‘I do not want to answer by reproaches to reproaches.... Crimes in war may not be excusable, but they are committed in the struggle for victory and in the defence of national existence, and passions are aroused which make the conscience of peoples blunt. The hundreds of thousands of non-combatants who have perished since November 11 by reason of the blockade, were killed with cold deliberation, after our adversaries had conquered and victory had been assured them. Think of that when you speak of guilt and punishment.’
No one seems to have noticed this trifle in presence of the heinousness of the cigarette, the gloves, and the other crimes. Yet this was an insult indeed. If true, it shamefully disgraces England—if England is responsible. The public presumably simply did not care whether it was true or not.
A few months after the Armistice I wrote as follows:—
‘When the Germans sank the Lusitania and slew several hundred women and children, we knew—at least we thought we knew—that that was the kind of thing which Englishmen could not do. In all the hates and stupidities, the dirt and heartbreaks of the war, there was just this light on the horizon: that there were certain things to which we at least could never fall, in the name of victory or patriotism, or any other of the deadly masked words that are “the unjust stewards of men’s ideas.”
‘And then we did it. We, too, sank Lusitanias. We, too, for some cold political end, plunged the unarmed, the weak, the helpless, the children, the suffering women, to agonising death and torture. Without a tremor. Not alone in the bombing of cities, which we did so much better than the enemy. For this we had the usual excuse. It was war.
‘But after the War, when the fighting was finished, the enemy was disarmed, his submarines surrendered, his aeroplanes destroyed, his soldiers dispersed; months afterwards, we kept a weapon which was for use first and mainly against the children, the weak, the sick, the old, the women, the mothers, the decrepit: starvation and disease. Our papers told us—our patriotic papers—how well it was succeeding. Correspondents wrote complacently, sometimes exultingly, of how thin and pinched were all the children, even those well into teens; how stunted, how defective, the next generation would be; and how the younger children, those of seven and eight, looked like children of three and four; and how those beneath this age simply did not live. Either they were born dead, or if they were born alive—what was there to give them? Milk? An unheard-of luxury. And nothing to wrap them in; even in hospitals the new-born children were wrapped in newspapers, the lucky ones in bits of sacking. The mothers were most fortunate when the children were born dead. In an insane asylum a mother wails: “If only I did not hear the cry of the children for food all day long, all day long!” To “bring Germany to reason” we had, you see, to drive mothers out of their reason.
’“It would have been more merciful,” said Bob Smillie, “to turn the machine-guns on those children.” Put this question to yourself, patriot Englishmen: “Was the sinking of the Lusitania as cruel, as prolonged, as mean, as merciless a death as this?” And we—you and I—do it every day, every night.
‘Here is the Times of May 21, half a year after the cessation of war, telling the Germans that they do not know how much more severe we can still make the “domestic results” of starvation, if we really put our mind to it. To the blockade we shall add the “horrors of invasion.” The invasion of a country already disarmed is to be marked—when we do it—by horror.
‘But the purpose! That justifies it! What purpose? To obtain the signature to the Treaty of Peace. Many Englishmen—not Pacifists, not sentimentalists, not conscientious objectors, or other vermin of that kind, but Bishops, Judges, Members of the House of Lords, great public educators. Tory editors—have declared that this Treaty is a monstrous injustice. Some Englishmen at least think so. But if the Germans say so, that becomes a crime which we shall know how to punish. “The enemy have been reminded already” says the Times, proud organ of British respectability, of Conservatism, of distinguished editors and ennobled proprietors, “that the machinery of the blockade can again be put into force at a few hours’ notice ... the intention of the Allies to take military action if necessary.... Rejection of the Peace terms now offered them, will assuredly lead to fresh chastisement.”
‘But will not Mr Lloyd George be able to bring back signatures? Will he not have made Peace—permanent Peace? Shall we not have destroyed this Prussian philosophy of frightfulness, force, and hate? Shall we not have proved to the world that a State without military power can trust to the good faith and humanity of its neighbours? Can we not, then, celebrate victory with light hearts, honour our dead and glorify our arms? Have we not served faithfully those ideals of right and justice, mercy and chivalry, for which a whole generation of youth went through hell and gave their lives?’
THE facts of the present situation in Europe, so far sketched, reveal broadly this spectacle: everywhere the failure of national power to indispensable ends, sustenance, political security, nationality, right; everywhere a fierce struggle for national power.
Germany, which successfully fed her expanding population by a system which did not rest upon national power, wrecked that system in order to attempt one which all experience showed could not succeed. The Allied world pilloried both the folly and the wickedness of such a statecraft; and at the peace proceeded to imitate it in every particular. The faith in the complete efficacy of preponderant power which the economic and other demands of the Treaty of Versailles and the policy towards Russia reveal, is already seen to be groundless (for the demands, in fact, are being abandoned). There is in that document an element of naïveté, and in the subsequent policy a cruelty which will be the amazement of history—if our race remains capable of history.
