Chapter 13

And this has taken place because men--individually--have decided that the advantage of the security of each from aggression outweighs the advantage which each has in the possible exercise of aggression. When nations have come to the same decision--and not a moment before--they will protect themselves from aggression in precisely the same way--by agreeing between them that they will cancel by their collective power the force of any one member exercised against another.

I emphasize the fact that you must get this recognition of common interest in a given action before you can get the common action. We have managed it in the relations between individuals because, the numbers being so much greater than in the case of nations, individual dissent goes for less. The policeman, the judge, the jailer have behind them a larger number relatively to individual exceptions than is the case with nations. For the existence of such an arrangement by no means implies that men shall be perfect, that each shall willingly obey all the laws which he enforces. It merely implies that his interest in the law as a whole is greater than his interest in its general violation.

No man for a single day of his life observes all the Ten Commandments, yet you can always secure a majority for the support of the Ten Commandments, for the simple reason that while there are a great many who would like to rob, all are in favor of being protected against the robber. While there are a great many who would like on occasion to kill, all are in favor of being protected against being killed. The prohibition of this act secures universal support embracing "all of the people all of the time"; the positive impulse to it is isolated and occasional--with some individuals perhaps all the time, but with all individuals only some of the time, if ever.

When you come to the nations, there is less disproportion between the strength of the unit and the society. Hence nations have been slower than individuals in realizing their common interest. Each has placed greater reliance on its own strength for its protection. Yet the principle remains the same. There may be nations which desire for their own interest to go to war, but they all want to protect themselves against being beaten. You have there an absolutely common interest. The other interest, the desire to beat, is not so universal; in fact, if any value can be given whatever to the statement of the respective statesmen, such an interest is non-existent.

There is not a single statesman in Christendom today who would admit for a moment that it is his desire to wage war on a neighboring nation for the purpose of conquering it. All this warfare is, each party to it declares, merely a means of protecting itself against the aggression of neighbors. Whatever insincerity there may be in these declarations we can at least admit this much, that the desire to be safe is more widespread than the desire to conquer, for the desire to be safe is universal.

We ought to be able, therefore, to achieve, on the part of the majority, action to that end. And on this same principle there can be no doubt that the nations as a whole would give their support to any plan which would help to secure them from being attacked. It is time for the society of nations to take this first step toward the creation of a real community; to agree, that is, that the influence of the whole shall be thrown against the one recalcitrant member.

The immensely increased contact between nations which has set up a greater independence (in the way hinted at in my last article) has given weight to the interest in security and taken from the interest in aggression. The tendency to aggression is often a blind impulse due to the momentum of old ideas which have not yet had time to be discredited and disintegrated by criticism. And of organization for the really common interest--that of security against aggression--there has, in fact, been none. If there is one thing certain it is that in Europe last July the people did not want war; they tolerated it, passively dragged by the momentum of old forces which they could not even formulate. The really general desire has never been organized; any means of giving effect to a common will--such as is given it in society within the frontiers--has never so far been devised.

I believe that it is the mission of America in her own interest to devise it; that the circumstances of her isolation, historical and geographical, enable her to do for the older peoples--and herself--a service which by reason of their circumstances, geographical and historical, they cannot do for themselves.

The power that she exercises to this end need not be military. I do not think that it should be military. This war has shown that the issues of military conflict are so uncertain, depending upon all sorts of physical accidents, that no man can possibly say which side will win. The present war is showing daily that the advantage does not always go with numbers, and the outcome of war is always to some extent a hazard and a gamble, but there are certain forces that can be set in operation by nations situated as the United States, that are not in any way a gamble and a hazard, the effect of which will be quite certain.

I refer to the pressure of such a thing as organized non-intercourse, the sending of a country to moral, social, economic Coventry. We are, I know, here treading somewhat unknown ground, but we have ample evidence to show that there do exist forces capable of organization, stronger, and more certain in their operation than military forces. That the world is instinctively feeling this is demonstrated by the present attitude of all the combatants in Europe to the United States. The United States relatively to powers like Russia, Britain, and Germany is not a great military power, yet they are all pathetically anxious to secure the good-will of the United States.

Why?

