Towards an enduring peace

by Unknown

PRINCIPLES OF THE SETTLEMENT: POLITICAL

NATIONALITY AND THE FUTURE

War has shattered our constructive effort.

For the first time in our lives, we find ourselves in complete uncertainty as to the future. To uncivilized people the situation is commonplace; but in twentieth-century Europe we are accustomed to look ahead, to forecast accurately what lies before us, and then to choose our path and follow it steadily to its end; and we rightly consider that this is the characteristic of civilized men. The same ideal appears in every side of our life: in the individual’s morality as a desire for “Independence” strong enough to control most human passions: in our Economics as Estimates and Insurances: in our Politics as a great sustained concentration of all our surplus energies (in which parties are becoming increasingly at one in aim and effort, while their differences are shrinking to alternatives of method), to raise the material, moral, and intellectual standard of life throughout the nation. From all this fruitful, constructive, exacting work, which demands the best from us and makes us the better for giving it, we have been violently wrenched away and plunged into a struggle for existence with people very much like ourselves, with whom we have no quarrel.

We must face the fact that this is pure evil, and that we cannot escape it. We must fight with all our strength: every particle of our energy must be absorbed in the war: and meanwhile our social construction must stand still indefinitely, or even be in part undone, and every class and individual in the country must suffer in their degree, according to the quite arbitrary chance of war, in lives horribly destroyed and work ruined....

The psychological devastation of war is even more terrible than the material. War brings the savage substratum of human character to the surface, after it has swept away the strong habits that generations of civilized effort have built up. We saw how the breath of war in Ireland demoralized all parties alike. We have met the present more ghastly reality with admirable calmness; but we must be on our guard. Time wears out nerves, and War inevitably brings with it the suggestion of certain obsolete points of view, which in our real, normal life, have long been buried and forgotten.

It has roused the instinct of revenge.

It rouses the instinct of revenge. “If Germany has hurt us, we will hurt her more—to teach her not to do it again.” The wish is the savage’s automatic reaction, the reason his perfunctory justification of it: but the civilized man knows that the impulse is hopelessly unreasonable. The “hurt” is being at war, and the evil we wish to ban is the possibility of being at war again, because war prevents us working out our own lives as we choose. If we beat Germany and then humiliate her, she will never rest till she has “redeemed her honor,” by humiliating us more cruelly in turn. Instead of being free to return to our own pressing business, we shall have to be constantly on the watch against her. Two great nations will sit idle, weapon in hand, like two Afghans in their loopholed towers when the blood feud is between them; and we shall have sacrificed deliberately and to an ever-increasing extent (for the blood feud grows by geometrical progression), the very freedom for which we are now giving our lives.

And of plunder.

Another war instinct is plunder. War is often the savage’s profession: “‘With my sword, spear and shield I plow, I sow, I reap, I gather in the vintage.’ If we beat Germany our own mills and factories will have been at a standstill, our horses requisitioned and our crops unharvested, our merchant steamers stranded in dock if not sunk on the high seas, and our ‘blood and treasure’ lavished on the war: but in the end Germany’s wealth will be in our grasp, her colonies, her markets, and such floating riches as we can distrain upon by means of an indemnity. If we have had to beat our plowshares into swords, we can at least draw some profit from the new tool, and recoup ourselves partially for the inconvenience. It is no longer a question of irrational, impulsive revenge, perhaps not even of sweetening our sorrow by a little gain. To draw on the life-blood of German wealth may be the only way to replenish the veins of our exhausted Industry and Commerce.” So the plunder instinct might be clothed in civilized garb: “War,” we might express it, “is an investment that must bring in its return.”

The first argument against this point of view is that it has clearly been the inspiring idea of Germany’s policy, and history already shows that armaments are as unbusinesslike a speculation for civilized countries as war is an abnormal occupation for civilized men. We saw the effect of the Morocco tension upon German finance in 1911, and the first phase of the present war has been enough to show how much Germany’s commerce will inevitably suffer, whether she wins or loses.

It is only when all the armaments are on one side and all the wealth is on the other, that war pays; when, in fact, an armed savage attacks a civilized man possessed of no arms for the protection of his wealth. Our Afghans in their towers are sharp enough not to steal each other’s cows (supposing they possess any of their own) for cows do not multiply by being exchanged, and both Afghans would starve in the end after wasting all their bullets in the skirmish. They save their bullets to steal cows from the plainsmen who cannot make reprisals.

If Germany were really nothing but a “nation in arms,” successful war might be as lucrative for her as an Afghan’s raid on the plain, but she is normally a great industrial community like ourselves. In the last generation she has achieved a national growth of which she is justly proud. Like our own, it has been entirely social and economic. Her goods have been peacefully conquering the world’s markets. Now her workers have been diverted en masse from their prospering industry to conquer the same markets by military force, and the whole work of forty years is jeopardized by the change of method.

But to fight for trade no longer pays.

Fighting for trade and industry is not like fighting for cattle. Cattle are driven from one fastness to another, and if no better, are at least no worse for the transit. Civilized wealth perishes on the way. Our economic organization owes its power and range to the marvelous forethought and cooperation that has built it up; but the most delicate organisms are the most easily dislocated, and the conqueror, whether England or Germany, will have to realize that, though he may seem to have got the wealth of the conquered into his grip, the total wealth of both parties will have been vastly diminished by the process of the struggle.

Germany’s economic ruin would compromise world-prosperity.

The characteristic feature of modern wealth is that it is international. Economic gain and loss is shared by the whole world, and the shifting of the economic balance does not correspond to the moves in the game of diplomatists and armies. Germany’s economic growth has been a phenomenon quite independent of her political ambitions, and Germany’s economic ruin would compromise something far greater than Germany’s political future—the whole world’s prosperity. British wealth, among the rest, would be dealt a deadly wound by Germany’s economic death, and it would be idle to pump Germany’s last life-blood into our veins, if we were automatically draining them of our own blood in the process.

But issues greater than the economic are involved. The modern “Nation” is for good or ill an organism one and indivisible, and all the diverse branches of national activity flourish or wither with the whole national well-being. You cannot destroy German wealth without paralyzing German intellect and art, and European civilization, if it is to go on growing, cannot do without them. Every doctor and musician, every scientist, engineer, political economist and historian, knows well his debt to the spiritual energy of the German nation. In the moments when one realizes the full horror of what is happening, the worst thought is the aimless hurling to destruction of the world’s only true wealth, the skill and nobility and genius of human beings, and it is probably in the German casualties that the intellectual world is suffering its most irreparable human losses.

With these facts in our minds, we can look into the future more clearly, and choose our policy (supposing that we win the war, and, thereby, the power to choose) with greater confidence. We have accepted the fact that war itself is evil, and will in any event bring pure loss to both parties: that no good can come from the war itself, but only from our policy when the war is over: and that the one good our policy can achieve, without which every gain is delusive, is the banishing of this evil from the realities of the future. This is our one supreme “British interest,” and it is a German interest just as much, and an interest of the whole world.

This war, and the cloud of war that has weighed upon us so many years before the bursting of the storm, has brought to bankruptcy the “National State.” Till 1870 it was the ultimate ideal of European politics, as it is still in the Balkans, where the Turk has broken Time’s wings. It was such a fruitful ideal that it has rapidly carried us beyond itself, and in the last generation the life of the world has been steadily finding new and wider channels. In the crisis of change from nationalism to internationalism we were still exposed to the plague of war. The crisis might have been passed without it, and war banished for ever between the nations of civilized Europe. Now that the catastrophe has happened (it is childish to waste energy in incriminations against its promoters) we must carry through the change completely and at once: we cannot possibly afford to be exposed to the danger again.

The bases of true nationality must be laid.

No tool, machine, or idea made by men has an immortal career. Sooner or later they all run amuck, and begin to do evil instead of good. At that stage savage or unskilful men destroy them by force and replace them by their opposite: civilized men get them under control, and build them into something new and greater. Nationality will sink from being the pinnacle of politics only to become their foundation, and till the foundations are laid true, further building is impossible. But the bases of nationality have never yet been laid true in Europe. When we say that “nationality was the political ideal of the nineteenth century,” and that 1870 left the populations of Europe organized in national groups, we are taking far too complacent a view of historical facts. The same century that produced a united Italy and Germany, saw out the whole tragedy of Poland, from the first partition in 1772 to the last revolt in 1863. Human ideas do not spring into the world full-grown and shining like Athena: they trail the infection of evil things from the past.

In the Dark Ages Europe’s most pressing need and only practicable ideal was strong government. Strong government came with its blessings, but it brought the evil of territorial ambitions. The Duke of Burgundy spent the wealth of his Netherland subjects in trying to conquer the Swiss mountaineers. Burgundy succumbed to the king of France. But the very factor that made the French kings survive in the struggle for existence between governments, the force of compact nationality which the French kingdom happened to contain, delivered the inheritance of the kings to the Nation.

Nationalism has perpetuated violence.

The French Nation in the Revolution burst the chrysalis of irresponsible government beneath which it had grown to organic life, but like a true heir it took over the Royal Government’s ideal: “Peace within and piracy without.” France had already begun aggression abroad before she had accomplished self-government at home, and in delivering herself to Napoleon she sacrificed her liberty to her ambition. Napoleon’s only enduring achievements outside France were the things he set himself to prevent, the realization, by a forceful reaction against force, of German and Italian nationality. Nationalism was converted to violence from the outset, and the struggle for existence between absolute governments has merely been replaced by a struggle between nationalities, equally blind, haphazard, and non-moral, but far more terrific, just because the virtue of self-government is to focus and utilize human energy so much more effectively than the irresponsible government it has superseded.

Naturally the result of this planless strife has been no grouping of Europe on a just and reasonable national basis. France and England, achieving racial frontiers and national self-government early, inherited the Earth before Germany and Italy struggled up beside them, to take their leavings of markets and colonial areas. But the government that united Germany had founded its power on the partition of Poland, and in the second Balkan War of 1913 we saw a striking example of the endless chain of evil forged by an act of national injustice.

Intranational oppression has been a chief cause of war.

The Hungarians used the liberty they won in 1867 to subject the Slavonic population between themselves and the sea, and prevent its union with the free principality of Serbia of the same Slavonic nationality. This drove Serbia in 1912 to follow Hungary’s example by seizing the coast of the non-Slavonic Albanians; and when Austria-Hungary prevented this (a right act prompted by most unrighteous motives), Serbia fought an unjust war with Bulgaria and subjected a large Bulgarian population, in order to gain access to the only seaboard left her, the friendly Greek port of Salonika.

Hungary and Serbia are nominally national states: but more than half the population in Hungary, and perhaps nearly a quarter in Serbia, is alien, only held within the state by force against its will. The energy of both states is perverted to the futile and demoralizing work of “Magyarizing” and “Serbizing” subject foreign populations, and they have not even been successful. The resistance of Southern Slav nationalism on the defensive to the aggression of Hungarian nationalism has given the occasion for the present catastrophe.

The evil element in nationalism under its many names, “Chauvinism,” “Jingoism,” “Prussianism,” is the one thing in our present European civilization that can and does produce the calamity of war. If our object is to prevent war, then, the way to do so is to purge Nationality of this evil. This we cannot do by any mechanical means, but only by a change of heart, by converting public opinion throughout Europe from “National Competition” to “National Cooperation.” Public opinion will never be converted so long as the present system of injustice remains in force, so long as one nation has less and another more than its due. The first step towards internationalism is not to flout the problems of nationality, but to solve them.

The map of Europe must be justly revised.

The most important practical business, then, of the conference that meets when war is over, will be the revision of the map of Europe....

Otherwise no permanent settlement is possible.

