axiomatic. Even if the country had been swung into war by steps
taken secretly and announced to the public only after they had been
consummated, it was felt that that attitude of the American State
towards foreign policy was only a relic of the bad old days and must
be superseded in the new order. The American President himself, the
liberal hope of the world, had demanded, in the eyes of the world, open
diplomacy, agreements freely and openly arrived at. Did this mean a
genuine transference of power in this most crucial of State functions
from Government to people? Not at all. When the question recently came
to a challenge in Congress, and the implications of open discussion
were somewhat specifically discussed, and the desirabilities frankly
commended, the President let his disapproval be known in no uncertain
way. No one ever accused Mr. Wilson of not being a State idealist, and
whenever democratic aspirations swung ideals too far out of the State
orbit, he could be counted on to react vigorously. Here was a clear
case of conflict between democratic idealism and the very crux of the
concept of the State. However unthinkingly he might have been led on
to encourage open diplomacy in his liberalizing programme, when its
implication was made vivid to him, he betrayed how mere a tool the idea
had been in his mind to accentuate America’s redeeming rôle. Not in any
sense as a serious pragmatic technique had he thought of a genuinely
open diplomacy. And how could he? For the last stronghold of State
power is foreign policy. It is in foreign policy that the State acts
most concentratedly as the organized herd, acts with fullest sense of
aggressive power, acts with freest arbitrariness. In foreign policy,
the State is most itself. States, with reference to each other, may
be said to be in a continual state of latent war. The “armed truce,”
a phrase so familiar before 1914, was an accurate description of the
normal relation of States when they are not at war. Indeed, it is not
too much to say that the normal relation of States is war. Diplomacy is
a disguised war, in which States seek to gain by barter and intrigue,
by the cleverness of wits, the objectives which they would have to gain
more clumsily by means of war. Diplomacy is used while the States are
recuperating from conflicts in which they have exhausted themselves.
It is the wheedling and the bargaining of the worn-out bullies as
they rise from the ground and slowly restore their strength to begin
fighting again. If diplomacy had been a moral equivalent for war, a
higher stage in human progress, an inestimable means of making words
prevail instead of blows, militarism would have broken down and given
place to it. But since it is a mere temporary substitute, a mere
appearance of war’s energy under another form, a surrogate effect
is almost exactly proportioned to the armed force behind it. When
it fails, the recourse is immediate to the military technique whose
thinly veiled arm it has been. A diplomacy that was the agency of
popular democratic forces in their non-State manifestations would be no
diplomacy at all. It would be no better than the Railway or Education
Commissions that are sent from one country to another with rational
constructive purpose. The State, acting as a diplomatic-military
ideal, is eternally at war. Just as it must act arbitrarily and
autocratically in time of war, it must act in time of peace in this
particular rôle where it acts as a unit. Unified control is necessarily
autocratic control. Democratic control of foreign policy is therefore
a contradiction in terms. Open discussion destroys swiftness and
certainty of action. The giant State is paralyzed. Mr. Wilson retains
his full ideal of the State at the same time that he desires to
eliminate war. He wishes to make the world safe for democracy as
well as safe for diplomacy. When the two are in conflict, his clear
political insight, his idealism of the State, tells him that it is
the naïver democratic values that must be sacrificed. The world must
primarily be made safe for diplomacy. The State must not be diminished.
What is the State essentially? The more closely we examine it, the more
mystical and personal it becomes. On the Nation we can put our hand
as a definite social group, with attitudes and qualities exact enough
to mean something. On the Government we can put our hand as a certain
organization of ruling functions, the machinery of law-making and
law-enforcing. The Administration is a recognizable group of political
functionaries, temporarily in charge of the government. But the State
stands as an idea behind them all, eternal, sanctified, and from it
Government and Administration conceive themselves to have the breath
of life. Even the nation, especially in times of war--or at least,
its significant classes--considers that it derives its authority, and
its purpose from the idea of the State. Nation and State are scarcely
differentiated, and the concrete, practical, apparent facts are sunk in
the symbol. We reverence not our country but the flag. We may criticize
ever so severely our country, but we are disrespectful to the flag at
our peril. It is the flag and the uniform that make men’s heart beat
high and fill them with noble emotions, not the thought of and pious
hopes for America as a free and enlightened nation.
