III.—AMERICA AS LEADER.
In the preceding article I indicated that America might undertake at this juncture of international affairs an intervention in the politics of the Old World which is of a kind not heretofore attempted by any nation, an intervention, that is to say, that should not be military, but in the first instance mediatory and moral, having in view if needs be the employment of certain organized social and economic forces which I will detail presently.
The suggestion that America should take any such lead is resisted first on the ground that it is a violation of her traditional policy, and secondly that "economic and social forces" are bound to be ineffective unless backed by military, so that the plea would involve her in a militarist policy. With reference to these two points, I pointed out in the preceding article that America's isolation from a movement for world agreement would infallibly land her in a very pronounced militarist policy, the increase of her armaments, the militarization of her civilization and all that that implies.
There are open to America at this present moment two courses: one which will lead her to militarism and the indefinite increase of armaments—that is the course of isolation from the world's life, from the new efforts that will be made toward world organization; the other to anticipate events and take the initiative in the leadership of world organization, which would have the effect of rendering western civilization, including herself, less military, less dependent upon arms, and put the development of that civilization on a civilist rather than a militarist basis.
I believe that it is the failure to realize that this intervention can be non-military in character which explains the reluctance of very many Americans to depart from their traditional policy of non-intervention. With reference to that point it is surely germane to remember that the America of 1914 is not the America of 1776; circumstances which made Washington's advice sound and statesmanlike have been transformed. The situation today is not that of a tiny power not yet solidified, remote from the main currents of the world's life, out-matched in resources by any one of the greater powers of Europe. America is no longer so remote as to have little practical concern with Europe. Its contacts with Europe are instantaneous, daily, intimate, innumerable—so much so indeed that our own civilization will be intimately affected and modified by certain changes which threaten in the older world.
I will put the case thus: Suppose that there are certain developments in Europe which would profoundly threaten our own civilization and our own security, and suppose further that we could without great cost to ourselves so guide or direct those changes and developments as to render them no longer a menace to this country. If such a case could be established, would not adherence to a formula established under eighteenth century conditions have the same relation to sound politics that the incantations and taboos of superstitious barbarians have to sound religion? And I think such a case can be established.
I wonder whether it has occurred to many Americans to ask why all the belligerents in this present war are showing such remarkable deference to American public opinion. Some Americans may, of course, believe that it is the sheer personal fascination of individual Americans or simple tenderness of moral feeling that makes Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Austria take definitely so much trouble at a time when they have sufficient already, to demonstrate that they have taken the right course, that they are obeying all the laws of war, that they are not responsible for the war in any way, and so forth. Is it simply that our condemnation would hurt their feelings? This hardly agrees with certain other ideas which we hold as to the belligerents.
There is something beyond this order of motive at the bottom of the immense respect which all the combatants alike are paying to American opinion. It happened to the writer recently to meet a considerable number of Belgian refugees from Brussels, all of them full of stories (which I must admit were second or third or three-hundredth hand) of German barbarity and ferocity. Yet all were obliged to admit that German behavior in Brussels had on the whole been very good. But that, they explained, was "merely because the American Consul put his foot down." Yet one is not aware that President Wilson had authorized the American Consul so much as to hint at the possible military intervention of America in this war. Nevertheless there can be no doubt that these "Huns," so little susceptible in our view for the most part to moral considerations, were greatly influenced by the opinion of America; and we know also that the other belligerents have shown the same respect for the attitude of the United States.
I think we have here what so frequently happens in the development of the attitude of men toward large general questions: the intuitive recognition of a truth which those who recognize it are quite unable to put into words. It is a self-protective instinct, a movement that is made without its being necessary to think it out. (In the way that the untaught person is able instantly to detect the false note in a tune without knowing that such things as notes or crotchets and quavers exist.)
It is quite true that the Germans feared the bad opinion of the world because the bad opinion of the world may be translated into an element of resistance to the very ends which it is the object of the war to achieve for Germany.
Those ends include the extension of German influence, material and moral, of German commerce and culture. But a world very hostile to Germany might quite conceivably check both. We say, rightly enough, probably, that pride of place and power had its part—many declare the prominent part—in the motives that led Germany into this war. But it is quite conceivable that a universal revulsion of feeling against a power like Germany might neutralize the influence she would gain in the world by a mere extension of her territorial conquests.
