The Great Illusion Part 15

I do not know which of the two pa.s.sages that I have quoted is the more striking commentary on the moral influence of military training; that such training should have the effect which Captain March Phillips describes, or (as Mr. J.A. Hobson in his "Psychology of Jingoism" says) that the second judgment should be given by a man of sterling character and culture--the judgment, that thieving, and lying, and looting, and b.e.s.t.i.a.l talk do not matter. Which fact const.i.tutes the severer condemnation of the ethical atmosphere of militarism and military training? Which is the more convincing testimony to the corrupting influences of war?[100]

To do the soldiers justice, they very rarely raise this plea of war being a moral training-school. "War itself," said an officer on one occasion, "is an infernally dirty business. But somebody has got to do the dirty work of the world, and I am glad to think that it is the business of the soldier to prevent rather than to make war."

Not that I am concerned to deny that we owe a great deal to the soldier.

I do not know even why we should deny that we owe a great deal to the Viking. Neither the one nor the other was in every aspect despicable.

Both have bequeathed a heritage of courage, st.u.r.diness, hardihood, and a spirit of ordered adventure; the capacity to take hard knocks and to give them; comrades.h.i.+p and rough discipline--all this and much more. It is not true to say of any emotion that it is wholly and absolutely good, or wholly and absolutely bad. The same psychological force which made the Vikings destructive and cruel pillagers made their descendants st.u.r.dy and resolute pioneers and colonists; and the same emotional force which turns so much of Africa into a sordid and b.l.o.o.d.y shambles would, with a different direction and distribution, turn it into a garden. Is it for nothing that the splendid Scandinavian race, who have converted their rugged and rock-strewn peninsula into a group of prosperous and stable States, which are an example to Europe, and have infused the great Anglo-Saxon stock with something of their sane but n.o.ble idealism, have the blood of Vikings in their veins? Is there no place for the free play of all the best qualities of the Viking and the soldier in a world still sadly in need of men with courage enough, for instance, to face the truth, however difficult it may seem, however unkind to our pet prejudices?

There is not the least necessity for the peace advocate to ignore facts in this matter. The race of man loves a soldier just as boys love the pirate, and many of us, perhaps to our great advantage, remain in part boys our lives through. But as, growing out of boyhood, we regretfully discover the sad fact that we cannot be pirates, that we cannot even hunt Indians, nor be scouts, nor even trappers, so surely the time has come to realize that we have grown out of soldiering. The romantic appeal of the ventures of the old Vikings, and even later of piracy,[101] was as great as that of war. Yet we superseded the Viking, and we hanged the pirate, though I doubt not we loved him while we hanged him; and I am not aware that those who urged the suppression of piracy were vilified, except by the pirates, as maudlin sentimentalists, who ignored human nature, or, in Homer Lea's phrase, as "half-educated, sick-brained visionaries, denying the inexorability of the primordial law of struggle." Piracy interfered seriously with the trade and industry of those who desired to earn for themselves as good a living as they could get, and to obtain from this imperfect world all that it had to offer. Piracy was magnificent, doubtless, but it was not business. We are prepared to sing about the Viking, but not to tolerate him on the high seas; and some of us who are quite prepared to give the soldier his due place in poetry and legend and romance, quite prepared to admit, with Mr. Roosevelt and Von Moltke and the rest, the qualities which perhaps we owe to him, and without which we should be poor folk indeed, are nevertheless inquiring whether the time has not come to place him (or a good portion of him) gently on the poetic shelf with the Viking; or at least to find other fields for those activities which, however much we may be attracted by them, have in their present form little place in a world in which, though, as Bacon has said, men like danger better than travail, travail is bound, alas!--despite ourselves--to be our lot.

CHAPTER VI

THE STATE AS A PERSON: A FALSE a.n.a.lOGY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Why aggression upon a State does not correspond to aggression upon an individual--Our changing conception of collective responsibility--Psychological progress in this connection--Recent growth of factors breaking down the h.o.m.ogeneous personality of States.

