An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation Part 5

Such, no doubt, would be their own sense of the matter.

Reflection on the a.n.a.logous case of the tutelage exercised by the American government over the subject Philippinos may contribute to a just and temperate view of what is intended in the regime of tutelage and submission so spoken for by the German Intellectuals,--and, it may be added, found good by the Imperial statesmen. There would, of course, be the difference, as against the case of the Philippinos, that whereas the American government is after all answerable, in the last resort and in a somewhat random fas.h.i.+on, to a popular opinion that runs on democratic preconceptions, the German Imperial establishment on the other hand is answerable to no one, except it be to G.o.d, who is conceived to stand in somewhat the relation of a silent partner, or a minority stockholder in this dynastic enterprise.

Yet it should not be overlooked that any presumptive hard usage which the va.s.sal peoples might look for at the hands of the German dynasty would necessarily be tempered with considerations of expediency as dictated by the exigencies of usufruct. The Imperial establishment has shown itself to be wise, indeed more wise than amiable, but wise at least in its intentions, in the use which it has made of subject peoples. .h.i.therto. It is true, a somewhat accentuated eagerness on the part of the Imperial establishment to get the maximum service in a minimum of time and at a minimum cost from these subject populations,--as, e.g., in Silesia and Poland, in Schleswig-Holstein, in Alsace-Lorraine, or in its African and Oceanic possessions,--has at times led to practices altogether dubious on humanitarian grounds, at the same time that in point of thrifty management they have gone beyond "what the traffic will bear." Yet it is not to be overlooked--and in this connection it is a point of some weight--that, so far as the predatory traditions of its statecraft will permit, the Imperial establishment has in all these matters been guided by a singularly unreserved attention to its own material advantage. Where its management in these premises has yielded a less profitable usufruct than the circ.u.mstances would reasonably admit, the failure has been due to an excess of cupidity rather than the reverse.

The circ.u.mstantial evidence converges to the effect that the Imperial establishment may confidently be counted on to manage the affairs of its subject peoples with an eye single to its own material gain, and it may with equal confidence be counted on that in the long run no unadvised excesses will be practised. Of course, an excessive adventure in atrocity and predation, due to such human infirmity in its agents or in its directorate as has been shown in various recent episodes, is to be looked for now and again; but these phenomena would come in by way of fluctuating variations from the authentic routine, rather than as systematic features of it.

That superfluity of naughtiness that has given character to the current German Imperial policy in Belgium, e.g., or that similarly has characterised the dealings of Imperial j.a.pan in Korea during the late "benevolent a.s.similation" of that people into j.a.panese-Imperial usufruct, is not fairly to be taken to indicate what such an Imperial establishment may be expected to do with a subject people on a footing of settled and long-term exploitation. At the outset, in both instances, the policy of frightfulness was dictated by a well-advised view to economy of effort in reducing the subject people to an abject state of intimidation, according to the art of war as set forth in the manuals; whereas latterly the somewhat profligate excesses of the government of occupation--decently covered with diplomatic parables on benevolence and legality--have been dictated by military convenience, particularly by the need of forced labor and the desirability of a reduced population in the acquired territory. So also the "personally conducted" dealings with the Armenians by use of the Turks should probably also best be explained as an endeavour to reduce the numbers of an undesirable population beforehand, without incurring unnecessary blame. All these things are, at the most, misleading indications of what the Imperial policy would be like under settled conditions and in the absence of insubordination.

By way of contrast, such as may serve to bring the specific traits of this prospective Imperial tutelage of nations into a better light, the Ottoman usufruct of the peoples of the Turkish dominions offers an instructive instance. The Ottoman tutelage is today spoken of by its apologists in terms substantially identical with the sketches of the future presented by hopeful German patriots in the early months of the current war. But as is so frequently the case in such circ.u.mstances, these expressions of the officers have to be understood in a diplomatic sense; not as touching the facts in any other than a formal way. It is sufficiently evident that the Ottoman management of its usufruct has throughout been ill-advised enough persistently to charge more than the traffic would bear, probably due in great part to lack of control over its agents or ramifications, by the central office. The Ottoman establishment has not observed, or enforced, the plain rules of economy in its utilisation of the subject peoples, and finds itself today bankrupt in consequence. What may afford more of a parallel to the prospective German tutelage of the nations is the procedure of the j.a.panese establishment in Korea, Manchuria, or China; which is also duly covered with an ostensibly decent screen of diplomatic parables, but the nature and purpose of which is overt enough in all respects but the nomenclature. It is not unlikely that even this j.a.panese usufruct and tutelage runs on somewhat less humane and complaisant lines than a well-advised economy of resources would dictate for the prospective German usufruct of the Western nations.

