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

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Anyone who is interested in the nature and derivation of governmental
institutions and establishments in Europe, in any but the formal
respect, should be able to satisfy his curiosity by looking over the
shoulders of the professed students of Political Science. Quite properly
and profitably that branch of scholarship is occupied with the authentic
pedigree of these institutions, and with the documentary instruments in
the case; since Political Science is, after all, a branch of theoretical
jurisprudence and is concerned about a formally competent analysis of
the recorded legal powers. The material circumstances from which these
institutions once took their beginning, and the exigencies which have
governed the rate and direction of their later growth and mutation, as
well as the _de facto_ bearing of the institutional scheme on the
material welfare or the cultural fortunes of the given community,--while
all these matters of fact may be germane to the speculations of
Political Theory, they are not intrinsic to its premises, to the logical
sequence of its inquiry, or to its theoretical findings. The like is
also true, of course, as regards that system of habits of thought, that
current frame of mind, in which any given institutional scheme
necessarily is grounded, and without the continued support of which any
given scheme of governmental institutions or policy would become
nugatory and so would pass into the province of legal fiction. All these
are not idle matters in the purview of the student of Political Science,
but they remain after all substantially extraneous to the structure of
political theory; and in so far as matters of this class are to be
brought into the case at all, the specialists in the field can not
fairly be expected to contribute anything beyond an occasional _obiter
dictum_. There can be no discourteous presumption, therefore, in
accepting the general theorems of current political theory without
prejudice, and looking past the received theoretical formulations for a
view of the substantial grounds on which the governmental establishments
have grown into shape, and the circumstances, material and spiritual,
that surround their continued working and effect.

By lineal descent the governmental establishments and the powers with
which they are vested, in all the Christian nations, are derived from
the feudal establishments of the Middle Ages; which, in turn, are of a
predatory origin and of an irresponsible character.[2] In nearly all
instances, but more particularly among the nations that are accounted
characteristically modern, the existing establishments have been greatly
altered from the mediaeval pattern, by concessive adaptation to later
exigencies or by a more or less revolutionary innovation. The degree of
their modernity is (conventionally) measured, roughly, by the degree in
which they have departed from the mediaeval pattern. Wherever the
unavoidable concessions have been shrewdly made with a view to
conserving the autonomy and irresponsibility of the governmental
establishment, or the "State," and where the state of national sentiment
has been led to favor this work of conservation, as, e.g., in the case
of Austria, Spain or Prussia, there the modern outcome has been what may
be called a Dynastic State. Where, on the other hand, the run of
national sentiment has departed notably from the ancient holding ground
of loyal abnegation, and has enforced a measure of revolutionary
innovation, as in the case of France or of the English-speaking peoples,
there the modern outcome has been an (ostensibly) democratic
commonwealth of ungraded citizens. But the contrast so indicated is a
contrast of divergent variants rather than of opposites. These two
type-forms may be taken as the extreme and inclusive limits of variation
among the governmental establishments with which the modern world is
furnished.[3]

[Footnote 2: The partial and dubious exception of the Scandinavian
countries or of Switzerland need raise no question on this head.]

[Footnote 3: Cf., e.g., Eduard Meyer, _England: its political
organisation and development_. ch. ii.]

The effectual difference between these two theoretically contrasted
types of governmental establishments is doubtless grave enough, and for
many purposes it is consequential, but it is after all not of such a
nature as need greatly detain the argument at this point. The two differ
less, in effect, in that range of their functioning which comes in
question here than in their bearing on the community's fortunes apart
from questions of war and peace. In all cases there stand over in this
bearing certain primary characteristics of the ancient regime, which all
these modern establishments have in common, though not all in an equal
degree of preservation and effectiveness. They are, e.g., all vested
with certain attributes of "sovereignty." In all cases the citizen still
proves on closer attention to be in some measure a "subject" of the
State, in that he is invariably conceived to owe a "duty" to the
constituted authorities in one respect and another. All civilised
governments take cognizance of Treason, Sedition, and the like; and all
good citizens are not only content but profoundly insistent on the clear
duty of the citizen on this head. The bias of loyalty is not a matter on
which argument is tolerated. By virtue of this bias of loyalty, or
"civic duty"--which still has much of the color of feudal
allegiance--the governmental establishment is within its rights in
coercively controlling and directing the actions of the citizen, or
subject, in those respects that so lie within his duty; as also in
authoritatively turning his abilities to account for the purposes that
so lie within the governmental discretion, as, e.g., the Common Defense.

