Part 16

The official solution, and that almost universally accepted by the bulk of the people, insists that the {195} “military domination of Prussia,” “German militarism,” or the “German military system” as it is variously phrased, must be wholly and finally destroyed. This doctrine has received many interpretations. In spite, however, of criticism by moderates on the one hand and by unpractically ferocious root-and-branch men on the other, it seems to remain—significantly enough—an expression of policy which the common man feels for the time to be adequate.

The most considerable criticism has come from the small class of accomplished and intellectual writers who from their pacifist and “international” tendencies have to some extent been accused, no doubt falsely, of being pro-German in the sense of anti-English. The complaint of this school against the official declaration of policy is, that it does not disclose a sufficiently definite object or the means by which this object is to be attained. We are told that as a nation we do not know what we are fighting for, and, what amounts to the same thing, that we cannot attain the object we profess to pursue by the exercise of military force however drastically it may be applied. We are warned that we should seek a “reasonable” peace and one which by its moderation would have an educative effect upon the German people, that to crush and especially in any way to dismember the German Empire would confirm its people in their belief that this war is a war of aggression by envious neighbours, and make revenge a national aspiration.

Such criticism has not always been very effectually answered, and the generally current feeling has proved disconcertingly inarticulate in the presence of its agile and well-equipped opponents. Indeed, upon the ordinary assumptions of political debate, it is doubtful whether any quite satisfactory answer {196} can be produced. It is just, however, these very assumptions which must be abandoned and replaced by more appropriate psychological principles when we are trying to obtain light upon the relations of two peoples of profoundly different social type and instinctive reaction. The common man seems to be dimly aware of this difference though he cannot define it; the intellectual of what, for want of a better term, I may call the pacifist type in all its various grades, proceeds upon the assumption that no such difference exists. Much as one must respect the courage and capacity of many of these latter, one cannot but recognize that their conceptions, however logical and however ingenious, lack the invigorating contact with reality which the instinctive feelings of the common man have not altogether failed to attain.

Let us now consider what guidance in the solution of the problem can be got from a consideration of the peculiarities of the social type which the Germans of the present day so characteristically present.

Regarded from this point of view, the war is seen to be directed against a social type which, when endowed with the technical resources of modern civilization, is, and must continue to be, a dangerous anachronism. A people of the aggressive social habit can never be in a state of stable equilibrium with its neighbours. The constitution of its society presents a rigid barrier to smooth and continuous internal integration; its energy, therefore, must be occupied upon essentially, though not always superficially, external objects, and its history will necessarily be made up of alternating periods of aggression and periods of preparation. Such a people has no conception of the benign use of power. It must regard war as an end in itself, as the summit of its national activities, as the recurring apogee {197} of its secular orbit; it must regard peace as a necessary and somewhat irksome preparation for war in which it may savour reminiscently the joys of conquest by dragooning its new territories and drastically imposing upon them its national type. This instinctive insistence upon uniformity makes every conquest by such a people an impoverishment of the human race, and makes the resistance of such aggression an elementary human duty.

In every particular Germany has proved true to her social type, and every detail of her history for the last fifty years betrays the lupine quality of her ideals and her morals.

We have seen that in all gregarious animals the social instinct must follow one of three principal types, each of which will produce a herd having special activities and reactions. The major units of the human species appear limited to a similar number of categories, but it is probable that the perpetuation of a given type in a given herd is not chiefly a matter of heredity in the individual. The individual is gregarious by inheritance; the type according to which his gregarious reactions are manifested is not inherited, but will depend upon the form current in the herd to which he belongs, and handed down in it from generation to generation. Thus it has happened that nations have been able in the course of their history to pass from the aggressive to the socialized type. The change has perhaps been rendered possible by the existence of class segregation of a not too rigid kind, and has doubtless depended upon a progressive intercommunication and the consequently developing altruism. The extremely rigid Prussian social system seems clearly to be associated with the persistence of the aggressive form of society.

In considering the permanent deliverance of Europe from the elements in Germany for which {198} there can be no possible toleration, we therefore have not to deal with characters which must be regarded as inherited in the biological sense. We have to deal rather with a group of reactions which, while owing their unity, coherence, and power to the inherited qualities of the gregarious mind, owe their perpetuation to organized State suggestion, to tradition, and to their past success as a national method.

