The international crisis in its ethical and psychological aspects
Author: Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick; Bernard Bosanquet; A. C. Bradley; L. P. Jacks; Gilbert Murray; George Frederick Stout
Date: 2026-08-19T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: World War; 1914-1918

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Title: The international crisis in its ethical and psychological aspects

Lectures delivered in February and March, 1915, under the scheme for imperial studies in the University of London, at Bedford college for women

Author: Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick

Bernard Bosanquet

A. C. Bradley

L. P. Jacks

Gilbert Murray

George Frederick Stout

Release date: August 19, 2026 [eBook #79404]

Language: English

Original publication: London: H. Milford, 1915

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79404

Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

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The International Crisis in its Ethical and Psychological Aspects

LECTURES
DELIVERED IN FEBRUARY AND MARCH 1915
BY
ELEANOR M. SIDGWICK
GILBERT MURRAY
A. C. BRADLEY
L. P. JACKS
G. F. STOUT
B. BOSANQUET
UNDER THE SCHEME FOR IMPERIAL STUDIES IN
THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
AT
BEDFORD COLLEGE FOR WOMEN
HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK
TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY
1915

PRINTED IN ENGLAND

AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

CONTENTS

| | PAGE
ELEANOR M. SIDGWICK
I. | The Morality of Strife in Relation to the War | 1
GILBERT MURRAY
II. | Herd Instinct and the War | 22
A. C. BRADLEY
III. | International Morality: the United States of Europe | 46
L. P. JACKS
IV. | The Changing Mind of a Nation at War | 78
G. F. STOUT
V. | War and Hatred | 103
B. BOSANQUET
VI. | Patriotism in the Perfect State | 132

I
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE IN RELATION TO THE WAR

By Eleanor M. Sidgwick

I must begin by confessing that I am so entirely without such special knowledge on any subject connected with ‘the International Crisis in its Ethical and Psychological Aspects’ as would enable me to speak about it with authority, or otherwise than as an ordinary member of the general public, that it was only after much hesitation that I accepted the invitation to give this lecture. I reflected, however, that in a crisis like this there is a general desire to exchange views. We all have views whether we are experts or not. We all have our minds fixed on the crisis, and have all made them up, with more or less definiteness, on such questions as the rightness of the war and what our attitude towards it and matters connected with it, as a nation and as individuals, should be. But with most of us, in this as in other matters about which we have to judge, the more or less definiteness is apt to be less. Or perhaps I should say that definite conclusions are based on vague and hazy premisses leading to confusion and contradiction and doubt—vagueness and confusion which can only be cleared away by resolute effort and a determination to try to see things in their proper proportion. In this process any of us who will sincerely try to think out and express his own views may help others whose minds are dwelling on the same things, and this not so much by compelling agreement as by offering points round which the thoughts of each of us may crystallize. I hope that anything I have to say will be received in this spirit, and that I shall be regarded not as expressing any original views or speaking from any standpoint of superior knowledge, but merely with the knowledge at the disposal of all of us endeavouring to make out what we do think and feel, and what we ought to think and feel, about our duty as a nation and as individuals concerning war and especially this present war.

But before I go on to the main subject I must note that one reason given for inviting me to lecture was that I am a woman and it was desired that at least one lecture in the series should be given by a woman. I do not know whether this desire was prompted by any idea that the point of view of women as such might be different from that of men and that I might represent it and speak as a woman. I should be very willing to do so if I could, and indeed, if there is a difference, my point of view must of course be the feminine one. But I am quite unaware of any such difference, and do not see how in a great national crisis women can have a special point of view—the whole thing is above differences of sex. In many of the details of national affairs—chiefly practical affairs of daily life and legislation affecting them—the different experience of men and of women necessarily places them at somewhat different points of view, and the nation generally would, I think, gain by having both represented. But in the really big things, in things in which our action here and now irrevocably affects the whole future of our country, and (in the present case) the progress in civilization of the whole world as well—in a crisis, in short, like that through which we are passing—it seems to me that if the men and women of the country as such felt differently from each other the country would be rotten at the core, and would be doomed to defeat and decay.

I know there are people who assume that there is a difference, and that according as one or other sex managed the affairs of the world there would be less or more war. But their arguments, so far as I have seen them, seem to take a very superficial view of the causes and consequences of great wars. I may mention two of these arguments. The first is expressed in a pamphlet written by a woman which was sent to me the other day. She maintains among other things that while the larger share of the suffering which war produces falls on the women, the honour and glory of fighting is exclusively enjoyed by the men, who in her view are thereby tempted to make wars which women would prevent. The other argument I will mention, and which is, I think, a commoner one, is almost in contradiction to the first. It is, if I understand it rightly, that as the labour and hardship and personal risk of the actual fighting must be borne by men, it is for the men—that is, I suppose, the young men of fighting age—to decide whether the fighting is worth while or not.

Neither of these considerations seems to have much weight unless war be regarded as a kind of game played between opposing armies—dangerous no doubt, but still a game played for its own sake. The first argument dwells on the danger the game causes to the general public, such as might come, for instance, from playing hockey in a crowded street, the other on the risks to the players themselves; but neither argument looks beyond the war itself. But wars are hardly ever fought like games, simply for their own sake. Even a Prussian militarist party does not do that. It fights to gain some supposed advantage for its country. Even if the perfection of its war machine makes it long to use it, it does not do so without some ulterior object in view. And the ulterior object for which each side fights, whether it be legitimate or illegitimate, honest or dishonest, right or wrong, concerns the whole country, not only the fighting men. It concerns not only the men or only the women, not one class or section or another class or section, but the whole nation, and if it be a right cause and an important cause the whole nation must be prepared to suffer if need be and each man and each woman to contribute what he or she can and to sacrifice all that is required to secure success in the struggle. That cannot be done in a grudging spirit. So far as sacrifices can be measured, those who sacrifice most must get their reward in being proud of it.

Our young men are in an enviable position, for it is they who have the chance of translating their patriotism into action in the most direct way. It is on their courage and endurance and self-sacrifice in the field that success largely depends. It is on them that the brunt of physical effort and physical hardship first falls. And in fact of course war could not be carried on without them. Our soldiers and sailors have been splendid, as we always knew they would be, and we may be proud of the way our young men have under the voluntary service system come forward and shown themselves willing to suffer and die for their country.

But they are not the only people called on to give active service of one kind or another, and they are not the only people who suffer and will suffer. This is so in our own country, and we see it yet more in Belgium and the north of France. A war like this is a horrible thing. It brings sorrow and suffering to almost every home in the countries engaged in it; it impoverishes victors and vanquished and brings poverty and misery in its wake more widespread than the belligerent countries. It no doubt draws out some virtues—courage and valour, and, more important still, ardent ‘self-sacrifice for duty and the common good’—and we must not underrate these. But it also tends to stimulate evil feelings, brutality, bitterness, and hate, and to increase national selfishness and mutual distrust among nations.

War is an awful calamity, and it is no wonder that some ask themselves whether all war is not wrong. No wonder that many more think there must be some way of securing perpetual peace. But it is of no use discussing the general question whether war is wrong. Any particular war is usually wrong if we consider both sides together—that is to say, it is usually due to wrongdoing on one side or the other or both. But the question that is important for each particular State is whether it is itself right to fight. And whether on any given occasion it is its duty to do so may often be a question by no means easy to answer. I hope that my opening words have not suggested to any one that I intend to be so rash as to attempt any general answer myself. To give such an answer would require far more knowledge than I possess, and far more space than I have at my disposal, and in the end discussion would probably lead to the conclusion that circumstances vary so much that rules are scarcely possible, and each case must be decided on its merits. Fortunately the present case is perfectly clear, and barely admits of difference of opinion, for we are fighting for freedom and independent national existence, and we are fighting in fulfilment of obligations deliberately undertaken.

There are, I take it, few people in the world who would uncompromisingly advocate peace at any price. Few would not grant that a State when attacked must defend itself, just as in a country with no settled government a man must defend himself and his family from those who try to injure him, whether they be men or wild beasts. Few would deny (at least in any country but Germany) that a State must fight in support of pledges solemnly undertaken, like the guarantee by France, Prussia, and England of Belgium’s neutrality. A strong State cannot sit by with folded arms while what it has guaranteed is violated by another, any more than a man who has promised to help his neighbour in case of attack can shut himself up in his own house when the attack is made. It would be admitted, in fact, by almost all, that there are circumstances for nations, as there are for individuals, when they must fight for their life and liberty and that of others. And these circumstances have arisen for us in the present case.

Is there, then, any possibility of preventing such circumstances arising? Can we hope that war will ever cease? I am perhaps a sanguine person, but I do think we may hope that it will at any rate greatly diminish in frequency. I am not, however, sanguine about the possibility of devising schemes for international government which shall of themselves secure us from wars.

The first of such schemes is arbitration—and it is a good scheme as far as it goes. Given an arbitration court in which both sides feel confidence, and given on both sides a desire to avoid quarrelling, a good many disputes between States might be settled by arbitration. And as a matter of fact a good many have been so settled of recent years. But arbitration is necessarily limited in its application. Generally speaking, questions that can be settled by arbitration are either questions like those which in private life can be settled as civil cases in the law courts—questions of fact, or rights, or of interpretation of conventions, or of damage done which is capable of being compensated, and so forth. Or they must at least be questions, like those involved in most trade disputes, about which each side can put forward a more or less plausible case, the one comparable with the other.

But even when arbitration is possible, it is only useful if both sides prefer peace to war, and cases that would lend themselves to arbitration are perhaps more often the occasion—the pretext—for war than its real cause, at least where great countries are concerned. However, we should none of us deny that arbitration may help materially in maintaining peace and should be used to the utmost.

Still more should every favourable opportunity be made use of by States, while at peace, to remove by negotiation causes of irritation and friction which might lead to quarrels. Negotiation has over arbitration the advantage that the nations concerned are more likely through it to come to understand one another, to realize each other’s attitude and point of view; and are therefore more likely to trust each other afterwards than if they leave all that to the external arbitrator before whom each merely advocates his own cause. We in England have endeavoured for many years past to promote both these things—arbitration and negotiation about difficulties—to the utmost of our ability. And France, too, has worked with us of late, with the Entente Cordiale as a result. I wish we could say the same of Germany; but Germany has for years managed to give the impression of thinking it her interest to prevent the sore places of the world—the danger spots—from being healed, and even of working to create new ones.

But it is clear that there are some causes of war that neither arbitration nor negotiation can touch. Neither can, for instance, prevent wars of pure aggression. There is nothing to arbitrate about when practically the whole contention of one side is that Might makes Right and that therefore it proposes to secure what it would like to have by force. There is a proverb that it takes two to make a quarrel. There is some truth in this—enough to remind us, both in private life and in international affairs, that if we say and do irritating things we are responsible for the irritation produced. But it is much more true that it takes two to keep the peace. A nation that is determined to fight will fight, and will have no difficulty in finding, or making, the occasion for it. Nothing can prevent it except the conviction that those it desires to fight against are too strong to be overcome.

Wanton aggression for the sake of gaining power or territory or wealth is not the only cause of war which cannot be arbitrated about. Another cause which we have seen in operation within the life of many of us is the conflict of incompatible principles. The American Civil War was a war for principles. And we may observe that there was no militarism there—no perfecting of the war machine in long preparation to attack or defend. And, moreover, another of the plans for securing European peace, a federation of States for the purpose, failed here, for the antagonists were knit in a federation far closer than any we can conceive as taking place among the European nations.

We need not infer that such a federation in Europe would be useless. It would be very difficult to arrange, but if satisfactorily arranged it might have some effect in preventing aggression, just as the fact that England, France, Germany, and Belgium were bound by treaty to preserve Belgian neutrality may very well have saved Belgium from attacks for all these years till now. But no such federation could be a complete guarantee of peace; for what would there be to prevent the federated nations—even if we assume them all to be actuated by good intentions—from disagreeing on questions as to how their function of guardians of the peace was in any particular case to be carried out, or whether some particular action of some particular State constituted a breach of the convention or not? Would there not here be as much danger of war as now? The only sanction behind the rules of such a federation would be the threat of armed intervention against an offending State, and if there were disagreement so that the federation were divided into parties, armed intervention would mean a European war.

One method suggested for the prevention of war is an agreed reduction of armaments. Of course in this country we should all like reduction of armaments, and so would our Allies. It would, to say the least, save much wasteful expenditure, and if we fight this war to a finish and win, we may well hope that it will come about. But if it were carried out all round I doubt if it would in itself have much effect in promoting peace, for all would still be in the same relative strength. And if it were carried out only partially it would leave those who refused to reduce, who would certainly include those who wished to attack their neighbours, in a specially advantageous position for doing so.

I have dwelt rather long on the difficulty, if not impossibility, as it seems to me, of really securing international peace by any scheme of international arrangement. But though I do not think the ingenuity of man has yet devised a way of doing this, I am nevertheless hopeful that progress in the direction of reduction of war is being made and will continue. It is on general improvement in the moral tone of the world that I build my hopes. Progress is slow; but although of course this shocking and surprising return of Germany to mediaeval barbarism is rather disconcerting to one’s optimism, the world still seems to me to be a better world than it was; by which I mean that it is tending on the whole to become less selfish and more just and sympathetic, without on the whole losing its energy and virility.

Then another hopeful sign is that, except in Germany and in places like the Central American Republics, there is in these days no chronic desire to fight either in governments or in people. The desire may be kindled under the influence of angry passions, or in consequence of oppression, or by other causes, but it is not there all the time, and in most places it takes a good deal of kindling. Most European nations have tasted the sweets of peace, some of them know the horrors of war, and almost all wish for opportunity to develop their internal resources. Neither we nor any of our Allies in this war had any desire for the war. Neither the people nor the governments had. We have only to read the diplomatic correspondence that preceded it to feel sure of this. France, Russia, Belgium, England, simply wanted to be let alone. Serbia went great lengths for the sake of peace in yielding to Austria’s demands. The desire for revenge which the tearing from France of Alsace and Lorraine left in the breasts of Frenchmen for many years had practically died. They may have hoped that a change in the position of Alsace might somehow be brought about, but not by war. As one of their writers, M. Paul Sabatier, said in 1911,[1]

‘La France veut la paix avec l’Allemagne parce qu’une guerre est une explosion de haine, et qu’elle ne se sent pas plus de haine pour nos voisins de l’Est que pour les autres. Elle sent sa solidarité avec eux.’

But he goes on:

‘Si le malheur voulait que ces sentiments ne fussent pas compris, et qu’après nous avoir représentés pendant plus de quarante ans comme ceux qui menacent la paix de l’Europe, on nous attaquât, oh! alors, nous nous élancerions avec l’enthousiasme de citoyens qui défendent non seulement le sol de leur patrie, mais qui portent une idée, qui par leurs efforts, leur martyre s’il le faut, fera son entrée dans le monde.’

There are many States in Europe which for many decades have had no warlike impulses and have only desired to be let alone to develop themselves in their own way. If only, therefore, the moral perversion of Germany could be cured, and some perennial sources of friction, e.g. in the Balkan States and parts of Austria-Hungary, removed, the prospects of peace, if we are victorious in this war, would for a long time be very good. It is, then, these two things, the development of international morality and the removal of causes of friction, that those who desire a peaceful world must seek.

What, then, is wrong with Germany? How comes prosperous Germany to bring the calamity of war on us all?

Germany won too easily in her previous wars; and since 1870 has suffered from what our American cousins call swelled head. She applies to nations an idea which has, I understand, proved attractive to her in theoretical social psychology and in art—the idea of a superman who in virtue of his strength, physical and intellectual, is above all moral law, and has the right as well as the power to work his will on his fellow men. However much he may be admired in theory, we may be sure that the superman, if he appeared in real life and used his strength so as to annoy his neighbours, would in Germany, as in any other well-governed country where slavery is not allowed, be dealt with by the police. But when the idea is carried into international relations, and it is deliberately maintained by a powerful State that Might makes Right, that a nation is a law to itself, and not only has no duties to other nations but is bound to aim solely at what it conceives to be its own interests irrespective of all considerations of justice, veracity, and good faith—when a State holds this it is obvious that trouble is bound to come.

Leading Germans have taught this Neo-Machiavellianism for many years. It is not only Treitschke and Bernhardi, of whom we in England have lately heard so much—it is not only they who have preached it; it has been widespread in Germany for half a century or more. Perhaps you will allow me to read a passage which brings out this fact from an essay on ‘Public Morality’, written in 1897 by the late Henry Sidgwick[2]. The immorality of Machiavellianism begins, he says:

‘when the interest of a particular State is taken as the ultimate and paramount end justifying the employment of any means whatever to attain it, whatever the consequences of such action may be to the rest of the human race. And this “national egoism” is, I think, the essence of the Neo-Machiavellianism, which,—though views somewhat similar have frequently found expression from the sixteenth century onwards,—has been especially prominent in the political thought of the last forty years, and as I have said has found the most unreserved and meditated expression in the writings of Germans. I may give as an example the statements of an able and moderate writer who is by no means an admirer of Machiavelli. “The State”, says Rümelin,[3] “is self-sufficient.” “Self-regard is its appointed duty; the maintenance and development of its own power and well-being,—egoism, if you like to call this egoism,—is the supreme principle of politics.” “The State can only have regard to the interest of any other State so far as this can be identified with its own interest.” “Self-devotion is the principle for the individual, self-assertion for the State.” “The maintenance of the State justifies every sacrifice, and is superior to every moral rule.”’

The practical aim in affirming national egoism, Mr. Sidgwick further says, of the writers to whom he refers,

‘is almost always expressly to emancipate the public action of statesmen from the restraints of private morality.’

It is this want of international morality—the absence of a moral code, not merely the failure to live up to one—in one of the leading States of the world which has more than anything else, and for many years, endangered the peace of Europe and has now plunged us into this ghastly war. It is the theory held in Germany that envy, hatred, and malice are not vices in a nation whatever they may be in individuals; that justice, veracity, and good faith are not virtues which a powerful nation should foster in its relations with other nations, however admirable they may be in individuals—it is this theory which threatens to wreck western civilization, and which has already shown us that the progress we were fain to hope had been attained in the humane conduct of war was largely illusory, and that international treaties are, for nations with Germany’s views, scraps of paper.

Till this immoral theory is abandoned there is little hope of lasting peace. Have we, then, we must ask, any reason for believing that it ever will be abandoned by Germany? I may be optimistic, but I think we have reason to hope it. I think we may very reasonably look forward to Germany’s conversion, at least if we win. In the first place, the temptation to hold such a theory is much greater when a nation feels itself to be stronger than all its neighbours. As its might becomes to itself more doubtful, the disadvantages of the theory that Might makes Right become more obvious.

Then, secondly, I do not think that Germans in general—whatever their statesmen may do—I do not think that Germany as a nation holds the theory quite single-heartedly now. I infer this from the fact that Germany tries to explain away her actions. If to attack is the right of the strong, why are Germany’s statesmen concerned to make out, when their case is so miserably poor, that she was not the attacking party but the attacked? If strong States are justified in ignoring treaty obligations when they think it their interest to do so, why, with such miserable arguments to produce, do they try to convince a wondering world that Belgium and France—not Germany—violated Belgium’s neutrality? It may be said that these arguments are addressed to neutral States, that Germany is aware that she has not got international public opinion with her, and is not strong enough—no one is—to be willing to do without. But so far as I can judge from the statements from German sources I have seen, it is not only to impress outsiders that these arguments are used, but to satisfy the conscience of Germany’s own people.

Then, thirdly, there is probably an ideal element mixed up in German motives which is not purely selfish. All nations—including Germany—believe in their own Kultur. We each believe in our national way of looking at things, our national methods of administration, our own way of advancing civilization, our own plans of family life, and so forth. I do not, of course, mean that we do not regard them as capable of improvement—progressive nations are always trying to improve them—but, taken as a whole, we prefer our own way of doing things to other peoples’. Germany, which is, I think, deficient in sympathy and in the power of understanding other people, probably goes further and sincerely believes that her own Kultur is necessarily the best for all the world, and that all humanity would gain in the long run by being Germanized—by force or otherwise. I think it is probable, too, for all her apparent substitution of Odin for the Christian God, that her visions of conquest include visions of future world-wide peace under her own domination. These benevolent plans for the world are mistaken, but the fact that they are benevolent at all, affords a hope for something beyond national egoism.

There is yet another reason for expecting a change in the views of the German people. Although they are evidently very docile—very ready to think what they are told to think—still the opinions inculcated in them by their Government have been supported by false or misleading information conveyed largely through a manipulated press, manipulated in the way so successfully developed by Bismarck. But this is a dangerous expedient, for, easy as it is for us all to see things as we wish to see them, in the end the truth comes at least partially to light. As a result of the war—if we win—the scales are likely to fall from German eyes, the German nation will see things that have been hidden from it as a nation for many years, and with new premisses new conclusions may be hoped for.

Do not let us, then, despair of Germany. On the contrary, let us look forward to a day when her many excellent qualities—her industry, her thoroughness, her methodicalness, her discipline, her patriotism—may under a freer and more independent habit of thought, and a less egoistic system of international morality, be an important part of the forces making for human progress, not only physically and intellectually, but morally.

