THE ALTERNATIVE RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT
The facts of the present situation in Europe, so far sketched, reveal
broadly this spectacle: everywhere the failure of national power to
indispensable ends, sustenance, political security, nationality, right;
everywhere a fierce struggle for national power.
Germany, which successfully fed her expanding population by a system
which did not rest upon national power, wrecked that system in order to
attempt one which all experience showed could not succeed. The Allied
world pilloried both the folly and the wickedness of such a statecraft;
and at the peace proceeded to imitate it in every particular. The faith
in the complete efficacy of preponderant power which the economic and
other demands of the Treaty of Versailles and the policy towards Russia
reveal, is already seen to be groundless (for the demands, in fact, are
being abandoned). There is in that document an element of _naïveté_, and
in the subsequent policy a cruelty which will be the amazement of
history--if our race remains capable of history.
Yet the men who made the Treaty, and accelerated the famine and break-up
of half a world, including those, like M. Tardieu, who still demand a
ruined Germany and an indemnity-paying one, were the ablest statesmen of
Europe, experienced, realist, and certainly not morally monsters. They
were probably no worse morally, and certainly more practical, than the
passionate democracies, American and European, who encouraged all the
destructive elements of policy and were hostile to all that was
recuperative and healing.
It is perfectly true--and this truth is essential to the thesis here
discussed--that the statesmen at Versailles were neither fools or
villains. Neither were the Cardinals and the Princes of the Church, who
for five hundred years, more or less, attempted to use physical coercion
for the purpose of suppressing religious error. There is, of course an
immeasurably stronger case for the Inquisition as an instrument of
social order than there is for the use of competing national military
power as the basis of modern European society. And the stronger case for
the Inquisition as an instrument of social by a modern statesman when he
goes to war. It was less. The inquisitor, in burning and torturing the
heretic, passionately believed that he obeyed the voice of God, as the
modern statesman believes that he is justified by the highest dictates
of patriotism. We are now able to see that the Inquisitor was wrong, his
judgment twisted by some overpowering prepossession: Is some similar
prepossession distorting vision and political wisdom in modern
statecraft? And if so, what is the nature of this prepossession?
As an essay towards the understanding of its nature, the following
suggestions are put forward:--
The assertion of national power, domination, is always in line with
popular feeling. And in crises--like that of the settlement with
Germany--popular feeling dictates policy.
The feelings associated with coercive domination evidently lie near
the surface of our natures and are easily excited. To attain our
end by mere coercion instead of bargain or agreement, is the method
in conduct which, in the order of experiments, our race generally
tries first, not only in economics (as by slavery) but in sex, in
securing acquiescence to our religious beliefs, and in most other
relationships. Coercion is not only the response to an instinct; it
relieves us of the trouble and uncertainties of intellectual
decision as to what is equitable in a bargain.
To restrain the combative instinct sufficiently to realise the need
of co-operation, demands a social discipline which the prevailing
political traditions and moralities of Nationalism and Patriotism
not only do not furnish, but directly discourage.
But when some vital need becomes obvious and we find that force
simply cannot fulfil it, we then try other methods, and manage to
restrain our impulse sufficiently to do so. If we simply must have
a man's help, and we find we cannot force him to give it, we then
offer him inducements, bargain, enter a contract, even though it
limits our independence.
Stable international co-operation cannot come in any other way. Not
until we realise the failure of national coercive power for
indispensable ends (like the food of our people) shall we cease to
idealise power and to put our most intense political emotions (like
those of patriotism) behind it. Our traditions will buttress and
'rationalise' the instinct to power until we see that it is
mischievous. We shall then begin to discredit it and create new
traditions.
An American sociologist (Professor Giddings of Columbia University) has
written thus:--
'So long as we can confidently act, we do not argue; but when we
face conditions abounding in uncertainty, or when we are confronted
by alternative possibilities, we first hesitate, then feel our way,
then guess, and at length venture to reason. Reasoning,
accordingly, is that action of the mind to which we resort when the
possibilities before us and about us are distributed substantially
according to the law of chance occurrence, or, as the mathematician
would say, in accordance with "the normal curve" of random
frequency. The moment the curve is obviously skewed, we decide; if
it is obviously skewed from the beginning, by authority, or
coercion, our reasoning is futile or imperfect. So, in the State,
if any interest or coalition of interests is dominant, and can act
promptly, it rules by absolutist methods. Whether it is benevolent
or cruel, it wastes neither time nor resources upon government by
discussion; but if interests are innumerable, and so distributed as
to offset one another, and if no great bias or overweighting
anywhere appears, government by discussion inevitably arises. The
interests can get together only if they talk. If power shall be
able to dictate, it will also rule, and the appeal to reason will
be vain.'
This means that a realisation of interdependence--even though it be
subconscious--is the basis of the social sense, the feeling and
tradition which make possible a democratic society, in which freedom is
voluntarily limited for the purpose of preserving any freedom at all.
It indicates also the relation of certain economic truths to the
impulses and instincts that underlie international conflict. We shall
excuse or justify or fail to restrain those instincts, unless and until
we see that their indulgence stands in the way of the things which we
need and must have if society is to live. We shall then discredit them
as anti-social, as we have discredited religious fanaticism, and build
up a controlling _Sittlichkeit_.
