CHAPTER VIII

THE NATIONAL CHARACTER SPIRITUALLY TRANSFORMED: THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY, OR THE ORGANIZATION OF MANKIND

There is such a thing as a national character.[91] The national character is reflected in the language, literature, laws and customs, arts, institutions and religion of a people. Even when the religion professed by different peoples is the same in name it is strongly tinctured in the different countries by the national differences. Compare for example the Christianity of Prussia with that of France, or that of England with that of Russia.

The national character, like that of the individual, has its plus and minus qualities, its excellent and its repellent traits.

The national character is to be spiritualized by raising the plus traits to the Nth degree.

To this end, as before, the three-fold reverence and especially the third reverence is the means. _The backward peoples of the earth are the paramount object of reverence._ The more advanced peoples are to bring to light the spiritual life latent in the backward. In order to do so, they are to carry out the principle of reverence toward past civilization, to sift out what is vital in the work of previous generations. And further, they are to conform to the second principle of reverence, that toward contemporaries approximately on the same level, _i.e._, toward the other civilized nations. No single nation is really competent to undertake the great task of awaking the stationary peoples of India and China, of educating the primitive peoples of Africa. A union of the civilized nations should be formed in order that together they may jointly accomplish _the pedagogy of the less developed_. The educational point of view once again appears as the ethical. The relation of the less developed to the more advanced peoples should be analogous to that of the child towards the parents. Just as neither the father singly nor the mother alone can release spiritual life in the offspring, so the different civilized nations, each of which has its own gift, its own plus traits, are to interact for the purpose of jointly awakening the creative energies within the slumbering souls of the undeveloped peoples.

It follows that a nation cannot even be defined ethically except as a member of an international society, and we begin to see the help afforded by the spiritual conception in solving at least ideally the problem of right international relations. Whereas hitherto the notion of the sovereignty of each nation has been a formidable impediment to the formation of an overarching world society, the ethical conception not only permits this expansion of sovereignty, but necessitates it. A nation, ethically defined, is a unique member of the _corpus internationale_ of mankind. As unique it maintains of right its relative independence, as a member it is bound by intrinsic ties to its fellow-members, and is subject to the greater sovereignty including them all alike.[92] A nation indeed cannot even maintain its independence against other nations except by sheer might if it acknowledges none but capricious ties between itself and them, such as treaties, or Hague Conference agreements which can be dissolved at pleasure. There must be recognized an inner ethical tie between nation and nation, and it must receive legal formulation. This ethical tie is the true _vinculum societatis humanæ_ and supplies what has hitherto been absolutely lacking,—an ethical basis for international law.

The ethical relation between nations is founded on the fact that each nation represents a significant type of humanity, that each nation has certain plus and minus qualities, that it is dependent on other nations to supplement its defects; and more than this, that it can expurgate, as it ought, its minus qualities only by striving to evoke the spiritual life in other peoples.

One salient point I must emphasize. The national character with its plus and minus traits is empirical, and the development of the empirical character is not itself the highest aim of the state. The spiritual transformation of this empirical character, as I must take pains to repeat, is the aim.

And herein appears the difference between the point of view taken in this chapter and the political doctrine of the eminent Swiss publicist Bluntschli. He too recognizes the development of the national character as the aim of the state; and in so far as he does this he is in advance of writers who limit the state’s functions to the protection of life and property, to defense against foreign aggression, promotion of prosperity, and of power and prestige. Bluntschli has the insight to perceive that a nation is a collective entity, having a certain defined character, and the development of the distinctive national gifts is in his eyes the supreme purpose of national life, the political organization of the state being a means to this end. But he falls into a grave error by identifying the empirical with the spiritual character of the nation, and setting up the former as an end worthy on its own account. The empirical character of a collective entity is in this respect no more worthy of honor, and no more fit to be a ground of obligation, than the empirical character of the individual. And the conclusions at which Bluntschli arrives are a sufficient proof of the ethical inadequacy of his vision. Some nations, a very few he thinks, possess political capacity, and they are to rule other peoples. Here we have the “White Man’s Burden”—an obvious violation of the ethical principle of national independence. Further, the world state, which is to include all nations, is to concern itself only with their common interests. Bluntschli thus accepts the uniformity principle in ethics, excluding the idea of the reaction of differences which is of the very essence of the ethical relation; while the ideal future as he sees it is that of nations coexisting peacefully side by side, competing peacefully with each other, and doubtless borrowing from one another the best fruits produced by each. But it is idle to expect peaceful coexistence so long as the strong exist by the side of the weak without there being acknowledged an _intrinsic_ spiritual tie between them; and competition between peoples will result, like competition between individuals, in strife and exploitation; while the mere borrowing by each of the fruits produced by the rest omits the vital point, upon which I lay the greatest stress, of the eliciting of the fruits in each by the spiritualizing influence of the rest.

