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

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* * * * *

The initial stages of this Germanic occupation of the Fatherland are
sufficiently obscure under the cloud of unrecorded antiquity that covers
them; and then, an abundance of obscurantism has also been added by the
vapours of misguided vanity that have surrounded so nearly all
historical inquiry on the part of patriotic German scholars. Yet there
are certain outstanding features in the case, in history and prehistory,
that are too large or too notorious to be set aside or to be covered
over, and these may suffice to show the run of circumstances which have
surrounded the German peoples and shaped their civil and political
institutions, and whose discipline has guided German habits of thought
and preserved the German spirit of loyalty in the shape in which it
underlies the dynastic State of the present day.

Among the most engaging of those fables that make the conventional
background of German history is the academic legend of a free
agricultural village community made up of ungraded and masterless men.
It is not necessary here to claim that such a village community never
played a part in the remoter prehistoric experiences out of which the
German people, or their ruling classes, came into the territory of the
Fatherland; such a claim might divert the argument. But it is
sufficiently patent to students of those matters today that no such
community of free and ungraded men had any part in the Germanic
beginnings; that is to say, in the early experiences of the Fatherland
under German rule. The meager and ambiguous remarks of Tacitus on the
state of domestic and civil economy among the inhabitants of Germany
need no longer detain anyone, in the presence of the available
archaeological and historical evidence. The circumstantial evidence of
the prehistoric antiquities which touch this matter, as well as the
slight allusions of historical records in antiquity, indicate
unambiguously enough that when the Germanic immigrants moved into the
territories of the Fatherland they moved in as invaders, or rather as
marauders, and made themselves masters of the people already living on
the land. And history quite as unambiguously declares that when the
Fatherland first comes under its light it presents a dark and bloody
ground of tumultuous contention and intrigue; where princes and
princelings, captains of war and of rapine as well as the captains of
superstition, spend the substance of an ignominiously sordid and servile
populace in an endless round of mutual raiding, treachery,
assassinations and supersession.

Taken at their face value, the recorded stories of that early time would
leave one to infer that the common people, whose industry supported this
superstructure of sordid mastery, could have survived only by oversight.
But touched as it is with poetic license and devoted to the admirable
life of the master class--admirable in their own eyes and in those of
their chroniclers, as undoubtedly also in the eyes of the subject
populace--the history of that time doubtless plays up the notable
exploits and fortunes of its conspicuous personages, somewhat to the
neglect of the obscure vicissitudes of life and fortune among that human
raw material by use of which the admirable feats of the master class
were achieved, and about the use of which the dreary traffic of greed
and crime went on among the masters.

Of the later history, what covers, say, the last one thousand years,
there is no need to speak at length. With transient, episodic,
interruptions it is for the Fatherland a continuation out of these
beginnings, leading out into a more settled system of subjection and
mastery and a progressively increased scale of princely enterprise,
resting on an increasingly useful and increasingly loyal populace. In
all this later history the posture of things in the Fatherland is by no
means unique, nor is it even strikingly peculiar, by contrast with the
rest of western Europe, except in degree. It is of the same general kind
as the rest of what has gone to make the historical advance of medieval
and modern times; but it differs from the generality in a more sluggish
movement and a more tenacious adherence to what would be rated as the
untoward features of mediaevalism. The approach to a modern scheme of
institutions and modern conceptions of life and of human values has been
slow, and hitherto incomplete, as compared with those communities that
have, for good or ill, gone farthest along the ways of modernity.
Habituation to personal subjection and subservience under the rigorous
and protracted discipline of standardised service and fealty has
continued later, and with later and slighter mitigation, in the
Fatherland; so as better to have conserved the spiritual attitude of the
feudal order. Law and order in the Fatherland has in a higher degree
continued to mean unquestioning obedience to a personal master and
unquestioning subservience to the personal ambitions of the master. And
since freedom, in the sense of discretionary initiative on the part of
the common man, does not fit into the framework of such a system of
dependence on personal authority and surveillance, any degree of such
free initiative will be "licence" in the eyes of men bred into the
framework of this system; whereas "liberty," as distinct from "licence,"
is not a matter of initiative and self-direction, but of latitude in the
service of a master. Hence no degree of curtailment in this delegated
"liberty" will be resented or repudiated by popular indignation, so long
as the master to whom service is due can give assurance that it is
expedient for his purposes.

