wealth—the power derived from command of the seas and the straits,
the wealth derived from a century of industrial supremacy. In both
these respects they feel that their deserts are higher than ours. They
have devoted far more thought and skill to military and industrial
organization. Their average of intelligence and knowledge is far
superior; their capacity for pursuing an attainable end, unitedly and
with forethought, is infinitely greater. Yet we, merely (as they think)
because we had a start in the race, have achieved a vastly larger
Empire than they have, and an enormously greater control of capital.
All this is unbearable; yet nothing but a great war can alter it.
Besides all these feelings, there is in many Germans, especially in
those who know us best, a hot hatred of us on account of our pride.
Farinata degli Uberti surveyed Hell “_come avesse lo Inferno in gran
dispitto_.” Just so, by German accounts, English officer prisoners
look round them among their captors—holding aloof, as though the enemy
were noxious, unclean creatures, toads or slugs or centipedes, which
a man does not touch willingly, and shakes off with loathing if he
is forced to touch them for a moment. It is easy to imagine how the
devils hated Farinata, and inflicted greater pains upon him than upon
his neighbors, hoping to win recognition by some slight wincing on his
part, driven to frenzy by his continuing to behave as if they did not
exist. In just the same way the Germans are maddened by our spiritual
immobility. At bottom we have regarded the Germans as one regards flies
on a hot day: they are a nuisance, one has to brush them off, but it
would not occur to one to be turned aside by them. Now that the initial
certainty of victory has faded, we begin to be affected inwardly by the
Germans. In time, if we continue to fail in our military enterprises,
we shall realize that they are human beings, not just a tiresome
circumstance. Then perhaps we shall hate them with a hatred which they
will have no reason to resent. And from such a hatred it will be only a
short journey to a genuine _rapprochement_.
The problem which must be solved, if the future of the world is to be
less terrible than its present, is the problem of preventing nations
from getting into the moods of England and Germany at the outbreak of
the war. These two nations as they were at that moment might be taken
as almost mythical representatives of pride and envy—cold pride and
hot envy. Germany declaimed passionately: “You, England, swollen and
decrepit, you overshadow my whole growth—your rotting branches keep
the sun from shining upon me and the rain from nourishing me. Your
spreading foliage must be lopped, your symmetrical beauty must be
destroyed, that I too may have freedom to grow, that my young vigor may
no longer be impeded by your decaying mass.” England, bored and aloof,
unconscious of the claims of outside forces, attempted absent-mindedly
to sweep away the upstart disturber of meditation; but the upstart was
not swept away, and remains so far with every prospect of making good
his claim. The claim and the resistance to it are alike folly. Germany
had no good ground for envy; we had no good ground for resisting
whatever in Germany’s demands was compatible with our continued
existence. Is there any method of averting such reciprocal folly in the
future?
I think if either the English or the Germans were capable of thinking
in terms of individual welfare rather than national pride, they would
have seen that, at every moment during the war the wisest course would
have been to conclude peace at once, on the best terms that could have
been obtained. This course, I am convinced, would have been the wisest
for each separate nation, as well as for civilization in general. The
utmost evil that the enemy could inflict through an unfavorable peace
would be a trifle compared to the evil which all the nations inflict
upon themselves by continuing to fight. What blinds us to this obvious
fact is pride, the pride which makes the acknowledgment of defeat
intolerable, and clothes itself in the garb of reason by suggesting
all kinds of evils which are supposed to result from admitting defeat.
But the only real evil of defeat is humiliation, and humiliation is
subjective; we shall not feel humiliated if we become persuaded that
it was a mistake to engage in the war, and that it is better to pursue
other tasks not dependent upon world-dominion. If either the English or
the Germans could admit this inwardly, any peace which did not destroy
national independence could be accepted without real loss in the
self-respect which is essential to a good life.
The mood in which Germany embarked upon the war was abominable, but it
was a mood fostered by the habitual mood of England. We have prided
ourselves upon our territory and our wealth; we have been ready at all
times to defend by force of arms what we have conquered in India and
Africa. If we had realized the futility of empire, and had shown a
willingness to yield colonies to Germany without waiting for the threat
of force, we might have been in a position to persuade the Germans
that their ambitions were foolish, and that the respect of the world
was not to be won by an imperialist policy. But by our resistance we
showed that we shared their standards. We, being in possession, became
enamored of the _status quo_. The Germans were willing to make war to
upset the _status quo_; we were willing to make war to prevent its
being upset in Germany’s favor. So convinced were we of the sacredness
of the _status quo_ that we never realized how advantageous it was to
us, or how, by insisting upon it, we shared the responsibility for the
war. In a world where nations grow and decay, where forces change and
populations become cramped, it is not possible or desirable to maintain
the _status quo_ for ever. If peace is to be preserved, nations must
learn to accept unfavorable alterations of the map without feeling that
they must first be defeated in war, or that in yielding they incur a
humiliation.
