The issue is plain: We get a better understanding of certain political facts in Europe, or we have war. And the Bellicist at present is resolutely opposed to such political education. And it is for that reason, not because he is asking for adequate armament, that some of the best of this country look with the deepest misgiving upon his work, and will continue to do so in increasing degree unless his policy be changed.
Now a word as to the peace Pacifist—the Pacifist sans phrases—as distinct from the military Pacifist. It is not because I am in favour of defence that I have at times with some emphasis disassociated myself from certain features and methods of the peace movement, for non-resistance is no necessary part of that movement, and, indeed, so far as I know, it is no appreciable part. It is the methods not the object or the ideals of the peace movement which I have ventured to criticize, without, I hope, offence to men whom I respect in the very highest and sincerest degree. The methods of Pacifism have in the past, to some extent at least, implied a disposition to allow easy emotion to take the place of hard thinking, good intention to stand for intellectual justification; and it is as plain as anything well can be that some of the best emotion of the world has been expended upon some of the very worst objects, and that in no field of human effort—medicine, commerce, engineering, legislation—has good intention ever been able to dispense with the necessity of knowing the how and the why.
It is not that the somewhat question-begging and emotional terminology of some Pacifists—the appeal to brotherly love and humanity—connotes things which are in themselves poor or mean (as the average Militarist would imply), but because so much of Pacifism in the past has failed to reconcile intellectually the claims of these things with what are the fundamental needs of men and to show their relation and practical application to actual problems and conditions.
[Footnote 8: As a matter of fact, of course, the work of these two men has not been fruitless. As Lord Morley truly says: "They were routed on the question of the Crimean War, but it was the rapid spread of their principles which within the next twenty years made intervention impossible in the Franco-Austrian War, in the American War, in the Danish War, in the Franco-German War, and above all, in the war between Russia and Turkey, which broke out only the other day."]
[Footnote 9: Thus the Editor of the Spectator:—
"For ourselves, as far as the main economic proposition goes, he preaches to the converted…. If nations were perfectly wise and held perfectly sound economic theories, they would recognize that exchange is the union of forces, and that it is very foolish to hate or be jealous of your co-operators…. Men are savage, bloodthirsty creatures … and when their blood is up will fight for a word or a sign, or, as Mr. Angell would put it, for an illusion."
Therefore, argues the Spectator, let the illusion continue—for there is no other conclusion to be drawn from the argument.]
[Footnote 10: Need it be said that this criticism does not imply the faintest want of respect for Lord Roberts, his qualities and his services. He has ventured into the field of foreign politics and prophecy. A public man of great eminence, he has expressed an English view of German "intentions." For the man in the street (I write in that capacity) to receive that expression in silence is to endorse it, to make it national. And I have stated here the reasons which make such an attitude disastrous. We all greatly respect Lord Roberts, but, even before that, must come respect for our country, the determination that it shall be in the right and not in the wrong, which it certainly will be if this easy dogmatism concerning the evil intentions of other nations becomes national.]
[Footnote 11: The German Navy Law in its preamble might have filched this from the British Navy League catechism.]
CHAPTER VII.
"THEORIES" FALSE AND TRUE: THEIR ROLE IN EUROPEAN PROGRESS.
The improvement of ideas the foundation of all improvement—Shooting straight and thinking straight; the one as important as the other—Pacifism and the Millennium—How we got rid of wars of religion—A few ideas have changed the face of the world—The simple ideas the most important—The "theories" which have led to war—The work of the reformer to destroy old and false theories—The intellectual interdependence of nations—Europe at unity in this matter—New ideas cannot be confined to one people—No fear of ourselves or any nation being ahead of the rest.
But what, it will be said, is the practical outcome? Admitting that we are, or that our fathers were, in part responsible for this war, that it is their false theories which have made it necessary, that like false theories on our part may make future wars inevitable—what shall we do to prevent that catastrophe?