The statement of Professor Giddings, quoted above, leaves out certain
psychological facts which the present writer in an earlier work has
attempted to indicate. He, therefore, makes no apology for reproducing a
somewhat long passage bearing on the case before us:--
'The element in man which makes him capable, however feebly, of
choice in the matter of conduct, the one fact distinguishing him
from that vast multitude of living things which act unreflectingly,
instinctively (in the proper and scientific sense of the word), as
the mere physical reaction to external prompting, is something not
deeply rooted, since it is the latest addition of all to our
nature. The really deeply rooted motives of conduct, those having
by far the greatest biological momentum, are naturally the
"motives" of the plant and the animal, the kind that marks in the
main the acts of all living things save man, the unreflecting
motives, those containing no element of ratiocination and free
volition, that almost mechanical reaction to external forces which
draw the leaves towards the sun-rays and makes the tiger tear its
living food limb from limb.
'To make plain what that really means in human conduct, we must
recall the character of that process by which man turns the forces
of nature to his service instead of allowing them to overwhelm him.
Its essence is a union of individual forces against the common
enemy, the forces of nature. Where men in isolated action would
have been powerless, and would have been destroyed, union,
association, co-operation, enabled them to survive. Survival was
contingent upon the cessation of struggle between them, and the
substitution therefor of common action. Now, the process both in
the beginning and in the subsequent development of this device of
co-operation is important. It was born of a failure of force. If
the isolated force had sufficed, the union of force would not have
been resorted to. But such union is not a mere mechanical
multiplication of blind energies; it is a combination involving
will, intelligence. If mere multiplication of physical energy had
determined the result of man's struggles, he would have been
destroyed or be the helpless slave of the animals of which he makes
his food. He has overcome them as he has overcome the flood and the
storm--by quite another order of action. Intelligence only emerges
where physical force is ineffective.
'There is an almost mechanical process by which, as the complexity
of co-operation grows, the element of physical compulsion declines
in effectiveness, and is replaced by agreement based on mutual
recognition of advantage. There is through every step of this
development the same phenomenon: intelligence and agreement only
emerge as force becomes ineffective. The early (and purely
illustrative) slave-owner who spent his days seeing that his slave
did not run away, and compelling him to work, realised the economic
defect of the arrangement: most of the effort, physical and
intellectual, of the slave was devoted to trying to escape; that of
the owner, trying to prevent him. The force of the one,
intellectual or physical, cancelled the force of the other, and the
energies of both were lost so far as productive value was
concerned, and the needed task, the building of the shelter or the
catching of the fish, was not done, or badly done, and both went
short of food and shelter. But from the moment that they struck a
bargain as to the division of labour and of spoils, and adhered to
it, the full energies of both were liberated for direct production,
and the economic effectiveness of the arrangement was not merely
doubled, but probably multiplied many times. But this substitution
of free agreement for coercion, with all that it implied of
contract, of "what is fair," and all that followed of mutual
reliance in the fulfilment of the agreement, was _based upon mutual
recognition of advantage_. Now, that recognition, without which the
arrangement could not exist at all, required, relatively, a
considerable mental effort, _due in the first instance to the
failure of force_. If the slave-owner had had more effective means
of physical coercion, and had been able to subdue his slave, he
would not have bothered about agreement, and this embryo of human
society and justice would not have been brought into being. And in
history its development has never been constant, but marked by the
same rise and fall of the two orders of motive; as soon as one
party or the other obtained such preponderance of strength as
promised to be effective, he showed a tendency to drop free
agreement and use force; this, of course, immediately provoked the
resistance of the other, with a lesser or greater reversion to the
earlier profitless condition.
'This perpetual tendency to abandon the social arrangement and
resort to physical coercion is, of course, easily explainable by
the biological fact just touched on. To realise at each turn and
permutation of the division of labour that the social arrangement
was, after all, the best demanded on the part of the two characters
in our sketch, not merely control of instinctive actions, but a
relatively large ratiocinative effort for which the biological
history of early man had not fitted him. The physical act of
compulsion only required a stone axe and a quickness of purely
physical movement for which his biological history had afforded
infinitely long training. The more mentally-motived action, that of
social conduct, demanding reflection as to its effect on others,
and the effect of that reaction upon our own position and a
conscious control of physical acts, is of modern growth; it is but
skin-deep; its biological momentum is feeble. Yet on that feeble
structure has been built all civilisation.
'When we remember this--how frail are the ultimate foundations of
our fortress, how much those spiritual elements which alone can
give us human society are outnumbered by the pre-human elements--is
it surprising that those pre-social promptings of which
civilisation represents the conquest, occasionally overwhelm man,
break up the solidarity of his army, and push him back a stage or
two nearer to the brute condition from which he came? That even at
this moment he is groping blindly as to the method of distributing
in the order of his most vital needs the wealth he is able to wring
from the earth; that some of his most fundamental social and
political conceptions--those, among others, with which we are now
dealing--have little relation to real facts; that his animosities
and hatreds are as purposeless and meaningless as his enthusiasms
and his sacrifices; that emotion and effort which quantitatively
would suffice amply for the greater tasks before him, for the
firmer establishment of justice and well-being, for the cleaning up
of all the festering areas of moral savagery that remain, are as a
simple matter of fact turned to those purposes hardly at all, but
to objects which, to the degree to which they succeed, merely
stultify each other?
'Now, this fact, the fact that civilisation is but skin-deep and
that man is so largely the unreflecting brute, is not denied by
pro-military critics. On the contrary they appeal to it as the
first and last justification of their policy. "All your talk will
never get over human nature; men are not guided by logic; passion
is bound to get the upper hand," and such phrases, are a sort of
Greek chorus supplied by the military party to the whole of this
discussion.
