By Viscount (James) Bryce.
* * * * *
London, Oct. 3.
The present war has had some unexpected consequences. It has called the
attention of the world outside of Germany to some amazing doctrines
proclaimed there, which strike at the root of all international morality
as well as of all international law, and which threaten a return to
primitive savagery, when every tribe was wont to plunder and massacre
its neighbors.
These doctrines may be found set forth in the widely circulated book of
Gen. von Bernhardi, entitled "Germany and the Next War," published in
1911, and professing to be mainly based on the teachings of the famous
professor of history, Heinrich von Treitschke. To readers in other
countries, and I trust to most readers in Germany also, they will appear
to be an outburst of militarism run mad, a product of a brain
intoxicated by love of war and by superheated national self-consciousness.
They would have deserved little notice, much less refutation, but for
one deplorable fact, viz., that action has recently been taken by the
Government of a great nation (though, as we hope and trust, without the
approval of that nation) which is consonant with them and seems to imply
belief in their soundness.
Acting on Bernhardi's Doctrines.
This fact is the conduct of the German Imperial Government in the
violation of the neutrality of Belgium, which Prussia, as well as Great
Britain and France, had solemnly guaranteed by treaty (made in 1839 and
renewed in 1870); in invading Belgium when she refused to allow her
armies to pass, although France, the other belligerent, had explicitly
promised not to enter Belgium; and in treating Belgian cities and people
against whom she had no cause of quarrel with a harshness unprecedented
in the history of modern European warfare.
What are these doctrines? I do not for a moment attribute them to the
learned class in Germany, for whom I have profound respect, recognizing
their immense services to science and learning; nor to the bulk of the
civil administration, a body whose capacity and uprightness are known to
all the world, and least of all to the German people generally. That the
latter hold no such views appears from Bernhardi's own words, for he
repeatedly complains of and deplores the pacific tendencies of his
fellow countrymen.
[_Note--See Pp. 10-14 of the English translation and note the
phrase: "Aspirations for peace seem to poison the soul of the
German people._"]
Nevertheless, the fact that the action referred to, which these
doctrines seem to have prompted, and which cannot be defended except by
them, has been actually taken and has thus brought into this war Great
Britain, whose interests and feelings made her desire peace, renders it
proper to call attention to them and to all that they involve.
I have certainly no prejudice in the matter, for I have been one of
those who for many years labored to promote good relations between the
German and English peoples, that ought to be friendly, and that never
before had been enemies; and I had hoped and believed till the beginning
of August last that between them at least there would be no war, because
Belgian neutrality would be respected.
Nor was it only for the sake of Great Britain and Germany that English
friends of peace sought to maintain good feeling. We had hoped, as some
leading German statesmen had hoped, that a friendliness with Germany
might enable Great Britain, with the co-operation of the United States,
our closest friends, to mitigate the long antagonism of Germany and of
the French, with whom we were already on good terms, and to so improve
their relations as to secure the general peace of Europe.
Into the causes which frustrated these efforts and so suddenly brought
on this war I will not enter. Many others have dealt with them;
moreover, the facts, at least as we in England see and believe them, and
as the documents seem to prove them to be, appear not to be known to the
German people, and the motives of the chief actors are not yet fully
ascertained.
One thing, however, I can confidently declare: It was neither commercial
rivalry nor jealousy of German power that brought Great Britain into the
field, nor was there any hatred in the British people for the German
people, nor any wish to break their power. The leading political
thinkers and historians of England had given hearty sympathy to the
efforts made by the German people, from 1815 to 1866 and 1870, to attain
political unity, and they had sympathized with the parallel efforts of
the Italians. The two nations, German and British, were of kindred race
and linked by many ties. To the German people even now we feel no sort
of enmity. In both countries there were doubtless some persons who
desired war and whose writings, apparently designed to provoke it, did
much to misrepresent general national sentiment; but these persons were,
as I believe, a small minority in both countries.
So far as Great Britain was concerned, it was the invasion of Belgium
that arrested all efforts to avert war and made the friends of peace
themselves join in holding that the duty of fulfilling their treaty
obligations to a weak State was paramount to every other consideration.