The age-long course of experience and institutional discipline out of
which the current German situation has come may be drawn schematically
to the following effect: In the beginning a turmoil of conquest, rapine,
servitude, and contention between rival bands of marauders and their
captains, gradually, indeed imperceptibly, fell into lines of settled
and conventionalised exploitation; with repeated interruptions due to
new incursions and new combinations of rapacious chieftains. Out of it
all in the course of time came a feudal regime, under which personal
allegiance and service to petty chiefs was the sole and universal
accredited bond of solidarity. As the outcome of further unremitting
intrigue and contention among feudal chiefs, of high and low degree, the
populace fell into larger parcels, under the hands of feudal lords of
larger dominion, and the bias of allegiance and service came to hold
with some degree of permanence and uniformity, or at least of
consistency, over a considerable reach of country, including its
inhabitants. With the rise of States came allegiance to a dynasty, as
distinguished from the narrower and more ephemeral allegiance to the
semi-detached person of a victorious prince; and the relative permanence
of territorial frontiers under this rule gave room for an effectual
recrudescence of the ancient propensity to a sentimental group
solidarity; in which the accredited territorial limits of the dynastic
dominion served to outline the group that so was felt to belong together
under a joint dispensation and with something of a joint interest in
matters of fame and fortune. As the same notion is more commonly and
more suggestively expressed, a sense of nationality arose within the
sweep of the dynastic rule. This sense of community interest that is
called nationality so came in to reenforce the sense of allegiance to
the dynastic establishment and so has coalesced with it to produce that
high-wrought loyalty to the State, that draws equally on the sentiment
of community interest in the nation and on the prescriptive docility to
the dynastic head. The sense of national solidarity and of feudal
loyalty and service have coalesced, to bring this people to that climax
of patriotic devotion beyond which there lies no greater height along
this way. But this is also as far as the German people have gone; and it
is scarcely to be claimed that the Japanese have yet reached this stage;
they would rather appear to be, essentially, subjects of the emperor,
and only inchoately a Japanese nation. Of the German people it seems
safe to say that they have achieved such a coalescence of unimpaired
feudal fealty to a personal master and a full-blown sense of national
solidarity, without any perceptible slackening in either strand of the
double tie which so binds them in the service of the dynastic State.

Germany, in other words, is somewhat in arrears, as compared with those
Europeans that have gone farthest along this course of institutional
growth, or perhaps rather institutional permutation. It is not that this
retardation of the German people in this matter of national spirit is to
be counted as an infirmity, assuredly not as a handicap in the pursuit
of that national prestige on which all patriotic endeavour finally
converges. For this purpose the failure to distinguish between the
ambitions of the dynastic statesmen and the interests of the
commonwealth is really a prodigious advantage, which their rivals, of
more mature growth politically, have lost by atrophy of this same
dynastic axiom of subservience. These others, of whom the French and the
English-speaking peoples make up the greater part and may be taken as
the typical instance, have had a different history, in part. The
discipline of experience has left a somewhat different residue of habits
of thought embedded in their institutional equipment and effective as
axiomatic premises in their further apprehension of what is worth while,
and why.

It is not that the difference between these two contrasted strains of
the Western civilisation is either profound or very pronounced; it is
perhaps rather to be stated as a difference of degree than of kind; a
retardation of spiritual growth, in respect of the prevalent and
controlling habits of thought on certain heads, in the one case as
against the other. Therefore any attempt to speak with sufficient
definition, so as to bring out this national difference of animus in any
convincing way, will unavoidably have an appearance of overstatement, if
not also of bias. And in any case, of course, it is not to be expected
that the national difference here spoken for can be brought home to the
apprehension of any unspoiled son of the Fatherland, since it does not
lie within that perspective.

