A word or two as to the facts alleged in the foregoing. We are told that the two nations not only followed respectively two different methods, but that it was in each case a deliberate national choice, supported by organised propaganda. ‘By consciously controlled methods, France,’ we are told, ‘endeavoured’ to keep her birth-rate down. The fact is, of course, that all the conscious endeavours of ‘France,’ if by France is meant the Government, the Church, the learned bodies, were in the exactly contrary direction. Not only organised propaganda, but most elaborate legislation, aiming through taxation at giving a preference to large families, has for a generation been industriously urging an increase in the French population. It has notoriously been a standing dish in the menu of the reformers and uplifters of nearly every political party. What we obviously have in the case of France is not a decision made by the nation as a corporate body and the Government representing it, but a tendency which their deliberate decision, as represented by propaganda and legislation, has been unable to check.[31]

In discussing the merits of the two plans, Dr Pearl goes on:—

Let us assume, therefore, that France adopts the high birth-rate plan. She, too, will then be compelled, if the plan has worked out successfully, ‘to get out and conquer some one.’ But that some one will also, for the same reasons, have been following the plan of high birth-rate. What is then to happen? A competition in fecundity as a solution of the excess population problem seems inadequate. Yet it is inevitably prompted by the nationalist impulse.

Happily the general rise in the standard of life itself furnishes a solution. As we have seen, the birth-rate is, within certain limits, in inverse ratio to a people’s prosperity. But again, nationalism, by preventing the economic unification of Europe, may well stand in the way of that solution also. It checks the tendencies which would solve the problem.

A fall in the birth-rate, as a concomitant of a rising standard of living, was beginning to be revealed in Germany also before the War.[32] If now, under the new order, German industrialism is checked and we get an agricultural population compelled by circumstances to a standard of life not higher than that of the Russian moujik, we may perhaps also be faced by a revival of high fertility in mystic disregard of the material means available for the support of the population.

There is a further point.

Those who have dealt with the world’s food resources point out that there are great sources of food still undeveloped. But the difficulties do not arise from a total shortage. They arise from a mal-distribution of population, coupled with the fact that as between nations the Ten Commandments—particularly the eighth—do not run. By the code of nationalism we have no obligation towards starving foreigners. A nation may seize territory which it does not need, and exclude from it those who direly need its resources. While we insist that internationalism is political atheism, and that the only doctrine fit for red-blooded people is what Colonel Roosevelt called ‘intense Nationalism,’ intense nationalism means, in economic practice, the attempt, even at some cost, to render the political unit also the economic unit, and as far as possible self-sufficing.

It serves little purpose, therefore, to point out that one or two States in South America can produce food for half the world, if we also create a political tradition which leads the patriotic South American to insist upon having his own manufactures, even at cost to himself, so that he will not need ours. He will achieve that result at the cost of diminishing his production of food. Both he and the Englishman will be poorer, but according to the standard of the intense nationalist, the result should be a good one, though it may confront many of us with starvation, just as the intense nationalism of the various nations of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe actually results in famine on soil fully capable, before the War, of supporting the population, and capable of supporting still greater populations if natural resources are used to the best advantage. It is political passions, anti-social doctrines, and the muddle, confusion, and hostility that go therewith which are the real cause of the scarcity.

And that may forecast the position of Europe as a whole to-morrow: we may suffer starvation for the patriotic joy of seeing foreigners—Boche or Bolshevist—suffer in still greater degree.

Given the nationalist conception of a world divided into completely distinct groups of separate corporate bodies, entities so different that the binding social ties between them (laws, in fact) are impossible of maintenance, there must inevitably grow up pugnacities and rivalries, creating a general sense of conflict that will render immeasurably difficult the necessary co-operation between the peoples, the kind of co-operation which the Treaty of Versailles has, in so large degree, deliberately destroyed. Whether the hostility comes, in the first instance, from the ‘herd,’ or tribal, instinct, and develops into a sense of economic hostility, or whether the hostility arises from the conviction that there exists a conflict of interest, the result is pretty much the same. I happen to have put the case elsewhere in these terms:—

