In a purely military state unselfish feelings are necessarily repressed, whilst the bold, keen, hard and cruel side of human nature is liberally developed. To hate an enemy and avenge an injury are manly virtues. The predatory instincts are useful and approved. Treachery is not discredited, and the man clever enough to take advantage of an enemy and successfully intrigue against him may be ranked among the gods! The plunderer who falters not in keen pursuit of prey and in the hour of victory shows relentless cruelty is deemed heroic. No thought of happiness or misery to others gives him pause; military glory is his absorbing aim, and in the intervals of peace his callous nature manifests in ruling with tyrannic power slavish subordinates, who bend and cringe before him.
Now let us glance at two of these militant characteristics, viz. rapacity and personal pride, with a view to observe how their survival into our industrial epoch has vitiated the national life.
The purely militant stage of British development has passed, and the outward form of our collective life is industrial, not military. A sanguinary path of glory has no intrinsic fascination for our people, and there is no national desire to conquer and rule over races established on other parts of the earth’s surface, however superior to ours may be their climate and quarters. Nevertheless, within the last half century we have fought battles and shed blood copiously in China, Persia, Afghanistan, Abyssinia, Egypt, South Africa and elsewhere. Seldom, however, has the nation itself clamoured for war. In the year 1854 a relapse into militant mood occurred, and, in spite of unwillingness on the part of individual rulers, the Government yielded to a sinister wave of barbaric feeling in the nation—a martial frenzy that impelled to the Crimean War. Since that period wars have originated from other causes than the will of the nation. Our people, immersed in a painful struggle for livelihood at home, are indifferent to the rights and wrongs of the many squabbles into which we flounder abroad. General malevolence has no part in this matter; our real collective attitude towards foreigners is one of friendliness, combined with an impulse to the peaceful exchange of commodities, kind words and gentle arts—the whole provocative of love, not hatred.
The fundamental causes of war, then, have been: first, the commercial interests of a capitalist class, or, if expressed in terms of feeling, the desire in that class for increased wealth—a desire partly the product of inherited rapacity, a sentiment descended to us from our militant epoch; second, national pride—a pride which has kindled animosities, embroiled us in disputes and dragged us into wars, the pettiness of whose small beginnings is only matched by the pettiness of British conduct throughout their whole extent. But both this rapacity and this national pride belong almost exclusively to our ruling classes. Their existence is explained by the action of outward conditions on special sections of the community. The British passed suddenly out of a period of constant fighting and feud into a period of frantic industrial activity. Feudal chiefs and their descendants became grasping landlords. There also sprang up a class of sharp-witted, keen-sighted men, whose native rapacity strengthened in the genial hot-bed of our brilliant commercial success. A tremendous start in the international race after wealth was secured to Great Britain by her possession of iron, coal, etc. She absorbed riches from every quarter of the globe, and mercantile triumph swelled the pride already deeply implanted in our industrial organizers, our politicians and plenipotentiaries. The great mass of the people were differently affected by industrial conditions. Workers of every description, packed together in towns and factories, rapidly developed the qualities of intimate social life, and out-grew, in the main, the savage instincts of militancy. Our commercial wars and Imperialistic policy are fruits—not of the nation’s brutality, its greed, or its pride, but of its simple ignorance and its blind trust in individuals peculiarly unfitted by inheritance and personal bias to guide it aright in relations with other, and especially with weaker, nations. All the wars of recent times—a record of cruel bloodshed causing needless sorrow and suffering to the innocent—have been instigated by the ruling classes under the dominion of rapacity and pride. When these ruling classes are dispossessed of supreme power, and civilized democracies assume public responsibility with political supremacy, the day of disarming of nations will dawn. The world’s workers who, apart from their rulers, have no tendency to undue accumulation or national pride, but whose bias, on the contrary, is towards sympathetic co-operation in industry, will strenuously seek the joys and blessings of universal peace.
But although the war-spirit of the ancient Briton dies out and general brutality declines, individual brutality, practised privately, is common enough. Class tyranny, sex tyranny, and much of domestic tyranny are rampant; and the co-relative feelings, viz. abject fear giving rise to hatred, anger, malice, cunning and despicable meanness of soul, are all strongly in evidence.
The industrial system that succeeded our military system is of no genuinely social type. It is distinctly contentious, and when we consider how it has pressed for about a century upon a plastic race inwardly prone to every vice engendered by militancy, the matter for surprise perhaps is that we are as good as we are.
In classifying emotional states there is a sentiment which, if not begotten, has at least been bred, nourished and widely diffused during our industrial epoch—I mean the sentiment, love of property. On no subject are opposite opinions more strongly and disputatiously held than on the question of the nature and value of this sentiment. It is claimed by some as not only the chief support of present-day society, but the prime evolutional factor of our entire civilization. A savage only cares to secure the things he is in immediate need of. He lacks imagination to picture what he may want to-morrow, also intelligence to provide for future contingencies and sympathetic desire to provide for the wants of others.
No sooner, however, does an established government give safe protection to individual property than prudence and forethought appear. The man who acquires property soon surrounds himself with comforts, and inspires in others the desire to follow his example. Social wealth accumulates, and energies are set free for further development. Some social units become complex, intellectual tastes and love of travel arise, and works of art—the treasure-trove of earlier civilizations—are impounded to lay the foundation of artistic life in the later civilization. Aesthetic culture now grows rapidly. Painting, poetry, music abound, and men may be lifted above the meaner cares of existence to an inward freedom, where sympathy expands through the exercise of elevated thought and feeling. Is not love of property, then, a sentiment to honour and conserve? Its genesis and history certainly command respect; but the already quoted case of the Podhalians proves that by no means is it an essential in human evolution. To that primitive people, as Dr. Le Bon has shown, riches have no charms; they are poor, living principally upon oats made into cakes and goat’s milk. They enjoy perfect health and live long. They are quick in apprehension, fond of dancing, singing, music and poetry. There is clearly no development here of the property-sense, yet the Podhalians have a very considerable development of that group of emotions we term aesthetic and regard as an evidence of high refinement and culture. We are not therefore logically entitled to claim that were British love of property and British cupidity greatly diminished, art as a consequence must needs decay and the race revert into barbarism.
Herbert Spencer tells us “that in some established societies there has been a constant exercise of the feeling which is satisfied by a provision for the future, and a growth of this feeling so great that it now prompts accumulation to an extent beyond what is needful.” (1st vol. of Essays, 2nd series, p. 132.)
That point has been overpassed by the British. What we have now to struggle against are varied evils arising from a glut of national wealth (but I do not mean by this term commodities of intrinsic value, only wealth representing an acknowledged claim on the labour of others) and a frightful inflation of the sentiments allied with wealth, which at one time were useful, but for generations have been producing outward vice and inward misery and corruption.