An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation
Chapter 6: Elimination of the Unfit
Thorsten Veblen
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It may seem early (January 1917) to offer a surmise as to what must be the manner of league into which the pacific nations are to enter and by which the peace will be kept, in case such a move is to be made. But the circumstances that are to urge such a line of action, and that will condition its carrying out in case it is entered on, have already come into bearing and should, on the whole, no longer be especially obscure to anyone who will let the facts of the case rather than his own predilections decide what he will believe. By and large, the pressure of these conditioning circumstances may be seen, and the line of least resistance under this pressure may be calculated with due allowance of a margin of error owing to unknown contingencies of time and minor variables.
Time is of the essence of the case. So that what would have been dismissed as idle vapour two years ago has already become subject of grave deliberation today, and may rise to paramount urgency that far hence. Time is needed to appreciate and get used to any innovation of appreciable gravity, particularly where the innovation depends in any degree on a change in public sentiment, as in this instance. The present outlook would seem to be that no excess of time is allowed in these premises; but it should also be noted that events are moving with unexampled celerity, and are impinging on the popular ap-
(234) -prehension with unexampled force, unexampled an such a scale. It is hoped that a recital of these circumstances that provoke to action along this line will not seem unwarrantably tedious, and that a tentative definition of the line of least resistance under pressure of these circumstances may not seem unwarrantably presumptuous.
The major premise in the case is the felt need of security from aggression at the hands of Imperial Germany and its auxiliary Powers; seconded by an increasingly uneasy apprehension as to the prospective line of conduct on the part of Imperial Japan, bent on a similar quest of dominion. There is also the less articulate apprehension of what, if anything, may be expected from Imperial Russia; an obscure and scarcely definable factor, which comes into the calculation chiefly by way of reenforcing the urgency of the situation created by the dynastic ambitions of these other two Imperial States. Further, the pacific nations, the leading ones among them being the French and English-speaking peoples, are coming to recognise that no one among them can provide for its own security single-handed, even at the cost of their utmost endeavour in the way of what is latterly called "preparedness ;" and they are at the same time unwilling to devote their force unreservedly to warlike preparation, having nothing to gain. The solution proposed is a league of the pacific nations, commonly spoken of at the present stage as a league to enforce peace, or less ambitiously as a league to enforce arbitration. The question being left somewhat at loose ends, whether the projected league is to include the two or three Imperial Powers whose pacific intentions are, euphemistically, open to doubt.
Such is the outline of the project and its premises. An attempt to fill in this outline will, perhaps, conduce to
(235) an appreciation of what is sought and of what the conditioning circumstances will enforce in the course of its realisation. As touches the fear of aggression, it has already been indicated, perhaps with unnecessary iteration, that these two Imperial Powers are unable to relinquish the quest of dominion through warlike enterprise, because as dynastic States they have no other ulterior aim ; as has abundantly appeared in the great volume of expository statements that have come out of the Fatherland the past few years, official, semi-official, inspired, and spontaneous. "Assurance of the nation's future" is not translatable into any other terms. The Imperial dynasty has no other ground to stand on, and can not give up the enterprise so long as it can muster force for any formidable diversion, to get anything in the way of dominion by seizure, threat or chicane.
This is coming to be informally and loosely, but none the less definitively, realised by the pacific nations; and the realisation of it is gaining in clearness and assurance as time passes. And it is backed by the conviction. that, in the nature of things, no engagement on the part of such a dynastic State has any slightest binding force, beyond the material constraint that would enforce it from the outside. So the demand has been diplomatically phrased as a demand for "substantial guarantees." Any gain in resources on the part of these Powers is to be counted as a gain in the ways and means of disturbing the peace, without reservation.
The pacific nations include among them two large items, both of which are indispensable to the success of the project, the United States and the United Kingdom. The former brings in its train, virtually without exception or question, the other American republics, none of which
(236) can practicably go in or stay out except in company and collusion with the United States. The United Kingdom after the same fashion, and with scarcely less assurance, may be counted on to carry the British colonies. Evidently, without both of these groups the project would not even make a beginning. Beyond this is to be counted in as elements of strength, though scarcely indispensable, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. The other west-European nations would in all probability be found in the league, although so far as regards its work and its fortunes their adhesion would scarcely be a matter of decisive consequence; they may therefore be left somewhat on one side in any consideration of the circumstances that would shape the league, its aims and its limitations. The Balkan states, in the wider acceptance, they that frequent the Sign of the Double Cross, are similarly negligible in respect of the organisation of such a league or its resources and the mutual concessions necessary to be made between its chief members. Russia is so doubtful a factor, particularly as regards its place and value in industry, culture and politics, in the near future, as to admit nothing much more than a doubt on what its relation to the situation will be. The evil intentions of the Imperial-bureaucratic establishment are probably no more to be questioned than the good intentions of the underlying peoples of Russia. China will have to be taken in, if for no other reason than the use to which the magnificent resources of that country would be turned by its Imperial neighbour in the absence of insurmountable interference from outside. But China will come in on any terms that include neutrality and security.
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The question then arises as to the Imperial Powers whose dynastic enterprise is primarily to be hedged against by such a league. Reflection will show that if the league is to effect any appreciable part of its purpose, these Powers will also be included in the league, or at least in its jurisdiction. A pacific league not including these Powers, or not extending its jurisdiction and surveillance to them and their conduct, would come to the same thing as a coalition of nations in two hostile groups, the one standing on the defensive against the warlike machinations of the other, and both groups bidding for the favor of those minor Powers whose traditions and current aspirations run to national (dynastic) aggrandizement by way of political intrigue. It would come to a more articulate and accentuated form of that balance of power that has latterly gone bankrupt in Europe, with the most corrupt and unreliable petty monarchies of eastern Europe vested with a casting vote; anal it would also involve a system of competitive armaments of the same general character as what has also shown itself bankrupt. It would, in other words, mean a virtual return to the status quo mite, but with an overt recognition of its provisional character, and with the lines of division more sharply drawn. That is to say, it would amount to reinstating the situation which the projected league is intended to avert. It is evidently contained in the premises that the projected league must be all-inclusive, at least as regards its jurisdiction and surveillance. The argument will return to this point presently.
The purpose of the projected league is peace and security, commonly spoken of under patriotic preconceptions as "national" peace and security. This will have to mean a competent enforcement of peace, on such a footing of
(238) overmastering force at the disposal of the associated pacific nations as to make security a matter of ordinary routine. It is true, the more genial spokesmen of the project are given to the view that what is to come of it all is a comity of neutral nations, amicably adjusting their own relations among themselves in a spirit of peace and good-will. But this view is over-sanguine, in that it overlooks the point that into this prospective comity of nations Imperial Germany (and Imperial Japan) fit like a drunken savage with a machine gun. It also overlooks the patent fatality that these two are bound to come into a coalition at the next turn, with whatever outside and subsidiary resources they can draw on; provided only that a reasonable opening for further enterprise presents itself. The league, in other terms, must be in a position to enforce peace by overmastering force, and to anticipate any move at cross purposes with the security of the pacific nations.
This end can be reached by either one of two ways. If the dynastic States are left to their own devices, it will be incumbent on the associated nations to put in the field a standing force sufficient to prevent a recourse to arms; which means competitive armament and universal military rule. Or the dynastic States may be taken into partnership and placed under such surveillance and constraint as to practically disarm them; which would admit virtual disarmament of the federated nations. The former arrangement has nothing in its favour, except the possibility that no better or less irksome arrangement can be had under existing circumstances; that is to say that the pacific nations may not be able to bring these dynastic states to terms of disarmament under surveillance. They assuredly can not except by force; and
(239) this is the precise point on which the continued hostilities in Europe turn today. In diplomatic parable the German Imperial spokesmen say that they can accept (or as they prefer to phrase it, grant) no terms that do not fully safeguard the Future of the Fatherland; and in similarly diplomatic parable the spokesmen of the Entente insist that Prussian militarism must be permanently put out of commission; but it all means the same thing, viz. that the Imperial establishment is to be (or is not to be) disabled beyond the possibility of its entering on a similar warlike enterprise again, when it has had time for recuperation. The dynastic statesmen, and the lay subjects of the Imperial establishment, are strenuously set on securing a fair opportunity for recuperation and a wiser endeavour to achieve that dominion which the present adventure promises to defeat; while the Entente want no recurrence, and are persuaded that a recurrence can be avoided only on the footing of a present collapse of the Imperial power and a scrupulously enforced prostration of it henceforth.
Without the definitive collapse of the Imperial power no pacific league of nations can come to anything much more than armistice. On the basis of such a collapse the league may as well administer its affairs economically by way of an all-around reduction of armaments, as by the costlier and more irksome way of "preparedness." But a sensible reduction of armaments on the part of the neutral nations implies disarmament of the dynastic States. Which would involve a neutral surveillance of the affairs of these dynastic States in such detail and with such exercise of authority as would reduce their governments to the effective status of local administrative officials. Out of which, in turn, would arise complications that
(240) would lead to necessary readjustments all along the line. It would involve the virtual, if not also the formal, abolition of the monarchy, since the monarchy has no other use than that of international war and intrigue; or at least it would involve the virtual abrogation of its powers, reducing it to the same status of faineantise as now characterises the British crown. Evidently this means a serious intermeddling in the domestic concerns and arrangements of the Fatherland, such as is not admissible under the democratic principle that any people must be left free to follow their own inclinations and devices in their own concerns; at the same time that this degree of interference is imperative if the peace is to be kept on any other footing than that of eternal vigilance and superior armed force, with a people whose own inclinations and devices are of the kind now grown familiar in the German case,-all of which also applies, with accentuation, in the case of Imperial Japan.
Some such policy of neutral surveillance in the affairs of these peoples whose pacific temper is under suspicion, is necessarily involved in a plan to enforce peace by concert of the pacific nations, and it will necessarily carry implications and farther issues, touching not only these supposedly recalcitrant peoples, but also as regards the pacific nations themselves. Assuming always that the prime purpose and consistent aim of the projected league is the peace and security of those pacific nations on whose initiative it is to be achieved, then it should be reasonable to assume that the course of procedure in its organisation, administration and further adaptations and adjustments must follow the logic of necessities leading to that end. He who wills the end must make up his account with the means.
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The end in this case is peace and security; which means, for practical purposes, peace and good-will. Ill-will is not a secure foundation of peace. Even the military strategists of the Imperial establishment recommend a programme of "frightfulness" only as a convenient military expedient, essentially a provisional basis of tranquility. In the long run and as a permanent peace measure it is doubtless not to the point. Security is finally to be had among or between modern peoples only on the ground of a common understanding and an impartially common basis of equity, or something approaching that basis as nearly as circumstances will permit. Which means that in so far as the projected peace-compact is to take effect in any enduring way, and leave the federated nations some degree of freedom from persistent apprehension and animosity, as well as from habitual insecurity of life and limb, the league must not only be all-inclusive, but it must be inclusively uniform in all its requirements and regulations.
