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

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* * * * *

The German nation is of a peculiar composition in respect of its social
structure. So far as bears on the question in hand, it is made up of
three distinctive constituent factors, or perhaps rather categories or
conditions of men. The populace is of course the main category, and in
the last resort always the main and decisive factor. Next in point of
consequence as well as of numbers and initiative is the personnel of the
control,--the ruling class, the administration, the official community,
the hierarchy of civil and political servants, or whatever designation
may best suit; the category comprises that pyramidal superstructure of
privilege and control whereof the sovereign is the apex, and in whom,
under any dynastic rule, is in effect vested the usufruct of the
populace. These two classes or conditions of men, the one of which
orders and the other obeys, make up the working structure of the nation,
and they also between them embody the national life and carry forward
the national work and aim. Intermediate between them, or rather beside
them and overlapping the commissure, is a third category whose life
articulates loosely with both the others at the same time that it still
runs along in a semi-detached way. This slighter but more visible, and
particularly more audible, category is made up of the "Intellectuals,"
as a late, and perhaps vulgar, designation would name them.

These are they who chiefly communicate with the world outside, and at
the same time they do what is academically called thinking. They are in
intellectual contact and communication with the world at large, in a
contact of give and take, and they think and talk in and about those
concepts that go in under the caption of the humanities in the world at
large. The category is large enough to constitute an intellectual
community, indeed a community of somewhat formidable magnitude, taken in
absolute terms, although in percentages of the population at large their
numbers will foot up to only an inconsiderable figure. Their contact
with the superior class spoken of above is fairly close, being a
contact, in the main, of service on the one side and of control on the
other. With the populace their contact and communion is relatively
slight, the give and take in the case being neither intimate nor
far-reaching. More particularly is there a well-kept limit of moderation
on any work of indoctrination or intellectual guidance which this class
may carry down among the people at large, dictated and enforced by
dynastic expediency. This category, of the Intellectuals, is
sufficiently large to live its own life within itself, without drawing
on the spiritual life of the community at large, and of sufficiently
substantial quality to carry its own peculiar scheme of intellectual
conventions and verities. Of the great and highly meritorious place and
work of these Intellectuals in the scheme of German culture it is
needless to speak. What is to the point is that they are the accredited
spokesmen of the German nation in all its commonplace communication with
the rest of civilised Europe.

The Intellectuals have spoken with conviction and sincerity of the
spiritual state of the German people, but in so doing, and in so far as
bears on the character of German nationalism, they have been in closer
contact, intellectually and sympathetically, with the intellectual and
spiritual life of civilised Europe at large than with the movements of
the spirit among the German populace. And their canvassing of the
concepts which so have come under their attention from over the national
frontiers has been carried forward--so far, again, as bears on the
questions that are here in point--with the German-dynastic principles,
logic and mechanism of execution under their immediate observation and
supplying the concrete materials for inquiry. Indeed, it holds true, by
and large, that nothing else than this German-dynastic complement of
ways and means has, or can effectually, come under their observation in
such a degree of intimacy as to give body and definition to the somewhat
abstract theorems on cultural aims and national preconceptions that have
come to them from outside. In short, they have borrowed these
theoretical formulations from abroad, without the concrete apparatus of
ways and means in which these theorems are embodied in their foreign
habitat, and have so found themselves construing these theoretical
borrowings in the only concrete terms of which they have had first-hand
and convincing knowledge. Such an outcome would be fairly unavoidable,
inasmuch as these Intellectuals, however much they are, in the spirit,
citizens of the cosmopolitan republic of knowledge and intelligence,
they are after all, _in propria persona_, immediately and unremittingly
subjects of the German-dynastic State; so that all their detail thinking
on the aims, ways and means of life, in all its civil and political
bearings, is unavoidably shaped by the unremitting discipline of their
workday experience under this dynastic scheme. The outcome has been that
while they have taken up, as they have understood them, the concepts
that rule the civic life of these other, maturer nations, they have
apprehended and developed these theorems of civic life in the terms and
by the logic enforced in that system of control and surveillance known
to them by workday experience,--the only empirical terms at hand.

