THE WAR AND DEMOCRACY
by
R.W. SETON-WATSON, _D.Litt_.
J. DOVER WILSON
ALFRED E. ZIMMERN
and
ARTHUR GREENWOOD
1915
* * * * *
TO
The Workers' Educational Association
* * * * *
When wilt Thou save the people?
O God of mercy, when?
Not kings and lords, but nations!
Not thrones and crowns, but men!
Flowers of Thy heart, O God, are they;
Let them not pass, like weeds, away--
Their heritage a sunless day.
God save the people!
EBENEZER ELLIOTT.
"To remake the map of Europe, and to rearrange the peoples in accordance
with the special mission assigned to each of them by geographical, ethnical
and historical conditions--this is the first essential step for all."
MAZZINI (1832).
* * * * *
PREFACE
For many years past the prospect of universal war has haunted the dreams of
pacificists and militarists alike. Many of us, without denying its growing
menace, hoped against hope that it might be averted by the gradual
strengthening of international goodwill and mutual intercourse, and the
steady growth of democratic influences and political thought. But our
misgivings proved more prophetic than our hopes; and last August the great
war came upon us like a thief in the night. After four months of war we
feel that, in spite of the splendid response of the nation at large, in
spite of a unanimity which has no parallel in our previous history, there
are still large sections of the community who fail to realise the vastness
of the issues at stake, the formidable nature of the forces ranged against
us, and the true inner significance of the struggle. And yet all that is
worth living for depends upon the outcome of this war--for ourselves the
future of the democratic ideal in these islands and in the British Empire
at large, for the peoples of Europe deliverance from competing armaments
and the yoke of racial tyranny. But before our future can be secured,
sacrifices will be required of every citizen, and in a free community
sacrifice can only spring from knowledge. Moreover, if we are to put an end
to the intolerable situation of an unwilling Europe in arms, public opinion
must think out very carefully the great problems which have been thrown
into the melting-pot and be prepared for the day of settlement.
The present volume has been written as a guide to the study of the
underlying causes and issues of the war. It does not pretend to cover the
whole of so vast a field, and it will have attained its aim if it provides
the basis for future discussion. It originated in the experience of its
five writers at the Summer Schools for working-class students held in
connection with the Workers' Educational Associations. In the early days of
August, at the outbreak of the war, Summer Schools were in full swing
at Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, Bangor, and Durham, and it at once became
apparent, not merely that the word "citizen" had suddenly acquired a new
depth and significance for the men and women of our generation, but also
that for the individual citizen himself a large new field of study and
discussion had been opened up on subjects and issues hitherto unfamiliar.
This book was planned to meet the need there expressed, but it is hoped
that it may be found useful by a wider circle of readers.
We have called the book _The War and Democracy_, because our guiding idea
throughout has been the sense of the great new responsibilities, both of
thought and action, which the present situation lays upon British Democracy
and on believers in democracy throughout the world.
In devoting one chapter to a survey of the issues raised for settlement by
the war, we must disclaim most emphatically all idea of dividing the
lion's skin before the animal has been killed. Our object has not been to
prophesy, but merely to stimulate thought and discussion. The field is so
vast and complicated that unless public opinion begins to mobilise without
further delay and to form clear ideas as to how the principles laid down
by our statesmen are to be converted into practice, it may find itself
confronted, as it was confronted in 1814, with a situation which it can
neither understand nor control, and with a settlement which will perpetuate
many of the abuses which this war ought to remove. Our best excuse is
supplied by the attitude of many leaders of German political thought--men
like Franz von Liszt, Ostwald; and Paul Rohrbach--who are already mapping
out the world according to their victorious fancies.
