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

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So that the best that can be accomplished along this line by the
dynastic statesmen is a shrewd compromise, embodying such a degree of
isolation and inhibition as will leave the country passably
self-sufficient in case of need, without lowering the national
efficiency to such a point as to cripple its productive forces beyond
what will be offset by the greater warlike readiness that is so
attained. The point to which such a policy of isolation and sufficiency
will necessarily be directed is that measure of inhibition that will
yield the most facile and effective ways and means of warlike
enterprise, the largest product of warlike effectiveness to be had on
multiplying the nation's net efficiency into its readiness to take the
field.

Into any consideration of this tactical problem a certain subsidiary
factor enters, in that the patriotic temper of the nation is always more
or less affected by such an economic policy. The greater the degree of
effectual isolation and discrimination embodied in the national policy,
the greater will commonly be its effect on popular sentiment in the way
of national animosity and spiritual self-sufficiency; which may be an
asset of great value for the purposes of warlike enterprise.

Plainly, any dynastic statesman who should undertake to further the
common welfare regardless of its serviceability for warlike enterprise
would be defeating his own purpose. He would, in effect, go near to
living up to his habitual professions touching international peace,
instead of professing to live up to them, as the exigencies of his
national enterprise now conventionally require him to do. In effect, he
would be _functus officio_.

There are two great administrative instruments available for this work
of repression and national self-sufficiency at the hands of the
imperialistic statesman: the protective tariff, and commercial
subvention. The two are not consistently to be distinguished from one
another at all points, and each runs out into a multifarious convolution
of variegated details; but the principles involved are, after all,
fairly neat and consistent. The former is of the nature of a conspiracy
in restraint of trade by repression; the latter, a conspiracy to the
like effect by subsidised monopoly; both alike act to check the pursuit
of industry in given lines by artificially increasing the cost of
production for given individuals or classes of producers, and both alike
impose a more than proportionate cost on the community within which they
take effect. Incidentally, both of these methods of inhibition bring a
degree, though a less degree, of hardship, to the rest of the industrial
world.

All this is matter of course to all economic students, and it should,
reasonably, be plain to all intelligent persons; but its voluble denial
by interested parties, as well as the easy credulity with which
patriotic citizens allow themselves to accept the sophistries offered in
defense of these measures of inhibition, has made it seem worth while
here to recall these commonplaces of economic science.

The ground of this easy credulity is not so much infirmity of intellect
as it is an exuberance of sentiment, although it may reasonably be
believed that its more pronounced manifestations--as, e.g., the high
protective tariff--can be had only by force of a formidable cooperation
of the two. The patriotic animus is an invidious sentiment of joint
prestige; and it needs no argument or documentation to bear out the
affirmation that its bias will lend a color of merit and expediency to
any proposed measure that can, however speciously, promise an increase
of national power or prestige. So that when the statesmen propose a
policy of inhibition and mitigated isolation on the professed ground
that such a policy will strengthen the nation economically by making it
economically self-supporting, as well as ready for any warlike
adventure, the patriotic citizen views the proposed measures through the
rosy haze of national aspirations and lets the will to believe persuade
him that whatever conduces to a formidable national battle-front will
also contribute to the common good. At the same time all these national
conspiracies in restraint of trade are claimed, with more or less
reason, to inflict more or less harm on rival nationalities with whom
economic relations are curtailed; and patriotism being an invidious
sentiment, the patriotic citizen finds comfort in the promise of
mischief to these others, and is all the more prone to find all kinds of
merit in proposals that look to such an invidious outcome. In any
community imbued with an alert patriotic spirit, the fact that any given
circumstance, occurrence or transaction can be turned to account as a
means of invidious distinction or invidious discrimination against
humanity beyond the national pale, will always go far to procure
acceptance of it as being also an article of substantial profit to the
community at large, even though the slightest unbiased scrutiny would
find it of no ascertainable use in any other bearing than that of
invidious mischief. And whatever will bear interpretation as an
increment of the nation's power or prowess, in comparison with rival
nationalities, will always be securely counted as an item of joint
credit, and will be made to serve the collective conceit as an invidious
distinction; and patriotic credulity will find it meritorious also in
other respects.

