An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation Part 4

The national, or rather the dynastic and warlike, animus of this people is of the essence of their social and political inst.i.tutions. Without such a groundwork of popular sentiment neither the national establishment, nor the social order on which it rests and through which it works, could endure. And with this underlying national sentiment intact nothing but a dynastic establishment of a somewhat ruthless order, and no enduring system of law and order not based on universal submission to personal rule, could be installed. Both the popular animus and the correlative coercive scheme of law and order are of historical growth. Both have been learned, acquired, and are in no cogent sense original with the German people. But both alike and conjointly have come out of a very protracted, exacting and consistent discipline of mastery and subjection, running virtually unbroken over the centuries that have pa.s.sed since the region that is now the Fatherland first pa.s.sed under the predaceous rule of its Teutonic invaders,--for no part of the "Fatherland" is held on other tenure than that of forcible seizure in ancient times by bands of invaders, with the negligible exception of Holstein and a slight extent of territory adjoining that province to the south and south-west. Since the time when such peoples as were overtaken in this region by the Germanic barbarian invasions, and were reduced to subjection and presently merged with their alien masters, the same general fas.h.i.+on of law and order that presently grew out of that barbarian conquest has continued to govern the life of those peoples, with relatively slight and intermittent relaxation of its rigors.

Contrasted with its beginnings, in the shameful atrocities of the Dark Ages and the prehistoric phases of this German occupation, the later stages of this system of coercive law and order in the Fatherland will appear humane, not to say genial; but as compared with the degree of mitigation which the like order of things presently underwent elsewhere in western Europe, it has throughout the historical period preserved a remarkable degree of that character of arrogance and servility which it owes to its barbarian and predatory beginnings.

The initial stages of this Germanic occupation of the Fatherland are sufficiently obscure under the cloud of unrecorded antiquity that covers them; and then, an abundance of obscurantism has also been added by the vapours of misguided vanity that have surrounded so nearly all historical inquiry on the part of patriotic German scholars. Yet there are certain outstanding features in the case, in history and prehistory, that are too large or too notorious to be set aside or to be covered over, and these may suffice to show the run of circ.u.mstances which have surrounded the German peoples and shaped their civil and political inst.i.tutions, and whose discipline has guided German habits of thought and preserved the German spirit of loyalty in the shape in which it underlies the dynastic State of the present day.

Among the most engaging of those fables that make the conventional background of German history is the academic legend of a free agricultural village community made up of ungraded and masterless men.

It is not necessary here to claim that such a village community never played a part in the remoter prehistoric experiences out of which the German people, or their ruling cla.s.ses, came into the territory of the Fatherland; such a claim might divert the argument. But it is sufficiently patent to students of those matters today that no such community of free and ungraded men had any part in the Germanic beginnings; that is to say, in the early experiences of the Fatherland under German rule. The meager and ambiguous remarks of Tacitus on the state of domestic and civil economy among the inhabitants of Germany need no longer detain anyone, in the presence of the available archaeological and historical evidence. The circ.u.mstantial evidence of the prehistoric antiquities which touch this matter, as well as the slight allusions of historical records in antiquity, indicate unambiguously enough that when the Germanic immigrants moved into the territories of the Fatherland they moved in as invaders, or rather as marauders, and made themselves masters of the people already living on the land. And history quite as unambiguously declares that when the Fatherland first comes under its light it presents a dark and b.l.o.o.d.y ground of tumultuous contention and intrigue; where princes and princelings, captains of war and of rapine as well as the captains of superst.i.tion, spend the substance of an ignominiously sordid and servile populace in an endless round of mutual raiding, treachery, a.s.sa.s.sinations and supersession.

Taken at their face value, the recorded stories of that early time would leave one to infer that the common people, whose industry supported this superstructure of sordid mastery, could have survived only by oversight.

But touched as it is with poetic license and devoted to the admirable life of the master cla.s.s--admirable in their own eyes and in those of their chroniclers, as undoubtedly also in the eyes of the subject populace--the history of that time doubtless plays up the notable exploits and fortunes of its conspicuous personages, somewhat to the neglect of the obscure vicissitudes of life and fortune among that human raw material by use of which the admirable feats of the master cla.s.s were achieved, and about the use of which the dreary traffic of greed and crime went on among the masters.