The apex of growth and the center of diffusion as regards the modern
culture in respect of the ideals and logic of civic life--other phases
of this culture than this its civil aspect do not concern the point here
in question--this apex of growth and center of diffusion lie outside the
Fatherland, in an environment alien to the German institutional scheme.
Yet so intrinsic to the cultural drift of modern mankind are these aims
and this logic, that in taking over and further enriching the
intellectual heritage of this modern world the Intellectuals of the
Fatherland have unavoidably also taken over those conceptions of civil
initiative and masterless self-direction that rule the logic of life in
a commonwealth of ungraded men. They have taken these over and
assimilated them as best their experience would permit. But workday
experience and its exigencies are stubborn things; and in this process
of assimilation of these alien conceptions of right and honest living,
it is the borrowed theorems concerning civic rights and duties that have
undergone adaptation and revision, not the concrete system of ways and
means in which these principles, so accepted, are to be put in practice.
Necessarily so, since in the German scheme of law and order the major
premise is the dynastic State, whereas the major premise of the modern
civilised scheme of civic life is the absence of such an organ. So, the
development and elaboration of these modern principles of civic
liberty--and this elaboration has taken on formidable dimensions--under
the hand of the German Intellectuals has uniformly run out into
Pickwickian convolutions, greatly suggestive of a lost soul seeking a
place to rest. With unquestionably serious purpose and untiring
endeavour, they have sought to embody these modern civilised
preconceptions in terms afforded by, or in terms compatible with, the
institutions of the Fatherland; and they have been much concerned and
magniloquently elated about the German spirit of freedom that so was to
be brought to final and consummate realisation in the life of a free
people. But at no point and in no case have either the proposals or
their carrying out taken shape as a concrete application of the familiar
principle of popular self-direction. It has always come to something in
the way of a concessive or expedient mitigation of the antagonistic
principle of personal authority. Where the forms of self-government or
of individual self-direction have concessively been installed, under the
Imperial rule, they have turned out to be an imitative structure with
some shrewd provision for their coercion or inhibition at the discretion
of an irresponsible authority.

Neither the sound intelligence nor the good faith of these Intellectuals
of the Fatherland is to be impugned. That the--necessarily vague and
circumlocutory--expositions of civic institutions and popular liberty
which they have so often and so largely promulgated should have been
used as a serviceable blind of dynastic statecraft is not to be set down
to their discredit. Circumstances over which they could have no control,
since they were circumstances that shaped their own habits of thought,
have placed it beyond their competence to apprehend or to formulate
these alien principles (habits of thought) concretely in those alien
institutional details and by the alien logic with which they could have
no working acquaintance.

To one and another this conception of cultural solidarity within the
nation, and consequent cultural aliency between nations, due to the
different habits of life and of thought enforced by the two diverse
institutional systems, may be so far unfamiliar as to carry no
conviction. It may accordingly not seem out of place to recall that the
institutional system of any given community, particularly for any
community living under a home-bred and time-tried system of its own,
will necessarily be a balanced system of interdependent and mutually
concordant parts working together in one comprehensive plan of law and
order. Through such an institutional system, as, e.g., the German
Imperial organisation, there will run a degree of logical consistency,
consonant with itself throughout, and exerting a consistent discipline
throughout the community; whereby there is enforced a consistent drift
or bent in the prevalent habits of life, and a correlative bent in the
resulting habits of thought prevalent in the community. It is, in fact,
this possession of a common scheme of use and wont, and a consequent
common outlook and manner of thinking, that constitutes the most
intrinsic bond of solidarity in any nationality, and that finally marks
it off from any other.

