Morals and the Evolution of Man Part 6

Secondly, the idea that owing to Morality the state might one day actually be in such a position as to be forced to sacrifice itself is the most shocking nonsense. How could that possibly be? If the state always acts with strict Morality towards its citizens and foreign states, it is simply impossible that it should have to sacrifice its existence in the fulfilment of some task; for tasks only arise when, and as long as, the state exists. Once it is disintegrated there can be no task, either theoretically or practically, for it to accomplish, therefore it cannot have to sacrifice itself for such a task. But if the Immorality of another state, or of a minority of its citizens, should endanger it, threaten it with an unjust attack from within or without, then there is no rule of Morality that can forbid it to defend itself to the last, and its self-sacrifice could then only be a result of its complete annihilation in a justifiable war of necessity. On the other hand, even the most unscrupulous practical politicians do not possess any absolute guarantee against defeat, though they declare a war of aggression to be permissible, whether waged on account of an itching for power, for purposes of conquest, for the winning of prestige, predominance or economic advantages.

Thirdly and lastly, the duty of self-sacrifice for the state can only be envisaged and seriously discussed, if the state be conceived as a person to whom the duty of Morality applies in every way; but this conception is mystic anthropomorphism, not sober, sensible recognition of realities such as the practical politicians love to boast of.

For, as a matter of fact, the state is not a person but a concept, an inst.i.tution created by man in the interests of one individual, of a few, of many or of all; an organization of habits and interests, a relation in which individuals live together. The mysticism of the weak-minded has transformed it into a person with human features, with the qualities, desires, duties, and aims of an individual; these men are intellectually incapable of penetrating to the fundamental facts underlying the concept, and cling entirely to word-pictures which are mere verbalism.

Scholasticism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was chiefly occupied in a quarrel about Nominalism and Realism. It was allowed to drop and was not fought out to a decision. Perhaps because it is impossible to convince these superficial babblers who take a name or a word for an object actually existent in time and s.p.a.ce, that they are in error. The fight between Abelard and Roscelet and that between the two of them and Duns Scotus ought to be taken up again. Above all, one ought to knock it into the heads of those who make a fetish of the state that it is a mere word, the famous "_flatus vocis_" of the Nominalists, which they wors.h.i.+p, to which they build altars and make human sacrifices.

This humiliating form of idolatry is practised by the school of sociologists known as organicistic, as well as by the practical politicians. This school maintains that the individual has no independent existence at all, that he continues to exist only in the community, by the community, as a totally subordinate, dependent and incomplete fraction of the community; that the only real thing in the species is society, the state; that this must be regarded as a living organism, in which the individual human being is merely a cell which in solitude, outside the community and detached from it, is as little capable of life and has as little significance as a cell separated from a highly differentiated creature, such as a man or some other mammal. In my book "_Der Sinn der Geschichte_" (The Meaning of History), I threw as much light as I possibly could on this superst.i.tion, and I pointed out in detail its lack of sense as well as its dangers. I can, therefore, content myself here with a resume and a few indications.

There is nothing mysterious or supernatural about the historic or even the prehistoric origin of the state; part we can learn from reliable doc.u.mentary evidence, part we can gather with certainty from obvious facts. From the primitive human family, which more probably consisted of a pair than of a man and several women, there arose the formless horde, a crowd of individuals of all ages, connected by blood; this developed into a tribe in which age, strength, courage and intelligence were appreciated in a certain order, and thereby were produced the beginnings of discipline, co-operation and regularized mutual relations; that is to say, of organization. This embryo of later formations, this sketchy beginning of an economic and political community, evolved more definite and differentiated forms when the wandering huntsmen and shepherds, seeking prolific hunting grounds and pasture lands, and later on arable land too, came upon other groups of men and fought with them for the possession of the desired domain. In the conflict strong and brave men came to the front, and the victor became the natural, and for the most part willingly recognized, leader and master of his companions, while any who opposed him were reduced by force to submit to his authority.

The state crystallized around this war-hero, and by all its members its aim was clearly and obviously recognized to be defence and the increase of property outside the state; that is, the warding off of attacks by foreign robbers and acquisitive invasions of neighbouring domains--wars of defence and conquest, but always war; and within the state the maintenance of a certain measure of safety for individuals. This safety, however, had to be purchased dearly by the limitation, often enough the complete surrender, of the right of self-determination, of independence of will and freedom; so dearly, in fact, that the price was far higher than the value of the advantages acquired.

