The Great Illusion Part 19

I must risk here the reproach of egotism and bad taste to call attention to a fact which bears more directly on that point, perhaps, than any other that could be cited.

It is some fifteen years since it first struck me that certain economic facts of our civilization--facts of such visible and mechanical nature as reacting bourses and bank rate-movements, in all the economic capitals of the world, and so on--would soon force upon the attention of men a principle which, though existing for long past in some degree in human affairs, had not become operative to any extent. Was there any doubt as to the reality of the material facts involved? Circ.u.mstances of my occupation happily furnished opportunities of discussing the matter thoroughly with bankers and statesmen of world-wide authority. There was no doubt on that score. Had we yet arrived at the point at which it was possible to make the matter plain to general opinion? Were politicians too ill-educated on the real facts of the world, too much absorbed in the rough-and-tumble of workaday politics to change old ideas? Were they, and the rank and file, still too enslaved by the hypnotism of an obsolete terminology to accept a new view? One could only put it to a practical test. A brief exposition of the cardinal principles was embodied in a brief pamphlet and published obscurely without advertis.e.m.e.nt, and bearing, necessarily, an unknown name. The result was, under the circ.u.mstances, startling, and certainly did not justify in the least the plea that there exists universal hostility to the advance of political rationalism. Encouragement came from most unlooked-for quarters: public men whose interests have been mainly military, alleged Jingoes, and even from soldiers. The more considerable edition has appeared in English, German, French, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Spanish, Italian, Russian, j.a.panese, Erdu, Persian, and Hindustani, and nowhere has the Press completely ignored the book. Papers of Liberal tendencies have welcomed it everywhere. Those of more reactionary tendencies have been much less hostile than one could have expected.[121]

Does such an experience justify that universal rebelliousness to political rationalism on which my critics for the most part found their case? My object in calling attention to it is evident. If this is possible as the result of the effort of a single obscure person working without means and without leisure, what could not be accomplished by an organization adequately equipped and financed? Mr. Augustine Birrell says somewhere: "Some opinions, bold and erect as they may still stand, are in reality but empty sh.e.l.ls. One shove would be fatal. Why is it not given?"

If little apparently has been done in the modification of ideas in this matter, it is because little relatively has been attempted. Millions of us are prepared to throw ourselves with energy into that part of national defence which, after all, is a makeshift, into agitation for the building of _Dreadnoughts_ and the raising of armies, the things in fact which can be seen, where barely dozens will throw themselves with equal ardor into that other department of national defence, the only department which will really guarantee security, but by means which are invisible--the rationalization of ideas.

CHAPTER IV

METHODS

Relative failure of Hague Conferences and the cause--Public opinion the necessary motive force of national action--That opinion only stable if informed--"Friendship" between nations and its limitations--America's role in the coming "Political Reformation."

Much of the pessimism as to the possibility of any progress in this matter is based on the failure of such efforts as Hague Conferences.

Never has the contest of armament been so keen as when Europe began to indulge in Peace Conferences. Speaking roughly and generally, the era of great armament expansion dates from the first Hague Conference.

Well, the reader who has appreciated the emphasis laid in the preceding pages on working through the reform of ideas will not feel much astonishment at the failure of efforts such as these. The Hague Conferences represented an attempt not to work through the reform of ideas, but to modify by mechanical means the political machinery of Europe, without reference to the ideas which had brought it into existence.

Arbitration treaties, Hague Conferences, International Federation involve a new conception of relationship between nations. But the ideals--political, economical, and social--on which the old conceptions are based, our terminology, our political literature, our old habits of thought, diplomatic inertia, which all combine to perpetuate the old notions, have been left serenely undisturbed. And surprise is expressed that such schemes do not succeed.

French politics have given us this proverb, "I am the leader, therefore I follow." This is not mere cynicism, but expresses in reality a profound truth. What is a leader or a ruler in a modern parliamentary sense? He is a man who holds office by virtue of the fact that he represents the mean of opinion in his party. Initiative, therefore, cannot come from him until he can be sure of the support of his party--that is, until the initiative in question represents the common opinion of his party. The author happened to discuss the views embodied in this book with a French parliamentary chief, who said in effect: "Of course you are talking to the converted, but I am helpless. Suppose that I attempted to embody these views before they were ready for acceptance by my party. I should simply lose my leadership in favor of a man less open to new ideas, and the prospect of their acceptance would not be increased, but diminished. Even if I were not already converted, it would be no good trying to convert me. Convert the body of the party and its leaders will not need conversion."