'Nor do the militarist advocates deny that these unreflecting
elements are anti-social; again, it is part of their case that,
unless they are held in check by the "iron hand," they will
submerge society in a welter of savagery. Nor do they deny--it is
hardly possible to do so--that the most important securities which
we enjoy, the possibility of living in mutual respect of right
because we have achieved some understanding of right; all that
distinguishes modern Europe from the Europe of (among other things)
religious wars and St. Bartholomew massacres, and distinguishes
British political methods from those Turkey or Venezuela, are due
to the development of moral forces (since physical force is most
resorted to in the less desirable age and area), and particularly
to the general recognition that you cannot solve religious and
political problems by submitting them to the irrelevant hazard of
physical force.
'We have got thus far, then: both parties to the discussion are
agreed as to the fundamental fact that civilisation is based upon
moral and intellectual elements in constant danger of being
overwhelmed by more deeply-rooted anti-social elements. The plain
facts of history past and present are there to show that where
those moral elements are absent the mere fact of the possession of
arms only adds to the destructiveness of the resulting welter.
'Yet all attempts to secure our safety by other than military means
are not merely regarded with indifference; they are more generally
treated either with a truly ferocious contempt or with definite
condemnation.
'This apparently on two grounds: first, that nothing that we can do
will affect the conduct of other nations; secondly, that, in the
development of those moral forces which do undoubtedly give us
security, government action--which political effort has in
view--can play no part.
'Both assumptions are, of course, groundless. The first implies not
only that our own conduct and our own ideas need no examination,
but that ideas current in one country have no reaction on those of
another, and that the political action of one State does not affect
that of others. "The way to be sure of peace is to be so much
stronger than your enemy that he will not dare to attack you," is
the type of accepted and much-applauded "axioms" the unfortunate
corollary of which is (since both parties can adopt the rule) that
peace will only be finally achieved when each is stronger than the
other.
'So thought and acted the man with the stone axe in our
illustration, and in both cases the psychological motive is the
same: the long-inherited impulse to isolated action, to the
solution of a difficulty by some simple form of physical movement;
the tendency to break through the more lately acquired habit of
action based on social compact and on the mental realisation of its
advantage. It is the reaction against intellectual effort and
responsible control of instinct, a form of natural protest very
common in children and in adults not brought under the influence of
social discipline.
'The same general characteristics are as recognisable in militarist
politics within the nation as in the international field. It is not
by accident that Prussian and Bismarckian conceptions in foreign
policy are invariably accompanied by autocratic conceptions in
internal affairs. Both are founded upon a belief in force as the
ultimate determinant in human conduct; a disbelief in the things of
the mind as factors of social control, a disbelief in moral forces
that cannot be expressed in "blood and iron." The impatience shown
by the militarist the world over at government by discussion, his
desire to "shut up the talking shops" and to govern autocratically,
are but expressions of the same temper and attitude.
'The forms which Governments have taken and the general method of
social management, are in large part the result of its influence.
Most Governments are to-day framed far more as instruments for the
exercise of physical force than as instruments of social
management.
'The militarist does not allow that man has free will in the matter
of his conduct at all; he insists that mechanical forces on the one
side or the other alone determine which of two given courses shall
be taken; the ideas which either hold, the rôle of intelligent
volition, apart from their influence in the manipulation of
physical force, play no real part in human society. "Prussianism,"
Bismarckian "blood and iron," are merely political expressions of
this belief in the social field--the belief that force alone can
decide things; that it is not man's business to question authority
in politics or authority in the form of inevitability in nature. It
is not a question of who is right, but of who is stronger. "Fight
it out, and right will be on the side of the victor"--on the side,
that is, of the heaviest metal or the heaviest muscle, or, perhaps,
on that of the one who has the sun at his back, or some other
advantage of external nature. The blind material things--not the
seeing mind and the soul of man--are the ultimate sanction of human
society.
'Such a doctrine, of course, is not only profoundly anti-social, it
is anti-human--fatal not merely to better international relations,
but, in the end, to the degree to which it influences human conduct
at all, to all those large freedoms which man has so painfully won.
'This philosophy makes of man's acts, not something into which
there enters the element of moral responsibility and free volition,
something apart from and above the mere mechanical force of
external nature, but it makes man himself a helpless slave; it
implies that his moral efforts and the efforts of his mind and
understanding are of no worth--that he is no more the master of his
conduct than the tiger of his, or the grass and the trees of
theirs, and no more responsible.
'To this philosophy the "civilist" may oppose another: that in man
there is that which sets him apart from the plants and the animals,
which gives him control of and responsibility for his social acts,
which makes him the master of his social destiny if he but will it;
that by virtue of the forces of his mind he may go forward to the
completer conquest, not merely of nature, but of himself, and
thereby, and by that alone, redeem human association from the evils
that now burden it.'
_From Balance to Community of Power_
Does the foregoing imply that force or compulsion has no place in human
society? Not the least in the world. The conclusions so far drawn might
be summarised, and certain remaining ones suggested, thus:--
Coercion has its place in human society, and the considerations
here urged do not imply any sweeping theory of non-resistance. They
are limited to the attempt to show that the effectiveness of
political power depends upon certain moral elements usually utterly
neglected in international politics, and particularly that
instincts inseparable from Nationalism as now cultivated and
buttressed by prevailing political morality, must condemn political
power to futility. Two broad principles of policy are available:
that looking towards isolated national power, or that looking
towards common power behind a common purpose. The second may fail;
it has risks. But the first is bound to fail. The fact would be
self-evident but for the push of certain instincts warping our
judgment in favour of the first. If mankind decides that it can do
better than the first policy, it will do better. If it decides that
it cannot, that decision will itself make failure inevitable. Our
whole social salvation depends upon making the right choice.
In an earlier chapter certain stultifications of the Balance of Power as
applied to the international situation were dealt with. It was there
pointed out that if you could get such a thing as a real Balance, that
would certainly be a situation tempting the hot-heads of both sides to a
trial of strength. An obvious preponderance of power on one side might
check the temper of the other. A 'balance' would assuredly act as no
check. But preponderance has an even worse result.
