The International Crisis in Its Ethical and Psychological Aspects

IV THE CHANGING MIND OF A NATION AT WAR — I — II — III — IV — V — VI

I owe you a word of explanation for the seeming audacity displayed in the title of my lecture. What right have I, what right has any one, to speak for the mind of the nation? Surely the most that one can do is to describe the changes of his own mind. The mind of the nation is beyond him.

I do not believe this. There is one mind in all of us at the present moment—and it is the mind of the nation. The mind of the nation has become, to a greater degree than ever before, the mind of the individual citizen. That is the greatest of all the changes which have taken place since the war began. The national mind is no longer a mere theme for speculation. It has entered, in some measure, into every one of us. It has become an active principle of our consciousness. It has brought great thoughts and great resolutions to multitudes. It has both amplified and simplified our lives. It has wakened powers that slumbered; it has revived great memories that were half forgotten; it has linked us together and made us one.

Under these circumstances there is no audacity in speaking of the mind of the nation. The 79distinction between our own thoughts and the nation’s thoughts is being obliterated. Ask the first honest man you meet to tell you what he is thinking, and if he answers faithfully, he will tell you something of what the nation is thinking.

Never, in my memory, has intercourse with thoughtful men been as suggestive and stimulating as it has been since the war broke out. It is hardly possible, to-day, to enter into conversation with an educated person without noting the emergence of some new point of view. Under the strain and pressure of the time mens’ minds are yielding ideas and making discoveries. There is in consequence a certain vividness in the intellectual life of the country which relieves, to some extent, the moral distress. In the presence of danger our intelligence, our imagination, our will, are unusually wide awake. We begin to perceive the limits of accepted forms of thought, the inadequacy of the standards by which we have been accustomed to pass judgement on life and on history, and the partial nature of truths we had regarded as final and complete. A great disturbance, like that of an earthquake, is passing beneath our life, and the elements of that life are rearranging themselves in new perspectives. We are virtually living in another world compared with that in which we were alive eight months ago.

The world before the war was comparatively safe; the world of to-day is threatened. Eight 80months ago we looked out into a future which seemed assured. We were laying out plans, buying, selling, building, marrying and giving in marriage, like the men of old before the Lord rained fire on Sodom and Gomorrah. Our sons were growing up and we were arranging their peaceful careers. To-day our sons are in arms, and under orders for the front, and as they gather round us for the parting feast, we thank God that we cannot raise the veil of the future. Our most intimate ties are threatened with possibilities of which we dare not think. Thus at the very centre of our life the earthquake begins, and it runs outward until every idea, every habit of mind, every interest, every conviction, has received some share of the shock. But the shock, far from paralysing the nation’s mind, serves rather to liberate its reserves of intellectual vitality. The new world in which we find ourselves is not terrible only; it is full of challenge to our thinking faculties. It provides a daily stimulus to spiritual curiosity. Thus the intercourse of thoughtful men grows more vivid, and it becomes easy to understand how, from conditions like these, new births of the soul have come to nations; times of danger and calamity being often followed by times of creativeness in all the arts of life.

Ladies and gentlemen, are we not all thinking more than we did before the war began—thinking more deeply, more earnestly, more constantly? There is a new thoughtfulness in the air which is raising the level of intelligence in all classes of the 81community. The matters we are thinking about are big and terrible and splendid, all at the same time. We are asking questions which it is an education to ask, even though for the time being we cannot answer them. Because the questions are great questions they are giving us a juster sense of proportion. We are thinking a little more about our duties and a little less about our rights. ‘Business’ still goes on; but not quite as usual, for something more important than business is in our minds. We are measuring ourselves by higher standards. The heroism of the forces, the daily spectacle of our young men going to the war, reminds us of ethical truths we had half forgotten. Great questions about society and civilization are challenging our minds and compelling us to look at them from new angles of vision. It is good for us to be ‘brought up sharp’ by these things. Still better, that we should be forced to think of them not as mere academic questions, but as questions of life and death. And best of all, when the whole people is forced to think about them at the same time. We are coming together into the presence of these problems. That makes an enormous difference. One reason why the great concerns of life are not better cared for is that in normal times the interest taken in them is piecemeal. You think of them to-day and I think of them to-morrow, with the result that I am hot while you are cold, and I am critical while you are enthusiastic. But the new thoughtfulness is not of that broken, 82interrupted kind. It is simultaneous and widespread. We are all in it at once. You remember what Emerson says about the strange things that may happen when God lets loose a thinker on this planet. But this time a thinking community has been let loose. Momentous results are bound to follow.

I am inclined to believe that the mind of the nation was never in a more hopeful frame. I cannot go to the length of a writer in one of the daily papers who says that England was never so happy. The tragedy is too deep for that. But I do think that England was never so promising. What will come from her awakened thoughtfulness no man can predict. But if it should turn out to be better than the best we have ever hoped for, there would be no cause for surprise.

And here we come to a strange and paradoxical thing. One of the first effects of this awakened intelligence is to raise a doubt as to whether the minds of nations are as intelligent as we thought them to be. For a long time past a kind of humanism has been current which took the form of an enthusiastic faith in the ‘march of mind’. Appearances seemed to warrant the belief that men, organized in modern societies, were becoming far more reasonable than their fathers. But look at this war! What comment does it suggest on the ‘march of mind’? Think not of this nation or of that, dismiss the question of whose diplomacy 83was right or wrong, and view the war as though it were, what indeed it is, a single action performed by civilization. What is our impression? Do we feel ourselves in presence of some masterpiece of wisdom? Speaking for myself, I can only say that the war, viewed as a single action, appears to be the kind of action that could only be performed by a fool. I cannot get away from the feeling that I am in the presence of some colossal stupidity. Since history began to record the deeds of men, has there ever been seen such an exhibition of limited intelligence? Who in his sane senses would do such a thing?

Just think what has happened. For generations past the general level of intelligence in Western Europe has been rising. The individual is better educated. Millions of these better educated individuals are combined into societies more or less democratic. But what has become of this vast aggregate of intelligence? Has it all gone into the common stock? Is it all employed for the common good? Does the intelligence of every citizen reinforce the intelligence of every other citizen, so that States become endowed with the sum total of all the wisdom in all of their members? Apparently not. Most of this intelligence seems to be wasted away in mutual criticism, in the war of minds, before the State can get possession of what remains. Does it not seem as though there were some process of inner opposition at work by which a multitude of minds will often neutralize each other’s intelligence; so 84that States, instead of being wiser than individuals, often perpetrate follies of which the least intelligent of their members would be heartily ashamed?

I am inclined to think, therefore, that we shall emerge from the war with a chastened confidence in the mere ‘march of mind’. We shall think more, we are already thinking more, of those other qualities, such as the plain sense of right and wrong, with which the march of mind needs to be blended before it can do its work. Many disillusions of this kind are on the way. There is a feeling abroad which is not quite articulate as yet, that the war has somehow brought us into contact with Reality, and that our ideas must be modified accordingly. ‘We are up against the real thing’ is a phrase you must often have heard. It is frequently used in soldiers’ letters written from the front; I have encountered it in sermons, political speeches, and newspaper articles, in conversations with working men; and in the comments of distinguished philosophers.

Now I will not attempt to define what the ‘real thing’ is. I am not quite sure that I know. But I think I can point out one of its characteristics. The ‘real thing’ as we are now feeling its presence is not a mere subject for study: it is something we have to obey. It is a command, a summons, a trumpet note. In ordinary times Reality shows us its interesting side. Just now it is showing its imperative side. In ordinary times we talk about it. Just now it is talking to us. I can almost imagine that Reality is paying off 85an old score it had against us. We had been writing philosophical essays about it, treating it as ‘our subject’, as though we had it in the hollow of our hand; and perhaps Reality was getting a little tired of hearing itself defined and discussed. Anyhow the real thing is no longer passive. It has become intensely active. It has given us a shock, it has roused us to our duty and put a constraint upon our wills. The consequence is that a good deal of nonsense is being knocked out of us. Let us hope it will not return! We were much too comfortable, much too complacent, much too selfish, before the war. And we were hardly prepared for so sudden a change of behaviour on the part of the real thing.

One effect of this shock has been to change our attitude towards the State, and to make us think differently of the rights and duties of the State.

For many years past, there had been a tendency among us to look to the State as an omnipotent power whose function and duty were to gratify our desires and do our bidding. Whatever we wanted, better trade, higher wages, easier conditions of life, schoolrooms, playgrounds, libraries, art galleries, food for our children, provision for our old age—and so on through an endless list—whatever it was, we exploited the State. And the State, like an indulgent mother, gave in to us all round. Now this one had his turn, and now that; and there was a good deal of quarrelling among us 86as to whose turn came next. There seemed no limit to what the State could do for us, and no limit either to what we had the right to demand. It was a demoralizing business—demoralizing to us who got our way, demoralizing to the State which gave us our way. But it went on merrily and the wildest expectations were abroad of vast favours yet to come. A few more teasings, a few more pistols held at the head of the State, and a ‘scheme’ would be forthcoming which would render us all happy and good in spite of ourselves.

Then, one fine morning last August, there came a rude awakening. We got a message from the State couched in language we had never heard before. ‘I require you,’ said the State, ‘to place your property and your lives at my service. Now and for some time to come, I give nothing but ask everything. Arm yourselves for my defence. Give me your sons and be willing that they should die for me. Repay what you owe me. My turn has come.’

That is how the Real Thing talks to men when it uses the State as its mouthpiece. Considering how strange and unaccustomed the language was, I think the response the nation made was to its credit. No sooner did the State turn its imperative side towards us than an instant peace fell upon our warring factions. We had all been waiting for that word of command to make us one—waiting but not knowing what we waited for. Our demands on the State had been for different things: the State’s demand on us was 87for the same thing—for uttermost self-sacrifice. It brought us together as nothing else could have done. This was the first result of our contact with the Real Thing.

This awakening of a sense of duty to the State is leading to a more thorough understanding of the particular State to which we happen to belong—I mean of course the British Empire. This is another and a very promising change in the national mind. During the last few months a new vision has come to many of us of what the British Empire really is.