If we do not think about nationality, it is simply because we have long taken it for granted, and our mind is focussed on posterior developments; but it is increasingly hard to keep ourselves out of touch with other countries, and though our blindness has been partly distraction, it has also been in part deliberate policy. We saw well enough that the present phase of the national problem in Europe carried in it the seeds of war. We rightly thought that war itself was the evil, an evil incomparably greater than the national injustices that might become the cause of it. We knew that, if these questions were opened, war would follow. We accordingly adopted the only possible course. We built our policy on the chance that national feeling could be damped down till it had been superseded in the public opinion of Europe by other interests, not because Nationalism was unjustified, but because it endangered so much more than it was worth. Knowing that we had passed out of the nationalist phase ourselves, and that from our present political point of view war was purely evil, we hoped that it was merely a question of time for the Continental populations to reach the same standpoint. Notably in Germany, the focus of danger, we saw social interests coming more and more to the front at the expense of militarism. We threw ourselves into the negative task of staving off the catastrophe in the interim, by a strenuous policy of compromise and conciliation, which has been successful on at least two critical occasions. Now that the evil has been too powerful and the catastrophe has happened, the reasons for this policy are dead. Nationalism has been strong enough to produce war in spite of us. It has terribly proved itself to be no outworn creed, but a vital force to be reckoned with. It is stronger on the Continent than social politics. It is the raw material that litters the whole ground. We must build it into our foundations, or give up the task, not only of constructive social advance beyond the limits we have already reached, but even of any fundamental reconstruction of what the war will have destroyed.

Perhaps we might have foretold this from the case of Ireland immediately under our eyes. Failure to solve her national problem has arrested Ireland’s development since the seventeenth century, and imprisoned her in a world of ideas almost unintelligible to an Englishman till he has traveled in the Balkans. This has been England’s fault, and we are now at last in a fair way to remedy it. The moment we have succeeded in arranging that the different national groups in Ireland govern themselves in the way they really wish, the national question will pass from the Irish consciousness; they will put two centuries behind them at one leap, and come into line with ourselves. The Dublin strike, contemporary with the arming of the Volunteers, shows how the modern problems are jostling at the heels of the old. Although “Unionist” and “Nationalist” politicians could still declare that their attitude towards the strike was neutral, the parliament of the new Irish state will discuss the social problem and nothing else.

Nationality is subjective not material.

Ireland, then, has forced us to think about the problem of nationalism; and our Irish experience will be invaluable to us when peace is made, and we take in hand, in concert with our allies, the national questions of the rest of Europe. To begin with, we already have a notion of what Nationality is. Like all great forces in human life, it is nothing material or mechanical, but a subjective psychological feeling in living people. This feeling can be kindled by the presence of one or several of a series of factors: a common country, especially if it is a well defined physical region, like an island, a river basin, or a mountain mass; a common language, especially if it has given birth to a literature; a common religion; and that much more impalpable force, a common tradition or sense of memories shared from the past.

“Historical sentiment” is largely factitious.

But it is impossible to argue a priori from the presence of one or even several of these factors to the existence of a nationality: they may have been there for ages and kindled no response. And it is impossible to argue from one case to another: precisely the same group of factors may produce nationality here, and there have no effect. Great Britain is a nation by geography and tradition, though important Keltic-speaking sections of the population in Wales and the Highlands do not understand the predominant English language. Ireland is an island smaller still and more compact, and is further unified by the almost complete predominance of the same English language, for the Keltic speech is incomparably less vigorous here than in Wales; yet the absence of common tradition combines with religious differences to divide the country into two nationalities, at present sharply distinct from one another and none the less hostile because their national psychology is strikingly the same. Germany is divided by religion in precisely the same way as Ireland, her common tradition is hardly stronger, and her geographical boundaries quite vague: yet she has built up her present concentrated national feeling in three generations. Italy has geography, language and traditions to bind her together; and yet a more vivid tradition is able to separate the Ticinese from his neighbors, and bind him to people of alien speech and religion beyond a great mountain range. The Armenian nationality does not occupy a continuous territory, but lives by language and religion. The Jews speak the language of the country where they sojourn, but religion and tradition hold them together. The agnostic Jew accepts not only the language but all the other customs of his adopted countrymen, but tradition by itself is too strong for him: he remains a Jew and cannot be assimilated.

These instances taken at random show that each case must be judged on its own merits, and that no argument holds good except the ascertained wish of the living population actually concerned. Above all we must be on our guard against “historical sentiment,” that is, against arguments taken from conditions which once existed or were supposed to exist, but which are no longer real at the present moment. They are most easily illustrated by extreme examples. Italian newspapers have described the annexation of Tripoli as “recovering the soil of the Fatherland” because it was once a province of the Roman Empire; and the entire region of Macedonia is claimed by Greek chauvinists on the one hand, because it contains the site of Pella, the cradle of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., and by Bulgarians on the other, because Ohhrida, in the opposite corner, was the capital of the Bulgarian Tzardom in the tenth century A.D., though the drift of time has buried the tradition of the latter almost as deep as the achievements of the “Emathian Conqueror,” on which the modern Greek nationalist insists so strongly.

We must understand nationalistic aims and diversities.

The national problems of Europe are numerous, and each one is beset by arguments good, bad, and indifferent, some no more specious than the above, some so elaborately staged that it requires the greatest discernment to expose them. Vast bodies of people, with brains and money at their disposal, have been interested in obscuring the truth, and have used every instrument in their power to do so. It is therefore essential for us in England to take up these hitherto remote and uninteresting national problems in earnest, to get as near to the truth as we possibly can, both as to what the respective wishes of the different populations are, and as to how far it is possible to reconcile them with each other and with Geography; and to come to the conference which will follow the war and is so much more important than the war itself, with a clear idea of the alternative solutions and a mature judgment upon their relative merits.

To accomplish this we need a coordination of knowledge on a large scale, knowledge of history, geography, religion, national psychology and public opinion....

Individuality and tolerance must be our international ideals.

With the growth of civilization the human and the territorial unit become less and less identical. In a primitive community the members are undifferentiated from one another: the true human unit is the total group, and not the individual, and the territory this group occupies is a unit too, self-sufficing and cut off from intercourse with the next valley. In modern Europe every sub-group and every individual has developed a “character” or “individuality” of its own which must have free play; while the growth of communications, elaboration of organization, and economic interdependence of the whole world have broken down the barriers between region and region. The minimum territorial block that can be organized efficiently as a separate political unit according to modern standards is constantly growing in size: the maximum human group which can hold together without serious internal divergence is as steadily diminishing.

This would look like an impasse, were it not corrected by the virtues of civilization itself. We started with the fact that the essence of civilization was “Forethought” and its ideal the “power of free choice”: the complementary side of this ideal, on the principle “Do as you would be done by,” is to allow free choice to others when they are in your power. It is a virtue with as many names as there are spheres of human life: “Forbearance,” “Toleration,” “Constitutionalism.”...

Arnold J. Toynbee, “Nationality and the War,” chap. I.

NATIONALITY AND SOVEREIGNTY

We must have new forms of guarantee.

The old Europe is dead, the old vision vanished, and we are wrestling in agony for new inspiration....

We must beware of putting our new wine into old bottles. While guarantees hold, they conserve their charge: when they break, the destruction is worse than if they had never existed. Unless we can ensure that the sovereign States of Europe respect European guarantees hereafter in other fashion than Germany at the present crisis, we must modify the formula or else discard it altogether.

Can the mechanism of the European system be safeguarded against its individual members?...

We have asked our question and must accept the answer. It is useless to fortify our new European organism by guarantees of the old order, because we cannot fortify such guarantees themselves against the sovereign national State. Whenever it chooses, the sovereign unit can shatter the international mechanism by war. We are powerless to prevent it: all we can do is to abandon our direct attack, and look for the causes which impel States to a choice as terrible for themselves as for their victims.

The German position.

“You ask,” the Germans say, “why we broke our contract towards Belgium? It would be more pertinent to ask how we were ever committed to such a contract at all.

“The heart of modern Germany is the industrial world of the Rhineland and Westphalia. The Belgian frontier and the Belgian tariff-wall rob this region of its natural outlet at Antwerp, yet the contract expressly forbids us to right this economic and geographical wrong by uniting the sea-port to its hinterland.

“The chief need of modern Germany is a source of raw produce and a market for her finished products in the tropical zone. Belgium has staked out for herself the one important region in Africa which was not already occupied by France or Great Britain. She can do nothing with it, while we—but this contract expressly forbids us to kick the Belgian dog out of the manger.

“Because of this Belgian guarantee we must go in want of almost everything we need, yet meanwhile our great neighbors on either flank have conspired to take from us even the little we possess already. The struggle with France and Russia on which we are now engaged has been impending for years, and on our part it is a struggle for existence, but even here the same remorseless contract operates to paralyze our efforts. On the scale of modern warfare the Western battle-front must extend from Switzerland to the North Sea, yet the greater part of this immense zone is neutralized by natural and artificial obstacles on either side. From Switzerland to the Ardennes there will be stalemate: the decision will be reached in the open country between the Ardennes and the coast. Here, as soon as war broke out, France and our own fatherland had to concentrate the terrific energy of their armaments, yet we had contracted away our initiative in this vital area, for it lies within the frontiers of the Belgian State. The Government we had guaranteed might prepare the ground for France and ruin it for ourselves, yet because of the guarantee we must look on passively at the digging of our grave.

“Why, then, had we suffered ourselves to be bound hand and foot? We had not: our grandfathers had entailed the bonds upon us. When they signed the contract in 1839, they knew not what they did. At that time Germany had no industry, Belgium had no colonies, and the Franco-German frontier between the Ardennes and the Jura was not closed to field operations by two continuous lines of opposing fortifications. Had their signature been demanded in 1914, they would have refused it as indignantly as we should have refused it ourselves. To us no choice was offered, and if we have asserted for ourselves the right to choose, who dares in his heart to condemn us? Who will impose a changeless law upon a changing world?”

We must provide for national growth.

This is Germany’s argument about Belgium. Her facts may be true or false, the arguments she builds on them valid or fallacious. That is not the point. Behind arguments and facts there looms an idea that can inspire an individual nation to make war on Europe. We must do justice to this idea, if it is not to play the same havoc again.

Humanity has an instinctive craving for something eternal, absolute, petrified. This seems to be a fundamental factor in our psychology: it has obtruded itself equally in spheres as diverse as religion and politics, but it has been especially dominant in diplomacy.

Whenever the European organism proves its instability by breaking down, we start in quest of a perfect mechanism, a “permanent settlement.” We are invariably disappointed, but invariably we return to the quest again. The Congress of statesmen at Vienna followed this will-o’-the-wisp in 1814: in 1915 the belligerent democracies are preparing to lead themselves the same dance. “Europe is in a mess,” we are all saying: “Let us tidy her up ‘once for all,’ and then we can live comfortably ever after.”

We might as well expect a baby to “live comfortably ever after” in its swaddling clothes....

The European organism is full of dynamic life.

So it is with the European organism. It is as full of life, as perpetually in transformation, as the individual national molecules of which it is woven, yet we confuse it in turn with each of its transitory garments. If we are to find a satisfactory issue out of the present crisis, we must begin by correcting our standpoint.

The impending settlement will not be permanent, and the better it fits the situation, the less permanent will it be....

Our real work will be to regulate this immediate settlement so that it varies in harmony with the subsequent growth of Europe and modifies its structure and mechanism to meet the organism’s changing needs.

We have now discovered the flaw in guarantees of the old order. They were framed for rigidity, and therefore were doomed to crack. Our new guarantees must be elastic: they must be forged of steel not cast in iron.

How can we frame guarantees of this malleable character?...

