Human Nature in Politics Part 14

But if the extermination is to be both inevitable and deliberate how can there exist a community either of affection or purpose between the killers and the killed? No one at this moment professes, as far as I know, to have an easy and perfect answer to this question. The point of ethics lies within the region claimed by religion. But Christianity, which at present is the religion chiefly concerned, has conspicuously failed even to produce a tolerable working compromise. The official Christian theory is, apparently, that all human souls are of equal value, and that it ought to be a matter of indifference to us whether a given territory is inhabited a thousand years hence by a million converted Central African pigmies or a million equally converted Europeans or Hindus. On the practical point, however, whether the stronger race should base its plans of extension on the extermination of the weaker race, or on an attempt, within the limits of racial possibility, to improve it, Christians have, during the nineteenth century, been infinitely more ruthless than Mohammedans, though their ruthlessness has often been disguised by more or less conscious hypocrisy.

But the most immediately dangerous result of political 'Darwinism' was not its effect in justifying the extermination of African aborigines by European colonists, but the fact that the conception of the 'struggle for life' could be used as a proof that that conflict among the European nations for the control of the trade-routes of the world which has been threatening for the last quarter of a century is for each of the nations concerned both a scientific necessity and a moral duty. Lord Ampthill, for instance, the athletic ex-governor of Madras, said the other day: 'From an individual struggle, a struggle of families, of communities, and nations, the struggle for existence has now advanced to a struggle of empires.'[114]

[114] _Times_, Jan. 22, 1908.

The exhilaration with which Lord Ampthill proclaims that one-half of the species must needs slaughter the other half in the cause of human progress is particularly terrifying when one reflects that he may have to conduct negotiations as a member of the next Conservative Government with a German statesman like Prince Bullow, who seems to combine the teaching of Bismarck with what he understands to have been the teaching of Darwin when he defends the Polish policy of his master by a declaration that the rules of private morality do not apply to national conduct.

Any such identification of the biological advantage arising from the 'struggle for life' among individuals with that which is to be expected from a 'struggle of empires' is, of course, thoroughly unscientific. The 'struggle of empires' must either be fought out between European troops alone, or between Europeans in combination with their non-European allies and subjects. If it takes the first form, and if we a.s.sume, as Lord Ampthill probably does, that the North European racial type is 'higher' than any other, then the slaughter of half a million selected Englishmen and half a million selected Germans will clearly be an act of biological retrogression. Even if the non-European races are brought in and a corresponding number of selected Turks and Arabs and Tartars, or of Gurkhas and Pathans and Soudanese are slaughtered, the biological loss to the world, as measured by the percentage of surviving 'higher'

or 'lower' individuals will only be slightly diminished.

Nor is that form of the argument much better founded which contends that the evolutionary advantage to be expected from the 'struggle of empires'

is the 'survival' not of races but of political and cultural types. Our victory over the German Empire, for instance, would mean, it is said, a victory for the idea of political liberty. This argument, which, when urged by the rulers of India, sounds somewhat temerarious, requires the a.s.sumption that types of culture are in the modern world most successfully spread by military occupation. But in the ancient world Greek culture spread most rapidly after the fall of the Greek Empire; j.a.pan in our own time adopted Western culture more readily as an independent nation than she would have done as a dependency of Russia or France; and India is perhaps more likely to-day to learn from j.a.pan than from England.

Lord Ampthill's phrase, however, represents not so much an argument, as a habit of feeling shared by many who have forgotten or never known the biological doctrine which it echoes. The first followers of Darwin believed that the human species had been raised above its prehuman ancestors because, and in so far as, it had surrendered itself to a blind instinct of conflict. It seemed, therefore, as if the old moral precept that men should control their more violent impulses by reflection had been founded upon a mistake. Unreflecting instinct was, after all, the best guide, and nations who acted instinctively towards their neighbours might justify themselves like the Parisian ruffians of ten years ago, by claiming to be 'strugforlifeurs.'

If this habit of mind is to be destroyed it must be opposed not merely by a new argument but by a conception of man's relation to the universe which creates emotional force as well as intellectual conviction.

And the change that has already shown itself in our conception of the struggle for life among individuals indicates that, by some divine chance, a corresponding change may come in our conception of the struggle between peoples. The evolutionists of our own time tell us that the improvement of the biological inheritance of any community is to be hoped for, not from the encouragement of individual conflict, but from the stimulation of the higher social impulses under the guidance of the science of eugenics; and the emotional effect of this new conception is already seen in the almost complete disappearance from industrial politics of that unwillingly brutal 'individualism' which afflicted kindly Englishmen in the eighteen sixties.

An international science of eugenics might in the same way indicate that the various races should aim, not at exterminating each other, but at encouraging the improvement by each of its own racial type. Such an idea would not appeal to those for whom the whole species arranges itself in definite and obvious grades of 'higher' and 'lower,' from the northern Europeans downwards, and who are as certain of the ultimate necessity of a 'white world' as the Sydney politicians are of the necessity of a 'white Australia.' But in this respect during the last few years the inhabitants of Europe have shown signs of a new humility, due partly to widespread intellectual causes and partly to the hard facts of the Russo-j.a.panese war and the arming of China. The 'spheres of influence' into which we divided the Far East eight years ago, seem to us now a rather stupid joke, and those who read history are already bitterly ashamed that we destroyed by the sack of the Summer Palace in 1859, the products of a thousand years of such art as we can never hope to emulate. We are coming honestly to believe that the world is richer for the existence both of other civilisations and of other racial types than our own. We have been compelled by the study of the Christian doc.u.ments to think of our religion as one only among the religions of the world, and to acknowledge that it has owed much and may owe much again to the longer philosophic tradition and the subtler and more patient brains of Hindustan and Persia. Even if we look at the future of the species as a matter of pure biology, we are warned by men of science that it is not safe to depend only on one family or one variety for the whole breeding-stock of the world. For the moment we shrink from the interbreeding of races, but we do so in spite of some conspicuous examples of successful interbreeding in the past, and largely because of our complete ignorance of the conditions on which success depends.

Already, therefore, it is possible without intellectual dishonesty to look forward to a future for the race which need not be reached through a welter of blood and hatred. We can imagine the nations settling the racial allocation of the temperate or tropical breeding-grounds, or even deliberately placing the males and females of the few hopelessly backward tribes on different islands, without the necessity that the most violent pa.s.sions of mankind should be stimulated in preparation for a general war. No one now expects an immediate, or prophesies with certainty an ultimate, Federation of the Globe; but the consciousness of a common purpose in mankind, or even the acknowledgment that such a common purpose is possible, would alter the face of world-politics at once. The discussion at the Hague of a halt in the race of armaments would no longer seem Utopian, and the strenuous profession by the colonising powers that they have no selfish ends in view might be transformed from a sordid and useless hypocrisy into a fact to which each nation might adjust its policy. The irrational race-hatred which breaks out from time to time on the fringes of empire, would have little effect in world politics when opposed by a consistent conception of the future of human progress.

Meanwhile, it is true, the military preparations for a death-struggle of empires still go on, and the problem even of peaceful immigration becomes yearly more threatening, now that shipping companies can land tens of thousands of Chinese or Indian labourers for a pound or two a head at any port in the world. But when we think of such things we need no longer feel ourselves in the grip of a Fate that laughs at human purpose and human kindliness. An idea of the whole existence of our species is at last a possible background to our individual experience.

Its emotional effect may prove to be not less than that of the visible temples and walls of the Greek cities, although it is formed not from the testimony of our eyesight, but from the knowledge which we acquire in our childhood and confirm by the half-conscious corroboration of our daily life.

We all of us, plain folk and learned alike, now make a picture for ourselves of the globe with its hemispheres of light and shadow, from every point of which the telegraph brings us hourly news, and which may already be more real to us than the fields and houses past which we hurry in the train. We can all see it, hanging and turning in the monstrous emptiness of the skies, and obedient to forces whose action we can watch hundreds of light-years away and feel in the beating of our hearts. The sharp new evidence of the camera brings every year nearer to us its surface of ice and rock and plain, and the wondering eyes of alien peoples.

It may be that we shall long continue to differ as to the full significance of this vision. But now that we can look at it without helpless pain it may stir the deepest impulses of our being. To some of us it may bring confidence in that Love that Dante saw, 'which moves the Sun and the other Stars.' To each of us it may suggest a kinder pity for all the bewildered beings who hand on from generation to generation the torch of conscious life.