Speaking of Britons in general, I am afraid it must be confessed that our knowledge of the Empire, our grasp of its significance, have been inadequate to the immense human issues, and to the corresponding responsibilities, which the Empire involves. We have been proud of this vast heritage, we have complacently enjoyed the advantages which come to all of us from its possession, we have talked vaguely and largely about imperialism, but we have hardly taken our imperial duties to heart. Some of us may have done so, but not the nation as a whole. To the majority of the electorate the Empire has been a side issue, or a thing that might be left to look after itself. It seemed too big and too broadly based to be in danger of disturbance. Few of us gave much thought to it; few of us allowed our imaginations to play round its meaning; still 88fewer took the trouble to study its history. Had we done so we should have realized, as I am afraid not many did realize, that a day would dawn when our right to possess this Empire would be put to the proof, when we should be challenged before the world to show that our intelligence and our valour were equal to the vast imperial enterprise on which we had engaged.

But let us not forget that the British Empire, in its present extent and organization, is a comparatively recent phenomenon. In size, in wealth, in the civilization of its component parts and their close relations with one another, its characteristics are so different from what they were a century ago that we can draw no parallel with the Napoleonic era. And now, for the first time in its history, this Greater Britain is being attacked—and attacked with unexampled vehemence and resolution. It is a new experience, and like all new experiences it is compelling a readjustment of thought.

This is a war of the Empire, by the Empire, for the Empire—and by the Empire I mean all for which the Empire stands, its ideals as well as its actualities. The Colonies and India are fighting for us and we are fighting for them. Our fellow subjects in India are represented by a great army of fine warriors, who have helped to check the would-be invaders of our shores. Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Pathans have shed their blood that London might be safe. Mohammedan, Hindu, and Christian have fallen side by side in defence of the 89liberties of our race. This, I say, is a new thing in our history. We feel a deepened intimacy with these widely sundered races; the dominions over the seas seem no further off than the next county. The Germans predicted that the outbreak of war would split the Empire into fragments. It has given the Empire a splendid solidarity such as it never before possessed. It has made us a greater nation, not in the sense that it has added to our dominions, but in the deeper sense that it has caused our political consciousness to dilate to the imperial scale. The political organization of the Empire is acquiring a corporate mind, just as the mother country after the defeat of the Spanish Armada awoke to a new consciousness of her national individuality and began to know herself for what she was.

The parallel is profoundly interesting. It took the English people many centuries to discover their own country. The English in the reign of Henry VIII had a vaguer notion of England than we have of Canada (very few had seen a map of England); of Scotland than we have of Ceylon; of Ireland than we have of Central Africa. But just as these vague conceptions gave place in course of time to vision and realization and patriotic love for England, so now we British are beginning to think of the Empire as something more than a confused extension of our national boundaries, or as a group of appendages to our national home. The Empire is becoming our country, an inheritance of which we have to prove 90ourselves worthy, and we are becoming its citizens in heart as well as in name. Not that the change is already complete or even very far advanced. But no close observer of present tendencies will doubt that the movement of the national mind is in the direction of which I speak. Our imperial soul is beginning to germinate. If the change continues its ethical and spiritual consequences will be very great.

In connexion with this extension of our national consciousness one may note at the present time some curious questionings among thoughtful men as to the bearing of democratic theory on our imperial obligations. We call ourselves a democracy; but there are moments, even in the course of dealing with domestic problems, when we find it hard to reconcile the facts with the theory. And the difficulty becomes greater in proportion as we extend our thoughts to the imperial scale. According to the democratic theory the people are to be consulted as to all that concerns their interests. Well, there is nothing that concerns our interests quite so deeply as the existence of the Empire. But when has the people been consulted in the matter? Proud as the British may be of possessing an empire on which the sun never sets, it is certain that the people as a whole have never been asked whether they wished to possess such an empire or not. They have never been asked how large they wished the Empire to 91be; or whether they would or would not be content with something less or greater. In an age when all things political are supposed to be determined by voting it is a curious circumstance that this, the greatest of political questions, has never been voted on at all. Nay more. So far as I know, the British people have never said to themselves, as the Germans have recently been saying, ‘Go to, now; world-dominion shall be ours.’ It would tax the historian to fix the period when the design for a world-wide empire became a definite ambition of the British people. True, there have been statesmen like the late Lord Beaconsfield, or Lord Chatham in an earlier age, who made plans for increasing the dominions of the Crown. But the popular will did not originate these designs, much as it may have applauded them when they had been carried out—though even this has not always been the case. Moreover, the control exercised even by statesmen over the process of imperial expansion has been of a distinctly piecemeal character. As one annexation followed another none of our ministers has foreseen where the process would end. None of them has had a vision in advance of the Empire as it exists to-day—in extent, in population, and in wealth. As Seeley long ago pointed out, we have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind. Indeed it would be extremely hard to fix responsibility for the existence of the Empire, in its present character, on any group or series of statesmen, or on any particular generation of Britons—to 92say nothing of individual men. A province here, a frontier there, an island somewhere else might be correctly set down to an assignable wave of public opinion or to the diplomacy of a particular minister. But the total growth seems to have escaped from human control altogether. Certainly nothing would be more untrue than to treat the existence of the Empire as though it corresponded to the expressed will of the living generation. We have not willed it into being. We have found it there—like so many of the financial obligations—e.g. the National Debt—which have been inherited from the past, and have to be accepted whether we like them or not, in spite of the maxim which is said to be the corner-stone of the constitution—‘No taxation without representation’.

Our new vision of the Empire is teaching us another thing. We are learning to understand more clearly the influence of the past on the present. We begin to see that we inherit from the past something more than the monuments of the mighty dead. We inherit the very form and pressure of our national life; the range, significance and general direction of our imperial duties. We inherit not our social problems only; but the courage to attack them, and much of the wisdom which guides us to their solution. These in all their essential features have been determined not by us but for us by the action of forces which did their work before we came into existence. We are therefore in no mood to respond to the 93lines of the well-known hymn which bid us ‘give the past unto the wind’. A past which has bequeathed to us our national status and the broad outline of our imperial responsibilities, a past which has given us our political idealism and our love of liberty, cannot be ‘given to the wind’ without a degree of treachery of which the fiercest anarchist in our midst is not capable. Without distinction we feel ourselves bound to ‘carry on’; and what we are ‘carrying on’ is the work of our fathers from the most distant ages to the present day. We are learning the great truth of which Burke was the prophet—the immortality of the State. The past is throbbing in our veins. The cause we are fighting for is a thousand years old. Patriots and martyrs for liberty are no longer mere names in the book of history; they are living forces in our midst. The buried generations are with us. We are members of a community which is continuous in time and has millions of members, vast clouds of witnesses from every age, whose work is waiting for our loyalty to make it complete.

Ladies and gentlemen, all the changes I have described run together into one and lead our minds in the same direction. They are driving the thoughts of the nation to the roots of things. They are forcing us to question the whole basis of our civilization. With the war before our eyes we are prepared to find that there is something 94radically wrong. We are beginning to suspect that the mischief is deep-seated. It is true that these suspicions had often been roused before this war broke out. A visit to the slums will rouse them any day. But the war has made this difference: it has brought us all together into a suspicious frame of mind; so that if anybody could make clear to us what the driving forces of civilization really are, the mind of the nation would at once challenge these forces to give an account of themselves and hold them under suspicion until they could prove their innocence.

Now there are two great forces which as everybody knows have been mightily at work in European history for the last hundred years. One is militarism, the other is industrialism. The mind of the nation is thinking deeply about both of them. Militarism we have always suspected: industrialism has borne a better character, though some of us have had our doubts. But recently there have been signs—and they have been especially prominent in Germany—that these two forces are much more intimately connected than once seemed possible. What have militarism and industrialism to do with one another? How are they related? The war has thrown a new light on that question and I will try to express some of our thoughts.

On a superficial view we are tempted to describe the relation of industrialism to militarism as one of antagonism. The two principles are simply opposed the one to the other. Industrialism, we 95think, makes for peace; militarism for war. Whence follows the simple conclusion that the destruction of militarism will leave the peace-making principle in control of civilization and fighting will be at an end.

I believe that thoughtful people are becoming more and more dissatisfied with this simple account of the matter.

To begin with, there is the fact staring us in the face that an age which is saturated with industrialism has given birth to the bloodiest and most destructive war the world has ever seen. We have no need, at this point, to assert the disputable proposition that industrialism has caused the war. Let us content ourselves with the indisputable proposition that industrialism has not prevented the war.

If industrialism were essentially pacific this failure to prevent the war would be hard to understand. As the dominant interest of nations and individuals, and as making always for peace, how has it come to pass, we may well ask, that industrialism has been unable to restrain the forces which make for war, and for war on the most stupendous scale? We had flattered ourselves that commerce by multiplying and strengthening the ties between nations, would make it impossible for these to tear themselves asunder and engage in mutual destruction. The event has proved we were in error.

Reflecting more deeply on its failure to keep the peace, a suspicion gains ground that industrialism 96when unchecked by other forces may be a positive cause of war. By increasing the wealth, the ostentation, and the pride of the peoples, does it not serve to accentuate their rivalries, to deepen their jealousies, and to inflame their predatory passions? Is it not true that wherever great treasure-chests exist, there will robbers be found also; and is the treasure less provocative of covetousness when gained by commerce, than when extorted from the labour of slaves or exacted by the ransom of conquered cities? Are two nations, rich and happy in the sort of happiness that comes from riches, more likely to be friends than two poor nations each possessing nothing which tempts the cupidity of the other?

For example, is not one of the chief causes of the present hostility between Germany and Great Britain to be found in the fact that both of them, as we say, ‘have done so well in business’? Is it of no significance that war broke out at the very time when each was ‘doing better than ever’? Eliminate, from the complex of conditions out of which the war arose, the circumstance that industry had made both these nations rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and may we not say without hesitation that war between them would not have taken place?

What answer shall we give to these questions? Shall we take refuge in the argument that industrialism shows these baleful tendencies only because it is imperfectly developed, and has not yet become truly international in character? 97Shall we plead for a finer articulation of the commercial tie, and for more industrialism rather than less? Will our dream of the millennium be the conversion of the whole human race into a Universal Joint Stock Company? Are we, in a word, to content ourselves with the suppression of militarism and trust the weal of the race to the working out of the industrial principle, unhampered by the interference of its military yoke-fellow?

Such answers show, I cannot help thinking, that we are legislating for mankind without reckoning with man, as we so often fail to do. They leave untouched the tap-root of war—that primitive instinct which the old legislation sought to restrain by the command ‘Thou shalt not covet’.

