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

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Neither producers, shippers, merchants nor consumers have any slightest
interest in the national allegiance of the carriers of their freight,
except such as may artificially be induced by discriminatory shipping
regulations. In all but the name--in time of peace--the world's merchant
shipping already comes near being so neutralised, and the slight further
simplification required to leave it on a neutral peace footing would be
little else than a neglect of such vexatious discrimination as is still
in force. If no nation could claim the allegiance, and therefore the
usufruct, of any given item of merchant shipping in case of eventual
hostilities, on account of the domicile of the owners or the port of
registry, that would create a further handicap on eventual warlike
enterprise and add so much to the margin of tolerance. At the same time,
in the event of hostilities, shipping sailing under the neutral no-man's
flag and subject to no national allegiance would enjoy such immunities
as still inure to neutral shipping. It is true, neutrality has not
carried many immunities lately.

Cumulatively effective usage and the exigencies of a large, varied,
shifting and extensive maritime trade have in the course of time
brought merchant shipping to something approaching a neutral footing.
For most, one might venture to say for virtually all, routine purposes
of business and legal liability the merchant shipping comes under the
jurisdiction of the local courts, without reservation. It is true, there
still are formalities and reservations which enable questions arising
out of incidents in the shipping trade to become subject of
international conference and adjustment, but they are after all not such
as would warrant the erection of national apparatus to take care of them
in case they were not already covered by usage to that effect. The
visible drift of usage toward neutralisation in merchant shipping, in
maritime trade, and in international commercial transactions, together
with the similarly visible feasibility of a closer approach to
unreserved neutralisation of this whole range of traffic, suggests that
much the same line of considerations should apply as regards the
personal and pecuniary rights of citizens traveling or residing abroad.
The extreme,--or, as seen from the present point of view, the
ultimate--term in the relinquishment of national pretensions along this
line would of course be the neutralisation of citizenship.

This is not so sweeping a move as a patriotically-minded person might
imagine on the first alarm, so far as touches the practical status of
the ordinary citizen in his ordinary relations, and particularly among
the English-speaking peoples. As an illustrative instance, citizenship
has sat somewhat lightly on the denizens of the American republic, and
with no evident damage to the community at large or to the inhabitants
in detail. Naturalisation has been easy, and has been sought with no
more eagerness, on the whole, than the notably low terms of its
acquirement would indicate. Without loss or discomfort many law-abiding
aliens have settled in this country and spent the greater part of a
life-time under its laws without becoming citizens, and no one the worse
or the wiser for it. Not infrequently the decisive inducement to
naturalisation on the part of immigrant aliens has been, and is, the
desirability of divesting themselves of their rights of citizenship in
the country of their origin. Not that the privilege and dignity of
citizenship, in this or in any other country, is to be held of little
account. It is rather that under modern civilised conditions, and among
a people governed by sentiments of humanity and equity, the stranger
within our gates suffers no obloquy and no despiteful usage for being a
stranger. It may be admitted that of late, with the fomentation of a
more accentuated nationalism by politicians seeking a _raison d'etre_,
additional difficulties have been created in the way of naturalisation
and the like incidents. Still, when all is told of the average American
citizen, _qua_ citizen, there is not much to tell. The like is true
throughout the English-speaking peoples, with inconsequential allowance
for local color. A definitive neutralisation of citizenship within the
range of these English-speaking countries would scarcely ripple the
surface of things as they are--in time of peace.

All of which has not touched the sore and sacred spot in the received
scheme of citizenship and its rights and liabilities. It is in the event
of hostilities that the liabilities of the citizen at home come into the
foreground, and it is as a source of patriotic grievance looking to
warlike retaliation that the rights of the citizen abroad chiefly come
into the case.