Surveying Bluntschli’s doctrine as a whole, it is clear that his empirical conception of the state leaves it a purely secular institution concerned with externals, and not really related to the inner life, certainly not a station in the development of personality. He practically acknowledges as much when he says that the state is man writ large, and the church woman writ large; that the state represents the masculine principle, the church the feminine principle. For the feminine, according to him, is the spiritual principle. The state deals with externals; to the church is reserved the prerogative of entering into and transforming the inner life.[93]

But what shall be the motive force for the creation of an international society? I hold that the sense of national sin, or of national guilt, must supply the motive force. At present all the more advanced nations are to be censured because of their pride. Germany prides itself on its science and its efficiency, England on its political liberalism, France on its logical conception of equality, America on its democratic individualism. Each of the great nations dwells complacently upon its fair traits, and vaunts its special type of civilization as that which should rightfully prevail among mankind generally. The national defects, acknowledged perhaps by the critical few, are glozed over. Indeed the consciousness of a collective national character though latent is not yet distinct. It must be evoked. National self-knowledge must be promoted by the leaders and teachers of mankind, and with it must come, as in the case of the individual, the conscious recognition of deep defects—in the case of Germany the narrowness of the conception of the expert:[94] in the case of England the discrepancy between political liberalism as applied to the white inhabitants of the British Isles and of the self-governing dominions on the one hand, and the “benevolent despotism” exercised over the subject millions of India on the other; in America the effacement of true individualism under the crushing pressure of mass opinion, etc.

Moreover not only will the defects be admitted, but their detrimental influence on other peoples will have to be frankly avowed—every nation must cry its _Peccavi_—the effect for instance on Europe of the French love of glory, the effect of the efficiency notion of the Germans as it is at present penetrating all other nations,[95] and in the still wider view the effect of Western civilization as a whole on the stationary civilization of China, on Egypt, on the myriads of Africa. The civilized peoples of the earth have sinned their sins and are best seen when we consider:

A. The spoliation and outrages perpetrated by the Western nations, for instance at the time of the entrance of the Allies into Pekin, the wholesale destruction of human life and the mutilations of the natives on the Congo. It has been stated that some ten millions of the natives of Africa perished as victims of the white race. If these acts do not warrant our speaking of the sins of the civilized nations, what kind of human behavior does deserve that name?

B. The effect of European example in practically forcing the peoples of the Orient to adopt militarism and navalism.

C. The effect of Western individualism in undermining the religious foundation in Eastern civilization.[96] The spreading of Christianity itself, despite the exemplary influence of the higher type of missionary, must yet be classed, in one important respect, among the detrimental influences exercised by the West upon the East. For Christianity, in the form in which it is usually taught, tends to break up the sense of solidarity which is often strong among the less civilized peoples, without supplying an adequate principle upon which solidarity might be reëstablished on a higher plane. Hence Christian teaching in the Orient and in Africa, however friendly and merciful in intention, and however beneficent in many ways, is yet a disintegrating influence.

