Finally, of course, we are told that even though these forces are at

work, they must take "thousands of years" to operate. This dogmatism

ignores the Law of Acceleration, as true in the domain of sociology as

in that of physics, which I have touched on at the close of the

preceding chapter. The most recent evidence would seem to show that man

as a fire-using animal dates back to the Tertiary epoch--say, three

hundred thousand years. Now, in all that touches this discussion, man in

Northern Europe (in Great Britain, say) remained unchanged for two

hundred and ninety-eight thousand of those years. In the last two

thousand years he changed more than in the two hundred and ninety-eight

thousand preceding, and in one hundred he has changed more, perhaps,

than in the preceding two thousand. The comparison becomes more

understandable if we resolve it into hours. For, say, fifty years the

man was a cannibal savage or a wild animal, hunting other wild animals,

and then in the space of three months he became John Smith of Des

Moines, attending church, passing laws, using the telephone, and so on.

That is the history of European mankind. And in the face of it, the

wiseacres talk sapiently, and lay it down as a self-evident and

demonstrable fact that inter-State war, which, by reason of the

mechanics of our civilization, accomplishes nothing and can accomplish

nothing, will forever be unassailable because, once man has got the

habit of doing a thing, he will go on doing it, although the

reason which in the first instance prompted it has long since

disappeared--because, in short, of the "unchangeability of human

nature."

CHAPTER IV

DO THE WARLIKE NATIONS INHERIT THE EARTH?

The confident dogmatism of militarist writers on this subject--The

facts--The lessons of Spanish America--How conquest makes for the

survival of the unfit--Spanish method and English method in the New

World--The virtues of military training--The Dreyfus case--The

threatened Germanization of England--"The war which made Germany

great and Germans small."

The militarist authorities I have quoted in the preceding chapter admit,

therefore, and admit very largely, man's drift, in a sentimental sense,

away from war. But that drift, they declare, is degeneration; without

those qualities which "war alone," in Mr. Roosevelt's phrase, can

develop, man will "rot and decay."

This plea is, of course, directly germane to our subject. To say that

the qualities which we associate with war, and nothing else but war, are

necessary to assure a nation success in its struggles with other nations

is equivalent to saying that those who drift away from war will go down

before those whose warlike activity can conserve those qualities

essential to survival; and this is but another way of saying that men

must always remain warlike if they are to survive, that the warlike

nations inherit the earth; that men's pugnacity, therefore, is the

outcome of the great natural law of survival, and that a decline of

pugnacity marks in any nation a retrogression and not an advance in its

struggle for survival. I have already indicated (Chapter II., Part II.)

the outlines of the proposition, which leaves no escape from this

conclusion. This is the scientific basis of the proposition voiced by

the authorities I have quoted--Mr. Roosevelt, Von Moltke, Renan,

Nietzsche, and various of the warlike clergy[68]--and it lies at the

very bottom of the plea that man's nature, in so far as it touches the

tendency of men as a whole to go to war, does not change; that the

warlike qualities are a necessary part of human vitality in the struggle

for existence; that, in short, all that we know of the law of evolution

forbids the conclusion that man will ever lose this warlike pugnacity,

or that nations will survive other than by the struggle of physical

force.

The view is best voiced, perhaps, by Homer Lea, whom I have already

quoted. He says, in his "Valor of Ignorance":

As physical vigor represents the strength of man in his

struggle for existence, in the same sense military vigor

constitutes the strength of nations; ideals, laws,

constitutions are but temporary effulgences [P. 11]. The

deterioration of the military force and the consequent

destruction of the militant spirit have been concurrent with

national decay [P. 24]. International disagreements are ... the

result of the primordial conditions that sooner or later cause

war ... the law of struggle, the law of survival, universal,

unalterable ... to thwart them, to short-cut them, to

circumvent them, to cozen, to deny, to scorn, to violate them,

is folly such as man's conceit alone makes possible....

Arbitration denies the inexorability of natural laws ... that

govern the existence of political entities [Pp. 76, 77]. Laws

that govern the militancy of a people are not of man's framing,

but follow the primitive ordinances of nature that govern all

forms of life, from simple protozoa, awash in the sea, to the

empires of man.[69]

I have already indicated the grave misconception which lies at the

bottom of the interpretation of the evolutionary law here indicated.

What we are concerned with now is to deal with the facts on which this

alleged general principle is inductively based. We have seen from the

foregoing chapter that man's nature certainly does change; the next step

is to show, from the facts of the present-day world, that the warlike

qualities do not make for survival, that the warlike nations do not

inherit the earth.

Which are the military nations? We generally think of them in Europe as

Germany and France, or perhaps also Russia, Austria, and Italy.

Admittedly (_vide_ all the English and American military pundits and

economists) England is the least militarized nation in Europe, the

United States perhaps in the world. It is, above all, Germany that

appeals to us as the type of the military nation, one in which the stern

school of war makes for the preservation of the "manly and adventurous

qualities."

The facts want a little closer examination. What is a career of

unwarlike ease, in Mr. Roosevelt's phrase? In the last chapter we saw

that during the last forty years eight thousand out of sixty million

Germans have been engaged in warfare during a trifle over a year, and

that against Hottentots or Hereros--a proportion of war days per German

to peace days per German which is as one to some hundreds of thousands.

So that if we are to take Germany as the type of the military nation,

and if we are to accept Mr. Roosevelt's dictum that by war alone can we

acquire "those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of

actual life," we shall nevertheless be doomed to lose them, for under

conditions like those of Germany how many of us can ever see war, or can

pretend to fall under its influence? As already pointed out, the men who

really give the tone to the German nation, to German life and

conduct--that is to say, the majority of adult Germans--have never seen

a battle and never will see one. France has done much better. Not only

has she seen infinitely more actual fighting, but her population is much

more militarized than that of Germany, 50 per cent. more, in fact,

since, in order to maintain from a population of forty millions the same

effective military force as Germany does with sixty millions, 1-1/2 per

cent. of the French population is under arms as against 1 per cent. of

the German.[70]

Still more military in organization and in recent practical experience

is Russia, and more military than Russia is Turkey, and more military

than Turkey as a whole are the semi-independent sections of Turkey,

Arabia, and Albania, and then, perhaps, comes Morocco.

On the Western Hemisphere we can draw a like table as to the "warlike,

adventurous, manly, and progressive peoples" as compared with the

"peaceful, craven, slothful, and decadent." The least warlike of all,

the nation which has had the least training in war, the least experience

of it, which has been the least purified by it, is Canada. After that

comes the United States, and after that the best--(excuse me, I mean, of

course, the worst--_i.e._, the least warlike)--of the Spanish American

republics like Brazil and Argentina; while the most warlike of all, and

consequently the most "manly and progressive," are the "Sambo"

republics, like San Domingo, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Venezuela. They

are always fighting. If they cannot manage to get up a fight between one

another, the various parties in each republic will fight between

themselves. Here we get the real thing. The soldiers do not pass their

lives in practising the goose-step, cleaning harness, pipeclaying belts,

but in giving and taking hard pounding. Several of these progressive

republics have never known a year since they declared their independence

from Spain in which they have not had a war. And quite a considerable

proportion of the populations spend their lives in fighting. During the

first twenty years of Venezuela's independent existence she fought no

less than one hundred and twenty important battles, either with her

neighbors or with herself, and she has maintained the average pretty

well ever since. Every election is a fight--none of your

"mouth-fighting," none of your craven talking-shops for them. Good,

honest, hard, manly knocks, with anything from one to five thousand

dead and wounded left on the field. The presidents of these strenuous

republics are not poltroons of politicians, but soldiers--men of blood

and iron with a vengeance, men after Mr. Roosevelt's own heart, all

following "the good old rule, the simple plan." These are the people who

have taken Carlyle's advice to "shut up the talking-shops." _They_ fight

it out like men; _they_ talk with Gatling-guns and Mausers. Oh, they are

a very fine, manly, military lot! If fighting makes for survival, they

should completely oust from the field Canada and the United States, one

of which has never had a real battle for the best part of its hundred

years of craven, sordid, peaceful life, and the other of which Homer Lea

assures us is surely dying, because of its tendency to avoid fighting.

Mr. Lea does not make any secret of the fact (and if he did, some of his

rhetoric would display it) that he is out of sympathy with predominant

American ideals. He might emigrate to Venezuela, or Colombia, or

Nicaragua. He would be able to prove to each military dictator in turn

that, in converting the country into a shambles, far from committing a

foul crime for which such dictators should be, and are, held in

execration by civilized men the world over, they are, on the contrary,

but obeying one of God's commands in tune with all the immutable laws of

the universe. I desire to write in all seriousness, but, to one who

happens to have seen at first hand something of the conditions which

arise from a real military conception of civilization, it is very

difficult. How does Mr. Roosevelt, who declares that "by war alone can

we acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife

of actual life"; how does Von Stengel, who declares that "war is a test

of a nation's health, political, physical, and moral"; how do our

militarists, who infer that the military state is so much finer than the

Cobdenite one of commercial pursuits; how does M. Ernest Renan, who

declares that war is the condition of progress, and that under peace we

should sink to a degree of degeneracy difficult to realize; and how do

the various English clergymen who voice a like philosophy reconcile

their creed with military Spanish America? How can they urge that

non-military industrialism, which, with all its shortcomings, has on the

Western Continent given us Canada and the United States, makes for

decadence and degeneration, while militarism and the qualities and

instincts that go with it have given us Venezuela and San Domingo? Do we

not all recognize that industrialism--Mr. Lea's "gourmandizing and

retching" notwithstanding--is the one thing which will save these

military republics; that the one condition of their advance is that they

shall give up the stupid and sordid gold-braid militarism and turn to

honest work?

If ever there was a justification for Herbert Spencer's sweeping

generalization that "advance to the highest forms of man and society

depends on the decline of militancy and the growth of industrialism,"

it is to be found in the history of the South and Central American

Republics. Indeed, Spanish America at the present moment affords more

lessons than we seem to be drawing, and, if militancy makes for advance

and survival, it is a most extraordinary thing that all who are in any

way concerned with those countries, all who live in them and whose

future is wrapped up in them, can never sufficiently express their

thankfulness that at last there seems to be a tendency with some of them

to get away from the blood and valor nonsense which has been their curse

for three centuries, and to exchange the military ideal for the

Cobdenite one of buying cheap and selling dear which excites so much

contempt.

Some years ago an Italian lawyer, a certain Tomasso Caivano, wrote a

letter detailing his experiences and memories of twenty years' life in

Venezuela and the neighboring republics, and his general conclusions

have for this discussion a direct relevancy. As a sort of farewell

exhortation to the Venezuelans, he wrote:

The curse of your civilization is the soldier and the soldier's

temper. It is impossible for two of you, still less for two

parties, to carry on a discussion without one wanting to fight

the other about the matter in hand. You regard it as a

derogation of dignity to consider the point of view of the

other side, and to attempt to meet it, if it is possible to

fight about it. You deem that personal valor atones for all

defects. The soldier of evil character is more considered

amongst you than the civilian of good character, and military

adventure is deemed more honorable than honest labor. You

overlook the worst corruption, the worst oppression, in your

leaders if only they gild it with military fanfaronade and

declamation about bravery and destiny and patriotism. Not until

there is a change in this spirit will you cease to be the

victims of evil oppression. Not until your general

populace--your peasantry and your workers--refuse thus to be

led to slaughter in quarrels of which they know and care

nothing, but into which they are led because they also prefer

fighting to work--not until all this happens will those

beautiful lands which are among the most fertile on God's earth

support a happy and prosperous people living in contentment and

secure possession of the fruits of their labor.[71]

Spanish America seems at last in a fair way to throwing off the

domination of the soldier and awakening from these nightmares of

successive military despotisms tempered by assassination, though, in

abandoning, in Signor Caivano's words, "military adventure for honest

labor," she will necessarily have less to do with those deeds of blood

and valor of which her history has been so full. But those in South

America who matter are not mourning. Really they are not.[72]

The situation can be duplicated absolutely on the other side of the

hemisphere. Change a few names, and you get Arabia or Morocco. Listen to

this from a recent London _Times_ article:[73]

The fact is that for many years past Turkey has almost

invariably been at war in some part or other of Arabia.... At

the present moment Turkey is actually conducting three separate

small campaigns within Arabia or upon its borders, and a fourth

series of minor operations in Mesopotamia. The last-named

movement is against the Kurdish tribes of the Mosul

district.... Another, and more important, advance is against

the truculent Muntefik Arabs of the Euphrates delta.... The

fourth, and by far the largest, campaign is the unending

warfare in the province of Yemen, north of Aden, where the

Turks have been fighting intermittently for more than a decade.

