In the decade since the foregoing was written things have enormously improved in South America. Why? For the simple reason, as pointed out in Chapter V. of the first part of this book, that Spanish America is being brought more and more into the economic movement of the world; and with the establishment of factories, in which large capital has been sunk, banks, businesses, etc., the whole attitude of mind of those interested in these ventures is changed. The Jingo, the military adventurer, the fomentor of trouble, are seen for what they are—not as patriots, but as representing exceedingly mischievous and maleficent forces.
This general truth has two facets: if long warfare diverts a people from the capacity for industry, so in the long run economic pressure—the influences, that is, which turn the energies of people to preoccupation with social well-being—is fatal to the military tradition. Neither tendency is constant; warfare produces poverty; poverty pushes to thrift and work, which result in wealth; wealth creates leisure and pride and pushes to warfare.
Where Nature does not respond readily to industrial effort, where it is, at least apparently, more profitable to plunder than to work, the military tradition survives. The Beduin has been a bandit since the time of Abraham, for the simple reason that the desert does not support industrial life nor respond to industrial effort. The only career offering a fair apparent return for effort is plunder. In Morocco, in Arabia, in all very poor pastoral countries, the same phenomenon is exhibited; in mountainous countries which are arid and are removed from the economic centres, idem. The same may have been to some extent the case in Prussia before the era of coal and iron; but the fact that to-day 99 per cent. of the population is normally engaged in trade and industry, and 1 per cent. only in military preparation, and some fraction too small to be properly estimated engaged in actual war, shows how far she has outgrown such a state—shows, incidentally, what little chance the ideal and tradition represented by 1 per cent. or some fractional percentage has against interests and activities represented by 99 per cent. The recent history of South and Central America, because it is recent, and because the factors are less complicated, illustrates best the tendency with which we are dealing. Spanish America inherited the military tradition in all its vigor. As I have already pointed out, the Spanish occupation of the American Continent was a process of conquest rather than of colonizing; and while the mother country got poorer and poorer by the process of conquest, the new countries also impoverished themselves in adherence to the same fatal illusion. The glamour of conquest was, of course, Spain's ruin. So long as it was possible for her to live on extorted bullion, neither social nor industrial development seemed possible. Despite the common idea to the contrary, Germany has known how to keep this fatal hypnotism at bay, and, far from allowing her military activities to absorb her industrial, it is precisely the military activities which are in a fair way now to being absorbed by the industrial and commercial, and her world commerce has its foundation, not in tribute or bullion exacted at the sword's point, but in sound and honest exchange. So that to-day the legitimate commercial tribute which Germany, who never sent a soldier there, exacts from Spanish America is immensely greater than that which goes to Spain, who poured out blood and treasure during three centuries on these territories. In this way, again, do the warlike nations inherit the earth!
If Germany is never to duplicate Spain's decadence, it is precisely because (1) she has never had, historically, Spain's temptation to live by conquest, and (2) because, having to live by honest industry, her commercial hold, even upon the territories conquered by Spain, is more firmly set than that of Spain herself.
How may we sum up the whole case, keeping in mind every empire that ever existed—the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Mede and Persian, the Macedonian, the Roman, the Frank, the Saxon, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Bourbon, the Napoleonic? In all and every one of them we may see the same process, which is this: If it remains military it decays; if it prospers and takes its share of the work of the world it ceases to be military. There is no other reading of history.
That history furnishes no justification for the plea that pugnacity and antagonism between nations is bound up in any way with the real process of national survival, shows clearly enough that nations nurtured normally in peace are more than a match for nations nurtured normally in war; that communities of non-military tradition and instincts, like the Anglo-Saxon communities of the New World, show elements of survival stronger than those possessed by communities animated by the military tradition, like the Spanish and Portuguese nations of the New World; that the position of the industrial nations in Europe as compared with the military gives no justification for the plea that the warlike qualities make for survival. It is clearly evident that there is no biological justification in the terms of man's political evolution for the perpetuation of antagonism between nations, nor any justification for the plea that the diminution of such antagonism runs counter to the teachings of the "natural law." There is no such natural law; in accordance with natural laws, men are being thrust irresistibly towards co-operation between communities and not towards conflict.
