The Great Illusion / A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage

by Norman Angell

The preceding chapter is, indeed, the historical justification of the economic truths established in the first section of this book in the terms of the facts of the present-day world, which show that the predominating factor in survival is shifting from the physical to the intellectual plane. This evolutionary process has now reached a point in international affairs which involves the complete economic futility of military force. In the last chapter but one I dealt with the psychological consequence of this profound change in the nature of man's normal activities, showing that his nature is coming more and more to adapt itself to what he normally and for the greater part of his life—in most cases all his life—is engaged in, and is losing the impulses concerned with an abnormal and unusual occupation.

Why have I presented the facts in this order, and dealt with the psychological result involved in this change before the change itself? I have adopted this order of treatment because the believer in war justifies his dogmatism for the most part by an appeal to what he alleges is the one dominating fact of the situation—i.e., that human nature is unchanging. Well, as will be seen from the chapter on that subject, that alleged fact does not bear investigation. Human nature is changing out of all recognition. Not only is man fighting less, but he is using all forms of physical compulsion less, and as a very natural result is losing those psychological attributes that go with the employment of physical force. And he is coming to employ physical force less because accumulated evidence is pushing him more and more to the conclusion that he can accomplish more easily that which he strives for by other means.

Few of us realize to what extent economic pressure—and I use that term in its just sense, as meaning, not only the struggle for money, but everything implied therein, well-being, social consideration, and the rest—has replaced physical force in human affairs. The primitive mind could not conceive a world in which everything was not regulated by force: even the great minds of antiquity could not believe the world would be an industrious one unless the great mass were made industrious by the use of physical force—i.e., by slavery. Three-fourths of those who peopled what is now Italy in Rome's palmiest days were slaves, chained in the fields when at work, chained at night in their dormitories, with those who were porters chained to the doorways. It was a society of slavery—fighting slaves, working slaves, cultivating slaves, official slaves, and Gibbon adds that the Emperor himself was a slave, "the first slave to the ceremonies he imposed." Great and penetrating as were many of the minds of antiquity, none of them show much conception of any condition of society in which the economic impulse could replace physical compulsion.[90] Had they been told that the time would come when the world would work very much harder under the impulse of an abstract thing known as economic interest, they would have regarded such a statement as that of a mere sentimental theorist. Indeed, one need not go so far: if one had told an American slaveholder of sixty years ago that the time would come when the South would produce more cotton under the free pressure of economic forces than under slavery, he would have made a like reply. He would probably have declared that "a good cowhide whip beats all economic pressure"—pretty much the sort of thing that one may hear from the mouth of the average militarist to-day. Very "practical" and virile, of course, but it has the disadvantage of not being true.

The presumed necessity for physical compulsion did not stop at slavery. As we have already seen, it was accepted as an axiom in statecraft that men's religious beliefs had to be forcibly restrained, and not merely their religious belief, but their very clothing; and we have hundreds of years of complicated sumptuary laws, hundreds of years, also, of forcible control or, rather, the attempted forcible control of prices and trade, the elaborate system of monopolies, absolute prohibition of the entrance into the country of certain foreign goods, the violation of which prohibition was treated as a penal offence. We had even the use of forced money, the refusal to accept which was treated as a penal offence. In many countries for years it was a crime to send gold abroad, all indicating the domination of the mind of man by the same curious obsession that man's life must be ruled by physical force, and it is only very slowly and very painfully that we have arrived at the truth that men will work best when left to unseen and invisible forces. A world in which physical force was withdrawn from the regulation of men's labor, faith, clothes, trade, language, travel, would have been absolutely inconceivable to even the best minds during the three or four thousand years of history which mainly concern us. What is the central explanation of the profound change involved here—the shifting of the pivot in all human affairs, in so far as they touch both the individual and the community, from physical ponderable forces to economic imponderable forces? It is surely that, strange as it may seem, the latter forces accomplish the desired result more efficiently and more readily than do the former, which even when they are not completely futile are in comparison wasteful and stultifying. It is the law of the economy of effort. Indeed, the use of physical force usually involves in those employing it the same limitation of freedom (even if in lesser degree) as that which it is desired to impose. Herbert Spencer illustrates the process in the following suggestive passage:

The exercise of mastery inevitably entails on the master himself some sort of slavery more or less pronounced. The uncultured masses and even the greater part of the cultured will regard this statement as absurd, and though many who have read history with an eye to essentials rather than to trivialities know that this is a paradox in the right sense—that is, true in fact though not seeming true—even they are not fully conscious of the mass of evidence establishing it, and will be all the better for having illustrations recalled. Let me begin with the earliest and simplest which serves to symbolize the whole.

