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

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Yet it is equally evident that when once a warlike enterprise has been
entered upon so far as to commit the nation to hostilities, it will have
the cordial support of popular sentiment even if it is patently an
aggressive war. Indeed, it is quite a safe generalisation that when
hostilities have once been got fairly under way by the interested
statesmen, the patriotic sentiment of the nation may confidently be
counted on to back the enterprise irrespective of the merits of the
quarrel. But even if the national sentiment is in this way to be counted
in as an incidental matter of course, it is also to be kept in mind in
this connection that any quarrel so entered upon by any nation will
forthwith come to have the moral approval of the community. Dissenters
will of course be found, sporadically, who do not readily fall in with
the prevailing animus; but as a general proposition it will still hold
true that any such quarrel forthwith becomes a just quarrel in the eyes
of those who have so been committed to it.

A corollary following from this general theorem may be worth noting in
the same connection. Any politician who succeeds in embroiling his
country in a war, however nefarious, becomes a popular hero and is
reputed a wise and righteous statesman, at least for the time being.
Illustrative instances need perhaps not, and indeed can not gracefully,
be named; most popular heroes and reputed statesmen belong in this
class.

Another corollary, which bears more immediately on the question in hand,
follows also from the same general proposition: Since the ethical values
involved in any given international contest are substantially of the
nature of afterthought or accessory, they may safely be left on one side
in any endeavour to understand or account for any given outbreak of
hostilities. The moral indignation of both parties to the quarrel is to
be taken for granted, as being the statesman's chief and necessary ways
and means of bringing any warlike enterprise to a head and floating it
to a creditable finish. It is a precipitate of the partisan animosity
that inspires both parties and holds them to their duty of
self-sacrifice and devastation, and at its best it will chiefly serve as
a cloak of self-righteousness to extenuate any exceptionally profligate
excursions in the conduct of hostilities.

Any warlike enterprise that is hopefully to be entered on must have the
moral sanction of the community, or of an effective majority in the
community. It consequently becomes the first concern of the warlike
statesman to put this moral force in train for the adventure on which he
is bent. And there are two main lines of motivation by which the
spiritual forces of any Christian nation may so be mobilised for warlike
adventure: (1) The preservation or furtherance of the community's
material interests, real or fancied, and (2) vindication of the national
honour. To these should perhaps be added as a third, the advancement and
perpetuation of the nation's "Culture;" that is to say, of its habitual
scheme of use and wont. It is a nice question whether, in practical
effect, the aspiration to perpetuate the national Culture is
consistently to be distinguished from the vindication of the national
honour. There is perhaps the distinction to be made that "the
perpetuation of the national Culture" lends a readier countenance to
gratuitous aggression and affords a broader cover for incidental
atrocities, since the enemies of the national Culture will necessarily
be conceived as an inferior and obstructive people, falling beneath the
rules of commonplace decorum.

Those material interests for which modern nations are in the habit of
taking to arms are commonly of a fanciful character, in that they
commonly have none but an imaginary net value to the community at large.
Such are, e.g., the national trade or the increase of the national
territory. These and the like may serve the warlike or dynastic
ambitions of the nation's masters; they may also further the interests
of office-holders, and more particularly of certain business houses or
businessmen who stand to gain some small advantage by help of the powers
in control; but it all signifies nothing more to the common man than an
increased bill of governmental expense and a probable increase in the
cost of living.

That a nation's trade should be carried in vessels owned by its citizens
or registered in its ports will doubtless have some sentimental value to
the common run of its citizens, as is shown by the fact that
disingenuous politicians always find it worth their while to appeal to
this chauvinistic predilection. But it patently is all a completely idle
question, in point of material advantage, to anyone but the owners of
the vessels; and to these owners it is also of no material consequence
under what flag their investments sail, except so far as the government
in question may afford them some preferential opportunity for
gain,--always at the cost of their fellow citizens. The like is equally
true as regards the domicile and the national allegiance of the
businessmen who buy and sell the country's imports and exports. The
common man plainly has no slightest material interest in the nationality
or the place of residence of those who conduct this traffic; though all
the facts go to say that in some puzzle-headed way the common man
commonly persuades himself that it does make some occult sort of
difference to him; so that he is commonly willing to pay something
substantial toward subsidising businessmen of his own nationality, in
the way of a protective tariff and the like.

