CHAPTER VIII

THE FIGHT FOR "THE PLACE IN THE SUN"

How Germany really expands--Where her real Colonies are--How she

exploits without conquest--What is the difference between an army

and a police force?--The policing of the world--Germany's share of

it in the Near East.

What is the practical outcome of the situation which the facts detailed

in the last chapter make plain? Must nations like Germany conclude that,

because there can be no duplication of the fight for empty territory

which took place between European nations in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, and because talk of the German conquest of British

Colonies is childish nonsense, Germany must therefore definitely

surrender any hope of expansion, and accept a secondary position because

she happens to have "come too late into the world"? Are Germans with all

their activities and scientific thoroughness, and with such a lively

sense of the difficulty of finding room in the world for the additional

million of Germans every year quietly to accept the _status quo_?

If our thoughts were not so distorted by misleading political imagery,

it is doubtful whether it would ever occur to us that such a "problem"

existed.

When one nation, say England, occupies a territory, does it mean that

that territory is "lost" to Germans? We know this to be an absurdity.

Germany does an enormous and increasing trade with the territory that

has been pre-empted by the Anglo-Saxon race. Millions of Germans in

Germany gain their livelihood by virtue of German enterprise and German

industry in Anglo-Saxon countries--indeed, it is the bitter and growing

complaint of Englishmen that they are being driven out of these

territories by the Germans; that where originally British shipping was

universal in the East,[35] German shipping is now coming to occupy the

prominent place; that the trade of whole territories which Englishmen

originally had to themselves is now being captured by Germans, and this

not merely where the fiscal arrangements are more or less under the

control of the British Government, as in the Crown Colonies, but in

those territories originally British but now independent, like the

United States, as well as in those territories which are in reality

independent, though nominally still under British control, like

Australia and Canada.

Moreover, why need Germany occupy the extraordinary position of phantom

"ownership," which England occupies, in order to enjoy all the real

benefits which in our day result from a Colonial Empire? More Germans

have found homes in the United States in the last half-century than have

Englishmen in all their Colonies. It is calculated that between ten and

twelve millions of the population of the United States are of direct

German descent It is true, of course, that Germans do not live under

their flag, but it is equally true that they do not regret that fact,

but rejoice in it! The majority of German emigrants do not desire that

the land to which they go shall have the political character of the land

which they leave behind. The fact that in adopting the United States

they have shed something of the German tradition and created a new

national type, partaking in part of the English and in part of the

German, is, on the whole, very much to their advantage--and incidentally

to ours.

Of course it is urged that, despite all this, the national sentiment

will always desire, for the overflow of its population, territories in

which that nation's language, law, and literature reign. But how far is

that aspiration one of those purely political aspirations still

persisting, it is true, but really the result of the momentum of old

ideas, the outcome of facts long since passed away, and destined to

disappear as soon as the real facts have been absorbed by the general

public?

Thus a German will shout patriotically, and, if needs be, embroil his

country in a war for an equatorial or Asiatic colony; the truth being

that he does not think about the matter seriously. But if he and his

family have to emigrate, he _does_ think about it seriously, and then it

is another matter; he does not choose Equatorial Africa or China; he

goes to the United States, which he knows to be a far better country in

which to make his home than the Cameroons or Kiau Chau could ever be.

Indeed, in England's own case, are not certain foreign countries much

more her real colonies for her children of the future than certain

territory under her own flag? Will not her children find better and more

congenial conditions, more readily build real homes, in Pennsylvania,

which is "foreign," than in Bombay, which is "British"?

Of course, if by sheer military conquest it were possible to turn a

United States or even a Canada into a real Germany--of German language,

law, literature--the matter would assume another aspect. But the facts

dealt with in the last chapter show that the day is past for conquest in

that form. Quite other means must be employed. The German conqueror of

the future would have to say with Napoleon: "I come too late. The

nations are too firmly set." Even when the English, the greatest

colonizers of the world, conquer a territory like the Transvaal or the

Orange Free State, they have no resort, having conquered it, but to

allow its own law, its own literature, its own language to have free

play, just as though the conquest had never taken place. This was even

the case with Quebec more than one hundred years ago, and Germany will

have to be guided by a like rule. On the morrow of conquest she would

have to proceed to establish her real ascendancy by other than military

means--a thing she is free to do to-day, if she can. It cannot

throughout this discussion be too often repeated that the world has been

modified, and that what was possible to the Canaanites and the Romans,

and even to the Normans, is no longer possible to us. The edict can no

longer go forth to "slay every male child" that is born into the

conquered territory, in order that the race may be exterminated.

Conquest in this sense is impossible. The most marvellous colonial

history in the world--British colonial history--demonstrates that in

this field physical force is no longer of avail.

And Germans are beginning to realize it. "We must resign ourselves in

all clearness and calm to the fact that there is no possibility of

acquiring Colonies suitable for emigration," writes Dr. P. Rohrbach. He

continues:

But if we cannot have such Colonies, it by no means follows

that we cannot obtain the advantages, if only to a limited

extent, which make these Colonies desirable. It is a mistake to

regard the mere possession of extensive trans-oceanic

territories, even when they are able to absorb a part of the

national surplus of population, as necessarily a direct

increase of power. Australia, Canada, and South Africa do not

increase the power of the British Empire because they are

British possessions, nor yet because they are peopled by a few

million British emigrants and their descendants, but because by

trade with them the wealth and with it the defensive strength

of the Mother Country are increased. Colonies which do not

produce that result have but little value; and countries which

possess this importance for a nation, even though they are not

its Colonies, are in this decisive point a substitute for

colonial possessions in the ordinary sense.[36]

In fact the misleading political imagery to which I referred a few pages

back has gone far to destroy our sense of reality and sense of

proportion in the matter of political control of foreign territory, a

fact which the diplomatic turmoil of 1911 most certainly illustrated. I

had occasion at the time to emphasize it in the following terms:

The Press of Europe and America is very busy discussing the

lessons of the diplomatic conflict which has just ended, and

the military conflict which has just begun. And the outstanding

impression which one gets from most of these essays in high

politics--whether French, Italian, or British--is that we have

been and still are witnessing part of a great world movement,

the setting in motion of Titanic forces "deep-set in primordial

needs and impulses."

For months those in the secrets of the Chancelleries have

spoken with bated breath--as though in the presence of some

vision of Armageddon. On the strength of this mere talk of war

by the three nations, vast commerical interests have been

embarrassed, fortunes have been lost and won on the Bourses,

banks have suspended payment, some thousands have been ruined;

while the fact that the fourth and fifth nations have actually

gone to war has raised all sorts of further possibilities of

conflict, not alone in Europe, but in Asia, with remoter danger

of religious fanaticism and all its sequelae. International

bitterness and suspicion in general have been intensified, and

the one certain result of the whole thing is that immense

burdens will be added in the shape of further taxation for

armaments to the already heavy ones carried by the five or six

nations concerned. For two or three hundred millions of people

in Europe, life, which with all the problems of high prices,

labor wars, unsolved social difficulties, is none too easy as

it is, will be made harder still.

The needs, therefore, that can have provoked a conflict of

these dimensions must be "primordial" indeed. In fact one

authority assures us that what we have seen going on is "the

struggle for life among men"--that struggle which has its

parallel in the whole of sentient existence.

Well, I put it to you, as a matter worth just a moment or two

of consideration, that this conflict is about nothing of the

sort; that it is about a perfectly futile matter, one which the

immense majority of the German, English, French, Italian, and

Turkish people could afford to treat with the completest

indifference. For, to the vast majority of these 250,000,000

people more or less, it does not matter two straws whether

Morocco or some vague African swamp near the Equator is

administered by German, French, Italian, or Turkish officials,

so long as it is well administered. Or rather one should go

further: if French, German, or Italian colonization of the past

is any guide, the nation which wins in the contest for

territory of this sort has added a wealth-draining incubus.

This, of course, is preposterous; I am losing sight of the need

for making provision for the future expansion of the race, for

each party to "find its place in the sun"; and Heaven knows

what!

The European Press was full of these phrases at the time, and I

attempted to weigh their real meaning by a comparison of French and

German history in the matter of national "expansion" during the last

thirty or forty years.

France has got a new empire, we are told; she has won a great

victory; she is growing and expanding and is richer by

something which her rivals are the poorer for not having.

Let us assume that she makes the same success of Morocco that

she has made of her other possessions, of, say, Tunis, which

represents one of the most successful of those operations of

colonial expansion which have marked her history during the

last forty years. What has been the precise effect on French

prosperity?

In thirty years, at a cost of many millions (it is part of

successful colonial administration in France never to let it be

known what the Colonies really cost), France has founded in

Tunis a Colony, in which to-day there are, excluding soldiers

and officials, about 25,000 genuine French colonists; just the

number by which the French population in France--the real

France--is diminishing every year! And the value of Tunis as a

market does not even amount to the sum which France spends

directly on its occupation and administration, to say nothing

of the indirect extension of military burdens which its

conquest involved; and, of course, the market which it

represents would still exist in some form, though England--or

even Germany--administered the country.

In other words, France loses every year in her home population

a Colony equivalent to Tunis--if we measure Colonies in terms

of communities made up of the race which has sprung from the

Mother Country. And yet, if once in a generation her rulers and

diplomats can point to 25,000 Frenchmen living artificially

and exotically under conditions which must in the long-run be

inimical to their race, it is pointed to as "expansion" and as

evidence that France is maintaining her position as a Great

Power. In a few years, as history goes, unless there is some

complete change in tendencies, which at present seem as strong

as ever, the French race, as we know it, will have ceased to

exist, swamped without the firing, may be, of a single shot, by

the Germans, Belgians, English, Italians, and Jews. There are

to-day more Germans in France than there are Frenchmen in all

the Colonies that France has acquired in the last half-century,

and German trade with France outweighs enormously the trade of

France with all French Colonies. France is to-day a better

Colony for the Germans than they could make of any exotic

Colony which France owns.

"They _tell_ me," said a French Deputy recently (in a not quite

original _mot_), "that the Germans are at Agadir. I _know_ they

are in the Champs-Elysees." Which, of course, is in reality a

much more serious matter.

On the other side we are to assume that Germany has during the

period of France's expansion,--since the war--not expanded at

all. That she has been throttled and cramped--that she has not

had her place in the sun; and that is why she must fight for it

and endanger the security of her neighbors.

Well, I put it to you again that all this in reality is false:

that Germany has not been cramped or throttled; that, on the

contrary, as we recognize when we get away from the mirage of

the map, her expansion has been the wonder of the world. She

has added twenty millions to her population--one-half the

present population of France--during a period in which the

French population has actually diminished. Of all the nations

in Europe, she has cut the biggest slice in the development of

world trade, industry, and influence. Despite the fact that she

has not "expanded" in the sense of mere political dominion, a

proportion of her population, equivalent to the white

population of the whole Colonial British Empire, make their

living, or the best part of it, from the development and

exploitation of territory outside her borders. These facts are

not new, they have been made the text of thousands of political

sermons preached in England itself during the last few years;

but one side of their significance seems to have been missed.

We get, then, this: On the one side a nation extending

enormously its political dominion, and yet diminishing in

national force--if by national force we mean the growth of a

sturdy, enterprising, vigorous people. (I am not denying that

France is both wealthy and comfortable, to a greater degree it

may be than her rival; but that is another story.) On the other

side, we get immense expansion expressed in terms of those

things--a growing and vigorous population, and the possibility

of feeding them--and yet the political dominion, speaking

practically, has hardly been extended at all.

Such a condition of things, if the common jargon of high

politics means anything, is preposterous. It takes nearly all

meaning out of most that we hear about "primordial needs" and

the rest of it.

As a matter of fact, we touch here one of the vital confusions,

which is at the bottom of most of the present political trouble

between nations, and shows the power of the old ideas and the

old phraseology.