This can only happen, of course, through German public opinion, which is made up, as all public opinion is, of individual opinions and feelings acting and reacting on each other. And this brings me to some things I want to say about our duties as individuals in this crisis. The duty of patriotism, of helping in every way we can the cause for which we are fighting, I need not dwell on. We are fighting for our life as a free nation, and the help of every individual counts. The active help we can render varies of course much—for some of us it is necessarily almost non-existent. But what I may call the spiritual help—the help through thought and feeling, both as individuals and as contributing to public opinion—which we can all render, is important, and it is incumbent on all of us to see if we are helping as we should.

There are two of the duties in this region on which I should like to dwell a little. The first is the duty of not hating the Germans. We may, and as I think must, judge Germany as having committed a terrible crime, but let us condemn her as a judge would, impartially and without hate or rancour; remembering, too, that if all who do wrong are to be hated, few in this world would escape. This war may be called a holy war if there ever was one. We and our Allies are not only fighting, as I have said, for our own national existence, we are not only fighting for the rights of small States, or for the liberty to develop each in our own way. We are fighting not only for these things, but against the principle of which I have spoken—the principle that Might makes Right, that there is no sense in the idea of justice and good faith as between nations, and that envy and hatred between them is natural and right. Do not let us, then, indulge on our side in the very vices we are condemning. How can we hope to diminish hatred in the world if we allow ourselves to feel it? How can we hope to have any influence in restoring or increasing peace and good will if we ourselves are full of hatred? Hatred is not, except in a very limited way, a source of strength but a source of weakness, and if we depend on hatred to enable us to win we shall lose. We must be absolutely firm. We must fight to the utmost of our strength and as long as necessary in the cause of justice. We must see that Germany pays the debts she has incurred (they are very heavy debts to Belgium and France and Poland and Serbia). And we must help to make arrangements which, by giving satisfaction so far as possible to the inhabitants of all the provinces affected by them, may give hope of a durable peace. But desire for retaliation—that is, to inflict on Germany the injuries she has inflicted on our Allies or on ourselves; or the desire to humiliate Germany because we think she would like to humiliate us, or indeed for any other reason—these things are unworthy of the spirit in which this war should be fought on our side.

The second duty I want to insist on is that of not being afraid. I do not of course mean that we are to be reckless, or that we are to shut our eyes to difficulties and dangers, or that we are to say that things are well when they are not well. On the contrary, we must face the task before us, keeping steadily in view that it is a very difficult one and needs every effort we can make, as a nation and as individuals, to carry it through. But when we have done and are continuing to do all that is in our power to ensure success, then whatever we have to bear (and remember so far we in England have had nothing to bear like Belgium and France and Poland and Serbia), whatever we have to face, fear should have no place in our hearts. For fear is weakness. The task before us is hard and we may have anxious times to go through; as indeed we have had already in this war, and as we had in those other wars when England helped to save Europe from the domination of ambitious nations or individuals. But we are going to win now as we did in the end; then and even those of us who can contribute no active service can help to bring about victory by courage and hope.

II
HERD INSTINCT AND THE WAR

By Gilbert Murray

At the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, close to the entrance, you can buy for the sum of fourpence a most fascinating little book on The Fossil Remains of Man. It is official and, I presume, authoritative. And it tells how, in very remote times, before there was any South Kensington Museum, or any England, or, I believe, in the strict sense, any Europe, there lived in swampy forests in various parts of the world, troops of little lemur-like tree-dwellers. They were, I suppose, rather like small monkeys, but much prettier. They had nice fur, good prehensile tails, and effective teeth. Then there fell upon them, or some of them, a momentous change, a hypertrophy or over-development of one part of the body. This kind of special increase, the author tells us, seldom stops till it becomes excessive. With the lemurs it was the brain which began to grow. It grew and grew, both in size and in complexity. The rest of the body suffered in consequence. The fur became mangy and disappeared. The prehensile tails wasted away. The teeth ceased to be useful as weapons. And in the end, Ladies and Gentlemen, after incalculable ages, here we are!

Now these lemurs had certain instincts and habits of life. Let us define our terms. By an instinct I mean, following the exposition of Dr. McDougall, an innate psycho-physical disposition to notice objects of a certain class, to feel about them in certain ways and to act correspondingly. They would notice an enemy, hate him and spit at him; notice an object that was good to eat, desire it and eat it. They made love, they protected their young, they defended their group against other groups. And primitive man inherited, with modifications, their instincts, and we have similarly inherited his. Some of them were generally desirable, and are consequently admitted and encouraged; others were generally undesirable, and have been habitually denied and suppressed in our conscious life, only to break out in dreams, in fits of insanity or passion, or more subtly in self-deception. But, suppressed or unsuppressed, man’s instincts form the normal motive force in his life, though the direction of that force may from time to time be controlled by conscious reason.

From this point of view, I wish to consider what has happened to us in England since August 4, 1914. For that something has happened is quite clear. There is an inward change, which some people praise and some blame. There is a greater seriousness in life, less complaining, less obvious selfishness, and more hardihood. There is a universal power of self-sacrifice whose existence we never suspected before: on every side young men are ready to go and face death for their country, and parents are ready to let them go. There is more brotherhood and more real democracy; and at the same time, a quality of which we stood in much need, far more discipline and obedience.

This makes a very strong case on the good side. Yet, on the other, you will find generally that reformers and idealists are disheartened. Friends of peace, of women’s causes, of legal reform, of the mitigation of cruelty to animals, are all reduced to something like impotence. One hears the statement that ‘there is no Christianity left’. The very increase of power and devotion which has occurred is directed, so some say, to the service of evil. The same process has taken place in Germany, and has there apparently reached a higher degree of intensity. To leave aside its more insane manifestations, a Danish friend sends me the following quotation from a German religious poet, much admired in evangelical circles: ‘We have become the nation of wrath.... We accomplish the almighty will of God, and will vengefully wreak the demands of His righteousness on the godless, filled with sacred fury.... We are bound together like a scourge of punishment whose name is War. We flame like lightning. Our wounds blossom like rose-gardens at the gate of heaven. Thanks be to Thee, God Almighty! Thy wrathful awakening does away with our sins. As the iron in Thy hand we smite all our enemies on the cheekbone.’ Another poet, a clergyman, prays that the Germans may not fall into the temptation of carrying out the judgements of God’s wrath with too great mildness. Now the state of mind which these poems reveal—and I dare say they could be paralleled or nearly paralleled in England—is compatible with great self-sacrifice and heroism, but it is certainly not what one would call wholesome.

In order to understand this change as a whole, it is necessary to analyse it; and I would venture to suggest that, in the main, it consists simply in an immense stimulation of the Herd or Group Instincts, though of course other instincts are also involved. For the present, let us neither praise nor blame, but simply analyse. At the end we may have some conclusion to draw.

Man is by nature a gregarious animal and is swayed by Herd Instincts, as a gregarious animal must be; but of course they are greatly modified. Outside mankind we find these instincts in various grades of development. They show strongest in ants and bees, with their communal life of utter self-sacrifice, utter ruthlessness. I see that Professor Julian Huxley, in his book on The Individual in the Animal Kingdom, doubts whether among ants the single ant or the whole ant-heap is really the individual. I remember a traveller in northern Australia narrating how he once saw a procession of white ants making towards his camp, and, to head them off, sprinkled across their line of advance a train of bluestone, or sulphate of copper. And instead of turning aside, each ant as he came up threw himself on the horribly corrosive stuff and devoured it till he fell dead; and presently the main army marched on over a line consisting no longer of bluestone, but of dead ants.

The instinct is less overpowering in cattle, horses, wolves, &c. Certain wild cattle in South Africa are taken by Galton as types of it. In ordinary herd life they show no interest in each other, much less any mutual affection. But if one is taken out of the herd and put by himself he pines, and when he is taken back to the herd he shoves and nozzles to the very centre of it. Wolves, again, will fight for their pack, but not from mutual affection. If the pack is not threatened they will readily fight and kill one another. A dog in domesticated conditions is especially interesting. He has been taken away from his pack, but he retains his fundamental habits. He barks to call his mates on every emergency, even if barking frightens his prey away. He sniffs at everything when he is out walking, because he has wanted so long to smell his way home to the lost pack. His real pack is now artificial, grouped round his master. It will take in his master’s friends and house-companions, including quite possibly various animals such as cats and rabbits. Meantime he rejects the strange man and cheerfully kills the strange cat or rabbit. His delightful friendliness and sympathy are of course due to his herd habits. A cat has no herd. She has always ‘walked alone’.

Now Man satisfies his Herd Instinct by many groups, mainly artificial. Like the dog, he may take in other animals. In ordinary life the group of which he is most conscious is his social class, especially if it is threatened in any way. Clergymen, land-owners, teachers, coal-miners tend, as the phrase is, to hang together. They have the same material interests and the same habits of life. Again, there may be local groups, counties or villages; or groups dependent on ideas and beliefs, a church, a party in politics, a clique in art. But of all groups, far the strongest when it is once roused is the Nation, and it is the Nation that is roused now.

Normally men of science form a group, so do theologians. But now they feel no longer as men of science or theologians, they feel as Englishmen or Germans. I see that the Archbishop of Munich has expressed a doubt whether ‘any appreciable number of Belgian priests’ have been ‘irregularly killed’ by German soldiers. There is an absence of class feeling about this remark which few clergymen could attain in peace time. I see that even the German Jesuits are sharply differing from the rest of the Jesuits, an Order famous throughout history for its extreme cohesion and discipline. The only bodies that have at all asserted themselves against the main current of feeling in the various nations have been a few isolated Intellectuals and some small groups of International Socialists. It was easier for these last, since with them Internationalism was not only a principle but a habit, and besides they were accustomed in ordinary life to be against their own government and to differ from their neighbours.

In the main, what has happened is very simple. In all wild herds we find that the strength of this instinct depends upon the need for it. As soon as the Herd is in danger, the Herd Instinct flames up in passion to defend it. The members of the Herd first gather together, and then fight or fly. This is what has happened to us. Our Herd is in danger, and our natural Herd Instinct is aflame. Let us notice certain different ways in which it operates.

First, the Herd unites. Wolves who are quarrelling cease when menaced by a common enemy. Cattle and horses draw together. We in England find ourselves a band of brothers; and the same of course occurs in Germany. Indeed, it probably occurs even more strongly there, since all herd emotions there tend to be passionately expressed and officially encouraged. Those who are ordinarily separate have drawn together. Canada, Australia, India, even Crown colonies like Fiji, seem to be feeling a common emotion. A year or so ago one might see in the advertisements of employment in Canadian newspapers the words ‘No English need apply’. You would not find them now. Even the United States have drawn close to us. Of course in part this is due to the goodness of our cause, to sympathy with the wrongs of Belgium, and the like. Most neutrals are somewhat on our side. But Herd Instinct is clearly present; or why do the German-Americans side with the Germans?

Even those who are ordinarily at strife have drawn together. Before the war our whole people seemed at strife with itself, how far from natural causes and how far from definite intrigue on the part of Germany history will doubtless show. We had the Militant Suffragists, we had an utterly abnormal number of strikes and a great deal of rebellion against Trade Union leaders, we had trouble in India, terrific threats in Ireland. And, on the whole, these various enemies have now ‘made it up’. Of course it was much harder for them than for those who were merely separated by distance. There were serious obstacles in the way; habits of anger, habits of suspicion; often the mere routine of party attack which comes natural to small groups in strong opposition to a government. As a journalist said to me: ‘I mostly keep the truce all right; but sometimes, when one is tired and has nothing particular to say, one drops into abusing McKenna.’

The chief problem that arises in this general drawing together is the problem of fidelity to the Lesser Herd. Sometimes there is no clash between the lesser and the greater. A man’s emotion towards his family, his associates, his native district, causes as a rule no clash. On the contrary, it is usually kindled and strengthened by some sort of analogy or some emotional infection. The emotions of loyalty, of love to one’s neighbours and surroundings, are all stirred; and the family emotions in particular, being themselves very ancient and deep-rooted in our instinctive nature, have grown stronger together with those of the Herd.

But often there is a clash. For instance, an individual who has recently been in Germany and made close friends there, will, out of loyalty to this friendship, rebel against the current anti-German passion, and so become ‘pro-German’. I mean by ‘pro-German’, not one who wishes the Germans to win—I know of none such—but one who habitually interprets doubtful questions in a way sympathetic to Germany. Again, there are a few people who, on one ground or another, disapproved of the declaration of war. They are attacked and maligned: their friends naturally stand by them. The whole group hits back angrily and becomes, in the same sense, pro-German. Then there are people who are influenced by a peculiar form of pugnacity which is often miscalled ‘love of justice.’ It is really a habit of irritation at excess which finds vent not in justice but in counter-excess. ‘So-and-so is overpraised; for Heaven’s sake let us bring him down a peg!’ ‘Every fool I meet is emotionalized about the German treatment of Belgium; can we not somehow show that no harm was done, or that Belgium deserved it, or at least that it was all the fault of some one the fools admire?’ People of these types and others, some generous and some perverse, form, both here and in Germany, a protesting small Herd in reaction against the great Herd. Thus the Herd draws together, though lesser and protesting herds within it may do the same.

Secondly, in time of danger the Individual subordinates himself to the Herd. He ceases to make claims upon it, he desires passionately to serve it. He is miserable and unsatisfied if there is no public work found for him. Discipline consequently becomes easy and automatic. I know of one case where a number of recruits in a certain new regiment were drawn from a local trade union of pugnacious traditions. One of them was punished for something or other. The rest instinctively proposed to strike, but even as they proposed it found themselves in the grip of a stronger instinct. They hesitated for an instant and then obeyed orders. Again, I seem to have noticed that there is in most people an active desire to be ordered about. We like a drill-sergeant to speak to us severely, much as you speak to a dog which has not yet been naughty but looks as if he meant to be. In ordinary life, when a man has to obey and submit, he feels small. The action is accompanied by what Mr. McDougall calls ‘negative self-feeling’. But now, it seems, we actually have a sense of pride when we are ordered about. It makes us feel that we are really serving.

We may notice here a curious side-movement, a counter-action to the main stream making for union. Such counter-actions are of course always to be expected and need cause no surprise. Why is it that, among these great steady forces of union and mutual trust, we have sudden flashes of the very opposite, especially of wild suspicions of the Herd-leaders? I do not mean mere spy-mania. That is simple enough, a morbid excess of a perfectly natural feeling directed against the common enemy. You desire passionately to capture a real German spy; and, since you cannot find one, you make up a bogus one and capture him. I mean a similar mania, though much weaker and rarer, directed against the Herd itself: the semi-insane suspicions of Prince Louis of Battenberg, of Lord Haldane, and of persons even more exalted. Partly these impulses are merely the remains of old quarrels in feeble minds. But partly they have a real biological origin. For while, in ordinary dangers, the safety of the future race depends on the individuals serving and trusting their Herd, there are moments when the only chance of safety lies in their deserting and rejecting it. If once the Herd is really conquered and in the power of the enemy, then the cry must be ‘sauve qui peut’, and the panic which is generally disastrous is now a protection. Thus these small cases of panic, though practically unimportant, are psychologically interesting and have their proper evolutional explanation.

So far we have found, first, that the Herd draws together, and next, that the individual subordinates himself to the Herd. Thirdly, it seems clear that this closer Herd union has an effect upon the emotions, and a twofold effect. As all readers of psychology know, Herd-union intensifies all the emotions which are felt in common. The effect is so strong and so striking that some writers have treated it as a kind of mystery and described it in language that is almost mythological. But there does not seem to be anything inexplicable in the matter. Emotion is infectious. Each member of a Herd which is in the grasp of some emotion is himself in a ‘suggestible’ state and is also exerting ‘suggestion’ upon his neighbours. They are all directly stimulating his emotion and he theirs. And doubtless we should also remember that, Herd-emotion being itself a very old and deep-rooted animal affection, its stimulation has probably a sympathetic effect on all kinds of similar disturbances, such as fear and anger and animal desires of various sorts.

Furthermore, Herd-union often gives the suppressed subconscious forces their chance of satisfaction. Hence come the atrocities committed by crowds. Some dormant desire, existing in your nature but normally suppressed, is suddenly encouraged by suggestion. You see a look in your neighbour’s face, and he in yours; and in a flash you both know what that look means. You dare to own a feeling which, in your normal condition, you would have strangled unborn. Suppressed instinct calls to instinct across the gulf of personality, and the infamous thing is half done. For the Herd, besides tempting you, also offers you a road of impunity. You can repudiate responsibility afterwards. It is never exactly you that really did the thing. It is the crowd that did it, and the crowd has now ceased to exist. M. Lenôtre, in his studies of the French Revolution, has commented on the somewhat ghastly fact that in moments of Herd-excitement people on the verge of lunacy, people touched by persecution-mania, by suspicion-mania, by actual homicidal-mania, are apt to become leaders and inspire confidence. The same phenomenon has been noticed in certain revolutionary movements in Russia.

In England, fortunately, there has been so far almost no field for this kind of dangerous Herd-excitement. There has been of course some ferocity in speech, a comparatively harmless safety-valve for bad feelings, and in some persons a preferable alternative to apoplexy; but no violent actions and, I think, among decent people, extraordinarily little vindictiveness.

But Herd-union does not intensify all emotions. It intensifies those which are felt in common, but it actually deadens and shuts down those which are only felt by the individual. The Herd is, as a matter of fact, habitually callous toward the sufferings of its individual members, and it infects each member with its own callousness. To take a trifling instance, a friend writes to me thus: ‘I discovered one day on a march that my boot was hurting me; after an hour or so it became obvious that my foot was bleeding. In ordinary times I should have made a fuss and insisted on sympathy, and certainly not gone on walking for several miles. But as it was, moving in a steady mass of people who were uninterested in my boots, and I in theirs, I marched on without making any remark or even feeling much.’

The ramifications of this Herd-callousness are very curious and intricate. It acts even with Fear, that most contagious of emotions. The Herd deadens the fears of the individual as long as they do not become real Herd-fears. Untrained troops will advance in close masses. It needs good troops to advance individually in open order. The close masses are much more dangerous and the open order less so, but in the close mass the Herd is all round you, buttressing you and warming you, and it deadens your private fear. It may also be that there is here some hereditary instinct at work, derived from a time when the act of huddling together was a real protection, as it is with sheep and cattle attacked by wolves.

If this Herd-callousness acts with fear, it acts of course far more with scruples or pities. The first scruple or ruth or criticism of the Herd must rise in the breast of some individual. If, by good luck, at the same moment it occurs to some dozen other men, it has a chance of asserting itself. Otherwise there is only the single unit standing up, in his infinite weakness, against the great Herd. The scruple is silenced and dies.

Of course in actual warfare this callousness is immensely increased by the nature of the work which the combatants are doing, and the immense change in their habitual standard of expectation. You cannot always be pitying people, or you would never get on with your business. A friend of mine, a clever and kindly man, told me how he and his men, after a long spell in the trenches, utterly tired and chilled and dropping with sleep, had at last got into their billets—a sort of warm cellar where they could just squeeze in. They heard the scream of shrapnel sweeping the street outside, and some soldiers of another regiment and nationality ran up to the door begging for admittance and shelter. With one voice, so my friend said, he and his men growled at them and slammed the door in their faces. It was their own cellar, and these people were intruders. And they shut them out into the shrapnel much as, in ordinary circumstances, they would perhaps have felt justified in shutting them out into the rain. The strangest development of all is perhaps the disregard of the Herd for its wounded, and the readiness of the wounded themselves to be so disregarded. Of course there are abundant cases of the opposite sort, where individuals show the utmost regard for the wounded, risk their lives for them, and count no labour too hard for their sake. But I have certainly met with well-authenticated stories, notably of incidents in the German and Japanese and Turkish armies, which seem to take one back to some rather primitive instincts. The true animal Herd hates its wounded and kills them; cattle, wolves, porpoises, every herd of gregarious animals does the same. Of course it hates them. They not only tend to hamper its movements, but they present vividly to its eyes and senses the very thing that it most loathes—its own blood and pain. And one finds also curious instances where the wounded man himself is so absorbed in the general Herd-emotion that he insists, even angrily, on being left alone.

Thus under the influence of Herd-union common emotions are intensified, individual emotions deadened.

Now thought, unlike emotion, is markedly individual and personal. It is not infectious. It is communicated by articulate language. The Herd growls, cries, sobs, sometimes laughs; but it finds speech very difficult. Again, thought is critical, and the Herd wants unanimity, not criticism. Consequently Herd-union deadens thought.

True, the herd-leader must think and plan, and the Herd will obey him. In an organized army, where discipline and organization powerfully counteract many of the normal herd characteristics, thought sits enthroned and directs the whole mass. But it is a special kind of thought, under central control and devoted simply to attaining the purposes of the Herd. Other thought is inhibited.

For instance, if the Herd is angry it is quite simply angry with another Herd. This state of mind is normal among savages and primitive men. Some one belonging to a tribe over the river has speared one of our cows, therefore we catch some other person belonging to a different tribe over the river and club him on the head. Herd justice is satisfied. It only sees things in Herds. ‘The Germans’ did so-and-so; therefore punish ‘the Germans’: ‘the English’ did so-and-so; therefore punish ‘the English’. Whenever a Herd is offended by some action it is made happy by punishing as dramatically as possible several people who did not do it. Collective anger, collective punishment, are always opposed to Justice, because Justice only applies to individuals. And again, the more angry a Herd is, the less evidence it needs that there is due cause for its anger. Accuse a man of some irregularity in his accounts and the Herd will expect to have the charge duly proven. But accuse him of having drenched little girls in paraffin and set fire to them, and the Herd will very likely tear him—or some one else—to pieces at once without further evidence.