Yet the men who made the Treaty, and accelerated the famine and break-up of half a world, including those, like M. Tardieu, who still demand a ruined Germany and an indemnity-paying one, were the ablest statesmen of Europe, experienced, realist, and certainly not morally monsters. They were probably no worse morally, and certainly more practical, than the passionate democracies, American and European, who encouraged all the destructive elements of policy and were hostile to all that was recuperative and healing.
It is perfectly true—and this truth is essential to the thesis here discussed—that the statesmen at Versailles were neither fools or villains. Neither were the Cardinals and the Princes of the Church, who for five hundred years, more or less, attempted to use physical coercion for the purpose of suppressing religious error. There is, of course an immeasurably stronger case for the Inquisition as an instrument of social order than there is for the use of competing national military power as the basis of modern European society. And the stronger case for the Inquisition as an instrument of social by a modern statesman when he goes to war. It was less. The inquisitor, in burning and torturing the heretic, passionately believed that he obeyed the voice of God, as the modern statesman believes that he is justified by the highest dictates of patriotism. We are now able to see that the Inquisitor was wrong, his judgment twisted by some overpowering prepossession: Is some similar prepossession distorting vision and political wisdom in modern statecraft? And if so, what is the nature of this prepossession?
As an essay towards the understanding of its nature, the following suggestions are put forward:—
The assertion of national power, domination, is always in line with popular feeling. And in crises—like that of the settlement with Germany—popular feeling dictates policy.
The feelings associated with coercive domination evidently lie near the surface of our natures and are easily excited. To attain our end by mere coercion instead of bargain or agreement, is the method in conduct which, in the order of experiments, our race generally tries first, not only in economics (as by slavery) but in sex, in securing acquiescence to our religious beliefs, and in most other relationships. Coercion is not only the response to an instinct; it relieves us of the trouble and uncertainties of intellectual decision as to what is equitable in a bargain.
To restrain the combative instinct sufficiently to realise the need of co-operation, demands a social discipline which the prevailing political traditions and moralities of Nationalism and Patriotism not only do not furnish, but directly discourage.
But when some vital need becomes obvious and we find that force simply cannot fulfil it, we then try other methods, and manage to restrain our impulse sufficiently to do so. If we simply must have a man’s help, and we find we cannot force him to give it, we then offer him inducements, bargain, enter a contract, even though it limits our independence.
Stable international co-operation cannot come in any other way. Not until we realise the failure of national coercive power for indispensable ends (like the food of our people) shall we cease to idealise power and to put our most intense political emotions (like those of patriotism) behind it. Our traditions will buttress and ‘rationalise’ the instinct to power until we see that it is mischievous. We shall then begin to discredit it and create new traditions.
An American sociologist (Professor Giddings of Columbia University) has written thus:—
‘So long as we can confidently act, we do not argue; but when we face conditions abounding in uncertainty, or when we are confronted by alternative possibilities, we first hesitate, then feel our way, then guess, and at length venture to reason. Reasoning, accordingly, is that action of the mind to which we resort when the possibilities before us and about us are distributed substantially according to the law of chance occurrence, or, as the mathematician would say, in accordance with “the normal curve” of random frequency. The moment the curve is obviously skewed, we decide; if it is obviously skewed from the beginning, by authority, or coercion, our reasoning is futile or imperfect. So, in the State, if any interest or coalition of interests is dominant, and can act promptly, it rules by absolutist methods. Whether it is benevolent or cruel, it wastes neither time nor resources upon government by discussion; but if interests are innumerable, and so distributed as to offset one another, and if no great bias or overweighting anywhere appears, government by discussion inevitably arises. The interests can get together only if they talk. If power shall be able to dictate, it will also rule, and the appeal to reason will be vain.’
This means that a realisation of interdependence—even though it be subconscious—is the basis of the social sense, the feeling and tradition which make possible a democratic society, in which freedom is voluntarily limited for the purpose of preserving any freedom at all.
It indicates also the relation of certain economic truths to the impulses and instincts that underlie international conflict. We shall excuse or justify or fail to restrain those instincts, unless and until we see that their indulgence stands in the way of the things which we need and must have if society is to live. We shall then discredit them as anti-social, as we have discredited religious fanaticism, and build up a controlling Sittlichkeit.
The statement of Professor Giddings, quoted above, leaves out certain psychological facts which the present writer in an earlier work has attempted to indicate. He, therefore, makes no apology for reproducing a somewhat long passage bearing on the case before us:—
‘The element in man which makes him capable, however feebly, of choice in the matter of conduct, the one fact distinguishing him from that vast multitude of living things which act unreflectingly, instinctively (in the proper and scientific sense of the word), as the mere physical reaction to external prompting, is something not deeply rooted, since it is the latest addition of all to our nature. The really deeply rooted motives of conduct, those having by far the greatest biological momentum, are naturally the “motives” of the plant and the animal, the kind that marks in the main the acts of all living things save man, the unreflecting motives, those containing no element of ratiocination and free volition, that almost mechanical reaction to external forces which draw the leaves towards the sun-rays and makes the tiger tear its living food limb from limb.
