“I cannot listen to such statements,” exclaimed Joséphin Leclerc. “We
require outlets for our products, and territories for our industrial
and commercial expansion. What are you thinking of, Langelier? One
policy alone governs Europe, America, and the world to-day--colonial
policy.”
Nicole Langelier, unruffled, replied:
“Colonial policy is the most recent form of barbarism, or, if you
prefer, the term of civilisation. I make no distinction between these
two expressions; they are identical. What men call civilisation is
the present condition of manners, while what they style barbarism are
anterior conditions. The manners of to-day will be styled barbarian
when they shall be of the past. It is patent to me that our manners and
morals embody the idea that strong nations shall destroy the weaker
ones. Of such is the principle of the law of nations.
“It remains to be seen, however, whether conquests abroad always
constitute a good stroke of business for nations. It would not seem so.
What have Mexico and Peru done for Spain? Brazil for Portugal? Batavia
for Holland? There are various kinds of colonies. There are colonies
which afford to unfortunate Europeans desert and uncultivated lands.
These, loyal as long as they remain poor, separate from the mother
country as soon as they become prosperous. Some there are which are
inhabitable; these supply raw material, and import manufactured goods.
Now it is plain that these colonies enrich, not those who govern them,
but whoever trades with them. The greater part of the time they are
not worth what they cost. Moreover, they may at any moment expose the
mother country to military disasters.”
“How about England?” interrupted M. Goubin.
“England is less a nation than a race. The Anglo-Saxons know no
fatherland but the sea. England, looked upon as wealthy in her vast
domains, owes her fortune and her power to her commerce. It is not her
colonies which should be envied her, but her merchants, the authors of
her wealth. Do you imagine, by way of illustration, that the Transvaal
represents so very good a stroke of business for her? For all that, it
is conceivable that in the present state of the world nations who bring
forth many children and manufacture products in large quantities should
seek territories and markets in far-off lands, and secure possession
of them by stratagem and violence. How different it is in our own
case! Our thrifty nation, careful not to have more children than the
natal soil can feed without difficulty, and producing in a moderate
degree, does not willingly embark on distant adventures; our France,
who hardly goes beyond her garden wall, great heavens, what need has
she of colonies? Of what use are they to her? What do they bring her?
She has spent men and money in profusion, in order that the Congo,
Cochin-China, Annam, Tonking, Guiana, and Madagascar shall purchase
calicoes from Manchester, guns from Birmingham and Liége, brandies from
Dantzig, and cases of wine all the way from Bordeaux to Hamburg. She
has, for seventy years, despoiled, hunted, and shot down Arabs, and in
the end she has peopled Algeria with Italians and Spaniards!
“The irony of these results is cruel enough, and it is hard to realise
that this empire, ten or eleven times as big as France herself, has
been formed to our detriment. But, it must be taken into consideration
that whereas the French nation derives no advantage whatsoever from
the possession of territories in Africa and Asia, the heads of its
Government, on the other hand, find it to their great advantage to
acquire them. They thereby secure the affection of the navy and army,
which on the occasion of colonial expeditions reap a harvest of
promotions, pensions, and crosses, to say nothing of the glory won in
defeating the enemy. They conciliate the clergy by opening new paths
to the Propaganda, and by allocating territories to Catholic missions.
They make joyous the ship-owners, builders, and army contractors,
whom they load with orders. They secure for themselves in the country
itself a numerous following by the granting of concessions of immense
forests and plantations without end. And, what is still more precious
to them, they attach to their majority every parliamentary jobber
and kerbstone-broker. Lastly, they cajole the multitude, proud in
its possession of a yellow and black empire, which makes Germany and
England turn green with envy. They are looked upon as good citizens,
patriots, and great statesmen. And if, like Ferry, they incur the
risk of going under, as the result of some military disaster, they
willingly run the risk fully convinced that the most harmful of distant
expeditions will cost them fewer difficulties, and will inveigle them
into fewer perils than the most useful of social reforms.
“You can now realise why we have occasionally had imperialist
ministers, jealous of aggrandising our colonial domain. We must
congratulate ourselves, however, and praise the moderation of our
rulers, who might have burdened us with still more colonies.
“But all danger has not been averted, and we are threatened with an
eighty years’ warfare in Morocco. Is there never to be an end to the
colonial mania?
