ELIMINATION OF THE UNFIT
It may seem early (January 1917) to offer a surmise as to what must be
the manner of league into which the pacific nations are to enter and by
which the peace will be kept, in case such a move is to be made. But the
circumstances that are to urge such a line of action, and that will
condition its carrying out in case it is entered on, have already come
into bearing and should, on the whole, no longer be especially obscure
to anyone who will let the facts of the case rather than his own
predilections decide what he will believe. By and large, the pressure of
these conditioning circumstances may be seen, and the line of least
resistance under this pressure may be calculated, with due allowance of
a margin of error owing to unknown contingencies of time and minor
variables.
Time is of the essence of the case. So that what would have been
dismissed as idle vapour two years ago has already become subject of
grave deliberation today, and may rise to paramount urgency that far
hence. Time is needed to appreciate and get used to any innovation of
appreciable gravity, particularly where the innovation depends in any
degree on a change in public sentiment, as in this instance. The present
outlook would seem to be that no excess of time is allowed in these
premises; but it should also be noted that events are moving with
unexampled celerity, and are impinging on the popular apprehension with
unexampled force,--unexampled on such a scale. It is hoped that a
recital of these circumstances that provoke to action along this line
will not seem unwarrantably tedious, and that a tentative definition of
the line of least resistance under pressure of these circumstances may
not seem unwarrantably presumptuous.
The major premise in the case is the felt need of security from
aggression at the hands of Imperial Germany and its auxiliary Powers;
seconded by an increasingly uneasy apprehension as to the prospective
line of conduct on the part of Imperial Japan, bent on a similar quest
of dominion. There is also the less articulate apprehension of what, if
anything, may be expected from Imperial Russia; an obscure and scarcely
definable factor, which comes into the calculation chiefly by way of
reenforcing the urgency of the situation created by the dynastic
ambitions of these other two Imperial States. Further, the pacific
nations, the leading ones among them being the French and
English-speaking peoples, are coming to recognise that no one among them
can provide for its own security single-handed, even at the cost of
their utmost endeavour in the way of what is latterly called
"preparedness;" and they are at the same time unwilling to devote their
force unreservedly to warlike preparation, having nothing to gain. The
solution proposed is a league of the pacific nations, commonly spoken of
at the present stage as a league to enforce peace, or less ambitiously
as a league to enforce arbitration. The question being left somewhat at
loose ends, whether the projected league is to include the two or three
Imperial Powers whose pacific intentions are, euphemistically, open to
doubt.
Such is the outline of the project and its premises. An attempt to fill
in this outline will, perhaps, conduce to an appreciation of what is
sought and of what the conditioning circumstances will enforce in the
course of its realisation. As touches the fear of aggression, it has
already been indicated, perhaps with unnecessary iteration, that these
two Imperial Powers are unable to relinquish the quest of dominion
through warlike enterprise, because as dynastic States they have no
other ulterior aim; as has abundantly appeared in the great volume of
expository statements that have come out of the Fatherland the past few
years, official, semi-official, inspired, and spontaneous. "Assurance of
the nation's future" is not translatable into any other terms. The
Imperial dynasty has no other ground to stand on, and can not give up
the enterprise so long as it can muster force for any formidable
diversion, to get anything in the way of dominion by seizure, threat or
chicane.
This is coming to be informally and loosely, but none the less
definitively, realised by the pacific nations; and the realisation of it
is gaining in clearness and assurance as time passes. And it is backed
by the conviction that, in the nature of things, no engagement on the
part of such a dynastic State has any slightest binding force, beyond
the material constraint that would enforce it from the outside. So the
demand has been diplomatically phrased as a demand for "substantial
guarantees." Any gain in resources on the part of these Powers is to be
counted as a gain in the ways and means of disturbing the peace, without
reservation.
The pacific nations include among them two large items, both of which
are indispensable to the success of the project, the United States and
the United Kingdom. The former brings in its train, virtually without
exception or question, the other American republics, none of which can
practicably go in or stay out except in company and collusion with the
United States. The United Kingdom after the same fashion, and with
scarcely less assurance, may be counted on to carry the British
colonies. Evidently, without both of these groups the project would not
even make a beginning. Beyond this is to be counted in as elements of
strength, though scarcely indispensable, France, Belgium, the
Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. The other west-European
nations would in all probability be found in the league, although so far
as regards its work and its fortunes their adhesion would scarcely be a
matter of decisive consequence; they may therefore be left somewhat on
one side in any consideration of the circumstances that would shape the
league, its aims and its limitations. The Balkan states, in the wider
acceptance, they that frequent the Sign of the Double Cross, are
similarly negligible in respect of the organisation of such a league or
its resources and the mutual concessions necessary to be made between
its chief members. Russia is so doubtful a factor, particularly as
regards its place and value in industry, culture and politics, in the
near future, as to admit nothing much more than a doubt on what its
relation to the situation will be. The evil intentions of the
Imperial-bureaucratic establishment are probably no more to be
questioned than the good intentions of the underlying peoples of Russia.
China will have to be taken in, if for no other reason than the use to
which the magnificent resources of that country would be turned by its
Imperial neighbour in the absence of insurmountable interference from
outside. But China will come in on any terms that include neutrality and
security.
The question then arises as to the Imperial Powers whose dynastic
enterprise is primarily to be hedged against by such a league.
Reflection will show that if the league is to effect any appreciable
part of its purpose, these Powers will also be included in the league,
or at least in its jurisdiction. A pacific league not including these
Powers, or not extending its jurisdiction and surveillance to them and
their conduct, would come to the same thing as a coalition of nations in
two hostile groups, the one standing on the defensive against the
warlike machinations of the other, and both groups bidding for the favor
of those minor Powers whose traditions and current aspirations run to
national (dynastic) aggrandizement by way of political intrigue. It
would come to a more articulate and accentuated form of that balance of
power that has latterly gone bankrupt in Europe, with the most corrupt
and unreliable petty monarchies of eastern Europe vested with a casting
vote; and it would also involve a system of competitive armaments of the
same general character as what has also shown itself bankrupt. It would,
in other words, mean a virtual return to the _status quo ante_, but with
an overt recognition of its provisional character, and with the lines of
division more sharply drawn. That is to say, it would amount to
reinstating the situation which the projected league is intended to
avert. It is evidently contained in the premises that the projected
league must be all-inclusive, at least as regards its jurisdiction and
surveillance. The argument will return to this point presently.
The purpose of the projected league is peace and security, commonly
spoken of under patriotic preconceptions as "national" peace and
security. This will have to mean a competent enforcement of peace, on
such a footing of overmastering force at the disposal of the associated
pacific nations as to make security a matter of ordinary routine. It is
true, the more genial spokesmen of the project are given to the view
that what is to come of it all is a comity of neutral nations, amicably
adjusting their own relations among themselves in a spirit of peace and
good-will. But this view is over-sanguine, in that it overlooks the
point that into this prospective comity of nations Imperial Germany (and
Imperial Japan) fit like a drunken savage with a machine gun. It also
overlooks the patent fatality that these two are bound to come into a
coalition at the next turn, with whatever outside and subsidiary
resources they can draw on; provided only that a reasonable opening for
further enterprise presents itself. The league, in other terms, must be
in a position to enforce peace by overmastering force, and to anticipate
any move at cross purposes with the security of the pacific nations.
This end can be reached by either one of two ways. If the dynastic
States are left to their own devices, it will be incumbent on the
associated nations to put in the field a standing force sufficient to
prevent a recourse to arms; which means competitive armament and
universal military rule. Or the dynastic States may be taken into
partnership and placed under such surveillance and constraint as to
practically disarm them; which would admit virtual disarmament of the
federated nations. The former arrangement has nothing in its favour,
except the possibility that no better or less irksome arrangement can be
had under existing circumstances; that is to say that the pacific
nations may not be able to bring these dynastic states to terms of
disarmament under surveillance. They assuredly can not except by force;
and this is the precise point on which the continued hostilities in
Europe turn today. In diplomatic parable the German Imperial spokesmen
say that they can accept (or as they prefer to phrase it, grant) no
terms that do not fully safeguard the Future of the Fatherland; and in
similarly diplomatic parable the spokesmen of the Entente insist that
Prussian militarism must be permanently put out of commission; but it
all means the same thing, viz. that the Imperial establishment is to be
(or is not to be) disabled beyond the possibility of its entering on a
similar warlike enterprise again, when it has had time for recuperation.
The dynastic statesmen, and the lay subjects of the Imperial
establishment, are strenuously set on securing a fair opportunity for
recuperation and a wiser endeavour to achieve that dominion which the
present adventure promises to defeat; while the Entente want no
recurrence, and are persuaded that a recurrence can be avoided only on
the footing of a present collapse of the Imperial power and a
scrupulously enforced prostration of it henceforth.
Without the definitive collapse of the Imperial power no pacific league
of nations can come to anything much more than armistice. On the basis
of such a collapse the league may as well administer its affairs
economically by way of an all-around reduction of armaments, as by the
costlier and more irksome way of "preparedness." But a sensible
reduction of armaments on the part of the neutral nations implies
disarmament of the dynastic States. Which would involve a neutral
surveillance of the affairs of these dynastic States in such detail and
with such exercise of authority as would reduce their governments to the
effective status of local administrative officials. Out of which, in
turn, would arise complications that would lead to necessary
readjustments all along the line. It would involve the virtual, if not
also the formal, abolition of the monarchy, since the monarchy has no
other use than that of international war and intrigue; or at least it
would involve the virtual abrogation of its powers, reducing it to the
same status of _faineantise_ as now characterises the British crown.
Evidently this means a serious intermeddling in the domestic concerns
and arrangements of the Fatherland, such as is not admissible under the
democratic principle that any people must be left free to follow their
own inclinations and devices in their own concerns; at the same time
that this degree of interference is imperative if the peace is to be
kept on any other footing than that of eternal vigilance and superior
armed force, with a people whose own inclinations and devices are of the
kind now grown familiar in the German case,--all of which also applies,
with accentuation, in the case of Imperial Japan.
* * * * *
Some such policy of neutral surveillance in the affairs of these peoples
whose pacific temper is under suspicion, is necessarily involved in a
plan to enforce peace by concert of the pacific nations, and it will
necessarily carry implications and farther issues, touching not only
these supposedly recalcitrant peoples, but also as regards the pacific
nations themselves. Assuming always that the prime purpose and
consistent aim of the projected league is the peace and security of
those pacific nations on whose initiative it is to be achieved, then it
should be reasonable to assume that the course of procedure in its
organisation, administration and further adaptations and adjustments
must follow the logic of necessities leading to that end. He who wills
the end must make up his account with the means.
The end in this case is peace and security; which means, for practical
purposes, peace and good-will. Ill-will is not a secure foundation of
peace. Even the military strategists of the Imperial establishment
recommend a programme of "frightfulness" only as a convenient military
expedient, essentially a provisional basis of tranquility. In the long
run and as a permanent peace measure it is doubtless not to the point.
