‘Not the facts, but men’s opinions about the facts is what matters. This is because men’s conduct is determined, not necessarily by the right conclusion from facts, but the conclusion they believe to be right.... As long as Europe is dominated by the old beliefs, those beliefs will have virtually the same effect in politics as though they were intrinsically sound.’—(p. 327.)
‘It is evident that so long as the misconception we are dealing with is all but universal in Europe, so long as the nations believe that in some way the military and political subjugation of others will bring with it a tangible material advantage to the conqueror, we all do, in fact, stand in danger from such aggression. Not his interest, but what he deems to be his interest, will furnish the real motive of our prospective enemy’s action. And as the illusion with which we are dealing does, indeed, dominate all those minds most active in European politics, we must, while this remains the case, regard an aggression, even such as that which Mr Harrison foresees, as within the bounds of practical politics.... On this ground alone I deem that we or any other nation are justified in taking means of self-defence to prevent such aggression. This is not, therefore, a plea for disarmament irrespective of the action of other nations. So long as current political philosophy in Europe remains what it is, I would not urge the reduction of our war budget by a single sovereign.’—(p. 329.)
‘The need for defence arises from the existence of a motive for attack.... That motive is, consequently, part of the problem of defence.... Since as between the European peoples we are dealing with in this matter, one party is as able in the long run to pile up armaments as the other, we cannot get nearer to solution by armaments alone; we must get at the original provoking cause—the motive making for aggression.... If that motive results from a true judgment of the facts; if the determining factor in a nation’s well-being and progress is really its power to obtain by force advantage over others, the present situation of armament rivalry tempered by war is a natural and inevitable one.... If, however, the view is a false one, our progress towards solution will be marked by the extent to which the error becomes generally recognised in European public opinion.’—(p. 337.)
‘In this matter it seems fatally easy to secure either one of two kinds of action: that of the “practical man” who limits his energies to securing a policy which will perfect the machinery of war and disregard anything else; or that of the Pacifist, who, persuaded of the brutality or immorality of war, is apt to deprecate effort directed at self-defence. What is needed is the type of activity which will include both halves of the problem: provision for education, for a Political Reformation in this matter, as well as such means of defence as will meantime counterbalance the existing impulse to aggression. To concentrate on either half to the exclusion of the other half is to render the whole problem insoluble.’—(p. 330.)
‘Never has the contest of armament been so keen as when Europe began to indulge in Peace Conferences. Speaking roughly and generally, the era of great armament expansion dates from the first Hague Conference. The reader who has appreciated the emphasis laid in the preceding pages on working through the reform of ideas will not feel much astonishment at the failure of efforts such as these. The Hague Conferences represented an attempt, not to work through the reform of ideas, but to modify by mechanical means the political machinery of Europe, without reference to the ideas which had brought it into existence.
‘Arbitration treaties, Hague Conferences, International Federation, involve a new conception of relationship between nations. But the ideals—political, economical, and social—on which the old conceptions are based, our terminology, our political literature, our old habits of thought, diplomatic inertia, which all combine to perpetuate the old notions, have been left serenely undisturbed. And surprise is expressed that such schemes do not succeed.’—(p. 350.)
Very soon after the appearance of the book, I find I am shouting myself hoarse in the Press against this monstrous ‘impossibility of war’ foolishness. An article in the Daily Mail of September 15th, 1911, begins thus:—
’ ... One learns, with some surprise, that the very simple facts to which I have now for some years been trying to draw the attention they deserve, teach that:—
1. War is now impossible.
2. War would ruin both the victor and the vanquished.
3. War would leave the victor worse off than the vanquished.
‘May I say with every possible emphasis that nothing I have ever written justifies any one of these conclusions.
‘I have always, on the contrary, urged that:—
(1) War is, unhappily, quite possible, and, in the prevailing condition of ignorance concerning certain elementary politico-economic facts, even likely.
(2) There is nothing to justify the conclusion that war would “ruin” both victor and vanquished. Indeed, I do not quite know what the “ruin” of a nation means.
(3) While in the past the vanquished has often profited more by defeat than he could possibly have done by victory, it is no necessary result, and we are safest in assuming that the vanquished will suffer most.’
Nearly two years later I find myself still engaged in the same task. Here is a letter to the Saturday Review (March 8th, 1913):—
‘You are good enough to say that I am “one of the very few advocates of peace at any price who is not altogether an ass.” And yet you also state that I have been on a mission “to persuade the German people that war in the twentieth century is impossible.” If I had ever tried to teach anybody such sorry rubbish I should be altogether an unmitigated ass. I have never, of course, nor so far as I am aware, has any one ever said that war was impossible. Personally, not only do I regard war as possible, but extremely likely. What I have been preaching in Germany is that it is impossible for Germany to benefit by war, especially a war against us; and that, of course, is quite a different matter.’
