Chapter IV: Part 4

The consciousness of unity and the consequent sense of separateness from some other body or bodies are subject to constant change and surprisingly erratic in their application. A bare hint to the Welshman, the Scotsman, the Breton, the Provençal, or the Bavarian that his national idiosyncrasies do not exist, and you will speedily see a demonstration of them. And yet, a moment ago, they felt entirely British or French or German. Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians have each a keen sense of national separateness (and superiority), but let the tongue of slander touch their common nature, and Scandinavia rises in indignant unity. I have attended many International Congresses, and have observed how easily the party is on the verge of grave national crises. Each alliance musters a good-humoured tolerance of the deficiencies of others. But let an opponent of the whole scheme, for which they have assembled, attack the principle which is sacred to all, and there is an immediate truce and concerted action against the intruder. Russian and German troops have found it necessary to suspend their fighting in order to defend themselves against the attacks of wolves. The hungry pack of wolves, waiting by the trenches at night, presented a force which called for united opposition, and the European war had to wait whilst the men of the opposite armies joined in killing them. When the slaughter of wolves was happily over, the human battle was resumed. Supposing, instead of wolves, an airship of super-terrestrial proportions had brought an army of ten-armed, four-headed, and six-legged creatures, bent on dealing out death to the occupants of the trenches, what would have happened? Supposing the inhabitants of a more cruel and vicious planet than ours (cosmological specialists assure us such exist) developed powers of warfare before which the exploits of Hannibal or Attila paled into insignificance, and learnt the art of destroying life not only in their own world but in others as well? They might come armed with new atmospheric weapons, trailing clouds of suffocating fumes to which resistance with guns and bombs would be utterly ineffectual. The horror of the unknown danger would paralyse the war, batteries would be deserted and the trenches would quickly be internationalized. The sense of our common humanity, outraged at the sight and the smell of the monsters, would assert itself. Generals and statesmen of the belligerent peoples--if any were left to direct the defensive--would hold subterranean meetings, and, forgetting the cause for which they sent men to die nobly but a few days ago, would discuss how they could save the united remnants of humanity by strategy and simulation.

The sense of unity is, after all, dependent on innumerable conditions and circumstances over which we have little control. There is the unity of tradition and education, of Eton and Harrow, of Oxford and Cambridge. It moulds opinion and imposes certain restrictions of conduct and prejudices in outlook. Rivalry is an indispensable and normal adjunct of such unity. Races and the honour and glory of one's school and team can stir the group-soul to incredible heights of enthusiasm and effort. There is the instinctive unity of seafarers. Who has not, when crossing the ocean, felt that he was part of a small world independent and isolated from others, but bound together by special ties of adventure? An encounter with an iceberg will bring the common responsibilities and dangers to the notice of the most inveterate individualist, but even while the ship moves uneventfully forward, he, perforce, shares the feeling of oneness. There is the humorous unity which will seize the opposing parties in a court of law and make them join in laughter at some feeble judicial joke just to experience the relief of forgetting that they are there to be contentious.

The advocates of the theory that nations and nationalities are eternally distinct and separate can see no analogy of unity in the simple examples of everyday life. They tell us conclusively that England is England and France is France, and our humble retort that we know as much and something besides is silenced by the further information that each nation has a soul that will tolerate no interference from other souls. They forget, our apostles of the creed of separateness, that the States of to-day are built up on a vast mixture of races and nationalities. They forget, also, that nationality is not a fixed and immovable quantity. Like personality, it is alive and changing, susceptible to influence and experience, liable to psychic contagion from the thoughts and emotions of others. There is no pure nationality. Hybrids are regarded as inferior creatures, as biological outlaws. The truth is, we are all hybrids. Our bluest blood has all the shades of common colour in it when examined ethnically. Great Britain--and Ireland--contains a mixture of Romans, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Danes, Normans, and Celts. To-day, Scotch, Welsh, and Irish are mixtures within mixtures. And what is the British Empire? A conglomeration of races and languages, a pan-national product of conquest and colonization, in which the forces of racial modification are always at work obliterating old divisions and creating new claims to national recognition.

The Russian Empire, sown by Vikings, Slavs, and Mongols, has a rich racial flora, including Germans, Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, Letts, Roumanians, Afghans, Tartars, Finns, and scores of others. The Great Russians, the White Russians, and the Little Russians may each claim to have sprung from the purest Russian stock, but no one has as yet been able to settle satisfactorily the meaning of that claim. The Russians have successively been proved to be of Mongol, Slav, Teutonic, Aryan, Tartar, Celto-Slav, and Slav-Norman origin. Italy, believed to be the home of pure Latin blood, has sheltered and mingled a great number of races, such as Egyptians, Greeks, Spaniards, Slavs, Germans, Jews, and Normans. The Republics of Central and South America are to a large extent peopled by half-breeds. Here the commingling is flagrant and offensive to the partisan of the superiority of the white race. Spain in Mexico and Portugal in Brazil have produced a wild-garden crop which is the despair of the custodian of racial law and order. The search for national purity brings many unexpected discoveries and destroys various theories. It reveals the fact that America has no monopoly of racial amalgamation.

