which rules in our midst, this vulgar greed, which loads people's bodies
with jewels and furs and their tables with costly food, regardless of
those from whom these comforts are snatched, should eventuate ultimately
in rapacity and violence on the vast stage of the drama of nations, and
in red letters of war and conflict written across the continents? It is
no good, with a pious snuffle, to say we are out to put down warfare and
militarism, and all the time to encourage in our own lives, and in our
Church and Empire Leagues and other institutions, the most sordid and
selfish commercialism--which itself is in essence a warfare, only a
warfare of a far meaner and more cowardly kind than that which is
signalized by the shock of troops or the rage of rifles and cannon.
No, there is no other way; and only by the general abandonment of our
present commercial and capitalist system will the plague of war be
stayed.[23]
FOOTNOTES:
[23] When these hundreds and hundreds of thousands of men return home
after the war is over, do we expect them to go meekly back to the
idiotic slavery of dingy offices and dirty workshops? If we do I trust
that we shall be disappointed. These men who have fought so nobly for
their land, and who have tasted, even under the most trying conditions,
something of the largeness and gladness of a free open-air life, will, I
hope, refuse to knuckle down again to the old commercialism. Now at last
arises the opportunity for our outworn Civilization to make a fresh
start. Now comes the chance to establish great self-supporting Colonies
in our own countrysides and co-operative concerns where real Goods may
be manufactured and Agriculture carried on in free and glad and healthy
industry.
XI
COMMERCIAL PROSPERITY THE PROSPERITY OF A CLASS
The economics of the statement that "commercial prosperity means little
more than the prosperity of a _class_"[24] may be roughly indicated by
the following considerations: International trade means division of
labour among the nations. There is certainly a gain in such division, a
margin of advantage in production; and that gain, that margin, is
secured by the trading class. That is all.
Let us take an example, and to simplify the problem let us leave out of
account those exotic products--like tea or rubber or raw cotton--which
_can_ only be produced in one of the exchanging countries. Let us take
the case of Germany and England, both producing cutlery and both
producing cloth. There is no reason why each country should not produce
_both_ articles exclusively for its own use; and as a matter of fact for
a long time they did so. But presently it was found that the cost of
production of certain kinds of cutlery was less in Germany, and the cost
of production of certain kinds of cloth less in England. Merchants and
dealers came in and effected the exchange, and so an intertrade has
sprung up. The effect of this on the workers in England is simply to
transfer a certain amount of employment from the cutlery trade to the
cloth trade, and on the workers in Germany to transfer an equal amount
from the cloth trade to the cutlery trade. This may mean dislocation of
industry; but the actual number of persons employed or of wages received
in both countries may in such a case remain just the same as before.
There is nothing in the mere fact of exchange to alter those figures.
There is, however, a gain, there is a marginal advantage, in the
exchange; and that is collared by the merchants and dealers. It is, in
fact, _in order to secure this margin_ that the merchant class arises.
This is, of course, a very simple and elementary statement of the
problem, and the exceptions to it or modifications of it may be supplied
by the reader. But in the main it embodies the very obvious truth that
trade is created for the advantage of the trader (who often also in
modern times is the manufacturer himself). What advantages may here and
there leak through to the public or to the employee are small and, so to
speak, accidental. The mere fact of exchange in itself forms no index of
general prosperity. Yet it is often assumed that it does. If, for
instance, it should happen that the whole production of cutlery, as
between Germany and England, were secured by Germany, and the whole
production of cloth were secured by England, so that the _whole_ of
these products on each side had to be exchanged, then doubtless there
would be great jubilation--talk of the immense growth of oversea trade
in both countries, the wonderful increase of exports and imports, the
great prosperity, and so forth; but really and obviously it would only
mean the jubilation and the prosperity of the merchants, the brokers,
the railway and shipping companies of both lands. There would be an
increase in _their_ riches (and an increase in the number of their
employees). It would mean more merchant palaces in Park Lane, bigger
dividends on the shares of transport companies; but after that the
general position of the manual workers in both trades, the numbers
employed, and their rates of wages would be much as before. Prices also,
as regards the general Public, would be but little altered. It is only
because this great trading, manufacturing, and commercial class has
amassed such enormous wealth and influence, and is able to command the
Press, and social position, and votes and representation on public
bodies and in both Houses of Parliament, that it succeeds in impressing
the nation generally with the idea that _its_ welfare is the welfare of
the whole people, and its prosperity the advantage of every citizen. And
it is in this very fact that its great moral and social danger to the
community lies.
It must not be thought (but I believe I have said this before) that in
making out that the commercial classes are largely to blame for modern
wars I mean to say that the present war, and many previous ones, have
been _directly_ instigated by commercial folk. It is rather that the
atmosphere of commercial competition and rivalry automatically leads up
to military rivalries and collisions, which often at the last moment
(though not always) turn out contrary to the wishes of the commercial
people themselves. Also I would repeat that it is not _Commerce_ but the
_class_ interest that is to blame. Commerce and exchange, as we know in
a thousand ways, have the effect of drawing peoples together, giving
them common interests, acquaintance, and understanding of each other,
and so making for peace. The great jubilation during the latter half of
the nineteenth century--from 1851 onwards--over world-wide trade and
Industrial Exhibitions, as the heralds of the world's peace and amity--a
jubilation voiced in Tennyson's earlier _Locksley Hall_--was to a
certain extent justified. There is no doubt that the nations have been
drawn together by intertrading and learned to know each other. Bonds,
commercial and personal, have grown up between them, and are growing
up, which must inevitably make wars more difficult in the future and
less desirable. And if it had been possible to carry on this intertrade
in a spirit of real friendliness and without grasping or greed the
result to-day would be incalculably great. But, unfortunately, this
latter element came in to an extent quite unforeseen and blighted the
prophetic hopes. The second _Locksley Hall_ was a wail of
disillusionment. The growth of large mercantile classes, intoxicated
with wealth and pursuing their own interests _apart from, and indeed
largely in opposition to_, those of the mass-peoples, derailed the
forward movement, and led in some of the ways which I have indicated
above to more of conflict between the nations and less of peace.
Doubtless the growth of these mercantile classes has to a certain extent
been inevitable; and we must do them the justice to acknowledge that
their enterprise and ingenuity (even set in action for their own private
advantage) have been of considerable benefit to the world, and that
their growth may represent a necessary stage in affairs. Still, we
cannot help looking forward to a time when, this stage having been
completed, and commerce between nation and nation having ceased to be
handled for mere private profit and advantage, the parasitical power in
our midst which preys upon the Commonweal will disappear, the mercantile
classes will become organic with the Community, and one great and
sinister source of wars will also cease.
FOOTNOTES:
[24] See p. 50 above.
XII
COLONIES AND SEAPORTS
There is another point of economics on which there seems to be some
confusion of mind. If mere extension of Trade is the thing sought for,
it really does not matter much, in these days of swift and international
transport, whether the outlying lands with which the Trader deals or the
ports _through_ which he deals are the property of his own nation or of
some other nation. The trade goes on all the same. England certainly has
colonies all over the world; but with her free trade and open ports it
often happens that one of her colonies takes more German or French goods
of a certain class than English goods of the same class; or that it
exports more to Germany and France than it does to England. The bulk,
for instance, of the produce of our West African colonies goes, in
normal times, to Germany. German or French trade does not suffer in
dealing with English colonies, though English trade may sometimes suffer
in dealing with French, German or other foreign colonies on account of
the preferential duties they put on in favour of their own goods. Except
for these tariff-walls and bounty systems (which after all, on account
of their disturbing and crippling effect, seem to be gradually going out
of fashion) trade flows over the world, regardless of national barriers,
and will continue so to flow. It is all a question of relative
efficiency and price. German goods, owing to their cheapness and their
accuracy of construction, have of late years been penetrating
everywhere; and to the German trader, as a pure matter of trade, it
makes no difference whether he sells to a foreign nation or a German
colony.
It is the same with seaports. Holland is delighted to provide passage
for Germany's exports and imports, and probably does so at a minimum
cost. The Berlin manufacturer or merchant would be no better off, as far
as trade conditions are concerned, if Germany instead of Holland held
the mouths of the Rhine. The same with a harbour like Salonika. Germany
or Austria may covet dreadfully its possession; and for strategic or
political reasons they may be right, but for pure trade purposes
Salonika in the hands of the Greeks would probably (except for certain
initial expenses in the enlargement of dock accommodation) serve them as
well as in their own hands.
Of course there _are_ other reasons which make nations desire colonies
and ports. Such things may be useful for offensive or defensive purposes
against other nations; they feed a jealous sense of importance and
Imperialism; they provide outlets for population and access to lands
where the institutions and customs of the Homeland prevail; they supply
financiers with a field for the investment of capital under the
protection of their own Governments; they favour the development of a
national _carrying_ trade; and, above all, they supply plentiful
official and other posts and situations for the young men of the middle
and commercial classes; but for the mere extension and development of
the nation's general trade and commerce it is doubtful whether they have
anything like the importance commonly credited to them.
XIII
WAR AND THE SEX IMPULSE
_January_, 1915.
It seems that War, like all greatest things--like Passion, Politics,
Religion, and so forth--is impossible to reckon up. It belongs to
another plane of existence than our ordinary workaday life, and breaks
into the latter as violently and unreasonably, as a volcano into the
cool pastures where cows and sheep are grazing. No arguments, protests,
proofs, or explanations are of any avail; and those that are advanced
are confused, contradictory, and unconvincing. Just as people quarrel
most violently over Politics and Religion, because, in fact, those are
the two subjects which no one really understands, so they quarrel in
Warfare, not really knowing _why_, but impelled by deep, inscrutable
forces. Spectators even and neutrals, for the same reason, take sides
and range themselves bitterly, if only in argument, against each other.
But Logic and Morals are of no use on these occasions. They are too
thin. They are only threads in a vast fabric. You extract a single
thread from the weaving of a carpet, and note its colour and its
concatenations, but that gives you no faintest idea of the pattern of
the carpet; and then you extract another, and another, but you are no
nearer the design. Logic and morals are similar threads in the great web
of life. You may follow them in various directions, but without
effective result. Life is so much greater than either; and War is a
volcanic manifestation of Life which gives them little or no heed.
There is a madness of nations, as well as of individual people. Every
one who has paid attention to the fluctuations of popular sentiment
knows how strange, how unaccountable, these are. They seem to suggest
the coming to the surface, from time to time, of hidden
waves--groundswells of some deep ocean. The temper, the temperament, the
character, the policy of a whole nation will change, and it is
difficult to see why. Sometimes a passion, a fury, a veritable mania,
quite unlike its ordinary self, will seize it. There is a madness of
peoples, which causes them for a while to hate each other with bitter
hatred, to fight furiously and wound and injure each other; and then lo!
a little while more and they are shaking hands and embracing and
swearing eternal friendship! What does it all mean?
It is all as mad and unreasonable as Love is--and that is saying a good
deal! In love, too, people desire to _hurt_ each other; they do not
hesitate to wound one another--wounding hearts, wounding bodies even,
and hating themselves even while they act so. What does it all mean? Are
they trying the one to reach the other _at all costs_--if not by
embraces, at least by injuries--each longing to make his or her
personality felt, to _impress_ himself or herself upon the other in such
wise as never again to be forgotten. Sometimes a man will stab the girl
he loves, if he cannot get at her any other way. Sex itself is a
positive battle. Lust connects itself only too frequently with violence
and the spilling of blood.
Is it possible that something the same happens with whole nations and
peoples--an actual lust and passion of conflict, a mad intercourse and
ravishment, a kind of generation in each other, and exchange of
life-essences, leaving the two peoples thereafter never more the same,
but each strangely fertilized towards the future? Is it this that
explains the extraordinary ecstasy which men experience on the
battlefield, even amid all the horrors--an ecstasy so great that it
calls them again and again to return? "Have you noticed," says one of
our War correspondents,[25] "how many of our colonels fall? Do you know
why? It is for five minutes of _life_. It is for the joy of riding, when
the charge sounds, at the crest of a wave of men."
Is it this that explains the curious fact that Wars--notwithstanding all
their bitterness and brutishness--do not infrequently lead to strange
amalgamations and generations? The spreading of the seeds of Greek
culture over the then known world by Alexander's conquests, or the
fertilizing of Europe with the germs of republican and revolutionary
ideas by the armies of Napoleon, or the immense reaction on the
mediaeval Christian nations caused by the Crusades, are commonplaces of
history; and who--to come to quite modern times--could have foreseen
that the Boer War would end in the present positive alliance between the
Dutch and English in South Africa, or that the Russo-Japanese conflict
would so profoundly modify the ideas and outlook of the two peoples
concerned?
In making these remarks I do not for a moment say that the gains
resulting from War are worth the suffering caused by it, or that the
gains are _not_ worth the suffering. The whole subject is too vast and
obscure for one to venture to dogmatize on it. I only say that if we are
to find any order and law (as we must inevitably _try_ to do) in these
convulsions of peoples, these tempests of human history, it is probably
in the direction that I have indicated.
Of course we need not leave out of sight the ordinary theory and
explanation, that wars are simply a part of the general struggle for
existence--culminating explosions of hatred and mutual destruction
between peoples who are competing with each other for the means of
subsistence. That there is something in this view one can hardly deny;
and it is one which I have already touched upon. Still, I cannot help
thinking that there is something even deeper--something that connects
War with the amatory instinct; and that this probably is to be found in
the direction of a physiological impact and fusion between the two (or
more) peoples concerned, which fertilizes and regenerates them, and is
perhaps as necessary in the life of Nations as the fusion of cells is in
the life of Protozoa, or the phenomena of sex in the evolution of Man.
And while the Nations fight, the little mortals who represent them have
only the faintest idea of what is really going on, of what the warfare
means. They _feel_ the sweep of immense passions; ecstasies and horrors
convulse and dislocate their minds; but they do not, cannot, understand.
And the dear creatures in the trenches and the firing-lines give their
lives--equally beautiful, equally justified, on both sides: fascinated,
rapt, beyond and beside themselves, as foes hating each other with a
deadly hatred; seized with hideous, furious, nerve-racking passions;
performing heroic, magnificent deeds, suffering untold, indescribable
wounds and pains, and lying finally side by side (as not unfrequently
happens) on the deserted battlefield, reconciled and redeemed and
clasping hands of amity even in death.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] H.M. Tomlinson, in the _Daily News_.
XIV
THE OVER-POPULATION SCARE
Some cheerful and rather innocent people insist that because of the
over-population difficulty wars must go on for ever. The population of
the world, they say--or at any rate of the civilized countries--is
constantly increasing, and if war did not from time to time reduce the
numbers there would soon be a deadlock. They seem to think that the only
way to solve the problem is for the men to murder each other. This says
nothing about the women, who, after all, are the chief instruments of
multiplication. It may also be pointed out that even the barbaric method
of slaughter is not practicable. Although wars of extermination may have
now and then occurred in the past among tribes and small peoples, such
wars are not considered decent nowadays; and the numbers killed in
modern campaigns--horribly "scientific" and "efficient" as the methods
are--is such a small fraction of the population concerned as to have no
appreciable result. The population of Germany is about seventy millions,
and I suppose the wildest anti-Teuton could hardly hope that _more_ than
a million Germans will be actually killed in the present conflict--less
than 1-1/2 per cent.--a fraction which would probably soon be
compensated by the increased uxoriousness of the returning troops.
No, War is no solution for the over-population question. If that
question is a difficulty, other means must be employed. We ask
therefore: (1) Is it a serious difficulty? (2) If so, what is the
remedy?
That over-population is in certain localities a serious difficulty few
would deny. China, with her four hundred millions, is probably
over-populated; that is, with her present resources in production the
population presses against the margin of subsistence and can only just
maintain itself. There is evidence to show that in the past the natives
of some of the Pacific islands, isolated in the great ocean and unable
to migrate to other lands, have suffered from the same trouble. Britain
is often said to be over-populated; but here quite other considerations
come in. Though it might be pleasant for many reasons to have more land
at our immediate command, we cannot fairly say that our population
presses against the margin of subsistence, for the simple reason that
with our immense powers of industrial production and the enormous wealth
here yearly obtained the total, if evenly distributed (anything like as
well, for instance, as in China), would yield to every man, woman, and
child in the United Kingdom an ample affluence.[26] The _appearance_
here of over-population arises from the fact that while the wage-earners
actually produce this mass of wealth, two-thirds of it are taken by the
employers and employing classes. Great portions, therefore, of the
actual producers or producing classes _are_ on the margin of
subsistence, while the rest of the wealth of the country is absorbed by
those trading and dividend-consuming classes of whom I have spoken more
than once in previous pages. There is over-population certainly, but it
is an over-population (as any one may see who walks through the West End
of London or the corresponding quarters of any of our large towns) of
idlers and futile people, who are a burden to the nation. With our
extraordinary industrial system--or want of system--it commonly happens
that the abundance of ill-paid or unemployed workers at one end of the
social scale, by reducing the rates of wages and so increasing the rates
of dividends, actually creates a greater abundance of unemployed rich at
the other end; but neither excess points in itself to over-population
--only to a diseased state of distribution. What we really
ought to aim at creating is a nation in which every one was
capable of doing useful or beautiful work of some kind or other and was
gladly occupied in doing it. Such a nation would be truly healthy. It
would be powerful and productive beyond all our present dreams. But the
Western nations of to-day, with their huge burdens of unskilled,
ill-grown poor and their huge burden of incompetent, feeble rich--it is
a wonder that they survive. They would not survive a decade or two if
the Chinese or the Japanese in their numbers were to come into personal
and direct competition with them.
If Britain is not really at present over-populated, the same is probably
even more true of Germany. For Germany, with a larger and more fertile
area in proportion to her population, is safer than we are in the matter
of self-support. But again in Germany the outcry of over-population has
arisen, and has arisen from the same cause as here--namely, the rise of
the commercial system, the division of the nation into extremes of
poverty and riches, and the consequent _appearance_ of excess population
in both directions. And this diseased state of the nation has led to a
fever of "expansion" and has been (as already said) one of the chief
causes of the present war. As long as the modern nations are such fools
as to conduct their industrial affairs in the existing way they will not
only be full of strife, disease, and discord in themselves, but they
will inevitably quarrel with their neighbours.
All this, however, does not prove that a genuine over-population
difficulty may not occur even now in localities, and possibly in some
far future time over the whole earth. And it may be just as well to
consider these possibilities.
Dismissing War and Disease as solutions--as belonging to barbarous and
ignorant ages of human evolution--there remain, perhaps, three rational
methods of dealing with the question: (1) the organization and
improvement of industrial production on existing lands so far as to
allow the support of a larger population; (2) the transport of excess
populations to new and undeveloped lands (colonization); (3) the
limitation of families.