What hopes dare we cherish, in this hour of conflict, for the future of civilization?
The great, the supreme task of human politics and statesmanship is to extend the sphere of Law. Let others labor to make men cultured or virtuous or happy. These are the tasks of the teacher, the priest, and the common man. The statesman’s task is simpler. It is to enfold them in a jurisdiction which will enable them to live the life of their soul’s choice. The State, said the Greek philosophers, is the foundation of the good life; but its crown rises far above mere citizenship. “There where the State ends,” cries Nietzsche, echoing Aristotle and the great tradition of civilized political thought, “there men begin. There, where the State ends, look thither, my brothers! Do you not see the rainbow and the bridge to the Overman?” Ever since organized society began, the standards of the individual, the ideals of priest and teacher, the doctrines of religion and morality, have outstripped the practise of statesmanship. For the polestar of the statesman has not been love, but law. His not the task of exhorting men to love one another, but the simpler duty of enforcing the law, “Thou shalt not kill.” And in that simple, strenuous, necessary task statesmen and political thinkers have watched the slow extension of the power of Law, from the family to the tribe, from the tribe to the city, from the city to the nation, from the nation to the Commonwealth. When will Law take its next extension? When will warfare, which is murder between individuals and “rebellion” between groups of citizens, be equally preventable between nations by the common law of the world?
The answer is simple. When the world has a common will, and has created a common government to express and enforce that will.
The World is already one great Society.
In the sphere of science and invention, of industry and economics, as Norman Angell and others have taught us, the world is already one Great Society. For the merchant, the banker, and the stockbroker political frontiers have been broken down. Trade and industry respond to the reactions of a single, world-wide, nervous system. Shocks and panics pass as freely as airmen over borders and custom-houses. And not “big business” only, but the humblest citizen, in his search for a livelihood, finds himself caught in the meshes of the same world-wide network. “The widow who takes in washing,” says Graham Wallas, in his deep and searching analysis of our contemporary life, “fails or succeeds according to her skill in choosing starch or soda or a wringing machine under the influence of half a dozen competing world-schemes of advertisement.... The English factory girl who is urged to join her Union, the tired old Scotch gatekeeper with a few pounds to invest, the Galician peasant when the emigration agent calls, the artisan in a French provincial town whose industry is threatened by a new invention, all know that unless they find their way among world-wide facts, which only reach them through misleading words, they will be crushed.” The Industrial Revolution of the past century, steam-power and electricity, the railway and the telegraph, have knit mankind together, and made the world one place.
But it lacks a common will and emotion.
But this new Great Society is as yet formless and inarticulate. It is not only devoid of common leadership and a common government; it lacks even the beginnings of a common will, a common emotion, and a common consciousness. Of the Great Society, consciously or unconsciously, we must all perforce be members; but of the Great State, the great World-Commonwealth, we do not yet discern the rudiments. The economic organization of the world has outstripped the development of its citizenship and government—the economic man, with his far-sighted vision and scientific control of the resources of the world, must sit by and see the work of his hands laid in ashes by contending governments and peoples. No man can say how many generations must pass before the platitudes of the market and the exchange pass into the current language of politics.
In the great work which lies before the statesmen and peoples of the world for the extension of law and common citizenship and prevention of war there are two parallel lines of advance.
The ideal of Inter-State Law must be revived.
One road lies through the development of what is known as International, but should more properly be called Inter-State Law, through the revival, on a firmer and broader foundation, of the Concert of Europe conceived by the Congress of Vienna just a hundred years ago—itself a revival, on a secular basis, of the great medieval ideal of an international Christendom, held together by Christian Law and Christian ideals. That ideal faded away forever at the Reformation, which grouped Europe into independent sovereign States ruled by men responsible to no one outside their own borders. It will never be revived on an ecclesiastical basis. Can we hope for its revival on a basis of modern democracy, modern nationality, and modern educated public opinion? Can Inter-State Law, hitherto a mere shadow of the majestic name it bears, almost a matter of convention and etiquette, with no permanent tribunal to interpret it, and no government to enforce it, be enthroned with the necessary powers to maintain justice between the peoples and governments of the world?