In the days of the sailing ship and the lumbering wagon

dragging slowly over all but impassable roads, for one country

to derive any considerable profit from another it had

practically to administer it politically. But the compound

steam-engine, the railway, the telegraph, have profoundly

modified the elements of the whole problem. In the modern world

political dominion is playing a more and more effaced role as a

factor in commerce; the non-political factors have in practice

made it all but inoperative. It is the case with every modern

nation, actually, that the outside territories which it

exploits most successfully are precisely those of which it does

not "own" a foot. Even with the most characteristically

colonial of all--Great Britain--the greater part of her

overseas trade is done with countries which she makes no

attempt to "own," control, coerce, or dominate--and

incidentally she has ceased to do any of those things with her

Colonies.

Millions of Germans in Prussia and Westphalia derive profit or

make their living out of countries to which their political

dominion in no way extends. The modern German exploits South

America by remaining at home. Where, forsaking this principle,

he attempts to work through political power, he approaches

futility. German Colonies are Colonies _pour rire_. The

Government has to bribe Germans to go to them; her trade with

them is microscopic; and if the twenty millions who have been

added to Germany's population since the war had had to depend

on their country's political conquest, they would have had to

starve. What feeds them are countries which Germany has never

"owned," and never hopes to "own": Brazil, Argentina, the

United States, India, Australia, Canada, Russia, France, and

England. (Germany, which never spent a mark on its political

conquest, to-day draws more tribute from South America than

does Spain, which has poured out mountains of treasure and

oceans of blood in its conquest.) These are Germany's real

Colonies. Yet the immense interests which they represent, of

really primordial concern to Germany, without which so many of

her people would be actually without food, are for the

diplomats and the soldiers quite secondary ones; the immense

trade which they represent owes nothing to the diplomat, to

Agadir incidents, to _Dreadnoughts_: it is the unaided work of

the merchant and the manufacturer. All this diplomatic and

military conflict and rivalry, this waste of wealth, the

unspeakable foulness which Tripoli is revealing, are reserved

for things which both sides to the quarrel could sacrifice, not

merely without loss, but with profit. And Italy, whose

statesmen have been faithful to all the old "axioms" (Heaven

save the mark!) will discover it rapidly enough. Even her

defenders are ceasing now to urge that she can possibly derive

any real benefit from this colossal ineptitude.

Is it not time that the man in the street--verily, I believe,

less deluded by diplomatic jargon than his betters, less the

slave of an obsolete phraseology--insisted that the experts in

the high places acquired some sense of the reality of things,

of proportions, some sense of figures, a little knowledge of

industrial history, of the real processes of human

co-operation?

But are we to assume that the extension of a European nation's authority

overseas can never be worth while; or that it could, or should, never be

the occasion for conflict between nations; or that the role of, say,

England in India or Egypt, is neither useful nor profitable?

In the second part of this book I have attempted to uncover the general

principle--which sadly needs establishing in politics--serving to

indicate clearly the advantageous and disadvantageous employment of

force. Because force plays an undoubted role in human development and

co-operation, it is sweepingly concluded that military force and the

struggle between groups must always be a normal feature of human

society.

To a critic, who maintained that the armies of the world were necessary

and justifiable on the same grounds as the police forces of the world

("Even in communities such as London, where, in our civic capacity, we

have nearly realized all your ideals, we still maintain and are

constantly improving our police force"), I replied:

When we learn that London, instead of using its police for the

running in of burglars and "drunks," is using them to lead an

attack on Birmingham for the purpose of capturing that city as

part of a policy of "municipal expansion," or "Civic

Imperialism," or "Pan-Londonism," or what not; or is using its

force to repel an attack by the Birmingham police acting as the

result of a similar policy on the part of the Birmingham

patriots--when that happens you can safely approximate a police

force to a European army. But until it does, it is quite

evident that the two--the army and the police force--have in

reality diametrically opposed roles. The police exist as an

instrument of social co-operation; the armies as the natural

outcome of the quaint illusion that though one city could never

enrich itself by "capturing" or "subjugating" another, in some

unexplained way one country can enrich itself by capturing or

subjugating another.

In the existing condition of things in England this illustration covers

the whole case; the citizens of London would have no imaginable interest

in "conquering" Birmingham, or _vice versa_. But suppose there arose in

the cities of the North such a condition of disorder that London could

not carry on its ordinary work and trade; then London, if it had the

power, _would_ have an interest in sending its police into Birmingham,

presuming that this could be done. The citizens of London would have a

tangible interest in the maintenance of order in the North--they would

be the richer for it.

Order was just as well maintained in Alsace-Lorraine before the German

conquest as it was after, and for that reason Germany has not benefited

by the conquest. But order was not maintained in California, and would

not have been as well maintained under Mexican as under American rule,

and for that reason America has benefited by the conquest of California.

France has benefited by the conquest of Algeria, England by that of

India, because in each case the arms were employed not, properly

speaking, for conquest at all, but for police purposes, for the

establishment and maintenance of order; and, so far as they achieved

that object, their role was a useful one.

How does this distinction affect the practical problem under discussion?

Most fundamentally. Germany has no need to maintain order in England,

nor England in Germany, and the latent struggle therefore between these

two countries is futile. It is not the result of any inherent necessity

of either people; it is the result merely of that woeful confusion which

dominates statecraft to-day, and it is bound, so soon as that confusion

is cleared up, to come to an end.

Where the condition of a territory is such that the social and economic

co-operation of other countries with it is impossible, we may expect the

intervention of military force, not as the result of the "annexationist

illusion," but as the outcome of real social forces pushing to the

maintenance of order. That is the story of England in Egypt, or, for

that matter, in India. But foreign nations have no need to maintain

order in the British Colonies, nor in the United States; and though

there might be some such necessity in the case of countries like

Venezuela, the last few years have taught us that by bringing these

countries into the great economic currents of the world, and so setting

up in them a whole body of interests in favor of order, more can be done

than by forcible conquest. We occasionally hear rumors of German designs

in Brazil and elsewhere, but even the modicum of education possessed by

the average European statesman makes it plain to him that these nations

are, like the others, "too firmly set" for military occupation and

conquest by an alien people.

It is one of the humors of the whole Anglo-German conflict that so much

has the British public been concerned with the myths and bogies of the

matter that it seems calmly to have ignored the realities. While even

the wildest Pan-German has never cast his eyes in the direction of

Canada, he has cast them, and does cast them, in the direction of Asia

Minor; and the political activities of Germany may centre on that area,

for precisely the reasons which result from the distinction between

policing and conquest, which I have drawn. German industry is coming to

have dominating interests in the Near East, and as those interests--her

markets and investments--increase, the necessity for better order in,

and the better organization of, those territories increases in

corresponding degree. Germany may need to police Asia Minor.

What interest have we in attempting to prevent her? It may be urged that

she would close the markets of those territories against us. But even if

she attempted it, which she is never likely to do, a Protectionist Asia

Minor organized with German efficiency would be better from the point of

view of trade than a Free Trade Asia Minor organized _a la Turque_.

Protectionist Germany is one of the best markets in Europe. If a second

Germany were created in the Near East, if Turkey had a population with

the German purchasing power and the German tariff, the markets would be

worth some two hundred to two hundred and fifty millions instead of some

fifty to seventy-five. Why should we try to prevent Germany increasing

our trade?

It is true that we touch here the whole problem of the fight for the

open door in the undeveloped territories. But the real difficulty in

this problem is not the open door at all, but the fact that Germany is

beating England--or England fears she is beating her in those

territories where she has the same tariff to meet that Germany has, or

even a smaller one; and that she is even beating England in the

territories that the English already "own"--in their Colonies, in the

East, in India. How, therefore, would England's final crushing of

Germany in the military sense change anything? Suppose England crushed

her so completely that she "owned" Asia Minor and Persia as completely

as she owns India or Hong Kong, would not the German merchant continue

to beat her even then, as he is beating her now, in that part of the

East over which she already holds political sway? Again, how would the

disappearance of the German navy affect the problem one way or the

other?

Moreover, in this talk of the open door in the undeveloped territories,

we again seem to lose all our sense of proportion. English trade is in

relative importance first with the great nations--the United States,

France, Germany, Argentina, South America generally--after that with the

white Colonies; after that with the organized East; and last of all, and

to a very small extent, with the countries concerned in this squabble

for the open door--territories in which the trade really is so small as

hardly to pay for the making and upkeep of a dozen battleships.

When the man in the street, or, for that matter, the journalistic

pundit, talks commercial diplomacy, his arithmetic seems to fall from

him. Some years since the question of the relative position of the

three Powers in Samoa exercised the minds of these wiseacres, who got

fearfully warlike both in England and in the United States. Yet the

trade of the whole island is not worth that of an obscure Massachusetts

village, and the notion that naval budgets should be increased to

"maintain our position," the notion that either of the countries

concerned should really think it worth while to build so much as a

single battleship the more for such a purpose, is not throwing away a

sprat to catch a whale, but throwing away a whale to catch a sprat--and

then not catching it. For even when you _have_ the predominant political

position, even when you _have_ got your extra _Dreadnought_ or extra

dozen _Dreadnoughts_, it is the more efficiently organized nation on the

commercial side that will take the trade. And while England is getting

excited over the trade of territories that matter very little, rivals,

including Germany, will be quietly walking off with the trade that

_does_ matter, will be increasing their hold upon such markets as the

United States, Argentina, South America, and the lesser Continental

States.

If we really examined these questions without the old meaningless

prepossessions, we should see that it is more to the general interest to

have an orderly and organized Asia Minor under German tutelage than to

have an unorganized and disorderly one which should be independent.

Perhaps it would be best of all that Great Britain should do the

organizing, or share it with Germany, though England has her hands full

in that respect--Egypt and India are problems enough. Why should

England forbid Germany to do in a small degree what she has done in a

large degree? Sir Harry H. Johnston, in the _Nineteenth Century_ for

December, 1910, comes a great deal nearer to touching the real kernel of

the problem that is preoccupying Germany than any of the writers on the

Anglo-German conflict of whom I know. As the result of careful

investigation, he admits that Germany's real objective is not, properly

speaking, England or England's Colonies at all, but the undeveloped

lands of the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, down even to the

mouth of the Euphrates. He adds that the best informed Germans use this

language to him:

In regard to England, we would recall a phrase dropped by

ex-President Roosevelt at an important public speech in London,

a phrase which for some reason was not reported by the London

Press. Roosevelt said that the best guarantee for Great Britain

on the Nile is the presence of Germany on the Euphrates.

Putting aside the usual hypocrisies of the Teutonic peoples,

you know that this is so. You know that we ought to make common

cause in our dealing with the backward races of the world. Let

Britain and Germany once come to an agreement in regard to the

question of the Near East, and the world can scarcely again be

disturbed by any great war in any part of the globe, if such a

war is contrary to the interests of the two Empires.

Such, declares Sir Harry, is German opinion. And in all human

probability, so far as sixty-five million people can be said to have

the same opinion, he is absolutely right.

It is because the work of policing backward or disorderly populations is

so often confused with the annexationist illusion that the danger of

squabbles in the matter is a real one. Not the fact that England is

doing a real and useful work for the world at large in policing India

creates jealousy of her work there, but the notion that in some way she

"possesses" this territory, and draws tribute and exclusive advantage

therefrom. When Europe is a little more educated in these matters, the

European populations will realize that they have no primordial interest

in furnishing the policemen. German public opinion will see that, even

if such a thing were possible, the German people would gain no advantage

by replacing England in India, especially as the final result of the

administrative work of Europe in the Near and Far East will be to make

populations like those of Asia Minor in the last resort their own

policemen. Should some Power, acting as policeman, ignoring the lessons

of history, try again the experiment tried by Spain in South America and

later by England in North America, should she try to create for herself

exclusive privileges and monopolies, the other nations have means of

retaliation apart from the military ones--in the numberless instruments

which the economic and financial relationships of nations furnish.