If, as was once, almost inaudibly, hinted by a well-regarded statesman,
the national establishment should refuse to jeopardise the public peace
for the safeguarding of the person and property of citizens who go out
_in partes infidelium_ on their own private concerns, and should so
leave them under the uncurbed jurisdiction of the authorities in those
countries into which they have intruded, the result might in many cases
be hardship to such individuals. This would, of course, be true almost
exclusively of such instances only as occur in such localities as are,
temporarily or permanently, outside the pale of modern law and order.
And, it may be in place to remark, instances of such hardship, with the
accompanying hazard of national complications, would, no doubt, greatly
diminish in frequency consequent upon the promulgation of such a
disclaimer of national responsibility for the continued well-being of
citizens who so expatriate themselves in the pursuit of their own
advantage or amusement. Meantime, let it not seem inconsiderate to
recall that to the community at large the deplorable case of such
expatriates under hardship involves no loss or gain in the material
respect; and that, except for the fortuitous circumstance of his being a
compatriot, the given individual's personal or pecuniary fortune in
foreign parts has no special claim on his compatriots' sympathy or
assistance; from which it follows also that with the definitive
neutralisation of citizenship as touches expatriates, the sympathy which
is now somewhat unintelligently confined to such cases, on what may
without offense be called extraneous grounds, would somewhat more
impartially and humanely extend to fellowmen in distress, regardless of
nativity or naturalisation.

What is mainly to the point here, however, is the fact that if
citizenship were so neutralised within the range of neutral countries
here contemplated, one further source of provocation to international
jealousy and distrust would drop out of the situation. And it is not
easy to detect any element of material loss involved in such a move. In
the material respect no individual would be any the worse off, with the
doubtful and dubious exception of the expatriate fortune-hunter, who
aims to fish safely in troubled waters at his compatriots' expense. But
the case stands otherwise as regards the balance of immaterial assets.
The scaffolding of much highly-prized sentiment would collapse, and the
world of poetry and pageantry--particularly that of the tawdrier and
more vendible poetry and pageantry--would be poorer by so much. The Man
Without a Country would lose his pathetic appeal, or would at any rate
lose much of it. It may be, of course, that in the sequel there would
result no net loss even in respect of these immaterial assets of
sentimental animation and patriotic self-complacency, but it is after
all fairly certain that something would be lost, and it is by no means
clear what if anything would come in to fill its place.

An historical parallel may help to illustrate the point. In the movement
out of what may be called the royal age of dynasties and chivalric
service, those peoples who have moved out of that age and out of its
spiritual atmosphere have lost much of the conscious magnanimity and
conviction of merit that once characterised that order of things, as it
still continues to characterise the prevalent habit of mind in the
countries that still continue under the archaic order of dynastic
mastery and service. But it is also to be noted that these peoples who
so have moved out of the archaic order appear to be well content with
this change of spiritual atmosphere, and they are even fairly well
persuaded, in the common run, that the move has brought them some net
gain in the way of human dignity and neighbourly tolerance, such as to
offset any loss incurred on the heroic and invidious side of life. Such
is the tempering force of habit. Whereas, e.g., on the other hand, the
peoples of these surviving dynastic States, to which it is necessary
continually to recur, who have not yet moved out of that realm of
heroics, find themselves unable to see anything in such a prospective
shift but net loss and headlong decay of the spirit; that modicum of
forbearance and equity that is requisite to the conduct of life in a
community of ungraded masterless men is seen by these stouter stomachs
as a loosening of the moral fiber and a loss of nerve.

* * * * *

What is here tentatively projected under the phrase, "neutralization of
citizenship," is only something a little more and farther along the same
general line of movement which these more modern peoples have been
following in all that sequence of institutional changes that has given
them their present distinctive character of commonwealths, as contrasted
with the dynastic States of the mediaeval order. What may be in
prospect--if such a further move away from the mediaeval landmarks is to
take effect--may best be seen in the light of the later moves in the
same direction hitherto, more particularly as regards the moral and
aesthetic merits at large of such an institutional mutation. As touches
this last previous shifting of ground along this line, just spoken of,
the case stands in this singular but significant posture, in respect of
the spiritual values and valuations involved: These peoples who have,
even in a doubtful measure, made this transition from the archaic
institutional scheme, of fealty and dynastic exploit and coercion, to
the newer scheme of the ungraded commonwealth, are convinced, to the
point of martyrdom, that anything like a return to the old order is
morally impossible as well as insufferably shameful and irksome; whereas
those people, of the retarded division of the race, who have had no
experience of this new order, are equally convinced that it is all quite
incompatible with a worthy life.

