Human Nature in Politics Part 13

In this chapter I propose to discuss the effect of the same tendencies on international and inter-racial relations. But, as soon as one leaves the single State and deals with the interrelation of several States, one meets with the preliminary question, What is a State? Is the British Empire, or the Concert of Europe, one State or many? Every community in either area now exerts political influence on every other, and the telegraph and the steamship have abolished most of the older limitations on the further development and extension of that influence. Will the process of coalescence go on either in feeling or in const.i.tutional form, or are there any permanent causes tending to limit the geographical or racial sphere of effective political solidarity, and therefore the size and composition of States?

Aristotle, writing under the conditions of the ancient world, laid it down that a community whose population extended to a hundred thousand would no more be a State than would one whose population was confined to ten.[95] He based his argument on measurable facts as to the human senses and the human memory. The territory of a State must be 'visible as a whole' by one eye, and the a.s.sembly attended by all the full citizens must be able to hear one voice--which must be that of an actual man and not of the legendary Stentor. The governing officials must be able to remember the faces and characters of all their fellow citizens.[96] He did not ignore the fact that nearly all the world's surface as he knew it was occupied by States enormously larger than his rule allowed. But he denied that the great barbarian monarchies were in the truest sense 'States' at all.

[95] _Ethics_, IX., X. 3. [Greek: oute gar ek deka anthropon genoit' an polis, out' ek deka myriadon eti polis estin.]

[96] Aristotle, _Polit._, Bk. VII. ch. iv.

We ourselves are apt to forget that the facts on which Aristotle relied were both real and important. The history of the Greek and mediaeval City-States shows how effective a stimulus may be given to some of the highest activities and emotions of mankind when the whole environment of each citizen comes within the first-hand range of his senses and memory. It is now only here and there, in villages outside the main stream of civilisation, that men know the faces of their neighbours and see daily as part of one whole the fields and cottages in which they work and rest. Yet, even now, when a village is absorbed by a sprawling suburb or overwhelmed by the influx of a new industrial population, some of the older inhabitants feel that they are losing touch with the deeper realities of life.

A year ago I stood with a hard-walking and hard-thinking old Yorkshire schoolmaster on the high moorland edge of Airedale. Opposite to us was the country-house where Charlotte Bronte was governess, and below us ran the railway, linking a string of manufacturing villages which already were beginning to stretch out towards each other, and threatened soon to extend through the valley an unbroken succession of tall chimneys and slate roofs. He told me how, within his memory, the old affection for place and home had disappeared from the district. I asked whether he thought that a new affection was possible, whether, now that men lived in the larger world of knowledge and inference, rather than in the narrower world of sight and hearing, a patriotism of books and maps might not appear which should be a better guide to life than the patriotism of the village street.

This he strongly denied; as the older feeling went, nothing, he said, had taken its place, or would take its place, but a naked and restless individualism, always seeking for personal satisfaction, and always missing it. And then, almost in the words of Morris and Ruskin, he began to urge that we should pay a cheap price if we could regain the true riches of life by forgetting steam and electricity, and returning to the agriculture of the mediaeval village and the handicrafts of the mediaeval town.

He knew and I knew that his plea was hopeless. Even under the old conditions the Greek and Italian and Flemish City-States perished, because they were too small to protect themselves against larger though less closely organised communities; and industrial progress is an invader even more irresistible than the armies of Macedon or Spain. For a constantly increasing proportion of the inhabitants of modern England there is now no place where in the old sense they 'live.' Nearly the whole of the cla.s.s engaged in the direction of English industry, and a rapidly increasing proportion of the manual workers, pa.s.s daily in tram or train between sleeping-place and working-place a hundred times more sights than their eyes can take in or their memory retain. They are, to use Mr. Wells's phrase, 'delocalised.'[97]

[97] _Mankind in the Making_, p. 406.

But now that we can no longer use the range of our senses as a basis for calculating the possible area of the civilised State, there might seem to be no facts at all which can be used for such a calculation. How can we fix the limits of effective intercommunication by steam or electricity, or the area which can be covered by such political expedients as representation and federalism? When Aristotle wished to ill.u.s.trate the relation of the size of the State to the powers of its citizens he compared it to a ship, which, he said, must not be too large to be handled by the muscles of actual men. 'A ship of two furlongs length would not be a ship at all.'[98] But the _Lusitania_ is already not very far from a furlong and a half in length, and no one can even guess what is the upward limit of size which the ship-builders of a generation hence will have reached. If once we a.s.sume that a State may be larger than the field of vision of a single man, then the merely mechanical difficulty of bringing the whole earth under a government as effective as that of the United States or the British Empire has already been overcome. If such a government is impossible, its impossibility must be due to the limits not of our senses and muscles but of our powers of imagination and sympathy.

