The Great Illusion Part 13

A writer on contemporary Spain remarks that any intelligent middle-cla.s.s Spaniard will admit every charge of incompetence which can be brought against the conduct of public affairs.

"Yes, we have a wretched Government. In any other country somebody would be shot." This is the hopeless military creed: killing somebody is the only remedy.

Here we see a trace of that intellectual legacy which Spain has left to the New World, and which has stamped itself so indelibly on the history of Spanish America. On a later occasion in this connection I wrote as follows:

To appreciate the outcome of much soldiering, the condition in which persistent military training may leave a race, one should study Spanish America. Here we have a collection of some score of States, all very much alike in social and political make-up.

Most of the South American States so resemble one another in language, laws, inst.i.tutions, that to an outsider it would seem not to matter a straw under which particular six-months-old republic one should live; whether one be under the Government of the p.r.o.nunciamento-created President of Colombia, or under that of the President of Venezuela, one's condition would appear to be much the same. Apparently no particular country has anything which differentiates it from another, and, consequently, anything to protect against the other. Actually, the Governments might all change places and the people be none the wiser. Yet, so hypnotized, are these little States by the "necessity for self-protection," by the glamour of armaments, that there is not one without a relatively elaborate and expensive military establishment to protect it from the rest.

No conditions seem so propitious for a practical confederation as those of Spanish America; with a few exceptions, the virtual unity of language, laws, general race-ideals, would seem to render protection of frontiers supererogatory. Yet the citizens give untold wealth, service, life, and suffering to be protected against a Government exactly like their own. All this waste of life and energy has gone on without it ever occurring to one of these States that it would be preferable to be annexed a thousand times over, so trifling would be the resulting change in their condition, than continue the everlasting and futile tribute of blood and treasure. Over some absolutely unimportant matter--like that of the Patagonian roads, which nearly brought Argentina and Chili to grips the other day--as much patriotic devotion will be expended as ever the Old Guard lavished in protecting the honor of the Tricolor.

Battles will be fought which will make all the struggles in South Africa appear mean in comparison. Actions in which the dead are counted in thousands will excite no more comment in the world than that produced by a skirmish in Natal, in which a score of yeomen are captured and released.[78]

In the decade since the foregoing was written things have enormously improved in South America. Why? For the simple reason, as pointed out in Chapter V. of the first part of this book, that Spanish America is being brought more and more into the economic movement of the world; and with the establishment of factories, in which large capital has been sunk, banks, businesses, etc., the whole att.i.tude of mind of those interested in these ventures is changed. The Jingo, the military adventurer, the fomentor of trouble, are seen for what they are--not as patriots, but as representing exceedingly mischievous and maleficent forces.

This general truth has two facets: if long warfare diverts a people from the capacity for industry, so in the long run economic pressure--the influences, that is, which turn the energies of people to preoccupation with social well-being--is fatal to the military tradition. Neither tendency is constant; warfare produces poverty; poverty pushes to thrift and work, which result in wealth; wealth creates leisure and pride and pushes to warfare.

Where Nature does not respond readily to industrial effort, where it is, at least apparently, more profitable to plunder than to work, the military tradition survives. The Beduin has been a bandit since the time of Abraham, for the simple reason that the desert does not support industrial life nor respond to industrial effort. The only career offering a fair apparent return for effort is plunder. In Morocco, in Arabia, in all very poor pastoral countries, the same phenomenon is exhibited; in mountainous countries which are arid and are removed from the economic centres, _idem_. The same may have been to some extent the case in Prussia before the era of coal and iron; but the fact that to-day 99 per cent. of the population is normally engaged in trade and industry, and 1 per cent. only in military preparation, and some fraction too small to be properly estimated engaged in actual war, shows how far she has outgrown such a state--shows, incidentally, what little chance the ideal and tradition represented by 1 per cent. or some fractional percentage has against interests and activities represented by 99 per cent. The recent history of South and Central America, because it is recent, and because the factors are less complicated, ill.u.s.trates best the tendency with which we are dealing. Spanish America inherited the military tradition in all its vigor. As I have already pointed out, the Spanish occupation of the American Continent was a process of conquest rather than of colonizing; and while the mother country got poorer and poorer by the process of conquest, the new countries also impoverished themselves in adherence to the same fatal illusion. The glamour of conquest was, of course, Spain's ruin. So long as it was possible for her to live on extorted bullion, neither social nor industrial development seemed possible. Despite the common idea to the contrary, Germany has known how to keep this fatal hypnotism at bay, and, far from allowing her military activities to absorb her industrial, it is precisely the military activities which are in a fair way now to being absorbed by the industrial and commercial, and her world commerce has its foundation, not in tribute or bullion exacted at the sword's point, but in sound and honest exchange. So that to-day the legitimate commercial tribute which Germany, who never sent a soldier there, exacts from Spanish America is immensely greater than that which goes to Spain, who poured out blood and treasure during three centuries on these territories. In this way, again, do the warlike nations inherit the earth!