‘To make plain what that really means in human conduct, we must recall the character of that process by which man turns the forces of nature to his service instead of allowing them to overwhelm him. Its essence is a union of individual forces against the common enemy, the forces of nature. Where men in isolated action would have been powerless, and would have been destroyed, union, association, co-operation, enabled them to survive. Survival was contingent upon the cessation of struggle between them, and the substitution therefor of common action. Now, the process both in the beginning and in the subsequent development of this device of co-operation is important. It was born of a failure of force. If the isolated force had sufficed, the union of force would not have been resorted to. But such union is not a mere mechanical multiplication of blind energies; it is a combination involving will, intelligence. If mere multiplication of physical energy had determined the result of man’s struggles, he would have been destroyed or be the helpless slave of the animals of which he makes his food. He has overcome them as he has overcome the flood and the storm—by quite another order of action. Intelligence only emerges where physical force is ineffective.
‘There is an almost mechanical process by which, as the complexity of co-operation grows, the element of physical compulsion declines in effectiveness, and is replaced by agreement based on mutual recognition of advantage. There is through every step of this development the same phenomenon: intelligence and agreement only emerge as force becomes ineffective. The early (and purely illustrative) slave-owner who spent his days seeing that his slave did not run away, and compelling him to work, realised the economic defect of the arrangement: most of the effort, physical and intellectual, of the slave was devoted to trying to escape; that of the owner, trying to prevent him. The force of the one, intellectual or physical, cancelled the force of the other, and the energies of both were lost so far as productive value was concerned, and the needed task, the building of the shelter or the catching of the fish, was not done, or badly done, and both went short of food and shelter. But from the moment that they struck a bargain as to the division of labour and of spoils, and adhered to it, the full energies of both were liberated for direct production, and the economic effectiveness of the arrangement was not merely doubled, but probably multiplied many times. But this substitution of free agreement for coercion, with all that it implied of contract, of “what is fair,” and all that followed of mutual reliance in the fulfilment of the agreement, was based upon mutual recognition of advantage. Now, that recognition, without which the arrangement could not exist at all, required, relatively, a considerable mental effort, due in the first instance to the failure of force. If the slave-owner had had more effective means of physical coercion, and had been able to subdue his slave, he would not have bothered about agreement, and this embryo of human society and justice would not have been brought into being. And in history its development has never been constant, but marked by the same rise and fall of the two orders of motive; as soon as one party or the other obtained such preponderance of strength as promised to be effective, he showed a tendency to drop free agreement and use force; this, of course, immediately provoked the resistance of the other, with a lesser or greater reversion to the earlier profitless condition.
‘This perpetual tendency to abandon the social arrangement and resort to physical coercion is, of course, easily explainable by the biological fact just touched on. To realise at each turn and permutation of the division of labour that the social arrangement was, after all, the best demanded on the part of the two characters in our sketch, not merely control of instinctive actions, but a relatively large ratiocinative effort for which the biological history of early man had not fitted him. The physical act of compulsion only required a stone axe and a quickness of purely physical movement for which his biological history had afforded infinitely long training. The more mentally-motived action, that of social conduct, demanding reflection as to its effect on others, and the effect of that reaction upon our own position and a conscious control of physical acts, is of modern growth; it is but skin-deep; its biological momentum is feeble. Yet on that feeble structure has been built all civilisation.
‘When we remember this—how frail are the ultimate foundations of our fortress, how much those spiritual elements which alone can give us human society are outnumbered by the pre-human elements—is it surprising that those pre-social promptings of which civilisation represents the conquest, occasionally overwhelm man, break up the solidarity of his army, and push him back a stage or two nearer to the brute condition from which he came? That even at this moment he is groping blindly as to the method of distributing in the order of his most vital needs the wealth he is able to wring from the earth; that some of his most fundamental social and political conceptions—those, among others, with which we are now dealing—have little relation to real facts; that his animosities and hatreds are as purposeless and meaningless as his enthusiasms and his sacrifices; that emotion and effort which quantitatively would suffice amply for the greater tasks before him, for the firmer establishment of justice and well-being, for the cleaning up of all the festering areas of moral savagery that remain, are as a simple matter of fact turned to those purposes hardly at all, but to objects which, to the degree to which they succeed, merely stultify each other?
‘Now, this fact, the fact that civilisation is but skin-deep and that man is so largely the unreflecting brute, is not denied by pro-military critics. On the contrary they appeal to it as the first and last justification of their policy. “All your talk will never get over human nature; men are not guided by logic; passion is bound to get the upper hand,” and such phrases, are a sort of Greek chorus supplied by the military party to the whole of this discussion.
‘Nor do the militarist advocates deny that these unreflecting elements are anti-social; again, it is part of their case that, unless they are held in check by the “iron hand,” they will submerge society in a welter of savagery. Nor do they deny—it is hardly possible to do so—that the most important securities which we enjoy, the possibility of living in mutual respect of right because we have achieved some understanding of right; all that distinguishes modern Europe from the Europe of (among other things) religious wars and St. Bartholomew massacres, and distinguishes British political methods from those Turkey or Venezuela, are due to the development of moral forces (since physical force is most resorted to in the less desirable age and area), and particularly to the general recognition that you cannot solve religious and political problems by submitting them to the irrelevant hazard of physical force.