Let us assume the extreme case and suppose that on the conclusion of the war the nations of Europe, convinced of their folly and wickedness, abandon every form of armament and determine for the future to spend not one farthing of the national wealth on armies or fortresses or fleets. What would follow?

The immediate result would be the liberation of an enormous amount of wealth hitherto set aside for military purposes. The greater part of this wealth would flow into industrial channels. It is fair to assume that industrialism would be the gainer annually to the extent of five hundred million sterling and of a labour force represented by twenty millions of men. This is a prospect that ought to make the mouths water of those who 98think that industrial wealth is the foundation of human good.

Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, the United States—to speak of no others—rich as they now are, would then grow enormously richer. The natural resources of the earth would be exploited to an extent of which the present economic development, vast as it is, affords no measure. The mere circumstance that each nation might pursue its gains undisturbed by the risk of aggression from the others would bring a vast accession of confidence, and therefore of efficiency, to the labour and capital employed. The total population of the earth would grow by leaps and bounds. And under any fairly equitable scheme of distribution there would be enough wealth in the world to render every member of the human race well-off.

But would there be peace?

Long before the pleasing process we have imagined could work itself out every one of the great communities would be torn to pieces by civil wars. This, I mean, is what would assuredly happen if we suppose the economic process to go on without some fundamental change in the ethos of mankind.

The peace of nations depends only in part on the suppression of militarism. In yet larger measure it depends on the absence of disruptive tendencies in the nations themselves.

What these disruptive tendencies can do, or at least what they can threaten, was made sufficiently 99clear in Great Britain during the few months which preceded the outbreak of war. Nor were we alone in this danger. I need not enter into particulars, for the facts are well known. France, Germany, Austria, Russia—even the United States—were seething with discontent. I recall the remark made to me by an American statesman in 1912. Speaking of the prevalent social unrest he said, ‘We are on the eve of a greater crisis than that of our Civil War.’

Internal disruption is the inevitable fate of every nation whose ethos, or ideal, rests upon a purely industrial creed. The larger the scope for pure industrialism and the fewer the checks which hold it in restraint, the more rapidly do the disruptive tendencies gather head and the more destructive do they become. It is not the poorest nations which reveal the maximum of social discontent. It is the richest. And the prime cause of this does not lie in the sense of inequality between individuals who have more and individuals who have less; that, no doubt, is a cause, but secondary. The root evil is, that a community which makes wealth its object, and pursues it on the terms laid down by the economic machine, is living under conditions which satisfy nobody and against which all men are, by the higher human nature, born rebels. From this point of view success in the economic enterprise is even worse for a nation than failure. The greater the accumulation of wealth the more dissatisfied do men become with the conditions of a merely 100economic life. Industrial communities are always more restless when trade is good than when trade is bad, as though the rottenness of the system could only be revealed by its triumph. Seldom, however, does the restless spirit penetrate to the true cause of the trouble. Unaware that the trouble comes from the original vice of the whole enterprise on which we are engaged, we throw upon our fellow victims the blame for the common lot, thinking that because these suffer less than ourselves therefore they are responsible for our sufferings—like the emigrants in the sinking ship who in the blindness of their despair fell upon the first-class passengers and tore them to pieces.

In short, the common pursuit of wealth is not a human bond. It leads to the invention of schemes and machinery of every kind—material, political, and social; but, of itself, it can never lead to the vital organization of mankind. Nay rather, in spite of all that has been said of its unifying tendency, we cannot doubt that its final working is to disintegrate the community. Seekers of buried treasure invariably quarrel among themselves, for reasons which are manifest to a child. They may arrange the most equitable scheme for the division of the spoils, and seal their mutual loyalty with fearful oaths, but before the voyage is over the captain will be at the yardarm and the deck will be slippery with the blood of half the crew. Whether they sail under the Jolly Roger, or under the red ensign of industrial civilization, makes little difference. Whether the 101spoil be buried in a pirate’s cavern or in the unexploited resources of the earth, it all comes to the same thing.

Nor must we forget that the disruptive tendencies of pure industrialism have hitherto been largely held in check by militarism itself. There can hardly be a doubt that for many years past the common fear of foreign aggression and the common need of being prepared for it have played a very considerable part, against contrary forces working from within, in maintaining the cohesion of every one of the great States now at war. And if the question were raised, in which of the great communities of the modern world have the signs of economic disruption been most abundant, should we not have to point for answer to that country which is at once the wealthiest and the least menaced by foreign war, and where all classes have the largest share of this world’s goods—the United States?

By this time we are all agreed about one thing: militarism—I mean the kind of militarism in which Germany has set the example—must go. Whether a nobler militarism may arise hereafter is a question: but of this kind we have had enough and more than enough. But let us be under no delusion as to the sequel. When militarism goes the check will be removed which has so far prevented industrialism from producing its bitterest fruits. If, therefore, the war merely yields the negative result of destroying militarism, we may lay our account with the 102certainty that there are yet greater troubles in store for the world.

But there is ground for hope in the very magnitude of the present calamity. Let me remind you of something I have already mentioned in another connexion: I mean the way in which the lessons of the war are coming simultaneously to vast multitudes of persons. Apply that to the mind of Europe as a whole. All the nations involved in the struggle are learning the same lesson at the same time. All are engaged together in the bitter but salutary process of discovering their souls. A piecemeal repentance of the nations, following a series of partial conflicts, might effect very little; a simultaneous repentance, imposed by a world-war, may effect a great deal.

Whatever new wisdom, whatever vision of the weak spot in civilization are coming to ourselves as a result of the war, we may be very sure that the same wisdom, the same vision, are coming, in the same way, to our allies and to our enemies. Realizing this, may we not believe that beneath the fierce and bloody oppositions of the hour a profound principle of unity is at work?

V WAR AND HATRED [21]

What is the real attitude of those who call themselves Christians and profess to accept the teaching of the New Testament towards the Sermon on the Mount and especially towards such precepts as ‘Love your enemies’? That there is here a huge and startling divergence between theory and practice seems undeniable. It is equally clear that the divergence is not merely of the kind which unavoidably separates moral ideals from the actual conduct of imperfect human beings. For this only means that, because of the frailty of human nature, we cannot, even with our best endeavours, live up to the level of the moral ideal; it does not mean that we refuse sincerely to recognize the ideal as a practical guide—as a standard to which good men will endeavour to conform their actions as far as lies in their power. But the precept ‘Love your enemies’ does not seem to be generally recognized in this way as a practical guide amid the stress and strain of daily life. It is not even generally appealed to as a standard for approving or condemning the ordinary behaviour of men. It is not effectively 104sanctioned by public opinion and sentiment. If we inquire why this is so, there appear to be two answers, vaguely and confusedly underlying the position of common sense. The first is that any sustained effort to pursue the ideal under the actual conditions of human life is so impossible that it is useless to attempt it. The second is that if we did succeed in loving our enemies and in acting as if we loved them, the result would be disastrous; the good would be exposed without defence to the forces of evil and life would no longer be worth living. For one or both of these reasons it seems to be tacitly assumed that in practice we are justified in setting aside the precept ‘Love your enemies’ and in substituting for it the precept ‘Love your friends and hate your enemies’. At the same time it is generally granted that under conditions different from ours the rule of love would be universally applicable. But this concession turns out on examination to mean very little. For the state of things contemplated under which we might be reasonably expected to love our enemies seems to be one under which our enemies would be prepared to love us or might easily be induced to love us, and this almost amounts to saying that we can only be reasonably required to love our enemies when there are no enemies for us to love.

This conflict between theory and practice remains for the most part inarticulate and subconscious. There is latent uneasiness; but the problem is not definitely faced even by thoughtful men. To bring it into clear consciousness a special 105crisis is required. For many of us the present war with its painful incidents and complications has had this effect. Nor is it difficult to see why this should be so. In war, or, at any rate, in such a war as this, we devote all our energies to the task of inflicting hurt, loss, and destruction on the enemy, and he in his turn devotes all his energies to the task of inflicting hurt, loss, and destruction on us. Neither side, it would seem, can do this efficiently without being sustained by strong and enduring feeling. But this feeling can scarcely partake of the nature of love. It must, it would seem, be an emotion the reverse of this. Whether and in what sense there can be an emotion opposed to love which is yet not identified with hate, is a question which I shall have to discuss later on. In any case, it will scarcely be denied that the actual feeling generated even in good and well-meaning men by such conditions as those of the present war are to a large extent to be classed as feelings of hatred. When the enemy is held to have been guilty of cruel and inhuman conduct contrary to the recognized usage of civilized warfare, it seems to be still more impossible to make any pretence of loving the enemy or of doing anything but hate the enemy. How can we love the authors and perpetrators of the Belgian atrocities? Not only is this attitude regarded as inevitable in war but it is also felt to be justifiable in a special way by the special conditions. It is taken to be justifiable for reasons which are not in general applicable to similar relations between private individuals. One reason is that a private individual is in the 106main protected against the grosser forms of injury by the social order of the community to which he belongs, by its laws and institutions, and by public opinion and sentiment; to this extent he has no need to take the law into his own hands. In war this no longer holds good. We seem in war to be reduced to the position of animals who having directly to repel harm and aggression themselves, need for that end the primitive and instinctive emotion of blind anger which impels them to hurt and destroy indiscriminately the enemies who threaten their own destruction. It is true that in war there is some protection against certain forms of injury in what is called the established usage of civilized warfare. But as we know by recent experience, this safeguard cannot be safely relied on; and it is just when even this semi-legal protection fails, that we tend to give full play to the feeling of hatred or analogous feelings, with the sense that we are right in so doing. Another obvious reason why we naturally regard hatred of our enemies as especially justified in the case of war is that here it is not our own private injuries which we resent but injuries done to the whole community of which we are members. We are so much in the habit of connecting what is morally wrong with selfishness that when there is no selfishness, we tend to assume that there can be nothing wrong or at any rate nothing seriously wrong. Further, a benevolent disposition towards the common enemy is felt as disloyalty to our own people. It tends to awaken indignation or disgust as revealing a want of patriotism. On 107the other hand, the most unsparing hatred of the common enemy, though we may more or less condemn it on other grounds, is at least approved as an expression of patriotism; and patriotism is a virtue of all others most important and indispensable in time of war. Hence even though we condemn all hatred as such, yet if we cannot have the most intense and efficient patriotism without it we feel justified in preferring the two together.

