misrepresentation such as this? If he were a manufacturer of soap and
some one said his soap was underweight, or he were a grocer and some one
said his sugar was half sand, he could of course obtain enormous
damages. But a mere writer, having given some years of his life to the
study of the most important problem of his time, is quite helpless when
a tired headline writer, or a journalist indulging his resentment, or
what he thinks is likely to be the resentment of his readers, describes
a book as proclaiming one thing when as a matter of simple fact it
proclaims the exact contrary.
* * * * *
So much for myth or misrepresentation No. 1. We come to a second,
namely, that _The Great Illusion_ is an appeal to avarice; that it urges
men not to defend their country 'because to do so does not pay;' that it
would have us place 'pocket before patriotism,' a view reflected in
Benjamin Kidd's last book, pages of which are devoted to the
condemnation of the 'degeneracy and futility' of resting the cause of
peace on no higher ground than that it is 'a great illusion to believe
that a national policy founded on war can be a profitable policy for any
people in the long run.'[99] He quotes approvingly Sir William Robertson
Nicoll for denouncing those who condemn war because 'it would postpone
the blessed hour of tranquil money getting.'[100] As a means of
obscuring truths which it is important to realise, of creating by
misrepresentation a moral repulsion to a thesis, and thus depriving it
of consideration, this second line of attack is even more important than
the first.
To say of a book that it prophesied 'the impossibility of war,' is to
imply that it is mere silly rubbish, and its author a fool. Sir William
Robertson Nicoll's phrase would of course imply that its doctrine was
morally contemptible.
The reader must judge, after considering dispassionately what follows,
whether this second description is any truer than the first.
CHAPTER II
'ECONOMIC' AND 'MORAL' MOTIVES IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
_The Great Illusion_ dealt--among other factors of international
conflict--with the means by which the population of the world is driven
to support itself; and studied the effect of those efforts to find
sustenance upon the relations of States. It therefore dealt with
economics.
On the strength of this, certain critics (like some of those quoted in
the last chapter) who cannot possibly have read the book thoroughly,
seem to have argued: If this book about war deals with 'economics,' it
must deal with money and profits. To bring money and profits into a
discussion of war is to imply that men fight for money, and won't fight
if they don't get money from it; that war does not 'pay.' This is wicked
and horrible. Let us denounce the writer for a shallow Hedonist and
money-grubber....
As a matter of simple fact, as we shall see presently, the book was
largely an attempt to show that the economic argument usually adduced
for a particularly ruthless form of national selfishness was not a sound
argument; that the commonly invoked justification for a selfish
immoralism in Foreign Policy was a fallacy, an illusion. Yet the critics
somehow managed to turn what was in fact an argument against national
egoism into an argument for selfishness.
What was the political belief and the attitude towards life which _The
Great Illusion_ challenged? And what was the counter principle which it
advocated as a substitute therefore?
It challenged the theory that the vital interests of nations are
conflicting, and that war is part of the inevitable struggle for life
among them; the view that, in order to feed itself, a nation with an
expanding population must conquer territory and so deprive others of the
means of subsistence; the view that war is the 'struggle for
bread.'[101] In other words, it challenged the economic excuse or
justification for the 'sacred egoism' which is so largely the basis of
the nationalist political philosophy, an excuse, which, as we shall see,
the nationalist invokes if not to deny the moral law in the
international field, at least to put the morality governing the
relations of States on a very different plane from that which governs
the relations of individuals. As against this doctrine _The Great
Illusion_ advanced the proposition, among others, that the economic or
biological assumption on which it is based is false; that the policy of
political power which results from this assumption is economically
unworkable, its benefits an illusion; that the amount of sustenance
provided by the earth is not a fixed quantity so that what one nation
can seize another loses, but is an expanding quantity, its amount
depending mainly upon the efficiency with which men co-operate in their
exploitation of Nature. As already pointed out, a hundred thousand Red
Indians starved in a country where a hundred million modern Americans
have abundance. The need for co-operation, and the faith on which alone
it can be maintained, being indispensable to our common welfare, the
violation of the social compact, international obligation, will be
visited with penalties just as surely as are violations of the moral law
in relations between individuals. The economic factor is not the sole or
the largest element in human relations, but it is the one which occupies
the largest place in public law and policy. (Of two contestants, each
can retain his religion or literary preferences without depriving the
other of like possessions; they cannot both retain the same piece of
material property.) The economic problem is vital in the sense of
dealing with the means by which we maintain life; and it is invoked as
justification for the political immoralism of States. Until the
confusions concerning it are cleared up, it will serve little purpose to
analyse the other elements of conflict.
What justifies the assumption that the predatory egotism, sacred or
profane, here implied, was an indispensable part of the pre-war
political philosophy, explaining the great part of policy in the
international field?[102]
First the facts: the whole history of international conflict in the
decade or two which preceded the War; and the terms of the Treaty of
Versailles. If you would find out the nature of a people's (or a
statesman's) political morality, note their conduct when they have
complete power to carry their desires into effect. The terms of peace,
and the relations of the Allies with Russia, show a deliberate and
avowed pre-occupation with sources of oil, iron, coal; with indemnities,
investments, old debts; with Colonies, markets; the elimination of
commercial rivals--with all these things to a degree very much greater
and in a fashion much more direct than was assumed in _The Great
Illusion_.
But the tendency had been evident in the conflicts which preceded the
War. These conflicts, in so far as the Great Powers were concerned, had
been in practically every case over territory, or roads to territory;
over Madagascar, Egypt, Morocco, Korea, Mongolia; 'warm water' ports,
the division of Africa, the partitioning of China, loans thereto and
concessions therein; the Persian Gulf, the Bagdad Railway, the Panama
Canal. Where the principle of nationality was denied by any Great Power
it was generally because to recognise it might block access to the sea
or raw materials, throw a barrier across the road to undeveloped
territory.
There was no denial of this by those who treated of public affairs. Mr
Lloyd George declared that England would be quite ready to go to war
rather than have the Morocco question settled without reference to her.
Famous writers like Mahan did not balk at conclusions like this:--
'It is the great amount of unexploited raw material in territories
politically backward, and now imperfectly possessed by the nominal
owners, which at the present moment constitutes the temptation and
the impulse to war of European States.'[103]
Nor to justify them thus:--
'More and more Germany needs the assured importation of raw
materials, and, where possible, control of regions productive of
such materials. More and more she requires assured markets, and
security as to the importation of food, since less and less
comparatively is produced within her own borders for her rapidly
increasing population. This all means security at sea.... Yet the
supremacy of Great Britain in European seas means a perpetually
latent control of German commerce.... The world has long been
accustomed to the idea of a predominant naval power, coupling it
accurately with the name of Great Britain: and it has been noted
that such power, when achieved, is commonly found associated with
commercial and industrial pre-eminence, the struggle for which is
now in progress between Great Britain and Germany. Such
pre-eminence forces a nation to seek markets, and, where possible,
to control them to its own advantage by preponderant force, the
ultimate expression of which is possession.... From this flow two
results: the attempt to possess, and the organisation of force by
which to maintain possession already achieved.... This statement is
simply a specific formulation of the general necessity stated;
itself an inevitable link in a chain of logical sequence: industry,
markets, control, navy, bases....[104]
Mr Spenser Wilkinson, of a corresponding English school, is just as
definite:--
'The effect of growth is an expansion and an increase of power. It
necessarily affects the environment of the growing organisms; it
interferes with the _status quo_. Existing rights and interests are
disturbed by the fact of growth, which is itself a change. The
growing community finds itself hedged in by previously existing and
surviving conditions, and fettered by prescriptive rights. There
is, therefore, an exertion of force to overcome resistance. No
process of law or of arbitration can deal with this phenomenon,
because any tribunal administering a system of right or law must
base its decision upon the tradition of the past which has become
unsuited to the new conditions that have arisen. The growing State
is necessarily expansive or aggressive.'[105]
Even more decisive as a definite philosophy are the propositions of Mr
Petre, who, writing on 'The Mandate of Humanity,' says:--
'The conscience of a State cannot, therefore, be as delicate, as
disinterested, as altruistic, as that of the noblest individuals.
The State exists primarily for its own people and only secondarily
for the rest of the world. Hence, given a dispute in which it feels
its rights and welfare to be at stake, it may, however erroneously,
set aside its moral obligations to international society in favour
of its obligations to the people for whom it exists.
'But no righteous conscience, it may be said, could give its
verdict against a solemn pledge taken and reciprocated; no
righteous conscience could, in a society of nations, declare
against the ends of that society. Indeed I think it could, and
sometimes would, if its sense of justice were outraged, if its duty
to those who were bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh came into
conflict with its duty to those who were not directly belonging to
it....
'The mechanism of a State exists mainly for its own preservation,
and cannot be turned against this, its legitimate end. The
conscience of a State will not traverse this main condition, and to
weaken its conscience is to weaken its life....
'The strong will not give way to the weak; the one who thinks
himself in the right will not yield to those whom he believes to be
in the wrong; the living generations will not be restrained by the
promises to a dead one; nature will not be controlled by
conventions.'[106]
It is the last note that gives the key to popular feeling about the
scramble for territory. In _The Great Illusion_ whole pages of popular
writing are quoted to show that the conception of the struggle as in
truth the struggle for survival had firmly planted itself in the popular
consciousness. One of the critics who is so severe upon the present
writer for trying to undermine the economic foundation of that popular
creed, Benjamin Kidd, himself testifies to the depth and sweep of this
pseudo-Darwinism (he seems to think indeed that it is true Darwinism,
which it is not, as Darwin himself pointed out). He declares that 'there
is no precedent in the history of the human mind to compare with the
saturnalia of the Western intellect' which followed the popularisation
of what he regards as Darwin's case and I would regard as a distortion
of it. Kidd says it 'touched the profoundest depth of the psychology of
the West.' 'Everywhere throughout civilisation an almost inconceivable
influence was given to the doctrine of the law of biological necessity
in books of statecraft and war-craft, of expanding military empires.'
'Struggle for life,' 'a biological necessity,' 'survival of the fit,'
had passed into popular use and had come to buttress popular feeling
about the inevitability of war and its ultimate justification and the
uselessness of organising the natives save on a basis of conflict.
