Section Iii.--Unity of Interconnexion

This brings us to the third sense in which unity can be predicated of a cultural group. The unity that depends on the interconnexion of distinct parts implies some differences of character. Western civilization has lost something of the unity of character which it owed to its common origin, though it still retains enough of it to figure as a single whole in contrast to the rest of the world. We may be sure that the differences between German, French, and English seem much less marked to the intelligent Chinese than they are to Germans, Frenchmen, and English themselves. We ourselves habitually think of China and Japan together as denizens of the Far East, and it is only personal acquaintance which makes us begin to mark the differences between them. Few Europeans, I imagine, get as far in their discrimination as to appreciate the distinctions between the Northern and Southern Chinese, which are as clear to the Chinese themselves as the difference between English and Scottish is to us. Western civilization does retain a generic unity of character, though national differences have had an increasing influence in the sphere of thought. Meanwhile the unity of interconnexion has on the whole grown closer with the spread of education, the multiplication of learned magazines and the facilities of travel. One of the most interesting chapters in the development of modern thought can be written, as Dr. Merz has shown by example as well as by precept, on the theme of the mutual influence of the great national centres of thought, and in particular of France, England, and Germany. These nations might seem as though designed, whether by nature or by the unconscious hand of political history, to be half-willing, half-reluctant complements to each other. English common sense, French lucidity, German idealism; English liberty, French equality, German organization; English breadth, French exactitude, German detail,--how much poorer the world would be if any one of these had been allowed to develop on its own lines without the criticism of the other two. What a special providence gave the easy-going Englishman a northern neighbour to lecture him on German metaphysics in his own tongue and compel him to the definiteness which he instinctively detests. Without Scotland as a link, the connexion between English and German thought would hardly have been effective and continuous, and it was a Scotsman who aroused the greatest of German metaphysicians--himself of Scottish descent--from his dogmatic slumbers.

This international division of labour is more significant in the regions of metaphysics and political thought than of physical science. To science, every modern nation has contributed both great names and useful journeyman work. Through the medium of the learned reviews and of periodical congresses science has become more and more international. It is still possible now and again for a great discovery like that of Mendel or an important hypothesis like that of the kinetic theory of gases to be ignored for a whole generation. But this does not seem to depend especially on difficulties of language or of international communication. There is a queer element of arbitrary fashion in the scientific world which every now and then decrees that certain people shall be ignored, no matter how sound their work, or that certain hypotheses shall be treated as matters of faith, no matter how flimsy their structure. Man does not all at once become a creature of pure reasoning by assuming the robe of science and entering the laboratory. But national prejudices are not pre-eminent among the forces which dictate these fashions. Indeed in the English intellectual world there operates, if anything, a certain anti-national prejudice. It has sometimes been easier for an Englishman to get a hearing in Germany than in England, and it is certain that in many subjects a respect is paid to German writers which they would not have been able to win if they had written either in French or in English. This is due to a certain encyclopaedic minuteness which is the peculiar property of German industry. If you want an exhaustive negative, I remember an archaeologist saying once, you must go to the Germans. That is to say, on almost any subject you will find some German, and a German only, who has taken the trouble to go through the whole matter from beginning to end, not attending merely to what is interesting or important, but writing down all that is to be found out in all the authorities bearing on that subject. And this work will be insufferably tedious and, taken by itself, may be very unilluminating. But it is much less tedious for the reader than it was for the writer, and, if suitably indexed, such a work will in permanence serve as a guide-book to those who are going to exercise real thought and insight upon that subject. It is the element of disinterested drudgery which the Germans have contributed to science. Not that they have lacked men of genius, but that they have added to genius that which, Carlyle notwithstanding, it so often lacks--the infinite capacity for taking pains. Take up any scientific treatise in any language and on almost any subject, cast your eye down the references to authorities in the footnotes on a few pages at random, and you will find probably three out of four of those cited bearing German names. They will outbalance English, American, French, Dutch, and Italian added together. If you pass from quantity to quality, if you take the leading ideas contributed to the subject, you will find the balance redressed. Here French and English and others hold their own, and perhaps a little more than their own. But in bulk of work, and especially in the faithful, unrepaying service of the hard dry fact, the Germans have set a standard to the world. It may be that their very merit is due in part to a lack of certain qualities as well as to a superabundance of others. There is a want of proportion in some of these vast Teutonic treatises that takes the heart out of the English student. Some witty person has said that German science consists in demonstrating over again with enormously elaborate apparatus what an Englishman has already made plain enough to any sensible person with the aid of a gingerbeer bottle and an old sardine tin. But I suspect there is another side to the question. The German has probably worked out his figures to the twentieth decimal where the Englishman was content with the second, and it may always turn out that the twentieth decimal has its value. Be that as it may, the co-operation of both types of mind is necessary, and patient endeavour in the elaboration of detail is the peculiar function which the German academic tradition has developed in the service of the general cause of the advancement of learning.

In more speculative thought the equipoise of international co-operation reveals itself in the changes which national thought has undergone under foreign influence. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries English and Scottish metaphysics developed in the main on lines of their own. It was the heyday of the so-called English school of experience. This school was influential in France, and in Germany acted as the ferment which dissolved the older academic tradition and stimulated the growth of the new idealism. German idealism first became an influence in England through the medium of Coleridge and later of Carlyle. But it had little effect on the national philosophy except in shaking the younger Mill out of the narrow rut in which he had been educated and contributing to his thought that stream of influence which throughout life he tried in vain to merge harmoniously with the paternal teaching. But in the last third of the nineteenth century new channels of influence were opened. The authority of Green at Oxford and of Caird in the Scottish universities brought the tide of Hegelian influence, on the ebb in Germany, in full flood over the intellectual world of Great Britain and America. English empiricism was rapidly swept out of existence. Mill and Spencer, the dominating figures of the sixties and seventies were reduced to the position of dummies used for target practice by beginners. Being intelligible they could be read by the first-year student, and the exposition of their fallacies provided an easy task for the lecturer's wit. There was none so poor to do them reverence, or if any did he was relegated to a fourth class in the Final Schools. It would be a very interesting study in our object to analyse the Anglo-Scottish idealism in close relation to the German original, and measure the changes which a philosophy undergoes in the process of assimilation by a people of very different intellectual tradition. Lack of sympathy with German and particularly with Hegelian idealism disqualifies me from the task, but this much in spite of this lack I can see. The German philosophers had a hold on those large and general ideas which the English mind seems instinctively to distrust, and which English philosophy had sought to resolve away into component parts. The Englishman as a philosopher is by nature very much like the Englishman as a mechanic or as a business man. He wants to touch and see, to test and handle, before he is convinced of reality. 'I desire that it be produced' is the frequent remark of Hume--Scotsman in some respects, but very English in this--whenever he is dealing with some conception not readily verifiable in experience. English philosophy left to itself was not inclined to do justice to the subtler, more evasive notions that are not readily defined. It did not allow enough for what we may call the imponderable elements. German idealism has had just the opposite fault. It has been too ready to take its thoughts for realities, too prone to use large and perhaps vague conceptions as if they were solid coin and not tokens that needed a good deal of scrutiny to determine their value. We may see an example in a branch of political thought which has been a good deal under discussion of late. To some German thinkers the conception of the State presents itself in a manner which by no means comes natural to the Englishman. To the German the State is an entity as obvious, real, and apparent as the individual citizen. It is not just the head of Germany, or the sixty-five millions of Germans, or the Kaiser, or the army, or the Government. It is just itself, the State, and it has attributes and powers, is the object of duties and possessor of rights just like any Hamburg merchant or Prussian Junker. To the natural Englishman all this seems half mystical, half superficial. Talk to him of the State and if he is to grasp the conception at all he must get it into terms of persons or things. He pictures it perhaps as the Government, perhaps simply as the income-tax collector, perhaps as the miscellaneous millions living in the United Kingdom. If he discusses its well-being, its success or its failure, he does so under the reserve that all this is a shorthand for the well-being of great numbers of men and women. If its honour and good faith are in question what he will ask is whether Sir E. Grey fulfilled a definite pledge at a given moment after the manner of an English gentleman. Now for my own part, whether through national prejudice or not, I believe this habit of checking and resolving large conceptions to be the safest and most scientific way of dealing with them. Yet I can also see that it may lead to a good deal of crudity and may lead men to ignore important elements for which they cannot readily find some concrete expression. In this very matter of the State, for example, we are dealing with an organization of individuals, and if our way of talking about it makes us overlook the flesh and blood of which it is composed, the other way may obscure in our minds the vital differences introduced by the very fact of organization. The Germans have often seen the wood more clearly when the Englishman was more careful to distinguish and name the trees. So I cannot doubt that it will prove in the end to have been good for us to have been compelled by a few leading thinkers to go to school with the Germans for a couple of generations, even at the cost of the temporary depreciation of much that was most vital in our own social philosophy. Perhaps the best thing that can be wished for Germany, and through her for Europe, in the next generation, is that she should learn as much from our tradition as we have learned from her.

The whole history of political thought in the last two centuries is a study of complex interactions between processes going forward in each of the leading nations. The liberalism of Locke and the principles of the Whig revolution profoundly influenced France, and the very fact that distance lent them enchantment and allowed them to be idealized gave them a value as a stimulus to the French critic of absolute government which they could hardly exercise at home, where their real limitations were better known. The French revolution bore on the entire thought of Europe, alike by sympathy and antipathy, producing the reactionary philosophies of Burke in England and of Hegel in Germany, and the endeavour to formulate a new and safer line of Radicalism by Bentham. Philosophical Radicalism expressed in the main by the distinct but related Manchester school had two generations of development in England, and was felt as a real influence abroad during the period of comparative peace that followed Waterloo and that raised men's hopes of an era that should put wars aside and devote itself to the essential progress of mankind. French influences again, particularly that of Comte acting through J.S. Mill, brought new life into this school as the first flush of its youth was fading. Finally, as we have seen, German influences overwhelmed it, and England, fascinated as much by the prestige of Germany as by her thought, gravitated more and more to the doctrine of the self-contained, military, Protectionist, all-powerful State. In this story of political thought events have been no less potent than arguments. The failure and success of institutions, the victories and defeats of countries identified with certain principles have repeatedly brought new strength and resolution to the adherents or opponents of those principles as the case might be in all lands. The successive steps by which Italy secured unity and freedom were a perpetual encouragement to believers in national right and liberal government throughout the middle of the century. The triumph of Germany in 1870 was a victory for autocratic power, for discipline, for unscrupulous statesmanship, for blood and iron, which effected a conversion, only half conscious and very slow in producing its result, but all the more complete for that reason, in the attitude of men to fundamental questions of social ethics. Looking back on the hundred years that separate the two European cataclysms, the historian will discover a rise of liberal and humanitarian opinions to ascendancy in the earlier period and a reaction against them towards the close. The causes of such a change are multifarious and tangled, but he will, I believe, recognize the year 1870 and the victory of Bismarck as the dividing line. May it be so that he will find in the present war another turning-point from which a new movement is to begin.

Be this as it may, we may rest assured that the political thought of Europe, like its philosophy and its science, will go forward or backward as a unity. It may move by peaceful and friendly co-operation or by the stimulus of embittered rivalry. But its many centres are related by so many strands of connexion that the movement in any one of these is reflected in the rest. The liberties of England are fostered by the emancipation of the Alsatian, the Slovak, or the Pole. They are enfeebled by the victories of political autocracy or the military machine. Thinkers, it may be said, ought to be above these mundane influences. Philosophy should deal with what is in itself and eternally rational and just and wise. But philosophy as it exists on earth is the work of philosophers, who, authority tells us, suffer as much from toothache as other mortals, and are, like others, open to the impressions of near and striking events and to the seductions of intellectual fashion. Yet, if the larger thought is worth anything, it should enable those who follow it to look a little further beyond the present and a little deeper below the surface differences that distract the kindred peoples. If the thinkers are true to their thought it may be that from them will come the beginnings of the healing process which Europe will need. Much is being and will be said of the political reconstruction which is needed to restore and secure the civilized order. But the commonwealth of thought will revive of itself from the day when peace is concluded. German physiology will not be less learned, German scientists will not be less expert, German chemists will not be less pre-eminent because their military lords have plunged Europe into a disastrous war. We shall need their services, shall watch their experiments, read their records, and utilize their brains as before. Perhaps it may be some years before the international congresses can be resumed, but the internationalism of learning will revive of itself, against our wills if not by and with our wills, and in the world of science, and in this world alone, the event of war will make no difference. Conqueror and conquered will work at the same task and meet as equals. The scientific demonstration knows no more of the nationality of its originator than of his caste or colour, age or sex. In this one real democracy the idea, the hypothesis, the proof, whatever it may be, stands or falls on its own merits with no questions asked as to its ancestors or country of origin. In the growth of this commonwealth war is but a momentary check. Its destiny is to become wider in extent, closer in its interconnexions, and not less rich in the diversities of its national centres. Whether it is also destined to grow into a political unity the future must decide. At least we can say that for any such unity it provides the only sure and solid foundation.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Merz, History of European Thought in the 19th Century. W. Blackwood.

Marvin, The Living Past. Clarendon Press.

VIII

THE UNITY OF WESTERN EDUCATION

I have been asked to address you on the Unity of Education in Western Europe. The task is not an easy one, for what do we mean by unity? It would be easy for me to spend my time in talking on the technical aspect of the subject; I could deal with curriculum and organization, with school buildings and class-rooms, black-boards, and all the material of schoolmastering, and could show you how great is the similarity in these matters in all civilized countries. I doubt, however, whether this would interest you; I doubt whether this is the unity of which you are in search. You would tell me that you asked for unity and I had given you uniformity. Uniformity you can have anywhere; in modern life all is standardized and stereotyped; you have it in the great hotel and the Atlantic liner--there you have men of all nations, they do the same thing at the same time, they eat the same food and wear the same clothes; you find it in the factory and on the battle-field. Go to a textile factory, whether in Oldham or in Chemnitz, or in Bombay, the processes are the same and the product is the same, except as there may be more or less adulteration.

And so in education, if you care to do so, you can find the mechanical uniformity of modern civilization. A new form of school-desk makes the round of the world as quickly as a new chemical process or a new battleship. The pictures on the walls of the rooms may be the reproduction of some modern German work, and the atlases you use may be second-rate copies of the products of Gotha or Leipzig; you can have, too, uniformity in time-table and curriculum; but, after all, this uniformity may be merely superficial. Go along the streets of an old town and you may see the regular façade of a modern street, but behind this you will find all the variety of the mediaeval buildings which it encloses--the façade is mere paint and stucco.

Uniformity is not necessarily unity, and unity is not inconsistent with variety. That which I presume we are searching for is a more fundamental, spiritual, and intellectual unity--internal not external; not a painted and stucco resemblance, but a unity of origin and of life.

Let us see what we can learn from history.

The history of European education is centred round two institutions, the School and the University. Both have their origin in the remote past, and both have maintained themselves with singular fidelity to their original type.

The School goes back to the very origin of our civilization; if we are to understand its nature, we must transfer ourselves in thought to those early days when the first missionaries planted in the Somerset valleys and on the stern Northumberland coast the Cross of Christ. They came to a people still on the verge of barbarism, with a language still unformed by literature, with a religion that gave no clue to the mysteries of life by which they were oppressed. They came to these men full of the enthusiasm of the Gospel--coming not only as teachers of religion, but as the apostles of a higher civilization, for they had behind them the awful name of Rome.

Wherever they came, among their first duties was to found schools in which to train men who would succeed them; we must always remember that the education which they gave had one supreme object--it was to bring up the boys of the rude and barbarous communities in which they found themselves, to become teachers and servants of the Church. The substance of the teaching was always the same, whether in Spain, in Gaul, in Ireland or in Britain; it was the Bible, the services of the Church, and the writings of the Fathers. It was by the school that the boys were initiated into the common system of Western Christendom, and were made citizens of the greater world the centre of which was in Rome.

But if the substance and the object was identical throughout Europe, so always was the form in which the teaching was given; at a time when all learning and all religion came from Rome, the foundation of knowledge was the Latin tongue. In these early days was established the tradition that still subsists; the gateway to learning and to culture lay by the narrow road of the Latin grammar. The schoolboy who still tells out his longs and shorts can compare them with the ruder efforts of his Saxon forefathers thirteen centuries ago. Never have authors attained a fame and a circulation equal to that of the great grammarians who, during the decline of the Empire, codified the rules of Latin speech; generation after generation passed, and down almost to our own days every schoolboy began his career on the lines laid down in the works of Donatus and Priscian.

We must, however, guard ourselves against a mistake into which it would be easy to fall. It is true that in the early mediaeval days education was based on the study of the Latin language; and it was only through literature that the language could be learnt. The study of classical literature as we understand it was, however, far removed from the ideals of this time. The most authoritative teachers never neglected to warn their pupils against the moral dangers which arose from the study of heathen writers; Ovid and Cicero were only admitted under protest, and they were merely the stepping-stone to the study of Augustine and Prudentius.

On this common basis--the Bible, the Church, and the Latin language--was then established the education of Western Europe, and the form it then assumed it retained for over a thousand years, almost without change. By this a common cast was given to the intellect, and the nations were disciplined by common spiritual teaching. It was extraordinarily effective. It kept down, and in many countries almost destroyed, the vigorous and aspiring local and national life which, in every country, was striving after self-expression. In our own country this effect was most conspicuous. The English, illiterate though they might be, were not without the promise of a great future. In the remains of the Saxon poems we can see the beginnings of what under happier circumstances might have grown into a great national literature. Its origins were deep seated in the life of the people. It proved itself quickly able to absorb the new teaching of the Gospel, and, as the Christian Epics show, here was the basis on which might have been built a national interpretation of Christianity. All that was required was the adoption of English as the language of the Church and the School. The beginning was made when Alfred, during the few years which he secured from the Danish inroads, began his great work of founding an English literature in which the teaching of the Church and the works of antiquity were included. The attempt was ruined for the time by the renewal of the Danish inroads, permanently by the Norman Conquest. For William brought with him not only his French knights, but also Italian priests. Once more, under the influence of Lanfranc and his successors, the Church and the School were brought under the full control of the revived power of Rome, and all prospect of a spontaneous and indigenous national intellectual life was destroyed. Unity was re-established, and the School was the instrument by which England was fully incorporated in the culture and religion of the Western Church.

As it was with the School so also with the university. The second, as the first, was the creation of the Church, and even more conspicuously it was the vehicle for fostering and maintaining the control of common institutions and a common learning, and thereby of crushing out the rich variety of local life which everywhere was springing up. In its very constitution the University of Paris, the mother and model of all later universities (at least in northern Europe), showed its international character; the students who flocked to it from all countries were organized in 'nations' a system which, at least in name, still remains in many of the universities to this day; the whole instruction was and remained in Latin, and the whole course of instruction was a long apprenticeship to the study of theology. It was from the universities that emanated the great system of philosophy in which a Frenchman as Abelard, an Italian as Thomas of Aquinas, an Englishman as William of Ockham each took his part.

We may regard with admiration the great intellectual achievements of the Scholastic philosophy which, for over two centuries, dominated the official education, but we must not forget that its ascendancy implied the exclusion from all public recognition of the local and national thought and literature which now, as before, was struggling into life. The Troubadours and the Minnesänger, the Chanson de Roland and the Nibelungenlied, the Chronicles of Froissard, Chaucer, and Piers Plowman, each of them so full of fresh vigorous local life, were not only outside the official system of education, but in their essence opposed to it. This was clearly seen as soon as the free and uncontrolled mind was directed to the highest subjects of thought. National idiosyncrasies, as they found expression in the domain of philosophy and theology, produced results different from the established teaching of the school. To the Church truth was always one and the same. Truth was one, error was manifold; in unity was salvation, and divergence was heresy. And so every attempt at national and local thought was not only suppressed in education, but fell under the ban of discipline. In Languedoc the Albigenses ventured the assertion of their independence; Huss in Bohemia, in England Wyclif. What happened? The Albigenses were massacred, Huss was burnt, Wyclif was condemned, and his followers suffered under the new law of heresy.

This system, which had originated as a part of a great spiritual movement, long outlived its usefulness. It became an intolerable tyranny. Its effects were to be seen in the teaching of the humblest grammar school, and every boy who began the study of the Latin grammar was being initiated into the abstractions or the Scholastic logic. It became a dead and iron crust by which the mind of man was confined, and it was the school and the university which were the peculiar institutions by which this system was maintained. Unity of education there was, but at what a price had it been won.

One thing had, however, been secured: the common Christian basis of our modern civilization had been stamped upon the peoples; so long as Europe remains Europe this cannot be forgotten or obliterated. No nation can repudiate its own past, and, whether they will or no, all Western nations are irrevocably bound together by the ties of the home in which their childhood and youth was passed.

At last the change came: it came in that double revolution which we call the Renaissance and the Reformation. In considering them we must confine ourselves as closely as we can to their effect on education.

The revival of learning was essentially an educational movement, it had from the beginning to do primarily with the school. It had as its object a complete change both in the subject-matter and in the spirit of education. Always it drew its inspiration from the literature of Greece, and this meant the fullest freedom of the human intellect, freedom of speculation, freedom of inquiry on the conditions of human life, and in particular it was a revolt from the ascetic ideas of the mediaeval Church; it was the assertion of the dignity of the body and mind of man. Now whereas in Italy, its original home, this took a warp definitely antagonistic to Christian faith and Christian ethics, in Northern Europe the new classical learning was harmonized with Christianity, and classical learning was applied to the interpretation of the Bible. It was the synthesis of what mediaeval Europe had regarded as irreconcilable opponents. That was the inspiration of the school reform, and this is the guiding principle of all higher education for the next three centuries. It was a movement that originally was not local or national but European, and in its first form was not in opposition to the maintenance of the ecclesiastical unity of Western Europe. The figure in whom it reaches its clearest expression is that of Erasmus. Standing at the transition between two epochs, he was the last of the great European scholars, and belongs to the undivided Catholic Church as much as did Abelard or Anselm. The wandering scholar of the Renaissance, without father, without mother, completely freed from ties of family or country, at home equally in Deventer or Cambridge, in Basel or in Paris or in Rome, without even a native language, for to him Latin was the only vernacular (he has, I believe, left no word written in any other language), he saw the vision of a Europe still united in obedience to the one Church, but a Europe in which the culture of the humanist would go side by side with the common faith inherited from early days.

The hopes of Erasmus were not to be fulfilled. It is indeed true that he laid the foundation on which the recognized and official scheme of education has continued almost to our own day; the Latin schools of Germany and the Grammar Schools of England were each alike conducted on the basis of the Church and the classics, but even before the foundations had been completed the real unity was gone. The Renaissance was met by two forces, each stronger than itself, and the common stream was broken into a number of smaller currents. These have since increased in strength till the sense of the common origin has almost disappeared.

The common mediaeval system (and in this the spirit of the Renaissance was still mediaeval) depended on the common Church, and especially in education, in the use of Latin as the universal language of learning. During the sixteenth century both were overthrown. Luther was stronger than Erasmus, and the new languages, Italian, French, Spanish, English, quickly began to encroach on the claims of Latin to be the one language of the school.

The religious revolution need not detain us. It is sufficient to recall that in many parts of Europe the divergence of creed tended to become if not identical with, at least closely to follow the boundaries of states and nations. In every land the school was still strictly under the control of the Church, acting now as the delegate of the temporal ruler, and in each country a whole body of teaching and discipline was evolved, the result of which was a fundamental difference in the attitude of mind. The English bishops, the German consistories, the Scotch presbytery, set their seal on the schools, as much as did the Jesuits and Port Royal in France. The Shorter Catechism, the English Prayer Book, the German hymns, each gave a distinct character to the religions of the country, and this character was the basis of the teaching in the schools.

Religion, which had been the great unifier, became the chief engine of separation.

Equally important was the growth of national literature. This indeed goes back far beyond the sixteenth century, but none the less it is from this time that the writers not only of imagination, but also of learning, began to express themselves each in his own vernacular. Sir Thomas More, it is true, wrote his Utopia in Latin, but it was in English that it had its great circulation. Bacon used both languages, but it is on English editions of his works that his fame chiefly rests. In particular we find that works on religion and theology are now produced not only in Latin, but one hundred years before Hooker would have discoursed on 'ecclesiastical polity' in the learned language, and Pascal would never have thought of using French for discussing the philosophy of the Jesuits.