Bernhardi's Praise of War.
I return to the doctrines set forth by von Bernhardi and apparently
accepted by the military caste to which he belongs. Briefly summed up,
they are as follows--his own words are used except when it becomes
necessary to abridge a lengthened argument:
* War is in itself a good thing. It is a biological necessity of
the first importance. (P. 18.)
* The inevitableness, the idealism, the blessing of war as an
indispensable and stimulating law of development must be repeatedly
emphasized. (P. 37.)
* War is the greatest factor in the furtherance of culture and
power. Efforts to secure peace are extraordinarily detrimental as
soon as they influence politics. (P. 28.)
* Fortunately these efforts can never attain their ultimate
objects in a world bristling with arms, where healthy egotism still
directs the policy of most countries. God will see to it, says
Treitschke, that war always recurs as a drastic medicine for the
human race. (P. 36.)
* Efforts directed toward the abolition of war are not only
foolish, but absolutely immoral, and must be stigmatized as
unworthy of the human race. (P. 34.)
* Courts of arbitration are pernicious delusions. The whole idea
represents a presumptuous encroachment on natural laws of
development, which can only lead to the most disastrous
consequences for humanity generally. (P. 34.)
* The maintenance of peace never can be or may be the goal of a
policy.
* Efforts for peace would, if they attained their goal, lead to
general degeneration, as happens everywhere in nature where the
struggle for existence is eliminated. (P. 35.)
* Huge armaments are in themselves desirable. They are the most
necessary precondition of our national health. (P. 11.)
* The end all and be all of a State is power, and he who is not
man enough to look this truth in the face should not meddle with
politics, (quoted from Treitschke's "Politik").
* The State's highest moral duty is to increase its power. (P.
45-6.)
* The State is justified in making conquests whenever its own
advantage seems to require additional territory. (P. 46.)
* Self-preservation is the State's highest ideal and justifies
whatever action it may take if that action be conducive to that
end. The State is the sole judge of the morality of its own action.
It is, in fact, above morality, or, in other words, whatever is
necessary is moral. Recognized rights (i.e., treaty rights) are
never absolute rights; they are of human origin, and, therefore,
imperfect and variable. There are conditions in which they do not
correspond to the actual truth of things. In this case infringement
of the right appears morally justified. (P. 49.)
* In fact, the State is a law unto itself. Weak nations have not
the same right to live as powerful and vigorous nations. (P. 34.)
* Any action in favor of collective humanity outside the limits
of the State and nationality is impossible. (P. 25.)
* * * * *
A Doctrine 2,200 Years Old.
These are startling propositions, though propounded as practically
axiomatic. They are not new, for twenty-two centuries ago the sophist
Thrasymachus in Plato's "Republic" argued--Socrates refuting him--that
justice is nothing more than the advantage of the stronger; might is
right.
[_Note.--Plato laid down that the end for which the State exists is
justice._]
The most startling among them are (1) denial that there are any duties
owed by the State to humanity, except that of imposing its own superior
civilization upon as large a part of humanity as possible, and (2)
denial of the duty of observing treaties which are only so much paper to
modern German writers.
The State is a much more tremendous entity than it is to Englishmen or
Americans; it is the supreme power, with a sort of mystic sanctity--a
power conceived of, as it were, self-created; a force altogether
distinct from and superior to the persons who compose it. But a State
is, after all, only so many individuals organized under a Government. It
is no wiser, no more righteous than the human beings of whom at
consists, and whom it sets up to govern it. If it is right for persons
united as citizens into a State to rob and murder for their collective
advantage by their collective power, why should it be wicked for
citizens, as individuals, to do so? Does their moral responsibility
cease when and because they act together? Most legal systems hold that
there are acts which one man may lawfully do which become unlawful if
done by a number of men conspiring together; but now it would seem that
what would be a crime in persons as individuals, is high policy for
those persons united in a State. Has the State, then, no morality, no
responsibility? Is there no such thing as a common humanity? Are there
no duties owed to it? Is there none of that "decent respect to the
opinions of mankind," which the framers of the Declaration of
Independence recognized? No sense that even the greatest States are
amenable to the sentiment of the civilized world?
