TOWARDS AN
ENDURING PEACE

A SYMPOSIUM OF PEACE
PROPOSALS AND PROGRAMS
1914-1916

COMPILED BY
RANDOLPH S. BOURNE

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR
INTERNATIONAL CONCILIATION
NEW YORK

VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY
BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

When the storm has gone by and the skies after clearing have softened, we may discover that a corrected perspective is the result of the war that we are most conscious of. Familiar presumptions will appear foreshortened, and new distances of fact and possibility will lie before us.

Before the fateful midsummer of 1914 the most thoughtful part of mankind confidently held a lot of agreeable presumptions which undoubtedly influenced individual and collective conduct. The more intangible of them were grouped under such name symbols as “idealism,” “humanitarian impulse,” “human brotherhood,” “Christian civilization.” The workaday ones were pigeonholed under the rubric: “enlightened economic interest.” Between the practical and the aspirational were distributed all the excellent Aristotelian middle course presumptions of the “rule of reason” order.

And why not? The nineteenth century had closed in a blaze of scientific glory. By patient inductive research the human mind had found out nature’s way on earth and in the heavens, and with daring invention had turned knowledge to immediate practical account. The struggle for existence had become a mighty enterprise of progress. Steam and electricity had brought the utmost parts of the world together. Upon substantial material foundations the twentieth century would build a world republic, wherein justice should apportion abundance.

Upon presumption we reared the tower of expectation.

Yet on the horizon we might have seen—some of us did see—a thickening haze and warning thunderheads. Not much was said about them, but to some it seemed that the world behaved as if it felt the tension of a rising storm. With nervous eagerness the nations pushed their way into the domains of the backward peoples. They sought concessions, opportunities for investment, command of resources, exclusive trade, spheres of influence. Private negotiations were backed by diplomacy, and year after year diplomacy was backed by an ever more impressive show of naval and military power.

But we did not believe that the Great War impended. There would still be restricted wars here and there of course, but more and more they could be prevented. The human mind that had mastered nature’s way could master and control the ways of man. Economic interest would bring its resistless strength to bear against the mad makers of the wastes of war. A sensitive conscience would revolt against the cruelties of war. Reason, which had invented rules and agencies to keep the peace within the state, would devise tribunals and procedures to substitute a rational adjustment of differences for the arbitrament of war between states.

The world has recovered from disaster before now, it will recover again. Presumptions that disappointed have been reexamined and brought into truer drawing. Expectation has been more broadly built, it will be more broadly built again.

There is conscience in mankind, and the war has sublimely revealed it, as it has revealed also undreamed of survivals of faithlessness and cruelty. The presumption of rational control in human affairs has been foreshortened, but not painted out. In the background stand forth as grim realities, forces of fear, distrust, envy, ignorance, and hate that we had thought were ghosts. Conscience is as strong and as sensitive as we believed it to be; reason is as effective as we presumed; but the forces arrayed against them we now see are mightier than we knew. So now we ask, By what power shall conscience and reason be reinforced, and the surviving forces of barbarism be driven back?

There is but one answer left, all others have been shot to pieces. Conscience and reason are effective when they organize material energies, not when they dissipate themselves in dreams. Conscience and reason must assemble, coördinate, and bring to bear the economic resources and the physical energies of the civilized world to narrow the area and to diminish the frequency of war.

But how? General presumptions will not do this time. There must be a specific plan, concrete and practical; a specific preparedness, a specific method. And what is more, plan, preparedness, method must be drawn forth from the situation as the war makes and leaves it, not imposed upon it. They must be a composition of forces now in operation.

There were academic plans aplenty for the creation of pacific internationalism before the war began. The bankers had invented theirs; the socialists, the conciliationists, and the international lawyers respectively had invented theirs. The free traders, first in the field, had not lost hope.

It would be foolish to let ourselves think in discouragement that all these efforts to organize “the international mind” were idle. They were not ineffective. They did not organize the international mind adequately, much less did they reform its habits, but they quickened it; they organized it in part, they pulled it together enough to make it powerful for the work yet to be done.

What we have to face, then, is not the extinction or abandonment of internationalism, but the fact that the ideal, the all-embracing and thoroughly rational internationalism lies far in the future, and that before it can be attained we must have that partial internationalism which is practically the same thing as the widening of nationalism that is achieved when nations coöperate in leagues or combine in federations. The league of peace may be academic or it may soon stand forth as a tremendous piece of realism, we do not know which, but the forces that are holding many of the nations together in military coöperation now are present realities, and they will be realities after the military war is over. There will still be tariffs, but the areas within which tariff barriers will no longer be maintained will be immensely widened. Beyond these areas will be, as now, various arrangements of reciprocity. In like manner, there will be a determination on the part of the coöperating nations to stand together for the enforcement of international agreements and to discipline a law-breaking state that would needlessly resort to arms. The internationalism of commerce, of travel, of communication, of intellectual exchange and moral endeavor will continue to grow throughout the world, but in addition there will be the more definite, the more concrete internationalism of the nations that agree in making common cause for the attainment of specific ends.

Within this relatively restricted internationalism there will be, there is now, a certain yet more definite aggregation of peoples, interests, and traditions upon which rests a great and peculiar moral responsibility. The English-speaking people of the world are together the largest body of human beings among whom a nearly complete intellectual and moral understanding is already achieved. They have reached high attainments in science and the arts, in education, in social order, in justice. They are highly organized, they cherish the traditions of their common history. To permit anything to endanger the moral solidarity of this nucleus of a perfected internationalism would be a crime unspeakable. To strengthen it, to make it one of the supreme forces working for peace and humanity is a supreme obligation.

Franklin H. Giddings.

CONCERNING THE AUTHORS QUOTED

Jane Addams has been head resident at Hull House in Chicago for many years. She is widely known for her leadership in the social movement, and particularly for her connection with the International Congress of Women at The Hague.

Norman Angell is the author of “The Great Illusion,” and one of the most brilliant of the workers in the cause of peace. He is also the author of “International Polity,” “Arms and Industry,” and “The World’s Highway.”

Ed. Bernstein is one of the leaders of the German Social Democracy of the revisionist wing.

H. N. Brailsford is a prominent English traveler, correspondent, and essayist, and one of the most illuminating writers on world-problems. His books include “The War of Steel and Gold,” “Shelley, Godwin and their Circle.”

Nicholas Murray Butler is President of Columbia University, Acting Director of the Division of Intercourse and Education of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Chairman of the American Association for International Conciliation.

Charles Roden Buxton is a prominent English Liberal, and member of the Union for Democratic Control.

John Bates Clark is Director of the Division of Economics and History of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University.

Bernhard Dernburg is the German ex-Minister of Colonies, who spent some time in America at the beginning of the war as semi-official spokesman for German opinion.

Charles W. Eliot is President Emeritus of Harvard University, and a leader in the peace movement.

Rudolf Eucken is one of the most widely-known of living German philosophers. He visited America in 1913.

G. Lowes Dickinson of Cambridge University, England, is author of “Letters of a Chinese Official,” “Justice and Liberty,” “A Modern Symposium,” etc.

Franklin H. Giddings is Professor of Sociology at Columbia University.

John A. Hobson is one of the best-known English economists, the author of “The Rise of Modern Capitalism,” “The Science of Wealth,” “The Industrial System,” “Towards International Government,” etc.

Hamilton Holt is managing editor of The Independent.

Paul U. Kellogg is an editor of the Survey in New York.

Walter Lippmann is one of the most brilliant of the younger American publicists, an editor of the New Republic, and author of “A Preface to Politics,” “Drift and Mastery,” and “The Stakes of Diplomacy.”

A. Lawrence Lowell is President of Harvard University.

Romain Rolland is the author of “Jean-Christophe.” His attitude on the war has forced his exile from France to Geneva. His eloquent book “Above the Battle” expresses the emotion of a cosmopolitan soul confronted with the madness of a world-war.

Prof. L. Quidde was one of the leading German pacifists before the war.

A. A. Tenney is assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University.

Arnold J. Toynbee is the son-in-law of Prof. Gilbert Murray, and the author of “Nationality and the War,” and “Greek Policy Since 1882.” He is one of the most brilliant students of problems of nationality.

Lillian Wald is head-worker at the Henry Street Settlement in New York City.

William English Walling is a prominent American Socialist, editor of the New Review, and author of “Socialists and the War,” etc.

Alfred E. Zimmern is in the English Education service, and is author of “The Greek Commonwealth.”

PREFACE

The aim of this book is to present a discussion of some of the most hopeful and constructive suggestions for the settlement of the war on terms that would make for a lasting peace. The selections are taken from books, magazines, manifestoes, programs, etc., that have appeared since the beginning of the war. Part I contains a discussion of the general principles of a settlement, economic and political. Part II contains the more concrete suggestions for the constitution of a definite League of Peace. Part III presents some of the reconstructive ideals—“Towards the Future”—as voiced by writers in the different countries. In the Appendix are collected definite programs for peace put forward by associations and individuals, international organizations, etc., in this country, Great Britain, Germany, France, Holland, Denmark and Sweden, and Switzerland.

The books quoted form, it is believed, an indispensable library for the understanding of international questions:

“Nationality and the War,” by Arnold J. Toynbee. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co.

“Towards International Government,” by John A. Hobson.

“The Stakes of Diplomacy,” by Walter Lippmann. New York: Henry Holt and Co.

“The Road Toward Peace,” by Charles W. Eliot. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

“The War of Steel and Gold,” by H. N. Brailsford. New York: Macmillan.

“The War and Democracy,” by A. E. Zimmern and others. New York: Macmillan.

“The World’s Highway,” by Norman Angell. New York: Geo. H. Doran & Co.

PART I
PRINCIPLES OF THE SETTLEMENT

PART I. PRINCIPLES OF THE SETTLEMENT: ECONOMIC

PROBLEMS OF ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY

Most international quarrels have economic origin. The present war produced by economic antagonisms.

The growing dependence of modern civilized and thickly populated countries for the necessaries of life and industry, for commercial profits, and for gainful investments of capital upon free access to other countries, especially to countries differing from themselves in climate, natural resources, and degree of economic development, is of necessity a consideration of increasing weight in the foreign policy of to-day. Every active industrial or commercial nation is therefore fain to watch and guard its existing opportunities for foreign trade and investment, and to plan ahead for enlarged opportunities to meet the anticipated future needs of an expanding trade and a growing population. It views with fear, suspicion, and jealousy every attempt of a foreign country to curtail its liberty of access to other countries and its equal opportunities for advantageous trade or exploitation. The chief substance of the treaties, conventions, and agreements between modern nations in recent times has consisted in arrangements about commercial and financial opportunities, mostly in countries outside the acknowledged control of the negotiating parties. The real origins of most quarrels between such nations have related to tariffs, railway, banking, commercial, and financial operations in lands belonging to one or other of the parties, or in lands where some sphere of special interest was claimed. Egypt, Morocco, Persia, Asia Minor, China, Congo, Mexico, are the most sensitive spots affecting international relations outside of Europe, testifying to the predominance of economic considerations in foreign policy. The stress laid upon such countries hinges in the last resort upon the need of “open doors” or upon the desire to close doors to other countries. These keenly felt desires to safeguard existing foreign markets for goods and capital, to obtain by diplomatic pressure or by force new markets, and in other cases to monopolize markets, have everywhere been the chief directing influences in foreign policy, the chief causes of competing armaments, and the permanent underlying menaces to peace. The present war, when regard is had to the real directing pressure behind all diplomatic acts and superficial political ferments, is in the main a product of these economic antagonisms. This point of view is concisely and effectively expressed in a striking memorandum presented by the Reform Club of New York to President Wilson:—

Consider the situation of the present belligerents.