Security is finally to be had among or between modern peoples only on
the ground of a common understanding and an impartially common basis of
equity, or something approaching that basis as nearly as circumstances
will permit. Which means that in so far as the projected peace-compact
is to take effect in any enduring way, and leave the federated nations
some degree of freedom from persistent apprehension and animosity, as
well as from habitual insecurity of life and limb, the league must not
only be all-inclusive, but it must be inclusively uniform in all its
requirements and regulations.
The peoples of the quondam Imperial nations must come into the league on
a footing of formal equality with the rest. This they can not do without
the virtual abdication of their dynastic governmental establishments and
a consequent shift to a democratic form of organisation, and a formal
abrogation of class privileges and prerogatives.
However, a virtual abdication or cancelment of the dynastic rule, such
as to bring it formally into the same class with the British crown,
would scarcely meet the requirements in the case of the German Imperial
establishment; still more patently not in the case of Imperial Japan.
If, following the outlines of the decayed British crown, one or the
other of these Imperial establishments were by formal enactment reduced
to a state of nominal desuetude, the effect would be very appreciably
different from what happens in the British community, where the crown
has lost its powers by failure of the requisite subordination on the
part of the people, and not by a formal abdication of rights. In the
German case, and even more in the Japanese case, the strength of the
Imperial establishment lies in the unimpaired loyalty of the populace;
which would remain nearly intact at the outset, and would thin out only
by insensible degrees in the sequel; so that if only the Imperial
establishment were left formally standing it would command the fealty of
the common run in spite of any formal abrogation of its powers, and the
course of things would, in effect, run as before the break. In effect,
to bring about a shift to a democratic basis the dynastic slate would
have to be wiped very clean indeed. And this shift would be
indispensable to the successful conduct of such a pacific league of
nations, since any other than an effectually democratic national
establishment is to be counted on unfailingly to intrigue for dynastic
aggrandizement, through good report and evil.
In a case like that of Imperial Germany, with its federated States and
subsidiaries, where royalty and nobility still are potent preconceptions
investing the popular imagination, and where loyal abnegation in the
presence of authority still is the chief and staple virtue of the common
man,--in all such cases virtual abdication of the dynastic initiative
under constitutional forms can be had only by a formal and scrupulously
complete abrogation of all those legal and customary arrangements on
which this irresponsible exercise of authority has rested and through
which it has taken effect. Neutralisation in these instances will mean
reduction to an unqualified democratic footing; which will, at least at
the outset, not be acceptable to the common people, and will be wholly
intolerable to the ruling classes. Such a régime, therefore, while it is
indispensable as a working basis for a neutral league of peace, would
from the outset have to be enforced against the most desperate
resistance of the ruling classes, headed by the dynastic statesmen and
warlords, and backed by the stubborn loyalty of the subject populace. It
would have to mean the end of things for the ruling classes and the most
distasteful submission to an alien scheme of use and wont for the
populace. And yet it is also an indispensable element in any scheme of
pacification that aims at permanent peace and security. In time, it may
well be believed, the people of the Fatherland might learn to do well
enough without the gratuitous domination of their ruling classes, but at
the outset it would be a heartfelt privation.
It follows that a league to enforce peace would have to begin its régime
with enforcing peace on terms of the unconditional surrender of the
formidable warlike nations; which could be accomplished only by the
absolute and irretrievable defeat of these Powers as they now stand. The
question will, no doubt, present itself, Is the end worth the cost? That
question can, of course, not be answered in absolute terms, inasmuch as
it resolves itself into a question of taste and prepossession. An answer
to it would also not be greatly to the purpose here, since it would have
no particular bearing on the course of action likely to be pursued by
these pacific nations in their quest of a settled peace. It is more to
the point to ask what is likely to be the practical decision of these
peoples on that head when the question finally presents itself in a
concrete form.
Again it is necessary to call to mind that any momentous innovation
which rests on popular sentiment will take time; that consequently
anything like a plébiscite on the question today would scarcely give a
safe index of what the decision is likely to be when presently put to
the test; and that as things go just now, swiftly and urgent, any
time-allowance counts at something more than its ordinary workday
coefficient. What can apparently be said with some degree of confidence
is that just now, during these two years past, sentiment has been moving
in the direction indicated, and that any growing inclination of the kind
is being strongly reenforced by a growing realisation that nothing but
heroic remedies will avail at this juncture. If it comes to be currently
recognised that a settled peace can be had only at the cost of
eradicating privilege and royalty from the warlike nations, it would
seem reasonable to expect, from their present state of mind, that the
pacific nations will scarcely hesitate to apply that remedy,--provided
always that the fortunes of war fall out as that measure would require,
and provided also that the conflict lasts long enough and severe enough
to let them make up their mind to anything so drastic.
* * * * *
There is a certain side issue bearing on this question of the ulterior
probabilities of popular sentiment and national policy as to what is to
be done with the warlike nations in the event that the allied nations
who fight for neutrality have the disposal of such matters. This side
issue may seem remote, and it may not unlikely be overlooked among the
mass of graver and more tangible considerations. It was remarked above
that the United Kingdom is one of the two chief pillars of the projected
house of peace; and it may be added without serious fear of
contradiction or annoyance that the United Kingdom is also the one among
these pacific nations that comes nearest being capable, in the event of
such an emergency, to take care of its own case single-handed. For
better or worse, British adhesion to the project is indispensable, and
the British are in a position virtually to name their own terms of
adhesion. The British commonwealth--a very inclusive phrase in this
connection--must form the core of the pacific league, if any, and
British sentiment will have a very great place in the terms of its
formation and in the terms which it will be inclined to offer the
Imperial coalition at the settlement.
Now, it happens that the British community entered on this war as a
democratic monarchy ruled and officered by a body of gentlemen--doubtless
the most correct and admirable muster of gentlemen, of anything approaching
its volume, that the modern world can show. But the war has turned out not
to be a gentlemen's war. It has on the contrary been a war of technological
exploits, reenforced with all the beastly devices of the heathen. It is a
war in which all the specific traits of the well-bred and gently-minded man
are a handicap; in which veracity, gallantry, humanity, liberality are
conducive to nothing but defeat and humiliation. The death-rate among the
British gentlemen-officers in the early months, and for many months, ran
extravagantly high, for the most part because they were gallant
gentlemen as well as officers imbued with the good, old class spirit of
_noblesse oblige_, that has made half the tradition and more than half
the working theory of the British officer in the field,--good, but old,
hopelessly out of date. That generation of officers died, for the most
part; being unfit to survive or to serve the purpose under these modern
conditions of warfare, to which their enemy on the other hand had
adapted themselves with easy facility from beforehand. The gentlemanly
qualifications, and the material apparatus of gentility, and, it will
perhaps have to be admitted, the gentlemen, have fallen into the
background, or perhaps rather have measurably fallen into abeyance,
among the officers of the line. There may be more doubt as to the state
of things in respect of the gentility of the staff, but the best that
can confidently be said is that it is a point in doubt.
It is hoped that one may say without offense that in the course of time
the personnel has apparently worked down to the level of vulgarity
defined by the ways and means of this modern warfare; which means the
level on which runs a familiar acquaintance with large and complex
mechanical apparatus, railway and highway transport and power,
reenforced concrete, excavations and mud, more particularly mud,
concealment and ambush, and unlimited deceit and ferocity. It is not
precisely that persons of pedigree and gentle breeding have ceased to
enter or seek entrance to employment as officers, still less that
measures have been taken to restrain their doing so or to eliminate from
the service those who have come into it--though there may present itself
a doubt on this point as touches the more responsible discretionary
positions--but only that the stock of suitable gentlemen, uncommonly
large as it is, has been overdrawn; that those who have latterly gone
into service, or stayed in, have perforce divested themselves of their
gentility in some appreciable measure, particularly as regards class
distinction, and have fallen on their feet in the more commonplace role
of common men.
Serviceability in this modern warfare is conditioned on much the same
traits of temperament and training that make for usefulness in the
modern industrial processes, where large-scale coordinations of movement
and an effective familiarity with precise and far-reaching mechanical
processes is an indispensable requirement,--indispensable in the same
measure as the efficient conduct of this modern machine industry is
indispensable. But the British gentleman, in so far as he runs true to
type, is of no use to modern industry; quite the contrary, in fact.
Still, the British gentleman is, in point of heredity, the same thing
over again as the British common man; so that, barring the misdirected
training that makes him a gentleman, and which can largely be undone
under urgent need and pressure, he can be made serviceable for such uses
as the modern warfare requires. Meantime the very large demand for
officers, and the insatiable demand for capable officers, has brought
the experienced and capable common man into the case and is in a fair
way to discredit gentility as a necessary qualification of field
officers.
But the same process of discredit and elimination is also extending to
the responsible officials who have the administration of things in hand.
Indeed, the course of vulgarisation among the responsible officials has
now been under way for some appreciable time and with very perceptible
effect, and the rate of displacement appears to be gathering velocity
with every month that passes. Here, as in the field operations, it also
appears that gentlemanly methods, standards, preconceptions, and
knowledge of men and things, is no longer to the purpose. Here, too, it
is increasingly evident that this is not a gentlemen's war. And the
traditional qualifications that have sufficed in the past, at least to
the extent of enabling the British management to "muddle through," as
they are proudly in the habit of saying,--these qualifications are of
slight account in this technological conjuncture of the nation's
fortunes. It would perhaps be an under-statement to say that these
gentlemanly qualifications are no longer of any account, for the purpose
immediately in hand, and it would doubtless not do to say that they are
wholly and unreservedly disserviceable as things run today; but captious
critics might find at least a precarious footing of argument on such a
proposition.
Through the course of the nineteenth century the British government had
progressively been taking on the complexion of a "gentlemen's
agreement;" a government by gentlemen, for gentlemen, and of gentlemen,
too, beyond what could well be alleged in any other known instance,
though never wholly so. No government could be a government of gentlemen
exclusively, since there is no pecuniary profit in gentlemen as such,
and therefore no object in governing them; more particularly could there
never be any incentive in it for gentlemen, whose livelihood is, in the
nature of the case, drawn from some one else. A gentlemen's government
can escape death by inanition only in so far as it serves the material
interest of its class, as contrasted with the underlying population from
which the class draws its livelihood. This British arrangement of a
government by prudent and humane gentlemen with a view to the
conservation of that state of things that best conduced to the material
well-being of their own class, has on the whole had the loyal support of
the underlying populace, with an occasional floundering protest. But
the protest has never taken the shape of an expressed distrust of
gentlemen, considered as the staple ways and means of government; nor
has the direction of affairs ever descended into the hands of any other
or lower class or condition of men.
