significant the war brought a sense of the sanctity of the State,
which, if they had had time to think about it, would have seemed a
sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought. In times
of peace, we usually ignore the State in favor of partisan political
controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the pursuit of
party policies. It is the Government rather than the State with which
the politically-minded are concerned. The State is reduced to a shadowy
emblem which comes to consciousness only on occasions of patriotic
holiday.
Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is
thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your own
party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely enough;
but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor have
fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that way.
What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of a
very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for
granted. When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that
they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of the
institution of the State as it stands behind the objective government
of men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who hold office are
indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of them possess the slightest
personal dignity with which they could endow their political rôle;
even if they ever thought of such a thing. And they have no class
distinction to give them glamor. In a Republic the Government is obeyed
grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or sanctities to gild it.
If you are a good old-fashioned democrat, you rejoice at this fact, you
glory in the plainness of a system where every citizen has become a
king. If you are more sophisticated you bemoan the passing of dignity
and honor from affairs of State. But in practice, the democrat does not
in the least treat his elected citizen with the respect due to a king,
nor does the sophisticated citizen pay tribute to the dignity even when
he finds it. The republican state has almost no trappings to appeal to
the common man’s emotions. What it has are of military origin, and in
an unmilitary era such as we have passed through since the Civil War,
even military trappings have been scarcely seen. In such an era the
sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men.
With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again.
The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation
of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling,
the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision
with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the
country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it
is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been
hurled towards us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal
and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our
going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes,
it can gently whisper of a bigger rôle in the destiny of the world.
The result is that, even in those countries where the business of
declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the
people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an
Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and
irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats
are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the
popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an
absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern
pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of
republics as well as in the most tyrannical of Empires, all foreign
policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are
equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government,
and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or
the people voting as a mass themselves.
The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through
some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and
executed the deed themselves. They then with the exception of a few
malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced,
deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a
solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may
have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the
Government’s disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and
indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes,
revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more
walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism
becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense
and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears
and should bear towards the society of which he is a part.
The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation
and government. In our quieter moments, the Nation or Country forms the
basic idea of society. We think vaguely of a loose population spreading
over a certain geographical portion of the earth’s surface, speaking
a common language, and living in a homogeneous civilization. Our idea
of Country concerns itself with the non-political aspects of a people,
its ways of living, its personal traits, its literature and art, its
characteristic attitudes towards life. We are Americans because we live
in a certain bounded territory, because our ancestors have carried on
a great enterprise of pioneering and colonization, because we live in
certain kinds of communities which have a certain look and express
their aspirations in certain ways. We can see that our civilization is
different from contiguous civilizations like the Indian and Mexican.
The institutions of our country form a certain network which affects
us vitally and intrigues our thoughts in a way that these other
civilizations do not. We are a part of country, for better or for
worse. We have arrived in it through the operation of physiological
laws, and not in any way through our own choice. By the time we have
reached what are called years of discretion, its influences have molded
our habits, our values, our ways of thinking, so that however aware
we may become, we never really lose the stamp of our civilization, or
could be mistaken for the child of any other country. Our feeling for
our fellow-countrymen is one of similarity or of mere acquaintance. We
may be intensely proud of and congenial to our particular network of
civilization, or we may detest most of its qualities and rage at its
defects. This does not alter the fact that we are inextricably bound up
in it. The Country, as an inescapable group into which we are born, and
which makes us its particular kind of a citizen of the world, seems to
be a fundamental fact of our consciousness, an irreducible minimum of
social feeling.
Now this feeling for country is essentially non-competitive; we think
of our own people merely as living on the earth’s surface along
with other groups, pleasant or objectionable as they may be, but
fundamentally as sharing the earth with them. In our simple conception
of country there is no more feeling of rivalry with other peoples than
there is in our feeling for our family. Our interest turns within
rather than without, is intensive and not belligerent. We grow up and
our imaginations gradually stake out the world we live in, they need no
greater conscious satisfaction for their gregarious impulses than this
sense of a great mass of people to whom we are more or less attuned,
and in whose institutions we are functioning. The feeling for country
would be an uninflatable maximum were it not for the ideas of State and
Government which are associated with it. Country is a concept of peace,
of tolerance, of living and letting live. But State is essentially
a concept of power, of competition; it signifies a group in its
aggressive aspects. And we have the misfortune of being born not only
into a country but into a State, and as we grow up we learn to mingle
the two feelings into a hopeless confusion.
The State is the country acting as a political unit, it is the group
acting as a repository of force, determiner of law, arbiter of justice.
International politics is a “power politics” because it is a relation
of States and that is what States infallibly and calamitously are,
huge aggregations of human and industrial force that may be hurled
against each other in war. When a country acts as a whole in relation
to another country, or in imposing laws on its own inhabitants, or in
coercing or punishing individuals or minorities, it is acting as a
State. The history of America as a country is quite different from that
of America as a State. In one case it is the drama of the pioneering
conquest of the land, of the growth of wealth and the ways in which
it was used, of the enterprise of education, and the carrying out
of spiritual ideals, of the struggle of economic classes. But as a
State, its history is that of playing a part in the world, making war,
obstructing international trade, preventing itself from being split to
pieces, punishing those citizens whom society agrees are offensive, and
collecting money to pay for all....
THE END
FOOTNOTE:
[1] June, 1917.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
The cover image for this eBook was created by the transcriber using
the original cover as the background and is entered into the public
domain.