Serbia wants a window on the sea, and is shut out by Austrian influence.

Austria wants an outlet in the East, Constantinople or Salonica.

Russia wants ice-free ports on the Baltic and Pacific, Constantinople, and a free outlet from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean.

Germany claims to be hemmed in by a ring of steel, and needs the facilities of Antwerp and Rotterdam for her Rhine Valley commerce, security against being shut out from the East by commercial restrictions on the overland route, and freedom of the seas for her foreign commerce.

England must receive uninterrupted supplies of food and raw materials, and her oversea communications must be maintained.

This is true also of France, Germany, Belgium, and other European countries.

Japan, like Germany, must have opportunity for her expanding population, industries, and commerce.

The foreign policies of the nations still at peace are also determined by trade relations. Our own country desires the open door in the East.

South and North American States and Scandinavia are already protesting against the war’s interference with their ocean trade.

All nations that are not in possession of satisfactory harbors on the sea demand outlets, and cannot and ought not to be contented till they get them.

Nations desiring to extend their colonial enterprises entertain those ambitions for commercial reasons, either to possess markets from which they cannot be excluded, or to develop such markets for themselves and be able to exclude others from them when they so determine.

Desire for commercial privilege is the primary cause of war.

The generalization from these statements of fact is expressed in the formula, “The desire for commercial privilege and for freedom from commercial restraint is the primary cause of war.”

Now, that the foreign policies of nations are, in fact, determined mainly by these commercial and financial considerations, and that the desire to secure economic privilege and to escape economic restraints is a chief cause of war, are indisputable propositions. So long as these motives are left free to work in the future as in the past there will be constant friction among the commercially developed nations, giving rise to dangerous quarrels that will strain, perhaps to the breaking-point, any arrangements for arbitration that may be made....

International trade is restricted.

Disputes arising from these economic causes are even deeper seated and more dangerous than those connected with the claims of nationality and autonomy. Indeed, political autonomy is shorn of most of its value unless it is accompanied by a large measure of economic liberty as regards commercial relations with the outside world. The case of Serbia, liable at any moment to be denied access to the sea, or to be cut off by Austria from her chief land markets, is a case in point. Or once again, would the autonomy of such a country as Hungary, Bohemia, or Poland, however valid its political guarantees, satisfy the legitimate aspirations of its population if high tariff-walls encompassed it on every frontier? Such instances make it evident that no settlement of “the map of Europe” on lines of nationality can suffice to establish peace. The effective liberty of every people demands freedom of commercial intercourse with other peoples. A refusal or a hindrance of such intercourse deprives a people of its fair share of the common fruits of the earth, and deprives the other peoples of the world of any special fruits which it is able to contribute to the common stock.

If any international Government existed, representing the commonwealth of nations, it would seek to remove all commercial restrictions which impair the freedom of economic intercourse between nations.

These restrictions are placed by the Reform Club Memorandum under the four following categories:—

First. There is the restriction of tariffs imposed by nations.

Second. There are restrictions upon the best uses of International commerce, of the terminal and land transfer facilities of the great trade routes and seaports of the world. A few such ports command entrance to and exit from vast continental hinterlands. It is vital to these interior regions that their natural communications with the outside world should be kept widely open, and this is equally vital to the rest of the world. Obstructive control of such ports and routes to the detriment of the world’s commerce cannot and should not be tolerated by states whose interests are adversely affected. But routes and ports are needed for use, not government; and port rivalries constantly tend towards offering the best and equal facilities to all. The swelling tides of commerce are clearing their own channels, and mutual interests will more and more prompt the states through which the principal trade routes pass to facilitate the movement of commerce.

Third. There are restrictions upon opportunities to trade with territories ruled as colonies or being exploited within spheres of influence. This is what now remains of the old mercantile system which flourished before our Revolutionary War, and which has been weakening ever since. Great Britain claims no preference for herself in her colonies. Other states have been less liberal. The fear of such restrictions being applied against them is to-day the main motive for a policy of colonial oversea possessions. If industrial states could be assured of the application of the open-door policy, no state would envy another its colonies. Colonies should be the world’s.

Fourth. There are restrictions in the free use of the sea. Unlike land routes, ocean routes are offered practically without cost to all, whithersoever the sea runs. Over these, however, until modern times commerce has been subject to pillage by regular warships as well as by pirates. The claims of commerce have been more slowly recognized on the sea than on the land; and, to an extent now unthinkable on land, warring states still feel free to interfere with neutral traders....

National financial groups control foreign policy. Economic oppositions determine foreign policy.

Another factor of increasing importance in the recent conflict of nations has been the competition between groups of financiers and concessionaires, organized upon a “national” basis, to obtain exclusive or preferential control in the undeveloped countries for the profitable use of exported capital. Closely related to commercial competition, this competition for lucrative investments has played an even greater part in producing dangerous international situations. For these financial and commercial interests have sought to use the political and the forcible resources of their respective Governments to enable them to obtain the concessions and other privileges they require for the security and profitable application of their capital. The control of foreign policy thus wielded has been fraught with two perils to world-peace. It has brought the Governments of the competing financial groups into constant friction, and it has been the most fruitful direct source of expeditionary forces and territorial aggressions in the coveted areas. As the struggle for lucrative overseas investments has come to occupy a more important part than the struggle for ordinary markets, the economic oppositions between European Governments have become more and more the determinant factors in foreign policy, and in the competition of armaments, upon which Governments rely to support and to achieve the aims their economic masters impose upon them.

John A. Hobson, “Towards International Government,” pp. 128-139.

TRADE AS A CAUSE OF WAR

Idealism hides real causes of war.

Decent men in the belligerent countries feel a natural repugnance in time of war to any discussion of the economic bearings of the struggle. If nations are to fight with clear consciences and single hearts, they must fight on in the belief that any objects which concern their statesmen beyond the objects of defense and national security are purely idealistic. We are all pragmatists in wartime; we believe what will conduce to victory. Cool observers see clearly the widening out of an immense range of colonial, imperial, and economic issues which will confront us at the settlement and after it. But these things are not debated as we debate the issues of nationality in this war. One might suppose from a study of our press that we are much more vitally interested in the fate of the Slovenes than we are in the trade of China.

This idealism is absolutely sincere, and a natural consequence of the exaltation of emotion which belongs to any war of nations. We can endure the thought that our young men are falling in many thousands for the liberties of little peoples. That brief statement of our aims would end in bathos if we were to add to it the subjection of China to Japanese suzerainty, the partition of Turkey into spheres of influence, the acquisition by the Allies of the German colonies, and the setting up of a Russian customs house at Constantinople. The mischief of this obsession is that the very field which stands most in need of illumination from critical yet idealistic thinking is left in a half light of semi-secrecy, and the will of democracies hardly dreams of intervening in the clash of the interests which divide it. Public opinion and the fortunes of war will govern the settlement of Belgium and Alsace, but in our present temper it is only too probable that all the colonial and economic issues involved in it will be left to the diplomatists with only the interests behind them.

Our need is organization to make international change without war.

The penetrating memorandum addressed by the New York Reform Club to President Wilson has sketched broadly but with sure insight the commercial and colonial questions which helped to lead up to this war. None of these issues appeared in the negotiations which preceded the war, but most of them were latent in the consciousness of the statesmen and even of the peoples. The curse of our unorganized Europe has been that fundamental change has rarely been possible save as a sequel of war. Diplomacy was always busied with a pathetic conservatism in bolstering up the status quo, or in arranging those little readjustments which might just avail to stave off war. We shall not banish war from Europe until we are civilized enough to create an organization that can make and impose fundamental changes without war. The best we can do in the meantime is to prepare to avail ourselves of the brief moment of settlement during which the structure of Europe will still be fluid under the shock of war, to bring our idealistic and democratic forces to bear upon these larger issues.

Free trade would remove incentive for colonies—and for concessions and monopolies.

The Reform Club’s memorandum deals with three of these questions: the abolition of capture at sea in wartime, the freedom of the world’s straits and highways in time of war, and the exploitation of colonies under a system of protection. The system of legalized piracy which permits navies to prey on commerce in wartime is undoubtedly the most potent incentive to swollen armaments at sea. So long as it survives, the opinion of the mercantile classes will never effectively back the demand for economy in armaments, for it is bound to regard navies as an insurance. The question of the ownership of straits stands high among the many competing causes of bloodshed. It explains the German struggle for Calais no less than the Allied expedition to the Dardanelles. One may doubt, however, whether a proposal to neutralize any of the more vital of these straits—the Straits of Dover or Gibraltar, for example—would stand a chance of calm consideration on the morrow of such a war as this. It will be feasible when war is no longer an ever-present terror; and when that day comes it will have lost its importance. Far more central in our problem is the general question of colonialism. It is a commonplace to say that modern industrial peoples desire colonies almost solely for economic reasons, and that one of the chief motives for this expansion would disappear with any approach to free trade. If the British colonies had not granted a preference to the mother country, and if French colonies were not hedged about with an impenetrable tariff wall, the feeling among German industrialists that their expansion was “hemmed in” would have been less acute, and the pressure for “places in the sun” would have been less powerful.

But it is doubtful whether the question of markets is as potent a cause of armaments and war as the competition to secure concessions, monopolies, and spheres of influence. The export of capital means much more for the modern politics of imperialism than the export of manufactured goods. The conquistador of to-day is the financier who acquires mining rights in Morocco, loan privileges in Turkey, or railway concessions in China. The foreign policy of Great Britain and our place in the European system has been governed for a generation by the occupation of Egypt, whither we went in the wake of the bond-holders. It explains our long bickerings with France; it helped to fling an isolated France into the arms of Russia; it brought us finally into the disastrous bargain over Morocco which underlay our feud with Germany. The competition of national financial groups for concessions in Turkey or China is not the competition of the market-place at home. Behind the financier stands the diplomatist, and behind the diplomatist is his navy. There is a clash of armor-plates when these competitors jostle. The struggle for a Balance of Power in Europe has often seemed little more than a race for the force and prestige which would enable the dominant Power or group of Powers to secure the concessions of the monopoly spheres which it coveted in the half-developed regions of the earth. No modern nation would openly make war to secure such ends as these, for no democracy would support it. Even the half-evolved democracy of Russia recoiled from the Manchurian War. But every nation, by pursuing these ends, makes the armed peace and the unstable equilibrium which prepares our wars.