On the whole, this British arrangement for the control of national
affairs by a body of interested gentlemen-investors has been, and
perhaps still is, just as well at home in the affectionate
preconceptions of the nineteenth-century British as the corresponding
German usufruct by self-appointed swaggering aristocrats has been among
the underlying German population, or as the American arrangement of
national control by business men for business ends. The British and the
American arrangements run very much to the same substantial effect, of
course, inasmuch as the British gentlemen represent, as a class, the
filial generations of a business community, and their aims and standards
of conduct continue to be such as are enforced by the pecuniary
interests on which their gentility is conditioned. They continue to draw
the ways and means of a worthy life from businesslike arrangements of a
"vested" character, made and provided with a view to their nourishment
and repose. Their resulting usufruct of the community's productive
efforts rests on a vested interest of a pecuniary sort, sanctioned by
the sacred rights of property; very much as the analogous German
dynastic and aristocratic usufruct rests on personal prerogative,
sanctioned by the sacred rights of authentic prescription, without
afterthought. The two, it will be noted are very much alike, in effect,
"under the skin." The great distinguishing mark being that the German
usufructuary gentlemen are, in theory at least, gentlemen-adventurers of
prowess and proud words, whose place in the world's economy it is to
glorify God and disturb the peace; whereas their British analogues are
gentlemen-investors, of blameless propriety, whose place it is more
simply to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
All this arrangement of a usufruct with a view to the reputable
consumption of the community's superfluous production has had the
cordial support of British sentiment, perhaps fully as cordial as the
German popular subservience in the corresponding German scheme; both
being well embedded in the preconceptions of the common man. But the war
has put it all to a rude test, and has called on the British gentlemen's
executive committee to take over duties for which it was not designed.
The exigencies of this war of technological exploits have been almost
wholly, and very insistently, of a character not contemplated in the
constitution of such an executive committee of gentlemen-investors
designed to safeguard class interests and promote their pecuniary class
advantage by a blamelessly inconspicuous and indirect management of
national affairs. The methods are of the class known colloquially among
the vulgar-spoken American politicians as "pussyfooting" and
"log-rolling"; but always with such circumstance of magnitude,
authenticity and well-bred deference to precedent, as to give the
resulting routine of subreption, trover and conversion, an air not only
of benevolent consideration but of austere morality.
But the most austere courtesy and the most authentically dispassionate
division of benefits will not meet the underbred exigencies of a war
conducted on the mechanistic lines of the modern state of the industrial
arts. So the blameless, and for the purpose imbecile, executive
committee of gentlemen-investors has been insensibly losing the
confidence and the countenance of the common man; who, when all is said,
will always have to do what is to be done. The order of gentlemanly
parleying and brokery has, therefore, with many apprehensions of
calamity, been reluctantly and tardily giving ground before something
that is of a visibly underbred order. Increasingly underbred, and
thereby insensibly approaching the character of this war situation, but
accepted with visible reluctance and apprehension both by the ruling
class and by the underlying population. The urgent necessity of going to
such a basis, and of working out the matter in hand by an unblushing
recourse to that matter-of-fact logic of mechanical efficiency, which
alone can touch the difficulties of the case, but which has no respect
of persons,--this necessity has been present from the outset and has
been vaguely apprehended for long past, but it is only tardily and after
the chastening of heavy penalties on this gentlemanly imbecility that a
substantial move in that direction has been made. It has required much
British resolution to overcome the night-fear of going out into the
unhallowed ground of matter-of-fact, where the farthest earlier
excursions of the governmental agencies had taken them no farther than
such financial transactions as are incident to the accomplishment of
anything whatever in a commercial nation. And then, too, there is a
pecuniary interest in being interested in financial transactions.
This shifting of discretionary control out of the hands of the gentlemen
into those of the underbred common run, who know how to do what is
necessary to be done in the face of underbred exigencies, may
conceivably go far when it has once been started, and it may go forward
at an accelerated rate if the pressure of necessity lasts long enough.
If time be given for habituation to this manner of directorate in
national affairs, so that the common man comes to realise how it is
feasible to get along without gentlemen-investors holding the
discretion, the outcome may conceivably be very grave. It is a point in
doubt, but it is conceivable that in such a case the gentlemanly
executive committee administering affairs in the light of the
gentlemanly pecuniary interest, will not be fully reinstated in the
discretionary control of the United Kingdom for an appreciable number of
years after the return of peace. Possibly, even, the régime may be
permanently deranged, and there is even a shadowy doubt possible to be
entertained as to whether the vested pecuniary rights, on which the
class of gentlemen rests, may not suffer some derangement, in case the
control should pass into the hands of the underbred and unpropertied for
so long a season as to let the common man get used to thinking that the
vested interests and the sacred rights of gentility are so much ado
about nothing.
Such an outcome would be extreme, but as a remote contingency it is to
be taken into account. The privileged classes of the United Kingdom
should by this time be able to see the danger there may be for them and
their vested interests, pecuniary and moral, in an excessive
prolongation of the war; in such postponement of peace as would afford
time for a popular realisation of their incompetence and
disserviceability as touches the nation's material well-being under
modern conditions. To let the nation's war experience work to such an
outcome, the season of war would have to be prolonged beyond what either
the hopes or the fears of the community have yet contemplated; but the
point is after all worth noting, as being within the premises of the
case, that there is herein a remote contingency of losing, at least for
a time, that unformulated clause in the British constitution which has
hitherto restricted the holding of responsible office to men of pedigree
and of gentle breeding, or at least of very grave pecuniary weight; so
grave as to make the incumbents virtual gentlemen, with a virtual
pedigree, and with a virtual gentleman's accentuated sense of class
interest. Should such an eventuality overtake British popular sentiment
and belief there is also the remote contingency that the rights of
ownership and investment would lose a degree of sanctity.
It seems necessary to note a further, and in a sense more improbable,
line of disintegration among modern fixed ideas. Among the best
entrenched illusions of modern economic preconceptions, and in economic
as well as legal theory, has been the indispensability of funds, and the
hard and fast limitation of industrial operations by the supply or
with-holding of funds. The war experience has hitherto gone tentatively
to show that funds and financial transactions, of credit, bargain, sale
and solvency, may be dispensed with under pressure of necessity; and
apparently without seriously hindering that run of mechanical fact, on
which interest in the present case necessarily centers, and which must
be counted on to give the outcome. Latterly the case is clearing up a
little further, on further experience and under further pressure of
technological exigencies, to the effect that financial arrangements are
indispensable in this connection only because and in so far as it has
been arranged to consider them indispensable; as in international trade.
They are an indispensable means of intermediation only in so far as
pecuniary interests are to be furthered or safeguarded in the
intermediation. When, as has happened with the belligerents in the
present instance, the national establishment becomes substantially
insolvent, it is beginning to appear that its affairs can be taken care
of with less difficulty and with better effect without the use of
financial expedients. Of course, it takes time to get used to doing
things by the more direct method and without the accustomed
circumlocution of accountancy, or the accustomed allowance for profits
to go to interested parties who, under the financial régime, hold a
power of discretionary permission in all matters that touch the use of
the industrial arts. Under these urgent material exigencies, investment
comes to have much of the appearance of a gratuitous drag and drain on
the processes of industry.
Here, again, is a sinister contingency; sinister, that is, for those
vested rights of ownership by force of which the owners of "capital" are
enabled to permit or withhold the use of the industrial arts by the
community at large, on pain of privation in case the accustomed toll to
the owners of capital is not paid. It is, of course, not intended to
find fault with this arrangement; which has the sanction of "time
immemorial" and of a settled persuasion that it lies at the root of all
civilised life and intercourse. It is only that in case of extreme need
this presumed indispensable expedient of industrial control has broken
down, and that experience is proving it to be, in these premises, an
item of borrowed trouble. Should experience continue to run on the same
lines for an appreciable period and at a high tension, it is at least
conceivable that the vested right of owners to employ unlimited sabotage
in the quest of profits might fall so far into disrepute as to leave
them under a qualified doubt on the return of "normal" conditions. The
common man, in other words, who gathers nothing but privation and
anxiety from the owners' discretionary sabotage, may conceivably stand
to lose his preconception that the vested rights of ownership are the
cornerstone of his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
* * * * *
The considerations recited in this lengthy excursion on the war
situation and its probable effects on popular habits of thought in the
United Kingdom go to say that when peace comes to be negotiated, with
the United Kingdom as the chief constituent and weightiest spokesman of
the allied nations and of the league of pacific neutrals, the
representatives of British aims and opinions are likely to speak in a
different, chastened, and disillusioned fashion, as contrasted with what
the British attitude was at the beginning of hostilities. The
gentlemanly British animus of arrogant self-sufficiency will have been
somewhat sobered, perhaps somewhat subdued. Concession to the claims and
pretensions of the other pacific nations is likely to go farther than
might once have been expected, particularly in the way of concession to
any demand for greater international comity and less international
discrimination; essentially concession looking to a reduction of
national pretensions and an incipient neutralisation of national
interests. Coupled with this will presumably be a less conciliatory
attitude toward the members of the dynastic coalition against whom the
war has been fought, owing to a more mature realisation of the
impossibility of a lasting peace negotiated with a Power whose
substantial core is a warlike and irresponsible dynastic establishment.
The peace negotiations are likely to run on a lower level of diplomatic
deference to constituted authorities, and with more of a view to the
interests and sentiments of the underlying population, than was evident
in the futile negotiations had at the outbreak of hostilities. The
gentle art of diplomacy, that engages the talents of exalted personages
and well-bred statesmen, has been somewhat discredited; and if it turns
out that the vulgarisation of the directorate in the United Kingdom and
its associated allies and neutrals will have time to go on to something
like dominance and authenticity, then the deference which the spokesmen
of these nations are likely to show for the prescriptive rights of
dynasty, nobility, bureaucracy, or even of pecuniary aristocracy, in the
countries that make up the party of the second part, may be expected to
have shrunk appreciably, conceivably even to such precarious dimensions
as to involve the virtual neglect or possible downright abrogation of
them, in sum and substance.
Indeed, the chances of a successful pacific league of neutrals to come
out of the current situation appear to be largely bound up with the
degree of vulgarisation due to overtake the several directorates of the
belligerent nations as well as the popular habits of thought in these
and in the neutral countries, during the further course of the war. It
is too broad a generalisation, perhaps, to say that the longer the war
lasts the better are the chances of such a neutral temper in the
interested nations as will make a pacific league practicable, but the
contrary would appear a much less defensible proposition. It is, of
course, the common man that has the least interest in warlike
enterprise, if any, and it is at the same time the common man that bears
the burden of such enterprise and has also the most immediate interest
in keeping the peace. If, slowly and pervasively, in the course of hard
experience, he learns to distrust the conduct of affairs by his betters,
and learns at the same move to trust to his own class to do what is
necessary and to leave undone what is not, his deference to his betters
is likely to suffer a decline, such as should show itself in a somewhat
unguarded recourse to democratic ways and means.
In short, there is in this progressive vulgarisation of effectual use
and wont and of sentiment, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, some
slight ground for the hope, or the apprehension, that no peace will be
made with the dynastic Powers of the second part until they cease to be
dynastic Powers and take on the semblance of democratic commonwealths,
with dynasties, royalties and privileged classes thrown in the discard.