The great problem of the spiritual education of the lower races will have to be taken up anew. Not only are individual missionaries of broader mental and moral horizons needed, the civilized nations as such must reach a common understanding and establish a union among themselves, the keynote of which shall be reverence for the undeveloped, that is to say divination of what, under right educational influence, they, the undeveloped, may come to mean for humanity. And a union of this kind, consecrated to a noble object, will at the same time be the means of leading the Western world out of the chaotic condition in which it is at present weltering. The object for which nations combine may not be their own peace, their own prosperity. The key to peace between the adult peoples is a common, effectual resolve to win new varieties of spiritual expression from the child and adolescent peoples of the earth. Peace must come incidentally. The common object must be disinterested, spiritual, because there is a duty on the part of the civilized towards the uncivilized to exercise a spiritual function. The task of humanity in general consists in extending the web of spiritual relations so as to cover larger and still larger areas of the finite world. The family is only partly spiritualized. The vocations, the state, are not yet spiritualized. The international society hardly exists. But what I here endeavor to sketch is the human world as it would be in the light and under the influence of the spiritual ideal. And I set down as the saving task of the civilized nations that of extending the spiritual realm so as to cover backward, undeveloped peoples, so as to embody them in the _corpus spirituale_ of mankind.

_Some of the Principal Obstacles That Stand in the Way of the Organization of Mankind._

The first obstacle is to be found in the inadequate theories that underlie international law. Seventeenth and eighteenth century thinking is still, strange to say, the theoretical foundation. Grotius and Vattel remain the chief authorities. Grotius’s theory is a system of empirical individualism with Christian individualism grafted upon it, to mitigate its harsher features. The right of conquest is admitted. A nation is allowed to punish another, punishment being taken in the crude sense, while what has been permitted under natural law is subsequently modified by counsels of perfection derived from Christian individualism.

Vattel is the intellectual grandchild of Leibnitz. He derives from Leibnitz through Wolff. Vattel envisages the various states as so many individual entities without intrinsic ties. Peaceful coexistence and unhindered pursuit by each people of its own perfection or welfare with mutual aid to be voluntarily rendered are the ultimate conceptions beyond which this thinker does not venture. And if the root principles are thus infertile, small wonder that the fruit of the tree should be what it is. In any handbook of international law, the preponderant space is allotted to the laws of war, and yet international law has proved impotent to restrain the passion of war, or even to prevent its excesses. International law binds the Samson of war with green withes which the giant snaps in derision. It is plain that we are still in the earliest stages, not only of international practice, but even of international thinking. The problem of the right ethical relations between the nations has hardly been broached.

Another conspicuous obstacle in the way of international progress is to be seen in false hopes. Among the false hopes I class:

A. The hope that increased facilities of intercourse will automatically bring about more friendly relations. To expect this is to forget that closeness accentuates repugnances as well as congenialities, increases antipathy as well as amity. When nations come within short range of each other they resemble antipathetical kinsmen who are compelled to live together. The Czechs and Germans in Bohemia would not hate each other as they do were they not such near neighbors. Spatial rapprochement, for instance, between East and West will not of itself guarantee moral rapprochement—far from it.

B. The hope that science may be relied on to bring the nations together. Science is neutral. Science is subservient to evil as well as good. Science is at present distilling the poisonous gases used on the European battlefields as well as inventing the improved methods of surgery. It has made possible instruments of destruction such as savages might have shrunk from using. Moreover, scientific as well as artistic interests are partial manifestations of a people’s life and the ethical relation is between peoples as totalities or collective entities—just as the ethical relation between man and man is between the whole man and the whole man, and not between some partial aspect of the man and of his fellows. Hence it is easy to explain why the scientists and the scholars of the different belligerent peoples were swept away by the war passion like the rest, and in their utterance have even carried animosity to greater lengths, expressing it in language calculated to wound more deeply and to leave more permanent scars. They felt that they belonged to the people as a whole, and when the occasion came for them to choose between their scientific co-workers across the frontier and their fellow-nationals, they sided with the latter.

C. The hope that reliance can be placed on international trade to bring about ethical relations between nations. But trade, like science, is ethically neutral. In its own interest it is favorable to order and security in colonies and dependencies, and when, sufficiently enlightened, to the impartial administration of justice. The European nations abolished the slave trade in Africa because it decimated the native population, and decreased the supply of labor.[97] On the other hand England in the eighteenth century, even at that time the most liberal country of Europe, did not hesitate to wage war with Spain for the maintenance of the monopoly of the hideous slave-trade, and the Opium War occurred in the “full light” of the nineteenth century. But the most striking example of the ethical neutrality of the commercial mind is to be found in the recent partition of Africa between England, France, the Congo Free State and Germany. The methods which these four nations adopted in the “scramble for Africa” were marked by a perfect disregard of the rights of the native populations of the African continent. Two devices were used—proclamations, and treaties with native chiefs. The Queen of England proclaimed that a certain territory would thenceforth be a British possession, as if proclamation could convey a right to the territory. The German emperor indulged in the same fiction. And there was a veritable race between French and English in the West; between Germans and English in the East, as to which of the two could outdistance or outwit the other in treaty-making. Karl Peters came in disguise with a stock of blank treaties in his pocket. Forty or fifty treaties were concluded by the French annually for several years in the West—as if a treaty with a native chief, who might be bribed or coerced into lending his signature, could be the foundation of moral right to the territory occupied by his tribe. The European nations artfully employed the fictions of sovereignty in order to varnish their acts of plunder with a semblance of legality. Of course these proclamations and treaties were not intended to justify exploitation in the eyes of the natives—the natives were not consulted or regarded—but rather to base thereon the division of the spoils between the exploiters. A proclamation or the conclusion of a treaty with a chief was notice given to rivals not to interfere with the spoils reserved for the nation that had issued the proclamation or secured the treaty. It meant “hands off” to competing exploiters.

If it be asked whether this picture is not too dark? Whether the civilized nations of the twentieth century in their dealings with the helpless natives were merely selfish? Whether their motives are so sinister? Whether they are not animated by better, more moral aims? the answer is that the commercial mind, and it is the commercial mind that chiefly rules the world today, allays its scruples and justifies its aggressions by the fallacy that to extend trade is to spread civilization, and to spread civilization is to contribute to the advancement of the human race. The interests of trade and of civilization are simply identified. To build railroads, to stretch telegraph lines across the Dark Continent, to launch steamboats on lakes that never heard the whistle of a steam engine before, these are assumed to be the evidences of “progress.” Besides are not the natives disciplined in habits of industry, are they not encouraged to cultivate the raw products needed by Europe, and in return to receive the overflow of European markets? The instruments of civilization are thus confounded with civilization itself; the means with the end; while the real object, veiled by sophistry, is nevertheless the material benefit to be secured by the white race. Even the humane treatment of the natives, where it is humane, resembles somewhat too unpleasantly the fattening of the calf prior to its consumption by the owner.

Furthermore, the interests of Trade being supposed to be paramount, it is held that any country the people of which do not sufficiently cultivate the products desired by other peoples, or who close their doors against the industrial surplus of Europe, may be annexed, the land forcibly seized, and the inhabitants subjugated, and moreover that such action is right and proper and in the interests of humanity. So long as this view obtains, there will be no peace on earth. The competition for foreign territories and foreign markets, the scramble between the “civilized” exploiters, will be indefinitely provocative of new wars.

The root disease that afflicts the world at the present day is the supremacy of the commercial point of view. Intercourse and exchange of products is no doubt desirable. The education of backward peoples in agriculture and in industry for their own good and along their own line is indispensable. The fallacy of the commercial mind consists in erecting the means into the paramount end, in brusquing the love of independence which is so strongly entrenched, even among many primitive peoples, and in preventing their development in the direction prescribed by their own natures. All this for the sake of the immediate increase of material wealth. The white race shall have the lion’s share of the wealth; the native population are to be accorded a lesser share, with which they must be content. This is the extent of the concession to humanity. This is, in plain words, what is signified by the haughty phrase—“the spread of civilization.”

The commercial mind is neither benevolent nor malevolent—as little as science is. It seems at times to be beneficent; at other times it seems to be almost fiendish—as in the case of the atrocities perpetrated on the Congo. It is not fiendish, it is simply ethically neutral or blind.

From this series of reflections, certain conclusions may be drawn as to fundamental points of view relating to international law. The main principle is respect for the total personality of peoples, recognition of them as potential members of the spiritual body of mankind.