The peoples of the quondam Imperial nations must come into the league on a footing of formal equality with the rest. This they can not do without the virtual abdication of their dynastic governmental establishments and a consequent shift to a democratic form of organisation, and a formal abrogation of class privileges and prerogatives.However, a virtual abdication or cancelment of the dynastic rile, such as to bring it formally into the wine class with the British crown, would scarcely meet the requirements in the case of the German Imperial establishment; still more patently not in the case of Imperial Japan. If, following the outlines of the decayed British crown, one or the other of these Imperial establishments
(242) were by formal enactment reduced to a state of nominal desuetude, the effect would be very appreciably different from what happens in the British community, where the crown has lost its powers by failure of the requisite subordination on the part of the people, and not by a formal abdication of rights. In the German case, and even more in the Japanese case, the strength of the Imperial establishment lies in the unimpaired loyalty of the populace; which would remain nearly intact at the outset, and would thin out only by insensible degrees in the sequel; so that if only the Imperial establishment were left formally standing it would command the fealty of the common run in spite of any formal abrogation of its powers, and the course of things would, in effect, run as before the break. In effect, to bring about a shift to a democratic basis the dynastic slate would have to be wiped very clean indeed. And this shift would be indispensable to the successful conduct of such a pacific league of nations, since any other than an effectually democratic national establishment is to be counted on unfailingly to intrigue for dynastic aggrandizement, through good report and evil.
In a case like that of Imperial Germany, with its federated States and subsidiaries, where royalty and nobility still are potent preconceptions investing the popular imagination, and where loyal abnegation in the presence of authority still is the chief and staple virtue of the common man,-in all such cases virtual abdication of the dynastic initiative under constitutional forms can be had only by a formal and scrupulously complete abrogation of all those legal and customary arrangements on which this irresponsible exercise of authority has rested and through which it has taken effect. Neutralisation in these in-
(243) -stances will mean reduction to an unqualified democratic footing; which will, at least at the outset, not be acceptable to the common people, and will be wholly intolerable to the ruling classes. Such a régime. therefore, while it is indispensable as a working basis for a neutral league of peace, would from the outset have to be enforced against the most desperate resistance of the ruling classes, headed by the dynastic statesmen and war-lords, and backed by the stubborn loyalty of the subject populace. It would have to mean the end of things for the ruling classes and the most distasteful submission to an alien scheme of use and wont for the populace. And yet it is also an indispensable element in any scheme of pacification that aims at permanent peace and security. In time, it may well be believed, the people of tire Fatherland might learn to do well enough without the gratuitous domination of their ruling classes, but at the outset it would be a heartfelt privation.
It follows that a league to enforce peace would have to begin its régime with enforcing peace on terms of the unconditional surrender of the formidable warlike nations; which could be accomplished only by the absolute and irretrievable defeat of these Powers as they now stand. The question will, no doubt, present itself, Is the end worth the cost? That question can, of course, not be answered in absolute terms, inasmuch as it resolves itself into a question of taste and prepossession. An answer to it would also clot be greatly to the purpose here, since it would have no particular bearing on the course of action likely to be pursued by these pacific nations in their quest of a settled peace. It is more to the point to ask what is likely to be the practical decision of these
(244) peoples on that head when the question finally presents itself in a concrete form.
Again it is necessary to call to mind that any momentous innovation which rests on popular sentiment will take time; that consequently anything like a plébiscite on the question today would scarcely give a safe index of what the decision is likely to be when presently put to the test; and that as things go just now, swiftly and urgent, any time-allowance counts at something more than its ordinary workday, coefficient. What can apparently be said with some degree of confidence is that just now, during these two years past, sentiment has been moving in the direction indicated, and that any growing inclination of the kind is being strongly re-enforced by a growing realisation that nothing but heroic remedies will avail at this juncture. If it comes to be currently recognised that a settled peace can be had only at the cost of eradicating privilege and royalty from the warlike nations, it would seem reasonable to expect, from their present state of mind, that the pacific nations will scarcely hesitate to apply that remedy,-provided always that the fortunes of war fall out as that measure would require, and provided also that the conflict lasts long enough and severe enough to let them make up their mind to anything so drastic.
There is a certain side issue bearing on this question of the ulterior probabilities of popular sentiment and national policy as to what is to be done with the warlike nations in the event that the allied nations who fight for neutrality have the disposal of such matters. This side issue may seem remote, and it may not unlikely be overlooked among the mass of graver and more tangible con-
(245) siderations. It was remarked above that the United Kingdom is one of the two chief pillars of the projected house of peace; and it may be added without serious fear of contradiction or annoyance that the United Kingdom is also the one among these pacific nations that comes nearest being capable, in the event of such an emergency, to take care of its own case single-handed. For better or worse, British adhesion to the project is indispensable, and the British are in a position virtually to name their own terms of adhesion. The British commonwealtha very inclusive phrase in this connection-must form the core of the pacific league, if any, and British sentiment will have a very great place in the terms of its formation and in the terms which it will be inclined to offer the Imperial coalition at the settlement.
Now, it happens that the British community entered on this war as a democratic monarchy ruled and officered by a body of gentlemen-doubtless the most correct and admirable muster of gentlemen, of anything approaching its volume, that the modern world can show. But the war has turned out not to be a gentlemen's war. It has on the contrary been a war of technological exploits, reenforced with all the beastly devices of the heathen. It is a war in which all the specific traits of the well-bred and gently-minded man are a handicap; in which veracity, gallantry, humanity, liberality are conducive to nothing but defeat and humiliation. The death-rate among the British gentlemen-officers in the early months, and for many months, ran extravagantly high, for the most part because they were gallant gentlemen as well as officers imbued with the good, old class spirit of noblesse oblige, that has made half the tradition and more than half the working theory of the British officer in the field, good,
(246) but old, hopelessly out of date. That generation of officers died, for the most part; being unfit to survive or to serve the purpose under these modern conditions of warfare, to which their enemy on the other hand had adapted themselves with easy facility from beforehand. The gentlemanly qualifications, and the material apparatus of gentility, and, it will perhaps have to be admitted, the gentlemen, have fallen into the background, or perhaps rather have measurably fallen into abeyance, among the officers of the line. There may be more doubt as to the state of things in respect of the gentility of the staff, but the best that can confidently be said is that it is a point in doubt.
It is hoped that one may say without offense that in the course of time the personnel has apparently worked down to the level of vulgarity defined by the ways and means of this modern warfare; which means the level on which runs a familiar acquaintance with large and complex mechanical apparatus, railway and highway transport and power, reenforced concrete, excavations and mud, more particularly mud, concealment and ambush, and unlimited deceit and ferocity. It is not precisely that persons of pedigree and gentle breeding have ceased to enter or seek entrance to employment as officers, still less that measures have been taken to restrain their doing so or to eliminate from the service those who have come into it-though there may present itself a doubt on this point as touches the inure responsible discretionary positions - but only that the stock of suitable gentlemen, uncommonly large as it is, has been overdrawn; that those who have latterly gone into service, or stayed in, have perforce divested themselves of their gentility in some appreciable measure, particularly as regards class distinction, and have fallen
(247) on their feet in the more commonplace role of common men.
Serviceability in this modern warfare is conditioned on much the same traits of temperament and training that make for usefulness in the modern industrial processes, where large-scale coordinations of movement and an effective familiarity with precise and far-reaching mechanical processes is an indispensable requirement,-indispensable in the same measure as the efficient conduct of this modern machine industry is indispensable. But the British gentleman, in so far as he runs true to type, is of no use to modern industry; quite the contrary, in fact. Still, the British gentleman is, in point of heredity, the same thing over again as the British common man; so that, barring the misdirected training that makes him a gentleman, and which can largely be undone under urgent need and pressure, he can be made serviceable for such uses as the modern warfare requires. Meantime the very large demand for officers, and the insatiable demand for capable officers, has brought the experienced and capable common man into the case and is in a fair way to discredit gentility as a necessary qualification of field officers.
But the same process of discredit and elimination is also extending to the responsible officials who have the administration of things in hand. Indeed, the course of vulgarisation among the responsible officials has now been under way for some appreciable time and with very perceptible effect, and the rate of displacement appears to be gathering velocity with every month that passes. Here, as in the field operations, it also appears that gentlemanly methods, standards, preconceptions, and knowledge of men and things, is no longer to the purpose. Here, too,
(248) it is increasingly evident that this is not a gentlemen's war. And the traditional qualifications that have sufficed in the past, at least to the extent of enabling the British management to "muddle through," as they are proudly in the habit of saying,-these qualifications are of slight account in this technological conjuncture of the nation's fortunes. It would perhaps be an under-statement to say that these gentlemanly qualifications are no longer of any account, for the purpose immediately in hand, and it would doubtless not do to say that they are wholly and unreservedly disserviceable as things run today; but captious critics might find at least a precarious footing of argument on such a proposition.
Through the course of the nineteenth century the British government had progressively been taking on the complexion of a "gentlemen's agreement;" a government by gentlemen, for gentlemen, and of gentlemen, too, beyond what could well be alleged in any other known instance, though never wholly so. No government could be a government of gentlemen exclusively, since there is no pecuniary profit in gentlemen as such, and therefore no object in governing them; more particularly could there never be any incentive in it for gentlemen, whose livelihood is, in the nature of the case, drawn from some one else. A gentlemen's government can escape death by inanition only in so far as it serves the material interest of its class, as contrasted with the underlying population from which the class draws its livelihood. This British arrangement of a government by prudent and humane gentlemen with a view to the conservation of that state of things that best conduced to the material well-being of their own class, has on the whole had the loyal support of the underlying populace, with an occasional floundering
(249) protest. But the protest has never taken the shape of an expressed distrust of gentlemen, considered as the staple ways and means of government; nor has the direction of affairs ever descended into the hands of any other or lower class or condition of men.