This would probably mean some prolongation of hostilities, until the
dynasties and privileged classes had completely exhausted their
available resources; and, by the same token, until the privileged
classes in the more modern nations among the belligerents had also been
displaced from direction and discretion by those underbred classes on
whom it is incumbent to do what is to be done; or until a juncture were
reached that comes passably near to such a situation. On the contingency
of such a course of events and some such outcome appears also to hang
the chance of a workable pacific league. Without further experience of
the futility of upper-class and pecuniary control, to discredit
precedent and constituted authority, it is scarcely conceivable, e.g.,
that the victorious allies would go the length of coercively discarding
the German Imperial dynasty and the kept classes that with it constitute
the Imperial State, and of replacing it with a democratic organisation
of the people in the shape of a modern commonwealth; and without a
change of that nature, affecting that nation and such of its allies as
would remain on the map, no league of pacific neutrals would be able to
manage its affairs, even for a time, except on a war-footing that would
involve a competitive armament against future dynastic enterprises from
the same quarter. Which comes to saying that a lasting peace is possible
on no other terms than the disestablishment of the Imperial dynasty and
the abrogation of all feudalistic remnants of privilege in the
Fatherland and its allies, together with the reduction of those
countries to the status of commonwealths made up of ungraded men.
* * * * *
It is easy to speculate on what the conditions precedent to such a
pacific league of neutrals must of necessity be; but it is not therefore
less difficult to make a shrewd guess as to the chances of these
conditions being met. Of these conditions precedent, the chief and
foremost, without which any other favorable circumstances are
comparatively idle, is a considerable degree of neutralisation,
extending to virtually all national interests and pretensions, but more
particularly to all material and commercial interests of the federated
peoples; and, indispensably and especially, such neutralisation would
have to extend to the nations from whom aggression is now apprehended,
as, e.g., the German people. But such neutralisation could not
conceivably reach the Fatherland unless that nation were made over in
the image of democracy, since the Imperial State is, by force of the
terms, a warlike and unneutral power. This would seem to be the
ostensibly concealed meaning of the allied governments in proclaiming
that their aim is to break German militarism without doing harm to the
German people.
As touches the neutralisation of the democratically rehabilitated
Fatherland, or in default of that, as touches the peace terms to be
offered the Imperial government, the prime article among the
stipulations would seem to be abolition of all trade discrimination
against Germany or by Germany against any other nationality. Such
stipulation would, of course, cover all manner of trade
discrimination,--e.g., import, export and excise tariff, harbor and
registry dues, subsidy, patent right, copyright, trade mark, tax
exemption whether partial or exclusive, investment preferences at home
and abroad,--in short it would have to establish a thoroughgoing
neutralisation of trade relations in the widest acceptation of the term,
and to apply in perpetuity. The like applies, of course, to all that
fringe of subsidiary and outlying peoples on whom Imperial Germany
relies for much of its resources in any warlike enterprise. Such a move
also disposes of the colonial question in a parenthesis, so far as
regards any special bond of affiliation between the Empire, or the
Fatherland, and any colonial possessions that are now thought desirable
to be claimed. Under neutralisation, colonies would cease to be
"colonial possessions," being necessarily included under the general
abrogation of commercial discriminations, and also necessarily exempt
from special taxation or specially favorable tax rates.
Colonies there still would be, though it is not easy to imagine what
would be the meaning of a "German Colony" in such a case. Colonies would
be free communities, after the fashion of New Zealand or Australia, but
with the further sterilisation of the bond between colony and mother
country involved in the abolition of all appointive offices and all
responsibility to the crown or the imperial government. Now, there are
no German colonies in this simpler British sense of the term, which
implies nothing more than community of blood, institutions and language,
together with that sense of solidarity between the colony and the mother
country which this community of pedigree and institutions will
necessarily bring; but while there are today no German colonies, in the
sense of the term so given, there is no reason to presume that no such
German colonies would come into bearing under the conditions of this
prospective régime of neutrality installed by such a pacific league,
when backed by the league's guarantee that no colony from the Fatherland
will be exposed to the eventual risk of coming under the discretionary
tutelage of the German Imperial establishment and so falling into a
relation of step-childhood to the Imperial dynasty.
As is well known, and as has by way of superfluous commonplace been set
forth by a sometime Colonial Secretary of the Empire, the decisive
reason for there being no German colonies in existence is the
consistently impossible colonial policy of the German government,
looking to the usufruct of the colonies by the government, and the fear
of further arbitrary control and nepotic discrimination at the pleasure
of the self-seeking dynastic establishment. It is only under Imperial
rule that no German colony, in this modern sense of the term, is
possible; and only because Imperial rule does not admit of a free
community being formed by colonists from the Fatherland; or of an
ostensibly free community of that kind ever feeling secure from
unsolicited interference with its affairs.
The nearest approach to a German Colony, as contrasted with a "Colonial
Possession," hitherto have been the very considerable, number of
escaped German subjects who have settled in English-speaking or
Latin-speaking countries, particularly in North and South America. And
considering that the chief common trait among them is their successful
evasion of the Imperial government's heavy hand, they show an admirable
filial piety toward the Imperial establishment; though troubled with no
slightest regret at having escaped from the Imperial surveillance and no
slightest inclination to return to the shelter of the Imperial tutelage.
A colloquialism--"hyphenate"--has latterly grown up to meet the need of
a term to designate these evasive and yet patriotic colonists. It is
scarcely misleading to say that the German-American hyphenate, e.g., in
so far as he runs true to form, is still a German subject with his
heart, but he is an American citizen with his head. All of which goes to
argue that if the Fatherland were to fall into such a state of
democratic tolerance that no recidivist need carry a defensive hyphen to
shield him from the importunate attentions of the Imperial government,
German colonies would also come into bearing; although, it is true, they
would have no value to the German government.
In the Imperial colonial policy colonies are conceived to stand to their
Imperial guardian or master in a relation between that of a step-child
and that of an indentured servant; to be dealt with summarily and at
discretion and to be made use of without scruple. The like attitude
toward colonies was once familiar matter-of-course with the British and
Spanish statesmen. The British found the plan unprofitable, and also
unworkable, and have given it up. The Spanish, having no political
outlook but the dynastic one, could of course not see their way to
relinquish the only purpose of their colonial enterprise, except in
relinquishing their colonial possessions. The German (Imperial) colonial
policy is and will be necessarily after the Spanish pattern, and
necessarily, too, with the Spanish results.
Under the projected neutral scheme there would be no colonial policy,
and of course, no inducement to the acquisition of colonies, since
there would be no profit to be derived, or to be fancied, in the case.
But while no country, as a commonwealth, has any material interest in
the acquisition or maintenance of colonies, it is otherwise as regards
the dynastic interests of an Imperial government; and it is also
otherwise, at least in the belief of the interested parties, as regards
special businessmen or business concerns who are in a position to gain
something by help of national discrimination in their favor. As regards
the pecuniary interests of favored businessmen or business concerns, and
of investors favored by national discrimination in colonial relations,
the case falls under the general caption of trade discrimination, and
does not differ at all materially from such expedients as a protective
tariff, a ship subsidy, or a bounty on exports. But as regards the
warlike, that is to say dynastic, interest of an Imperial government the
case stands somewhat different.
Colonial Possessions in such a case yield no material benefit to the
country at large, but their possession is a serviceable plea for warlike
preparations with which to retain possession of the colonies in the face
of eventualities, and it is also a serviceable means of stirring the
national pride and keeping alive a suitable spirit of patriotic
animosity. The material service actually to be derived from such
possessions in the event of war is a point in doubt, with the
probabilities apparently running against their being of any eventual net
use. But there need be no question that such possessions, under the hand
of any national establishment infected with imperial ambitions, are a
fruitful source of diplomatic complications, excuses for armament,
international grievances, and eventual aggression. A pacific league of
neutrals can evidently not tolerate the retention of colonial
possessions by any dynastic State that may be drawn into the league or
under its jurisdiction, as, e.g., the German Empire in case it should be
left on an Imperial footing. Whereas, in case the German peoples are
thrown back on a democratic status, as neutralised commonwealths without
a crown or a military establishment, the question of their colonial
possessions evidently falls vacant.
As to the neutralisation of trade relations apart from the question of
colonies, and as bears on the case of Germany under the projected
jurisdiction of a pacific league of neutrals, the considerations to be
taken account of are of much the same nature. As it would have to take
effect, e.g., in the abolition of commercial and industrial
discriminations between Germany and the pacific nations, such
neutralisation would doubtless confer a lasting material benefit on the
German people at large; and it is not easy to detect any loss or
detriment to be derived from such a move so long as peace prevails.
Protective, that is to say discriminating, export, import, or excise
duties, harbor and registry dues, subsidies, tax exemptions and trade
preferences, and all the like devices of interference with trade and
industry, are unavoidably a hindrance to the material interests of any
people on whom they are imposed or who impose these disabilities on
themselves. So that exemption from these things by a comprehensive
neutralisation of trade relations would immediately benefit all the
nations concerned, in respect of their material well-being in times of
peace. There is no exception and no abatement to be taken account of
under this general statement, as is well known to all men who are
conversant with these matters.
But it is otherwise as regards the dynastic interest in the case, and as
regards any national interest in warlike enterprise. It is doubtless
true that all restraint of trade between nations, and between classes or
localities within the national frontiers, unavoidably acts to weaken and
impoverish the people on whose economic activities this restraint is
laid; and to the extent to which this effect is had it will also be true
that the country which so is hindered in its work will have a less
aggregate of resources to place at the disposal of its enterprising
statesmen for imperialist ends. But these restraints may yet be useful
for dynastic, that is to say warlike, ends by making the country more
nearly a "self-contained economic whole." A country becomes a
"self-contained economic whole" by mutilation, in cutting itself off
from the industrial system in which industrially it belongs, but in
which it is unwilling nationally to hold its place. National frontiers
are industrial barriers. But as a result of such mutilation of its
industrial life such a country is better able--it has been believed--to
bear the shock of severing its international trade relations entirely,
as is likely to happen in case of war.
In a large country, such as America or Russia, which comprises within
its national boundaries very extensive and very varied resources and a
widely distributed and diversified population, the mischief suffered
from restraints of trade that hinder industrial relations with the world
at large will of course be proportionately lessened. Such a country
comes nearer being a miniature industrial world; although none of the
civilised nations, large or small, can carry on its ordinary industrial
activities and its ordinary manner of life without drawing on foreign
parts to some appreciable extent. But a country of small territorial
extent and of somewhat narrowly restricted natural resources, as, e.g.,
Germany or France, can even by the most drastic measures of restraint
and mutilation achieve only a very mediocre degree of industrial
isolation and "self-sufficiency,"--as has, e.g., appeared in the present
war. But in all cases, though in varying measure, the mitigated
isolation so enforced by these restraints on trade will in their degree
impair the country's industrial efficiency and lower the people's
material well-being; yet, if the restrictions are shrewdly applied this
partial isolation and partial "self-sufficiency" will go some way toward
preparing the nation for the more thorough isolation that follows on the
outbreak of hostilities.
