life
has been killed, and the enforcement of clothing (which the natives
naturally cast off in the cooler evening, when the sensitive European
was not able to see them) has led to an appalling amount of pneumonia
and phthisis. We have done much to turn a wonderfully happy and
healthy people into a gin-drinking swaddled caricature of a Bank
Holiday crowd.
But the lists of our crimes in dealing with the lower races need not
be given here. If we white people are to go out among the more
backward coloured races, and to profess that we are assuming the
paternal function of administering their territory, we must act on
some principle. It is rather late in the history of the world to send
out civilising expeditions which consist of missionaries presenting
copies of the Sermon on the Mount, and soldiers and merchants who, in
flagrant contradiction to the Sermon on the Mount, exploit the natives
and appropriate their soil. There must be a serious attempt to educate
them, and then an elimination of the unfit. Africa will prove a
formidable region for this discriminating work. The Mohammedans
themselves have already proved that many of its peoples are capable of
culture.
We have a special problem in our treatment of races which, like the
Hindus and Egyptians, have already been drawn into the white system.
Let us be quite candid with ourselves in this matter. We appropriated
their territory for our advantage, not theirs, and our professed
modern sentiments are compelling us to say that we are not in
possession of their territory in their interest. We protect the Hindu
from native despots, the Egyptian from a cruel Mahdi or Pacha, the
retired official tells you. However, I do not propose that we should
investigate the title-deeds of all our existing empires as regards
their oversea possessions; nor do I in the least advocate the
dismemberment of such large unities as the British Empire. But the
principle on which some would stake our existence in India or Egypt,
the maxim that "What we have we hold,"--which is often illustrated
by a picture of a particularly stupid-looking bull-dog guarding the
British flag,--is the first principle of the pickpocket and the
burglar. Modern sentiment has to grant colonial empires a sort of
"Bula de Composicion," such as the Spanish Church, for a
consideration, grants to pickpockets. The best compromise is that the
peoples which are to-day linked in empires should remain linked; not
as dominant and subject peoples, but as sister-nations working out the
destiny of the race according to the highest standards. This implies
that, as they assimilate Western culture (as the Hindus are quite
rapidly doing), they shall be more and more entrusted with the
administration of their own countries. The very different situation of
colonies need not be discussed. When Australia and Canada find, if
they ever do find, that it is to their interest to set up complete
independence, they will not cut the cable: they will cast it off as
calmly and confidently as they now cast off the cable of an Orient
liner on the quays at Sydney.
Along these lines we may forecast the future, and very slow, drafting
of the more backward peoples into the homogeneous family of the more
civilised races. The unification of languages, coinage, etc., will be
gradually extended to them. But it is not my purpose in this work to
contemplate remote tasks and contingencies. A great and practicable
reform lies at our doors. The overwhelming majority of the race are
already incorporated in civilised nations, and the work of
organisation amongst these is urgent and comparatively easy. I am not
advocating a fantastic and lofty scheme for which one needs to be
prepared by the acceptance of advanced humanitarian sentiments. What
I am pleading for is the application to international life of our
treasured maxims of common-sense and efficiency. Those simple and
indisputable maxims condemn in the most stringent terms the patriotic
shams which we suffer to perplex and burden our life. Let us run the
planet on recognised business-principles.