It is true that if the argument of the book as a whole pointed to the conclusion that war was ‘impossible,’ it would be beside the point to quote passages repudiating that conclusion. They might merely prove the inconsequence of the author’s thought. But the book, and the whole effort of which it was a part, would have had no raison d’être if the author had believed war unlikely or impossible. It was a systematic attack on certain political ideas which the author declared were dominant in international politics. If he had supposed those powerful ideas were making not for war, but for peace, why as a pacifist should he be at such pains to change them? And if he thought those war-provoking ideas which he attacked were not likely to be put into effect, why, in that case either, should he bother at all? Why, for that matter, should a man who thought war impossible engage in not too popular propaganda against war—against something which could not occur?
A moment’s real reflection on the part of those responsible for this description of The Great Illusion, should have convinced them that it could not be a true one.
I have taken the trouble to go through some of the more serious criticisms of the book to see whether this extraordinary confusion was created in the mind of those who actually read the book instead of reading about it. So far as I know, not a single serious critic has come to a conclusion that agrees with the ‘popular’ verdict. Several going to the book after the War, seem to express surprise at the absence of any such conclusion. Professor Lindsay writes:—
‘Let us begin by disposing of one obvious criticism of the doctrines of The Great Illusion which the out-break of war has suggested. Mr Angell never contended that war was impossible, though he did contend that it must always be futile. He insisted that the futility of war would not make war impossible or armament unnecessary until all nations recognised its futility. So long as men held that nations could advance their interests by war, so long war would last. His moral was that we should fight militarism, whether in Germany or in our own country, as one ought to fight an idea with better ideas. He further pointed out that though it is pleasanter to attack the wrong ideals held by foreigners, it is more effective to attack the wrong ideals held in our own country.... The pacifist hope was that the outbreak of a European war, which was recognised as quite possible, might be delayed until, with the progress of pacifist doctrine, war became impossible. That hope has been tragically frustrated, but if the doctrines of pacifism are convincing and irrefutable, it was not in itself a vain hope. Time was the only thing it asked of fortune, and time was denied it.’
Another post-war critic—on the other side of the Atlantic—writes:—
‘Mr. Angell has received too much solace from the unwisdom of his critics. Those who have denounced him most vehemently are those who patently have not read his books. For example, he cannot properly be classed, as frequently asserted in recent months, as one of those Utopian pacifists who went about proclaiming war impossible. A number of passages in The Great Illusion show him fully alive to the danger of the present collapse; indeed, from the narrower view of politics his book was one of the several fruitless attempts to check that growing estrangement between England and Germany whose sinister menace far-sighted men discerned. Even less justifiable are the flippant sneers which discard his argument as mercenary or sordid. Mr Angell has never taken an “account book” or “breeches pocket” view of war. He inveighs against what he terms its political and moral futilities as earnestly as against its economic futility.’
It may be said that there must be some cause for so persistent a misrepresentation. There is. Its cause is that obstinate and deep-seated fatalism which is so large a part of the prevailing attitude to war and against which the book under consideration was a protest. Take it as an axiom that war comes upon us as an outside force, like the rain or the earthquake, and not as something that we can influence, and a man who ‘does not believe in war,’ must be a person who believes that war is not coming;[98] that men are naturally peaceable. To be a Pacifist because one believes that the danger of war is very great indeed, or because one believes men to be naturally extremely prone to war, is a position incomprehensible until we have rid our minds of the fatalism which regards war as an ‘inevitable’ result of uncontrollable forces.
What is a writer to do, however, in the face of persistent misrepresentation such as this? If he were a manufacturer of soap and some one said his soap was underweight, or he were a grocer and some one said his sugar was half sand, he could of course obtain enormous damages. But a mere writer, having given some years of his life to the study of the most important problem of his time, is quite helpless when a tired headline writer, or a journalist indulging his resentment, or what he thinks is likely to be the resentment of his readers, describes a book as proclaiming one thing when as a matter of simple fact it proclaims the exact contrary.
So much for myth or misrepresentation No. 1. We come to a second, namely, that The Great Illusion is an appeal to avarice; that it urges men not to defend their country ‘because to do so does not pay;’ that it would have us place ‘pocket before patriotism,’ a view reflected in Benjamin Kidd’s last book, pages of which are devoted to the condemnation of the ‘degeneracy and futility’ of resting the cause of peace on no higher ground than that it is ‘a great illusion to believe that a national policy founded on war can be a profitable policy for any people in the long run.’[99] He quotes approvingly Sir William Robertson Nicoll for denouncing those who condemn war because ‘it would postpone the blessed hour of tranquil money getting.’[100] As a means of obscuring truths which it is important to realise, of creating by misrepresentation a moral repulsion to a thesis, and thus depriving it of consideration, this second line of attack is even more important than the first.
To say of a book that it prophesied ‘the impossibility of war,’ is to imply that it is mere silly rubbish, and its author a fool. Sir William Robertson Nicoll’s phrase would of course imply that its doctrine was morally contemptible.
The reader must judge, after considering dispassionately what follows, whether this second description is any truer than the first.