_December 1914._
R.W.S.-W. J.D.W. A.E.Z. A.G.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
By ALFRED E. ZIMMERN, M.A., late Fellow and Tutor of New College, Oxford;
Author of _The Greek Commonwealth_
CHAPTER II
THE NATIONAL IDEA IN EUROPE, 1789-1914 By J. DOVER WILSON, M.A., Gonville
and Cains College, Cambridge, late Lecturer in the University of
Helsingfors, Finland
1. NATION AND NATIONALITY 2. THE BIRTH OF NATIONALISM: POLAND AND THE
FRENCH REVOLUTION 3. THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA AND THE INTERNATIONAL IDEA
4. THE NATIONAL IDEA IN BELGIUM AND THE PROBLEM OF SMALL NATIONS 5. THE
NATIONAL IDEA IN ITALY: THE IDEAL TYPE 6. THE NATIONAL IDEA IN GERMANY: A
CASE OF ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT 7. THE MAP OF EUROPE, 1814-1914
CHAPTER III
GERMANY By ALFRED E. ZIMMERN
1. THE GERMAN STATE 2. THE REAL GERMANY 3. PRUSSIA 4. GERMANY SINCE 1870
CHAPTER IV
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY AND THE SOUTHERN SLAVS By R.W. SETON-WATSON, D.Litt., New
College, Oxford, author of _Racial Problems in Hungary, The Southern Slav
Question_, etc.
INTRODUCTION
1. AUSTRIA AND THE HABSBURGS 2. HUNGARY AND MAGYAR MISRULE 3. THE DECAY OF
THE DUAL SYSTEM 4. THE GENESIS OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS 5. THE RENAISSANCE
OF SERBIA 6. SERBO-CROAT UNITY 7. THE BALKAN WARS 8. THE MURDER OF THE
ARCHDUKE 9. THE FUTURE OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS
CHAPTER V
RUSSIA By J. DOVER WILSON
1. THE RUSSIAN STATE 2. RELIGION 3. THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT AND ITS
SIGNIFICANCE 4. THE SUBJECT NATIONALITIES
CHAPTER VI
FOREIGN POLICY [_Contributed_]
A. THE MEANING OF FOREIGN POLICY
1. THE FOREIGN OFFICE 2. THE WORK OF THE FOREIGN OFFICE 3. THE BALANCE OF
POWER 4. THE ESTIMATION OF NATIONAL FORCES
B. THE DEMOCRATISATION OF FOREIGN POLICY
1. DEMOCRACY AND PEACE 2. FOREIGN POLICY AND POPULAR FORCES 3. FOREIGN
POLICY AND EDUCATION
CHAPTER VII
THE ISSUES OF THE WAR By R.W. SETON-WATSON
1. IS THERE AN IDEA BEHIND THE WAR? 2. THE AIMS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP
3. BRITAIN AND GERMANY 4. NATIONALITY AND THE GERMAN EMPIRE (1)
ALSACE-LORRAINE, (2) SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN, (3) POLAND 5. THE FUTURE OF
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY--MINIMUM AND MAXIMUM LOSSES 6. THE SOUTHERN SLAV QUESTION
7. THE ROUMANIAN QUESTION 8. CAN THE DUAL MONARCHY BE REPLACED? 9. BOHEMIA
AND HUNGARY 10. GERMANY AND AUSTRIA 11. ITALIAN ASPIRATIONS 12. THE BALKAN
SITUATION: BULGARIA AND GREECE 13. THE FUTURE OF TURKEY 14. RUSSIA AND
CONSTANTINOPLE 15. ASIATIC TURKEY 16. RUSSIA AND POLAND 17. GENERAL AIMS
CHAPTER VIII
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC ASPECTS OF THE WAR By ARTHUR GREENWOOD, B.Sc., Lecturer
in Economics at the University of Leeds
INTRODUCTION
A. STATE ACTION IN INDUSTRY AND COMMERCE
B. IMMEDIATE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF THE WAR
1. FOREIGN TRADE 2. UNEMPLOYMENT AND SHORT TIME 3. TRADE UNIONS,
CO-OPERATIVE SOCIETIES, AND DISTRESS 4. THE NEW SPIRIT
C. AFTER THE WAR
1. GENERAL EFFECTS 2. POSSIBLE INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENTS 3. SOCIAL EFFECTS
AND THE NEW OUTLOOK
CHAPTER IX
GERMAN CULTURE AND THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH By ALFRED E. ZIMMERN
1. THE TWO ISSUES 2. CULTURE 3. CULTURE AS A STATE PRODUCT 4. GERMAN AND
BRITISH IDEALS OF EDUCATION 5. GERMAN AND BRITISH IDEALS OF CIVILISATION 6.
