initial commit of ebook 20694HEADmain

10 files changed, 33843 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/20694-8.txt b/20694-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e3f1e47
--- /dev/null
+++ b/20694-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11237 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The
+Terms Of Its Perpetuation, by Thorstein Veblen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation
+
+Author: Thorstein Veblen
+
+Release Date: February 27, 2007 [EBook #20694]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NATURE OF PEACE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Irma Špehar, Graeme Mackreth and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This
+file made using scans of public domain works at the
+University of Georgia.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+AN INQUIRY INTO
+
+THE NATURE OF PEACE
+
+AND
+
+THE TERMS OF ITS PERPETUATION
+
+BY
+
+THORSTEIN VEBLEN
+
+
+New York
+B.W. HUEBSCH
+1919
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1917.
+BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+
+Published April, 1917:
+Reprinted August, 1917.
+
+New edition published by
+B.W. HUEBSCH.
+January, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+It is now some 122 years since Kant wrote the essay, _Zum ewigen
+Frieden_. Many things have happened since then, although the Peace to
+which he looked forward with a doubtful hope has not been among them.
+But many things have happened which the great critical philosopher, and
+no less critical spectator of human events, would have seen with
+interest. To Kant the quest of an enduring peace presented itself as an
+intrinsic human duty, rather than as a promising enterprise. Yet through
+all his analysis of its premises and of the terms on which it may be
+realised there runs a tenacious persuasion that, in the end, the régime
+of peace at large will be installed. Not as a deliberate achievement of
+human wisdom, so much as a work of Nature the Designer of
+things--_Natura daedala rerum_.
+
+To any attentive reader of Kant's memorable essay it will be apparent
+that the title of the following inquiry--On the nature of peace and the
+terms of its perpetuation--is a descriptive translation of the caption
+under which he wrote. That such should be the case will not, it is
+hoped, be accounted either an unseemly presumption or an undue
+inclination to work under a borrowed light. The aim and compass of any
+disinterested inquiry in these premises is still the same as it was in
+Kant's time; such, indeed, as he in great part made it,--viz., a
+systematic knowledge of things as they are. Nor is the light of Kant's
+leading to be dispensed with as touches the ways and means of
+systematic knowledge, wherever the human realities are in question.
+
+Meantime, many things have also changed since the date of Kant's essay.
+Among other changes are those that affect the direction of inquiry and
+the terms of systematic formulation. _Natura daedala rerum_ is no longer
+allowed to go on her own recognizances, without divulging the ways and
+means of her workmanship. And it is such a line of extension that is
+here attempted, into a field of inquiry which in Kant's time still lay
+over the horizon of the future.
+
+The quest of perpetual peace at large is no less a paramount and
+intrinsic human duty today than it was, nor is it at all certain that
+its final accomplishment is nearer. But the question of its pursuit and
+of the conditions to be met in seeking this goal lies in a different
+shape today; and it is this question that concerns the inquiry which is
+here undertaken,--What are the terms on which peace at large may
+hopefully be installed and maintained? What, if anything, is there in
+the present situation that visibly makes for a realisation of these
+necessary terms within the calculable future? And what are the
+consequences presumably due to follow in the nearer future from the
+installation of such a peace at large? And the answer to these questions
+is here sought not in terms of what ought dutifully to be done toward
+the desired consummation, but rather in terms of those known factors of
+human behaviour that can be shown by analysis of experience to control
+the conduct of nations in conjunctures of this kind.
+
+February 1917
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTORY: ON THE STATE AND ITS RELATION TO WAR
+AND PEACE                                                            1
+
+The inquiry is not concerned with the intrinsic merits
+of peace or war, 2.
+
+--But with the nature, causes and consequences of the
+preconceptions favoring peace or war, 3.
+
+--A breach of the peace is an act of the government,
+or State, 3.
+
+--Patriotism is indispensable to furtherance of warlike
+enterprise, 4.
+
+--All the peoples of Christendom are sufficiently patriotic, 6.
+
+--Peace established by the State, an armistice--the State
+is an instrumentality for making peace, not for perpetuating it, 7.
+
+--The governmental establishments and their powers in all
+the Christian nations are derived from the feudal establishments
+of the Middle Ages, 9.
+
+--Still retain the right of coercively controlling the actions
+of their citizens, 11.
+
+--Contrast of Icelandic Commonwealth, 12.
+
+--The statecraft of the past half century has been
+one of competitive preparedness, 14.
+
+--Prussianised Germany has forced the pace in this
+competitive preparedness, 20.
+
+--An avowedly predatory enterprise no longer meets
+with approval, 21.
+
+--When a warlike enterprise has been entered upon, it
+will have the support of popular sentiment even if it
+is an aggressive war, 22.
+
+--The moral indignation of both parties to the quarrel
+is to be taken for granted, 23.
+
+--The spiritual forces of any Christian nation may be
+mobilised for war by either of two pleas: (1) The
+preservation or furtherance of the community's material
+interests, real or fancied, and (2) vindication of the
+National Honour; as perhaps also perpetuation of the
+national "Culture," 23.
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ON THE NATURE AND USES OF PATRIOTISM                                31
+
+The nature of Patriotism, 31.
+
+--Is a spirit of Emulation, 33.
+
+--Must seem moral, if only to a biased populace, 33.
+
+--The common man is sufficiently patriotic but is hampered
+with a sense of right and honest dealing, 38.
+
+--Patriotism is at cross purposes with modern life, 38.
+
+--Is an hereditary trait? 41.
+
+--Variety of racial stocks in Europe, 43.
+
+--Patriotism a ubiquitous trait, 43.
+
+--Patriotism disserviceable, yet men hold to it, 46.
+
+--Cultural evolution of Europeans, 48.
+
+--Growth of a sense of group solidarity, 49.
+
+--Material interests of group falling into abeyance
+as class divisions have grown up, until prestige
+remains virtually the sole community interest, 51.
+
+--Based upon warlike prowess, physical magnitude and
+pecuniary traffic of country, 54.
+
+--Interests of the master class are at cross purposes
+with the fortunes of the common man, 57.
+
+--Value of superiors is a "prestige value," 57.
+
+--The material benefits which this ruling class contribute
+are: defense against aggression, and promotion of the
+community's material gain, 60.
+
+--The common defense is a remedy for evils due to the
+patriotic spirit, 61.
+
+--The common defense the usual blind behind which events
+are put in train for eventual hostilities, 62.
+
+--All the nations of warring Europe convinced that they
+are fighting a defensive war, 62.
+
+--Which usually takes the form of a defense of the National
+Honour, 63.
+
+--Material welfare is of interest to the Dynastic statesman
+only as it conduces to political success, 64.
+
+--The policy of national economic self-sufficiency, 67.
+
+--The chief material use of patriotism is its use to a
+limited number of persons in their quest of private gain, 67.
+
+--And has the effect of dividing the nations on lines of
+rivalry, 76.
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ON THE CONDITIONS OF A LASTING PEACE                                77
+
+The patriotic spirit of modern peoples is the abiding
+source of contention among nations, 77.
+
+--Hence any calculus of the Chances of Peace will be
+a reckoning of forces which may be counted on to keep
+a patriotic nation in an unstable equilibrium of peace, 78.
+
+--The question of peace and war at large is a question of
+peace and war among the Powers, which are of two contrasted
+kinds: those which may safely be counted on spontaneously
+to take the offensive and those which will fight on provocation, 79.
+
+--War not a question of equity but of opportunity, 81.
+
+--The Imperial designs of Germany and Japan as the prospective
+cause of war, 82.
+
+--Peace can be maintained in two ways: submission to
+their dominion, or elimination of these two Powers;
+No middle course open, 84.
+
+--Frame of mind of states; men and popular sentiment in
+a Dynastic State, 84.
+
+--Information, persuasion and reflection will not subdue
+national animosities and jealousies; Peoples of Europe
+are racially homogeneous along lines of climatic latitude, 88.
+
+--But loyalty is a matter of habituation, 89.
+
+--Derivation and current state of German nationalism, 94.
+
+--Contrasted with the animus of the citizens of a commonwealth,
+103;--A neutral peace-compact may be practicable in the
+absence of Germany and Japan, but it has no chance in
+their presence, 106.
+
+--The national life of Germany: the Intellectuals, 108.
+
+--Summary of chapter, 116.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+PEACE WITHOUT HONOUR                                               118
+
+Submission to the Imperial Power one of the conditions
+precedent to a peaceful settlement, 118.
+
+--Character of the projected tutelage, 118.
+
+--Life under the _Pax Germanica_ contrasted with
+the Ottoman and Russian rule, 124.
+
+--China and biological and cultural success, 130.
+
+--Difficulty of non-resistant subjection is of a psychological
+order, 131.
+
+--Patriotism of the bellicose kind is of the nature of
+habit, 134.
+
+--And men may divest themselves of it, 140.
+
+--A decay of the bellicose national spirit must be of
+the negative order, the disuse of the discipline out
+of which it has arisen, 142.
+
+--Submission to Imperial authorities necessitates
+abeyance of national pride among the other peoples, 144.
+
+--Pecuniary merits of the projected Imperial dominion, 145.
+
+--Pecuniary class distinctions in the commonwealths and
+the pecuniary burden on the common man, 150.
+
+--Material conditions of life for the common man under
+the modern rule of big business, 156.
+
+--The competitive régime, "what the traffic will bear,"
+and the life and labor of the common man, 158.
+
+--Industrial sabotage by businessmen, 165.
+
+--Contrasted with the Imperial usufruct and its material
+advantages to the common man, 174.
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+PEACE AND NEUTRALITY                                               178
+
+Personal liberty, not creature comforts, the ulterior
+springs of action of the common man of the democratic
+nations, 178.
+
+--No change of spiritual state to be looked for in the
+life-time of the oncoming generation, 185.
+
+--The Dynastic spirit among the peoples of the Empire
+will, under the discipline of modern economic conditions,
+fall into decay, 187.
+
+--Contrast of class divisions in Germany and England, 192.
+
+--National establishments are dependent for their
+continuance upon preparation for hostilities, 196.
+
+--The time required for the people of the Dynastic
+States to unlearn their preconceptions will be longer
+than the interval required for a new onset, 197.
+
+--There can be no neutral course between peace by
+unconditional surrender and submission or peace by
+the elimination of Imperial Germany and Japan, 202.
+
+--Peace by submission not practicable for the modern
+nations, 203.
+
+--Neutralisation of citizenship, 205.
+
+--Spontaneous move in that direction not to be looked for, 213.
+
+--Its chances of success, 219.
+
+--The course of events in America, 221.
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+ELIMINATION OF THE UNFIT                                           233
+
+A league of neutrals, its outline, 233.
+
+--Need of security from aggression of Imperial Germany, 234.
+
+--Inclusion of the Imperial States in the league, 237.
+
+--Necessity of elimination of Imperial military clique, 239.
+
+--Necessity of intermeddling in internal affairs of Germany even
+if not acceptable to the German people, 240.
+
+--Probability of pacific nations taking measures to insure peace, 244-298.
+
+--The British gentleman and his control of the English government, 244.
+
+--The shifting of control out of the hands of the gentleman into
+those of the underbred common man, 251.
+
+--The war situation and its probable effect on popular habits
+of thought in England, 252.
+
+--The course of such events and their bearing on the chances
+of a workable pacific league, 255.
+
+--Conditions precedent to a successful pacific league
+of neutrals, 258.
+
+--Colonial possessions, 259.
+
+--Neutralisation of trade relations, 263.
+
+--Futility of economic boycott, 266.
+
+--The terms of settlement, 269.
+
+--The effect of the war and the chances of the British people
+being able to meet the exigencies of peace, 273.
+
+--Summary of the terms of settlement, 280.
+
+--Constitutional monarchies and the British gentlemanly
+government, 281.
+
+--The American national establishment, a government
+by businessmen, and its economic policy, 292.
+
+--America and the league, 294.
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+PEACE AND THE PRICE SYSTEM                                         299
+
+The different conceptions of peace, 299.
+
+--Psychological effects of the war, 303.
+
+--The handicraft system and the machine industry,
+and their psychological effect on political preconceptions, 306.
+
+--The machine technology and the decay of patriotic loyalty, 310.
+
+--Summary, 313.
+
+--Ownership and the right of contract, 315.
+
+--Standardised under handicraft system, 319.
+
+--Ownership and the machine industry. 320.
+
+--Business control and sabotage, 322.
+
+--Governments of pacific nations controlled by privileged classes, 326.
+
+--Effect of peace on the economic situation, 328.
+
+--Economic aspects of a régime of peace, especially as related
+to the development of classes, 330.
+
+--The analogy of the Victorian Peace, 344.
+
+--The case of the American Farmer, 348.
+
+--The leisure class, 350.
+
+--The rising standard of living, 354.
+
+--Culture, 355.
+
+--The eventual cleavage of classes, those who own and those
+who do not, 360.
+
+--Conditioned by peace at large, 366.
+
+--Necessary conditions of a lasting peace, 367.
+
+
+AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE OF PEACE AND THE TERMS OF ITS PERPETUATION
+
+
+
+
+ON THE NATURE OF PEACE AND THE TERMS OF ITS PERPETUATION
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTORY: ON THE STATE AND ITS RELATION TO WAR AND PEACE
+
+
+To many thoughtful men ripe in worldly wisdom it is known of a verity
+that war belongs indefeasibly in the Order of Nature. Contention, with
+manslaughter, is indispensable in human intercourse, at the same time
+that it conduces to the increase and diffusion of the manly virtues. So
+likewise, the unspoiled youth of the race, in the period of adolescence
+and aspiring manhood, also commonly share this gift of insight and back
+it with a generous commendation of all the martial qualities; and women
+of nubile age and no undue maturity gladly meet them half way.
+
+On the other hand, the mothers of the people are commonly unable to see
+the use of it all. It seems a waste of dear-bought human life, with a
+large sum of nothing to show for it. So also many men of an elderly
+turn, prematurely or otherwise, are ready to lend their countenance to
+the like disparaging appraisal; it may be that the spirit of prowess in
+them runs at too low a tension, or they may have outlived the more vivid
+appreciation of the spiritual values involved. There are many, also,
+with a turn for exhortation, who find employment for their best
+faculties in attesting the well-known atrocities and futility of war.
+
+Indeed, not infrequently such advocates of peace will devote their
+otherwise idle powers to this work of exhortation without stipend or
+subsidy. And they uniformly make good their contention that the
+currently accepted conception of the nature of war--General Sherman's
+formula--is substantially correct. All the while it is to be admitted
+that all this axiomatic exhortation has no visible effect on the course
+of events or on the popular temper touching warlike enterprise. Indeed,
+no equal volume of speech can be more incontrovertible or less
+convincing than the utterances of the peace advocates, whether
+subsidised or not. "War is Bloodier than Peace." This would doubtless be
+conceded without argument, but also without prejudice. Hitherto the
+pacifists' quest of a basis for enduring peace, it must be admitted, has
+brought home nothing tangible--with the qualification, of course, that
+the subsidised pacifists have come in for the subsidy. So that, after
+searching the recesses of their imagination, able-bodied pacifists whose
+loquacity has never been at fault hitherto have been brought to ask:
+"What Shall We Say?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Under these circumstances it will not be out of place to inquire into
+the nature of this peace about which swings this wide orbit of opinion
+and argument. At the most, such an inquiry can be no more gratuitous and
+no more nugatory than the controversies that provoke it. The intrinsic
+merits of peace at large, as against those of warlike enterprise, it
+should be said, do not here come in question. That question lies in the
+domain of preconceived opinion, so that for the purposes of this
+inquiry it will have no significance except as a matter to be inquired
+into; the main point of the inquiry being the nature, causes and
+consequences of such a preconception favoring peace, and the
+circumstances that make for a contrary preconception in favor of war.
+
+By and large, any breach of the peace in modern times is an official act
+and can be taken only on initiative of the governmental establishment,
+the State. The national authorities may, of course, be driven to take
+such a step by pressure of warlike popular sentiment. Such, e.g., is
+presumed to have been the case in the United States' attack on Spain
+during the McKinley administration; but the more that comes to light of
+the intimate history of that episode, the more evident does it become
+that the popular war sentiment to which the administration yielded had
+been somewhat sedulously "mobilised" with a view to such yielding and
+such a breach. So also in the case of the Boer war, the move was made
+under sanction of a popular war spirit, which, again, did not come to a
+head without shrewd surveillance and direction. And so again in the
+current European war, in the case, e.g., of Germany, where the
+initiative was taken, the State plainly had the full support of popular
+sentiment, and may even be said to have precipitated the war in response
+to this urgent popular aspiration; and here again it is a matter of
+notoriety that the popular sentiment had long been sedulously nursed and
+"mobilised" to that effect, so that the populace was assiduously kept in
+spiritual readiness for such an event. The like is less evident as
+regards the United Kingdom, and perhaps also as regards the other
+Allies.
+
+And such appears to have been the common run of the facts as regards all
+the greater wars of the last one hundred years,--what may be called the
+"public" wars of this modern era, as contrasted with the "private" or
+administrative wars which have been carried on in a corner by one and
+another of the Great Powers against hapless barbarians, from time to
+time, in the course of administrative routine.
+
+It is also evident from the run of the facts as exemplified in these
+modern wars that while any breach of the peace takes place only on the
+initiative and at the discretion of the government, or State,[1] it is
+always requisite in furtherance of such warlike enterprise to cherish
+and eventually to mobilise popular sentiment in support of any warlike
+move. Due fomentation of a warlike animus is indispensable to the
+procuring and maintenance of a suitable equipment with which eventually
+to break the peace, as well as to ensure a diligent prosecution of such
+enterprise when once it has been undertaken. Such a spirit of militant
+patriotism as may serviceably be mobilised in support of warlike
+enterprise has accordingly been a condition precedent to any people's
+entry into the modern Concert of Nations. This Concert of Nations is a
+Concert of Powers, and it is only as a Power that any nation plays its
+part in the concert, all the while that "power" here means eventual
+warlike force.
+
+[Footnote 1: A modern nation constitutes a State only in respect of or
+with ulterior bearing on the question of International peace or war.]
+
+Such a people as the Chinese, e.g., not pervaded with an adequate
+patriotic spirit, comes into the Concert of Nations not as a Power but
+as a bone of contention. Not that the Chinese fall short in any of the
+qualities that conduce to efficiency and welfare in time of peace, but
+they appear, in effect, to lack that certain "solidarity of prowess" by
+virtue of which they should choose to be (collectively) formidable
+rather than (individually) fortunate and upright; and the modern
+civilised nations are not in a position, nor in a frame of mind, to
+tolerate a neighbor whose only claim on their consideration falls under
+the category of peace on earth and good-will among men. China appears
+hitherto not to have been a serviceable people for warlike ends, except
+in so far as the resources of that country have been taken over and
+converted to warlike uses by some alien power working to its own ends.
+Such have been the several alien dynasties that have seized upon that
+country from time to time and have achieved dominion by usufruct of its
+unwarlike forces. Such has been the nature of the Manchu empire of the
+recent past, and such is the evident purpose of the prospective Japanese
+usufruct of the same country and its populace. Meantime the Chinese
+people appear to be incorrigibly peaceable, being scarcely willing to
+fight in any concerted fashion even when driven into a corner by
+unprovoked aggression, as in the present juncture. Such a people is very
+exceptional. Among civilised nations there are, broadly speaking, none
+of that temper, with the sole exception of the Chinese,--if the Chinese
+are properly to be spoken of as a nation.
+
+Modern warfare makes such large and direct use of the industrial arts,
+and depends for its successful prosecution so largely on a voluminous
+and unremitting supply of civilian services and wrought goods, that any
+inoffensive and industrious people, such as the Chinese, could doubtless
+now be turned to good account by any warlike power that might have the
+disposal of their working forces. To make their industrial efficiency
+count in this way toward warlike enterprise and imperial dominion, the
+usufruct of any such inoffensive and unpatriotic populace would have to
+fall into the hands of an alien governmental establishment. And no alien
+government resting on the support of a home population trained in the
+habits of democracy or given over to ideals of common honesty in
+national concerns could hopefully undertake the enterprise. This work of
+empire-building out of unwarlike materials could apparently be carried
+out only by some alien power hampered by no reserve of scruple, and
+backed by a servile populace of its own, imbued with an impeccable
+loyalty to its masters and with a suitably bellicose temper, as, e.g.,
+Imperial Japan or Imperial Germany.
+
+However, for the commonplace national enterprise the common run will do
+very well. Any populace imbued with a reasonable measure of patriotism
+will serve as ways and means to warlike enterprise under competent
+management, even if it is not habitually prone to a bellicose temper.
+Rightly managed, ordinary patriotic sentiment may readily be mobilised
+for warlike adventure by any reasonably adroit and single-minded body of
+statesmen,--of which there is abundant illustration. All the peoples of
+Christendom are possessed of a sufficiently alert sense of nationality,
+and by tradition and current usage all the national governments of
+Christendom are warlike establishments, at least in the defensive sense;
+and the distinction between the defensive and the offensive in
+international intrigue is a technical matter that offers no great
+difficulty. None of these nations is of such an incorrigibly peaceable
+temper that they can be counted on to keep the peace consistently in the
+ordinary course of events.
+
+Peace established by the State, or resting in the discretion of the
+State, is necessarily of the nature of an armistice, in effect
+terminable at will and on short notice. It is maintained only on
+conditions, stipulated by express convention or established by custom,
+and there is always the reservation, tacit or explicit, that recourse
+will be had to arms in case the "national interests" or the punctilios
+of international etiquette are traversed by the act or defection of any
+rival government or its subjects. The more nationally-minded the
+government or its subject populace, the readier the response to the call
+of any such opportunity for an unfolding of prowess. The most peaceable
+governmental policy of which Christendom has experience is a policy of
+"watchful waiting," with a jealous eye to the emergence of any occasion
+for national resentment; and the most irretrievably shameful dereliction
+of duty on the part of any civilised government would be its eventual
+insensibility to the appeal of a "just war." Under any governmental
+auspices, as the modern world knows governments, the keeping of the
+peace comes at its best under the precept, "Speak softly and carry a big
+stick." But the case for peace is more precarious than the wording of
+the aphorism would indicate, in as much as in practical fact the "big
+stick" is an obstacle to soft speech. Evidently, in the light of recent
+history, if the peace is to be kept it will have to come about
+irrespective of governmental management,--in spite of the State rather
+than by its good offices. At the best, the State, or the government, is
+an instrumentality for making peace, not for perpetuating it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Anyone who is interested in the nature and derivation of governmental
+institutions and establishments in Europe, in any but the formal
+respect, should be able to satisfy his curiosity by looking over the
+shoulders of the professed students of Political Science. Quite properly
+and profitably that branch of scholarship is occupied with the authentic
+pedigree of these institutions, and with the documentary instruments in
+the case; since Political Science is, after all, a branch of theoretical
+jurisprudence and is concerned about a formally competent analysis of
+the recorded legal powers. The material circumstances from which these
+institutions once took their beginning, and the exigencies which have
+governed the rate and direction of their later growth and mutation, as
+well as the _de facto_ bearing of the institutional scheme on the
+material welfare or the cultural fortunes of the given community,--while
+all these matters of fact may be germane to the speculations of
+Political Theory, they are not intrinsic to its premises, to the logical
+sequence of its inquiry, or to its theoretical findings. The like is
+also true, of course, as regards that system of habits of thought, that
+current frame of mind, in which any given institutional scheme
+necessarily is grounded, and without the continued support of which any
+given scheme of governmental institutions or policy would become
+nugatory and so would pass into the province of legal fiction. All these
+are not idle matters in the purview of the student of Political Science,
+but they remain after all substantially extraneous to the structure of
+political theory; and in so far as matters of this class are to be
+brought into the case at all, the specialists in the field can not
+fairly be expected to contribute anything beyond an occasional _obiter
+dictum_. There can be no discourteous presumption, therefore, in
+accepting the general theorems of current political theory without
+prejudice, and looking past the received theoretical formulations for a
+view of the substantial grounds on which the governmental establishments
+have grown into shape, and the circumstances, material and spiritual,
+that surround their continued working and effect.
+
+By lineal descent the governmental establishments and the powers with
+which they are vested, in all the Christian nations, are derived from
+the feudal establishments of the Middle Ages; which, in turn, are of a
+predatory origin and of an irresponsible character.[2] In nearly all
+instances, but more particularly among the nations that are accounted
+characteristically modern, the existing establishments have been greatly
+altered from the mediaeval pattern, by concessive adaptation to later
+exigencies or by a more or less revolutionary innovation. The degree of
+their modernity is (conventionally) measured, roughly, by the degree in
+which they have departed from the mediaeval pattern. Wherever the
+unavoidable concessions have been shrewdly made with a view to
+conserving the autonomy and irresponsibility of the governmental
+establishment, or the "State," and where the state of national sentiment
+has been led to favor this work of conservation, as, e.g., in the case
+of Austria, Spain or Prussia, there the modern outcome has been what may
+be called a Dynastic State. Where, on the other hand, the run of
+national sentiment has departed notably from the ancient holding ground
+of loyal abnegation, and has enforced a measure of revolutionary
+innovation, as in the case of France or of the English-speaking peoples,
+there the modern outcome has been an (ostensibly) democratic
+commonwealth of ungraded citizens. But the contrast so indicated is a
+contrast of divergent variants rather than of opposites. These two
+type-forms may be taken as the extreme and inclusive limits of variation
+among the governmental establishments with which the modern world is
+furnished.[3]
+
+[Footnote 2: The partial and dubious exception of the Scandinavian
+countries or of Switzerland need raise no question on this head.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Cf., e.g., Eduard Meyer, _England: its political
+organisation and development_. ch. ii.]
+
+The effectual difference between these two theoretically contrasted
+types of governmental establishments is doubtless grave enough, and for
+many purposes it is consequential, but it is after all not of such a
+nature as need greatly detain the argument at this point. The two differ
+less, in effect, in that range of their functioning which comes in
+question here than in their bearing on the community's fortunes apart
+from questions of war and peace. In all cases there stand over in this
+bearing certain primary characteristics of the ancient régime, which all
+these modern establishments have in common, though not all in an equal
+degree of preservation and effectiveness. They are, e.g., all vested
+with certain attributes of "sovereignty." In all cases the citizen still
+proves on closer attention to be in some measure a "subject" of the
+State, in that he is invariably conceived to owe a "duty" to the
+constituted authorities in one respect and another. All civilised
+governments take cognizance of Treason, Sedition, and the like; and all
+good citizens are not only content but profoundly insistent on the clear
+duty of the citizen on this head. The bias of loyalty is not a matter on
+which argument is tolerated. By virtue of this bias of loyalty, or
+"civic duty"--which still has much of the color of feudal
+allegiance--the governmental establishment is within its rights in
+coercively controlling and directing the actions of the citizen, or
+subject, in those respects that so lie within his duty; as also in
+authoritatively turning his abilities to account for the purposes that
+so lie within the governmental discretion, as, e.g., the Common Defense.
+
+These rights and powers still remain to the governmental establishment
+even at the widest democratic departure from that ancient pattern of
+masterful tutelage and usufruct that marked the old-fashioned
+patrimonial State,--and that still marks the better preserved ones among
+its modern derivatives. And so intrinsic to these governmental
+establishments are these discretionary powers, and by so unfailing a
+popular bias are they still accounted a matter of course and of
+axiomatic necessity, that they have invariably been retained also among
+the attributes of those democratic governments that trace their origin
+to a revolutionary break with the old order.
+
+To many, all this will seem a pedantic taking note of commonplaces,--as
+if it were worth while remarking that the existing governments are
+vested with the indispensable attributes of government. Yet history
+records an instance at variance with this axiomatic rule, a rule which
+is held to be an unavoidable deliverance of common sense. And it is by
+no means an altogether unique instance. It may serve to show that these
+characteristic and unimpeachable powers that invest all current
+governmental establishments are, after all, to be rated as the marks of
+a particular species of governments, and not characteristics of the
+genus of governmental establishments at large. These powers answer to an
+acquired bias, not to an underlying trait of human nature; a matter of
+habit, not of heredity.
+
+Such an historical instance is the so-called Republic, or Commonwealth,
+of Iceland--tenth to thirteenth centuries. Its case is looked on by
+students of history as a spectacular anomaly, because it admitted none
+of these primary powers of government in its constituted authorities.
+And yet, for contrast with these matter-of-course preconceptions of
+these students of history, it is well to note that in the deliberations
+of those ancients who installed the Republic for the management of their
+joint concerns, any inclusion of such powers in its competency appears
+never to have been contemplated, not even to the extent of its being
+rejected. This singularity--as it would be rated by modern statesmen and
+students--was in no degree a new departure in state-making on the part
+of the founders of the Republic. They had no knowledge of such powers,
+duties and accountabilities, except as unwholesome features of a novel
+and alien scheme of irresponsible oppression that was sought to be
+imposed on them by Harald Fairhair, and which they incontinently made it
+their chief and immediate business to evade. They also set up no joint
+or collective establishment with powers for the Common Defense, nor does
+it appear that such a notion had occurred to them.
+
+In the history of its installation there is no hint that the men who set
+up this Icelandic Commonwealth had any sense of the need, or even of the
+feasibility, of such a coercive government as would be involved in
+concerted preparation for the common defense. Subjection to personal
+rule, or to official rule in any degree of attenuation, was not
+comprised in their traditional experience of citizenship; and it was
+necessarily out of the elements comprised in this traditional experience
+that the new structure would have to be built up. The new commonwealth
+was necessarily erected on the premises afforded by the received scheme
+of use and wont; and this received scheme had come down out of
+pre-feudal conditions, without having passed under the discipline of
+that régime of coercion which the feudal system had imposed on the rest
+of Europe, and so had established as an "immemorial usage" and a "second
+nature" among the populations of Christendom. The resulting character of
+the Icelandic Commonwealth is sufficiently striking when contrasted with
+the case of the English commonwealth of the seventeenth century, or the
+later French and American republics. These, all and several, came out of
+a protracted experience in feudalistic state-making and State policy;
+and the common defense--frequently on the offensive--with its necessary
+coercive machinery and its submissive loyalty, consequently would take
+the central place in the resulting civic structure.
+
+To close the tale of the Icelandic commonwealth it may be added that
+their republic of insubordinate citizens presently fell into default,
+systematic misuse, under the disorders brought on by an accumulation of
+wealth, and that it died of legal fiction and constitutional formalities
+after some experience at the hands of able and ambitious statesmen in
+contact with an alien government drawn on the coercive plan. The clay
+vessel failed to make good among the iron pots, and so proved its
+unfitness to survive in the world of Christian nations,--very much as
+the Chinese are today at the mercy of the defensive rapacity of the
+Powers.
+
+     And the mercy that we gave them
+   Was to sink them in the sea,
+   Down on the coast of High Barbarie.
+
+No doubt, it will be accepted as an axiomatic certainty that the
+establishment of a commonwealth after the fashion of the Icelandic
+Republic, without coercive authority or provision for the common
+defense, and without a sense of subordination or collective
+responsibility among its citizens, would be out of all question under
+existing circumstances of politics and international trade. Nor would
+such a commonwealth be workable on the scale and at the pace imposed by
+modern industrial and commercial conditions, even apart from
+international jealousy and ambitions, provided the sacred rights of
+ownership were to be maintained in something like their current shape.
+And yet something of a drift of popular sentiment, and indeed something
+of deliberate endeavour, setting in the direction of such a harmless and
+helpless national organisation is always visible in Western Europe,
+throughout modern times; particularly through the eighteenth and the
+early half of the nineteenth centuries; and more particularly among the
+English-speaking peoples and, with a difference, among the French. The
+Dutch and the Scandinavian countries answer more doubtfully to the same
+characterisation.
+
+The movement in question is known to history as the Liberal,
+Rationalistic, Humanitarian, or Individualistic departure. Its ideal,
+when formulated, is spoken of as the System of Natural Rights; and its
+goal in the way of a national establishment has been well characterised
+by its critics as the Police State, or the Night-Watchman State. The
+gains made in this direction, or perhaps better the inroads of this
+animus in national ideals, are plainly to be set down as a shift in the
+direction of peace and amity; but it is also plain that the shift of
+ground so initiated by this strain of sentiment has never reached a
+conclusion and never has taken effect in anything like an effectual
+working arrangement. Its practical consequences have been of the nature
+of abatement and defection in the pursuit of national ambitions and
+dynastic enterprise, rather than a creative work of installing any
+institutional furniture suitable to its own ends. It has in effect gone
+no farther than what would be called an incipient correction of abuses.
+The highest rise, as well as the decline, of this movement lie within
+the nineteenth century.
+
+In point of time, the decay of this amiable conceit of _laissez-faire_
+in national policy coincides with the period of great advance in the
+technology of transport and communication in the nineteenth century.
+Perhaps, on a larger outlook, it should rather be said that the run of
+national ambitions and animosities had, in the eighteenth and nineteenth
+centuries, suffered a degree of decay through the diffusion of this
+sentimental predilection for Natural Liberty, and that this decline of
+the manlier aspirations was then arrested and corrected by help of these
+improvements in the technological situation; which enabled a closer and
+more coercive control to be exercised over larger areas, and at the same
+time enabled a more massive aggregate of warlike force to strike more
+effectively at a greater distance. This whole episode of the rise and
+decline of _laissez-faire_ in modern history is perhaps best to be
+conceived as a transient weakening of nationalism, by neglect; rather
+than anything like the growth of a new and more humane ideal of national
+intercourse. Such would be the appraisal to be had at the hands of those
+who speak for a strenuous national life and for the arbitrament of
+sportsmanlike contention in human affairs. And the latterday growth of
+more militant aspirations, together with the more settled and sedulous
+attention to a development of control and of formidable armaments, such
+as followed on through the latter half of the nineteenth century, would
+then be rated as a resumption of those older aims and ideals that had
+been falling somewhat into abeyance in the slack-water days of
+Liberalism.
+
+There is much to be said for this latter view; and, indeed, much has
+been said for it, particularly by the spokesmen of imperialist politics.
+This bias of Natural Liberty has been associated in history with the
+English-speaking peoples, more intimately and more extensively than with
+any other. Not that this amiable conceit is in any peculiar degree a
+race characteristic of this group of peoples; nor even that the history
+of its rise and decline runs wholly within the linguistic frontiers
+indicated by this characterisation. The French and the Dutch have borne
+their share, and at an earlier day Italian sentiment and speculation
+lent its impulsion to the same genial drift of faith and aspiration.
+But, by historical accident, its center of gravity and of diffusion has
+lain with the English-speaking communities during the period when this
+bias made history and left its impress on the institutional scheme of
+the Western civilisation. By grace of what may, for the present purpose,
+be called historical accident, it happens that the interval of history
+during which the bias of Natural Liberty made visible headway was also a
+period during which these English-speaking peoples, among whom its
+effects are chiefly visible, were relatively secure from international
+disturbance, by force of inaccessibility. Little strain was put upon
+their sense of national solidarity or national prowess; so little,
+indeed, that there was some danger of their patriotic animosity falling
+into decay by disuse; and then they were also busy with other things.
+Peaceable intercourse, it is true, was relatively easy, active and
+far-reaching--eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--as compared with what
+had been the case before that time; but warlike intercourse on such a
+scale as would constitute a substantial menace to any large nation was
+nearly out of the question, so far as regards the English-speaking
+peoples. The available means of aggression, as touches the case of these
+particular communities, were visibly and consciously inadequate as
+compared with the means of defense. The means of internal or
+intra-national control or coercion were also less well provided by the
+state of the arts current at that time than the means of peaceable
+intercourse. These means of transport and communication were, at that
+stage of their development, less well suited for the purposes of
+far-reaching warlike strategy and the exercise of surveillance and
+coercion over large spaces than for the purposes of peaceable traffic.
+
+But the continued improvement in the means of communication during the
+nineteenth century presently upset that situation, and so presently
+began to neutralise the geographical quarantine which had hedged about
+these communities that were inclined to let well enough alone. The
+increasing speed and accuracy of movement in shipping, due to the
+successful introduction of steam, as well as the concomitant increasing
+size of the units of equipment, all runs to this effect and presently
+sets at naught the peace barriers of sea and weather. So also the
+development of railways and their increasing availability for strategic
+uses, together with the far-reaching coordination of movement made
+possible by their means and by the telegraph; all of which is further
+facilitated by the increasing mass and density of population.
+Improvements in the technology of arms and armament worked to the like
+effect, of setting the peace of any community on an increasingly
+precarious footing, through the advantage which this new technology gave
+to a ready equipment and a rapid mobilisation. The new state of the
+industrial arts serviceable for warlike enterprise put an increasingly
+heavy premium on readiness for offense or defense, but more particularly
+it all worked increasingly to the advantage of the offensive. It put the
+Fabian strategy out of date, and led to the doctrine of a defensive
+offense.
+
+Gradually it came true, with the continued advance in those industrial
+arts that lend themselves to strategic uses, and it came also to be
+realised, that no corner of the earth was any longer secure by mere
+favor of distance and natural difficulty, from eventual aggression at
+the hands of any provident and adventurous assailant,--even by help of a
+modicum of defensive precaution. The fear of aggression then came
+definitively to take the place of international good-will and became the
+chief motive in public policy, so fast and so far as the state of the
+industrial arts continued to incline the balance of advantage to the
+side of the aggressor. All of which served greatly to strengthen the
+hands of those statesmen who, by interest or temperament, were inclined
+to imperialistic enterprise. Since that period all armament has
+conventionally been accounted defensive, and all statesmen have
+professed that the common defense is their chief concern. Professedly
+all armament has been designed to keep the peace; so much of a shadow of
+the peaceable bias there still stands over.
+
+Throughout this latest phase of modern civilisation the avowed fear of
+aggression has served as apology, possibly as provocation in fact, to
+national armaments; and throughout the same period any analysis of the
+situation will finally run the chain of fear back to Prussia as the
+putative or actual, center of disturbance and apprehension. No doubt,
+Prussian armament has taken the lead and forced the pace among the
+nations of Christendom; but the Prussian policy, too, has been
+diligently covered with the same decorous plea of needful provision for
+the common defense and an unremitting solicitude for international
+peace,--to which has been added the canny afterthought of the "defensive
+offense."
+
+It is characteristic of this era of armed peace that in all these
+extensive preparations for breaking the peace any formal avowal of other
+than a defensive purpose has at all times been avoided as an
+insufferable breach of diplomatic decorum. It is likewise characteristic
+of the same era that armaments have unremittingly been increased, beyond
+anything previously known; and that all men have known all the while
+that the inevitable outcome of this avowedly defensive armament must
+eventually be war on an unprecedented scale and of unexampled ferocity.
+It would be neither charitable nor otherwise to the point to call
+attention to the reflection which this state of the case throws on the
+collective sagacity or the good faith of the statesmen who have had the
+management of affairs. It is not practicable to imagine how such an
+outcome as the present could have been brought about by any degree of
+stupidity or incapacity alone, nor is it easier to find evidence that
+the utmost sagacity of the statecraft engaged has had the slightest
+mitigating effect on the evil consummation to which the whole case has
+been brought. It has long been a commonplace among observers of public
+events that these professedly defensive warlike preparations have in
+effect been preparations for breaking the peace; against which, at
+least ostensibly, a remedy had been sought in the preparation of still
+heavier armaments, with full realisation that more armament would
+unfailingly entail a more unsparing and more disastrous war,--which sums
+up the statecraft of the past half century.
+
+Prussia, and afterwards Prussianised Germany, has come in for the
+distinction of taking the lead and forcing the pace in this competitive
+preparation--or "preparedness"--for war in time of peace. That such has
+been the case appears in good part to be something of a fortuitous
+circumstance. The season of enterprising force and fraud to which that
+country owes its induction into the concert of nations is an episode of
+recent history; so recent, indeed, that the German nation has not yet
+had time to live it down and let it be forgotten; and the Imperial State
+is consequently burdened with an irritably uneasy sense of odium and an
+established reputation for unduly bad faith. From which it has followed,
+among other things, that the statesmen of the Empire have lived in the
+expectation of having their unforgotten derelictions brought home, and
+so have, on the one hand, found themselves unable to credit any pacific
+intentions professed by the neighboring Powers, while on the other hand
+they have been unable to gain credence for their own voluble professions
+of peace and amity. So it has come about that, by a fortuitous
+conjuncture of scarcely relevant circumstances, Prussia and the Empire
+have been thrown into the lead in the race of "preparedness" and have
+been led assiduously to hasten a breach which they could ill afford. It
+is, to say the least, extremely doubtful if the event would have been
+substantially different in the absence of that special provocation to
+competitive preparedness that has been injected into the situation by
+this German attitude; but the rate of approach to a warlike climax has
+doubtless been hastened by the anticipatory policy of preparedness which
+the Prussian dynasty has seen itself constrained to pursue. Eventually,
+the peculiar circumstances of its case--embarrassment at home and
+distaste and discredit abroad--have induced the Imperial State to take
+the line of a defensive offense, to take war by the forelock and
+retaliate on presumptive enemies for prospective grievances. But in any
+case, the progressive improvement in transport and communication, as
+well as in the special technology of warfare, backed by greatly enhanced
+facilities for indoctrinating the populace with militant
+nationalism,--these ways and means, working under the hand of patriotic
+statesmen must in course of the past century have brought the peace of
+Europe to so precarious a footing as would have provoked a material
+increase in the equipment for national defense; which would unavoidably
+have led to competitive armament and an enhanced international distrust
+and animosity, eventually culminating in hostilities.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may well be that the plea of defensive preparation advanced by the
+statesmen, Prussian and others, in apology for competitive armaments is
+a diplomatic subterfuge,--there are indications that such has commonly
+been the case; but even if it commonly is visibly disingenuous, the need
+of making such a plea to cover more sinister designs is itself an
+evidence that an avowedly predatory enterprise no longer meets with the
+requisite popular approval. Even if an exception to this rule be
+admitted in the recent attitude of the German people, it is to be
+recalled that the exception was allowed to stand only transiently, and
+that presently the avowal of a predatory design in this case was
+urgently disclaimed in the face of adversity. Even those who speak most
+fluently for the necessity of war, and for its merits as a needed
+discipline in the manly virtues, are constrained by the prevailing
+sentiment to deprecate its necessity.
+
+Yet it is equally evident that when once a warlike enterprise has been
+entered upon so far as to commit the nation to hostilities, it will have
+the cordial support of popular sentiment even if it is patently an
+aggressive war. Indeed, it is quite a safe generalisation that when
+hostilities have once been got fairly under way by the interested
+statesmen, the patriotic sentiment of the nation may confidently be
+counted on to back the enterprise irrespective of the merits of the
+quarrel. But even if the national sentiment is in this way to be counted
+in as an incidental matter of course, it is also to be kept in mind in
+this connection that any quarrel so entered upon by any nation will
+forthwith come to have the moral approval of the community. Dissenters
+will of course be found, sporadically, who do not readily fall in with
+the prevailing animus; but as a general proposition it will still hold
+true that any such quarrel forthwith becomes a just quarrel in the eyes
+of those who have so been committed to it.
+
+A corollary following from this general theorem may be worth noting in
+the same connection. Any politician who succeeds in embroiling his
+country in a war, however nefarious, becomes a popular hero and is
+reputed a wise and righteous statesman, at least for the time being.
+Illustrative instances need perhaps not, and indeed can not gracefully,
+be named; most popular heroes and reputed statesmen belong in this
+class.
+
+Another corollary, which bears more immediately on the question in hand,
+follows also from the same general proposition: Since the ethical values
+involved in any given international contest are substantially of the
+nature of afterthought or accessory, they may safely be left on one side
+in any endeavour to understand or account for any given outbreak of
+hostilities. The moral indignation of both parties to the quarrel is to
+be taken for granted, as being the statesman's chief and necessary ways
+and means of bringing any warlike enterprise to a head and floating it
+to a creditable finish. It is a precipitate of the partisan animosity
+that inspires both parties and holds them to their duty of
+self-sacrifice and devastation, and at its best it will chiefly serve as
+a cloak of self-righteousness to extenuate any exceptionally profligate
+excursions in the conduct of hostilities.
+
+Any warlike enterprise that is hopefully to be entered on must have the
+moral sanction of the community, or of an effective majority in the
+community. It consequently becomes the first concern of the warlike
+statesman to put this moral force in train for the adventure on which he
+is bent. And there are two main lines of motivation by which the
+spiritual forces of any Christian nation may so be mobilised for warlike
+adventure: (1) The preservation or furtherance of the community's
+material interests, real or fancied, and (2) vindication of the national
+honour. To these should perhaps be added as a third, the advancement and
+perpetuation of the nation's "Culture;" that is to say, of its habitual
+scheme of use and wont. It is a nice question whether, in practical
+effect, the aspiration to perpetuate the national Culture is
+consistently to be distinguished from the vindication of the national
+honour. There is perhaps the distinction to be made that "the
+perpetuation of the national Culture" lends a readier countenance to
+gratuitous aggression and affords a broader cover for incidental
+atrocities, since the enemies of the national Culture will necessarily
+be conceived as an inferior and obstructive people, falling beneath the
+rules of commonplace decorum.
+
+Those material interests for which modern nations are in the habit of
+taking to arms are commonly of a fanciful character, in that they
+commonly have none but an imaginary net value to the community at large.
+Such are, e.g., the national trade or the increase of the national
+territory. These and the like may serve the warlike or dynastic
+ambitions of the nation's masters; they may also further the interests
+of office-holders, and more particularly of certain business houses or
+businessmen who stand to gain some small advantage by help of the powers
+in control; but it all signifies nothing more to the common man than an
+increased bill of governmental expense and a probable increase in the
+cost of living.
+
+That a nation's trade should be carried in vessels owned by its citizens
+or registered in its ports will doubtless have some sentimental value to
+the common run of its citizens, as is shown by the fact that
+disingenuous politicians always find it worth their while to appeal to
+this chauvinistic predilection. But it patently is all a completely idle
+question, in point of material advantage, to anyone but the owners of
+the vessels; and to these owners it is also of no material consequence
+under what flag their investments sail, except so far as the government
+in question may afford them some preferential opportunity for
+gain,--always at the cost of their fellow citizens. The like is equally
+true as regards the domicile and the national allegiance of the
+businessmen who buy and sell the country's imports and exports. The
+common man plainly has no slightest material interest in the nationality
+or the place of residence of those who conduct this traffic; though all
+the facts go to say that in some puzzle-headed way the common man
+commonly persuades himself that it does make some occult sort of
+difference to him; so that he is commonly willing to pay something
+substantial toward subsidising businessmen of his own nationality, in
+the way of a protective tariff and the like.
+
+The only material advantage to be derived from such a preferential trade
+policy arises in the case of international hostilities, in which case
+the home-owned vessels and merchants may on occasion count toward
+military readiness; although even in that connection their value is
+contingent and doubtful. But in this way they may contribute in their
+degree to a readiness to break off peaceable relations with other
+countries. It is only for warlike purposes, that is to say for the
+dynastic ambitions of warlike statesmen, that these preferential
+contrivances in economic policy have any substantial value; and even in
+that connection their expediency is always doubtful. They are a source
+of national jealousy, and they may on occasion become a help to military
+strategy when this national jealousy eventuates in hostilities.
+
+The run of the facts touching this matter of national trade policy is
+something as follows: At the instance of businessmen who stand to gain
+by it, and with the cordial support of popular sentiment, the
+constituted authorities sedulously further the increase of shipping and
+commerce under protection of the national power. At the same time they
+spend substance and diplomatic energy in an endeavor to extend the
+international market facilities open to the country's businessmen, with
+a view always to a preferential advantage in favor of these
+businessmen, also with the sentimental support of the common man and at
+his cost. To safeguard these commercial interests, as well as
+property-holdings of the nation's citizens in foreign parts, the nation
+maintains naval, military, consular and diplomatic establishments, at
+the common expense. The total gains derivable from these commercial and
+investment interests abroad, under favorable circumstances, will never
+by any chance equal the cost of the governmental apparatus installed to
+further and safeguard them. These gains, such as they are, go to the
+investors and businessmen engaged in these enterprises; while the costs
+incident to the adventure are borne almost wholly by the common man, who
+gets no gain from it all. Commonly, as in the case of a protective
+tariff or a preferential navigation law, the cost to the common man is
+altogether out of proportion to the gain which accrues to the
+businessmen for whose benefit he carries the burden. The only other
+class, besides the preferentially favored businessmen, who derive any
+material benefit from this arrangement is that of the office-holders who
+take care of this governmental traffic and draw something in the way of
+salaries and perquisites; and whose cost is defrayed by the common man,
+who remains an outsider in all but the payment of the bills. The common
+man is proud and glad to bear this burden for the benefit of his
+wealthier neighbors, and he does so with the singular conviction that in
+some occult manner he profits by it. All this is incredible, but it is
+everyday fact.
+
+In case it should happen that these business interests of the nation's
+businessmen interested in trade or investments abroad are jeopardised by
+a disturbance of any kind in these foreign parts in which these
+business interests lie, then it immediately becomes the urgent concern
+of the national authorities to use all means at hand for maintaining the
+gainful traffic of these businessmen undiminished, and the common man
+pays the cost. Should such an untoward situation go to such sinister
+lengths as to involve actual loss to these business interests or
+otherwise give rise to a tangible grievance, it becomes an affair of the
+national honour; whereupon no sense of proportion as between the
+material gains at stake and the cost of remedy or retaliation need
+longer be observed, since the national honour is beyond price. The
+motivation in the case shifts from the ground of material interest to
+the spiritual ground of the moral sentiments.
+
+In this connection "honour" is of course to be taken in the euphemistic
+sense which the term has under the _code duello_ governing "affairs of
+honour." It carries no connotation of honesty, veracity, equity,
+liberality, or unselfishness. This national honour is of the nature of
+an intangible or immaterial asset, of course; it is a matter of
+prestige, a sportsmanlike conception; but that fact must not be taken to
+mean that it is of any the less substantial effect for purposes of a
+_casus belli_ than the material assets of the community. Quite the
+contrary: "Who steals my purse, steals trash," etc. In point of fact, it
+will commonly happen that any material grievance must first be converted
+into terms of this spiritual capital, before it is effectually turned to
+account as a stimulus to warlike enterprise.
+
+Even among a people with so single an eye to the main chance as the
+American community it will be found true, on experiment or on review of
+the historical evidence, that an offense against the national honour
+commands a profounder and more unreserved resentment than any
+infraction of the rights of person or property simply. This has latterly
+been well shown in connection with the manoeuvres of the several
+European belligerents, designed to bend American neutrality to the
+service of one side or the other. Both parties have aimed to intimidate
+and cajole; but while the one party has taken recourse to effrontery and
+has made much and ostentatious use of threats and acts of violence
+against person and property, the other has constantly observed a
+deferential attitude toward American national self-esteem, even while
+engaged on a persistent infraction of American commercial rights. The
+first named line of diplomacy has convicted itself of miscarriage and
+has lost the strategic advantage, as against the none too adroit finesse
+of the other side. The statesmen of this European war power were so ill
+advised as to enter on a course of tentatively cumulative intimidation,
+by threats and experimentally graduated crimes against the property and
+persons of American citizens, with a view to coerce American cupidity
+and yet to avoid carrying these manoeuvres of terrorism far enough to
+arouse an unmanageable sense of outrage. The experiment has served to
+show that the breaking point in popular indignation will be reached
+before the terrorism has gone far enough to raise a serious question of
+pecuniary caution.