There can be no doubt that the success of the German Empire has consolidated the hold of the aggressive social type upon its people, and has guarded it from the eroding effects of increasing communication with other peoples and knowledge of the world. As I have already tried to show, the moral power of such peoples is intimately associated with the continuance of aggression and of success. The German Empire has had no experience of failure, and for this reason has been able to maintain its ideals and aspirations untouched by modern influences. It needs no psychological insight to foretell that if the result of this war can be in any way regarded as a success for Germany, she will be thereby confirmed in her present ideals, however great her sufferings may have been, and however complete her exhaustion. It must be remembered that this type of people is capable of interpreting facts in accordance with its prejudices to an almost incredible extent, as we have seen time and again in the course of the war. The proof that the aggressive national type is intolerable in modern Europe, if it can be afforded by force of arms, must therefore be made very plain, or it will have no value as a lesson. Proof of failure adequate to convince a people of the socialized type might be quite inadequate to convince a people of the lupine type in whom, from the nature of the case, mental resistiveness is so much more {199} impenetrable. This is the psychological fact of which the statesmen of Europe will have to be, above all things, aware when questions of peace come seriously to be discussed, for otherwise they will risk the loss of all the blood and treasure which have been expended without any corresponding gain for civilization.

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We have been warned that to “humiliate” Germany will merely be to set her upon the preparation of vengeance, and to confirm her belief in the supreme value of military strength. This opinion affects to be based on a knowledge of human nature, but its pretensions are not very well founded. The passion of revenge is habitually over-estimated as a motive—possibly through the influence of the novelists and playwrights to whom it is so useful. When we examine man’s behaviour objectively we find that revenge, however deathless a passion it is vowed to be at emotional moments, is in actual life constantly having to give way to more urgent and more recent needs and feelings. Between nations there is no reason to suppose that it has any more reality as a motive of policy, though it perhaps has slightly more value as a consolatory pose.

It is curious that the naïve over-estimation of the revenge ideal should have been uninfluenced by so obvious an example as the relations of France and Germany. In 1870 the former was “humiliated” with brutal completeness and every element of insult. She talked of revenge, as she could scarcely fail to do, but she soon showed that her grasp on reality was too firm to allow her policy to be moved by that childish passion. Characteristically, it was the victorious aggressor who believed in her longing for revenge, and who at length attacked her again. {200}

A psychological hint of great value may be obtained from our knowledge of those animals whose gregariousness, like that of the Germans, is of the aggressive type. When it is thought necessary to correct a dog by corporal measures, it is found that the best effect is got by what is rather callously called a “sound” thrashing. The animal must be left in no doubt as to who is the master, and his punishment must not be diluted by hesitation, nervousness, or compunction on the part of the punisher. The experience then becomes one from which the dog is capable of learning, and if the sense of mastery conveyed to him is unmistakable, he can assimilate the lesson without reservation or the desire for revenge. However repulsive the idea may be to creatures of the socialized type, no sentimentalism and no pacifist theorizing can conceal the fact that the respect of a dog can be won by violence. If there is any truth in the view I have expressed that the moral reactions of Germany follow the gregarious type which is illustrated by the wolf and the dog, it follows that her respect is to be won by a thorough and drastic beating, and it is just that elementary respect for other nations, of which she is now entirely free, which it is the duty of Europe to teach her. If she is allowed to escape under conditions which in any way can be sophisticated into a victory, or, at any rate, not a defeat, she will continue to hate us as she continued to hate her victim France.

To the politician, devoted as he necessarily is to the exclusively human point of view, it may seem fantastic and scandalous to look for help in international policy to the conduct of dogs. The gulf between the two fields is not perhaps so impassably profound as he would like to think, but, however that may be, the analogy I have drawn is not unsupported by evidence of a more respectable kind. {201} The susceptibility of the individual German to a harsh and even brutally enforced discipline is well known. The common soldier submits to be beaten by his sergeant, and is the better soldier for it; both submit to the bullying of their officer apparently also with profit; the common student is scarcely less completely subject to his professor, and becomes thereby a model of scientific excellence; the common citizen submits to the commands of his superiors, however unreasonably conceived and insultingly conveyed, and becomes a model of disciplined behaviour; finally the head of the State, combining the most drastic methods of the sergeant, the professor, and the official, wins not merely a slavish respect, but a veritable apotheosis.

