‘When, after the counting of the votes, you ask Mr Wilson to step down from the President’s chair, how do you know he will get down? I repeat, How do you know he will get down? You think that a foolish and fantastic question? But, in a great many interesting American republics, Mexico, Venezuela, or Hayti, he would not get down! You say, “Oh, the army would turn him out.” I beg your pardon. It is Mr Wilson who commands the army; it is not the army that commands Mr Wilson. Again, in many American republics a President who can depend on his army, when asked to get out of the Presidency, would reply almost as a matter of course, “Why should I get down when I have an army that stands by me?”
‘How do we know that Mr Wilson, able, we will assume, to count on his army, or, if you prefer, some President particularly popular with the army, will not do that? Is it physical force which prevents it? If so, whose? You may say: “If he did that, he knows that the country would raise an army of rebellion to turn him out.” Well, suppose it did? You raise this army, as they would in Mexico, or Venezuela, and the army turns him out. And your man gets into the Presidential chair, and then, when you think he has stolen enough, you vote him down. He would do precisely the same thing. He would say: “My dear people, as very great philosophers tell you, the State is Force, and as a great French monarch once said. ‘I am the State.’ J’y suis, j’y reste.”. And then you would have to get another army of rebellion to turn him out—just as they do in Mexico, Venezuela, Hayti, or Honduras.’
There, then, is the crux of the matter. Every constitution at times breaks down. But if that fact were a conclusive argument for the anarchical arming of each man against the other as preferable to a police enforcing law, there could be no human society. The object of constitutional machinery for change is to make civil war unnecessary.
There will be no advance save through an improved tradition. Perhaps it will be impossible to improve the tradition. Very well, then the old order, whether among the nations of Europe or the political parties of Venezuela, will remain unchanged. More ‘force,’ more soldiers, will not do it. The disturbed areas of Spanish-America each show a greater number of soldiers to population than States like Massachusetts or Ohio. So in the international solution. What would it have availed if Britain had quadrupled the quantity of rifles to Koltchak’s peasant soldiers so long as his land policy caused them to turn their rifles against his Government? Or for France to have multiplied many times the loans made to the Ukraine, if at the same time the loans made to Poland so fed Polish nationalism that the Ukrainians preferred making common cause with the Bolsheviks to becoming satellites of an Imperialist Poland? Do we add to the ‘force’ of the Alliance by increasing the military power of Serbia, if that fact provokes her to challenge Italy? Do we strengthen it by increasing at one and the same time the military forces of two States—say Poland and Czecho-Slovakia—if the nationalism which we nurse leads finally to those two States turning their forces one against the other? Unless we know the policy (again a thing of the mind, of opinion) which will determine the use to which guns will be put, it does not increase our security—it may diminish it—to add more guns.
The Alternative Risks
We see, therefore, that the alternatives are not in fact a choice between ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ means. The material can only operate, whether for our defence or against us, by virtue of a spiritual thing, the will. ‘The direction in which the gun will shoot’—a rather important point in its effectiveness as a defensive weapon—depends not on the gun but on the mind of the man using it, the moral factor. The two cannot be separated.
It is untrue to say that the knife is a magic instrument, saving the cancer patient’s life: it is the mind of the surgeon using the material thing in a certain way which saves the patient’s life. A child or savage who, failing to realise the part played by the invisible element of the surgeon’s mind, should deem that a knife of a particular pattern used ‘boldly’ could be depended upon to cure cancer, would merely, of course commit manslaughter.
It is foolish to talk of an absolute guarantee of security by force, as of guarantee of success in surgical operations by perfection of knives. In both cases we are dealing with instruments, indispensable, but not of themselves enough. The mind behind the instrument, technical in one case, social in the other, may in both cases fail; then we must improve it. Merely to go on sharpening the knife, to go on applying, for instance, to the international problem more ‘force,’ in the way it has been applied in the past, can only give us in intenser degree the present results.
Yet the truth here indicated is perpetually being disregarded, particularly by those who pique themselves on being ‘practical.’ In the choice of risks by men of the world and realist statesmen the choice which inevitably leads to destruction is for ever being made on grounds of safety; the choice which leads at least in the direction of security is for ever being rejected on the grounds of its danger.
Why is this? The choice is instinctive assuredly; it is not the result of ‘hard-headed calculation’ though it often professes to be. We speak of it as the ‘protective’ instinct. But it is a protective instinct which obviously destroys us.