Of the later history, what covers, say, the last one thousand years, there is no need to speak at length. With transient, episodic, interruptions it is for the Fatherland a continuation out of these beginnings, leading out into a more settled system of subjection and mastery and a progressively increased scale of princely enterprise, resting on an increasingly useful and increasingly loyal populace. In all this later history the posture of things in the Fatherland is by no means unique, nor is it even strikingly peculiar, by contrast with the rest of western Europe, except in degree. It is of the same general kind as the rest of what has gone to make the historical advance of medieval and modern times; but it differs from the generality in a more sluggish movement and a more tenacious adherence to what would be rated as the untoward features of mediaevalism. The approach to a modern scheme of inst.i.tutions and modern conceptions of life and of human values has been slow, and hitherto incomplete, as compared with those communities that have, for good or ill, gone farthest along the ways of modernity.

Habituation to personal subjection and subservience under the rigorous and protracted discipline of standardised service and fealty has continued later, and with later and slighter mitigation, in the Fatherland; so as better to have conserved the spiritual att.i.tude of the feudal order. Law and order in the Fatherland has in a higher degree continued to mean unquestioning obedience to a personal master and unquestioning subservience to the personal ambitions of the master. And since freedom, in the sense of discretionary initiative on the part of the common man, does not fit into the framework of such a system of dependence on personal authority and surveillance, any degree of such free initiative will be "licence" in the eyes of men bred into the framework of this system; whereas "liberty," as distinct from "licence,"

is not a matter of initiative and self-direction, but of lat.i.tude in the service of a master. Hence no degree of curtailment in this delegated "liberty" will be resented or repudiated by popular indignation, so long as the master to whom service is due can give a.s.surance that it is expedient for his purposes.

The age-long course of experience and inst.i.tutional discipline out of which the current German situation has come may be drawn schematically to the following effect: In the beginning a turmoil of conquest, rapine, servitude, and contention between rival bands of marauders and their captains, gradually, indeed imperceptibly, fell into lines of settled and conventionalised exploitation; with repeated interruptions due to new incursions and new combinations of rapacious chieftains. Out of it all in the course of time came a feudal regime, under which personal allegiance and service to petty chiefs was the sole and universal accredited bond of solidarity. As the outcome of further unremitting intrigue and contention among feudal chiefs, of high and low degree, the populace fell into larger parcels, under the hands of feudal lords of larger dominion, and the bias of allegiance and service came to hold with some degree of permanence and uniformity, or at least of consistency, over a considerable reach of country, including its inhabitants. With the rise of States came allegiance to a dynasty, as distinguished from the narrower and more ephemeral allegiance to the semi-detached person of a victorious prince; and the relative permanence of territorial frontiers under this rule gave room for an effectual recrudescence of the ancient propensity to a sentimental group solidarity; in which the accredited territorial limits of the dynastic dominion served to outline the group that so was felt to belong together under a joint dispensation and with something of a joint interest in matters of fame and fortune. As the same notion is more commonly and more suggestively expressed, a sense of nationality arose within the sweep of the dynastic rule. This sense of community interest that is called nationality so came in to reenforce the sense of allegiance to the dynastic establishment and so has coalesced with it to produce that high-wrought loyalty to the State, that draws equally on the sentiment of community interest in the nation and on the prescriptive docility to the dynastic head. The sense of national solidarity and of feudal loyalty and service have coalesced, to bring this people to that climax of patriotic devotion beyond which there lies no greater height along this way. But this is also as far as the German people have gone; and it is scarcely to be claimed that the j.a.panese have yet reached this stage; they would rather appear to be, essentially, subjects of the emperor, and only inchoately a j.a.panese nation. Of the German people it seems safe to say that they have achieved such a coalescence of unimpaired feudal fealty to a personal master and a full-blown sense of national solidarity, without any perceptible slackening in either strand of the double tie which so binds them in the service of the dynastic State.

Germany, in other words, is somewhat in arrears, as compared with those Europeans that have gone farthest along this course of inst.i.tutional growth, or perhaps rather inst.i.tutional permutation. It is not that this r.e.t.a.r.dation of the German people in this matter of national spirit is to be counted as an infirmity, a.s.suredly not as a handicap in the pursuit of that national prestige on which all patriotic endeavour finally converges. For this purpose the failure to distinguish between the ambitions of the dynastic statesmen and the interests of the commonwealth is really a prodigious advantage, which their rivals, of more mature growth politically, have lost by atrophy of this same dynastic axiom of subservience. These others, of whom the French and the English-speaking peoples make up the greater part and may be taken as the typical instance, have had a different history, in part. The discipline of experience has left a somewhat different residue of habits of thought embedded in their inst.i.tutional equipment and effective as axiomatic premises in their further apprehension of what is worth while, and why.