If it be true that since the world is of limited space, we must fight one another for it, that if our children are to be fed others must starve, then agreement between peoples will be for ever impossible. Nations will certainly not commit suicide for the sake of peace. If this is really the relationship of two great nations, they are, of course, in the position of two cannibals, one of whom says to the other: ‘Either I have got to eat you, or you have got to eat me. Let’s come to a friendly agreement about it.’ They won’t come to a friendly agreement about it. They will fight. And my point is that not only would they fight if it really were true that the one had to kill and eat the other, but they would fight as long as they believed it to be true. It might be that there was ample food within their reach—out of their reach, say, so long as each acted alone, but within their reach if one would stand on the shoulders of the other (‘this is an allegory’), and so get the fat cocoa-nuts on the higher branches. But they would, nevertheless, be cannibals so long as each believed that the flesh of the other was the only source of food. It would be that mistake, not the necessary fact, which would provoke them to fight.

When we learn that one Balkan State refuses to another a necessary raw material, or access over a railroad, because it prefers the suffering of that neighbour to its own welfare, we are shocked and talk about primitive and barbarous passions. But are we ourselves—Britain or France—in better state? The whole story of the negotiations about the indemnity and the restoration of Europe shows that we are not. Quite soon after the Armistice the expert advisers of the British Government urged the necessity, for the economic safety of the Allies themselves, of helping in the restoration of Germany. But they also admitted that it was quite hopeless to go to Parliament with any proposal to help Germany. And even when one gets a stage further and there is general admission ‘in the abstract’ that if France is to secure reparations, Germany must be fed and permitted to work, the sentiment of hostility stands in the way of any specific measure.

We are faced with certain traditions and moralities, involving a psychology which, gathering round words like ‘patriotism,’ deprives us of the emotional restraint and moral discipline necessary to carry through the measures which intellectually we recognise to be indispensable to our country’s welfare.

We thus see why it is impossible to speak of international economics without predicating the nation as a concept. In the economic problems of nations or States, one is necessarily dealing not only with economic facts, but with political facts: a political entity in its economic relations (before the War inconsiderable, but since the War very great); group consciousness; the interests, or what is sometimes as important, the supposed interests of this group or area as distinct from that; the moral phenomena of nationalism—group preferences or prejudices, herd instinct, tribal hostility. All this is part of the economic problem in international politics. Protection, for instance, is only in part a problem of economics; it is also a problem of political preferences: the manufacturer who is content to face the competition of his own countrymen, objects to facing that of foreigners. Political conceptions are part of the economic problem when dealing with nations, just as primary economic need must be taken into account as part of the cause of the conflict of nationalisms.

One very commonly hears the argument: ‘What is the good of discussing economic forces in relation to the conflict of Europe when our participation, for instance, in the War, was in no way prompted by economic considerations?’

Our motive may not have been economic, yet the cause of the War may very well have been mainly economic. The sentiment of nationality may be a stronger motive in European politics than any other. The chief menace to nationality may none the less be economic need.

While it may be perfectly true that Belgians, Serbs, Poles, Bohemians, fought from motives of nationality, it may also be true that the wars which they were compelled to fight had an economic cause.

If the desire of Germany or Austria for undeveloped territory had anything to do with that thrust towards the Near East in the way of which stood Serbian nationality, then economic causes had something to do with compelling Serbia and Belgium to fight for their nationality. Owing to the pressure of the economic need or greed of others, we are still concerned with economic forces, though we may be actuated only by the purest nationalism: the economic pressure of others is obviously part of the problem of our national defence. And if one examines in turn the chief problems of nationality, one finds in almost every case that any aggression by which it may be menaced is prompted by the need, or assumed need, of other nations for mines, ports, access to the sea (warm water or other), or for strategic frontiers to defend those things.

Why should the desire of one people to rule itself, to be free, be thwarted by another making exactly the same demands? In the case of the Germans we ascribe it to some special and evil lust peculiar to their race and training. But the Peace has revealed to us that it exists in every people, every one.

A glance at the map enables us to realise readily enough why a given State may resist the ‘complete independence’ of a neighbouring territory.