The Great Illusion dealt—among other factors of international conflict—with the means by which the population of the world is driven to support itself; and studied the effect of those efforts to find sustenance upon the relations of States. It therefore dealt with economics.
On the strength of this, certain critics (like some of those quoted in the last chapter) who cannot possibly have read the book thoroughly, seem to have argued: If this book about war deals with ‘economics,’ it must deal with money and profits. To bring money and profits into a discussion of war is to imply that men fight for money, and won’t fight if they don’t get money from it; that war does not ‘pay.’ This is wicked and horrible. Let us denounce the writer for a shallow Hedonist and money-grubber....
As a matter of simple fact, as we shall see presently, the book was largely an attempt to show that the economic argument usually adduced for a particularly ruthless form of national selfishness was not a sound argument; that the commonly invoked justification for a selfish immoralism in Foreign Policy was a fallacy, an illusion. Yet the critics somehow managed to turn what was in fact an argument against national egoism into an argument for selfishness.
What was the political belief and the attitude towards life which The Great Illusion challenged? And what was the counter principle which it advocated as a substitute therefore?
It challenged the theory that the vital interests of nations are conflicting, and that war is part of the inevitable struggle for life among them; the view that, in order to feed itself, a nation with an expanding population must conquer territory and so deprive others of the means of subsistence; the view that war is the ‘struggle for bread.’[101] In other words, it challenged the economic excuse or justification for the ‘sacred egoism’ which is so largely the basis of the nationalist political philosophy, an excuse, which, as we shall see, the nationalist invokes if not to deny the moral law in the international field, at least to put the morality governing the relations of States on a very different plane from that which governs the relations of individuals. As against this doctrine The Great Illusion advanced the proposition, among others, that the economic or biological assumption on which it is based is false; that the policy of political power which results from this assumption is economically unworkable, its benefits an illusion; that the amount of sustenance provided by the earth is not a fixed quantity so that what one nation can seize another loses, but is an expanding quantity, its amount depending mainly upon the efficiency with which men co-operate in their exploitation of Nature. As already pointed out, a hundred thousand Red Indians starved in a country where a hundred million modern Americans have abundance. The need for co-operation, and the faith on which alone it can be maintained, being indispensable to our common welfare, the violation of the social compact, international obligation, will be visited with penalties just as surely as are violations of the moral law in relations between individuals. The economic factor is not the sole or the largest element in human relations, but it is the one which occupies the largest place in public law and policy. (Of two contestants, each can retain his religion or literary preferences without depriving the other of like possessions; they cannot both retain the same piece of material property.) The economic problem is vital in the sense of dealing with the means by which we maintain life; and it is invoked as justification for the political immoralism of States. Until the confusions concerning it are cleared up, it will serve little purpose to analyse the other elements of conflict.
What justifies the assumption that the predatory egotism, sacred or profane, here implied, was an indispensable part of the pre-war political philosophy, explaining the great part of policy in the international field?[102]
First the facts: the whole history of international conflict in the decade or two which preceded the War; and the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. If you would find out the nature of a people’s (or a statesman’s) political morality, note their conduct when they have complete power to carry their desires into effect. The terms of peace, and the relations of the Allies with Russia, show a deliberate and avowed pre-occupation with sources of oil, iron, coal; with indemnities, investments, old debts; with Colonies, markets; the elimination of commercial rivals—with all these things to a degree very much greater and in a fashion much more direct than was assumed in The Great Illusion.
But the tendency had been evident in the conflicts which preceded the War. These conflicts, in so far as the Great Powers were concerned, had been in practically every case over territory, or roads to territory; over Madagascar, Egypt, Morocco, Korea, Mongolia; ‘warm water’ ports, the division of Africa, the partitioning of China, loans thereto and concessions therein; the Persian Gulf, the Bagdad Railway, the Panama Canal. Where the principle of nationality was denied by any Great Power it was generally because to recognise it might block access to the sea or raw materials, throw a barrier across the road to undeveloped territory.