Here is a prisoner, with his hands tied and a cord round his neck (as suggested by figures in Assyrian bas-reliefs), being led home by his savage conqueror, who intends to make him a slave. The one you say is captive and the other free. Are you quite sure the other is free? He holds one end of the cord and, unless he means his captive to escape, he must continue to be fastened by keeping hold of the cord in such way that it cannot easily be detached. He must be himself tied to the captive while the captive is tied to him. In other ways his activities are impeded and certain burdens are imposed on him. A wild animal crosses the track and he cannot pursue. If he wishes to drink of the adjacent stream he must tie up his captive, lest advantage be taken of his defenceless position. Moreover, he has to provide food for both. In various ways he is no longer, then, completely at liberty; and these worries adumbrate in a simple manner the universal truth that the instrumentalities by which the subordination of others is effected themselves subordinate the victor, the master, or the ruler.[91]

Thus it comes that all nations attempting to live by conquest end by being themselves the victims of a military tyranny precisely similar to that which they hope to inflict; or, in other terms, that the attempt to impose by force of arms a disadvantageous commercial situation to the advantage of the conqueror ends in the conqueror's falling a victim to the very disadvantages from which he hoped by a process of spoliation to profit.

But the truth that economic force always in the long run outweighs physical or military force is illustrated by the simple fact of the universal use of money—the fact that the use of money is not a thing which we choose or can shake off, but a thing imposed by the operation of forces stronger than our volition, stronger than the tyranny of the cruellest tyrant who ever reigned by blood and iron. I think it is one of the most astounding things, to the man who takes a fairly fresh mind to the study of history, that the most absolute despots—men who can command the lives of their subjects with a completeness and a nonchalance of which the modern Western world furnishes no parallel—cannot command money. One asks oneself, indeed, why such an absolute ruler, able as he is by the sheer might of his position and by the sheer force of his power to take everything that exists in his kingdom, and able as he is to exact every sort and character of service, needs money, which is the means of obtaining goods or services by a freely consented exchange. Yet, as we know, it is precisely, in ancient as in modern times, the most absolute despot who is often the most financially embarrassed.[92] Is not this a demonstration that in reality physical force is operative in only very narrow limits? It is no mere rhetoric, but the cold truth, to say that under absolutism it is a simple thing to get men's lives, but often impossible to get money. And the more, apparently, that physical force was exercised, the more difficult did the command of money become. And for a very simple reason—a reason which reveals in rudimentary form that principle of the economic futility of military power with which we are dealing. The phenomenon is best illustrated by a concrete case. If one go to-day into one of the independent despotisms of Central Asia one will find generally a picture of the most abject poverty. Why? Because the ruler has absolute power to take wealth whenever he sees it, to take it by any means whatever—torture, death—up to the completest limit of uncontrolled physical force. What is the result? The wealth is not created, and torture itself cannot produce a thing which is non-existent. Step across the frontier into a State under British or Russian protection, where the Khan has some sort of limits imposed on his powers. The difference is immediately perceptible: evidence of wealth and comfort in relative profusion, and, other things being equal, the ruler, whose physical force over his subjects is limited, is a great deal richer than the ruler whose physical force over his subjects is unlimited. In other words, the farther one gets away from physical force, in the acquisition of wealth, the greater is the result for the effort expended. At the one end of the scale you get the despot in rags, exercising sway over what is probably a potentially rich territory, reduced to having to kill a man by torture in order to obtain a sum which at the other end of the scale a London tradesman will spend on a restaurant dinner for the purpose of sitting at table with a duke—or the thousandth part of the sum which the same tradesman will spend in philanthropy or otherwise, for the sake of acquiring an empty title from a monarch who has lost all power of exercising any physical force whatsoever.