The influence of these changes upon the school is remarkable. Strictly speaking, for many generations they seemed to have little immediate effect upon it. In every country in Europe Latin remained both the subject and the vehicle of higher education, but it is just for this reason that we find that, during the seventeenth century and the greater part of the eighteenth, the schools are more and more falling out of touch with the intellectual life of the times. They continued in the old way; for them Shakespeare and Milton, Montaigne and Molière, Cervantes and Tasso, seemed to have written in vain. They maintained the form of an older period, but they had lost the spirit by which it had been inspired. Their learning remained purely classical; but even though the new national literature was long in winning for itself a definite place in the recognized school system, the growth of this literature and the evolution of national consciousness of which it was a part could not in fact take place without altering the whole spirit of the teaching. If we are to understand how this was we must keep in mind one of the chief characteristics of what is called a classical education.

The study of the classics means the study of the whole life of the two great nations of antiquity as preserved in the extant literature. Now this does not contain a definite and formulated doctrine, it does not even, as might be said of the Middle Ages, mean one attitude towards the world; it opens to the student a field of extraordinary wealth and variety, and from this each will take that which he is able to appropriate. To one it may be the mysticism of the Cambridge Platonists, to another the frank and pagan joy in life of Anacreon and Horace. Rousseau and Grote will each in his own way appropriate the lesson of Liberty, while others will turn to the story of the militant and dominant aristocracy of Rome. Goethe and Keats, Milton and Gibbon, Berkeley and Schopenhauer, will each draw their inspiration from the classics, but the result will not be to make them resemble one another, it will be to give vigour, decision, form, resolution, and dignity to the qualities of each.

And as it is with individuals, so it is with nations. The schools of all nations maintained their classical curriculum; boys still began, and often ended, their schooling with the Latin grammar, but this did not mean, as it had meant in the earlier days, that the influence was the same. There was indeed little in common between what we may venture to call the pedantry of Germany and the superficial elegancy of the Jesuit schools. And so the classical basis did not prevent the school assuming a national complexion. Let me give one illustration of the manner in which the classical teaching could take a markedly national spirit. Perhaps the most effective classical teaching that we find in the eighteenth century is that at Eton, and it was on it that was founded the great school of oratory and statesmanship. It was on Cicero and Homer and Demosthenes that Pitt and Fox and Canning and Gladstone (for the tradition continued to his day) formed their minds and their style, but they emerged from their training above all Englishmen, but Englishmen who had learnt how to give to their own national feelings a dignity of expression and nobility of form equal to that of the exemplars whom they had studied.

Now just as the finest expression of the English national spirit is found in those whose school training had been based on the classics, just as the Girondists based their revolutionary doctrines on Hellenic models, so almost at the same time the great political awakening of Germany and Prussia was inspired by what has been called the second Renaissance; and yet how profound is the divergence between Wellesley and Pitt, Humboldt and Stein, St. Just, Demousin, and Vergniaud; all were children of the common classical tradition, but how different is the use to which they put it. During the centuries that passed between the Renaissance and the Revolution, the education of the different countries had then in fact been drifting far apart. What has been done during the nineteenth century has been openly to carry into effect changes which had long been overdue and were already to a large extent operative.

It was inevitable that the new literature and thought would eventually find its way into the schools and universities. Before this change had been accomplished, a fresh and even stronger influence asserted itself. Democracy had come, and a democracy which based the state on the principle of nationality. It seized on the school as the means to hold the minds of men in fief, just as had the mediaeval Church, and in doing so enforced and perpetuated the national differences.

In the eighteenth century rulers troubled themselves little about matters apparently of such minor importance as the languages in which their subjects conversed and read. Even the French did not try to touch the German-speaking inhabitants of Alsace, and Copenhagen could become a centre of German letters, while French maintained itself at the Court of Berlin. All this was changed by the Revolution, and Napoleon was the first deliberately to convert the whole fabric of French schools and the university into an instrument for the organized propaganda of the cult of the Empire. Since then there is scarcely a government (always except that of England, which alone has been strong enough to rest on the native and undisciplined political sense of the people) which has not followed in his path. In particular when the state is founded on the nation the school is used to develop in the children the full consciousness of nationality. That institution that was for so long the home of European unity has become the most useful agent for the perpetuation and exaggeration of national differences. It is in the school that the immigrant to the United States is taught to reverence the institutions of his new fatherland, and from generation to generation the school labours to keep alive the memory of the half-forgotten struggle of the new republic and the British monarchy. In France each successive government has used the school to force on the nation its interpretation of the national history and ideals. And the victories of Prussian armies were cemented and confirmed by the official exposition of the Prussian state and the cult of the Hohenzollern. To the school is transferred the conflict between the doctrines of authority and the revolution, of the secular state and of the Kingdom by the Grace of God. Every nation rightly struggling to be free has seen in the school the instrument for securing the allegiance of the young, and the school has become the centre of political struggle. In Trieste and in Poland, in Alsace and in Macedonia, we find kings and politicians contending for the minds and souls of children, and it is in the school, the college, and the university that has been prepared the conflict that is now devastating Europe.

What has been done in the nineteenth century has really been only to carry into effect the change which was long overdue and was implicit in earlier years. The national culture and national authors have at length forced their way into the schools, and the result has been that institutions which originally in reality, and for so long in appearance, were the vehicles for the expression of the common European civilization, have been almost entirely won over to the cause of the national expression.

This is indeed inevitable. Education, as we have seen, can only be effective when it is the vehicle for strong beliefs, and is informed by the conscious expression of an attitude towards the world. Now, in modern days, the consciousness of a common European spirit has, in fact, almost disappeared. In its place we find the intense consciousness of the nation. Even religion has become national, and God has once again become a tribal deity. The new consciousness of the common interests of what is called Labour have no recognition in the approved teaching. If the work of the school was not to be merely the dead instruction in useless knowledge, if the work was to be directed towards informing the minds of the pupils with ideals and beliefs, it was only in the idealization of the national thought that this could be attained.

Is the older union of thought to be permanently lost? If not, you must find it again in some higher synthesis. There are many who would do so in the pursuit of mathematics and the natural sciences; in them, at least, no divisions of country can be found. The student in his chemical laboratory, the doctor in his hospital, the mathematician in his study, finds his colleagues in every country in the civilized world, and it matters not to him whether the next step in penetrating the secrets of nature have been made in Vienna, or in Paris, or Amsterdam, or Bologna.

There are many who believe that on this basis will be established the Union of Civilization. If we look, however, more critically, we may find reason to doubt whether this optimistic view is justified. I do not share this hope and this belief, I do not look forward to a spiritual and intellectual unity of the nations established on the basis of scientific education. It is, indeed, impossible to over-estimate not only the practical but also the intellectual influence of what we may call the scientific spirit. It is indeed true that those who are accustomed to the careful and systematic investigation of causes, who have been trained from their earliest years to recognize in the pomp and pageantry of the external world--and even to some extent in the working of the human mind and the structure of human society--the orderly sequence of natural law, will have a type and character of mind essentially different from those who have not passed through this discipline. The civilization (I scarcely dare to use the word culture) of those nations who have this in common will have a unity of their own, and will differ fundamentally from their own past and from that of other races.

On the other hand there are two considerations that I should like to put before you, as leading to a less important position, the one arising from the practical nature of science, the other connected with its essential intellectual origin.

It is a characteristic of all work in physical science that however it may originate in the pure desire for truth, it is very quickly available for practical use, personal comfort, the acquisition of wealth, and national efficiency. The physicist who calculates the stresses and strains of an aeroplane finds that in teaching man how to control nature he is also providing the means for his struggle, whether in peace or war, in commerce or on the battle-field. We soon find that the progress of technical skill is curiously inoperative in its effect on human thought and feeling. Men remain the same whether they ride in a coach, or a train, or a motor-car; it matters little whether they use bows and arrows, or rifles, or hand-grenades, or liquid fire.

Now in education it is the technical side of scientific progress which almost inevitably becomes most prominent, and the greater the advance in knowledge the more will this be true. The wider the domain of knowledge the greater is the number of those who will be chiefly occupied with the use of the processes and materials that have been discovered and the smaller is the proportion of those who will have reached the border of the known, and will begin the work of exploration into the unknown. That is, the greater will be the number of those who are the servants and not the masters of science. A unity of a certain kind we shall have, the unity of those who have learned to pilot an aeroplane, to apply X-rays, to extract the phosphate from iron, or to test cattle for tubercle. All this may produce a uniformity in the machinery of life, it passes by untouched the motives of action, the beliefs, affections, and interests. How many illustrations of this do we see around us! What more glorious illustration of the power of the human intellect can be found than the later developments of electricity, but scarcely had the discoveries been made when we find them seized upon by the man of affairs, and wireless telegraphy becomes the subject of speculation on the Stock Exchange, and a chief instrument of war. That which the chemist finds in his laboratory is, within a few years, sometimes even a few months, found again in the factory, and perhaps on the field of battle.

Do not let it be supposed that I would underrate the possibility of a deeper unity, but if we would find it we must carry our analysis further back. The progress of science is in truth not a cause but a result, not an ultimate fact but the symptom of a state of mind. It springs from that which was brought into Europe consciously at the Renaissance and which we may call the spirit of Greece. It is that to which we owe not only the investigation and subjection of nature, but equally with it all progress in every department of thought, the analysis of society, whether political or economic, the investigations of the working of human reason, the probing of human passions, and their record in art and literature.

What is this spirit? Is it not the confidence in the spirit of man, the spirit which in intellectual matters bends to no authority, and recognizes no limit to its enterprise, which probes all things, tests all things, and follows fearlessly where the argument leads it? This is what I mean by the spirit of Greece, it is that which Sophocles has immortalized. Of all this, what we call science is but a part, perhaps at present the most striking and important part, but still a part only; to look to it as the key of our civilization and the sole basis of our education would be to set up a partial and, therefore, a false ideal. An ideal, moreover, which, if pursued to its logical conclusion, would become the basis for the most appalling tyranny, by which the free spirit of investigation, to which we owe all our scientific progress, would be buried in the structure that itself had reared. For what is the end to which it must lead? Is it not a society which is held together by technical skill, a society of organized efficiency, where each individual holds his place, not as a living spirit, but as a slave of the great machine, tied throughout his life to the perfect performance of his limited and specialized task? I can imagine such a society; it is the ideal which some modern German writers have definitely put before us. It may be that this will be the Europe of the future, a Europe with a common government and a universal system of education by which each child will be trained to take his allotted part in an organized slavery. I hope I shall not live to see it.

None the less, a unity there is, but it is a deeper unity than this. It is the unity inherited from the past. Here we may find, not indeed a superficial uniformity, but a real unity of life and spirit. No civilization can repudiate its own origin, and whatever the future may have in store the childhood of Europe was nourished on the Bible and Christianity, and in the more mature years there was added the impulse to the boldest use of the human intellect that came from Greece. These two elements give us that which is the peculiar characteristic of Western Europe, and as we are told that the growth of each individual repeats the evolution of the race, so the education of each individual repeats in childhood and boyhood the education of the nation. It is from these two elements that the whole of modern culture springs, and it is from them that again and again they regain their strength.

And if we recollect this we need not be much disturbed by our apparent differences and misunderstandings. After all, they are the necessary result of freedom, and what do the Bible and Greece mean but moral and intellectual freedom? We want no formal and artificial unity: to us change, progress, conflict and division are the breath of our life. Just as the cluster of little towns in the Aegean islands and valleys prized before all things their political and intellectual independence, so is it with these small countries nestling on the shores of the Atlantic. Politically they have always refused to acquiesce in the establishment of any common authority over them, whether it comes from outside or even from among themselves, and so also they always repudiate the ascendancy of any single or partial intellectual doctrine. Each party and each nation adds its own contribution; all have a common origin, and all spring from the same root. Since the bonds have been relaxed and the dominion of the Universal Church overthrown, we see nothing from the rivalry of political systems and passing schemes of thought; they chase each other like the storms which arise from the Atlantic and pass in quick succession over our shores. It is this change and succession which is to us the breath of our life: we know nothing of the steady static weather of the great continents, where rain and drought have each their measured and settled space: and we know nothing, and will know nothing, of the formal and authoritative rule combining all Europe into one realm, whether political or intellectual. For we know that unity and permanence does not belong to this life, and our nearest approach to truth is to be found not in a settled system but in the thousandfold interactions of half-truths and partial systems.

Life like a dome of many-coloured glass Stains the white radiance of eternity Until death shatters it to fragments.

A unity there is, but it is the unity of the countless and varied flowers that carpet the meadows in spring, the unity of the common spirit of life which animates them all.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Leach, The Schools of Medieval England. Methuen.

Mullinger, J. Bass, The Schools of Charles the Great.

Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts.

Rashdall, Universities in the Middle Ages. Clarendon Press.

Foster Watson, Grammar Schools. Cambridge University Press

Woodward, Erasmus. Cambridge University Press.

COMMERCE AND FINANCE AS INTERNATIONAL FORCES

Commerce and finance are departments of life in which mankind approaches nearer to unity than in any other. They are practical expressions of the instinct of self-preservation which is the first law of nature. They spring straight from the acquisitiveness which is a universal characteristic of human nature and indeed of animal and vegetable nature. Every living thing wants to acquire food. Adam Smith indeed restricts the trading instinct to mankind. 'The propensity', he says, 'to truck, barter, or exchange one thing for another ... is common to all men and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contracts. Two greyhounds in running down the same hare have sometimes the appearance of acting in some sort of concert. Each turns her towards his companion or endeavours to intercept her when his companion turns her towards himself. This, however, is not the effect of any contract, but of the accidental concurrence of their passions in the same object at that particular time. Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.'

Mr Cannan, in his edition of the Wealth of Nations, very judiciously points out in a note on this passage that 'it is by no means clear what object there could be in exchanging one bone for another'. Probably if one rummaged the literature of dog stories one would find plenty of examples of commerce between dogs, and when they perform tricks to get food, we detect the germ of the exchange of a service for a commodity.

When a bee takes honey from a flower and leaves in exchange the pollen from a flower of an opposite sex, it may be said to be at once a merchant, a carrier, and a matrimonial agent, and the brilliant colours with which flowers attract these merchants have been compared to the advertising posters of the human trader. But however the case may be in the animal and vegetable world, there can be no question that the trading instinct appears at a very early stage of human development. In boys the instinct to trade or swop articles appears long before they feel any inclination to fall in love or to give much serious thought to religion. The classical example is given by Mark Twain, who relates how Tom Sawyer exchanged one of his own teeth, which had been pulled out that morning, for a tick in the possession of Huckleberry Finn, and then 'the two boys separated, each feeling wealthier than before'. In fact, of course, they both were wealthier than before, because each had got something that he wanted more than the article with which he had parted; and this pleasant result sums up the whole genesis and basis of commerce.

But though commerce is thus merely an expression of an instinct which is primitive and universal, it does not follow that it is its only or even its earliest expression. Perhaps its earliest and most natural expression was through robbery, with or without violence. A primitive savage who saw something that he wanted would probably, if strong enough, hit its owner on the head and take it, and this short and simple method of acquisition still occasionally reappears in the realms of the most highly civilized diplomacy. Nevertheless, at a very early stage its limitations became obvious, and quite at the dawn of recorded history we find commercial transactions referred to as an established branch of human intercourse. The Old Testament story has not gone far before it tells us of buying and selling. In the twenty-third chapter of Genesis we find a very interesting bargain recorded between Abraham and Ephron. Sarah had died in Kirjath-arba:

'the same is Hebron in the land of Canaan: and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her. And Abraham stood up from before his dead, and spake unto the sons of Heth, saying, I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a buryingplace with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight. And the children of Heth answered Abraham, saying unto him, Hear us, my lord: thou art a mighty prince among us: in the choice of our sepulchres bury thy dead; none of us shall withhold from thee his sepulchre, but that thou mayest bury thy dead. And Abraham stood up and bowed himself to the people of the land, even to the children of Heth. And he communed with them, saying, If it be your mind that I should bury my dead out of my sight; hear me, and intreat for me to Ephron the son of Zohar, that he may give me the cave of Machpelah, which he hath, which is in the end of his field; for as much money as it is worth he shall give it me for a possession of a buryingplace amongst you. And Ephron dwelt among the children of Heth: and Ephron the Hittite answered Abraham in the audience of the children of Heth, even of all that went in at the gate of his city, saying, Nay, my lord, hear me: the field give I thee, and the cave that is therein, I give it thee; in the presence of the sons of my people give I it thee: bury thy dead. And Abraham bowed down himself before the people of the land. And he spake unto Ephron in the audience of the people of the land, saying, But if thou wilt give it, I pray thee, hear me: I will give thee money for the field; take it of me, and I will bury my dead there. And Ephron answered Abraham, saying unto him, My lord, hearken unto me: the land is worth four hundred shekels of silver; what is that betwixt me and thee? bury therefore thy dead. And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron; and Abraham weighed to Ephron the silver, which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant.'

In this very early and curious example of a bargain we find the seller continually expressing reluctance to sell and asking the buyer to accept as a gift the commodity that he wants. It appears from the sequel that this is merely an example of Oriental politeness. At any rate, the end of the bargain was that Abraham paid the money, four hundred shekels of silver, which is described as 'current money with the merchant', thus apparently showing that this system of payment in metals was already a regular feature of commercial transactions. Coined currency had not yet been developed, for we may note that Abraham weighed the silver.

When we come to the days of Solomon we find something like a developed international trade. The fifth chapter of the first book of Kings describes how Solomon, on taking the throne of his father, sent to Hiram, king of Tyre, and stated his purpose to build a house unto the name of the Lord his God, asking Hiram to send his servants to hew cedar trees out of Lebanon, and saying that he would give hire for Hiram's servants according to all that he should appoint. Hiram replied that he would do all that Solomon desired concerning timber of cedar and concerning timber of fir. 'My servants shall bring them down from Lebanon unto the sea: and I will convey them by sea in floats unto the place that thou shalt appoint me, and will cause them to be discharged there, and thou shalt receive them: and thou shalt accomplish my desire, in giving food for my household. So Hiram gave Solomon cedar trees and fir trees according to all his desire. And Solomon gave Hiram twenty thousand measures of wheat for food to his household, and twenty measures of pure oil: thus gave Solomon to Hiram year by year.'

According to this arrangement it would appear that Solomon paid for the timber that he imported by exporting to Hiram wheat and oil, but it is shown in a later chapter that the transaction was not a purely commercial one. At the end of twenty years, when Solomon had finished the building of the temple, he gave Hiram as further consideration twenty cities in the land of Galilee, 'and Hiram came out from Tyre to see the cities which Solomon had given him; and they pleased him not. And he said, What cities are these which thou hast given me, my brother? And he called them the land of Cabul [explained in the margin as meaning "displeasing" or "dirty"] unto this day. And Hiram sent to the king sixscore talents of gold.'

Apart from this transaction between the two kings, Solomon appears to have developed a very considerable foreign trade, presumably exporting wheat and oil and other agricultural products. His imports appear to have been various. Chapter ten of the first book of Kings states that 'the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.' ... 'And the king made silver to be in Jerusalem as stones, and cedars made he to be as the sycomore trees that are in the vale, for abundance. And Solomon had horses brought out of Egypt, and linen yarn: the king's merchants received the linen yarn at a price.'

The whole question of Solomon's balance of trade is a very interesting one, and deserves the attention of some Hebrew scholar who may be able to throw light upon it. In these days it is rather difficult to see how a purely agricultural country could have found the means of paying for all these articles of pure luxury which Solomon imported so freely. It must be noted, however, that 'all the earth sought to Solomon, to hear his wisdom, which God had put in his heart. And they brought every man his present, vessels of silver, and vessels of gold, and garments, and armour, and spices, horses, and mules, a rate year by year'. From this it appears that Solomon was able to exchange his wisdom for a very considerable part of the imports which came into his country, and so perhaps we may take it that Solomon's wisdom is the earliest recorded example of what is now known as an invisible export. A modern equivalent would be the articles which English writers contribute to American newspapers and are paid for, ultimately, by the shipment to England of American wheat and cotton. It is also interesting to note in these days, when personal economy and simplicity of life are so freely preached, that Solomon's very luxurious imports were followed by evil consequences, imports of an enormous number of strange women, and a consequent turning away of his heart after false gods.

When we come to secular history, the very first chapter of the first book of the first history ever written deals with a question of commerce. Herodotus, who has been called the Father of History, opens his work with a few introductory words stating that 'these are the researches which he publishes in the hope of thereby preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory, and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feud'. And then he plunges straight into his story, as follows: 'According to the Persians best informed in history, the Phoenicians began the quarrel. This people, who had formerly dwelt on the shores of the Erythræan Sea, having migrated to the Mediterranean and settled in the parts which they now inhabit, began at once, they say, to adventure on long voyages, freighting their vessels with the wares of Egypt and Assyria. They landed at many places on the coast, and among the rest at Argos, which was then pre-eminent above all the states included now under the common name of Hellas. Here they exposed their merchandise, and traded with the natives for five or six days; at the end of which time, when almost everything was sold, there came down to the beach a number of women, and among them the daughter of the king, who was, they say, agreeing in this with the Greeks, Io, the child of Inachus. The women were standing by the stern of the ship intent upon their purchases, when the Phoenicians, with a general shout, rushed upon them. The greater part made their escape, but some were seized and carried off. Io herself was among the captives. The Phoenicians put the women on board their vessel, and set sail for Egypt. Thus did Io pass into Egypt, according to the Persian story, which differs widely from the Phoenician: and thus commenced, according to their authors, the series of outrages.'

Commerce is thus a striking example of the unity of mankind, being a practically universal form of human activity which arises as soon as man verges from the earliest stages of barbarism. In the case of individuals it is easy to see how this desire to exchange commodities between one individual and another meant so great an increase in human efficiency that it had only to be thought of to be universally adopted. The primitive savage, doing everything for himself, building his own hut, killing or finding his own food, and making his own clothes, such as they were, was an extremely versatile and self-sufficing person. At the same time the comforts that he enjoyed were probably not very satisfactory. His hut was almost certain to be draughty and to let in rain through the roof; his hunting and finding of food must have very often left him with his larder empty, and the state of his wardrobe was probably simple rather than satisfying. It would inevitably happen that certain members of the tribe would show greater efficiency than others in doing a certain one of these various businesses which are essential even to the simplest form of human life. Thus the tendency to specialization begins to show itself. The skilful hut-builder builds huts not only for himself but for other members of the tribe; he acquires further skill by constant practice and the huts are more quickly built and better when finished. The other tribesmen, in effect, pay him by supplying him with a certain amount of food and clothes. The tendency for specialization would make very rapid progress, and it is easy to see how at a very early date and in the most primitive communities there would be bowyers, arrow-makers, and leather-dressers, and how various kinds of artificers would arise, supplying the wants of the community in some special line, and receiving from the community all the commodities which they required apart from those which they produced themselves. The individuals of the community thus become mutually dependent, and live by one another's production. Hence comes unity, and with it a fresh cause of disunion, owing to the likelihood of quarrelling over the exchanges effected.

As progress developed and the communities at a greater distance became acquainted with one another's wants and the various kinds of goods that certain districts supplied, this tendency to specialization and consequent exchange of goods would grow in an ever-widening circle. Instead of the tribe being a commercial unity, the zone in which the interchange of goods went on would widen as far as the geographical and other boundaries allowed it. In the same country one district would be found to be specially well adapted for agriculture, and another for pasture; another, being well supplied with metals, would naturally provide a race of smiths and producers of rough tools for industry, and the exchange of commodities between districts with these various capacities would mean that the specialization of production would go steadily further, and that a whole town or village would be found in which the great majority of the inhabitants were at work upon one particular form of industry, relying for the other kinds of commodities that they required upon the activity of a similar community living in the next valley or on the other side of the river. This widening-out process would naturally extend itself over the borders of different countries. Obstacles to this process would be found in the differences of language and probably in the difficulties of transport. On the other hand, it would be greatly stimulated by the different ideas of value that prevailed in different communities. Value depends upon the extent to which anybody wants a thing, also on what he thinks it is worth, that is to say, the number of commodities in his possession with which he is prepared to part in order to secure it. Obviously commodities coming in from foreign countries, and being unknown or rare in the country in which they are offered, if they are otherwise at all attractive, possess a certain amount of what is called scarcity value, which makes them easily saleable by adventurous merchants who arrive with the cargo.