‘We have got thus far, then: both parties to the discussion are agreed as to the fundamental fact that civilisation is based upon moral and intellectual elements in constant danger of being overwhelmed by more deeply-rooted anti-social elements. The plain facts of history past and present are there to show that where those moral elements are absent the mere fact of the possession of arms only adds to the destructiveness of the resulting welter.
‘Yet all attempts to secure our safety by other than military means are not merely regarded with indifference; they are more generally treated either with a truly ferocious contempt or with definite condemnation.
‘This apparently on two grounds: first, that nothing that we can do will affect the conduct of other nations; secondly, that, in the development of those moral forces which do undoubtedly give us security, government action—which political effort has in view—can play no part.
‘Both assumptions are, of course, groundless. The first implies not only that our own conduct and our own ideas need no examination, but that ideas current in one country have no reaction on those of another, and that the political action of one State does not affect that of others. “The way to be sure of peace is to be so much stronger than your enemy that he will not dare to attack you,” is the type of accepted and much-applauded “axioms” the unfortunate corollary of which is (since both parties can adopt the rule) that peace will only be finally achieved when each is stronger than the other.
‘So thought and acted the man with the stone axe in our illustration, and in both cases the psychological motive is the same: the long-inherited impulse to isolated action, to the solution of a difficulty by some simple form of physical movement; the tendency to break through the more lately acquired habit of action based on social compact and on the mental realisation of its advantage. It is the reaction against intellectual effort and responsible control of instinct, a form of natural protest very common in children and in adults not brought under the influence of social discipline.
‘The same general characteristics are as recognisable in militarist politics within the nation as in the international field. It is not by accident that Prussian and Bismarckian conceptions in foreign policy are invariably accompanied by autocratic conceptions in internal affairs. Both are founded upon a belief in force as the ultimate determinant in human conduct; a disbelief in the things of the mind as factors of social control, a disbelief in moral forces that cannot be expressed in “blood and iron.” The impatience shown by the militarist the world over at government by discussion, his desire to “shut up the talking shops” and to govern autocratically, are but expressions of the same temper and attitude.
‘The forms which Governments have taken and the general method of social management, are in large part the result of its influence. Most Governments are to-day framed far more as instruments for the exercise of physical force than as instruments of social management.
‘The militarist does not allow that man has free will in the matter of his conduct at all; he insists that mechanical forces on the one side or the other alone determine which of two given courses shall be taken; the ideas which either hold, the rôle of intelligent volition, apart from their influence in the manipulation of physical force, play no real part in human society. “Prussianism,” Bismarckian “blood and iron,” are merely political expressions of this belief in the social field—the belief that force alone can decide things; that it is not man’s business to question authority in politics or authority in the form of inevitability in nature. It is not a question of who is right, but of who is stronger. “Fight it out, and right will be on the side of the victor”—on the side, that is, of the heaviest metal or the heaviest muscle, or, perhaps, on that of the one who has the sun at his back, or some other advantage of external nature. The blind material things—not the seeing mind and the soul of man—are the ultimate sanction of human society.
‘Such a doctrine, of course, is not only profoundly anti-social, it is anti-human—fatal not merely to better international relations, but, in the end, to the degree to which it influences human conduct at all, to all those large freedoms which man has so painfully won.
‘This philosophy makes of man’s acts, not something into which there enters the element of moral responsibility and free volition, something apart from and above the mere mechanical force of external nature, but it makes man himself a helpless slave; it implies that his moral efforts and the efforts of his mind and understanding are of no worth—that he is no more the master of his conduct than the tiger of his, or the grass and the trees of theirs, and no more responsible.
‘To this philosophy the “civilist” may oppose another: that in man there is that which sets him apart from the plants and the animals, which gives him control of and responsibility for his social acts, which makes him the master of his social destiny if he but will it; that by virtue of the forces of his mind he may go forward to the completer conquest, not merely of nature, but of himself, and thereby, and by that alone, redeem human association from the evils that now burden it.’
Does the foregoing imply that force or compulsion has no place in human society? Not the least in the world. The conclusions so far drawn might be summarised, and certain remaining ones suggested, thus:—
Coercion has its place in human society, and the considerations here urged do not imply any sweeping theory of non-resistance. They are limited to the attempt to show that the effectiveness of political power depends upon certain moral elements usually utterly neglected in international politics, and particularly that instincts inseparable from Nationalism as now cultivated and buttressed by prevailing political morality, must condemn political power to futility. Two broad principles of policy are available: that looking towards isolated national power, or that looking towards common power behind a common purpose. The second may fail; it has risks. But the first is bound to fail. The fact would be self-evident but for the push of certain instincts warping our judgment in favour of the first. If mankind decides that it can do better than the first policy, it will do better. If it decides that it cannot, that decision will itself make failure inevitable. Our whole social salvation depends upon making the right choice.