The present plight of the German people under war conditions may serve
to show how nearly that end may be attained, and yet how inadequate even
the most unreserved measures of industrial isolation must be in face of
the fact that the modern state of the industrial arts necessarily draws
on the collective resources of the world at large. It may well be
doubted, on an impartial view, if the mutilation of the country's
industrial system by such measures of isolation does not after all
rather weaken the nation even for warlike ends; but then, the
discretionary authorities in the dynastic States are always, and it may
be presumed necessarily, hampered with obsolete theories handed down
from that cameralistic age, when the little princes of the Fatherland
were making dynastic history. So, e.g., the current, nineteenth and
twentieth century, economic policy of the Prussian-Imperial statesmen is
still drawn on lines within which Frederick II, called the Great, would
have felt well at home.
Like other preparation for hostilities this reduction of the country to
the status of a self-contained economic organisation is costly, but
like other preparation for hostilities it also puts the nation in a
position of greater readiness to break off friendly relations with its
neighbors. It is a war measure, commonly spoken for by its advocates as
a measure of self-defense; but whatever the merits of the
self-defenders' contention, this measure is a war measure. As such it
can reasonably claim no hearing in the counsels of a pacific league of
neutrals, whose purpose it is to make war impracticable. Particularly
can there be no reasonable question of admitting a policy of trade
discrimination and isolation on the part of a nation which has, for
purposes of warlike aggression, pursued such a policy in the past, and
which it is the immediate purpose of the league to bind over to keep the
peace.
There has been a volume of loose talk spent on the justice and
expediency of boycotting the trade of the peoples of the Empire after
the return of peace, as a penalty and as a preventive measure designed
to retard their recovery of strength with which to enter on a further
warlike enterprise. Such a measure would necessarily be somewhat futile;
since "Business is business," after all, and the practical limitations
imposed on an unprofitable boycott by the moral necessity to buy cheap
and sell dear that rests on all businessmen would surreptitiously
mitigate it to the point of negligibility. It is inconceivable--or it
would be inconceivable in the absence of imbecile politicians and
self-seeking businessmen--that measures looking to the trade isolation
of any one of these countries could be entertained as a point of policy
to be pursued by a league of neutrals. And it is only in so far as
patriotic jealousy and vindictive sentiments are allowed to displace the
aspiration for peace and security, that such measures can claim
consideration. Considered as a penalty to be imposed on the erring
nations who set this warlike adventure afoot, it should be sufficiently
plain that such a measure as a trade boycott could not touch the chief
offenders, or even their responsible abettors. It would, rather, play
into the hands of the militarist interests by keeping alive the spirit
of national jealousy and international hatred, out of which wars arise
and without which warlike enterprise might hopefully be expected to
disappear out of the scheme of human intercourse. The punishment would
fall, as all economic burdens and disabilities must always fall, on the
common man, the underlying population.
The chief relation of this common run, this underlying population of
German subjects, to the inception and pursuit of this Imperial warlike
enterprise, is comprised in the fact that they are an underlying
population of subjects, held in usufruct by the Imperial establishment
and employed at will. It is true, they have lent themselves unreservedly
to the uses for which the dynasty has use for them, and they have
entered enthusiastically into the warlike adventure set afoot by the
dynastic statesmen; but that they have done so is their misfortune
rather than their fault. By use and wont and indoctrination they have
for long been unremittingly, and helplessly, disciplined into a spirit
of dynastic loyalty, national animosity and servile abnegation; until it
would be nothing better than a pathetic inversion of all the equities of
the case to visit the transgressions of their masters upon the common
run; whose fault lies, after all, in their being an underlying
population of subjects, who have not had a chance to reach that
spiritual level on which they could properly be held accountable for the
uses to which they are turned. It is true, men are ordinarily punished
for their misfortunes; but the warlike enterprise of the Imperial
dynasty has already brought what might fairly be rated as a good measure
of punishment on this underlying populace, whose chief fault and chief
misfortune lies in an habitual servile abnegation of those traits of
initiative and discretion in man that constitute him an agent
susceptible of responsibility or retribution.
It would be all the more of a pathetic mockery to visit the
transgressions of their masters on these victims of circumstance and
dynastic mendacity, since the conventionalities of international equity
will scarcely permit the high responsible parties in the case to be
chastised with any penalty harsher than a well-mannered figure of
speech. To serve as a deterrent, the penalty must strike the point where
vests the discretion; but servile use and wont is still too well intact
in these premises to let any penalty touch the guilty core of a
profligate dynasty. Under the wear and tear of continued war and its
incident continued vulgarisation of the directorate and responsible
staff among the pacific allies, the conventional respect of persons is
likely to suffer appreciable dilapidation; but there need be no
apprehension of such a loss of decent respect for personages as would
compromise the creature comforts of that high syndicate of personages on
whose initiative the Fatherland entered upon this enterprise in
dominion.
Bygone shortcomings and transgressions can have no reasonable place in
the arrangements by which a pacific league of neutrals designs to keep
the peace. Neither can bygone prerogatives and precedents of
magnificence and of mastery, except in so far as they unavoidably must
come into play through the inability of men to divest themselves of
their ingrained preconceptions, by virtue of which a Hohenzollern or a
Hapsburger is something more formidable and more to be considered than a
recruiting sergeant or a purveyor of light literature. The league can do
its work of pacification only by elaborately forgetting differences and
discrepancies of the kind that give rise to international grievances.
Which is the same as saying that the neutralisation of national
discriminations and pretensions will have to go all the way, if it is to
serve. But this implies, as broadly as need be, that the pacific nations
who make the league and provisionally administer its articles of
agreement and jurisdiction, can not exempt themselves from any of the
leveling measures of neutralisation to which the dynastic suspects among
them are to be subject. It would mean a relinquishment of all those
undemocratic institutional survivals out of which international
grievances are wont to arise. As a certain Danish adage would have it,
the neutrals of the league must all be shorn over the same comb.
* * * * *
What is to be shorn over this one comb of neutralisation and democracy
is all those who go into the pacific league of neutrals and all who come
under its jurisdiction, whether of their own choice or by the
necessities of the case. It is of the substance of the case that those
peoples who have been employed in the campaigns of the German-Imperial
coalition are to come in on terms of impartial equality with those who
have held the ground against them; to come under the jurisdiction, and
prospectively into the copartnery, of the league of neutrals--all on the
presumption that the Imperial coalition will be brought to make peace on
terms of unconditional surrender.
Let it not seem presumptuous to venture on a recital of summary
specifications intended to indicate the nature of those concrete
measures which would logically be comprised in a scheme of pacification
carried out with such a view to impartial equality among the peoples who
are to make up the projected league. There is a significant turn of
expression that recurs habitually in the formulation of terms put forth
by the spokesmen of the Entente belligerents, where it is insisted that
hostilities are carried on not against the German people or the other
peoples associated with them, but only against the Imperial
establishments and their culpable aids and abettors in the enterprise.
So it is further insisted that there is no intention to bring pains and
penalties on these peoples, who so have been made use of by their
masters, but only on the culpable master class whose tools these peoples
have been. And later, just now (January 1917), and from a responsible
and disinterested spokesman for the pacific league, there comes the
declaration that a lasting peace at the hands of such a league can be
grounded only in a present "peace without victory."
The mutual congruity of these two declarations need not imply collusion,
but they are none the less complementary propositions and they are none
the less indicative of a common trend of convictions among the men who
are best able to speak for those pacific nations that are looked to as
the mainstay of the prospective league. They both converge to the point
that the objective to be achieved is not victory for the Entente
belligerents but defeat for the German-Imperial coalition; that the
peoples underlying the defeated governments are not to be dealt with as
vanquished enemies but as fellows in undeserved misfortune brought on by
their culpable masters; and that no advantage is designed to be taken of
these peoples, and no gratuitous hardship to be imposed on them. Their
masters are evidently to be put away, not as defeated antagonists but as
a public nuisance to be provided against as may seem expedient for the
peace and security of those nations whom they have been molesting.
Taking this position as outlined, it should not be extremely difficult
to forecast the general line of procedure which it would logically
demand,--barring irrelevant regard for precedents and overheated
resentment, and provided that the makers of these peace terms have a
free hand and go to their work with an eye single to the establishment
of an enduring peace. The case of Germany would be typical of all the
rest; and the main items of the bill in this case would seem logically
to run somewhat as follows:
(1) The definitive elimination of the Imperial establishment, together
with the monarchical establishments of the several states of the Empire
and the privileged classes;
(2) Removal or destruction of all warlike equipment, military and naval,
defensive and offensive;
(3) Cancelment of the public debt, of the Empire and of its
members--creditors of the Empire being accounted accessory to the
culpable enterprise of the Imperial government;
(4) Confiscation of such industrial equipment and resources as have
contributed to the carrying on of the war, as being also accessory;
(5) Assumption by the league at large of all debts incurred, by the
Entente belligerents or by neutrals, for the prosecution or by reason of
the war, and distribution of the obligation so assumed, impartially
among the members of the league, including the peoples of the defeated
nations;
(6) Indemnification for all injury done to civilians in the invaded
territories; the means for such indemnification to be procured by
confiscation of all estates in the defeated countries exceeding a
certain very modest maximum, calculated on the average of property
owned, say, by the poorer three-fourths of the population,--the kept
classes being properly accounted accessory to the Empire's culpable
enterprise.
The proposition to let the war debt be shared by all members of the
league on a footing of impartial equality may seem novel, and perhaps
extravagant. But all projects put forth for safeguarding the world's
peace by a compact among the pacific nations run on the patent, though
often tacit, avowal that the Entente belligerents are spending their
substance and pledging their credit for the common cause. Among the
Americans, the chief of the neutral nations, this is coming to be
recognised more and more overtly. So that, in this instance at least, no
insurmountable reluctance to take over their due share of the common
burden should fairly be looked for, particularly when it appears that
the projected league, if it is organised on a footing of neutrality,
will relieve the republic of virtually all outlay for their own defense.
Of course, there is, in all this, no temerarious intention to offer
advice as to what should be done by those who have it to do, or even to
sketch the necessary course which events are bound to take. As has been
remarked in another passage, that would have to be a work of prophesy or
of effrontery, both of which, it is hoped, lie equally beyond the
horizon of this inquiry; which is occupied with the question of what
conditions will logically have to be met in order to an enduring peace,
not what will be the nature and outcome of negotiations entered into by
astute delegates pursuing the special advantage, each of his own nation.
And yet the peremptory need of reaching some practicable arrangement
whereby the peace may be kept, goes to say that even the most astute
negotiations will in some degree be controlled by that need, and may
reasonably be expected to make some approach to the simple and obvious
requirements of the situation.
* * * * *
Therefore the argument returns to the United Kingdom and the probable
limit of tolerance of that people, in respect of what they are likely to
insist on as a necessary measure of democratisation in the nations of
the second part, and what measure of national abnegation they are likely
to accommodate themselves to. The United Kingdom is indispensable to the
formation of a pacific league of neutrals. And the British terms of
adhesion, or rather of initiation of such a league, therefore, will have
to constitute the core of the structure, on which details may be
adjusted and to which concessive adjustments will have to be made by all
the rest. This is not saying that the projected league must or will be
dominated by the United Kingdom or administered in the British interest.