Despite the common idea to the contrary, we dearly love an abstraction--especially, apparently, an abstraction which is based on half the facts. Whatever the foregoing chapters may have proved, they have at least proved this: that the character of the modern State, by virtue of a mult.i.tude of new factors which are special to our age, is essentially and fundamentally different from that of the ancient. Yet even those who have great and justified authority in this matter will still appeal to Aristotle's conception of the State as final, with the implication that everything which has happened since Aristotle's time should be calmly disregarded.

What some of those things are, the preceding chapters have indicated: First, there is the fact of the change in human nature itself, bound up with the general drift away from the use of physical force--a drift explained by the unromantic fact that physical force does not give so much response to expended effort as do other forms of energy. There is an interconnection of psychological and purely mechanical development in all this which it is not necessary to disentangle here. The results are evident enough. Very rarely, and to an infinitesimal extent, do we now employ force for the achievement of our ends. There is still a factor, however, which remains to be considered, and which has perhaps a more direct bearing on the question of continued conflict between nations than any of the other factors.

Conflicts between nations and international pugnacity generally imply a conception of a State as a h.o.m.ogeneous whole, having the same sort of responsibility that we attach to a person who, hitting us, provokes us to hit back. Now only to a very small and rapidly diminis.h.i.+ng extent can a State be regarded as such a person. There may have been a time--Aristotle's time--when this was possible; but it is now impossible. Yet the fine-spun theories on which are based the necessity for the use of force, as between nations, and the proposition that the relations.h.i.+p of nations can only be determined by force, and that international pugnacity will always be expressed by a physical struggle between nations, all arise from this fatal a.n.a.logy, which in truth corresponds to very few of the facts.

Thus Professor Spenser Wilkinson, whose contributions to this subject have such deserved weight, implies that what will permanently render the abandonment of force between nations impossible is the principle that "the employment of force for the maintenance of right is the foundation of all civilized human life, for it is the fundamental function of the State, and apart from the State there is no civilization, no life worth living.... The mark of the State is sovereignty, or the identification of force and right, and the measure of the perfection of the State is furnished by the completeness of this identification."

This, whether true or not, is irrelevant to the matter in hand.

Professor Spenser Wilkinson attempts to ill.u.s.trate his thesis by quoting a case which would seem to imply that those who take their stand against the necessity of armaments do so on the ground that the employment of force is wicked. There may be those who do this, but it is not necessary to introduce the question of right. If means other than force give the same result more easily, with less effort to ourselves, why discuss the abstract right? When Professor Spenser Wilkinson reinforces the appeal to this irrelevant abstract principle by a case which, while apparently relevant, is in truth irrelevant, he has successfully confused the whole issue. After quoting three verses from the fifth chapter of Matthew, he says:[102]

There are those who believe, or fancy they believe, that the words I have quoted involve the principle that the use of force or violence between man and man or between nation and nation is wicked. To the man who thinks it right to submit to any violence or be killed rather than use violence in resistance I have no reply to make; the world cannot conquer him, and fear has no hold upon him. But even he can carry out his doctrine only to the extent of allowing himself to be ill-treated, as I will now convince him. Many years ago the people of Lancas.h.i.+re were horrified by the facts reported in a trial for murder. In a village on the outskirts of Bolton lived a young woman, much liked and respected as a teacher in one of the Board-schools.

On her way home from school she was accustomed to follow a footpath through a lonely wood, and here one evening her body was found. She had been strangled by a ruffian who had thought in this lonely place to have his wicked will of her. She had resisted successfully, and he had killed her in the struggle.

Fortunately the murderer was caught, and the facts ascertained from circ.u.mstantial evidence were confirmed by his confession.

Now the question I have to ask the man who takes his stand on the pa.s.sage quoted from the Gospel is this: "What would have been your duty had you been walking through that wood and came upon the girl struggling with the man who killed her?" This is the crucial factor which, I submit, utterly destroys the doctrine that the use of violence is in itself wrong. The right or wrong is not in the employment of force, but simply in the purpose for which it is used. What the case establishes, I think, is that to use violence in resistance to violent wrong is not only right, but necessary.