It can hardly be to save the shock to their moral feelings which would come from the mere disapproval of people on the other side of the world. If any percentage of what we have read of German methods is true, if German ethics bear the faintest resemblance to what they are so often represented to be, Germany must have no feeling in the political sphere to be hurt by the moral disapproval of the people of the United States. If German statesmen are so desperately anxious as they evidently are to secure the approval and good-will of the United States it is because they realize, however indistinctly, that there lie in the hands of the United States powers which could be loosed, more portentous than those held by the masters of many legions.

Just what these powers are and how they might be used to give America greater security than she could achieve by arms, to place her at the virtual head of a great world State, and to do for mankind as a whole a service greater than any yet recorded in written history, must be left to the third and concluding article of this series.

III.

AMERICA AS LEADER.

In the preceding article I indicated that America might undertake at this juncture of international affairs an intervention in the politics of the Old World which is of a kind not heretofore attempted by any nation, an intervention, that is to say, that should not be military, but in the first instance mediatory and moral, having in view if needs be the employment of certain organized social and economic forces which I will detail presently.

The suggestion that America should take any such lead is resisted first on the ground that it is a violation of her traditional policy, and secondly that "economic and social forces" are bound to be ineffective unless backed by military, so that the plea would involve her in a militarist policy. With reference to these two points, I pointed out in the preceding article that America's isolation from a movement for world agreement would infallibly land her in a very pronounced militarist policy, the increase of her armaments, the militarization of her civilization and all that that implies.

There are open to America at this present moment two courses: one which will lead her to militarism and the indefinite increase of armaments--that is the course of isolation from the world's life, from the new efforts that will be made toward world organization; the other to anticipate events and take the initiative in the leadership of world organization, which would have the effect of rendering western civilization, including herself, less military, less dependent upon arms, and put the development of that civilization on a civilist rather than a militarist basis.

I believe that it is the failure to realize that this intervention can be non-military in character which explains the reluctance of very many Americans to depart from their traditional policy of non-intervention. With reference to that point it is surely germane to remember that the America of 1914 is not the America of 1776; circumstances which made Washington's advice sound and statesmanlike have been transformed. The situation today is not that of a tiny power not yet solidified, remote from the main currents of the world's life, out-matched in resources by any one of the greater powers of Europe. America is no longer so remote as to have little practical concern with Europe. Its contacts with Europe are instantaneous, daily, intimate, innumerable--so much so indeed that our own civilization will be intimately affected and modified by certain changes which threaten in the older world.

I will put the case thus: Suppose that there are certain developments in Europe which would profoundly threaten our own civilization and our own security, and suppose further that we could without great cost to ourselves so guide or direct those changes and developments as to render them no longer a menace to this country. If such a case could be established, would not adherence to a formula established under eighteenth century conditions have the same relation to sound politics that the incantations and taboos of superstitious barbarians have to sound religion? And I think such a case can be established.

I wonder whether it has occurred to many Americans to ask why all the belligerents in this present war are showing such remarkable deference to American public opinion. Some Americans may, of course, believe that it is the sheer personal fascination of individual Americans or simple tenderness of moral feeling that makes Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Austria take definitely so much trouble at a time when they have sufficient already, to demonstrate that they have taken the right course, that they are obeying all the laws of war, that they are not responsible for the war in any way, and so forth. Is it simply that our condemnation would hurt their feelings? This hardly agrees with certain other ideas which we hold as to the belligerents.

There is something beyond this order of motive at the bottom of the immense respect which all the combatants alike are paying to American opinion. It happened to the writer recently to meet a considerable number of Belgian refugees from Brussels, all of them full of stories (which I must admit were second or third or three-hundredth hand) of German barbarity and ferocity. Yet all were obliged to admit that German behavior in Brussels had on the whole been very good. But that, they explained, was "merely because the American Consul put his foot down." Yet one is not aware that President Wilson had authorized the American Consul so much as to hint at the possible military intervention of America in this war. Nevertheless there can be no doubt that these "Huns," so little susceptible in our view for the most part to moral considerations, were greatly influenced by the opinion of America; and we know also that the other belligerents have shown the same respect for the attitude of the United States.

