The Great Illusion Part 12

Finally, of course, we are told that even though these forces are at work, they must take "thousands of years" to operate. This dogmatism ignores the Law of Acceleration, as true in the domain of sociology as in that of physics, which I have touched on at the close of the preceding chapter. The most recent evidence would seem to show that man as a fire-using animal dates back to the Tertiary epoch--say, three hundred thousand years. Now, in all that touches this discussion, man in Northern Europe (in Great Britain, say) remained unchanged for two hundred and ninety-eight thousand of those years. In the last two thousand years he changed more than in the two hundred and ninety-eight thousand preceding, and in one hundred he has changed more, perhaps, than in the preceding two thousand. The comparison becomes more understandable if we resolve it into hours. For, say, fifty years the man was a cannibal savage or a wild animal, hunting other wild animals, and then in the s.p.a.ce of three months he became John Smith of Des Moines, attending church, pa.s.sing laws, using the telephone, and so on.

That is the history of European mankind. And in the face of it, the wiseacres talk sapiently, and lay it down as a self-evident and demonstrable fact that inter-State war, which, by reason of the mechanics of our civilization, accomplishes nothing and can accomplish nothing, will forever be una.s.sailable because, once man has got the habit of doing a thing, he will go on doing it, although the reason which in the first instance prompted it has long since disappeared--because, in short, of the "unchangeability of human nature."

CHAPTER IV

DO THE WARLIKE NATIONS INHERIT THE EARTH?

The confident dogmatism of militarist writers on this subject--The facts--The lessons of Spanish America--How conquest makes for the survival of the unfit--Spanish method and English method in the New World--The virtues of military training--The Dreyfus case--The threatened Germanization of England--"The war which made Germany great and Germans small."

The militarist authorities I have quoted in the preceding chapter admit, therefore, and admit very largely, man's drift, in a sentimental sense, away from war. But that drift, they declare, is degeneration; without those qualities which "war alone," in Mr. Roosevelt's phrase, can develop, man will "rot and decay."

This plea is, of course, directly germane to our subject. To say that the qualities which we a.s.sociate with war, and nothing else but war, are necessary to a.s.sure a nation success in its struggles with other nations is equivalent to saying that those who drift away from war will go down before those whose warlike activity can conserve those qualities essential to survival; and this is but another way of saying that men must always remain warlike if they are to survive, that the warlike nations inherit the earth; that men's pugnacity, therefore, is the outcome of the great natural law of survival, and that a decline of pugnacity marks in any nation a retrogression and not an advance in its struggle for survival. I have already indicated (Chapter II., Part II.) the outlines of the proposition, which leaves no escape from this conclusion. This is the scientific basis of the proposition voiced by the authorities I have quoted--Mr. Roosevelt, Von Moltke, Renan, Nietzsche, and various of the warlike clergy[68]--and it lies at the very bottom of the plea that man's nature, in so far as it touches the tendency of men as a whole to go to war, does not change; that the warlike qualities are a necessary part of human vitality in the struggle for existence; that, in short, all that we know of the law of evolution forbids the conclusion that man will ever lose this warlike pugnacity, or that nations will survive other than by the struggle of physical force.

The view is best voiced, perhaps, by Homer Lea, whom I have already quoted. He says, in his "Valor of Ignorance":

As physical vigor represents the strength of man in his struggle for existence, in the same sense military vigor const.i.tutes the strength of nations; ideals, laws, const.i.tutions are but temporary effulgences [P. 11]. The deterioration of the military force and the consequent destruction of the militant spirit have been concurrent with national decay [P. 24]. International disagreements are ... the result of the primordial conditions that sooner or later cause war ... the law of struggle, the law of survival, universal, unalterable ... to thwart them, to short-cut them, to circ.u.mvent them, to cozen, to deny, to scorn, to violate them, is folly such as man's conceit alone makes possible....

Arbitration denies the inexorability of natural laws ... that govern the existence of political ent.i.ties [Pp. 76, 77]. Laws that govern the militancy of a people are not of man's framing, but follow the primitive ordinances of nature that govern all forms of life, from simple protozoa, awash in the sea, to the empires of man.[69]

I have already indicated the grave misconception which lies at the bottom of the interpretation of the evolutionary law here indicated.

