The great problem of the spiritual education of the lower races will have to be taken up anew. Not only are individual missionaries of broader mental and moral horizons needed, the civilized nations as such must reach a common understanding and establish a union among themselves, the keynote of which shall be reverence for the undeveloped, that is to say divination of what, under right educational influence, they, the undeveloped, may come to mean for humanity. And a union of this kind, consecrated to a noble object, will at the same time be the means of leading the Western world out of the chaotic condition in which it is at present weltering. The object for which nations combine may not be their own peace, their own prosperity. The key to peace between the adult peoples is a common, effectual resolve to win new varieties of spiritual expression from the child and adolescent peoples of the earth. Peace must come incidentally. The common object must be disinterested, spiritual, because there is a duty on the part of the civilized towards the uncivilized to exercise a spiritual function. The task of humanity in general consists in extending the web of spiritual relations so as to cover larger and still larger areas of the finite world. The family is only partly spiritualized. The vocations, the state, are not yet spiritualized. The international society hardly exists. But what I here endeavor to sketch is the human world as it would be in the light and under the influence of the spiritual ideal. And I set down as the saving task of the civilized nations that of extending the spiritual realm so as to cover backward, undeveloped peoples, so as to embody them in the corpus spirituale of mankind.
Some of the Principal Obstacles That Stand in the Way of the Organization of Mankind.
The first obstacle is to be found in the inadequate theories that underlie international law. Seventeenth and eighteenth century thinking is still, strange to say, the theoretical foundation. Grotius and Vattel remain the chief authorities. Grotius’s theory is a system of empirical individualism with Christian individualism grafted upon it, to mitigate its harsher features. The right of conquest is admitted. A nation is allowed to punish another, punishment being taken in the crude sense, while what has been permitted under natural law is subsequently modified by counsels of perfection derived from Christian individualism.
Vattel is the intellectual grandchild of Leibnitz. He derives from Leibnitz through Wolff. Vattel envisages the various states as so many individual entities without intrinsic ties. Peaceful coexistence and unhindered pursuit by each people of its own perfection or welfare with mutual aid to be voluntarily rendered are the ultimate conceptions beyond which this thinker does not venture. And if the root principles are thus infertile, small wonder that the fruit of the tree should be what it is. In any handbook of international law, the preponderant space is allotted to the laws of war, and yet international law has proved impotent to restrain the passion of war, or even to prevent its excesses. International law binds the Samson of war with green withes which the giant snaps in derision. It is plain that we are still in the earliest stages, not only of international practice, but even of international thinking. The problem of the right ethical relations between the nations has hardly been broached.
Another conspicuous obstacle in the way of international progress is to be seen in false hopes. Among the false hopes I class:
A. The hope that increased facilities of intercourse will automatically bring about more friendly relations. To expect this is to forget that closeness accentuates repugnances as well as congenialities, increases antipathy as well as amity. When nations come within short range of each other they resemble antipathetical kinsmen who are compelled to live together. The Czechs and Germans in Bohemia would not hate each other as they do were they not such near neighbors. Spatial rapprochement, for instance, between East and West will not of itself guarantee moral rapprochement—far from it.
B. The hope that science may be relied on to bring the nations together. Science is neutral. Science is subservient to evil as well as good. Science is at present distilling the poisonous gases used on the European battlefields as well as inventing the improved methods of surgery. It has made possible instruments of destruction such as savages might have shrunk from using. Moreover, scientific as well as artistic interests are partial manifestations of a people’s life and the ethical relation is between peoples as totalities or collective entities—just as the ethical relation between man and man is between the whole man and the whole man, and not between some partial aspect of the man and of his fellows. Hence it is easy to explain why the scientists and the scholars of the different belligerent peoples were swept away by the war passion like the rest, and in their utterance have even carried animosity to greater lengths, expressing it in language calculated to wound more deeply and to leave more permanent scars. They felt that they belonged to the people as a whole, and when the occasion came for them to choose between their scientific co-workers across the frontier and their fellow-nationals, they sided with the latter.
C. The hope that reliance can be placed on international trade to bring about ethical relations between nations. But trade, like science, is ethically neutral. In its own interest it is favorable to order and security in colonies and dependencies, and when, sufficiently enlightened, to the impartial administration of justice. The European nations abolished the slave trade in Africa because it decimated the native population, and decreased the supply of labor.[97] On the other hand England in the eighteenth century, even at that time the most liberal country of Europe, did not hesitate to wage war with Spain for the maintenance of the monopoly of the hideous slave-trade, and the Opium War occurred in the “full light” of the nineteenth century. But the most striking example of the ethical neutrality of the commercial mind is to be found in the recent partition of Africa between England, France, the Congo Free State and Germany. The methods which these four nations adopted in the “scramble for Africa” were marked by a perfect disregard of the rights of the native populations of the African continent. Two devices were used—proclamations, and treaties with native chiefs. The Queen of England proclaimed that a certain territory would thenceforth be a British possession, as if proclamation could convey a right to the territory. The German emperor indulged in the same fiction. And there was a veritable race between French and English in the West; between Germans and English in the East, as to which of the two could outdistance or outwit the other in treaty-making. Karl Peters came in disguise with a stock of blank treaties in his pocket. Forty or fifty treaties were concluded by the French annually for several years in the West—as if a treaty with a native chief, who might be bribed or coerced into lending his signature, could be the foundation of moral right to the territory occupied by his tribe. The European nations artfully employed the fictions of sovereignty in order to varnish their acts of plunder with a semblance of legality. Of course these proclamations and treaties were not intended to justify exploitation in the eyes of the natives—the natives were not consulted or regarded—but rather to base thereon the division of the spoils between the exploiters. A proclamation or the conclusion of a treaty with a chief was notice given to rivals not to interfere with the spoils reserved for the nation that had issued the proclamation or secured the treaty. It meant “hands off” to competing exploiters.
If it be asked whether this picture is not too dark? Whether the civilized nations of the twentieth century in their dealings with the helpless natives were merely selfish? Whether their motives are so sinister? Whether they are not animated by better, more moral aims? the answer is that the commercial mind, and it is the commercial mind that chiefly rules the world today, allays its scruples and justifies its aggressions by the fallacy that to extend trade is to spread civilization, and to spread civilization is to contribute to the advancement of the human race. The interests of trade and of civilization are simply identified. To build railroads, to stretch telegraph lines across the Dark Continent, to launch steamboats on lakes that never heard the whistle of a steam engine before, these are assumed to be the evidences of “progress.” Besides are not the natives disciplined in habits of industry, are they not encouraged to cultivate the raw products needed by Europe, and in return to receive the overflow of European markets? The instruments of civilization are thus confounded with civilization itself; the means with the end; while the real object, veiled by sophistry, is nevertheless the material benefit to be secured by the white race. Even the humane treatment of the natives, where it is humane, resembles somewhat too unpleasantly the fattening of the calf prior to its consumption by the owner.
Furthermore, the interests of Trade being supposed to be paramount, it is held that any country the people of which do not sufficiently cultivate the products desired by other peoples, or who close their doors against the industrial surplus of Europe, may be annexed, the land forcibly seized, and the inhabitants subjugated, and moreover that such action is right and proper and in the interests of humanity. So long as this view obtains, there will be no peace on earth. The competition for foreign territories and foreign markets, the scramble between the “civilized” exploiters, will be indefinitely provocative of new wars.