France and Germany appear to us as opposites and irreconcilables. Yet, if you pursue Germany to the hour of her birth you will find that her mother was France. Examine France physiologically and you will find that her muscles and arteries have a German consistency. A thorough investigation of the origins of Germany may prove that she is more Gaulish than Gaul. The Germanic invasions of France are matters of elementary history. Originally a mixture of Ligurians, Celts, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans, she is only Latin in part. Cæsar conquered Gaul, but the Roman mixture has not obliterated previous or subsequent additions. The Latin blood of France was thoroughly diluted by Visigoths, Burgundians, Franks, Vandals, Normans, and other peoples of Germanic stamp. When Gaul was partitioned into the Burgundian kingdom, Austrasia, and Neustria, there were already present the selective processes which, centuries later, shaped the French and the German souls. Neustria clung to Roman culture, whilst Austrasia nurtured the seeds of the specific _Kultur_ which attained its full bloom in the twentieth century. Through rivalry and war the two types persisted. Charlemagne crushed the rebellious Saxon spirit and conquered Bavaria. He unified the divergent tendencies, but only for a time. In 843 his empire was partitioned. France grew out of the western portion, Germany out of the eastern. Lotharingia or Lorraine was established as a middle kingdom. Did kind Fates design it as a guarantee of peace and stability?

The Germans are apt to claim for themselves a pure and Valhallic origin, an exceptionally unmixed descent of the highest attributes. The primogenial origin may be hidden in obscurity, but the German people have absorbed Gauls, Serbs, Poles, Wends, and a medley of Slav and Celtic races which confound all claims to racial purity. Slavs settled in Teutonic countries and Teutons settled in Slavonic countries. The German colonists who invaded Russia at the invitation of Catherine II were imported to strengthen Russia, just as the Great Elector helped thousands of Huguenots fleeing from France to settle in Brandenburg, and gave them the rights of citizenship for the sake of the vitality which they would impart to his depopulated country.

The belief in the unalloyed purity of races and the consequent battles for national exclusiveness seem to be founded on one of those gigantic illusions which hold humanity captive for centuries. Here, as elsewhere, knowledge will spell freedom. When we realize that here and now nations are in course of transformation, that the divisions of the past are not the divisions of to-day, and that we, despite conservatism and resistance, are made to serve as ingredients in some great mixture of to-morrow, momentous questions arise. Are nations made by war and conquest? Are peoples amalgamated by oppressive legislation? Do political alliances between States create international unities?

Such alliances have not in the past caused any organic union. The nations have met like partners at a ball and danced to the tune of the dynastic or religious quarrel which happened to be paramount at the time. The grouping of nations in alliances has simply been a means of more effective prosecution of military campaigns, a temporary convenience to be discarded when no longer needed. If the example of the past is to be followed, then Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, and America, though holding hands now, will separate when the war is over, and may find it necessary to use the same hands for chastizing each other. Alliances have been political games and devices, useful or useless according to the shrewdness of their instigators, but of no value in promoting love between nations. Old-time enemies become friends, and old-time friends become enemies at the command of the political drill-sergeant. England was the hereditary enemy of France. Prussia was the ally of England. In the war of the Austrian succession, France in alliance with Prussia fought England and Austria. During the Seven Years War Prussia, allied to England, fought Austria allied to France. England, allied to France and Turkey, fought Russia in the Crimea. Turn the kaleidoscope of history and you see the English driven out of Normandy, Napoleon defiling Moscow, the Russians attacking Montmartre. Any schoolboy, can trace the changing partners in the grand alliances of the past, or refuse to commit them to memory on account of the bewildering fluctuations in international friendship.

A fiery common hate, though acting as a powerful cement for a time, is no guarantee of durability. Napoleon and the French were hated by the nations, as Wilhelm and the Germans are hated to-day. Rapacious designs for hegemony have always brought about a corresponding amount of defensive unity on the part of those whose independence was threatened. Whether it is Spain or France or Germany that dreams of world-supremacy, the result is international combination. Richelieu and Bismarck rouse the same resentment. A great hatred cannot by itself create a lasting unity, for hatred is apt to grow out of bonds, and, having settled its legitimate prey outside the circle, generally ends by turning on its neighbours within it.

Who can deny that nations have been made by conquest? Heroic self-defence, anger, bitter opposition to the violation of liberty, are of little avail if the psychological factors are favourable to amalgamation. A few decades, a few centuries, and there is fusion between oppressor and oppressed. Hence the loyalty of conquered nations to their foreign masters, at times, when rivals vainly hope for trouble. Hence the indisputable fact that many a nation which but a short time ago fought valiantly for liberty now manifests not only passive resignation, but positive contentment. If, on the other hand, the psychological factors do not favour amalgamation, the legacy of resentment and opposition is handed on from generation to generation and the injury is never forgiven. Cases of contented acceptance are quoted as evidence of the ultimate blessings of war by the adherents of the theory that efficient military measures constitute right. To me they are rather evidence of the strength and endurance of the pacifying forces in human life, and of the sovereignty of the greater unities which draw nations together. If, in spite of the injuries and devastations of war, it is possible for men to forgive and to labour for the same social ends, that is surely proof that the peoples erect no barrier to brotherhood. The truth is, war sometimes achieves that which pacific settlement and free intercourse always achieve.