So, e.g., it is past conception that such a patent imbecility as a
protective tariff should enlist the support of any ordinarily
intelligent community except by the help of some such chauvinistic
sophistry. So also, the various royal establishments of Europe, e.g.,
afford an extreme but therefore all the more convincing illustration of
the same logical fallacy. These establishments and personages are great
and authentic repositories of national prestige, and they are therefore
unreflectingly presumed by their several aggregations of subjects to be
of some substantial use also in some other bearing; but it would be a
highly diverting exhibition of credulity for any outsider to fall into
that amazing misconception. But the like is manifestly true of
commercial turnover and export trade among modern peoples; although on
this head the infatuation is so ingrained and dogmatic that even a rank
outsider is expected to accept the fallacy without reflection, on pain
of being rated as unsafe or unsound. Such matters again, as the
dimensions of the national territory, or the number of the population
and the magnitude of the national resources, are still and have perhaps
always been material for patriotic exultation, and are fatuously
believed to have some great significance for the material fortunes of
the common man; although it should be plain on slight reflection that
under modern conditions of ownership, these things, one and all, are of
no consequence to the common man except as articles of prestige to
stimulate his civic pride. The only conjuncture under which these and
the like national holdings can come to have a meaning as joint or
collective assets would arise in case of a warlike adventure carried to
such extremities as would summarily cancel vested rights of ownership
and turn them to warlike uses. While the rights of ownership hold, the
common man, who does not own these things, draws no profit from their
inclusion in the national domain; indeed, he is at some cost to
guarantee their safe tenure by their rightful owners.

In so pursuing their quest of the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, by
use of the national resources and by sanction of the national spirit,
the constituted authorities also assume the guardianship of sundry
material interests that are presumed to touch the common good; such as
security of person and property in dealings with aliens, whether at home
or abroad; security of investment and trade, and vindication of their
citizens before the law in foreign parts; and, chiefly and ubiquitously,
furtherance and extension of the national trade into foreign parts,
particularly of the export trade, on terms advantageous to the traders
of the nation.

The last named of these advantages is the one on which stress is apt to
fall in the argument of all those who advocate an unfolding of national
power, as being a matter of vital material benefit to the common man.
The other items indicated above, it is plain on the least reflection,
are matters of slight if any material consequence to him. The common
man--that is ninety-nine and a fraction in one hundred of the nation's
common men--has no dealings with aliens in foreign parts, as capitalist,
trader, missionary or wayfaring man, and has no occasion for security of
person or property under circumstances that raise any remotest question
of the national prowess or the national prestige; nor does he seek or
aspire to trade to foreign parts on any terms, equitable or otherwise,
or to invest capital among aliens under foreign rule, or to exploit
concessions or take orders, for acceptance or delivery; nor, indeed,
does he at all commonly come into even that degree of contact with
abroad that is implied in the purchase of foreign securities. Virtually
the sole occasion on which he comes in touch with the world beyond the
frontier is when, and if, he goes away from home as an emigrant, and so
ceases to enjoy the tutelage of the nation's constituted authorities.
But the common man, in point of fact, is a home-keeping body, who
touches foreign parts and aliens outside the national frontiers only at
the second or third remove, if at all, in the occasional purchase of
foreign products, or in the sale of goods that may find their way abroad
after he has lost sight of them. The exception to this general rule
would be found in the case of those under-sized nations that are too
small to contain the traffic in which their commonplace population are
engaged, and that have neither national prowess nor national prestige to
fall back on in a conceivable case of need,--and whose citizens,
individually, appear to be as fortunately placed in their workday
foreign relations, without a background of prowess and prestige, as the
citizens of the great powers who are most abundantly provided in these
respects.