It is not of the nature of a divergence, but rather a differential in
point of cultural maturity, due to a differential in the rate of
progression through that sequence of institutional phases through which
the civilised peoples of Europe, jointly and severally, have been led by
force of circumstance. In this movement out of the Dark Ages and onward,
circumstances have fallen out differently for those Europeans that
chanced to live within the confines of the Fatherland, different with
such effect as to have in the present placed these others at a farther
remove from the point of departure, leaving them furnished with less of
that archaic frame of mind that is here in question. Possessed of less,
but by no means shorn of all--perhaps not of the major part--of that
barbaric heritage.

Circumstances have so fallen out that these--typically the French and
the English-speaking peoples--have left behind and partly forgotten that
institutional phase in which the people of Imperial Germany now live and
move and have their being. The French partly because they--that is the
common people of the French lands--entered the procession with a very
substantial lead, having never been put back to a point abreast of their
neighbors across the Rhine, in that phase of European civilisation from
which the peoples of the Fatherland tardily emerged into the feudal age.
So, any student who shall set out to account for the visible lead which
the French people still so obstinately maintain in the advance of
European culture, will have to make up his account with this notable
fact among the premises of his inquiry, that they have had a shorter
course to cover and have therefore, in the sporting phrase, had the
inside track. They measure from a higher datum line. Among the
advantages which so have come, in a sense unearned, to the French
people, is their uninterrupted retention, out of Roman--and perhaps
pre-Roman--times, of the conception of a commonwealth, a community of
men with joint and mutual interests apart from any superimposed
dependence on a joint feudal superior. The French people therefore
became a nation, with unobtrusive facility, so soon as circumstances
permitted, and they are today the oldest "nation" in Europe. They
therefore were prepared from long beforehand, with an adequate principle
(habit of thought) of national cohesion and patriotic sentiment, to make
the shift from a dynastic State to a national commonwealth whenever the
occasion for such a move should arise; that is to say, whenever the
dynastic State, by a suitable conjunction of infirmity and irksomeness,
should pass the margin of tolerance in this people's outraged sense of
national shame. The case of the German people in their latterday
attitude toward dynastic vagaries may afford a term of comparison. These
appear yet incapable of distinguishing between national shame and
dynastic ambition.

By a different course and on lines more nearly parallel with the
life-history of the German peoples, the English-speaking peoples have
reached what is for the present purpose much the same ground as the
French, in that they too have made the shift from the dynastic State to
the national commonwealth. The British started late, but the discipline
of servitude and unmitigated personal rule in their case was relatively
brief and relatively ineffectual; that is to say, as compared with what
their German cousins had to endure and to learn in the like connection.
So that the British never learned the lesson of dynastic loyalty fully
by heart; at least not the populace; whatever may be true for the
privileged classes, the gentlemen, whose interests were on the side of
privilege and irresponsible mastery. Here as in the French case it was
the habits of thought of the common man, not of the class of gentlemen,
that made the obsolescence of the dynastic State a foregone conclusion
and an easy matter--as one speaks of easy achievement in respect of
matters of that magnitude. It is now some two and a half centuries since
this shift in the national point of view overtook the English-speaking
community. Perhaps it would be unfair to say that that period, or that
period plus what further time may yet have to be added, marks the
interval by which German habits of thought in these premises are in
arrears, but it is not easy to find secure ground for a different and
more moderate appraisal.

The future, of course, is not to be measured in terms of the past, and
the tempo of the present and of the calculable future is in many
bearings very different from that which has ruled even in the recent
historical past. But then, on the other hand, habituation always
requires time; more particularly such habituation as is to take effect
throughout a populous nation and is counted on to work a displacement of
a comprehensive institutional system and of a people's outlook on life.

