France. If revolutionary France could have conquered the Continent and
Great Britain, the world would now be happier, more civilized, and
more free, as well as more peaceful. But revolutionary France was a
quite exceptional case, because its early conquests were made in the
name of liberty, against tyrants, not against peoples; and everywhere
the French armies were welcomed as liberators by all except rulers and
bigots. In the case of Philip II we were as clearly right as we were
wrong in 1793. But in both cases our action is not to be judged by some
abstract diplomatic conception of the “liberties of Europe,” but by the
ideals of the Power seeking hegemony, and by the probable effect upon
the welfare of ordinary men and women throughout Europe.
“Hegemony” is a very vague word, and everything turns upon the degree
of interference with liberty which it involves. There is a degree of
interference with liberty which is fatal to many forms of national
life; for example, Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
was crushed by the supremacy of Spain and Austria. If the Germans
were actually to annex French provinces, as they did in 1871, they
would probably inflict a serious injury upon those provinces, and make
them less fruitful for civilization in general. For such reasons
national liberty is a matter of real importance, and a Europe actually
governed by Germany would probably be very dead and unproductive. But
if “hegemony” merely means increased weight in diplomatic questions,
more coaling stations and possessions in Africa, more power of securing
advantageous commercial treaties, then it can hardly be supposed that
it would do any vital damage to other nations; certainly it would not
do so much damage as the present war is doing. I cannot doubt that,
before the war, a hegemony of this kind would have abundantly satisfied
the Germans. But the effect of the war, so far, has been to increase
immeasurably all the dangers which it was intended to avert. We have
now only the choice between certain exhaustion of Europe in fighting
Germany and possible damage to the national life of France by German
tyranny. Stated in terms of civilization and human welfare, not in
terms of national prestige, that is now in fact the issue.
Assuming that war is not ended by one State conquering all the
others, the only way in which it can be permanently ended is by a
world-federation. So long as there are many sovereign States, each with
its own Army, there can be no security that there will not be war.
There will have to be in the world only one Army and one Navy before
there will be any reason to think that wars have ceased. This means
that, so far as the military functions of the State are concerned,
there will be only one State, which will be world-wide.
The civil functions of the State—legislative, administrative, and
judicial—have no very essential connection with the military functions,
and there is no reason why both kinds of functions should normally be
exercised by the same State. There is, in fact, every reason why the
civil State and the military State should be different. The greater
modern States are already too large for most civil purposes, but
for military purposes they are not large enough, since they are not
world-wide. This difference as to the desirable area for the two kinds
of State introduces a certain perplexity and hesitation, when it is not
realized that the two functions have little necessary connection: one
set of considerations points towards small States, the other towards
continually larger States. Of course, if there were an international
Army and Navy, there would have to be some international authority
to set them in motion. But this authority need never concern itself
with any of the internal affairs of national States: it need only
declare the rules which should regulate their relations, and pronounce
judicially when those rules have been so infringed as to call for the
intervention of the international force. How easily the limit of the
authority could be fixed may be seen by many actual examples.
The civil and military State are often different in practice, for many
purposes. The South American Republics are sovereign for all purposes
except their relations with Europe, in regard to which they are subject
to the United States: in dealings with Europe, the Army and Navy of the
United States are their Army and Navy. Our self-governing Dominions
depend for their defense, not upon their own forces but upon our Navy.
Most Governments, nowadays, do not aim at formal annexation of a
country which they wish to incorporate, but only at a protectorate—that
is, civil autonomy subject to military control. Such autonomy is,
of course, in practice incomplete, because it does not enable the
“protected” country to adopt measures which are vetoed by the Power
in military control. But it may be very nearly complete, as in the
case of our self-governing Dominions. At the other extreme, it may
become a mere farce, as in Egypt. In the case of an alliance, there is
complete autonomy of the separate allied countries, together with what
is practically a combination of their military forces into one single
force.
The great advantage of a large military State is that it increases the
area over which internal war is not possible except by revolution. If
England and Canada have a disagreement, it is taken as a matter of
course that a settlement shall be arrived at by discussion, not by
force. Still more is this the case if Manchester and Liverpool have a
quarrel, in spite of the fact that each is autonomous for many local
purposes. No one would have thought it reasonable that Liverpool should
go to war to prevent the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal,
although almost any two Great Powers would have gone to war over
an issue of the same relative importance. England and Russia would
probably have gone to war over Persia if they had not been allies; as
it is, they arrived by diplomacy at much the same iniquitous result as
they would otherwise have reached by fighting. Australia and Japan
would probably fight if they were both completely independent; but both
depend for their liberties upon the British Navy, and therefore they
have to adjust their differences peaceably.