With wholly negligible exceptions, these matters touch the needs or the
sensibilities of the common man only through the channel of the
national honour, which may be injured in the hardships suffered by his
compatriots in foreign parts, or which may, again, be repaired or
enhanced by the meritorious achievements of the same compatriots; of
whose existence he will commonly have no other or more substantial
evidence, and in whose traffic he has no share other than this vicarious
suffering of vague and remote indignity or vainglory by force of the
wholly fortuitous circumstance that they are (inscrutably) his
compatriots. These immaterial goods of vicarious prestige are, of
course, not to be undervalued, nor is the fact to be overlooked or
minimised that they enter into the sum total of the common citizen's
"psychic income," for whatever they may foot up to; but evidently their
consideration takes us back to the immaterial category of prestige
value, from which the argument just now was hopefully departing with a
view to consideration of the common man's material interest in that
national enterprise about which patriotic aspirations turn.

These things, then, are matters in which the common man has an interest
only as they have a prestige value. But there need be no question as to
their touching his sensibilities and stirring him to action, and even to
acts of bravery and self-sacrifice. Indignity or ill treatment of his
compatriots in foreign parts, even when well deserved, as is not
infrequently the case, are resented with a vehemence that is greatly to
the common man's credit, and greatly also to the gain of those patriotic
statesmen who find in such grievances their safest and most reliable raw
materials for the production of international difficulty. That he will
so respond to the stimulus of these, materially speaking irrelevant,
vicissitudes of good or ill that touch the fortunes of his compatriots,
as known to him by hearsay, bears witness, of course, to the high
quality of his manhood; but it falls very far short of arguing that
these promptings of his patriotic spirit have any value as traits that
count toward his livelihood or his economic serviceability in the
community in which he lives. It is all to his credit, and it goes to
constitute him a desirable citizen, in the sense that he is properly
amenable to the incitements of patriotic emulation; but it is none the
less to be admitted, however reluctantly, that this trait of impulsively
vicarious indignation or vainglory is neither materially profitable to
himself nor an asset of the slightest economic value to the community in
which he lives. Quite the contrary, in fact. So also is it true that the
common man derives no material advantage from the national success along
this line, though he commonly believes that it all somehow inures to his
benefit. It would seem that an ingrown bias of community interest,
blurred and driven by a jealously sensitive patriotic pride, bends his
faith uncritically to match his inclination. His persuasion is a work of
preconception rather than of perception.

But the most substantial and most unqualified material benefit currently
believed to be derivable from a large unfolding of national prowess and
a wide extension of the national domain is an increased volume of the
nation's foreign trade, particularly of the export trade. "Trade follows
the Flag." And this larger trade and enhanced profit is presumed to
inure to the joint benefit of the citizens. Such is the profession of
faith of the sagacious statesmen and such is also the unreflecting
belief of the common man.

It may be left an open question if an unfolding of national prowess and
prestige increases the nation's trade, whether in imports or in
exports. There is no available evidence that it has any effect of the
kind. What is not an open question is the patent fact that such an
extension of trade confers no benefit on the common man, who is not
engaged in the import or export business. More particularly does it
yield him no advantage at all commensurate with the cost involved in any
endeavour so to increase the volume of trade by increasing the nation's
power and extending its dominion. The profits of trade go not to the
common man at large but to the traders whose capital is invested; and it
is a completely idle matter to the common citizen whether the traders
who profit by the nation's trade are his compatriots or not.[6]

[Footnote 6: All this, which should be plain without demonstration, has
been repeatedly shown in the expositions of various peace advocates,
typically by Mr. Angell.]

The pacifist argument on the economic futility of national ambitions
will commonly rest its case at this point; having shown as unreservedly
as need be that national ambition and all its works belong of right
under that rubric of the litany that speaks of Fire, Flood and
Pestilence. But an hereditary bent of human nature is not to be put out
of the way with an argument showing that it has its disutilities. So
with the patriotic animus; it is a factor to be counted with, rather
than to be exorcised.