Now while as an "abstract proposition" everyone will admit that the one thing which distinguishes the civilized man from the savage is a difference of ideas, no one apparently believes that it is a dangerous and evil thing for the political ideas of savages to dominate most of our countrymen or that so intangible a thing as "ideas" have any practical importance at all. While we believe this, of course—to the extent to which we believe it—improvement is out of the question. We have to realize that civic faith, like religious faith, is of importance; that if English influence is to stand for the right and not the wrong in human affairs, it is impossible for each one of us individuals to be wrong; that if the great mass is animated by temper, blindness, ignorance, passion, small and mean prejudices, it is not possible for "England" to stand for something quite different and for its influence to be ought but evil. To say that we are "for our country right or wrong" does not get over the matter at all; rather is it equivalent to saying that we would as readily have it stand for evil as for good. And we do not in the least seem to realize that for an Englishman to go on talking wicked nonsense across the dinner table and making one of the little rivulets of bad temper and prejudice which forms the mighty river drowning sane judgment is to do the England of our dreams a service as ill (in reality far more mischievous) as though the plans of fortresses were sold to Germany. We must all learn to shoot straight; apparently we need not learn to think straight. And yet if Europe could do the second it could dispense with the first. "Good faith" has a score of connotations, and we believe apparently that good politics can dispense with all of them and that "Patriotism" has naught to do with any.
Of course, to shoot straight is so much easier than to think straight, and I suppose at bottom the bellicist believes that the latter is a hopeless object since "man is not a thinking animal." He deems, apparently, we must just leave it at that. Of course, if he does leave it at that—if we persist in believing that it is no good discussing these matters, trying to find out the truth about them, writing books and building churches—our civilization is going to drift just precisely as those other civilizations which have been guided by the same dreadful fatalism have drifted—towards the Turkish goal. "Kismet. Man is a fool to babble of these things; what he may do is of no avail; all things will happen as they were pre-ordained." And the English Turk—the man who prefers to fight things out instead of thinking things out—takes the same line.
If he adopts the Turkish philosophy he must be content with the Turkish result. But the Western world as a whole has refused to be content with the Turkish result, and however tiresome it may be to know about things, to bother with "theories" and principles, we have come to realise that we have to choose between one of two courses: either to accept things as they are, not to worry about improvement or betterment at all, fatalistically to let things slide or—to find out bit by bit where our errors have been and to correct those errors. This is a hard road, but it is the road the Western world has chosen; and it is better than the other.
And it has not accepted this road because it expects the millenium to-morrow week. There is no millenium, and Pacifists do not expect it or talk about it; the word is just one of those three-shies-a-penny brickbats thrown at them by ignorance. You do not dismiss attempts to correct errors in medicine or surgery, or education, or tramcars, or cookery, by talking about the millenium; why should you throw that word at attempts to correct the errors of international relationship?
Nothing has astonished me more than the fact that the "practical" man who despises "theories" nearly always criticises Pacifism because it is not an absolute dogma with all its thirty-nine articles water-tight. "You are a Pacifist, then suppose…," and then follows generally some very remote hypothesis of what would happen if all the Orient composed its differences and were to descend suddenly upon the Western world; or some dogmatic (and very theoretical) proposition about the unchangeability of human nature, and the foolishness of expecting the millenium—an argument which would equally well have told against the union of Scotland and England or would equally justify the political parties in a South American republic in continuing to settle their differences by militarist methods instead of the Pacifist methods of England.
Human nature may be unchanging: it is no reason why we should fight a futile war with Germany over nothing at all; the yellow peril may threaten; that is a very good reason why we should compose our differences in Europe. Men always will quarrel, perhaps, over religious questions, bigotry and fanaticism always will exist—it did not prevent our getting rid of the wars of religion, still less is it a reason for re-starting them.
The men who made that immense advance—the achievement of religious toleration—possible, were not completely right and had not a water-tight theory amongst them; they did not bring the millenium, but they achieved an immense step. They were pioneers of religious freedom, yet were themselves tyrants and oppressors; those who abolished slavery did a good work, though much of the world was left in industrial servitude; it was a good thing to abolish judicial torture, though much of our penal system did yet remain barbaric; it was a real advance to recognise the errors upon which these things rested, although that recognition did not immediately achieve a complete, logical, symmetrical and perfect change, because mankind does not advance that way. And so with war. Pacifism does not even pretend to be a dogma: it is an attempt to correct in men's minds some of the errors and false theories out of which war grows.
The reply to this is generally that the inaptitude of men for clear thinking and the difficulties of the issues involved will render any decision save the sheer clash of physical force impossible; that the field of foreign politics is such a tangle that the popular mind will always fall back upon decision by force.
