ON THE CONDITIONS OF A LASTING PEACE
The considerations set out in earlier chapters have made it appear that
the patriotic spirit of modern peoples is the abiding source of
contention among nations. Except for their patriotism a breach of the
peace among modern peoples could not well be had. So much will doubtless
be assented to as a matter of course. It is also a commonplace of
current aphoristic wisdom that both parties to a warlike adventure in
modern times stand to lose, materially; whatever nominal--that is to say
political--gains may be made by one or the other. It has also appeared
from these considerations recited in earlier passages that this
patriotic spirit prevails throughout, among all civilised peoples, and
that it pervades one nation about as ubiquitously as another. Nor is
there much evidence of a weakening of this sinister proclivity with the
passage of time or the continued advance in the arts of life. The only
civilized nations that can be counted on as habitually peaceable are
those who are so feeble or are so placed as to be cut off from hope of
gain through contention. Vainglorious arrogance may run at a higher
tension among the more backward and boorish nations; but it is not
evident that the advance guard among the civilised peoples are imbued
with a less complete national self-complacency. If the peace is to be
kept, therefore, it will have to be kept by and between peoples made up,
in effect, of complete patriots; which comes near being a contradiction
in terms. Patriotism is useful for breaking the peace, not for keeping
it. It makes for national pretensions and international jealously and
distrust, with warlike enterprise always in perspective; as a way to
national gain or a recourse in case of need. And there is commonly no
settled demarkation between these two contrasted needs that urge a
patriotic people forever to keep one eye on the chance of a recourse to
arms.
Therefore any calculus of the Chances of Peace appears to become a
reckoning of the forces which may be counted on to keep a patriotic
nation in an unstable equilibrium of peace for the time being. As has
just been remarked above, among civilised peoples only those nations can
be counted on consistently to keep the peace who are so feeble or
otherwise so placed as to be cut off from hope of national gain. And
these can apparently be so counted on only as regards aggression, not as
regards the national defense, and only in so far as they are not drawn
into warlike enterprise, collectively, by their more competent
neighbors. Even the feeblest and most futile of them feels in honour
bound to take up arms in defense of such national pretensions as they
still may harbour; and all of them harbour such pretensions. In certain
extreme cases, which it might seem invidious to specify more explicitly,
it is not easy to discover any specific reasons for the maintenance of a
national establishment, apart from the vindication of certain national
pretensions which would quietly lapse in the absence of a national
establishment on whom their vindication is incumbent.
Of the rest, the greater nations that are spoken of as Powers no such
general statement will hold. These are the peoples who stand, in
matters of national concern, on their own initiative; and the question
of peace and war at large is in effect, a question of peace and war
among these Powers. They are not so numerous that they can be sifted
into distinct classes, and yet they differ among themselves in such a
way that they may, for the purpose in hand, fairly be ranged under two
distinguishable if not contrasted heads: those which may safely be
counted on spontaneously to take the offensive, and those which will
fight on provocation. Typically of the former description are Germany
and Japan. Of the latter are the French and British, and less
confidently the American republic. In any summary statement of this kind
Russia will have to be left on one side as a doubtful case, for reasons
to which the argument may return at a later point; the prospective
course of things in Russia is scarcely to be appraised on the ground of
its past. Spain and Italy, being dubious Powers at the best, need not
detain the argument; they are, in the nature of things, subsidiaries who
wait on the main chance. And Austria, with whatever the name may cover,
is for the immediate purpose to be counted under the head of Germany.
There is no invidious comparison intended in so setting off these two
classes of nations in contrast to one another. It is not a contrast of
merit and demerit or of prestige. Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan
are, in the nature of things as things go, bent in effect on a
disturbance of the peace,--with a view to advance the cause of their own
dominion. On a large view of the case, such as many German statesmen
were in the habit of professing in the years preceding the great war, it
may perhaps appear reasonable to say--as they were in the habit of
saying--that these Imperial Powers are as well within the lines of fair
and honest dealing in their campaign of aggression as the other Powers
are in taking a defensive attitude against their aggression. Some sort
of international equity has been pleaded in justification of their
demand for an increased share of dominion. At least it has appeared that
these Imperial statesmen have so persuaded themselves after very mature
deliberation; and they have showed great concern to persuade others of
the equity of their Imperial claim to something more than the law would
allow. These sagacious, not to say astute, persons have not only reached
a conviction to this effect, but they have become possessed of this
conviction in such plenary fashion that, in the German case, they have
come to admit exceptions or abatement of the claim only when and in so
far as the campaign of equitable aggression on which they had entered
has been proved impracticable by the fortunes of war.
With some gift for casuistry one may, at least conceivably, hold that
the felt need of Imperial self-aggrandisement may become so urgent as to
justify, or at least to condone, forcible dispossession of weaker
nationalities. This might, indeed it has, become a sufficiently
perplexing question of casuistry, both as touches the punctilios of
national honour and as regards an equitable division between rival
Powers in respect of the material means of mastery. So in private life
it may become a moot question--in point of equity--whether the craving
of a kleptomaniac may not on occasion rise to such an intolerable pitch
of avidity as to justify him in seizing whatever valuables he can safely
lay hands on, to ease the discomfort of ungratified desire. In private
life any such endeavour to better oneself at one's neighbors' cost is
not commonly reprobated if it takes effect on a decently large scale
and shrewdly within the flexibilities of the law or with the connivance
of its officers. Governing international endeavours of this class there
is no law so inflexible that it can not be conveniently made over to fit
particular circumstances. And in the absence of law the felt need of a
formal justification will necessarily appeal to the unformulated
equities of the case, with some such outcome as alluded to above. All
that, of course, is for the diplomatists to take care of.
But any speculation on the equities involved in the projected course of
empire to which these two enterprising nations are committing themselves
must run within the lines of diplomatic parable, and will have none but
a speculative interest. It is not a matter of equity. Accepting the
situation as it stands, it is evident that any peace can only have a
qualified meaning, in the sense of armistice, so long as there is
opportunity for national enterprise of the character on which these two
enterprising national establishments are bent, and so long as these and
the like national establishments remain. So, taking the peaceable
professions of their spokesmen at a discount of one hundred percent, as
one necessarily must, and looking to the circumstantial evidence of the
case, it is abundantly plain that at least these two imperial Powers may
be counted on consistently to manoeuvre for warlike advantage so long as
any peace compact holds, and to break the peace so soon as the strategy
of Imperial enterprise appears to require it.
There has been much courteous make-believe of amiable and upright
solicitude on this head the past few years, both in diplomatic
intercourse and among men out of doors; and since make-believe is a
matter of course in diplomatic intercourse it is right and seemly, of
course, that no overt recognition of unavowed facts should be allowed
to traverse this run of make-believe within the precincts of diplomatic
intercourse. But in any ingenuous inquiry into the nature of peace and
the conditions of its maintenance there can be no harm in conveniently
leaving the diplomatic make-believe on one side and looking to the
circumstances that condition the case, rather than to the formal
professions designed to mask the circumstances.