Such considerations as these seem to make a strong case for regarding hate, or at least some emotion essentially akin to it, as an attitude which may be often both unavoidable and justifiable in dealing with our enemies, and more especially with the enemies of our country in time of war. None the less it remains true that this attitude is, prima facie, very hard to reconcile with the spirit and tendency of Christian morality, and particularly with such precepts as ‘Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that despitefully use you and persecute you’. Hence all of us who, whatever may be our view of the dogmas of Christian Theology, agree in accepting the moral teaching of Christ as expressing the highest human ideal, are placed in a difficult position. It looks like a mere evasion and not a solution of this difficulty to content ourselves with saying that the Christian ideal, though it is in itself the highest, cannot and ought not to be pursued under the actual conditions of human life. There are not two relatively independent and separate kinds of truth, the theoretical and the practical. What is false in practice must, to 108that extent, be false in theory also. The highest ideal is the ideal which we ought to endeavour to pursue under all relevant conditions. There is evidence that this is recognized by some Christians who entertain no misgiving as to the righteousness of the present war, and who are convinced of the necessity of prosecuting it with the utmost zeal and energy, and yet, at the same time, feel that it is hard or impossible to do so while retaining for the enemy anything akin to a Christian disposition. We have here, perhaps, the most fundamental reason why some conscientious men who, in general, believe in prayer and in the efficacy of prayer, none the less shrink from praying for the defeat of the enemy in war. Other grounds are put forward, but they seem valid in this particular case only if they are valid against prayer in general. It is urged, for instance, that God controls the course of events in accordance with His own wisdom and goodness, and that it is therefore a futile impertinence to attempt to direct His activity to what we erring mortals think best, however sincere and well-meaning we may be. Any petition, it is said, which is for our own ends is condemned in advance, in so far as our own ends are not His ends; and in so far as they do coincide with His the petition is superfluous. Taken strictly, this argument would cut at the root not only of all prayer but of all human activity. For whatever ends we pursue and by whatever means, it is always possible that our aim does not coincide with the divine purpose. It would follow, if the 109argument were sound, that the truly religious attitude would be to sit still with our hands folded and let events take their course. The fallacy lies in the assumption that what is best in matters which concern human beings is determined independently of the thoughts and feelings of the human beings themselves. In particular, it lies in the assumption that what is best for us and for the world must be determined quite independently of whether we pray for it or not.

Another reason urged against praying for success in war is that good men on the other side are praying for their own success and for our defeat with a clear conscience and full belief in the righteousness of their cause. What has been called ‘the spectacle of serious men in opposite camps raising their competitive prayers to the one God’ may well appear to reduce to an absurdity the prayers on both sides. Yet I do not see that this consideration has any real weight. For it is not asserted that good men ought to refrain from using other ways of pursuing what they are sincerely convinced is a good end, merely because other good men with equal sincerity are opposed to them. I can find no cogent reason for making an exception in the case of prayer. The use of prayer in a proper spirit can, at least, do no harm. Further, it is to be remembered that when prayer is offered in a right spirit, all special petitions have behind them that general attitude of mind which is expressed in the words ‘Thy Will be done’. So far as this is so the agreement is 110more fundamental than the opposition. The real difficulty felt by tender consciences in praying for success in war seems to me to be of a different nature. What holds them back is their sense that they cannot pray in that spirit which would alone make their prayers acceptable, and that they cannot even prevail on themselves to make a sincere effort to attain this spirit. They feel that they cannot appeal to God to be on their side unless, in so far as lies in their power, they in the same act endeavour to place themselves on the side of God, to conform their will and their whole mental attitude to His will as directed to what is highest and best. But how is this possible when they not only continue to harbour in their heart fierce and embittered emotions, which appear irreconcilable with the precept ‘Love your enemies’, but cling to them in such a way that they cannot without hypocrisy pretend to try to lay them aside or even pray for deliverance from them? They feel that under such conditions they would be appealing not to the true God but to some partisan deity such as the Kaiser must have had in view when he spoke of God as ‘the constant ally of Prussia under the Great Elector and the Great King’.

Let it be fully understood that I am not here expressing any view concerning the justification of prayer or the efficacy of prayer, or concerning Christian doctrine or Christian morality. But if we leave such questions entirely on one side, the conception of prayer at least supplies us with a useful mode of approaching our present problem. 111For no feelings can be right feelings which in the case of a man who really believes in prayer would rightly debar him from seeking in his extreme need the help of a Power whom he regards as all wise and all good. We may, then, put our question thus: How far is it true that feelings of hatred or feelings in any way akin to hatred ought to present a barrier of this kind? It is true that what we gain by this mode of stating the question is only a point of view which helps us to grapple with it earnestly and thoroughly without indulging in weak and illogical compromise. It does not directly bring us any nearer to a solution. For in order to determine what is acceptable to God we must first determine what is good. Our course would indeed be plain if we could take such precepts as ‘Love your enemies’, so to speak at their face value and treat them without further discussion or interpretation as finally authoritative. But even theologians, as such, for the most part refuse to do this. Still less is it admissible that I should do so. For I am trying to deal with the problem on its own intrinsic merits without appeal to authority. This being so I can proceed only in one way. I must begin by asking what reasons there are for holding that hatred and kindred emotions are evil; then in the light of these reasons I must attempt to determine in what sense and without what limits, if there be any limits, the general principle holds good. Here we may look for some help to the great philosophers. For some of these have maintained, on independent 112grounds, the Christian doctrine in its general spirit and tendency. Plato, for instance, holds firmly that the maxim is entirely wrong which bids us do good to our friends and harm to our enemies. The righteous man, he insists, will in all cases aim only at doing good, whether to enemies or friends. Spinoza, too, lays down the principle that ‘all hatred is evil’, and even attempts to demonstrate it like a proposition in Euclid. There is a Christian philosopher, Bishop Butler, who has given us an admirable discussion of the whole subject on rational grounds.

At this point I must prepare the ground for further advance by expressing more exactly the nature of the problem. So far, the question I have raised is whether hatred and kindred emotions are in all cases evil. But the tendency of ordinary language is to associate the very word, hatred, with some form of bad feeling. From this point of view, to ask the question, Can hatred ever be good? sounds like asking whether what is bad can be good. But the real issue can easily be stated so as to avoid this paradox. There is a certain primitive and instinctive emotion called anger, common to man and animals; in animals, it tends to be excited by such conditions as overt or threatened attack, painful wounds or blows, and often by any kind of opposition or interference, or by the threat of such opposition or interference, or even by the mere presence of a natural enemy. The real or threatened injury may be either to the animal itself or to its young or its mate, or, 113in the case of gregarious animals, to the community of which it is a member. There is a modified and restrained form of this passion which arises between animals closely connected by social ties, as when the mother slaps her young or the mother cat boxes the kitten’s ears. But where the emotion is aroused by an outsider there is in general no such limitation. The impulse is blindly and indiscriminately directed to damage and destroy. By preference, of course, to damage and destroy the enemy, and in the next place, whatever is in any way associated with the enemy, but also beyond this there is a general destructive impulse which vents itself on whatever may encounter it. Consider, for instance, the behaviour of a raging bull or of a man who in his fury destroys furniture and breaks crockery. Now, so far as animals are concerned, this passion is not the subject either of moral approval or disapproval. It is simply a natural endowment like the teeth and claws of the cat, or the venom of the snake, or the malodorous secretion of the skunk. It has the biological function of preserving the individual and the species in the struggle for existence; but it has no moral significance. The same holds good also for a man, so far as he merely reacts like an animal in a sudden and trying situation which takes him by surprise. But it is quite otherwise with complex human sentiments which are developed from the primitive emotion of anger and remain to the end essentially akin to it. In the animal, the emotion occurs as a transient reaction 114to a transient situation. In human beings it passes into a variety of more or less permanent dispositions or sentiments, which permeate and control complex systems of thought and conduct. Indeed, in some instances, such a disposition may be the mainspring of organized thought and action throughout a lifetime, as we see in the case of Hannibal’s attitude to the Romans. Now the question we have to deal with is this, Are all these developed sentiments which have their root in the primitive emotion of anger to be condemned as evil; and if not, on what principle are we to draw a distinction? If by the word hatred we agree to mean all bad passions of this kind, then the question will be, Are all angry sentiments and dispositions to be classed as forms of hatred? In dealing with this problem we have especially to consider the state of things generated by war.

Our first step will be to examine the grounds for regarding hatred as necessarily evil. We may then proceed to inquire whether these grounds apply to all forms of angry emotion which compel us to hurt or destroy our fellow men. The reasons for regarding hatred as evil seem all capable of being brought under one head. Hatred is evil inasmuch as it is blind, inasmuch as it perpetuates at a higher level the original blind and undiscriminating character of the primitive emotion of animal anger. So far as this is the case, it is incompatible with the development of the higher nature of man as a rational being. The most fundamental ground for this position is, perhaps, most clearly 115stated by Spinoza. The supreme good for human beings, he asserts, is to be found only in their union and co-operation with each other. ‘Nothing is more useful to a man than a man.’ It is only with other men that a man can enter on that sort of union which is necessary at once for his own existence and development as a human being and for theirs. ‘Except man we know of no particular thing in nature in whose Mind we can rejoice. With nothing else can we unite in friendship or in any kind of social life’ (Eth. V. 14, App. § 26). Hence there is a fundamental distinction between our relation to human beings and to other things. In the case of anything else, ‘A regard for our own welfare does not require us to preserve it, but leads us either to preserve or destroy it, or to adapt it to our wants in any way according to the varied uses of which it admits’ (ibid.). It is otherwise in the case of human beings. To seek to destroy them is virtually to seek to destroy ourselves. But the passion of hatred blinds us to all this; it blinds us to the fact that the essential good of man is to be sought in union with his fellow men and impels us to maintain disunion with them and to seek our highest good in hurting and destroying them. Nor is it only in its consequences that hatred as such is evil. As contrary to the rational nature of man, as blinding him to his true good, it works like a disease or a cancerous growth in the soul of those who feel it. ‘Nothing can be so good for a man as such a temper of mind as will unite him with’ his fellow men and them with 116him; while nothing on the contrary can be so bad for him or in him as that which sets him and them at variance. All hatred, then, is evil and there can be no greater evil.

