complete form. The first bad move--though it was a relatively small and
inoffensive move--was made by France. The Powers, after much
deliberation, had come to certain conclusions concerning Morocco, and
while giving France a predominant influence in that country, had
carefully limited her power of action. But France, anxious to increase
her hold on the land, sent out, with the usual pretexts, an unnecessary
expedition to Fez. Had an international tribunal with an adequate force
behind it been in existence, France would have been called upon to
justify her action, and whether she succeeded or failed in such
justification, no further evils would have occurred. But there was no
force able or willing to call France to account, and the other Powers
found it a simpler plan to follow her example than to check it. In
pursuance of this policy, Germany sent a warship to the Moroccan port of
Agadir, using the same pretext as the French, with even less
justification. When the supreme military power of the world wags even a
finger the whole world is thrown into a state of consternation. That
happened on the present occasion, though, as a matter of fact, giants
are not given to reckless violence, and Germany, far from intending to
break the world's peace, merely used her power to take advantage of
France's bad move. She agreed to condone France's mistake, and to resign
to her the Moroccan rights to which neither country had the slightest
legitimate claim, in return for an enormous tract of land in another
part of Africa. Now, so far, the game had been played in accordance with
rules which, though by no means those of abstract justice, were fairly
in accordance with the recognized practices of nations. But now another
Power was moved to far more openly unscrupulous action. It has long been
recognized that if there must be a partition of North Africa, Italy's
share is certainly Tripoli. The action of France and of Germany stirred
up in Italy the feeling that now or never was the moment for action, and
with brutal recklessness, and the usual pretexts, now flimsier than
ever, Italy made war on Turkey, without offer of mediation, in flagrant
violation of her own undertakings at the Hague Peace Convention of 1899.
There was now only one Mohammedan country left to attack, and it was
Russia's turn to make the attack. Northern Persia--the most civilized
and fruitful half of Persia--had been placed under the protection of
Russia, and Russia, after cynically doing her best to make good
government in Persia impossible, seized on the pretext of the bad
government to invade the country. If the Powers of Europe had wished to
demonstrate the necessity for a great international tribunal, with a
mighty force behind it to ensure the observance of its decisions, they
could not have devised a more effective demonstration.
Thus it is that there can be no question of disarmament at present, and
that there can be no effective international tribunal unless it has
behind it an effective army. A great army must continue to exist apart
altogether from the question as to whether the army in itself is a
school of virtue or of vice. Both these views of its influence have been
held in extreme forms, and both seem to be without any great
justification. On this point we may perhaps accept the conclusion of
Professor Guérard, who can view the matter from a fairly impartial
standpoint, having served in the French army, closely studied the life
of the people in London, and occupied a professorial chair in
California. He denies that an army is a school of all the vices, but he
is also unable to see that it exercises an elevating influence on any
but the lowest: "A regiment is not much worse than a big factory.
Factory life in Europe is bad enough; military service extends its evils
to agricultural labourers, and also to men who would otherwise have
escaped these lowering influences. As for traces of moral uplift in the
army, I have totally failed to notice any. War may be a stern school of
virtue; barrack life is not. Honour, duty, patriotism, are feelings
instilled at school; they do not develop, but often deteriorate, during
the term of compulsory service."[235]
But, as we have seen, and as Guérard admits, it is probable that wars
will be abolished generations before armies are suppressed. The question
arises what we are to do with our armies. There seem to be at least two
ways in which armies may be utilized, as we may already see in France,
and perhaps to some slight extent in England. In the first place, the
army may be made a great educational agency, an academy of arts and
sciences, a school of citizenship. In the second place, armies are
tending to become, as William James pointed out, the reserve force of
peace, great organized unemployed bodies of men which can be brought
into use during sudden emergencies and national disasters. Thus the
French army performed admirable service during the great Seine floods a
few years ago, and both in France and in England the army has been
called upon to help to carry on public duties indispensable to the
welfare of the nation during great strikes, though here it would be
unfortunate if the army came to be regarded as a mere strike-breaking
corps. Along these main lines, however, there are, as Guérard has
pointed out, signs of a transformation which, while preserving armies
for international use, yet point to a compromise between the army and
modern democracy.
It is feared by some that the reign of universal peace will deprive them
of the opportunity of exhibiting daring and heroism. Without inquiring
too carefully what use has been made of their present opportunities by
those who express this fear, it must be said that such a fear is
altogether groundless. There are an infinite number of positions in life
in which courage is needed, as much as on a battlefield, though, for the
most part, with less risk of that total annihilation which in the past
has done so much to breed out the courageous stocks. Moreover, the
certain establishment of peace will immensely enlarge the scope for
daring and adventure in the social sphere. There are departments in the
higher breeding and social evolution of the race--some perhaps even
involving questions of life and death--where the highest courage is
needed. It would be premature to discuss them, for they can scarcely
enter the field of practical politics until war has been abolished. But
those persons who are burning to display heroism may rest assured that
the course of social evolution will offer them every opportunity.