* * * * *
Chief among the relevant circumstances in the current situation are the
imperial designs of Germany and Japan. These two national establishments
are very much alike. So much so that for the present purpose a single
line of analysis will passably cover both cases. The same line of
analysis will also apply, with slight adaptation, to more than one of
the other Powers, or near-Powers, of the modern world; but in so far as
such is held to be the case, that is not a consideration that weakens
the argument as applied to these two, which are to be taken as the
consummate type-form of a species of national establishments. They are,
between them, the best instance there is of what may be called a
Dynastic State.
Except as a possible corrective of internal disorders and discontent,
neither of the two States "desires" war; but both are bent on dominion,
and as the dominion aimed at is not to be had except by fighting for it,
both in effect are incorrigibly bent on warlike enterprise. And in
neither case will considerations of equity, humanity, decency, veracity,
or the common good be allowed to trouble the quest of dominion. As lies
in the nature of the dynastic State, imperial dominion, in the ambitions
of both, is beyond price; so that no cost is too high so long as
ultimate success attends the imperial enterprise. So much is commonplace
knowledge among all men who are at all conversant with the facts.
To anyone who harbors a lively sentimental prejudice for or against
either or both of the two nations so spoken of, or for or against the
manner of imperial enterprise to which both are committed, it may seem
that what has just been said of them and their relation to the world's
peace runs on something of a bias and conveys something of dispraise and
reprobation. Such is not the intention, however, though the appearance
is scarcely to be avoided. It is necessary for the purposes of the
argument unambiguously to recognise the nature of these facts with which
the inquiry is concerned; and any plain characterisation of the facts
will unavoidably carry a fringe of suggestions of this character,
because current speech is adapted for their reprobation. The point aimed
at is not this inflection of approval or disapproval. The facts are to
be taken impersonally for what they are worth in their causal bearing on
the chance of peace or war; not at their sentimental value as traits of
conduct to be appraised in point of their goodness or expediency.
So seen without prejudice, then, if that may be, this Imperial
enterprise of these two Powers is to be rated as the chief circumstance
bearing on the chances of peace and conditioning the terms on which any
peace plan must be drawn. Evidently, in the presence of these two
Imperial Powers any peace compact will be in a precarious case; equally
so whether either or both of them are parties to such compact or not. No
engagement binds a dynastic statesman in case it turns out not to
further the dynastic enterprise. The question then recurs: How may peace
be maintained within the horizon of German or Japanese ambitions? There
are two obvious alternatives, neither of which promises an easy way out
of the quandary in which the world's peace is placed by their presence:
Submission to their dominion, or Elimination of these two Powers. Either
alternative would offer a sufficiently deterrent outlook, and yet any
project for devising some middle course of conciliation and amicable
settlement, which shall be practicable and yet serve the turn, scarcely
has anything better to promise. The several nations now engaged on a war
with the greater of these Imperial Powers hold to a design of
elimination, as being the only measure that merits hopeful
consideration. The Imperial Power in distress bespeaks peace and
good-will.
Those advocates, whatever their nationality, who speak for negotiation
with a view to a peace compact which is to embrace these States intact,
are aiming, in effect, to put things in train for ultimate submission to
the mastery of these Imperial Powers. In these premises an amicable
settlement and a compact of perpetual peace will necessarily be
equivalent to arranging a period of recuperation and recruiting for a
new onset of dynastic enterprise. For, in the nature of the case, no
compact binds the dynastic statesman, and no consideration other than
the pursuit of Imperial dominion commands his attention.
There is, of course, no intention to decry this single-mindedness that
is habitually put in evidence by the dynastic statesmen. Nor should it
be taken as evidence of moral obliquity in them. It is rather the result
of a peculiar moral attitude or bent, habitual to such statesmen, and in
its degree also habitual to their compatriots, and is indispensably
involved in the Imperial frame of mind. The consummation of Imperial
mastery being the highest and ubiquitously ulterior end of all
endeavour, its pursuit not only relieves its votaries from the
observance of any minor obligations that run counter to its needs, but
it also imposes a moral obligation to make the most of any opportunity
for profitable deceit and chicanery that may offer. In short, the
dynastic statesman is under the governance of a higher morality, binding
him to the service of his nation's ambition--or in point of fact, to the
personal service of his dynastic master--to which it is his dutiful
privilege loyally to devote all his powers of force and fraud.
Democratically-minded persons, who are not moved by the call of loyalty
to a gratuitous personal master, may have some difficulty in
appreciating the force and the moral austerity of this spirit of
devotion to an ideal of dynastic aggrandisement, and in seeing how its
paramount exigence will set aside all meticulous scruples of personal
rectitude and veracity, as being a shabby with-holding of service due.
To such of these doubters as still have retained some remnants of their
religious faith this attitude of loyalty may perhaps be made
intelligible by calling to mind the analogous self-surrender of the
religious devotee. And in this connection it may also be to the purpose
to recall that in point of its genesis and derivation that unreserved
self-abasement and surrender to the divine ends and guidance, which is
the chief grace and glory of the true believer, is held by secular
students of these matters to be only a sublimated analogue or
counterfeit of this other dutiful abasement that constitutes loyalty to
a temporal master. The deity is currently spoken of as The Heavenly
King, under whose dominion no sinner has a right that He is bound to
respect; very much after the fashion in which no subject of a dynastic
state has a right which the State is bound to respect. Indeed, all these
dynastic establishments that so seek the Kingdom, the Power and the
Glory are surrounded with a penumbra of divinity, and it is commonly a
bootless question where the dynastic powers end and the claims of
divinity begin. There is something of a coalescence.[7]
[Footnote 7: "To us the state is the most indispensable as well as the
highest requisite to our earthly existence.... All individualistic
endeavor ... must be unreservedly subordinated to this lofty claim....
The state ... eventually is of infinitely more value than the sum of all
the individuals within its jurisdiction." "This conception of the state,
which is as much a part of our life as is the blood in our veins, is
nowhere to be found in the English Constitution, and is quite foreign to
English thought, and to that of America as well."--Eduard Meyer,
_England, its Political Organisation and Development and the War against
Germany_, translated by H.S. White. Boston 1916. pp. 30-31.]
The Kaiser holds dominion by divine grace and is accountable to none but
God, if to Him. The whole case is in a still better state of repair as
touches the Japanese establishment, where the Emperor is a lineal
descendant of the supreme deity, Amaterazu (_o mi Kami_), and where, by
consequence, there is no line of cleavage between a divine and a secular
mastery. Pursuant to this more unqualified authenticity of autocratic
rule, there is also to be found in this case a correspondingly
unqualified devotion in the subjects and an unqualified subservience to
dynastic ends on the part of the officers of the crown. The coalescence
of dynastic rule with the divine order is less complete in the German
case, but all observers bear witness that it all goes far enough also in
the German case. This state of things is recalled here as a means of
making plain that the statesmen of these Imperial Powers must in the
nature of the case, and without blame, be drawn out from under the
customary restraint of those principles of vulgar morality that are
embodied in the decalogue. It is not that the subject, or--what comes to
the same thing--the servant of such a dynastic State may not be upright,
veracious and humane in private life, but only that he must not be
addicted to that sort of thing in such manner or degree as might hinder
his usefulness for dynastic purposes. These matters of selfishly
individual integrity and humanity have no weight as against the
exigencies of the dynastic enterprise.