The above presents, very cleverly, the utterly false a.n.a.logy with which we are dealing. Professor Spenser Wilkinson's cleverness, indeed, is a little Machiavellian, because he approximates non-resisters of a very extreme type to those who advocate agreement among nations in the matter of armaments--a false approximation, for the proportion of those who advocate the reduction of armaments on such grounds is so small that they can be disregarded in this discussion. A movement which is identified with some of the acutest minds in European affairs cannot be disposed of by a.s.sociating it with such a theory. But the basis of the fallacy is in the approximation of a State to a person. Now a State is not a person, and is becoming less so every day, and the difficulty, which Professor Spenser Wilkinson indicates, is a doctrinaire difficulty, not a real one. Professor Wilkinson would have us infer that a State can be injured or killed in the same simple way in which it is possible to kill or injure a person, and that because there must be physical force to restrain aggression upon persons, there must be physical force to restrain aggression upon States; and because there must be physical force to execute the judgment of a court of law in the case of individuals, there must be physical force to execute the judgment rendered by a decision as to differences between States. All of which is false, and arrived at by approximating a person to a State, and disregarding the numberless facts which render a person different from a State.

How do we know that these difficulties are doctrinaire ones? It is the British Empire which supplies the answer. The British Empire is made up in large part of practically independent States, and Great Britain not only exercises no control over their acts, but has surrendered in advance any intention of employing force concerning them.[103] The British States have disagreements among themselves. They may or may not refer their differences to the British Government, but if they do, is Great Britain going to send an army to Canada, say, to enforce her judgment? Everyone knows that that is impossible. Even when one State commits what is in reality a serious breach of international comity on another, not only does Great Britain refrain from using force herself, but so far as she interferes at all, it is to prevent the employment of physical force. For years now British Indians have been subjected to most cruel and unjust treatment in the State of Natal.[104] The British Government makes no secret of the fact that she regards this treatment as unjust and cruel; were Natal a foreign State, it is conceivable that she would employ force, but, following the principle laid down by Sir C.P. Lucas, "whether they are right or whether they are wrong, more perhaps when they are wrong than when they are right, they cannot be made amenable by force," the two States are left to adjust the difficulty as best they may, without resort to force. In the last resort the British Empire reposes upon the expectation that its Colonies will behave as civilized communities, and in the long run the expectation is, of course, a well-founded one, because, if they do not so behave, retribution will come more surely by the ordinary operation of social and economic forces than it could come by any force of arms.

The case of the British Empire is not an isolated one. The fact is that most of the States of the world maintain their relations one with another without any possibility of a resort to force; half the States of the world have no means of enforcing by arms such wrongs as they may suffer at the hands of other States. Thousands of Englishmen, for instance, make their homes in Switzerland, and it has happened that wrongs have been suffered by Englishmen at the hands of the Swiss Government. Would, however, the relations between the two States, or the practical standard of protection of British subjects in Switzerland, be any the better were Switzerland the whole time threatened by the might of Great Britain? Switzerland knows that she is practically free from the possibility of the exercise of that force, but this has not prevented her from behaving as a civilized community towards British subjects.

What is the real guarantee of the good behavior of one State to another?

It is the elaborate interdependence which, not only in the economic sense, but in every sense, makes an unwarrantable aggression of one State upon another react upon the interests of the aggressor.

Switzerland has every interest in affording an absolutely secure asylum to British subjects; that fact, and not the might of the British Empire, gives protection to British subjects in Switzerland. Where, indeed, the British subject has to depend upon the force of his Government for protection it is a very frail protection indeed, because in practice the use of that force is so c.u.mbersome, so difficult, so costly, that any other means are to be preferred to it. When the traveller in Greece had to depend upon British arms, great as was relatively the force of those arms, it proved but a very frail protection. In the same way, when physical force was used to impose on the South American and Central American States the observance of their financial obligations, such efforts failed utterly and miserably--so miserably that Great Britain finally surrendered any attempt at such enforcement. What other means have succeeded? The bringing of those countries under the influence of the great economic currents of our time, so that now property is infinitely more secure in Argentina than it was when British gunboats were bombarding her ports. More and more in international relations.h.i.+p is the purely economic motive--and the economic motive is only one of several possible ones--being employed to replace the use of physical force. Austria, the other day, was untouched by any threat of the employment of the Turkish army when the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was consummated, but when the Turkish population enforced a very successful commercial boycott of Austrian goods and Austrian s.h.i.+ps, Austrian merchants and public opinion made it quickly plain to the Austrian Government that pressure of this nature could not be disregarded.