The chief disadvantage of a large military State is that, when external
war occurs, the area affected is greater. The quadruple Entente forms,
for the present, one military State; the result is that, because
of a dispute between Austria and Serbia, Belgium is devastated and
Australians are killed in the Dardanelles. Another disadvantage is
that it facilitates oppression. A large military State is practically
omnipotent against a small State, and can impose its will, as England
and Russia did in Persia and as Austria-Hungary has been doing in
Serbia. It is impossible to make sure of avoiding oppression by any
purely mechanical guarantees; only a liberal and humane spirit can
afford a real protection. It has been perfectly possible for England
to oppress Ireland, in spite of democracy and the presence of Irish
Members at Westminster. Nor has the presence of Poles in the Reichstag
prevented the oppression of Prussian Poland. But democracy and
representative government undoubtedly make oppression less probable:
they afford a means by which those who might be oppressed can cause
their wishes and grievances to be publicly known, they render it
certain that only a minority can be oppressed, and then only if the
majority are nearly unanimous in wishing to oppress them. Also the
practice of oppression affords much more pleasure to the governing
classes, who actually carry it out, than to the mass of the population.
For this reason the mass of the population, where it has power, is
likely to be less tyrannical than an oligarchy or a bureaucracy.
In order to prevent war and at the same time preserve liberty it is
necessary that there should be only one military State in the world,
and that when disputes between different countries arise, it should
act according to the decision of a central authority. This is what
would naturally result from a federation of the world, if such a thing
ever came about. But the prospect is remote, and it is worth while to
consider why it is so remote.
The unity of a nation is produced by similar habits, instinctive
liking, a common history, and a common pride. The unity of a nation is
partly due to intrinsic affinities between its citizens, but partly
also to the pressure and contrast of the outside world: if a nation
were isolated, it would not have the same cohesion or the same fervor
of patriotism. When we come to alliances of nations, it is seldom
anything except outside pressure that produces solidarity. England
and America, to some extent, are drawn together by the same causes
which often make national unity: a (more or less) common language,
similar political institutions, similar aims in international politics.
But England, France, and Russia were drawn together solely by fear
of Germany; if Germany had been annihilated by a natural cataclysm,
they would at once have begun to hate one another, as they did before
Germany was strong. For this reason, the possibility of coöperation in
the present alliance against Germany affords no ground whatever for
hoping that all the nations of the world might coöperate permanently in
a peaceful alliance. The present motive for cohesion, namely a common
fear, would be gone, and could not be replaced by any other motive
unless men’s thoughts and purposes were very different from what they
are now.
The ultimate fact from which war results is not economic or political,
and does not rest upon any mechanical difficulty of inventing means
for the peaceful settlement of international disputes. The ultimate
fact from which war results is the fact that a large proportion of
mankind have an impulse to conflict rather than harmony, and can only
be brought to coöperate with others in resisting or attacking a common
enemy. This is the case in private life as well as in the relations of
States. Most men, when they feel themselves sufficiently strong, set to
work to make themselves feared rather than loved; the wish to gain the
good opinion of others is confined, as a rule, to those who have not
acquired secure power. The impulse to quarreling and self-assertion,
the pleasure of getting one’s own way in spite of opposition, is native
to most men. It is this impulse, rather than any motive of calculated
self-interest, which produces war, and causes the difficulty of
bringing about a World-State. And this impulse is not confined to one
nation; it exists, in varying degrees, in all the vigorous nations of
the world.
But although this impulse is strong, there is no reason why it should
be allowed to lead to war. It was exactly the same impulse which led to
duelling; yet now civilized men conduct their private quarrels without
bloodshed. If political contest within a World-State were substituted
for war, imagination would soon accustom itself to the new situation,
as it has accustomed itself to absence of duelling. Through the
influence of institutions and habits, without any fundamental change
in human nature, men would learn to look back upon war as we look upon
the burning of heretics or upon human sacrifice to heathen deities. If
I were to buy a revolver costing several pounds, in order to shoot my
friend with a view to stealing sixpence out of his pocket, I should
be thought neither very wise nor very virtuous. But if I can get
sixty-five million accomplices to join me in this criminal absurdity, I
become one of a great and glorious nation, nobly sacrificing the cost
of my revolver, perhaps even my life, in order to secure the sixpence
for the honor of my country. Historians, who are almost invariably
sycophants, will praise me and my accomplices if we are successful,
and say that we are worthy successors of the heroes who overthrew the
might of Imperial Rome. But if my opponents are victorious, if their
sixpences are defended at the cost of many pounds each and the lives
of a large proportion of the population, then historians will call me
a brigand (as I am), and praise the spirit and self-sacrifice of those
who resisted me.