How Weaker States Are Affected.
Let us see how these doctrines affect smaller and weaker States which
have hitherto lived in comparative security beside great powers. They
will be absolutely at the mercy of the stronger, even if protected by
treaties guaranteeing their neutrality and independence. They will not
be safe, for treaty obligations are worthless "when they do not
correspond to facts," i.e., when the strong power finds that they stand
in its way its interests are paramount.
If a State hold valuable minerals, as Sweden has iron, and Belgium coal,
and Rumania oil, or if it has abundance of water power, like Norway,
Sweden, and Switzerland; or if it holds the mouth of a navigable river,
the upper course of which belongs to another nation, a great State may
conquer and annex that small State as soon as it finds that it needs
minerals or water power or river mouth. It has the power, and power
gives right. The interests, sentiments of patriotism, and love of
independence of the small people go for nothing. Civilization has turned
back upon itself; culture is to expand itself by barbaric force;
Governments derive their authority, not from the consent of the
governed, but from the weapons of the conqueror; law and morality
between nations have vanished. Herodotus tells us that the Scythians
worshipped as their god a naked sword; that is the deity to be installed
in the place once held by the God of Christianity, the God of
righteousness and mercy.
States--mostly despotic States--have sometimes applied parts of this
system of doctrine; but none have proclaimed it. The Roman conquerors of
the world were not a scrupulous people, but even they stopped short of
these principles; certainly they never set them up as an ideal; neither
did those magnificent Teutonic Emperors of the Middle Ages, whose fame
Gen. von Bernhardi is fond of recalling. They did not enter Italy as
conquerors, claiming her by right of the strongest; they came on the
faith of a legal title which, however fantastic it may seem to us today,
the Italians themselves, and, indeed, the whole of Latin Christendom,
admitted. Dante, the greatest and most patriotic of Italians, welcomed
the Emperor Henry VII. into Italy, and wrote a famous book to prove his
claims, vindicating them on the ground that he, as heir of Rome, stood
for law and right and peace. The noblest title which these Emperors
chose to bear was that of Imperator Pacificus.
In the Middle Ages, when men were always fighting, they appreciated the
blessings of war much less than does Gen. von Bernhardi, and they valued
peace, not war, as a means to civilization and culture. They had not
learned in the school of Treitschke that peace means decadence and war
is the true civilizing influence.
Great Achievements of Small States.
The doctrines above stated are, as I have tried to point out, well
calculated to alarm small States which prize their liberty and their
individuality, and have been thriving under the safeguard of treaties;
but there are other considerations affecting those States which ought to
appeal to men in all countries, to strong nations as well as to weak
nations.
The small States whose absorption is now threatened have been a potent
and useful--perhaps the most potent and useful--factor in the advance of
civilization. It is in them and by them that most of what is most
precious in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in science, and in
art has been produced.
The first great thoughts that brought man into true relation with God
came from a tiny people inhabiting a country smaller than Denmark. The
religions of mighty Babylon and populous Egypt have vanished; the
religion of Israel remains in its earlier as well as in that later form
which has overspread the world.
The Greeks were a small people, not united in one great State, but
scattered over coasts and among hills in petty city communities, each
with its own life. Slender in numbers, but eager, versatile, and
intense, they gave us the richest, most varied, and most stimulating of
all literatures.
When poetry and art reappeared after the long night of the Dark Ages,
their most splendid blossoms flowered in the small republics of Italy.
In modern Europe what do we not owe to little Switzerland, lighting the
torch of freedom 600 years ago and keeping it alight through all the
centuries when despotic monarchies held the rest of the European
Continent? And what to free Holland, with her great men of learning and
her painters surpassing those of all other countries save Italy?
So the small Scandinavian nations have given to the world famous men of
science, from Linnaeus downward; poets like Tegnor and Björnson;
scholars like Madvig; dauntless explorers like Fridtjof Nansen.