I antic.i.p.ate the plea that while the elaborate interconnection of economic relations renders the employment of force as between nations unnecessary in so far as their material interests are concerned, those forces cannot cover a case of aggression upon what may be termed the moral property of nations. A critic of the first edition of this book[105] writes:

The State is the only complete form in which human society exists, and there are a mult.i.tude of phenomena which will be found only as manifestations of human life in the form of a society united by the political bond into a State. The products of such society are law, literature, art, and science, and it has yet to be shown that apart from that form of society known as the State, the family or education or development of character is possible. The State, in short, is an organism or living thing which can be wounded and can be killed, and like every other living thing requires protection against wounding and destruction.... Conscience and morals are products of social and not of individual life, and to say that the sole purpose of the State is to make possible a decent livelihood is as though a man should say that the sole object of human life is to satisfy the interests of existence. A man cannot live any kind of life without food, clothing, and shelter, but that condition does not abolish or diminish the value of the life industrial, the life intellectual, or the life artistic. The State is the condition of all these lives, and its purpose is to sustain them. That is why the State must defend itself. In the ideal, the State represents and embodies the whole people's conception of what is true, of what is beautiful, and of what is right, and it is the sublime quality of human nature that every great nation has produced citizens ready to sacrifice themselves rather than submit to an external force attempting to dictate to them a conception other than their own of what is right.

One is, of course, surprised to see the foregoing in the London _Morning Post_; the concluding phrase would justify the present agitation in India or in Egypt or Ireland against British rule. What is that agitation but an attempt on the part of the peoples of those provinces to resist "an external force attempting to dictate to them a conception other than their own of what is right"? Fortunately, however, for British Imperialism, a people's conception of "what is true, of what is beautiful, and of what is right," and their maintenance of that conception, need not necessarily have anything whatever to do with the particular administrative conditions under which they may live--the only thing that a conception of a "State" predicates. The fallacy which runs through the whole pa.s.sage just quoted, and which makes it, in fact, nonsense, is the same fallacy which dominates the quotation that I have made from Professor Spenser Wilkinson's book, "Britain at Bay"--namely, the approximation of a State to a person, the a.s.sumption that the political delimitation coincides with the economic and moral delimitation, that in short a State is the embodiment of "the whole people's conception of what is true, etc." A State is nothing of the sort. Take the British Empire. This State embodies not a h.o.m.ogeneous conception, but a series of often absolutely contradictory conceptions of "what is true, etc."; it embodies the Mohammedan, the Buddhist, the Copt, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Pagan conceptions of right and truth. The fact which vitiates the whole of this conception of a State is that the frontiers which define the State do not coincide with the conception of any of those things which the London _Morning Post_ critic has enumerated; there is no such thing as British morality as opposed to French or German morality, or art or industry. One may, indeed, talk of an English conception of life, because that is a conception of life peculiar to England, but it would be opposed to the conception of life in other parts of the same State, in Ireland, in Scotland, in India, in Egypt, in Jamaica. And what is true of England is true of all the great modern States. Every one of them includes conceptions absolutely opposed to other conceptions in the same State, but many of them absolutely agree with conceptions in foreign States. The British State includes, in Ireland, a Catholic conception in cordial agreement with the Catholic conception in Italy, but in cordial disagreement with the Protestant conception in Scotland, or the Mohammedan conception in Bengal. The real divisions of all those ideals, which the critic enumerates, cut right across State divisions, disregarding them entirely. Yet, again, it is only the State divisions which military conflict has in view.