If Germany is never to duplicate Spain's decadence, it is precisely because (1) she has never had, historically, Spain's temptation to live by conquest, and (2) because, having to live by honest industry, her commercial hold, even upon the territories conquered by Spain, is more firmly set than that of Spain herself.

How may we sum up the whole case, keeping in mind every empire that ever existed--the a.s.syrian, the Babylonian, the Mede and Persian, the Macedonian, the Roman, the Frank, the Saxon, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Bourbon, the Napoleonic? In all and every one of them we may see the same process, which is this: If it remains military it decays; if it prospers and takes its share of the work of the world it ceases to be military. There is no other reading of history.

That history furnishes no justification for the plea that pugnacity and antagonism between nations is bound up in any way with the real process of national survival, shows clearly enough that nations nurtured normally in peace are more than a match for nations nurtured normally in war; that communities of non-military tradition and instincts, like the Anglo-Saxon communities of the New World, show elements of survival stronger than those possessed by communities animated by the military tradition, like the Spanish and Portuguese nations of the New World; that the position of the industrial nations in Europe as compared with the military gives no justification for the plea that the warlike qualities make for survival. It is clearly evident that there is no biological justification in the terms of man's political evolution for the perpetuation of antagonism between nations, nor any justification for the plea that the diminution of such antagonism runs counter to the teachings of the "natural law." There is no such natural law; in accordance with natural laws, men are being thrust irresistibly towards co-operation between communities and not towards conflict.

There remains the argument that, though the conflict itself may make for degeneration, the preparation for that conflict makes for survival, for the improvement of human nature. I have already touched upon the hopeless confusion which comes of the plea that, while long-continued peace is bad, military preparations find justification in that they insure peace.

Almost every defence of militarism includes a sneer at the ideal of peace because it involves the Cobdenite state of buying cheap and selling dear. But, with equal regularity, the advocate of the military system goes on to argue for great armaments, not as a means of promoting war, that valuable school, etc., but as the best means of securing peace; in other words, that condition of "buying cheap and selling dear"

which but a moment before he has condemned as so defective. As though to make the stultification complete, he pleads for the peace value of military training, on the ground that German commerce has benefited from it--that, in other words, it has promoted the "Cobdenite ideal." The a.n.a.lysis of the reasoning, as has been brilliantly shown by Mr. John M.

Robertson,[79] gives a result something like this: (1) War is a great school of morals, therefore we must have great armaments to insure peace; (2) to secure peace engenders the Cobdenite ideal, which is bad, therefore we should adopt conscription, (_a_) because it is the best safeguard of peace, (_b_) because it is a training for commerce--the Cobdenite ideal.

Is it true that barrack training--the sort of school which the compet.i.tion of armaments during the last generation has imposed on the people of Continental Europe--makes for moral health? Is it likely that a "perpetual rehearsal for something never likely to come off, and when it comes off is not like the rehearsal," should be a training for life's realities? Is it likely that such a process would have the stamp and touch of closeness to real things? Is it likely that the mechanical routine of artificial occupations, artificial crimes, artificial virtues, artificial punishments should form any training for the battle of real life?[80] What of the Dreyfus case? What of the abominable scandals that have marked German military life of late years? If peace military training is such a fine school, how could the London _Times_ write thus of France after she had submitted to a generation of a very severe form of it:

A thrill of horror and shame ran through the whole civilized world outside France when the result of the Rennes Court-Martial became known.... By their (the officers') own admission, whether flung defiantly at the judges, their inferiors, or wrung from them under cross-examination, Dreyfus's chief accusers were convicted of gross and fraudulent illegalities which, anywhere, would have sufficed, not only to discredit their testimony--had they any serious testimony to offer--but to transfer them speedily from the witness-box to the prisoner's dock.... Their vaunted honor "rooted in dishonor stood." ... Five judges out of the seven have once more demonstrated the truth of the astounding axiom first propounded during the Zola trial, that "military justice is not as other justice." ... We have no hesitation in saying that the Rennes Court-Martial const.i.tutes in itself the grossest, and, viewed in the light of the surrounding circ.u.mstances, the most appalling prost.i.tution of justice which the world has witnessed in modern times.... Flagrantly, deliberately, mercilessly trampled justice underfoot.... The verdict, which is a slap in the face to the public opinion of the civilized world, to the conscience of humanity.... France is henceforth on her trial before history. Arraigned at the bar of a tribunal far higher than that before which Dreyfus stood, it rests with her to show whether she will undo this great wrong and rehabilitate her fair name, or whether she will stand irrevocably condemned and disgraced by allowing it to be consummated. We can less than ever afford to underrate the forces against truth and justice.... Hypnotized by the wild tales perpetually dinned into all credulous ears of an international "syndicate of treason," conspiring against the honor of the army and the safety of France, the conscience of the French nation has been numbed, and its intelligence atrophied.... Amongst those statesmen who are in touch with the outside world in the Senate and Chamber there must be some that will remind her that nations, no more than individuals, cannot bear the burden of universal scorn and live.... France cannot close her ears to the voice of the civilized world, for that voice is the voice of history.[81]