History has a cavalier way of recording the benefits of conquest. The feelings of the great conquered receive scant consideration. It is enough that after the passage of some centuries we contemplate the matter and declare the conquest to have been beneficial. Was not France invigorated by the wild Northmen who overran her territories and settled wherever they found settlement advantageous? The Normans, originally pirates and plunderers, intermingled with the gentler inhabitants of France. When they turned their eyes to England they were already guardians of civilization. And we blandly record the Norman conquest of England as an unqualified benefit, as an impetus to social amenity, art, learning, architecture, and religion. Protests are useless. The earth abounds in instances of the spread of knowledge, inventions, culture, through war and subjugation. The "rude" peoples who cried out at the outrage, and who fain would have kept their rudeness, receive no sympathy from posterity.

This, I repeat, is no argument for the perpetuation of the old ways of aggression. We have reached a new consciousness and a new responsibility. We see better ways of spreading the fruits of civilization. In the past ambition and brute force, hatred and suspicion, fear and deceit, have had full play. In spite of barbaric warfare and Machiavellian politics the human desire for unity and co-operation has not been uprooted.

The principle of nationality is emerging from the tortuous confusion of the ages. We see that it follows no arbitrary rules of state or empire. It is a law unto itself: the law of mental attraction and community. The centres of passionate nationhood--Poland, Finland, Ireland--withstand all attempts at suppression. You cannot break a strong will to national independence by sledge-hammer blows. In all the wars of the past nations have been treated with contemptuous indifference to the wishes of the people. They were there to be seized and used, invaded and evacuated at a price, to be bought and sold for some empirical or commercial consideration. In the treaties of peace, princes and statesmen tossed countries and populations to each other as if they had been balls in a game of chance.

A new conception of human dignity and of the inviolability of natural rights now demands a revaluation of all the motives and objects for which governments send subjects to battle. Democracy is finding her international unity. A great many wars of the past are recognized as having been, not only unnecessary, but positively foolish. The force of an idea is threatening to dispel the force of arms. The idea which rises dominant out of the European war is the conviction that nations have a right to choose their own allegiance or independence; that there must be freedom instead of compulsion; that real nationality is a psychological state, a tribute of sympathy, a voluntary service to which the mind is drawn by affection. To some who lightly praised the idea, treating it as an admirable prop to war, the consequences and application will bring dismay. For here you have the pivot of a social revolution such as the world has never yet seen. It cannot only remain a question of Belgium, or Serbia, or Alsace-Lorraine. It will inevitably be retrospective and prospective. It cannot be limited to the possessions of Germany or Austria or Turkey. It will not pass over India, South Africa, and Egypt. All empires have been extended by conquest of unwilling nationalities. Bitter wars have been fought in Europe for colonial supremacy in other continents. The unwilling tribes of Africa, Asia, and America who have been suppressed or exterminated to make room for the expanding nations of Europe knew little of the liberty of choice which has now become the beacon of militant morality. The principle--if triumphant--will be destructive of empire based on military force. It will be destructive of war, for war is national compulsion in its most logical and uncompromising form. If there is nothing and nobody to conquer, if you may not use armies to widen your national frontiers, or to procure valuable land for economical exploitation, the incentive to war will be removed. The principle will be constructive of a commonwealth of nations, and empires which have achieved a spiritual unity will survive the change of form.

Nationality may be merely instinctive. It is characterized by the my-country-right-or-wrong attitude, and knows not the difference between Beelzebub and Michael. It is primitive and unreasoning. Nationality may be compulsory--a sore grievance and a bitter reproach to existence. It may be a matter of choice, free and deliberate, a source of joy and social energy. Such nationality--whether inborn or acquired--is the best and safest asset which a State can possess. It is generally supposed that the naturalized subject must be disloyal in a case of conflict between his country of adoption and his country of birth. Such a view assumes that all sense of nationality is of the primitive and unreasoning kind. It precludes all the psychological factors of attraction, education, friendship, adoption, amalgamation. It is ignorant of the fact that some of the bitterest enemies of Germany are Germans, who have left Germany because they could stand her no longer. These men have a much keener knowledge of her weak spots than the visitors who give romantic accounts in newspapers of her internal state. The whole process of naturalization may be rendered unnecessary and undesirable by future developments in international co-operation. As things are, it is a formal and legal confirmation of an allegiance which must exist before the certificate of citizenship is sought. Once given, the certificate should be honoured and the oath respected. To treat it as a scrap of paper is unworthy of a State which upholds constitutional rights. There are doubtless scoundrels amongst naturalized people. It would be strange if there were not. But to proclaim that a naturalized subject cannot love the country of his choice as much as the country of his birth is as rational as the statement that a man cannot love his wife as much as he loves his mother. Now I have touched on a delicate point. He may love his wife, but he must repudiate his mother, curse her, abuse her, disown her. In time of war some do, and some do not. I am not sure that the deepest loyalty is accompanied by the loudest curses.