These considerations may not satisfy all doubters as to the moral
sufficiency of these motives that so suffice to decide the dynastic
statesmen on their enterprise of aggression by force and fraud; but it
should be evident that so long as these statesmen continue in the frame
of mind spoken of, and so long as popular sentiment in these countries
continues, as hitherto, to lend them effectual support in the pursuit of
such Imperial enterprise, so long it must also remain true that no
enduring peace can be maintained within the sweep of their Imperial
ambition. Any peace compact would necessarily be, in effect, an
armistice terminable at will and serving as a season of preparation to
meet a deferred opportunity. For the peaceable nations it would, in
effect, be a respite and a season of preparation for eventual submission
to the Imperial rule.
By advocates of such a negotiated compact of perpetual peace it has been
argued that the populace underlying these Imperial Powers will readily
be brought to realise the futility and inexpediency of such dynastic
enterprise, if only the relevant facts are brought to their knowledge,
and that so these Powers will be constrained to keep the peace by
default of popular support for their warlike projects. What is required,
it is believed by these sanguine persons, is that information be
competently conveyed to the common people of these warlike nations,
showing them that they have nothing to apprehend in the way of
aggression or oppressive measures from the side of their more peaceable
neighbours; whereupon their warlike animus will give place to a
reasonable and enlightened frame of mind. This argument runs tacitly or
explicitly, on the premise that these peoples who have so
enthusiastically lent themselves to the current warlike enterprise are
fundamentally of the same racial complexion and endowed with the same
human nature as their peaceable neighbours, who would be only too glad
to keep the peace on any terms of tolerable security from aggression. If
only a fair opportunity is offered for the interested peoples to come to
an understanding, it is held, a good understanding will readily be
reached; at least so far as to result in a reasonable willingness to
submit questions in dispute to an intelligent canvass and an equitable
arbitration.
Projects for a negotiated peace compact, to include the dynastic States,
can hold any prospect of a happy issue only if this line of argument, or
its equivalent, is pertinent and conclusive; and the argument is to the
point only in so far as its premises are sound and will carry as far as
the desired conclusion. Therefore a more detailed attention to the
premises on which it runs will be in place, before any project of the
kind is allowed to pass inspection.
As to homogeneity of race and endowment among the several nations in
question, the ethnologists, who are competent to speak of that matter,
are ready to assert that this homogeneity goes much farther among the
nations of Europe than any considerable number of peace advocates would
be ready to claim. In point of race, and broadly speaking, there is
substantially no difference between these warring nations, along any
east-and-west line; while the progressive difference in racial
complexion that is always met with along any north-and-south line,
nowhere coincides with a national or linguistic frontier. In no case
does a political division between these nations mark or depend on a
difference of race or of hereditary endowment. And, to give full
measure, it may be added that also in no case does a division of classes
within any one of these nations, into noble and base, patrician and
plebeian, lay and learned, innocent and vicious, mark or rest on any
slightest traceable degree of difference in race or in heritable
endowment. On the point of racial homogeneity there is no fault to find
with the position taken.
If the second postulate in this groundwork of premises on which the
advocates of negotiable peace base their hopes were as well taken there
need be no serious misgiving as to the practicability of such a plan.
The plan counts on information, persuasion and reflection to subdue
national animosities and jealousies, at least in such measure as would
make them amenable to reason. The question of immediate interest on this
head, therefore, would be as to how far this populace may be accessible
to the contemplated line of persuasion. At present they are,
notoriously, in a state of obsequious loyalty to the dynasty,
single-minded devotion to the fortunes of the Fatherland, and
uncompromising hatred of its enemies. In this frame of mind there is
nothing that is new, except the degree of excitement. The animus, it
will be recalled, was all there and on the alert when the call came, so
that the excitement came on with the sweep of a conflagration on the
first touch of a suitable stimulus. The German people at large was
evidently in a highly unstable equilibrium, so that an unexampled
enthusiasm of patriotic self-sacrifice followed immediately on the first
incitement to manslaughter, very much as if the nation had been held
under an hypnotic spell. One need only recall the volume of overbearing
magniloquence that broke out all over the place in that beginning, when
The Day was believed to be dawning.
Such a popular frame of mind is not a transient episode, to be created
at short notice and put aside for a parcel of salutary advice. The
nation that will make such a massive concerted move with the alacrity
shown in this instance must be living in a state of alert readiness for
just such an onset. Yet this is not to be set down as anything in the
way of a racial trait specifically distinguishing the German people from
those other adjacent nationalities that are incapable of a similarly
swift and massive response to the appeal of patriotism. These adjacent
nationalities are racially identical with the German people, but they do
not show the same warlike abandon in nearly the same degree.
But for all that, it is a national trait, not to be acquired or put away
by taking thought. It is just here that the line of definition runs: it
is a national trait, not a racial one. It is not Nature, but it is
Second Nature. But a national trait, while it is not heritable in the
simple sense of that term, has the same semblance, or the same degree,
of hereditary persistence that belongs to the national institutions,
usages, conventionalities, beliefs, which distinguish the given nation
from its neighbors. In this instance it may be said more specifically
that this eager loyalty is a heritage of the German people at large in
the same sense and with the same degree of permanence as the institution
of an autocratic royalty has among them, or a privileged nobility.
Indeed, it is the institutional counterfoil of these establishments. It
is of an institutional character, just as the corresponding sense of
national solidarity and patriotic devotion is among the neighboring
peoples with whom the German nation comes in comparison. And an
institution is an historical growth, with just so much of a character of
permanence and continuity of transmission as is given it by the
circumstances out of which it has grown. Any institution is a product of
habit, or perhaps more accurately it is a body of habits of thought
bearing on a given line of conduct, which prevails with such generality
and uniformity throughout the group as to have become a matter of common
sense.
Such an article of institutional furniture is an outcome of usage, not
of reflection or deliberate choice; and it has consequently a character
of self-legitimation, so that it stands in the accredited scheme of
things as intrinsically right and good, and not merely as a shrewdly
chosen expedient _ad interim_. It affords a norm of life, inosculating
with a multiplicity of other norms, with which it goes to make up a
balanced scheme of ends, ways and means governing human conduct; and no
one such institutional item, therefore, is materially to be disturbed,
discarded or abated except at the cost of serious derangement to the
balanced scheme of things in which it belongs as an integral
constituent. Nor can such a detail norm of conduct and habitual
propensity come into bearing and hold its place, except by force of
habituation which is at the same time consonant with the common run of
habituation to which the given community is subject. It follows that
the more rigorous, comprehensive, unremitting and long-continued the
habituation to which a given institutional principle owes its vogue, the
more intimately and definitively will it be embedded in the common sense
of the community, the less chance is there of its intrinsic necessity
being effectually questioned or doubted, and the less chance is there of
correcting it or abating its force in case circumstances should so
change as to make its continued rule visibly inexpedient. Its abatement
will be a work not of deliberation and design, but of defection through
disuse.