How in practical politics are we to say when a group has become
preponderantly powerful? We know to our cost that military power is
extremely difficult of precise estimate. It cannot be weighed and
balanced exactly. In political practice, therefore, the Balance of Power
means a rivalry of power, because each to be on the safe side wants to
be just a bit stronger than the other. The competition creates of itself
the very condition it sets out to prevent.
The defect of principle here is not the employment of force. It is the
refusal to put force behind a law which may demand our allegiance. The
defect lies in the attempt to make ourselves and our own interests by
virtue of preponderant power superior to law.
The feature which stood condemned in the old order was not the
possession by States of coercive power. Coercion is an element in every
good society that we have heretofore known. The evil of the old order
was that in case of States the Power was anti-social; that it was not
pledged to the service of some code or rule designed for mutual
protection, but was the irresponsible possession of each individual,
maintained for the express purpose of enabling him to enforce his own
views of his own rights, to be judge and executioner in his own case,
when his view came into collision with that of others. The old effort
meant in reality the attempt on the part of a group of States to
maintain in their own favour a preponderance of force of undefined and
unlimited purpose. Any opposing group that found itself in a position of
manifest inferiority had in fact to submit in international affairs to
the decision of the possessor of preponderant power for the time being.
It might be used benevolently; in that case the weaker obtained his
rights as a gift from the stronger. But so long as the possession of
power was unaccompanied by any defined obligation, there could be no
democracy of States, no Society of Nations. To destroy the power of the
preponderant group meant merely to transpose the situation. The security
of one meant always the insecurity of the other.
The Balance of Power in fact adopts the fundamental premise of the
'might makes right' principle, because it regards power as the ultimate
fact in politics; whereas the ultimate fact is the purpose for which the
power will be used. Obviously you don't want a Balance of Power between
justice and injustice, law and crime; between anarchy and order. You
want a preponderance of power on the side of justice, of law and of
order.
We approach here one of the commonest and most disastrous confusions
touching the employment of force in human society, particularly in the
Society of Nations.
It is easy enough to make play with the absurdities and contradictions
of the _si vis pacem para bellum_ of our militarists. And the hoary
falsehood does indeed involve a flouting of all experience, an
intellectual astigmatism that almost makes one despair. But what is the
practical alternative?
The anti-militarist who disparages our reliance upon 'force' is almost
as remote from reality, for all society as we know it in practice, or
have ever known it, does rely a great deal upon the instrument of
'force,' upon restraint and coercion.
We have seen where the competition in arming among European nations has
led us. But it may be argued: suppose you were greatly to reduce all
round, cut in half, say, the military equipment of Europe, would the
power for mutual destruction be sensibly reduced, the security of Europe
sensibly greater? 'Adequacy' and 'destructiveness' of armament are
strictly relative terms. A country with a couple of battleships has
overwhelming naval armament if its opponent has none. A dozen
machine-guns or a score of rifles against thousands of unarmed people
may be more destructive of life than a hundred times that quantity of
material facing forces similarly armed. (Fifty rifles at Amritsar
accounted for two thousand killed and wounded, without a single casualty
on the side of the troops.) Wars once started, instruments of
destruction can be rapidly improvised, as we know. And this will be
truer still when we have progressed from poison gas to disease germs, as
we almost certainly shall.
The first confusion is this:--
The issue is made to appear as between the 'spiritual' and the
'material'; as between material force, battleships, guns, armies on the
one side as one method, and 'spiritual' factors, persuasion, moral
goodness on the other side, as the contrary method. 'Force v. Faith,' as
some evangelical writer has put it. The debate between the Nationalist
and the Internationalist is usually vitiated at the outset by an
assumption which, though generally common to the two parties, is not
only unproven, but flatly contrary to the weight of evidence. The
assumption is that the military Nationalist, basing his policy upon
material force--a preponderant navy, a great army, superior
artillery--can dispense with the element of trust, contract, treaty.
Now to state the issue in that way creates a gross confusion, and the
assumption just indicated is quite unjustifiable. The militarist quite
as much as the anti-militarist, the nationalist quite as much as the
internationalist, has to depend upon a moral factor, 'a contract,' the
force of tradition, and of morality. Force cannot operate at all in
human affairs without a decision of the human mind and will. Guns do not
get pointed and go off without a mind behind them, and as already
insisted, the direction in which the gun shoots is determined by the
mind which must be reached by a form of moral suasion, discipline, or
tradition; the mind behind the gun will be influenced by patriotism in
one case, or by a will to rebellion and mutiny, prompted by another
tradition or persuasion, in another. And obviously the moral decision,
in the circumstances with which we are dealing, goes much deeper and
further back. The building of battleships, or the forming of armies, the
long preparation which is really behind the material factor, implies a
great deal of 'faith.' These armies and navies could never have been
brought into existence and be manoeuvred without vast stores of faith
and tradition. Whether the army serves the nation, as in Britain or
France, or dominates it as in a Spanish-American Republic (or in a
somewhat different sense in Prussia), depends on a moral factor: the
nature of the tradition which inspires the people from whom the army is
drawn. Whether the army obeys its officers or shoots them is determined
by moral not material factors, for the officers have not a preponderance
of physical force over the men. You cannot form a pirate crew without a
moral factor: the agreement not to use force against one another, but to
act in consort and combine it against the prey. Whether the military
material we and France supplied Russia, and the armies France helped to
train, are employed against us or the Germans, depends upon certain
moral and political factors inside Russia, certain ideas formed in the
minds of certain men. It is not a situation of Ideas against Guns, but
of ideas using guns. The confusion involves a curious distortion in our
reading of the history of the struggle against privilege and tyranny.