The leader in warfare became the ruler and bequeathed his privileges to his descendants. The state was he himself, the land his property, the people his family in the old sense of the word--that is, his kindred, his servants, his slaves. His comrades in arms who had most distinguished themselves became an aristocracy of the sword, the supporters and tools of his power, though often enough they became his rebellious rivals and overthrew him. Defeated enemies were robbed of all their possessions and slaughtered; later on they were degraded to serfs, a position little better than that of beasts of burden. A regular parasitism developed, by means of which the ruler and his companions in arms exploited the subjugated and productive ma.s.ses for their own profit.

The acute form of this parasitism was warfare in its chronic form, its prolongation in times of peace, the extortion of contributions and duties, the imposition of taxes and forced labour from the people. The ruler was clever enough to provide himself with a moral right to his exercise of brute force, by inventing a divine origin for his person and power, and making wors.h.i.+p of his person an essential tenet of the national religion. The systematic suppression of the ma.s.ses without rights became the universal practice of the ruler and of the instruments of his power, and this gradually spread to the higher cla.s.ses who could still play the master to the lower strata, but were of no more account than the vulgar herd in the eyes of the ruler, having to bow their proud heads beneath the same yoke. A very few races followed a different course of development from the primitive horde to an organized state.

They remained free members of the community with equal rights, they allowed no hereditary ruler from among themselves to become their superior, and governed themselves as republicans, who nevertheless also waged war without exception, either forced thereto by the attacks of greedy neighbours or lured into doing so by the example of the monarchies within their purview or by l.u.s.t for booty. In warfare they won slaves and subjects, and changed into oligarchies, most often into despotic states, and before they ultimately declined to the parasitism of a single man and his aids fell victims to a collective parasitism which gave the conquered and subjugated population up to the spoliation of the victors.

Up till modern times the state preserved the character of a private domain belonging to the ruler and his house. Wars were waged in the interests of dynasties, and as late as the eighteenth century the succession in Spain and in certain provinces of Austria was the origin and purpose of various campaigns. The French Revolution first wrought a change in this. Since this great event it has been impossible to plunge any European state into war in order to support the claims to property, more or less legally justified, made by its ruling house. The people have taken the place of princes, and now the principle of nationalities furnishes the reason or excuse for b.l.o.o.d.y conflicts between states; and this has become a factor in modern politics and history merely because dynasties had built up their realms regardless of the origin and language of the inhabitants of the districts which they had conquered, stolen, bought, or acquired by exchange, by marriage or by inheritance, and were indifferent to the national unity of their subjects as long as they could gain possession of the country and the people.

From the time of its first vague beginnings up till the rise of modern democracy, the state has been nothing but a means of parasitism in the hands of the ruling person or group, and an instrument for the preparation for, and the waging of, war. All the state's tasks, which apparently lie outside the sphere of war, if they are carefully examined, will be found, after all, to aim at efficiency in war, and it has gradually selected these tasks from the simple consideration that their execution increases the guarantees of success in warfare and in government.

The deification of the ruler in Asiatic and Egyptian lands, the unconditional identification of the realm with his person, the uniform enslavement of the whole people, its nave exploitation for the sole benefit of the sovereign and his a.s.sistants are no longer possible in Europe at the present day. The development of the nations to a higher plane of civilization and a clearer consciousness of their own worth forced the state to alter its const.i.tution to a certain extent and to devote itself, at least theoretically, more to the interests of its citizens than the service of its prince. The intellectual constructions of the eighteenth century correspond to no historical reality. The Social Contract, the inception of which J. J. Rousseau described so graphically, was never made. Hutcheson, who had expressed the idea long before the enthusiast of Geneva, conceived it only as the epitome of the principles which the state should embody; according to Hume, the relations of the citizens to each other and to the state are a tacit contract which need not be explicitly formulated, because it originates in human nature; and Fichte even a.s.sures us that Rousseau himself did not mean his Social Contract to be taken literally. According to him it was only an idea. But societies must act in pursuance of this idea, and they were founded, if not actually, yet legally upon an unwritten contract. Anyway, the ideas of Hutcheson, Hume and Rousseau have nowadays been a.s.similated by the general consciousness. The ma.s.ses believe in the natural, inborn rights of man, some of which he certainly has surrendered in favour of the community; they demand and expect of the state that it should serve their just interests, and they are no longer ready to be made use of by the ruler and a powerful, often very small, minority, for purposes which are foreign to them, which they do not know, and for which they do not care.