All this applies to hatred of the enemy in war. Indeed the evil is the greater because the hatred is between great and highly organized communities instead of between individuals. There is, however, one fact which tends to veil and disguise the evil of hatred in this case. War disunites nations, but within each nation it strengthens union and mutual co-operation. Now this in itself is good. But it is not good, if and so far as the source of unity is participation in a common hatred. To this extent the nation is in the position of the individual hater and is blinded as he is to its own true good. Speaking broadly, just in so far as war leads a nation to treat what is good for it as essentially separate from and opposed to what is good for other nations and for mankind in general, war does that nation harm. The history of Germany illustrates this sufficiently. The root of the mischief is to be sought far back in the horrible Thirty Years’ War. But subsequent wars have served to keep it alive—the Seven Years’ War, the Napoleonic War, and above all, that process of cementing the German Empire with blood and iron which Bismarck artificially and violently substituted for the natural development which was leading to the same result in a better form. The Franco-Prussian War belongs to the same series. It is an easily intelligible and even an 117excusable result of the course of German history that national sentiment in Germany has come half-unconsciously to treat even peace as if it were a state of suppressed and disguised warfare, and to feel no security for its national existence and national development unless the mailed fist is continually shaken in the face of its enemies in the East and in the West, and unless it is continually prepared to pounce on them before they can pounce on it. It has now actually pounced in what is called a preventive war. The temper and attitude which led to this result is essentially what I found some thirty years ago generally diffused among the common people of Berlin and especially among old soldiers of the Franco-Prussian War: men’s minds were dwelling on the necessity of a reckoning with Russia, and of a renewed humiliation of France; there was deep hostility to England mingled with contempt for our ways of thinking and acting and with jealousy of our undeserved riches and prosperity. This attitude of mind has in one way had its reward. In the present struggle the Germans started better prepared for war than their opponents. But for this advantage they have paid and are likely to pay very dearly. You may be inclined to say ‘Serve them right’. But if this is taken to imply that the German people is much worse by nature in this respect than other peoples I must disagree. I doubt whether under like historical conditions any people would have done better.

Hatred, we have said, is bad because it is 118blind; and fundamentally the blindness consists in failure to recognize the true good of man in mutual union and co-operation. But there are many other subordinate ways in which its essential blindness is manifested. To hate is to view the actions and characters of others through a medium which falsifies and distorts. To quote Bishop Butler, ‘the whole character and behaviour of those we hate is considered with an eye to that particular part which has offended us, and the whole man appears monstrous without anything right or human in him’. Hatred in fact seeks only its own appropriate food and disregards or rejects whatever does not sustain its own life and development. We can see this clearly enough in the attitude of our enemies towards ourselves. We can see, for instance, how hard it is for the German mind, at the present moment, to think anything that is good of England and Englishmen; how hard, for instance, they find it to admit that we are really patriotic, that our soldiers are anything but hirelings, actuated by merely mercenary motives, or that they can fight efficiently, or that even our fleet is anything but a pretentious sham. But to the reflective observer it is plain enough that a similar disposition prevails, though not, I hope, in the same degree, among ourselves. Are we prepared to consider fairly the possibility that the Germans in entering on the present war were actuated by motives which were not wholly bad, or that they really feared and believed that the neutrality of Belgium would be violated by France, or in 119general that they feared and believed with what seemed to them good reason that unless they took the initiative by a preventive war, they themselves would be attacked and taken at a disadvantage?

Hatred not only blinds us to what may be favourable to the enemy; it also blinds us to whatever may be wrong in our own feelings and behaviour towards them. It tends to place the blame all on one side. This, as we know, is very rarely the case. It is very unlikely to be the case in a war between great civilized nations. The present war is, I am fully convinced, most just and necessary. Yet I also believe that faults on our side have indirectly contributed in some degree to prepare the way for it.^[22]

I shall mention only one more of the manifold ways in which hate leads to blindness. It shrinks from any serious and impartial endeavour to trace the evil which offends it to the conditions which may account for it and render it intelligible. The impulse of hate is not to understand, but to destroy. To inquire into conditions and to seek an explanation would only divert and distract it. It prefers, therefore, to concentrate itself on the persons hated as if they were the sole ultimate sources of the evil, as if the evil were due merely to their intrinsic and spontaneous badness. It is this attitude of mind which leads us to turn away with impatience from any attempt to explain, for instance, the Belgian atrocities so as to make 120it intelligible how they could be committed or condoned by a people who in their original human nature are not so very different from ourselves. The attempt to explain is treated as an attempt to explain away, and resented as if it were a justification or defence or denial of fact.

My general position is that hatred is bad inasmuch as it is blind, and I am unable to discover anything else which justifies us in treating it as necessarily evil. The question is whether all sentiments and emotions partaking of the nature of anger are to be condemned on this account. Ought we to set before us, as our ideal, freedom from all such emotions and sentiments, and the substitution of other motives for them? Let us provisionally suppose that this is the ideal, and examine how it would work if it were consistently followed. In the first place we must consider how we should proceed in attempting to realize the ideal. It may be suggested that we should follow invariably in all cases the rule ‘Overcome evil with good’. Now there may be a sense in which this rule is universally applicable and ought to be universally applied. But in the common and obvious interpretation of it, this is plainly untrue. As commonly interpreted, it means that we ought not to hurt or destroy the evildoer, and that instead of this we ought to appeal to his better nature by showing goodwill and kindness towards him. This is, of course, infinitely the best way where it can be followed effectively and followed effectively without incurring greater evils than it 121has any reasonable chance of curing. But these limiting conditions are very important. They would clearly apply, for instance, in case of an attack by scalp-hunting Red Indians on a family of peaceful settlers. In general, the words ‘Overcome evil with good’ are to be taken as qualified by the preceding words ‘Be not overcome of evil’. If and so far as we can overcome evil without being overcome of evil, it is our duty to do so, otherwise it is not. It may, however, still be maintained that, though it is admittedly often right and necessary to inflict pain, hurt, and destruction on evildoers, yet we ought not to do this in the spirit of anger. We ought rather to act purely out of regard for the highest attainable good, and we ought to inflict pain and damage on evildoers only as a necessary means to this end and not out of any angry emotion we may feel towards them.

This is the general position of Spinoza when he asserts as a universal principle that all ‘hatred is bad’. It may seem a lofty and noble position. But it is not enough for a moral ideal to appear lofty and noble when we contemplate it vaguely in the abstract. It must be in such direct contact with the actual conditions of human life as to afford constant practical guidance in dealing with these. Judged by this standard the proposed principle seems to break down. It requires us in dealing with the malevolence of human beings to be actuated merely by love of good, not at all by resentment against the evildoer. Our mental attitude ought, on this view, to be always that 122assumed by the Quaker in Uncle Tom’s Cabin who pushed the slave-driver over the precipice and explained his action by the words ‘Friend, thou art not wanted here’. The fundamental objection to this is that love of anything implies and includes a corresponding feeling of aversion to whatever is recognized as opposed to what we love or destructive of what we love. The love of health, for instance, implies and includes aversion to disease wherever we meet disease and recognize it as such. It does not, of course, imply that we must be angry with disease, but that is because we do not love health in the same way as we love what is good in human beings and in the personal relations of human beings to each other. Just as the sentiment of love varies in its nature with the nature of its object, there is a corresponding difference in the aversion which is its counterpart. Where the evil is malevolence, where it is an evil will directed to injustice, cruelty, and selfish aggression, the appropriate correlate of love to the good is some form of anger with the evil. And this must mean anger with the evildoer. It is not satisfactory to say that we may feel aversion to what is evil in a man and only kindness towards the man himself. This is to overlook the central fact that the evil in this case is an expression of the man’s personal will and character which cannot be separated from himself. Nor can we substitute sorrow for anger. Sorrow is appropriate to misfortune, but intentional injury is not merely a misfortune which happens to 123befall the person who inflicts it. To feel towards it as if it were merely a misfortune is to be more or less blind to its true nature. In consequence, when sorrow takes the place of anger, it fails to give rise to efficient action; the tendency is to mourn over the offender where rebuke and punishment are required by the situation.

In actual life, we find some who, owing either to their nature or to their circumstances and education, are but little susceptible of angry emotion; in such persons we find also a corresponding failure to understand or believe in the malicious attitude of mind in which intentional injuries have their source. They turn aside from the evidence or interpret it in their own one-sided way. An extreme instance is that of Charles Lamb’s friend, George Dyer, who, as Lamb tells us, could find nothing more severe to say about the worst criminals than that they must have been very eccentric. So far as I can make out, I belong myself to this class, though not to the same extent as Lamb’s friend. I naturally skip such passages in the newspapers as these which describe German atrocities in Belgium. I refuse to read even official reports. I put myself off by hoping that in the main they are not true, or that they are greatly exaggerated, or that they can be explained so as to cast another light on them. Yet I have been gradually forced to believe in their reality by evidence which I cannot reasonably resist. Persons of this type do very well so long as they live a sheltered life, spent, for instance, in study. But they are unfit to grapple 124effectively with certain forms of evil or really to appreciate their nature or fully to recognize their existence. There are other men who, though they are by nature fully susceptible of angry sentiments, suppress them on principle, because they regard them as wrong and especially because they are afraid of giving way to hatred. So far as concerns those whom they recognize as their personal enemies or as the enemies of the society to which they belong, their mental attitude and behaviour tends to resemble more or less those of the type of men who are naturally deficient in angry sentiments. But they are likely to differ from these in an important respect. In their anxiety to be fair and benevolent to enemies, they are likely to be unfair and harsh to their friends. In opposing the natural tendency to regard the faults all on one side, that of the enemy, they tend to run to the opposite extreme and to make out that it is their own side which is wholly or mainly or at least equally to blame in cases where an impartial consideration of the evidence would show the contrary. Thus, with them natural sentiments of anger tend to creep in, as it were, by a back door. The phrase ‘friends of every country but their own’ is often most unfairly applied. But there are cases in which it is more or less applicable; and it applies appropriately to the type of persons I have described.