It is equally a matter of course that any other given community, living
under the rule of a substantially different, or divergent, system of
institutions, will be exposed to a course of workday discipline running
to a different, perhaps divergent, effect; and that this other community
will accordingly come in for a characteristically different discipline
and fall under the rule of a different commonsense outlook. Where an
institutional difference of this kind is somewhat large and consistent,
so as to amount in effect to a discrepancy, as may fairly be said of the
difference between Imperial Germany and its like on the one hand, and
the English-speaking nations on the other hand, there the difference in
everyday conceptions may readily make the two peoples mutually
unintelligible to one another, on those points of institutional
principle that are involved in the discrepancy. This is the state of the
case as between the German people, including the Intellectuals, and the
peoples against whom their preconceptions of national destiny have
arrayed them. And the many vivid expressions of consternation,
abhorrence and incredulity that have come out of this community of
Intellectuals in the course of the past two years of trial and error,
bear sufficient testimony to the rigorous constraint which these German
preconceptions and their logic exercise over the Intellectuals, no less
than over the populace.

Conversely, of course, it is nearly as impracticable for those who have
grown up under the discipline of democratic institutions to comprehend
the habitual outlook of the commonplace German patriot on national
interests and aims; not quite, perhaps, because the discipline of use
and wont and indoctrination is neither so rigorous nor so consistent in
their case. But there is, after all, prevalent among them a sufficiently
evident logical inability to understand and appreciate the paramount
need of national, that is to say dynastic, ascendancy that actuates all
German patriots; just as these same patriots are similarly unable to
consider national interests in any other light than that of dynastic
ascendancy.

Going simply on the face value of the available evidence, any outsider
might easily fall into the error of believing that when the great
adventure of the war opened up before them, as well as when presently
the shock of baffled endeavour brought home its exasperating futility,
the Intellectuals of the Fatherland distinguished themselves above all
other classes and conditions of men in the exuberance of their patriotic
abandon. Such a view would doubtless be almost wholly erroneous. It is
not that the Intellectuals reached a substantially superior pitch of
exaltation, but only that, being trained in the use of language, they
were able to express their emotions with great facility. There seems no
reason to believe that the populace fell short of the same measure in
respect of their prevalent frame of mind.

To return to the workings of the Imperial dynastic State and the forces
engaged. It plainly appears that the Intellectuals are to be counted as
supernumeraries, except so far as they serve as an instrument of
publicity and indoctrination in the hands of the discretionary
authorities. The working factors in the case are the dynastic
organisation of control, direction and emolument, and the populace at
large by use of whose substance the traffic in dynastic ascendancy and
emolument is carried on. These two are in fairly good accord, on the
ancient basis of feudal loyalty. Hitherto there is no evident ground for
believing that this archaic tie that binds the populace to the dynastic
ambitions has at all perceptibly weakened. And the possibility of
dynastic Germany living at peace with the world under any compact,
therefore translates itself into the possibility of the German people's
unlearning its habitual deference and loyalty to the dynasty.

As its acquirement has been a work of protracted habituation, so can its
obsolescence also come about only through more or less protracted
habituation under a system of use and wont of a different or divergent
order. The elements of such a systematic discipline running to an effect
at cross purposes with this patriotic animus are not absent from the
current situation in the Fatherland; the discipline of the modern
industrial system, for instance, runs to such a divergent effect; but
this, and other conceivable forces which may reenforce it, will after
all take time, if they are to work a decisive change in the current
frame of mind of the patriotic German community. During the interval
required for such a change in the national temper, the peace of the
world would be conditioned on the inability of the dynastic State to
break it. So that the chances of success for any neutral peace league
will vary inversely as the available force of Imperial Germany, and it
could be accounted secure only in the virtual elimination of the
Imperial State as a national Power.