There is a class of people--I have met them in every country--who are devotees of the simple creed that you should stay at home and not interfere in the affairs of others. Travel you may, with a Baedeker or a Cook's guide, and stay you may in hotels provided for the purpose, but you must do it in a proper way and at proper times, and preserve a strict regard for your national prerogatives. But you should not go and live in countries which are not your own. To such people there is something almost indecent in the thought that any one should deliberately wish to shed his own nationality and clothe himself in another. They form the unintelligent background against which the wild and lurid nationalists of every tribe disport themselves in frenzied movements of hate and antagonism. An irate old colonel (very gouty) said to me the other day: "A man who forgets his duties to his own country and settles in another is a damnable cur. So much for these dirty foreigners who overrun England."

I ventured to remind him that the English have settled in a good many places: in America, in Australia, in spots fair and foul, friendly and unfriendly; that they have brought afternoon tea and sport and Anglican services to the pleasure resorts of Europe and the deserts of Africa. Meeting with no response, I embarked on a short account of the past travels and achievements of the Dutch, the Spaniards, and the French in the art of settlement in foreign lands. I ended up by prophesying that the aeroplane of the future will transport us swiftly from continent to continent and make mincemeat of the last remnants of our national exclusiveness. He was not in the least perturbed. "That is all rubbish," he said; "people ought to stick to their own country."

I am afraid neither he nor anybody else can check the wanderings of individuals and peoples which have gone on ever since man discovered that he has two legs with which he can move about. And naturalization, after all, is an easy way of acquiring new and possibly useful citizens. The subjects come willingly, whilst the millions who are made subjects by war and subjugation are sometimes exceedingly troublesome. After all, the aim of all the great kingdoms has been to increase and strengthen the population, and differences of nationality have been treated as but trifling obstacles in the way. If the principle of free nationality which is now stirring the world and inspiring a war of liberation is to triumph, then the liberty won must include the individuals who prefer a chosen to a compulsory political allegiance.

Sometimes the forces of attraction and repulsion create strong ties of sympathy or lead to acts of repudiation which cross frontiers irrespectively of the indications on the barometer of foreign politics. A man may find his spiritual home in the most unexpected place. He may irresistibly be drawn by the currents of philosophy and art to a foreign country. The customs in his own may drive him to bitter denunciation. No one has said harder things of Germany than Nietzsche. Schopenhauer wished it to be known that he despised the German nation on account of its infinite stupidity, and that he blushed to belong to it. Heine fled from Germany in intellectual despair. "If I were a German," he wrote, "and I am no German...." His heart was captured by the French. Goethe and Frederick the Great were both profoundly influenced by the French spirit. Voltaire was most useful at the Prussian Court, for he corrected the voluminous literary and political output which his Prussian majesty penned--in French. But there was something more than mere utility in the tie between the philosopher and the monarch. Frederick was not only trying to handle heavy German artillery with light French esprit; his mind craved for the spices of Gallic wit, his thought was ever striving to clothe itself in the form of France. Another "great" German, Catherine II of Russia, also moved within the orbit of the French philosophers.

Admiration of Germany and German ways has found the strongest expression in foreigners, and the megalomania from which her sons suffer to-day may be traced to such outbursts of adulation. Carlyle, the most representative of pro-German men of letters in the Victorian era, wrote in 1870:

Alone of nations, Prussia seems still to understand something
of the art of governing, and of fighting enemies to said art.
Germany from of old, has been the peaceablest, most pious, and in
the end most valiant and terriblest of nations. Germany ought to
be the President of Europe, and will again, it seems, be tried
with that office for another five centuries or so.... This is her
_first_ lesson poor France is getting. It is probable she will
require many such.

This is blasphemy indeed at the present time. Charles Kingsley was no less emphatic in his admiration of Germany. Writing on the Franco-Prussian War to Professor Max Müller, he said:

Accept my loving congratulations, my dear Max, to you and your
people. The day which dear Bunsen used to pray, with tears in his
eyes, might not come till the German people were ready, has come,
and the German people are ready. Verily God is just and rules
too; whatever the Press may think to the contrary. My only fear
is lest the Germans should think of Paris, which cannot concern
them, and turn their eyes away from that which does concern
them, the retaking of Alsace (which is their own), and leaving
the Frenchman no foot of the Rhine-bank. To make the Rhine a word
not to be mentioned by the French henceforth ought to be the one
object of wise Germans, and that alone.... I am full of delight
and hope for Germany.

And to Sir Charles Bunbury:

I confess to you that were I a German I should feel it my duty to
my country to send my last son, my last shilling, and after all
my own self, to the war, to get that done which must be done,
done so that it will never need doing again. I trust that I
should be able to put vengeance out of my heart, to forget all
that Germany has suffered for two hundred years past from that
vain, greedy, restless nation, all even which she suffered, women
as well as men, in the late French war.

The attraction of Germany is not only paramount in literature, in Walter Scott and Mill and Matthew Arnold; the superiority of German blood and constitution was an article of faith of the Victorians. The sins of Prussia were forgiven with amazing alacrity. The base attacks on Austria and Denmark evoked no moral indignation. German influence on English life was not only welcomed; historians went so far as to proclaim the identity of England and Germany. Thus Freeman, in a lecture in 1872, stated that "what is Teutonic in us is not merely one element among others, but that it is the very life and essence of our national being...." Houston Chamberlain, in his reverent unravelling of the greatness of the Germanic peoples, is merely carrying on the tradition of the Victorian age. In the application of theories he is a disciple of Gobineau, a Frenchman, who after a profound study of the inequality of the human race became convinced of the superiority and high destiny of Germany. Gobineau and Chamberlain have told the Germans that they are mighty and unconquerable, and the Germans have listened with undisguised pleasure.

