The World in Chains
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John Mavrogordato >> The World in Chains
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Sec. 11
Diplomacy not bad in itself
The real importance of diplomacy, as I have said, is in the fact that it
is a mitigation of primary ferocity, a symptom of readiness to
negotiate, a recognition of the fact that disputes need not be settled
by immediate violence: and as such it points to a time when war may be
superseded, as personal combat has been superseded by litigation. The
man who puts a quarrel with his neighbour into the hands of a legal
representative is a stage higher in social civilisation than the man who
fights it out at sight. Diplomats are the legal representatives of
nations--only there is no supernational court before which they can
state their case.
Of course, it is perfectly true that the ultimate sanction of diplomacy
is always force, that international negotiations may always be resolved
into a series of polite threats, and that the envoy of the small and
weak nation rarely has any influence. Indeed there are few less enviable
situations than that of the minister of a very small State at the court
of a very large one. But the mere fact that force is their sanction does
not _ipso facto_ dispose of diplomatic and arbitrational methods. We all
know that the force at the disposal of the Sovereign is the ultimate
sanction of Law. But that force never has to be fully exerted because
there is a common consent to respect the Law and its officers.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 10: Cf. Webb, _Industrial Democracy_, p. 718.]
Sec. 12
Manners no Substitute for Morals
The real difference between legal methods and the methods of diplomacy
(in which I here include international conversations of every sort) is
that the latter take place, as it were, in a vacuum. There is no
Sovereign, no common denominator, no unifying system in which both
parties are related by their common obligations. They exist and act in
two separate moral spheres, and no real intercourse is possible between
them. For all their ambassadors and diplomatic conferences the nations
of Europe are only wolves with good manners. And manners, as we all
know, are no substitute for morals.
Sec. 13
War a Moral Anachronism
Thus we come back to our thesis that war is not only possible but
inevitable so long as the extent of the moral sphere is conterminous
with the frontiers of the State. But merely to explain laboriously that
all this organised killing is not really a paradox but the natural
accompaniment of a certain stage of moral development, and to leave it
at that, would be rather to exaggerate our philosophic detachment. The
point is that we are long past the stage of regarding any but our
fellow-subjects as moral outlaws. For some years, to say the least, it
has been generally received that the sphere of morality is co-extensive
with mankind. In spite of certain lingering exceptions, it is to-day a
commonplace of thought that every human being on the earth is our
colleague in civilisation; is a member that is of the human race, which
finding itself on this earth has got somehow to make the best of it; is
a shareholder in the human asset of self-consciousness which we are
called upon to exploit. It would certainly be hard to find a man of what
we have called enlightened opinions who would not profess, whatever his
private feelings, that it is as great a crime to kill a Hottentot or a
Jew as to kill an Englishman. With certain lingering exceptions then we
already regard the foreigner as a member of our own moral system. The
moral sphere has already extended or is at least in course of extension
to its ultimate limits: and war is a survival from the penultimate stage
of morality. War, to put it mildly, is a moral anachronism. War between
European nations is civil war. Logically all war should be recognised at
once, at any rate by enlightened opinion, as the crime, the disaster,
the ultimate disgrace that it obviously is. Why then do we cling to the
implications of a system that we have grown out of? Why do we affect the
limitation of boundaries that have been already extended? Or is our
prison so lovely that though the walls fall down we refuse to walk out
into the air?
CHAPTER II
A sociologist wrote to the Vali of Aleppo, asking: What are the
imports of Aleppo? What is the nature of the water-supply? What is
the birth-rate, and the death-rate?
The Vali replied: It is impossible for anyone to number the camels
that kneel in the markets of Aleppo. The water is sufficient; no
one ever dies of thirst in Aleppo. How many children shall be born
in this great city is known only to Allah the compassionate, the
merciful. And who would venture to inquire the tale of the dead?
For it is revealed only to the Angels of death who shall be taken
and who shall be left. O idle Frank, cease from your presumptuous
questioning, and know that these things are not revealed to the
children of men.
The _Bustan of Mahmud Aga el-Arnauty_.
Sec. 1
The Armament Ring
What, in short, are the forces that make for the anachronistic survival
of war--apart of course from the defect that it is always with us, the
habit of inertia, sometimes called Conservatism?