In an earlier chapter certain stultifications of the Balance of Power as applied to the international situation were dealt with. It was there pointed out that if you could get such a thing as a real Balance, that would certainly be a situation tempting the hot-heads of both sides to a trial of strength. An obvious preponderance of power on one side might check the temper of the other. A ‘balance’ would assuredly act as no check. But preponderance has an even worse result.
How in practical politics are we to say when a group has become preponderantly powerful? We know to our cost that military power is extremely difficult of precise estimate. It cannot be weighed and balanced exactly. In political practice, therefore, the Balance of Power means a rivalry of power, because each to be on the safe side wants to be just a bit stronger than the other. The competition creates of itself the very condition it sets out to prevent.
The defect of principle here is not the employment of force. It is the refusal to put force behind a law which may demand our allegiance. The defect lies in the attempt to make ourselves and our own interests by virtue of preponderant power superior to law.
The feature which stood condemned in the old order was not the possession by States of coercive power. Coercion is an element in every good society that we have heretofore known. The evil of the old order was that in case of States the Power was anti-social; that it was not pledged to the service of some code or rule designed for mutual protection, but was the irresponsible possession of each individual, maintained for the express purpose of enabling him to enforce his own views of his own rights, to be judge and executioner in his own case, when his view came into collision with that of others. The old effort meant in reality the attempt on the part of a group of States to maintain in their own favour a preponderance of force of undefined and unlimited purpose. Any opposing group that found itself in a position of manifest inferiority had in fact to submit in international affairs to the decision of the possessor of preponderant power for the time being. It might be used benevolently; in that case the weaker obtained his rights as a gift from the stronger. But so long as the possession of power was unaccompanied by any defined obligation, there could be no democracy of States, no Society of Nations. To destroy the power of the preponderant group meant merely to transpose the situation. The security of one meant always the insecurity of the other.
The Balance of Power in fact adopts the fundamental premise of the ‘might makes right’ principle, because it regards power as the ultimate fact in politics; whereas the ultimate fact is the purpose for which the power will be used. Obviously you don’t want a Balance of Power between justice and injustice, law and crime; between anarchy and order. You want a preponderance of power on the side of justice, of law and of order.
We approach here one of the commonest and most disastrous confusions touching the employment of force in human society, particularly in the Society of Nations.
It is easy enough to make play with the absurdities and contradictions of the si vis pacem para bellum of our militarists. And the hoary falsehood does indeed involve a flouting of all experience, an intellectual astigmatism that almost makes one despair. But what is the practical alternative?
The anti-militarist who disparages our reliance upon ‘force’ is almost as remote from reality, for all society as we know it in practice, or have ever known it, does rely a great deal upon the instrument of ‘force,’ upon restraint and coercion.
We have seen where the competition in arming among European nations has led us. But it may be argued: suppose you were greatly to reduce all round, cut in half, say, the military equipment of Europe, would the power for mutual destruction be sensibly reduced, the security of Europe sensibly greater? ‘Adequacy’ and ‘destructiveness’ of armament are strictly relative terms. A country with a couple of battleships has overwhelming naval armament if its opponent has none. A dozen machine-guns or a score of rifles against thousands of unarmed people may be more destructive of life than a hundred times that quantity of material facing forces similarly armed. (Fifty rifles at Amritsar accounted for two thousand killed and wounded, without a single casualty on the side of the troops.) Wars once started, instruments of destruction can be rapidly improvised, as we know. And this will be truer still when we have progressed from poison gas to disease germs, as we almost certainly shall.
The first confusion is this:—
The issue is made to appear as between the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘material’; as between material force, battleships, guns, armies on the one side as one method, and ‘spiritual’ factors, persuasion, moral goodness on the other side, as the contrary method. ‘Force v. Faith,’ as some evangelical writer has put it. The debate between the Nationalist and the Internationalist is usually vitiated at the outset by an assumption which, though generally common to the two parties, is not only unproven, but flatly contrary to the weight of evidence. The assumption is that the military Nationalist, basing his policy upon material force—a preponderant navy, a great army, superior artillery—can dispense with the element of trust, contract, treaty.