Indeed, it can not well be made to serve British particular interests in
any appreciable degree, except at the cost of defeat to its main
purpose; since the purposes of an enduring peace can be served only by
an effectual neutralisation of national claims and interests. But it
would mean that the neutralisation of national interests and
discriminations to be effected would have to be drawn on lines
acceptable to British taste in these matters, and would have to go
approximately so far as would be dictated by the British notions of what
is expedient, and not much farther. The pacific league of neutrals would
have much of a British air, but "British" in this connection is to be
taken as connoting the English-speaking countries rather than as
applying to the United Kingdom alone; since the entrance of the British
into the league would involve the entrance of the British colonies, and,
indeed, of the American republic as well.
The temper and outlook of this British community, therefore, becomes a
matter of paramount importance in any attempted analysis of the
situation resulting after the war, or of any prospective course of
conduct to be entered on by the pacific nations. And the question
touches not so much the temper and preconceptions of the British
community as known in recent history, but rather as it is likely to be
modified by the war experience. So that the practicability of a neutral
league comes to turn, in great measure, on the effect which this war
experience is having on the habits of thought of the British people, or
on that section of the British population which will make up the
effectual majority when the war closes. The grave interest that attaches
to this question must serve as justification for pursuing it farther,
even though there can be no promise of a definite or confident answer to
be found beforehand.
Certain general assertions may be made with some confidence. The
experiences of the war, particularly among the immediate participants
and among their immediate domestic connections--a large and increasing
proportion of the people at large--are plainly impressing on them the
uselessness and hardship of such a war. There can be no question but
they are reaching a conviction that a war of this modern kind and scale
is a thing to be avoided if possible. They are, no doubt, willing to go
to very considerable lengths to make a repetition of it impossible, and
they may reasonably be expected to go farther along that line before
peace returns. But the lengths to which they are ready to go may be in
the way of concessions, or in the way of contest and compulsion. There
need be no doubt but a profound and vindictive resentment runs through
the British community, and there is no reason to apprehend that this
will be dissipated in the course of further hostilities; although it
should fairly be expected to lose something of its earlier exuberant
malevolence and indiscrimination, more particularly if hostilities
continue for some time. It is not too much to expect, that this popular
temper of resentment will demand something very tangible in the way of
summary vengeance on those who have brought the hardships of war upon
the nation.
The manner of retribution which would meet the popular demand for
"justice" to be done on the enemy is likely to be affected by the
fortunes of war, as also the incidence of it. Should the governmental
establishment and the discretion still vest in the gentlemanly classes
at the close of hostilities, the retribution is likely to take the
accustomed gentlemanly shape of pecuniary burdens imposed on the people
of the defeated country, together with diplomatically specified
surrender of territorial and colonial possessions, and the like; such as
to leave the _de facto_ enemy courteously on one side, and to yield
something in the way of pecuniary benefit to the gentlemen-investors in
charge, and something more in the way of new emoluments of office to the
office-holding class included in the same order of gentlemen. The
retribution in the case would manifestly fall on the underlying
population in the defeated country, without seriously touching the
responsible parties, and would leave the defeated nation with a new
grievance to nourish its patriotic animosity and with a new incentive
to a policy of watchful waiting for a chance of retaliation.
But it is to be noted that under the stress of the war there is going
forward in the British community a progressive displacement of
gentlemanly standards and official procedure by standards and procedure
of a visibly underbred character, a weakening of the hold of the
gentlemanly classes on the control of affairs and a weakening of the
hold which the sacred rights of property, investment and privilege have
long had over the imagination of the British people. Should hostilities
continue, and should the exigencies of the war situation continue to
keep the futility of these sacred rights, as well as the fatuity of
their possessors, in the public eye, after the same fashion as hitherto,
it would not be altogether unreasonable to expect that the discretion
would pass into the hands of the underbred, or into the hands of men
immediately and urgently accountable to the underbred. In such a case,
and with a constantly growing popular realisation that the directorate
and responsible enemy in the war is the Imperial dynasty and its
pedigreed aids and abettors, it is conceivable that the popular
resentment would converge so effectually on these responsible
instigators and directors of misfortune as to bring the incidence of the
required retribution effectually to bear on them. The outcome might, not
inconceivably, be the virtual erasure of the Imperial dynasty, together
with the pedigreed-class rule on which it rests and the apparatus of
irresponsible coercion through which it works, in the Fatherland and in
its subsidiaries and dependencies.
With a sufficiently urgent realisation of their need of peace and
security, and with a realisation also that the way to avoid war is to
avoid the ways and means of international jealousy and of the national
discriminations out of which international jealousy grows, it is
conceivable that a government which should reflect the British temper
and the British hopes might go so far in insisting on a neutralisation
of the peoples of the Fatherland as would leave them without the
dynastic apparatus with which warlike enterprise is set afoot, and so
leave them also perforce in a pacific frame of mind. In time, in the
absence of their dearly beloved leavings of feudalism, an enforced
reliance on their own discretion and initiative, and an enforced respite
from the rant and prance of warlike swagger, would reasonably be
expected to grow into a popular habit. The German people are by no means
less capable of tolerance and neighbourly decorum than their British or
Scandinavian neighbours of the same blood,--if they can only be left to
their own devices, untroubled by the maggoty conceit of national
domination.
There is no intention herewith to express an expectation that this
out-and-out neutralisation of the Fatherland's international relations
and of its dynastic government will come to pass on the return of peace,
or that the German people will, as a precaution against recurrent
Imperial rabies, be organised on a democratic pattern by constraint of
the pacific nations of the league. The point is only that this measure
of neutralisation appears to be the necessary condition, in the absence
of which no such neutral league can succeed, and that so long as the war
goes on there is something of a chance that the British community may in
time reach a frame of mind combining such settled determination to
safeguard the peace at all costs, with such a degree of disregard for
outworn conventions, that their spokesmen in the negotiations may push
the neutralisation of these peoples to that length.
The achievement of such an outcome would evidently take time as well as
harsh experience, more time and harsher experience, perhaps, than one
likes to contemplate.
Most men, therefore, would scarcely rate the chance of such an outcome
at all high. And yet it is to be called to mind that the war has lasted
long and the effect of its demands and its experience has already gone
far, and that the longer it lasts the greater are the chances of its
prolongation and of its continued hardships, at least to the extent that
with every month of war that passes the prospect of the allied nations
making peace on any terms short of unconditional surrender grows less.
And unconditional surrender is the first step in the direction of an
unconditional dispossession of the Imperial establishment and its war
prophets,--depending primarily on the state of mind of the British
people at the time. And however unlikely, it is also always possible, as
some contend, that in the course of further war experience the common
man in the Fatherland may come to reflect on the use and value of the
Imperial establishment, with the result of discarding and disowning it
and all its works. Such an expectation would doubtless underrate the
force of ancient habit, and would also involve a misapprehension of the
psychological incidence of a warlike experience. The German people have
substantially none of those preconceptions of independence and
self-direction to go on, in the absence of which an effectual revulsion
against dynastic rule can not come to pass.
Embedded in the common sense of the British population at large is a
certain large and somewhat sullen sense of fair dealing. In this they
are not greatly different from their neighbours, if at all, except that
the body of common sense in which this British sense of fair dealing
lies embedded is a maturer fashion of common sense than that which
serves to guide the workday life of many of their neighbours. And the
maturity in question appears to be chiefly a matter of their having
unlearned, divested themselves of, or been by force of disuse divested
of, an exceptionally large proportion of that burden of untoward
conceits which western Europe, and more particularly middle Europe, at
large has carried over from the Middle Ages. They have had time and
occasion to forget more of what the exigencies of modern life make it
expedient to have forgotten. And yet they are reputed slow,
conservative. But they have been well placed for losing much of what
would be well lost.
Among other things, their preconception of national animosity is not
secure, in the absence of provocation. They are now again in a position
to learn to do without some of the useless legacy out of the
past,--useless, that is, for life as it runs today, however it may be
rated in the setting in which it was all placed in that past out of
which it has come. And the question is whether now, under the pressure
of exigencies that make for a disestablishment of much cumbersome
inherited apparatus for doing what need not be done, they will be ruled
by their sense of expediency and of fair dealing to the extent of
cancelling out of their own scheme of life so much of this legacy of
conventional preconceptions as has now come visibly to hinder their own
material well-being, and at the same time to defeat that peace and
security for which they have shown themselves willing to fight. It is,
of course, a simpler matter to fight than it is to put away a
preconceived, even if it is a bootless, superstition; as, e.g., the
prestige of hereditary wealth, hereditary gentility, national
vainglory, and perhaps especially national hatred. But if the school is
hard enough and the discipline protracted enough there is no reason in
the nature of things why the common run of the British people should not
unlearn these futilities that once were the substance of things under an
older and outworn order. They have already shown their capacity for
divesting themselves of outworn institutional bonds, in discarding the
main substance of dynastic rule; and when they now come to face the
exigencies of this new situation it should cause no great surprise if
they are able to see their way to do what further is necessary to meet
these exigencies.
* * * * *
At the hands of this British commonwealth the new situation requires the
putting away of the German Imperial establishment and the military
caste; the reduction of the German peoples to a footing of unreserved
democracy with sufficient guarantees against national trade
discriminations; surrender of all British tutelage over outlying
possessions, except what may go to guarantee their local autonomy;
cancelment of all extra-territorial pretensions of the several nations
entering into the league; neutralisation of the several national
establishments, to comprise virtual disarmament, as well as cancelment
of all restrictions on trade and of all national defense of
extra-territorial pecuniary claims and interests on the part of
individual citizens. The naval control of the seas will best be left in
British hands. No people has a graver or more immediate interest in the
freedom and security of the sea-borne trade; and the United Kingdom has
shown that it is to be trusted in that matter. And then it may well be
that neither the national pride nor the apprehensions of the British
people would allow them to surrender it; whereas, if the league is to
be formed it will have to be on terms to which the British people are
willing to adhere. A certain provision of armed force will also be
needed to keep the governments of unneutral nations in check,--and for
the purpose in hand all effectively monarchical countries are to be
counted as congenitally unneutral, whatever their formal professions and
whether they are members of the league or not. Here again it will
probably appear that the people of the United Kingdom, and of the
English-speaking countries at large, will not consent to this armed
force and its discretionary use passing out of British hands, or rather
out of French-British hands; and here again the practical decision will
have to wait on the choice of the British people, all the more because
the British community has no longer an interest, real or fancied, in the
coercive use of this force for their own particular ends. No other power
is to be trusted, except France, and France is less well placed for the
purpose and would assuredly also not covet so invidious an honour and so
thankless an office.
* * * * *
The theory, i.e. the logical necessities, of such a pacific league of
neutral nations is simple enough, in its elements. War is to be avoided
by a policy of avoidance. Which signifies that the means and the motives
to warlike enterprise and warlike provocation are to be put away, so far
as may be. If what may be, in this respect, does not come up to the
requirements of the case, the experiment, of course, will fail. The
preliminary requirement,--elimination of the one formidable dynastic
State in Europe,--has been spoken of. Its counterpart in the Far East
will cease to be formidable on the decease of its natural ally in
Central Europe, in so far as touches the case of such a projected
league. The ever increasingly dubious empire of the Czar would appear to
fall in the same category. So that the pacific league's fortunes would
seem to turn on what may be called its domestic or internal
arrangements.