What was one of the reasons leading to the cessation of religious wars between States? It was that religious conceptions cut across the State frontiers, so that the State ceased to coincide with the religious divisions of Europe, and a condition of things was brought about in which a Protestant Sweden was allied with a Catholic France. This rendered the conflict absurd, and religious wars became an anachronism.

Is not precisely the same thing taking place with reference to the conflicting conceptions of life which now separate men in Christendom?

Have not we in America the same doctrinal struggle which is going on in France and Germany and Great Britain? To take one instance--social conflict. On the one side in each case are all the interests bound up with order, authority, individual freedom, without reference to the comfort of the weak, and on the other the reconstruction of human society along hitherto untried lines. These problems are for most men probably--are certainly coming to be, if they are not now--much more profound and fundamental than any conception which coincides with or can be identified with State divisions. Indeed, what are the conceptions of which the divisions coincide with the political frontiers of the British Empire, in view of the fact that that Empire includes nearly every race and nearly every religion under the sun? It may be said, of course, that in the case of Germany and Russia we have an autocratic conception of social organization as compared with a conception based on individual freedom in England and America. Both Mr. Hyndman and Mr. Blatchford seem to take this view. "To me," says the former, "it is quite evident that if we Socialists were to achieve success we should at once be liable to attack from without by the military Powers," an opinion which calmly overlooks the fact that Socialism and anti-militarism have gone much farther and are far better organized in the "military" States than they are in England, and that the military Governments have all their work cut out as it is to keep those tendencies in check within their own borders, without quixotically undertaking to perform the same service in other States.

This conception of the State as the political embodiment of h.o.m.ogeneous doctrine is due in large part not only to the distortion produced by false a.n.a.logy, but to the survival of a terminology which has become obsolete, and, indeed, the whole of this subject is vitiated by those two things. The State in ancient times was much more a personality than it is to-day, and it is mainly quite modern tendencies which have broken up its doctrinal h.o.m.ogeneity, and that break-up has results which are of the very first importance in their bearing upon international pugnacity.

The matter deserves careful examination. Professor William McDougal, in his fascinating work, "An Introduction to Social Psychology," says in the chapter on the instinct of pugnacity:

The replacement of individual by collective pugnacity is most clearly ill.u.s.trated by barbarous peoples living in small, strongly organized communities. Within such communities individual combat and even expressions of personal anger may be almost completely suppressed, while the pugnacious instinct finds itself in perpetual warfare between communities whose relations remain subject to no law. As a rule no material benefit is gained, and often none is sought, in these tribal wars.... All are kept in constant fear of attack, whole villages are often exterminated, and the population is in this way kept down very far below the limit at which any pressure on the means of subsistence could arise. This perpetual warfare, like the squabbles of a roomful of quarrelsome children, seems to be almost wholly and directly due to the uncomplicated operation of the instinct of pugnacity. No material benefits are sought; a few heads and sometimes a slave or two are the only trophies gained, and if one asks an intelligent chief why he keeps up this senseless practice, the best reason he can give is that unless he does so his neighbors will not respect him and his people, and will fall upon them and exterminate them.

Now, how does such hostility as that indicated in this pa.s.sage differ from the hostility which marks international differences in our day? In certain very evident respects. It does not suffice that the foreigner should be merely a foreigner for us to want to kill him: there must be some conflict of interest. The English are completely indifferent to the Scandinavian, the Belgian, the Dutchman, the Spaniard, the Austrian, and the Italian, and are supposed for the moment to be greatly in love with the French. The German is the enemy. But ten years ago it was the Frenchman who was the enemy, and Mr. Chamberlain was talking of an alliance with the Germans--England's natural allies, he called them--while it was for France that he reserved his attacks.[106] It cannot be, therefore, that there is any inherent racial hostility in English national character, because the Germans have not changed their nature in ten years, nor the French theirs. If to-day the French are England's quasi-allies and the Germans her enemies, it is simply because their respective interests or apparent interests have modified in the last ten years, and their political preferences have modified with them.

