PART I. Principles of the Settlement

PRINCIPLES OF THE SETTLEMENT

PART I. PRINCIPLES OF THE SETTLEMENT: ECONOMIC

PROBLEMS OF ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY

The growing dependence of modern civilized and thickly populated countries for the necessaries of life and industry, for commercial profits, and for gainful investments of capital upon free access to other countries, especially to countries differing from themselves in climate, natural resources, and degree of economic development, is of necessity a consideration of increasing weight in the foreign policy of to-day. Every active industrial or commercial nation is therefore fain to watch and guard its existing opportunities for foreign trade and investment, and to plan ahead for enlarged opportunities to meet the anticipated future needs of an expanding trade and a growing population. It views with fear, suspicion, and jealousy every attempt of a foreign country to curtail its liberty of access to other countries and its equal opportunities for advantageous trade or exploitation. The chief substance of the treaties, conventions, and agreements between modern nations in recent times has consisted in arrangements about commercial and financial opportunities, mostly in countries outside the acknowledged control of the negotiating parties. The real origins of most quarrels between such nations have related to tariffs, railway, banking, commercial, and financial operations in lands belonging to one or other of the parties, or in lands where some sphere of special interest was claimed. Egypt, Morocco, Persia, Asia Minor, China, Congo, Mexico, are the most sensitive spots affecting international relations outside of Europe, testifying to the predominance of economic considerations in foreign policy. The stress laid upon such countries hinges in the last resort upon the need of “open doors” or upon the desire to close doors to other countries. These keenly felt desires to safeguard existing foreign markets for goods and capital, to obtain by diplomatic pressure or by force new markets, and in other cases to monopolize markets, have everywhere been the chief directing influences in foreign policy, the chief causes of competing armaments, and the permanent underlying menaces to peace. The present war, when regard is had to the real directing pressure behind all diplomatic acts and superficial political ferments, is in the main a product of these economic antagonisms. This point of view is concisely and effectively expressed in a striking memorandum presented by the Reform Club of New York to President Wilson:—

Consider the situation of the present belligerents.

Serbia wants a window on the sea, and is shut out by Austrian influence.

Austria wants an outlet in the East, Constantinople or Salonica.

Russia wants ice-free ports on the Baltic and Pacific, Constantinople, and a free outlet from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean.

Germany claims to be hemmed in by a ring of steel, and needs the facilities of Antwerp and Rotterdam for her Rhine Valley commerce, security against being shut out from the East by commercial restrictions on the overland route, and freedom of the seas for her foreign commerce.

England must receive uninterrupted supplies of food and raw materials, and her oversea communications must be maintained.

This is true also of France, Germany, Belgium, and other European countries.

Japan, like Germany, must have opportunity for her expanding population, industries, and commerce.

The foreign policies of the nations still at peace are also determined by trade relations. Our own country desires the open door in the East.

South and North American States and Scandinavia are already protesting against the war’s interference with their ocean trade.

All nations that are not in possession of satisfactory harbors on the sea demand outlets, and cannot and ought not to be contented till they get them.

Nations desiring to extend their colonial enterprises entertain those ambitions for commercial reasons, either to possess markets from which they cannot be excluded, or to develop such markets for themselves and be able to exclude others from them when they so determine.

The generalization from these statements of fact is expressed in the formula, “The desire for commercial privilege and for freedom from commercial restraint is the primary cause of war.”

Now, that the foreign policies of nations are, in fact, determined mainly by these commercial and financial considerations, and that the desire to secure economic privilege and to escape economic restraints is a chief cause of war, are indisputable propositions. So long as these motives are left free to work in the future as in the past there will be constant friction among the commercially developed nations, giving rise to dangerous quarrels that will strain, perhaps to the breaking-point, any arrangements for arbitration that may be made....

Disputes arising from these economic causes are even deeper seated and more dangerous than those connected with the claims of nationality and autonomy. Indeed, political autonomy is shorn of most of its value unless it is accompanied by a large measure of economic liberty as regards commercial relations with the outside world. The case of Serbia, liable at any moment to be denied access to the sea, or to be cut off by Austria from her chief land markets, is a case in point. Or once again, would the autonomy of such a country as Hungary, Bohemia, or Poland, however valid its political guarantees, satisfy the legitimate aspirations of its population if high tariff-walls encompassed it on every frontier? Such instances make it evident that no settlement of “the map of Europe” on lines of nationality can suffice to establish peace. The effective liberty of every people demands freedom of commercial intercourse with other peoples. A refusal or a hindrance of such intercourse deprives a people of its fair share of the common fruits of the earth, and deprives the other peoples of the world of any special fruits which it is able to contribute to the common stock.

If any international Government existed, representing the commonwealth of nations, it would seek to remove all commercial restrictions which impair the freedom of economic intercourse between nations.

These restrictions are placed by the Reform Club Memorandum under the four following categories:—

First. There is the restriction of tariffs imposed by nations.

Second. There are restrictions upon the best uses of International commerce, of the terminal and land transfer facilities of the great trade routes and seaports of the world. A few such ports command entrance to and exit from vast continental hinterlands. It is vital to these interior regions that their natural communications with the outside world should be kept widely open, and this is equally vital to the rest of the world. Obstructive control of such ports and routes to the detriment of the world’s commerce cannot and should not be tolerated by states whose interests are adversely affected. But routes and ports are needed for use, not government; and port rivalries constantly tend towards offering the best and equal facilities to all. The swelling tides of commerce are clearing their own channels, and mutual interests will more and more prompt the states through which the principal trade routes pass to facilitate the movement of commerce.

Third. There are restrictions upon opportunities to trade with territories ruled as colonies or being exploited within spheres of influence. This is what now remains of the old mercantile system which flourished before our Revolutionary War, and which has been weakening ever since. Great Britain claims no preference for herself in her colonies. Other states have been less liberal. The fear of such restrictions being applied against them is to-day the main motive for a policy of colonial oversea possessions. If industrial states could be assured of the application of the open-door policy, no state would envy another its colonies. Colonies should be the world’s.

Fourth. There are restrictions in the free use of the sea. Unlike land routes, ocean routes are offered practically without cost to all, whithersoever the sea runs. Over these, however, until modern times commerce has been subject to pillage by regular warships as well as by pirates. The claims of commerce have been more slowly recognized on the sea than on the land; and, to an extent now unthinkable on land, warring states still feel free to interfere with neutral traders....

Another factor of increasing importance in the recent conflict of nations has been the competition between groups of financiers and concessionaires, organized upon a “national” basis, to obtain exclusive or preferential control in the undeveloped countries for the profitable use of exported capital. Closely related to commercial competition, this competition for lucrative investments has played an even greater part in producing dangerous international situations. For these financial and commercial interests have sought to use the political and the forcible resources of their respective Governments to enable them to obtain the concessions and other privileges they require for the security and profitable application of their capital. The control of foreign policy thus wielded has been fraught with two perils to world-peace. It has brought the Governments of the competing financial groups into constant friction, and it has been the most fruitful direct source of expeditionary forces and territorial aggressions in the coveted areas. As the struggle for lucrative overseas investments has come to occupy a more important part than the struggle for ordinary markets, the economic oppositions between European Governments have become more and more the determinant factors in foreign policy, and in the competition of armaments, upon which Governments rely to support and to achieve the aims their economic masters impose upon them.

John A. Hobson, “Towards International Government,” pp. 128-139.

TRADE AS A CAUSE OF WAR

Decent men in the belligerent countries feel a natural repugnance in time of war to any discussion of the economic bearings of the struggle. If nations are to fight with clear consciences and single hearts, they must fight on in the belief that any objects which concern their statesmen beyond the objects of defense and national security are purely idealistic. We are all pragmatists in wartime; we believe what will conduce to victory. Cool observers see clearly the widening out of an immense range of colonial, imperial, and economic issues which will confront us at the settlement and after it. But these things are not debated as we debate the issues of nationality in this war. One might suppose from a study of our press that we are much more vitally interested in the fate of the Slovenes than we are in the trade of China.

This idealism is absolutely sincere, and a natural consequence of the exaltation of emotion which belongs to any war of nations. We can endure the thought that our young men are falling in many thousands for the liberties of little peoples. That brief statement of our aims would end in bathos if we were to add to it the subjection of China to Japanese suzerainty, the partition of Turkey into spheres of influence, the acquisition by the Allies of the German colonies, and the setting up of a Russian customs house at Constantinople. The mischief of this obsession is that the very field which stands most in need of illumination from critical yet idealistic thinking is left in a half light of semi-secrecy, and the will of democracies hardly dreams of intervening in the clash of the interests which divide it. Public opinion and the fortunes of war will govern the settlement of Belgium and Alsace, but in our present temper it is only too probable that all the colonial and economic issues involved in it will be left to the diplomatists with only the interests behind them.

The penetrating memorandum addressed by the New York Reform Club to President Wilson has sketched broadly but with sure insight the commercial and colonial questions which helped to lead up to this war. None of these issues appeared in the negotiations which preceded the war, but most of them were latent in the consciousness of the statesmen and even of the peoples. The curse of our unorganized Europe has been that fundamental change has rarely been possible save as a sequel of war. Diplomacy was always busied with a pathetic conservatism in bolstering up the status quo, or in arranging those little readjustments which might just avail to stave off war. We shall not banish war from Europe until we are civilized enough to create an organization that can make and impose fundamental changes without war. The best we can do in the meantime is to prepare to avail ourselves of the brief moment of settlement during which the structure of Europe will still be fluid under the shock of war, to bring our idealistic and democratic forces to bear upon these larger issues.

The Reform Club’s memorandum deals with three of these questions: the abolition of capture at sea in wartime, the freedom of the world’s straits and highways in time of war, and the exploitation of colonies under a system of protection. The system of legalized piracy which permits navies to prey on commerce in wartime is undoubtedly the most potent incentive to swollen armaments at sea. So long as it survives, the opinion of the mercantile classes will never effectively back the demand for economy in armaments, for it is bound to regard navies as an insurance. The question of the ownership of straits stands high among the many competing causes of bloodshed. It explains the German struggle for Calais no less than the Allied expedition to the Dardanelles. One may doubt, however, whether a proposal to neutralize any of the more vital of these straits—the Straits of Dover or Gibraltar, for example—would stand a chance of calm consideration on the morrow of such a war as this. It will be feasible when war is no longer an ever-present terror; and when that day comes it will have lost its importance. Far more central in our problem is the general question of colonialism. It is a commonplace to say that modern industrial peoples desire colonies almost solely for economic reasons, and that one of the chief motives for this expansion would disappear with any approach to free trade. If the British colonies had not granted a preference to the mother country, and if French colonies were not hedged about with an impenetrable tariff wall, the feeling among German industrialists that their expansion was “hemmed in” would have been less acute, and the pressure for “places in the sun” would have been less powerful.

But it is doubtful whether the question of markets is as potent a cause of armaments and war as the competition to secure concessions, monopolies, and spheres of influence. The export of capital means much more for the modern politics of imperialism than the export of manufactured goods. The conquistador of to-day is the financier who acquires mining rights in Morocco, loan privileges in Turkey, or railway concessions in China. The foreign policy of Great Britain and our place in the European system has been governed for a generation by the occupation of Egypt, whither we went in the wake of the bond-holders. It explains our long bickerings with France; it helped to fling an isolated France into the arms of Russia; it brought us finally into the disastrous bargain over Morocco which underlay our feud with Germany. The competition of national financial groups for concessions in Turkey or China is not the competition of the market-place at home. Behind the financier stands the diplomatist, and behind the diplomatist is his navy. There is a clash of armor-plates when these competitors jostle. The struggle for a Balance of Power in Europe has often seemed little more than a race for the force and prestige which would enable the dominant Power or group of Powers to secure the concessions of the monopoly spheres which it coveted in the half-developed regions of the earth. No modern nation would openly make war to secure such ends as these, for no democracy would support it. Even the half-evolved democracy of Russia recoiled from the Manchurian War. But every nation, by pursuing these ends, makes the armed peace and the unstable equilibrium which prepares our wars.

The remedy is so simple that only a very clever man could sophisticate himself into missing it, and it is as old as Cobden. It is not necessary to establish universal free trade to stop the rivalry to monopolize colonial markets; it would suffice to declare free trade in the colonies, or even in those which are not self-governing. To deal with the evil of “concessions” all that is required is a general understanding that financiers must win their own way, by merit or push or bribes, and that the doors of the embassies will be banged in their faces when they seek support. These sentences are easily written, but they would involve the democratization of diplomacy everywhere, the overthrow of the colonial group in France, and the confounding of the national economists in Germany. The force which might work such miracles is nowhere mobilized, for, with all their will to peace, the democracies nowhere understand the bearings of these colonial and commercial issues on war and armaments. It requires some imagination to understand that when two embassies compete in Peking for a railway concession, the issue may be determined by the balance of naval power in the North Sea. It requires some habit of observation to realize that because this may happen in Peking, the investing and governing classes are bound to keep up the balance in the North Sea. The nexus is none the less simple and clear, and it will hold as long as diplomacy continues to engage in this disguised imperial trading, so long as capital possesses nationality and regards the flag as an asset.

There are none the less ways of escape which are neither Utopian nor heroic. It ought not to be utterly beyond the statesmanship of Europe to decree some limited form of colonial free trade by general agreement—to apply it, for example, to Africa. France would oppose it, but what if Alsace were to be restored on this condition? To open a great colonial market to Hamburg, while ending the dream of revanche, would be to remove the two chief causes of war in western Europe. American statesmanship may ere long have the power to propose such a bargain as this. For the plague of concession-hunting the best expedient would probably be to impose on all the competing national groups in each area the duty of amalgamating in a permanently international syndicate. If one such syndicate controlled all the railways and another all the mines of China and Turkey, a vast cause of national rivalry would be removed. The interests of China and Turkey might be secured by interposing a disinterested council or arbitrator between them and the syndicate to adjust their respective interests. Short of creating a world state or a European federation, the chief constructive work for peace is to establish colonial free trade and internationalize the export of capital.

H. N. Brailsford, “Trade as a Cause of War,” The New Republic, May 8, 1915.

ECONOMIC IMPERIALISM

The evils of an unrestricted competition for concessions and monopolies between rival financial groups backed by their Governments, are so notorious that diplomacy has found several typical formulæ for bringing them to an end. The obvious method of resolving such conflicts is the demarcation of spheres of “influences,” “interest” or “penetration” within which each of the competing Powers enjoys a monopoly respected by the others. This method is open to two grave objections. In the first place, it is rarely adopted before a ruinous conflict has exhausted the competitors. For years or decades they carry on a trial of strength which affects not merely their local relationship, but their attitude to one another in Europe, and is measured year by year in their military and naval estimates. If we were to take the sum by which British and German armaments have increased in the present century, it would be possible to allocate the increase, roughly, somewhat as follows: 50 per cent. or less for the settlement of the question, Who shall exploit Morocco?; 25 per cent. or more for the privilege of building a railway to Bagdad and beyond it; 25 per cent. or more for the future eventualities which remain unsettled—the fate of the Portuguese colonies in Africa, and the destinies of China. In the second place, the delimitation of spheres of interest is almost inevitably fatal to the national existence of the country partitioned, and as inevitably adds a vast burden to the commitments of the Imperial Power. Persia furnishes the obvious illustration. Sir Edward Grey is clearly resolved that he will not allow himself by the march of events to be drawn into the assumption of any direct responsibility for the administration of the British sphere. It is a laudable resolve, but Russia may at any moment frustrate it. She deals with her own sphere on the opposite principle, and her sphere happens to include the seat of the central government. That government is already a puppet of Russian policy, enjoying only a simulacrum of independence. How much longer can a government which is not a government continue to rule the southern sphere? Sooner or later a choice must be made. Either Russia must withdraw, or some separate government under British protection must be created for the south. Turkey is drifting rapidly towards a dissolution in which the spheres which the Great Powers already claim will be formally delimited. It is easy to predict what that will mean. There will be first provincial loans, then provincial advisers, and finally a military control, under which each of these “spheres” will become what Egypt already is, a dependency of a European Power.