And what the _Times_ said then all England was saying, and not only all England, but all America.

And has Germany escaped a like condemnation? We commonly a.s.sume that the Dreyfus case could not be duplicated in Germany. But this is not the opinion of very many Germans themselves. Indeed, just before the Dreyfus case reached its crisis, the Kotze scandal--in its way just as grave as the Dreyfus affair, and revealing a moral condition just as serious--prompted the London _Times_ to declare that "certain features of German civilization are such as to make it difficult for Englishmen to understand how the whole State does not collapse from sheer rottenness." If that could be said of the Kotze affair, what shall be said of the state of things which has been revealed by Maximilien Harden among others?

Need it be said that the writer of these lines does not desire to represent Germans as a whole as more corrupt than their neighbors? But impartial observers are not of opinion, and very many Germans are not of opinion, that there has been either economic, social, or moral advantage to the German people from the victories of 1870 and the state of regimentation which the sequel has imposed. This is surely evidenced by the actual position of affairs in the German Empire, the complex difficulty with which the German people are now struggling, the growing discontent, the growing influence of those elements which are nurtured in discontent, the growth on one side of radical intransigence and on the other of almost feudal autocracy, the failure to effect normally and easily those democratic developments which have been effected in almost every other European State, the danger for the future which such a situation represents, the precariousness of German finance, the relatively small profit which her population as a whole has received from the greatly increased foreign trade--all this, and much more, confirms that view. England has of late seemed to have been affected with the German superst.i.tion. With the curious perversity that marks "patriotic" judgments, the whole tendency of the English has been to make comparisons with Germany to the disadvantage of themselves and of other European countries. Yet if Germans themselves are to be believed, much of that superiority which the English see in Germany is as purely non-existent as the phantom German war-balloon to which the British Press devoted serious columns, to the phantom army corps in Epping Forest, to the phantom stories of arms in London cellars, and to the German spy which English patriots see in every Italian waiter.[82]

Despite the hypnotism which German "progress" seems to exercise on the minds of English Jingoes, the German people themselves, as distinct from the small group of Prussian Junkers, are not in the least enamored of it, as is proved by the unparalleled growth of the social-democratic element, which is the negation of military imperialism, and which, as the figures in Prussia prove, receives support not from one cla.s.s of the population merely, but from the mercantile, industrial, and professional cla.s.ses as well. The agitation for electoral reform in Prussia shows how acute the conflict has become; on the one side the increasing democratic element showing more and more of a revolutionary tendency, and on the other side the Prussian autocracy showing less and less disposition to yield. Does anyone really believe that the situation will remain there, that the Democratic parties will continue to grow in numbers and be content for ever to be ridden down by the "booted Prussian," and that German democracy will indefinitely accept a situation in which it will be always possible--in the words of the Junker, von Oldenburg, member of the Reichstag--for the German Emperor to say to a Lieutenant, "Take ten men and close the Reichstag"?

What must be the German's appreciation of the value of military victory and militarization when, mainly because of it, he finds himself engaged in a struggle which elsewhere less militarized nations settled a generation since? And what has the English defender of the militarist regimen, who holds the German system up for imitation, to say of it as a school of national discipline, when the Imperial Chancellor himself defends the refusal of democratic suffrage like that obtaining in England on the ground that the Prussian people have not yet acquired those qualities of public discipline which make it workable in England?[83]

Yet what Prussia, in the opinion of the Chancellor, is not yet fit for, Scandinavian nations, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, have fitted themselves for without the aid of military victory and subsequent regimentation. Did not someone once say that the war had made Germany great and Germans small?

