Peace Theories and the Balkan War Part 6

In examining my critic's balance sheet I remarked that were his figures as complete as they were absurdly incomplete and misleading, I should still have been unimpressed. We all know that very marvellous results are possible with figures; but one can generally find some simple fact which puts them to the supreme test without undue mathematics. I do not know whether it has ever happened to my critic, as it has happened to me, while watching the gambling in the casino of a Continental watering resort, to have a financial genius present weird columns of figures, which demonstrate conclusively, irrefragably, that by this system which they embody one can break the bank and win a million. I have never examined these figures, and never shall, for this reason: the genius in question is prepared to sell his wonderful secret for twenty francs. Now, in the face of that fact I am not interested in his figures. If they were worth examination they would not be for sale.

And so in this matter there are certain test facts which upset the adroitest statistical legerdemain. Though, really, the fallacy which regards an addition of territory as an addition of wealth to the "owning" nation is a very much simpler matter than the fallacies lying behind gambling systems, which are bound up with the laws of chance and the law of averages and much else that philosophers will quarrel about till the end of time. It requires an exceptional mathematical brain really to refute those fallacies, whereas the one we are dealing with is due simply to the difficulty experienced by most of us in carrying in our heads two facts at the same time. It is so much easier to seize on one fact and forget the other. Thus we realize that when Germany has conquered Alsace-Lorraine she has "captured" a province worth, "cash value,"

in my critic's phrase, sixty-six millions sterling. What we overlook is that Germany has also captured the people who own the property and who continue to own it. We have multiplied by _x_, it is true, but we have overlooked the fact that we have had to divide by _x_, and that the resultant is consequently, so far as the individual is concerned, exactly what it was before. My critic remembered the multiplication all right, but he forgot the division.

Just think of all the theories, the impossible theories for which the "practical" man has dragged the nations into war: the Balance of Power, for instance. Fifteen or twenty years ago it was the ineradicable belief of fifty or sixty million Americans, good, honest, sincere, and astute folk, that it was their bounden duty, their manifest interest, to fight--and in the words of one of their Senators, annihilate--Great Britain, in the interests of the Monroe Doctrine (which is a form of the "Balance of Power"). I do not think any one knew what the Monroe Doctrine meant, or could coherently defend it. An American Amba.s.sador had an after-dinner story at the time.

"What is this I hear, Jones, that you do not believe in the Monroe Doctrine?"

"It is a wicked lie. I have said no such thing. I do believe in the Monroe Doctrine. I would lay down my life for it; I would die for it.

What I did say was that I didn't know what it meant."

And it was this vague theory which very nearly drove America into a war that would have been disastrous to the progress of Anglo-Saxon civilization.

This was at the time of the Venezuelan crisis: the United States, which for nearly one hundred years had lived in perfect peace with a British power touching her frontier along three thousand miles, laid it down as a doctrine that her existence was imperilled if Great Britain should extend by so much as a mile a vague frontier running through a South American swamp thousands of miles away. And for that cause these decent and honourable people were prepared to take all the risks that would be involved to Anglo-Saxon civilisation by a war between England and America. The present writer happened at that time to be living in America, and concerned with certain political work. Night after night he heard these fulminations against Great Britain; politicians, Congressmen, Senators, Governors, Ministers, Preachers, clamouring for war, for a theory as vague and as little practical as one could wish.

And we, of course, have had our like obsessions without number: "the independence integrity of the Turkish dominion in Europe" is one. Just think of it! Take in the full sound of the phrase: "the independence integrity of the Turkish dominion in Europe!"

What, of course, makes these fantastic political doctrines possible, what leads men to subscribe to them, are a few false general conceptions to which they hold tenaciously--as all fundamental conceptions are held, and ought to be. The general conceptions in question are precisely the ones I have indicated: that nations are rival and struggling units, that military force is consequently the determining factor of their relative advantage; that enlargement of political frontiers is the supreme need, and so on.

And the revision of these fundamental conceptions will, of course, be the general work of Christendom, and given the conditions which now obtain, the development will go on _pari pa.s.su_ in all nations or not all. It will not be the work of "nations" at all; it will be the work of individual men.

States do not think. It is the men who form the states who think, and the number of those men who will act as pioneers in a better policy must, of course, at first be small: a group here and a group there, the best men of all countries--England, France, Germany, America--influencing by their ideas finally the great ma.s.s. To say, as so many do in this matter: "Let other nations do it first" is, of course, to condemn us all to impotence--for the other nations use the same language. To ask that one group of forty or seventy or ninety million people shall by some sort of magic all find their way to a saner doctrine before such doctrine has affected other groups is to talk the language of childishness. Things do not happen in that in human affairs.