Russia, for instance, has nearly five times the population and very many times the area of France; but one may doubt whether even a Russian would assert that Russian influence is five or ten times greater than that of France; still less that the world yielded him in any sense a proportionately greater deference than it yields the Frenchman. The extent to which the greatest power can impose itself by bayonets is very limited in area and depth. All the might of the Prussian Army cannot compel the children of Poland or of Lorraine to say their prayers in German; it cannot compel the housewives of Switzerland or Paraguay or of any other little State that has not a battleship to its name to buy German saucepans if so be they do not desire to. There are so many other things necessary to render political or military force effective, and there are so many that can offset it altogether.
We see these forces at work around us every day accomplishing miracles, doing things which a thousand years of fighting was never able to do—and then say serenely that they are mere "theories." Why do Catholic powers no longer execute heretics? They have a perfect right—even in international law—to do so. What is it that protects the heretic in Catholic countries? The police? But the main business of the police and the army used to be to hunt him down. What is controlling the police and the army?
By some sort of process there has been an increasing intuitive recognition of a certain code which we realize to be necessary for a decent society. It has come to be a sanction much stronger than the sanction of law, much more effective than the sanction of military force. During the German advance on Paris in August last I happened to be present at a French family conference. Stories of the incredible cruelties and ferocity of the Germans were circulating in the Northern Department, where I happened to be staying.
Every one was in a condition of panic, and two Frenchmen, fathers of families, were seeing red at the story of all these barbarities. But they had to decide—and the thing was discussed at a little family conference—where they should send their wives and children. And one of these Frenchmen, the one who had been most ferocious in his condemnation of the German barbarian, said quite naïvely and with no sense of irony or paradox: "Of course, if we could find an absolutely open town which would not be defended at all the women folk and children would be all right." His instinct, of course, was perfectly just. The German "savage" had had three quarters of a million people in his absolute power in Brussels, and so far as we know, not a child or a woman has been injured.
Indeed, in normal times our security against foreigners is not based upon physical force at all. I suppose during the last century some hundreds of thousands of British and American tourists have traveled through the historic cities of Germany, their children have gone to the German educational institutions, their invalids have been attended by German doctors and cut up by German surgeons in German sanatoria and health resorts, and I am quite sure that it never occurred to any one of these hundreds of thousands that their little children when in the educational institutions of these "Huns" were in any way in danger. It was not the guns of the American Navy or the British Navy that were protecting them; the physical force of America or of Great Britain could not certainly be the factor operative in, say, Switzerland or Austria, yet every Summer tens of thousands of them trust their lives and those of their women and children in the remote mountains of Switzerland on no better security than the expectation that a foreign community over whom we have no possibility of exercising force will observe a convention which has no sanction other than the recognition that it is to their advantage to observe it.
And we thus have the spectacle of millions of Anglo-Saxons absolutely convinced that the sanctity of their homes and the safety of their property are secure from the ravages of the foreigner only because they possess a naval and military force that overawes him, yet serenely leaving the protection of that military force, and placing life and property alike within the absolute power of that very foreigner against whose predatory tendencies we spend millions in protecting ourselves.
No use of military power, however complete and overwhelming, would pretend to afford a protection anything like as complete as that afforded by these moral forces. Sixty years ago Britain had as against Greece a preponderance of power that made her the absolute dictator of the latter's policy, yet all the British battleships and all the threats of "consequences" could not prevent British travelers being murdered by Greek brigands, though in Switzerland only moral forces—the recognition by an astute people of the advantage of treating foreigners well—had already made the lives and property of Britons as safe in that country as in their own.
In the same way, no scheme of arming Protestants as against Catholics, or Catholics as against Protestants (the method which gave us the wars of religion and massacre of St. Bartholomew) could assure that general security of spiritual and intellectual possessions which we now in large measure enjoy. So indeed with the more material things, France, Great Britain, and some of the older nations have sunk thousands of millions in foreign investments, the real security of which is not in any physical force which their Government could possibly exercise, but the free recognition of foreigners that it is to their advantage to adhere to financial obligations. Englishmen do not even pretend that the security of their investments in a country like the United States or the Argentine is dependent upon the coercion which the British Government is able to exercise over these communities.
