The Fruits of Victory / A Sequel to The Great Illusion

by Norman Angell

The issue is made to appear as between the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘material’; as between material force, battleships, guns, armies on the one side as one method, and ‘spiritual’ factors, persuasion, moral goodness on the other side, as the contrary method. ‘Force v. Faith,’ as some evangelical writer has put it. The debate between the Nationalist and the Internationalist is usually vitiated at the outset by an assumption which, though generally common to the two parties, is not only unproven, but flatly contrary to the weight of evidence. The assumption is that the military Nationalist, basing his policy upon material force—a preponderant navy, a great army, superior artillery—can dispense with the element of trust, contract, treaty.

Now to state the issue in that way creates a gross confusion, and the assumption just indicated is quite unjustifiable. The militarist quite as much as the anti-militarist, the nationalist quite as much as the internationalist, has to depend upon a moral factor, ‘a contract,’ the force of tradition, and of morality. Force cannot operate at all in human affairs without a decision of the human mind and will. Guns do not get pointed and go off without a mind behind them, and as already insisted, the direction in which the gun shoots is determined by the mind which must be reached by a form of moral suasion, discipline, or tradition; the mind behind the gun will be influenced by patriotism in one case, or by a will to rebellion and mutiny, prompted by another tradition or persuasion, in another. And obviously the moral decision, in the circumstances with which we are dealing, goes much deeper and further back. The building of battleships, or the forming of armies, the long preparation which is really behind the material factor, implies a great deal of ‘faith.’ These armies and navies could never have been brought into existence and be manœuvred without vast stores of faith and tradition. Whether the army serves the nation, as in Britain or France, or dominates it as in a Spanish-American Republic (or in a somewhat different sense in Prussia), depends on a moral factor: the nature of the tradition which inspires the people from whom the army is drawn. Whether the army obeys its officers or shoots them is determined by moral not material factors, for the officers have not a preponderance of physical force over the men. You cannot form a pirate crew without a moral factor: the agreement not to use force against one another, but to act in consort and combine it against the prey. Whether the military material we and France supplied Russia, and the armies France helped to train, are employed against us or the Germans, depends upon certain moral and political factors inside Russia, certain ideas formed in the minds of certain men. It is not a situation of Ideas against Guns, but of ideas using guns. The confusion involves a curious distortion in our reading of the history of the struggle against privilege and tyranny.

Usually when we speak of the past struggles of the people against tyranny, we have in our minds a picture of the great mass held down by the superior physical force of the tyrant. But such a picture is, of course, quite absurd. For the physical force which held down the people was that which they themselves supplied. The tyrant had no physical force save that with which his victims furnished him. In this struggle of ‘People v. Tyrant,’ obviously the weight of physical force was on the side of the people. This was as true of the slave States of antiquity as it is of the modern autocracies. Obviously the free minority—the five or ten or fifteen per cent.—of Rome or Egypt, or the governing orders of Prussia or Russia, did not impose their will upon the remainder by virtue of superior physical force, the sheer weight of numbers, of sinew and muscle. If the tyranny of the minority had depended upon its own physical power, it could not have lasted a day. The physical force which the minority used was the physical force of the majority. The people were oppressed by an instrument which they themselves furnished.

In that picture, therefore, which we make of the mass of mankind struggling against the ‘force’ of tyranny, we must remember that the force against which they struggled was not in the last analysis physical force at all; it was their own weight from which they desired to be liberated.

Do we realise all that this means? It means that tyranny has been imposed, as freedom has been won: through the Mind.

The small minority imposes itself and can only impose itself by getting first at the mind of the majority—the people—in one form or another: by controlling it through keeping knowledge from it, as in so much of antiquity, or by controlling the knowledge itself, as in Germany. It is because the minds of the masses have failed them that they have been enslaved. Without that intellectual failure of the masses, tyranny could have found no force wherewith to impose its burdens.

This confusion as to the relation of ‘force’ to the moral factor is of all confusions most worth while clearing up: and for that purpose we may descend to homely illustrations.

You have a disorderly society, a frontier mining camp, every man armed, every man threatened by the arms of his neighbour and every man in danger. What is the first need in restoring order? More force—more revolvers and bowie knives? No; every man is fully armed already. If there exists in this disorder the germ of order some attempt will be made to move towards the creation of a police. But what is the indispensable prerequisite for the success of such an effort? It is the capacity for a nucleus of the community to act in common, to agree together to make the beginnings of a community. And unless that nucleus can achieve agreement—a moral and intellectual problem—there can be no police force. But be it noted well, this first prerequisite—the agreement among a few members necessary to create the first Vigilance Committee—is not force; it is a decision of certain minds determining how force shall be used, how combined. Even when you have got as far as the police, this device of social protection will entirely break down unless the police itself can be trusted to obey the constituted authority, and the constituted authority itself to abide by the law. If the police represents a mere preponderance of power, using that power to create a privileged position for itself or for its employers—setting itself, that is, against the community—you will sooner or later get resistance which will ultimately neutralise that power and produce a mere paralysis so far as any social purpose is concerned. The existence of the police depends upon general agreement not to use force except as the instrument of the social will, the law to which all are party. This social will may not exist; the members of the vigilance committee or town council or other body may themselves use their revolvers and knives each against the other. Very well, in that case you will get no police. ‘Force’ will not remedy it. Who is to use the force if no one man can agree with the other? All along the line here we find ourselves, whatever our predisposition to trust only ‘force,’ thrown back upon a moral factor, compelled to rely upon contract, an agreement, before we can use force at all.

It will be noted incidentally that effective social force does not rest upon a Balance of Power: society does not need a Balance of Power as between the law and crime; it wants a preponderance of power on the side of the law. One does not want a Balance of Power between rival parties in the State. One wants a preponderance of power on behalf of a certain fundamental code upon which all parties, or an immense majority of parties, will be agreed. As against the Balance of Power we need a Community of Power—to use Mr. Wilson’s phrase—on the side of a purpose or code of which the contributors to the power are aware.

One may read in learned and pretentious political works that the ultimate basis of a State is force—the army—which is the means by which the State’s authority is maintained. But who compels the army to carry out the State’s orders rather than its own will or the personal will of its commander? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The following passage from an address delivered by the present writer in America may perhaps help to make the point clear:—