As a matter of fact the outstanding principles which serve to improve human conduct, are quite simple and understandable, as soon as they have been shorn of the sophistries and illusions with which the pundits clothe them. The real work of the reformers is to hack away these encumbering theories. The average European has not followed, and could not follow, the amazing and never-ending disputation on obscure theological points round which raged the Reformation; but the one solid fact which did emerge from the whole was the general realization that whatever the truth might be in all this confusion, it was quite evidently wicked and futile to attempt to compel conformity to any one section of it by force; that in the interests of all force should be withheld; because if such queries were settled by the accident of predominant force, it would prove, not which was right, but which was stronger. So in such things as witchcraft. The learned and astute judges of the 18th century, who sent so many thousands to their death for impossible crimes, knew far more of the details of witchcraft than do we, and would beat us hopelessly in an argument on the subject; but all their learning was of no avail, because they had a few simple facts, the premises, crooked, and we have them straight; and all that we need to know in this amazing tangle of learned nonsense, is that the probabilities are against an old woman having caused a storm at sea and drowned a Scottish King. And so with the French Revolution. What the Encyclopaedists and other pioneers of that movement really did for the European peoples in that matter, was not to elaborate fantastic schemes of constitution making, but by their argumentation to achieve the destruction of old political sophistries—Divine Rights of Kings and what not—and to enable one or two simple facts to emerge clearly and unmistakeably, as that the object of government is the good of the governed, and can find its justification in nothing else whatsoever. It was these simple truths which, spreading over the world—with many checks and set-backs—have so profoundly modified the structure of Christendom.
Somewhere it is related of Montaigne that talking with academic colleagues, he expressed a contemptuous disbelief in the whole elaborate theory of witchcraft as it existed at that time. Scandalised, his colleagues took him into the University library, and showed him hundreds, thousands, of parchment volumes written in Latin by the learned men of the subject. Had he read these volumes, that he talked so disrespectfully of their contents? No, replied Montaigne, he had not read them, and he was not going to, because they were all wrong, and he was right. And Montaigne spoke with this dogmatism because he realised that he saw clearly that which they did not—the crookedness and unsoundness of just those simple fundamental assumptions on which the whole fantastic structure was based.
And so with all the sophistries and illusions by which the war system is still defended. If the public as a whole had to follow all the intricacies of those marvellous diplomatic combinations, the maze of our foreign politics, to understand abstruse points of finance and economics, in order to have just and sound ideas as to the real character of international relationship, why then public opinion would go on being as ignorant and mistaken as it had been hitherto. But sound opinion and instincts in that field depend upon nothing of the sort, but upon the emergence of a few quite simple facts, which are indisputable and self-evident, which stare us in the face, and which absolutely disprove all the elaborate theories of the Bellicist statesmen.
For instance, if conquest and extension of territory is the main road of moral and material progress, the fundamental need which sets up all these rivalries and collisions, then it is the populations of the Great States which should be the most enviable; the position of the Russian should be more desirable than that of the Hollander; it is not. The Austrian should be better off than the Switzer; he is not. If a nation's wealth is really subject to military confiscation, and needs the defence of military power, then the wealth of those small states should be insecure indeed—and Belgian national stocks stand 20 points higher than the German. If nations are rival units, then we should benefit by the disappearance of our rivals—and if they disappeared, something like a third of our population would starve to death. If the growth and prosperity of rival nations threatens us, then we should be in far greater danger of America to-day than we were some 50 years ago, when the growth of that power disturbed the sleep of our statesmen (and when, incidentally, we were just as much afraid of the growth of that power as we are now afraid of the growth of Germany). If the growing power of Russia compelled us to fight a great war in alliance with the Turk to check her "advance on India," why are we now co-operating with Russia to build railroads to India?
It is such quite simple questions as these, and the quite plain facts which underlie them which will lead to sounder conceptions in this matter on the part of the peoples.
It is not we who are the "theorists," if by "theorists" is meant the constructors of elaborate and deceptive theorems in this matter. It is our opponents, the military mystics, who persistently shut their eyes to the great outstanding facts of history and of our time. And these fantastic theories are generally justified by most esoteric doctrine, not by the appeal to the facts which stare you in the face. I once replied to a critic thus:—
In examining my critic's balance sheet I remarked that were his figures as complete as they were absurdly incomplete and misleading, I should still have been unimpressed. We all know that very marvellous results are possible with figures; but one can generally find some simple fact which puts them to the supreme test without undue mathematics. I do not know whether it has ever happened to my critic, as it has happened to me, while watching the gambling in the casino of a Continental watering resort, to have a financial genius present weird columns of figures, which demonstrate conclusively, irrefragably, that by this system which they embody one can break the bank and win a million. I have never examined these figures, and never shall, for this reason: the genius in question is prepared to sell his wonderful secret for twenty francs. Now, in the face of that fact I am not interested in his figures. If they were worth examination they would not be for sale.