The method of avoiding financial competition by marking off zones of monopoly, is clearly the worst which can be pursued. There are alternatives. Let us consider what methods might be followed if the Powers were sage enough to shrink from the terrific conflict which may one day overtake them for the partition of China. China is so thickly peopled that crude conquest presents few attractions. Even Japan could not settle her surplus population in a country where every hill is terraced and every field subjected to intensive cultivation. But there is here a field which capital is already eager to exploit, and every year diminishes the resistance of prejudice and inertia to its ambitions. The attempts to mark out spheres of influence have so far been tentative and unsuccessful. Our own claim to the lion’s share, the Yangtse Valley, is admitted by no other Power, and it is doubtful whether the Foreign Office still maintains it. There are several principles which might be adopted if the Powers desired to avoid the jealous and dangerous struggle for concessions. In the first place, the simplest plan and the best would be the adoption of a self-denying ordinance by all the chief competitors. Let it be understood that British, French, and German banks may compete among themselves for railways and loans, but that none of them shall receive any aid or countenance whatever from the embassies or consulates of their respective countries. If that could be decided, the allotment of concessions would be settled either by the merits of the competitors or more probably by their skill and audacity in bribing Chinese officials. One may doubt, however, whether any of the Powers has sufficient faith in the honor of its competitors to enter on such an undertaking. A second and more hopeful plan might be borrowed from the undertaking negotiated by France and Germany over Morocco. They agreed to promote cooperation among their subjects, who were to share in agreed percentages in the coveted opportunities for public works. A vast “pool” or syndicate in which all the rival financial groups were represented, might be left to internationalize all the opportunities of monopoly in China on a plan which would give to each its allotted share in the risks and profits. The scheme worked badly in Morocco, and indeed created the friction which led to the Agadir incident. Something of the kind existed in China while the alliance of the banks of the Six Powers subsisted, and it eventually broke down. By this method friction may be avoided among the Great Powers, but China would be subjected to an intolerable financial dictation, which would be none the less oppressive because it was cosmopolitan. There exists, however, in the Ottoman Public Debt, a model which might be followed elsewhere. Its council represents all the bondholders of every nationality, and usually maintains good relations with the Porte. If the railways of Turkey, China, and Persia could be amalgamated, each in a single system under a cosmopolitan administration, the risk of partition and all the danger to peace, which this risk entails, might be removed. The obvious step is to confer on these syndicates of capitalists an international legal personality, which would enable them to sue or be sued before the Hague Tribunal. Some disinterested council nominated by The Hague should be interposed between the syndicate and the State in which it operates, so that the intervention of diplomacy may be as far as possible eliminated.

The problems raised by the export of capital have been considered in this chapter mainly from the standpoint of the creditor State, which sees its diplomacy involved in the process. We have found, so far, no solution which is satisfactory from the standpoint of the debtor nation. The inroad of foreign capital always means for it some loss of independence, and it has nothing to gain by agreements among competing Empires. It may, indeed, keep its independence by playing on their rivalries. Its shadowy autonomy vanishes when they come to terms. The pacifist and the nationalist are here divided in their sympathies. The former, thinking only of European peace, rejoices when Russia and Britain end their differences by the partition of Persia. The latter, seeing only that a nation has been destroyed, regards the agreement as a peculiarly evil development of Imperialism. Both are right, and both are wrong. The ideal expedient would preserve European peace without destroying the victim nationality. To propose that expedient requires an excursion into the realms of Utopian construction. We can propose nothing which seems feasible to-day, but a solution is conceivable which requires only an easy step in the organization of the civilized world for peace. The motives for the partition of Persia were rather political than financial. The object-lesson of Egypt, where the occupation had its origin in debt, is a more typical instance of modern processes. It happens that the Hague Conference has laid down a principle which is capable of fruitful extension for dealing with such cases as these. The Drago Doctrine, put forward by Señor Drago, a jurist and statesman of the Argentine Republic, supported by the United States and eventually adopted by all the Powers, provides that no creditor State may use arms to enforce a liability upon a debtor State, unless a decision of the Hague Tribunal has recognized the liability and prescribed the method of payment. This doctrine, even as it stands, is of immense value to minor but civilized States like the South American republics, Portugal and Greece, which may find themselves obliged to defer payment of an external debt. The Hague Tribunal would in such a case, if it realized its opportunities, act as a good County Court Judge would do at home—refuse to admit a merely usurious claim, and lay down terms and dates of payment which would admit of the debtor’s recovery from any temporary difficulty.

But to defeat the more unscrupulous methods of the international usurer, this idea requires some amplification. It may be necessary for a debtor State, some grades below the level of Portugal and Greece in civilization, to mortgage some part of its revenues, and to accept, at least over part of them, some degree of foreign control. That means, if the creditor country has also political ambitions, the almost certain loss of its independence. There are also States like Turkey which stand in need of expert advice for the reorganization of their finances, but dread the consequences of admitting any foreigner, who may perhaps think more of the interests of European finance and of his own motherland, than of those of the country which employs him. To draw the full advantage from the international machinery at The Hague, there ought to be evolved a permanent Credit Bureau to which weak and timid States might apply. It might conduct enquiries into their solvency, lend them experts to reorganize their finances, help them to negotiate loans in neutral markets on fair terms, and in case of need provide the commissioners who would control their mortgaged revenues. It would act as a trustee or as a Court of Chancery towards its wards. It could have no political ambitions to further, and the country which applied to it need not tremble for its independence. Persia or Egypt, had this Bureau existed, might have turned to The Hague for help. If, in the end, owing to civil war, or the hopeless incapacity of native statesmen, forcible intervention became inevitable, it would lie not with any interested Power, but with The Hague itself, to take the initiative of summoning a European Conference to prescribe the nature and limits of the interference. It is even possible that the Bureau might be used as an arbitrator at the request of a State like China, hard pressed by the rivalry of Empires competing for concessions, to decide between them in its name, and to appoint a neutral adviser or board of advisers, who would stand between it and the greedy Powers in the allotment of its financial patronage.

A Europe which has organized itself for peace will be at no loss for expedients wherewith to reconcile the appetites of capital with the rights of nationality. A spectator of the moving cosmopolitan drama which is played, the world over, around this central motive of the export of capital, can readily invent attractive schemes for the regulation of the process. But such exercises tempt one to ignore the dynamics of the problem. The same primitive forces of greed which in earlier centuries inspired conquests and migrations are still strong enough to grip diplomacy and build navies. Our first task is to win at home the power to control this export of capital, to check it where it disregards the current ethical standards, to rebuff it where it would lead us into international rivalry, and at last to use it as the potent servant of a humane diplomacy. It can be forbidden to carry the devastations of slavery into distant continents. It can be checked in its usurer’s practises upon simple States. It can be used, if it be firmly mastered, to starve into submission a semi-civilized Empire which meditates aggressive war, or draws from Western stores the funds to finance its own oppressions.

H. N. Brailsford, “The War of Steel and Gold,” pp. 241-253.

THE PROBLEM OF DIPLOMACY

This whole business of jockeying for position is at first glance so incredibly silly that many liberals regard diplomacy as a cross between sinister conspiracy and a meaningless etiquette. It would be all of that if the stakes of diplomacy were not real. Those stakes have to be understood, for without such an understanding diplomacy is incomprehensible and any scheme of world peace an idle fancy.

The chief, the overwhelming problem of diplomacy seems to be the weak state—the Balkans, the African sultanates, Turkey, China, and Latin America, with the possible exception of the Argentine, Chile, and Brazil. These states are “weak” because they are industrially backward and at present politically incompetent. They are rich in resources and cheap labor, poor in capital, poor in political experience, poor in the power of defense. The government of these states is the supreme problem of diplomacy. Just as the chief task of American politics to the Civil War was the organization of the unexploited West, so the chief task of world diplomacy to-day is the organization of virgin territory and backward peoples. I use backward in the conventional sense to mean a people unaccustomed to modern commerce and modern political administration.

This solicitude about backward peoples seems to many good democrats a combination of superciliousness and greed....

And yet the plain fact is that the interrelation of peoples has gone so far that to advocate international laissez-faire now is to speak a counsel of despair. Commercial cunning, lust of conquest, rum, bibles, rifles, missionaries, traders, concessionaires have brought the two civilizations into contact, and the problem created must be solved, not evaded.

The great African empires, for example, were not created deliberately by theoretical imperialists. Explorers, missionaries, and traders penetrated these countries. They found rubber, oil, cocoa, tin; they could sell cotton goods, rifles, liquor. The native rulers bartered away enormous riches at trivial prices. But the trading-posts and the concessions were insecure. There were raids and massacres. No public works existed, no administrative machinery. The Europeans exploited the natives cruelly, and the natives retaliated. Concession hunters and merchants from other nations began to come in. They bribed and bullied the chiefs, and created still greater insecurity. An appeal would be made to the home government for help, which generally meant declaring a protectorate of the country. Armed forces were sent in to pacify, and civil servants to administer the country. These protectorates were generally sanctioned by the other European governments on the proviso that trade should be free to all....

It is essential to remember that what turns a territory into a diplomatic “problem” is the combination of natural resources, cheap labor, markets, defenselessness, corrupt and inefficient government. The desert of Sahara is no “problem,” except where there are oases and trade routes. Switzerland is no “problem,” for Switzerland is a highly organized modern state. But Mexico is a problem, and Haiti, and Turkey, and Persia. They have the pretension of political independence which they do not fulfil. They are seething with corruption, eaten up with “foreign” concessions, and unable to control the adventurers they attract or safeguard the rights which these adventurers claim. More foreign capital is invested in the United States than in Mexico, but the United States is not a “problem” and Mexico is. The difference was hinted at in President Wilson’s speech at Mobile. Foreigners invest in the United States, and they are assured that life will be reasonably safe and that titles to property are secured by orderly legal means. But in Mexico they are given “concessions,” which means that they secure extra privileges and run greater risks, and they count upon the support of European governments or of the United States to protect them and their property.

The weak states, in other words, are those which lack the political development that modern commerce requires. To take an extreme case which brings out the real nature of the “problem,” suppose that the United States was organized politically as England was in the time of William the Conqueror. Would it not be impossible to do business in the United States? There would be an everlasting clash between an impossible legal system and a growing commercial development. And the internal affairs of the United States would constitute a diplomatic “problem.”

This, it seems to me, is the reason behind the outburst of modern imperialism among the Great Powers. It is not enough to say that they are “expanding” or “seeking markets” or “grabbing resources.” They are doing all these things, of course. But if the world into which they are expanding were not politically archaic, the growth of foreign trade would not be accompanied by political imperialism. Germany has “expanded” wonderfully in the British Empire, in Russia, in the United States, but no German is silly enough to insist on planting his flag wherever he sells his dyestuffs or stoves. It is only when his expansion is into weak states—into China, Morocco, Turkey, or elsewhere that foreign trade is imperialistic. This imperialism is actuated by many motives—by a feeling that political control insures special privileges, by a desire to play a large part in the world, by national vanity, by a passion for “ownership,” but none of these motives would come into play if countries like China or Turkey were not politically backward.

Imperialism in our day begins generally as an attempt to police and pacify. This attempt stimulates national pride, it creates bureaucrats with a vested interest in imperialism, it sucks in and receives added strength from concessionaires and traders who are looking for economic privileges. There is no doubt that certain classes in a nation gain by imperialism, though to the people as a whole the adventure may mean nothing more than an increased burden of taxes.

Some pacifists have attempted to deny that a nation could ever gain anything by political control of weak states. They have not defined the “nation.” What they overlook is that even the most advanced nations are governed, not by the “people,” but by groups with special interests. These groups do gain, just as the railroad men who controlled American legislatures gained. A knot of traders closely in league with the colonial office of a great Power can make a good deal of money out of its friendships. Every government has contracts to be let, franchises to give; it establishes tariffs, fixes railroad rates, apportions taxes, creates public works, builds roads. To be favored by that power is to be favored indeed. The favoritism may cost the motherland and the colony dear, but the colonial merchant is not a philanthropist....

The whole situation might be summed up by saying that the commercial development of the world will not wait until each territory has created for itself a stable and fairly modern political system. By some means or other the weak states have to be brought within the framework of commercial administration. Their independence and integrity, so-called, are dependent upon their creating conditions under which world-wide business can be conducted. The pressure to organize the globe is enormous....

Out of this complexity of motive there is created a union of various groups on the imperial program: the diplomatic group is interested primarily in prestige; the military group in an opportunity to act; the bureaucratic in the creation of new positions; the financial groups in safeguarding investments; traders in securing protection and privileges, religious groups in civilizing the heathen, the “intellectuals,” in realizing theories of expansion and carrying out “manifest destinies,” the people generally in adventure and glory and the sense of being great. These interested groups severally control public opinion, and under modern methods of publicity public opinion is easily “educated.”

Who should intervene in backward states, what the intervention shall mean, how the protectorate shall be conducted—this is the bone and sinew of modern diplomacy. The weak spots of the world are the arenas of friction. This friction is increased and made popular by frontier disputes over Alsace-Lorraine or Italia Irredenta, but in my judgment the boundary lines of Europe are not the grand causes of diplomatic struggle. Signor Ferrero confessed recently that the present generation of Italians had all but forgotten Italia Irredenta, and the Revanche has been a decadent French dream until the Entente and the Dual Alliance began to clash in Morocco, in Turkey, in China. Alsace-Lorraine has no doubt kept alive suspicion of Germany, and predisposed French opinion to inflicting diplomatic defeats in Morocco. But the arena where the European Powers really measure their strength against each other is in the Balkans, in Africa, and in Asia....

This war is fought not for specific possessions, but for that diplomatic prestige and leadership which are required to solve all the different problems. It is like a great election to decide who shall have the supreme power in the Concert of Europe. Austria began the contest to secure her position as a great Power in the Balkans; Russia entered it to thwart this ambition; France was engaged because German diplomatic supremacy would reduce France to a “second-class power,” which means a power that holds world power on sufferance; England could not afford to see France “crushed” or Belgium annexed because British imperialism cannot alone cope with the vigor of Germany; Germany felt herself “encircled,” which meant that wherever she went—to Morocco, Asia Minor, or China—there a coalition was ready to thwart her. The ultimate question involved was this: whenever in the future diplomats meet to settle a problem in the backward countries, which European nation shall be listened to most earnestly? What shall be the relative prestige of Germans and Englishmen and Frenchmen and Russians; what sense of their power, what historical halo, what threat of force, what stimulus to admiration shall they possess? To lose this war will be like being a Republican politician in the solid South when the Democrats are in power at Washington. It will mean political, social, and economic inferiority.

Americans have every reason to understand the dangers of unorganized territory, to realize clearly why it is a “problem.” Our Civil War was preceded by thirty or forty years of diplomatic struggle for a balance of power in the West. Should the West be slave or free, that is, should it be the scene of homesteads and free labor, or of plantations and slaves? Should it be formed into States which sent senators and representatives to support the South or the North? We were virtually two nations, each trying to upset the balance of power in its own favor. And when the South saw that it was beaten, that is to say “encircled,” when its place in the Western sun was denied, the South seceded and fought. Until the problem or organizing the West had been settled, peace and federal union were impossible.

The world’s problem is the same problem tremendously magnified and complicated.

The point I have been making will, I fear, seem a paradox to many readers,—that the anarchy of the world is due to the backwardness of weak states; that the modern nations have lived in an armed peace and collapsed into hideous warfare because in Asia, Africa, the Balkans, Central and South America there are rich territories in which weakness invites exploitation, in which inefficiency and corruption invite imperial expansion, in which the prizes are so great that the competition for them is to the knife.

This is the world problem upon which all schemes for arbitration, leagues of peace, reduction of armaments must prove themselves. The diplomats have in general recognized this. It was commonly said for a generation that Europe would be lucky if it escaped a general war over the breakup of Turkey in Europe. The Sick Man has infected the Continent. Our own “preparedness” campaign is based on the fear that the defenselessness of Latin America will invite European aggression, that the defenselessness of China will bring on a struggle in the Pacific. Few informed people imagine for a moment that any nation of the world contemplates seizing or holding our own territory. That would be an adventure so ridiculous that no statesman would think of it. If we get into trouble it will be over some place like Mexico, or Haiti, or the Philippines, or the Panama Canal, or Manchuria, or Hawaii....

Europe has also recognized that some kind of world government must be created. The phrase world government, of course, arouses immediate opposition; the idea of a European legislature would be pronounced utopian. Yet there have been a number of European legislatures. The Berlin Conference of 1885 was called to discuss “freedom of commerce in the basin and mouths of the Congo; application to the Congo and Niger of the principles adopted at the Congress of Vienna with a view to preserve freedom of navigation on certain international rivers ... and a definition of formalities to be observed so that new occupations on the African coasts shall be deemed effective.” The Powers represented made all sorts of reservations, but they managed to pass a “General Act of the West African Conference.” The Congo Free State was recognized. As Mr. Harris says: “Bismarck saw in this a means of preventing armed conflict over the Congo Basin, of restricting the Portuguese advance, and of preserving the region to free trade.” What was it that Bismarck saw? He saw that the great wealth of the Congo and its political weakness might make trouble in Europe unless the Congo was organized into the legal structure of the world.

The Conference at Algeciras was an international legislature in which even the United States was represented; the London Conference after the Balkan wars was a gathering of ambassadors trying to legislate out of existence the sources of European trouble in the Balkans. But all these legislatures have had one great fault. They met, they passed laws, they adjourned, and left the enforcement of their mandate to the conscience of the individual Powers. The legislature was international, but the executive was merely national. The legislature moreover had no way of checking up or controlling the executive. The representatives of all the nations would pass laws for the government of weak territories, but the translation of those laws into practise was left to the colonial bureaucrats of some one nation.

If the law was not carried out, to whom would an appeal be made? Not to the Conference, for it had ceased to exist. There was no way in which a European legislature could recall the officials who did not obey its will. Those officials were responsible to their home government, although they were supposed to be executing a European mandate. Those who were injured had also to appeal to their home government, and the only way to remedy an abuse or even sift out the truth of an allegation was by negotiation between the Powers. This raised the question of their sovereignty, called forth patriotic feeling, revived a thousand memories, and made any satisfactory interpretation of the European Act or any criticism of its administration a highly explosive adventure.

Suppose, for example, that Congress had power to pass laws, but that the execution of them was left to the States. Suppose New York had its own notions of tariff administration. How would the other States compel the New York customs officials to execute the spirit and letter of the Federal law? Suppose every criticism by Pennsylvania of a New York Collector was regarded as an infringement of New York’s sovereignty, as a blow at New York’s pride, what kind of chaos would we suffer from? Yet that is the plight of our world society.