If the gradual obsolescence of the spirit of militant loyalty in the
German people, through disuse under a regime of peace, industry, self
government and free trade, is to be the agency by force of which
dynastic imperialism is to cease, the chance of a neutral peace will
depend on the thoroughness with which such a regime of self-direction
can be installed in this case, and on the space of time required for
such obsolescence through disuse. Obviously, the installation of a
workable regime of self-government on peaceable lines would in any case
be a matter of great difficulty among a people whose past experience has
so singularly incapacitated them for self-government; and obviously,
too, the interval of time required to reach secure ground along this
line of approach would be very considerable. Also, in view of these
conditions, obviously, this scheme for maintaining the peace of nations
by a compact of neutrals based on a compromise with an aspiring dynastic
State resolves itself into the second of the two alternatives spoken of
at the outset, viz., a neutral peace based on the elimination of Germany
as a war power, together with the elimination of any materials suitable
for the formation of a formidable coalition. And then, with Imperial
Germany supposedly eliminated or pacified, there would still remain the
Japanese establishment, to which all the arguments pertinent in the case
of Germany will apply without abatement; except that, at least hitherto,
the dynastic statesmen of Japan have not had the disposal of so massive
a body of resources, in population, industry, or raw materials.

CHAPTER IV

PEACE WITHOUT HONOUR

The argument therefore turns back to a choice between the two
alternatives alluded to: peace in submission to the rule of the German
dynastic establishment (and to Japan), or peace through elimination of
these enterprising Powers. The former alternative, no doubt, is
sufficiently unattractive, but it is not therefore to be put aside
without a hearing. As goes without saying, it is repugnant to the
patriotic sentiments of those peoples whom the Imperial German
establishment have elected for submission. But if this unreflecting
patriotic revulsion can once be made amenable to reason, there is always
something to be said in favor of such a plan of peaceable submission, or
at least in extenuation of it; and if it is kept in mind that the
ulterior necessity of such submission must always remain in perspective
as a condition precedent to a peaceful settlement, so long as one or
both of these enterprising Powers remains intact, it will be seen that a
sane appraisal of the merits of such a regime of peace is by no means
uncalled for. For neither of these two Powers is there a conclusive
issue of endeavour short of paramount dominion.

* * * * *

There should also be some gain of insight and sobriety in recalling that
the Intellectuals of the Fatherland, who have doubtless pondered this
matter longer and more dispassionately than all other men, have spoken
very highly of the merits of such a plan of universal submission to the
rule of this German dynastic establishment. They had, no doubt, been
considering the question both long and earnestly, as to what would, in
the light of reason, eventually be to the best interest of those peoples
whose manifest destiny was eventual tutelage under the Imperial crown;
and there need also be no doubt that in that time (two years past) they
therefore spoke advisedly and out of the fulness of the heart on this
head. The pronouncements that came out of the community of Intellectuals
in that season of unembarrassed elation and artless avowal are doubtless
to be taken as an outcome of much thoughtful canvassing of what had best
be done, not as an enforced compromise with untoward necessities but as
the salutary course freely to be pursued with an eye single to the best
good of all concerned.

It is true, the captious have been led to speak slightingly of the many
utterances of this tenure coming out of the community of Intellectuals,
as, e.g., the lay sermons of Professor Ostwald dating back to that
season; but no unprejudiced reader can well escape the persuasion that
these, as well as the very considerable volume of similar pronouncements
by many other men of eminent scholarship and notable for benevolent
sentiments, are faithfully to be accepted as the expressions of a
profound conviction and a consciously generous spirit. In so speaking of
the advantages to be derived by any subject people from submission to
the German Imperial rule, these Intellectuals are not to be construed as
formulating the drift of vulgar patriotic sentiment among their
compatriots at large, but rather as giving out the deliverances of their
own more sensitive spirit and maturer deliberation, as men who are in a
position to see human affairs and interests in a larger perspective.
Such, no doubt, would be their own sense of the matter.

Reflection on the analogous case of the tutelage exercised by the
American government over the subject Philippinos may contribute to a
just and temperate view of what is intended in the regime of tutelage
and submission so spoken for by the German Intellectuals,--and, it may
be added, found good by the Imperial statesmen. There would, of course,
be the difference, as against the case of the Philippinos, that whereas
the American government is after all answerable, in the last resort and
in a somewhat random fashion, to a popular opinion that runs on
democratic preconceptions, the German Imperial establishment on the
other hand is answerable to no one, except it be to God, who is
conceived to stand in somewhat the relation of a silent partner, or a
minority stockholder in this dynastic enterprise.