In other words, national hostilities follow the exigencies of real or imagined political interests. Surely the point need not be labored, seeing that England has boxed the compa.s.s of the whole of Europe in her likes and dislikes, and poured her hatred upon the Spaniards, the Dutch, the Americans, the Danes, the Russians, the Germans, the French, and again the Germans, all in turn. The phenomenon is a commonplace of individual relations.h.i.+p: "I never noticed his collars were dirty till he got in my way," said someone of a rival.

The second point of difference with Professor McDougal's savage is that when we get to grips our conflict does not include the whole tribe; we do not, in the Biblical fas.h.i.+on, exterminate men, women, children, and cattle. Enough of the old Adam remains for us to detest the women and children, so that an English poet could write of the "whelps and dams of murderous foes"; but we no longer slaughter them.[107]

But there is a third fact which we must note--that Professor McDougal's nation was made up of a single tribe entirely h.o.m.ogeneous. Even the fact of living across a river was sufficient to turn another tribe into foreigners and to involve a desire to kill them. The development from that stage to the present has involved, in addition to the two factors just enumerated, this: we now include as fellow-countrymen many who would under the old conception necessarily be foreigners, and the process of our development, economic and otherwise, has made of foreigners, between whom, in Homer Lea's philosophy, there should exist this "primordial hostility leading inevitably to war," one State from which all conflict of interest has disappeared entirely. The modern State of France includes what were, even in historical times, eighty separate and warring States, since each of the old Gallic cities represented a different State. In England people have come to regard as fellow-citizens between whom there can be no sort of conflict of interest scores of tribes that spent their time mutually throat-cutting at no very distant period, as history goes. Anyone, particularly Americans, can recognize, indeed, that profound national differences like those which exist between the Welshman and the Englishman, or the Scotsman and the Irishman, need involve not only no conflict of interest, but even no separate political existence.

One has heard in recent times of the gradual revival of Nationalism, and it is commonly argued that the principle of Nationality must stand in the way of co-operation between States. But the facts do not justify that conclusion for a moment. The formation of States has disregarded national divisions altogether. If conflicts are to coincide with national divisions, Wales should co-operate with Brittany and Ireland against Normandy and England; Provence and Savoy with Sardinia against--I do not know what French province, because in the final rearrangement of European frontiers races and provinces have become so inextricably mixed, and have paid so little regard to "natural" and "inherent" divisions, that it is no longer possible to disentangle them.

In the beginning the State is a h.o.m.ogeneous tribe or family, and in the process of economic and social development these divisions so far break down that a State may include, as the British State does, not only half a dozen different races in the mother country, but a thousand different races scattered over various parts of the earth--white, black, yellow, brown, copper-colored. This, surely, is one of the great sweeping tendencies of history--a tendency which operates immediately any complicated economic life is set up. What justification have we, therefore, for saying dogmatically that a tendency to co-operation, which has swept before it profound ethnic differences, social and political divisions, which has been constant from the dawn of men's attempts to live and labor together, is to stop at the wall of modern State divisions, which represent none of the profound divisions of the human race, but mainly mere administrative convenience, and embody a conception which is being every day profoundly modified?

Some indication of the processes involved in this development has already been given in the outline sketch in Chapter II. of this section, to which the reader may be referred. I have there attempted to make plain that _pari pa.s.su_ with the drift from physical force towards economic inducement goes a corresponding diminution of pugnacity, until the psychological factor which is the exact reverse of pugnacity comes to have more force even than the economic one. Quite apart from any economic question, it is no longer possible for any government to order the extermination of a whole population, of the women and children, in the old Biblical style. In the same way, the greater economic interdependence which improved means of communication have provoked must carry with it a greater moral interdependence, and a tendency which has broken down profound national divisions, like those which separated the Celt and the Saxon, will certainly break down on the psychological side divisions which are obviously more artificial.