FOOTNOTES:
[221] The respective parts of war and law in the constitution of states
are clearly and concisely set forth by Edward Jenks in his little
primer, _A History of Politics_. Steinmetz, who argues in favour of the
preservation of the method of war, in his book _Die Philosophie des
Krieges_ (p. 303) states that "not a single element of the warlike
spirit, not one of the psychic conditions of war, is lacking to the
civilized European peoples of to-day." That may well be, although there
is much reason to believe that they have all very considerably
diminished. Such warlike spirit as exists to-day must be considerably
discounted by the fact that those who manifest it are not usually the
people who would actually have to do the fighting. It is more important
to point out (as is done in a historical sketch of warfare by A.
Sutherland, _Nineteenth Century_, April, 1899) that, as a matter of
fact, war is becoming both less frequent and less ferocious. In England,
for instance, where at one period the population spent a great part of
their time in fighting, there has practically been no war for two and a
half centuries. When the ancient Germans swept through Spain (as
Procopius, who was an eye-witness, tells) they slew every human being
they met, including women and children, until millions had perished. The
laws of war, though not always observed, are constantly growing more
humane, and Sutherland estimates that warfare is now less than
one-hundredth part as destructive as it was in the early Middle Ages.
[222] This inevitable extension of the sphere of law from the settlement
of disputes between individuals to disputes between individual states
has been pointed out before, and is fairly obvious. Thus
Mougins-Roquefort, a French lawyer, in his book _De la Solution
Juridique des Conflits Internationaux_ (1889), observes that in the
days of the Roman Empire, when there was only one civilized state, any
system of international relationships was impossible, but that as soon
as we have a number of states forming units of international society
there at once arises the necessity for a system of international
relationships, just as some system of social order is necessary to
regulate the relations of any community of individuals.
[223] In England, a small and compact country, this process was completed
at a comparatively early date. In France it was not until the days of
Louis XV (in 1756) that the "last feudal brigand," as Taine calls the
Marquis de Pleumartin in Poitou, was captured and beheaded.
[224] France, notwithstanding her military aptitude, has always taken the
pioneering part in the pacific movement of civilization. Even at the
beginning of the fourteenth century France produced an advocate of
international arbitration, Pierre Dubois (Petrus de Bosco), the Norman
lawyer, a pupil of Thomas Aquinas. In the seventeenth century Emeric
Crucé proposed, for the first time, to admit all peoples, without
distinction of colour or religion, to be represented at some central
city where every state would have its perpetual ambassador, these
representatives forming an assembly to adjudicate on international
differences (Dubois and Crucé have lately been studied by Prof.
Vesnitch, _Revue d'Histoire Diplomatique_, January, 1911). The history
of the various peace projects generally has been summarily related by
Lagorgette in _Le Rôle de la Guerre_, 1906, Part IV, chap. VI.
[225] The same points had previously been brought forward by others,
although not so vigorously enforced. Thus the well-known Belgian
economist and publicist, Emile de Laveleye, pointed out (_Pall Mall
Gazette_, 4th August, 1888) that "the happiest countries are
incontestably the smallest: Switzerland, Norway, Luxembourg, and still
more the Republics of San Marino and Val d'Andorre"; and that "countries
in general, even when victorious, do not profit by their conquests."
[226] Bismarck himself declared that without the deep shame of the German
defeat at Jena in 1806 the revival of German national feeling would have
been impossible.
[227] D. Starr Jordan, The Human Harvest, 1907; J. Novikov, La Guerre et
ses Prétendus Bienfaits, 1894, chap. IV; Novikov here argued that the
selection of war eliminates not the feeble but the strong, and tends to
produce, therefore, a survival of the unfittest.
[228] "The most demoralizing features in French military life," says
Professor Guérard, a highly intelligent observer, "are due to an
incontestable progress in the French mind--its gradual loss of faith and
interest in military glory. Henceforth the army is considered as
useless, dangerous, a burden without a compensation. Authors of school
books may be censured for daring to print such opinions, but the great
majority of the French hold them in their hearts. Nay, there is a
prevailing suspicion among working men that the military establishment
is kept up for the sole benefit of the capitalists, and the reckless use
of troops in case of labour conflicts gives colour to the contention."
It has often happened that what the French think to-day the world
generally thinks to-morrow. There is probably a world-wide significance
in the fact that French experience is held to show that progress in
intelligence means the demoralization of the army.
[229] The influence of Syndicalism has, however, already reached the
English Labour Movement, and an ill-advised prosecution by the English
Government must have immensely aided in extending and fortifying that
influence.