We are now in a position to see the respective moral positions of the
two protagonists.
The advocate of Political Theory No. 1, which an overwhelming
preponderance of evidence shows to be the prevailing theory, says:--You
Pacifists are asking us to commit national suicide; to sacrifice future
generations to your political ideals. Now, as voters or statesmen we are
trustees, we act for others. Sacrifice, suicide even, on behalf of an
ideal, may be justified when we are sacrificing ourselves. But we cannot
sacrifice others, our wards. Our first duty is to our own nation, our
own children; to their national security and future welfare. It is
regrettable if, by the conquests, wars, blockades, rendered necessary by
those objects other people starve, and lose their national freedom and
see their children die; but that is the hard necessity of life in a hard
world.
Advocate of Political Theory No. 2 says:--I deny that the excuse of
justification which you give for your cruelty to others is a valid
excuse or justification. Pacifism does not ask you to sacrifice your
people, to betray the interest of your wards. You will serve their
interests best by the policy we advocate. Your children will not be more
assured of their sustenance by these conquests that attempt to render
the feeding of foreign children more difficult; yours will be less
secure. By co-operating with those others instead of using your
energies against them, the resultant wealth....
Advocate No. 1:--Wealth! Interest! You introduce your wretched economic
calculations of interest into a question of Patriotism. You have the
soul of a bagman concerned only to restore 'the blessed hour of tranquil
money-getting,' and Sir William Robertson Nicoll shall denounce you in
the _British Weekly_!
And the discussion usually ends with this moral flourish and gestures of
melodramatic indignation.
But are they honest gestures? Here are the upholders of a certain
position who say:--'In certain circumstances as when you are in a
position of trustee, the only moral course, the only right course, is to
be guided by the interests of your ward. Your duty then demands a
calculation of advantage. You may not be generous at your ward's
expense. This is the justification of the "sacred egoism" of the poet.'
If in that case a critic says: 'Very well. Let us consider what will be
the best interests of your ward,' is it really open to the first party
to explain in a paroxysm of moral indignation: 'You are making a
shameful and disgraceful appeal to selfishness and avarice?'
This is not an attempt to answer one set of critics by quoting another
set. The self-same people take those two attitudes. I have quoted above
a passage of Admiral Mahan's in which he declares that nations can never
be expected to act from any other motive than that of interest (a
generalisation, by the way, from which I should most emphatically
dissent). He goes on to declare that Governments 'must put first the
rival interests of their own wards ... their own people,' and are thus
pushed to the acquisition of markets by means of military predominance.
Very well. _The Great Illusion_ argued some of Admiral Mahan's
propositions in terms of interest and advantage. And then, when he
desired to demolish that argument, he did not hesitate in a long
article in the _North American Review_ to write as follows:--
'The purpose of armaments, in the minds of those maintaining them,
is not primarily an economical advantage, in the sense of depriving
a neighbour State of its own, or fear of such consequences to
itself through the deliberate aggression of a rival having that
particular end in view.... The fundamental proposition of the book
is a mistake. Nations are under no illusion as to the
unprofitableness of war in itself.... The entire conception of the
work is itself an illusion, based upon a profound misreading of
human action. To regard the world as governed by self-interest only
is to live in a non-existent world, an ideal world, a world
possessed by an idea much less worthy than those which mankind, to
do it bare justice, persistently entertains.'[107]
Admiral Mahan was a writer of very great and deserved reputation, in the
very first rank of those dealing with the relations of power to national
politics, certainly incapable of any conscious dishonesty of opinion.
Yet, as we have seen, his opinion on the most important fact of all
about war--its ultimate purpose, and the reasons which justify it or
provoke it--swings violently in absolute self-contradiction. And the
flat contradiction here revealed shows--and this surely is the moral of
such an incident--that he could never have put to himself detachedly,
coldly, impartially the question: 'What do I really believe about the
motives of nations in War? To what do the facts as a whole really
point?' Had he done so, it might have been revealed to him that what
really determined his opinion about the causes of war was a desire to
justify the great profession of arms, to one side of which he had
devoted his life and given years of earnest labour and study; to defend
from some imputation of futility one of the most ancient of man's
activities that calls for some at least of the sublimest of human
qualities. If a widened idealism clearly discredited that ancient
institution, he was prepared to show that an ineradicable conflict of
national interests rendered it inevitable. If it was shown that war was
irrelevant to those conflicts, or ineffective as a means of protecting
the interests concerned, he was prepared to show that the motives
pushing to war were not those of interest at all.
It may be said that none the less the thesis under discussion
substitutes one selfish argument for another; tries by appealing to
self-interest (the self-interest of a group or nation) to turn
selfishness from a destructive result to a more social result. Its basis
is self. Even that is not really true. For, first, that argument ignores
the question of trusteeship; and, secondly, it involves a confusion
between the motive of a given policy and the criterion by which its
goodness or badness shall be tested.
How is one to deal with the claim of the 'mystic nationalist' (he exists
abundantly even outside the Balkans) that the subjugation of some
neighbouring nationalism is demanded by honour; that only the great
State can be the really good State; that power--'majesty,' as the
Oriental would say--is a thing good in itself?[108] There are ultimate
questions as to what is good and what is bad that no argument can
answer; ultimate values which cannot be discussed. But one can reduce
those unarguable values to a minimum by appealing to certain social
needs. A State which has plenty of food may not be a good State; but a
State which cannot feed its population cannot be a good State, for in
that case the citizens will be hungry, greedy, and violent.
In other words, certain social needs and certain social utilities--which
we can all recognise as indispensables--furnish a ground of agreement
for the common action without which no society can be established. And
the need for such a criterion becomes more manifest as we learn more of
the wonderful fashion in which we sublimate our motives. A country
refuses to submit its dispute to arbitration, because its 'honour' is
involved. Many books have been written to try and find out precisely
what honour of this kind is. One of the best of them has decided that it
is anything which a country cares to make it. It is never the presence
of coal, or iron, or oil, which makes it imperative to retain a given
territory: it is honour (as Italy's Foreign Minister explained when
Italy went to war for the conquest of Tripoli). Unfortunately, rival
States have also impulses of honour which compel them to claim the same
undeveloped territory. Nothing can prove--or disprove--that honour, in
such circumstances, is invoked by each or either of the parties
concerned to make a piece of acquisitiveness or megalomania appear as
fine to himself as possible: that, just because he has a lurking
suspicion that all is not well with the operation, he seeks to justify
it to himself with fine words that have a very vague content. But on
this basis there can be no agreement. If, however, one shifts the
discussion to the question of what is best for the social welfare of
both, one can get a _modus vivendi_. For each to admit that he has no
right so to use his power as to deprive the other of means of life,
would be the beginning of a code which could be tested. Each might
conceivably have that right to deprive the other of means of livelihood,
if it were a choice between the lives of his own people or others.
The economic fact is the test of the ethical claim: if it really be true
that we must withhold sources of food from others because otherwise our
own would starve, there is some ethical justification for such use of
our power. If such is not the fact, the whole moral issue is changed,
and with it, to the degree to which it is mutually realised, the social
outlook and attitude. The knowledge of interdependence is part, at
least, of an attitude which makes the 'social sense'--the sense that one
kind of arrangement is fair and workable, and another is not. To bring
home the fact of this interdependence is not simply an appeal to
selfishness: it is to reveal a method by which an apparently
irreconcilable conflict of vital needs can be reconciled. The sense of
interdependence, of the need of one for another, is part of the
foundation of the very difficult art of living together.
Much mischief arises from the misunderstanding of the term 'economic
motive.' Let us examine some further examples of this. One is a common
confusion of terms: an economic motive may be the reverse of selfish.
The long sustained efforts of parents to provide fittingly for their
children--efforts continued, it may be, through half a lifetime--are
certainly economic. Just as certainly they are not selfish in any exact
sense of the term. Yet something like this confusion seems to overlie
the discussion of economics in connection with war.
Speaking broadly, I do not believe that men ever go to war from a cold
calculation of advantage or profit. I never have believed it. It seems
to me an obvious and childish misreading of human psychology. I cannot
see how it is possible to imagine a man laying down his life on the
battle-field for personal gain. Nations do not fight for their money or
interests, they fight for their rights, or what they believe to be their
rights. The very gallant men who triumphed at Bull Run or
Chancellorsville were not fighting for the profits on slave-labour: they
were fighting for what they believed to be their independence: the
rights, as they would have said, to self-government or, as we should now
say, of self-determination. Yet it was a conflict which arose out of
slave labour: an economic question. Now the most elementary of all
rights, in the sense of the first right which a people will claim, is
the right to existence--the right of a population to bread and a decent
livelihood.[109] For that nations certainly will fight. Yet, as we see,
it is a right which arises out of an economic need or conflict. We have
seen how it works as a factor in our own foreign policy: as a compelling
motive for the command of the sea. We believe that the feeding of these
islands depends upon it: that if we lost it our children might die in
the streets and the lack of food compel us to an ignominious surrender.
It is this relation of vital food supply to preponderant sea power which
has caused us to tolerate no challenge to the latter. We know the part
which the growth of the German Navy played in shaping Anglo-Continental
relations before the War; the part which any challenge to our naval
preponderance has always played in determining our foreign policy. The
command of the sea, with all that that means in the way of having built
up a tradition, a battle-cry in politics, has certainly bound up with it
this life and death fact of feeding our population. That is to say it is
an economic need. Yet the determination of some millions of Englishmen
to fight for this right to life, to die rather than see the daily bread
of their people in jeopardy, would be adequately described by some
phrase about Englishmen going to war because it 'paid.' It would be a
silly or dishonest gibe. Yet that is precisely the kind of gibe that I
have had to face these fifteen years in attempting to disentangle the
forces and motives underlying international conflict.
What picture is summoned to our minds by the word 'economics' in
relation to war? To the critics whose indignation is so excited at the
introduction of the subject at all into the discussion of war--and they
include, unhappily, some of the great names of English literature--'economic'
seems to carry no picture but that of an obese Semitic stockbroker, in
quaking fear for his profits. This view cannot be said to imply either
much imagination or much sense of reality. For among the stockbrokers,
the usurers, those closest to financial manipulation and in touch with
financial changes, are to be found some groups numerically small, who
are more likely to gain than to lose by war; and the present writer has
never suggested the contrary.
