quite equally the suggestion that a machine can make me good. It might
be the unfortunate fact that a coolness had arisen between myself and
Mr. Fitzarlington Blenkinsop, inhabiting the suburban villa and garden
next to mine; and I might even be largely to blame for it. But if
somebody told me that a new kind of lawn-mower had just been invented,
of so cunning a structure that I should be forced to become a
bosom-friend of Mr. Blenkinsop whether I liked it or not, I should be
very much annoyed. I should be moved to say that if that was the only
way of cutting my grass I would not cut my grass, but continue to cut my
neighbour. Or suppose the difference were even less defensible; suppose
a man had suffered from a trifling shindy with his wife. And suppose
somebody told him that the introduction of an entirely new
vacuum-cleaner would compel him to a reluctant reconciliation with his
wife. It would be found, I fancy, that human nature abhors that vacuum.
Reasonably spirited human beings will not be ordered about by bicycles
and sewing-machines; and a sane man will not be made good, let alone
bad, by the things he has himself made. I have occasionally dictated to
a typewriter, but I will not be dictated to by a typewriter, even of the
newest and most complicated mechanism; nor have I ever met a typewriter,
however complex, that attempted such a tyranny.
Yet this and nothing else is what is implied in all such talk of the
aeroplane annihilating distinctions as well as distances; and an
international aviation abolishing nationalities. This and nothing else
was really implied in one speaker's prediction that such aviation will
almost necessitate an Anglo-American friendship. Incidentally, I may
remark, it is not a true suggestion even in the practical and
materialistic sense; and the speaker's phrase refuted the speaker's
argument. He said that international relations must be more friendly
when men can get from England to America in a day. Well, men can already
get from England to Germany in a day; and the result was a mutual
invitation of which the formalities lasted for five years. Men could get
from the coast of England to the coast of France very quickly, through
nearly all the ages during which those two coasts were bristling with
arms against each other. They could get there very quickly when Nelson
went down by that Burford Inn to embark for Trafalgar; they could get
there very quickly when Napoleon sat in his tent in that camp at
Boulogne that filled England with alarums of invasion. Are these the
amiable and pacific relations which will unite England and America, when
Englishmen can get to America in a day? The shortening of the distance
seems quite as likely, so far as that argument goes, to facilitate that
endless guerilla warfare which raged across the narrow seas in the
Middle Ages; when French invaders carried away the bells of Rye, and the
men of those flats of East Sussex gloriously pursued and recovered them.
I do not know whether American privateers, landing at Liverpool, would
carry away a few of the more elegant factory chimneys as a substitute
for the superstitious symbols of the past. I know not if the English, on
ripe reflection, would essay with any enthusiasm to get them back. But
anyhow it is anything but self-evident that people cannot fight each
other because they are near to each other; and if it were true, there
would never have been any such thing as border warfare in the world. As
a fact, border warfare has often been the one sort of warfare which it
was most difficult to bring under control. And our own traditional
position in face of this new logic is somewhat disconcerting. We have
always supposed ourselves safer because we were insular and therefore
isolated. We have been congratulating ourselves for centuries on having
enjoyed peace because we were cut off from our neighbours. And now they
are telling us that we shall only enjoy peace when we are joined up with
our neighbours. We have pitied the poor nations with frontiers, because
a frontier only produces fighting; and now we are trusting to a frontier
as the only thing that will produce friendship. But, as a matter of
fact, and for a far deeper and more spiritual reason, a frontier will
not produce friendship. Only friendliness produces friendship. And we
must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces
friendliness.
But apart from this fallacy about the facts, I feel, as I say, a strong
abstract anger against the idea, or what some would call the ideal. If
it were true that men could be taught and tamed by machines, even if
they were taught wisdom or tamed to amiability, I should think it the
most tragic truth in the world. A man so improved would be, in an
exceedingly ugly sense, losing his soul to save it. But in truth he
cannot be so completely coerced into good; and in so far as he is
incompletely coerced, he is quite as likely to be coerced into evil. Of
the financial characters who figure as philanthropists and philosophers
in such cases, it is strictly true to say that their good is evil. The
light in their bodies is darkness, and the highest objects of such men
are the lowest objects of ordinary men. Their peace is mere safety,
their friendship is mere trade; their international friendship is mere
international trade. The best we can say of that school of capitalism is
that it will be unsuccessful. It has every other vice, but it is not
practical. It has at least the impossibility of idealism; and so far as
remoteness can carry it, that Inferno is indeed a Utopia. All the
visible manifestations of these men are materialistic; but at least
their visions will not materialise. The worst we suffer; but the best we
shall at any rate escape. We may continue to endure the realities of
cosmopolitan capitalism; but we shall be spared its ideals.