+
+This national honour, which so is rated a necessary of life, is an
+immaterial substance in a peculiarly high-wrought degree, being not only
+not physically tangible but also not even capable of adequate statement
+in pecuniary terms,--as would be the case with ordinary immaterial
+assets. It is true, where the point of grievance out of which a question
+of the national honour arises is a pecuniary discrepancy, the national
+honour can not be satisfied without a pecuniary accounting; but it needs
+no argument to convince all right-minded persons that even at such a
+juncture the national honour that has been compromised is indefinitely
+and indefinably more than what can be made to appear on an accountant's
+page. It is a highly valued asset, or at least a valued possession, but
+it is of a metaphysical, not of a physical nature, and it is not known
+to serve any material or otherwise useful end apart from affording a
+practicable grievance consequent upon its infraction.
+
+This national honour is subject to injury in divers ways, and so may
+yield a fruitful grievance even apart from offences against the person
+or property of the nation's businessmen; as, e.g., through neglect or
+disregard of the conventional punctilios governing diplomatic
+intercourse, or by disrespect or contumelious speech touching the Flag,
+or the persons of national officials, particularly of such officials as
+have only a decorative use, or the costumes worn by such officials, or,
+again, by failure to observe the ritual prescribed for parading the
+national honour on stated occasions. When duly violated the national
+honour may duly be made whole again by similarly immaterial
+instrumentalities; as, e.g., by recital of an appropriate formula of
+words, by formal consumption of a stated quantity of ammunition in the
+way of a salute, by "dipping" an ensign, and the like,--procedure which
+can, of course, have none but a magical efficacy. The national honour,
+in short, moves in the realm of magic, and touches the frontiers of
+religion.
+
+Throughout this range of duties incumbent on the national defense, it
+will be noted, the offenses or discrepancies to be guarded against or
+corrected by recourse to arms have much of a ceremonial character.
+Whatever may be the material accidents that surround any given concrete
+grievance that comes up for appraisal and redress, in bringing the case
+into the arena for trial by combat it is the spiritual value of the
+offense that is played up and made the decisive ground of action,
+particularly in so far as appeal is made to the sensibilities of the
+common man, who will have to bear the cost of the adventure. And in such
+a case it will commonly happen that the common man is unable, without
+advice, to see that any given hostile act embodies a sacrilegious
+infraction of the national honour. He will at any such conjuncture
+scarcely rise to the pitch of moral indignation necessary to float a
+warlike reprisal, until the expert keepers of the Code come in to
+expound and certify the nature of the transgression. But when once the
+lesion to the national honour has been ascertained, appraised and duly
+exhibited by those persons whose place in the national economy it is to
+look after all that sort of thing, the common man will be found nowise
+behindhand about resenting the evil usage of which he so, by force of
+interpretation, has been a victim.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ON THE NATURE AND USES OF PATRIOTISM
+
+
+Patriotism may be defined as a sense of partisan solidarity in respect
+of prestige. What the expert psychologists, and perhaps the experts in
+Political Science, might find it necessary to say in the course of an
+exhaustive analysis and definition of this human faculty would
+presumably be something more precise and more extensive. There is no
+inclination here to forestall definition, but only to identify and
+describe the concept that loosely underlies the colloquial use of this
+term, so far as seems necessary to an inquiry into the part played by
+the patriotic animus in the life of modern peoples, particularly as it
+bears on questions of war and peace.
+
+On any attempt to divest this concept of all extraneous or adventitious
+elements it will be found that such a sense of an undivided joint
+interest in a collective body of prestige will always remain as an
+irreducible minimum. This is the substantial core about which many and
+divers subsidiary interests cluster, but without which these other
+clustering interests and aspirations will not, jointly or severally,
+make up a working palladium of the patriotic spirit.
+
+It is true, seen in some other light or rated in some other bearing or
+connection, one and another of these other interests, ideals,
+aspirations, beatitudes, may well be adjudged nobler, wiser, possibly
+more urgent than the national prestige; but in the forum of patriotism
+all these other necessaries of human life--the glory of God and the good
+of man--rise by comparison only to the rank of subsidiaries,
+auxiliaries, amenities. He is an indifferent patriot who will let "life,
+liberty and the pursuit of happiness" cloud the issue and get in the way
+of the main business in hand.
+
+There once were, we are told, many hardy and enterprising spirits banded
+together along the Spanish Main for such like ends, just as there are in
+our day an even greater number of no less single-minded spirits bent on
+their own "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness," according to their
+light, in the money-markets of the modern world; but for all their
+admirable qualities and splendid achievements, their passionate quest of
+these amenities has not entitled these Gentlemen Adventurers to claim
+rank as patriots. The poet says:
+
+   "Strike for your altars and your fires!
+   Strike for the green graves of your sires!
+     God and your native land!"
+
+But, again, a temperate scrutiny of the list of desiderata so enumerated
+in the poet's flight, will quickly bring out the fact that any or all of
+them might drop out of the situation without prejudice to the plain call
+of patriotic duty. In the last resort, when the patriotic spirit falls
+back on its naked self alone, it is not reflection on the merits of
+these good and beautiful things in Nature that gives him his cue and
+enforces the ultimate sacrifice. Indeed it is something infinitely more
+futile and infinitely more urgent,--provided only that the man is imbued
+with the due modicum of patriotic devotion; as, indeed, men commonly
+are. It is not faith, hope or charity that abide as the irreducible
+minimum of virtue in the patriot's scheme of things; particularly not
+that charity that has once been highly spoken of as being the greatest
+of these. It may be that, viewed in the light of reason, as Doctor
+Katzenberger would say, patriotic devotion is the most futile thing in
+the world; but, for good or ill, the light of reason has nothing to do
+with the case,--no more than "The flowers that bloom in the spring."
+
+The patriotic spirit is a spirit of emulation, evidently, at the same
+time that it is emulation shot through with a sense of solidarity. It
+belongs under the general caption of sportsmanship, rather than of
+workmanship. Now, any enterprise in sportsmanship is bent on an
+invidious success, which must involve as its major purpose the defeat
+and humiliation of some competitor, whatever else may be comprised in
+its aim. Its aim is a differential gain, as against a rival; and the
+emulative spirit that comes under the head of patriotism commonly, if
+not invariably, seeks this differential advantage by injury of the rival
+rather than by an increase of home-bred well-being.
+
+Indeed, well-being is altogether out of the perspective, except as
+underpinning for an edifice of national prestige. It is, at least, a
+safe generalisation that the patriotic sentiment never has been known to
+rise to the consummate pitch of enthusiastic abandon except when bent on
+some work of concerted malevolence. Patriotism is of a contentious
+complexion, and finds its full expression in no other outlet than
+warlike enterprise; its highest and final appeal is for the death,
+damage, discomfort and destruction of the party of the second part.
+
+It is not that the spirit of patriotism will tolerate no other
+sentiments bearing on matters of public interest, but only that it will
+tolerate none that traverse the call of the national prestige. Like
+other men, the patriot may be moved by many and divers other
+considerations, besides that of the national prestige; and these other
+considerations may be of the most genial and reasonable kind, or they
+may also be as foolish and mischievous as any comprised in the range of
+human infirmities. He may be a humanitarian given over to the kindliest
+solicitude for the common good, or a religious devotee hedged about in
+all his motions by the ever present fear of God, or taken up with
+artistic, scholarly or scientific pursuits; or, again, he may be a
+spendthrift devotee of profane dissipation, whether in the slums or on
+the higher levels of gentility, or he may be engaged on a rapacious
+quest of gain, as a businessman within the law or as a criminal without
+its benefit, or he may spend his best endeavors in advancing the
+interests of his class at the cost of the nation at large. All that is
+understood as a matter of course and is beside the point. In so far as
+he is a complete patriot these other interests will fall away from him
+when the one clear call of patriotic duty comes to enlist him in the
+cause of the national prestige. There is, indeed, nothing to hinder a
+bad citizen being a good patriot; nor does it follow that a good
+citizen--in other respects--may not be a very indifferent patriot.
+
+Many and various other preferences and considerations may coincide with
+the promptings of the patriotic spirit, and so may come in to coalesce
+with and fortify its driving force; and it is usual for patriotic men to
+seek support for their patriotic impulses in some reasoned purpose of
+this extraneous kind that is believed to be served by following the call
+of the national prestige,--it may be a presumptive increase and
+diffusion of culture at large, or the spread and enhancement of a
+presumptively estimable religious faith, or a prospective liberation of
+mankind from servitude to obnoxious masters and outworn institutions;
+or, again, it may be the increase of peace and material well-being among
+men, within the national frontiers or impartially throughout the
+civilised world. There are, substantially, none of the desirable things
+in this world that are not so counted on by some considerable body of
+patriots to be accomplished by the success of their own particular
+patriotic aspirations. What they will not come to an understanding about
+is the particular national ascendency with which the attainment of these
+admirable ends is conceived to be bound up.
+
+The ideals, needs and aims that so are brought into the patriotic
+argument to lend a color of rationality to the patriotic aspiration in
+any given case will of course be such ideals, needs and aims as are
+currently accepted and felt to be authentic and self-legitimating among
+the people in whose eyes the given patriotic enterprise is to find
+favor. So one finds that, e.g., among the followers of Islam, devout and
+resolute, the patriotic statesman (that is to say the politician who
+designs to make use of the popular patriotic fervor) will in the last
+resort appeal to the claims and injunctions of the faith. In a similar
+way the Prussian statesman bent on dynastic enterprise will conjure in
+the name of the dynasty and of culture and efficiency; or, if worse
+comes to worst, an outbreak will be decently covered with a plea of
+mortal peril and self-defense. Among English-speaking peoples much is to
+be gained by showing that the path of patriotic glory is at the same
+time the way of equal-handed justice under the rule of free
+institutions; at the same time, in a fully commercialised community,
+such as the English-speaking commonly are, material benefits in the way
+of trade will go far to sketch in a background of decency for any
+enterprise that looks to the enhancement of the national prestige.
+
+But any promise of gain, whether in the nation's material or immaterial
+assets, will not of itself carry full conviction to the commonplace
+modern citizen; or even to such modern citizens as are best endowed with
+a national spirit. By and large, and overlooking that appreciable
+contingent of morally defective citizens that is to be counted on in any
+hybrid population, it will hold true that no contemplated enterprise or
+line of policy will fully commend itself to the popular sense of merit
+and expediency until it is given a moral turn, so as to bring it to
+square with the dictates of right and honest dealing. On no terms short
+of this will it effectually coalesce with the patriotic aspiration. To
+give the fullest practical effect to the patriotic fervor that animates
+any modern nation, and so turn it to use in the most effective way, it
+is necessary to show that the demands of equity are involved in the
+case. Any cursory survey of modern historical events bearing on this
+point, among the civilised peoples, will bring out the fact that no
+concerted and sustained movement of the national spirit can be had
+without enlisting the community's moral convictions. The common man must
+be persuaded that right is on his side. "Thrice is he armed who knows
+his quarrel just." The grounds of this conviction may often be tawdry
+enough, but the conviction is a necessary factor in the case.
+
+The requisite moral sanction may be had on various grounds, and, on the
+whole, it is not an extremely difficult matter to arrange. In the
+simplest and not infrequent case it may turn on a question of equity in
+respect of trade or investment as between the citizens or subjects of
+the several rival nations; the Chinese "Open Door" affords as sordid an
+example as may be desired. Or it may be only an envious demand for a
+share in the world's material resources--"A Place in the Sun," as a
+picturesque phrase describes it; or "The Freedom of the Seas," as
+another equally vague and equally invidious demand for international
+equity phrases it. These demands are put forward with a color of
+demanding something in the way of equitable opportunity for the
+commonplace peaceable citizen; but quite plainly they have none but a
+fanciful bearing on the fortunes of the common man in time of peace, and
+they have a meaning to the nation only as a fighting unit; apart from
+their prestige value, these things are worth fighting for only as
+prospective means of fighting. The like appeal to the moral
+sensibilities may, again, be made in the way of a call to self-defense,
+under the rule of Live and let live; or it may also rest on the more
+tenuous obligation to safeguard the national integrity of a weaker
+neighbor, under a broader interpretation of the same equitable rule of
+Live and let live. But in one way or another it is necessary to set up
+the conviction that the promptings of patriotic ambition have the
+sanction of moral necessity.
+
+It is not that the line of national policy or patriotic enterprise so
+entered upon with the support of popular sentiment need be right and
+equitable as seen in dispassionate perspective from the outside, but
+only that it should be capable of being made to seem right and equitable
+to the biased populace whose moral convictions are requisite to its
+prosecution; which is quite another matter. Nor is it that any such
+patriotic enterprise is, in fact, entered on simply or mainly on these
+moral grounds that so are alleged in its justification, but only that
+some such colorable ground of justification or extenuation is necessary
+to be alleged, and to be credited by popular belief.
+
+It is not that the common man is not sufficiently patriotic, but only
+that he is a patriot hampered with a plodding and uneasy sense of right
+and honest dealing, and that one must make up one's account with this
+moral bias in looking to any sustained and concerted action that draws
+on the sentiment of the common man for its carrying on. But the moral
+sense in the case may be somewhat easily satisfied with a modicum of
+equity, in case the patriotic bias of the people is well pronounced, or
+in case it is reenforced with a sufficient appeal to self-interest. In
+those cases where the national fervor rises to an excited pitch, even
+very attenuated considerations of right and justice, such as would under
+ordinary conditions doubtfully bear scrutiny as extenuating
+circumstances, may come to serve as moral authentication for any
+extravagant course of action to which the craving for national prestige
+may incite. The higher the pitch of patriotic fervor, the more tenuous
+and more thread-bare may be the requisite moral sanction. By cumulative
+excitation some very remarkable results have latterly been attained
+along this line.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Patriotism is evidently a spirit of particularism, of aliency and
+animosity between contrasted groups of persons; it lives on invidious
+comparison, and works out in mutual hindrance and jealousy between
+nations. It commonly goes the length of hindering intercourse and
+obstructing traffic that would patently serve the material and cultural
+well-being of both nationalities; and not infrequently, indeed
+normally, it eventuates in competitive damage to both.
+
+All this holds true in the world of modern civilisation, at the same
+time that the modern civilised scheme of life is, notoriously, of a
+cosmopolitan character, both in its cultural requirements and in its
+economic structure. Modern culture is drawn on too large a scale, is of
+too complex and multiform a character, requires the cooperation of too
+many and various lines of inquiry, experience and insight, to admit of
+its being confined within national frontiers, except at the cost of
+insufferable crippling and retardation. The science and scholarship that
+is the peculiar pride of civilised Christendom is not only
+international, but rather it is homogeneously cosmopolitan; so that in
+this bearing there are, in effect, no national frontiers; with the
+exception, of course, that in a season of patriotic intoxication, such
+as the current war has induced, even the scholars and scientists will be
+temporarily overset by their patriotic fervour. Indeed, with the best
+efforts of obscurantism and national jealousy to the contrary, it
+remains patently true that modern culture is the culture of Christendom
+at large, not the culture of one and another nation in severalty within
+the confines of Christendom. It is only as and in so far as they partake
+in and contribute to the general run of Western civilisation at large
+that the people of any one of these nations of Christendom can claim
+standing as a cultured nation; and even any distinctive variation from
+this general run of civilised life, such as may give a "local colour" of
+ideals, tastes and conventions, will, in point of cultural value, have
+to be rated as an idle detail, a species of lost motion, that serves no
+better purpose than a transient estrangement.
+
+So also, the modern state of the industrial arts is of a like
+cosmopolitan character, in point of scale, specialisation, and the
+necessary use of diversified resources, of climate and raw materials.
+None of the countries of Europe, e.g., is competent to carry on its
+industry by modern technological methods without constantly drawing on
+resources outside of its national boundaries. Isolation in this
+industrial respect, exclusion from the world market, would mean
+intolerable loss of efficiency, more pronounced the more fully the given
+country has taken over this modern state of the industrial arts.
+Exclusion from the general body of outlying resources would seriously
+cripple any one or all of them, and effectually deprive them of the
+usufruct of this technology; and partial exclusion, by prohibitive or
+protective tariffs and the like, unavoidably results in a partial
+lowering of the efficiency of each, and therefore a reduction of the
+current well-being among them all together.
+
+Into this cultural and technological system of the modern world the
+patriotic spirit fits like dust in the eyes and sand in the bearings.
+Its net contribution to the outcome is obscuration, distrust, and
+retardation at every point where it touches the fortunes of modern
+mankind. Yet it is forever present in the counsels of the statesmen and
+in the affections of the common man, and it never ceases to command the
+regard of all men as the prime attribute of manhood and the final test
+of the desirable citizen. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that no
+other consideration is allowed in abatement of the claims of patriotic
+loyalty, and that such loyalty will be allowed to cover any multitude of
+sins. When the ancient philosopher described Man as a "political animal,"
+this, in effect, was what he affirmed; and today the ancient maxim is as
+good as new. The patriotic spirit is at cross purposes with modern life,
+but in any test case it is found that the claims of life yield before
+those of patriotism; and any voice that dissents from this order of things
+is as a voice crying in the wilderness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To anyone who is inclined to moralise on the singular discrepancies of
+human life this state of the case will be fruitful of much profound
+speculation. The patriotic animus appears to be an enduring trait of
+human nature, an ancient heritage that has stood over unshorn from time
+immemorial, under the Mendelian rule of the stability of racial types.
+It is archaic, not amenable to elimination or enduring suppression, and
+apparently not appreciably to be mitigated by reflection, education,
+experience or selective breeding.
+
+Throughout the historical period, and presumably through an incalculable
+period of the unrecorded past, patriotic manslaughter has consistently
+been weeding out of each successive generation of men the most patriotic
+among them; with the net result that the level of patriotic ardor today
+appears to be no lower than it ever was. At the same time, with the
+advance of population, of culture and of the industrial arts, patriotism
+has grown increasingly disserviceable; and it is to all appearance as
+ubiquitous and as powerful as ever, and is held in as high esteem.
+
+The continued prevalence of this archaic animus among the modern
+peoples, as well as the fact that it is universally placed high among
+the virtues, must be taken to argue that it is, in its elements, an
+hereditary trait, of the nature of an inborn impulsive propensity,
+rather than a product of habituation. It is, in substance, not
+something that can be learned and unlearned. From one generation to
+another, the allegiance may shift from one nationality to another, but
+the fact of unreflecting allegiance at large remains. And it all argues
+also that no sensible change has taken effect in the hereditary
+endowment of the race, at least in this respect, during the period known
+by record or by secure inference,--say, since the early Neolithic in
+Europe; and this in spite of the fact that there has all this while been
+opportunity for radical changes in the European population by
+cross-breeding, infiltration and displacement of the several racial
+stocks that go to make up this population. Hence, on slight reflection
+the inference has suggested itself and has gained acceptance that this
+trait of human nature must presumably have been serviceable to the
+peoples of the earlier time, on those levels of savagery or of the lower
+barbarism on which the ancestral stocks of the European population first
+made good their survival and proved their fitness to people that quarter
+of the earth. Such, indeed, is the common view; so common as to pass for
+matter-of-course, and therefore habitually to escape scrutiny.
+
+Still it need not follow, as more patient reflection will show. All the
+European peoples show much the same animus in this respect; whatever
+their past history may have been, and whatever the difference in past
+experience that might be conceived to have shaped their temperament. Any
+difference in the pitch of patriotic conceit and animosity, between the
+several nationalities or the several localities, is by no means wide,
+even in cases where the racial composition of the population is held to
+be very different, as, e.g., between the peoples on the Baltic seaboard
+and those on the Mediterranean. In point of fact, in this matter of
+patriotic animus there appears to be a wider divergence,
+temperamentally, between individuals within any one of these communities
+than between the common run in any one community and the corresponding
+common run in any other. But even such divergence of individual temper
+in respect of patriotism as is to be met with, first and last, is after
+all surprisingly small in view of the scope for individual variation
+which this European population would seem to offer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These peoples of Europe, all and several, are hybrids compounded out of
+the same run of racial elements, but mixed in varying proportions. On
+any parallel of latitude--taken in the climatic rather than in the
+geometric sense--the racial composition of the west-European population
+will be much the same, virtually identical in effect, although always of
+a hybrid complexion; whereas on any parallel of longitude--also in the
+climatic sense--the racial composition will vary progressively, but
+always within the limits of the same general scheme of hybridisation,--the
+variation being a variation in the proportion in which the several racial
+elements are present in any given case. But in no case does a notable
+difference in racial composition coincide with a linguistic or national
+frontier. But in point of patriotic animus these European peoples are one
+as good as another, whether the comparison be traced on parallels of
+latitude or of longitude. And the inhabitants of each national territory,
+or of each detail locality, appear also to run surprisingly uniform in
+respect of their patriotic spirit.
+
+Heredity in any such community of hybrids will, superficially, appear to
+run somewhat haphazard. There will, of course, be no traceable
+difference between social or economic classes, in point of heredity,--as
+is visibly the case in Christendom. But variation--of an apparently
+haphazard description--will be large and ubiquitous among the
+individuals of such a populace. Indeed, it is a matter of course and of
+easy verification that individual variation within such a hybrid stock
+will greatly exceed the extreme differences that may subsist between the
+several racial types that have gone to produce the hybrid stock. Such is
+the case of the European peoples. The inhabitants vary greatly among
+themselves, both in physical and in mental traits, as would be expected;
+and the variation between individuals in point of patriotic animus
+should accordingly also be expected to be extremely wide,--should, in
+effect, greatly exceed the difference, if any, in this respect between
+the several racial elements engaged in the European population. Some
+appreciable difference in this respect there appears to be, between
+individuals; but individual divergence from the normal or average
+appears always to be of a sporadic sort,--it does not run on class
+lines, whether of occupation, status or property, nor does it run at all
+consistently from parent to child. When all is told the argument returns
+to the safe ground that these variations in point of patriotic animus
+are sporadic and inconsequential, and do not touch the general
+proposition that, one with another, the inhabitants of Europe and the
+European Colonies are sufficiently patriotic, and that the average
+endowment in this respect runs with consistent uniformity across all
+differences of time, place and circumstance. It would, in fact, be
+extremely hazardous to affirm that there is a sensible difference in the
+ordinary pitch of patriotic sentiment as between any two widely diverse
+samples of these hybrid populations, in spite of the fact that the
+diversity in visible physical traits may be quite pronounced.
+
+In short, the conclusion seems safe, on the whole, that in this respect
+the several racial stocks that have gone to produce the existing
+populations of Christendom have all been endowed about as richly one as
+another. Patriotism appears to be a ubiquitous trait, at least among the
+races and peoples of Christendom. From which it should follow, that
+since there is, and has from the beginning been, no differential
+advantage favoring one racial stock or one fashion of hybrid as against
+another, in this matter of patriotic animus, there should also be no
+ground of selective survival or selective elimination on this account as
+between these several races and peoples. So that the undisturbed and
+undiminished prevalence of this trait among the European population,
+early or late, argues nothing as to its net serviceability or
+disserviceability under any of the varying conditions of culture and
+technology to which these Europeans have been subjected, first and last;
+except that it has, in any case, not proved so disserviceable under the
+conditions prevailing hitherto as to result in the extinction of these
+Europeans, one with another.[4]
+
+[Footnote 4: For a more extended discussion of this matter, cf.
+_Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution_, ch. i. and
+Supplementary Notes i. and ii.]
+
+The patriotic frame of mind has been spoken of above as if it were an
+hereditary trait, something after the fashion of a Mendelian unit
+character. Doubtless this is not a competent account of the matter; but
+the present argument scarcely needs a closer analysis. Still, in a
+measure to quiet title and avoid annoyance, it may be noted that this
+patriotic animus is of the nature of a "frame of mind" rather than a
+Mendelian unit character; that it so involves a concatenation of
+several impulsive propensities (presumably hereditary); and that both
+the concatenation and the special mode and amplitude of the response are
+a product of habituation, very largely of the nature of conventionalised
+use and wont. What is said above, therefore, goes little farther than
+saying that the underlying aptitudes requisite to this patriotic frame
+of mind are heritable, and that use and wont as bearing on this point
+run with sufficient uniformity to bring a passably uniform result. It
+may be added that in this concatenation spoken of there seems to be
+comprised, ordinarily, that sentimental attachment to habitat and custom
+that is called love of home, or in its accentuated expression,
+home-sickness; so also an invidious self-complacency, coupled with a
+gregarious bent which gives the invidious comparison a group content;
+and further, commonly if not invariably, a bent of abnegation,
+self-abasement, subservience, or whatever it may best be called, that
+inclines the bearer unreasoningly and unquestioningly to accept and
+serve a prescriptive ideal given by custom or by customary authority.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The conclusion would therefore provisionally run to the effect that
+under modern conditions the patriotic animus is wholly a disserviceable
+trait in the spiritual endowment of these peoples,--in so far as bears
+on the material conditions of life unequivocally, and as regards the
+cultural interests more at large presumptively; whereas there is no
+assured ground for a discriminating opinion as touches its possible
+utility or disutility at any remote period in the past. There is, of
+course, always room for the conservative estimate that, as the
+possession of this spiritual trait has not hitherto resulted in the
+extinction of the race, so it may also in the calculable future
+continue to bring no more grievous results than a degree of mischief,
+without even stopping or greatly retarding the increase of population.
+
+All this, of course, is intended to apply only so far as it goes. It
+must not be taken as intending to say any least word in derogation of
+those high qualities that inspire the patriotic citizen. In its
+economic, biological and cultural incidence patriotism appears to be an
+untoward trait of human nature; which has, of course, nothing to say as
+to its moral excellence, its aesthetic value, or its indispensability to
+a worthy life. No doubt, it is in all these respects deserving of all
+the esteem and encomiums that fall to its share. Indeed, its well-known
+moral and aesthetic value, as well as the reprobation that is visited on
+any shortcomings in this respect, signify, for the purposes of the
+present argument, nothing more than that the patriotic animus meets the
+unqualified approval of men because they are, all and several, infected
+with it. It is evidence of the ubiquitous, intimate and ineradicable
+presence of this quality in human nature; all the more since it
+continues untiringly to be held in the highest esteem in spite of the
+fact that a modicum of reflection should make its disserviceability
+plain to the meanest understanding. No higher praise of moral
+excellence, and no profounder test of loyalty, can be asked than this
+current unreserved commendation of a virtue that makes invariably for
+damage and discomfort. The virtuous impulse must be deep-seated and
+indefeasible that drives men incontinently to do good that evil may come
+of it. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him."
+
+In the light--and it is a dim and wavering light--of the archaeological
+evidence, helped out by circumstantial evidence from such parallel or
+analogous instances as are afforded by existing communities on a
+comparable level of culture, one may venture more or less confidently on
+a reconstruction of the manner of life among the early Europeans, of
+early neolithic times and later.[5] And so one may form some conception
+of the part played by this patriotic animus among those beginnings,
+when, if not the race, at least its institutions were young; and when
+the native temperament of these peoples was tried out and found fit to
+survive through the age-long and slow-moving eras of stone and bronze.
+In this connection, it appears safe to assume that since early neolithic
+times no sensible change has taken effect in the racial complexion of
+the European peoples; and therefore no sensible change in their
+spiritual and mental make-up. So that in respect of the spiritual
+elements that go to make up this patriotic animus the Europeans of today
+will be substantially identical with the Europeans of that early time.
+The like is true as regards those other traits of temperament that come
+in question here, as being included among the stable characteristics
+that still condition the life of these peoples under the altered
+circumstances of the modern age.
+
+[Footnote 5: Cf. _Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution_, as
+above.]
+
+The difference between prehistoric Europe and the present state of these
+peoples resolves itself on analysis into a difference in the state of
+the industrial arts, together with such institutional changes as have
+come on in the course of working out this advance in the industrial
+arts. The habits and the exigencies of life among these peoples have
+greatly changed; whereas in temperament and capacities the peoples that
+now live by and under the rule of this altered state of the industrial
+arts are the same as they were. It is to be noted, therefore, that the
+fact of their having successfully come through the long ages of
+prehistory by the use of this mental and spiritual endowment can not be
+taken to argue that these peoples are thereby fit to meet the exigencies
+of this later and gravely altered age; nor will it do to assume that
+because these peoples have themselves worked out this modern culture and
+its technology, therefore it must all be suitable for their use and
+conducive to their biological success. The single object lesson of the
+modern urban community, with its endless requirements in the way of
+sanitation, police, compulsory education, charities,--all this and many
+other discrepancies in modern life should enjoin caution on anyone who
+is inclined off-hand to hold that because modern men have created these
+conditions, therefore these must be the most suitable conditions of life
+for modern mankind.
+
+In the beginning, that is to say in the European beginning, men lived in
+small and close groups. Control was close within the group, and the
+necessity of subordinating individual gains and preferences to the
+common good was enjoined on the group by the exigencies of the case, on
+pain of common extinction. The situation and usages of existing Eskimo
+villages may serve to illustrate and enforce the argument on this head.
+The solidarity of sentiment necessary to support the requisite
+solidarity of action in the case would be a prime condition of survival
+in any racial stock exposed to the conditions which surrounded these
+early Europeans. This needful sense of solidarity would touch not simply
+or most imperatively the joint prestige of the group, but rather the
+joint material interests; and would enforce a spirit of mutual support
+and dependence. Which would be rather helped than hindered by a jealous
+attitude of joint prestige; so long as no divergent interests of members
+within the group were in a position to turn this state of the common
+sentiment to their own particular advantage.
+
+This state of the case will have lasted for a relatively long time; long
+enough to have tested the fitness of these peoples for that manner of
+life,--longer, no doubt, than the interval that has elapsed since
+history began. Special interests--e.g., personal and family
+interests--will have been present and active in these days of the
+beginning; but so long as the group at large was small enough to admit
+of a close neighborly contact throughout its extent and throughout the
+workday routine of life, at the same time that it was too small and
+feeble to allow any appreciable dissipation of its joint energies in
+such pursuit of selfish gains as would run counter to the paramount
+business of the common livelihood, so long the sense of a common
+livelihood and a joint fortune would continue to hold any particularist
+ambitions effectually in check. Had it fallen out otherwise, the story
+of the group in question would have been ended, and another and more
+suitably endowed type of men would have taken the place vacated by its
+extinction.
+
+With a sensible advance in the industrial arts the scale of operations
+would grow larger, and the group more numerous and extensive. The margin
+between production and subsistence would also widen and admit additional
+scope for individual ambitions and personal gains. And as this process
+of growth and increasing productive efficiency went on, the control
+exercised by neighborly surveillance, through the sentiment of the
+common good as against the self-seeking pursuits of individuals and
+sub-groups, would gradually slacken; until by progressive disuse it
+would fall into a degree of abeyance; to be called into exercise and
+incite to concerted action only in the face of unusual exigencies
+touching the common fortunes of the group at large, or on persuasion
+that the collective interest of the group at large was placed in
+jeopardy in the molestation of one and another of its members from
+without. The group's prestige at least would be felt to suffer in the
+defeat or discourtesy suffered by any of its members at the hands of any
+alien; and, under compulsion of the ancient sense of group solidarity,
+whatever material hardship or material gain might so fall to individual
+members in their dealings with the alien would pass easy scrutiny as
+material detriment or gain inuring to the group at large,--in the
+apprehension of men whose sense of community interest is inflamed with a
+jealous disposition to safeguard their joint prestige.
+
+With continued advance in the industrial arts the circumstances
+conditioning life will undergo a progressive change of such a character
+that the joint interest of the group at large, in the material respect,
+will progressively be less closely bound up with the material fortunes
+of any particular member or members; until in the course of time and
+change there will, in effect, in ordinary times be no general and
+inclusive community of material interest binding the members together in
+a common fortune and working for a common livelihood. As the rights of
+ownership begin to take effect, so that the ownership of property and
+the pursuit of a livelihood under the rules of ownership come to govern
+men's economic relations, these material concerns will cease to be a
+matter of undivided joint interest, and will fall into the shape of
+interest in severalty. So soon and so far as this institution of
+ownership or property takes effect, men's material interests cease to
+run on lines of group solidarity. Solely, or almost solely, in the
+exceptional case of defense against a predatory incursion from outside,
+do the members of the group have a common interest of a material kind.
+Progressively as the state of the arts advances, the industrial
+organisation advances to a larger scale and a more extensive
+specialisation, with increasing divergence among individual interests
+and individual fortunes; and intercourse over larger distances grows
+easier and makes a larger grouping practicable; which enables a larger,
+prompter and more effective mobilisation of forces with which to defend
+or assert any joint claims. But by the same move it also follows, or at
+least it appears uniformly to have followed in the European case, that
+the accumulation of property and the rights of ownership have
+progressively come into the first place among the material interests of
+these peoples; while anything like a community of usufruct has
+imperceptibly fallen into the background, and has presently gone
+virtually into abeyance, except as an eventual recourse _in extremis_
+for the common defense. Property rights have displaced community of
+usufruct; and invidious distinctions as between persons, sub-groups, and
+classes have displaced community of prestige in the workday routine of
+these peoples; and the distinctions between contrasted persons or
+classes have come to rest, in an ever increasing degree, directly or
+indirectly, on invidious comparisons in respect of pecuniary standing
+rather than on personal affiliation with the group at large.
+
+So, with the advance of the industrial arts a differentiation of a new
+character sets in and presently grows progressively more pronounced and
+more effectual, giving rise to a regrouping on lines that run regardless
+of those frontiers that divide one community from another for purposes
+of patriotic emulation. So far as it comes chiefly and typically in
+question here, this regrouping takes place on two distinct but somewhat
+related principles of contrast: that of wealth and poverty, and that of
+master and servant, or authority and obedience. The material interests
+of the population in this way come to be divided between the group of
+those who own and those who command, on the one hand, and of those who
+work and who obey, on the other hand.
+
+Neither of these two contrasted categories of persons have any direct
+material interest in the maintenance of the patriotic community; or at
+any rate no such interest as should reasonably induce them to spend
+their own time and substance in support of the political (patriotic)
+organisation within which they live. It is only in so far as one or
+another of these interests looks for a more than proportionate share in
+any prospective gain from the joint enterprise, that the group or class
+in question can reasonably be counted on to bear its share in the joint
+venture. And it is only when and in so far as their particular material
+or self-regarding interest is reenforced by patriotic conceit, that they
+can be counted on to spend themselves in furtherance of the patriotic
+enterprise, without the assurance of a more than proportionate share in
+any gains that may be held in prospect from any such joint enterprise;
+and it is only in its patriotic bearing that the political community
+continues to be a joint venture. That is to say, in more generalised
+terms, through the development of the rights of property, and of such
+like prescriptive claims of privilege and prerogative, it has come
+about that other community interests have fallen away, until the
+collective prestige remains as virtually the sole community interest
+which can hold the sentiment of the group in a bond of solidarity.
+
+To one or another of these several interested groups or classes within
+the community the political organisation may work a benefit; but only to
+one or another, not to each and several, jointly or collectively. Since
+by no chance will the benefit derived from such joint enterprise on the
+part of the community at large equal the joint cost; in as much as all
+joint enterprise of the kind that looks to material advantage works by
+one or another method of inhibition and takes effect, if at all, by
+lowering the aggregate efficiency of the several countries concerned,
+with a view to the differential gain of one at the cost of another. So,
+e.g., a protective tariff is plainly a conspiracy in restraint of trade,
+with a view to benefit the conspirators by hindering their competitors.
+The aggregate cost to the community at large of such an enterprise in
+retardation is always more than the gains it brings to those who may
+benefit by it.
+
+In so speaking of the uses to which the common man's patriotic devotion
+may be turned, there is no intention to underrate its intrinsic value as
+a genial and generous trait of human nature. Doubtless it is best and
+chiefly to be appreciated as a spiritual quality that beautifies and
+ennobles its bearer, and that endows him with the full stature of
+manhood, quite irrespective of ulterior considerations. So it is to be
+conceded without argument that this patriotic animus is a highly
+meritorious frame of mind, and that it has an aesthetic value scarcely
+to be overstated in the farthest stretch of poetic license. But the
+question of its serviceability to the modern community, in any other
+than this decorative respect, and particularly its serviceability to the
+current needs of the common man in such a modern community, is not
+touched by such an admission; nor does this recognition of its generous
+spiritual nature afford any help toward answering a further question as
+to how and with what effect this animus may be turned to account by
+anyone who is in position to make use of the forces which it sets free.
+
+Among Christian nations there still is, on the whole, a decided
+predilection for that ancient and authentic line of national repute that
+springs from warlike prowess. This repute for warlike prowess is what
+first comes to mind among civilised peoples when speaking of national
+greatness. And among those who have best preserved this warlike ideal of
+worth, the patriotic ambition is likely to converge on the prestige of
+their sovereign; so that it takes the concrete form of personal loyalty
+to a master, and so combines or coalesces with a servile habit of mind.
+
+But peace hath its victories no less renowned than war, it is said; and
+peaceable folk of a patriotic temper have learned to make the best of
+their meager case and have found self-complacency in these victories of
+the peaceable order. So it may broadly be affirmed that all nations look
+with complacency on their own peculiar Culture--the organised complex of
+habits of thought and of conduct by which their own routine of life is
+regulated--as being in some way worthier than the corresponding habits
+of their neighbors. The case of the German Culture has latterly come
+under a strong light in this way. But while it may be that no other
+nation has been so naive as to make a concerted profession of faith to
+the effect that their own particular way of life is altogether
+commendable and is the only fashion of civilisation that is fit to
+survive; yet it will scarcely be an extravagance to assert that in their
+own secret mind these others, too, are blest with much the same
+consciousness of unique worth. Conscious virtue of this kind is a good
+and sufficient ground for patriotic inflation, so far as it goes. It
+commonly does not go beyond a defensive attitude, however. Now and
+again, as in the latterday German animation on this head, these
+phenomena of national use and wont may come to command such a degree of
+popular admiration as will incite to an aggressive or proselyting
+campaign.
+
+In all this there is nothing of a self-seeking or covetous kind. The
+common man who so lends himself to the aggressive enhancement of the
+national Culture and its prestige has nothing of a material kind to gain
+from the increase of renown that so comes to his sovereign, his
+language, his countrymen's art or science, his dietary, or his God.
+There are no sordid motives in all this. These spiritual assets of
+self-complacency are, indeed, to be rated as grounds of high-minded
+patriotism without afterthought. These aspirations and enthusiasms would
+perhaps be rated as Quixotic by men whose horizon is bounded by the main
+chance; but they make up that substance of things hoped for that
+inflates those headlong patriotic animosities that stir universal
+admiration.
+
+So also, men find an invidious distinction in such matters of physical
+magnitude as their country's area, the number of its population, the
+size of its cities, the extent of its natural resources, its aggregate
+wealth and its wealth per capita, its merchant marine and its foreign
+trade. As a ground of invidious complacency these phenomena of physical
+magnitude and pecuniary traffic are no better and no worse than such
+immaterial assets as the majesty of the sovereign or the perfections of
+the language. They are matters in which the common man is concerned
+only by the accident of domicile, and his only connection with these
+things is an imaginary joint interest in their impressiveness. To these
+things he has contributed substantially nothing, and from them he
+derives no other merit or advantage than a patriotic inflation. He takes
+pride in these things in an invidious way, and there is no good reason
+why he should not; just as there is also no good reason why he should,
+apart from the fact that the common man is so constituted that he,
+mysteriously, takes pride in these things that concern him not.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of the several groups or classes of persons within the political
+frontiers, whose particular interests run systematically at cross
+purposes with those of the community at large under modern conditions,
+the class of masters, rulers, authorities,--or whatever term may seem
+most suitable to designate that category of persons whose characteristic
+occupation is to give orders and command deference,--of the several
+orders and conditions of men these are, in point of substantial motive
+and interest, most patently at variance with all the rest, or with the
+fortunes of the common man. The class will include civil and military
+authorities and whatever nobility there is of a prescriptive and
+privileged kind. The substantial interest of these classes in the common
+welfare is of the same kind as the interest which a parasite has in the
+well-being of his host; a sufficiently substantial interest, no doubt,
+but there is in this relation nothing like a community of interest. Any
+gain on the part of the community at large will materially serve the
+needs of this group of personages, only in so far as it may afford them
+a larger volume or a wider scope for what has in latterday colloquial
+phrase been called "graft." These personages are, of course, not to be
+spoken of with disrespect or with the slightest inflection of
+discourtesy. They are all honorable men. Indeed they afford the
+conventional pattern of human dignity and meritorious achievement, and
+the "Fountain of Honor" is found among them. The point of the argument
+is only that their material or other self-regarding interests are of
+such a nature as to be furthered by the material wealth of the
+community, and more particularly by the increasing volume of the body
+politic; but only with the proviso that this material wealth and this
+increment of power must accrue without anything like a corresponding
+cost to this class. At the same time, since this class of the superiors
+is in some degree a specialised organ of prestige, so that their value,
+and therefore their tenure, both in the eyes of the community and in
+their own eyes, is in the main a "prestige value" and a tenure by
+prestige; and since the prestige that invests their persons is a shadow
+cast by the putative worth of the community at large, it follows that
+their particular interest in the joint prestige is peculiarly alert and
+insistent. But it follows also that these personages cannot of their own
+substance or of their own motion contribute to this collective prestige
+in the same proportion in which it is necessary for them to draw on it
+in support of their own prestige value. It would, in other words, be a
+patent absurdity to call on any of the current ruling classes,
+dynasties, nobility, military and diplomatic corps, in any of the
+nations of Europe, e.g., to preserve their current dignity and command
+the deference that is currently accorded them, by recourse to their own
+powers and expenditure of their own substance, without the usufruct of
+the commonalty whose organ of dignity they are. The current prestige
+value which they enjoy is beyond their unaided powers to create or
+maintain, without the usufruct of the community. Such an enterprise does
+not lie within the premises of the case.
+
+In this bearing, therefore, the first concern with which these
+personages are necessarily occupied is the procurement and retention of
+a suitable usufruct in the material resources and good-will of a
+sufficiently large and industrious population. The requisite good-will
+in these premises is called loyalty, and its retention by the line of
+personages that so trade on prestige rests on a superinduced association
+of ideas, whereby the national honour comes to be confounded in popular
+apprehension with the prestige of these personages who have the keeping
+of it. But the potentates and the establishments, civil and military, on
+whom this prestige value rests will unavoidably come into invidious
+comparison with others of their kind; and, as invariably happens in
+matters of invidious comparison, the emulative needs of all the
+competitors for prestige are "indefinitely extensible," as the phrase of
+the economists has it. Each and several of them incontinently needs a
+further increment of prestige, and therefore also a further increment of
+the material assets in men and resources that are needful as ways and
+means to assert and augment the national honor.
+
+It is true, the notion that their prestige value is in any degree
+conditioned by the material circumstances and the popular imagination of
+the underlying nation is distasteful to many of these vicars of the
+national honour. They will incline rather to the persuasion that this
+prestige value is a distinctive attribute, of a unique order, intrinsic
+to their own persons. But, plainly, any such detached line of magnates,
+notables, kings and mandarins, resting their notability on nothing more
+substantial than a slightly sub-normal intelligence and a moderately
+scrofulous habit of body could not long continue to command that eager
+deference that is accounted their due. Such a picture of majesty would
+be sadly out of drawing. There is little conviction and no great dignity
+to be drawn from the unaided pronouncement:
+
+   "We're here because,
+   We're here because,
+   We're here because
+   We're here,"
+
+even when the doggerel is duly given the rhetorical benefit of a "Tenure
+by the Grace of God." The personages that carry this dignity require the
+backing of a determined and patriotic populace in support of their
+prestige value, and they commonly have no great difficulty in procuring
+it. And their prestige value is, in effect, proportioned to the volume
+of material resources and patriotic credulity that can be drawn on for
+its assertion. It is true, their draught on the requisite sentimental
+and pecuniary support is fortified with large claims of serviceability
+to the common good, and these claims are somewhat easily, indeed
+eagerly, conceded and acted upon; although the alleged benefit to the
+common good will scarcely be visible except in the light of glory shed
+by the blazing torch of patriotism.
+
+In so far as it is of a material nature the benefit which the
+constituted authorities so engage to contribute to the common good, or
+in other words to confer on the common man, falls under two heads:
+defense against aggression from without; and promotion of the
+community's material gain. It is to be presumed that the constituted
+authorities commonly believe more or less implicitly in their own
+professions in so professing to serve the needs of the common man in
+these respects. The common defense is a sufficiently grave matter, and
+doubtless it claims the best affections and endeavour of the citizen;
+but it is not a matter that should claim much attention at this point in
+the argument, as bearing on the service rendered the common man by the
+constituted authorities, taken one with another. Any given governmental
+establishment at home is useful in this respect only as against another
+governmental establishment elsewhere. So that on the slightest
+examination it resolves itself into a matter of competitive patriotic
+enterprise, as between the patriotic aspirations of different
+nationalities led by different governmental establishments; and the
+service so rendered by the constituted authorities in the aggregate
+takes on the character of a remedy for evils of their own creation. It
+is invariably a defense against the concerted aggressions of other
+patriots. Taken in the large, the common defense of any given nation
+becomes a detail of the competitive struggle between rival nationalities
+animated with a common spirit of patriotic enterprise and led by
+authorities constituted for this competitive purpose.
+
+Except on a broad basis of patriotic devotion, and except under the
+direction of an ambitious governmental establishment, no serious
+international aggression is to be had. The common defense, therefore, is
+to be taken as a remedy for evils arising out of the working of the
+patriotic spirit that animates mankind, as brought to bear under a
+discretionary authority; and in any balance to be struck between the
+utility and disutility of this patriotic spirit and of its service in
+the hands of the constituted authorities, it will have to be cancelled
+out as being at the best a mitigation of some of the disorders brought
+on by the presence of national governments resting on patriotic loyalty
+at large.
+
+But this common defense is by no means a vacant rubric in any attempted
+account of modern national enterprise. It is the commonplace and
+conclusive plea of the dynastic statesmen and the aspiring warlords, and
+it is the usual blind behind which events are put in train for eventual
+hostilities. Preparation for the common defense also appears unfailingly
+to eventuate in hostilities. With more or less _bona fides_ the
+statesmen and warriors plead the cause of the common defense, and with
+patriotic alacrity the common man lends himself to the enterprise aimed
+at under that cover. In proportion as the resulting equipment for
+defense grows great and becomes formidable, the range of items which a
+patriotically biased nation are ready to include among the claims to be
+defended grows incontinently larger, until by the overlapping of
+defensive claims between rival nationalities the distinction between
+defense and aggression disappears, except in the biased fancy of the
+rival patriots.
+
+Of course, no reflections are called for here on the current American
+campaign of "Preparedness." Except for the degree of hysteria it appears
+to differ in no substantial respect from the analogous course of
+auto-intoxication among the nationalities of Europe, which came to a
+head in the current European situation. It should conclusively serve the
+turn for any self-possessed observer to call to mind that all the
+civilised nations of warring Europe are, each and several, convinced
+that they are fighting a defensive war.
+
+The aspiration of all right-minded citizens is presumed to be "Peace
+with Honour." So that first, as well as last, among those national
+interests that are to be defended, and in the service of which the
+substance and affections of the common man are enlisted under the aegis
+of the national prowess, comes the national prestige, as a matter of
+course. And the constituted authorities are doubtless sincere and
+single-minded in their endeavors to advance and defend the national
+honour, particularly those constituted authorities that hold their place
+of authority on grounds of fealty; since the national prestige in such a
+case coalesces with the prestige of the nation's ruler in much the same
+degree in which the national sovereignty devolves upon the person of its
+ruler. In so defending or advancing the national prestige, such a
+dynastic or autocratic overlord, together with the other privileged
+elements assisting and dependent on him, is occupied with his own
+interest; his own tenure is a tenure by prestige, and the security of
+his tenure lies in the continued maintenance of that popular fancy that
+invests his person with this national prestige and so constitutes him
+and his retinue of notables and personages its keeper.
+
+But it is uniformly insisted by the statesmen--potentates, notables,
+kings and mandarins--that this aegis of the national prowess in their
+hands covers also many interests of a more substantial and more tangible
+kind. These other, more tangible interests of the community have also a
+value of a direct and personal sort to the dynasty and its hierarchy of
+privileged subalterns, in that it is only by use of the material forces
+of the nation that the dynastic prestige can be advanced and maintained.
+The interest of such constituted authorities in the material welfare of
+the nation is consequently grave and insistent; but it is evidently an
+interest of a special kind and is subject to strict and peculiar
+limitations. The common good, in the material respect, interests the
+dynastic statesman only as a means to dynastic ends; that is to say,
+only in so far as it can be turned to account in the achievement of
+dynastic aims. These aims are "The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory," as
+the sacred formula phrases the same conception in another bearing.
+
+That is to say, the material welfare of the nation is a means to the
+unfolding of the dynastic power; provided always that this material
+welfare is not allowed to run into such ramifications as will make the
+commonwealth an unwieldy instrument in the hands of the dynastic
+statesmen. National welfare is to the purpose only in so far as it
+conduces to political success, which is always a question of warlike
+success in the last resort. The limitation which this consideration
+imposes on the government's economic policy are such as will make the
+nation a self-sufficient or self-balanced economic commonwealth. It must
+be a self-balanced commonwealth at least in such measure as will make it
+self-sustaining in case of need, in all those matters that bear directly
+on warlike efficiency.
+
+Of course, no community can become fully self-sustaining under modern
+conditions, by use of the modern state of the industrial arts, except by
+recourse to such drastic measures of repression as would reduce its
+total efficiency in an altogether intolerable degree. This will hold
+true even of those nations who, like Russia or the United States, are
+possessed of extremely extensive territories and extremely large and
+varied resources; but it applies with greatly accentuated force to
+smaller and more scantily furnished territorial units. Peoples living
+under modern conditions and by use of the modern state of the industrial
+arts necessarily draw on all quarters of the habitable globe for
+materials and products which they can procure to the best advantage
+from outside their own special field so long as they are allowed access
+to these outlying sources of supply; and any arbitrary limitation on
+this freedom of traffic makes the conditions of life that much harder,
+and lowers the aggregate efficiency of the community by that much.
+National self-sufficiency is to be achieved only by a degree of economic
+isolation; and such a policy of economic isolation involves a degree of
+impoverishment and lowered efficiency, but it will also leave the nation
+readier for warlike enterprise on such a scale as its reduced efficiency
+will compass.
+
+So that the best that can be accomplished along this line by the
+dynastic statesmen is a shrewd compromise, embodying such a degree of
+isolation and inhibition as will leave the country passably
+self-sufficient in case of need, without lowering the national
+efficiency to such a point as to cripple its productive forces beyond
+what will be offset by the greater warlike readiness that is so
+attained. The point to which such a policy of isolation and sufficiency
+will necessarily be directed is that measure of inhibition that will
+yield the most facile and effective ways and means of warlike
+enterprise, the largest product of warlike effectiveness to be had on
+multiplying the nation's net efficiency into its readiness to take the
+field.