The stories of fortunes made by merchants who travelled among simple native tribes with cargoes of glass beads and were able to exchange these gaudy baubles for gold or rubber or other commodities which are valuable in civilized countries, have often been told, and opportunities for trading of this kind must have been very much more frequent when communication was comparatively difficult. Value to a great extent being determined by local convention and local habit, the profits of the trader were likely to be considerably increased the further he got from his home market. If he took away with him plenty of things which were in abundant supply at home and consequently cheap, he would almost certainly be able to bring back a large number of things which were plentiful in a far-away community, and consequently cheap for him to acquire, and scarce in his own district and consequently sure of a good market. This difference of standard of value in different countries was a great stimulus to foreign trade, also a great help to bringing mankind together, though it sometimes ended in disillusionment. It has been asserted that even within the memory of man an English merchant traded with a primitive community in which gold and silver were exchangeable weight for weight. For some years he did a very pleasant and profitable trade by taking a cargo of silver and bringing back with him the same weight in gold, the value of which in England happened to be sixteen times as great, or more. Unfortunately, when he made his last voyage he was met at the mouth of the river by a friendly native, who informed him that the community was waiting for him with tomahawks, and he hastily put to sea again. For the rest of his life he cherished a grievance against this curious people with which he had dealt, according to his own view, on perfectly equitable terms, having sold them a commodity at a price to which they were accustomed, and which they regarded as quite correct, with the result that they proposed to murder him because they found that the price was not in accordance with that current in other parts of the world.

By this business of exchange of commodities between one community and another, the process of specialization or division of labour which has already been referred to as its basis has been developed to extraordinary lengths. Its effect has been to increase enormously the wealth available, while at the same time the concentration of the individual has narrowed down his work so that he now no longer specializes on making one commodity, but on making a part of a fraction of a commodity.

Adam Smith's chapters on division of labour are so well known that there is no need to point out the very great economic benefits that arise from it. Clearly, any man who spends all his working time upon one particular process of productive activity acquires thereby a skill and rapidity in carrying out his part of the operation which would be impossible to any worker who has to carry the manufacture of an article from the beginning to its end. Just as we saw, when the primitive savage left off doing everything for himself and took to building huts for the rest of the community, that the huts became much more water-tight and comfortable, so the process goes still further, and building becomes very much more rapid and very much more cheap and efficient when a large number of specialists are set to work on the various very different processes required for the construction of a house. The consequence is that the production of goods is very greatly cheapened and made much more rapid, but at the same time the worker tends to become an artisan instead of a craftsman, and his work is likely to be much more monotonous and much more trying. Instead of seeing his product grow under his hand from its beginning to its end, with constant changes in the nature of its call on his energy and care, he is employed during the whole of his working time on some mechanical process, with the result that he himself becomes something very like a machine. What he has gained in the power to make and acquire commodities cheaply and quickly is offset to a certain extent by the less interesting and varied nature of his work.

It also follows that as the worker becomes a specialist he becomes dependent upon other members of the community for the supply to him of a large number of things which he requires for his own existence. If he spends his life in making one commodity or in making part of one commodity, it is clear that his requirements of all the things that are necessary for life apart from what he makes himself can only be satisfied by the willingness of the community to take the commodity that he makes in payment for those which it produces and of which he is in need. When he works for himself, he only makes things that he knows himself to need; when he works to sell to others, he has to speculate on the hope that the others will want what he makes.

Commerce thus not only shows the unity of mankind by being a universal feature of his existence, but increases that unity by making each individual dependent upon the exertions of his fellows, and on their willingness to take from him stuff which he is turning out; but if commerce thus promotes unity, it also tends to create a certain amount of friction and disagreement between one man and another when differences of opinion arise concerning the value of the product which each man is making, that is to say, concerning the amount of goods which the rest of the community is prepared to give him in exchange.

This consideration is also very strongly evident with regard to international trade. Here the division of labour is assisted by the difference in the products of different countries. There can be no doubt that the exchange of commodities between one nation and another tends to bring them together and to promote unity and harmony of interests. At the same time it is also likely to be fruitful in quarrels and bickering. We saw that Hiram was very much dissatisfied with the cities in Galilee which Solomon presented to him in the course of their semi-commercial transactions. He appears to have retaliated by making Solomon a very handsome present in gold; but Hiram seems to have been a very exceptional person, and it is probable that most traders who are dissatisfied with the consideration received would not have been so generous in expressing themselves.

International commerce has also been a fruitful cause of disunion rather than unity when various nations have quarrelled with one another concerning the right to trade with a third people. If one nation is trading with another greatly to its profit, it feels that it has a grievance when it finds that a neighbouring nation is sending cargoes to the same destination and undercutting it and taking the cream of the trade. After religion, it is probable that trade has produced more bloodshed than any other form of human activity. At the same time there can be no doubt that on the whole its influence has been strongly on the side of unity and that it has done more to break down international barriers than any other influence that has operated in the course of history. The trader, as such, believes entirely and whole-heartedly in the unity of mankind. All that he wants to do is to buy his products as cheaply as he can and to sell them at the best possible price. Whether he buys at home or abroad, or whether he sells at home or abroad, is a matter of complete indifference to him except that, as has been shown, owing to variations in value in different parts of the world, he is probably likely to be able to make larger profits from foreign trade than in commerce at home. National preferences sometimes induce him to encourage home industry by buying home products when foreign goods would have paid him better, but in so far as this happens, he ceases to be a trader as such and becomes a mixture of trader and patriot. As buyers and sellers, however, mankind is, on the whole, singularly free from international prejudices. It was thought at one time that importation of foreign goods into England would be considerably checked by insisting upon marks of origin, that is to say, that imported goods should be stamped as such. This expectation, however, seems to have been entirely disappointed, since most buyers were not concerned with the question of the country whence the commodity that they bought came, and only considered whether it suited their purses and was what they wanted. Sometimes there is actually a prejudice in favour of foreign goods, and, curiously enough, this is found to be so even in countries in which a protective policy has been very highly developed. It is, or was a few years ago, common to see in American newspapers, flaming advertisements heralding sales of imported goods, which were definitely stated to be such obviously because the sellers thought that they were likely to be able to sell them better because they were stated to be so. It is also a proud boast of English manufacturers that in many countries on the Continent it is common, or was until quite lately, for native manufacturers to sell their goods more easily in their home markets by describing them as English. Political and national prejudice seems to be overruled by the common human desire for something new and strange, and consequently, in spite of all friction that has arisen from international trade, and of the number of wars which have had their origin in commercial questions, there is good reason for the assertion that on the whole commerce has been a mighty promoter of intercourse among the nations and of the unity of mankind. If it had not been for commerce, the cheapening and quickening of communication could never have been carried out. The trader goes first, and after him the traveller and the tourist.

This claim can be made with perhaps even more certainty when we proceed to the realm of finance. If commerce is international and unifying, finance is perhaps even more so. Finance, of course, arises out of commerce and is an essential part of its machinery. By finance we mean the machinery of money--money-dealing and money-lending. Money becomes necessary as soon as the exchange of commodities, which is the meaning of trade, becomes fairly developed. At first, primitive peoples exchanged their commodities one for another, but a difficulty arose when out of a pair of possible traders one had something which the other wanted but the other had not. For example, if the arrow-maker had arrows to sell and wanted to buy fish, there obviously could be no bargain if his friend who wanted to buy arrows had only got deerskins to give in exchange. It was essential to the development of trade that some commodity should be hit on which could always be taken in exchange and so form a circulating medium. We have seen from the twenty-third chapter of Genesis that a certain weight of silver had in Abraham's time begun to assume this function. Economic text-books tell us that many other commodities had the form and function of money before the metals came into use. Until quite lately there were many places in which the use of an agreed medium of exchange had not been adopted to facilitate the purposes of commerce. Jevons begins his very interesting book on money by relating how

Some years since, Mdlle Zélie, a singer of the Théâtre Lyrique at Paris, made a professional tour round the world, and gave a concert in the Society Islands. In exchange for an air from Norma and a few other songs, she was to receive a third of the receipts. When counted, her share was found to consist of three pigs, twenty-three turkeys, forty-four chickens, five thousand cocoa-nuts, besides considerable quantities of bananas, lemons, and oranges. At the Halles in Paris, as the prima donna remarks in her lively letter, ... this amount of live stock and vegetables might have brought four thousand francs [£160], which would have been good remuneration for five songs. In the Society Islands, however, pieces of money were very scarce; and as Mademoiselle could not consume any considerable portion of the receipts herself, it became necessary in the meantime to feed the pigs and poultry with the fruit,' and so her receipts consumed one another.

This is an example of the inconvenience which the invention of money overcame. In primitive communities it took the form of cowry-shells or tobacco or gunpowder or any commodity which was in universal request in the place. All the seller wanted to do was to be able to obtain for his product a certain amount of stuff which he could rely on being able to exchange for other things that he wanted. In the end the precious metals, with their strong appeal to human vanity, and their utility for adorning temples and so propitiating divine favour, ousted all other commodities which had been used for money; and they are now to a great extent ousted by pieces of paper, which still, however, represent claims to so much gold.

The discovery of a circulating medium enormously facilitated the progress of commerce, and it was not long before a class of people grew up who specialized in this particular form of business and became financiers and moneylenders. Bankers and financiers were known in Rome and Athens, and we know that some machinery existed by which the monetary claims of one country on another could be settled by something that fulfilled the functions of the modern bill of exchange. The actual provision of metallic currency has from the earliest times been almost entirely under the control of the government which took into its own hands, as an essential part of the police protection which it gives to the people, the coining of currency, stamping the coin in such a way that anybody who took one might know that he was getting a certain weight of a precious metal. But the money-dealing business very soon developed the machinery of credit by which anybody who had an enterprise or a venture out of which he expected to make an attractive profit could, if he had sufficient property to pledge, provide himself with the means to finance it between the day that he started on his operations and the day when he brought home his profits: and this business also became international, though not, perhaps, as rapidly as commerce had overstepped the boundaries between one people and another.

In the Merchant of Venice we find Antonio trading with all the countries of the then known world,

From Tripolis, from Mexico, and England, From Lisbon, Barbary, and India,

but we do not find that Shylock was lending money on at all the same international scale. When communication was slow, difficult, and untrustworthy, money-lending at a distance was made very risky, because it was impossible for the lender to keep the watchful eye on the borrower's operations and credit that is required if he is to feel comfortable in his venture. For a Lombard Street banker to lend money to a merchant in Cheapside payable at a year hence was, until comparatively lately, a much safer enterprise than to lend it to a merchant in Paris, because the local borrower was always under the lender's observation. If he were overtrading or living on too lavish a scale it would at once be noticed and reported.

Nevertheless, international finance made steady progress through somewhat obscure beginnings. We know that Philip II of Spain was heavily indebted to moneylenders all over the Continent, and that by his famous repudiation he carried consternation throughout Europe. Edward III was also heavily indebted to Florentine bankers, and he also omitted to pay his debt; and it is said that the descendants of the Florentine bankers still have a claim against the English Crown in consequence; but it was not until after the creation of stock exchanges and the machinery of a public market in securities that international finance became a question of general importance.

Here also the effect has been for unity combined with a good deal of disunion. Twenty years ago it used to be said that feeling in the Western States of America was very strongly anti-English because most of the Western farmers were indebted to English moneylenders, and on the whole it may be said that the relations between the borrower and lender are not likely to be so friendly and so likely to promote unity as those between buyer and seller. There is really no logical reason why this should be so: the basis of the bargain between the two is exactly the same. In commercial transactions one man sells to another because the other man wants something that he has got more than he does. It is exactly the same with the borrower and lender of money. A man borrows because he wants money and is prepared to pay a rate of interest for it. The lender lends because he has money to lend and wants to earn interest on it. Nevertheless there is something in this relationship which seems to produce discord. It is not many years since the Australian newspapers used to talk of England as John Bull Cohen, implying that the English money market made more than it ought to do by developing, with the help of its financial resources, the production and commerce of the young countries of the world. Perhaps it is human to feel a grudge against a creditor, because the money has to be paid back, whereas a commercial bargain is done with. Nevertheless, after allowing for all the friction that money-lending seems to produce, there can be no question that the establishment of the international market in securities has enormously widened the world's output of commodities, and it has greatly promoted that unity of interests which has brought mankind together more than anything else.

Englishmen are always supposed to be particularly insular. Nevertheless, any one who looks at the Official List daily published by the London Stock Exchange and sees the enormous number of Government and municipal loans from all parts of the world, the number of foreign railways, and the number of foreign enterprises of all kinds which are dealt in on the London Stock Exchange, cannot avoid the conclusion that this practice of investing money abroad, which has been followed here to a greater extent than in any other country, must have very greatly widened the Englishman's horizon and forced him to confess that at least from one point of view dwellers in foreign countries have some right to exist. At any rate, in practice English investors not only have shown that they do not recognize international barriers, but there have even been times when foreign securities have actually been preferred to English. A few years ago it was reported by stockbrokers that many of their clients would not invest money at home and insisted whenever possible that it should be placed abroad. To such an extent has this process been carried on that it is now calculated by statisticians that no less than four thousand millions of English money have been placed outside England, about one-half of this having been lent to foreign countries, and about one-half to our own colonies. Here again, as in commerce, there arises a possibility of quarrelling, not only between the lender and borrower but also between rival groups of lenders in different countries. When an economically backward country is being developed with the assistance of capital from nations which are at a further stage of economic progress, the moneylender is supposed to acquire a certain amount of political prestige and privilege which makes other nations, which have an eye to increasing their influence in the borrowing country, jealous concerning such operations. A curious example was presented not long ago by China. China wanted to borrow, and probably the only countries which had any genuine surplus of capital available for export were England and France. Nevertheless, owing to the political side issues involved, Russia, Germany, and the United States also all insisted on taking part in the business of lending money to China. China was compelled to borrow more money than it wanted, so that all these so-called civilized Powers could share in the operation, and the absurdity of the position was increased by the fact that some at least of the Powers which lent the money would have had to borrow it somewhere before they could do so.

This freedom with which England has furnished financial resources to the rest of the world is sometimes called in question as having had, or being likely to have, bad effects upon the activity of production at home. It is quite clear that the progress of international commerce and the division of labour among nations by which commodities of all kinds have been very greatly cheapened could not have been carried out if England and other comparatively far developed countries had not supplied the necessary capital for the development of the relatively backward parts of the earth. If English money had not gone into building railways in America, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and all over the world, and supplying capital to the farmers and others who opened up these countries, food could not have been nearly as cheap as it is or as it was before the war, and clothes and other necessaries of life would have been at a very different price. In fact, it may be said that if England had not acted as she has, as the world's financier, the development of the world's trade to anything like its present scale would have been altogether impossible. If we could feel sure that the distribution of the world's production had been as satisfactory as the wonderful increase in its output, there would be no question that all classes in England had been very greatly benefited by its financial activities abroad. As it is, it is sometimes argued that English capital going abroad stimulates production in other countries and increases the demand for labour there, but that the demand for labour in England and its reward might have been on a higher scale if English capital had been kept at home. This is a question which is, happily perhaps, outside my province at present, but it is one which demands serious attention. This much can be said, that the years in which English capital has gone abroad with the greatest rapidity have also been those in which our export trade has been most active, and it is obvious that this must be so, because when England exports capital it does so in the form of lending money either to a foreign Government or to a foreign municipality, or to some company, English or foreign, which is conducting some enterprise in a foreign country.

In whatever way the money is lent the result is that the country to which it is lent is given so much buying power in England and consequently its demand for English goods is to that extent stimulated. It does not follow, of course, that the whole amount of money that it borrows is actually spent in England. It is possible that the Canadian railway which is raising money in England may spend it by buying steel rails in Belgium, but in practical fact the net result is that somebody or other abroad is given a claim on England which finally, by some roundabout process, takes effect in a demand for English goods and services. At the same time, when one does admit that international finance is essential to international commerce and that the specialization, which is an essential product of commerce, is thereby quickened, we have to remember that the objections, such as they are, which can be put forward against the division of labour among individuals cannot be overlooked altogether when the division of labour is applied to nations.

Dr. Bowley, in his book on England's foreign trade, puts the matter dramatically as follows:--

The limit to the indefinite division of labour is to be found in the social, intellectual, and moral objections to specialization. It is not pleasant to contemplate England as one vast factory, an enlarged Manchester, manufacturing in semi-darkness, continual uproar, and at intense pressure for the rest of the world. Nor would the Continent of America, divided into square, numbered fields, and cultivated from a central station by electricity, be an ennobling spectacle.'

This is a picturesque expression of the objections to the unity of mankind if carried too far through the process of specialization. While admitting their force, it is not necessary to admit that the specialization process need go quite to that length. Even if England became one vast factory, it need not necessarily follow that it must work in semi-darkness, continual uproar, or at intense pressure, but it is all to the good that a specialist of Dr. Bowley's eminence should call our attention to certain things which have to be guarded against. On the other hand, we may contend that if England became one vast factory, it would only do so because it paid it so well to do so, that that vast factory might be made more in accordance with William Morris's ideal than the picture of Inferno drawn by Dr. Bowley. We might imagine England one vast Garden City, dotted over with factories, each of which might be as beautiful as a cathedral, embowered and surrounded by fruit trees and gardens, in which a highly educated and technically trained population would work for five or six hours a day, and spend the rest of their time in intellectual leisure and healthy exercise and home life under ideally happy conditions.

It is interesting to note that the result of the present war is likely, if anything, to check the export of capital for a time, not only owing to the very obvious reason that for the present all our available capital is going into the war and for some time to come will have to go into expenses connected with the war, but also because this war has set a new precedent with regard to the duty of belligerents in the matter of making payments to one another. In olden times, when war was a gentlemanly business, trade and finance were very little interrupted by it. At the time of the Crimean War the Russian Government punctually paid the interest due on Russian loans to English holders and thereby established a prestige amongst English investors which was cherished for several decades. Now that nations have taken to going to war with tooth and nail, throwing their whole available population into the field and using every possible device, military, commercial, and financial, to beat their enemies, any such pleasant decencies as paying money due from one country to another in the shape of interest or otherwise have been abandoned. When the war is over it is possible that investors will remember this fact to a certain extent and will be more chary than they were before of investing their money abroad, at any rate in any country with which there is the remotest possibility of our being involved in war.

War has also shown the great inconvenience that arises when the mutual dependence of nations one on another for certain products leaves them crippled because international exchange is interrupted. International trade and finance, in their full and free development, have been shown to depend on the assumption that peace is secure. Unless the present war should be so ended as to secure peace for all time, it seems likely that all nations will aim at being able to rely, at least for the essentials of life and of defence, on home production or on a supply from countries with which war may be regarded as impossible. If this be so, then unity through trade and finance will be less universal, but more close-knit in its narrower scope.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

A.L. Bowley, England's Foreign Trade. Swan Sonnenschein.

C.K. Hobson, The Export of Capital. Constable.

W.S. Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.

Smith's Wealth of Nations, chs. i-iv.

FOOTNOTES:

INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION

We have learned to look upon the doctrine of interdependence of classes within the nation as a truth self-evident to all eyes unblinded by wilful prejudice or ignorance of that disabling kind charitably defined by the Roman Catholic Church as invincible. To say that unemployment in the mills of Lancashire or the shipyards of the Clyde not only affects the happiness and well-being of cotton operatives and boiler-makers and the great businesses which are carried on by their means, but depresses the national vitality and puts a drag on the national energy throughout the kingdom--to assert that no people can be wholly strong and vigorous while any corner of its territory or any layer in its social strata remains in the possession of a group physically weak, mentally undeveloped, and morally below the standard of ethics which, as a people, it has tacitly agreed to accept as necessary, seems to many of us in these days to state truisms. Yet it is not so long ago that facts which we now presume to be familiar, at least to every undergraduate, were the dangerous discovery of the few who, in an age when people said 'Socialist' as Mr. Pecksniff said 'Pagan', had the temerity to point out, that in things human and political as in mechanics, a chain was and could be no stronger than its weakest link. Even now, in the reaction, often only half conscious, of the employing class against any force which tends to raise the employed to a social plane less removed from that on which they themselves move, in the genuine dislike of education, concealed under ceremonial phrases in days of peace but breaking into fire and fury when the natural man is roused by a touch of excitement, we can see how skin-deep in many cases is the general belief in the widely proclaimed creed that economically as well as spiritually, we are all members one of another. And if the truth of our interdependence as citizens has won acceptance slowly and grudgingly, because the facts that prove it lie other-where than on the surface, it is easy to understand that the interdependence which is international, resulting as it does from the meeting, and crossing, and twining in the web of national life of innumerable fine threads drawn from the utmost corners of the civilized world, has scarcely yet come within the consideration of the ordinary man as an influence from which he cannot escape, and with which, therefore, he is bound to reckon. That, doubtless, is why international movements in general arouse so little interest in the mind of the average reader of newspapers. He does not regard them as practical. The persons engaged in promoting them he defines as cranks, dividing them into two classes, of whom one may be dismissed as harmlessly absurd, while the other ought probably to be suppressed as dangerous.

The events of the first week of August 1914, where the interdependence of countries is concerned, might and did throw some light on the journalistic mirror into which civilized man looks morning by morning, but it was light of the crudest kind. The result of the illumination, in numerous instances, was only to make a great number of people reflect with astonishment on the number of things which this country is in the habit of purchasing from abroad, comment with indignation on her folly in not having made them all at home, and, when passion rose sufficiently high, express a resolution that, however deeply they might need the enemy's products, they would never buy any of them again. To do them justice, this was not the attitude of the men confronted with the actual difficulty of inventing substitutes for raw materials of which the source had suddenly dried up. Those who sat in factory offices ruefully contemplating models of goods to the making of which Germany, Belgium, and Austria had hitherto sent some indispensable contribution, did not, even while they set about inventing something that should replace this contribution, belittle what they had lost. They knew, and said, that while they were confident of producing a working substitute, they did not pretend to offer in every case the precise quality which seemed to be the special gift of the German, or Belgian, or Austrian trader. Perhaps it was not after all only sheer laziness on the part of the British manufacturer, and sheer lack of patriotism on the part of British governments which induced our commercial leaders to concentrate on one field of production and abandon another. To each nation, as to each man, his gift. Some realization of this law may have come instinctively to practical workers engaged in practical tasks.

If the organizers of production among us have not been forward in the past to promote international action in the matter of labour legislation, this is not from any failure to realize the effect of inequality of industrial conditions upon nations competing in the markets of the world. This effect was naturally greatest in cases where the countries concerned were geographically contiguous and engaged in direct rivalry with one another in respect of manufactures falling under the same trade category. Here is the perfect case of competition, in which any circumstance tending to lessen production on the one side is immediately counted as an advantage to the other. But the pressure is felt even where the territory of the rival is situated at the other side of the world, even where the article produced belongs to a different class of manufacture. In normal times long distance transport is easy and long distance freight rates cheap, so that the question of distance, although still to be reckoned with, is no longer a determining factor in the sum of consideration. Again, the network of prices which controls the ultimate cost of production of any finished article is so complex that it is difficult in many cases to rule out this or that set of industrial conditions in one country as being without importance for a given factory in another. The price of a pair of corsets sold retail in Paris may have been subtly influenced by a strike of smelters of iron ore in Silesia; and your china tea-set may be dearer to-morrow by reason of a sudden outbreak of foot and mouth disease among the herds of the Argentine. Quite naturally, therefore, it has come about that manufacturers, in opposing proposals to make existing labour legislation either more stringent in detail or wider-reaching in scope, have put forward, as their principal objection, the plea that such reforms in favour of the worker would place British industry at a disadvantage with that of countries where the action of the manufacturer remained comparatively unfettered. The distrust, as well as the dislike of long hours as a means of increasing production, together with the belief that healthy and pleasant surroundings conduce to the development of the worker's powers as well as to the satisfactory maintenance of his physical condition, has made remarkable progress among the more intelligent of the employing class since the twentieth century began. But there is still, in nearly every trade, a considerable mass of masters who rarely think and never experiment, who turn a deaf ear to the representations of their managers and foremen when these, coming into direct personal contact with the employed, take note of results due to over-strain which are invisible to the head of the business in his office, and who continue to suppose, with their fathers, that limitation of the working period necessarily restricts output and spells commercial loss. Such men, hearing that their own manufacture is produced, let us say in Russia, by men working twelve hours a day to their men's nine, and paid at a considerably lower rate than that which obtains in their own works, would certainly not dream of drawing any other conclusion than the, to them, obvious one that the result of this difference must be a lowered cost of production. Inquiries which should prove, as did those of Sir Alfred Mond's firm when confronted with such a case, that the cost of production per ton was actually higher under the long hour and low wage system would never be instituted by them, and their results, when made by others, leave them sceptical if not suspicious.