My conclusion, then, is that some developed forms of the primitive emotion of anger are necessary and right. But how are we to determine 125what these are? How are we to draw the line between them and these forms of angry passion which are condemned under the general head of hatred or malevolence? After the previous discussion, there need be no difficulty as regards the principle upon which we have to proceed. Hatred is bad only because it is blind and in so far as it is blind, just as the weakly amiable spirit is bad for the same reason. On the other hand, what we call just resentment or righteous indignation, though it is akin to hatred as being, like it, developed from the primitive emotion of anger, is good inasmuch as it is enlightened—inasmuch as it is free from the various forms of blindness which characterize hatred. Here, of course, the fundamental blindness, which we must do all that in us lies to avoid, is blindness to the highest good of humanity as consisting in union and co-operation. Righteous indignation or just resentment, as felt against the enemy of social order, ought to be merely the obverse aspect, the necessary counterpart, of the spirit which pursues union and co-operation as its supreme end. So far as we are willing and able to follow this principle, we cannot go wrong.

This does not imply that justifiable resentment is necessarily weaker or less intense than hatred. The distinction is not one of degree. Justifiable resentment is not a fainter form of hatred. It is not, so to speak, hatred watered down. So long as it is not blind, there is no general limit to its strength, persistence, or intensity. This must be 126proportioned to the varying conditions. In any case, just resentment will cease when it is no longer required by the actual situation. Hatred, on the contrary, tends to persist blindly.

The theoretical principle on which we must proceed may be defined in this way. But its practical application is, of course, very difficult. It is hard to ‘be angry and sin not’, to be righteously resentful and yet to avoid the blindness of hate. Yet, however far we may be compelled to fall short of our ideal, we should consistently endeavour to keep this ideal in view as our supreme practical guide and as the measure of our failure and success. Here a great help ought to be found in prayer by those who believe in prayer and who realize that in prayer they are approaching a Being who is completely good and wise. In any case we must here, as elsewhere, be willing to take risks; and though the converse is more usual, it may sometimes be better to run the risk of being actuated by hatred than to run the alternative risk of not feeling due resentment.

Let us now turn to a question of fact. How far is it true that we hate the Germans and that the Germans hate us? As regards the Germans there would seem to be no room for doubt. They loudly tell us that they hate us and make a parade of their hatred. But it is easy to attach too much importance to this self-conscious and deliberate working up of an emotion and theatrical display of it. The best comment is supplied by the picture in Punch of a German family practising hatred of England 127before breakfast with appropriate attitudes and grimaces. The same holds good for the song of hatred. It is a spirited composition. But I am not inclined to take very seriously the kind of hatred which finds lyric expression of this sort. In such manifestoes we come upon the sentimentality so characteristic of the Germans, the romantic side of the German character. The more serious forms of hatred are rather those which do not fully examine and express themselves in this fashion. The real question is, How far have our angry passions a blinding influence in practice? Certainly there is abundant evidence that the Germans are blinded in this way. The belief is widespread among them that the key to our conduct is throughout to be sought in one master motive, the love of gain. They charge us with pursuing our ignoble ends by sly and underhand means, veiled under hypocritical pretence. They are convinced, for instance, that our horror and resentment at the brutal attack on Belgium was merely simulated, and that throughout we care for nothing but our own self-interest. They also charge us as a nation with a failure in the patriotic spirit which subordinates the interest of individuals and parties and classes to the good of the whole. They find in us an irresponsible frivolity and easy-going self-complacency which make us entirely undeserving of the position which we claim among civilized nations. On the other hand, they entertain no doubt that in all these ways in which we come short, they themselves are very strong, and that 128they, therefore, have a natural right to supplant us. Now I am far from saying that there is no foundation for some at least of the bad things which the Germans believe about us. But the sweeping and utterly indiscriminate way in which they hold these beliefs is obviously due to the blinding influence of hatred and kindred sentiments. That we on our side are similarly blinded admits, I think, of no doubt. We are convinced, for very cogent reasons, that our enemies deliberately brought on this war when they might honourably and safely have maintained peace. I do not believe that we are at all blind on this point. But our natural resentment does, I think, tend to obscure our view of the underlying motives for conduct which in any case cannot be justified. No doubt, a spirit of aggression, fostered by the German military system and by German traditions, was the most important factor. But we are apt to overlook the fact that fear also was a strong motive, fear of rival nations with antagonistic interests falling upon them and taking them at a disadvantage. Another error to which we are naturally prone is found in the assumption that what seems evident to us must be evident to our opponents. To us it is clear that the aggression is on their side. But the great body of the German people, including the best men among them, are convinced that it is they who are the victims and we who are the aggressors. Their natural leaders have assured them that this is the case, and have so stated the facts as to make it 129appear so; and this view found ready acceptance because of that attitude of suspicious fear to which I have just alluded. The picture which we are apt to make for ourselves of a whole people rushing to arms merely in order to make an unprovoked onslaught on its neighbours is certainly a false one, which we could not entertain unless we were more or less blinded by hate. I find further evidence of the same blindness in much of the current talk about the necessity of crushing Germany. So far as this means that we ought to do our work so thoroughly that it will not need to be done over again it is fully justified. But if the meaning is that the best or the only way of effecting this is by destroying the national existence of Germany, it seems to me that we are being misled by our passions. However good our case may be in this quarrel, we shall put ourselves in the wrong if we reduce our adversary to a position in which it becomes his absolute duty to lose sight of all other considerations in the bare struggle for existence. Again, I do not think that we at all realize how much we should miss Germany if there were no Germany. Omitting other most important considerations, it is very far from clear that the political situation as regards the balance of power in Europe would be at all improved by such a change. Besides this, we do not sufficiently consider whether it lies in our power to crush Germany in the way proposed, or, if it does, whether the attempt may not cost us too dear.

In another direction, the blindness of hate finds 130expression in the present tendency to depreciate German literature, science, and philosophy. Some of the things which are now being said on this topic I largely agree with. I have long held that the value of the German contribution to literature, science, and even philosophy has been seriously over-estimated as compared with that of other nations. But much of the current talk on this subject is hopelessly undiscriminating and exaggerated. In any case, it is amusing to find men talking in this vein who would never have thought of doing so if there had been no war. Our being at war with Germany can scarcely make any difference, one would think, to the greatness of Goethe or of Hegel.

In conclusion, let me go back to my starting-point. What are we to say finally concerning the precept ‘Love your enemies’? Is there any sense in which it is of universal application? I think there may be. It must not, of course, be taken to mean that we are to love our enemies with what Bishop Butler calls ‘a peculiar affection’. There are many who are not our enemies for whom we can feel no peculiar affection. Besides, if we love our enemies in this sense, what, as Confucius is said to have inquired, are we to do in the case of our friends? But if we take the meaning to be—Will good to your enemy rather than evil, the rule may, under a certain condition, be regarded as universally applicable. If we accept Plato’s doctrine that it is better for 131the evildoer himself that he should suffer punishment than that he should go unpunished, it seems possible, however difficult in practice, to inflict pain and hurt on him while retaining goodwill towards him in the very act of doing so. From this point of view, failure to feel just resentment and express it in action is an injury to the evildoer himself as well as to others. But is it always better for the evildoer himself to be punished? If it makes him a better man, we may agree that this is so. But so far as we can see, it sometimes has the reverse effect. If we are to justify the principle in its widest generality, we must go beyond what we can see. We must postulate a moral order or something equivalent to a moral order in the universe according to which it is always in some way ultimately better for the evildoer to be punished than to escape punishment. If this is Christian doctrine, then Christianity may consistently maintain the universal application of the maxim, ‘Love your enemies.’

VI PATRIOTISM IN THE PERFECT STATE

The quality of patriotism is determined by what we desire for our country, as the quality of friendship is determined by what we desire for our friend. And this question—the question what it is that we desire for our country—is of supreme moment to-day, because in the answer given to it, whether by practice or in principle, are rooted the permanent underlying conditions of war and peace.

Assuming then that what is true of principles is true of the corresponding practice, whether or no the actors understand what they are doing, I will ask you to consider with me three typical ideas expressive of what men desire for their country, each of them bearing a distinctive relation to the causes and customs of war, and to the permanent basis of peace.

And in this consideration I hope that we shall also be elucidating an interesting question in the history of recent thought. We shall see how the splendid political philosophy of Germany a hundred years ago has passed on the one hand into her intoxication of to-day, while on the other hand, elsewhere, in face of a more liberal experience, it has found a decisive completion in a human and democratic sense. The three conceptions to which 133I refer have very much in common, and a great part of the interest of our inquiry, and also perhaps a little practical value which it might possess, depends on noticing very precisely the points at which distinctions become blurred, and the ideas, mostly by mere omission, are apt to slide into one another.

Let us make a beginning, then, with Hegel’s political thought, the German thought of a hundred years ago. At that time the idea of a man’s country, as focussed in the state, was a glorious vision, stimulated largely by Greek conceptions and drawing something from English constitutional experience; while in the existing reality of the Prussian system there was little to catch the eye, and little power, therefore, to narrow the outlook.

Now the essential point for us here to grasp firmly, if we wish to enter into the truth of the matter and its adjacent fallacies, is that Hegel means by the state, not the machine of government, but all that fulfils, in the actual community, the individual’s mind and will. The individual is supposed to see in it the form of life, and more than that, the particular form of sentiment and volition, which his nation has so far worked out for itself, and in which he, the private person, finds the substance of his own mind, and what unites him with others. It includes, of course, the ethical tradition of the society, with the observances and institutions in which it is embodied and preserved; and more especially it is identified with the general will as expressed in the laws and the political constitution. 134The state, in short, is the ark in which the whole treasure of the individual citizen’s head and heart is preserved and guarded within a world which may be disorderly and hostile.

One may naturally ask, where then does humanity come in, and how recognize the claims of other nations and persons? This is exceedingly important, but not difficult. Your country is held to express the whole form of life for which you stand, and therefore, within that, your moral attitude to humanity and the world in general. If you are an Englishman, you probably object to slavery. But that attitude is not a thing of chance, in which you stand outside your age and country. It is part of the outlook at which, on the whole, England had at a certain time arrived, and which came to individual Englishmen through their participation in the national mind. Here is a point at which a slide into fallacy is too possible. That moral view of the world which you and your state stand up for is one thing. A moral view which considers only your own and your state’s immediate interests is quite another thing; but it is very easy to confuse the two, both in practice and in controversy.

We have said enough to indicate the value which, according to such ideas, the private individual, in theory or by practice, recognizes in his state. Looked at in this way, our country, the state, is simply all we have. Innumerable claims may come to us from outside, but they all come through it and subject to it; just as they all come to us 135through our own feelings and our own beliefs. Without the state we are nothing and nobody. It is for us the vehicle of the value of the world. It stands for our contribution to the general sum of what humanity has achieved and what makes any life worth living.