Not that reflection and sane counsel will count for nothing in these
premises, but only that these exertions of intelligence will count for
relatively very little by comparison with the run of habituation as
enforced by the circumstances conditioning any given case; and further,
that wise counsel and good resolutions can take effect in the way of
amending any untoward institutional bent only by way of suitable
habituation, and only at such a rate of change as the circumstances
governing habituation will allow. It is, at the best, slow work to shift
the settled lines of any community's scheme of common sense. Now,
national solidarity, and more particularly an unquestioning loyalty to
the sovereign and the dynasty, is a matter of course and of commonsense
necessity with the German people. It is not necessary to call to mind
that the Japanese nation, which has here been coupled with the German,
are in the same case, only more so.
Doubtless it would be exceeding the premises to claim that it should
necessarily take the German people as long-continued and as harsh a
schooling to unlearn their excess of chauvinism, their servile stooping
to gratuitous authority, and their eager subservience to the dynastic
ambitions of their masters, as that which has in the course of history
induced these habits in them. But it would seem reasonable to expect
that there should have to be some measure of proportion between what it
has cost them in time and experience to achieve their current frame of
mind in this bearing and what it would cost to divest themselves of it.
It is a question of how long a time and how exacting a discipline would
be required so far to displace the current scheme of commonsense values
and convictions in force in the Fatherland as to neutralise their
current high-wrought principles of servility, loyalty and national
animosity; and on the solution of this difficulty appear to depend the
chances of success for any proposed peace compact to which the German
nation shall be made a party, on terms of what is called an "honorable
peace."
The national, or rather the dynastic and warlike, animus of this people
is of the essence of their social and political institutions. Without
such a groundwork of popular sentiment neither the national
establishment, nor the social order on which it rests and through which
it works, could endure. And with this underlying national sentiment
intact nothing but a dynastic establishment of a somewhat ruthless
order, and no enduring system of law and order not based on universal
submission to personal rule, could be installed. Both the popular animus
and the correlative coercive scheme of law and order are of historical
growth. Both have been learned, acquired, and are in no cogent sense
original with the German people. But both alike and conjointly have come
out of a very protracted, exacting and consistent discipline of mastery
and subjection, running virtually unbroken over the centuries that have
passed since the region that is now the Fatherland first passed under
the predaceous rule of its Teutonic invaders,--for no part of the
"Fatherland" is held on other tenure than that of forcible seizure in
ancient times by bands of invaders, with the negligible exception of
Holstein and a slight extent of territory adjoining that province to the
south and south-west. Since the time when such peoples as were overtaken
in this region by the Germanic barbarian invasions, and were reduced to
subjection and presently merged with their alien masters, the same
general fashion of law and order that presently grew out of that
barbarian conquest has continued to govern the life of those peoples,
with relatively slight and intermittent relaxation of its rigors.
Contrasted with its beginnings, in the shameful atrocities of the Dark
Ages and the prehistoric phases of this German occupation, the later
stages of this system of coercive law and order in the Fatherland will
appear humane, not to say genial; but as compared with the degree of
mitigation which the like order of things presently underwent elsewhere
in western Europe, it has throughout the historical period preserved a
remarkable degree of that character of arrogance and servility which it
owes to its barbarian and predatory beginnings.
* * * * *
The initial stages of this Germanic occupation of the Fatherland are
sufficiently obscure under the cloud of unrecorded antiquity that covers
them; and then, an abundance of obscurantism has also been added by the
vapours of misguided vanity that have surrounded so nearly all
historical inquiry on the part of patriotic German scholars. Yet there
are certain outstanding features in the case, in history and prehistory,
that are too large or too notorious to be set aside or to be covered
over, and these may suffice to show the run of circumstances which have
surrounded the German peoples and shaped their civil and political
institutions, and whose discipline has guided German habits of thought
and preserved the German spirit of loyalty in the shape in which it
underlies the dynastic State of the present day.
Among the most engaging of those fables that make the conventional
background of German history is the academic legend of a free
agricultural village community made up of ungraded and masterless men.
It is not necessary here to claim that such a village community never
played a part in the remoter prehistoric experiences out of which the
German people, or their ruling classes, came into the territory of the
Fatherland; such a claim might divert the argument. But it is
sufficiently patent to students of those matters today that no such
community of free and ungraded men had any part in the Germanic
beginnings; that is to say, in the early experiences of the Fatherland
under German rule. The meager and ambiguous remarks of Tacitus on the
state of domestic and civil economy among the inhabitants of Germany
need no longer detain anyone, in the presence of the available
archaeological and historical evidence. The circumstantial evidence of
the prehistoric antiquities which touch this matter, as well as the
slight allusions of historical records in antiquity, indicate
unambiguously enough that when the Germanic immigrants moved into the
territories of the Fatherland they moved in as invaders, or rather as
marauders, and made themselves masters of the people already living on
the land. And history quite as unambiguously declares that when the
Fatherland first comes under its light it presents a dark and bloody
ground of tumultuous contention and intrigue; where princes and
princelings, captains of war and of rapine as well as the captains of
superstition, spend the substance of an ignominiously sordid and servile
populace in an endless round of mutual raiding, treachery,
assassinations and supersession.
Taken at their face value, the recorded stories of that early time would
leave one to infer that the common people, whose industry supported this
superstructure of sordid mastery, could have survived only by oversight.
But touched as it is with poetic license and devoted to the admirable
life of the master class--admirable in their own eyes and in those of
their chroniclers, as undoubtedly also in the eyes of the subject
populace--the history of that time doubtless plays up the notable
exploits and fortunes of its conspicuous personages, somewhat to the
neglect of the obscure vicissitudes of life and fortune among that human
raw material by use of which the admirable feats of the master class
were achieved, and about the use of which the dreary traffic of greed
and crime went on among the masters.
Of the later history, what covers, say, the last one thousand years,
there is no need to speak at length. With transient, episodic,
interruptions it is for the Fatherland a continuation out of these
beginnings, leading out into a more settled system of subjection and
mastery and a progressively increased scale of princely enterprise,
resting on an increasingly useful and increasingly loyal populace. In
all this later history the posture of things in the Fatherland is by no
means unique, nor is it even strikingly peculiar, by contrast with the
rest of western Europe, except in degree. It is of the same general kind
as the rest of what has gone to make the historical advance of medieval
and modern times; but it differs from the generality in a more sluggish
movement and a more tenacious adherence to what would be rated as the
untoward features of mediaevalism. The approach to a modern scheme of
institutions and modern conceptions of life and of human values has been
slow, and hitherto incomplete, as compared with those communities that
have, for good or ill, gone farthest along the ways of modernity.