+
+Into any consideration of this tactical problem a certain subsidiary
+factor enters, in that the patriotic temper of the nation is always more
+or less affected by such an economic policy. The greater the degree of
+effectual isolation and discrimination embodied in the national policy,
+the greater will commonly be its effect on popular sentiment in the way
+of national animosity and spiritual self-sufficiency; which may be an
+asset of great value for the purposes of warlike enterprise.
+
+Plainly, any dynastic statesman who should undertake to further the
+common welfare regardless of its serviceability for warlike enterprise
+would be defeating his own purpose. He would, in effect, go near to
+living up to his habitual professions touching international peace,
+instead of professing to live up to them, as the exigencies of his
+national enterprise now conventionally require him to do. In effect, he
+would be _functus officio_.
+
+There are two great administrative instruments available for this work
+of repression and national self-sufficiency at the hands of the
+imperialistic statesman: the protective tariff, and commercial
+subvention. The two are not consistently to be distinguished from one
+another at all points, and each runs out into a multifarious convolution
+of variegated details; but the principles involved are, after all,
+fairly neat and consistent. The former is of the nature of a conspiracy
+in restraint of trade by repression; the latter, a conspiracy to the
+like effect by subsidised monopoly; both alike act to check the pursuit
+of industry in given lines by artificially increasing the cost of
+production for given individuals or classes of producers, and both alike
+impose a more than proportionate cost on the community within which they
+take effect. Incidentally, both of these methods of inhibition bring a
+degree, though a less degree, of hardship, to the rest of the industrial
+world.
+
+All this is matter of course to all economic students, and it should,
+reasonably, be plain to all intelligent persons; but its voluble denial
+by interested parties, as well as the easy credulity with which
+patriotic citizens allow themselves to accept the sophistries offered in
+defense of these measures of inhibition, has made it seem worth while
+here to recall these commonplaces of economic science.
+
+The ground of this easy credulity is not so much infirmity of intellect
+as it is an exuberance of sentiment, although it may reasonably be
+believed that its more pronounced manifestations--as, e.g., the high
+protective tariff--can be had only by force of a formidable cooperation
+of the two. The patriotic animus is an invidious sentiment of joint
+prestige; and it needs no argument or documentation to bear out the
+affirmation that its bias will lend a color of merit and expediency to
+any proposed measure that can, however speciously, promise an increase
+of national power or prestige. So that when the statesmen propose a
+policy of inhibition and mitigated isolation on the professed ground
+that such a policy will strengthen the nation economically by making it
+economically self-supporting, as well as ready for any warlike
+adventure, the patriotic citizen views the proposed measures through the
+rosy haze of national aspirations and lets the will to believe persuade
+him that whatever conduces to a formidable national battle-front will
+also contribute to the common good. At the same time all these national
+conspiracies in restraint of trade are claimed, with more or less
+reason, to inflict more or less harm on rival nationalities with whom
+economic relations are curtailed; and patriotism being an invidious
+sentiment, the patriotic citizen finds comfort in the promise of
+mischief to these others, and is all the more prone to find all kinds of
+merit in proposals that look to such an invidious outcome. In any
+community imbued with an alert patriotic spirit, the fact that any given
+circumstance, occurrence or transaction can be turned to account as a
+means of invidious distinction or invidious discrimination against
+humanity beyond the national pale, will always go far to procure
+acceptance of it as being also an article of substantial profit to the
+community at large, even though the slightest unbiased scrutiny would
+find it of no ascertainable use in any other bearing than that of
+invidious mischief. And whatever will bear interpretation as an
+increment of the nation's power or prowess, in comparison with rival
+nationalities, will always be securely counted as an item of joint
+credit, and will be made to serve the collective conceit as an invidious
+distinction; and patriotic credulity will find it meritorious also in
+other respects.
+
+So, e.g., it is past conception that such a patent imbecility as a
+protective tariff should enlist the support of any ordinarily
+intelligent community except by the help of some such chauvinistic
+sophistry. So also, the various royal establishments of Europe, e.g.,
+afford an extreme but therefore all the more convincing illustration of
+the same logical fallacy. These establishments and personages are great
+and authentic repositories of national prestige, and they are therefore
+unreflectingly presumed by their several aggregations of subjects to be
+of some substantial use also in some other bearing; but it would be a
+highly diverting exhibition of credulity for any outsider to fall into
+that amazing misconception. But the like is manifestly true of
+commercial turnover and export trade among modern peoples; although on
+this head the infatuation is so ingrained and dogmatic that even a rank
+outsider is expected to accept the fallacy without reflection, on pain
+of being rated as unsafe or unsound. Such matters again, as the
+dimensions of the national territory, or the number of the population
+and the magnitude of the national resources, are still and have perhaps
+always been material for patriotic exultation, and are fatuously
+believed to have some great significance for the material fortunes of
+the common man; although it should be plain on slight reflection that
+under modern conditions of ownership, these things, one and all, are of
+no consequence to the common man except as articles of prestige to
+stimulate his civic pride. The only conjuncture under which these and
+the like national holdings can come to have a meaning as joint or
+collective assets would arise in case of a warlike adventure carried to
+such extremities as would summarily cancel vested rights of ownership
+and turn them to warlike uses. While the rights of ownership hold, the
+common man, who does not own these things, draws no profit from their
+inclusion in the national domain; indeed, he is at some cost to
+guarantee their safe tenure by their rightful owners.
+
+In so pursuing their quest of the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, by
+use of the national resources and by sanction of the national spirit,
+the constituted authorities also assume the guardianship of sundry
+material interests that are presumed to touch the common good; such as
+security of person and property in dealings with aliens, whether at home
+or abroad; security of investment and trade, and vindication of their
+citizens before the law in foreign parts; and, chiefly and ubiquitously,
+furtherance and extension of the national trade into foreign parts,
+particularly of the export trade, on terms advantageous to the traders
+of the nation.
+
+The last named of these advantages is the one on which stress is apt to
+fall in the argument of all those who advocate an unfolding of national
+power, as being a matter of vital material benefit to the common man.
+The other items indicated above, it is plain on the least reflection,
+are matters of slight if any material consequence to him. The common
+man--that is ninety-nine and a fraction in one hundred of the nation's
+common men--has no dealings with aliens in foreign parts, as capitalist,
+trader, missionary or wayfaring man, and has no occasion for security of
+person or property under circumstances that raise any remotest question
+of the national prowess or the national prestige; nor does he seek or
+aspire to trade to foreign parts on any terms, equitable or otherwise,
+or to invest capital among aliens under foreign rule, or to exploit
+concessions or take orders, for acceptance or delivery; nor, indeed,
+does he at all commonly come into even that degree of contact with
+abroad that is implied in the purchase of foreign securities. Virtually
+the sole occasion on which he comes in touch with the world beyond the
+frontier is when, and if, he goes away from home as an emigrant, and so
+ceases to enjoy the tutelage of the nation's constituted authorities.
+But the common man, in point of fact, is a home-keeping body, who
+touches foreign parts and aliens outside the national frontiers only at
+the second or third remove, if at all, in the occasional purchase of
+foreign products, or in the sale of goods that may find their way abroad
+after he has lost sight of them. The exception to this general rule
+would be found in the case of those under-sized nations that are too
+small to contain the traffic in which their commonplace population are
+engaged, and that have neither national prowess nor national prestige to
+fall back on in a conceivable case of need,--and whose citizens,
+individually, appear to be as fortunately placed in their workday
+foreign relations, without a background of prowess and prestige, as the
+citizens of the great powers who are most abundantly provided in these
+respects.
+
+With wholly negligible exceptions, these matters touch the needs or the
+sensibilities of the common man only through the channel of the
+national honour, which may be injured in the hardships suffered by his
+compatriots in foreign parts, or which may, again, be repaired or
+enhanced by the meritorious achievements of the same compatriots; of
+whose existence he will commonly have no other or more substantial
+evidence, and in whose traffic he has no share other than this vicarious
+suffering of vague and remote indignity or vainglory by force of the
+wholly fortuitous circumstance that they are (inscrutably) his
+compatriots. These immaterial goods of vicarious prestige are, of
+course, not to be undervalued, nor is the fact to be overlooked or
+minimised that they enter into the sum total of the common citizen's
+"psychic income," for whatever they may foot up to; but evidently their
+consideration takes us back to the immaterial category of prestige
+value, from which the argument just now was hopefully departing with a
+view to consideration of the common man's material interest in that
+national enterprise about which patriotic aspirations turn.
+
+These things, then, are matters in which the common man has an interest
+only as they have a prestige value. But there need be no question as to
+their touching his sensibilities and stirring him to action, and even to
+acts of bravery and self-sacrifice. Indignity or ill treatment of his
+compatriots in foreign parts, even when well deserved, as is not
+infrequently the case, are resented with a vehemence that is greatly to
+the common man's credit, and greatly also to the gain of those patriotic
+statesmen who find in such grievances their safest and most reliable raw
+materials for the production of international difficulty. That he will
+so respond to the stimulus of these, materially speaking irrelevant,
+vicissitudes of good or ill that touch the fortunes of his compatriots,
+as known to him by hearsay, bears witness, of course, to the high
+quality of his manhood; but it falls very far short of arguing that
+these promptings of his patriotic spirit have any value as traits that
+count toward his livelihood or his economic serviceability in the
+community in which he lives. It is all to his credit, and it goes to
+constitute him a desirable citizen, in the sense that he is properly
+amenable to the incitements of patriotic emulation; but it is none the
+less to be admitted, however reluctantly, that this trait of impulsively
+vicarious indignation or vainglory is neither materially profitable to
+himself nor an asset of the slightest economic value to the community in
+which he lives. Quite the contrary, in fact. So also is it true that the
+common man derives no material advantage from the national success along
+this line, though he commonly believes that it all somehow inures to his
+benefit. It would seem that an ingrown bias of community interest,
+blurred and driven by a jealously sensitive patriotic pride, bends his
+faith uncritically to match his inclination. His persuasion is a work of
+preconception rather than of perception.
+
+But the most substantial and most unqualified material benefit currently
+believed to be derivable from a large unfolding of national prowess and
+a wide extension of the national domain is an increased volume of the
+nation's foreign trade, particularly of the export trade. "Trade follows
+the Flag." And this larger trade and enhanced profit is presumed to
+inure to the joint benefit of the citizens. Such is the profession of
+faith of the sagacious statesmen and such is also the unreflecting
+belief of the common man.
+
+It may be left an open question if an unfolding of national prowess and
+prestige increases the nation's trade, whether in imports or in
+exports. There is no available evidence that it has any effect of the
+kind. What is not an open question is the patent fact that such an
+extension of trade confers no benefit on the common man, who is not
+engaged in the import or export business. More particularly does it
+yield him no advantage at all commensurate with the cost involved in any
+endeavour so to increase the volume of trade by increasing the nation's
+power and extending its dominion. The profits of trade go not to the
+common man at large but to the traders whose capital is invested; and it
+is a completely idle matter to the common citizen whether the traders
+who profit by the nation's trade are his compatriots or not.[6]
+
+[Footnote 6: All this, which should be plain without demonstration, has
+been repeatedly shown in the expositions of various peace advocates,
+typically by Mr. Angell.]
+
+The pacifist argument on the economic futility of national ambitions
+will commonly rest its case at this point; having shown as unreservedly
+as need be that national ambition and all its works belong of right
+under that rubric of the litany that speaks of Fire, Flood and
+Pestilence. But an hereditary bent of human nature is not to be put out
+of the way with an argument showing that it has its disutilities. So
+with the patriotic animus; it is a factor to be counted with, rather
+than to be exorcised.
+
+As has been remarked above, in the course of time and change the advance
+of the industrial arts and of the institutions of ownership have taken
+such a turn that the working system of industry and business no longer
+runs on national lines and, indeed, no longer takes account of national
+frontiers,--except in so far as the national policies and legislation,
+arbitrarily and partially, impose these frontiers on the workings of
+trade and industry. The effect of such regulation for political ends is,
+with wholly negligible exceptions, detrimental to the efficient working
+of the industrial system under modern conditions; and it is therefore
+detrimental to the material interests of the common citizen. But the
+case is not the same as regards the interests of the traders. Trade is a
+competitive affair, and it is to the advantage of the traders engaged in
+any given line of business to extend their own markets and to exclude
+competing traders. Competition may be the soul of trade, but monopoly is
+necessarily the aim of every trader. And the national organisation is of
+service to its traders in so far as it shelters them, wholly or partly,
+from the competition of traders of other nationalities, or in so far as
+it furthers their enterprise by subvention or similar privileges as
+against their competitors, whether at home or abroad. The gain that so
+comes to the nation's traders from any preferential advantage afforded
+them by national regulations, or from any discrimination against traders
+of foreign nationality, goes to the traders as private gain. It is of no
+benefit to any of their compatriots; since there is no community of
+usufruct that touches these gains of the traders. So far as concerns his
+material advantage, it is an idle matter to the common citizen whether
+he deals with traders of his own nationality or with aliens; both alike
+will aim to buy cheap and sell dear, and will charge him "what the
+traffic will bear." Nor does it matter to him whether the gains of this
+trade go to aliens or to his compatriots; in either case equally they
+immediately pass beyond his reach, and are equally removed from any
+touch of joint interest on his part. Being private property, under
+modern law and custom he has no use of them, whether a national frontier
+does or does not intervene between his domicile and that of their owner.
+
+These are facts that every man of sound mind knows and acts on without
+doubt or hesitation in his own workday affairs. He would scarcely even
+find amusement in so futile a proposal as that his neighbor should share
+his business profits with him for no better reason than that he is a
+compatriot. But when the matter is presented as a proposition in
+national policy and embroidered with an invocation of his patriotic
+loyalty the common citizen will commonly be found credulous enough to
+accept the sophistry without abatement. His archaic sense of group
+solidarity will still lead him at his own cost to favor his trading
+compatriots by the imposition of onerous trade regulations for their
+private advantage, and to interpose obstacles in the way of alien
+traders. All this ingenious policy of self-defeat is greatly helped out
+by the patriotic conceit of the citizens; who persuade themselves to see
+in it an accession to the power and prestige of their own nation and a
+disadvantage to rival nationalities. It is, indeed, more than doubtful
+if such a policy of self-defeat as is embodied in current international
+trade discriminations could be insinuated into the legislation of any
+civilized nation if the popular intelligence were not so clouded with
+patriotic animosity as to let a prospective detriment to their foreign
+neighbors count as a gain to themselves.
+
+So that the chief material use of the patriotic bent in modern
+populations, therefore, appears to be its use to a limited class of
+persons engaged in foreign trade, or in business that comes in
+competition with foreign industry. It serves their private gain by
+lending effectual countenance to such restraint of international trade
+as would not be tolerated within the national domain. In so doing it has
+also the secondary and more sinister effect of dividing the nations on
+lines of rivalry and setting up irreconcilable claims and ambitions, of
+no material value but of far-reaching effect in the way of provocation
+to further international estrangement and eventual breach of the peace.
+
+How all this falls in with the schemes of militant statesmen, and
+further reacts on the freedom and personal fortunes of the common man,
+is an extensive and intricate topic, though not an obscure one; and it
+has already been spoken of above, perhaps as fully as need be.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ON THE CONDITIONS OF A LASTING PEACE
+
+
+The considerations set out in earlier chapters have made it appear that
+the patriotic spirit of modern peoples is the abiding source of
+contention among nations. Except for their patriotism a breach of the
+peace among modern peoples could not well be had. So much will doubtless
+be assented to as a matter of course. It is also a commonplace of
+current aphoristic wisdom that both parties to a warlike adventure in
+modern times stand to lose, materially; whatever nominal--that is to say
+political--gains may be made by one or the other. It has also appeared
+from these considerations recited in earlier passages that this
+patriotic spirit prevails throughout, among all civilised peoples, and
+that it pervades one nation about as ubiquitously as another. Nor is
+there much evidence of a weakening of this sinister proclivity with the
+passage of time or the continued advance in the arts of life. The only
+civilized nations that can be counted on as habitually peaceable are
+those who are so feeble or are so placed as to be cut off from hope of
+gain through contention. Vainglorious arrogance may run at a higher
+tension among the more backward and boorish nations; but it is not
+evident that the advance guard among the civilised peoples are imbued
+with a less complete national self-complacency. If the peace is to be
+kept, therefore, it will have to be kept by and between peoples made up,
+in effect, of complete patriots; which comes near being a contradiction
+in terms. Patriotism is useful for breaking the peace, not for keeping
+it. It makes for national pretensions and international jealously and
+distrust, with warlike enterprise always in perspective; as a way to
+national gain or a recourse in case of need. And there is commonly no
+settled demarkation between these two contrasted needs that urge a
+patriotic people forever to keep one eye on the chance of a recourse to
+arms.
+
+Therefore any calculus of the Chances of Peace appears to become a
+reckoning of the forces which may be counted on to keep a patriotic
+nation in an unstable equilibrium of peace for the time being. As has
+just been remarked above, among civilised peoples only those nations can
+be counted on consistently to keep the peace who are so feeble or
+otherwise so placed as to be cut off from hope of national gain. And
+these can apparently be so counted on only as regards aggression, not as
+regards the national defense, and only in so far as they are not drawn
+into warlike enterprise, collectively, by their more competent
+neighbors. Even the feeblest and most futile of them feels in honour
+bound to take up arms in defense of such national pretensions as they
+still may harbour; and all of them harbour such pretensions. In certain
+extreme cases, which it might seem invidious to specify more explicitly,
+it is not easy to discover any specific reasons for the maintenance of a
+national establishment, apart from the vindication of certain national
+pretensions which would quietly lapse in the absence of a national
+establishment on whom their vindication is incumbent.
+
+Of the rest, the greater nations that are spoken of as Powers no such
+general statement will hold. These are the peoples who stand, in
+matters of national concern, on their own initiative; and the question
+of peace and war at large is in effect, a question of peace and war
+among these Powers. They are not so numerous that they can be sifted
+into distinct classes, and yet they differ among themselves in such a
+way that they may, for the purpose in hand, fairly be ranged under two
+distinguishable if not contrasted heads: those which may safely be
+counted on spontaneously to take the offensive, and those which will
+fight on provocation. Typically of the former description are Germany
+and Japan. Of the latter are the French and British, and less
+confidently the American republic. In any summary statement of this kind
+Russia will have to be left on one side as a doubtful case, for reasons
+to which the argument may return at a later point; the prospective
+course of things in Russia is scarcely to be appraised on the ground of
+its past. Spain and Italy, being dubious Powers at the best, need not
+detain the argument; they are, in the nature of things, subsidiaries who
+wait on the main chance. And Austria, with whatever the name may cover,
+is for the immediate purpose to be counted under the head of Germany.
+
+There is no invidious comparison intended in so setting off these two
+classes of nations in contrast to one another. It is not a contrast of
+merit and demerit or of prestige. Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan
+are, in the nature of things as things go, bent in effect on a
+disturbance of the peace,--with a view to advance the cause of their own
+dominion. On a large view of the case, such as many German statesmen
+were in the habit of professing in the years preceding the great war, it
+may perhaps appear reasonable to say--as they were in the habit of
+saying--that these Imperial Powers are as well within the lines of fair
+and honest dealing in their campaign of aggression as the other Powers
+are in taking a defensive attitude against their aggression. Some sort
+of international equity has been pleaded in justification of their
+demand for an increased share of dominion. At least it has appeared that
+these Imperial statesmen have so persuaded themselves after very mature
+deliberation; and they have showed great concern to persuade others of
+the equity of their Imperial claim to something more than the law would
+allow. These sagacious, not to say astute, persons have not only reached
+a conviction to this effect, but they have become possessed of this
+conviction in such plenary fashion that, in the German case, they have
+come to admit exceptions or abatement of the claim only when and in so
+far as the campaign of equitable aggression on which they had entered
+has been proved impracticable by the fortunes of war.
+
+With some gift for casuistry one may, at least conceivably, hold that
+the felt need of Imperial self-aggrandisement may become so urgent as to
+justify, or at least to condone, forcible dispossession of weaker
+nationalities. This might, indeed it has, become a sufficiently
+perplexing question of casuistry, both as touches the punctilios of
+national honour and as regards an equitable division between rival
+Powers in respect of the material means of mastery. So in private life
+it may become a moot question--in point of equity--whether the craving
+of a kleptomaniac may not on occasion rise to such an intolerable pitch
+of avidity as to justify him in seizing whatever valuables he can safely
+lay hands on, to ease the discomfort of ungratified desire. In private
+life any such endeavour to better oneself at one's neighbors' cost is
+not commonly reprobated if it takes effect on a decently large scale
+and shrewdly within the flexibilities of the law or with the connivance
+of its officers. Governing international endeavours of this class there
+is no law so inflexible that it can not be conveniently made over to fit
+particular circumstances. And in the absence of law the felt need of a
+formal justification will necessarily appeal to the unformulated
+equities of the case, with some such outcome as alluded to above. All
+that, of course, is for the diplomatists to take care of.
+
+But any speculation on the equities involved in the projected course of
+empire to which these two enterprising nations are committing themselves
+must run within the lines of diplomatic parable, and will have none but
+a speculative interest. It is not a matter of equity. Accepting the
+situation as it stands, it is evident that any peace can only have a
+qualified meaning, in the sense of armistice, so long as there is
+opportunity for national enterprise of the character on which these two
+enterprising national establishments are bent, and so long as these and
+the like national establishments remain. So, taking the peaceable
+professions of their spokesmen at a discount of one hundred percent, as
+one necessarily must, and looking to the circumstantial evidence of the
+case, it is abundantly plain that at least these two imperial Powers may
+be counted on consistently to manoeuvre for warlike advantage so long as
+any peace compact holds, and to break the peace so soon as the strategy
+of Imperial enterprise appears to require it.
+
+There has been much courteous make-believe of amiable and upright
+solicitude on this head the past few years, both in diplomatic
+intercourse and among men out of doors; and since make-believe is a
+matter of course in diplomatic intercourse it is right and seemly, of
+course, that no overt recognition of unavowed facts should be allowed
+to traverse this run of make-believe within the precincts of diplomatic
+intercourse. But in any ingenuous inquiry into the nature of peace and
+the conditions of its maintenance there can be no harm in conveniently
+leaving the diplomatic make-believe on one side and looking to the
+circumstances that condition the case, rather than to the formal
+professions designed to mask the circumstances.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Chief among the relevant circumstances in the current situation are the
+imperial designs of Germany and Japan. These two national establishments
+are very much alike. So much so that for the present purpose a single
+line of analysis will passably cover both cases. The same line of
+analysis will also apply, with slight adaptation, to more than one of
+the other Powers, or near-Powers, of the modern world; but in so far as
+such is held to be the case, that is not a consideration that weakens
+the argument as applied to these two, which are to be taken as the
+consummate type-form of a species of national establishments. They are,
+between them, the best instance there is of what may be called a
+Dynastic State.
+
+Except as a possible corrective of internal disorders and discontent,
+neither of the two States "desires" war; but both are bent on dominion,
+and as the dominion aimed at is not to be had except by fighting for it,
+both in effect are incorrigibly bent on warlike enterprise. And in
+neither case will considerations of equity, humanity, decency, veracity,
+or the common good be allowed to trouble the quest of dominion. As lies
+in the nature of the dynastic State, imperial dominion, in the ambitions
+of both, is beyond price; so that no cost is too high so long as
+ultimate success attends the imperial enterprise. So much is commonplace
+knowledge among all men who are at all conversant with the facts.
+
+To anyone who harbors a lively sentimental prejudice for or against
+either or both of the two nations so spoken of, or for or against the
+manner of imperial enterprise to which both are committed, it may seem
+that what has just been said of them and their relation to the world's
+peace runs on something of a bias and conveys something of dispraise and
+reprobation. Such is not the intention, however, though the appearance
+is scarcely to be avoided. It is necessary for the purposes of the
+argument unambiguously to recognise the nature of these facts with which
+the inquiry is concerned; and any plain characterisation of the facts
+will unavoidably carry a fringe of suggestions of this character,
+because current speech is adapted for their reprobation. The point aimed
+at is not this inflection of approval or disapproval. The facts are to
+be taken impersonally for what they are worth in their causal bearing on
+the chance of peace or war; not at their sentimental value as traits of
+conduct to be appraised in point of their goodness or expediency.
+
+So seen without prejudice, then, if that may be, this Imperial
+enterprise of these two Powers is to be rated as the chief circumstance
+bearing on the chances of peace and conditioning the terms on which any
+peace plan must be drawn. Evidently, in the presence of these two
+Imperial Powers any peace compact will be in a precarious case; equally
+so whether either or both of them are parties to such compact or not. No
+engagement binds a dynastic statesman in case it turns out not to
+further the dynastic enterprise. The question then recurs: How may peace
+be maintained within the horizon of German or Japanese ambitions? There
+are two obvious alternatives, neither of which promises an easy way out
+of the quandary in which the world's peace is placed by their presence:
+Submission to their dominion, or Elimination of these two Powers. Either
+alternative would offer a sufficiently deterrent outlook, and yet any
+project for devising some middle course of conciliation and amicable
+settlement, which shall be practicable and yet serve the turn, scarcely
+has anything better to promise. The several nations now engaged on a war
+with the greater of these Imperial Powers hold to a design of
+elimination, as being the only measure that merits hopeful
+consideration. The Imperial Power in distress bespeaks peace and
+good-will.
+
+Those advocates, whatever their nationality, who speak for negotiation
+with a view to a peace compact which is to embrace these States intact,
+are aiming, in effect, to put things in train for ultimate submission to
+the mastery of these Imperial Powers. In these premises an amicable
+settlement and a compact of perpetual peace will necessarily be
+equivalent to arranging a period of recuperation and recruiting for a
+new onset of dynastic enterprise. For, in the nature of the case, no
+compact binds the dynastic statesman, and no consideration other than
+the pursuit of Imperial dominion commands his attention.
+
+There is, of course, no intention to decry this single-mindedness that
+is habitually put in evidence by the dynastic statesmen. Nor should it
+be taken as evidence of moral obliquity in them. It is rather the result
+of a peculiar moral attitude or bent, habitual to such statesmen, and in
+its degree also habitual to their compatriots, and is indispensably
+involved in the Imperial frame of mind. The consummation of Imperial
+mastery being the highest and ubiquitously ulterior end of all
+endeavour, its pursuit not only relieves its votaries from the
+observance of any minor obligations that run counter to its needs, but
+it also imposes a moral obligation to make the most of any opportunity
+for profitable deceit and chicanery that may offer. In short, the
+dynastic statesman is under the governance of a higher morality, binding
+him to the service of his nation's ambition--or in point of fact, to the
+personal service of his dynastic master--to which it is his dutiful
+privilege loyally to devote all his powers of force and fraud.
+
+Democratically-minded persons, who are not moved by the call of loyalty
+to a gratuitous personal master, may have some difficulty in
+appreciating the force and the moral austerity of this spirit of
+devotion to an ideal of dynastic aggrandisement, and in seeing how its
+paramount exigence will set aside all meticulous scruples of personal
+rectitude and veracity, as being a shabby with-holding of service due.
+
+To such of these doubters as still have retained some remnants of their
+religious faith this attitude of loyalty may perhaps be made
+intelligible by calling to mind the analogous self-surrender of the
+religious devotee. And in this connection it may also be to the purpose
+to recall that in point of its genesis and derivation that unreserved
+self-abasement and surrender to the divine ends and guidance, which is
+the chief grace and glory of the true believer, is held by secular
+students of these matters to be only a sublimated analogue or
+counterfeit of this other dutiful abasement that constitutes loyalty to
+a temporal master. The deity is currently spoken of as The Heavenly
+King, under whose dominion no sinner has a right that He is bound to
+respect; very much after the fashion in which no subject of a dynastic
+state has a right which the State is bound to respect. Indeed, all these
+dynastic establishments that so seek the Kingdom, the Power and the
+Glory are surrounded with a penumbra of divinity, and it is commonly a
+bootless question where the dynastic powers end and the claims of
+divinity begin. There is something of a coalescence.[7]
+
+[Footnote 7: "To us the state is the most indispensable as well as the
+highest requisite to our earthly existence.... All individualistic
+endeavor ... must be unreservedly subordinated to this lofty claim....
+The state ... eventually is of infinitely more value than the sum of all
+the individuals within its jurisdiction." "This conception of the state,
+which is as much a part of our life as is the blood in our veins, is
+nowhere to be found in the English Constitution, and is quite foreign to
+English thought, and to that of America as well."--Eduard Meyer,
+_England, its Political Organisation and Development and the War against
+Germany_, translated by H.S. White. Boston 1916. pp. 30-31.]
+
+The Kaiser holds dominion by divine grace and is accountable to none but
+God, if to Him. The whole case is in a still better state of repair as
+touches the Japanese establishment, where the Emperor is a lineal
+descendant of the supreme deity, Amaterazu (_o mi Kami_), and where, by
+consequence, there is no line of cleavage between a divine and a secular
+mastery. Pursuant to this more unqualified authenticity of autocratic
+rule, there is also to be found in this case a correspondingly
+unqualified devotion in the subjects and an unqualified subservience to
+dynastic ends on the part of the officers of the crown. The coalescence
+of dynastic rule with the divine order is less complete in the German
+case, but all observers bear witness that it all goes far enough also in
+the German case. This state of things is recalled here as a means of
+making plain that the statesmen of these Imperial Powers must in the
+nature of the case, and without blame, be drawn out from under the
+customary restraint of those principles of vulgar morality that are
+embodied in the decalogue. It is not that the subject, or--what comes to
+the same thing--the servant of such a dynastic State may not be upright,
+veracious and humane in private life, but only that he must not be
+addicted to that sort of thing in such manner or degree as might hinder
+his usefulness for dynastic purposes. These matters of selfishly
+individual integrity and humanity have no weight as against the
+exigencies of the dynastic enterprise.
+
+These considerations may not satisfy all doubters as to the moral
+sufficiency of these motives that so suffice to decide the dynastic
+statesmen on their enterprise of aggression by force and fraud; but it
+should be evident that so long as these statesmen continue in the frame
+of mind spoken of, and so long as popular sentiment in these countries
+continues, as hitherto, to lend them effectual support in the pursuit of
+such Imperial enterprise, so long it must also remain true that no
+enduring peace can be maintained within the sweep of their Imperial
+ambition. Any peace compact would necessarily be, in effect, an
+armistice terminable at will and serving as a season of preparation to
+meet a deferred opportunity. For the peaceable nations it would, in
+effect, be a respite and a season of preparation for eventual submission
+to the Imperial rule.
+
+By advocates of such a negotiated compact of perpetual peace it has been
+argued that the populace underlying these Imperial Powers will readily
+be brought to realise the futility and inexpediency of such dynastic
+enterprise, if only the relevant facts are brought to their knowledge,
+and that so these Powers will be constrained to keep the peace by
+default of popular support for their warlike projects. What is required,
+it is believed by these sanguine persons, is that information be
+competently conveyed to the common people of these warlike nations,
+showing them that they have nothing to apprehend in the way of
+aggression or oppressive measures from the side of their more peaceable
+neighbours; whereupon their warlike animus will give place to a
+reasonable and enlightened frame of mind. This argument runs tacitly or
+explicitly, on the premise that these peoples who have so
+enthusiastically lent themselves to the current warlike enterprise are
+fundamentally of the same racial complexion and endowed with the same
+human nature as their peaceable neighbours, who would be only too glad
+to keep the peace on any terms of tolerable security from aggression. If
+only a fair opportunity is offered for the interested peoples to come to
+an understanding, it is held, a good understanding will readily be
+reached; at least so far as to result in a reasonable willingness to
+submit questions in dispute to an intelligent canvass and an equitable
+arbitration.
+
+Projects for a negotiated peace compact, to include the dynastic States,
+can hold any prospect of a happy issue only if this line of argument, or
+its equivalent, is pertinent and conclusive; and the argument is to the
+point only in so far as its premises are sound and will carry as far as
+the desired conclusion. Therefore a more detailed attention to the
+premises on which it runs will be in place, before any project of the
+kind is allowed to pass inspection.
+
+As to homogeneity of race and endowment among the several nations in
+question, the ethnologists, who are competent to speak of that matter,
+are ready to assert that this homogeneity goes much farther among the
+nations of Europe than any considerable number of peace advocates would
+be ready to claim. In point of race, and broadly speaking, there is
+substantially no difference between these warring nations, along any
+east-and-west line; while the progressive difference in racial
+complexion that is always met with along any north-and-south line,
+nowhere coincides with a national or linguistic frontier. In no case
+does a political division between these nations mark or depend on a
+difference of race or of hereditary endowment. And, to give full
+measure, it may be added that also in no case does a division of classes
+within any one of these nations, into noble and base, patrician and
+plebeian, lay and learned, innocent and vicious, mark or rest on any
+slightest traceable degree of difference in race or in heritable
+endowment. On the point of racial homogeneity there is no fault to find
+with the position taken.
+
+If the second postulate in this groundwork of premises on which the
+advocates of negotiable peace base their hopes were as well taken there
+need be no serious misgiving as to the practicability of such a plan.
+The plan counts on information, persuasion and reflection to subdue
+national animosities and jealousies, at least in such measure as would
+make them amenable to reason. The question of immediate interest on this
+head, therefore, would be as to how far this populace may be accessible
+to the contemplated line of persuasion. At present they are,
+notoriously, in a state of obsequious loyalty to the dynasty,
+single-minded devotion to the fortunes of the Fatherland, and
+uncompromising hatred of its enemies. In this frame of mind there is
+nothing that is new, except the degree of excitement. The animus, it
+will be recalled, was all there and on the alert when the call came, so
+that the excitement came on with the sweep of a conflagration on the
+first touch of a suitable stimulus. The German people at large was
+evidently in a highly unstable equilibrium, so that an unexampled
+enthusiasm of patriotic self-sacrifice followed immediately on the first
+incitement to manslaughter, very much as if the nation had been held
+under an hypnotic spell. One need only recall the volume of overbearing
+magniloquence that broke out all over the place in that beginning, when
+The Day was believed to be dawning.
+
+Such a popular frame of mind is not a transient episode, to be created
+at short notice and put aside for a parcel of salutary advice. The
+nation that will make such a massive concerted move with the alacrity
+shown in this instance must be living in a state of alert readiness for
+just such an onset. Yet this is not to be set down as anything in the
+way of a racial trait specifically distinguishing the German people from
+those other adjacent nationalities that are incapable of a similarly
+swift and massive response to the appeal of patriotism. These adjacent
+nationalities are racially identical with the German people, but they do
+not show the same warlike abandon in nearly the same degree.
+
+But for all that, it is a national trait, not to be acquired or put away
+by taking thought. It is just here that the line of definition runs: it
+is a national trait, not a racial one. It is not Nature, but it is
+Second Nature. But a national trait, while it is not heritable in the
+simple sense of that term, has the same semblance, or the same degree,
+of hereditary persistence that belongs to the national institutions,
+usages, conventionalities, beliefs, which distinguish the given nation
+from its neighbors. In this instance it may be said more specifically
+that this eager loyalty is a heritage of the German people at large in
+the same sense and with the same degree of permanence as the institution
+of an autocratic royalty has among them, or a privileged nobility.
+Indeed, it is the institutional counterfoil of these establishments. It
+is of an institutional character, just as the corresponding sense of
+national solidarity and patriotic devotion is among the neighboring
+peoples with whom the German nation comes in comparison. And an
+institution is an historical growth, with just so much of a character of
+permanence and continuity of transmission as is given it by the
+circumstances out of which it has grown. Any institution is a product of
+habit, or perhaps more accurately it is a body of habits of thought
+bearing on a given line of conduct, which prevails with such generality
+and uniformity throughout the group as to have become a matter of common
+sense.
+
+Such an article of institutional furniture is an outcome of usage, not
+of reflection or deliberate choice; and it has consequently a character
+of self-legitimation, so that it stands in the accredited scheme of
+things as intrinsically right and good, and not merely as a shrewdly
+chosen expedient _ad interim_. It affords a norm of life, inosculating
+with a multiplicity of other norms, with which it goes to make up a
+balanced scheme of ends, ways and means governing human conduct; and no
+one such institutional item, therefore, is materially to be disturbed,
+discarded or abated except at the cost of serious derangement to the
+balanced scheme of things in which it belongs as an integral
+constituent. Nor can such a detail norm of conduct and habitual
+propensity come into bearing and hold its place, except by force of
+habituation which is at the same time consonant with the common run of
+habituation to which the given community is subject. It follows that
+the more rigorous, comprehensive, unremitting and long-continued the
+habituation to which a given institutional principle owes its vogue, the
+more intimately and definitively will it be embedded in the common sense
+of the community, the less chance is there of its intrinsic necessity
+being effectually questioned or doubted, and the less chance is there of
+correcting it or abating its force in case circumstances should so
+change as to make its continued rule visibly inexpedient. Its abatement
+will be a work not of deliberation and design, but of defection through
+disuse.
+
+Not that reflection and sane counsel will count for nothing in these
+premises, but only that these exertions of intelligence will count for
+relatively very little by comparison with the run of habituation as
+enforced by the circumstances conditioning any given case; and further,
+that wise counsel and good resolutions can take effect in the way of
+amending any untoward institutional bent only by way of suitable
+habituation, and only at such a rate of change as the circumstances
+governing habituation will allow. It is, at the best, slow work to shift
+the settled lines of any community's scheme of common sense. Now,
+national solidarity, and more particularly an unquestioning loyalty to
+the sovereign and the dynasty, is a matter of course and of commonsense
+necessity with the German people. It is not necessary to call to mind
+that the Japanese nation, which has here been coupled with the German,
+are in the same case, only more so.
+
+Doubtless it would be exceeding the premises to claim that it should
+necessarily take the German people as long-continued and as harsh a
+schooling to unlearn their excess of chauvinism, their servile stooping
+to gratuitous authority, and their eager subservience to the dynastic
+ambitions of their masters, as that which has in the course of history
+induced these habits in them. But it would seem reasonable to expect
+that there should have to be some measure of proportion between what it
+has cost them in time and experience to achieve their current frame of
+mind in this bearing and what it would cost to divest themselves of it.
+It is a question of how long a time and how exacting a discipline would
+be required so far to displace the current scheme of commonsense values
+and convictions in force in the Fatherland as to neutralise their
+current high-wrought principles of servility, loyalty and national
+animosity; and on the solution of this difficulty appear to depend the
+chances of success for any proposed peace compact to which the German
+nation shall be made a party, on terms of what is called an "honorable
+peace."
+
+The national, or rather the dynastic and warlike, animus of this people
+is of the essence of their social and political institutions. Without
+such a groundwork of popular sentiment neither the national
+establishment, nor the social order on which it rests and through which
+it works, could endure. And with this underlying national sentiment
+intact nothing but a dynastic establishment of a somewhat ruthless
+order, and no enduring system of law and order not based on universal
+submission to personal rule, could be installed. Both the popular animus
+and the correlative coercive scheme of law and order are of historical
+growth. Both have been learned, acquired, and are in no cogent sense
+original with the German people. But both alike and conjointly have come
+out of a very protracted, exacting and consistent discipline of mastery
+and subjection, running virtually unbroken over the centuries that have
+passed since the region that is now the Fatherland first passed under
+the predaceous rule of its Teutonic invaders,--for no part of the
+"Fatherland" is held on other tenure than that of forcible seizure in
+ancient times by bands of invaders, with the negligible exception of
+Holstein and a slight extent of territory adjoining that province to the
+south and south-west. Since the time when such peoples as were overtaken
+in this region by the Germanic barbarian invasions, and were reduced to
+subjection and presently merged with their alien masters, the same
+general fashion of law and order that presently grew out of that
+barbarian conquest has continued to govern the life of those peoples,
+with relatively slight and intermittent relaxation of its rigors.
+Contrasted with its beginnings, in the shameful atrocities of the Dark
+Ages and the prehistoric phases of this German occupation, the later
+stages of this system of coercive law and order in the Fatherland will
+appear humane, not to say genial; but as compared with the degree of
+mitigation which the like order of things presently underwent elsewhere
+in western Europe, it has throughout the historical period preserved a
+remarkable degree of that character of arrogance and servility which it
+owes to its barbarian and predatory beginnings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The initial stages of this Germanic occupation of the Fatherland are
+sufficiently obscure under the cloud of unrecorded antiquity that covers
+them; and then, an abundance of obscurantism has also been added by the
+vapours of misguided vanity that have surrounded so nearly all
+historical inquiry on the part of patriotic German scholars. Yet there
+are certain outstanding features in the case, in history and prehistory,
+that are too large or too notorious to be set aside or to be covered
+over, and these may suffice to show the run of circumstances which have
+surrounded the German peoples and shaped their civil and political
+institutions, and whose discipline has guided German habits of thought
+and preserved the German spirit of loyalty in the shape in which it
+underlies the dynastic State of the present day.
+
+Among the most engaging of those fables that make the conventional
+background of German history is the academic legend of a free
+agricultural village community made up of ungraded and masterless men.
+It is not necessary here to claim that such a village community never
+played a part in the remoter prehistoric experiences out of which the
+German people, or their ruling classes, came into the territory of the
+Fatherland; such a claim might divert the argument. But it is
+sufficiently patent to students of those matters today that no such
+community of free and ungraded men had any part in the Germanic
+beginnings; that is to say, in the early experiences of the Fatherland
+under German rule. The meager and ambiguous remarks of Tacitus on the
+state of domestic and civil economy among the inhabitants of Germany
+need no longer detain anyone, in the presence of the available
+archaeological and historical evidence. The circumstantial evidence of
+the prehistoric antiquities which touch this matter, as well as the
+slight allusions of historical records in antiquity, indicate
+unambiguously enough that when the Germanic immigrants moved into the
+territories of the Fatherland they moved in as invaders, or rather as
+marauders, and made themselves masters of the people already living on
+the land. And history quite as unambiguously declares that when the
+Fatherland first comes under its light it presents a dark and bloody
+ground of tumultuous contention and intrigue; where princes and
+princelings, captains of war and of rapine as well as the captains of
+superstition, spend the substance of an ignominiously sordid and servile
+populace in an endless round of mutual raiding, treachery,
+assassinations and supersession.
+
+Taken at their face value, the recorded stories of that early time would
+leave one to infer that the common people, whose industry supported this
+superstructure of sordid mastery, could have survived only by oversight.
+But touched as it is with poetic license and devoted to the admirable
+life of the master class--admirable in their own eyes and in those of
+their chroniclers, as undoubtedly also in the eyes of the subject
+populace--the history of that time doubtless plays up the notable
+exploits and fortunes of its conspicuous personages, somewhat to the
+neglect of the obscure vicissitudes of life and fortune among that human
+raw material by use of which the admirable feats of the master class
+were achieved, and about the use of which the dreary traffic of greed
+and crime went on among the masters.
+
+Of the later history, what covers, say, the last one thousand years,
+there is no need to speak at length. With transient, episodic,
+interruptions it is for the Fatherland a continuation out of these
+beginnings, leading out into a more settled system of subjection and
+mastery and a progressively increased scale of princely enterprise,
+resting on an increasingly useful and increasingly loyal populace. In
+all this later history the posture of things in the Fatherland is by no
+means unique, nor is it even strikingly peculiar, by contrast with the
+rest of western Europe, except in degree. It is of the same general kind
+as the rest of what has gone to make the historical advance of medieval
+and modern times; but it differs from the generality in a more sluggish
+movement and a more tenacious adherence to what would be rated as the
+untoward features of mediaevalism. The approach to a modern scheme of
+institutions and modern conceptions of life and of human values has been
+slow, and hitherto incomplete, as compared with those communities that
+have, for good or ill, gone farthest along the ways of modernity.
+Habituation to personal subjection and subservience under the rigorous
+and protracted discipline of standardised service and fealty has
+continued later, and with later and slighter mitigation, in the
+Fatherland; so as better to have conserved the spiritual attitude of the
+feudal order. Law and order in the Fatherland has in a higher degree
+continued to mean unquestioning obedience to a personal master and
+unquestioning subservience to the personal ambitions of the master. And
+since freedom, in the sense of discretionary initiative on the part of
+the common man, does not fit into the framework of such a system of
+dependence on personal authority and surveillance, any degree of such
+free initiative will be "licence" in the eyes of men bred into the
+framework of this system; whereas "liberty," as distinct from "licence,"
+is not a matter of initiative and self-direction, but of latitude in the
+service of a master. Hence no degree of curtailment in this delegated
+"liberty" will be resented or repudiated by popular indignation, so long
+as the master to whom service is due can give assurance that it is
+expedient for his purposes.
+
+The age-long course of experience and institutional discipline out of
+which the current German situation has come may be drawn schematically
+to the following effect: In the beginning a turmoil of conquest, rapine,
+servitude, and contention between rival bands of marauders and their
+captains, gradually, indeed imperceptibly, fell into lines of settled
+and conventionalised exploitation; with repeated interruptions due to
+new incursions and new combinations of rapacious chieftains. Out of it
+all in the course of time came a feudal régime, under which personal
+allegiance and service to petty chiefs was the sole and universal
+accredited bond of solidarity. As the outcome of further unremitting
+intrigue and contention among feudal chiefs, of high and low degree, the
+populace fell into larger parcels, under the hands of feudal lords of
+larger dominion, and the bias of allegiance and service came to hold
+with some degree of permanence and uniformity, or at least of
+consistency, over a considerable reach of country, including its
+inhabitants. With the rise of States came allegiance to a dynasty, as
+distinguished from the narrower and more ephemeral allegiance to the
+semi-detached person of a victorious prince; and the relative permanence
+of territorial frontiers under this rule gave room for an effectual
+recrudescence of the ancient propensity to a sentimental group
+solidarity; in which the accredited territorial limits of the dynastic
+dominion served to outline the group that so was felt to belong together
+under a joint dispensation and with something of a joint interest in
+matters of fame and fortune. As the same notion is more commonly and
+more suggestively expressed, a sense of nationality arose within the
+sweep of the dynastic rule. This sense of community interest that is
+called nationality so came in to reenforce the sense of allegiance to
+the dynastic establishment and so has coalesced with it to produce that
+high-wrought loyalty to the State, that draws equally on the sentiment
+of community interest in the nation and on the prescriptive docility to
+the dynastic head. The sense of national solidarity and of feudal
+loyalty and service have coalesced, to bring this people to that climax
+of patriotic devotion beyond which there lies no greater height along
+this way. But this is also as far as the German people have gone; and it
+is scarcely to be claimed that the Japanese have yet reached this stage;
+they would rather appear to be, essentially, subjects of the emperor,
+and only inchoately a Japanese nation. Of the German people it seems
+safe to say that they have achieved such a coalescence of unimpaired
+feudal fealty to a personal master and a full-blown sense of national
+solidarity, without any perceptible slackening in either strand of the
+double tie which so binds them in the service of the dynastic State.
+
+Germany, in other words, is somewhat in arrears, as compared with those
+Europeans that have gone farthest along this course of institutional
+growth, or perhaps rather institutional permutation. It is not that this
+retardation of the German people in this matter of national spirit is to
+be counted as an infirmity, assuredly not as a handicap in the pursuit
+of that national prestige on which all patriotic endeavour finally
+converges. For this purpose the failure to distinguish between the
+ambitions of the dynastic statesmen and the interests of the
+commonwealth is really a prodigious advantage, which their rivals, of
+more mature growth politically, have lost by atrophy of this same
+dynastic axiom of subservience. These others, of whom the French and the
+English-speaking peoples make up the greater part and may be taken as
+the typical instance, have had a different history, in part. The
+discipline of experience has left a somewhat different residue of habits
+of thought embedded in their institutional equipment and effective as
+axiomatic premises in their further apprehension of what is worth while,
+and why.
+
+It is not that the difference between these two contrasted strains of
+the Western civilisation is either profound or very pronounced; it is
+perhaps rather to be stated as a difference of degree than of kind; a
+retardation of spiritual growth, in respect of the prevalent and
+controlling habits of thought on certain heads, in the one case as
+against the other. Therefore any attempt to speak with sufficient
+definition, so as to bring out this national difference of animus in any
+convincing way, will unavoidably have an appearance of overstatement, if
+not also of bias. And in any case, of course, it is not to be expected
+that the national difference here spoken for can be brought home to the
+apprehension of any unspoiled son of the Fatherland, since it does not
+lie within that perspective.
+
+It is not of the nature of a divergence, but rather a differential in
+point of cultural maturity, due to a differential in the rate of
+progression through that sequence of institutional phases through which
+the civilised peoples of Europe, jointly and severally, have been led by
+force of circumstance. In this movement out of the Dark Ages and onward,
+circumstances have fallen out differently for those Europeans that
+chanced to live within the confines of the Fatherland, different with
+such effect as to have in the present placed these others at a farther
+remove from the point of departure, leaving them furnished with less of
+that archaic frame of mind that is here in question. Possessed of less,
+but by no means shorn of all--perhaps not of the major part--of that
+barbaric heritage.
+
+Circumstances have so fallen out that these--typically the French and
+the English-speaking peoples--have left behind and partly forgotten that
+institutional phase in which the people of Imperial Germany now live and
+move and have their being. The French partly because they--that is the
+common people of the French lands--entered the procession with a very
+substantial lead, having never been put back to a point abreast of their
+neighbors across the Rhine, in that phase of European civilisation from
+which the peoples of the Fatherland tardily emerged into the feudal age.
+So, any student who shall set out to account for the visible lead which
+the French people still so obstinately maintain in the advance of
+European culture, will have to make up his account with this notable
+fact among the premises of his inquiry, that they have had a shorter
+course to cover and have therefore, in the sporting phrase, had the
+inside track. They measure from a higher datum line. Among the
+advantages which so have come, in a sense unearned, to the French
+people, is their uninterrupted retention, out of Roman--and perhaps
+pre-Roman--times, of the conception of a commonwealth, a community of
+men with joint and mutual interests apart from any superimposed
+dependence on a joint feudal superior. The French people therefore
+became a nation, with unobtrusive facility, so soon as circumstances
+permitted, and they are today the oldest "nation" in Europe. They
+therefore were prepared from long beforehand, with an adequate principle
+(habit of thought) of national cohesion and patriotic sentiment, to make
+the shift from a dynastic State to a national commonwealth whenever the
+occasion for such a move should arise; that is to say, whenever the
+dynastic State, by a suitable conjunction of infirmity and irksomeness,
+should pass the margin of tolerance in this people's outraged sense of
+national shame. The case of the German people in their latterday
+attitude toward dynastic vagaries may afford a term of comparison. These
+appear yet incapable of distinguishing between national shame and
+dynastic ambition.
+
+By a different course and on lines more nearly parallel with the
+life-history of the German peoples, the English-speaking peoples have
+reached what is for the present purpose much the same ground as the
+French, in that they too have made the shift from the dynastic State to
+the national commonwealth. The British started late, but the discipline
+of servitude and unmitigated personal rule in their case was relatively
+brief and relatively ineffectual; that is to say, as compared with what
+their German cousins had to endure and to learn in the like connection.
