Will this new State have the other attributes of Government—a Common Legislature and a Common Executive—as well as a Common Judiciary? Let us go back to Professor Murray's words. He speaks of "outvoted minorities." Let us suppose the refractory country to be Great Britain, outvoted on some question relating to sea-power. Of whom will the outvoted minority consist? Of the British members on the "Common Council" of the Concert. But the question at once arises, what are the credentials of these British members? Whom do they represent? To whom are they responsible? If they are the representatives of the British people and responsible to the democracy which sent them, how can they be expected to "accustom themselves to giving way"—perhaps to a majority composed of the representatives of undemocratic governments? Their responsibility is, not to the Concert, but to their own Government and people. They are not the minority members of a democratically-elected Council of their own fellow-citizens. They are the minority members of a heterogeneous Council towards which they owe no allegiance and recognise no binding responsibility. There is no half-way house between Citizenship and no Citizenship, between Responsibility and no Responsibility. No man and no community can serve two masters. When the point of conflict arises men and nations have to make the choice where their duty lies. Not the representatives of Great Britain on the International Concert, but the people of Great Britain themselves would have to decide whether their real allegiance, as citizens, was due to the World-State or to their own Commonwealth: they would find themselves at the same awful parting of the ways which confronted the people of the Southern States in 1861. When at the outbreak of the Civil War General Lee was offered by Lincoln the Commandership of the Northern armies and refused it, to become the Commander-in-Chief on the side of the South, he did so because "he believed," as he told Congress after the war, "that the act of Virginia in withdrawing herself from the United States carried him along with it as a citizen of Virginia, and that her laws and acts were binding on him." In other words, unless the proposed Common Council is to be made something more than a Council of the delegates of sovereign States (as the Southern States believed themselves to be till 1861), a deadlock sooner or later is almost inevitable, and the terrible and difficult question—so familiar to Americans and recently to ourselves on the smaller stage of Ulster—of the right of secession and the coercion of minorities will arise. But if the Common Council is framed in accordance with a Constitution which binds its representatives to accept its decisions and obey its government, then the World-State, with a World-Executive, will already have come into being. There will be no more war, but only Rebellion and Treason.
Such is the real meaning of proposals to give a binding sanction to the decisions of an Inter-State Concert. Anything short of this—treaties and arbitration-agreements based upon inter-State arrangements without any executive to enforce them—may give relief for a time and pave the way for further progress, but can in itself provide no permanent security, no satisfactory justification for the neglect of defensive measures by the various sovereign governments on behalf of their peoples. Mr. Bryan, for the United States, has within the last eighteen months concluded twenty-six general arbitration treaties with different Governments, and may yet succeed in his ambition of signing treaties with all the remainder. Yet no one imagines that, when the immunity of the United States from attack is guaranteed by the promise of every Government in the world, America will rely for her defence upon those promises alone.
In discussing proposals for a European Council, then, we must be quite sure to face all that it means. But let us not reject Professor Murray's suggestion off-hand because of its inherent difficulties: for that men should be discussing such schemes at all marks a significant advance in our political thought. Only let us be quite clear as to what they presuppose. They presuppose the supremacy, in the collective mind of civilised mankind, of Law over Force, a definite supremacy of what may be called the civilian as against the military ideal, not in a majority of States, but in every State powerful enough to defy coercion. They presuppose a world map definitely settled on lines satisfactory to the national aspirations of the peoples. They presuppose a status quo which is not simply maintained, like that after 1815, because it is a legal fact and its disturbance would be inconvenient to the existing rulers, but because it is inherently equitable.[1] They presuppose a similar democratic basis of citizenship and representation among the component States. They presuppose, lastly, an educated public opinion incomparably less selfish, less ignorant, less unsteady, less materialistic, and less narrowly national than has been prevalent hitherto. Let us work and hope for these things: let us use our best efforts to remove misunderstandings and promote a sense of common responsibilities and common trusteeship for civilisation between the peoples of all the various sovereign States; but meanwhile let us work also, with better hopes of immediate if less ambitious successes, along the other parallel road of advance.
[Footnote 1: The same applies to proposals for ensuring permanent peace in the industrial sphere. Neither capital nor labour will abide by "scraps of paper" if they do not feel the status quo (i.e. the conditions under which wage-contracts are made) to be equitable and inherently just.]