Recognizing this mental attitude in a large section of the business men of every country, and bearing in mind that, in order to secure the efficient administration of labour laws, the legislator must be able to carry with him at least the general consent of the majority of those employers to whose trades they apply, it becomes clear that if we would remove all objection to complete and adequate protective law for the workers we must first dispel the fear of the manufacturer that such law would handicap him unfairly in the international market. And what way so apt to this end as the bringing of his competitors under a law similar in character and as far as possible uniform in its provisions?

It is a proof of the prescience of Robert Owen that, even before he had succeeded in planting the first small seed which was to grow into the flourishing tree of British industrial legislation, he had grasped the necessity and formulated the demand for international action in the matter of Factory Laws. Owen's labours at home have, naturally enough, bulked so large in the estimation of historians and publicists in their writings on this subject, that the continental side of his activities has received comparatively little attention at their hands. Nevertheless his correspondence with European governments on the abuses and needs of industrialism as it existed in the early years of the nineteenth century are among the most remarkable he ever wrote; and his appeal to the Congress of the Holy Alliance in 1818 shows how thoroughly prepared he was to treat national reform as the first step to a system which should be international. Had the statesmen of his time, too busy in their making and unmaking of kingdoms to heed his arguments and appeals, turned their attention from those high matters (in which, after all, their achievement was for the most part neither brilliant nor beneficial) to the homelier details of their people's lives, social progress would have been indefinitely hastened, and we might have been spared the sorry spectacle of one industrial nation after another committing the blunders and painfully learning the lesson of its predecessors at the cost of much avoidable human suffering. For, in this matter of industrial legislation, as in many others, men are astonishingly slow to learn by example. Perhaps the most remarkable case in point that has occurred is that of Japan, at this hour still in course of being worked out before our eyes. Here we have a nation brimful of intelligence, quick of apprehension, with a genius for selecting from the polity and procedure of other States exactly those features best fitted to promote prosperity and efficiency and an unmatched power for assimilating and reproducing them in the form suitable to its own tradition of development, following the Western Powers along the crooked path of their early dealings with industrialism and allowing the very conditions which stunted and degraded the Lancashire cotton operative of the 'thirties to be created in the mills of Osaka.

Since the days of Owen ideals of industrial conditions have mightily grown and developed. This was inevitable, since the standards of social comfort and hygiene have undergone complete transformation during the last century. But the important points to note are, first, that it is not only 'reformers' who put forward these ideals, but that they have become to a large extent common to all classes of the people, and, secondly, that the raising of the standard which proceeded at a slow, irregular rate for, roughly speaking, a hundred years, quickening in one decade and remaining almost stationary during the next, is now proceeding with comparative rapidity. Already such a rate of mortality and sickness as was common in the trades technically called dangerous twenty years ago has come to be regarded as monstrous and would no longer be tolerated with patience. This acceleration in the raising of industrial standards is doubtless largely due to the conscious participation of the workers themselves in the business of providing for their own protection; but it may also be referred in some degree to a quickened conscience and a more intelligent appreciation of the importance of the manual worker in the national economy on the part of the public as a whole. The same movement has been taking place, in different degrees according to their differing circumstances, among the other industrial peoples of the Old World and the New. The quicker this advance on the part of some nations the more keenly was the failure of others to make progress in the same ratio felt by those belonging to the first group. An uneasy consciousness that the backward nations were beginning to constitute an obstacle to progressive domestic legislation on the part of the advanced nations began to manifest itself. It appeared that the lame ducks were setting the pace for the whole fleet, and it was seen that self-defence no less than concern for the welfare of the human race at large demanded the devising of some machinery by which the movements of these laggards should be quickened.

Thus, seventy years after Owen had appealed in vain to the Powers in session at Aix-la-Chapelle, a definite step was taken towards an international agreement directed to the benefit of the working classes of Europe. It must not be supposed that during this interval no inheritor of Owen's tradition had been found or that his doctrine had been altogether forgotten for want of a preacher. Now and again prophets arose who, if they did not share Owen's genius, were at least his equals in sincerity and energy. Dr. Ernst Francke, in the article reprinted from the Economic Journal of June 1909, which I have recommended for reference at the end of this chapter, names one of these devoted pioneers, Daniel Legrand, an Alsatian manufacturer who for thirty years did his best to induce France, Great Britain, Prussia, and Switzerland to agree on a minimum of industrial legislation. Some very useful work in the same direction was done, during the years following the Franco-German War, by a Belgian publicist; and in 1876 Colonel Frey, President of the Swiss Federal Council, took the first official step in the direction of international labour treaties, by a speech in the Council recommending that Switzerland should take the lead in an endeavour to establish them. To the Swiss Government belongs the honour of addressing the first circular note to the governments of Europe proposing the calling of a conference as a first step towards this end. This conference never met. The idea of international labour legislation was in the air, and voluntary societies composed of social reformers were beginning not only to discuss but to support it. The international meetings of organized workmen, such as the miners and cotton operatives, in different countries had familiarized the continental mind with the possibility of common action between peoples in respect of labour questions. Nowhere did the proposal for the conference arouse more general interest than in Germany, where the present German Emperor, then at the beginning of his career, was showing an active interest in German conditions of industry. It seemed that he too desired to call a conference, and on his request that he should be given precedence in the matter, the Swiss Government gracefully gave way. So it fell out that the first conference on workmen's protection met in Berlin, at the invitation of the German Government, in March 1890. There were fifteen delegates, all the governments of Europe, except those of Russia and the Balkan States, being represented. The chair was occupied by the then Minister of Commerce, Freiherr von Berlepsch, a man of broad and enlightened views and singularly sympathetic character, who subsequently became one of the founders of the International Association for Labour Legislation, and has probably, more than any other individual, secured the success of its biennial meetings.

At this conference, which the German Emperor stated in precise terms to have been called in view of the problems raised by international competition, a wide range of subjects was discussed by the delegates of the different States, including employment in mines, Sunday work, child labour, the employment of women and young persons, and administrative measures. While on many points agreement was found to be possible, and the general principles which should underlie industrial legislation were accorded ready acceptance, there was enough of objection, reservation, and allegation of constitutional difficulty to prevent the conclusion of anything in the nature of an international treaty. At the time the conference appeared to have failed of its object. Subsequent events have, however, shown that this was not the case. The failure to frame an official agreement probably showed that the ground had not yet been sufficiently laboured, and that further action in the direction of inquiry and discussion was necessary before the taking of so novel a step could be justified to the official mind; but it is certain that the recognition by the representatives of all the Western States that international action in labour questions was desirable in itself, and a goal at which governments should aim, not only laid the foundation for future State action, but gave to the voluntary work of obtaining the materials for building on that foundation an impetus and a sanction which it could have obtained in no other way.

That work was speedily set on foot and continued during the next ten years. It was greatly aided by the action of the International Labour Congress held at Zurich in 1897, when the trade unionists who composed the gathering passed resolutions in favour of the establishment of an International Labour Office, and by the Congress of Brussels which assembled at the invitation of Freiherr von Berlepsch, soon afterwards. At the latter gathering, which included a number of distinguished members of parliament, men of science, lawyers, and economists from France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, and Belgium, the view that for the present progress must be made by the way of private initiative prevailed, and the creation of three national committees, having for their object the foundation of an international association for labour legislation, quickly followed. These committees, which had their head-quarters in Brussels, Berlin, and Vienna respectively, were by the good offices of Professors Cauwès and Jay enabled to call an international congress in Paris in the year of the Great Exhibition, and at this congress the Association was actually founded, and its statutes, provisionally drafted by Professor Mahaim and presented by the Belgian committee, were adopted. A president, a general secretary, and an international committee were provisionally appointed. The functions of the Association were also defined. It was designed to serve as a bond between all those who, in industrial countries, are convinced supporters of the principle of protective legislation; to facilitate the study of labour legislation by the publication of the labour laws of the different States, and of reports on their administration; to assist in the compilation of international statistics of labour and of all studies tending to bring into harmony the existing national industrial codes; and finally, it was charged with the duty of organizing the meetings of international congresses in which labour legislation should be considered. A very important part of its business was to consist in the publication in German, French, and English of a periodical collection of all labour laws newly in force in different countries.

This has been, from the first, the work of the International Labour Office, the fixed head-quarters of the Association, which serves as an exchange and clearing-house for all information pertinent to the Association's work. It is in perpetual session at Basle, and to it all reports and inquiries are addressed by the national sections, while from it issue circulars for the sections' consideration and requests for national investigation of problems which appear ripe for international treaty. The spade work of the Association is done by the national sections in their own countries, all action of the Association being necessarily based in the first instance on the reports received from them at head-quarters. There are now fifteen such national sections--an increase of eight on the original group of seven formed in 1901. The actual membership of the Association has trebled in ten years. The seven sections to which belongs the place of honour at the head of the roll, are those of Germany, Austria, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, France, and Switzerland. Great Britain did not form a section till 1904, and it was not till 1910 that the British Government sent official representatives to the biennial meetings. The official representatives constitute a very important element at those gatherings. They attend the plenary meetings and take part in discussions, often contributing hints on their governments' attitude towards a given reform which are invaluable to those who are framing or modifying proposals with a view to government acceptance; and are also frequently present at the sitting of commissions charged with the consideration of detail, where they can hear the opinions and arguments of experts on every important point in debate. When resolutions are before the conference they do not vote--although in respect of voting right they stand on the same footing as other delegates. But on occasion they are not afraid to express opinions on the merits and tendencies of those resolutions which may have a determining effect on the votes of their fellow members, and I have known a few weighty words from such a man as M. Arthur Fontaine, commending a proposal on which feeling was largely divided, to turn the scale at once in its favour.

The delegates of a section are elected by the section itself. They may be either men or women, and their number is in proportion to the size of the section, the maximum figure being eight, as far as voting delegates are concerned, but substitute members and experts may be present in addition. The following is a list of the fifteen sections represented at Zurich in 1912: Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, the United States, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. In addition the following countries and dominions sent government representatives only: Russia, Rumania, Greece, Turkey, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, and the Australian Commonwealth.

A brief account of the Association's method of doing business may be interesting. Meetings are held once in two years, in the month of September, different towns in Switzerland being selected in turn for the place of assembly. The four conferences which I personally attended as British delegate took place in Geneva, Lucerne, Lugano, and Zurich. There are two plenary assemblies, the first having as chief business, apart from the hearing of introductory addresses, the appointment of the five commissions into which the conference splits up for actual work; the second meeting to receive the reports of these commissions and their recommendations, and decide upon the adoption or rejection of the latter. The trilingual rule is followed, delegates addressing the assembly either in French, German, or English, as they prefer, each speech being followed by a brief résumé in the other two languages from the interpreter. In the commissions, by an unwritten but generally accepted custom, French and German are the only languages used. (Latterly the representatives of the United States of America, with the individualistic courage that becomes them, have shown a disposition to rebel against this custom and defy it; but the close of the Zurich meeting left it uncertain whether in this particular the New World will be able to prevail over the Old.) In the dignified speech-making of the General Assembly the recurrent changes of language, if a little disconcerting at first, can be faced with tolerable equanimity; but when it is a question of the quicker verbal sword-play which goes on in the commissions, the member imperfect in the tongues finds his position occasionally difficult. The sympathies of every humane person must go out to the expert who, having just made a telling exposé of his case in French well practised for the occasion, encounters a crushing rejoinder in German of which he can barely follow the general drift.

The composition of these commissions--in which all the real work of the conferences is done--is truly heterogeneous. A commission may represent a dozen nationalities; it will certainly contain specimens of every social class, members of the most varied shades of thought in politics, religion, and sociology. I can still remember the constituents of my first commission at Geneva in 1906. Our subject was the night-work of young persons. At the head of the table was a professor of Civil Law in the University of Louvain. On either side of him sat a Catholic clerical member of the German Reichstag; a German Protestant pastor from Bavaria; a distinguished Parisian engineer; an Austrian nobleman interested in social reform; a Hungarian man of science; a Dutch factory inspector; a Swiss Trade Union secretary; and myself. We were a motley crew, but the strange 'pattern' which we must have presented to the observation of any higher intelligences interested in our deliberations had no effect on the goodwill and good humour with which they were conducted.

The range of subjects considered at international meetings is very wide. It includes all questions relating to the labour of women, young persons and children; matters of health and hygiene, with special reference to the use of poisonous material in industry, and the regulation of dangerous trades; workmen's insurance; the establishment of wages boards and minimum rates as preventives against sweating; the extension of the ten-hours' day and the Saturday half-holiday to be the legal rule in all industrial countries; and the introduction of the three-shift system and the eight-hour working day in continuous industries. As it is obvious that questions so large, touching so deeply the domestic life and habits of every people, cannot possibly be settled either out of hand or all at once, the Association's study of each separate problem is always prolonged and, according to the circumstances and the difficulty of the case, more prolonged in one instance than in another. Like the old pioneers of National Factory legislation, the Association has proceeded along the line of least resistance: not because it lacks courage, but for reasons of sheer prudence. If it was to become, in the words of M. Millerand, the present French Minister of War, one of its oldest and staunchest members, 'the laboratory in which international treaties are made', it was clear that it must not propose for international acceptance reforms which even among the most progressive peoples were looked upon as doubtful or dangerous. Accordingly it chose for the subject of its first great efforts two reforms in relation to which it could count with certainty upon a considerable amount of sympathy, and proposed international legislation prohibiting the night-work of women in factories, and the manufacture, importation, and sale of matches made with white phosphorus. Information on both these subjects was collected by means of the national sections; the Association in conference drew up proposals and recommendations to the governments concerned; the governments consented to a diplomatic conference at Berne, and the conventions concluded in 1906 were the happy result of their meeting.

But it must not be supposed that these results were reached without difficulty. Even as regards so comparatively simple a reform as the abolition of the night-work of women--to be carried out, after considerable 'delays' in favour of those countries in which night-work by women had hitherto been an accepted industrial custom--the adjustment of the change to the varying circumstances of each State proved a delicate business, and agreement could never have been reached but for the willingness of the more backward States to make substantial sacrifices and encounter possible risks. For this reason, the allowance of some years of grace before adherence to the treaty should become practically binding was a measure almost of necessity. It would have been unreasonable and might have been cruel to insist on Belgium and Hungary assimilating their practice in such a matter to that of Great Britain without ample time to prepare for the change. Thirteen States adhered to this treaty.

The difficulties in the white phosphorus case were at first sight even more striking, and, to begin with, only seven States--Germany, France, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Luxemburg--were signatories of this convention. Of these, the first five had previously prohibited the use of white phosphorus within their own frontiers. Room was, however, left for the entry of other States into the convention at a subsequent date, with the result that the scope of the treaty has been gradually extended, and that we now find ourselves fairly within sight of the banishment from manufacture of one of the most deadly of all industrial poisons, and the consequent disappearance of an industrial disease peculiarly dreadful in its nature and symptoms. The tardy adhesion of the United Kingdom to this treaty remains a matter of regret; but the procedure of the Indian Government and of all the British self-governing dominions in following the mother country when at last she determined to take action has done much to redeem that tardiness. Obviously, it was the prohibition of the importation and sale of phosphorus matches in India and the Dominions which has forced the Scandinavian and Belgian manufacturers who were opposing complete prohibition to seek for substitutes for white phosphorus. At the present moment only Japan and Sweden among manufacturing countries stand outside the convention, the United States, whose constitution forbade her to impose prohibition by direct legislation, having brought about the desired result by the imposition of a prohibitive tax.

Is this all? it may be asked. If the question be of treaties signed, sealed, and ratified, the answer must be 'Yes'. On the subject of the night-work of boys and the hours of women and young persons, proposals were actually considered and conventions drafted by an official conference at Berne in 1913. The draft conventions were far from admirable: their framers went so far in the spirit of compromise to meet the objections of the backward States that the provisions laid down, had they been accepted without modification, would have tended to depress rather than to raise the standard of international opinion on the questions to be affected by them. We need not, therefore, feel much regret that the war has swept them, with so many other pre-war schemes, into the wastepaper-basket. The vast question of minimum rates of wages and their regulation by the State is obviously still too much in the experimental stage of its solution (even in this country where experiments have been boldest) for it to be possible to make it the subject of international agreement. As a subject of international discussion it has had its place, and an increasingly important place, for at least eight years past in the studies of the sections and the discussions of the Association meeting. Upon no question has public international opinion ripened more rapidly. In 1906, at Geneva, where the conditions of home workers were first under discussion, a few daring delegates met in corners and whispered under their breath the words 'Wages board'. By 1910, at Lugano, an English woman delegate was elected joint president of the Association's Home Work Committee, 'as a recognition of Great Britain's achievement in passing the first Trade Boards Act'; at Zurich, in 1912, a two-day conference on the legal minimum wage preceded the meeting of the Association, and a whole sheaf of minimum wage bills introduced by private members into the Chambers of different countries was before the delegates, together with an official measure of the French Government. To watch this change of attitude was to see international thought in the making. To appreciate its full significance, it is necessary to bear in mind the different aspects presented by the 'sweating' difficulty in this country and in the great industrial States of the Continent. The French or German social reformer sees it mainly, if no longer exclusively, as a problem of home work. Now home work in Great Britain is a by-product of a strictly limited class of industries, affecting a comparatively small class of the population; in France and Germany it forms a highly important section of the general industrial structure, it is interwoven, to an extent rarely grasped by British students, with the life, and habits, and productive power of the nation. Much more courage--and greater freedom from prejudice--was required in the one case than the other. The remarkable advance towards definite action on the part of the State in relation to the establishment of minimum rates for home workers which took place between 1906 and 1913 could not have been achieved in so short a time but for the labours of certain voluntary associations led by men of insight, candour, and indefatigable devotion. In this connexion the pioneer work of the late Comte de Mun and Professor Raoul Jay has been of inestimable value. Realizing themselves, as did few unofficial reformers, the wide nature of the movement in which they had engaged and the impossibility of confining it in its sweep and effects to a section of the manual workers, they succeeded in gradually bringing home to the ablest among their fellow-workers the necessity for closing the gulf which French mental habit had fixed between factory and home workers and preparing to treat both classes on a similar footing of equity. In Germany,--where, as we might expect, there was less forwardness to launch unofficial schemes and a disposition to work rather from the first through authoritative channels--experiments were being made under the Home Work Act which, if of little value in themselves, seemed the earnest of much better things.

If this result only had been attained, the meetings of the Association and the labours of the sections would not have been in vain. But far more was in process of achievement when the work of the Association was interrupted by the catastrophe of the European War. The adoption in all industrial countries of the 'English week', with its half-holiday so much coveted by the continental worker--the establishment of a uniform working day--the gradual introduction of the eight-hours shift into such 'continuous industries' as steel-smelting and glass-blowing--an international agreement to eliminate the use of lead from many branches of the pottery industry and to limit and safeguard its use in all others,--these were only some among the questions which study and investigation and discussion had brought to a stage at which the Association could look upon them as fit matter for potential international conventions in August 1914. Now that its activities are, for the most part, in suspense, it is well to remember that its greatest achievement was the proof, again and again renewed, that it is possible for persons of twenty different nationalities, holding the most diverse opinions on nearly every subject under the sun, not only to act together but to find common motives of action so strong as to break down every sundering barrier of political doctrine and religious creed. Whatever of suspicion or antipathy might flourish outside the boundaries of the international association, these evil weeds have never taken root inside them. Is it Utopian to dream, when the days of peace shall have returned, of a reconciliation within its borders for those between whom at present the great gulf of division seems hopelessly fixed?

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

History of Factory Legislation, Harrison and Hutchins. Macmillan. Revised edition.

Frederic Keeling, Child Labour in the United Kingdom. P.S. King.

Clementina Black, Sweating. Duckworth.

R.H. Tawney, Studies in the Minimum Wage: (i) Chainmaking; (ii) Tailoring. G. Bell & Sons.

J.A. Hobson, Work and Wealth. Macmillan.

Edward Howarth and Mona Wilson, West Ham: A Study. Dent.

Sir Thomas Oliver, M.D., Dangerous Trades. John Murray.

Annual Reports of International Association for Labour Legislation (British Section), 1906-14. To be obtained of the Secretary, Queen Anne's Chambers, 28 Broadway, Westminster.

Ernest Barker, Nationalism and Internationalism. C.S.U. Pamphlets, Mowbray, Oxford.

Dr. Bauer, International Legislation. Mowbray, Oxford.

Ernest Francke, 'International Labour Treaties,' Economic Journal (June, 1909). Reprinted separately, Macmillan.

Albert Métin, Les Traités Ouvriers. Armand Colin: Paris.

E. Mahaim, Le Droit International Ouvrier. Librairie Recueil-Sirey: Paris.

Fagnot, Millerand et Strohl, La Durée légale du Travail. Félix Alcan: Paris.

Paul Boyaval, La Lutte contre le Sweating System. Félix Alcan: Paris.

Students might also consult the following Reports:

Le Travail à Domicile en France. Ministère du Travail: Paris.

Le Travail à Domicile en Belgique. Ministère du Travail: Bruxelles.

FOOTNOTES:

COMMON IDEALS OF SOCIAL REFORM

Earlier ages were more able than ours to believe in the good old days. We, knowing more of the past than our forefathers did, can find in it no golden age. But our eyes do not rest even upon the present. In the nineteenth century men thought they were at the end of a process, and their evolutionary creed was often only a polite method of saying what fine fellows they were. Now we look forward. The future seems to us longer than the past and more important than the present; and we ourselves seem to be at the beginning rather than at the end of time. A knowledge of the past has made it impossible to believe that growth has stopped, and we understand how different the future may be, in part at least, by perceiving how different even this grimy and blood-stained present is from the still more inhuman past.

Among the recorded changes the Economists write of an increasing interchange of goods, and we can see as well an increasing interchange of ideas across the frontiers of States. Music, painting, literature, and science have all been influenced; and ideas concerning political, economic, and social facts have been affected by that interchange which has developed our philosophy, our science, and our art. No one nation has originated all; and each nation has depended on hints and hypotheses which have arisen in others.

But the interchange of ideas on social life has led to an increase of ideals, which are plans of action emotionally appreciated and therefore motive forces. Some of these are the Utopias of individual thinkers; but we shall consider here only those more powerful ideals which are shared, however vaguely, by many. In this case also, as in the purely intellectual sphere, the fire spreads from group to group, from nation to nation; and as the interchange of ideas increases knowledge, so the exchange of enthusiasm makes action more powerful. A really effective ideal, however, cannot arise except from the perception of definite evil. Vague discontents may cause such revolution as leads to reaction; but the clear sight of evil is the only source of reform. We may take it for granted, then, that although an ideal is nerveless if it is not passionate, it is futile unless it is based on knowledge. Therefore a hint must be given of the evils from the knowledge of which ideals of social reform now rise. That all is not well in the relations of man to man or of group to group must be fairly obvious to any one with imagination enough for sympathy. General dissatisfaction and universal cures for society are childish; but the perception of this and that evil gives rise to different plans for reform which all originate in the enthusiasm which is an ideal. We may put aside the long history of the growth of this shared enthusiasm for better relations between men, whatever their ability, their rank, their race, or their government.