Now to state the issue in that way creates a gross confusion, and the assumption just indicated is quite unjustifiable. The militarist quite as much as the anti-militarist, the nationalist quite as much as the internationalist, has to depend upon a moral factor, ‘a contract,’ the force of tradition, and of morality. Force cannot operate at all in human affairs without a decision of the human mind and will. Guns do not get pointed and go off without a mind behind them, and as already insisted, the direction in which the gun shoots is determined by the mind which must be reached by a form of moral suasion, discipline, or tradition; the mind behind the gun will be influenced by patriotism in one case, or by a will to rebellion and mutiny, prompted by another tradition or persuasion, in another. And obviously the moral decision, in the circumstances with which we are dealing, goes much deeper and further back. The building of battleships, or the forming of armies, the long preparation which is really behind the material factor, implies a great deal of ‘faith.’ These armies and navies could never have been brought into existence and be manœuvred without vast stores of faith and tradition. Whether the army serves the nation, as in Britain or France, or dominates it as in a Spanish-American Republic (or in a somewhat different sense in Prussia), depends on a moral factor: the nature of the tradition which inspires the people from whom the army is drawn. Whether the army obeys its officers or shoots them is determined by moral not material factors, for the officers have not a preponderance of physical force over the men. You cannot form a pirate crew without a moral factor: the agreement not to use force against one another, but to act in consort and combine it against the prey. Whether the military material we and France supplied Russia, and the armies France helped to train, are employed against us or the Germans, depends upon certain moral and political factors inside Russia, certain ideas formed in the minds of certain men. It is not a situation of Ideas against Guns, but of ideas using guns. The confusion involves a curious distortion in our reading of the history of the struggle against privilege and tyranny.
Usually when we speak of the past struggles of the people against tyranny, we have in our minds a picture of the great mass held down by the superior physical force of the tyrant. But such a picture is, of course, quite absurd. For the physical force which held down the people was that which they themselves supplied. The tyrant had no physical force save that with which his victims furnished him. In this struggle of ‘People v. Tyrant,’ obviously the weight of physical force was on the side of the people. This was as true of the slave States of antiquity as it is of the modern autocracies. Obviously the free minority—the five or ten or fifteen per cent.—of Rome or Egypt, or the governing orders of Prussia or Russia, did not impose their will upon the remainder by virtue of superior physical force, the sheer weight of numbers, of sinew and muscle. If the tyranny of the minority had depended upon its own physical power, it could not have lasted a day. The physical force which the minority used was the physical force of the majority. The people were oppressed by an instrument which they themselves furnished.
In that picture, therefore, which we make of the mass of mankind struggling against the ‘force’ of tyranny, we must remember that the force against which they struggled was not in the last analysis physical force at all; it was their own weight from which they desired to be liberated.
Do we realise all that this means? It means that tyranny has been imposed, as freedom has been won: through the Mind.
The small minority imposes itself and can only impose itself by getting first at the mind of the majority—the people—in one form or another: by controlling it through keeping knowledge from it, as in so much of antiquity, or by controlling the knowledge itself, as in Germany. It is because the minds of the masses have failed them that they have been enslaved. Without that intellectual failure of the masses, tyranny could have found no force wherewith to impose its burdens.
This confusion as to the relation of ‘force’ to the moral factor is of all confusions most worth while clearing up: and for that purpose we may descend to homely illustrations.
You have a disorderly society, a frontier mining camp, every man armed, every man threatened by the arms of his neighbour and every man in danger. What is the first need in restoring order? More force—more revolvers and bowie knives? No; every man is fully armed already. If there exists in this disorder the germ of order some attempt will be made to move towards the creation of a police. But what is the indispensable prerequisite for the success of such an effort? It is the capacity for a nucleus of the community to act in common, to agree together to make the beginnings of a community. And unless that nucleus can achieve agreement—a moral and intellectual problem—there can be no police force. But be it noted well, this first prerequisite—the agreement among a few members necessary to create the first Vigilance Committee—is not force; it is a decision of certain minds determining how force shall be used, how combined. Even when you have got as far as the police, this device of social protection will entirely break down unless the police itself can be trusted to obey the constituted authority, and the constituted authority itself to abide by the law. If the police represents a mere preponderance of power, using that power to create a privileged position for itself or for its employers—setting itself, that is, against the community—you will sooner or later get resistance which will ultimately neutralise that power and produce a mere paralysis so far as any social purpose is concerned. The existence of the police depends upon general agreement not to use force except as the instrument of the social will, the law to which all are party. This social will may not exist; the members of the vigilance committee or town council or other body may themselves use their revolvers and knives each against the other. Very well, in that case you will get no police. ‘Force’ will not remedy it. Who is to use the force if no one man can agree with the other? All along the line here we find ourselves, whatever our predisposition to trust only ‘force,’ thrown back upon a moral factor, compelled to rely upon contract, an agreement, before we can use force at all.
It will be noted incidentally that effective social force does not rest upon a Balance of Power: society does not need a Balance of Power as between the law and crime; it wants a preponderance of power on the side of the law. One does not want a Balance of Power between rival parties in the State. One wants a preponderance of power on behalf of a certain fundamental code upon which all parties, or an immense majority of parties, will be agreed. As against the Balance of Power we need a Community of Power—to use Mr. Wilson’s phrase—on the side of a purpose or code of which the contributors to the power are aware.
