In this chapter I propose to speculate a little about the future
development of these four great States, whose destinies are likely to be
much more closely interwoven than their past histories have been. I
believe that the stars in their courses tend to draw these States
together into a dominant peace alliance, maintaining the peace of the
world. There may be other stars in that constellation, Italy, Japan, a
confederated Latin America, for example; I do not propose to deal with
that possibility now, but only to dwell upon the development of
understandings and common aims between France, Russia, and the
English-speaking States.
They have all shared one common experience during the last two years;
they have had an enormous loss of self-sufficiency. This has been
particularly the case with the United States of America. At the
beginning of this war, the United States were still possessed by the
glorious illusion that they were aloof from general international
politics, that they needed no allies and need fear no enemies, that they
constituted a sort of asylum from war and all the bitter stresses and
hostilities of the old world. Themselves secure, they could intervene
with grim resolution to protect their citizens all over the world. Had
they not bombarded Algiers?...
I remember that soon after the outbreak of the war I lunched at the
Savoy Hotel in London when it was crammed with Americans suddenly swept
out of Europe by the storm. My host happened to be a man of some
diplomatic standing, and several of them came and talked to him. They
were full of these old-world ideas of American immunity. Their
indignation was comical even at the time. Some of them had been hustled;
some had lost their luggage in Germany. When, they asked, was it to be
returned to them? Some seemed to be under the impression that, war or no
war, an American tourist had a perfect right to travel about in the
Vosges or up and down the Rhine just as he thought fit. They thought he
had just to wave a little American flag, and the referee would blow a
whistle and hold up the battle until he had got by safely. One family
had actually been careering about in a cart--their automobile
seized--between the closing lines of French and Germans, brightly
unaware of the disrespect of bursting shells for American
nationality.... Since those days the American nation has lived
politically a hundred years.
The people of the United States have shed their delusion that there is
an Eastern and a Western hemisphere, and that nothing can ever pass
between them but immigrants and tourists and trade, and realised that
this world is one round globe that gets smaller and smaller every decade
if you measure it by day's journeys. They are only going over the lesson
the British have learnt in the last score or so of years. This is one
world and bayonets are a crop that spreads. Let them gather and seed, it
matters not how far from you, and a time will come when they will be
sticking up under your nose. There is no real peace but the peace of the
whole world, and that is only to be kept by the whole world resisting
and suppressing aggression wherever it arises. To anyone who watches the
American Press, this realisation has been more and more manifest. From
dreams of aloofness and ineffable superiority, America comes round very
rapidly to a conception of an active participation in the difficult
business of statecraft. She is thinking of alliances, of throwing her
weight and influence upon the side of law and security. No longer a
political Thoreau in the woods, a sort of vegetarian recluse among
nations, a being of negative virtues and unpremeditated superiorities,
she girds herself for a manly part in the toilsome world of men.
So far as I can judge, the American mind is eminently free from any
sentimental leaning towards the British. Americans have a traditional
hatred of the Hanoverian monarchy, and a democratic disbelief in
autocracy. They are far more acutely aware of differences than
resemblances. They suspect every Englishman of being a bit of a
gentleman and a bit of a flunkey. I have never found in America anything
like that feeling common in the mass of English people that prevents the
use of the word "foreigner" for an American; there is nothing to
reciprocate the sympathy and pride that English and Irish republicans
and radicals feel for the States. Few Americans realise that there are
such beings as English republicans.
What has linked Americans with the British hitherto has been very
largely the common language and literature; it is only since the war
began that there seems to have been any appreciable development of
fraternal feeling. And that has been not so much discovery of a mutual
affection as the realisation of a far closer community of essential
thought and purpose than has hitherto been suspected. The Americans,
after thinking the matter out with great frankness and vigour, do
believe that Britain is on the whole fighting against aggression and not
for profit, that she is honestly backing France and Belgium against an
intolerable attack, and that the Hohenzollern Empire is a thing that
needs discrediting and, if possible, destroying in the interests of all
humanity, Germany included.
America has made the surprising discovery that, allowing for their
greater nearness, the British are thinking about these things almost
exactly as Americans think about them. They follow the phases of the war
in Great Britain, the strain, the blunderings, the tenacity, the onset
of conscription in an essentially non-military community, with the
complete understanding of a people similarly circumstanced, differing
only by scale and distance. They have been through something of the sort
already; they may have something of the sort happen again. It had not
occurred to them hitherto how parallel we were. They begin to have
inklings of how much more parallel we may presently become.
There is evidence of a real search for American affinities among the
other peoples of the world; it is a new war-made feature of the
thoughtful literature and journalists of America. And it is interesting
to note how partial and divided these affinities must necessarily be.
Historically and politically, the citizen of the United States must be
drawn most closely to France. France is the one other successful modern
republic; she was the instigator and friend of American liberation. With
Great Britain the tie of language, the tradition of personal freedom,
and the strain in the blood are powerful links. But both France and
Britain are old countries, thickly populated, with a great and ancient
finish and completeness, full of implicit relationships; America is by
comparison crude, uninformed, explicit, a new country, still turning
fresh soil, still turning over but half-explored natural resources.
The United States constitute a modern country, a country on an
unprecedented scale, being organised from the very beginning on modern
lines. There is only one other such country upon the planet, and that
curiously enough is parallel in climate, size, and position--Russia in
Asia. Even Russia in Europe belongs rather to the newness that is
American than to the tradition that is European; Harvard was founded
more than half a century before Petrograd. And when I looked out of the
train window on my way to Petrograd from Germany, the little towns I saw
were like no European towns I had ever seen. The wooden houses, the
broad unmade roads, the traffic, the winter-bitten scenery, a sort of
untidy spaciousness, took my mind instantly to the country one sees in
the back part of New York State as one goes from Boston to Niagara. And
the reality follows the appearance.