The obvious answer is not, I think, the correct one. At least it is
correct as far as it goes, but leaves us very far from a complete
explanation of this unpleasant survival. So scandalous is the
interrelation of the armament firms[11] which has developed the world's
trade in munitions and explosives into one obscene cartel; so cynical is
the avidity with which their agents exchange their trade secrets, sell
ships and guns, often by means of diplomatic blackmail, to friend or foe
alike, and follow those pioneers of civilisation the missionary, the gin
merchant and the procurer,[12] into the wildest part of the earth; so
absurd on the face of it is the practice of allowing the manufacture of
armaments to remain in the hands of private companies; that it is very
tempting to see in the great Armament Firms the principal if not the
only cause of modern war. Examiners of German militarism, most of them
stupid enough to quote Nietzsche, may be pardoned for emphasising the
political influence of Krupp; and since every great Power has a more or
less efficiently organised Krupp of its own, it would be permissible to
suggest that war would be already obsolete but for the intensive
cultivation it receives for the benefit of Krupp, Creusot, Elswick and
the rest. But it would be wrong; our syllogism would have a badly
undistributed middle. It is true that Krupp in particular, who is the
actual owner of more than one popular German newspaper, and other
armament firms in a smaller degree, exercise an enormous influence on
national opinion, create their own markets by the threat of war, and
would go bankrupt if wars should cease. You may also say that their
shareholders live by prostituting the patriotism of their
fellow-citizens: in short, you may denounce them with the most expensive
rhetoric to be had without doing them any injustice. But the fact
remains that their position with regard to war is exactly analogous to
that of the great breweries with regard to drunkenness. They live by
taking advantage of human weakness. It is quite accurate, therefore, to
describe their earnings as immoral, but they are no more the cause of
the immorality they exploit and undoubtedly encourage, than makers of
seismological instruments are responsible for the occurrence of
earthquakes. The interests of one trade alone, however powerful in
itself, would never be strong enough to plunge a nation into war. They
are, of course, accessories to the crime; but the militarism they are
guilty of fostering has other primary explanations.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 11: Several books have been published giving details of the
Armament Ring and international "Kruppism." I don't think that the
language here used does any injustice to the facts.]
[Footnote 12: See below, Sec. 7.]
Sec. 2
Eugenics?
In this brief investigation of the possible causes of war, it must be
understood that what we want to find is what is called a "sufficient
reason" for its continued existence. The armament trades may supply the
means, the occasion, the stimulant, but their relation to it is not
essentially causal. Many writers of another school have attempted to
prove that the sufficient reason of war is a beneficent function of
which they believe it to be capable. This imaginary function is none
other than that of improving the race, and we may admit at once that, if
there were the slightest scientific basis for such a belief, the
bloodiest war would be morally justified, and it would be the religious
duty of every individual to kill as many as possible of his fellows for
the benefit of their descendants. But of course modern warfare so far
from improving the race must sensibly exhaust it. In ancient Sparta, and
generally whenever the conditions of warfare approximated to those of
personal combat, courage and the allied characteristics of mental as
well as of physical nobility must have had a survival value; whereas in
modern warfare which makes for the indiscriminate extermination of all
combatants, the result is exactly reversed. Our semi-scientific
militarists forget that the "survival of the fittest"[13] is in nature
essentially a process of selective elimination; and modern war is a
process of inverted selection which eliminates the brave, the
adventurous and the healthy; precisely those members of the community
who are best fitted to survive, that is to propagate their kind, in the
ordinary environment of political life. Conscription, indeed, spreading
a wider net than the voluntary system, may be described as an
institution for exposing the best citizens of a state to abnormal risks
of annihilation. As a matter of historic fact we are told, though I
don't know on what authority, that the Napoleonic wars, how much less
deadly than our own, reduced by an inch the average height of the French
nation.
So much, in brief, for the "scientific" justification of war. It is
evident that by the eugenic argument war could be defended only if we
agreed to send into battle precisely those men whom our recruiting
officers disqualify. A good deal might be said, from the sociologist's
point of view, in favour of a system of cathartic conscription which
would rejuvenate England with a watchword of "The Unfit to the
Trenches."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 13: They usually add to their mental confusion the elementary
blunder of using the word "fittest" in a moral instead of in its
biological sense.]