The common ideals of the present are the result of a gradual development, but we shall consider them here as attempts to deal with existing evils and plans for a better future.

* * * * *

Some social evils of the present are perhaps as old as any settled civilization. Such are disease and personal violence. Some are due to forces which have come into existence recently, owing to increased communication and accumulated wealth. Such are extreme poverty and the dehumanizing of social relations. With both kinds of evil we are moved to deal, and we are not deterred from the attempt to reform even long-established evil; for we feel that we do not know what is possible. Nothing is inevitable. This is not the place to give in detail the description of those evils which are being dealt with. It is enough if we recognize that it is no abstract or airy theory of equality or human nature which moves us to action. All real theories are intensely personal: and no theory has ever yet moved men unless they saw through it to the crude facts. However it may be phrased in a theory of society, we recognize it as evil that disease, leading to premature death, should be as common as it is. As a social evil it may be said to disturb seriously the relations between men. We see also that it is a social evil that men should use fraud or violence in compelling labour or in the pursuit of riches. Of the newer social evils there is the physical and spiritual deterioration which seems to result from the massing of men in great cities. There is also the dehumanizing of the relations between master and man. And this is like in kind to the dehumanizing of all functions in the vast institutions of modern times. The director of a company comes to regard himself as part of a machine; and so does the shareholder. So eventually does the agent of the State. Until at last we reach the immense evil that human action is done for which no moral responsibility is felt. How then shall we act? What has been done and what is still hoped for? The answer to such questions will be a statement of ideals.

One may speak of ideals of social reform from two different points of view; either with respect to (1) the changing sentiment which produces movements for reform or with respect to (2) the institutional change which embodies that sentiment. The two are complementary parts of one historical movement: and it is difficult to divide them as cause and effect. For sentiment, becoming enthusiasm, certainly causes institutional change, and yet the reformed institution invariably creates a new sentiment. The province of law and of social custom is to lead as well as to register--a dynamic as well as a static influence, to increase order and to incite to liberty. In actual life, therefore, it is often impossible to separate the sentiment from its embodiment in measures of social reform.

For purposes of study, however, one may divide. We may put aside the moving sentiments--the passions, however faint, which urge men to wish for a better future--and we may consider first the particular instances of reform.

* * * * *

One definite and in some sense new departure in the results of the shared enthusiasms of nations has been the industrial legislation of recent years. That has been already dealt with. But, although in an economic age such as ours industrial reform may seem the most striking, it is not the only effect of our shared enthusiasm and later ages may not think it the most important. There has been reform of social evils owing to the interchange between nations of ideas on education, religious toleration, medicine, and sanitation, the treatment of criminals, the suppression of slavery and many other subjects. All these and many more reforms are, as it were, registered in institutional (legal or administrative) change.

Perhaps it is better to begin with a definite instance of the working of an ideal, lest it may seem that we are speaking only of an empty aspiration. We may take as an example the reforms connected with medicine and sanitation, and those only in so far as they have been officially established by the joint action of states. This is a very restricted embodiment of a social ideal, since of course we may find the same use of common labour between men of different races in the private contest with disease or in the municipal preventive medicine which in every great city owes much to investigators and practitioners of other nations. But it is better to take the most tangible effect in purely governmental action.

The French Government proposed an international conference, which met in 1851, to deal with infectious disease; and a second conference met in 1856. In 1865 the outburst of cholera in the East led to a third congress at Constantinople. Great Britain opposed treaties for regulating quarantine, &c., because of the delay which might be caused to the pursuit of shipping interests. But at last a treaty was made in 1892 at Venice for protection against cholera. Further and more effective treaties were agreed to by civilized states in 1897 and 1903. A bureau of information concerning infectious disease was established at Paris, and commissions to supervise were established in Turkey and Egypt. With regard to sleeping sickness Great Britain took the initiative; and a conference met in 1907, in London, at which six countries were represented. So much with respect to disease; we may now turn to examples of the joint action of states as regards crime.

The African slave traffic has been dealt with since 1885 (Berlin Conference) by the European States acting together on certain general principles. And what is known as the White Slave traffic was the subject of arrangement between fifteen states in the conference at Paris in 1902.

Again, the reform of prisons and penitentiaries has been much assisted by international congresses since 1846. The last was held in 1910 in America, at which twenty-eight states were represented. A secretariat has been established at Berne for the exchange of expert opinion and for making suggestions to governments.

These are examples of a very numerous class of reforms undertaken by the joint action of governments. They are all comparatively recent and most of the twenty-eight unions between governments for concerted action have been established during the years of European peace between 1871 and 1914. In these instances the States of Europe have put their precious sovereignties into their pockets; although the lawyers and diplomatists explain the situation in the old terms.

With respect to all these movements for social reform three points must be noticed: first, the initiative in most reform has come from private enterprise and not from diplomacy or governments. Secondly, this private interest has spread from the few of one nation to the few of another before any effective result was attained. Thirdly, the states have not acted together because of any general theory of international action, but simply because certain social evils could not be dealt with at all by any state acting separately. Whatever hampers common action, then, also hinders effective reform in dealing with disease or crime. I need not elaborate the conclusion.

* * * * *

There are also instances of governmental action being directly influenced by the practice of other states, even when there has been no common action. The two most striking reforms of recent years have been in education and religious toleration. Of education enough has already been said. The interest from our point of view here is chiefly in the effect of education on social structure. It is increasingly evident that of all forces for transforming a nation, education is the most powerful; but no one nation can transform its education effectively without respect to the mistakes and successes of its neighbours. This has been perceived and acted upon. The influence, for example, of Germany on England is sufficiently well known. German precedents were quoted in the House of Commons in the early days of state education for England: and the Education Acts of 1870 and 1876 were largely due to the impression made in England by the success of state education in Prussia. Coleridge, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold definitely acknowledged a debt to Germany. But Germany owed something to England in the perception of the value of surroundings and corporate life in schools. France also was affected by English education; and, in fact, French educators had to come to England to find the thing for which the French gave us the name--Esprit de Corps.

The United States have been very definitely influenced in their University education both by Germany and England; and their Government has in primary education certainly established for all states the transforming possibilities of a school system. It must be remembered that the crudity of civilization and its apparent corruption in the United States are European not American. It is because Europe has neglected its duty, enslaved and brutalized its peoples, that social and political evil enters with the immigrants; and all this mass of European incompetence, the result of neglect or evil-doing in Ireland, Poland, the Slavonic Countries and Italy, the Government of the United States exorcises with education: and the effect is spreading beyond the frontiers of the States. A further effect of influence passing from nation to nation has been the change with regard to the relations of State and Church. In England it is some years since the State persecuted in the supposed interest of religion; but we remember that the abolition of tests against Roman Catholics was as late as 1830 and as against Jews as late as 1850. Even the most backward of European countries have been affected by the general feeling. In 1874 Austria for the first time allowed any creed, not dangerous to morals, to be preached; and ecclesiastical power is not any longer to be used against any but members of the particular Church which is offended. In Spain there are still some obstacles to public manifestations of any religious belief but that which is most prevalent; free worship in private, however, is at last allowed. Thus, the general tendency, spreading from the nations which are most intricately divided in religion, has been towards what is called toleration. Connected with this has been the gradual recognition of civil marriage; in which the old privilege of the most powerful Church is no longer recognized by the modern State. Law and custom have both changed.

Perhaps the general attitude has not really changed. We persecute more for political than for religious unorthodoxy; or it may be that in our more economic age we forbear to burn heretics only because we cannot afford the faggots. But in any case the relations between men in society are more justly arranged, even where religion is concerned.

* * * * *

We have thus examples of (1) joint governmental action and (2) separate actions of governments influenced directly by foreign governments.

There are also certain results of the interchange of ideals between nations which are not yet, or only in part, registered in legal or political institutions. Such for example is the changed position given to women. A change has occurred quite outside the political or even the economic sphere, both in the habits of western humanity and in their guiding conceptions.

The change is affecting the meaning of marriage, since we are becoming inclined to suppose that man and woman are not simply male and female. Human individuality is given a new value; and there is no telling yet what the new attitude may involve in lessening the friction due to primitive and obsolete tradition or in making society more reasonable and civilized. The source of the change is undoubtedly an enthusiasm which has been influenced by men and women of all nations. Ibsen has a place in the history of social transformation. And besides, the contact between nations has made it possible for the freer position of women in one group to affect the domestic slavery of another.

In the position of children, also, an immense change is proceeding. We cannot fail to call it social reform, that the child should be given so much more definite a place in the social organism. Aristotle thought woman was a mistake of nature's in the attempt to make man; and nearly all philosophers have treated children as if they ought to be rather ashamed of themselves for not being grown up. I speak of philosophers in the wide sense of the term, for I do not think the metaphysicians knew that there was such a thing as a child in the universe. However that may be, we can hardly believe that as late as the nineteenth century parents really imagined that they knew what was good for their children. In our more sceptical age, children have generally to be careful not to allow their parents to read certain books, and in every well brought up family, it is thought that parents should be seen and not heard. A social change has occurred in the comparative importance we assign to childhood and age.

Thirdly, there is gradually coming about a transformation of social castes. One must speak carefully; for in the West we are supposed not to have castes. There is, however, an uncomfortable feeling that society is not one, that the two cities which Plato said would divide and destroy the true city of men are now established--the rich and the poor. I do not mean those with £3,000 a year, and those with £160 a year. It is not a question for the Exchequer. I mean that great numbers in all 'civilized' nations are ill-fed and ill-clothed from birth, and die prematurely. To perceive it is to desire action which perhaps no state can perform. But that we perceive it is something. Read the complacent rhymes of Lord Tennyson about 'freedom slowly broadening down' and then turn to contemporary literature, to Jean Richepin or John Galsworthy, and you will acknowledge that a common ideal of social reform has come into existence. We are at least restless in face of a social organization which wastes humanity during long years of peace almost as completely, though not so recklessly, as during a few months of war.

Something has been already done--English writers and English experience have given a motive power to Hungarian, Russian, Finnish, Turkish, Persian, and Indian democracy. Groups of men have claimed, for example in South America, their right to free development. And everywhere during the period of European peace the contact between nations was teaching every nation the force of its own character, while the new complexities of society were weakening the old dividing lines of caste between individuals.

In all these matters we seem to be moved by a desire for a freer social atmosphere. Whether law or administration changes or not, it is clear that most European nations have undergone in the years of peace from 1871 to 1914 considerable social changes. How far they are effective in all nations and in all classes it is very difficult for a contemporary to judge. It may be that the social structure of the decorative upper fringe or of the bedraggled hem of society is much the same as it was before communication was easy and transit rapid. But the central body of European society is certainly changed; and, after all, between the scum and the dregs is the good soup.

* * * * *

Such are the changes which have been introduced into social life owing to the interdependence of nations. But we should not understand what has happened if we accepted the mere record of achievements. The future is built not only upon what we have done, but upon what we hope to do. Reforms accomplished do not make us more satisfied to endure evil not yet reformed--for always working in the achieved present is the ideal which transformed the past into what we now see.

We may turn, then, to consider some general features of the force working in social reform which is not yet achieved. And for that purpose we put aside established law and custom to consider the implied attitude.

Now that political privilege and inequality before the law are more or less removed, there is a greater concentration upon the underlying social injustice. We all accept it as good that the activities of government should not be for the benefit of the few, or that the money should not be drawn from one class. We suppose at least that there should be one law for rich and poor.

To any one with a knowledge of history this seems an immense step since small classes in every nation held political privilege, made law for others, and forced tribute from the majority. Not that all is justice and liberty. The law still, with noble impartiality, forbids both the millionaire and the pauper to steal bread. Of course it is not directed against the poor. The law never forbids the poor man to cheat the state out of more than £3,000 a year. Again, political power still depends on the social position of your cousins and your aunts. But something has been done.

We hear much more nowadays about social than about political or legal reform. That, in itself, is a sign of a change of attitude. In the revolution of 1381 the crowds came marching to London swearing, in the words of the old chronicle, that there would be no peace in the land till each and every lawyer was slain. In the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 it was 'death to the politicians'. Now--it may be that we despair of lawyers or politicians, dead or alive. In any case the attention of those in every state who are moved by enthusiasm for a better society is concentrated less upon votes and laws than upon the distribution of well-being.

Secondly, there has been a transference of enthusiasm of the religious or poetic kind from the sphere of contemplation or aloofness to that of earthly and even material action. Ideals of social reform do not any longer involve a neglect of food and clothing: we are all more and more convinced that it is idle to preach culture to a starving man, or to talk of liberty to one whose whole life is a bestial struggle for bare food and covering. I speak of normal times. In England, France, and Germany, social betterment means giving to a greater number security of bare life, upon which alone the good life can be built.

It will be seen that I imply a disagreement with the Tolstoian conception of reform; in so far as that involves a neglect of food and clothing and generally of what are called material goods. That conception is not perhaps powerful among those who deal with what is usually called social reform. It is not 'modern', and it is also dependent upon a mistaken argument in ethical theory. An unfortunate confusion made by what is called Eastern, Stoic, or Mediaeval asceticism led to the idea that because the mind is more important than the body, the body has no importance at all. But we need not deal with this theory in detail, especially as the general attitude of to-day is opposed to it. There is undoubtedly a concentration upon the bare necessities of human life with a view to discovering how these can be shared more generally.

We are fully aware of the immense social danger in the desire for riches; but that is no objection to the desire for bread and clothing and the bare necessities of human life. And the seemingly materialistic enthusiasm which will gradually transform our semi-bestial civilization is no less poetic or religious than any Eastern aloofness or Tolstoian simplicity. Poetry is not all rhyming couplets: religion is not all for the intellectually or artistically incompetent. So, a world in which twenty per cent. of humanity did not slowly starve to death would not necessarily be less worthy of admiration. Nor would religion disappear if every one were healthy, unless religion means the result of neurasthenia or dyspepsia or premature ageing. No doubt there is some exaggeration in this element of the common social ideals. Not even a poor man lives on bread alone; and it is indeed possible to have a perfectly well-fed society which would be quite barbarous. But we must regard the fine flower of culture as purchased at too high a price if, for the sake of a few connoisseurs and courtiers not to say bourgeois plutocrats, the majority in every nation must lack a bare human life. Some declare that the division between nations is more important than that between the rich and the poor. It may be so; but the only reason must be that what the few have, the many, however dimly, may hope to share or may be induced to think they do share. Humanity is infinitely gullible. But in every nation there is rising a murmur which may yet become an articulate cry.

The writers of modern Utopias in their detailed conception of what is desirable may speak only for themselves; but it is a sign of the common enthusiasm that they all attach so much importance to organization and to physical health. This indicates that we all, in every nation, look forward, however vaguely, to a society in which human life shall be less difficult for the majority to obtain. We speak sometimes of the redistribution of leisure--August Bebel made it one of the chief articles of his creed. But this as an ideal does not indicate any desire that the dock-labourer should have time to loaf in a club, or his wife time to play bridge, except in so far as time to loaf is an opportunity for some other employment than the mere struggle for food. There is nothing inevitable in a situation which makes the development of most of the human faculties a privilege of a few and an impossibility for the greater number. Nor is it correct to suppose that the half-starved and the ill-clothed should be satisfied with being 'virtuous', and leave it to others, possibly wicked and certainly far from simple, to cultivate art and science.

Nor again is it absurd to hope for a world in which all should have at least the opportunity for the development of any faculties they may possess. The social gain would be immense. It would be like the change from a harmony which is produced by a few amateurs to one of a full orchestra.

Thirdly, it is increasingly evident that no one state or nation can act effectively in social reform unless it acts in concert with others. Treaties of commerce, common prison legislation, and common measures for sanitation and medicine have proved effective because they are in the nature of things. They are necessary means for the desired prosperity even of the most selfish and segregated state.

But ignorance and prejudice and irrational violence spread as easily as disease or crime. Knowledge is not secure until it is widespread; and civilization perishes, which is segregated in a world of barbarism. Therefore education also, in its widest sense, must be contrived in common. Not merely school systems influenced by foreign ideas, but the very atmosphere of thought must change in harmony among all nations, if we are not to go toppling down into the abyss from which by painful centuries we have ascended.

* * * * *

This ideal of social reform then seems to be agreed upon between some men of all nations, that more common action should be taken. It is not a vague sentiment for the abolition of conflict between states; nor is it a pious aspiration for peace. It is the clear perception that the state cannot fulfil its functions in modern life if it continues to act as isolated or segregated. That for which the state itself stands cannot be attained even within the frontiers of one state by any state acting alone.

This is not the place to distinguish those subjects upon which states should act together from those on which they should act separately. That is simply the problem as to the limits of political regionalism. The fact which is sufficient for our argument here is that certain forces, chiefly economic, have come into existence in recent years, which disregard state boundaries. In concrete terms, these are international trusts and international labour interests. But it is increasingly evident that these cannot be effectively dealt with by any one state acting separately. The isolated sovereign state of earlier times is simply helpless before the elaborate world-system of economics; and control can only be secured by an established world-system of politics. The states, one supposes, exist for justice and liberty. Divided, they will perish or become mere playthings in the hands of non-moral economic 'interests'.

To save itself and all it stands for, the state must cease to pose as a possible opponent to any other state, and must deliberately co-operate in an increasing number of reforms.

It is better to put into the coldest terms a conception which has too often hitherto proved futile, because it arose rather from vague discontent, than from the perception of a definite evil. The fire of enthusiasm must indeed work upon that conception before any effective change can be made in the attitude of governments or of peoples. But enthusiasm will be wasted if we cannot pause to see against what we are contending.

We are struggling with the greatest of all obstacles to social reform when we attack the isolation of nations. Unless that is overcome we shall perhaps patch and prop; but, time and again, we shall be enslaved to the immensely powerful non-moral forces, in the midst of which humanity finds its way. I cannot speak more clearly--[Greek: bous epi glôssê]. The nations face each other in conflict, while death, disease, violence, bestial indolence and docility corrode every state.

* * * * *

But when war was at its brutish worst Grotius spoke with effect of a moral bond which survived between men who in physical conflict had been trying to take their 'enemies' for beasts and stones. And humanity began once more its long struggle with the beast in man. So now--I leave it to your imagination.

We have made immense progress by assisting each other across the frontiers of states in such science as may provide high explosive and submarine warfare. In these the nations have co-operated. The guns which kill the English at the Dardanelles were made by Englishmen. There may yet come a time when high explosives will be out of date, and the state will use the careful dissemination of disease among its enemies. The only reason, I think, why it is not now done, is that no group can be certain of making itself immune from the disease it may spread among its enemies.

* * * * *

Our conclusion, therefore, is that one of the elements in the present attitude towards social reform is a tendency to co-operation between nations. We have seen that this has already had effect in various details of law and administration; and there is every reason to suppose that the method will be carried further.

But the problem cannot be left there. Co-operation as a word is a mere charm, like Evolution. There has been, and there may be co-operation in doing wrong. That action has become common does not prove that it is right; and an ideal implies at least some ethical judgement. Therefore, in every nation there are some few who are convinced of the necessity for more deliberately moral action in common between men of different races. If there can be so much co-operation in the making of armaments or the defrauding of shareholders, there may yet be more co-operation in the elimination of disease and poverty. And not only may there be such co-operation, but it must be. The situation no longer exists in which most of the effects of an evil régime are confined within frontiers. The social distress of European nations must be dealt with as a whole because it is a whole. Therefore whatever militates against the unity of western civilization destroys the possibility of social reform.

Many times before it has been seen that there are nobler conflicts than the struggle for markets or for the political domination of one clique or one nation. Many times before it has been felt, at least by a few, that man is deceived when he imagines that man is his enemy. And many times when the deliverance seemed near we have been enslaved again by an evil magic. A hundred years ago, at the end of the Napoleonic wars, the dreamers imagined that humanity would have done with its false prophets and lay the ghosts which have haunted it since it began to shake off the manners of the beasts. But a dismal succession of new falsehoods and new blind guides appeared. And now, in this so advanced age, we have to face the same possibility. There is much to excuse a despair; from which nothing can free us but a new enthusiasm. The evil magic must be overcome by magic of another kind, and how acute the crisis seems it is hardly possible to indicate.

The quality of our age was its expectancy. For that reason men of every nation were moved to desire a transformed society. But perhaps that quality of expectancy was the quality of youth. For the first time in history, in the early twentieth century, age was giving place to youth in the political equilibrium of the generations. Now--I dare not speak too plainly. The young men of the western world are already, since August 1914, noticeably fewer. Death may have made no difference to them. It has made an immense difference to the future. It means that the eager expectancy of youth, which is the source of so much enthusiasm for a better world, is being lost. The crisis is here. As yet the common ideals of civilized nations still survive; but the desire for a better future is at ebb and flow with a tired acquiescence in the established order. It is in our hands to decide which shall overcome. No generation has faced a greater issue. We cannot tell what will be the outcome; but to hope too much is at least a more generous fault than to despair too soon.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

C.D. Burns, Political Ideals. Clarendon Press.

P. Geddes, Cities in Evolution. Williams & Norgate.

J.A. Hobson, Towards International Government. Allen & Unwin.

P.S. Reinsch, Public International Unions. Ginn & Co.

XII

POLITICAL BASES OF A WORLD-STATE

World-state is a term likely to be offensive in its arrogance, if it be taken to mean the substitution of a single political community and government for the numerous separate national states which have hitherto existed. I therefore hasten to say that I intend no such meaning, but use the term as a convenient expression to cover any body of political arrangements, to which most of the principal nations of the world are parties, sufficiently stable in character and wide in scope to merit the title of international government.

Towards such a possibility the nineteenth century has made three great contributions. During that century great advances have been made in the settlement of political government upon a basis of nationality. This process has been accomplished partly by throwing off the dominion of some foreign power, as in the case of Belgium, Greece, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Serbia, and the South American colonies of Spain; partly by the closer federal union of independent states, as in the case of Germany and Switzerland; partly by a blend of the two methods as in the case of Italy; and partly by the peaceful dissolution of an unnatural union, as with Norway and Sweden. Though much still remains to be done before the identification of statehood with nationality even for Europe is completed, and some backward steps have been taken, the growing acceptance of the conception of nationality as a just and expedient basis of government is a powerful guarantee for the persistence of this joint work of liberation and of union. If, as the result of the settlement following this war, political readjustments are made which fairly satisfy the remaining aspirations after national autonomy, the more pacific atmosphere will favour all opportunities for co-operation between nations.

The second contribution of the nineteenth century towards political internationalism is of a more positive character. It consists in a series of inchoate and fragmentary but genuine attempts of the Great Powers to work together upon critical occasions in the interests of 'justice and order', as they understood those terms, and to embody in acts or conventions some policy which is the result of their deliberations. This flickering light, called the Concert of Europe, first kindled at the Congress of Vienna, has reappeared fitfully throughout the century. The treaties, declarations, and conventions, proceeding from these conferences or congresses of the Powers, have marked important advances, not only in the substance of international law, but in the method of legislation. For whereas, before the Congress of Vienna, all the treaties between states which helped to form the body of international law were the acts of two or, at the most, a small group of states, since that time law-making treaties of general application and of world-wide importance have come into being. The most noteworthy examples of these general treaties are the Final Act of the Vienna Congress in 1815, the Declaration of Paris in 1856, the Geneva Convention of 1864, the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, the General Act of the Congo Conference in 1885, and the two Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907. Having regard to the general character of many of the rules laid down at these conferences, as, for instance, the abolition of the slave trade, the neutralization of certain lands and waters, and the regulation of the rules of war, it is clear that we have to recognize throughout last century the existence of a rudimentary organ of international legislation, very irregular in its operation, very imperfect in structure and authority, but none the less a genuine experiment in international government.

