The War and Democracy Part 21

Let us look a little more closely at the German idea of national culture rather than national character as the chief element in civilisation. We shall see that it is directly contrary to the ideals which inspire and sustain the British Commonwealth, and practically prohibits that a.s.sociation of races and peoples at varying levels of social progress which is its peculiar task.

"Culture," in the German idea, is the justification of a nation's existence. Nationality has no other claim. Goethe, Luther, Kant, and Beethoven are Germany's t.i.tle-deeds. A nation without a culture has no right to a "place in the sun." "History," says Wilamowitz in a lecture delivered in 1898, "knows nothing of any right to exist on the part of a people or a language without a culture. If a people becomes dependent on a foreign culture" (_i.e._ in the German idea, on a foreign civilisation) "it matters little if its lower cla.s.ses speak a different language: they, too ... must eventually go over to the dominant language.... Wisely to further this necessary organic process is a blessing to all parties; violent haste will only curb it and cause reactions. Importunate insistence on Nationality has never anywhere brought true vitality into being, and often destroyed vitality; but the superior Culture which, sure of its inner strength, throws her doors wide open, can win men's hearts."[1] In the light of a pa.s.sage like this, from the most distinguished representative of German humanism, it is easier to grasp the failure of educated Germany to understand the sequel of the South African War, or the aspirations of the Slav peoples, or to stigmatise the folly of their statesmen in Poland, Denmark, Alsace-Lorraine, and Belgium. "Importunate insistence on Nationality"--the words come home to us now with a new meaning when we learn that in Belgium, now perforce "dependent on a foreign culture,"

babies are registered under German names and newspapers printed in "the dominant language," and that already "forty newspaper vendors in Brussels have been sentenced to long terms of hard labour in German prisons for selling English, French, and Belgian newspapers."[2] "Our fearless German warriors," writes the leading German dramatist, Gerhart Hauptmann,[3]

"are _well aware of the reasons for which they have taken the field_. No illiterates will be found among them. Many of them, besides shouldering their muskets, carry their Goethe's _Faust_, some work of Schopenhauer, a Bible, or a Homer in their knapsacks." Such is a serious German writer's idea of the way in which civilisation is diffused!

[Footnote 1: _Speeches and Lectures_, pp. 147-148 (1913 edition).]

[Footnote 2: Daily Papers, October 12, 1914 (Exchange Telegram from Rotterdam).]

[Footnote 3: Letter quoted in the _Westminster Gazette._]

With such a philosophy of human progress as this, German thinkers and statesmen look out into the future and behold nothing but conflict--eternal conflict between rival national "cultures," each seeking to impose its domination. "In the struggle between Nationalities," writes Prince Bulow,[1] in defence of his Polish policy, putting into a cruder form the philosophy of Wilamowitz, "one nation is the hammer and the other the anvil; one is the victor and the other the vanquished. It is a law of life and development in history that where two national civilisations meet they fight for supremacy."

[Footnote 1: _Imperial Germany_, p. 245 (1st ed.).]

Here we have the necessary and logical result of the philosophy of culture.

In the struggle between cultures no collaboration, no compromise even, is possible. German is German: Flemish is Flemish: Polish is Polish: French is French. Who is to decide which is the "more civilised," which is the fitter to survive? Force alone can settle the issue. A Luther and Goethe may be the puppets pitted in a contest of culture against Maeterlinck and Victor Hugo. But it is Krupp and Zeppelin and the War-Lord that pull the strings.

As Wilamowitz reminds us, it was the Roman legions, not Virgil and Horace, that stamped out the Celtic languages and romanised Western Europe. It is the German army, two thousand years later, that is to germanise it. It is an old, old theory; Prussia did not invent it, nor even Rome. "You know as well as we do," said the Athenians in 416 B.C. to the representatives of a small people of that day,[1] "that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must"; and they went on, like the Kaiser, to claim the favour of the G.o.ds, "neither our pretensions nor our conduct being in any way contrary to what men believe of the G.o.ds, or practise amongst themselves." There is, in fact, to be no Law between Nations but the Rule of the Stronger.

[Footnote 1: _Thucydides_, Book v. 89 and 105.]