[230] Some small beginnings have already been made. "The greatest gain
ever yet won for the cause of peace," writes Mr. H.W. Nevinson, the
well-known war correspondent (_Peace and War in the Balance_, p. 47),
"was the refusal of the Catalonian reservists to serve in the war
against the Riff mountaineers of Morocco in July, 1909.... So Barcelona
flared to heaven, and for nearly a week the people held the vast city. I
have seen many noble, as well as many terrible, events, but none more
noble or of finer promise than the sudden uprising of the Catalan
working people against a dastardly and inglorious war, waged for the
benefit of a few speculators in Paris and Madrid."
[231] J. Novikov, _Le Fédération de l'Europe_, chap. iv. Olive Schreiner,
_Woman and Labour_, chap. IV. While this is the fundamental fact, we
must remember that we cannot generalize about the ideas or the feelings
of a whole sex, and that the biological traditions of women have been
associated with a primitive period when they were the delighted
spectators of combats. "Woman," thought Nietzsche, "is essentially
unpeaceable, like the cat, however well she may have assumed the
peaceable demeanour." Steinmetz (_Philosophie des Krieges_, p. 314),
remarking that women are opposed to war in the abstract, adds: "In
practice, however, it happens that women regard a particular war--and
all wars are particular wars--with special favour"; he remarks that the
majority of Englishwomen fully shared the war fever against the Boers,
and that, on the other side, he knew Dutch ladies in Holland, very
opposed to war, who would yet have danced with joy at that time on the
news of a declaration of war against England.
[232] The general strike, which has been especially developed by the
syndicalist Labour movement, and is now tending to spread to various
countries, is a highly powerful weapon, so powerful that its results are
not less serious than those of war. To use it against war seems to be to
cast out Beelzebub by Beelzebub. Even in Labour disputes the modern
strike threatens to become as serious and, indeed, almost as sanguinary
as the civil wars of ancient times. The tendency is, therefore, in
progressive countries, as we see in Australia, to supersede strikes by
conciliation and arbitration, just as war is tending to be superseded by
international tribunals. These two aims are, however, absolutely
distinct, and the introduction of law into the disputes between nations
can have no direct effect on the disputes between social classes. It is
quite possible, however, that it may have an indirect effect, and that
when disputes between nations are settled in an orderly manner, social
feeling will forbid disputes between classes to be settled in a
disorderly manner.
[233] The Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743), a churchman without vocation,
was a Norman of noble family, and first published his Mémoires pour
rendre la Paix Perpetuelle à l'Europe in 1722. As Siégler-Pascal well
shows (Les Projets de l'Abbé dé Saint-Pierre, 1900) he was not a mere
visionary Utopian, but an acute and far-seeing thinker, practical in his
methods, a close observer, an experimentalist, and one of the first to
attempt the employment of statistics. He was secretary to the French
plenipotentiaries who negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht, and was thus
probably put on the track of his scheme. He proposed that the various
European states should name plenipotentiaries to form a permanent
tribunal of compulsory arbitration for the settlement of all
differences. If any state took up arms against one of the allies, the
whole confederation would conjointly enter the field, at their conjoint
expense, against the offending state. He was opposed to absolute
disarmament, an army being necessary to ensure peace, but it must be a
joint army composed of contingents from each Power in the confederation.
Saint-Pierre, it will be seen, had clearly grasped the essential facts
of the situation as we see them to-day. "The author of The Project of
Perpetual Peace" concludes Prof. Pierre Robert in a sympathetic summary
of his career (Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Langue et de la
Littérature Française, Vol. VI), "is the precursor of the twentieth
century." His statue, we cannot doubt, will be a conspicuous object,
beside Sully's, on the future Palace of any international tribunal.
[234] Jules de Gaultier, "Comment Naissent les Dogmes," Mercure de
France, 1st Sept., 1911. Jules de Gaultier also observes that "conflict
is the law and condition of all existence." That may be admitted, but it
ceases to be true if we assume, as the same thinker assumes, that
"conflict" necessarily involves "war." The establishment of law to
regulate the disputes between individuals by no means suppresses
conflict, but it suppresses fighting, and it ensures that if any
fighting occur the aggressor shall not profit by his aggression. In the
same way the existence of a tribunal to regulate the disputes between
national communities of individuals can by no means suppress conflict;
but unless it suppresses fighting, and unless it ensures that if
fighting occurs the aggressor shall not profit by his aggression, it
will have effected nothing.
[235] A.L. Guérard, "Impressions of Military Life in France," _Popular
Science Monthly_, April, 1911.