The only material advantage to be derived from such a preferential trade
policy arises in the case of international hostilities, in which case
the home-owned vessels and merchants may on occasion count toward
military readiness; although even in that connection their value is
contingent and doubtful. But in this way they may contribute in their
degree to a readiness to break off peaceable relations with other
countries. It is only for warlike purposes, that is to say for the
dynastic ambitions of warlike statesmen, that these preferential
contrivances in economic policy have any substantial value; and even in
that connection their expediency is always doubtful. They are a source
of national jealousy, and they may on occasion become a help to military
strategy when this national jealousy eventuates in hostilities.

The run of the facts touching this matter of national trade policy is
something as follows: At the instance of businessmen who stand to gain
by it, and with the cordial support of popular sentiment, the
constituted authorities sedulously further the increase of shipping and
commerce under protection of the national power. At the same time they
spend substance and diplomatic energy in an endeavor to extend the
international market facilities open to the country's businessmen, with
a view always to a preferential advantage in favor of these
businessmen, also with the sentimental support of the common man and at
his cost. To safeguard these commercial interests, as well as
property-holdings of the nation's citizens in foreign parts, the nation
maintains naval, military, consular and diplomatic establishments, at
the common expense. The total gains derivable from these commercial and
investment interests abroad, under favorable circumstances, will never
by any chance equal the cost of the governmental apparatus installed to
further and safeguard them. These gains, such as they are, go to the
investors and businessmen engaged in these enterprises; while the costs
incident to the adventure are borne almost wholly by the common man, who
gets no gain from it all. Commonly, as in the case of a protective
tariff or a preferential navigation law, the cost to the common man is
altogether out of proportion to the gain which accrues to the
businessmen for whose benefit he carries the burden. The only other
class, besides the preferentially favored businessmen, who derive any
material benefit from this arrangement is that of the office-holders who
take care of this governmental traffic and draw something in the way of
salaries and perquisites; and whose cost is defrayed by the common man,
who remains an outsider in all but the payment of the bills. The common
man is proud and glad to bear this burden for the benefit of his
wealthier neighbors, and he does so with the singular conviction that in
some occult manner he profits by it. All this is incredible, but it is
everyday fact.

In case it should happen that these business interests of the nation's
businessmen interested in trade or investments abroad are jeopardised by
a disturbance of any kind in these foreign parts in which these
business interests lie, then it immediately becomes the urgent concern
of the national authorities to use all means at hand for maintaining the
gainful traffic of these businessmen undiminished, and the common man
pays the cost. Should such an untoward situation go to such sinister
lengths as to involve actual loss to these business interests or
otherwise give rise to a tangible grievance, it becomes an affair of the
national honour; whereupon no sense of proportion as between the
material gains at stake and the cost of remedy or retaliation need
longer be observed, since the national honour is beyond price. The
motivation in the case shifts from the ground of material interest to
the spiritual ground of the moral sentiments.

In this connection "honour" is of course to be taken in the euphemistic
sense which the term has under the _code duello_ governing "affairs of
honour." It carries no connotation of honesty, veracity, equity,
liberality, or unselfishness. This national honour is of the nature of
an intangible or immaterial asset, of course; it is a matter of
prestige, a sportsmanlike conception; but that fact must not be taken to
mean that it is of any the less substantial effect for purposes of a
_casus belli_ than the material assets of the community. Quite the
contrary: "Who steals my purse, steals trash," etc. In point of fact, it
will commonly happen that any material grievance must first be converted
into terms of this spiritual capital, before it is effectually turned to
account as a stimulus to warlike enterprise.