By this process of killing out thought the Herd sinks all its members in itself and assimilates them to an average. And this average is in some ways above but in most considerably below that of the average man in normal life. For it is that of the average man not thinking but merely feeling. Only the leader has the function of thinking; hence his enormous and uncanny power.

Lastly, let us consider the effect of this Herd-union on religion. At first sight the answer would seem simple. Religion is a network of primitive collective emotions, and any stimulus which works upon such emotions is likely, by force of sympathy, to rouse religious emotion at the same time. At any rate some of the causes which have recently roused Herd-emotion in Europe are just the causes on which religious emotion is often said to be based. Man has been made to feel the presence of terrific forces over which he has no control. He has been taught, crudely and violently, his dependence on the unknown. On this line of reasoning, the religious life of the world should be greatly intensified. Yet there are serious considerations leading to the opposite conclusion. A world so mad and evil, however terrific, can hardly seem like the mirror in which to see God. I remember a dreadful incident in one of the Consular reports of the Armenian massacres of 1895. At that time the universal dread and horror throughout Armenia sent most people praying day and night in the churches. But the report tells of one woman who sat by the road and refused to pray. ‘Do you not see what has happened?’ she said. ‘God has gone mad. It is no use to pray to Him.’ I have myself talked on different days to two soldiers who gave vivid accounts of the hideous proceedings of the war in Flanders and of their own feelings of terror. Their accounts agreed, but the conclusions they drew were different. One man ended by saying with a sort of gasp: ‘It made you believe in God, I can tell you.’ The other, a more thoughtful man, said: ‘It made you doubt the existence of God.’ I think that the effect of this year of history will be to discourage the higher kind of religion and immensely strengthen the lower.

Let me try to analyse this conclusion more closely, and see what we mean in this context by ‘higher’ and ‘lower’. I hope that most of my hearers will agree with me, or at least not disagree violently, in assuming that the attributes which a man ascribes to his God are conditioned by his own mind, its limitations and its direction. I could, if necessary, quote at least one Father of the Church in support of such a view. Thus the God whom a man worships is in some form a projection of his own personality. The respective Gods of a seventeenth-century Puritan, a Quaker, an Arab, a South Sea Islander, will all differ as their worshippers differ, and the human qualities attributed to each will be projections of the emotions of the worshipper. Thus the lower, and often the more passionate, religion will be directed towards a God who is a projection of the worshipper’s own terrors and angers and desires and selfishness. The higher religion weaves its conception of God more out of its duties and its aspirations. To one of those soldiers whom I mentioned above God was evidently a Being of pure terror, fitly mirrored by the action of a host of high-explosive shells. To many people in great oppression, again, God is almost an incarnation of their desire for revenge: let those who doubt it read the history of persecution. To others, an incarnation of Self. Some of you will have seen Mr. Dyson’s finely tragic cartoon entitled ‘Alone with his God’. It represents the Kaiser kneeling, a devout and fully armed figure, before another Kaiser exactly the same in dress and feature, but gigantic, august, enthroned amid the incense of ruined towns and burning churches, blindly staring and inexpressibly sad. It is a picture to ponder on.

All these emotions, the self-worship, the hate, the revenge, the terror, will be stimulated, and so will the kind of religion that depends on them. The higher religion, of which it is less easy to speak, which expresses itself in the love of righteousness, in the sense of one’s own imperfection, in the aspiration after a better life and a world with more love in it ... that sort of religion, I fear, will chiefly come in reaction. It cannot be the main flood. There is too much reflection in it, too much inhibition. The main flood of Herd-emotion will sweep over it for the time being, but it will not die. There is a strange life in the things of the spirit.

I suggested at the beginning of this very rough and sketchy analysis that perhaps at the end we might be able to pass some definite moral judgement on the change which has taken place in us, and say whether it is a good or a bad change. But I fear that the suggestion has not been realized. Herd-instinct in itself is neither good nor bad. It is simply part of the stuff of life, an immense store of vitality out of which both good and evil, extreme good and extreme evil, can spring.

Thus it is impossible to say without qualification that we ought to rejoice in this stimulation of our herd-instincts or that we ought rigorously to master and reject it. Neither alternative is sufficient. We must do this and not leave the other undone. We must accept gladly the quickened pulse, the new strength and courage, the sense of brotherhood, the spirit of discipline and self-sacrifice. All these things make life a finer thing. It is nothing against a particular emotion that mankind shares it with the ape and the tiger. Gorillas are famous for their family life, and tigresses are, up to their lights, exemplary mothers. As regards herd-feeling in particular, we should realize that even in its most unthinking forms it generally makes a man kinder and more trustworthy towards his immediate neighbours and daily associates; the evil side of it comes into play much more rarely, since it is directed against the far-off alien herd which is seldom met or seen. And lastly, we should remember one piece of certain knowledge which is both immensely important and very difficult to apply: that thwarted instincts act like poison in human nature, and a normal and temperate satisfaction of instinct is what keeps it sweet and sane. At the present time, for instance, the people whose minds have turned sour and vicious are almost always those who can neither fight nor serve. The fighters and doctors and nurses and public servants—as a rule their herd-desire is satisfied, and they do their work with fervour and without bitterness.

Yet after all we are thinking beings. If we acknowledge our instincts we need not worship them. Thinking itself is both an instinct and a form of public service, and it is our business to watch ourselves. We must see to it that this fresh force which we feel within us is not wrongly directed, and that the higher and gentler elements of life are not swamped by this new strong wine. Millions of men throughout Europe are, without stint or question, offering all that is in them to the service of their countries and the command of their leaders. We must see, as far as lies in our power, that we do not abuse that heroic blindness. And, among us who remain at home, we must see as far as possible that the normal texture of life is not lowered or coarsened.

There has been current in England of recent years a reaction against reason, an avowed worship of instinct and tradition and even prejudice. The doctrines of this reaction are in themselves fascinating, and they have been preached by fascinating writers. The way of instinct and old habit is so full of ease, so facile and strong and untroubled. Look at the faces of men who are wrapped up in some natural and instinctive purpose. Look at a dog chasing his prey, a lover pursuing his beloved, a band of vigorous men advancing to battle, a crowd of friends drinking and laughing. That shows us, say the writers aforesaid, what life can be and what it ought to be. ‘Let us not think and question,’ they say. ‘Let us be healthy and direct, and not fret against the main current of instinctive feeling and tradition.’

In matters of art such a habit of mind may be valuable; in matters of truth or of conduct it is, I believe, as disastrous as it is alluring. True, the way of instinct is pleasant. I happened once to be waiting at a railway station on a summer afternoon. There were several railwaymen about, rather wearily engaged on work of one sort or another, when suddenly something happened which made them look alert and cheerful and put a kindly smile on their faces. One of them had seen some small animal—I think, a rat—and a little crowd of them ran blithely and pelted it to death. One would have seen the same kindly and happy smile, the same healthy vigour, in the people who amid other circumstances let loose their hunting instincts on runaway slaves or heretics or Jews. And the man among them who should feel a qualm, who should check himself and try to think whether such hunting was really a pleasant and praiseworthy action, would, I have little doubt, have looked guilty and uneasy and tongue-tied. His face would have condemned him. ‘Why should he trouble himself with thinking and criticizing?’ people may say. ‘Why not enjoy himself with his mates! Thought is just as likely to lead you wrong as feeling is.’

The answer of mankind to such pleadings should be firm and clear. Human reason is very far from infallible, but the only remedy for bad thinking is to think better. The question was really settled for us, thousands and thousands of years ago, by those little lemurs in the marshy forests. They took not the path of ease but the path of hard brain-work, and we their children must go on with it. That is the way of life and the bettering of life, to think and labour and build up; not to glide with the current. We of the human race have our work in the scheme of things; and to do our work we must use all our powers, especially our greatest powers, those of thinking and judging. And even if we deliberately set our faces in the other direction, if we yield to the stream of instinct and let scruples and doubts and inhibitions be swept away, we shall not really find life easier. At least not for long. For the powers to which we yield will only demand more and more.

There is one character in Shakespeare, who is often taken as a type—a very unflattering type, I admit—of the follower of the mere instincts; who feels the release, the joy, the sense of revelation which they bring, and thinks that they will lead him to glory. And I suspect that some modern adorers of instinct as against reason will in the end awake to disillusion like that of Caliban:

What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a God,
And worship this dull fool!

III
INTERNATIONAL MORALITY:
THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE

By A. C. Bradley

When I was invited to give a lecture in a series dealing with the present crisis in its ethical and philosophical aspects, I had been endeavouring to clear my own mind as to the basis of international morality, and also as to some proposals aimed at the diminution of war; and I thought that this endeavour might perhaps be of some use to others.[4] I say the ‘basis’ of international morality; not the question what in particular the duties of states to one another are, but the question whether states are moral agents at all, and, if so, in what sense. This question runs back into that of the nature of the state, and cannot help being more or less a philosophical one; but I aim only at the outline of an answer and at being intelligible rather than precisely accurate; and, the subject being large, I intend, without reference to opposing views, merely to expound, at any rate at first, a view that is mine only in the sense that long since it got into my head out of other peoples’, and to expound it without adding to every sentence the words ‘so far as I can see’. Perhaps you will be kind enough to supply them.

My second subject is not itself philosophical. Judgement on proposals for diminishing war requires good sense, some knowledge of the past and present, and some capacity for faith and hope about the future. These things are not philosophy; and yet one of them, good sense, might be called philosophy pretending not to know herself; and, in any case, reflection on the nature of the state may help one in estimating concrete schemes which cannot succeed unless they correspond fairly well with that nature.

I must begin with some prefatory explanations suggested by the phrase just used. First, the nature of the state appears, of course, in a variety of forms; and a city-state such as Athens is very unlike a nation-state such as France, and both are unlike a state, such as Austria-Hungary, which is not based on nationality, or, again, a federal union such as the United States of America. But, to save time, I propose to ignore these differences and to take a national state as typical. Next, the full nature of the state is realized but partially in any individual state, and very feebly in some; and therefore, when I say that the state is or does this or that, you may truly make the comment that our state, or any other, is or does this in a very poor degree. And, lastly, I must point to what seems at first a curious fact. A state rests on, and, in a sense, only exists in, the minds and wills of its members, so that, if mind and will in all Frenchmen could suddenly vanish, the French state would do so too. And, further, the improvement of this state depends on the ideas of its members, and their will to make their ideas good. And yet what we call the ‘nature’ of the state does not depend on their thinking this or that, and if they think and will what conflicts with that nature they will not succeed. They will succeed only by developing further so much of that nature as is already developed in France or elsewhere. On the other hand, there can be no more fatal error than simply to identify the nature of the state with any development of it that has hitherto appeared. It only lives in realizing capacities still unfolded, and a state that does not advance goes back and, apart from any external violence, may even die.

If now we ask what the state is, we may say that it is the nation considered as an organized whole or individual. You have some millions of people, inhabiting a definite piece or pieces of the earth, and, for the most part, so united by blood, language, customs, traditions, and history, that they have a special character and so can more fully understand and count on one another, and can live together more easily and happily, than any chance collection of human beings could. Further, they are not a mere collection or aggregate, but form an organized whole, performing a multitude of different functions, which should, and more or less do, so complement and play into one another that they make a common life and produce a common good—a good shared by the members in degrees necessarily different, though not, one hopes, of necessity so very different as they everywhere now are. Finally (for so far we have not, strictly speaking, a state) the common life, mind, or will expresses itself formally in laws binding on all the members, and in acts explicitly done on behalf of the whole and in its name. It is in these laws, and still more in these acts, that the whole appears most plainly as individual or a single agent, over against its members taken severally, and over against other states. Hence we often identify the state with the particular organ through which it acts in this way, asking, for example, indifferently whether the state, or whether government, ought to own the railways. And this usage, though it leads to confusion if we forget that the state is the whole, points to the fact that it does not act as the state except through the organ called (in a wide sense) the government.

Is the state then a moral agent? It can hardly be so with reference to other states, unless it is so with reference to itself; so that we may safely consider it at first as if it stood alone in the world.

What is the end or object for which the state exists—its reason to be? Aristotle, after his manner, replied in two words, ‘Good life’. We may expand a little and say ‘The best possible life of its members’, or ‘The fullest possible development in them of the forces and faculties of man’ (a Mazzinian formula), or ‘To make of human nature in them all that it has in it to become’ (which is more like Green’s language). These are various ways of expressing what is substantially the same idea. Suppose it true; then what has morality to do with this end, the best life or the fullest realization of human capacities?

Morality, or moral goodness, is, in the first place, a large part of this best life. To be self-controlled in regard to your desires and fears, to be just and generous and the like; to do your part as well as you can in the common life, in your functions, say, as a son, a neighbour, a friend, a carpenter, or a poet; and to do this, not merely because you happen to like it or because it pays you, but because it is right and good to do it:—something like this is to be morally good. And to be so is not a mere means to an end beyond it, but a great part of the end, or best life, or realization of human nature.

It is not, however, the whole. To discover or re-discover truth, for example, and to make or re-make beauty, are certainly elements in the best life; and truth and beauty are not morality, nor yet mere means to it; they have an intrinsic value of their own. Moral goodness, therefore, though a large part of the best life, is not the whole. No: but it is the condition, the sine qua non, of these other parts. To discover truth, for example, is not a mere matter of natural gifts—it requires will, and a moral will. The investigator must undergo fatigue, renounce many pleasant things, sacrifice his pre-conceived ideas and his secret wish to reach a particular conclusion; and all this is morality, whether in other respects he is moral or not. And these are only examples. The same thing holds good over the whole of life, wherever there is action, inward or outward.

Thus it appears, first, that morality is a large part of the good life; and, secondly, that all those activities which in their special natures are not moral still fall within the moral sphere so far as will and character are concerned in them; and they cannot help being so concerned. But, if so, the end of the state, the best life, is a moral end, and the state a moral agent.

I said I would ignore objections; but there is an objection to this view so obvious and so dangerous that I dare not pass it by. ‘If the state had a moral end,’ it may be said, ‘it would not merely protect the life and property of the citizen, and then leave him free to live well or ill at his pleasure: it would enforce morality, or at any rate promote it by rewards and punishments. But it neither does this, nor do most of us think that it ought.’ Now even in England the state does much more than this objection supposes; but, leaving that alone, we may answer thus. The state, though its end is moral, does not enforce morality because it cannot. It can enforce actions outwardly the same as moral actions; but to force a man to do them morally, to do them not because he must but because he approves them or thinks them his duty, is beyond the power, not only of the state, but of the whole universe. Moral action, like immoral, is free action; and to talk of enforcing it is to talk of a square circle. And, in the second place, the reason why, on the whole, the state abstains, so far as possible, from enforcing or promoting actions outwardly like moral ones, is itself a moral reason. To force or bribe a man to do what he ought to do freely and morally, tends in some degree to interfere with his doing it freely and morally. The state cannot help taking this risk to some extent; for it must maintain the necessary pre-requisites of good life, e. g. security of life and property. But it limits its compulsive action, not in order that people may freely live as badly as they please, but in order that they may freely live as well as they can.[5]

We have now reached the conclusion that, as regards itself or (it is the same thing) its members in their organic unity, the state is a moral agent. But is it one in the further sense that it has duties to other states, such duties that these other states have a moral right to their performance? Almost all of us, probably, will be disposed to answer Yes; yet, as soon as we begin to think about the question, we meet with facts and considerations that perplex us. Not three centuries ago a great philosopher could say that states are by nature enemies.[6] Bacon is often called our great English moralist; and Bacon, writing of the dealings of kings with their neighbours, tells us that only one general rule can be given in the matter, but ‘one that ever holdeth; which is, that Princes do keep due sentinel that none of their neighbours do overgrow so ... as they become more able to annoy them than they were’.[7] We may reassure ourselves by remembering that Bacon lived a long time ago and had studied Machiavelli to some purpose; yet we, in our own day, are not surprised if a subject of dispute between other nations is dismissed by our Government in the phrase, ‘It does not affect British interests’, a phrase which may seem to imply that the duty of a state is simply and solely to itself. What it does imply, a moment’s thought will show us, is only that the state’s primary duty is that; and this inoffensive implication we may be ready to accept. And yet if a man saw two other men quarrelling in the street in a manner that threatened bloodshed, we should hardly think it moral in him to pass on with the remark, ‘It does not affect my interests’; we should think he ought at any rate to look for a policeman. This difficulty, again, we may remove by the just reflection that no policeman can be found for states, and in general that we cannot safely argue from the duties of a citizen to those of a nation. But then where will this reflection lead us? Citizens, perhaps we shall say, have duties to one another and to the state, and the state has duties to them, because they are members of this one community and share its one life, will, and good; but this moral community is the largest and highest that exists in the visible or actual world, what we call mankind being evidently not an organized whole but a mere scattered aggregate. Thus we may feel driven after all to conclude that the state is its own absolute end and has no duty except to itself. And if this conclusion still troubles us, we may consider that, at any rate, the state has a duty to itself in respect of its behaviour to other states; and we may even suspect that we are vexing ourselves with a mere question of words, since in any case a moral agent cannot have a duty to another which is not also a duty to itself.

However this may be, we shall find it worth while to dwell for a minute on the idea that the state has duties only to itself. If this idea were fully carried out it would lead, I believe, to just the same result as the view that states have duties to each other. For, as we have seen, the end of the state, and therefore the state’s own ‘interest’,[8] is nothing short of the best possible life of its members. Its independence is necessary to that life; power is necessary to it; wealth is necessary; even high spirit and a certain pride may be so; and times may come when a resolute assertion of its rights even by war is necessary. But the best possible life, including, permanently or on occasion, all these things, is much wider than any or all of them. None of them has value apart from it. Those of them which, like wealth and power, exist only in this or that degree, are of value only in the degree in which they really contribute to the best life, and in that life the goods of the soul rank, in value, first. An action of the state, therefore, which increases its wealth or power to the detriment of the character of its citizens cannot be in its interest, but is, on the contrary, a violation of its duty to itself. And so is any breach of promise to another state, any intentional injury to another, or any war upon another, which is inconsistent with that best life of its own citizens which is their one and only absolute interest. Hence we may say that a state can do no wrong to another which is not equally, or even more, a wrong to itself; that, if it rightly understands its duty to itself, it need consider nothing else; and that patriotism, in the true and complete meaning of the word, is the final and all-inclusive virtue. And if this view of the matter could really become the inspiration of a nation’s life, it would certainly have great advantages. It would make the nation realize that, next to the primary duty of maintaining the pre-requisites of its life, its main business is not to improve others—least of all by conquest—but to improve itself; and that to be grasping, inconsiderate, irritable, and meddlesome is no part of the best life. Or imagine for a moment that, when peace returns to England, we could retain undiminished that sense of unity and that self-devotion which have been evoked by war, and could use them wisely in all their strength, if only for ten years, to make England, morally and socially, all that it might be. Why, it might become, for itself, almost what Shakespeare called it, a ‘second Eden’, and, for others, a light to lighten the nations.

Thus the doctrine that a state has duties only to itself, if taken in its full sense, is far from being selfish or degrading. But then it is fatally easy to take it in its more obvious and its untrue sense; and we know too well how ideas, innocent and just in themselves, may be twisted into shapes that affront any unsophisticated conscience. Besides, this formula, even rightly construed, does not appear to suffice. To say that the so-called duty of a state to another is simply its duty to itself in respect of that other, would be satisfactory if that other were a tree or a lion; because my having a duty to another implies, in strictness, that this other has or may have a duty to me; and a tree or a lion, not being a rational agent, is incapable of duty, and, for the same reason, cannot be a member of a moral community. But the other state, like my own, is a rational being. The two have the same nature and the same end, the best possible life. That is common to them; and though it is by no means enough to make them members of an actual community in which the good of one is, in some degree, the good of another and of all, it surely is enough to give them, so far as they come in contact, and apart from obligations arising out of treaties between them, duties to one another and moral rights against one another. Indeed this seems to hold of all human beings, whether they belong to states or to lower forms of society. Slavery, for example, is now among civilized peoples universally admitted to be wrong, and states forbid their citizens to practise it. To whom then is it a wrong? To the enslaver himself, no doubt, but surely also to the slave. He—a negro, perhaps—is, like the enslaver, a rational being with a capacity for a best life. He proves it by his membership in a tribe, in which he has what, in effect, are rights and duties. His tribal morality differs from our civic morality; but what of that? It is enough to give him a claim against us to be left free to live as well as he can, and enough to make it our duty to him, if not to aid him, at least to leave him free.[9]

The duties which, on this showing, all men have to one another may now be few and elementary; and this may be said even of the duties of states to one another (over and above the unquestionable obligations arising from their treaties). But these duties are bound to grow in number and complexity, and the day perhaps may come when ‘mankind’ or ‘humanity’ will be no mere scattered aggregate, but an all-embracing organized community of members—if not states, still corporate bodies of some kind—united in pursuit of a common end, the best life of man. This life would be different in each body, a harmony, not a monotone; and the difference in each would be its special contribution to the whole. The members of each would still be more closely united with one another than with those of other bodies, and have duties to their own body that they had not to others; and these bodies, being human, could hardly fail sometimes to disagree. But none of them would dream of regarding itself as its sole or absolute end, and one may surely believe that they would not need to settle their differences by war. This community, at the best, must be far distant; but to keep it in view and, so far as possible, to feel and act as though it were already here, is, even in warring, to live inwardly in peace with your enemy, and, it may be, to lessen the distance by an hour or even a day.[10] And at least the pre-requisite of such a community—I mean the closer contact of mankind—is undeniably and rapidly being realized. Our own country makes itself a huge far-extending Empire. In the East Japan starts into sudden greatness. Africa is parcelled out among the states of Europe. The states of the world are bound together more and more by trade. There is another side, no doubt, to all these changes. In our Empire-making we did things we cannot justify, and the Empire made becomes an object of envy and a cause of war. The rise of Japan at once brings war in the East, and alarm and enmity in the Western hemisphere. The parcelling of Africa means the horrors of the Congo; and states bound together by trade fight one another with tariffs. Nevertheless these changes do visibly tend in one direction. Is it vain to hope that they move invisibly to one goal, moving there neither by accident nor mainly by the conscious purpose of men?