Evidently, there should be no disputing about tastes. Evidently, too,
these retarded others will not move on into the later institutional
phase, of the ungraded commonwealth, by preconceived choice; but only,
if at all, by such schooling of experience as will bring them insensibly
to that frame of mind out of which the ideal of the ungraded
commonwealth emerges by easy generalisation of workday practice.
Meantime, having not yet experienced that phase of sentiment and opinion
on civic rights and immunities that is now occupied by their
institutionally maturer neighbours, the subjects of the Imperial
Fatherland, e.g., in spite of the most laudable intentions and the best
endeavour, are, by failure of this experience, unable to comprehend
either the ground of opposition to their well-meaning projects of
dominion or the futility of trying to convert these their elder brothers
to their own prescriptive acceptation of what is worth while. In time,
and with experience, this retarded division of Christendom may come to
the same perspective on matters of national usage and ideals as has been
enforced on the more modern peoples by farther habituation. So, also, in
time and with experience, if the drift of circumstance shall turn out to
set that way, the further move away from mediaeval discriminations and
constraint and into the unspectacular scheme of neutralisation may come
to seem as right, good and beautiful as the democratic commonwealth now
seems to the English-speaking peoples, or as the Hohenzollern Imperial
State now seems to the subjects of the Fatherland. There is, in effect,
no disputing about tastes.

There is little that is novel, and nothing that is to be rated as
constructive innovation, in this sketch of what might not inaptly be
called peace by neglect. The legal mind, which commonly takes the
initiative in counsels on what to do, should scarcely be expected to
look in that direction for a way out, or to see its way out in that
direction in any case; so that it need occasion no surprise if the many
current projects of pacification turn on ingenious and elaborate
provisions of apparatus and procedure, rather than on that simpler line
of expedients which the drift of circumstance, being not possessed of a
legal mind, has employed in the sequence of institutional change
hitherto. The legal mind that dominates in the current deliberations on
peace is at home in exhaustive specifications and meticulous
demarkations, and it is therefore prone to seek a remedy for the burden
of supernumerary devices by recourse to further excesses of regulation.

This trait of the legal mind is not a bad fault at the worst, and the
quality in which this defect inheres is of the greatest moment in any
project of constructive engineering on the legal and political plane.
But it is less to the purpose, indeed it is at cross purposes, in such a
conjuncture as the present; when the nations are held up in their quest
of peace chiefly by an accumulation of institutional apparatus that has
out-stayed its usefulness. It is the fortune even of good institutions
to become imbecile with the change of conditioning circumstances, and it
then becomes a question of their disestablishment, not of their
rehabilitation. If there is anywhere a safe negative conclusion, it is
that an institution grown mischievous by obsolescence need not be
replaced by a substitute.

Instances of such mischievous institutional arrangements, obsolete or in
process of obsolescence, would be, e.g., the French monarchy of the
ancient regime, the Spanish Inquisition, the British corn laws and the
"rotten boroughs," the Barbary pirates, the Turkish rule in Armenia, the
British crown, the German Imperial Dynasty, the European balance of
powers, the Monroe Doctrine. In some sense, at least in the sense and
degree implied in their selective survival, these various articles of
institutional furniture, and many like them, have once presumably been
suitable to some end, in the days of their origin and vigorous growth;
and they have at least in some passable fashion met some felt want; but
if they ever had a place and use in the human economy they have in time
grown imbecile and mischievous by force of changing circumstances, and
the question is not how to replace them with something else to the same
purpose after their purpose is outworn. A man who loses a wart off the
end of his nose does not apply to the _Ersatz_ bureau for a convenient
substitute.