It is the insistence of legalists and friends of peace upon the
maintenance of the _status quo_ that has driven Germany into
militarism. Germany had as good a right to an Empire as any other Great
Power, but could only acquire an Empire through war. Love of peace has
been too much associated with a static conception of international
relations. In economic disputes we all know that whatever is vigorous
in the wage-earning classes is opposed to “industrial peace,” because
the existing distribution of wealth is felt to be unfair. Those who
enjoy a privileged position endeavor to bolster up their claims by
appealing to the desire for peace, and decrying those who promote
strife between the classes. It never occurs to them that by opposing
changes without considering whether they are just, the capitalists
share the responsibility for the class war. And in exactly the same
way England shares the responsibility for Germany’s war. If actual war
is ever to cease there will have to be political methods of achieving
the results which now can only be achieved by successful fighting, and
nations will have voluntarily to admit adverse claims which appear just
in the judgment of neutrals.
It is only by some such admission, embodying itself in a Parliament
of the nations with full power to alter the distribution of territory,
that militarism can be permanently overcome. It may be that the present
war will bring, in the Western nations, a change of mood and outlook
sufficient to make such an institution possible. It may be that more
wars and more destruction will be necessary before the majority of
civilized men rebel against the brutality and futile destruction of
modern war. But unless our standards of civilization and our powers
of constructive thought are to be permanently lowered, I cannot doubt
that, sooner or later, reason will conquer the blind impulses which now
lead nations into war. And if a large majority of the Great Powers had
a firm determination that peace should be preserved, there would be
no difficulty in devising diplomatic machinery for the settlement of
disputes, and in establishing educational systems which would implant
in the minds of the young an ineradicable horror of the slaughter which
they are now taught to admire.
Besides the conscious and deliberate forces leading to war, there are
the inarticulate feelings of common men, which, in most civilized
countries, are always ready to burst into war fever at the bidding of
statesmen. If peace is to be secure, the readiness to catch war fever
must be somehow diminished. Whoever wishes to succeed in this must
first understand what war fever is and why it arises.
The men who have an important influence in the world, whether for
good or evil, are dominated as a rule by a threefold desire: they
desire, first, an activity which calls fully into play the faculties in
which they feel that they excel; secondly, the sense of successfully
overcoming resistance; thirdly, the respect of others on account of
their success. The third of these desires is sometimes absent: some
men who have been great have been without the “last infirmity,” and
have been content with their own sense of success, or merely with the
joy of difficult effort. But as a rule all three are present. Some
men’s talents are specialized, so that their choice of activities is
circumscribed by the nature of their faculties; other men have, in
youth, such a wide range of possible aptitudes that their choice is
chiefly determined by the varying degrees of respect which public
opinion gives to different kinds of success.
The same desires, usually in a less marked degree, exist in men who
have no exceptional talents. But such men cannot achieve anything
very difficult by their individual efforts; for them, as units, it is
impossible to acquire the sense of greatness or the triumph of strong
resistance overcome. Their separate lives are unadventurous and dull.
In the morning they go to the office or the plow, in the evening they
return tired and silent, to the sober monotony of wife and children.
Believing that security is the supreme good, they have insured against
sickness and death, and have found an employment where they have little
fear of dismissal and no hope of any great rise. But security, once
achieved, brings a Nemesis of ennui. Adventure, imagination, risk,
also have their claims; but how can these claims be satisfied by the
ordinary wage-earner? Even if it were possible to satisfy them, the
claims of wife and children have priority and must not be neglected.
To this victim of order and good organization the realization comes,
in some moment of sudden crisis, that he belongs to a nation, that his
nation may take risks, may engage in difficult enterprises, enjoy the
hot passion of doubtful combat, stimulate adventure and imagination
by military expeditions to Mount Sinai and the Garden of Eden. What
his nation does, in some sense, he does; what his nation suffers, he
suffers. The long years of private caution are avenged by a wild plunge
into public madness. All the horrid duties of thrift and order and
care which he has learnt to fulfil in private are thought not to apply
to public affairs: it is patriotic and noble to be reckless for the
nation, though it would be wicked to be reckless for oneself. The old
primitive passions, which civilization has denied, surge up all the
stronger for repression. In a moment imagination and instinct travel
back through the centuries, and the wild man of the woods emerges from
the mental prison in which he has been confined. This is the deeper
part of the psychology of the war fever.