Yet it should not be overlooked that any presumptive hard usage which
the vassal peoples might look for at the hands of the German dynasty
would necessarily be tempered with considerations of expediency as
dictated by the exigencies of usufruct. The Imperial establishment has
shown itself to be wise, indeed more wise than amiable, but wise at
least in its intentions, in the use which it has made of subject peoples
hitherto. It is true, a somewhat accentuated eagerness on the part of
the Imperial establishment to get the maximum service in a minimum of
time and at a minimum cost from these subject populations,--as, e.g., in
Silesia and Poland, in Schleswig-Holstein, in Alsace-Lorraine, or in its
African and Oceanic possessions,--has at times led to practices
altogether dubious on humanitarian grounds, at the same time that in
point of thrifty management they have gone beyond "what the traffic will
bear." Yet it is not to be overlooked--and in this connection it is a
point of some weight--that, so far as the predatory traditions of its
statecraft will permit, the Imperial establishment has in all these
matters been guided by a singularly unreserved attention to its own
material advantage. Where its management in these premises has yielded a
less profitable usufruct than the circumstances would reasonably admit,
the failure has been due to an excess of cupidity rather than the
reverse.

The circumstantial evidence converges to the effect that the Imperial
establishment may confidently be counted on to manage the affairs of its
subject peoples with an eye single to its own material gain, and it may
with equal confidence be counted on that in the long run no unadvised
excesses will be practised. Of course, an excessive adventure in
atrocity and predation, due to such human infirmity in its agents or in
its directorate as has been shown in various recent episodes, is to be
looked for now and again; but these phenomena would come in by way of
fluctuating variations from the authentic routine, rather than as
systematic features of it.

That superfluity of naughtiness that has given character to the current
German Imperial policy in Belgium, e.g., or that similarly has
characterised the dealings of Imperial Japan in Korea during the late
"benevolent assimilation" of that people into Japanese-Imperial
usufruct, is not fairly to be taken to indicate what such an Imperial
establishment may be expected to do with a subject people on a footing
of settled and long-term exploitation. At the outset, in both instances,
the policy of frightfulness was dictated by a well-advised view to
economy of effort in reducing the subject people to an abject state of
intimidation, according to the art of war as set forth in the manuals;
whereas latterly the somewhat profligate excesses of the government of
occupation--decently covered with diplomatic parables on benevolence and
legality--have been dictated by military convenience, particularly by
the need of forced labor and the desirability of a reduced population in
the acquired territory. So also the "personally conducted" dealings with
the Armenians by use of the Turks should probably also best be explained
as an endeavour to reduce the numbers of an undesirable population
beforehand, without incurring unnecessary blame. All these things are,
at the most, misleading indications of what the Imperial policy would be
like under settled conditions and in the absence of insubordination.

By way of contrast, such as may serve to bring the specific traits of
this prospective Imperial tutelage of nations into a better light, the
Ottoman usufruct of the peoples of the Turkish dominions offers an
instructive instance. The Ottoman tutelage is today spoken of by its
apologists in terms substantially identical with the sketches of the
future presented by hopeful German patriots in the early months of the
current war. But as is so frequently the case in such circumstances,
these expressions of the officers have to be understood in a diplomatic
sense; not as touching the facts in any other than a formal way. It is
sufficiently evident that the Ottoman management of its usufruct has
throughout been ill-advised enough persistently to charge more than the
traffic would bear, probably due in great part to lack of control over
its agents or ramifications, by the central office. The Ottoman
establishment has not observed, or enforced, the plain rules of economy
in its utilisation of the subject peoples, and finds itself today
bankrupt in consequence. What may afford more of a parallel to the
prospective German tutelage of the nations is the procedure of the
Japanese establishment in Korea, Manchuria, or China; which is also duly
covered with an ostensibly decent screen of diplomatic parables, but the
nature and purpose of which is overt enough in all respects but the
nomenclature. It is not unlikely that even this Japanese usufruct and
tutelage runs on somewhat less humane and complaisant lines than a
well-advised economy of resources would dictate for the prospective
German usufruct of the Western nations.

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