The other road may seem, in this hour of dreams and disaster, of extremes of hope and disillusionment, a long and tedious track: it is the old slow high road of civilisation, not the short cut across the fields. It looks forward to abiding results, not through the mechanical co-operation of governments, but through the growth of an organic citizenship, through the education of the nations themselves to a sense of common duty and a common life. It looks forward, not to the definite establishment, in our day, of the World-State, but only to the definite refutation of the wicked theory of the mutual incompatibility of nations. It looks forward to the expression in the outward order of the world's government of what we may call "the Principle of the Commonwealth," of Lord Acton's great principle of the State composed of free nations, of the State as a living body which lives through the organic union and free activity of its several national members. And it finds its immediate field of action in the deepening and extension of the obligations of citizenship among the peoples of the great, free, just, peace-loving, supra-national Commonwealths whose patriotism has been built up, not by precept and doctrine, but on a firm foundation of older loyalties.
The principle of the Commonwealth is not a European principle: it is a world-principle. It does not proceed upon the expectation of a United States of Europe; for all the Great Powers of Europe except Austria-Hungary (and some of the smaller, such as Holland, Belgium, and Portugal) are extra-European Powers also. Indeed if we contract our view, with Gladstone and Bismarck and the statesmen of the last generation, to European issues alone, we shall be ignoring the chief political problem of our age—the contact of races and nations with wide varieties of social experience and at different levels of civilisation. It is this great and insistent problem (call it the problem of East and West, or the problem of the colour-line) in all its difficult ramifications, political, social, and, above all, economic, which makes the development of the principle of the Commonwealth the most pressing political need of our age. For the problems arising out of the contact of races and nations can never be adjusted either by the wise action of individuals or by conflict and warfare; they can only be solved by fair and deliberate statesmanship within the bosom of a single State, through the recognition by both parties of a higher claim than their own sectional interest—the claim of a common citizenship and the interest of civilisation.[1] It is here, in the union and collaboration of diverse races and peoples, that the principle of the Commonwealth finds its peculiar field of operation. Without this principle, and without its expression, however imperfect, in the British Empire, the world would be in chaos to-day.
[Footnote 1: The most recent example of this is the settlement of the very difficult dispute between India and South Africa.]
We cannot predict the political development of the various Great Powers who between them control the destinies of civilisation. We cannot estimate the degree or the manner in which France, freed at last from nearer preoccupations, will seek to embody in her vast dominion the great civilising principles for which her republic stands. We cannot foretell the issue of the conflict of ideas which has swayed to and fro in Russia between the British and the Prussian method of dealing with the problem of nationality. Germany, Italy, Japan—here, too, we are faced by enigmas. One other great Commonwealth remains besides the British. Upon the United States already lies the responsibility, voluntarily assumed and, except during a time of internal crisis,[1] successfully discharged, of securing peace from external foes for scores of millions of inhabitants of the American continent. Yet with the progress of events her responsibilities must yearly enlarge: for both the immigrant nationalities within and the world-problems without her borders seem to summon her to a deeper education and to wider obligations.
[Footnote 1: French occupation of Mexico, 1862, during the American Civil
War, when the Monroe Doctrine was temporarily in abeyance.]
But upon the vast, ramifying, and inchoate Commonwealth of Great Britain lies the heaviest responsibility. It is a task unequally shared between those of her citizens who are capable of discharging it. Her task within the Commonwealth is to maintain the common character and ideals and to adjust the mutual relations of one quarter of the human race. Her task without is to throw her weight into the scales of peace, and to uphold and develop the standard and validity of inter-State agreements. It is a task which requires, even at this time of crisis, when, by the common sentiment of her citizens, the real nature and purpose of the Commonwealth have become clear to us, the active thoughts of all political students. For to bring home to all within her borders who bear rule and responsibility, from the village headman in India and Nigeria, the Basutu chief and the South Sea potentate, to the public opinion of Great Britain and the self-governing Dominions, the nature of the British Commonwealth, and the character of its citizenship and ideals, and to study how those ideals may be better expressed in its working institutions and executive government—that is a task to which the present crisis beckons the minds of British citizens, a task which Britain owes not only to herself but to mankind.