THE PRINCIPLE OF THE COMMONWEALTH 7. THE FUTURE OF CIVILISATION 8. THE TWO
ROADS OF ADVANCE: INTER-STATE ACTION AND COMMON CITIZENSHIP
INDEX
MAPS
THE PARTITION OF POLAND
EUROPE IN 1815
GERMANY IN 1815
PRUSSIA SINCE THE ACCESSION OF FREDERICK THE GREAT
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: PHYSICAL
THE FRANCO-GERMAN FRONTIER
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: POLITICAL DIVISIONS
RACIAL AND NATIONAL BOUNDARIES IN CENTRAL EUROPE
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
"It seems to me that the amount of lawlessness and crime, the amount of
waste and futility, the amount of war and war possibility and war danger
in the world are just the measure of the present inadequacy of the world's
system of collective organisations to the purpose before them. It follows
from this very directly that only one thing can end war on the earth, and
that is a subtle mental development, an idea, the development of the idea
of the world commonweal in the collective mind."--H.G. WELLS in 1908.
THIS is a testing time for Democracy. The people of Great Britain and the
Dominions, to whom all the world looks as the trustees, together with
France and America, of the great democratic tradition, are brought face
to face, for the first time, with their full ultimate responsibility as
British citizens. Upon the way in which that responsibility is realised
and discharged depends the future of the democratic principle, not only in
these islands, but throughout the world.
Democracy is not a mere form of government. It does not depend on ballot
boxes or franchise laws or any constitutional machinery. These are but its
trappings. Democracy is a spirit and an atmosphere, and its essence is
trust in the moral instincts of the people. A tyrant is not a democrat, for
he believes in government by force; neither is a demagogue a democrat, for
he believes in government by flattery. A democratic country is a country
where the government has confidence in the people and the people in the
government and in itself, and where all are united in the faith that the
cause of their country is not a mere matter of individual or national
self-interest, but is in harmony with the great moral forces which rule the
destinies of mankind. No form of government is so feeble as a democracy
without faith. But a democracy armed with faith is not merely strong: it
is invincible; for its cause will live on, in defeat and disaster, in the
breast of every one of its citizens. Belgium is a living testimony to that
great truth.
British Democracy has carried this principle of confidence to the furthest
possible point. Alone among the States of Europe, Great Britain relies for
her existence and for the maintenance of her world-wide responsibilities
upon the free choice of her citizens. Her privileges are extended to all:
her active obligations are forced upon none. Trusting in the principle of
individual freedom, and upon the sound instinct and understanding of her
people, she leaves it to each citizen to make his choice whether, and in
what manner, he shall serve his country. Never have responsibilities so
arduous and so urgent been laid upon the citizens of any community: and
never have the citizens been so free to choose or to decline the burden.
The world will judge Great Britain, and judge Democracy, according to the
measure of our free response.
What is the nature of the responsibility cast upon us at this crisis?
It is threefold. It concerns the present, the past, and the future. There
are three questions which every citizen must needs ask, and try to answer,
for himself. The first and most urgent is a matter of present decision:
What is my duty here and now? The second involves a judgment of past
events: Why is it that we are at war? Are we fighting in a just cause? The
third involves an estimate of the future and of the part which British
public opinion can and should play in shaping it: What are the issues
involved in the various belligerent countries? What should be the
principles of a just settlement? How can Great Britain best use her
influence in the cause of human progress and for the welfare of the peoples
involved in the war?
It is with the second and especially with the third of these
responsibilities that this volume is concerned.
"What is the war about?" "Are we fighting in a just cause?" Every one by
now has asked himself this question, and most people have studied some at
least of the evidence, and tried to satisfy themselves as to the answer.
The Foreign Office White Paper and numberless books and pamphlets have
enlightened the public on many of the questions at issue. Yet the fact
remains that the necessity of this educative campaign involves a confession
of failure--or at least of grave neglect--on the part of British democracy.
Under our democratic constitution the people of Great Britain have assumed
the responsibility for the management of their own affairs. One great
department of those affairs, the most vital of all, they and their
representatives have systematically neglected. Deeply engaged and
interested in domestic problems, they have left the control of their
foreign relations in the hands of expert advisers. And so it was with
something like stupefaction that they discovered, one day in August, that
they were called upon to honour the obligations contracted in their name.
There has been no desire to evade those obligations. But there has been a
very real desire to understand them, and also a fixed determination never
again to allow such a lack of contact, on vital issues, between the mind of
the people and the activities of their ministers.
But no mere changes in the machinery of democratic control can avail to
save the people from the consequences of their own ignorance and neglect.
There is only one way in which we can achieve full Democracy in this
country, and that is through Education.
In the sphere of domestic affairs, particularly in connection with social
and industrial questions, the people have slowly realised this hard truth.
After a generation or more of attempts and failures and disillusionments
many thousands of workpeople have learnt the lesson that power without
knowledge is not power at all, and that knowledge, whether for public
affairs or for any other purpose, cannot be gained without effort and
discipline. They have come to realise that Democracy needs, for its full
working, not only schools in which to train its young, but also--what
no Democracy save those of the ancient world has ever possessed--such
facilities for the education for its adult citizens, engaged in the active
work of the community, as will enable them to maintain unimpaired their
intellectual freshness and vigour, and to face with wisdom and courage the
problems for which, as citizens, they have assumed responsibility. They
have come to think of Education, not as a time of tutelage or training, but
as a part of active life itself, woven of the same texture and concerned
with the same issues, as being, in fact, the effort to understand the world
in which they live. But they have naturally tended to confine those issues
within the limits of their own domestic interests and experience. They
are called upon now to widen their horizon, and to apply the democratic
conception of education to the new problems which have arisen owing to the
part which Great Britain is now playing in the affairs of Europe.
It is never easy to think things out clearly and coldly. But it is hardest
of all in the crisis of a great war, when men's minds are blurred by
passionate emotions of sorrow, anxiety, and indignation. Hence a time of
war is the heyday of fallacies and delusions, of misleading hopes and
premature disillusionments: men tend to live in an unreal world of phrases
and catchwords. Yet never is it more necessary than at such a period, in
the old Greek phrase, "to follow the argument whithersoe'er it leads,"
to look facts squarely in the face, and, particularly, the great ugly
outstanding fact of war itself, the survival of which democrats, especially
in Great Britain and the United States, have of recent years been so
greatly tempted to ignore.
People speak as if war were a new sudden and terrible phenomenon. There is
nothing new about the fact of war. What is new about this war is the scale
on which it is waged, the science and skill expended on it, and the fact
that it is being carried on by national armies, numbering millions, instead
of by professional bodies of soldiers. But war itself is as old as the
world: and if it surprises and shocks us this is due to our own blindness.
There are only two ways of settling disputes between nations, by law or
by war. As there is as yet no World-State, with the power to enforce
a World-law between the nations, the possibility of war, with all its
contingent horrors, should have been before our eyes all the time. The
_occasion_ of this war was no doubt a surprise. But that it could happen at
all should not be a surprise to us, still less a disillusionment. It does
not mark a backward step in human civilisation. It only registers the
fact that civilisation is still grievously incomplete and unconsolidated.
Terrible as this war is in its effect on individual lives and happiness, it
ought not to depress us--even if, in our blindness, we imagined the world
to be a far better organised place than it actually is. The fact that many
of the combatants regard war as an anachronism adds to the tragedy, but
also to the hope, of the struggle. It shows that civilised opinion is
gathering strength for that deepening and extension of the meaning and
range of citizenship which alone can make war between the nations of the
world as obsolete as it has become between the nations of the British
Empire or between the component parts of the United States.
It was perhaps inevitable that British citizens in particular, removed from
the storm centres of Continental Europe, and never very logical in their
thinking, should have failed to realise the possibility of another great
war, similar to the Napoleonic struggle of a hundred years ago. For nearly
half a century the great European States had been at peace: and we had come
to look upon their condition, and the attachment of their peoples, as being
as ancient and as stable as our own. We had grown used to the map of Europe
as it had been left by the great convulsions between 1848 and 1871. Upon
the basis of that map and of the governments represented on it, and in
response to the growing needs of the world as a whole, we had embarked on
every kind of international co-operation and cosmopolitan effort. The Hague
Congress, convened by the Tsar of Russia, looked forward to the day when
war, and the causes of war, should be obsolete. The Socialist Movement, a
growing force in all industrial communities, stood for the same ideal, and
for the international comradeship of the working class. Law and medicine,
science and scholarship followed suit; and every summer, in quest of
health and change, thousands of plain citizens have crossed international
frontiers with scarcely greater sense of change than in moving from
province to province in a single State. Commerce and industry, the greatest
material forces of our time, have become inextricably international, and
in the palpable injury in which a war would involve them some thinkers
of clear but limited vision saw the best hope of averting a European
conflagration.