Even among a people with so single an eye to the main chance as the
American community it will be found true, on experiment or on review of
the historical evidence, that an offense against the national honour
commands a profounder and more unreserved resentment than any
infraction of the rights of person or property simply. This has latterly
been well shown in connection with the manoeuvres of the several
European belligerents, designed to bend American neutrality to the
service of one side or the other. Both parties have aimed to intimidate
and cajole; but while the one party has taken recourse to effrontery and
has made much and ostentatious use of threats and acts of violence
against person and property, the other has constantly observed a
deferential attitude toward American national self-esteem, even while
engaged on a persistent infraction of American commercial rights. The
first named line of diplomacy has convicted itself of miscarriage and
has lost the strategic advantage, as against the none too adroit finesse
of the other side. The statesmen of this European war power were so ill
advised as to enter on a course of tentatively cumulative intimidation,
by threats and experimentally graduated crimes against the property and
persons of American citizens, with a view to coerce American cupidity
and yet to avoid carrying these manoeuvres of terrorism far enough to
arouse an unmanageable sense of outrage. The experiment has served to
show that the breaking point in popular indignation will be reached
before the terrorism has gone far enough to raise a serious question of
pecuniary caution.

This national honour, which so is rated a necessary of life, is an
immaterial substance in a peculiarly high-wrought degree, being not only
not physically tangible but also not even capable of adequate statement
in pecuniary terms,--as would be the case with ordinary immaterial
assets. It is true, where the point of grievance out of which a question
of the national honour arises is a pecuniary discrepancy, the national
honour can not be satisfied without a pecuniary accounting; but it needs
no argument to convince all right-minded persons that even at such a
juncture the national honour that has been compromised is indefinitely
and indefinably more than what can be made to appear on an accountant's
page. It is a highly valued asset, or at least a valued possession, but
it is of a metaphysical, not of a physical nature, and it is not known
to serve any material or otherwise useful end apart from affording a
practicable grievance consequent upon its infraction.

This national honour is subject to injury in divers ways, and so may
yield a fruitful grievance even apart from offences against the person
or property of the nation's businessmen; as, e.g., through neglect or
disregard of the conventional punctilios governing diplomatic
intercourse, or by disrespect or contumelious speech touching the Flag,
or the persons of national officials, particularly of such officials as
have only a decorative use, or the costumes worn by such officials, or,
again, by failure to observe the ritual prescribed for parading the
national honour on stated occasions. When duly violated the national
honour may duly be made whole again by similarly immaterial
instrumentalities; as, e.g., by recital of an appropriate formula of
words, by formal consumption of a stated quantity of ammunition in the
way of a salute, by "dipping" an ensign, and the like,--procedure which
can, of course, have none but a magical efficacy. The national honour,
in short, moves in the realm of magic, and touches the frontiers of
religion.

Throughout this range of duties incumbent on the national defense, it
will be noted, the offenses or discrepancies to be guarded against or
corrected by recourse to arms have much of a ceremonial character.
Whatever may be the material accidents that surround any given concrete
grievance that comes up for appraisal and redress, in bringing the case
into the arena for trial by combat it is the spiritual value of the
offense that is played up and made the decisive ground of action,
particularly in so far as appeal is made to the sensibilities of the
common man, who will have to bear the cost of the adventure. And in such
a case it will commonly happen that the common man is unable, without
advice, to see that any given hostile act embodies a sacrilegious
infraction of the national honour. He will at any such conjuncture
scarcely rise to the pitch of moral indignation necessary to float a
warlike reprisal, until the expert keepers of the Code come in to
expound and certify the nature of the transgression. But when once the
lesion to the national honour has been ascertained, appraised and duly
exhibited by those persons whose place in the national economy it is to
look after all that sort of thing, the common man will be found nowise
behindhand about resenting the evil usage of which he so, by force of
interpretation, has been a victim.