On the whole, this British arrangement for the control of national affairs by a body of interested gentlemen-investors has been, and perhaps still is, just as well at home in the affectionate preconceptions of the nineteenth-century British as the corresponding German usufruct by self-appointed swaggering aristocrats has been among the underlying German population, or as the American arrangement of national control by business men for business ends. The British and the American arrangements run very much to the same substantial effect, of course, inasmuch as the British gentlemen represent, as a class, the filial generations of a business community, and their aims and standards of conduct continue to be such as are enforced by the pecuniary interests on which their gentility is conditioned. They continue to draw the ways and means of a worthy life from businesslike arrangements of a "vested" character, made and provided with a view to their nourishment and repose. Their resulting usufruct of the community's productive efforts rests on a vested interest of a pecuniary sort, sanctioned by the sacred rights of property; very much as the analogous German dynastic and aristocratic usufruct rests on personal prerogative, sanctioned by die sacral rights of authentic prescription, without afterthought. The two, it will be noted are very much alike, in effect, "under the skin." The great distinguishing mark being that the German usufructuary gentlemen are, in theory at least, gentlemen-adventurers of prowess and proud words, whose
(250) place in the world's economy it is to glorify God and disturb the peace; whereas their British analogues are gentlemen-investors, of blameless propriety, whose place it is more simply to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
All this arrangement of a usufruct with a view to the reputable consumption of the community's superfluous production has had the cordial support of British sentiment, perhaps fully as cordial as the German popular subservience in the corresponding German scheme; both being well embedded in the preconceptions of the common man. But the war has put it all to a rude test, and has called on the British gentlemen's executive committee to take over duties for which it was not designed. The exigencies of this war of technological exploits have been almost wholly, and very insistently, of a character not contemplated in the constitution of such an executive committee of gentlemen-investors designed to safeguard class interests and promote their pecuniary class advantage by a blamelessly inconspicuous and indirect management of national affairs. The methods are of the class known colloquially among the vulgar-spoken American politicians as "pussyfooting" and "log-rolling" ; but always with such circumstance of magnitude, authenticity and well-bred deference to precedent, as to give the resulting routine of subreption, trover and conversion, an air not only of benevolent consideration but of austere morality.
But the most austere courtesy and the most authentically dispassionate division of benefits will not meet the underbred exigencies of a war conducted on the mechanistic lines of the modern state of the industrial arts. So the blameless, and for the purpose imbecile, executive committee of gentlemen-investors has been insensibly los-
(251) -ing the confidence and the countenance of the common man; who, when all is said, will always have to do what is to be done. The order of gentlemanly parleying and brokery has, therefore, with many apprehensions of calamity, been reluctantly and tardily giving ground before something that is of a visibly underbred order. Increasingly underbred, and thereby insensibly approaching the character of this war situation, but accepted with visible reluctance and apprehension both by the ruling class and by the underlying population. The urgent necessity of going to such a basis, and of working out the matter in hand by an unblushing recourse to that matter-of-fact logic of mechanical efficiency, which alone can touch the difficulties of the case, but which has no respect of persons, -this necessity has been present from the outset and has been vaguely apprehended for long past, but it is only tardily, and after the chastening of heavy penalties on this gentlemanly imbecility that a substantial move in that direction has been made. It has required much British resolution to overcome the night-fear of going out into the unhallowed ground of matter-of-fact, where the farthest earlier excursions of the governmental agencies had taken them no farther than such financial transactions as are incident to the accomplishment of anything whatever in a commercial nation. And then, too, there is a pecuniary interest in being interested in financial transactions.
This shifting of discretionary control out of the hands of the gentlemen into those of the underbred common run, who know how to do what is necessary to be done in the face of underbred exigencies, may conceivably go far when it has once been started, and it may go forward at an accelerated rate if the pressure of necessity lasts long enough. If time be given for habituation to
(252) this manner of directorate in national affairs, so that the common man comes to realise how it is feasible to get along without gentlemen-investors holding the discretion, the outcome may conceivably be very grave. It is a point in doubt, but it is conceivable that in such a case the gentlemanly executive committee administering affairs in the light of the gentlemanly pecuniary interest, will not be fully reinstated in the discretionary control of the United Kingdom for an appreciable number of years after the return of peace. Possibly, even, the régime may be permanently deranged, and there is even a shadowy doubt possible to be entertained as to whether the vested pecuniary rights, on which the class of gentlemen rests, may not suffer some derangement, in case the control should pass into the hands of the underbred and unpropertied for so long a season as to let the common man get used to thinking that the vested interests and the sacred rights of gentility are so much ado about nothing.
Such an outcome would be extreme, but as a remote contingency it is to be taken into account. The privileged classes of the United Kingdom should by this time be able to see the danger there may be for them and their vested interests, pecuniary and moral, in an excessive prolongation of the war; in such postponement of peace as would afford time for a popular realisation of their incompetence and disserviceability as touches the nation's material well-being under modern conditions. To let the nation's war experience work to such an outcome, the season of war would have to be prolonged beyond what either the hopes or the fears of the community have yet contemplated; but the point is after all worth noting, as being within the premises of the case, that there is herein a remote contingency of losing, at least for a time, that unformulated
(253) clause in the British constitution which has hitherto restricted the holding of responsible office to men of pedigree and of gentle breeding, or at least of very grave pecuniary weight; so grave as to make the incumbents virtual gentlemen, with a virtual pedigree, and with a virtual gentleman's accentuated sense of class interest. Should such an eventuality overtake British popular sentiment and belief there is also the remote contingency that the rights of ownership and investment would lose a degree of sanctity.
It seems necessary to note a further, and in a sense more improbable, line of disintegration among modern fixed ideas. Among the best entrenched illusions of modern economic preconceptions, and in economic as well as legal theory, has been the indispensability of funds, and the hard and fast limitation of industrial operations by the supply or with-holding of funds. The war experience has hitherto gone tentatively to show that funds and financial transactions, of credit, bargain, sale and solvency, may be dispensed with under pressure of necessity; and apparently without seriously hindering that run of mechanical fact, on which interest in the present case necessarily centers, and which must be counted on to give the outcome. Latterly the case is clearing up a little further, on further experience and under further pressure of technological exigencies, to the effect that financial arrangements are indispensable in this connection only because and in so far as it has been arranged to consider them indispensable; as in international trade. They are an indispensable means of intermediation only in so far as pecuniary interests are to be furthered or safeguarded in the intermediation. When, as has happened with the belligerents in the present instance, the national establishment
(254) becomes substantially insolvent, it is beginning to appear that its affairs can be taken care of with less difficulty and with better effect without the use of financial expedients. Of course, it takes time to get used to doing things by the more direct method and without the accustomed circumlocution of accountancy, or the accustomed allowance for profits to go to interested parties who, under the financial régime, hold a power of discretionary permission in all matters that touch the use of the industrial arts. Under these urgent material exigencies, investment comes to have much of the appearance of a gratuitous drag and drain on the processes of industry.
Here, again, is a sinister contingency ; sinister, that is, for those vested rights of ownership by force of which the owners of "capital" are enabled to permit or withhold the use of the industrial arts by the community at large, on pain of privation in case the accustomed toll to the owners of capital is not paid. It is, of course, not intended to find fault with this arrangement; which has the sanction of "time immemorial" and of a settled persuasion that it lies at the root of all civilised life and intercourse. It is only that in case of extreme need this presumed indispensable expedient of industrial control has broken down, and that experience is proving it to be, in these premises, an item of borrowed trouble. Should experience continue to run on the same lines for an appreciable period and at a high tension, it is at least conceivable that the vested right of owners to employ unlimited sabotage in the quest of profits might fall so far into disrepute as to leave them under a qualified doubt on the return of "normal" conditions. The common man, in other words, who gathers nothing but privation and anxiety from the owners' discretionary sabotage, may conceivably stand to lose his
(255) preconception that the vested rights of ownership are the cornerstone of his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
The considerations recited in this lengthy excursion on the war situation and its probable effects on popular habits of thought in the United Kingdom go to say that when peace comes to be negotiated, with the United Kingdom as the chief constituent and weightiest spokesman of the allied nations and of the league of pacific neutrals, the representatives of British aims and opinions are likely to speak in a different, chastened, and disillusioned fashion, as contrasted with what the British attitude was at the beginning of hostilities. The gentlemanly British animus of arrogant self-sufficiency will have been somewhat sobered, perhaps somewhat subdued. Concession to the claims and pretensions of the other pacific nations is likely to go farther than might once have been expected, particularly in the way of concession to any demand for greater international comity and less international discrimination; essentially concession looking to a reduction of national pretensions and an incipient neutralisation of national interests. Coupled with this will presumably be a less conciliatory attitude toward the members of the dynastic coalition against whom the war has been fought, owing to a more mature realisation of the impossibility of a lasting peace negotiated with a Power whose substantial core is a warlike and irresponsible dynastic establishment. The peace negotiations are likely to run on a lower level Of diplomatic deference to constituted authorities, anti with more of a view to the interests and sentiments of the underlying population, than was evident in the futile negotiations had at the outbreak of hostilities. The gentle art of diplomacy, that engages the talents of exalted person-
(256) -ages and well-bred statesmen, has been somewhat discredited; and if it turns out that the vulgarisation of the directorate in the United Kingdom and its associated allies and neutrals will have time to go on to something like dominance and authenticity, then the deference which the spokesmen of these nations are likely to show for the prescriptive rights of dynasty, nobility, bureaucracy, or even of pecuniary aristocracy, in the countries that make up the party of the second part, may be expected to have shrunk appreciably, conceivably even to such precarious dimensions as to involve the virtual neglect or possible downright abrogation of them, in sum and substance.
Indeed, the chances of a successful pacific league of neutrals to come out of the current situation appear to be largely bound up with the degree of vulgarisation due to overtake the several directorates of the belligerent nations as well as the popular habits of thought in these and in the neutral countries, during the further course of the war. It is too broad a generalisation, perhaps, to say that the longer the war lasts the better are the chances of such a neutral temper in the interested nations as win make a pacific league practicable, but the contrary would appear a much less defensible proposition. It is, of course, the common man that has the least interest in warlike enterprise, if any, and it is at the same time the common man that bears the burden of such enterprise and has also the most immediate interest in keeping the peace. If, slowly and pervasively, in the course of hard experience, he learns to distrust the conduct of affairs by his betters, and learns at the same move to trust to his own class to do what is necessary and to leave undone what is not, his deference to his betters is likely to suffer a decline, such
(257) as should show itself in a somewhat unguarded recourse to democratic ways and means.
In short, there is in this progressive vulgarisation of effectual use and wont and of sentiment, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, some slight ground for the hope, or the apprehension, that no peace will be made with the dynastic Powers of the second part until they cease to by dynastic Powers and take on the semblance of democratic commonwealths, with dynasties, royalties and privileged classes thrown in the discard.
