Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social Subjects

by Laurence Housman

The State’s claim—latent in peace-time and liable to emerge whenever war or crisis shall arise—is not that its citizens should fight for it when the cause is just and right, but that they should fight for it in any case, if it orders them. That claim, made by every State with more or less urgency, we are now invited to view with horror operating at its full efficiency throughout a Prussianised Germany. Thus exalted and perfected, it has become, we are told, a danger to the world; in such a State the moral conscience of the individual has become atrophied by subordination, and he is not free to choose between right and wrong. But war only brings home to us the logic of a situation which in peace-time we have burked; and now, in order to combat the evil, in its fullest manifestation, men in this country are asked to give their souls into similar keeping—to accept, that is to say, the over-riding of individual conscience by the law of State-necessity. It is a claim which any State, founded on force, is bound eventually to make; it is a claim which anyone who believes force to be evil is bound to repudiate. The follower of the one school draws his ethics from the established rules of the body politic to which he belongs; the follower of the other draws them, it may be, from the personal example and teaching of One whom the body politic of his day regarded as a criminal, and put to death; of One whose followers, it may be said further, were persecuted in the early centuries of the Christian era, not because of their opinions, but because, in practice, they were a danger to the State. The Roman mind was very logical; and only when Christianity had become absorbed in the State system and had accepted the view that physical force and persecution were good social remedies, only then did Christianity cease to be an apparent danger and a fit subject for persecution.

But the primitive Christian standpoint is always liable to emerge; and when it does, then we get the opposing principles of two incompatible schools. And we must keep these principles in mind—the principle of conduct based upon a personal example rejecting force, and the principle of conduct based upon a social edifice relying upon force for its well-being and advancement; otherwise we confuse the issue, and weaken our appreciation of the moral position which each side assumes. It is surely quite evident that the State, while based upon force, cannot (except as an indulgence) countenance the claim of any individual to make the morality of its action the test for personal allegiance and service. And so this State-claim must be unequivocably defined, otherwise we do not really know where we are.

Now many fervent supporters of the doctrine that State-necessity must stand supreme above individual conscience, confuse matters by importing the moral equation, and by arguing for the compelling principle from particular instances where moral considerations seem to favour it: “Our Cause is just; therefore, etc.,” is the line on which they contend. But the State’s claim stands independent of the justice of its cause; and “My Country right or wrong!” is the real motto which the objector to conscientious liberty is called to fight under.

All that the State-backers say as to the obligation for Englishmen to fight Germany to-day, applies equally to the obligation for Germans to fight England. So while we continue to assert that a man must fight here with us for the cause of liberty, honour, righteousness—in a word, for God—we assert equally that in another country he must subject his conscience to the claims of the State, and fight for oppression, dishonour, unrighteousness—in a word, for the Devil (and that in spite of the baptismal vows which oblige him to “fight manfully under Christ’s banner,” not merely against sin, as he individually is concerned, but sin spiritually combined in its symbolic representative, and defended by the temporalities of the world). From which we must argue that, if Christ were here on earth to-day, born of German parents, he would be called upon to fight in the ranks of Germany; that if he were born of English parents he would be called to fight for England; while, if again, born of Jewish parents, he might be accorded the alternative privilege of fighting for England which was not his country, or of being deported to Russia to fight for the persecutors of his race.

The conscientious objector, on the other hand, feels bound to take the moral equation of all such particular instances as a guide to his diagnosis of the evils of war; and he comes thus to regard the expedient of war as altogether so bad a remedy for evil that he dares to doubt whether Christ would be seen bearing arms on either side; and he is probably strengthened in that conviction by the fact that modern conditions of war tend more and more to involve the weak, the innocent, and the helpless in the ruin and suffering wrought by industrial and financial exhaustion, invasion and blockade, and that “arms of precision” are so unprecise and blind in action that they are quite as likely, when directed against towns, to destroy the non-fighters as the fighters. And the conscientious objector finds a difficulty in seeing Christ serving a gun for the artillery of either side (however righteous the cause) which may have for immediate result the disembowelling of a mother while in the pains of child-birth, or the dismembering of young children.

He holds further (and it is a tenable argument addressed to any Power which maintains despotic sway over an alien race, declaring such sway to be acceptable to the people concerned, while treating as “seditious” any reluctance to regard it as acceptable), he holds that, if the worst comes to the worst, submission to force, or mere passive resistance thereto, is more lifesaving, both morally and physically, than the setting of force against force even for the defence of “liberty.” He holds, probably, that Finland, in her policy of passive resistance to Tsarist domination, has better conditions and prospects to-day than Serbia; that the present fate of India, as the result of submission to a stronger Power is preferable to the present fate of Belgium; even though the Government forced upon it be more alien to the genius of its races than is the German to the Flemish. He may believe that in the long run India is more likely to escape from being Britainised by bowing to the subjugating Power, than Britain is likely to escape from being Prussianised by a hurried adoption of a similar system to that which she has set out to destroy. He may even think (for there is no limit to the contrariety of his views) that if England wins handsomely in this war by adopting the Prussian system of militarism, she is more likely to retain it than if she gets beaten. In a word he thinks war the most hazardous of all remedies for the evils it sets out to cure.

The State, on the other side, sees the very gravest danger to that edifice of worldly power which is summed up in the word “imperial,” if once it allows the individual conscience to pick and choose the moral terms of its allegiance. And the better the argument the conscientious objector can present from political parallels in other countries, or from the failures and blunders of past history, the more dangerous becomes his propaganda and the more rigorously must it be suppressed.

The State’s claim to our duty to-day is precisely the same, neither more nor less, than it would be if it required our services for the prosecution of a second Boer War, a second Opium-trade war against China, or a second war against the Independence of America. The causes of the war might be no more reputable than in these cases, but the State’s claim on our allegiance would remain the same. “It is not for you,” the State says, in effect, “to judge whether I am right or wrong, if I come to claim your services for war.”

Now nobody, I presume, is so convinced of the perennial purity of his country’s motives, or that its foreign policy has in the past been so safe-guarded by democratic control, as to claim that it has never waged foolish or unjust wars. Most reasonable people will admit that the State is, in matters of morals, a fallible authority. The claim is, therefore, that of a fallible authority for the unquestioning obedience of its citizens in a course of action which may involve the ruin, torture, and death of an innocent people, or the subjugation of a liberty-loving race. That claim by a State which stands based on the doctrine that Might is a surer remedy and defence than Right, is a perfectly logical one. I have not a word to say against it.