PART II

THE HUMAN NATURE AND MORALS OF THE CASE

CHAPTER I

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CASE FOR WAR

The non-economic motives of war--Moral and psychological--The

importance of these pleas--English, German, and American

exponents--The biological plea.

Perhaps the commonest plea urged in objection to the case presented in

the first part of this book is that the real motives of nations in going

to war are not economic at all; that their conflicts arise from moral

causes, using that word in its largest sense; that they are the outcome

of conflicting views of rights; or that they arise from, not merely

non-economic, but also non-rational causes--from vanity, rivalry, pride

of place, the desire to be first, to occupy a great situation in the

world, to have power or prestige; from quick resentment of insult or

injury; from temper; the unreasoned desire, which comes of quarrel or

disagreement, to dominate a rival at all costs; from the "inherent

hostility" that exists between rival nations; from the contagion of

sheer passion, the blind strife of mutually hating men; and generally

because men and nations always have fought and always will, and because,

like the animals in Watt's doggerel, "it is their nature to."

An expression of the first point of view is embodied in the criticism of

an earlier edition of this book, in which the critic says:

The cause of war is spiritual, not material.... The great wars

arose from conflicts as to rights, and the dangerous causes of

war are the existence of antagonistic ideas of rights or

righteousness.... It is for moral ideas that men are most ready

to make sacrifices.[37]

A similar criticism is made by Admiral Mahan.[38]

In the same way the London _Spectator_ while admitting the truth of the

principles outlined in the first part of this book, deems that such

facts do not seriously affect the basic cause of war:

Just as individuals quarrel among themselves, and fight as

bitterly as the police and the law courts will allow them, not

because they think it will make them rich, but because their

blood is up, and they want to stand up for what they believe to

be their rights, or to revenge themselves for wrongs done to

them, as they think, by their fellows, so nations will fight,

even though it is demonstrable that they will get no material

gain thereby.... They want sometimes freedom, sometimes power.

Sometimes a passion for expansion or dominion comes over them.

Sometimes they seem impelled to fight for fighting's sake, or,

as their leaders and rhetoricians vaguely say, to fulfil their

destinies.... Men fight sometimes for the love of fighting,

sometimes for great and noble causes, and sometimes for bad

causes, but practically never with an account-book and a

balance-sheet in their hands.

I desire to give every possible weight to this plea, and not to shirk a

detail of it, and I think that the pages that follow cover every one of

the points here raised. But there is a whole school of philosophy which

goes much farther than the _Spectator_. The view just cited rather

implies that though it is a fact that men settle their differences by

force and passion, instead of by reason, it is a regrettable fact. But

the school to which I refer urges that men should be encouraged to

fight, and that war is the preferable solution. War, declare these

philosophers, is a valuable discipline for the nations, and it is not

desirable to see human conflict shifted from the plane of physical

force. They urge that humanity will be permanently the poorer when, as

one of them has put it, the great struggles of mankind become merely the

struggles of "talk and money-bags."

Parenthetically, it should be pointed out that the matter has a good

deal more than academic interest. This philosophy constitutes a constant

element of resistance to that reform of political thought and tradition

in Europe which must be the necessary precedent of a sounder condition.

Not merely, of course, do international situations become infinitely

more dangerous when you get, on both sides of the frontier, a general

"belief in war for war's sake," but a tendency is directly created to

discredit the use of patience, a quality as much needed in the

relationship of nations as in that of individuals; and further there is

a tendency to justify political action making for war as against action

that might avoid it. All these pleas, biological and otherwise, are

powerful factors in creating an atmosphere and temperament in Europe

favorable to war and unfavorable to international agreement. For, be it

noted, this philosophy is not special to any one country: one finds it

plentifully expressed in England and America, as well as in France and

Germany. It is a European doctrine, part of that "mind of Europe," of

which someone has spoken, that, among other factors, determines the

character of European civilization generally.

This particular point of view has received a notable re-statement quite

recently[39] from General Bernhardi, a distinguished cavalry General,

and probably the most influential German writer on current strategical

and tactical problems, in his book, "Deutschland und der naechste

Krieg."[40] He therein gives very candid expression to the opinion that

Germany must, regardless of the rights and interests of other peoples,

fight her way to predominance. One of the chapters is headed, "The Duty

to Make War." He describes the peace movement in Germany as "poisonous,"

and proclaims the doctrine that the duties and tasks of the German

people cannot be fulfilled save by the sword. "The duty of

self-assertion is by no means exhausted in the mere repelling of

hostile attacks. It includes the need of securing to the whole people,

which the State embraces, the possibility of existence and development."

It is desirable, declares the author, that conquest shall be effected by

war, and not by peaceful means; Silesia would not have had the same

value for Prussia if Frederick the Great had obtained it from an

Arbitration Court. The attempt to abolish war is not only "immoral and

unworthy of humanity," it is an attempt to deprive man of his highest

possession--the right to stake physical life for ideal ends. The German

people "must learn to see that the maintenance of peace cannot be, and

must never be, the goal of policy."

Similar efforts are being made in England by English writers to secure

the acceptance of this doctrine of force. Many passages almost

duplicating those of Bernhardi, or at least extolling the general

doctrine of force, may be found in the writings of such Anglo-Saxon

authors as Admiral Mahan and Professor Spenser Wilkinson.[41]

A scientific color is often given to the philosophy of force, as

expressed by the authors just referred to, by an appeal to evolutionary

and biological laws.

It is urged that the condition of man's advance in the past has been the

survival of the fit by struggle and warfare, and that in that struggle

it is precisely those endowed with combativeness and readiness to fight

who have survived. Thus the tendency to combat is not a mere human

perversity, but is part of the self-protective instinct rooted in a

profound biological law--the struggle of nations for survival.

This point of view is expressed by S.R. Steinmetz in his "Philosophie

des Krieges." War, according to this author, is an ordeal instituted by

God, who weighs the nations in its balance. It is the essential function

of the State, and the only function in which peoples can employ all

their powers at once and convergently. No victory is possible save as

the resultant of a totality of virtues; no defeat for which some vice or

weakness is not responsible. Fidelity, cohesiveness, tenacity, heroism,

conscience, education, inventiveness, economy, wealth, physical health

and vigor--there is no moral or intellectual point of superiority that

does not tell when "God holds His assizes, and hurls the peoples one

upon another" (Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht); and Dr.

Steinmetz does not believe that in the long-run chance and luck play any

part in apportioning the issues.

It is urged that international hostility is merely the psychological

stimulus to that combativeness which is a necessary element of

existence, and that though, like other elemental instincts--our animal

appetites, for instance--it may in some of its manifestations be ugly

enough, it makes for survival, and is to that extent a part of the great

plan. Too great a readiness to accept the "friendly assurances" of

another nation and an undue absence of distrust would, in accordance

with a sort of Gresham's Law in international relationships, make

steadily for the disappearance of the humane and friendly communities in

favor of the truculent and brutal. If friendliness and good-feeling

towards other nations led us to relax our self-defensive efforts, the

quarrelsome communities would see, in this slackening, an opportunity to

commit aggression, and there would be a tendency, therefore, for the

least civilized to wipe out the most. Animosity and hostility between

nations is a corrective of this sentimental slackness, and to that

extent it plays a useful role, however ugly it may appear--"not pretty,

but useful, like the dustman." Though the material and economic motives

which prompt conflict may no longer obtain, other than economic motives

will be found for collision, so profound is the psychological stimulus

thereto.

Some such view as this has found lurid expression in the recent work of

an American soldier, Homer Lea.[42] The author urges not only that war

is inevitable, but that any systematic attempt to prevent it is merely

an unwise meddling with the universal law.

National entities, in their birth, activities, and death, are

controlled by the same laws that govern all life--plant,

animal, or national--the law of struggle, the law of survival.

These laws, so universal as regards life and time, so

unalterable in causation and consummation, are only variable in

the duration of national existence as the knowledge of and

obedience to them is proportionately true or false. Plans to

thwart them, to shortcut them, to circumvent, to cozen, to

deny, to scorn and violate them, is folly such as man's conceit

alone makes possible. Never has this been tried--and man is

ever at it--but what the end has been gangrenous and fatal.

In theory international arbitration denies the inexorability of

natural laws, and would substitute for them the veriest

Cagliostroic formulas, or would, with the vanity of Canute, sit

down on the ocean-side of life and command the ebb and flow of

its tides to cease.

The idea of international arbitration as a substitute for

natural laws that govern the existence of political entities

arises not only from a denial of their fiats and an ignorance

of their application, but from a total misconception of war,

its causes, and its meaning.

Homer Lea's thesis is emphasized in the introduction to his work,

written by another American soldier, General John P. Storey:

A few idealists may have visions that with advancing

civilization war and its dread horrors will cease. Civilization

has not changed human nature. The nature of man makes war

inevitable. Armed strife will not disappear from the earth

until human nature changes.

"Weltstadt und Friedensproblem," the book of Professor Baron Karl von

Stengel, a jurist who was one of Germany's delegates at the First Hague

Peace Conference, contains a chapter entitled "The Significance of War

for Development of Humanity," in which the author says:

War has more often facilitated than hindered progress. Athens

and Rome, not only in spite of, but just because of their many

wars, rose to the zenith of civilization. Great States like

Germany and Italy are welded into nationalities only through

blood and iron.

Storm purifies the air and destroys the frail trees, leaving

the sturdy oaks standing. War is the test of a nation's

political, physical, and intellectual worth. The State in which

there is much that is rotten may vegetate for a while in peace,

but in war its weakness is revealed.

Germany's preparations for war have not resulted in economic

disaster, but in unexampled economic expansion, unquestionably

because of our demonstrated superiority over France. It is

better to spend money on armaments and battleships than luxury,

motormania, and other sensual living.

We know that Moltke expressed a similar view in his famous letter to

Bluntschli. "A perpetual peace," declared the Field-Marshal, "is a

dream, and not even a beautiful dream. War is one of the elements of

order in the world, established by God. The noblest virtues of men are

developed therein. Without war the world would degenerate and disappear

in a morass of materialism."[43]

At the very time that Moltke was voicing this sentiment, a precisely

similar one was being voiced by no less a person than Ernest Renan. In

his "La Reforme Intellectuelle et Morale" (Paris: Levy, 1871, p. 111) he

writes:

If the foolishness, negligence, idleness, and short-sightedness

of States did not involve their occasional collision, it is

difficult to imagine the degree of degeneracy to which the

human race would descend. War is one of the conditions of

progress, the sting which prevents a country from going to

sleep, and compels satisfied mediocrity itself to awaken from

its apathy. Man is only sustained by effort and struggle. The

day that humanity achieves a great pacific Roman Empire, having

no external enemies, that day its morality and its intelligence

will be placed in the very greatest peril.

In our own times a philosophy not very dissimilar has been voiced in the

public declarations of ex-President Roosevelt. I choose a few phrases

from his speeches and writings, at random:

We despise a nation, just as we despise a man, who submits to

insult. What is true of a man ought to be true of a nation.[44]

We must play a great part in the world, and especially ...

perform those deeds of blood, of valor, which above everything

else bring national renown.

We do not admire a man of timid peace.

By war alone can we acquire those virile qualities necessary to

win in the stern strife of actual life.

In this world the nation that is trained to a career of

unwarlike and isolated ease is bound to go down in the end

before other nations which have not lost the manly and

adventurous qualities.[45]

Professor William James covers the whole ground of these claims in the

following passage:

The war party is assuredly right in affirming that the martial

virtues, although originally gained by the race through war,

are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and

ambition in their military form are, after all, only

specifications of a more universal and enduring competitive

passion.... Pacifism makes no converts from the military party.

The military party denies neither the bestiality, nor the

horror, nor the expense; it only says that these things tell

but half the story. It only says that war is worth these

things; that, taking human nature as a whole, war is its best

protection against its weaker and more cowardly self, and that

mankind cannot afford to adopt a peace economy.... Militarism

is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human

life without hardihood would be contemptible.... This natural

feeling forms, I think, the innermost soul of army writings.