England had in the age of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton a population
little larger than that of Bulgaria today. The United States in the days
of Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Hamilton and Marshall
counted fewer inhabitants than Denmark or Greece. In the most brilliant
generations of German literature and thought, the age of Kant and
Lessing and Goethe, of Hegel and Schiller and Fichte, there was no real
German State at all, but a congeries of principalities and free
cities--independent centres of intellectual life in which letters and
science produced a richer crop than the two succeeding generations have
raised, just as Great Britain also, with eight times the population of
the year 1600, has had no more Shakespeares or Miltons.
Culture Decayed in Imperial Rome.
No fiction is more palpably contradicted by history than that relied on
by the school to which von Bernhardi belongs--that culture, literary,
scientific, and artistic, flourishes best in great military States. The
decay of art and literature in the Roman world began just when Rome's
military power had made that world one great and ordered State. The
opposite view would be much nearer the truth, though one must admit that
no general theory regarding the relations of art and letters to
Governments and political conditions has ever yet been proved to be
sound.
[_Note--Gen. von Bernhardi's knowledge of current history may be
estimated by the fact that he assumes_ (1) _that trade rivalry
makes war probable between Great Britain and the United States;_
(2) _that he believes that the Indian princes and peoples are
likely to revolt against Great Britain should she be involved in
war, and_ (3) _that he expects her self-governing colonies to take
such an opportunity of severing their connection with her._]
The world is already too uniform and is becoming more uniform every day.
A few leading languages, a few forms of civilization, a few types of
character, are spreading out from the seven or eight greatest States and
extinguishing weaker languages, forms, and types. Although great States
are stronger and more populous, their peoples are not necessarily more
gifted, and the extinction of the minor languages and types would be a
misfortune for the world's future development.
We may not be able to arrest the forces which seem to be making for that
extinction, but we certainly ought not strengthen them. Rather we ought
to maintain and defend the smaller States and to favor the rise and
growth of new peoples. Not merely because they were delivered from the
tyranny of Sultans like Abdul Hamid did the intellect of Europe welcome
the successively won liberations of Greece, Servia, Bulgaria, and
Montenegro; it was also in the hope that those countries would in time
develop out of their present crude conditions new types of culture, new
centres of productive intellectual life.
Gen. von Bernhardi invokes history as the ultimate court of appeal. He
appeals to Caesar; to Caesar let him go. "Die Weltgeschichte ist das
Weltgericht", ("World history is world tribunal.") History declares that
no nation, however great, is entitled to try to impose its type of
civilization on others. No race, not even the Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon,
is entitled to claim the leadership of humanity. Each people has in its
time contributed something that was distinctively its own, and the world
is far richer thereby than if any one race, however gifted, had
established its permanent ascendency.
We of the Anglo-Saxon race do not claim for ourselves, any more than we
admit in others, any right to dominate by force or to impose our own
type of civilization on less powerful races. Perhaps we have not that
assured conviction of its superiority which the school of von Bernhardi
expressed for the Teutons of North Germany. We know how much we owe,
even within our own islands, to the Celtic race; and, though we must
admit that peoples of Anglo-Saxon stock have, like others, made some
mistakes and sometimes abused their strength, let it be remembered what
have been the latest acts they have done abroad.
Praises American Altruism.
The United States have twice withdrawn their troops from Cuba, which
they could easily have retained; they have resisted all temptations to
annex any part of the territories of Mexico, in which the lives and
property of their citizens were for three years in constant danger. So
Great Britain also six years ago restored the amplest self-government to
two South African republics, having already agreed to the maintenance on
equal terms of the Dutch language; and the citizens of those republics,
which were in arms against her thirteen years ago, have now
spontaneously come forward to support her by arms under the gallant
leader who then commanded the Boers; and I may add that one reason why
the Princes of India have rallied so promptly and heartily to Great
Britain in this war is because for many years past we have avoided
annexing the territories of those Princes, allowing them to adopt heirs
when the successors of their own families failed, and leaving to them as
much as possible of the ordinary functions of government.