Now, the means of warlike enterprise, as well as of unadvised
embroilment, is always in the last analysis the patriotic spirit of the
nation. Given this patriotic spirit in sufficient measure, both the
material equipment and the provocation to hostilities will easily be
found. It should accordingly appear to be the first care of such a
pacific league to reduce the sources of patriotic incitement to the
practicable minimum. This can be done, in such measure as it can be done
at all, by neutralisation of national pretensions. The finished outcome
in this respect, such as would assure perpetual peace among the peoples
concerned, would of course be an unconditional neutralisation of
citizenship, as has already been indicated before. The question which,
in effect, the spokesmen for a pacific league have to face is as to how
nearly that outcome can be brought to pass. The rest of what they may
undertake, or may come to by way of compromise and stipulation, is
relatively immaterial and of relatively transient consequence.
A neutralisation of citizenship has of course been afloat in a somewhat
loose way in the projects of socialistic and other "undesirable"
agitators, but nothing much has come of it. Nor have specific projects
for its realisation been set afoot. That anything conclusive along that
line could now be reached would seem extremely doubtful, in view of the
ardent patriotic temper of all these peoples, heightened just now by the
experience of war. Still, an undesigned and unguided drift in that
direction has been visible in all those nations that are accounted the
vanguard among modern civilised peoples, ever since the dynastic rule
among them began to be displaced by a growth of "free" institutions,
that is to say institutions resting on an accepted ground of
insubordination and free initiative.
The patriotism of these peoples, or their national spirit, is after all
and at the best an attenuated and impersonalised remnant of dynastic
loyalty, and it amounts after all, in effect, to nothing much else than
a residual curtailment or partial atrophy of that democratic habit of
mind that embodies itself in the formula: Live and let live. It is, no
doubt, both an ancient and a very meritorious habit. It is easily
acquired and hard to put away. The patriotic spirit and the national
life (prestige) on which it centers are the subject of untiring eulogy;
but hitherto its encomiasts have shown no cause and put forward no claim
to believe that it all is of any slightest use for any purpose that does
not take it and its paramount merit for granted. It is doubtless a very
meritorious habit; at least so they all say. But under the circumstances
of modern civilised life it is fruitful of no other net material result
than damage and discomfort. Still it is virtually ubiquitous among
civilised men, and in an admirable state of repair; and for the
calculable future it is doubtless to be counted in as an enduring
obstacle to a conclusive peace, a constant source of anxiety and
unremitting care.
The motives that work out through this national spirit, by use of this
patriotic ardor, fall under two heads: dynastic ambition, and business
enterprise. The two categories have the common trait that neither the
one nor the other comprises anything that is of the slightest material
benefit to the community at large; but both have at the same time a
high prestige value in the conventional esteem of modern men. The
relation of dynastic ambition to warlike enterprise, and the uses of
that usufruct of the nation's resources and man-power which the nation's
patriotism places at the disposal of the dynastic establishment, have
already been spoken of at length above, perhaps at excessive length, in
the recurrent discussion of the dynastic State and its quest of dominion
for dominion's sake. What measures are necessary to be taken as regards
the formidable dynastic States that threaten the peace, have also been
outlined, perhaps with excessive freedom.
But it remains to call attention to that mitigated form of dynastic rule
called a constitutional monarchy. Instances of such a constitutional
monarchy, designed to conserve the well-beloved abuses of dynastic rule
under a cover of democratic formalities, or to bring in effectual
democratic insubordination under cover of the ancient dignities of an
outworn monarchical system,--the characterisation may run either way
according to the fancy of the speaker, and to much the same practical
effect in either case,--instances illustrative of this compromise
monarchy at work today are to be had, as felicitously as anywhere, in
the Balkan states; perhaps the case of Greece will be especially
instructive. At the other, and far, end of the line will be found such
other typical instances as the British, the Dutch, or, in pathetic and
droll miniature, the Norwegian.
There is, of course, a wide interval between the grotesque effrontery
that wears the Hellenic crown and the undeviatingly decorous
self-effacement of the Dutch sovereign; and yet there is something of a
common complexion runs through the whole range of establishments, all
the way from the quasi-dynastic to the pseudo-dynastic. For reasons
unavoidable and persistent, though not inscribed in the constituent law,
the governmental establishment associated with such a royal concern will
be made up of persons drawn from the kept classes, the nobility or
lesser gentlefolk, and will be imbued with the spirit of these "better"
classes rather than that of the common run.
With what may be uncanny shrewdness, or perhaps mere tropismatic
response to the unreasoned stimulus of a "consciousness of kind," the
British government--habitually a syndicate of gentlefolk--has uniformly
insisted on the installation of a constitutional monarchy at the
formation of every new national organisation in which that government
has had a discretionary voice. And the many and various constitutional
governments so established, commonly under British auspices in some
degree, have invariably run true to form, in some appreciable degree.
They may be quasi-dynastic or pseudo-dynastic, but at this nearest
approach to democracy they always, and unavoidably, include at least a
circumlocution office of gentlefolk, in the way of a ministry and court
establishment, whose place in the economy of the nation's affairs it is
to adapt the run of these affairs to the needs of the kept classes.
There need be no imputation of sinister designs to these gentlefolk, who
so are elected by force of circumstances to guard and guide the nation's
interests. As things go, it will doubtless commonly be found that they
are as well-intentioned as need be. But a well-meaning gentleman of good
antecedents means well in a gentlemanly way and in the light of good
antecedents. Which comes unavoidably to an effectual bias in favor of
those interests which honorable gentlemen of good antecedents have at
heart. And among these interests are the interests of the kept classes,
as contrasted with that common run of the population from which their
keep is drawn.
Under the auspices, even if they are only the histrionic and decorative
auspices, of so decorous an article of institutional furniture as
royalty, it follows of logical necessity that the personnel of the
effectual government must also be drawn from the better classes, whose
place and station and high repute will make their association with the
First Gentleman of the Realm not too insufferably incongruous. And then,
the popular habit of looking up to this First Gentleman with that
deference that royalty commands, also conduces materially to the
attendant habitual attitude of deference to gentility more at large.
Even in so democratic a country, and with so exanimate a crown as is to
be found in the United Kingdom, the royal establishment visibly, and
doubtless very materially, conduces to the continued tenure of the
effectual government by representatives of the kept classes; and it
therefore counts with large effect toward the retardation of the
country's further move in the direction of democratic insubordination
and direct participation in the direction of affairs by the underbred,
who finally pay the cost. And on the other hand, even so moderately
royal an establishment as the Norwegian has apparently a sensible effect
in the way of gathering the reins somewhat into the hands of the better
classes, under circumstances of such meagerness as might be expected to
preclude anything like a "better" class, in the conventional acceptation
of that term. It would appear that even the extreme of pseudo-dynastic
royalty, sterilised to the last degree, is something of an effectual
hindrance to democratic rule, and in so far also a hindrance to the
further continued neutralisation of nationalist pretensions, as also an
effectual furtherance of upper-class rule for upper-class ends.
Now, a government by well-meaning gentlemen-investors will, at the
nearest, come no nearer representing the material needs and interests of
the common run than a parable comes to representing the concrete facts
which it hopes to illuminate. And as bears immediately on the point in
hand, these gentlemanly administrators of the nation's affairs who so
cluster about the throne, vacant though it may be of all but the bodily
presence of majesty, are after all gentlemen, with a gentlemanly sense
of punctilio touching the large proprieties and courtesies of political
life. The national honor is a matter of punctilio, always; and out of
the formal exigencies of the national honor arise grievances to be
redressed; and it is grievances of this character that commonly afford
the formal ground of a breach of the peace. An appeal on patriotic
grounds of wounded national pride, to the common run who have no trained
sense of punctilio, by the gentlemanly responsible class who have such a
sense, backed by assurances that the national prestige or the national
interests are at stake, will commonly bring a suitable response. It is
scarcely necessary that the common run should know just what the stir is
about, so long as they are informed by their trusted betters that there
is a grievance to redress. In effect, it results that the democratic
nation's affairs are administered by a syndicate composed of the least
democratic class in the population.
Excepting what is to be excepted, it will commonly hold true today that
these gentlemanly governments are conducted in a commendably clean and
upright fashion, with a conscious rectitude and a benevolent intention.
But they are after all, in effect, class governments, and they
unavoidably carry the bias of their class. The gentlemanly officials and
law-givers come, in the main, from the kept classes, whose living comes
to them in the way of income from investments, at home or in foreign
parts, or from an equivalent source of accumulated wealth or official
emolument. The bias resulting from this state of the case need not be of
an intolerant character in order to bring its modicum of mischief into
the national policy, as regards amicable relations with other
nationalities. A slight bias running on a ground of conscious right and
unbroken usage may go far. So, e.g., anyone of these gentlemanly
governments is within its legitimate rights, or rather within its
imperative duty, in defending the foreign investments of its citizens
and enforcing due payment of its citizens' claims to income or principal
of such property as they may hold in foreign parts; and it is within its
ordinary lines of duty in making use of the nation's resources--that is
to say of the common man and his means of livelihood--in enforcing such
claims held by the investing classes. The community at large has no
interest in the enforcement of such claims; it is evidently a class
interest, and as evidently protected by a code of rights, duties and
procedure that has grown out of a class bias, at the cost of the
community at large.
This bias favoring the interests of invested wealth may also, and indeed
it commonly does, take the aggressive form of aggressively forwarding
enterprise in investment abroad, particularly in commercially backward
countries abroad, by extension of the national jurisdiction and the
active countenancing of concessions in foreign parts, by subventions,
or by creation of offices to bring suitable emoluments to the younger
sons of deserving families. The protective tariffs to which recourse is
sometimes had, are of the same general nature and purpose. Of course, it
is in this latter, aggressive or excursive, issue of the well-to-do bias
in favor of investment and invested wealth that its most pernicious
effect on international relations is traceable.
Free income, that is to say income not dependent on personal merit or
exertion of any kind, is the breath of life to the kept classes; and as
a corollary of the "First Law of Nature," therefore, the invested wealth
which gives a legally equitable claim to such income has in their eyes
all the sanctity that can be given by Natural Right. Investment--often
spoken of euphemistically as "savings"--is consequently a meritorious
act, conceived to be very serviceable to the community at large, and
properly to be furthered by all available means. Invested wealth is so
much added to the aggregate means at the community's disposal, it is
believed. Of course, in point of fact, income from investment in the
hands of these gentlefolk is a means of tracelessly consuming that much
of the community's yearly product; but to the kept classes, who see the
matter from the point of view of the recipient, the matter does not
present itself in that light. To them it is the breath of life. Like
other honorable men they are faithful to their bread; and by authentic
tradition the common man, in whose disciplined preconceptions the kept
classes are his indispensable betters, is also imbued with the
uncritical faith that the invested wealth which enables these betters
tracelessly to consume a due share of the yearly product is an addition
to the aggregate means in hand.