And this is the position of every civilized government, parliamentary or not. The struggle for religious freedom was not gained by agreements drawn up between Catholic States and Protestant States, or even between Catholic bodies and Protestant bodies. No such process was possible, for in the last resort there was no such thing as an absolutely Catholic State or an absolutely Protestant one. Our security from persecution is due simply to the general recognition of the futility of the employment of physical force in a matter of religious belief. Our progress towards political rationalism will take place in like manner.

There is no royal road of this kind to a better state. It seems decreed that we shall not permanently achieve improvement which we as individuals have not paid for in the coin of hard thinking.

Nothing is easier to achieve in international politics than academic declarations in favor of Peace. But governments being trustees have a first duty in the interests of their wards, or what they conceive to be such interests, and they disregard what is still looked upon as a conception having its origin in altruistic and self-sacrificing motives.

"Self-sacrifice" is the last motive governments can allow themselves to consider. They are created to protect, not to sacrifice, the interests of which they are placed in charge.

It is impossible for governments to base their normal policies on conceptions which are in advance of the general standard of the political opinion of the people from whom they derive their power. The average man will, it is true, quite readily subscribe abstractly to a peace ideal, just as he will subscribe abstractly to certain religious ideals--to take no thought for the morrow, not to save up treasure upon earth--without the faintest notion of making them a guide of conduct, or, indeed, of seeing how they _can_ be a guide of conduct. At peace meetings he will cheer l.u.s.tily and sign pet.i.tions, because he believes Peace to be a great moral idea, and that armies, like the Police, are destined to disappear one day--on about the same day in his belief--when the nature of man shall have been altered.

One may be able fully to appreciate this att.i.tude of the "average sensual man" without doubting the least in the world the sincerity, genuineness, wholeheartedness of these emotional movements in favor of peace, which from time to time sweep over a country (as on the occasion of the Taft-Grey exchange of views on arbitration). But what it is necessary to emphasize, what cannot be too often reiterated, is that these movements, however emotional and sincere, are not movements which can lead to breaking up the intellectual basis of the policy which produces armaments in the Western World. These movements embrace only one section of the factors making for peace--the moral and the emotional. And while those factors have immense power, they are uncertain and erratic in their operation, and when the shouting dies and there is a natural reaction from emotion, and it is a question once more of doing the humdrum week-day work of the world, of pushing our interests, of finding markets, of achieving the best possible generally for our nation as against other nations, of preparing for the future, of organizing one's efforts, the old code of compromise between the ideal and the necessary will be as operative as ever. So long as his notions of what war can accomplish in an economic or commercial sense remain what they are, the average man will not deem that his prospective enemy is likely to make the peace ideal a guide of conduct. Incidentally he would be right. At the bottom of his mind--and I say this not lightly and as a guess, but as an absolute conviction after very close observation--the ideal of peace is conceived as a demand that he weaken his own defences on no better a.s.surance than that his prospective rival or enemy will be well-behaved and not wicked enough to attack him.

It appeals to him as about equivalent to asking that he shall not lock his doors because to suppose people will rob him is to have a low view of human nature!

Though he believes his own position in the world (as a colonial Power, etc.) to be the result of the use of force by himself, of his readiness to seize what could be seized, he is asked to believe that foreigners will not do in the future what he himself has done in the past. He finds this difficult to swallow.

Save in his Sunday moods, the whole thing makes him angry. It appeals to him as "unfair," in that he is asked by his own countrymen to do something that they apparently do not ask of foreigners; it appears to him as unmanly, in that he is asked to surrender the advantage which his strength has secured him in favor of a somewhat emasculate ideal.

The patriot feels that his moral intention is every bit as sincere as that of the pacifist--that, indeed, patriotism is a finer moral ideal than pacifism. The difference between the pacifist and the advocate of _real-politik_ is an intellectual and not a moral one at all, and the a.s.sumption of superior morality which the former sometimes makes does the cause which he has at heart infinite harm. Until the pacifist can show that the employment of military force fails to secure material advantage, the common man will, in ordinary times, continue to believe that the militarist has a moral sanction as great as that underlying pacifism.

It may seem gratuitously ungracious to suggest that the very elevation which has marked peace propaganda in the past should have been the very thing that has sometimes stood in the way of its success. But such a phenomenon is not new in human development. There was as much good intention in the world of religious warfare and oppression as there is in ours. Indeed, the very earnestness of the men who burnt, tortured, and imprisoned and stamped out human thought with the very best motives, was precisely the factor which stood in the way of improvement.

Improvement came finally, not from better intention, but from an acuter use of the intelligence of men, from hard mental work.

So long as we a.s.sume that high motive, a better moral tone is all that is needed in international relations, and that an understanding of these problems will in some wonderful way come of itself, without hard and systematic intellectual effort, we shall make little headway.