(i.) Firstly, we propose guarantees of political independence and integrity in the case of the three Scandinavian States, the Slovene Unit, the Greek islands off Anatolia, Persia, and the Sultanate of Oman. The autonomy guaranteed to Poland within the Russian Empire comes under the same head.

(ii.) Secondly, we propose to guarantee economic rights-of-way to one State across the political territory of another. Instances of this type are the Russian railway through Norway to the Atlantic and through Persia to the Indian Ocean; Poland’s title to free trade down the Vistula, and to the enjoyment of a free port at Danzig; and Germany’s similar claim to an unhampered outlet at Trieste.

Both these classes of guarantee are adapted from the international machinery invented during the nineteenth century. The first class is an extension of the political guarantee given to Belgium in 1839, the second of the economic right-of-way secured to her through Dutch waters, in order to furnish the commerce of Antwerp with a free passage down the estuary of the Scheldt to the open sea.

No settlement can be permanent.

Our standpoint towards these two classes is inevitably prejudiced by their associations. We envisage them as embodied “once for all,” like their nineteenth-century precedents, in a contract, and like nineteenth-century diplomacy we tend to regard such contracts as so many girders in a “permanent settlement.”

(iii.) There is a third class, however, which has no precedent in the past, and which will react upon our standpoint in the very opposite direction: our proposed guarantee of alien minorities within the national State....

The German populations transferred with Schleswig to Denmark and with the Eastern frontier-zone to Autonomous Poland; the Poles abandoned to Germany in West Prussia; the Germans and Slovaks who cannot be disentangled from Hungary; the Christian elements in Anatolia and Arabia—these are a few out of many instances, and each one of them is a refutation of “finality.”

The fact that such minorities must inevitably be left on our hands compels us to recognize that beyond a certain degree the economic and the national factor are not commensurable. Here is an essential imperfection in the best settlement we can possibly devise.

The fact that these minorities require a guarantee reveals a deficiency still more grave than the other, inasmuch as it is not environmental but psychological. It means that hardly a single national society in Europe has yet become capable of national toleration. Just as people were persecuted for their religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and for their political opinions in the nineteenth, so they are still in the twentieth century almost universally exposed to persecution for their national individuality. In this sphere the social evolution of Europe is exceptionally backward, and the problem of nationality will never be solved till this psychological incongruity is removed.

But elastic guarantees will further racial toleration.

This at once reduces to their proper proportion both the immediate geographical settlement of the problem which we have elaborated in this book and that guarantee of alien minorities which we have found to be its necessary supplement. In this light, the contracts in which such guarantees are enshrined appear as the transitory scaffolding they are. Weakened by the morbid hypertrophy of nationalism which has been preying upon her for years, exhausted by the convulsion of war in which the malady has culminated, Europe must walk on crutches now or else collapse; yet she will not be a cripple forever. Relieved by these guarantees from the immediate strain of unmitigated national friction, she will be able to concentrate all her energy upon her spiritual convalescence. As soon as she has trained herself to national toleration, she will discard the guarantees and walk unaided.

So far from constituting a “permanent settlement,” our third type of guarantee is an intimation that the problem still remains unsettled. The work will not be complete until we can dispense with the instrument, but the instrument will not accomplish the work unless it is wielded by a craftsman’s hand. Not only are guarantees of our third type merely the means to an end beyond themselves: the contract in which it is embodied is in this case the least important part of the guarantee.

When we guarantee a national minority we have of course to define certain liberties which it is to enjoy—liberties, for instance, of religion, education, local self-government—and all the parties to the Conference must contract responsibility for the observance of such stipulations; yet when we have done this, we cannot simply deposit our document in some international “Ark of the Covenant” and go our ways. The essence of the guarantee is its subsequent interpretation.

The relation between the different elements in a country is continually changing. One church dwindles while another makes converts; one race advances in culture while another degenerates; man’s indefatigable struggle to dominate his physical environment alters the natural boundaries between localities: a barrier that once seemed insurmountable is pierced, and leaves one formerly insignificant in relative prominence. Each of these modifications demands an adjustment of the guarantee, and since they are an infinite series, the guarantee itself requires ceaseless manipulation if it is to perform its function aright.

The changing organism needs a new form of international executive.

This need cannot be satisfied by the original fiat of the International Conference: it can only be met by the appointment of a standing international committee with executive powers, empowered, that is, to administer and interpret the contracts to which the members of the Conference have originally subscribed. Our third type of guarantee has thus presented us with the clue we sought. The letter of international law has proved ineffective hitherto because it has lacked the inspiration of a living spirit, and this spirit can only be breathed into it by a human organ of international authority.

The executive and the guarantees.

Supposing that such an organ were called into existence, what kind of international relations would naturally fall within its scope? We can analyze its probable sphere of activity into several departments.

(i.) The first branch would of course be those guarantees of national minorities which have just taught us the necessity for its existence.

(ii.) The second branch would include the two subjects of guarantee we dealt with first, namely, “Political Independence” and “Rights of Way.” We can see now that their administration by a representative international executive would eliminate that defect of rigidity which has always proved fatal to them heretofore.

Between them these two branches would cover all the machinery we have suggested for our regenerated European organism. Are there any further spheres of national interaction over which our international organ might properly assume control? It would be logical to assign to it, if possible, all relations between sovereign national States which are peculiarly subject to change.

Change is a harmonization of two rhythms—Growth and Decay. Some sovereign units are continually waxing in population, material wealth and spiritual energy: such are Great Britain and Germany, France and the Russian Empire. Others, like the Ottoman Empire or Spain, are as continually waning in respect of the same factors.

This ebb and flow in the current of life causes, and must cause, a perpetual readjustment of the relations between units in the two complementary phases. Units in the positive phase inevitably absorb the fibers and trespass upon the environment of those which have passed over into the negative rhythm. We cannot arrest this process any more than we can abolish change itself: what we can do is to regulate it on the lines of civilization, instead of letting it run riot in a blind struggle for existence.

The current radiates in an almost infinite variety of interactions. Great Britain, Germany, and India are discharging surplus population into the empty lands of the New World; Great Britain and France are applying surplus wealth to evoke the latent resources of countries with no surplus of their own; Great Britain and Russia are putting forth spiritual energy to inspire primitive peoples with the vitality of civilization.

How this international organ would function.

Our international organ can handle no more than a fraction of this world-wide interchange.

(i.) We may exclude at once from its competence every interaction that is confined within the limits of a single sovereign unit. Within the British Empire, for example, it is patently impracticable to “internationalize” the problems of Indian emigration to Vancouver or the Transvaal, of the closure of the Australian labor-market against labor from the British Isles, of commercial exploitation in Nigeria or Rhodesia, of autonomy in Ireland or the Asiatic Dependencies. The Empire may handle its own problems well or ill, but it will never consent to waive its sovereignty in respect of them. We should regard the proposition of international intervention as a menace to the Empire’s existence. We should undoubtedly fight rather than submit to it, and every other sovereign State would do the same under similar circumstances. In purely internal affairs international authority will never obtain a footing at the expense of the individual unit.

(ii.) We may likewise exclude interactions between two or more sovereign States in spheres that fall entirely within their respective sovereignty. The Dominion of Canada or the U. S. A. would never submit to international regulation the question of Japanese immigration along their Pacific seaboard. If Russia wished to float a loan, she would never allow our international organ to decide where and in what proportions it should be placed: she would insist on keeping her hands free, and making the best bargain for herself both from the financial and the political point of view. Italy and the Argentine would never relinquish their respective sovereign rights over the Italian laborers who cross the Atlantic every year to reap the South American harvests. International authority would be flouted as uncompromisingly in these instances as in the former.

Control of weak States, and of immigration.

(iii.) There are some units, however, so raw in their growth or so deeply sunk in their decay as to lack the attribute of sovereignty altogether—units which through want of population, wealth, spiritual energy, or all three together are unable to keep the spark of vitality aglow. Such dead units are the worst danger that threatens the peace of the world: each one of them is an arena enticing the living units around to clash in conflict, a vacuum into which the current of life swirls like a maelstrom. In these “no-man’s-lands” where no sovereignty exists, our international organ can and must assert its own sovereignty against the sovereign States outside.

(a) In every such area the standing international executive should regulate immigration from over-populated sovereign units—German colonization, for instance, in Anatolia, or Indian settlement on the alluvium of Irak.

(b) It should likewise regulate the inflow of capital....

(c) In areas where the pressure of spiritual energy is so low that the population cannot save itself by its own efforts from political anarchy, the international executive should be prepared to step in and organize “strong government.”...

Morocco, the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire—the present war is not really being waged to settle these problems: it is being waged because they have been settled already, and settled on such unjust and injudicious lines that all parties concerned have found it worth while to stake their existence for the reversal of the settlement. No one need have been involved by such problems in a struggle for life. They were all problems of expansion, and their solution ought at worst to have disappointed the expectation of immoderate gains: it ought never, as it has done, to have threatened the parties with the loss of what they possessed already before the problems were probed.

Such an executive could have prevented the war of diplomacy and of arms.

Why has the contrary occurred? Because, just for lack of that international executive with the sovereign authority we postulate, these issues that were not vital have been fought out, like issues of life and death, by war—not by the war of arms which has descended upon us now like some recurrent plague, into which we relapse at rarer and rarer intervals as we advance in civilization, but by the unobtrusive, unremittent war of diplomacy which is being waged year in and year out between the sovereign States of Europe, and which has increased appallingly in violence during the last generation.

In this disastrous diplomatic warfare our opponents in the present war of arms have been uniformly the aggressors. If Austria-Hungary is now struggling for existence, it is because she deliberately embarked nearly forty years ago upon a diplomatic campaign of aggrandizement against South-Slavonic nationality. If Germany is fighting back to back with her in the same ghastly struggle, it is because Germany has wielded diplomatic weapons still more ruthlessly against her other European neighbors.

The war of diplomacy.

For the terrible embitterment of the diplomatic contest Germany herself is entirely responsible, but she has inevitably exposed herself to reprisals as severe as her own provocative blows. She opened the battle over Morocco by forcibly intruding upon a sphere where she had no shadow of claim to expansion: thereby she drew France and Great Britain into diplomatic alliance against her, and laid herself open to the humiliation of 1911, when Franco-British diplomacy mobilized its financial forces and drove her to retreat by cutting off her supplies. In Turkey she might easily have satisfied her needs without any battle at all. The untenanted area was vast, the claims staked out on it were singularly narrow: when German enterprise circumvented the enterprise of Great Britain and France, and secured all the railway-concessions in the virgin hinterland of Anatolia, French and British diplomacy grumbled but did not attempt to open hostilities. Yet instead of reaping her harvest in peace, Germany again precipitated a diplomatic conflict by extending her ambitions to Bagdad and the Persian Gulf. The moment she aspired to absorb the whole Ottoman Empire, Great Britain and Russia entered into diplomatic cooperation, and opposed her purpose with all their might. Germany’s Arabian venture has jeopardized her Anatolian gains, and if she is defeated in the present struggle, she will probably be excluded from the Ottoman area altogether.

The diplomatic warfare over three secondary issues, which ought never to have been settled by fighting at all, has thus left none of the combatants unscathed. On the contrary, the wounds inflicted then have festered till their poison has threatened each combatant with the pains of dissolution, and made that quack-physician the diplomatist call out in panic for the knife of that quack-surgeon the war lord.

This diplomatic warfare is the objective of our new international organization. Upon diplomacy we can and must make a direct attack. If we can draw this monster’s teeth, we shall no longer be troubled by its still more monstrous offspring—War.

Arnold J. Toynbee, “Nationality and the War,” chap. XII.