There was no denial of this by those who treated of public affairs. Mr Lloyd George declared that England would be quite ready to go to war rather than have the Morocco question settled without reference to her. Famous writers like Mahan did not balk at conclusions like this:—
‘It is the great amount of unexploited raw material in territories politically backward, and now imperfectly possessed by the nominal owners, which at the present moment constitutes the temptation and the impulse to war of European States.’[103]
Nor to justify them thus:—
‘More and more Germany needs the assured importation of raw materials, and, where possible, control of regions productive of such materials. More and more she requires assured markets, and security as to the importation of food, since less and less comparatively is produced within her own borders for her rapidly increasing population. This all means security at sea.... Yet the supremacy of Great Britain in European seas means a perpetually latent control of German commerce.... The world has long been accustomed to the idea of a predominant naval power, coupling it accurately with the name of Great Britain: and it has been noted that such power, when achieved, is commonly found associated with commercial and industrial pre-eminence, the struggle for which is now in progress between Great Britain and Germany. Such pre-eminence forces a nation to seek markets, and, where possible, to control them to its own advantage by preponderant force, the ultimate expression of which is possession.... From this flow two results: the attempt to possess, and the organisation of force by which to maintain possession already achieved.... This statement is simply a specific formulation of the general necessity stated; itself an inevitable link in a chain of logical sequence: industry, markets, control, navy, bases....[104]
Mr Spenser Wilkinson, of a corresponding English school, is just as definite:—
‘The effect of growth is an expansion and an increase of power. It necessarily affects the environment of the growing organisms; it interferes with the status quo. Existing rights and interests are disturbed by the fact of growth, which is itself a change. The growing community finds itself hedged in by previously existing and surviving conditions, and fettered by prescriptive rights. There is, therefore, an exertion of force to overcome resistance. No process of law or of arbitration can deal with this phenomenon, because any tribunal administering a system of right or law must base its decision upon the tradition of the past which has become unsuited to the new conditions that have arisen. The growing State is necessarily expansive or aggressive.’[105]
Even more decisive as a definite philosophy are the propositions of Mr Petre, who, writing on ‘The Mandate of Humanity,’ says:—
‘The conscience of a State cannot, therefore, be as delicate, as disinterested, as altruistic, as that of the noblest individuals. The State exists primarily for its own people and only secondarily for the rest of the world. Hence, given a dispute in which it feels its rights and welfare to be at stake, it may, however erroneously, set aside its moral obligations to international society in favour of its obligations to the people for whom it exists.
‘But no righteous conscience, it may be said, could give its verdict against a solemn pledge taken and reciprocated; no righteous conscience could, in a society of nations, declare against the ends of that society. Indeed I think it could, and sometimes would, if its sense of justice were outraged, if its duty to those who were bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh came into conflict with its duty to those who were not directly belonging to it....
‘The mechanism of a State exists mainly for its own preservation, and cannot be turned against this, its legitimate end. The conscience of a State will not traverse this main condition, and to weaken its conscience is to weaken its life....
‘The strong will not give way to the weak; the one who thinks himself in the right will not yield to those whom he believes to be in the wrong; the living generations will not be restrained by the promises to a dead one; nature will not be controlled by conventions.’[106]
It is the last note that gives the key to popular feeling about the scramble for territory. In The Great Illusion whole pages of popular writing are quoted to show that the conception of the struggle as in truth the struggle for survival had firmly planted itself in the popular consciousness. One of the critics who is so severe upon the present writer for trying to undermine the economic foundation of that popular creed, Benjamin Kidd, himself testifies to the depth and sweep of this pseudo-Darwinism (he seems to think indeed that it is true Darwinism, which it is not, as Darwin himself pointed out). He declares that ‘there is no precedent in the history of the human mind to compare with the saturnalia of the Western intellect’ which followed the popularisation of what he regards as Darwin’s case and I would regard as a distortion of it. Kidd says it ‘touched the profoundest depth of the psychology of the West.’ ‘Everywhere throughout civilisation an almost inconceivable influence was given to the doctrine of the law of biological necessity in books of statecraft and war-craft, of expanding military empires.’ ‘Struggle for life,’ ‘a biological necessity,’ ‘survival of the fit,’ had passed into popular use and had come to buttress popular feeling about the inevitability of war and its ultimate justification and the uselessness of organising the natives save on a basis of conflict.
We are now in a position to see the respective moral positions of the two protagonists.
The advocate of Political Theory No. 1, which an overwhelming preponderance of evidence shows to be the prevailing theory, says:—You Pacifists are asking us to commit national suicide; to sacrifice future generations to your political ideals. Now, as voters or statesmen we are trustees, we act for others. Sacrifice, suicide even, on behalf of an ideal, may be justified when we are sacrificing ourselves. But we cannot sacrifice others, our wards. Our first duty is to our own nation, our own children; to their national security and future welfare. It is regrettable if, by the conquests, wars, blockades, rendered necessary by those objects other people starve, and lose their national freedom and see their children die; but that is the hard necessity of life in a hard world.
Advocate of Political Theory No. 2 says:—I deny that the excuse of justification which you give for your cruelty to others is a valid excuse or justification. Pacifism does not ask you to sacrifice your people, to betray the interest of your wards. You will serve their interests best by the policy we advocate. Your children will not be more assured of their sustenance by these conquests that attempt to render the feeding of foreign children more difficult; yours will be less secure. By co-operating with those others instead of using your energies against them, the resultant wealth....
Advocate No. 1:—Wealth! Interest! You introduce your wretched economic calculations of interest into a question of Patriotism. You have the soul of a bagman concerned only to restore ‘the blessed hour of tranquil money-getting,’ and Sir William Robertson Nicoll shall denounce you in the British Weekly!
And the discussion usually ends with this moral flourish and gestures of melodramatic indignation.
But are they honest gestures? Here are the upholders of a certain position who say:—‘In certain circumstances as when you are in a position of trustee, the only moral course, the only right course, is to be guided by the interests of your ward. Your duty then demands a calculation of advantage. You may not be generous at your ward’s expense. This is the justification of the “sacred egoism” of the poet.’