CHAPTER II

ON THE NATURE AND USES OF PATRIOTISM

Patriotism may be defined as a sense of partisan solidarity in respect
of prestige. What the expert psychologists, and perhaps the experts in
Political Science, might find it necessary to say in the course of an
exhaustive analysis and definition of this human faculty would
presumably be something more precise and more extensive. There is no
inclination here to forestall definition, but only to identify and
describe the concept that loosely underlies the colloquial use of this
term, so far as seems necessary to an inquiry into the part played by
the patriotic animus in the life of modern peoples, particularly as it
bears on questions of war and peace.

On any attempt to divest this concept of all extraneous or adventitious
elements it will be found that such a sense of an undivided joint
interest in a collective body of prestige will always remain as an
irreducible minimum. This is the substantial core about which many and
divers subsidiary interests cluster, but without which these other
clustering interests and aspirations will not, jointly or severally,
make up a working palladium of the patriotic spirit.

It is true, seen in some other light or rated in some other bearing or
connection, one and another of these other interests, ideals,
aspirations, beatitudes, may well be adjudged nobler, wiser, possibly
more urgent than the national prestige; but in the forum of patriotism
all these other necessaries of human life--the glory of God and the good
of man--rise by comparison only to the rank of subsidiaries,
auxiliaries, amenities. He is an indifferent patriot who will let "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness" cloud the issue and get in the way
of the main business in hand.

There once were, we are told, many hardy and enterprising spirits banded
together along the Spanish Main for such like ends, just as there are in
our day an even greater number of no less single-minded spirits bent on
their own "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness," according to their
light, in the money-markets of the modern world; but for all their
admirable qualities and splendid achievements, their passionate quest of
these amenities has not entitled these Gentlemen Adventurers to claim
rank as patriots. The poet says:

"Strike for your altars and your fires!
Strike for the green graves of your sires!
God and your native land!"

But, again, a temperate scrutiny of the list of desiderata so enumerated
in the poet's flight, will quickly bring out the fact that any or all of
them might drop out of the situation without prejudice to the plain call
of patriotic duty. In the last resort, when the patriotic spirit falls
back on its naked self alone, it is not reflection on the merits of
these good and beautiful things in Nature that gives him his cue and
enforces the ultimate sacrifice. Indeed it is something infinitely more
futile and infinitely more urgent,--provided only that the man is imbued
with the due modicum of patriotic devotion; as, indeed, men commonly
are. It is not faith, hope or charity that abide as the irreducible
minimum of virtue in the patriot's scheme of things; particularly not
that charity that has once been highly spoken of as being the greatest
of these. It may be that, viewed in the light of reason, as Doctor
Katzenberger would say, patriotic devotion is the most futile thing in
the world; but, for good or ill, the light of reason has nothing to do
with the case,--no more than "The flowers that bloom in the spring."

The patriotic spirit is a spirit of emulation, evidently, at the same
time that it is emulation shot through with a sense of solidarity. It
belongs under the general caption of sportsmanship, rather than of
workmanship. Now, any enterprise in sportsmanship is bent on an
invidious success, which must involve as its major purpose the defeat
and humiliation of some competitor, whatever else may be comprised in
its aim. Its aim is a differential gain, as against a rival; and the
emulative spirit that comes under the head of patriotism commonly, if
not invariably, seeks this differential advantage by injury of the rival
rather than by an increase of home-bred well-being.

Indeed, well-being is altogether out of the perspective, except as
underpinning for an edifice of national prestige. It is, at least, a
safe generalisation that the patriotic sentiment never has been known to
rise to the consummate pitch of enthusiastic abandon except when bent on
some work of concerted malevolence. Patriotism is of a contentious
complexion, and finds its full expression in no other outlet than
warlike enterprise; its highest and final appeal is for the death,
damage, discomfort and destruction of the party of the second part.

It is not that the spirit of patriotism will tolerate no other
sentiments bearing on matters of public interest, but only that it will
tolerate none that traverse the call of the national prestige. Like
other men, the patriot may be moved by many and divers other
considerations, besides that of the national prestige; and these other
considerations may be of the most genial and reasonable kind, or they
may also be as foolish and mischievous as any comprised in the range of
human infirmities. He may be a humanitarian given over to the kindliest
solicitude for the common good, or a religious devotee hedged about in
all his motions by the ever present fear of God, or taken up with
artistic, scholarly or scientific pursuits; or, again, he may be a
spendthrift devotee of profane dissipation, whether in the slums or on
the higher levels of gentility, or he may be engaged on a rapacious
quest of gain, as a businessman within the law or as a criminal without
its benefit, or he may spend his best endeavors in advancing the
interests of his class at the cost of the nation at large. All that is
understood as a matter of course and is beside the point. In so far as
he is a complete patriot these other interests will fall away from him
when the one clear call of patriotic duty comes to enlist him in the
cause of the national prestige. There is, indeed, nothing to hinder a
bad citizen being a good patriot; nor does it follow that a good
citizen--in other respects--may not be a very indifferent patriot.

Many and various other preferences and considerations may coincide with
the promptings of the patriotic spirit, and so may come in to coalesce
with and fortify its driving force; and it is usual for patriotic men to
seek support for their patriotic impulses in some reasoned purpose of
this extraneous kind that is believed to be served by following the call
of the national prestige,--it may be a presumptive increase and
diffusion of culture at large, or the spread and enhancement of a
presumptively estimable religious faith, or a prospective liberation of
mankind from servitude to obnoxious masters and outworn institutions;
or, again, it may be the increase of peace and material well-being among
men, within the national frontiers or impartially throughout the
civilised world. There are, substantially, none of the desirable things
in this world that are not so counted on by some considerable body of
patriots to be accomplished by the success of their own particular
patriotic aspirations. What they will not come to an understanding about
is the particular national ascendency with which the attainment of these
admirable ends is conceived to be bound up.

The ideals, needs and aims that so are brought into the patriotic
argument to lend a color of rationality to the patriotic aspiration in
any given case will of course be such ideals, needs and aims as are
currently accepted and felt to be authentic and self-legitimating among
the people in whose eyes the given patriotic enterprise is to find
favor. So one finds that, e.g., among the followers of Islam, devout and
resolute, the patriotic statesman (that is to say the politician who
designs to make use of the popular patriotic fervor) will in the last
resort appeal to the claims and injunctions of the faith. In a similar
way the Prussian statesman bent on dynastic enterprise will conjure in
the name of the dynasty and of culture and efficiency; or, if worse
comes to worst, an outbreak will be decently covered with a plea of
mortal peril and self-defense. Among English-speaking peoples much is to
be gained by showing that the path of patriotic glory is at the same
time the way of equal-handed justice under the rule of free
institutions; at the same time, in a fully commercialised community,
such as the English-speaking commonly are, material benefits in the way
of trade will go far to sketch in a background of decency for any
enterprise that looks to the enhancement of the national prestige.

But any promise of gain, whether in the nation's material or immaterial
assets, will not of itself carry full conviction to the commonplace
modern citizen; or even to such modern citizens as are best endowed with
a national spirit. By and large, and overlooking that appreciable
contingent of morally defective citizens that is to be counted on in any
hybrid population, it will hold true that no contemplated enterprise or
line of policy will fully commend itself to the popular sense of merit
and expediency until it is given a moral turn, so as to bring it to
square with the dictates of right and honest dealing. On no terms short
of this will it effectually coalesce with the patriotic aspiration. To
give the fullest practical effect to the patriotic fervor that animates
any modern nation, and so turn it to use in the most effective way, it
is necessary to show that the demands of equity are involved in the
case. Any cursory survey of modern historical events bearing on this
point, among the civilised peoples, will bring out the fact that no
concerted and sustained movement of the national spirit can be had
without enlisting the community's moral convictions. The common man must
be persuaded that right is on his side. "Thrice is he armed who knows
his quarrel just." The grounds of this conviction may often be tawdry
enough, but the conviction is a necessary factor in the case.

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