There is the essential difference between the two cases that while j.a.pan is over-populated, so that it becomes the part of a wise government to find additional lands for occupancy, and that so it is constrained by its imperial ambitions to displace much of the population in its subject territories, the Fatherland on the other hand is under-populated-- notoriously, though not according to the letter of the diplomatic parables on this head--and for the calculable future must continue to be under-populated; provided that the state of the industrial arts continues subject to change in the same general direction as. .h.i.therto, and provided that no radical change affects the German birth-rate. So, since the Imperial government has no need of new lands for occupancy by its home population, it will presumably be under no inducement to take measures looking to the partial depopulation of its subject territories.

The case of Belgium and the measures looking to a reduction of its population may raise a doubt, but probably not a well taken doubt. It is rather that since it has become evident that the territory can not be held, it is thought desirable to enrich the Fatherland with whatever property can be removed, and to consume the acc.u.mulated man-power of the Belgian people in the service of the war. It would appear that it is a war-measure, designed to make use of the enemy's resources for his defeat. Indeed, under conditions of settled occupation or subjection, any degree of such depopulation would entail an economic loss, and any well-considered administrative policy would therefore look to the maintenance of the inhabitants of the acquired territories in undiminished numbers and unimpaired serviceability.

The resulting scheme of Imperial usufruct should accordingly be of a considerate, not to say in effect humane, character,--always provided that the requisite degree of submission and subservience ("law and order") can be enforced by a system of coercion so humane as not to reduce the number of the inhabitants or materially to lower their physical powers. Such would, by reasonable expectation, be the character of this projected Imperial tutelage and usufruct of the nations of Christendom. In its working-out this German project should accordingly differ very appreciably from the policy which its imperial ambitions have constrained the j.a.panese establishment to pursue in its dealings with the life and fortunes of its recently, and currently, acquired subject peoples.

The better to appreciate in some concrete fas.h.i.+on what should, by reasonable expectation, be the terms on which life might so be carried on _sub pace germanica_, attention may be invited to certain typical instances of such peace by abnegation among contemporary peoples.

Perhaps at the top of the list stands India, with its many and varied native peoples, subject to British tutelage, but, the British apologists say, not subject to British usufruct. The margin of tolerance in this instance is fairly wide, but its limits are sharply drawn. India is wanted and held, not for tribute or revenue to be paid into the Imperial treasury, nor even for exclusive trade privileges or preferences, but mainly as a preserve to provide official occupation and emoluments for British gentlemen not otherwise occupied or provided for; and secondarily as a means of safeguarding lucrative British investments, that is to say, investments by British capitalists of high and low degree. The current British professions on the subject of this occupation of India, and at times the shamefaced apology for it, is that the people of India suffer no hards.h.i.+p by this means; the resulting governmental establishment being no more onerous and no more expensive to them than any equally, or even any less, competent government of their own would necessarily be. The fact, however, remains, that India affords a much needed and very considerable net revenue to the cla.s.s of British gentlemen, in the shape of official salaries and pensions, which the British gentry at large can on no account forego. Narrowed to these proportions it is readily conceivable that the British usufruct of India should rest with no extraordinary weight on the Indian people at large, however burdensome it may at times become to those cla.s.ses who aspire to take over the usufruct in case the British establishment can be dislodged. This case evidently differs very appreciably from the projected German usufruct of neighboring countries in Europe.

A case that may be more nearly in point would be that of any one of the countries subject to the Turkish rule in recent times; although these instances scarcely show just what to expect under the projected German regime. The Turkish rule has been notably inefficient, considered as a working system of dynastic usufruct; whereas it is confidently expected that the corresponding German system would show quite an exceptional degree of efficiency for the purpose. This Turkish inefficiency has had a two-fold effect, which should not appear in the German case. Through administrative abuses intended to serve the personal advantage of the irresponsible officials, the underlying peoples have suffered a progressive exhaustion and dilapidation; whereby the central authority, the dynastic establishment, has also grown progressively, c.u.mulatively weaker and therefore less able to control its agents; and, in the second place, on the same grounds, in the pursuit of personal gain, and prompted by personal animosities, these irresponsible agents have persistently carried their measures of extortion beyond reasonable bounds,--that is to say beyond the bounds which a well considered plan of permanent usufruct would countenance. All this would be otherwise and more sensibly arranged under German Imperial auspices.