If in that case a critic says: ‘Very well. Let us consider what will be the best interests of your ward,’ is it really open to the first party to explain in a paroxysm of moral indignation: ‘You are making a shameful and disgraceful appeal to selfishness and avarice?’
This is not an attempt to answer one set of critics by quoting another set. The self-same people take those two attitudes. I have quoted above a passage of Admiral Mahan’s in which he declares that nations can never be expected to act from any other motive than that of interest (a generalisation, by the way, from which I should most emphatically dissent). He goes on to declare that Governments ‘must put first the rival interests of their own wards ... their own people,’ and are thus pushed to the acquisition of markets by means of military predominance.
Very well. The Great Illusion argued some of Admiral Mahan’s propositions in terms of interest and advantage. And then, when he desired to demolish that argument, he did not hesitate in a long article in the North American Review to write as follows:—
‘The purpose of armaments, in the minds of those maintaining them, is not primarily an economical advantage, in the sense of depriving a neighbour State of its own, or fear of such consequences to itself through the deliberate aggression of a rival having that particular end in view.... The fundamental proposition of the book is a mistake. Nations are under no illusion as to the unprofitableness of war in itself.... The entire conception of the work is itself an illusion, based upon a profound misreading of human action. To regard the world as governed by self-interest only is to live in a non-existent world, an ideal world, a world possessed by an idea much less worthy than those which mankind, to do it bare justice, persistently entertains.’[107]
Admiral Mahan was a writer of very great and deserved reputation, in the very first rank of those dealing with the relations of power to national politics, certainly incapable of any conscious dishonesty of opinion. Yet, as we have seen, his opinion on the most important fact of all about war—its ultimate purpose, and the reasons which justify it or provoke it—swings violently in absolute self-contradiction. And the flat contradiction here revealed shows—and this surely is the moral of such an incident—that he could never have put to himself detachedly, coldly, impartially the question: ‘What do I really believe about the motives of nations in War? To what do the facts as a whole really point?’ Had he done so, it might have been revealed to him that what really determined his opinion about the causes of war was a desire to justify the great profession of arms, to one side of which he had devoted his life and given years of earnest labour and study; to defend from some imputation of futility one of the most ancient of man’s activities that calls for some at least of the sublimest of human qualities. If a widened idealism clearly discredited that ancient institution, he was prepared to show that an ineradicable conflict of national interests rendered it inevitable. If it was shown that war was irrelevant to those conflicts, or ineffective as a means of protecting the interests concerned, he was prepared to show that the motives pushing to war were not those of interest at all.
It may be said that none the less the thesis under discussion substitutes one selfish argument for another; tries by appealing to self-interest (the self-interest of a group or nation) to turn selfishness from a destructive result to a more social result. Its basis is self. Even that is not really true. For, first, that argument ignores the question of trusteeship; and, secondly, it involves a confusion between the motive of a given policy and the criterion by which its goodness or badness shall be tested.
How is one to deal with the claim of the ‘mystic nationalist’ (he exists abundantly even outside the Balkans) that the subjugation of some neighbouring nationalism is demanded by honour; that only the great State can be the really good State; that power—‘majesty,’ as the Oriental would say—is a thing good in itself?[108] There are ultimate questions as to what is good and what is bad that no argument can answer; ultimate values which cannot be discussed. But one can reduce those unarguable values to a minimum by appealing to certain social needs. A State which has plenty of food may not be a good State; but a State which cannot feed its population cannot be a good State, for in that case the citizens will be hungry, greedy, and violent.
In other words, certain social needs and certain social utilities—which we can all recognise as indispensables—furnish a ground of agreement for the common action without which no society can be established. And the need for such a criterion becomes more manifest as we learn more of the wonderful fashion in which we sublimate our motives. A country refuses to submit its dispute to arbitration, because its ‘honour’ is involved. Many books have been written to try and find out precisely what honour of this kind is. One of the best of them has decided that it is anything which a country cares to make it. It is never the presence of coal, or iron, or oil, which makes it imperative to retain a given territory: it is honour (as Italy’s Foreign Minister explained when Italy went to war for the conquest of Tripoli). Unfortunately, rival States have also impulses of honour which compel them to claim the same undeveloped territory. Nothing can prove—or disprove—that honour, in such circumstances, is invoked by each or either of the parties concerned to make a piece of acquisitiveness or megalomania appear as fine to himself as possible: that, just because he has a lurking suspicion that all is not well with the operation, he seeks to justify it to himself with fine words that have a very vague content. But on this basis there can be no agreement. If, however, one shifts the discussion to the question of what is best for the social welfare of both, one can get a modus vivendi. For each to admit that he has no right so to use his power as to deprive the other of means of life, would be the beginning of a code which could be tested. Each might conceivably have that right to deprive the other of means of livelihood, if it were a choice between the lives of his own people or others.
