Public Right
Let us try to be more concrete still, and in this context let us turn to such definite statements as are available of the views entertained by our chief statesmen, politicians, and leaders of public opinion. I turn to the speech which Mr. Asquith delivered on Friday evening, September 25, in Dublin, as part of the crusade which he and others are undertaking for the general enlightenment of the country. "I should like," said Mr. Asquith, "to ask your attention and that of my fellow-countrymen to the end which, in this war, we ought to keep in view. Forty-four years ago, at the time of the war of 1870, Mr. Gladstone used these words. He said: 'The greatest triumph of our time will be the enthronement of the idea of public right as the governing idea of European politics.' Nearly fifty years have passed. Little progress, it seems, has as yet been made towards that good and beneficent change, but it seems to me to be now at this moment as good a definition as we can have of our European policy—the idea of public right. What does it mean when translated into concrete terms? It means, first and foremost, the clearing of the ground by the definite repudiation of militarism as the governing factor in the relation of states and of the future moulding of the European world. It means next that room must be found and kept for the independent existence and the free development of the smaller nationalities, each with a corporate consciousness of its own.... And it means, finally, or it ought to mean, perhaps, by a slow and gradual process, the substitution for force, for the clash of competing ambition, for groupings and alliances, of a real European partnership based on the recognition of equal right and established and enforced by a common will."[6]
Much the same language has been used by Sir Edward Grey and by Mr. Winston Churchill.
[6] The Times, September 26.
A Common Will
Observe that there are three points here. In the first place—if I do not misapprehend Mr. Asquith's drift—in working for the abolition of militarism, we are working for a great diminution in those armaments which have become a nightmare to the modern world. The second point is that we have to help in every fashion small nationalities, or, in other words, that we have to see that countries like Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries, Greece and the Balkan States, and, perhaps, more specially, the Slav nationalities shall have a free chance in Europe, shall "have their place in the sun," and not be browbeaten and raided and overwhelmed by their powerful neighbours. And the third point, perhaps more important than all, is the creation of what Mr. Asquith calls a "European partnership based on the recognition of equal right and established and enforced by a common will." We have to recognise that there is such a thing as public right; that there is such a thing as international morality, and that the United States of Europe have to keep as their ideal the affirmation of this public right, and to enforce it by a common will. That creation of a common will is at once the most difficult and the most imperative thing of all. Every one must be aware how difficult it is. We know, for instance, how the common law is enforced in any specified state, because it has a "sanction," or, in other words, because those who break it can be punished. But the weakness for a long time past of international law, from the time of Grotius onwards, is that it apparently has no real sanction. How are we to punish an offending state? It can only be done by the gradual development of a public conscience in Europe, and by means of definite agreements so that the rest of the civilised world shall compel a recalcitrant member to abide by the common decrees. If only this common will of Europe ever came into existence, we should have solved most, if not all, our troubles. But the question is: How?