But the 'economic futility' of war expresses itself otherwise: in half a
Continent unable to feed or clothe or warm itself; millions rendered
neurotic, abnormal, hysterical by malnutrition, disease, and anxiety;
millions rendered greedy, selfish, and violent by the constant strain of
hunger; resulting in 'social unrest' that threatens more and more to
become sheer chaos and confusion: the dissolution and disintegration of
society. Everywhere, in the cities, are the children who cry and who are
not fed, who raise shrunken arms to our statesmen who talk with
pride[110] of their stern measures of 'rigorous' blockade. Rickety and
dying children, and undying hate for us, their murderers, in the hearts
of their mothers--these are the human realities of the 'economics of
war.'
The desire to prevent these things, to bring about an order that would
render possible both patriotism and mercy, would save us from the
dreadful dilemma of feeding our own children only by the torture and
death of others equally innocent--the effort to this end is represented
as a mere appeal to selfishness and avarice, something mean and ignoble,
a degradation of human motive.
'These theoretical dilemmas do not state accurately the real conditions
of politics,' the reader may object. 'No one proposes to inflict famine
as a means of enforcing our policy' ... 'England does not make war on
women and children.'
Not one man or woman in a million, English or other, would wittingly
inflict the suffering of starvation upon a single child, if the child
were visible to his eyes, present in his mind, and if the simple human
fact were not obscured by the much more complex and artificial facts
that have gathered round our conceptions of patriotism. The heaviest
indictment of the military-nationalist philosophy we are discussing is
that it manages successfully to cover up human realities by dehumanising
abstractions. From the moment that the child becomes a part of that
abstraction--'Russia,' 'Austria,' 'Germany'--it loses its human
identity, and becomes merely an impersonal part of the political problem
of the struggle of our nation with others. The inverted moral alchemy,
by which the golden instinct that we associate with so much of direct
human contact is transformed into the leaden cruelty of nationalist hate
and high statecraft, has been dealt with at the close of Part I. When in
tones of moral indignation it is declared that Englishmen 'do not make
war on women and children,' we must face the truth and say that
Englishmen, like all peoples, do make such war.
An action in public policy--the proclamation of the blockade, or the
confiscation of so much tonnage, or the cession of territory, or the
refusal of a loan--these things are remote and vague; not only is the
relation between results and causes remote and sometimes difficult to
establish, but the results themselves are invisible and far away. And
when the results of a policy are remote, and can be slurred over in our
minds, we are perfectly ready to apply, logically and ruthlessly, the
most ferocious of political theories. It is of supreme importance then
what those theories happen to be. When the issue of war and peace hangs
in the balance, the beam may well be kicked one way or the other by our
general political philosophy, these somewhat vague and hazy notions
about life being a struggle, and nature red of tooth and claw, about
wars being part of the cosmic process, sanctioned by professors and
bishops and writers. It may well be these vague notions that lead us to
acquiesce in the blockade or the newest war. The typhus or the rickets
do not kill or maim any the less because we do not in our minds connect
those results with the political abstractions that we bandy about so
lightly. And we touch there the greatest service which a more 'economic'
treatment of European problems may perform. If the Treaty of Versailles
had been more economic it would also have been a more humane and human
document. If there had been more of Mr Keynes and less of M. Clemenceau,
there would have been not only more food in the world, but more
kindliness; not only less famine, but less hate; not only more life, but
a better way of life; those living would have been nearer to
understanding and discarding the way of death.
Let us summarise the points so far made with reference to the 'economic'
motive.
We need not accept any hard and fast (and in the view of the present
writer, unsound) doctrine of economic determinism, in order to admit the
truth of the following:--
1. Until economic difficulties are so far solved as to give the mass of
the people the means of secure and tolerable physical existence,
economic considerations and motives will tend to exclude all others. The
way to give the spiritual a fair chance with ordinary men and women is
not to be magnificently superior to their economic difficulties, but to
find a solution for them. Until the economic dilemma is solved, no
solution of moral difficulties will be adequate. If you want to get rid
of the economic preoccupation, you must solve the worst of the economic
problem.
2. In the same way the solution of the economic conflict between nations
will not of itself suffice to establish peace; but no peace is possible
until that conflict is solved. That makes it of sufficient importance.
3. The 'economic' problem involved in international politics the use of
political power for economic ends--is also one of Right, including the
most elemental of all rights, that to exist.
4. The answer which we give to that question of Right will depend upon
our answer to the actual query of _The Great Illusion_: must a country
of expanding population expand its territory or trade by means of its
political power, in order to live? Is the political struggle for
territory a struggle for bread?
5. If we take the view that the truth is contained in neither an
unqualified affirmative nor an unqualified negative, then all the more
is it necessary that the interdependence of peoples, the necessity for a
truly international economy, should become a commonplace. A wider
realisation of those facts would help to create that pre-disposition
necessary for a belief in the workability of voluntary co-operation, a
belief which must precede any successful attempt to make such
co-operation the basis of an international order.
6. The economic argument of _The Great Illusion_, if valid, destroys the
pseudo-scientific justification for political immoralism, the doctrine
of State necessity, which has marked so much of classical statecraft.
7. The main defects of the Treaty of Versailles are due to the pressure
of a public opinion obsessed by just those ideas of nations as persons,
of conflicting interests, which _The Great Illusion_ attempted to
destroy. If the Treaty had been inspired by the ideas of interdependence
of interest, it would have been not only more in the interests of the
Allies, but morally sounder, providing a better ethical basis for future
peace.
8. To go on ignoring the economic unity and interdependence of Europe,
to refuse to subject nationalist pugnacities to that needed unity
because 'economics' are sordid, is to refuse to face the needs of human
life, and the forces that shape it. Such an attitude, while professing
moral elevation, involves a denial of the right of others to live. Its
worst defect, perhaps, is that its heroics are fatal to intellectual
rectitude, to truth. No society built upon such foundations can stand.
CHAPTER III
THE GREAT ILLUSION ARGUMENT
The preceding chapters have dealt rather with misconceptions concerning
_The Great Illusion_ than with its positive propositions. What, outlined
as briefly as possible, was its central argument?
* * * * *
That argument was an elaboration of these propositions: Military
preponderance, conquest, as a means to man's most elemental
needs--bread, sustenance--is futile, because the processes (exchange,
division of labour) to which the dense populations of modern Western
society are compelled to resort, cannot be exacted by military coercion;
they can only operate as the result of a large measure of voluntary
acquiescence by the parties concerned. A realisation of this truth is
indispensable for the restraint of the instinctive pugnacities that
hamper human relationship, particularly where nationalism enters.[111]
The competition for power so stimulates those pugnacities and fears,
that isolated national power cannot ensure a nation's political security
or independence. Political security and economic well-being can only be
ensured by international co-operation. This must be economic as well as
political, be directed, that is, not only at pooling military forces for
the purpose of restraining aggression, but at the maintenance of some
economic code which will ensure for all nations, whether militarily
powerful or not, fair economic opportunity and means of subsistence.
It was, in other words, an attempt to clear the road to a more workable
international policy by undermining the main conceptions and
prepossessions inimical to an international order.[112] It did not
elaborate machinery, but the facts it dealt with point clearly to
certain conclusions on that head.
While arguing that prevailing beliefs (false beliefs for the most part)
and feelings (largely directed by the false beliefs) were the
determining factors in international politics, the author challenged the
prevailing assumption of the unchangeability of those ideas and
feelings, particularly the proposition that war between human groups
arises out of instincts and emotions incapable of modification or
control or re-direction by conscious effort. The author placed equal
emphasis on both parts of the proposition--that dealing with the alleged
immutability of human pugnacity and ideas, and that which challenged the
representation of war as an inevitable struggle for physical
sustenance--if only because no exposure of the biological fallacy would
be other than futile if the former proposition were true.[113]
If conduct in these matters is the automatic reaction to uncontrollable
instinct and is not affected by ideas, or if ideas themselves are the
mere reflection of that instinct, obviously it is no use attempting
demonstrations of futility, economic or other. The more we demonstrate
the intensity of our inherent pugnacity and irrationalism, the more do
we in fact demonstrate the need for the conscious control of those
instincts. The alternative conclusion is fatalism: an admission not only
that our ship is not under control, but that we have given up the task
of getting it under control. We have surrendered our freedom.
Moreover, our record shows that the direction taken by our
pugnacities--their objective--is in fact largely determined by
traditions and ideas which are in part at least the sum of conscious
intellectual effort. The history of religious persecution--its wars,
inquisitions, repressions--shows a great change (which we must admit as
a fact, whether we regard it as good or bad) not only of idea but of
feeling.[114] The book rejected instinct as sufficient guide and urged
the need of discipline by intelligent foresight of consequence.
To examine our subconscious or unconscious motives of conduct is the
first step to making them conscious and modifying them.
This does not imply that instincts--whether of pugnacity or other--can
readily be repressed by a mere effort of will. But their direction, the
object upon which they expend themselves, will depend upon our
interpretation of facts. If we interpret the hailstorm or the curdled
milk in one way, our fear and hatred of the witch is intense; the same
facts interpreted another way make the witch an object of another
emotion, pity.
Reason may be a very small part of the apparatus of human conduct
compared with the part played by the unconscious and subconscious, the
instinctive and the emotional. The power of a ship's compass is very
small indeed compared with the power developed by the engines. But the
greater the power of the engines, the greater will be the disaster if
the relatively tiny compass is deflected and causes the ship to be
driven on to the rocks. The illustration indicates, not exactly but with
sufficient truth, the relationship of 'reason' to 'instinct.'
The instincts that push to self-assertion, to the acquisition of
preponderant power, are so strong that we shall only abandon that method
as the result of perceiving its futility. Co-operation, which means a
relationship of partnership and give and take, will not succeed till
force has failed.