The economic fact is the test of the ethical claim: if it really be true that we must withhold sources of food from others because otherwise our own would starve, there is some ethical justification for such use of our power. If such is not the fact, the whole moral issue is changed, and with it, to the degree to which it is mutually realised, the social outlook and attitude. The knowledge of interdependence is part, at least, of an attitude which makes the ‘social sense’—the sense that one kind of arrangement is fair and workable, and another is not. To bring home the fact of this interdependence is not simply an appeal to selfishness: it is to reveal a method by which an apparently irreconcilable conflict of vital needs can be reconciled. The sense of interdependence, of the need of one for another, is part of the foundation of the very difficult art of living together.
Much mischief arises from the misunderstanding of the term ‘economic motive.’ Let us examine some further examples of this. One is a common confusion of terms: an economic motive may be the reverse of selfish. The long sustained efforts of parents to provide fittingly for their children—efforts continued, it may be, through half a lifetime—are certainly economic. Just as certainly they are not selfish in any exact sense of the term. Yet something like this confusion seems to overlie the discussion of economics in connection with war.
Speaking broadly, I do not believe that men ever go to war from a cold calculation of advantage or profit. I never have believed it. It seems to me an obvious and childish misreading of human psychology. I cannot see how it is possible to imagine a man laying down his life on the battle-field for personal gain. Nations do not fight for their money or interests, they fight for their rights, or what they believe to be their rights. The very gallant men who triumphed at Bull Run or Chancellorsville were not fighting for the profits on slave-labour: they were fighting for what they believed to be their independence: the rights, as they would have said, to self-government or, as we should now say, of self-determination. Yet it was a conflict which arose out of slave labour: an economic question. Now the most elementary of all rights, in the sense of the first right which a people will claim, is the right to existence—the right of a population to bread and a decent livelihood.[109] For that nations certainly will fight. Yet, as we see, it is a right which arises out of an economic need or conflict. We have seen how it works as a factor in our own foreign policy: as a compelling motive for the command of the sea. We believe that the feeding of these islands depends upon it: that if we lost it our children might die in the streets and the lack of food compel us to an ignominious surrender. It is this relation of vital food supply to preponderant sea power which has caused us to tolerate no challenge to the latter. We know the part which the growth of the German Navy played in shaping Anglo-Continental relations before the War; the part which any challenge to our naval preponderance has always played in determining our foreign policy. The command of the sea, with all that that means in the way of having built up a tradition, a battle-cry in politics, has certainly bound up with it this life and death fact of feeding our population. That is to say it is an economic need. Yet the determination of some millions of Englishmen to fight for this right to life, to die rather than see the daily bread of their people in jeopardy, would be adequately described by some phrase about Englishmen going to war because it ‘paid.’ It would be a silly or dishonest gibe. Yet that is precisely the kind of gibe that I have had to face these fifteen years in attempting to disentangle the forces and motives underlying international conflict.
What picture is summoned to our minds by the word ‘economics’ in relation to war? To the critics whose indignation is so excited at the introduction of the subject at all into the discussion of war—and they include, unhappily, some of the great names of English literature—‘economic’ seems to carry no picture but that of an obese Semitic stockbroker, in quaking fear for his profits. This view cannot be said to imply either much imagination or much sense of reality. For among the stockbrokers, the usurers, those closest to financial manipulation and in touch with financial changes, are to be found some groups numerically small, who are more likely to gain than to lose by war; and the present writer has never suggested the contrary.
But the ‘economic futility’ of war expresses itself otherwise: in half a Continent unable to feed or clothe or warm itself; millions rendered neurotic, abnormal, hysterical by malnutrition, disease, and anxiety; millions rendered greedy, selfish, and violent by the constant strain of hunger; resulting in ‘social unrest’ that threatens more and more to become sheer chaos and confusion: the dissolution and disintegration of society. Everywhere, in the cities, are the children who cry and who are not fed, who raise shrunken arms to our statesmen who talk with pride[110] of their stern measures of ‘rigorous’ blockade. Rickety and dying children, and undying hate for us, their murderers, in the hearts of their mothers—these are the human realities of the ‘economics of war.’
The desire to prevent these things, to bring about an order that would render possible both patriotism and mercy, would save us from the dreadful dilemma of feeding our own children only by the torture and death of others equally innocent—the effort to this end is represented as a mere appeal to selfishness and avarice, something mean and ignoble, a degradation of human motive.
‘These theoretical dilemmas do not state accurately the real conditions of politics,’ the reader may object. ‘No one proposes to inflict famine as a means of enforcing our policy’ ... ‘England does not make war on women and children.’
Not one man or woman in a million, English or other, would wittingly inflict the suffering of starvation upon a single child, if the child were visible to his eyes, present in his mind, and if the simple human fact were not obscured by the much more complex and artificial facts that have gathered round our conceptions of patriotism. The heaviest indictment of the military-nationalist philosophy we are discussing is that it manages successfully to cover up human realities by dehumanising abstractions. From the moment that the child becomes a part of that abstraction—‘Russia,’ ‘Austria,’ ‘Germany’—it loses its human identity, and becomes merely an impersonal part of the political problem of the struggle of our nation with others. The inverted moral alchemy, by which the golden instinct that we associate with so much of direct human contact is transformed into the leaden cruelty of nationalist hate and high statecraft, has been dealt with at the close of Part I. When in tones of moral indignation it is declared that Englishmen ‘do not make war on women and children,’ we must face the truth and say that Englishmen, like all peoples, do make such war.