Meanwhile already we have in Europe a number of states, connected by almost perpetual contact, sharing to some extent a single type of civilization and morality, yet possessed of such distinct characters, and developing this type in such individual forms, that each of them brings to the common stock a contribution which no other can bring and which it is essential to preserve. What further duties they have to one another beyond that contribution I cannot discuss: I have to dwell on a different point. That these duties may be more extensive and positive than they are now generally recognized to be, one can well imagine; but I find it difficult to imagine that the primary and main duty of a state to other states can cease to be the contribution of its own best life. Yet to many minds this appears a selfish view. Openly or unconsciously they seem to demand that states should behave to one another like good men, or even like friends, or even like brothers. And the flagrant contradiction between such demands and the actual behaviour of states causes not only painful disappointment but an injurious dismay. Yet what is in fault here, perhaps, is not only, or even mainly, the behaviour of states, but something unreasonable in the demand.

I have not read General Bernhardi’s book since it first appeared, but I understand he says in it that the morality of a state cannot be the same as that of an individual. This assertion, if one may judge from a poem by Mr. Noyes and an article in one of our best weekly papers, is considered almost diabolical; and very likely the author draws from it false and immoral conclusions—one would expect him to. But surely the statement itself is perfectly sound. All moralities, of course, are the same, in the sense that they are morality, or a doing of duty: but what acts in particular are the duties of a moral agent must depend on the nature of the agent and the position he occupies. The duty of my brother to help me, if need be, with his money, or to tell me that I am disgracing the family, does not therefore belong to every one here present. It may be of use to point out some differences between a state and an individual, which prevent them from having the same duties and even account for their sometimes doing what two reasonable men, practically speaking, never do—fighting one another.

If A and B, two reasonable Englishmen, cannot agree in interpreting their contract, they do not fall to blows, they go to arbitration or a court of law. If A vilifies B, the latter, if he thinks it of importance, can take A into court. If A tries to pick B’s pocket or assaults him, B may indeed use such force as is immediately necessary to protect his person or property, but no more; it is the business of the law to protect him and to punish A. This power, the law, has three obvious characteristics. It purports to be, and in a good state is, the expression of that reason and right will which is common to A and B, as distinguished from their personal feelings and passions. It is perfectly impartial in regard to A and B. And, lastly, it is a power, against which they are powerless. Whatever they may think of its decision, it will enforce it.

But if A and B are states, how do they stand? If they differ in interpreting their treaty, or in fixing what sum A should pay to B for an unintentional injury, they, like citizens, can go, in one way or another, to arbitration. The arbiter, it is true, has no power to enforce his decision, but that need not matter much, since A and B would hardly have gone to him if they did not mean to abide by it. This, however, is a narrow field. When the question concerns an assault of A on B, or what they call their vital interests or even their honour (which is not merely their private feeling but their repute and weight in the world), where will they find an embodied reason with its perfect impartiality? Seldom, if ever, in other states, either severally or combined, when each of these others has its likes and dislikes to A and B, and vital interests of its own, connected positively or negatively with theirs. And even if this problem were surmounted and the impartial arbiter found, his decision, so far from having overwhelming force behind it, has or may have none at all except that of public opinion. Of course it does not follow that B’s duty must be war, but it does follow that you cannot find his duty by examining the duties of an individual.

Take a second difference. You, an individual citizen, have interests in a special sense your own. But you may well think it your duty to injure some of them; to be poor when you might be well off; to leave many of your capacities undeveloped that you may do good through the disproportionate growth of one or two; even to weaken your health and shorten your life for some worthy object; nay, if need be, to risk it or throw it away for the life of another. Asked to justify your conduct, you might answer perhaps that your life is but one of forty million English lives, that what you lose others gain, and that there are plenty to take your place. But England, your state, is forty million lives. For it to surrender its interest, to make itself poor, weak, or maimed, is to do that to forty millions, many of them children. How then can it have the same duty that you have; and how can its normal primary duty help being its duty to itself? Nor is this all. It, your country, is not merely these forty millions, any more than an oak is the leaves of this year. Your country’s span of life is not a little threescore years and ten. Its honour is the honour of its countless dead, and both its honour and its welfare are those of its innumerable sons and daughters yet to be. How can it, the state of this year, a mere trustee, have the same right and duty to sacrifice that welfare that you have to sacrifice yours? And even this, again, is not all. You can sacrifice yours, for you are but one of forty millions. But how many states are there in the world? Not a hundred, I imagine.[11] And, out of these, how many whose value to mankind is equal to the value of your state? Let us be modest and say ‘six’. Well, but if your country had only a hundred inhabitants, and only six of them were as useful as you, your right and duty to injure or risk your life would undergo a prodigious change. I do not say it would vanish, nor that a state cannot have such a duty; but the question whether such a duty has arisen cannot be settled by comparison with the duties of a citizen.

I trust I have not seemed to be championing either national selfishness[12] or war. No one can be more convinced that it is sometimes the duty of a state to forgo an advantage, to run a risk, and even to injure itself in some degree, in order to help another actively or allow another to develop itself, if (I must add) it is satisfied that this is to the advantage of mankind. And, as to war, I should like to say briefly how I regard it (which it would be absurd to do if I thought this view a merely personal one). Certainly I believe that a war may be right and therefore a duty; and I do not see how to maintain that an offensive war can never be so. Nor could I for a moment admit—what is often taken for granted—that peace is an unconditional good. Nothing is so except the best possible life; and peace, though it is the normal foundation of that, is no more. Hence, when I ask myself whether I wish for the total disappearance of war, I answer ‘Yes, if, or when, uninterrupted peace can perform the office and generate the good of war’. There are wars almost entirely evil; but war, on the whole, may roughly be compared with tragedy—I mean the tragic actions and sufferings portrayed by great poets. If things had to be classed roughly as good and evil, war and tragedy would be placed among the evils. But if the disappearance of either meant the disappearance, or even a lowering, of those noble and glorious energies of the soul which appear in both and are in part the cause of both, the life of perpetual peace would be a poor thing, superficially less terrible perhaps than the present life, but much less great and good. Nor, if I may say so, do I understand how this view can seem heathenish to any one who believes that suffering, and even wrong, have some meaning in the world.

But those who think thus about war are not therefore champions of war. They may believe that it does lie in man’s power slowly by degrees to gain in peace all the good of war; that it is monstrous to call war an end in itself, or even, if we speak strictly, one of the purposes of the state; that many wars, perhaps most, have been, so far as we can see, needless and therefore, in their origin, wholly wrong; and that the diminution of war is assuredly to be desired and pursued. And so I hasten to a few remarks on the second subject of the lecture.

This subject is not the conditions of the peace to which we are looking forward—no safe matter for public discussion even by persons more competent than I. And, further, the proposals, or rather the one proposal of which there is time to speak, belong—in my view at least—to a future more or less distant, and in any case subsequent to the period when, as we trust, the feelings produced by this war will be dying away. For we surely cannot imagine that any ambitious scheme can work unless it has behind it positive goodwill as well as a desire to avoid the evils of war.

Let us assume, and so dismiss, as a thing which seems clearly coming to be in principle admitted, the duty of states to observe international law,[13] and to refer to arbitration in some form such matters as may safely be so referred; and I will merely remind the despondent that the progress towards that admission during the last fifty or even twenty years has been nothing less than immense. Even in this matter, no doubt, much remains to be done; but what is desired is much more than this. It is an arrangement or institution likely to diminish the chances of war about the more difficult and dangerous questions: for example the question, not of the complicity of Serbian officials in the murder of the Archduke, but whether Serbia was pursuing a policy, or encouraging a movement, aimed at the integrity of Austria-Hungary; a question which, I imagine, neither state would have cared to submit to a court unless it had been pretty sure what the decision would be. And, if we recall the differences pointed out between an individual and a state, it seems clear that what is wanted is something like that state-law which stands above individuals, something which, at its best, is an embodiment of reason, perfectly impartial, and possessed of overwhelming force.

The idea of a United States, or Confederation, of Europe has been mooted for some centuries.[14] Kant took it up a hundred and twenty years ago, and drew the outline of a scheme in his essay on Perpetual Peace. It was a favourite idea with Mazzini. And it is now coming into the foreground in various shapes, of which the following is perhaps the most definite. The states of Europe, by federation or without it, would form a permanent council to decide all international differences, arbitrable or other, and, if necessary, to carry out the decision through an armed force, to which in some agreed way their several armies would contribute. But, considering the overwhelming power of the Union as compared with that of a recalcitrant state, this necessity, it is thought, would never, or at any rate very rarely, arise.

Just because this idea is so attractive and appears so hopeful, I propose to pass by its obvious advantages and to touch on some of its difficulties and dangers; but I must first mention a variation in the scheme, due to a sense of one of these dangers. Seeley, soon after the Franco-German War (Macmillan’s Magazine, March, 1871), considered the United States idea, with results which may be thus condensed. (1) The Union must be a federation, and a close one, as close as that of the United States of America. (2) No state must possess an armed force of its own: the only army would be that of the Federation. (3) Existing states would never consent to this provision; but a long and unremitting propaganda among all the populations (for it is to them that peace is all-important) might quite possibly compel their governments to adopt the scheme. ‘Possibly’, I say to myself, ‘it might, but nothing else would; and if the populations ever acquired so unanimous and resolute a will for peace, surely the need of a Union would have disappeared, and, with states remaining as separate as they are now, the chances of war would be as much diminished as they can be.’ Therefore, without discussing the feasibility of Seeley’s plan, or its desirability (which is far from indubitable), I go on to some remarks on the unmodified scheme.

1. Since the Union would deal with all disputes, and not only with what may be called legal ones, could all its states have equal voices in the council? Where vital interests are concerned, can one ask or expect that a fifty-million state should have no more votes than a five-million one? Surely not. In any case, whatever the voting-arrangements of the council might be, it seems wellnigh certain that these disputes would in effect be settled, I do not say in the interest of the Great Powers, but by them.

2. When a decree unfavourable to a powerful state (or more than one) was felt by it to touch deeply its honour or interests, there would always be danger of its trying to elude the requirements laid on it, and an equal danger that other states would shut their eyes to this attempt rather than enforce the decree at the cost of all the evils of war. It is vain to imagine that states would constantly put their duty to Europe in front of their duty to their own people.

3. There would always be danger of secret combinations of individual states in pursuit of what they thought their common interests over against the interests of the rest; a danger therefore that things would either drift back to their present position or else lead to civil war in the Union. Some people appear to have forgotten that there was ever civil war in the American Union; but ugly facts do not vanish by being ignored, and we have to remember too that the European Union would consist of states differing in race or nationality far more than the American states.

4. Europe is not the world. There is, for example, a western hemisphere. Would the American Union be willing to join the European, and so to entangle itself in our disputes? And, if it were, would many European states care to give it the chance? Scarcely, unless it became what some writers apparently imagine it to be already, an eminently peace-loving, self-sacrificing, and scrupulous Power.

Let us suppose, then, that it stayed outside. In that case, war between it and one or more of the European states would not, presumably, be held to involve the rest. And yet the success of the European Union would depend a good deal on the growth of a special European feeling which does not now exist; and, just as the growth of national feeling has brought great dangers with it, so, though doubtless in smaller measure, would the growth of that European feeling. And in the West, we must remember, we have not only the United States but the Monroe doctrine. The possibility I am pointing to is a frightful one, and, some will say, too frightful to be realized. And so they said, a year ago, of a possibility which at this moment is an appalling fact.

It should be needless to refer to similar risks arising from the greatness of Japan, a possible revival of China, the facts that Russia extends into Asia and that the other great European Powers have colonies or dependencies outside Europe. When the idea of a European Union was first broached, the dangers of which I have lately been speaking were not yet in sight.

5. There is still another, and a very grave one. History is a continual change, and, as we all hope and some of us believe, the change is, in the main, a progress. But is it not probable, to say the least, that to a European Union the easiest and the most tempting course would generally be to discourage change and maintain the status quo? And if its first or chief object were peace, would it not seem right in doing this? Yet if such a Union had been formed a century ago, and had not soon been broken by the secession of England and France, would it not certainly have discouraged and even resisted most of the changes that we now think good—changes, let us remember, made largely by insurrection and war? We know what the Holy Alliance actually did and wanted to do. Well, we may feel fairly secure that the European Union would not resemble it in supporting mere ‘legitimacy’, but can we feel secure that, in the very interest of law and peace, it would never ‘haply be found fighting against God’; or, if that phrase is objected to, let us say ‘fighting against changes that are necessary for the progress of mankind’?[15]

The difficulties and dangers now mentioned (and there may well be others) are formidable. To meet and surmount them would tax, no doubt, the foresight and skill of statesmen, and the goodwill of populations which cannot be expected to have foresight and skill. But they do not appear to be more than dangers and difficulties, nor does the ideal of a United States (not necessarily a federation) seem to conflict with anything fundamental in the nature of the state; while both the course of history and the minds of men do seem to have been moving for some time in this direction. On the other hand, as has been suggested already, any attempt to realize that ideal in the immediate future would almost certainly be vain and, if vain, highly dangerous; and there are reasons not yet mentioned for fearing that the time when it could succeed must be distant. Must we not accept what Mazzini used to say of such an ideal—that it could not be made real until two pre-requisites had been attained?[16]

The map of Europe must first be re-drawn, he said, so that the divisions of states correspond with those of nationality. A deliverance like this must be taken somewhat loosely. It did not mean for Mazzini that the Union of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland must be dissolved, or that the German Empire must cease to exist; and we are told that there are ethnical unities in the south-east of Europe which are geographically so distributed that they could not form single states. But, any really necessary qualification being admitted, the general statement appears sound. The sentiment of nationality has unquestionably been one of the chief causes of unrest and war in Europe ever since the Powers established in 1815 a system based on legitimacy. And this sentiment, which is not a sentiment but a passion and almost a religious faith, shows not the slightest sign of dying away. It has wellnigh destroyed the Turkish Empire in Europe, in Mazzini’s view one of the two main obstacles to progress. The other was the Austrian Empire; and the working of that same passion in Serbia may have initiated the dissolution of that Empire too.

According to Mazzini, the second pre-requisite of a United States was that all the states concerned should have become democratic. Kant, using another terminology, had said the same thing. What is in question here is, surely, not chiefly the ‘democratization’ of foreign policy and diplomacy, about which much nonsense is being written just now, and some good sense.[17] When we call a state democratic, and when we use the word in a strictly political sense, we mean, roughly speaking, that it has a very large electorate, and that the power which acts for the state really represents, and is responsible to, this electorate. And, though we may feel less confident than Mazzini was, that democracies would always be friendly and never more pugnacious than nobles or kings, most of us perhaps will agree that the prospects of peace will not be greatly improved so long as the power to make war rests, openly or otherwise, either with an autocrat, wise and good or foolish and ill-willed, as chance may determine, or with representatives of sectional interests, social, military, bureaucratic, or financial, all of which, though in varying degrees, are separable from national interests and provide motives for unnecessary wars. Only it must be remembered that a state is not democratic merely because its government fairly represents the nation. In this war, for example, the German Government appears to represent the German people as fully as our Government does ours. Yet Germany is in no sense democratic, and England, politically, is.[18]

This brings me to a last word. Perhaps some of my hearers, listening to the earlier part of this lecture, may have said to themselves: ‘Why this theorizing about the nature of the state and its exalted mission? It is just what has brought the Germans to worship force and to glorify to themselves their desire for domination.’ This particular charge against German philosophy is in the fashion, and, although a proper discussion of it is out of the question here, I should like to refer to it.

Even if it had much truth, we English are not Germans, and intoxication by ideas is not exactly a failing of the English—nor even of the Scotch, who do reverence intellect. But the truth in this charge is not great. What has led, apparently, a large number of Germans to the strange, perverted state of mind we witness, is surely not, in the main, ideas, philosophical or other, but first and foremost what has happened to Germany. After being for long years, even for centuries, a ‘Hamlet among the nations’; great, that is to say, in the purely spiritual spheres of religion, philosophy, music, poetry, but, to all appearance, incapable in the world of political action, she found herself on a sudden, five-and-forty years ago, the most powerful state in Europe. She owed this, too, in the main, not to a long and arduous effort of her peoples (for that would have had a different effect), but to a merely military force enlarged and perfected by the unconstitutional action of a statesman and a king. And on the success of this military force and of a Machiavellian diplomacy in creating the Empire there followed (what also was to a large extent new) an immense increase in industrial and commercial activity, in wealth, and in population. It would be no great wonder, I think, if any people’s head were turned by such a change.

Next to this chief cause comes the fact (as, on the testimony of others, I suppose it to be) that the views and feelings thus generated concerning the greatness and the future of Germany have been for years assiduously fostered in the people through an admirably efficient system of university and school education.[19]

Now what has philosophy had to do with the ideas so instilled, and with other ideas that have gone to produce a perverted ideal and state of mind? Something, no doubt, but of that something very little belongs to the great philosophers. A leading German historian, I am told, criticizes Plato and Aristotle because they say almost nothing about the state’s being essentially might. Perhaps they thought this undeniable fact too obvious to need emphasis; but in any case the same criticism might be passed on Kant and Hegel. It is true that in Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie there are a few expressions which, taken in isolation and exaggerated as a philosopher’s ideas are apt to be, might do harm; but in all its pages, while there is much about will and the will for good, there is little enough about force.[20] Germany’s greatest philosopher since Hegel, I suppose, is Lotze, a teacher about as likely as Mill or Green to encourage the worship of force. Indeed, so far as I know, the only philosopher who is, in a degree worth notice, responsible for that worship is Nietzsche, who was neither an admirer of the Prussian state nor by any means a great philosopher. He was, however, a man of genius, with a poetic imagination and an admirable style; and in Germany that is a thing rarer than a philosopher and, to the mass of readers, much more dangerous. If he could have written as Kant wrote he would scarcely have done much mischief. Nobody could bear to read Kant who was not bent on finding truth, but truth is not the quarry that Nietzsche’s thousands of readers hunt.

If Germany were doomed to win this war, she might continue—for how long, we cannot tell—to be the victim of a perverse ideal. But any Englishman who reveres and loves that soul of her which speaks in her music, philosophy, and poetry, must desire her total defeat for her own sake as well as for his country’s and the world’s. It is incredible that that soul is dead, and that anguish would not wake it from its evil dream.

IV
THE CHANGING MIND OF A NATION AT WAR

By L. P. Jacks

I owe you a word of explanation for the seeming audacity displayed in the title of my lecture. What right have I, what right has any one, to speak for the mind of the nation? Surely the most that one can do is to describe the changes of his own mind. The mind of the nation is beyond him.

I do not believe this. There is one mind in all of us at the present moment—and it is the mind of the nation. The mind of the nation has become, to a greater degree than ever before, the mind of the individual citizen. That is the greatest of all the changes which have taken place since the war began. The national mind is no longer a mere theme for speculation. It has entered, in some measure, into every one of us. It has become an active principle of our consciousness. It has brought great thoughts and great resolutions to multitudes. It has both amplified and simplified our lives. It has wakened powers that slumbered; it has revived great memories that were half forgotten; it has linked us together and made us one.

Under these circumstances there is no audacity in speaking of the mind of the nation. The distinction between our own thoughts and the nation’s thoughts is being obliterated. Ask the first honest man you meet to tell you what he is thinking, and if he answers faithfully, he will tell you something of what the nation is thinking.

I

Never, in my memory, has intercourse with thoughtful men been as suggestive and stimulating as it has been since the war broke out. It is hardly possible, to-day, to enter into conversation with an educated person without noting the emergence of some new point of view. Under the strain and pressure of the time mens’ minds are yielding ideas and making discoveries. There is in consequence a certain vividness in the intellectual life of the country which relieves, to some extent, the moral distress. In the presence of danger our intelligence, our imagination, our will, are unusually wide awake. We begin to perceive the limits of accepted forms of thought, the inadequacy of the standards by which we have been accustomed to pass judgement on life and on history, and the partial nature of truths we had regarded as final and complete. A great disturbance, like that of an earthquake, is passing beneath our life, and the elements of that life are rearranging themselves in new perspectives. We are virtually living in another world compared with that in which we were alive eight months ago.