“I am fully aware that nations are not sensible. How can it be
expected of them, if one considers what they are made of? Still, a
certain instinct oftentimes warns them of what is harmful. They are
occasionally endowed with the power of observing. In the long run they
undergo the painful experience of their errors and blunders. The day
will come when it will dawn upon them that colonies are a source of
perils and ruinous results. Commercial barbarism will be followed by
commercial civilisation, and forcible, by pacific penetration. These
ideas have to-day found an echo even in the bosom of parliaments. They
will prevail, not because men will be more disinterested, but because
they will know their own interests better.
“The great human asset is man himself. In order to rate the terrestrial
globe, it is necessary to begin by rating men. To exploit the soil, the
mines, the waters, all the substances and all the forces of our planet,
it needs man, the whole of man; humanity, the whole of humanity. The
complete exploitation of the terrestrial globe demands the united
labour of white, yellow, and black men. By reducing, diminishing, and
weakening, or, to sum it up in one word, by colonising a portion of
humanity, we are working against ourselves. It is to our advantage
that yellow and black men should be powerful, free, and wealthy. Our
prosperity and our wealth depend on theirs. The more is produced, the
more will there be consumed. The greater the profit they derive from
us, the greater the profit we shall derive from them. If they reap the
benefit of our labours, so shall we fully reap theirs.
“If we study the movements which govern the destinies of societies, we
may perhaps discover signs that the era of violent deeds is coming to
an end. War, which was formerly a standing institution among nations,
is now intermittent, and the periods of peace have become of longer
duration than those of war. Our country affords the observations of
a fact full of interest, for the French nation presents an original
characteristic in the military history of nations. Whereas other
nations never waged war except from interest or necessity, alone the
French have fought for the pleasure of fighting. Now it is remarkable
that the taste of our compatriots has undergone a change. Thirty years
ago Renan wrote: ‘Whoever knows France as a whole and in her provincial
varieties will not hesitate to recognise the fact that the movement
swaying this country for the past fifty years is essentially pacific.’
It is a fact attested by a large number of observers that in 1870
France had no desire to have recourse to the arbitrament of war, and
that the declaration of war was greeted with consternation. It is an
assured fact that few Frenchmen dream of taking the field, and that
everybody readily accepts the idea that the army exists in order to
avoid a war. Let me quote one example out of a thousand in confirmation
of this state of mind. Monsieur Ribot, a representative of the people
and a former Cabinet Minister, having been invited to some patriotic
celebration, replied with an eloquent letter, begging to be excused.
The same Monsieur Ribot knits his brows superciliously at the mere
mention of the word disarmament. He has towards standards and cannon
the leaning proper to a former Minister of Foreign Affairs. In his
letter he denounces as a national peril the pacific ideas disseminated
by the Socialist. He sees in them a spirit of renunciation he cannot
endure. Not that he is of a bellicose turn of mind. He, too, sighs
for peace, but a peace full of pomp, magnificent, and flashing with
the same pride as war. Between Monsieur Ribot and Jaurès, the matter
is merely one of form. Both of them are for peace. Jaurès, simply;
Monsieur Ribot, superbly. That is all. Better still and more surely
than the Socialist democracy which contents itself with a bloused or
coated peace does the sentiment of the bourgeois, who demand a peace
gleaming with military insignia and bedecked with emblems of glory,
testify to the inevitable decline of all idea of revenge and conquests,
since one discerns in it the military instinct, at the very time when
it is losing its nature and is becoming pacific.
“France is acquiring by degrees the sentiment of her true strength,
consisting in intellectual strength; she is becoming conscious of her
mission, which is the sowing of ideas and the exercise of a sway over
thought. She will within measurable time perceive that her only stable
power has lain in her speakers, her writers, and her men of science.
Hence she will some day fain have to recognise that the force of
numbers, after having so often betrayed her, is finally escaping from
her, and that the time has come for her to resign herself to the glory
which the exercise of the mind and the use of reason assure her of.”
Jean Boilly, shaking his head, said:
“You ask that France should teach other nations concord and peace. Are
you so sure that she will be listened to and her example followed?