+So that the British never learned the lesson of dynastic loyalty fully
+by heart; at least not the populace; whatever may be true for the
+privileged classes, the gentlemen, whose interests were on the side of
+privilege and irresponsible mastery. Here as in the French case it was
+the habits of thought of the common man, not of the class of gentlemen,
+that made the obsolescence of the dynastic State a foregone conclusion
+and an easy matter--as one speaks of easy achievement in respect of
+matters of that magnitude. It is now some two and a half centuries since
+this shift in the national point of view overtook the English-speaking
+community. Perhaps it would be unfair to say that that period, or that
+period plus what further time may yet have to be added, marks the
+interval by which German habits of thought in these premises are in
+arrears, but it is not easy to find secure ground for a different and
+more moderate appraisal.
+
+The future, of course, is not to be measured in terms of the past, and
+the tempo of the present and of the calculable future is in many
+bearings very different from that which has ruled even in the recent
+historical past. But then, on the other hand, habituation always
+requires time; more particularly such habituation as is to take effect
+throughout a populous nation and is counted on to work a displacement of
+a comprehensive institutional system and of a people's outlook on life.
+
+Germany is still a dynastic State. That is to say, its national
+establishment is, in effect, a self-appointed and irresponsible
+autocracy which holds the nation in usufruct, working through an
+appropriate bureaucratic organisation, and the people is imbued with
+that spirit of abnegation and devotion that is involved in their
+enthusiastically supporting a government of that character. Now, it is
+in the nature of a dynastic State to seek dominion, that being the whole
+of its nature. And a dynastic establishment which enjoys the unqualified
+usufruct of such resources as are placed at its disposal by the
+feudalistic loyalty of the German people runs no chance of keeping the
+peace, except on terms of the unconditional surrender of all those whom
+it may concern. No solemn engagement and no pious resolution has any
+weight in the balance against a cultural fatality of this magnitude.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This account of the derivation and current state of German nationalism
+will of course appear biased to anyone who has been in the habit of
+rating German Culture high in all its bearings, and to whom at the same
+time the ideals of peace and liberty appeal. Indeed, such a critic,
+gifted with the due modicum of asperity, might well be provoked to call
+it all a more or less ingenious diatribe of partisan malice. But it can
+be so construed only by those who see the question at issue as a point
+of invidious distinction between this German animus on the one hand and
+the corresponding frame of mind of the neighboring peoples on the other
+hand. There may also appear to the captious to be some air of
+deprecation about the characterisation here offered of the past history
+of political traffic within the confines of the Fatherland. All of
+which, of course, touches neither the veracity of the characterisation
+nor the purpose with which so ungrateful a line of analysis and
+exposition has been entered upon. It is to be regretted if facts that
+may flutter the emotions of one and another among the sensitive and
+unreflecting can not be drawn into such an inquiry without having their
+cogency discounted beforehand on account of the sentimental value
+imputed to them. Of course no offense is intended and no invidious
+comparison is aimed at.
+
+Even if the point of it all were an invidious comparison it would
+immediately have to be admitted that the net showing in favor of these
+others, e.g., the French or the English-speaking peoples, is by no means
+so unreservedly to their credit as such a summary statement of the
+German case might seem to imply. As bearing on the chances of a peace
+contingent upon the temper of the contracting nationalities, it is by no
+means a foregone conclusion that such a peace compact would hold
+indefinitely even if it depended solely on the pacific animus of these
+others that have left the dynastic State behind. These others, in fact,
+are also not yet out of the woods. They may not have the same gift of
+gratuitous and irresponsible truculence as their German cousins, in the
+same alarming degree; but as was said in an earlier passage, they too
+are ready to fight on provocation. They are patriotic to a degree;
+indeed to such a degree that anything which visibly touches the national
+prestige will readily afford a _casus belli_. But it remains true that
+the popular temper among them is of the defensive order; perhaps of an
+unnecessarily enthusiastic defensive order, but after all in such a
+frame of mind as leaves them willing to let well enough alone, to live
+and let live.
+
+And herein appears to lie the decisive difference between those peoples
+whose patriotic affections center about the fortunes of an impersonal
+commonwealth and those in whom is superadded a fervent aspiration for
+dynastic ascendency. The latter may be counted on to break the peace
+when a promising opportunity offers.
+
+The contrast may be illustrated, though not so sharply as might be
+desirable, in the different temper shown by the British people in the
+Boer war on the one hand, as compared with the popularity of the
+French-Prussian war among the German people on the other hand. Both were
+aggressive wars, and both were substantially unprovoked. Diplomatically
+speaking, of course, sufficient provocation was found in either case, as
+how should it not? But in point of substantial provocation and of
+material inducement, both were about equally gratuitous. In either case
+the war could readily have been avoided without material detriment to
+the community and without perceptible lesion to the national honour.
+Both were "engineered" on grounds shamelessly manufactured _ad hoc_ by
+interested parties; in the one case by a coterie of dynastic statesmen,
+in the other by a junta of commercial adventurers and imperialistic
+politicians. In neither case had the people any interest of gain or loss
+in the quarrel, except as it became a question of national prestige. But
+both the German and the British community bore the burden and fought the
+campaign to a successful issue for those interested parties who had
+precipitated the quarrel. The British people at large, it is true, bore
+the burden; which comes near being all that can be said in the way of
+popular approval of this war, which political statesmen have since then
+rated as one of the most profitable enterprises in which the forces of
+the realm have been engaged. On the subject of this successful war the
+common man is still inclined to cover his uneasy sense of decency with a
+recital of extenuating circumstances. What parallels all this in the
+German case is an outbreak of patriotic abandon and an admirable spirit
+of unselfish sacrifice in furtherance of the dynastic prestige, an
+intoxication of patriotic blare culminating in the triumphant coronation
+at Versailles. Nor has the sober afterthought of the past forty-six
+years cast a perceptible shadow of doubt across the glorious memory of
+that patriotic debauch.
+
+Such is the difference of animus between a body of patriotic citizens in
+a modern commonwealth on the one hand and the loyal subjects of a
+dynastic State on the other hand. There need be no reflections on the
+intrinsic merits of either. Seen in dispassionate perspective from
+outside the turmoil, there is not much to choose, in point of sane and
+self-respecting manhood, between the sluggish and shamefaced abettor of
+a sordid national crime, and a ranting patriot who glories in serving as
+cat's-paw to a syndicate of unscrupulous politicians bent on dominion
+for dominion's sake. But the question here is not as to the relative
+merits or the relative manhood contents of the two contrasted types of
+patriot. Doubtless both and either have manhood enough and to spare; at
+least, so they say. But the point in question is the simpler and nowise
+invidious one, as to the availability of both or either for the
+perpetuation of the world's peace under a compact of vigilant
+neutrality. Plainly the German frame of mind admits of no neutrality;
+the quest of dominion is not compatible with neutrality, and the
+substantial core of German national life is still the quest of dominion
+under dynastic tutelage. How it stands with the spirit that has
+repeatedly come in sight in the international relations of the British
+community is a question harder to answer.
+
+It may be practicable to establish a peace of neutrals on the basis of
+such national spirit as prevails among these others--the French and
+English-speaking peoples, together with the minor nationalities that
+cluster about the North Sea--because their habitual attitude is that of
+neutrality, on the whole and with allowance for a bellicose minority in
+all these countries. By and large, these peoples have come to the
+tolerant attitude that finds expression in the maxim, Live and let live.
+But they are all and several sufficiently patriotic. It may, indeed,
+prove that they are more than sufficiently patriotic for the purposes of
+a neutral peace. They stand for peace, but it is "peace with honour;"
+which means, in more explicit terms, peace with undiminished national
+prestige. Now, national prestige is a very particular commodity, as has
+been set out in earlier passages of this inquiry; and a peace which is
+to be kept only on terms of a jealous maintenance of the national honour
+is likely to be in a somewhat precarious case. If, and when, the
+national honour is felt to require an enhanced national ascendancy, the
+case for a neutral peace immediately becomes critical. And the greater
+the number and diversity of pretensions and interests that are conceived
+to be bound up with the national honour, the more unstable will the
+resulting situation necessarily be.
+
+The upshot of all this recital of considerations appears to be that a
+neutral peace compact may, or it may not, be practicable in the absence
+of such dynastic States as Germany and Japan; whereas it has no chance
+in the presence of these enterprising national establishments.
+
+No one will be readier or more voluble in exclaiming against the falsity
+of such a discrimination as is here attempted, between the democratic
+and the dynastic nations of the modern world, than the spokesmen of
+these dynastic Powers. No one is more outspoken in professions of
+universal peace and catholic amity than these same spokesmen of the
+dynastic Powers; and nowhere is there more urgent need of such
+professions. Official and "inspired" professions are, of course, to be
+overlooked; at least, so charity would dictate. But there have, in the
+historic present, been many professions of this character made also by
+credible spokesmen of the German, and perhaps of the Japanese, people,
+and in all sincerity. By way of parenthesis it should be said that this
+is not intended to apply to expressions of conviction and intention that
+have come out of Germany these two years past (December 1916). Without
+questioning the credibility of these witnesses that have borne witness
+to the pacific and genial quality of national sentiment in the German
+people, it will yet be in place to recall the run of facts in the
+national life of Germany in this historical present and the position of
+these spokesmen in the German community.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The German nation is of a peculiar composition in respect of its social
+structure. So far as bears on the question in hand, it is made up of
+three distinctive constituent factors, or perhaps rather categories or
+conditions of men. The populace is of course the main category, and in
+the last resort always the main and decisive factor. Next in point of
+consequence as well as of numbers and initiative is the personnel of the
+control,--the ruling class, the administration, the official community,
+the hierarchy of civil and political servants, or whatever designation
+may best suit; the category comprises that pyramidal superstructure of
+privilege and control whereof the sovereign is the apex, and in whom,
+under any dynastic rule, is in effect vested the usufruct of the
+populace. These two classes or conditions of men, the one of which
+orders and the other obeys, make up the working structure of the nation,
+and they also between them embody the national life and carry forward
+the national work and aim. Intermediate between them, or rather beside
+them and overlapping the commissure, is a third category whose life
+articulates loosely with both the others at the same time that it still
+runs along in a semi-detached way. This slighter but more visible, and
+particularly more audible, category is made up of the "Intellectuals,"
+as a late, and perhaps vulgar, designation would name them.
+
+These are they who chiefly communicate with the world outside, and at
+the same time they do what is academically called thinking. They are in
+intellectual contact and communication with the world at large, in a
+contact of give and take, and they think and talk in and about those
+concepts that go in under the caption of the humanities in the world at
+large. The category is large enough to constitute an intellectual
+community, indeed a community of somewhat formidable magnitude, taken in
+absolute terms, although in percentages of the population at large their
+numbers will foot up to only an inconsiderable figure. Their contact
+with the superior class spoken of above is fairly close, being a
+contact, in the main, of service on the one side and of control on the
+other. With the populace their contact and communion is relatively
+slight, the give and take in the case being neither intimate nor
+far-reaching. More particularly is there a well-kept limit of moderation
+on any work of indoctrination or intellectual guidance which this class
+may carry down among the people at large, dictated and enforced by
+dynastic expediency. This category, of the Intellectuals, is
+sufficiently large to live its own life within itself, without drawing
+on the spiritual life of the community at large, and of sufficiently
+substantial quality to carry its own peculiar scheme of intellectual
+conventions and verities. Of the great and highly meritorious place and
+work of these Intellectuals in the scheme of German culture it is
+needless to speak. What is to the point is that they are the accredited
+spokesmen of the German nation in all its commonplace communication with
+the rest of civilised Europe.
+
+The Intellectuals have spoken with conviction and sincerity of the
+spiritual state of the German people, but in so doing, and in so far as
+bears on the character of German nationalism, they have been in closer
+contact, intellectually and sympathetically, with the intellectual and
+spiritual life of civilised Europe at large than with the movements of
+the spirit among the German populace. And their canvassing of the
+concepts which so have come under their attention from over the national
+frontiers has been carried forward--so far, again, as bears on the
+questions that are here in point--with the German-dynastic principles,
+logic and mechanism of execution under their immediate observation and
+supplying the concrete materials for inquiry. Indeed, it holds true, by
+and large, that nothing else than this German-dynastic complement of
+ways and means has, or can effectually, come under their observation in
+such a degree of intimacy as to give body and definition to the somewhat
+abstract theorems on cultural aims and national preconceptions that have
+come to them from outside. In short, they have borrowed these
+theoretical formulations from abroad, without the concrete apparatus of
+ways and means in which these theorems are embodied in their foreign
+habitat, and have so found themselves construing these theoretical
+borrowings in the only concrete terms of which they have had first-hand
+and convincing knowledge. Such an outcome would be fairly unavoidable,
+inasmuch as these Intellectuals, however much they are, in the spirit,
+citizens of the cosmopolitan republic of knowledge and intelligence,
+they are after all, _in propria persona_, immediately and unremittingly
+subjects of the German-dynastic State; so that all their detail thinking
+on the aims, ways and means of life, in all its civil and political
+bearings, is unavoidably shaped by the unremitting discipline of their
+workday experience under this dynastic scheme. The outcome has been that
+while they have taken up, as they have understood them, the concepts
+that rule the civic life of these other, maturer nations, they have
+apprehended and developed these theorems of civic life in the terms and
+by the logic enforced in that system of control and surveillance known
+to them by workday experience,--the only empirical terms at hand.
+
+The apex of growth and the center of diffusion as regards the modern
+culture in respect of the ideals and logic of civic life--other phases
+of this culture than this its civil aspect do not concern the point here
+in question--this apex of growth and center of diffusion lie outside the
+Fatherland, in an environment alien to the German institutional scheme.
+Yet so intrinsic to the cultural drift of modern mankind are these aims
+and this logic, that in taking over and further enriching the
+intellectual heritage of this modern world the Intellectuals of the
+Fatherland have unavoidably also taken over those conceptions of civil
+initiative and masterless self-direction that rule the logic of life in
+a commonwealth of ungraded men. They have taken these over and
+assimilated them as best their experience would permit. But workday
+experience and its exigencies are stubborn things; and in this process
+of assimilation of these alien conceptions of right and honest living,
+it is the borrowed theorems concerning civic rights and duties that have
+undergone adaptation and revision, not the concrete system of ways and
+means in which these principles, so accepted, are to be put in practice.
+Necessarily so, since in the German scheme of law and order the major
+premise is the dynastic State, whereas the major premise of the modern
+civilised scheme of civic life is the absence of such an organ. So, the
+development and elaboration of these modern principles of civic
+liberty--and this elaboration has taken on formidable dimensions--under
+the hand of the German Intellectuals has uniformly run out into
+Pickwickian convolutions, greatly suggestive of a lost soul seeking a
+place to rest. With unquestionably serious purpose and untiring
+endeavour, they have sought to embody these modern civilised
+preconceptions in terms afforded by, or in terms compatible with, the
+institutions of the Fatherland; and they have been much concerned and
+magniloquently elated about the German spirit of freedom that so was to
+be brought to final and consummate realisation in the life of a free
+people. But at no point and in no case have either the proposals or
+their carrying out taken shape as a concrete application of the familiar
+principle of popular self-direction. It has always come to something in
+the way of a concessive or expedient mitigation of the antagonistic
+principle of personal authority. Where the forms of self-government or
+of individual self-direction have concessively been installed, under the
+Imperial rule, they have turned out to be an imitative structure with
+some shrewd provision for their coercion or inhibition at the discretion
+of an irresponsible authority.
+
+Neither the sound intelligence nor the good faith of these Intellectuals
+of the Fatherland is to be impugned. That the--necessarily vague and
+circumlocutory--expositions of civic institutions and popular liberty
+which they have so often and so largely promulgated should have been
+used as a serviceable blind of dynastic statecraft is not to be set down
+to their discredit. Circumstances over which they could have no control,
+since they were circumstances that shaped their own habits of thought,
+have placed it beyond their competence to apprehend or to formulate
+these alien principles (habits of thought) concretely in those alien
+institutional details and by the alien logic with which they could have
+no working acquaintance.
+
+To one and another this conception of cultural solidarity within the
+nation, and consequent cultural aliency between nations, due to the
+different habits of life and of thought enforced by the two diverse
+institutional systems, may be so far unfamiliar as to carry no
+conviction. It may accordingly not seem out of place to recall that the
+institutional system of any given community, particularly for any
+community living under a home-bred and time-tried system of its own,
+will necessarily be a balanced system of interdependent and mutually
+concordant parts working together in one comprehensive plan of law and
+order. Through such an institutional system, as, e.g., the German
+Imperial organisation, there will run a degree of logical consistency,
+consonant with itself throughout, and exerting a consistent discipline
+throughout the community; whereby there is enforced a consistent drift
+or bent in the prevalent habits of life, and a correlative bent in the
+resulting habits of thought prevalent in the community. It is, in fact,
+this possession of a common scheme of use and wont, and a consequent
+common outlook and manner of thinking, that constitutes the most
+intrinsic bond of solidarity in any nationality, and that finally marks
+it off from any other.
+
+It is equally a matter of course that any other given community, living
+under the rule of a substantially different, or divergent, system of
+institutions, will be exposed to a course of workday discipline running
+to a different, perhaps divergent, effect; and that this other community
+will accordingly come in for a characteristically different discipline
+and fall under the rule of a different commonsense outlook. Where an
+institutional difference of this kind is somewhat large and consistent,
+so as to amount in effect to a discrepancy, as may fairly be said of the
+difference between Imperial Germany and its like on the one hand, and
+the English-speaking nations on the other hand, there the difference in
+everyday conceptions may readily make the two peoples mutually
+unintelligible to one another, on those points of institutional
+principle that are involved in the discrepancy. This is the state of the
+case as between the German people, including the Intellectuals, and the
+peoples against whom their preconceptions of national destiny have
+arrayed them. And the many vivid expressions of consternation,
+abhorrence and incredulity that have come out of this community of
+Intellectuals in the course of the past two years of trial and error,
+bear sufficient testimony to the rigorous constraint which these German
+preconceptions and their logic exercise over the Intellectuals, no less
+than over the populace.
+
+Conversely, of course, it is nearly as impracticable for those who have
+grown up under the discipline of democratic institutions to comprehend
+the habitual outlook of the commonplace German patriot on national
+interests and aims; not quite, perhaps, because the discipline of use
+and wont and indoctrination is neither so rigorous nor so consistent in
+their case. But there is, after all, prevalent among them a sufficiently
+evident logical inability to understand and appreciate the paramount
+need of national, that is to say dynastic, ascendancy that actuates all
+German patriots; just as these same patriots are similarly unable to
+consider national interests in any other light than that of dynastic
+ascendancy.
+
+Going simply on the face value of the available evidence, any outsider
+might easily fall into the error of believing that when the great
+adventure of the war opened up before them, as well as when presently
+the shock of baffled endeavour brought home its exasperating futility,
+the Intellectuals of the Fatherland distinguished themselves above all
+other classes and conditions of men in the exuberance of their patriotic
+abandon. Such a view would doubtless be almost wholly erroneous. It is
+not that the Intellectuals reached a substantially superior pitch of
+exaltation, but only that, being trained in the use of language, they
+were able to express their emotions with great facility. There seems no
+reason to believe that the populace fell short of the same measure in
+respect of their prevalent frame of mind.
+
+To return to the workings of the Imperial dynastic State and the forces
+engaged. It plainly appears that the Intellectuals are to be counted as
+supernumeraries, except so far as they serve as an instrument of
+publicity and indoctrination in the hands of the discretionary
+authorities. The working factors in the case are the dynastic
+organisation of control, direction and emolument, and the populace at
+large by use of whose substance the traffic in dynastic ascendancy and
+emolument is carried on. These two are in fairly good accord, on the
+ancient basis of feudal loyalty. Hitherto there is no evident ground for
+believing that this archaic tie that binds the populace to the dynastic
+ambitions has at all perceptibly weakened. And the possibility of
+dynastic Germany living at peace with the world under any compact,
+therefore translates itself into the possibility of the German people's
+unlearning its habitual deference and loyalty to the dynasty.
+
+As its acquirement has been a work of protracted habituation, so can its
+obsolescence also come about only through more or less protracted
+habituation under a system of use and wont of a different or divergent
+order. The elements of such a systematic discipline running to an effect
+at cross purposes with this patriotic animus are not absent from the
+current situation in the Fatherland; the discipline of the modern
+industrial system, for instance, runs to such a divergent effect; but
+this, and other conceivable forces which may reenforce it, will after
+all take time, if they are to work a decisive change in the current
+frame of mind of the patriotic German community. During the interval
+required for such a change in the national temper, the peace of the
+world would be conditioned on the inability of the dynastic State to
+break it. So that the chances of success for any neutral peace league
+will vary inversely as the available force of Imperial Germany, and it
+could be accounted secure only in the virtual elimination of the
+Imperial State as a national Power.
+
+If the gradual obsolescence of the spirit of militant loyalty in the
+German people, through disuse under a régime of peace, industry, self
+government and free trade, is to be the agency by force of which
+dynastic imperialism is to cease, the chance of a neutral peace will
+depend on the thoroughness with which such a régime of self-direction
+can be installed in this case, and on the space of time required for
+such obsolescence through disuse. Obviously, the installation of a
+workable régime of self-government on peaceable lines would in any case
+be a matter of great difficulty among a people whose past experience has
+so singularly incapacitated them for self-government; and obviously,
+too, the interval of time required to reach secure ground along this
+line of approach would be very considerable. Also, in view of these
+conditions, obviously, this scheme for maintaining the peace of nations
+by a compact of neutrals based on a compromise with an aspiring dynastic
+State resolves itself into the second of the two alternatives spoken of
+at the outset, viz., a neutral peace based on the elimination of Germany
+as a war power, together with the elimination of any materials suitable
+for the formation of a formidable coalition. And then, with Imperial
+Germany supposedly eliminated or pacified, there would still remain the
+Japanese establishment, to which all the arguments pertinent in the case
+of Germany will apply without abatement; except that, at least hitherto,
+the dynastic statesmen of Japan have not had the disposal of so massive
+a body of resources, in population, industry, or raw materials.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+PEACE WITHOUT HONOUR
+
+
+The argument therefore turns back to a choice between the two
+alternatives alluded to: peace in submission to the rule of the German
+dynastic establishment (and to Japan), or peace through elimination of
+these enterprising Powers. The former alternative, no doubt, is
+sufficiently unattractive, but it is not therefore to be put aside
+without a hearing. As goes without saying, it is repugnant to the
+patriotic sentiments of those peoples whom the Imperial German
+establishment have elected for submission. But if this unreflecting
+patriotic revulsion can once be made amenable to reason, there is always
+something to be said in favor of such a plan of peaceable submission, or
+at least in extenuation of it; and if it is kept in mind that the
+ulterior necessity of such submission must always remain in perspective
+as a condition precedent to a peaceful settlement, so long as one or
+both of these enterprising Powers remains intact, it will be seen that a
+sane appraisal of the merits of such a régime of peace is by no means
+uncalled for. For neither of these two Powers is there a conclusive
+issue of endeavour short of paramount dominion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There should also be some gain of insight and sobriety in recalling that
+the Intellectuals of the Fatherland, who have doubtless pondered this
+matter longer and more dispassionately than all other men, have spoken
+very highly of the merits of such a plan of universal submission to the
+rule of this German dynastic establishment. They had, no doubt, been
+considering the question both long and earnestly, as to what would, in
+the light of reason, eventually be to the best interest of those peoples
+whose manifest destiny was eventual tutelage under the Imperial crown;
+and there need also be no doubt that in that time (two years past) they
+therefore spoke advisedly and out of the fulness of the heart on this
+head. The pronouncements that came out of the community of Intellectuals
+in that season of unembarrassed elation and artless avowal are doubtless
+to be taken as an outcome of much thoughtful canvassing of what had best
+be done, not as an enforced compromise with untoward necessities but as
+the salutary course freely to be pursued with an eye single to the best
+good of all concerned.
+
+It is true, the captious have been led to speak slightingly of the many
+utterances of this tenure coming out of the community of Intellectuals,
+as, e.g., the lay sermons of Professor Ostwald dating back to that
+season; but no unprejudiced reader can well escape the persuasion that
+these, as well as the very considerable volume of similar pronouncements
+by many other men of eminent scholarship and notable for benevolent
+sentiments, are faithfully to be accepted as the expressions of a
+profound conviction and a consciously generous spirit. In so speaking of
+the advantages to be derived by any subject people from submission to
+the German Imperial rule, these Intellectuals are not to be construed as
+formulating the drift of vulgar patriotic sentiment among their
+compatriots at large, but rather as giving out the deliverances of their
+own more sensitive spirit and maturer deliberation, as men who are in a
+position to see human affairs and interests in a larger perspective.
+Such, no doubt, would be their own sense of the matter.
+
+Reflection on the analogous case of the tutelage exercised by the
+American government over the subject Philippinos may contribute to a
+just and temperate view of what is intended in the régime of tutelage
+and submission so spoken for by the German Intellectuals,--and, it may
+be added, found good by the Imperial statesmen. There would, of course,
+be the difference, as against the case of the Philippinos, that whereas
+the American government is after all answerable, in the last resort and
+in a somewhat random fashion, to a popular opinion that runs on
+democratic preconceptions, the German Imperial establishment on the
+other hand is answerable to no one, except it be to God, who is
+conceived to stand in somewhat the relation of a silent partner, or a
+minority stockholder in this dynastic enterprise.
+
+Yet it should not be overlooked that any presumptive hard usage which
+the vassal peoples might look for at the hands of the German dynasty
+would necessarily be tempered with considerations of expediency as
+dictated by the exigencies of usufruct. The Imperial establishment has
+shown itself to be wise, indeed more wise than amiable, but wise at
+least in its intentions, in the use which it has made of subject peoples
+hitherto. It is true, a somewhat accentuated eagerness on the part of
+the Imperial establishment to get the maximum service in a minimum of
+time and at a minimum cost from these subject populations,--as, e.g., in
+Silesia and Poland, in Schleswig-Holstein, in Alsace-Lorraine, or in its
+African and Oceanic possessions,--has at times led to practices
+altogether dubious on humanitarian grounds, at the same time that in
+point of thrifty management they have gone beyond "what the traffic will
+bear." Yet it is not to be overlooked--and in this connection it is a
+point of some weight--that, so far as the predatory traditions of its
+statecraft will permit, the Imperial establishment has in all these
+matters been guided by a singularly unreserved attention to its own
+material advantage. Where its management in these premises has yielded a
+less profitable usufruct than the circumstances would reasonably admit,
+the failure has been due to an excess of cupidity rather than the
+reverse.
+
+The circumstantial evidence converges to the effect that the Imperial
+establishment may confidently be counted on to manage the affairs of its
+subject peoples with an eye single to its own material gain, and it may
+with equal confidence be counted on that in the long run no unadvised
+excesses will be practised. Of course, an excessive adventure in
+atrocity and predation, due to such human infirmity in its agents or in
+its directorate as has been shown in various recent episodes, is to be
+looked for now and again; but these phenomena would come in by way of
+fluctuating variations from the authentic routine, rather than as
+systematic features of it.
+
+That superfluity of naughtiness that has given character to the current
+German Imperial policy in Belgium, e.g., or that similarly has
+characterised the dealings of Imperial Japan in Korea during the late
+"benevolent assimilation" of that people into Japanese-Imperial
+usufruct, is not fairly to be taken to indicate what such an Imperial
+establishment may be expected to do with a subject people on a footing
+of settled and long-term exploitation. At the outset, in both instances,
+the policy of frightfulness was dictated by a well-advised view to
+economy of effort in reducing the subject people to an abject state of
+intimidation, according to the art of war as set forth in the manuals;
+whereas latterly the somewhat profligate excesses of the government of
+occupation--decently covered with diplomatic parables on benevolence and
+legality--have been dictated by military convenience, particularly by
+the need of forced labor and the desirability of a reduced population in
+the acquired territory. So also the "personally conducted" dealings with
+the Armenians by use of the Turks should probably also best be explained
+as an endeavour to reduce the numbers of an undesirable population
+beforehand, without incurring unnecessary blame. All these things are,
+at the most, misleading indications of what the Imperial policy would be
+like under settled conditions and in the absence of insubordination.
+
+By way of contrast, such as may serve to bring the specific traits of
+this prospective Imperial tutelage of nations into a better light, the
+Ottoman usufruct of the peoples of the Turkish dominions offers an
+instructive instance. The Ottoman tutelage is today spoken of by its
+apologists in terms substantially identical with the sketches of the
+future presented by hopeful German patriots in the early months of the
+current war. But as is so frequently the case in such circumstances,
+these expressions of the officers have to be understood in a diplomatic
+sense; not as touching the facts in any other than a formal way. It is
+sufficiently evident that the Ottoman management of its usufruct has
+throughout been ill-advised enough persistently to charge more than the
+traffic would bear, probably due in great part to lack of control over
+its agents or ramifications, by the central office. The Ottoman
+establishment has not observed, or enforced, the plain rules of economy
+in its utilisation of the subject peoples, and finds itself today
+bankrupt in consequence. What may afford more of a parallel to the
+prospective German tutelage of the nations is the procedure of the
+Japanese establishment in Korea, Manchuria, or China; which is also duly
+covered with an ostensibly decent screen of diplomatic parables, but the
+nature and purpose of which is overt enough in all respects but the
+nomenclature. It is not unlikely that even this Japanese usufruct and
+tutelage runs on somewhat less humane and complaisant lines than a
+well-advised economy of resources would dictate for the prospective
+German usufruct of the Western nations.
+
+There is the essential difference between the two cases that while Japan
+is over-populated, so that it becomes the part of a wise government to
+find additional lands for occupancy, and that so it is constrained by its
+imperial ambitions to displace much of the population in its subject
+territories, the Fatherland on the other hand is under-populated--
+notoriously, though not according to the letter of the diplomatic
+parables on this head--and for the calculable future must continue to be
+under-populated; provided that the state of the industrial arts
+continues subject to change in the same general direction as hitherto,
+and provided that no radical change affects the German birth-rate. So,
+since the Imperial government has no need of new lands for occupancy by
+its home population, it will presumably be under no inducement to take
+measures looking to the partial depopulation of its subject territories.
+
+The case of Belgium and the measures looking to a reduction of its
+population may raise a doubt, but probably not a well taken doubt. It is
+rather that since it has become evident that the territory can not be
+held, it is thought desirable to enrich the Fatherland with whatever
+property can be removed, and to consume the accumulated man-power of the
+Belgian people in the service of the war. It would appear that it is a
+war-measure, designed to make use of the enemy's resources for his
+defeat. Indeed, under conditions of settled occupation or subjection,
+any degree of such depopulation would entail an economic loss, and any
+well-considered administrative policy would therefore look to the
+maintenance of the inhabitants of the acquired territories in
+undiminished numbers and unimpaired serviceability.
+
+The resulting scheme of Imperial usufruct should accordingly be of a
+considerate, not to say in effect humane, character,--always provided
+that the requisite degree of submission and subservience ("law and
+order") can be enforced by a system of coercion so humane as not to
+reduce the number of the inhabitants or materially to lower their
+physical powers. Such would, by reasonable expectation, be the character
+of this projected Imperial tutelage and usufruct of the nations of
+Christendom. In its working-out this German project should accordingly
+differ very appreciably from the policy which its imperial ambitions
+have constrained the Japanese establishment to pursue in its dealings
+with the life and fortunes of its recently, and currently, acquired
+subject peoples.
+
+The better to appreciate in some concrete fashion what should, by
+reasonable expectation, be the terms on which life might so be carried
+on _sub pace germanica_, attention may be invited to certain typical
+instances of such peace by abnegation among contemporary peoples.
+Perhaps at the top of the list stands India, with its many and varied
+native peoples, subject to British tutelage, but, the British apologists
+say, not subject to British usufruct. The margin of tolerance in this
+instance is fairly wide, but its limits are sharply drawn. India is
+wanted and held, not for tribute or revenue to be paid into the Imperial
+treasury, nor even for exclusive trade privileges or preferences, but
+mainly as a preserve to provide official occupation and emoluments for
+British gentlemen not otherwise occupied or provided for; and
+secondarily as a means of safeguarding lucrative British investments,
+that is to say, investments by British capitalists of high and low
+degree. The current British professions on the subject of this
+occupation of India, and at times the shamefaced apology for it, is that
+the people of India suffer no hardship by this means; the resulting
+governmental establishment being no more onerous and no more expensive
+to them than any equally, or even any less, competent government of
+their own would necessarily be. The fact, however, remains, that India
+affords a much needed and very considerable net revenue to the class of
+British gentlemen, in the shape of official salaries and pensions, which
+the British gentry at large can on no account forego. Narrowed to these
+proportions it is readily conceivable that the British usufruct of India
+should rest with no extraordinary weight on the Indian people at large,
+however burdensome it may at times become to those classes who aspire to
+take over the usufruct in case the British establishment can be
+dislodged. This case evidently differs very appreciably from the
+projected German usufruct of neighboring countries in Europe.
+
+A case that may be more nearly in point would be that of any one of the
+countries subject to the Turkish rule in recent times; although these
+instances scarcely show just what to expect under the projected German
+régime. The Turkish rule has been notably inefficient, considered as a
+working system of dynastic usufruct; whereas it is confidently expected
+that the corresponding German system would show quite an exceptional
+degree of efficiency for the purpose. This Turkish inefficiency has had
+a two-fold effect, which should not appear in the German case. Through
+administrative abuses intended to serve the personal advantage of the
+irresponsible officials, the underlying peoples have suffered a
+progressive exhaustion and dilapidation; whereby the central authority,
+the dynastic establishment, has also grown progressively, cumulatively
+weaker and therefore less able to control its agents; and, in the second
+place, on the same grounds, in the pursuit of personal gain, and
+prompted by personal animosities, these irresponsible agents have
+persistently carried their measures of extortion beyond reasonable
+bounds,--that is to say beyond the bounds which a well considered plan
+of permanent usufruct would countenance. All this would be otherwise and
+more sensibly arranged under German Imperial auspices.
+
+One of the nations that have fallen under Turkish rule--and Turkish
+peace--affords a valuable illustration of a secondary point that is to
+be considered in connection with any plan of peace by submission. The
+Armenian people have in later time come partly under Russian dominion,
+and so have been exposed to the Russian system of bureaucratic
+exploitation; and the difference between Russian and Turkish Armenia is
+instructive. According to all credible--that is unofficial--accounts,
+conditions are perceptibly more tolerable in Russian Armenia. Well
+informed persons relate that the cause for this more lenient, or less
+extreme, administration of affairs under Russian officials is a
+selective death rate among them, such that a local official who
+persistently exceeds a certain ill-defined limit of tolerance is removed
+by what would under other circumstances be called an untimely death. No
+adequate remedy has been found, within the large limits which Russian
+bureaucratic administration habitually allows itself in questions of
+coercion. The Turk, on the other hand, less deterred by considerations
+of long-term expediency, and, it may be, less easily influenced by
+outside opinion on any point of humanity, has found a remedy in the
+systematic extirpation of any village in which an illicit death occurs.
+One will incline to presume that on this head the German Imperial
+procedure would be more after the Russian than after the Turkish
+pattern; although latterday circumstantial evidence will throw some
+sinister doubt on the reasonableness of such an expectation.
+
+It is plain, however, that the Turkish remedy for this form of
+insubordination is a wasteful means of keeping the peace. Plainly, to
+the home office, the High Command, the extinction of a village with its
+population is a more substantial loss than the unseasonable decease of
+one of its administrative agents; particularly when it is called to mind
+that such a decease will presumably follow only on such profligate
+excesses of naughtiness as are bound to be inexcusably unprofitable to
+the central authority. It may be left an open question how far a
+corrective of this nature can hopefully be looked to as applicable, in
+case of need, under the projected German Imperial usufruct.
+
+It may, I apprehend, be said without offense that there is no depth of
+depravity below the ordinary reach of the Russian bureaucracy; but this
+organisation finds itself constrained, after all, to use circumspection
+and set some limits on individual excursions beyond the bounds of
+decency and humanity, so soon as these excesses touch the common or
+joint interest of the organisation. Any excess of atrocity, beyond a
+certain margin of tolerance, on the part of any one of its members is
+likely to work pecuniary mischief to the rest; and then, the
+bureaucratic conduct of affairs is also, after all, in an uncertain
+degree subject to some surveillance by popular sentiment at home or
+abroad. The like appears not to hold true of the Turkish official
+organisation. The difference may be due to a less provident spirit among
+the latter, as already indicated. But a different tradition, perhaps an
+outgrowth of this lack of providence and of the consequent growth of a
+policy of "frightfulness," may also come in for a share in the outcome;
+and there is also a characteristic difference in point of religious
+convictions, which may go some way in the same direction. The followers
+of Islam appear on the whole to take the tenets of their faith at their
+face value--servile, intolerant and fanatic--whereas the Russian
+official class may perhaps without undue reproach be considered to have
+on the whole outlived the superstitious conceits to which they yield an
+expedient _pro forma_ observance. So that when worse comes to worst, and
+the Turk finds himself at length with his back against the last
+consolations of the faith that makes all things straight, he has the
+assured knowledge that he is in the right as against the unbelievers;
+whereas the Russian bureaucrat in a like case only knows that he is in
+the wrong. The last extremity is a less conclusive argument to the man
+in whose apprehension it is not the last extremity. Again, there is some
+shadow of doubt falls on the question as to which of these is more
+nearly in the German Imperial spirit.
+
+On the whole, the case of China is more to the point. By and large, the
+people of China, more particularly the people of the coastal-plains
+region, have for long habitually lived under a régime of peace by
+non-resistance. The peace has been broken transiently from time to time,
+and local disturbances have not been infrequent; but, taken by and
+large, the situation has habitually been of the peaceful order, on a
+ground of non-resisting submission. But this submission has not commonly
+been of a whole-hearted kind, and it has also commonly been associated
+with a degree of persistent sabotage; which has clogged and retarded the
+administration of governmental law and order, and has also been
+conducive to a large measure of irresponsible official corruption. The
+habitual scheme of things Chinese in this bearing may fairly be
+described as a peace of non-resistance tempered with sabotage and
+assassination. Such was the late Manchu régime, and there is no reason
+in China for expecting a substantially different outcome from the
+Japanese invasion that is now under way. The nature of this Japanese
+incursion should be sufficiently plain. It is an enterprise in
+statecraft after the order of Macchiavelli, Metternich, and Bismarck. Of
+course, the conciliatory fables given out by the diplomatic service, and
+by the other apologists, are to be taken at the normal discount of
+one-hundred percent. The relatively large current output of such fables
+may afford a hint as to the magnitude of the designs which the fables
+are intended to cover.
+
+The Chinese people have had a more extended experience in peace of this
+order than all others, and their case should accordingly be instructive
+beyond all others. Not that a European peace by non-resistance need be
+expected to run very closely on the Chinese lines, but there should be
+a reasonable expectation that the large course of things would be
+somewhat on the same order in both cases. Neither the European
+traditions and habitual temperament nor the modern state of the
+industrial arts will permit one to look for anything like a close
+parallel in detail; but it remains true, when all is said, that the
+Chinese experience of peace under submission to alien masters affords
+the most instructive illustration of such a régime, as touches its
+practicability, its methods, its cultural value, and its effect on the
+fortunes of the subject peoples and of their masters.
+
+Now, it may be said by way of preliminary generalisation that the
+life-history of the Chinese people and their culture is altogether the
+most imposing achievement which the records of mankind have to show;
+whereas the history of their successive alien establishments of mastery
+and usufruct is an unbroken sequence of incredibly shameful
+episodes,--always beginning in unbounded power and vainglory, running by
+way of misrule, waste and debauchery, to an inglorious finish in abject
+corruption and imbecility. Always have the gains in civilisation,
+industry and in the arts, been made by the subject Chinese, and always
+have their alien masters contributed nothing to the outcome but misrule,
+waste, corruption and decay. And yet in the long run, with all this
+handicap and misrule, the Chinese people have held their place and made
+headway in those things to which men look with affection and esteem when
+they come to take stock of what things are worth while. It would be a
+hopeless task to count up how many dynasties of masterful barbarians,
+here and there, have meanwhile come up and played their ephemeral role
+of vainglorious nuisance and gone under in shame and confusion, and
+dismissed with the invariable verdict of "Good Riddance!"
+
+It may at first sight seem a singular conjuncture of circumstances, but
+it is doubtless a consequence of the same conjuncture, that the Chinese
+people have also kept their hold through all history on the Chinese
+lands. They have lived and multiplied and continued to occupy the land,
+while their successive alien masters have come and gone. So that today,
+as the outcome of conquest, and of what would be rated as defeat, the
+people continue to be Chinese, with an unbroken pedigree as well as an
+unbroken line of home-bred culture running through all the ages of
+history. In the biological respect the Chinese plan of non-resistance
+has proved eminently successful.
+
+And, by the way, much the same, though not in the same degree, is true
+for the Armenian people; who have continued to hold their hill country
+through good days and evil, apparently without serious or enduring
+reduction of their numbers and without visible lapse into barbarism,
+while the successive disconnected dynasties of their conquering rulers
+have come and gone, leaving nothing but an ill name. "This fable
+teaches" that a diligent attention to the growing of crops and children
+is the sure and appointed way to the maintenance of a people and its
+culture even under the most adverse conditions, and that eventual death
+and shameful destruction inexorably wait on any "ruling race." Hitherto
+the rule has not failed. The rule, indeed, is grounded in the heritable
+traits of human nature, from which there is no escape.
+
+For its long-term biological success, as well as for the continued
+integrity of a people's culture, a peace of non-resistance, under good
+or evil auspices, is more to be desired than imperial dominion. But
+these things are not all that modern peoples live for, perhaps it is
+safe to say that in no case are these chief among the things for which
+civilised Europeans are willing to live. They urgently need also freedom
+to live their own life in their own way, or rather to live within the
+bonds of convention which they have come in for by use and wont, or at
+least they believe that such freedom is essential to any life that shall
+be quite worth while. So also they have a felt need of security from
+arbitrary interference in their pursuit of a livelihood and in the free
+control of their own pecuniary concerns. And they want a discretionary
+voice in the management of their joint interests, whether as a nation or
+in a minor civil group. In short, they want personal, pecuniary and
+political liberty, free from all direction or inhibition from without.
+They are also much concerned to maintain favorable economic conditions
+for themselves and their children. And last, but chiefly rather than
+least, they commonly are hide-bound patriots inspired with an
+intractable felt need of national prestige.
+
+It is an assemblage of peoples in such a frame of mind to whom the
+pacifists are proposing, in effect, a plan for eventual submission to an
+alien dynasty, under the form of a neutral peace compact to include the
+warlike Powers. There is little likelihood of such a scheme being found
+acceptable, with popular sentiment running as it now does in the
+countries concerned. And yet, if the brittle temper in which any such
+proposal is rejected by popular opinion in these countries today could
+be made to yield sufficiently to reflection and deliberate appraisal, it
+is by no means a foregone conclusion that its acceptance would not be
+the best way out of a critical situation. The cost of disabling and
+eliminating the warlike Power whose dominion is feared, or even of
+staving off the day of surrender, is evidently serious enough. The
+merits of the alternative should be open to argument, and should,
+indeed, be allowed due consideration. And any endeavour to present them
+without heat should presumably find a hearing. It appears to have been
+much of the fault of the pacifists who speak for the Peace League that
+they have failed or refused to recognise these ulterior consequences of
+the plan which they advocate; so that they appear either not to know
+what they are talking about, or to avoid talking about what they know.
+
+It will be evident from beforehand that the grave difficulty to be met
+in any advocacy of peace on terms of non-resistant subjection to an
+alien dynastic rule--"peace at any price"--is a difficulty of the
+psychological order. Whatever may be conceived to hold true for the
+Chinese people, such submission is repugnant to the sentiments of the
+Western peoples. Which in turn evidently is due to the prevalence of
+certain habitual preconceptions among modern civilised men,--certain
+acquired traits of temper and bias, of the nature of fixed ideas. That
+something in the way of a reasonably contented and useful life is
+possible under such a régime as is held in prospect, and even some
+tolerable degree of well-being, is made evident in the Chinese case. But
+the Chinese tolerance of such a régime goes to argue that they are
+charged with fewer preconceptions at variance with the exigencies of
+life under these conditions. So, it is commonly accepted, and presumably
+to be accepted, that the Chinese people at large have little if any
+effectual sense of nationality; their patriotism appears to be nearly a
+negligible quantity. This would appear to an outsider to have been their
+besetting weakness, to which their successful subjection by various and
+sundry ambitious aliens has been due. But it appears also to have been
+the infirmity by grace of which this people have been obliged to learn
+the ways of submission, and so have had the fortune to outlive their
+alien masters, all and sundry, and to occupy the land and save the
+uncontaminated integrity of their long-lived civilisation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some account of the nature and uses of this spirit of patriotism that is
+held of so great account among Western nations has already been set out
+in an earlier passage. One or two points in the case, that bear on the
+argument here, may profitably be recalled. The patriotic spirit, or the
+tie of nationalism, is evidently of the nature of habit, whatever
+proclivity to the formation of such a habit may be native to mankind.
+More particularly is it a matter of habit--it might even be called a
+matter of fortuitous habit--what particular national establishment a
+given human subject will become attached to on reaching what is called
+"years of discretion" and so becoming a patriotic citizen.
+
+The analogy of the clam may not be convincing, but it may at least serve
+to suggest what may be the share played by habituation in the matter of
+national attachment. The young clam, after having passed the
+free-swimming phase of his life, as well as the period of attachment to
+the person of a carp or similar fish, drops to the bottom and attaches
+himself loosely in the place and station in life to which he has been
+led; and he loyally sticks to his particular patch of ooze and sand
+through good fortune and evil. It is, under Providence, something of a
+fortuitous matter where the given clam shall find a resting place for
+the sole of his foot, but it is also, after all, "his own, his native
+land" etc. It lies in the nature of a clam to attach himself after this
+fashion, loosely, to the bottom where he finds a living, and he would
+not be a "good clam and true" if he failed to do so; but the particular
+spot for which he forms this attachment is not of the essence of the
+case. At least, so they say.
+
+It may be, as good men appear to believe or know, that all men of sound,
+or at least those of average, mind will necessarily be of a patriotic
+temper and be attached by ties of loyalty to some particular national
+establishment, ordinarily the particular establishment which is formally
+identified with the land in which they live; although it is always
+possible that a given individual may be an alien in the land, and so may
+owe allegiance to and be ruled by a patriotic attachment to another
+national establishment, to which the conventionalities governing his
+special case have assigned him as his own proper nation. The analogy of
+the clam evidently does not cover the case. The patriotic citizen is
+attached to his own proper nationality not altogether by the accident of
+domicile, but rather by the conventions, legal or customary, which
+assign him to this or that national establishment according to certain
+principles of use and wont.
+
+Mere legal citizenship or allegiance does not decide the matter either;
+at least not by any means unavoidably; as appears in the case of the
+Chinese subject under Manchu or Japanese rule; and as appears perhaps
+more perspicuously in the case of the "hyphenate" American citizen,
+whose formal allegiance is to the nation in whose land he prefers to
+live, all the while that his patriotic affection centers on his
+spiritual Fatherland in whose fortunes he has none but a non-resident
+interest. Indeed, the particular national tie that will bind the
+affections--that is to say the effectual patriotic attachment--of any
+given individual may turn out on closer scrutiny to be neither that of
+domicile or of formal legal allegiance, nor that of putative origin or
+pedigree, but only a reflex of certain national animosities; which may
+also turn out on examination to rest on putative grounds--as illustrated
+by a subsidiary class of hyphenate American citizens whose affections
+have come to be bound up in the national fortunes of one foreign Power
+for the simple, but sufficient, reason that, on conventional grounds,
+they bear malice against another equally foreign Power.
+
+Evidently there is much sophistication, not to say conventionalised
+affectation, in all this national attachment and allegiance. It will
+perhaps not do to say that it is altogether a matter of sophistication.
+Yet it may not exceed the premises to say that the particular choice,
+the concrete incidence, of this national attachment is in any given case
+a matter of sophistication, largely tempered with fortuity. One is born
+into a given nationality--or, in case of dynastic allegiance, into
+service and devotion to a (fortuitously) given sovereign--or at least so
+it is commonly believed. Still one can without blame, and without
+excessive shame, shift one's allegiance on occasion. What is not
+countenanced among civilised men is to shift out of allegiance to any
+given nationality or dynasty without shifting into the like complication
+of gainless obligations somewhere else. Such a shifting of national or
+dynastic base is not quite reputable, though it is also not precisely
+disreputable. The difficulty in the case appears to be a moral
+difficulty, not a mental or a pecuniary one, and assuredly not a
+physical difficulty, since the relation in question is not a physical
+relation. It would appear to be of the moral order of things, in that
+sense of the term in which conventional proprieties are spoken of as
+moral. That is to say, it is a question of conforming to current
+expectations under a code of conventional proprieties. Like much of the
+conventional code of behavior this patriotic attachment has the benefit
+of standardised decorum, and its outward manifestations are enjoined by
+law. All of which goes to show how very seriously the whole matter is
+regarded.
+
+And yet it is also a matter of common notoriety that large aggregates of
+men, not to speak of sporadic individuals, will on occasion shift their
+allegiance with the most felicitous effect and with no sensible loss of
+self-respect or of their good name. Such a shift is to be seen in
+multiple in the German nation within the past half-century, when, for
+instance, the Hanoverians, the Saxons, and even the Holsteiners in very
+appreciable numbers, not to mention the subjects of minuscular
+principalities whose names have been forgotten in the shuffle, all
+became good and loyal subjects of the Empire and of the Imperial
+dynasty,--good and loyal without reservation, as has abundantly
+appeared. So likewise within a similar period the inhabitants of the
+Southern States repudiated their allegiance to the Union, putting in its
+place an equivalent loyalty to their new-made country; and then, when
+the new national establishment slipped out from under their feet they
+returned as whole-heartedly as need be to their earlier allegiance. In
+each of these moves, taken with deliberation, it is not to be doubted
+that this body of citizens have been moved by an unimpeachable spirit of
+patriotic honour. No one who is in any degree conversant with the facts
+is likely to question the declaration that it would be a perversion, not
+to say an inversion, of fact to rate their patriotic devotion to the
+Union today lower than that of any other section of the country or any
+other class or condition of men.
