Let us assume that a great number of people in the world want peace,
permanent world peace. We have to assume this because there is no
way of proving it, and it is open to very considerable doubt. But it
is a prevalent habit to assert as much. If it is true, then there is
amazingly little effort to realize this aspiration. Those people who
want permanent world peace carry inaggressiveness too far. Nowhere
in the world do I find any evidence of a real, strenuous effort to
establish the peace of the world on sure foundations. Nowhere do I
find really clear-headed, resolute efforts on a scale commensurate to
the task to restrain the processes that will inevitably develop into
warfare in the not very remote future.
Many readers will no doubt rebel against this statement. They
will point to the League of Nations, League of Nations Unions and
Societies, innumerable declarations by prominent people, “No More
War” organizations, and so forth and so on. I admit a prevalent
sentimentality in the matter. I can even believe that if the peace of
the world could be secured for ever by a show of hands, there would
be a considerable majority in its favour. I am convinced, too, that
wars in the future, even at the outset, will not be undertaken with
the gusto with which we all set about the Great War. But if a man has
an idiot incendiary in his house, it is no good for him to go about
saying, “No more fire,” unless he has the matches locked up, the fires
guarded, and the idiot watched. Since 1914, in spite of vast volumes of
pious intention, hardly anything of practical value has been done to
prevent future wars.
Peace talk bores many people. And it is interesting to note that it
bores them. Among the hundreds of thousands who will glance over this
article there are thousands, especially among the younger contingent,
who will probably be killed or maimed in war. The present reader has a
fairly good chance of having some of his face blown out at the back of
his head, or his hips smashed to splinters, or his viscera dispersed
rather painfully, or some such surprising experience--it always seems
to surprise them--by one of the missiles that will be flying about in
great abundance when the next fighting is under way. It is a touching
manifestation of the careless bravery of our race that this probability
does not seem to move them to any appreciable effort to avert such a
culmination of their careers. Until it happens they seem rather to
enjoy the prospect, and after it has happened their opinion loses any
weight in the matter.
Still more of my readers will be maimed or impoverished, and wasted by
the coming war, but they never seem to think they will draw bad numbers
until they get them, and after they have got them, like the fox that
lost its tail, the common reaction seems to be a more or less conscious
desire to see the experience spread to those still intact. And for most
women and girls war is as good as a richly sentimental film that moves
them to tears and pity. While it converts great multitudes of men into
a muddy mixture of rags of flesh and uniform, it greatly enhances the
economic importance of women and their value as nurses, war wives, and
the inspirers of heroic sacrifices. The feminine disapproval of war
is an outward and visible gentleness that is entirely compatible with
a very considerable readiness to face it bravely and to discourage
effective efforts to prevent it. This widespread objection to war of
which we hear so much does not go very deep into people’s hearts; it
certainly does not stir them as religious hatred or unfamiliar customs
can stir them, and it is a complete delusion to regard it as in itself
an operative cause preventing war.
One real test of pacifist sincerity is to be found in the pose towards
national independence. To any one who will sit down for five minutes
and face the facts squarely it must be evident that the organization of
world peace, so that wars will be impossible and disarmament secure,
involves some sort of federal authority in the world’s affairs. At some
point there must be the certainty of a decision upon all disputes of
races and peoples and nations that would otherwise necessitate war. And
this authority must clearly have the power to enforce its decisions.
Whatever navies and armies survive, other than police forces for local
and definite ends, must be under the control of this central authority.
It may be a committee of national representatives or what you will, but
central authority there must be. Pax Mundi, like the Pax Romana or the
Pax Britannica, must be the only sovereign power within its realm. If
you are not prepared to see your own country and your own flag so far
subordinated to collective control, whatever protestations of peaceful
intentions you make are either made unintelligently or else in bad
faith. Your country cannot be both independent and restricted. Either
you are for Cosmopolis or you are for war.
It is interesting to note how many excellent people boggle at this
obvious alternative. They declare they are for peace, first, last, and
all the time; they belong to this or that association for universal
arbitration or for propaganda on behalf of the League of Nations, they
advocate disarmament, and all the while they shirk the plain logical
consequences of these pretensions, which are, in one word, _disloyalty_
to their own government. The idea of loyalty is unquestioning
obedience, complete devotion; “our country, right or wrong.” We abandon
easy and natural poses and stiffen up to a mechanical salute at the
first note of the national anthem. By that we indicate that, before all
other things, and even to the sacrifice of our lives, we are prepared
to serve, support, and sustain the free and separate existence, alleged
collective prosperity, natural destiny, necessary expansion, honour,
and glory of our own sovereign government, its Empire and its subjects,
against right, reason, justice, the knavish tricks of foreigners (and
practically that is all foreigners are supposed to do), the stars in
their courses, or the welfare of mankind. We put our nationality first
in our hearts and souls and lives. We regard _our_ country as something
primary and eternal. We must never think of it subordinated nor imagine
that its separateness can end. It is to go on for all time just as
it is, only more so. The rest of the world may go to the devil. If
patriotism is not all that, then what is patriotism?
Now, I maintain that in this matter you cannot run with the hare and
hunt with the hounds. You cannot be an advocate of organized world
peace and a full and complete patriot also. A great number of worthy
people are trying to achieve this impossibility. If we subtract them
from the total of those who are “working for world peace,” I doubt if
any large number of people remain. The patriotic attitude seems to be
a much more natural and satisfactory one than the cosmopolitan. It
is much easier to adhere to a government that exists than to get at
cross-purposes with all the honour and procedure of your own country
in order to work for one that does not and never may exist. Patriotism
is rich with associations; it is romantic and poetic. It is always
nice and strengthening to hate and despise something, and patriotism
gives you the whole outer world for that sustaining use. Its chief
drawback is that it takes you along roads that end sooner or later in
war, and that, in spite of the professional soldiers, war becomes more
frightful, disgusting, destructive, and futile every year. And another
drawback is that it restricts your movements to your own dear country,
and that on the rest of this small planet you must travel about as a
latent enemy and a potential spy.
Nor do the logical consequences of a desire for world peace end
with the sacrifice of complete national freedom in the matter of
disarmament and in diplomatic action. These concern merely the material
and forms of war. The underlying cause of most recent wars seems to
be the treatment of each sovereign community as a separate economic
system in hostile competition with all the rest, and the consequent
struggle to secure priority in markets and exclusive or privileged
access to supplies of raw material. Arrangements for disarmament and
arbitration may delay conflicts and render warfare clumsier and more
sluggish, exhausting, and painful, but they will do little or nothing
to prevent the ultimate resort to war, so long as we are living under
the assumption that there is a struggle for existence, an unavoidable
competition for vital material, between sovereign states. Unless people
are prepared to accept the idea that the economic life of the world can
be regarded and controlled as one system to the general advantage of
the race, their aspirations for a universal peace will remain the most
unreal of all possible aspirations. Separate economic systems _must_
compete, _must_ jostle, _must_ forestall, and _must_ drive, for all
their virtuous protestations, towards a tussle.
No doubt the reorganization of the world’s affairs and the world’s
ideas to the form of an economic unity is a gigantic task. But it is
not a bit of good preparing palm branches and hosannahs for the final
pacification of mankind unless we believe and intend that that gigantic
task will and shall be done.
When some central body determines the distribution of raw material
and staple commodities throughout the world, when these movements are
lubricated by transactions in a common currency, then, and only then,
is a stable world peace a reasonable proposition.
And it is not only trade and business that have to be brought to
the scale of world affairs, but the movements of population demand a
similar unified control. We have to remember that the idea of world
peace runs counter to the general processes of nature. Nature’s way
with species seems always to have been multiplication up to the
limits of subsistence and a consequent struggle to survive. This
has not always produced happy or dignified results; the hyena, the
wart-hog, thousands of species of parasites that seem very cruel,
hideous, and vile to us, have been brought to their present state
of survival efficiency by this struggle. War, both internecine and
external, is nature’s way. But we are told by the moving spirits of
what is called the birth-control movement that mankind need be driven
no longer by population pressure. If they are right in saying that,
then world peace is possible. If they are wrong it is not. If they are
wrong, then the Italians and Japanese are justified in breeding like
rabbits, clamouring to grab land from more restrained populations,
and threatening war. If they are wrong, there is an excuse for the
Italian threats against the French, and for the Japanese claims to
a foothold in Australia and California. But if their increase is
a preventable increase due to the sinful ignorance fostered by a
repressive Government, then those “expansion”-seeking people cease to
appear as heroic aggressors and become instead merely philoprogenitive
nuisances in the commonweal of mankind. Apparently birth-rates fall
as knowledge increases; the lower the standard of life, the greater
the breeding. It is clear that unless there is a common protection
of knowledge and information throughout the world, this biological
suffocation of peace possibilities must continue. Civilization will
remain restricted by the militant protective necessities imposed upon
it by such slum-breeding regions as Fascist Italy, Japan, and Bengal.
The space-consuming communities must arm against them. So here again
we see a clear incompatibility between any hope of world peace and the
sovereign freedom of individual states.
I suppose that this article is what amiable supporters of the dear
League of Nations at Geneva will call a “pessimistic” article. It
is not in the least pessimistic, but it does attempt to indicate
something of the scale and quality of the task if peace is indeed to
be established for ever in the world. The Anglo-Saxon community in
particular suffers from a delusion that afternoon meetings (with tea),
small regular subscriptions to societies with noble intentions, the
circulation of nicely printed reports, and a polite and deferential
attitude towards all that is respected and influential in life, may
be considered not merely as progressive activities, but as all that
is required in the way of progressive activities. This job calls for
something much rougher and more fundamental. I do not see how we can
avoid the conclusion that the search for world peace, since it is a
project to subordinate our sovereign government to something larger,
comes near to or passes the legal definition of treason. Moreover, the
necessary conditions for world peace bring us into sharp conflict,
not simply with the ordinary patriot but with much that is regarded
by large sections of people as current morality. And, as a further
obstacle, such views must necessarily antagonize big interests
entrenched behind tariff walls and currency advantages. A real world
peace movement must be a revolutionary movement in politics, finance,
industrialism, and the daily life alike. It is not a proposed change in
certain formal aspects of life; it is a proposal to change the whole of
life. People are allowed to go about talking of world peace now, not
because their views are regarded as acceptable, but because they are
supposed to be incoherent and ineffective. As the conditions of world
peace are made plainer and as the movement for world peace becomes more
distinctly practicable, that present tolerance is unlikely to continue.
The first phase when any creative movement passes from the realm of
mere talk towards realization is resistance and persecution. The first
sign that an attack is approaching its objective is that shots and
shell take effect, amateurism vanishes, men fall, and the strain and
effort mount steeply to the climax. My impression is that at present
the movement for world peace is still at a considerable distance from
its objective. One may doubt, indeed, whether any of these various
League of Nations Unions and “No More War” societies that play about
in the sun of popular approval can be regarded as even a preliminary
assembly for the main attack. Great revolutions in human affairs need
time to incubate, and the price of the peace of the world means an
effort whose duration will have to be measured by lifetimes. I believe
that such an effort will be made, but I believe it is a delusion to say
that it has even begun.
_12 June, 1927._