Here, on the borders of Russia, for instance, are a number of small States in a position to block the access of the population of Russia to the sea; in a position, indeed, by their control of certain essential raw materials, to hold up the development of a hundred million people, very much as the robber barons of the Rhine held up the commerce of that waterway. No powerful Russia, Bolshevik or Czarist, will permanently recognise the absolute right of a little State, at will (at the bidding, perhaps, of some military dictator, who in South American fashion may have seized its Government), to block her access to the ‘highways of the world.’ ‘Sovereignty and independence’—absolute sovereignty over its own territory, that is—may well include the ‘right’ to make the existence of others intolerable. Ought any nation to have such a right? Like questions are raised in the case of the States that once were Austria. They have achieved their complete freedom and independence. Some of the results are dealt with in the first chapter. In some cases the new States are using their ‘freedom, sovereignty, and independence’ for the purpose of worsening a condition of famine and economic paralysis that spells indescribable suffering for millions of completely innocent folk.[33]

So far, the new Europe is economically less competent than the old. The old Austrian grouping, for instance, made possible a stable and orderly life for fifty million people. A Mittel Europa, with its Berlin-Bagdad designs, would, whatever its dangers otherwise, have given us a vastly greater area of co-ordinated production, an area approaching that of the United States; it would have ensured the effective co-operation of populations greatly in excess of those of the United States. Whatever else might have happened, there would have been no destruction by famine of the populations concerned if some such plan of organised production had materialised. The old Austria at least ensured for the children physical health and education, for the peasants work in their fields, in security; and although denial of full national rights was doubtless an evil thing, it still left free a vast field of human activities—those of the family, of productive labour, of religion, music, art, love, laughter.

A Europe of small ‘absolute’ nationalisms threatens to make these things impossible. We have no standard, unhappily, by which we can appraise the moral loss and gain in the exchange of the European life of July, 1914, for that which Europe now faces and is likely to face in the coming years. But if we cannot measure or weigh the moral value of absolute nationalism, the present situation does enable us to judge in some measure the degree of security achieved for the principle of nationality, and to what extent it may be menaced by the economic needs of the millions of Europe. And one is impelled to ask whether nationality is not threatened by a danger far greater than any it had to meet in the old Europe, in the anarchy and chaos that nationalism itself is at present producing.

The greater States, like Germany, may conceivably manage somehow to find a modus vivendi. A self-sufficing State may perhaps be developed (a fact which will enable Germany at one and the same time to escape the payment of reparations and to defy future blockades). But that will mean embittered nationalism. The sense of exclusion and resentment will remain.

The need of Germany for outside raw materials and food may, as the result of this effort to become self-sufficing, prove less than the above considerations might suggest. But unhappily, assumed need can be as patent a motive in international politics as real need. Our recent acquiescence in the independence of Egypt would imply that our need for persistent occupation was not as great as we supposed. Yet the desire to remain in Egypt helped to shape our foreign policy during a whole generation, and played no small part in the bargaining with France over Morocco which widened the gulf between ourselves and Germany.

The preservation of the principle of nationality depends upon making it subject at least to some form of internationalism. If ‘self-determination’ means the right to condemn other peoples to death by starvation, then that principle cannot survive. The Balkanisation of Europe, turning it into a cauldron of rival ‘absolute’ nationalisms, does not mean safety for the principle of nationality, it means its ultimate destruction either by anarchy or by the autocratic domination of the great Powers. The problem is to reconcile national right and international obligation. That will mean a discipline of the national impulse, and of the instincts of domination which so readily attach themselves to it. The recognition of economic needs will certainly help towards such discipline. However ‘materialistic’ it may be to recognise the right of others to life, that recognition makes a sounder foundation for human society than do the instinctive impulses of mystic nationalism.

Until we have managed somehow to create an economic code or comity which makes the sovereignty of each nationality subject to the general need of the whole body of organised society, this struggle, in which nationality is for ever threatened, will go on.

The alternatives were very clearly stated on the other side of the Atlantic:—

‘The underlying assumption heretofore has been that a nation’s security and prosperity rest chiefly upon its own strength and resources. Such an assumption has been used to justify statesmen in attempting, on the ground of the supreme need for national security, to increase their own nation’s power and resources by insistence upon strategic frontiers, territory with raw material, outlets to the sea, even though that course does violence to the security and prosperity of others. Under any system in which adequate defence rests upon individual preponderance of power, the security of one must involve the insecurity of another, and must inevitably give rise to covert or overt competitions for power and territory, dangerous to peace and destructive to justice.