--6. _The Principle of the Commonwealth_.--Such seems to many the meaning of the present European situation--a stern conflict between nations and cultures, to be decided by force of arms. The bridges between the nations seem broken down, and no one can tell when they will be repaired. The hopes that had gathered round international movements, the cosmopolitan dreams of common action between the peoples across the barriers of States and Governments, seem to have vanished into limbo; and the enthusiastic dreamers of yesterday are the disillusioned soldiers and spectators of to-day. Nationality, that strange, inarticulate, una.n.a.lysable force that can call all men to her tents in the hour of crisis and danger, seems to have overthrown the international forces of to-day, the Socialists, the Pacifists, and, strongest of all, the Capitalists, as it overthrew Napoleon and his dreams of Empire a hundred years ago. What Law is there but force that can decide the issue between nation and nation? And, in the absence of a Law, what becomes of all our hopes for international action, for the future of civilisation and the higher life of the human race?

But in truth the disillusionment is as premature as the hopes that preceded it. We are still far off from the World-State and the World-Law which formed the misty ideal of cosmopolitan thinkers. But only those who are blind to the true course of human progress can fail to see that the day of the Nation-State is even now drawing to a close in the West. There is in fact at present working in the world a higher Law and a better patriotism than that of single nations and cultures, a Law and a patriotism that override and transcend the claims of Nationality in a greater, a more compelling, and a more universal appeal. The great States or Powers of to-day, Great Britain, the United States, France, and (if they had eyes to sec it) Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, are not Nation-States but composite States--States compacted of many nationalities united together by a common citizenship and a common law. Great Britain, the United States, the German Empire, and Austria-Hungary bear in their very names the reminder of the diverse elements of which they are composed; but France with her great African Empire, and Russia with her mult.i.tudinous populations, from Poland to the Pacific, from Finland to the Caucasus, are equally composite. In each of these great States nations have been united under a common law; and where the wisdom of the central government has not "broken the bruised reed or quenched the smoking flax" of national life, the nations have been not only willing but anxious to join in the work of their State. Nations, like men, were made not to compete but to work together; and it is so easy, so simple, to win their good-hearted devotion.

It takes all sorts of men, says the old proverb, to make a world. It takes all sorts of nations to make a modern State. "The combination of different nations in one State is as necessary a condition of civilised life as the combination of men in society. ... It is in the cauldron of the State that the fusion takes place by which the vigour, the knowledge, and the capacity of one portion of mankind may be communicated to another.... If we take the establishment of liberty for the realisation of moral duties to be the end of civil society, we must conclude that those States are substantially the most perfect which, like the British and Austrian Empires, include various distinct nationalities without oppressing them." So wrote Lord Acton, the great Catholic historian, fifty years ago, when the watchwords of Nationality were on all men's lips, adding, in words that were prophetic of the failure of the Austrian and the progress of the British Commonwealth of Nations: "The coexistence of several nations under the same State _is a test_ as well as the best security _of its freedom_. It is also one of the chief instruments of civilisation; and, as such, it is in the natural and providential order, and indicates a state of greater advancement than the national unity which is the ideal of modern liberalism."[1]

[Footnote 1: Essay on Nationality, in _The History of Freedom and other Essays_, pp. 290, 298.]

Of the Great Powers which between them control the destinies of civilisation Great Britain is at once the freest, the largest, and the most various. If the State is a "cauldron" for mingling "the vigour, the knowledge, and the capacity" of the portions of mankind--or if, to use an apter metaphor, it is a body whose perfection consists in the very variety of the functions of its several members--there has never been on the earth a political organism like the British Empire. Its 433 million inhabitants, from Great Britain to Polynesia, from India and Egypt to Central Africa, are drawn from every division of the human race. Cut a section through mankind, and in every layer there will be British citizens, living under the jurisdiction of British law. Here is something to hearten those who have looked in vain to the Hague. While international law has been brought to a standstill through the absence of a common will and a common executive, Great Britain has thrown a girdle of law around the globe.

--7. _The Future of Civilisation_.--What hopes dare we cherish, in this hour of conflict, for the future of civilisation?