Now, a large proportion, perhaps even substantially the whole, of the
existing apparatus of international rights, pretensions,
discriminations, covenants and provisos, visibly fall in that class, in
so far as concerns their material serviceability to the nation at large,
and particularly as regards any other than a warlike purpose, offensive
or defensive. Of course, the national dignity and diplomatic punctilio,
and the like adjuncts and instrumentalities of the national honour, all
have their prestige value; and they are not likely to be given up out of
hand. In point of fact, however solicitous for a lasting peace these
patriotically-minded modern peoples may be, it is doubtful if they could
be persuaded to give up any appreciable share of these appurtenances of
national jealousy even when their retention implies an imminent breach
of the peace. Yet it is plain that the peace will be secure in direct
proportion to the measure in which national discrimination and prestige
are allowed to pass into nothingness and be forgot.

* * * * *

By so much as it might amount to, such neutralisation of outstanding
interests between these pacific nations should bring on a degree of
coalescence of these nationalities. In effect, they are now held apart
in many respects by measures of precaution against their coming to a
common plan of use and wont. The degree of coalescence would scarcely be
extreme; more particularly it could not well become onerous, since it
would rest on convenience, inclination and the neglect of artificial
discrepancies. The more intimate institutions of modern life, that
govern human conduct locally and in detail, need not be affected, or not
greatly affected, for better or worse. Yet something appreciable in that
way might also fairly be looked for in time.

The nature, reach and prescriptive force of this prospective coalescence
through neutralisation may perhaps best be appreciated in the light of
what has already come to pass, without design or mandatory guidance, in
those lines of human interest where the national frontiers interpose no
bar, or at least no decisive bar, whether by force of unconcern or
through impotence. Fashions of dress, equipage and decorous usage, e.g.,
run with some uniformity throughout these modern nations, and indeed
with some degree of prescriptive force. There is, of course, nothing
mandatory, in the simpler sense, about all this; nor is the degree of
conformity extreme or uniform throughout. But it is a ready-made
generalisation that only those communities are incorporated in this
cosmopolitan coalescence of usage that are moved by their own
incitement, and only so far as they have an effectually felt need of
conformity in these premises. It is true, a dispassionate outsider, if
such there be, would perhaps be struck by the degree of such painstaking
conformity to canons of conduct which it frequently must cost serious
effort even to ascertain in such detail as the case calls for.
Doubtless, or at least presumably, conformity under the jurisdiction of
the fashions, and in related provinces of decorum, is obligatory in a
degree that need not be looked for throughout the scheme of use and wont
at large, even under the advisedly established non-interference of the
authorities. Still, on a point on which the evidence hitherto is
extremely scant it is the part of discretion to hold no settled opinion.

A more promising line of suggestion is probably that afforded by the
current degree of contact and consistency among the modern nations in
respect of science and scholarship, as also in the aesthetic or the
industrial arts. Local color and local pride, with one thing and another
in the way of special incitement or inhibition, may come in to vary the
run of things, or to blur or hinder a common understanding and mutual
furtherance and copartnery in these matters of taste and intellect. Yet
it is scarcely misleading to speak of the peoples of Christendom as one
community in these respects. The sciences and the arts are held as a
joint stock among these peoples, in their elements, and measurably also
in their working-out. It is true, these interests and achievements of
the race are not cultivated with the same assiduity or with identical
effect throughout; but it is equally true that no effectual bar could
profitably be interposed, or would be tolerated in the long run in this
field, where men have had occasion to learn that unlimited collusion is
more to the purpose than a clannish discrimination.

* * * * *

It is, no doubt, beyond reasonable hope that these democratic peoples
could be brought forthwith to concerted action on the lines of such a
plan of peace by neutralisation of all outstanding national pretensions.
Both the French and the English-speaking peoples are too eagerly set on
national aims and national prestige, to allow such a plan to come to a
hearing, even if something of the kind should be spoken for by their
most trusted leaders. By settled habit they are thinking in terms of
nationality, and just now they are all under the handicap of an inflamed
national pride. Advocacy of such a plan, of course, does not enter
seriously into the purpose of this inquiry; which is concerned with the
conditions under which peace is sought today, with the further
conditions requisite to its perpetuation, and with the probable effects
of such a peace on the fortunes of these peoples in case peace is
established and effectually maintained.