The reader will not, I think, misunderstand me. I am not pleading that human nature has undergone or will undergo any radical transformation. Rather am I asserting that it will not undergo any; that the intention of the man of the tenth century in Europe was as good as that of the man of the twentieth, that the man of the tenth century was as capable of self-sacrifice—was, it may be, less self-seeking. But what I am trying to hint is that the shrinking of the world by our developed intercommunication has made us all more interdependent.
The German Government moves its troops against Belgium; a moratorium is immediately proclaimed in Rio de Janeiro, a dozen American Stock Exchanges are promptly closed and some hundreds of thousands of our people are affected in their daily lives. This worldwide effect is not a matter of some years or a generation or two. It is a matter of an hour; we are intimately concerned with the actions of men on the other side of the world that we have never seen and never shall see; and they are intimately concerned with us. We know without having thought it out that we are bound together by a compact; the very fact that we are dependent upon one another creates as a matter of fact a partnership. We are expecting the other man to perform his part; he has been doing so uninterruptedly for years, and we send him our goods or we take his bill of exchange, or our families are afloat in his ships, expecting that he will pay for his goods, honor the bill of exchange, navigate safely his ship—he has undertaken to do these things in the world-wide partnership of our common labor and then he fails. He does not do these things, and we have a very lively sense of the immorality of the doctrine which permits him to escape doing them.
And so there are certain things that are not done, certain lengths to which even in war time we cannot go. What will stop the war is not so much the fighting, any more than Protestant massacres prevented Catholic massacres. Men do not fear the enemy soldiers; they do fear the turning of certain social and moral forces against them. The German Government does not hesitate for a moment to send ten thousand of its own people to certain death under enemy guns even though the military advantage of so doing may be relatively trifling. But it dare not order the massacre of ten thousand foreign residents in Berlin. There is some force which makes it sometimes more scrupulous of the lives of its enemy than of the lives of its own people.
Yet why should it care? Because of the physical force of the armies ranged against it? But it has to meet that force in any case. It fears that the world will be stirred. In other words, it knows that the world at large has a very lively realization that in its own interest certain things must not be done, that the world would not live together as we now know it, if it permitted those things to be done. It would not so permit them.
At the bottom of this moral hesitation is an unconscious realization of the extent of each nation's dependence upon the world partnership. It is not a fear of physical chastisement; any nation will go to war against desperate odds if a foreign nation talks of chastising it. It is not that consideration which operates, as a thousand examples in history prove to us. There are forces outside military power more visible and ponderable than these.
There exists, of course, already a world State which has no formal recognition in our paper constitutions at all, and no sanction in physical force. If you are able to send a letter to the most obscure village of China, a telegram to any part of the planet, to travel over most of the world in safety, to carry on trade therewith, it is because for a generation the Post Office Departments of the world have been at work arranging traffic and communication details, methods of keeping their accounts; because the ship owner has been devising international signal codes; the banker arranging conditions of international credit; because, in fact, not merely a dozen but some hundreds of international agreements, most of them made not between Governments at all, but between groups and parties directly concerned, have been devised.
There is no overlord enforcing them, yet much of our daily life depends upon their normal working. The bankers or the shipowners or the makers of electric machinery have met in Paris or Brussels and decided that such shall be the accepted code, such the universal measurement for the lamp or instrument, such the conditions for the bill of exchange and from the moment that there is an agreement you do not need any sanction. If the instrument does not conform to the measurement it is unsalable and that is sanction enough.
ANTONIO SALANDRA—Minister of the Interior
and President of the Italian Ministry—(Photo from Bain)
JAMES W. GERARD—
American Ambassador to the German Empire
We have seen in the preceding article that the dependence of the nations goes back a good deal further than we are apt to think; that long before the period of fully developed intercommunication, all nations owed their civilization to foreigners. It was to their traffic with Gaul and the visits of the Phoenician traders that the early inhabitants of the British Isles learned their first steps in arts and crafts and the development of a civilized society, and even in what we know as the Dark Ages we find Charlemagne borrowing scholars from York to assist him in civilizing the Continent.
The civilization which our forefathers brought with them to America was the result of centuries of exchange in ideas between Britain and the Continent, and though in the course of time it had become something characteristically Anglo-Saxon, its origins were Greek and Arabic and Roman and Jewish. But the interdependence of nations today is of an infinitely more vital and insistent kind, and despite superficial setbacks becomes more vital every day. As late as the first quarter of the nineteenth century, for instance, Britain was still practically self-sufficing; her very large foreign trade was a trade in luxuries. She could still produce her own food, her population could still live on her own soil.