One of the nations that have fallen under Turkish rule--and Turkish peace--affords a valuable ill.u.s.tration of a secondary point that is to be considered in connection with any plan of peace by submission. The Armenian people have in later time come partly under Russian dominion, and so have been exposed to the Russian system of bureaucratic exploitation; and the difference between Russian and Turkish Armenia is instructive. According to all credible--that is unofficial--accounts, conditions are perceptibly more tolerable in Russian Armenia. Well informed persons relate that the cause for this more lenient, or less extreme, administration of affairs under Russian officials is a selective death rate among them, such that a local official who persistently exceeds a certain ill-defined limit of tolerance is removed by what would under other circ.u.mstances be called an untimely death. No adequate remedy has been found, within the large limits which Russian bureaucratic administration habitually allows itself in questions of coercion. The Turk, on the other hand, less deterred by considerations of long-term expediency, and, it may be, less easily influenced by outside opinion on any point of humanity, has found a remedy in the systematic extirpation of any village in which an illicit death occurs.

One will incline to presume that on this head the German Imperial procedure would be more after the Russian than after the Turkish pattern; although latterday circ.u.mstantial evidence will throw some sinister doubt on the reasonableness of such an expectation.

It is plain, however, that the Turkish remedy for this form of insubordination is a wasteful means of keeping the peace. Plainly, to the home office, the High Command, the extinction of a village with its population is a more substantial loss than the unseasonable decease of one of its administrative agents; particularly when it is called to mind that such a decease will presumably follow only on such profligate excesses of naughtiness as are bound to be inexcusably unprofitable to the central authority. It may be left an open question how far a corrective of this nature can hopefully be looked to as applicable, in case of need, under the projected German Imperial usufruct.

It may, I apprehend, be said without offense that there is no depth of depravity below the ordinary reach of the Russian bureaucracy; but this organisation finds itself constrained, after all, to use circ.u.mspection and set some limits on individual excursions beyond the bounds of decency and humanity, so soon as these excesses touch the common or joint interest of the organisation. Any excess of atrocity, beyond a certain margin of tolerance, on the part of any one of its members is likely to work pecuniary mischief to the rest; and then, the bureaucratic conduct of affairs is also, after all, in an uncertain degree subject to some surveillance by popular sentiment at home or abroad. The like appears not to hold true of the Turkish official organisation. The difference may be due to a less provident spirit among the latter, as already indicated. But a different tradition, perhaps an outgrowth of this lack of providence and of the consequent growth of a policy of "frightfulness," may also come in for a share in the outcome; and there is also a characteristic difference in point of religious convictions, which may go some way in the same direction. The followers of Islam appear on the whole to take the tenets of their faith at their face value--servile, intolerant and fanatic--whereas the Russian official cla.s.s may perhaps without undue reproach be considered to have on the whole outlived the superst.i.tious conceits to which they yield an expedient _pro forma_ observance. So that when worse comes to worst, and the Turk finds himself at length with his back against the last consolations of the faith that makes all things straight, he has the a.s.sured knowledge that he is in the right as against the unbelievers; whereas the Russian bureaucrat in a like case only knows that he is in the wrong. The last extremity is a less conclusive argument to the man in whose apprehension it is not the last extremity. Again, there is some shadow of doubt falls on the question as to which of these is more nearly in the German Imperial spirit.

On the whole, the case of China is more to the point. By and large, the people of China, more particularly the people of the coastal-plains region, have for long habitually lived under a regime of peace by non-resistance. The peace has been broken transiently from time to time, and local disturbances have not been infrequent; but, taken by and large, the situation has habitually been of the peaceful order, on a ground of non-resisting submission. But this submission has not commonly been of a whole-hearted kind, and it has also commonly been a.s.sociated with a degree of persistent sabotage; which has clogged and r.e.t.a.r.ded the administration of governmental law and order, and has also been conducive to a large measure of irresponsible official corruption. The habitual scheme of things Chinese in this bearing may fairly be described as a peace of non-resistance tempered with sabotage and a.s.sa.s.sination. Such was the late Manchu regime, and there is no reason in China for expecting a substantially different outcome from the j.a.panese invasion that is now under way. The nature of this j.a.panese incursion should be sufficiently plain. It is an enterprise in statecraft after the order of Macchiavelli, Metternich, and Bismarck. Of course, the conciliatory fables given out by the diplomatic service, and by the other apologists, are to be taken at the normal discount of one-hundred percent. The relatively large current output of such fables may afford a hint as to the magnitude of the designs which the fables are intended to cover.