Without any exception known to me, militarist authors take a

highly mystical view of their subject, and regard war as a

biological or sociological necessity.... Our ancestors have

bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow and thousands of years

of peace won't breed it out of us.[46]

Even famous English clergymen have voiced the same view. Charles

Kingsley, in his defence of the Crimean War as a "just war against

tyrants and oppressors," wrote: "For the Lord Jesus Christ is not only

the Prince of Peace, He is the Prince of War, too. He is the Lord of

Hosts, the God of armies, and whoever fights in a just war against

tyrants and oppressors is fighting on Christ's side, and Christ is

fighting on his side. Christ is his captain and his leader, and he can

be in no better service. Be sure of it, for the Bible tells you so."[47]

Canon Newbolt, Dean Farrar, and the Archbishop of Armagh, have all

written not dissimilarly.

The whole case may be summarized thus:

1. Nations fight for opposing conceptions of right: it is the moral

conflict of men.

2. They fight from non-rational causes of a lower kind: from vanity,

rivalry, pride of place, the desire to occupy a great situation in the

world, or from sheer hostility to dissimilar people--the blind strife of

mutually hating men.

3. These causes justify war, or render it inevitable. The first is

admirable in itself, the second is inevitable, in that the peoples

readiest to fight, and showing most energy in fighting, replace the more

peacefully inclined, and the warlike type tends thus permanently to

survive; "the warlike nations inherit the earth."

Or it may be put deductively, thus: Since struggle is the law of life,

and a condition of survival as much with nations as with other

organisms, pugnacity, which is merely intense energy in struggle, a

readiness to accept struggle in its acutest form, must necessarily be a

quality marking those individuals successful in the vital contests. It

is this deep-seated, biological law which renders impossible the

acceptance by mankind of the literal injunction to turn the other cheek

to the smiter, or for human nature ever to conform to the ideal implied

in that injunction; since, were it accepted, the best men and

nations--in the sense of the kindliest and most humane--would be placed

at the mercy of the most brutal, who, eliminating the least brutal,

would stamp the survivors with their own brutality and re-establish the

militarist virtues. For this reason a readiness to fight, which means

the qualities of rivalry and pride and combativeness, hardihood,

tenacity, and heroism--what we know as the manly qualities--must in any

case survive as the race survives, and, since this stands in the way of

the predominance of the purely brutal, it is a necessary part of the

highest morality.

Despite the apparent force of these propositions, they are founded upon

a gross misreading of certain facts, and especially upon a gross

misapplication of a certain biological analogy.

CHAPTER II

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CASE FOR PEACE

The shifting ground of pro-war arguments--The narrowing gulf

between the material and moral ideals--The non-rational causes of

war--False biological analogies--The real law of man's struggle:

struggle with Nature, not with other men--Outline sketch of man's

advance and main operating factor therein--The progress towards

elimination of physical force--Co-operation across frontiers

and its psychological result--Impossible to fix limits of

community--Such limits irresistibly expanding--Break up of

State homogeneity--State limits no longer coinciding with real

conflicts between men.

Those who have followed at all closely the peace advocacy of the last

few years will have observed a curious shifting of ground on the part of

its opponents. Until quite recently, most peace advocacy being based on

moral, not material grounds, pacifists were generally criticized as

unduly idealistic, sentimental, oblivious to the hard necessities of men

in a hard world of struggle, and disposed to ask too much of human

nature in the way of altruistic self-sacrifice on behalf of an

idealistic dogma. We were given to understand that while peace might

represent a great moral ideal, man's evil passions and cupidity would

always stand in the way of its achievement. The citations I have given

in Chapter II. of the first part of this book prove sufficiently, I

think, that this was, until quite recently, overwhelmingly the point of

view of those who defended war as an unavoidable part of human struggle.

During the last few years, however, the defence of war has been made for

the most part on very different grounds. Peace, we are told by those who

oppose the pacifist movement, may embody the material interests of men,

but the spiritual nature of mankind will stand in the way of its ever

being achieved! Pacifism, far from being branded as too idealistic and

sentimental, is now scorned as "sordidly material."

I do not desire, in calling attention to this fact, merely to score a

cheap jibe. I want, on the contrary, to do every justice to the point of

view of those who urge that moral motives push men into war. I have

never, indeed, taken the ground that the defender of war is morally

inferior to the defender of peace, or that much is to be gained by

emphasizing the moral superiority of the peace ideal. Too often has it

been assumed in pacifist advocacy that what is needed in order to clear

up the difficulties in the international field, is a better moral tone,

a greater kindliness, and so forth--for that assumption ignores the fact

that the emotion of humanity repelling it from war may be more than

counteracted by the equally strong moral emotion that we connect with

patriotism. The patriot admits that war may occasion suffering, but

urges that men should be prepared to endure suffering for their country.

As I pointed out in the first chapter of this book, the pacifist appeal

to humanity so often fails because the militarist pleads that he too is

working and suffering for humanity.

My object in calling attention to this unconscious shifting of ground,

on the part of the advocate of war, is merely to suggest that the growth

of events during the last generation has rendered the economic case for

war practically untenable, and has consequently compelled those who

defend war to shift their defence. Nor, of course, am I urging that the

sentimental defence of war is a modern doctrine--the quotations made in

the last chapter show that not to be the case--but merely that greater

emphasis is now placed upon the moral case.

Thus, writing in 1912, Admiral Mahan criticizes this book as follows:

The purpose of armaments, in the minds of those maintaining

them, is not primarily an economical advantage, in the sense of

depriving a neighboring State of its own, or fear of such

consequences to itself through the deliberate aggression of a

rival having that particular end in view.... The fundamental

proposition of the book is a mistake. Nations are under no

illusion as to the unprofitableness of war in itself.... The

entire conception of the work is itself an illusion, based upon

a profound misreading of human action. To regard the world as

governed by self-interest only is to live in a non-existent

world, an ideal world, a world possessed by an idea much less

worthy than those which mankind, to do it bare justice,

persistently entertains.[48]

Yet hardly four years previously Admiral Mahan had himself outlined the

elements of international politics as follows:

It is as true now as when Washington penned the words, and will

always be true, that it is vain to expect nations to act

consistently from any motive other than that of interest. This

under the name of Realism is the frankly avowed motive of

German statecraft. It follows from this directly that the study

of interests--international interest--is the one basis of

sound, of provident, policy for statesmen....

The old predatory instinct, that he should take who has the

power, survives ... and moral force is not sufficient to

determine issues unless supported by physical. Governments are

corporations, and corporations have no souls ... they must put

first the rival interests of their own wards ... their own

people. Commercial and industrial predominance forces a nation

to seek markets, and, where possible, to control them to its

own advantage by preponderating force, the ultimate expression

of which is possession ... an inevitable link in a chain of

logical sequences: industry, markets, control, navy bases.[49]

Admiral Mahan, it is true, anticipates this criticism by pleading the

complex character of human nature (which no one denies). He says:

"Bronze is copper, and bronze is tin." But he entirely overlooks the

fact that if one withholds copper or one withholds tin it is no longer

bronze. The present author has never taken the ground that all

international action can be explained in the terms of one narrow motive,

but he does take the ground that if you can profoundly modify the

bearing of a constituent, as important as the one to which Admiral Mahan

has himself, in his own work, attributed such weight, you will

profoundly modify the whole texture and character of international

relations. Thus, even though it were true that the thesis here

elaborated were as narrowly economic as the criticism I have quoted

would imply, it would, nevertheless, have, on Admiral Mahan's own

showing, a very profound bearing on the problems of international

statecraft.

Not only do the principles elaborated here postulate no such narrow

conception of human motive, but it is essential to realize that you

cannot separate a problem of interest from a problem of right or

morality in the absolute fashion that Admiral Mahan would imply, because

right and morality connote the protection and promotion of the general

interest.

A nation, a people, we are given to understand, have higher motives than

money or "self-interest." What do we mean when we speak of the money of

a nation, or the self-interest of a community? We mean--and in such a

discussion as this can mean nothing else--better conditions for the

great mass of the people, the fullest possible lives, the abolition or

attenuation of poverty and of narrow circumstances; that the millions

shall be better housed and clothed and fed, more capable of making

provision for sickness and old age, with lives prolonged and

cheered--and not merely this, but also that they shall be better

educated, with character disciplined by steady labor and a better use of

leisure; a general social atmosphere which shall make possible family

affection, individual dignity and courtesy and the graces of life, not

only among the few, but among the many.

Now, do these things constitute, as a national policy, an inspiring aim,

or not? They are, speaking in terms of communities, pure

self-interest--bound up with economic problems, with money. Does Admiral

Mahan mean us to take him at his word when he would attach to such

efforts the same discredit that one implies in talking of a mercenary

individual? Would he have us believe that the typical great movements of

our time--Socialism, Trades Unionism, Syndicalism, Insurance Acts, Land

Reforms, Old Age Pensions, Charity Organization, improved

Education--bound up as they all are with economic problems--are not the

objects which, more and more, are absorbing the best activities of

Christendom?

In the pages which follow, I have attempted to show that the activities

which lie outside the range of these things--the religious wars,

movements like those which promoted the Crusades, or the sort of

tradition which we associate with the duel (which has, in fact,

disappeared from Anglo-Saxon society)--do not, and cannot, any longer

form part of the impulse creating the long-sustained conflicts between

large groups which a European war implies. I have attempted roughly to

indicate certain processes at work; to show, among other things, that

in the changing character of men's ideals there is a distinct narrowing

of the gulf which is supposed to separate ideal and material aims. Early

ideals, whether in the field of politics or religion, are generally

dissociated from any aim of general well-being. In early politics,

ideals are concerned simply with personal allegiance to some dynastic

chief, a feudal lord, or a monarch; the well-being of a community does

not enter into the matter at all. Later the chief must embody in his

person that well-being, or he does not obtain the allegiance of a

community of any enlightenment; later, the well-being of the community

becomes the end in itself, without being embodied in the person of an

hereditary chief, so that the people realize that their efforts, instead

of being directed to the protection of the personal interests of some

chief, are as a matter of fact directed to the protection of their own

interests, and their altruism has become communal self-interest, since

the self-sacrifice of the community for the sake of the community is a

contradiction in terms. In the religious sphere a similar development

has occurred. Early religious ideals have no relation to the material

betterment of mankind. The early Christian thought it meritorious to

live a sterile life at the top of a pillar, eaten by vermin, just as the

Hindoo saint to-day thinks it meritorious to live an equally sterile

life upon a bed of spikes. But as the early Christian ideal progressed,

sacrifices having no end connected with the betterment of mankind lost

their appeal. Our admiration now goes, not to the recluse who does

nothing for mankind, but rather to the priest who gives his life to

bring a ray of comfort to a leper settlement. The Christian saint who

would allow the nails of his fingers to grow through the palms of his

clasped hands would excite, not our admiration, but our revolt. More and

more is religious effort being subjected to this test: Does it make for

the improvement of society? If not, it stands condemned. Political

ideals are inevitably undergoing a similar development, and will be more

and more subjected to a similar test.[50]

I am aware that very often at present they are not thus tested.

Dominated as our political thought is by Roman and feudal

imagery--hypnotized by symbols and analogies which the necessary

development of organized society has rendered obsolete--the ideals even

of democracies are still often pure abstractions, divorced from any aim

calculated to advance the moral or material betterment of mankind. The

craze for sheer size of territory, the mere extent of administrative

area, is still deemed a thing deserving immense, incalculable

sacrifices.