‘Under such a system of competitive as opposed to co-operative nationalism, the smaller nationalities can never be really secure. International commitments of some kind there must be. The price of secure nationality is some degree of internationalism.

‘The problem is to modify the conditions that lead to war. It will be quite inadequate to establish courts of arbitration or of law if they have to arbitrate or judge on the basis of the old laws and practices. These have proved insufficient.

‘It is obvious that any plan ensuring national security and equality of opportunity will involve a limitation of national sovereignty. States possessing ports that are the natural outlet of a hinterland occupied by another people, will perhaps regard it as an intolerable invasion of their independence if their sovereignty over those ports is not absolute but limited by the obligation to permit of their use by a foreign and possibly rival people on equal terms. States possessing territories in Africa or Asia inhabited by populations in a backward state of development, have generally heretofore looked for privileged and preferential treatment of their own industry and commerce in those territories. Great interests will be challenged, some sacrifice of national pride demanded, and the hostility of political factions in some countries will be aroused.

‘Yet if, after the War, States are to be shut out from the sea; if rapidly expanding populations find themselves excluded from raw materials indispensable to their prosperity; if the privileges and preferences enjoyed by States with overseas territories place the less powerful States at a disadvantage, we shall have re-established potent motives for that competition for political power which, in the past, has been so large an element in the causation of war and the subjugation of weaker peoples. The ideal of the security of all nations and “equality of opportunity” will have failed of realisation.’[34]

The Balance of Power and Defence of Law and Nationality.

‘Why were you so whole-soully for this war?’ asked the interviewer of Mr Lloyd George.

‘Belgium,’ was the reply.

The Prime Minister of the morrow continued:—

A little later, in the same interview, Mr Lloyd George, after allusion to German misrepresentations, said:—

This interview compels several very important conclusions. One, perhaps the most important—and the most hopeful—is profoundly creditable to English popular instinct and not so creditable to Mr Lloyd George.

If Mr Lloyd George is speaking the truth (it is difficult to find just the phrase which shall express one’s meaning and be Parliamentary), if he believes it would have been entirely safe for Great Britain to have kept out of the War provided only that the invasion of Belgium could have been prevented, then indeed is the account against the Cabinet, of which he was then a member and (after modifications in it) was shortly to become the head, a heavy one. I shall not pursue here the inquiry whether in point of simple political fact, Belgium was the sole cause of our entrance into the War, because I don’t suppose anybody believes it. But—and here Mr Lloyd George almost certainly does speak the truth—the English people gave their whole-souled support to the war because they believed it to be for a cause of which Belgium was the shining example and symbol: the right of the small nation to the same consideration as the great. That objective may not have been the main inspiration of the Governments: it was the main moral inspiration of the British people, the sentiment which the Government exploited, and to which it mainly appealed.

‘The purpose of the Allies in this War,’ said Mr Asquith, ‘is to pave the way for an international system which will secure the principle of equal rights for all civilised States ... to render secure the principle that international problems must be handled by free people and that their settlement shall no longer be hampered and swayed by the overmastering dictation of a Government controlled by a military caste.’ We should not sheathe the sword ‘until the rights of the smaller nationalities of Europe are placed upon an unassailable foundation.’ Professor Headlam (an ardent upholder of the Balance of Power, by the way), in a book that is characteristic of the early war literature, says the cardinal principles for which the War was fought were two: first, that Europe is, and should remain, divided between independent national States, and, second, that subject to the condition that it did not threaten or interfere with the security of other States, each country should have full and complete control over its own affairs.

How far has our victory achieved that object? Is the policy which our power supported before the War—and still supports—compatible with it? Does it help to strengthen the national security of Belgium, and other weak States like Yugo-Slavia, Poland, Albania, Finland, the Russian Border States, China?

It is here suggested, first, that our commitments under the Balance of Power policy which we had espoused[36] deprived our national force of any preventive effectiveness whatever in so far as the invasion of Belgium was concerned, and secondly, that our post-war policy, which is also in fact a Balance of Power policy is betraying in like fashion the cause of the small State.