The Chinese people have had a more extended experience in peace of this order than all others, and their case should accordingly be instructive beyond all others. Not that a European peace by non-resistance need be expected to run very closely on the Chinese lines, but there should be a reasonable expectation that the large course of things would be somewhat on the same order in both cases. Neither the European traditions and habitual temperament nor the modern state of the industrial arts will permit one to look for anything like a close parallel in detail; but it remains true, when all is said, that the Chinese experience of peace under submission to alien masters affords the most instructive ill.u.s.tration of such a regime, as touches its practicability, its methods, its cultural value, and its effect on the fortunes of the subject peoples and of their masters.

Now, it may be said by way of preliminary generalisation that the life-history of the Chinese people and their culture is altogether the most imposing achievement which the records of mankind have to show; whereas the history of their successive alien establishments of mastery and usufruct is an unbroken sequence of incredibly shameful episodes,--always beginning in unbounded power and vainglory, running by way of misrule, waste and debauchery, to an inglorious finish in abject corruption and imbecility. Always have the gains in civilisation, industry and in the arts, been made by the subject Chinese, and always have their alien masters contributed nothing to the outcome but misrule, waste, corruption and decay. And yet in the long run, with all this handicap and misrule, the Chinese people have held their place and made headway in those things to which men look with affection and esteem when they come to take stock of what things are worth while. It would be a hopeless task to count up how many dynasties of masterful barbarians, here and there, have meanwhile come up and played their ephemeral role of vainglorious nuisance and gone under in shame and confusion, and dismissed with the invariable verdict of "Good Riddance!"

It may at first sight seem a singular conjuncture of circ.u.mstances, but it is doubtless a consequence of the same conjuncture, that the Chinese people have also kept their hold through all history on the Chinese lands. They have lived and multiplied and continued to occupy the land, while their successive alien masters have come and gone. So that today, as the outcome of conquest, and of what would be rated as defeat, the people continue to be Chinese, with an unbroken pedigree as well as an unbroken line of home-bred culture running through all the ages of history. In the biological respect the Chinese plan of non-resistance has proved eminently successful.

And, by the way, much the same, though not in the same degree, is true for the Armenian people; who have continued to hold their hill country through good days and evil, apparently without serious or enduring reduction of their numbers and without visible lapse into barbarism, while the successive disconnected dynasties of their conquering rulers have come and gone, leaving nothing but an ill name. "This fable teaches" that a diligent attention to the growing of crops and children is the sure and appointed way to the maintenance of a people and its culture even under the most adverse conditions, and that eventual death and shameful destruction inexorably wait on any "ruling race." Hitherto the rule has not failed. The rule, indeed, is grounded in the heritable traits of human nature, from which there is no escape.

For its long-term biological success, as well as for the continued integrity of a people's culture, a peace of non-resistance, under good or evil auspices, is more to be desired than imperial dominion. But these things are not all that modern peoples live for, perhaps it is safe to say that in no case are these chief among the things for which civilised Europeans are willing to live. They urgently need also freedom to live their own life in their own way, or rather to live within the bonds of convention which they have come in for by use and wont, or at least they believe that such freedom is essential to any life that shall be quite worth while. So also they have a felt need of security from arbitrary interference in their pursuit of a livelihood and in the free control of their own pecuniary concerns. And they want a discretionary voice in the management of their joint interests, whether as a nation or in a minor civil group. In short, they want personal, pecuniary and political liberty, free from all direction or inhibition from without.

They are also much concerned to maintain favorable economic conditions for themselves and their children. And last, but chiefly rather than least, they commonly are hide-bound patriots inspired with an intractable felt need of national prestige.

It is an a.s.semblage of peoples in such a frame of mind to whom the pacifists are proposing, in effect, a plan for eventual submission to an alien dynasty, under the form of a neutral peace compact to include the warlike Powers. There is little likelihood of such a scheme being found acceptable, with popular sentiment running as it now does in the countries concerned. And yet, if the brittle temper in which any such proposal is rejected by popular opinion in these countries today could be made to yield sufficiently to reflection and deliberate appraisal, it is by no means a foregone conclusion that its acceptance would not be the best way out of a critical situation. The cost of disabling and eliminating the warlike Power whose dominion is feared, or even of staving off the day of surrender, is evidently serious enough. The merits of the alternative should be open to argument, and should, indeed, be allowed due consideration. And any endeavour to present them without heat should presumably find a hearing. It appears to have been much of the fault of the pacifists who speak for the Peace League that they have failed or refused to recognise these ulterior consequences of the plan which they advocate; so that they appear either not to know what they are talking about, or to avoid talking about what they know.