The futility of power as a means to our most fundamental and social ends
is due mainly to two facts, one mechanical, and the other moral. The
mechanical fact is that if we really need another, our power over him
has very definite limits. Our dependence on him gives him a weapon
against us. The moral fact is that in demanding a position of
domination, we ask something to which we should not accede if it were
asked of us: the claim does not stand the test of the categorical
imperative. If we need another's labour, we cannot kill him; if his
custom, we cannot forbid him to earn money. If his labour is to be
effective, we must give him tools, knowledge; and these things can be
used to resist our exactions. To the degree to which he is powerful for
service he is powerful for resistance. A nation wealthy as a customer
will also be ubiquitous as a competitor.
The factors which have operated to make physical compulsion (slavery) as
a means of obtaining service less economical than service for reward,
operate just as effectively between nations. The employment of military
force for economic ends is an attempt to apply indirectly the principle
of chattel-slavery to groups; and involves the same disadvantages.[115]
In so far as coercion represents a means of securing a wider and more
effective social co-operation as against a narrower social co-operation,
or more anarchic condition, it is likely to be successful and to justify
itself socially. The imposition of Western government upon backward
peoples approximates to the role of police; the struggles between the
armed forces of rival Western Powers do not. The function of a police
force is the exact contrary to that of armies competing with one
another.[116]
The demonstration of the futility of conquest rested mainly on these
facts. After conquest the conquered people cannot be killed. They
cannot be allowed to starve. Pressure of population on means of
subsistence has not been reduced, but probably increased, since the
number of mouths to fill eliminated by the casualty lists is not
equivalent to the reduced production occasioned by war. To impose by
force (e.g. exclusion from raw materials) a lower standard of living,
creates (_a_) resistance which involves costs of coercion (generally in
military establishments, but also in the political difficulties in which
the coercion of hostile peoples--as in Alsace-Lorraine and
Ireland--generally involves their conqueror), costs which must be
deducted from the economic advantage of the conquest; and (_b_) loss of
markets which may be indispensable to countries (like Britain) whose
prosperity depends upon an international division of labour. A
population that lives by exchanging its coal and iron for (say) food,
does not profit by reducing the productivity of subject peoples engaged
in food production.
In _The Great Illusion_ the case was put as follows:--
'When we conquer a nation in these days, we do not exterminate it:
we leave it where it was. When we "overcome" the servile races, far
from eliminating them, we give them added chances of life by
introducing order, etc., so that the lower human quality tends to
be perpetuated by conquest by the higher. If ever it happens that
the Asiatic races challenge the white in the industrial or military
field, it will be in large part thanks to the work of race
conservation, which has been the result of England's conquest in
India, Egypt, and Asia generally.'--(pp. 191-192.)
'When the division of labour was so little developed that every
homestead produced all that it needed, it mattered nothing if part
of the community was cut off from the world for weeks and months at
a time. All the neighbours of a village or homestead might be slain
or harassed, and no inconvenience resulted. But if to-day an
English county is by a general railroad strike cut off for so much
as forty-eight hours from the rest of the economic organism, we
know that whole sections of its population are threatened with
famine. If in the time of the Danes England could by some magic
have killed all foreigners, she would presumably have been the
better off. If she could do the same thing to-day half her
population would starve to death. If on one side of the frontier a
community is, say, wheat-producing, and on the other
coal-producing, each is dependent for its very existence on the
fact of the other being able to carry on its labour. The miner
cannot in a week set to and grow a crop of wheat; the farmer must
wait for his wheat to grow, and must meantime feed his family and
dependents. The exchange involved here must go on, and each party
have fair expectation that he will in due course be able to reap
the fruits of his labour, or both starve; and that exchange, that
expectation, is merely the expression in its simplest form of
commerce and credit; and the interdependence here indicated has, by
the countless developments of rapid communication, reached such a
condition of complexity that the interference with any given
operation affects not merely the parties directly involved, but
numberless others having at first sight no connection therewith.
'The vital interdependence here indicated, cutting athwart
frontiers, is largely the work of the last forty years; and it has,
during that time, so developed as to have set up a financial
interdependence of the capitals of the world, so complex that
disturbance in New York involves financial and commercial
disturbance in London, and, if sufficiently grave, compels
financiers of London to co-operate with those of New York to put an
end to the crisis, not as a matter of altruism, but as a matter of
commercial self-protection. The complexity of modern finance makes
New York dependent on London, London upon Paris, Paris upon Berlin,
to a greater degree than has ever yet been the case in history.
This interdependence is the result of the daily use of those
contrivances of civilisation which date from yesterday--the rapid
post, the instantaneous dissemination of financial and commercial
information by means of telegraphy, and generally the incredible
progress of rapidity in communication which has put the half-dozen
chief capitals of Christendom in closer contact financially, and
has rendered them more dependent the one upon the other than were
the chief cities of Great Britain less than a hundred years
ago.--(pp. 49-50.)
'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 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 naught the
force of credit. 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.... 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.'--(pp. 270-272.)
In elaboration of this general thesis it is pointed out that the
processes of exchange have become too complex for direct barter, and can
only take place by virtue of credit; and it is by the credit system, the
'sensory nerve' of the economic organism, that the self-injurious
results of economic war are first shown. If, after a victorious war, we
allow enemy industry and international trade to go on much as before,
then obviously our victory will have had very little effect on the
fundamental economic situation. If, on the other hand, we attempt for
political or other reasons to destroy our enemy's industry and trade, to
keep him from the necessary materials of it, we should undermine our own
credit by diminishing the exchange value of much of our own real wealth.
For this reason it is 'a great illusion' to suppose that by the
political annexation of colonies, territories with iron-mines,
coal-mines, we enrich ourselves by the amount of wealth their
exploitation represents.[117]
The large place which such devices as an international credit system
must take in our international economy, adds enormously to the
difficulty of securing any 'spoils of victory' in the shape of
indemnity. A large indemnity is not impossible, but the only condition
on which it can be made possible--a large foreign trade by the defeated
people--is not one that will be readily accepted by the victorious
nation. Yet the dilemma is absolute: the enemy must do a big foreign
trade (or deliver in lieu of money large quantities of goods) which will
compete with home production, or he can pay no big indemnity--nothing
commensurate with the cost of modern war.
Since we are physically dependent on co-operation with foreigners, it
is obvious that the frontiers of the national State are not co-terminous
with the frontiers of our society. Human association cuts athwart
frontiers. The recognition of the fact would help to break down that
conception of nations as personalities which plays so large a part in
international hatred. The desire to punish this or that 'nation' could
not long survive if we had in mind, not the abstraction, but the babies,
the little girls, old men, in no way responsible for the offences that
excited our passions, whom we treated in our minds as a single
individual.[118]
As a means of vindicating a moral, social, religious, or cultural
ideal--as of freedom or democracy--war between States, and still more
between Alliances, must be largely ineffective for two main reasons.
First, because the State and the moral unit do not coincide. France or
the British Empire could not stand as a unit for Protestanism as opposed
to Catholicism, Christianity as opposed to Mohammedanism, or
Individualism as opposed to Socialism, or Parliamentary Government as
opposed to Bureaucratic Autocracy, or even for European ascendancy as
against Coloured Races. For both Empires include large coloured
elements; the British Empire is more Mohammedan than Christian, has
larger areas under autocratic than under Parliamentary government; has
powerful parties increasingly Socialistic. The State power in both cases
is being used, not to suppress, but to give actual vitality to the
non-Christian or non-European or coloured elements that it has
conquered. The second great reason why it is futile to attempt to use
the military power of States for ends such as freedom and democracy, is
that the instincts to which it is compelled to appeal, the spirit it
must cultivate and the methods it is compelled increasingly to employ,
are themselves inimical to the sentiment upon which freedom must rest.
Nations that have won their freedom as the result of military victory,
usually employ that victory to suppress the freedom of others. To rest
our freedom upon a permanent basis of nationalist military power, is
equivalent to seeking security from the moral dangers of Prussianism by
organising our States on the Prussian model.
Our real struggle is with nature: internecine struggles between men
lessen the effectiveness of the human army. A Continent which supported
precariously, with recurrent famine, a few hundred thousand savages
fighting endlessly between themselves, can support, abundantly a hundred
million whites who can manage to maintain peace among themselves and
fight nature.
Nature here includes human nature. Just as we turn the destructive
forces of external nature from our hurt to our service, not by their
unintelligent defiance, but by utilising them through a knowledge of
their qualities, so can the irrepressible but not 'undirectable' forces
of instinct, emotion, sentiment, be turned by intelligence to the
service of our greatest and most permanent needs.
CHAPTER IV
ARGUMENTS NOW OUT OF DATE
For the purposes of simplicity and brevity the main argument of _The
Great Illusion_ assumed the relative permanence of the institution of
private property in Western society, and the persistence of the tendency
of victorious belligerents to respect it, a tendency which had steadily
grown in strength for five hundred years. The book assumed that the
conqueror would do in the future what he has done to a steadily
increasing degree in the past, especially as the reasons for such
policy, in terms of self-interest, have so greatly grown in force during
the last generation or two. To have argued its case in terms of
non-existent and hypothetical conditions which might not exist for
generations or centuries, would have involved hopelessly bewildering
complications. And the decisive reason for not adding this complication
was the fact that _though it would vary the form of the argument, it
would not effect the final conclusion_.
As already explained in the first part of this book (Chapter II) this
war has marked a revolution in the position of private property and the
relation of the citizen to the State. The Treaty of Versailles departs
radically from the general principles adhered to, for instance, in the
Treaty of Frankfurt; the position of German traders and that of the
property of German citizens does not at all to-day resemble the position
in which the Treaty of Frankfurt left the French trader and French
private property.
The fact of the difference has already been entered into at some length.
It remains to see how the change affects the general argument adopted in
_The Great Illusion_.
It does not affect its final conclusions. The argument ran: A conqueror
cannot profit by 'loot' in the shape of confiscations, tributes,
indemnities, which paralyse the economic life of the defeated enemy.