Service the Test of Greatness.
It is only vulgar minds that mistake bigness for greatness; for
greatness is of the soul, not of the body. In the judgment which history
will hereafter pass upon the forty centuries of recorded progress toward
civilization that now lie behind us, what are the tests it will apply to
determine the true greatness of a people? Not population, not territory,
not wealth, not military power; rather will history ask what examples of
lofty character and unselfish devotion to honor and duty has a people
given? What has it done to increase the volume of knowledge? What
thoughts and what ideals of permanent value and unexhausted fertility
has it bequeathed to mankind? What works has it produced in poetry,
music, and other arts to be an unfailing source of enjoyment to
posterity? The small peoples need not fear the application of such
tests.
The world advances, not, as the Bernhardi school supposes, only or even
mainly by fighting; it advances mainly by thinking and by the process of
reciprocal teaching and learning; by the continuous and unconscious
co-operation of all its strongest and finest minds. Each race--Hellenic,
Italic, Celtic, Teutonic, Iberian, Slavonic--has something to give, each
something to learn; and when their blood is blended the mixed stock may
combine gifts of both. Most progressive races have been those who
combined willingness to learn with strength, which enabled them to
receive without loss to their own quality, retaining their primal vigor,
but entering into the labors of others, as the Teutons who settled
within the dominions of Rome profited by the lessons of the old
civilization.
Let me disclaim once more before I close, any intention to attribute to
the German people the principles set forth by the school of Treitschke
and Bernhardi--the school which teaches hatred of peace and
arbitration, disregard of treaty obligations, scorn for weaker peoples.
We in England would feel even deeper sadness than weighs upon us now if
we could suppose that such principles had been embraced by the nation
whose thinkers have done so much for human progress and who have
produced so many shining examples of Christian saintliness; but when
those principles have been ostentatiously proclaimed, when a peaceful
neutral country which the other belligerent had solemnly and repeatedly
undertaken to respect has been invaded and treated as Belgium has been
treated, and when attempts are made to justify these deeds as incidental
to a campaign for civilization and culture, it becomes necessary to
point out how untrue and how pernicious such principles are.
Most Wars Needless and Unjust.
What are the teachings of history to which Gen. Bernhardi is fond of
appealing? That war has been the constant handmaid of tyranny and the
source of more than half the miseries of man; that, although some wars
have been necessary and have given occasion for a display of splendid
heroism--wars of defense against aggression or to succor the
oppressed--most wars have been needless or unjust; that the mark of an
advancing civilization has been the substitution of friendship for
hatred and of peaceful for warlike ideals; that small peoples have done
and can do as much for the common good of humanity as large peoples;
that treaties must be observed, (for what are they but records of
national faith, solemnly pledged, and what could bring mankind more
surely and swiftly back to that reign of violence and terror from which
it has been slowly rising for the last ten centuries than the
destruction of trust in the plighted faith of nations?)
No event has brought out that essential unity which now exists in the
world so forcibly as this war has done, for no event has ever so
affected every part of the world. Four continents are involved, the
whole of the Old World, and the New World suffers grievously in its
trade, industry, and finances. Thus the whole world is interested in
preventing the recurrence of such a calamity and there is a general
feeling throughout the world that the causes which have brought it upon
us must be removed.
We are told that armaments must be reduced; that the baleful spirit of
militarism must be quenched; that peoples must everywhere be admitted to
a fuller share in the control of foreign policy; that efforts must be
made to establish a sort of league of concord--some system of
international relations and reciprocal peace alliances by which weaker
nations may be protected and under which differences between nations may
be adjusted by courts of arbitration and conciliation of wider scope
than those that now exist.
All these things are desirable, but no scheme for preventing future wars
will have any chance of success unless it rests upon the assurance that
the States which enter into it will loyally and steadfastly abide by it,
and that each and all of them will join in coercing by their
overwhelming united strength any State which may disregard obligations
it has undertaken. The faith of treaties is the only solid foundation on
which the temple of peace can be built up.