These rights and powers still remain to the governmental establishment
even at the widest democratic departure from that ancient pattern of
masterful tutelage and usufruct that marked the old-fashioned
patrimonial State,--and that still marks the better preserved ones among
its modern derivatives. And so intrinsic to these governmental
establishments are these discretionary powers, and by so unfailing a
popular bias are they still accounted a matter of course and of
axiomatic necessity, that they have invariably been retained also among
the attributes of those democratic governments that trace their origin
to a revolutionary break with the old order.

To many, all this will seem a pedantic taking note of commonplaces,--as
if it were worth while remarking that the existing governments are
vested with the indispensable attributes of government. Yet history
records an instance at variance with this axiomatic rule, a rule which
is held to be an unavoidable deliverance of common sense. And it is by
no means an altogether unique instance. It may serve to show that these
characteristic and unimpeachable powers that invest all current
governmental establishments are, after all, to be rated as the marks of
a particular species of governments, and not characteristics of the
genus of governmental establishments at large. These powers answer to an
acquired bias, not to an underlying trait of human nature; a matter of
habit, not of heredity.

Such an historical instance is the so-called Republic, or Commonwealth,
of Iceland--tenth to thirteenth centuries. Its case is looked on by
students of history as a spectacular anomaly, because it admitted none
of these primary powers of government in its constituted authorities.
And yet, for contrast with these matter-of-course preconceptions of
these students of history, it is well to note that in the deliberations
of those ancients who installed the Republic for the management of their
joint concerns, any inclusion of such powers in its competency appears
never to have been contemplated, not even to the extent of its being
rejected. This singularity--as it would be rated by modern statesmen and
students--was in no degree a new departure in state-making on the part
of the founders of the Republic. They had no knowledge of such powers,
duties and accountabilities, except as unwholesome features of a novel
and alien scheme of irresponsible oppression that was sought to be
imposed on them by Harald Fairhair, and which they incontinently made it
their chief and immediate business to evade. They also set up no joint
or collective establishment with powers for the Common Defense, nor does
it appear that such a notion had occurred to them.

In the history of its installation there is no hint that the men who set
up this Icelandic Commonwealth had any sense of the need, or even of the
feasibility, of such a coercive government as would be involved in
concerted preparation for the common defense. Subjection to personal
rule, or to official rule in any degree of attenuation, was not
comprised in their traditional experience of citizenship; and it was
necessarily out of the elements comprised in this traditional experience
that the new structure would have to be built up. The new commonwealth
was necessarily erected on the premises afforded by the received scheme
of use and wont; and this received scheme had come down out of
pre-feudal conditions, without having passed under the discipline of
that regime of coercion which the feudal system had imposed on the rest
of Europe, and so had established as an "immemorial usage" and a "second
nature" among the populations of Christendom. The resulting character of
the Icelandic Commonwealth is sufficiently striking when contrasted with
the case of the English commonwealth of the seventeenth century, or the
later French and American republics. These, all and several, came out of
a protracted experience in feudalistic state-making and State policy;
and the common defense--frequently on the offensive--with its necessary
coercive machinery and its submissive loyalty, consequently would take
the central place in the resulting civic structure.