The world before the war was comparatively safe; the world of to-day is threatened. Eight months ago we looked out into a future which seemed assured. We were laying out plans, buying, selling, building, marrying and giving in marriage, like the men of old before the Lord rained fire on Sodom and Gomorrah. Our sons were growing up and we were arranging their peaceful careers. To-day our sons are in arms, and under orders for the front, and as they gather round us for the parting feast, we thank God that we cannot raise the veil of the future. Our most intimate ties are threatened with possibilities of which we dare not think. Thus at the very centre of our life the earthquake begins, and it runs outward until every idea, every habit of mind, every interest, every conviction, has received some share of the shock. But the shock, far from paralysing the nation’s mind, serves rather to liberate its reserves of intellectual vitality. The new world in which we find ourselves is not terrible only; it is full of challenge to our thinking faculties. It provides a daily stimulus to spiritual curiosity. Thus the intercourse of thoughtful men grows more vivid, and it becomes easy to understand how, from conditions like these, new births of the soul have come to nations; times of danger and calamity being often followed by times of creativeness in all the arts of life.

Ladies and gentlemen, are we not all thinking more than we did before the war began—thinking more deeply, more earnestly, more constantly? There is a new thoughtfulness in the air which is raising the level of intelligence in all classes of the community. The matters we are thinking about are big and terrible and splendid, all at the same time. We are asking questions which it is an education to ask, even though for the time being we cannot answer them. Because the questions are great questions they are giving us a juster sense of proportion. We are thinking a little more about our duties and a little less about our rights. ‘Business’ still goes on; but not quite as usual, for something more important than business is in our minds. We are measuring ourselves by higher standards. The heroism of the forces, the daily spectacle of our young men going to the war, reminds us of ethical truths we had half forgotten. Great questions about society and civilization are challenging our minds and compelling us to look at them from new angles of vision. It is good for us to be ‘brought up sharp’ by these things. Still better, that we should be forced to think of them not as mere academic questions, but as questions of life and death. And best of all, when the whole people is forced to think about them at the same time. We are coming together into the presence of these problems. That makes an enormous difference. One reason why the great concerns of life are not better cared for is that in normal times the interest taken in them is piecemeal. You think of them to-day and I think of them to-morrow, with the result that I am hot while you are cold, and I am critical while you are enthusiastic. But the new thoughtfulness is not of that broken, interrupted kind. It is simultaneous and widespread. We are all in it at once. You remember what Emerson says about the strange things that may happen when God lets loose a thinker on this planet. But this time a thinking community has been let loose. Momentous results are bound to follow.

I am inclined to believe that the mind of the nation was never in a more hopeful frame. I cannot go to the length of a writer in one of the daily papers who says that England was never so happy. The tragedy is too deep for that. But I do think that England was never so promising. What will come from her awakened thoughtfulness no man can predict. But if it should turn out to be better than the best we have ever hoped for, there would be no cause for surprise.

II

And here we come to a strange and paradoxical thing. One of the first effects of this awakened intelligence is to raise a doubt as to whether the minds of nations are as intelligent as we thought them to be. For a long time past a kind of humanism has been current which took the form of an enthusiastic faith in the ‘march of mind’. Appearances seemed to warrant the belief that men, organized in modern societies, were becoming far more reasonable than their fathers. But look at this war! What comment does it suggest on the ‘march of mind’? Think not of this nation or of that, dismiss the question of whose diplomacy was right or wrong, and view the war as though it were, what indeed it is, a single action performed by civilization. What is our impression? Do we feel ourselves in presence of some masterpiece of wisdom? Speaking for myself, I can only say that the war, viewed as a single action, appears to be the kind of action that could only be performed by a fool. I cannot get away from the feeling that I am in the presence of some colossal stupidity. Since history began to record the deeds of men, has there ever been seen such an exhibition of limited intelligence? Who in his sane senses would do such a thing?

Just think what has happened. For generations past the general level of intelligence in Western Europe has been rising. The individual is better educated. Millions of these better educated individuals are combined into societies more or less democratic. But what has become of this vast aggregate of intelligence? Has it all gone into the common stock? Is it all employed for the common good? Does the intelligence of every citizen reinforce the intelligence of every other citizen, so that States become endowed with the sum total of all the wisdom in all of their members? Apparently not. Most of this intelligence seems to be wasted away in mutual criticism, in the war of minds, before the State can get possession of what remains. Does it not seem as though there were some process of inner opposition at work by which a multitude of minds will often neutralize each other’s intelligence; so that States, instead of being wiser than individuals, often perpetrate follies of which the least intelligent of their members would be heartily ashamed?

I am inclined to think, therefore, that we shall emerge from the war with a chastened confidence in the mere ‘march of mind’. We shall think more, we are already thinking more, of those other qualities, such as the plain sense of right and wrong, with which the march of mind needs to be blended before it can do its work. Many disillusions of this kind are on the way. There is a feeling abroad which is not quite articulate as yet, that the war has somehow brought us into contact with Reality, and that our ideas must be modified accordingly. ‘We are up against the real thing’ is a phrase you must often have heard. It is frequently used in soldiers’ letters written from the front; I have encountered it in sermons, political speeches, and newspaper articles, in conversations with working men; and in the comments of distinguished philosophers.

Now I will not attempt to define what the ‘real thing’ is. I am not quite sure that I know. But I think I can point out one of its characteristics. The ‘real thing’ as we are now feeling its presence is not a mere subject for study: it is something we have to obey. It is a command, a summons, a trumpet note. In ordinary times Reality shows us its interesting side. Just now it is showing its imperative side. In ordinary times we talk about it. Just now it is talking to us. I can almost imagine that Reality is paying off an old score it had against us. We had been writing philosophical essays about it, treating it as ‘our subject’, as though we had it in the hollow of our hand; and perhaps Reality was getting a little tired of hearing itself defined and discussed. Anyhow the real thing is no longer passive. It has become intensely active. It has given us a shock, it has roused us to our duty and put a constraint upon our wills. The consequence is that a good deal of nonsense is being knocked out of us. Let us hope it will not return! We were much too comfortable, much too complacent, much too selfish, before the war. And we were hardly prepared for so sudden a change of behaviour on the part of the real thing.

III

One effect of this shock has been to change our attitude towards the State, and to make us think differently of the rights and duties of the State.

For many years past, there had been a tendency among us to look to the State as an omnipotent power whose function and duty were to gratify our desires and do our bidding. Whatever we wanted, better trade, higher wages, easier conditions of life, schoolrooms, playgrounds, libraries, art galleries, food for our children, provision for our old age—and so on through an endless list—whatever it was, we exploited the State. And the State, like an indulgent mother, gave in to us all round. Now this one had his turn, and now that; and there was a good deal of quarrelling among us as to whose turn came next. There seemed no limit to what the State could do for us, and no limit either to what we had the right to demand. It was a demoralizing business—demoralizing to us who got our way, demoralizing to the State which gave us our way. But it went on merrily and the wildest expectations were abroad of vast favours yet to come. A few more teasings, a few more pistols held at the head of the State, and a ‘scheme’ would be forthcoming which would render us all happy and good in spite of ourselves.

Then, one fine morning last August, there came a rude awakening. We got a message from the State couched in language we had never heard before. ‘I require you,’ said the State, ‘to place your property and your lives at my service. Now and for some time to come, I give nothing but ask everything. Arm yourselves for my defence. Give me your sons and be willing that they should die for me. Repay what you owe me. My turn has come.’

That is how the Real Thing talks to men when it uses the State as its mouthpiece. Considering how strange and unaccustomed the language was, I think the response the nation made was to its credit. No sooner did the State turn its imperative side towards us than an instant peace fell upon our warring factions. We had all been waiting for that word of command to make us one—waiting but not knowing what we waited for. Our demands on the State had been for different things: the State’s demand on us was for the same thing—for uttermost self-sacrifice. It brought us together as nothing else could have done. This was the first result of our contact with the Real Thing.

IV

This awakening of a sense of duty to the State is leading to a more thorough understanding of the particular State to which we happen to belong—I mean of course the British Empire. This is another and a very promising change in the national mind. During the last few months a new vision has come to many of us of what the British Empire really is.

Speaking of Britons in general, I am afraid it must be confessed that our knowledge of the Empire, our grasp of its significance, have been inadequate to the immense human issues, and to the corresponding responsibilities, which the Empire involves. We have been proud of this vast heritage, we have complacently enjoyed the advantages which come to all of us from its possession, we have talked vaguely and largely about imperialism, but we have hardly taken our imperial duties to heart. Some of us may have done so, but not the nation as a whole. To the majority of the electorate the Empire has been a side issue, or a thing that might be left to look after itself. It seemed too big and too broadly based to be in danger of disturbance. Few of us gave much thought to it; few of us allowed our imaginations to play round its meaning; still fewer took the trouble to study its history. Had we done so we should have realized, as I am afraid not many did realize, that a day would dawn when our right to possess this Empire would be put to the proof, when we should be challenged before the world to show that our intelligence and our valour were equal to the vast imperial enterprise on which we had engaged.

But let us not forget that the British Empire, in its present extent and organization, is a comparatively recent phenomenon. In size, in wealth, in the civilization of its component parts and their close relations with one another, its characteristics are so different from what they were a century ago that we can draw no parallel with the Napoleonic era. And now, for the first time in its history, this Greater Britain is being attacked—and attacked with unexampled vehemence and resolution. It is a new experience, and like all new experiences it is compelling a readjustment of thought.

This is a war of the Empire, by the Empire, for the Empire—and by the Empire I mean all for which the Empire stands, its ideals as well as its actualities. The Colonies and India are fighting for us and we are fighting for them. Our fellow subjects in India are represented by a great army of fine warriors, who have helped to check the would-be invaders of our shores. Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Pathans have shed their blood that London might be safe. Mohammedan, Hindu, and Christian have fallen side by side in defence of the liberties of our race. This, I say, is a new thing in our history. We feel a deepened intimacy with these widely sundered races; the dominions over the seas seem no further off than the next county. The Germans predicted that the outbreak of war would split the Empire into fragments. It has given the Empire a splendid solidarity such as it never before possessed. It has made us a greater nation, not in the sense that it has added to our dominions, but in the deeper sense that it has caused our political consciousness to dilate to the imperial scale. The political organization of the Empire is acquiring a corporate mind, just as the mother country after the defeat of the Spanish Armada awoke to a new consciousness of her national individuality and began to know herself for what she was.

The parallel is profoundly interesting. It took the English people many centuries to discover their own country. The English in the reign of Henry VIII had a vaguer notion of England than we have of Canada (very few had seen a map of England); of Scotland than we have of Ceylon; of Ireland than we have of Central Africa. But just as these vague conceptions gave place in course of time to vision and realization and patriotic love for England, so now we British are beginning to think of the Empire as something more than a confused extension of our national boundaries, or as a group of appendages to our national home. The Empire is becoming our country, an inheritance of which we have to prove ourselves worthy, and we are becoming its citizens in heart as well as in name. Not that the change is already complete or even very far advanced. But no close observer of present tendencies will doubt that the movement of the national mind is in the direction of which I speak. Our imperial soul is beginning to germinate. If the change continues its ethical and spiritual consequences will be very great.

V

In connexion with this extension of our national consciousness one may note at the present time some curious questionings among thoughtful men as to the bearing of democratic theory on our imperial obligations. We call ourselves a democracy; but there are moments, even in the course of dealing with domestic problems, when we find it hard to reconcile the facts with the theory. And the difficulty becomes greater in proportion as we extend our thoughts to the imperial scale. According to the democratic theory the people are to be consulted as to all that concerns their interests. Well, there is nothing that concerns our interests quite so deeply as the existence of the Empire. But when has the people been consulted in the matter? Proud as the British may be of possessing an empire on which the sun never sets, it is certain that the people as a whole have never been asked whether they wished to possess such an empire or not. They have never been asked how large they wished the Empire to be; or whether they would or would not be content with something less or greater. In an age when all things political are supposed to be determined by voting it is a curious circumstance that this, the greatest of political questions, has never been voted on at all. Nay more. So far as I know, the British people have never said to themselves, as the Germans have recently been saying, ‘Go to, now; world-dominion shall be ours.’ It would tax the historian to fix the period when the design for a world-wide empire became a definite ambition of the British people. True, there have been statesmen like the late Lord Beaconsfield, or Lord Chatham in an earlier age, who made plans for increasing the dominions of the Crown. But the popular will did not originate these designs, much as it may have applauded them when they had been carried out—though even this has not always been the case. Moreover, the control exercised even by statesmen over the process of imperial expansion has been of a distinctly piecemeal character. As one annexation followed another none of our ministers has foreseen where the process would end. None of them has had a vision in advance of the Empire as it exists to-day—in extent, in population, and in wealth. As Seeley long ago pointed out, we have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind. Indeed it would be extremely hard to fix responsibility for the existence of the Empire, in its present character, on any group or series of statesmen, or on any particular generation of Britons—to say nothing of individual men. A province here, a frontier there, an island somewhere else might be correctly set down to an assignable wave of public opinion or to the diplomacy of a particular minister. But the total growth seems to have escaped from human control altogether. Certainly nothing would be more untrue than to treat the existence of the Empire as though it corresponded to the expressed will of the living generation. We have not willed it into being. We have found it there—like so many of the financial obligations—e.g. the National Debt—which have been inherited from the past, and have to be accepted whether we like them or not, in spite of the maxim which is said to be the corner-stone of the constitution—‘No taxation without representation’.

Our new vision of the Empire is teaching us another thing. We are learning to understand more clearly the influence of the past on the present. We begin to see that we inherit from the past something more than the monuments of the mighty dead. We inherit the very form and pressure of our national life; the range, significance and general direction of our imperial duties. We inherit not our social problems only; but the courage to attack them, and much of the wisdom which guides us to their solution. These in all their essential features have been determined not by us but for us by the action of forces which did their work before we came into existence. We are therefore in no mood to respond to the lines of the well-known hymn which bid us ‘give the past unto the wind’. A past which has bequeathed to us our national status and the broad outline of our imperial responsibilities, a past which has given us our political idealism and our love of liberty, cannot be ‘given to the wind’ without a degree of treachery of which the fiercest anarchist in our midst is not capable. Without distinction we feel ourselves bound to ‘carry on’; and what we are ‘carrying on’ is the work of our fathers from the most distant ages to the present day. We are learning the great truth of which Burke was the prophet—the immortality of the State. The past is throbbing in our veins. The cause we are fighting for is a thousand years old. Patriots and martyrs for liberty are no longer mere names in the book of history; they are living forces in our midst. The buried generations are with us. We are members of a community which is continuous in time and has millions of members, vast clouds of witnesses from every age, whose work is waiting for our loyalty to make it complete.

VI

Ladies and gentlemen, all the changes I have described run together into one and lead our minds in the same direction. They are driving the thoughts of the nation to the roots of things. They are forcing us to question the whole basis of our civilization. With the war before our eyes we are prepared to find that there is something radically wrong. We are beginning to suspect that the mischief is deep-seated. It is true that these suspicions had often been roused before this war broke out. A visit to the slums will rouse them any day. But the war has made this difference: it has brought us all together into a suspicious frame of mind; so that if anybody could make clear to us what the driving forces of civilization really are, the mind of the nation would at once challenge these forces to give an account of themselves and hold them under suspicion until they could prove their innocence.

Now there are two great forces which as everybody knows have been mightily at work in European history for the last hundred years. One is militarism, the other is industrialism. The mind of the nation is thinking deeply about both of them. Militarism we have always suspected: industrialism has borne a better character, though some of us have had our doubts. But recently there have been signs—and they have been especially prominent in Germany—that these two forces are much more intimately connected than once seemed possible. What have militarism and industrialism to do with one another? How are they related? The war has thrown a new light on that question and I will try to express some of our thoughts.

On a superficial view we are tempted to describe the relation of industrialism to militarism as one of antagonism. The two principles are simply opposed the one to the other. Industrialism, we think, makes for peace; militarism for war. Whence follows the simple conclusion that the destruction of militarism will leave the peace-making principle in control of civilization and fighting will be at an end.

I believe that thoughtful people are becoming more and more dissatisfied with this simple account of the matter.

To begin with, there is the fact staring us in the face that an age which is saturated with industrialism has given birth to the bloodiest and most destructive war the world has ever seen. We have no need, at this point, to assert the disputable proposition that industrialism has caused the war. Let us content ourselves with the indisputable proposition that industrialism has not prevented the war.

If industrialism were essentially pacific this failure to prevent the war would be hard to understand. As the dominant interest of nations and individuals, and as making always for peace, how has it come to pass, we may well ask, that industrialism has been unable to restrain the forces which make for war, and for war on the most stupendous scale? We had flattered ourselves that commerce by multiplying and strengthening the ties between nations, would make it impossible for these to tear themselves asunder and engage in mutual destruction. The event has proved we were in error.

Reflecting more deeply on its failure to keep the peace, a suspicion gains ground that industrialism when unchecked by other forces may be a positive cause of war. By increasing the wealth, the ostentation, and the pride of the peoples, does it not serve to accentuate their rivalries, to deepen their jealousies, and to inflame their predatory passions? Is it not true that wherever great treasure-chests exist, there will robbers be found also; and is the treasure less provocative of covetousness when gained by commerce, than when extorted from the labour of slaves or exacted by the ransom of conquered cities? Are two nations, rich and happy in the sort of happiness that comes from riches, more likely to be friends than two poor nations each possessing nothing which tempts the cupidity of the other?

For example, is not one of the chief causes of the present hostility between Germany and Great Britain to be found in the fact that both of them, as we say, ‘have done so well in business’? Is it of no significance that war broke out at the very time when each was ‘doing better than ever’? Eliminate, from the complex of conditions out of which the war arose, the circumstance that industry had made both these nations rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and may we not say without hesitation that war between them would not have taken place?

What answer shall we give to these questions? Shall we take refuge in the argument that industrialism shows these baleful tendencies only because it is imperfectly developed, and has not yet become truly international in character? Shall we plead for a finer articulation of the commercial tie, and for more industrialism rather than less? Will our dream of the millennium be the conversion of the whole human race into a Universal Joint Stock Company? Are we, in a word, to content ourselves with the suppression of militarism and trust the weal of the race to the working out of the industrial principle, unhampered by the interference of its military yoke-fellow?

Such answers show, I cannot help thinking, that we are legislating for mankind without reckoning with man, as we so often fail to do. They leave untouched the tap-root of war—that primitive instinct which the old legislation sought to restrain by the command ‘Thou shalt not covet’.

Let us assume the extreme case and suppose that on the conclusion of the war the nations of Europe, convinced of their folly and wickedness, abandon every form of armament and determine for the future to spend not one farthing of the national wealth on armies or fortresses or fleets. What would follow?

The immediate result would be the liberation of an enormous amount of wealth hitherto set aside for military purposes. The greater part of this wealth would flow into industrial channels. It is fair to assume that industrialism would be the gainer annually to the extent of five hundred million sterling and of a labour force represented by twenty millions of men. This is a prospect that ought to make the mouths water of those who think that industrial wealth is the foundation of human good.

Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, the United States—to speak of no others—rich as they now are, would then grow enormously richer. The natural resources of the earth would be exploited to an extent of which the present economic development, vast as it is, affords no measure. The mere circumstance that each nation might pursue its gains undisturbed by the risk of aggression from the others would bring a vast accession of confidence, and therefore of efficiency, to the labour and capital employed. The total population of the earth would grow by leaps and bounds. And under any fairly equitable scheme of distribution there would be enough wealth in the world to render every member of the human race well-off.

But would there be peace?

Long before the pleasing process we have imagined could work itself out every one of the great communities would be torn to pieces by civil wars. This, I mean, is what would assuredly happen if we suppose the economic process to go on without some fundamental change in the ethos of mankind.

The peace of nations depends only in part on the suppression of militarism. In yet larger measure it depends on the absence of disruptive tendencies in the nations themselves.

What these disruptive tendencies can do, or at least what they can threaten, was made sufficiently clear in Great Britain during the few months which preceded the outbreak of war. Nor were we alone in this danger. I need not enter into particulars, for the facts are well known. France, Germany, Austria, Russia—even the United States—were seething with discontent. I recall the remark made to me by an American statesman in 1912. Speaking of the prevalent social unrest he said, ‘We are on the eve of a greater crisis than that of our Civil War.’

Internal disruption is the inevitable fate of every nation whose ethos, or ideal, rests upon a purely industrial creed. The larger the scope for pure industrialism and the fewer the checks which hold it in restraint, the more rapidly do the disruptive tendencies gather head and the more destructive do they become. It is not the poorest nations which reveal the maximum of social discontent. It is the richest. And the prime cause of this does not lie in the sense of inequality between individuals who have more and individuals who have less; that, no doubt, is a cause, but secondary. The root evil is, that a community which makes wealth its object, and pursues it on the terms laid down by the economic machine, is living under conditions which satisfy nobody and against which all men are, by the higher human nature, born rebels. From this point of view success in the economic enterprise is even worse for a nation than failure. The greater the accumulation of wealth the more dissatisfied do men become with the conditions of a merely economic life. Industrial communities are always more restless when trade is good than when trade is bad, as though the rottenness of the system could only be revealed by its triumph. Seldom, however, does the restless spirit penetrate to the true cause of the trouble. Unaware that the trouble comes from the original vice of the whole enterprise on which we are engaged, we throw upon our fellow victims the blame for the common lot, thinking that because these suffer less than ourselves therefore they are responsible for our sufferings—like the emigrants in the sinking ship who in the blindness of their despair fell upon the first-class passengers and tore them to pieces.