Usually when we speak of the past struggles of the people against
tyranny, we have in our minds a picture of the great mass held down by
the superior physical force of the tyrant. But such a picture is, of
course, quite absurd. For the physical force which held down the people
was that which they themselves supplied. The tyrant had no physical
force save that with which his victims furnished him. In this struggle
of 'People _v._ Tyrant,' obviously the weight of physical force was on
the side of the people. This was as true of the slave States of
antiquity as it is of the modern autocracies. Obviously the free
minority--the five or ten or fifteen per cent.--of Rome or Egypt, or the
governing orders of Prussia or Russia, did not impose their will upon
the remainder by virtue of superior physical force, the sheer weight of
numbers, of sinew and muscle. If the tyranny of the minority had
depended upon its own physical power, it could not have lasted a day.
The physical force which the minority used was the physical force of the
majority. The people were oppressed by an instrument which they
themselves furnished.
In that picture, therefore, which we make of the mass of mankind
struggling against the 'force' of tyranny, we must remember that the
force against which they struggled was not in the last analysis physical
force at all; it was their own weight from which they desired to be
liberated.
Do we realise all that this means? It means that tyranny has been
imposed, as freedom has been won: through the Mind.
The small minority imposes itself and can only impose itself by getting
first at the mind of the majority--the people--in one form or another:
by controlling it through keeping knowledge from it, as in so much of
antiquity, or by controlling the knowledge itself, as in Germany. It is
because the minds of the masses have failed them that they have been
enslaved. Without that intellectual failure of the masses, tyranny could
have found no force wherewith to impose its burdens.
This confusion as to the relation of 'force' to the moral factor is of
all confusions most worth while clearing up: and for that purpose we may
descend to homely illustrations.
You have a disorderly society, a frontier mining camp, every man armed,
every man threatened by the arms of his neighbour and every man in
danger. What is the first need in restoring order? More force--more
revolvers and bowie knives? No; every man is fully armed already. If
there exists in this disorder the germ of order some attempt will be
made to move towards the creation of a police. But what is the
indispensable prerequisite for the success of such an effort? It is the
capacity for a nucleus of the community to act in common, to agree
together to make the beginnings of a community. And unless that nucleus
can achieve agreement--a moral and intellectual problem--there can be no
police force. But be it noted well, this first prerequisite--the
agreement among a few members necessary to create the first Vigilance
Committee--is not force; it is a decision of certain minds determining
how force shall be used, how combined. Even when you have got as far as
the police, this device of social protection will entirely break down
unless the police itself can be trusted to obey the constituted
authority, and the constituted authority itself to abide by the law. If
the police represents a mere preponderance of power, using that power to
create a privileged position for itself or for its employers--setting
itself, that is, against the community--you will sooner or later get
resistance which will ultimately neutralise that power and produce a
mere paralysis so far as any social purpose is concerned. The existence
of the police depends upon general agreement not to use force except as
the instrument of the social will, the law to which all are party. This
social will may not exist; the members of the vigilance committee or
town council or other body may themselves use their revolvers and knives
each against the other. Very well, in that case you will get no police.
'Force' will not remedy it. Who is to use the force if no one man can
agree with the other? All along the line here we find ourselves,
whatever our predisposition to trust only 'force,' thrown back upon a
moral factor, compelled to rely upon contract, an agreement, before we
can use force at all.
It will be noted incidentally that effective social force does not rest
upon a Balance of Power: society does not need a Balance of Power as
between the law and crime; it wants a preponderance of power on the
side of the law. One does not want a Balance of Power between rival
parties in the State. One wants a preponderance of power on behalf of a
certain fundamental code upon which all parties, or an immense majority
of parties, will be agreed. As against the Balance of Power we need a
Community of Power--to use Mr. Wilson's phrase--on the side of a purpose
or code of which the contributors to the power are aware.
One may read in learned and pretentious political works that the
ultimate basis of a State is force--the army--which is the means by
which the State's authority is maintained. But who compels the army to
carry out the State's orders rather than its own will or the personal
will of its commander? _Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?_ The following
passage from an address delivered by the present writer in America may
perhaps help to make the point clear:--
'When, after the counting of the votes, you ask Mr Wilson to step
down from the President's chair, how do you know he will get down?
I repeat, How do you know he will get down? You think that a
foolish and fantastic question? But, in a great many interesting
American republics, Mexico, Venezuela, or Hayti, he would not get
down! You say, "Oh, the army would turn him out." I beg your
pardon. It is Mr Wilson who commands the army; it is not the army
that commands Mr Wilson. Again, in many American republics a
President who can depend on his army, when asked to get out of the
Presidency, would reply almost as a matter of course, "Why should I
get down when I have an army that stands by me?"
'How do we know that Mr Wilson, able, we will assume, to count on
his army, or, if you prefer, some President particularly popular
with the army, will not do that? Is it physical force which
prevents it? If so, whose? You may say: "If he did that, he knows
that the country would raise an army of rebellion to turn him out."
Well, suppose it did? You raise this army, as they would in
Mexico, or Venezuela, and the army turns him out. And your man gets
into the Presidential chair, and then, when you think he has stolen
enough, you vote _him_ down. He would do precisely the same thing.
He would say: "My dear people, as very great philosophers tell you,
the State is Force, and as a great French monarch once said. 'I am
the State.' _J'y suis, j'y reste._". And then you would have to get
another army of rebellion to turn _him_ out--just as they do in
Mexico, Venezuela, Hayti, or Honduras.'