The beginnings of a remedy would seem to lie in not disbanding these European conferences when they have passed a law. They ought to continue in existence as a kind of senate, meeting from time to time. They ought to regard themselves as watchers over the legislation which they have passed. To them could be brought grievances, by them amendments could be passed when needed. The colonial officials should at least be made to report to this senate, and all important matters of policy should be laid open to its criticism and suggestion. In this way a problem like that of Morocco, for example, might be kept localized to a permanent European Conference on Morocco. Europe would never lose its grip on the situation, because it would have representatives on the spot watching the details of administration, in a position to learn the facts, and with a real opportunity for stating grievances.

The development of such a senate would probably be towards an increasing control of colonial officials. At first it would have no power of appointment or removal. It would be limited to criticism. But it is surely not fantastic to suppose that the colonial civil service would in time be internationalized; that is to say, opened to men of different nationalities. The senate, if it developed any traditions, would begin to supervise the budget, would fight for control of salaries, and might well take over the appointing power altogether. It would become an upper house for the government of the protected territory, not essentially different perhaps from the American Philippine Commission. The lower house would be native, and there would probably be a minority of natives in the senate....

An organization of this kind would meet all the difficulties that our Continental Congress or that any other primitive legislature has had to deal with. There would be conflicts of jurisdiction, puzzling questions of interpretation, and some place of final appeal would have to be provided. It might be the Senate of European representatives; but if the Senate deadlocked, an appeal might be taken to The Hague. The details of all this are obviously speculative at the moment.

The important point is that there should be in existence permanent international commissions to deal with those spots of the earth where world crises originate. How many there should be need not be suggested here. There should have been one for Morocco, for the Congo, for the Balkan Peninsula, perhaps for Manchuria; there may have to be one for Constantinople, for certain countries facing the Caribbean Sea. Such international governing bodies are needed wherever the prizes are great, the territory unorganized, and the competition active.

The idea is not over-ambitious. It seems to me the necessary development of schemes which European diplomacy has been playing with for some time. It represents an advance along the line that governments, driven by necessity, have been taking of their own accord. What makes it especially plausible is that it grasps the real problems of diplomacy, that it provides not a panacea but a method and the beginnings of a technique. It is internationalism, not spread thin as a Parliament of Man, but sharply limited to those areas of friction where internationalism is most obviously needed.

Walter Lippmann, “The Stakes of Diplomacy,” pp. 87-135.

SOCIALISTS AND IMPERIALISM

Possibly we shall learn nothing from the war; at the present moment it looks that way. For all the world, including Socialists, seem to be divided between militarists and pacifists. By pacifism I mean of course the movement Socialists have attacked for fifty years—up to the present war—under the name of “bourgeois pacifism,” the idea that disarmament, the Hague Tribunal, and similar devices could put an end to militarism and war.

In one sense of course every internationalist, whether Socialist or Democrat, is a pacifist. Every internationalist is opposed to war. But from the days of Marx and before, up to the present time, all Socialists have been prepared for certain war-producing contingencies which can be abolished neither by calling them “illusions,” as Norman Angell has done, nor by any other phrases or exorcisms. Nor can the economic causes of national conflict be avoided by disarmament, Hague tribunals, international police, or abolition of secret diplomacy, as proposed by the Women’s Peace Party, the British Union of Democratic Control, the Independent Labor Party, etc. In a word, no measure dealing with military affairs or with mere political forms can in the long run have any effect whatever—as long as the present conflict of economic interests between the nations remains. The whole effort of the bourgeois pacifist from the Socialist standpoint is to attempt—in spite of the horrible and tremendous lessons of the present war—to close our eyes resolutely to the great task that lies before us, namely, to find a way either in the near future or ultimately to bring the conflict of national economic interests to an end.

There are two economic forces in the world which can not be conjured away either by words, by mere political rearrangements, or by any action whatever with regard to arms—whether making for more armament or less armament. There is no power at present which can prevent a great independent nation like Russia or Japan, Germany or Austria, where the political conditions are in whole or in part those of the eighteenth century, from declaring wars of conquest either against helpless, backward or small countries, or against the economically more advanced and more democratic countries like England, France, or the United States. It is true that industrial capitalism now preponderates in Germany, but no German publicist has ever denied the tremendous influence of the landlord nobility, both over the government and over the economic and political structure of German society. It is true also that these great agricultural estates are partially operated under capitalistic conditions, but the position of agricultural labor throughout enormous districts of Prussia is certainly semi-feudal. This is equally true of Austria, and the landlord nobility is perhaps even more predominant in Hungary than in Prussia.

The second fact which can not be conjured away by phrases or mere political rearrangements is that—under the present system of society—there is a direct conflict of interests between all nations, even the most civilized. This is why Norman Angell, in his new book (“Arms and Industry”), is at such great pains to deny that nations are economic units and “competing business firms.” His denial is futile.

Even under individualistic capitalism all elements of the capitalist class have a greater or less interest in the business of the nation to which they belong; under the State Socialist policy, which is spreading everywhere, this community of interests is still closer. Moreover, under State Socialism even the working classes gain a share (of course, a small one) of whatever profits accrue from the successful competition of one’s own nation with other nations, and especially from such competition in its aggressive form, “imperialism.”

Socialists have sometimes denied that the economic interests of the working people of the various nations conflict.

Otto Bauer, of Austria, the world’s leading Socialist authority on Imperialism—who was to report on the subject for the International Socialist Congress to have been held in Vienna last summer—is of the contrary opinion. He believes that one of the worst features of the present system is that, under capitalism, the immediate economic interests of the working people of the various nations do conflict.

Only in so far as the working people attach greater importance to attaining Socialism than to anything they can gain under the present society, are their interests in all nations the same. In so far as the working people aim at an improvement of their condition this side of Socialism their economic interests are often in conflict.

Moreover, State Socialism, political democracy, and social reform, since they tend to give the working people a slightly greater share in the prosperity of each nation, intensify the workers’ nationalism and aggravate the conflict of immediate economic interests. This is why all the labor union parties of the world are tending in the same direction as that in which the German Party has been so clearly headed since the war—a tendency very clearly formulated by Vorwaerts when it recently asked whether the German Party was not becoming a “nationalistic social reform labor party.”

The bourgeois pacifists consider war to be the “great illusion.” In favoring war, under any conditions, they say, the capitalists, the middle classes, and the working classes are all mistaken. The only people that gain are the officers of armies and navies, and armament manufacturers. It is needless for Socialists—believers in the economic interpretation of politics—to point out that such a conclusion can only be reached by an abandonment of the economic point of view.

In the opinion of internationalists, war can be abolished neither by armament or disarmament, nor by any measures leading in either direction. War can be abolished only by abolishing the causes of war, which every practical man admits are economic. By strengthening already existing and natural economic tendencies which are slowly bringing the nations together, the causes of war may be gradually done away with.

The outlook therefore is very hopeful—provided the intelligent (if selfish) ruling classes of the great capitalistic nations (England, France, America) decide once and for all to place no hopes either on militarism or pacifism. These natural economic tendencies indeed would already have made war impossible if they had not been impeded by artificial obstacles, such as tariff walls, immigration restriction, financial concessions to favored nations, etc.

Socialists relied upon natural economic forces to abolish competition, establish the trusts, bring about government ownership, and prepare the way for democratic ownership. They rely upon similar economic forces to bring the nations together; reciprocal lowering of tariffs, the common development of the backward countries by the leading nations, the neutralization of canals—and last but not least, the modernization of Russia, Japan, Prussia, and Austria, that is, the full establishment in these countries of industrial capitalism and the semi-democratic political institutions that accompany it—as we see them in Great Britain, France, and America.

William English Walling, “The Great Illusions,” The New Review, June 1, 1915.

THE HIGHER IMPERIALISM

When the Socialists in the belligerent countries voted for the war budgets and took their seats in the war cabinets, their whole attitude towards war underwent a fundamental change. It is true that in Germany and elsewhere the Socialists berated the capitalists and militarists for bringing on the conflict, but having made this protest, they acted exactly as did every one else. They excused themselves on the ground that the war was defensive. But the Kaiser and the Czar and the President of the French Republic all made the same excuse. It was not that the Socialists did not have power to put obstacles in the way of their governments. They did not have the will. They were forced into a painful position, where their love of country struggled against their adherence to the proletariat of the world. Despite themselves they were moved by idealistic considerations, which according to their theory should have had no weight.

For according to socialist doctrine the great events of the world are determined by economic factors. The idealists may speak of national honor and national duty, of the inviolability of treaties and the sacred rights of small nations, but the cause of all wars is really to be traced to the clash of economic motives. If we are to establish peace, we must found it on the customary reactions of selfish men, who want things and are willing to fight for them. Peace must be a peace between men as they are. It will not come by preaching, nor by nations surrendering their ambitions. It will not come through non-resistance, through the submission of the meek to the overbearing. It will not come through the nations joyously disarming as the light of reason breaks through the clouds. Reason is not so simple nor so unrelated a thing, for the material things that each nation wants, and the means by which the nation gets them, seem to the nation preeminently just and reasonable. However pompous the superstructure of ethics and ideals, the solid foundation of war, as of other social developments, is economic. So long as nations, or at all events their ruling groups, have conflicting economic interests, war is inevitable.

According to the Socialist, therefore, war and capitalism were inseparable. War must continue so long as the wage-system continued. The argument was simple. The great owners of capital, earning more than they could consume or profitably invest in home industries, were compelled to send their surplus to colonies and dependencies, where a new profit could be made. With the rapid increase of capital, however, the competition between the industrial nations for the possession of these agricultural dependencies became keener. Such competition meant war. As capitalism approached its climax wars were bound to become more frequent, destructive, and violent.

If this theory had been true it would have followed that the interests of capital would make for war and the interests of labor would make for peace. The day laborer, with no money in the bank, would not be interested in capital investments in Morocco, Manchuria, or Asia Minor. He would have no national interests whatever. But, as we may read in the admirable book on “Socialists and the War,” by William English Walling, a few Socialists have for some time begun to recognize that wage-earners do have special national interests and that these interests may be directly opposed to the interests of wage-earners in an adjoining country. If Serbia is completely shut off from the sea, her wage-earners suffer as acutely as do her peasants. If Switzerland is surrounded by a wall of hostile tariffs, if Holland and England are deprived of their colonies, the loss is felt not only by great capitalists but by the man who works with a trowel or a lathe. The ultimate interests of German and British wage-earners are identical, but if their immediate interests conflict, there will grow up a spirit of nationalism in both countries, and wage-earners will clamor for a national policy which may lead to war.

This seems to shut a door that leads to peace. But in shutting this door the newer Socialist thought has opened another. It assumes that the capitalists themselves are increasingly likely to profit by peace, to desire peace, and to achieve peace. According to the German Socialist, Karl Kautsky, we are approaching a new stage in the industrial development of the world. At first capitalists exploited the resources of their own country. Then they competed nationally for the exploitation of colonies and dependencies, and this policy led to imperialism and war. Now they are beginning to unite for the joint exploitation of all backward lands. Competitive imperialism is making way for imperialism by combination, just as competitive industry gave way to the trust. English, French, German, and Belgian capitalists will unite to exploit dependencies, will have joint spheres of influence, and the result will be peace with profits. Imperialism in the old sense will die out, and its place will be taken by a pacific super-imperialism, a higher imperialism.

What this theory actually means is that the normal development of industry and finance will automatically bring about international peace, and that socialism and even democracy are quite unessential to that end. Socialists may cry for peace, but they might as well cry for free air. But the theory concedes too much and goes too far. It is tainted with the same ultra-rationalistic spirit as is the earlier socialist theory, from which it is a reaction. War is not fought for economic motives alone, although these are important. Serbia would have been less vindictive had Austria conceded her an outlet for her trade, but in any case Serbia would not willingly be ruled by Austria, nor Bulgaria by Greece. Racial pride, religious prejudice, ancient traditions of all sorts still divide nations irrespective of economic interest. You cannot reduce a nation to a single unit thinking only in economic terms.

Moreover, even on the purely economic side there are infinite chances for war in the distribution of the profits of joint enterprises among the capitalists of the various nations. We all know how “gentlemen’s agreements” are broken as soon as it is profitable for the gentlemen to break them, and we cannot wholly trust irresponsible magnates, whether industrial or political, to be even intelligently selfish. Moreover, in the present state of the world the higher imperialism is a policy fraught with the very dangers and difficulties which it seeks to evade. If the capitalists of Europe were determined to exploit South America under a joint European control, the decision might directly lead to war. There are too many vested national interests in colonies, dependencies and spheres of influence to make internationalization of investment an immediate specific against war.

But in this matter of the higher imperialism we are less concerned to know how false than how true it is. It is a thing to be desired if it circumscribes war, even though it does not end war, if it tends towards peace, even though it does not by itself alone assure peace. We believe that this present war is not unlikely to end in a combination of great nations with enormous capital, willing to enter upon foreign investments jointly. The great capitalists, who influence if they do not rule our modern industrial nations, will often discover that it is cheaper to divide than to fight. It will be better to have twenty per cent. of a Chinese loan without going to war than thirty per cent.—or nothing at all—after a war. They will strive for the peace of “understanding”—the peace of give and take.

If the big speculators can thus merge their interests and deal across national boundaries, the little investors who have less to gain and more to lose by war will be even more pacific. Farmers and wage-earners have a still more attenuated interest in war, and a still more obvious interest in peace. Once great liens of peace are established, moreover, many of the incitements to war will of themselves disappear....

In the end, however, any internationalization of investment will be only a single step in the direction of peace. There are many other steps to be taken. Education, commerce, the development of an international morality, the creation of machinery for dealing with international disputes, are all essential to the evolution of peace. Industrial and political democracy are above all necessary. Men must be given a full life and a real stake in the wealth that peace provides, and they who bear the burdens of war must actually determine the national policies which make for war or peace.

The New Republic, June 5, 1915.

PRINCIPLES OF THE SETTLEMENT: POLITICAL

NATIONALITY AND THE FUTURE

For the first time in our lives, we find ourselves in complete uncertainty as to the future. To uncivilized people the situation is commonplace; but in twentieth-century Europe we are accustomed to look ahead, to forecast accurately what lies before us, and then to choose our path and follow it steadily to its end; and we rightly consider that this is the characteristic of civilized men. The same ideal appears in every side of our life: in the individual’s morality as a desire for “Independence” strong enough to control most human passions: in our Economics as Estimates and Insurances: in our Politics as a great sustained concentration of all our surplus energies (in which parties are becoming increasingly at one in aim and effort, while their differences are shrinking to alternatives of method), to raise the material, moral, and intellectual standard of life throughout the nation. From all this fruitful, constructive, exacting work, which demands the best from us and makes us the better for giving it, we have been violently wrenched away and plunged into a struggle for existence with people very much like ourselves, with whom we have no quarrel.

We must face the fact that this is pure evil, and that we cannot escape it. We must fight with all our strength: every particle of our energy must be absorbed in the war: and meanwhile our social construction must stand still indefinitely, or even be in part undone, and every class and individual in the country must suffer in their degree, according to the quite arbitrary chance of war, in lives horribly destroyed and work ruined....

The psychological devastation of war is even more terrible than the material. War brings the savage substratum of human character to the surface, after it has swept away the strong habits that generations of civilized effort have built up. We saw how the breath of war in Ireland demoralized all parties alike. We have met the present more ghastly reality with admirable calmness; but we must be on our guard. Time wears out nerves, and War inevitably brings with it the suggestion of certain obsolete points of view, which in our real, normal life, have long been buried and forgotten.

It rouses the instinct of revenge. “If Germany has hurt us, we will hurt her more—to teach her not to do it again.” The wish is the savage’s automatic reaction, the reason his perfunctory justification of it: but the civilized man knows that the impulse is hopelessly unreasonable. The “hurt” is being at war, and the evil we wish to ban is the possibility of being at war again, because war prevents us working out our own lives as we choose. If we beat Germany and then humiliate her, she will never rest till she has “redeemed her honor,” by humiliating us more cruelly in turn. Instead of being free to return to our own pressing business, we shall have to be constantly on the watch against her. Two great nations will sit idle, weapon in hand, like two Afghans in their loopholed towers when the blood feud is between them; and we shall have sacrificed deliberately and to an ever-increasing extent (for the blood feud grows by geometrical progression), the very freedom for which we are now giving our lives.

Another war instinct is plunder. War is often the savage’s profession: “‘With my sword, spear and shield I plow, I sow, I reap, I gather in the vintage.’ If we beat Germany our own mills and factories will have been at a standstill, our horses requisitioned and our crops unharvested, our merchant steamers stranded in dock if not sunk on the high seas, and our ‘blood and treasure’ lavished on the war: but in the end Germany’s wealth will be in our grasp, her colonies, her markets, and such floating riches as we can distrain upon by means of an indemnity. If we have had to beat our plowshares into swords, we can at least draw some profit from the new tool, and recoup ourselves partially for the inconvenience. It is no longer a question of irrational, impulsive revenge, perhaps not even of sweetening our sorrow by a little gain. To draw on the life-blood of German wealth may be the only way to replenish the veins of our exhausted Industry and Commerce.” So the plunder instinct might be clothed in civilized garb: “War,” we might express it, “is an investment that must bring in its return.”