Habituation to personal subjection and subservience under the rigorous
and protracted discipline of standardised service and fealty has
continued later, and with later and slighter mitigation, in the
Fatherland; so as better to have conserved the spiritual attitude of the
feudal order. Law and order in the Fatherland has in a higher degree
continued to mean unquestioning obedience to a personal master and
unquestioning subservience to the personal ambitions of the master. And
since freedom, in the sense of discretionary initiative on the part of
the common man, does not fit into the framework of such a system of
dependence on personal authority and surveillance, any degree of such
free initiative will be "licence" in the eyes of men bred into the
framework of this system; whereas "liberty," as distinct from "licence,"
is not a matter of initiative and self-direction, but of latitude in the
service of a master. Hence no degree of curtailment in this delegated
"liberty" will be resented or repudiated by popular indignation, so long
as the master to whom service is due can give assurance that it is
expedient for his purposes.
The age-long course of experience and institutional discipline out of
which the current German situation has come may be drawn schematically
to the following effect: In the beginning a turmoil of conquest, rapine,
servitude, and contention between rival bands of marauders and their
captains, gradually, indeed imperceptibly, fell into lines of settled
and conventionalised exploitation; with repeated interruptions due to
new incursions and new combinations of rapacious chieftains. Out of it
all in the course of time came a feudal régime, under which personal
allegiance and service to petty chiefs was the sole and universal
accredited bond of solidarity. As the outcome of further unremitting
intrigue and contention among feudal chiefs, of high and low degree, the
populace fell into larger parcels, under the hands of feudal lords of
larger dominion, and the bias of allegiance and service came to hold
with some degree of permanence and uniformity, or at least of
consistency, over a considerable reach of country, including its
inhabitants. With the rise of States came allegiance to a dynasty, as
distinguished from the narrower and more ephemeral allegiance to the
semi-detached person of a victorious prince; and the relative permanence
of territorial frontiers under this rule gave room for an effectual
recrudescence of the ancient propensity to a sentimental group
solidarity; in which the accredited territorial limits of the dynastic
dominion served to outline the group that so was felt to belong together
under a joint dispensation and with something of a joint interest in
matters of fame and fortune. As the same notion is more commonly and
more suggestively expressed, a sense of nationality arose within the
sweep of the dynastic rule. This sense of community interest that is
called nationality so came in to reenforce the sense of allegiance to
the dynastic establishment and so has coalesced with it to produce that
high-wrought loyalty to the State, that draws equally on the sentiment
of community interest in the nation and on the prescriptive docility to
the dynastic head. The sense of national solidarity and of feudal
loyalty and service have coalesced, to bring this people to that climax
of patriotic devotion beyond which there lies no greater height along
this way. But this is also as far as the German people have gone; and it
is scarcely to be claimed that the Japanese have yet reached this stage;
they would rather appear to be, essentially, subjects of the emperor,
and only inchoately a Japanese nation. Of the German people it seems
safe to say that they have achieved such a coalescence of unimpaired
feudal fealty to a personal master and a full-blown sense of national
solidarity, without any perceptible slackening in either strand of the
double tie which so binds them in the service of the dynastic State.
Germany, in other words, is somewhat in arrears, as compared with those
Europeans that have gone farthest along this course of institutional
growth, or perhaps rather institutional permutation. It is not that this
retardation of the German people in this matter of national spirit is to
be counted as an infirmity, assuredly not as a handicap in the pursuit
of that national prestige on which all patriotic endeavour finally
converges. For this purpose the failure to distinguish between the
ambitions of the dynastic statesmen and the interests of the
commonwealth is really a prodigious advantage, which their rivals, of
more mature growth politically, have lost by atrophy of this same
dynastic axiom of subservience. These others, of whom the French and the
English-speaking peoples make up the greater part and may be taken as
the typical instance, have had a different history, in part. The
discipline of experience has left a somewhat different residue of habits
of thought embedded in their institutional equipment and effective as
axiomatic premises in their further apprehension of what is worth while,
and why.
It is not that the difference between these two contrasted strains of
the Western civilisation is either profound or very pronounced; it is
perhaps rather to be stated as a difference of degree than of kind; a
retardation of spiritual growth, in respect of the prevalent and
controlling habits of thought on certain heads, in the one case as
against the other. Therefore any attempt to speak with sufficient
definition, so as to bring out this national difference of animus in any
convincing way, will unavoidably have an appearance of overstatement, if
not also of bias. And in any case, of course, it is not to be expected
that the national difference here spoken for can be brought home to the
apprehension of any unspoiled son of the Fatherland, since it does not
lie within that perspective.
It is not of the nature of a divergence, but rather a differential in
point of cultural maturity, due to a differential in the rate of
progression through that sequence of institutional phases through which
the civilised peoples of Europe, jointly and severally, have been led by
force of circumstance. In this movement out of the Dark Ages and onward,
circumstances have fallen out differently for those Europeans that
chanced to live within the confines of the Fatherland, different with
such effect as to have in the present placed these others at a farther
remove from the point of departure, leaving them furnished with less of
that archaic frame of mind that is here in question. Possessed of less,
but by no means shorn of all--perhaps not of the major part--of that
barbaric heritage.
Circumstances have so fallen out that these--typically the French and
the English-speaking peoples--have left behind and partly forgotten that
institutional phase in which the people of Imperial Germany now live and
move and have their being. The French partly because they--that is the
common people of the French lands--entered the procession with a very
substantial lead, having never been put back to a point abreast of their
neighbors across the Rhine, in that phase of European civilisation from
which the peoples of the Fatherland tardily emerged into the feudal age.
So, any student who shall set out to account for the visible lead which
the French people still so obstinately maintain in the advance of
European culture, will have to make up his account with this notable
fact among the premises of his inquiry, that they have had a shorter
course to cover and have therefore, in the sporting phrase, had the
inside track. They measure from a higher datum line. Among the
advantages which so have come, in a sense unearned, to the French
people, is their uninterrupted retention, out of Roman--and perhaps
pre-Roman--times, of the conception of a commonwealth, a community of
men with joint and mutual interests apart from any superimposed
dependence on a joint feudal superior. The French people therefore
became a nation, with unobtrusive facility, so soon as circumstances
permitted, and they are today the oldest "nation" in Europe. They
therefore were prepared from long beforehand, with an adequate principle
(habit of thought) of national cohesion and patriotic sentiment, to make
the shift from a dynastic State to a national commonwealth whenever the
occasion for such a move should arise; that is to say, whenever the
dynastic State, by a suitable conjunction of infirmity and irksomeness,
should pass the margin of tolerance in this people's outraged sense of
national shame. The case of the German people in their latterday
attitude toward dynastic vagaries may afford a term of comparison. These
appear yet incapable of distinguishing between national shame and
dynastic ambition.
By a different course and on lines more nearly parallel with the
life-history of the German peoples, the English-speaking peoples have
reached what is for the present purpose much the same ground as the
French, in that they too have made the shift from the dynastic State to
the national commonwealth. The British started late, but the discipline
of servitude and unmitigated personal rule in their case was relatively
brief and relatively ineffectual; that is to say, as compared with what
their German cousins had to endure and to learn in the like connection.