Even these ideals, however, firmly set as they are in our language and

tradition, are rapidly yielding to the necessary force of events. A

generation ago it would have been inconceivable that a people or a

monarch should calmly see part of its country secede and establish

itself as a separate political entity without attempting to prevent it

by force of arms. Yet this is what happened, a year or two ago, in the

Scandinavian peninsula. For forty years Germany has added to her own

difficulties and to those of the European situation for the purpose of

including Alsace and Lorraine in its Federation, but even there, obeying

the tendency which is world-wide, an attempt has been made to create a

constitutional and autonomous government. The history of the British

Empire for fifty years has been a process of undoing the work of

conquest. Colonies are now neither colonies nor possessions; they are

independent States. England, which for centuries has made such

sacrifices to retain Ireland, is now making great sacrifices in order to

make her secession workable. To each political arrangement, to each

political ideal, the final test will be applied: does it, or does it

not, make for the widest interests of the mass of the people involved?

It is true that those who emphasize the psychological causes of war

might rejoin with another distinction. They might urge that, though the

questions dividing nations had more or less their origin in an economic

problem, the economic question becomes itself a moral question, a

question of right. It was not the few pence of the tax on tea that the

Colonies fought about, but the question of right which its payment

involved. So with nations. War, ineffective to achieve an economic end,

unprofitable in the sense that the cost involved in the defence of a

given economic point exceeds the monetary value of that point, will

still be fought because a point, trifling in the economic sense, is all

important from the point of view of right; and though there is no real

division of interests between nations, though those interests are in

reality interdependent, minor differences provoking a sudden and

uncontrolled flash of temper suffice to provoke war. War is the outcome

of the "hot fits" of men, "of the devil that is in them."

Although militarist literature on this, as on most similar points, shows

flagrant contradictions, even that literature is against the view that

war is the outcome of the sheer sudden temper of nations. Most of the

popular, and all of the scientific, militarist writers take the contrary

view. Mr. Blatchford and his school normally represent a typical

militarist policy, like that of Germany, as actuated by a cold, deep,

Machiavellian, unsentimental, calculated opportunism, as diverse from a

wild, irrational explosion of feeling as possible. Mr. Blatchford

writes:

German policy, based upon the teachings of Clausewitz, may be

expressed in two questions, the questions laid down by

Clausewitz: "Is it expedient to do this? Have we the power to

do it?" If it will benefit the Fatherland to break up the

British Empire, then it is expedient to break up the British

Empire. Clausewitz taught Germany that "war is a part of

policy." He taught that policy is a system of bargaining or

negotiating, backed by arms. Clausewitz does not discuss the

moral aspect of war; he deals with power and expediency. His

pupils take his lead. They do not read poems on the blessings

of peace; they do not spend ink on philanthropic theories.

All the more scientific writers, without an exception, so far as I am

aware, repudiate its "accidental" character. They one and all, from

Grotius to Von der Goltz, take the view that it results from definite

and determinable laws, like all the great processes of human

development.

Von der Goltz ("On the Conduct of War") says:

One must never lose sight of the fact that war is the

consequence and continuation of policy. One will act on the

defensive strategically or rest on the defensive according as

the policy has been offensive or defensive. An offensive and

defensive policy is in its turn indicated by the line of

conduct dictated historically. We see this very clearly in

antiquity by the example furnished us in the Persians and

Romans. In their wars we see the strategical role following

the bend of the historical role. The people which in its

historical development has arrived at the stage of inertia, or

even retrogression, will not carry on a policy of offence, but

merely one of defence; a nation in that situation will wait to

be attacked, and its strategy will consequently be defensive,

and from a defensive strategy will follow necessarily a

defensive tactic.

Lord Esher has expressed a like thought.[51]

But whether wars result from sheer temper, national "hot fits," or not,

it is quite certain that the lengthy preparation for war, the condition

of armed peace, the burden of armaments which is almost worse than an

occasional war, does not result therefrom.

The paraphernalia of war in the modern world cannot be improvised on the

spur of the moment to meet each gust of ill-feeling, and be dropped when

it is over. The building of battleships, the discussion of budgets and

the voting of them, the training of armies, the preparation of a

campaign, are a long business, and more and more in our day does each

distinctive campaign involve a special and distinctive preparation. The

pundits declare that the German battleships have been especially built

with a view to work in the North Sea. In any case, we know that the

conflict with Germany has been going on for ten years. This is surely a

rather prolonged "hot fit." The truth is that war in the modern world is

the outcome of armed peace, and involves, with all its elaborate

machinery of yearly budgets, and slowly built warships and forts, and

slowly trained armies, fixity of policy and purpose extending over

years, and sometimes generations. Men do not make these sacrifices month

after month, year after year, pay taxes, and upset Governments and fight

in Parliament for a mere passing whim; and as conflicts necessarily

become more scientific, we shall in the nature of things be forced to

prepare everything more thoroughly, and have clearer and sounder ideas

as to their essence, their cause, and their effects, and to watch more

closely their relation to national motive and policy. The final

justification for all these immense, humdrum, workaday sacrifices must

be more and more national well-being.

This does not imply, as some critics allege, the conclusion that an

Englishman is to say: "Since I might be just as well off under the

Germans, let them come"; but that the German will say: "Since I shall be

no better off for the going, I will not go."

Indeed, the case of the authorities cited in the preceding chapter is

marked by a false form of statement. Those who plead for war on moral

grounds say: "War will go on because men will defend their ideals,

moral, political, social, and religious." It should be stated thus: "War

will go on because men will always attack the spiritual possessions of

other men," because, of course, the necessity for defence arises from

the fact that these possessions are in danger of attack.

Put in the second form, however, the case breaks down almost of itself.

The least informed of us realizes that the whole trend of history is

against the tendency for men to attack the ideals and the beliefs of

other men. In the religious domain that tendency is plain, so much so

that the imposition of religious ideals or beliefs by force has

practically been abandoned in Europe, and the causes which have wrought

this change of attitude in the European mind are just as operative in

the field of politics.

Those causes have been, in the religious field, of a twofold nature,

both having direct bearing on the problem with which we are dealing. The

first cause is that at which I have already hinted, the general shifting

of the ideals from sterile aims to those concerned with the improvement

of society; the second one being that development of communication which

has destroyed the spiritual homogeneity of States.

A given movement of religious opinion is not confined to one State,

transforming it completely, while another current of opinion transforms

completely in another sense another State; but it goes on piecemeal,

_pari passu_, in the various States. Very early in the religious

development of Europe there ceased to be such a thing as a purely

Catholic or a purely Protestant State: the religious struggle went on

inside the political frontiers--between the people of the same State.

The struggle of political and social ideas must take a like course.

Those struggles of ideas will be carried out, not between States, but

between different groups in the same State, those groups acting in

intellectual co-operation with corresponding groups in other States.

This intellectual co-operation across frontiers is a necessary outcome

of the similar economic co-operation athwart frontiers which the

physical division of labor, owing to the development of communication,

has set up. It has become impossible for the army of a State to embody

the fight for an ideal, for the simple reason that the great moral

questions of our time can no longer be postulated in national terms.

What follows will make this plain.

There remains a final moral claim for war: that it is a needed moral

discipline for nations, the supreme test for the survival of the

fittest.

In the first chapter of this section, I have pointed out the importance

of this plea in determining the general character of European public

opinion, on which alone depends the survival or the disappearance of the

militarist regimen. Yet in strict logic there is no need to rebut this

claim in detail at all, for only a small fraction of those who believe

in it have the courage of their convictions.

The defender of large armaments always justifies his position on the

ground that such armaments ensure peace. _Si vis pacem_, etc. As between

war and peace he has made his choice, and he has chosen, as the definite

object of his endeavors, peace. Having directed his efforts to secure

peace, he must accept whatever disadvantages there may lie in that

state. He is prepared to admit that, of the two states, peace is

preferable, and it is peace towards which our efforts should be

directed. Having decided on that aim, what utility is there in showing

that it is an undesirable one?

We must, as a matter of fact, be honest for our opponent. We must assume

that in an alternative, where his action would determine the issue of

war or peace, he will allow that action to be influenced by the general

consideration that war might make for the moral advantage of his

country. More important even than this consideration is that of the

general national temper, to which his philosophy, however little in

keeping with his professed policy and desire, necessarily gives rise.

For these reasons it is worth while to consider in detail the biological

case which he presents.

The illusion underlying that case arises from the indiscriminate

application of scientific formulae.

Struggle is the law of survival with man, as elsewhere, but it is the

struggle of man with the universe, not man with man. Dog does not eat

dog--even tigers do not live on one another. Both dogs and tigers live

upon their prey.

It is true that as against this it is argued that dogs struggle with one

another for the same prey--if the supply of food runs short the weakest

dog, or the weakest tiger, starves. But an analogy between this state

and one in which co-operation is a direct means of increasing the supply

of food, obviously breaks down. If dogs and tigers were groups,

organized on the basis of the division of labor, even the weak dogs and

tigers could, conceivably, perform functions which would increase the

food supply of the group as a whole, and, conceivably, their existence

would render the security of that supply greater than would their

elimination. If to-day a territory like England supports in comfort, a

population of 45,000,000, where in other times rival groups, numbering

at most two or three millions, found themselves struggling with one

another for a bare subsistence, the greater quantity of food and the

greater security of the supply is not due to any process of elimination

of Wessex men by Northumbrian men, but is due precisely to the fact that

this rivalry has been replaced by common action against their prey, the

forces of nature. The obvious facts of the development of communities

show that there is a progressive replacement of rivalry by co-operation,

and that the vitality of the social organism increases in direct ratio

to the efficiency of the co-operation, and to the abandonment of the

rivalry, between its parts.[52]

All crude analogies between the processes of plant and animal survival

and social survival are vitiated, therefore, by disregarding the dynamic

element of conscious co-operation.

That mankind as a whole represents the organism and the planet the

environment, to which he is more and more adapting himself, is the only

conclusion that consorts with the facts. If struggle between men is the

true reading of the law of life, those facts are absolutely

inexplicable, for he is drifting away from conflict, from the use of

physical force, and towards co-operation. This much is unchallengeable,

as the facts which follow will show.

But in that case, if struggle for extermination of rivals between men is

the law of life, mankind is setting at naught the natural law, and must

be on the way to extinction.

Happily the natural law in this matter has been misread. The individual

in his sociological aspect is not the complete organism. He who attempts

to live without association with his fellows dies. Nor is the nation the

complete organism. If Britain attempted to live without co-operation

with other nations, half the population would starve. The completer the

co-operation the greater the vitality; the more imperfect the

co-operation the less the vitality. Now, a body, the various parts of

which are so interdependent that without co-ordination vitality is

reduced or death ensures, must be regarded, in so far as the functions

in question are concerned, not as a collection of rival organisms, but

as one. This is in accord with what we know of the character of living

organisms in their conflict with environment. The higher the organism,

the greater the elaboration and interdependence of its part, the

greater the need for co-ordination.[53]

If we take this as the reading of the biological law, the whole thing

becomes plain; man's irresistible drift away from conflict and towards

co-operation is but the completer adaptation of the organism (man) to

its environment (the planet, wild nature), resulting in a more intense

vitality.

The psychological development involved in man's struggle along these

lines may best be stated by an outline sketch of the character of his

advance.

When I kill my prisoner (cannibalism was a very common characteristic of

early man), it is in "human nature" to keep him for my own larder

without sharing him. It is the extreme form of the use of force, the

extreme form of human individualism. But putrefaction sets in before I

can consume him (it is as well to recall these real difficulties of the

early man, because, of course, "human nature does not change"), and I am

left without food.