And yet, throughout these two generations of economic and social
development, the fear of war has never been absent from the mind of Europe.
Her emperors and statesmen have talked of peace; but they have prepared for
war, more skilfully and more persistently than ever before in the history
of Europe or of the world. Almost the entire manhood of every European
nation but England has been trained to arms; and the annual war budget of
Europe rose, in time of peace, to over 300 million pounds. The States of
Europe, each afraid to stand alone against a coalition of possible rivals,
formed themselves into opposing groups; and each of the groups armed
feverishly against the other, fearful lest, by any change in the diplomatic
or political situation, they might be caught unawares and suffer loss.
Thus, it ought not to have surprised us that finally, through the accident
of a royal murder, the spark should be fired and the explosion ensue,
and that merchants and manufacturers, propagandists and philanthropists,
scholars and scientists, should find the ground shaken beneath their
feet and the projects patiently built up through years of international
co-operation shattered by the events of a few days.
Now that the war has come it is easy to see that they were mistaken. They
had built up the structure of a cosmopolitan society without looking to
the foundations. The economic activities of mankind have indeed brought a
World-Society and a World-Industry into being; but its political analogue,
a World-State, can only be formed, not through the co-operation of
individuals or groups of individuals, but through the union of nations and
the federation of national governments. The first task of our time for
Europe, as we shall try to show in the next chapter, is to lay firm the
foundations of those nations by carrying to victory the twin principles of
Nationality and Democracy--to secure that the peoples of Europe shall be
enabled to have governments corresponding to their national needs and
responsible to their own control, and to build up, under the care
and protection of those governments, the social institutions and the
civilisation of their choice. So long as there are peoples in Europe under
alien governments, curtailed in the use of their own language,[1] in the
propagation of their literature and ideas, in their social intercourse, in
their corporate life, in all that we in Great Britain understand by civil
liberty, so long will there be men who will mock at the very idea of
international peace, and look forward to war, not as an outworn instrument
of a barbarous age, but as a means to national freedom and self-expression.
Englishmen sometimes forget that there are worse evils than open war, both
in political and industrial relations, and that the political causes for
which their fathers fought and died have still to be carried to victory on
the Continent. Nationality and their national institutions are the very
life-blood of English people. They are as natural to them as the air
they breathe. That is what makes it sometimes so difficult for them to
understand, as the history of Ireland and even of Ulster shows, what
nationality means to other peoples. And that is why they have not realised,
not only that there are peoples in Europe living under alien governments,
but that there are governments in Europe so foolish as to think that men
and women deprived of their national institutions, humiliated in their
deepest feelings, and forced into an alien mould, can make good citizens,
trustworthy soldiers, or even obedient subjects.
[Footnote 1: The German official _communiqué_ on August 26, 1914, reports
as follows: "All the newspapers in Belgium, with the exception of those in
Antwerp, are printed in the German language." This, of course, is on the
model of the Prussian administration of Poland. The Magyars are more
repressive even than the Germans. See the bibliography given in _General
Books_ below.]
The political causes of the present war, then, and of the half century
of Armed Peace which preceded it are to be found, not in the particular
schemes and ambitions of any of the governments of Europe, nor in their
secret diplomacy, nor in the machinations of the great armament interests
allied to them, sinister though all these may have been, but in the nature
of some of those governments themselves, and in their relation to the
peoples over whom they rule.