When we ascribe so large a measure of Germany's social progress (which no one, so far as I know, is concerned to deny) to the victories and regimentation, why do we conveniently overlook the social progress of the small States which I have just mentioned, where such progress on the material side has certainly been as great as, and on the moral side greater than, in Germany? Why do we overlook the fact that, if Germany has done well in certain social organizations, Scandinavia and Switzerland have done better? And why do we overlook the fact that, if regimentation is of such social value, it has been so completely inoperative in States which are more highly militarized even than Germany--in Spain, Italy, Austria, Turkey, and Russia?

But even a.s.suming--a very large a.s.sumption--that regimentation has played the role in German progress which English Germano-maniacs would have us believe, is there any justification for supposing that a like process would be in any way adaptable to English conditions social, moral, material, and historical?

The position of Germany since the war of 1870--what it has stood for in the generation since victory, and what it stood for in the generations that followed defeat--furnishes a much-needed lesson as to the outcome of the philosophy of force. Practically all impartial observers of Germany are in agreement with Mr. Harb.u.t.t Dawson when he writes as follows:

It is questionable whether unified Germany counts as much to-day as an intellectual and moral agent in the world as when it was little better than a geographical expression.... Germany has at command an apparently inexhaustible reserve of physical and material force, but the real influence and power which it exerts is disproportionately small. The history of civilization is full of proofs that the two things are not synonymous. A nation's mere force is, on ultimate a.n.a.lysis, its sum of brute strength. This force may, indeed, go with intrinsic power, yet such power can never depend permanently on force, and the test is easy to apply.... No one who genuinely admires the best in the German character, and who wishes well to the German people, will seek to minimize the extent of the loss which would appear to have befallen the old national ideals; hence the discontent of the enlightened cla.s.ses with the political laws under which they live--a discontent often vague and indefinite, the discontent of men who do not know clearly what is wrong or what they want, but feel that a free play is denied them which belongs to the dignity and worth and essence of human personality.

"Is there a German culture to-day?" asks Fuchs.[84] "We Germans are able to perfect all works of civilizing power as well as, and indeed better than, the best in other nations. Yet nothing that the heroes of labor execute goes beyond our own border." And the most extraordinary thing is that those who do not in the least deny this condition to which Germany has fallen--who, indeed, exaggerate it, and ask us with triumph to look upon the brutality of German method and German conception--ask us to go and follow Germany's example!

Most British pro-armament agitation is based upon the plea that Germany is dominated by a philosophy of force. They point to books like those of General Bernhardi, idealizing the employment of force, and then urge a policy of replying by force--and force only--which would, of course, justify in Germany the Bernhardi school, and by the reaction of opposing forces stereotype the philosophy in Europe and make it part of the general European tradition. England stands in danger of becoming Prussianized by virtue of the fact of fighting Prussianism, or rather by virtue of the fact that, instead of fighting it with the intellectual tools that won religious freedom in Europe, she insists upon confining her efforts to the tools of physical force.

Some of the acutest foreign students of English progress--men like Edmond Demolins--ascribe it to the very range of qualities which the German system is bound to crush; their apt.i.tude for initiative, their reliance upon their own efforts, their st.u.r.dy resistance to State interference (already weakening), their impatience with bureaucracy and red tape (also weakening), all of which is wrapped up with general rebelliousness to regimentation.

Though the English base part of the defence of armaments on the plea that, economic interest apart, they desire to live their own life in their own way, to develop in their own fas.h.i.+on, do they not run some danger that with this mania for the imitation of German method they may Germanize England, though never a German soldier land on their soil?

Of course, it is always a.s.sumed that, though the English may adopt the French and German system of conscription, they could never fall a victim to the defects of those systems, and that the scandals which break out from time to time in France and Germany could never be duplicated by _their_ barrack system, and that the military atmosphere of their own barracks, the training in their own army, would always be wholesome.

But what do even its defenders say?

Mr. Blatchford himself says:[85]

Barrack life is bad. Barrack life will always be bad. It is never good for a lot of men to live together apart from home influences and feminine. It is not good for women to live or work in communities of women. The s.e.xes react upon each other; each provides for the other a natural restraint, a wholesome incentive.... The barracks and the garrison town are not good for young men. The young soldier, fenced and hemmed in by a discipline unnecessarily severe, and often stupid, has at the same time an amount of license which is dangerous to all but those of strong good sense and strong will. I have seen clean, good, nice boys come into the Army and go to the devil in less than a year. I am no Puritan. I am a man of the world; but any sensible and honest man who has been in the Army will know at once that what I am saying is entirely true, and is the truth expressed with much restraint and moderation. A few hours in a barrack-room would teach a civilian more than all the soldier stories ever written. When I joined the Army I was unusually unsophisticated for a boy of twenty. I had been brought up by a mother. I had attended Sunday-school and chapel. I had lived a quiet, sheltered life, and I had an astonis.h.i.+ng amount to learn. The language of the barrack-room shocked me, appalled me. I could not understand half I heard; I could not credit much that I saw. When I began to realize the truth, I took my courage in both hands and went about the world I had come into with open eyes. So I learnt the facts, but I must not tell them.[86]

CHAPTER V

THE DIMINIs.h.i.+NG FACTOR OF PHYSICAL FORCE: PSYCHOLOGICAL RESULTS

Diminis.h.i.+ng factor of physical force--Though diminis.h.i.+ng, physical force has always had an important role in human affairs--What is underlying principle, determining advantageous and disadvantageous use of physical force?--Force that aids co-operation in accord with law of man's advance: force that is exercised for parasitism in conflict with such law and disadvantageous for both parties--Historical process of the abandonment of physical force--The Khan and the London tradesman--Ancient Rome and modern Britain--The sentimental defence of war as the purifier of human life--The facts--The redirection of human pugnacity.

Despite the general tendency indicated by the facts dealt with in the preceding chapter, it will be urged (with perfect justice) that, though the methods of Anglo-Saxondom as compared with those of the Spanish, Portuguese, and French Empires, may have been mainly commercial and industrial rather than military, war was a necessary part of expansion; that but for some fighting the Anglo-Saxons would have been ousted from North America or Asia, or would never have gained a footing there.

Does this, however, prevent us establis.h.i.+ng, on the basis of the facts exposed in the preceding chapter, a general principle sufficiently definite to serve as a practical guide in policy, and to indicate reliably a general tendency in human affairs? a.s.suredly not. The principle which explains the uselessness of much of the force exerted by the military type of empire, and justifies in large part that employed by Britain, is neither obscure nor uncertain, although empiricism, rule of thumb (which is the curse of political thinking in our days, and more than anything else stands in the way of real progress), gets over the difficulty by declaring that no principle in human affairs can be pushed to its logical or theoretical conclusion; that what may be "right in theory" is wrong in practice.

Thus Mr. Roosevelt, who expresses with such admirable force and vigor the average thoughts of his hearers or readers, takes generally this line: We must be peaceful, but not too peaceful; warlike, but not too warlike; moral, but not too moral.[87]

By such verbal mystification we are encouraged to s.h.i.+rk the rough and stony places along the hard road of thinking. If we cannot carry a principle to its logical conclusion, at what point are we to stop? One will fix one and another will fix another with equal justice. What is it to be "moderately" peaceful, or "moderately" warlike? Temperament and predilection can stretch such limitations indefinitely. This sort of thing only darkens counsel.

If a theory is right, it can be pushed to its logical conclusion; indeed, the only real test of its value is that it _can_ be pushed to its logical conclusion. If it is wrong in practice, it is wrong in theory, for the right theory will take cognizance of all the facts, not only of one set.

In Chapter II. of this part (pp. 186-192), I have very broadly indicated the process by which the employment of physical force in the affairs of the world has been a constantly diminis.h.i.+ng factor since the day that primitive man killed his fellow-man in order to eat him. Yet throughout the whole process the employment of force has been an integral part of progress, until even to-day in the most advanced nations force--the police-force--is an integral part of their civilization.

What, then, is the principle determining the advantageous and the disadvantageous employment of force?

Preceding the outline sketch just referred to is another sketch indicating the real biological law of man's survival and advance; the key to that law is found in co-operation between men and struggle with nature. Mankind as a whole is the organism which needs to co-ordinate its parts in order to insure greater vitality by better adaptation to its environment.

Here, then, we get the key: force employed to secure completer co-operation between the parts, to facilitate exchange, makes for advance; force which runs counter to such co-operation, which attempts to replace the mutual benefit of exchange by compulsion, which is in any way a form of parasitism, makes for retrogression.

Why is the employment of force by the police justified? Because the bandit refuses to co-operate. He does not offer an exchange; he wants to live as a parasite, to take by force, and give nothing in exchange. If he increased in numbers, co-operation between the various parts of the organism would be impossible; he makes for disintegration. He must be restrained, and so long as the police use their force in such restraint they are merely insuring co-operation. The police are not attempting to settle things by force; they are preventing things from being settled in that way.

Now, suppose that this police-force becomes the army of a political Power, and the diplomats of that Power say to a smaller one: "We outnumber you; we are going to annex your territory, and you are going to pay us tribute." And the smaller Power says: "What are you going to give us for that tribute?" And the larger replies: "Nothing. You are weak; we are strong; we gobble you up. It is the law of life; always has been--always will be to the end."