It will be evident from beforehand that the grave difficulty to be met in any advocacy of peace on terms of non-resistant subjection to an alien dynastic rule--"peace at any price"--is a difficulty of the psychological order. Whatever may be conceived to hold true for the Chinese people, such submission is repugnant to the sentiments of the Western peoples. Which in turn evidently is due to the prevalence of certain habitual preconceptions among modern civilised men,--certain acquired traits of temper and bias, of the nature of fixed ideas. That something in the way of a reasonably contented and useful life is possible under such a regime as is held in prospect, and even some tolerable degree of well-being, is made evident in the Chinese case. But the Chinese tolerance of such a regime goes to argue that they are charged with fewer preconceptions at variance with the exigencies of life under these conditions. So, it is commonly accepted, and presumably to be accepted, that the Chinese people at large have little if any effectual sense of nationality; their patriotism appears to be nearly a negligible quant.i.ty. This would appear to an outsider to have been their besetting weakness, to which their successful subjection by various and sundry ambitious aliens has been due. But it appears also to have been the infirmity by grace of which this people have been obliged to learn the ways of submission, and so have had the fortune to outlive their alien masters, all and sundry, and to occupy the land and save the uncontaminated integrity of their long-lived civilisation.

Some account of the nature and uses of this spirit of patriotism that is held of so great account among Western nations has already been set out in an earlier pa.s.sage. One or two points in the case, that bear on the argument here, may profitably be recalled. The patriotic spirit, or the tie of nationalism, is evidently of the nature of habit, whatever proclivity to the formation of such a habit may be native to mankind.

More particularly is it a matter of habit--it might even be called a matter of fortuitous habit--what particular national establishment a given human subject will become attached to on reaching what is called "years of discretion" and so becoming a patriotic citizen.

The a.n.a.logy of the clam may not be convincing, but it may at least serve to suggest what may be the share played by habituation in the matter of national attachment. The young clam, after having pa.s.sed the free-swimming phase of his life, as well as the period of attachment to the person of a carp or similar fish, drops to the bottom and attaches himself loosely in the place and station in life to which he has been led; and he loyally sticks to his particular patch of ooze and sand through good fortune and evil. It is, under Providence, something of a fortuitous matter where the given clam shall find a resting place for the sole of his foot, but it is also, after all, "his own, his native land" etc. It lies in the nature of a clam to attach himself after this fas.h.i.+on, loosely, to the bottom where he finds a living, and he would not be a "good clam and true" if he failed to do so; but the particular spot for which he forms this attachment is not of the essence of the case. At least, so they say.

It may be, as good men appear to believe or know, that all men of sound, or at least those of average, mind will necessarily be of a patriotic temper and be attached by ties of loyalty to some particular national establishment, ordinarily the particular establishment which is formally identified with the land in which they live; although it is always possible that a given individual may be an alien in the land, and so may owe allegiance to and be ruled by a patriotic attachment to another national establishment, to which the conventionalities governing his special case have a.s.signed him as his own proper nation. The a.n.a.logy of the clam evidently does not cover the case. The patriotic citizen is attached to his own proper nationality not altogether by the accident of domicile, but rather by the conventions, legal or customary, which a.s.sign him to this or that national establishment according to certain principles of use and wont.

Mere legal citizens.h.i.+p or allegiance does not decide the matter either; at least not by any means unavoidably; as appears in the case of the Chinese subject under Manchu or j.a.panese rule; and as appears perhaps more perspicuously in the case of the "hyphenate" American citizen, whose formal allegiance is to the nation in whose land he prefers to live, all the while that his patriotic affection centers on his spiritual Fatherland in whose fortunes he has none but a non-resident interest. Indeed, the particular national tie that will bind the affections--that is to say the effectual patriotic attachment--of any given individual may turn out on closer scrutiny to be neither that of domicile or of formal legal allegiance, nor that of putative origin or pedigree, but only a reflex of certain national animosities; which may also turn out on examination to rest on putative grounds--as ill.u.s.trated by a subsidiary cla.s.s of hyphenate American citizens whose affections have come to be bound up in the national fortunes of one foreign Power for the simple, but sufficient, reason that, on conventional grounds, they bear malice against another equally foreign Power.

Evidently there is much sophistication, not to say conventionalised affectation, in all this national attachment and allegiance. It will perhaps not do to say that it is altogether a matter of sophistication.