The peoples of Arabia are also indulging in conflict on their

own account. The interminable feud between the rival potentates

of Nedjd, Ibn Saud of Riadh and Ibn Rashid of Hail, has broken

out afresh, and the tribes of the coastal province of El Katar

are supposed to have plunged into the fray. The Muntefik Arabs,

not content with worrying the Turks, are harrying the

territories of Sheikh Murbarak of Koweit. In the far south the

Sultan of Shehr and Mokalla, a feudatory of the British

Government, is conducting a tiny war against a hostile tribe in

the mysterious Hadramaut. In the west the Beduin are

spasmodically menacing certain sections of the Hedjaz Railway,

which they very much dislike.... Ten years ago the Ibn Rashids

were nominally masters of a great deal of Arabia, and grew so

aggressive that they tried to seize Koweit. The fiery old

Sheikh of Koweit marched against them, and alternately won and

lost. He had his revenge. He sent an audacious scion of the Ibn

Sauds to the old Wahabi capital of Riadh, and by a remarkable

stratagem the youth captured the stronghold with only fifty

men. The rival parties have been fighting at intervals ever

since.

And so on and so on to the extent of a column. So that what Venezuela

and Nicaragua are to the American Continent, Arabia, Albania, Armenia,

Montenegro, and Morocco are to the Eastern Hemisphere. We find exactly

the same rule--that just as one gets away from militancy one gets

towards advance and civilization; as men lose the tendency to fight they

gain the tendency to work, and it is by working with one another, and

not by fighting against each other, that men advance.

Take the progression away from militancy, and it gives us a table

something like this:

Arabia and Morocco.

Turkish territory as a whole.

The more unruly Balkan States. Montenegro.

Russia.

Spain. Italy. Austria.

France.

Germany.

Scandinavia. Holland. Belgium.

England.

The United States.

Canada.

Do Mr. Roosevelt, Admiral Mahan, Baron von Stengel, Marshal von Moltke,

Mr. Homer Lea, and the English clergymen seriously argue that this list

should be reversed, and that Arabia and Turkey should be taken as the

types of progressive nations, and England and Germany and Scandinavia as

the decadent?

It may be urged that my list is not absolutely accurate, in that

England, having fought more little wars (though the conflict with the

Boers, waged with a small, pastoral people, shows how a little war may

drain a great country), is more militarized than Germany, which has not

been fighting at all. But I have tried in a very rough fashion to arrive

at the degree of militancy in each State, and the absence of actual

fighting in the case of Germany (as in that of the smaller States) is

balanced by the fact of the military training of her people. As I have

indicated, France is more military than Germany, both in the extent to

which her people are put through the mill of universal military

training, and by virtue of the fact that she has done so much more small

fighting than Germany (Madagascar, Tonkin, Africa, etc.); while, of

course, Turkey and the Balkan States are still more military in both

senses--more actual fighting, more military training.

Perhaps the militarist will argue that, while useless and unjust wars

make for degeneration, just wars are a moral regeneration. But did a

nation, group, tribe, family, or individual ever yet enter into a war

which he did not think just? The British, or most of them, believed the

war against the Boers just, but most of the authorities in favor of war

in general, outside of Great Britain, believed it unjust. Nowhere do you

find such deathless, absolute, unwavering belief in the justice of war

as in those conflicts which all Christendom knows to be at once unjust

and unnecessary. I refer to the religious wars of Mohammedan fanaticism.

Do you suppose that when Nicaragua goes to war with San Salvador, or

Costa Rica or Colombia with Peru, or Peru with Chili, or Chili with

Argentina, they do not each and every one of them believe that they are

fighting for immutable and deathless principles? The civilization of

most of them is, of course, as like as two peas, and there is no more

reason, except their dislike of rational thought and hard work, why they

should fight with one another, than that Illinois should fight with

Indiana, despite Homer Lea's fine words as to the primordial character

of national differences; to one another they are as alike, and whether

San Salvador beats Costa Rica or Costa Rica, San Salvador, does not, so

far as essentials are concerned, matter a continental. But their

rhetoric of patriotism--the sacrifice, and the deathless glory, and the

rest of it--is often just as sincere as ours. That is the tragedy of it,

and it is that which gives to the solution of the problem in Spanish

America its real difficulty.

But even if we admit that warfare _a l'espagnole_ may be degrading, and

that just wars are ennobling and necessary to our moral welfare, we

should nevertheless be condemned to degeneracy and decline. A just war

implies that someone must act unjustly towards us, but as the general

condition improves--as it is improving in Europe as compared with

Central and South America, or Morocco, or Arabia--we shall get less and

less "moral purification"; as men become less and less disposed to make

unjustifiable attacks, they will become more and more degenerate. In

such incoherence are we landed by the pessimistic and impossible

philosophy that men will decay and die unless they go on killing each

other.

What is the fundamental error at the base of the theory that war makes

for the survival of the fit--that warfare is any necessary expression of

the law of survival? It is the illusion induced by the hypnotism of a

terminology which is obsolete. The same factor which leads us so astray

in the economic domain leads us astray in this also.

Conquest does not make for the elimination of the conquered; the weakest

do not go to the wall, though that is the process which those who adopt

the formula of evolution in this matter have in their minds.

Great Britain has conquered India. Does that mean that the inferior race

is replaced by the superior? Not the least in the world; the inferior

race not only survives, but is given an extra lease of life by virtue

of the conquest. If ever the Asiatic threatens the white race, it will

be thanks in no small part to the work of race conservation which

England's conquests in the East have involved. War, therefore, does not

make for the elimination of the unfit and the survival of the fit. It

would be truer to say that it makes for the survival of the unfit.

What is the real process of war? You carefully select from the general

population on both sides the healthiest, sturdiest, the physically and

mentally soundest, those possessing precisely the virile and manly

qualities which you desire to preserve, and, having thus selected the

elite of the two populations, you exterminate them by battle and

disease, and leave the worst of both sides to amalgamate in the process

of conquest or defeat--because, in so far as the final amalgamation is

concerned, both processes have the same result--and from this amalgam of

the worst of both sides you create the new nation or the new society

which is to carry on the race. Even supposing the better nation wins,

the fact of conquest results only in the absorption of the inferior

qualities of the beaten nation--inferior presumably because beaten, and

inferior because we have killed off their selected best and absorbed the

rest, since we no longer exterminate the women, the children, the old

men, and those too weak or too feeble to go into the army.[74]

You have only to carry on this process long enough and persistently

enough to weed out completely from both sides the type of man to whom

alone we can look for the conservation of virility, physical vigor, and

hardihood. That such a process did play no small role in the

degeneration of Rome and the populations on which the crux of the Empire

reposed there can hardly be any reasonable doubt. And the process of

degeneration on the part of the conqueror is aided by this additional

factor: If the conqueror profits much by his conquest, as the Romans in

one sense did, it is the conqueror who is threatened by the enervating

effect of the soft and luxurious life; while it is the conquered who is

forced to labor for the conqueror, and learns in consequence those

qualities of steady industry which are certainly a better moral training

than living upon the fruits of others, upon labor extorted at the

sword's point. It is the conqueror who becomes effete, and it is the

conquered who learns discipline and the qualities making for a

well-ordered State.

To say of war, therefore, as does Baron von Stengel, that it destroys

the frail trees, leaving the sturdy oaks standing, is merely to state

with absolute confidence the exact reverse of the truth; to take

advantage of loose catch-phrases, which by inattention not only distort

common thought in these matters, but often turn the truth upside down.

Our everyday ideas are full of illustrations of the same thing. For

hundreds of years we talked of the "riper wisdom of the ancients,"

implying that this generation is the youth in experience, and that the

early ages had the accumulated experience--the exact reverse, of course,

of the truth. Yet "the learning of the ancients" and "the wisdom of our

forefathers" was a common catch-phrase, even in the British Parliament,

until an English country parson killed this nonsense by ridicule.[75]

I do not urge that the somewhat simple, elementary, selective process

which I have described accounts in itself for the decadence of military

Powers. That is only a part of the process; the whole of it is somewhat

more complicated, in that the process of elimination of the good in

favor of the bad is quite as much sociological as biological; that is to

say, if during long periods a nation gives itself up to war, trade

languishes, the population loses the habit of steady industry,

government and administration become corrupt, abuses escape punishment,

and the real sources of a people's strength and expansion dwindle. What

has caused the relative failure and decline of Spanish, Portuguese, and

French expansion in Asia and the New World, and the relative success of

English expansion therein? Was it the mere hazards of war which gave to

Great Britain the domination of India and half of the New World? That is

surely a superficial reading of history. It was, rather, that the

methods and processes of Spain, Portugal, and France were military,

while those of the Anglo-Saxon world were commercial and peaceful. Is it

not a commonplace that in India, quite as much as in the New World, the

trader and the settler drove out the soldier and the conqueror? The

difference between the two methods was that one was a process of

conquest, and the other of colonizing, or non-military administration

for commercial purposes. The one embodied the sordid Cobdenite idea,

which so excites the scorn of the militarists, and the other the lofty

military ideal. The one was parasitism; the other co-operation.[76]

Those who confound the power of a nation with the size of its army and

navy are mistaking the check-book for the money. A child, seeing its

father paying bills in checks, assumes that you need only plenty of

check-books in order to have plenty of money; it does not see that for

the check-book to have power there must be unseen resources on which to

draw. Of what use is domination unless there be individual capacity,

social training, industrial resources, to profit thereby? How can you

have these things if energy is wasted in military adventure? Is not the

failure of Spain explicable by the fact that she failed to realize this

truth? For three centuries she attempted to live upon conquest, upon the

force of her arms, and year after year got poorer in the process and her

modern social renaissance dates from the time when she lost the last of

her American colonies. It is since the loss of Cuba and the Philippines

that Spanish national securities have doubled in value. (At the outbreak

of the Hispano-American War Spanish Fours were at 45; they have since

touched par.) If Spain has shown in the last decade a social

renaissance, not shown perhaps for a hundred and fifty years, it is

because a nation still less military than Germany, and still more purely

industrial, has compelled Spain once and for all to surrender all dreams

of empire and conquest. The circumstances of the last surrender are

eloquent in this connection as showing how even in warfare itself the

industrial training and the industrial tradition--the Cobdenite ideal of

militarist scorn--are more than a match for the training of a society in

which military activities are predominant. If it be true that it was the

German schoolmaster who conquered at Sedan, it was the Chicago merchant

who conquered at Manila. The writer happens to have been in touch both

with Spaniards and Americans at the time of the war, and well remembers

the scorn with which the Spaniards referred to the notion that the

Yankee pork-butchers could possibly conquer a nation of their military

tradition, and to the idea that tradesmen would ever be a match for the

soldiery and pride of old Spain. And French opinion was not so very

different.[77] Shortly after the war I wrote in an American journal as

follows:

Spain represents the outcome of some centuries devoted mainly

to military activity. No one can say that she has been

unmilitary or at all deficient in those qualities which we

associate with soldiers and soldiering. Yet, if such qualities

in any way make for national efficiency, for the conservation

of national force, the history of Spain is absolutely

inexplicable. In their late contest with America, Spaniards

showed no lack of the distinctive military virtues. Spain's

inferiority--apart from deficiency of men and money--was

precisely in those qualities which industrialism has bred in

the unmilitary American. Authentic stories of wretched

equipment, inadequate supplies, and bad leadership show to what

depths of inefficiency the Spanish service, military and naval,

had fallen. We are justified in believing that a much smaller

nation than Spain, but one possessing a more industrial and

less military training, would have done much better, both as

regards resistance to America and the defence of her own

colonies. The present position of Holland in Asia seems to

prove this. The Dutch, whose traditions are industrial and

non-military for the most part, have shown greater power and

efficiency as a nation than the Spanish, who are more numerous.

Here, as always, it is shown that, in considering national

efficiency, even as expressed in military power, the economic

problem cannot be divorced from the military, and that it is a

fatal mistake to suppose that the power of a nation depends

solely upon the power of its public bodies, or that it can be

judged simply from the size of its army. A large army may,

indeed, be a sign of a national--that is, military--weakness.

Warfare in these days is a business like other activities, and

no courage, no heroism, no "glorious past," no "immortal

traditions," will atone for deficient rations and fraudulent

administration. Good civilian qualities are the ones that will

in the end win a nation's battles. The Spaniard is the last one

in the world to see this. He talks and dreams of Castilian

bravery and Spanish honor, and is above shopkeeping details....

A writer on contemporary Spain remarks that any intelligent

middle-class Spaniard will admit every charge of incompetence

which can be brought against the conduct of public affairs.