So far what we desire for our country, our view of its mission, is to achieve the very best we all are capable of becoming. But there is another side to this same set of ideas.

Obviously, to fulfil this, its necessary mission, the state needs above all things to be strong. Men who had lived through Napoleonic times could have no doubt about that. Who indeed was to help a state if it could not help itself? War, then, was the inevitable arbiter, and by the test of war the state must stand or fall. Hegel is primarily appealing to facts when he says that outside the several communities there is no general will. As yet there could not be; for the general will is the will of a community, backed by its whole body, mind, and sentiment. Thus, no one can possibly dictate into what demands separate states shall throw their ultimate honour and self-assertion; and if in these they conflict there is no ultimate solution but war. On one side, we have seen, the state is akin to art, philosophy, and religion; it is mind in a concentrated form. But between it and these other shapes of mind there is the one fundamental distinction. The state is mind ‘in the world’. It is not only our treasure, but it is the ark which carries our treasure. ‘In the world’ right can 136only prevail through might. Strength in war is therefore the first condition of the state’s fulfilment of its function; and being the first condition, and a condition peculiar to the state among the forms of mind, it is too easily taken as the aim and whole upshot of the state. This again, as we shall see, is a point at which one idea is apt to slide into another.

Therefore, since as yet there can be, outside and above the several states, no general will with a common heart and force, no ‘praetor’—judge representing power—but only at best an ‘arbitrator’, all international laws, treaties, and usages are, at bottom, only agreements of a number of particular wills, the wills of absolute independent bodies. So far nations are to one another, as older writers had said, in a state of nature, like the supposed (but quite imaginary) individuals before Society was invented. Hegel does not say that there cannot be, and are not, humane usages, conventions, rules, and treaties. The whole of international law rests on the principle that treaties are to be observed. But behind all this there is the sheer fact of the separate individual powers, each absolute in its limited area; so that, at bottom, the whole fabric of international rules and customs is just an agreement of separate wills, and not an expression of a single general will. Ultimately, or fundamentally, each of these separate wills is and must be determined by its own conception of its own welfare. This is the difficulty I think in the way of leagues and federations in favour of 137peace as suggested by Kant and by Norman Angell. They are purely de facto. They do not rest upon the spirit of a solid community; and every powerful league tends ipso facto to raise up a powerful counter-league against it, with grave risk of war.

It follows from this that there is a fundamental distinction between the moral position of the private individual who works out the detail of his duty on the basis of recognized rights within a previously ordered and organized society, and that of the state, which has ‘in the world’ to provide and sustain, at all hazards, the organized society within which the individual is to live. The tasks of morals and of international politics are different in principle, though the end to which they co-operate is the same. The immediate task of morals is to live a life, that of international politics is to provide a world within which life can be lived.

The same distinction must be pushed beyond the difference of the tasks into the difference of their possibility. For the private individual it is fairly easy, in the main, at least to know what he should do, and what he should not. He lives within a scheme of recognized rights and obligations; and, starting from his legal position and accepted duties, he can tell whether he is behaving selfishly or generously, rudely or courteously, kindly or unkindly. His lawyer will tell him his legal rights; and it is for him to insist upon them or to surrender them. But in principle the state has no such guide. It is not living out an ordered 138life, within a recognized scheme. It cannot tell whether it is being less than just, or merely just, or kind and generous. For it every case is under altering conditions and new, and it is sole judge in its own cause. A state may think that it is behaving with superhuman generosity, while its antagonist may think it is behaving like a bandit. There is no complete or detailed scheme and scale of conduct and sentiment to operate as a norm of feeling and judgement. Of course this language may seem exaggerated in face of the well-established usages of international law, and the existence of treaties. But the difference we have mentioned affects them all. Ultimately, to reiterate that terrible adverb, which governs the whole argument, it is as we say. A private person has the letter and spirit of his moral world to live up to, and on the main lines and choices of life there is a wealth of recognized obligations which, I do not say tell him what to do, but certainly warn him what he is doing. A state is sailing a sea but slightly charted, and what marks the charts do furnish are mostly recent and depend on a revocable consent. As a supreme power, it has a responsibility for every choice, of which no precedents nor external recommendations can divest it. At every step it is making a new world.

Thus, in such an idea of patriotism as we have been describing, the attitude to war is favourable on the whole. There is, it suggests, an element in the world which is transitory and accidental, the element of temporal life and temporal goods. It 139is natural and necessary that accident should prey upon the accidental, and that contingent values should thus be distinguished from substantial. War is the fiery test of reality, and the maker of nations. ‘In the world’ accident is necessary and has its good. Here is a striking passage; not a complete survey of the question, but, I think, requiring consideration, and showing the conviction embodied in the attitude we have tried to portray:

‘Of course, war brings insecurity of possessions, but this actual insecurity is only a necessary movement. We hear from the pulpit so much of the uncertainty, vanity, and fickleness of temporal things; but every one thinks as he hears it, however touching may be the eloquence, “I shall manage to keep what is mine”. But now if this uncertainty confronts them in grim earnest in the shape of hussars with naked sabres, then the touching spirit of edification, in the face of the very thing it foretold, betakes itself to hurling curses at the victors. But in spite of all, wars take place when the occasion demands it; the crops grow again; and babble is mute before the grim iterations of history.’^[23]

Before leaving these ideas of a hundred years ago, it is worth while to note the general temper of intellectual Germany in that great age. It was full, no doubt, of self-assertion, not unbecoming to a nation conscious of immense capacities. But it was sympathetic and receptive. No men ever worked harder to educate themselves in the widest experience of humanity than Goethe and his 140contemporaries. Their feeling is fairly expressed in some verses addressed by Schiller to Goethe, on the exceptional occasion of a play by Voltaire being performed at the Weimar theatre. We see in them the delicate balance of self-assertion and receptivity. Here is a rough version:

The Briton and the Greek are Shakespeare and Aristotle, or perhaps the Greek Tragedians. And the same types of experience, English and Hellenic, were at work in the conception of patriotism we have portrayed. It is not, Hegel says, emphatically, the mere occasional readiness for extreme sacrifices. It is the recognition of the community as our substance throughout all the detailed functions of life. We shall further see the supreme value of this apparently prosaic view.

Now we need not add many words in explaining how this attitude of the great time has degenerated into the creed of violence and self-interest of which we hear to-day. It is essentially the passage of a large and many-sided philosophical doctrine into the hands of ignorant and biased amateurs, soldiers, historians, politicians.^[24] Well, all philosophy 141is dangerous, for it blinks no side of the truth, and any one of its statements, taken by itself and with bias, may act as a mighty strong wine or as a high explosive.

It is enough to recall the two points in the great German philosophy at which we noted how readily one idea slides into another. One is where it says that a state is and can be determined only by its own good. We tried to explain that the thing is a truism. Its good is the form of life and feeling which it has made and chosen, and includes its relations to others. But if for good (Wohl) you read exclusive self-interest, the thing is done. A great idea slides before your eyes into the meanest of worldly maxims. So with the other point. As guardian of a treasure, the state must 142be strong in war. But it is different when you say that its strength in war sets it free to sully at its will the treasure it has to guard.

To make these two transitions is the same thing as to drop out from the conception of patriotism all that we said about the positive values of which the state is guardian. In a huge country, intoxicated with its new material prosperity, and even in the realm of intellect so busy with myriad specialities as to be deafened to voices from without by the clamour of its own contending schools, such a transition seems almost natural.

But yet, when this transition is made, the public conscience, the compass of the difficult voyage, is gone. Everything depended on its recognition of the supreme values within its own good; and the change leaves them as mere names for whatever can be effected by force. And now, all the de facto truths which the great philosophy conceded with regard to international conventions return upon us with crushing force. You can find parallels in Hegel, as we saw, for much of the language, e. g., of the Book of War, about mere usages and conventions. The only difference is that the national conscience—which makes Hegel say, for instance, that Europe is in actual humane behaviour a single family—the national conscience is now deleted from the theory.

So by mere omission and exaggeration, this great idea of patriotism is totally perverted, and we are brought to the point that what a man desires for his country is military supremacy to be used 143without scruple in the promotion of its exclusive interest.

This was the second of the three attitudes or ideas of patriotism which we meant to consider. We have observed how it might arise by a heated and narrowed conception of the first, under the intoxication of new achievements, leading to new temptations and ambitions.

But now, recurring for a moment to the philosophy of the great time, let us consider a third expression of patriotism, to which it has given rise in a wholly different atmosphere.

It was a conviction, held in common by the two forms of patriotism we have been considering, that war is a necessary accident, arising out of the very nature of the state as a separate sovereign power exposed to accident, and therefore, something to which a state is liable because and in as far as it is what a state should be. Now a great deal in this idea may seem to us a truism. States are particular independent bodies, themselves sole ultimate judges of their differences and their honour. No independent state (as Pericles said) will brook an order from another state; if it does, its independence is gone. And on such a point there can be no arbitration. War is the ultimate arbiter, and therefore springs from this very nature of states; and it does behove states to be strong. And for war, as for all other evils and accidents, there is a good deal to be said. Each of them by itself is clearly a thing to be fought against, but without any of them at all—well, life would very soon generate new ones.

144But a further question has been raised, and seems worth pursuing. Is not a wrong done somewhere, when lives are sacrificed in war? Certainly it is not murder, for it is not unlawful killing; but again, it is not merely like an earthquake. It comes from human conduct somewhere and somewhen. We may not be able to apportion the guilt of it, but it might be worth inquiry whether the conduct could not be changed. Perhaps our analysis has hitherto not gone far enough. After differences have broken out between independent sovereign states all we have said holds good—the separate wills of separate bodies, the mere outward agreements with no deep-seated impartial will and power behind them, the usages and rules at the mercy of the individual conscience of states, which in some cases appears to be an absent factor.

Well, but cannot we go further back? Is it in the nature of states that differences should constantly be arising between them? The state is there to be the condition of organized good life for the inhabitants of a certain territory. Is it a property of this function that different states should be continually liable to be at variance? Is tendency to war really a feature of states in respect of what they are as states? Or is it not rather perhaps a feature of them in so far as they fail to be states? To organize good life in a certain territory seems to have nothing in it prima facie which should necessitate variance between the bodies charged with the task in one place and in another.

