"Certain people like the arrangements under which they live. They prefer to die rather than to let other people come in and change things. Even if their nation decides on a policy that is suicidal, they would rather die with her than live without her. That is nationality. When the call came, the citizens of the nations answered with what was deep in their subconsciousness. All resolutions to act as 'workers,' as members of an 'International,' fell away. If pacifists of the ruling class, like Miss Hobhouse and Bertrand Russell, would analyze what is really in their mind, they would find that what they dislike is the spectacle of democracy enthusiastically and unanimously agreeing to do something. They distrust democracy on the march. It is their artistocratic sense that disapproves. Just now, it is the Kaiser whom the democracies are marching out to find, and the people are not behaving as the pacifists would like to have them."
This idea of nationalism, instead of being an early and now obsolete idea, is a recent and a noble idea. What the common life of the home is to the father and mother and children, through poverty and childbirth and fame, that is the life of a nation to its citizens. In the blood of sacrifice it is welded together. Mixed races cannot dilute it, a doctored border cannot suppress it, a stern climate cannot quench it, an oppressive government cannot enslave it. Only one thing can destroy it and that is when it annuls its past and weakens at the heart. When it ceases to respond to the great ideas that once aroused it, then it is time for those who love it to look to the influences at work that have made it forgetful. The denial of that common experience, the refusal to inherit the great tradition, the unwillingness to continue the noble and costly policy—these mark the decline of a nation. These are the signs of peril we see in the unwieldy life of our immense democracy to-day. The call that came to us from France was the same voice that we once knew as the voice of our most precious friend. By our failure to respond we show that we have allowed something alien to enter our inmost life. In our equal failure to safeguard our own helpless non-combatants, we reveal that the old compulsions no longer move us. By the cry that went up from half our nation—not of outrage at stricken France, not of anger for slaughtered children of our own race—but that strange mystical cry, "He kept us out of war," we betray that we have lost our hardihood. We have been overwhelmed by numbers. We have suffered such a heaping up of new elements that we have no time to teach our tradition, no will to continue our race experience.
I was talking of this recently with a profound student of race psychology, Havelock Ellis. He said that the determining factor is the strength of the civilization receiving the fresh contributions. Is that civilization potent enough to shape the new contributions? The French have always had their boundaries beaten in upon by other races, but so distinctive, so salient, is their civilization that it absorbs the invasion. He said that the question to decide is whether the cells are sufficiently organized and determinate to receive alien matter.
Surely no student of our social conditions can say that our tendencies are clear, our collective will formed, our national mind unified. We keep adding chemical elements without coming to a solution. England accepted a few invasions and conquests and then had to stiffen up and work the material into a mold. France was overrun every half century, but finally she drew the sacred circle around her borders, and proceeded to the work of coalescing her parts. Our present stream of tendency, and our present grip on our own historic tradition, are not strong enough to admit of immense new European contributions. We are losing the sense of what we mean as a people.
In dealing with any pet assumption of modern thought, one must guard against misunderstanding. The opponent calls one reactionary and then one's day in court is over. Or the opponent pushes a plain statement over into an academic discussion, and the whole matter at issue is befogged. I am not attacking the desirability of a true internationalism. I am saying that our conception of it is all wrong, and that our method of attaining it is futile. The greater day of peace between nations will not come by weakening the ties of nationality. It will come through a deepening of the sense of citizenship in each nation. But much of our recent thinking has tended to weaken the claims of nationality. It is against this that we must set ourselves. We want internationalism, but the internationalism we mean is an understanding and a good will between distinct nations, not an internationalism which is the loss of a rich variety, and the blurring of distinctions. Nations will not disappear. They will heighten their individuality under the process of time. The hope of peace lies in the appreciation of those differences. We are not to reach internationalism by ceasing to become nations, as our present-day theorists advocate. There lies the service of the war. It has taught us that the Frenchman and the German will refuse to merge their ideas about life and duty in a denationalized world league. Each wants his plot of ground, his own patch of sky, his own kind of a world, with those men for neighbors who think as he thinks. The Frenchman does not wish to be speeded up by universal vocational training, and a governmental régime where efficiency and organization are the aims of the corporate life. The German does not wish his world to contain waste and laziness and dilettantism. A hundred years ago the world put up a sign in front of encroaching France: "No trespassing on these premises." To-day the grass of France is red where the marauder crossed the line. I have seen the soul of France at tension for two years, and I know that her agony has deepened her sense of nationality.