Germany has shown unmistakably the way to her heart; it is for Europe to take it.

ENGLAND AGAINST GERMANY—ENGLAND.

It is one of the most impressive facts about the war, that while Germany is the very type of a perfected aggressive herd, England is perhaps the most complete example of a socialized herd. Corresponding with this biological difference is the striking difference in their history. Germany has modelled her soul upon the wolf’s, and has rushed through the possibilities of her archetype in fifty feverish years of development; already she is a finished product, her moral ideal is fulfilled and leaves her nothing to strive for except the imposition of it upon the world. England has taken as her model the bee, and still lags infinitely far behind the fulfilment of her ideal. In the unbroken security of her land, for near a thousand years, she has leisurely, perhaps lazily, and with infinite slowness, pursued her path towards a social integration of an {202} ever closer and deeper kind. She has stolidly, even stupidly, and always in a grossly practical spirit, held herself to the task of shaping a society in which free men could live and yet be citizens. She has had no theory of herself, no consciousness of her destiny, no will to power. She has had almost no national heroes, and has always been constitutionally frigid to her great men, grudging them the material for their experimentations on her people, indifferent to their expositions of her duty and her imperial destiny, granting them a chance to die for her with no more encouragement than an impatient sigh. She has allowed an empire to be won for her by her restless younger sons, has shown no gratification in their conquests, and so far from thrilling with the exultation of the conqueror, has always at the earliest moment set her new dominions at work upon the problem in which her wholly unromantic absorption has never relaxed. And after a thousand years she seems as far as ever from her goal. Her society is irregular, disorganized, inco-ordinate, split into classes at war with one another, weighted at one end with poverty, squalor, ignorance, and disease, weighted at the other end by ignorance, prejudice, and corpulent self-satisfaction. Nevertheless, her patience is no more shaken by what she is lectured upon as failure than was her composure by what she was assured was imperial success. She is no less bound by her fate than is Germany, and must continue her path until she reaches its infinitely remoter goal. Nations may model themselves on her expedients, and found the architecture of their liberty on the tabernacles she has set up by the wayside to rest in for a night—she will continue on her road unconscious of herself or her greatness, absent-mindedly polite to genius, pleasantly tickled by prophets with very loud voices, but apt to go to sleep under {203} sermons, too awkward to boast or bluster, too composed to seem strong, too dull to be flattered, too patient to be flurried, and withal inflexibly practical and indifferent to dreams.

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No more perfect illustration of the characteristics of the two nations could be found than their attitude before the war. England the empiric, dimly conscious of trouble, was puzzled, restless, and uneasy in the face of a problem she was threatened with some day having to study; Germany, the theorist, cool, “objective,” conscious of herself, was convinced there was no problem at all.

In studying the mind of England in the spirit of the biological psychologist, it is necessary to keep in mind the society of the bee, just as in studying the German mind it was necessary to keep in mind the society of the wolf.

One of the most striking phenomena which observers of the bee have noticed is the absence of any obvious means of direction or government in the hive. The queen seems to be valued merely for her functions, which are in no way directive. Decisions of policy of the greatest moment appear, as far as we can detect, to arise spontaneously among the workers, and whether the future is to prove them right or wrong, are carried out without protest or disagreement. This capacity for unanimous decisions is obviously connected with the limited mental development of the individual, as is shown by the fact that in man it is very much more feeble. In spite of this, the unanimity of the hive is wonderfully effective and surprisingly successful. Speculators upon the physiology and psychology of bees have been forced—very tentatively of course—to imagine that creatures living in such intensely close communion are able to communicate to one another, and, as it were, to a common stock, such extremely {204} simple conceptions as they can be supposed to entertain, and produce, so to say, a communal mind which comes to have, at any rate in times of crisis, a quasi-independent existence. The conception is difficult to express in concrete terms, and even to grasp in more than an occasional intuitive flash. Whether we are to entertain such a conception or are to reject it, the fact remains that societies of a very closely communal habit are apt to give the appearance of being ruled by a kind of common mind—a veritable spirit of the hive—although no trace of any directive apparatus can be detected.

A close study of England gives the impression of some agency comparable with a “spirit of the hive” being at work within it. The impression is not perhaps to be taken as altogether fantastic, when we remember how her insular station and her long history have forced upon her a physical seclusion and unity resembling, though of course far less complete than, that of the hive. I am of course not unaware that disquisitions upon the national spirit are very familiar to us. These, however, are so loosely conceived, so much concerned with purely conventional personifications of quite imaginary qualities, that I cannot regard them as referring to the phenomenon I am trying to describe.

The conception in my mind is that of an old and isolated people, developing, by the slow mingling and attrition of their ideas, and needs, and impulses, a certain deeply lying unity which becomes a kind of “instinct” for national life, and gives to national policy, without the conscious knowledge of any individual citizen, without the direction of statesmen, and perhaps in spite of them all, a continuity of trend, and even an intelligence, by which events may be influenced in a profoundly important way.

The making of some such assumption, helped as it is by the analogy of the bee, seems to be {205} necessary when we consider at all objectively the history of England and her Empire. She has done so much without any leading, so much in spite of her ostensible leaders, so often a great policy or a successful stroke has been apparently accidental. So much of her work that seemed, while it was doing, to be local and narrow in conception and motive displays at a distance evidences of design on the great scale. Her contests with Philip of Spain, with Louis XIV, with Napoleon, and the foundation of her Colonial Empire, would seem to be the grandiose conceptions of some supreme genius did we not know how they were undertaken and in what spirit pursued.

It appears, then, that England has something with which to retort upon the conscious direction to which Germany owes so much of her strength. Among the number of embattled principles and counter principles which this war has brought into the field, we must include as not the least interesting the duel between conscious national direction on the one side and unconscious national will and knowledge on the other.

It is quite outside my province to touch upon the diplomatic events which led up to the war. They seem to me to be irrelevant to the biological type of analysis we are trying to pursue. There can be no doubt at all that the ordinary consciousness of the vast majority of citizens of this country was intensely averse from the idea of war. Those who were in general bellicose were for the moment decidedly out of influence. Can we suppose, however, that the deep, still spirit of the hive that whispers unrecognized in us all had failed to note that strange, gesticulating object across the North Sea? In its vast, simple memory would come up other objects that had gone on like that. It would remember a mailed fist that had been {206} flourished across the Bay of Biscay three hundred years ago, a little man in shining armour who had strutted threateningly on the other shore of the Channel, and the other little man who had stood there among his armies, and rattled his sabre in the scabbard. It had marked them all down in their time, and it remembered the old vocabulary. It would turn wearily and a little impatiently to this new portent over the North Sea. . . . Wise with the experience of a thousand years, it would know when to strike.

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Such deeply buried combined national impulses as we are here glancing at are far removed from the influence of pacifist or jingo. Any attempt to define them must be a matter of guesswork and groping, in which the element of speculation is far in excess of the element of ascertained fact. It seems, however, that, as in the case of the bee, they concern chiefly actual decisions of crucial matters of policy. To put this suggestion in another form, we might say the spirit of the people makes the great wars, but it leaves the statesman to conduct them. It may make, therefore, a decision of incredible profundity, launch the people on the necessary course at the necessary moment, and then leave them to flounder through the difficulties of their journey as best they can. Herein is the contrast it presents with the German resource of conscious direction—superficial, apt to blunder in all the larger, deeper matters of human nature, but constant, alert, and ingenious in making immediate use of every available means and penetrating every department of activity.

During the conduct of war it is only in the simplest, broadest matters that the spirit of the people can bring its wisdom to bear. One of the most striking manifestations of it has, for example, been {207} the way in which it has shown a knowledge that the war would be long and hard. The bad news has been, in general, received without complaint, reproach, or agitation, the good news, such as it has been, with a resolute determination not to exult or rejoice. That so many months of a deadly war have produced no _popular_ expression of exultation or dismay is a substantial evidence of moral power, and not the less impressive for being so plainly the work of the common man himself.

Such manifestations of the spirit of the people are rare, and meet with very little encouragement from those who have access to the public. It is astonishing how absent the gift of interpretation seems to be. A few, a very few, stand out as being able to catch those whispers of immemorial wisdom; many seem to be occupied in confusing them with a harsh and discordant clamour of speech.

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