The practical question for the future is whether there is any prospect of returning, under more favourable auspices, to the unrealised ideal of the Middle Ages—an agreement among the nations of Europe to live amicably under one system of international law and right, binding upon all, and with the consciousness of an intellectual and spiritual unity deeper than political divisions. 'The nations are the citizens of humanity,' said Mazzini; and so they ought to be. Some of the omens are favourable. Militarism has dug its own grave. The great powers increased their armaments till the burden became insupportable, and have now rushed into bankruptcy in the hope of shaking it off. In prehistoric times the lords of creation were certain gigantic lizards, protected by massive armour-plates which could only be carried by a creature thirty to sixty feet long. Then they died, when neither earth, air, nor water could support them any longer. Such must be the end of the European nations, unless they learn wisdom. The lesson will be brought home to them by Transatlantic competition. The United States of America had already, before this war, an initial advantage over the disunited states of Europe, amounting to at least 10 per cent. on every contract; after the war this advantage will be doubled. It remains to be seen whether the next generation will honour the debts which we are piling up. Disraeli used to complain of what he called 'Dutch finance,' which consists in 'mortgaging the industry of the future to protect property in the present.' Pitt paid for the great war of a hundred years ago in this manner; after a century we are still groaning under the burden of his loans. We may hear more of the iniquity of 'Dutch finance' when the democracies of the next generation have a chance of repudiating obligations which, as they will say, they did not contract. However that may be, international rivalry is plainly very bad business; and there are great possibilities in the Hague Tribunal, if, and only if, the signatories to the conference bind themselves to use force against a recalcitrant member. The conduct of Germany in this war has shown that public opinion is powerless to restrain a nation which feels strong enough to defy it.
Another cause which may give patriots leisure to turn their thoughts away from war's alarms is that the 'swarming' period of the European races is coming to an end. The unparalleled increase of population in the first three quarters of the 19th century has been followed by a progressive decrease in the birth-rate, which will begin to tell upon social conditions when the reduction in the death-rate, which has hitherto kept pace with it, shall have reached its natural limit. Europe with a stationary population will be in a much happier condition; and problems of social reform can then be tackled with some hope of success. Honourable emulation in the arts of life may then take the place of desperate competition and antagonism. Human lives will begin to have a positive value, and we may even think it fair to honour our saviours more than our destroyers. The effects of past follies will then soon be effaced; for nations recover much more quickly from wars than from internal disorders. External injuries are rapidly cured; but 'those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves.' The greatest obstacle to progress is not man's inherited pugnacity, but his incorrigible tendency to parasitism. The true patriot will keep his eye fixed on this, and will dread as the state's worst enemies those citizens who at the top and bottom of the social scale have no other ambition than to hang on and suck the life-blood of the nation. Great things may be hoped from the new science of eugenics, when it has passed out of its tentative and experimental stage.
In the distant future we may reasonably hope that patriotism will be a sentiment like the loyalty which binds a man to his public school and university, an affection purged of all rancour and jealousy, a stimulus to all honourable conduct and noble effort, a part of the poetry of life. It is so already to many of us, and has been so to the noblest Englishmen since we have had a literature. If Henry V's speech at Agincourt is the splendid gasconade of a royal freebooter, there is no false ring in the scene where John of Gaunt takes leave of his banished son; nor in Sir Walter Scott's 'Breathes there a man with soul so dead,' etc. 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.' We cannot quite manage to substitute London for Zion in singing psalms, though there are some in England—Eton, Winchester, Oxford, Cambridge—which do evoke these feelings. These emotions of loyalty and devotion are by no means to be checked or despised. They have an infinite potency for good. In spiritual things there is no conflict between intensity and expansion. The deepest sympathy is, potentially, also the widest. He who loves not his home and country which he has seen, how shall he love humanity in general which he has not seen? There are, after all, few emotions of which one has less reason to be ashamed than the little lump in the throat which the Englishman feels when he first catches sight of the white cliffs of Dover.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] In his Introduction to Social Psychology.
[9] The reasons of their irresistible strength have been explained in a most brilliant manner by Dr. Peisker in the first volume of the 'Cambridge Medieval History.'
THE BIRTH-RATE
(1917)
The numbers of every species are determined, not by the procreative power of its members, which always greatly exceeds the capacity of the earth to support a progeny increasing in geometrical progression, but by two factors, the activity of its enemies and the available supply of food. Those species which survive owe their success in the struggle for existence mainly to one of two qualities, enormous fertility or parental care. The female cod spawns about 6,000,000 eggs at a time, of which at most one-third—perhaps much less—are afterwards fertilised. An infinitesimal proportion of these escapes being devoured by fish or fowl. An insect-eating bird is said to require for its support about 250,000 insects a year, and the number of such birds must amount to thousands of millions. As a rule there is a kind of equilibrium between the forces of destruction and of reproduction. If a species is nearly exterminated by its enemies, those enemies lose their food-supply and perish themselves. In some sheltered spot the survivors of the victims remain and increase till they begin to send out colonies again. In some species, such as the mice in La Plata, and the beasts and birds which devour them, there is an alternation of increase and decrease, to be accounted for in this way. But permanent disturbances of equilibrium sometimes occur. The rabbit in Australia, having found a virgin soil, multiplied for some time almost up to the limit of its natural fertility and is firmly established on that continent. The brown rat (some say) has exterminated our black rat and the Maori rat in New Zealand. The microbe of the terrible disease which the crews of Columbus brought back to Europe, after causing a devastating epidemic at the end of the fifteenth century, established a kind of modus vivendi with its hosts, and has remained as a permanent scourge in Europe. Other microbes, like those of cholera and plague, emigrate from the lands where they are endemic, like a horde of Tartars, and after slaying all who are susceptible disappear from inanition. The draining of the fens has driven the anopheles mosquito from England, and our countrymen no longer suffer from 'ague.' Cleanlier habits are banishing the louse and its accompaniment typhus fever.