The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

But this large task of planting a definite conviction in the minds of the majority in many nations does not conflict with what I said about the essential clearness and simplicity of the reform. If you set out to attack poverty or to reform marriage, you have first to settle very serious controversies about the way to do it. There is no such controversy here. There are, it is true, a few who still have in their veins some of the blood of the medieval swashbuckler. They say that, while a quarrel about territory might fitly be referred to a judge, an outrage on our national honour must be expiated by blood. The idea is purely barbaric. As if this river of human blood were not an immeasurably greater outrage than the heated words of a nervous diplomatist, or the jibes of a silly journalist, or the acts of an excited crowd, or the guilt of a couple of assassins! As if an international court could not devise some means of appeasing injured honour as well as of restoring injured rights! It is dreadful materialism, they say, to put honour in the scale with money. So men said in the clubs of London a century ago in defence of the duel, and we recognise in their pleas the lingering, more or less disguised, of a barbaric sentiment. Most of us recognise that same feature in this last apology for the duel of nations. If we can trust our individual honour to a mediocre magistrate or judge, or a still worse jury, we can certainly entrust our national honour to a group of the ablest and most impartial lawyers of the world. It is sheer distrust of justice to refuse it.

Here again history is wholly on the side of reform. Which of the great wars of the nineteenth century involved a point of honour that could not, with entire decency, have been submitted to arbitration? Was there such a point of honour in the Napoleonic wars? The Prusso-Danish? The Prusso-Austrian? The Italian? The American Civil War? The Franco-German? The Russo-Turkish? The South African? What point was involved in any of them that could not have been settled with far greater honour to the combatants and greater regard for justice by an impartial tribunal? In most cases they were really wars of aggression and expansion, like the war in which we are engaged. We may at least ask the men who hold that medieval idea of war to have—since they boast much of their courage—the elementary courage to say so.

There is no conceivable quarrel that cannot with perfect honour be submitted to arbitration. And the ostensible ground of this colossal struggle which is now exhausting Europe—the satisfaction due to Austria for the assassination of the Archduke—was pre-eminently a matter for a tribunal. The frivolity and insincerity with which these grave issues are sometimes met are, to put it on the lowest level, costly. Speaking in a London club some time ago, I urged this substitution of arbitration for war. My opponent frivolously observed that he was not sure that a court of great lawyers would be cheaper than war, and there were some who quite seriously applauded. Yet Europe had then actually expended about £2,000,000,000 in the preliminary stages of its great war!

Wherever there is a considerable and deliberate reluctance to substitute arbitration for war, wherever these unsatisfactory pleas for war are put forward, we find a hypocritical concealment of real motives. If we would be practical we must candidly confront these motives, and we shall find that the most persistent and most dangerous of them is still the desire to gain territory. The spectacle of the decay of the Ottoman Empire and the apparent helplessness of the Balkan peoples had more to do with the militarism of European Powers than they were willing to admit. That source of temptation is now renewed, and most of the Powers have, or soon will have, all the territory they can reasonably desire. The further distribution of African territory could clearly be best controlled by an international court. There remains one Power that will still feel the lust of territory. Germany conspicuously thwarted in Europe the advance of the pacifist reform because, as the whole world now sees, it had an aggressive territorial ambition. We may assume that Austria will now be cured of its lawless and costly designs, and that Germany will remain the one unsated and discontented nation. But Europe will surely have the elementary wisdom of refusing to maintain its terrible burden on that account. It will pay us better to meet the real economic need of Germany by a generous colonial deal, and then to use the power of an international polity to destroy and prevent the revival of militarism in that country.

We should thus remove the last serious obstacle to the reform, and the work might advance rapidly. The tribunal, as I said, exists, and has had more experience than is generally realised. The Hague Conference of 1907 established a Prize Court, with permanent salaried judges, and an Arbitration Court. A large number of very grave quarrels have since been adjusted by this tribunal, and, as Professor Schücking observes, “more than a hundred contracts between States have been concluded in which, on each occasion, two States made the Arbitration Court obligatory.” But, largely owing to the opposition of Germany and the general apathy, the Court remained optional, and the Powers maintained their armies for the settlement of quarrels in the old barbaric manner. The next and last step is for all the Powers to recognise the Court as compulsory, and to furnish it with an executive (a small international army and navy) for the enforcement of its decisions. Our vast armies and navies then become superfluous and would be disbanded simultaneously, leaving only a small force in each country for the suppression of native aggression (with the consent of the Hague Court) and for use by the Court itself to enforce its verdicts or suppress illegal attempts to arm.