But my two neighbors, each with his butchered prisoner, are in a similar

difficulty, and though I could quite easily defend my larder, we deem it

better on the next occasion to join forces and kill one prisoner at a

time. I share mine with the other two; they share theirs with me. There

is no waste through putrefaction. It is the earliest form of the

surrender of the use of force in favor of co-operation--the first

attenuation of the tendency to act on impulse. But when the three

prisoners are consumed, and no more happen to be available, it strikes

us that on the whole we should have done better to make them catch game

and dig roots for us. The next prisoners that are caught are not

killed--a further diminution of impulse and the factor of physical

force--they are only enslaved, and the pugnacity which in the first case

went to kill them is now diverted to keeping them at work. But the

pugnacity is so little controlled by rationalism that the slaves starve,

and prove incapable of useful work. They are better treated; there is a

diminution of pugnacity. They become sufficiently manageable for the

masters themselves, while the slaves are digging roots, to do a little

hunting. The pugnacity recently expended on the slaves is redirected to

keeping hostile tribes from capturing them--a difficult matter, because

the slaves themselves show a disposition to try a change of mastership.

They are bribed into good behavior by better treatment: a further

diminution of force, a further drift towards co-operation; they give

labor, we give food and protection. As the tribes enlarge, it is found

that those have most cohesion where the position of slaves is recognized

by definite rights and privileges. Slavery becomes serfdom or villeiny.

The lord gives land and protection, the serf labor and military service:

a further drift from force, a further drift towards co-operation,

exchange. With the introduction of money even the form of force

disappears: the laborer pays rent and the lord pays his soldiers. It is

free exchange on both sides, and economic force has replaced physical

force. The further the drift from force towards simple economic interest

the better the result for the effort expended. The Tartar khan, who

seizes by force the wealth in his State, giving no adequate return, soon

has none to seize. Men will not work to create what they cannot enjoy,

so that, finally, the khan has to kill a man by torture in order to

obtain a sum which is the thousandth part of what a London tradesman

will spend to secure a title carrying no right to the exercise of force

from a Sovereign who has lost all right to the use or exercise of

physical force, the head of the wealthiest country in the world, the

sources of whose wealth are the most removed from any process involving

the exercise of physical force.

But while this process is going on inside the tribe, or group, or

nation, force and hostility as between differing tribes or nations

remain; but not undiminished. At first it suffices for the fuzzy head of

a rival tradesman to appear above the bushes for primitive man to want

to hit it. He is a foreigner: kill him. Later, he only wants to kill him

if he is at war with his tribe. There are periods of peace: diminution

of hostility. In the first conflicts all of the other tribe are

killed--men, women, and children. Force and pugnacity are absolute. But

the use of slaves, both as laborers and as concubines, attentuates

this; there is a diminution of force. The women of the hostile tribe

bear children by the conqueror: there is a diminution of pugnacity. At

the next raid into the hostile territory it is found that there is

nothing to take, because everything has been killed or carried off. So

on later raids the conqueror kills the chiefs only (a further diminution

of pugnacity, a further drift from mere impulse), or merely dispossesses

them of their lands, which he divides among his followers (Norman

Conquest type). We have already passed the stage of extermination.[54]

The conqueror simply absorbs the conquered--or the conquered absorbs

the conqueror, whichever you like. It is no longer the case of one

gobbling up the other. Neither is gobbled. In the next stage we do not

even dispossess the chiefs--a further sacrifice of physical force--we

merely impose tribute. But the conquering nation soon finds itself in

the position of the khan in his own State--the more he squeezes the less

he gets, until, finally, the cost of getting the money by military means

exceeds what is obtained. It was the case of Spain in Spanish

America--the more territory she "owned" the poorer she became. The wise

conqueror, then, finds that better than the exaction of tribute is an

exclusive market--old English colonial type. But in the process of

ensuring exclusiveness more is lost than is gained: the colonies are

allowed to choose their own system--further drift from the use of force,

further drift from hostility and pugnacity. Final result: complete

abandonment of physical force, co-operation on basis of mutual profit

the only relationship, with reference not merely to colonies which have

become in fact foreign States, but also to States foreign in name as

well as in fact. We have arrived not at the intensification of the

struggle between men, but at a condition of vital dependence upon the

prosperity of foreigners. Could England by some magic kill all

foreigners, half the British population would starve. This is not a

condition making indefinitely for hostility to foreigners; still less

is it a condition in which such hostility finds its justification in any

real instinct of self-preservation or in any deep-seated biological law.

With each new intensification of dependence between the parts of the

organism must go that psychological development which has marked every

stage of the progress in the past, from the day that we killed our

prisoner in order to eat him, and refused to share him with our fellow,

to the day that the telegraph and the bank have rendered military force

economically futile.

But the foregoing does not include all the facts, or all the factors. If

Russia does England an injury--sinks a fishing fleet in time of peace,

for instance--it is no satisfaction to Englishmen to go out and kill a

lot of Frenchmen or Irishmen. They want to kill Russians. If, however,

they knew a little less geography--if, for instance, they were Chinese

Boxers, it would not matter in the least which they killed, because to

the Chinaman all alike are "foreign devils"; his knowledge of the case

does not enable him to differentiate between the various nationalities

of Europeans. In the case of a wronged negro in the Congo the collective

responsibility is still wider; for a wrong inflicted by one white man he

will avenge himself on any other--American, German, English, French,

Dutch, Belgian, or Chinese. As our knowledge increases, our sense of the

collective responsibility of outside groups narrows. But immediately we

start on this differentiation there is no stopping. The English yokel is

satisfied if he can "get a whack at them foreigners"--Germans will do

if Russians are not available. The more educated man wants Russians; but

if he stops a moment longer, he will see that in killing Russian

peasants he might as well be killing so many Hindoos, for all they had

to do with the matter. He then wants to get at the Russian Government.

But so do a great many Russians--Liberals, Reformers, etc. He then sees

that the real conflict is not English against Russians at all, but the

interest of all law-abiding folk--Russian and English alike--against

oppression, corruption, and incompetence. To give the Russian Government

an opportunity of going to war would only strengthen its hands against

those with whom he was in sympathy--the Reformers. As war would increase

the influence of the reactionary party in Russia, it would do nothing to

prevent the recurrence of such incidents, and so quite the wrong party

would suffer. Were the real facts and the real responsibilities

understood, a Liberal people would reply to such an aggression by taking

every means which the social and economic relationship of the two States

afforded to enable Russian Liberals to hang a few Russian Admirals and

establish a Russian Liberal Government. In any case, the realization of

the fact attenuates hostility. In the same way, as they become more

familiar with the facts, the English will attenuate their hostility to

"Germans." An English patriot recently said, "We must smash

Prussianism." The majority of Germans are in cordial agreement with him,

and are working to that end. But if England went to war for that

purpose, Germans would be compelled to fight for Prussianism. War

between States for a political ideal of this kind is not only futile, it

is the sure means of perpetuating the very condition which it would

bring to an end. International hostilities repose for the most part upon

our conception of the foreign State, with which we are quarrelling, as a

homogeneous personality, having the same character of responsibility as

an individual, whereas the variety of interests, both material and

moral, regardless of State boundaries, renders the analogy between

nations and individuals an utterly false one.

Indeed, when the co-operation between the parts of the social organism

is as complete as our mechanical development has recently made it, it is

impossible to fix the limits not merely of the economic interests, but

of the moral interest of the community, and to say what is one community

and what is another. Certainly the State limits no longer define the

limits of the community; and yet it is only the State limits which

international antagonism predicates. If the Louisiana cotton crop fails,

a part of Lancashire starves. There is closer community of interest in a

vital matter between Lancashire and Louisiana than between Louisiana

and, say, Iowa, parts of the same State. There is much closer

intercommunication between Britain and the United States in all that

touches social and moral development than between Britain and, say,

Bengal, part of the same State. An English nobleman has more community

of thought and feeling with a European continental aristocrat (will

marry his daughter, for instance) than he would think of claiming with

such "fellow" British countrymen as a Bengal Babu, a Jamaica negro, or

even a Dorset yokel. A professor at Oxford will have closer community of

feeling with a member of the French Academy than with, say, a

Whitechapel publican. One may go further, and say that a British subject

of Quebec has closer contact with Paris than with London; the British

subject of Dutch-speaking Africa with Holland than with England; the

British subject of Hong Kong with Pekin than with London; of Egypt, with

Constantinople than with London, and so on. In a thousand respects,

association cuts across State boundaries, which are purely conventional,

and renders the biological division of mankind into independent and

warring States a scientific ineptitude.

Allied factors, introduced by the character of modern intercourse, have

already gone far to render territorial conquest futile for the

satisfaction of natural human pride and vanity. Just as in the economic

sphere, factors peculiar to our generation have rendered the old analogy

between States and persons a false one, so do these factors render the

analogy in the sentimental sphere a false one. While the individual of

great possessions does in fact obtain, by reason of his wealth, a

deference which satisfies his pride and vanity, the individual of the

great nation has no such sentimental advantage as against the citizen of

the small nation. No one thinks of respecting the Russian mujik because

he belongs to a great nation, or despising a Scandinavian or Belgian

gentleman because he belongs to a small one; and any society will accord

prestige to the nobleman of Norway, Holland, Belgium, Spain, or even

Portugal, which it refuses to an American "Climber." The nobleman of any

country will marry the noblewoman of another more readily than a woman

from a lower class of his own country. The prestige of the foreign

country rarely counts for anything in the matter, when it comes to the

real facts of everyday life, so shallow is the real sentiment which now

divides States. Just as in material things community of interest and

relationship cut clear across State boundaries, so inevitably will the

psychic community of interest come so to do.

Just as, in the material domain, the real biological law, which is

association and co-operation between individuals of the same species in

the struggle with their environment, has pushed men in their material

struggle to conform with that law, so will it do so in the sentimental

sphere. We shall come to realize that the real psychic and moral

divisions are not as between nations, but as between opposing

conceptions of life. Even admitting that man's nature will never lose

the combativeness, hostility, and animosity which are so large a part of

it (although the manifestations of such feelings have so greatly changed

within the historical period as almost to have changed in character),

what we shall see is the diversion of those psychological qualities to

the real, instead of the artificial, conflict of mankind. We shall see

that at the bottom of any conflict between the armies or Governments of

Germany and England lies not the opposition of "German" interests to

"English" interests, but the conflict in both States between democracy

and autocracy, or between Socialism and Individualism, or reaction and

progress, however one's sociological sympathies may classify it. That is

the real division in both countries, and for Germans to conquer English,

or English Germans, would not advance the solution of such a conflict

one iota; and as such conflict becomes more acute, the German

individualist will see that it is more important to protect his freedom

and property against the Socialist and trade unionist, who can and do

attack them, than against the British Army, which cannot. In the same

way the British Tory will be more concerned with what Mr. Lloyd George's

Budgets can do than with what the Germans can do.[55] From the

realization of these things to the realization on the part of the

British democrat that what stands in the way of his securing for social

expenditure enormous sums, that now go to armaments, is mainly a lack of

co-operation between himself and the democrats of a hostile nation who

are in a like case, is but a step, and a step that, if history has any

meaning, is bound shortly to be taken. When it is taken, property,

capital, Individualism will have to give to its international

organization, already far-reaching, a still more definite form, in which

international differences will play no part. And when that condition is

reached, both peoples will find inconceivable the idea that artificial

State divisions (which are coming more and more to approximate to mere

administrative divisions, leaving free scope within them or across them

for the development of genuine nationality) could ever in any way define

the real conflicts of mankind.

There remains, of course, the question of time; that these developments

will take "thousands" or "hundreds" of years. Yet the interdependence of

modern nations is the growth of little more than fifty years. A century

ago England could have been self-supporting, and little the worse for

it. One must not overlook the Law of Acceleration. The age of man on the

earth is placed variously at from thirty thousand to three hundred

thousand years. He has in some respects developed more in the last two

hundred years than in all the preceding ages. We see more change now in

ten years than originally in ten thousand. Who shall foretell the

developments of a generation?

CHAPTER III

UNCHANGING HUMAN NATURE

The progress from cannibalism to Herbert Spencer--The disappearance

of religious oppression by government--Disappearance of the

duel--The Crusaders and the Holy Sepulchre--The wail of militarist

writers at man's drift away from militancy.

All of us who have had occasion to discuss this subject are familiar

with the catch-phrases with which the whole matter is so often

dismissed. "You cannot change human nature," "What man always has been

during thousands of years, he always will be," are the sort of dicta

generally delivered as self-evident propositions that do not need

discussion. Or if, in deference to the fact that very profound changes,

in which human nature is involved, _have_ taken place in the habits of

mankind, the statement of the proposition is somewhat less dogmatic, we

are given to understand that any serious modification of the tendency to

go to war can only be looked for in "thousands of years."

What are the facts? They are these:

That the alleged unchangeability of human nature in this matter is not

borne out; that man's pugnacity though not disappearing, is very

visibly, under the forces of mechanical and social development, being

transformed and diverted from ends that are wasteful and destructive to

ends that are less wasteful, which render easier that co-operation

between men in the struggle with their environment which is the

condition of their survival and advance; that changes which, in the

historical period, have been extraordinarily rapid are necessarily

quickening--quickening in geometrical rather than in arithmetical ratio.

With very great courtesy, one is impelled to ask those who argue that

human nature in all its manifestations must remain unchanged how they

interpret history. We have seen man progress from the mere animal

fighting with other animals, seizing his food by force, seizing also by

force his females, eating his own kind, the sons of the family

struggling with the father for the possession of the father's wives; we

have seen this incoherent welter of animal struggle at least partly

abandoned for settled industry, and partly surviving as a more organized

tribal warfare or a more ordered pillaging, like that of the Vikings and

the Huns; we have seen even these pillagers abandon in part their

pillaging for ordered industry, and in part for the more ceremonial

conflict of feudal struggle; we have seen even the feudal conflict

abandoned in favor of dynastic and religious and territorial conflict,

and then dynastic and religious conflict abandoned. There remains now

only the conflict of States, and that, too, at a time when the character

and conception of the State are being profoundly modified.

Human nature may not change, whatever that vague phrase may mean; but

human nature is a complex factor. It includes numberless motives, many

of which are modified in relation to the rest as circumstances change;

so that the manifestations of human nature change out of all

recognition. Do we mean by the phrase that "human nature does not

change" that the feelings of the paleolithic man who ate the bodies of

his enemies and of his own children are the same as those of a Herbert

Spencer, or even of the modern New Yorker who catches his subway train

to business in the morning? If human nature does not change, may we

therefore expect the city clerk to brain his mother and serve her up for

dinner, or suppose that Lord Roberts or Lord Kitchener is in the habit,

while on campaign, of catching the babies of his enemies on spear-heads,

or driving his motor-car over the bodies of young girls, like the

leaders of the old Northmen in their ox-wagons.

What _do_ these phrases mean? These, and many like them, are repeated in

a knowing way with an air of great wisdom and profundity by journalists

and writers of repute, and one may find them blatant any day in our

newspapers and reviews; yet the most cursory examination proves them to

be neither wise nor profound, but simply parrot-like catch-phrases which

lack common sense, and fly in the face of facts of everyday experience.

The truth is that the facts of the world as they stare us in the face

show that, in our common attitude, we not only overlook the

modifications in human nature, which have occurred historically since

yesterday--occurred even in our generation--but we also ignore the

modification of human nature which mere differences of social habit and

custom and outlook effect. Take the case of the duel. Even educated

people in Germany, France, and Italy, will tell you that it is "not in

human nature" to expect a man of gentle birth to abandon the habit of

the duel; the notion that honorable people should ever so place their

honor at the mercy of whoever may care to insult them is, they assure

you, both childish and sordid. With them the matter will not bear

discussion.

Yet the great societies which exist in England, North America,

Australia--the whole Anglo-Saxon world, in fact--have abandoned the

duel, and we cannot lump the whole Anglo-Saxon race as either sordid or

childish.

That such a change as this, which must have conflicted with human

pugnacity in its most insidious form,--pride and personal vanity, the

traditions of an aristocratic status, every one of the psychological

factors now involved in international conflict--has been effected in our

own generation should surely give pause to those who dismiss as

chimerical any hope that rationalism will ever dominate the conduct of

nations.

Discussing the impossibility of allowing arbitration to cover all causes

of difference, Mr. Roosevelt remarked, in justification of large

armaments: "We despise a nation, just as we despise a man, who fails to

resent an insult."[56] Mr. Roosevelt seems to forget that the duel with

us is extinct. Do _we_, the English-speaking people of the world, to

whom presumably Mr. Roosevelt must have been referring, despise a man

who fails to resent an insult by arms? Would we not, on the contrary,

despise the man who should do so? Yet so recent is this charge that it

has not yet reached the majority of Europeans.

The vague talk of national honor, as a quality under the especial

protection of the soldier, shows, perhaps more clearly than aught else,

how much our notions concerning international politics have fallen

behind the notions that dominate us in everyday life. When an individual

begins to rave about his honor, we may be pretty sure he is about to do

some irrational, most likely some disreputable deed. The word is like an

oath, serving with its vague yet large meaning to intoxicate the fancy.

Its vagueness and elasticity make it possible to regard a given

incident, at will, as either harmless or a _casus belli_. Our sense of

proportion in these matters approximates to that of the schoolboy. The

passing jeer of a foreign journalist, a foolish cartoon, is sufficient

to start the dogs of war baying up and down the land.[57] We call it

"maintaining the national prestige," "enforcing respect," and I know not

what other high-sounding name. It amounts to the same thing in the end.

The one distinctive advance in civil society achieved by the Anglo-Saxon

world is fairly betokened by the passing away of this old notion of a

peculiar possession in the way of honor, which has to be guarded by

arms. It stands out as the one clear moral gain of the nineteenth

century; and, when we observe the notion resurging in the minds of men,

we may reasonably expect to find that it marks one of those reversions

in development which so often occur in the realm of mind as well as in

that of organic forms.

Two or three generations since, this progress, even among Anglo-Saxons,

towards a rational standard of conduct in this matter, as between

individuals, would have seemed as unreasonable as do the hopes of

international peace in our day. Even to-day the continental officer is

as firmly convinced as ever that the maintenance of personal dignity is

impossible save by the help of the duel. He will ask in triumph, "What

will you do if one of your own order openly insults you? Can you

preserve your self-respect by summoning him to the police-court?" And

the question is taken as settling the matter offhand.

The survival, where national prestige is concerned, of the standards of

the _code duello_ is daily brought before us by the rhetoric of the

patriots. Our army and our navy, not the good faith of our statesmen,

are the "guardians of our national honor." Like the duellist, the

patriot would have us believe that a dishonorable act is made honorable

if the party suffering by the dishonor be killed. The patriot is careful

to withdraw from the operation of possible arbitration all questions

which could affect the "national honor." An "insult to the flag" must be

"wiped out in blood." Small nations, which in the nature of the case

cannot so resent the insults of great empires, have apparently no right

to such a possession as "honor." It is the peculiar prerogative of

world-wide empires. The patriots who would thus resent "insults to the

flag" may well be asked whether they would condemn the conduct of the

German lieutenant who kills the unarmed civilian in cold blood "for the

honor of the uniform."

It does not seem to have struck the patriot that, as personal dignity

and conduct have not suffered but been improved by the abandonment of

the principle of the duel, there is little reason to suppose that

international conduct, or national dignity, would suffer by a similar

change of standards.

The whole philosophy underlying the duel, where personal relations are

concerned, excites in our day the infinite derision of all Anglo-Saxons.

Yet these same Anglo-Saxons maintain it as rigorously as ever in the

relations of States.

Profound as is the change involved in the Anglo-Saxon abandonment of the

duel, a still more universal change, affecting still more nearly our

psychological impulses, has been effected within a relatively recent

historical period. I refer to the abandonment, by the Governments of

Europe, of their right to prescribe the religious belief of their

citizens. For hundreds of years, generation after generation, it was

regarded as an evident part of a ruler's right and duty to dictate what

his subjects should believe.

As Lecky has pointed out, the preoccupation which, for numberless

generations, was the centre round which all other interests revolved has

simply and purely disappeared; coalitions which were once the most

serious occupation of statesmen now exist only in the speculations of

the expounders of prophecy. Among all the elements of affinity and

repulsion that regulate the combinations of nations, dogmatic influences

which were once supreme can scarcely be said to exist. There is a change

here reaching down into the most fundamental impulses of the human mind.

"Until the seventeenth century every mental discussion, which philosophy

pronounces to be essential to legitimate research, was almost uniformly

branded as a sin, and a large proportion of the most deadly intellectual

vices were deliberately inculcated as virtues."

Anyone who argued that the differences between Catholics and Protestants

were not such as force could settle, and that the time would come when

man would realize this truth, and regard a religious war between

European States as a wild and unimaginable anachronism, would have been

put down as a futile doctrinaire, completely ignoring the most

elementary facts of "unchanging human nature."

There is one striking incident of the religious struggle of States which

illustrates vividly the change which has come over the spirit of man.

For nearly two hundred years Christians fought the Infidel for the

conquest of the Holy Sepulchre. All the nations of Europe joined in this

great endeavor. It seemed to be the one thing which could unite them,

and for generations, so profound was the impulse which produced the

movement, the struggle went on. There is nothing in history, perhaps,

quite comparable to it. Suppose that during this struggle one had told a

European statesman of that age that the time would come when, assembled

in a room, the representatives of a Europe, which had made itself the

absolute master of the Infidel, could by a single stroke of the pen

secure the Holy Sepulchre for all time to Christendom, but that, having

discussed the matter cursorily twenty minutes or so, they would decide

that on the whole it was not worth while! Had such a thing been told to

a mediaeval statesman, he would certainly have regarded the prophecy as

that of a madman. Yet this, of course, is precisely what has taken

place.[58]

A glance over the common incidents of Europe's history will show the

profound change which has visibly taken place, not only in the minds,

but in the hearts of men. Things which even in our stage of civilization

would no longer be possible, owing to that change in human nature which

the military dogmatist denies, were commonplace incidents with our

grandfathers. Indeed, the modifications in the religious attitude just

touched on assuredly arise from an emotional as much as from an

intellectual change. A theology which could declare that the unborn

child would suffer eternal torment in the fires of hell for no crime,

other than that of its conception, would be in our day impossible on

merely emotional grounds.[59] What was once deemed a mere truism would

now be viewed with horror and indignation. Again, as Lecky says, "For a

great change has silently swept over Christendom. Without disturbance,

an old doctrine has passed away from among the realizations of mankind."

Not only in the religious sphere do we see this progress. In a

civilization, which was in many respects an admirable one, it was

possible for 400 slaves to be slaughtered because one of them had

committed some offence; for a lady of fashion to gratify a momentary

caprice by ordering a slave to be crucified; and, a generation or two

since, for whole populations to turn torture into a public amusement[60]

and a public festival; for kings, historically yesterday, to assist

personally at the tortures of persons accused of witchcraft. It is

related by Pitcairn, in his "Criminal Trials of Scotland," that James I.

of Scotland personally presided over the tortures of one, Dr. Fian,

accused of having caused a storm at sea. The bones of the prisoner's

legs were broken into small pieces in the boot, and it was the King

himself who suggested the following variation and witnessed the

execution of it: the nails of both hands were seized by a pair of

pincers and torn from the fingers, and into the bleeding stump of each

finger two needles were thrust up to their heads!

Does anyone seriously contend that the conditions of modern life have

not modified psychology in these matters? Does anyone seriously deny

that our wider outlook, which is the result of somewhat larger

conceptions and wider reading, has wrought such a change that the

repetition of things like these in London, or in Edinburgh, or in

Berlin, has become impossible?

