The Unity of Western Civilization Part 17

They are not insignificant, as we know to our cost. But by dwelling on the things of greater moment and solidity, we train ourselves and others to reduce the elements of discord to their true proportion and allay the storm. The progress of a united mankind is thus an ideal, slowly realizing itself in time. But its realization is quickened and rendered wider and more beneficent, the more we think of it and believe in it. A blow comes, such as the present war, and seems to shatter the whole picture which so many hands have limned and so many eyes admired. Those who have followed its growth through the ages, know well that no such blow can finally destroy a living growth or even go very deep in injuring its features.

It is surely a commonplace that in proportion as western populations, from statesmen downwards, are animated by sentiments of comradeship which arise from considerations such as these, the danger of war must diminish and the possibilities of fruitful common action increase. Yet there is probably no country in Europe where any deliberate attempt is made to instruct the people in ideas which would most surely broaden their sympathies and lay the foundations of peace.

The argument takes us back for a moment to the essay on education. We left off there at a point where the old unity based on Greco-Roman culture was seen to be disappearing in a confused ma.s.s of new studies, partly suggested by modern languages and history, still more by the growth of science and the application of science to the problems of contemporary life. It may well be that in this conception of humanity, the co-operation of mankind in a growing structure of thought, we shall ultimately find the _idee-mere_ under which all the other subordinate ideas in education may be grouped and inspired. This might take place if the notion were grasped in no narrow sense, but so broadly that all human thought, religion, and philosophy, art as well as science, might find their justification in it.

The advantage of putting the educational issue first has been already indicated. We can all get to work on it at once for ourselves, and it is a far more fundamental and, in some respects, easier thing to introduce a new idea into the minds of others than to alter the boundaries and political conditions of States. If we once achieved a general atmosphere of co-operation and goodwill in the world, the practical problems would be already more than half solved.

Discussion will take place, with more and more vigour as years go on, as to the various measures which have been described collectively as the establishment of a World-State. At what point could it be said that a World-State is in being? How can such a World-State be reconciled with the independent sovereignty of the several States comprised in it? What is to be the sanction imposing the decisions of the larger community on its const.i.tuent members? Such are a few of the problems involved in any advance towards the Kantian ideal of cosmopolitanism. None of them admit of a single definite answer. They do not belong to questions of pure theory, and we shall have to solve them slowly and with difficulty, seizing every favourable opportunity of a slight advance, avoiding grave obstacles, compromising with every possible friend.

But for the moment we seem likely to be overwhelmed by unchained pa.s.sions which are the practical denial of everything that the ideal of humanity implies. Instead of co-operation we are faced by schemes of conquest and domination, and the simplest notion of brotherhood is limited to comradeship in arms for defence or attack. Many will be found to ridicule the idea that any real progress in unity has ever been made, or that the world can ever be envisaged except as an irksome enclosure of rival armed forces thirsting for the fray. But to those who are not prepared to accept this as the last word in human a.s.sociation the argument of this volume may have some weight. It will lead those who follow it to a quiet but well-grounded belief that the forces tending to unity in the world are different in quality, incomparably greater in scope than those which make for disruption. Discord is explosive and temporary, harmony rises slowly but dominates the final chord.

Like the great common purposes of science, the common tendencies of human action have in recent years suffered some eclipse through the bustle of our activity and the multiplicity of its detail. The colours, too, of a conflict of any kind are so much more vivid and arresting than the quiet and monotonous tones of a long piece of harmonious and co-operative work. The labours of such a bureau of international effort as is described in Chapter X appear to our pressmen and publicists so little interesting that they are practically ignored, and the results of scientific congresses, being of a highly specialized kind, are left perforce to those who can understand them. Yet it is precisely in these things, if our diagnosis is correct, that the most characteristic features of the age are to be found. For in them and in similar movements we see united the two fundamental human traits from which we started, reason and sympathy: reason winning triumphs over nature, sympathy realizing itself at last in a community of men devoting their powers to mutual aid. 'Idle dreams', it will be said, as we hurl more and more millions of our best youth to destruction by the most highly developed resources of science. Yes, but the same nations were only yesterday celebrating the services of Pasteur, Virchow, and Lister to a common humanity, and will do so again to-morrow or the day after.

It is in truth one of the most poignant features of the tragedy in which we are manfully and rightly bearing our part, that the community-sense in the world had never been so highly developed, or found so many channels in which to diffuse itself, as just at the moment when the blow fell. The socialist movements in all civilized countries have always had this as a leading motive; comrades and poor among themselves, these men have always been eager to stretch out a hand to those of like mind abroad. And in the last chapter we saw how among Christian communities throughout the world there has been in recent years a growing approximation. Neither the cause nor the effects of such forces can die away. They will reappear when the storm has pa.s.sed and rebuild the wreck.