[98] Aristotle, _Polit._, Bk. VII. ch. iv.

I have already pointed out[99] that the modern State must exist for the thoughts and feelings of its citizens, not as a fact of direct observation but as an ent.i.ty of the mind, a symbol, a personification, or an abstraction. The possible area of the State will depend, therefore, mainly on the facts which limit our creation and use of such ent.i.ties. Fifty years ago the statesmen who were reconstructing Europe on the basis of nationality thought that they had found the relevant facts in the causes which limit the physical and mental h.o.m.ogeneity of nations. A State, they thought, if it is to be effectively governed, must be a h.o.m.ogeneous 'nation,' because no citizen can imagine his State or make it the object of his political affection unless he believes in the existence of a national type to which the individual inhabitants of the State are a.s.similated; and he cannot continue to believe in the existence of such a type unless in fact his fellow-citizens are like each other and like himself in certain important respects. Bismarck deliberately limited the area of his intended German Empire by a quant.i.tative calculation as to the possibility of a.s.similating other Germans to the Prussian type. He always opposed the inclusion of Austria, and for a long time the inclusion of Bavaria, on the ground that while the Prussian type was strong enough to a.s.similate the Saxons and Hanoverians to itself, it would fail to a.s.similate Austrians and Bavarians. He said, for instance, in 1866: 'We cannot use these Ultramontanes, and we must not swallow more than we can digest.'[100]

[99] Part I. ch. ii. pp. 72, 73, and 77-81.

[100] _Bismarck_ (J.W. Headlam), p. 269.

Mazzini believed, with Bismarck, that no State could be well governed unless it consisted of a h.o.m.ogeneous nation. But Bismarck's policy of the artificial a.s.similation of the weaker by the stronger type seemed to him the vilest form of tyranny; and he based his own plans for the reconstruction of Europe upon the purpose of G.o.d, as revealed by the existing correspondence of national uniformities with geographical facts. 'G.o.d,' he said, 'divided humanity into distinct groups or nuclei upon the face of the earth.... Evil governments have disfigured the Divine design. Nevertheless you may still trace it, distinctly marked out--at least as far as Europe is concerned--by the course of the great rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and other geographical conditions.'[101]

[101] _Life, and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iv. (written 1858), p. 275.

Both Mazzini and Bismarck, therefore, opposed with all their strength the humanitarianism of the French Revolution, the philosophy which, as Canning said, 'reduced the nation into individuals in order afterwards to congregate them into mobs.'[102] Mazzini attacked the 'cosmopolitans,'

who preached that all men should love each other without distinction of nationality, on the ground that they were asking for a psychological impossibility. No man, he argued, can imagine, and therefore no one can love, mankind, if mankind means to him all the millions of individual human beings. Already in 1836 he denounced the original Carbonari for this reason: 'The cosmopolitan,' he then said, 'alone in the midst of the immense circle by which he is surrounded, whose boundaries extend beyond the limits of his vision; possessed of no other weapons than the consciousness of his rights (often misconceived) and his individual faculties--which, however powerful, are incapable of extending their activity over the whole sphere of application const.i.tuting the aim ...

has but two paths before him. He is compelled to choose between despotism and inertia.'[103] He quotes the Breton fisherman who, as he puts out to sea, prays to G.o.d, 'Help me my G.o.d! My boat is so small and Thy ocean so wide.'[104]

[102] Canning, _Life_ by Stapleton, p. 341 (speech at Liverpool, 1818).

[103] Mazzini, _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iii. p. 8.

[104] _Ibid._, vol. iv. p. 274.

For Mazzini the divinely indicated nation stood therefore between the individual man and the unimaginable mult.i.tude of the human race. A man could comprehend and love his nation because it consisted of beings like himself 'speaking the same language, gifted with the same tendencies and educated by the same historical tradition,'[105] and could be thought of as a single national ent.i.ty. The nation was 'the intermediate term between humanity and the individual,'[106] and man could only attain to the conception of humanity by picturing it to himself as a mosaic of h.o.m.ogeneous nations. 'Nations are the citizens of humanity as individuals are the citizens of the nation,'[107] and again, 'The pact of humanity cannot be signed by individuals, but only by free and equal peoples, possessing a name, a banner, and the consciousness of a distinct existence.'[108]

[105] _Ibid._, vol. iv. p. 276 (written 1858).