Germany is still a dynastic State. That is to say, its national
establishment is, in effect, a self-appointed and irresponsible
autocracy which holds the nation in usufruct, working through an
appropriate bureaucratic organisation, and the people is imbued with
that spirit of abnegation and devotion that is involved in their
enthusiastically supporting a government of that character. Now, it is
in the nature of a dynastic State to seek dominion, that being the whole
of its nature. And a dynastic establishment which enjoys the unqualified
usufruct of such resources as are placed at its disposal by the
feudalistic loyalty of the German people runs no chance of keeping the
peace, except on terms of the unconditional surrender of all those whom
it may concern. No solemn engagement and no pious resolution has any
weight in the balance against a cultural fatality of this magnitude.

* * * * *

This account of the derivation and current state of German nationalism
will of course appear biased to anyone who has been in the habit of
rating German Culture high in all its bearings, and to whom at the same
time the ideals of peace and liberty appeal. Indeed, such a critic,
gifted with the due modicum of asperity, might well be provoked to call
it all a more or less ingenious diatribe of partisan malice. But it can
be so construed only by those who see the question at issue as a point
of invidious distinction between this German animus on the one hand and
the corresponding frame of mind of the neighboring peoples on the other
hand. There may also appear to the captious to be some air of
deprecation about the characterisation here offered of the past history
of political traffic within the confines of the Fatherland. All of
which, of course, touches neither the veracity of the characterisation
nor the purpose with which so ungrateful a line of analysis and
exposition has been entered upon. It is to be regretted if facts that
may flutter the emotions of one and another among the sensitive and
unreflecting can not be drawn into such an inquiry without having their
cogency discounted beforehand on account of the sentimental value
imputed to them. Of course no offense is intended and no invidious
comparison is aimed at.

Even if the point of it all were an invidious comparison it would
immediately have to be admitted that the net showing in favor of these
others, e.g., the French or the English-speaking peoples, is by no means
so unreservedly to their credit as such a summary statement of the
German case might seem to imply. As bearing on the chances of a peace
contingent upon the temper of the contracting nationalities, it is by no
means a foregone conclusion that such a peace compact would hold
indefinitely even if it depended solely on the pacific animus of these
others that have left the dynastic State behind. These others, in fact,
are also not yet out of the woods. They may not have the same gift of
gratuitous and irresponsible truculence as their German cousins, in the
same alarming degree; but as was said in an earlier passage, they too
are ready to fight on provocation. They are patriotic to a degree;
indeed to such a degree that anything which visibly touches the national
prestige will readily afford a _casus belli_. But it remains true that
the popular temper among them is of the defensive order; perhaps of an
unnecessarily enthusiastic defensive order, but after all in such a
frame of mind as leaves them willing to let well enough alone, to live
and let live.

And herein appears to lie the decisive difference between those peoples
whose patriotic affections center about the fortunes of an impersonal
commonwealth and those in whom is superadded a fervent aspiration for
dynastic ascendency. The latter may be counted on to break the peace
when a promising opportunity offers.

The contrast may be illustrated, though not so sharply as might be
desirable, in the different temper shown by the British people in the
Boer war on the one hand, as compared with the popularity of the
French-Prussian war among the German people on the other hand. Both were
aggressive wars, and both were substantially unprovoked. Diplomatically
speaking, of course, sufficient provocation was found in either case, as
how should it not? But in point of substantial provocation and of
material inducement, both were about equally gratuitous. In either case
the war could readily have been avoided without material detriment to
the community and without perceptible lesion to the national honour.
Both were "engineered" on grounds shamelessly manufactured _ad hoc_ by
interested parties; in the one case by a coterie of dynastic statesmen,
in the other by a junta of commercial adventurers and imperialistic
politicians. In neither case had the people any interest of gain or loss
in the quarrel, except as it became a question of national prestige. But
both the German and the British community bore the burden and fought the
campaign to a successful issue for those interested parties who had
precipitated the quarrel. The British people at large, it is true, bore
the burden; which comes near being all that can be said in the way of
popular approval of this war, which political statesmen have since then
rated as one of the most profitable enterprises in which the forces of
the realm have been engaged. On the subject of this successful war the
common man is still inclined to cover his uneasy sense of decency with a
recital of extenuating circumstances. What parallels all this in the
German case is an outbreak of patriotic abandon and an admirable spirit
of unselfish sacrifice in furtherance of the dynastic prestige, an
intoxication of patriotic blare culminating in the triumphant coronation
at Versailles. Nor has the sober afterthought of the past forty-six
years cast a perceptible shadow of doubt across the glorious memory of
that patriotic debauch.