There, then, is the crux of the matter. Every constitution at times
breaks down. But if that fact were a conclusive argument for the
anarchical arming of each man against the other as preferable to a
police enforcing law, there could be no human society. The object of
constitutional machinery for change is to make civil war unnecessary.
There will be no advance save through an improved tradition. Perhaps it
will be impossible to improve the tradition. Very well, then the old
order, whether among the nations of Europe or the political parties of
Venezuela, will remain unchanged. More 'force,' more soldiers, will not
do it. The disturbed areas of Spanish-America each show a greater number
of soldiers to population than States like Massachusetts or Ohio. So in
the international solution. What would it have availed if Britain had
quadrupled the quantity of rifles to Koltchak's peasant soldiers so long
as his land policy caused them to turn their rifles against his
Government? Or for France to have multiplied many times the loans made
to the Ukraine, if at the same time the loans made to Poland so fed
Polish nationalism that the Ukrainians preferred making common cause
with the Bolsheviks to becoming satellites of an Imperialist Poland? Do
we add to the 'force' of the Alliance by increasing the military power
of Serbia, if that fact provokes her to challenge Italy? Do we
strengthen it by increasing at one and the same time the military forces
of two States--say Poland and Czecho-Slovakia--if the nationalism which
we nurse leads finally to those two States turning their forces one
against the other? Unless we know the policy (again a thing of the mind,
of opinion) which will determine the use to which guns will be put, it
does not increase our security--it may diminish it--to add more guns.
_The Alternative Risks_
We see, therefore, that the alternatives are not in fact a choice
between 'material' and 'spiritual' means. The material can only operate,
whether for our defence or against us, by virtue of a spiritual thing,
the will. 'The direction in which the gun will shoot'--a rather
important point in its effectiveness as a defensive weapon--depends not
on the gun but on the mind of the man using it, the moral factor. The
two cannot be separated.
It is untrue to say that the knife is a magic instrument, saving the
cancer patient's life: it is the mind of the surgeon using the material
thing in a certain way which saves the patient's life. A child or savage
who, failing to realise the part played by the invisible element of the
surgeon's mind, should deem that a knife of a particular pattern used
'boldly' could be depended upon to cure cancer, would merely, of course
commit manslaughter.
It is foolish to talk of an absolute guarantee of security by force, as
of guarantee of success in surgical operations by perfection of knives.
In both cases we are dealing with instruments, indispensable, but not of
themselves enough. The mind behind the instrument, technical in one
case, social in the other, may in both cases fail; then we must improve
it. Merely to go on sharpening the knife, to go on applying, for
instance, to the international problem more 'force,' in the way it has
been applied in the past, can only give us in intenser degree the
present results.
Yet the truth here indicated is perpetually being disregarded,
particularly by those who pique themselves on being 'practical.' In the
choice of risks by men of the world and realist statesmen the choice
which inevitably leads to destruction is for ever being made on grounds
of safety; the choice which leads at least in the direction of security
is for ever being rejected on the grounds of its danger.
Why is this? The choice is instinctive assuredly; it is not the result
of 'hard-headed calculation' though it often professes to be. We speak
of it as the 'protective' instinct. But it is a protective instinct
which obviously destroys us.
I am suggesting here that, at the bottom of the choice in favour of the
Balance of Power or preponderance as a political method, is neither the
desire for safety nor the desire to place 'might behind right,' but the
desire for domination, the instinct of self-assertion, the anti-social
wish to be judge in our own case; and further, that the way out of the
difficulty is to discipline this instinct by a better social tradition.
To do that we must discredit the old tradition--create a different
feeling about it; to which end it is indispensable to face frankly the
nature of its moral origins; to look its motives in the face.[68]
It is extremely suggestive in this connection that the 'realist'
politician, the 'hard-headed practical man,' disdainful of Sunday School
standards,' in his defence of national necessity, is quite ready to be
contemptuous of national safety and interest when these latter point
plainly to a policy of international agreement as against domination.
Agreement is then rejected as pusillanimous, and consideration for
national interest as placing 'pocket before patriotism.' We are then
reminded, even by the most realist of nationalists, that nations live
for higher things than 'profit' or even safety. 'Internationalism,' says
Colonel Roosevelt, 'inevitably emasculates its sincere votaries,' and
'every civilisation worth calling such' must be based 'on a spirit of
intense nationalism.' For Colonel Roosevelt or General Wood in America
as for Mr Kipling, or Mr Chesterton, or Mr Churchill, or Lord
Northciffe, or Mr Bottomley, and a vast host of poets, professors,
editors, historians, bishops, publicists of all sorts in England and
France, 'Internationalist' and 'Pacifist' are akin to political atheist.
A moral consideration now replaces the 'realist.' The metamorphosis is
only intelligible on the assumption here suggested that both
explanations or justifications are a rationalisation of the impulse to
power and domination.
Our political, quite as much as our social, conduct is in the main the
result of motives that are mainly unconscious instinct, habit,
unquestioned tradition. So long as we find the result satisfactory, well
and good. But when the result of following instinct is disaster, we
realise that the time has come to 'get outside ourselves,' to test our
instincts by their social result. We have then to see whether the
'reasons' we have given for our conduct are really its motives. That
examination is the first step to rendering the unconscious motive
conscious. In considering, for instance, the two methods indicated in
this chapter, we say, in 'rationalising' our decision, that we chose the
lesser of two risks. I am suggesting that in the choice of the method of
the Balance of Power our real motive was not desire to achieve security,
but domination. It is just because our motives are not mainly
intellectual but 'instinctive' that the desire for domination is so
likely to have played the determining role: for few instincts and
innate desires are stronger than that which pushes to 'self-affirmation'--the
assertion of preponderant force.
