Chapter III: On the Conditions of a Lasting Peace (2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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