One may read in learned and pretentious political works that the ultimate basis of a State is force—the army—which is the means by which the State’s authority is maintained. But who compels the army to carry out the State’s orders rather than its own will or the personal will of its commander? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The following passage from an address delivered by the present writer in America may perhaps help to make the point clear:—
‘When, after the counting of the votes, you ask Mr Wilson to step down from the President’s chair, how do you know he will get down? I repeat, How do you know he will get down? You think that a foolish and fantastic question? But, in a great many interesting American republics, Mexico, Venezuela, or Hayti, he would not get down! You say, “Oh, the army would turn him out.” I beg your pardon. It is Mr Wilson who commands the army; it is not the army that commands Mr Wilson. Again, in many American republics a President who can depend on his army, when asked to get out of the Presidency, would reply almost as a matter of course, “Why should I get down when I have an army that stands by me?”
‘How do we know that Mr Wilson, able, we will assume, to count on his army, or, if you prefer, some President particularly popular with the army, will not do that? Is it physical force which prevents it? If so, whose? You may say: “If he did that, he knows that the country would raise an army of rebellion to turn him out.” Well, suppose it did? You raise this army, as they would in Mexico, or Venezuela, and the army turns him out. And your man gets into the Presidential chair, and then, when you think he has stolen enough, you vote him down. He would do precisely the same thing. He would say: “My dear people, as very great philosophers tell you, the State is Force, and as a great French monarch once said. ‘I am the State.’ J’y suis, j’y reste.”. And then you would have to get another army of rebellion to turn him out—just as they do in Mexico, Venezuela, Hayti, or Honduras.’
There, then, is the crux of the matter. Every constitution at times breaks down. But if that fact were a conclusive argument for the anarchical arming of each man against the other as preferable to a police enforcing law, there could be no human society. The object of constitutional machinery for change is to make civil war unnecessary.
There will be no advance save through an improved tradition. Perhaps it will be impossible to improve the tradition. Very well, then the old order, whether among the nations of Europe or the political parties of Venezuela, will remain unchanged. More ‘force,’ more soldiers, will not do it. The disturbed areas of Spanish-America each show a greater number of soldiers to population than States like Massachusetts or Ohio. So in the international solution. What would it have availed if Britain had quadrupled the quantity of rifles to Koltchak’s peasant soldiers so long as his land policy caused them to turn their rifles against his Government? Or for France to have multiplied many times the loans made to the Ukraine, if at the same time the loans made to Poland so fed Polish nationalism that the Ukrainians preferred making common cause with the Bolsheviks to becoming satellites of an Imperialist Poland? Do we add to the ‘force’ of the Alliance by increasing the military power of Serbia, if that fact provokes her to challenge Italy? Do we strengthen it by increasing at one and the same time the military forces of two States—say Poland and Czecho-Slovakia—if the nationalism which we nurse leads finally to those two States turning their forces one against the other? Unless we know the policy (again a thing of the mind, of opinion) which will determine the use to which guns will be put, it does not increase our security—it may diminish it—to add more guns.
We see, therefore, that the alternatives are not in fact a choice between ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ means. The material can only operate, whether for our defence or against us, by virtue of a spiritual thing, the will. ‘The direction in which the gun will shoot’—a rather important point in its effectiveness as a defensive weapon—depends not on the gun but on the mind of the man using it, the moral factor. The two cannot be separated.
It is untrue to say that the knife is a magic instrument, saving the cancer patient’s life: it is the mind of the surgeon using the material thing in a certain way which saves the patient’s life. A child or savage who, failing to realise the part played by the invisible element of the surgeon’s mind, should deem that a knife of a particular pattern used ‘boldly’ could be depended upon to cure cancer, would merely, of course commit manslaughter.
It is foolish to talk of an absolute guarantee of security by force, as of guarantee of success in surgical operations by perfection of knives. In both cases we are dealing with instruments, indispensable, but not of themselves enough. The mind behind the instrument, technical in one case, social in the other, may in both cases fail; then we must improve it. Merely to go on sharpening the knife, to go on applying, for instance, to the international problem more ‘force,’ in the way it has been applied in the past, can only give us in intenser degree the present results.
Yet the truth here indicated is perpetually being disregarded, particularly by those who pique themselves on being ‘practical.’ In the choice of risks by men of the world and realist statesmen the choice which inevitably leads to destruction is for ever being made on grounds of safety; the choice which leads at least in the direction of security is for ever being rejected on the grounds of its danger.
Why is this? The choice is instinctive assuredly; it is not the result of ‘hard-headed calculation’ though it often professes to be. We speak of it as the ‘protective’ instinct. But it is a protective instinct which obviously destroys us.