But I am not primarily interested in the plutocrats whose vision takes
so vulgar a form. I am interested in the same thing when it takes a far
more subtle form, in men of genius and genuine social enthusiasm like
Mr. H. G. Wells. It would be very unfair to a man like Mr. Wells to
suggest that in his vision the Englishman and the American are to
embrace only in the sense of clinging to each other in terror. He is a
man who understands what friendship is, and who knows how to enjoy the
motley humours of humanity. But the political reconstruction which he
proposes is too much determined by this old nightmare of
necessitarianism. He tells us that our national dignities and
differences must be melted into the huge mould of a World State, or else
(and I think these are almost his own words) we shall be destroyed by
the instruments and machinery we have ourselves made. In effect, men
must abandon patriotism or they will be murdered by science. After this,
surely no one can accuse Mr. Wells of an undue tenderness for scientific
over other types of training. Greek may be a good thing or no; but
nobody says that if Greek scholarship is carried past a certain point,
everybody will be torn in pieces like Orpheus, or burned up like Semele,
or poisoned like Socrates. Philosophy, theology and logic may or may not
be idle academic studies; but nobody supposes that the study of
philosophy, or even of theology, ultimately forces its students to
manufacture racks and thumb-screws against their will; or that even
logicians need be so alarmingly logical as all that. Science seems to be
the only branch of study in which people have to be waved back from
perfection as from a pestilence. But my business is not with the
scientific dangers which alarm Mr. Wells, but with the remedy he
proposes for them; or rather with the relation of that remedy to the
foundation and the future of America. Now it is not too much to say that
Mr. Wells finds his model in America. The World State is to be the
United States of the World. He answers almost all objections to the
practicability of such a peace among states, by pointing out that the
American States have such a peace, and by adding, truly enough, that
another turn of history might easily have seen them broken up by war.
The pattern of the World State is to be found in the New World.
Oddly enough, as it seems to me, he proposes almost cosmic conquests for
the American Constitution, while leaving out the most successful thing
in that Constitution. The point appeared in answer to a question which
many, like myself, must have put in this matter; the question of
despotism and democracy. I cannot understand any democrat not seeing the
danger of so distant and indirect a system of government. It is hard
enough anywhere to get representatives to represent. It is hard enough
to get a little town council to fulfil the wishes of a little town,
even when the townsmen meet the town councillors every day in the
street, and could kick them down the street if they liked. What the same
town councillors would be like if they were ruling all their
fellow-creatures from the North Pole or the New Jerusalem, is a vision
of Oriental despotism beyond the towering fancies of Tamberlane. This
difficulty in all representative government is felt everywhere, and not
least in America. But I think that if there is one truth apparent in
such a choice of evils, it is that monarchy is at least better than
oligarchy; and that where we have to act on a large scale, the most
genuine popularity can gather round a particular person like a Pope or a
President of the United States, or even a dictator like Caesar or
Napoleon, rather than round a more or less corrupt committee which can
only be defined as an obscure oligarchy. And in that sense any oligarchy
is obscure. For people to continue to trust twenty-seven men it is
necessary, as a preliminary formality, that people should have heard of
them. And there are no twenty-seven men of whom everybody has heard as
everybody in France had heard of Napoleon, as all Catholics have heard
of the Pope or all Americans have heard of the President. I think the
mass of ordinary Americans do really elect their President; and even
where they cannot control him at least they watch him, and in the long
run they judge him. I think, therefore, that the American Constitution
has a real popular institution in the Presidency. But Mr. Wells would
appear to want the American Constitution without the Presidency. If I
understand his words rightly, he seems to want the great democracy
without its popular institution. Alluding to this danger, that the
World State might be a world tyranny, he seems to take tyranny entirely
in the sense of autocracy. He asks whether the President of the World
State would not be rather too tremendous a person, and seems to suggest
in answer that there need not even be any such person. He seems to imply
that the committee controlling the planet could meet almost without any
one in the chair, certainly without any one on the throne. I cannot
imagine anything more manifestly made to be a tyranny than such an
acephalous aristocracy. But while Mr. Wells's decision seems to me
strange, his reason for it seems to me still more extraordinary.
He suggests that no such dictator will be needed in his World State
because 'there will be no wars and no diplomacy.' A World State ought
doubtless to go round the world; and going round the world seems to be a
good training for arguing in a circle. Obviously there will be no wars
and no war-diplomacy if something has the power to prevent them; and we
cannot deduce that the something will not want any power. It is rather
as if somebody, urging that the Germans could only be defeated by
uniting the Allied commands under Marshal Foch, had said that after all
it need not offend the British Generals because the French supremacy
need only be a fiction, the Germans being defeated. We should naturally
say that the German defeat would only be a reality because the Allied
command was not a fiction. So the universal peace would only be a
reality if the World State were not a fiction. And it could not be even
a state if it were not a government. This argument amounts to saying,
first that the World State will be needed because it is strong, and
then that it may safely be weak because it will not be needed.
Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy. I do not say it is
incompatible with it; but any combination of the two will be a
compromise between the two. The only purely popular government is local,
and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because
they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen
who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote
and altogether alien cities. All Irishmen may know roughly the same sort
of things about Ireland; but it is absurd to say they all know the same
things about Iceland, when they may include a scholar steeped in
Icelandic sagas or a sailor who has been to Iceland. To make all
politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If
your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend
of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have
been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more
select minority who have come back.
Given this difficulty about quite direct democracy over large areas, I
think the nearest thing to democracy is despotism. At any rate I think
it is some sort of more or less independent monarchy, such as Andrew
Jackson created in America. And I believe it is true to say that the two
men whom the modern world really and almost reluctantly regards with
impersonal respect, as clothed by their office with something historic
and honourable, are the Pope and the President of the United States.
But to admire the United States as the United States is one thing. To
admire them as the World State is quite another. The attempt of Mr.
Wells to make America a sort of model for the federation of all the free
nations of the earth, though it is international in intention, is really
as narrowly national, in the bad sense, as the desire of Mr. Kipling to
cover the world with British Imperialism, or of Professor Treitschke to
cover it with Prussian Pan-Germanism. Not being schoolboys, we no longer
believe that everything can be settled by painting the map red. Nor do I
believe it can be done by painting it blue with white spots, even if
they are called stars. The insufficiency of British Imperialism does not
lie in the fact that it has always been applied by force of arms. As a
matter of fact, it has not. It has been effected largely by commerce, by
colonisation of comparatively empty places, by geographical discovery
and diplomatic bargain. Whether it be regarded as praise or blame, it is
certainly the truth that among all the things that have called
themselves empires, the British has been perhaps the least purely
military, and has least both of the special guilt and the special glory
that goes with militarism. The insufficiency of British Imperialism is
not that it is imperial, let alone military. The insufficiency of
British Imperialism is that it is British; when it is not merely Jewish.
It is that just as a man is no more than a man, so a nation is no more
than a nation; and any nation is inadequate as an international model.
Any state looks small when it occupies the whole earth. Any polity is
narrow as soon as it is as wide as the world. It would be just the same
if Ireland began to paint the map green or Montenegro were to paint it
black. The objection to spreading anything all over the world is that,
among other things, you have to spread it very thin.
But America, which Mr. Wells takes as a model, is in another sense
rather a warning. Mr. Wells says very truly that there was a moment in
history when America might well have broken up into independent states
like those of Europe. He seems to take it for granted that it was in all
respects an advantage that this was avoided. Yet there is surely a case,
however mildly we put it, for a certain importance in the world still
attaching to Europe. There are some who find France as interesting as
Florida; and who think they can learn as much about history and humanity
in the marble cities of the Mediterranean as in the wooden towns of the
Middle West. Europe may have been divided, but it was certainly not
destroyed; nor has its peculiar position in the culture of the world
been destroyed. Nothing has yet appeared capable of completely eclipsing
it, either in its extension in America or its imitation in Japan. But
the immediate point here is perhaps a more important one. There is now
no creed accepted as embodying the common sense of all Europe, as the
Catholic creed was accepted as embodying it in mediaeval times. There is
no culture broadly superior to all others, as the Mediterranean culture
was superior to that of the barbarians in Roman times. If Europe were
united in modern times, it would probably be by the victory of one of
its types over others, possibly over all the others. And when America
was united finally in the nineteenth century, it _was_ by the victory of
one of its types over others. It is not yet certain that this victory
was a good thing. It is not yet certain that the world will be better
for the triumph of the North over the Southern traditions of America.
It may yet turn out to be as unfortunate as a triumph of the North
Germans over the Southern traditions of Germany and of Europe.
The men who will not face this fact are men whose minds are not free.
They are more crushed by Progress than any pietists by Providence. They
are not allowed to question that whatever has recently happened was all
for the best. Now Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a
theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It
is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far
more miraculous than a miracle. If there be no purpose, or if the
purpose permits of human free will, then in either case it is almost
insanely unlikely that there should be in history a period of steady and
uninterrupted progress; or in other words a period in which poor
bewildered humanity moves amid a chaos of complications, without making
a single mistake. What has to be hammered into the heads of most normal
newspaper-readers to-day is that Man has made a great many mistakes.
Modern Man has made a great many mistakes. Indeed, in the case of that
progressive and pioneering character, one is sometimes tempted to say
that he has made nothing but mistakes. Calvinism was a mistake, and
Capitalism was a mistake, and Teutonism and the flattery of the Northern
tribes were mistakes. In the French the persecution of Catholicism by
the politicians was a mistake, as they found out in the Great War; when
the memory gave Irish or Italian Catholics an excuse for hanging back.
In England the loss of agriculture and therefore of food-supply in war,
and the power to stand a siege, was a mistake. And in America the
introduction of the negroes was a mistake; but it may yet be found that
the sacrifice of the Southern white man to them was even more of a
mistake.