"If it were possible," writes Prince Büllow, who directed German policy
as Imperial Chancellor from 1900 to 1909, "for members of different
nationalities, with different language and customs, and an intellectual
life of a different kind, to live side by side in one and the same State,
without succumbing to the temptation of each trying to force his own
nationality on the other, things on earth would look a good deal more
peaceful. But it is a law of life and development in history that where
two national civilisations meet they fight for ascendancy. In the struggle
between nationalities one nation is the hammer and the other the anvil; one
is the victor and the other the vanquished."[1] No words could indicate
more clearly the cause that is at stake in the present war. They show us
that there are still governments in Europe so ignorant as to believe that
the different nationalities of mankind are necessarily hostile to one
another, and so foolish and brutal as to think that national civilisation,
or, as the German Professors call it, "culture," can and indeed must be
propagated by the sword. It is this extraordinary conception which is at
the back of protests like that of Professor Haeckel and Professor Eucken
(men whom, in the field of their own studies, all Europe is proud to
honour) against "England fighting with a half-Asiatic power against
Germanism."[2]
[Footnote 1: _Imperial Germany_, by Prince Bernhard von Bülow, English
translation, 1st ed. pp. 245-6 (London, 1914).]
[Footnote 2: Protest of Professors Ernst Haeckel and Rudolf Eucken of Jena,
quoted in _The Times_ from the _Vossische Zeitung_ of August 20, 1914.]
There are not only half-Asiatics, there are real Asiatics side by side with
England; and England is not ashamed of it. For she does not reckon the
culture of Europe as higher than the culture of Asia, or regard herself as
the hammer upon the anvil of India.
Prince Bülow's words, and the theory of policy underlying them, really go
to the root of the whole trouble in European politics. They explain
the Balance of Power, the competition in armaments, the belief in the
inevitability and the moral value of war, and all those common European
shibboleths which seem so inexplicable to citizens of the more
modern-minded States and communities of the world. Why should Germany and
Austria arm against France and Russia when Canada does not arm against
the United States? Why should a Balance of Power be necessary to the
maintenance of European Peace when we do not consider the preponderance
of a single Power, such as the United States in North, Central and South
America, or Great Britain in the Pacific or Southern Asia dangerous to the
peace of the whole world? Why, finally, to press Prince Bülow's logic home,
if members of different nationalities cannot live side by side without
playing the game of Hammer and Anvil together, are not the English spending
the whole of their energy fighting the Welsh, the Scotch, and the Irish in
the United Kingdom, the Dutch in South Africa, and the French in Canada,
not to speak of the Jews in every part of the British Empire? The fact is
that the statesmen of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and of Russia also, have
missed the chief lesson of recent history and politics: that in the growing
complexity of world-relations power is falling more and more, of necessity,
into the hands of States which are not Nations but Commonwealths of
Nations, States composed, like the British Empire and the United States, of
a variety of nationalities and "cultures," living peacefully, each with its
own institutions, under a single law and a single central government.
But the time is not ripe yet for a Commonwealth of Europe. The peoples of
Europe have yet to win their liberties before they can be free to dream of
a United States of Europe. So long as the Emperors and statesmen of Central
Europe believe, like the Mahomedans of old, that propaganda can be imposed
by the sword, they can only be met by the sword, and controlled by the
sword. Not till they have been conquered and rendered harmless, or
displaced by the better mind of the peoples whom they have indoctrinated,
can Europe proceed along the natural course of her development.
So far we have been concerned--as we shall be concerned throughout this
book--with the _political_ causes underlying the war. But it would not be
right to ignore the fact that there are other deeper causes, unconnected
with the actions of governments, for which we in this country are jointly
responsible with the rest of the civilised world.
This war is not simply a conflict between governments and nations for the
attainment of certain political ends, Freedom and Nationality on the one
side and Conquest and Tyranny on the other. It is also a great outburst
of pent-up feeling, breaking like lava through the thin crust of European
civilisation. On the _political_ side, as we have said just now, the war
reveals the fact that civilisation is still incomplete and ill-organised.
But on the _moral_ side it reveals the fact that modern society has broken
down, that the forces and passions that divide and embitter mankind have
proved stronger, at the moment of strain, than those which bind them
together in fellowship and co-operation. "What we are suffering from,"
says one of the greatest of living democrats,[1] "is something far more
widespread than the German Empire. Is it not the case that what we are in
face of is nothing less than the breakdown in a certain idea and hope of
civilisation, which was associated with the liberal and industrial movement
of the last century? There was to be an inevitable and glorious progress
of humanity of which science, commerce, and education were to be the main
instruments, and which was to be crowned with a universal peace. Older
prophets like Thomas Carlyle expressed their contempt for the shallowness
of this prevailing ideal, and during this century we have been becoming
more and more doubtful of its value. But we are now witnessing its
downfall. Science, commerce, and education have done, and can do, much for
us. But they cannot expel the human spirit from human nature. What is
that? At bottom, love of self, self-interest, selfishness individual and
corporate. As a theory, the philosophy of selfishness has often been
exposed. But, to an extent that is difficult to exaggerate, it has been the
motive, acknowledged and relied upon without shame or apology in commerce,
in politics and in practical life. Our civilisation has been based on
selfishness, our commerce on competition and the unrestricted love of
wealth, our education on the motive of self-advancement. And science and
knowledge, made the instrument of selfishness and competition, have armed
man against man, class against class, and nation against nation, with
tenfold the power of destruction which belonged to a less educated and
highly organised age."