"Yes, we have a wretched Government. In any other country

somebody would be shot." This is the hopeless military creed:

killing somebody is the only remedy.

Here we see a trace of that intellectual legacy which Spain has left to

the New World, and which has stamped itself so indelibly on the history

of Spanish America. On a later occasion in this connection I wrote as

follows:

To appreciate the outcome of much soldiering, the condition in

which persistent military training may leave a race, one should

study Spanish America. Here we have a collection of some score

of States, all very much alike in social and political make-up.

Most of the South American States so resemble one another in

language, laws, institutions, that to an outsider it would seem

not to matter a straw under which particular six-months-old

republic one should live; whether one be under the Government

of the pronunciamento-created President of Colombia, or under

that of the President of Venezuela, one's condition would

appear to be much the same. Apparently no particular country

has anything which differentiates it from another, and,

consequently, anything to protect against the other. Actually,

the Governments might all change places and the people be none

the wiser. Yet, so hypnotized, are these little States by the

"necessity for self-protection," by the glamour of armaments,

that there is not one without a relatively elaborate and

expensive military establishment to protect it from the rest.

No conditions seem so propitious for a practical confederation

as those of Spanish America; with a few exceptions, the virtual

unity of language, laws, general race-ideals, would seem to

render protection of frontiers supererogatory. Yet the citizens

give untold wealth, service, life, and suffering to be

protected against a Government exactly like their own. All this

waste of life and energy has gone on without it ever occurring

to one of these States that it would be preferable to be

annexed a thousand times over, so trifling would be the

resulting change in their condition, than continue the

everlasting and futile tribute of blood and treasure. Over some

absolutely unimportant matter--like that of the Patagonian

roads, which nearly brought Argentina and Chili to grips the

other day--as much patriotic devotion will be expended as ever

the Old Guard lavished in protecting the honor of the Tricolor.

Battles will be fought which will make all the struggles in

South Africa appear mean in comparison. Actions in which the

dead are counted in thousands will excite no more comment in

the world than that produced by a skirmish in Natal, in which a

score of yeomen are captured and released.[78]

In the decade since the foregoing was written things have enormously

improved in South America. Why? For the simple reason, as pointed out in

Chapter V. of the first part of this book, that Spanish America is being

brought more and more into the economic movement of the world; and with

the establishment of factories, in which large capital has been sunk,

banks, businesses, etc., the whole attitude of mind of those interested

in these ventures is changed. The Jingo, the military adventurer, the

fomentor of trouble, are seen for what they are--not as patriots, but as

representing exceedingly mischievous and maleficent forces.

This general truth has two facets: if long warfare diverts a people from

the capacity for industry, so in the long run economic pressure--the

influences, that is, which turn the energies of people to preoccupation

with social well-being--is fatal to the military tradition. Neither

tendency is constant; warfare produces poverty; poverty pushes to thrift

and work, which result in wealth; wealth creates leisure and pride and

pushes to warfare.

Where Nature does not respond readily to industrial effort, where it is,

at least apparently, more profitable to plunder than to work, the

military tradition survives. The Beduin has been a bandit since the time

of Abraham, for the simple reason that the desert does not support

industrial life nor respond to industrial effort. The only career

offering a fair apparent return for effort is plunder. In Morocco, in

Arabia, in all very poor pastoral countries, the same phenomenon is

exhibited; in mountainous countries which are arid and are removed from

the economic centres, _idem_. The same may have been to some extent the

case in Prussia before the era of coal and iron; but the fact that

to-day 99 per cent. of the population is normally engaged in trade and

industry, and 1 per cent. only in military preparation, and some

fraction too small to be properly estimated engaged in actual war, shows

how far she has outgrown such a state--shows, incidentally, what little

chance the ideal and tradition represented by 1 per cent. or some

fractional percentage has against interests and activities represented

by 99 per cent. The recent history of South and Central America, because

it is recent, and because the factors are less complicated, illustrates

best the tendency with which we are dealing. Spanish America inherited

the military tradition in all its vigor. As I have already pointed out,

the Spanish occupation of the American Continent was a process of

conquest rather than of colonizing; and while the mother country got

poorer and poorer by the process of conquest, the new countries also

impoverished themselves in adherence to the same fatal illusion. The

glamour of conquest was, of course, Spain's ruin. So long as it was

possible for her to live on extorted bullion, neither social nor

industrial development seemed possible. Despite the common idea to the

contrary, Germany has known how to keep this fatal hypnotism at bay,

and, far from allowing her military activities to absorb her industrial,

it is precisely the military activities which are in a fair way now to

being absorbed by the industrial and commercial, and her world commerce

has its foundation, not in tribute or bullion exacted at the sword's

point, but in sound and honest exchange. So that to-day the legitimate

commercial tribute which Germany, who never sent a soldier there, exacts

from Spanish America is immensely greater than that which goes to Spain,

who poured out blood and treasure during three centuries on these

territories. In this way, again, do the warlike nations inherit the

earth!

If Germany is never to duplicate Spain's decadence, it is precisely

because (1) she has never had, historically, Spain's temptation to live

by conquest, and (2) because, having to live by honest industry, her

commercial hold, even upon the territories conquered by Spain, is more

firmly set than that of Spain herself.

How may we sum up the whole case, keeping in mind every empire that ever

existed--the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Mede and Persian, the

Macedonian, the Roman, the Frank, the Saxon, the Spanish, the

Portuguese, the Bourbon, the Napoleonic? In all and every one of them

we may see the same process, which is this: If it remains military it

decays; if it prospers and takes its share of the work of the world it

ceases to be military. There is no other reading of history.

That history furnishes no justification for the plea that pugnacity and

antagonism between nations is bound up in any way with the real process

of national survival, shows clearly enough that nations nurtured

normally in peace are more than a match for nations nurtured normally in

war; that communities of non-military tradition and instincts, like the

Anglo-Saxon communities of the New World, show elements of survival

stronger than those possessed by communities animated by the military

tradition, like the Spanish and Portuguese nations of the New World;

that the position of the industrial nations in Europe as compared with

the military gives no justification for the plea that the warlike

qualities make for survival. It is clearly evident that there is no

biological justification in the terms of man's political evolution for

the perpetuation of antagonism between nations, nor any justification

for the plea that the diminution of such antagonism runs counter to the

teachings of the "natural law." There is no such natural law; in

accordance with natural laws, men are being thrust irresistibly towards

co-operation between communities and not towards conflict.

There remains the argument that, though the conflict itself may make for

degeneration, the preparation for that conflict makes for survival, for

the improvement of human nature. I have already touched upon the

hopeless confusion which comes of the plea that, while long-continued

peace is bad, military preparations find justification in that they

insure peace.

Almost every defence of militarism includes a sneer at the ideal of

peace because it involves the Cobdenite state of buying cheap and

selling dear. But, with equal regularity, the advocate of the military

system goes on to argue for great armaments, not as a means of promoting

war, that valuable school, etc., but as the best means of securing

peace; in other words, that condition of "buying cheap and selling dear"

which but a moment before he has condemned as so defective. As though to

make the stultification complete, he pleads for the peace value of

military training, on the ground that German commerce has benefited from

it--that, in other words, it has promoted the "Cobdenite ideal." The

analysis of the reasoning, as has been brilliantly shown by Mr. John M.

Robertson,[79] gives a result something like this: (1) War is a great

school of morals, therefore we must have great armaments to insure

peace; (2) to secure peace engenders the Cobdenite ideal, which is bad,

therefore we should adopt conscription, (_a_) because it is the best

safeguard of peace, (_b_) because it is a training for commerce--the

Cobdenite ideal.

Is it true that barrack training--the sort of school which the

competition of armaments during the last generation has imposed on the

people of Continental Europe--makes for moral health? Is it likely that

a "perpetual rehearsal for something never likely to come off, and when

it comes off is not like the rehearsal," should be a training for life's

realities? Is it likely that such a process would have the stamp and

touch of closeness to real things? Is it likely that the mechanical

routine of artificial occupations, artificial crimes, artificial

virtues, artificial punishments should form any training for the battle

of real life?[80] What of the Dreyfus case? What of the abominable

scandals that have marked German military life of late years? If peace

military training is such a fine school, how could the London _Times_

write thus of France after she had submitted to a generation of a very

severe form of it:

A thrill of horror and shame ran through the whole civilized

world outside France when the result of the Rennes

Court-Martial became known.... By their (the officers') own

admission, whether flung defiantly at the judges, their

inferiors, or wrung from them under cross-examination,

Dreyfus's chief accusers were convicted of gross and

fraudulent illegalities which, anywhere, would have sufficed,

not only to discredit their testimony--had they any serious

testimony to offer--but to transfer them speedily from the

witness-box to the prisoner's dock.... Their vaunted honor

"rooted in dishonor stood." ... Five judges out of the seven

have once more demonstrated the truth of the astounding axiom

first propounded during the Zola trial, that "military justice

is not as other justice." ... We have no hesitation in saying

that the Rennes Court-Martial constitutes in itself the

grossest, and, viewed in the light of the surrounding

circumstances, the most appalling prostitution of justice which

the world has witnessed in modern times.... Flagrantly,

deliberately, mercilessly trampled justice underfoot.... The

verdict, which is a slap in the face to the public opinion of

the civilized world, to the conscience of humanity.... France

is henceforth on her trial before history. Arraigned at the bar

of a tribunal far higher than that before which Dreyfus stood,

it rests with her to show whether she will undo this great

wrong and rehabilitate her fair name, or whether she will stand

irrevocably condemned and disgraced by allowing it to be

consummated. We can less than ever afford to underrate the

forces against truth and justice.... Hypnotized by the wild

tales perpetually dinned into all credulous ears of an

international "syndicate of treason," conspiring against the

honor of the army and the safety of France, the conscience of

the French nation has been numbed, and its intelligence

atrophied.... Amongst those statesmen who are in touch with the

outside world in the Senate and Chamber there must be some that

will remind her that nations, no more than individuals, cannot

bear the burden of universal scorn and live.... France cannot

close her ears to the voice of the civilized world, for that

voice is the voice of history.[81]

And what the _Times_ said then all England was saying, and not only all

England, but all America.

And has Germany escaped a like condemnation? We commonly assume that the

Dreyfus case could not be duplicated in Germany. But this is not the

opinion of very many Germans themselves. Indeed, just before the Dreyfus

case reached its crisis, the Kotze scandal--in its way just as grave as

the Dreyfus affair, and revealing a moral condition just as

serious--prompted the London _Times_ to declare that "certain features

of German civilization are such as to make it difficult for Englishmen

to understand how the whole State does not collapse from sheer

rottenness." If that could be said of the Kotze affair, what shall be

said of the state of things which has been revealed by Maximilien Harden

among others?

Need it be said that the writer of these lines does not desire to

represent Germans as a whole as more corrupt than their neighbors? But

impartial observers are not of opinion, and very many Germans are not of

opinion, that there has been either economic, social, or moral advantage

to the German people from the victories of 1870 and the state of

regimentation which the sequel has imposed. This is surely evidenced by

the actual position of affairs in the German Empire, the complex

difficulty with which the German people are now struggling, the growing

discontent, the growing influence of those elements which are nurtured

in discontent, the growth on one side of radical intransigence and on

the other of almost feudal autocracy, the failure to effect normally and

easily those democratic developments which have been effected in almost

every other European State, the danger for the future which such a

situation represents, the precariousness of German finance, the

relatively small profit which her population as a whole has received

from the greatly increased foreign trade--all this, and much more,

confirms that view. England has of late seemed to have been affected

with the German superstition. With the curious perversity that marks

"patriotic" judgments, the whole tendency of the English has been to

make comparisons with Germany to the disadvantage of themselves and of

other European countries. Yet if Germans themselves are to be believed,

much of that superiority which the English see in Germany is as purely

non-existent as the phantom German war-balloon to which the British

Press devoted serious columns, to the phantom army corps in Epping

Forest, to the phantom stories of arms in London cellars, and to the

German spy which English patriots see in every Italian waiter.[82]

Despite the hypnotism which German "progress" seems to exercise on the

minds of English Jingoes, the German people themselves, as distinct

from the small group of Prussian Junkers, are not in the least enamored

of it, as is proved by the unparalleled growth of the social-democratic

element, which is the negation of military imperialism, and which, as

the figures in Prussia prove, receives support not from one class of the

population merely, but from the mercantile, industrial, and professional

classes as well. The agitation for electoral reform in Prussia shows how

acute the conflict has become; on the one side the increasing democratic

element showing more and more of a revolutionary tendency, and on the

other side the Prussian autocracy showing less and less disposition to

yield. Does anyone really believe that the situation will remain there,

that the Democratic parties will continue to grow in numbers and be

content for ever to be ridden down by the "booted Prussian," and that

German democracy will indefinitely accept a situation in which it will

be always possible--in the words of the Junker, von Oldenburg, member of

the Reichstag--for the German Emperor to say to a Lieutenant, "Take ten

men and close the Reichstag"?

What must be the German's appreciation of the value of military victory

and militarization when, mainly because of it, he finds himself engaged

in a struggle which elsewhere less militarized nations settled a

generation since? And what has the English defender of the militarist

regimen, who holds the German system up for imitation, to say of it as a

school of national discipline, when the Imperial Chancellor himself

defends the refusal of democratic suffrage like that obtaining in

England on the ground that the Prussian people have not yet acquired

those qualities of public discipline which make it workable in

England?[83]

Yet what Prussia, in the opinion of the Chancellor, is not yet fit for,

Scandinavian nations, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, have fitted

themselves for without the aid of military victory and subsequent

regimentation. Did not someone once say that the war had made Germany

great and Germans small?

When we ascribe so large a measure of Germany's social progress (which

no one, so far as I know, is concerned to deny) to the victories and

regimentation, why do we conveniently overlook the social progress of

the small States which I have just mentioned, where such progress on the

material side has certainly been as great as, and on the moral side

greater than, in Germany? Why do we overlook the fact that, if Germany

has done well in certain social organizations, Scandinavia and

Switzerland have done better? And why do we overlook the fact that, if

regimentation is of such social value, it has been so completely

inoperative in States which are more highly militarized even than

Germany--in Spain, Italy, Austria, Turkey, and Russia?

But even assuming--a very large assumption--that regimentation has

played the role in German progress which English Germano-maniacs would

have us believe, is there any justification for supposing that a like

process would be in any way adaptable to English conditions social,

moral, material, and historical?

The position of Germany since the war of 1870--what it has stood for in

the generation since victory, and what it stood for in the generations

that followed defeat--furnishes a much-needed lesson as to the outcome

of the philosophy of force. Practically all impartial observers of

Germany are in agreement with Mr. Harbutt Dawson when he writes as

follows:

It is questionable whether unified Germany counts as much

to-day as an intellectual and moral agent in the world as when

it was little better than a geographical expression.... Germany

has at command an apparently inexhaustible reserve of physical

and material force, but the real influence and power which it

exerts is disproportionately small. The history of civilization

is full of proofs that the two things are not synonymous. A

nation's mere force is, on ultimate analysis, its sum of brute

strength. This force may, indeed, go with intrinsic power, yet

such power can never depend permanently on force, and the test

is easy to apply.... No one who genuinely admires the best in

the German character, and who wishes well to the German people,

will seek to minimize the extent of the loss which would appear

to have befallen the old national ideals; hence the discontent

of the enlightened classes with the political laws under which

they live--a discontent often vague and indefinite, the

discontent of men who do not know clearly what is wrong or what

they want, but feel that a free play is denied them which

belongs to the dignity and worth and essence of human

personality.

"Is there a German culture to-day?" asks Fuchs.[84] "We Germans are able

to perfect all works of civilizing power as well as, and indeed better

than, the best in other nations. Yet nothing that the heroes of labor

execute goes beyond our own border." And the most extraordinary thing is

that those who do not in the least deny this condition to which Germany

has fallen--who, indeed, exaggerate it, and ask us with triumph to look

upon the brutality of German method and German conception--ask us to go

and follow Germany's example!

Most British pro-armament agitation is based upon the plea that Germany

is dominated by a philosophy of force. They point to books like those of

General Bernhardi, idealizing the employment of force, and then urge a

policy of replying by force--and force only--which would, of course,

justify in Germany the Bernhardi school, and by the reaction of opposing

forces stereotype the philosophy in Europe and make it part of the

general European tradition. England stands in danger of becoming

Prussianized by virtue of the fact of fighting Prussianism, or rather by

virtue of the fact that, instead of fighting it with the intellectual

tools that won religious freedom in Europe, she insists upon confining

her efforts to the tools of physical force.

Some of the acutest foreign students of English progress--men like

Edmond Demolins--ascribe it to the very range of qualities which the

German system is bound to crush; their aptitude for initiative, their

reliance upon their own efforts, their sturdy resistance to State

interference (already weakening), their impatience with bureaucracy and

red tape (also weakening), all of which is wrapped up with general

rebelliousness to regimentation.

Though the English base part of the defence of armaments on the plea

that, economic interest apart, they desire to live their own life in

their own way, to develop in their own fashion, do they not run some

danger that with this mania for the imitation of German method they may

Germanize England, though never a German soldier land on their soil?

Of course, it is always assumed that, though the English may adopt the

French and German system of conscription, they could never fall a victim

to the defects of those systems, and that the scandals which break out

from time to time in France and Germany could never be duplicated by

_their_ barrack system, and that the military atmosphere of their own

barracks, the training in their own army, would always be wholesome.

But what do even its defenders say?

Mr. Blatchford himself says:[85]

Barrack life is bad. Barrack life will always be bad. It is

never good for a lot of men to live together apart from home

influences and feminine. It is not good for women to live or

work in communities of women. The sexes react upon each other;

each provides for the other a natural restraint, a wholesome

incentive.... The barracks and the garrison town are not good

for young men. The young soldier, fenced and hemmed in by a

discipline unnecessarily severe, and often stupid, has at the

same time an amount of license which is dangerous to all but

those of strong good sense and strong will. I have seen clean,

good, nice boys come into the Army and go to the devil in less

than a year. I am no Puritan. I am a man of the world; but any

sensible and honest man who has been in the Army will know at

once that what I am saying is entirely true, and is the truth

expressed with much restraint and moderation. A few hours in a

barrack-room would teach a civilian more than all the soldier

stories ever written. When I joined the Army I was unusually

unsophisticated for a boy of twenty. I had been brought up by a

mother. I had attended Sunday-school and chapel. I had lived a

quiet, sheltered life, and I had an astonishing amount to

learn. The language of the barrack-room shocked me, appalled

me. I could not understand half I heard; I could not credit

much that I saw. When I began to realize the truth, I took my

courage in both hands and went about the world I had come into

with open eyes. So I learnt the facts, but I must not tell

them.[86]

CHAPTER V

THE DIMINISHING FACTOR OF PHYSICAL FORCE: PSYCHOLOGICAL RESULTS

Diminishing factor of physical force--Though diminishing, physical

force has always had an important role in human affairs--What is

underlying principle, determining advantageous and disadvantageous

use of physical force?--Force that aids co-operation in accord

with law of man's advance: force that is exercised for

parasitism in conflict with such law and disadvantageous for

both parties--Historical process of the abandonment of physical

force--The Khan and the London tradesman--Ancient Rome and modern

Britain--The sentimental defence of war as the purifier of human

life--The facts--The redirection of human pugnacity.

Despite the general tendency indicated by the facts dealt with in the

preceding chapter, it will be urged (with perfect justice) that, though

the methods of Anglo-Saxondom as compared with those of the Spanish,

Portuguese, and French Empires, may have been mainly commercial and

industrial rather than military, war was a necessary part of expansion;

that but for some fighting the Anglo-Saxons would have been ousted from

North America or Asia, or would never have gained a footing there.

Does this, however, prevent us establishing, on the basis of the facts

exposed in the preceding chapter, a general principle sufficiently

definite to serve as a practical guide in policy, and to indicate

reliably a general tendency in human affairs? Assuredly not. The

principle which explains the uselessness of much of the force exerted by

the military type of empire, and justifies in large part that employed

by Britain, is neither obscure nor uncertain, although empiricism, rule

of thumb (which is the curse of political thinking in our days, and more

than anything else stands in the way of real progress), gets over the

difficulty by declaring that no principle in human affairs can be pushed

to its logical or theoretical conclusion; that what may be "right in

theory" is wrong in practice.

Thus Mr. Roosevelt, who expresses with such admirable force and vigor

the average thoughts of his hearers or readers, takes generally this

line: We must be peaceful, but not too peaceful; warlike, but not too

warlike; moral, but not too moral.[87]

By such verbal mystification we are encouraged to shirk the rough and

stony places along the hard road of thinking. If we cannot carry a

principle to its logical conclusion, at what point are we to stop? One

will fix one and another will fix another with equal justice. What is it

to be "moderately" peaceful, or "moderately" warlike? Temperament and

predilection can stretch such limitations indefinitely. This sort of

thing only darkens counsel.

If a theory is right, it can be pushed to its logical conclusion;

indeed, the only real test of its value is that it _can_ be pushed to

its logical conclusion. If it is wrong in practice, it is wrong in

theory, for the right theory will take cognizance of all the facts, not

only of one set.

In Chapter II. of this part (pp. 186-192), I have very broadly indicated

the process by which the employment of physical force in the affairs of

the world has been a constantly diminishing factor since the day that

primitive man killed his fellow-man in order to eat him. Yet throughout

the whole process the employment of force has been an integral part of

progress, until even to-day in the most advanced nations force--the

police-force--is an integral part of their civilization.

What, then, is the principle determining the advantageous and the

disadvantageous employment of force?

Preceding the outline sketch just referred to is another sketch

indicating the real biological law of man's survival and advance; the

key to that law is found in co-operation between men and struggle with

nature. Mankind as a whole is the organism which needs to co-ordinate

its parts in order to insure greater vitality by better adaptation to

its environment.

Here, then, we get the key: force employed to secure completer

co-operation between the parts, to facilitate exchange, makes for

advance; force which runs counter to such co-operation, which attempts

to replace the mutual benefit of exchange by compulsion, which is in any

way a form of parasitism, makes for retrogression.

Why is the employment of force by the police justified? Because the

bandit refuses to co-operate. He does not offer an exchange; he wants to

live as a parasite, to take by force, and give nothing in exchange. If

he increased in numbers, co-operation between the various parts of the

organism would be impossible; he makes for disintegration. He must be

restrained, and so long as the police use their force in such restraint

they are merely insuring co-operation. The police are not attempting to

settle things by force; they are preventing things from being settled in

that way.

Now, suppose that this police-force becomes the army of a political

Power, and the diplomats of that Power say to a smaller one: "We

outnumber you; we are going to annex your territory, and you are going

to pay us tribute." And the smaller Power says: "What are you going to

give us for that tribute?" And the larger replies: "Nothing. You are

weak; we are strong; we gobble you up. It is the law of life; always has

been--always will be to the end."

Now that police-force, become an army, is no longer making for

co-operation; it has simply and purely taken the place of the bandits;

and to approximate such an army to a police-force, and to say that

because both operations involve the employment of force they both stand

equally justified, is to ignore half the facts, and to be guilty of

those lazy generalizations which we associate with savagery.[88]

But the difference is more than a moral one. If the reader will again

return to the little sketch referred to above, he will probably agree

that the diplomats of the larger Power are acting in an extraordinarily

stupid fashion. I say nothing of their sham philosophy (which happens,

however, to be that of European statecraft to-day), by which this

aggression is made to appear in keeping with the law of man's struggle

for life, when, as a matter of fact, it is the very negation of that

law; but we know _now_ that they are taking a course which gives the

least result, even from _their_ point of view, for the effort expended.

Here we get the key also to the difference between the respective

histories of the military empires, like Spain, France, and Portugal, and

the more industrial type, like England, which has been touched upon in

the preceding chapter. Not the mere hazard of war, not a question of

mere efficiency in the employment of force, has given to Great Britain

influence in half a world, and taken it from Spain, but a radical,

fundamental difference in underlying principles however imperfectly

realized. England's exercise of force has approximated on the whole to

the role of police; Spain's to that of the diplomats of the

supposititious Power just referred to. England's has made for

co-operation; Spain's for the embarrassment of co-operation. England's

has been in keeping with the real law of man's struggle; Spain's in

keeping with the sham law which the "blood and iron" empiricists are

forever throwing at our heads. For what has happened to all attempts to

live on extorted tribute? They have all failed--failed miserably and

utterly[89]--to such an extent that to-day the exaction of tribute has

become an economic impossibility.

If, however, our supposititious diplomats, instead of asking for

tribute, had said: "Your country is in disorder; your police-force is

insufficient; our merchants are robbed and killed; we will lend you

police and help you to maintain order; you will pay the police their

just wage, and that is all;" and had honestly kept to this office, their

exercise of force would have aided human co-operation, not checked it.

Again, it would have been a struggle, not against man, but against the

use of force; the "predominant Power" would have been living, not on

other men, but by more efficient organization of man's fight with

nature.