But if today by some sort of magic Britain could kill off all foreigners the means of livelihood for quite an appreciable portion of her population would have disappeared. Millions would be threatened by actual starvation. For Britain's overseas trade, on which so large a proportion of the population actually lives, is mainly with the outside world and not with her own empire. We have seen what isolation merely from two countries has meant for Great Britain. Britain is still maintaining her contacts with the world as a whole, but the cessation of relationship with two countries has precipitated the gravest financial crisis known in all her history, has kept her Stock Exchanges closed for months, has sent her Consols to a lower point than any known since the worst period of the Napoleonic wars, and has compelled the Government ruthlessly to pledge its credit for the support of banking institutions and all the various trades that have been most seriously hit.
Nor is Germany's isolation altogether complete. She manages through neutral countries and otherwise to maintain a considerable current of relationship with the outside world, but how deeply and disastrously the partial severance of contact has affected Germany we shall not at present, probably at no time, in full measure know.
All this gives a mere hint of what the organized isolation by the entire world would mean to any one nation. Imagine the position of a civilized country whose ports no ship from another country would enter, whose bills no banker would discount, a country unable to receive a telegram or a letter from the outside world or send one thereto, whose citizens could neither travel in other countries or maintain communications therewith. It would have an effect in the modern world somewhat equivalent to that of the dreadful edicts of excommunication and interdict which the papal power was able to issue in the mediaeval world.
I am aware, of course, that such a measure would fall very hardly upon certain individuals in the countries inflicting this punishment, but it is quite within the power of the Governments of those countries to do what the British Government has done in the case of persons like acceptors of German bills who found themselves threatened with bankruptcy and who threatened in consequence to create great disturbance around them because of the impossibility of securing payment from the German indorsers. The British Government came to the rescue of those acceptors, used the whole national credit to sustain them. It is expensive, if you will, but infinitely less expensive than a war, and, finally, most of the cost of it will probably be recovered.
Now if that were done, how could a country so dealt with retaliate? She could not attack all the world at once. Upon those neighbors more immediately interested could be thrown the burden of taking such defensive military measures as the circumstances might dictate. You might have a group of powers probably taking such defensive measures and all the powers of Christendom co-operating economically by this suggested non-intercourse. It is possible even that the powers as a whole might contribute to a general fund indemnifying individuals in those States particularly hit by the fact of non-intercourse. I am thinking, for instance, of shipping interests in a port like Amsterdam if the decree of non-intercourse were proclaimed against a power like Germany.
We have little conception of the terror which such a policy might constitute to a nation. It has never been tried, of course, because even in war complete non-intercourse is not achieved. At the present time Germany is buying and selling and trading with the outside world, cables from Berlin are being sent almost as freely to New York as cables from London and German merchants are making contracts, maintaining connections of very considerable complexity. But if this machinery of non-intercourse were organized as it might be, there would be virtually no neutrals, and its effect in our world today would be positively terrifying.
It is true that the American administration did try something resembling a policy of non-intercourse in dealing with Mexico. But, the thing was a fiction. While the Department of State talked of non-intercourse the Department of the Treasury was busy clearing ships for Mexico, facilitating the dispatch of mails, &c. And, of course, Mexico's communication with Europe remained unimpaired; at the exact moment when the President of the United States was threatening Huerta with all sorts of dire penalties Huerta's Government was arranging in London for the issue of large loans and the advertisements of these Mexican loans were appearing in The London Times. So that the one thing that might have moved Huerta's Government the United States Government was unable to enforce. In order to enforce it, it needed the co-operation of other countries.
I have spoken of the economic world State—of all those complex international arrangements concerning Post Offices, shipping, banking, codes, sanctions of law, criminal research, and the rest, on which so much of our civilized life depends. This world State is unorganized, incoherent. It has neither a centre nor a capital, nor a meeting place. The shipowners gather in Paris, the world's bankers in Madrid or Berne, and what is in effect some vital piece of world regulation is devised in the smoking room of some Brussels hotel. The world State has not so much as an office or an address, The United States should give it one. Out of its vast resources it should endow civilization with a Central Bureau of Organization—a Clearing House of its international activities as it were, with the funds needed for its staff and upkeep.