It is a reasonable question, and one to which a provisional answer may
be found, whether the drift of circumstances in the present and for the
immediate future may be counted on to set in the direction of a
progressive neutralisation of the character spoken of above, and
therefore possibly toward a perpetuation of that peace that is to follow
the present season of war. So also is it an open and interesting
question whether the drift in that direction, if such is the set of it,
can be counted on to prove sufficiently swift and massive, so as not to
be overtaken and overborne by the push of agencies that make for
dissension and warlike enterprise.

Anything like a categorical answer to these questions would have to be a
work of vaticination or of effrontery,--possibly as much to the point
the one as the other. But there are certain conditions precedent to a
lasting peace as the outcome of events now in train, and there are
certain definable contingencies conditioned on such current facts as the
existing state of the industrial arts and the state of popular
sentiment, together with the conjuncture of circumstances under which
these factors will come into action.

The state of the industrial arts, as it bears on the peace and its
violation, has been spoken of above. It is of such a character that a
judiciously prepared offensive launched by any Power of the first rank
at an opportune time can reach and lay waste any given country of the
habitable globe. The conclusive evidence of this is at hand, and it is
the major premise underlying all current proposals and projects of
peace, as well as the refusal of the nations now on the defensive to
enter into negotiations looking to an "inconclusive peace." This state
of the case is not commonly recognised in so many words, but it is well
enough understood. So that all peace projects that shall hope to find a
hearing must make up their account with it, and must show cause why they
should be judged competent to balk any attempted offensive. In an
inarticulate or inchoate fashion, perhaps, but none the less with
ever-increasing certitude and increasing apprehension, this state of the
case is also coming to be an article of popular "knowledge and belief,"
wherever much or little thought is spent on the outlook for peace. It
has already had a visible effect in diminishing the exclusiveness of
nationalities and turning the attention of the pacific peoples to the
question of feasible ways and means of international cooperation in case
of need; but it has not hitherto visibly lessened the militant spirit
among these nations, nor has it lowered the tension of their national
pride, at least not yet; rather the contrary, in fact.

The effect, upon the popular temper, of this inchoate realisation of the
fatality that so lies in the modern state of the industrial arts, varies
from one country to another, according to the varying position in which
they are placed, or in which they conceive themselves to be placed.
Among the belligerent nations it has put the spur of fear to their need
of concerted action as well as to their efforts to strengthen the
national defense. But the state of opinion and sentiment abroad in the
nation in time of war is no secure indication of what it will be after
the return to peace. The American people, the largest and most
immediately concerned of the neutral nations, should afford more
significant evidence of the changes in the popular attitude likely to
follow from a growing realisation of this state of the case, that the
advantage has passed definitively to any well prepared and resolute
offensive, and that no precautions of diplomacy and no practicable
measures of defensive armament will any longer give security,--provided
always that there is anywhere a national Power actuated by designs of
imperial dominion.

It is, of course, only little by little that the American people and
their spokesmen have come to realise their own case under this
late-modern situation, and hitherto only in an imperfect degree. Their
first response to the stimulus has been a display of patriotic
self-sufficiency and a move to put the national defense on a
war-footing, such as would be competent to beat off all aggression.
Those elements of the population who least realise the gravity of the
situation, and who are at the same time commercially interested in
measures of armament or in military preferment, have not begun to shift
forward beyond this position of magniloquence and resolution; nor is
there as yet much intimation that they see beyond it, although there is
an ever-recurring hint that they in a degree appreciate the practical
difficulty of persuading a pacific people to make adequate preparation
beforehand, in equipment and trained man-power, for such a plan of
self-sufficient self-defense. But increasingly among those who are, by
force of temperament or insight or by lack of the pecuniary and the
placeman's interest, less confident of an appeal to the nation's
prowess, there is coming forward an evident persuasion that warlike
preparations--"preparedness"--alone and carried through by the Republic
in isolation, will scarcely serve the turn.

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