Gobineau may be set aside as a professor of a fixed idea. There are other Frenchmen who have paid glowing tribute to Germany. Taine excelled in praise of her intellectual vigour and productivity. Victor Hugo expressed his love and admiration for her people, and confessed to an almost filial feeling for the noble and holy fatherland of thinkers. If he had not been French he would have liked to have been German. Ernest Renan studied Germany, and found her like a temple--so pure, so moral, so touching in her beauty. This reminds us of the many who during the present war, though ostensibly enemies of Germany, spend half their time in proclaiming her perfection and the necessity for immediate imitation of all her ways. Madame de Staël and Michelet expressed high regard for German character and institutions. There are degrees and qualities of attraction and absorption, varying from the amorous surrender with which Lafcadio Hearn took on Japanese form to the bootlicking flattery which Sven Hedin heaps on the Germans. (It is quite futile to seek for an explanation of Hedin's conduct in his Jewish-Prussian descent. He would lackey anywhere. Strindberg dealt faithfully with Hedin's pretensions. Strindberg, alas! is dead, but his exposure of Hedin has been strangely justified.)

Heine is an example of the curious and insistent fascination with which the mind may be drawn to one nationality whilst it is repelled by another. His judgment on England is painful in the extreme:

"It is eight years since I went to London," he writes in the Memoirs, "to make the acquaintance of the language and the people. The devil take the people and their language! They take a dozen words of one syllable into their mouth, chew them, gnaw them, spit them out again, and they call that talking. Fortunately they are by nature rather silent, and although they look at us with gaping mouths, yet they spare us long conversations."

Can anything be more sweeping? Can anything be more untrue? "Fortunately they are by nature rather silent"--imagine the reversed verdict had Heine attended a general election campaign! The unattractiveness of England is softened by the women. "If I can leave England alive, it will not be the fault of the women; they do their best." This is praise indeed, when placed side by side with his dismissal of the women of Hamburg. They are plump, we are told, "but the little god Cupid is to blame, who often sets the sharpest of love's darts to his bow, but from naughtiness or clumsiness shoots too low, and hits the women of Hamburg not in the heart but in the stomach."

France was as delightful as England was doleful:

"My poor sensitive soul," he cries, "that often recoiled in shyness from German coarseness, opened out to the flattering sounds of French urbanity. God gave us our tongues so that we might say pleasant things to our fellow-men.... Sorrows are strangely softened. In the air of Paris wounds are healed quicker than anywhere else; there is something so noble, so gentle, so sweet in the air as in the people themselves."

I suppose the only analogy to such superlative contentment is provided by the phenomenon known as falling in love. Happily we do not all choose the same object of affection. England has a curious way of inspiring either great and lasting love or irritation and positive dislike. There seems to be little or no indifference. I believe love predominates.

From exiled kings to humble refugees, from peripatetic philosophers to indolent aborigines, the testimony of her charm can be gathered. I speak as a victim. I love England with a fervour born of admiration (without admiration no one ever falls in love). I love her ways and her mind, I love her chilly dampness and her hot, glowing fires (attempts to analyse and classify love are always silly). In her thinkers and workers, in her schemes and efforts for social improvement, in her freedom of thought and speech I found my mental _milieu_.

To me England is inexpressibly dear, not because a whole conspiracy of influences--educational, conventional, patriotic--were at work persuading me that she is worthy of affection. I myself discovered her lovableness. Your Chauvinist is always a mere repeater. He is but a member of the Bandar-Log, shouting greatness of which he knows nothing. True love does not need the trumpets of Jingoism. I have no room for lies about England: the truth is sufficient for me. Though I love England, I have affection to spare for other countries. I feel at home in France, in Sweden, in America, in Switzerland. Your Chauvinist will excuse the former affections on account of "blood." Swedish-French by ties of ancestry, such a sense of familiarity is natural when set against my preternatural love of England.

Chauvinism flourishes exceedingly on the soil of national conceit. That conceit is prodigious and universal. The Germans are past-masters in the art of self-glorification, and their pan-German literature is certainly not only bold but ingenious in this respect. Is any one great outside Germany? Very well, let us trace his German origin. It may be remote, it may be hidden by centuries of illusory nationality, but it must be there. France has her apostles of superiority. Their style is more flexible, their pretensions less clumsy, but they neglect no opportunity of seducing us into a belief that France, and France only, is mistress of the human mind. Russia has her fervid declaimers of holy excellence and the superior quality of the Slav character. It does not matter whether the country is great or small, whether it be Montenegro or Cambodia, it always contains souls who feel constrained to give the world a demonstration of their overflowing superiority. Pan-Germanism, pan-Slavism, pan-Magyarism, pan-Anglosaxism, pan-Americanism grow out of such conceit, systematized by professors and sanctified by bishops.