In short, the common pursuit of wealth is not a human bond. It leads to the invention of schemes and machinery of every kind—material, political, and social; but, of itself, it can never lead to the vital organization of mankind. Nay rather, in spite of all that has been said of its unifying tendency, we cannot doubt that its final working is to disintegrate the community. Seekers of buried treasure invariably quarrel among themselves, for reasons which are manifest to a child. They may arrange the most equitable scheme for the division of the spoils, and seal their mutual loyalty with fearful oaths, but before the voyage is over the captain will be at the yardarm and the deck will be slippery with the blood of half the crew. Whether they sail under the Jolly Roger, or under the red ensign of industrial civilization, makes little difference. Whether the spoil be buried in a pirate’s cavern or in the unexploited resources of the earth, it all comes to the same thing.

Nor must we forget that the disruptive tendencies of pure industrialism have hitherto been largely held in check by militarism itself. There can hardly be a doubt that for many years past the common fear of foreign aggression and the common need of being prepared for it have played a very considerable part, against contrary forces working from within, in maintaining the cohesion of every one of the great States now at war. And if the question were raised, in which of the great communities of the modern world have the signs of economic disruption been most abundant, should we not have to point for answer to that country which is at once the wealthiest and the least menaced by foreign war, and where all classes have the largest share of this world’s goods—the United States?

By this time we are all agreed about one thing: militarism—I mean the kind of militarism in which Germany has set the example—must go. Whether a nobler militarism may arise hereafter is a question: but of this kind we have had enough and more than enough. But let us be under no delusion as to the sequel. When militarism goes the check will be removed which has so far prevented industrialism from producing its bitterest fruits. If, therefore, the war merely yields the negative result of destroying militarism, we may lay our account with the certainty that there are yet greater troubles in store for the world.

But there is ground for hope in the very magnitude of the present calamity. Let me remind you of something I have already mentioned in another connexion: I mean the way in which the lessons of the war are coming simultaneously to vast multitudes of persons. Apply that to the mind of Europe as a whole. All the nations involved in the struggle are learning the same lesson at the same time. All are engaged together in the bitter but salutary process of discovering their souls. A piecemeal repentance of the nations, following a series of partial conflicts, might effect very little; a simultaneous repentance, imposed by a world-war, may effect a great deal.

Whatever new wisdom, whatever vision of the weak spot in civilization are coming to ourselves as a result of the war, we may be very sure that the same wisdom, the same vision, are coming, in the same way, to our allies and to our enemies. Realizing this, may we not believe that beneath the fierce and bloody oppositions of the hour a profound principle of unity is at work?

V
WAR AND HATRED[21]

By G. F. Stout

What is the real attitude of those who call themselves Christians and profess to accept the teaching of the New Testament towards the Sermon on the Mount and especially towards such precepts as ‘Love your enemies’? That there is here a huge and startling divergence between theory and practice seems undeniable. It is equally clear that the divergence is not merely of the kind which unavoidably separates moral ideals from the actual conduct of imperfect human beings. For this only means that, because of the frailty of human nature, we cannot, even with our best endeavours, live up to the level of the moral ideal; it does not mean that we refuse sincerely to recognize the ideal as a practical guide—as a standard to which good men will endeavour to conform their actions as far as lies in their power. But the precept ‘Love your enemies’ does not seem to be generally recognized in this way as a practical guide amid the stress and strain of daily life. It is not even generally appealed to as a standard for approving or condemning the ordinary behaviour of men. It is not effectively sanctioned by public opinion and sentiment. If we inquire why this is so, there appear to be two answers, vaguely and confusedly underlying the position of common sense. The first is that any sustained effort to pursue the ideal under the actual conditions of human life is so impossible that it is useless to attempt it. The second is that if we did succeed in loving our enemies and in acting as if we loved them, the result would be disastrous; the good would be exposed without defence to the forces of evil and life would no longer be worth living. For one or both of these reasons it seems to be tacitly assumed that in practice we are justified in setting aside the precept ‘Love your enemies’ and in substituting for it the precept ‘Love your friends and hate your enemies’. At the same time it is generally granted that under conditions different from ours the rule of love would be universally applicable. But this concession turns out on examination to mean very little. For the state of things contemplated under which we might be reasonably expected to love our enemies seems to be one under which our enemies would be prepared to love us or might easily be induced to love us, and this almost amounts to saying that we can only be reasonably required to love our enemies when there are no enemies for us to love.

This conflict between theory and practice remains for the most part inarticulate and subconscious. There is latent uneasiness; but the problem is not definitely faced even by thoughtful men. To bring it into clear consciousness a special crisis is required. For many of us the present war with its painful incidents and complications has had this effect. Nor is it difficult to see why this should be so. In war, or, at any rate, in such a war as this, we devote all our energies to the task of inflicting hurt, loss, and destruction on the enemy, and he in his turn devotes all his energies to the task of inflicting hurt, loss, and destruction on us. Neither side, it would seem, can do this efficiently without being sustained by strong and enduring feeling. But this feeling can scarcely partake of the nature of love. It must, it would seem, be an emotion the reverse of this. Whether and in what sense there can be an emotion opposed to love which is yet not identified with hate, is a question which I shall have to discuss later on. In any case, it will scarcely be denied that the actual feeling generated even in good and well-meaning men by such conditions as those of the present war are to a large extent to be classed as feelings of hatred. When the enemy is held to have been guilty of cruel and inhuman conduct contrary to the recognized usage of civilized warfare, it seems to be still more impossible to make any pretence of loving the enemy or of doing anything but hate the enemy. How can we love the authors and perpetrators of the Belgian atrocities? Not only is this attitude regarded as inevitable in war but it is also felt to be justifiable in a special way by the special conditions. It is taken to be justifiable for reasons which are not in general applicable to similar relations between private individuals. One reason is that a private individual is in the main protected against the grosser forms of injury by the social order of the community to which he belongs, by its laws and institutions, and by public opinion and sentiment; to this extent he has no need to take the law into his own hands. In war this no longer holds good. We seem in war to be reduced to the position of animals who having directly to repel harm and aggression themselves, need for that end the primitive and instinctive emotion of blind anger which impels them to hurt and destroy indiscriminately the enemies who threaten their own destruction. It is true that in war there is some protection against certain forms of injury in what is called the established usage of civilized warfare. But as we know by recent experience, this safeguard cannot be safely relied on; and it is just when even this semi-legal protection fails, that we tend to give full play to the feeling of hatred or analogous feelings, with the sense that we are right in so doing. Another obvious reason why we naturally regard hatred of our enemies as especially justified in the case of war is that here it is not our own private injuries which we resent but injuries done to the whole community of which we are members. We are so much in the habit of connecting what is morally wrong with selfishness that when there is no selfishness, we tend to assume that there can be nothing wrong or at any rate nothing seriously wrong. Further, a benevolent disposition towards the common enemy is felt as disloyalty to our own people. It tends to awaken indignation or disgust as revealing a want of patriotism. On the other hand, the most unsparing hatred of the common enemy, though we may more or less condemn it on other grounds, is at least approved as an expression of patriotism; and patriotism is a virtue of all others most important and indispensable in time of war. Hence even though we condemn all hatred as such, yet if we cannot have the most intense and efficient patriotism without it we feel justified in preferring the two together.

Such considerations as these seem to make a strong case for regarding hate, or at least some emotion essentially akin to it, as an attitude which may be often both unavoidable and justifiable in dealing with our enemies, and more especially with the enemies of our country in time of war. None the less it remains true that this attitude is, prima facie, very hard to reconcile with the spirit and tendency of Christian morality, and particularly with such precepts as ‘Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that despitefully use you and persecute you’. Hence all of us who, whatever may be our view of the dogmas of Christian Theology, agree in accepting the moral teaching of Christ as expressing the highest human ideal, are placed in a difficult position. It looks like a mere evasion and not a solution of this difficulty to content ourselves with saying that the Christian ideal, though it is in itself the highest, cannot and ought not to be pursued under the actual conditions of human life. There are not two relatively independent and separate kinds of truth, the theoretical and the practical. What is false in practice must, to that extent, be false in theory also. The highest ideal is the ideal which we ought to endeavour to pursue under all relevant conditions. There is evidence that this is recognized by some Christians who entertain no misgiving as to the righteousness of the present war, and who are convinced of the necessity of prosecuting it with the utmost zeal and energy, and yet, at the same time, feel that it is hard or impossible to do so while retaining for the enemy anything akin to a Christian disposition. We have here, perhaps, the most fundamental reason why some conscientious men who, in general, believe in prayer and in the efficacy of prayer, none the less shrink from praying for the defeat of the enemy in war. Other grounds are put forward, but they seem valid in this particular case only if they are valid against prayer in general. It is urged, for instance, that God controls the course of events in accordance with His own wisdom and goodness, and that it is therefore a futile impertinence to attempt to direct His activity to what we erring mortals think best, however sincere and well-meaning we may be. Any petition, it is said, which is for our own ends is condemned in advance, in so far as our own ends are not His ends; and in so far as they do coincide with His the petition is superfluous. Taken strictly, this argument would cut at the root not only of all prayer but of all human activity. For whatever ends we pursue and by whatever means, it is always possible that our aim does not coincide with the divine purpose. It would follow, if the argument were sound, that the truly religious attitude would be to sit still with our hands folded and let events take their course. The fallacy lies in the assumption that what is best in matters which concern human beings is determined independently of the thoughts and feelings of the human beings themselves. In particular, it lies in the assumption that what is best for us and for the world must be determined quite independently of whether we pray for it or not.

Another reason urged against praying for success in war is that good men on the other side are praying for their own success and for our defeat with a clear conscience and full belief in the righteousness of their cause. What has been called ‘the spectacle of serious men in opposite camps raising their competitive prayers to the one God’ may well appear to reduce to an absurdity the prayers on both sides. Yet I do not see that this consideration has any real weight. For it is not asserted that good men ought to refrain from using other ways of pursuing what they are sincerely convinced is a good end, merely because other good men with equal sincerity are opposed to them. I can find no cogent reason for making an exception in the case of prayer. The use of prayer in a proper spirit can, at least, do no harm. Further, it is to be remembered that when prayer is offered in a right spirit, all special petitions have behind them that general attitude of mind which is expressed in the words ‘Thy Will be done’. So far as this is so the agreement is more fundamental than the opposition. The real difficulty felt by tender consciences in praying for success in war seems to me to be of a different nature. What holds them back is their sense that they cannot pray in that spirit which would alone make their prayers acceptable, and that they cannot even prevail on themselves to make a sincere effort to attain this spirit. They feel that they cannot appeal to God to be on their side unless, in so far as lies in their power, they in the same act endeavour to place themselves on the side of God, to conform their will and their whole mental attitude to His will as directed to what is highest and best. But how is this possible when they not only continue to harbour in their heart fierce and embittered emotions, which appear irreconcilable with the precept ‘Love your enemies’, but cling to them in such a way that they cannot without hypocrisy pretend to try to lay them aside or even pray for deliverance from them? They feel that under such conditions they would be appealing not to the true God but to some partisan deity such as the Kaiser must have had in view when he spoke of God as ‘the constant ally of Prussia under the Great Elector and the Great King’.

Let it be fully understood that I am not here expressing any view concerning the justification of prayer or the efficacy of prayer, or concerning Christian doctrine or Christian morality. But if we leave such questions entirely on one side, the conception of prayer at least supplies us with a useful mode of approaching our present problem. For no feelings can be right feelings which in the case of a man who really believes in prayer would rightly debar him from seeking in his extreme need the help of a Power whom he regards as all wise and all good. We may, then, put our question thus: How far is it true that feelings of hatred or feelings in any way akin to hatred ought to present a barrier of this kind? It is true that what we gain by this mode of stating the question is only a point of view which helps us to grapple with it earnestly and thoroughly without indulging in weak and illogical compromise. It does not directly bring us any nearer to a solution. For in order to determine what is acceptable to God we must first determine what is good. Our course would indeed be plain if we could take such precepts as ‘Love your enemies’, so to speak at their face value and treat them without further discussion or interpretation as finally authoritative. But even theologians, as such, for the most part refuse to do this. Still less is it admissible that I should do so. For I am trying to deal with the problem on its own intrinsic merits without appeal to authority. This being so I can proceed only in one way. I must begin by asking what reasons there are for holding that hatred and kindred emotions are evil; then in the light of these reasons I must attempt to determine in what sense and without what limits, if there be any limits, the general principle holds good. Here we may look for some help to the great philosophers. For some of these have maintained, on independent grounds, the Christian doctrine in its general spirit and tendency. Plato, for instance, holds firmly that the maxim is entirely wrong which bids us do good to our friends and harm to our enemies. The righteous man, he insists, will in all cases aim only at doing good, whether to enemies or friends. Spinoza, too, lays down the principle that ‘all hatred is evil’, and even attempts to demonstrate it like a proposition in Euclid. There is a Christian philosopher, Bishop Butler, who has given us an admirable discussion of the whole subject on rational grounds.

At this point I must prepare the ground for further advance by expressing more exactly the nature of the problem. So far, the question I have raised is whether hatred and kindred emotions are in all cases evil. But the tendency of ordinary language is to associate the very word, hatred, with some form of bad feeling. From this point of view, to ask the question, Can hatred ever be good? sounds like asking whether what is bad can be good. But the real issue can easily be stated so as to avoid this paradox. There is a certain primitive and instinctive emotion called anger, common to man and animals; in animals, it tends to be excited by such conditions as overt or threatened attack, painful wounds or blows, and often by any kind of opposition or interference, or by the threat of such opposition or interference, or even by the mere presence of a natural enemy. The real or threatened injury may be either to the animal itself or to its young or its mate, or, in the case of gregarious animals, to the community of which it is a member. There is a modified and restrained form of this passion which arises between animals closely connected by social ties, as when the mother slaps her young or the mother cat boxes the kitten’s ears. But where the emotion is aroused by an outsider there is in general no such limitation. The impulse is blindly and indiscriminately directed to damage and destroy. By preference, of course, to damage and destroy the enemy, and in the next place, whatever is in any way associated with the enemy, but also beyond this there is a general destructive impulse which vents itself on whatever may encounter it. Consider, for instance, the behaviour of a raging bull or of a man who in his fury destroys furniture and breaks crockery. Now, so far as animals are concerned, this passion is not the subject either of moral approval or disapproval. It is simply a natural endowment like the teeth and claws of the cat, or the venom of the snake, or the malodorous secretion of the skunk. It has the biological function of preserving the individual and the species in the struggle for existence; but it has no moral significance. The same holds good also for a man, so far as he merely reacts like an animal in a sudden and trying situation which takes him by surprise. But it is quite otherwise with complex human sentiments which are developed from the primitive emotion of anger and remain to the end essentially akin to it. In the animal, the emotion occurs as a transient reaction to a transient situation. In human beings it passes into a variety of more or less permanent dispositions or sentiments, which permeate and control complex systems of thought and conduct. Indeed, in some instances, such a disposition may be the mainspring of organized thought and action throughout a lifetime, as we see in the case of Hannibal’s attitude to the Romans. Now the question we have to deal with is this, Are all these developed sentiments which have their root in the primitive emotion of anger to be condemned as evil; and if not, on what principle are we to draw a distinction? If by the word hatred we agree to mean all bad passions of this kind, then the question will be, Are all angry sentiments and dispositions to be classed as forms of hatred? In dealing with this problem we have especially to consider the state of things generated by war.

Our first step will be to examine the grounds for regarding hatred as necessarily evil. We may then proceed to inquire whether these grounds apply to all forms of angry emotion which compel us to hurt or destroy our fellow men. The reasons for regarding hatred as evil seem all capable of being brought under one head. Hatred is evil inasmuch as it is blind, inasmuch as it perpetuates at a higher level the original blind and undiscriminating character of the primitive emotion of animal anger. So far as this is the case, it is incompatible with the development of the higher nature of man as a rational being. The most fundamental ground for this position is, perhaps, most clearly stated by Spinoza. The supreme good for human beings, he asserts, is to be found only in their union and co-operation with each other. ‘Nothing is more useful to a man than a man.’ It is only with other men that a man can enter on that sort of union which is necessary at once for his own existence and development as a human being and for theirs. ‘Except man we know of no particular thing in nature in whose Mind we can rejoice. With nothing else can we unite in friendship or in any kind of social life’ (Eth. V. 14, App. § 26). Hence there is a fundamental distinction between our relation to human beings and to other things. In the case of anything else, ‘A regard for our own welfare does not require us to preserve it, but leads us either to preserve or destroy it, or to adapt it to our wants in any way according to the varied uses of which it admits’ (ibid.). It is otherwise in the case of human beings. To seek to destroy them is virtually to seek to destroy ourselves. But the passion of hatred blinds us to all this; it blinds us to the fact that the essential good of man is to be sought in union with his fellow men and impels us to maintain disunion with them and to seek our highest good in hurting and destroying them. Nor is it only in its consequences that hatred as such is evil. As contrary to the rational nature of man, as blinding him to his true good, it works like a disease or a cancerous growth in the soul of those who feel it. ‘Nothing can be so good for a man as such a temper of mind as will unite him with’ his fellow men and them with him; while nothing on the contrary can be so bad for him or in him as that which sets him and them at variance. All hatred, then, is evil and there can be no greater evil.

All this applies to hatred of the enemy in war. Indeed the evil is the greater because the hatred is between great and highly organized communities instead of between individuals. There is, however, one fact which tends to veil and disguise the evil of hatred in this case. War disunites nations, but within each nation it strengthens union and mutual co-operation. Now this in itself is good. But it is not good, if and so far as the source of unity is participation in a common hatred. To this extent the nation is in the position of the individual hater and is blinded as he is to its own true good. Speaking broadly, just in so far as war leads a nation to treat what is good for it as essentially separate from and opposed to what is good for other nations and for mankind in general, war does that nation harm. The history of Germany illustrates this sufficiently. The root of the mischief is to be sought far back in the horrible Thirty Years’ War. But subsequent wars have served to keep it alive—the Seven Years’ War, the Napoleonic War, and above all, that process of cementing the German Empire with blood and iron which Bismarck artificially and violently substituted for the natural development which was leading to the same result in a better form. The Franco-Prussian War belongs to the same series. It is an easily intelligible and even an excusable result of the course of German history that national sentiment in Germany has come half-unconsciously to treat even peace as if it were a state of suppressed and disguised warfare, and to feel no security for its national existence and national development unless the mailed fist is continually shaken in the face of its enemies in the East and in the West, and unless it is continually prepared to pounce on them before they can pounce on it. It has now actually pounced in what is called a preventive war. The temper and attitude which led to this result is essentially what I found some thirty years ago generally diffused among the common people of Berlin and especially among old soldiers of the Franco-Prussian War: men’s minds were dwelling on the necessity of a reckoning with Russia, and of a renewed humiliation of France; there was deep hostility to England mingled with contempt for our ways of thinking and acting and with jealousy of our undeserved riches and prosperity. This attitude of mind has in one way had its reward. In the present struggle the Germans started better prepared for war than their opponents. But for this advantage they have paid and are likely to pay very dearly. You may be inclined to say ‘Serve them right’. But if this is taken to imply that the German people is much worse by nature in this respect than other peoples I must disagree. I doubt whether under like historical conditions any people would have done better.

Hatred, we have said, is bad because it is blind; and fundamentally the blindness consists in failure to recognize the true good of man in mutual union and co-operation. But there are many other subordinate ways in which its essential blindness is manifested. To hate is to view the actions and characters of others through a medium which falsifies and distorts. To quote Bishop Butler, ‘the whole character and behaviour of those we hate is considered with an eye to that particular part which has offended us, and the whole man appears monstrous without anything right or human in him’. Hatred in fact seeks only its own appropriate food and disregards or rejects whatever does not sustain its own life and development. We can see this clearly enough in the attitude of our enemies towards ourselves. We can see, for instance, how hard it is for the German mind, at the present moment, to think anything that is good of England and Englishmen; how hard, for instance, they find it to admit that we are really patriotic, that our soldiers are anything but hirelings, actuated by merely mercenary motives, or that they can fight efficiently, or that even our fleet is anything but a pretentious sham. But to the reflective observer it is plain enough that a similar disposition prevails, though not, I hope, in the same degree, among ourselves. Are we prepared to consider fairly the possibility that the Germans in entering on the present war were actuated by motives which were not wholly bad, or that they really feared and believed that the neutrality of Belgium would be violated by France, or in general that they feared and believed with what seemed to them good reason that unless they took the initiative by a preventive war, they themselves would be attacked and taken at a disadvantage?

Hatred not only blinds us to what may be favourable to the enemy; it also blinds us to whatever may be wrong in our own feelings and behaviour towards them. It tends to place the blame all on one side. This, as we know, is very rarely the case. It is very unlikely to be the case in a war between great civilized nations. The present war is, I am fully convinced, most just and necessary. Yet I also believe that faults on our side have indirectly contributed in some degree to prepare the way for it.[22]

I shall mention only one more of the manifold ways in which hate leads to blindness. It shrinks from any serious and impartial endeavour to trace the evil which offends it to the conditions which may account for it and render it intelligible. The impulse of hate is not to understand, but to destroy. To inquire into conditions and to seek an explanation would only divert and distract it. It prefers, therefore, to concentrate itself on the persons hated as if they were the sole ultimate sources of the evil, as if the evil were due merely to their intrinsic and spontaneous badness. It is this attitude of mind which leads us to turn away with impatience from any attempt to explain, for instance, the Belgian atrocities so as to make it intelligible how they could be committed or condoned by a people who in their original human nature are not so very different from ourselves. The attempt to explain is treated as an attempt to explain away, and resented as if it were a justification or defence or denial of fact.

