To those who know the local narrowness, the jealousies and pettiness of much of our own national life, it will seem a primary duty in education to present the country as an object of education and service, imperfect indeed and limited by larger ends, but yet supreme over the selfish interests of trade, town, or individual. This, with all its terrible losses, the war is doing for us with mighty and irresistible strokes, and it is a tragic truth that in our present imperfect social state, it is only a war, hurling us against other great and really co-operating communities of men, which can make us bear with comparative ease and cheerfulness the most serious burdens of loss and suffering. We act instantly as one people in war, we haggle and hesitate about the most moderate sacrifices to secure an advance in peace. It is this quality in patriotism, and in war as its stimulus, which largely and naturally biases our view. But to the ideal of a united Western civilization or a united mankind it is only one step. We cannot do without patriotism, but we must immediately proceed beyond it. We cannot reform the troubles and conflicts of mankind by attempting to root up some of our most tenacious passions; we progress by mastering and not mutilating our being. We have to advance beyond the limits of patriotism by wider sympathy, by seeing analogies, by recognizing the facts of common interests and co-operation in the world.
But here again, looking at the question from an educational rather than an abstract point of view, we have to recognize that actual realization of the life and services of other nations is a slow, difficult, and, at best, a limited process. It was really easier for the travelling student of the Middle Ages to enter into the simple and similar life of universities abroad than for the modern traveller to grasp the complex relations of a great foreign city or state. We have therefore, in practice, to select and concentrate. For the modern Englishman a knowledge of one or two other countries and languages is as much as the pressure of life will permit, and it is greatly to be regretted that poverty and hard work limit even this acquisition to very few. A Wanderjahr for the working-man would do much to cement the unity of western civilization.
Until the recent acute rivalry with Germany developed, English sympathies were fairly evenly divided. Your Liberal, as a rule, was a Frenchman, and your Conservative a German. George Meredith and John Morley sang the praises of France, Coleridge and Carlyle would have us learn from Germany. Now for many years the die is cast. We shall face the settlement and the dangers of the future side by side with France.
This becomes, then, one of the fixed points in our orientation. History and geography both dictate it. Just as in the building of our fatherland and its attendant sentiments, the process is not a purely logical one, but comes to its completion by most irregular courses, with all sorts of bypaths due to the odd configuration of our nature and the world we live in, so in widening out from patriotism to humanity we have to follow a line given, for the most part, by external facts. The French as our nearest neighbours have always had a special interest for us. They, like ourselves, have inherited a mixed race and a mixed civilization, partly Teutonic, partly Celtic, partly Roman, but with elements variously combined. To us a more predominantly Teutonic stock and an insular position have given a more independent and unique character, history, and constitution. France, as being continental and more central, was also more completely Romanized, and has at all periods of her history been more in touch with the general stream of thought than ourselves. Often she has led it, always she has reflected it more quickly and perfectly. Our traditional rivalry has been a chivalrous one, marked by many episodes of real admiration and close friendship. To Elizabeth, to Cromwell, to the Crusaders of the twelfth and the philosophers of the eighteenth century, France and England seemed as naturally allied as they are now in repelling a common aggression on their homes and liberty. But for the future the strongest links will be the two great common ideals, self-government and individual freedom at home, and the community of free peoples abroad. In the practical democracy already realized at home, and in the ideal of a humanity built up of such self-governing and co-operating states, France and England stand for the unity of western civilization in the sense in which it has been traced in this volume, the only sense which makes it worth the sacrifice of wealth and toil and life.
ERRATUM.
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for cannot it abolish read it cannot abolish
Marvin: The Unity of Western Civilization.
[** Transcriber's Note: The text below was modified to reflect the ERRATUM above. The original ERRATUM is left in the document for historical purposes. **]
The unity of which we believe ourselves to be now the champions must therefore be a real thing based on freedom and realized by conscious effort; but it must also be truly comprehensive, not exclusive of any willing co-operator, not aimed against any one but for the whole. It is not intended in this volume to discuss any burning questions of the day, and therefore the briefest indications must be given of how the nucleus of western culture has been formed and how it must reform itself after the war. France, Germany, and England have been for many years, collectively far the most important centres of science and social progress in the world, and it would have been the ideal policy for them to give a united lead to the rest of the world. The war has altered that, but it cannot abolish the fundamental facts on which the civilization of the West is based, science, power over nature, and social organization. In these the same three countries will still have a certain primacy, though the position of the United States will be enormously strengthened. No peace can, of course, be permanent which contemplates the excommunication of a leading member of the human family.
Italy in science, philosophy, and literature, is a worthy colleague, and Russia makes a great stride forward by allying herself with the forces of progress and European unity.
Now it is clear that there are two distinct lines of approach to our goal of a united mankind. We may cultivate for ourselves, as an ideal based on love and reason, the notion of all men as brothers working together, helping one another even when unknown, strengthening one another's powers, and gradually advancing towards a higher goal. This, though not a complete religion for most people, at least partakes of the nature of religion. The other line is concerned with the practical task of reconciling actual difficulties, bringing nations together for various purposes—arbitration, international trade, boards of conciliation and the like. This is the slow and thorny path, and on account of its very difficulty is apt to engross the thoughts and energy of the best brains which devote themselves to the cause. But the first line, of self-cultivation and the promotion of a favourable spirit among others, though open to any one and easy of approach, is apt to be neglected. Such 'mere idealism', like pure benevolence, runs some risk of being choked by the multiplicity of details and agencies and organizations which beset the modern world. Humanity, as an idea, was perhaps more easily apprehended in the days of Turgot and Condorcet than it is with us when the implements of a united mankind have been immeasurably augmented and improved. All the greater, then, the need to re-integrate the notion. Just as in science the dispersive effect of specialism has led many thinkers to desire another order of minds specially devoted to generalism, to knitting together the results of the detailed investigations of others, so in conduct, morals and politics, it is more and more imperative to recall men's minds, and, in the first place, our own, to the large governing ideas by which after all our lesser rules and objects must stand or fall. For who will dispute that all our alliances and international action and the war itself can only be ultimately justified if they are seen to serve the highest interests of mankind as a whole?
A volume, and a very valuable one, might be written on the evolution of this idea of Humanity in history. We should need in the first place to analyse, with some care, in what sense it is in each case used. There is the simple sense of brotherhood such as we know to be deeply felt among our allies in Russia. Of this there must have been germs from the earliest appearance of mankind upon earth. It is one of those most precious things which the development of wealth and class and distinctive culture has tended to blunt in more elaborate civilizations. But when we consider that the full conception of Humanity involves a knowledge of man's evolution, his growth in power, and organization throughout history, as well as the simple but indispensable sense of man's brotherhood, we shall see how long a road the Russian moujik—as well as multitudes of his fellows in all other lands—must travel before he comes in view of the goal. In the fuller sense of a self-conscious and developing being, the idea of Humanity first appears with the Stoics, after the Greeks had put their leaven of abstract thought into the world. The whole inhabited world as the City of Man was the Stoic ideal, and it embraced both the idea of the [Greek: polis] which Platonic and Aristotelian thought had reached in the fourth century B.C., and the extension to the rest of mankind which was in the air just before the Christian era. Christianity affected the conception in a twofold manner. On the one hand it limited it, for the Stoic City of Man became the City of God, who was to be sought and worshipped in one prescribed order. On the other hand it deepened it, for the springs of a common humanity were found to go beneath the superficial facts of a citizen life into the depths of souls which have identical relations with eternal things, with sin and suffering and hopes of the future.