We have indeed seen that the Balance of Power means in practice the
determination to secure a preponderance of power. What is a 'Balance?'
The two sides will not agree on that, and each to be sure will want it
tilted in its favour. We decline to place ourselves within the power of
another who may differ from us as to our right. We demand to be
stronger, in order that we may be judge in our own case. This means that
we shall resist the claim of others to exactly the same thing.
The alternative is partnership. It means trust. But we have seen that
the exercise of any form of force, other than that which one single
individual can wield, must involve an element of 'trust.' The soldiers
must be trusted to obey the officers, since the former have by far the
preponderance of force; the officers must be trusted to obey the
constitution instead of challenging it; the police must be trusted to
obey the authorities; the Cabinet must be trusted to obey the electoral
decision; the members of an alliance to work together instead of against
one another, and so on. Yet the assumption of the 'Power Politician' is
that the method which has succeeded (notably within the State) is the
'idealistic' but essentially unpractical method in which security and
advantage are sacrificed to Utopian experiment; while the method of
competitive armament, however distressing it may be to the Sunday
Schools, is the one that gives us real security. 'The way to be sure of
preserving peace,' says Mr Churchill, 'is to be so much stronger than
your enemy that he won't dare to attack you.' In other words it is
obvious that the way for two people to keep the peace is for each to be
stronger than the other.
'You may have made your front door secure' says Marshal Foch, arguing
for the Rhine frontier, 'but you may as well make sure by having a good
high garden wall as well.'
'Make sure,' that is the note--_si vis pacem_.... And he can be sure
that 'the average practical man,' who prides himself on 'knowing human
nature' and 'distrusting theories' will respond to the appeal. Every
club smoking room will decide that 'the simple soldier' knows his
business and has judged human forces aright.
Yet of course the simple truth is that the 'hard-headed soldier' has
chosen the one ground upon which all experience, all the facts, are
against him. Then how is he able to 'get away with it'--to ride off
leaving at least the impression of being a sternly practical
unsentimental man of the world by virtue of having propounded an
aphorism which all practical experience condemns? Here is Mr Churchill.
He is talking to hard-headed Lancashire manufacturers. He desires to
show that he too is no theorist, that he also can be hard-headed and
practical. And he--who really does know the mind of the 'hard-headed
business man'--is perfectly aware that the best road to those hard heads
is to propound an arrant absurdity, to base a proposed line of policy on
the assumption of a physical impossibility, to follow a will-o'-the-wisp
which in all recorded history has led men into a bog.
They applaud Mr Churchill, not because he has put before them a cold
calculation of relative risk in the matter of maintaining peace, an
indication, where, on the whole, the balance of safety lies; Mr
Churchill, of course, knows perfectly well that, while professing to do
that, he has been doing nothing of the sort. He has, in reality, been
appealing to a sentiment, the emotion which is strongest and steadiest
in the 'hard-faced men' who have elbowed their way to the top in a
competitive society. He has 'rationalised' that competitive sentiment of
domination by putting forward a 'reason' which can be avowed to them and
to others.
Colonel Roosevelt managed to inject into his reasons for predominance a
moral strenuousness which Mr Churchill does not achieve.
The following is a passage from one of the last important speeches made
by Colonel Roosevelt--twice President of the United States and one of
the out-standing figures in the world in his generation:--
'Friends, be on your guard against the apostles of weakness and
folly when peace comes. They will tell you that this is the last
great war. They will tell you that they can make paper treaties and
agreements and guarantees by which brutal and unscrupulous men will
have their souls so softened that weak and timid men won't have
anything to fear and that brave and honest men won't have to
prepare to defend themselves.
'Well, we have seen that all such treaties are worth less than
scraps of paper when it becomes to the interests of powerful and
ruthless militarist nations to disregard them.... After this War is
over, these foolish pacifist creatures will again raise their
piping voices against preparedness and in favour of patent devices
for maintaining peace without effort. Let us enter into every
reasonable agreement which bids fair to minimise the chances of war
and to circumscribe its area.... But let us remember it is a
hundred times more important for us to prepare our strength for our
own defence than to enter any of these peace treaties, and that if
we thus prepare our strength for our own defence we shall minimise
the chances of war as no paper treaties can possibly minimise them;
and we shall thus make our views effective for peace and justice in
the world at large as in no other way can they be made
effective.'[69]
Let us dispose of one or two of the more devastating confusions in the
foregoing.
First there is the everlasting muddle as to the internationalist
attitude towards the likelihood of war. To Colonel Roosevelt one is an
internationalist or 'pacifist' because one thinks war will not take
place. Whereas probably the strongest motive of internationalism is the
conviction that without it war is inevitable, that in a world of rival
nationalisms war cannot be avoided. If those who hate war believe that
the present order will without effort give them peace, why in the name
of all the abuse which their advocacy brings on their heads should they
bother further about the matter?
Secondly, internationalism is assumed to be the _alternative_ to the
employment of force or power of arms, whereas it is the organisation of
force, of power (latent or positive) to a common--an international--end.
Our incurable habit of giving to homely but perfectly healthy and
justifiable reasons of conduct a high faluting romanticism sometimes
does morality a very ill service. When in political situations--as in
the making of a Peace Treaty--a nation is confronted by the general
alternative we are now discussing, the grounds of opposition to a
co-operative or 'Liberal' or 'generous' settlement are almost always
these: 'Generosity' is lost upon a people as crafty and treacherous as
the enemy; he mistakes generosity for weakness; he will take advantage
of it; his nature won't be softened by mild treatment; he understands
nothing but force.