Yet it may not exceed the premises to say that the particular choice, the concrete incidence, of this national attachment is in any given case a matter of sophistication, largely tempered with fortuity. One is born into a given nationality--or, in case of dynastic allegiance, into service and devotion to a (fortuitously) given sovereign--or at least so it is commonly believed. Still one can without blame, and without excessive shame, s.h.i.+ft one's allegiance on occasion. What is not countenanced among civilised men is to s.h.i.+ft out of allegiance to any given nationality or dynasty without s.h.i.+fting into the like complication of gainless obligations somewhere else. Such a s.h.i.+fting of national or dynastic base is not quite reputable, though it is also not precisely disreputable. The difficulty in the case appears to be a moral difficulty, not a mental or a pecuniary one, and a.s.suredly not a physical difficulty, since the relation in question is not a physical relation. It would appear to be of the moral order of things, in that sense of the term in which conventional proprieties are spoken of as moral. That is to say, it is a question of conforming to current expectations under a code of conventional proprieties. Like much of the conventional code of behavior this patriotic attachment has the benefit of standardised decorum, and its outward manifestations are enjoined by law. All of which goes to show how very seriously the whole matter is regarded.

And yet it is also a matter of common notoriety that large aggregates of men, not to speak of sporadic individuals, will on occasion s.h.i.+ft their allegiance with the most felicitous effect and with no sensible loss of self-respect or of their good name. Such a s.h.i.+ft is to be seen in multiple in the German nation within the past half-century, when, for instance, the Hanoverians, the Saxons, and even the Holsteiners in very appreciable numbers, not to mention the subjects of minuscular princ.i.p.alities whose names have been forgotten in the shuffle, all became good and loyal subjects of the Empire and of the Imperial dynasty,--good and loyal without reservation, as has abundantly appeared. So likewise within a similar period the inhabitants of the Southern States repudiated their allegiance to the Union, putting in its place an equivalent loyalty to their new-made country; and then, when the new national establishment slipped out from under their feet they returned as whole-heartedly as need be to their earlier allegiance. In each of these moves, taken with deliberation, it is not to be doubted that this body of citizens have been moved by an unimpeachable spirit of patriotic honour. No one who is in any degree conversant with the facts is likely to question the declaration that it would be a perversion, not to say an inversion, of fact to rate their patriotic devotion to the Union today lower than that of any other section of the country or any other cla.s.s or condition of men.

But there is more, and in a sense worse, to be found along the same general line of evidence touching this sublimated sentiment of group solidarity that is called nationalism. The nation, of course, is large; the larger the better, it is believed. It is so large, indeed, that considered as a group or community of men living together it has no sensible degree of h.o.m.ogeneity in any of their material circ.u.mstances or interests; nor is anything more than an inconsiderable fraction of the aggregate population, territory, industry, or daily life known to any one of these patriotic citizens except by remote and highly dubious hearsay. The one secure point on which there is a (constructive) uniformity is the matter of national allegiance; which grows stronger and more confident with every increase in aggregate ma.s.s and volume. It is also not doubtful, e.g., that if the people of the British Dominions in North America should choose to throw in their national lot with the Union, all sections and cla.s.ses, except those whose pecuniary interest in a protective tariff might be conceived to suffer, would presently welcome them; nor is it doubtful that American nationality would cover the new and larger aggregate as readily as the old. Much the same will hold true with respect to the other countries colonised under British auspices. And there is no conclusive reason for drawing the limit of admissible national extension at that point.

So much, however, is fairly within the possibilities of the calculable future; its realisation would turn in great measure on the discontinuance of certain outworn or disserviceable inst.i.tutional arrangements; as, e.g., the remnants of a decayed monarchy, and the legally protected vested interests of certain business enterprises and of certain office-holding cla.s.ses. What more and farther might practicably be undertaken in this way, in the absence of marplot office-holders, office-seekers, sovereigns, priests and monopolistic business concerns sheltered under national animosities and restraints of trade, would be something not easy to a.s.sign a limit to. All the minor neutrals, that cl.u.s.ter about the North Sea, could unquestionably be drawn into such a composite nationality, in the absence, or with due disregard, of those cla.s.ses, families and individuals whose pecuniary or invidious gain is dependent on or furthered by the existing division of these peoples.

The projected defensive league of neutrals is, in effect, an inchoate coalescence of the kind. Its purpose is the safeguarding of the common peace and freedom, which is also the avowed purpose and justification of all those modern nations that have outlived the regime of dynastic ambition and so of enterprise in dominion for dominion's sake, and have pa.s.sed into the neutral phase of nationality; or it should perhaps rather be said that such is the end of endeavour and the warrant of existence and power for these modern national establishments in so far as they have outlived and repudiated such ambitions of a dynastic or a quasi-dynastic order, and so have taken their place as intrinsically neutral commonwealths.