THE GOVERNMENTAL THEORY

International politics dominated by a theory.

The position I intend to put forward and defend is this: War is made—this war has been made—not by any necessity of nature, any law beyond human control, any fate to which men must passively bow; it is made because certain men who have immediate power over other men are possessed by a certain theory. Sometimes they are fully conscious of this theory. More often, perhaps, it works in them unconsciously. But it is there, the dominating influence in international politics. I shall call it the governmental theory, because it is among governing persons—Emperors, Kings, Ministers, and their diplomatic and military advisers—that its influence is most conspicuous and most disastrous. But it is supported also by historians, journalists, and publicists, and it is only too readily adopted by the ordinary man, when he turns from the real things he knows and habitually handles to consider the unknown field of foreign affairs.

Very briefly, and, therefore, crudely expressed, the theory is this: “The world is divided, politically, into States. These States are a kind of abstract beings, distinct from the men, women, and children who inhabit them. They are in perpetual and inevitable antagonism to one another; and though they may group themselves in alliances, that can be only for temporary purposes to meet some other alliance or single power. For States are bound by a moral or physical obligation to expand indefinitely, each at the cost of the others. They are natural enemies, they always have been so, and they always will be; and force is the only arbiter between them. That being so, war is an eternal necessity. As a necessity, it should be accepted, if not welcomed, by all sound-thinking and right-feeling men. Pacifists are men at once weak and dangerous. They deny a fact as fundamental as any of the facts of the natural world. And their influence, if they have any, can only be disastrous to their State in its ceaseless and inevitable contest with other States.”

Artificiality of the governmental theory.

Stated thus briefly, and in its most uncompromising terms, this is what I have called the governmental theory. I propose to criticize it in detail. But before doing so I will ask the reader to compare with it the ordinary attitude of the plain men and women who inhabit these States, and who have to bear the burden of the wars in which the theory involves them. These ordinary people, in the course of their daily lives, do not think at all in terms of the State. They think about the people they come in contact with, about their business, their friends, and their families. When they come across foreigners, as many of them do, in business or in travel, they may like or dislike them, but they do not regard them as predestined enemies. On the contrary, if they are intelligent, they know themselves to be cooperating with them in innumerable complicated ways, implying mutual advantage. Differences of language and of social habit make it easier for most people to associate with their fellow-countrymen than with foreigners. But that is all. There are, of course, among these men and women real enmities and spontaneous quarrels. But these do not occur because men belong to different States. They occur because they really have injured one another, or hate one another; and they occur, naturally, for the most part, between men of the same State, because it is these who most often come into direct contact with one another. It is not, therefore, these enmities of ordinary men that give rise to wars.

Governments, not peoples, make wars.

Wars are made by governments, acting under the influence of the governmental theory. And of this fact—for a fact it is among civilized Western peoples in modern times—no better example could be given than the present war. Before it broke out nobody outside governmental and journalistic circles was expecting it. Nobody desired it. And though, now that it is being waged, all the nations concerned are passionately interested in it, and all believe themselves to be fighting in a righteous cause, yet no ordinary citizen, in the days preceding its outbreak, would have maintained that there was any good reason for war, and few even knew what the reasons alleged were or might be. Even now the different nations have quite opposite views as to which Government was responsible. We believe it was the German Government; and with equal conviction Germans believe it was the British. But nobody believes that it was the mass of the people in any nation. The millions who are carrying on the war, at the cost of incalculable suffering, would never have made it if the decision had rested with them. That is the one indisputable fact. How can such a fact occur? How is it possible for Governments to drag into war people who did not desire war and who have no quarrel with one another?

The immediate answer is simple enough. In no country is there any effective control by the people over foreign policy. That is clear in the case of the great military empires. But it is true also of France and of England, where, in other respects, government is more or less under popular control. The country has no real choice, for it gets its information only after the decisive action has been taken. That is an important truth which ought to lead to important changes in our methods of conducting foreign affairs. But it is only part of the truth. For we have now to notice this further fact: that in all countries, in Germany no less than in England and France, no sooner is the war declared than it is supported by the whole nation. The voice of criticism is silenced, and every one, whatever his opinion about the origin of the war, gives his help to see it through. Why is that? The reason is obvious. As soon as war is made, the people of one country, conscious just before of no cause of enmity, do really become enemies of the people of another country; for armed populations are marching on armed populations to massacre them. Everybody, therefore, is bound to fight in self-defense. It is too late to ask whether there was any real cause of quarrel; for, quarrel or no, there is real and imminent danger. To meet that danger becomes, therefore, the immediate necessity which overbears every other consideration. And that is the deepest reason why wars made by governments without, and even against, the will of peoples, will always be supported by peoples.

But peoples are also obsessed by the theory.

But though that is the most powerful reason, it is not the only one. There is a further fact. The ordinary man, though he does not live under the obsession of the governmental theory, is not protected against it by any knowledge or reflection. As far as he is concerned, he knows no reason for war, and, left to himself, would never make it. But he has a blank mind open to suggestion; and he has passions and instincts which it is easy to enlist on the side of the governmental theory. He has been busy all his life; and he has no education, or one that is worse than none, about those issues which, in a crisis like that which has come upon us, suddenly reveal themselves as the issues of life and death. History, no doubt, should have informed him. But history, for the most part, is written without intelligence or conviction. It is mere narrative, devoid of instruction, and seasoned, if at all, by some trivial, habitual, and second-hand prejudice of the author. History has never been understood, though it has often been misunderstood. To understand it is perhaps beyond the power of the human intellect. But the attempt even has hardly begun to be made.

Press and government poison the public mind.

Deprived, then, of this source of enlightenment, the ordinary man falls back upon the press. But the press is either an agent of the very governments it should exist to criticize (it is so notoriously and admittedly on the Continent, and, to an extent which we cannot measure, also in England), or else it is (with a few honorable exceptions) an instrument to make money for certain individuals or syndicates. But the easiest way for the press to make money is to appeal to the most facile emotions and the most superficial ideas of the reader; and these can easily be made to respond to the suggestion that this or that foreign State is our natural and inevitable enemy. The strong instincts of pugnacity and self-approbation, the nobler sentiment of patriotism, a vague and unanalyzed impression of the course of history, these and other factors combine to produce this result. And the irony is that they may be directed indifferently against any State. In England, for instance, a hundred years ago, it was France against whom they were marshaled; sixty years ago it was Russia; thirty years ago it was France again; now it is Germany; presently, if governments have their way, it will be Russia again.

The foreign offices and the press do with nations what they like. And they will continue to do so until ordinary people acquire right ideas and a machinery to make them effective....

We must realize that States are unreal abstractions.

The governmental theory holds that States are the great realities, and that they are natural enemies. My reply is that States are unreal abstractions; that the reality is the men and women and children who are the members of the States; and that as soon as you substitute real people for the abstract idea that symbolizes them you find that they have no cause of quarrel, no interests or desires of a kind to justify or necessitate aggressive war. And, if there were no aggressive war, there could, of course, be no cause for defensive war....

G. Lowes Dickinson, “The War and the Way Out,” Atlantic Monthly, January, 1915.

THE WAY OUT OF WAR

No aggrandizement!

We will to perpetuate European peace. How are we to accomplish it? By keeping in view and putting into effect certain clear principles.

First, the whole idea of aggrandizing one nation and humiliating another must be set aside. What we are aiming at is, not that this or that group of States should dominate the others, but that none should in future have any desire or motive to dominate. With that view, we must leave behind the fewest possible sores, the least possible sense of grievance, the least possible humiliation. The defeated States, therefore, must not be dismembered in the hope of making or keeping them weak; and that means, in detail, that, if the Allies win, the English and the French must not take the German colonies, or the Russians the Baltic Coast, the Balkans, or Constantinople; and that, if Germany wins, she must not dismember or subordinate to her system France or England or the neutral powers. That is the first clear condition of the future peace of Europe.

No subjugation of small nationalities!

Secondly, in rearranging the boundaries of States—and clearly they must be rearranged—one point, and one only, must be kept in mind: to give to all peoples suffering and protesting under alien rule the right to decide whether they will become an autonomous unit, or will join the political system of some other nation. Thus, for example, the people of Alsace-Lorraine should be allowed to choose whether they will remain under Germany, or become an autonomous community, or be included in France. The same principles shall be applied to the Poles. The same to Schleswig-Holstein. The same to the Balkan States. The same to the Slav communities included in Austria-Hungary. There would arise, of course, difficulties in carrying this principle through. For, in the Balkan States, in Bohemia, and elsewhere, there is an almost inextricable tangle of nationalities. But with good-will these difficulties could be at least partially met.

Even the wholesale transference of peoples of one nationality from one location to another is a possibility; and, indeed, it is now going on. In any case the principle itself is clear. Political rule must cease to be imposed on peoples against their will in the supposed interest of that great idol, the abstract state. Let the Germans, who belong together, live together under the same government, pursuing in independence their national ideal and their national culture. But let them not impose that ideal and that culture on reluctant Poles and Slavs and Danes. So, too, let Russia develop her own life over the huge territory where Russians live. But let her not impose that life on unwilling Poles and Finns. The English, in history, have been as guilty as other nations of sacrificing nationality to the supposed exigencies of the State. But of late they have been learning their lesson. Let them learn it to the end. Let no community be coerced under British rule that wants to be self-governing. The British have had the courage, though late, to apply this principle to South Africa and Ireland. There remains their greatest act of courage and wisdom—to apply it to India.

There must be established an international authority.

A Europe thus rearranged, as it might be at the peace, on a basis of real nationality instead of on a basis of States, would be a Europe ripe for a permanent league. And by such a league only, in my judgment, can its future peace, prosperity, happiness, goodness, and greatness be assured. There must be an end to the waste upon armaments of resources too scanty, at the best, to give to all men and women in all countries the material basis for a good life. But if States are left with the power to arm against one another they will do so, each asserting, and perhaps with truth, that it is arming in defense against the imagined aggression of the others. If all are arming, all will spend progressively more and more on their armaments, for each will be afraid of being outstripped by the others. This circle is fatal, as we have seen in the last quarter of a century.

To secure the peace of Europe the peoples of Europe must hand over their armaments, and the use of them for any purpose except internal police, to an international authority. This authority must determine what force is required for Europe as a whole, acting as a whole in the still possible case of war against powers not belonging to the league. It must apportion the quota of armaments between the different nations according to their wealth, population, resources, and geographical position. And it, and it alone, must carry on, and carry on in public, negotiations with powers outside the league. All disputes that may arise between members of the league must be settled by judicial process. And none of the forces of the league must be available for purposes of aggression by any member against any other.

With such a league of Europe constituted, the problem of reduction of armaments would be automatically solved. Whatever force a united Europe might suppose itself to require for possible defense would clearly be far less than the sum of the existing armaments of the separate States. Immense resources would be set free for the general purposes of civilization, and especially for those costly social reforms on the accomplishment of which depends the right of any nation to call itself civilized at all. And if any one insists on looking at the settlement from the point of view of material advantage—and that point of view will and must be taken—it may be urged, without a shadow of doubt, that any and every nation, the conquerors no less than the conquered, would gain from a reduction of armaments far more than they could possibly gain by pecuniary indemnities or cessions of territory which would leave every nation still arming against the others with a view to future squandering of resources in another great war. This is sheer common sense of the most matter-of-fact kind.

A League of Europe is not Utopian. It is sound business.

And we must prepare public opinion for the idea.