Such is the difference of animus between a body of patriotic citizens in
a modern commonwealth on the one hand and the loyal subjects of a
dynastic State on the other hand. There need be no reflections on the
intrinsic merits of either. Seen in dispassionate perspective from
outside the turmoil, there is not much to choose, in point of sane and
self-respecting manhood, between the sluggish and shamefaced abettor of
a sordid national crime, and a ranting patriot who glories in serving as
cat's-paw to a syndicate of unscrupulous politicians bent on dominion
for dominion's sake. But the question here is not as to the relative
merits or the relative manhood contents of the two contrasted types of
patriot. Doubtless both and either have manhood enough and to spare; at
least, so they say. But the point in question is the simpler and nowise
invidious one, as to the availability of both or either for the
perpetuation of the world's peace under a compact of vigilant
neutrality. Plainly the German frame of mind admits of no neutrality;
the quest of dominion is not compatible with neutrality, and the
substantial core of German national life is still the quest of dominion
under dynastic tutelage. How it stands with the spirit that has
repeatedly come in sight in the international relations of the British
community is a question harder to answer.

It may be practicable to establish a peace of neutrals on the basis of
such national spirit as prevails among these others--the French and
English-speaking peoples, together with the minor nationalities that
cluster about the North Sea--because their habitual attitude is that of
neutrality, on the whole and with allowance for a bellicose minority in
all these countries. By and large, these peoples have come to the
tolerant attitude that finds expression in the maxim, Live and let live.
But they are all and several sufficiently patriotic. It may, indeed,
prove that they are more than sufficiently patriotic for the purposes of
a neutral peace. They stand for peace, but it is "peace with honour;"
which means, in more explicit terms, peace with undiminished national
prestige. Now, national prestige is a very particular commodity, as has
been set out in earlier passages of this inquiry; and a peace which is
to be kept only on terms of a jealous maintenance of the national honour
is likely to be in a somewhat precarious case. If, and when, the
national honour is felt to require an enhanced national ascendancy, the
case for a neutral peace immediately becomes critical. And the greater
the number and diversity of pretensions and interests that are conceived
to be bound up with the national honour, the more unstable will the
resulting situation necessarily be.

The upshot of all this recital of considerations appears to be that a
neutral peace compact may, or it may not, be practicable in the absence
of such dynastic States as Germany and Japan; whereas it has no chance
in the presence of these enterprising national establishments.

No one will be readier or more voluble in exclaiming against the falsity
of such a discrimination as is here attempted, between the democratic
and the dynastic nations of the modern world, than the spokesmen of
these dynastic Powers. No one is more outspoken in professions of
universal peace and catholic amity than these same spokesmen of the
dynastic Powers; and nowhere is there more urgent need of such
professions. Official and "inspired" professions are, of course, to be
overlooked; at least, so charity would dictate. But there have, in the
historic present, been many professions of this character made also by
credible spokesmen of the German, and perhaps of the Japanese, people,
and in all sincerity. By way of parenthesis it should be said that this
is not intended to apply to expressions of conviction and intention that
have come out of Germany these two years past (December 1916). Without
questioning the credibility of these witnesses that have borne witness
to the pacific and genial quality of national sentiment in the German
people, it will yet be in place to recall the run of facts in the
national life of Germany in this historical present and the position of
these spokesmen in the German community.

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