Is her own tranquillity so assured? Has she not to fear threats from
outside, to foresee dangers, to watch over her safety, and to provide
for her defence? One swallow does not make a summer; one nation does
not make the peace of the world. Is it so sure that Germany keeps up
an army with the sole object of not waging war? Her Social-Democrats
desire peace. But they are not the masters, and their deputies do
not enjoy in the Parliament the authority which the number of their
electors should give them. And Russia, who has hardly entered upon the
industrial period, do you believe that she will soon be entering upon
the pacific period? Is it not to be feared that after having disturbed
Asia she will disturb Europe?
“Supposing even that Europe should become pacific, can you not see
that America would become warlike? Following upon Cuba, reduced to the
state of a vassal republic, Hawaii, Porto Rico, and the annexation of
the Philippines, it is impossible to say that the American Union is
not a conquering nation. A publicist of Yankee proclivities, Stead,
has said amid the plaudits of the whole of the United States: ‘The
Americanisation of the world is on the march.’ And then there is Mr.
Roosevelt, whose dream is to plant the Stars and Stripes in South
Africa, Australia, and the West Indies. Mr. Roosevelt is Imperialist
and he sighs for an America mistress of the world. Between ourselves,
he is planning the Empire of Augustus. He has unfortunately perused
Livy. The conquests of the Romans banish sleep from him. Have you read
his speeches? They breathe a bellicose spirit. ‘Fight, my friends,’
says Mr. Roosevelt, ‘and fight hard. There is nothing like blows. We
are upon earth only to exterminate one another. Those who tell you the
contrary are men without morality. Mistrust men who think. Thought
enervates. ’Tis a French failing. The Romans conquered the world. They
lost it. We are the modern Romans.’ Words full of eloquence, backed
up with a navy which will soon be the second in the world, and with a
military Budget of 40,500,000 francs!
“The Yankees declare that in four years’ time they will fight Germany.
If we are to believe this, they should first tell us where they
expect to come into contact with the enemy. That a Russia, the serf
of her Czar, that a still feudal Germany, should entertain armies
for fighting purposes, this one is tempted to lay to the door of
ancient habits and the survival of a strenuous past. But that a young
democracy, the United States of America, an aggregation of business
men, a mass of emigrants from all countries, lacking community,
traditions, and memories, madly cast into the scramble for the
mighty dollar, should of a sudden be swept with the desire of firing
torpedoes at the flanks of battleships, and of exploding mines under
the enemy’s columns, affords a proof that the inordinate struggle for
the production and exploitation of riches keeps alive the employment
of and taste for brutal force, that industrial violence engenders
military violence, and that mercantile rivalries kindle between nations
hatreds that bloodshed can alone extinguish. The colonial mania of
which you were speaking a while ago is but one of the thousand forms
of the much-vaunted competition of our economists. The capitalistic
state is just as much a warlike one as the feudal. The era has dawned
of great wars for the industrial sovereignty. Under the present
_régime_ of national production it is the cannon which fixes tariffs,
establishes customs, opens and closes markets. There exists no other
regulator of commerce and industry. Extermination is the fatal result
of the economic conditions in which the civilised world finds itself
to-day....”
The perfume of Gorgonzola and Stracchino was pervading the table. The
waiter was bringing in wax-candles to each of which was attached the
_abbrustolatoio_[H] wherewith to light the long cigars with straws, so
dear to Italians.
[H] _Abbrustolatoio_--apparatus attached to the candle; it has
two rings through which the cigar is placed, and left to
burn awhile.
Hippolyte Dufresne, who for some time past seemed to have remained
indifferent to the conversation, here remarked in a low tone tinged
with an ostentatious modesty:
“Gentlemen, our friend Langelier was asserting just now that many men
are afraid of disgracing themselves in the eyes of their contemporaries
by assuming the horrible immorality which is to be the morality of the
future. I do not entertain a like fear, and I have written a little
tale, which has perhaps no other merit than the one of revealing my
calmness of mind when considering the future. I shall one day crave
permission to read it to you.”
“Read it right away,” said Boni, lighting his cigar.
“You will be giving us pleasure,” added Joséphin Leclerc, Nicole
Langelier, and M. Goubin.
“I am not sure whether I have the manuscript with me,” replied
Hippolyte Dufresne.
With these words, he drew out of his pocket a roll of paper, and began
to read what follows.
V