Such a league, it is true, could hardly come into being immediately at the peace. There must be preparation of opinion first; and, not less important, there must be such changes in the government of the monarchic States as will insure the control of their policy by popular opinion; otherwise we might get a league in which the preponderating influence would be with autocratic emperors. But in making peace the future league must be kept in view. Everything must be done that will further it, and nothing that will hinder it. And what would hinder it most would be a peace by which either there should be a return to the conditions before the war—but of that there is little fear—or by which any one power, or group of powers, should be given a hegemony over the others. For that would mean a future war for the rehabilitation of the vanquished.

View of peoples must supersede view of governments.

The mood, therefore, which seems to be growing in England, that the British must “punish” Germany by annihilating her as a political force; the mood which seems to be growing in Germany, that she must annihilate the British as the great disturbers of the peace—all such moods must be resolutely discouraged. For on those lines no permanent peace can be made. Militarism must be destroyed, not only in Germany but everywhere. Limitation of armaments must be general, not imposed only on the vanquished by victors who propose themselves to remain fully armed. The view of peoples must be substituted once for all for the view of governments, and the view of peoples is no domination, and, therefore, no war, but a union of nations developing freely on their own lines, and settling all disputes by arbitration.

G. Lowes Dickinson, “The War and the Way Out,” Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1915.

LOWES DICKINSON’S PLAN

Mr. Dickinson’s plan lacks hard-headedness.

Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Mr. Lowes Dickinson attempts to point the moral of the war and to offer a way out. His theory is that wars are made by governments without the consent and against the interest of their subjects; they are made because the governmental mind is obsessed with the illusion that States are “natural enemies,” that they have always been so and always will be, that force is the only arbiter between them. This fantasy of the governing caste, says Mr. Dickinson, is what rules the State, and through control of foreign policy and the press drags the population to slaughter. The remedy is to shatter the illusion, to assert against the criminal nonsense of the governing mind the humanity and commonsense of ordinary people....

Now peace will have to be built on a very hard-headed basis or it will be fragile and illusory. But it is just this hard-headedness which Mr. Dickinson’s argument seems to lack. In our opinion he himself is building on an illusion, and if his doctrine prevails among the workers for peace their passion will be misdirected, and their disappointment will be as deep as their hopes are high.

Is political power irrelevant to economic power?

To prove these assertions, we need not go beyond the example which Mr. Dickinson uses, the case of Russia and her desire to hold Constantinople. Mr. Dickinson dismisses this ambition with the statement that “for all purposes of trade, for all peace purposes, the Dardanelles are open. And it is the interest of all nations alike that they should remain so.” What he is assuming here is that it makes no economic difference whether Constantinople is under one political government or another. This is the center of Mr. Dickinson’s argument, and it rests on the doctrine of Norman Angell that “political power is a consideration irrelevant to economic power.”

Is it irrelevant in a case like that of the Dardanelles? The Black Sea region is already a great agricultural exporting region; it is destined most probably to become the industrial center of Russia. But to carry out goods, Russian ships must pass through a narrow Turkish strait. Mr. Dickinson says that for all “peace purposes” the passage is free. Is it? Let us suppose that Mexico held New York harbor, or that Ecuador held Liverpool. Would these harbors be free to American and English commerce? They would be free if Mexico and Ecuador were highly efficient governments imbued with the doctrine of absolute free trade. Then commerce might pass through easily. But if Mexicans or Ecuadorians took it into their heads to exercise sovereignty by setting up a tariff zone around New York or Liverpool, who would regard political power as irrelevant to economic power? Certainly not the Manchester exporter as he paid his customs tax to the pleasant official from Ecuador.

Although England is in no danger from Ecuador, there are nations in the world which suffer just as fantastically. There is the case of Servia, shut off from a “window on the sea.” Servia exports pigs, when she isn’t fighting for the privilege of exporting them. But to export anything she has to run the gauntlet of an Austrian tariff to the north, Albanian and Greek discrimination to the west and south. Shut off from the sea, she is like a man trying to get out of a restaurant who has still to tip the waiter, the headwaiter, the girl who took care of his hat, and the boy who brushed it.

No; political power is an instrument for monopolies and concessions.

Political power is not in the least irrelevant to economic power. Mr. Dickinson has no doubt heard of a thing which we Americans call vulgarly “dollar diplomacy.” European powers do not call it that, but they practise it. They call it staking out “spheres of influence,” and there is nothing sentimental or illusory about it. The nation that can secure political control of an undeveloped country can decide who shall receive the mining rights and the railroad franchises, can fix railroad rates to favor its own manufacturers, can use all the methods which Americans describe as restraint of trade. It may have been dishonest, it certainly wasn’t a delusion, when capitalists in those dreadful early days of this republic bought political power to further economic ends. A legislature or a governor was generally worth the price in this country, and we presume that they would be worth the price in Asia Minor. If German bureaucrats governed Morocco, they would, we suppose, be good to their friends, almost all of whom have at least a nominal residence east of Belgium, and French capitalists might then be prospecting fresh mines and pastures new.

Mr. Dickinson ignores these considerations when he speaks of national antagonisms arising “because a few men of the military and diplomatic caste have a theory about States, their interests and destinies.” He ignores the monopolies, the use of tariffs, the special privileges of which political power is the instrument. He does not face the fact that in every country there are exporters of goods and capital, concession-hunters and traders, who stand to gain by the use of governmental power in half developed territory. To them at least it is not a matter of indifference whether Germany is politically supreme in say India or China. Since Germany has brought the doctrine of protection to its highest point, it would make a very great difference to the commerce of other nations if Germany developed a world-empire.

How little reality there is in Mr. Dickinson’s contention may be seen by analyzing his concrete proposals. Apart from the shattering of the great illusion of the governmental mind by a propaganda, he suggests a settlement of Europe on the basis of nationality, capped by a League of Europe to maintain the peace.

Governmental theory not mere illusion.

Now there are all sorts of reasons for trying to found States on nationality, and the only reason against the proposal is the reason on which Mr. Dickinson’s article is built. He tells us on one page that “ordinary people, in the course of their daily lives, do not think at all in terms of the state.” Then what difference does it make to people of the same nationality that they should be under different governments, and how is the world’s peace to be assured by gathering into one State people who do not care about the State? Either the people have an interest in the State or they have not, but surely it is futile for Mr. Dickinson to argue in one place against the German contention that their emigrants are “lost,” and in another that the Danes of Schleswig-Holstein should go back to Denmark. And what does he mean by telling us that in the event of an Austro-German victory “Italy and the Balkans will be pillaged to the benefit of Austria, and Russia rolled back—though that would be all to the good—from her ambition to expand in the West.” Is Mr. Dickinson also afflicted with the “governmental mind,” that he should talk of “benefit” to Austria and pronounce it good that “Russia” be rolled back? What does he mean by telling us that “the English and the French must not take the German colonies, or the Russians the Baltic coast, the Balkans, or Constantinople,” for what difference does it make, except to the “governmental mind,” who exercises political power!

Mr. Dickinson ignores crucial problems.

As for the League of Europe, surely no one here would wish to obstruct the plan. But if the League is to be based on nothing more realistic than an absence of governmental thinking, it will be a very precarious league. Every argument advanced by Mr. Dickinson is based on the assumption of absolute free trade in the world, yet in his plan of peace he says not one syllable about how tariffs and discriminations and monopolies are to be wiped out. The conflict between Germany and England is world-wide, yet Mr. Dickinson is thinking only of rectified frontiers in Europe.

When he proposes so readily a League of Europe with a police force to carry out its jurisdiction, has he considered the possibility of civil war within the League? If Germany and Austria rebelled against the League, they would presumably be attacked on all sides. But they are now attacked on all sides. We had on this continent a league of States with a central government, a Supreme Court, and an army. In 1861 some of the States seceded, and the struggle which followed, called a Civil War, was a terrible conflict. Has Mr. Dickinson faced the fact that a League of Europe would be based on the status quo, would be a sort of legalization of every existing injustice? And how does he propose to amend peacefully the constitution of Europe if some nation objects too seriously?

The New Republic, Jan. 2, 1915.

THE MORROW OF THE WAR

OUR PURPOSE

In time of war, prepare for peace.

This country (Great Britain) is at war, and has for the moment one overwhelming preoccupation: to render safe our national inheritance.

The Union of Democratic Control has been founded for the purpose of trying to secure for ourselves and the generations that succeed us a new course of policy which will prevent a similar peril ever again befalling our Empire. Many men and women have already joined us holding varying shades of opinion as to the origins of the war. Some think it was inevitable, some that it could and should have been avoided. But we believe that all are in general agreement about two things: First, it is imperative that the war, once begun, should be prosecuted to a victory for our country. Secondly, it is equally imperative, while we carry on the war, to prepare for peace. Hard thinking, free discussion, the open exchange of opinion and information are the duty of all citizens to-day, if we are to have any hope that this war will not be what most wars of the past have been—merely the prelude to other wars.

The program.

Our contribution to this necessary discussion are the principles put forward for consideration by the Union of Democratic Control.

The Union of Democratic Control has been created to insist that the following policy shall inspire the actual conditions of peace, and shall dominate the situation after peace has been declared:

1. No Province shall be transferred from one Government to another without consent by plébiscite or otherwise of the population of such Province.

2. No Treaty, Arrangement, or Undertaking shall be entered upon in the name of Great Britain without the sanction of Parliament. Adequate machinery for ensuring democratic control of foreign policy shall be created.

3. The Foreign Policy of Great Britain shall not be aimed at creating Alliances for the purpose of maintaining the “Balance of Power”; but shall be directed to the establishment of a Concert of the Powers and the setting up of an International Council whose deliberations and decisions shall be public, part of the labor of such Council to be the creation of definite Treaties of Arbitration and the establishment of Courts for their interpretation and enforcement.

4. Great Britain shall propose as part of the Peace settlement a plan for the drastic reduction by consent of the armaments of all the belligerent Powers, and to facilitate that policy shall attempt to secure the general nationalization of the manufacture of armaments, and the control of the export of armaments by one country to another.

It is the purpose of this pamphlet to elaborate and explain the considerations which underlie the policy outlined above.

I

No Province shall be transferred from one Government to another without the consent of plébiscite of the population of such Province.

There must be general recognition of principle of plébiscite.

This condition has been placed first because if adhered to practically and in spirit, and if recognized by the European Powers as a principle that must guide all frontier rearrangements, it would help to put an end to European war.

If no province were retained under a Government’s power against the will of its inhabitants, the policy of conquest and the imposition of political power would lose its raison d’être.

The subject as a whole is wrapped up, of course, with the principle of democratic government and is not merely a problem of international but of internal politics, and could not be treated briefly in a mere outline like the present. But any one who reflects carefully on the subject will see that the peace in Europe ultimately depends upon the acceptance of this idea.

It is obvious that there are many difficulties of detail in its application; that a plébiscite may be a mere form and not reflect the real wishes of the population concerned, and under military control it can be used as an instrument for obtaining an apparent sanction for oppression, and that in populations of mixed race it is very difficult of application. But it should not be impossible to guard against the defeat of the principle through defects in the working machinery. Plébiscites, where used at the end of the war, might be carried out under international supervision. The essential is that the principle involved should be clearly enunciated.

Fortunately the Government has already given the country a valuable lead in this matter. For Mr. Churchill, speaking on September 11, said:

“Now the war has come, and when it is over let us be careful not to make the same mistake or the same sort of mistake as Germany made when she had France prostrate at her feet in 1870. [Cheers.] Let us, whatever we do, fight for and work towards great and sound principles for the European system, and the first of those principles which we should keep before us is the principle of nationality—that is to say, not the conquest or subjugation of any great community, or of any strong race of men, but the setting free of those races which have been subjugated and conquered; and if doubt arises about disputed areas of country we should try to settle their ultimate destination in the reconstruction of Europe which must follow from this war with a fair regard to the wishes and feelings of the people who live in them.”

One nation must not be allowed to dominate another.

