It was this failure of democratic control of ‘big business’ by the pre-war democracies which helped to break down the old individualism. While private capital was apparently gaining control over the democratic forces, moulding the policy of democratic governments, it was in fact digging its own grave. If political democracy in this respect had been equal to its task, or if the captains of industry had shown a greater scruple or discernment in their use of political power, the individualist order might have given us a workable civilisation; or its end might have been less painful.
The Great Illusion did not assume its impending demise. Democracy had not yet organised socialistic controls within the nation. To have assumed that the world of nationalisms would face socialistic regulation and control as between States, would have implied an agility on the part of the public imagination which it does not in fact possess. An international policy on these lines would have been unintelligible and preposterous. It is only because the situation which has followed victory is so desperate, so much worse than anything The Great Illusion forecast, that we have been brought to face these remedies to-day.
Before the War, the line of advance, internationally, was not by elaborate regulation. We had seen a congeries of States like those of the British Empire maintain not only peace but a sort of informal Federation, without limitation in any formal way of the national freedom of any one of them. Each could impose tariffs against the mother country, exclude citizens of the Empire, recognise no common defined law. The British Empire seemed to forecast a type of international Association which could secure peace without the restraints or restrictions of a central authority in anything but the most shadowy form. If the merely moral understanding which held it together and enabled co-operation in a crisis could have been extended to the United States; if the principle of ‘self-determination’ that had been applied to the white portion of the Empire were gradually extended to the Asiatic; if a bargain had been made with Germany and France as to the open door, and equality of access to undeveloped territory made a matter of defined agreement, we should have possessed the nucleus of a world organisation giving the widest possible scope for independent national development. But world federation on such lines depended above all, of course, upon the development of a certain ‘spirit,’ a guiding temper, to do for nations of different origin what had already been done for nations of a largely common origin (though Britain has many different stocks—English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and, overseas, Dutch and French as well). But the spirit was not there. The whole tradition in the international field was one of domination, competition, rivalry, conflicting interest, ‘Struggle for life.’
The possibility of such a free international life has disappeared with the disappearance of the laisser-faire ideal in national organisation. We shall perforce be much more concerned now with the machinery of control in both spheres as the only alternative to an anarchy more devastating than that which existed before the War. For all the reasons which point to that conclusion the reader is referred once more to the second chapter of the first part of this book.
CHAPTER V
THE ARGUMENT AS AN ATTACK ON THE STATE
THERE was not before the War, and there has not been since, any serious challenge to the economic argument of The Great Illusion. Criticism (which curiously enough does not seem to have included the point dealt with in the preceding Chapter) seems to have centred rather upon the irrelevance of economic considerations to the problem of war—the problem, that is, of creating an international society. The answer to that is, of course, both explicit and implicit in much of what precedes.
The most serious criticism has been directed to one specific point. It is made notably both by Professor Spenser Wilkinson[122] and Professor Lindsay,[123] and as it is relevant to the existing situation and to much of the argument of the present book, it is worth dealing with.
The criticism is based on the alleged disparagement of the State implied in the general attitude of the book. Professor Lindsay (whose article, by the way, although hostile and misapprehending the spirit of the book, is a model of fair, sincere, and useful criticism) describes the work under criticism largely as an attack on the conception of ‘the State as a person.’ He says in effect that the present author argues thus:—
‘The only proper thing to consider is the interest or the happiness of individuals. If a political action conduces to the interests of individuals, it must be right; if it conflicts with these interests it must be wrong.’
Professor Lindsay continues:—