The United States and Russia are the west and the east of the same
thing; they are great modern States, developing from the beginning upon
a scale that only railways make possible. France and Britain may perish
in the next two centuries or they may persist, but there can be no doubt
that two centuries ahead Russia and the United States will be two of the
greatest masses of fairly homogeneous population on the globe.
There are no countries with whom the people of the United States are so
likely to develop sympathy and a sense of common values and common
interests as with these three, unless it be with the Scandinavian
peoples. The Scandinavian peoples have developed a tendency to an
extra-European outlook, to look west and east rather than southwardly,
to be pacifist and progressive in a manner essentially American. From
any close sympathy with Germany the Americans are cut off at present by
the Hohenzollerns and the system of ideas that the Hohenzollerns have
imposed upon German thought. So long as the Germans cling to the tawdry
tradition of the Empire, so long as they profess militarism, so long as
they keep up their ridiculous belief in some strange racial superiority
to the rest of mankind, it is absurd to expect any co-operative feeling
between them and any other great people.
The American tradition is based upon the casting off of a Germanic
monarchy; it is its cardinal idea. These sturdy Republicans did not
fling out the Hanoverians and their Hessian troops to prepare the path
of glory for Potsdam. But except for the gash caused by the Teutonic
monarchy, there runs round the whole world a north temperate and
sub-arctic zone of peoples, generally similar in complexion, physical
circumstances, and intellectual and moral quality, having enormous
undeveloped natural resources, and a common interest in keeping the
peace while these natural resources are developed, having also a common
interest in maintaining the integrity of China and preventing her
development into a military power; it is a zone with the clearest
prospect of a vast increase in its already enormous population, and it
speaks in the main one or other of three languages, either French,
Russian, or English. I believe that natural sympathy will march with the
obvious possibilities of the situation in bringing the American mind to
the realisation of this band of common interests and of its
compatibility with the older idea of an American continent protected by
a Monroe doctrine from any possibility of aggression from the monarchies
of the old world.
As the old conception of isolation fades and the American mind accustoms
itself to the new conception of a need of alliances and understandings
to save mankind from the megalomania of races and dynasties, I believe
it will turn first to the idea of keeping the seas with Britain and
France, and then to this still wider idea of an understanding with the
Pledged Allies that will keep the peace of the world.
Now Germany has taught the world several things, and one of the most
important of these lessons is the fact that the destinies of states and
peoples is no longer to be determined by the secret arrangements of
diplomatists and the agreements or jealousies of kings. For fifty years
Germany has been unifying the mind of her people against the world. She
has obsessed them with an evil ideal, but the point we have to note is
that she has succeeded in obsessing them with that ideal. No other
modern country has even attempted such a moral and mental solidarity as
Germany has achieved. And good ideals need, just as much as bad ones,
systematic inculcation, continual open expression and restatement. Mute,
mindless, or demented nations are dangerous and doomed nations. The
great political conceptions that are needed to establish the peace of
the world must become the common property of the mass of intelligent
adults if they are to hold against the political scoundrel, the royal
adventurer, the forensic exploiter, the enemies and scatterers of
mankind. The French, Americans, and English have to realise this
necessity; they have to state a common will and they have to make their
possession by that will understood by the Russian people, and they have
to share that will with the Russian people. Beyond that there lies the
still greater task or making some common system of understandings with
the intellectual masses of China and India. At present, with three of
these four great powers enormously preoccupied with actual warfare,
there is an opportunity for guiding expression on the part of America,
for a real world leadership, such as may never occur again....
So far I have been stating a situation and reviewing certain
possibilities. In the past half-century the United States has been
developing a great system of universities and a continental production
of literature and discussion to supplement the limited Press and the New
England literature of the earlier phase of the American process. It is
one of the most interesting speculations in the world to everyone how
far this new organisation of the American mind is capable of grasping
the stupendous opportunities and appeals of the present time. The war
and the great occasions that must follow the war will tax the mind and
the intellectual and moral forces of the Pledged Allies enormously. How
far is this new but very great and growing system of thought and
learning in the United States capable of that propaganda of ideas and
language, that progressive expression of a developing ideal of
community, that in countries so spontaneous, so chaotic or democratic as
the United States and the Pledged Allies must necessarily take the
place of the organised authoritative _Kultur_ of the Teutonic type of
state?
As an undisguisedly patriotic Englishman, I would like to see the lead
in this intellectual synthesis of the nations, that _must_ be achieved
if wars are to cease, undertaken by Great Britain. But I am bound to
confess that in Great Britain I see neither the imaginative courage of
France nor the brisk enterprise of the Americans. I see this matter as a
question of peace and civilisation, but there are other baser but quite
as effective reasons why America, France, and Great Britain should exert
themselves to create confidences and understandings between their
populations and the Russian population. There is the immediate business
opportunity in Russia. There is the secondary business opportunity in
China that can best be developed as the partners rather than as the
rivals of the Russians. Since the Americans are nearest, by way of the
Pacific, since they are likely to have more capital and more free energy
to play with than the Pledged Allies, I do on the whole incline to the
belief that it is they who will yet do the pioneer work and the leading
work that this opportunity demands.