We agree with Mr. Churchill that the terms of peace should secure that there shall in the future be no more Alsace-Lorraines to create during half a century resentment, unrest, and intrigues for a revanche. The power of the victorious parties must not be used for vindictive oppression and dismemberment of beaten nationalities, but for the creation, by cooperation with all the belligerents, victors and vanquished alike, of a true society of nations, banded together for mutual security. The future relationship of the States of Europe must be not that of victor and vanquished, domination or subserviency, but of partnership. The struggle of one nation for domination over another must be replaced by the association of the people for their common good.

II

No Treaty, Arrangement, or Undertaking shall be entered upon in the name of Great Britain without the sanction of Parliament. Adequate machinery for ensuring democratic control of foreign policy shall be created.

Secret diplomacy must go.

The peoples of all constitutionally-governed countries are justified in demanding that diplomatic relations with their neighbors shall be conducted with the main object of maintaining friendly international intercourse. The increasing social and economic interdependence, the ramifications of the credit system, the facility and rapidity of intercommunication, the developing community of intellectual interest, the growth of a collective social consciousness, are combining to minimize the significance of the purely political frontiers which divide civilized States. For these reasons the world is moving towards conferences when political difficulties arise as a substitute for war. The determination to preserve national ideals and traditions offers no real obstacle. But the common interest of civilized democracies cannot be advanced by a secret diplomacy out of touch with democratic sentiment.

The anomaly of such practises in a democratic State has only to be understood to be condemned. All the domestic activities of a constitutional Government are tested in the crucible of public analysis and criticism. But the Government department charged with the supervision of the nation’s intercourse with its neighbors, which if wrongly handled may react with ruinous effect upon the whole field of its domestic activities and upon the future of its entire social economy, not only escapes efficient public control, but considers itself empowered to commit the nation to specific courses and to involve it in obligations to third parties entailing the risk of war, without the nation’s knowledge of consent.

British foreign policy has been autocratic.

During the past eight years particularly, the management of the Foreign department has become avowedly and frankly autocratic. Parliamentary discussion of foreign policy has become so restricted as to be perfunctory. It is confined to a few hours’ roving debate on one day in each session. The eliciting of information by means of questions, never satisfactory, is rendered extremely difficult by the ingenuity employed in evading the issues it is attempted to raise. Advantage has been taken of the wholesome desire that discussion of foreign policy should not partake of mere party recriminations, to burke discussion altogether, and this process has received the endorsement of both Front Benches. A claim to “continuity” has been further evolved to stifle debate on foreign affairs, whereas in point of fact, if one feature more than another has characterized British foreign policy of recent years, it has been its bewildering fluctuations. Parliamentary paralysis has had its counterpart in the country. The present Government’s tenure of office has been marked by an almost complete abstention from public reference to foreign affairs. The public has been treated as though foreign affairs were outside—and properly outside—its ken. And the public has acquiesced. Every attempt to shake its apathy has been violently assailed by spokesmen of the Foreign Office in the press. The country has been told that its affairs were in the wisest hands, and that mystery and silence are the indispensable attributes to a successful direction of foreign policy. The caste system which prevails in the diplomatic service, and which has survived unimpaired the democratizing of the majority of the public services, facilitates these outworn political dogmatisms. Appointment is made by nomination and selection. Candidates are required to possess an income per annum of £400. The natural result is that the vast bulk of the national intelligence is debarred from the diplomatic field of employment. A study of the Foreign Office list will disclose the fact that over 95 per cent. of the British diplomatic staff is composed of members of the aristocracy and landed gentry.

Connection between politics and business is ignored.

Inevitable exile from their country results in our diplomatic representatives abroad losing touch with the center of affairs and living in a mental atmosphere remote from the popular and progressive movements of the time. Another pronounced characteristic of the system is the indifference displayed by the Foreign Office to the business interests of the nation. Our vast commercial interests, so intimately affected by our relations with foreign Powers, are regarded as lying outside the orbit of diplomatic considerations. The connection between politics and business—and by business we mean the entire framework of peaceful commerce upon which the prosperity of this country depends—appears to be ignored, or, at least, treated with indifference and something like contempt. The services of our Consuls abroad are not sufficiently utilized, and the Consular machinery requires complete overhauling. Such questions as, for instance, the effect upon British commercial interest of British diplomacy supporting the acquisition of undeveloped areas of the world’s surface by a Power like France, which imposes differential tariffs upon British goods, and opposing the acquisition of such areas by a Power like Germany, which admits British goods on terms of equality, does not appear to enter into Foreign Office calculations.

Policy is framed by military experts without Parliamentary control.

In the last few years also has been added another institution which modifies national policy without coming under Parliamentary control, the Committee of Imperial Defense. Its influence upon the Cabinet is nominally indirect, and its activities confined to the discussion of hypothetical events. But no one can doubt that its recommendations exercise a powerful effect on the executive decisions of the Government. No criticism of the advice given by the Committee is possible in Parliament. Momentous military and naval schemes are prepared there on which hang the issues of peace and war, as in the case of our recent relations to France. It is an intimate and powerful means of framing Government policy according to the ideas of military experts, without the knowledge and control of Parliament.

In the various ways indicated, opportunities of evincing an intelligent concern in its foreign policy has been increasingly withdrawn from the nation. The work of the Department escapes all outside control, loses all sense of contact with national life, and tends more and more to become an autocratic institution, contemptuous of the efforts of a small group of members in the House to acquire information, and utilizing a powerful section of the press to mold public opinion in the direction it considers public opinion should travel.

The nation awoke with a shock to the evils of this state of affairs in the summer of 1911, when it suddenly found itself on the very brink of war with Germany over a Franco-German quarrel about Morocco, and became cognizant of the existence of diplomatic entanglements of which it had no previous intimation.

It is obviously impossible to attempt here a full presentment of the Moroccan crisis of 1911. But the story is inseparably intertwined with the avowals to the House of Commons on August 3rd, 1914, of the secret understanding with France which has played so capital a part in bringing about British intervention in the present war.

Nation must participate in direction of foreign policy.

So long as this situation prevails it must be perfectly clear to any man of ordinary intelligence that the system of government under which we live is not a democratic system, but its antithesis. It cannot be too often insisted upon that the domestic concerns of the nation, its constitutional liberties, its social reforms, all its internal activities in short, depend upon the preservation of peaceful relations with its neighbors. War in which this country is involved is certain to prove a serious check to social progress. Hence it is a matter of absolutely vital concern to the nation that the machinery of its Foreign Office should be thoroughly capable of performing its functions, and that the policy pursued by that department should be pursued with the knowledge and the consent of the nation. It is imperative not only that a treaty with a foreign Power should require endorsement by Parliament, but that no agreement or understanding possessing binding force and postulating the use of the national military and naval forces should be valid without the assent of Parliament. The nation should insist upon this essential reform, and should seriously apply itself to considering what other steps are needed to ensure some mechanical means whereby a greater national control of foreign policy can be secured; whether by the establishment of a permanent Committee of the House of Commons, by the adaptation to suit our needs of the American system under which a two-thirds majority of one branch of the Legislature is required for the validity of international agreements, or other procedure. But real and permanent reforms will not be obtained unless the nation is determined to assert its fundamental right to participate in the formation of its own foreign policy.

III

The Foreign Policy of Great Britain shall not be aimed at creating Alliances for the purpose of maintaining the “Balance of Power”; but shall be directed to the establishment of a Concert of Europe and the setting up of an International Council whose deliberations and decisions shall be public.

The “Balance of Power.”

What does the “Balance of Power” mean?

It is popularly supposed to mean that no single Power or group of Powers should, in the interests of international peace, be allowed to acquire a preponderating position in Europe, and that the policy of Great Britain should be directed against such a consummation. British policy during the past few years has been based upon the assumption that Germany had attained, or was seeking to attain, that position of eminence.

It is that idea which, in the minds of masses of our people, justifies the present war.

But if this policy has been right in the past, what prospect does the future hold? The victory of the Allies—which is a vital necessity—must enormously upset the “balance” by making Russia the dominant military power of Europe, possibly the dictator both in this Continent and in Asia.

Russia can draw upon vast sources of human military material, only partly civilized. At present she is governed by a military autocracy which is largely hostile to Western ideas of political and religious freedom. There is hope in the minds of Western Liberals that the war may bring political liberation to Russia. At present that is only a hope. For wars have as often been a prelude to tyranny as to liberty. It is only too likely that after a victorious war our national feeling may revert to its old anti-Russian channel, and we shall again have the “Balance of Power” invoked to protect Europe and India against a new Russian preeminence.

Speaking generally, the “Balance of Power” is little more than a diplomatic formula made use of by the mouthpieces of the interests from whose operations war comes. It signifies nothing more than that, at a given moment, in a given country, there is an effort to hold up to the public gaze the Government and the people of another country as being intent upon the destruction of its neighbors. At one moment it is Russia, at another France, and at another Germany. The “Balance of Power” was invoked for several years and down to within a few weeks of the Crimean War to inflame British public opinion against France. It was invoked against Russia to justify the Crimean War, and France was chosen as the ally with which to fight Russia! No sooner had peace been signed than France became once more the potential threat to the “Balance of Power”; and again during the period of rivalry in West and Central Africa, and in the Far East, in the late nineties.

The power of the press in making war-opinion.

Once the ball has been set rolling in the required direction, influences of all kinds are brought to bear for the purpose of permanently fixing this idea in the public mind. A flood of innuendo, denunciation, and distorted information is let loose. Every dishonorable motive and the most sinister of projects are attributed to the Government and the people selected for attack. The public becomes the sport of private ambitions and interests, of personal prejudices and obscure passions, which it can neither detect nor control, and, for the most part, does not even suspect. The power for mischief wielded by these forces is to-day immense, owing to a cheap press and to the concentration of a large number of newspapers, possessing in the aggregate an enormous circulation, under one directing will. At the present moment the editorial and news columns of some fifty British newspapers echo the views of one man, who is thus able to superimpose in permanent fashion upon public thought the dead weight of his own prejudices or personal aims and intentions, and to exercise a potent influence upon the Government of the day.

How the “Balance of Power” works.

For the last few years these newspapers have striven with unceasing pertinacity to create an atmosphere of ill-will and suspicion between Great Britain and Germany. The effort has been continuous, systematic, and magnificently organized, and inferential evidence is not lacking that it has been pursued with the approval and even with the assistance of certain official influences, and to the satisfaction of certain foreign Governments. This propaganda has had, needless to say, its counterpart in Germany. The net result of the latest recrudescence of the “Balance of Power” policy with its Alliances and Ententes as the dominating factor in international relationships is now visible to all men. A quarrel (whose culminating episode was the murder in a Bosnian town of the heir to the Austrian throne last June) between Austria and Serbia, to which the Russian Government determined to become a party, has already involved the peoples of France, Belgium, Britain, and Germany, the first three of whom were not even remotely concerned, in a terrible and desolating war.

Japan and Montenegro have also become involved, and the same fate may overtake Holland, Italy, the other Balkan States, and the Scandinavian Powers. But for the policy of the “Balance of Power” the results of the quarrel would almost certainly have been confined to the parties immediately affected, and an early mediation by the neutral Powers would have been possible.

Bright’s scathing denunciation of the fetish of the “Balance of Power” appeals with even greater force to us to-day:

“You cannot comprehend at a thought what is meant by this balance of power. If the record could be brought before you—but it is not possible to the eye of humanity to scan the scroll upon which are recorded the sufferings which the theory of the balance of power has entailed upon this country. It rises up before me when I think of it as a ghastly phantom ... which has loaded the nation with debt and with taxes, has sacrificed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, has desolated the homes of millions of families, and has left us, as the great result of the profligate expenditure which it has caused, a doubled peerage at one end of the social scale, and far more than a doubled pauperism at the other.”