+
+But there is more, and in a sense worse, to be found along the same
+general line of evidence touching this sublimated sentiment of group
+solidarity that is called nationalism. The nation, of course, is large;
+the larger the better, it is believed. It is so large, indeed, that
+considered as a group or community of men living together it has no
+sensible degree of homogeneity in any of their material circumstances or
+interests; nor is anything more than an inconsiderable fraction of the
+aggregate population, territory, industry, or daily life known to any
+one of these patriotic citizens except by remote and highly dubious
+hearsay. The one secure point on which there is a (constructive)
+uniformity is the matter of national allegiance; which grows stronger
+and more confident with every increase in aggregate mass and volume. It
+is also not doubtful, e.g., that if the people of the British Dominions
+in North America should choose to throw in their national lot with the
+Union, all sections and classes, except those whose pecuniary interest
+in a protective tariff might be conceived to suffer, would presently
+welcome them; nor is it doubtful that American nationality would cover
+the new and larger aggregate as readily as the old. Much the same will
+hold true with respect to the other countries colonised under British
+auspices. And there is no conclusive reason for drawing the limit of
+admissible national extension at that point.
+
+So much, however, is fairly within the possibilities of the calculable
+future; its realisation would turn in great measure on the
+discontinuance of certain outworn or disserviceable institutional
+arrangements; as, e.g., the remnants of a decayed monarchy, and the
+legally protected vested interests of certain business enterprises and
+of certain office-holding classes. What more and farther might
+practicably be undertaken in this way, in the absence of marplot
+office-holders, office-seekers, sovereigns, priests and monopolistic
+business concerns sheltered under national animosities and restraints of
+trade, would be something not easy to assign a limit to. All the minor
+neutrals, that cluster about the North Sea, could unquestionably be
+drawn into such a composite nationality, in the absence, or with due
+disregard, of those classes, families and individuals whose pecuniary or
+invidious gain is dependent on or furthered by the existing division of
+these peoples.
+
+The projected defensive league of neutrals is, in effect, an inchoate
+coalescence of the kind. Its purpose is the safeguarding of the common
+peace and freedom, which is also the avowed purpose and justification of
+all those modern nations that have outlived the régime of dynastic
+ambition and so of enterprise in dominion for dominion's sake, and have
+passed into the neutral phase of nationality; or it should perhaps
+rather be said that such is the end of endeavour and the warrant of
+existence and power for these modern national establishments in so far
+as they have outlived and repudiated such ambitions of a dynastic or a
+quasi-dynastic order, and so have taken their place as intrinsically
+neutral commonwealths.
+
+It is only in the common defense (or in the defense of the like
+conditions of life for their fellowmen elsewhere) that the citizens of
+such a commonwealth can without shame entertain or put in evidence a
+spirit of patriotic solidarity; and it is only by specious and
+sophistical appeal to the national honour--a conceit surviving out of
+the dynastic past--that the populace of such a commonwealth can be
+stirred to anything beyond a defense of their own proper liberties or
+the liberties of like-minded men elsewhere, in so far as they are not
+still imbued with something of the dynastic animus and the chauvinistic
+animosities which they have formally repudiated in repudiating the
+feudalistic principles of the dynastic State.
+
+The "nation," without the bond of dynastic loyalty, is after all a
+make-shift idea, an episodic half-way station in the sequence, and
+loyalty, in any proper sense, to the nation as such is so much of a
+make-believe, that in the absence of a common defense to be safeguarded
+any such patriotic conceit must lose popular assurance and, with the
+passing of generations, fall insensibly into abeyance as an archaic
+affectation. The pressure of danger from without is necessary to keep
+the national spirit alert and stubborn, in case the pressure from
+within, that comes of dynastic usufruct working for dominion, has been
+withdrawn. With further extension of the national boundaries, such that
+the danger of gratuitous infraction from without grows constantly less
+menacing, while the traditional régime of international animosities
+falls more and more remotely into the background, the spirit of
+nationalism is fairly on the way to obsolescence through disuse. In
+other words, the nation, as a commonwealth, being a partisan
+organisation for a defensive purpose, becomes _functa officio_ in
+respect of its nationalism and its patriotic ties in somewhat the same
+measure as the national coalition grows to such a size that partisanship
+is displaced by a cosmopolitan security.
+
+Doubtless the falling into abeyance through disuse of so pleasing a
+virtue as patriotic devotion will seem an impossibly distasteful
+consummation; and about tastes there is no disputing, but tastes are
+mainly creations of habit. Except for the disquieting name of the thing,
+there is today little stands in the way of a cosmopolitan order of
+human intercourse unobtrusively displacing national allegiance; except
+for vested interests in national offices and international
+discriminations, and except for those peoples among whom national life
+still is sufficiently bound up with dynastic ambition.
+
+In an earlier passage the patriotic spirit has been defined as a sense
+of partisan solidarity in point of prestige, and sufficient argument has
+been spent in confirming the definition and showing its implications.
+With the passing of all occasion for a partisan spirit as touches the
+common good, through coalescence of the parts between which partisan
+discrepancies have hitherto been kept up, there would also have passed
+all legitimate occasion for or provocation to an intoxication of
+invidious prestige on national lines,--and there is no prestige that is
+not of an invidious nature, that being, indeed, the whole of its nature.
+He would have to be a person of praeternatural patriotic sensibilities
+who could fall into an emotional state by reason of the national
+prestige of such a coalition commonwealth as would be made up, e.g., of
+the French and English-speaking peoples, together with those other
+neutrally and peaceably inclined European communities that are of a
+sufficiently mature order to have abjured dynastic ambitions of
+dominion, and perhaps including the Chinese people as well. Such a
+coalition may now fairly be said to be within speaking distance, and
+with its consummation, even in the inchoate shape of a defensive league
+of neutrals, the eventual abeyance of that national allegiance and
+national honour that bulks so large in the repertory of current
+eloquence would also come in prospect.
+
+All this is by no means saying that love of country, and of use and wont
+as it runs in one's home area and among one's own people, would suffer
+decay, or even abatement. The provocation to nostalgia would presumably
+be as good as ever. It is even conceivable that under such a
+(contemplated) régime of unconditional security, attachment to one's own
+habitat and social circumstances might grow to something more than is
+commonly seen in the precarious situation in which the chances of a
+quiet life are placed today. But nostalgia is not a bellicose distemper,
+nor does it make for gratuitous disturbance of peaceable alien peoples;
+neither is it the spirit in which men lend themselves to warlike
+enterprise looking to profitless dominion abroad. Men make patriotic
+sacrifices of life and substance in spite of home-sickness rather than
+by virtue of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The aim of this long digression has been to show that patriotism, of
+that bellicose kind that seeks satisfaction in inflicting damage and
+discomfort on the people of other nations, is not of the essence of
+human life; that it is of the nature of habit, induced by circumstances
+in the past and handed on by tradition and institutional arrangements
+into the present; and that men can, without mutilation, divest
+themselves of it, or perhaps rather be divested of it by force of
+circumstances which will set the current of habituation the contrary
+way.
+
+The change of habituation necessary to bring about such a decay of the
+bellicose national spirit would appear to be of a negative order, at
+least in the main. It would be an habituation to unconditional peace and
+security; in other words, to the absence of provocation, rather than a
+coercive training away from the bellicose temper. This bellicose temper,
+as it affects men collectively, appears to be an acquired trait; and it
+should logically disappear in time in the absence of those conditions by
+impact of which it has been acquired. Such obsolescence of patriotism,
+however, would not therefore come about abruptly or swiftly, since the
+patriotic spirit has by past use and wont, and by past indoctrination,
+been so thoroughly worked into the texture of the institutional fabric
+and into the commonsense taste and morality, that its effectual
+obsolescence will involve a somewhat comprehensive displacement and
+mutation throughout the range of institutions and popular conceits that
+have been handed down. And institutional changes take time, being
+creations of habit. Yet, again, there is the qualification to this last,
+that since the change in question appears to be a matter, not of
+acquiring a habit and confirming it in the shape of an article of
+general use and wont, but of forgetting what once was learned, the time
+and experience to be allowed for its decay need logically not equal that
+required for its acquirement, either in point of duration or in point of
+the strictness of discipline necessary to inculcate it.
+
+While the spirit of nationalism is such an acquired trait, and while it
+should therefore follow that the chief agency in divesting men of it
+must be disuse of the discipline out of which it has arisen, yet a
+positive, and even something of a drastic discipline to the contrary
+effect need not be altogether ineffectual in bringing about its
+obsolescence. The case of the Chinese people seems to argue something of
+the sort. Not that the Chinese are simply and neutrally unpatriotic;
+they appear also to be well charged with disloyalty to their alien
+rulers. But along with a sense of being on the defensive in their common
+concerns, there is also the fact that they appear not to be appreciably
+patriotic in the proper sense; they are not greatly moved by a spirit
+of nationality. And this failure of the national spirit among them can
+scarcely be set down to a neutral disuse of that discipline which has on
+the other hand induced a militant nationalism in the peoples of
+Christendom; it should seem more probable, at least, that this relative
+absence of a national ambition is traceable in good part to its having
+been positively bred out of them by the stern repression of all such
+aspirations under the autocratic rule of their alien masters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Peace on terms of submission and non-resistance to the ordinary
+exactions and rulings of those Imperial authorities to whom such
+submission may become necessary, then, will be contingent on the virtual
+abeyance of the spirit of national pride in the peoples who so are to
+come under Imperial rule. A sufficient, by no means necessarily a total,
+elimination or decadence of this proclivity will be the condition
+precedent of any practicable scheme for a general peace on this footing.
+How large an allowance of such animus these prospectively subject
+peoples might still carry, without thereby assuring the defeat of any
+such plan, would in great measure depend on the degree of clemency or
+rigor with which the superior authority might enforce its rule. It is
+not that a peace plan of this nature need precisely be considered to
+fall outside the limits of possibility, on account of this necessary
+condition, but it is at the best a manifestly doubtful matter. Advocates
+of a negotiated peace should not fail to keep in mind and make public
+that the plan which they advocate carries with it, as a sequel or
+secondary phase, such an unconditional surrender and a consequent régime
+of non-resistance, and that there still is grave doubt whether the
+peoples of these Western nations are at present in a sufficiently
+tolerant frame of mind, or can in the calculable future come in for such
+a tolerantly neutral attitude in point of national pride, as to submit
+in any passable fashion to any alien Imperial rule.
+
+If the spiritual difficulty presented by this prevalent spirit of
+national pride--sufficiently stubborn still, however inane a conceit it
+may seem on sober reflection--if this animus of factional
+insubordination could be overcome or in some passable measure be
+conciliated or abated, there is much to be said in favor of such a plan
+of peaceable submission to an extraneous and arbitrary authority, and
+therefore also for that plan of negotiated peace by means of which
+events would be put in train for its realisation.
+
+Any passably dispassionate consideration of the projected régime will
+come unavoidably to the conclusion that the prospectively subject
+peoples should have no legitimate apprehension of loss or disadvantage
+in the material respect. It is, of course, easy for an unreflecting
+person to jump to the conclusion that subjection to an alien power must
+bring grievous burdens, in the way of taxes and similar impositions. But
+reflection will immediately show that no appreciable increase, over the
+economic burdens already carried by the populace under their several
+national establishments, could come of such a move.
+
+As bearing on this question it is well to call to mind that the
+contemplated imperial dominion is designed to be very wide-reaching and
+with very ample powers. Its nearest historical analogue, of course, is
+the Roman imperial dominion--in the days of the Antonines--and that the
+nearest analogue to the projected German peace is the Roman peace, in
+the days of its best security. There is every warrant for the
+presumption that the contemplated Imperial dominion is to be
+substantially all-inclusive. Indeed there is no stopping place for the
+projected enterprise short of an all-inclusive dominion. And there will
+consequently be no really menacing outside power to be provided against.
+Consequently there will be but little provision necessary for the common
+defense, as compared, e.g., with the aggregate of such provision found
+necessary for self-defense on the part of the existing nations acting in
+severalty and each jealously guarding its own national integrity.
+Indeed, compared with the burden of competitive armament to which the
+peoples of Europe have been accustomed, the need of any armed force
+under the new régime should be an inconsiderable matter, even when there
+is added to the necessary modicum of defensive preparation the more
+imperative and weightier provision of force with which to keep the peace
+at home.
+
+Into the composition of this necessary modicum of armed force slight if
+any contingents of men would be drawn from the subject peoples, for the
+reason that no great numbers would be needed; as also because no devoted
+loyalty to the dynasty could reasonably be looked for among them, even
+if no positive insecurity were felt to be involved in their employment.
+On this head the projected scheme unambiguously commends itself as a
+measure of economy, both in respect of the pecuniary burdens demanded
+and as regards the personal annoyance of military service.
+
+As a further count, it is to be presumed that the burden of the Imperial
+government and its bureaucratic administration--what would be called the
+cost of maintenance and repairs of the dynastic establishment and its
+apparatus of control--would be borne by the subject peoples. Here again
+one is warranted in looking for a substantial economy to be effected by
+such a centralised authority, and a consequent lighter aggregate burden
+on the subjects. Doubtless, the "overhead charges" would not be reduced
+to their practicable minimum. Such a governmental establishment, with
+its bureaucratic personnel, its "civil list" and its privileged classes,
+would not be conducted on anything like a parsimonious footing. There is
+no reason to apprehend any touch of modesty in the exactions of such a
+dynastic establishment for itself or in behalf of its underlying
+hierarchy of gentlefolk.
+
+There is also to be counted in, in the concrete instance on which the
+argument here turns, a more or less considerable burden of contributions
+toward the maintenance and augmentation of that culture that has been
+the topic of so many encomiums. At this point it should be recalled that
+it is the pattern of Periclean Athens that is continually in mind in
+these encomiums. Which brings up, in this immediate connection, the
+dealings of Periclean Athens with the funds of the League, and the
+source as well as the destination of these surplus funds. Out of it all
+came the works on the Acropolis, together with much else of intellectual
+and artistic life that converged upon and radiated from this Athenian
+center of culture. The vista of _Denkmäler_ that so opens to the vision
+of a courageous fancy is in itself such a substance of things hoped for
+as should stir the heart of all humane persons.[8] The cost of this
+subvention of Culture would doubtless be appreciable, but those grave
+men who have spent most thought on this prospective cultural gain to be
+had from the projected Imperial rule appear to entertain no doubt as to
+its being worth all that it would cost.
+
+[Footnote 8: _Denk 'mall_]
+
+Any one who is inclined to rate the prospective pecuniary costs and
+losses high would doubtless be able to find various and sundry items of
+minor importance to add to this short list of general categories on the
+side of cost; but such additional items, not fairly to be included under
+these general captions, would after all be of minor importance, in the
+aggregate or in detail, and would not appreciably affect the grand
+balance of pecuniary profit and loss to be taken account of in any
+appraisal of the projected Imperial régime. There should evidently be
+little ground to apprehend that its installation would entail a net loss
+or a net increase of pecuniary burdens. There is, of course, the
+ill-defined and scarcely definable item of expenditure under the general
+head of Gentility, Dignity, Distinction, Magnificence, or whatever term
+may seem suitable to designate that consumption of goods and services
+that goes to maintain the high repute of the Court and to keep the
+underlying gentlefolk in countenance. In its pecuniary incidence this
+line of (necessary) expenditure belongs under the rubric of Conspicuous
+Waste; and one will always have to face the disquieting flexibility of
+this item of expenditure. The consumptive demand of this kind is in an
+eminent degree "indefinitely extensible," as the phrasing of the
+economists would have it, and as various historical instances of courtly
+splendor and fashionable magnificence will abundantly substantiate.
+There is a constant proclivity to advance this conventional "standard of
+living" to the limit set by the available means; and yet these
+conventional necessities will ordinarily not, in the aggregate, take up
+all the available means; although now and again, as under the _Ancien
+Régime_, and perhaps in Imperial Rome, the standard of splendid living
+may also exceed the current means in hand and lead to impoverishment of
+the underlying community.
+
+An analysis of the circumstances governing this flexibility of the
+conventional standard of living and of pecuniary magnificence can not be
+gone into here. In the case under consideration it will have to be left
+as an indeterminate but considerable item in the burden of cost which
+the projected Imperial rule may be counted on to impose on the
+underlying peoples. The cost of the Imperial court, nobility, and civil
+service, therefore, would be a matter of estimate, on which no close
+agreement would be expected; and yet, here as in an earlier connection,
+it seems a reasonable expectation that sufficient dignity and
+magnificence could be put in evidence by such a large-scale
+establishment at a lower aggregate cost than the aggregate of
+expenditures previously incurred for the like ends by various nations
+working in severalty and at cross purposes.
+
+Doubtless it would be altogether a mistaken view of this production of
+dignity by means of a lavish expenditure on superfluities, to believe
+that the same principle of economy should apply here as was found
+applicable in the matter of armament for defense. With the installation
+of a collective national establishment, to include substantially all the
+previously competing nations, the need of defensive armament should in
+all reason decline to something very inconsiderable indeed. But it would
+be hasty to conclude that with the coalescence of these nations under
+one paramount control the need of creating notoriety and prestige for
+this resulting central establishment by the consumption of decorative
+superfluities would likewise decline. The need of such dignity and
+magnificence is only in part, perhaps a minor part, of a defensive
+character. For the greater part, no doubt, the motive to this
+conspicuously wasteful consumption is personal vanity, in Imperial
+policy as well as in the private life of fashion,--or perhaps one should
+more deferentially say that it is a certain range of considerations
+which would be identified as personal vanity in case they were met with
+among men beneath the Imperial level. And so far as the creation of this
+form of "good-will" by this manner of advertising is traceable to such,
+or equivalent, motives of a personal incidence, the provocation to
+economy along this line would presumably not be a notable factor in the
+case. And one returns perforce to the principle already spoken of above,
+that the consumptive need of superfluities is indefinitely extensible,
+with the resulting inference that nothing conclusive is to be said as to
+the prospective magnitude of this item in the Imperial bill of expense,
+or of the consequent pecuniary burdens which it would impose on the
+underlying peoples.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So far the argument has run on the pecuniary incidence of this projected
+Imperial dominion as it falls on the underlying community as a whole,
+with no attempt to discriminate between the divergent interests of the
+different classes and conditions of men that go to make up any modern
+community. The question in hand is a question of pecuniary burdens, and
+therefore of the pecuniary interests of these several distinguishable
+classes or conditions of men. In all these modern nations that now stand
+in the article of decision between peace by submission or a doubtful and
+melancholy alternative,--in all of them men are by statute and custom
+inviolably equal before the law, of course; they are ungraded and
+masterless men before the law. But these same peoples are also alike in
+the respect that pecuniary duties and obligations among them are
+similarly sacred and inviolable under the dispassionate findings of the
+law. This pecuniary equality is, in effect, an impersonal equality
+between pecuniary magnitudes; from which it follows that these citizens
+of the advanced nations are not ungraded men in the pecuniary respect;
+nor are they masterless, in so far as a greater pecuniary force will
+always, under this impersonal equality of the law, stand in a relation
+of mastery toward a lesser one.
+
+Class distinctions, except pecuniary distinctions, have fallen away. But
+all these modern nations are made up of pecuniary classes, differing
+from one another by minute gradations in the marginal cases, but
+falling, after all, and in the large, into two broadly and securely
+distinguishable pecuniary categories: those who have more and those who
+have less. Statisticians have been at pains to ascertain that a
+relatively very small numerical minority of the citizens in these modern
+nations own all but a relatively very small proportion of the aggregate
+wealth in the country. So that it appears quite safe to say that in such
+a country as America, e.g., something less than ten percent of the
+inhabitants own something more than ninety percent of the country's
+wealth. It would scarcely be a wild overstraining of its practical
+meaning to say that this population is made up of two classes: those who
+own the country's wealth, and those who do not. In strict accuracy, as
+before the law, this characterisation will not hold; whereas in
+practical effect, it is a sufficiently close approximation. This latter
+class, who have substantially no other than a fancied pecuniary interest
+in the nation's material fortunes, are the category often spoken of as
+The Common Man. It is not necessary, nor is it desired, to find a
+corresponding designation for the other category, those who own.
+
+The articulate recognition of this division into contrasted pecuniary
+classes or conditions, with correspondingly (at least potentially)
+divergent pecuniary interests, need imply no degree of approval or
+disapproval of the arrangement which is so recognised. The recognition
+of it is necessary to a perspicuous control of the argument, as bears on
+the possible systematic and inherent discrepancy among these men in
+respect of their material interests under the projected Imperial rule.
+Substantially, it is a distinction between those who have and those who
+have not, and in a question of prospective pecuniary loss the man who
+has nothing to lose is differently placed from the one who has. It would
+perhaps seem flippant, and possibly lacking in the courtesy due one's
+prospective lord paramount, to say with the poet, _Cantabit vacuus coram
+latrone viator_.
+
+But the whole case is not so simple. It is only so long as the projected
+pecuniary inroad is conceived as a simple sequestration of wealth in
+hand, that such a characterisation can be made to serve. The Imperial
+aim is not a passing act of pillage, but a perpetual usufruct; and the
+whole question takes on a different and more complex shape when it so
+touches the enduring conditions of life and livelihood. The citizen who
+has nothing, or who has no capitalisable source of unearned income, yet
+has a pecuniary interest in a livelihood to be gained from day to day,
+and he is yet vulnerable in the pecuniary respect in that his livelihood
+may with the utmost facility be laid under contribution by various and
+sundry well-tried contrivances. Indeed, the common man who depends for
+his livelihood on his daily earnings is in a more immediately
+precarious position than those who have something appreciable laid up
+against a rainy day, in the shape of a capitalised source of income.
+Only that it is still doubtful if his position is precarious in such a
+fashion as to lay him open to a notable increase of hardship, or to loss
+of the amenities of life, in the same relative degree as his well-to-do
+neighbour.
+
+In point of fact it may well be doubted if this common man has anything
+to apprehend in the way of added hardship or loss of creature comforts
+under the contemplated régime of Imperial tutelage. He would presumably
+find himself in a precarious case under the arbitrary and irresponsible
+authority of an alien master working through an alien master class. The
+doubt which presents itself is as to whether this common man would be
+more precariously placed, or would come in for a larger and surer sum of
+hard usage and scant living, under this projected order of things, than
+what he already is exposed to in his pecuniary relations with his
+well-to-do compatriots under the current system of law and order.
+
+Under this current régime of law and order, according to the equitable
+principles of Natural Rights, the man without means has no pecuniary
+rights which his well-to-do pecuniary master is bound to respect. This
+may have been an unintended, as it doubtless was an unforeseen, outcome
+of the move out of feudalism and prescriptive rights and immunities,
+into the system of individual liberty and manhood franchise; but as
+commonly happens in case of any substantial change in the scheme of
+institutional arrangements, unforeseen consequences come in along with
+those that have been intended. In that period of history when Western
+Europe was gathering that experience out of which the current habitual
+scheme of law and order has come, the right of property and free
+contract was a complement and safeguard to that individual initiative
+and masterless equality of men for which the spokesmen of the new era
+contended. That it is no longer so at every turn, or even in the main,
+in later time, is in great part due to changes of the pecuniary order,
+that have come on since then, and that seem not to have cast their
+shadow before.
+
+In all good faith, and with none but inconsequential reservations, the
+material fortunes of modern civilised men--together with much else--have
+so been placed on a pecuniary footing, with little to safeguard them at
+any point except the inalienable right of pecuniary self-direction and
+initiative, in an environment where virtually all the indispensable
+means of pecuniary self-direction and initiative are in the hands of
+that contracted category of owners spoken of above. A numerical
+minority--under ten percent of the population--constitutes a conclusive
+pecuniary majority--over ninety percent of the means--under a system of
+law and order that turns on the inalienable right of owners to dispose
+of the means in hand as may suit their convenience and profit,--always
+barring recourse to illegal force or fraud. There is, however, a very
+appreciable margin of legal recourse to force and of legally protected
+fraud available in case of need. Of course the expedients here referred
+to as legally available force and fraud in the defense of pecuniary
+rights and the pursuit of pecuniary gain are not force and fraud _de
+jure_ but only _de facto_. They are further, and well known,
+illustrations of how the ulterior consequences of given institutional
+arrangements and given conventionalised principles (habits of thought)
+of conduct may in time come to run at cross purposes with the initial
+purpose that led to the acceptance of these institutions and to the
+confirmation and standardisation of these habitual norms of conduct. For
+the time being, however, they are "fundamentally and eternally right and
+good."
+
+Being a pecuniary majority--what may be called a majority of the
+corporate stock--of the nation, it is also fundamentally and eternally
+right and good that the pecuniary interests of the owners of the
+material means of life should rule unabated in all those matters of
+public policy that touch on the material fortunes of the community at
+large. Barring a slight and intermittent mutter of discontent, this
+arrangement has also the cordial approval of popular sentiment in these
+modern democratic nations. One need only recall the paramount importance
+which is popularly attached to the maintenance and extension of the
+nation's trade--for the use of the investors--or the perpetuation of a
+protective tariff--for the use of the protected business concerns--or,
+again, the scrupulous regard with which such a body of public servants
+as the Interstate Commerce Commission will safeguard the legitimate
+claim of the railway companies to a "reasonable" rate of earnings on the
+capitalised value of the presumed earning-capacity of their property.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again, in view of the unaccustomed freedom with which it is here
+necessary to speak of these delicate matters, it may be in place to
+disclaim all intention to criticise the established arrangements on
+their merits as details of public policy. All that comes in question
+here, touching these and the like features of the established law and
+order, is the bearing of all this on the material fortunes of the common
+man under the current régime, as contrasted with what he would
+reasonably have to look for under the projected régime of Imperial
+tutelage that would come in, consequent upon this national surrender to
+Imperial dominion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In these democratic countries public policy is guided primarily by
+considerations of business expediency, and the administration, as well
+as the legislative power, is in the hands of businessmen, chosen
+avowedly on the ground of their businesslike principles and ability.
+There is no power in such a community that can over-rule the exigencies
+of business, nor would popular sentiment countenance any exercise of
+power that should traverse these exigencies, or that would act to
+restrain trade or discourage the pursuit of gain. An apparent exception
+to the rule occurs in wartime, when military exigencies may over-rule
+the current demands of business traffic; but the exception is in great
+part only apparent, in that the warlike operations are undertaken in
+whole or in part with a view to the protection or extension of business
+traffic.
+
+National surveillance and regulation of business traffic in these
+countries hitherto, ever since and in so far as the modern democratic
+order of things has taken effect, has uniformly been of the nature of
+interference with trade and investment in behalf of the nation's
+mercantile community at large, as seen in port and shipping regulations
+and in the consular service, or in behalf of particular favored groups
+or classes of business concerns, as in protective tariffs and subsidies.
+In all this national management of pecuniary affairs, under modern
+democratic principles, the common man comes into the case only as raw
+material of business traffic,--as consumer or as laborer. He is one of
+the industrial agencies by use of which the businessman who employs him
+supplies himself with goods for the market, or he is one of the units
+of consumptive demand that make up this market in which the business man
+sells his goods, and so "realises" on his investment. He is, of course,
+free, under modern principles of the democratic order, to deal or not to
+deal with this business community, whether as laborer or as consumer, or
+as small-scale producer engaged in purveying materials or services on
+terms defined by the community of business interests engaged on so large
+a scale as to count in their determination. That is to say, he is free
+_de jure_ to take or leave the terms offered. _De facto_ he is only free
+to take them--with inconsequential exceptions--the alternative being
+obsolescence by disuse, not to choose a harsher name for a distasteful
+eventuality.
+
+The general ground on which the business system, as it works under the
+over-ruling exigencies of the so-called "big business," so defines the
+terms of life for the common man, who works and buys, is the ground
+afforded by the principle of "charging what the traffic will bear;" that
+is to say, fixing the terms of hiring, buying and selling at such a
+figure as will yield the largest net return to the business concerns in
+whom, collectively or in severalty, the discretion vests. Discretion in
+these premises does not vest in any business concern that does not
+articulate with the system of "big business," or that does not dispose
+of resources sufficient to make it a formidable member of the system.
+Whether these concerns act in severalty or by collusion and conspiracy,
+in so defining the pecuniary terms of life for the community at large,
+is substantially an idle question, so far as bears on the material
+interest of the common man. The base-line is still what the traffic will
+bear, and it is still adhered to, so nearly as the human infirmity of
+the discretionary captains of industry will admit, whether the due
+approximation to this base-line is reached by a process of competitive
+bidding or by collusive advisement.
+
+The generalisation so offered, touching the material conditions of life
+for the common man under the modern rule of big business, may seem
+unwarrantably broad. It may be worth while to take note of more than one
+point in qualification of it, chiefly to avoid the appearance of having
+overlooked any of the material circumstances of the case. The "system"
+of large business, working its material consequences through the system
+of large-scale industry, but more particularly by way of the large-scale
+and wide-reaching business of trade in the proper sense, draws into the
+net of its control all parts of the community and all its inhabitants,
+in some degree of dependence. But there is always, hitherto, an
+appreciable fraction of the inhabitants--as, e.g., outlying agricultural
+sections that are in a "backward" state--who are by no means closely
+bound in the orderly system of business, or closely dependent on the
+markets. They may be said to enjoy a degree of independence, by virtue
+of their foregoing as much as may be of the advantages offered by modern
+industrial specialisation. So also there are the minor and interstitial
+trades that are still carried on by handicraft methods; these, too, are
+still somewhat loosely held in the fabric of the business system. There
+is one thing and another in this way to be taken account of in any
+exhaustive survey, but the accounting for them will after all amount to
+nothing better than a gleaning of remnants and partial exceptions, such
+as will in no material degree derange the general proposition in hand.
+
+Again, there runs through the length and breadth of this business
+community a certain measure of incompetence or inefficiency of
+management, as seen from the point of view of the conceivable perfect
+working of the system as a whole. It may be due to a slack attention
+here and there; or to the exigencies of business strategy which may
+constrain given business concerns to an occasional attitude of "watchful
+waiting" in the hope of catching a rival off his guard; or to a lack of
+perfect mutual understanding among the discretionary businessmen, due
+sometimes to an over-careful guarding of trade secrets or advance
+information; or, as also happens, and quite excusably, to a lack of
+perfect mutual confidence among these businessmen, as to one another's
+entire good faith or good-will. The system is after all a competitive
+one, in the sense that each of the discretionary directors of business
+is working for his own pecuniary gain, whether in cooperation with his
+fellows or not. "An honest man will bear watching." As in other
+collusive organisations for gain, confederates are apt to fall out when
+it comes to a division of what is in hand. In one way and another the
+system is beset with inherent infirmities, which hinder its perfect
+work; and in so far it will fall short of the full realisation of that
+rule of business that inculcates charging what the traffic will bear,
+and also in so far the pressure which the modern system of business
+management brings to bear on the common man will also fall short of the
+last straw--perhaps even of the next-to-the-last. Again it turns out to
+be a question not of the failure of the general proposition as
+formulated, but rather as to the closeness of approximation to its
+theoretically perfect work. It may be remarked by the way that vigilant
+and impartial surveillance of this system of business enterprise by an
+external authority interested only in aggregate results, rather than in
+the differential gains of the interested individuals, might hopefully
+be counted on to correct some of these shortcomings which the system
+shows when running loose under the guidance of its own multifarious
+incentives.
+
+On the opposite side of the account, it is also worth noting that, while
+modern business management may now and again fall short of what the
+traffic will bear, it happens more commonly that its exactions will
+exceed that limit. This will particularly be true in businessmen's
+dealings with hired labour, as also and perhaps with equally
+far-reaching consequences in an excessive recourse to sophistications
+and adulterants and an excessively parsimonious provision for the
+safety, health or comfort of their customers--as, e.g., in passenger
+traffic by rail, water or tramway. The discrepancy to which attention is
+invited here is due to a discrepancy between business expediency, that
+is expediency for the purpose of gain by a given businessman, on the one
+hand, and serviceability to the common good, on the other hand. The
+business concern's interest in the traffic in which it engages is a
+short-term interest, or an interest in the short-term returns, as
+contrasted with the long-term or enduring interest which the community
+at large has in the public service over which any such given business
+concern disposes. The business incentive is that afforded by the
+prospective net pecuniary gain from the traffic, substantially an
+interest in profitable sales; while the community at large, or the
+common man that goes to make up such a community, has a material
+interest in this traffic only as regards the services rendered and the
+enduring effects that follow from it.
+
+The businessman has not, or at least is commonly not influenced by, any
+interest in the ulterior consequences of the transactions in which he
+is immediately engaged. This appears to hold true in an accentuated
+degree in the domain of that large-scale business that draws its gains
+from the large-scale modern industry and is managed on the modern
+footing of corporation finance. This modern fashion of business
+organisation and management apparently has led to a substantial
+shortening of the term over which any given investor maintains an
+effective interest in any given corporate enterprise, in which his
+investments may be placed for the time being. With the current practice
+of organising industrial and mercantile enterprises on a basis of
+vendible securities, and with the nearly complete exemption from
+personal responsibility and enduring personal attachment to any one
+corporate enterprise which this financial expedient has brought, it has
+come about that in the common run of cases the investor, as well as the
+directorate, in any given enterprise, has an interest only for the time
+being. The average term over which it is (pecuniarily) incumbent on the
+modern businessman to take account of the working of any given
+enterprise has shortened so far that the old-fashioned accountability,
+that once was depended on to dictate a sane and considerate management
+with a view to permanent good-will, has in great measure become
+inoperative.
+
+By and large, it seems unavoidable that the pecuniary interests of the
+businessmen on the one hand and the material interests of the community
+on the other hand are diverging in a more and more pronounced degree,
+due to institutional circumstances over which no prompt control can be
+had without immediate violation of that scheme of personal rights in
+which the constitution of modern democratic society is grounded. The
+quandary in which these communities find themselves, as an outcome of
+their entrance upon "the simple and obvious system of Natural Liberty,"
+is shown in a large and instructive way by what is called "labor
+trouble," and in a more recondite but no less convincing fashion by the
+fortunes of the individual workman under the modern system.
+
+The cost of production of a modern workman has constantly increased,
+with the advance of the industrial arts. The period of preparation, of
+education and training, necessary to turn out competent workmen, has
+been increasing; and the period of full workmanlike efficiency has been
+shortening, in those industries that employ the delicate and exacting
+processes of the modern technology. The shortening of this working-life
+of the workman is due both to a lengthening of the necessary period of
+preparation, and to the demand of these processes for so full a use of
+the workman's forces that even the beginning of senescence will count as
+a serious disability,--in many occupations as a fatal disability. It is
+also a well ascertained fact that effectual old age will be brought on
+at an earlier period by overwork; overwork shortens the working
+life-time of the workman. Thorough speeding-up ("Scientific
+Management"?) will unduly shorten this working life-time, and so it may,
+somewhat readily, result in an uneconomical consumption of the
+community's man-power, by consuming the workmen at a higher rate of
+speed, a higher pressure, with a more rapid rate of deterioration, than
+would give the largest net output of product per unit of man-power
+available, or per unit of cost of production of such man-power.
+
+On this head the guiding incentives of the businessman and the material
+interest of the community at large--not to speak of the selfish interest
+of the individual workman--are systematically at variance. The cost of
+production of workmen does not fall on the business concern which
+employs them, at least not in such definite fashion as to make it appear
+that the given business concern or businessman has a material interest
+in the economical consumption of the man-power embodied in this given
+body of employees. Some slight and exceptional qualification of this
+statement is to be noted, in those cases where the processes in use are
+such as to require special training, not to be had except by a working
+habituation to these processes in the particular industrial plant in
+question. So far as such special training, to be had only as employees
+of the given concern, is a necessary part of the workman's equipment for
+this particular work, so far the given employer bears a share and an
+interest in the cost of production of the workmen employed; and so far,
+therefore, the employer has also a pecuniary interest in the economical
+use of his employees; which usually shows itself in the way of some
+special precautions being taken to prevent the departure of these
+workmen so long as there is a clear pecuniary loss involved in replacing
+them with men who have not yet had the special training required.
+Evidently this qualifying consideration covers no great proportion of
+the aggregate man-power consumed in industrial enterprises under
+business management. And apart from the instances, essentially
+exceptional, where such a special consideration comes in, the
+businessmen in charge will, quite excusably as things go, endeavour to
+consume the man-power of which they dispose in the persons of their
+employees, not at the rate that would be most economical to the
+community at large, in view of the cost of their replacement, nor at
+such a rate as would best suit the taste or the viability of the
+particular workman, but at such a rate as will yield the largest net
+pecuniary gain to the employer.
+
+There is on record an illustrative, and indeed an illustrious, instance
+of such cannily gainful consumption of man-power carried out
+systematically and with consistently profitable effect in one of the
+staple industries of the country. In this typical, though exceptionally
+thoroughgoing and lucrative enterprise, the set rule of the management
+was, to employ none but select workmen, in each respective line of work;
+to procure such select workmen and retain them by offering wages
+slightly over the ordinary standard; to work them at the highest pace
+and pressure attainable with such a picked body; and to discharge them
+on the first appearance of aging or of failing powers. In the rules of
+the management was also included the negative proviso that the concern
+assumed no responsibility for the subsequent fortunes of discharged
+workmen, in the way of pension, insurance or the like.
+
+This enterprise was highly successful and exceedingly profitable, even
+beyond the high average of profits among enterprises in the same line of
+business. Out of it came one of the greater and more illustrious
+fortunes that have been accumulated during the past century; a fortune
+which has enabled one of the most impressive and most gracious of this
+generation's many impressive philanthropists, never weary in well-doing;
+but who, through this cannily gainful consumption of man-power, has been
+placed in the singular position of being unable, in spite of avowedly
+unremitting endeavour, to push his continued disbursements in the
+service of humanity up to the figure of his current income. The case in
+question is one of the most meritorious known to the records of modern
+business, and while it will conveniently serve to illustrate many an
+other, and perhaps more consequential truth come to realisation in the
+march of Triumphant Democracy, it will also serve to show the
+gainfulness of an unreservedly canny consumption of man-power with an
+eye single to one's own net gain in terms of money.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Evidently this is a point in the articulation of the modern economic
+system where a sufficiently ruthless outside authority, not actuated by
+a primary regard for the pecuniary interests of the employers, might
+conceivably with good effect enforce a more economical consumption of
+the country's man-power. It is not a matter on which one prefers to
+dwell, but it can do no harm to take note of the fact for once in a way,
+that these several national establishments of the democratic order, as
+they are now organised and administered, do somewhat uniformly and
+pervasively operate with an effectual view to the advantage of a class,
+so far as may plausibly be done. They are controlled by and administered
+in behalf of those elements of the population that, for the purpose in
+hand, make up a single loose-knit class,--the class that lives by income
+rather than by work. It may be called the class of the business
+interests, or of capital, or of gentlemen. It all comes to much the
+same, for the purpose in hand.
+
+The point in speaking of this contingent whose place in the economy of
+human affairs it is to consume, or to own, or to pursue a margin of
+profit, is simply that of contrasting this composite human contingent
+with the common man; whose numbers account for some nine-tenths or more
+of the community, while his class accounts for something less than
+one-tenth of the invested wealth, and appreciably less than that
+proportion of the discretionary national establishment,--the government,
+national or local, courts, attorneys, civil service, diplomatic and
+consular, military and naval. The arrangement may be called a
+gentlemen's government, if one would rather have it that way; but a
+gentleman is necessarily one who lives on free income from invested
+wealth--without such a source of free, that is to say unearned, income
+he becomes a decayed gentleman. Again, pushing the phrasing back a step
+farther toward the ground facts, there are those who would speak of the
+current establishments as "capitalistic;" but this term is out of line
+in that it fails to touch the human element in the case, and
+institutions, such as governmental establishments and their functioning,
+are after all nothing but the accustomed ways and means of human
+behaviour; so that "capitalistic" becomes a synonym for "businessmen's"
+government so soon as it is designated in terms of the driving
+incentives and the personnel. It is an organisation had with a view to
+the needs of business (i.e. pecuniary) enterprise, and is made up of
+businessmen and gentlemen, which comes to much the same, since a
+gentleman is only a businessman in the second or some later generation.
+Except for the slightly odious suggestion carried by the phrase, one
+might aptly say that the gentleman, in this bearing, is only a
+businessman gone to seed.
+
+By and large, and taking the matter naively at the simple face value of
+the material gain or loss involved, it should seem something of an idle
+question to the common man whether his collective affairs are to be
+managed by a home-bred line of businessmen and their successive filial
+generations of gentlemen, with a view to accelerate the velocity and
+increase the volume of competitive gain and competitive spending, on
+the one hand, or by an alien line of officials, equally aloof from his
+common interests, and managing affairs with a view to the usufruct of
+his productive powers in furtherance of the Imperial dominion.
+
+Not that the good faith or the generous intentions of these governments
+of gentlemen is questioned or is in any degree questionable; what is
+here spoken of is only the practical effect of the policies which they
+pursue, doubtless with benevolent intentions and well-placed
+complacency. In effect, things being as they are today in the civilised
+world's industry and trade, it happens, as in some sort an unintended
+but all-inclusive accident, that the guidance of affairs by business
+principles works at cross purposes with the material interests of the
+common man.
+
+So ungraceful a view of the sacred core of this modern democratic
+organisation will need whatever evidence can be cited to keep it in
+countenance. Therefore indulgence is desired for one further count in
+this distasteful recital of ineptitudes inherent in this institutional
+scheme of civilised life. This count comes under the head of what may be
+called capitalistic sabotage. "Sabotage" is employed to designate a
+wilful retardation, interruption or obstruction of industry by
+peaceable, and ordinarily by legally defensible, measures. In its
+present application, particularly, there is no design to let the term
+denote or insinuate a recourse to any expedients or any line of conduct
+that is in any degree legally dubious, or that is even of questionable
+legitimacy.
+
+Sabotage so understood, as not comprising recourse to force or fraud, is
+a necessary and staple expedient of business management, and its
+employment is grounded in the elementary and indefeasible rights of
+ownership. It is simply that the businessman, like any other owner, is
+vested with the right freely to use or not to use his property for any
+given purpose. His decision, for reasons of his own, not to employ the
+property at his disposal in a particular way at a particular time, is
+well and blamelessly within his legitimate discretion, under the rights
+of property as universally accepted and defended by modern nations. In
+the particular instance of the American nation he is protected in this
+right by a constitutional provision that he must not be deprived of his
+property without due process of law. When the property at his disposal
+is in the shape of industrial plant or industrial material, means of
+transportation or stock of goods awaiting distribution, then his
+decision not to employ this property, or to limit its use to something
+less than full capacity, in the way for which it is adapted, becomes
+sabotage, normally and with negligible exceptions. In so doing he
+hinders, retards or obstructs the working of the country's industrial
+forces by so much. It is a matter of course and of absolute necessity to
+the conduct of business, that any discretionary businessman must be free
+to deal or not to deal in any given case; to limit or to withhold the
+equipment under his control, without reservation. Business discretion
+and business strategy, in fact, has no other means by which to work out
+its aims. So that, in effect, all business sagacity reduces itself in
+the last analysis to a judicious use of sabotage. Under modern
+conditions of large business, particularly, the relation of the
+discretionary businessman to industry is that of authoritative
+permission and of authoritative limitation or stoppage, and on his
+shrewd use of this authority depends the gainfulness of his enterprise.
+
+If this authority were exercised with an eye single to the largest and
+most serviceable output of goods and services, or to the most economical
+use of the country's material resources and man-power, regardless of
+pecuniary consequences, the course of management so carried out would be
+not sabotage but industrial strategy. But business is carried on for
+pecuniary gain, not with an unreserved view to the largest and most
+serviceable output or to the economical use of resources. The volume and
+serviceability of the output must wait unreservedly on the very
+particular pecuniary question of what quantity and what degree of
+serviceability will yield the largest net return in terms of price.
+Uneconomical use of equipment, labor and resources is necessarily an
+everyday matter under these circumstances, as in the duplication of
+plant and processes between rival concerns, and in the wasteful use of
+all resources that do not involve expenditure on the part of the given
+concern.
+
+It has been the traditional dogma among economists and publicists in
+these modern communities that free competition between the businessmen
+in charge will indefeasibly act to bring the productiveness of industry
+to the highest practicable pitch and would lead to the most unreserved
+and vigilant endeavour to serve the community's material needs at all
+points. The reasons for the failure of this genial expectation,
+particularly under latterday business management, might be shown in some
+detail, if that were needed to enforce the argument as it runs in the
+present connection. But a summary indication of the commoner varieties
+and effects of sabotage as it is systematically applied in the
+businesslike conduct of industry will serve the purpose as well and with
+less waste of words and patience.
+
+It is usual to notice, and not unusual to deplore the duplication of
+plant and appliances in many lines of industry, due to competitive
+management, as in factories engaged in the same class of manufacture, in
+parallel or otherwise competing railways and boat lines, in retail
+merchandising, and in some degree also in the wholesale trade. The
+result, of course, is sabotage; in the sense that this volume of
+appliances, materials and workmen are not employed to the best advantage
+for the community. One effect of the arrangement is an increased
+necessary cost of the goods and services supplied by these means. The
+reason for it is competition for gain to be got from the traffic. That
+all this is an untoward state of things is recognised on all hands; but
+no lively regret is commonly spent on the matter, since it is commonly
+recognised that under the circumstances there is no help for it except
+at the cost of a more untoward remedy.
+
+The competitive system having been tried and found good--or at least so
+it is assumed--it is felt that the system will have to be accepted with
+the defects of its qualities. Its characteristic qualities are held to
+be good, acceptable to the tastes of modern men whose habits of thought
+have been standardised in its terms; and it would be only reluctantly
+and by tardy concession that these modern men could bring themselves to
+give up that scheme of "Natural Liberty" within the framework of which
+runs this competitive system of business management and its wasteful
+manifolding of half-idle equipment and nugatory work. The common man, at
+the worst, comforts himself and his neighbour with the sage reflection
+that "It might have been worse." The businessmen, on the other hand,
+have also begun to take note of this systematic waste by duplication
+and consequent incompetence, and have taken counsel how to intercept the
+waste and divert it to their own profit. The businessmen's remedy is
+consolidation of competing concerns, and monopoly control.
+
+To the common man, with his preconceptions on the head of "restraint of
+trade," the proposed remedy seems more vicious than the evil it is
+designed to cure. The fault of the remedy plainly is not that the
+mismanagement of affairs due to competitive business can not be
+corrected by recourse to monopoly, but only that the community, it is
+presumed, would still suffer all the burdens and discomforts of the
+régime of competition and sabotage, with, possibly, further
+inconveniences and impositions at the hands of the businesslike
+monopoly; which, men are agreed, may fairly be depended on to use its
+advantage unsparingly under the business principle of charging what the
+traffic will bear.
+
+There is also this other singular phenomenon in this modern industrial
+world, that something not very far short of one-half the industrial
+equipment systematically lies idle for something approaching one-half
+the time, or is worked only to one-half its capacity half the time; not
+because of competition between these several industrial concerns, but
+because business conditions will not allow its continued productive use;
+because the volume of product that would be turned out if the equipment
+were working uninterruptedly at its full capacity could not be sold at
+remunerative prices. From time to time one establishment and another
+will shut down during a period of slack times, for the same reason.
+
+This state of things is singular only as seen from the point of view of
+the community's material interest, not that it is in any degree
+unfamiliar or that any serious fault is found with the captains of
+industry for so shutting off the industrial process and letting the
+industrial equipment lie waste. As all men know, the exigencies of
+business will not tolerate production to supply the community's needs
+under these circumstances; although, as is equally notorious, these
+slack times, when production of goods is unadvisable on grounds of
+business expediency, are commonly times of wide-spread privation, "hard
+times," in the community at large, when the failure of the supply is
+keenly felt.
+
+It is not that the captains of industry are at fault in so failing, or
+refusing, to supply the needs of the community under these
+circumstances, but only that they are helpless under the exigencies of
+business. They can not supply the goods except for a price, indeed not
+except for a remunerative price, a price which will add something to the
+capital values which they are venturing in their various enterprises. So
+long as the exigencies of price and of pecuniary gain rule the case,
+there is manifestly no escaping this enforced idleness of the country's
+productive forces.
+
+It may not be out of place also to remark, by way of parenthesis, that
+this highly productive state of the industrial arts, which is embodied
+in the industrial plant and processes that so are systematically and
+advisedly retarded or arrested under the rule of business, is at the
+same time the particular pride of civilised men and the most tangible
+achievement of the civilised world.
+
+A conservative estimate of this one item of capitalistic sabotage could
+scarcely appraise it at less than a twenty-five percent reduction from
+the normally possible productive capacity of the community, at an
+average over any considerable period; and a somewhat thorough review of
+the pertinent facts would probably persuade any impartial observer that,
+one year with another, such businesslike enforced idleness of plant and
+personnel lowers the actual output of the country's industry by
+something nearer fifty percent of its ordinary capacity when fully
+employed. To many, such an assertion may seem extravagant, but with
+further reflection on the well-known facts in the case it will seem less
+so in proportion as the unfamiliarity of it wears off.
+
+However, the point of attention in the case is not the precise, nor the
+approximate, percentages of this arrest and retardation, this partial
+neutralisation of modern improvements in the industrial arts; it is only
+the notorious fact that such arrest occurs, systematically and
+advisedly, under the rule of business exigencies, and that there is no
+corrective to be found for it that will comport with those fundamental
+articles of the democratic faith on which the businessmen necessarily
+proceed. Any effectual corrective would break the framework of
+democratic law and order, since it would have to traverse the
+inalienable right of men who are born free and equal, each freely to
+deal or not to deal in any pecuniary conjuncture that arises.
+
+But it is at the same time plain enough that this, in the larger sense
+untoward, discrepancy between productive capacity and current productive
+output can readily be corrected, in some appreciable degree at least, by
+any sufficient authority that shall undertake to control the country's
+industrial forces without regard to pecuniary profit and loss. Any
+authority competent to take over the control and regulate the conduct of
+the community's industry with a view to maximum output as counted by
+weight and tale, rather than by net aggregate price-income over
+price-cost, can readily effect an appreciable increase in the effectual
+productive capacity; but it can be done only by violating that
+democratic order of things within which business enterprise runs. The
+several belligerent nations of Europe are showing that it can be done,
+that the sabotage of business enterprise can be put aside by
+sufficiently heroic measures. And they are also showing that they are
+all aware, and have always been aware, that the conduct of industry on
+business principles is incompetent to bring the largest practicable
+output of goods and services; incompetent to such a degree, indeed, as
+not to be tolerable in a season of desperate need, when the nation
+requires the full use of its productive forces, equipment and man-power,
+regardless of the pecuniary claims of individuals.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, the projected Imperial dominion is a power of the character
+required to bring a sufficient corrective to bear, in case of need, on
+this democratic situation in which the businessmen in charge necessarily
+manage the country's industry at cross purposes with the
+community's--that is the common man's--material interest. It is an
+extraneous power, to whom the continued pecuniary gain of these nations'
+businessmen is a minor consideration, a negligible consideration in case
+it shall appear that the Imperial usufruct of the underlying nation's
+productive forces is in any degree impaired by the businessmen's
+management of it for their own net gain. It is difficult to see on what
+grounds of self-interest such an Imperial government could consent to
+tolerate the continued management of these underlying nations'
+industries on business principles, that is to say on the principle of
+the maximum pecuniary gain to the businesslike managers; and recent
+experience seems to teach that no excessive, that is to say no
+inconvenient, degree of consideration for vested rights, and the like,
+would long embarrass the Imperial government in its administration of
+its usufruct.