[Footnote 1: _The War and the Church_, by Charles Gore (Oxford, Mowbray,
1914).]
The civilised world has been shocked during the past months at the
spectacle of the open adoption by a great Power of this philosophy
of selfishness. Men had not realised that the methods and principles
underlying so much of our commercial and industrial life could be
transferred so completely to the field of politics or so ruthlessly pressed
home by military force. But it is well for us to remember that it is not
Prussia, even in the modern world, who invented the theory of Blood and
Iron or the philosophy of Force. The Iron Law of Wages is a generation
older than Bismarck: and "Business is Business" can be no less odious a
watchword than "War is War." Treitschke and Nietzsche may have furnished
Prussian ambitions with congenial ammunition; but Bentham with his purely
selfish interpretation of human nature and Marx with his doctrine of the
class-struggle--the high priest of Individualism and the high priest of
Socialism--cannot be acquitted of a similar charge. If the appeal has been
made in a less crude and brutal form, and if the instrument of domination
has been commercial and industrial rather than military, it is because
Militarism is not the besetting sin of the English-speaking peoples. Let
us beware, therefore, at this moment, of anything savouring of
self-righteousness.
"Some of us," says Bishop Gore, "see the chief security" against
this disease which has infected our civilisation "in the progress of
Democracy--the government of the people really by the people and for the
people. I am one of those who believe this and desire to serve towards the
realising of this end. But the answer does not satisfy me. I do not know
what evils we might find arising from a world of materialistic democracies.
But I am sure we shall not banish the evil spirits which destroy human
lives and nations and civilisations by any mere change in the methods
of government. Nothing can save civilisation except a new spirit in the
nations."
The task before Europe, then, is a double one--a task of development and
construction in the region of politics, and of purification and conversion
in the region of the spirit. "For the finer spirits of Europe," says the
great French writer, Romain Rolland, who is none the less a patriot because
he is also a lover of Germany, "there are two dwelling-places: our earthly
fatherland, and that other, the City of God. Of the one we are the guests,
of the other the builders. To the one let us give our lives and our
faithful hearts; but neither family, friend, nor fatherland, nor aught that
we love has power over the spirit which is the light. It is our duty to
rise above tempests and thrust aside the clouds which threaten to obscure
it; to build higher and stronger, dominating the injustice and hatred of
nations, the walls of that city wherein the souls, of the whole world may
assemble."[1]
[Footnote 1: Article in the _Journal de Genève_, translated in the
_Cambridge Magazine_ and reprinted in _Public Opinion_, Nov. 27, 1914.
Those who hold that Christianity and war are incompatible would seem to be
committed to a monastic and passively anarchist view of life, inconsistent
with membership in a political society. But whatever the relation between
Christianity and war, there can be no question of the relation between
Christianity and _hatred_. Hatred (which is not the same thing as moral
indignation) is a poison which corrodes and embitters, and so degrades, and
thereby weakens, the national spirit. It is a pity that some of our most
prominent newspaper-proprietors do not understand this.]
Internationalism as a political theory has broken down: for it was based on
a false conception of the nature of government and of the obligations of
citizenship. The true internationalism--a spirit of mutual understanding
and fellowship between men and nations, to replace the suspicions, the
competition, and the watchful selfishness of the past generation--is the
moral task that lies before Europe and America to-day. If Great Britain is
to lead the way in promoting "a new spirit between the nations" she needs a
new spirit also in the whole range of her corporate life. For what Britain
stands for in the world is, in the long run, what Britain is, and, when
thousands are dying for her, it is more than ever the duty of all of us to
try to make her worthier of their devotion.