It is further suggested that the very nature of the operation of the Balance of Power policy sets up in practice a conflict of obligation: if our power is pledged to the support of one particular group, like the Franco-Russian group of 1914, it cannot also be pledged to the support, honestly and impartially, of a general principle of European law.

We were drawn into the War, Mr Lloyd George tells us, to vindicate the integrity of Belgium. Very good. We know what happened in the negotiations. Germany wanted very much to know what would induce us to keep out of the War. Would we keep out of the War if Germany refrained from crossing the Belgian frontier? Such an assurance, giving Germany the strongest material reasons for not invading Belgium, converting a military reason (the only reason, we are told, that Germany would listen to) for that offence into an immensely powerful military reason against it, could not be given. In order to be able to maintain the Balance of Power against Germany we must ‘keep our hands free.’

It is not a question here of Germany’s trustworthiness, but of using her sense of self-interest to secure our object of the protection of Belgium. The party in the German councils opposed to the invasion would say: ‘If you invade Belgium you will have to meet the hostility of Great Britain. If you don’t, you will escape that hostility.’ To which the general staff was able to reply: ‘Britain’s Balance of Power policy means that you will have to meet the enmity of Britain in any case. In terms of expediency, it does not matter whether you go through Belgium or not.’

The fact that the principle of the ‘Balance’ compelled us to support France, whether Germany respected the Treaty of 1839 or not, deprived our power of any value as a restraint upon German military designs against Belgium. There was, in fact, a conflict of obligations: the obligations to the Balance of Power rendered that to the support of the Treaty of no avail in terms of protection. If the object of force is to compel observance of law on the part of those who will not observe it otherwise, that object is defeated by the entanglements of the Balance of Power.

Sir Edward Grey’s account of that stage of the negotiations at which the question of Belgium was raised, is quite clear and simple. The German Ambassador asked him ‘whether, if Germany gave a promise not to violate Belgian neutrality, we would engage to remain neutral.’ ‘I replied,’ writes Sir Edward, ‘that I could not say that; our hands were still free, and we were considering what our attitude should be. I did not think that we could give a promise of neutrality on that condition alone. The Ambassador pressed me as to whether I could not formulate conditions on which we would remain neutral. He even suggested that the integrity of France and her Colonies might be guaranteed. I said that I felt obliged to refuse definitely any promise to remain neutral on similar terms, and I could only say that we must keep our hands free.’

‘If language means anything,’ comments Lord Loreburn,[37] ‘this means that whereas Mr Gladstone bound this country to war in order to safeguard Belgian neutrality, Sir Edward would not even bind this country to neutrality to save Belgium. He may have been right, but it was not for the sake of Belgian interests that he refused.’

Compare our experience, and the attitude of Sir Edward Grey in 1914, when we were concerned to maintain the Balance of Power, with our experience and Mr Gladstone’s behaviour when precisely the same problem of protecting Belgium was raised in 1870. In these circumstances Mr Gladstone proposed both to France and to Prussia a treaty by which Great Britain undertook that, if either of the belligerents should in the course of that war violate the neutrality of Belgium, Great Britain would co-operate with the other belligerent in defence of the same, ‘employing for that purpose her naval and military forces to ensure its observance.’ In this way both France and Germany knew and the whole world knew, that invasion of Belgium meant war with Great Britain. Whichever belligerent violated the neutrality must reckon with the consequences. Both France and Prussia signed that Treaty. Belgium was saved.

Lord Loreborn (How the War Came) says of the incident:—

This, then, is an illustration of the truth above insisted upon: to employ our force for the maintenance of the Balance of Power is to deprive it of the necessary impartiality for the maintenance of Right.

Much more clear even than in the case of Belgium was the conflict in certain other cases between the claims of the Balance of Power and our obligation to place ‘the rights of the smaller nationalities of Europe upon an unassailable foundation’ which Mr Asquith proclaimed as the object of the War.

