Good feeling and kindliness and a ready emotion are among the most precious things in life, but they are qualities possessed by some of the most retrograde nations in the world, because in them they are not coupled with the homely quality of hard work, in which one may include hard thinking. This last is the real price of progress, and we shall make none of worth unless we pay it.
A word or two as to the rôle of "friendship" in international relations. Courtesy and a certain measure of good faith are essential elements wherever civilized men come in direct contact; without them organized society would go to pieces. But these invaluable elements never yet of themselves settled real differences; they merely render the other factors of adjustment possible. Why should one expect courtesy and good-fellowship to settle grave political differences between English and Germans when they altogether fail to settle such differences between English and English? What should we say of a statesman professing to be serious who suggested that all would be well between President Wilson and the lobbyists concerning the tariff, between the Democrats and Republicans on protection, between the millionaire and the day laborer on the question of the income tax, and a thousand and one other things—that all these knotty problems would disappear, if only the respective protagonists could be persuaded to take lunch together? Is it not a little childish?
Yet I am bound to admit that a whole school of persons who deal with international problems would have us believe that all international differences would disappear if only we could have enough junketings, dinner-parties, exchange visits of clergymen, and what not. These things have immense use in so far as they facilitate discussion and the elucidation of the policy in which the rivalry has its birth, and to that extent only. But if they are not vehicles of intellectual comprehension, if the parties go away with as little understanding of the factors and nature of international relationship as they had before such meetings took place, they have served no purpose whatsoever.
The work of the world does not get done merely by being good friends with everybody; the problems of international diplomacy are not to be solved merely by a sort of international picnic; that would make the world too easy a place to live in.
However ungracious it may seem, it is nevertheless dangerous to allow to go unchallenged the notion that the cultivation of "friendship and affection" between nations, irrespective of the other factors affecting their relationship, can ever seriously modify international politics. The matter is of grave importance, because so much good effort is spent in putting the cart before the horse, and attempting to create an operative factor out of a sentiment that can never be constant and positive one way or the other, since it must in the nature of things be largely artificial. It is a psychological impossibility in any ordinary workaday circumstances to have any special feeling of affection for a hundred or sixty or forty millions of people, composed of infinitely diverse elements, good, bad, and indifferent, noble and mean, pleasing and unpleasing, whom, moreover, we have never seen and never shall see. It is too large an order. We might as well be asked to entertain feelings of affection for the Tropic of Capricorn. As I have already hinted, we have no particular affection for the great mass of our own countrymen—your lobbyist enthusiast for Mr. Wilson, your railroad striker for the employer of labor, your Suffragette for your anti-Suffragette, and so on ad infinitum. Patriotism has nothing to do with it. The patriot is often the person who had the heartiest detestation for a large mass of his fellow-countrymen. Consider any anti-administration literature. As an English instance a glance at Mr. Leo Maxse's monthly masterpieces of epithet-making, or at what the pan-Germans have to say of their own Empire and Government ("poltroons in the pay of the English" is a choice tit-bit I select from one German newspaper), will soon convince one.
Why, therefore, should we be asked to entertain for foreigners a sentiment we do not give to our own people? And not only to entertain that sentiment, but to make (always in the terms of the present political beliefs) great sacrifices on behalf of it!
Need it be said that I have not the least desire to deprecate sincere emotion as a factor in progress? Emotion and enthusiasm form the divine stimulus without which no great things would be achieved; but emotion divorced from mental and moral discipline is not the kind on which wise men will place a very high value. Some of the intensest emotion of the world has been given to some of the worst possible objects. Just as in the physical world, the same forces—steam, gunpowder, what you will—which, controlled and directed may do an infinitely useful work—may, uncontrolled, cause accidents and catastrophes of the gravest kind.
Nor is it true that the better understanding of this matter is beyond the great mass of men, that sounder ideas depend upon the comprehension of complex and abstruse points, correct judgment in intricate matters of finance or economics. Things which seem in one stage of thought obscure and difficult are cleared up merely by setting one or two crooked facts straight. The rationalists, who a generation or two ago struggled with such things as the prevalent belief in witchcraft, may have deemed that the abolition of superstitions of this kind would take "thousands of years."
Lecky has pointed out that during the eighteenth century many judges in Europe—not ignorant men, but, on the contrary, exceedingly well-educated men, trained to sift evidence—were condemning people to death by hundreds for witchcraft. Acute and educated men still believed in it; its disproof demanded a large acquaintance with the forces and processes of physical nature, and it was generally thought that, while a few exceptional intelligences here and there would shake off these beliefs, they would remain indefinitely the possessions of the great mass of mankind.
What has happened? A schoolboy to-day would scout the evidence which, on the judgment of very learned men, sent thousands of poor wretches to their doom in the eighteenth century. Would the schoolboy necessarily be more learned or more acute than those judges? They probably knew a great deal about the science of witchcraft, were more familiar with its literature, with the arguments which supported it, and they would have hopelessly worsted any nineteenth-century schoolboy in any argument on the subject. The point is, however, that the schoolboy would have two or three essential facts straight, instead of getting them crooked.