As has been remarked above, in the course of time and change the advance
of the industrial arts and of the institutions of ownership have taken
such a turn that the working system of industry and business no longer
runs on national lines and, indeed, no longer takes account of national
frontiers,--except in so far as the national policies and legislation,
arbitrarily and partially, impose these frontiers on the workings of
trade and industry. The effect of such regulation for political ends is,
with wholly negligible exceptions, detrimental to the efficient working
of the industrial system under modern conditions; and it is therefore
detrimental to the material interests of the common citizen. But the
case is not the same as regards the interests of the traders. Trade is a
competitive affair, and it is to the advantage of the traders engaged in
any given line of business to extend their own markets and to exclude
competing traders. Competition may be the soul of trade, but monopoly is
necessarily the aim of every trader. And the national organisation is of
service to its traders in so far as it shelters them, wholly or partly,
from the competition of traders of other nationalities, or in so far as
it furthers their enterprise by subvention or similar privileges as
against their competitors, whether at home or abroad. The gain that so
comes to the nation's traders from any preferential advantage afforded
them by national regulations, or from any discrimination against traders
of foreign nationality, goes to the traders as private gain. It is of no
benefit to any of their compatriots; since there is no community of
usufruct that touches these gains of the traders. So far as concerns his
material advantage, it is an idle matter to the common citizen whether
he deals with traders of his own nationality or with aliens; both alike
will aim to buy cheap and sell dear, and will charge him "what the
traffic will bear." Nor does it matter to him whether the gains of this
trade go to aliens or to his compatriots; in either case equally they
immediately pass beyond his reach, and are equally removed from any
touch of joint interest on his part. Being private property, under
modern law and custom he has no use of them, whether a national frontier
does or does not intervene between his domicile and that of their owner.

These are facts that every man of sound mind knows and acts on without
doubt or hesitation in his own workday affairs. He would scarcely even
find amusement in so futile a proposal as that his neighbor should share
his business profits with him for no better reason than that he is a
compatriot. But when the matter is presented as a proposition in
national policy and embroidered with an invocation of his patriotic
loyalty the common citizen will commonly be found credulous enough to
accept the sophistry without abatement. His archaic sense of group
solidarity will still lead him at his own cost to favor his trading
compatriots by the imposition of onerous trade regulations for their
private advantage, and to interpose obstacles in the way of alien
traders. All this ingenious policy of self-defeat is greatly helped out
by the patriotic conceit of the citizens; who persuade themselves to see
in it an accession to the power and prestige of their own nation and a
disadvantage to rival nationalities. It is, indeed, more than doubtful
if such a policy of self-defeat as is embodied in current international
trade discriminations could be insinuated into the legislation of any
civilized nation if the popular intelligence were not so clouded with
patriotic animosity as to let a prospective detriment to their foreign
neighbors count as a gain to themselves.

So that the chief material use of the patriotic bent in modern
populations, therefore, appears to be its use to a limited class of
persons engaged in foreign trade, or in business that comes in
competition with foreign industry. It serves their private gain by
lending effectual countenance to such restraint of international trade
as would not be tolerated within the national domain. In so doing it has
also the secondary and more sinister effect of dividing the nations on
lines of rivalry and setting up irreconcilable claims and ambitions, of
no material value but of far-reaching effect in the way of provocation
to further international estrangement and eventual breach of the peace.

How all this falls in with the schemes of militant statesmen, and
further reacts on the freedom and personal fortunes of the common man,
is an extensive and intricate topic, though not an obscure one; and it
has already been spoken of above, perhaps as fully as need be.