My general position is that hatred is bad inasmuch as it is blind, and I am unable to discover anything else which justifies us in treating it as necessarily evil. The question is whether all sentiments and emotions partaking of the nature of anger are to be condemned on this account. Ought we to set before us, as our ideal, freedom from all such emotions and sentiments, and the substitution of other motives for them? Let us provisionally suppose that this is the ideal, and examine how it would work if it were consistently followed. In the first place we must consider how we should proceed in attempting to realize the ideal. It may be suggested that we should follow invariably in all cases the rule ‘Overcome evil with good’. Now there may be a sense in which this rule is universally applicable and ought to be universally applied. But in the common and obvious interpretation of it, this is plainly untrue. As commonly interpreted, it means that we ought not to hurt or destroy the evildoer, and that instead of this we ought to appeal to his better nature by showing goodwill and kindness towards him. This is, of course, infinitely the best way where it can be followed effectively and followed effectively without incurring greater evils than it has any reasonable chance of curing. But these limiting conditions are very important. They would clearly apply, for instance, in case of an attack by scalp-hunting Red Indians on a family of peaceful settlers. In general, the words ‘Overcome evil with good’ are to be taken as qualified by the preceding words ‘Be not overcome of evil’. If and so far as we can overcome evil without being overcome of evil, it is our duty to do so, otherwise it is not. It may, however, still be maintained that, though it is admittedly often right and necessary to inflict pain, hurt, and destruction on evildoers, yet we ought not to do this in the spirit of anger. We ought rather to act purely out of regard for the highest attainable good, and we ought to inflict pain and damage on evildoers only as a necessary means to this end and not out of any angry emotion we may feel towards them.

This is the general position of Spinoza when he asserts as a universal principle that all ‘hatred is bad’. It may seem a lofty and noble position. But it is not enough for a moral ideal to appear lofty and noble when we contemplate it vaguely in the abstract. It must be in such direct contact with the actual conditions of human life as to afford constant practical guidance in dealing with these. Judged by this standard the proposed principle seems to break down. It requires us in dealing with the malevolence of human beings to be actuated merely by love of good, not at all by resentment against the evildoer. Our mental attitude ought, on this view, to be always that assumed by the Quaker in Uncle Tom’s Cabin who pushed the slave-driver over the precipice and explained his action by the words ‘Friend, thou art not wanted here’. The fundamental objection to this is that love of anything implies and includes a corresponding feeling of aversion to whatever is recognized as opposed to what we love or destructive of what we love. The love of health, for instance, implies and includes aversion to disease wherever we meet disease and recognize it as such. It does not, of course, imply that we must be angry with disease, but that is because we do not love health in the same way as we love what is good in human beings and in the personal relations of human beings to each other. Just as the sentiment of love varies in its nature with the nature of its object, there is a corresponding difference in the aversion which is its counterpart. Where the evil is malevolence, where it is an evil will directed to injustice, cruelty, and selfish aggression, the appropriate correlate of love to the good is some form of anger with the evil. And this must mean anger with the evildoer. It is not satisfactory to say that we may feel aversion to what is evil in a man and only kindness towards the man himself. This is to overlook the central fact that the evil in this case is an expression of the man’s personal will and character which cannot be separated from himself. Nor can we substitute sorrow for anger. Sorrow is appropriate to misfortune, but intentional injury is not merely a misfortune which happens to befall the person who inflicts it. To feel towards it as if it were merely a misfortune is to be more or less blind to its true nature. In consequence, when sorrow takes the place of anger, it fails to give rise to efficient action; the tendency is to mourn over the offender where rebuke and punishment are required by the situation.

In actual life, we find some who, owing either to their nature or to their circumstances and education, are but little susceptible of angry emotion; in such persons we find also a corresponding failure to understand or believe in the malicious attitude of mind in which intentional injuries have their source. They turn aside from the evidence or interpret it in their own one-sided way. An extreme instance is that of Charles Lamb’s friend, George Dyer, who, as Lamb tells us, could find nothing more severe to say about the worst criminals than that they must have been very eccentric. So far as I can make out, I belong myself to this class, though not to the same extent as Lamb’s friend. I naturally skip such passages in the newspapers as these which describe German atrocities in Belgium. I refuse to read even official reports. I put myself off by hoping that in the main they are not true, or that they are greatly exaggerated, or that they can be explained so as to cast another light on them. Yet I have been gradually forced to believe in their reality by evidence which I cannot reasonably resist. Persons of this type do very well so long as they live a sheltered life, spent, for instance, in study. But they are unfit to grapple effectively with certain forms of evil or really to appreciate their nature or fully to recognize their existence. There are other men who, though they are by nature fully susceptible of angry sentiments, suppress them on principle, because they regard them as wrong and especially because they are afraid of giving way to hatred. So far as concerns those whom they recognize as their personal enemies or as the enemies of the society to which they belong, their mental attitude and behaviour tends to resemble more or less those of the type of men who are naturally deficient in angry sentiments. But they are likely to differ from these in an important respect. In their anxiety to be fair and benevolent to enemies, they are likely to be unfair and harsh to their friends. In opposing the natural tendency to regard the faults all on one side, that of the enemy, they tend to run to the opposite extreme and to make out that it is their own side which is wholly or mainly or at least equally to blame in cases where an impartial consideration of the evidence would show the contrary. Thus, with them natural sentiments of anger tend to creep in, as it were, by a back door. The phrase ‘friends of every country but their own’ is often most unfairly applied. But there are cases in which it is more or less applicable; and it applies appropriately to the type of persons I have described.

My conclusion, then, is that some developed forms of the primitive emotion of anger are necessary and right. But how are we to determine what these are? How are we to draw the line between them and these forms of angry passion which are condemned under the general head of hatred or malevolence? After the previous discussion, there need be no difficulty as regards the principle upon which we have to proceed. Hatred is bad only because it is blind and in so far as it is blind, just as the weakly amiable spirit is bad for the same reason. On the other hand, what we call just resentment or righteous indignation, though it is akin to hatred as being, like it, developed from the primitive emotion of anger, is good inasmuch as it is enlightened—inasmuch as it is free from the various forms of blindness which characterize hatred. Here, of course, the fundamental blindness, which we must do all that in us lies to avoid, is blindness to the highest good of humanity as consisting in union and co-operation. Righteous indignation or just resentment, as felt against the enemy of social order, ought to be merely the obverse aspect, the necessary counterpart, of the spirit which pursues union and co-operation as its supreme end. So far as we are willing and able to follow this principle, we cannot go wrong.

This does not imply that justifiable resentment is necessarily weaker or less intense than hatred. The distinction is not one of degree. Justifiable resentment is not a fainter form of hatred. It is not, so to speak, hatred watered down. So long as it is not blind, there is no general limit to its strength, persistence, or intensity. This must be proportioned to the varying conditions. In any case, just resentment will cease when it is no longer required by the actual situation. Hatred, on the contrary, tends to persist blindly.

The theoretical principle on which we must proceed may be defined in this way. But its practical application is, of course, very difficult. It is hard to ‘be angry and sin not’, to be righteously resentful and yet to avoid the blindness of hate. Yet, however far we may be compelled to fall short of our ideal, we should consistently endeavour to keep this ideal in view as our supreme practical guide and as the measure of our failure and success. Here a great help ought to be found in prayer by those who believe in prayer and who realize that in prayer they are approaching a Being who is completely good and wise. In any case we must here, as elsewhere, be willing to take risks; and though the converse is more usual, it may sometimes be better to run the risk of being actuated by hatred than to run the alternative risk of not feeling due resentment.

Let us now turn to a question of fact. How far is it true that we hate the Germans and that the Germans hate us? As regards the Germans there would seem to be no room for doubt. They loudly tell us that they hate us and make a parade of their hatred. But it is easy to attach too much importance to this self-conscious and deliberate working up of an emotion and theatrical display of it. The best comment is supplied by the picture in Punch of a German family practising hatred of England before breakfast with appropriate attitudes and grimaces. The same holds good for the song of hatred. It is a spirited composition. But I am not inclined to take very seriously the kind of hatred which finds lyric expression of this sort. In such manifestoes we come upon the sentimentality so characteristic of the Germans, the romantic side of the German character. The more serious forms of hatred are rather those which do not fully examine and express themselves in this fashion. The real question is, How far have our angry passions a blinding influence in practice? Certainly there is abundant evidence that the Germans are blinded in this way. The belief is widespread among them that the key to our conduct is throughout to be sought in one master motive, the love of gain. They charge us with pursuing our ignoble ends by sly and underhand means, veiled under hypocritical pretence. They are convinced, for instance, that our horror and resentment at the brutal attack on Belgium was merely simulated, and that throughout we care for nothing but our own self-interest. They also charge us as a nation with a failure in the patriotic spirit which subordinates the interest of individuals and parties and classes to the good of the whole. They find in us an irresponsible frivolity and easy-going self-complacency which make us entirely undeserving of the position which we claim among civilized nations. On the other hand, they entertain no doubt that in all these ways in which we come short, they themselves are very strong, and that they, therefore, have a natural right to supplant us. Now I am far from saying that there is no foundation for some at least of the bad things which the Germans believe about us. But the sweeping and utterly indiscriminate way in which they hold these beliefs is obviously due to the blinding influence of hatred and kindred sentiments. That we on our side are similarly blinded admits, I think, of no doubt. We are convinced, for very cogent reasons, that our enemies deliberately brought on this war when they might honourably and safely have maintained peace. I do not believe that we are at all blind on this point. But our natural resentment does, I think, tend to obscure our view of the underlying motives for conduct which in any case cannot be justified. No doubt, a spirit of aggression, fostered by the German military system and by German traditions, was the most important factor. But we are apt to overlook the fact that fear also was a strong motive, fear of rival nations with antagonistic interests falling upon them and taking them at a disadvantage. Another error to which we are naturally prone is found in the assumption that what seems evident to us must be evident to our opponents. To us it is clear that the aggression is on their side. But the great body of the German people, including the best men among them, are convinced that it is they who are the victims and we who are the aggressors. Their natural leaders have assured them that this is the case, and have so stated the facts as to make it appear so; and this view found ready acceptance because of that attitude of suspicious fear to which I have just alluded. The picture which we are apt to make for ourselves of a whole people rushing to arms merely in order to make an unprovoked onslaught on its neighbours is certainly a false one, which we could not entertain unless we were more or less blinded by hate. I find further evidence of the same blindness in much of the current talk about the necessity of crushing Germany. So far as this means that we ought to do our work so thoroughly that it will not need to be done over again it is fully justified. But if the meaning is that the best or the only way of effecting this is by destroying the national existence of Germany, it seems to me that we are being misled by our passions. However good our case may be in this quarrel, we shall put ourselves in the wrong if we reduce our adversary to a position in which it becomes his absolute duty to lose sight of all other considerations in the bare struggle for existence. Again, I do not think that we at all realize how much we should miss Germany if there were no Germany. Omitting other most important considerations, it is very far from clear that the political situation as regards the balance of power in Europe would be at all improved by such a change. Besides this, we do not sufficiently consider whether it lies in our power to crush Germany in the way proposed, or, if it does, whether the attempt may not cost us too dear.

In another direction, the blindness of hate finds expression in the present tendency to depreciate German literature, science, and philosophy. Some of the things which are now being said on this topic I largely agree with. I have long held that the value of the German contribution to literature, science, and even philosophy has been seriously over-estimated as compared with that of other nations. But much of the current talk on this subject is hopelessly undiscriminating and exaggerated. In any case, it is amusing to find men talking in this vein who would never have thought of doing so if there had been no war. Our being at war with Germany can scarcely make any difference, one would think, to the greatness of Goethe or of Hegel.

In conclusion, let me go back to my starting-point. What are we to say finally concerning the precept ‘Love your enemies’? Is there any sense in which it is of universal application? I think there may be. It must not, of course, be taken to mean that we are to love our enemies with what Bishop Butler calls ‘a peculiar affection’. There are many who are not our enemies for whom we can feel no peculiar affection. Besides, if we love our enemies in this sense, what, as Confucius is said to have inquired, are we to do in the case of our friends? But if we take the meaning to be—Will good to your enemy rather than evil, the rule may, under a certain condition, be regarded as universally applicable. If we accept Plato’s doctrine that it is better for the evildoer himself that he should suffer punishment than that he should go unpunished, it seems possible, however difficult in practice, to inflict pain and hurt on him while retaining goodwill towards him in the very act of doing so. From this point of view, failure to feel just resentment and express it in action is an injury to the evildoer himself as well as to others. But is it always better for the evildoer himself to be punished? If it makes him a better man, we may agree that this is so. But so far as we can see, it sometimes has the reverse effect. If we are to justify the principle in its widest generality, we must go beyond what we can see. We must postulate a moral order or something equivalent to a moral order in the universe according to which it is always in some way ultimately better for the evildoer to be punished than to escape punishment. If this is Christian doctrine, then Christianity may consistently maintain the universal application of the maxim, ‘Love your enemies.’

VI
PATRIOTISM IN THE PERFECT STATE

By B. Bosanquet

The quality of patriotism is determined by what we desire for our country, as the quality of friendship is determined by what we desire for our friend. And this question—the question what it is that we desire for our country—is of supreme moment to-day, because in the answer given to it, whether by practice or in principle, are rooted the permanent underlying conditions of war and peace.

Assuming then that what is true of principles is true of the corresponding practice, whether or no the actors understand what they are doing, I will ask you to consider with me three typical ideas expressive of what men desire for their country, each of them bearing a distinctive relation to the causes and customs of war, and to the permanent basis of peace.

And in this consideration I hope that we shall also be elucidating an interesting question in the history of recent thought. We shall see how the splendid political philosophy of Germany a hundred years ago has passed on the one hand into her intoxication of to-day, while on the other hand, elsewhere, in face of a more liberal experience, it has found a decisive completion in a human and democratic sense. The three conceptions to which I refer have very much in common, and a great part of the interest of our inquiry, and also perhaps a little practical value which it might possess, depends on noticing very precisely the points at which distinctions become blurred, and the ideas, mostly by mere omission, are apt to slide into one another.

Let us make a beginning, then, with Hegel’s political thought, the German thought of a hundred years ago. At that time the idea of a man’s country, as focussed in the state, was a glorious vision, stimulated largely by Greek conceptions and drawing something from English constitutional experience; while in the existing reality of the Prussian system there was little to catch the eye, and little power, therefore, to narrow the outlook.

Now the essential point for us here to grasp firmly, if we wish to enter into the truth of the matter and its adjacent fallacies, is that Hegel means by the state, not the machine of government, but all that fulfils, in the actual community, the individual’s mind and will. The individual is supposed to see in it the form of life, and more than that, the particular form of sentiment and volition, which his nation has so far worked out for itself, and in which he, the private person, finds the substance of his own mind, and what unites him with others. It includes, of course, the ethical tradition of the society, with the observances and institutions in which it is embodied and preserved; and more especially it is identified with the general will as expressed in the laws and the political constitution. The state, in short, is the ark in which the whole treasure of the individual citizen’s head and heart is preserved and guarded within a world which may be disorderly and hostile.

One may naturally ask, where then does humanity come in, and how recognize the claims of other nations and persons? This is exceedingly important, but not difficult. Your country is held to express the whole form of life for which you stand, and therefore, within that, your moral attitude to humanity and the world in general. If you are an Englishman, you probably object to slavery. But that attitude is not a thing of chance, in which you stand outside your age and country. It is part of the outlook at which, on the whole, England had at a certain time arrived, and which came to individual Englishmen through their participation in the national mind. Here is a point at which a slide into fallacy is too possible. That moral view of the world which you and your state stand up for is one thing. A moral view which considers only your own and your state’s immediate interests is quite another thing; but it is very easy to confuse the two, both in practice and in controversy.

We have said enough to indicate the value which, according to such ideas, the private individual, in theory or by practice, recognizes in his state. Looked at in this way, our country, the state, is simply all we have. Innumerable claims may come to us from outside, but they all come through it and subject to it; just as they all come to us through our own feelings and our own beliefs. Without the state we are nothing and nobody. It is for us the vehicle of the value of the world. It stands for our contribution to the general sum of what humanity has achieved and what makes any life worth living.

So far what we desire for our country, our view of its mission, is to achieve the very best we all are capable of becoming. But there is another side to this same set of ideas.

Obviously, to fulfil this, its necessary mission, the state needs above all things to be strong. Men who had lived through Napoleonic times could have no doubt about that. Who indeed was to help a state if it could not help itself? War, then, was the inevitable arbiter, and by the test of war the state must stand or fall. Hegel is primarily appealing to facts when he says that outside the several communities there is no general will. As yet there could not be; for the general will is the will of a community, backed by its whole body, mind, and sentiment. Thus, no one can possibly dictate into what demands separate states shall throw their ultimate honour and self-assertion; and if in these they conflict there is no ultimate solution but war. On one side, we have seen, the state is akin to art, philosophy, and religion; it is mind in a concentrated form. But between it and these other shapes of mind there is the one fundamental distinction. The state is mind ‘in the world’. It is not only our treasure, but it is the ark which carries our treasure. ‘In the world’ right can only prevail through might. Strength in war is therefore the first condition of the state’s fulfilment of its function; and being the first condition, and a condition peculiar to the state among the forms of mind, it is too easily taken as the aim and whole upshot of the state. This again, as we shall see, is a point at which one idea is apt to slide into another.

Therefore, since as yet there can be, outside and above the several states, no general will with a common heart and force, no ‘praetor’—judge representing power—but only at best an ‘arbitrator’, all international laws, treaties, and usages are, at bottom, only agreements of a number of particular wills, the wills of absolute independent bodies. So far nations are to one another, as older writers had said, in a state of nature, like the supposed (but quite imaginary) individuals before Society was invented. Hegel does not say that there cannot be, and are not, humane usages, conventions, rules, and treaties. The whole of international law rests on the principle that treaties are to be observed. But behind all this there is the sheer fact of the separate individual powers, each absolute in its limited area; so that, at bottom, the whole fabric of international rules and customs is just an agreement of separate wills, and not an expression of a single general will. Ultimately, or fundamentally, each of these separate wills is and must be determined by its own conception of its own welfare. This is the difficulty I think in the way of leagues and federations in favour of peace as suggested by Kant and by Norman Angell. They are purely de facto. They do not rest upon the spirit of a solid community; and every powerful league tends ipso facto to raise up a powerful counter-league against it, with grave risk of war.

It follows from this that there is a fundamental distinction between the moral position of the private individual who works out the detail of his duty on the basis of recognized rights within a previously ordered and organized society, and that of the state, which has ‘in the world’ to provide and sustain, at all hazards, the organized society within which the individual is to live. The tasks of morals and of international politics are different in principle, though the end to which they co-operate is the same. The immediate task of morals is to live a life, that of international politics is to provide a world within which life can be lived.

The same distinction must be pushed beyond the difference of the tasks into the difference of their possibility. For the private individual it is fairly easy, in the main, at least to know what he should do, and what he should not. He lives within a scheme of recognized rights and obligations; and, starting from his legal position and accepted duties, he can tell whether he is behaving selfishly or generously, rudely or courteously, kindly or unkindly. His lawyer will tell him his legal rights; and it is for him to insist upon them or to surrender them. But in principle the state has no such guide. It is not living out an ordered life, within a recognized scheme. It cannot tell whether it is being less than just, or merely just, or kind and generous. For it every case is under altering conditions and new, and it is sole judge in its own cause. A state may think that it is behaving with superhuman generosity, while its antagonist may think it is behaving like a bandit. There is no complete or detailed scheme and scale of conduct and sentiment to operate as a norm of feeling and judgement. Of course this language may seem exaggerated in face of the well-established usages of international law, and the existence of treaties. But the difference we have mentioned affects them all. Ultimately, to reiterate that terrible adverb, which governs the whole argument, it is as we say. A private person has the letter and spirit of his moral world to live up to, and on the main lines and choices of life there is a wealth of recognized obligations which, I do not say tell him what to do, but certainly warn him what he is doing. A state is sailing a sea but slightly charted, and what marks the charts do furnish are mostly recent and depend on a revocable consent. As a supreme power, it has a responsibility for every choice, of which no precedents nor external recommendations can divest it. At every step it is making a new world.

Thus, in such an idea of patriotism as we have been describing, the attitude to war is favourable on the whole. There is, it suggests, an element in the world which is transitory and accidental, the element of temporal life and temporal goods. It is natural and necessary that accident should prey upon the accidental, and that contingent values should thus be distinguished from substantial. War is the fiery test of reality, and the maker of nations. ‘In the world’ accident is necessary and has its good. Here is a striking passage; not a complete survey of the question, but, I think, requiring consideration, and showing the conviction embodied in the attitude we have tried to portray:

‘Of course, war brings insecurity of possessions, but this actual insecurity is only a necessary movement. We hear from the pulpit so much of the uncertainty, vanity, and fickleness of temporal things; but every one thinks as he hears it, however touching may be the eloquence, “I shall manage to keep what is mine”. But now if this uncertainty confronts them in grim earnest in the shape of hussars with naked sabres, then the touching spirit of edification, in the face of the very thing it foretold, betakes itself to hurling curses at the victors. But in spite of all, wars take place when the occasion demands it; the crops grow again; and babble is mute before the grim iterations of history.’[23]

Before leaving these ideas of a hundred years ago, it is worth while to note the general temper of intellectual Germany in that great age. It was full, no doubt, of self-assertion, not unbecoming to a nation conscious of immense capacities. But it was sympathetic and receptive. No men ever worked harder to educate themselves in the widest experience of humanity than Goethe and his contemporaries. Their feeling is fairly expressed in some verses addressed by Schiller to Goethe, on the exceptional occasion of a play by Voltaire being performed at the Weimar theatre. We see in them the delicate balance of self-assertion and receptivity. Here is a rough version:

To home-born art this stage is consecrated,
No more are stranger idols worshipped here;
The laurel we display with heart elated
On our poetic mount its growth did rear;
To art’s high fane, himself initiated,
Boldly the German genius has drawn near;
And on the track of Briton and of Greek
Has set his face a purer fame to seek.