I am suggesting here that, at the bottom of the choice in favour of the Balance of Power or preponderance as a political method, is neither the desire for safety nor the desire to place ‘might behind right,’ but the desire for domination, the instinct of self-assertion, the anti-social wish to be judge in our own case; and further, that the way out of the difficulty is to discipline this instinct by a better social tradition. To do that we must discredit the old tradition—create a different feeling about it; to which end it is indispensable to face frankly the nature of its moral origins; to look its motives in the face.[68]
It is extremely suggestive in this connection that the ‘realist’ politician, the ‘hard-headed practical man,’ disdainful of Sunday School standards,’ in his defence of national necessity, is quite ready to be contemptuous of national safety and interest when these latter point plainly to a policy of international agreement as against domination. Agreement is then rejected as pusillanimous, and consideration for national interest as placing ‘pocket before patriotism.’ We are then reminded, even by the most realist of nationalists, that nations live for higher things than ‘profit’ or even safety. ‘Internationalism,’ says Colonel Roosevelt, ‘inevitably emasculates its sincere votaries,’ and ‘every civilisation worth calling such’ must be based ‘on a spirit of intense nationalism.’ For Colonel Roosevelt or General Wood in America as for Mr Kipling, or Mr Chesterton, or Mr Churchill, or Lord Northciffe, or Mr Bottomley, and a vast host of poets, professors, editors, historians, bishops, publicists of all sorts in England and France, ‘Internationalist’ and ‘Pacifist’ are akin to political atheist. A moral consideration now replaces the ‘realist.’ The metamorphosis is only intelligible on the assumption here suggested that both explanations or justifications are a rationalisation of the impulse to power and domination.
Our political, quite as much as our social, conduct is in the main the result of motives that are mainly unconscious instinct, habit, unquestioned tradition. So long as we find the result satisfactory, well and good. But when the result of following instinct is disaster, we realise that the time has come to ‘get outside ourselves,’ to test our instincts by their social result. We have then to see whether the ‘reasons’ we have given for our conduct are really its motives. That examination is the first step to rendering the unconscious motive conscious. In considering, for instance, the two methods indicated in this chapter, we say, in ‘rationalising’ our decision, that we chose the lesser of two risks. I am suggesting that in the choice of the method of the Balance of Power our real motive was not desire to achieve security, but domination. It is just because our motives are not mainly intellectual but ‘instinctive’ that the desire for domination is so likely to have played the determining role: for few instincts and innate desires are stronger than that which pushes to ‘self-affirmation’—the assertion of preponderant force.
We have indeed seen that the Balance of Power means in practice the determination to secure a preponderance of power. What is a ‘Balance?’ The two sides will not agree on that, and each to be sure will want it tilted in its favour. We decline to place ourselves within the power of another who may differ from us as to our right. We demand to be stronger, in order that we may be judge in our own case. This means that we shall resist the claim of others to exactly the same thing.
The alternative is partnership. It means trust. But we have seen that the exercise of any form of force, other than that which one single individual can wield, must involve an element of ‘trust.’ The soldiers must be trusted to obey the officers, since the former have by far the preponderance of force; the officers must be trusted to obey the constitution instead of challenging it; the police must be trusted to obey the authorities; the Cabinet must be trusted to obey the electoral decision; the members of an alliance to work together instead of against one another, and so on. Yet the assumption of the ‘Power Politician’ is that the method which has succeeded (notably within the State) is the ‘idealistic’ but essentially unpractical method in which security and advantage are sacrificed to Utopian experiment; while the method of competitive armament, however distressing it may be to the Sunday Schools, is the one that gives us real security. ‘The way to be sure of preserving peace,’ says Mr Churchill, ‘is to be so much stronger than your enemy that he won’t dare to attack you.’ In other words it is obvious that the way for two people to keep the peace is for each to be stronger than the other.
‘You may have made your front door secure’ says Marshal Foch, arguing for the Rhine frontier, ‘but you may as well make sure by having a good high garden wall as well.’
‘Make sure,’ that is the note—si vis pacem.... And he can be sure that ‘the average practical man,’ who prides himself on ‘knowing human nature’ and ‘distrusting theories’ will respond to the appeal. Every club smoking room will decide that ‘the simple soldier’ knows his business and has judged human forces aright.
Yet of course the simple truth is that the ‘hard-headed soldier’ has chosen the one ground upon which all experience, all the facts, are against him. Then how is he able to ‘get away with it’—to ride off leaving at least the impression of being a sternly practical unsentimental man of the world by virtue of having propounded an aphorism which all practical experience condemns? Here is Mr Churchill. He is talking to hard-headed Lancashire manufacturers. He desires to show that he too is no theorist, that he also can be hard-headed and practical. And he—who really does know the mind of the ‘hard-headed business man’—is perfectly aware that the best road to those hard heads is to propound an arrant absurdity, to base a proposed line of policy on the assumption of a physical impossibility, to follow a will-o’-the-wisp which in all recorded history has led men into a bog.
They applaud Mr Churchill, not because he has put before them a cold calculation of relative risk in the matter of maintaining peace, an indication, where, on the whole, the balance of safety lies; Mr Churchill, of course, knows perfectly well that, while professing to do that, he has been doing nothing of the sort. He has, in reality, been appealing to a sentiment, the emotion which is strongest and steadiest in the ‘hard-faced men’ who have elbowed their way to the top in a competitive society. He has ‘rationalised’ that competitive sentiment of domination by putting forward a ‘reason’ which can be avowed to them and to others.
Colonel Roosevelt managed to inject into his reasons for predominance a moral strenuousness which Mr Churchill does not achieve.
The following is a passage from one of the last important speeches made by Colonel Roosevelt—twice President of the United States and one of the out-standing figures in the world in his generation:—