The archetype of suppressed nationality was Poland; a nation with an ancient culture, a passionate and romantic attachment to its ancient traditions, which had simply been wiped off the map. If ever there was a case of nation-murder it was this. And one of the culprits—perhaps the chief culprit—was Russia. To-day the Allies, notably France, stand as the champions of Polish nationality. But as late as 1917, as part of that kind of bargain which inevitably marks the old type of diplomatic Alliance, France was agreeing to hand over Poland, helpless, to her old jailer, the Czarist Government. In March, 1916, the Russian Ambassador in Paris was instructed that, at the then impending diplomatic conference[39]

On February 12th, 1917, the Russian Foreign Minister informed the Russian Ambassador that M. Doumergue (French Ambassador in Petrograd) had told the Czar of France’s wish to get Alsace-Lorraine at the end of the War, and also ‘a special position in the Saar Valley, and to bring about the detachment from Germany of the territories west of the Rhine and their reorganisation in such a way that in future the Rhine may form a permanent strategic obstacle to any German advance.’ The Czar was pleased to express his approval in principle of this proposal. Accordingly the Russian Foreign Minister expressed his wish that an Agreement by exchange of Notes should take place on this subject, and desired that if Russia agreed to the unrestricted right of France and Britain to fix Germany’s western frontiers, so Russia was to have an assurance of freedom of action in fixing Germany’s future frontier on the east. (This means the Russian western frontier.)[40]

Or take the case of Serbia, the oppressed nationality whose struggle for freedom against Austria was the immediate cause of the War. It was because Russia would not permit Austria to do with reference to Serbia, what Russia claimed the right to do with reference to Poland, that the latter made of the Austrian policy a casus belli.

Very well. We stood at least for the vindication of Serbian nationality. But the ‘Balance’ demanded that we should win Italy to our side of the scale. She had to be paid. So on April 20th, 1915, without informing Serbia, Sir Edward Grey signed a Treaty (the last article of which stipulated that it should be kept secret) giving to Italy the whole of Dalmatia, in its present extent, together with the islands north and west of the Dalmatian coast and Istria as far as the Quarnero and the Istrian Islands. That Treaty placed under Italian rule whole populations of Southern Slavs, creating inevitably a Southern Slav irredentism, and put the Yugo-Slavia, that we professed to be creating, under the same kind of economic disability which it had suffered from the Austrian Empire. One is not astonished to find Signor Salandra describing the principles which should guide his policy as ‘a freedom from all preoccupations and prejudices, and from every sentiment except that of “Sacred egoism” (sacro egoismo) for Italy.’

To-day, it need hardly be said, there is bitter hatred between our Serbian Ally and our Italian Ally, and most patriotic Yugo-Slavs regard war with Italy one day as inevitable.[41] Yet, assuredly, Sir Edward Grey is not to be blamed. If allegiance to the Balance of Power was to come first, allegiance to any principle, of nationality or of anything else, must come second.

The moral implications of this political method received another illustration in the case of the Rumanian Treaty. Its nature is indicated in the Report of General Polivanov, amongst the papers published at Petrograd and dated 7th-20th November, 1916. It explains how Rumania was at first a neutral, but shifting between different inclinations—a wish not to come in too late for the partition of Austria-Hungary, and a wish to earn as much as possible at the expense of the belligerents. At first, according to this Report, she favoured our enemies and had obtained very favourable commercial agreements with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Then in 1916, on the Russian successes under Brusilov, she inclined to the Entente Powers. The Russian Chief of the Staff thought Rumanian neutrality preferable to her intervention, but later on General Alexeiev adopted the view of the Allies, ‘who looked upon Rumania’s entry as a decisive blow for Austria-Hungary and as the nearing of the War’s end.’ So in August, 1916, an agreement was signed with Rumania (by whom it was signed is not stated), assigning to her Bukovina and all Transylvania. ‘The events which followed,’ says the report, ‘showed how greatly our Allies were mistaken and how they overvalued Rumania’s entry.’ In fact, Rumania was in a brief time utterly overthrown. And then Polivanov points out that the collapse of Rumania’s plans as a Great Power ‘is not particularly opposed to Russia’s interests.’