Hardly less significant for our purpose has been the prominent assertion of the principle of federalism in the formation or growth of national government. The great example of the United States has been followed by Switzerland and Germany, by Mexico, Argentine, Brazil, and Venezuela, and by the dominions of the British Empire in Canada, Australia, and South Africa. I must not in this brief survey even touch upon the different forms of federalism. It must suffice to remark that, whether as a a principle of devolution, as in the case of the proposal of Home Rule for the constituent parts of Great Britain, or as a principle of closer union, as in the proposal for a federated British Empire, federalism is very much alive. It furnishes a hopeful mode not only for reconciling demands for local autonomy with effective central sovereignty among the provinces or districts of a single national state, but even for harmonizing the claims of separate nationality with those of wider racial, linguistic, and traditional sympathy. But even more important than these distinctively political movements and events, as a pledge of the coming world-state, is the manifold structure of industrial and commercial internationalism which has been growing during the last few generations at an ever accelerating pace. The network of material, financial, and intellectual communications, connecting all parts of the developed world, and establishing quick, constant, cheap, and reliable modes of transport for men, goods, money, and information, form the actual basis of what may not improperly be called an economic world-state. Though much of this machinery, with the great work of international trade and capitalistic co-operation which it assists to perform, lies outside the sphere of politics, there are innumerable points of political contact and pressure. The realities of foreign policy in every state are more and more concerned with issues of trade, communications, and concessions, and the treaties and other formal arrangements between states are to a growing extent the instruments and the expressions of the internationalism of economic interests. The imperialism and the colonial policy of each great Power, though composed of various ingredients, are mainly directed by commerce and finance. Most of the disagreements and conflicts between governments relate to interferences with the free play of economic internationalism by states whose policy is still dominated by foolish and obsolescent rules of a narrowly national economy. An enlightened interpretation of the needs and interests of modern man demands that all such national economic barriers be removed and replaced by governmental co-operation to secure, by free trade and an open door, for capital and labour the fullest and best development and distribution of the economic resources of the world.

While, therefore, the most impressive political events of the nineteenth century have been the expression and the successful realization of nationalism, many powerful undercurrents of internationalism have been gathering force. The pressures of civilization have been more and more towards extra-national activities. Thoughtful men and women in our time recognize the urgent need of closer international communion for three related purposes: First, the consolidation, extension, and effective sanction of the existing body of international law; secondly, the establishment of peace on a basis of reliable methods for the just settlement of differences; thirdly, the provision of regular accepted means for the co-operation of nations in all sorts of positive constructive work for the human commonwealth.

These general considerations I will ask you to regard as introductory to the grave practical question which confronts us. Is this essential work of internationalism consistent with the preservation of the sovereignty and independence of the present national state, or does its performance involve some definite cession of these national state-rights to the requirements of an international government?

The terrible events which are passing to-day ripen and sharpen this issue. They bring into powerful relief the inherent defects of an international polity based upon the absolute independence of the several states, and the futile mechanical balances and readjustments by which foreign policy has been conducted hitherto. But how far do they offer assistance or security for the achievement of organic reform? After this war has come to a close, will the nations and governments be enabled to lay a sound basis for pacific settlement of disputes and for active co-operation in the common cause of humanity for the future? No confident answer to this question is possible. For nobody can predict the composition and the relative strength of the feelings and ideas which will constitute 'the state of mind' of the several nations and their statesmen. As regards immediate or early policy, much will, of course, depend upon the definiteness of the victory and defeat, and the consequent distribution and intensity of the passions of elation and depression, anger and revenge, which peace may leave behind. It is, of course, part of the fighting strength of every belligerent to persuade himself that an overwhelming victory for himself affords the best security of peace and progress in the future. But this conclusion, based on the prior assumption, equally liable to error, that one's own cause is entirely right and one's enemy's entirely wrong, is unlikely to be sound. A peace which brings the least intensity of triumph and humiliation, the most even distribution of gains and losses, would seem to give an atmosphere most favourable to the growth of pacific internationalism. This, of course, will be sharply contested, and those who contest it will exhibit the usual excessive confidence of those whose mind moves in a shut oven of heated but unmeaning phrases about fighting to a finish, crushing German militarism, and 'a war to end war'. But there is no stronger evidence of the intellectual and moral havoc of war than the easy acceptance of what Ruskin called 'masked words' in lieu of thinking.

"There are masked words abroad, I say, which nobody understands, but which everybody uses, and most people will also fight for, live for, or even die for, fancying they mean this or that or other of the things dear to them. There were never creatures of prey so mischievous, never diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners so deadly, as these masked words; they are the unjust stewards of all men's ideas; whatever fancy or favourite instinct a man most cherishes, he gives to his favourite masked word to take care of for him; the word at last comes to have an infinite power over him--you cannot get at him but by its ministry." In war-time this domination of 'masked words' is all-powerful, and is likely to leave the thinking powers of all Europe seriously impaired when the war is over.

There are those who hold that sheer exhaustion, nervous and economic, will compel the nations to seek concerted action against the recurrence of so shattering an experience, that some sheer instinct of self-preservation will find expression in adequate political arrangements. I should be the last to deny the reality of the collective instinct. But remember that, as an instinct, it works blindly, and is liable to be diverted and frustrated in a thousand ways by the conflicting streams of narrow passion amongst which it moves. Mere exhaustion and a general feeling of insecurity cannot yield a sufficient motive and directing force for the work of international construction. It is necessary to rationalize this instinct of self-preservation and co-operation, in order to make it of effective service. Here lies the heart of our difficulty. War is the most intensely derationalizing process, and the long steeping of European civilization in the boiling cauldron will have twisted and blunted the very instruments of thought. As Professor Murray points out in a powerful essay, war rapidly undoes the slow secular process by which liberty and capacity for individual thought have grown up, and plunges the personal judgement into the common trough of the herd-mind. It is, I take it, the recognition of this peril to the human mind, this necessity of safeguarding the powers of individual thought and personal responsibility, that brings us here. We seek to fortify the separate centres of personal judgement, to inform the individual mind, because the work of making a positive contribution to the unity of civilization depends upon the vigorous independent functioning of many minds.

This consideration brings me directly to confront the enemy, that is to say, those who contend that a world-state or any real international government is now and must always remain an impossibility, an unrealizable Utopian dream. The process of social evolution on its political side ends with the national state. It is a final product. National states cannot, will not, and ought not, to abate one jot or tittle of their inherent sovereignty and independence, and the experience of history shows that all attempts at international federation or union are pre-doomed to failure.

It is evidently quite impossible for me to present here a full formal refutation of these positions. I will therefore content myself with brief demurrers. To the argument from social evolution I would reply that evolution knows no finality of type, and that the presumption lies in favour of those who hold that the centripetal or co-operative powers, which have forged the national state out of the smaller social unities, are not exhausted, but are capable of carrying the organizing process further. To those who rely upon the authority of history, citing the collapse of the experiments in federation which followed the Congress of Vienna as proof that similar experiments will similarly fail to-day or to-morrow, I reply that this view is based on a false interpretation of the statement that 'history repeats itself'. A psychological or sociological experiment is not the same when fundamental changes have taken place in the psychical and social conditions. We have already recognized that the nineteenth century has seen a series of vital changes in the economic and spiritual structure of civilization. The evidence of 1815 cannot, therefore, be conclusive as regards the possibilities of 1915. To those who insist on the sovereignty and independence of the national state as an eternal verity, I will make no further reply than to say that such language has for me no more meaning than talk of 'the divine right of kings', 'the natural rights of man', or any other phrase of the abracadabra of metaphysical politics. The actual world in which we live knows no such absolutes. Sovereignty and independence, like all other legal claims, are subject to modification and compromise. Every bargain made by treaty or agreement with another state, every acceptance of international law or custom, involves some real diminution of sovereign independence, unless indeed the liberty to break all treaties and to violate all laws is expressly reserved as an inalienable right of nations. Moreover, within the limits of a single nation, sovereignty is itself divided and distributed. Alike in the United States of America, the Swiss Republic, and the German Empire, the constituent states as well as the nations are recognized as sovereign, possessing certain rights or powers safeguarded by the constitution against all encroachments of the central or federal government. So again within the state itself, the sovereignty is often no longer concentrated in a single person or a single body of persons, but is exercised by the joint action of several organs, as in Great Britain, where the king and the Houses of Parliament are the joint administrators of the sovereignty of the state. Sovereignty thus becomes more and more a question of degree and of adjustment. International lawyers will doubtless insist that neither treaties nor international laws involve any derogation of sovereign powers. But when the substantial liberties of action are curtailed by any binding agreement, the unimpaired sovereignty is an idle abstraction.

When, therefore, we ask whether it is not possible to extend and consolidate the agreements between so-called sovereign states into some form of effective international government, we broach a proposition less revolutionary in substance than in sound. If all the separate treaties, conventions, and other agreements, existing now between pairs of nations for the performance of specific acts and the settlement of differences, were modified and gathered into the forms of general treaties signed by all the treaty-making states; if all international laws and usages were codified and brought under the surveillance of some single representative court or council,--we should discover that there existed already the substance of an international government, not indeed adequate to our needs, but far ampler than we had suspected. In the Hague conventions and courts, again, and in certain other intergovernmental instruments, such as the Postal and Telegraphic Bureaux at Berne, we already possess the nucleus of the general forms required. We possess already the beginnings alike of the legislative, judicial, and administrative apparatus of international government. But it is slight in substance, fragmentary in its application, and exceedingly imperfect in its sanctions. Moreover, it has just shown itself quite inadequate to perform the first function of a government, viz. to keep the public peace.

The task of converting so feeble a structure of government into an effective instrument of international peace and progress is evidently one of great magnitude and difficulty. But it is the task which lies persistently before us, and upon its performance the safety of civilization itself depends. It is, therefore, well not to exaggerate its difficulties, but to measure them as closely as we can. This can best be done by means of a brief survey of the principal lines of advance which have been proposed. In this country, in America, in Holland, and elsewhere, the air is thickening with schemes for obtaining better international relations after the war. All of them have this, I think, in common, that they concern themselves primarily not with ideal or practical plans for the general co-operation of nations in advancing the welfare of the world, but with methods of preventing future wars and securing relief against the burden of armaments. All agree that some general formal arrangements between nations must be substituted for 'the clash of competing ambitions, of groupings and alliances and a precarious equipoise', and that only by such stable agreement can disarmament be got and peace rendered secure. All agree that the instrument of this international government must be a general treaty to which a number of states must be parties and that the terms of this treaty must require them to submit all forms of disputes to some pacific mode of settlement. Nearly all, moreover, accept the distinction drawn between justiciable issues, relating to the application or interpretation of laws or to the ascertainment of facts by means of legal evidence, which are suitable for settlement by a judicial or arbitral process, and those which, not being capable of such settlement, are better suited for a looser process of inquiry and conciliation.

But the proposals differ widely, both as regards the scope they assign to the work of preventing war, and as regards the measures they advocate for securing the fulfilment of international agreement. They may be grouped, I think, in three classes on an ascending scale of rigour. The first class envisages a general treaty, by which the signatory states shall undertake to submit all differences between them to processes of arbitration or conciliation conducted by impartial courts or commissions, and to abstain from all acts of hostility during the progress of such investigation. This principle has recently found an important expression in the treaties signed last year by the United States with Great Britain and France, and other nations. The first article of these treaties reads as follows: 'The High Contracting Parties agree that all disputes between them, of every nature whatsoever, other than disputes the settlement of which is provided for, and in fact achieved, under existing agreements between the High Contracting Parties, shall, when diplomatic methods of adjustment have failed, be referred for investigation and report to a Permanent International Commission to be constituted in the manner prescribed in the next succeeding article; and they agree not to declare war or begin hostilities during such investigation and before the report is submitted.' The objects of this method of pacific settlement are three: first, to provide impartial and responsible bodies for a reasonable inquiry into all disputes; secondly, to secure a 'cooling off' time for the heated feelings of the contestants; thirdly, to inform the public opinion of the world and to make effective its moral pressure for a sound pacific settlement.

The efficacy of any such arrangement evidently depends upon two conditions, first, the confidence of the signatory states that each and all will abide by their undertaking, and, secondly, the uncovenanted condition that they will accept and carry into effect the awards or recommendations of the arbitral and conciliation commissions. These proposals, however, furnish no sanctions or guarantees other than those of conscience and public opinion for the due performance of the treaty obligations, and make no attempt to bind the parties to an acceptance of the decision of the commissions. Moreover, regarded as a means of securing world-peace and disarmament, all such proposals appear defective in that they make no provision for disputes between one or more of the signatory states and outside states which are no parties to the arrangement.

Such considerations have moved many to seek to strengthen the bond of the alliance, and to make it available for mutual support against outside aggression. The vital issue here is one of sanctions or the use of joint force, diplomatic, economic, or military, to compel the fulfilment of treaty obligations and the execution of the awards. Many hold that, while most civilized states might be relied upon to carry out their undertakings, some powerful state--Germany, or Russia, or Japan--could not be trusted, and that this want of confidence would oblige all nations to maintain large armaments with all their attendant risks and burdens. To obviate this difficulty, it is proposed by some that the signatories shall pledge themselves to take joint action, diplomatic, economic, or forcible, against any of their members who, in defiance of the treaty obligations, makes or proposes an armed attack upon another member. This is the measure of stiffening added by Mr. Lowes Dickinson in his constructive pamphlet After the War: 'The Powers entering into the arrangement' are to 'pledge themselves to assist, if necessary, by their national forces, any member of the League who should be attacked before the dispute provoking the attack has been submitted to arbitration or conciliation.' A state, however, by Mr. Dickinson's scheme, is still to remain at liberty to refuse an award, and after the prescribed period, even to make war for the enforcement of its demands. Other peace-leaguers go somewhat further, assigning to the league an obligation to use economic or forcible pressure for securing the acceptance of the award of the Court of Arbitration, though leaving the acceptance of the recommendations of the Conciliation Court to the free option of the parties. This is the proposal made by Mr. Raymond Unwin, and by the League of Peace.

Now a definite halt at this position is intelligible and defensible. While binding by strict sanctions the States to submit all disputes to the pacific machinery that is provided, to await the conclusion of the arbitral and conciliatory processes, and even to accept the legal awards of arbitration, it leaves a complete formal freedom to refuse the recommendations of the Commission of Conciliation. Yet it must be borne in mind that most of the really dangerous disputes, involving likelihood of war, are not arbitrable in their nature, and will come before the Commission of Conciliation. If no provision is made for enforcing the acceptance of the recommendations of this body, what measure of real security for peace has been attained? An incendiary torch, like that kindled last year in the Balkans, may once again put Europe in flames. The defenders of the position we are now considering have three replies. They admit that their proposal still leaves open the possibility of war, but they contend that if a sufficient cooling-off time or 'moratorium' is secured, the likelihood of an ultimate recourse to war by rejection of the award will be reduced to a minimum. They urge that no scheme which can be devised will preclude the possibility of a strong criminal or reckless State violating its treaty obligations and seeking to enforce its will by force. Finally they urge that many self-respecting States would refuse to abandon the ultimate right of declaring war, in cases where they deemed their vital interests were affected, and that any invitation to take this step might wreck the possibility of a less complete but very valuable arrangement.

Now it would be a considerable advance towards world government, if all or most powerful States would consent to abandon separate alliances, or subordinate them to a general alliance binding them to submit all disputes to a process of impartial inquiry before attempting to enforce their national will by arms. It may be that this is as far as it is possible to go in the direction of securing world-peace and international co-operation in the early future. If States will not carry their co-operation so far as to agree upon united action to put down all wars between their members, and to take a united stand against all attacks from outside, it would be necessary to respect their scruples, and to rely upon the softening influence of the moratorium and informed public opinion to render a final recourse to arms unlikely among civilized States. But, in considering the measure of security thus achieved, we must remember that we must look to the weakest link in the chain of the alliance, and ask ourselves how far the plan of conciliation represented in the recent treaties between the United States and several friendly European nations can be considered equally secure in dealing with Germany, Russia, or Japan. If our international arrangement is to dispense with all forcible pressure in the last resort, and to rely upon purely moral pressure, it seems evident that the validity of the arrangement depends upon the degree of confidence which other States will entertain as to the bona fides and pacific disposition of the least scrupulous of the powerful signatory States. For if the opinion held of any one or two powerful States is that under the stimulus of greed or ambition they would be likely, in defiance of an award or of the public opinion of other States, to enforce their will upon some weaker neighbour, such an opinion will keep alive so strong a feeling of insecurity that no considerable reduction of military preparations will be possible.

In assessing the early value of all proposals for better international relations, the best practical test is afforded by the question, 'Will the proposal lead nations to reduce their armaments?' For it will be admitted that any settlement or international agreement, which leaves the claims of militarism and navalism upon the vital and financial resources of the several nations unimpaired, affords little hope of a pacific future. A return to the era of competing armaments will destroy the moral strength of any formal international agreements, however specious. The importance of this consideration has led many to insist that an explicit agreement for proportional disarmament should take a prominent place in any settlement. This proposal, however, seems to me defective in that it presumes in all or some of the nations a persistence of the motives which have hitherto led them to strengthen their fighting forces. Now the primary object of such international arrangements as we are discussing, is to bring about a state of things in which the past motives to arm will weaken and tend to disappear. If nations, actuated either by arrogance or greed or fear, continue to desire to increase their fighting strength, no arrangements for proportionate disarmament are likely to be effective. On the other hand, if the basis of a really valid league or federation can be laid, precluding the most ambitious State from any reasonable hope of indulging dreams of successful conquest, while relieving timid States from the apprehensions under which they have lived hitherto, the natural play of political forces within each State will favour disarmament. An international arrangement that meets our requirements must be strong enough to reverse the motives, aggressive and defensive, which in the past have caused nations to arm. Nations will not pile up armaments if they believe that they will have no need or opportunity to use them. To produce this belief in the uselessness of national armies and navies is therefore a prime object of international policy. The successful establishment of this belief involves, however, a change of disposition among national governments amounting to the process known in religious circles as conversion. They must be induced to forgo that right of war which according to past statecraft has been the brightest jewel in the crown of sovereignty.

Thus we are again brought round to our vital issue, that of the amount and kind of cession of sovereignty required for an effective International Government. It may be the case that it will be impossible to induce a sufficient number of the great States to transfer the ultimate right of waging war to a representative International Government, or to cede to such a Government the right to legislate on international relations with power to enforce obedience to these laws. There are, however, many of us who hold that these powers are essential to an international arrangement which shall effectively guarantee the peace of the world. The abandonment of the sovereign right to make war is essential for the future security of peace. Legislative and executive powers for an International Government are essential to obtain by pacific means those changes in the political and economic relations of peoples which hitherto have only been attainable by war. No merely statical settlement will suffice. Great new issues of national controversy or of economic needs will certainly come up afresh for settlement, and until some stable method of government is established with power to determine and enforce the equities and the utilities they represent, recourse to the arbitrament of war will still be likely.

But granting that national government does not represent a final form of political structure, and that some federal internationalism is now practicable, is it possible to hope or to expect that by a single stride, or by a series of rapid strides, the sovereignty of national states will submit to so much diminution as is involved in the more advanced scheme of international government? Most historians, statesmen, and political philosophers will, I think, hold that so large and rapid a process of development is impracticable, however desirable in theory it might be. It will be necessary, they insist, to take one step at a time, to preserve as closely as possible the principle of continuity, and not to attempt to move further and faster than circumstances and the necessities of the time compel.

But do circumstances and necessities always compel us to move slowly and to take one step at a time? Though normal growth is slow and continuous, modern science tends to lay increasing stress upon discontinuous and sudden larger variations in the production of organic changes. Biology distinguishes these mutations by which new species arise from the normal process of evolution by insensible gradations. There is, as I understand it, no real breach of continuity, no miraculous creation, but a sudden removal from a structural position which by slow accumulation of prior changes had become unstable, or to a new position of stability, involving a swift readjustment of organic parts. May not similarly important mutations occur in the evolution of political institutions, when a similar stress of circumstances makes itself felt? Nay, we may further ask, whether the special function of man's reasonable will is not to bring about these changes in the direction of individual and collective conduct. The power of making new quick and complex adaptations to new environments is the essential economy of the human brain. Freedom of thought and of will are continually producing new judgements and new determinations for action which contain this quality of sudden mutation. Quick conversions of thought and will are of the essence of our conscious life. When they carry important consequences to our conduct they appear to be, and in fact are, breaches of the normal conduct of our life which proceeds by custom, repetition, and insensible modifications.

In politics, as in religion, sudden conversions under the stress of circumstances are not unknown, and they may be genuine and lasting. And what holds of individual wills and judgements holds also of the collective mind. That human nature in its fundaments of thought and feeling, its primary needs, desires and emotions, will not be appreciably changed even by this shattering experience of war must be conceded. But what we may call the general state of mind, or the moral and intellectual atmosphere, will be profoundly affected. This will be in part the result of the great economic and political disturbances which are occurring, and which will have undermined and loosened the old ideas and valuations in relation to such important institutions as property, the control of industry, the activities of woman, the party system, the State itself. But more profound still will be the direct reaction of sorrow and suffering of war, the revelation of the power of the organized destructiveness and cruelty, and of the inadequacy of reason, justice, and goodwill as defences of civilization. The very foundations of organized religion in the hearts of men will be shaken. The patent failure of the State to perform its primary function of safeguarding life and property is likely to feed currents of revolutionism in every country. The sudden changes produced in the balance of age and of sex by the destruction of so large a proportion of the young and energetic men of every nation, will affect all processes of thought and policy. Some of these changes will seem favourable to conservatism, timidity, and reaction. Everywhere, at the close of the war, military and official autocracy will be enthroned in the seats of power, and the spirit of political authority will be stoking the fires of fevered nationalism which war evokes. But other forces will be making for bold political experiments. Not only the fear of restive and impoverished workmen, who have recently acquired the use of arms and perhaps the taste for risks, but the havoc wrought upon industry and commerce, and above all the crushing burden of taxation, will dispose the controlling and possessing classes to seek alternatives to a return to the era of competing alliances and armaments. Mild and conservative measures will be obviously unavailing. During the years of exhaustion following the war, resolute leaders of public opinion will be setting themselves everywhere to frame schemes of international relations which shall yield adequate guarantees of peace. For the first time in history great reading and thinking communities will give their chief attention to international politics. They will recognize the urgency of the work of building the society of nations upon a basis of genuinely representative government. Behind this reasonable process of constructive thinking, carried on in every country by politically convinced individuals and groups, will be the powerful support of the unthinking, suffering masses, motived by no clear conception of causes or remedies, but by that collective instinct of self-preservation which impels the herd to avoid destruction and to follow leaders who point the way to safety.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

The International Crisis in its Ethical and Psychological Aspects. Humphrey Milford.

G. Lowes Dickinson, After the War. Fifield.

C.E. Hooper, The Wider Outlook beyond the World-War. Watts & Co.

F.N. Keen, The World in Alliance. Southwood.

Norman Angell, Prussianism and its Destruction. Heinemann.

Allison Phillips, The Confederation of Europe. Longmans.

The New Statesman. Special Supplement. Suggestions for the Prevention of War.

J.A. Hobson, Towards International Government. Allen & Unwin.

XIII

RELIGION AS A UNIFYING INFLUENCE IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION

The argument of these essays has been to prove that even now, in the greatest armed conflict of the world, the term 'Christendom' is not inapplicable to Europe. There is a real unity in Western civilization--a unity due in large measure to the influence of religious faith and organization. The mediaeval Church gave the Teutonic peoples of Northern Europe, and the barbarians who overran the Roman Empire, their first momentous introduction into the great inheritance formed by the uneasy blending of Christian faith and literature with Greco-Roman civilization. The spiritual achievements of Greek and Roman, Jew and Christian have remained the common possessions of the West, the foundation of what is still Christendom. In so far as it exists Christendom witnesses to the formative power of a religious faith: in so far as it remains a dream, we may suspect it demands the renewed impulse of a faith enlightened and chastened by all the experience of the past.

If, however, we ask, Is there any likelihood that a common religious faith and life will contribute to raise Western civilization to a yet higher unity? modern as contrasted with mediaeval history seems at first sight to demonstrate the futility of any such inquiry.