It is only in the common defense (or in the defense of the like conditions of life for their fellowmen elsewhere) that the citizens of such a commonwealth can without shame entertain or put in evidence a spirit of patriotic solidarity; and it is only by specious and sophistical appeal to the national honour--a conceit surviving out of the dynastic past--that the populace of such a commonwealth can be stirred to anything beyond a defense of their own proper liberties or the liberties of like-minded men elsewhere, in so far as they are not still imbued with something of the dynastic animus and the chauvinistic animosities which they have formally repudiated in repudiating the feudalistic principles of the dynastic State.

The "nation," without the bond of dynastic loyalty, is after all a make-s.h.i.+ft idea, an episodic half-way station in the sequence, and loyalty, in any proper sense, to the nation as such is so much of a make-believe, that in the absence of a common defense to be safeguarded any such patriotic conceit must lose popular a.s.surance and, with the pa.s.sing of generations, fall insensibly into abeyance as an archaic affectation. The pressure of danger from without is necessary to keep the national spirit alert and stubborn, in case the pressure from within, that comes of dynastic usufruct working for dominion, has been withdrawn. With further extension of the national boundaries, such that the danger of gratuitous infraction from without grows constantly less menacing, while the traditional regime of international animosities falls more and more remotely into the background, the spirit of nationalism is fairly on the way to obsolescence through disuse. In other words, the nation, as a commonwealth, being a partisan organisation for a defensive purpose, becomes _functa officio_ in respect of its nationalism and its patriotic ties in somewhat the same measure as the national coalition grows to such a size that partisans.h.i.+p is displaced by a cosmopolitan security.

Doubtless the falling into abeyance through disuse of so pleasing a virtue as patriotic devotion will seem an impossibly distasteful consummation; and about tastes there is no disputing, but tastes are mainly creations of habit. Except for the disquieting name of the thing, there is today little stands in the way of a cosmopolitan order of human intercourse un.o.btrusively displacing national allegiance; except for vested interests in national offices and international discriminations, and except for those peoples among whom national life still is sufficiently bound up with dynastic ambition.

In an earlier pa.s.sage the patriotic spirit has been defined as a sense of partisan solidarity in point of prestige, and sufficient argument has been spent in confirming the definition and showing its implications.

With the pa.s.sing of all occasion for a partisan spirit as touches the common good, through coalescence of the parts between which partisan discrepancies have hitherto been kept up, there would also have pa.s.sed all legitimate occasion for or provocation to an intoxication of invidious prestige on national lines,--and there is no prestige that is not of an invidious nature, that being, indeed, the whole of its nature.

He would have to be a person of praeternatural patriotic sensibilities who could fall into an emotional state by reason of the national prestige of such a coalition commonwealth as would be made up, e.g., of the French and English-speaking peoples, together with those other neutrally and peaceably inclined European communities that are of a sufficiently mature order to have abjured dynastic ambitions of dominion, and perhaps including the Chinese people as well. Such a coalition may now fairly be said to be within speaking distance, and with its consummation, even in the inchoate shape of a defensive league of neutrals, the eventual abeyance of that national allegiance and national honour that bulks so large in the repertory of current eloquence would also come in prospect.

All this is by no means saying that love of country, and of use and wont as it runs in one's home area and among one's own people, would suffer decay, or even abatement. The provocation to nostalgia would presumably be as good as ever. It is even conceivable that under such a (contemplated) regime of unconditional security, attachment to one's own habitat and social circ.u.mstances might grow to something more than is commonly seen in the precarious situation in which the chances of a quiet life are placed today. But nostalgia is not a bellicose distemper, nor does it make for gratuitous disturbance of peaceable alien peoples; neither is it the spirit in which men lend themselves to warlike enterprise looking to profitless dominion abroad. Men make patriotic sacrifices of life and substance in spite of home-sickness rather than by virtue of it.

The aim of this long digression has been to show that patriotism, of that bellicose kind that seeks satisfaction in inflicting damage and discomfort on the people of other nations, is not of the essence of human life; that it is of the nature of habit, induced by circ.u.mstances in the past and handed on by tradition and inst.i.tutional arrangements into the present; and that men can, without mutilation, divest themselves of it, or perhaps rather be divested of it by force of circ.u.mstances which will set the current of habituation the contrary way.

