We see these forces at work around us every day accomplishing miracles, doing things which a thousand years of fighting was never able to do—and then say serenely that they are mere "theories." Why do Catholic powers no longer execute heretics? They have a perfect right—even in international law—to do so. What is it that protects the heretic in Catholic countries? The police? But the main business of the police and the army used to be to hunt him down. What is controlling the police and the army?
By some sort of process there has been an increasing intuitive recognition of a certain code which we realize to be necessary for a decent society. It has come to be a sanction much stronger than the sanction of law, much more effective than the sanction of military force. During the German advance on Paris in August last I happened to be present at a French family conference. Stories of the incredible cruelties and ferocity of the Germans were circulating in the Northern Department, where I happened to be staying.
Every one was in a condition of panic, and two Frenchmen, fathers of families, were seeing red at the story of all these barbarities. But they had to decide—and the thing was discussed at a little family conference—where they should send their wives and children. And one of these Frenchmen, the one who had been most ferocious in his condemnation of the German barbarian, said quite naïvely and with no sense of irony or paradox: "Of course, if we could find an absolutely open town which would not be defended at all the women folk and children would be all right." His instinct, of course, was perfectly just. The German "savage" had had three quarters of a million people in his absolute power in Brussels, and so far as we know, not a child or a woman has been injured.
Indeed, in normal times our security against foreigners is not based upon physical force at all. I suppose during the last century some hundreds of thousands of British and American tourists have traveled through the historic cities of Germany, their children have gone to the German educational institutions, their invalids have been attended by German doctors and cut up by German surgeons in German sanatoria and health resorts, and I am quite sure that it never occurred to any one of these hundreds of thousands that their little children when in the educational institutions of these "Huns" were in any way in danger. It was not the guns of the American Navy or the British Navy that were protecting them; the physical force of America or of Great Britain could not certainly be the factor operative in, say, Switzerland or Austria, yet every Summer tens of thousands of them trust their lives and those of their women and children in the remote mountains of Switzerland on no better security than the expectation that a foreign community over whom we have no possibility of exercising force will observe a convention which has no sanction other than the recognition that it is to their advantage to observe it.
And we thus have the spectacle of millions of Anglo-Saxons absolutely convinced that the sanctity of their homes and the safety of their property are secure from the ravages of the foreigner only because they possess a naval and military force that overawes him, yet serenely leaving the protection of that military force, and placing life and property alike within the absolute power of that very foreigner against whose predatory tendencies we spend millions in protecting ourselves.
No use of military power, however complete and overwhelming, would pretend to afford a protection anything like as complete as that afforded by these moral forces. Sixty years ago Britain had as against Greece a preponderance of power that made her the absolute dictator of the latter's policy, yet all the British battleships and all the threats of "consequences" could not prevent British travelers being murdered by Greek brigands, though in Switzerland only moral forces—the recognition by an astute people of the advantage of treating foreigners well—had already made the lives and property of Britons as safe in that country as in their own.
In the same way, no scheme of arming Protestants as against Catholics, or Catholics as against Protestants (the method which gave us the wars of religion and massacre of St. Bartholomew) could assure that general security of spiritual and intellectual possessions which we now in large measure enjoy. So indeed with the more material things, France, Great Britain, and some of the older nations have sunk thousands of millions in foreign investments, the real security of which is not in any physical force which their Government could possibly exercise, but the free recognition of foreigners that it is to their advantage to adhere to financial obligations. Englishmen do not even pretend that the security of their investments in a country like the United States or the Argentine is dependent upon the coercion which the British Government is able to exercise over these communities.
The reader will not, I think, misunderstand me. I am not pleading that human nature has undergone or will undergo any radical transformation. Rather am I asserting that it will not undergo any; that the intention of the man of the tenth century in Europe was as good as that of the man of the twentieth, that the man of the tenth century was as capable of self-sacrifice—was, it may be, less self-seeking. But what I am trying to hint is that the shrinking of the world by our developed intercommunication has made us all more interdependent.
The German Government moves its troops against Belgium; a moratorium is immediately proclaimed in Rio de Janeiro, a dozen American Stock Exchanges are promptly closed and some hundreds of thousands of our people are affected in their daily lives. This worldwide effect is not a matter of some years or a generation or two. It is a matter of an hour; we are intimately concerned with the actions of men on the other side of the world that we have never seen and never shall see; and they are intimately concerned with us. We know without having thought it out that we are bound together by a compact; the very fact that we are dependent upon one another creates as a matter of fact a partnership. We are expecting the other man to perform his part; he has been doing so uninterruptedly for years, and we send him our goods or we take his bill of exchange, or our families are afloat in his ships, expecting that he will pay for his goods, honor the bill of exchange, navigate safely his ship—he has undertaken to do these things in the world-wide partnership of our common labor and then he fails. He does not do these things, and we have a very lively sense of the immorality of the doctrine which permits him to escape doing them.
And so there are certain things that are not done, certain lengths to which even in war time we cannot go. What will stop the war is not so much the fighting, any more than Protestant massacres prevented Catholic massacres. Men do not fear the enemy soldiers; they do fear the turning of certain social and moral forces against them. The German Government does not hesitate for a moment to send ten thousand of its own people to certain death under enemy guns even though the military advantage of so doing may be relatively trifling. But it dare not order the massacre of ten thousand foreign residents in Berlin. There is some force which makes it sometimes more scrupulous of the lives of its enemy than of the lives of its own people.