+
+It should be a reasonable expectation that, without malice and with an
+unprejudiced view to its own usufruct of these underlying countries, the
+Imperial establishment would take due care that no systematically, and
+in its view gratuitously, uneconomical methods should continue in the
+ordinary conduct of their industry. Among other considerations of weight
+in this connection is the fact that a contented, well-fed, and not
+wantonly over-worked populace is a valuable asset in such a case.
+Similarly, by contraries, as an asset in usufruct to such an alien
+power, a large, wealthy, spendthrift, body of gentlefolk, held in high
+esteem by the common people, would have but a slight value, conceivably
+even a negative value, in such a case. A wise administration would
+presumably look to their abatement, rather than otherwise. At this point
+the material interest of the common man would seem to coincide with that
+of the Imperial establishment. Still, his preconceived notions of the
+wisdom and beneficence of his gentlefolk would presumably hinder his
+seeing the matter in that reasonable light.
+
+Under the paramount surveillance of such an alien power, guided solely
+by its own interest in the usufruct of the country and its population,
+it is to be presumed that class privileges and discrimination would be
+greatly abated if not altogether discontinued. The point is in some
+doubt, partly because this alien establishment whose dominion is in
+question is itself grounded in class prerogatives and discrimination,
+and so, not improbably, it would carry over into its supervision of the
+underlying nations something of a bias in favor of class privileges. And
+a similar order of things might also result by choice of a class-system
+as a convenient means of control and exploitation. The latter
+consideration is presumably the more cogent, since the Imperial
+establishment in question is already, by ancient habit, familiar with
+the method of control by class and privilege; and, indeed, unfamiliar
+with any other method. Such a government, which governs without
+effectual advice or formal consent of the governed, will almost
+necessarily rest its control of the country on an interested class, of
+sufficient strength and bound by sufficiently grave interest to abet the
+Imperial establishment effectually in all its adventures and
+enterprises.
+
+But such a privileged order, that is to be counted in to share dynastic
+usufruct and liabilities, in good days and evil, will be of a
+feudalistic complexion rather than something after the fashion of a
+modern business community doing business by investment and pecuniary
+finesse. It would still be a reasonable expectation that discrimination
+between pecuniary classes should fall away under this projected alien
+tutelage; more particularly all such discrimination as is designed to
+benefit any given class or interest at the cost of the whole, as, e.g.,
+protective tariffs, monopolistic concessions and immunities, engrossing
+of particular lines of material resources, and the like.
+
+The character of the economic policy to be pursued should not be
+difficult of apprehension, if only these underlying peoples are
+conceived as an estate in tail within the dynastic line of descent. The
+Imperial establishment which so is prospectively to take over the
+surveillance of these modern peoples under this projected enterprise in
+dominion, may all the more readily be conceived as handling its new and
+larger resources somewhat unreservedly as an estate to be administered
+with a shrewd eye to the main chance, since such has always been its
+relation to the peoples and territories whose usufruct it already
+enjoys. It is only that the circumstances of the case will admit a freer
+and more sagacious application of those principles of usufruct that lie
+at the root of the ancient Culture of the Fatherland.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This excessively long, and yet incomplete, review of the presumptive
+material advantages to accrue to the common man under a régime of peace
+by unconditional surrender to an alien dynasty, brings the argument
+apparently to the conclusion that such an eventuality might be fortunate
+rather than the reverse; or at least that it has its compensations, even
+if it is not something to be desired. Such should particularly appear to
+be the presumption in case one is at all inclined to make much of the
+cultural gains to be brought in under the new régime. And more
+particularly should a policy of non-resistant submission to the
+projected new order seem expedient in view of the exceedingly high, not
+to say prohibitive, cost of resistance, or even of materially retarding
+its fulfillment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+PEACE AND NEUTRALITY
+
+
+Considered simply on the face of the tangible material interests
+involved, the choice of the common man in these premises should seem
+very much of a foregone conclusion, if he could persuade himself to a
+sane and perspicuous consideration of these statistically apparent
+merits of the case alone. It is at least safely to be presumed that he
+has nothing to lose, in a material way, and there is reason to look for
+some slight gain in creature comforts and in security of life and limb,
+consequent upon the elimination, or at least the partial
+disestablishment, of pecuniary necessity as the sole bond and criterion
+of use and wont in economic concerns.
+
+But man lives not by bread alone. In point of fact, and particularly as
+touches the springs of action among that common run that do not
+habitually formulate their aspirations and convictions in extended and
+grammatically defensible documentary form, and the drift of whose
+impulses therefore is not masked or deflected by the illusive
+consistencies of set speech,--as touches the common run, particularly,
+it will hold true with quite an unacknowledged generality that the
+material means of life are, after all, means only; and that when the
+question of what things are worth while is brought to the final test, it
+is not these means, nor the life conditioned on these means, that are
+seen to serve as the decisive criterion; but always it is some
+ulterior, immaterial end, in the pursuit of which these material means
+find their ulterior ground of valuation. Neither the overt testimony nor
+the circumstantial evidence to this effect is unequivocal; but seen in
+due perspective, and regard being had chiefly to the springs of
+concerted action as shown in any massive movement of this common run of
+mankind, there is, after all, little room to question that the things
+which commend themselves as indefeasibly worth while are the things of
+the human spirit.
+
+These ideals, aspirations, aims, ends of endeavour, are by no means of a
+uniform or homogeneous character throughout the modern communities,
+still less throughout the civilised world, or throughout the checkered
+range of classes and conditions of men; but, with such frequency and
+amplitude that it must be taken as a major premise in any attempted
+insight into human behaviour, it will hold true that they are of a
+spiritual, immaterial nature.
+
+The caution may, parenthetically, not be out of place, that this
+characterisation of the ulterior springs of action as essentially not of
+the nature of creature comforts, need be taken in no wider extension
+than that which so is specifically given it. It will be found to apply
+as touches the conduct of the common run; what modification of it might
+be required to make it at all confidently applicable to the case of one
+and another of those classes into whose scheme of life creature comforts
+enter with more pronounced effect may be more of a delicate point. But
+since it is the behaviour, and the grounds of behaviour, of the common
+run that are here in question, the case of their betters in this respect
+may conveniently be left on one side.
+
+The question in hand touches the behavior of the common man, taken in
+the aggregate, in face of the quandary into which circumstances have led
+him; since the question of what these modern peoples will do is after
+all a question of what the common man in the aggregate will do, of his
+own motion or by persuasion. His betters may be in a position to guide,
+persuade, cajole, mislead, and victimise him; for among the many
+singular conceits that beset the common man is the persuasion that his
+betters are in some way better than he, wiser, more beneficent. But the
+course that may so be chosen, with or without guidance or persuasion
+from the superior classes, as well as the persistence and energy with
+which this course is pursued, is conditioned on the frame of mind of the
+common run.
+
+Just what will be the nature and the concrete expression of these ideal
+aspirations that move the common run is a matter of habitual
+preconceptions; and habits of thought vary from one people to another
+according to the diversity of experience to which they have been
+exposed. Among the Western nations the national prestige has come to
+seem worth while as an ulterior end, perhaps beyond all else that is
+comprised in the secular scheme of things desirable to be had or to be
+achieved. And in the apprehension of such of them as have best preserved
+the habits of thought induced by a long experience in feudal subjection,
+the service of the sovereign or the dynasty still stands over as the
+substantial core of the cultural scheme, upon which sentiment and
+endeavour converge. In the past ages of the democratic peoples, as well
+as in the present-day use and wont among subjects of the dynastic
+States--as e.g., Japan or Germany--men are known to have resolutely
+risked, and lost, their life for the sake of the sovereign's renown, or
+even to save the sovereign's life; whereas, of course, even the
+slightest and most nebulous reflection would make it manifest that in
+point of net material utility the sovereign's decease is an idle matter
+as compared with the loss of an able-bodied workman. The sovereign may
+always be replaced, with some prospect of public advantage, or failing
+that, it should be remarked that a regency or inter-regnum will commonly
+be a season of relatively economical administration. Again, religious
+enthusiasm, and the furtherance of religious propaganda, may come to
+serve the same general purpose as these secular ideals, and will perhaps
+serve it just as well. Certain "principles," of personal liberty and of
+opportunity for creative self-direction and an intellectually worthy
+life, perhaps may also become the idols of the people, for which they
+will then be willing to risk their material fortune; and where this has
+happened, as among the democratic peoples of Christendom, it is not
+selfishly for their own personal opportunity to live untroubled under
+the light of these high principles that these opinionated men are ready
+to contend, but rather impersonally for the human right which under
+these principles is the due of all mankind, and particularly of the
+incoming and of later generations.
+
+On these and the like intangible ends the common man is set with such
+inveterate predilection that he will, on provocation, stick at nothing
+to put the project through. For such like ends the common man will lay
+down his life; at least, so they say. There may always be something of
+rhetorical affectation in it all; but, after all, there is sufficient
+evidence to hand of such substance and tenacity in the common man's hold
+on these ideal aspirations, on these idols of his human spirit, as to
+warrant the assertion that he is, rather commonly, prepared to go to
+greater lengths in the furtherance of these immaterial gains that are to
+inure to someone else than for any personal end of his own, in the way
+of creature comforts or even of personal renown.
+
+For such ends the common man, in democratic Christendom is, on
+provocation, willing to die; or again, the patient and perhaps more
+far-seeing common man of pagan China is willing to live for these idols
+of an inveterate fancy, through endless contumely and hard usage. The
+conventional Chinese preconceptions, in the way of things that are worth
+while in their own right, appear to differ from those current in the
+Occident in such a way that the preconceived ideal is not to be realised
+except by way of continued life. The common man's accountability to the
+cause of humanity, in China, is of so intimately personal a character
+that he can meet it only by tenaciously holding his place in the
+sequence of generations; whereas among the peoples of Christendom there
+has arisen out of their contentious past a preconception to the effect
+that this human duty to mankind is of the nature of a debt, which can be
+cancelled by bankruptcy proceedings, so that the man who unprofitably
+dies fighting for the cause has thereby constructively paid the
+reckoning in full.
+
+Evidently, if the common man of these modern nations that are
+prospectively to be brought under tutelage of the Imperial government
+could be brought to the frame of mind that is habitual with his Chinese
+counterpart, there should be a fair hope that pacific counsels would
+prevail and that Christendom would so come in for a régime of peace by
+submission under this Imperial tutelage. But there are always these
+preconceptions of self-will and insubordination to be counted with
+among these nations, and there is the ancient habit of a contentious
+national solidarity in defense of the nation's prestige, more urgent
+among these peoples than any sentiment of solidarity with mankind at
+large, or any ulterior gain in civilisation that might come of continued
+discipline in the virtues of patience and diligence under distasteful
+circumstances.
+
+The occidental conception of manhood is in some considerable measure
+drawn in negative terms. So much so that whenever a question of the
+manly virtues comes under controversy it presently appears that at least
+the indispensable minimum, and indeed the ordinary marginal modicum, of
+what is requisite to a worthy manner of life is habitually formulated in
+terms of what not. This appearance is doubtless misleading if taken
+without the universally understood postulate on the basis of which
+negative demands are formulated. There is a good deal of what would be
+called historical accident in all this. The indispensable demands of
+this modern manhood take the form of refusal to obey extraneous
+authority on compulsion; of exemption from coercive direction and
+subservience; of insubordination, in short. But it is always understood
+as a matter of course that this insubordination is a refusal to submit
+to irresponsible or autocratic rule. Stated from the positive side it
+would be freedom from restraint by or obedience to any authority not
+constituted by express advice and consent of the governed. And as near
+as it may be formulated, when reduced to the irreducible minimum of
+concrete proviso, this is the final substance of things which neither
+shame nor honour will permit the modern civilised man to yield. To no
+arrangement for the abrogation of this minimum of free initiative and
+self-direction will he consent to be a party, whether it touches the
+conditions of life for his own people who are to come after, or as
+touches the fortunes of such aliens as are of a like mind on this head
+and are unable to make head against invasion of these human rights from
+outside.
+
+As has just been remarked, the negative form so often taken by these
+demands is something of an historical accident, due to the fact that
+these modern peoples came into their highly esteemed system of Natural
+Liberty out of an earlier system of positive checks on self-direction
+and initiative; a system, in effect, very much after the fashion of that
+Imperial jurisdiction that still prevails in the dynastic States--as,
+e.g., Germany or Japan--whose projected dominion is now the immediate
+object of apprehension and repugnance. How naively the negative
+formulation gained acceptance, and at the same time how intrinsic to the
+new dispensation was the aspiration for free initiative, appears in the
+confident assertion of its most genial spokesman, that when these
+positive checks are taken away, "The simple and obvious system of
+Natural Liberty establishes itself of its own accord."
+
+The common man, in these modern communities, shows a brittle temper when
+any overt move is made against this heritage of civil liberty. He may
+not be altogether well advised in respect of what liberties he will
+defend and what he will submit to; but the fact is to be counted with in
+any projected peace, that there is always this refractory residue of
+terms not open to negotiation or compromise. Now it also happens, also
+by historical accident, that these residual principles of civil liberty
+have come to blend and coalesce with a stubborn preconception of
+national integrity and national prestige. So that in the workday
+apprehension of the common man, not given to analytic excursions, any
+infraction of the national integrity or any abatement of the national
+prestige has come to figure as an insufferable infringement on his
+personal liberty and on those principles of humanity that make up the
+categorical articles of the secular creed of Christendom. The fact may
+be patent on reflection that the common man's substantial interest in
+the national integrity is slight and elusive, and that in sober common
+sense the national prestige has something less than a neutral value to
+him; but this state of the substantially pertinent facts is not greatly
+of the essence of the case, since his preconceptions in these premises
+do not run to that effect, and since they are of too hard and fast a
+texture to suffer any serious abatement within such a space of time as
+can come in question here and now.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The outlook for a speedy settlement of the world's peace on a plan of
+unconditional surrender to the projected Imperial dominion seems
+unpromisingly dubious, in view of the stubborn temper shown by these
+modern peoples wherever their preconceived ideas of right and honest
+living appear to be in jeopardy; and the expediency of entering into any
+negotiated compact of diplomatic engagements and assurances designed to
+serve as groundwork to an eventual enterprise of that kind must
+therefore also be questionable in a high degree. It is even doubtful if
+any allowance of time can be counted on to bring these modern peoples to
+a more reasonable, more worldly-wise, frame of mind; so that they would
+come to see their interest in such an arrangement, or would divest
+themselves of their present stubborn and perhaps fantastic prejudice
+against an autocratic régime of the kind spoken for. At least for the
+present any such hope of a peaceable settlement seems illusive. What
+may be practicable in this way in the course of time is of course still
+more obscure; but argument on the premises which the present affords
+does not point to a substantially different outcome in the calculable
+future.
+
+For the immediate future--say, within the life-time of the oncoming
+generation--the spiritual state of the peoples concerned in this
+international quandary is not likely to undergo so radical a change as
+to seriously invalidate an argument that proceeds on the present lie of
+the land in this respect. Preconceptions are a work of habit impinging
+on a given temperamental bent; and where, as in these premises, the
+preconceptions have taken on an institutionalised form, have become
+conventionalised and commonly accepted, and so have been woven into the
+texture of popular common sense, they must needs be a work of protracted
+and comprehensive habituation impinging on a popular temperamental bent
+of so general a prevalence that it may be called congenital to the
+community at large. A heritable bent pervading the group within which
+inheritance runs, does not change, so long as the racial complexion of
+the group remains passably intact; a conventionalised, commonly
+established habit of mind will change only slowly, commonly not without
+the passing of at least one generation, and only by grace of a
+sufficiently searching and comprehensive discipline of experience. For
+good or ill, the current situation is to be counted on not to lose
+character over night or with a revolution of the seasons, so far as
+concerns these spiritual factors that make or mar the fortunes of
+nations.
+
+At the same time these spiritual assets, being of the nature of habit,
+are also bound to change character more or less radically, by insensible
+shifting of ground, but incontinently,--provided only that the
+conditions of life, and therefore the discipline of experience, undergo
+any substantial change. So the immediate interest shifts to the
+presumptive rate and character of those changes that are in prospect,
+due to the unremitting change of circumstances under which these modern
+peoples live and to the discipline of which they are unavoidably
+exposed. For the present and for the immediate future the current state
+of things is a sufficiently stable basis of argument; but assurance as
+to the sufficiency of the premises afforded by the current state of
+things thins out in proportion as the perspective of the argument runs
+out into the succeeding years. The bearing of it all is two-fold, of
+course. This progressive, cumulative habituation under changing
+circumstances affects the case both of those democratic peoples whose
+fortunes are in the hazard, and also of those dynastic States by whom
+the projected enterprise in dominion is to be carried into effect.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The case of the two formidable dynastic States whose names have been
+coupled together in what has already been said is perhaps the more
+immediately interesting in the present connection. As matters stand, and
+in the measure in which they continue so to stand, the case of these is
+in no degree equivocal. The two dynastic establishments seek dominion,
+and indeed they seek nothing else, except incidentally to and in
+furtherance of the main quest. As has been remarked before, it lies in
+the nature of a dynastic State to seek dominion, that being the whole of
+its nature in so far as it runs true to form. But a dynastic State, like
+any other settled, institutionalised community of men, rests on and
+draws its effectual driving force from the habit of mind of its
+underlying community, the common man in the aggregate, his
+preconceptions and ideals as to what things are worth while. Without a
+suitable spiritual ground of this kind such a dynastic State passes out
+of the category of formidable Powers and into that of precarious
+despotism.
+
+In both of the two States here in question the dynastic establishment
+and its bodyguard of officials and gentlefolk may be counted on to
+persevere in the faith that now animates them, until an uneasy
+displacement of sentiment among the underlying populace may in time
+induce them judiciously to shift their footing. Like the ruling classes
+elsewhere, they are of a conservative temper and may be counted on so to
+continue. They are also not greatly exposed to the discipline of
+experience that makes for adaptive change in habits of life, and
+therefore in the correlated habits of thought. It is always the common
+man that is effectually reached by any exacting or wide-reaching change
+in the conditions of life. He is relatively unsheltered from any forces
+that make for adaptive change, as contrasted with the case of his
+betters; and however sluggish and reluctant may be his response to such
+discipline as makes for a displacement of outworn preconceptions, yet it
+is always out of the mass of this common humanity that those movements
+of disaffection and protest arise, which lead, on occasion, to any
+material realignment of the institutional fabric or to any substantial
+shift in the line of policy to be pursued under the guidance of their
+betters.
+
+The common mass of humanity, it may be said in parenthesis, is of course
+not a homogeneous body. Uncommon men, in point of native gifts of
+intelligence, sensibility, or personal force, will occur as frequently,
+in proportion to the aggregate numbers, among the common mass as among
+their betters. Since in any one of these nations of Christendom, with
+their all-inclusive hybridisation, the range, frequency and amplitude of
+variations in hereditary endowment is the same throughout all classes.
+Class differentiation is a matter of habit and convention; and in
+distinction from his betters the common man is common only in point of
+numbers and in point of the more general and more exacting conditions to
+which he is exposed. He is in a position to be more hardly ridden by the
+discipline of experience, and is at the same time held more consistently
+to such a body of preconceptions, and to such changes only in this body
+of preconceptions, as fall in with the drift of things in a larger mass
+of humanity. But all the while it is the discipline which impinges on
+the sensibilities of this common mass that shapes the spiritual attitude
+and temper of the community and so defines what may and what may not be
+undertaken by the constituted leaders. So that, in a way, these dynastic
+States are at the mercy of that popular sentiment whose creatures they
+are, and are subject to undesired changes of direction and efficiency in
+their endeavors, contingent on changes in the popular temper; over which
+they have only a partial, and on the whole a superficial control.
+
+A relatively powerful control and energetic direction of the popular
+temper is and has been exercised by these dynastic establishments, with
+a view to its utilisation in the pursuit of the dynastic enterprise; and
+much has visibly been accomplished in that way; chiefly, perhaps, by
+military discipline in subordination to personal authority, and also by
+an unsparing surveillance of popular education, with a view to fortify
+the preconceptions handed down from the passing order as well as to
+eliminate all subversive innovation. Yet in spite of all the
+well-conceived and shrewdly managed endeavors of the German Imperial
+system in this direction, e.g., there has been evidence of an obscurely
+growing uneasiness, not to say disaffection, among the underlying mass.
+So much so that hasty observers, and perhaps biased, have reached the
+inference that one of the immediate contributory causes that led to the
+present war was the need of a heroic remedy to correct this untoward
+drift of sentiment.
+
+For the German people the government of the present dynastic incumbent
+has done all that could (humanly speaking) be expected in the way of
+endeavoring to conserve the passing order and to hold the popular
+imagination to the received feudalistic ideals of loyal service. And yet
+the peoples of the Empire are already caught in the net of that newer
+order which they are now endeavoring to break by force of arms. They are
+inextricably implicated in the cultural complex of Christendom; and
+within this Western culture those peoples to whom it fell to lead the
+exodus out of the Egypt of feudalism have come quite naturally to set
+the pace in all the larger conformities of civilised life. Within the
+confines of Christendom today, for good or ill, whatever usage or
+customary rule of conduct falls visibly short of the precedent set by
+these cultural pioneers is felt to fall beneath the prescriptive
+commonplace level of civilisation. Failure to adopt and make use of
+those tried institutional expedients on which these peoples of the
+advance guard have set their mark of authentication is today
+presumptively a mistake and an advantage foregone; and a people who are
+denied the benefit of these latterday ways and means of civic life are
+uneasy with a sense of grievance at the hands of their rulers. Besides
+which, the fashion in articles of institutional equipage so set by the
+authentic pioneers of culture has also come to be mandatory, as a
+punctilio of the governmental proprieties; so that no national
+establishment which aspires to a decorous appearance in the eyes of the
+civilised world can longer afford to be seen without them. The forms at
+least must be observed. Hence the "representative" and
+pseudo-representative institutions of these dynastic States.
+
+These dynastic States among the rest have partly followed the dictates
+of civilised fashion, partly yielded to the, more or less intelligent,
+solicitations of their subjects, or the spokesmen of their subjects, and
+have installed institutional apparatus of this modern pattern--more in
+point of form than of substance, perhaps. Yet in time the adoption of
+the forms is likely to have an effect, if changing circumstances favor
+their taking effect. Such has on the whole been the experience of those
+peoples who have gone before along this trail of political advance. As
+instance the growth of discretionary powers under the hands of
+parliamentary representatives in those cases where the movement has gone
+on longest and farthest; and these instances should not be considered
+idle, as intimations of what may presumptively be looked for under the
+Imperial establishments of Germany or Japan. It may be true that
+hitherto, along with the really considerable volume of imitative
+gestures of discretionary deliberation delegated to these parliamentary
+bodies, they have as regards all graver matters brought to their notice
+only been charged with a (limited) power to talk. It may be true that,
+for the present, on critical or weighty measures the parliamentary
+discretion extends no farther than respectfully to say: "_Ja wohl_!" But
+then, _Ja wohl_ is also something; and there is no telling where it may
+all lead to in the long course of years. One has a vague apprehension
+that this "_Ja wohl_!" may some day come to be a customarily necessary
+form of authentication, so that with-holding it (_Behüt' es Gott_!) may
+even come to count as an effectual veto on measures so pointedly
+neglected. More particularly will the formalities of representation and
+self-government be likely to draw the substance of such like "free
+institutions" into the effectual conduct of public affairs if it turns
+out that the workday experiences of these people takes a turn more
+conducive to habits of insubordination than has been the case hitherto.
+
+Indications are, again, not wanting, that even in the Empire the
+discipline of workday experience is already diverging from that line
+that once trained the German subjects into the most loyal and unrepining
+subservience to dynastic ambitions. Of course, just now, under the
+shattering impact of warlike atrocities and patriotic clamour, the
+workday spirit of insubordination and critical scrutiny is gone out of
+sight and out of hearing.
+
+Something of this inchoate insubordination has showed itself repeatedly
+during the present reign, sufficient to provoke many shrewd protective
+measures on the side of the dynastic establishment, both by way of
+political strategy and by arbitrary control. Disregarding many minor and
+inconsequential divisions of opinion and counsel among the German people
+during this eventful reign, the political situation has been moving on
+the play of three, incipiently divergent, strains of interest and
+sentiment: (a) the dynasty (together with the Agrarians, of whom in a
+sense the dynasty is a part); (b) the businessmen, or commercial
+interest (including investors); and (c) the industrial workmen.
+Doubtless it would be easier to overstate than to indicate with any nice
+precision what has been the nature, and especially the degree, of this
+alienation of sentiment and divergence of conscious interest among these
+several elements. It is not that there has at any point been a
+perceptible faltering in respect of loyalty to the crown as such. But
+since the crown belongs, by origin, tradition, interest and spiritual
+identity, in the camp of the Agrarians, the situation has been such as
+would inevitably take on a character of disaffection toward the dynastic
+establishment, in the conceivable absence of that strong surviving
+sentiment of dynastic loyalty that still animates all classes and
+conditions of men in the Fatherland. It would accordingly, again, be an
+overstatement to say that the crown has been standing precariously at
+the apex of a political triangle, the other two corners of which are
+occupied by these two divided and potentially recalcitrant elements of
+the body politic, held apart by class antipathy and divergent pecuniary
+interest, and held in check by divided counsels; but something after
+that fashion is what would have resulted under similar conditions of
+strain in any community where the modern spirit of insubordination has
+taken effect in any large measure.
+
+Both of these elements of incipient disturbance in the dynastic economy,
+the modern commercial and working classes, are creatures of the new era;
+and they are systematically out of line with the received dynastic
+tradition of fealty, both in respect of their pecuniary interests and in
+respect of that discipline of experience to which their workday
+employment subjects them. They are substantially the same two classes or
+groupings that came forward in the modernisation of the British
+community, with a gradual segregation of interest and a consequent
+induced solidarity of class sentiment and class animosities. But with
+the difference that in the British case the movement of changing
+circumstances was slow enough to allow a fair degree of habituation to
+the altered economic conditions; whereas in the German case the move
+into modern economic conditions has been made so precipitately as to
+have carried the mediaeval frame of mind over virtually intact into this
+era of large business and machine industry. In the Fatherland the
+commercial and industrial classes have been called on to play their part
+without time to learn their lines.
+
+The case of the English-speaking peoples, who have gone over this course
+of experience in more consecutive fashion than any others, teaches that
+in the long run, if these modern economic conditions persist, one or the
+other or both of these creatures of the modern era must prevail, and
+must put the dynastic establishment out of commission; although the
+sequel has not yet been seen in this British case, and there is no
+ground afforded for inference as to which of the two will have the
+fortune to survive and be invested with the hegemony. Meantime the
+opportunity of the Imperial establishment to push its enterprise in
+dominion lies in the interval of time so required for the discipline of
+experience under modern conditions to work out through the growth of
+modern habits of thought into such modern (i.e. civilised) institutional
+forms and such settled principles of personal insubordination as will
+put any effectual dynastic establishment out of commission. The same
+interval of time, that must so be allowed for the decay of the dynastic
+spirit among the German people under the discipline of life by the
+methods of modern trade and industry, marks the period during which no
+peace compact will be practicable, except with the elimination of the
+Imperial establishment as a possible warlike power. All this, of
+course, applies to the case of Japan as well, with the difference that
+while the Japanese people are farther in arrears, they are also a
+smaller, less formidable body, more exposed to outside forces, and their
+mediaevalism is of a more archaic and therefore more precarious type.
+
+What length of time will be required for this decay of the dynastic
+spirit among the people of the Empire is, of course, impossible to say.
+The factors of the case are not of a character to admit anything like
+calculation of the rate of movement; but in the nature of the factors
+involved it is also contained that something of a movement in this
+direction is unavoidable, under Providence. As a preliminary
+consideration, these peoples of the Empire and its allies, as well as
+their enemies in the great war, will necessarily come out of their
+warlike experience in a more patriotic and more vindictive frame of mind
+than that in which they entered on this adventure. Fighting makes for
+malevolence. The war is itself to be counted as a set-back. A very large
+proportion of those who have lived through it will necessarily carry a
+warlike bent through life. By that much, whatever it may count for, the
+decay of the dynastic spirit--or the growth of tolerance and equity in
+national sentiment, if one chooses to put it that way--will be retarded
+from beforehand. So also the Imperial establishment, or whatever is left
+of it, may be counted on to do everything in its power to preserve the
+popular spirit of loyalty and national animosity, by all means at its
+disposal; since the Imperial establishment finally rests on the
+effectual body of national animosity. What hindrance will come in from
+this agency of retardation can at least vaguely be guessed at, in the
+light of what has been accomplished in that way under the strenuously
+reactionary rule of the present reign.
+
+Again, there is the chance, as there always is a chance of human folly,
+that the neighboring peoples will undertake, whether jointly or
+severally, to restrict or prohibit trade relations between the people of
+the Empire and their enemies in the present war; thereby fomenting
+international animosity, as well as contributing directly to the
+economic readiness for war both on their own part and on that of the
+Empire. This is also, and in an eminent degree, an unknown factor in the
+case, on which not even a reasonable guess can be made beforehand. These
+are, all and several, reactionary agencies, factors of retardation,
+making for continuation of the current international situation of
+animosity, distrust, chicane, trade rivalry, competitive armament, and
+eventual warlike enterprise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To offset these agencies of conservatism there is nothing much that can
+be counted on but that slow, random, and essentially insidious working
+of habituation that tends to the obsolescence of the received
+preconceptions; partly by supplanting them with something new, but more
+effectually by their falling into disuse and decay. There is, it will
+have to be admitted, little of a positive character that can be done
+toward the installation of a régime of peace and good-will. The
+endeavours of the pacifists should suffice to convince any dispassionate
+observer of the substantial futility of creative efforts looking to such
+an end. Much can doubtless be done in the way of precautionary measures,
+mostly of a negative character, in the way especially of removing
+sources of infection and (possibly) of so sterilising the apparatus of
+national life that its working shall neither maintain animosities and
+interests at variance with the conditions of peace nor contribute to
+their spread and growth.
+
+There is necessarily little hope or prospect that any national
+establishment will contribute materially or in any direct way to the
+obsolescence of warlike sentiments and ambitions; since such
+establishments are designed for the making of war by keeping national
+jealousies intact, and their accepted place in affairs is that of
+preparation for eventual hostilities, defensive or offensive. Except for
+the contingency of eventual hostilities, no national establishment could
+be kept in countenance. They would all fall into the decay of desuetude,
+just as has happened to the dynastic establishments among those peoples
+who have (passably) lost the spirit of dynastic aggression.
+
+The modern industrial occupations, the modern technology, and that
+modern empirical science that runs so close to the frontiers of
+technology, all work at cross purposes with the received preconceptions
+of the nationalist order; and in a more pronounced degree they are at
+cross purposes with that dynastic order of preconceptions that converges
+on Imperial dominion. The like is true, with a difference, of the ways,
+means and routine of business enterprise as it is conducted in the
+commercialised communities of today. The working of these agencies runs
+to this effect not by way of deliberate and destructive antagonism, but
+almost wholly by force of systematic, though unintended and incidental,
+neglect of those values, standards, verities, and grounds of
+discrimination and conviction that make up the working realities of the
+national spirit and of dynastic ambition. The working concepts of this
+new, essentially mechanistic, order of human interests, do not
+necessarily clash with those of the old order, essentially the order of
+personages and personalities; the two are incommensurable, and they are
+incompatible only in the sense and degree implied in that state of the
+case. The profoundest and most meritorious truths of dynastic politics
+can on no provocation and by no sleight of hand be brought within the
+logic of that system of knowledge and appraisal of values by which the
+mechanistic technology proceeds. Within the premises of this modern
+mechanistic industry and science all the best values and verities of the
+dynastic order are simply "incompetent, irrelevant and impertinent."
+
+There is accordingly no unavoidable clash and no necessary friction
+between the two schemes of knowledge or the two habits of mind that
+characterise the two contrasted cultural eras. It is only that a given
+individual--call him the common man--will not be occupied with both of
+these incommensurable systems of logic and appreciation at the same time
+or bearing on the same point; and further that in proportion as his
+waking hours and his mental energy are fully occupied within the lines
+of one of these systems of knowledge, design and employment, in much the
+same measure he will necessarily neglect the other, and in time he will
+lose proficiency and interest in its pursuits and its conclusions. The
+man who is so held by his daily employment and his life-long attention
+within the range of habits of thought that are valid in the mechanistic
+technology, will, on an average and in the long run, lose his grip on
+the spiritual virtues of national prestige and dynastic primacy; "for
+they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they
+are spiritually discerned."
+
+Not that the adepts in this modern mechanistic system of knowledge and
+design may not also be very good patriots and devoted servants of the
+dynasty. The artless and, on the whole, spontaneous riot of dynastic
+avidity displayed to the astonished eyes of their fellow craftsmen in
+the neutral countries by the most eminent scientists of the Fatherland
+during the early months of the war should be sufficient warning that the
+archaic preconceptions do not hurriedly fly out of the window when the
+habits of thought of the mechanistic order come in at the door. But with
+the passage of time, pervasively, by imperceptible displacement, by the
+decay of habitual disuse, as well as by habitual occupation with these
+other and unrelated ways and means of knowledge and belief, dynastic
+loyalty and the like conceptions in the realm of religion and magic pass
+out of the field of attention and fall insensibly into the category of
+the lost arts. Particularly will this be true of the common man, who
+lives, somewhat characteristically, in the mass and in the present, and
+whose waking hours are somewhat fully occupied with what he has to do.
+
+With the commercial interests the Imperial establishment can probably
+make such terms as to induce their support of the dynastic enterprise,
+since they can apparently always be made to believe that an extension of
+the Imperial dominion will bring correspondingly increased opportunities
+of trade. It is doubtless a mistake, but it is commonly believed by the
+interested parties, which is just as good for the purpose as if it were
+true. And it should be added that in this, as in other instances of the
+quest of larger markets, the costs are to be paid by someone else than
+the presumed commercial beneficiaries; which brings the matter under the
+dearest principle known to businessmen: that of getting something for
+nothing. It will not be equally easy to keep the affections of the
+common man loyal to the dynastic enterprise when he begins to lose his
+grip on the archaic faith in dynastic dominion and comes to realise that
+he has also--individually and in the mass--no material interest even in
+the defense of the Fatherland, much less in the further extension of
+Imperial rule.
+
+But the time when this process of disillusionment and decay of ideals
+shall have gone far enough among the common run to afford no secure
+footing in popular sentiment for the contemplated Imperial
+enterprise,--this time is doubtless far in the future, as compared with
+the interval of preparation required for a new onset. Habituation takes
+time, particularly such habituation as can be counted on to derange the
+habitual bent of a great population in respect of their dearest
+preconceptions. It will take a very appreciable space of time even in
+the case of a populace so accessible to new habits of thought as the
+German people are by virtue of their slight percentage of illiteracy,
+the very large proportion engaged in those modern industries that
+constantly require some intelligent insight into mechanistic facts, the
+density of population and the adequate means of communication, and the
+extent to which the whole population is caught in the web of
+mechanically standardised processes that condition their daily life at
+every turn. As regards their technological situation, and their exposure
+to the discipline of industrial life, no other population of nearly the
+same volume is placed in a position so conducive to a rapid acquirement
+of the spirit of the modern era. But, also, no other people comparable
+with the population of the Fatherland has so large and well-knit a body
+of archaic preconceptions to unlearn. Their nearest analogue, of course,
+is the Japanese nation.
+
+In all this there is, of course, no inclination to cast a slur on the
+German people. In point of racial characteristics there is no difference
+between them and their neighbours. And there is no reason to question
+their good intentions. Indeed, it may safely be asserted that no people
+is more consciously well-meaning than the children of the Fatherland. It
+is only that, with their archaic preconceptions of what is right and
+meritorious, their best intentions spell malevolence when projected into
+the civilised world as it stands today. And by no fault of theirs. Nor
+is it meant to be intimated that their rate of approach to the accepted
+Occidental standard of institutional maturity will be unduly slow or
+unduly reluctant, so soon as the pertinent facts of modern life begin
+effectively to shape their habits of thought. It is only that, human
+nature--and human second nature--being what it always has been, the rate
+of approach of the German people to a passably neutral complexion in
+matters of international animosity and aggression must necessarily be
+slow enough to allow ample time for the renewed preparation of a more
+unsparing and redoubtable endeavour on the part of the Imperial
+establishment.
+
+What makes this German Imperial establishment redoubtable, beyond
+comparison, is the very simple but also very grave combination of
+circumstances whereby the German people have acquired the use of the
+modern industrial arts in the highest state of efficiency, at the same
+time that they have retained unabated the fanatical loyalty of feudal
+barbarism.[9] So long, and in so far, as this conjunction of forces
+holds there is no outlook for peace except on the elimination of
+Germany as a power capable of disturbing the peace.
+
+[Footnote 9: For an extended discussion of this point, see _Imperial
+Germany and the Industrial Revolution_, especially ch. v. and vi.]
+
+It may seem invidious to speak so recurrently of the German Imperial
+establishment as the sole potential disturber of the peace in Europe.
+The reason for so singling out the Empire for this invidious
+distinction--of merit or demerit, as one may incline to take it--is that
+the facts run that way. There is, of course, other human material, and
+no small volume of it in the aggregate, that is of much the same
+character, and serviceable for the same purposes as the resources and
+man-power of the Empire. But this other material can come effectually
+into bearing as a means of disturbance only in so far as it clusters
+about the Imperial dynasty and marches under his banners. In so speaking
+of the Imperial establishment as the sole enemy of a European peace,
+therefore, these outlying others are taken for granted, very much as one
+takes the nimbus for granted in speaking of one of the greater saints of
+God.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So the argument returns to the alternative: Peace by unconditional
+surrender and submission, or peace by elimination of Imperial Germany
+(and Japan). There is no middle course apparent. The old-fashioned--that
+is to say nineteenth-century--plan of competitive defensive armament and
+a balance of powers has been tried, and it has not proved to be a
+success, even so early in the twentieth century. This plan offers a
+substitute (_Ersatz_) for peace; but even as such it has become
+impracticable. The modern, or rather the current late-modern, state of
+the industrial arts does not tolerate it. Technological knowledge has
+thrown the advantage in military affairs definitively to the offensive,
+particularly to the offensive that is prepared beforehand with the
+suitable appliances and with men ready matured in that rigorous and
+protracted training by which alone they can become competent to make
+warlike use of these suitable appliances provided by the modern
+technology. At the same time, and by grace of the same advance in
+technology, any well-designed offensive can effectually reach any given
+community, in spite of distance or of other natural obstacles. The era
+of defensive armaments and diplomatic equilibration, as a substitute for
+peace, has been definitively closed by the modern state of the
+industrial arts.
+
+Of the two alternatives spoken of above, the former--peace by submission
+under an alien dynasty--is presumably not a practicable solution, as has
+appeared in the course of the foregoing argument.
+
+The modern nations are not spiritually ripe for it. Whether they have
+reached even that stage of national sobriety, or neutrality, that would
+enable them to live at peace among themselves after elimination of the
+Imperial Powers is still open to an uneasy doubt. It would be by a
+precarious margin that they can be counted on so to keep the peace in
+the absence of provocation from without the pale. Their predilection for
+peace goes to no greater lengths than is implied in the formula: Peace
+with Honour; which assuredly does not cover a peace of non-resistance,
+and which, in effect, leaves the distinction between an offensive and a
+defensive war somewhat at loose ends. The national prestige is still a
+live asset in the mind of these peoples; and the limit of tolerance in
+respect of this patriotic animosity appears to be drawn appreciably
+closer than the formula cited above would necessarily presume. They will
+fight on provocation, and the degree of provocation required to upset
+the serenity of these sportsmanlike modern peoples is a point on which
+the shrewdest guesses may diverge. Still, opinion runs more and more
+consistently to the effect that if these modern--say the French and the
+English-speaking--peoples were left to their own devices the peace might
+fairly be counted on to be kept between them indefinitely, barring
+unforeseen contingencies.
+
+Experience teaches that warlike enterprise on a moderate scale and as a
+side interest is by no means incompatible with such a degree of neutral
+animus as these peoples have yet acquired,--e.g., the Spanish-American
+war, which was made in America, or the Boer war, which was made in
+England. But these wars, in spite of the dimensions which they presently
+took on, were after all of the nature of episodes,--the one chiefly an
+extension of sportsmanship, which engaged the best attention of only the
+more sportsmanlike elements, the other chiefly engineered by certain
+business interests with a callous view to getting something for nothing.
+Both episodes came to be serious enough, both in their immediate
+incidence and in their consequences; but neither commanded the
+deliberate and cordial support of the community at large. There is a
+meretricious air over both; and there is apparent a popular inclination
+to condone rather than to take pride in these _faits accomplis_. The one
+excursion was a product of sportsmanlike bravado, fed on boyish
+exuberance, fomented for mercenary objects by certain business interests
+and place-hunting politicians, and incited by meretricious newspapers
+with a view to increase their circulation. The other was set afoot by
+interested businessmen, backed by politicians, seconded by newspapers,
+and borne by the community at large, in great part under
+misapprehension and stung by wounded pride.
+
+Opinions will diverge widely as to the chances of peace in a community
+of nations among whom episodes of this character, and of such
+dimensions, have been somewhat more than tolerated in the immediate
+past. But the consensus of opinion in these same countries appears to be
+setting with fair consistency to the persuasion that the popular spirit
+shown in these and in analogous conjunctures in the recent past gives
+warrant that peace is deliberately desired and is likely to be
+maintained, barring unforeseen contingencies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the large, the measures conducive to the perpetuation of peace, and
+necessary to be taken, are simple and obvious; and they are largely of a
+negative character, exploits of omission and neglect. Under modern
+conditions, and barring aggression from without, the peace is kept by
+avoiding the breaking of it. It does not break of itself,--in the
+absence of such national establishments as are organised with the sole
+ulterior view of warlike enterprise. A policy of peace is obviously a
+policy of avoidance,--avoidance of offense and of occasion for
+annoyance.
+
+What is required to insure the maintenance of peace among pacific
+nations is the neutralisation of all those human relations out of which
+international grievances are wont to arise. And what is necessary to
+assure a reasonable expectation of continued peace is the neutralisation
+of so much of these relations as the patriotic self-conceit and
+credulity of these peoples will permit. These two formulations are by no
+means identical; indeed, the disparity between what could advantageously
+be dispensed with in the way of national rights and pretensions, and
+what the common run of modern patriots could be induced to relinquish,
+is probably much larger than any sanguine person would like to believe.
+It should be plain on slight reflection that the greater part, indeed
+substantially the whole, of those material interests and demands that
+now engage the policy of the nations, and that serve on occasion to set
+them at variance, might be neutralised or relinquished out of hand,
+without detriment to any one of the peoples concerned.
+
+The greater part of these material interests over which the various
+national establishments keep watch and hold pretensions are, in point of
+historical derivation, a legacy from the princely politics of what is
+called the "Mercantilist" period; and they are uniformly of the nature
+of gratuitous interference or discrimination between the citizens of the
+given nation and outsiders. Except (doubtfully) in the English case,
+where mercantilist policies are commonly believed to have been adopted
+directly for the benefit of the commercial interest, measures of this
+nature are uniformly traceable to the endeavours of the crown and its
+officers to strengthen the finances of the prince and give him an
+advantage in warlike enterprise. They are kept up essentially for the
+same eventual end of preparation for war. So, e.g., protective tariffs,
+and the like discrimination in shipping, are still advocated as a means
+of making the nation self-supporting, self-contained, self-sufficient;
+with a view to readiness in the event of hostilities.
+
+A nation is in no degree better off in time of peace for being
+self-sufficient. In point of patent fact no nation can be industrially
+self-sufficient except at the cost of foregoing some of the economic
+advantages of that specialisation of industry which the modern state of
+the industrial arts enforces. In time of peace there is no benefit
+comes to the community at large from such restraint of trade with the
+outside world, or to any class or section of the community except those
+commercial concerns that are favored by the discrimination; and these
+invariably gain their special advantage at the cost of their
+compatriots. Discrimination in trade--export, import or shipping--has no
+more beneficial effect when carried out publicly by the national
+authorities than when effected surreptitiously and illegally by a
+private conspiracy in restraint of trade within a group of interested
+business concerns.
+
+Hitherto the common man has found it difficult to divest himself of an
+habitual delusion on this head, handed down out of the past and
+inculcated by interested politicians, to the effect that in some
+mysterious way he stands to gain by limiting his own opportunities. But
+the neutralisation of international trade, or the abrogation of all
+discrimination in trade, is the beginning of wisdom as touches the
+perpetuation of peace. The first effect of such a neutral policy would
+be wider and more intricately interlocking trade relations, coupled with
+a further specialisation and mutual dependence of industry between the
+several countries concerned; which would mean, in terms of international
+comity, a lessened readiness for warlike operations all around.
+
+It used to be an argument of the free-traders that the growth of
+international commercial relations under a free-trade policy would
+greatly conduce to a spirit of mutual understanding and forbearance
+between the nations. There may or may not be something appreciable in
+the contention; it has been doubted, and there is no considerable
+evidence to be had in support of it. But what is more to the point is
+the tangible fact that such specialisation of industry and consequent
+industrial interdependence would leave all parties to this relation less
+capable, materially and spiritually, to break off amicable relations. So
+again, in time of peace and except with a view to eventual hostilities,
+it would involve no loss, and presumably little pecuniary gain, to any
+country, locality, town or class, if all merchant shipping were
+registered indiscriminately under neutral colors and sailed under the
+neutral no-man's flag, responsible indiscriminately to the courts where
+they touched or where their business was transacted.
+
+Neither producers, shippers, merchants nor consumers have any slightest
+interest in the national allegiance of the carriers of their freight,
+except such as may artificially be induced by discriminatory shipping
+regulations. In all but the name--in time of peace--the world's merchant
+shipping already comes near being so neutralised, and the slight further
+simplification required to leave it on a neutral peace footing would be
+little else than a neglect of such vexatious discrimination as is still
+in force. If no nation could claim the allegiance, and therefore the
+usufruct, of any given item of merchant shipping in case of eventual
+hostilities, on account of the domicile of the owners or the port of
+registry, that would create a further handicap on eventual warlike
+enterprise and add so much to the margin of tolerance. At the same time,
+in the event of hostilities, shipping sailing under the neutral no-man's
+flag and subject to no national allegiance would enjoy such immunities
+as still inure to neutral shipping. It is true, neutrality has not
+carried many immunities lately.
+
+Cumulatively effective usage and the exigencies of a large, varied,
+shifting and extensive maritime trade have in the course of time
+brought merchant shipping to something approaching a neutral footing.
+For most, one might venture to say for virtually all, routine purposes
+of business and legal liability the merchant shipping comes under the
+jurisdiction of the local courts, without reservation. It is true, there
+still are formalities and reservations which enable questions arising
+out of incidents in the shipping trade to become subject of
+international conference and adjustment, but they are after all not such
+as would warrant the erection of national apparatus to take care of them
+in case they were not already covered by usage to that effect. The
+visible drift of usage toward neutralisation in merchant shipping, in
+maritime trade, and in international commercial transactions, together
+with the similarly visible feasibility of a closer approach to
+unreserved neutralisation of this whole range of traffic, suggests that
+much the same line of considerations should apply as regards the
+personal and pecuniary rights of citizens traveling or residing abroad.
+The extreme,--or, as seen from the present point of view, the
+ultimate--term in the relinquishment of national pretensions along this
+line would of course be the neutralisation of citizenship.
+
+This is not so sweeping a move as a patriotically-minded person might
+imagine on the first alarm, so far as touches the practical status of
+the ordinary citizen in his ordinary relations, and particularly among
+the English-speaking peoples. As an illustrative instance, citizenship
+has sat somewhat lightly on the denizens of the American republic, and
+with no evident damage to the community at large or to the inhabitants
+in detail. Naturalisation has been easy, and has been sought with no
+more eagerness, on the whole, than the notably low terms of its
+acquirement would indicate. Without loss or discomfort many law-abiding
+aliens have settled in this country and spent the greater part of a
+life-time under its laws without becoming citizens, and no one the worse
+or the wiser for it. Not infrequently the decisive inducement to
+naturalisation on the part of immigrant aliens has been, and is, the
+desirability of divesting themselves of their rights of citizenship in
+the country of their origin. Not that the privilege and dignity of
+citizenship, in this or in any other country, is to be held of little
+account. It is rather that under modern civilised conditions, and among
+a people governed by sentiments of humanity and equity, the stranger
+within our gates suffers no obloquy and no despiteful usage for being a
+stranger. It may be admitted that of late, with the fomentation of a
+more accentuated nationalism by politicians seeking a _raison d'ętre_,
+additional difficulties have been created in the way of naturalisation
+and the like incidents. Still, when all is told of the average American
+citizen, _qua_ citizen, there is not much to tell. The like is true
+throughout the English-speaking peoples, with inconsequential allowance
+for local color. A definitive neutralisation of citizenship within the
+range of these English-speaking countries would scarcely ripple the
+surface of things as they are--in time of peace.
+
+All of which has not touched the sore and sacred spot in the received
+scheme of citizenship and its rights and liabilities. It is in the event
+of hostilities that the liabilities of the citizen at home come into the
+foreground, and it is as a source of patriotic grievance looking to
+warlike retaliation that the rights of the citizen abroad chiefly come
+into the case.
+
+If, as was once, almost inaudibly, hinted by a well-regarded statesman,
+the national establishment should refuse to jeopardise the public peace
+for the safeguarding of the person and property of citizens who go out
+_in partes infidelium_ on their own private concerns, and should so
+leave them under the uncurbed jurisdiction of the authorities in those
+countries into which they have intruded, the result might in many cases
+be hardship to such individuals. This would, of course, be true almost
+exclusively of such instances only as occur in such localities as are,
+temporarily or permanently, outside the pale of modern law and order.
+And, it may be in place to remark, instances of such hardship, with the
+accompanying hazard of national complications, would, no doubt, greatly
+diminish in frequency consequent upon the promulgation of such a
+disclaimer of national responsibility for the continued well-being of
+citizens who so expatriate themselves in the pursuit of their own
+advantage or amusement. Meantime, let it not seem inconsiderate to
+recall that to the community at large the deplorable case of such
+expatriates under hardship involves no loss or gain in the material
+respect; and that, except for the fortuitous circumstance of his being a
+compatriot, the given individual's personal or pecuniary fortune in
+foreign parts has no special claim on his compatriots' sympathy or
+assistance; from which it follows also that with the definitive
+neutralisation of citizenship as touches expatriates, the sympathy which
+is now somewhat unintelligently confined to such cases, on what may
+without offense be called extraneous grounds, would somewhat more
+impartially and humanely extend to fellowmen in distress, regardless of
+nativity or naturalisation.
+
+What is mainly to the point here, however, is the fact that if
+citizenship were so neutralised within the range of neutral countries
+here contemplated, one further source of provocation to international
+jealousy and distrust would drop out of the situation. And it is not
+easy to detect any element of material loss involved in such a move. In
+the material respect no individual would be any the worse off, with the
+doubtful and dubious exception of the expatriate fortune-hunter, who
+aims to fish safely in troubled waters at his compatriots' expense. But
+the case stands otherwise as regards the balance of immaterial assets.