And so in this matter there are certain test facts which upset the adroitest statistical legerdemain. Though, really, the fallacy which regards an addition of territory as an addition of wealth to the "owning" nation is a very much simpler matter than the fallacies lying behind gambling systems, which are bound up with the laws of chance and the law of averages and much else that philosophers will quarrel about till the end of time. It requires an exceptional mathematical brain really to refute those fallacies, whereas the one we are dealing with is due simply to the difficulty experienced by most of us in carrying in our heads two facts at the same time. It is so much easier to seize on one fact and forget the other. Thus we realize that when Germany has conquered Alsace-Lorraine she has "captured" a province worth, "cash value," in my critic's phrase, sixty-six millions sterling. What we overlook is that Germany has also captured the people who own the property and who continue to own it. We have multiplied by x, it is true, but we have overlooked the fact that we have had to divide by x, and that the resultant is consequently, so far as the individual is concerned, exactly what it was before. My critic remembered the multiplication all right, but he forgot the division.
Just think of all the theories, the impossible theories for which the "practical" man has dragged the nations into war: the Balance of Power, for instance. Fifteen or twenty years ago it was the ineradicable belief of fifty or sixty million Americans, good, honest, sincere, and astute folk, that it was their bounden duty, their manifest interest, to fight—and in the words of one of their Senators, annihilate—Great Britain, in the interests of the Monroe Doctrine (which is a form of the "Balance of Power"). I do not think any one knew what the Monroe Doctrine meant, or could coherently defend it. An American Ambassador had an after-dinner story at the time.
"What is this I hear, Jones, that you do not believe in the Monroe
Doctrine?"
"It is a wicked lie. I have said no such thing. I do believe in the
Monroe Doctrine. I would lay down my life for it; I would die for it.
What I did say was that I didn't know what it meant."
And it was this vague theory which very nearly drove America into a war that would have been disastrous to the progress of Anglo-Saxon civilization.
This was at the time of the Venezuelan crisis: the United States, which for nearly one hundred years had lived in perfect peace with a British power touching her frontier along three thousand miles, laid it down as a doctrine that her existence was imperilled if Great Britain should extend by so much as a mile a vague frontier running through a South American swamp thousands of miles away. And for that cause these decent and honourable people were prepared to take all the risks that would be involved to Anglo-Saxon civilisation by a war between England and America. The present writer happened at that time to be living in America, and concerned with certain political work. Night after night he heard these fulminations against Great Britain; politicians, Congressmen, Senators, Governors, Ministers, Preachers, clamouring for war, for a theory as vague and as little practical as one could wish.
And we, of course, have had our like obsessions without number: "the independence integrity of the Turkish dominion in Europe" is one. Just think of it! Take in the full sound of the phrase: "the independence integrity of the Turkish dominion in Europe!"
What, of course, makes these fantastic political doctrines possible, what leads men to subscribe to them, are a few false general conceptions to which they hold tenaciously—as all fundamental conceptions are held, and ought to be. The general conceptions in question are precisely the ones I have indicated: that nations are rival and struggling units, that military force is consequently the determining factor of their relative advantage; that enlargement of political frontiers is the supreme need, and so on.
And the revision of these fundamental conceptions will, of course, be the general work of Christendom, and given the conditions which now obtain, the development will go on pari passu in all nations or not all. It will not be the work of "nations" at all; it will be the work of individual men.
States do not think. It is the men who form the states who think, and the number of those men who will act as pioneers in a better policy must, of course, at first be small: a group here and a group there, the best men of all countries—England, France, Germany, America—influencing by their ideas finally the great mass. To say, as so many do in this matter: "Let other nations do it first" is, of course, to condemn us all to impotence—for the other nations use the same language. To ask that one group of forty or seventy or ninety million people shall by some sort of magic all find their way to a saner doctrine before such doctrine has affected other groups is to talk the language of childishness. Things do not happen in that in human affairs. It is not in that way that opinion grows. It did not grow in that way in any one of the steps that I have mentioned—in the abolition of religious persecution, or slavery, or judicial torture. Unless the individual man sees his responsibility for determining what is right and knowing how and why it is right, there will be no progress; there cannot even be a beginning.