The first argument against this point of view is that it has clearly been the inspiring idea of Germany’s policy, and history already shows that armaments are as unbusinesslike a speculation for civilized countries as war is an abnormal occupation for civilized men. We saw the effect of the Morocco tension upon German finance in 1911, and the first phase of the present war has been enough to show how much Germany’s commerce will inevitably suffer, whether she wins or loses.

It is only when all the armaments are on one side and all the wealth is on the other, that war pays; when, in fact, an armed savage attacks a civilized man possessed of no arms for the protection of his wealth. Our Afghans in their towers are sharp enough not to steal each other’s cows (supposing they possess any of their own) for cows do not multiply by being exchanged, and both Afghans would starve in the end after wasting all their bullets in the skirmish. They save their bullets to steal cows from the plainsmen who cannot make reprisals.

If Germany were really nothing but a “nation in arms,” successful war might be as lucrative for her as an Afghan’s raid on the plain, but she is normally a great industrial community like ourselves. In the last generation she has achieved a national growth of which she is justly proud. Like our own, it has been entirely social and economic. Her goods have been peacefully conquering the world’s markets. Now her workers have been diverted en masse from their prospering industry to conquer the same markets by military force, and the whole work of forty years is jeopardized by the change of method.

Fighting for trade and industry is not like fighting for cattle. Cattle are driven from one fastness to another, and if no better, are at least no worse for the transit. Civilized wealth perishes on the way. Our economic organization owes its power and range to the marvelous forethought and cooperation that has built it up; but the most delicate organisms are the most easily dislocated, and the conqueror, whether England or Germany, will have to realize that, though he may seem to have got the wealth of the conquered into his grip, the total wealth of both parties will have been vastly diminished by the process of the struggle.

The characteristic feature of modern wealth is that it is international. Economic gain and loss is shared by the whole world, and the shifting of the economic balance does not correspond to the moves in the game of diplomatists and armies. Germany’s economic growth has been a phenomenon quite independent of her political ambitions, and Germany’s economic ruin would compromise something far greater than Germany’s political future—the whole world’s prosperity. British wealth, among the rest, would be dealt a deadly wound by Germany’s economic death, and it would be idle to pump Germany’s last life-blood into our veins, if we were automatically draining them of our own blood in the process.

But issues greater than the economic are involved. The modern “Nation” is for good or ill an organism one and indivisible, and all the diverse branches of national activity flourish or wither with the whole national well-being. You cannot destroy German wealth without paralyzing German intellect and art, and European civilization, if it is to go on growing, cannot do without them. Every doctor and musician, every scientist, engineer, political economist and historian, knows well his debt to the spiritual energy of the German nation. In the moments when one realizes the full horror of what is happening, the worst thought is the aimless hurling to destruction of the world’s only true wealth, the skill and nobility and genius of human beings, and it is probably in the German casualties that the intellectual world is suffering its most irreparable human losses.

With these facts in our minds, we can look into the future more clearly, and choose our policy (supposing that we win the war, and, thereby, the power to choose) with greater confidence. We have accepted the fact that war itself is evil, and will in any event bring pure loss to both parties: that no good can come from the war itself, but only from our policy when the war is over: and that the one good our policy can achieve, without which every gain is delusive, is the banishing of this evil from the realities of the future. This is our one supreme “British interest,” and it is a German interest just as much, and an interest of the whole world.

This war, and the cloud of war that has weighed upon us so many years before the bursting of the storm, has brought to bankruptcy the “National State.” Till 1870 it was the ultimate ideal of European politics, as it is still in the Balkans, where the Turk has broken Time’s wings. It was such a fruitful ideal that it has rapidly carried us beyond itself, and in the last generation the life of the world has been steadily finding new and wider channels. In the crisis of change from nationalism to internationalism we were still exposed to the plague of war. The crisis might have been passed without it, and war banished for ever between the nations of civilized Europe. Now that the catastrophe has happened (it is childish to waste energy in incriminations against its promoters) we must carry through the change completely and at once: we cannot possibly afford to be exposed to the danger again.

No tool, machine, or idea made by men has an immortal career. Sooner or later they all run amuck, and begin to do evil instead of good. At that stage savage or unskilful men destroy them by force and replace them by their opposite: civilized men get them under control, and build them into something new and greater. Nationality will sink from being the pinnacle of politics only to become their foundation, and till the foundations are laid true, further building is impossible. But the bases of nationality have never yet been laid true in Europe. When we say that “nationality was the political ideal of the nineteenth century,” and that 1870 left the populations of Europe organized in national groups, we are taking far too complacent a view of historical facts. The same century that produced a united Italy and Germany, saw out the whole tragedy of Poland, from the first partition in 1772 to the last revolt in 1863. Human ideas do not spring into the world full-grown and shining like Athena: they trail the infection of evil things from the past.

In the Dark Ages Europe’s most pressing need and only practicable ideal was strong government. Strong government came with its blessings, but it brought the evil of territorial ambitions. The Duke of Burgundy spent the wealth of his Netherland subjects in trying to conquer the Swiss mountaineers. Burgundy succumbed to the king of France. But the very factor that made the French kings survive in the struggle for existence between governments, the force of compact nationality which the French kingdom happened to contain, delivered the inheritance of the kings to the Nation.

The French Nation in the Revolution burst the chrysalis of irresponsible government beneath which it had grown to organic life, but like a true heir it took over the Royal Government’s ideal: “Peace within and piracy without.” France had already begun aggression abroad before she had accomplished self-government at home, and in delivering herself to Napoleon she sacrificed her liberty to her ambition. Napoleon’s only enduring achievements outside France were the things he set himself to prevent, the realization, by a forceful reaction against force, of German and Italian nationality. Nationalism was converted to violence from the outset, and the struggle for existence between absolute governments has merely been replaced by a struggle between nationalities, equally blind, haphazard, and non-moral, but far more terrific, just because the virtue of self-government is to focus and utilize human energy so much more effectively than the irresponsible government it has superseded.

Naturally the result of this planless strife has been no grouping of Europe on a just and reasonable national basis. France and England, achieving racial frontiers and national self-government early, inherited the Earth before Germany and Italy struggled up beside them, to take their leavings of markets and colonial areas. But the government that united Germany had founded its power on the partition of Poland, and in the second Balkan War of 1913 we saw a striking example of the endless chain of evil forged by an act of national injustice.

The Hungarians used the liberty they won in 1867 to subject the Slavonic population between themselves and the sea, and prevent its union with the free principality of Serbia of the same Slavonic nationality. This drove Serbia in 1912 to follow Hungary’s example by seizing the coast of the non-Slavonic Albanians; and when Austria-Hungary prevented this (a right act prompted by most unrighteous motives), Serbia fought an unjust war with Bulgaria and subjected a large Bulgarian population, in order to gain access to the only seaboard left her, the friendly Greek port of Salonika.

Hungary and Serbia are nominally national states: but more than half the population in Hungary, and perhaps nearly a quarter in Serbia, is alien, only held within the state by force against its will. The energy of both states is perverted to the futile and demoralizing work of “Magyarizing” and “Serbizing” subject foreign populations, and they have not even been successful. The resistance of Southern Slav nationalism on the defensive to the aggression of Hungarian nationalism has given the occasion for the present catastrophe.

The evil element in nationalism under its many names, “Chauvinism,” “Jingoism,” “Prussianism,” is the one thing in our present European civilization that can and does produce the calamity of war. If our object is to prevent war, then, the way to do so is to purge Nationality of this evil. This we cannot do by any mechanical means, but only by a change of heart, by converting public opinion throughout Europe from “National Competition” to “National Cooperation.” Public opinion will never be converted so long as the present system of injustice remains in force, so long as one nation has less and another more than its due. The first step towards internationalism is not to flout the problems of nationality, but to solve them.

The most important practical business, then, of the conference that meets when war is over, will be the revision of the map of Europe....

If we do not think about nationality, it is simply because we have long taken it for granted, and our mind is focussed on posterior developments; but it is increasingly hard to keep ourselves out of touch with other countries, and though our blindness has been partly distraction, it has also been in part deliberate policy. We saw well enough that the present phase of the national problem in Europe carried in it the seeds of war. We rightly thought that war itself was the evil, an evil incomparably greater than the national injustices that might become the cause of it. We knew that, if these questions were opened, war would follow. We accordingly adopted the only possible course. We built our policy on the chance that national feeling could be damped down till it had been superseded in the public opinion of Europe by other interests, not because Nationalism was unjustified, but because it endangered so much more than it was worth. Knowing that we had passed out of the nationalist phase ourselves, and that from our present political point of view war was purely evil, we hoped that it was merely a question of time for the Continental populations to reach the same standpoint. Notably in Germany, the focus of danger, we saw social interests coming more and more to the front at the expense of militarism. We threw ourselves into the negative task of staving off the catastrophe in the interim, by a strenuous policy of compromise and conciliation, which has been successful on at least two critical occasions. Now that the evil has been too powerful and the catastrophe has happened, the reasons for this policy are dead. Nationalism has been strong enough to produce war in spite of us. It has terribly proved itself to be no outworn creed, but a vital force to be reckoned with. It is stronger on the Continent than social politics. It is the raw material that litters the whole ground. We must build it into our foundations, or give up the task, not only of constructive social advance beyond the limits we have already reached, but even of any fundamental reconstruction of what the war will have destroyed.

Perhaps we might have foretold this from the case of Ireland immediately under our eyes. Failure to solve her national problem has arrested Ireland’s development since the seventeenth century, and imprisoned her in a world of ideas almost unintelligible to an Englishman till he has traveled in the Balkans. This has been England’s fault, and we are now at last in a fair way to remedy it. The moment we have succeeded in arranging that the different national groups in Ireland govern themselves in the way they really wish, the national question will pass from the Irish consciousness; they will put two centuries behind them at one leap, and come into line with ourselves. The Dublin strike, contemporary with the arming of the Volunteers, shows how the modern problems are jostling at the heels of the old. Although “Unionist” and “Nationalist” politicians could still declare that their attitude towards the strike was neutral, the parliament of the new Irish state will discuss the social problem and nothing else.

Ireland, then, has forced us to think about the problem of nationalism; and our Irish experience will be invaluable to us when peace is made, and we take in hand, in concert with our allies, the national questions of the rest of Europe. To begin with, we already have a notion of what Nationality is. Like all great forces in human life, it is nothing material or mechanical, but a subjective psychological feeling in living people. This feeling can be kindled by the presence of one or several of a series of factors: a common country, especially if it is a well defined physical region, like an island, a river basin, or a mountain mass; a common language, especially if it has given birth to a literature; a common religion; and that much more impalpable force, a common tradition or sense of memories shared from the past.

But it is impossible to argue a priori from the presence of one or even several of these factors to the existence of a nationality: they may have been there for ages and kindled no response. And it is impossible to argue from one case to another: precisely the same group of factors may produce nationality here, and there have no effect. Great Britain is a nation by geography and tradition, though important Keltic-speaking sections of the population in Wales and the Highlands do not understand the predominant English language. Ireland is an island smaller still and more compact, and is further unified by the almost complete predominance of the same English language, for the Keltic speech is incomparably less vigorous here than in Wales; yet the absence of common tradition combines with religious differences to divide the country into two nationalities, at present sharply distinct from one another and none the less hostile because their national psychology is strikingly the same. Germany is divided by religion in precisely the same way as Ireland, her common tradition is hardly stronger, and her geographical boundaries quite vague: yet she has built up her present concentrated national feeling in three generations. Italy has geography, language and traditions to bind her together; and yet a more vivid tradition is able to separate the Ticinese from his neighbors, and bind him to people of alien speech and religion beyond a great mountain range. The Armenian nationality does not occupy a continuous territory, but lives by language and religion. The Jews speak the language of the country where they sojourn, but religion and tradition hold them together. The agnostic Jew accepts not only the language but all the other customs of his adopted countrymen, but tradition by itself is too strong for him: he remains a Jew and cannot be assimilated.

These instances taken at random show that each case must be judged on its own merits, and that no argument holds good except the ascertained wish of the living population actually concerned. Above all we must be on our guard against “historical sentiment,” that is, against arguments taken from conditions which once existed or were supposed to exist, but which are no longer real at the present moment. They are most easily illustrated by extreme examples. Italian newspapers have described the annexation of Tripoli as “recovering the soil of the Fatherland” because it was once a province of the Roman Empire; and the entire region of Macedonia is claimed by Greek chauvinists on the one hand, because it contains the site of Pella, the cradle of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., and by Bulgarians on the other, because Ohhrida, in the opposite corner, was the capital of the Bulgarian Tzardom in the tenth century A.D., though the drift of time has buried the tradition of the latter almost as deep as the achievements of the “Emathian Conqueror,” on which the modern Greek nationalist insists so strongly.

The national problems of Europe are numerous, and each one is beset by arguments good, bad, and indifferent, some no more specious than the above, some so elaborately staged that it requires the greatest discernment to expose them. Vast bodies of people, with brains and money at their disposal, have been interested in obscuring the truth, and have used every instrument in their power to do so. It is therefore essential for us in England to take up these hitherto remote and uninteresting national problems in earnest, to get as near to the truth as we possibly can, both as to what the respective wishes of the different populations are, and as to how far it is possible to reconcile them with each other and with Geography; and to come to the conference which will follow the war and is so much more important than the war itself, with a clear idea of the alternative solutions and a mature judgment upon their relative merits.

To accomplish this we need a coordination of knowledge on a large scale, knowledge of history, geography, religion, national psychology and public opinion....

With the growth of civilization the human and the territorial unit become less and less identical. In a primitive community the members are undifferentiated from one another: the true human unit is the total group, and not the individual, and the territory this group occupies is a unit too, self-sufficing and cut off from intercourse with the next valley. In modern Europe every sub-group and every individual has developed a “character” or “individuality” of its own which must have free play; while the growth of communications, elaboration of organization, and economic interdependence of the whole world have broken down the barriers between region and region. The minimum territorial block that can be organized efficiently as a separate political unit according to modern standards is constantly growing in size: the maximum human group which can hold together without serious internal divergence is as steadily diminishing.

This would look like an impasse, were it not corrected by the virtues of civilization itself. We started with the fact that the essence of civilization was “Forethought” and its ideal the “power of free choice”: the complementary side of this ideal, on the principle “Do as you would be done by,” is to allow free choice to others when they are in your power. It is a virtue with as many names as there are spheres of human life: “Forbearance,” “Toleration,” “Constitutionalism.”...

Arnold J. Toynbee, “Nationality and the War,” chap. I.

NATIONALITY AND SOVEREIGNTY

The old Europe is dead, the old vision vanished, and we are wrestling in agony for new inspiration....

We must beware of putting our new wine into old bottles. While guarantees hold, they conserve their charge: when they break, the destruction is worse than if they had never existed. Unless we can ensure that the sovereign States of Europe respect European guarantees hereafter in other fashion than Germany at the present crisis, we must modify the formula or else discard it altogether.

Can the mechanism of the European system be safeguarded against its individual members?...

We have asked our question and must accept the answer. It is useless to fortify our new European organism by guarantees of the old order, because we cannot fortify such guarantees themselves against the sovereign national State. Whenever it chooses, the sovereign unit can shatter the international mechanism by war. We are powerless to prevent it: all we can do is to abandon our direct attack, and look for the causes which impel States to a choice as terrible for themselves as for their victims.

“You ask,” the Germans say, “why we broke our contract towards Belgium? It would be more pertinent to ask how we were ever committed to such a contract at all.

“The heart of modern Germany is the industrial world of the Rhineland and Westphalia. The Belgian frontier and the Belgian tariff-wall rob this region of its natural outlet at Antwerp, yet the contract expressly forbids us to right this economic and geographical wrong by uniting the sea-port to its hinterland.

“The chief need of modern Germany is a source of raw produce and a market for her finished products in the tropical zone. Belgium has staked out for herself the one important region in Africa which was not already occupied by France or Great Britain. She can do nothing with it, while we—but this contract expressly forbids us to kick the Belgian dog out of the manger.

“Because of this Belgian guarantee we must go in want of almost everything we need, yet meanwhile our great neighbors on either flank have conspired to take from us even the little we possess already. The struggle with France and Russia on which we are now engaged has been impending for years, and on our part it is a struggle for existence, but even here the same remorseless contract operates to paralyze our efforts. On the scale of modern warfare the Western battle-front must extend from Switzerland to the North Sea, yet the greater part of this immense zone is neutralized by natural and artificial obstacles on either side. From Switzerland to the Ardennes there will be stalemate: the decision will be reached in the open country between the Ardennes and the coast. Here, as soon as war broke out, France and our own fatherland had to concentrate the terrific energy of their armaments, yet we had contracted away our initiative in this vital area, for it lies within the frontiers of the Belgian State. The Government we had guaranteed might prepare the ground for France and ruin it for ourselves, yet because of the guarantee we must look on passively at the digging of our grave.

“Why, then, had we suffered ourselves to be bound hand and foot? We had not: our grandfathers had entailed the bonds upon us. When they signed the contract in 1839, they knew not what they did. At that time Germany had no industry, Belgium had no colonies, and the Franco-German frontier between the Ardennes and the Jura was not closed to field operations by two continuous lines of opposing fortifications. Had their signature been demanded in 1914, they would have refused it as indignantly as we should have refused it ourselves. To us no choice was offered, and if we have asserted for ourselves the right to choose, who dares in his heart to condemn us? Who will impose a changeless law upon a changing world?”