[106] _Ibid._, vol. v. p. 273.

[107] Mazzini, _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. v. p. 274 (written 1849).

[108] _Ibid_., vol. iii. p. 15 (written 1836).

Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck or by Mazzini, played a great and invaluable part in the development of the political consciousness of Europe during the nineteenth century. But it is becoming less and less possible to accept it as a solution for the problems of the twentieth century. We cannot now a.s.sert with Mazzini, that the 'indisputable tendency of our epoch' is towards a reconst.i.tution of Europe into a certain number of h.o.m.ogeneous national States 'as nearly as possible equal in population and extent'[109]

Mazziui, indeed, unconsciously but enormously exaggerated the simplicity of the question even in his own time. National types throughout the greater part of south-eastern Europe were not even then divided into h.o.m.ogeneous units by 'the course of the great rivers and the direction of the high mountains,' but were intermingled from village to village; and events have since forced us to admit that fact. We no longer, for instance, can believe, as Mr. Swinburne and the other English disciples of Mazzini and of Kossuth seem to have believed in the eighteen sixties, that Hungary is inhabited only by a h.o.m.ogeneous population of patriotic Magyars. We can see that Mazzini was already straining his principle to the breaking point when he said in 1852: 'It is in the power of Greece ... to become, by extending itself to Constantinople, a powerful barrier against the European encroachments of Russia.'[110] In Macedonia to-day bands of Bulgarian and Greek patriots, both educated in the pure tradition of Mazzinism, are attempting to exterminate the rival populations in order to establish their own claim to represent the purposes of G.o.d as indicated by the position of the Balkan mountains.

Mazzini himself would, perhaps, were he living now, admit that, if the Bismarckian policy of artificial a.s.similation is to be rejected, there must continue to be some States in Europe which contain inhabitants belonging to widely different national types.

[109] _Ibid._, vol. v. p. 275.

[110] _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. vi. p. 258.

Bismarck's conception of an artificial uniformity created by 'blood and iron' corresponded more closely than did Mazzini's to the facts of the nineteenth century. But its practicability depended upon the a.s.sumption that the members of the dominant nationality would always vehemently desire to impose their own type on the rest. Now that the Social-Democrats, who are a not inconsiderable proportion of the Prussian population, apparently admire their Polish or Bavarian or Danish fellow-subjects all the more because they cling to their own national characteristics, Prince Bulow's Bismarckian dictum the other day, that the strength of Germany depends on the existence and dominance of an intensely national Prussia, seemed a mere political survival. The same change of feeling has also shown itself in the United Kingdom, and both the English parties have now tacitly or explicitly abandoned that Anglicisation of Ireland and Wales, which all parties once accepted as a necessary part of English policy.

A still more important difficulty in applying the principle that the area of the State should be based on h.o.m.ogeneity of national type, whether natural or artificial, has been created by the rapid extension during the last twenty-five years of all the larger European states into non-European territory. Neither Mazzini, till his death in 1872, nor Bismarck, till the colonial adventure of 1884, was compelled to take into his calculations the inclusion of territories and peoples outside Europe. Neither of them, therefore, made any effective intellectual preparation for those problems which have been raised in our time by 'the scramble for the world.' Mazzini seems, indeed, to have vaguely expected that nationality would spread from Europe into Asia and Africa, and that the 'pact of humanity' would ultimately be 'signed' by h.o.m.ogeneous and independent 'nations,' who would cover the whole land surface of the globe. But he never indicated the political forces by which that result was to be brought about. The Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1896 might have been represented either as a necessary stage in the Mazzinian policy of spreading the idea of nationality to Africa, or as a direct contradiction of that idea itself.

Bismarck, with his narrower and more practical intellect, never looked forward, as Mazzini did, to a 'pact of humanity,' which should include even the nations of Europe, and, indeed, always protested against the attempt to conceive of any relation whatsoever, moral or political, as existing between any State and the States or populations outside its boundaries. 'The only sound principle of action,' he said, 'for a great State is political egoism.'[111] When, therefore, after Bismarck's death German sailors and soldiers found themselves in contact with the defenceless inhabitants of China or East Africa, they were, as the Social-Democrats quickly pointed out, provided with no conception of the situation more highly developed than that which was acted upon in the fifth century A.D., by Attila and his Huns.

[111] Speech, 1850, quoted by J.W. Headlam, _Bismarck_, p. 83.