It is not that the difference between these two contrasted strains of the Western civilisation is either profound or very p.r.o.nounced; it is perhaps rather to be stated as a difference of degree than of kind; a r.e.t.a.r.dation of spiritual growth, in respect of the prevalent and controlling habits of thought on certain heads, in the one case as against the other. Therefore any attempt to speak with sufficient definition, so as to bring out this national difference of animus in any convincing way, will unavoidably have an appearance of overstatement, if not also of bias. And in any case, of course, it is not to be expected that the national difference here spoken for can be brought home to the apprehension of any unspoiled son of the Fatherland, since it does not lie within that perspective.

It is not of the nature of a divergence, but rather a differential in point of cultural maturity, due to a differential in the rate of progression through that sequence of inst.i.tutional phases through which the civilised peoples of Europe, jointly and severally, have been led by force of circ.u.mstance. In this movement out of the Dark Ages and onward, circ.u.mstances have fallen out differently for those Europeans that chanced to live within the confines of the Fatherland, different with such effect as to have in the present placed these others at a farther remove from the point of departure, leaving them furnished with less of that archaic frame of mind that is here in question. Possessed of less, but by no means shorn of all--perhaps not of the major part--of that barbaric heritage.

Circ.u.mstances have so fallen out that these--typically the French and the English-speaking peoples--have left behind and partly forgotten that inst.i.tutional phase in which the people of Imperial Germany now live and move and have their being. The French partly because they--that is the common people of the French lands--entered the procession with a very substantial lead, having never been put back to a point abreast of their neighbors across the Rhine, in that phase of European civilisation from which the peoples of the Fatherland tardily emerged into the feudal age.

So, any student who shall set out to account for the visible lead which the French people still so obstinately maintain in the advance of European culture, will have to make up his account with this notable fact among the premises of his inquiry, that they have had a shorter course to cover and have therefore, in the sporting phrase, had the inside track. They measure from a higher datum line. Among the advantages which so have come, in a sense unearned, to the French people, is their uninterrupted retention, out of Roman--and perhaps pre-Roman--times, of the conception of a commonwealth, a community of men with joint and mutual interests apart from any superimposed dependence on a joint feudal superior. The French people therefore became a nation, with un.o.btrusive facility, so soon as circ.u.mstances permitted, and they are today the oldest "nation" in Europe. They therefore were prepared from long beforehand, with an adequate principle (habit of thought) of national cohesion and patriotic sentiment, to make the s.h.i.+ft from a dynastic State to a national commonwealth whenever the occasion for such a move should arise; that is to say, whenever the dynastic State, by a suitable conjunction of infirmity and irksomeness, should pa.s.s the margin of tolerance in this people's outraged sense of national shame. The case of the German people in their latterday att.i.tude toward dynastic vagaries may afford a term of comparison. These appear yet incapable of distinguis.h.i.+ng between national shame and dynastic ambition.

By a different course and on lines more nearly parallel with the life-history of the German peoples, the English-speaking peoples have reached what is for the present purpose much the same ground as the French, in that they too have made the s.h.i.+ft from the dynastic State to the national commonwealth. The British started late, but the discipline of servitude and unmitigated personal rule in their case was relatively brief and relatively ineffectual; that is to say, as compared with what their German cousins had to endure and to learn in the like connection.

So that the British never learned the lesson of dynastic loyalty fully by heart; at least not the populace; whatever may be true for the privileged cla.s.ses, the gentlemen, whose interests were on the side of privilege and irresponsible mastery. Here as in the French case it was the habits of thought of the common man, not of the cla.s.s of gentlemen, that made the obsolescence of the dynastic State a foregone conclusion and an easy matter--as one speaks of easy achievement in respect of matters of that magnitude. It is now some two and a half centuries since this s.h.i.+ft in the national point of view overtook the English-speaking community. Perhaps it would be unfair to say that that period, or that period plus what further time may yet have to be added, marks the interval by which German habits of thought in these premises are in arrears, but it is not easy to find secure ground for a different and more moderate appraisal.

The future, of course, is not to be measured in terms of the past, and the tempo of the present and of the calculable future is in many bearings very different from that which has ruled even in the recent historical past. But then, on the other hand, habituation always requires time; more particularly such habituation as is to take effect throughout a populous nation and is counted on to work a displacement of a comprehensive inst.i.tutional system and of a people's outlook on life.