It cannot be said that the object of emotion is the same, because the
flag is the symbol of the nation, so that in reverencing the American
flag we are reverencing the nation. For the flag is not a symbol of
the country as a cultural group, following certain ideals of life, but
solely a symbol of the political State, inseparable from its prestige
and expansion. The flag is most intimately connected with military
achievement, military memory. It represents the country not in its
intensive life, but in its far-flung challenge to the world. The flag
is primarily the banner of war; it is allied with patriotic anthem and
holiday. It recalls old martial memories. A nation’s patriotic history
is solely the history of its wars, that is, of the State in its health
and glorious functioning. So in responding to the appeal of the flag,
we are responding to the appeal of the State, to the symbol of the herd
organized as an offensive and defensive body, conscious of its prowess
and its mystical herd-strength.
Even those authorities in the present Administration, to whom has
been granted autocratic control over opinion, feel, though they are
scarcely able to philosophize over, this distinction. It has been
authoritatively declared that the horrid penalties against seditious
opinion must not be construed as inhibiting legitimate, that is,
partisan criticism of the Administration. A distinction is made
between the Administration and the Government. It is quite accurately
suggested by this attitude that the Administration is a temporary band
of partisan politicians in charge of the machinery of Government,
carrying out the mystical policies of State. The manner in which
they operate this machinery may be freely discussed and objected to
by their political opponents. The Governmental machinery may also be
legitimately altered, in case of necessity. What may not be discussed
or criticized is the mystical policy itself or the motives of the
State in inaugurating such a policy. The President, it is true, has
made certain partisan distinctions between candidates for office
on the ground of support or non-support of the Administration, but
what he meant was really support or non-support of the State policy
as faithfully carried out by the Administration. Certain of the
Administration measures were devised directly to increase the health
of the State, such as the Conscription and the Espionage laws. Others
were concerned merely with the machinery. To oppose the first was to
oppose the State and was therefore not tolerable. To oppose the second
was to oppose fallible human judgment, and was therefore, though to be
deprecated, not to be wholly interpreted as political suicide.
The distinction between Government and State, however, has not been so
carefully observed. In time of war it is natural that Government as
the seat of authority should be confused with the State or the mystic
source of authority. You cannot very well injure a mystical idea which
is the State, but you can very well interfere with the processes of
Government. So that the two become identified in the public mind, and
any contempt for or opposition to the workings of the machinery of
Government is considered equivalent to contempt for the sacred State.
The State, it is felt, is being injured in its faithful surrogate, and
public emotion rallies passionately to defend it. It even makes any
criticism of the form of Government a crime.
The inextricable union of militarism and the State is beautifully
shown by those laws which emphasize interference with the Army and
Navy as the most culpable of seditious crimes. Pragmatically, a case
of capitalistic sabotage, or a strike in war industry would seem to
be far more dangerous to the successful prosecution of the war than
the isolated and ineffectual efforts of an individual to prevent
recruiting. But in the tradition of the State ideal, such industrial
interference with national policy is not identified as a crime against
the State. It may be grumbled against; it may be seen quite rationally
as an impediment of the utmost gravity. But it is not _felt_ in those
obscure seats of the herd-mind which dictate the identity of crime and
fix their proportional punishments. Army and Navy, however, are the
very arms of the State; in them flows its most precious life-blood.
To paralyze them is to touch the very State itself. And the majesty
of the State is so sacred that even to attempt such a paralysis is a
crime equal to a successful stroke. The will is deemed sufficient. Even
though the individual in his effort to impede recruiting should utterly
and lamentably fail, he shall be in no wise spared. Let the wrath of
the State descend upon him for his impiety! Even if he does not try
any overt action, but merely utters sentiments that may incidentally
in the most indirect way cause some one to refrain from enlisting, he
is guilty. The guardians of the State do not ask whether any pragmatic
effect flowed out of this evil will or desire. It is enough that the
will is present. Fifteen or twenty years in prison is not deemed too
much for such sacrilege.