This would probably mean some prolongation of hostilities, until the dynasties and privileged classes had completely exhausted their available resources; and, by the same token, until the privileged classes in the more modern nations among the belligerents had also been displaced from direction and discretion by those underbred classes on whom it is incumbent to do what is to be done; or until a juncture were reached that comes passably near to such a situation. On the contingency of such a course of events and some such outcome appears also to hang the chance of a workable pacific league. Without further experience of the futility of upperclass and pecuniary control, to discredit precedent and constituted authority, it is scarcely conceivable, e. g., that the victorious allies would go the length of coercively discarding the German Imperial dynasty and the kept classes that with it constitute the Imperial State, and of replacing it with a democratic organisation of the people in the Shape of a modern commonwealth; and without a change of that nature, affecting that nation and such of its allies as would remain on the map, no league of pacific neutrals would be able to manage its affairs, even for a time, except on a war-footing that would involve a competitive armament
(258) against future dynastic enterprises from the same quarter. Which comes to saying that a lasting peace is possible on no other terms than the disestablishment of the Imperial dynasty and the abrogation of all feudalistic remnants of privilege in the Fatherland and its allies, together with the reduction of those countries to the status of commonwealths made up of ungraded men.
It is easy to speculate on what the conditions precedent to such a pacific league of neutrals must of necessity be; but it is not therefore less difficult to make a shrewd guess as to the chances of these conditions being met. Of these conditions precedent, the chief and foremost, without which any other favorable circumstances are comparatively idle, is a considerable degree of neutralisation, extending to virtually all national interests and pretensions, but more particularly to all material and commercial interests of the federated peoples; and, indispensably and especially, such neutralisation would have to extend to the nations from whom aggression is now apprehended, as, e. g., the German people. But such neutralisation could not conceivably reach the Fatherland unless that nation were made over in the image of democracy, since the Imperial State is, by force of the terms, a warlike and unneutral power. This would seem to be the ostensibly concealed meaning of the allied governments in proclaiming that their aim is to break German militarism without doing harm to the German people.
As touches the neutralisation of the democratically rehabilitated Fatherland, or in default of that, as touches the peace terms to be offered the Imperial government, the prime article among the stipulations would seem to be abolition of all trade discrimination against Germany or
(259) by Germany against any other nationality. Such stipulation would, of course, cover all manner of trade discrimination,-e. g., import, export and excise tariff, harbor anti registry dues, subsidy, patent right, copyright, trade mark, tax exemption whether partial or exclusive, investment preferences at home and abroad,-in short it would have to establish a thorough -going neutralisation of trade relations in the widest acceptation of the term, and to apply in perpetuity. The like applies, of course, to all that fringe of subsidiary and outlying peoples on whom Imperial Germany relies for much of its resources in any warlike enterprise. Such a move also disposes of the colonial question in a parenthesis, so far as regards any special bond of affiliation between the Empire, or the Fatherland, and any colonial possessions that are now thought desirable to he claimed. Under neutralisation, colonies would cease to be "colonial possessions," being necessarily included under the general abrogation of commercial discriminations, and also necessarily exempt from special taxation or specially favorable tax rates.
Colonies there still would be, though it is not easy to imagine what would be the meaning of a "German Colony" in such a case. Colonies would be free communities, after the fashion of New Zealand or Australia, but with the further sterilisation of the bond between colony and mother country involved in the abolition of all appointive offices and all responsibility to the crown or the imperial government. Now, there are no German colonies in this simpler British sense of the term, which implies nothing more than community of blood, institutions and language, together with that sense of solidarity between the colony and the mother country which this community of pedigree and institutions will necessarily bring; but
(260) while there are today no German colonies, its the sense of the term so given, there is no reason to presume that no such German colonies would come into bearing under the conditions of this prospective régime of neutrality installed by such a pacific league, when backed by the league's guarantee that no colony from the Fatherland will be exposed to the eventual risk of coming under the discretionary tutelage of the German Imperial establishment and so falling into a relation of step-childhood to the Imperial dynasty.
As is well known, and as has by way of superflous commonplace been set forth by a sometime Colonial Secretary of the Empire, the decisive reason for there being no German colonies in existence is the consistently impossible colonial policy of the German government, looking to the usufruct of the colonies by the government, and the fear of further arbitrary control and nepotic discrimination at the pleasure of the self-seeking dynastic establishment. It is only under Imperial rule that no German colony, in this modern sense of the term, is possible; and only because Imperial rule does not admit of a free community being formed by colonists from the Fatherland; or of an ostensibly free community of that kind ever feeling secure from unsolicited interference with its affairs.
The nearest approach to a German Colony, as contrasted with a "Colonial Possession," hitherto have been the, very considerable, number of escaped German subjects who have settled in English-speaking or Latin-speaking countries, particularly in North and South America. And considering that the chief common trait among them is their successful evasion of the Imperial government's heavy hand, they show an admirable filial piety toward the
(261) Imperial establishment; though troubled with no slightest regret at having escaped from the Imperial surveillance and no slightest inclination to return to the shelter of the Imperial tutelage. A colloquialism-"hyphenate"-has latterly grown up to meet the need of a term to designate these evasive and yet patriotic colonists. It is scarcely misleading to say that the German-American hyphenate, e. g., in so far as he runs true to form, is still a German subject with his heart, but he is an American citizen with his head. All of which goes to argue that if the Fatherland were to fall into such a state of democratic tolerance that no recidivist need carry a defensive hypen to shield him from the importunate attentions of the Imperial government, German colonies would also come into bearing; although, it is true, they would have no value to the German government.
In the Imperial colonial policy colonies are conceived to stand to their Imperial guardian or master in a relation between that of a step-child and that of an indentured servant; to be dealt with summarily and at discretion and to be made use of without scruple. The like attitude toward colonies was once familiar matter-of-course with the British and Spanish statesmen. The British found the plan unprofitable, and also unworkable, and have given it up. The Spanish, having no political outlook but the dynastic one, could of course not see their way to relinquish the only purpose of their colonial enterprise, except in relinquishing their colonial Possessions. The German (Imperial) colonial policy is and will be necessarily after the Spanish pattern, and necessarily, too, with the Spanish results.
Under the projected neutral scheme there would be no colonial policy, and of course, no inducement to the ac
(262) -quisition of colonies, since there would be no profit to be derived, or to be fancied, in the case. But while no country, as a commonwealth, has any material interest in the acquisition or maintenance of colonies, it is otherwise as regards the dynastic interests of an Imperial government; and it is also otherwise, at least in the belief of the interested parties, as regards special businessmen or business concerns who are in a position to gain something by help of national discrimination in their favor. As regards the pecuniary interests of favored businessmen or business concerns, and of investors favored by national discrimination in colonial relations, the case falls under the general caption of trade discrimination, and does not differ at all materially from such expedients as a protective tariff, a ship subsidy, or a bounty on exports. But as regards the warlike, that is to say dynastic, interest of an Imperial government the case stands somewhat different.
Colonial Possessions in such a case yield no material benefit to the country at large, but their possession is a serviceable plea for warlike preparations with which to retain possession of the colonies in the face of eventualities, and it is also a serviceable means of stirring the national pride and keeping alive a suitable spirit of patriotic animosity. The material service actually to be derived from such possessions in the event of war is a point in doubt, with the probabilities apparently running against their being of any eventual net use. But there need be no question that such possessions, under the hand of any national establishment infected with imperial ambitions, are a fruitful source of diplomatic complications, excuses for armament, international grievances, and eventual aggression. A pacific league of neutrals can evidently not
(263) tolerate the retention of colonial possessions by any dynastic State that may be drawn into the league or under its jurisdiction, as, e. g., the German Empire in case it should be left on an Imperial footing. Whereas, in case the German peoples are thrown back on a democratic status, as neutralised commonwealths without a crown or a military establishment, the question of their colonial possessions evidently falls vacant.
As to the neutralisation of trade relations apart from the question of colonies, and as bears on the case of Germany under the projected jurisdiction of a pacific league of neutrals, the considerations to be taken account of are of much the same nature. As it would have to take effect, e. g., in the abolition of commercial and industrial discriminations between Germany and the pacific nations, such neutralisation would doubtless confer a lasting material benefit on the German people at large; and it is not easy to detect any loss or detriment to be derived from such a move so long as peace prevails. Protective, that is to say discriminating, export, import, or excise duties, harbor and registry dues, subsidies, tax exemptions and trade preferences, and all the like devices of interference with trade and industry, are unavoidably a hinderance to the material interests of any people on whom they are imposed or who impose these disabilities on themselves. So that exemption from these things by a comprehensive neutralisation of trade relations would immediately benefit all the nations concerned, in respect of their material well-being in times of peace. There is no exception and no abatement to be taken account of under this general statement, as is well known to all men who are conversant with these matters.
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But it is otherwise as regards the dynastic interest in the case, and as regards any national interest in warlike enterprise. It is doubtless true that all restraint of trade between nations, and between classes or localities within the national frontiers, unavoidably acts to weaken and impoverish the people on whose economic activities this restraint is laid; and to the extent to which this effect is had it will also be true that the country which so is hindered in its work will have a less aggregate of resources to place at the disposal of its enterprising statesmen for imperialist ends. But these restraints may yet be useful for dynastic, that is to say warlike, ends by making the country more nearly a "self-contained economic whole." A country becomes a "self-contained economic whole" by mutilation, in cutting itself off from the industrial system in which industrially it belongs, but in which it is unwilling nationally to hold its place. National frontiers are industrial barriers. But as a result of such mutilation of its industrial life such a country is better able-it has been believed-to bear the shock of severing its international trade relations entirely, as is likely to happen in case of war.
In a large country, such as America or Russia, which comprises within its national boundaries very extensive and very varied resources and a widely distributed and diversified population, the mischief suffered from restraints of trade that hinder industrial relations with the world at large will of course be proportionately lessened. Such a country comes nearer being a miniature industrial world; although none of the civilised nations, large or small, can carry on its ordinary industrial activities and its ordinary manner of life without drawing on foreign parts to some appreciable extent. But a country of small terri-
(265) -torial extent and of somewhat narrowly restricted natural resources, as, e. g., Germany or France, can even by the most drastic measures of restaint and mutilation achieve only a very mediocre degree of industrial isolation and "self-sufficiency,"-as has, e. g., appeared in the present war. But in all cases, though in varying measure, the mitigated isolation so enforced by these restraints on trade will in their degree impair the country's industrial efficiency and lower the people's material well-being; yet, if the restrictions are shrewdly applied this partial isolation and partial "self-sufficiency" will go some way toward preparing the nation for the more thorough isolation that follows on the outbreak of hostilities.
The present plight of the German people under war conditions may serve to show how nearly that end may be attained, and yet how inadequate even the most unreserved measures of industrial isolation must be in face of the fact that the modern state of the industrial arts necessarily draws on the collective resources of the world at large. It may well be doubted, on an impartial view, if the mutilation of the country's industrial system by such measures of isolation does not after all rather weaken the nation even for warlike ends; but then, the discretionary authorities in the dynastic States are always, and it may be presumed necessarily, hampered with obsolete theories handed down from that cameralistic age, when the little princes of the Fatherland were making dynastic history. So, e. g., the current, nineteenth and twentieth century, economic policy of the Prussian-Imperial statesmen is still drawn on lines within which Frederick II, called the Great, would have felt well at home.
Like other preparation for hostilities this reduction of the country to the status of a self-contained economic or-
(266) -ganisation is costly, but like other preparation for hostilities it also puts the nation in a position of greater readiness to break off friendly relations with its neighbors. It is a war measure, commonly spoken for by its advocates as a measure of self-defense; but whatever the merits of the self-defenders' contention, this measure is a war measure. As such it can reasonably claim no hearing in the counsels of a pacific league of neutrals, whose purpose it is to make war impracticable. Particularly can there be no reasonable question of admitting a policy of trade discrimination and isolation on the part of a nation which has, for purposes of warlike aggression, pursued such a policy in the past, and which it is the immediate purpose of the league to bind over to keep the peace.
There has been a volume of loose talk spent on the justice and expediency of boycotting the trade of the peoples of the Empire after the return of peace, as a penalty and as a preventive measure designed to retard their recovery of strength with which to enter on a further warlike enterprise. Such a measure would necessarily be somewhat futile ; since "Business is business," after all, and the practical limitations imposed on an unprofitable boycott by the moral necessity to buy cheap and sell dear that rests on all businessmen would surreptitiously mitigate it to the point of negligibility. It is inconceivable -or it would be inconceivable in the absence of imbecile politicians and self-seeking businessmen-that measures looking to the trade isolation of any one of these countries could be entertained as a point of policy to be pursued by a league of neutrals. And it is only in so far as patriotic jealously and vindictive sentiments are allowed to displace the aspiration for peace and security, that such measures can claim consideration. Considered as a pen-
(267) -alty to be imposed on the erring nations who set this warlike adventure afoot, it should be sufficiently plain that such a measure as a trade boycott could not touch the chief offenders, or even their responsible abettors. It would, rather, play into the hands of the militarist interests by keening alive the spirit of national jealously and international hatred, out of which wars arise and without which warlike enterprise might hopefully be expected to disappear out of the scheme of human intercourse. The punishment would fall, as all economic burdens and disabilities must always fall, on the common man, the underlying population.
The chief relation of this common run, this underlying population of German subjects, to the inception and pursuit of this Imperial warlike enterprise, is comprised in the fact that they are an underlying population of subjects, held in usufruct by the Imperial establishment and employed at will. It is true, they have lent themselves unreservedly to the uses for which the dynasty has use for them, and they have entered enthusiastically into the warlike adventure set afoot by the dynastic statesmen; but that they have done so is their misfortune rather than their fault. By use and wont and indoctrination they have for long been unremittingly, and helplessly, disciplined into a spirit of dynastic loyalty, national animosity and servile abnegation; until it would be nothing better than a pathetic inversion of all the equities of the case to visit the transgressions of their masters upon the common run whose fault lies, after all, in their being an underlying population of subjects, who have not had a chance to reach that spiritual level on which they could properly be held accountable for the uses to which they are turned. It is true, men are ordinarily punished for their misfor-
(268) -tunes; but the warlike enterprise of the Imperial dynasty has already brought what might fairly be rated as a good measure of punishment on this underlying populace, whose chief fault and chief misfortune lies in an habitual servile abnegation of those traits of initiative and discretion in man that constitute him an agent susceptible of responsibility or retribution.
It would be all the more of a pathetic mockery to visit the transgressions of their masters on these victims of circumstance and dynastic mendacity, since the conventionalities of international equity will scarcely permit the high responsible parties in the case to be chastised with any penalty harsher than a well-mannered figure of speech. To serve as a deterrent, the penalty must strike the point where vests the discretion; but servile use and wont is still too well intact in these premises to let any penalty touch the guilty core of a profligate dynasty. Under the wear and tear of continued war and its incident continued vulgarisation of the directorate and responsible staff among the pacific allies, the conventional respect of persons is likely to suffer appreciable dilapidation; but there need be no apprehension of such a loss of decent respect for personages as would compromise the creature comforts of that high syndicate of personages on whose initiative the Fatherland entered upon this enterprise in dominion.
Bygone shortcomings and transgressions can have no reasonable place in the arrangements by which a pacific league of neutrals designs to keep the peace. Neither can bygone prerogatives and precedents of magnificence and of mastery, except in so far as they unavoidably must come into play through the inability of men to divest themselves of their ingrained preconceptions, by virtue of which
(269) a Hohenzollern or a Hapsburger is something more formidable and more to be considered than a recruiting sergeant or a purveyor of light literature. The league can do its work of pacification only by elaborately forgetting differences and discrepancies of the kind that give rise to international grievances. Which is the same as saying that the neutralisation of national discriminations and pretensions will have to go all the way, if it is to serve. But this implies, as broadly as need be, that the pacific nations who make the league and provisionally administer its articles of agreement and jurisdiction, can not exempt themselves from any of the leveling measures of neutralisation to which the dynastic suspects among them are to be subject. It would mean a relinquishment of all those undemocratic institutional survivals out of which international grievances are wont to arise. As a certain Danish adage would have it, the neutrals of the league must all be shorn over the same comb.
What is to be shorn over this one comb of neutralisation and democracy is all those who go into the pacific league of neutrals and all who come under its jurisdiction, whether of their own choice or by the necessities of the case. It is of the substance of the case that those peoples who have been employed in the campaigns of the GermanImperial coalition are to come in on terms of impartial equality with those who have held the ground against them; to come under the jurisdiction, and prospectively into the copartnery, of the league of neutrals-all on the presumption that the Imperial coalition will be brought to make peace on terms of unconditional surrender.
Let it not seem presumptuous to venture on a recital of summary specifications intended to indicate the nature of
(270) those concrete measures which would logically be comprised in a scheme of pacification carried out with such a view to impartial equality among the peoples who are to make up the projected league. There is a significant turn of expression that recurs habitually in the formulation of terms put forth by the spokesmen of the Entente belligerents, where it is insisted that hostilities arc carried on not against the German people or the other peoples associated with them, but only against the Imperial establishments and their culpable aids and abettors in the enterprise. So it is further insisted that there is no intention to bring pains and penalties on these peoples, who so have been made use of by their masters, but only on the culpable master class whose tools these peoples have been. And later, just now (January 1917), and from a responsible and disinterested spokesman for the pacific league, there comes the declaration that a lasting peace at the hands of such a league can be grounded only in a present "peace without victory."
The mutual congruity of these two declarations need not imply collusion, but they are none the less complementary propositions and they are none the less indicative of a common trend of convictions among the men who are best able to speak for those pacific nations that ire looked to as the mainstay of the prospective league. They both converge to the point that the objective to be achieved is not victory for the Entente belligerents but defeat for the German--Imperial coalition; that the peoples underlying tote defeated governments are not to be dealt with as vanquished enemies but as fellows in undeserved misfortune brought on by their culpable masters; and that no advantage is designed to be taken of these peoples, and no gratuitous hardship to be imposed on them.
(271) Their masters are evidently to be put away, not as defeated antagonists but as a public nuisance to be provided against as may seem expedient for the peace and security of those nations whom they have been molesting.
Taking this position as outlined, it should not be extremely difficult to forecast the general line of procedure which it would logically demand,-barring irrelevant regard for precedents and overheated resentment, and provided that the makers of these peace terms have a free hand and go to their work with an eye single to the establishment of an enduring peace. The case of Germany would be typical of all the rest; and the main items of the bill in this case would seem logically to run somewhat as follows
(1) The definitive elimination of the Imperial establishment, together with the monarchical establishments of the several states of the Empire and the privileged classes;(2) Removal or destruction of all warlike equipment, military and naval, defensive and offensive;
(3) Cancelment of the public debt, of the Empire and of its members-creditors of the Empire being accounted accessory to the culpable enterprise of the Imperial government;
(4) Confiscation of such industrial equipment and resources as have contributed to the carrying on of the war, as being also accessory;
(5) Assumption by the league at large of all debts incurred, by the Entente belligerents or by neutrals, for the prosecution or by reason of the war, and distribution of the obligation so assumed, impartially among the members of the league, including the peoples of the defeated nations;
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(6) Indemnification for all injury done to civilians in the invaded territories; the means for such indemnification to be procured by confiscation of all estates in the defeated countries exceeding a certain very modest maximum, calculated on the average of property owned, say, by the poorer three-fourths of the population,-the kept classes being properly accounted accessory to the Empire's culpable enterprise.
The proposition to let the war debt be shared by all members of the league on a footing of impartial equality may seem novel, and perhaps extravagant. But all projects put forth for safeguarding the world's peace by a compact among the pacific nations run on the patent, though often tacit, avowal that the Entente belligerents are spending their substance and pledging their credit for the common cause. Among the Americans, the chief of the neutral nations, this is coming to be recognised more and more overtly. So that, in this instance at least, no insurmountable reluctance to take over their due share of the common burden should fairly be looked for, particularly when it appears that the projected league, if it is organised on a footing of neutrality, will relieve the republic of virtually all outlay for their own defense.Of course, there is, in all this, no temerarious intention to offer advice as to what should be done by those who have it to do, or even to sketch the necessary course which events are bound to take. As has been remarked in another passage, that would have to be a work of prophesy or of effrontery, both of which, it is hoped, lie equally beyond the horizon of this inquiry; which is occupied with the question of what conditions will logically have to be met in order to an enduring peace, not what will be the nature and outcome of negotiations entered into
(273) by astute delegates pursuing the special advantage, each of his own nation. And yet the peremptory nced of reaching some practicable arrangement whereby the peace may be kept, goes to say that even the most astute negotiations will in some degree he controlled by that need, and may reasonably be expected to make some approach to the simple and obvious requirements of the situation.
Therefore the argument returns to the United Kingdom and the probable limit of tolerance of that people, in respect of what they are likely to insist on as a necessary measure of democratisation in the nations of the second part, and what measure of national abnegation they are likely to accomodate themselves to. The United Kingdom is indispensable to the formation of a pacific league of neutrals. And the British terms of adhesion, or rather of initiation of such a league, therefore, will have to constitute the core of the structure, on which details may be adjusted and to which concessive adjustments will have to be made by all the rest. This is not saying that the projected league must or will be dominated by the United Kingdom or administered in the British interest. Indeed, it can not well be made to serve British particular interests in any appreciable degree, except at the cost of defeat to its main purpose; since the purposes of an enduring peace can be served only by an effectual neutralisation of national claims and interests. But it would mean that the neutralisation of national interests and discriminations to be effected would have to be drawn on lines acceptable to British taste in these matters, and would have to go approximately so far as would be dictated by the British notions of what is expedient, and not much farther. The pacific league of neutrals would have much of a British
(274) air, but "British" in this connection is to be taken as connoting the English-speaking countries rather than as applying to the United Kingdom alone; since the entrance of the British into the league would involve the entrance of the British colonies, and, indeed, of the American republic as well.
The temper and outlook of this British community, therefore, becomes a matter of paramount importance in any attempted analysis of the situation resulting after the war, or of any prospective course of conduct to be entered on by the pacific nations. And the question touches not so much the temper and preconceptions of the British community as known in recent history, but rather as it is likely to be modified by the war experience. So that the practicability of a neutral league comes to turn, in great measure, on the effect which this war experience is having on the habits of thought of the British people, or on that section of the British population which will make up the effectual majority when the war closes. The grave interest that attaches to this question must serve as justification for pursuing it farther, even though there can be no promise of a definite or confident answer to be found beforehand.
Certain general assertions may be made with some confidence. The experiences of the war, particularly among the immediate participants and among their immediate domestic connections-a large and increasing proportion e f the people at large-are plainly impressing oil theirs the uselessness and hardship of such a war. There can be no question but they are reaching a conviction that a war of this modern kind and scale is a thing to be avoided if possible. They are, .no doubt, willing to go to very considerable lengths to make a repetition of it impossible, and
(275) they may reasonably be expected to go farther along that line before peace returns. But the lengths to which they are ready to go may be in the way of concessions, or in the way of contest and compulsion. There need be no doubt but a profound and vindictive resentment runs through the British community, and there is no reason to apprehend that this will be dissipated in the course of further hostilities; although it should fairly be expected to lose something of its earlier exuberant malevolence and indiscrimination, more particularly if hostilities continue for some time. It is not too much to expect, that this popular temper of resentment will demand something very tangible in the way of summary vengeance on those who have brought the hardships of war upon the nation.
The manner of retribution which would meet the popular demand for "justice" to be done on the enemy is likely to be affected by the fortunes of war, as also the incidence of it. Should the governmental establishment and the discretion still vest in the gentlemanly classes at the close of hostilities, the retribution is likely to take the accustomed gentlemanly shape of pecuniary burdens imposed on the people of the defeated country, together with diplomatically specified surrender of territorial and colonial possessions, and the like; such as to leave the de facto enemy courteously on one side, and to yield something in the way of pecuniary benefit to the gentlemen-investors in charge, and something more in the way of new emoluments of office to the office holding class included in the same order of gentlemen. The retribution in the case would manifestly fall on the underlying population in the defeated country, without seriously touching the responsible parties, and would leave the defeated nation with a new grievance to nourish its patriotic animosity and with
(276) a new incentive to a policy of watchful waiting for a chance of retaliation.
But it is to be noted that under the stress of the war there is going forward in the British community a progressive displacement of gentlemanly standards and official procedure by standards and procedure of a visibly underbred character, a weakening of the hold of the gentlemanly classes on the control of affairs and a weakening of the hold which the sacred rights of property, investment and privilege have long had over the imagination of the British people. Should hostilities continue, and should the exigencies of the war situation continue to keep the futility of these sacred rights, as well as the fatuity of their possessors, in the public eye, after the same fashion as hitherto, it would not be altogether unreasonable to expect that the discretion would pass into the hands of the underbred, or into the hands of men immediately and urgently accountable to the underbred. In such a case, and with a constantly growing popular realisation that the directorate and responsible enemy in the war is the Imperial dynasty and its pedigreed aids and abettors, it is conceivable that the popular resentment would converge so effectually on these responsible instigators and directors of misfortune as to bring the incidence of the required retribution effectually to bear on them. The outcome might, not inconceivably, be the virtual erasure of the Imperial dynasty, together with the pedigreed-class rule on which it rests anti the apparatus of irresponsible coercion through which it works, in the Fatherland and in its subsidiaries and dependencies.
With a sufficiently urgent realisation of their need of peace and security, and with a realisation also that the way to avoid war is to avoid the ways and means of in-
(277) -ternational jealousy and of the national discriminations out of which international jealousy grows, it is conceivable that a government which should reflect the British temper and the British hopes might go so far in insisting on a neutralisation of the peoples of the Fatherland as would leave them without the dynastic apparatus with which warlike enterprise is set afoot, and so leave them also perforce in a pacific frame of mind. In time, in the absence of their dearly beloved leavings of feudalism, an enforced reliance on their own discretion and initiative, and an enforced respite from the rant and prance of warlike swagger, would reasonably be expected to grow into a popular habit. The German people are by no means less capable of tolerance and neighbourly decorum than their British or Scandinavian neighbours of the same blood,if they can only be left to their own devices, untroubled by the maggoty conceit of national domination.
There is no intention herewith to express an expectation that this out-and-out neutralisation of the Fatherland's international relations and of its dynastic government will come to pass on the return of peace, or that the German people will, as a precaution against recurrent Imperial rabies, be organised on a democratic pattern by constraint of the pacific nations of the league. The point is only that this measure of neutralisation appears to be the necessary condition, in the absence of which no such neutral league can succeed, and that so long as the war goes on there is something of a chance that the British community may in time reach a frame of mind combining such settled determination to safeguard the peace at all costs, with such a degree of disregard for outworn conventions, that their spokesmen in the negotiations may push the neutralisation of these peoples to that length.
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The achievement of such an outcome would evidently take time as well as harsh experience, more time and harsher experience, perhaps, than one likes to contemplate.
Most men, therefore, would scarcely rate the chance of such an outcome at all high. And yet it is to be called to mind that the war has lasted long and the effect of its demands and its experience has already gone far, and that the longer it lasts the greater are the chances of its prolongation and of its continued hardships, at least to the extent that with every month of war that passes the prospect of the allied nations making peace on any terms short of unconditional surrender grows less. And unconditional surrender is the first step in the direction of an unconditional dispossession of the Imperial establishment and its war prophets,-depending primarily on the state of mind of the British people at the time. And however unlikely, it is also always possible, as some contend, that in the course of further war experience the common man in the Fatherland may come to reflect on the use and value of the Imperial establishment, with the result of discarding and disowning it and all its works. Such an expectation would doubtless underrate the force of ancient habit, and would also involve a misapprehension of the psychological incidence of a warlike experience. The German people have substantially none of those preconceptions of independence and self-direction to go on, in the absence of which an effectual revulsion against dynastic rule can not come to pass.Embedded in the common sense of the British population at large is a certain large and somewhat sullen sense of fair dealing. In this they are not greatly different from their neighbours, if at all, except that the body of common
(279) sense in which this British sense of fair dealing lies embedded is a maturer fashion of common sense than that which serves to guide the workday life of many of their neighbours. And the maturity in question appears to be chiefly a matter of their having unlearned, divested themselves of, or been by force of disuse divested of an exceptionally large proportion of that burden of untoward conceits which western Europe, and more particularly middle Europe, at large has carried over from the Middle Ages. They have had time and occasion to forget more of what the exigencies of modern life make it expedient to have forgotten. And yet they are reputed slow, conservative. But they have been well placed for losing much of what would be well lost.
Among other things, their preconception of national animosity is not secure, in the absence of provocation. They are now again in a position to learn to do without some of the useless legacy out of the past,-useless, that is, for life as it runs today, however it may be rated in the setting in which it was all placed in that past out of which it has come. And the question is whether now, under the pressure of exigencies that make for a disestablishment of much cumbersome inherited apparatus for doing what need not be done, they will be ruled by their sense of expediency and of fair dealing to the extent of cancelling out of their own scheme of life so much of this legacy of conventional preconceptions as has now come visibly to hinder their own material well-being, and at the same time to defeat that peace and security for which they have shown themselves willing to fight. It is, of course, a simpler matter to fight than it is to put away a preconceived, even if it is a bootless, superstition; as, e. g., the prestige of hereditary wealth, hereditary gentil-
(280) -ity, national vainglory, and perhaps especially national hatred. But if the school is hard enough and the discipline protracted enough there is no reason in the nature of things why the common run of the British people should not unlearn these futilities that once were the substance of things under an older and outworn order. They have already shown their capacity for divesting themselves of outworn institutional bonds, in discarding the main substance of dynastic rule; and when they now come to face the exigencies of this new situation it should cause no great surprise if they are able to see their way to do what further is necessary to meet these exigencies.
At the hands of this British commonwealth the new situation requires the putting away of the German Imperial establishment and the military caste; the reduction of the German peoples to a footing of unreserved democracy with sufficient guarantees against national trade discriminations; surrender of all British tutelage over outlying possessions, except what may go to guarantee their local autonomy; cancelment of all extra-territorial pretensions of the several nations entering into the league; neutralisation of the several national establishments, to comprise virtual disarmament, as well as cancelment of all restrictions on trade and of all national defense of extraterritorial pecuniary claims and interests on the part of individual citizens. The naval control of the seas will best he left in British hands. No people has a graver or more immediate interest in the freedom and security of the sea-borne trade; and the United Kingdom has shown that it is to be trusted in that matter. And then it may well be that neither the national pride nor the apprehensions of the British people would allow them to surren-
(281) -der it; whereas, if the league is to be formed it will have to be on terms to which the British people are willing to adhere. A certain provision of armed force will also be needed to keep the governments of unneutral nations in check,-and for the purpose in hand all effectively monarchical countries are to be counted as congenitally unneutral, whatever their formal professions and whether they are members of the league or not. Here again it will probably appear that the people of the United Kingdom, and of the English-speaking countries at large, will not consent to this armed force and its discretionary use passing out of British hands, or rather out of French-British hands; and here again the practical decision will have to wait on the choice of the British people, all the more because the British community has no longer an interest, real or fancied, in the coercive use of this force for their own particular ends. No other power is to be trusted, except France, and France is less well placed for the purpose and would assuredly also not covet so invidious an honor and so thankless an office.
The theory, or the logical necessities, of such a pacific league of neutral nations is simple enough, in its elements. War is to be avoided by a policy of avoidance. Which signifies that the means and the motives to warlike enterprise and warlike provocation are to be put away, so far as may be. If what may be, in this respect, does riot conic up to the requirements of the case, the experiment, of course, will fail. The preliminary requirement, elimination of the one formidable dynastic State in Europe,-has been spoken of. Its counterpart in the Far East will cease to be formidable on the decease of its natural ally in Central Europe, in so
282) far as touches the case of such a projected league. The ever increasingly dubious empire of the Czar would appear to fall in the same category. So that the pacific league's fortunes would seem to turn on what may be called its domestic or internal arrangements.
Now, the means of warlike enterprise, as well as of unadvised embroilment, is always in the last analysis the patriotic spirit of the nation. Given this patriotic spirit in sufficient measure, both the material equipment and the provocation to hostilities will easily be found. It should accordingly appear to be the first care of such a pacific league to reduce the sources of patriotic incitement to the practicable minimum. This can be done, in such measure as it can be done at all, by neutralisation of national pretensions. The finished outcome in this respect, such as would assure perpetual peace among the peoples concerned, would of course be an unconditional neutralisation of citizenship, as has already been indicated before. The question which, in effect, the spokesmen for a pacific league have to face is as to how nearly that outcome can be brought to pass. The rest of what they may undertake, or may come to by way of compromise and stipulation, is relatively immaterial and of relatively transient consequence.
A neutralisation of citizenship has of course been afloat in a somewhat loose way in the projects of socialistic and other "undesirable" agitators, but nothing much has come of it. Nor have specific projects for its realisation been set afoot. That anything conclusive along that line could now be reached would seem extremely doubtful, in view of the ardent patriotic temper of all these peoples, heightened just now by the experience of war. Still, an undesigned and unguided drift in that direction has been visible
(283) in all those nations that are accounted the vanguard among modern civilised peoples, ever since the dynastic rule among them began to be displaced by a growth of "free" institutions, that is to say institutions resting on an accepted ground of insubordination and free initiative.
The patriotism of these peoples, or their national spirit, is after all and at the best an attenuated and impersonalised remnant of dynastic loyalty, and it amounts after all, in effect, to nothing much else than a residual curtailment or partial atrophy of that democratic habit of mind that embodies itself in the formula: Live and let live. It is, no doubt, both an ancient and a very meritorious habit. It is easily acquired and hard to put away. The patriotic spirit and the national life (prestige) on which it centers are the subject of untiring eulogy; but hitherto its encomiasts have shown no cause and put forward no claim to believe that it all is of any slightest use :or any purpose that does not take it and its paramount merit for granted. It is doubtless a very meritorious habit; at least so they all say. But under the circumstances of modern civilised life it is fruitful of no other net material result than damage and discomfort. Still it is virtually ubiquitous among civilised men, and in an admirable state of repair; and for the calculable future it is doubtless to be counted in as an enduring obstacle to a conclusive peace, a constant source of anxiety and unremitting care.
The motives that work out through this national spirit, by use of this patriotic ardor, fall under two heads: dynastic ambition, and business enterprise. The two categories have the common trait that neither the one nor the other comprises anything that is of the slightest material benefit to the community at large; but both have
(284) at the same time a high prestige value in the conventional esteem of modern men. The relation of dynastic ambition to warlike enterprise, and the uses of that usufruct of the nation's resources and man-power which the nation's patriotism places at the disposal of the dynastic establishment, have already been spoken of at length above, perhaps at excessive length, in the recurrent discussion of the dynastic State and its quest of dominion for dominion's sake. What measures are necessary to be taken as regards the formidable dynastic States that threaten the peace, have also been outlined, perhaps with excessive freedom.
But it remains to call attention to that mitigated form of dynastic rule called a constitutional monarchy. Instances of such a constitutional monarchy, designed to conserve the well-beloved abuses of dynastic rule under a cover of democratic formalities, or to bring in effectual democratic insubordination under cover of the ancient dignities of an outworn monarchical system,-the characterisation may run either way according to the fancy of the speaker, and to much the same practical effect in either case,-instances illustrative of this compromise monarchy at work today are to be had, as felicitously as anywhere, in the Balkan states; perhaps the case of Greece will be especially instructive. At the other, and far, end of the line will be found such other typical instances as the British, the Dutch, or, in pathetic and droll miniature, the Norwegian.
There is, of course, a wide interval between the grotesque effrontery that wears the Hellenic crown and the undeviatingly decorous self-effacement of the Dutch sovereign; and yet there is something of a common complexion runs through the whole range of establishments,
(285) all the way from the quasi-dynastic to the pseudo-dynastic. For reasons unavoidable and persistent, though not inscribed in the constituent law, the governmental establishment associated with such a royal concern will be made up of persons drawn from the kept classes, the nobility or lesser gentlefolk, and will be imbued with the spirit of these "better" classes rather than that of the common run.
With what may be uncanny shrewdness, or perhaps mere tropismatic response to the unreasoned stimulus of a "consciousness of kind," the British government--habitually a syndicate of gentlefolk--has uniformly insisted on the installation of a constitutional monarchy at the formation of every new national organisation in which that government has had a discretionary voice. And the many and various constitutional governments so established, commonly under British auspices in some degree, have invariably run true to form, in some appreciable degree. They may be quasi-dynastic or pseudo-dynastic, but at this nearest approach to democracy they always, and unavoidably, include at least a circumlocution office of gentlefolk, in the way of a ministry and court establishment, whose place in the economy of the nation's affairs it is to adapt the run of these affairs to the needs of the kept classes.
There need be no imputation of sinister designs to these gentlefolk, who so are elected by force of circumstances to guard and guile the nation's interests. As things g,, it will doubtless commonly be found that they are as well-intentioned as need be. But a well-meaning gentleman of good antecedents means well in a gentlemanly way and in the light of good antecedents. Which comes unavoidably to an effectual bias in favor of those interests
(286) which honorable gentlemen of good antecedents have at heart. And among these interests are the interests of the kept classes, as contrasted with that common run of the population from which their keep is drawn.
Under the auspices, even if they are only the histrionic and decorative auspices, of so decorous an article of institutional furniture as royalty, it follows of logical necessity that the personnel of the effectual government must also be drawn from the better classes, whose place and station and high repute will make their association with the First Gentleman of the Realm not too insufferably incongruous. And then, the popular habit of looking up to this First Gentleman with that deference that royalty commands, also conduces materially to the attendant habitual attitude of deference to gentility more at large.
Even in so democratic a country, and with so exanimate a crown as is to be found in the United Kingdom, the royal establishment visibly, and doubtless very materially, conduces to the continued tenure of the effectual government by representatives of the kept classes; and it therefore counts with large effect toward the retardation of the country's further move in the direction of democratic insubordination and direct participation in the direction of affairs by the underbred, who finally pay the cost. And on the other hand, even so moderately royal an establishment as the Norwegian has apparently a sensible effect in the way of gathering the reins somewhat into the hands of the better classes, tinder circumstances of such meagerness as might be expected to preclude anything like a "better" class, in the conventional acceptation of that term. It would appear that even the extreme of pseudo-dynastic royalty, sterilised to the last degree, is something of an effectual hindrance to democratic rule,
(287) and in so far also a hindrance to the further continued neutralisation of nationalist pretensions, as also an effectual furtherance of upper-class rule for upper-class ends.
Now, a government by well-meaning gentlemen-investors will, at the nearest, come no nearer representing the material needs and interests of the common run than a parable comes to representing the concrete facts which it hopes to illuminate. And as bears immediately on the point in hand, these gentlemanly administrators of the nation's affairs who so cluster about the throne, vacant though it may be of all but the bodily presence of majesty, are after all gentlemen, with a gentlemanly sense of punctilio touching the large proprieties and courtesies of political life. The national honor is a matter of punctilio, always; and out of the formal exigencies of the national honor arise grievances to be redressed; and it is grievances of this character that commonly afford the formal ground of a breach of the peace. An appeal on patriotic grounds of wounded national pride, to the common run who have no trained sense of punctilio, by the gentlemanly responsible class who have such a sense, backed by assurances that the national prestige or the national interests are at stake, will commonly bring a suitable response. It is scarcely necessary that the common run should know just what the stir is about, so long as they are informed by their trusted betters that there is a grievance to redress. In effect, it results that the democratic nation's affairs are administered by a syndicate composed of the least democratic class in the population.
Excepting what is to be excepted, it will commonly hold true today that these gentlemanly governments are
(288) conducted in a commendably clean and upright fashion, with a conscious rectitude and a benevolent intention. But they are after all, in effect, class governments, and they unavoidably carry the bias of their class. The gentlemanly officials and law-givers come, in the main, from the kept classes, whose living comes to them in the way of income from investments, at home or in foreign parts, or from an equivalent source of accumulated wealth or official emolument. The bias resulting from this state of the case reed not be of an intolerant character in order to bring its modicum of mischief into the national policy, as regards amicable relations with other nationalities. A slight bias running on a ground of conscious right and unbroken usage may- go far. So, e. g., anyone of these gentlemanly governments is within its legitimate rights, or rather within its imperative duty, in defending the foreign investments of its citizens and enforcing due payment of its citizens' claims to income or principal of such property as they may hold in foreign parts; and it is within its ordinary lines of duty in making use of the nation's resources-that is to say of the common man and his means of livelihood-in enforcing such claims held by the investing classes. The community at large has no interest in the enforcement of such claims; it is evidently a class interest, and as evidently protected by a code of rights, duties and procedure that has grown out of a class bias, at the cost of the community at large.
This bias favoring the interests of invested wealth may also, and indeed it commonly does, take the aggressive form of aggressively forwarding enterprise in investment abroad, particularly in commercially backward countries abroad, by extension of the national jurisdiction and the active countenancing of concessions in foreign
(289) parts, by subventions, or by creation of offices to bring suitable emoluments to the younger sons of deserving families. The protective tariffs to which recourse is sometimes had, are of the same general nature and purpose. Of course, it is in this latter, aggressive or excursive, issue of the well-to-do bias in favor of investment and invested wealth that its most pernicious effect on international relations is traceable.
Free income, that is to say income not dependent on personal merit or exertion of any kind, is the breath of life to the kept classes; and as a corollary of the "First Law of Nature," therefore, the invested wealth which gives a legally equitable claim to such income has in their eyes all the sanctity that can be given by Natural Right. Investment-often spoken of euphemistically as "savings" -is consequently a meritorious act, conceived to be very serviceable to the community at large, and properly to be furthered by all available means. Invested wealth is so much added to the aggregate means at the community's disposal, it is believed. Of course, in point of fact, income from investment in the hands of these gentlefolk is a means of tracelessly consuming that much of the community's yearly product; but to the kept classes, who see the matter from the point of view of the recipient, the matter does not present itself in that light. To them it is the breath of life. Like other honorable men they are faithful to their bread; and by authentic tradition the common man, in whose disciplined preconceptions the kept classes are his indispensable betters, is also imbued with the uncritical faith that the invested wealth which enables these betters tracelessly to consume a due share of the yearly product is an addition to the aggregate means ill hand.
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The advancement of commercial and other business enterprise beyond the national frontiers is consequently one of the duties not to be neglected, and with which no trifling can be tolerated. It is so bound up with national ideals, under any gentlemanly government, that any invasion or evasion of the rights of investors in foreign parts, or of other business involved in dealings with foreign parts, immediately involves not only the material interest of the nation but the national honor as well. Hence international jealousies and eventual embroilment.
The constitutional monarchy that commonly covers a modern democratic community is accordingly a menace to the common peace, and any pacific league of neutrals will be laying up trouble and prospective defeat for itself in allowing such an institution to stand over in any instance. Acting with a free hand, if such a thing were possible, the projected league should logically eliminate all monarchical establishments, constitutional or otherwise, from among its federated nations. It is doubtless not within reason to look for such a move in the negotiations that are to initiate the projected league of neutrals; but the point is called to mind here chiefly as indicating one of the difficult passages which are to be faced in any attempted formation of such a league, as well as one of the abiding sources of international irritation with which the league's jurisdiction will be burdened so long as a decisive measure of the kind is not taken.
The logic of the whole matter is simple enough, and the necessary measures to be taken to remedy it are no less simple-barring sentimental objections which will probably prove insuperable. A monarchy, even a sufficiently inane monarchy, carries the burden of a gentlemanly governmental establishment-a government by and
(291) for the kept classes; such a government will unavoidably direct the affairs of state with a view to income on invested wealth, and will see the. material interests of the country only in so far as they present themselves under the form of investment and business enterprise designed to eventuate in investment; these are the only forms of material interest that give rise to international jealousies, discriminations and misunderstanding, at the same time that they are interests of individuals only and have no material use or value to the community at large. Given a monarchical establishment and the concomitant gentlemanly governmental corps, there is no avoiding this sinister prime mover of international rivalry, so long as the rights of invested wealth continue in popular apprehension to be held inviolable.
Quite obviously there is a certain to quoque ready to the hand of these "gentlemen of the old school" who see in the constitutional monarchy a God-given shelter from the unreserved vulgarisation of life at the hands of the unblest and unbalanced underbred and underfed. The formally democratic nations, that have not retained even a pseudo-dynastic royalty, are not much more fortunately placed in respect of national discrimination in trade and investment. The American republic will obviously come into the comparison as the type-form of economic policy in a democratic commonwealth. There is little to choose between the economic policy pursued by such republics as France or America on the one side and their nearest counterparts among tile constitutional monarchies on the other. It is even to be admitted out of hand that the comparison does no credit to democratic institutions as seen at work in these republics. They are, in fact, somewhat the crudest and most singularly foolish in their
(292) economic policy of any peoples in Christendom. And in view of the amazing facility with which these democratic commonwealths are always ready to delude themselves in everything that touches their national trade policies, it is obvious that any league of neutrals whose fortunes are in any degree contingent on their reasonable compliance with a call to neutralise their trade regulations for the sake of peace, will have need of all the persuasive power it can bring to bear.
However, the powers of darkness have one less line of defense to shelter them and their work of malversation in these commonwealths than in the constitutional monarchies. The American national establishment, e. g., which may be taken as a fairly characteristic type-form in this bearing, is a government of businessmen for business ends; and there is no tabu of axiomatic gentility or of certified pedigree to hedge about this working syndicate of business interests. So that it is all nearer by one remove to the disintegrating touch of the common man and his commonplace circumstances. The businesslike régime of these democratic politicians is as undeviating in its advocacy and aid of enterprise in pursuit of private gain under shelter of national discrimination as the circumstances will permit; and the circumstances will permit them to do much and go far; for the limits of popular gullibility in all things that touch the admirable feats of business enterprise are very wide in these countries. There is a sentimental popular belief running to the curious effect that because the citizens of such a commonwealth are ungraded equals before the law, therefore somehow they can all and several become wealthy by trading at the expense of their neighbours.
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Yet, the fact remains that there is only the one line of defense in these countries where the business interests have not the countenance of a time-honored order of gentlefolk, with the sanction of royalty in the background. And this fact is further enhanced by one of its immediate consequences. Proceeding upon the abounding faith which these peoples have in business enterprise as a universal solvent, the unreserved venality and greed of their businessmen-unhampered by the gentleman's noblesse oblige-have pushed the conversion of public law to private gain farther and more openly here than elsewhere. The outcome has been divers measures in restraint of trade or in furtherance of profitable abuses, of such a crass and flagrant character that if once the popular apprehension is touched by matter-of-fact reflection on the actualities of this businesslike policy the whole structure should reasonably be expected to crumble. If the present conjuncture of circumstances should, e. g., present to the American populace a choice between exclusion from the neutral league, and a consequent probable and dubious war of self-defense, on the one hand; as against entrance into the league, and security at the cost of relinquishing their national tariff in restraint of trade, on the other hand, it is always possible that the people might be brought to look their protective tariff in the face and recognise it for a commonplace conspiracy in restraint of trade, and so decide to shuffle it out of the %%-ay as a good riddance. And the rest of the Republic's businesslike policy of special favors would in such a case stand a chance of going in the discard along with the protective tariff, since the rest is of substantially the same disingenuous character.
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Not that anyone need entertain a confident expectation of such an exploit of common sense on the part of the American voters. There is little encouragement for such a hope in their past career of gullibility on this head. But this is again a point of difficulty to be faced in negotiations looking to such a pacific league of neutralsWithout a somewhat comprehensive neutralisation of national trade regulations, the outlook for lasting peace would be reduced by that much; there would be so much material for international jealousy and misunderstanding left standing over and requiring continued readjustment and compromise, always with the contingency of a breach that much nearer. The infatuation of the Americans with their protective tariff and other businesslike discriminations is a sufficiently serious matter in this connection, and it is always possible that their inability to give up this superstition might lead to their not adhering to this projected neutral league. Yet it is at least to be said that the longer the time that passes before active measures are taken toward the organisation of such a league -that is to say, in effect, the longer the great war lasts the more amenable is the temper of the Americans likely to be, and the more reluctantly would they see themselves excluded. Should the war be protracted to some such length as appears to be promised by latterday pronunciamentos from the belligerents, or to something passably approaching such a duration; and should the Imperial designs and anomalous diplomacy of Japan continue to force themselves on the popular attention at the present rate; at the same time that the operations in Europe continue to demonstrate the excessive cost of defense against a well devised and resolute offensive; then it should reasonably be expected that the Americans might come to
(295) such a realisation of their own case as to let no minor considerations of trade discrimination stand in the way of their making common cause with the other pacific nations.
It appears already to be realised in the most responsible quarter that America needs the succor of the other pacific nations, with a need that is not to be put away or put off ; as it is also coming to be realised that the Imperial Powers are disturbers of the peace, by force of their Imperial character. Of course, the politicians who seek their own advantage in the nation's embarrassment are commonly unable to see the matter in that light. But it is also apparent that the popular sentiment is affected with the same apprehension, more and more as time passes and the aims and methods of the Imperial Powers become more patent.
Hitherto the spokesmen of a pacific federation of nations have spoken for a league of such an (indeterminate) constitution as to leave all the federated nations undisturbed in all their conduct of their own affairs, domestic or international; probably for want of second thought as to the complications of copartnership between them in so grave and unwonted an enterprise. They have also spoken of America's share in the project as being that of an interested outsider, whose interest in any precautionary measures of this kind is in part a regard for his own tranquility as a disinterested neighbour, but in greater part a humane solicitude for the well-being of civilised mankind at large. In this view, somewhat self-complacent it is to be admitted, America is conceived to come into the case as initiator and guide, about whom the pacific nations are to cluster as some sort of queen-bee.
Now, there is not a little verisimilitude in this conception of America as a sort of central office and a tower
(296) of strength in the projected federation of neutral nations, however pharisaical an appearance it may all have in the self-complacent utterances of patriotic Americans. The American republic is, after all, the greatest of the pacific nations of Christendom, in resources, population and industrial capacity; and it is also not to be denied that the temper of this large population is, on the whole, as pacific as that of any considerable people-outside of China. The adherence of the American republic would, in effect, double the mass and powers of the projected league, and would so place it beyond all hazard of defeat from without, or even of serious outside opposition to its aims.
Yet it will not hold true that America is either disinterested or indispensable. The unenviable position of the indispensable belongs to the United Kingdom, and carries with it the customary suspicion of interested motives that attaches to the stronger party in a bargain. To America, on the other hand, the league is indispensable, as a refuge from otherwise inevitable dangers ahead; and it is only a question of a moderate allowance of time for the American voters to realise that without an adequate copartnership with the other pacific nations the outlook of the Republic is altogether precarious. Single-handed, America can not defend itself, except at a prohibitive cost; whereas in copartnership with these others the national defense becomes a virtually negligible matter. It is for America a choice between a policy of extravagant armament and aggressive diplomacy, with a doubtful issue, on the one side, and such abatement of national pretensions as would obviate bootless contention, on the other side.
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Yet, it must be admitted, the patriotic temper of the American people is of such a susceptible kind as to leave the issue in doubt. Not that the Americans will not endeavor to initiate some form of compact for the keeping of the peace, when hostilities are concluded; barring unforeseen contingencies, it is virtually a foregone conclusion that the attempt will be made, and that the Americans will take an active part in its promotion. But the doubt is as to their taking such a course as will lead to a compact of the kind needed to safeguard the peace of the country. The business interests have much to say in the counsels of the Americans, and these business interests look to short-term gains-American business interests particularly-to be derived from the country's necessities. It is likely to appear that the business interests, through representatives in Congress and elsewhere, will disapprove of any peace compact that does not involve an increase of the national armament and a prospective demand for munitions and an increased expenditure of the national funds.
With or without the adherence of America, the pacific nations of Europe will doubtless endeavour to form a league or alliance designed to keep the peace. If America does not come into the arrangement it may well come to nothing much more than a further continued defensive alliance of the belligerent nations now opposed to the German coalition. In any case it is still a point in doubt whether the league so projected is to he merely a compact of defensive armament against a common! enemy-in which case it will necessarily be transient, perhaps ephemeral-or a more inclusive coalition of a closer character designed to avoid any breach of the peace, by disarmament and by disallowance and disclaimer of such national pre-
(298) -tensions and punctilio as the patriotic sentiment of the contracting parties will consent to dispense with. The nature of the resulting peace, therefore, as well as its chances of duration, will in great measure be conditioned on the fashion of peace-compact on which it is to rest; which will be conditioned in good part on the degree in which the warlike coalition under German Imperial control is effectually to be eliminated from the situation as a prospective disturber of the peace; which, in turn, is a question somewhat closely bound up with the further duration of the war, as has already been indicated in an earlier passage.