XI
THE PROBLEM OF AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE
Early Attempts to Construct an International Language--The Urgent
Need of an Auxiliary Language To-day--Volapük--The Claims of
Spanish--Latin--The Claims of English--Its Disadvantages--The
Claims of French--Its Disadvantages--The Modern Growth of National
Feeling opposed to Selection of a Natural Language--Advantages of
an Artificial Language--Demands it must fulfil--Esperanto--Its
Threatened Disruption--The International Association for the
adoption of an Auxiliary International Language--The First Step to
Take.
Ever since the decay of Latin as the universal language of educated
people, there have been attempts to replace it by some other medium of
international communication. That decay was inevitable; it was the
outward manifestation of a movement of individualism which developed
national languages and national literatures, and burst through the
restraining envelope of an authoritarian system expounded in an official
language. This individualism has had the freest play, and we are not
likely to lose all that it has given us. Yet as soon as it was achieved
the more distinguished spirits in every country began to feel the need
of counterbalancing it. The history of the movement may be said to begin
with Descartes, who in 1629 wrote to his friend Mersenne that it would
be possible to construct an artificial language which could be used as
an international medium of communication. Leibnitz, though he had solved
the question for himself, writing some of his works in Latin and others
in French, was yet all his life more or less occupied with the question
of a universal language. Other men of the highest distinction--Pascal,
Condillac, Voltaire, Diderot, Ampère, Jacob Grimm--have sought or
desired a solution to this problem.[236] None of these great men, however,
succeeded even in beginning an attempt to solve the problem they were
concerned with.
Some forty years ago, however, the difficulty began again to be felt,
this time much more keenly and more widely than before. The spread of
commerce, the facility of travel, the ramifications of the postal
service, the development of new nationalities and new literatures, have
laid upon civilized peoples a sense of burden and restriction which
could never have been felt by their forefathers in the previous century.
Added to this, a new sense of solidarity had been growing up in the
world; the financial and commercial solidarity, by which any disaster or
disturbance in one country causes a wave of disaster or disturbance to
pass over the whole civilized globe, was being supplemented by a sense
of spiritual solidarity. Men began to realize that the tasks of
civilization cannot be carried out except by mutual understanding and
mutual sympathy among the more civilized nations, that every nation has
something to learn from other nations, and that the bonds of
international intercourse must thus be drawn closer. This feeling of the
need of an international language led in America to several serious
attempts to obtain a consensus of opinion among scientific men regarding
an international language. Thus in 1888 the Philosophical Society of
Philadelphia, the oldest of American learned societies, unanimously
resolved, on the initiative of Brinton, to address a letter to learned
societies throughout the world, asking for their co-operation in
perfecting a language for commercial and learned purposes, based on the
Aryan vocabulary and grammar in their simplest forms, and to that end
proposing an international congress, the first meeting of which should
be held in Paris or London. In the same year Horatio Hale read a paper
on the same subject before the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. A little later, in 1890, it was again proposed at a meeting
of the same Association that, in order to consider the question of the
construction and adoption of a symmetrical and scientific language, a
congress should be held, delegates being in proportion to the number of
persons speaking each language.
These excellent proposals seem, however, to have borne little fruit. It
is always an exceedingly difficult matter to produce combined action
among scientific societies even of the same nation. Thus the way has
been left open for individuals to adopt the easier but far less decisive
or satisfactory method of inventing a new language by their own unaided
exertions. Certainly over a hundred such languages have been proposed
during the past century. The most famous of these was undoubtedly
Volapük, which was invented in 1880 by Schleyer, a German-Swiss priest
who knew many languages and had long pondered over this problem, but who
was not a scientific philologist; the actual inception of the language
occurred in a dream. Volapük was almost the first real attempt at an
organic language capable of being used for the oral transmission of
thought. On this account, no doubt, it met with great and widespread
success; it was actively taken up by a professor at Paris, societies
were formed for its propagation, journals and hundreds of books were
published in it; its adherents were estimated at a million. But its
success, though brilliant, was short-lived. In 1889, when the third
Volapük Congress was held, it was at the height of its success, but
thereafter dissension arose, and its reputation suddenly collapsed. No
one now speaks Volapük; it is regarded as a hideous monstrosity, even by
those who have the most lively faith in artificial languages. Its
inventor has outlived his language, and, like it, has been forgotten by
the world, though his achievement was a real step towards the solution
of the problem.
The collapse of Volapük discouraged thoughtful persons from expecting
any solution of the problem in an artificial language. It seemed
extremely improbable that any invented language, least of all the
unaided product of a single mind, could ever be generally accepted, or
be worthy of general acceptance, as an international mode of
communication. Such a language failed to carry the prestige necessary to
overcome the immense inertia which any attempt to adopt it would meet
with. Invented languages, the visionary schemes of idealists, apparently
received no support from practical men of affairs. It seemed to be among
actual languages, living or dead, that we might most reasonably expect
to find a medium of communication likely to receive wide support. The
difficulty then lay in deciding which language should be selected.