One large aspect of the united action of the western world has received no notice in this volume, though it might very well be the subject of a detailed study in itself. This is the relation of the more advanced and powerful nations of the West towards the weaker and less progressive peoples. It might, indeed, be treated as the touchstone of our civilization, just as the education of the young is a good, perhaps the best, test of the advancement of any single people. For it involves some joint action of the western nations; it shows how far they are disinterested and how far skilful in their treatment of the less advanced.

The record is not a good one, but it confirms, on the whole, the view we have suggested that a growth of the sense and conception of humanity may be traced from the time when modern science was born in the sixteenth century. The Middle Ages hardly furnish us with any examples of the action of Christendom towards heathen and weaker people until the Crusades, in which, with rare examples of personal chivalry, the earlier att.i.tude was one of contempt and hatred of the unbeliever. In the conquest of the New World, which was to some of its earliest conquerors a new Crusade, there is the same general savagery marked by rare cases of Christian kindness, such as Las Casas showed. But after the Reformation, when the Church itself had been purified and more human tolerance and care and interest in life prevailed, we find the enlightened Jesuit missions to China and Paraguay, St. Francis Xavier's work in India, and the Quaker dealings with Red Indians in the New World. From the middle of the seventeenth century, slavery, which had fallen into abeyance during the Middle Ages as a domestic inst.i.tution, began to be denounced as a trade. We are on the threshold of the great humanitarian outburst of the eighteenth century. It is impossible to believe that this growth of human feeling in dealing with other men is unconnected with that new gospel of human power which Bacon and Descartes had just proclaimed. Except for the occasional superman, the greater the powers a man possesses and the higher he rates human capacity at its best, the more careful he is to cherish and develop the germs of humanity in the young and weak.

This was undoubtedly the case with the 'philosophers' of the eighteenth century; it is equally true of the nineteenth century, an age wonderful alike for its unexampled development of science and for the rise of activities, national and international, for the betterment of the race.

Jointly the western nations have in this period put down the slave trade, and in the Brussels Conference of 1890 we see the highest point yet reached by the united humanity of the West expressed by the a.s.sembled states in regard to backward people. The point therefore is a notable one, and Englishmen will be glad to remember that it was Lord Salisbury, then Foreign Secretary, who took the first step. The previous Conference at Berlin, in 1884, had secured freedom of trade for the basins of the Congo and the Niger, and in 1889 Lord Salisbury, through the Belgian Government, called the Powers together to consider questions relating to the slave trade in Africa. For Africa, home of the black race, last exploited of the continents, discovered after the white man had discovered science, was pre-eminently the part of the world where the co-operation of leading peoples in civilizing backward races was most needed and most to be expected. The Congo, the Herreros, Morocco, Tripoli, Omdurman, offer a blood-stained record in reply.

But the general act of the Brussels Conference is clear and adequate as to what the purpose of the Powers should be. "To put an end to the crimes and devastations engendered by the traffic in African slaves, to protect effectively the aboriginal populations of Africa, to ensure for that vast continent the benefits of peace and civilization", is in fact the whole duty of a united western civilization when dealing with the less civilized. The results achieved may well seem small compared with the magnitude of the purpose, but those who know most about it do not despise them. Slave-raiding and tribal wars have been diminished and some check put on importing arms and spirits.

It is not a topic on which it is easy to keep a cheerful mind. Some Putumayo will constantly occur to remind us of the fierce brutality of strength unsupervised and unrestrained. We compare the actual performance of mankind when free to try their best or wreak their worst on comparatively defenceless folk, with the n.o.ble rivalry which we can imagine between the nations of the world in leading the weaker people to develop their resources and themselves, on paths which may tend to the greatest prosperity and happiness of all, advanced and backward together: and the comparison leaves us sick at heart. But a sober judgement will not deny that even here advance is being made. The ideal has been admitted. The rights of smaller States are being made, as in the present conflict, the subject of the concern of their strongest neighbours. Steps are being taken all over the world to preserve and ameliorate the remnants of primitive people. Horrors when revealed are more strongly reprobated. Missionaries are pursuing their labours with more enlightenment and zeal, and in wider spheres. In spite of cynics and doubters, it is true in this as in the other activities of a united mankind, _e pur si muove_. And as the work moves on it is seen to involve the same guiding thoughts that inspire us in the case of the young and feeble at home--pity for their weakness, love for their humanity, hope for the future.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

_Kant's Perpetual Peace_ (new edition just published).

_International Policy_. Chapman & Hall.

Fayle, _The Great Settlement_. Murray.

_The Leadership of the World_. (Oxford pamphlet.)