That question may perhaps make one wonder why it has not been heard more often during the war as a text of the Church. There is little doubt that very many men whose feeling towards the Church is in no way disrespectful or hostile are conscious of a certain uneasiness in hearing her vigorously defending the prosecution of the war and demonstrating its righteousness. They feel, in spite of however conclusive demonstrations to the contrary, that there is a deep-seated inconsistency between war for whatever object and the Sermon on the Mount, and they cannot but remember, when they are told that this is a holy war, that that also the Germans say. They perhaps feel that the justification of the war is, after all, a matter for politicians and statesmen, and that the Church would be more appropriately employed in making it as far as she can a vehicle of good, rather than trying to justify superfluously its existence. A people already awed by the self-sacrifice of its armies may be supposed to be capable of profiting by the exhortations of a Church whose cardinal doctrine is concerned with the responsibility that attaches to those for whose sake life has voluntarily been given up. One cannot imagine an institution more perfectly qualified by its faith and its power to bring home to this people the solemnity of the sanction under which they lie to make themselves worthy of the price that is still being unreservedly paid. If it were consciously the determination of every citizen to make himself worth dying for, who can doubt that a national unity of the sublimest kind would be within reach? {155}
Of all the influences which tend to rob the citizen of the sense of his birthright, perhaps one of the strongest, and yet the most subtle, is that of officialism. It seems inevitable that the enormously complex public services which are necessary in the modern State should set up a barrier between the private citizen and the official, whereby the true relation between them is obscured. The official loses his grasp of the fact that the mechanism of the State is established in the interests of the citizen; the citizen comes to regard the State as a hostile institution, against which he has to defend himself, although it was made for his defence. It is a crime for him to cheat the State in the matter of tax-paying, it is no crime for the State to defraud him in excessive charges. Considered in the light of the fundamental relation of citizen and State, it seems incredible that in a democratic country it is possible for flourishing establishments to exist the sole business of which is to save the private individual from being defrauded by the tax-gathering bureaucracy. This is but a single and rather extreme example of the far-stretching segregation effected by the official machine. The slighter kinds of aloofness, of inhuman etiquette, of legalism and senseless dignity, of indifference to the individual, of devotion to formulæ and routine are no less powerful agents in depriving the common man of the sense of intimate reality in his citizenship which might be so valuable a source of national unity. If the official machine through its utmost parts were animated by an even moderately human spirit and used as a means of binding together the people, instead of as an engine of moral disruption, it might be of incalculable value in the strengthening of morale. {156}
ENGLAND AGAINST GERMANY—GERMANY.
In an earlier part of this book the statement was made that the present juncture in human affairs probably forms one of those rare nodes of circumstance in which the making of an epoch in history corresponds with a perceptible change in the secular progress of biological evolution. It remains to attempt some justification of this opinion.
England and Germany face one another as perhaps the two most typical antagonists of the war. It may seem but a partial way of examining events if we limit our consideration to them. Nevertheless, it is in this duel that the material we are concerned with is chiefly to be found, and it may be added Germany herself has abundantly distinguished this country as her typical foe—an instinctive judgment not without value.
By the end of September 1914 it had become reasonably clear that the war would be one of endurance, and the comparatively equal though fluctuating strength of the two groups of adversaries has since shown that in such endurance the main factor will be the moral factor rather than the material. An examination of the moral strength of the two arch-enemies will therefore have the interest of life and death behind it, as well as such as may belong to the thesis which stands at the head of this chapter.
Germany affords a profoundly interesting study for the biological psychologist, and it is very important that we should not allow what clearness of representation we can get into our picture of her mind to be clouded by the heated atmosphere of national feeling in which our work must be done. As I have said elsewhere, it is merely to encourage fallacy to allow oneself to believe that one is without prejudices. The most one can do is to recognize {157} what prejudices are likely to exist and liberally to allow for them.
If I were to say that at the present moment I can induce myself to believe that it will ever be possible for Europe to contain a strong Germany of the current type and remain habitable by free peoples, the apparent absence of national bias in the statement would be a mere affectation, and by no means an evidence of freedom from prejudice. I am much more likely to get into reasonable relations with the truth if I admit to myself, quite frankly, my innermost conviction that the destruction of the German Empire is an indispensable preliminary to the making of a civilization tolerable by rational beings. Having recognized the existence of that belief as a necessary obstacle to complete freedom of thought, it may be possible to allow for it and to counteract what aberrations of judgment it may be likely to produce.
In making an attempt to estimate the relative moral resources of England and Germany at the present time it is necessary to consider them as biological entities or major units of the human species in the sense of that term we have already repeatedly used. We shall have to examine the evolutionary tendencies which each of these units has shown, and if possible to decide how far they have followed the lines of development which psychological theory indicates to be those of healthy and progressive development for a gregarious animal.
I have already tried to show that the acquirement of the social habit by man—though in fact there is reason to believe that the social habit preceded and made possible his distinctively human characters—has committed him to an evolutionary process which is far from being completed yet, but which {158} nevertheless must be carried out to its consummation if he is to escape increasingly severe disadvantages inherent in that biological type. In other words, the gregarious habit in an animal of large individual mental capacity is capable of becoming, and indeed must become a handicap rather than a bounty unless the society of the species undergoes a continuously progressive co-ordination which will enable it to attract and absorb the energy and activities of its individual members. We have seen that in a species such as man, owing to the freedom from the direct action of natural selection within the major unit, the individual’s capacity for varied reaction to his environment has undergone an enormous development, while at the same time the capacity for intercommunication—upon which the co-ordination of the major unit into a potent and frictionless mechanism depends—has lagged far behind. The term “intercommunication” is here used in the very widest sense to indicate the ties that bind the individual to his fellows and them to him. It is not a very satisfactory word; but as might be expected in attempting to express a series of functions so complex and so unfamiliar to generalization, it is not easy to find an exact expression ready made. Another phrase applicable to a slightly different aspect of the same function is “herd accessibility,” which has the advantage of suggesting by its first constituent the limitation, primitively at any rate, an essential part of the capacities it is desired to denote. The conception of herd accessibility includes the specific sensitiveness of the individual to the existence, presence, thought, and feelings of his fellow-members of the major unit; the power he possesses of reacting in an altruistic and social mode to stimuli which would necessarily evoke a merely egoistic response from a non-social animal—that is to say, the power to deflect and modify egoistic {159} impulses into a social form without emotional loss or dissatisfaction; the capacity to derive from the impulses of the herd a moral power in excess of any similar energy he may be able to develop from purely egoistic sources.