Among the multiple factors which have entered into the great sweeping tendency just mentioned are one or two which stand out as most likely to have immediate effect on the breakdown of a purely psychological hostility embodied by merely State divisions. One is that lessening of the reciprocal sentiment of collective responsibility which the complex heterogeneity of the modern State involves. What do I mean by this sense of collective responsibility? To the Chinese Boxer all Europeans are "foreign devils"; between Germans, English, Russians, there is little distinction, just as to the black in Africa there is little differentiation between the various white races. Even the yokel in England talks of "them foreigners." If a Chinese Boxer is injured by a Frenchman, he kills a German, and feels himself avenged--they are all "foreign devils." When an African tribe suffers from the depredations of a Belgian trader, the next white man who comes into its territory, whether he happens to be an Englishman or a Frenchman, loses his life; the tribesmen also feel themselves avenged. But if the Chinese Boxer had our clear conception of the different European nations, he would feel no psychological satisfaction in killing a German because a Frenchman had injured him. There must be in the Boxer's mind some collective responsibility as between the two Europeans, or in the negro's mind between the two white men, in order to obtain this psychological satisfaction. If that collective responsibility does not exist, the hostility to the second white man, in each case, is not even raised.

Now, our international hostilities are largely based on the notion of a collective responsibility in each of the various States against which our hostility is directed, which does not, in fact, exist. There is at the present moment great ill-feeling in England against "the German."

Now, "the German" is a non-existent abstraction. Englishmen are angry with the German because he is building wars.h.i.+ps, conceivably directed against them; but a great many Germans are as much opposed to that increase of armament as are the English, and the desire of the yokel to "have a go at them Germans" depends absolutely upon a confusion just as great as--indeed, greater than--that which exists in the mind of the Boxer, who cannot differentiate between the various European peoples.

Mr. Blatchford commenced that series of articles which has done so much to accentuate this ill-feeling with this phrase:

Germany is deliberately preparing to destroy the British Empire;

and later in the articles he added:

Britain is disunited; Germany is h.o.m.ogeneous. We are quarrelling about the Lords' Veto, Home Rule, and a dozen other questions of domestic politics. We have a Little Navy Party, an Anti-Militarist Party; Germany is unanimous upon the question of naval expansion.

It would be difficult to pack a more dangerous untruth into so few lines. What are the facts? If "Germany" means the bulk of the German people, Mr. Blatchford is perfectly aware that he is not telling the truth. It is not true to say of the bulk of the German people that they are deliberately preparing to destroy the British Empire. The bulk of the German people, if they are represented by any one party at all, are represented by the Social Democrats, who have stood from the first resolutely against any such intention. Now the facts have to be misstated in this way in order to produce that temper which makes for war. If the facts are correctly stated, no such temper arises.

What has a particularly competent German to say to Mr. Blatchford's generalization? Mr. Fried, the editor of _Die Friedenswarte_, writes:

There is no one German people, no single Germany.... There are more abrupt contrasts between Germans and Germans than between Germans and Indians. Nay, the contradistinctions within Germany are greater than those between Germans and the units of any other foreign nation whatever. It might be possible to make efforts to promote good understanding between Germans and Englishmen, between Germans and Frenchmen, to organize visits between nation and nation; but it will be forever impossible to set on foot any such efforts at an understanding between German Social Democrats and Prussian Junkers, between German Anti-Semites and German Jews.[108]

The disappearance of most international hostility depends upon nothing more intricate than the realization of facts which are little more complex than the geographical knowledge which enables us to see that the anger of the yokel is absurd when he pummels a Frenchman because an Italian has swindled him.

It may be argued that there never has existed in the past this identification between a people and the acts of its Government which rendered the hatred of one country for another logical, yet that hatred has arisen. That is true; but certain new factors have entered recently to modify this problem. One is that never in the history of the world have nations been so complex as they are to-day; and the second is that never before have the dominating interests of mankind so completely cut across State divisions as they do to-day. The third factor is that never before has it been possible, as it is possible by our means of communication to-day, to offset a solidarity of cla.s.ses and ideas against a presumed State solidarity.

Never at any stage of the world's development has there existed, as exists to-day, the machinery for embodying these interests and cla.s.s ideas and ideals which cut across frontiers. It is not generally understood how many of our activities have become international. Two great forces have become internationalized: Capital on the one hand, Labor and Socialism on the other.