The Briton and the Greek are Shakespeare and Aristotle, or perhaps the Greek Tragedians. And the same types of experience, English and Hellenic, were at work in the conception of patriotism we have portrayed. It is not, Hegel says, emphatically, the mere occasional readiness for extreme sacrifices. It is the recognition of the community as our substance throughout all the detailed functions of life. We shall further see the supreme value of this apparently prosaic view.

Now we need not add many words in explaining how this attitude of the great time has degenerated into the creed of violence and self-interest of which we hear to-day. It is essentially the passage of a large and many-sided philosophical doctrine into the hands of ignorant and biased amateurs, soldiers, historians, politicians.[24] Well, all philosophy is dangerous, for it blinks no side of the truth, and any one of its statements, taken by itself and with bias, may act as a mighty strong wine or as a high explosive.

It is enough to recall the two points in the great German philosophy at which we noted how readily one idea slides into another. One is where it says that a state is and can be determined only by its own good. We tried to explain that the thing is a truism. Its good is the form of life and feeling which it has made and chosen, and includes its relations to others. But if for good (Wohl) you read exclusive self-interest, the thing is done. A great idea slides before your eyes into the meanest of worldly maxims. So with the other point. As guardian of a treasure, the state must be strong in war. But it is different when you say that its strength in war sets it free to sully at its will the treasure it has to guard.

To make these two transitions is the same thing as to drop out from the conception of patriotism all that we said about the positive values of which the state is guardian. In a huge country, intoxicated with its new material prosperity, and even in the realm of intellect so busy with myriad specialities as to be deafened to voices from without by the clamour of its own contending schools, such a transition seems almost natural.

But yet, when this transition is made, the public conscience, the compass of the difficult voyage, is gone. Everything depended on its recognition of the supreme values within its own good; and the change leaves them as mere names for whatever can be effected by force. And now, all the de facto truths which the great philosophy conceded with regard to international conventions return upon us with crushing force. You can find parallels in Hegel, as we saw, for much of the language, e. g., of the Book of War, about mere usages and conventions. The only difference is that the national conscience—which makes Hegel say, for instance, that Europe is in actual humane behaviour a single family—the national conscience is now deleted from the theory.

So by mere omission and exaggeration, this great idea of patriotism is totally perverted, and we are brought to the point that what a man desires for his country is military supremacy to be used without scruple in the promotion of its exclusive interest.

This was the second of the three attitudes or ideas of patriotism which we meant to consider. We have observed how it might arise by a heated and narrowed conception of the first, under the intoxication of new achievements, leading to new temptations and ambitions.

But now, recurring for a moment to the philosophy of the great time, let us consider a third expression of patriotism, to which it has given rise in a wholly different atmosphere.

It was a conviction, held in common by the two forms of patriotism we have been considering, that war is a necessary accident, arising out of the very nature of the state as a separate sovereign power exposed to accident, and therefore, something to which a state is liable because and in as far as it is what a state should be. Now a great deal in this idea may seem to us a truism. States are particular independent bodies, themselves sole ultimate judges of their differences and their honour. No independent state (as Pericles said) will brook an order from another state; if it does, its independence is gone. And on such a point there can be no arbitration. War is the ultimate arbiter, and therefore springs from this very nature of states; and it does behove states to be strong. And for war, as for all other evils and accidents, there is a good deal to be said. Each of them by itself is clearly a thing to be fought against, but without any of them at all—well, life would very soon generate new ones.

But a further question has been raised, and seems worth pursuing. Is not a wrong done somewhere, when lives are sacrificed in war? Certainly it is not murder, for it is not unlawful killing; but again, it is not merely like an earthquake. It comes from human conduct somewhere and somewhen. We may not be able to apportion the guilt of it, but it might be worth inquiry whether the conduct could not be changed. Perhaps our analysis has hitherto not gone far enough. After differences have broken out between independent sovereign states all we have said holds good—the separate wills of separate bodies, the mere outward agreements with no deep-seated impartial will and power behind them, the usages and rules at the mercy of the individual conscience of states, which in some cases appears to be an absent factor.

Well, but cannot we go further back? Is it in the nature of states that differences should constantly be arising between them? The state is there to be the condition of organized good life for the inhabitants of a certain territory. Is it a property of this function that different states should be continually liable to be at variance? Is tendency to war really a feature of states in respect of what they are as states? Or is it not rather perhaps a feature of them in so far as they fail to be states? To organize good life in a certain territory seems to have nothing in it prima facie which should necessitate variance between the bodies charged with the task in one place and in another.

When, in the light of this question, we look closer at the facts, what stares us in the face is that the cause of external conflict as a rule is not internal organization, but internal disorganization. The quarrelsome man is not well organized in his mind; he is ill organized—certainly in mind, probably in body. Plato indeed laid his finger on the place, though you might criticize his explanation in some particulars. The origin of war, he says, is when states become internally diseased; the more they are distracted within, the more they come into conflict without.

Let us think further of this. People who are satisfied do not want to make war; and in a well-organized community people are satisfied. War must arise from dissatisfied elements in a community; people who have not got what they want within (or have it but are afraid of losing it) and so look for profit or for security in adventures without. War belongs to a state, then, ultimately, not in so far as it is a state, but in so far as it is not a state.

All sorts of causes of dissatisfaction or alarm lead to external conflict. There may be privileged classes directly interested in resisting the better organization of the community; in maintaining, for instance, an obsolete franchise and the power of a military caste. There may be oppressed religious persuasions, oppressed nationalities, provinces torn from the allegiance they prefer. All of these are likely to throw their hopes and ambitions outside the state which formally includes them, and to produce resentments against it in other groups. Then, more subtle and more modern, there are the whole set of restrictions upon human intercourse which depend on the idea that the gain of one community is the loss of another. All of these make doubly for war; they make privileges at home, which turn the mind of the privileged class away from internal organization and towards external aggression; and they make exclusions abroad, turning the mind of the excluded classes to retaliation both in kind and by arms. Exclusion reaches the climax of its vicious effect when it becomes an affair of what I shall call for short ‘passive markets’—such, that is, as raise the problem of the prior possession of uncivilized regions which the white man can exploit at pleasure, and at pleasure close against others.

I must not pause to analyse at length the claims supported by that blessed word ‘expansion’. So good a historian as Dr. Holland Rose[25] seems to accept the increase of Germany’s population by 50 per cent. in one generation as a sufficient reason for a vigorous expansion policy. But surely we must distinguish between the duties really imposed upon a state by such an increase with a view to organization of life, and the adventures and exclusive exploitations for which it may be the pretext, but which do nothing serious to aid the work of organization, while they fill the world with monopolies and with terrors of aggression.

And again, it appears only just to remark, following for example a recent article by Sir Harry Johnston,[26] confirmed in this respect by Mr. Morel,[26] that when in a huge world-empire there is advocated a policy of commercial exclusion directed against other countries, these countries will anticipate being gravely prejudiced in their legitimate foreign trade. Then follows the desire on their part to possess themselves of exclusive markets, and unending fears and resentments are bred on every side. That the practical and theoretical inspiration of the policy so advocated had its source in some of the countries threatened by it, would have made it, if carried out, an interesting retribution, but would not have diminished its danger.

Surely, for the legitimate expansion demanded by increase of population the ‘open door’ is the right and effective principle. It will meet both the need of trade, and in the last resort, the need of space and elbow-room for population. Under it no one’s expansion can be a threat to any one, or produce monopolies which will hinder social organization, and turn men’s minds to aggression. And it must also be noted that the loss of citizen population, which is sometimes complained of, is not really met by mere increase of territorial possessions. It is largely due to the very military system which is relied on to remedy its causes—in a word, to defective social organization, which lays unwelcome burdens on the ordinary citizen, and even fails to utilize territorial expansion as an outlet for population.

It must be borne in mind, however, that the exclusive policy advocated within our Empire was decisively rejected, and the open door, the main thing demanded by expansion elsewhere, was as decisively maintained. Even territorial acquisition in tropical regions, though it has practically been of little value to the increasing populations of European countries, this country has not obstructed, and I hope and trust that it will maintain its unenvious policy in this respect up to the limits of possibility in the settlement after the war.

I have no right to lecture on economics, but the general principles which I have been advocating, of absence of monopoly at home, and the ‘open door’ abroad, fall, I think, within the competence of a student of politics. Restrictions on human intercourse are prima facie injurious, and demand the very strongest justification if they are to be tolerated.

And on a kindred point, really beyond my competence, I will merely put a question. Presupposing a sufficiency of external trade to pay for food and raw materials, is not the home market the most important and the most secure? When it is not so, is not the purchasing power of the most numerous classes short of what it should be? And through directing the minds of the leaders of trade to external adventure, is not such a state of things a constant incentive to exclusive exploitation and to war?

I will end by summarizing as shortly as I can the conclusions which follow from our argument—both what we must admit, and what we are anxious to maintain.

(1) We must admit that states, in consequence of their separateness and absoluteness, are so far in a relation of nature to each other, though this is mitigated by humane conventions and usages. If differences arise, the ultimate arbiter is war, which is therefore necessary to the function of states as now existing. While this is so, international politics must differ from individual morality as maintaining a world differs from living in one.

(2) We must admit that when, on this basis, it is attempted to secure peace according to the rule Si vis pacem, para bellum, the project is self-contradictory. As principles are the same for all parties, it implies the condition of securing peace to be that of any two opponent powers each must be at the same time stronger than the other. This contradiction is the root of the race in armaments.

(3) We must admit that, on this basis, no league or federation ad hoc can secure peace. Every such league must, sooner or later (being a mere convention of separate wills) arouse a counter-league. Such arrangements, I believe, are fertile of wars.

(4) We maintain that the fundamental root of peace lies in the recognition that war belongs to states not in as far as they are states, but in as far as they are not states; granted that their actual defects to-day make the reverse of this appear to be the truth.

(5) We maintain that the patriotism which is the source of peace therefore lies in a thorough everyday loyalty to the state as a means of harmonious internal organization excluding privilege and monopoly, and in our desire for our country of those supreme goods which are not diminished by sharing. Trade and industry, though acquisitions of material wealth, take on this character when conducted on an impartial and rational basis. This view agrees with the great German philosophy in its estimate of true patriotism, but goes further in analysing the relation of such patriotism to the causes of war.[27]

(6) We maintain that in a group or world of states, possessed by such a patriotism, and therefore organized so as to be free from causes of resentment, and united in aims and methods which admit of harmony, it is conceivable that a true general will (not a mere external convention) might grow up which should be solidly supported by the body, spirit, and sentiment of all the communities.[28] In such a case a genuine international moral world would be created, and international politics would approach more nearly to the nature of private morality, though they could never be the same. In some respects, indeed, the state, as more impartial, might maintain a higher standard than the individual, as happens on occasion even to-day.[29]

(7) We maintain that the patriotism which is the desire for our country of those supreme goods which are not diminished by sharing, is a guarantee of a right estimate of values, and therefore of justice and reasonable organization in dealing with wealth and power both at home and abroad.

Such a patriotism, desiring and sustaining the perfection of the state in its organizing functions as a state, is the only force which is essentially directed to destroying the causes of war. Even those intangible springs of hostility, the jealousy and vanity of nations, cannot ultimately exist in the same world with such a patriotism.

This temper of mind offers the only prospect of a solid general will including groups of states. As its expression, but not without it, leagues of states for the enforcement of peace might do good service. Its detailed operation in such a crisis as will confront the nations of Europe at the close of the war, will consist in a sincere and persevering effort to secure everywhere the removal of all such causes of internal distraction as have been specified above.

By the merest accident in the world, the last word in this course of lectures has fallen to me. And I feel irresistibly impelled to use the opportunity, well knowing how inadequately, in making an appeal to you in the spirit of a conviction which more and more possesses my mind.

I will try to explain it thus.

It was proposed some weeks ago that there should be a day of national humiliation. The highest authority in the land rejected that form of expression, and I believe that we all approved of the rejection.

No, we do not want a day of national humiliation. If ever it is right for a country to hold up its head, it is right for our country to-day. But nevertheless there is something, not wholly different from this, for which in the spirit of our argument I would earnestly appeal. There is a way in which every one of us can do something, and even can do much, to promote the solid foundations of a stable peace. I repeat that we do not want a national humiliation. But we at least who must stay at home have a need and duty of individual and national self-examination. It cannot indeed be a duty incumbent on the men at the front—they have other matters to attend to—but, most remarkably, the evil temper against which it is directed is not on the whole the temper of the men at the front. But for us—it is a thing we can do, and a thing we should do. We should examine ourselves—is our patriotism such as to lead towards the perfectly organized state? Do we desire for our country and ourselves only the best things we know, beauty and truth and love and wholesome living? Do we seek, by this infallible criterion of values, to guarantee both ourselves and our country against the corrupt self-seeking which is the ultimate cause of war?

Right as our cause is to-day, has not the wrong which we are labouring to undo been fostered by ourselves as by others, if not in our case by direct international action, yet by the exhibition of a jealous and menacing spirit of rivalry? Do we not constantly endeavour to lower other nations in our private and public talk, in the world of letters, and in trade? Is our journalism, is our literature of the war—though I gladly acknowledge some most excellent things in both—yet are they on the whole such as we can look upon with satisfaction?

I am entirely without sympathy for the attempts made by a few among our learned men, and by very many who are far from learned, to belittle the intellectual and moral debt of Europe to Germany, and to prove for instance that Goethe—Goethe—was a great exemplar of selfishness. And horrible things as I believe her armies have done in the war, yet the attitude which demands that when peace returns Germany or Prussia should be intentionally humiliated and excluded from the European family of nations, to my own feeling is actually repellent, and to my judgement is an attitude of self-satisfaction, morally dangerous in the extreme, and politically absurd. Surely, whatever others may do, we on our side should fight our terrific battle like gentlemen, without rancour or venom, and with eagerness, above all, when the fight is done, to recognize the merits of our adversary which both his passion and ours have for the moment travestied, and to renew the international bonds of commerce, science, art, and philosophy. We ought not to fall below the standard set us by our private soldiers upon Christmas Day, and indeed, as we hear, upon every day of the war.

Punishment and humiliation let us leave to consequences and to history. Belligerents are not good moral judges of each other. Much of what we hear to-day in anticipation of the sequel of the war brings irresistibly to my mind the profound wisdom of George Meredith’s warning against the ridiculous attempt at a union of ill temper and policy.

The patriotism we have attempted to portray implies and demands that we should desire for our country, not a triumph of vanity and self-interest, but a share in such a solid work of organization as shall be most favourable to the performance of a true state’s function in every community of Europe. Thus alone can we deserve well of our country, and our country of the world.

1. L’Orientation religieuse de la France actuelle, pp. 62, 63.

2. Practical Ethics, pp. 64, 65.

3. These sentences are taken from an address, ‘Ueber das Verhältniss der Politik zur Moral’, published in 1875, among the Reden und Aufsätze of Gustav Rümelin, Chancellor of the University of Tübingen.

4. The mistake of attempting to deal with both subjects was discovered too late to be remedied, but some remarks on the second which were omitted in the delivery of the lecture are here printed.

5. The reader to whom discussions of the subject of the preceding paragraphs are new, and who desires to pursue them, is recommended to refer to F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies, v and vi; Green, Principles of Political Obligation, in Works, vol. ii, or as separately published; Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State. The line followed in these books runs back through Hegel to Plato and Aristotle, on whose political philosophy see vol. i of Newman’s edition of Aristotle’s Politics. My short statement does not profess, of course, to represent the views of any one of the writers named.

6. ‘By nature’ here does not mean what the reader is likely to suppose. On Spinoza’s doctrine see Green, op. cit.

7. Essay Of Empire. Cf. Of Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates. That Bacon should be thought a great moral guide seems strange, but his political essays (notably that Of Plantations), like his others, are of course full of wisdom.

8. I introduce the word in order to indicate the danger of using it. It inevitably suggests an antithesis to something higher (‘duty’ or ‘principle’), and so is taken to mean, not the end of the state, but some subordinate part of that end.

9. What is said here of slavery was suggested by a passage in Green, op. cit.

10. Regarding this ideal, and others less ambitious, there is always the question whether they do not presuppose a moral progress which would make an actual organization needless.

11. The number of British embassies and legations abroad is fifty-seven (Whitaker).

12. It is ridiculous to give this name to the state’s normal duty of developing its own life.

13. This cannot be called an unconditional duty, if that means a duty which in no circumstances can be superseded by a higher duty (every duty is unconditional except as against a higher). I honour the German Chancellor for his frank statement that the violation of Belgian neutrality was an ‘Unrecht’ (a violation of law; i.e. something which is almost always, but not always, wrong). What was false was the description, as ‘a matter of life and death’, of the supposed superior duty taken to justify the supersession of the inferior. And what was revolting, and only too significant, was the revelation, in the phrase ‘a scrap of paper’, of the belief that the supersession of a duty is a trifle.

14. See the introduction to the translation of Kant’s essay (1893, now republished). There is a slighter sketch in W. A. Phillips’ instructive Confederation of Europe, 1914.

15. The conduct of the ‘Concert of Europe’ in recent years may be contrasted very favourably with that of the Holy Alliance, and may well be taken as a good augury; and it is better to emphasize this than to dwell on the defects of the Concert. At the same time, one must remember that it has been mainly concerned with troubles arising from the decay of the Turkish Empire, and that this Empire has not been considered as a full member of the European ‘Family’, and so has not been treated as one of the United States of Europe would have to be.

16. I do not remember, and have not found, any passage in his writings which shows in what precise form he conceived this ideal.

17. The latter, for example, in the instructive little book called The War and Democracy, by members of that admirable society, ‘The Workers’ Educational Association’.

18. As regards its social spirit and its standard of social values, England can hardly be called democratic. It is probably less so than France was under the third Napoleon.

19. I must point out that it by no means follows from the doctrine of the state’s moral end that the state should promulgate or encourage one particular view regarding the duties of its citizens or its own future. On the contrary, one may hold that doctrine and yet hold that the state should abstain from doing this and, however much it may support or enforce education, should, within the necessary limits, leave ‘ideas’ to prevail or fail through the process of free competition.

20. In his lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel spoke of ‘world-historical’ individuals and peoples, who represent for a time that ‘world-spirit’ whose ‘right’ is supreme; and perhaps some rash German reader might cry, ‘Yes, France a century ago, and Germany now.’ But he will not find a word in Hegel to countenance his claim; and if he builds his hopes on military power he might ponder Hegel’s final sentence about the astounding victories of Napoleon: ‘Never was the powerlessness of victory shown in a clearer light than then.’ I do not mean to imply that, according to Hegel, what we call the best intentions are bound to prevail. No philosopher was less inclined to ignore painful facts. His whole philosophy might even be called an attempt to understand and justify them.

21. My indebtedness in this Paper to Bishop Butler will be obvious to all who know his sermons on ‘Resentment’ and on ‘The Forgiveness of Injuries’.

22. Among these faults I should count our failure to intervene in the Schleswig-Holstein War.

23. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, s. 324.

24. The professors, it is said, have been mobilized in the service of Germany. And on the general merits of the dispute this is so. But I am not aware of evidence that philosophers of repute have adopted, say, Bernhardi’s or Treitschke’s views of justification by force. Eucken, though he stands up for his country, does so partly on the ground that Bernhardi is not representative, and we must be allowed to discount the popular use of hard sayings from Nietzsche, though he has very probably misled the multitude. Nietzsche is not a thinker whom he that runs may read. Wundt, I think, is simply misinformed and credulous, while strongly affected by national bias and vanity. I may add that the idea of ‘culture’ in the earlier period is right and fine. I cite from Kant what is probably the original account of it: ‘We are civilized to the point of wearisomeness, into all sorts of social courtesy and politeness. But before we can be held to be moralized there is a very long way to go. For culture implies more than civilization, it implies the idea of morality.’ Kant’s Werke (R.) 7,329. He is censuring the expenditure on ‘expansion’, as thwarting the spiritual growth of the citizens.

25. Manchester Lectures on Germany in 19th Century, 2nd. ed. 19.

26. New Statesman, February 6 and 13.

27. See T. H. Green, Lectures on Principles of Political Obligation, ss. 157–75.

28. Lord Haldane’s Montreal address, ‘Higher Nationality’, republished in The Conduct of Life, Murray, 1914.

29. Green, op. cit., s. 175.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

- Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.

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Table of Contents

- The International Crisis in its Ethical and Psychological Aspects

- CONTENTS

- I THE MORALITY OF STRIFE IN RELATION TO THE WAR

- II HERD INSTINCT AND THE WAR

- III INTERNATIONAL MORALITY: THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE

- IV THE CHANGING MIND OF A NATION AT WAR

- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI

- V WAR AND HATRED[21]
- VI PATRIOTISM IN THE PERFECT STATE
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE