An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation

At the same time these spiritual assets, being of the nature of habit, are also bound to change character more or less radically, by insensible shifting of ground, but incontinently,—provided only that the conditions of life, and therefore the discipline of experience, undergo any substantial change. So the immediate interest shifts to the presumptive rate and character of those changes that are in prospect, due to the unremitting change of circumstances under which these modern peoples live and to the discipline of which they are unavoidably exposed. For the present and for the immediate future the current state of things is a sufficiently stable basis of argument; but assurance as to the sufficiency of the premises afforded by the current state of things thins out in proportion as the perspective of the argument runs out into the succeeding years. The bearing of it all is two-fold, of course. This progressive, cumulative habituation under changing circumstances affects the case both of those democratic peoples whose fortunes are in the hazard, and also of those dynastic States by whom the projected enterprise in dominion is to be carried into effect.

The case of the two formidable dynastic States whose names have been coupled together in what has already been said is perhaps the more immediately interesting in the present connection. As matters stand, and in the measure in which they continue so to stand, the case of these is in no degree equivocal. The two dynastic establishments seek dominion, and indeed they seek nothing else, except incidentally to and in furtherance of the main quest. As has been remarked before, it lies in the nature of a dynastic State to seek dominion, that being the whole of its nature in so far as it runs true to form. But a dynastic State, like any other settled, institutionalised community of men, rests on and draws its effectual driving force from the habit of mind of its underlying community, the common man in the aggregate, his preconceptions and ideals as to what things are worth while. Without a suitable spiritual ground of this kind such a dynastic State passes out of the category of formidable Powers and into that of precarious despotism.

In both of the two States here in question the dynastic establishment and its bodyguard of officials and gentlefolk may be counted on to persevere in the faith that now animates them, until an uneasy displacement of sentiment among the underlying populace may in time induce them judiciously to shift their footing. Like the ruling classes elsewhere, they are of a conservative temper and may be counted on so to continue. They are also not greatly exposed to the discipline of experience that makes for adaptive change in habits of life, and therefore in the correlated habits of thought. It is always the common man that is effectually reached by any exacting or wide-reaching change in the conditions of life. He is relatively unsheltered from any forces that make for adaptive change, as contrasted with the case of his betters; and however sluggish and reluctant may be his response to such discipline as makes for a displacement of outworn preconceptions, yet it is always out of the mass of this common humanity that those movements of disaffection and protest arise, which lead, on occasion, to any material realignment of the institutional fabric or to any substantial shift in the line of policy to be pursued under the guidance of their betters.

The common mass of humanity, it may be said in parenthesis, is of course not a homogeneous body. Uncommon men, in point of native gifts of intelligence, sensibility, or personal force, will occur as frequently, in proportion to the aggregate numbers, among the common mass as among their betters. Since in any one of these nations of Christendom, with their all-inclusive hybridisation, the range, frequency and amplitude of variations in hereditary endowment is the same throughout all classes. Class differentiation is a matter of habit and convention; and in distinction from his betters the common man is common only in point of numbers and in point of the more general and more exacting conditions to which he is exposed. He is in a position to be more hardly ridden by the discipline of experience, and is at the same time held more consistently to such a body of preconceptions, and to such changes only in this body of preconceptions, as fall in with the drift of things in a larger mass of humanity. But all the while it is the discipline which impinges on the sensibilities of this common mass that shapes the spiritual attitude and temper of the community and so defines what may and what may not be undertaken by the constituted leaders. So that, in a way, these dynastic States are at the mercy of that popular sentiment whose creatures they are, and are subject to undesired changes of direction and efficiency in their endeavors, contingent on changes in the popular temper; over which they have only a partial, and on the whole a superficial control.

A relatively powerful control and energetic direction of the popular temper is and has been exercised by these dynastic establishments, with a view to its utilisation in the pursuit of the dynastic enterprise; and much has visibly been accomplished in that way; chiefly, perhaps, by military discipline in subordination to personal authority, and also by an unsparing surveillance of popular education, with a view to fortify the preconceptions handed down from the passing order as well as to eliminate all subversive innovation. Yet in spite of all the well-conceived and shrewdly managed endeavors of the German Imperial system in this direction, e.g., there has been evidence of an obscurely growing uneasiness, not to say disaffection, among the underlying mass. So much so that hasty observers, and perhaps biased, have reached the inference that one of the immediate contributory causes that led to the present war was the need of a heroic remedy to correct this untoward drift of sentiment.

For the German people the government of the present dynastic incumbent has done all that could (humanly speaking) be expected in the way of endeavoring to conserve the passing order and to hold the popular imagination to the received feudalistic ideals of loyal service. And yet the peoples of the Empire are already caught in the net of that newer order which they are now endeavoring to break by force of arms. They are inextricably implicated in the cultural complex of Christendom; and within this Western culture those peoples to whom it fell to lead the exodus out of the Egypt of feudalism have come quite naturally to set the pace in all the larger conformities of civilised life. Within the confines of Christendom today, for good or ill, whatever usage or customary rule of conduct falls visibly short of the precedent set by these cultural pioneers is felt to fall beneath the prescriptive commonplace level of civilisation. Failure to adopt and make use of those tried institutional expedients on which these peoples of the advance guard have set their mark of authentication is today presumptively a mistake and an advantage foregone; and a people who are denied the benefit of these latterday ways and means of civic life are uneasy with a sense of grievance at the hands of their rulers. Besides which, the fashion in articles of institutional equipage so set by the authentic pioneers of culture has also come to be mandatory, as a punctilio of the governmental proprieties; so that no national establishment which aspires to a decorous appearance in the eyes of the civilised world can longer afford to be seen without them. The forms at least must be observed. Hence the "representative" and pseudo-representative institutions of these dynastic States.

These dynastic States among the rest have partly followed the dictates of civilised fashion, partly yielded to the, more or less intelligent, solicitations of their subjects, or the spokesmen of their subjects, and have installed institutional apparatus of this modern pattern—more in point of form than of substance, perhaps. Yet in time the adoption of the forms is likely to have an effect, if changing circumstances favor their taking effect. Such has on the whole been the experience of those peoples who have gone before along this trail of political advance. As instance the growth of discretionary powers under the hands of parliamentary representatives in those cases where the movement has gone on longest and farthest; and these instances should not be considered idle, as intimations of what may presumptively be looked for under the Imperial establishments of Germany or Japan. It may be true that hitherto, along with the really considerable volume of imitative gestures of discretionary deliberation delegated to these parliamentary bodies, they have as regards all graver matters brought to their notice only been charged with a (limited) power to talk. It may be true that, for the present, on critical or weighty measures the parliamentary discretion extends no farther than respectfully to say: "Ja wohl!" But then, Ja wohl is also something; and there is no telling where it may all lead to in the long course of years. One has a vague apprehension that this "Ja wohl!" may some day come to be a customarily necessary form of authentication, so that with-holding it (Behüt' es Gott!) may even come to count as an effectual veto on measures so pointedly neglected. More particularly will the formalities of representation and self-government be likely to draw the substance of such like "free institutions" into the effectual conduct of public affairs if it turns out that the workday experiences of these people takes a turn more conducive to habits of insubordination than has been the case hitherto.

Indications are, again, not wanting, that even in the Empire the discipline of workday experience is already diverging from that line that once trained the German subjects into the most loyal and unrepining subservience to dynastic ambitions. Of course, just now, under the shattering impact of warlike atrocities and patriotic clamour, the workday spirit of insubordination and critical scrutiny is gone out of sight and out of hearing.

Something of this inchoate insubordination has showed itself repeatedly during the present reign, sufficient to provoke many shrewd protective measures on the side of the dynastic establishment, both by way of political strategy and by arbitrary control. Disregarding many minor and inconsequential divisions of opinion and counsel among the German people during this eventful reign, the political situation has been moving on the play of three, incipiently divergent, strains of interest and sentiment: (a) the dynasty (together with the Agrarians, of whom in a sense the dynasty is a part); (b) the businessmen, or commercial interest (including investors); and (c) the industrial workmen. Doubtless it would be easier to overstate than to indicate with any nice precision what has been the nature, and especially the degree, of this alienation of sentiment and divergence of conscious interest among these several elements. It is not that there has at any point been a perceptible faltering in respect of loyalty to the crown as such. But since the crown belongs, by origin, tradition, interest and spiritual identity, in the camp of the Agrarians, the situation has been such as would inevitably take on a character of disaffection toward the dynastic establishment, in the conceivable absence of that strong surviving sentiment of dynastic loyalty that still animates all classes and conditions of men in the Fatherland. It would accordingly, again, be an overstatement to say that the crown has been standing precariously at the apex of a political triangle, the other two corners of which are occupied by these two divided and potentially recalcitrant elements of the body politic, held apart by class antipathy and divergent pecuniary interest, and held in check by divided counsels; but something after that fashion is what would have resulted under similar conditions of strain in any community where the modern spirit of insubordination has taken effect in any large measure.

Both of these elements of incipient disturbance in the dynastic economy, the modern commercial and working classes, are creatures of the new era; and they are systematically out of line with the received dynastic tradition of fealty, both in respect of their pecuniary interests and in respect of that discipline of experience to which their workday employment subjects them. They are substantially the same two classes or groupings that came forward in the modernisation of the British community, with a gradual segregation of interest and a consequent induced solidarity of class sentiment and class animosities. But with the difference that in the British case the movement of changing circumstances was slow enough to allow a fair degree of habituation to the altered economic conditions; whereas in the German case the move into modern economic conditions has been made so precipitately as to have carried the mediaeval frame of mind over virtually intact into this era of large business and machine industry. In the Fatherland the commercial and industrial classes have been called on to play their part without time to learn their lines.

The case of the English-speaking peoples, who have gone over this course of experience in more consecutive fashion than any others, teaches that in the long run, if these modern economic conditions persist, one or the other or both of these creatures of the modern era must prevail, and must put the dynastic establishment out of commission; although the sequel has not yet been seen in this British case, and there is no ground afforded for inference as to which of the two will have the fortune to survive and be invested with the hegemony. Meantime the opportunity of the Imperial establishment to push its enterprise in dominion lies in the interval of time so required for the discipline of experience under modern conditions to work out through the growth of modern habits of thought into such modern (i.e. civilised) institutional forms and such settled principles of personal insubordination as will put any effectual dynastic establishment out of commission. The same interval of time, that must so be allowed for the decay of the dynastic spirit among the German people under the discipline of life by the methods of modern trade and industry, marks the period during which no peace compact will be practicable, except with the elimination of the Imperial establishment as a possible warlike power. All this, of course, applies to the case of Japan as well, with the difference that while the Japanese people are farther in arrears, they are also a smaller, less formidable body, more exposed to outside forces, and their mediaevalism is of a more archaic and therefore more precarious type.

What length of time will be required for this decay of the dynastic spirit among the people of the Empire is, of course, impossible to say. The factors of the case are not of a character to admit anything like calculation of the rate of movement; but in the nature of the factors involved it is also contained that something of a movement in this direction is unavoidable, under Providence. As a preliminary consideration, these peoples of the Empire and its allies, as well as their enemies in the great war, will necessarily come out of their warlike experience in a more patriotic and more vindictive frame of mind than that in which they entered on this adventure. Fighting makes for malevolence. The war is itself to be counted as a set-back. A very large proportion of those who have lived through it will necessarily carry a warlike bent through life. By that much, whatever it may count for, the decay of the dynastic spirit—or the growth of tolerance and equity in national sentiment, if one chooses to put it that way—will be retarded from beforehand. So also the Imperial establishment, or whatever is left of it, may be counted on to do everything in its power to preserve the popular spirit of loyalty and national animosity, by all means at its disposal; since the Imperial establishment finally rests on the effectual body of national animosity. What hindrance will come in from this agency of retardation can at least vaguely be guessed at, in the light of what has been accomplished in that way under the strenuously reactionary rule of the present reign.

Again, there is the chance, as there always is a chance of human folly, that the neighboring peoples will undertake, whether jointly or severally, to restrict or prohibit trade relations between the people of the Empire and their enemies in the present war; thereby fomenting international animosity, as well as contributing directly to the economic readiness for war both on their own part and on that of the Empire. This is also, and in an eminent degree, an unknown factor in the case, on which not even a reasonable guess can be made beforehand. These are, all and several, reactionary agencies, factors of retardation, making for continuation of the current international situation of animosity, distrust, chicane, trade rivalry, competitive armament, and eventual warlike enterprise.

To offset these agencies of conservatism there is nothing much that can be counted on but that slow, random, and essentially insidious working of habituation that tends to the obsolescence of the received preconceptions; partly by supplanting them with something new, but more effectually by their falling into disuse and decay. There is, it will have to be admitted, little of a positive character that can be done toward the installation of a régime of peace and good-will. The endeavours of the pacifists should suffice to convince any dispassionate observer of the substantial futility of creative efforts looking to such an end. Much can doubtless be done in the way of precautionary measures, mostly of a negative character, in the way especially of removing sources of infection and (possibly) of so sterilising the apparatus of national life that its working shall neither maintain animosities and interests at variance with the conditions of peace nor contribute to their spread and growth.

There is necessarily little hope or prospect that any national establishment will contribute materially or in any direct way to the obsolescence of warlike sentiments and ambitions; since such establishments are designed for the making of war by keeping national jealousies intact, and their accepted place in affairs is that of preparation for eventual hostilities, defensive or offensive. Except for the contingency of eventual hostilities, no national establishment could be kept in countenance. They would all fall into the decay of desuetude, just as has happened to the dynastic establishments among those peoples who have (passably) lost the spirit of dynastic aggression.

The modern industrial occupations, the modern technology, and that modern empirical science that runs so close to the frontiers of technology, all work at cross purposes with the received preconceptions of the nationalist order; and in a more pronounced degree they are at cross purposes with that dynastic order of preconceptions that converges on Imperial dominion. The like is true, with a difference, of the ways, means and routine of business enterprise as it is conducted in the commercialised communities of today. The working of these agencies runs to this effect not by way of deliberate and destructive antagonism, but almost wholly by force of systematic, though unintended and incidental, neglect of those values, standards, verities, and grounds of discrimination and conviction that make up the working realities of the national spirit and of dynastic ambition. The working concepts of this new, essentially mechanistic, order of human interests, do not necessarily clash with those of the old order, essentially the order of personages and personalities; the two are incommensurable, and they are incompatible only in the sense and degree implied in that state of the case. The profoundest and most meritorious truths of dynastic politics can on no provocation and by no sleight of hand be brought within the logic of that system of knowledge and appraisal of values by which the mechanistic technology proceeds. Within the premises of this modern mechanistic industry and science all the best values and verities of the dynastic order are simply "incompetent, irrelevant and impertinent."

There is accordingly no unavoidable clash and no necessary friction between the two schemes of knowledge or the two habits of mind that characterise the two contrasted cultural eras. It is only that a given individual—call him the common man—will not be occupied with both of these incommensurable systems of logic and appreciation at the same time or bearing on the same point; and further that in proportion as his waking hours and his mental energy are fully occupied within the lines of one of these systems of knowledge, design and employment, in much the same measure he will necessarily neglect the other, and in time he will lose proficiency and interest in its pursuits and its conclusions. The man who is so held by his daily employment and his life-long attention within the range of habits of thought that are valid in the mechanistic technology, will, on an average and in the long run, lose his grip on the spiritual virtues of national prestige and dynastic primacy; "for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."

Not that the adepts in this modern mechanistic system of knowledge and design may not also be very good patriots and devoted servants of the dynasty. The artless and, on the whole, spontaneous riot of dynastic avidity displayed to the astonished eyes of their fellow craftsmen in the neutral countries by the most eminent scientists of the Fatherland during the early months of the war should be sufficient warning that the archaic preconceptions do not hurriedly fly out of the window when the habits of thought of the mechanistic order come in at the door. But with the passage of time, pervasively, by imperceptible displacement, by the decay of habitual disuse, as well as by habitual occupation with these other and unrelated ways and means of knowledge and belief, dynastic loyalty and the like conceptions in the realm of religion and magic pass out of the field of attention and fall insensibly into the category of the lost arts. Particularly will this be true of the common man, who lives, somewhat characteristically, in the mass and in the present, and whose waking hours are somewhat fully occupied with what he has to do.

With the commercial interests the Imperial establishment can probably make such terms as to induce their support of the dynastic enterprise, since they can apparently always be made to believe that an extension of the Imperial dominion will bring correspondingly increased opportunities of trade. It is doubtless a mistake, but it is commonly believed by the interested parties, which is just as good for the purpose as if it were true. And it should be added that in this, as in other instances of the quest of larger markets, the costs are to be paid by someone else than the presumed commercial beneficiaries; which brings the matter under the dearest principle known to businessmen: that of getting something for nothing. It will not be equally easy to keep the affections of the common man loyal to the dynastic enterprise when he begins to lose his grip on the archaic faith in dynastic dominion and comes to realise that he has also—individually and in the mass—no material interest even in the defense of the Fatherland, much less in the further extension of Imperial rule.

But the time when this process of disillusionment and decay of ideals shall have gone far enough among the common run to afford no secure footing in popular sentiment for the contemplated Imperial enterprise,—this time is doubtless far in the future, as compared with the interval of preparation required for a new onset. Habituation takes time, particularly such habituation as can be counted on to derange the habitual bent of a great population in respect of their dearest preconceptions. It will take a very appreciable space of time even in the case of a populace so accessible to new habits of thought as the German people are by virtue of their slight percentage of illiteracy, the very large proportion engaged in those modern industries that constantly require some intelligent insight into mechanistic facts, the density of population and the adequate means of communication, and the extent to which the whole population is caught in the web of mechanically standardised processes that condition their daily life at every turn. As regards their technological situation, and their exposure to the discipline of industrial life, no other population of nearly the same volume is placed in a position so conducive to a rapid acquirement of the spirit of the modern era. But, also, no other people comparable with the population of the Fatherland has so large and well-knit a body of archaic preconceptions to unlearn. Their nearest analogue, of course, is the Japanese nation.

In all this there is, of course, no inclination to cast a slur on the German people. In point of racial characteristics there is no difference between them and their neighbours. And there is no reason to question their good intentions. Indeed, it may safely be asserted that no people is more consciously well-meaning than the children of the Fatherland. It is only that, with their archaic preconceptions of what is right and meritorious, their best intentions spell malevolence when projected into the civilised world as it stands today. And by no fault of theirs. Nor is it meant to be intimated that their rate of approach to the accepted Occidental standard of institutional maturity will be unduly slow or unduly reluctant, so soon as the pertinent facts of modern life begin effectively to shape their habits of thought. It is only that, human nature—and human second nature—being what it always has been, the rate of approach of the German people to a passably neutral complexion in matters of international animosity and aggression must necessarily be slow enough to allow ample time for the renewed preparation of a more unsparing and redoubtable endeavour on the part of the Imperial establishment.

What makes this German Imperial establishment redoubtable, beyond comparison, is the very simple but also very grave combination of circumstances whereby the German people have acquired the use of the modern industrial arts in the highest state of efficiency, at the same time that they have retained unabated the fanatical loyalty of feudal barbarism.⁹ So long, and in so far, as this conjunction of forces holds there is no outlook for peace except on the elimination of Germany as a power capable of disturbing the peace.

It may seem invidious to speak so recurrently of the German Imperial establishment as the sole potential disturber of the peace in Europe. The reason for so singling out the Empire for this invidious distinction—of merit or demerit, as one may incline to take it—is that the facts run that way. There is, of course, other human material, and no small volume of it in the aggregate, that is of much the same character, and serviceable for the same purposes as the resources and man-power of the Empire. But this other material can come effectually into bearing as a means of disturbance only in so far as it clusters about the Imperial dynasty and marches under his banners. In so speaking of the Imperial establishment as the sole enemy of a European peace, therefore, these outlying others are taken for granted, very much as one takes the nimbus for granted in speaking of one of the greater saints of God.

So the argument returns to the alternative: Peace by unconditional surrender and submission, or peace by elimination of Imperial Germany (and Japan). There is no middle course apparent. The old-fashioned—that is to say nineteenth-century—plan of competitive defensive armament and a balance of powers has been tried, and it has not proved to be a success, even so early in the twentieth century. This plan offers a substitute (Ersatz) for peace; but even as such it has become impracticable. The modern, or rather the current late-modern, state of the industrial arts does not tolerate it. Technological knowledge has thrown the advantage in military affairs definitively to the offensive, particularly to the offensive that is prepared beforehand with the suitable appliances and with men ready matured in that rigorous and protracted training by which alone they can become competent to make warlike use of these suitable appliances provided by the modern technology. At the same time, and by grace of the same advance in technology, any well-designed offensive can effectually reach any given community, in spite of distance or of other natural obstacles. The era of defensive armaments and diplomatic equilibration, as a substitute for peace, has been definitively closed by the modern state of the industrial arts.

Of the two alternatives spoken of above, the former—peace by submission under an alien dynasty—is presumably not a practicable solution, as has appeared in the course of the foregoing argument.

The modern nations are not spiritually ripe for it. Whether they have reached even that stage of national sobriety, or neutrality, that would enable them to live at peace among themselves after elimination of the Imperial Powers is still open to an uneasy doubt. It would be by a precarious margin that they can be counted on so to keep the peace in the absence of provocation from without the pale. Their predilection for peace goes to no greater lengths than is implied in the formula: Peace with Honour; which assuredly does not cover a peace of non-resistance, and which, in effect, leaves the distinction between an offensive and a defensive war somewhat at loose ends. The national prestige is still a live asset in the mind of these peoples; and the limit of tolerance in respect of this patriotic animosity appears to be drawn appreciably closer than the formula cited above would necessarily presume. They will fight on provocation, and the degree of provocation required to upset the serenity of these sportsmanlike modern peoples is a point on which the shrewdest guesses may diverge. Still, opinion runs more and more consistently to the effect that if these modern—say the French and the English-speaking—peoples were left to their own devices the peace might fairly be counted on to be kept between them indefinitely, barring unforeseen contingencies.