Such attitudes and such laws, which affront every principle of human
reason, are no accident, nor are they the result of hysteria caused by
the war. They are considered just, proper, beautiful by all the classes
which have the State ideal, and they express only an extreme of health
and vigor in the reaction of the State to its non-friends.
Such attitudes are inevitable as arising from the devotees of the
State. For the State is a personal as well as a mystical symbol,
and it can only be understood by tracing its historical origin. The
modern State is not the national and intelligent product of modern
men desiring to live harmoniously together with security of life,
property and opinion. It is not an organization which has been devised
as pragmatic means to a desired social end. All the idealism with
which we have been instructed to endow the State is the fruit of
our retrospective imaginations. What it does for us in the way of
security and benefit of life, it does incidentally as a by-product
and development of its original functions, and not because at any
time men or classes in the full possession of their insight and
intelligence have desired that it be so. It is very important that we
should occasionally lift the incorrigible veil of that _ex post facto_
idealism by which we throw a glamor of rationalization over what is,
and pretend in the ecstasies of social conceit that we have personally
invented and set up for the glory of God and man the hoary institutions
which we see around us. Things are what they are, and come down to us
with all their thick encrustations of error and malevolence. Political
philosophy can delight us with fantasy and convince us who need
illusion to live that the actual is a fair and approximate copy--full
of failings, of course, but approximately sound and sincere--of that
ideal society which we can imagine ourselves as creating. From this it
is a step to the tacit assumption that we have somehow had a hand in
its creation and are responsible for its maintenance and sanctity.
Nothing is more obvious, however, than that every one of us comes into
society as into something in whose creation we had not the slightest
hand. We have not even the advantage of consciousness before we take up
our careers on earth. By the time we find ourselves here we are caught
in a network of customs and attitudes, the major directions of our
desires and interests have been stamped on our minds, and by the time
we have emerged from tutelage and reached the years of discretion when
we might conceivably throw our influence to the reshaping of social
institutions, most of us have been so molded into the society and
class we live in that we are scarcely aware of any distinction between
ourselves as judging, desiring individuals and our social environment.
We have been kneaded so successfully that we approve of what our
society approves, desire what our society desires, and add to the group
our own passional inertia against change, against the effort of reason,
and the adventure of beauty.
Every one of us, without exception, is born into a society that is
given, just as the fauna and flora of our environment are given.
Society and its institutions are, to the individual who enters it,
as much naturalistic phenomena as is the weather itself. There is
therefore, no natural sanctity in the State any more than there is
in the weather. We may bow down before it, just as our ancestors
bowed before the sun and moon, but it is only because something in us
unregenerate finds satisfaction in such an attitude, not because there
is anything inherently reverential in the institution worshipped. Once
the State has begun to function, and a large class finds its interest
and its expression of power in maintaining the State, this ruling class
may compel obedience from any uninterested minority. The State thus
becomes an instrument by which the power of the whole herd is wielded
for the benefit of a class. The rulers soon learn to capitalize the
reverence which the State produces in the majority, and turn it into
a general resistance towards a lessening of their privileges. The
sanctity of the State becomes identified with the sanctity of the
ruling class and the latter are permitted to remain in power under the
impression that in obeying and serving them, we are obeying and serving
society, the nation, the great collectivity of all of us.
An analysis of the State would take us back to the beginnings of
society, to the complex of religious and personal and herd-impulses
which has found expression in so many forms. What we are interested in
is the American State as it behaves and as Americans behave towards
it in this twentieth century, and to understand that, we have to go
no further back than the early English monarchy of which our American
republic is the direct descendant. How straight and true is that
line of descent almost nobody realizes. Those persons who believe
in the sharpest distinction between democracy and monarchy can
scarcely appreciate how a political institution may go through so many
transformations and yet remain the same. Yet a swift glance must show
us that in all the evolution of the English monarchy, with all its
broadenings and its revolutions, and even with its jump across the sea
into a colony which became an independent nation and then a powerful
State, the same State functions and attitudes have been preserved
essentially unchanged. The changes have been changes of form and not
of inner spirit, and the boasted extension of democracy has been not
a process by which the State was essentially altered to meet the
shifting of classes, the extension of knowledge, the needs of social
organization, but a mere elastic expansion by which the old spirit of
the State easily absorbed the new and adjusted itself successfully to
its exigencies. Never once has it been seriously shaken. Only once or
twice has it been seriously challenged, and each time it has speedily
recovered its equilibrium and proceeded with all its attitudes and
faiths reënforced by the disturbance.