The conceit of nationality often fosters great deeds, and generally finds expression that is more aggressive than intelligent. It takes hold of the most unlikely subjects. It is a potent destroyer of balanced judgment, and will pitilessly make the most solemn men ridiculous. The outbursts of Emerson when under its influence are truly amazing. "If a temperate wise man should look over our American society," he said in a lecture, "I think the first danger which would excite his alarm would be the European influences on this country.... See the secondariness and aping of foreign and English life that runs through this country, in building, in dress, in eating, in books."

This rejection savours of the contempt with which some young men turn their backs on the fathers who fashioned them. "Let the passion for America," he cried, "cast out the passion for Europe. Here let there be what the earth waits for--exalted manhood." He gives a picture of the finished man, the gentleman who will be born in America. He defines the superiority of such a man to the Englishman:

Freer swing his arms; farther pierce his eyes, more forward and
forthright his whole build and rig than the Englishman's, who,
we see, is much imprisoned in his backbone.

It is difficult to surmise the exact meaning of being imprisoned in one's backbone. The possession of plenty of backbone is generally held to be a decided advantage. Emerson may have had special and transcendental prejudices against strongly fashioned vertebræ.

The freaks of nationalism are as remarkable as the freaks of internationalism. There is a constant interplay between the two, and the ascendancy of the one or the other often seems strangely capricious. Nationalism is weak where it should be strong, and rigid where common sense would make it fluid. The painful position of most royal families in time of war is an example of the readiness with which nations submit to foreign rulership and influence. Thrones, one would think, should represent the purely national spirit in its more intimate and sacred aspect. Yet the abundance of crowned rulers, past and present, attached by solemn selection or marriage, who are not by blood and tradition of the people, shows the fallacy of this supposition. Napoleon was an Italian who learnt French with some difficulty, and who was at first hostile to the French and somewhat contemptuous of their ways. Maréchal Bernadotte--French to his finger-tips--became King of Sweden. Pierre Loti, interviewing the charming and beloved Queen of the Belgians during the present war, remembers that the martyred lady before him is a Bavarian princess. The delicate and painful subject is mentioned. "It is at an end," says the Queen; "between _them_ and me has fallen a curtain of iron which will never again be lifted."

Prominent statesmen, who, one would also think, should be bone of the bone of the nations for which they speak, have often been of alien birth or of mixed racial composition. Bismarck was of Slav origin; Beaconsfield was a Jew. The most picturesque example of such irregularities of the national consciousness is perhaps the presence of General Smuts in the War Cabinet. Once the alert and brave enemy in arms against this country, he is now its trusted guide, philosopher, and friend.

Writers whom posterity classes as typical representatives of the national genius have often been of mixed racial strain, as were Tennyson, Browning, Ibsen, Kant, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Longfellow, and Whitman. The "bastards" of internationalism, so offensive to some nationalist fire-eaters, are not produced by the simple and natural processes by which races are mixed. They are self-created, their minds are set on gathering the varied fruit of all the nations. Genealogically they may be as uninteresting as the snail in the cabbage-patch, spiritually they are provocative and arresting. Romain Rolland and George Brandes challenge and outrage the champions of nationalism by the very texture of their minds. Joseph Conrad, a Pole, stands side by side with Thomas Hardy in his mastership of contemporary English fiction. Conrad in his consummate interpretation of sea-life is, if anything, more English than Hardy.

The future of internationalism is possibly fraught with greater wonders than has been the past. The path will certainly not be laid out with the smoothness which some enthusiasts imagine. The idea and the hope are old as the hills. Cicero proclaimed a universal society of the human race. Seneca declared the world to be his country. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius declared themselves citizens of the world. St. Paul explained that there is neither Jew nor Greek. John Wesley looked upon the world as his parish. "The world is my country, mankind are my brothers," said Thomas Paine. "The whole world being only one city," said Goldsmith, "I do not care in which of the streets I happen to reside."

Such complete impartiality is a little too detached for the make-up of present humanity. It may suit an etherialized and mobile race of the future. We are dependent on conditions of space and surroundings, we are the creatures of association and love. The master-problem in internationalism is the elimination of the forces of prejudice and ignorance that foster hostility, and the preservation of the precious characteristics which are the riches of the Soul of the World.

RELIGION IN TRANSITION

The general destructiveness of war is patent to everybody. The destruction of life, of property, of trade, strikes the most superficial observer as inevitable consequences of a state of war. At the outbreak of hostilities most of us foresaw that the uprooting would not stop short at the sacrifices of livelihood and occupation which were demanded by military necessities. We expected a sweeping revision of our habits, our prejudices, our conventions. We have got infinitely more than we expected. Not only have we made acquaintance with the State--the State as a relentless master of human fate and service; not only have we learnt that individualism--philosophic or commercial--is borne like a bubble on the waters of national tribulation and counts for nothing in the mass of collective effort demanded from us. Industry, commerce, art, learning, science, energy, enthusiasm, every gift and power within the range of human capacity, is requisitioned for the efficient pursuit of war. Liberty of action, of speech, ancient rights which were won by centuries of struggle, are taken away because we are more useful and less troublesome without them. We are made parts of the machinery of State, and we have to be drilled and welded into the proper shape.