It must be superseded by a council of nations.

For a system therefore which carries with it the implication that the interests of nations are necessarily in constant conflict and which involves the permanent division of Europe into two hostile competing groups, we must substitute machinery which will facilitate cooperation and a reasonable solution of differences between all the peoples of the world.

The objective should be a real council of the nations with at first very limited powers, rather an expansion of an alliance of three Powers against three, into a league of six Powers, designed to act against any one recalcitrant member which might threaten the peace of the whole. To this ideal, indeed, the pronouncement of Mr. Asquith in his Dublin speech has already pointed, while it is noteworthy that Sir Edward Grey himself seems in a significant passage of one of his despatches to admit the failure of the balance principle and to indicate that the nations must “start afresh” on the basis of a general council. This passage is as follows:

“If the peace of Europe can be preserved, and the present crisis safely passed, my own endeavor will be to promote some arrangement to which Germany could be a party, by which she could be assured that no aggressive or hostile policy would be pursued against her or her allies by France, Russia, and ourselves, jointly or separately. I have desired this and worked for it as far as I could through the last Balkan crisis; and Germany having a corresponding object, our relations sensibly improved. The idea has hitherto been too Utopian to form the subject of definite proposals, but if this present crisis, so much more acute than any Europe has gone through for generations, be safely passed, I am hopeful that the relief and reaction which will follow may make possible some more definite rapprochement between the Powers than has been possible hitherto.”

It is from some such simple beginning, pursued with good will and perseverance by all parties, that the nations may hope to arrive at a system of cooperation to replace the system of hostile alliances, the fruits of which are the present war.

It is essential, of course, if the negotiations of such a council are to be lifted out of the atmosphere of diplomatic intrigue which the secrecy of negotiations always involves, that its deliberations be public. Publicity will at one and the same time be a guarantee of openness, of good faith, and of democratic control.

IV

Great Britain shall propose as part of the Peace settlement a plan for the drastic reduction by consent of the armaments of all the belligerent Powers, and to facilitate that policy shall attempt to secure the general nationalization of the manufacture of armaments, and the control of the export of armaments by one country to another.

Armaments, the instrument of diplomacy, must be reduced.

The theory of the “Balance of Power” and secret diplomacy are two factors which, in combination, make for war.

Two other factors intimately connected with these ensure its certainty. They are: a constant progression in expenditure upon armaments, and the toleration of a private armament interest.

Competitive armaments mean the bankruptcy of statesmanship.

It would be labor wasted to endeavor to apportion responsibility between the various European Governments for the insane competition in armaments which of recent years has attained incredible proportions. No government can escape liability. Each government has defended its policy on the ground that its neighbor’s action compelled it to do so. Many of the governing statesmen of the world have alternately confessed their helplessness, attacked their rivals, appealed to public opinion, and blamed the warlike tendencies inherent in the people whose destinies they control. Every government, without exception, has proceeded on the assumption that in order to ensure peace it had to be stronger than its neighbor, a philosophy which could have but one possible outcome—war. In pursuance of this phantom, a considerable proportion of the wealth of the European States has been wasted, and activities have been withdrawn from the constructive work of the world, to prepare for the world’s destruction. And with every fresh outburst of expenditure, responding to some diplomatic check or alarmist propaganda, fresh fagots have been piled around Europe’s powder magazine. The disaster which has fallen upon Europe is the fitting sequel to the bankruptcy of statesmanship which this policy embodies.

The more extensive the armaments, the greater the temptation to seize an opportunity for testing their efficiency; the greater the nervousness and irritation of Governments when negotiating; the greater the pressure upon those Governments of the powerful professional and other interests concerned in armament construction.

The policy of gigantic armaments cannot in the very nature of things ensure any final settlement of disputes between States. It leads, and can only lead, to an intolerable situation from which war comes to be regarded by diplomacy as the only escape.

An all-round limitation of armaments must follow the present war if the world is to be permanently relieved of the nightmare which has weighed upon it for so long. We can no longer afford to listen to arguments as to the impracticability of such a course from those whose claims to the possession of human wisdom and experienced guidance have so utterly broken down.

Armament industry rests in government demand, and creates an economic force interested in war preparedness.

The difficulty of compelling a change in the policy of European Governments has been intensified by the conditions under which armament construction is carried on in this and other countries. Every one is familiar with the fact that the object of a commercial firm is to push its wares in every legitimate manner, to advertise them, and systematically to tout for orders both at home and abroad. Every one is aware that there exists a powerfully-equipped industry for the manufacture of military and naval engines and instruments of offense. Disguise it as we may, that industry waxes and wanes, the profits its management derives rise and fall, the dividends earned by its shareholders increase and dwindle in the measure of the demand for the articles it produces. That demand does not emanate from members of the public. It emanates from the military and naval departments of the public services. The industry relies, therefore, for its existence and for its profits not upon a private demand, but upon a Government demand, and the extent of that Government demand will depend upon the view which the Government may take of the number and nature of these articles required to ensure the national safety. Such a condition of affairs is a permanent and terrible danger both to democratic government and to international peace. What are its implications?

Private interests manipulate government.

There is created in every country an economic force in private hands directly interested in war and in the preparation for war; directly interested in assisting to bring about a general atmosphere advantageous to an industry which, were wars to cease or the expenditure on armaments to be substantially reduced, would suffer accordingly. What the successful prosecution of an ordinary commercial undertaking requires this industry also requires. The demand for the article must be created. That basic situation engenders effects which can only be appreciated in their cumulative significance. It is not at all necessary to attribute sinister machinations to individuals. These effects are automatic. An industry disposing, as does this one, of an enormous aggregate of capital possesses almost unlimited power of influence and suggestion. For such purposes the press is a potent instrument ready at hand. Many of those most closely associated with this great industry are men of considerable influence. Some have been in the public service and have acquaintances in the Government Departments. Others may be on friendly and perfectly honorable terms with the proprietors or editors of newspapers or associations of newspapers. The proprietor of a newspaper may be honestly convinced, or may by arguments be persuaded, that an agitation for increased armaments is advisable. If he is acquainted with one of the directors of the armament industry that acquaintance will hardly act as a deterrent to his entertaining those views. He may be furnished with special information, accurate or otherwise, as to the projects, real or alleged, of other Governments, which will be familiar to the director through his connection with Continental branches of the same industry. The press may be utilized in a similar manner by certain permanent officials in the nation’s Foreign Department, who feel that their views of the international situation can be best served by a press campaign of a certain kind. The influence of the industry which stands to gain from the existence of these views, and the willingness of newspaper editors and proprietors to push them on to the public, cannot be expected to intervene against their propagation. Again, an ambitious Minister, in charge of one of the fighting branches of the public service, desirous of placing his personality in the limelight and focusing public attention upon the affairs of his Department, will be from that circumstance a readier listener to representations from the industry in question. Those representations may quite legitimately take the form of pointing out that heavy expenses have been incurred in providing a certain type of machinery or special accommodation for the construction of a particular kind of offensive instrument, that the orders have not kept pace with the expenditure, and that if further orders be not forthcoming losses will ensue and future facilities for production be necessarily restricted. There would be nothing indefensible in representations of this character. And again, it is not unlikely that a member of Parliament, convinced of certain public dangers associated with the existing system, but representing a constituency where this great industry is established and employs, perhaps, not an inconsiderable section of the local labor, may find his freedom of speech considerably curtailed lest he should be accused of taking the bread from the mouths of some of his constituents.

Armaments cannot be safely left to private profit.

Endless, indeed, are the ramifications of a private industrial interest so wealthy and so well organized, and dependent for its profits upon national expenditure in instruments of warfare, and, consequently, in the ultimate resort, upon war itself. The general influence exerted upon public life as a whole by the very fact that this industry is a private one, and possesses a large body of shareholders usually belonging to the upper strata of society, cannot be regarded otherwise than as an unhealthy and dangerous element in the nation. Emphasis is lent to this aspect of the case when it is borne in mind that the armaments industry has of late years become internationalized to a remarkable degree. Recent disclosures, the accuracy of which has not been disputed, in Germany, France, England, and Japan, have clearly shown an inter-connection of the armament interest productive of repellent accompaniments. This inter-connection of interest has, for example, made it possible for a body of British shareholders, including prominent ecclesiastics, members of Parliament, and even Cabinet Ministers, to be financially interested in enterprises engaged in the manufacture of engines of destruction impartially used in the slaughter of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and Russians.

But however revolting this may be, it is insignificant compared with the graver peril to which precedent allusion has been made. Reflection must bring with it the conviction that the armament industry is not one which the nation can safely permit to be retained in private hands and to be the subject of private profit.

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What, then, is to be our policy in connection with the war? First and foremost we must be victorious. That is a prime necessity upon which the nation is unanimous. We must win not only because many British institutions of the highest value would be destroyed by our defeat, not only because Prussia, our principal enemy, is the leading exponent of that doctrine of military domination and intolerance which is incompatible with a permanently peaceful Europe; but also because we must see justice done, as far as may be, to the least powerful of our Allies. Ample compensation must be secured for Belgium to repair her material loss and in recognition of the wrong done to her.

What Democracy must do.

What of the future? What lessons do the incompetence and secretiveness, the jealousies and vanities of that vaunted European statecraft which has plunged the world in war convey to the peoples who are its victims?

What can the people do to amend a system under which they are used as pawns in a game of chess?

They can begin to understand what that system is and that its existence is their undoing. They can begin to understand the monstrous errors and fallacies which underlie the whole teaching imposed upon their intelligence. They can begin to understand that this immunity from public control enjoyed by the small group of professional men who manipulate international relations has led to the establishment amongst the latter of a standard of conduct which would not be tolerated in the ordinary affairs of a well-ordered community. They can begin to understand that “high politics” in the diplomatic world has become a synonym for intrigue; that a code of morals is therein practised which, in other branches of the public service, would entail dismissal, and in the business world would involve disgrace.

They can force themselves to a mental effort which shall lead them to the realization of the complete artificiality of the conditions under which they suffer, the remoteness from their real and vital needs of the issues for which they are asked to sacrifice all that they hold dear. They can rid themselves of the paralyzing belief that their relations with their neighbors are so complicated and mysterious as to be beyond their comprehension. They can bring themselves to grasp a plain and demonstrable truth, and to appreciate its full significance, which is that those to whom they have looked for guidance, those who have told them that in the preservation of the “Balance of Power,” and in the multiplication of colossal armaments lay the one chance of international peace, have been utterly, hopelessly, calamitously wrong. They can put to themselves these simple issues.

“By the terrible logic of events which now confront us we see that the methods advocated by those to whose training and wisdom we trusted to ensure peace among the nations have entirely failed. The system which we were induced reluctantly to support, far from preserving peace, has precipitated us into the greatest conflict in history, a conflict we passionately desired to avoid, and for the avoidance of which we made heavy sacrifices because, we were told, that therein lay our hope of averting it. The system was wrong. We must evolve another.”

We must aim at a federalized Europe.

The idea of a federalized Europe, regulated by an Areopagus, involving the disappearance, or substantial reduction, of standing armies and navies, and the submission of all disputes to a Central Council, is not to be dismissed. It is the ultimate goal to aim at. But it cannot be attained until the constitutionally governed democracies of the West are brought to realize how impossible it is that their moral and spiritual development and their happiness and well-being can be secured under a system of government which leaves them at the mercy of the intrigues and imbecilities of professional diplomatists and of the ambitions of military castes; helpless, too, in the face of an enormously powerful and internationalized private interest dependent for its profits upon the maintenance of that “armed peace” which is the inevitable prelude to the carnage and futility of war.