The great, the supreme task of human politics and statesmanship is to extend the sphere of Law. Let others labour to make men cultured or virtuous or happy. These are the tasks of the teacher, the priest, and the common man. The statesman's task is simpler. It is to enfold them in a jurisdiction which will enable them to live the life of their souls'

choice. The State, said the Greek philosophers, is the foundation of the good life; but its crown rises far above mere citizenship. "There where the State ends," cries Nietzsche,[1] echoing Aristotle and the great tradition of civilised political thought, "there _men begin_. There, where the State ends, look thither, my brothers! Do you not see the rainbow and the bridge to the Overman?" Ever since organised society began, the standards of the individual, the ideals of priest and teacher, the doctrines of religion and morality, have outstripped the practice of statesmanship. For the polestar of the statesman has not been love, but law. His not the task of exhorting men to love one another, but the simpler duty of enforcing the law, "Thou shalt not kill." And in that simple, strenuous, necessary task statesmen and political thinkers have watched the slow extension of the power of Law, from the family to the tribe, from the tribe to the city, from the city to the nation, from the nation to the Commonwealth. When will Law take its next extension? When will warfare, which is murder between individuals and "rebellion" between groups of citizens, be equally preventable between nations by the common law of the world?

[Footnote 1: _Also sprach Zarathustra_, Speech xi. (end).]

The answer is simple. When the world has a common will, and has created a common government to express and enforce that will.

In the sphere of science and invention, of industry and economics, as Norman Angell and others have taught us, the world is already one Great Society. For the merchant, the banker, and the stockbroker political frontiers have been broken down. Trade and industry respond to the reactions of a single, world-wide, nervous system. Shocks and panics pa.s.s as freely as airmen over borders and custom-houses. And not "big business"

only, but the humblest citizen, in his search for a livelihood, finds himself caught in the meshes of the same world-wide network. "The widow who takes in washing," says Graham Wallas,[1] in his deep and searching a.n.a.lysis of our contemporary life, "fails or succeeds according to her skill in choosing starch or soda or a wringing machine under the influence of half a dozen competing world-schemes of advertis.e.m.e.nt.... The English factory girl who is urged to join her Union, the tired old Scotch gatekeeper with a few pounds to invest, the Galician peasant when the emigration agent calls, the artisan in a French provincial town whose industry is threatened by a new invention, all know that unless they find their way among world-wide facts, which only reach them through misleading words, they will be crushed." The Industrial Revolution of the past century, steam-power and electricity, the railway and the telegraph, have knit mankind together, and made the world one place.

[Footnote 1: _The Great Society_ (1914), p. 4.]

But this new Great Society is as yet formless and inarticulate. It is not only devoid of common leadership and a common government; it lacks even the beginnings of a common will, a common emotion, and a common consciousness.

Of the Great Society, consciously or unconsciously, we must all perforce be members; but of the Great State, the great World-Commonwealth, we do not yet discern the rudiments. The economic organisation of the world has outstripped the development of its citizenship and government: the economic man, with his farsighted vision and scientific control of the resources of the world, must sit by and see the work of his hands laid in ashes by contending governments and peoples. No man can say how many generations must pa.s.s before the plat.i.tudes of the market and the exchange pa.s.s into the current language of politics.

--8. _The Two Roads of Advance: Inter-State Action and Common Citizenship_.--In the great work which lies before the statesmen and peoples of the world for the extension of law and common citizenship and the prevention of war there are two parallel lines of advance.

One road lies through the development of what is known as International, but should more properly be called _Inter-State Law_, through the revival, on a firmer and broader foundation, of the Concert of Europe conceived by the Congress of Vienna just a hundred years ago--itself a revival, on a secular basis, of the great mediaeval ideal of an international Christendom, held together by Christian Law and Christian ideals. That ideal faded away for ever at the Reformation, which grouped Europe into independent sovereign States ruled by men responsible to no one outside their own borders. It will never be revived on an ecclesiastical basis. Can we hope for its revival on a basis of modern democracy, modern nationality, and modern educated public opinion? Can Inter-State Law, hitherto a mere shadow of the majestic name it bears, almost a matter of convention and etiquette, with no permanent tribunal to interpret it, and no government to enforce it, be enthroned with the necessary powers to maintain justice between the peoples and governments of the world?