The changes imposed on us from without are thorough and have been surprisingly many, but the changes taking place within our own souls are deeper and likely to surprise us more in the end. Everything has been found untenable. Theories and systems are shaken by the great upheaval. Civilization has become a question instead of a postulate. All human thought is undergoing a process of retrospection, drawn by a desire to find a new and stable beginning. Take down Spencer and Comte or Lecky and Kidd from your bookshelf and try to settle down to a contented contemplation of the sociological tenets of the past. You will fail, for you will feel that this is a new world with burning problems and compelling facts which cannot be covered by the old systems. Take down the old books of religious comfort--Thomas à Kempis, or Bunyan, or St. Augustine, and you feel their remoteness from the new agonies of soul. But it is not only the old books of piety which fail to satisfy the hunger of to-day; the mass of devotional writings, especially produced to meet the needs of the war, are painfully inadequate. Rightly or wrongly, there is a sense of the inadequacy of the thought of the past to meet the need of the present. It invades every recess of the mind, it interposes itself in science as well as in religion; it leaves us no peace.

There can be no doubt about it: we are blighted by the great destructiveness. All attempts to keep the war from our thoughts are destined to fail. Without being struck in an air-raid or torpedoed on the high seas, there is a sufficiency of destructive force in the daily events and in our accommodation to live on for them or in spite of them.

Hence the universal demand for reconstruction. It is a blessed word: we cling to it, we live by it. So many buildings have tumbled about our ears, so many foundations were nothing but running sand; a whole galaxy of truths turned out to be lies. Now we must prepare that which is solid and indestructible. Perhaps some great and wise spirit brooding over our world, learned with the experience of æons, of human attempts and mistakes, smiles at the deadly earnestness of the intention to reconstruct. I do not care. We have reached a pass when all life and all hope are centred in this faith: the faith that we can make anew and good and beautiful the distorted web of human existence.

The war has not taught us what civilization is. But it has taught us what it is not. We know now that it is not mechanical ingenuity or clever inventions or commercialism carried to its utmost perfection. Civilization is not railways or telephones or vast cities or material prosperity. A satisfactory definition of civilization is well-nigh impossible. The past has born a bewildering number of different types, and it is a matter of personal taste where we place the line of demarcation between barbarism and culture. Our Christian civilization is passing through catastrophic changes, and it is again a matter of opinion whether it is in its death-throes or in the pangs of a new birth. But we feel vaguely, yet insistently, that civilization is a state of the soul; it is the gentle life towards which we aspire. It is based on the gradual substitution of moral and spiritual forces for simple brute force. What is the exact relation of religion to civilization? The answer has been as variable as the purpose of the questioners. To some religion is civilization, to others it is merely a temporary weakness of the human mind, to which it will always be prone from fear of the unknown and the wish to live for ever. Comparative studies of the great religions of the world, their past and present forms, do not support the view that civilization is identical with religion. Religions have on many occasions ranged themselves on the side of brute force to the suppression of gentleness and sympathetic tolerance. It is really all a question of the meaning which we attach to the word "religion." Do we mean the Church, set forms of worship and ceremonial, or do we mean the human craving for spiritual truth with the consequent strife to reach certainty, and, in certainty, peace of soul? There is a gulf between the two conceptions of religion.

Religion is questioned as never heretofore. The great destructiveness is passing over the old beliefs. In the clamour for reconstruction we must clearly distinguish between the wider religious life and mere denominationalism.

The vast host of rationalists are busy proclaiming the downfall of religion. The war serves them as material for demonstration. The failure of Christianity to avert bloodshed, and the horrors under which Christendom is now submerged, are naturally used as a proof that the ethic of Christianity is lamentably feeble. The difference between theoretical Christianity and the social practices which the Church condones is held to be damning evidence of hypocrisy and falsehood. The quarrels between sects and divisions, the petty subjects which rouse the ire of the orthodox mind, the persistent quibbling over insignificant details of faith and service, have strained rationalistic patience to the breaking-point. The Church has been found fiddling whilst Rome burns.

Our little rationalists are right, perfectly right, when they point to the shortcomings of the Churches. But they confuse the form with the substance, the frailties of human nature with the irrepressible desire to find God. They have their small idols and their conventional forms of worship, which, if put to the great social test, would prove as ineffective in building the City of Light as the churchgoing of the past. Their prime deity is Science. We are on the point of developing intelligence, they tell us; we at last see through the silly theories about God and the Universe, which deluded the childish and the ignorant of past ages. Assisted by the sound of guns and the sight of general misery, we must at last realize that there is no God to interfere in the troubles of man, and that Churches and creeds are hopeless failures. Science, we are assured, will take the place of religion.

I am a patient and sympathetic student of the propagandist literature of rationalism. I have the greatest admiration for the moral and social idealism which is advocated. I agree that the atheological moral idea is superior to the mere performance of religious ceremonial. But I cannot admire the reasoning or the intelligence of those who use a smattering of science as evidence of the decay of religion. There is something almost comical in the solemnity with which they contrast the commonplaces of scientific observation with the vast mysteries of religion, to the detriment of the latter. "These marvellous researches of the human eye," writes Sir Harry Johnston in a collection of articles entitled _A Generation of Religious Progress_, presumably intended to portray our rationalistic progress, "so far, though they have sounded the depths of the Universe, have found no God." He is speaking of astronomical investigation, and he has just emphasized the reliability of our five senses.