+The scaffolding of much highly-prized sentiment would collapse, and the
+world of poetry and pageantry--particularly that of the tawdrier and
+more vendible poetry and pageantry--would be poorer by so much. The Man
+Without a Country would lose his pathetic appeal, or would at any rate
+lose much of it. It may be, of course, that in the sequel there would
+result no net loss even in respect of these immaterial assets of
+sentimental animation and patriotic self-complacency, but it is after
+all fairly certain that something would be lost, and it is by no means
+clear what if anything would come in to fill its place.
+
+An historical parallel may help to illustrate the point. In the movement
+out of what may be called the royal age of dynasties and chivalric
+service, those peoples who have moved out of that age and out of its
+spiritual atmosphere have lost much of the conscious magnanimity and
+conviction of merit that once characterised that order of things, as it
+still continues to characterise the prevalent habit of mind in the
+countries that still continue under the archaic order of dynastic
+mastery and service. But it is also to be noted that these peoples who
+so have moved out of the archaic order appear to be well content with
+this change of spiritual atmosphere, and they are even fairly well
+persuaded, in the common run, that the move has brought them some net
+gain in the way of human dignity and neighbourly tolerance, such as to
+offset any loss incurred on the heroic and invidious side of life. Such
+is the tempering force of habit. Whereas, e.g., on the other hand, the
+peoples of these surviving dynastic States, to which it is necessary
+continually to recur, who have not yet moved out of that realm of
+heroics, find themselves unable to see anything in such a prospective
+shift but net loss and headlong decay of the spirit; that modicum of
+forbearance and equity that is requisite to the conduct of life in a
+community of ungraded masterless men is seen by these stouter stomachs
+as a loosening of the moral fiber and a loss of nerve.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What is here tentatively projected under the phrase, "neutralization of
+citizenship," is only something a little more and farther along the same
+general line of movement which these more modern peoples have been
+following in all that sequence of institutional changes that has given
+them their present distinctive character of commonwealths, as contrasted
+with the dynastic States of the mediaeval order. What may be in
+prospect--if such a further move away from the mediaeval landmarks is to
+take effect--may best be seen in the light of the later moves in the
+same direction hitherto, more particularly as regards the moral and
+aesthetic merits at large of such an institutional mutation. As touches
+this last previous shifting of ground along this line, just spoken of,
+the case stands in this singular but significant posture, in respect of
+the spiritual values and valuations involved: These peoples who have,
+even in a doubtful measure, made this transition from the archaic
+institutional scheme, of fealty and dynastic exploit and coercion, to
+the newer scheme of the ungraded commonwealth, are convinced, to the
+point of martyrdom, that anything like a return to the old order is
+morally impossible as well as insufferably shameful and irksome; whereas
+those people, of the retarded division of the race, who have had no
+experience of this new order, are equally convinced that it is all quite
+incompatible with a worthy life.
+
+Evidently, there should be no disputing about tastes. Evidently, too,
+these retarded others will not move on into the later institutional
+phase, of the ungraded commonwealth, by preconceived choice; but only,
+if at all, by such schooling of experience as will bring them insensibly
+to that frame of mind out of which the ideal of the ungraded
+commonwealth emerges by easy generalisation of workday practice.
+Meantime, having not yet experienced that phase of sentiment and opinion
+on civic rights and immunities that is now occupied by their
+institutionally maturer neighbours, the subjects of the Imperial
+Fatherland, e.g., in spite of the most laudable intentions and the best
+endeavour, are, by failure of this experience, unable to comprehend
+either the ground of opposition to their well-meaning projects of
+dominion or the futility of trying to convert these their elder brothers
+to their own prescriptive acceptation of what is worth while. In time,
+and with experience, this retarded division of Christendom may come to
+the same perspective on matters of national usage and ideals as has been
+enforced on the more modern peoples by farther habituation. So, also, in
+time and with experience, if the drift of circumstance shall turn out to
+set that way, the further move away from mediaeval discriminations and
+constraint and into the unspectacular scheme of neutralisation may come
+to seem as right, good and beautiful as the democratic commonwealth now
+seems to the English-speaking peoples, or as the Hohenzollern Imperial
+State now seems to the subjects of the Fatherland. There is, in effect,
+no disputing about tastes.
+
+There is little that is novel, and nothing that is to be rated as
+constructive innovation, in this sketch of what might not inaptly be
+called peace by neglect. The legal mind, which commonly takes the
+initiative in counsels on what to do, should scarcely be expected to
+look in that direction for a way out, or to see its way out in that
+direction in any case; so that it need occasion no surprise if the many
+current projects of pacification turn on ingenious and elaborate
+provisions of apparatus and procedure, rather than on that simpler line
+of expedients which the drift of circumstance, being not possessed of a
+legal mind, has employed in the sequence of institutional change
+hitherto. The legal mind that dominates in the current deliberations on
+peace is at home in exhaustive specifications and meticulous
+demarkations, and it is therefore prone to seek a remedy for the burden
+of supernumerary devices by recourse to further excesses of regulation.
+
+This trait of the legal mind is not a bad fault at the worst, and the
+quality in which this defect inheres is of the greatest moment in any
+project of constructive engineering on the legal and political plane.
+But it is less to the purpose, indeed it is at cross purposes, in such a
+conjuncture as the present; when the nations are held up in their quest
+of peace chiefly by an accumulation of institutional apparatus that has
+out-stayed its usefulness. It is the fortune even of good institutions
+to become imbecile with the change of conditioning circumstances, and it
+then becomes a question of their disestablishment, not of their
+rehabilitation. If there is anywhere a safe negative conclusion, it is
+that an institution grown mischievous by obsolescence need not be
+replaced by a substitute.
+
+Instances of such mischievous institutional arrangements, obsolete or in
+process of obsolescence, would be, e.g., the French monarchy of the
+ancient régime, the Spanish Inquisition, the British corn laws and the
+"rotten boroughs," the Barbary pirates, the Turkish rule in Armenia, the
+British crown, the German Imperial Dynasty, the European balance of
+powers, the Monroe Doctrine. In some sense, at least in the sense and
+degree implied in their selective survival, these various articles of
+institutional furniture, and many like them, have once presumably been
+suitable to some end, in the days of their origin and vigorous growth;
+and they have at least in some passable fashion met some felt want; but
+if they ever had a place and use in the human economy they have in time
+grown imbecile and mischievous by force of changing circumstances, and
+the question is not how to replace them with something else to the same
+purpose after their purpose is outworn. A man who loses a wart off the
+end of his nose does not apply to the _Ersatz_ bureau for a convenient
+substitute.
+
+Now, a large proportion, perhaps even substantially the whole, of the
+existing apparatus of international rights, pretensions,
+discriminations, covenants and provisos, visibly fall in that class, in
+so far as concerns their material serviceability to the nation at large,
+and particularly as regards any other than a warlike purpose, offensive
+or defensive. Of course, the national dignity and diplomatic punctilio,
+and the like adjuncts and instrumentalities of the national honour, all
+have their prestige value; and they are not likely to be given up out of
+hand. In point of fact, however solicitous for a lasting peace these
+patriotically-minded modern peoples may be, it is doubtful if they could
+be persuaded to give up any appreciable share of these appurtenances of
+national jealousy even when their retention implies an imminent breach
+of the peace. Yet it is plain that the peace will be secure in direct
+proportion to the measure in which national discrimination and prestige
+are allowed to pass into nothingness and be forgot.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By so much as it might amount to, such neutralisation of outstanding
+interests between these pacific nations should bring on a degree of
+coalescence of these nationalities. In effect, they are now held apart
+in many respects by measures of precaution against their coming to a
+common plan of use and wont. The degree of coalescence would scarcely be
+extreme; more particularly it could not well become onerous, since it
+would rest on convenience, inclination and the neglect of artificial
+discrepancies. The more intimate institutions of modern life, that
+govern human conduct locally and in detail, need not be affected, or not
+greatly affected, for better or worse. Yet something appreciable in that
+way might also fairly be looked for in time.
+
+The nature, reach and prescriptive force of this prospective coalescence
+through neutralisation may perhaps best be appreciated in the light of
+what has already come to pass, without design or mandatory guidance, in
+those lines of human interest where the national frontiers interpose no
+bar, or at least no decisive bar, whether by force of unconcern or
+through impotence. Fashions of dress, equipage and decorous usage, e.g.,
+run with some uniformity throughout these modern nations, and indeed
+with some degree of prescriptive force. There is, of course, nothing
+mandatory, in the simpler sense, about all this; nor is the degree of
+conformity extreme or uniform throughout. But it is a ready-made
+generalisation that only those communities are incorporated in this
+cosmopolitan coalescence of usage that are moved by their own
+incitement, and only so far as they have an effectually felt need of
+conformity in these premises. It is true, a dispassionate outsider, if
+such there be, would perhaps be struck by the degree of such painstaking
+conformity to canons of conduct which it frequently must cost serious
+effort even to ascertain in such detail as the case calls for.
+Doubtless, or at least presumably, conformity under the jurisdiction of
+the fashions, and in related provinces of decorum, is obligatory in a
+degree that need not be looked for throughout the scheme of use and wont
+at large, even under the advisedly established non-interference of the
+authorities. Still, on a point on which the evidence hitherto is
+extremely scant it is the part of discretion to hold no settled opinion.
+
+A more promising line of suggestion is probably that afforded by the
+current degree of contact and consistency among the modern nations in
+respect of science and scholarship, as also in the aesthetic or the
+industrial arts. Local color and local pride, with one thing and another
+in the way of special incitement or inhibition, may come in to vary the
+run of things, or to blur or hinder a common understanding and mutual
+furtherance and copartnery in these matters of taste and intellect. Yet
+it is scarcely misleading to speak of the peoples of Christendom as one
+community in these respects. The sciences and the arts are held as a
+joint stock among these peoples, in their elements, and measurably also
+in their working-out. It is true, these interests and achievements of
+the race are not cultivated with the same assiduity or with identical
+effect throughout; but it is equally true that no effectual bar could
+profitably be interposed, or would be tolerated in the long run in this
+field, where men have had occasion to learn that unlimited collusion is
+more to the purpose than a clannish discrimination.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is, no doubt, beyond reasonable hope that these democratic peoples
+could be brought forthwith to concerted action on the lines of such a
+plan of peace by neutralisation of all outstanding national pretensions.
+Both the French and the English-speaking peoples are too eagerly set on
+national aims and national prestige, to allow such a plan to come to a
+hearing, even if something of the kind should be spoken for by their
+most trusted leaders. By settled habit they are thinking in terms of
+nationality, and just now they are all under the handicap of an inflamed
+national pride. Advocacy of such a plan, of course, does not enter
+seriously into the purpose of this inquiry; which is concerned with the
+conditions under which peace is sought today, with the further
+conditions requisite to its perpetuation, and with the probable effects
+of such a peace on the fortunes of these peoples in case peace is
+established and effectually maintained.
+
+It is a reasonable question, and one to which a provisional answer may
+be found, whether the drift of circumstances in the present and for the
+immediate future may be counted on to set in the direction of a
+progressive neutralisation of the character spoken of above, and
+therefore possibly toward a perpetuation of that peace that is to follow
+the present season of war. So also is it an open and interesting
+question whether the drift in that direction, if such is the set of it,
+can be counted on to prove sufficiently swift and massive, so as not to
+be overtaken and overborne by the push of agencies that make for
+dissension and warlike enterprise.
+
+Anything like a categorical answer to these questions would have to be a
+work of vaticination or of effrontery,--possibly as much to the point
+the one as the other. But there are certain conditions precedent to a
+lasting peace as the outcome of events now in train, and there are
+certain definable contingencies conditioned on such current facts as the
+existing state of the industrial arts and the state of popular
+sentiment, together with the conjuncture of circumstances under which
+these factors will come into action.
+
+The state of the industrial arts, as it bears on the peace and its
+violation, has been spoken of above. It is of such a character that a
+judiciously prepared offensive launched by any Power of the first rank
+at an opportune time can reach and lay waste any given country of the
+habitable globe. The conclusive evidence of this is at hand, and it is
+the major premise underlying all current proposals and projects of
+peace, as well as the refusal of the nations now on the defensive to
+enter into negotiations looking to an "inconclusive peace." This state
+of the case is not commonly recognised in so many words, but it is well
+enough understood. So that all peace projects that shall hope to find a
+hearing must make up their account with it, and must show cause why they
+should be judged competent to balk any attempted offensive. In an
+inarticulate or inchoate fashion, perhaps, but none the less with
+ever-increasing certitude and increasing apprehension, this state of the
+case is also coming to be an article of popular "knowledge and belief,"
+wherever much or little thought is spent on the outlook for peace. It
+has already had a visible effect in diminishing the exclusiveness of
+nationalities and turning the attention of the pacific peoples to the
+question of feasible ways and means of international cooperation in case
+of need; but it has not hitherto visibly lessened the militant spirit
+among these nations, nor has it lowered the tension of their national
+pride, at least not yet; rather the contrary, in fact.
+
+The effect, upon the popular temper, of this inchoate realisation of the
+fatality that so lies in the modern state of the industrial arts, varies
+from one country to another, according to the varying position in which
+they are placed, or in which they conceive themselves to be placed.
+Among the belligerent nations it has put the spur of fear to their need
+of concerted action as well as to their efforts to strengthen the
+national defense. But the state of opinion and sentiment abroad in the
+nation in time of war is no secure indication of what it will be after
+the return to peace. The American people, the largest and most
+immediately concerned of the neutral nations, should afford more
+significant evidence of the changes in the popular attitude likely to
+follow from a growing realisation of this state of the case, that the
+advantage has passed definitively to any well prepared and resolute
+offensive, and that no precautions of diplomacy and no practicable
+measures of defensive armament will any longer give security,--provided
+always that there is anywhere a national Power actuated by designs of
+imperial dominion.
+
+It is, of course, only little by little that the American people and
+their spokesmen have come to realise their own case under this
+late-modern situation, and hitherto only in an imperfect degree. Their
+first response to the stimulus has been a display of patriotic
+self-sufficiency and a move to put the national defense on a
+war-footing, such as would be competent to beat off all aggression.
+Those elements of the population who least realise the gravity of the
+situation, and who are at the same time commercially interested in
+measures of armament or in military preferment, have not begun to shift
+forward beyond this position of magniloquence and resolution; nor is
+there as yet much intimation that they see beyond it, although there is
+an ever-recurring hint that they in a degree appreciate the practical
+difficulty of persuading a pacific people to make adequate preparation
+beforehand, in equipment and trained man-power, for such a plan of
+self-sufficient self-defense. But increasingly among those who are, by
+force of temperament or insight or by lack of the pecuniary and the
+placeman's interest, less confident of an appeal to the nation's
+prowess, there is coming forward an evident persuasion that warlike
+preparations--"preparedness"--alone and carried through by the Republic
+in isolation, will scarcely serve the turn.
+
+There are at least two lines of argument, or of persuasion, running to
+the support of such a view; readiness for a warlike defense, by
+providing equipment and trained men, might prove a doubtfully effectual
+measure even when carried to the limit of tolerance that will always be
+reached presently in any democratic country; and then, too, there is
+hope of avoiding the necessity of such warlike preparation, at least in
+the same extreme degree, by means of some practicable working
+arrangement to be effected with other nations who are in the same case.
+Hitherto the farthest reach of these pacific schemes for maintaining the
+peace, or for the common defense, has taken the shape of a projected
+league of neutral nations to keep the peace by enforcement of specified
+international police regulations or by compulsory arbitration of
+international disputes. It is extremely doubtful how far, if at all,
+popular sentiment of any effectual force falls in with this line of
+precautionary measures. Yet it is evident that popular sentiment, and
+popular apprehension, has been stirred profoundly by the events of the
+past two years, and the resulting change that is already visible in the
+prevailing sentiment as regards the national defense would argue that
+more far-reaching changes in the same connection are fairly to be looked
+for within a reasonable allowance of time.
+
+In this American case the balance of effectual public opinion hitherto
+is to all appearance quite in doubt, but it is also quite unsettled. The
+first response has been a display of patriotic emotion and national
+self-assertion. The further, later and presumably more deliberate,
+expressions of opinion carry a more obvious note of apprehension and
+less of stubborn or unreflecting national pride. It may be too early to
+anticipate a material shift of base, to a more neutral, or less
+exclusively national footing in matters of the common defense.
+
+The national administration has been moving at an accelerated rate in
+the direction not of national isolation and self-reliance resting on a
+warlike equipment formidable enough to make or break the peace at
+will--such as the more truculent and irresponsible among the politicians
+have spoken for--but rather in the direction of moderating or curtailing
+all national pretensions that are not of undoubted material consequence,
+and of seeking a common understanding and concerted action with those
+nationalities whose effectual interests in the matters of peace and war
+coincide with the American. The administration has grown visibly more
+pacific in the course of its exacting experience,--more resolutely, one
+might even say more aggressively pacific; but the point of chief
+attention in all this strategy of peace has also visibly been shifting
+somewhat from the maintenance of a running equilibrium between
+belligerents and a keeping of the peace from day to day, to the ulterior
+and altogether different question of what is best to be done toward a
+conclusive peace at the close of hostilities, and the ways and means of
+its subsequent perpetuation.
+
+This latter is, in effect, an altogether different question from that of
+preserving neutrality and amicable relations in the midst of importunate
+belligerents, and it may even, conceivably, perhaps not unlikely, come
+to involve a precautionary breach of the current peace and a taking of
+sides in the war with an urgent view to a conclusive outcome. It would
+be going too far to impute to the administration, at the present stage,
+such an aggressive attitude in its pursuit of a lasting peace as could
+be called a policy of defensive offense; but it will shock no one's
+sensibilities to say that such a policy, involving a taking of sides and
+a renouncing of national isolation, is visibly less remote from the
+counsels of the administration today than it has been at any earlier
+period.
+
+In this pacific attitude, increasingly urgent and increasingly
+far-reaching and apprehensive, the administration appears to be speaking
+for the common man rather than for the special interests or the
+privileged classes. Such would appear, on the face of the returns, to be
+the meaning of the late election. It is all the more significant on that
+account, since in the long run it is after all the common man that will
+have to pass on the expediency of any settled line of policy and to bear
+the material burden of carrying it into effect.
+
+It may seem rash to presume that a popularly accredited administration
+in a democratic country must approximately reflect the effectual changes
+of popular sentiment and desire. Especially would it seem rash to anyone
+looking on from the point of view of an undemocratic nation, and
+therefore prone to see the surface fluctuations of excitement and
+shifting clamor. But those who are within the democratic pale will know
+that any administration in such a country, where official tenure and
+continued incumbency of the party rest on a popular vote,--any such
+administration is a political organisation and is guided by political
+expediency, in the tawdry sense of the phrase. Such a political
+situation has the defects of its qualities, as has been well and
+frequently expounded by its critics, but it has also the merits of its
+shortcomings. In a democracy of this modern order any incumbent of high
+office is necessarily something of a politician, quite indispensably so;
+and a politician at the same time necessarily is something of a
+demagogue. He yields to the popular drift, or to the set of opinion and
+demands among the effective majority on whom he leans; and he can not
+even appear to lead, though he may surreptitiously lead opinion in
+adroitly seeming to reflect it and obey it. Ostensible leadership, such
+as has been staged in this country from time to time, has turned out to
+be ostensible only. The politician must be adroit; but if he is also to
+be a statesman he must be something more. He is under the necessity of
+guessing accurately what the drift of events and opinion is going to be
+on the next reach ahead; and in taking coming events by the forelock he
+may be able to guide and shape the drift of opinion and sentiment
+somewhat to his own liking. But all the while he must keep within the
+lines of the long-term set of the current as it works out in the habits
+of thought of the common man.
+
+Such foresight and flexibility is necessary to continued survival, but
+flexibility of convictions alone does not meet the requirements. Indeed,
+it has been tried. It is only the minor politicians--the most numerous
+and long-lived, it is true--who can hold their place in the crevices of
+the party organisation, and get their livelihood from the business of
+party politics, without some power of vision and some hazard of
+forecast. It results from this state of the case that the drift of
+popular sentiment and the popular response to the stimulus of current
+events is reflected more faithfully and more promptly by the short-lived
+administrations of a democracy than by the stable and formally
+irresponsible governmental establishments of the older order. It should
+also be noted that these democratic administrations are in a less
+advantageous position for the purpose of guiding popular sentiment and
+shaping it to their own ends.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, it happens that at no period within the past half-century has the
+course of events moved with such celerity or with so grave a bearing on
+the common good and the prospective contingencies of national life as
+during the present administration. This apparent congruity of the
+administration's policy with the drift of popular feeling and belief
+will incline anyone to put a high rating on the administration's course
+of conduct, in international relations as well as in national measures
+that have a bearing on international relations, as indicating the course
+taken by sentiment and second thought in the community at large,--for,
+in effect, whether or not in set form, the community at large reflects
+on any matters of such gravity and urgency as to force themselves upon
+the attention of the common man.
+
+Two main lines of reflection have visibly been enforced on the
+administration by the course of events in the international field. There
+has been a growing apprehension, mounting in the later months to
+something like the rank of a settled conviction, that the Republic has
+been marked down for reduction to a vassal state by the dynastic Empire
+now engaged with its European adversaries. In so saying that the
+Republic has been marked down for subjection it is not intended to
+intimate that deliberate counsel has been had by the Imperial
+establishment on that prospective enterprise; still less that a
+resolution to such effect, with specification of ways and means, has
+been embodied in documentary form and deposited for future reference in
+the Imperial archives. All that is intended, and all that is necessary
+to imply, is that events are in train to such effect that the
+subjugation of the American republic will necessarily find its place in
+the sequence presently, provided that the present Imperial adventure is
+brought to a reasonably auspicious issue; though it does not follow that
+this particular enterprise need be counted on as the next large
+adventure in dominion to be undertaken when things again fall into
+promising shape. This latter point would, of course, depend on the
+conjuncture of circumstances, chief of which would have to be the
+exigencies of imperial dominion shaping the policy of the Empire's
+natural and necessary ally in the Far East. All this has evidently been
+coming more and more urgently into the workday deliberations of the
+American administration. Of course, it is not spoken of in set terms to
+this effect in official utterances, perhaps not even within doors; that
+sort of thing is not done. But it can do no harm to use downright
+expressions in a scientific discussion of these phenomena, with a view
+to understanding the current drift of things in this field.
+
+Beyond this is the similar apprehension, similarly though more slowly
+and reluctantly rising to the level of settled conviction, that the
+American commonwealth is not fit to take care of its own case
+single-handed. This apprehension is enforced more and more unmistakably
+with every month that passes on the theatre of war. And it is reenforced
+by the constantly more obvious reflection that the case of the American
+commonwealth in this matter is the same as that of the democratic
+countries of Europe, and of the other European colonies. It is not, or
+at least one may believe it is not yet, that in the patriotic
+apprehension of the common man, or of the administration which speaks
+for him, the resources of the country would be inadequate to meet any
+contingencies of the kind that might arise, whether in respect of
+industrial capacity or in point of man-power, if these resources were
+turned to this object with the same singleness of purpose and the same
+drastic procedure that marks the course of a national establishment
+guided by no considerations short of imperial dominion. The doubt
+presents itself rather as an apprehension that the cost would be
+extravagantly high, in all respects in which cost can be counted; which
+is presently seconded, on very slight reflection and review of
+experience, by recognition of the fact that a democracy is, in point of
+fact, not to be persuaded to stand under arms interminably in mere
+readiness for a contingency, however distasteful the contingency may be.
+
+In point of fact, a democratic commonwealth is moved by other interests
+in the main, and the common defense is a secondary consideration, not a
+primary interest,--unless in the exceptional case of a commonwealth so
+placed under the immediate threat of invasion as to have the common
+defense forced into the place of paramount consequence in its workday
+habits of thought. The American republic is not so placed. Anyone may
+satisfy himself by reasonable second thought that the people of this
+nation are not to be counted on to do their utmost in time of peace to
+prepare for war. They may be persuaded to do much more than has been
+their habit, and adventurous politicians may commit them to much more
+than the people at large would wish to undertake, but when all is done
+that can be counted on for a permanency, up to the limit of popular
+tolerance, it would be a bold guess that should place the result at more
+than one-half of what the country is capable of. Particularly would the
+people's patience balk at the extensive military training requisite to
+put the country in an adequate position of defense against a sudden and
+well-prepared offensive. It is otherwise with a dynastic State, to the
+directorate of which all other interests are necessarily secondary,
+subsidiary, and mainly to be considered only in so far as they are
+contributory to the nation's readiness for warlike enterprise.
+
+America at the same time is placed in an extra-hazardous position,
+between the two seas beyond which to either side lie the two Imperial
+Powers whose place in the modern economy of nations it is to disturb the
+peace in an insatiable quest of dominion. This position is no longer
+defensible in isolation, under the later state of the industrial arts,
+and the policy of isolation that has guided the national policy hitherto
+is therefore falling out of date. The question is as to the manner of
+its renunciation, rather than the fact of it. It may end in a defensive
+copartnership with other nations who are placed on the defensive by the
+same threatening situation, or it may end in a bootless struggle for
+independence, but the choice scarcely extends beyond this alternative.
+It will be said, of course, that America is competent to take care of
+itself and its Monroe doctrine in the future as in the past. But that
+view, spoken for cogently by thoughtful men and by politicians looking
+for party advantage, overlooks the fact that the modern technology has
+definitively thrown the advantage to the offensive, and that intervening
+seas can no longer be counted on as a decisive obstacle. On this latter
+head, what was reasonably true fifteen years ago is doubtful today, and
+it is in all reasonable expectation invalid for the situation fifteen
+years hence.
+
+The other peoples that are of a neutral temper may need the help of
+America sorely enough in their endeavours to keep the peace, but
+America's need of cooperation is sorer still, for the Republic is coming
+into a more precarious place than any of the others. America is also, at
+least potentially, the most democratic of the greater Powers, and is
+handicapped with all the disabilities of a democratic commonwealth in
+the face of war. America is also for the present, and perhaps for the
+calculable future, the most powerful of these greater Powers, in point
+of conceivably available resources, though not in actually available
+fighting-power; and the entrance of America unreservedly into a neutral
+league would consequently be decisive both of the purposes of the league
+and of its efficiency for the purpose; particularly if the
+neutralisation of interests among the members of the league were carried
+so far as to make withdrawal and independent action disadvantageous.
+
+On the establishment of such a neutral league, with such neutralisation
+of national interests as would assure concerted action in time of
+stress, the need of armament on the part of the American republic would
+disappear, at least to the extent that no increase of armed force would
+be advisable. The strength of the Republic lies in its large and varied
+resources and the unequalled industrial capacity of its population,--a
+capacity which is today seriously hampered by untoward business
+interests and business methods sheltered under national discrimination,
+but which would come more nearly to its own so soon as these national
+discriminations were corrected or abrogated in the neutralisation of
+national pretensions. The neutrally-minded countries of Europe have been
+constrained to learn the art of modern war, as also to equip themselves
+with the necessary appliances, sufficient to meet all requirements for
+keeping the peace through such a period as can or need be taken into
+account,--provided the peace that is to come on the conclusion of the
+present war shall be placed on so "conclusive" a footing as will make it
+anything substantially more than a season of recuperation for that
+warlike Power about whose enterprise in dominion the whole question
+turns. Provided that suitably "substantial guarantees" of a reasonable
+quiescence on the part of this Imperial Power are had, there need be no
+increase of the American armament. Any increased armament would in that
+case amount to nothing better than an idle duplication of plant and
+personnel already on hand and sufficient to meet the requirements.
+
+To meet the contingencies had in view in its formation, such a league
+would have to be neutralised to the point that all pertinent national
+pretensions would fall into virtual abeyance, so that all the necessary
+resources at the disposal of the federated nations would automatically
+come under the control of the league's appointed authorities without
+loss of time, whenever the need might arise. That is to say, national
+interests and pretensions would have to give way to a collective control
+sufficient to insure prompt and concerted action. In the face of such a
+neutral league Imperial Japan alone would be unable to make a really
+serious diversion or to entertain much hope of following up its quest of
+dominion. The Japanese Imperial establishment might even be persuaded
+peaceably to let its unoffending neighbours live their own life
+according to their own light. It is, indeed, possibly the apprehension
+of some such contingency that has hurried the rapacity of the Island
+Empire into the headlong indecencies of the past year or two.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+ELIMINATION OF THE UNFIT
+
+
+It may seem early (January 1917) to offer a surmise as to what must be
+the manner of league into which the pacific nations are to enter and by
+which the peace will be kept, in case such a move is to be made. But the
+circumstances that are to urge such a line of action, and that will
+condition its carrying out in case it is entered on, have already come
+into bearing and should, on the whole, no longer be especially obscure
+to anyone who will let the facts of the case rather than his own
+predilections decide what he will believe. By and large, the pressure of
+these conditioning circumstances may be seen, and the line of least
+resistance under this pressure may be calculated, with due allowance of
+a margin of error owing to unknown contingencies of time and minor
+variables.
+
+Time is of the essence of the case. So that what would have been
+dismissed as idle vapour two years ago has already become subject of
+grave deliberation today, and may rise to paramount urgency that far
+hence. Time is needed to appreciate and get used to any innovation of
+appreciable gravity, particularly where the innovation depends in any
+degree on a change in public sentiment, as in this instance. The present
+outlook would seem to be that no excess of time is allowed in these
+premises; but it should also be noted that events are moving with
+unexampled celerity, and are impinging on the popular apprehension with
+unexampled force,--unexampled on such a scale. It is hoped that a
+recital of these circumstances that provoke to action along this line
+will not seem unwarrantably tedious, and that a tentative definition of
+the line of least resistance under pressure of these circumstances may
+not seem unwarrantably presumptuous.
+
+The major premise in the case is the felt need of security from
+aggression at the hands of Imperial Germany and its auxiliary Powers;
+seconded by an increasingly uneasy apprehension as to the prospective
+line of conduct on the part of Imperial Japan, bent on a similar quest
+of dominion. There is also the less articulate apprehension of what, if
+anything, may be expected from Imperial Russia; an obscure and scarcely
+definable factor, which comes into the calculation chiefly by way of
+reenforcing the urgency of the situation created by the dynastic
+ambitions of these other two Imperial States. Further, the pacific
+nations, the leading ones among them being the French and
+English-speaking peoples, are coming to recognise that no one among them
+can provide for its own security single-handed, even at the cost of
+their utmost endeavour in the way of what is latterly called
+"preparedness;" and they are at the same time unwilling to devote their
+force unreservedly to warlike preparation, having nothing to gain. The
+solution proposed is a league of the pacific nations, commonly spoken of
+at the present stage as a league to enforce peace, or less ambitiously
+as a league to enforce arbitration. The question being left somewhat at
+loose ends, whether the projected league is to include the two or three
+Imperial Powers whose pacific intentions are, euphemistically, open to
+doubt.
+
+Such is the outline of the project and its premises. An attempt to fill
+in this outline will, perhaps, conduce to an appreciation of what is
+sought and of what the conditioning circumstances will enforce in the
+course of its realisation. As touches the fear of aggression, it has
+already been indicated, perhaps with unnecessary iteration, that these
+two Imperial Powers are unable to relinquish the quest of dominion
+through warlike enterprise, because as dynastic States they have no
+other ulterior aim; as has abundantly appeared in the great volume of
+expository statements that have come out of the Fatherland the past few
+years, official, semi-official, inspired, and spontaneous. "Assurance of
+the nation's future" is not translatable into any other terms. The
+Imperial dynasty has no other ground to stand on, and can not give up
+the enterprise so long as it can muster force for any formidable
+diversion, to get anything in the way of dominion by seizure, threat or
+chicane.
+
+This is coming to be informally and loosely, but none the less
+definitively, realised by the pacific nations; and the realisation of it
+is gaining in clearness and assurance as time passes. And it is backed
+by the conviction that, in the nature of things, no engagement on the
+part of such a dynastic State has any slightest binding force, beyond
+the material constraint that would enforce it from the outside. So the
+demand has been diplomatically phrased as a demand for "substantial
+guarantees." Any gain in resources on the part of these Powers is to be
+counted as a gain in the ways and means of disturbing the peace, without
+reservation.
+
+The pacific nations include among them two large items, both of which
+are indispensable to the success of the project, the United States and
+the United Kingdom. The former brings in its train, virtually without
+exception or question, the other American republics, none of which can
+practicably go in or stay out except in company and collusion with the
+United States. The United Kingdom after the same fashion, and with
+scarcely less assurance, may be counted on to carry the British
+colonies. Evidently, without both of these groups the project would not
+even make a beginning. Beyond this is to be counted in as elements of
+strength, though scarcely indispensable, France, Belgium, the
+Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. The other west-European
+nations would in all probability be found in the league, although so far
+as regards its work and its fortunes their adhesion would scarcely be a
+matter of decisive consequence; they may therefore be left somewhat on
+one side in any consideration of the circumstances that would shape the
+league, its aims and its limitations. The Balkan states, in the wider
+acceptance, they that frequent the Sign of the Double Cross, are
+similarly negligible in respect of the organisation of such a league or
+its resources and the mutual concessions necessary to be made between
+its chief members. Russia is so doubtful a factor, particularly as
+regards its place and value in industry, culture and politics, in the
+near future, as to admit nothing much more than a doubt on what its
+relation to the situation will be. The evil intentions of the
+Imperial-bureaucratic establishment are probably no more to be
+questioned than the good intentions of the underlying peoples of Russia.
+China will have to be taken in, if for no other reason than the use to
+which the magnificent resources of that country would be turned by its
+Imperial neighbour in the absence of insurmountable interference from
+outside. But China will come in on any terms that include neutrality and
+security.
+
+The question then arises as to the Imperial Powers whose dynastic
+enterprise is primarily to be hedged against by such a league.
+Reflection will show that if the league is to effect any appreciable
+part of its purpose, these Powers will also be included in the league,
+or at least in its jurisdiction. A pacific league not including these
+Powers, or not extending its jurisdiction and surveillance to them and
+their conduct, would come to the same thing as a coalition of nations in
+two hostile groups, the one standing on the defensive against the
+warlike machinations of the other, and both groups bidding for the favor
+of those minor Powers whose traditions and current aspirations run to
+national (dynastic) aggrandizement by way of political intrigue. It
+would come to a more articulate and accentuated form of that balance of
+power that has latterly gone bankrupt in Europe, with the most corrupt
+and unreliable petty monarchies of eastern Europe vested with a casting
+vote; and it would also involve a system of competitive armaments of the
+same general character as what has also shown itself bankrupt. It would,
+in other words, mean a virtual return to the _status quo ante_, but with
+an overt recognition of its provisional character, and with the lines of
+division more sharply drawn. That is to say, it would amount to
+reinstating the situation which the projected league is intended to
+avert. It is evidently contained in the premises that the projected
+league must be all-inclusive, at least as regards its jurisdiction and
+surveillance. The argument will return to this point presently.
+
+The purpose of the projected league is peace and security, commonly
+spoken of under patriotic preconceptions as "national" peace and
+security. This will have to mean a competent enforcement of peace, on
+such a footing of overmastering force at the disposal of the associated
+pacific nations as to make security a matter of ordinary routine. It is
+true, the more genial spokesmen of the project are given to the view
+that what is to come of it all is a comity of neutral nations, amicably
+adjusting their own relations among themselves in a spirit of peace and
+good-will. But this view is over-sanguine, in that it overlooks the
+point that into this prospective comity of nations Imperial Germany (and
+Imperial Japan) fit like a drunken savage with a machine gun. It also
+overlooks the patent fatality that these two are bound to come into a
+coalition at the next turn, with whatever outside and subsidiary
+resources they can draw on; provided only that a reasonable opening for
+further enterprise presents itself. The league, in other terms, must be
+in a position to enforce peace by overmastering force, and to anticipate
+any move at cross purposes with the security of the pacific nations.
+
+This end can be reached by either one of two ways. If the dynastic
+States are left to their own devices, it will be incumbent on the
+associated nations to put in the field a standing force sufficient to
+prevent a recourse to arms; which means competitive armament and
+universal military rule. Or the dynastic States may be taken into
+partnership and placed under such surveillance and constraint as to
+practically disarm them; which would admit virtual disarmament of the
+federated nations. The former arrangement has nothing in its favour,
+except the possibility that no better or less irksome arrangement can be
+had under existing circumstances; that is to say that the pacific
+nations may not be able to bring these dynastic states to terms of
+disarmament under surveillance. They assuredly can not except by force;
+and this is the precise point on which the continued hostilities in
+Europe turn today. In diplomatic parable the German Imperial spokesmen
+say that they can accept (or as they prefer to phrase it, grant) no
+terms that do not fully safeguard the Future of the Fatherland; and in
+similarly diplomatic parable the spokesmen of the Entente insist that
+Prussian militarism must be permanently put out of commission; but it
+all means the same thing, viz. that the Imperial establishment is to be
+(or is not to be) disabled beyond the possibility of its entering on a
+similar warlike enterprise again, when it has had time for recuperation.
+The dynastic statesmen, and the lay subjects of the Imperial
+establishment, are strenuously set on securing a fair opportunity for
+recuperation and a wiser endeavour to achieve that dominion which the
+present adventure promises to defeat; while the Entente want no
+recurrence, and are persuaded that a recurrence can be avoided only on
+the footing of a present collapse of the Imperial power and a
+scrupulously enforced prostration of it henceforth.
+
+Without the definitive collapse of the Imperial power no pacific league
+of nations can come to anything much more than armistice. On the basis
+of such a collapse the league may as well administer its affairs
+economically by way of an all-around reduction of armaments, as by the
+costlier and more irksome way of "preparedness." But a sensible
+reduction of armaments on the part of the neutral nations implies
+disarmament of the dynastic States. Which would involve a neutral
+surveillance of the affairs of these dynastic States in such detail and
+with such exercise of authority as would reduce their governments to the
+effective status of local administrative officials. Out of which, in
+turn, would arise complications that would lead to necessary
+readjustments all along the line. It would involve the virtual, if not
+also the formal, abolition of the monarchy, since the monarchy has no
+other use than that of international war and intrigue; or at least it
+would involve the virtual abrogation of its powers, reducing it to the
+same status of _faineantise_ as now characterises the British crown.
+Evidently this means a serious intermeddling in the domestic concerns
+and arrangements of the Fatherland, such as is not admissible under the
+democratic principle that any people must be left free to follow their
+own inclinations and devices in their own concerns; at the same time
+that this degree of interference is imperative if the peace is to be
+kept on any other footing than that of eternal vigilance and superior
+armed force, with a people whose own inclinations and devices are of the
+kind now grown familiar in the German case,--all of which also applies,
+with accentuation, in the case of Imperial Japan.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some such policy of neutral surveillance in the affairs of these peoples
+whose pacific temper is under suspicion, is necessarily involved in a
+plan to enforce peace by concert of the pacific nations, and it will
+necessarily carry implications and farther issues, touching not only
+these supposedly recalcitrant peoples, but also as regards the pacific
+nations themselves. Assuming always that the prime purpose and
+consistent aim of the projected league is the peace and security of
+those pacific nations on whose initiative it is to be achieved, then it
+should be reasonable to assume that the course of procedure in its
+organisation, administration and further adaptations and adjustments
+must follow the logic of necessities leading to that end. He who wills
+the end must make up his account with the means.
+
+The end in this case is peace and security; which means, for practical
+purposes, peace and good-will. Ill-will is not a secure foundation of
+peace. Even the military strategists of the Imperial establishment
+recommend a programme of "frightfulness" only as a convenient military
+expedient, essentially a provisional basis of tranquility. In the long
+run and as a permanent peace measure it is doubtless not to the point.
+Security is finally to be had among or between modern peoples only on
+the ground of a common understanding and an impartially common basis of
+equity, or something approaching that basis as nearly as circumstances
+will permit. Which means that in so far as the projected peace-compact
+is to take effect in any enduring way, and leave the federated nations
+some degree of freedom from persistent apprehension and animosity, as
+well as from habitual insecurity of life and limb, the league must not
+only be all-inclusive, but it must be inclusively uniform in all its
+requirements and regulations.
+
+The peoples of the quondam Imperial nations must come into the league on
+a footing of formal equality with the rest. This they can not do without
+the virtual abdication of their dynastic governmental establishments and
+a consequent shift to a democratic form of organisation, and a formal
+abrogation of class privileges and prerogatives.
+
+However, a virtual abdication or cancelment of the dynastic rule, such
+as to bring it formally into the same class with the British crown,
+would scarcely meet the requirements in the case of the German Imperial
+establishment; still more patently not in the case of Imperial Japan.
+If, following the outlines of the decayed British crown, one or the
+other of these Imperial establishments were by formal enactment reduced
+to a state of nominal desuetude, the effect would be very appreciably
+different from what happens in the British community, where the crown
+has lost its powers by failure of the requisite subordination on the
+part of the people, and not by a formal abdication of rights. In the
+German case, and even more in the Japanese case, the strength of the
+Imperial establishment lies in the unimpaired loyalty of the populace;
+which would remain nearly intact at the outset, and would thin out only
+by insensible degrees in the sequel; so that if only the Imperial
+establishment were left formally standing it would command the fealty of
+the common run in spite of any formal abrogation of its powers, and the
+course of things would, in effect, run as before the break. In effect,
+to bring about a shift to a democratic basis the dynastic slate would
+have to be wiped very clean indeed. And this shift would be
+indispensable to the successful conduct of such a pacific league of
+nations, since any other than an effectually democratic national
+establishment is to be counted on unfailingly to intrigue for dynastic
+aggrandizement, through good report and evil.
+
+In a case like that of Imperial Germany, with its federated States and
+subsidiaries, where royalty and nobility still are potent preconceptions
+investing the popular imagination, and where loyal abnegation in the
+presence of authority still is the chief and staple virtue of the common
+man,--in all such cases virtual abdication of the dynastic initiative
+under constitutional forms can be had only by a formal and scrupulously
+complete abrogation of all those legal and customary arrangements on
+which this irresponsible exercise of authority has rested and through
+which it has taken effect. Neutralisation in these instances will mean
+reduction to an unqualified democratic footing; which will, at least at
+the outset, not be acceptable to the common people, and will be wholly
+intolerable to the ruling classes. Such a régime, therefore, while it is
+indispensable as a working basis for a neutral league of peace, would
+from the outset have to be enforced against the most desperate
+resistance of the ruling classes, headed by the dynastic statesmen and
+warlords, and backed by the stubborn loyalty of the subject populace. It
+would have to mean the end of things for the ruling classes and the most
+distasteful submission to an alien scheme of use and wont for the
+populace. And yet it is also an indispensable element in any scheme of
+pacification that aims at permanent peace and security. In time, it may
+well be believed, the people of the Fatherland might learn to do well
+enough without the gratuitous domination of their ruling classes, but at
+the outset it would be a heartfelt privation.
+
+It follows that a league to enforce peace would have to begin its régime
+with enforcing peace on terms of the unconditional surrender of the
+formidable warlike nations; which could be accomplished only by the
+absolute and irretrievable defeat of these Powers as they now stand. The
+question will, no doubt, present itself, Is the end worth the cost? That
+question can, of course, not be answered in absolute terms, inasmuch as
+it resolves itself into a question of taste and prepossession. An answer
+to it would also not be greatly to the purpose here, since it would have
+no particular bearing on the course of action likely to be pursued by
+these pacific nations in their quest of a settled peace. It is more to
+the point to ask what is likely to be the practical decision of these
+peoples on that head when the question finally presents itself in a
+concrete form.
+
+Again it is necessary to call to mind that any momentous innovation
+which rests on popular sentiment will take time; that consequently
+anything like a plébiscite on the question today would scarcely give a
+safe index of what the decision is likely to be when presently put to
+the test; and that as things go just now, swiftly and urgent, any
+time-allowance counts at something more than its ordinary workday
+coefficient. What can apparently be said with some degree of confidence
+is that just now, during these two years past, sentiment has been moving
+in the direction indicated, and that any growing inclination of the kind
+is being strongly reenforced by a growing realisation that nothing but
+heroic remedies will avail at this juncture. If it comes to be currently
+recognised that a settled peace can be had only at the cost of
+eradicating privilege and royalty from the warlike nations, it would
+seem reasonable to expect, from their present state of mind, that the
+pacific nations will scarcely hesitate to apply that remedy,--provided
+always that the fortunes of war fall out as that measure would require,
+and provided also that the conflict lasts long enough and severe enough
+to let them make up their mind to anything so drastic.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is a certain side issue bearing on this question of the ulterior
+probabilities of popular sentiment and national policy as to what is to
+be done with the warlike nations in the event that the allied nations
+who fight for neutrality have the disposal of such matters. This side
+issue may seem remote, and it may not unlikely be overlooked among the
+mass of graver and more tangible considerations. It was remarked above
+that the United Kingdom is one of the two chief pillars of the projected
+house of peace; and it may be added without serious fear of
+contradiction or annoyance that the United Kingdom is also the one among
+these pacific nations that comes nearest being capable, in the event of
+such an emergency, to take care of its own case single-handed. For
+better or worse, British adhesion to the project is indispensable, and
+the British are in a position virtually to name their own terms of
+adhesion. The British commonwealth--a very inclusive phrase in this
+connection--must form the core of the pacific league, if any, and
+British sentiment will have a very great place in the terms of its
+formation and in the terms which it will be inclined to offer the
+Imperial coalition at the settlement.
+
+Now, it happens that the British community entered on this war as a
+democratic monarchy ruled and officered by a body of gentlemen--doubtless
+the most correct and admirable muster of gentlemen, of anything approaching
+its volume, that the modern world can show. But the war has turned out not
+to be a gentlemen's war. It has on the contrary been a war of technological
+exploits, reenforced with all the beastly devices of the heathen. It is a
+war in which all the specific traits of the well-bred and gently-minded man
+are a handicap; in which veracity, gallantry, humanity, liberality are
+conducive to nothing but defeat and humiliation. The death-rate among the
+British gentlemen-officers in the early months, and for many months, ran
+extravagantly high, for the most part because they were gallant
+gentlemen as well as officers imbued with the good, old class spirit of
+_noblesse oblige_, that has made half the tradition and more than half
+the working theory of the British officer in the field,--good, but old,
+hopelessly out of date. That generation of officers died, for the most
+part; being unfit to survive or to serve the purpose under these modern
+conditions of warfare, to which their enemy on the other hand had
+adapted themselves with easy facility from beforehand. The gentlemanly
+qualifications, and the material apparatus of gentility, and, it will
+perhaps have to be admitted, the gentlemen, have fallen into the
+background, or perhaps rather have measurably fallen into abeyance,
+among the officers of the line. There may be more doubt as to the state
+of things in respect of the gentility of the staff, but the best that
+can confidently be said is that it is a point in doubt.
+
+It is hoped that one may say without offense that in the course of time
+the personnel has apparently worked down to the level of vulgarity
+defined by the ways and means of this modern warfare; which means the
+level on which runs a familiar acquaintance with large and complex
+mechanical apparatus, railway and highway transport and power,
+reenforced concrete, excavations and mud, more particularly mud,
+concealment and ambush, and unlimited deceit and ferocity. It is not
+precisely that persons of pedigree and gentle breeding have ceased to
+enter or seek entrance to employment as officers, still less that
+measures have been taken to restrain their doing so or to eliminate from
+the service those who have come into it--though there may present itself
+a doubt on this point as touches the more responsible discretionary
+positions--but only that the stock of suitable gentlemen, uncommonly
+large as it is, has been overdrawn; that those who have latterly gone
+into service, or stayed in, have perforce divested themselves of their
+gentility in some appreciable measure, particularly as regards class
+distinction, and have fallen on their feet in the more commonplace role
+of common men.
+
+Serviceability in this modern warfare is conditioned on much the same
+traits of temperament and training that make for usefulness in the
+modern industrial processes, where large-scale coordinations of movement
+and an effective familiarity with precise and far-reaching mechanical
+processes is an indispensable requirement,--indispensable in the same
+measure as the efficient conduct of this modern machine industry is
+indispensable. But the British gentleman, in so far as he runs true to
+type, is of no use to modern industry; quite the contrary, in fact.
+Still, the British gentleman is, in point of heredity, the same thing
+over again as the British common man; so that, barring the misdirected
+training that makes him a gentleman, and which can largely be undone
+under urgent need and pressure, he can be made serviceable for such uses
+as the modern warfare requires. Meantime the very large demand for
+officers, and the insatiable demand for capable officers, has brought
+the experienced and capable common man into the case and is in a fair
+way to discredit gentility as a necessary qualification of field
+officers.
+
+But the same process of discredit and elimination is also extending to
+the responsible officials who have the administration of things in hand.
+Indeed, the course of vulgarisation among the responsible officials has
+now been under way for some appreciable time and with very perceptible
+effect, and the rate of displacement appears to be gathering velocity
+with every month that passes. Here, as in the field operations, it also
+appears that gentlemanly methods, standards, preconceptions, and
+knowledge of men and things, is no longer to the purpose. Here, too, it
+is increasingly evident that this is not a gentlemen's war. And the
+traditional qualifications that have sufficed in the past, at least to
+the extent of enabling the British management to "muddle through," as
+they are proudly in the habit of saying,--these qualifications are of
+slight account in this technological conjuncture of the nation's
+fortunes. It would perhaps be an under-statement to say that these
+gentlemanly qualifications are no longer of any account, for the purpose
+immediately in hand, and it would doubtless not do to say that they are
+wholly and unreservedly disserviceable as things run today; but captious
+critics might find at least a precarious footing of argument on such a
+proposition.
+
+Through the course of the nineteenth century the British government had
+progressively been taking on the complexion of a "gentlemen's
+agreement;" a government by gentlemen, for gentlemen, and of gentlemen,
+too, beyond what could well be alleged in any other known instance,
+though never wholly so. No government could be a government of gentlemen
+exclusively, since there is no pecuniary profit in gentlemen as such,
+and therefore no object in governing them; more particularly could there
+never be any incentive in it for gentlemen, whose livelihood is, in the
+nature of the case, drawn from some one else. A gentlemen's government
+can escape death by inanition only in so far as it serves the material
+interest of its class, as contrasted with the underlying population from
+which the class draws its livelihood. This British arrangement of a
+government by prudent and humane gentlemen with a view to the
+conservation of that state of things that best conduced to the material
+well-being of their own class, has on the whole had the loyal support of
+the underlying populace, with an occasional floundering protest. But
+the protest has never taken the shape of an expressed distrust of
+gentlemen, considered as the staple ways and means of government; nor
+has the direction of affairs ever descended into the hands of any other
+or lower class or condition of men.