I think we have here what so frequently happens in the development of the attitude of men toward large general questions: the intuitive recognition of a truth which those who recognize it are quite unable to put into words. It is a self-protective instinct, a movement that is made without its being necessary to think it out. (In the way that the untaught person is able instantly to detect the false note in a tune without knowing that such things as notes or crotchets and quavers exist.)

It is quite true that the Germans feared the bad opinion of the world because the bad opinion of the world may be translated into an element of resistance to the very ends which it is the object of the war to achieve for Germany.

Those ends include the extension of German influence, material and moral, of German commerce and culture. But a world very hostile to Germany might quite conceivably check both. We say, rightly enough, probably, that pride of place and power had its part--many declare the prominent part--in the motives that led Germany into this war. But it is quite conceivable that a universal revulsion of feeling against a power like Germany might neutralize the influence she would gain in the world by a mere extension of her territorial conquests.

Russia, for instance, has nearly five times the population and very many times the area of France; but one may doubt whether even a Russian would assert that Russian influence is five or ten times greater than that of France; still less that the world yielded him in any sense a proportionately greater deference than it yields the Frenchman. The extent to which the greatest power can impose itself by bayonets is very limited in area and depth. All the might of the Prussian Army cannot compel the children of Poland or of Lorraine to say their prayers in German; it cannot compel the housewives of Switzerland or Paraguay or of any other little State that has not a battleship to its name to buy German saucepans if so be they do not desire to. There are so many other things necessary to render political or military force effective, and there are so many that can offset it altogether.

We see these forces at work around us every day accomplishing miracles, doing things which a thousand years of fighting was never able to do--and then say serenely that they are mere "theories." Why do Catholic powers no longer execute heretics? They have a perfect right--even in international law--to do so. What is it that protects the heretic in Catholic countries? The police? But the main business of the police and the army used to be to hunt him down. What is controlling the police and the army?

By some sort of process there has been an increasing intuitive recognition of a certain code which we realize to be necessary for a decent society. It has come to be a sanction much stronger than the sanction of law, much more effective than the sanction of military force. During the German advance on Paris in August last I happened to be present at a French family conference. Stories of the incredible cruelties and ferocity of the Germans were circulating in the Northern Department, where I happened to be staying.

Every one was in a condition of panic, and two Frenchmen, fathers of families, were seeing red at the story of all these barbarities. But they had to decide--and the thing was discussed at a little family conference--where they should send their wives and children. And one of these Frenchmen, the one who had been most ferocious in his condemnation of the German barbarian, said quite naïvely and with no sense of irony or paradox: "Of course, if we could find an absolutely open town which would not be defended at all the women folk and children would be all right." His instinct, of course, was perfectly just. The German "savage" had had three quarters of a million people in his absolute power in Brussels, and so far as we know, not a child or a woman has been injured.

Indeed, in normal times our security against foreigners is not based upon physical force at all. I suppose during the last century some hundreds of thousands of British and American tourists have traveled through the historic cities of Germany, their children have gone to the German educational institutions, their invalids have been attended by German doctors and cut up by German surgeons in German sanatoria and health resorts, and I am quite sure that it never occurred to any one of these hundreds of thousands that their little children when in the educational institutions of these "Huns" were in any way in danger. It was not the guns of the American Navy or the British Navy that were protecting them; the physical force of America or of Great Britain could not certainly be the factor operative in, say, Switzerland or Austria, yet every Summer tens of thousands of them trust their lives and those of their women and children in the remote mountains of Switzerland on no better security than the expectation that a foreign community over whom we have no possibility of exercising force will observe a convention which has no sanction other than the recognition that it is to their advantage to observe it.

And we thus have the spectacle of millions of Anglo-Saxons absolutely convinced that the sanctity of their homes and the safety of their property are secure from the ravages of the foreigner only because they possess a naval and military force that overawes him, yet serenely leaving the protection of that military force, and placing life and property alike within the absolute power of that very foreigner against whose predatory tendencies we spend millions in protecting ourselves.

No use of military power, however complete and overwhelming, would pretend to afford a protection anything like as complete as that afforded by these moral forces. Sixty years ago Britain had as against Greece a preponderance of power that made her the absolute dictator of the latter's policy, yet all the British battleships and all the threats of "consequences" could not prevent British travelers being murdered by Greek brigands, though in Switzerland only moral forces--the recognition by an astute people of the advantage of treating foreigners well--had already made the lives and property of Britons as safe in that country as in their own.