Democracies in the different countries must cooperate.

To awaken these sentiments among the democracies of this and other countries, to instil into them these convictions, to ensure the cooperation of all forces in all countries working to that end—is the task to which we must all turn our attention.

Potentates, diplomatists, and militarists made this war. They should not be allowed to arrange unchecked and uncontrolled the terms of peace and to decide alone the conditions which will follow it. The mass of the people who suffer from their blunders and their quarrels must claim the ineradicable right of participating in the future settlement.

And, when peace has come, the democratic parties of Europe must set before themselves a new province of political effort. That peace will be permanently preserved only if our artisans and industrialists keep up with the artisans and industrialists of other countries a constant and deliberate communication through their political parties and other organizations which will prevent misunderstandings and subdue the hatreds out of which war ultimately comes.

“The Morrow of the War,” Union of Democratic Control, London, Bulletin No. 1.

NO PEACE WITHOUT FEDERATION

The war has betrayed mankind.

The great war has now been going on long enough to enable mankind to form approximately correct views about its vast extent and scale of operations, its sudden interference with commerce and all other helpful international intercourse, its unprecedented wrecking of family happiness and continuity, its wiping out, as it proceeds, of the accumulated savings of many former generations in structures, objects of art, and industrial capital, and the huge burdens it is likely to impose on twentieth-century Europe. From all these points of view, it is evidently the most horrible calamity that has ever befallen the human race, and the most crucial trial to which civilization has been exposed. It is, and is to be, the gigantic struggle of these times between the forces which make for liberty and righteousness and those which make for the subjection of the individual man, the exaltation of the State, and the enthronement of physical force directed by a ruthless collective will. It threatens a sweeping betrayal of the best hopes of mankind.

The real causes of the war.

Each of the nations involved, horrified at the immensity of the disaster, maintains that it is not responsible for the war; and each Government has issued a statement to prove that some other Government is responsible for the outbreak. This discussion, however, relates almost entirely to actions by monarchs and Cabinets between July 23 and August 4—a short period of hurried messages between the chancelleries of Europe—actions which only prove that the monarchs and ministers for foreign affairs could not, or at least did not, prevent the long-prepared general war from breaking out. The assassination of the Archduke and Duchess of Hohenberg, on the 28th of June, was in no proper sense a cause of the war, except as it was one of the consequences of the persistent aggressions of Austria-Hungary against her southeastern neighbors. Neither was Russian mobilization in four military districts on July 29 a cause of the war; for that was only an external manifestation of the Russian state of mind toward the Balkan peoples, a state of mind well known to all publicists ever since the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. No more was the invasion of Belgium by the German army on August 4 a true cause of the war, or even the cause, as distinguished from the occasion, of Great Britain’s becoming involved in it. By that action, Germany was only taking the first step in carrying out a long-cherished purpose, and in executing a judicious plan of campaign prepared many years in advance. The artificial panic in Germany about its exposed position between two powerful enemies, France and Russia, was not a genuine cause of the war; for the General Staff knew they had crushed France once, and were confident they could do it again in a month. As to Russia, it was, in their view, a huge nation, but very clumsy and dull in war.

The most potent cause is the lust for world-empire.

The real causes of the war are all of many years’ standing; and all the nations now involved in the fearful catastrophe have contributed to the development of one or more of these effective causes. The fundamental causes are: (1) The maintenance of monarchical Governments, each sanctioned and supported by the national religion, and each furnished with a Cabinet selected by the monarch,—Governments which can make war without any previous consultation of the peoples through their elected representatives; (2) the constant maintenance of conscript armies, through which the entire able-bodied male population is trained in youth for service in the army or navy, and remains subject to the instant call of the Government till late in life, the officering of these permanent armies involving the creation of a large military class likely to become powerful in political, industrial, and social administration; (3) the creation of a strong, permanent bureaucracy within each nation for the management of both foreign and domestic affairs, much of whose work is kept secret from the public at large; and finally (4) the habitual use of military and naval forces to acquire new territories, contiguous or detached, without regard to the wishes of the people annexed or controlled. This last cause of the war is the most potent of the four, since it is strong in itself, and is apt to include one or more of the other three. It is the gratification of the lust for world-empire.

Of all the nations taking part in the present war, Great Britain is the only one which does not maintain a conscript army; but, on the other hand, Great Britain is the earliest modern claimant of world-empire by force, with the single exception of Spain, which long since abandoned that quest. Every one of these nations except little Servia has yielded to the lust for empire. Every one has permitted its monarch or its Cabinet to carry on secret negotiations liable at any time to commit the nation to war, or to fail in maintaining the peace of Europe or of the Near East. In the crowded diplomatic events of last July, no phenomenon is more striking than the exhibition of the power which the British people confide to the hands of their Foreign Secretary. In the interests of public liberty and public welfare no official should possess such powers as Sir Edward Grey used admirably—though in vain—last July. In all three of the empires engaged in the war there has long existed a large military caste which exerts a strong influence on the Government and its policies, and on the daily life of the people.

Germany has been the leader in imperialism.

These being the real causes of the terrific convulsion now going on in Europe, it cannot be questioned that the nation in which these complex causes have taken strongest and most complete effect during the last fifty years is Germany. Her form of government has been imperialistic and autocratic in the highest degree. She has developed with great intelligence and assiduity the most formidable conscript army in the world, and the most influential and insolent military caste. Three times since 1864 she has waged war in Europe, and each time she has added to her territory without regard to the wishes of the annexed population. For twenty-five years she has exhibited a keen desire to obtain colonial possessions; and since 1896 she has been aggressive in this field. In her schools and universities the children and youth have been taught for generations that Germany is surrounded by hostile peoples, that her expansion in Europe and in other continents is resisted by jealous Powers which started earlier in the race for foreign possessions, and that the salvation of Germany has depended from the first, and will depend till the last, on the efficiency of her army and navy and the warlike spirit of her people. This instruction, given year after year by teachers, publicists, and rulers, was first generally accepted in Prussia, but now seems to be accepted by the entire empire as unified in 1871.

The German ethics is the ethics of valor and the State.

The attention of the civilized world was first called to this state of the German mind and will by the triumphant policies of Bismarck; but during the reign of the present Emperor the external aggressiveness of Germany and her passion for world-empire have grown to much more formidable proportions. Although the German Emperor has sometimes played the part of the peacemaker, he has habitually acted the war-lord in both speech and bearing, and has supported the military caste whenever it has been assailed. He is by inheritance, conviction, and practise a divine-right sovereign whose throne rests on an “invincible” army, an army conterminous with the nation. In the present tremendous struggle he carries his subjects with him in a rushing torrent of self-sacrificing patriotism. Mass-fanaticism and infectious enthusiasm seem to have deprived the leading class in Germany, for the moment, of all power to see, reason, and judge correctly—no new phenomenon in the world, but instructive in this case because it points to the grave defect in German education—the lack of liberty and, therefore, of practise in self-control.

No peace is possible unless idea of world-domination is given up.

The twentieth-century educated German is, however, by no means given over completely to material and physical aggrandizement and the worship of might. He cherishes a partly new conception of the State as a collective entity whose function is to develop and multiply, not the free, healthy, and happy individual man and woman, but higher and more effective types of humanity, made superior by a strenuous discipline which takes much account of the strong and ambitious, and little of the weak or meek. He rejects the ethics of the Beatitudes as unsound, but accepts the religion of Valor, which exalts strength, courage, endurance, and the ready sacrifice by the individual of liberty, happiness, and life itself for Germany’s honor and greatness. A nation of sixty millions holding these philosophical and religious views, and proposing to act on them in winning by force the empire of the world, threatens civilization with more formidable irruptions of a destroying host than any that history has recorded. The rush of the German army into Belgium, France, and Russia and its consequences to those lands have taught the rest of Europe to dread German domination, and—it is to be hoped—to make it impossible.

The hopes for federation instead of domination.

The real cause of the present convulsion is, then, the state of mind or temper of Germany, including her conception of national greatness, her theory of the State, and her intelligent and skilful use of all the forces of nineteenth-century applied science for the destructive purposes of war. It is, therefore, apparent that Europe can escape from the domination of Germany only by defeating her in her present undertakings; and that this defeat can be brought about only by using against her the same effective agencies of destruction and the same martial spirit on which Germany itself relies. Horrible as are the murderous and devastating effects of this war, there can be no lasting peace until Europe as a whole is ready to make some serious and far-reaching decisions in regard to governmental structures and powers. In all probability the sufferings and losses of this widespread war must go farther and cut deeper before Europe can be brought to the decisions which alone can give securities for lasting peace against Germany on the one hand and Russia on the other, or to either of these nations, or can give security for the future to any of the smaller nations of Continental Europe. There can, indeed, be no security for future peace in Europe until every European nation recognizes the fact that there is to be no such thing in the world as one dominating nation—no such thing as world-empire for any single nation—Great Britain, Germany, Russia, Japan, or China. There can be no sense of security against sudden invasion in Europe so long as all the able-bodied men are trained to be soldiers, and the best possible armies are kept constantly ready for instant use. There can be no secure peace in Europe until a federation of the European States is established, capable of making public contracts intended to be kept, and backed by an overwhelming international force subject to the orders of an international tribunal. The present convulsion demonstrates the impotence toward permanent peace of secret negotiations, of unpublished agreements, of treaties and covenants that can be broken on grounds of military necessity, of international law if without sanctions, of pious wishes, of economic and biological predictions, and of public opinion unless expressed through a firm international agreement, behind which stands an international force. When that international force has been firmly established it will be time to consider what proportionate reductions in national armaments can be prudently recommended. Until that glorious day dawns, no patriot and no lover of his kind can expect lasting peace in Europe or wisely advocate any reduction of armaments.

A federalized Europe is possible, even if the road is long.

The hate-breeding and worse than brutal cruelties and devastations of the war with their inevitable moral and physical degradations ought to shock mankind into attempting a great step forward. Europe and America should undertake to exterminate the real causes of the catastrophe. In studying that problem the coming European conference can profit by the experience of the three prosperous and valid countries in which public liberty and the principle of federation have been most successfully developed—Switzerland, Great Britain, and the United States. Switzerland is a democratic federation which unites in a firm federal bond three different racial stocks speaking three unlike languages, and divided locally and irregularly between the Catholic Church and the Protestant. The so-called British Empire tends strongly to become a federation; and the methods of government both in Great Britain itself and in its affiliated commonwealths are becoming more and more democratic in substance. The war has brought this fact out in high relief. As to the United States, it is a strong federation of forty-eight heterogeneous States which has been proving for a hundred years that freedom and democracy are safer and happier for mankind than subjection to any sort of autocracy, and afford far the best training for national character and national efficiency. Republican France has not yet had time to give this demonstration, being encumbered with many survivals of the Bourbon and Napoleonic régimes, and being forced to maintain a conscript army.

It is an encouraging fact that every one of the political or governmental changes needed is already illustrated in the practise of one or more of the civilized nations. To exaggerate the necessary changes is to postpone or prevent a satisfactory outcome from the present calculated destructions and wrongs and the accompanying moral and religious chaos. Ardent proposals to remake the map of Europe, reconstruct European society, substitute republics for empires, and abolish armaments are in fact obstructing the road toward peace and good-will among men. That road is hard at best.

The immediate duty of the United States is presumably to prepare, on the basis of its present army and navy, to furnish an effective quota of the international force, servant of an international tribunal, which will make the ultimate issue of this most abominable of wars, not a truce, but a durable peace.

Charles W. Eliot, “The Road Toward Peace,” chap. XI.

PART II
A LEAGUE OF PEACE