They are economically futile. They are unlikely to be attempted, but if
they are attempted they will still be futile.[119]
Events have confirmed that conclusion, though not the expectation that
the enemy's economic life would be left undisturbed. We have started a
policy which does injure the economic life of the enemy. The more it
injures him, the less it pays us. And we are abandoning it as rapidly as
nationalist hostilities will permit us. In so far as pre-war conditions
pointed to the need of a definitely organised international economic
code, the situation created by the Treaty has only made the need more
visible and imperative. For, as already explained in the first Part, the
old understandings enabled industry to be built up on an international
basis; the Treaty of Versailles and its confiscations, prohibitions,
controls, have destroyed those foundations. Had that instrument treated
German trade and industry as the Germans treated French in 1871 we might
have seen a recovery of German economic life relatively as rapid as that
which took place in France during the ten years which followed her
defeat. We should not to-day be faced by thirty or forty millions in
Central and Eastern Europe without secure means of livelihood.
The present writer confesses most frankly--and the critics of _The Great
Illusion_ are hereby presented with all that they can make of the
admission--that he did not expect a European conqueror, least of all
Allied conquerors, to use their victory for enforcing a policy having
these results. He believed that elementary considerations of
self-interest, the duty of statesmen to consider the needs of their own
countries just emerging from war, would stand in the way of a policy of
this kind. On the other hand, he was under no illusions as to what would
result if they did attempt to enforce that policy. Dealing with the
damage that a conqueror might inflict, the book says that such things as
the utter destruction of the enemy's trade
could only be inflicted by an invader as a means of punishment
costly to himself, or as the result of an unselfish and expensive
desire to inflict misery for the mere joy of inflicting it. In this
self-seeking world it is not practical to assume the existence of
an inverted altruism of this kind.--(p. 29.)
Because of the 'interdependence of our credit-built finance and
industry'
the confiscation by an invader of private property, whether stocks,
shares, ships, mines, or anything more valuable than jewellery or
furniture--anything, in short, which is bound up with the economic
life of the people--would so react upon the finance of the
invader's country as to make the damage to the invader resulting
from the confiscation exceed in value the property confiscated--(p.
29).
Speaking broadly and generally, the conqueror in our day has before
him two alternatives: to leave things alone, and in order to do
that he need not have left his shores; or to interfere by
confiscation in some form, in which case he dries up the source of
the profit which tempted him--(p. 59).
All the suggestions made as to the economic futility of such a
course--including the failure to secure an indemnity--have been
justified.[120]
In dealing with the indemnity problem the book did forecast the
likelihood of special trading and manufacturing interests within the
conquering nation opposing the only condition upon which a very large
indemnity would be possible--that condition being either the creation of
a large foreign trade by the enemy or the receipt of payment in kind, in
goods which would compete with home production. But the author certainly
did not think it likely that England and France would impose conditions
so rapidly destructive of the enemy's economic life that they--the
conquerors--would, for their own economic preservation, be compelled to
make loans to the defeated enemy.
Let us note the phase of the argument that the procedure adopted renders
out of date. A good deal of _The Great Illusion_ was devoted to showing
that Germany had no need to expand territorially; that her desire for
overseas colonies was sentimental, and had little relation to the
problem of providing for her population. At the beginning of 1914 that
was certainly true. It is not true to-day. The process by which she
supported her excess population before the War will, to put it at its
lowest, be rendered extremely difficult of maintenance as the result of
allied action. The point, however, is that we are not benefiting by
this paralysis of German industry. We are suffering very greatly from
it: suffering so much that we can be neither politically nor
economically secure until this condition is brought to an end. There can
be no peace in Europe, and consequently no safety for us or France, so
long as we attempt by power to maintain a policy which denies to
millions in the midst of our civilisation the possibility of earning
their living. In so far as the new conditions create difficulties which
did not originally exist, our victory does but the more glaringly
demonstrate the economic futility of our policy towards the vanquished.
An argument much used in _The Great Illusion_ as disproving the claims
made for conquest was the position of the population of small States.
'Very well,' may say the critic, 'Germany is now in the position of a
small State. But you talk about her being ruined!'
In the conditions of 1914, the small State argument was entirely valid
(incidentally the Allied Governments argue that it still holds).[121] It
does not hold to-day. In the conditions of 1920 at any rate, the small
State is, like Germany, economically at the mercy of British sea power
or the favoritism of the French Foreign Office, to a degree that was
unknown before the War. How is the situation to develop? Is the Dutch or
Swedish or Austrian industrial city permanently to be dependent upon the
good graces of some foreign official sitting in Whitehall or the Quai
d'Orsay? At present, if an industrialist in such a city wishes to import
coal or to ship a cargo to one of the new Baltic States, he may be
prevented owing to political arrangements between France and England. If
that is to be the permanent situation of the non-Entente world, then
peace will become less and less secure, and all our talk of having
fought for the rights of the small and weak will be a farce. The
friction, the irritation, and sense of grievance will prolong the unrest
and uncertainty, and the resultant decline in the productivity of
Europe will render our own economic problems the more acute. The power
by which we thus arrogate to ourselves the economic dictatorship of
Europe will ultimately be challenged.
Can we revert to the condition of things which, by virtue of certain
economic freedoms that were respected, placed the trader or
industrialist of a small State pretty much on an equality, in most
things, with the trader of the Great State? Or shall we go forward to a
recognised international economic system, in which the small States will
have their rights secured by a definite code?
Reversion to the old individualist 'trans-nationalism' or an
internationalism without considerable administrative machinery--seems
now impossible. The old system is destroyed at its sources within each
State. The only available course now is, recognising the fact of an
immense growth in the governmental control or regulation of foreign
trade, to devise definite codes or agreements to meet the case. If the
obtaining of necessary raw materials by all the States other than France
and England is to be the subject of wrangles between officials, each
case to be treated on its merits, we shall have a much worse anarchy
than before the War. A condition in which two or three powers can lay
down the law for the world will indeed be an anti-climax.
We may never learn the lesson; the old futile struggles may go on
indefinitely. But if we do put our intelligences to the situation it
will call for a method of treatment somewhat different from that which
pre-war conditions required.
For the purposes of the War, in the various Inter-Allied bodies for the
apportionment of shipping and raw material, we had the beginnings of an
economic League of Nations, an economic World Government. Those bodies
might have been made democratic, and enlarged to include neutral
interests, and maintained for the period of Reconstruction (which might
in any case have been regarded as a phase properly subject to war
treatment in these matters). But these international organisations were
allowed to fall to pieces on the removal of the common enmity which held
the European Allies and America together.
The disappearance of these bodies does not mean the disappearance of
'controls,' but the controls will now be exercised in considerable part
through vast private Capitalist Trusts dealing with oil, meat, and
shipping. Nor will the interference of government be abolished. If it is
considered desirable to ensure to some group a monopoly of phosphates,
or palm nuts, the aid of governments will be invoked for the purpose.
But in this case the government will exercise its powers not as the
result of a publicly avowed and agreed principle, but illicitly,
hypocritically.
While professing to exercise a 'mandate' for mankind, a government will
in fact be using its authority to protect special interests. In other
words we shall get a form of internationalism in which the international
capitalist Trust will control the Government instead of the Government's
controlling the Trust.
The fact that this was happening more and more before the War was one
reason why the old individualist order has broken down. More and more
the professed position and function of the State was not its real
position and function. The amount of industry and trade dependent upon
governmental intervention (enterprises of the Chinese Loan and Bagdad
Railway type) before the War was small compared with the quantity that
owed nothing to governmental protection. But the illicit pressure
exercised upon governments by those interested in the exploitation of
backward countries was out of proportion to the public importance of
their interests.
It was this failure of democratic control of 'big business' by the
pre-war democracies which helped to break down the old individualism.
While private capital was apparently gaining control over the democratic
forces, moulding the policy of democratic governments, it was in fact
digging its own grave. If political democracy in this respect had been
equal to its task, or if the captains of industry had shown a greater
scruple or discernment in their use of political power, the
individualist order might have given us a workable civilisation; or its
end might have been less painful.
_The Great Illusion_ did not assume its impending demise. Democracy had
not yet organised socialistic controls within the nation. To have
assumed that the world of nationalisms would face socialistic regulation
and control as between States, would have implied an agility on the part
of the public imagination which it does not in fact possess. An
international policy on these lines would have been unintelligible and
preposterous. It is only because the situation which has followed
victory is so desperate, so much worse than anything _The Great
Illusion_ forecast, that we have been brought to face these remedies
to-day.
Before the War, the line of advance, internationally, was not by
elaborate regulation. We had seen a congeries of States like those of
the British Empire maintain not only peace but a sort of informal
Federation, without limitation in any formal way of the national freedom
of any one of them. Each could impose tariffs against the mother
country, exclude citizens of the Empire, recognise no common defined
law. The British Empire seemed to forecast a type of international
Association which could secure peace without the restraints or
restrictions of a central authority in anything but the most shadowy
form. If the merely moral understanding which held it together and
enabled co-operation in a crisis could have been extended to the United
States; if the principle of 'self-determination' that had been applied
to the white portion of the Empire were gradually extended to the
Asiatic; if a bargain had been made with Germany and France as to the
open door, and equality of access to undeveloped territory made a matter
of defined agreement, we should have possessed the nucleus of a world
organisation giving the widest possible scope for independent national
development. But world federation on such lines depended above all, of
course, upon the development of a certain 'spirit,' a guiding temper, to
do for nations of different origin what had already been done for
nations of a largely common origin (though Britain has many different
stocks--English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and, overseas, Dutch and French
as well). But the spirit was not there. The whole tradition in the
international field was one of domination, competition, rivalry,
conflicting interest, 'Struggle for life.'
The possibility of such a free international life has disappeared with
the disappearance of the _laisser-faire_ ideal in national organisation.
We shall perforce be much more concerned now with the machinery of
control in both spheres as the only alternative to an anarchy more
devastating than that which existed before the War. For all the reasons
which point to that conclusion the reader is referred once more to the
second chapter of the first part of this book.
CHAPTER V
THE ARGUMENT AS AN ATTACK ON THE STATE
There was not before the War, and there has not been since, any serious
challenge to the economic argument of _The Great Illusion_. Criticism
(which curiously enough does not seem to have included the point dealt
with in the preceding Chapter) seems to have centred rather upon the
irrelevance of economic considerations to the problem of war--the
problem, that is, of creating an international society. The answer to
that is, of course, both explicit and implicit in much of what precedes.
The most serious criticism has been directed to one specific point. It
is made notably both by Professor Spenser Wilkinson[122] and Professor
Lindsay,[123] and as it is relevant to the existing situation and to
much of the argument of the present book, it is worth dealing with.