145When, in the light of this question, we look closer at the facts, what stares us in the face is that the cause of external conflict as a rule is not internal organization, but internal disorganization. The quarrelsome man is not well organized in his mind; he is ill organized—certainly in mind, probably in body. Plato indeed laid his finger on the place, though you might criticize his explanation in some particulars. The origin of war, he says, is when states become internally diseased; the more they are distracted within, the more they come into conflict without.

Let us think further of this. People who are satisfied do not want to make war; and in a well-organized community people are satisfied. War must arise from dissatisfied elements in a community; people who have not got what they want within (or have it but are afraid of losing it) and so look for profit or for security in adventures without. War belongs to a state, then, ultimately, not in so far as it is a state, but in so far as it is not a state.

All sorts of causes of dissatisfaction or alarm lead to external conflict. There may be privileged classes directly interested in resisting the better organization of the community; in maintaining, for instance, an obsolete franchise and the power of a military caste. There may be oppressed religious persuasions, oppressed nationalities, provinces torn from the allegiance they prefer. All of these are likely to throw their hopes and ambitions outside the state which formally includes them, and to produce resentments against it in 146other groups. Then, more subtle and more modern, there are the whole set of restrictions upon human intercourse which depend on the idea that the gain of one community is the loss of another. All of these make doubly for war; they make privileges at home, which turn the mind of the privileged class away from internal organization and towards external aggression; and they make exclusions abroad, turning the mind of the excluded classes to retaliation both in kind and by arms. Exclusion reaches the climax of its vicious effect when it becomes an affair of what I shall call for short ‘passive markets’—such, that is, as raise the problem of the prior possession of uncivilized regions which the white man can exploit at pleasure, and at pleasure close against others.

I must not pause to analyse at length the claims supported by that blessed word ‘expansion’. So good a historian as Dr. Holland Rose^[25] seems to accept the increase of Germany’s population by 50 per cent. in one generation as a sufficient reason for a vigorous expansion policy. But surely we must distinguish between the duties really imposed upon a state by such an increase with a view to organization of life, and the adventures and exclusive exploitations for which it may be the pretext, but which do nothing serious to aid the work of organization, while they fill the world with monopolies and with terrors of aggression.

And again, it appears only just to remark, following for example a recent article by Sir 147Harry Johnston,^[26] confirmed in this respect by Mr. Morel,^[26] that when in a huge world-empire there is advocated a policy of commercial exclusion directed against other countries, these countries will anticipate being gravely prejudiced in their legitimate foreign trade. Then follows the desire on their part to possess themselves of exclusive markets, and unending fears and resentments are bred on every side. That the practical and theoretical inspiration of the policy so advocated had its source in some of the countries threatened by it, would have made it, if carried out, an interesting retribution, but would not have diminished its danger.

Surely, for the legitimate expansion demanded by increase of population the ‘open door’ is the right and effective principle. It will meet both the need of trade, and in the last resort, the need of space and elbow-room for population. Under it no one’s expansion can be a threat to any one, or produce monopolies which will hinder social organization, and turn men’s minds to aggression. And it must also be noted that the loss of citizen population, which is sometimes complained of, is not really met by mere increase of territorial possessions. It is largely due to the very military system which is relied on to remedy its causes—in a word, to defective social organization, which lays unwelcome burdens on the ordinary citizen, and even fails to utilize territorial expansion as an outlet for population.

148It must be borne in mind, however, that the exclusive policy advocated within our Empire was decisively rejected, and the open door, the main thing demanded by expansion elsewhere, was as decisively maintained. Even territorial acquisition in tropical regions, though it has practically been of little value to the increasing populations of European countries, this country has not obstructed, and I hope and trust that it will maintain its unenvious policy in this respect up to the limits of possibility in the settlement after the war.

I have no right to lecture on economics, but the general principles which I have been advocating, of absence of monopoly at home, and the ‘open door’ abroad, fall, I think, within the competence of a student of politics. Restrictions on human intercourse are prima facie injurious, and demand the very strongest justification if they are to be tolerated.

And on a kindred point, really beyond my competence, I will merely put a question. Presupposing a sufficiency of external trade to pay for food and raw materials, is not the home market the most important and the most secure? When it is not so, is not the purchasing power of the most numerous classes short of what it should be? And through directing the minds of the leaders of trade to external adventure, is not such a state of things a constant incentive to exclusive exploitation and to war?

I will end by summarizing as shortly as I can the conclusions which follow from our argument—both 149what we must admit, and what we are anxious to maintain.

(1) We must admit that states, in consequence of their separateness and absoluteness, are so far in a relation of nature to each other, though this is mitigated by humane conventions and usages. If differences arise, the ultimate arbiter is war, which is therefore necessary to the function of states as now existing. While this is so, international politics must differ from individual morality as maintaining a world differs from living in one.

(2) We must admit that when, on this basis, it is attempted to secure peace according to the rule Si vis pacem, para bellum, the project is self-contradictory. As principles are the same for all parties, it implies the condition of securing peace to be that of any two opponent powers each must be at the same time stronger than the other. This contradiction is the root of the race in armaments.

(3) We must admit that, on this basis, no league or federation ad hoc can secure peace. Every such league must, sooner or later (being a mere convention of separate wills) arouse a counter-league. Such arrangements, I believe, are fertile of wars.

(4) We maintain that the fundamental root of peace lies in the recognition that war belongs to states not in as far as they are states, but in as far as they are not states; granted that their actual defects to-day make the reverse of this appear to be the truth.

(5) We maintain that the patriotism which is 150the source of peace therefore lies in a thorough everyday loyalty to the state as a means of harmonious internal organization excluding privilege and monopoly, and in our desire for our country of those supreme goods which are not diminished by sharing. Trade and industry, though acquisitions of material wealth, take on this character when conducted on an impartial and rational basis. This view agrees with the great German philosophy in its estimate of true patriotism, but goes further in analysing the relation of such patriotism to the causes of war.^[27]

(6) We maintain that in a group or world of states, possessed by such a patriotism, and therefore organized so as to be free from causes of resentment, and united in aims and methods which admit of harmony, it is conceivable that a true general will (not a mere external convention) might grow up which should be solidly supported by the body, spirit, and sentiment of all the communities.^[28] In such a case a genuine international moral world would be created, and international politics would approach more nearly to the nature of private morality, though they could never be the same. In some respects, indeed, the state, as more impartial, might maintain a higher standard than the individual, as happens on occasion even to-day.^[29]

151(7) We maintain that the patriotism which is the desire for our country of those supreme goods which are not diminished by sharing, is a guarantee of a right estimate of values, and therefore of justice and reasonable organization in dealing with wealth and power both at home and abroad.

Such a patriotism, desiring and sustaining the perfection of the state in its organizing functions as a state, is the only force which is essentially directed to destroying the causes of war. Even those intangible springs of hostility, the jealousy and vanity of nations, cannot ultimately exist in the same world with such a patriotism.

This temper of mind offers the only prospect of a solid general will including groups of states. As its expression, but not without it, leagues of states for the enforcement of peace might do good service. Its detailed operation in such a crisis as will confront the nations of Europe at the close of the war, will consist in a sincere and persevering effort to secure everywhere the removal of all such causes of internal distraction as have been specified above.

By the merest accident in the world, the last word in this course of lectures has fallen to me. And I feel irresistibly impelled to use the opportunity, well knowing how inadequately, in making an appeal to you in the spirit of a conviction which more and more possesses my mind.

I will try to explain it thus.

It was proposed some weeks ago that there should be a day of national humiliation. The 152highest authority in the land rejected that form of expression, and I believe that we all approved of the rejection.

No, we do not want a day of national humiliation. If ever it is right for a country to hold up its head, it is right for our country to-day. But nevertheless there is something, not wholly different from this, for which in the spirit of our argument I would earnestly appeal. There is a way in which every one of us can do something, and even can do much, to promote the solid foundations of a stable peace. I repeat that we do not want a national humiliation. But we at least who must stay at home have a need and duty of individual and national self-examination. It cannot indeed be a duty incumbent on the men at the front—they have other matters to attend to—but, most remarkably, the evil temper against which it is directed is not on the whole the temper of the men at the front. But for us—it is a thing we can do, and a thing we should do. We should examine ourselves—is our patriotism such as to lead towards the perfectly organized state? Do we desire for our country and ourselves only the best things we know, beauty and truth and love and wholesome living? Do we seek, by this infallible criterion of values, to guarantee both ourselves and our country against the corrupt self-seeking which is the ultimate cause of war?

Right as our cause is to-day, has not the wrong which we are labouring to undo been fostered by ourselves as by others, if not in our case by 153direct international action, yet by the exhibition of a jealous and menacing spirit of rivalry? Do we not constantly endeavour to lower other nations in our private and public talk, in the world of letters, and in trade? Is our journalism, is our literature of the war—though I gladly acknowledge some most excellent things in both—yet are they on the whole such as we can look upon with satisfaction?

I am entirely without sympathy for the attempts made by a few among our learned men, and by very many who are far from learned, to belittle the intellectual and moral debt of Europe to Germany, and to prove for instance that Goethe—Goethe—was a great exemplar of selfishness. And horrible things as I believe her armies have done in the war, yet the attitude which demands that when peace returns Germany or Prussia should be intentionally humiliated and excluded from the European family of nations, to my own feeling is actually repellent, and to my judgement is an attitude of self-satisfaction, morally dangerous in the extreme, and politically absurd. Surely, whatever others may do, we on our side should fight our terrific battle like gentlemen, without rancour or venom, and with eagerness, above all, when the fight is done, to recognize the merits of our adversary which both his passion and ours have for the moment travestied, and to renew the international bonds of commerce, science, art, and philosophy. We ought not to fall below the standard set us by our private soldiers upon Christmas Day, 154and indeed, as we hear, upon every day of the war.

Punishment and humiliation let us leave to consequences and to history. Belligerents are not good moral judges of each other. Much of what we hear to-day in anticipation of the sequel of the war brings irresistibly to my mind the profound wisdom of George Meredith’s warning against the ridiculous attempt at a union of ill temper and policy.

The patriotism we have attempted to portray implies and demands that we should desire for our country, not a triumph of vanity and self-interest, but a share in such a solid work of organization as shall be most favourable to the performance of a true state’s function in every community of Europe. Thus alone can we deserve well of our country, and our country of the world.