What we are concerned with now is to deal with the facts on which this alleged general principle is inductively based. We have seen from the foregoing chapter that man's nature certainly does change; the next step is to show, from the facts of the present-day world, that the warlike qualities do not make for survival, that the warlike nations do not inherit the earth.

Which are the military nations? We generally think of them in Europe as Germany and France, or perhaps also Russia, Austria, and Italy.

Admittedly (_vide_ all the English and American military pundits and economists) England is the least militarized nation in Europe, the United States perhaps in the world. It is, above all, Germany that appeals to us as the type of the military nation, one in which the stern school of war makes for the preservation of the "manly and adventurous qualities."

The facts want a little closer examination. What is a career of unwarlike ease, in Mr. Roosevelt's phrase? In the last chapter we saw that during the last forty years eight thousand out of sixty million Germans have been engaged in warfare during a trifle over a year, and that against Hottentots or Hereros--a proportion of war days per German to peace days per German which is as one to some hundreds of thousands.

So that if we are to take Germany as the type of the military nation, and if we are to accept Mr. Roosevelt's dictum that by war alone can we acquire "those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life," we shall nevertheless be doomed to lose them, for under conditions like those of Germany how many of us can ever see war, or can pretend to fall under its influence? As already pointed out, the men who really give the tone to the German nation, to German life and conduct--that is to say, the majority of adult Germans--have never seen a battle and never will see one. France has done much better. Not only has she seen infinitely more actual fighting, but her population is much more militarized than that of Germany, 50 per cent. more, in fact, since, in order to maintain from a population of forty millions the same effective military force as Germany does with sixty millions, 1-1/2 per cent. of the French population is under arms as against 1 per cent. of the German.[70]

Still more military in organization and in recent practical experience is Russia, and more military than Russia is Turkey, and more military than Turkey as a whole are the semi-independent sections of Turkey, Arabia, and Albania, and then, perhaps, comes Morocco.

On the Western Hemisphere we can draw a like table as to the "warlike, adventurous, manly, and progressive peoples" as compared with the "peaceful, craven, slothful, and decadent." The least warlike of all, the nation which has had the least training in war, the least experience of it, which has been the least purified by it, is Canada. After that comes the United States, and after that the best--(excuse me, I mean, of course, the worst--_i.e._, the least warlike)--of the Spanish American republics like Brazil and Argentina; while the most warlike of all, and consequently the most "manly and progressive," are the "Sambo"

republics, like San Domingo, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Venezuela. They are always fighting. If they cannot manage to get up a fight between one another, the various parties in each republic will fight between themselves. Here we get the real thing. The soldiers do not pa.s.s their lives in practising the goose-step, cleaning harness, pipeclaying belts, but in giving and taking hard pounding. Several of these progressive republics have never known a year since they declared their independence from Spain in which they have not had a war. And quite a considerable proportion of the populations spend their lives in fighting. During the first twenty years of Venezuela's independent existence she fought no less than one hundred and twenty important battles, either with her neighbors or with herself, and she has maintained the average pretty well ever since. Every election is a fight--none of your "mouth-fighting," none of your craven talking-shops for them. Good, honest, hard, manly knocks, with anything from one to five thousand dead and wounded left on the field. The presidents of these strenuous republics are not poltroons of politicians, but soldiers--men of blood and iron with a vengeance, men after Mr. Roosevelt's own heart, all following "the good old rule, the simple plan." These are the people who have taken Carlyle's advice to "shut up the talking-shops." _They_ fight it out like men; _they_ talk with Gatling-guns and Mausers. Oh, they are a very fine, manly, military lot! If fighting makes for survival, they should completely oust from the field Canada and the United States, one of which has never had a real battle for the best part of its hundred years of craven, sordid, peaceful life, and the other of which Homer Lea a.s.sures us is surely dying, because of its tendency to avoid fighting.