It is not in that way that opinion grows. It did not grow in that way in any one of the steps that I have mentioned--in the abolition of religious persecution, or slavery, or judicial torture. Unless the individual man sees his responsibility for determining what is right and knowing how and why it is right, there will be no progress; there cannot even be a beginning.

We are to an even greater degree an integral part of European Society, and a factor of European Policy, than we were at the time of the Crimean War, when we mainly determined it; and our theories and discussions will act and re-act upon that policy just as did any considerable body of thought, whether French political thought of the eighteenth century, or German religious thought of the sixteenth century, even at a time when the means of producing that reaction, the book, literature, the newspaper, rapid communication, were so immeasurably more primitive and rudimentary than ours. What we think and say and do affects not merely ourselves, but that whole body politic of Christendom of which we are an integral part.

It is a curious fact that the moral and intellectual interdependence of States preceded by a long period, that material and economic independence which I have tried recently to make clear. Nothing is more contrary to fact than to suppose that any considerable movement of opinion in Europe can be limited to the frontiers of one nation. Even at a time when it took half a generation for a thought to travel from one capital to another, a student or thinker in some obscure Italian, Swiss or German village was able to modify policy, to change the face of Europe and of mankind. Coming nearer to our time, it was the work of the encyclopaedists and earlier political questioners which made the French Revolution; and the effect of that Revolution was not confined to France. The ideas which animated it re-acted directly upon our Empire, upon the American Colonies, upon the Spanish Colonies, upon Italy, and the formation of United Italy, upon Germany--the world over. These miracles, almost too vast and great to conceive, were the outcome of that intangible thing, an idea, an aspiration, an ideal. And if they could accomplish so much in that day when the popular press and cheap literature and improved communication did not exist, how is it possible to suppose that any great ferment of opinion can be limited to one group in our day, when we have a condition of things in which the declaration of an English Cabinet Minister to-night is read to-morrow morning by every reading German?

It should be to our everlasting glory that our political thought in the past, some of our political inst.i.tutions, parliamentary government, and what not, have had an enormous influence in the world. We have some ground for hoping that another form of political inst.i.tution which we have initiated, a relations.h.i.+p of distinct political groups into which force does not enter, will lead the way to a better condition of things in Christendom. We have demonstrated that five independent nations, the nations of the British Empire, can settle their differences as between one another without the use of force. We have definitely decided that whatever the att.i.tude Australia, Canada, and South Africa may adopt to us we shall not use force to change it. What is possible with five is possible with fifteen nations. Just as we have given to the world roughly our conception of Parliamentary Government, so it is to be hoped may we give to the world our conception of the true relations.h.i.+p of nations.

The great steps of the past--religious freedom, the abolition of torture and of slavery, the rights of the ma.s.s, self-government--every real step which man has made has been made because men "theorised," because a Galileo, or a Luther, or a Calvin, or a Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Spencer, Darwin, wrote and put notes of interrogation. Had they not done so none of those things could have been accomplished. The greatest work of the renaissance was the elimination of physical force in the struggle of religious groups, in religious struggles generally; the greatest work of our generation will be elimination of physical force from the struggle of the political groups and from political struggles generally.

But it will be done in exactly the same way: by a common improvement of opinion. And because we possess immeasurably better instruments for the dissemination of ideas, we should be able to achieve the Political Reformation of Europe much more rapidly and effectively than our predecessors achieved the great intellectual Reformation of their time.

CHAPTER VIII.

WHAT MUST WE _DO_?

We must have the right political faith--Then we must give effect to it--Good intention not enough--The organization of the great forces of modern life--Our indifference as to the foundations of the evil--The only hope.

What then must we _do_? Well the first and obvious thing is for each to do his civic duty, for each to determine that he at least shall not reject, with that silly temper which nearly always meets most new points of view, principles which do at least seek to explain things, and do point to the possibility of a better way.

The first thing is to make our own policy right--and that is the work of each one of us; to correct the temper which made us, for instance, to our shame, the partners of the Turk in his work of oppression.

And we must realise that mere good intent does not suffice; that understanding, by which alone we can make headway, is not arrived at by a pleasant emotion like that produced by a Beethoven Sonata; that we pay for our progress in a little harder money than that, the money of hard work, in which must be included hard thinking. And having got that far, we must realise that sound ideas do not spread themselves. They are spread by men. It is one of the astonis.h.i.+ng things in the whole problem of the breaking of war, that while men realise that if women are to have votes, or men to be made temperate, or the White Slave Traffic to be stopped, or for that matter, if battles.h.i.+ps are to be built, or conscription to be introduced, or soap or pills to be sold, effort, organisation, time, money, must be put into these things. But the greatest revolution that the world has known since mankind acquired the right to freedom of opinion, will apparently get itself accomplished without any of these things; or that at least the Government can quite easily attend to it by asking other Governments to attend a Conference.

We must realise that a change of opinion, the recognition of a new fact, or of facts heretofore not realised, is a slow and laborious work, even in the relatively simple things which I have mentioned, and that you cannot make savages into civilised men by collecting them round a table.

For the Powers of Europe, so far as their national policies are concerned, are still uncivilised individuals. And their Conferences are bound to fail, when each unit has the falsest conception concerning the matters under discussion. Governments are the embodied expression of general public opinion--and not the best public opinion at that; and until opinion is modified, the embodiment of it will no more be capable of the necessary common action, than would Red Indians be capable of forming an efficient Court of Law, while knowing nothing of law or jurisprudence, or worse still, having utterly false notions of the principles upon which human society is based.

And the occasional conferences of private men still hazy as to these principles are bound to be as ineffective. If the mere meeting and contact of people cleared up misunderstandings, we should not have Suffragettes and Anti-Suffragettes, or Mr. Lloyd George at grips with the doctors.

These occasional conferences, whether official, like those of the Hague, or non-official like those which occasionally meet in London or in Berlin, will not be of great avail in this matter unless a better public opinion renders them effective. They are of some use and no one would desire to see them dropped, but they will not of themselves stem or turn the drift of opinion. What is needed is a permanent organisation of propaganda, framed, not for the purpose of putting some cut and dried scheme into immediate operation, but with the purpose of clarifying European public opinion, making the great ma.s.s see a few simple facts straight, instead of crooked, and founded in the hope that ten or fifteen years of hard, steady, persistent work, will create in that time (by virtue of the superiority of the instruments, the Press and the rest of it which we possess) a revolution of opinion as great as that produced at the time of the Reformation, in a period which probably was not more than the lifetime of an ordinary man.

The organization for such permanent work has hardly begun. The Peace Societies have done, and are doing, a real service, but it is evident, for the reasons already indicated, that if the great ma.s.s are to be affected, instruments of far wider sweep must be used. Our great commercial and financial interests, our educational and academic inst.i.tutions, our industrial organizations, the political bodies, must all be reached. An effort along the right lines has been made thanks to the generosity of a more than ordinarily enlightened Conservative capitalist. But the work should be taken up at a hundred points. Some able financier should do for the organization of Banking--which has really become the Industry of Finance and Credit--the same sort of service that Sir Charles Macara has done for the cotton industry of the world. The international action and co-ordination of Trades Unions the world over should be made practical and not, in this matter, be allowed to remain a merely platonic aspiration.

The greater European Universities should possess endowed Chairs of the Science of International Statecraft. While we have Chairs to investigate the nature of the relations.h.i.+p of insects, we have none to investigate the nature of the relations.h.i.+p of man in his political grouping. And the occupants of these Chairs might change places--that of Berlin coming to London or Oxford, and that of Oxford going to Berlin.

The English Navy League and the German Navy League alike tell us that the object of their endeavours is to create an instrument of peace. In that case their efforts should not be confined to increasing the size of the respective arms, but should also be directed to determining how and why and when, and under what conditions, and for what purpose that arm should be used. And that can only be done effectually if the two bodies learn something of the aims and objects of the other. The need for a Navy, and the size of the Navy, depends upon policy, either our own policy, or the policy of the prospective aggressor; and to know something of that, and its adjustment, is surely an integral part of national defence. If both these Navy Leagues, in the fifteen or sixteen years during which they have been in existence, had possessed an intelligence committee, each conferring with the other, and spending even a fraction of the money and energy upon disentangling policy that has been spent upon the sheer bull-dog piling up of armaments, in all human possibility, the situation which now confronts us would not exist.

Then each political party of the respective Parliaments might have its accredited delegates in the Lobbies of the other: the Social Democrats might have their permanent delegates in London, in the Lobbies of the House of Commons; the Labour Party might have their Permanent Delegates in the Lobbies of the Reichstag; and when any Anglo-German question arose, those delegates could speak through the mouth of the Members of the Party to which they were accredited, to the Parliament of the other nation. The Capitalistic parties could have a like bi-national organisation.

"These are wild and foolish suggestions"--that is possible. They have never, however, been discussed with a view to the objects in question.

All efforts in this direction have been concentrated upon an attempt to realize mechanically, by some short and royal road, a result far too great and beneficent to be achieved so cheaply.

Before our Conferences, official or unofficial, can have much success, the parties to them must divest their minds of certain illusions which at present dominate them. Until that is done, you might as reasonably expect two cannibals to arrive at a workable scheme for consuming one another. The elementary conceptions, the foundations of the thing are unworkable. Our statecraft is still founded on a sort of political cannibalism, upon the idea that nations progress by conquering, or dominating one another. So long as that is our conception of the relations.h.i.+p of human groups we shall always stand in danger of collision, and our schemes of a.s.sociation and co-operation will always break down.

APPENDIX.

Many of the points touched upon in the last two chapters are brought out clearly in a recent letter addressed to the Press by my friend and colleague Mr. A.W. Hayc.o.c.k. In this letter to the Press he says:--

If you will examine systematically, as I have done, the comments which have appeared in the Liberal Press, either in the form of leading articles, or in letters from readers, concerning Lord Roberts' speech, you will find that though it is variously described as "diabolical," "pernicious," "wicked," "inflammatory"

and "criminal," the real fundamental a.s.sumptions on which the whole speech is based, and which, if correct, justify it, are by implication admitted; at any rate, in not one single case that I can discover are they seriously challenged.

Now, when you consider this, it is the most serious fact of the whole incident--far more disquieting in reality than the fact of the speech itself, especially when we remember that Lord Roberts did but adopt and adapt the arguments already used with more sensationalism and less courtesy by Mr. Winston Churchill himself.

The protests against Lord Roberts' speech take the form of denying the intention of Germany to attach this country. But how can his critics be any more aware of the intentions of Germany--65 millions of people acted upon by all sorts of complex political and social forces--than is Lord Roberts? Do we know the intention of England with reference to Woman's Suffrage or Home Rule or Tariff Reform?

How, therefore, can we know the intentions of "Germany"?

Lord Roberts, with courtesy, in form at least and with the warmest tribute to the "n.o.ble and imaginative patriotism" of German policy, a.s.sumed that that policy would follow the same general impulse that our own has done in the past, and would necessarily follow it since the relation between military power and national greatness and prosperity was to-day what it always has been. In effect, Lord Roberts' case amounts to this:--

"We have built up our Empire and our trade by virtue of the military power of our state; we exist as a nation, sail the seas, and carry on our trade, by virtue of our predominant strength; as that strength fails we shall do all these things merely on the sufferance of stronger nations, who, when pushed by the needs of an expanding population to do so, will deprive us of the capacity for carrying on those vital functions of life, and transfer the means of so doing to themselves to their very great advantage; we have achieved such transfer to ourselves in the past by force and must expect other nations to try and do the same thing unless we are able to prevent them. It is the inevitable struggles of life to be fought out either by war or armaments."

These are not Lord Roberts' words, but the proposition is the clear underlying a.s.sumption of his speech. And his critics do not seriously challenge it. Mr. Churchill by implication warmly supports it. At Glasgow he said: "The whole fortune of our race and Empire, the whole treasure acc.u.mulated during so many centuries of sacrifice and achievement would perish and be swept utterly away, if our naval supremacy were to be impaired."

Now why should there be any danger of Germany bringing about this catastrophe unless she could profit enormously by so doing? But that implies that a nation does expand by military force, does achieve the best for its people by that means; it does mean that if you are not stronger than your rival, you carry on your trade "on sufferance" and at the appointed hour will have it taken from you by him. And if that a.s.sumption--plainly indicated as it is by a Liberal Minister--is right, who can say that Lord Roberts'

conclusion is not justified?

Now as to the means of preventing the war. Lord Roberts' formula is:--

"Such a battle front by sea and land that no power or probable combination of powers shall dare to attack us without the certainty of disaster."

This, of course, is taken straight from Mr. Churchill, who, at Dundee, told us that "the way to make war impossible is to be so strong as to make victory certain."