There remains the argument that, though the conflict itself may make for degeneration, the preparation for that conflict makes for survival, for the improvement of human nature. I have already touched upon the hopeless confusion which comes of the plea that, while long-continued peace is bad, military preparations find justification in that they insure peace.
Almost every defence of militarism includes a sneer at the ideal of peace because it involves the Cobdenite state of buying cheap and selling dear. But, with equal regularity, the advocate of the military system goes on to argue for great armaments, not as a means of promoting war, that valuable school, etc., but as the best means of securing peace; in other words, that condition of "buying cheap and selling dear" which but a moment before he has condemned as so defective. As though to make the stultification complete, he pleads for the peace value of military training, on the ground that German commerce has benefited from it—that, in other words, it has promoted the "Cobdenite ideal." The analysis of the reasoning, as has been brilliantly shown by Mr. John M. Robertson,[79] gives a result something like this: (1) War is a great school of morals, therefore we must have great armaments to insure peace; (2) to secure peace engenders the Cobdenite ideal, which is bad, therefore we should adopt conscription, (a) because it is the best safeguard of peace, (b) because it is a training for commerce—the Cobdenite ideal.
Is it true that barrack training—the sort of school which the competition of armaments during the last generation has imposed on the people of Continental Europe—makes for moral health? Is it likely that a "perpetual rehearsal for something never likely to come off, and when it comes off is not like the rehearsal," should be a training for life's realities? Is it likely that such a process would have the stamp and touch of closeness to real things? Is it likely that the mechanical routine of artificial occupations, artificial crimes, artificial virtues, artificial punishments should form any training for the battle of real life?[80] What of the Dreyfus case? What of the abominable scandals that have marked German military life of late years? If peace military training is such a fine school, how could the London Times write thus of France after she had submitted to a generation of a very severe form of it:
A thrill of horror and shame ran through the whole civilized world outside France when the result of the Rennes Court-Martial became known.... By their (the officers') own admission, whether flung defiantly at the judges, their inferiors, or wrung from them under cross-examination, Dreyfus's chief accusers were convicted of gross and fraudulent illegalities which, anywhere, would have sufficed, not only to discredit their testimony—had they any serious testimony to offer—but to transfer them speedily from the witness-box to the prisoner's dock.... Their vaunted honor "rooted in dishonor stood." ... Five judges out of the seven have once more demonstrated the truth of the astounding axiom first propounded during the Zola trial, that "military justice is not as other justice." ... We have no hesitation in saying that the Rennes Court-Martial constitutes in itself the grossest, and, viewed in the light of the surrounding circumstances, the most appalling prostitution of justice which the world has witnessed in modern times.... Flagrantly, deliberately, mercilessly trampled justice underfoot.... The verdict, which is a slap in the face to the public opinion of the civilized world, to the conscience of humanity.... France is henceforth on her trial before history. Arraigned at the bar of a tribunal far higher than that before which Dreyfus stood, it rests with her to show whether she will undo this great wrong and rehabilitate her fair name, or whether she will stand irrevocably condemned and disgraced by allowing it to be consummated. We can less than ever afford to underrate the forces against truth and justice.... Hypnotized by the wild tales perpetually dinned into all credulous ears of an international "syndicate of treason," conspiring against the honor of the army and the safety of France, the conscience of the French nation has been numbed, and its intelligence atrophied.... Amongst those statesmen who are in touch with the outside world in the Senate and Chamber there must be some that will remind her that nations, no more than individuals, cannot bear the burden of universal scorn and live.... France cannot close her ears to the voice of the civilized world, for that voice is the voice of history.[81]