But besides the irrational and instinctive element in the war
fever, there is always also, if only as a liberator of primitive
impulse, a certain amount of quasi-rational calculation and what is
euphemistically called “thought.” The war fever very seldom seizes a
nation unless it believes that it will be victorious. Undoubtedly,
under the influence of excitement, men over-estimate their chances
of success; but there is some proportion between what is hoped and
what a rational man would expect. Holland, though quite as humane as
England, had no impulse to go to war on behalf of Belgium, because
the likelihood of disaster was so obviously overwhelming. The London
populace, if they had known how the war was going to develop, would
not have rejoiced as they did on that August Bank Holiday long ago.
A nation which has had a recent experience of war, and has come to
know that a war is almost always more painful than it is expected
to be at the outset, becomes much less liable to war fever until a
new generation grows up. The element of rationality in war fever is
recognized by Governments and journalists who desire war, as may be
seen by their invariably minimizing the perils of a war which they
wish to provoke. At the beginning of the South African War Sir William
Butler was dismissed, apparently for suggesting that sixty thousand men
and three months might not suffice to subdue the Boer Republics. And
when the war proved long and difficult, the nation turned against those
who had made it. We may assume, I think, without attributing too great
a share to reason in human affairs, that a nation would not suffer from
war fever in a case where every sane man could see that defeat was
very probable.
The importance of this lies in the fact that it would make aggressive
war very unlikely if its chances of success were very small. If the
peace-loving nations were sufficiently strong to be obviously capable
of defeating the nations which were willing to wage aggressive war,
the peace-loving nations might form an alliance and agree to fight
jointly against any nation which refused to submit its claims to an
International Council. Before the present war we might have reasonably
hoped to secure the peace of the world in some such way; but the
military strength of Germany has shown that such a scheme has no great
chance of success at present. Perhaps at some not far distant date it
may be made more feasible by developments of policy in America.
The economic and political forces which make for war could be easily
curbed if the will to peace existed strongly in all civilized nations.
But so long as the populations are liable to war fever, all work for
peace must be precarious; and if war fever could not be aroused,
political and economic forces would be powerless to produce any long
or very destructive war. The fundamental problem for the pacifist is
to prevent the impulse towards war which seizes whole communities from
time to time. And this can only be done by far-reaching changes in
education, in the economic structure of society, and in the moral code
by which public opinion controls the lives of men and women.[10]
A great many of the impulses which now lead nations to go to war are
in themselves essential to any vigorous or progressive life. Without
imagination and love of adventure a society soon becomes stagnant and
begins to decay. Conflict, provided it is not destructive and brutal,
is necessary in order to stimulate men’s activities, and to secure the
victory of what is living over what is dead or merely traditional. The
wish for the triumph of one’s cause, the sense of solidarity with large
bodies of men, are not things which a wise man will wish to destroy. It
is only the outcome in death and destruction and hatred that is evil.
The problem is, to keep these impulses, without making war the outlet
for them.
All Utopias that have hitherto been constructed are intolerably dull.
Any man with any force in him would rather live in this world, with
all its ghastly horrors, than in Plato’s Republic or among Swift’s
Houyhnhnms. The men who make Utopias proceed upon a radically false
assumption as to what constitutes a good life. They conceive that it
is possible to imagine a certain state of society and a certain way of
life which should be once for all recognized as good, and should then
continue for ever and ever. They do not realize that much the greater
part of a man’s happiness depends upon activity, and only a very small
remnant consists in passive enjoyment. Even the pleasures which do
consist in enjoyment are only satisfactory, to most men, when they
come in the intervals of activity. Social reformers, like inventors of
Utopias, are apt to forget this very obvious fact of human nature. They
aim rather at securing more leisure, and more opportunity for enjoying
it, than at making work itself more satisfactory, more consonant with
impulse, and a better outlet for creativeness and the desire to employ
one’s faculties. Work, in the modern world, is, to almost all who
depend on earnings, mere work, not an embodiment of the desire for
activity. Probably this is to a considerable extent inevitable. But in
so far as it can be prevented something will be done to give a peaceful
outlet to some of the impulses which lead to war.
It would, of course, be easy to bring about peace if there were no
vigor in the world. The Roman Empire was pacific and unproductive; the
Athens of Pericles was the most productive and almost the most warlike
community known to history. The only form of production in which our
own age excels is science, and in science Germany, the most warlike
of Great Powers, is supreme. It is useless to multiply examples; but
it is plain that the very same vital energy which produces all that
is best also produces war and the love of war. This is the basis of
the opposition to pacifism felt by many men whose aims and activities
are by no means brutal. Pacifism, in practice, too often expresses
merely lack of force, not the refusal to use force in thwarting others.
Pacifism, if it is to be both victorious and beneficent, must find an
outlet, compatible with humane feeling, for the vigor which now leads
nations into war and destruction.
This problem was considered by William James in an admirable address on
“The Moral Equivalent of War,” delivered to a congress of pacifists
during the Spanish-American War of 1898. His statement of the problem
could not be bettered; and so far as I know, he is the only writer who
has faced the problem adequately. But his solution is not adequate;
perhaps no adequate solution is possible. The problem, however, is
one of degree: every additional peaceful outlet for men’s energies
diminishes the force which urges nations towards war, and makes war
less frequent and less fierce. And as a question of degree, it is
capable of more or less partial solutions.[11]
Every vigorous man needs some kind of contest, some sense of resistance
overcome, in order to feel that he is exercising his faculties. Under
the influence of economics, a theory has grown up that what men desire
is wealth; this theory has tended to verify itself, because people’s
actions are more often determined by what they think they desire than
by what they really desire. The less active members of a community
often do in fact desire wealth, since it enables them to gratify a
taste for passive enjoyment, and to secure respect without exertion.
But the energetic men who make great fortunes seldom desire the actual
money: they desire the sense of power through a contest, and the joy of
successful activity. For this reason, those who are the most ruthless
in making money are often the most willing to give it away; there are
many notorious examples of this among American millionaires. The only
element of truth in the economic theory that these men are actuated
by desire for money is this: owing to the fact that money is what is
_believed_ to be desirable, the making of money is recognized as the
test of success. What is desired is visible and indubitable success;
but this can only be achieved by being one of the few who reach a goal
which many men would wish to reach. For this reason, public opinion
has a great influence in directing the activities of vigorous men. In
America a millionaire is more respected than a great artist; this leads
men who might become either the one or the other to choose to become
millionaires. In Renaissance Italy great artists were more respected
than millionaires, and the result was the opposite of what it is in
America.
Some pacifists and all militarists deprecate social and political
conflicts. In this the militarists are in the right, from their point
of view; but the pacifists seem to me mistaken. Conflicts of party
politics, conflicts between capital and labor, and generally all
those conflicts of principle which do not involve war, serve many
useful purposes, and do very little harm. They increase men’s interest
in public affairs, they afford a comparatively innocent outlet for
the love of contest, and they help to alter laws and institutions,
when changing conditions or greater knowledge create the wish for an
alteration. Everything that intensifies political life tends to bring
about a peaceful interest of the same kind as the interest which leads
to desire for war. And in a democratic community political questions
give every voter a sense of initiative and power and responsibility
which relieves his life of something of its narrow unadventurousness.
The object of the pacifist should be to give men more and more
political control over their own lives, and in particular to introduce
democracy into the management of industry, as the syndicalists advise.
The problem for the reflective pacifist is two-fold: how to keep his
own country at peace, and how to preserve the peace of the world. It
is impossible that the peace of the world should be preserved while
nations are liable to the mood in which Germany entered upon the
war—unless, indeed, one nation were so obviously stronger than all
others combined as to make war unnecessary for that one and hopeless
for all the others. As this war has dragged on its weary length,
many people must have asked themselves whether national independence
is worth the price that has to be paid for it. Would it not perhaps
be better to secure universal peace by the supremacy of one Power?
“To secure peace by a world federation”—so a submissive pacifist may
argue—“would require some faint glimmerings of reason in rulers and
peoples, and is therefore out of the question; but to secure it by
allowing Germany to dictate terms to Europe would be easy, in view of
Germany’s amazing military success. Since there is no other way of
ending war”—so our advocate of peace at any price would contend—“let
us adopt this way, which happens at the moment to be open to us.” It
is worth while to consider this view more attentively than is commonly
considered.
There is one great historic example of a long peace secured in this
way; I mean the Roman Empire. We in England boast of the _Pax
Britannica_ which we have imposed, in this way, upon the warring races
and religions in India. If we are right in boasting of this, if we have
in fact conferred a benefit upon India by enforced peace, the Germans
would be right in boasting if they could impose a _Pax Germanica_ upon
Europe. Before the war, men might have said that India and Europe
are not analogous, because India is less civilized than Europe; but
now, I hope, no one would have the effrontery to maintain anything so
preposterous. Repeatedly in modern history there has been a chance of
achieving European unity by the hegemony of a single State; but always
England, in obedience to the doctrine of the Balance of Power, has
prevented this consummation, and preserved what our statesmen have
called the “liberties of Europe.” It is this task upon which we are now
engaged. But I do not think our statesmen, or any others among us, have
made much effort to consider whether the task is worth what it costs.