‘So thought and acted the man with the stone axe in our illustration, and in both cases the psychological motive is the same: the long-inherited impulse to isolated action, to the solution of a difficulty by some simple form of physical movement; the tendency to break through the more lately acquired habit of action based on social compact and on the mental realisation of its advantage. It is the reaction against intellectual effort and responsible control of instinct, a form of natural protest very common in children and in adults not brought under the influence of social discipline.
‘The same general characteristics are as recognisable in militarist politics within the nation as in the international field. It is not by accident that Prussian and Bismarckian conceptions in foreign policy are invariably accompanied by autocratic conceptions in internal affairs. Both are founded upon a belief in force as the ultimate determinant in human conduct; a disbelief in the things of the mind as factors of social control, a disbelief in moral forces that cannot be expressed in “blood and iron.” The impatience shown by the militarist the world over at government by discussion, his desire to “shut up the talking shops” and to govern autocratically, are but expressions of the same temper and attitude.
‘The forms which Governments have taken and the general method of social management, are in large part the result of its influence. Most Governments are to-day framed far more as instruments for the exercise of physical force than as instruments of social management.
‘The militarist does not allow that man has free will in the matter of his conduct at all; he insists that mechanical forces on the one side or the other alone determine which of two given courses shall be taken; the ideas which either hold, the rôle of intelligent volition, apart from their influence in the manipulation of physical force, play no real part in human society. “Prussianism,” Bismarckian “blood and iron,” are merely political expressions of this belief in the social field—the belief that force alone can decide things; that it is not man’s business to question authority in politics or authority in the form of inevitability in nature. It is not a question of who is right, but of who is stronger. “Fight it out, and right will be on the side of the victor”—on the side, that is, of the heaviest metal or the heaviest muscle, or, perhaps, on that of the one who has the sun at his back, or some other advantage of external nature. The blind material things—not the seeing mind and the soul of man—are the ultimate sanction of human society.
‘Such a doctrine, of course, is not only profoundly anti-social, it is anti-human—fatal not merely to better international relations, but, in the end, to the degree to which it influences human conduct at all, to all those large freedoms which man has so painfully won.
‘This philosophy makes of man’s acts, not something into which there enters the element of moral responsibility and free volition, something apart from and above the mere mechanical force of external nature, but it makes man himself a helpless slave; it implies that his moral efforts and the efforts of his mind and understanding are of no worth—that he is no more the master of his conduct than the tiger of his, or the grass and the trees of theirs, and no more responsible.
‘To this philosophy the “civilist” may oppose another: that in man there is that which sets him apart from the plants and the animals, which gives him control of and responsibility for his social acts, which makes him the master of his social destiny if he but will it; that by virtue of the forces of his mind he may go forward to the completer conquest, not merely of nature, but of himself, and thereby, and by that alone, redeem human association from the evils that now burden it.’
From Balance to Community of Power
Does the foregoing imply that force or compulsion has no place in human society? Not the least in the world. The conclusions so far drawn might be summarised, and certain remaining ones suggested, thus:—
Coercion has its place in human society, and the considerations here urged do not imply any sweeping theory of non-resistance. They are limited to the attempt to show that the effectiveness of political power depends upon certain moral elements usually utterly neglected in international politics, and particularly that instincts inseparable from Nationalism as now cultivated and buttressed by prevailing political morality, must condemn political power to futility. Two broad principles of policy are available: that looking towards isolated national power, or that looking towards common power behind a common purpose. The second may fail; it has risks. But the first is bound to fail. The fact would be self-evident but for the push of certain instincts warping our judgment in favour of the first. If mankind decides that it can do better than the first policy, it will do better. If it decides that it cannot, that decision will itself make failure inevitable. Our whole social salvation depends upon making the right choice.