VI
THE ETHICS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSHIP
We have seen that all empires have been built up by a series of successful aggressions, and that claim-jumping still characterizes the relations of the nations. Nevertheless, there has been some progress in applying to groups and nations the moral principles we recognize as binding upon individuals. Consider again our internal life: it was twenty years ago that we coined and used so widely the phrase "soulless corporations" for our great combinations of capital in industry. To-day that phrase is rarely heard. One sees it seldom even in the pages of surviving "muck-raking" magazines. Why has a phrase, used so widely in the past, all but disappeared? Again the answer is illuminating: there has been tremendous growth in twenty years, on the part of our great corporations, in treating their employees as human beings and not merely as cog-wheels in a productive machine. When the greatest corporation in the United States voluntarily raises the wages of all its employees in the country ten per cent., five several times, within a few months, as the Steel trust has recently done, something has happened. It may be said, "they did it because it was good business": twenty years ago they would not have recognized that it was good business. It may be said, "they did it to avoid strikes": twenty years ago they would have welcomed the strikes, fought them through and gained what selfish advantage was possible. The point is, there has been vast increase in the consciousness of moral responsibility on the part of corporations toward their artisans. This has been due partly to legislation, but mainly to education and the awakening of public conscience. If you wish to find the greatest arrogance and selfishness now, you will discover it, not among the capitalists: they are timid and submissive—strangely so. You will find it rather in certain leaders of the labor movement, with their consciousness of newly-gained powers.
Some growth there has been in the application of the same moral principles even to the relations of the nations. For instance: a hundred years ago the Napoleonic wars had just come to an end. In the days of Napoleon men generally gloried in war; to-day most of them bitterly regret it, and fight because they believe they are fighting for high moral aims or for national self-preservation, whether they are right or wrong.
When Napoleon conquered a country, often he pushed the weakling king off the throne, and replaced him with a member of his own family—at times a worse weakling. Think of such a thing being attempted to-day: it is unimaginable, unless the worst tyranny on earth got the upper hand for the next three hundred years of human history.
A more pungent illustration of progress is the feverish desire, shown by each of the combatants in this world struggle, to prove that he did not begin it. Now some one began it. A hundred years ago belligerents would not have been so anxious to prove their innocence: then victory closed all accounts and no one went behind the returns. The feverish anxiety each combatant has shown to establish his innocence of initiating this devastating War is conclusive proof that even the worst of them recognizes that they all must finally stand before the moral court of the world's conscience and be judged. The same tendency is shown in the efforts of Germany—grotesquely and tragically sophistical as they are— to justify her ever-expanding, freshly-invented atrocities. At least she is aware that they require justification.
This explains why we react so bitterly even on what would have been accepted a century ago. What was taken for granted yesterday is not tolerated to-day, and what is taken for granted to-day will not be tolerated in a to-morrow that maybe is not so distant as in our darker moments we imagine.
What would be the conclusion of this process? It would be, would it not, the complete application to the relations of the nations, of the moral principles universally accepted as binding upon individuals? If it is true that the moral order of the universe is one and unchanging, then what is right for a man is right for a nation of men, and what is wrong for a man is wrong for a nation; and no fallacious reasoning should be allowed to blind us to that basic truth.
This would mean the end of all diplomacy of lying and deceit. The relations of the nations would be placed on the same plane of relative honesty and frankness now prevailing among individuals: not absolute truth—few of us practice that—but that general ability to trust each other, in word and conduct, that is the foundation of our business and social life.
It would mean the end of empire building. Those empires that exist would fall naturally into their component parts. If those parts remained affiliated with the central government, it would be only through the voluntary choice of the majority of the population dwelling upon the territory. Thus every people would be affiliated with the government to which it naturally belonged and with which it wished to be affiliated.
It would mean finally a voluntary federation of the nations, with the establishment of a world court of justice; but no weak-kneed, spineless arbitration court: rather a court of justice, comparable to those established over individuals, whose judgments would be enforced by an international military and naval police, contributed by the federated nations.
People misunderstand this proposal. They imagine it would mean the giving over of the entire military and naval equipment of each federated nation to the central court. Far from it: each nation would retain, for defense purposes, the mass of its manhood and the larger fraction of its limited equipment, while a minor fraction would be contributed to the world court.
When this is achieved there will be, for the first time in the history of the world, the dawn of the longed-for era of universal and relatively permanent peace for mankind.
It is a far-off dream, is it not? Let us admit it frankly, and it seems further off than it did four years ago; for the approximations to it, achieved through international law, we have seen go down in a blind welter, through the invention of new instruments of destruction and the willful perpetration of illegal and immoral atrocities in this horrible War.
Nevertheless, it is not so far off as in ourdarker moments we fear. If this world War ends justly; which means if it ends so that the people dwelling on any territory are affiliated with the government to which they naturally belong and with which they wish to be affiliated, the dream will be brought appreciably nearer. If the War ends unjustly, which means if it ends with the gratification of the ambitions of aggressive tyranny, the dream will be put remotely far off. If a peace is patched up meantime, with no solution, it will mean Europe sleeping on its arms, and the breaking out of the war with multiplied devastation within twenty years. That is why these blithely undertaken peace missions and other efforts at peace without victory, even when not cloaks for pro-German movements, are such preposterous absurdities or else play directly into the hands of tyranny.
At best, however, the dream is a long way ahead. Men dislike to give up power, nations equally. It will take a long process of international moral education to induce the nations to renounce their arbitrary powers, their right to adjust all their own quarrels, and lead them to enter voluntarily a federation under a world court of Justice. This, nevertheless, is the hope of the world, toward which we should work with all our might.