It is easy to retort that it is the nationalism of Germany that has spread fire and blood across Europe. But it is easier yet to give the final answer. There are diseases of individuality—the "artistic temperament," egoism, freakishness, criminality—which require chastening. But because certain individuals have to be restrained, we do not crush individual liberty, self-expression and the free play of development. There are diseases of nationalism—the lust for power and territory, the desire to impose the will, the language and the customs, on smaller units. When a nation hands over its foreign policy and its personal morality to the state, which is only the machinery of a nation, and when the machine, operated by a little group of imperialists instead of by the collective will of the nation, turns to organized aggression, there is catastrophe. Prussian history from the vivisection of Poland, through the rape of Schleswig and the crushing of Paris, to the assassination of Belgium, offers us no guarantees of a common aim for human welfare. But it is because nationality has been betrayed, not because it has been expressed. The Uhlan officer, murdering women, is no reason for abolishing Habeas Corpus. The misbehavior of Germany is no excuse for rebuking the liberty of France.
At the touch of the bayonet, on the first shock of reality, internationalism crumbles—the internationalism, I mean, that disbelieves in national quality, and disregards essential differences. Groups of "workers," the "universal" church of co-religionists, dissolve. The nation emerges. Wars have been the terrible method by which nations have created themselves, and by which they have defended their being. Pacifism is not a disease, it is the symptom of the disease of a false internationalism. Pacifism springs from the belief that nations do not matter, that "humanity is the great idea." "Why should nations go to war, since the principle of nationality is not vital?" But, actually, this principle is vital. "An effective internationalism can only be rendered possible by a triumphant nationalism." The present war is a fight by the little nations of Belgium and Serbia, and by the great nation, France, for the preservation of their nationality. We have failed to understand "the causes and objects" of this war, because we have weakened our own sense of nationality. Our tradition has been drowned out by new voices. Ninety years ago, we responded to Greece, and, later, to Garibaldi and Kossuth. To-day, only those understand the fight of the nations who have been reared in our American tradition. Richard Neville Hall went from Dartmouth College and died on an Alsatian Hill, serving France. A friend writes of him: "He was saying things about the France of Washington and Lafayette, how he had been brought up on the tradition of that historic friendship."
I have found something inspiring in the action of these young Americans in France. Perhaps out of them will come the leadership which our country lacks. My own generation moves on to middle life, and, as is the way of elders, reveals moderation of mind and a good-natured acceptance of conditions. Nothing is to be hoped for from us. The great generation of Walt Whitman and Julia Ward Howe is dead, and the next generation of George Haven Putnam and Eliot and O. O. Howard is dying. There is nowhere to turn but to the young. They must strive where we have failed. They must fight where we were neutral. I have seen some hundreds of these youth who love France because they love America. In them our tradition is continued. Through them the American idea can be reaffirmed for all our people. May they remember their dead, their boy-comrades who fell in service at the front. They have shared in the greatness of France. May they come home to us very sure of their possession. We have nothing for them. Complacent in our neutrality, and fat with our profits, we have lost our chance. They bring us moral leadership.
Now, all this will have no appeal to the many nationalities among us. The American tradition (except for a few personalities and ideas) is meaningless to them. I have dealt with their needs in the preceding chapter. I am writing these next chapters for the inheritors of our American tradition, who have grown slack and cosmopolitan, who, though of the blood-strain and cultural consciousness that fought our wars and created our civilization, are now too tired, some of them, to do anything but exploit the other nationalities which have tumbled in on the later waves of immigration. Others of us are simply swamped by the multitude and find our refuge in cosmopolitanism. "They're all alike. They will all be Americans to-morrow." If these tame descendants of America will be true to their own tradition, they will learn to be merciful to their fellow-countrymen with quite other traditions. It is precisely because we "old-timers" have been forgetting our tradition that we have been blind to the rich inherited life of those that come to us. If we recover our own sense of spiritual values, we shall welcome the tradition and the hope which the humblest Jew has brought us.