The assumption is that the liberal policy is based upon an appeal to the
better side of the enemy; upon arousing his nobler nature. And such an
assumption concerning the Hun or the Bolshevik, for instance (or at an
earlier date, the Boer or the Frenchman), causes the very gorge of the
Roosevelt-Bottomley patriot to rise in protest. He simply does not
believe in the effective operation of so remote a motive.
But the real ground of defence for the liberal policy is not the
existence of an abnormal if heretofore successfully disguised nobility
on the part of the enemy, but of his very human if not very noble fears
which, from our point of view, it is extremely important not to arouse
or justify. If our 'punishment' of him creates in his mind the
conviction that we are certain to use our power for commercial
advantage, or that in any case our power is a positive danger to him,
he _will_ use his recovered economic strength for the purpose of
resisting it; and we should face a fact so dangerous and costly to us.
To take cognisance of this fact, and to shape our policy accordingly is
not to attribute to the enemy any particular nobility of motive. But
almost always when that policy is attacked, it is attacked on the ground
of its 'Sunday School' assumption of the accessibility of the enemy to
gratitude or 'softening' in Colonel Roosevelt's phrase.
We reach in the final analysis of the interplay of motive a very clear
political pragmatism. Either policy will justify itself, and by the way
it works out in practice, prove that it is right.
Here is a statesman--Italian, say--who takes the 'realist' view, and
comes to a Peace Conference which may settle for centuries the position
of his country in the world--its strength, its capacity for defending
itself, the extent of its resources. In the world as he knows it, a
country has one thing, and one thing only, upon which it can depend for
its national security and the defence of its due rights; and that thing
is its own strength. Italy's adequate defence must include the naval
command of the Adriatic and a strategic position in the Tyrol. This
means deep harbours on the Dalmatian coast and the inclusion in the
Tyrol of a very considerable non-Italian population. To take them may,
it is true, not only violate the principle of nationality but shut off
the new Yugo-Slav nation from access to the sea and exchange one
irredentism for another. But what can the 'realist' Italian statesman,
whose first duty is to his own country do? He is sorry, but his own
nationality and its due protection are concerned; and the Italian nation
will be insecure without those frontiers and those harbours.
Self-preservation is the law of life for nations as for other living
things. You have, unfortunately, a condition in which the security of
one means the insecurity of another, and if a statesman in these
circumstances has to choose which of the two is to be secure, he must
choose his own country.
Some day, of course, there may come into being a League of Nations so
effective that nations can really look to it for their safety. Meantime
they must look to themselves. But, unfortunately, for each nation to
take these steps about strategic frontiers means not only killing the
possibility of an effective League: it means, sooner or later, killing
the military alliance which is the alternative. If one Alsace-Lorraine
could poison European politics in the way it did, what is going to be
the effect ultimately of the round dozen that we have created under the
treaty? The history of Britain in reference to Arab and Egyptian
Nationality; of France in relation to Poland and other Russian border
States; of all the Allies in reference to Japanese ambitions in China
and Siberia, reveals what is, fundamentally, a precisely similar
dilemma.
When the statesmen--Italian or other--insist upon strategic frontiers
and territories containing raw materials, on the ground that a nation
must look to itself because we live in a world in which international
arrangements cannot be depended on, they can be quite certain that the
reason they give is a sound one: because their own action will make it
so: their action creates the very conditions to which they appeal as the
reason for it. Their decision, with the popular impulse of sacred egoism
which supports it, does something more than repudiate Mr Wilson's
principles; it is the beginning of the disruption of the Alliance upon
which their countries have depended. The case is put in a manifesto
issued a year or two ago by a number of eminent Americans from which we
have already quoted in Chapter III.
It says:--
'If, as in the past, nations must look for their future security
chiefly to their own strength and resources, then inevitably, in
the name of the needs of national defence, there will be claims for
strategic frontiers and territories with raw material which do
violence to the principle of nationality. Afterwards those who
suffer from such violations would be opposed to the League of
Nations, because it would consecrate the injustice of which they
would be the victims. A refusal to trust to the League of Nations,
and a demand for "material" guarantees for future safety, will set
up that very distrust which will afterwards be appealed to as
justification for regarding the League as impracticable because it
inspires no general confidence. A bold "Act of Political Faith" in
the League will justify itself by making the League a success; but,
equally, lack of faith will justify itself by ruining the League.'
That is why, when in the past the realist statesman has sometimes
objected that he does not believe in internationalism because it is not
practical, I have replied that it is not practical because he does not
believe in it.
The prerequisite to the creation of a society is the Social Will. And
herein lies the difficulty of making any comparative estimate of the
respective risks of the alternative courses. We admit that if the
nations would sink their sacred egoisms and pledge their power to mutual
and common protection, the risk of such a course would disappear. We get
the paradox that there is no risk if we all take the risk. But each
refuses to begin. William James has illustrated the position:--
'I am climbing the Alps, and have had the ill luck to work myself
into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap.
Being without similar experience, I have no evidence of my ability
to perform it successfully; but hope and confidence in myself make
me sure that I shall not miss my aim, and nerve my feet to execute
what, without those subjective emotions, would have been
impossible.
'But suppose that, on the contrary, the emotions ... of mistrust
predominate.... Why, then, I shall hesitate so long that at last,
exhausted and trembling, and launching myself in a moment of
despair, I miss my foothold and roll into the abyss. In this case,
and it is one of an immense class, the part of wisdom is to believe
what one desires; for the belief is one of the indispensable,
preliminary conditions of the realisation of its object. There are
cases where faith creates its own justification. Believe, and you
shall be right, for you shall save yourself; doubt, and you shall
again be right, for you shall perish.'