The modern English imperialists tried for some time to apply the idea of national h.o.m.ogeneity to the facts of the British Empire. From the publication of Seeley's _Expansion of England_ in 1883 till the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 they strove to believe in the existence of a 'Blood,' an 'Island Race,' consisting of h.o.m.ogeneous English-speaking individuals, among whom were to be reckoned not only the whole population of the United Kingdom, but all the reasonably white inhabitants of our colonies and dependencies; while they thought of the other inhabitants of the Empire as 'the white man's burden'--the necessary material for the exercise of the white man's virtues. The idealists among them, when they were forced to realise that such a h.o.m.ogeneity of the whites did not yet exist, persuaded themselves that it would come peacefully and inevitably as a result of the reading of imperial poems and the summoning of an imperial council. The Bismarckian realists among them believed that it would be brought about, in South Africa and elsewhere, by 'blood and iron.' Lord Milner, who is perhaps the most loyal adherent of the Bismarckian tradition to be found out of Germany, contended even at Vereeniging against peace with the Boers on any terms except such an unconditional surrender as would involve the ultimate Anglicisation of the South African colonies. He still dreams of a British Empire whose egoism shall be as complete as that of Bismarck's Prussia, and warns us in 1907, in the style of 1887, against those 'ideas of our youth' which were 'at once too insular and too cosmopolitan.'[112]

[112] _Times_, Dec. 19, 1907.

But in the minds of most of our present imperialists, imperial egoism is now deprived of its only possible psychological basis. It is to be based not upon national h.o.m.ogeneity but upon the consciousness of national variation. The French in Canada are to remain intensely French, and the Dutch in South Africa intensely Dutch; though both are to be divided from the world outside the British Empire by an unbridgeable moral chasm. To imperialism so conceived facts lend no support. The loyal acceptance of British Imperial citizenship by Sir Wilfred Laurier or General Botha const.i.tutes something more subtle, something, to adapt Lord Milner's phrase, less insular but more cosmopolitan than imperial egoism. It does not, for instance, involve an absolute indifference to the question whether France or Holland shall be swallowed up by the sea.

At the same time the non-white races within the Empire show no signs of enthusiastic contentment at the prospect of existing, like the English 'poor' during the eighteenth century, as the mere material of other men's virtues. They too have their own vague ideas of nationality; and if those ideas do not ultimately break up our Empire, it will be because they are enlarged and held in check, not by the sentiment of imperial egoism, but by those wider religious and ethical conceptions which pay little heed to imperial or national frontiers. It may, however, be objected by our imperial 'Real-politiker' that cosmopolitan feeling is at this moment both visionary and dangerous, not because, as Mazzini thought, it is psychologically impossible, but because of the plain facts of our military position. Our Empire, they say, will have to fight for its existence against a German or a Russian Empire or both together during the next generation, and our only chance of success is to create that kind of imperial sentiment which has fighting value. If the white inhabitants of the Empire are encouraged to think of themselves as a 'dominant race,' that is to say as both a h.o.m.ogeneous nation and a natural aristocracy, they will soon be hammered by actual fighting into a Bismarckian temper of imperial 'egoism.' Among the non-white inhabitants of the Empire (since either side in the next inter-imperial war will, after its first serious defeat, abandon the convention of only employing European troops against Europeans) we must discover and drill those races who like the Gurkhas and the Soudanese, may be expected to fight for us and to hate our enemies without asking for political rights. In any case we, like Bismarck, must extirpate, as the most fatal solvent of empire, that humanitarianism which concerns itself with the interests of our future opponents as well as those of our fellow-subjects.

This sort of argument might of course be met by a _reductio ad absurdum_. If the policy of imperial egoism is a successful one it will be adopted by all empires alike, and whether we desire it or not, the victor in each inter-imperial war will take over the territory of the loser. After centuries of warfare and the steady retrogression, in the waste of blood and treasure and loyalty, of modern civilisation, two empires, England and Germany, or America and China, may remain. Both will possess an armament which represents the whole 'surplus value,'

beyond mere subsistence, created by its inhabitants. Both will contain white and yellow and brown and black men hating each other across a wavering line on the map of the world. But the struggle will go on, and, as the result of a naval Armageddon in the Pacific, only one Empire will exist. 'Imperial egoism,' having worked itself out to its logical conclusion, will have no further meaning, and the inhabitants of the globe, diminished to half their number, will be compelled to consider the problems of race and of the organised exploitation of the globe from the point of view of mere humanitarianism.

Is the suggestion completely wanting in practicability that we might begin that consideration before the struggle goes any further? Fifteen hundred years ago, in south-eastern Europe, men who held the h.o.m.oousian opinion of the Trinity were gathered in arms against the h.o.m.oiousians.

The generals and other 'Real-politiker' on both sides may have feared, like Lord Milner, lest their followers should become 'too cosmopolitan,'

too ready to extend their sympathies across the frontiers of theology.

'This' a h.o.m.oousian may have said 'is a practical matter. Unless our side learn by training themselves in theological egoism to hate the other side, we shall be beaten in the next battle.' And yet we can now see that the practical interests of Europe were very little concerned with the question whether 'we' or 'they' won, but very seriously concerned with the question whether the division itself into 'we' or 'they' could not be obliterated by the discovery either of a less clumsy metaphysic or of a way of thinking about humanity which made the continued existence of those who disagreed with one in theology no longer intolerable. May the Germans and ourselves be now marching towards the horrors of a world-war merely because 'nation' and 'empire'

like 'h.o.m.oousia' and 'h.o.m.oiousia' are the best that we can do in making ent.i.ties of the mind to stand between us and an unintelligible universe, and because having made such ent.i.ties our sympathies are shut up within them?

I have already urged, when considering the conditions of political reasoning, that many of the logical difficulties arising from our tendency to divide the infinite stream of our thoughts and sensations into h.o.m.ogeneous cla.s.ses and species are now unnecessary and have been avoided in our time by the students of the natural sciences. Just as the modern artist subst.i.tutes without mental confusion his ever-varying curves and surfaces for the straight and simple lines of the savage, so the scientific imagination has learnt to deal with the varying facts of nature without thinking of them as separate groups, each composed of identical individuals and represented to us by a single type.

Can we learn so to think of the varying individuals of the whole human race? Can we do, that is to say, what Mazzini declared to be impossible?

And if we can, shall we be able to love the fifteen hundred million different human beings of whom we are thus enabled to think?

To the first question the publication of the _Origin of Species_ in 1859 offered an answer. Since then we have in fact been able to represent the human race to our imagination, neither as a chaos of arbitrarily varying individuals, nor as a mosaic of h.o.m.ogeneous nations, but as a biological group, every individual in which differs from every other not arbitrarily but according to an intelligible process of organic evolution.[113] And, since that which exists for the imagination can exist also for the emotions, it might have been hoped that the second question would also have been answered by evolution, and that the warring egoisms of nations and empires might henceforth have been dissolved by love for that infinitely varying mult.i.tude whom we can watch as they work their way through so much pain and confusion towards a more harmonious relation to the universe.

[113] Sir Sydney Olivier, e.g. in his courageous and penetrating book _White Capital and Coloured Labour_ considers (in chap. ii.) the racial distinctions between black and white from the point of view of evolution. This consideration brings him at once to 'the infinite, inexhaustible distinctness of personality between individuals, so much a fundamental fact of life that one almost would say that the amalgamating race-characteristics are merely incrustations concealing this sparkling variety' (pp. 12, 13).

But it was the intellectual tragedy of the nineteenth century that the discovery of organic evolution, instead of stimulating such a general love of humanity, seemed at first to show that it was for ever impossible. Progress, it appeared, had been always due to a ruthless struggle for life, which must still continue unless progress was to cease. Pity and love would turn the edge of the struggle, and therefore would lead inevitably to the degeneration of the species.

This grim conception of an internecine conflict, inevitable and unending, in which all races must play their part, hung for a generation after 1859 over the study of world-politics as the fear of a cooling sun hung over physics, and the fear of a population to be checked only by famine and war hung over the first century of political economy. Before Darwin wrote, it had been possible for philanthropists to think of the non-white races as 'men and brothers' who, after a short process of education, would become in all respects except colour identical with themselves. Darwin made it clear that the difficulty could not be so glossed over. Racial variations were shown to be unaffected by education, to have existed for millions of years, and to be tending perhaps towards divergence rather than a.s.similation.

The practical problem also of race relationship has by a coincidence presented itself since Darwin wrote in a sterner form. During the first half of the nineteenth century the European colonists who were in daily contact with non-European races, although their impulses and their knowledge alike revolted from the optimistic ethnology of Exeter Hall, yet could escape all thought about their own position by a.s.suming that the problem would settle itself. To the natives of Australia or Canada or the Hottentots of South Africa trade automatically brought disease, and disease cleared the land for a stronger population. But the weakest races and individuals have now died out, the surviving population are showing unexpected powers of resisting the white man's epidemics, and we are adding every year to our knowledge of, and therefore our responsibility for, the causation of infection. We are nearing the time when the extermination of races, if it is done at all, must be done deliberately.