An action in public policy—the proclamation of the blockade, or the confiscation of so much tonnage, or the cession of territory, or the refusal of a loan—these things are remote and vague; not only is the relation between results and causes remote and sometimes difficult to establish, but the results themselves are invisible and far away. And when the results of a policy are remote, and can be slurred over in our minds, we are perfectly ready to apply, logically and ruthlessly, the most ferocious of political theories. It is of supreme importance then what those theories happen to be. When the issue of war and peace hangs in the balance, the beam may well be kicked one way or the other by our general political philosophy, these somewhat vague and hazy notions about life being a struggle, and nature red of tooth and claw, about wars being part of the cosmic process, sanctioned by professors and bishops and writers. It may well be these vague notions that lead us to acquiesce in the blockade or the newest war. The typhus or the rickets do not kill or maim any the less because we do not in our minds connect those results with the political abstractions that we bandy about so lightly. And we touch there the greatest service which a more ‘economic’ treatment of European problems may perform. If the Treaty of Versailles had been more economic it would also have been a more humane and human document. If there had been more of Mr Keynes and less of M. Clemenceau, there would have been not only more food in the world, but more kindliness; not only less famine, but less hate; not only more life, but a better way of life; those living would have been nearer to understanding and discarding the way of death.
Let us summarise the points so far made with reference to the ‘economic’ motive.
We need not accept any hard and fast (and in the view of the present writer, unsound) doctrine of economic determinism, in order to admit the truth of the following:—
1. Until economic difficulties are so far solved as to give the mass of the people the means of secure and tolerable physical existence, economic considerations and motives will tend to exclude all others. The way to give the spiritual a fair chance with ordinary men and women is not to be magnificently superior to their economic difficulties, but to find a solution for them. Until the economic dilemma is solved, no solution of moral difficulties will be adequate. If you want to get rid of the economic preoccupation, you must solve the worst of the economic problem.
2. In the same way the solution of the economic conflict between nations will not of itself suffice to establish peace; but no peace is possible until that conflict is solved. That makes it of sufficient importance.
3. The ‘economic’ problem involved in international politics the use of political power for economic ends—is also one of Right, including the most elemental of all rights, that to exist.
4. The answer which we give to that question of Right will depend upon our answer to the actual query of The Great Illusion: must a country of expanding population expand its territory or trade by means of its political power, in order to live? Is the political struggle for territory a struggle for bread?
5. If we take the view that the truth is contained in neither an unqualified affirmative nor an unqualified negative, then all the more is it necessary that the interdependence of peoples, the necessity for a truly international economy, should become a commonplace. A wider realisation of those facts would help to create that pre-disposition necessary for a belief in the workability of voluntary co-operation, a belief which must precede any successful attempt to make such co-operation the basis of an international order.
6. The economic argument of The Great Illusion, if valid, destroys the pseudo-scientific justification for political immoralism, the doctrine of State necessity, which has marked so much of classical statecraft.
7. The main defects of the Treaty of Versailles are due to the pressure of a public opinion obsessed by just those ideas of nations as persons, of conflicting interests, which The Great Illusion attempted to destroy. If the Treaty had been inspired by the ideas of interdependence of interest, it would have been not only more in the interests of the Allies, but morally sounder, providing a better ethical basis for future peace.
8. To go on ignoring the economic unity and interdependence of Europe, to refuse to subject nationalist pugnacities to that needed unity because ‘economics’ are sordid, is to refuse to face the needs of human life, and the forces that shape it. Such an attitude, while professing moral elevation, involves a denial of the right of others to live. Its worst defect, perhaps, is that its heroics are fatal to intellectual rectitude, to truth. No society built upon such foundations can stand.
THE preceding chapters have dealt rather with misconceptions concerning The Great Illusion than with its positive propositions. What, outlined as briefly as possible, was its central argument?
That argument was an elaboration of these propositions: Military preponderance, conquest, as a means to man’s most elemental needs—bread, sustenance—is futile, because the processes (exchange, division of labour) to which the dense populations of modern Western society are compelled to resort, cannot be exacted by military coercion; they can only operate as the result of a large measure of voluntary acquiescence by the parties concerned. A realisation of this truth is indispensable for the restraint of the instinctive pugnacities that hamper human relationship, particularly where nationalism enters.[111] The competition for power so stimulates those pugnacities and fears, that isolated national power cannot ensure a nation’s political security or independence. Political security and economic well-being can only be ensured by international co-operation. This must be economic as well as political, be directed, that is, not only at pooling military forces for the purpose of restraining aggression, but at the maintenance of some economic code which will ensure for all nations, whether militarily powerful or not, fair economic opportunity and means of subsistence.
