Reason may be a very small part of the apparatus of human conduct compared with the part played by the unconscious and subconscious, the instinctive and the emotional. The power of a ship’s compass is very small indeed compared with the power developed by the engines. But the greater the power of the engines, the greater will be the disaster if the relatively tiny compass is deflected and causes the ship to be driven on to the rocks. The illustration indicates, not exactly but with sufficient truth, the relationship of ‘reason’ to ‘instinct.’
The instincts that push to self-assertion, to the acquisition of preponderant power, are so strong that we shall only abandon that method as the result of perceiving its futility. Co-operation, which means a relationship of partnership and give and take, will not succeed till force has failed.
The futility of power as a means to our most fundamental and social ends is due mainly to two facts, one mechanical, and the other moral. The mechanical fact is that if we really need another, our power over him has very definite limits. Our dependence on him gives him a weapon against us. The moral fact is that in demanding a position of domination, we ask something to which we should not accede if it were asked of us: the claim does not stand the test of the categorical imperative. If we need another’s labour, we cannot kill him; if his custom, we cannot forbid him to earn money. If his labour is to be effective, we must give him tools, knowledge; and these things can be used to resist our exactions. To the degree to which he is powerful for service he is powerful for resistance. A nation wealthy as a customer will also be ubiquitous as a competitor.
The factors which have operated to make physical compulsion (slavery) as a means of obtaining service less economical than service for reward, operate just as effectively between nations. The employment of military force for economic ends is an attempt to apply indirectly the principle of chattel-slavery to groups; and involves the same disadvantages.[115]
In so far as coercion represents a means of securing a wider and more effective social co-operation as against a narrower social co-operation, or more anarchic condition, it is likely to be successful and to justify itself socially. The imposition of Western government upon backward peoples approximates to the role of police; the struggles between the armed forces of rival Western Powers do not. The function of a police force is the exact contrary to that of armies competing with one another.[116]
The demonstration of the futility of conquest rested mainly on these facts. After conquest the conquered people cannot be killed. They cannot be allowed to starve. Pressure of population on means of subsistence has not been reduced, but probably increased, since the number of mouths to fill eliminated by the casualty lists is not equivalent to the reduced production occasioned by war. To impose by force (e.g. exclusion from raw materials) a lower standard of living, creates (a) resistance which involves costs of coercion (generally in military establishments, but also in the political difficulties in which the coercion of hostile peoples—as in Alsace-Lorraine and Ireland—generally involves their conqueror), costs which must be deducted from the economic advantage of the conquest; and (b) loss of markets which may be indispensable to countries (like Britain) whose prosperity depends upon an international division of labour. A population that lives by exchanging its coal and iron for (say) food, does not profit by reducing the productivity of subject peoples engaged in food production.
In The Great Illusion the case was put as follows:—
‘When we conquer a nation in these days, we do not exterminate it: we leave it where it was. When we “overcome” the servile races, far from eliminating them, we give them added chances of life by introducing order, etc., so that the lower human quality tends to be perpetuated by conquest by the higher. If ever it happens that the Asiatic races challenge the white in the industrial or military field, it will be in large part thanks to the work of race conservation, which has been the result of England’s conquest in India, Egypt, and Asia generally.’—(pp. 191-192.)
‘When the division of labour was so little developed that every homestead produced all that it needed, it mattered nothing if part of the community was cut off from the world for weeks and months at a time. All the neighbours of a village or homestead might be slain or harassed, and no inconvenience resulted. But if to-day an English county is by a general railroad strike cut off for so much as forty-eight hours from the rest of the economic organism, we know that whole sections of its population are threatened with famine. If in the time of the Danes England could by some magic have killed all foreigners, she would presumably have been the better off. If she could do the same thing to-day half her population would starve to death. If on one side of the frontier a community is, say, wheat-producing, and on the other coal-producing, each is dependent for its very existence on the fact of the other being able to carry on its labour. The miner cannot in a week set to and grow a crop of wheat; the farmer must wait for his wheat to grow, and must meantime feed his family and dependents. The exchange involved here must go on, and each party have fair expectation that he will in due course be able to reap the fruits of his labour, or both starve; and that exchange, that expectation, is merely the expression in its simplest form of commerce and credit; and the interdependence here indicated has, by the countless developments of rapid communication, reached such a condition of complexity that the interference with any given operation affects not merely the parties directly involved, but numberless others having at first sight no connection therewith.
‘The vital interdependence here indicated, cutting athwart frontiers, is largely the work of the last forty years; and it has, during that time, so developed as to have set up a financial interdependence of the capitals of the world, so complex that disturbance in New York involves financial and commercial disturbance in London, and, if sufficiently grave, compels financiers of London to co-operate with those of New York to put an end to the crisis, not as a matter of altruism, but as a matter of commercial self-protection. The complexity of modern finance makes New York dependent on London, London upon Paris, Paris upon Berlin, to a greater degree than has ever yet been the case in history. This interdependence is the result of the daily use of those contrivances of civilisation which date from yesterday—the rapid post, the instantaneous dissemination of financial and commercial information by means of telegraphy, and generally the incredible progress of rapidity in communication which has put the half-dozen chief capitals of Christendom in closer contact financially, and has rendered them more dependent the one upon the other than were the chief cities of Great Britain less than a hundred years ago.—(pp. 49-50.)