To close the tale of the Icelandic commonwealth it may be added that
their republic of insubordinate citizens presently fell into default,
systematic misuse, under the disorders brought on by an accumulation of
wealth, and that it died of legal fiction and constitutional formalities
after some experience at the hands of able and ambitious statesmen in
contact with an alien government drawn on the coercive plan. The clay
vessel failed to make good among the iron pots, and so proved its
unfitness to survive in the world of Christian nations,--very much as
the Chinese are today at the mercy of the defensive rapacity of the
Powers.

And the mercy that we gave them
Was to sink them in the sea,
Down on the coast of High Barbarie.

No doubt, it will be accepted as an axiomatic certainty that the
establishment of a commonwealth after the fashion of the Icelandic
Republic, without coercive authority or provision for the common
defense, and without a sense of subordination or collective
responsibility among its citizens, would be out of all question under
existing circumstances of politics and international trade. Nor would
such a commonwealth be workable on the scale and at the pace imposed by
modern industrial and commercial conditions, even apart from
international jealousy and ambitions, provided the sacred rights of
ownership were to be maintained in something like their current shape.
And yet something of a drift of popular sentiment, and indeed something
of deliberate endeavour, setting in the direction of such a harmless and
helpless national organisation is always visible in Western Europe,
throughout modern times; particularly through the eighteenth and the
early half of the nineteenth centuries; and more particularly among the
English-speaking peoples and, with a difference, among the French. The
Dutch and the Scandinavian countries answer more doubtfully to the same
characterisation.

The movement in question is known to history as the Liberal,
Rationalistic, Humanitarian, or Individualistic departure. Its ideal,
when formulated, is spoken of as the System of Natural Rights; and its
goal in the way of a national establishment has been well characterised
by its critics as the Police State, or the Night-Watchman State. The
gains made in this direction, or perhaps better the inroads of this
animus in national ideals, are plainly to be set down as a shift in the
direction of peace and amity; but it is also plain that the shift of
ground so initiated by this strain of sentiment has never reached a
conclusion and never has taken effect in anything like an effectual
working arrangement. Its practical consequences have been of the nature
of abatement and defection in the pursuit of national ambitions and
dynastic enterprise, rather than a creative work of installing any
institutional furniture suitable to its own ends. It has in effect gone
no farther than what would be called an incipient correction of abuses.
The highest rise, as well as the decline, of this movement lie within
the nineteenth century.

In point of time, the decay of this amiable conceit of _laissez-faire_
in national policy coincides with the period of great advance in the
technology of transport and communication in the nineteenth century.
Perhaps, on a larger outlook, it should rather be said that the run of
national ambitions and animosities had, in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, suffered a degree of decay through the diffusion of this
sentimental predilection for Natural Liberty, and that this decline of
the manlier aspirations was then arrested and corrected by help of these
improvements in the technological situation; which enabled a closer and
more coercive control to be exercised over larger areas, and at the same
time enabled a more massive aggregate of warlike force to strike more
effectively at a greater distance. This whole episode of the rise and
decline of _laissez-faire_ in modern history is perhaps best to be
conceived as a transient weakening of nationalism, by neglect; rather
than anything like the growth of a new and more humane ideal of national
intercourse. Such would be the appraisal to be had at the hands of those
who speak for a strenuous national life and for the arbitrament of
sportsmanlike contention in human affairs. And the latterday growth of
more militant aspirations, together with the more settled and sedulous
attention to a development of control and of formidable armaments, such
as followed on through the latter half of the nineteenth century, would
then be rated as a resumption of those older aims and ideals that had
been falling somewhat into abeyance in the slack-water days of
Liberalism.