CHAPTER III

ON THE CONDITIONS OF A LASTING PEACE

The considerations set out in earlier chapters have made it appear that
the patriotic spirit of modern peoples is the abiding source of
contention among nations. Except for their patriotism a breach of the
peace among modern peoples could not well be had. So much will doubtless
be assented to as a matter of course. It is also a commonplace of
current aphoristic wisdom that both parties to a warlike adventure in
modern times stand to lose, materially; whatever nominal--that is to say
political--gains may be made by one or the other. It has also appeared
from these considerations recited in earlier passages that this
patriotic spirit prevails throughout, among all civilised peoples, and
that it pervades one nation about as ubiquitously as another. Nor is
there much evidence of a weakening of this sinister proclivity with the
passage of time or the continued advance in the arts of life. The only
civilized nations that can be counted on as habitually peaceable are
those who are so feeble or are so placed as to be cut off from hope of
gain through contention. Vainglorious arrogance may run at a higher
tension among the more backward and boorish nations; but it is not
evident that the advance guard among the civilised peoples are imbued
with a less complete national self-complacency. If the peace is to be
kept, therefore, it will have to be kept by and between peoples made up,
in effect, of complete patriots; which comes near being a contradiction
in terms. Patriotism is useful for breaking the peace, not for keeping
it. It makes for national pretensions and international jealously and
distrust, with warlike enterprise always in perspective; as a way to
national gain or a recourse in case of need. And there is commonly no
settled demarkation between these two contrasted needs that urge a
patriotic people forever to keep one eye on the chance of a recourse to
arms.

Therefore any calculus of the Chances of Peace appears to become a
reckoning of the forces which may be counted on to keep a patriotic
nation in an unstable equilibrium of peace for the time being. As has
just been remarked above, among civilised peoples only those nations can
be counted on consistently to keep the peace who are so feeble or
otherwise so placed as to be cut off from hope of national gain. And
these can apparently be so counted on only as regards aggression, not as
regards the national defense, and only in so far as they are not drawn
into warlike enterprise, collectively, by their more competent
neighbors. Even the feeblest and most futile of them feels in honour
bound to take up arms in defense of such national pretensions as they
still may harbour; and all of them harbour such pretensions. In certain
extreme cases, which it might seem invidious to specify more explicitly,
it is not easy to discover any specific reasons for the maintenance of a
national establishment, apart from the vindication of certain national
pretensions which would quietly lapse in the absence of a national
establishment on whom their vindication is incumbent.

Of the rest, the greater nations that are spoken of as Powers no such
general statement will hold. These are the peoples who stand, in
matters of national concern, on their own initiative; and the question
of peace and war at large is in effect, a question of peace and war
among these Powers. They are not so numerous that they can be sifted
into distinct classes, and yet they differ among themselves in such a
way that they may, for the purpose in hand, fairly be ranged under two
distinguishable if not contrasted heads: those which may safely be
counted on spontaneously to take the offensive, and those which will
fight on provocation. Typically of the former description are Germany
and Japan. Of the latter are the French and British, and less
confidently the American republic. In any summary statement of this kind
Russia will have to be left on one side as a doubtful case, for reasons
to which the argument may return at a later point; the prospective
course of things in Russia is scarcely to be appraised on the ground of
its past. Spain and Italy, being dubious Powers at the best, need not
detain the argument; they are, in the nature of things, subsidiaries who
wait on the main chance. And Austria, with whatever the name may cover,
is for the immediate purpose to be counted under the head of Germany.

There is no invidious comparison intended in so setting off these two
classes of nations in contrast to one another. It is not a contrast of
merit and demerit or of prestige. Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan
are, in the nature of things as things go, bent in effect on a
disturbance of the peace,--with a view to advance the cause of their own
dominion. On a large view of the case, such as many German statesmen
were in the habit of professing in the years preceding the great war, it
may perhaps appear reasonable to say--as they were in the habit of
saying--that these Imperial Powers are as well within the lines of fair
and honest dealing in their campaign of aggression as the other Powers
are in taking a defensive attitude against their aggression. Some sort
of international equity has been pleaded in justification of their
demand for an increased share of dominion. At least it has appeared that
these Imperial statesmen have so persuaded themselves after very mature
deliberation; and they have showed great concern to persuade others of
the equity of their Imperial claim to something more than the law would
allow. These sagacious, not to say astute, persons have not only reached
a conviction to this effect, but they have become possessed of this
conviction in such plenary fashion that, in the German case, they have
come to admit exceptions or abatement of the claim only when and in so
far as the campaign of equitable aggression on which they had entered
has been proved impracticable by the fortunes of war.

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