Germany is still a dynastic State. That is to say, its national establishment is, in effect, a self-appointed and irresponsible autocracy which holds the nation in usufruct, working through an appropriate bureaucratic organisation, and the people is imbued with that spirit of abnegation and devotion that is involved in their enthusiastically supporting a government of that character. Now, it is in the nature of a dynastic State to seek dominion, that being the whole of its nature. And a dynastic establishment which enjoys the unqualified usufruct of such resources as are placed at its disposal by the feudalistic loyalty of the German people runs no chance of keeping the peace, except on terms of the unconditional surrender of all those whom it may concern. No solemn engagement and no pious resolution has any weight in the balance against a cultural fatality of this magnitude.

This account of the derivation and current state of German nationalism will of course appear biased to anyone who has been in the habit of rating German Culture high in all its bearings, and to whom at the same time the ideals of peace and liberty appeal. Indeed, such a critic, gifted with the due modic.u.m of asperity, might well be provoked to call it all a more or less ingenious diatribe of partisan malice. But it can be so construed only by those who see the question at issue as a point of invidious distinction between this German animus on the one hand and the corresponding frame of mind of the neighboring peoples on the other hand. There may also appear to the captious to be some air of deprecation about the characterisation here offered of the past history of political traffic within the confines of the Fatherland. All of which, of course, touches neither the veracity of the characterisation nor the purpose with which so ungrateful a line of a.n.a.lysis and exposition has been entered upon. It is to be regretted if facts that may flutter the emotions of one and another among the sensitive and unreflecting can not be drawn into such an inquiry without having their cogency discounted beforehand on account of the sentimental value imputed to them. Of course no offense is intended and no invidious comparison is aimed at.

Even if the point of it all were an invidious comparison it would immediately have to be admitted that the net showing in favor of these others, e.g., the French or the English-speaking peoples, is by no means so unreservedly to their credit as such a summary statement of the German case might seem to imply. As bearing on the chances of a peace contingent upon the temper of the contracting nationalities, it is by no means a foregone conclusion that such a peace compact would hold indefinitely even if it depended solely on the pacific animus of these others that have left the dynastic State behind. These others, in fact, are also not yet out of the woods. They may not have the same gift of gratuitous and irresponsible truculence as their German cousins, in the same alarming degree; but as was said in an earlier pa.s.sage, they too are ready to fight on provocation. They are patriotic to a degree; indeed to such a degree that anything which visibly touches the national prestige will readily afford a _casus belli_. But it remains true that the popular temper among them is of the defensive order; perhaps of an unnecessarily enthusiastic defensive order, but after all in such a frame of mind as leaves them willing to let well enough alone, to live and let live.

And herein appears to lie the decisive difference between those peoples whose patriotic affections center about the fortunes of an impersonal commonwealth and those in whom is superadded a fervent aspiration for dynastic ascendency. The latter may be counted on to break the peace when a promising opportunity offers.

The contrast may be ill.u.s.trated, though not so sharply as might be desirable, in the different temper shown by the British people in the Boer war on the one hand, as compared with the popularity of the French-Prussian war among the German people on the other hand. Both were aggressive wars, and both were substantially unprovoked. Diplomatically speaking, of course, sufficient provocation was found in either case, as how should it not? But in point of substantial provocation and of material inducement, both were about equally gratuitous. In either case the war could readily have been avoided without material detriment to the community and without perceptible lesion to the national honour.

Both were "engineered" on grounds shamelessly manufactured _ad hoc_ by interested parties; in the one case by a coterie of dynastic statesmen, in the other by a junta of commercial adventurers and imperialistic politicians. In neither case had the people any interest of gain or loss in the quarrel, except as it became a question of national prestige. But both the German and the British community bore the burden and fought the campaign to a successful issue for those interested parties who had precipitated the quarrel. The British people at large, it is true, bore the burden; which comes near being all that can be said in the way of popular approval of this war, which political statesmen have since then rated as one of the most profitable enterprises in which the forces of the realm have been engaged. On the subject of this successful war the common man is still inclined to cover his uneasy sense of decency with a recital of extenuating circ.u.mstances. What parallels all this in the German case is an outbreak of patriotic abandon and an admirable spirit of unselfish sacrifice in furtherance of the dynastic prestige, an intoxication of patriotic blare culminating in the triumphant coronation at Versailles. Nor has the sober afterthought of the past forty-six years cast a perceptible shadow of doubt across the glorious memory of that patriotic debauch.