Such a Law the statesmen of Great Britain and Russia sought to impose on Europe in 1815, to maintain a state of affairs which history has shown to have been intolerable to the European peoples. There are those who hope that the task can be resumed, on a better basis, at the next Congress.

"Shall we try again," writes Professor Gilbert Murray,[1] "to achieve Castlereagh's and Alexander's ideal of a permanent Concert, pledged to make collective war upon the peace-breaker? Surely we must. We must, at all costs and in spite of all difficulties, because the alternative means such unspeakable failure. We must learn to agree, we civilised nations of Europe, or else we must perish. I believe that the chief council of wisdom here is to be sure to go far enough. We need a permanent Concert, perhaps a permanent Common Council, in which every awkward problem can be dealt with before it has time to grow dangerous, and in which outvoted minorities must accustom themselves to giving way."

[Footnote 1: _Hibbert Journal,_ Oct. 1914, p. 77.]

Other utterances by public men, such as Mr. Roosevelt and our own Prime Minister, might be cited in the same sense; but Professor Murray's has been chosen because he has had the courage to grasp the nettle. In his words the true position is quite clearly set forth. If Inter-State Law is to become a reality we must "be sure to go far enough." There is no half-way house between Law and no Law, between Government and no Government, between Responsibility and no Responsibility. If the new Concert is to be effective it must be able to compel the submission of all "awkward problems" and causes of quarrel to its permanent Tribunal at the Hague or elsewhere; and it must be able to enforce the decision of its tribunal, employing for the purpose, if necessary, the armed forces of the signatory Powers as an international police. "Out-voted minorities must accustom themselves to giving way." It is a bland and easy phrase; but it involves the whole question of world-government. "Men must accustom themselves not to demand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," the earliest law-givers might have said, when the State first intervened between individuals to make itself responsible for public order. Peace between the Powers, as between individuals, is, no doubt, a habit to which cantankerous Powers "must accustom themselves." But they will be sure to do so if there is a Law, armed with the force to be their schoolmaster towards peaceable habits. In other words, they will do so because they have surrendered one of the most vital elements in the independent life of a State--the right of conducting its own policy--to the jurisdiction of a higher Power. An Inter-State Concert, with a Judiciary of its own and an Army and Navy under its own orders, is, in fact, not an Inter-State Concert at all; it is a new State: it is, in fact, the World-State. There is no middle course between Law and no Law: and the essence of Statehood, as we have seen, is a Common Law.

Will this new State have the other attributes of Government--a Common Legislature and a Common Executive--as well as a Common Judiciary? Let us go back to Professor Murray's words. He speaks of "outvoted minorities."

Let us suppose the refractory country to be Great Britain, outvoted on some question relating to sea-power. Of whom will the outvoted minority consist?

Of the British members on the "Common Council" of the Concert. But the question at once arises, what are the credentials of these British members?

Whom do they represent? To whom are they responsible? If they are the representatives of the British people and responsible to the democracy which sent them, how can they be expected to "accustom themselves to giving way"--perhaps to a majority composed of the representatives of undemocratic governments? Their responsibility is, not to the Concert, but to their own Government and people. They are not the minority members of a democratically-elected Council of their own fellow-citizens. They are the minority members of a heterogeneous Council towards which they owe no allegiance and recognise no binding responsibility. There is no half-way house between Citizenship and no Citizenship, between Responsibility and no Responsibility. No man and no community can serve two masters. When the point of conflict arises men and nations have to make the choice where their duty lies. Not the representatives of Great Britain on the International Concert, but the people of Great Britain themselves would have to decide whether their real allegiance, as citizens, was due to the World-State or to their own Commonwealth: they would find themselves at the same awful parting of the ways which confronted the people of the Southern States in 1861. When at the outbreak of the Civil War General Lee was offered by Lincoln the Commandership of the Northern armies and refused it, to become the Commander-in-Chief on the side of the South, he did so because "he believed," as he told Congress after the war, "that the act of Virginia in withdrawing herself from the United States carried him along with it as a citizen of Virginia, and that _her_ laws and acts were binding on him." In other words, unless the proposed Common Council is to be made something more than a Council of the delegates of sovereign States (as the Southern States believed themselves to be till 1861), a deadlock sooner or later is almost inevitable, and the terrible and difficult question--so familiar to Americans and recently to ourselves on the smaller stage of Ulster--of the right of secession and the coercion of minorities will arise. But if the Common Council is framed in accordance with a Const.i.tution which binds its representatives to accept its decisions and obey its government, then the World-State, with a World-Executive, will already have come into being. There will be no more war, but only Rebellion and Treason.