In the same way, no scheme of arming Protestants as against Catholics, or Catholics as against Protestants (the method which gave us the wars of religion and massacre of St. Bartholomew) could assure that general security of spiritual and intellectual possessions which we now in large measure enjoy. So indeed with the more material things, France, Great Britain, and some of the older nations have sunk thousands of millions in foreign investments, the real security of which is not in any physical force which their Government could possibly exercise, but the free recognition of foreigners that it is to their advantage to adhere to financial obligations. Englishmen do not even pretend that the security of their investments in a country like the United States or the Argentine is dependent upon the coercion which the British Government is able to exercise over these communities.

The reader will not, I think, misunderstand me. I am not pleading that human nature has undergone or will undergo any radical transformation. Rather am I asserting that it will not undergo any; that the intention of the man of the tenth century in Europe was as good as that of the man of the twentieth, that the man of the tenth century was as capable of self-sacrifice--was, it may be, less self-seeking. But what I am trying to hint is that the shrinking of the world by our developed intercommunication has made us all more interdependent.

The German Government moves its troops against Belgium; a moratorium is immediately proclaimed in Rio de Janeiro, a dozen American Stock Exchanges are promptly closed and some hundreds of thousands of our people are affected in their daily lives. This worldwide effect is not a matter of some years or a generation or two. It is a matter of an hour; we are intimately concerned with the actions of men on the other side of the world that we have never seen and never shall see; and they are intimately concerned with us. We know without having thought it out that we are bound together by a compact; the very fact that we are dependent upon one another creates as a matter of fact a partnership. We are expecting the other man to perform his part; he has been doing so uninterruptedly for years, and we send him our goods or we take his bill of exchange, or our families are afloat in his ships, expecting that he will pay for his goods, honor the bill of exchange, navigate safely his ship--he has undertaken to do these things in the world-wide partnership of our common labor and then he fails. He does not do these things, and we have a very lively sense of the immorality of the doctrine which permits him to escape doing them.

And so there are certain things that are not done, certain lengths to which even in war time we cannot go. What will stop the war is not so much the fighting, any more than Protestant massacres prevented Catholic massacres. Men do not fear the enemy soldiers; they do fear the turning of certain social and moral forces against them. The German Government does not hesitate for a moment to send ten thousand of its own people to certain death under enemy guns even though the military advantage of so doing may be relatively trifling. But it dare not order the massacre of ten thousand foreign residents in Berlin. There is some force which makes it sometimes more scrupulous of the lives of its enemy than of the lives of its own people.

Yet why should it care? Because of the physical force of the armies ranged against it? But it has to meet that force in any case. It fears that the world will be stirred. In other words, it knows that the world at large has a very lively realization that in its own interest certain things must not be done, that the world would not live together as we now know it, if it permitted those things to be done. It would not so permit them.

At the bottom of this moral hesitation is an unconscious realization of the extent of each nation's dependence upon the world partnership. It is not a fear of physical chastisement; any nation will go to war against desperate odds if a foreign nation talks of chastising it. It is not that consideration which operates, as a thousand examples in history prove to us. There are forces outside military power more visible and ponderable than these.

There exists, of course, already a world State which has no formal recognition in our paper constitutions at all, and no sanction in physical force. If you are able to send a letter to the most obscure village of China, a telegram to any part of the planet, to travel over most of the world in safety, to carry on trade therewith, it is because for a generation the Post Office Departments of the world have been at work arranging traffic and communication details, methods of keeping their accounts; because the ship owner has been devising international signal codes; the banker arranging conditions of international credit; because, in fact, not merely a dozen but some hundreds of international agreements, most of them made not between Governments at all, but between groups and parties directly concerned, have been devised.

There is no overlord enforcing them, yet much of our daily life depends upon their normal working. The bankers or the shipowners or the makers of electric machinery have met in Paris or Brussels and decided that such shall be the accepted code, such the universal measurement for the lamp or instrument, such the conditions for the bill of exchange and from the moment that there is an agreement you do not need any sanction. If the instrument does not conform to the measurement it is unsalable and that is sanction enough.