Colonial free trade must be declared by international agreement, and the export of capital internationalized.

The remedy is so simple that only a very clever man could sophisticate himself into missing it, and it is as old as Cobden. It is not necessary to establish universal free trade to stop the rivalry to monopolize colonial markets; it would suffice to declare free trade in the colonies, or even in those which are not self-governing. To deal with the evil of “concessions” all that is required is a general understanding that financiers must win their own way, by merit or push or bribes, and that the doors of the embassies will be banged in their faces when they seek support. These sentences are easily written, but they would involve the democratization of diplomacy everywhere, the overthrow of the colonial group in France, and the confounding of the national economists in Germany. The force which might work such miracles is nowhere mobilized, for, with all their will to peace, the democracies nowhere understand the bearings of these colonial and commercial issues on war and armaments. It requires some imagination to understand that when two embassies compete in Peking for a railway concession, the issue may be determined by the balance of naval power in the North Sea. It requires some habit of observation to realize that because this may happen in Peking, the investing and governing classes are bound to keep up the balance in the North Sea. The nexus is none the less simple and clear, and it will hold as long as diplomacy continues to engage in this disguised imperial trading, so long as capital possesses nationality and regards the flag as an asset.

There are none the less ways of escape which are neither Utopian nor heroic. It ought not to be utterly beyond the statesmanship of Europe to decree some limited form of colonial free trade by general agreement—to apply it, for example, to Africa. France would oppose it, but what if Alsace were to be restored on this condition? To open a great colonial market to Hamburg, while ending the dream of revanche, would be to remove the two chief causes of war in western Europe. American statesmanship may ere long have the power to propose such a bargain as this. For the plague of concession-hunting the best expedient would probably be to impose on all the competing national groups in each area the duty of amalgamating in a permanently international syndicate. If one such syndicate controlled all the railways and another all the mines of China and Turkey, a vast cause of national rivalry would be removed. The interests of China and Turkey might be secured by interposing a disinterested council or arbitrator between them and the syndicate to adjust their respective interests. Short of creating a world state or a European federation, the chief constructive work for peace is to establish colonial free trade and internationalize the export of capital.

H. N. Brailsford, “Trade as a Cause of War,” The New Republic, May 8, 1915.

ECONOMIC IMPERIALISM

Evil of “spheres of influence.” “Spheres” become “dependencies.”

The evils of an unrestricted competition for concessions and monopolies between rival financial groups backed by their Governments, are so notorious that diplomacy has found several typical formulæ for bringing them to an end. The obvious method of resolving such conflicts is the demarcation of spheres of “influences,” “interest” or “penetration” within which each of the competing Powers enjoys a monopoly respected by the others. This method is open to two grave objections. In the first place, it is rarely adopted before a ruinous conflict has exhausted the competitors. For years or decades they carry on a trial of strength which affects not merely their local relationship, but their attitude to one another in Europe, and is measured year by year in their military and naval estimates. If we were to take the sum by which British and German armaments have increased in the present century, it would be possible to allocate the increase, roughly, somewhat as follows: 50 per cent. or less for the settlement of the question, Who shall exploit Morocco?; 25 per cent. or more for the privilege of building a railway to Bagdad and beyond it; 25 per cent. or more for the future eventualities which remain unsettled—the fate of the Portuguese colonies in Africa, and the destinies of China. In the second place, the delimitation of spheres of interest is almost inevitably fatal to the national existence of the country partitioned, and as inevitably adds a vast burden to the commitments of the Imperial Power. Persia furnishes the obvious illustration. Sir Edward Grey is clearly resolved that he will not allow himself by the march of events to be drawn into the assumption of any direct responsibility for the administration of the British sphere. It is a laudable resolve, but Russia may at any moment frustrate it. She deals with her own sphere on the opposite principle, and her sphere happens to include the seat of the central government. That government is already a puppet of Russian policy, enjoying only a simulacrum of independence. How much longer can a government which is not a government continue to rule the southern sphere? Sooner or later a choice must be made. Either Russia must withdraw, or some separate government under British protection must be created for the south. Turkey is drifting rapidly towards a dissolution in which the spheres which the Great Powers already claim will be formally delimited. It is easy to predict what that will mean. There will be first provincial loans, then provincial advisers, and finally a military control, under which each of these “spheres” will become what Egypt already is, a dependency of a European Power.

How to avoid the evil. Must preserve peace without destroying victim nationality.

The method of avoiding financial competition by marking off zones of monopoly, is clearly the worst which can be pursued. There are alternatives. Let us consider what methods might be followed if the Powers were sage enough to shrink from the terrific conflict which may one day overtake them for the partition of China. China is so thickly peopled that crude conquest presents few attractions. Even Japan could not settle her surplus population in a country where every hill is terraced and every field subjected to intensive cultivation. But there is here a field which capital is already eager to exploit, and every year diminishes the resistance of prejudice and inertia to its ambitions. The attempts to mark out spheres of influence have so far been tentative and unsuccessful. Our own claim to the lion’s share, the Yangtse Valley, is admitted by no other Power, and it is doubtful whether the Foreign Office still maintains it. There are several principles which might be adopted if the Powers desired to avoid the jealous and dangerous struggle for concessions. In the first place, the simplest plan and the best would be the adoption of a self-denying ordinance by all the chief competitors. Let it be understood that British, French, and German banks may compete among themselves for railways and loans, but that none of them shall receive any aid or countenance whatever from the embassies or consulates of their respective countries. If that could be decided, the allotment of concessions would be settled either by the merits of the competitors or more probably by their skill and audacity in bribing Chinese officials. One may doubt, however, whether any of the Powers has sufficient faith in the honor of its competitors to enter on such an undertaking. A second and more hopeful plan might be borrowed from the undertaking negotiated by France and Germany over Morocco. They agreed to promote cooperation among their subjects, who were to share in agreed percentages in the coveted opportunities for public works. A vast “pool” or syndicate in which all the rival financial groups were represented, might be left to internationalize all the opportunities of monopoly in China on a plan which would give to each its allotted share in the risks and profits. The scheme worked badly in Morocco, and indeed created the friction which led to the Agadir incident. Something of the kind existed in China while the alliance of the banks of the Six Powers subsisted, and it eventually broke down. By this method friction may be avoided among the Great Powers, but China would be subjected to an intolerable financial dictation, which would be none the less oppressive because it was cosmopolitan. There exists, however, in the Ottoman Public Debt, a model which might be followed elsewhere. Its council represents all the bondholders of every nationality, and usually maintains good relations with the Porte. If the railways of Turkey, China, and Persia could be amalgamated, each in a single system under a cosmopolitan administration, the risk of partition and all the danger to peace, which this risk entails, might be removed. The obvious step is to confer on these syndicates of capitalists an international legal personality, which would enable them to sue or be sued before the Hague Tribunal. Some disinterested council nominated by The Hague should be interposed between the syndicate and the State in which it operates, so that the intervention of diplomacy may be as far as possible eliminated.

The Drago Doctrine.

The problems raised by the export of capital have been considered in this chapter mainly from the standpoint of the creditor State, which sees its diplomacy involved in the process. We have found, so far, no solution which is satisfactory from the standpoint of the debtor nation. The inroad of foreign capital always means for it some loss of independence, and it has nothing to gain by agreements among competing Empires. It may, indeed, keep its independence by playing on their rivalries. Its shadowy autonomy vanishes when they come to terms. The pacifist and the nationalist are here divided in their sympathies. The former, thinking only of European peace, rejoices when Russia and Britain end their differences by the partition of Persia. The latter, seeing only that a nation has been destroyed, regards the agreement as a peculiarly evil development of Imperialism. Both are right, and both are wrong. The ideal expedient would preserve European peace without destroying the victim nationality. To propose that expedient requires an excursion into the realms of Utopian construction. We can propose nothing which seems feasible to-day, but a solution is conceivable which requires only an easy step in the organization of the civilized world for peace. The motives for the partition of Persia were rather political than financial. The object-lesson of Egypt, where the occupation had its origin in debt, is a more typical instance of modern processes. It happens that the Hague Conference has laid down a principle which is capable of fruitful extension for dealing with such cases as these. The Drago Doctrine, put forward by Señor Drago, a jurist and statesman of the Argentine Republic, supported by the United States and eventually adopted by all the Powers, provides that no creditor State may use arms to enforce a liability upon a debtor State, unless a decision of the Hague Tribunal has recognized the liability and prescribed the method of payment. This doctrine, even as it stands, is of immense value to minor but civilized States like the South American republics, Portugal and Greece, which may find themselves obliged to defer payment of an external debt. The Hague Tribunal would in such a case, if it realized its opportunities, act as a good County Court Judge would do at home—refuse to admit a merely usurious claim, and lay down terms and dates of payment which would admit of the debtor’s recovery from any temporary difficulty.

Permanent Credit Bureau.

But to defeat the more unscrupulous methods of the international usurer, this idea requires some amplification. It may be necessary for a debtor State, some grades below the level of Portugal and Greece in civilization, to mortgage some part of its revenues, and to accept, at least over part of them, some degree of foreign control. That means, if the creditor country has also political ambitions, the almost certain loss of its independence. There are also States like Turkey which stand in need of expert advice for the reorganization of their finances, but dread the consequences of admitting any foreigner, who may perhaps think more of the interests of European finance and of his own motherland, than of those of the country which employs him. To draw the full advantage from the international machinery at The Hague, there ought to be evolved a permanent Credit Bureau to which weak and timid States might apply. It might conduct enquiries into their solvency, lend them experts to reorganize their finances, help them to negotiate loans in neutral markets on fair terms, and in case of need provide the commissioners who would control their mortgaged revenues. It would act as a trustee or as a Court of Chancery towards its wards. It could have no political ambitions to further, and the country which applied to it need not tremble for its independence. Persia or Egypt, had this Bureau existed, might have turned to The Hague for help. If, in the end, owing to civil war, or the hopeless incapacity of native statesmen, forcible intervention became inevitable, it would lie not with any interested Power, but with The Hague itself, to take the initiative of summoning a European Conference to prescribe the nature and limits of the interference. It is even possible that the Bureau might be used as an arbitrator at the request of a State like China, hard pressed by the rivalry of Empires competing for concessions, to decide between them in its name, and to appoint a neutral adviser or board of advisers, who would stand between it and the greedy Powers in the allotment of its financial patronage.

Export of capital must be made servant of humane diplomacy.