Those who juggle with words, who talk dark and mysterious nonsense about the concept of the state, or dogmatize fanatically on the subject, contemptuously call this conception of the nature of the state and the relation of its citizens to it shallow rationalism, and from the heights of their supposed knowledge they look down disdainfully upon arguments which they libellously call the laymen's babble. They are only in part b.u.mptious fools who pretend that uncritical, parrotlike repet.i.tion of traditional formulae is erudition and confused thought is profundity, and who declare the clear-headed men who mock their silly mysticism, their superst.i.tious dread of word phantoms, to be simply incapable of understanding their depth. Partly they are very sly toadies, very cunning sycophants of power, or ruthless egoists, unscrupulous freebooters, who pretend to be enthusiastic and devout apostles of the divinity of the state and demand the most humble submission, adoration and unconditional devotion in order that, as priests in its temple, they may grind their own axes at its altars.

Such are those folk who maintain the double thesis that the state is everything, the individual nothing, the former the sole reality, the latter without any separate existence, and that the state, as mankind's highest form of existence, need recognize nothing as superior to itself, neither right nor law, and may therefore take as sole guide for its actions its own interests and not Morality.

You cannot maintain a single one of these contentions unless you and all men are deprived of reasoning power; they crumble away instantly in the light of Reason. It is not true that the state alone is real and that it is superior to the individual, not only because of the forces at its disposal, the complex of which it represents, but also as an ent.i.ty, as a thought, a principle. The individual alone in the species, that is, living, feeling, thinking and acting man, is real. The individual created the state out of himself. He can also destroy it. The practical politicians above all people should be of this opinion; as he can do it, he may do it; as he has the power to do it, he has the right to do it. The individualist will not make this a question of law, but will simply a.s.sert that, though the individual is the father of the state, yet he has no reasonable grounds for destroying it, so long as it makes no murderous attacks on its creator. The individual did not create the state consciously, intentionally and formally by means of a social contract, but naturally and organically, under pressure of circ.u.mstances. It is clearly to his interests to maintain it, to furnish the necessary means for its existence and efficiency, but always on the one condition that the state should really protect and promote the interests of the individual, lighten his burdens in the struggle for existence, and make that prosperity, comfort and happiness possible which he cannot secure unaided in his struggle with the hostile forces of Nature and with rival fellow-men.

But if the state oppresses the individual with burdens and duties which he feels no inner necessity to fulfil, if it confiscates him, body and soul, instead of respecting his freedom and his right to self-determination, then the a.s.sumption falls to the ground; the state is no longer an inst.i.tution which benefits the individual; it is inimical to the individual, hinders him in his struggle for existence, destroys his happiness; and he obeys his primitive instinct for self-preservation if he turns against it, masters it as he would a monster, draws its teeth and claws, and forces it back to the place it was meant to occupy, that of a docile and industrious servant of the individual, not of one individual who aspires to rule the others, but of all individuals who are of the people that make up the state.

I consider it unnecessary and a little ridiculous to quote authorities in support of the statement that twice two are four; what is reasonable and clear is convincing without further recommendation; nevertheless, it is a fact that may be worthy of mention that some of the best intellects of all nations have sided with the individual against the state. On the one side we have Plato, whose ideal is Sparta and who would like to see the despotism of this model state and its communal meals completed by the addition of community of property, of wives, and of children; we have Hegel, who has gone farther than any one in his idolatry of the state; we have Auguste Comte, who, in his zeal for his newly founded science of Sociology, conceives society as an organism biologically superior to the individual, and thereby has become the father of the Organicists. But against these we can put the Englishman, Jeremy Bentham, the embodiment of sound common sense, whom the muddle-headed fools that pose as deep thinkers have good reason to hate and fear, and whom they try to depreciate as vulgar and shallow; further, his compatriot, Herbert Spencer, who is his kindred spirit; the Frenchman, Frederic Bastiat, whose writings sparkle with flashes of wit; the German, Wilhelm Humboldt, who bravely and successfully combated the state tyranny defended by Fichte. All these are convinced individualists who adduce irrefutable reasons for their views. We may also include Kant among them, as he gave utterance to this decisive sentence: "Man is his own aim and end, and must never be a mere means"; consequently it is never permissible to sacrifice the sovereignty of one's own person to that of the state, or make use of it for the realization of political aims by disregarding, and doing violence to, one's right of self-determination. Harald Hofding contends that progress should be measured by the extent to which, in Kant's sense of the words, man is recognized to be his own aim and end; but that is not only a measure of progress, it is the measure of all civilization.

For civilization, to my idea, means a state worthy of man, implying his mental, moral and material independence of all motive forces other than those of his own nature; its aim is the most complete attainment possible of this independence; its measure the extent to which the individual determines his own fate and is able to ward off from it undesired outside influences. At the first awakening of his consciousness primitive man was aware of being exposed to unknown forces which controlled him at will and against which his will was powerless.

From the very beginning, at first dimly and then more and more clearly, man has felt this to be unworthy and intolerable. The best of the species have always laboured with all their strength to liberate themselves, and the great ambition of man throughout his development has always been not submissively to accept whatever fate was accorded him, but to work out his destiny according to his needs and his own ideas.

The anguish caused by wretched dependence upon external forces is the origin of religion as of superst.i.tion, which both spring from the same root. With the anthropomorphism peculiar to the earliest stages of thought, man personified the mysterious powers which ruled his fate. He created G.o.ds for himself, and then, as far as his knowledge permitted, he sought some relation between himself and them, and tried to get at them by every means available. He imagined them like unto himself, that is, vain, capricious, greedy, easily frightened by dark threats, and then, very reasonably on this hypothesis, he importuned them with prayers, sacrifices, hymns of praise and vows, as well as magic formulae and incantations, always with the inflexible intention of making them serve his purposes, not of serving theirs. The contrite Jewish prayer: "Thy will be done, Lord, Thy will, not mine," is a new trait in the religious thought of man. The heathen always strives to have his will done in opposition to that of the G.o.ds, and to divert them from their decisions if he dislikes them.

In a state of advanced development theological thought gave way before the scientific. Man learnt to conceive Nature's rule, not transcendentally, but intrinsically. He recognized that the forces around him, which so often crossed his purpose, are not to be influenced by prayer and sacrifice, but that it is expedient and possible to discover their character and the conditions of their activity. By dint of long-sustained efforts he has succeeded in effectively standing up to hostile Nature and in warding off her undesired interference in his destiny. If the tribulations, which formerly suddenly brought his schemes to nought and often destroyed him, are not entirely overcome, it is merely because his practice does not conform closely enough to the directions evolved by his theoretical knowledge, because he is too careless or too clumsy to make proper use of the weapons against the elements with which science has armed him.

But this same man, who has learnt to be a match for Nature, his creator, is powerless against his creature, the state. He can neither evade it nor escape from it. The state disposes of him without his consent, against his most obvious interests, in spite of his powerless opposition; it hurls him hither and thither, annihilates him, crushes him by its will and is unmoved by the will of the individual.

True, man has sought to maintain his right of self-determination against the forces of politics, as against all others that broke his will and intervened in his life without his consent. For thousands of years all state development has tried to protect the modest individual, lost in the crowd and featureless, but nevertheless a person, that is, a world to himself, against the arbitrariness of rulers or leading statesmen.

That is the one unchanging tendency which leads from Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the slayers of a tyrant, the rebellion of the elder Brutus, the murder of Caesar, by way of the Revolt of the Netherlands and the execution of Charles I of England, to the great Revolution, the risings of 1848 and the struggle for const.i.tutional government in all states of the Old World and the New. The formula has long been discovered whereby the individual can maintain the dignity of his sovereign personality and his own responsibility for the shaping of his destiny. It is civil freedom, const.i.tutionalism, sovereignty of the people. There are arrangements, carefully thought out, nicely weighed, cleverly worked out to the smallest detail, by which the individual is fitted into his place in the community without being deprived of the management of his own affairs, by which the sacrifices needful for the fulfilment of collective tasks are exacted without his being reduced to a condition of slavery, by which the independence of the individual is safeguarded and yet a state of chaos and anarchy is avoided.

But this formula fares as do the doctrines of science: hitherto it has remained a theory everywhere. The franchise, representation of the people, responsibility of ministers, const.i.tutional limitation of the ruler's power, are infallibly effective weapons or instruments, but no people has yet learnt how to handle them rightly. That is why pessimists speak of the bankruptcy of civilization, that is why the aim of civilization, the liberation of the person and the enforcement of its sovereignty, has nowhere been attained, that is why, to quote Napoleon I in his interview with Goethe at Erfurt, "In our times the power of fate is politics." And yet all these inst.i.tutions of a modern const.i.tutional state, from the ballot-paper and the voting of taxes in Parliament to the enforced resignation of the ministry on a vote of censure and the oath of the ruler to observe the const.i.tution, recognize the rights of the individual as opposed to the state, and at least theoretically give the lie to the bold declaration that the state is everything and the individual nothing.

It is no less untrue to say that the state is superior to Morality and is not bound by it. In order to prove this we need only be brave enough not to be intimidated by the mysterious mien and gestures and the dark, pompous phrases of the mystics who wors.h.i.+p the state, and to penetrate to the real, conceptual idea of the word.

The hocus pocus that the wors.h.i.+ppers of the state perform around their idol puts one in mind of Kempelen, who created a sensation with his automaton in the beginning of the nineteenth century. This figure, got up as a Turkish woman, gave rise to astonishment and, among not a few, to superst.i.tious fear. It played chess, and so well, too, that it almost always succeeded in winning, even against its most skilled opponents.

People cudgelled their brains to solve the riddle, all sorts of explanations were suggested, one more impossible than the other, but still the mystery remained dark, until the owner, having made enough money and sick of the part of an itinerant swindler, revealed the trick.

In the hollow figure there sat a clever chess player who worked its hands and with them carried out the moves on the board.

This anecdote can be applied literally to the state. Simpletons, drunk with phrases, and cunning cheats contend that the state is a supernatural creation in which the "spirit of the universe," the "spirit of history" takes shape, and through which it realizes its aims; these aims, utterly transcending the understanding of the individual, are unintelligible to man. Such overwhelming phrases strike the simple, credulous hearer dumb and send cold shudders of awe up his spine. But let us look at the inside of this magic machine whose works are driven by the "spirit of the world" and with whose help this spirit fulfils its impenetrable designs. What do we find? Men, quite ordinary mortals, who sit in the machine and work its levers; men whose intellectual powers are only in rare cases superior to those of their enslaved subjects bereft of will; men who are, as a rule, of average intelligence and not seldom even below the average.

These men are the rulers, ministers who cling to office, high officials, party leaders and professional politicians who would like to become ministers, generals who seek to make themselves conspicuous, publicists who hope to derive personal profit by dint of bowing and sc.r.a.ping before the men in power, by flattering the stupidest and most despicable prejudices of the ma.s.ses, or even by implanting such prejudices with persuasive talk and purposely leading them astray. These men are formed on the same model as all individuals of the species and are therefore full of human weaknesses, a prey to all human desires, moved by all human impulses. They are selfish, vain, the sport of likes and dislikes, of self-deception as to the value of their ideas, opinions and judgments, disputatious, arrogant, greedy of possessions, power and pleasure, spurred by the instinct to magnify and swell their personality and impose it upon others. And these men are to be liberated from the discipline of the moral law? They are to be superior to the moral law?

For whom, then, was the moral law created and developed if not for these men--whose actions, although they spring from the same motives and aspire to the same satisfaction of self as those of all other men, can be fraught with consequences incomparably more evil, because they make use of the state machine for their purposes. Through the force and momentum given by the machinery of the state these actions are boundlessly augmented, their range being indefinitely increased and their results multiplied a thousandfold. The simplest logic shows that these men within the state machine, rendered so specially dangerous by their terrible armament and weapons, far from being liberated from the coercion of moral law, ought to be subjected to it with extraordinary severity, a severity which should be greater than that which suffices for the average man, in proportion as their power to do harm is greater than that of the man in the street.

Now all this time, rather carelessly, or at any rate weakly, I am making a concession to the pious devotees of the religion of the state, by speaking of the state machine,--a dubious expression, coined to deceive by rousing superst.i.tious ideas. The phrase is a picture, a rhetorical figure that one must be careful not to take literally. There is no state machine. There is only a relation of men to one another and to traditional habits, organized rules of command, obedience and equable conduct--habits into which the community of men has fallen in accordance with the law of least resistance, in order to promote their own interests, at least theoretically, without being forced to exert themselves continually to form new judgments, decisions and arrangements which the ever-s.h.i.+fting, ever-changing conditions of life render necessary.

Here again, behind the word, we find men, always only men. Just as those who command, from whose will all state action emanates, are men, so also the instruments by which they carry out their decisions are only metaphorically speaking, levers and wheels, parts of a machine of steel and iron; in reality they are officials, soldiers and policemen, they are judges and bailiffs; in short, they are men. And these men, who in all private relations with their fellow men are sternly required to submit to the dictates of Morality and the demands of the Law, are the same on whom other men, the leaders of the state, impose the duty of breaking all these precepts and laws; as amba.s.sadors they must deny and dishonour the signatures to treaties; as leaders or paid servants of the press bureau they must systematically spread lies; as attorneys of the state they must persecute and maltreat those who tell the truth; as policemen they must tear the fathers of families from wife and children and hunt them into the barracks; as soldiers they must invade a foreign land, murder unknown and innocent men, rob them of their property, burn down their houses, lay waste their lands, in a word, do everything that is punishable with prison and gallows; they must perpetrate all crimes which the aim and end of Morality and Law are to prevent and condemn. If one defends such action, where can one find the courage and the justification to require these men at one time to honour the Ten Commandments and at another to disregard them, to be criminals in the name of the state in the morning and to be moral private persons and law-abiding citizens in the afternoon? After all, they only have one nature, one mind, one character and one set of perceptive faculties.

To realize the monstrosity of this doctrine of twofold Morality, public and private, and of the non-compulsoriness of moral law for the state, it suffices to refer again to the fundamental concepts of Morality.

Individuals have banded themselves together in a community in order to be able to live more easily, or to live at all, under the present conditions obtaining on our planet. Lest society should be disintegrated by the quarrels of its members, and the latter should find themselves exposed single-handed to a hopeless struggle for existence, a limitation of their unfettered whims and desires, the curbing of their selfishness, control of their impulses and the exercise of consideration for their neighbours have been imposed upon them.

This coercion is Morality, and society can enforce it by vigorous measures; but for the most part this is unnecessary, for society has inculcated in its members the faculty of urging upon themselves in every situation the dictates of the community and of insisting on obedience to them. This faculty is conscience. The means by which conscience, inspired and a.s.sisted by reason, determines the will to keep in check or to suppress organic impulses and inclinations, desires and appet.i.tes, is inhibition; moreover, the development and strengthening of inhibition does not alone promote the aims of the community, but is of the highest biological importance to the individual himself, apart from his relations to society, as it renders him stronger and more efficient, differentiates him more subtly, and raises him to a higher level of development.

Now the state is a special development of society; it owes its existence to the same necessities as the latter, its task is to minimize the struggle for existence for the individual, to protect him from avoidable dangers and to ensure the safety of his life, the fruits of his labour and that measure of freedom which is compatible with life in a community. But if the state puts an end to the coercion inst.i.tuted by the community and therefore by the state itself; if it does away with Morality for itself, that is, for a number of individuals, be they few or many, that act in its name; if it allows selfishness, appet.i.tes and ruthlessness to have the same free play as with creatures of a lower order than man, or as with men before they formed themselves into communities; if in the pursuit of its plans beyond the bounds of Morality it intensifies the struggle for existence in a tragic manner, exposes men to the most terrible dangers, brutally destroys their liberty, gravely threatens their life and property or even devotes them to ruin--why, then it destroys the a.s.sumptions on which the state itself is based, denies its own aim, deprives itself of any right to existence, and the individuals have thenceforward but one interest, namely, to drive away this bogey of the state and with all possible means to force the men, who make use of it and the superst.i.tions clinging to it, to respect the moral law which the community has created to overwhelm anti-social, immoral individuals, to render them harmless and if necessary to destroy them.

One point there is on which the Machiavellian or practical politicians are particularly fond of talking nonsense, and that is the state's loyalty to treaties. Is the state bound by a treaty? Must it honour its signature? Must it perform what it has undertaken to do? The detestable, unanimous answer is "No. A treaty cannot hinder the state from doing what its interest demands." Prince Bismarck is often cited on this point, as he once said: "The only sound foundation for the state is state egoism." And another time: "A treaty is only valid _rebus sic stantibus_, if the situation is the same as when it was concluded; if the circ.u.mstances change, it becomes invalid by the very fact." Such views are revolting, however great a name be appended to them. Contract, or treaty, is the basis of the law. Whoever breaks it is dishonoured, and doubly dishonoured is he who from the beginning enters upon it with the idea at the back of his mind of deriving every possible advantage from it and of breaking it when the time comes to fulfil obligations.

The phrase, "sound egoism," whether it refer to a private person or to the state, must make every decent man blush for shame. Egoism may be sound, but it is always the contrary of moral. It is just as convenient for the individual as for the state to think only of his own advantage and unhesitatingly to sacrifice his neighbour's rights to it; but Morality arose and was const.i.tuted a rule of human relations in order to break the back of this selfishness and to teach man consideration for his neighbour. It is no valid excuse to say that state egoism is no sin, but a virtue and a merit, that it is different in character from the egoism of the individual. That is not true. It is not different in character. It is of exactly the same character as in private life. The responsible leader of the state who is guilty of a breach of treaty makes believe to himself and others that he does not do it for his own sake, but in the interests of the state. But who is the state? I have already given the answer to this. The state consists of men, the interests served by a breach of treaty are those of men, not, as a rule, of all, not even of many members of the state, but of a few, of a cla.s.s, a group, perhaps of only one family whose power, wealth and reputation it is intended to increase. So-called state egoism is in actual fact the private egoism of many individuals, who break the law, or tolerate and condone a breach of the law, for the sake of pocketing ill-gotten gains; and no one is so stupid as to let himself be bamboozled into believing that the shameful crime of breaking a treaty for the purpose of "sound"

egoistic grabbing becomes moral when it is perpetrated not by one individual but by thousands or millions of individuals.

The _reservatio mentalis_, too, of "_rebus sic stantibus_" is an unwarrantable and wicked reservation. Nothing prevents a decent man when making a contract from adding a clause reserving the right to terminate it if the essential conditions should change. If the other party to the contract does not agree to this, well, then the contract cannot be concluded. But to sign it with the mental reservation that one will disavow one's signature if the obligations undertaken become irksome, that is swindling. There is one consideration so simple that it is inconceivable that those who break contracts do not realize it. In some concrete case the leader of the state judges it to be profitable to the state to disregard good faith. What guarantee has he that his judgment is right? He is a man, and no man is infallible. But all mankind have made good faith the foundation of their life in communities, and if a single man has the temerity to draw a conclusion violating the immutable convictions and doctrines of all mankind, he must be mad not to see that most probably he is wrong and that all mankind in every age and every clime is right. I have left out of consideration the fact that any possible advantage arising from the breach of faith would not excuse him morally, and setting aside the ethical aspect of the case, I dwell only on the logical argument.

There is one case and one only in which a contract is not binding, either on the state or on the private individual, and that is when the signatory was forced to enter upon it with a knife at his throat.

Obligations which a victor imposes on his defeated and disarmed opponent are by their very nature invalid. The old cry of Brennus: "_Vae victis!_" is might and cannot const.i.tute a right. Civil law calls this kind of thing compulsion and decrees that it invalidates any contract.

Only a pedantic mind, stupid and depraved, immersed in hair-splitting trickery and incapable of a straight thought, could complacently maintain in the face of all common sense that might and compulsion, far from doing away with right, are the source of all right. The silly formula coined for this is: "Might is right." Might may be a fact, but it is not right. The source of right is not might but Morality, which might disavows and destroys. The necessary condition of any obligation which is to be valid is freedom. Kant proved this, but his proof was unnecessary, for it is self-evident. A forced treaty is no treaty, for it is the victor's fist which has guided the hand of the vanquished, and it is he who wrote the latter's signature under the doc.u.ment. The will, the consciousness of the seeming signatory were absent at the time.

But the worst and most immoral action of the state, beside which a breach of treaty for selfish reasons pales to insignificance, is the war of aggression for purposes of profit, that is, for the conquest of territory, extortion of money, increase of power, or fame. War is the quintessence of all crimes against life and property, against the body and mind of a person, the prevention of which is the aim and object of all Morality and all laws derived from it. Any means are permissible whereby this wickedness may be prevented; the war of defence, waged by the party attacked, is not only justified but sacred, as are the functions of the inst.i.tutions that society has developed to hunt down and punish those who do not respect Morality and Law. And just as it is the duty of every society to maintain courts of justice, police and prisons, so it is the duty of every state to be well armed, well versed in the use of weapons and strong, so long as it must count on the fact that there are practical politicians who do not recognize Morality as binding the state, and nations that are ready on the first hint of their leaders to perpetrate every crime that conscience, the Ten Commandments and penal law forbid.

It is idle, in my opinion, to discuss the question whether war will ever disappear from the world. It serves no purpose to contradict those who declare it to be eternal. It is possible that it will continue to exist as long as there is vice, sin and crime; and I do not believe that these will ever be completely exterminated. Among mankind there will probably never be a lack of sick and depraved people whose selfishness is monstrously exaggerated, whose instincts urge them with stormy violence, whose powers of inhibition are scantily developed or altogether wanting, who suffer from anaesthesia of the feelings and are therefore incapable of any sympathy with their fellow men and who are mentally too weak to foresee the results of their actions. Individuals of this kind are born criminals whose existence society will probably never be able to prevent and against whom it is obliged to protect itself. Now war arises from the same psychic conditions as the antisocial actions of these born criminals, and therefore the pessimists may be right in maintaining that it can never be abolished. But it is one thing to a.s.sert the existence of a deplorable fact and quite another to glorify it. To say that war is a part of the universe const.i.tuted by G.o.d is blasphemy, even though the saying emanates from Moltke. To extol war ecstatically and to sing hymns of praise to it, to declare that it evokes the highest virtues of man is a panegyric of crime, a thing antic.i.p.ated and punishable in the penal code.

I am not here attempting to solve the problem of what practical measures can be taken whereby right may be set in the place of might in inter-state relations, and instead of ruthless selfishness, Morality, that is, self-control, consideration and respect for the just claims of one's fellow men and love of one's neighbour. That is as far beyond the scope of this work as is the investigation of the methods of education, criminal justice, police organization or prison conditions intended to deal with the tide of crime and to stem it as far as possible. I am concerned with moral philosophy, and from that point of view I show that all Morality is rooted in the desire of men to live together peaceably in a society, to have greater security of life and property, greater possibilities of happiness, and that the same needs must impose the rules of Morality upon states in their relations to one another.

According to Hobbes the primitive condition of mankind is that of a war of every man against all other men, and only the creation of society makes an end of it. But if the state unleashes the dogs of aggressive warfare it hurls mankind back into its primitive condition and destroys the work it was created to do. The Stoic Seneca says: "_h.o.m.o sacra res homini_," "Man is sacred to man." The practical politicians who praise war repeat with Hobbes: "_h.o.m.o homini lupus_," "Man is a wolf to man."

The moral man demands a return from Hobbes to Seneca. If it has been possible in the state to tame the wolfish instincts of the individual and to make him bow down before Custom and Law, it must be equally possible to do so in the relations of states to one another. He who denies this in principle disavows Morality altogether, not only for the state but also for the individual; he who admits it in principle but in practice scornfully disregards it is a bandit, and it is desirable to treat him like any other robber and murderer who, to satisfy his wolfish appet.i.tes, tramples on Morality and Right and acts like a wild beast.

To this, however, the Moralist will object sadly, and the practical politician with scornful superiority, that the state has created inst.i.tutions for suppressing the bandit, but that there are none such to control bandit states, and that self-defence alone, the only means of self-protection for man in Hobbes's primitive condition, can gain a footing between them. Clearly only the party attacked is in a state of self-defence, but the bandit who has a sufficient sense of humour to play the pettifogging lawyer can always maintain that attack is also self-defence, the preventive form of self-defence. The answer to this is: if society has managed to provide judges and police in order to secure peace, then mankind will for the same purpose learn how to provide courts of justice and a police force to deal with the bandits of practical politics who endanger peace among nations. But that is a practical question, not a theoretical one, not a principle of moral philosophy. The latter shows irrefutably that there is only one Morality, not a private one and a public one which is its negation, not one kind for the individual and another for politics, for the state.

He who defends the thesis of a twofold Morality merely shows that he does not possess simple Morality.

CHAPTER VI

FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY