Chapter XII: Part III: Towards the Future

THE NEW OUTLOOK

[Sidenote: The war, a Katharsis for humanity.]

No one dare predict just what the end of this world war will be, or when that end will come. It is possible, of course, that this cataclysm marks the end of centuries of progress, and it is possible that man in 1914 crossed over the watershed of civilization and is now to descend on the other side towards steadily growing barbarism and the steadily extending rule of force. That I say is possible; but I for one am an unconquerable optimist. I prefer to read history differently and to see in this appalling catastrophe what the Greek called a _katharsis_, a cleansing of the spirit. I prefer to think of it as history’s way of teaching beyond peradventure or dispute the fallacy and the folly of the old ways and the old policies. Surely that struggle for the balance of power which the historian Stubbs described as the principle which gives unity to the plot of modern history,—surely that struggle has proved its futility. Surely we can see the vanity of Ententes and Alliances and of a division of the world into heavily armed camps each waiting for an opportunity or for an excuse to pounce upon the other. Surely the international politics of a Palmerston, or a Disraeli, or a Bismarck, striking and splendid as they were in their own way,—surely those policies are put behind us and are outgrown forever.

A democratic federated people can teach the world democracy and the use of the federative principle. A people devoted to civil liberty and to international honor, no less lightly held than the honor of an individual—that people can teach the world the foundations upon which to rebuild the shattered fabric of international law and of broken treaties.

[Sidenote: We must think internationally!]

The outlook before the people of the United States has changed. When Joseph Chamberlain returned from South Africa his message to the people of Great Britain was: “You must learn to think imperially.” The message which any American alive to the world’s situation to-day must bring to his fellow citizens is, you must learn to think internationally! Domestic policies and problems are perhaps no less important than they have been in the past, but by their side and for the immediate future surpassing them in interest and in importance are the international problems and the international policies of the people of the United States. For those problems and for those policies we must prepare—prepare thoughtfully, seriously, speedily; for when the war shall be ended, we may truly say, as Gambetta said to the French people forty-five years ago, “Now that the danger is past, the difficulties begin.”

_Nicholas Murray Butler, Address at 147th Annual Banquet of Chamber
of Commerce of the State of New York, Nov. 18, 1915._

ABOVE THE BATTLE

[Sidenote: The tragedy and heroism of self-sacrificing youth!]

O young men that shed your blood with so generous a joy for the starving earth! O heroism of the world! What a harvest for destruction to reap under this splendid summer sun! Young men of all nations, brought into conflict by a common ideal, making enemies of those who should be brothers; all of you, marching to your death, are dear to me. Slavs, hastening to the aid of your race; Englishmen fighting for honor and right; intrepid Belgians who dared to oppose the Teutonic colossus, and defend against him the Thermopylæ of the West; Germans fighting to defend the philosophy and the birthplace of Kant against the Cossack avalanche; and you, above all, my young compatriots, in whom the generation of heroes of the Revolution lives again; you, who for years have confided your dreams to me, and now, on the verge of battle, bid me a sublime farewell....

O my friends, may nothing mar your joy! Whatever fate has in store, you have risen to the pinnacle of earthly life, and borne your country with you. And you will be victorious. Your self-sacrifice, your courage, your whole-hearted faith in your sacred cause, and the unshaken certainty that, in defending your invaded country, you are defending the liberty of the world—all this assures me of your victory, young armies of the Marne and Meuse, whose names are graven henceforth in history by the side of your elders of the Great Republic. Yet even had misfortune decreed that you should be vanquished, and with you France itself, no people could have aspired to a more noble death. It would have crowned the life of that great people of the Crusades—it would have been their supreme victory. Conquerors or conquered, living or dead, rejoice! As one of you said to me, embracing me on the terrible threshold: “A splendid thing it is to fight with clean hands and a pure heart, and to dispense divine justice with one’s life.”

[Sidenote: But have the leaders done their duty by you!]

You are doing your duty, but have others done theirs? Let us be bold and proclaim the truth to the elders of these young men, to their moral guides, to their religious and secular leaders, to the Churches, the great thinkers, the leaders of socialism; these living riches, these treasures of heroism you held in your hands; for what are you squandering them? What ideal have you held up to the devotion of these youths so eager to sacrifice themselves? Their mutual slaughter! A European war! A sacrilegious conflict which shows a maddened Europe ascending its funeral pyre, and, like Hercules, destroying itself with its own hands!

And thus the three greatest nations of the West, the guardians of civilization, rush headlong to their ruin, calling in to their aid Cossacks, Turks, Japanese, Cingalese, Soudanese, Senegalese, Moroccans, Egyptians, Sikhs and Sepoys—barbarians from the poles and those from the equator, souls and bodies of all colors. It is as if the four quarters of the Roman Empire at the time of the Tetrarchy had called upon the barbarians of the whole universe to devour each other.

Is our civilization so solid that you do not fear to shake the pillars on which it rests? Can you not see that all falls in upon you if one column be shattered? Could you not have learned if not to love one another, at least to tolerate the great virtues and the great vices of each other? Was it not your duty to attempt—you have never attempted it in sincerity—to settle amicably the questions which divided you, the problem of peoples annexed against their will, the equitable division of productive labor and the riches of the world? Must the stronger forever darken the others with the shadow of his pride, and the others forever unite to dissipate it? Is there no end to this bloody and puerile sport, in which the partners change about from century to century—no end, until the whole of humanity is exhausted thereby?

[Sidenote: The cowardice of fatalism!]

The rulers who are the criminal authors of these wars dare not accept the responsibility for them. Each one by underhand means seeks to lay the blame at the door of his adversary. The peoples who obey them submissively resign themselves with the thought that a power higher than mankind has ordered it thus. Again the venerable refrain is heard: “The fatality of war is stronger than our wills.” The old refrain of the herd that makes a god of its feebleness and bows down before him. Man has invented fate, that he may make it responsible for the disorders of the universe, those disorders which it was his duty to regulate. There is no fatality! The only fatality is what we desire; and more often, too, what we do not desire enough. Let each now repeat his _mea culpa_. The leaders of thought, the Church, the Labor Parties did not desire war.... That may be.... What then did they do to prevent it? What are they doing to put an end to it? They are stirring up the bonfire, each one bringing his fagot.

The most striking feature in this monstrous epic, the fact without precedent, is the unanimity for war in each of the nations engaged. An epidemic of homicidal fury, which started in Tokio ten years ago, has spread like a wave and overflowed the whole world. None has resisted it; no high thought has succeeded in keeping out of the reach of this scourge. A sort of demoniacal irony broods over this conflict of the nations, from which, whatever its result, only a mutilated Europe can emerge. For it is not racial passion alone which is hurling millions of men blindly one against another, so that not even neutral countries remain free of the dangerous thrill, but all the forces of the spirit, of reason, of faith, of poetry, and of science, all have placed themselves at the disposal of the armies in every State. There is not one amongst the leaders of thought in each country who does not proclaim with conviction that the cause of his people is the cause of God, the cause of liberty and of human progress. And I, too, proclaim it.

Strange combats are being waged between metaphysicians, poets, historians—Eucken against Bergson; Hauptmann against Maeterlinck; Rolland against Hauptmann; Wells against Bernard Shaw. Kipling and D’Annunzio, Dehmel and de Régnier sing war hymns, Barrès and Maeterlinck chant pæans of hatred. Between a fugue of Bach and the organ which thunders _Deutschland über Alles_, Wundt, the aged philosopher of eighty-two, calls with his quavering voice the students of Leipzig to the holy war. And each nation hurls at the other the name “Barbarians....”

[Sidenote: Come! Let us make a stand!]

Come, friends! Let us make a stand! Can we not resist this contagion, whatever its nature and virulence be—whether moral epidemic or cosmic force? Do we not fight against the plague, and strive even to repair the disaster caused by an earthquake? Or must we bow ourselves before it, agreeing with Luzzatti in his famous article that “_In the universal disaster, the nations triumph_”? Shall we say with him that it is good and reasonable that “the demon of international war, which mows down thousands of beings, should be let loose,” so that the great and simple truth, “love of our country,” be understood? It would seem, then, that love of our country can flourish only through the hatred of other countries and the massacre of those who sacrifice themselves in the defense of them. There is in this theory a ferocious absurdity, a Neronian dilettantism which repels me to the very depths of my being. No! Love of my country does not demand that I shall hate and slay those noble and faithful souls who also love theirs, but rather that I should honor them and seek to unite with them for our common good....

[Sidenote: We are at heart all brothers!]

There was no reason for war between the Western nations; French, English, and German, we are all brothers and do not hate one another. The war-preaching press is envenomed by a minority, a minority vitally interested in maintaining these hatreds; but our peoples, I know, ask for peace and liberty and that alone. The real tragedy, to one situated in the midst of the conflict and able to look down from the high plateaus of Switzerland into all the hostile camps, is the patent fact that actually each of the nations is being menaced in its dearest possessions—in its honor, its independence, its life. Who has brought these plagues upon them? Brought them to the desperate alternative of overwhelming their adversary or dying? None other than their governments, and above all, in my opinion, the three great culprits, the three rapacious eagles, the three empires, the tortuous policy of the house of Austria, the ravenous greed of Czarism, the brutality of Prussia. The worst enemy of each nation is not without, but within its frontiers, and none has the courage to fight against it. It is the monster of a hundred heads, the monster named Imperialism, the will to pride and domination, which seeks to absorb all, or subdue all, or break all, and will suffer no greatness except itself. For the Western nations Prussian imperialism is the most dangerous. Its hand uplifted in menace against Europe has forced us to join in arms against this outcome of a military and feudal caste, which is the curse not only of the rest of the world but also of Germany itself, whose thought it has subtly poisoned. We must destroy this first: but not this alone; the Russian autocracy too will have its turn. Every nation to a greater or less extent has an imperialism of its own, and whether it be military, financial, feudal, republican, social, or intellectual, it is always the octopus sucking the best blood of Europe. Let the free men of all the countries of Europe when this war is over take up again the motto of Voltaire: “_Ecrasons l’infâme!_”

[Sidenote: Not revenge, but the re-establishment of justice!]

When the war is over! The evil is done now, the torrent let loose and we cannot force it back into its channel unaided. Moreover crimes have been committed against right, attacks on the liberties of peoples and on the sacred treasuries of thought, which must and will be expiated. Europe cannot pass over unheeded the violence done to the noble Belgian people, the devastation of Malines and Louvain, sacked by modern Tillys.... But in the name of heaven let not these crimes be expiated by similar crimes! Let not the hideous words “vengeance” and “retaliation” be heard; for a great nation does not revenge itself, it re-establishes justice. But let those in whose hands lies the execution of justice show themselves worthy of her to the end.

It is our duty to keep this before them; nor will we be passive and wait for the fury of this conflict to spend itself. Such conduct would be unworthy of us who have such a task before us....

[Sidenote: Take risks for the honor of humanity!]

The neutral countries are too much effaced. Confronted by unbridled force they are inclined to believe that opinion is defeated in advance, and the majority of thinkers in all countries share their pessimism. There is a lack of courage here as well as of clear thinking. For just at this time the power of opinion is immense. The most despotic of governments, even though marching to victory, trembles before public opinion and seeks to court it. Nothing shows this more clearly than the efforts of both parties engaged in war, of their ministers, chancellors, sovereigns, of the Kaiser himself turned journalist, to justify their own crimes, and denounce the crimes of their adversary at the invisible tribunal of humanity. Let this invisible tribunal be seen at last, let us venture to constitute it. Ye know not your moral power, O ye of little faith! If there be a risk, will you not take it for the honor of humanity? What is the value of life when you have saved it at the price of all that is worth living for?...

_Et propter vitam, vivendi perdere causas_....

But for us, the artists and poets, priests and thinkers of all countries, remains another task. Even in time of war it remains a crime for finer spirits to compromise the integrity of their thought; it is shameful to see it serving the passion of a puerile, monstrous policy of race, a policy scientifically absurd—since no country possesses a race wholly pure. Such a policy, as Renan points out in his beautiful letter to Strauss, “_can only lead to zoological wars, wars of extermination, similar to those in which various species of rodents and carnivorous beasts fight for their existence. This would be the end of that fertile admixture called humanity, composed as it is of such various necessary elements._” Humanity is a symphony of great collective souls; and he who understands and loves it only by destroying a part of those elements, proves himself a barbarian and shows his idea of harmony to be no better than the idea of order another held in Warsaw.

[Sidenote: We are builders of the City of God!]

For the finer spirits of Europe there are two dwelling-places: our earthly fatherland, and that other City of God. Of the one we are the guests, of the other the builders. To the one let us give our lives and our faithful hearts; but neither family, friend, nor fatherland, nor aught that we love has power over the spirit. The spirit is the light. It is our duty to lift it above tempests, and thrust aside the clouds which threaten to obscure it; to build higher and stronger, dominating the injustice and hatred of nations, the walls of that city wherein the souls of the whole world may assemble.

I feel here how the generous heart of Switzerland is thrilled, divided between sympathies for the various nations, and lamenting that it cannot choose freely between them, nor even express them. I understand its torment; but I know that this is salutary. I hope it will rise thence to that superior joy of a harmony of races, which may be a noble example for the rest of Europe. It is the duty of Switzerland now to stand in the midst of the tempest, like an island of justice and of peace, where, as in the great monasteries of the early Middle Ages, the spirit may find a refuge from unbridled force; where the fainting swimmers of all nations, those who are weary of hatred, may persist, in spite of all the wrongs they have seen and suffered, in loving all men as their brothers.

I know that such thoughts have little chance of being heard to-day. Young Europe, burning with the fever of battle, will smile with disdain and show its fangs like a young wolf. But when the access of fever has spent itself, wounded and less proud of its voracious heroism, it will come to itself again.

Moreover I do not speak to convince it. I speak but to solace my conscience ... and I know that at the same time I shall solace the hearts of thousands of others who, in all countries, cannot or dare not speak themselves.

_Romain Rolland, in Journal de Genève, September 15, 1914._

THE NEW IDEALISM

[Sidenote: Germany wishes lasting peace.]

What wishes may we have for the future? What tasks and what prospects does the New Year unroll before us? Naturally, our first wish is for a decisive victory,—a victory which will bring us an honorable peace. A discussion of how the conditions of peace should be drawn up seems to us premature, in fact it runs counter to our feeling; for we are still too much under the tension and excitement of the fight to pursue such thoughts. However, it may be said that the German people unanimously desire a settlement which will guarantee a lasting peace and which will prevent further wars. Moreover, the wish is general that, when it is time for peace negotiations, not only professional diplomats, but also representatives of the various professions and industries shall be consulted. Just as war is an affair of the whole people, so, in its conclusion, the voice of the whole people should have due weight.

[Sidenote: Life must be reinvigorated after the war.]

Closely bound up with the desire for an honorable peace is the hope that the mighty spiritual movement, which the war has called forth, may continue to influence German life after the war. This war must be the starting-point of a new epoch. The tremendous sacrifices which it entails will be justified only in case new life comes forth out of loss and death and the achievements of the moment are transformed into permanent gain. In this connection we think, first of all, of the wonderful consciousness of unity which the war has awakened. The long history of the German people furnishes no counterpart of such a unity of sentiment as we enjoy to-day. We must now see to it that this unanimity of purpose is deeply implanted in German life. Since, through common effort, so much has been accomplished during the war, when peace has been re-established, no one should be prevented from cooperating in the solution of our common tasks. In the future there should be no discrimination on account of political partisanship, whether in the pursuit of a profession or in the holding of a public office.

But especially must we hope that the sense of belonging together, the sense of being dependent on each other, the sense of being under obligation to each other will persist beyond the war into peace. It is, however, not only for the feelings of the individuals, but also for our national life, that we should seek to win lasting gain from the storms of the present. All the earnestness and all the mighty force, which we have now exerted, must be used in an energetic fight against all that has threatened to lower our standards of life.

Such a reinvigoration of German idealism parallels a similar movement which has spread throughout the whole of humanity. Old forms of life have often been found too narrow; they have, moreover, frequently lost their basis in our minds. Therefore, the position of man in the universe has seemed obscure and the purpose of his life has become very uncertain. On the other hand, there now awakens a deep longing for the restrengthening, deepening and inner renewal of life.

[Sidenote: German life must not be narrowly national.]

As Germans, we must consider our attitude towards the world of as much importance as our attitude towards ourselves. We must not allow ourselves to indulge in a narrow national life. We must not, and shall not, have a false racial pride. On the contrary, we must ceaselessly broaden our lives, steadily preserving our inter-relations with all mankind. Our great nation cannot attain its proper level without keeping the whole of humanity in mind. We wish to think highly enough of ourselves to believe that we are capable of drawing to ourselves everything great and good, that has arisen or shall arise anywhere, so that we may use it in building up the ethical civilization (Wesenkultur) which our nature demands.

_Rudolf Eucken, “German Thoughts and Wishes for the New Year, 1915.”_

THE FUTURE OF PATRIOTISM

[Sidenote: Patriotism is a retreat to what seems secure and protecting.]

There is another way of looking at this matter which will appeal to those who are speculating upon the future of mankind. Any one who thinks about the possibility of a world state is stopped to-day by the fact that there is no world patriotism to support it. How are we to transfer allegiance from the national to the international State?

The answer depends upon an analysis of nationality. I have described it as a retreat to the authority and flavor of our earliest associations, as a defensive-offensive reaction to what seems to us secure. Our loyalty turns to what we associate with our protection and our ambitions. The reason we are not loyal to mankind in general or to The Hague or to internationalism is that these conceptions are cold and abstract beside the warmth of the country and place where we were born. Impressed by the fear of Russian invasion, the internationalism of German socialists vanished. Internationalism offered no protection. The German army did. To be a German was to be part of a tangible group with power; to be a citizen of the world was to be homeless everywhere.

[Sidenote: Patriotism cries to-day for expansion.]

And yet we find Canadians and Australians and New Zealanders fighting and dying for a thing called the British Empire, a vague, formless organization of one-quarter of the human race. What is it that has produced this super-national patriotism? Nothing less, it seems to me, than a realization that the protection and growth of the Dominions is bound up with the strength of the Empire. Home is the place where you are safe; loyalty reaches back to the source of your security. That is why danger has welded the British Empire instead of disintegrating it.

Imagine the Empire shattered, its navy gone, and the Dominions left to fetch for themselves. What would Canada and Australia do? They would, it seems to me, develop a great loyalty to the United States. They would not face the world alone. They would have to find some larger political organization in which they could feel secure.

In other words, loyalty overflows the national State because in the world to-day the national State is no longer a sufficient protection. People have got to a point in their development where isolation terrifies them. They want to be members of a stronger group. In Europe they turned to a system of alliances because no nation dared to stand alone. We have turned in this country in part to an understanding with Great Britain, in part to the Latin-American States. All of which proves that patriotism is not a fixed quantity, that it is not attached to the map as it was drawn when we were at school, and that it is not only capable of expansion, but is crying for it.

Fear has almost always played a large part in welding States together. The fear of England was a great argument for federal union under our Constitution; the sense of weakness in the presence of unfriendly neighbors undoubtedly helped to break down the separatism of the little German principalities. Just as the appearance of an enemy tends to blot out political differences within a nation, so it will often unite a number of nations. The rise of Germany had that effect on the Great Powers of Europe; the fear of her created a league almost coextensive with western civilization. It covered up the feud between France and England which comes down through the centuries; it jolted together an understanding with Russia, the great bogy of liberals.

It is not pleasant to think of fear as one of the most powerful forces that unify mankind. It would be more gratifying to think that cooperation was always spontaneous and free. But the facts will not justify this belief. The inner impulse to compose differences seems often to work most actively when there is pressure from without. Forced by danger to cooperate, men seem to discover the advantages of cooperation. The Germans are daily discovering good qualities in the Turks; the British are seeing deeper into the souls of Russians....

The only way in which, world organization can command a world patriotism is by proving its usefulness. If it affords a protection and produces a prosperity such as the national State cannot produce, it will begin to draw upon the emotions of men. If they are capable of loving anything so abstract and complicated as the British Empire, or even the United States, they are not incapable of attaching themselves to a still larger State. For the moment it was evident that patriotism could embrace something more extensive and abstract than a village which a man might know personally, world organization ceased to be an idle dream. If men could be citizens of an empire scattered over all the seas, there was no longer anything inconceivable about their becoming citizens of a State which covered modern civilization. The idea has ceased to be a psychological impossibility.

[Sidenote: Problem is to broaden the basis of loyalty.]

Our problem is to broaden the basis of loyalty. And for that task we have considerable experience to guide us. Within a hundred and twenty-five years we have seen the welding together of the United States, Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary. We have seen small rival States converted into members of federal unions. We have watched patriotism expand from the local unit to the larger one. We have seen Massachusetts patriots converted into American patriots, Bavarians into Germans, Venetians into Italians. In the last few years we have been witnessing the growth of an imperial patriotism within the British Empire.

[Sidenote: Loyalty will not stop at existing frontiers.]

There is, so far as I can see, not the least ground for supposing that the broadening of loyalty must stop at the existing frontiers. The task of the great unifiers, like Hamilton, Cavour, and Bismarck, looked just as difficult in their day as ours does now. They had States’ rights, sovereignty, traditional jealousy, and economic conflicts to overcome. They conquered them. Who dares to say that we must fail?...

Loyalty is a fluctuating force, not attached by any necessity to some one spot on the map or contained within some precise frontier. Loyalty seeks an authority to which it can be loyal, and when it finds an authority which gives security and progress and opportunity it fastens itself there. The problem of world organization is to attach enough loyalty to the immature World State to enable it to weather the inevitable attacks.

_Walter Lippmann, “The Stakes of Diplomacy,” pp. 172-188._

THE FUTURE OF CIVILIZATION

[Sidenote: Our task is to extend the sphere of Law.]

What hopes dare we cherish, in this hour of conflict, for the future of civilization?

The great, the supreme task of human politics and statesmanship is to extend the sphere of Law. Let others labor to make men cultured or virtuous or happy. These are the tasks of the teacher, the priest, and the common man. The statesman’s task is simpler. It is to enfold them in a jurisdiction which will enable them to live the life of their soul’s choice. The State, said the Greek philosophers, is the foundation of the good life; but its crown rises far above mere citizenship. “There where the State ends,” cries Nietzsche, echoing Aristotle and the great tradition of civilized political thought, “there _men begin_. There, where the State ends, look thither, my brothers! Do you not see the rainbow and the bridge to the Overman?” Ever since organized society began, the standards of the individual, the ideals of priest and teacher, the doctrines of religion and morality, have outstripped the practise of statesmanship. For the polestar of the statesman has not been love, but law. His not the task of exhorting men to love one another, but the simpler duty of enforcing the law, “Thou shalt not kill.” And in that simple, strenuous, necessary task statesmen and political thinkers have watched the slow extension of the power of Law, from the family to the tribe, from the tribe to the city, from the city to the nation, from the nation to the Commonwealth. When will Law take its next extension? When will warfare, which is murder between individuals and “rebellion” between groups of citizens, be equally preventable between nations by the common law of the world?

The answer is simple. When the world has a common will, and has created a common government to express and enforce that will.

[Sidenote: The World is already one great Society.]

In the sphere of science and invention, of industry and economics, as Norman Angell and others have taught us, the world is already one Great Society. For the merchant, the banker, and the stockbroker political frontiers have been broken down. Trade and industry respond to the reactions of a single, world-wide, nervous system. Shocks and panics pass as freely as airmen over borders and custom-houses. And not “big business” only, but the humblest citizen, in his search for a livelihood, finds himself caught in the meshes of the same world-wide network. “The widow who takes in washing,” says Graham Wallas, in his deep and searching analysis of our contemporary life, “fails or succeeds according to her skill in choosing starch or soda or a wringing machine under the influence of half a dozen competing world-schemes of advertisement.... The English factory girl who is urged to join her Union, the tired old Scotch gatekeeper with a few pounds to invest, the Galician peasant when the emigration agent calls, the artisan in a French provincial town whose industry is threatened by a new invention, all know that unless they find their way among world-wide facts, which only reach them through misleading words, they will be crushed.” The Industrial Revolution of the past century, steam-power and electricity, the railway and the telegraph, have knit mankind together, and made the world one place.

[Sidenote: But it lacks a common will and emotion.]

But this new Great Society is as yet formless and inarticulate. It is not only devoid of common leadership and a common government; it lacks even the beginnings of a common will, a common emotion, and a common consciousness. Of the Great Society, consciously or unconsciously, we must all perforce be members; but of the Great State, the great World-Commonwealth, we do not yet discern the rudiments. The economic organization of the world has outstripped the development of its citizenship and government—the economic man, with his far-sighted vision and scientific control of the resources of the world, must sit by and see the work of his hands laid in ashes by contending governments and peoples. No man can say how many generations must pass before the platitudes of the market and the exchange pass into the current language of politics.

In the great work which lies before the statesmen and peoples of the world for the extension of law and common citizenship and prevention of war there are two parallel lines of advance.

[Sidenote: The ideal of Inter-State Law must be revived.]

One road lies through the development of what is known as International, but should more properly be called _Inter-State Law_, through the revival, on a firmer and broader foundation, of the Concert of Europe conceived by the Congress of Vienna just a hundred years ago—itself a revival, on a secular basis, of the great medieval ideal of an international Christendom, held together by Christian Law and Christian ideals. That ideal faded away forever at the Reformation, which grouped Europe into independent sovereign States ruled by men responsible to no one outside their own borders. It will never be revived on an ecclesiastical basis. Can we hope for its revival on a basis of modern democracy, modern nationality, and modern educated public opinion? Can Inter-State Law, hitherto a mere shadow of the majestic name it bears, almost a matter of convention and etiquette, with no permanent tribunal to interpret it, and no government to enforce it, be enthroned with the necessary powers to maintain justice between the peoples and governments of the world?

Such a Law the statesmen of Great Britain and Russia sought to impose on Europe in 1815, to maintain a state of affairs which history has shown to have been intolerable to the European peoples. There are those who hope that the task can be resumed, on a better basis, at the next Congress. “Shall we try again,” writes Professor Gilbert Murray, “to achieve Castlereagh’s and Alexander’s ideal of a permanent Concert, pledged to make collective war upon the peace-breaker? Surely we must. We must, at all cost and in spite of all difficulties, because the alternative means such unspeakable failure. We must learn to agree, we civilized nations of Europe, or else we must perish. I believe that the chief counsel of wisdom here is to be sure to go far enough. We need a permanent Concert, perhaps a permanent Common Council, in which every awkward problem can be dealt with before it has time to grow dangerous, and in which outvoted minorities must accustom themselves to giving way.”

[Sidenote: Peace will be based on Law.]

Other utterances by public men, such as Mr. Roosevelt and our own Prime Minister, might be cited in the same sense; but Professor Murray’s has been chosen because he has the courage to grasp the nettle. In his words the true position is quite clearly set forth. If Inter-State Law is to become a reality we must “be sure to go far enough.” There is no half-way house between Law and no Law, between Government and no Government, between Responsibility and no Responsibility. If the new Concert is to be effective it must be able to compel the submission of all “awkward problems” and causes of quarrel to its permanent Tribunal at The Hague or elsewhere; and it must be able to enforce the decision of its tribunal, employing for the purpose, if necessary, the armed forces of the signatory Powers as an international police. “Outvoted minorities must accustom themselves to giving way.” It is a bland and easy phrase; but it involves the whole question of world-government. “Men must accustom themselves not to demand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” the earliest law-givers might have said, when the State first intervened between individuals to make itself responsible for public order. Peace between the Powers, as between individuals, is, no doubt, a habit to which cantankerous Powers “must accustom themselves.” But they will be sure to do so if there is a Law, armed with the force to be their schoolmaster towards peaceable habits. In other words, they will do so because they have surrendered one of the most vital elements in the independent life of a State—the right of conducting its own policy—to the jurisdiction of a higher Power. An Inter-State Concert, with a Judiciary of its own and an army and navy under its own orders, is, in fact, not an Inter-State Concert at all; it is a new State: it is, in fact, the World-State. There is no middle course between Law and no Law: and the essence of Statehood, as we have seen, is a Common Law....

In discussing proposals for a European Council, then, we must be quite sure to face all that it means. But let us not reject Professor Murray’s suggestion off-hand because of its inherent difficulties: for that men should be discussing such schemes at all marks a significant advance in our political thought. Only let us be quite clear as to what they presuppose. They presuppose the supremacy, in the collective mind of civilized mankind, of Law over Force, a definite supremacy of what may be called the civilian as against the military ideal, not in a majority of States, but in every State powerful enough to defy coercion. They presuppose a world map definitely settled on lines satisfactory to the national aspirations of the peoples. They presuppose a _status quo_ which is not simply maintained, like that after 1815, because it is a legal fact and its disturbance would be inconvenient to the existing rulers, but because it is inherently equitable. They presuppose a similar democratic basis of citizenship and representation among the component States. They presuppose, lastly, an educated public opinion incomparably less selfish, less ignorant, less unsteady, less materialistic, and less narrowly national than has been prevalent hitherto. Let us work and hope for these things: let us use our best efforts to remove misunderstandings and promote a sense of common responsibilities and common trusteeship for civilization between the peoples of all the various sovereign States; but meanwhile let us work also, with better hopes of immediate if less ambitious successes, along the other parallel road of advance.

[Sidenote: We must work for “The Principle of the Commonwealth.”]

The other road may seem, in this hour of dreams and disaster, of extremes of hope and disillusionment, a long and tedious track: it is the old slow high road of civilization, not the short cut across the fields. It looks forward to abiding results, not through the mechanical cooperation of governments, but through the growth of an organic citizenship, through the education of the nations themselves to a sense of common duty and a common life. It looks forward, not to the definite establishment, in our day, of the World-State, but only to the definite refutation of the wicked theory of the mutual incompatibility of nations. It looks forward to the expression in the outward order of the world’s government of what we may call “the Principle of the Commonwealth,” of Lord Acton’s great principle of the State composed of free nations, of the State as a living body which lives through the organic union and free activity of its several national members. And it finds its immediate field of action in the deepening and extension of the obligations of citizenship among the peoples of the great, free, just, peace-loving, supra-national Commonwealths whose patriotism has been built up, not by precept and doctrine, but on a firm foundation of older loyalties.

[Sidenote: This is a world-principle.]

The principle of the Commonwealth is not a European principle: it is a world-principle. It does not proceed upon the expectation of a United States of Europe; for all the Great Powers of Europe except Austria-Hungary (and some of the smaller, such as Holland, Belgium, and Portugal) are extra-European Powers also. Indeed if we contract our view, with Gladstone and Bismarck and the statesmen of the last generation, to European issues alone, we shall be ignoring the chief political problem of our age—the contact of races and nations with wide varieties of social experience and at different levels of civilization. It is this great and insistent problem (call it the problem of East and West, or the problem of the color-line) in all its difficult ramifications, political, social, and, above all, economic, which makes the development of the principle of the Commonwealth the most pressing political need of our age. For the problems arising out of the contact of races and nations can never be adjusted either by the wise action of individuals or by conflict and warfare; they can only be solved by fair and deliberate statesmanship within the bosom of a single State, through the recognition by both parties of a higher claim than their own sectional interest—the claim of a common citizenship and the interest of civilization. It is here, in the union and collaboration of diverse races and peoples, that the principle of the Commonwealth finds its peculiar field of operation. Without this principle, and without its expression, however imperfect, in the British Empire, the world would be in chaos to-day.

We cannot predict the political development of the various Great Powers who between them control the destinies of civilization. We cannot estimate the degree or the manner in which France, freed at last from nearer preoccupations, will seek to embody in her vast dominion the great civilizing principles for which her republic stands. We cannot foretell the issue of the conflict of ideas which has swayed to and fro in Russia between the British and the Prussian method of dealing with the problem of nationality. Germany, Italy, Japan—here, too, we are faced by enigmas. One other great Commonwealth remains besides the British. Upon the United States already lies the responsibility, voluntarily assumed and, except during a time of internal crisis, successfully discharged, of securing peace from external foes for scores of millions of inhabitants of the American continent. Yet with the progress of events her responsibilities must yearly enlarge: for both the immigrant nationalities within and the world-problems without her borders seem to summon her to a deeper education and to wider obligations.

[Sidenote: The responsibility of the British Commonwealth to hold the scales of Peace, and to bring home to all the meaning of Law.]

But upon the vast, ramifying, and inchoate Commonwealth of Great Britain lies the heaviest responsibility. It is a task unequally shared between those of her citizens who are capable of discharging it. Her task within the Commonwealth is to maintain the common character and ideals and to adjust the mutual relations of one quarter of the human race. Her task without is to throw her weight into the scales of peace, and to uphold and develop the standard and validity of inter-State agreements. It is a task which requires, even at this time of crisis, when, by the common sentiment of her citizens, the real nature and purpose of the Commonwealth have become clear to us, the active thoughts of all political students. For to bring home to all within her borders who bear rule and responsibility, from the village headman in India and Nigeria, the Basutu chief and the South Sea potentate, to the public opinion of Great Britain and the self-governing Dominions, the nature of the British Commonwealth, and the character of its citizenship and ideals, and to study how those ideals may be better expressed in its working institutions and executive government—that is a task to which the present crisis beckons the minds of British citizens, a task which Britain owes not only to herself but to mankind.

_Alfred E. Zimmern, “The War and Democracy,” pp. 371-382._

TOWARDS THE PEACE THAT SHALL LAST

[Sidenote: War must pass away like human sacrifice.]

At every stage of warfare in the past, men and women in all nations have endeavored to abate and lessen it. Their repeated endeavors have been answered by repeated wars, until the present war in Europe completes the works of death, desolation, and tyranny.

In spite of this, these protests against war are destined to succeed; as once before in the history of the race, the sentiment of pity, of respect for human life, called a halt to senseless slaughter.

There came a time in the history of the Greek and Jewish people when a few set their faces against _human sacrifice as a religious rite_ of their highest faith,—bound up, like our wars, with old fealties and solemn customs and with their most desperate fears. Humble men and women, out of sheer affection for their kind, revolted. In face of persecution and ridicule, they warned their countrymen that in pouring human blood upon altars to the gods, they wrought upon their kind more irreparable wrong than any evil against which they sought to forefend. Finally, there came to be enough people with courage and pity sufficient to carry a generation with them; and human sacrifice became a thing of the past.

It took the human race many centuries to rid itself of human sacrifice; during many centuries more it relapsed again and again in periods of national despair. So have we fallen back into warfare, and perhaps will fall back again and again, until in self-pity, in self-defense, in self-assertion of the right of life, not as hitherto, a few, but the _whole people of the world_, will brook this thing no longer.

OUR RIGHT TO PROTEST

[Sidenote: We have a right to protest against war.]

By that opportunity, now ours as never before, to weigh the case against war and to draw the counts from burning words spoken by those who protest and who are of all peoples—_we make single judgment and complete indictment_.

By that good fortune which has placed us outside the conflict; by that ill fortune by which the belligerent and his rights have heretofore bestrode the world; by mine-strewn channels, and by international codes which offer scant redress—_we speak as people of a neutral nation_.

By the unemployed of our water-fronts, and the augmented misery of our cities; by the financial depression which has curtailed our school building and crippled our works of good-will; by the sluicing of human impulse among us from channels of social development to the back-eddies of salvage and relief—_we have a right to speak_.

By the hot anger and civil strife that we have known; by our pride, vain-glory, and covetousness; by the struggles we have made for national integrity and defense of our hearthstones; by our consciousness that every instinct and motive and ideal at work in this war, however lofty or however base, has had some counterpart in our national history and our current life—_we can speak a common language_.

By that comradeship among nations which has made for mutual understanding; by those inventions which have bound us in communication and put the horrors of war at our doors; by the mechanical contrivances which multiply and intensify those horrors; by the quickening human sympathies which have made us sensitive to the hurts of others—_we can speak as fellow-victims of this great oppression_.

By our heritage from each embattled nation; by our debt to them for languages and faiths and social institutions; for science, scholarship and invention; by the broken and desolated hearts that will come to us when the war ends; by our kinships and our unfeigned friendships—_we can speak as brothers_.

By all these things, we hold the present opportunity for conscience-searching and constructive action to be an especial charge upon us; upon the newcomers among us from the fatherlands; and upon the joint youth of all the peoples of the two Americas.

WHAT WAR HAS DONE AND IS DOING

_Its Blights_

[Sidenote: War has blighted Life.]

War has brought low our conception of the _preciousness of human life_ as slavery brought low our conception of human liberty.

It has benumbed our growing sense of the _nurture of life_; and at a time when we were challenging Reichstag, Parliament, and Congress with the needlessness of infant mortality and child labor, it entrenches a million youths with cold and fever and impending death.

[Sidenote: It has violated humanity.]

It has thwarted the chance of our times toward the _fulfilment of life_, and scattered like burst shrapnel the hands of the sculptors and the violinists, the limbs of the hurdlers and swimmers, the sensitive muscles of the mechanics and the weavers, the throats of the singers and the interpreters, the eyes of the astronomers and the melters—every skilled and prescient part of the human body, every type of craft and competence of the human mind.

It has set back our promptings toward the _conservation of life_; and in a decade when England and France and Russia, Germany and Austria and Belgium, have been working out social insurance against the hazards of peace, it throws back upon the world an unnumbered company of the widowed and the fatherless, and of aged parents left bereft and destitute.

It has blocked our way toward _the ascent of life_, and in a century which has seen the beginnings of effort to upbuild the common stock, has cut off from parenthood the strong, the courageous and the high-spirited.

_Its Injuries_

It has in its development of armaments, pitted human flesh against machinery.

It has wrested the power of self-defense from the hands of free-men who wielded lance and sword and scythe, and has set them as machine-tenders to do the bidding of their masters.

[Sidenote: It has turned effort into destruction.]

It has brought strange men to the door-sills of peaceful people; men like their own men, bearing no grudges one against another; men snatched away from their fields and villages where their fathers lie buried, to kill and burn and destroy till this other people are driven from their homes of a thousand years or sit abject and broken.

It has stripped farms and ruined self-sustaining communities, and poured into a bewildered march for succor, the crippled and aged and bedridden, the little children and the women great with child unborn.

It has razed the flowing lines in which the art and aspiration of earlier generations expressed themselves, and has thus waged war upon the dead.

It has tortured and twisted the whole social fabric of the living.

It has burdened our children and our children’s children with a staggering load of debt.

It has inundated the lowlands of the world’s economy with penury and suffering unreckonable, hopelessly depressing standards of living already much too low.

It has rent and trampled upon the net-work of world cooperation in trade and craftsmanship which had made all men fellow-workers.

It has whetted a lust among neutral nations to profit by furnishing the means to prolong its struggles.

It has blasted our new internationalism in the protection of working women and children.

It has distracted our minds with the business of destruction and stayed the forward reach of the builders among men.

It has conscripted physician and surgeon, summoning them from research and the prolongation of life to the patchwork of its wreckage.

It has sucked into its blood and mire our most recent conquests over the elements—over electricity, and air and the depths of ocean; and has prostituted our prowess in engineering, chemistry and technology, to the service of terror and injury.

It has bent our achievements in transportation into runways, so that neither volcanoes nor earthquakes, nor the rat-holes of famine, but only the plagues can match war in unbounded disaster.

_Its Wrongs_

It has in its compulsory service made patriotism a shell, empty of liberty.

It has set up the military independent of and superior to the civil power.

It has substituted arbitrary authority and the morals of foot-loose men who escape identity in the common uniform, for the play of individual conscience, and that social pressure which in household and village, in neighborhood and State, makes for individual responsibility, for decency, and fair play.

It has battened on apathy, unintelligence and helplessness such as surrender the judgment and volition of nations into a few hands; and has nullified rights and securities, such as are of inestimable value to the people and formidable to tyrants only.

It has threatened the results of a hundred martyrdoms and revolutions, and put in jeopardy those free governments which make possible still newer social conquests.

It has crushed under iron heels the uprisings of civilization itself.

_Its Evils_

[Sidenote: It has poisoned intelligence.]

It has turned the towers of art and science into new Babels, so that our philosophers, and men of letters, our physicists and geographers, our economists and biologists and dramatists, speak in strange tongues, and to hate each other has become a holy thing among them.

It has made were-wolves of neighboring peoples, in the imaginations of each other.

It has put its stamp upon growing boys and girls, and taught them to hate other children who have chanced to be born on the other side of some man-made boundary.

It has massed and exploded the causes of strife, fostering religious antagonisms and racial hates, inbreeding with the ugliest strains of commercialism, perverting to its purposes the increase of over-dense populations and their natural yearning for new opportunities for enterprise and livelihood.

It has not only shattered men’s breasts, but loosened the black fury of their hearts; so that in rape, and cruelty, and rage, we have ancient brutishness trailing at the heels of all armies.

It has found a world of friends and neighbors, and substituted a world of outlanders and aliens and enemies.

It has lessened the number of those who feel the joys and sorrows of all peoples as of their own.

It has strangled truth and paralyzed the power and wish to face it, and has set up monstrous and irreconcilable myths of self-justification.

It has mutilated the human spirit.

It has become a thing which passeth all understanding.

STRIKING HANDS

[Sidenote: We must join in throwing off this tyranny.]

We have heard the call from overseas of those who have appealed to men and women of good-will in all nations to join with them in throwing off this tyranny upon life.

We must go further; we must throw open a peace which shall be other than a shadow of old wars and a prelude to new. We do more than plead with men to stay their hands from killing. We hail living men. As peace-lovers, we are charged with the sanctity of human life; as democrats and freemen we are charged with its sovereignty.

By the eight million natives of the warring States living among us without malice or assault one upon another, let us leave the occasions of fighting no longer for idle war boards to decide.

By the blow our forebears struck at barbarism when they took vengeance out of private hands, let us wrest the manufacture of armaments and deadly weapons from the gun-mongers and powder-makers who gain by it.

By those electric currents that have cut the ground from under the old service of diplomacy, and spread the new intelligence, let us put the ban upon intrigue and secret treaties.

For we hold that not soldiers, nor profit-takers, nor diplomats, but the people who suffer and bear the brunt of war should determine whether war must be; that with ample time for investigation and publicity of its every cause and meaning, with recourse to every avenue for mediation and settlement abroad, war should come only by the slow process of self-willing among men and women who solemnly publish and declare it to be a last and sole resort.

[Sidenote: America must lead the nations.]

With our treated borderland, 3000 miles in length without fort or trench from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which has helped weld us for a century of unbroken peace with our neighbors to the north, we would spread faith not in entrenched camps but in open boundaries.

With the pacts of our written constitutions before us which bind our own sovereign States in amity, we are convinced that treaty-making may be lifted to a new and inviolable estate, and lay the foundations for that world organization which for all time shall make for peace upon earth and good-will among men.

With our experience in lesser conflicts in industrial life, which have none the less embraced groups as large as armies, have torn passions and rasped endurance to the uttermost, we can bear testimony that at the end of such strife as cleaves to the heart of things, men are disposed to lay the framework of their relations in larger molds than those which broke beneath them.

With our ninety million people drawn from Alpine and Mediterranean, Danubean, Baltic, and Slavic stocks; with a culture blended from these different affluents, we hold that progress lies in the predominance of none; and that the civilization of each nation needs to be refreshed by that cross-breeding with the genius and the type of other human groups, that blending which began on the coast lands and islands of the Ægean Sea where European civilization first drew its sources from the Euphrates and the Nile.

[Sidenote: We must lead through our own ideals in the war on war.]

With memories of the tyranny which provoked our Revolution, with the travail still upon us by which we in our turn have paid for the enslavement of a people, with the bitterness only now assuaged which marked our period of mistrust and reconstruction, we bear witness that boundaries should be set where not force, but justice and consanguinity direct; and that, however boundaries fall, liberty and the flowering-out of native cultures should be secure.

With our fair challenge to the spirit of the East and to the chivalry of the West in standing for the open door in China when that Empire, now turned Republic, was threatened by dismemberment, we call for the freeing of the ports of every ocean from special privilege based on territorial claims, throwing them open with equal chance to all who by their ability and energy can serve new regions to their mutual benefit.

With the faith we have kept with Cuba, the regard we have shown for the integrity of Mexico and our preparations for the independence of the Philippine Islands, we urge the framing of a common colonial policy which shall put down that predatory exploitation which has embroiled the West and oppressed the East and shall stand for an opportunity for each latent and backward race to build up according to its own genius.

By our full century of ruthless waste of forest, ore and fuel; by the vision which has come to us in these latter days of conserving to the permanent uses of the people, the water power and natural wealth of our public domain, we propose the laying down of a planetary policy of conservation.

[Sidenote: For the sake of freedom.]

By that tedium and monotony of life and labor for vast companies of people, which when war drums sound, goads the field worker to forsake his harvest and the wage-earner to leap from his bench, we hold that the ways of peace should be so cast as to make stirring appeal to the heroic qualities in men, and give common utterance to the rhythm and beauty of national feeling.

By the joy of our people in the conquest of a continent; by the rousing of all Europe, when the great navigators threw open the new Indies and the New World, we stand for such a scheming-out of our joint existence that the achieving instincts among men, not as one nation against another, nor as one class against another, but as one generation after another, shall have freedom to come into their own.

_Jane Addams_,
_Lillian Wald_,
_Paul U. Kellogg_.