One might follow up this record and see how far the method of the Balance has protected the small and weak nation in the case of Albania, whose partition was arranged for in April, 1915, under the Treaty of London; in the case of Macedonia and the Bulgarian Macedonians; in the case of Western Thrace, of the Serbian Banat, of the Bulgar Dobrudja, of the Southern Tyrol, of German Bohemia, of Shantung—of still further cases in which we were compelled to change or modify or betray the cause for which we entered the War in order to maintain the preponderance of power by which we could achieve military success.

The moral paralysis exemplified in this story is already infecting our nascent efforts at creating a society of nations—witness the relation of the League with Poland. No one in 1920 justified the Polish claims made against Russia. Our own communications to Russia described them as ‘imperialistic.’ The Prime Minister condemned them in unmeasured terms. Poland was a member of the League. Her supplies of arms and ammunition, military stores, credit, were obtained by the grace of the chief members of the League. The only port by which arms could enter Poland was a city under the special control of the League. An appeal was made to the League to take steps to prevent the Polish adventure. Lord Robert Cecil advocated the course with particular urgency. The Soviet Government itself, while Poland was preparing, appealed to the chief constitutional governments of the League for some preventive action. Why was none taken? Because the Balance of Power demanded that we should ‘stand by France,’ and Polish Imperialism was part of the policy quite overtly and deliberately laid down by M. Clemenceau, who, with a candour entirely admirable, expressed his preference for the old system of alliances as against the newfangled Society of Nations. We could not restrain Poland and at the same time fulfil our Alliance obligations to France, who was supporting the Polish policy.[42]

By reason of the grip of this system we supported (while proclaiming the sacredness of the cause of oppressed nationalities) or acquiesced in the policy of Czarist Russia against Poland, and incidentally Finland; we supported Poland against republican Russia; we encouraged the creation of small border States as means of fighting Soviet Russia, while we aided Koltchak and Denikin, who would undoubtedly if successful have suppressed the border States. We supported the Southern Slavs against Austria when we desired to destroy the latter; we supported Italy (in secret treaties) against the Southern Slavs when we desired the help of the former. Violations and repressions of nationality which, when committed by the enemy States, we declared should excite the deathless resistance of all free men and call down the punishment of Heaven, we acquiesce in and are silent about when committed by our Allies.

This was the Fight for Right, the war to vindicate the moral law in the relations of States.

The political necessities of the Balance of Power have prevented the country from pledging its power, untrammelled, to the maintenance of Right. The two objects are in theory and practice incompatible. The Balance of Power is in fact an assertion of the principle of Macht-Politik, of the principle that Might makes Right.

CHAPTER IV

MILITARY PREDOMINANCE—AND INSECURITY

The fact bears not only upon the use of power for the purpose of carrying an economic policy—or some moral end, like the defence of Nationality—into effect. The disruptive influence of the Nationalisms of which alliances are composed raises the question of how far a military preponderance resting on a National foundation can even give us political security.

If the moral factors of nationality are, as we have seen, an indispensable part of the study of international economics, so must those same factors be considered as an indispensable part of the problem of the power to be exercised by an alliance.

During the War there was an extraordinary neglect of this simple truth. It seemed to occur to no one that the intensification of the psychology of nationalism—not only among the lesser States but in France and America and England—ran the risk of rendering the Alliance powerless after its victory. Yet that is what has happened.

The power of an Alliance (again we are dealing with things that are obvious but neglected) does not depend upon the sum of its material forces—navies, armies, artillery. It depends upon being able to assemble those things to a common purpose; in other words, upon policy fit to direct the instrument. If the policy, or certain moral elements within it, are such that one member of the Alliance is likely to turn his arms against the others, the extent of his armament does not add to the strength of the Alliance. It was with ammunition furnished by Britain and France that Russia in 1919 and 1920 destroyed British and French troops. The present building of an enormous navy by America is not accepted in Britain as necessarily adding to the security of the British Empire.

It is worth while to note how utterly fallacious are certain almost universal assumptions concerning the relation of war psychology to the problem of alliance solidarity. An English visitor to the United States (or an American visitor to England) during the years 1917-1918 was apt to be deluged by a flood of rhetoric to this effect: The blood shed on the same battle-fields, the suffering shared in common in the same common cause, would unite and cement as nothing had ever yet united the two great branches of the English-speaking race, destined by Providence....