It was, in other words, an attempt to clear the road to a more workable international policy by undermining the main conceptions and prepossessions inimical to an international order.[112] It did not elaborate machinery, but the facts it dealt with point clearly to certain conclusions on that head.
While arguing that prevailing beliefs (false beliefs for the most part) and feelings (largely directed by the false beliefs) were the determining factors in international politics, the author challenged the prevailing assumption of the unchangeability of those ideas and feelings, particularly the proposition that war between human groups arises out of instincts and emotions incapable of modification or control or re-direction by conscious effort. The author placed equal emphasis on both parts of the proposition—that dealing with the alleged immutability of human pugnacity and ideas, and that which challenged the representation of war as an inevitable struggle for physical sustenance—if only because no exposure of the biological fallacy would be other than futile if the former proposition were true.[113]
If conduct in these matters is the automatic reaction to uncontrollable instinct and is not affected by ideas, or if ideas themselves are the mere reflection of that instinct, obviously it is no use attempting demonstrations of futility, economic or other. The more we demonstrate the intensity of our inherent pugnacity and irrationalism, the more do we in fact demonstrate the need for the conscious control of those instincts. The alternative conclusion is fatalism: an admission not only that our ship is not under control, but that we have given up the task of getting it under control. We have surrendered our freedom.
Moreover, our record shows that the direction taken by our pugnacities—their objective—is in fact largely determined by traditions and ideas which are in part at least the sum of conscious intellectual effort. The history of religious persecution—its wars, inquisitions, repressions—shows a great change (which we must admit as a fact, whether we regard it as good or bad) not only of idea but of feeling.[114] The book rejected instinct as sufficient guide and urged the need of discipline by intelligent foresight of consequence.
To examine our subconscious or unconscious motives of conduct is the first step to making them conscious and modifying them.
This does not imply that instincts—whether of pugnacity or other—can readily be repressed by a mere effort of will. But their direction, the object upon which they expend themselves, will depend upon our interpretation of facts. If we interpret the hailstorm or the curdled milk in one way, our fear and hatred of the witch is intense; the same facts interpreted another way make the witch an object of another emotion, pity.
Reason may be a very small part of the apparatus of human conduct compared with the part played by the unconscious and subconscious, the instinctive and the emotional. The power of a ship’s compass is very small indeed compared with the power developed by the engines. But the greater the power of the engines, the greater will be the disaster if the relatively tiny compass is deflected and causes the ship to be driven on to the rocks. The illustration indicates, not exactly but with sufficient truth, the relationship of ‘reason’ to ‘instinct.’
The instincts that push to self-assertion, to the acquisition of preponderant power, are so strong that we shall only abandon that method as the result of perceiving its futility. Co-operation, which means a relationship of partnership and give and take, will not succeed till force has failed.
The futility of power as a means to our most fundamental and social ends is due mainly to two facts, one mechanical, and the other moral. The mechanical fact is that if we really need another, our power over him has very definite limits. Our dependence on him gives him a weapon against us. The moral fact is that in demanding a position of domination, we ask something to which we should not accede if it were asked of us: the claim does not stand the test of the categorical imperative. If we need another’s labour, we cannot kill him; if his custom, we cannot forbid him to earn money. If his labour is to be effective, we must give him tools, knowledge; and these things can be used to resist our exactions. To the degree to which he is powerful for service he is powerful for resistance. A nation wealthy as a customer will also be ubiquitous as a competitor.
The factors which have operated to make physical compulsion (slavery) as a means of obtaining service less economical than service for reward, operate just as effectively between nations. The employment of military force for economic ends is an attempt to apply indirectly the principle of chattel-slavery to groups; and involves the same disadvantages.[115]
In so far as coercion represents a means of securing a wider and more effective social co-operation as against a narrower social co-operation, or more anarchic condition, it is likely to be successful and to justify itself socially. The imposition of Western government upon backward peoples approximates to the role of police; the struggles between the armed forces of rival Western Powers do not. The function of a police force is the exact contrary to that of armies competing with one another.[116]
The demonstration of the futility of conquest rested mainly on these facts. After conquest the conquered people cannot be killed. They cannot be allowed to starve. Pressure of population on means of subsistence has not been reduced, but probably increased, since the number of mouths to fill eliminated by the casualty lists is not equivalent to the reduced production occasioned by war. To impose by force (e.g. exclusion from raw materials) a lower standard of living, creates (a) resistance which involves costs of coercion (generally in military establishments, but also in the political difficulties in which the coercion of hostile peoples—as in Alsace-Lorraine and Ireland—generally involves their conqueror), costs which must be deducted from the economic advantage of the conquest; and (b) loss of markets which may be indispensable to countries (like Britain) whose prosperity depends upon an international division of labour. A population that lives by exchanging its coal and iron for (say) food, does not profit by reducing the productivity of subject peoples engaged in food production.
In The Great Illusion the case was put as follows:—