The territory of a people is to be regarded as the body of that people’s soul. Their independence is to be strictly respected. Expropriation or annexation is to be characterized as outrage. Intrusion, except for purposes of education, is to be forbidden. The conception which underlies the scramble for Africa and for the Far East—that the material interests of the advanced nations entitle them to force the backward to become receptacles of the industrial overflow of the West, the producers of raw material for the factories of the West must be abandoned.[98]

And now the main point may once more be stated. The salvation of the civilized peoples, their spiritualization in the effort to spiritualize the less advanced demands a new turn in the history of humanity. _Union in a common sublime object will overcome the antagonisms and discords that prevail among the civilized nations themselves._ The sword will never be turned into a plow-share until the nations come to love the work of the plow—the work of spiritual _tilth in the human_ field. The strong peoples will never cease to harm the weak, and in so doing to harm themselves, until they see in the weak, members of the _corpus spirituale_ of mankind, depositaries of potential spiritual life in liberating which they the strong themselves will find increased life. And the task of uplifting the lower peoples will never be successfully prosecuted until it is seen to be part of the task of humanity in general, which is to spread the web of spiritual relations over larger and ever larger provinces of the finite realm.[99]

FOOTNOTES:

[91] See Fouillée’s _Esquisse psychologique des Peuples européens_, also the Chapter on German, English and American Ideals in _The World Crisis_.

[92] Each term in the series of social institutions is ethically defined by referring to the succeeding terms. The family prepares for the vocation, the vocation for the state or nation, the nation for the international society, and all the successive terms receive their ultimate definition from the infinite spiritual universe which includes them, and broods over them and dwells in each, so that the expanding ethical experience gained at the successive stations is spiritually the _ratio cognoscendi_, not the _ratio essendi_.

[93] It is true that the state is concerned with those conditions of the spiritual reactions that are capable of being enforced, but in instituting such conditions the spiritual content is inevitably kept in view. And in the very process of fitting the body to the spirit, the form to the content, the content itself will be discerned more clearly and explicitly.

[94] See the chapter in _The World Crisis_.

[95] To myself as an individual I say: look to your radiations, consider the effects you produce on others; if the effects are harmful trace them to faults in your character, and let your desire and obligation to influence others beneficently be the spur to lead you to transform your own character. The same each people should say to itself. For instance the obvious faults of our democracy have retarded the progress of democracy in Europe. Our failure in municipal government is constantly quoted abroad as an argument against democracy. This should be a real incentive to rouse us out of our self-complacency.

[96] Cf. Lord Cromer’s remarks on this subject in his book on Egypt.

[97] See, however, the importation of Indian and Chinese coolies, and the surreptitious resurrection of the slave trade mentioned by Sir Charles Dilke in his _Problems of Greater Britain_.

[98] As to practical steps that might be taken to give effect to this conception of international law, see my published address “The Great Rôle of the United States After the War,” in which is discussed the creation of an international law-making body or a Parliament of Parliaments. In connection with the latter, I should attach particular importance to the institution of commissions which may serve as a link between the international legislature and the less civilized peoples—the commissions to study the needs and gifts of those peoples with a view to securing their development along their own lines. In the case of civilized peoples that have until recently been stationary, like the Chinese, the commission representing the Western nations would sit in consultation with the most enlightened leaders of the Chinese people themselves, the common object being to discover the points of attachment in Chinese civilization which may wisely be made the starting point of a more modern and progressive evolution. For instance the filial piety of the Chinese, the rectitude of their merchants, the absence of an aristocracy, and their civil service resting on education (despite its defects). In this manner it may become possible to avoid the abrupt, superficial, and infinitely destructive substitution of modern ideas for the system at present existing, and gradual development will take the place of intrusive and uncongenial change.

[99] I add that this conception will react on the internal life of democracy. Democracy is at present regarded as a relation between equals. In fact, we have in America the negro population, the illiterate and backward immigrants. A truer conception of democracy depends on our realizing that within each people as well as between people and people there is the distinction of the more advanced and the less advanced groups. Democracy rightly conceived will be found to consist in the effort spent by the more advanced in each vocational group to uplift the less advanced, the more advanced themselves coming into possession of their spiritual worth in the degree that they realize this their task of leadership and its great responsibilities.