Sec. 3
Patriotism
If again there were any evidence to show that war and war alone kept
alive the spirit of true patriotism, it would be less easy to denounce
its manifold wickedness. For true patriotism, although like all
passionate emotion it involves a certain mental distortion, a slight
disturbance of the rational orbit, is yet one of those happy diseases
which relieve the colourlessness of strict normality. It is a magic, a
glamour, of the nature of personal affection, which only great poetry
can fully express, and volumes of bad poetry cannot quite destroy. It
has besides a real political value, binding the State together, and
giving it a stronger moral coherence than can be attained by any legal
or constitutional authority; a fact that is illustrated by those
distressful countries in which its limits are not conterminous with the
political boundaries of the State. I am inclined to think that just
because true patriotism is of the nature of a personal affection, it is
an emotion that cannot be inspired by an empire, any more than personal
affection can be inspired by a corporation or a joint-stock company.[14]
Certainly Imperialism more often gives rise to a sentimental worship of
force and a certain promiscuous lust for mere extension of territory
which are quite alien to the steady devotion of the patriot to the land
he knows.[15]
Unless one be a poet, it is difficult, as may perhaps be gathered from
the preceding paragraph, sufficiently to praise genuine patriotism
without falling into vague rhetoric. But I submit that there is nothing
to show that this political emotion is created, stimulated, or even
discovered by war. Actually it seems that the reverse is the case, if
one may judge by the fact that war is invariably accompanied by an
overwhelming outbreak of every spurious form of patriotism that was ever
invented by the devil to make an honest man ashamed of his country. True
patriotism is a calm and lovely orientation of the spirit towards the
vital beauty of England. It has no noisy manifestations and consequently
one may not be able to find it among the crowds who shout most loudly
for war.
One finds instead a sort of violent fever and calenture which not merely
deflects, as any emotion may, but totally inhibits the rational
operations of the mind. The newspapers supply a legion of witnesses.
Thus the _Evening Standard_ perorates against some pacificist lecturer
(who had attempted to clear his views from all sorts of
misrepresentations) with the magnificent comment that he had not
"repudiated his remarks as to the pleasure which the tune of the
Austrian National Anthem gave him."[16] But I should weary you were I
to transcribe a tithe of the stupid remarks made by persons in authority
under the influence of war. The record, I believe, in England is held at
present by Mr. Bodkin, K.C.
It may be said of course that men, and newspapers, are equally stupid in
time of peace; and I fear that fundamentally this is true. War does not
change their nature, but only brings to the bubbling surface the dregs
and vileness and scum. War does not change any one's nature; and that is
why it is vain to expect that under its influence those crowds will love
their country who never loved anything before. But if war cannot create
it may at least be supposed to discover and test the existent patriotism
of the nation. And this supposition is corroborated at first sight by
the realisation that hundreds of thousands, that actually millions of
previously ordinary young men have implied by enlisting their
willingness to die for England. One might, of course, reason that no
individual recruit really believes he is going to be killed, that each
boy thinks he will be one of the lucky ones who escape all the bullets
unhurt to enjoy an honoured return, that recruiting would have failed
entirely if the barracks were explicitly a grave and enlistment the
certainty of violent death or mutilation. But somehow I don't think that
would be a fair argument. It is more pertinent if less easy to remember
that a readiness to die for one's country is not the highest form of
political virtue. If it be, as it is, a solemn and wonderful thing to be
willing to die for the salvation (_ex hypothesi_) of England, it must be
much more wonderful and solemn to be willing to die in order slightly to
increase the income of one's family. And every schoolboy knows that the
Chinaman of the old regime was willing to have his head cut off for the
payment of a few dollars to his next of kin. Let no one ever deny our
soldiers the honour of their courage and nobility; but the fact remains
that the readiness to die for England is a less adequate test of
patriotism than a readiness to live for England; and if the readiness to
live for the State rather than for private interests had been for a
hundred years a social virtue whose votaries could be numbered by the
million, then indeed England would be to-day a nation worth dying for.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 14: If anyone were to suggest that this is disproved by the
unparalleled nobility of Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and
Indians in the present campaign, I should reply that they are actuated
by devotion not to the Empire but to England, not to the Company but to
the Chairman of the Company. This may be a quibble, but I think the
distinction is real. Anyhow, I leave it at that, as the point has no
primary relevance.]
[Footnote 15: See below, Chapter IV, Sec. 5.]
[Footnote 16: The paragraph is worth preserving in its entirety: "Mr. W.
N. Ewer, who lectured at Finchley for the Union of Democratic Control,
has explained that the report which we published of his speech is
unfair, and that he is really in substantial agreement with Mr. Asquith.
This is disingenuous, and Mr. Ewer knows it is. He has not repudiated
the correctness of the report, which stated that he dilated on the
danger of British navalism, and declared that we must give up singing
'Rule Britannia!' nor has he repudiated his remarks as to the pleasure
which the tune of the Austrian National Anthem gave him. Does he think
that Mr. Asquith would substantially agree with that? Or the
country?"--_The Evening Standard_, July 26, 1915.]
Sec. 4
The "Moral Test"
The theory that war is beneficial as a moral test, a furnace in which
character is proved--_ut fulvum spectatur in ignibus aurum_--is that
generally adopted by the Christian Churches, who may be said without
disrespect to have taken every advantage of their founder's unique
reference to the sword. I cannot help thinking that there is something
fundamental in this ecclesiastical advocacy of war; that some
psychological theory could be outlined to correlate this almost uniform
advocacy with the facts that such religious men as Tennyson and Ruskin
were among the loudest in their support of the Crimean War, that such a
militarist as Rudyard Kipling in his best work (in _Kim_, in _Puck of
Pook's Hill_ and the intercalated poems, in the most successful of his
short stories) shows himself to be at heart a deeply religious mystic;
and that in France the very active Clerical party, one consequence of a
disestablished Church, is always closely supported by the Chauvinists.
In many cases, however, I have no doubt that the pious Christian,
finding himself confronted with war, and not having the moral courage or
the political detachment to condemn it, only applies automatically to
its justification the arguments which he habitually uses to explain the
existence of evil and pain. It is certain at least that the theories of
war as a Moral Test or a School of Character bear a strong resemblance
to the commonplaces of religious consolation which almost any good
Christian will offer to the bereaved and afflicted. Any one who has seen
an innocent friend slowly tortured to death by some vile disease will
know the futility of the Christian defence (for these religious
consolations amount theologically to a defence) that pain ennobles the
character and "proves" the moral courage of the sufferer.[17] The
leading fallacy of the defence that war, or pain, is valuable as a
moral test is akin to the common misunderstanding of the word "prove" in
the saying that "the exception proves the rule"; the truth being that a
strong and noble character, one of whose corollary qualities is a
capacity to bear pain, is not less strong and noble if it is never
called upon to exercise that capacity. The San Francisco earthquake was
not a blessing in disguise because it happened to "test" and "prove" the
strength and flexibility of modern American architecture.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 17: I cannot help reproducing here a letter which originally
appeared in the _Manchester Guardian_ at the time of the Boer War, and
is quoted by Mr. Norman Angell in _The Great Illusion_, p. 281.
"SIR,--I see that 'The Church's Duty in Regard to War' is to be
discussed at the Church Congress. This is right. For a year the heads of
our Church have been telling us what war is and does--that it is a
school of character; that it sobers men, cleans them, strengthens them,
knits their hearts; makes them brave, patient, humble, tender, prone to
self-sacrifice. Watered by 'war's red rain,' one Bishop tells us, virtue
grows; a cannonade, he points out, is an 'oratorio'--almost a form of
worship. True; and to the Church men look for help to save their souls
from starving for lack of this good school, this kindly rain, this
sacred music. Congresses are apt to lose themselves in wastes of words.
This one must not, surely cannot, so straight is the way to the goal. It
has simply to draft and submit a new Collect for war in our time, and to
call for the reverent but firm emendation, in the spirit of the best
modern thought, of those passages in Bible and Prayer Book by which even
the truest of Christians and the best of men have at times been blinded
to the duty of seeking war and ensuing it. Still, man's moral nature
cannot, I admit, live by war alone; nor do I say with some that peace is
wholly bad. Even amid the horrors of peace you will find little shoots
of character fed by the gentle and timely rains of plague and famine,
tempest and fire; simple lessons of patience and courage conned in the
schools of typhus, gout, and stone; not oratorios, perhaps, but homely
anthems and rude hymns played on knife and probe in the long winter
nights. Far from me to 'sin our mercies,' or to call mere twilight dark.
Yet dark it may become; for remember that even these poor makeshift
schools of character, these second-bests, these halting substitutes for
war--remember that the efficiency of every one of them, be it hunger,
accident, ignorance, sickness, or pain, is menaced by the intolerable
strain of its struggles with secular doctors, plumbers, inventors,
schoolmasters, and policemen. Every year thousands who would once have
been braced and steeled by manly tussles with small-pox or diphtheria
are robbed of that blessing by the great changes made in our drains.
Every year thousands of women and children must go their way bereft of
the rich spiritual experience of the widow and the orphan."]
Sec. 5
Trade
I shall never forget the tones of hoarse satisfaction with which a
vendor of the _Evening News_ disturbed the twilight of a May evening in
London, triumphantly proclaiming a "Great Troop Train Disaster." I had
often noticed with what apparent joy the newspapers announced the
sinking of a British cruiser; with what entirely neutral delight they
welcomed or invented the report of Terrible Slaughter on either side.
But somehow that hoarse and rufous man with the loose lip remained in my
memory and became for me a type of one element in the population to
which war was not unwelcome; the journalistic element that lives by
exploiting the sadistic curiosity, the craving for mean excitements, and
all the gladiatorial instinct of the modern world.[18] It soon became
clear that the newspapers were not alone in the commercial exploitation
of war. They were not even the worst offenders. The publishers were
hurriedly producing volume after volume of faked memoirs badly written
by imaginary governesses. The production of spurious memoirs and
"autobiographies," even if they are skilfully composed, is always
grossly immoral; and of the specimens occasioned by this war one may say
that if they had been genuine it would have been possible to attribute
the low morality of some Germanic princes to the literary style of the
English governesses who had had a share in their education. The
catchpenny manoeuvres of publishers are really only a branch of
journalism,[19] and such trivial offences were not, after all,
unexpected, because the very profession of journalism is to take
advantage. But the journalist is a man of straw who shows which way the
wind blows, and his raucous exultation over disaster was the manifest
symbol of a commercial exploitation of war by tradesmen and speculators
which soon became sensible from one end of belligerent Europe to the
other. Like the Vali of Aleppo, I am not good at statistics. It is well
known however without the assistance of a mathematician that in England
during the winter of 1915, when the cost of living had already risen by
nearly 50 per cent, wholesale dealers often kept provisions of all sorts
rotting in their stores rather than break the artificial scarcity they
had created; farmers would not sell fresh eggs when the price was
twopence-halfpenny, because they knew that in a week or two the price
for the same eggs would have risen to threepence. Here is a cartoon from
a Hungarian paper[20] showing the bloated profiteer of The Sugar Trust
laughing at the women who feebly attack his barricade of sugar loaves. I
mention it here because it is sufficiently remote from English affairs,
and because it happens to come to hand, and because it is a good
fragment of evidence, there being no reason why sugar should be scarce
in Hungary as an immediate result of the war. And from every country
between England and Hungary, from every country in Europe, can be heard
the same complaint, unmistakable but how much too feeble, the cry of the
people who discover that one of the horrors of war is Trade.[21]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 18: Cf. the present writer's introduction to Whyte-Melville's
_Gladiators_ in _Everyman's Library_, 1911.]
[Footnote 19: It was certainly, for example, the Headline Instinct which
caused Mr. John Lane, a publisher of some repute, to impose on Mr. Ford
Madox Hueffer's novel _The Saddest Story_, one of the most remarkable
novels of the century, such an absurdly irrelevant title as _The Good
Soldier_. _The Good Soldier_ was published in April, 1915. The evidence
that the publisher must have changed the title just before publication
is that an instalment of it had appeared serially as _The Saddest Story_
in the summer of 1914, and that as _The Saddest Story_ it actually
figured in Mr. John Lane's catalogue at the end of the book.]
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