War is surrounded with glamour, by tradition, by Homer and the Old
Testament, by early education, by elaborate myths as to the importance
of the issues involved, by the heroism and self-sacrifice, which
these myths call out. Jephthah sacrificing his daughter is a heroic
figure, but he would have let her live if he had not been deceived by
a myth. Mothers sending their sons to the battlefield are heroic, but
they are as much deceived as Jephthah. And, in both cases alike, the
heroism which issues in cruelty would be dispelled if there were not
some strain of barbarism in the imaginative outlook from which myths
spring. A God who can be pleased by the sacrifice of an innocent girl
could only be worshiped by men to whom the thought of receiving such
a sacrifice is not wholly abhorrent. A nation which believes that its
welfare can only be secured by suffering and inflicting hundreds of
thousands of equally horrible sacrifices, is a nation which has no very
spiritual conception of what constitutes national welfare. It would
be better a hundredfold to forgo material comfort, power, pomp, and
outward glory than to kill and be killed, to hate and be hated, to
throw away in a mad moment of fury the bright heritage of the ages.
We have learnt gradually to free our God from the savagery with which
the primitive Israelites and the Fathers endowed Him: few of us now
believe that it is His pleasure to torture most of the human race in an
eternity of hell-fire. But we have not yet learnt to free our national
ideals from the ancient taint. Devotion to the nation is perhaps the
deepest and most widespread religion of the present age. Like the
ancient religions, it demands its persecutions, its holocausts, its
lurid heroic cruelties; like them, it is noble, primitive, brutal, and
mad. Now, as in the past, religion, lagging behind private consciences
through the weight of tradition, steels the hearts of men against mercy
and their minds against truth. If the world is to be saved, men must
learn to be noble without being cruel, to be filled with faith and yet
open to truth, to be inspired by great purposes without hating those
who try to thwart them. But before this can happen, men must first face
the terrible realization that the gods before whom they have bowed down
were false gods and the sacrifices they have made were vain.
IV
PROPERTY
Among the many gloomy novelists of the realistic school, perhaps the
most full of gloom is Gissing. In common with all his characters, he
lives under the weight of a great oppression: the power of the fearful
and yet adored idol of Money. One of his typical stories is “Eve’s
Ransom,” where the heroine, with various discreditable subterfuges,
throws over the poor man whom she loves in order to marry the rich man
whose income she loves still better. The poor man, finding that the
rich man’s income has given her a fuller life and a better character
than the poor man’s love could have given her, decides that she has
done quite right, and that he deserves to be punished for his lack of
money. In this story, as in his other books, Gissing has set forth,
quite accurately, the actual dominion of money, and the impersonal
worship which it exacts from the great majority of civilized mankind.
Gissing’s facts are undeniable, and yet his attitude produces a revolt
in any reader who has vital passions and masterful desires. His worship
of money is bound up with his consciousness of inward defeat. And in
the modern world generally, it is the decay of life which has promoted
the religion of material goods; and the religion of material goods, in
its turn, has hastened the decay of life on which it thrives. The man
who worships money has ceased to hope for happiness through his own
efforts or in his own activities: he looks upon happiness as a passive
enjoyment of pleasures derived from the outside world. The artist or
the lover does not worship money in his moments of ardor, because
his desires are specific, and directed towards objects which only he
can create. And conversely, the worshiper of money can never achieve
greatness as an artist or a lover.
Love of money has been denounced by moralists since the world began.
I do not wish to add another to the moral denunciations, of which the
efficacy in the past has not been encouraging. I wish to show how the
worship of money is both an effect and a cause of diminishing vitality,
and how our institutions might be changed so as to make the worship
of money grow less and the general vitality grow more. It is not the
desire for money as a means to definite ends that is in question. A
struggling artist may desire money in order to have leisure for his
art, but this desire is finite, and can be satisfied fully by a very
modest sum. It is the _worship_ of money that I wish to consider: the
belief that all values may be measured in terms of money, and that
money is the ultimate test of success in life. This belief is held in
fact, if not in words, by multitudes of men and women, and yet it is
not in harmony with human nature, since it ignores vital needs and the
instinctive tendency towards some specific kind of growth. It makes
men treat as unimportant those of their desires which run counter to
the acquisition of money, and yet such desires are, as a rule, more
important to well-being than any increase of income. It leads men to
mutilate their own natures from a mistaken theory of what constitutes
success, and to give admiration to enterprises which add nothing to
human welfare. It promotes a dead uniformity of character and purpose,
a diminution in the joy of life, and a stress and strain which leaves
whole communities weary, discouraged, and disillusioned.
America, the pioneer of Western progress, is thought by many to display
the worship of money in its most perfect form. A well-to-do American,
who already has more than enough money to satisfy all reasonable
requirements, almost always continues to work at his office with
an assiduity which would only be pardonable if starvation were the
alternative.
But England, except among a small minority, is almost as much given
over to the worship of money as America. Love of money in England
takes, as a rule, the form of snobbishly desiring to maintain a certain
social status, rather than of striving after an indefinite increase
of income. Men postpone marriage until they have an income enabling
them to have as many rooms and servants in their house as they feel
that their dignity requires. This makes it necessary for them while
they are young to keep a watch upon their affections, lest they should
be led into an imprudence: they acquire a cautious habit of mind, and
a fear of “giving themselves away,” which makes a free and vigorous
life impossible. In acting as they do they imagine that they are being
virtuous, since they would feel it a hardship for a woman to be asked
to descend to a lower social status than that of her parents, and a
degradation to themselves to marry a woman whose social status was not
equal to their own. The things of nature are not valued in comparison
with money. It is not thought a hardship for a woman to have to accept,
as her only experience of love, the prudent and limited attentions of
a man whose capacity for emotion has been lost during years of wise
restraint or sordid relations with women whom he did not respect.
The woman herself does not know that it is a hardship; for she, too,
has been taught prudence for fear of a descent in the social scale,
and from early youth she has had it instilled into her that strong
feeling does not become a young woman. So the two unite to slip through
life in ignorance of all that is worth knowing. Their ancestors were
not restrained from passion by the fear of hell-fire, but they are
restrained effectually by a worse fear, the fear of coming down in the
world.
The same motives which lead men to marry late also lead them to limit
their families. Professional men wish to send their sons to a public
school, though the education they will obtain is no better than at a
grammar school, and the companions with whom they will associate are
more vicious. But snobdom has decided that public schools are best, and
from its verdict there is no appeal. What makes them the best is that
they are the most expensive. And the same social struggle, in varying
forms, runs through all classes except the very highest and the very
lowest. For this purpose men and women make great moral efforts, and
show amazing powers of self-control; but all their efforts and all
their self-control, being not used for any creative end, serve merely
to dry up the well-spring of life within them, to make them feeble,
listless, and trivial. It is not in such a soil that the passion which
produces genius can be nourished. Men’s souls have exchanged the
wilderness for the drawing-room: they have become cramped and petty
and deformed, like Chinese women’s feet. Even the horrors of war have
hardly awakened them from the smug somnambulism of respectability.
And it is chiefly the worship of money that has brought about this
deathlike slumber of all that makes men great.
In France the worship of money takes the form of thrift. It is not
easy to make a fortune in France, but an inherited competence is very
common, and where it exists the main purpose of life is to hand it
on undiminished, if not increased. The French _rentier_ is one of the
great forces in international politics: it is he through whom France
has been strengthened in diplomacy and weakened in war, by increasing
the supply of French capital and diminishing the supply of French men.
The necessity of providing a _dot_ for daughters, and the subdivision
of property by the law of inheritance, have made the family more
powerful, as an institution, than in any other civilized country. In
order that the family may prosper, it is kept small, and the individual
members are often sacrificed to it. The desire for family continuity
makes men timid and unadventurous: it is only in the organized
proletariat that the daring spirit survives which made the Revolution
and led the world in political thought and practice. Through the
influence of money, the strength of the family has become a weakness
to the nation by making the population remain stationary and even tend
to decline. The same love of safety is beginning to produce the same
effects elsewhere; but in this, as in many better things, France has
led the way.
In Germany the worship of money is more recent than in France, England,
and America; indeed, it hardly existed until after the Franco-Prussian
War. But it has been adopted now with the same intensity and
whole-heartedness which have always marked German beliefs. It is
characteristic that, as in France the worship of money is associated
with the family, so in Germany it is associated with the State. Liszt,
in deliberate revolt against the English economists, taught his
compatriots to think of economics in national terms, and the German
who develops a business is felt, by others as well as by himself, to
be performing a service to the State. Germans believe that England’s
greatness is due to industrialism and Empire, and that our success in
these is due to an intense nationalism. The apparent internationalism
of our Free Trade policy they regard as mere hypocrisy. They have set
themselves to imitate what they believe we really are, with only the
hypocrisy omitted. It must be admitted that their success has been
amazing. But in the process they have destroyed almost all that made
Germany of value to the world, and they have not adopted whatever of
good there may have been among us, since that was all swept aside in
the wholesale condemnation of “hypocrisy.” And in adopting our worst
faults, they have made them far worse by a system, a thoroughness, and
a unanimity of which we are happily incapable. Germany’s religion is
of great importance to the world, since Germans have a power of real
belief, and have the energy to acquire the virtues and vices which
their creed demands. For the sake of the world, as well as for the sake
of Germany, we must hope that they will soon abandon the worship of
wealth which they have unfortunately learnt from us.