Or, is it seriously argued that we may witness a repetition of these

events, that we are quite capable at any moment of taking pleasure in

burning alive a beautiful child? Does the Catholic or the Protestant

really stand in danger of such things from his religious rival? If human

nature is unchanged by the progress of ideas, then he does, and Europe's

general adoption of religious freedom is a mistake, and each sect should

arm against the other in the old way, and the only real hope of

religious peace and safety is in the domination of an absolutely

universal Church. This was, indeed, the plea of the old inquisitor, just

as it is the plea of the _Spectator_ to-day, that the only hope of

political peace is in the domination of an absolutely universal power:

There is only one way to end war and preparation for war, and

that is, as we have said, by a universal monarchy. If we can

imagine one country--let us say Russia for the sake of

argument--so powerful that she could disarm the rest of the

world, and then maintain a force big enough to forbid any Power

to invade the rights of any other Power ... no doubt we should

have universal peace.[61]

This dictum recalls one, equally emphatic, once voiced by a colleague of

the late Procurator of the Holy Synod in Russia, who said:

There is only one way to ensure religious peace in the State,

to compel all in that State to conform to the State religion.

Those that will not conform must, in the interests of peace, be

driven out.

Mr. Lecky, who of all authors has written most suggestively, perhaps, on

the disappearance of religious persecution, has pointed out that the

strife between opposing religious bodies arose out of a religious spirit

which, though often high-minded and disinterested (he protests with

energy against the notion that persecution as a whole was dictated by

interested motives), was unpurified by rationalism; and he adds that the

irrationality which once characterized the religious sentiment has now

been replaced by the irrationality of patriotism. Mr. Lecky says:

If we take a broad view of the course of history, and examine

the relations of great bodies of men, we find that religion

and patriotism are the chief moral influences to which they

have been subjected, and that the separate modifications and

mutual interaction of these two agents may almost be said to

constitute the moral history of mankind.

Is it to be expected that the rationalization and humanization which

have taken place in the more complex domain of religious doctrine and

belief will not also take place in the domain of patriotism? More

especially, as the same author points out, since it was the necessities

of material interest which brought about the reform in the first domain,

and since "not only does interest, as distinct from passion, gain a

greater empire with advancing civilization, but passion itself is mainly

guided by its power."

Have we not abundant evidence, indeed, that the passion of patriotism,

as divorced from material interest, is being modified by the pressure of

material interest? Are not the numberless facts of national

interdependence, which I have indicated here, pushing inevitably to that

result? And are we not justified in concluding that, just as the

progress of rationalism has made it possible for the various religious

groups to live together, to exist side by side without physical

conflict; just as there has been in that domain no necessary choice

between universal domination or unending strife, so in like manner will

the progress of political rationalism mark the evolution of the

relationship of political groups; that the struggle for domination will

cease because it will be realized that physical domination is futile,

and that instead of either universal strife or universal domination

there will come, without formal treaties or Holy Alliances, the general

determination for each to go his way undisturbed in his political

allegiance, as he is now undisturbed in his religious allegiance?

Perhaps the very strongest evidence that the whole drift of human

tendencies is away from such conflict as is represented by war between

States is to be found in the writings of those who declare war to be

inevitable. Among the writers quoted in the first chapter of this

section, there is not one who, if his arguments are examined carefully,

does not show that he realizes, consciously, or subconsciously, that

man's disposition to fight, far from being unchanged, is becoming

rapidly enfeebled. Take, for instance, one of the latest works voicing

the philosophy that war is inevitable; that, indeed, it is both wicked

and childish to try to prevent it.[62] Notwithstanding that the

inevitability of war is the thesis of his book, Homer Lea entitles the

first section "The Decline of Militancy," and shows clearly, in fact,

that the commercial activities of the world lead directly away from war.

Trade, ducats, and mortgages are regarded as far greater assets

and sources of power than armies or navies. They produce

national effeminacy and effeteness.

Now, as this tendency is common to all nations of Christendom--indeed,

of the world--since commercial and industrial development is

world-wide, it necessarily means, if it is true of any one nation, that

the world as a whole is drifting away from the tendency to warfare.

A large part of Homer Lea's book is a sort of Carlylean girding at what

he terms "protoplasmic gourmandizing and retching" (otherwise the busy

American industrial and social life of his countrymen). He declares

that, when a country makes wealth, production, and industries its sole

aim, it becomes "a glutton among nations, vulgar, swinish, arrogant";

"commercialism, having seized hold of the American people, overshadows

it, and tends to destroy not only the aspirations and world-wide career

open to the nation, but the Republic itself." "Patriotism in the true

sense" (_i.e._, the desire to go and kill other people) Homer Lea

declares almost dead in the United States. The national ideals, even of

the native-born American, are deplorably low:

There exists not only individual prejudice against military

ideals, but public antipathy; antagonism of politicians,

newspapers, churches, colleges, labor unions, theorists, and

organized societies. They combat the military spirit as if it

were a public evil and a national crime.

In that case, what, in the name of all that is muddleheaded, becomes of

the "unchanging tendency towards warfare"? What is all this curious

rhetoric of Homer Lea's (and I have dealt with him at some length,

because his principles if not his language are those which characterize

much similar literature in England, France, Germany, and the continent

of Europe generally) but an admission that the whole tendency is not, as

he would have us believe, towards war, but away from it? Here is an

author who tells us that war is to be forever inevitable, and in the

same breath that men are rapidly conceiving not only a "slothful

indifference" to fighting, but a profound antipathy to the military

ideal.

Of course, Homer Lea implies that this tendency is peculiar to the

American Republic, and is for that reason dangerous to his country; but,

as a matter of fact, Homer Lea's book might be a free translation of

much nationalist literature of either France or Germany.[63] I cannot

recall a single author of either of the four great countries who,

treating of the inevitability of war, does not bewail the falling away

of his own country from the military ideal, or, at least, the tendency

so to fall away. Thus the English journalist reviewing in the _Daily

Mail_ Homer Lea's book cannot refrain from saying:

Is it necessary to point out that there is a moral in all this

for us as well as for the American? Surely almost all that Mr.

Lea says applies to Great Britain as forcibly as to the United

States. We too have lain dreaming. We have let our ideals

tarnish. We have grown gluttonous, also.... Shame and folly are

upon us as well as upon our brethren. Let us hasten with all

our energy to cleanse ourselves of them, that we can look the

future in the face without fear.

Exactly the same note dominates the literature of an English protagonist

like Mr. Blatchford, the militarist socialist. He talks of the "fatal

apathy" of the British people. "The people," he says, breaking out in

anger at the small disposition they show to kill other people, "are

conceited, self-indulgent, decadent, and greedy. They will shout for the

Empire, but they will not fight for it."[64] A glance at such

publications as _Blackwood's_, the _National Review_, the London

_Spectator_, the London _World_, will reveal precisely similar

outbursts.

Of course, Mr. Blatchford declares that the Germans are very different,

and that what Mr. Lea (in talking of _his_ country) calls the

"gourmandizing and retching" is not at all true of Germany. As a matter

of fact, however, the phrase I have quoted might have been "lifted" from

the work of any average Pan-German, or even from more responsible

quarters. Have Mr. Blatchford and Mr. Lea forgotten that no less a

person than Prince von Buelow, in a speech made in the Prussian Diet,

used almost the words I have quoted from Mr. Blatchford, and dwelt at

length on the self-indulgence and degeneracy, the rage for luxury, etc.,

which possess modern Germany, and told how the old qualities which had

marked the founders of the Empire were disappearing?[65]

Indeed, do not a great part of the governing classes of Germany almost

daily bewail the infiltration of anti-militarist doctrines among the

German people, and does not the extraordinary increase in the Socialist

vote justify the complaint?

A precisely analogous plea is made by the Nationalist writer in France

when he rails at the pacifist tendencies of _his_ country, and points to

the contrasting warlike activities of neighbouring nations. A glance at

a copy of practically any Nationalist or Conservative paper in France

will furnish ample evidence of this. Hardly a day passes but that the

_Echo de Paris_, _Gaulois_, _Figaro_, _Journal des Debats_, _Patrie_, or

_Presse_, sounds this note, while one may find it rampant in the works

of such serious writers as Paul Bourget, Faguet, Le Bon, Barres,

Brunetiere, Paul Adam, to say nothing of more popular publicists like

Deroulede, Millevoye, Drumont, etc.

All these advocates of war, therefore--American, English, German,

French--are at one in declaring that foreign countries are very warlike,

but that their own country, "sunk in sloth," is drifting away from war.

As presumably they know more of their own country than of others, their

own testimony involves mutual destruction of their own theories. They

are thus unwilling witnesses to the truth, which is that we are all

alike--English, Americans, Germans, French--losing the psychological

impulse to war, just as we have lost the psychological impulse to kill

our neighbors on account of religious differences, and (at least in the

case of the Anglo-Saxon) to kill our neighbors in duels for some cause

of wounded vanity.

How, indeed, could it be otherwise? How can modern life, with its

overpowering proportion of industrial activities and its infinitesimal

proportion of military ones, keep alive the instincts associated with

war as against those developed by peace?

Not only evolution, but common sense and common observation, teaches us

that we develop most those qualities which we exercise most, which serve

us best in the occupation in which we are most engaged. A race of seamen

is not developed by agricultural pursuits, carried on hundreds of miles

from the sea.

Take the case of what is reputed (quite wrongly, incidentally) to be the

most military nation in Europe--Germany. The immense majority of adult

Germans--practically, all who make up what we know as Germany--have

never seen a battle, and in all human probability never will see one. In

forty years eight thousand Germans have been in the field about twelve

months--against naked blacks.[66] So that the proportion of warlike

activities to peaceful activities works out at one to hundreds of

thousands. I wish it were possible to illustrate this diagrammatically;

but it could not be done in this book, because, if a single dot the size

of a full-stop were to be used to illustrate the expenditure of time in

actual war, I should have to fill most of the book with dots to

illustrate the time spent by the balance of the population in peace

activities.[67]

In that case, how can we possibly expect to keep alive warlike

qualities, when all our interests and activities--all our environments,

in short--are peace-like?

In other words, the occupations which develop the qualities of industry

and peace are so much in excess of those which would develop the

qualities we associate with war that that excess has almost now passed

beyond any ordinary means of visual illustration, and has entirely

passed beyond any ordinary human capacity fully to appreciate. Peace is

with us now nearly always; war is with us rarely, yet we are told that

it is the qualities of war which will survive, and the qualities of

peace which will be subsidiary.

I am not forgetting, of course, the military training, the barrack life

which is to keep alive the military tradition. I have dealt with that

question in the next chapter. It suffices for the moment to note that

that training is defended on the grounds (notably among those who would

introduce it into England)--(1) that it ensures peace; (2) that it

renders a population more efficient in the arts of peace--that is to

say, perpetuates that condition of "slothful ease" which we are told is

so dangerous to our characters, in which we are bound to lose the

"warlike qualities," and which renders society still more

"gourmandizing" in Mr. Lea's contemptuous phrase, still more "Cobdenite"

in Mr. Leo Maxse's. One cannot have it both ways. If long-continued

peace is enervating, it is mere self-stultification to plead for

conscription on the ground that it will still further prolong that

enervating condition. If Mr. Leo Maxse sneers at industrial society and

the peace ideal--"the Cobdenite ideal of buying cheap and selling

dear"--he must not defend German conscription (though he does) on the

ground that it renders German commerce more efficient--that, in other

words, it advances that "Cobdenite ideal." In that case, the drift away

from war will be stronger than ever. Perhaps some of all this

inconsistency was in Mr. Roosevelt's mind when he declared that by "war

alone" can man develop those manly qualities, etc. If conscription

really does prolong peace and increase our aptitude for the arts of

peace, then conscription itself is but a factor in man's temperamental

drift away from war, in the change of his nature towards peace.

It is not because man is degenerate or swinish or gluttonous (such

language, indeed, applied as it is by Mr. Lea to the larger and better

part of the human race, suggests a not very high-minded ill-temper at

the stubbornness of facts which rhetoric does not affect) that he is

showing less and less disposition to fight, but because he is condemned

by the real "primordial law" to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow,

and his nature in consequence develops those qualities which the bulk of

his interests and capacities demand and favor.