There is much to be said for this latter view; and, indeed, much has
been said for it, particularly by the spokesmen of imperialist politics.
This bias of Natural Liberty has been associated in history with the
English-speaking peoples, more intimately and more extensively than with
any other. Not that this amiable conceit is in any peculiar degree a
race characteristic of this group of peoples; nor even that the history
of its rise and decline runs wholly within the linguistic frontiers
indicated by this characterisation. The French and the Dutch have borne
their share, and at an earlier day Italian sentiment and speculation
lent its impulsion to the same genial drift of faith and aspiration.
But, by historical accident, its center of gravity and of diffusion has
lain with the English-speaking communities during the period when this
bias made history and left its impress on the institutional scheme of
the Western civilisation. By grace of what may, for the present purpose,
be called historical accident, it happens that the interval of history
during which the bias of Natural Liberty made visible headway was also a
period during which these English-speaking peoples, among whom its
effects are chiefly visible, were relatively secure from international
disturbance, by force of inaccessibility. Little strain was put upon
their sense of national solidarity or national prowess; so little,
indeed, that there was some danger of their patriotic animosity falling
into decay by disuse; and then they were also busy with other things.
Peaceable intercourse, it is true, was relatively easy, active and
far-reaching--eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--as compared with what
had been the case before that time; but warlike intercourse on such a
scale as would constitute a substantial menace to any large nation was
nearly out of the question, so far as regards the English-speaking
peoples. The available means of aggression, as touches the case of these
particular communities, were visibly and consciously inadequate as
compared with the means of defense. The means of internal or
intra-national control or coercion were also less well provided by the
state of the arts current at that time than the means of peaceable
intercourse. These means of transport and communication were, at that
stage of their development, less well suited for the purposes of
far-reaching warlike strategy and the exercise of surveillance and
coercion over large spaces than for the purposes of peaceable traffic.

But the continued improvement in the means of communication during the
nineteenth century presently upset that situation, and so presently
began to neutralise the geographical quarantine which had hedged about
these communities that were inclined to let well enough alone. The
increasing speed and accuracy of movement in shipping, due to the
successful introduction of steam, as well as the concomitant increasing
size of the units of equipment, all runs to this effect and presently
sets at naught the peace barriers of sea and weather. So also the
development of railways and their increasing availability for strategic
uses, together with the far-reaching coordination of movement made
possible by their means and by the telegraph; all of which is further
facilitated by the increasing mass and density of population.
Improvements in the technology of arms and armament worked to the like
effect, of setting the peace of any community on an increasingly
precarious footing, through the advantage which this new technology gave
to a ready equipment and a rapid mobilisation. The new state of the
industrial arts serviceable for warlike enterprise put an increasingly
heavy premium on readiness for offense or defense, but more particularly
it all worked increasingly to the advantage of the offensive. It put the
Fabian strategy out of date, and led to the doctrine of a defensive
offense.

Gradually it came true, with the continued advance in those industrial
arts that lend themselves to strategic uses, and it came also to be
realised, that no corner of the earth was any longer secure by mere
favor of distance and natural difficulty, from eventual aggression at
the hands of any provident and adventurous assailant,--even by help of a
modicum of defensive precaution. The fear of aggression then came
definitively to take the place of international good-will and became the
chief motive in public policy, so fast and so far as the state of the
industrial arts continued to incline the balance of advantage to the
side of the aggressor. All of which served greatly to strengthen the
hands of those statesmen who, by interest or temperament, were inclined
to imperialistic enterprise. Since that period all armament has
conventionally been accounted defensive, and all statesmen have
professed that the common defense is their chief concern. Professedly
all armament has been designed to keep the peace; so much of a shadow of
the peaceable bias there still stands over.

Throughout this latest phase of modern civilisation the avowed fear of
aggression has served as apology, possibly as provocation in fact, to
national armaments; and throughout the same period any analysis of the
situation will finally run the chain of fear back to Prussia as the
putative or actual, center of disturbance and apprehension. No doubt,
Prussian armament has taken the lead and forced the pace among the
nations of Christendom; but the Prussian policy, too, has been
diligently covered with the same decorous plea of needful provision for
the common defense and an unremitting solicitude for international
peace,--to which has been added the canny afterthought of the "defensive
offense."