If undertaken with largeness of spirit, it would become the capital of the world. And the Old World looks to America to do this service, because it is the one which it cannot do for itself. Its old historic jealousies and squabbles, from which America is so happily detached, prevent any one power taking up and putting through this work of organization, but America could do it, and do it so effectively that from it might well flow this organization of that common action of all the nations against any recalcitrant member of which I have spoken as a means of enforcing non-militarily a common decision.
It is this world State which it should be the business of America during the next decade or two to co-ordinate, to organize. Its organization will not come into being as the result of a week-end talk between Ambassadors. There will be difficulties, material as well as moral, jealousies to overcome, suspicions to surmount. But this war places America in a more favorable position than any one European power. The older powers would be less suspicious of her than of any one among their number. America has infinitely greater material resources, she has a greater gift for improvised organization, she is less hidebound by old traditions, more disposed to make an attempt along new lines.
That is the most terrifying thing about the proposal which I make—it has never been tried. But the very difficulties constitute for America also an immense opportunity. We have had nations give their lives and the blood of their children for a position of supremacy and superiority. But we are in a position of superiority and supremacy which for the most part would be welcomed by the world as a whole and which would not demand of America the blood of one of her children. It would demand some enthusiasm, some moral courage, some sustained effort, faith, patience, and persistence. It would establish new standards in, and let us hope a new kind of, international rivalry.
One word as to a starting point and a possible line of progress. The first move toward the ending of this present war may come from America. The President of the United States will probably act as mediator. The terms of peace will probably be settled in Washington. Part of the terms of peace to be exacted by the Allies will probably be, as I have already hinted, some sort of assurance against future danger from German militarist aggression.
The German, rightly or wrongly, does not believe that he has been the aggressor—it is not a question at all of whether he is right or wrong; it is a question of what he believes. And he believes quite honestly and sincerely that he is merely defending himself. So what he will be mainly concerned about in the future is his security from the victorious Allies.
Around this point much of the discussion at the conclusion of this present war will range. If it is to be a real peace and not a truce an attempt will have to be made to give to each party security from the other, and the question will then arise whether America will come into that combination or not. I have already indicated that I think she should not come in, certainly I do not think she will come in, with the offer of military aid. But if she stays out of it altogether she will have withdrawn from this world congress that must sit at the end of the war a mediating influence which may go far to render it nugatory.
And when, after it may be somewhat weary preliminaries, an international council of conciliation is established to frame the general basis of the new alliance between the civilized powers for mutual protection along the lines indicated, America, if she is to play her part in securing the peace of the world, must be ready to throw at least her moral and economic weight into the common stock, the common moral and economic forces which will act against the common enemy, whoever he may happen to be.
That does not involve taking sides, as I showed in my last article. The policeman does not decide which of two quarrelers is right; he merely decides that the stronger shall not use his power against the weaker. He goes to the aid of the weaker, and then later the community deals with the one who is the real aggressor. One may admit, if you will, that at present there is no international law, and that it may not be possible to create one. But we can at least exact that there shall be an inquiry, a stay; and more often than not that alone would suffice to solve the difficulty without the application of definite law.
It is just up to that point that the United States should at this stage be ready to commit herself in the general council of conciliation, namely, to say this: "We shall throw our weight against any power that refuses to give civilization an opportunity at least of examining and finding out what the facts of the dispute are. After due examination we may reserve the right to withdraw from any further interference between such power and its antagonist. But, at least, we pledge ourselves to secure that by throwing the weight of such non-military influence as we may have on to the side of the weaker." That is the point at which a new society of nations would begin, as it is the point at which a society of individuals has begun. And it is for the purpose of giving effect to her undertaking in that one regard that America should become the centre of a definite organization of that world State which has already cut athwart all frontiers and traversed all seas.
It is not easy without apparent hyperbole to write of the service which America would thus render to mankind. She would have discovered a new sanction for human justice, would have made human society a reality. She would have done something immeasurably greater, immeasurably more beneficent than any of the conquests recorded in the long story of man's mostly futile struggles. The democracy of America would have done something which the despots and the conquerors of all time, from Alexander and Caesar to Napoleon and the Kaiser, have found to be impossible. Dangerous as I believe national vanity to be, America would, I think, find in the pride of this achievement—this American leadership of the human race—a glory that would not be vain, a world victory which the world would welcome.