We are to an even greater degree an integral part of European Society, and a factor of European Policy, than we were at the time of the Crimean War, when we mainly determined it; and our theories and discussions will act and re-act upon that policy just as did any considerable body of thought, whether French political thought of the eighteenth century, or German religious thought of the sixteenth century, even at a time when the means of producing that reaction, the book, literature, the newspaper, rapid communication, were so immeasurably more primitive and rudimentary than ours. What we think and say and do affects not merely ourselves, but that whole body politic of Christendom of which we are an integral part.
It is a curious fact that the moral and intellectual interdependence of States preceded by a long period, that material and economic independence which I have tried recently to make clear. Nothing is more contrary to fact than to suppose that any considerable movement of opinion in Europe can be limited to the frontiers of one nation. Even at a time when it took half a generation for a thought to travel from one capital to another, a student or thinker in some obscure Italian, Swiss or German village was able to modify policy, to change the face of Europe and of mankind. Coming nearer to our time, it was the work of the encyclopaedists and earlier political questioners which made the French Revolution; and the effect of that Revolution was not confined to France. The ideas which animated it re-acted directly upon our Empire, upon the American Colonies, upon the Spanish Colonies, upon Italy, and the formation of United Italy, upon Germany—the world over. These miracles, almost too vast and great to conceive, were the outcome of that intangible thing, an idea, an aspiration, an ideal. And if they could accomplish so much in that day when the popular press and cheap literature and improved communication did not exist, how is it possible to suppose that any great ferment of opinion can be limited to one group in our day, when we have a condition of things in which the declaration of an English Cabinet Minister to-night is read to-morrow morning by every reading German?
It should be to our everlasting glory that our political thought in the past, some of our political institutions, parliamentary government, and what not, have had an enormous influence in the world. We have some ground for hoping that another form of political institution which we have initiated, a relationship of distinct political groups into which force does not enter, will lead the way to a better condition of things in Christendom. We have demonstrated that five independent nations, the nations of the British Empire, can settle their differences as between one another without the use of force. We have definitely decided that whatever the attitude Australia, Canada, and South Africa may adopt to us we shall not use force to change it. What is possible with five is possible with fifteen nations. Just as we have given to the world roughly our conception of Parliamentary Government, so it is to be hoped may we give to the world our conception of the true relationship of nations.
The great steps of the past—religious freedom, the abolition of torture and of slavery, the rights of the mass, self-government—every real step which man has made has been made because men "theorised," because a Galileo, or a Luther, or a Calvin, or a Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Spencer, Darwin, wrote and put notes of interrogation. Had they not done so none of those things could have been accomplished. The greatest work of the renaissance was the elimination of physical force in the struggle of religious groups, in religious struggles generally; the greatest work of our generation will be elimination of physical force from the struggle of the political groups and from political struggles generally. But it will be done in exactly the same way: by a common improvement of opinion. And because we possess immeasurably better instruments for the dissemination of ideas, we should be able to achieve the Political Reformation of Europe much more rapidly and effectively than our predecessors achieved the great intellectual Reformation of their time.
CHAPTER VIII.
WHAT MUST WE DO?
We must have the right political faith—Then we must give effect to it—Good intention not enough—The organization of the great forces of modern life—Our indifference as to the foundations of the evil—The only hope.
What then must we do? Well the first and obvious thing is for each to do his civic duty, for each to determine that he at least shall not reject, with that silly temper which nearly always meets most new points of view, principles which do at least seek to explain things, and do point to the possibility of a better way.
The first thing is to make our own policy right—and that is the work of each one of us; to correct the temper which made us, for instance, to our shame, the partners of the Turk in his work of oppression.
And we must realise that mere good intent does not suffice; that understanding, by which alone we can make headway, is not arrived at by a pleasant emotion like that produced by a Beethoven Sonata; that we pay for our progress in a little harder money than that, the money of hard work, in which must be included hard thinking. And having got that far, we must realise that sound ideas do not spread themselves. They are spread by men. It is one of the astonishing things in the whole problem of the breaking of war, that while men realise that if women are to have votes, or men to be made temperate, or the White Slave Traffic to be stopped, or for that matter, if battleships are to be built, or conscription to be introduced, or soap or pills to be sold, effort, organisation, time, money, must be put into these things. But the greatest revolution that the world has known since mankind acquired the right to freedom of opinion, will apparently get itself accomplished without any of these things; or that at least the Government can quite easily attend to it by asking other Governments to attend a Conference. We must realise that a change of opinion, the recognition of a new fact, or of facts heretofore not realised, is a slow and laborious work, even in the relatively simple things which I have mentioned, and that you cannot make savages into civilised men by collecting them round a table. For the Powers of Europe, so far as their national policies are concerned, are still uncivilised individuals. And their Conferences are bound to fail, when each unit has the falsest conception concerning the matters under discussion. Governments are the embodied expression of general public opinion—and not the best public opinion at that; and until opinion is modified, the embodiment of it will no more be capable of the necessary common action, than would Red Indians be capable of forming an efficient Court of Law, while knowing nothing of law or jurisprudence, or worse still, having utterly false notions of the principles upon which human society is based.