It is characteristic of this era of armed peace that in all these
extensive preparations for breaking the peace any formal avowal of other
than a defensive purpose has at all times been avoided as an
insufferable breach of diplomatic decorum. It is likewise characteristic
of the same era that armaments have unremittingly been increased, beyond
anything previously known; and that all men have known all the while
that the inevitable outcome of this avowedly defensive armament must
eventually be war on an unprecedented scale and of unexampled ferocity.
It would be neither charitable nor otherwise to the point to call
attention to the reflection which this state of the case throws on the
collective sagacity or the good faith of the statesmen who have had the
management of affairs. It is not practicable to imagine how such an
outcome as the present could have been brought about by any degree of
stupidity or incapacity alone, nor is it easier to find evidence that
the utmost sagacity of the statecraft engaged has had the slightest
mitigating effect on the evil consummation to which the whole case has
been brought. It has long been a commonplace among observers of public
events that these professedly defensive warlike preparations have in
effect been preparations for breaking the peace; against which, at
least ostensibly, a remedy had been sought in the preparation of still
heavier armaments, with full realisation that more armament would
unfailingly entail a more unsparing and more disastrous war,--which sums
up the statecraft of the past half century.

Prussia, and afterwards Prussianised Germany, has come in for the
distinction of taking the lead and forcing the pace in this competitive
preparation--or "preparedness"--for war in time of peace. That such has
been the case appears in good part to be something of a fortuitous
circumstance. The season of enterprising force and fraud to which that
country owes its induction into the concert of nations is an episode of
recent history; so recent, indeed, that the German nation has not yet
had time to live it down and let it be forgotten; and the Imperial State
is consequently burdened with an irritably uneasy sense of odium and an
established reputation for unduly bad faith. From which it has followed,
among other things, that the statesmen of the Empire have lived in the
expectation of having their unforgotten derelictions brought home, and
so have, on the one hand, found themselves unable to credit any pacific
intentions professed by the neighboring Powers, while on the other hand
they have been unable to gain credence for their own voluble professions
of peace and amity. So it has come about that, by a fortuitous
conjuncture of scarcely relevant circumstances, Prussia and the Empire
have been thrown into the lead in the race of "preparedness" and have
been led assiduously to hasten a breach which they could ill afford. It
is, to say the least, extremely doubtful if the event would have been
substantially different in the absence of that special provocation to
competitive preparedness that has been injected into the situation by
this German attitude; but the rate of approach to a warlike climax has
doubtless been hastened by the anticipatory policy of preparedness which
the Prussian dynasty has seen itself constrained to pursue. Eventually,
the peculiar circumstances of its case--embarrassment at home and
distaste and discredit abroad--have induced the Imperial State to take
the line of a defensive offense, to take war by the forelock and
retaliate on presumptive enemies for prospective grievances. But in any
case, the progressive improvement in transport and communication, as
well as in the special technology of warfare, backed by greatly enhanced
facilities for indoctrinating the populace with militant
nationalism,--these ways and means, working under the hand of patriotic
statesmen must in course of the past century have brought the peace of
Europe to so precarious a footing as would have provoked a material
increase in the equipment for national defense; which would unavoidably
have led to competitive armament and an enhanced international distrust
and animosity, eventually culminating in hostilities.

* * * * *

It may well be that the plea of defensive preparation advanced by the
statesmen, Prussian and others, in apology for competitive armaments is
a diplomatic subterfuge,--there are indications that such has commonly
been the case; but even if it commonly is visibly disingenuous, the need
of making such a plea to cover more sinister designs is itself an
evidence that an avowedly predatory enterprise no longer meets with the
requisite popular approval. Even if an exception to this rule be
admitted in the recent attitude of the German people, it is to be
recalled that the exception was allowed to stand only transiently, and
that presently the avowal of a predatory design in this case was
urgently disclaimed in the face of adversity. Even those who speak most
fluently for the necessity of war, and for its merits as a needed
discipline in the manly virtues, are constrained by the prevailing
sentiment to deprecate its necessity.

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