Good feeling and kindliness and a ready emotion are among the most precious things in life, but they are qualities possessed by some of the most retrograde nations in the world, because in them they are not coupled with the homely quality of hard work, in which one may include hard thinking. This last is the real price of progress, and we shall make none of worth unless we pay it.

A word or two as to the role of "friendship" in international relations.

Courtesy and a certain measure of good faith are essential elements wherever civilized men come in direct contact; without them organized society would go to pieces. But these invaluable elements never yet of themselves settled real differences; they merely render the other factors of adjustment possible. Why should one expect courtesy and good-fellowship to settle grave political differences between English and Germans when they altogether fail to settle such differences between English and English? What should we say of a statesman professing to be serious who suggested that all would be well between President Wilson and the lobbyists concerning the tariff, between the Democrats and Republicans on protection, between the millionaire and the day laborer on the question of the income tax, and a thousand and one other things--that all these knotty problems would disappear, if only the respective protagonists could be persuaded to take lunch together? Is it not a little childish?

Yet I am bound to admit that a whole school of persons who deal with international problems would have us believe that all international differences would disappear if only we could have enough junketings, dinner-parties, exchange visits of clergymen, and what not. These things have immense use in so far as they facilitate discussion and the elucidation of the policy in which the rivalry has its birth, and to that extent only. But if they are not vehicles of intellectual comprehension, if the parties go away with as little understanding of the factors and nature of international relationship as they had before such meetings took place, they have served no purpose whatsoever.

The work of the world does not get done merely by being good friends with everybody; the problems of international diplomacy are not to be solved merely by a sort of international picnic; that would make the world too easy a place to live in.

However ungracious it may seem, it is nevertheless dangerous to allow to go unchallenged the notion that the cultivation of "friendship and affection" between nations, irrespective of the other factors affecting their relationship, can ever seriously modify international politics.

The matter is of grave importance, because so much good effort is spent in putting the cart before the horse, and attempting to create an operative factor out of a sentiment that can never be constant and positive one way or the other, since it must in the nature of things be largely artificial. It is a psychological impossibility in any ordinary workaday circ.u.mstances to have any special feeling of affection for a hundred or sixty or forty millions of people, composed of infinitely diverse elements, good, bad, and indifferent, n.o.ble and mean, pleasing and unpleasing, whom, moreover, we have never seen and never shall see.

It is too large an order. We might as well be asked to entertain feelings of affection for the Tropic of Capricorn. As I have already hinted, we have no particular affection for the great ma.s.s of our own countrymen--your lobbyist enthusiast for Mr. Wilson, your railroad striker for the employer of labor, your Suffragette for your anti-Suffragette, and so on _ad infinitum_. Patriotism has nothing to do with it. The patriot is often the person who had the heartiest detestation for a large ma.s.s of his fellow-countrymen. Consider any anti-administration literature. As an English instance a glance at Mr.

Leo Maxse's monthly masterpieces of epithet-making, or at what the pan-Germans have to say of their own Empire and Government ("poltroons in the pay of the English" is a choice t.i.t-bit I select from one German newspaper), will soon convince one.

Why, therefore, should we be asked to entertain for foreigners a sentiment we do not give to our own people? And not only to entertain that sentiment, but to make (always in the terms of the present political beliefs) great sacrifices on behalf of it!

Need it be said that I have not the least desire to deprecate sincere emotion as a factor in progress? Emotion and enthusiasm form the divine stimulus without which no great things would be achieved; but emotion divorced from mental and moral discipline is not the kind on which wise men will place a very high value. Some of the intensest emotion of the world has been given to some of the worst possible objects. Just as in the physical world, the same forces--steam, gunpowder, what you will--which, controlled and directed may do an infinitely useful work--may, uncontrolled, cause accidents and catastrophes of the gravest kind.

Nor is it true that the better understanding of this matter is beyond the great ma.s.s of men, that sounder ideas depend upon the comprehension of complex and abstruse points, correct judgment in intricate matters of finance or economics. Things which seem in one stage of thought obscure and difficult are cleared up merely by setting one or two crooked facts straight. The rationalists, who a generation or two ago struggled with such things as the prevalent belief in witchcraft, may have deemed that the abolition of superst.i.tions of this kind would take "thousands of years."

Lecky has pointed out that during the eighteenth century many judges in Europe--not ignorant men, but, on the contrary, exceedingly well-educated men, trained to sift evidence--were condemning people to death by hundreds for witchcraft. Acute and educated men still believed in it; its disproof demanded a large acquaintance with the forces and processes of physical nature, and it was generally thought that, while a few exceptional intelligences here and there would shake off these beliefs, they would remain indefinitely the possessions of the great ma.s.s of mankind.

What has happened? A schoolboy to-day would scout the evidence which, on the judgment of very learned men, sent thousands of poor wretches to their doom in the eighteenth century. Would the schoolboy necessarily be more learned or more acute than those judges? They probably knew a great deal about the science of witchcraft, were more familiar with its literature, with the arguments which supported it, and they would have hopelessly worsted any nineteenth-century schoolboy in any argument on the subject. The point is, however, that the schoolboy would have two or three essential facts straight, instead of getting them crooked.

All the fine theories about the advantages of conquest, of territorial aggrandizement, so learnedly advanced by the Mahans and the von Stengels; the immense value which the present-day politician attaches to foreign conquest, all these absurd rivalries aiming at "stealing" one another's territory, will be recognized as the preposterous illusions that they are by the younger mind, which really sees the quite plain fact that the citizen of a small State is just as well off as the citizen of a great. From that fact, which is not complex or difficult in the least, will emerge the truth that modern government is a matter of administration, and that it can no more profit a community to annex other communities, than it could profit London to annex Manchester.

These things will not need argument to be clear to the schoolboy of the future--they will be self-evident, like the improbability of an old woman causing a storm at sea.

Of course, it is true that many of the factors bearing on this improvement will be indirect. As our education becomes more rational in other fields, it will make for understanding in this; as the visible factors of our civilization make plain--as they are making plainer every day--the unity and interdependence of the modern world, the attempt to separate those interdependent activities by irrelevant divisions must more and more break down. All improvement in human co-operation--and human co-operation is a synonym for civilization--must help the work of those laboring in the field of international relationship. But again I would reiterate that the work of the world does not get itself done. It is done by men; ideas do not improve themselves, they are improved by the thought of men; and it is the efficiency of the conscious effort which will mainly determine progress.

When all nations realize that if England can no longer exert force towards her Colonies, others certainly could not; that if a great modern Empire cannot usefully employ force as against communities that it "owns," still less can we employ it usefully against communities that we do not "own"; when the world as a whole has learned the real lesson of British Imperial development, not only will that Empire have achieved greater security than it can achieve by battleships, but it will have played a part in human affairs incomparably greater and more useful than could be played by any military "leadership of the human race," that futile duplication of the Napoleonic role, which Imperialists of a certain school seem to dream for us.

It is to Anglo-Saxon practice, and to Anglo-Saxon experience, that the world will look as a guide in this matter. The extension of the dominating principle of the British Empire to European society as a whole is the solution of the international problem which this book urges. That extension cannot be made by military means. The English conquest of great military nations is a physical impossibility, and it would involve the collapse of the principle upon which the Empire is based if it were. The day for progress by force has pa.s.sed; it will be progress by ideas or not at all.

Because these principles of free human co-operation between communities are, in a special sense, an Anglo-Saxon development, it is upon us that there falls the responsibility of giving a lead. If it does not come from us, who have developed these principles as between all the communities which have sprung from the Anglo-Saxon race, can we ask to have it given elsewhere? If we have not faith in our own principles, to whom shall we look?

English thought gave us the science of political economy; Anglo-Saxon thought and practice must give us another science, that of International Polity--the science of the political relationship of human groups. We have the beginnings of it, but it sadly needs systemization--recognition by those intellectually equipped to develop it and enlarge it.

The developments of such a work would be in keeping with the contributions which the practical genius and the positive spirit of the Anglo-Saxon race have already made to human progress.

I believe that, if the matter were put efficiently before them with the force of that sane, practical, disinterested labor and organization which have been so serviceable in the past in other forms of propaganda--not only would they prove particularly responsive to the labor, but Anglo-Saxon tradition would once more be a.s.sociated with the leadership in one of those great moral and intellectual movements which would be so fitting a sequel to our leadership in such things as human freedom and parliamentary government. Failing such effort and such response, what are we to look for? Are we, in blind obedience to primitive instinct and old prejudices, enslaved by the old catchwords and that curious indolence which makes the revision of old ideas unpleasant, to duplicate indefinitely on the political and economic side a condition from which we have liberated ourselves on the religious side? Are we to continue to struggle, as so many good men struggled in the first dozen centuries of Christendom--spilling oceans of blood, wasting mountains of treasure--to achieve what is at bottom a logical absurdity; to accomplish something which, when accomplished, can avail us nothing, and which, if it could avail us anything, would condemn the nations of the world to never-ending bloodshed and the constant defeat of all those aims which men, in their sober hours, know to be alone worthy of sustained endeavor?

APPENDIX

ON RECENT EVENTS IN EUROPE