And the occasional conferences of private men still hazy as to these principles are bound to be as ineffective. If the mere meeting and contact of people cleared up misunderstandings, we should not have Suffragettes and Anti-Suffragettes, or Mr. Lloyd George at grips with the doctors.
These occasional conferences, whether official, like those of the Hague, or non-official like those which occasionally meet in London or in Berlin, will not be of great avail in this matter unless a better public opinion renders them effective. They are of some use and no one would desire to see them dropped, but they will not of themselves stem or turn the drift of opinion. What is needed is a permanent organisation of propaganda, framed, not for the purpose of putting some cut and dried scheme into immediate operation, but with the purpose of clarifying European public opinion, making the great mass see a few simple facts straight, instead of crooked, and founded in the hope that ten or fifteen years of hard, steady, persistent work, will create in that time (by virtue of the superiority of the instruments, the Press and the rest of it which we possess) a revolution of opinion as great as that produced at the time of the Reformation, in a period which probably was not more than the lifetime of an ordinary man.
The organization for such permanent work has hardly begun. The Peace Societies have done, and are doing, a real service, but it is evident, for the reasons already indicated, that if the great mass are to be affected, instruments of far wider sweep must be used. Our great commercial and financial interests, our educational and academic institutions, our industrial organizations, the political bodies, must all be reached. An effort along the right lines has been made thanks to the generosity of a more than ordinarily enlightened Conservative capitalist. But the work should be taken up at a hundred points. Some able financier should do for the organization of Banking—which has really become the Industry of Finance and Credit—the same sort of service that Sir Charles Macara has done for the cotton industry of the world. The international action and co-ordination of Trades Unions the world over should be made practical and not, in this matter, be allowed to remain a merely platonic aspiration.
The greater European Universities should possess endowed Chairs of the Science of International Statecraft. While we have Chairs to investigate the nature of the relationship of insects, we have none to investigate the nature of the relationship of man in his political grouping. And the occupants of these Chairs might change places—that of Berlin coming to London or Oxford, and that of Oxford going to Berlin.
The English Navy League and the German Navy League alike tell us that the object of their endeavours is to create an instrument of peace. In that case their efforts should not be confined to increasing the size of the respective arms, but should also be directed to determining how and why and when, and under what conditions, and for what purpose that arm should be used. And that can only be done effectually if the two bodies learn something of the aims and objects of the other. The need for a Navy, and the size of the Navy, depends upon policy, either our own policy, or the policy of the prospective aggressor; and to know something of that, and its adjustment, is surely an integral part of national defence. If both these Navy Leagues, in the fifteen or sixteen years during which they have been in existence, had possessed an intelligence committee, each conferring with the other, and spending even a fraction of the money and energy upon disentangling policy that has been spent upon the sheer bull-dog piling up of armaments, in all human possibility, the situation which now confronts us would not exist.
Then each political party of the respective Parliaments might have its accredited delegates in the Lobbies of the other: the Social Democrats might have their permanent delegates in London, in the Lobbies of the House of Commons; the Labour Party might have their Permanent Delegates in the Lobbies of the Reichstag; and when any Anglo-German question arose, those delegates could speak through the mouth of the Members of the Party to which they were accredited, to the Parliament of the other nation. The Capitalistic parties could have a like bi-national organisation.
"These are wild and foolish suggestions"—that is possible. They have never, however, been discussed with a view to the objects in question. All efforts in this direction have been concentrated upon an attempt to realize mechanically, by some short and royal road, a result far too great and beneficent to be achieved so cheaply.
Before our Conferences, official or unofficial, can have much success, the parties to them must divest their minds of certain illusions which at present dominate them. Until that is done, you might as reasonably expect two cannibals to arrive at a workable scheme for consuming one another. The elementary conceptions, the foundations of the thing are unworkable. Our statecraft is still founded on a sort of political cannibalism, upon the idea that nations progress by conquering, or dominating one another. So long as that is our conception of the relationship of human groups we shall always stand in danger of collision, and our schemes of association and co-operation will always break down.
APPENDIX.
Many of the points touched upon in the last two chapters are brought out clearly in a recent letter addressed to the Press by my friend and colleague Mr. A.W. Haycock. In this letter to the Press he says:—
If you will examine systematically, as I have done, the comments which have appeared in the Liberal Press, either in the form of leading articles, or in letters from readers, concerning Lord Roberts' speech, you will find that though it is variously described as "diabolical," "pernicious," "wicked," "inflammatory" and "criminal," the real fundamental assumptions on which the whole speech is based, and which, if correct, justify it, are by implication admitted; at any rate, in not one single case that I can discover are they seriously challenged.
Now, when you consider this, it is the most serious fact of the whole incident—far more disquieting in reality than the fact of the speech itself, especially when we remember that Lord Roberts did but adopt and adapt the arguments already used with more sensationalism and less courtesy by Mr. Winston Churchill himself.
The protests against Lord Roberts' speech take the form of denying the intention of Germany to attach this country. But how can his critics be any more aware of the intentions of Germany—65 millions of people acted upon by all sorts of complex political and social forces—than is Lord Roberts? Do we know the intention of England with reference to Woman's Suffrage or Home Rule or Tariff Reform? How, therefore, can we know the intentions of "Germany"?
Lord Roberts, with courtesy, in form at least and with the warmest tribute to the "noble and imaginative patriotism" of German policy, assumed that that policy would follow the same general impulse that our own has done in the past, and would necessarily follow it since the relation between military power and national greatness and prosperity was to-day what it always has been. In effect, Lord Roberts' case amounts to this:—
"We have built up our Empire and our trade by virtue of the military power of our state; we exist as a nation, sail the seas, and carry on our trade, by virtue of our predominant strength; as that strength fails we shall do all these things merely on the sufferance of stronger nations, who, when pushed by the needs of an expanding population to do so, will deprive us of the capacity for carrying on those vital functions of life, and transfer the means of so doing to themselves to their very great advantage; we have achieved such transfer to ourselves in the past by force and must expect other nations to try and do the same thing unless we are able to prevent them. It is the inevitable struggles of life to be fought out either by war or armaments."
These are not Lord Roberts' words, but the proposition is the clear underlying assumption of his speech. And his critics do not seriously challenge it. Mr. Churchill by implication warmly supports it. At Glasgow he said: "The whole fortune of our race and Empire, the whole treasure accumulated during so many centuries of sacrifice and achievement would perish and be swept utterly away, if our naval supremacy were to be impaired."
Now why should there be any danger of Germany bringing about this catastrophe unless she could profit enormously by so doing? But that implies that a nation does expand by military force, does achieve the best for its people by that means; it does mean that if you are not stronger than your rival, you carry on your trade "on sufferance" and at the appointed hour will have it taken from you by him. And if that assumption—plainly indicated as it is by a Liberal Minister—is right, who can say that Lord Roberts' conclusion is not justified?
Now as to the means of preventing the war. Lord Roberts' formula is:—
"Such a battle front by sea and land that no power or probable combination of powers shall dare to attack us without the certainty of disaster."
This, of course, is taken straight from Mr. Churchill, who, at
Dundee, told us that "the way to make war impossible is to be so
strong as to make victory certain."
We have all apparently, Liberals and Conservatives alike, accepted
this "axiom" as self-evident.
Well, since it is so obvious as all that we may expect the Germans to adopt it. At present they are guided by a much more modest principle (enunciated in the preamble of the German Navy Law); namely, to be sufficiently strong to make it dangerous for your enemy to attack. They must now, according to our "axiom," be so strong as to make our defeat certain.
I am quite sure that the big armament people in Germany are very grateful for the advice which Mr. Churchill and Lord Roberts thus give to the nations of the world, and we may expect to see German armaments so increased as to accord with the new principle.
And Lord Roberts is courageous enough to abide by the conclusion which flows from the fundamental assumption of Liberals and Conservatives alike, i.e., that trade and the means of livelihood can be transferred by force. We have transferred it in the past. "It is excellent policy; it is, or should be, the policy of every nation prepared to play a great part in history." Such are Lord Roberts' actual words. At least, they don't burke the issue.
The Germans will doubtless note the combination: be so strong as to make victory certain, and strike when you have made it certain, and they will then, in the light of this advice, be able to put the right interpretation upon our endeavours to create a great conscript force and our arrangements, which have been going on for some years, to throw an expeditionary force on to the continent.