Since the Reformation, religion has made for division rather than co-operation. The modern period of European history begins in disruption. Not only was Europe rent by the conflict of Catholic and Protestant, but the dream of an international reformed Church which at one time floated before the mind of Cranmer was dissipated by the strength of nationalism and the cleavage in the ranks of the reformers themselves. In our own country, what is euphemistically termed the Elizabethan Settlement proved to be the source of further dissension, and reform appeared as the prolific mother of sects and schisms. The Protestant Churches were organized on national and state lines. They ceased to retain any international character in their constitution, while international intercourse became a diminishing influence. The Church of Rome in the conflict with Gallicanism found herself at grips with the spirit of nationalism, and to-day the strength of national feeling within Roman Catholicism hinders the Pope from exerting a moral authority over sovereign states that would parallel the judicial functions successfully asserted by Innocent III. No Christian Church to-day so rises above the national states of Europe, as to control or even adequately to criticize the claims of those states. The Churches no longer serve to embody and express an European conscience.

The break-up of a common ecclesiastical organization was not perhaps the most serious loss of unifying power which religion in the West suffered at the time of the Reformation. If it be true that the Bible and the Greek spirit are the great common factors of Western civilization, then we must recognize that these two great influences tended to fall apart and even to oppose each other in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The humanist element in the Reform-movement grew less and less, while humanism itself became more definitely secular. The European mind has ever since been conscious of a disturbing division between religion and culture. A development of religion which should render to Western civilization services comparable to those rendered by the mediaeval Church demands not only a heightened international consciousness among Christians, which shall be able to find organized expression, but also some fresh synthesis of religion and culture, some reunion of the spirit of Hellas, the Greek delight in beauty and faith in reason, with the moral strength and religious insight of Hebrew prophecy.

Those who are concerned for the future of our civilization will look eagerly for signs of any such development in the religious life and thought of our time. Do recent history and present experience discover any influences at work which may yet restore a unifying power to religion? Naturally any answer to such a question will be of a subjective character. The personal equation cannot easily be eliminated; we may be duped by our hopes or deceived by our fears. In the last analysis we cannot safely predict the future of religion. We may, however, take stock of our present situation, and survey its significant elements, even if our value-judgements as to their relative importance will inevitably vary.

While religious divisions have not vanished from the West, and indeed show no prospect of immediate reconciliation, and while the formation of new sects, of which the Christian Science Movement offers an example, has not altogether ceased, there has been an admitted decline of the dogmatic and sectarian tempers, and this decline has opened the way for knitting up severed friendships. The revolt against the dogmatic attitude of mind and even against religious dogma itself is widespread. The sense of loss involved in the isolation of any sect, and the wish to pass beyond the limits of any denominational tradition, are both appreciably affecting the religious situation. In England Matthew Arnold's somewhat unhappy criticism of Dissent expressed a dislike both of dogma and sectarian narrowness. His profounder contribution to the better understanding of St. Paul derives its worth precisely from his elevation of the mystic and the saint in Paul at the expense of the doctrinal theologian of Calvinist tradition. The wish to be rid of dogma continues to find vigorous intellectual expression, of which Mr. Lowes Dickinson's Religion, a Criticism and a Forecast, may be taken as an example. In another direction the Brotherhood Movement and the Adult School Movement represent the search, if not for an altogether undogmatic faith, yet at least for a broader basis of association than is compatible with the insistence on definite statements of belief. Both would unite in the prayer

God send us men whose aim will be Not to defend some outworn creed,

and some members of both entertain the suspicion that all creeds are outworn.

This dislike of dogma may cloak an unwarranted scepticism as to the possibility of reaching truth in religion, but it is symptomatic of the longing for larger sympathy and broader fellowship. It is but the extreme expression of a temper which has reduced the angularity of those who are very far from surrendering or belittling definite beliefs and doctrines. The denominationalist who used to have no hesitation in claiming a monopoly of the truth for his particular Church, now falters where he firmly stood. We are more ready to recognize our limitations. A growing number of thoughtful minds appreciate Lord Acton's position when he wrote to Mary Gladstone: 'I scarcely venture to make points against the religion of other people, from a curious experience that they have more to say than I know, and from a sense that it is safer to reserve censure for one's own which one understands more intimately, having a share in responsibility and action.' This more chastened mood opens the way to fresh understandings in the religious world. Whence does this change in atmosphere originate?

In tracing out the causes of this new temper in religion, a first place may legitimately be assigned to the growth of the scientific spirit. In considering science as a source of unity, it is a mistake to dwell exclusively on the creation of a body of common knowledge. To know the same thing may do little to unite men. To attack problems in the same way, and to share the same spirit of free inquiry, the same reverence for fact, the same resolute endeavour to surmount prejudice, issue in a far closer bond of union. Science unites men even more closely by its spirit than by its achievement. The application of scientific method to the literary and historical study of the Bible, as well as in the psychological analysis of religious experience, has called into being in every Church and every land, groups of people who approach the subject-matter of their faith from the same angle and under the guidance of the same mental discipline. As a result of the critical movement a man finds his foes in his own and his friends in his neighbours' ecclesiastical household. The study of religion renews international contact and requires international co-operation as much as any other branch of science. It is possible to detect differing characteristics in the scholarship of the leading nations, though it may be doubted whether these are fundamental differences. The volume of critical work published in Germany is so considerable as to foster the illusion that it constitutes a self-sufficing world. Thus it is possible for Dr. Schweitzer in his brilliant survey of research into the life of Jesus, to represent the whole inquiry as the work of German genius and as the endeavour of German liberalism to picture Jesus in accordance with its own half-unconscious bias. Yet even so the cloven-hoof of international interdependence makes its appearance, for he has to devote one unsympathetic chapter to Renan, even if he contrives to ignore Seeley's Ecce Homo. But the debt of English scholarship to Germany is undeniable, and must not be repudiated in war-time. Nor is the debt entirely on one side. It is worth recalling that Adolph Harnack, perhaps the greatest living German scholar in the realm of New Testament criticism and Church History, derived no little inspiration from the work of Edwin Hatch. At any rate the acceptance of the critical method associates scholars in all lands, produces International Congresses for the study of Religions, and fosters personal friendships which even war will not destroy.

Beyond the internationalism of scholarship, we must remember the reaction of criticism on popular religious thought. Slowly but surely the judgements of believers, lay and clerical, are being permeated with some sense of historical perspective. The mere attempt to recognize the literary character of the various books of the Bible has effected a liberation. The variation of the different parts of the Bible in literary quality, in evidential value for history and in spiritual significance, are at last being freely recognized outside the study and the lecture-room. Men are ceasing to regard the Bible as a series of legal enactments or common-law precedents of equal authority. This is leading to a revision of inherited traditions, that were based on a view of the Bible which is no longer tenable. In general this development favours a more modest assertion of one's own beliefs and a more charitable consideration of other people's. When we continue to differ, we differ with a more sympathetic understanding of those from whom we differ.

It is impossible to trace here in any detail the influence of the critical movement on traditional beliefs or even on the conception of authority in religion. It may, however, be worth while to point out that the psychological study of religion has tended to broaden sympathy by promoting the frank recognition of the varieties of religious experience. More allowance is made for temperament, and there is less anxiety to force all spiritual life into the same mould or scheme. The sacramentalist and the non-sacramentalist, the mystic and the intellectualist, the man of feeling and the man of action, those who experience sudden changes and those who are the subjects of more gradual growth--each receives his due, and neither need despise the other. There are dangers associated with our constant reference to temperament. It is really a condemnation of a Church to say that its position appeals to a particular temperament, while it is often no real kindness to an individual to be excused from attempting to enter into a particular phase of religious life on the ground that he is temperamentally disqualified. But it is clearly a gain to challenge an over-rigid standardization of religious life. It is pathetic to hear people protest that they have no religious experience, when they are simply blinded by too narrow an interpretation of the term. In so far as the psychology of religion throws into relief the manifold appeal of religious ideas to different minds, it helps to create a new sense of unity in difference.

Accompanying the growth of the scientific spirit and in part stimulated by it, more distinctly religious and philosophical influences are at work quickening the desire for wider and deeper fellowship. Considering first the problem within the borders of the Christian Church, I think we may claim that there is a growing willingness to co-operate and a revival of the hope of reunion. We may further claim that certain advances in thought, in the understanding of Christianity itself, have already been made, and render co-operation if not reunion less Utopian than before. Of these I would put first the acceptance of the principle of toleration as an essential element of Christian faith. It has been suggested by Mr. Norman Angell that the religious wars of the seventeenth century came to an end through economic exhaustion and through rationalism. Toleration was accepted as a state-principle on the strength of a common-sense calculation as to the uselessness of repression. I am not disposed to ignore the forcefulness of the argument, 'You will starve or go bankrupt, if you do not cease to persecute heretics or fight Protestants,' nor would I underestimate the influence of common-sense in closing the era of religious wars, but I cannot help thinking that an intense religious conviction of the duty of toleration and a kind of philosophic liberalism, though entertained by few, contributed to the triumph of the principle. For the Christian, the duty has become clearer through the influence of the gospels. Some of the Churches have begun to take to heart the rebuke of Jesus to the disciples who wished to call down fire on the Samaritans. Nor is it a question of a particular incident. A deep respect for individuality is found to lie at the centre of the gospel. For the Christian, the attitude of toleration, the reliance on persuasion, on the appeal to every man's conscience, has become more and more clearly the indispensable qualification of the ambassador for Christ. As the acceptance of the principle of toleration is by no means universal in the Church, its fuller recognition in some quarters may serve at first to intensify division. It may emphasize, e.g. the continued necessity for Protestantism, by bringing into clearer light the moral obstacle to reunion in the Inquisition and disciplinary methods of the Church of Rome. But in the long run, this development of thought must make for better understanding and wider fellowship.

Still confining our survey to the Christian Church, there has been a significant fastening of attention on those parts of the New Testament in which the idea of Catholicity is fully developed. The epistle to the Ephesians and the seventeenth chapter of John are beginning to haunt the Christian consciousness as never before since the days of the Reformation. It is clear that the present position of the Church, in which divisions have crystallized into separate organizations, does not reflect and envisage the ideal that 'they all may be one'. The unity of the Church appears to be a condition precedent to the success of its testimony. The scandal and the impotence of division are more acutely felt. Unless the Church of Christ can heal herself or find healing for herself, it is little enough which she will be able to contribute to the healing of the nations.

There is hope then for closer fellowship within the Church, because the problem is being more and more definitely laid upon the consciences of her members. A further advance in thought which makes possible a closer approximation of the severed fragments of the Christian Church, is to be found in the process of sifting the essential from the accidental in the Christian tradition. It would be idle to pretend that the process has reached its conclusion, or that there is any large measure of agreement as to what constitutes the essence of Christianity. No one indeed believes any longer in the whole Bible from cover to cover--not even those who say they do. The fight for the creeds is more strenuous, while Rome cannot afford to admit that any article of faith which has been authoritatively defined may be treated as non-essential. But if I may venture a personal judgement, I cannot see that even the Apostles' creed will be able to retain its place as a summary of essential Christianity. The articles which deal with the Descent into Hades and the Resurrection of the Body, and perhaps those which deal with the Virgin-Birth and Ascension of our Lord, are dubious, if not false, and cannot fairly be regarded as indispensable. If I may attempt to forecast, I would say that the ultimate cleavage is coming not over particular articles of the Apostles' Creed, but over the value we set on the history and person of Jesus. The choice will lie between a conception of God for which the story and character of Jesus are final and determinative, and a vaguer spiritual theism for which Jesus has no supreme significance. This is not even the division between Trinitarian and Unitarian. The ultimate parting of the ways turns on the question whether a man's faith in God is Christ-centred or not. The significant cleavage of the future will come between those who believe that Christianity--the belief in the Fatherhood of God through Jesus Christ--is the final religion, and those who hold that Christianity in this sense is destined to be swallowed up in some still broader faith in God for which other revelations, through nature and through other figures in history, are as significant as the creed embodied in a tale in Galilee and on Golgotha nineteen centuries ago. But whatever cleavage may appear hereafter in the religion of the West, the search for the essence of Christianity, even when it works through controversy, will contribute to lop off idle dissensions and reveal fellowship in fundamentals where men had previously supposed themselves to be hopelessly divided.

It is a little invidious to choose out any particular movements for special reference, and in so doing I may merely betray personal bias rather than critical judgement. Yet it is perhaps permissible to point out that the genesis of the Adult School movement is the natural development of the Quaker respect for that of God in every man. It represents the longing for a religious fellowship which does not force opinion but offers the most favourable conditions for the formation of independent judgement and the growth of individual faith. How far the movement realizes its ideal, I forbear to inquire, but its very existence affords some evidence of the belief in the positive virtue of toleration as an essential element of the Christian character. Another powerful factor making for co-operation and better understanding among Christians may be found in the Student Christian movement. For this country its value has been enhanced if not created by the opening of the older Universities to Nonconformists. The future leaders of all our Churches are now being educated together, and through the Student Christian movement, they are educating each other and facing together old controversies and inherited problems at a time when their judgements are least hampered either by tradition or responsibility. What this may mean for the religious life of this country, we cannot yet tell, but it is certain that a new temper will be brought to bear on our divisions. The men who learn to appreciate one another through this association, tend to hold together when they pass out of the Universities into their life-work. There are springing up through the Student movement new associations or fellowships which conserve and continue the unifying impetus of the movement itself. Nor is that unifying power confined to this country. It forms a world-wide federation whose lines of communication have not been cut even by the present war. In every land, the Student movement intends to resume international intercourse at the earliest possible moment. I think it is not simply the bias of a student in favour of his own class, which makes me regard the Student Christian movement as one of the most hopeful developments in the religious life of our age.

Perhaps the influence of this movement itself may be traced in the growing demand for co-operation in the missionary task of the Church. This demand has no doubt arisen in part through the changes in the means of transport and communication which have made the world a smaller place. Missionary effort is less sporadic than it was. The Churches are developing a Weltpolitik. The exact proportions of the task before them are now more clearly grasped. The difficulty of overtaking the task even when united, and the impossibility of discharging it effectively while divided are also more apparent. But the demand for unity and the power of co-operation have also been strengthened by the men and women who have gone abroad under the influence of the Student Volunteer Missionary Union. High Churchmen and Nonconformist having learnt to work together on a Christian Student executive do not find it difficult to co-operate, where opportunity offers, in India or China. A half-involuntary revolution of sentiment is proceeding under our eyes. The strength of the new spirit of co-operation was revealed in the Edinburgh Conference of 1910. That date will stand out as supremely significant in the growth of a new Catholicism in the West.

We have so far been concerned with influences making for a deeper sense of unity within the Christian Church. But if we attempt a wider survey, we shall discover that religious thought and feeling in the West, whether definitely Christian or no, possess some common characteristics, bear the impress of convictions which are ever struggling for expression.

First among these characteristic features of religious thought in the West I would place faith in the solidarity of mankind. The origin of this faith probably passes beyond our analysis. I should suspect that there is a universal impulse stimulating this belief which I should be inclined to regard as instinctive. Yet it has certainly found fuller expression in the West than in the civilization of India or China. It is possible to point to traditions, to philosophies, and to particular events which have carried this faith in human solidarity deep into the consciousness of the West. Dr. Prichard, whose scientific labours, we were told in an earlier lecture, refuted the heresy of polygenism, was moved to undertake his inquiries by a desire to maintain the accuracy of the Mosaic tradition as to the common origin of mankind. It is a little curious to reflect that illusory anthropology, accepted on the authority of Moses and of Rousseau, the belief in Adam, and the belief in the free and happy savage, have perhaps done more than scientific research into primitive culture to maintain our faith in human brotherhood and equality. We must not, however, attach too much weight to the story of Adam. The Western sense of the dignity of ordinary manhood owes much more to the great Stoic conception of humanity, as Mr. Barker reminded us in his lecture on the Middle Ages. Perhaps even more significant is the feeling for humanity engendered by regarding all men as the objects of a common redemption. The poorest of men have been protected from their fellows where they have been recognized as brothers for whom Christ died. It would be worth while, if one had the time and the knowledge, to follow the growth of this sentiment in modern times, to trace the influence of the doctrine of Natural Rights, of the French Revolution, of the philosophy of Comte, and of the Evangelical Revival, upon its development. But whatever the sources and phases of its growth, the existence and strength of this faith in humanity are undeniable. It is this faith which compels us to refuse to think of Western civilization as merely Western. For we believe that the West holds in trust for mankind, not only a right knowledge of nature, not only a correct scientific method, but also an essential conception of the worth and unity of human life. Whatever we are to gain from the East, this is one of the gifts we bring to the other half of the world.

In speaking of this faith in human solidarity as Western, I am aware that I am making broad statements which badly need qualification. I am far from wishing to suggest that there is no such sentiment of humanity in the great structures of Asiatic civilization, particularly in the ethical systems of China. But I am persuaded that there is a broad contrast between West and East in this respect, and that in particular there is a significant gulf between the West and Hinduism. In the West, this often inarticulate faith in humanity has acted as a spring of progress. It inspires our faith in democracy, it acts as a perpetual challenge to privilege and oppression, as a constant denial of permanence to divisions of class, nationality, and race. The very difficulty which the orthodox Hindu experiences in appreciating the spiritual meaning of democracy--his feeling that the democratic movement is an irrational blindly selfish confusing of a divine appointed social order--discloses the existence of this gulf. It is not for nothing that the religious traditions of Hinduism trace the four castes back to divine appointment and regard them as coeval with the race. Nor is it without significance that India rejected Buddhism--a movement which challenged caste and whose missionary enthusiasm embodied a broader sentiment of humanity than has yet been woven into Indian civilization. The influence of the West is now renewing the attack on caste which Buddha initiated and failed to accomplish.

Without serious injustice we may claim that this faith in human solidarity has attained clearer expression and exerts greater influence in the West than in the East. To detail its influence is impossible. It underlies our hopes of social reform, it refuses to believe in the subhuman--at least it refuses to believe in the necessity of his continued existence. It inspires the religious enthusiasm with which men embrace Socialism as 'a hope for mankind'. It turns the brotherhood of man into a 'masked word.' As a character in one of St. John Ervine's novels puts it, 'Brother'ood of man, my boy--that's my motter. Brother'ood of man! the 'ole world, see! Not a little bit like England! the 'ole world! all of us! see? No fightin or nothink! Just peace an' 'appiness! Takes your breath away when you think on it. It do, straight.' The same religious impulse is at work in that disease of humanitarianism which distresses Chauvinists--the humanitarianism which Bernhardi denounces in Germany and Mr. Moreton Fullerton deplores in France. It is reflected in the religious life alike of Russia and of France. Paul Sabatier's book is largely concerned with following out the influence of this sense of solidarity in all philosophic and religious schools and in all classes in France. He notes, for example, the anti-clericalism of the French peasant, which does not, however, lead him to embrace the dogmatic negations of Free-thought. The peasant still clings to the rites of the Church through 'the perhaps unconscious desire to perform an act of social solidarity, to meet our fellow-men elsewhere than on the field of material interests and distractions, to accept the rendezvous which they offer to us and we to them, that we may draw together and, more than that--unite and unify'. In another quarter we may witness a new feeling for humanity resulting from the throwing together of diverse racial elements in the melting-pot of the United States. Zangwill's play might be cited as a document of this larger faith, while Jane Addams has sympathetically described its genesis in her Newer Ideals of Peace. Yet another expression of this instinctive faith may be discovered in the broad human interest of much of our modern literature and art. For the standard of orthodoxy in this connexion requires not only that we respond to a grand conception of humanity as a whole, but that also in particulars we are loyal to the Terentian tag, 'Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.' The worthier side of modern realism has done full justice to this motto.

The expressions of this faith in human solidarity are so various, and its influence so pervading, that it is not surprising to find some modern thinkers looking to it as the essence of religion. In the sociological theory of religion, it is suggested that to become aware of society and its claims constitutes religion itself. A man is converted when his soul is 'congregationalized'. There is even a tendency to find the highest element in religious experience in a strong feeling of one's unity with one's fellows. Such a feeling of endless sympathy and tolerance is so large a part of love that it is easily mistaken for the whole. For this starting-point, we might readily imagine a Western faith in humanity with Walt Whitman as its prophet. But a second characteristic of Western thought about religion forbids any idealization of humanity as we know it, and draws us beyond the indiscriminate catholicism of 'The Open Road'. This characteristic may be defined as our faith in the worth of activity and in the reality of progress. We believe in the unity of mankind much more as a task to be achieved than as an accomplished or given fact to be enjoyed. Nietzsche says somewhere, 'if the goal of humanity be wanting, do we not lack humanity itself?' We look for the ultimate unity of mankind in the pursuit of a common end. The search for such a goal, and the effort to achieve it, lend worth to history and to present action.

This faith, often blind and unreasoned, is distinctly Western and modern. We do not derive it even from Greece. It comes to us through Christianity and modern science. The absence of any such faith in activity and progress creates the pessimism of the East. Hinduism and Buddhism are alike in their bankruptcy on this side. The majestic religious philosophy of India sees in history only an endless and meaningless repetition. Thucydides and Plato assume the same view, if I mistake not. As Eucken says, 'Ancient views of life bore throughout an unhistorical character. The numerous philosophical doctrines of the procession of endless similar cycles, which continually return to the starting-point, were only the expression of the conviction that all movement at bottom brings nothing new and that life offers no prospect of further improvement.' When Paul discovered that the law was a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ, he enunciated a profounder philosophy of history than Plato ever knew.

The very fact that Christianity sprang out of Judaism means that it enshrines and suggests the idea of progress in the very circumstances of its origin. But its hold on the idea is something deeper than its connexion with Judaism. Christianity claims to be the final religion, but its claim differs in kind from the parallel claim of Mohammedanism. The world of Islam is held in mortmain by the prophet. It cannot advance beyond the forms in which he embodied his message without denying the claims he made for himself. But to the early Christians the synoptic gospels were the record of all that Jesus began to do and to say, while the highest development of Christian experience and reflection in the New Testament, the gospel of John, contemplates the greater things which the followers of Jesus shall accomplish and the fuller revelations which shall come as the disciples are able to bear them. The claim of Christianity to finality rests on its opening up endless possibilities of spiritual growth to mankind. To some of us it seems that part of this fuller revelation has come through modern knowledge and discovery. The faith in progress which Christians have often held falteringly and have sometimes denied, appears to be confirmed and clarified by all that we are learning of creative evolution. In any case, the influence of modern science has tended to produce a faith in progress in the West--a faith which some regard as essentially different from the Christian view of the world and history, but which for others seems more and more to coalesce with that earlier if in some respects cruder Christian conviction. No doubt when the facts of evolution were held to point to gradual and continuous development, they favoured a view of steady progress which was antagonistic to the Christian belief in the sudden introduction of new elements into history. But the later advances of evolutionary theory seem more akin to the early Christian attitude. The element of apocalyptic is seen not to be so alien from nature as had been at first supposed.

However it arises and whatever form it takes, this faith in progress is characteristic of the Western outlook, and gives a positive answer to the question, Is life worth living? That such a faith is strange to India may be evidenced by the reception accorded to the poet Tagore in India itself. Mr. Yeats gives us the judgement of a Bengali who said of Tagore, 'He is the first among our saints who has not refused to live, but spoken out of Life itself, and that is why we give him our love.' Now Tagore's genius is thoroughly Indian, but his originality in this respect is due directly or indirectly to contact with the influence of the West. It is our belief in action and in the worth of human achievement which is voiced in his poems and in his philosophy, and the note is new in India.

Illustrations of this belief in progress and activity are superfluous, though I may remind you of the prevalence of this temper in the realm of philosophy as well as of religion at the present time. Perhaps it is worth recalling that Harnack's great history of dogma ends with this significant sentence from Zwingli: 'It is not the part of a Christian man to be for ever talking grandly about dogma, but always to be attempting big things in fellowship with God.' This represents as well as anything our Western insistence on the worth of effort. As an admirable embodiment at once of the faith in humanity and the faith in progress, the close of Matthew Arnold's poem 'Rugby Chapel' recurs to the mind. You remember how he conceives the function of great men to lie in preserving the union of mankind, and how he conceives the life of mankind as a journey towards a city that hath foundations.