The modern democratic State, in this light, is therefore no bright and
rational creation of a new day, the political form under which great
peoples are to live healthfully and freely in a modern world, but the
last decrepit scion of an ancient and hoary stock, which has become so
exhausted that it scarcely recognizes its own ancestor, does, in fact
repudiate him while it clings tenaciously to the archaic and irrelevant
spirit that made that ancestor powerful, and resists the new bottles
for the new wine that its health as a modern society so desperately
needs. So sweeping a conclusion might have been doubted concerning the
American State had it not been for the war, which has provided a long
and beautiful series of examples of the tenacity of the State ideal and
its hold on the significant classes of the American nation. War is the
health of the State, and it is during war that one best understands
the nature of that institution. If the American democracy during
wartime has acted with an almost incredible trueness to form, if it has
resurrected with an almost joyful fury the somnolent State, we can only
conclude that that tradition from the past has been unbroken, and that
the American republic is the direct descendant of the early English
State.
And what was the nature of this early English State? It was first of
all a mediæval absolute monarchy, arising out of the feudal chaos,
which had represented the first effort at order after the turbulent
assimilation of the invading barbarians by the Christianizing Roman
civilization. The feudal lord evolved out of the invading warrior
who had seized or been granted land and held it, souls and usufruct
thereof, as fief to some higher lord whom he aided in war. His own
serfs and vassals were exchanging faithful service for the protection
which the warrior with his organized band could give them. Where one
invading chieftain retained his power over his lesser lieutenants, a
petty kingdom would arise, as in England, and a restless and ambitious
king might extend his power over his neighbors and consolidate the
petty kingdoms only to fall before the armed power of an invader like
William the Conqueror, who would bring the whole realm under his
heel. The modern State begins when a prince secures almost undisputed
sway over fairly homogeneous territory and people and strives to
fortify his power and maintain the order that will conduce to the
safety and influence of his heirs. The State in its inception is
pure and undiluted monarchy; it is armed power, culminating in a
single head, bent on one primary object, the reducing to subjection,
to unconditional and unqualified loyalty of all the people of a
certain territory. This is the primary striving of the State, and
it is a striving that the State never loses, through all its myriad
transformations.
When this subjugation was once acquired, the modern State had begun.
In the King, the subjects found their protection and their sense of
unity. From his side, he was a redoubtable, ambitious, and stiff-necked
warrior, getting the supreme mastery which he craved. But from theirs,
he was a symbol of the herd, the visible emblem of that security which
they needed and for which they drew gregariously together. Serfs
and villains, whose safety under their petty lords had been rudely
shattered in the constant conflicts for supremacy, now drew a new
breath under the supremacy, that wiped out all this local anarchy.
King and people agreed in the thirst for order, and order became
the first healing function of the State. But in the maintenance of
order, the King needed officers of justice; the old crude group-rules
for dispensing justice had to be codified, a system of formal law
worked out. The King needed ministers, who would carry out his will,
extensions of his own power, as a machine extends the power of a man’s
hand. So the State grew as a gradual differentiation of the King’s
absolute power, founded on the devotion of his subjects and his control
of a military band, swift and sure to smite. Gratitude for protection
and fear of the strong arm sufficed to produce the loyalty of the
country to the State.