Mr. Lea does not make any secret of the fact (and if he did, some of his rhetoric would display it) that he is out of sympathy with predominant American ideals. He might emigrate to Venezuela, or Colombia, or Nicaragua. He would be able to prove to each military dictator in turn that, in converting the country into a shambles, far from committing a foul crime for which such dictators should be, and are, held in execration by civilized men the world over, they are, on the contrary, but obeying one of G.o.d's commands in tune with all the immutable laws of the universe. I desire to write in all seriousness, but, to one who happens to have seen at first hand something of the conditions which arise from a real military conception of civilization, it is very difficult. How does Mr. Roosevelt, who declares that "by war alone can we acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life"; how does Von Stengel, who declares that "war is a test of a nation's health, political, physical, and moral"; how do our militarists, who infer that the military state is so much finer than the Cobdenite one of commercial pursuits; how does M. Ernest Renan, who declares that war is the condition of progress, and that under peace we should sink to a degree of degeneracy difficult to realize; and how do the various English clergymen who voice a like philosophy reconcile their creed with military Spanish America? How can they urge that non-military industrialism, which, with all its shortcomings, has on the Western Continent given us Canada and the United States, makes for decadence and degeneration, while militarism and the qualities and instincts that go with it have given us Venezuela and San Domingo? Do we not all recognize that industrialism--Mr. Lea's "gourmandizing and retching" notwithstanding--is the one thing which will save these military republics; that the one condition of their advance is that they shall give up the stupid and sordid gold-braid militarism and turn to honest work?

If ever there was a justification for Herbert Spencer's sweeping generalization that "advance to the highest forms of man and society depends on the decline of militancy and the growth of industrialism,"

it is to be found in the history of the South and Central American Republics. Indeed, Spanish America at the present moment affords more lessons than we seem to be drawing, and, if militancy makes for advance and survival, it is a most extraordinary thing that all who are in any way concerned with those countries, all who live in them and whose future is wrapped up in them, can never sufficiently express their thankfulness that at last there seems to be a tendency with some of them to get away from the blood and valor nonsense which has been their curse for three centuries, and to exchange the military ideal for the Cobdenite one of buying cheap and selling dear which excites so much contempt.

Some years ago an Italian lawyer, a certain Toma.s.so Caivano, wrote a letter detailing his experiences and memories of twenty years' life in Venezuela and the neighboring republics, and his general conclusions have for this discussion a direct relevancy. As a sort of farewell exhortation to the Venezuelans, he wrote:

The curse of your civilization is the soldier and the soldier's temper. It is impossible for two of you, still less for two parties, to carry on a discussion without one wanting to fight the other about the matter in hand. You regard it as a derogation of dignity to consider the point of view of the other side, and to attempt to meet it, if it is possible to fight about it. You deem that personal valor atones for all defects. The soldier of evil character is more considered amongst you than the civilian of good character, and military adventure is deemed more honorable than honest labor. You overlook the worst corruption, the worst oppression, in your leaders if only they gild it with military fanfaronade and declamation about bravery and destiny and patriotism. Not until there is a change in this spirit will you cease to be the victims of evil oppression. Not until your general populace--your peasantry and your workers--refuse thus to be led to slaughter in quarrels of which they know and care nothing, but into which they are led because they also prefer fighting to work--not until all this happens will those beautiful lands which are among the most fertile on G.o.d's earth support a happy and prosperous people living in contentment and secure possession of the fruits of their labor.[71]

Spanish America seems at last in a fair way to throwing off the domination of the soldier and awakening from these nightmares of successive military despotisms tempered by a.s.sa.s.sination, though, in abandoning, in Signor Caivano's words, "military adventure for honest labor," she will necessarily have less to do with those deeds of blood and valor of which her history has been so full. But those in South America who matter are not mourning. Really they are not.[72]

The situation can be duplicated absolutely on the other side of the hemisphere. Change a few names, and you get Arabia or Morocco. Listen to this from a recent London _Times_ article:[73]

The fact is that for many years past Turkey has almost invariably been at war in some part or other of Arabia.... At the present moment Turkey is actually conducting three separate small campaigns within Arabia or upon its borders, and a fourth series of minor operations in Mesopotamia. The last-named movement is against the Kurdish tribes of the Mosul district.... Another, and more important, advance is against the truculent Muntefik Arabs of the Euphrates delta.... The fourth, and by far the largest, campaign is the unending warfare in the province of Yemen, north of Aden, where the Turks have been fighting intermittently for more than a decade.