These two characteristics, faith in the oneness of mankind and in the reality of progress, do add a sense of common aspiration to the civilization of the West. But of themselves they do not create a very close unity. Men may believe in human solidarity and in the worth of effort, and yet be following divergent ideals and divisive enthusiasms. These beliefs are surrounded by haze and indefiniteness. In themselves they scarcely constitute a religion that will satisfy, much less one that can effectively unite us. However fully we share them, they will not enable us to meet and surmount the present crisis. So far as I can judge, these vaguer beliefs in humanity and progress are largely the deposit of Christian faith, and to be rendered effective they need to be ever reconnected with the central elements in that faith; in particular, with the Christian judgement on sin and with the Christian devotion to the historic Jesus.

The sense of sin has received a peculiar impress in the West. We owe it largely to the religious experience of the Jew and to the seriousness of the Latin mind. There is a curious coincidence of the seventh chapter of Romans with a famous quotation from Ovid. The Latin fathers, particularly Augustine, have developed, not to say over-developed, the analysis of sin. The concept of sin never had the same significance for the Greek, and humanism has always resented the severity of the tradition that comes from Paul through Augustine and Calvin. Mr. Holmes's stimulating books on education are inspired by a theological polemic against the doctrine of original sin. He not unnaturally takes refuge in Buddhism, for Buddhism makes suffering, not sin, the root trouble of human life. 'The division between the will and the power, the struggle of the senses against our better judgement, the falling below the moral ideal--none of all this comes within the horizon of Buddha.' Now it may freely be confessed that the Calvinist view of sin led to a distrust of human nature, and incidentally of child-nature, which had a not altogether healthy reaction on home discipline and school-life. It is very difficult to maintain the right balance, and the danger of morbidity through emphasis on sin is undeniable. Yet it seems to me that the worst errors of Calvinism and Evangelicalism in this regard have lain in a tendency to theological formalism and a failure to keep in touch with real life. In consequence, those who most deplore our waning sense of sin try us by a perverted or antiquated standard, and fasten often on changes of sentiment and habit which are by no means necessarily or largely sinful. They are least conscious of the want of a sense of sin, in modern society, where that want is most serious. But I do not doubt that our often old-fashioned friends are right on the main issue. I do not believe that we shall see the progress we desire, unless we recover a heightened sense of sin. I hold with Lord Acton that our internal conflicts are due to indifference to sin and not to a religious idea. We judge ourselves and our race too lightly. We quench our hope of progress by a leniency and indulgence towards our failings which involve an underestimate of our powers and responsibilities. The present crisis will not issue in a hopeful reaction through regret but only through repentance.

The sense of sin which Christianity has brought to the West is not, I think, to be found elsewhere. It only appears where men feel they have an assured knowledge of God's will. It is intense only where men are conscious of God's presence. The vision of the Holiest reveals to Isaiah that he is a man of unclean lips. Such a conviction of sin seems to me inexplicable apart from contact with the living God. Two things are required to bring home to men a true estimate of their moral failure, first a right standard of judgement, and, second, a conviction of the reality of God. Is it too much to say that we are not likely to reach either, apart from Jesus of Nazareth? 'It is through Jesus and not from Adam that we know sin.' It is through Him that men discover their moral ideal and learn not simply to believe that there is a God, but to say, O God, Thou art my God even for ever and ever.

Surely there is something providential in the resolute endeavour of the last century to get back to Christ. The whole movement has succeeded in disentangling the authority of Christ from that either of Moses or of Paul. We are almost where the disciples were when they saw no man save Jesus only. Some things in the traditions remain obscure and baffling. But we see enough to measure afresh our distance from Him. And when the peoples of Europe are thoroughly weary of the work of destruction, it may be they will turn to Him again for the secret of rest, and find that He alone can guide their feet into the way of peace.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Sabatier, L'Orientation religieuse de la France actuelle. Armand Colin: Paris.

W.K.L. Clarke, Facing the Facts; or, an Englishman's Religion. Nisbet.

E.C. Moore, Christian Thought since Kant. Duckworth's Studies in Theology.

XIV

THE GROWTH OF HUMANITY

The preceding chapter has recalled attention to the need of deeper elements of unity in civilization than can be afforded by any commercial, financial or political ties. Plans for a political union of nations, common tendencies in social reform, even the essential unity of commerce and science, will be of no avail, unless there is a basis in common sentiments of a religious kind, in the consciousness that we are all members one of another and can only advance and realize ourselves by the help and sympathy of other members of the same body. It is to this point then that we will address ourselves in the concluding section of the subject. The mechanics of unity need both earnest advocacy and careful study. But beneath and beyond them a motive force has to be found in ideals and sentiments by which alone in the end the working of all such mechanical arrangements is rendered possible. Right sentiments are not a sufficient safeguard, but they are an essential foundation, and it is of the first importance to realize the things to which the mass of mankind are most deeply attached, how they are affected towards one another, the channels through which the tide of feeling most naturally flows and is extended. Looked at from this point of view the problem becomes primarily an educational one. We study mankind as we find it in order to effect an improvement in the direction which we desire.

We find then in the first place that men as a rule are most strongly attached to the localities and the people with whom they are first brought closely in contact. Here in the family is the first true microcosm, the first community in which the individual is developed by association with his fellows. On the value of this earliest social training there are hardly two opinions, and we need not dwell upon it. It is at the next stage that divergence, both of definite opinion and still more of emphasis, begins to be apparent. How far is attachment to country a valuable thing, how far should it be cultivated, what are the necessary limitations and controlling ideas? As to the reality of the sentiment every man can examine himself. We know, most of us, with what intense satisfaction we return to the country, the district, of our birth and home. The feeling is one of the strongest and deepest things in us, even if our reason deprecates and disallows the claim. As Englishmen, perhaps even more as Scotchmen and Irish, we love with an indefinable and ineradicable passion our sea-coast, our hills and valleys, the fields and cottages, even the sometimes sordid, nearly always ill-assorted, congeries of houses which we have thrown together as towns. We fight among ourselves, we have more religious, political, and social differences than any other people. Yet when we need companionship for work or pleasure, at home or abroad, we would sooner have an Englishman at our side than any other man. Men and country--'dear souls and dear, dear land'--these are the elements which make up the real thing called patriotism and which, in spite of all our curses and all our self-seeking, lead us in millions to work or die for our country, and will, while life lasts, bring us home at last.

To those who know the local narrowness, the jealousies and pettiness of much of our own national life, it will seem a primary duty in education to present the country as an object of education and service, imperfect indeed and limited by larger ends, but yet supreme over the selfish interests of trade, town, or individual. This, with all its terrible losses, the war is doing for us with mighty and irresistible strokes, and it is a tragic truth that in our present imperfect social state, it is only a war, hurling us against other great and really co-operating communities of men, which can make us bear with comparative ease and cheerfulness the most serious burdens of loss and suffering. We act instantly as one people in war, we haggle and hesitate about the most moderate sacrifices to secure an advance in peace. It is this quality in patriotism, and in war as its stimulus, which largely and naturally biases our view. But to the ideal of a united Western civilization or a united mankind it is only one step. We cannot do without patriotism, but we must immediately proceed beyond it. We cannot reform the troubles and conflicts of mankind by attempting to root up some of our most tenacious passions; we progress by mastering and not mutilating our being. We have to advance beyond the limits of patriotism by wider sympathy, by seeing analogies, by recognizing the facts of common interests and co-operation in the world.

But here again, looking at the question from an educational rather than an abstract point of view, we have to recognize that actual realization of the life and services of other nations is a slow, difficult, and, at best, a limited process. It was really easier for the travelling student of the Middle Ages to enter into the simple and similar life of universities abroad than for the modern traveller to grasp the complex relations of a great foreign city or state. We have therefore, in practice, to select and concentrate. For the modern Englishman a knowledge of one or two other countries and languages is as much as the pressure of life will permit, and it is greatly to be regretted that poverty and hard work limit even this acquisition to very few. A Wanderjahr for the working-man would do much to cement the unity of western civilization.

Until the recent acute rivalry with Germany developed, English sympathies were fairly evenly divided. Your Liberal, as a rule, was a Frenchman, and your Conservative a German. George Meredith and John Morley sang the praises of France, Coleridge and Carlyle would have us learn from Germany. Now for many years the die is cast. We shall face the settlement and the dangers of the future side by side with France.

This becomes, then, one of the fixed points in our orientation. History and geography both dictate it. Just as in the building of our fatherland and its attendant sentiments, the process is not a purely logical one, but comes to its completion by most irregular courses, with all sorts of bypaths due to the odd configuration of our nature and the world we live in, so in widening out from patriotism to humanity we have to follow a line given, for the most part, by external facts. The French as our nearest neighbours have always had a special interest for us. They, like ourselves, have inherited a mixed race and a mixed civilization, partly Teutonic, partly Celtic, partly Roman, but with elements variously combined. To us a more predominantly Teutonic stock and an insular position have given a more independent and unique character, history, and constitution. France, as being continental and more central, was also more completely Romanized, and has at all periods of her history been more in touch with the general stream of thought than ourselves. Often she has led it, always she has reflected it more quickly and perfectly. Our traditional rivalry has been a chivalrous one, marked by many episodes of real admiration and close friendship. To Elizabeth, to Cromwell, to the Crusaders of the twelfth and the philosophers of the eighteenth century, France and England seemed as naturally allied as they are now in repelling a common aggression on their homes and liberty. But for the future the strongest links will be the two great common ideals, self-government and individual freedom at home, and the community of free peoples abroad. In the practical democracy already realized at home, and in the ideal of a humanity built up of such self-governing and co-operating states, France and England stand for the unity of western civilization in the sense in which it has been traced in this volume, the only sense which makes it worth the sacrifice of wealth and toil and life.

ERRATUM.

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for cannot it abolish read it cannot abolish

Marvin: The Unity of Western Civilization.

The unity of which we believe ourselves to be now the champions must therefore be a real thing based on freedom and realized by conscious effort; but it must also be truly comprehensive, not exclusive of any willing co-operator, not aimed against any one but for the whole. It is not intended in this volume to discuss any burning questions of the day, and therefore the briefest indications must be given of how the nucleus of western culture has been formed and how it must reform itself after the war. France, Germany, and England have been for many years, collectively far the most important centres of science and social progress in the world, and it would have been the ideal policy for them to give a united lead to the rest of the world. The war has altered that, but it cannot abolish the fundamental facts on which the civilization of the West is based, science, power over nature, and social organization. In these the same three countries will still have a certain primacy, though the position of the United States will be enormously strengthened. No peace can, of course, be permanent which contemplates the excommunication of a leading member of the human family.

Italy in science, philosophy, and literature, is a worthy colleague, and Russia makes a great stride forward by allying herself with the forces of progress and European unity.

Now it is clear that there are two distinct lines of approach to our goal of a united mankind. We may cultivate for ourselves, as an ideal based on love and reason, the notion of all men as brothers working together, helping one another even when unknown, strengthening one another's powers, and gradually advancing towards a higher goal. This, though not a complete religion for most people, at least partakes of the nature of religion. The other line is concerned with the practical task of reconciling actual difficulties, bringing nations together for various purposes--arbitration, international trade, boards of conciliation and the like. This is the slow and thorny path, and on account of its very difficulty is apt to engross the thoughts and energy of the best brains which devote themselves to the cause. But the first line, of self-cultivation and the promotion of a favourable spirit among others, though open to any one and easy of approach, is apt to be neglected. Such 'mere idealism', like pure benevolence, runs some risk of being choked by the multiplicity of details and agencies and organizations which beset the modern world. Humanity, as an idea, was perhaps more easily apprehended in the days of Turgot and Condorcet than it is with us when the implements of a united mankind have been immeasurably augmented and improved. All the greater, then, the need to re-integrate the notion. Just as in science the dispersive effect of specialism has led many thinkers to desire another order of minds specially devoted to generalism, to knitting together the results of the detailed investigations of others, so in conduct, morals and politics, it is more and more imperative to recall men's minds, and, in the first place, our own, to the large governing ideas by which after all our lesser rules and objects must stand or fall. For who will dispute that all our alliances and international action and the war itself can only be ultimately justified if they are seen to serve the highest interests of mankind as a whole?

A volume, and a very valuable one, might be written on the evolution of this idea of Humanity in history. We should need in the first place to analyse, with some care, in what sense it is in each case used. There is the simple sense of brotherhood such as we know to be deeply felt among our allies in Russia. Of this there must have been germs from the earliest appearance of mankind upon earth. It is one of those most precious things which the development of wealth and class and distinctive culture has tended to blunt in more elaborate civilizations. But when we consider that the full conception of Humanity involves a knowledge of man's evolution, his growth in power, and organization throughout history, as well as the simple but indispensable sense of man's brotherhood, we shall see how long a road the Russian moujik--as well as multitudes of his fellows in all other lands--must travel before he comes in view of the goal. In the fuller sense of a self-conscious and developing being, the idea of Humanity first appears with the Stoics, after the Greeks had put their leaven of abstract thought into the world. The whole inhabited world as the City of Man was the Stoic ideal, and it embraced both the idea of the [Greek: polis] which Platonic and Aristotelian thought had reached in the fourth century B.C., and the extension to the rest of mankind which was in the air just before the Christian era. Christianity affected the conception in a twofold manner. On the one hand it limited it, for the Stoic City of Man became the City of God, who was to be sought and worshipped in one prescribed order. On the other hand it deepened it, for the springs of a common humanity were found to go beneath the superficial facts of a citizen life into the depths of souls which have identical relations with eternal things, with sin and suffering and hopes of the future.

It is not till after the outburst of science in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after that reawakening of the hopes of human powers which takes our minds back to the Greeks, that we find the conception of Humanity appearing in something like the form in which we can now imagine it. It will have been gathered from our chapter on Science and Philosophy how essential is the growth of organized thought to the realization of any unity in a progressive world. For the realm of thought is the only one in which no distinctions of race or nation are possible, but it must be thought in which agreement is reached. So long as men can differ, as they still do, on questions of human affairs, politics, social arrangements, or even archaeological matters where race or national predominance is involved, so far science does not exert her unifying sway. But in mathematics, physics, chemistry, all the matters in which it is impossible for a man to take another view because he is a Frenchman or a German--here we reach a haven of intellectual peace; and these calm waters are spreading over the world, in spite of the tempests.

To return to the educational point from which we started, we can see now another line of approach to unity in training our own minds and those of others. In some respects it is a surer way, though less direct. When studying the political life and history of other nations, even if we do so deliberately in order to find out what we owe to them, we are bound to be arrested here and there by things that we do not like, even among our best friends. The French may seem frivolous or less self-restrained than ourselves; they have had their sanguinary outbursts of revolution. Where they have impeded our own movements, as in colonization, we are the more conscious of their faults. Or we may feel that Americans have their materialistic vein. And so on. This with our best friends, who, no doubt, feel the same about us. But on the other line of approach, the study of the things on which men now agree without question, which they have built up steadily with co-operating hands, the mental effect is quite different. The opening vista leads us on, with growing admiration and confidence in the unbreakable solidarity of mankind. We know that Newton who completes Galileo, Maxwell who follows Laplace, Helmholtz who uses the results of Joule, can have no conflicting jealousies. Here quite obviously and indisputably all are fellow-workers, and before the greatness of their work the passions of rival domination in material things, the differences of national taste and habit, the quarrels of the past or the future, appear contemptible and insignificant.

They are not insignificant, as we know to our cost. But by dwelling on the things of greater moment and solidity, we train ourselves and others to reduce the elements of discord to their true proportion and allay the storm. The progress of a united mankind is thus an ideal, slowly realizing itself in time. But its realization is quickened and rendered wider and more beneficent, the more we think of it and believe in it. A blow comes, such as the present war, and seems to shatter the whole picture which so many hands have limned and so many eyes admired. Those who have followed its growth through the ages, know well that no such blow can finally destroy a living growth or even go very deep in injuring its features.

It is surely a commonplace that in proportion as western populations, from statesmen downwards, are animated by sentiments of comradeship which arise from considerations such as these, the danger of war must diminish and the possibilities of fruitful common action increase. Yet there is probably no country in Europe where any deliberate attempt is made to instruct the people in ideas which would most surely broaden their sympathies and lay the foundations of peace.

The argument takes us back for a moment to the essay on education. We left off there at a point where the old unity based on Greco-Roman culture was seen to be disappearing in a confused mass of new studies, partly suggested by modern languages and history, still more by the growth of science and the application of science to the problems of contemporary life. It may well be that in this conception of humanity, the co-operation of mankind in a growing structure of thought, we shall ultimately find the idée-mère under which all the other subordinate ideas in education may be grouped and inspired. This might take place if the notion were grasped in no narrow sense, but so broadly that all human thought, religion, and philosophy, art as well as science, might find their justification in it.

The advantage of putting the educational issue first has been already indicated. We can all get to work on it at once for ourselves, and it is a far more fundamental and, in some respects, easier thing to introduce a new idea into the minds of others than to alter the boundaries and political conditions of States. If we once achieved a general atmosphere of co-operation and goodwill in the world, the practical problems would be already more than half solved.

Discussion will take place, with more and more vigour as years go on, as to the various measures which have been described collectively as the establishment of a World-State. At what point could it be said that a World-State is in being? How can such a World-State be reconciled with the independent sovereignty of the several States comprised in it? What is to be the sanction imposing the decisions of the larger community on its constituent members? Such are a few of the problems involved in any advance towards the Kantian ideal of cosmopolitanism. None of them admit of a single definite answer. They do not belong to questions of pure theory, and we shall have to solve them slowly and with difficulty, seizing every favourable opportunity of a slight advance, avoiding grave obstacles, compromising with every possible friend.

But for the moment we seem likely to be overwhelmed by unchained passions which are the practical denial of everything that the ideal of humanity implies. Instead of co-operation we are faced by schemes of conquest and domination, and the simplest notion of brotherhood is limited to comradeship in arms for defence or attack. Many will be found to ridicule the idea that any real progress in unity has ever been made, or that the world can ever be envisaged except as an irksome enclosure of rival armed forces thirsting for the fray. But to those who are not prepared to accept this as the last word in human association the argument of this volume may have some weight. It will lead those who follow it to a quiet but well-grounded belief that the forces tending to unity in the world are different in quality, incomparably greater in scope than those which make for disruption. Discord is explosive and temporary, harmony rises slowly but dominates the final chord.

Like the great common purposes of science, the common tendencies of human action have in recent years suffered some eclipse through the bustle of our activity and the multiplicity of its detail. The colours, too, of a conflict of any kind are so much more vivid and arresting than the quiet and monotonous tones of a long piece of harmonious and co-operative work. The labours of such a bureau of international effort as is described in Chapter X appear to our pressmen and publicists so little interesting that they are practically ignored, and the results of scientific congresses, being of a highly specialized kind, are left perforce to those who can understand them. Yet it is precisely in these things, if our diagnosis is correct, that the most characteristic features of the age are to be found. For in them and in similar movements we see united the two fundamental human traits from which we started, reason and sympathy: reason winning triumphs over nature, sympathy realizing itself at last in a community of men devoting their powers to mutual aid. 'Idle dreams', it will be said, as we hurl more and more millions of our best youth to destruction by the most highly developed resources of science. Yes, but the same nations were only yesterday celebrating the services of Pasteur, Virchow, and Lister to a common humanity, and will do so again to-morrow or the day after.

It is in truth one of the most poignant features of the tragedy in which we are manfully and rightly bearing our part, that the community-sense in the world had never been so highly developed, or found so many channels in which to diffuse itself, as just at the moment when the blow fell. The socialist movements in all civilized countries have always had this as a leading motive; comrades and poor among themselves, these men have always been eager to stretch out a hand to those of like mind abroad. And in the last chapter we saw how among Christian communities throughout the world there has been in recent years a growing approximation. Neither the cause nor the effects of such forces can die away. They will reappear when the storm has passed and rebuild the wreck.

One large aspect of the united action of the western world has received no notice in this volume, though it might very well be the subject of a detailed study in itself. This is the relation of the more advanced and powerful nations of the West towards the weaker and less progressive peoples. It might, indeed, be treated as the touchstone of our civilization, just as the education of the young is a good, perhaps the best, test of the advancement of any single people. For it involves some joint action of the western nations; it shows how far they are disinterested and how far skilful in their treatment of the less advanced.

The record is not a good one, but it confirms, on the whole, the view we have suggested that a growth of the sense and conception of humanity may be traced from the time when modern science was born in the sixteenth century. The Middle Ages hardly furnish us with any examples of the action of Christendom towards heathen and weaker people until the Crusades, in which, with rare examples of personal chivalry, the earlier attitude was one of contempt and hatred of the unbeliever. In the conquest of the New World, which was to some of its earliest conquerors a new Crusade, there is the same general savagery marked by rare cases of Christian kindness, such as Las Casas showed. But after the Reformation, when the Church itself had been purified and more human tolerance and care and interest in life prevailed, we find the enlightened Jesuit missions to China and Paraguay, St. Francis Xavier's work in India, and the Quaker dealings with Red Indians in the New World. From the middle of the seventeenth century, slavery, which had fallen into abeyance during the Middle Ages as a domestic institution, began to be denounced as a trade. We are on the threshold of the great humanitarian outburst of the eighteenth century. It is impossible to believe that this growth of human feeling in dealing with other men is unconnected with that new gospel of human power which Bacon and Descartes had just proclaimed. Except for the occasional superman, the greater the powers a man possesses and the higher he rates human capacity at its best, the more careful he is to cherish and develop the germs of humanity in the young and weak.

This was undoubtedly the case with the 'philosophers' of the eighteenth century; it is equally true of the nineteenth century, an age wonderful alike for its unexampled development of science and for the rise of activities, national and international, for the betterment of the race. Jointly the western nations have in this period put down the slave trade, and in the Brussels Conference of 1890 we see the highest point yet reached by the united humanity of the West expressed by the assembled states in regard to backward people. The point therefore is a notable one, and Englishmen will be glad to remember that it was Lord Salisbury, then Foreign Secretary, who took the first step. The previous Conference at Berlin, in 1884, had secured freedom of trade for the basins of the Congo and the Niger, and in 1889 Lord Salisbury, through the Belgian Government, called the Powers together to consider questions relating to the slave trade in Africa. For Africa, home of the black race, last exploited of the continents, discovered after the white man had discovered science, was pre-eminently the part of the world where the co-operation of leading peoples in civilizing backward races was most needed and most to be expected. The Congo, the Herreros, Morocco, Tripoli, Omdurman, offer a blood-stained record in reply.

But the general act of the Brussels Conference is clear and adequate as to what the purpose of the Powers should be. "To put an end to the crimes and devastations engendered by the traffic in African slaves, to protect effectively the aboriginal populations of Africa, to ensure for that vast continent the benefits of peace and civilization", is in fact the whole duty of a united western civilization when dealing with the less civilized. The results achieved may well seem small compared with the magnitude of the purpose, but those who know most about it do not despise them. Slave-raiding and tribal wars have been diminished and some check put on importing arms and spirits.

It is not a topic on which it is easy to keep a cheerful mind. Some Putumayo will constantly occur to remind us of the fierce brutality of strength unsupervised and unrestrained. We compare the actual performance of mankind when free to try their best or wreak their worst on comparatively defenceless folk, with the noble rivalry which we can imagine between the nations of the world in leading the weaker people to develop their resources and themselves, on paths which may tend to the greatest prosperity and happiness of all, advanced and backward together: and the comparison leaves us sick at heart. But a sober judgement will not deny that even here advance is being made. The ideal has been admitted. The rights of smaller States are being made, as in the present conflict, the subject of the concern of their strongest neighbours. Steps are being taken all over the world to preserve and ameliorate the remnants of primitive people. Horrors when revealed are more strongly reprobated. Missionaries are pursuing their labours with more enlightenment and zeal, and in wider spheres. In spite of cynics and doubters, it is true in this as in the other activities of a united mankind, e pur si muove. And as the work moves on it is seen to involve the same guiding thoughts that inspire us in the case of the young and feeble at home--pity for their weakness, love for their humanity, hope for the future.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Kant's Perpetual Peace (new edition just published).

International Policy. Chapman & Hall.

Fayle, The Great Settlement. Murray.

The Leadership of the World. (Oxford pamphlet.)