How is one to deal with the claim of the ‘mystic nationalist’ (he exists abundantly even outside the Balkans) that the subjugation of some neighbouring nationalism is demanded by honour; that only the great State can be the really good State; that power—‘majesty,’ as the Oriental would say—is a thing good in itself?[108] There are ultimate questions as to what is good and what is bad that no argument can answer; ultimate values which cannot be discussed. But one can reduce those unarguable values to a minimum by appealing to certain social needs. A State which has plenty of food may not be a good State; but a State which cannot feed its population cannot be a good State, for in that case the citizens will be hungry, greedy, and violent.
In other words, certain social needs and certain social utilities—which we can all recognise as indispensables—furnish a ground of agreement for the common action without which no society can be established. And the need for such a criterion becomes more manifest as we learn more of the wonderful fashion in which we sublimate our motives. A country refuses to submit its dispute to arbitration, because its ‘honour’ is involved. Many books have been written to try and find out precisely what honour of this kind is. One of the best of them has decided that it is anything which a country cares to make it. It is never the presence of coal, or iron, or oil, which makes it imperative to retain a given territory: it is honour (as Italy’s Foreign Minister explained when Italy went to war for the conquest of Tripoli). Unfortunately, rival States have also impulses of honour which compel them to claim the same undeveloped territory. Nothing can prove—or disprove—that honour, in such circumstances, is invoked by each or either of the parties concerned to make a piece of acquisitiveness or megalomania appear as fine to himself as possible: that, just because he has a lurking suspicion that all is not well with the operation, he seeks to justify it to himself with fine words that have a very vague content. But on this basis there can be no agreement. If, however, one shifts the discussion to the question of what is best for the social welfare of both, one can get a modus vivendi. For each to admit that he has no right so to use his power as to deprive the other of means of life, would be the beginning of a code which could be tested. Each might conceivably have that right to deprive the other of means of livelihood, if it were a choice between the lives of his own people or others.
The economic fact is the test of the ethical claim: if it really be true that we must withhold sources of food from others because otherwise our own would starve, there is some ethical justification for such use of our power. If such is not the fact, the whole moral issue is changed, and with it, to the degree to which it is mutually realised, the social outlook and attitude. The knowledge of interdependence is part, at least, of an attitude which makes the ‘social sense’—the sense that one kind of arrangement is fair and workable, and another is not. To bring home the fact of this interdependence is not simply an appeal to selfishness: it is to reveal a method by which an apparently irreconcilable conflict of vital needs can be reconciled. The sense of interdependence, of the need of one for another, is part of the foundation of the very difficult art of living together.
Much mischief arises from the misunderstanding of the term ‘economic motive.’ Let us examine some further examples of this. One is a common confusion of terms: an economic motive may be the reverse of selfish. The long sustained efforts of parents to provide fittingly for their children—efforts continued, it may be, through half a lifetime—are certainly economic. Just as certainly they are not selfish in any exact sense of the term. Yet something like this confusion seems to overlie the discussion of economics in connection with war.
Speaking broadly, I do not believe that men ever go to war from a cold calculation of advantage or profit. I never have believed it. It seems to me an obvious and childish misreading of human psychology. I cannot see how it is possible to imagine a man laying down his life on the battle-field for personal gain. Nations do not fight for their money or interests, they fight for their rights, or what they believe to be their rights. The very gallant men who triumphed at Bull Run or Chancellorsville were not fighting for the profits on slave-labour: they were fighting for what they believed to be their independence: the rights, as they would have said, to self-government or, as we should now say, of self-determination. Yet it was a conflict which arose out of slave labour: an economic question. Now the most elementary of all rights, in the sense of the first right which a people will claim, is the right to existence—the right of a population to bread and a decent livelihood.[109] For that nations certainly will fight. Yet, as we see, it is a right which arises out of an economic need or conflict. We have seen how it works as a factor in our own foreign policy: as a compelling motive for the command of the sea. We believe that the feeding of these islands depends upon it: that if we lost it our children might die in the streets and the lack of food compel us to an ignominious surrender. It is this relation of vital food supply to preponderant sea power which has caused us to tolerate no challenge to the latter. We know the part which the growth of the German Navy played in shaping Anglo-Continental relations before the War; the part which any challenge to our naval preponderance has always played in determining our foreign policy. The command of the sea, with all that that means in the way of having built up a tradition, a battle-cry in politics, has certainly bound up with it this life and death fact of feeding our population. That is to say it is an economic need. Yet the determination of some millions of Englishmen to fight for this right to life, to die rather than see the daily bread of their people in jeopardy, would be adequately described by some phrase about Englishmen going to war because it ‘paid.’ It would be a silly or dishonest gibe. Yet that is precisely the kind of gibe that I have had to face these fifteen years in attempting to disentangle the forces and motives underlying international conflict.
What picture is summoned to our minds by the word ‘economics’ in relation to war? To the critics whose indignation is so excited at the introduction of the subject at all into the discussion of war—and they include, unhappily, some of the great names of English literature—‘economic’ seems to carry no picture but that of an obese Semitic stockbroker, in quaking fear for his profits. This view cannot be said to imply either much imagination or much sense of reality. For among the stockbrokers, the usurers, those closest to financial manipulation and in touch with financial changes, are to be found some groups numerically small, who are more likely to gain than to lose by war; and the present writer has never suggested the contrary.
But the ‘economic futility’ of war expresses itself otherwise: in half a Continent unable to feed or clothe or warm itself; millions rendered neurotic, abnormal, hysterical by malnutrition, disease, and anxiety; millions rendered greedy, selfish, and violent by the constant strain of hunger; resulting in ‘social unrest’ that threatens more and more to become sheer chaos and confusion: the dissolution and disintegration of society. Everywhere, in the cities, are the children who cry and who are not fed, who raise shrunken arms to our statesmen who talk with pride[110] of their stern measures of ‘rigorous’ blockade. Rickety and dying children, and undying hate for us, their murderers, in the hearts of their mothers—these are the human realities of the ‘economics of war.’
The desire to prevent these things, to bring about an order that would render possible both patriotism and mercy, would save us from the dreadful dilemma of feeding our own children only by the torture and death of others equally innocent—the effort to this end is represented as a mere appeal to selfishness and avarice, something mean and ignoble, a degradation of human motive.
‘These theoretical dilemmas do not state accurately the real conditions of politics,’ the reader may object. ‘No one proposes to inflict famine as a means of enforcing our policy’ ... ‘England does not make war on women and children.’
Not one man or woman in a million, English or other, would wittingly inflict the suffering of starvation upon a single child, if the child were visible to his eyes, present in his mind, and if the simple human fact were not obscured by the much more complex and artificial facts that have gathered round our conceptions of patriotism. The heaviest indictment of the military-nationalist philosophy we are discussing is that it manages successfully to cover up human realities by dehumanising abstractions. From the moment that the child becomes a part of that abstraction—‘Russia,’ ‘Austria,’ ‘Germany’—it loses its human identity, and becomes merely an impersonal part of the political problem of the struggle of our nation with others. The inverted moral alchemy, by which the golden instinct that we associate with so much of direct human contact is transformed into the leaden cruelty of nationalist hate and high statecraft, has been dealt with at the close of Part I. When in tones of moral indignation it is declared that Englishmen ‘do not make war on women and children,’ we must face the truth and say that Englishmen, like all peoples, do make such war.