The criticism is based on the alleged disparagement of the State implied
in the general attitude of the book. Professor Lindsay (whose article,
by the way, although hostile and misapprehending the spirit of the book,
is a model of fair, sincere, and useful criticism) describes the work
under criticism largely as an attack on the conception of 'the State as
a person.' He says in effect that the present author argues thus:--
'The only proper thing to consider is the interest or the happiness
of individuals. If a political action conduces to the interests of
individuals, it must be right; if it conflicts with these interests
it must be wrong.'
Professor Lindsay continues:--
'Now if pacifism really implied such a view of the relation of the
State and the individual, and of the part played by self-interest
in life, its appeal has little moral force behind it....
'Mr. Angell seems to hold that not only is the national State being
superseded, but that the supersession is to be welcomed. The
economic forces which are destroying the State will do all the
State has done to bind men together, and more.'
As a matter of fact Professor Lindsay has himself answered his own
criticism. For he goes on:--
'The argument of _The Great Illusion_ is largely based on the
public part played by the organisation of credit. Mr Angell has
been the first to notice the great significance of its activity. It
has misled him, however, into thinking that it presaged a
supersession of political by economic control.... The facts are,
not that political forces are being superseded by economic, but
that the new industrial situation has called into being new
political organisations.... To co-ordinate their activities ...
will be impossible if the spirit of exclusive nationalism and
distrust of foreigners wins the day; it will be equally impossible
if the strength of our existing centres of patriotism and public
spirit are destroyed.'
Very well. We had here in the pre-war period two dangers, either of
which in Professor Lindsay's view would make the preservation of
civilisation impossible: one danger was that men would over-emphasise
their narrower patriotism and surrender themselves to the pugnacities
of exclusive nationalism and distrust of foreigners, forgetting that the
spiritual life of densely packed societies can only be rendered possible
by certain widespread economic co-operations, contracts; the other
danger was that we should under-emphasise each our own nationalism and
give too much importance to the wider international organisation of
mankind.
Into which danger have we run as a matter of simple fact? Which tendency
is it that is acting as the present disruptive force in Europe? Has
opinion and statesmanship--as expressed in the Treaty, for
instance--given too much or too little attention to the interdependence
of the world, and the internationally economic foundations of our
civilisation?
We have seen Europe smashed by neglecting the truths which _The Great
Illusion_ stressed, perhaps over-stressed, and by surrendering to the
exclusive nationalism which that book attacked. The book was based on
the anticipation that Europe would be very much more likely to come to
grief through over-stressing exclusive nationalism and neglecting its
economic interdependence, than through the decay of the narrower
patriotism.
If the book had been written _in vacuo_, without reference to impending
events, the emphasis might have been different.[124]
But in criticising the emphasis that is thrown upon the welfare of the
individual, Professor Lindsay would seem to be guilty of confusing the
_test_ of good political conduct with the _motive_. Certainly _The Great
Illusion_ did not disparage the need of loyalty to the social group--to
the other members of the partnership. That need is the burden of most
that has been written in the preceding pages when dealing with the facts
of interdependence. An individual who can see only his own interest does
not see even that; for such interest is dependent on others. (These
arguments of egoism versus altruism are always circular.) But it
insisted upon two facts which modern Europe seemed in very great danger
of forgetting. The first was that the Nation-State was not the social
group, not co-terminous with the whole of Society, only a very
arbitrarily chosen part of it; and the second was that the _test_ of the
'good State' was the welfare of the citizens who composed it. How
otherwise shall we settle the adjustment between national right and
international obligation, answer the old and inevitable question, 'What
is the _Good_ State?' The only intelligible answer is: the State which
produces good men, subserves their welfare. A State which did not
subserve the welfare of its citizens, that produced men morally,
intellectually, physically poor and feeble, could not be a good State. A
State is tested by the degree to which it serves individuals.
Now the fact of forgetting the first truth, that the Nation-State is not
the whole of Society but only a part, and that we have obligations to
the other part, led to a distortion of the second. The Hegelianism which
denied any obligation above or beyond that of the Nation-State sets up a
conflict of sovereignties, a competition of power, stimulating the
instinct of domination, making indeed the power and position of the
State with reference to rival States the main end of politics. The
welfare of men is forgotten. The fact that the State is made for man,
not man for the State, is obscured. It was certainly forgotten or
distorted by the later political philosophers of Prussia. The oversight
gave us Prussianism and Imperialism, the ideal of political power as an
end in itself, against which _The Great Illusion_ was a protest. The
Imperialism, not alone in Prussia, takes small account of the quality of
individual life, under the flag. The one thing to be sought is that the
flag should be triumphant, be flown over vast territories, inspire fear
in foreigners, and be an emblem of 'glory.' There is a discernible
distinction of aim and purpose between the Patriot, Jingo, Chauvinist,
and the citizen of the type interested in such things as social reform.
The military Patriot the world over does not attempt to hide his
contempt for efforts at the social betterment of his countryman. That is
'parish pump.' Mr Maxse or Mr Kipling is keenly interested in England,
but not in the betterment of Englishmen; indeed, both are in the habit
of abusing Englishmen very heartily, unless they happen to be soldiers.
In other words, the real end of politics is forgotten. It is not only
that the means have become the end, but that one element of the means,
power, has become the end.
The point I desired to emphasise was that unless we keep before
ourselves the welfare of the individual as the _test_ of politics (not
necessarily the motive of each individual for himself) we constantly
forget the purpose and aim of politics, and patriotism becomes not the
love of one's fellow countrymen and their welfare, but the love of power
expressed by that larger 'ego' which is one's group. 'Mystic
Nationalism' comes to mean something entirely divorced from any
attribute of individual life. The 'Nation' becomes an abstraction apart
from the life of the individual.
There is a further consideration. The fact that the Nation-State is not
co-terminous with Society is shown by its vital need of others; it
cannot live by itself; it must co-operate with others; consequently it
has obligations to those others. The demonstration of that fact involves
an appeal to 'interest,' to welfare. The most visible and vital
co-operation outside the limits of the Nation-State is the economic; it
gives rise to the most definite, as to the most fundamental
obligation--the obligation to accord to others the right to existence.
It is out of the common economic need that the actual structure of some
mutual arrangement, some social code, will arise, has indeed arisen.
This makes the beginning of the first visible structure of a world
society. And from these homely beginnings will come, if at all, a more
vivid sense of the wider society. And the 'economic' interest, as
distinct from the temperamental interest of domination, has at least
this social advantage. Welfare is a thing that in society may well grow
the more it is divided: the better my countrymen the richer is my life
likely to become. Domination has not this quality: it is mutually
exclusive. We cannot all be masters. If any country is to dominate,
somebody or some one else's country must be dominated; if the one is to
be the Superior Race, some other must be inferior. And the inferior
sooner or later objects, and from that resistance comes the
disintegration that now menaces us.
It is perfectly true that we cannot create the kind of State which will
best subserve the interests of its citizens unless each is ready to give
allegiance to it, irrespective of his immediate personal 'interest.'
(The word is put in inverted commas because in most men not compelled by
bad economic circumstances to fight fiercely for daily bread, sheer
physical sustenance, the satisfaction of a social and creative instinct
is a very real 'interest,' and would, in a well-organised society, be as
spontaneous as interest in sport or social ostentation.) The State must
be an idea, an abstraction, capable of inspiring loyalty, embodying the
sense of interdependence. But the circumstances of the independent
modern national State, in frequent and unavoidable contact with other
similar States, are such as to stimulate not mainly the motives of
social cohesion, but those instincts of domination which become
anti-social and disruptive. The nationalist stands condemned not because
he asks allegiance or loyalty to the social group, but first, because he
asks absolute allegiance to something which is not the social group but
only part of it, and secondly, because that exclusive loyalty gives rise
to disruptive pugnacities, injurious to all.
In pointing out the inadequacy of the unitary political Nation-State as
the embodiment of final sovereignty, an inadequacy due to precisely the
development of such organisations as Labour, the present writer merely
anticipated the drift of much political writing of the last ten years on
the problem of State sovereignty; as also the main drift of
events.[125]
If Mr Lindsay finds the very mild suggestions in _The Great Illusion_
touching the necessary qualification of the sovereignty of the
Nation-State subversive, one wonders what his feelings are on reading,
say, Mr Cole, who in a recent book (_Social Theory_) leaves the
Political State so attenuated that one questions whether what is left is
not just ghost. At the best the State is just one collateral association
among others.
The sheer mechanical necessities of administration of an industrial
society, so immeasurably more complex than the simple agricultural
society which gave us the unitary political State, seem to be pushing us
towards a divided or manifold sovereignty. If we are to carry over from
the National State into the new form of the State--as we seem now in
danger of doing--the attitude of mind which demands domination for 'our'
group, the pugnacities, suspicions, and hostilities characteristic of
nationalist temper, we may find the more complex society beyond our
social capacity. I agree that we want a common political loyalty, that
mere obedience to the momentary interest of our group will not give it;
but neither will the temper of patriotism as we have seen it manifested
in the European national State. The loyalty to some common code will
probably only come through a sense of its social need. (It is on the
ground of its social need that Mr Lindsay defends the political State.)
At present we have little sense of that need, because we have (as
Versailles proved) a belief in the effectiveness of our own power to
exact the services we may require. The rival social or industrial groups
have a like belief. Only a real sense of interdependence can undermine
that belief; and it must be a visible, economic interdependence.
A social sense may be described as an instinctive feeling for 'what will
work.' We are only yet at the beginning of the study of human motive. So
much is subconscious that we are certainly apt to ascribe to one motive
conduct which in fact is due to another. And among the neglected motives
of conduct is perhaps a certain sense of art--a sense, in this
connection, of the difficult 'art of living together.' It is probably
true that what some, at least, find so revolting in some of the
manifestations of nationalism, chauvinism, is that they violently
challenge the whole sense of what will work, to say nothing of the
rights of others. 'If every one took that line, nobody could live.' In a
social sense this is gross and offensive. It has an effect on one like
the manners of a cad. It is that sort of motive, perhaps, more than any
calculation of 'interest,' which may one day cause a revulsion against
Balkanisation. But to that motive some informed sense of interdependence
is indispensable.
CHAPTER VI
VINDICATION BY EVENTS
If the question merely concerned the past, if it were only a matter of
proving that this or that 'School of thought' was right, this
re-examination of arguments put forward before the War would be a
sterile business enough. But it concerns the present and the future;
bears directly and pertinently upon the reasons which have led us into
the existing chaos; and the means by which we might hope to emerge. As
much to-day as before the War (and far more obviously) is it true that
upon the reply to the questions raised in this discussion depends the
continuance of our civilisation. Our society is still racked by a fierce
struggle for political power, our populations still demand the method of
coercion, still refuse to face the facts of interdependence, still
insist clamorously upon a policy which denies those facts.
The propositions we are here discussing were not, it is well to recall,
merely to the effect that 'war does not pay,' but that the ideas and
impulses out of which it grows, and which underlay--and still
underlie--European politics, give us an unworkable society; and that
unless they can be corrected they will increasingly involve social
collapse and disintegration.
That conclusion was opposed, as we have seen, on two main grounds. One
was that the desire for conquest and extension of territory did not
enter appreciably into the causes of war, 'since no one really believed
that victory could advantage them.' The other ground of objection, in
contradistinction, was that the economic advantages of conquest or
military predominance were so great and so obvious that to deny them was
mere paradox-mongering.
The validity of both criticisms has been very thoroughly tested in the
period that has followed the Armistice. Whether it be true or not that
the competition for territory, the belief that predominant power could
be turned to economic account, entered into the causes of the War, that
competition and belief have certainly entered into the settlement and
must be reckoned among the causes of the next war. The proposition that
the economic advantages of conquest and coercion are illusory is hardly
to-day a paradox, however much policy may still ignore the facts.
The outstanding facts of the present situation most worth our attention
in this connection are these: Military predominance, successful war,
evidently offer no solution either of specifically international or of
our common social and economic problems. The political disintegration
going on over wide areas in Europe is undoubtedly related very
intimately to economic conditions: actual lack of food, the struggle for
ever-increasing wages and better conditions. Our attempted remedies--our
conferences for dealing with international credit, the suggestion of an
international loan, the loans actually made to the enemy--are a
confession of the international character of that problem. All this
shows that the economic question, alike nationally and internationally,
is not, it is true, something that ought to occupy all the energies of
men, but something that will, unless dealt with adequately; is a
question that simply cannot be swept aside with magnificent gestures.
Finally, the nature of the settlement actually made by the victor, its
characteristic defects, the failure to realise adequately the victor's
dependence on the economic life of the vanquished, show clearly enough
that, even in the free democracies, orthodox statecraft did indeed
suffer from the misconception which _The Great Illusion_ attributed to
it.
What do we see to-day in Europe? Our preponderant military
power--overwhelming, irresistible, unquestioned--is impotent to secure
the most elementary forms of wealth needed by our people: fuel, food,
shelter. France, who in the forty years of her 'defeat' had the soundest
finances in Europe, is, as a victor over the greatest industrial nation
in Europe, all but bankrupt. (The franc has fallen to a discount of over
seventy per cent.) All the recurrent threats of extended military
occupation fail to secure reparations and indemnities, the restoration
of credit, exchange, of general confidence and security.
And just as we are finding that the things necessary for the life of our
peoples cannot be secured by military force exercised against foreign
nations or a beaten enemy, so are we finding that the same method of
force within the limits of the nation used by one group as against
another, fails equally. The temper or attitude towards life which leads
us to attempt to achieve our end by the forcible imposition of our will
upon others, by dictatorship, and to reject agreement, has produced in
some degree everywhere revolt and rebellion on the one side, and
repression on the other; or a general disruption and the breakdown of
the co-operative processes by which mankind lives. All the raw materials
of wealth are here on the earth as they were ten years ago. Yet Europe
either starves or slips into social chaos, because of the economic
difficulty.
In the way of the necessary co-operation stands the Balkanisation of
Europe. Why are we Balkanised rather than Federalised? Why do Balkan and
other border States fight fiercely over this coalfield or that harbour?
Why does France still oppose trade with Russia, and plot for the control
of an enlarged Poland or a reactionary Hungary? Why does America now
wash her hands of the whole muddle in Europe?
Because everywhere the statesmen and the public believe that if only
the power of their State were great enough, they could be independent of
rival States, achieve political and economic security and dispense with
agreements and obligations.
If they had any vivid sense of the vast dangers to which reliance upon
isolated power exposed any State, however great; if they had realised
how the prosperity and social peace of their own States depended upon
the reconciliation and well-being of the vanquished, the Treaty would
have been a very different document, peace would long since have been
established with Russia, and the moral foundations of co-operation would
be present.
By every road that presented itself, _The Great Illusion_ attempted to
reveal the vital interdependence of peoples--within and without the
State--and, as a corollary to that interdependence, the very strict
limits of the force that can be exercised against any one whose life,
and daily--and willing--labour is necessary to us. It was not merely the
absence of these ideas but the very active presence of the directly
contrary ideas of rival and conflicting interest, which explained the
drift that the present writer thought--and said so often--would, unless
checked, lead Western civilisation to a vast orgy of physical
self-destruction and moral violence and chaos.
The economic conditions which constitute one part of the vindication of
_The Great Illusion_ are of course those described in the first part of
this book, particularly in the first chapter. All that need be added
here are a few suggestions as to the relationship between those
conditions and the propositions we are concerned to verify.
As bearing upon the truth of those propositions, we cannot neglect the
condition of Germany.
If ever national military power, the sheer efficiency of the military
instrument, could ensure a nation's political and economic security,
Germany should have been secure. It was not any lack of the 'impulse to
defence,' of the 'manly and virile qualities' so beloved of the
militarist, no tendency to 'softness,' no 'emasculating
internationalism' which betrayed her. She fell because she failed to
realise that she too, for all her power, had need of a co-operation
throughout the world, which her force could not compel; and that she
must secure a certain moral co-operation in her purposes or be defeated.
She failed, not for lack of 'intense nationalism,' but by reason of it,
because the policy which guided the employment of her military
instrument had in it too small a regard for the moral factors in the
world at large, which might set in motion material forces against her.
It is hardly possible to doubt that the easy victories of 1871 marked
the point at which the German spirit took the wrong turning, and
rendered her statesmen incapable of seeing the forces which were massing
for her destruction. The presence in 1919 of German delegates at
Versailles in the capacity of vanquished can only be adequately
explained by recalling the presence there of German statesmen as victors
in 1871. It took forty years for some of the moral fruits of victory to
manifest themselves in the German spirit.
But the very severity of the present German lot is one that lends itself
to sophistry. It will be argued: 'You say that preponderant military
power, victory, is ineffective to economic ends. Well, look at the
difference between ourselves and Germany. The victors, though they may
not flourish, are at least better off than the vanquished. If we are
lean, they starve. Our military power is not economically futile.'
If to bring about hardship to ourselves in order that some one else may
suffer still greater hardship is an economic gain, then it is untrue to
say that conquest is economically futile. But I had assumed that
advantage or utility was to be measured by the good to us, not by the
harm done to others at our cost. We are arguing for the moment the
economic, and not the ethical aspect of the thing. Keep for a moment to
those terms. If you were told that an enterprise was going to be
extremely profitable and you lost half your fortune in it, you would
certainly regard as curious the logic of the reply, that after all you
_had_ gained, because others in the same enterprise had lost everything.
We are considering in effect whether the facts show that nations must,
in order to provide bread for their people, defeat in war competing
nations who otherwise would secure it. But that economic case for the
'biological inevitability' of war is destroyed if it is true that, after
having beaten the rival nation, we find that we have less bread than
before; that the future security of our food is less; and that out of
our own diminished store we have to feed a defeated enemy who, before
his defeat, managed to feed himself, and helped to feed us as well.
And that is precisely what the present facts reveal.
Reference has already been made to the position of France. In the forty
years of her defeat France was the banker of Europe. She exacted tribute
in the form of dividends and interest upon investments from Russia, the
Near East, Germany herself; exacted it in a form which suited the
peculiar genius of her people and added to the security of her social
life. She was Germany's creditor, and managed to secure from her
conqueror of 1871 the prompt payment of the debts owing to her. When
France was not in a position to compel anything whatsoever from Germany
by military force, the financial claims of Frenchmen upon Germany were
readily discountable in any market of the world. To-day, the financial
claims on Germany, made by a France which is militarily all-powerful,
simply cannot be discounted anywhere. The indemnity vouchers, whatever
may be the military predominance behind them, are simply not negotiable
instruments so long as they depend upon present policy. They are a form
of paper which no banker would dream of discounting on their commercial
merits.
To-day France stands as the conquerer of the richest ore-fields in the
world, of territory which is geographically the industrial centre of
Europe; of a vast Empire in Africa and Asia; in a position of
predominance in Poland, Hungary, and Rumania. She has acquired through
the Reparations Commission such power over the enemy countries as to
reduce them almost to the economic position of an Asiatic or African
colony. If ever wealth could be conquered, France has conquered it. If
political power could really be turned to economic account, France ought
to-day to be rich beyond any nation in history. Never was there such an
opportunity of turning military power into wealth.
Then why is she bankrupt? Why is France faced by economic and financial
difficulties so acute that the situation seems inextricable save by
social revolution, a social reconstruction, that is, involving new
principles of taxation, directly aiming at the re-distribution of
wealth, a re-distribution resisted by the property-owning classes.
These, like other classes, have since the Armistice been so persistently
fed upon the fable of making the Boche pay, that the government is
unable to induce them to face reality.[126]
With a public debt of 233,729 million of francs (about £9,300,000,000,
at the pre-war rate of exchange); with the permanent problem of a
declining population accentuated by the loss of millions of men killed
and wounded in the war, and complicated by the importation of coloured
labour; with the exchange value of the franc reduced to sixty in terms
of the British pound, and to fifteen in terms of the American
dollar,[127] the position of victorious France in the hour of her
complete military predominance over Europe seems wellnigh desperate.