The outlook is not very pleasant, is it? And yet if you accept the "axiom" that our Empire and our trade is dependent upon force and can be advantageously attacked by a stronger power there is no escape from the inevitable struggle—for the other "axiom" that safety can be secured merely by being enormously stronger than your rival is, as soon as it is tested by applying it to the two parties to the conflict—and, of course, one has as much right to apply it as the other—seen to be simply dangerous and muddle-headed rubbish. Include the two parties in your "axiom" (as you must) and it becomes impossible of application.
Now the whole problem sifts finally down to this one question: Is the assumption made by Lord Roberts and implied by Mr. Churchill concerning the relation of military force to trade and national life well founded? If it is, conflict is inevitable. It is no good crying "panic." If there is this enormous temptation pushing to our national ruin, we ought to be in a panic. And if it is not true? Even in that case conflict will equally be inevitable unless we realise its falseness, for a universal false opinion concerning a fact will have the same result in conduct as though the false belief were true.
And my point is that those concerned to prevent this conflict seem but mildly interested in examining the foundations of the false beliefs that make conflict inevitable. Part of the reluctance to study the subject seems to arise from the fear that if we deny the nonsensical idea that the British Empire would instantaneously fall to pieces were the Germans to dominate the North Sea for 24 hours we should weaken the impulse to defence. That is probably an utterly false idea, but suppose it is true, is the risk of less ardour in defence as great as the risk which comes of having a nation of Roberts and Churchills on both sides of the frontier?
If that happens war becomes not a risk but a certainty.
And it is danger of happening. I speak from the standpoint of a somewhat special experience. During the last 18 months I have addressed not scores but many hundreds of meetings on the subject of the very proposition on which Lord Roberts' speech is based and which I have indicated at the beginning of this letter; I have answered not hundreds but thousands of questions arising out of it. And I think that gives me a somewhat special understanding of the mind of the man in the street. The reason he is subject to panic, and "sees red" and will often accept blindly counsels like those of Lord Roberts, is that he holds as axioms these primary assumptions to which I have referred, namely, that he carries on his daily life by virtue of military force, and that the means of carrying it on will be taken from him by the first stronger power that rises in the world, and that that power will be pushed to do it by the advantage of such seizure. And these axioms he never finds challenged even by his Liberal guides.
The issue for those who really desire a better condition is clear. So long as by their silence, or by their indifference to the discussion of the fundamental facts of this problem they create the impression that Mr. Churchill's axioms are unchallengeable, the panic-mongers will have it all their own way, and our action will be a stimulus to similar action in Germany, and that action will again re-act on ours, and so on ad infinitum.
Why is not some concerted effort made to create in both countries the necessary public opinion, by encouraging the study and discussion of the elements of the case, in some such way, for instance, as that adopted by Mr. Norman Angell in his book?
One organization due to private munificence has been formed and is doing, within limits, an extraordinarily useful work, but we can only hope to affect policy by a much more general interest—the interest of those of leisure and influence. And that does not seem to be forthcoming.
My own work, which has been based quite frankly on Mr. Angell's book, has convinced me that it embodies just the formula most readily understanded of the people. It constitutes a constructive doctrine of International Policy—the only statement I know so definitely applicable to modern conditions.
But the old illusions are so entrenched that if any impression is
to be made on public opinion generally, effort must be persistent,
permanent, and widespread. Mere isolated conferences, disconnected
from work of a permanent character, are altogether inadequate for
the forces that have to be met.
What is needed is a permanent and widespread organization embracing
Trades Unions, Churches and affiliated bodies, Schools and
Universities, basing its work on some definite doctrine of
International Policy which can supplant the present conceptions of
struggle and chaos.
I speak, at least, from the standpoint of experience; in the last resort the hostility, fear and suspicion which from time to time gains currency among the great mass of the people, is due to those elementary misconceptions as to the relation of prosperity, the opportunities of life, to military power. So long as these misconceptions are dominant, nothing is easier than to precipitate panic and bad feeling, and unless we can modify them, we shall in all human probability drift into conflict; and this incident of Lord Roberts' speech and the comment which it has provoked, show that for some not very well defined reason, Liberals, quite as much as Conservatives, by implication, accept the axioms upon which it is based, and give but little evidence that they are seriously bestirring themselves to improve that political education upon which according to their creed, progress can alone be made.
Yours very faithfully,
A.W. HAYCOCK.
End of Project Gutenberg's Peace Theories and the Balkan War, by Norman Angell