Which process, judged by all things that men desire, gives the better result, the physical force of blood and iron which we see, or the intellectual or psychic force which we cannot see? The principle which operates in the limited fashion which I have indicated, operates with no less force in the larger domain of modern international politics. The wealth of the world is not represented by a fixed amount of gold or money now in the possession of one Power, and now in the possession of another, but depends on all the unchecked multiple activities of a community for the time being. Check that activity, whether by imposing tribute, or disadvantageous commercial conditions, or an unwelcome administration which sets up sterile political agitation, and you get less wealth—less wealth for the conqueror, as well as less for the conquered. The broadest statement of the case is that all experience—especially the experience indicated in the last chapter—shows that in trade by free consent, carrying mutual benefit, we get larger results for effort expended than in the exercise of physical force, which attempts to exact advantage for one party at the expense of the other. I am not arguing over again the thesis of the first part of this book; but, as we shall see presently, the general principle of the diminishing factor of physical force in the affairs of the world carries with it a psychological change in human nature which modifies radically our impulses to sheer physical conflict. What it is important just now to keep in mind, is the incalculable intensification of this diminution of physical force by our mechanical development. The principle was obviously less true for Rome than it is for Great Britain or America: Rome, however imperfectly, lived largely by tribute. The sheer mechanical development of the modern world has rendered tribute in the Roman sense impossible. Rome did not have to create markets and find a field for the employment of her capital. We do. What result does this carry? Rome could afford to be relatively indifferent to the prosperity of her subject territory. We cannot. If the territory is not prosperous we have no market, and we have no field for our investments, and that is why we are checked at every point from doing what Rome was able to do. You can to some extent exact tribute by force; you cannot compel a man to buy your goods by force if he does not want them, and has not got the money to pay for them. Now, the difference which we see here has been brought about by the interaction of a whole series of mechanical changes—printing, gunpowder, steam, electricity, improved means of communication. It is the last-named which has mainly created the fact of credit. Now, credit is merely an extension of the use of money, and we can no more shake off the domination of the one than we can that of the other. We have seen that the bloodiest despot is himself the slave of money, in the sense that he is compelled to employ it. In the same way no physical force can, in the modern world, set at nought the force of credit.[93] It is no more possible for a great people of the modern world to live without credit than without money, of which it is a part. Do we not here get an illustration of the fact that intangible economic forces are setting at nought the force of arms?

One of the curiosities of this mechanical development, with its deep-seated psychological results, is the general failure to realize the real bearings of each step therein. Printing was regarded, in the first instance, as merely a new-fangled process which threw a great many copying scribes and monks out of employment. Who realized that in the simple invention of printing there was the liberation of a force greater than the power of kings? It is only here and there that we find an isolated thinker having a glimmering of the political bearing of such inventions of the conception of the great truth that the more man succeeds in his struggle with nature, the less must be the rôle of physical force between men, for the reason that human society has become, with each success in the struggle against nature, a completer organism. That is to say, that the interdependence of the parts has been increased, and that the possibility of one part injuring another without injury to itself, has been diminished. Each part is more dependent on the other parts, and the impulses to injury, therefore, must in the nature of things be diminished. And that fact must, and does, daily redirect human pugnacity. And it is noteworthy that perhaps the best service which the improvement of the instruments of man's struggle with nature performs is the improvement of human relations. Machinery and the steam-engine have done something more than make fortunes for manufacturers: they have abolished human slavery, as Aristotle foresaw they would. It was impossible for men in the mass to be other than superstitious and irrational until they had the printed book.[94] "Roads that are formed for the circulation of wealth become channels for the circulation of ideas, and render possible that simultaneous action upon which all liberty depends." Banking done by telegraphy concerns much more than the stockbroker: it demonstrates clearly and dramatically the real interdependence of nations, and is destined to transform the mind of the statesman. Our struggle is with our environment, not with one another; and those who talk as though struggle between the parts of the same organism must necessarily go on, and as though impulses which are redirected every day can never receive the particular redirection involved in abandoning the struggle between States, ignorantly adopt the formula of science, but leave half the facts out of consideration. And just as the direction of the impulses will be changed, so will the character of the struggle be changed; the force which we shall use for our needs will be the force of intelligence, of hard work, of character, of patience, self-control, and a developed brain, and pugnacity and combativeness which, instead of being used up and wasted in world conflicts of futile destructiveness, will be, and are being, diverted into the steady stream of rationally-directed effort. The virile impulses become, not the tyrant and master, but the tool and servant of the controlling brain.

The conception of abstract imponderable forces by the human mind is a very slow process. All man's history reveals this. The theologian has always felt this difficulty. For thousands of years men could only conceive of evil as an animal with horns and a tail, going about the world devouring folk; abstract conceptions had to be made understandable by a crude anthropomorphism. Perhaps it is better that humanity should have some glimmering of the great facts of the universe, even though interpreted by legends of demons, and goblins, and fairies, and the rest; but we cannot overlook the truth that the facts are distorted in the process, and our advance in the conception of morals is marked largely by the extent to which we can form an abstract conception of the fact of evil—none the less a fact because unembodied—without having to translate it into a non-existent person or animal with a forked tail.