One wonders whether he is simply echoing the well-known phrase of Laplace, or whether he seriously believes that the non-existence of God is proved by the inability of the human eye to see Him! Nothing could be more unscientific--one hates using that hackneyed expression, but there is no other--than this confidence in the reliability of the senses. It reminds one of the young man who said he could not believe in God because he had not seen Him. He could only believe in things which he could see. "Do you believe you have a brain?" some one asked. The young man did. "And have you seen it?" was the next question.

I shall be told that though the young man could not--fortunately--see his own brain, others might by opening his skull, and that no dissection of brains or examination of stars has ever shown us God. This is exactly the point where our easygoing rationalist misses the mark. Brains and stars do show God to those who have developed the faculties wherewith to perceive Him.

The senses are, after all, very fallible and very variable. A little opium, a little alcohol, a blow on the head, or some great emotion will modify their judgment to an incredible degree. Sir Harry Johnston may not be very representative as an exponent of scientific conclusions about the existence of God, but he is interesting and typical of much of the rough-and-ready opposition to formulated religion. I quote the upshot of his admiration for the feats of the human eye:

Religion, as the conception of a heavenly being, or heavenly
beings, hovering about the earth and concerning themselves
greatly with the affairs of man, has been abolished for all
thoughtful and educated people by the discoveries of science.
Perhaps, however, I should not say "abolished" as being too
final; I should prefer to say that such theories have been put
entirely in the background as unimportant Compared with the awful
problems which affect the welfare and progress of humanity on
this planet.

The honesty of the conviction is not marred by the fact that it is entirely mistaken. "God is infinitely more remote now (in 1916) from the thoughts of the educated few than he was prior to 1859," writes Sir Harry. This statement is not true. Speculation about God, the meaning of life, the social import of Christianity, was never more rife amongst educated people. Here I must check myself: what does "educated" mean? To be able to read and write, and say "Hear, hear" at public meetings? To have a pretty idea of the positions of Huxley and Haeckel by which to confound the poor old Bible? If by education we mean the exposition of some special branch of the physical sciences, the statement may be true. If we mean men and women with a general knowledge of life and letters, with a social consciousness and humanitarian sympathies, it is ridiculously wide of the truth. There is everywhere a hunger for a satisfying explanation of life. There are restlessness and impatience with dogma and creed, there is a growing indifference to the old sectarian exclusiveness, but there is above all a new interest in God. We need not go to Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Wells for testimony to this interest. They reflect the religious renaissance which is the essence of the reconstruction for which men crave. The symptoms are accessible to the observation of all. Neither priestly intolerance nor rationalistic prejudice can suppress them.

In _The Bankruptcy of Religion_, Mr. Joseph McCabe develops the case against religion with the skill of a trained controversialist. Like the converted sinner in the ranks of the Salvation Army, Mr. McCabe carries special weight to the lines of rationalists and ethicists. For he was once a priest and lived in a monastery, and he left the priesthood and the monastery convinced of the worthlessness of both. He is, therefore, _persona gratissima_ at the High Court of Reason. "The era of religious influence closes in bankruptcy," he informs us. He has no patience with attempts at religious reconstruction; he asks us to shake ourselves free of the vanishing dream of heaven and to leave the barren tracts of religion. He exhorts us to abandon the "last illusions of the childhood of the race":

Linger no longer in the "reconstruction" of fables which once
beguiled the Arabs of the desert and the Syrian slaves of
Corinth, but set your hearts and minds to the making of a new
earth! Sweep these ancient legends out of your schools and
colleges, your army and navy, your code of law, your legislative
houses, and substitute for them a spirit of progress, efficiency,
boldness, and candour!

Fine words, brave words, honest words, but hollow within. Mr. McCabe is no psychologist. The fables and legends of old times may be abandoned, the desire for the realities round which fable and legend grow remains and cannot be extirpated by a rationalistic operation. Supernaturalism--in the widest sense--is ineradicable. Religion will not be suspended by the discovery that it is possible to formulate excellent theories of social equity without the assistance of priests. The hunger of the human heart for knowledge of God persists though all the old religious systems may prove illusions.

Our little rationalists imagine that they are hitting the foundations of religion when they successfully assail the crumbling walls of dogmas. Religious life escapes their fire. Faith and hope rise above disillusionment. Love knows instinctively that it is not made of dust. Through the darkness and the wilderness it calls to God, and lo! God responds with light and guidance which outlast earthquakes and massacres. Reject every creed that has been offered as an explanation of the mysteries of life, forsake all the humiliating, joy-killing penances for sin, and God will reveal Himself in the beauty of Nature. He will speak through the impulses of creative art, through music and poetry and painting. He will attract our thought through philosophy and our emotion through the impetus to improve the social order. And science--the greater science, which rejects dogmatism and lies of self-sufficiency as it rejects the crudities of the Creed--takes us by circuitous paths to new temples for the worship of God.