She could of course secure very considerable alleviation of her present
difficulties if she would consent to the only condition upon which
Germany could make a considerable contribution to Reparations; the
restoration of German industry. But to that one indispensable condition
of indemnity or reparation France will not consent, because the French
feel that a flourishing Germany would be a Germany dangerous to the
security of France.
In this condition one may recall a part of _The Great Illusion_ case
which, more than any other of the 'preposterous propositions,' excited
derision and scepticism before the War. That was the part dealing with
the difficulties of securing an indemnity. In a chapter (of the early
1910 Edition) entitled _The Indemnity Futility_, occurred these
passages:--
'The difficulty in the case of a large indemnity is not so much the
payment by the vanquished as the receiving by the victor ...
'When a nation receives an indemnity of a large amount of gold, one
or two things happens: either the money is exchanged for real
wealth with other nations, in which case the greatly increased
imports compete directly with the home producers, or the money is
kept within the frontiers and is not exchanged for real wealth from
abroad, and prices inevitably rise.... The rise in price of home
commodities hampers the nation receiving the indemnity in selling
those commodities in the neutral markets of the world, especially
as the loss of so large a sum by the vanquished nation has just the
reverse effect of cheapening prices and therefore, enabling that
nation to compete on better terms with the conqueror in neutral
markets.'--(p. 76.)
The effect of the payment of the French indemnity of 1872 upon German
industry was analysed at length.
This chapter was criticised by economists in Britain, France, and
America. I do not think that a single economist of note admitted the
slightest validity in this argument. Several accused the author of
adopting protectionist fallacies in an attempt to 'make out a case.' It
happens that he is a convinced Free Trader. But he is also aware that it
is quite impracticable to dissociate national psychology from
international commercial problems. Remembering what popular feeling
about the expansion of enemy trade must be on the morrow of war, he
asked the reader to imagine vast imports of enemy goods as the means of
paying an indemnity, and went on:--
'Do we not know that there would be such a howl about the ruin of
home industry that no Government could stand the clamour for a
week?... That this influx of goods for nothing would be represented
as a deep-laid plot on the part of foreign nations to ruin the home
trade, and that the citizens would rise in their wrath to prevent
the accomplishment of such a plot? Is not this very operation by
which foreign nations tax themselves to send abroad goods, not for
nothing (that would be a crime at present unthinkable), but at
below cost, the offence to which we have given the name of
"dumping"? When it is carried very far, as in the case of sugar,
even Free Trade nations like Great Britain join International
Conferences to prevent these gifts being made!...'
The fact that not one single economist, so far as I know, would at the
time admit the validity of these arguments, is worth consideration. Very
learned men may sometimes be led astray by keeping their learning in
watertight compartments, 'economics' in one compartment and 'politics'
or political psychology in another. The politicians seemed to misread
the economies and the economists the politics.
What are the post-war facts in this connection? We may get them
summarised on the one hand by the Prime Minister of Great Britain and on
the other by the expert adviser of the British Delegation to the Peace
Conference.
Mr Lloyd George, speaking two years after the Armistice, and after
prolonged and exhaustive debates on this problem, says:--
'What I have put forward is an expression of the views of all the
experts.... Every one wants gold, which Germany has not got, and
they will not take German goods. Nations can only pay debts by
gold, goods, services, or bills of exchange on nations which are
its debtors.[128]
'The real difficulty ... is due to the difficulty of securing
payment outside the limits of Germany. Germany could pay--pay
easily--inside her own boundary, but she could not export her
forests, railways, or land across her own frontiers and make them
over to the Allies. Take the railways, for example. Suppose the
Allies took possession of them and doubled the charges; they would
be paid in paper marks which would be valueless directly they
crossed the frontier.
'The only way Germany could pay was by way of exports--that is by
difference between German imports and exports. If, however, German
imports were too much restricted, the Germans would be unable to
obtain food and raw materials necessary for their manufactures.
Some of Germany's principal markets--Russia and Central
Europe--were no longer purchasers, and if she exported too much to
the Allies, it meant the ruin of their industry and lack of
employment for their people. Even in the case of neutrals it was
only possible generally to increase German exports by depriving our
traders of their markets.'[129]
There is not a line here that is not a paraphrase of the chapter in the
early edition of _The Great Illusion_.
The following is the comment of Mr Maynard Keynes, ex-Advisor to the
British Treasury, on the claims put forward after the Paris Conference
of January 1921:--
'It would be easy to point out how, if Germany could compass the
vast export trade which the Paris proposals contemplate, it could
only be by ousting some of the staple trades of Great Britain from
the markets of the world. Exports of what commodities, we may ask,
in addition to her present exports, is Germany going to find a
market for in 1922--to look no farther ahead--which will enable her
to make the payment of between £150,000,000 and £200,000,000
including the export proportion which will be due from her in that
year? Germany's five principal exports before the War were iron,
steel, and machinery, coal and coke, woollen goods and cotton
goods. Which of these trades does Paris think she is going to
develop on a hitherto unprecedented scale? Or if not these, what
others? And how is she going to finance the import of raw materials
which, except in the case of coal and coke, are a prior necessity
to manufacture, if the proceeds of the goods when made will not be
available to repay the credits? I ask these questions in respect of
the year 1922 because many people may erroneously believe that
while the proposed settlement is necessarily of a problematic
character for the later years--only time can show--it makes some
sort of a start possible. These questions are serious and
practical, and they deserve to be answered. If the Paris proposals
are more than wind, they mean a vast re-organisation of the
channels of international trade. If anything remotely like them is
really intended to happen, the reactions on the trade and industry
of this country are incalculable. It is an outrage that they should
be dealt with by the methods of the poker party of which news comes
from Paris.'[130]
If the expert economists failed to admit the validity of _The Great
Illusion_ argument fifteen years ago, the general public has barely a
glimmering of it to-day. It is true that our miners realise that vast
deliveries of coal for nothing by Germany disorganise our coal export
trade. British shipbuilding has been disastrously affected by the Treaty
clauses touching the surrender of German tonnage--so much so that the
Government have now recommended the abandonment of these clauses, which
were among the most stringent and popular in the whole Treaty. The
French Government has flatly refused to accept German machinery to
replace that destroyed by the German armies, while French labour refuses
to allow German labour, in any quantity, to operate in the devastated
regions. Thus coal, ships, machinery, manufactures, labour, as means of
payment, have either already created great economic havoc or have been
rejected because they might. Yet our papers continue to shout that
'Germany can pay,' implying that failure to do so is merely a matter of
her will. Of course she can pay--if we let her. Payment means increasing
German foreign trade. Suppose, then, we put the question 'Can German
Foreign Trade be increased?' Obviously it can. It depends mainly on us.
To put the question in its truer form shows that the problem is much
more a matter of our will than of Germany's. Incidentally, of course,
German diplomacy has been as stupid as our own. If the German
representatives had said, in effect: 'It is common ground that we can
pay only in commodities. If you will indicate the kind and quantity of
goods we shall deliver, and will facilitate the import into Germany of,
and the payment for, the necessary food and raw material, we will
accept--on that condition--even your figures of reparation.' The Allies,
of course, could not have given the necessary undertaking, and the real
nature of the problem would have stood revealed.[131]
The review of the situation of France given in the preceding pages will
certainly be criticised on the ground that it gives altogether too great
weight to the temporary embarrassment, and leaves out the advantages
which future generations of Frenchmen will reap.
Now, whatever the future may have in store, it will certainly have for
France the task of defending her conquests if she either withholds their
product (particularly iron) from the peoples of Central Europe who need
them, or if she makes of their possession a means of exacting a tribute
which they feel to be burdensome and unjust. Again we are faced by the
same dilemma; if Germany gets the iron, her population goes on
expanding and her potential power of resistance goes on increasing. Thus
France's burden of defence would grow steadily greater, while her
population remained constant or declined. This difficulty of French
deficiency in human raw material is not a remote contingency; it is an
actual difficulty of to-day, which France is trying to meet in part by
the arming of the negro population of her African colonies, and in part
by the device of satellite militarisms, as in Poland. But the
precariousness of such methods is already apparent.
The arming of the African negro carries its appalling possibilities on
its face. Its development cannot possibly avoid the gravest complication
of the industrial problem. It is the Servile State in its most sinister
form; and unless Europe is itself ready for slavery it will stop this
reintroduction of slavery for the purposes of militarism.
The other device has also its self-defeating element. To support an
imperialist Poland means a hostile Russia; yet Poland, wedged in between
a hostile Slav mass on the one side and a hostile Teutonic one on the
other, herself compounded of Russian, German, Austrian, Lithuanian,
Ukrainian, and Jewish elements, ruled largely by a landowning
aristocracy when the countries on both sides have managed to transfer
the great estates to the peasants, is as likely, in these days, to be a
military liability as a military asset.
These things are not irrelevant to the problem of turning military power
to economic account: they are of the very essence of the problem.
Not less so is this consideration: If France should for political
reasons persist in a policy which means a progressive reduction in the
productivity of Europe, that policy would be at its very roots directly
contrary to the vital interests of England. The foregoing pages have
explained why the increasing population of these islands, that live by
selling coal or its products, are dependent upon the high productivity
of the outside world. France is self-supporting and has no such
pre-occupation. Already the divergence is seen in the case of the
Russian policy. Britain direly needs the wheat of Russia to reduce the
cost of living--or improve the value of what she has to sell, which is
very nearly the same thing. France does not need Russian foodstuffs, and
in terms of narrow self-interest (cutting her losses in Czarist bonds)
can afford to be indifferent to the devastation of Russia. As soon as
this divergence reaches a certain degree, rupture becomes inevitable.
The mainspring of French policy during the last two years has been
fear--fear of the economic revival of Germany which might be the
beginning of a military revival. The measures necessary to check German
economic revival inevitably increase German resentment, which is taken
as proof of the need for increasingly severe measures of repression.
Those measures are tending already to deprive France of her most
powerful military Allies. That fact still further increases the burden
that will be thrown upon her. Such burdens must inevitably make very
large deductions from the 'profits' of her new conquests.
Note in view of these circumstances some further difficulties of turning
those conquests to account. Take the iron mines of Lorraine.[132] France
has now within her borders what is, as already noted, the geographical
centre of Continental industry. How shall she turn that fact to account?