There is nothing Utopian or academic about this reform. A body of high-minded lawyers and statesmen have for years discussed the details of the scheme, and are ready to launch it whenever the various Governments are compelled by public opinion to adopt it. The immediate task is to create this pressure of public opinion. We may hope that, after our ghastly lesson in the price of the military method, we shall no longer be rebuffed with vapid phrases like: “Do not force the pace.” A business-man who talked nonsense of that kind would soon find his level. We need to conduct our national and international life on business-principles, to get rid as speedily as possible of a waste and disorder which are an outrage on the intelligence of the race. I look more confidently to business-men than to speech-making politicians and sentimental moralists for the triumph of the reform. Certain industries will, of course, be gravely dislocated, even annihilated, by the change; and vast bodies of additional workers will, in most countries, be thrown upon a crowded labour-market. From the abstract economical point of view it is only a question of transfer. Fifty millions which were spent on military industries will now be used in enlarging other industries or creating new. In reality there will be grave confusion; but that is due to the utterly disorganised nature of our industrial world, which I discuss later. In any case to allege this industrial difficulty as a serious reason against disarmament is a very singular piece of folly. The cost and trouble of adjusting this temporary dislocation would be infinitely less than the cost and trouble of a war.

We need, therefore, to persuade the public, which has borne its military yoke and endured the occasional lash of war with the placidity of a draught-ox—that is, candidly, how we shall appear in the social history of the future—that it may escape the yoke and the lash when it wills. Our Churches might make some atonement for a long and lamentable neglect of their duty by organising a really spirited collective campaign in this greatest of moral interests. The central educative body should, however, be quite unsectarian. I take it that an amalgamation of the various Peace Societies, strengthened by the adhesion of our commercial and industrial leaders, would form this central educative body. The present war would furnish it with a superb text and an unanswerable argument. It ought, in the circumstances, to capture each country in Europe more speedily than Cobden’s famous league captured England. The press would begin to assist at a certain stage of progress. Even the politicians would presently lend their oratory; especially as their prestige, at least in this country, would hardly survive a second strain such as this war has put on it. Every agency ought to be enlisted in impressing upon the public that, whatever other reforms may imply, here we ask no sacrifice; we indicate a way in which the community may, when it wills, rid itself of a stupendous burden and set free enormous resources for social improvement.

Reformers are widely, and with some reason, accused of being dreamy and unpractical. Here, at least, it will be seen that it is rather the public and the opponents of reform who are dreamy, romantic, and unpractical: that the reform itself is a business proposition of the most attractive and promising character. But let us be even more practical. To forecast the future is an interesting intellectual recreation; but to close one’s mind entirely against the possibilities and dangers of the future is positive folly. Let us glance at the future.

I have not the faintest hope that the Allied Powers will, as they ought to do, disarm Germany and Austria and then disarm themselves, when the war is over. Then Germany will concentrate all its marvellous power of organisation, dissimulation, and intrigue in a dream of revanche. The appalling incompetence displayed by what we may call, in the broadest sense, our Intelligence Department and our War Office will return, when the temporary accession of business-ability has been withdrawn from it. There will be no serious inquiry into our scandalous indolence in the early period of the war, our complete failure to forecast the conditions of war, and our heavy somnolence during Germany’s feverish preparations, although the documents published by the French Government show that, by 1913 at least, sharp-sighted foreign representatives saw clearly that war was, to put it moderately, highly probable. In point of fact, our authorities knew that war was gravely imminent. I happen to know, from a little breach of confidence, that our War Office secretly warned certain reservists in June 1914 (even before the Serajevo murder) to be ready. The men were ready, and have borne their share superbly; but our authorities had to confess that, even after nine months’ experience of the war, they were immeasurably behind Germany in the production of the two vital necessaries of a modern war—machine-guns and high-explosive shells.

Our experts will return to this comfortable somnolence. There will be no serious inquiry. Politicians and their advisers will escape in a cloud of thrilling emotions and enthusiastic rhetoric. Persistent questioners, who are rudely impatient of party-discipline, will be snubbed and evaded. Any other questioners, not of the political world, will be ignored. We shall return to British dignity and placidity. Germany will work and intrigue as it never worked and intrigued before. There will be grave domestic trouble in Russia and, as in the case of Turkey, German representatives will think while British representatives play. The preparations may occupy ten years or twenty years, but they will proceed. The aim will be a war with Russia neutral or friendly to Germany. If it occurs ... One has only to imagine where we should be to-day if Germany had not made the error of abandoning the Bismarckian tradition.