That is why, in the first section of this book, I have laid emphasis on

the truth that the justification of past wars has no bearing on the

problem which confronts us: the precise degree of fighting which was

necessary a hundred and fifty years ago is a somewhat academic problem.

The degree of fighting which is necessary to-day is the problem which

confronts us, and a great many factors have been introduced into it

since England won India and lost part of North America. The face of the

world has changed, and the factors of conflict have changed radically:

to ignore that is to ignore facts and to be guided by the worst form of

theorizing and sentimentalism--the theorizing that will not recognize

the facts. England does not need to maintain order in Germany, nor

Germany in France; and the struggle between those nations is no part of

man's struggle with nature--has no justification in the real law of

human struggle; it is an anachronism; it finds its justification in a

sham philosophy that will not bear the test of facts, and, responding to

no real need and achieving no real purpose, is bound with increasing

enlightenment to come to an end.

I wish it were not everlastingly necessary to reiterate the fact that

the world has moved. Yet for the purposes of this discussion it is

necessary. If to-day an Italian warship were suddenly to bombard

Liverpool without warning, the Bourse in Rome would present a condition,

and the bank-rate in Rome would take a drop that would ruin tens of

thousands of Italians--do far more injury, probably, to Italy than to

England. Yet if five hundred years ago Italian pirates had landed from

the Thames and sacked London itself, not an Italian in Italy would have

been a penny the worse for it.

Is it seriously urged that in the matter of the exercise of physical

force, therefore, there is no difference in these two conditions: and is

it seriously urged that the psychological phenomena which go with the

exercise of physical force are to remain unaffected?

The preceding chapter is, indeed, the historical justification of the

economic truths established in the first section of this book in the

terms of the facts of the present-day world, which show that the

predominating factor in survival is shifting from the physical to the

intellectual plane. This evolutionary process has now reached a point in

international affairs which involves the complete economic futility of

military force. In the last chapter but one I dealt with the

psychological consequence of this profound change in the nature of man's

normal activities, showing that his nature is coming more and more to

adapt itself to what he normally and for the greater part of his

life--in most cases all his life--is engaged in, and is losing the

impulses concerned with an abnormal and unusual occupation.

Why have I presented the facts in this order, and dealt with the

psychological result involved in this change before the change itself? I

have adopted this order of treatment because the believer in war

justifies his dogmatism for the most part by an appeal to what he

alleges is the one dominating fact of the situation--_i.e._, that human

nature is unchanging. Well, as will be seen from the chapter on that

subject, that alleged fact does not bear investigation. Human nature is

changing out of all recognition. Not only is man fighting less, but he

is using all forms of physical compulsion less, and as a very natural

result is losing those psychological attributes that go with the

employment of physical force. And he is coming to employ physical force

less because accumulated evidence is pushing him more and more to the

conclusion that he can accomplish more easily that which he strives for

by other means.

Few of us realize to what extent economic pressure--and I use that term

in its just sense, as meaning, not only the struggle for money, but

everything implied therein, well-being, social consideration, and the

rest--has replaced physical force in human affairs. The primitive mind

could not conceive a world in which everything was not regulated by

force: even the great minds of antiquity could not believe the world

would be an industrious one unless the great mass were made industrious

by the use of physical force--_i.e._, by slavery. Three-fourths of those

who peopled what is now Italy in Rome's palmiest days were slaves,

chained in the fields when at work, chained at night in their

dormitories, with those who were porters chained to the doorways. It was

a society of slavery--fighting slaves, working slaves, cultivating

slaves, official slaves, and Gibbon adds that the Emperor himself was a

slave, "the first slave to the ceremonies he imposed." Great and

penetrating as were many of the minds of antiquity, none of them show

much conception of any condition of society in which the economic

impulse could replace physical compulsion.[90] Had they been told that

the time would come when the world would work very much harder under

the impulse of an abstract thing known as economic interest, they would

have regarded such a statement as that of a mere sentimental theorist.

Indeed, one need not go so far: if one had told an American slaveholder

of sixty years ago that the time would come when the South would produce

more cotton under the free pressure of economic forces than under

slavery, he would have made a like reply. He would probably have

declared that "a good cowhide whip beats all economic pressure"--pretty

much the sort of thing that one may hear from the mouth of the average

militarist to-day. Very "practical" and virile, of course, but it has

the disadvantage of not being true.

The presumed necessity for physical compulsion did not stop at slavery.

As we have already seen, it was accepted as an axiom in statecraft that

men's religious beliefs had to be forcibly restrained, and not merely

their religious belief, but their very clothing; and we have hundreds of

years of complicated sumptuary laws, hundreds of years, also, of

forcible control or, rather, the attempted forcible control of prices

and trade, the elaborate system of monopolies, absolute prohibition of

the entrance into the country of certain foreign goods, the violation of

which prohibition was treated as a penal offence. We had even the use of

forced money, the refusal to accept which was treated as a penal

offence. In many countries for years it was a crime to send gold abroad,

all indicating the domination of the mind of man by the same curious

obsession that man's life must be ruled by physical force, and it is

only very slowly and very painfully that we have arrived at the truth

that men will work best when left to unseen and invisible forces. A

world in which physical force was withdrawn from the regulation of men's

labor, faith, clothes, trade, language, travel, would have been

absolutely inconceivable to even the best minds during the three or four

thousand years of history which mainly concern us. What is the central

explanation of the profound change involved here--the shifting of the

pivot in all human affairs, in so far as they touch both the individual

and the community, from physical ponderable forces to economic

imponderable forces? It is surely that, strange as it may seem, the

latter forces accomplish the desired result more efficiently and more

readily than do the former, which even when they are not completely

futile are in comparison wasteful and stultifying. It is the law of the

economy of effort. Indeed, the use of physical force usually involves in

those employing it the same limitation of freedom (even if in lesser

degree) as that which it is desired to impose. Herbert Spencer

illustrates the process in the following suggestive passage:

The exercise of mastery inevitably entails on the master

himself some sort of slavery more or less pronounced. The

uncultured masses and even the greater part of the cultured

will regard this statement as absurd, and though many who have

read history with an eye to essentials rather than to

trivialities know that this is a paradox in the right

sense--that is, true in fact though not seeming true--even

they are not fully conscious of the mass of evidence

establishing it, and will be all the better for having

illustrations recalled. Let me begin with the earliest and

simplest which serves to symbolize the whole.

Here is a prisoner, with his hands tied and a cord round his

neck (as suggested by figures in Assyrian bas-reliefs), being

led home by his savage conqueror, who intends to make him a

slave. The one you say is captive and the other free. Are you

quite sure the other is free? He holds one end of the cord and,

unless he means his captive to escape, he must continue to be

fastened by keeping hold of the cord in such way that it cannot

easily be detached. He must be himself tied to the captive

while the captive is tied to him. In other ways his activities

are impeded and certain burdens are imposed on him. A wild

animal crosses the track and he cannot pursue. If he wishes to

drink of the adjacent stream he must tie up his captive, lest

advantage be taken of his defenceless position. Moreover, he

has to provide food for both. In various ways he is no longer,

then, completely at liberty; and these worries adumbrate in a

simple manner the universal truth that the instrumentalities by

which the subordination of others is effected themselves

subordinate the victor, the master, or the ruler.[91]

Thus it comes that all nations attempting to live by conquest end by

being themselves the victims of a military tyranny precisely similar to

that which they hope to inflict; or, in other terms, that the attempt to

impose by force of arms a disadvantageous commercial situation to the

advantage of the conqueror ends in the conqueror's falling a victim to

the very disadvantages from which he hoped by a process of spoliation

to profit.

But the truth that economic force always in the long run outweighs

physical or military force is illustrated by the simple fact of the

universal use of money--the fact that the use of money is not a thing

which we choose or can shake off, but a thing imposed by the operation

of forces stronger than our volition, stronger than the tyranny of the

cruellest tyrant who ever reigned by blood and iron. I think it is one

of the most astounding things, to the man who takes a fairly fresh mind

to the study of history, that the most absolute despots--men who can

command the lives of their subjects with a completeness and a

nonchalance of which the modern Western world furnishes no

parallel--cannot command money. One asks oneself, indeed, why such an

absolute ruler, able as he is by the sheer might of his position and by

the sheer force of his power to take everything that exists in his

kingdom, and able as he is to exact every sort and character of service,

needs money, which is the means of obtaining goods or services by a

freely consented exchange. Yet, as we know, it is precisely, in ancient

as in modern times, the most absolute despot who is often the most

financially embarrassed.[92] Is not this a demonstration that in reality

physical force is operative in only very narrow limits? It is no mere

rhetoric, but the cold truth, to say that under absolutism it is a

simple thing to get men's lives, but often impossible to get money. And

the more, apparently, that physical force was exercised, the more

difficult did the command of money become. And for a very simple

reason--a reason which reveals in rudimentary form that principle of the

economic futility of military power with which we are dealing. The

phenomenon is best illustrated by a concrete case. If one go to-day into

one of the independent despotisms of Central Asia one will find

generally a picture of the most abject poverty. Why? Because the ruler

has absolute power to take wealth whenever he sees it, to take it by any

means whatever--torture, death--up to the completest limit of

uncontrolled physical force. What is the result? The wealth is not

created, and torture itself cannot produce a thing which is

non-existent. Step across the frontier into a State under British or

Russian protection, where the Khan has some sort of limits imposed on

his powers. The difference is immediately perceptible: evidence of

wealth and comfort in relative profusion, and, other things being equal,

the ruler, whose physical force over his subjects is limited, is a great

deal richer than the ruler whose physical force over his subjects is

unlimited. In other words, the farther one gets away from physical

force, in the acquisition of wealth, the greater is the result for the

effort expended. At the one end of the scale you get the despot in rags,

exercising sway over what is probably a potentially rich territory,

reduced to having to kill a man by torture in order to obtain a sum

which at the other end of the scale a London tradesman will spend on a

restaurant dinner for the purpose of sitting at table with a duke--or

the thousandth part of the sum which the same tradesman will spend in

philanthropy or otherwise, for the sake of acquiring an empty title from

a monarch who has lost all power of exercising any physical force

whatsoever.

Which process, judged by all things that men desire, gives the better

result, the physical force of blood and iron which we see, or the

intellectual or psychic force which we cannot see? The principle which

operates in the limited fashion which I have indicated, operates with no

less force in the larger domain of modern international politics. The

wealth of the world is not represented by a fixed amount of gold or

money now in the possession of one Power, and now in the possession of

another, but depends on all the unchecked multiple activities of a

community for the time being. Check that activity, whether by imposing

tribute, or disadvantageous commercial conditions, or an unwelcome

administration which sets up sterile political agitation, and you get

less wealth--less wealth for the conqueror, as well as less for the

conquered. The broadest statement of the case is that all

experience--especially the experience indicated in the last

chapter--shows that in trade by free consent, carrying mutual benefit,

we get larger results for effort expended than in the exercise of

physical force, which attempts to exact advantage for one party at the

expense of the other. I am not arguing over again the thesis of the

first part of this book; but, as we shall see presently, the general

principle of the diminishing factor of physical force in the affairs of

the world carries with it a psychological change in human nature which

modifies radically our impulses to sheer physical conflict. What it is

important just now to keep in mind, is the incalculable intensification

of this diminution of physical force by our mechanical development. The

principle was obviously less true for Rome than it is for Great Britain

or America: Rome, however imperfectly, lived largely by tribute. The

sheer mechanical development of the modern world has rendered tribute in

the Roman sense impossible. Rome did not have to create markets and find

a field for the employment of her capital. We do. What result does this

carry? Rome could afford to be relatively indifferent to the prosperity

of her subject territory. We cannot. If the territory is not prosperous

we have no market, and we have no field for our investments, and that is

why we are checked at every point from doing what Rome was able to do.

You can to some extent exact tribute by force; you cannot compel a man

to buy your goods by force if he does not want them, and has not got the

money to pay for them. Now, the difference which we see here has been

brought about by the interaction of a whole series of mechanical

changes--printing, gunpowder, steam, electricity, improved means of

communication. It is the last-named which has mainly created the fact

of credit. Now, credit is merely an extension of the use of money, and

we can no more shake off the domination of the one than we can that of

the other. We have seen that the bloodiest despot is himself the slave

of money, in the sense that he is compelled to employ it. In the same

way no physical force can, in the modern world, set at nought the force

of credit.[93] It is no more possible for a great people of the modern

world to live without credit than without money, of which it is a part.

Do we not here get an illustration of the fact that intangible economic

forces are setting at nought the force of arms?

One of the curiosities of this mechanical development, with its

deep-seated psychological results, is the general failure to realize the

real bearings of each step therein. Printing was regarded, in the first

instance, as merely a new-fangled process which threw a great many

copying scribes and monks out of employment. Who realized that in the

simple invention of printing there was the liberation of a force greater

than the power of kings? It is only here and there that we find an

isolated thinker having a glimmering of the political bearing of such

inventions of the conception of the great truth that the more man

succeeds in his struggle with nature, the less must be the role of

physical force between men, for the reason that human society has

become, with each success in the struggle against nature, a completer

organism. That is to say, that the interdependence of the parts has

been increased, and that the possibility of one part injuring another

without injury to itself, has been diminished. Each part is more

dependent on the other parts, and the impulses to injury, therefore,

must in the nature of things be diminished. And that fact must, and

does, daily redirect human pugnacity. And it is noteworthy that perhaps

the best service which the improvement of the instruments of man's

struggle with nature performs is the improvement of human relations.

Machinery and the steam-engine have done something more than make

fortunes for manufacturers: they have abolished human slavery, as

Aristotle foresaw they would. It was impossible for men in the mass to

be other than superstitious and irrational until they had the printed

book.[94] "Roads that are formed for the circulation of wealth become

channels for the circulation of ideas, and render possible that

simultaneous action upon which all liberty depends." Banking done by

telegraphy concerns much more than the stockbroker: it demonstrates

clearly and dramatically the real interdependence of nations, and is

destined to transform the mind of the statesman. Our struggle is with

our environment, not with one another; and those who talk as though

struggle between the parts of the same organism must necessarily go on,

and as though impulses which are redirected every day can never receive

the particular redirection involved in abandoning the struggle between

States, ignorantly adopt the formula of science, but leave half the

facts out of consideration. And just as the direction of the impulses

will be changed, so will the character of the struggle be changed; the

force which we shall use for our needs will be the force of

intelligence, of hard work, of character, of patience, self-control, and

a developed brain, and pugnacity and combativeness which, instead of

being used up and wasted in world conflicts of futile destructiveness,

will be, and are being, diverted into the steady stream of

rationally-directed effort. The virile impulses become, not the tyrant

and master, but the tool and servant of the controlling brain.

The conception of abstract imponderable forces by the human mind is a

very slow process. All man's history reveals this. The theologian has

always felt this difficulty. For thousands of years men could only

conceive of evil as an animal with horns and a tail, going about the

world devouring folk; abstract conceptions had to be made understandable

by a crude anthropomorphism. Perhaps it is better that humanity should

have some glimmering of the great facts of the universe, even though

interpreted by legends of demons, and goblins, and fairies, and the

rest; but we cannot overlook the truth that the facts are distorted in

the process, and our advance in the conception of morals is marked

largely by the extent to which we can form an abstract conception of the

fact of evil--none the less a fact because unembodied--without having to

translate it into a non-existent person or animal with a forked tail.

As our advance in the understanding of morality is marked by our

dropping these crude physical conceptions, is it not likely that our

advance in the understanding of those social problems, which so nearly

affect our general well-being, will be marked in like manner?

Is it not somewhat childish and elementary to conceive of force only as

the firing off of guns and the launching of _Dreadnoughts_, of struggle

as the physical struggle between men, instead of the application of

man's energies to his contest with the planet? Is not the time coming

when the real struggle will inspire us with the same respect and even

the same thrill as that now inspired by a charge in battle; especially

as the charges in battle are getting very out of date, and are shortly

to disappear from our warfare? The mind which can only conceive of

struggle as bombardment and charges is, of course, the Dervish mind. Not

that Fuzzy-Wuzzy is not a fine fellow. He is manly, sturdy, hardy, with

a courage, and warlike qualities generally, which no European can equal.

But the frail and spectacled English official is his master, and a few

score of such will make themselves the masters of teeming thousands of

Sudanese; the relatively unwarlike Englishman is doing the same thing

all over Asia, and he is doing it simply by virtue of superior brain

and character, more thought, more rationalism, more steady and

controlled hard work. The American is doing the same in the Philippines.

It may be said that it is superior armament which does it. But what is

the superior armament but the result of superior thought and work? And

even without the superior armament the larger intelligence would still

do it; for what the Englishman and American do, the Roman did of old,

with the same arms as the inhabitants of his vassal worlds. Force is

indeed the master, but it is the force of intelligence, character, and

rationalism.

I can imagine the contempt with which the man of physical force greets

the foregoing. To fight with words, to fight with talk! No, not words,

but ideas. And something more than ideas. Their translation into

practical effort, into organization, into the direction and

administration of organization, into the strategy and tactics of human

life.

What, indeed, is modern warfare in its highest phases but this? Is it

not altogether out of date and ignorant to picture soldiering as riding

about on horseback, bivouacking in forests, sleeping in tents, and

dashing gallantly at the head of shining regiments in plumes and

breastplates, and pounding in serried ranks against the equally serried

ranks of the cruel foe, storming breaches as the "war," in short, of Mr.

Henty's books for boys? How far does such a conception correspond to the

reality--to the German conception? Even if the whole picture were not

out of date, what proportion of the most military nation would ever be

destined to witness it or to take part in it? Not one in ten thousand.

What is the character even of military conflict but, for the most part,

years of hard and steady work, somewhat mechanical, somewhat divorced

from real life, but not a whit more exciting? That is true of all ranks;

and in the higher ranks of the directing mind war has become an almost

purely intellectual process. Was it not the late W.H. Steevens who

painted Lord Kitchener as the sort of man who would have made an

admirable manager of Harrod's Stores; who fought all his battles in his

study, and regarded the actual fighting as the mere culminating incident

in the whole process, the dirty and noisy part of it, which he would

have been glad to get away from?

The real soldiers of our time--those who represent the brain of the

armies--have a life not very different from that of men of any

intellectual calling; much less of physical strife than is called for in

many civil occupations; less than falls to the lot of engineers,

ranchers, sailors, miners, and so on. Even with armies the pugnacity

must be translated into intellectual and not into physical effort.[95]

The very fact that war was long an activity which was in some sense a

change and relaxation from the more intellectual strife of peaceful

life, in which work was replaced by danger, thought by adventure,

accounted in no small part for its attraction for men. But, as we have

seen, war is becoming as hopelessly intellectual and scientific as any

other form of work: officers are scientists, the men are workmen, the

army is a machine, battles are "tactical operations," the charge is

becoming out of date; a little while and war will become the least

romantic of all professions.

In this domain, as in all others, intellectual force is replacing sheer

physical force, and we are being pushed by the necessities even of this

struggle to be more rational in our attitude to war, to rationalize our

study of it; and as our attitude generally becomes more scientific, so

will the purely impulsive element lose its empire over us. That is one

factor; but, of course, there is the greater one. Our respect and

admiration goes in the long run, despite momentary setbacks, to those

qualities which achieve the results at which we are all, in common,

aiming. If those results are mainly intellectual, it is the intellectual

qualities that will receive the tribute of our admiration. We do not

make a man President because he holds the light-weight boxing

championship, and nobody knows or cares whether Mr. Wilson or Mr. Taft

would be the better man at golf. But in a condition of society in which

physical force was still the determining factor it would matter all in

the world, and even when other factors had obtained considerable weight,

as during the Middle Ages, physical combat went for a great deal: the

knight in his shining armor established his prestige by his prowess in

arms, and the vestige of this still remains in those countries that

retain the duel. To some small extent--a very small extent--a man's

dexterity with sword and pistol will affect his political prestige in

Paris, Rome, Budapest, or Berlin. But these are just interesting

vestiges, which in the case of Anglo-Saxon societies have disappeared

entirely. My commercial friend who declares that he works fifteen hours

a day mainly for the purpose of going one better than his commercial

rival across the street, must beat that rival in commerce, not in arms;

it would satisfy no pride of either to "have it out" in the back garden

in their shirt-sleeves. Nor is there the least danger that one will

stick a knife into the other.

Are all these factors to leave the national relationship unaffected?

Have they left it unaffected? Does the military prowess of Russia or of

Turkey inspire any particular satisfaction in the minds of the

individual Russian or of the individual Turk? Does it inspire Europe

with any especial respect? Would not most of us just as soon be a

non-military American as a military Turk? Do not, in short, all the

factors show that sheer physical force is losing its prestige as much in

the national as in the personal relationship?

I am not overlooking the case of Germany. Does the history of Germany,

during the last half-century, show the blind instinctive pugnacity which

is supposed to be so overpowering an element in international

relationship as to outweigh all question of material interest? Does the

commonly accepted history of the trickery and negotiation which preceded

the 1870 conflict, the cool calculation of those who swayed Germany's

policy during those years, show that subordination to the blind lust for

battle which the militarist would persuade us is always to be an element

in our international conflict? Does it not, on the contrary, show that

German destinies were swayed by very cool and calculating motives of

interest, though interest interpreted in terms of political and economic

doctrines which the development of the last thirty years or so has

demonstrated to be obsolete? Nor am I overlooking the "Prussian

tradition," the fact of a firmly entrenched, aristocratic status, the

intellectual legacy of pagan knighthood and Heaven knows what else. But

even a Prussian Junker becomes less of an energumen as he becomes more

of a scientist,[96] and although German science has of late spent its

energies in somewhat arid specialization, the influence of more

enlightened conceptions in sociology and statecraft must sooner or later

emerge from any thoroughgoing study of political and economic problems.

Of course, there are survivals of the old temper, but can it seriously

be argued that, when the futility of physical force to accomplish those

ends towards which we are all striving is fully demonstrated, we shall

go on maintaining war as a sort of theatrical entertainment? Has such a

thing ever happened in the past, when our impulses and "sporting"

instincts came into conflict with our larger social and economic

interests?

All this, in other words, involves a great deal more than the mere

change in the character of warfare. It involves a fundamental change in

our psychological attitude thereto. Not only does it show that on every

side, even the military side, conflict must become less impulsive and

instinctive, more rational and sustained, less the blind strife of

mutually hating men, and more and more the calculated effort to a

definite end; but it will affect the very well-springs of much of the

present defence of war.

Why is it that the authorities I have quoted in the first chapter of

this section--Mr. Roosevelt, Von Moltke, Renan, and the English

clergymen--sing the praises of war as such a valuable school of

morals?[97] Do these war advocates urge that war itself is desirable?

Would they urge going to war unnecessarily or unjustly merely because it

is good for us? Emphatically no. Their argument, in the last analysis,

resolves itself into this: that war, though bad, has redeeming

qualities, as teaching staunchness, courage, and the rest. Well, so has

cutting our legs off, or an operation for appendicitis. Whoever

composed epics on typhoid fever or cancer? Such advocates might object

to the efficient policing of a town because, if it was full of

cut-throats, the inhabitants would be taught courage. One can almost

imagine this sort of teacher pouring scorn upon those weaklings who want

to call upon the police for protection, and saying, "Police are for

sentimentalists and cowards and men of slothful ease. What will become

of the strenuous life if you introduce police?"[98]

The whole thing falls to the ground; and if we do not compose poems

about typhoid it is because typhoid does not attract us and war does.

That is the bottom of the whole matter, and it simplifies things a great

deal to admit honestly that while no one is thrilled by the spectacle of

disease, most of us are thrilled by the spectacle of war--that while

none of us are fascinated by the spectacle of a man struggling with a

disease, most of us are by the spectacle of men struggling with one

another in war. There is something in warfare, in its story and in its

paraphernalia, which profoundly stirs the emotions and sends the blood

tingling through the veins of the most peaceable of us, and appeals to I

know not what remote instincts, to say nothing of our natural admiration

for courage, our love of adventure, of intense movement and action. But

this romantic fascination resides to no small extent in that very

spectacular quality of which modern conditions are depriving war.

As we become a little more educated, we realize that human psychology is

a complex and not a simple thing; that because we yield ourselves to

the thrill of the battle spectacle we are not bound to conclude that the

processes behind it, and the nature behind it, are necessarily all

admirable; that the readiness to die is not the only test of virility or

a fine or noble nature.

In the book to which I have just referred (Mr. Steevens' "With Kitchener

to Khartoum") one may read the following:

And the Dervishes? The honor of the fight must still go with

the men who died. Our men were perfect, but the Dervishes were

superb--beyond perfection. It was their largest, best, and

bravest army that ever fought against us for Mahdism, and it

died worthily for the huge empire that Mahdism won and kept so

long. Their riflemen, mangled by every kind of death and

torment that man can devise, clung round the black flag and the

green, emptying their poor, rotten home-made cartridges

dauntlessly. Their spearmen charged death every minute

hopelessly. Their horsemen led each attack, riding into the

bullets till nothing was left.... Not one rush, or two, or ten,

but rush on rush, company on company, never stopping, though

all their view that was not unshaken enemy was the bodies of

the men who had rushed before them. A dusky line got up and

stormed forward: it bent, broke up, fell apart, and

disappeared. Before the smoke had cleared another line was

bending and storming forward in the same track.... From the

green army there now came only death-enamored desperadoes,

strolling one by one towards the rifles, pausing to take a

spear, turning aside to recognize a corpse, then, caught by a

sudden jet of fury, bounding forward, checking, sinking limply

to the ground. Now under the black flag in a ring of bodies

stood only three men, facing the three thousand of the Third

Brigade. They folded their arms about the staff and gazed

steadily forward. Two fell. The last Dervish stood up and

filled his chest; he shouted the name of his God and hurled his

spear. Then he stood quite still, waiting. It took him full; he

quivered, gave at the knees, and toppled with his head on his

arms and his face towards the legions of his conquerors."

Let us be honest. Is there anything in European history--Cambronne, the

Light Brigade, anything you like--more magnificent than this? If we are

honest we shall say, No.

But note what follows in Mr. Steevens' narrative. What sort of nature

should we expect those savage heroes to display? Cruel, perhaps; but at

least loyal. They will stand by their chief. Men who can die like that

will not betray him for gain. They are uncorrupted by commercialism.

Well, a few chapters after the scene just described, one may read this:

As a ruler the Khalifa finished when he rode out of Omdurman.

His own pampered Baggara horsemen killed his herdsmen and

looted the cattle that were to feed them. Somebody betrayed the

position of the reserve camels.... His followers took to

killing one another.... The whole population of the Khalifa's

capital was now racing to pilfer the Khalifa's grain....

Wonderful workings of the savage mind! Six hours before they

were dying in regiments for their master; now they were looting

his corn. Six hours before they were slashing our wounded to

pieces; now they were asking us for coppers.

This difficulty with the soldier's psychology is not special to

Dervishes or to savages. An able and cultivated British officer writes:

Soldiers as a class are men who have disregarded the civil

standard of morality altogether. They simply ignore it. It is

no doubt why civilians fight shy of them. In the game of life

they do not play the same rules, and the consequence is a good

deal of misunderstanding, until finally the civilian says he

will not play with Tommy any more. In soldiers' eyes lying,

theft, drunkenness, bad language, etc., are not evils at all.

They steal like jackdaws. As to language, I used to think the

language of a merchant ship's forecastle pretty bad, but the

language of Tommies, in point of profanity and in point of

obscenity, beats it hollow. This department is a speciality of

his. Lying he treats with the same large charity. To lie like a

trooper is quite a sound metaphor. He invents all sorts of

elaborate lies for the mere pleasure of inventing them.

Looting, again, is one of his preferred joys, not merely

looting for profit, but looting for the sheer fun of the

destruction.[99]

(Please, please, dear reader, do not say that I am slandering the

British soldier. I am quoting a British officer, and a British officer,

moreover, who is keenly in sympathy with the person that he has just

been describing.) He adds:

Are thieving, and lying, and looting, and bestial talk very bad

things? If they are, Tommy is a bad man. But for some reason or

other, since I got to know him, I have thought rather less of

the iniquity of these things than I did before.

I do not know which of the two passages that I have quoted is the more

striking commentary on the moral influence of military training; that

such training should have the effect which Captain March Phillips

describes, or (as Mr. J.A. Hobson in his "Psychology of Jingoism" says)

that the second judgment should be given by a man of sterling character

and culture--the judgment, that thieving, and lying, and looting, and

bestial talk do not matter. Which fact constitutes the severer

condemnation of the ethical atmosphere of militarism and military

training? Which is the more convincing testimony to the corrupting

influences of war?[100]

To do the soldiers justice, they very rarely raise this plea of war

being a moral training-school. "War itself," said an officer on one

occasion, "is an infernally dirty business. But somebody has got to do

the dirty work of the world, and I am glad to think that it is the

business of the soldier to prevent rather than to make war."

Not that I am concerned to deny that we owe a great deal to the soldier.

I do not know even why we should deny that we owe a great deal to the

Viking. Neither the one nor the other was in every aspect despicable.

Both have bequeathed a heritage of courage, sturdiness, hardihood, and a

spirit of ordered adventure; the capacity to take hard knocks and to

give them; comradeship and rough discipline--all this and much more. It

is not true to say of any emotion that it is wholly and absolutely good,

or wholly and absolutely bad. The same psychological force which made

the Vikings destructive and cruel pillagers made their descendants

sturdy and resolute pioneers and colonists; and the same emotional force

which turns so much of Africa into a sordid and bloody shambles would,

with a different direction and distribution, turn it into a garden. Is

it for nothing that the splendid Scandinavian race, who have converted

their rugged and rock-strewn peninsula into a group of prosperous and

stable States, which are an example to Europe, and have infused the

great Anglo-Saxon stock with something of their sane but noble idealism,

have the blood of Vikings in their veins? Is there no place for the free

play of all the best qualities of the Viking and the soldier in a world

still sadly in need of men with courage enough, for instance, to face

the truth, however difficult it may seem, however unkind to our pet

prejudices?

There is not the least necessity for the peace advocate to ignore facts

in this matter. The race of man loves a soldier just as boys love the

pirate, and many of us, perhaps to our great advantage, remain in part

boys our lives through. But as, growing out of boyhood, we regretfully

discover the sad fact that we cannot be pirates, that we cannot even

hunt Indians, nor be scouts, nor even trappers, so surely the time has

come to realize that we have grown out of soldiering. The romantic

appeal of the ventures of the old Vikings, and even later of

piracy,[101] was as great as that of war. Yet we superseded the Viking,

and we hanged the pirate, though I doubt not we loved him while we

hanged him; and I am not aware that those who urged the suppression of

piracy were vilified, except by the pirates, as maudlin sentimentalists,

who ignored human nature, or, in Homer Lea's phrase, as "half-educated,

sick-brained visionaries, denying the inexorability of the primordial

law of struggle." Piracy interfered seriously with the trade and

industry of those who desired to earn for themselves as good a living as

they could get, and to obtain from this imperfect world all that it had

to offer. Piracy was magnificent, doubtless, but it was not business. We

are prepared to sing about the Viking, but not to tolerate him on the

high seas; and some of us who are quite prepared to give the soldier his

due place in poetry and legend and romance, quite prepared to admit,

with Mr. Roosevelt and Von Moltke and the rest, the qualities which

perhaps we owe to him, and without which we should be poor folk indeed,

are nevertheless inquiring whether the time has not come to place him

(or a good portion of him) gently on the poetic shelf with the Viking;

or at least to find other fields for those activities which, however

much we may be attracted by them, have in their present form little

place in a world in which, though, as Bacon has said, men like danger

better than travail, travail is bound, alas!--despite ourselves--to be

our lot.

CHAPTER VI

THE STATE AS A PERSON: A FALSE ANALOGY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Why aggression upon a State does not correspond to aggression

upon an individual--Our changing conception of collective

responsibility--Psychological progress in this connection--Recent

growth of factors breaking down the homogeneous personality of

States.

Despite the common idea to the contrary, we dearly love an

abstraction--especially, apparently, an abstraction which is based on

half the facts. Whatever the foregoing chapters may have proved, they

have at least proved this: that the character of the modern State, by

virtue of a multitude of new factors which are special to our age, is

essentially and fundamentally different from that of the ancient. Yet

even those who have great and justified authority in this matter will

still appeal to Aristotle's conception of the State as final, with the

implication that everything which has happened since Aristotle's time

should be calmly disregarded.

What some of those things are, the preceding chapters have indicated:

First, there is the fact of the change in human nature itself, bound up

with the general drift away from the use of physical force--a drift

explained by the unromantic fact that physical force does not give so

much response to expended effort as do other forms of energy. There is

an interconnection of psychological and purely mechanical development in

all this which it is not necessary to disentangle here. The results are

evident enough. Very rarely, and to an infinitesimal extent, do we now

employ force for the achievement of our ends. There is still a factor,

however, which remains to be considered, and which has perhaps a more

direct bearing on the question of continued conflict between nations

than any of the other factors.

Conflicts between nations and international pugnacity generally imply a

conception of a State as a homogeneous whole, having the same sort of

responsibility that we attach to a person who, hitting us, provokes us

to hit back. Now only to a very small and rapidly diminishing extent can

a State be regarded as such a person. There may have been a

time--Aristotle's time--when this was possible; but it is now

impossible. Yet the fine-spun theories on which are based the necessity

for the use of force, as between nations, and the proposition that the

relationship of nations can only be determined by force, and that

international pugnacity will always be expressed by a physical struggle

between nations, all arise from this fatal analogy, which in truth

corresponds to very few of the facts.

Thus Professor Spenser Wilkinson, whose contributions to this subject

have such deserved weight, implies that what will permanently render

the abandonment of force between nations impossible is the principle

that "the employment of force for the maintenance of right is the

foundation of all civilized human life, for it is the fundamental

function of the State, and apart from the State there is no

civilization, no life worth living.... The mark of the State is

sovereignty, or the identification of force and right, and the measure

of the perfection of the State is furnished by the completeness of this

identification."

This, whether true or not, is irrelevant to the matter in hand.

Professor Spenser Wilkinson attempts to illustrate his thesis by quoting

a case which would seem to imply that those who take their stand against

the necessity of armaments do so on the ground that the employment of

force is wicked. There may be those who do this, but it is not necessary

to introduce the question of right. If means other than force give the

same result more easily, with less effort to ourselves, why discuss the

abstract right? When Professor Spenser Wilkinson reinforces the appeal

to this irrelevant abstract principle by a case which, while apparently

relevant, is in truth irrelevant, he has successfully confused the whole

issue. After quoting three verses from the fifth chapter of Matthew, he

says:[102]

There are those who believe, or fancy they believe, that the

words I have quoted involve the principle that the use of force

or violence between man and man or between nation and nation

is wicked. To the man who thinks it right to submit to any

violence or be killed rather than use violence in resistance I

have no reply to make; the world cannot conquer him, and fear

has no hold upon him. But even he can carry out his doctrine

only to the extent of allowing himself to be ill-treated, as I

will now convince him. Many years ago the people of Lancashire

were horrified by the facts reported in a trial for murder. In

a village on the outskirts of Bolton lived a young woman, much

liked and respected as a teacher in one of the Board-schools.

On her way home from school she was accustomed to follow a

footpath through a lonely wood, and here one evening her body

was found. She had been strangled by a ruffian who had thought

in this lonely place to have his wicked will of her. She had

resisted successfully, and he had killed her in the struggle.

Fortunately the murderer was caught, and the facts ascertained

from circumstantial evidence were confirmed by his confession.

Now the question I have to ask the man who takes his stand on

the passage quoted from the Gospel is this: "What would have

been your duty had you been walking through that wood and came

upon the girl struggling with the man who killed her?" This is

the crucial factor which, I submit, utterly destroys the

doctrine that the use of violence is in itself wrong. The right

or wrong is not in the employment of force, but simply in the

purpose for which it is used. What the case establishes, I

think, is that to use violence in resistance to violent wrong

is not only right, but necessary.

The above presents, very cleverly, the utterly false analogy with which

we are dealing. Professor Spenser Wilkinson's cleverness, indeed, is a

little Machiavellian, because he approximates non-resisters of a very

extreme type to those who advocate agreement among nations in the matter

of armaments--a false approximation, for the proportion of those who

advocate the reduction of armaments on such grounds is so small that

they can be disregarded in this discussion. A movement which is

identified with some of the acutest minds in European affairs cannot be

disposed of by associating it with such a theory. But the basis of the

fallacy is in the approximation of a State to a person. Now a State is

not a person, and is becoming less so every day, and the difficulty,

which Professor Spenser Wilkinson indicates, is a doctrinaire

difficulty, not a real one. Professor Wilkinson would have us infer that

a State can be injured or killed in the same simple way in which it is

possible to kill or injure a person, and that because there must be

physical force to restrain aggression upon persons, there must be

physical force to restrain aggression upon States; and because there

must be physical force to execute the judgment of a court of law in the

case of individuals, there must be physical force to execute the

judgment rendered by a decision as to differences between States. All of

which is false, and arrived at by approximating a person to a State, and

disregarding the numberless facts which render a person different from a

State.

How do we know that these difficulties are doctrinaire ones? It is the

British Empire which supplies the answer. The British Empire is made up

in large part of practically independent States, and Great Britain not

only exercises no control over their acts, but has surrendered in

advance any intention of employing force concerning them.[103] The

British States have disagreements among themselves. They may or may not

refer their differences to the British Government, but if they do, is

Great Britain going to send an army to Canada, say, to enforce her

judgment? Everyone knows that that is impossible. Even when one State

commits what is in reality a serious breach of international comity on

another, not only does Great Britain refrain from using force herself,

but so far as she interferes at all, it is to prevent the employment of

physical force. For years now British Indians have been subjected to

most cruel and unjust treatment in the State of Natal.[104] The British

Government makes no secret of the fact that she regards this treatment

as unjust and cruel; were Natal a foreign State, it is conceivable that

she would employ force, but, following the principle laid down by Sir

C.P. Lucas, "whether they are right or whether they are wrong, more

perhaps when they are wrong than when they are right, they cannot be

made amenable by force," the two States are left to adjust the

difficulty as best they may, without resort to force. In the last resort

the British Empire reposes upon the expectation that its Colonies will

behave as civilized communities, and in the long run the expectation is,

of course, a well-founded one, because, if they do not so behave,

retribution will come more surely by the ordinary operation of social

and economic forces than it could come by any force of arms.

The case of the British Empire is not an isolated one. The fact is that

most of the States of the world maintain their relations one with

another without any possibility of a resort to force; half the States of

the world have no means of enforcing by arms such wrongs as they may

suffer at the hands of other States. Thousands of Englishmen, for

instance, make their homes in Switzerland, and it has happened that

wrongs have been suffered by Englishmen at the hands of the Swiss

Government. Would, however, the relations between the two States, or the

practical standard of protection of British subjects in Switzerland, be

any the better were Switzerland the whole time threatened by the might

of Great Britain? Switzerland knows that she is practically free from

the possibility of the exercise of that force, but this has not

prevented her from behaving as a civilized community towards British

subjects.

What is the real guarantee of the good behavior of one State to another?

It is the elaborate interdependence which, not only in the economic

sense, but in every sense, makes an unwarrantable aggression of one

State upon another react upon the interests of the aggressor.

Switzerland has every interest in affording an absolutely secure asylum

to British subjects; that fact, and not the might of the British Empire,

gives protection to British subjects in Switzerland. Where, indeed, the

British subject has to depend upon the force of his Government for

protection it is a very frail protection indeed, because in practice the

use of that force is so cumbersome, so difficult, so costly, that any

other means are to be preferred to it. When the traveller in Greece had

to depend upon British arms, great as was relatively the force of those

arms, it proved but a very frail protection. In the same way, when

physical force was used to impose on the South American and Central

American States the observance of their financial obligations, such

efforts failed utterly and miserably--so miserably that Great Britain

finally surrendered any attempt at such enforcement. What other means

have succeeded? The bringing of those countries under the influence of

the great economic currents of our time, so that now property is

infinitely more secure in Argentina than it was when British gunboats

were bombarding her ports. More and more in international relationship

is the purely economic motive--and the economic motive is only one of

several possible ones--being employed to replace the use of physical

force. Austria, the other day, was untouched by any threat of the

employment of the Turkish army when the annexation of Bosnia and

Herzegovina was consummated, but when the Turkish population enforced a

very successful commercial boycott of Austrian goods and Austrian ships,

Austrian merchants and public opinion made it quickly plain to the

Austrian Government that pressure of this nature could not be

disregarded.

I anticipate the plea that while the elaborate interconnection of

economic relations renders the employment of force as between nations

unnecessary in so far as their material interests are concerned, those

forces cannot cover a case of aggression upon what may be termed the

moral property of nations. A critic of the first edition of this

book[105] writes:

The State is the only complete form in which human society

exists, and there are a multitude of phenomena which will be

found only as manifestations of human life in the form of a

society united by the political bond into a State. The products

of such society are law, literature, art, and science, and it

has yet to be shown that apart from that form of society known

as the State, the family or education or development of

character is possible. The State, in short, is an organism or

living thing which can be wounded and can be killed, and like

every other living thing requires protection against wounding

and destruction.... Conscience and morals are products of

social and not of individual life, and to say that the sole

purpose of the State is to make possible a decent livelihood is

as though a man should say that the sole object of human life

is to satisfy the interests of existence. A man cannot live any

kind of life without food, clothing, and shelter, but that

condition does not abolish or diminish the value of the life

industrial, the life intellectual, or the life artistic. The

State is the condition of all these lives, and its purpose is

to sustain them. That is why the State must defend itself. In

the ideal, the State represents and embodies the whole people's

conception of what is true, of what is beautiful, and of what

is right, and it is the sublime quality of human nature that

every great nation has produced citizens ready to sacrifice

themselves rather than submit to an external force attempting

to dictate to them a conception other than their own of what is

right.

One is, of course, surprised to see the foregoing in the London _Morning

Post_; the concluding phrase would justify the present agitation in

India or in Egypt or Ireland against British rule. What is that

agitation but an attempt on the part of the peoples of those provinces

to resist "an external force attempting to dictate to them a conception

other than their own of what is right"? Fortunately, however, for

British Imperialism, a people's conception of "what is true, of what is

beautiful, and of what is right," and their maintenance of that

conception, need not necessarily have anything whatever to do with the

particular administrative conditions under which they may live--the only

thing that a conception of a "State" predicates. The fallacy which runs

through the whole passage just quoted, and which makes it, in fact,

nonsense, is the same fallacy which dominates the quotation that I have

made from Professor Spenser Wilkinson's book, "Britain at Bay"--namely,

the approximation of a State to a person, the assumption that the

political delimitation coincides with the economic and moral

delimitation, that in short a State is the embodiment of "the whole

people's conception of what is true, etc." A State is nothing of the

sort. Take the British Empire. This State embodies not a homogeneous

conception, but a series of often absolutely contradictory conceptions

of "what is true, etc."; it embodies the Mohammedan, the Buddhist, the

Copt, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Pagan conceptions of right and

truth. The fact which vitiates the whole of this conception of a State

is that the frontiers which define the State do not coincide with the

conception of any of those things which the London _Morning Post_ critic

has enumerated; there is no such thing as British morality as opposed to

French or German morality, or art or industry. One may, indeed, talk of

an English conception of life, because that is a conception of life

peculiar to England, but it would be opposed to the conception of life

in other parts of the same State, in Ireland, in Scotland, in India, in

Egypt, in Jamaica. And what is true of England is true of all the great

modern States. Every one of them includes conceptions absolutely opposed

to other conceptions in the same State, but many of them absolutely

agree with conceptions in foreign States. The British State includes, in

Ireland, a Catholic conception in cordial agreement with the Catholic

conception in Italy, but in cordial disagreement with the Protestant

conception in Scotland, or the Mohammedan conception in Bengal. The

real divisions of all those ideals, which the critic enumerates, cut

right across State divisions, disregarding them entirely. Yet, again, it

is only the State divisions which military conflict has in view.

What was one of the reasons leading to the cessation of religious wars

between States? It was that religious conceptions cut across the State

frontiers, so that the State ceased to coincide with the religious

divisions of Europe, and a condition of things was brought about in

which a Protestant Sweden was allied with a Catholic France. This

rendered the conflict absurd, and religious wars became an anachronism.

Is not precisely the same thing taking place with reference to the

conflicting conceptions of life which now separate men in Christendom?

Have not we in America the same doctrinal struggle which is going on in

France and Germany and Great Britain? To take one instance--social

conflict. On the one side in each case are all the interests bound up

with order, authority, individual freedom, without reference to the

comfort of the weak, and on the other the reconstruction of human

society along hitherto untried lines. These problems are for most men

probably--are certainly coming to be, if they are not now--much more

profound and fundamental than any conception which coincides with or can

be identified with State divisions. Indeed, what are the conceptions of

which the divisions coincide with the political frontiers of the British

Empire, in view of the fact that that Empire includes nearly every race

and nearly every religion under the sun? It may be said, of course, that

in the case of Germany and Russia we have an autocratic conception of

social organization as compared with a conception based on individual

freedom in England and America. Both Mr. Hyndman and Mr. Blatchford seem

to take this view. "To me," says the former, "it is quite evident that

if we Socialists were to achieve success we should at once be liable to

attack from without by the military Powers," an opinion which calmly

overlooks the fact that Socialism and anti-militarism have gone much

farther and are far better organized in the "military" States than they

are in England, and that the military Governments have all their work

cut out as it is to keep those tendencies in check within their own

borders, without quixotically undertaking to perform the same service in

other States.

This conception of the State as the political embodiment of homogeneous

doctrine is due in large part not only to the distortion produced by

false analogy, but to the survival of a terminology which has become

obsolete, and, indeed, the whole of this subject is vitiated by those

two things. The State in ancient times was much more a personality than

it is to-day, and it is mainly quite modern tendencies which have broken

up its doctrinal homogeneity, and that break-up has results which are of

the very first importance in their bearing upon international pugnacity.

The matter deserves careful examination. Professor William McDougal, in

his fascinating work, "An Introduction to Social Psychology," says in

the chapter on the instinct of pugnacity:

The replacement of individual by collective pugnacity is most

clearly illustrated by barbarous peoples living in small,

strongly organized communities. Within such communities

individual combat and even expressions of personal anger may be

almost completely suppressed, while the pugnacious instinct

finds itself in perpetual warfare between communities whose

relations remain subject to no law. As a rule no material

benefit is gained, and often none is sought, in these tribal

wars.... All are kept in constant fear of attack, whole

villages are often exterminated, and the population is in this

way kept down very far below the limit at which any pressure on

the means of subsistence could arise. This perpetual warfare,

like the squabbles of a roomful of quarrelsome children, seems

to be almost wholly and directly due to the uncomplicated

operation of the instinct of pugnacity. No material benefits

are sought; a few heads and sometimes a slave or two are the

only trophies gained, and if one asks an intelligent chief why

he keeps up this senseless practice, the best reason he can

give is that unless he does so his neighbors will not respect

him and his people, and will fall upon them and exterminate

them.

Now, how does such hostility as that indicated in this passage differ

from the hostility which marks international differences in our day? In

certain very evident respects. It does not suffice that the foreigner

should be merely a foreigner for us to want to kill him: there must be

some conflict of interest. The English are completely indifferent to

the Scandinavian, the Belgian, the Dutchman, the Spaniard, the Austrian,

and the Italian, and are supposed for the moment to be greatly in love

with the French. The German is the enemy. But ten years ago it was the

Frenchman who was the enemy, and Mr. Chamberlain was talking of an

alliance with the Germans--England's natural allies, he called

them--while it was for France that he reserved his attacks.[106] It

cannot be, therefore, that there is any inherent racial hostility in

English national character, because the Germans have not changed their

nature in ten years, nor the French theirs. If to-day the French are

England's quasi-allies and the Germans her enemies, it is simply because

their respective interests or apparent interests have modified in the

last ten years, and their political preferences have modified with them.

In other words, national hostilities follow the exigencies of real or

imagined political interests. Surely the point need not be labored,

seeing that England has boxed the compass of the whole of Europe in her

likes and dislikes, and poured her hatred upon the Spaniards, the Dutch,

the Americans, the Danes, the Russians, the Germans, the French, and

again the Germans, all in turn. The phenomenon is a commonplace of

individual relationship: "I never noticed his collars were dirty till

he got in my way," said someone of a rival.

The second point of difference with Professor McDougal's savage is that

when we get to grips our conflict does not include the whole tribe; we

do not, in the Biblical fashion, exterminate men, women, children, and

cattle. Enough of the old Adam remains for us to detest the women and

children, so that an English poet could write of the "whelps and dams of

murderous foes"; but we no longer slaughter them.[107]

But there is a third fact which we must note--that Professor McDougal's

nation was made up of a single tribe entirely homogeneous. Even the fact

of living across a river was sufficient to turn another tribe into

foreigners and to involve a desire to kill them. The development from

that stage to the present has involved, in addition to the two factors

just enumerated, this: we now include as fellow-countrymen many who

would under the old conception necessarily be foreigners, and the

process of our development, economic and otherwise, has made of

foreigners, between whom, in Homer Lea's philosophy, there should exist

this "primordial hostility leading inevitably to war," one State from

which all conflict of interest has disappeared entirely. The modern

State of France includes what were, even in historical times, eighty

separate and warring States, since each of the old Gallic cities

represented a different State. In England people have come to regard as

fellow-citizens between whom there can be no sort of conflict of

interest scores of tribes that spent their time mutually throat-cutting

at no very distant period, as history goes. Anyone, particularly

Americans, can recognize, indeed, that profound national differences

like those which exist between the Welshman and the Englishman, or the

Scotsman and the Irishman, need involve not only no conflict of

interest, but even no separate political existence.