This is Germany’s argument about Belgium. Her facts may be true or false, the arguments she builds on them valid or fallacious. That is not the point. Behind arguments and facts there looms an idea that can inspire an individual nation to make war on Europe. We must do justice to this idea, if it is not to play the same havoc again.

Humanity has an instinctive craving for something eternal, absolute, petrified. This seems to be a fundamental factor in our psychology: it has obtruded itself equally in spheres as diverse as religion and politics, but it has been especially dominant in diplomacy.

Whenever the European organism proves its instability by breaking down, we start in quest of a perfect mechanism, a “permanent settlement.” We are invariably disappointed, but invariably we return to the quest again. The Congress of statesmen at Vienna followed this will-o’-the-wisp in 1814: in 1915 the belligerent democracies are preparing to lead themselves the same dance. “Europe is in a mess,” we are all saying: “Let us tidy her up ‘once for all,’ and then we can live comfortably ever after.”

We might as well expect a baby to “live comfortably ever after” in its swaddling clothes....

So it is with the European organism. It is as full of life, as perpetually in transformation, as the individual national molecules of which it is woven, yet we confuse it in turn with each of its transitory garments. If we are to find a satisfactory issue out of the present crisis, we must begin by correcting our standpoint.

The impending settlement will not be permanent, and the better it fits the situation, the less permanent will it be....

Our real work will be to regulate this immediate settlement so that it varies in harmony with the subsequent growth of Europe and modifies its structure and mechanism to meet the organism’s changing needs.

We have now discovered the flaw in guarantees of the old order. They were framed for rigidity, and therefore were doomed to crack. Our new guarantees must be elastic: they must be forged of steel not cast in iron.

How can we frame guarantees of this malleable character?...

(i.) Firstly, we propose guarantees of political independence and integrity in the case of the three Scandinavian States, the Slovene Unit, the Greek islands off Anatolia, Persia, and the Sultanate of Oman. The autonomy guaranteed to Poland within the Russian Empire comes under the same head.

(ii.) Secondly, we propose to guarantee economic rights-of-way to one State across the political territory of another. Instances of this type are the Russian railway through Norway to the Atlantic and through Persia to the Indian Ocean; Poland’s title to free trade down the Vistula, and to the enjoyment of a free port at Danzig; and Germany’s similar claim to an unhampered outlet at Trieste.

Both these classes of guarantee are adapted from the international machinery invented during the nineteenth century. The first class is an extension of the political guarantee given to Belgium in 1839, the second of the economic right-of-way secured to her through Dutch waters, in order to furnish the commerce of Antwerp with a free passage down the estuary of the Scheldt to the open sea.

Our standpoint towards these two classes is inevitably prejudiced by their associations. We envisage them as embodied “once for all,” like their nineteenth-century precedents, in a contract, and like nineteenth-century diplomacy we tend to regard such contracts as so many girders in a “permanent settlement.”

(iii.) There is a third class, however, which has no precedent in the past, and which will react upon our standpoint in the very opposite direction: our proposed guarantee of alien minorities within the national State....

The German populations transferred with Schleswig to Denmark and with the Eastern frontier-zone to Autonomous Poland; the Poles abandoned to Germany in West Prussia; the Germans and Slovaks who cannot be disentangled from Hungary; the Christian elements in Anatolia and Arabia—these are a few out of many instances, and each one of them is a refutation of “finality.”

The fact that such minorities must inevitably be left on our hands compels us to recognize that beyond a certain degree the economic and the national factor are not commensurable. Here is an essential imperfection in the best settlement we can possibly devise.

The fact that these minorities require a guarantee reveals a deficiency still more grave than the other, inasmuch as it is not environmental but psychological. It means that hardly a single national society in Europe has yet become capable of national toleration. Just as people were persecuted for their religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and for their political opinions in the nineteenth, so they are still in the twentieth century almost universally exposed to persecution for their national individuality. In this sphere the social evolution of Europe is exceptionally backward, and the problem of nationality will never be solved till this psychological incongruity is removed.

This at once reduces to their proper proportion both the immediate geographical settlement of the problem which we have elaborated in this book and that guarantee of alien minorities which we have found to be its necessary supplement. In this light, the contracts in which such guarantees are enshrined appear as the transitory scaffolding they are. Weakened by the morbid hypertrophy of nationalism which has been preying upon her for years, exhausted by the convulsion of war in which the malady has culminated, Europe must walk on crutches now or else collapse; yet she will not be a cripple forever. Relieved by these guarantees from the immediate strain of unmitigated national friction, she will be able to concentrate all her energy upon her spiritual convalescence. As soon as she has trained herself to national toleration, she will discard the guarantees and walk unaided.

So far from constituting a “permanent settlement,” our third type of guarantee is an intimation that the problem still remains unsettled. The work will not be complete until we can dispense with the instrument, but the instrument will not accomplish the work unless it is wielded by a craftsman’s hand. Not only are guarantees of our third type merely the means to an end beyond themselves: the contract in which it is embodied is in this case the least important part of the guarantee.

When we guarantee a national minority we have of course to define certain liberties which it is to enjoy—liberties, for instance, of religion, education, local self-government—and all the parties to the Conference must contract responsibility for the observance of such stipulations; yet when we have done this, we cannot simply deposit our document in some international “Ark of the Covenant” and go our ways. The essence of the guarantee is its subsequent interpretation.

The relation between the different elements in a country is continually changing. One church dwindles while another makes converts; one race advances in culture while another degenerates; man’s indefatigable struggle to dominate his physical environment alters the natural boundaries between localities: a barrier that once seemed insurmountable is pierced, and leaves one formerly insignificant in relative prominence. Each of these modifications demands an adjustment of the guarantee, and since they are an infinite series, the guarantee itself requires ceaseless manipulation if it is to perform its function aright.

This need cannot be satisfied by the original fiat of the International Conference: it can only be met by the appointment of a standing international committee with executive powers, empowered, that is, to administer and interpret the contracts to which the members of the Conference have originally subscribed. Our third type of guarantee has thus presented us with the clue we sought. The letter of international law has proved ineffective hitherto because it has lacked the inspiration of a living spirit, and this spirit can only be breathed into it by a human organ of international authority.

Supposing that such an organ were called into existence, what kind of international relations would naturally fall within its scope? We can analyze its probable sphere of activity into several departments.

(i.) The first branch would of course be those guarantees of national minorities which have just taught us the necessity for its existence.

(ii.) The second branch would include the two subjects of guarantee we dealt with first, namely, “Political Independence” and “Rights of Way.” We can see now that their administration by a representative international executive would eliminate that defect of rigidity which has always proved fatal to them heretofore.

Between them these two branches would cover all the machinery we have suggested for our regenerated European organism. Are there any further spheres of national interaction over which our international organ might properly assume control? It would be logical to assign to it, if possible, all relations between sovereign national States which are peculiarly subject to change.

Change is a harmonization of two rhythms—Growth and Decay. Some sovereign units are continually waxing in population, material wealth and spiritual energy: such are Great Britain and Germany, France and the Russian Empire. Others, like the Ottoman Empire or Spain, are as continually waning in respect of the same factors.

This ebb and flow in the current of life causes, and must cause, a perpetual readjustment of the relations between units in the two complementary phases. Units in the positive phase inevitably absorb the fibers and trespass upon the environment of those which have passed over into the negative rhythm. We cannot arrest this process any more than we can abolish change itself: what we can do is to regulate it on the lines of civilization, instead of letting it run riot in a blind struggle for existence.

The current radiates in an almost infinite variety of interactions. Great Britain, Germany, and India are discharging surplus population into the empty lands of the New World; Great Britain and France are applying surplus wealth to evoke the latent resources of countries with no surplus of their own; Great Britain and Russia are putting forth spiritual energy to inspire primitive peoples with the vitality of civilization.

Our international organ can handle no more than a fraction of this world-wide interchange.

(i.) We may exclude at once from its competence every interaction that is confined within the limits of a single sovereign unit. Within the British Empire, for example, it is patently impracticable to “internationalize” the problems of Indian emigration to Vancouver or the Transvaal, of the closure of the Australian labor-market against labor from the British Isles, of commercial exploitation in Nigeria or Rhodesia, of autonomy in Ireland or the Asiatic Dependencies. The Empire may handle its own problems well or ill, but it will never consent to waive its sovereignty in respect of them. We should regard the proposition of international intervention as a menace to the Empire’s existence. We should undoubtedly fight rather than submit to it, and every other sovereign State would do the same under similar circumstances. In purely internal affairs international authority will never obtain a footing at the expense of the individual unit.

(ii.) We may likewise exclude interactions between two or more sovereign States in spheres that fall entirely within their respective sovereignty. The Dominion of Canada or the U. S. A. would never submit to international regulation the question of Japanese immigration along their Pacific seaboard. If Russia wished to float a loan, she would never allow our international organ to decide where and in what proportions it should be placed: she would insist on keeping her hands free, and making the best bargain for herself both from the financial and the political point of view. Italy and the Argentine would never relinquish their respective sovereign rights over the Italian laborers who cross the Atlantic every year to reap the South American harvests. International authority would be flouted as uncompromisingly in these instances as in the former.

(iii.) There are some units, however, so raw in their growth or so deeply sunk in their decay as to lack the attribute of sovereignty altogether—units which through want of population, wealth, spiritual energy, or all three together are unable to keep the spark of vitality aglow. Such dead units are the worst danger that threatens the peace of the world: each one of them is an arena enticing the living units around to clash in conflict, a vacuum into which the current of life swirls like a maelstrom. In these “no-man’s-lands” where no sovereignty exists, our international organ can and must assert its own sovereignty against the sovereign States outside.

(a) In every such area the standing international executive should regulate immigration from over-populated sovereign units—German colonization, for instance, in Anatolia, or Indian settlement on the alluvium of Irak.

(b) It should likewise regulate the inflow of capital....

(c) In areas where the pressure of spiritual energy is so low that the population cannot save itself by its own efforts from political anarchy, the international executive should be prepared to step in and organize “strong government.”...

Morocco, the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire—the present war is not really being waged to settle these problems: it is being waged because they have been settled already, and settled on such unjust and injudicious lines that all parties concerned have found it worth while to stake their existence for the reversal of the settlement. No one need have been involved by such problems in a struggle for life. They were all problems of expansion, and their solution ought at worst to have disappointed the expectation of immoderate gains: it ought never, as it has done, to have threatened the parties with the loss of what they possessed already before the problems were probed.

Why has the contrary occurred? Because, just for lack of that international executive with the sovereign authority we postulate, these issues that were not vital have been fought out, like issues of life and death, by war—not by the war of arms which has descended upon us now like some recurrent plague, into which we relapse at rarer and rarer intervals as we advance in civilization, but by the unobtrusive, unremittent war of diplomacy which is being waged year in and year out between the sovereign States of Europe, and which has increased appallingly in violence during the last generation.

In this disastrous diplomatic warfare our opponents in the present war of arms have been uniformly the aggressors. If Austria-Hungary is now struggling for existence, it is because she deliberately embarked nearly forty years ago upon a diplomatic campaign of aggrandizement against South-Slavonic nationality. If Germany is fighting back to back with her in the same ghastly struggle, it is because Germany has wielded diplomatic weapons still more ruthlessly against her other European neighbors.

For the terrible embitterment of the diplomatic contest Germany herself is entirely responsible, but she has inevitably exposed herself to reprisals as severe as her own provocative blows. She opened the battle over Morocco by forcibly intruding upon a sphere where she had no shadow of claim to expansion: thereby she drew France and Great Britain into diplomatic alliance against her, and laid herself open to the humiliation of 1911, when Franco-British diplomacy mobilized its financial forces and drove her to retreat by cutting off her supplies. In Turkey she might easily have satisfied her needs without any battle at all. The untenanted area was vast, the claims staked out on it were singularly narrow: when German enterprise circumvented the enterprise of Great Britain and France, and secured all the railway-concessions in the virgin hinterland of Anatolia, French and British diplomacy grumbled but did not attempt to open hostilities. Yet instead of reaping her harvest in peace, Germany again precipitated a diplomatic conflict by extending her ambitions to Bagdad and the Persian Gulf. The moment she aspired to absorb the whole Ottoman Empire, Great Britain and Russia entered into diplomatic cooperation, and opposed her purpose with all their might. Germany’s Arabian venture has jeopardized her Anatolian gains, and if she is defeated in the present struggle, she will probably be excluded from the Ottoman area altogether.

The diplomatic warfare over three secondary issues, which ought never to have been settled by fighting at all, has thus left none of the combatants unscathed. On the contrary, the wounds inflicted then have festered till their poison has threatened each combatant with the pains of dissolution, and made that quack-physician the diplomatist call out in panic for the knife of that quack-surgeon the war lord.

This diplomatic warfare is the objective of our new international organization. Upon diplomacy we can and must make a direct attack. If we can draw this monster’s teeth, we shall no longer be troubled by its still more monstrous offspring—War.

Arnold J. Toynbee, “Nationality and the War,” chap. XII.

THE GOVERNMENTAL THEORY

The position I intend to put forward and defend is this: War is made—this war has been made—not by any necessity of nature, any law beyond human control, any fate to which men must passively bow; it is made because certain men who have immediate power over other men are possessed by a certain theory. Sometimes they are fully conscious of this theory. More often, perhaps, it works in them unconsciously. But it is there, the dominating influence in international politics. I shall call it the governmental theory, because it is among governing persons—Emperors, Kings, Ministers, and their diplomatic and military advisers—that its influence is most conspicuous and most disastrous. But it is supported also by historians, journalists, and publicists, and it is only too readily adopted by the ordinary man, when he turns from the real things he knows and habitually handles to consider the unknown field of foreign affairs.

Very briefly, and, therefore, crudely expressed, the theory is this: “The world is divided, politically, into States. These States are a kind of abstract beings, distinct from the men, women, and children who inhabit them. They are in perpetual and inevitable antagonism to one another; and though they may group themselves in alliances, that can be only for temporary purposes to meet some other alliance or single power. For States are bound by a moral or physical obligation to expand indefinitely, each at the cost of the others. They are natural enemies, they always have been so, and they always will be; and force is the only arbiter between them. That being so, war is an eternal necessity. As a necessity, it should be accepted, if not welcomed, by all sound-thinking and right-feeling men. Pacifists are men at once weak and dangerous. They deny a fact as fundamental as any of the facts of the natural world. And their influence, if they have any, can only be disastrous to their State in its ceaseless and inevitable contest with other States.”

Stated thus briefly, and in its most uncompromising terms, this is what I have called the governmental theory. I propose to criticize it in detail. But before doing so I will ask the reader to compare with it the ordinary attitude of the plain men and women who inhabit these States, and who have to bear the burden of the wars in which the theory involves them. These ordinary people, in the course of their daily lives, do not think at all in terms of the State. They think about the people they come in contact with, about their business, their friends, and their families. When they come across foreigners, as many of them do, in business or in travel, they may like or dislike them, but they do not regard them as predestined enemies. On the contrary, if they are intelligent, they know themselves to be cooperating with them in innumerable complicated ways, implying mutual advantage. Differences of language and of social habit make it easier for most people to associate with their fellow-countrymen than with foreigners. But that is all. There are, of course, among these men and women real enmities and spontaneous quarrels. But these do not occur because men belong to different States. They occur because they really have injured one another, or hate one another; and they occur, naturally, for the most part, between men of the same State, because it is these who most often come into direct contact with one another. It is not, therefore, these enmities of ordinary men that give rise to wars.

Wars are made by governments, acting under the influence of the governmental theory. And of this fact—for a fact it is among civilized Western peoples in modern times—no better example could be given than the present war. Before it broke out nobody outside governmental and journalistic circles was expecting it. Nobody desired it. And though, now that it is being waged, all the nations concerned are passionately interested in it, and all believe themselves to be fighting in a righteous cause, yet no ordinary citizen, in the days preceding its outbreak, would have maintained that there was any good reason for war, and few even knew what the reasons alleged were or might be. Even now the different nations have quite opposite views as to which Government was responsible. We believe it was the German Government; and with equal conviction Germans believe it was the British. But nobody believes that it was the mass of the people in any nation. The millions who are carrying on the war, at the cost of incalculable suffering, would never have made it if the decision had rested with them. That is the one indisputable fact. How can such a fact occur? How is it possible for Governments to drag into war people who did not desire war and who have no quarrel with one another?

The immediate answer is simple enough. In no country is there any effective control by the people over foreign policy. That is clear in the case of the great military empires. But it is true also of France and of England, where, in other respects, government is more or less under popular control. The country has no real choice, for it gets its information only after the decisive action has been taken. That is an important truth which ought to lead to important changes in our methods of conducting foreign affairs. But it is only part of the truth. For we have now to notice this further fact: that in all countries, in Germany no less than in England and France, no sooner is the war declared than it is supported by the whole nation. The voice of criticism is silenced, and every one, whatever his opinion about the origin of the war, gives his help to see it through. Why is that? The reason is obvious. As soon as war is made, the people of one country, conscious just before of no cause of enmity, do really become enemies of the people of another country; for armed populations are marching on armed populations to massacre them. Everybody, therefore, is bound to fight in self-defense. It is too late to ask whether there was any real cause of quarrel; for, quarrel or no, there is real and imminent danger. To meet that danger becomes, therefore, the immediate necessity which overbears every other consideration. And that is the deepest reason why wars made by governments without, and even against, the will of peoples, will always be supported by peoples.

But though that is the most powerful reason, it is not the only one. There is a further fact. The ordinary man, though he does not live under the obsession of the governmental theory, is not protected against it by any knowledge or reflection. As far as he is concerned, he knows no reason for war, and, left to himself, would never make it. But he has a blank mind open to suggestion; and he has passions and instincts which it is easy to enlist on the side of the governmental theory. He has been busy all his life; and he has no education, or one that is worse than none, about those issues which, in a crisis like that which has come upon us, suddenly reveal themselves as the issues of life and death. History, no doubt, should have informed him. But history, for the most part, is written without intelligence or conviction. It is mere narrative, devoid of instruction, and seasoned, if at all, by some trivial, habitual, and second-hand prejudice of the author. History has never been understood, though it has often been misunderstood. To understand it is perhaps beyond the power of the human intellect. But the attempt even has hardly begun to be made.

Deprived, then, of this source of enlightenment, the ordinary man falls back upon the press. But the press is either an agent of the very governments it should exist to criticize (it is so notoriously and admittedly on the Continent, and, to an extent which we cannot measure, also in England), or else it is (with a few honorable exceptions) an instrument to make money for certain individuals or syndicates. But the easiest way for the press to make money is to appeal to the most facile emotions and the most superficial ideas of the reader; and these can easily be made to respond to the suggestion that this or that foreign State is our natural and inevitable enemy. The strong instincts of pugnacity and self-approbation, the nobler sentiment of patriotism, a vague and unanalyzed impression of the course of history, these and other factors combine to produce this result. And the irony is that they may be directed indifferently against any State. In England, for instance, a hundred years ago, it was France against whom they were marshaled; sixty years ago it was Russia; thirty years ago it was France again; now it is Germany; presently, if governments have their way, it will be Russia again.

The foreign offices and the press do with nations what they like. And they will continue to do so until ordinary people acquire right ideas and a machinery to make them effective....

The governmental theory holds that States are the great realities, and that they are natural enemies. My reply is that States are unreal abstractions; that the reality is the men and women and children who are the members of the States; and that as soon as you substitute real people for the abstract idea that symbolizes them you find that they have no cause of quarrel, no interests or desires of a kind to justify or necessitate aggressive war. And, if there were no aggressive war, there could, of course, be no cause for defensive war....

G. Lowes Dickinson, “The War and the Way Out,” Atlantic Monthly, January, 1915.

THE WAY OUT OF WAR

We will to perpetuate European peace. How are we to accomplish it? By keeping in view and putting into effect certain clear principles.

First, the whole idea of aggrandizing one nation and humiliating another must be set aside. What we are aiming at is, not that this or that group of States should dominate the others, but that none should in future have any desire or motive to dominate. With that view, we must leave behind the fewest possible sores, the least possible sense of grievance, the least possible humiliation. The defeated States, therefore, must not be dismembered in the hope of making or keeping them weak; and that means, in detail, that, if the Allies win, the English and the French must not take the German colonies, or the Russians the Baltic Coast, the Balkans, or Constantinople; and that, if Germany wins, she must not dismember or subordinate to her system France or England or the neutral powers. That is the first clear condition of the future peace of Europe.

Secondly, in rearranging the boundaries of States—and clearly they must be rearranged—one point, and one only, must be kept in mind: to give to all peoples suffering and protesting under alien rule the right to decide whether they will become an autonomous unit, or will join the political system of some other nation. Thus, for example, the people of Alsace-Lorraine should be allowed to choose whether they will remain under Germany, or become an autonomous community, or be included in France. The same principles shall be applied to the Poles. The same to Schleswig-Holstein. The same to the Balkan States. The same to the Slav communities included in Austria-Hungary. There would arise, of course, difficulties in carrying this principle through. For, in the Balkan States, in Bohemia, and elsewhere, there is an almost inextricable tangle of nationalities. But with good-will these difficulties could be at least partially met.

Even the wholesale transference of peoples of one nationality from one location to another is a possibility; and, indeed, it is now going on. In any case the principle itself is clear. Political rule must cease to be imposed on peoples against their will in the supposed interest of that great idol, the abstract state. Let the Germans, who belong together, live together under the same government, pursuing in independence their national ideal and their national culture. But let them not impose that ideal and that culture on reluctant Poles and Slavs and Danes. So, too, let Russia develop her own life over the huge territory where Russians live. But let her not impose that life on unwilling Poles and Finns. The English, in history, have been as guilty as other nations of sacrificing nationality to the supposed exigencies of the State. But of late they have been learning their lesson. Let them learn it to the end. Let no community be coerced under British rule that wants to be self-governing. The British have had the courage, though late, to apply this principle to South Africa and Ireland. There remains their greatest act of courage and wisdom—to apply it to India.

A Europe thus rearranged, as it might be at the peace, on a basis of real nationality instead of on a basis of States, would be a Europe ripe for a permanent league. And by such a league only, in my judgment, can its future peace, prosperity, happiness, goodness, and greatness be assured. There must be an end to the waste upon armaments of resources too scanty, at the best, to give to all men and women in all countries the material basis for a good life. But if States are left with the power to arm against one another they will do so, each asserting, and perhaps with truth, that it is arming in defense against the imagined aggression of the others. If all are arming, all will spend progressively more and more on their armaments, for each will be afraid of being outstripped by the others. This circle is fatal, as we have seen in the last quarter of a century.

To secure the peace of Europe the peoples of Europe must hand over their armaments, and the use of them for any purpose except internal police, to an international authority. This authority must determine what force is required for Europe as a whole, acting as a whole in the still possible case of war against powers not belonging to the league. It must apportion the quota of armaments between the different nations according to their wealth, population, resources, and geographical position. And it, and it alone, must carry on, and carry on in public, negotiations with powers outside the league. All disputes that may arise between members of the league must be settled by judicial process. And none of the forces of the league must be available for purposes of aggression by any member against any other.

With such a league of Europe constituted, the problem of reduction of armaments would be automatically solved. Whatever force a united Europe might suppose itself to require for possible defense would clearly be far less than the sum of the existing armaments of the separate States. Immense resources would be set free for the general purposes of civilization, and especially for those costly social reforms on the accomplishment of which depends the right of any nation to call itself civilized at all. And if any one insists on looking at the settlement from the point of view of material advantage—and that point of view will and must be taken—it may be urged, without a shadow of doubt, that any and every nation, the conquerors no less than the conquered, would gain from a reduction of armaments far more than they could possibly gain by pecuniary indemnities or cessions of territory which would leave every nation still arming against the others with a view to future squandering of resources in another great war. This is sheer common sense of the most matter-of-fact kind.

A League of Europe is not Utopian. It is sound business.

Such a league, it is true, could hardly come into being immediately at the peace. There must be preparation of opinion first; and, not less important, there must be such changes in the government of the monarchic States as will insure the control of their policy by popular opinion; otherwise we might get a league in which the preponderating influence would be with autocratic emperors. But in making peace the future league must be kept in view. Everything must be done that will further it, and nothing that will hinder it. And what would hinder it most would be a peace by which either there should be a return to the conditions before the war—but of that there is little fear—or by which any one power, or group of powers, should be given a hegemony over the others. For that would mean a future war for the rehabilitation of the vanquished.

The mood, therefore, which seems to be growing in England, that the British must “punish” Germany by annihilating her as a political force; the mood which seems to be growing in Germany, that she must annihilate the British as the great disturbers of the peace—all such moods must be resolutely discouraged. For on those lines no permanent peace can be made. Militarism must be destroyed, not only in Germany but everywhere. Limitation of armaments must be general, not imposed only on the vanquished by victors who propose themselves to remain fully armed. The view of peoples must be substituted once for all for the view of governments, and the view of peoples is no domination, and, therefore, no war, but a union of nations developing freely on their own lines, and settling all disputes by arbitration.

G. Lowes Dickinson, “The War and the Way Out,” Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1915.

LOWES DICKINSON’S PLAN

Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Mr. Lowes Dickinson attempts to point the moral of the war and to offer a way out. His theory is that wars are made by governments without the consent and against the interest of their subjects; they are made because the governmental mind is obsessed with the illusion that States are “natural enemies,” that they have always been so and always will be, that force is the only arbiter between them. This fantasy of the governing caste, says Mr. Dickinson, is what rules the State, and through control of foreign policy and the press drags the population to slaughter. The remedy is to shatter the illusion, to assert against the criminal nonsense of the governing mind the humanity and commonsense of ordinary people....

Now peace will have to be built on a very hard-headed basis or it will be fragile and illusory. But it is just this hard-headedness which Mr. Dickinson’s argument seems to lack. In our opinion he himself is building on an illusion, and if his doctrine prevails among the workers for peace their passion will be misdirected, and their disappointment will be as deep as their hopes are high.

To prove these assertions, we need not go beyond the example which Mr. Dickinson uses, the case of Russia and her desire to hold Constantinople. Mr. Dickinson dismisses this ambition with the statement that “for all purposes of trade, for all peace purposes, the Dardanelles are open. And it is the interest of all nations alike that they should remain so.” What he is assuming here is that it makes no economic difference whether Constantinople is under one political government or another. This is the center of Mr. Dickinson’s argument, and it rests on the doctrine of Norman Angell that “political power is a consideration irrelevant to economic power.”

Is it irrelevant in a case like that of the Dardanelles? The Black Sea region is already a great agricultural exporting region; it is destined most probably to become the industrial center of Russia. But to carry out goods, Russian ships must pass through a narrow Turkish strait. Mr. Dickinson says that for all “peace purposes” the passage is free. Is it? Let us suppose that Mexico held New York harbor, or that Ecuador held Liverpool. Would these harbors be free to American and English commerce? They would be free if Mexico and Ecuador were highly efficient governments imbued with the doctrine of absolute free trade. Then commerce might pass through easily. But if Mexicans or Ecuadorians took it into their heads to exercise sovereignty by setting up a tariff zone around New York or Liverpool, who would regard political power as irrelevant to economic power? Certainly not the Manchester exporter as he paid his customs tax to the pleasant official from Ecuador.

Although England is in no danger from Ecuador, there are nations in the world which suffer just as fantastically. There is the case of Servia, shut off from a “window on the sea.” Servia exports pigs, when she isn’t fighting for the privilege of exporting them. But to export anything she has to run the gauntlet of an Austrian tariff to the north, Albanian and Greek discrimination to the west and south. Shut off from the sea, she is like a man trying to get out of a restaurant who has still to tip the waiter, the headwaiter, the girl who took care of his hat, and the boy who brushed it.

Political power is not in the least irrelevant to economic power. Mr. Dickinson has no doubt heard of a thing which we Americans call vulgarly “dollar diplomacy.” European powers do not call it that, but they practise it. They call it staking out “spheres of influence,” and there is nothing sentimental or illusory about it. The nation that can secure political control of an undeveloped country can decide who shall receive the mining rights and the railroad franchises, can fix railroad rates to favor its own manufacturers, can use all the methods which Americans describe as restraint of trade. It may have been dishonest, it certainly wasn’t a delusion, when capitalists in those dreadful early days of this republic bought political power to further economic ends. A legislature or a governor was generally worth the price in this country, and we presume that they would be worth the price in Asia Minor. If German bureaucrats governed Morocco, they would, we suppose, be good to their friends, almost all of whom have at least a nominal residence east of Belgium, and French capitalists might then be prospecting fresh mines and pastures new.

Mr. Dickinson ignores these considerations when he speaks of national antagonisms arising “because a few men of the military and diplomatic caste have a theory about States, their interests and destinies.” He ignores the monopolies, the use of tariffs, the special privileges of which political power is the instrument. He does not face the fact that in every country there are exporters of goods and capital, concession-hunters and traders, who stand to gain by the use of governmental power in half developed territory. To them at least it is not a matter of indifference whether Germany is politically supreme in say India or China. Since Germany has brought the doctrine of protection to its highest point, it would make a very great difference to the commerce of other nations if Germany developed a world-empire.

How little reality there is in Mr. Dickinson’s contention may be seen by analyzing his concrete proposals. Apart from the shattering of the great illusion of the governmental mind by a propaganda, he suggests a settlement of Europe on the basis of nationality, capped by a League of Europe to maintain the peace.

Now there are all sorts of reasons for trying to found States on nationality, and the only reason against the proposal is the reason on which Mr. Dickinson’s article is built. He tells us on one page that “ordinary people, in the course of their daily lives, do not think at all in terms of the state.” Then what difference does it make to people of the same nationality that they should be under different governments, and how is the world’s peace to be assured by gathering into one State people who do not care about the State? Either the people have an interest in the State or they have not, but surely it is futile for Mr. Dickinson to argue in one place against the German contention that their emigrants are “lost,” and in another that the Danes of Schleswig-Holstein should go back to Denmark. And what does he mean by telling us that in the event of an Austro-German victory “Italy and the Balkans will be pillaged to the benefit of Austria, and Russia rolled back—though that would be all to the good—from her ambition to expand in the West.” Is Mr. Dickinson also afflicted with the “governmental mind,” that he should talk of “benefit” to Austria and pronounce it good that “Russia” be rolled back? What does he mean by telling us that “the English and the French must not take the German colonies, or the Russians the Baltic coast, the Balkans, or Constantinople,” for what difference does it make, except to the “governmental mind,” who exercises political power!

As for the League of Europe, surely no one here would wish to obstruct the plan. But if the League is to be based on nothing more realistic than an absence of governmental thinking, it will be a very precarious league. Every argument advanced by Mr. Dickinson is based on the assumption of absolute free trade in the world, yet in his plan of peace he says not one syllable about how tariffs and discriminations and monopolies are to be wiped out. The conflict between Germany and England is world-wide, yet Mr. Dickinson is thinking only of rectified frontiers in Europe.

When he proposes so readily a League of Europe with a police force to carry out its jurisdiction, has he considered the possibility of civil war within the League? If Germany and Austria rebelled against the League, they would presumably be attacked on all sides. But they are now attacked on all sides. We had on this continent a league of States with a central government, a Supreme Court, and an army. In 1861 some of the States seceded, and the struggle which followed, called a Civil War, was a terrible conflict. Has Mr. Dickinson faced the fact that a League of Europe would be based on the status quo, would be a sort of legalization of every existing injustice? And how does he propose to amend peacefully the constitution of Europe if some nation objects too seriously?

The New Republic, Jan. 2, 1915.

THE MORROW OF THE WAR

OUR PURPOSE

This country (Great Britain) is at war, and has for the moment one overwhelming preoccupation: to render safe our national inheritance.

The Union of Democratic Control has been founded for the purpose of trying to secure for ourselves and the generations that succeed us a new course of policy which will prevent a similar peril ever again befalling our Empire. Many men and women have already joined us holding varying shades of opinion as to the origins of the war. Some think it was inevitable, some that it could and should have been avoided. But we believe that all are in general agreement about two things: First, it is imperative that the war, once begun, should be prosecuted to a victory for our country. Secondly, it is equally imperative, while we carry on the war, to prepare for peace. Hard thinking, free discussion, the open exchange of opinion and information are the duty of all citizens to-day, if we are to have any hope that this war will not be what most wars of the past have been—merely the prelude to other wars.

Our contribution to this necessary discussion are the principles put forward for consideration by the Union of Democratic Control.

The Union of Democratic Control has been created to insist that the following policy shall inspire the actual conditions of peace, and shall dominate the situation after peace has been declared:

1. No Province shall be transferred from one Government to another without consent by plébiscite or otherwise of the population of such Province.

2. No Treaty, Arrangement, or Undertaking shall be entered upon in the name of Great Britain without the sanction of Parliament. Adequate machinery for ensuring democratic control of foreign policy shall be created.

3. The Foreign Policy of Great Britain shall not be aimed at creating Alliances for the purpose of maintaining the “Balance of Power”; but shall be directed to the establishment of a Concert of the Powers and the setting up of an International Council whose deliberations and decisions shall be public, part of the labor of such Council to be the creation of definite Treaties of Arbitration and the establishment of Courts for their interpretation and enforcement.

4. Great Britain shall propose as part of the Peace settlement a plan for the drastic reduction by consent of the armaments of all the belligerent Powers, and to facilitate that policy shall attempt to secure the general nationalization of the manufacture of armaments, and the control of the export of armaments by one country to another.

It is the purpose of this pamphlet to elaborate and explain the considerations which underlie the policy outlined above.

No Province shall be transferred from one Government to another without the consent of plébiscite of the population of such Province.

This condition has been placed first because if adhered to practically and in spirit, and if recognized by the European Powers as a principle that must guide all frontier rearrangements, it would help to put an end to European war.

If no province were retained under a Government’s power against the will of its inhabitants, the policy of conquest and the imposition of political power would lose its raison d’être.

The subject as a whole is wrapped up, of course, with the principle of democratic government and is not merely a problem of international but of internal politics, and could not be treated briefly in a mere outline like the present. But any one who reflects carefully on the subject will see that the peace in Europe ultimately depends upon the acceptance of this idea.

It is obvious that there are many difficulties of detail in its application; that a plébiscite may be a mere form and not reflect the real wishes of the population concerned, and under military control it can be used as an instrument for obtaining an apparent sanction for oppression, and that in populations of mixed race it is very difficult of application. But it should not be impossible to guard against the defeat of the principle through defects in the working machinery. Plébiscites, where used at the end of the war, might be carried out under international supervision. The essential is that the principle involved should be clearly enunciated.

Fortunately the Government has already given the country a valuable lead in this matter. For Mr. Churchill, speaking on September 11, said:

“Now the war has come, and when it is over let us be careful not to make the same mistake or the same sort of mistake as Germany made when she had France prostrate at her feet in 1870. [Cheers.] Let us, whatever we do, fight for and work towards great and sound principles for the European system, and the first of those principles which we should keep before us is the principle of nationality—that is to say, not the conquest or subjugation of any great community, or of any strong race of men, but the setting free of those races which have been subjugated and conquered; and if doubt arises about disputed areas of country we should try to settle their ultimate destination in the reconstruction of Europe which must follow from this war with a fair regard to the wishes and feelings of the people who live in them.”

We agree with Mr. Churchill that the terms of peace should secure that there shall in the future be no more Alsace-Lorraines to create during half a century resentment, unrest, and intrigues for a revanche. The power of the victorious parties must not be used for vindictive oppression and dismemberment of beaten nationalities, but for the creation, by cooperation with all the belligerents, victors and vanquished alike, of a true society of nations, banded together for mutual security. The future relationship of the States of Europe must be not that of victor and vanquished, domination or subserviency, but of partnership. The struggle of one nation for domination over another must be replaced by the association of the people for their common good.

No Treaty, Arrangement, or Undertaking shall be entered upon in the name of Great Britain without the sanction of Parliament. Adequate machinery for ensuring democratic control of foreign policy shall be created.

The peoples of all constitutionally-governed countries are justified in demanding that diplomatic relations with their neighbors shall be conducted with the main object of maintaining friendly international intercourse. The increasing social and economic interdependence, the ramifications of the credit system, the facility and rapidity of intercommunication, the developing community of intellectual interest, the growth of a collective social consciousness, are combining to minimize the significance of the purely political frontiers which divide civilized States. For these reasons the world is moving towards conferences when political difficulties arise as a substitute for war. The determination to preserve national ideals and traditions offers no real obstacle. But the common interest of civilized democracies cannot be advanced by a secret diplomacy out of touch with democratic sentiment.

The anomaly of such practises in a democratic State has only to be understood to be condemned. All the domestic activities of a constitutional Government are tested in the crucible of public analysis and criticism. But the Government department charged with the supervision of the nation’s intercourse with its neighbors, which if wrongly handled may react with ruinous effect upon the whole field of its domestic activities and upon the future of its entire social economy, not only escapes efficient public control, but considers itself empowered to commit the nation to specific courses and to involve it in obligations to third parties entailing the risk of war, without the nation’s knowledge of consent.

During the past eight years particularly, the management of the Foreign department has become avowedly and frankly autocratic. Parliamentary discussion of foreign policy has become so restricted as to be perfunctory. It is confined to a few hours’ roving debate on one day in each session. The eliciting of information by means of questions, never satisfactory, is rendered extremely difficult by the ingenuity employed in evading the issues it is attempted to raise. Advantage has been taken of the wholesome desire that discussion of foreign policy should not partake of mere party recriminations, to burke discussion altogether, and this process has received the endorsement of both Front Benches. A claim to “continuity” has been further evolved to stifle debate on foreign affairs, whereas in point of fact, if one feature more than another has characterized British foreign policy of recent years, it has been its bewildering fluctuations. Parliamentary paralysis has had its counterpart in the country. The present Government’s tenure of office has been marked by an almost complete abstention from public reference to foreign affairs. The public has been treated as though foreign affairs were outside—and properly outside—its ken. And the public has acquiesced. Every attempt to shake its apathy has been violently assailed by spokesmen of the Foreign Office in the press. The country has been told that its affairs were in the wisest hands, and that mystery and silence are the indispensable attributes to a successful direction of foreign policy. The caste system which prevails in the diplomatic service, and which has survived unimpaired the democratizing of the majority of the public services, facilitates these outworn political dogmatisms. Appointment is made by nomination and selection. Candidates are required to possess an income per annum of £400. The natural result is that the vast bulk of the national intelligence is debarred from the diplomatic field of employment. A study of the Foreign Office list will disclose the fact that over 95 per cent. of the British diplomatic staff is composed of members of the aristocracy and landed gentry.

Inevitable exile from their country results in our diplomatic representatives abroad losing touch with the center of affairs and living in a mental atmosphere remote from the popular and progressive movements of the time. Another pronounced characteristic of the system is the indifference displayed by the Foreign Office to the business interests of the nation. Our vast commercial interests, so intimately affected by our relations with foreign Powers, are regarded as lying outside the orbit of diplomatic considerations. The connection between politics and business—and by business we mean the entire framework of peaceful commerce upon which the prosperity of this country depends—appears to be ignored, or, at least, treated with indifference and something like contempt. The services of our Consuls abroad are not sufficiently utilized, and the Consular machinery requires complete overhauling. Such questions as, for instance, the effect upon British commercial interest of British diplomacy supporting the acquisition of undeveloped areas of the world’s surface by a Power like France, which imposes differential tariffs upon British goods, and opposing the acquisition of such areas by a Power like Germany, which admits British goods on terms of equality, does not appear to enter into Foreign Office calculations.

In the last few years also has been added another institution which modifies national policy without coming under Parliamentary control, the Committee of Imperial Defense. Its influence upon the Cabinet is nominally indirect, and its activities confined to the discussion of hypothetical events. But no one can doubt that its recommendations exercise a powerful effect on the executive decisions of the Government. No criticism of the advice given by the Committee is possible in Parliament. Momentous military and naval schemes are prepared there on which hang the issues of peace and war, as in the case of our recent relations to France. It is an intimate and powerful means of framing Government policy according to the ideas of military experts, without the knowledge and control of Parliament.

In the various ways indicated, opportunities of evincing an intelligent concern in its foreign policy has been increasingly withdrawn from the nation. The work of the Department escapes all outside control, loses all sense of contact with national life, and tends more and more to become an autocratic institution, contemptuous of the efforts of a small group of members in the House to acquire information, and utilizing a powerful section of the press to mold public opinion in the direction it considers public opinion should travel.

The nation awoke with a shock to the evils of this state of affairs in the summer of 1911, when it suddenly found itself on the very brink of war with Germany over a Franco-German quarrel about Morocco, and became cognizant of the existence of diplomatic entanglements of which it had no previous intimation.

It is obviously impossible to attempt here a full presentment of the Moroccan crisis of 1911. But the story is inseparably intertwined with the avowals to the House of Commons on August 3rd, 1914, of the secret understanding with France which has played so capital a part in bringing about British intervention in the present war.

So long as this situation prevails it must be perfectly clear to any man of ordinary intelligence that the system of government under which we live is not a democratic system, but its antithesis. It cannot be too often insisted upon that the domestic concerns of the nation, its constitutional liberties, its social reforms, all its internal activities in short, depend upon the preservation of peaceful relations with its neighbors. War in which this country is involved is certain to prove a serious check to social progress. Hence it is a matter of absolutely vital concern to the nation that the machinery of its Foreign Office should be thoroughly capable of performing its functions, and that the policy pursued by that department should be pursued with the knowledge and the consent of the nation. It is imperative not only that a treaty with a foreign Power should require endorsement by Parliament, but that no agreement or understanding possessing binding force and postulating the use of the national military and naval forces should be valid without the assent of Parliament. The nation should insist upon this essential reform, and should seriously apply itself to considering what other steps are needed to ensure some mechanical means whereby a greater national control of foreign policy can be secured; whether by the establishment of a permanent Committee of the House of Commons, by the adaptation to suit our needs of the American system under which a two-thirds majority of one branch of the Legislature is required for the validity of international agreements, or other procedure. But real and permanent reforms will not be obtained unless the nation is determined to assert its fundamental right to participate in the formation of its own foreign policy.

III

The Foreign Policy of Great Britain shall not be aimed at creating Alliances for the purpose of maintaining the “Balance of Power”; but shall be directed to the establishment of a Concert of Europe and the setting up of an International Council whose deliberations and decisions shall be public.

What does the “Balance of Power” mean?

It is popularly supposed to mean that no single Power or group of Powers should, in the interests of international peace, be allowed to acquire a preponderating position in Europe, and that the policy of Great Britain should be directed against such a consummation. British policy during the past few years has been based upon the assumption that Germany had attained, or was seeking to attain, that position of eminence.

It is that idea which, in the minds of masses of our people, justifies the present war.

But if this policy has been right in the past, what prospect does the future hold? The victory of the Allies—which is a vital necessity—must enormously upset the “balance” by making Russia the dominant military power of Europe, possibly the dictator both in this Continent and in Asia.

Russia can draw upon vast sources of human military material, only partly civilized. At present she is governed by a military autocracy which is largely hostile to Western ideas of political and religious freedom. There is hope in the minds of Western Liberals that the war may bring political liberation to Russia. At present that is only a hope. For wars have as often been a prelude to tyranny as to liberty. It is only too likely that after a victorious war our national feeling may revert to its old anti-Russian channel, and we shall again have the “Balance of Power” invoked to protect Europe and India against a new Russian preeminence.

Speaking generally, the “Balance of Power” is little more than a diplomatic formula made use of by the mouthpieces of the interests from whose operations war comes. It signifies nothing more than that, at a given moment, in a given country, there is an effort to hold up to the public gaze the Government and the people of another country as being intent upon the destruction of its neighbors. At one moment it is Russia, at another France, and at another Germany. The “Balance of Power” was invoked for several years and down to within a few weeks of the Crimean War to inflame British public opinion against France. It was invoked against Russia to justify the Crimean War, and France was chosen as the ally with which to fight Russia! No sooner had peace been signed than France became once more the potential threat to the “Balance of Power”; and again during the period of rivalry in West and Central Africa, and in the Far East, in the late nineties.

Once the ball has been set rolling in the required direction, influences of all kinds are brought to bear for the purpose of permanently fixing this idea in the public mind. A flood of innuendo, denunciation, and distorted information is let loose. Every dishonorable motive and the most sinister of projects are attributed to the Government and the people selected for attack. The public becomes the sport of private ambitions and interests, of personal prejudices and obscure passions, which it can neither detect nor control, and, for the most part, does not even suspect. The power for mischief wielded by these forces is to-day immense, owing to a cheap press and to the concentration of a large number of newspapers, possessing in the aggregate an enormous circulation, under one directing will. At the present moment the editorial and news columns of some fifty British newspapers echo the views of one man, who is thus able to superimpose in permanent fashion upon public thought the dead weight of his own prejudices or personal aims and intentions, and to exercise a potent influence upon the Government of the day.

For the last few years these newspapers have striven with unceasing pertinacity to create an atmosphere of ill-will and suspicion between Great Britain and Germany. The effort has been continuous, systematic, and magnificently organized, and inferential evidence is not lacking that it has been pursued with the approval and even with the assistance of certain official influences, and to the satisfaction of certain foreign Governments. This propaganda has had, needless to say, its counterpart in Germany. The net result of the latest recrudescence of the “Balance of Power” policy with its Alliances and Ententes as the dominating factor in international relationships is now visible to all men. A quarrel (whose culminating episode was the murder in a Bosnian town of the heir to the Austrian throne last June) between Austria and Serbia, to which the Russian Government determined to become a party, has already involved the peoples of France, Belgium, Britain, and Germany, the first three of whom were not even remotely concerned, in a terrible and desolating war.

Japan and Montenegro have also become involved, and the same fate may overtake Holland, Italy, the other Balkan States, and the Scandinavian Powers. But for the policy of the “Balance of Power” the results of the quarrel would almost certainly have been confined to the parties immediately affected, and an early mediation by the neutral Powers would have been possible.

Bright’s scathing denunciation of the fetish of the “Balance of Power” appeals with even greater force to us to-day:

“You cannot comprehend at a thought what is meant by this balance of power. If the record could be brought before you—but it is not possible to the eye of humanity to scan the scroll upon which are recorded the sufferings which the theory of the balance of power has entailed upon this country. It rises up before me when I think of it as a ghastly phantom ... which has loaded the nation with debt and with taxes, has sacrificed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, has desolated the homes of millions of families, and has left us, as the great result of the profligate expenditure which it has caused, a doubled peerage at one end of the social scale, and far more than a doubled pauperism at the other.”

For a system therefore which carries with it the implication that the interests of nations are necessarily in constant conflict and which involves the permanent division of Europe into two hostile competing groups, we must substitute machinery which will facilitate cooperation and a reasonable solution of differences between all the peoples of the world.

The objective should be a real council of the nations with at first very limited powers, rather an expansion of an alliance of three Powers against three, into a league of six Powers, designed to act against any one recalcitrant member which might threaten the peace of the whole. To this ideal, indeed, the pronouncement of Mr. Asquith in his Dublin speech has already pointed, while it is noteworthy that Sir Edward Grey himself seems in a significant passage of one of his despatches to admit the failure of the balance principle and to indicate that the nations must “start afresh” on the basis of a general council. This passage is as follows:

“If the peace of Europe can be preserved, and the present crisis safely passed, my own endeavor will be to promote some arrangement to which Germany could be a party, by which she could be assured that no aggressive or hostile policy would be pursued against her or her allies by France, Russia, and ourselves, jointly or separately. I have desired this and worked for it as far as I could through the last Balkan crisis; and Germany having a corresponding object, our relations sensibly improved. The idea has hitherto been too Utopian to form the subject of definite proposals, but if this present crisis, so much more acute than any Europe has gone through for generations, be safely passed, I am hopeful that the relief and reaction which will follow may make possible some more definite rapprochement between the Powers than has been possible hitherto.”

It is from some such simple beginning, pursued with good will and perseverance by all parties, that the nations may hope to arrive at a system of cooperation to replace the system of hostile alliances, the fruits of which are the present war.

It is essential, of course, if the negotiations of such a council are to be lifted out of the atmosphere of diplomatic intrigue which the secrecy of negotiations always involves, that its deliberations be public. Publicity will at one and the same time be a guarantee of openness, of good faith, and of democratic control.

Great Britain shall propose as part of the Peace settlement a plan for the drastic reduction by consent of the armaments of all the belligerent Powers, and to facilitate that policy shall attempt to secure the general nationalization of the manufacture of armaments, and the control of the export of armaments by one country to another.

The theory of the “Balance of Power” and secret diplomacy are two factors which, in combination, make for war.

Two other factors intimately connected with these ensure its certainty. They are: a constant progression in expenditure upon armaments, and the toleration of a private armament interest.

It would be labor wasted to endeavor to apportion responsibility between the various European Governments for the insane competition in armaments which of recent years has attained incredible proportions. No government can escape liability. Each government has defended its policy on the ground that its neighbor’s action compelled it to do so. Many of the governing statesmen of the world have alternately confessed their helplessness, attacked their rivals, appealed to public opinion, and blamed the warlike tendencies inherent in the people whose destinies they control. Every government, without exception, has proceeded on the assumption that in order to ensure peace it had to be stronger than its neighbor, a philosophy which could have but one possible outcome—war. In pursuance of this phantom, a considerable proportion of the wealth of the European States has been wasted, and activities have been withdrawn from the constructive work of the world, to prepare for the world’s destruction. And with every fresh outburst of expenditure, responding to some diplomatic check or alarmist propaganda, fresh fagots have been piled around Europe’s powder magazine. The disaster which has fallen upon Europe is the fitting sequel to the bankruptcy of statesmanship which this policy embodies.

The more extensive the armaments, the greater the temptation to seize an opportunity for testing their efficiency; the greater the nervousness and irritation of Governments when negotiating; the greater the pressure upon those Governments of the powerful professional and other interests concerned in armament construction.

The policy of gigantic armaments cannot in the very nature of things ensure any final settlement of disputes between States. It leads, and can only lead, to an intolerable situation from which war comes to be regarded by diplomacy as the only escape.

An all-round limitation of armaments must follow the present war if the world is to be permanently relieved of the nightmare which has weighed upon it for so long. We can no longer afford to listen to arguments as to the impracticability of such a course from those whose claims to the possession of human wisdom and experienced guidance have so utterly broken down.

The difficulty of compelling a change in the policy of European Governments has been intensified by the conditions under which armament construction is carried on in this and other countries. Every one is familiar with the fact that the object of a commercial firm is to push its wares in every legitimate manner, to advertise them, and systematically to tout for orders both at home and abroad. Every one is aware that there exists a powerfully-equipped industry for the manufacture of military and naval engines and instruments of offense. Disguise it as we may, that industry waxes and wanes, the profits its management derives rise and fall, the dividends earned by its shareholders increase and dwindle in the measure of the demand for the articles it produces. That demand does not emanate from members of the public. It emanates from the military and naval departments of the public services. The industry relies, therefore, for its existence and for its profits not upon a private demand, but upon a Government demand, and the extent of that Government demand will depend upon the view which the Government may take of the number and nature of these articles required to ensure the national safety. Such a condition of affairs is a permanent and terrible danger both to democratic government and to international peace. What are its implications?

There is created in every country an economic force in private hands directly interested in war and in the preparation for war; directly interested in assisting to bring about a general atmosphere advantageous to an industry which, were wars to cease or the expenditure on armaments to be substantially reduced, would suffer accordingly. What the successful prosecution of an ordinary commercial undertaking requires this industry also requires. The demand for the article must be created. That basic situation engenders effects which can only be appreciated in their cumulative significance. It is not at all necessary to attribute sinister machinations to individuals. These effects are automatic. An industry disposing, as does this one, of an enormous aggregate of capital possesses almost unlimited power of influence and suggestion. For such purposes the press is a potent instrument ready at hand. Many of those most closely associated with this great industry are men of considerable influence. Some have been in the public service and have acquaintances in the Government Departments. Others may be on friendly and perfectly honorable terms with the proprietors or editors of newspapers or associations of newspapers. The proprietor of a newspaper may be honestly convinced, or may by arguments be persuaded, that an agitation for increased armaments is advisable. If he is acquainted with one of the directors of the armament industry that acquaintance will hardly act as a deterrent to his entertaining those views. He may be furnished with special information, accurate or otherwise, as to the projects, real or alleged, of other Governments, which will be familiar to the director through his connection with Continental branches of the same industry. The press may be utilized in a similar manner by certain permanent officials in the nation’s Foreign Department, who feel that their views of the international situation can be best served by a press campaign of a certain kind. The influence of the industry which stands to gain from the existence of these views, and the willingness of newspaper editors and proprietors to push them on to the public, cannot be expected to intervene against their propagation. Again, an ambitious Minister, in charge of one of the fighting branches of the public service, desirous of placing his personality in the limelight and focusing public attention upon the affairs of his Department, will be from that circumstance a readier listener to representations from the industry in question. Those representations may quite legitimately take the form of pointing out that heavy expenses have been incurred in providing a certain type of machinery or special accommodation for the construction of a particular kind of offensive instrument, that the orders have not kept pace with the expenditure, and that if further orders be not forthcoming losses will ensue and future facilities for production be necessarily restricted. There would be nothing indefensible in representations of this character. And again, it is not unlikely that a member of Parliament, convinced of certain public dangers associated with the existing system, but representing a constituency where this great industry is established and employs, perhaps, not an inconsiderable section of the local labor, may find his freedom of speech considerably curtailed lest he should be accused of taking the bread from the mouths of some of his constituents.

Endless, indeed, are the ramifications of a private industrial interest so wealthy and so well organized, and dependent for its profits upon national expenditure in instruments of warfare, and, consequently, in the ultimate resort, upon war itself. The general influence exerted upon public life as a whole by the very fact that this industry is a private one, and possesses a large body of shareholders usually belonging to the upper strata of society, cannot be regarded otherwise than as an unhealthy and dangerous element in the nation. Emphasis is lent to this aspect of the case when it is borne in mind that the armaments industry has of late years become internationalized to a remarkable degree. Recent disclosures, the accuracy of which has not been disputed, in Germany, France, England, and Japan, have clearly shown an inter-connection of the armament interest productive of repellent accompaniments. This inter-connection of interest has, for example, made it possible for a body of British shareholders, including prominent ecclesiastics, members of Parliament, and even Cabinet Ministers, to be financially interested in enterprises engaged in the manufacture of engines of destruction impartially used in the slaughter of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and Russians.

But however revolting this may be, it is insignificant compared with the graver peril to which precedent allusion has been made. Reflection must bring with it the conviction that the armament industry is not one which the nation can safely permit to be retained in private hands and to be the subject of private profit.

* * * * *

What, then, is to be our policy in connection with the war? First and foremost we must be victorious. That is a prime necessity upon which the nation is unanimous. We must win not only because many British institutions of the highest value would be destroyed by our defeat, not only because Prussia, our principal enemy, is the leading exponent of that doctrine of military domination and intolerance which is incompatible with a permanently peaceful Europe; but also because we must see justice done, as far as may be, to the least powerful of our Allies. Ample compensation must be secured for Belgium to repair her material loss and in recognition of the wrong done to her.

What of the future? What lessons do the incompetence and secretiveness, the jealousies and vanities of that vaunted European statecraft which has plunged the world in war convey to the peoples who are its victims?

What can the people do to amend a system under which they are used as pawns in a game of chess?

They can begin to understand what that system is and that its existence is their undoing. They can begin to understand the monstrous errors and fallacies which underlie the whole teaching imposed upon their intelligence. They can begin to understand that this immunity from public control enjoyed by the small group of professional men who manipulate international relations has led to the establishment amongst the latter of a standard of conduct which would not be tolerated in the ordinary affairs of a well-ordered community. They can begin to understand that “high politics” in the diplomatic world has become a synonym for intrigue; that a code of morals is therein practised which, in other branches of the public service, would entail dismissal, and in the business world would involve disgrace.

They can force themselves to a mental effort which shall lead them to the realization of the complete artificiality of the conditions under which they suffer, the remoteness from their real and vital needs of the issues for which they are asked to sacrifice all that they hold dear. They can rid themselves of the paralyzing belief that their relations with their neighbors are so complicated and mysterious as to be beyond their comprehension. They can bring themselves to grasp a plain and demonstrable truth, and to appreciate its full significance, which is that those to whom they have looked for guidance, those who have told them that in the preservation of the “Balance of Power,” and in the multiplication of colossal armaments lay the one chance of international peace, have been utterly, hopelessly, calamitously wrong. They can put to themselves these simple issues.

“By the terrible logic of events which now confront us we see that the methods advocated by those to whose training and wisdom we trusted to ensure peace among the nations have entirely failed. The system which we were induced reluctantly to support, far from preserving peace, has precipitated us into the greatest conflict in history, a conflict we passionately desired to avoid, and for the avoidance of which we made heavy sacrifices because, we were told, that therein lay our hope of averting it. The system was wrong. We must evolve another.”

The idea of a federalized Europe, regulated by an Areopagus, involving the disappearance, or substantial reduction, of standing armies and navies, and the submission of all disputes to a Central Council, is not to be dismissed. It is the ultimate goal to aim at. But it cannot be attained until the constitutionally governed democracies of the West are brought to realize how impossible it is that their moral and spiritual development and their happiness and well-being can be secured under a system of government which leaves them at the mercy of the intrigues and imbecilities of professional diplomatists and of the ambitions of military castes; helpless, too, in the face of an enormously powerful and internationalized private interest dependent for its profits upon the maintenance of that “armed peace” which is the inevitable prelude to the carnage and futility of war.

To awaken these sentiments among the democracies of this and other countries, to instil into them these convictions, to ensure the cooperation of all forces in all countries working to that end—is the task to which we must all turn our attention.

Potentates, diplomatists, and militarists made this war. They should not be allowed to arrange unchecked and uncontrolled the terms of peace and to decide alone the conditions which will follow it. The mass of the people who suffer from their blunders and their quarrels must claim the ineradicable right of participating in the future settlement.

And, when peace has come, the democratic parties of Europe must set before themselves a new province of political effort. That peace will be permanently preserved only if our artisans and industrialists keep up with the artisans and industrialists of other countries a constant and deliberate communication through their political parties and other organizations which will prevent misunderstandings and subdue the hatreds out of which war ultimately comes.

“The Morrow of the War,” Union of Democratic Control, London, Bulletin No. 1.

NO PEACE WITHOUT FEDERATION

The great war has now been going on long enough to enable mankind to form approximately correct views about its vast extent and scale of operations, its sudden interference with commerce and all other helpful international intercourse, its unprecedented wrecking of family happiness and continuity, its wiping out, as it proceeds, of the accumulated savings of many former generations in structures, objects of art, and industrial capital, and the huge burdens it is likely to impose on twentieth-century Europe. From all these points of view, it is evidently the most horrible calamity that has ever befallen the human race, and the most crucial trial to which civilization has been exposed. It is, and is to be, the gigantic struggle of these times between the forces which make for liberty and righteousness and those which make for the subjection of the individual man, the exaltation of the State, and the enthronement of physical force directed by a ruthless collective will. It threatens a sweeping betrayal of the best hopes of mankind.

Each of the nations involved, horrified at the immensity of the disaster, maintains that it is not responsible for the war; and each Government has issued a statement to prove that some other Government is responsible for the outbreak. This discussion, however, relates almost entirely to actions by monarchs and Cabinets between July 23 and August 4—a short period of hurried messages between the chancelleries of Europe—actions which only prove that the monarchs and ministers for foreign affairs could not, or at least did not, prevent the long-prepared general war from breaking out. The assassination of the Archduke and Duchess of Hohenberg, on the 28th of June, was in no proper sense a cause of the war, except as it was one of the consequences of the persistent aggressions of Austria-Hungary against her southeastern neighbors. Neither was Russian mobilization in four military districts on July 29 a cause of the war; for that was only an external manifestation of the Russian state of mind toward the Balkan peoples, a state of mind well known to all publicists ever since the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. No more was the invasion of Belgium by the German army on August 4 a true cause of the war, or even the cause, as distinguished from the occasion, of Great Britain’s becoming involved in it. By that action, Germany was only taking the first step in carrying out a long-cherished purpose, and in executing a judicious plan of campaign prepared many years in advance. The artificial panic in Germany about its exposed position between two powerful enemies, France and Russia, was not a genuine cause of the war; for the General Staff knew they had crushed France once, and were confident they could do it again in a month. As to Russia, it was, in their view, a huge nation, but very clumsy and dull in war.

The real causes of the war are all of many years’ standing; and all the nations now involved in the fearful catastrophe have contributed to the development of one or more of these effective causes. The fundamental causes are: (1) The maintenance of monarchical Governments, each sanctioned and supported by the national religion, and each furnished with a Cabinet selected by the monarch,—Governments which can make war without any previous consultation of the peoples through their elected representatives; (2) the constant maintenance of conscript armies, through which the entire able-bodied male population is trained in youth for service in the army or navy, and remains subject to the instant call of the Government till late in life, the officering of these permanent armies involving the creation of a large military class likely to become powerful in political, industrial, and social administration; (3) the creation of a strong, permanent bureaucracy within each nation for the management of both foreign and domestic affairs, much of whose work is kept secret from the public at large; and finally (4) the habitual use of military and naval forces to acquire new territories, contiguous or detached, without regard to the wishes of the people annexed or controlled. This last cause of the war is the most potent of the four, since it is strong in itself, and is apt to include one or more of the other three. It is the gratification of the lust for world-empire.

Of all the nations taking part in the present war, Great Britain is the only one which does not maintain a conscript army; but, on the other hand, Great Britain is the earliest modern claimant of world-empire by force, with the single exception of Spain, which long since abandoned that quest. Every one of these nations except little Servia has yielded to the lust for empire. Every one has permitted its monarch or its Cabinet to carry on secret negotiations liable at any time to commit the nation to war, or to fail in maintaining the peace of Europe or of the Near East. In the crowded diplomatic events of last July, no phenomenon is more striking than the exhibition of the power which the British people confide to the hands of their Foreign Secretary. In the interests of public liberty and public welfare no official should possess such powers as Sir Edward Grey used admirably—though in vain—last July. In all three of the empires engaged in the war there has long existed a large military caste which exerts a strong influence on the Government and its policies, and on the daily life of the people.

These being the real causes of the terrific convulsion now going on in Europe, it cannot be questioned that the nation in which these complex causes have taken strongest and most complete effect during the last fifty years is Germany. Her form of government has been imperialistic and autocratic in the highest degree. She has developed with great intelligence and assiduity the most formidable conscript army in the world, and the most influential and insolent military caste. Three times since 1864 she has waged war in Europe, and each time she has added to her territory without regard to the wishes of the annexed population. For twenty-five years she has exhibited a keen desire to obtain colonial possessions; and since 1896 she has been aggressive in this field. In her schools and universities the children and youth have been taught for generations that Germany is surrounded by hostile peoples, that her expansion in Europe and in other continents is resisted by jealous Powers which started earlier in the race for foreign possessions, and that the salvation of Germany has depended from the first, and will depend till the last, on the efficiency of her army and navy and the warlike spirit of her people. This instruction, given year after year by teachers, publicists, and rulers, was first generally accepted in Prussia, but now seems to be accepted by the entire empire as unified in 1871.

The attention of the civilized world was first called to this state of the German mind and will by the triumphant policies of Bismarck; but during the reign of the present Emperor the external aggressiveness of Germany and her passion for world-empire have grown to much more formidable proportions. Although the German Emperor has sometimes played the part of the peacemaker, he has habitually acted the war-lord in both speech and bearing, and has supported the military caste whenever it has been assailed. He is by inheritance, conviction, and practise a divine-right sovereign whose throne rests on an “invincible” army, an army conterminous with the nation. In the present tremendous struggle he carries his subjects with him in a rushing torrent of self-sacrificing patriotism. Mass-fanaticism and infectious enthusiasm seem to have deprived the leading class in Germany, for the moment, of all power to see, reason, and judge correctly—no new phenomenon in the world, but instructive in this case because it points to the grave defect in German education—the lack of liberty and, therefore, of practise in self-control.

The twentieth-century educated German is, however, by no means given over completely to material and physical aggrandizement and the worship of might. He cherishes a partly new conception of the State as a collective entity whose function is to develop and multiply, not the free, healthy, and happy individual man and woman, but higher and more effective types of humanity, made superior by a strenuous discipline which takes much account of the strong and ambitious, and little of the weak or meek. He rejects the ethics of the Beatitudes as unsound, but accepts the religion of Valor, which exalts strength, courage, endurance, and the ready sacrifice by the individual of liberty, happiness, and life itself for Germany’s honor and greatness. A nation of sixty millions holding these philosophical and religious views, and proposing to act on them in winning by force the empire of the world, threatens civilization with more formidable irruptions of a destroying host than any that history has recorded. The rush of the German army into Belgium, France, and Russia and its consequences to those lands have taught the rest of Europe to dread German domination, and—it is to be hoped—to make it impossible.

The real cause of the present convulsion is, then, the state of mind or temper of Germany, including her conception of national greatness, her theory of the State, and her intelligent and skilful use of all the forces of nineteenth-century applied science for the destructive purposes of war. It is, therefore, apparent that Europe can escape from the domination of Germany only by defeating her in her present undertakings; and that this defeat can be brought about only by using against her the same effective agencies of destruction and the same martial spirit on which Germany itself relies. Horrible as are the murderous and devastating effects of this war, there can be no lasting peace until Europe as a whole is ready to make some serious and far-reaching decisions in regard to governmental structures and powers. In all probability the sufferings and losses of this widespread war must go farther and cut deeper before Europe can be brought to the decisions which alone can give securities for lasting peace against Germany on the one hand and Russia on the other, or to either of these nations, or can give security for the future to any of the smaller nations of Continental Europe. There can, indeed, be no security for future peace in Europe until every European nation recognizes the fact that there is to be no such thing in the world as one dominating nation—no such thing as world-empire for any single nation—Great Britain, Germany, Russia, Japan, or China. There can be no sense of security against sudden invasion in Europe so long as all the able-bodied men are trained to be soldiers, and the best possible armies are kept constantly ready for instant use. There can be no secure peace in Europe until a federation of the European States is established, capable of making public contracts intended to be kept, and backed by an overwhelming international force subject to the orders of an international tribunal. The present convulsion demonstrates the impotence toward permanent peace of secret negotiations, of unpublished agreements, of treaties and covenants that can be broken on grounds of military necessity, of international law if without sanctions, of pious wishes, of economic and biological predictions, and of public opinion unless expressed through a firm international agreement, behind which stands an international force. When that international force has been firmly established it will be time to consider what proportionate reductions in national armaments can be prudently recommended. Until that glorious day dawns, no patriot and no lover of his kind can expect lasting peace in Europe or wisely advocate any reduction of armaments.

The hate-breeding and worse than brutal cruelties and devastations of the war with their inevitable moral and physical degradations ought to shock mankind into attempting a great step forward. Europe and America should undertake to exterminate the real causes of the catastrophe. In studying that problem the coming European conference can profit by the experience of the three prosperous and valid countries in which public liberty and the principle of federation have been most successfully developed—Switzerland, Great Britain, and the United States. Switzerland is a democratic federation which unites in a firm federal bond three different racial stocks speaking three unlike languages, and divided locally and irregularly between the Catholic Church and the Protestant. The so-called British Empire tends strongly to become a federation; and the methods of government both in Great Britain itself and in its affiliated commonwealths are becoming more and more democratic in substance. The war has brought this fact out in high relief. As to the United States, it is a strong federation of forty-eight heterogeneous States which has been proving for a hundred years that freedom and democracy are safer and happier for mankind than subjection to any sort of autocracy, and afford far the best training for national character and national efficiency. Republican France has not yet had time to give this demonstration, being encumbered with many survivals of the Bourbon and Napoleonic régimes, and being forced to maintain a conscript army.

It is an encouraging fact that every one of the political or governmental changes needed is already illustrated in the practise of one or more of the civilized nations. To exaggerate the necessary changes is to postpone or prevent a satisfactory outcome from the present calculated destructions and wrongs and the accompanying moral and religious chaos. Ardent proposals to remake the map of Europe, reconstruct European society, substitute republics for empires, and abolish armaments are in fact obstructing the road toward peace and good-will among men. That road is hard at best.

The immediate duty of the United States is presumably to prepare, on the basis of its present army and navy, to furnish an effective quota of the international force, servant of an international tribunal, which will make the ultimate issue of this most abominable of wars, not a truce, but a durable peace.

Charles W. Eliot, “The Road Toward Peace,” chap. XI.