But the same visitor moving in the same circle less than two years later found that this eternal cement of friendship had already lost its potency. Never, perhaps, for generations were Anglo-American relations so bad as they had become within a score or so of months of the time that Englishmen and Americans were dying side by side on the battle-field. At the beginning of 1921, in the United States, it was easier, on a public platform, to defend Germany than to present a defence of English policy in Ireland or in India. And at that period one might hear commonly enough in England, in trams and railway carriages, a repetition of the catch phrase, ‘America next.’ If certain popular assumptions as to war psychology were right, these things would be impossible.

Yet, as a matter of fact, the psychological phenomenon is true to type. It was not an accident that the internationalist America of 1915, of ‘Peace without Victory,’ should by 1918 have become more fiercely insistent upon absolute victory and unconditional surrender than any other of the belligerents, whose emotions had found some outlet during three years of war before America had begun. The complete reversal of the ‘Peace without Victory’ attitude was demanded—cultivated, deliberately produced—as a necessary part of war morale. But these emotions of coercion and domination cannot be intensively cultivated and then turned off as by a tap. They made America fiercely nationalist, with necessarily a temperamental distaste for the internationalism of Mr Wilson. And when a mere year of war left the emotional hungers unsatisfied, they turned unconsciously to other satisfactions. Twenty million Americans of Irish descent or association, among others, utilised the opportunity.

One feature—perhaps the very largest feature of all—of war morale, had been the exploitation of the German atrocities. The burning of Louvain, and other reprisals upon the Belgian civilian population, meant necessarily a special wickedness on the part of a definite entity, known as ‘Germany,’ that had to be crushed, punished, beaten, wiped out. There were no distinctions. The plea that all were not equally guilty excited the fierce anger reserved for all such ‘pacifist’ and pro-German pleas. A German woman had laughed at a wounded American: all German women were monsters. ‘No good German but a dead German.’ It was in the German blood and grey matter. The elaborate stories—illustrated—of Germans sticking bayonets into Belgian children produced a thesis which was beyond and above reason or explanation: for that atrocity, ‘Germany’—seventy million people, ignorant peasants, driven workmen, the babies, the invalids, the old women gathering sticks in the forest, the children trooping to school—all were guilty. To state the thing in black and white sounds like a monstrous travesty. But it is not a travesty. It is the thesis we, too, maintained; but in America it had, in the American way, an over simplification and an extra emphasis.

And then after the War an historical enemy of America’s does precisely the same thing. In the story of Amritsar and the Irish reprisals it is the Indian and Sinn Fein version only which is told; just as during the War we got nothing but the anti-German version of the burning of Louvain, or reprisals upon civilians. Why should we expect that the result should be greatly different upon American opinion? Four hundred unarmed and hopeless people, women and children as well as men, are mown down by machine-guns. Or, in the Irish reprisals, a farmer is shot in the presence of his wife and children. The Government defends the soldiers. ‘Britain’ has done this thing: forty-five millions of people, of infinitely varying degrees of responsibility, many opposing it, many ignorant of it, almost all entirely helpless. To represent them as inhuman monsters because of these atrocities is an infinitely mischievous falsehood. But it is made possible by a theory, which in the case of Germany we maintained for years as essentially true. And now it is doing as between Britain and America what a similar falsehood did as between Germany and England, and will go on doing so long as Nationalism includes conceptions of collective responsibility which fly in the face of common sense and truth. If the resultant hostilities can operate as between two national groups like the British and the American, what groups can be free of them?

It is a little difficult now, two years after the end of the War, with the world in its present turmoil, to realise that we really did expect the defeat of Germany to inaugurate an era of peace and security, of reduction of armaments, the virtual end of war; and believed that it was German militarism, ‘that trampling, drilling foolery in the heart of Europe, that has arrested civilisation and darkened the hopes of mankind for forty years,’[43] as Mr Wells wrote in The War that will End War, which accounted for nearly all the other militarisms, and that after its destruction we could anticipate ‘the end of the armament phase of European history.’ For, explained Mr Wells, ‘France, Italy, England, and all the smaller Powers of Europe are now pacific countries; Russia, after this huge War, will be too exhausted for further adventure.’[44]

‘When will peace come?’ asked Professor Headlam, and answered that