Such is the real meaning of proposals to give a binding sanction to the decisions of an Inter-State Concert. Anything short of this--treaties and arbitration-agreements based upon inter-State arrangements without any executive to enforce them--may give relief for a time and pave the way for further progress, but can in itself provide no permanent security, no satisfactory justification for the neglect of defensive measures by the various sovereign governments on behalf of their peoples. Mr. Bryan, for the United States, has within the last eighteen months concluded twenty-six general arbitration treaties with different Governments, and may yet succeed in his ambition of signing treaties with all the remainder. Yet no one imagines that, when the immunity of the United States from attack is guaranteed by the promise of every Government in the world, America will rely for her defence upon those promises alone.

In discussing proposals for a European Council, then, we must be quite sure to face all that it means. But let us not reject Professor Murray's suggestion off-hand because of its inherent difficulties: for that men should be discussing such schemes at all marks a significant advance in our political thought. Only let us be quite clear as to what they presuppose.

They presuppose the supremacy, in the collective mind of civilised mankind, of Law over Force, a definite supremacy of what may be called the civilian as against the military ideal, not in a majority of States, but in every State powerful enough to defy coercion. They presuppose a world map definitely settled on lines satisfactory to the national aspirations of the peoples. They presuppose a _status quo_ which is not simply maintained, like that after 1815, because it is a legal fact and its disturbance would be inconvenient to the existing rulers, but because it is inherently equitable.[1] They presuppose a similar democratic basis of citizenship and representation among the component States. They presuppose, lastly, an educated public opinion incomparably less selfish, less ignorant, less unsteady, less materialistic, and less narrowly national than has been prevalent hitherto. Let us work and hope for these things: let us use our best efforts to remove misunderstandings and promote a sense of common responsibilities and common trusteeship for civilisation between the peoples of all the various sovereign States; but meanwhile let us work also, with better hopes of immediate if less ambitious successes, along the other parallel road of advance.

[Footnote 1: The same applies to proposals for ensuring permanent peace in the industrial sphere. Neither capital nor labour will abide by "sc.r.a.ps of paper" if they do not feel the _status quo (i.e._ the conditions under which wage-contracts are made) to be equitable and inherently just.]

The other road may seem, in this hour of dreams and disaster, of extremes of hope and disillusionment, a long and tedious track: it is the old slow high road of civilisation, not the short cut across the fields. It looks forward to abiding results, not through the mechanical co-operation of governments, but through the growth of an organic citizenship, through the education of the nations themselves to a sense of common duty and a common life. It looks forward, not to the definite establishment, in our day, of the World-State, but only to the definite refutation of the wicked theory of the mutual incompatibility of nations. It looks forward to the expression in the outward order of the world's government of what we may call "the Principle of the Commonwealth," of Lord Acton's great principle of the State composed of free nations, of the State as a living body which lives through the organic union and free activity of its several national members. And it finds its immediate field of action in the deepening and extension of the obligations of citizenship among the peoples of the great, free, just, peace-loving, supra-national Commonwealths whose patriotism has been built up, not by precept and doctrine, but on a firm foundation of older loyalties.

The principle of the Commonwealth is not a European principle: it is a world-principle. It does not proceed upon the expectation of a United States of Europe; for all the Great Powers of Europe except Austria-Hungary (and some of the smaller, such as Holland, Belgium, and Portugal) are extra-European Powers also. Indeed if we contract our view, with Gladstone and Bismarck and the statesmen of the last generation, to European issues alone, we shall be ignoring the chief political problem of our age--the contact of races and nations with wide varieties of social experience and at different levels of civilisation. It is this great and insistent problem (call it the problem of East and West, or the problem of the colour-line) in all its difficult ramifications, political, social, and, above all, economic, which makes the development of the principle of the Commonwealth the most pressing political need of our age. For the problems arising out of the contact of races and nations can never be adjusted either by the wise action of individuals or by conflict and warfare; they can only be solved by fair and deliberate statesmanship within the bosom of a single State, through the recognition by both parties of a higher claim than their own sectional interest--the claim of a common citizenship and the interest of civilisation.[1] It is here, in the union and collaboration of diverse races and peoples, that the principle of the Commonwealth finds its peculiar field of operation. Without this principle, and without its expression, however imperfect, in the British Empire, the world would be in chaos to-day.

[Footnote 1: The most recent example of this is the settlement of the very difficult dispute between India and South Africa.]

We cannot predict the political development of the various Great Powers who between them control the destinies of civilisation. We cannot estimate the degree or the manner in which France, freed at last from nearer preoccupations, will seek to embody in her vast dominion the great civilising principles for which her republic stands. We cannot foretell the issue of the conflict of ideas which has swayed to and fro in Russia between the British and the Prussian method of dealing with the problem of nationality. Germany, Italy, j.a.pan--here, too, we are faced by enigmas.

One other great Commonwealth remains besides the British. Upon the United States already lies the responsibility, voluntarily a.s.sumed and, except during a time of internal crisis,[1] successfully discharged, of securing peace from external foes for scores of millions of inhabitants of the American continent. Yet with the progress of events her responsibilities must yearly enlarge: for both the immigrant nationalities within and the world-problems without her borders seem to summon her to a deeper education and to wider obligations.

[Footnote 1: French occupation of Mexico, 1862, during the American Civil War, when the Monroe Doctrine was temporarily in abeyance.]

But upon the vast, ramifying, and inchoate Commonwealth of Great Britain lies the heaviest responsibility. It is a task unequally shared between those of her citizens who are capable of discharging it. Her task within the Commonwealth is to maintain the common character and ideals and to adjust the mutual relations of one quarter of the human race. Her task without is to throw her weight into the scales of peace, and to uphold and develop the standard and validity of inter-State agreements. It is a task which requires, even at this time of crisis, when, by the common sentiment of her citizens, the real nature and purpose of the Commonwealth have become clear to us, the active thoughts of all political students. For to bring home to all within her borders who bear rule and responsibility, from the village headman in India and Nigeria, the Basutu chief and the South Sea potentate, to the public opinion of Great Britain and the self-governing Dominions, the nature of the British Commonwealth, and the character of its citizenship and ideals, and to study how those ideals may be better expressed in its working inst.i.tutions and executive government--that is a task to which the present crisis beckons the minds of British citizens, a task which Britain owes not only to herself but to mankind.

_Note_.--A friendly critic who saw this chapter in MS. remarked: "I think the author has been very successful in ignoring some of the shady methods by which the British Empire has been extended." The criticism is not strictly relevant to the subject of the chapter, but as it may occur to other readers it may be well to deal with it in a brief note. I would answer:

(1) The "shady methods" of which he speaks were not the result of British Imperialism, or of a desire for conquest on the part of the British State. They were the result, melancholy but inevitable, of the contact of individuals and races at different levels of development. This contact between the stronger and the weaker (which can be ill.u.s.trated from what is said about the sandalwood traders in the New Hebrides on p. 215 above) was the direct result of the explorations of the sixteenth century, which threw the seas of the world open to Western pioneers and traders. The extension of the authority of Western _governments_ (Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British), and the collisions between them, followed inevitably on the activities of their citizens, as has been pointed out on p. 216 above. All the Western governments have made mistakes in dealing with this unfamiliar situation; but the wise course for democratic public opinion, instead of railing at "Imperialism," would seem to be to familiarise itself with its problems and control its injurious tendencies.

(2) In any case, the mistakes of the past do not ent.i.tle us to wash our hands of responsibilities in the present. This war has shown that the non-self-governing parts of the Commonwealth are not, as our enemies supposed, a weakness to Great Britain in time of trouble, but a strength.

In other words, whatever may have happened in the past, Great Britain has now won the consent of the ruled to the fact--not necessarily to the methods--of British rule. To use what is doubtless unduly const.i.tutional language, we are now faced in India and elsewhere, not with a Revolutionary Movement, but with an Opposition. That is a great incentive to further development.

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