The history of the State, then, is the effort to maintain these
personal prerogatives of power, the effort to convert more and more
into stable law the rules of order, the conditions of public vengeance,
the distinction between classes, the possession of privilege. It was an
effort to convert what was at first arbitrary usurpation, a perfectly
apparent use of unjustified force, into the taken for granted and the
divinely established. The State moves inevitably along the line from
military dictatorship to the divine right of Kings. What had to be at
first rawly imposed becomes through social habit to seem the necessary,
the inevitable. The modern unquestioning acceptance of the State comes
out of long and turbulent centuries when the State was challenged and
had to fight its way to prevail. The King’s establishment of personal
power--which was the early State--had to contend with the impudence
of hostile barons, who saw too clearly the adventitious origin of the
monarchy and felt no reason why they should not themselves reign. Feuds
between the King and his relatives, quarrels over inheritance, quarrels
over the devolution of property, threatened constantly the existence
of the new monarchical State. The King’s will to power necessitated
for its absolute satisfaction universality of political control in his
dominions, just as the Roman Church claimed universality of spiritual
control over the whole world. And just as rival popes were the
inevitable product of such a pretension of sovereignty, rival kings and
princes contended for that dazzling jewel of undisputed power.
Not until the Tudor régime was there in England an irresponsible
absolute personal monarchy on the lines of the early State ideal,
governing a fairly well-organized and prosperous nation. The Stuarts
were not only too weak-minded to inherit this fruition of William
the Conqueror’s labors, but they made the fatal mistake of bringing
out to public view and philosophy the idea of Divine Right implicit
in the State, and this at a time when a new class of country gentry
and burghers were attaining wealth and self-consciousness backed by
the zeal of a theocratic and individualistic religion. Cromwell might
certainly, if he had continued in power, revised the ideal of the
State, perhaps utterly transformed it, destroying the concepts of
personal power, and universal sovereignty, and substituting a sort of
Government of Presbyterian Soviets under the tutelage of a celestial
Czar. But the Restoration brought back the old State under a peculiarly
frivolous form. The Revolution was the merest change of monarchs at
the behest of a Protestant majority which insisted on guarantees
against religious relapse. The intrinsic nature of the monarchy as the
symbol of the State was not in the least altered. In place of the
inept monarch who could not lead the State in person or concentrate
in himself the royal prerogatives, a coterie of courtiers managed
the State. But their direction was consistently in the interest of
the monarch and of the traditional ideal, so that the current of the
English State was not broken.
The boasted English Parliament of lords and commoners possessed at no
time any vitality which weakened or threatened to weaken the State
ideal. Its original purpose was merely to facilitate the raising of the
King’s revenues. The nobles responded better when they seemed to be
giving their consent. Their share in actual government was subjective,
but the existence of Parliament served to appease any restiveness at
the autocracy of the King. The significant classes could scarcely rebel
when they had the privilege of giving consent to the King’s measures.
There was always outlet for the rebellious spirit of a powerful lord
in private revolt against the King. The only Parliament that seriously
tried to govern outside of and against the King’s will precipitated a
civil war that ended with the effectual submission of Parliament in
a more careless and corrupt autocracy than had yet been known. By the
time of George III Parliament was moribund, utterly unrepresentative
either of the new bourgeois classes or of peasants and laborers, a
mere frivolous parody of a legislature, despised both by King and
people. The King was most effectively the State and his ministers the
Government, which was run in terms of his personal whim, by men whose
only interest was personal intrigue. Government had been for long what
it has never ceased to be--a series of berths and emoluments in Army,
Navy and the different departments of State, for the representatives of
the privileged classes.
The State of George III was an example of the most archaic ideal
of the English State, the pure, personal monarchy. The great mass
of the people had fallen into the age-long tradition of loyalty to
the crown. The classes that might have been restive for political
power were placated by a show of representative government and the
lucrative supply of offices. Discontent showed itself only in those
few enlightened elements which could not refrain from irony at the
sheer irrationality of a State managed on the old heroic lines
for so grotesque a sovereign and by so grotesque a succession of
courtier-ministers. Such discontent could by no means muster sufficient
force for a revolution, but the Revolution which was due came in
America where even the very obviously shadowy pigment of Parliamentary
representation was denied the colonists. All that was vital in the
political thought of England supported the American colonists in their
resistance to the obnoxious government of George III.