A Europe which has organized itself for peace will be at no loss for expedients wherewith to reconcile the appetites of capital with the rights of nationality. A spectator of the moving cosmopolitan drama which is played, the world over, around this central motive of the export of capital, can readily invent attractive schemes for the regulation of the process. But such exercises tempt one to ignore the dynamics of the problem. The same primitive forces of greed which in earlier centuries inspired conquests and migrations are still strong enough to grip diplomacy and build navies. Our first task is to win at home the power to control this export of capital, to check it where it disregards the current ethical standards, to rebuff it where it would lead us into international rivalry, and at last to use it as the potent servant of a humane diplomacy. It can be forbidden to carry the devastations of slavery into distant continents. It can be checked in its usurer’s practises upon simple States. It can be used, if it be firmly mastered, to starve into submission a semi-civilized Empire which meditates aggressive war, or draws from Western stores the funds to finance its own oppressions.

H. N. Brailsford, “The War of Steel and Gold,” pp. 241-253.

THE PROBLEM OF DIPLOMACY

The chief problem of diplomacy is the weak State.

This whole business of jockeying for position is at first glance so incredibly silly that many liberals regard diplomacy as a cross between sinister conspiracy and a meaningless etiquette. It would be all of that if the stakes of diplomacy were not real. Those stakes have to be understood, for without such an understanding diplomacy is incomprehensible and any scheme of world peace an idle fancy.

The chief, the overwhelming problem of diplomacy seems to be the weak state—the Balkans, the African sultanates, Turkey, China, and Latin America, with the possible exception of the Argentine, Chile, and Brazil. These states are “weak” because they are industrially backward and at present politically incompetent. They are rich in resources and cheap labor, poor in capital, poor in political experience, poor in the power of defense. The government of these states is the supreme problem of diplomacy. Just as the chief task of American politics to the Civil War was the organization of the unexploited West, so the chief task of world diplomacy to-day is the organization of virgin territory and backward peoples. I use backward in the conventional sense to mean a people unaccustomed to modern commerce and modern political administration.

This solicitude about backward peoples seems to many good democrats a combination of superciliousness and greed....

And yet the plain fact is that the interrelation of peoples has gone so far that to advocate international laissez-faire now is to speak a counsel of despair. Commercial cunning, lust of conquest, rum, bibles, rifles, missionaries, traders, concessionaires have brought the two civilizations into contact, and the problem created must be solved, not evaded.

Economic imperialism and the weak State.

The great African empires, for example, were not created deliberately by theoretical imperialists. Explorers, missionaries, and traders penetrated these countries. They found rubber, oil, cocoa, tin; they could sell cotton goods, rifles, liquor. The native rulers bartered away enormous riches at trivial prices. But the trading-posts and the concessions were insecure. There were raids and massacres. No public works existed, no administrative machinery. The Europeans exploited the natives cruelly, and the natives retaliated. Concession hunters and merchants from other nations began to come in. They bribed and bullied the chiefs, and created still greater insecurity. An appeal would be made to the home government for help, which generally meant declaring a protectorate of the country. Armed forces were sent in to pacify, and civil servants to administer the country. These protectorates were generally sanctioned by the other European governments on the proviso that trade should be free to all....

It is essential to remember that what turns a territory into a diplomatic “problem” is the combination of natural resources, cheap labor, markets, defenselessness, corrupt and inefficient government. The desert of Sahara is no “problem,” except where there are oases and trade routes. Switzerland is no “problem,” for Switzerland is a highly organized modern state. But Mexico is a problem, and Haiti, and Turkey, and Persia. They have the pretension of political independence which they do not fulfil. They are seething with corruption, eaten up with “foreign” concessions, and unable to control the adventurers they attract or safeguard the rights which these adventurers claim. More foreign capital is invested in the United States than in Mexico, but the United States is not a “problem” and Mexico is. The difference was hinted at in President Wilson’s speech at Mobile. Foreigners invest in the United States, and they are assured that life will be reasonably safe and that titles to property are secured by orderly legal means. But in Mexico they are given “concessions,” which means that they secure extra privileges and run greater risks, and they count upon the support of European governments or of the United States to protect them and their property.

Economic penetration into weak States is protected only through order and political control.

The weak states, in other words, are those which lack the political development that modern commerce requires. To take an extreme case which brings out the real nature of the “problem,” suppose that the United States was organized politically as England was in the time of William the Conqueror. Would it not be impossible to do business in the United States? There would be an everlasting clash between an impossible legal system and a growing commercial development. And the internal affairs of the United States would constitute a diplomatic “problem.”

This, it seems to me, is the reason behind the outburst of modern imperialism among the Great Powers. It is not enough to say that they are “expanding” or “seeking markets” or “grabbing resources.” They are doing all these things, of course. But if the world into which they are expanding were not politically archaic, the growth of foreign trade would not be accompanied by political imperialism. Germany has “expanded” wonderfully in the British Empire, in Russia, in the United States, but no German is silly enough to insist on planting his flag wherever he sells his dyestuffs or stoves. It is only when his expansion is into weak states—into China, Morocco, Turkey, or elsewhere that foreign trade is imperialistic. This imperialism is actuated by many motives—by a feeling that political control insures special privileges, by a desire to play a large part in the world, by national vanity, by a passion for “ownership,” but none of these motives would come into play if countries like China or Turkey were not politically backward.

Imperialism in our day begins generally as an attempt to police and pacify. This attempt stimulates national pride, it creates bureaucrats with a vested interest in imperialism, it sucks in and receives added strength from concessionaires and traders who are looking for economic privileges. There is no doubt that certain classes in a nation gain by imperialism, though to the people as a whole the adventure may mean nothing more than an increased burden of taxes.

Some pacifists have attempted to deny that a nation could ever gain anything by political control of weak states. They have not defined the “nation.” What they overlook is that even the most advanced nations are governed, not by the “people,” but by groups with special interests. These groups do gain, just as the railroad men who controlled American legislatures gained. A knot of traders closely in league with the colonial office of a great Power can make a good deal of money out of its friendships. Every government has contracts to be let, franchises to give; it establishes tariffs, fixes railroad rates, apportions taxes, creates public works, builds roads. To be favored by that power is to be favored indeed. The favoritism may cost the motherland and the colony dear, but the colonial merchant is not a philanthropist....

The backward States are the arenas of international friction.

The whole situation might be summed up by saying that the commercial development of the world will not wait until each territory has created for itself a stable and fairly modern political system. By some means or other the weak states have to be brought within the framework of commercial administration. Their independence and integrity, so-called, are dependent upon their creating conditions under which world-wide business can be conducted. The pressure to organize the globe is enormous....

Out of this complexity of motive there is created a union of various groups on the imperial program: the diplomatic group is interested primarily in prestige; the military group in an opportunity to act; the bureaucratic in the creation of new positions; the financial groups in safeguarding investments; traders in securing protection and privileges, religious groups in civilizing the heathen, the “intellectuals,” in realizing theories of expansion and carrying out “manifest destinies,” the people generally in adventure and glory and the sense of being great. These interested groups severally control public opinion, and under modern methods of publicity public opinion is easily “educated.”

Who should intervene in backward states, what the intervention shall mean, how the protectorate shall be conducted—this is the bone and sinew of modern diplomacy. The weak spots of the world are the arenas of friction. This friction is increased and made popular by frontier disputes over Alsace-Lorraine or Italia Irredenta, but in my judgment the boundary lines of Europe are not the grand causes of diplomatic struggle. Signor Ferrero confessed recently that the present generation of Italians had all but forgotten Italia Irredenta, and the Revanche has been a decadent French dream until the Entente and the Dual Alliance began to clash in Morocco, in Turkey, in China. Alsace-Lorraine has no doubt kept alive suspicion of Germany, and predisposed French opinion to inflicting diplomatic defeats in Morocco. But the arena where the European Powers really measure their strength against each other is in the Balkans, in Africa, and in Asia....

War is for sake of prestige in undeveloped countries.

This war is fought not for specific possessions, but for that diplomatic prestige and leadership which are required to solve all the different problems. It is like a great election to decide who shall have the supreme power in the Concert of Europe. Austria began the contest to secure her position as a great Power in the Balkans; Russia entered it to thwart this ambition; France was engaged because German diplomatic supremacy would reduce France to a “second-class power,” which means a power that holds world power on sufferance; England could not afford to see France “crushed” or Belgium annexed because British imperialism cannot alone cope with the vigor of Germany; Germany felt herself “encircled,” which meant that wherever she went—to Morocco, Asia Minor, or China—there a coalition was ready to thwart her. The ultimate question involved was this: whenever in the future diplomats meet to settle a problem in the backward countries, which European nation shall be listened to most earnestly? What shall be the relative prestige of Germans and Englishmen and Frenchmen and Russians; what sense of their power, what historical halo, what threat of force, what stimulus to admiration shall they possess? To lose this war will be like being a Republican politician in the solid South when the Democrats are in power at Washington. It will mean political, social, and economic inferiority.

World problem is due to competition for unorganized territory.

Americans have every reason to understand the dangers of unorganized territory, to realize clearly why it is a “problem.” Our Civil War was preceded by thirty or forty years of diplomatic struggle for a balance of power in the West. Should the West be slave or free, that is, should it be the scene of homesteads and free labor, or of plantations and slaves? Should it be formed into States which sent senators and representatives to support the South or the North? We were virtually two nations, each trying to upset the balance of power in its own favor. And when the South saw that it was beaten, that is to say “encircled,” when its place in the Western sun was denied, the South seceded and fought. Until the problem or organizing the West had been settled, peace and federal union were impossible.

The world’s problem is the same problem tremendously magnified and complicated.

The point I have been making will, I fear, seem a paradox to many readers,—that the anarchy of the world is due to the backwardness of weak states; that the modern nations have lived in an armed peace and collapsed into hideous warfare because in Asia, Africa, the Balkans, Central and South America there are rich territories in which weakness invites exploitation, in which inefficiency and corruption invite imperial expansion, in which the prizes are so great that the competition for them is to the knife.

This is the world problem upon which all schemes for arbitration, leagues of peace, reduction of armaments must prove themselves. The diplomats have in general recognized this. It was commonly said for a generation that Europe would be lucky if it escaped a general war over the breakup of Turkey in Europe. The Sick Man has infected the Continent. Our own “preparedness” campaign is based on the fear that the defenselessness of Latin America will invite European aggression, that the defenselessness of China will bring on a struggle in the Pacific. Few informed people imagine for a moment that any nation of the world contemplates seizing or holding our own territory. That would be an adventure so ridiculous that no statesman would think of it. If we get into trouble it will be over some place like Mexico, or Haiti, or the Philippines, or the Panama Canal, or Manchuria, or Hawaii....

Need of European legislatures to deal with problem.

Europe has also recognized that some kind of world government must be created. The phrase world government, of course, arouses immediate opposition; the idea of a European legislature would be pronounced utopian. Yet there have been a number of European legislatures. The Berlin Conference of 1885 was called to discuss “freedom of commerce in the basin and mouths of the Congo; application to the Congo and Niger of the principles adopted at the Congress of Vienna with a view to preserve freedom of navigation on certain international rivers ... and a definition of formalities to be observed so that new occupations on the African coasts shall be deemed effective.” The Powers represented made all sorts of reservations, but they managed to pass a “General Act of the West African Conference.” The Congo Free State was recognized. As Mr. Harris says: “Bismarck saw in this a means of preventing armed conflict over the Congo Basin, of restricting the Portuguese advance, and of preserving the region to free trade.” What was it that Bismarck saw? He saw that the great wealth of the Congo and its political weakness might make trouble in Europe unless the Congo was organized into the legal structure of the world.

Example of Algeciras.

The Conference at Algeciras was an international legislature in which even the United States was represented; the London Conference after the Balkan wars was a gathering of ambassadors trying to legislate out of existence the sources of European trouble in the Balkans. But all these legislatures have had one great fault. They met, they passed laws, they adjourned, and left the enforcement of their mandate to the conscience of the individual Powers. The legislature was international, but the executive was merely national. The legislature moreover had no way of checking up or controlling the executive. The representatives of all the nations would pass laws for the government of weak territories, but the translation of those laws into practise was left to the colonial bureaucrats of some one nation.

If the law was not carried out, to whom would an appeal be made? Not to the Conference, for it had ceased to exist. There was no way in which a European legislature could recall the officials who did not obey its will. Those officials were responsible to their home government, although they were supposed to be executing a European mandate. Those who were injured had also to appeal to their home government, and the only way to remedy an abuse or even sift out the truth of an allegation was by negotiation between the Powers. This raised the question of their sovereignty, called forth patriotic feeling, revived a thousand memories, and made any satisfactory interpretation of the European Act or any criticism of its administration a highly explosive adventure.

Suppose, for example, that Congress had power to pass laws, but that the execution of them was left to the States. Suppose New York had its own notions of tariff administration. How would the other States compel the New York customs officials to execute the spirit and letter of the Federal law? Suppose every criticism by Pennsylvania of a New York Collector was regarded as an infringement of New York’s sovereignty, as a blow at New York’s pride, what kind of chaos would we suffer from? Yet that is the plight of our world society.

An international Senate for each arena of friction.

The beginnings of a remedy would seem to lie in not disbanding these European conferences when they have passed a law. They ought to continue in existence as a kind of senate, meeting from time to time. They ought to regard themselves as watchers over the legislation which they have passed. To them could be brought grievances, by them amendments could be passed when needed. The colonial officials should at least be made to report to this senate, and all important matters of policy should be laid open to its criticism and suggestion. In this way a problem like that of Morocco, for example, might be kept localized to a permanent European Conference on Morocco. Europe would never lose its grip on the situation, because it would have representatives on the spot watching the details of administration, in a position to learn the facts, and with a real opportunity for stating grievances.

The development of such a senate would probably be towards an increasing control of colonial officials. At first it would have no power of appointment or removal. It would be limited to criticism. But it is surely not fantastic to suppose that the colonial civil service would in time be internationalized; that is to say, opened to men of different nationalities. The senate, if it developed any traditions, would begin to supervise the budget, would fight for control of salaries, and might well take over the appointing power altogether. It would become an upper house for the government of the protected territory, not essentially different perhaps from the American Philippine Commission. The lower house would be native, and there would probably be a minority of natives in the senate....

An organization of this kind would meet all the difficulties that our Continental Congress or that any other primitive legislature has had to deal with. There would be conflicts of jurisdiction, puzzling questions of interpretation, and some place of final appeal would have to be provided. It might be the Senate of European representatives; but if the Senate deadlocked, an appeal might be taken to The Hague. The details of all this are obviously speculative at the moment.

Prevention of war by international commissions for unorganized regions.

The important point is that there should be in existence permanent international commissions to deal with those spots of the earth where world crises originate. How many there should be need not be suggested here. There should have been one for Morocco, for the Congo, for the Balkan Peninsula, perhaps for Manchuria; there may have to be one for Constantinople, for certain countries facing the Caribbean Sea. Such international governing bodies are needed wherever the prizes are great, the territory unorganized, and the competition active.

The idea is not over-ambitious. It seems to me the necessary development of schemes which European diplomacy has been playing with for some time. It represents an advance along the line that governments, driven by necessity, have been taking of their own accord. What makes it especially plausible is that it grasps the real problems of diplomacy, that it provides not a panacea but a method and the beginnings of a technique. It is internationalism, not spread thin as a Parliament of Man, but sharply limited to those areas of friction where internationalism is most obviously needed.

Walter Lippmann, “The Stakes of Diplomacy,” pp. 87-135.

SOCIALISTS AND IMPERIALISM

Peace impossible without solution of economic conflicts.

Possibly we shall learn nothing from the war; at the present moment it looks that way. For all the world, including Socialists, seem to be divided between militarists and pacifists. By pacifism I mean of course the movement Socialists have attacked for fifty years—up to the present war—under the name of “bourgeois pacifism,” the idea that disarmament, the Hague Tribunal, and similar devices could put an end to militarism and war.

In one sense of course every internationalist, whether Socialist or Democrat, is a pacifist. Every internationalist is opposed to war. But from the days of Marx and before, up to the present time, all Socialists have been prepared for certain war-producing contingencies which can be abolished neither by calling them “illusions,” as Norman Angell has done, nor by any other phrases or exorcisms. Nor can the economic causes of national conflict be avoided by disarmament, Hague tribunals, international police, or abolition of secret diplomacy, as proposed by the Women’s Peace Party, the British Union of Democratic Control, the Independent Labor Party, etc. In a word, no measure dealing with military affairs or with mere political forms can in the long run have any effect whatever—as long as the present conflict of economic interests between the nations remains. The whole effort of the bourgeois pacifist from the Socialist standpoint is to attempt—in spite of the horrible and tremendous lessons of the present war—to close our eyes resolutely to the great task that lies before us, namely, to find a way either in the near future or ultimately to bring the conflict of national economic interests to an end.

Interests of nations do conflict.

There are two economic forces in the world which can not be conjured away either by words, by mere political rearrangements, or by any action whatever with regard to arms—whether making for more armament or less armament. There is no power at present which can prevent a great independent nation like Russia or Japan, Germany or Austria, where the political conditions are in whole or in part those of the eighteenth century, from declaring wars of conquest either against helpless, backward or small countries, or against the economically more advanced and more democratic countries like England, France, or the United States. It is true that industrial capitalism now preponderates in Germany, but no German publicist has ever denied the tremendous influence of the landlord nobility, both over the government and over the economic and political structure of German society. It is true also that these great agricultural estates are partially operated under capitalistic conditions, but the position of agricultural labor throughout enormous districts of Prussia is certainly semi-feudal. This is equally true of Austria, and the landlord nobility is perhaps even more predominant in Hungary than in Prussia.

The second fact which can not be conjured away by phrases or mere political rearrangements is that—under the present system of society—there is a direct conflict of interests between all nations, even the most civilized. This is why Norman Angell, in his new book (“Arms and Industry”), is at such great pains to deny that nations are economic units and “competing business firms.” His denial is futile.

Even workers gain from successful imperialism.

Even under individualistic capitalism all elements of the capitalist class have a greater or less interest in the business of the nation to which they belong; under the State Socialist policy, which is spreading everywhere, this community of interests is still closer. Moreover, under State Socialism even the working classes gain a share (of course, a small one) of whatever profits accrue from the successful competition of one’s own nation with other nations, and especially from such competition in its aggressive form, “imperialism.”

Socialists have sometimes denied that the economic interests of the working people of the various nations conflict.

Otto Bauer, of Austria, the world’s leading Socialist authority on Imperialism—who was to report on the subject for the International Socialist Congress to have been held in Vienna last summer—is of the contrary opinion. He believes that one of the worst features of the present system is that, under capitalism, the immediate economic interests of the working people of the various nations do conflict.

Only in so far as the working people attach greater importance to attaining Socialism than to anything they can gain under the present society, are their interests in all nations the same. In so far as the working people aim at an improvement of their condition this side of Socialism their economic interests are often in conflict.

Moreover, State Socialism, political democracy, and social reform, since they tend to give the working people a slightly greater share in the prosperity of each nation, intensify the workers’ nationalism and aggravate the conflict of immediate economic interests. This is why all the labor union parties of the world are tending in the same direction as that in which the German Party has been so clearly headed since the war—a tendency very clearly formulated by Vorwaerts when it recently asked whether the German Party was not becoming a “nationalistic social reform labor party.”

The bourgeois pacifists consider war to be the “great illusion.” In favoring war, under any conditions, they say, the capitalists, the middle classes, and the working classes are all mistaken. The only people that gain are the officers of armies and navies, and armament manufacturers. It is needless for Socialists—believers in the economic interpretation of politics—to point out that such a conclusion can only be reached by an abandonment of the economic point of view.

Only solution is industrial and financial internationalization.

In the opinion of internationalists, war can be abolished neither by armament or disarmament, nor by any measures leading in either direction. War can be abolished only by abolishing the causes of war, which every practical man admits are economic. By strengthening already existing and natural economic tendencies which are slowly bringing the nations together, the causes of war may be gradually done away with.

The outlook therefore is very hopeful—provided the intelligent (if selfish) ruling classes of the great capitalistic nations (England, France, America) decide once and for all to place no hopes either on militarism or pacifism. These natural economic tendencies indeed would already have made war impossible if they had not been impeded by artificial obstacles, such as tariff walls, immigration restriction, financial concessions to favored nations, etc.

And the modernization of undemocratic countries.

Socialists relied upon natural economic forces to abolish competition, establish the trusts, bring about government ownership, and prepare the way for democratic ownership. They rely upon similar economic forces to bring the nations together; reciprocal lowering of tariffs, the common development of the backward countries by the leading nations, the neutralization of canals—and last but not least, the modernization of Russia, Japan, Prussia, and Austria, that is, the full establishment in these countries of industrial capitalism and the semi-democratic political institutions that accompany it—as we see them in Great Britain, France, and America.

William English Walling, “The Great Illusions,” The New Review, June 1, 1915.

THE HIGHER IMPERIALISM

Cause of all wars found in economic motives:—that is, in competition of nationalist capitalistic groups.

When the Socialists in the belligerent countries voted for the war budgets and took their seats in the war cabinets, their whole attitude towards war underwent a fundamental change. It is true that in Germany and elsewhere the Socialists berated the capitalists and militarists for bringing on the conflict, but having made this protest, they acted exactly as did every one else. They excused themselves on the ground that the war was defensive. But the Kaiser and the Czar and the President of the French Republic all made the same excuse. It was not that the Socialists did not have power to put obstacles in the way of their governments. They did not have the will. They were forced into a painful position, where their love of country struggled against their adherence to the proletariat of the world. Despite themselves they were moved by idealistic considerations, which according to their theory should have had no weight.

For according to socialist doctrine the great events of the world are determined by economic factors. The idealists may speak of national honor and national duty, of the inviolability of treaties and the sacred rights of small nations, but the cause of all wars is really to be traced to the clash of economic motives. If we are to establish peace, we must found it on the customary reactions of selfish men, who want things and are willing to fight for them. Peace must be a peace between men as they are. It will not come by preaching, nor by nations surrendering their ambitions. It will not come through non-resistance, through the submission of the meek to the overbearing. It will not come through the nations joyously disarming as the light of reason breaks through the clouds. Reason is not so simple nor so unrelated a thing, for the material things that each nation wants, and the means by which the nation gets them, seem to the nation preeminently just and reasonable. However pompous the superstructure of ethics and ideals, the solid foundation of war, as of other social developments, is economic. So long as nations, or at all events their ruling groups, have conflicting economic interests, war is inevitable.

According to the Socialist, therefore, war and capitalism were inseparable. War must continue so long as the wage-system continued. The argument was simple. The great owners of capital, earning more than they could consume or profitably invest in home industries, were compelled to send their surplus to colonies and dependencies, where a new profit could be made. With the rapid increase of capital, however, the competition between the industrial nations for the possession of these agricultural dependencies became keener. Such competition meant war. As capitalism approached its climax wars were bound to become more frequent, destructive, and violent.

But now competitive imperialism makes way for imperialism by combination.

If this theory had been true it would have followed that the interests of capital would make for war and the interests of labor would make for peace. The day laborer, with no money in the bank, would not be interested in capital investments in Morocco, Manchuria, or Asia Minor. He would have no national interests whatever. But, as we may read in the admirable book on “Socialists and the War,” by William English Walling, a few Socialists have for some time begun to recognize that wage-earners do have special national interests and that these interests may be directly opposed to the interests of wage-earners in an adjoining country. If Serbia is completely shut off from the sea, her wage-earners suffer as acutely as do her peasants. If Switzerland is surrounded by a wall of hostile tariffs, if Holland and England are deprived of their colonies, the loss is felt not only by great capitalists but by the man who works with a trowel or a lathe. The ultimate interests of German and British wage-earners are identical, but if their immediate interests conflict, there will grow up a spirit of nationalism in both countries, and wage-earners will clamor for a national policy which may lead to war.

This seems to shut a door that leads to peace. But in shutting this door the newer Socialist thought has opened another. It assumes that the capitalists themselves are increasingly likely to profit by peace, to desire peace, and to achieve peace. According to the German Socialist, Karl Kautsky, we are approaching a new stage in the industrial development of the world. At first capitalists exploited the resources of their own country. Then they competed nationally for the exploitation of colonies and dependencies, and this policy led to imperialism and war. Now they are beginning to unite for the joint exploitation of all backward lands. Competitive imperialism is making way for imperialism by combination, just as competitive industry gave way to the trust. English, French, German, and Belgian capitalists will unite to exploit dependencies, will have joint spheres of influence, and the result will be peace with profits. Imperialism in the old sense will die out, and its place will be taken by a pacific super-imperialism, a higher imperialism.

This higher imperialism fraught with dangers.

What this theory actually means is that the normal development of industry and finance will automatically bring about international peace, and that socialism and even democracy are quite unessential to that end. Socialists may cry for peace, but they might as well cry for free air. But the theory concedes too much and goes too far. It is tainted with the same ultra-rationalistic spirit as is the earlier socialist theory, from which it is a reaction. War is not fought for economic motives alone, although these are important. Serbia would have been less vindictive had Austria conceded her an outlet for her trade, but in any case Serbia would not willingly be ruled by Austria, nor Bulgaria by Greece. Racial pride, religious prejudice, ancient traditions of all sorts still divide nations irrespective of economic interest. You cannot reduce a nation to a single unit thinking only in economic terms.

Moreover, even on the purely economic side there are infinite chances for war in the distribution of the profits of joint enterprises among the capitalists of the various nations. We all know how “gentlemen’s agreements” are broken as soon as it is profitable for the gentlemen to break them, and we cannot wholly trust irresponsible magnates, whether industrial or political, to be even intelligently selfish. Moreover, in the present state of the world the higher imperialism is a policy fraught with the very dangers and difficulties which it seeks to evade. If the capitalists of Europe were determined to exploit South America under a joint European control, the decision might directly lead to war. There are too many vested national interests in colonies, dependencies and spheres of influence to make internationalization of investment an immediate specific against war.

Internationalization of investment is only one step towards peace.

But in this matter of the higher imperialism we are less concerned to know how false than how true it is. It is a thing to be desired if it circumscribes war, even though it does not end war, if it tends towards peace, even though it does not by itself alone assure peace. We believe that this present war is not unlikely to end in a combination of great nations with enormous capital, willing to enter upon foreign investments jointly. The great capitalists, who influence if they do not rule our modern industrial nations, will often discover that it is cheaper to divide than to fight. It will be better to have twenty per cent. of a Chinese loan without going to war than thirty per cent.—or nothing at all—after a war. They will strive for the peace of “understanding”—the peace of give and take.

If the big speculators can thus merge their interests and deal across national boundaries, the little investors who have less to gain and more to lose by war will be even more pacific. Farmers and wage-earners have a still more attenuated interest in war, and a still more obvious interest in peace. Once great liens of peace are established, moreover, many of the incitements to war will of themselves disappear....

In the end, however, any internationalization of investment will be only a single step in the direction of peace. There are many other steps to be taken. Education, commerce, the development of an international morality, the creation of machinery for dealing with international disputes, are all essential to the evolution of peace. Industrial and political democracy are above all necessary. Men must be given a full life and a real stake in the wealth that peace provides, and they who bear the burdens of war must actually determine the national policies which make for war or peace.

The New Republic, June 5, 1915.

PRINCIPLES OF THE SETTLEMENT: POLITICAL

NATIONALITY AND THE FUTURE

War has shattered our constructive effort.

For the first time in our lives, we find ourselves in complete uncertainty as to the future. To uncivilized people the situation is commonplace; but in twentieth-century Europe we are accustomed to look ahead, to forecast accurately what lies before us, and then to choose our path and follow it steadily to its end; and we rightly consider that this is the characteristic of civilized men. The same ideal appears in every side of our life: in the individual’s morality as a desire for “Independence” strong enough to control most human passions: in our Economics as Estimates and Insurances: in our Politics as a great sustained concentration of all our surplus energies (in which parties are becoming increasingly at one in aim and effort, while their differences are shrinking to alternatives of method), to raise the material, moral, and intellectual standard of life throughout the nation. From all this fruitful, constructive, exacting work, which demands the best from us and makes us the better for giving it, we have been violently wrenched away and plunged into a struggle for existence with people very much like ourselves, with whom we have no quarrel.

We must face the fact that this is pure evil, and that we cannot escape it. We must fight with all our strength: every particle of our energy must be absorbed in the war: and meanwhile our social construction must stand still indefinitely, or even be in part undone, and every class and individual in the country must suffer in their degree, according to the quite arbitrary chance of war, in lives horribly destroyed and work ruined....

The psychological devastation of war is even more terrible than the material. War brings the savage substratum of human character to the surface, after it has swept away the strong habits that generations of civilized effort have built up. We saw how the breath of war in Ireland demoralized all parties alike. We have met the present more ghastly reality with admirable calmness; but we must be on our guard. Time wears out nerves, and War inevitably brings with it the suggestion of certain obsolete points of view, which in our real, normal life, have long been buried and forgotten.

It has roused the instinct of revenge.

It rouses the instinct of revenge. “If Germany has hurt us, we will hurt her more—to teach her not to do it again.” The wish is the savage’s automatic reaction, the reason his perfunctory justification of it: but the civilized man knows that the impulse is hopelessly unreasonable. The “hurt” is being at war, and the evil we wish to ban is the possibility of being at war again, because war prevents us working out our own lives as we choose. If we beat Germany and then humiliate her, she will never rest till she has “redeemed her honor,” by humiliating us more cruelly in turn. Instead of being free to return to our own pressing business, we shall have to be constantly on the watch against her. Two great nations will sit idle, weapon in hand, like two Afghans in their loopholed towers when the blood feud is between them; and we shall have sacrificed deliberately and to an ever-increasing extent (for the blood feud grows by geometrical progression), the very freedom for which we are now giving our lives.

And of plunder.

Another war instinct is plunder. War is often the savage’s profession: “‘With my sword, spear and shield I plow, I sow, I reap, I gather in the vintage.’ If we beat Germany our own mills and factories will have been at a standstill, our horses requisitioned and our crops unharvested, our merchant steamers stranded in dock if not sunk on the high seas, and our ‘blood and treasure’ lavished on the war: but in the end Germany’s wealth will be in our grasp, her colonies, her markets, and such floating riches as we can distrain upon by means of an indemnity. If we have had to beat our plowshares into swords, we can at least draw some profit from the new tool, and recoup ourselves partially for the inconvenience. It is no longer a question of irrational, impulsive revenge, perhaps not even of sweetening our sorrow by a little gain. To draw on the life-blood of German wealth may be the only way to replenish the veins of our exhausted Industry and Commerce.” So the plunder instinct might be clothed in civilized garb: “War,” we might express it, “is an investment that must bring in its return.”

The first argument against this point of view is that it has clearly been the inspiring idea of Germany’s policy, and history already shows that armaments are as unbusinesslike a speculation for civilized countries as war is an abnormal occupation for civilized men. We saw the effect of the Morocco tension upon German finance in 1911, and the first phase of the present war has been enough to show how much Germany’s commerce will inevitably suffer, whether she wins or loses.

It is only when all the armaments are on one side and all the wealth is on the other, that war pays; when, in fact, an armed savage attacks a civilized man possessed of no arms for the protection of his wealth. Our Afghans in their towers are sharp enough not to steal each other’s cows (supposing they possess any of their own) for cows do not multiply by being exchanged, and both Afghans would starve in the end after wasting all their bullets in the skirmish. They save their bullets to steal cows from the plainsmen who cannot make reprisals.

If Germany were really nothing but a “nation in arms,” successful war might be as lucrative for her as an Afghan’s raid on the plain, but she is normally a great industrial community like ourselves. In the last generation she has achieved a national growth of which she is justly proud. Like our own, it has been entirely social and economic. Her goods have been peacefully conquering the world’s markets. Now her workers have been diverted en masse from their prospering industry to conquer the same markets by military force, and the whole work of forty years is jeopardized by the change of method.

But to fight for trade no longer pays.

Fighting for trade and industry is not like fighting for cattle. Cattle are driven from one fastness to another, and if no better, are at least no worse for the transit. Civilized wealth perishes on the way. Our economic organization owes its power and range to the marvelous forethought and cooperation that has built it up; but the most delicate organisms are the most easily dislocated, and the conqueror, whether England or Germany, will have to realize that, though he may seem to have got the wealth of the conquered into his grip, the total wealth of both parties will have been vastly diminished by the process of the struggle.

Germany’s economic ruin would compromise world-prosperity.

The characteristic feature of modern wealth is that it is international. Economic gain and loss is shared by the whole world, and the shifting of the economic balance does not correspond to the moves in the game of diplomatists and armies. Germany’s economic growth has been a phenomenon quite independent of her political ambitions, and Germany’s economic ruin would compromise something far greater than Germany’s political future—the whole world’s prosperity. British wealth, among the rest, would be dealt a deadly wound by Germany’s economic death, and it would be idle to pump Germany’s last life-blood into our veins, if we were automatically draining them of our own blood in the process.

But issues greater than the economic are involved. The modern “Nation” is for good or ill an organism one and indivisible, and all the diverse branches of national activity flourish or wither with the whole national well-being. You cannot destroy German wealth without paralyzing German intellect and art, and European civilization, if it is to go on growing, cannot do without them. Every doctor and musician, every scientist, engineer, political economist and historian, knows well his debt to the spiritual energy of the German nation. In the moments when one realizes the full horror of what is happening, the worst thought is the aimless hurling to destruction of the world’s only true wealth, the skill and nobility and genius of human beings, and it is probably in the German casualties that the intellectual world is suffering its most irreparable human losses.

With these facts in our minds, we can look into the future more clearly, and choose our policy (supposing that we win the war, and, thereby, the power to choose) with greater confidence. We have accepted the fact that war itself is evil, and will in any event bring pure loss to both parties: that no good can come from the war itself, but only from our policy when the war is over: and that the one good our policy can achieve, without which every gain is delusive, is the banishing of this evil from the realities of the future. This is our one supreme “British interest,” and it is a German interest just as much, and an interest of the whole world.

This war, and the cloud of war that has weighed upon us so many years before the bursting of the storm, has brought to bankruptcy the “National State.” Till 1870 it was the ultimate ideal of European politics, as it is still in the Balkans, where the Turk has broken Time’s wings. It was such a fruitful ideal that it has rapidly carried us beyond itself, and in the last generation the life of the world has been steadily finding new and wider channels. In the crisis of change from nationalism to internationalism we were still exposed to the plague of war. The crisis might have been passed without it, and war banished for ever between the nations of civilized Europe. Now that the catastrophe has happened (it is childish to waste energy in incriminations against its promoters) we must carry through the change completely and at once: we cannot possibly afford to be exposed to the danger again.

The bases of true nationality must be laid.

No tool, machine, or idea made by men has an immortal career. Sooner or later they all run amuck, and begin to do evil instead of good. At that stage savage or unskilful men destroy them by force and replace them by their opposite: civilized men get them under control, and build them into something new and greater. Nationality will sink from being the pinnacle of politics only to become their foundation, and till the foundations are laid true, further building is impossible. But the bases of nationality have never yet been laid true in Europe. When we say that “nationality was the political ideal of the nineteenth century,” and that 1870 left the populations of Europe organized in national groups, we are taking far too complacent a view of historical facts. The same century that produced a united Italy and Germany, saw out the whole tragedy of Poland, from the first partition in 1772 to the last revolt in 1863. Human ideas do not spring into the world full-grown and shining like Athena: they trail the infection of evil things from the past.

In the Dark Ages Europe’s most pressing need and only practicable ideal was strong government. Strong government came with its blessings, but it brought the evil of territorial ambitions. The Duke of Burgundy spent the wealth of his Netherland subjects in trying to conquer the Swiss mountaineers. Burgundy succumbed to the king of France. But the very factor that made the French kings survive in the struggle for existence between governments, the force of compact nationality which the French kingdom happened to contain, delivered the inheritance of the kings to the Nation.

Nationalism has perpetuated violence.

The French Nation in the Revolution burst the chrysalis of irresponsible government beneath which it had grown to organic life, but like a true heir it took over the Royal Government’s ideal: “Peace within and piracy without.” France had already begun aggression abroad before she had accomplished self-government at home, and in delivering herself to Napoleon she sacrificed her liberty to her ambition. Napoleon’s only enduring achievements outside France were the things he set himself to prevent, the realization, by a forceful reaction against force, of German and Italian nationality. Nationalism was converted to violence from the outset, and the struggle for existence between absolute governments has merely been replaced by a struggle between nationalities, equally blind, haphazard, and non-moral, but far more terrific, just because the virtue of self-government is to focus and utilize human energy so much more effectively than the irresponsible government it has superseded.

Naturally the result of this planless strife has been no grouping of Europe on a just and reasonable national basis. France and England, achieving racial frontiers and national self-government early, inherited the Earth before Germany and Italy struggled up beside them, to take their leavings of markets and colonial areas. But the government that united Germany had founded its power on the partition of Poland, and in the second Balkan War of 1913 we saw a striking example of the endless chain of evil forged by an act of national injustice.

Intranational oppression has been a chief cause of war.

The Hungarians used the liberty they won in 1867 to subject the Slavonic population between themselves and the sea, and prevent its union with the free principality of Serbia of the same Slavonic nationality. This drove Serbia in 1912 to follow Hungary’s example by seizing the coast of the non-Slavonic Albanians; and when Austria-Hungary prevented this (a right act prompted by most unrighteous motives), Serbia fought an unjust war with Bulgaria and subjected a large Bulgarian population, in order to gain access to the only seaboard left her, the friendly Greek port of Salonika.

Hungary and Serbia are nominally national states: but more than half the population in Hungary, and perhaps nearly a quarter in Serbia, is alien, only held within the state by force against its will. The energy of both states is perverted to the futile and demoralizing work of “Magyarizing” and “Serbizing” subject foreign populations, and they have not even been successful. The resistance of Southern Slav nationalism on the defensive to the aggression of Hungarian nationalism has given the occasion for the present catastrophe.

The evil element in nationalism under its many names, “Chauvinism,” “Jingoism,” “Prussianism,” is the one thing in our present European civilization that can and does produce the calamity of war. If our object is to prevent war, then, the way to do so is to purge Nationality of this evil. This we cannot do by any mechanical means, but only by a change of heart, by converting public opinion throughout Europe from “National Competition” to “National Cooperation.” Public opinion will never be converted so long as the present system of injustice remains in force, so long as one nation has less and another more than its due. The first step towards internationalism is not to flout the problems of nationality, but to solve them.

The map of Europe must be justly revised.

The most important practical business, then, of the conference that meets when war is over, will be the revision of the map of Europe....

Otherwise no permanent settlement is possible.

If we do not think about nationality, it is simply because we have long taken it for granted, and our mind is focussed on posterior developments; but it is increasingly hard to keep ourselves out of touch with other countries, and though our blindness has been partly distraction, it has also been in part deliberate policy. We saw well enough that the present phase of the national problem in Europe carried in it the seeds of war. We rightly thought that war itself was the evil, an evil incomparably greater than the national injustices that might become the cause of it. We knew that, if these questions were opened, war would follow. We accordingly adopted the only possible course. We built our policy on the chance that national feeling could be damped down till it had been superseded in the public opinion of Europe by other interests, not because Nationalism was unjustified, but because it endangered so much more than it was worth. Knowing that we had passed out of the nationalist phase ourselves, and that from our present political point of view war was purely evil, we hoped that it was merely a question of time for the Continental populations to reach the same standpoint. Notably in Germany, the focus of danger, we saw social interests coming more and more to the front at the expense of militarism. We threw ourselves into the negative task of staving off the catastrophe in the interim, by a strenuous policy of compromise and conciliation, which has been successful on at least two critical occasions. Now that the evil has been too powerful and the catastrophe has happened, the reasons for this policy are dead. Nationalism has been strong enough to produce war in spite of us. It has terribly proved itself to be no outworn creed, but a vital force to be reckoned with. It is stronger on the Continent than social politics. It is the raw material that litters the whole ground. We must build it into our foundations, or give up the task, not only of constructive social advance beyond the limits we have already reached, but even of any fundamental reconstruction of what the war will have destroyed.

Perhaps we might have foretold this from the case of Ireland immediately under our eyes. Failure to solve her national problem has arrested Ireland’s development since the seventeenth century, and imprisoned her in a world of ideas almost unintelligible to an Englishman till he has traveled in the Balkans. This has been England’s fault, and we are now at last in a fair way to remedy it. The moment we have succeeded in arranging that the different national groups in Ireland govern themselves in the way they really wish, the national question will pass from the Irish consciousness; they will put two centuries behind them at one leap, and come into line with ourselves. The Dublin strike, contemporary with the arming of the Volunteers, shows how the modern problems are jostling at the heels of the old. Although “Unionist” and “Nationalist” politicians could still declare that their attitude towards the strike was neutral, the parliament of the new Irish state will discuss the social problem and nothing else.

Nationality is subjective not material.

Ireland, then, has forced us to think about the problem of nationalism; and our Irish experience will be invaluable to us when peace is made, and we take in hand, in concert with our allies, the national questions of the rest of Europe. To begin with, we already have a notion of what Nationality is. Like all great forces in human life, it is nothing material or mechanical, but a subjective psychological feeling in living people. This feeling can be kindled by the presence of one or several of a series of factors: a common country, especially if it is a well defined physical region, like an island, a river basin, or a mountain mass; a common language, especially if it has given birth to a literature; a common religion; and that much more impalpable force, a common tradition or sense of memories shared from the past.

“Historical sentiment” is largely factitious.

But it is impossible to argue a priori from the presence of one or even several of these factors to the existence of a nationality: they may have been there for ages and kindled no response. And it is impossible to argue from one case to another: precisely the same group of factors may produce nationality here, and there have no effect. Great Britain is a nation by geography and tradition, though important Keltic-speaking sections of the population in Wales and the Highlands do not understand the predominant English language. Ireland is an island smaller still and more compact, and is further unified by the almost complete predominance of the same English language, for the Keltic speech is incomparably less vigorous here than in Wales; yet the absence of common tradition combines with religious differences to divide the country into two nationalities, at present sharply distinct from one another and none the less hostile because their national psychology is strikingly the same. Germany is divided by religion in precisely the same way as Ireland, her common tradition is hardly stronger, and her geographical boundaries quite vague: yet she has built up her present concentrated national feeling in three generations. Italy has geography, language and traditions to bind her together; and yet a more vivid tradition is able to separate the Ticinese from his neighbors, and bind him to people of alien speech and religion beyond a great mountain range. The Armenian nationality does not occupy a continuous territory, but lives by language and religion. The Jews speak the language of the country where they sojourn, but religion and tradition hold them together. The agnostic Jew accepts not only the language but all the other customs of his adopted countrymen, but tradition by itself is too strong for him: he remains a Jew and cannot be assimilated.

These instances taken at random show that each case must be judged on its own merits, and that no argument holds good except the ascertained wish of the living population actually concerned. Above all we must be on our guard against “historical sentiment,” that is, against arguments taken from conditions which once existed or were supposed to exist, but which are no longer real at the present moment. They are most easily illustrated by extreme examples. Italian newspapers have described the annexation of Tripoli as “recovering the soil of the Fatherland” because it was once a province of the Roman Empire; and the entire region of Macedonia is claimed by Greek chauvinists on the one hand, because it contains the site of Pella, the cradle of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., and by Bulgarians on the other, because Ohhrida, in the opposite corner, was the capital of the Bulgarian Tzardom in the tenth century A.D., though the drift of time has buried the tradition of the latter almost as deep as the achievements of the “Emathian Conqueror,” on which the modern Greek nationalist insists so strongly.

We must understand nationalistic aims and diversities.

The national problems of Europe are numerous, and each one is beset by arguments good, bad, and indifferent, some no more specious than the above, some so elaborately staged that it requires the greatest discernment to expose them. Vast bodies of people, with brains and money at their disposal, have been interested in obscuring the truth, and have used every instrument in their power to do so. It is therefore essential for us in England to take up these hitherto remote and uninteresting national problems in earnest, to get as near to the truth as we possibly can, both as to what the respective wishes of the different populations are, and as to how far it is possible to reconcile them with each other and with Geography; and to come to the conference which will follow the war and is so much more important than the war itself, with a clear idea of the alternative solutions and a mature judgment upon their relative merits.

To accomplish this we need a coordination of knowledge on a large scale, knowledge of history, geography, religion, national psychology and public opinion....

Individuality and tolerance must be our international ideals.

With the growth of civilization the human and the territorial unit become less and less identical. In a primitive community the members are undifferentiated from one another: the true human unit is the total group, and not the individual, and the territory this group occupies is a unit too, self-sufficing and cut off from intercourse with the next valley. In modern Europe every sub-group and every individual has developed a “character” or “individuality” of its own which must have free play; while the growth of communications, elaboration of organization, and economic interdependence of the whole world have broken down the barriers between region and region. The minimum territorial block that can be organized efficiently as a separate political unit according to modern standards is constantly growing in size: the maximum human group which can hold together without serious internal divergence is as steadily diminishing.

This would look like an impasse, were it not corrected by the virtues of civilization itself. We started with the fact that the essence of civilization was “Forethought” and its ideal the “power of free choice”: the complementary side of this ideal, on the principle “Do as you would be done by,” is to allow free choice to others when they are in your power. It is a virtue with as many names as there are spheres of human life: “Forbearance,” “Toleration,” “Constitutionalism.”...

Arnold J. Toynbee, “Nationality and the War,” chap. I.

NATIONALITY AND SOVEREIGNTY

We must have new forms of guarantee.

The old Europe is dead, the old vision vanished, and we are wrestling in agony for new inspiration....

We must beware of putting our new wine into old bottles. While guarantees hold, they conserve their charge: when they break, the destruction is worse than if they had never existed. Unless we can ensure that the sovereign States of Europe respect European guarantees hereafter in other fashion than Germany at the present crisis, we must modify the formula or else discard it altogether.

Can the mechanism of the European system be safeguarded against its individual members?...

We have asked our question and must accept the answer. It is useless to fortify our new European organism by guarantees of the old order, because we cannot fortify such guarantees themselves against the sovereign national State. Whenever it chooses, the sovereign unit can shatter the international mechanism by war. We are powerless to prevent it: all we can do is to abandon our direct attack, and look for the causes which impel States to a choice as terrible for themselves as for their victims.

The German position.

“You ask,” the Germans say, “why we broke our contract towards Belgium? It would be more pertinent to ask how we were ever committed to such a contract at all.

“The heart of modern Germany is the industrial world of the Rhineland and Westphalia. The Belgian frontier and the Belgian tariff-wall rob this region of its natural outlet at Antwerp, yet the contract expressly forbids us to right this economic and geographical wrong by uniting the sea-port to its hinterland.

“The chief need of modern Germany is a source of raw produce and a market for her finished products in the tropical zone. Belgium has staked out for herself the one important region in Africa which was not already occupied by France or Great Britain. She can do nothing with it, while we—but this contract expressly forbids us to kick the Belgian dog out of the manger.

“Because of this Belgian guarantee we must go in want of almost everything we need, yet meanwhile our great neighbors on either flank have conspired to take from us even the little we possess already. The struggle with France and Russia on which we are now engaged has been impending for years, and on our part it is a struggle for existence, but even here the same remorseless contract operates to paralyze our efforts. On the scale of modern warfare the Western battle-front must extend from Switzerland to the North Sea, yet the greater part of this immense zone is neutralized by natural and artificial obstacles on either side. From Switzerland to the Ardennes there will be stalemate: the decision will be reached in the open country between the Ardennes and the coast. Here, as soon as war broke out, France and our own fatherland had to concentrate the terrific energy of their armaments, yet we had contracted away our initiative in this vital area, for it lies within the frontiers of the Belgian State. The Government we had guaranteed might prepare the ground for France and ruin it for ourselves, yet because of the guarantee we must look on passively at the digging of our grave.

“Why, then, had we suffered ourselves to be bound hand and foot? We had not: our grandfathers had entailed the bonds upon us. When they signed the contract in 1839, they knew not what they did. At that time Germany had no industry, Belgium had no colonies, and the Franco-German frontier between the Ardennes and the Jura was not closed to field operations by two continuous lines of opposing fortifications. Had their signature been demanded in 1914, they would have refused it as indignantly as we should have refused it ourselves. To us no choice was offered, and if we have asserted for ourselves the right to choose, who dares in his heart to condemn us? Who will impose a changeless law upon a changing world?”

We must provide for national growth.

This is Germany’s argument about Belgium. Her facts may be true or false, the arguments she builds on them valid or fallacious. That is not the point. Behind arguments and facts there looms an idea that can inspire an individual nation to make war on Europe. We must do justice to this idea, if it is not to play the same havoc again.

Humanity has an instinctive craving for something eternal, absolute, petrified. This seems to be a fundamental factor in our psychology: it has obtruded itself equally in spheres as diverse as religion and politics, but it has been especially dominant in diplomacy.

Whenever the European organism proves its instability by breaking down, we start in quest of a perfect mechanism, a “permanent settlement.” We are invariably disappointed, but invariably we return to the quest again. The Congress of statesmen at Vienna followed this will-o’-the-wisp in 1814: in 1915 the belligerent democracies are preparing to lead themselves the same dance. “Europe is in a mess,” we are all saying: “Let us tidy her up ‘once for all,’ and then we can live comfortably ever after.”

We might as well expect a baby to “live comfortably ever after” in its swaddling clothes....

The European organism is full of dynamic life.

So it is with the European organism. It is as full of life, as perpetually in transformation, as the individual national molecules of which it is woven, yet we confuse it in turn with each of its transitory garments. If we are to find a satisfactory issue out of the present crisis, we must begin by correcting our standpoint.

The impending settlement will not be permanent, and the better it fits the situation, the less permanent will it be....

Our real work will be to regulate this immediate settlement so that it varies in harmony with the subsequent growth of Europe and modifies its structure and mechanism to meet the organism’s changing needs.

We have now discovered the flaw in guarantees of the old order. They were framed for rigidity, and therefore were doomed to crack. Our new guarantees must be elastic: they must be forged of steel not cast in iron.

How can we frame guarantees of this malleable character?...

(i.) Firstly, we propose guarantees of political independence and integrity in the case of the three Scandinavian States, the Slovene Unit, the Greek islands off Anatolia, Persia, and the Sultanate of Oman. The autonomy guaranteed to Poland within the Russian Empire comes under the same head.

(ii.) Secondly, we propose to guarantee economic rights-of-way to one State across the political territory of another. Instances of this type are the Russian railway through Norway to the Atlantic and through Persia to the Indian Ocean; Poland’s title to free trade down the Vistula, and to the enjoyment of a free port at Danzig; and Germany’s similar claim to an unhampered outlet at Trieste.

Both these classes of guarantee are adapted from the international machinery invented during the nineteenth century. The first class is an extension of the political guarantee given to Belgium in 1839, the second of the economic right-of-way secured to her through Dutch waters, in order to furnish the commerce of Antwerp with a free passage down the estuary of the Scheldt to the open sea.

No settlement can be permanent.

Our standpoint towards these two classes is inevitably prejudiced by their associations. We envisage them as embodied “once for all,” like their nineteenth-century precedents, in a contract, and like nineteenth-century diplomacy we tend to regard such contracts as so many girders in a “permanent settlement.”

(iii.) There is a third class, however, which has no precedent in the past, and which will react upon our standpoint in the very opposite direction: our proposed guarantee of alien minorities within the national State....

The German populations transferred with Schleswig to Denmark and with the Eastern frontier-zone to Autonomous Poland; the Poles abandoned to Germany in West Prussia; the Germans and Slovaks who cannot be disentangled from Hungary; the Christian elements in Anatolia and Arabia—these are a few out of many instances, and each one of them is a refutation of “finality.”

The fact that such minorities must inevitably be left on our hands compels us to recognize that beyond a certain degree the economic and the national factor are not commensurable. Here is an essential imperfection in the best settlement we can possibly devise.

The fact that these minorities require a guarantee reveals a deficiency still more grave than the other, inasmuch as it is not environmental but psychological. It means that hardly a single national society in Europe has yet become capable of national toleration. Just as people were persecuted for their religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and for their political opinions in the nineteenth, so they are still in the twentieth century almost universally exposed to persecution for their national individuality. In this sphere the social evolution of Europe is exceptionally backward, and the problem of nationality will never be solved till this psychological incongruity is removed.

But elastic guarantees will further racial toleration.

This at once reduces to their proper proportion both the immediate geographical settlement of the problem which we have elaborated in this book and that guarantee of alien minorities which we have found to be its necessary supplement. In this light, the contracts in which such guarantees are enshrined appear as the transitory scaffolding they are. Weakened by the morbid hypertrophy of nationalism which has been preying upon her for years, exhausted by the convulsion of war in which the malady has culminated, Europe must walk on crutches now or else collapse; yet she will not be a cripple forever. Relieved by these guarantees from the immediate strain of unmitigated national friction, she will be able to concentrate all her energy upon her spiritual convalescence. As soon as she has trained herself to national toleration, she will discard the guarantees and walk unaided.

So far from constituting a “permanent settlement,” our third type of guarantee is an intimation that the problem still remains unsettled. The work will not be complete until we can dispense with the instrument, but the instrument will not accomplish the work unless it is wielded by a craftsman’s hand. Not only are guarantees of our third type merely the means to an end beyond themselves: the contract in which it is embodied is in this case the least important part of the guarantee.

When we guarantee a national minority we have of course to define certain liberties which it is to enjoy—liberties, for instance, of religion, education, local self-government—and all the parties to the Conference must contract responsibility for the observance of such stipulations; yet when we have done this, we cannot simply deposit our document in some international “Ark of the Covenant” and go our ways. The essence of the guarantee is its subsequent interpretation.

The relation between the different elements in a country is continually changing. One church dwindles while another makes converts; one race advances in culture while another degenerates; man’s indefatigable struggle to dominate his physical environment alters the natural boundaries between localities: a barrier that once seemed insurmountable is pierced, and leaves one formerly insignificant in relative prominence. Each of these modifications demands an adjustment of the guarantee, and since they are an infinite series, the guarantee itself requires ceaseless manipulation if it is to perform its function aright.