Such is the difference of animus between a body of patriotic citizens in a modern commonwealth on the one hand and the loyal subjects of a dynastic State on the other hand. There need be no reflections on the intrinsic merits of either. Seen in dispa.s.sionate perspective from outside the turmoil, there is not much to choose, in point of sane and self-respecting manhood, between the sluggish and shamefaced abettor of a sordid national crime, and a ranting patriot who glories in serving as cat's-paw to a syndicate of unscrupulous politicians bent on dominion for dominion's sake. But the question here is not as to the relative merits or the relative manhood contents of the two contrasted types of patriot. Doubtless both and either have manhood enough and to spare; at least, so they say. But the point in question is the simpler and nowise invidious one, as to the availability of both or either for the perpetuation of the world's peace under a compact of vigilant neutrality. Plainly the German frame of mind admits of no neutrality; the quest of dominion is not compatible with neutrality, and the substantial core of German national life is still the quest of dominion under dynastic tutelage. How it stands with the spirit that has repeatedly come in sight in the international relations of the British community is a question harder to answer.

It may be practicable to establish a peace of neutrals on the basis of such national spirit as prevails among these others--the French and English-speaking peoples, together with the minor nationalities that cl.u.s.ter about the North Sea--because their habitual att.i.tude is that of neutrality, on the whole and with allowance for a bellicose minority in all these countries. By and large, these peoples have come to the tolerant att.i.tude that finds expression in the maxim, Live and let live.

But they are all and several sufficiently patriotic. It may, indeed, prove that they are more than sufficiently patriotic for the purposes of a neutral peace. They stand for peace, but it is "peace with honour;"

which means, in more explicit terms, peace with undiminished national prestige. Now, national prestige is a very particular commodity, as has been set out in earlier pa.s.sages of this inquiry; and a peace which is to be kept only on terms of a jealous maintenance of the national honour is likely to be in a somewhat precarious case. If, and when, the national honour is felt to require an enhanced national ascendancy, the case for a neutral peace immediately becomes critical. And the greater the number and diversity of pretensions and interests that are conceived to be bound up with the national honour, the more unstable will the resulting situation necessarily be.

The upshot of all this recital of considerations appears to be that a neutral peace compact may, or it may not, be practicable in the absence of such dynastic States as Germany and j.a.pan; whereas it has no chance in the presence of these enterprising national establishments.

No one will be readier or more voluble in exclaiming against the falsity of such a discrimination as is here attempted, between the democratic and the dynastic nations of the modern world, than the spokesmen of these dynastic Powers. No one is more outspoken in professions of universal peace and catholic amity than these same spokesmen of the dynastic Powers; and nowhere is there more urgent need of such professions. Official and "inspired" professions are, of course, to be overlooked; at least, so charity would dictate. But there have, in the historic present, been many professions of this character made also by credible spokesmen of the German, and perhaps of the j.a.panese, people, and in all sincerity. By way of parenthesis it should be said that this is not intended to apply to expressions of conviction and intention that have come out of Germany these two years past (December 1916). Without questioning the credibility of these witnesses that have borne witness to the pacific and genial quality of national sentiment in the German people, it will yet be in place to recall the run of facts in the national life of Germany in this historical present and the position of these spokesmen in the German community.

The German nation is of a peculiar composition in respect of its social structure. So far as bears on the question in hand, it is made up of three distinctive const.i.tuent factors, or perhaps rather categories or conditions of men. The populace is of course the main category, and in the last resort always the main and decisive factor. Next in point of consequence as well as of numbers and initiative is the personnel of the control,--the ruling cla.s.s, the administration, the official community, the hierarchy of civil and political servants, or whatever designation may best suit; the category comprises that pyramidal superstructure of privilege and control whereof the sovereign is the apex, and in whom, under any dynastic rule, is in effect vested the usufruct of the populace. These two cla.s.ses or conditions of men, the one of which orders and the other obeys, make up the working structure of the nation, and they also between them embody the national life and carry forward the national work and aim. Intermediate between them, or rather beside them and overlapping the commissure, is a third category whose life articulates loosely with both the others at the same time that it still runs along in a semi-detached way. This slighter but more visible, and particularly more audible, category is made up of the "Intellectuals,"

as a late, and perhaps vulgar, designation would name them.

These are they who chiefly communicate with the world outside, and at the same time they do what is academically called thinking. They are in intellectual contact and communication with the world at large, in a contact of give and take, and they think and talk in and about those concepts that go in under the caption of the humanities in the world at large. The category is large enough to const.i.tute an intellectual community, indeed a community of somewhat formidable magnitude, taken in absolute terms, although in percentages of the population at large their numbers will foot up to only an inconsiderable figure. Their contact with the superior cla.s.s spoken of above is fairly close, being a contact, in the main, of service on the one side and of control on the other. With the populace their contact and communion is relatively slight, the give and take in the case being neither intimate nor far-reaching. More particularly is there a well-kept limit of moderation on any work of indoctrination or intellectual guidance which this cla.s.s may carry down among the people at large, dictated and enforced by dynastic expediency. This category, of the Intellectuals, is sufficiently large to live its own life within itself, without drawing on the spiritual life of the community at large, and of sufficiently substantial quality to carry its own peculiar scheme of intellectual conventions and verities. Of the great and highly meritorious place and work of these Intellectuals in the scheme of German culture it is needless to speak. What is to the point is that they are the accredited spokesmen of the German nation in all its commonplace communication with the rest of civilised Europe.

The Intellectuals have spoken with conviction and sincerity of the spiritual state of the German people, but in so doing, and in so far as bears on the character of German nationalism, they have been in closer contact, intellectually and sympathetically, with the intellectual and spiritual life of civilised Europe at large than with the movements of the spirit among the German populace. And their canva.s.sing of the concepts which so have come under their attention from over the national frontiers has been carried forward--so far, again, as bears on the questions that are here in point--with the German-dynastic principles, logic and mechanism of execution under their immediate observation and supplying the concrete materials for inquiry. Indeed, it holds true, by and large, that nothing else than this German-dynastic complement of ways and means has, or can effectually, come under their observation in such a degree of intimacy as to give body and definition to the somewhat abstract theorems on cultural aims and national preconceptions that have come to them from outside. In short, they have borrowed these theoretical formulations from abroad, without the concrete apparatus of ways and means in which these theorems are embodied in their foreign habitat, and have so found themselves construing these theoretical borrowings in the only concrete terms of which they have had first-hand and convincing knowledge. Such an outcome would be fairly unavoidable, inasmuch as these Intellectuals, however much they are, in the spirit, citizens of the cosmopolitan republic of knowledge and intelligence, they are after all, _in propria persona_, immediately and unremittingly subjects of the German-dynastic State; so that all their detail thinking on the aims, ways and means of life, in all its civil and political bearings, is unavoidably shaped by the unremitting discipline of their workday experience under this dynastic scheme. The outcome has been that while they have taken up, as they have understood them, the concepts that rule the civic life of these other, maturer nations, they have apprehended and developed these theorems of civic life in the terms and by the logic enforced in that system of control and surveillance known to them by workday experience,--the only empirical terms at hand.

The apex of growth and the center of diffusion as regards the modern culture in respect of the ideals and logic of civic life--other phases of this culture than this its civil aspect do not concern the point here in question--this apex of growth and center of diffusion lie outside the Fatherland, in an environment alien to the German inst.i.tutional scheme.

Yet so intrinsic to the cultural drift of modern mankind are these aims and this logic, that in taking over and further enriching the intellectual heritage of this modern world the Intellectuals of the Fatherland have unavoidably also taken over those conceptions of civil initiative and masterless self-direction that rule the logic of life in a commonwealth of ungraded men. They have taken these over and a.s.similated them as best their experience would permit. But workday experience and its exigencies are stubborn things; and in this process of a.s.similation of these alien conceptions of right and honest living, it is the borrowed theorems concerning civic rights and duties that have undergone adaptation and revision, not the concrete system of ways and means in which these principles, so accepted, are to be put in practice.

Necessarily so, since in the German scheme of law and order the major premise is the dynastic State, whereas the major premise of the modern civilised scheme of civic life is the absence of such an organ. So, the development and elaboration of these modern principles of civic liberty--and this elaboration has taken on formidable dimensions--under the hand of the German Intellectuals has uniformly run out into Pickwickian convolutions, greatly suggestive of a lost soul seeking a place to rest. With unquestionably serious purpose and untiring endeavour, they have sought to embody these modern civilised preconceptions in terms afforded by, or in terms compatible with, the inst.i.tutions of the Fatherland; and they have been much concerned and magniloquently elated about the German spirit of freedom that so was to be brought to final and consummate realisation in the life of a free people. But at no point and in no case have either the proposals or their carrying out taken shape as a concrete application of the familiar principle of popular self-direction. It has always come to something in the way of a concessive or expedient mitigation of the antagonistic principle of personal authority. Where the forms of self-government or of individual self-direction have concessively been installed, under the Imperial rule, they have turned out to be an imitative structure with some shrewd provision for their coercion or inhibition at the discretion of an irresponsible authority.

Neither the sound intelligence nor the good faith of these Intellectuals of the Fatherland is to be impugned. That the--necessarily vague and circ.u.mlocutory--expositions of civic inst.i.tutions and popular liberty which they have so often and so largely promulgated should have been used as a serviceable blind of dynastic statecraft is not to be set down to their discredit. Circ.u.mstances over which they could have no control, since they were circ.u.mstances that shaped their own habits of thought, have placed it beyond their competence to apprehend or to formulate these alien principles (habits of thought) concretely in those alien inst.i.tutional details and by the alien logic with which they could have no working acquaintance.

To one and another this conception of cultural solidarity within the nation, and consequent cultural aliency between nations, due to the different habits of life and of thought enforced by the two diverse inst.i.tutional systems, may be so far unfamiliar as to carry no conviction. It may accordingly not seem out of place to recall that the inst.i.tutional system of any given community, particularly for any community living under a home-bred and time-tried system of its own, will necessarily be a balanced system of interdependent and mutually concordant parts working together in one comprehensive plan of law and order. Through such an inst.i.tutional system, as, e.g., the German Imperial organisation, there will run a degree of logical consistency, consonant with itself throughout, and exerting a consistent discipline throughout the community; whereby there is enforced a consistent drift or bent in the prevalent habits of life, and a correlative bent in the resulting habits of thought prevalent in the community. It is, in fact, this possession of a common scheme of use and wont, and a consequent common outlook and manner of thinking, that const.i.tutes the most intrinsic bond of solidarity in any nationality, and that finally marks it off from any other.

It is equally a matter of course that any other given community, living under the rule of a substantially different, or divergent, system of inst.i.tutions, will be exposed to a course of workday discipline running to a different, perhaps divergent, effect; and that this other community will accordingly come in for a characteristically different discipline and fall under the rule of a different commonsense outlook. Where an inst.i.tutional difference of this kind is somewhat large and consistent, so as to amount in effect to a discrepancy, as may fairly be said of the difference between Imperial Germany and its like on the one hand, and the English-speaking nations on the other hand, there the difference in everyday conceptions may readily make the two peoples mutually unintelligible to one another, on those points of inst.i.tutional principle that are involved in the discrepancy. This is the state of the case as between the German people, including the Intellectuals, and the peoples against whom their preconceptions of national destiny have arrayed them. And the many vivid expressions of consternation, abhorrence and incredulity that have come out of this community of Intellectuals in the course of the past two years of trial and error, bear sufficient testimony to the rigorous constraint which these German preconceptions and their logic exercise over the Intellectuals, no less than over the populace.

Conversely, of course, it is nearly as impracticable for those who have grown up under the discipline of democratic inst.i.tutions to comprehend the habitual outlook of the commonplace German patriot on national interests and aims; not quite, perhaps, because the discipline of use and wont and indoctrination is neither so rigorous nor so consistent in their case. But there is, after all, prevalent among them a sufficiently evident logical inability to understand and appreciate the paramount need of national, that is to say dynastic, ascendancy that actuates all German patriots; just as these same patriots are similarly unable to consider national interests in any other light than that of dynastic ascendancy.

Going simply on the face value of the available evidence, any outsider might easily fall into the error of believing that when the great adventure of the war opened up before them, as well as when presently the shock of baffled endeavour brought home its exasperating futility, the Intellectuals of the Fatherland distinguished themselves above all other cla.s.ses and conditions of men in the exuberance of their patriotic abandon. Such a view would doubtless be almost wholly erroneous. It is not that the Intellectuals reached a substantially superior pitch of exaltation, but only that, being trained in the use of language, they were able to express their emotions with great facility. There seems no reason to believe that the populace fell short of the same measure in respect of their prevalent frame of mind.

To return to the workings of the Imperial dynastic State and the forces engaged. It plainly appears that the Intellectuals are to be counted as supernumeraries, except so far as they serve as an instrument of publicity and indoctrination in the hands of the discretionary authorities. The working factors in the case are the dynastic organisation of control, direction and emolument, and the populace at large by use of whose substance the traffic in dynastic ascendancy and emolument is carried on. These two are in fairly good accord, on the ancient basis of feudal loyalty. Hitherto there is no evident ground for believing that this archaic tie that binds the populace to the dynastic ambitions has at all perceptibly weakened. And the possibility of dynastic Germany living at peace with the world under any compact, therefore translates itself into the possibility of the German people's unlearning its habitual deference and loyalty to the dynasty.

As its acquirement has been a work of protracted habituation, so can its obsolescence also come about only through more or less protracted habituation under a system of use and wont of a different or divergent order. The elements of such a systematic discipline running to an effect at cross purposes with this patriotic animus are not absent from the current situation in the Fatherland; the discipline of the modern industrial system, for instance, runs to such a divergent effect; but this, and other conceivable forces which may reenforce it, will after all take time, if they are to work a decisive change in the current frame of mind of the patriotic German community. During the interval required for such a change in the national temper, the peace of the world would be conditioned on the inability of the dynastic State to break it. So that the chances of success for any neutral peace league will vary inversely as the available force of Imperial Germany, and it could be accounted secure only in the virtual elimination of the Imperial State as a national Power.

If the gradual obsolescence of the spirit of militant loyalty in the German people, through disuse under a regime of peace, industry, self government and free trade, is to be the agency by force of which dynastic imperialism is to cease, the chance of a neutral peace will depend on the thoroughness with which such a regime of self-direction can be installed in this case, and on the s.p.a.ce of time required for such obsolescence through disuse. Obviously, the installation of a workable regime of self-government on peaceable lines would in any case be a matter of great difficulty among a people whose past experience has so singularly incapacitated them for self-government; and obviously, too, the interval of time required to reach secure ground along this line of approach would be very considerable. Also, in view of these conditions, obviously, this scheme for maintaining the peace of nations by a compact of neutrals based on a compromise with an aspiring dynastic State resolves itself into the second of the two alternatives spoken of at the outset, viz., a neutral peace based on the elimination of Germany as a war power, together with the elimination of any materials suitable for the formation of a formidable coalition. And then, with Imperial Germany supposedly eliminated or pacified, there would still remain the j.a.panese establishment, to which all the arguments pertinent in the case of Germany will apply without abatement; except that, at least hitherto, the dynastic statesmen of j.a.pan have not had the disposal of so ma.s.sive a body of resources, in population, industry, or raw materials.

CHAPTER IV

PEACE WITHOUT HONOUR

The argument therefore turns back to a choice between the two alternatives alluded to: peace in submission to the rule of the German dynastic establishment (and to j.a.pan), or peace through elimination of these enterprising Powers. The former alternative, no doubt, is sufficiently unattractive, but it is not therefore to be put aside without a hearing. As goes without saying, it is repugnant to the patriotic sentiments of those peoples whom the Imperial German establishment have elected for submission. But if this unreflecting patriotic revulsion can once be made amenable to reason, there is always something to be said in favor of such a plan of peaceable submission, or at least in extenuation of it; and if it is kept in mind that the ulterior necessity of such submission must always remain in perspective as a condition precedent to a peaceful settlement, so long as one or both of these enterprising Powers remains intact, it will be seen that a sane appraisal of the merits of such a regime of peace is by no means uncalled for. For neither of these two Powers is there a conclusive issue of endeavour short of paramount dominion.

There should also be some gain of insight and sobriety in recalling that the Intellectuals of the Fatherland, who have doubtless pondered this matter longer and more dispa.s.sionately than all other men, have spoken very highly of the merits of such a plan of universal submission to the rule of this German dynastic establishment. They had, no doubt, been considering the question both long and earnestly, as to what would, in the light of reason, eventually be to the best interest of those peoples whose manifest destiny was eventual tutelage under the Imperial crown; and there need also be no doubt that in that time (two years past) they therefore spoke advisedly and out of the fulness of the heart on this head. The p.r.o.nouncements that came out of the community of Intellectuals in that season of unembarra.s.sed elation and artless avowal are doubtless to be taken as an outcome of much thoughtful canva.s.sing of what had best be done, not as an enforced compromise with untoward necessities but as the salutary course freely to be pursued with an eye single to the best good of all concerned.

It is true, the captious have been led to speak slightingly of the many utterances of this tenure coming out of the community of Intellectuals, as, e.g., the lay sermons of Professor Ostwald dating back to that season; but no unprejudiced reader can well escape the persuasion that these, as well as the very considerable volume of similar p.r.o.nouncements by many other men of eminent scholars.h.i.+p and notable for benevolent sentiments, are faithfully to be accepted as the expressions of a profound conviction and a consciously generous spirit. In so speaking of the advantages to be derived by any subject people from submission to the German Imperial rule, these Intellectuals are not to be construed as formulating the drift of vulgar patriotic sentiment among their compatriots at large, but rather as giving out the deliverances of their own more sensitive spirit and maturer deliberation, as men who are in a position to see human affairs and interests in a larger perspective.