The peoples of Arabia are also indulging in conflict on their own account. The interminable feud between the rival potentates of Nedjd, Ibn Saud of Riadh and Ibn Rashid of Hail, has broken out afresh, and the tribes of the coastal province of El Katar are supposed to have plunged into the fray. The Muntefik Arabs, not content with worrying the Turks, are harrying the territories of Sheikh Murbarak of Koweit. In the far south the Sultan of Shehr and Mokalla, a feudatory of the British Government, is conducting a tiny war against a hostile tribe in the mysterious Hadramaut. In the west the Beduin are spasmodically menacing certain sections of the Hedjaz Railway, which they very much dislike.... Ten years ago the Ibn Rashids were nominally masters of a great deal of Arabia, and grew so aggressive that they tried to seize Koweit. The fiery old Sheikh of Koweit marched against them, and alternately won and lost. He had his revenge. He sent an audacious scion of the Ibn Sauds to the old Wahabi capital of Riadh, and by a remarkable stratagem the youth captured the stronghold with only fifty men. The rival parties have been fighting at intervals ever since.

And so on and so on to the extent of a column. So that what Venezuela and Nicaragua are to the American Continent, Arabia, Albania, Armenia, Montenegro, and Morocco are to the Eastern Hemisphere. We find exactly the same rule--that just as one gets away from militancy one gets towards advance and civilization; as men lose the tendency to fight they gain the tendency to work, and it is by working with one another, and not by fighting against each other, that men advance.

Take the progression away from militancy, and it gives us a table something like this:

Arabia and Morocco.

Turkish territory as a whole.

The more unruly Balkan States. Montenegro.

Russia.

Spain. Italy. Austria.

France.

Germany.

Scandinavia. Holland. Belgium.

England.

The United States.

Canada.

Do Mr. Roosevelt, Admiral Mahan, Baron von Stengel, Marshal von Moltke, Mr. Homer Lea, and the English clergymen seriously argue that this list should be reversed, and that Arabia and Turkey should be taken as the types of progressive nations, and England and Germany and Scandinavia as the decadent?

It may be urged that my list is not absolutely accurate, in that England, having fought more little wars (though the conflict with the Boers, waged with a small, pastoral people, shows how a little war may drain a great country), is more militarized than Germany, which has not been fighting at all. But I have tried in a very rough fashion to arrive at the degree of militancy in each State, and the absence of actual fighting in the case of Germany (as in that of the smaller States) is balanced by the fact of the military training of her people. As I have indicated, France is more military than Germany, both in the extent to which her people are put through the mill of universal military training, and by virtue of the fact that she has done so much more small fighting than Germany (Madagascar, Tonkin, Africa, etc.); while, of course, Turkey and the Balkan States are still more military in both senses--more actual fighting, more military training.

Perhaps the militarist will argue that, while useless and unjust wars make for degeneration, just wars are a moral regeneration. But did a nation, group, tribe, family, or individual ever yet enter into a war which he did not think just? The British, or most of them, believed the war against the Boers just, but most of the authorities in favor of war in general, outside of Great Britain, believed it unjust. Nowhere do you find such deathless, absolute, unwavering belief in the justice of war as in those conflicts which all Christendom knows to be at once unjust and unnecessary. I refer to the religious wars of Mohammedan fanaticism.

Do you suppose that when Nicaragua goes to war with San Salvador, or Costa Rica or Colombia with Peru, or Peru with Chili, or Chili with Argentina, they do not each and every one of them believe that they are fighting for immutable and deathless principles? The civilization of most of them is, of course, as like as two peas, and there is no more reason, except their dislike of rational thought and hard work, why they should fight with one another, than that Illinois should fight with Indiana, despite Homer Lea's fine words as to the primordial character of national differences; to one another they are as alike, and whether San Salvador beats Costa Rica or Costa Rica, San Salvador, does not, so far as essentials are concerned, matter a continental. But their rhetoric of patriotism--the sacrifice, and the deathless glory, and the rest of it--is often just as sincere as ours. That is the tragedy of it, and it is that which gives to the solution of the problem in Spanish America its real difficulty.

But even if we admit that warfare _a l'espagnole_ may be degrading, and that just wars are enn.o.bling and necessary to our moral welfare, we should nevertheless be condemned to degeneracy and decline. A just war implies that someone must act unjustly towards us, but as the general condition improves--as it is improving in Europe as compared with Central and South America, or Morocco, or Arabia--we shall get less and less "moral purification"; as men become less and less disposed to make unjustifiable attacks, they will become more and more degenerate. In such incoherence are we landed by the pessimistic and impossible philosophy that men will decay and die unless they go on killing each other.

What is the fundamental error at the base of the theory that war makes for the survival of the fit--that warfare is any necessary expression of the law of survival? It is the illusion induced by the hypnotism of a terminology which is obsolete. The same factor which leads us so astray in the economic domain leads us astray in this also.

Conquest does not make for the elimination of the conquered; the weakest do not go to the wall, though that is the process which those who adopt the formula of evolution in this matter have in their minds.

Great Britain has conquered India. Does that mean that the inferior race is replaced by the superior? Not the least in the world; the inferior race not only survives, but is given an extra lease of life by virtue of the conquest. If ever the Asiatic threatens the white race, it will be thanks in no small part to the work of race conservation which England's conquests in the East have involved. War, therefore, does not make for the elimination of the unfit and the survival of the fit. It would be truer to say that it makes for the survival of the unfit.

What is the real process of war? You carefully select from the general population on both sides the healthiest, st.u.r.diest, the physically and mentally soundest, those possessing precisely the virile and manly qualities which you desire to preserve, and, having thus selected the elite of the two populations, you exterminate them by battle and disease, and leave the worst of both sides to amalgamate in the process of conquest or defeat--because, in so far as the final amalgamation is concerned, both processes have the same result--and from this amalgam of the worst of both sides you create the new nation or the new society which is to carry on the race. Even supposing the better nation wins, the fact of conquest results only in the absorption of the inferior qualities of the beaten nation--inferior presumably because beaten, and inferior because we have killed off their selected best and absorbed the rest, since we no longer exterminate the women, the children, the old men, and those too weak or too feeble to go into the army.[74]

You have only to carry on this process long enough and persistently enough to weed out completely from both sides the type of man to whom alone we can look for the conservation of virility, physical vigor, and hardihood. That such a process did play no small role in the degeneration of Rome and the populations on which the crux of the Empire reposed there can hardly be any reasonable doubt. And the process of degeneration on the part of the conqueror is aided by this additional factor: If the conqueror profits much by his conquest, as the Romans in one sense did, it is the conqueror who is threatened by the enervating effect of the soft and luxurious life; while it is the conquered who is forced to labor for the conqueror, and learns in consequence those qualities of steady industry which are certainly a better moral training than living upon the fruits of others, upon labor extorted at the sword's point. It is the conqueror who becomes effete, and it is the conquered who learns discipline and the qualities making for a well-ordered State.

To say of war, therefore, as does Baron von Stengel, that it destroys the frail trees, leaving the st.u.r.dy oaks standing, is merely to state with absolute confidence the exact reverse of the truth; to take advantage of loose catch-phrases, which by inattention not only distort common thought in these matters, but often turn the truth upside down.

Our everyday ideas are full of ill.u.s.trations of the same thing. For hundreds of years we talked of the "riper wisdom of the ancients,"

implying that this generation is the youth in experience, and that the early ages had the acc.u.mulated experience--the exact reverse, of course, of the truth. Yet "the learning of the ancients" and "the wisdom of our forefathers" was a common catch-phrase, even in the British Parliament, until an English country parson killed this nonsense by ridicule.[75]

I do not urge that the somewhat simple, elementary, selective process which I have described accounts in itself for the decadence of military Powers. That is only a part of the process; the whole of it is somewhat more complicated, in that the process of elimination of the good in favor of the bad is quite as much sociological as biological; that is to say, if during long periods a nation gives itself up to war, trade languishes, the population loses the habit of steady industry, government and administration become corrupt, abuses escape punishment, and the real sources of a people's strength and expansion dwindle. What has caused the relative failure and decline of Spanish, Portuguese, and French expansion in Asia and the New World, and the relative success of English expansion therein? Was it the mere hazards of war which gave to Great Britain the domination of India and half of the New World? That is surely a superficial reading of history. It was, rather, that the methods and processes of Spain, Portugal, and France were military, while those of the Anglo-Saxon world were commercial and peaceful. Is it not a commonplace that in India, quite as much as in the New World, the trader and the settler drove out the soldier and the conqueror? The difference between the two methods was that one was a process of conquest, and the other of colonizing, or non-military administration for commercial purposes. The one embodied the sordid Cobdenite idea, which so excites the scorn of the militarists, and the other the lofty military ideal. The one was parasitism; the other co-operation.[76]

Those who confound the power of a nation with the size of its army and navy are mistaking the check-book for the money. A child, seeing its father paying bills in checks, a.s.sumes that you need only plenty of check-books in order to have plenty of money; it does not see that for the check-book to have power there must be unseen resources on which to draw. Of what use is domination unless there be individual capacity, social training, industrial resources, to profit thereby? How can you have these things if energy is wasted in military adventure? Is not the failure of Spain explicable by the fact that she failed to realize this truth? For three centuries she attempted to live upon conquest, upon the force of her arms, and year after year got poorer in the process and her modern social renaissance dates from the time when she lost the last of her American colonies. It is since the loss of Cuba and the Philippines that Spanish national securities have doubled in value. (At the outbreak of the Hispano-American War Spanish Fours were at 45; they have since touched par.) If Spain has shown in the last decade a social renaissance, not shown perhaps for a hundred and fifty years, it is because a nation still less military than Germany, and still more purely industrial, has compelled Spain once and for all to surrender all dreams of empire and conquest. The circ.u.mstances of the last surrender are eloquent in this connection as showing how even in warfare itself the industrial training and the industrial tradition--the Cobdenite ideal of militarist scorn--are more than a match for the training of a society in which military activities are predominant. If it be true that it was the German schoolmaster who conquered at Sedan, it was the Chicago merchant who conquered at Manila. The writer happens to have been in touch both with Spaniards and Americans at the time of the war, and well remembers the scorn with which the Spaniards referred to the notion that the Yankee pork-butchers could possibly conquer a nation of their military tradition, and to the idea that tradesmen would ever be a match for the soldiery and pride of old Spain. And French opinion was not so very different.[77] Shortly after the war I wrote in an American journal as follows:

Spain represents the outcome of some centuries devoted mainly to military activity. No one can say that she has been unmilitary or at all deficient in those qualities which we a.s.sociate with soldiers and soldiering. Yet, if such qualities in any way make for national efficiency, for the conservation of national force, the history of Spain is absolutely inexplicable. In their late contest with America, Spaniards showed no lack of the distinctive military virtues. Spain's inferiority--apart from deficiency of men and money--was precisely in those qualities which industrialism has bred in the unmilitary American. Authentic stories of wretched equipment, inadequate supplies, and bad leadership show to what depths of inefficiency the Spanish service, military and naval, had fallen. We are justified in believing that a much smaller nation than Spain, but one possessing a more industrial and less military training, would have done much better, both as regards resistance to America and the defence of her own colonies. The present position of Holland in Asia seems to prove this. The Dutch, whose traditions are industrial and non-military for the most part, have shown greater power and efficiency as a nation than the Spanish, who are more numerous.

Here, as always, it is shown that, in considering national efficiency, even as expressed in military power, the economic problem cannot be divorced from the military, and that it is a fatal mistake to suppose that the power of a nation depends solely upon the power of its public bodies, or that it can be judged simply from the size of its army. A large army may, indeed, be a sign of a national--that is, military--weakness.

Warfare in these days is a business like other activities, and no courage, no heroism, no "glorious past," no "immortal traditions," will atone for deficient rations and fraudulent administration. Good civilian qualities are the ones that will in the end win a nation's battles. The Spaniard is the last one in the world to see this. He talks and dreams of Castilian bravery and Spanish honor, and is above shopkeeping details....