The change of habituation necessary to bring about such a decay of the bellicose national spirit would appear to be of a negative order, at least in the main. It would be an habituation to unconditional peace and security; in other words, to the absence of provocation, rather than a coercive training away from the bellicose temper. This bellicose temper, as it affects men collectively, appears to be an acquired trait; and it should logically disappear in time in the absence of those conditions by impact of which it has been acquired. Such obsolescence of patriotism, however, would not therefore come about abruptly or swiftly, since the patriotic spirit has by past use and wont, and by past indoctrination, been so thoroughly worked into the texture of the inst.i.tutional fabric and into the commonsense taste and morality, that its effectual obsolescence will involve a somewhat comprehensive displacement and mutation throughout the range of inst.i.tutions and popular conceits that have been handed down. And inst.i.tutional changes take time, being creations of habit. Yet, again, there is the qualification to this last, that since the change in question appears to be a matter, not of acquiring a habit and confirming it in the shape of an article of general use and wont, but of forgetting what once was learned, the time and experience to be allowed for its decay need logically not equal that required for its acquirement, either in point of duration or in point of the strictness of discipline necessary to inculcate it.

While the spirit of nationalism is such an acquired trait, and while it should therefore follow that the chief agency in divesting men of it must be disuse of the discipline out of which it has arisen, yet a positive, and even something of a drastic discipline to the contrary effect need not be altogether ineffectual in bringing about its obsolescence. The case of the Chinese people seems to argue something of the sort. Not that the Chinese are simply and neutrally unpatriotic; they appear also to be well charged with disloyalty to their alien rulers. But along with a sense of being on the defensive in their common concerns, there is also the fact that they appear not to be appreciably patriotic in the proper sense; they are not greatly moved by a spirit of nationality. And this failure of the national spirit among them can scarcely be set down to a neutral disuse of that discipline which has on the other hand induced a militant nationalism in the peoples of Christendom; it should seem more probable, at least, that this relative absence of a national ambition is traceable in good part to its having been positively bred out of them by the stern repression of all such aspirations under the autocratic rule of their alien masters.

Peace on terms of submission and non-resistance to the ordinary exactions and rulings of those Imperial authorities to whom such submission may become necessary, then, will be contingent on the virtual abeyance of the spirit of national pride in the peoples who so are to come under Imperial rule. A sufficient, by no means necessarily a total, elimination or decadence of this proclivity will be the condition precedent of any practicable scheme for a general peace on this footing.

How large an allowance of such animus these prospectively subject peoples might still carry, without thereby a.s.suring the defeat of any such plan, would in great measure depend on the degree of clemency or rigor with which the superior authority might enforce its rule. It is not that a peace plan of this nature need precisely be considered to fall outside the limits of possibility, on account of this necessary condition, but it is at the best a manifestly doubtful matter. Advocates of a negotiated peace should not fail to keep in mind and make public that the plan which they advocate carries with it, as a sequel or secondary phase, such an unconditional surrender and a consequent regime of non-resistance, and that there still is grave doubt whether the peoples of these Western nations are at present in a sufficiently tolerant frame of mind, or can in the calculable future come in for such a tolerantly neutral att.i.tude in point of national pride, as to submit in any pa.s.sable fas.h.i.+on to any alien Imperial rule.

If the spiritual difficulty presented by this prevalent spirit of national pride--sufficiently stubborn still, however inane a conceit it may seem on sober reflection--if this animus of factional insubordination could be overcome or in some pa.s.sable measure be conciliated or abated, there is much to be said in favor of such a plan of peaceable submission to an extraneous and arbitrary authority, and therefore also for that plan of negotiated peace by means of which events would be put in train for its realisation.

Any pa.s.sably dispa.s.sionate consideration of the projected regime will come unavoidably to the conclusion that the prospectively subject peoples should have no legitimate apprehension of loss or disadvantage in the material respect. It is, of course, easy for an unreflecting person to jump to the conclusion that subjection to an alien power must bring grievous burdens, in the way of taxes and similar impositions. But reflection will immediately show that no appreciable increase, over the economic burdens already carried by the populace under their several national establishments, could come of such a move.

As bearing on this question it is well to call to mind that the contemplated imperial dominion is designed to be very wide-reaching and with very ample powers. Its nearest historical a.n.a.logue, of course, is the Roman imperial dominion--in the days of the Antonines--and that the nearest a.n.a.logue to the projected German peace is the Roman peace, in the days of its best security. There is every warrant for the presumption that the contemplated Imperial dominion is to be substantially all-inclusive. Indeed there is no stopping place for the projected enterprise short of an all-inclusive dominion. And there will consequently be no really menacing outside power to be provided against.

Consequently there will be but little provision necessary for the common defense, as compared, e.g., with the aggregate of such provision found necessary for self-defense on the part of the existing nations acting in severalty and each jealously guarding its own national integrity.