So that the British never learned the lesson of dynastic loyalty fully
by heart; at least not the populace; whatever may be true for the
privileged classes, the gentlemen, whose interests were on the side of
privilege and irresponsible mastery. Here as in the French case it was
the habits of thought of the common man, not of the class of gentlemen,
that made the obsolescence of the dynastic State a foregone conclusion
and an easy matter--as one speaks of easy achievement in respect of
matters of that magnitude. It is now some two and a half centuries since
this shift in the national point of view overtook the English-speaking
community. Perhaps it would be unfair to say that that period, or that
period plus what further time may yet have to be added, marks the
interval by which German habits of thought in these premises are in
arrears, but it is not easy to find secure ground for a different and
more moderate appraisal.
The future, of course, is not to be measured in terms of the past, and
the tempo of the present and of the calculable future is in many
bearings very different from that which has ruled even in the recent
historical past. But then, on the other hand, habituation always
requires time; more particularly such habituation as is to take effect
throughout a populous nation and is counted on to work a displacement of
a comprehensive institutional system and of a people's outlook on life.
Germany is still a dynastic State. That is to say, its national
establishment is, in effect, a self-appointed and irresponsible
autocracy which holds the nation in usufruct, working through an
appropriate bureaucratic organisation, and the people is imbued with
that spirit of abnegation and devotion that is involved in their
enthusiastically supporting a government of that character. Now, it is
in the nature of a dynastic State to seek dominion, that being the whole
of its nature. And a dynastic establishment which enjoys the unqualified
usufruct of such resources as are placed at its disposal by the
feudalistic loyalty of the German people runs no chance of keeping the
peace, except on terms of the unconditional surrender of all those whom
it may concern. No solemn engagement and no pious resolution has any
weight in the balance against a cultural fatality of this magnitude.
* * * * *
This account of the derivation and current state of German nationalism
will of course appear biased to anyone who has been in the habit of
rating German Culture high in all its bearings, and to whom at the same
time the ideals of peace and liberty appeal. Indeed, such a critic,
gifted with the due modicum of asperity, might well be provoked to call
it all a more or less ingenious diatribe of partisan malice. But it can
be so construed only by those who see the question at issue as a point
of invidious distinction between this German animus on the one hand and
the corresponding frame of mind of the neighboring peoples on the other
hand. There may also appear to the captious to be some air of
deprecation about the characterisation here offered of the past history
of political traffic within the confines of the Fatherland. All of
which, of course, touches neither the veracity of the characterisation
nor the purpose with which so ungrateful a line of analysis and
exposition has been entered upon. It is to be regretted if facts that
may flutter the emotions of one and another among the sensitive and
unreflecting can not be drawn into such an inquiry without having their
cogency discounted beforehand on account of the sentimental value
imputed to them. Of course no offense is intended and no invidious
comparison is aimed at.
Even if the point of it all were an invidious comparison it would
immediately have to be admitted that the net showing in favor of these
others, e.g., the French or the English-speaking peoples, is by no means
so unreservedly to their credit as such a summary statement of the
German case might seem to imply. As bearing on the chances of a peace
contingent upon the temper of the contracting nationalities, it is by no
means a foregone conclusion that such a peace compact would hold
indefinitely even if it depended solely on the pacific animus of these
others that have left the dynastic State behind. These others, in fact,
are also not yet out of the woods. They may not have the same gift of
gratuitous and irresponsible truculence as their German cousins, in the
same alarming degree; but as was said in an earlier passage, they too
are ready to fight on provocation. They are patriotic to a degree;
indeed to such a degree that anything which visibly touches the national
prestige will readily afford a _casus belli_. But it remains true that
the popular temper among them is of the defensive order; perhaps of an
unnecessarily enthusiastic defensive order, but after all in such a
frame of mind as leaves them willing to let well enough alone, to live
and let live.
And herein appears to lie the decisive difference between those peoples
whose patriotic affections center about the fortunes of an impersonal
commonwealth and those in whom is superadded a fervent aspiration for
dynastic ascendency. The latter may be counted on to break the peace
when a promising opportunity offers.
The contrast may be illustrated, though not so sharply as might be
desirable, in the different temper shown by the British people in the
Boer war on the one hand, as compared with the popularity of the
French-Prussian war among the German people on the other hand. Both were
aggressive wars, and both were substantially unprovoked. Diplomatically
speaking, of course, sufficient provocation was found in either case, as
how should it not? But in point of substantial provocation and of
material inducement, both were about equally gratuitous. In either case
the war could readily have been avoided without material detriment to
the community and without perceptible lesion to the national honour.
Both were "engineered" on grounds shamelessly manufactured _ad hoc_ by
interested parties; in the one case by a coterie of dynastic statesmen,
in the other by a junta of commercial adventurers and imperialistic
politicians. In neither case had the people any interest of gain or loss
in the quarrel, except as it became a question of national prestige. But
both the German and the British community bore the burden and fought the
campaign to a successful issue for those interested parties who had
precipitated the quarrel. The British people at large, it is true, bore
the burden; which comes near being all that can be said in the way of
popular approval of this war, which political statesmen have since then
rated as one of the most profitable enterprises in which the forces of
the realm have been engaged. On the subject of this successful war the
common man is still inclined to cover his uneasy sense of decency with a
recital of extenuating circumstances. What parallels all this in the
German case is an outbreak of patriotic abandon and an admirable spirit
of unselfish sacrifice in furtherance of the dynastic prestige, an
intoxication of patriotic blare culminating in the triumphant coronation
at Versailles. Nor has the sober afterthought of the past forty-six
years cast a perceptible shadow of doubt across the glorious memory of
that patriotic debauch.
Such is the difference of animus between a body of patriotic citizens in
a modern commonwealth on the one hand and the loyal subjects of a
dynastic State on the other hand. There need be no reflections on the
intrinsic merits of either. Seen in dispassionate perspective from
outside the turmoil, there is not much to choose, in point of sane and
self-respecting manhood, between the sluggish and shamefaced abettor of
a sordid national crime, and a ranting patriot who glories in serving as
cat's-paw to a syndicate of unscrupulous politicians bent on dominion
for dominion's sake. But the question here is not as to the relative
merits or the relative manhood contents of the two contrasted types of
patriot. Doubtless both and either have manhood enough and to spare; at
least, so they say. But the point in question is the simpler and nowise
invidious one, as to the availability of both or either for the
perpetuation of the world's peace under a compact of vigilant
neutrality. Plainly the German frame of mind admits of no neutrality;
the quest of dominion is not compatible with neutrality, and the
substantial core of German national life is still the quest of dominion
under dynastic tutelage. How it stands with the spirit that has
repeatedly come in sight in the international relations of the British
community is a question harder to answer.
It may be practicable to establish a peace of neutrals on the basis of
such national spirit as prevails among these others--the French and
English-speaking peoples, together with the minor nationalities that
cluster about the North Sea--because their habitual attitude is that of
neutrality, on the whole and with allowance for a bellicose minority in
all these countries. By and large, these peoples have come to the
tolerant attitude that finds expression in the maxim, Live and let live.
But they are all and several sufficiently patriotic. It may, indeed,
prove that they are more than sufficiently patriotic for the purposes of
a neutral peace. They stand for peace, but it is "peace with honour;"
which means, in more explicit terms, peace with undiminished national
prestige. Now, national prestige is a very particular commodity, as has
been set out in earlier passages of this inquiry; and a peace which is
to be kept only on terms of a jealous maintenance of the national honour
is likely to be in a somewhat precarious case. If, and when, the
national honour is felt to require an enhanced national ascendancy, the
case for a neutral peace immediately becomes critical. And the greater
the number and diversity of pretensions and interests that are conceived
to be bound up with the national honour, the more unstable will the
resulting situation necessarily be.
The upshot of all this recital of considerations appears to be that a
neutral peace compact may, or it may not, be practicable in the absence
of such dynastic States as Germany and Japan; whereas it has no chance
in the presence of these enterprising national establishments.
No one will be readier or more voluble in exclaiming against the falsity
of such a discrimination as is here attempted, between the democratic
and the dynastic nations of the modern world, than the spokesmen of
these dynastic Powers. No one is more outspoken in professions of
universal peace and catholic amity than these same spokesmen of the
dynastic Powers; and nowhere is there more urgent need of such
professions. Official and "inspired" professions are, of course, to be
overlooked; at least, so charity would dictate. But there have, in the
historic present, been many professions of this character made also by
credible spokesmen of the German, and perhaps of the Japanese, people,
and in all sincerity. By way of parenthesis it should be said that this
is not intended to apply to expressions of conviction and intention that
have come out of Germany these two years past (December 1916). Without
questioning the credibility of these witnesses that have borne witness
to the pacific and genial quality of national sentiment in the German
people, it will yet be in place to recall the run of facts in the
national life of Germany in this historical present and the position of
these spokesmen in the German community.
* * * * *
The German nation is of a peculiar composition in respect of its social
structure. So far as bears on the question in hand, it is made up of
three distinctive constituent factors, or perhaps rather categories or
conditions of men. The populace is of course the main category, and in
the last resort always the main and decisive factor. Next in point of
consequence as well as of numbers and initiative is the personnel of the
control,--the ruling class, the administration, the official community,
the hierarchy of civil and political servants, or whatever designation
may best suit; the category comprises that pyramidal superstructure of
privilege and control whereof the sovereign is the apex, and in whom,
under any dynastic rule, is in effect vested the usufruct of the
populace. These two classes or conditions of men, the one of which
orders and the other obeys, make up the working structure of the nation,
and they also between them embody the national life and carry forward
the national work and aim. Intermediate between them, or rather beside
them and overlapping the commissure, is a third category whose life
articulates loosely with both the others at the same time that it still
runs along in a semi-detached way. This slighter but more visible, and
particularly more audible, category is made up of the "Intellectuals,"
as a late, and perhaps vulgar, designation would name them.
These are they who chiefly communicate with the world outside, and at
the same time they do what is academically called thinking. They are in
intellectual contact and communication with the world at large, in a
contact of give and take, and they think and talk in and about those
concepts that go in under the caption of the humanities in the world at
large. The category is large enough to constitute an intellectual
community, indeed a community of somewhat formidable magnitude, taken in
absolute terms, although in percentages of the population at large their
numbers will foot up to only an inconsiderable figure. Their contact
with the superior class spoken of above is fairly close, being a
contact, in the main, of service on the one side and of control on the
other. With the populace their contact and communion is relatively
slight, the give and take in the case being neither intimate nor
far-reaching. More particularly is there a well-kept limit of moderation
on any work of indoctrination or intellectual guidance which this class
may carry down among the people at large, dictated and enforced by
dynastic expediency. This category, of the Intellectuals, is
sufficiently large to live its own life within itself, without drawing
on the spiritual life of the community at large, and of sufficiently
substantial quality to carry its own peculiar scheme of intellectual
conventions and verities. Of the great and highly meritorious place and
work of these Intellectuals in the scheme of German culture it is
needless to speak. What is to the point is that they are the accredited
spokesmen of the German nation in all its commonplace communication with
the rest of civilised Europe.
The Intellectuals have spoken with conviction and sincerity of the
spiritual state of the German people, but in so doing, and in so far as
bears on the character of German nationalism, they have been in closer
contact, intellectually and sympathetically, with the intellectual and
spiritual life of civilised Europe at large than with the movements of
the spirit among the German populace. And their canvassing of the
concepts which so have come under their attention from over the national
frontiers has been carried forward--so far, again, as bears on the
questions that are here in point--with the German-dynastic principles,
logic and mechanism of execution under their immediate observation and
supplying the concrete materials for inquiry. Indeed, it holds true, by
and large, that nothing else than this German-dynastic complement of
ways and means has, or can effectually, come under their observation in
such a degree of intimacy as to give body and definition to the somewhat
abstract theorems on cultural aims and national preconceptions that have
come to them from outside. In short, they have borrowed these
theoretical formulations from abroad, without the concrete apparatus of
ways and means in which these theorems are embodied in their foreign
habitat, and have so found themselves construing these theoretical
borrowings in the only concrete terms of which they have had first-hand
and convincing knowledge. Such an outcome would be fairly unavoidable,
inasmuch as these Intellectuals, however much they are, in the spirit,
citizens of the cosmopolitan republic of knowledge and intelligence,
they are after all, _in propria persona_, immediately and unremittingly
subjects of the German-dynastic State; so that all their detail thinking
on the aims, ways and means of life, in all its civil and political
bearings, is unavoidably shaped by the unremitting discipline of their
workday experience under this dynastic scheme. The outcome has been that
while they have taken up, as they have understood them, the concepts
that rule the civic life of these other, maturer nations, they have
apprehended and developed these theorems of civic life in the terms and
by the logic enforced in that system of control and surveillance known
to them by workday experience,--the only empirical terms at hand.
The apex of growth and the center of diffusion as regards the modern
culture in respect of the ideals and logic of civic life--other phases
of this culture than this its civil aspect do not concern the point here
in question--this apex of growth and center of diffusion lie outside the
Fatherland, in an environment alien to the German institutional scheme.
Yet so intrinsic to the cultural drift of modern mankind are these aims
and this logic, that in taking over and further enriching the
intellectual heritage of this modern world the Intellectuals of the
Fatherland have unavoidably also taken over those conceptions of civil
initiative and masterless self-direction that rule the logic of life in
a commonwealth of ungraded men. They have taken these over and
assimilated them as best their experience would permit. But workday
experience and its exigencies are stubborn things; and in this process
of assimilation of these alien conceptions of right and honest living,
it is the borrowed theorems concerning civic rights and duties that have
undergone adaptation and revision, not the concrete system of ways and
means in which these principles, so accepted, are to be put in practice.
Necessarily so, since in the German scheme of law and order the major
premise is the dynastic State, whereas the major premise of the modern
civilised scheme of civic life is the absence of such an organ. So, the
development and elaboration of these modern principles of civic
liberty--and this elaboration has taken on formidable dimensions--under
the hand of the German Intellectuals has uniformly run out into
Pickwickian convolutions, greatly suggestive of a lost soul seeking a
place to rest. With unquestionably serious purpose and untiring
endeavour, they have sought to embody these modern civilised
preconceptions in terms afforded by, or in terms compatible with, the
institutions of the Fatherland; and they have been much concerned and
magniloquently elated about the German spirit of freedom that so was to
be brought to final and consummate realisation in the life of a free
people. But at no point and in no case have either the proposals or
their carrying out taken shape as a concrete application of the familiar
principle of popular self-direction. It has always come to something in
the way of a concessive or expedient mitigation of the antagonistic
principle of personal authority. Where the forms of self-government or
of individual self-direction have concessively been installed, under the
Imperial rule, they have turned out to be an imitative structure with
some shrewd provision for their coercion or inhibition at the discretion
of an irresponsible authority.
Neither the sound intelligence nor the good faith of these Intellectuals
of the Fatherland is to be impugned. That the--necessarily vague and
circumlocutory--expositions of civic institutions and popular liberty
which they have so often and so largely promulgated should have been
used as a serviceable blind of dynastic statecraft is not to be set down
to their discredit. Circumstances over which they could have no control,
since they were circumstances that shaped their own habits of thought,
have placed it beyond their competence to apprehend or to formulate
these alien principles (habits of thought) concretely in those alien
institutional details and by the alien logic with which they could have
no working acquaintance.
To one and another this conception of cultural solidarity within the
nation, and consequent cultural aliency between nations, due to the
different habits of life and of thought enforced by the two diverse
institutional systems, may be so far unfamiliar as to carry no
conviction. It may accordingly not seem out of place to recall that the
institutional system of any given community, particularly for any
community living under a home-bred and time-tried system of its own,
will necessarily be a balanced system of interdependent and mutually
concordant parts working together in one comprehensive plan of law and
order. Through such an institutional system, as, e.g., the German
Imperial organisation, there will run a degree of logical consistency,
consonant with itself throughout, and exerting a consistent discipline
throughout the community; whereby there is enforced a consistent drift
or bent in the prevalent habits of life, and a correlative bent in the
resulting habits of thought prevalent in the community. It is, in fact,
this possession of a common scheme of use and wont, and a consequent
common outlook and manner of thinking, that constitutes the most
intrinsic bond of solidarity in any nationality, and that finally marks
it off from any other.
It is equally a matter of course that any other given community, living
under the rule of a substantially different, or divergent, system of
institutions, will be exposed to a course of workday discipline running
to a different, perhaps divergent, effect; and that this other community
will accordingly come in for a characteristically different discipline
and fall under the rule of a different commonsense outlook. Where an
institutional difference of this kind is somewhat large and consistent,
so as to amount in effect to a discrepancy, as may fairly be said of the
difference between Imperial Germany and its like on the one hand, and
the English-speaking nations on the other hand, there the difference in
everyday conceptions may readily make the two peoples mutually
unintelligible to one another, on those points of institutional
principle that are involved in the discrepancy. This is the state of the
case as between the German people, including the Intellectuals, and the
peoples against whom their preconceptions of national destiny have
arrayed them. And the many vivid expressions of consternation,
abhorrence and incredulity that have come out of this community of
Intellectuals in the course of the past two years of trial and error,
bear sufficient testimony to the rigorous constraint which these German
preconceptions and their logic exercise over the Intellectuals, no less
than over the populace.
Conversely, of course, it is nearly as impracticable for those who have
grown up under the discipline of democratic institutions to comprehend
the habitual outlook of the commonplace German patriot on national
interests and aims; not quite, perhaps, because the discipline of use
and wont and indoctrination is neither so rigorous nor so consistent in
their case. But there is, after all, prevalent among them a sufficiently
evident logical inability to understand and appreciate the paramount
need of national, that is to say dynastic, ascendancy that actuates all
German patriots; just as these same patriots are similarly unable to
consider national interests in any other light than that of dynastic
ascendancy.
Going simply on the face value of the available evidence, any outsider
might easily fall into the error of believing that when the great
adventure of the war opened up before them, as well as when presently
the shock of baffled endeavour brought home its exasperating futility,
the Intellectuals of the Fatherland distinguished themselves above all
other classes and conditions of men in the exuberance of their patriotic
abandon. Such a view would doubtless be almost wholly erroneous. It is
not that the Intellectuals reached a substantially superior pitch of
exaltation, but only that, being trained in the use of language, they
were able to express their emotions with great facility. There seems no
reason to believe that the populace fell short of the same measure in
respect of their prevalent frame of mind.
To return to the workings of the Imperial dynastic State and the forces
engaged. It plainly appears that the Intellectuals are to be counted as
supernumeraries, except so far as they serve as an instrument of
publicity and indoctrination in the hands of the discretionary
authorities. The working factors in the case are the dynastic
organisation of control, direction and emolument, and the populace at
large by use of whose substance the traffic in dynastic ascendancy and
emolument is carried on. These two are in fairly good accord, on the
ancient basis of feudal loyalty. Hitherto there is no evident ground for
believing that this archaic tie that binds the populace to the dynastic
ambitions has at all perceptibly weakened. And the possibility of
dynastic Germany living at peace with the world under any compact,
therefore translates itself into the possibility of the German people's
unlearning its habitual deference and loyalty to the dynasty.
As its acquirement has been a work of protracted habituation, so can its
obsolescence also come about only through more or less protracted
habituation under a system of use and wont of a different or divergent
order. The elements of such a systematic discipline running to an effect
at cross purposes with this patriotic animus are not absent from the
current situation in the Fatherland; the discipline of the modern
industrial system, for instance, runs to such a divergent effect; but
this, and other conceivable forces which may reenforce it, will after
all take time, if they are to work a decisive change in the current
frame of mind of the patriotic German community. During the interval
required for such a change in the national temper, the peace of the
world would be conditioned on the inability of the dynastic State to
break it. So that the chances of success for any neutral peace league
will vary inversely as the available force of Imperial Germany, and it
could be accounted secure only in the virtual elimination of the
Imperial State as a national Power.
If the gradual obsolescence of the spirit of militant loyalty in the
German people, through disuse under a régime of peace, industry, self
government and free trade, is to be the agency by force of which
dynastic imperialism is to cease, the chance of a neutral peace will
depend on the thoroughness with which such a régime of self-direction
can be installed in this case, and on the space of time required for
such obsolescence through disuse. Obviously, the installation of a
workable régime of self-government on peaceable lines would in any case
be a matter of great difficulty among a people whose past experience has
so singularly incapacitated them for self-government; and obviously,
too, the interval of time required to reach secure ground along this
line of approach would be very considerable. Also, in view of these
conditions, obviously, this scheme for maintaining the peace of nations
by a compact of neutrals based on a compromise with an aspiring dynastic
State resolves itself into the second of the two alternatives spoken of
at the outset, viz., a neutral peace based on the elimination of Germany
as a war power, together with the elimination of any materials suitable
for the formation of a formidable coalition. And then, with Imperial
Germany supposedly eliminated or pacified, there would still remain the
Japanese establishment, to which all the arguments pertinent in the case
of Germany will apply without abatement; except that, at least hitherto,
the dynastic statesmen of Japan have not had the disposal of so massive
a body of resources, in population, industry, or raw materials.