The advancement of commercial and other business enterprise beyond the
national frontiers is consequently one of the duties not to be
neglected, and with which no trifling can be tolerated. It is so bound
up with national ideals, under any gentlemanly government, that any
invasion or evasion of the rights of investors in foreign parts, or of
other business involved in dealings with foreign parts, immediately
involves not only the material interest of the nation but the national
honour as well. Hence international jealousies and eventual embroilment.
The constitutional monarchy that commonly covers a modern democratic
community is accordingly a menace to the common peace, and any pacific
league of neutrals will be laying up trouble and prospective defeat for
itself in allowing such an institution to stand over in any instance.
Acting with a free hand, if such a thing were possible, the projected
league should logically eliminate all monarchical establishments,
constitutional or otherwise, from among its federated nations. It is
doubtless not within reason to look for such a move in the negotiations
that are to initiate the projected league of neutrals; but the point is
called to mind here chiefly as indicating one of the difficult passages
which are to be faced in any attempted formation of such a league, as
well as one of the abiding sources of international irritation with
which the league's jurisdiction will be burdened so long as a decisive
measure of the kind is not taken.
The logic of the whole matter is simple enough, and the necessary
measures to be taken to remedy it are no less simple--barring
sentimental objections which will probably prove insuperable. A
monarchy, even a sufficiently inane monarchy, carries the burden of a
gentlemanly governmental establishment--a government by and for the
kept classes; such a government will unavoidably direct the affairs of
state with a view to income on invested wealth, and will see the
material interests of the country only in so far as they present
themselves under the form of investment and business enterprise designed
to eventuate in investment; these are the only forms of material
interest that give rise to international jealousies, discriminations and
misunderstanding, at the same time that they are interests of
individuals only and have no material use or value to the community at
large. Given a monarchical establishment and the concomitant gentlemanly
governmental corps, there is no avoiding this sinister prime mover of
international rivalry, so long as the rights of invested wealth continue
in popular apprehension to be held inviolable.
Quite obviously there is a certain _tu quoque_ ready to the hand of
these "gentlemen of the old school" who see in the constitutional
monarchy a God-given shelter from the unreserved vulgarisation of life
at the hands of the unblest and unbalanced underbred and underfed. The
formally democratic nations, that have not retained even a
pseudo-dynastic royalty, are not much more fortunately placed in respect
of national discrimination in trade and investment. The American
republic will obviously come into the comparison as the type-form of
economic policy in a democratic commonwealth. There is little to choose
between the economic policy pursued by such republics as France or
America on the one side and their nearest counterparts among the
constitutional monarchies on the other. It is even to be admitted out of
hand that the comparison does no credit to democratic institutions as
seen at work in these republics. They are, in fact, somewhat the crudest
and most singularly foolish in their economic policy of any peoples in
Christendom. And in view of the amazing facility with which these
democratic commonwealths are always ready to delude themselves in
everything that touches their national trade policies, it is obvious
that any league of neutrals whose fortunes are in any degree contingent
on their reasonable compliance with a call to neutralise their trade
regulations for the sake of peace, will have need of all the persuasive
power it can bring to bear.
However, the powers of darkness have one less line of defense to shelter
them and their work of malversation in these commonwealths than in the
constitutional monarchies. The American national establishment, e.g.,
which may be taken as a fairly characteristic type-form in this bearing,
is a government of businessmen for business ends; and there is no tabu
of axiomatic gentility or of certified pedigree to hedge about this
working syndicate of business interests. So that it is all nearer by one
remove to the disintegrating touch of the common man and his commonplace
circumstances. The businesslike régime of these democratic politicians
is as undeviating in its advocacy and aid of enterprise in pursuit of
private gain under shelter of national discrimination as the
circumstances will permit; and the circumstances will permit them to do
much and go far; for the limits of popular gullibility in all things
that touch the admirable feats of business enterprise are very wide in
these countries. There is a sentimental popular belief running to the
curious effect that because the citizens of such a commonwealth are
ungraded equals before the law, therefore somehow they can all and
several become wealthy by trading at the expense of their neighbours.
Yet, the fact remains that there is only the one line of defense in
these countries where the business interests have not the countenance of
a time-honored order of gentlefolk, with the sanction of royalty in the
background. And this fact is further enhanced by one of its immediate
consequences. Proceeding upon the abounding faith which these peoples
have in business enterprise as a universal solvent, the unreserved
venality and greed of their businessmen--unhampered by the gentleman's
_noblesse oblige_--have pushed the conversion of public law to private
gain farther and more openly here than elsewhere. The outcome has been
divers measures in restraint of trade or in furtherance of profitable
abuses, of such a crass and flagrant character that if once the popular
apprehension is touched by matter-of-fact reflection on the actualities
of this businesslike policy the whole structure should reasonably be
expected to crumble. If the present conjuncture of circumstances should,
e.g., present to the American populace a choice between exclusion from
the neutral league, and a consequent probable and dubious war of
self-defense, on the one hand; as against entrance into the league, and
security at the cost of relinquishing their national tariff in restraint
of trade, on the other hand, it is always possible that the people might
be brought to look their protective tariff in the face and recognise it
for a commonplace conspiracy in restraint of trade, and so decide to
shuffle it out of the way as a good riddance. And the rest of the
Republic's businesslike policy of special favors would in such a case
stand a chance of going in the discard along with the protective tariff,
since the rest is of substantially the same disingenuous character.
Not that anyone need entertain a confident expectation of such an
exploit of common sense on the part of the American voters. There is
little encouragement for such a hope in their past career of gullibility
on this head. But this is again a point of difficulty to be faced in
negotiations looking to such a pacific league of neutrals. Without a
somewhat comprehensive neutralisation of national trade regulations, the
outlook for lasting peace would be reduced by that much; there would be
so much material for international jealousy and misunderstanding left
standing over and requiring continued readjustment and compromise,
always with the contingency of a breach that much nearer. The
infatuation of the Americans with their protective tariff and other
businesslike discriminations is a sufficiently serious matter in this
connection, and it is always possible that their inability to give up
this superstition might lead to their not adhering to this projected
neutral league. Yet it is at least to be said that the longer the time
that passes before active measures are taken toward the organisation of
such a league--that is to say, in effect, the longer the great war
lasts--the more amenable is the temper of the Americans likely to be,
and the more reluctantly would they see themselves excluded. Should the
war be protracted to some such length as appears to be promised by
latterday pronunciamentos from the belligerents, or to something
passably approaching such a duration; and should the Imperial designs
and anomalous diplomacy of Japan continue to force themselves on the
popular attention at the present rate; at the same time that the
operations in Europe continue to demonstrate the excessive cost of
defense against a well devised and resolute offensive; then it should
reasonably be expected that the Americans might come to such a
realisation of their own case as to let no minor considerations of trade
discrimination stand in the way of their making common cause with the
other pacific nations.
It appears already to be realised in the most responsible quarter that
America needs the succor of the other pacific nations, with a need that
is not to be put away or put off; as it is also coming to be realised
that the Imperial Powers are disturbers of the peace, by force of their
Imperial character. Of course, the politicians who seek their own
advantage in the nation's embarrassment are commonly unable to see the
matter in that light. But it is also apparent that the popular sentiment
is affected with the same apprehension, more and more as time passes and
the aims and methods of the Imperial Powers become more patent.
Hitherto the spokesmen of a pacific federation of nations have spoken
for a league of such an (indeterminate) constitution as to leave all the
federated nations undisturbed in all their conduct of their own affairs,
domestic or international; probably for want of second thought as to the
complications of copartnership between them in so grave and unwonted an
enterprise. They have also spoken of America's share in the project as
being that of an interested outsider, whose interest in any
precautionary measures of this kind is in part a regard for his own
tranquility as a disinterested neighbour, but in greater part a humane
solicitude for the well-being of civilised mankind at large. In this
view, somewhat self-complacent it is to be admitted, America is
conceived to come into the case as initiator and guide, about whom the
pacific nations are to cluster as some sort of queen-bee.
Now, there is not a little verisimilitude in this conception of America
as a sort of central office and a tower of strength in the projected
federation of neutral nations, however pharisaical an appearance it may
all have in the self-complacent utterances of patriotic Americans. The
American republic is, after all, the greatest of the pacific nations of
Christendom, in resources, population and industrial capacity; and it is
also not to be denied that the temper of this large population is, on
the whole, as pacific as that of any considerable people--outside of
China. The adherence of the American republic would, in effect, double
the mass and powers of the projected league, and would so place it
beyond all hazard of defeat from without, or even of serious outside
opposition to its aims.
Yet it will not hold true that America is either disinterested or
indispensable. The unenviable position of the indispensable belongs to
the United Kingdom, and carries with it the customary suspicion of
interested motives that attaches to the stronger party in a bargain. To
America, on the other hand, the league is indispensable, as a refuge
from otherwise inevitable dangers ahead; and it is only a question of a
moderate allowance of time for the American voters to realise that
without an adequate copartnership with the other pacific nations the
outlook of the Republic is altogether precarious. Single-handed, America
can not defend itself, except at a prohibitive cost; whereas in
copartnership with these others the national defense becomes a virtually
negligible matter. It is for America a choice between a policy of
extravagant armament and aggressive diplomacy, with a doubtful issue, on
the one side, and such abatement of national pretensions as would
obviate bootless contention, on the other side.
Yet, it must be admitted, the patriotic temper of the American people is
of such a susceptible kind as to leave the issue in doubt. Not that the
Americans will not endeavor to initiate some form of compact for the
keeping of the peace, when hostilities are concluded; barring unforeseen
contingencies, it is virtually a foregone conclusion that the attempt
will be made, and that the Americans will take an active part in its
promotion. But the doubt is as to their taking such a course as will
lead to a compact of the kind needed to safeguard the peace of the
country. The business interests have much to say in the counsels of the
Americans, and these business interests look to short-term
gains--American business interests particularly--to be derived from the
country's necessities. It is likely to appear that the business
interests, through representatives in Congress and elsewhere, will
disapprove of any peace compact that does not involve an increase of the
national armament and a prospective demand for munitions and an
increased expenditure of the national funds.
With or without the adherence of America, the pacific nations of Europe
will doubtless endeavour to form a league or alliance designed to keep
the peace. If America does not come into the arrangement it may well
come to nothing much more than a further continued defensive alliance of
the belligerent nations now opposed to the German coalition. In any case
it is still a point in doubt whether the league so projected is to be
merely a compact of defensive armament against a common enemy--in which
case it will necessarily be transient, perhaps ephemeral--or a more
inclusive coalition of a closer character designed to avoid any breach
of the peace, by disarmament and by disallowance and disclaimer of such
national pretensions and punctilio as the patriotic sentiment of the
contracting parties will consent to dispense with. The nature of the
resulting peace, therefore, as well as its chances of duration, will in
great measure be conditioned on the fashion of peace-compact on which it
is to rest; which will be conditioned in good part on the degree in
which the warlike coalition under German Imperial control is effectually
to be eliminated from the situation as a prospective disturber of the
peace; which, in turn, is a question somewhat closely bound up with the
further duration of the war, as has already been indicated in an earlier
passage.