+
+On the whole, this British arrangement for the control of national
+affairs by a body of interested gentlemen-investors has been, and
+perhaps still is, just as well at home in the affectionate
+preconceptions of the nineteenth-century British as the corresponding
+German usufruct by self-appointed swaggering aristocrats has been among
+the underlying German population, or as the American arrangement of
+national control by business men for business ends. The British and the
+American arrangements run very much to the same substantial effect, of
+course, inasmuch as the British gentlemen represent, as a class, the
+filial generations of a business community, and their aims and standards
+of conduct continue to be such as are enforced by the pecuniary
+interests on which their gentility is conditioned. They continue to draw
+the ways and means of a worthy life from businesslike arrangements of a
+"vested" character, made and provided with a view to their nourishment
+and repose. Their resulting usufruct of the community's productive
+efforts rests on a vested interest of a pecuniary sort, sanctioned by
+the sacred rights of property; very much as the analogous German
+dynastic and aristocratic usufruct rests on personal prerogative,
+sanctioned by the sacred rights of authentic prescription, without
+afterthought. The two, it will be noted are very much alike, in effect,
+"under the skin." The great distinguishing mark being that the German
+usufructuary gentlemen are, in theory at least, gentlemen-adventurers of
+prowess and proud words, whose place in the world's economy it is to
+glorify God and disturb the peace; whereas their British analogues are
+gentlemen-investors, of blameless propriety, whose place it is more
+simply to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
+
+All this arrangement of a usufruct with a view to the reputable
+consumption of the community's superfluous production has had the
+cordial support of British sentiment, perhaps fully as cordial as the
+German popular subservience in the corresponding German scheme; both
+being well embedded in the preconceptions of the common man. But the war
+has put it all to a rude test, and has called on the British gentlemen's
+executive committee to take over duties for which it was not designed.
+The exigencies of this war of technological exploits have been almost
+wholly, and very insistently, of a character not contemplated in the
+constitution of such an executive committee of gentlemen-investors
+designed to safeguard class interests and promote their pecuniary class
+advantage by a blamelessly inconspicuous and indirect management of
+national affairs. The methods are of the class known colloquially among
+the vulgar-spoken American politicians as "pussyfooting" and
+"log-rolling"; but always with such circumstance of magnitude,
+authenticity and well-bred deference to precedent, as to give the
+resulting routine of subreption, trover and conversion, an air not only
+of benevolent consideration but of austere morality.
+
+But the most austere courtesy and the most authentically dispassionate
+division of benefits will not meet the underbred exigencies of a war
+conducted on the mechanistic lines of the modern state of the industrial
+arts. So the blameless, and for the purpose imbecile, executive
+committee of gentlemen-investors has been insensibly losing the
+confidence and the countenance of the common man; who, when all is said,
+will always have to do what is to be done. The order of gentlemanly
+parleying and brokery has, therefore, with many apprehensions of
+calamity, been reluctantly and tardily giving ground before something
+that is of a visibly underbred order. Increasingly underbred, and
+thereby insensibly approaching the character of this war situation, but
+accepted with visible reluctance and apprehension both by the ruling
+class and by the underlying population. The urgent necessity of going to
+such a basis, and of working out the matter in hand by an unblushing
+recourse to that matter-of-fact logic of mechanical efficiency, which
+alone can touch the difficulties of the case, but which has no respect
+of persons,--this necessity has been present from the outset and has
+been vaguely apprehended for long past, but it is only tardily and after
+the chastening of heavy penalties on this gentlemanly imbecility that a
+substantial move in that direction has been made. It has required much
+British resolution to overcome the night-fear of going out into the
+unhallowed ground of matter-of-fact, where the farthest earlier
+excursions of the governmental agencies had taken them no farther than
+such financial transactions as are incident to the accomplishment of
+anything whatever in a commercial nation. And then, too, there is a
+pecuniary interest in being interested in financial transactions.
+
+This shifting of discretionary control out of the hands of the gentlemen
+into those of the underbred common run, who know how to do what is
+necessary to be done in the face of underbred exigencies, may
+conceivably go far when it has once been started, and it may go forward
+at an accelerated rate if the pressure of necessity lasts long enough.
+If time be given for habituation to this manner of directorate in
+national affairs, so that the common man comes to realise how it is
+feasible to get along without gentlemen-investors holding the
+discretion, the outcome may conceivably be very grave. It is a point in
+doubt, but it is conceivable that in such a case the gentlemanly
+executive committee administering affairs in the light of the
+gentlemanly pecuniary interest, will not be fully reinstated in the
+discretionary control of the United Kingdom for an appreciable number of
+years after the return of peace. Possibly, even, the régime may be
+permanently deranged, and there is even a shadowy doubt possible to be
+entertained as to whether the vested pecuniary rights, on which the
+class of gentlemen rests, may not suffer some derangement, in case the
+control should pass into the hands of the underbred and unpropertied for
+so long a season as to let the common man get used to thinking that the
+vested interests and the sacred rights of gentility are so much ado
+about nothing.
+
+Such an outcome would be extreme, but as a remote contingency it is to
+be taken into account. The privileged classes of the United Kingdom
+should by this time be able to see the danger there may be for them and
+their vested interests, pecuniary and moral, in an excessive
+prolongation of the war; in such postponement of peace as would afford
+time for a popular realisation of their incompetence and
+disserviceability as touches the nation's material well-being under
+modern conditions. To let the nation's war experience work to such an
+outcome, the season of war would have to be prolonged beyond what either
+the hopes or the fears of the community have yet contemplated; but the
+point is after all worth noting, as being within the premises of the
+case, that there is herein a remote contingency of losing, at least for
+a time, that unformulated clause in the British constitution which has
+hitherto restricted the holding of responsible office to men of pedigree
+and of gentle breeding, or at least of very grave pecuniary weight; so
+grave as to make the incumbents virtual gentlemen, with a virtual
+pedigree, and with a virtual gentleman's accentuated sense of class
+interest. Should such an eventuality overtake British popular sentiment
+and belief there is also the remote contingency that the rights of
+ownership and investment would lose a degree of sanctity.
+
+It seems necessary to note a further, and in a sense more improbable,
+line of disintegration among modern fixed ideas. Among the best
+entrenched illusions of modern economic preconceptions, and in economic
+as well as legal theory, has been the indispensability of funds, and the
+hard and fast limitation of industrial operations by the supply or
+with-holding of funds. The war experience has hitherto gone tentatively
+to show that funds and financial transactions, of credit, bargain, sale
+and solvency, may be dispensed with under pressure of necessity; and
+apparently without seriously hindering that run of mechanical fact, on
+which interest in the present case necessarily centers, and which must
+be counted on to give the outcome. Latterly the case is clearing up a
+little further, on further experience and under further pressure of
+technological exigencies, to the effect that financial arrangements are
+indispensable in this connection only because and in so far as it has
+been arranged to consider them indispensable; as in international trade.
+They are an indispensable means of intermediation only in so far as
+pecuniary interests are to be furthered or safeguarded in the
+intermediation. When, as has happened with the belligerents in the
+present instance, the national establishment becomes substantially
+insolvent, it is beginning to appear that its affairs can be taken care
+of with less difficulty and with better effect without the use of
+financial expedients. Of course, it takes time to get used to doing
+things by the more direct method and without the accustomed
+circumlocution of accountancy, or the accustomed allowance for profits
+to go to interested parties who, under the financial régime, hold a
+power of discretionary permission in all matters that touch the use of
+the industrial arts. Under these urgent material exigencies, investment
+comes to have much of the appearance of a gratuitous drag and drain on
+the processes of industry.
+
+Here, again, is a sinister contingency; sinister, that is, for those
+vested rights of ownership by force of which the owners of "capital" are
+enabled to permit or withhold the use of the industrial arts by the
+community at large, on pain of privation in case the accustomed toll to
+the owners of capital is not paid. It is, of course, not intended to
+find fault with this arrangement; which has the sanction of "time
+immemorial" and of a settled persuasion that it lies at the root of all
+civilised life and intercourse. It is only that in case of extreme need
+this presumed indispensable expedient of industrial control has broken
+down, and that experience is proving it to be, in these premises, an
+item of borrowed trouble. Should experience continue to run on the same
+lines for an appreciable period and at a high tension, it is at least
+conceivable that the vested right of owners to employ unlimited sabotage
+in the quest of profits might fall so far into disrepute as to leave
+them under a qualified doubt on the return of "normal" conditions. The
+common man, in other words, who gathers nothing but privation and
+anxiety from the owners' discretionary sabotage, may conceivably stand
+to lose his preconception that the vested rights of ownership are the
+cornerstone of his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The considerations recited in this lengthy excursion on the war
+situation and its probable effects on popular habits of thought in the
+United Kingdom go to say that when peace comes to be negotiated, with
+the United Kingdom as the chief constituent and weightiest spokesman of
+the allied nations and of the league of pacific neutrals, the
+representatives of British aims and opinions are likely to speak in a
+different, chastened, and disillusioned fashion, as contrasted with what
+the British attitude was at the beginning of hostilities. The
+gentlemanly British animus of arrogant self-sufficiency will have been
+somewhat sobered, perhaps somewhat subdued. Concession to the claims and
+pretensions of the other pacific nations is likely to go farther than
+might once have been expected, particularly in the way of concession to
+any demand for greater international comity and less international
+discrimination; essentially concession looking to a reduction of
+national pretensions and an incipient neutralisation of national
+interests. Coupled with this will presumably be a less conciliatory
+attitude toward the members of the dynastic coalition against whom the
+war has been fought, owing to a more mature realisation of the
+impossibility of a lasting peace negotiated with a Power whose
+substantial core is a warlike and irresponsible dynastic establishment.
+The peace negotiations are likely to run on a lower level of diplomatic
+deference to constituted authorities, and with more of a view to the
+interests and sentiments of the underlying population, than was evident
+in the futile negotiations had at the outbreak of hostilities. The
+gentle art of diplomacy, that engages the talents of exalted personages
+and well-bred statesmen, has been somewhat discredited; and if it turns
+out that the vulgarisation of the directorate in the United Kingdom and
+its associated allies and neutrals will have time to go on to something
+like dominance and authenticity, then the deference which the spokesmen
+of these nations are likely to show for the prescriptive rights of
+dynasty, nobility, bureaucracy, or even of pecuniary aristocracy, in the
+countries that make up the party of the second part, may be expected to
+have shrunk appreciably, conceivably even to such precarious dimensions
+as to involve the virtual neglect or possible downright abrogation of
+them, in sum and substance.
+
+Indeed, the chances of a successful pacific league of neutrals to come
+out of the current situation appear to be largely bound up with the
+degree of vulgarisation due to overtake the several directorates of the
+belligerent nations as well as the popular habits of thought in these
+and in the neutral countries, during the further course of the war. It
+is too broad a generalisation, perhaps, to say that the longer the war
+lasts the better are the chances of such a neutral temper in the
+interested nations as will make a pacific league practicable, but the
+contrary would appear a much less defensible proposition. It is, of
+course, the common man that has the least interest in warlike
+enterprise, if any, and it is at the same time the common man that bears
+the burden of such enterprise and has also the most immediate interest
+in keeping the peace. If, slowly and pervasively, in the course of hard
+experience, he learns to distrust the conduct of affairs by his betters,
+and learns at the same move to trust to his own class to do what is
+necessary and to leave undone what is not, his deference to his betters
+is likely to suffer a decline, such as should show itself in a somewhat
+unguarded recourse to democratic ways and means.
+
+In short, there is in this progressive vulgarisation of effectual use
+and wont and of sentiment, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, some
+slight ground for the hope, or the apprehension, that no peace will be
+made with the dynastic Powers of the second part until they cease to be
+dynastic Powers and take on the semblance of democratic commonwealths,
+with dynasties, royalties and privileged classes thrown in the discard.
+
+This would probably mean some prolongation of hostilities, until the
+dynasties and privileged classes had completely exhausted their
+available resources; and, by the same token, until the privileged
+classes in the more modern nations among the belligerents had also been
+displaced from direction and discretion by those underbred classes on
+whom it is incumbent to do what is to be done; or until a juncture were
+reached that comes passably near to such a situation. On the contingency
+of such a course of events and some such outcome appears also to hang
+the chance of a workable pacific league. Without further experience of
+the futility of upper-class and pecuniary control, to discredit
+precedent and constituted authority, it is scarcely conceivable, e.g.,
+that the victorious allies would go the length of coercively discarding
+the German Imperial dynasty and the kept classes that with it constitute
+the Imperial State, and of replacing it with a democratic organisation
+of the people in the shape of a modern commonwealth; and without a
+change of that nature, affecting that nation and such of its allies as
+would remain on the map, no league of pacific neutrals would be able to
+manage its affairs, even for a time, except on a war-footing that would
+involve a competitive armament against future dynastic enterprises from
+the same quarter. Which comes to saying that a lasting peace is possible
+on no other terms than the disestablishment of the Imperial dynasty and
+the abrogation of all feudalistic remnants of privilege in the
+Fatherland and its allies, together with the reduction of those
+countries to the status of commonwealths made up of ungraded men.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is easy to speculate on what the conditions precedent to such a
+pacific league of neutrals must of necessity be; but it is not therefore
+less difficult to make a shrewd guess as to the chances of these
+conditions being met. Of these conditions precedent, the chief and
+foremost, without which any other favorable circumstances are
+comparatively idle, is a considerable degree of neutralisation,
+extending to virtually all national interests and pretensions, but more
+particularly to all material and commercial interests of the federated
+peoples; and, indispensably and especially, such neutralisation would
+have to extend to the nations from whom aggression is now apprehended,
+as, e.g., the German people. But such neutralisation could not
+conceivably reach the Fatherland unless that nation were made over in
+the image of democracy, since the Imperial State is, by force of the
+terms, a warlike and unneutral power. This would seem to be the
+ostensibly concealed meaning of the allied governments in proclaiming
+that their aim is to break German militarism without doing harm to the
+German people.
+
+As touches the neutralisation of the democratically rehabilitated
+Fatherland, or in default of that, as touches the peace terms to be
+offered the Imperial government, the prime article among the
+stipulations would seem to be abolition of all trade discrimination
+against Germany or by Germany against any other nationality. Such
+stipulation would, of course, cover all manner of trade
+discrimination,--e.g., import, export and excise tariff, harbor and
+registry dues, subsidy, patent right, copyright, trade mark, tax
+exemption whether partial or exclusive, investment preferences at home
+and abroad,--in short it would have to establish a thoroughgoing
+neutralisation of trade relations in the widest acceptation of the term,
+and to apply in perpetuity. The like applies, of course, to all that
+fringe of subsidiary and outlying peoples on whom Imperial Germany
+relies for much of its resources in any warlike enterprise. Such a move
+also disposes of the colonial question in a parenthesis, so far as
+regards any special bond of affiliation between the Empire, or the
+Fatherland, and any colonial possessions that are now thought desirable
+to be claimed. Under neutralisation, colonies would cease to be
+"colonial possessions," being necessarily included under the general
+abrogation of commercial discriminations, and also necessarily exempt
+from special taxation or specially favorable tax rates.
+
+Colonies there still would be, though it is not easy to imagine what
+would be the meaning of a "German Colony" in such a case. Colonies would
+be free communities, after the fashion of New Zealand or Australia, but
+with the further sterilisation of the bond between colony and mother
+country involved in the abolition of all appointive offices and all
+responsibility to the crown or the imperial government. Now, there are
+no German colonies in this simpler British sense of the term, which
+implies nothing more than community of blood, institutions and language,
+together with that sense of solidarity between the colony and the mother
+country which this community of pedigree and institutions will
+necessarily bring; but while there are today no German colonies, in the
+sense of the term so given, there is no reason to presume that no such
+German colonies would come into bearing under the conditions of this
+prospective régime of neutrality installed by such a pacific league,
+when backed by the league's guarantee that no colony from the Fatherland
+will be exposed to the eventual risk of coming under the discretionary
+tutelage of the German Imperial establishment and so falling into a
+relation of step-childhood to the Imperial dynasty.
+
+As is well known, and as has by way of superfluous commonplace been set
+forth by a sometime Colonial Secretary of the Empire, the decisive
+reason for there being no German colonies in existence is the
+consistently impossible colonial policy of the German government,
+looking to the usufruct of the colonies by the government, and the fear
+of further arbitrary control and nepotic discrimination at the pleasure
+of the self-seeking dynastic establishment. It is only under Imperial
+rule that no German colony, in this modern sense of the term, is
+possible; and only because Imperial rule does not admit of a free
+community being formed by colonists from the Fatherland; or of an
+ostensibly free community of that kind ever feeling secure from
+unsolicited interference with its affairs.
+
+The nearest approach to a German Colony, as contrasted with a "Colonial
+Possession," hitherto have been the very considerable, number of
+escaped German subjects who have settled in English-speaking or
+Latin-speaking countries, particularly in North and South America. And
+considering that the chief common trait among them is their successful
+evasion of the Imperial government's heavy hand, they show an admirable
+filial piety toward the Imperial establishment; though troubled with no
+slightest regret at having escaped from the Imperial surveillance and no
+slightest inclination to return to the shelter of the Imperial tutelage.
+A colloquialism--"hyphenate"--has latterly grown up to meet the need of
+a term to designate these evasive and yet patriotic colonists. It is
+scarcely misleading to say that the German-American hyphenate, e.g., in
+so far as he runs true to form, is still a German subject with his
+heart, but he is an American citizen with his head. All of which goes to
+argue that if the Fatherland were to fall into such a state of
+democratic tolerance that no recidivist need carry a defensive hyphen to
+shield him from the importunate attentions of the Imperial government,
+German colonies would also come into bearing; although, it is true, they
+would have no value to the German government.
+
+In the Imperial colonial policy colonies are conceived to stand to their
+Imperial guardian or master in a relation between that of a step-child
+and that of an indentured servant; to be dealt with summarily and at
+discretion and to be made use of without scruple. The like attitude
+toward colonies was once familiar matter-of-course with the British and
+Spanish statesmen. The British found the plan unprofitable, and also
+unworkable, and have given it up. The Spanish, having no political
+outlook but the dynastic one, could of course not see their way to
+relinquish the only purpose of their colonial enterprise, except in
+relinquishing their colonial possessions. The German (Imperial) colonial
+policy is and will be necessarily after the Spanish pattern, and
+necessarily, too, with the Spanish results.
+
+Under the projected neutral scheme there would be no colonial policy,
+and of course, no inducement to the acquisition of colonies, since
+there would be no profit to be derived, or to be fancied, in the case.
+But while no country, as a commonwealth, has any material interest in
+the acquisition or maintenance of colonies, it is otherwise as regards
+the dynastic interests of an Imperial government; and it is also
+otherwise, at least in the belief of the interested parties, as regards
+special businessmen or business concerns who are in a position to gain
+something by help of national discrimination in their favor. As regards
+the pecuniary interests of favored businessmen or business concerns, and
+of investors favored by national discrimination in colonial relations,
+the case falls under the general caption of trade discrimination, and
+does not differ at all materially from such expedients as a protective
+tariff, a ship subsidy, or a bounty on exports. But as regards the
+warlike, that is to say dynastic, interest of an Imperial government the
+case stands somewhat different.
+
+Colonial Possessions in such a case yield no material benefit to the
+country at large, but their possession is a serviceable plea for warlike
+preparations with which to retain possession of the colonies in the face
+of eventualities, and it is also a serviceable means of stirring the
+national pride and keeping alive a suitable spirit of patriotic
+animosity. The material service actually to be derived from such
+possessions in the event of war is a point in doubt, with the
+probabilities apparently running against their being of any eventual net
+use. But there need be no question that such possessions, under the hand
+of any national establishment infected with imperial ambitions, are a
+fruitful source of diplomatic complications, excuses for armament,
+international grievances, and eventual aggression. A pacific league of
+neutrals can evidently not tolerate the retention of colonial
+possessions by any dynastic State that may be drawn into the league or
+under its jurisdiction, as, e.g., the German Empire in case it should be
+left on an Imperial footing. Whereas, in case the German peoples are
+thrown back on a democratic status, as neutralised commonwealths without
+a crown or a military establishment, the question of their colonial
+possessions evidently falls vacant.
+
+As to the neutralisation of trade relations apart from the question of
+colonies, and as bears on the case of Germany under the projected
+jurisdiction of a pacific league of neutrals, the considerations to be
+taken account of are of much the same nature. As it would have to take
+effect, e.g., in the abolition of commercial and industrial
+discriminations between Germany and the pacific nations, such
+neutralisation would doubtless confer a lasting material benefit on the
+German people at large; and it is not easy to detect any loss or
+detriment to be derived from such a move so long as peace prevails.
+Protective, that is to say discriminating, export, import, or excise
+duties, harbor and registry dues, subsidies, tax exemptions and trade
+preferences, and all the like devices of interference with trade and
+industry, are unavoidably a hindrance to the material interests of any
+people on whom they are imposed or who impose these disabilities on
+themselves. So that exemption from these things by a comprehensive
+neutralisation of trade relations would immediately benefit all the
+nations concerned, in respect of their material well-being in times of
+peace. There is no exception and no abatement to be taken account of
+under this general statement, as is well known to all men who are
+conversant with these matters.
+
+But it is otherwise as regards the dynastic interest in the case, and as
+regards any national interest in warlike enterprise. It is doubtless
+true that all restraint of trade between nations, and between classes or
+localities within the national frontiers, unavoidably acts to weaken and
+impoverish the people on whose economic activities this restraint is
+laid; and to the extent to which this effect is had it will also be true
+that the country which so is hindered in its work will have a less
+aggregate of resources to place at the disposal of its enterprising
+statesmen for imperialist ends. But these restraints may yet be useful
+for dynastic, that is to say warlike, ends by making the country more
+nearly a "self-contained economic whole." A country becomes a
+"self-contained economic whole" by mutilation, in cutting itself off
+from the industrial system in which industrially it belongs, but in
+which it is unwilling nationally to hold its place. National frontiers
+are industrial barriers. But as a result of such mutilation of its
+industrial life such a country is better able--it has been believed--to
+bear the shock of severing its international trade relations entirely,
+as is likely to happen in case of war.
+
+In a large country, such as America or Russia, which comprises within
+its national boundaries very extensive and very varied resources and a
+widely distributed and diversified population, the mischief suffered
+from restraints of trade that hinder industrial relations with the world
+at large will of course be proportionately lessened. Such a country
+comes nearer being a miniature industrial world; although none of the
+civilised nations, large or small, can carry on its ordinary industrial
+activities and its ordinary manner of life without drawing on foreign
+parts to some appreciable extent. But a country of small territorial
+extent and of somewhat narrowly restricted natural resources, as, e.g.,
+Germany or France, can even by the most drastic measures of restraint
+and mutilation achieve only a very mediocre degree of industrial
+isolation and "self-sufficiency,"--as has, e.g., appeared in the present
+war. But in all cases, though in varying measure, the mitigated
+isolation so enforced by these restraints on trade will in their degree
+impair the country's industrial efficiency and lower the people's
+material well-being; yet, if the restrictions are shrewdly applied this
+partial isolation and partial "self-sufficiency" will go some way toward
+preparing the nation for the more thorough isolation that follows on the
+outbreak of hostilities.
+
+The present plight of the German people under war conditions may serve
+to show how nearly that end may be attained, and yet how inadequate even
+the most unreserved measures of industrial isolation must be in face of
+the fact that the modern state of the industrial arts necessarily draws
+on the collective resources of the world at large. It may well be
+doubted, on an impartial view, if the mutilation of the country's
+industrial system by such measures of isolation does not after all
+rather weaken the nation even for warlike ends; but then, the
+discretionary authorities in the dynastic States are always, and it may
+be presumed necessarily, hampered with obsolete theories handed down
+from that cameralistic age, when the little princes of the Fatherland
+were making dynastic history. So, e.g., the current, nineteenth and
+twentieth century, economic policy of the Prussian-Imperial statesmen is
+still drawn on lines within which Frederick II, called the Great, would
+have felt well at home.
+
+Like other preparation for hostilities this reduction of the country to
+the status of a self-contained economic organisation is costly, but
+like other preparation for hostilities it also puts the nation in a
+position of greater readiness to break off friendly relations with its
+neighbors. It is a war measure, commonly spoken for by its advocates as
+a measure of self-defense; but whatever the merits of the
+self-defenders' contention, this measure is a war measure. As such it
+can reasonably claim no hearing in the counsels of a pacific league of
+neutrals, whose purpose it is to make war impracticable. Particularly
+can there be no reasonable question of admitting a policy of trade
+discrimination and isolation on the part of a nation which has, for
+purposes of warlike aggression, pursued such a policy in the past, and
+which it is the immediate purpose of the league to bind over to keep the
+peace.
+
+There has been a volume of loose talk spent on the justice and
+expediency of boycotting the trade of the peoples of the Empire after
+the return of peace, as a penalty and as a preventive measure designed
+to retard their recovery of strength with which to enter on a further
+warlike enterprise. Such a measure would necessarily be somewhat futile;
+since "Business is business," after all, and the practical limitations
+imposed on an unprofitable boycott by the moral necessity to buy cheap
+and sell dear that rests on all businessmen would surreptitiously
+mitigate it to the point of negligibility. It is inconceivable--or it
+would be inconceivable in the absence of imbecile politicians and
+self-seeking businessmen--that measures looking to the trade isolation
+of any one of these countries could be entertained as a point of policy
+to be pursued by a league of neutrals. And it is only in so far as
+patriotic jealousy and vindictive sentiments are allowed to displace the
+aspiration for peace and security, that such measures can claim
+consideration. Considered as a penalty to be imposed on the erring
+nations who set this warlike adventure afoot, it should be sufficiently
+plain that such a measure as a trade boycott could not touch the chief
+offenders, or even their responsible abettors. It would, rather, play
+into the hands of the militarist interests by keeping alive the spirit
+of national jealousy and international hatred, out of which wars arise
+and without which warlike enterprise might hopefully be expected to
+disappear out of the scheme of human intercourse. The punishment would
+fall, as all economic burdens and disabilities must always fall, on the
+common man, the underlying population.
+
+The chief relation of this common run, this underlying population of
+German subjects, to the inception and pursuit of this Imperial warlike
+enterprise, is comprised in the fact that they are an underlying
+population of subjects, held in usufruct by the Imperial establishment
+and employed at will. It is true, they have lent themselves unreservedly
+to the uses for which the dynasty has use for them, and they have
+entered enthusiastically into the warlike adventure set afoot by the
+dynastic statesmen; but that they have done so is their misfortune
+rather than their fault. By use and wont and indoctrination they have
+for long been unremittingly, and helplessly, disciplined into a spirit
+of dynastic loyalty, national animosity and servile abnegation; until it
+would be nothing better than a pathetic inversion of all the equities of
+the case to visit the transgressions of their masters upon the common
+run; whose fault lies, after all, in their being an underlying
+population of subjects, who have not had a chance to reach that
+spiritual level on which they could properly be held accountable for the
+uses to which they are turned. It is true, men are ordinarily punished
+for their misfortunes; but the warlike enterprise of the Imperial
+dynasty has already brought what might fairly be rated as a good measure
+of punishment on this underlying populace, whose chief fault and chief
+misfortune lies in an habitual servile abnegation of those traits of
+initiative and discretion in man that constitute him an agent
+susceptible of responsibility or retribution.
+
+It would be all the more of a pathetic mockery to visit the
+transgressions of their masters on these victims of circumstance and
+dynastic mendacity, since the conventionalities of international equity
+will scarcely permit the high responsible parties in the case to be
+chastised with any penalty harsher than a well-mannered figure of
+speech. To serve as a deterrent, the penalty must strike the point where
+vests the discretion; but servile use and wont is still too well intact
+in these premises to let any penalty touch the guilty core of a
+profligate dynasty. Under the wear and tear of continued war and its
+incident continued vulgarisation of the directorate and responsible
+staff among the pacific allies, the conventional respect of persons is
+likely to suffer appreciable dilapidation; but there need be no
+apprehension of such a loss of decent respect for personages as would
+compromise the creature comforts of that high syndicate of personages on
+whose initiative the Fatherland entered upon this enterprise in
+dominion.
+
+Bygone shortcomings and transgressions can have no reasonable place in
+the arrangements by which a pacific league of neutrals designs to keep
+the peace. Neither can bygone prerogatives and precedents of
+magnificence and of mastery, except in so far as they unavoidably must
+come into play through the inability of men to divest themselves of
+their ingrained preconceptions, by virtue of which a Hohenzollern or a
+Hapsburger is something more formidable and more to be considered than a
+recruiting sergeant or a purveyor of light literature. The league can do
+its work of pacification only by elaborately forgetting differences and
+discrepancies of the kind that give rise to international grievances.
+Which is the same as saying that the neutralisation of national
+discriminations and pretensions will have to go all the way, if it is to
+serve. But this implies, as broadly as need be, that the pacific nations
+who make the league and provisionally administer its articles of
+agreement and jurisdiction, can not exempt themselves from any of the
+leveling measures of neutralisation to which the dynastic suspects among
+them are to be subject. It would mean a relinquishment of all those
+undemocratic institutional survivals out of which international
+grievances are wont to arise. As a certain Danish adage would have it,
+the neutrals of the league must all be shorn over the same comb.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What is to be shorn over this one comb of neutralisation and democracy
+is all those who go into the pacific league of neutrals and all who come
+under its jurisdiction, whether of their own choice or by the
+necessities of the case. It is of the substance of the case that those
+peoples who have been employed in the campaigns of the German-Imperial
+coalition are to come in on terms of impartial equality with those who
+have held the ground against them; to come under the jurisdiction, and
+prospectively into the copartnery, of the league of neutrals--all on the
+presumption that the Imperial coalition will be brought to make peace on
+terms of unconditional surrender.
+
+Let it not seem presumptuous to venture on a recital of summary
+specifications intended to indicate the nature of those concrete
+measures which would logically be comprised in a scheme of pacification
+carried out with such a view to impartial equality among the peoples who
+are to make up the projected league. There is a significant turn of
+expression that recurs habitually in the formulation of terms put forth
+by the spokesmen of the Entente belligerents, where it is insisted that
+hostilities are carried on not against the German people or the other
+peoples associated with them, but only against the Imperial
+establishments and their culpable aids and abettors in the enterprise.
+So it is further insisted that there is no intention to bring pains and
+penalties on these peoples, who so have been made use of by their
+masters, but only on the culpable master class whose tools these peoples
+have been. And later, just now (January 1917), and from a responsible
+and disinterested spokesman for the pacific league, there comes the
+declaration that a lasting peace at the hands of such a league can be
+grounded only in a present "peace without victory."
+
+The mutual congruity of these two declarations need not imply collusion,
+but they are none the less complementary propositions and they are none
+the less indicative of a common trend of convictions among the men who
+are best able to speak for those pacific nations that are looked to as
+the mainstay of the prospective league. They both converge to the point
+that the objective to be achieved is not victory for the Entente
+belligerents but defeat for the German-Imperial coalition; that the
+peoples underlying the defeated governments are not to be dealt with as
+vanquished enemies but as fellows in undeserved misfortune brought on by
+their culpable masters; and that no advantage is designed to be taken of
+these peoples, and no gratuitous hardship to be imposed on them. Their
+masters are evidently to be put away, not as defeated antagonists but as
+a public nuisance to be provided against as may seem expedient for the
+peace and security of those nations whom they have been molesting.
+
+Taking this position as outlined, it should not be extremely difficult
+to forecast the general line of procedure which it would logically
+demand,--barring irrelevant regard for precedents and overheated
+resentment, and provided that the makers of these peace terms have a
+free hand and go to their work with an eye single to the establishment
+of an enduring peace. The case of Germany would be typical of all the
+rest; and the main items of the bill in this case would seem logically
+to run somewhat as follows:
+
+(1) The definitive elimination of the Imperial establishment, together
+with the monarchical establishments of the several states of the Empire
+and the privileged classes;
+
+(2) Removal or destruction of all warlike equipment, military and naval,
+defensive and offensive;
+
+(3) Cancelment of the public debt, of the Empire and of its
+members--creditors of the Empire being accounted accessory to the
+culpable enterprise of the Imperial government;
+
+(4) Confiscation of such industrial equipment and resources as have
+contributed to the carrying on of the war, as being also accessory;
+
+(5) Assumption by the league at large of all debts incurred, by the
+Entente belligerents or by neutrals, for the prosecution or by reason of
+the war, and distribution of the obligation so assumed, impartially
+among the members of the league, including the peoples of the defeated
+nations;
+
+(6) Indemnification for all injury done to civilians in the invaded
+territories; the means for such indemnification to be procured by
+confiscation of all estates in the defeated countries exceeding a
+certain very modest maximum, calculated on the average of property
+owned, say, by the poorer three-fourths of the population,--the kept
+classes being properly accounted accessory to the Empire's culpable
+enterprise.
+
+The proposition to let the war debt be shared by all members of the
+league on a footing of impartial equality may seem novel, and perhaps
+extravagant. But all projects put forth for safeguarding the world's
+peace by a compact among the pacific nations run on the patent, though
+often tacit, avowal that the Entente belligerents are spending their
+substance and pledging their credit for the common cause. Among the
+Americans, the chief of the neutral nations, this is coming to be
+recognised more and more overtly. So that, in this instance at least, no
+insurmountable reluctance to take over their due share of the common
+burden should fairly be looked for, particularly when it appears that
+the projected league, if it is organised on a footing of neutrality,
+will relieve the republic of virtually all outlay for their own defense.
+
+Of course, there is, in all this, no temerarious intention to offer
+advice as to what should be done by those who have it to do, or even to
+sketch the necessary course which events are bound to take. As has been
+remarked in another passage, that would have to be a work of prophesy or
+of effrontery, both of which, it is hoped, lie equally beyond the
+horizon of this inquiry; which is occupied with the question of what
+conditions will logically have to be met in order to an enduring peace,
+not what will be the nature and outcome of negotiations entered into by
+astute delegates pursuing the special advantage, each of his own nation.
+And yet the peremptory need of reaching some practicable arrangement
+whereby the peace may be kept, goes to say that even the most astute
+negotiations will in some degree be controlled by that need, and may
+reasonably be expected to make some approach to the simple and obvious
+requirements of the situation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Therefore the argument returns to the United Kingdom and the probable
+limit of tolerance of that people, in respect of what they are likely to
+insist on as a necessary measure of democratisation in the nations of
+the second part, and what measure of national abnegation they are likely
+to accommodate themselves to. The United Kingdom is indispensable to the
+formation of a pacific league of neutrals. And the British terms of
+adhesion, or rather of initiation of such a league, therefore, will have
+to constitute the core of the structure, on which details may be
+adjusted and to which concessive adjustments will have to be made by all
+the rest. This is not saying that the projected league must or will be
+dominated by the United Kingdom or administered in the British interest.
+Indeed, it can not well be made to serve British particular interests in
+any appreciable degree, except at the cost of defeat to its main
+purpose; since the purposes of an enduring peace can be served only by
+an effectual neutralisation of national claims and interests. But it
+would mean that the neutralisation of national interests and
+discriminations to be effected would have to be drawn on lines
+acceptable to British taste in these matters, and would have to go
+approximately so far as would be dictated by the British notions of what
+is expedient, and not much farther. The pacific league of neutrals would
+have much of a British air, but "British" in this connection is to be
+taken as connoting the English-speaking countries rather than as
+applying to the United Kingdom alone; since the entrance of the British
+into the league would involve the entrance of the British colonies, and,
+indeed, of the American republic as well.
+
+The temper and outlook of this British community, therefore, becomes a
+matter of paramount importance in any attempted analysis of the
+situation resulting after the war, or of any prospective course of
+conduct to be entered on by the pacific nations. And the question
+touches not so much the temper and preconceptions of the British
+community as known in recent history, but rather as it is likely to be
+modified by the war experience. So that the practicability of a neutral
+league comes to turn, in great measure, on the effect which this war
+experience is having on the habits of thought of the British people, or
+on that section of the British population which will make up the
+effectual majority when the war closes. The grave interest that attaches
+to this question must serve as justification for pursuing it farther,
+even though there can be no promise of a definite or confident answer to
+be found beforehand.
+
+Certain general assertions may be made with some confidence. The
+experiences of the war, particularly among the immediate participants
+and among their immediate domestic connections--a large and increasing
+proportion of the people at large--are plainly impressing on them the
+uselessness and hardship of such a war. There can be no question but
+they are reaching a conviction that a war of this modern kind and scale
+is a thing to be avoided if possible. They are, no doubt, willing to go
+to very considerable lengths to make a repetition of it impossible, and
+they may reasonably be expected to go farther along that line before
+peace returns. But the lengths to which they are ready to go may be in
+the way of concessions, or in the way of contest and compulsion. There
+need be no doubt but a profound and vindictive resentment runs through
+the British community, and there is no reason to apprehend that this
+will be dissipated in the course of further hostilities; although it
+should fairly be expected to lose something of its earlier exuberant
+malevolence and indiscrimination, more particularly if hostilities
+continue for some time. It is not too much to expect, that this popular
+temper of resentment will demand something very tangible in the way of
+summary vengeance on those who have brought the hardships of war upon
+the nation.
+
+The manner of retribution which would meet the popular demand for
+"justice" to be done on the enemy is likely to be affected by the
+fortunes of war, as also the incidence of it. Should the governmental
+establishment and the discretion still vest in the gentlemanly classes
+at the close of hostilities, the retribution is likely to take the
+accustomed gentlemanly shape of pecuniary burdens imposed on the people
+of the defeated country, together with diplomatically specified
+surrender of territorial and colonial possessions, and the like; such as
+to leave the _de facto_ enemy courteously on one side, and to yield
+something in the way of pecuniary benefit to the gentlemen-investors in
+charge, and something more in the way of new emoluments of office to the
+office-holding class included in the same order of gentlemen. The
+retribution in the case would manifestly fall on the underlying
+population in the defeated country, without seriously touching the
+responsible parties, and would leave the defeated nation with a new
+grievance to nourish its patriotic animosity and with a new incentive
+to a policy of watchful waiting for a chance of retaliation.
+
+But it is to be noted that under the stress of the war there is going
+forward in the British community a progressive displacement of
+gentlemanly standards and official procedure by standards and procedure
+of a visibly underbred character, a weakening of the hold of the
+gentlemanly classes on the control of affairs and a weakening of the
+hold which the sacred rights of property, investment and privilege have
+long had over the imagination of the British people. Should hostilities
+continue, and should the exigencies of the war situation continue to
+keep the futility of these sacred rights, as well as the fatuity of
+their possessors, in the public eye, after the same fashion as hitherto,
+it would not be altogether unreasonable to expect that the discretion
+would pass into the hands of the underbred, or into the hands of men
+immediately and urgently accountable to the underbred. In such a case,
+and with a constantly growing popular realisation that the directorate
+and responsible enemy in the war is the Imperial dynasty and its
+pedigreed aids and abettors, it is conceivable that the popular
+resentment would converge so effectually on these responsible
+instigators and directors of misfortune as to bring the incidence of the
+required retribution effectually to bear on them. The outcome might, not
+inconceivably, be the virtual erasure of the Imperial dynasty, together
+with the pedigreed-class rule on which it rests and the apparatus of
+irresponsible coercion through which it works, in the Fatherland and in
+its subsidiaries and dependencies.
+
+With a sufficiently urgent realisation of their need of peace and
+security, and with a realisation also that the way to avoid war is to
+avoid the ways and means of international jealousy and of the national
+discriminations out of which international jealousy grows, it is
+conceivable that a government which should reflect the British temper
+and the British hopes might go so far in insisting on a neutralisation
+of the peoples of the Fatherland as would leave them without the
+dynastic apparatus with which warlike enterprise is set afoot, and so
+leave them also perforce in a pacific frame of mind. In time, in the
+absence of their dearly beloved leavings of feudalism, an enforced
+reliance on their own discretion and initiative, and an enforced respite
+from the rant and prance of warlike swagger, would reasonably be
+expected to grow into a popular habit. The German people are by no means
+less capable of tolerance and neighbourly decorum than their British or
+Scandinavian neighbours of the same blood,--if they can only be left to
+their own devices, untroubled by the maggoty conceit of national
+domination.
+
+There is no intention herewith to express an expectation that this
+out-and-out neutralisation of the Fatherland's international relations
+and of its dynastic government will come to pass on the return of peace,
+or that the German people will, as a precaution against recurrent
+Imperial rabies, be organised on a democratic pattern by constraint of
+the pacific nations of the league. The point is only that this measure
+of neutralisation appears to be the necessary condition, in the absence
+of which no such neutral league can succeed, and that so long as the war
+goes on there is something of a chance that the British community may in
+time reach a frame of mind combining such settled determination to
+safeguard the peace at all costs, with such a degree of disregard for
+outworn conventions, that their spokesmen in the negotiations may push
+the neutralisation of these peoples to that length.
+
+The achievement of such an outcome would evidently take time as well as
+harsh experience, more time and harsher experience, perhaps, than one
+likes to contemplate.
+
+Most men, therefore, would scarcely rate the chance of such an outcome
+at all high. And yet it is to be called to mind that the war has lasted
+long and the effect of its demands and its experience has already gone
+far, and that the longer it lasts the greater are the chances of its
+prolongation and of its continued hardships, at least to the extent that
+with every month of war that passes the prospect of the allied nations
+making peace on any terms short of unconditional surrender grows less.
+And unconditional surrender is the first step in the direction of an
+unconditional dispossession of the Imperial establishment and its war
+prophets,--depending primarily on the state of mind of the British
+people at the time. And however unlikely, it is also always possible, as
+some contend, that in the course of further war experience the common
+man in the Fatherland may come to reflect on the use and value of the
+Imperial establishment, with the result of discarding and disowning it
+and all its works. Such an expectation would doubtless underrate the
+force of ancient habit, and would also involve a misapprehension of the
+psychological incidence of a warlike experience. The German people have
+substantially none of those preconceptions of independence and
+self-direction to go on, in the absence of which an effectual revulsion
+against dynastic rule can not come to pass.
+
+Embedded in the common sense of the British population at large is a
+certain large and somewhat sullen sense of fair dealing. In this they
+are not greatly different from their neighbours, if at all, except that
+the body of common sense in which this British sense of fair dealing
+lies embedded is a maturer fashion of common sense than that which
+serves to guide the workday life of many of their neighbours. And the
+maturity in question appears to be chiefly a matter of their having
+unlearned, divested themselves of, or been by force of disuse divested
+of, an exceptionally large proportion of that burden of untoward
+conceits which western Europe, and more particularly middle Europe, at
+large has carried over from the Middle Ages. They have had time and
+occasion to forget more of what the exigencies of modern life make it
+expedient to have forgotten. And yet they are reputed slow,
+conservative. But they have been well placed for losing much of what
+would be well lost.
+
+Among other things, their preconception of national animosity is not
+secure, in the absence of provocation. They are now again in a position
+to learn to do without some of the useless legacy out of the
+past,--useless, that is, for life as it runs today, however it may be
+rated in the setting in which it was all placed in that past out of
+which it has come. And the question is whether now, under the pressure
+of exigencies that make for a disestablishment of much cumbersome
+inherited apparatus for doing what need not be done, they will be ruled
+by their sense of expediency and of fair dealing to the extent of
+cancelling out of their own scheme of life so much of this legacy of
+conventional preconceptions as has now come visibly to hinder their own
+material well-being, and at the same time to defeat that peace and
+security for which they have shown themselves willing to fight. It is,
+of course, a simpler matter to fight than it is to put away a
+preconceived, even if it is a bootless, superstition; as, e.g., the
+prestige of hereditary wealth, hereditary gentility, national
+vainglory, and perhaps especially national hatred. But if the school is
+hard enough and the discipline protracted enough there is no reason in
+the nature of things why the common run of the British people should not
+unlearn these futilities that once were the substance of things under an
+older and outworn order. They have already shown their capacity for
+divesting themselves of outworn institutional bonds, in discarding the
+main substance of dynastic rule; and when they now come to face the
+exigencies of this new situation it should cause no great surprise if
+they are able to see their way to do what further is necessary to meet
+these exigencies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the hands of this British commonwealth the new situation requires the
+putting away of the German Imperial establishment and the military
+caste; the reduction of the German peoples to a footing of unreserved
+democracy with sufficient guarantees against national trade
+discriminations; surrender of all British tutelage over outlying
+possessions, except what may go to guarantee their local autonomy;
+cancelment of all extra-territorial pretensions of the several nations
+entering into the league; neutralisation of the several national
+establishments, to comprise virtual disarmament, as well as cancelment
+of all restrictions on trade and of all national defense of
+extra-territorial pecuniary claims and interests on the part of
+individual citizens. The naval control of the seas will best be left in
+British hands. No people has a graver or more immediate interest in the
+freedom and security of the sea-borne trade; and the United Kingdom has
+shown that it is to be trusted in that matter. And then it may well be
+that neither the national pride nor the apprehensions of the British
+people would allow them to surrender it; whereas, if the league is to
+be formed it will have to be on terms to which the British people are
+willing to adhere. A certain provision of armed force will also be
+needed to keep the governments of unneutral nations in check,--and for
+the purpose in hand all effectively monarchical countries are to be
+counted as congenitally unneutral, whatever their formal professions and
+whether they are members of the league or not. Here again it will
+probably appear that the people of the United Kingdom, and of the
+English-speaking countries at large, will not consent to this armed
+force and its discretionary use passing out of British hands, or rather
+out of French-British hands; and here again the practical decision will
+have to wait on the choice of the British people, all the more because
+the British community has no longer an interest, real or fancied, in the
+coercive use of this force for their own particular ends. No other power
+is to be trusted, except France, and France is less well placed for the
+purpose and would assuredly also not covet so invidious an honour and so
+thankless an office.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The theory, i.e. the logical necessities, of such a pacific league of
+neutral nations is simple enough, in its elements. War is to be avoided
+by a policy of avoidance. Which signifies that the means and the motives
+to warlike enterprise and warlike provocation are to be put away, so far
+as may be. If what may be, in this respect, does not come up to the
+requirements of the case, the experiment, of course, will fail. The
+preliminary requirement,--elimination of the one formidable dynastic
+State in Europe,--has been spoken of. Its counterpart in the Far East
+will cease to be formidable on the decease of its natural ally in
+Central Europe, in so far as touches the case of such a projected
+league. The ever increasingly dubious empire of the Czar would appear to
+fall in the same category. So that the pacific league's fortunes would
+seem to turn on what may be called its domestic or internal
+arrangements.
+
+Now, the means of warlike enterprise, as well as of unadvised
+embroilment, is always in the last analysis the patriotic spirit of the
+nation. Given this patriotic spirit in sufficient measure, both the
+material equipment and the provocation to hostilities will easily be
+found. It should accordingly appear to be the first care of such a
+pacific league to reduce the sources of patriotic incitement to the
+practicable minimum. This can be done, in such measure as it can be done
+at all, by neutralisation of national pretensions. The finished outcome
+in this respect, such as would assure perpetual peace among the peoples
+concerned, would of course be an unconditional neutralisation of
+citizenship, as has already been indicated before. The question which,
+in effect, the spokesmen for a pacific league have to face is as to how
+nearly that outcome can be brought to pass. The rest of what they may
+undertake, or may come to by way of compromise and stipulation, is
+relatively immaterial and of relatively transient consequence.
+
+A neutralisation of citizenship has of course been afloat in a somewhat
+loose way in the projects of socialistic and other "undesirable"
+agitators, but nothing much has come of it. Nor have specific projects
+for its realisation been set afoot. That anything conclusive along that
+line could now be reached would seem extremely doubtful, in view of the
+ardent patriotic temper of all these peoples, heightened just now by the
+experience of war. Still, an undesigned and unguided drift in that
+direction has been visible in all those nations that are accounted the
+vanguard among modern civilised peoples, ever since the dynastic rule
+among them began to be displaced by a growth of "free" institutions,
+that is to say institutions resting on an accepted ground of
+insubordination and free initiative.
+
+The patriotism of these peoples, or their national spirit, is after all
+and at the best an attenuated and impersonalised remnant of dynastic
+loyalty, and it amounts after all, in effect, to nothing much else than
+a residual curtailment or partial atrophy of that democratic habit of
+mind that embodies itself in the formula: Live and let live. It is, no
+doubt, both an ancient and a very meritorious habit. It is easily
+acquired and hard to put away. The patriotic spirit and the national
+life (prestige) on which it centers are the subject of untiring eulogy;
+but hitherto its encomiasts have shown no cause and put forward no claim
+to believe that it all is of any slightest use for any purpose that does
+not take it and its paramount merit for granted. It is doubtless a very
+meritorious habit; at least so they all say. But under the circumstances
+of modern civilised life it is fruitful of no other net material result
+than damage and discomfort. Still it is virtually ubiquitous among
+civilised men, and in an admirable state of repair; and for the
+calculable future it is doubtless to be counted in as an enduring
+obstacle to a conclusive peace, a constant source of anxiety and
+unremitting care.
+
+The motives that work out through this national spirit, by use of this
+patriotic ardor, fall under two heads: dynastic ambition, and business
+enterprise. The two categories have the common trait that neither the
+one nor the other comprises anything that is of the slightest material
+benefit to the community at large; but both have at the same time a
+high prestige value in the conventional esteem of modern men. The
+relation of dynastic ambition to warlike enterprise, and the uses of
+that usufruct of the nation's resources and man-power which the nation's
+patriotism places at the disposal of the dynastic establishment, have
+already been spoken of at length above, perhaps at excessive length, in
+the recurrent discussion of the dynastic State and its quest of dominion
+for dominion's sake. What measures are necessary to be taken as regards
+the formidable dynastic States that threaten the peace, have also been
+outlined, perhaps with excessive freedom.
+
+But it remains to call attention to that mitigated form of dynastic rule
+called a constitutional monarchy. Instances of such a constitutional
+monarchy, designed to conserve the well-beloved abuses of dynastic rule
+under a cover of democratic formalities, or to bring in effectual
+democratic insubordination under cover of the ancient dignities of an
+outworn monarchical system,--the characterisation may run either way
+according to the fancy of the speaker, and to much the same practical
+effect in either case,--instances illustrative of this compromise
+monarchy at work today are to be had, as felicitously as anywhere, in
+the Balkan states; perhaps the case of Greece will be especially
+instructive. At the other, and far, end of the line will be found such
+other typical instances as the British, the Dutch, or, in pathetic and
+droll miniature, the Norwegian.
+
+There is, of course, a wide interval between the grotesque effrontery
+that wears the Hellenic crown and the undeviatingly decorous
+self-effacement of the Dutch sovereign; and yet there is something of a
+common complexion runs through the whole range of establishments, all
+the way from the quasi-dynastic to the pseudo-dynastic. For reasons
+unavoidable and persistent, though not inscribed in the constituent law,
+the governmental establishment associated with such a royal concern will
+be made up of persons drawn from the kept classes, the nobility or
+lesser gentlefolk, and will be imbued with the spirit of these "better"
+classes rather than that of the common run.
+
+With what may be uncanny shrewdness, or perhaps mere tropismatic
+response to the unreasoned stimulus of a "consciousness of kind," the
+British government--habitually a syndicate of gentlefolk--has uniformly
+insisted on the installation of a constitutional monarchy at the
+formation of every new national organisation in which that government
+has had a discretionary voice. And the many and various constitutional
+governments so established, commonly under British auspices in some
+degree, have invariably run true to form, in some appreciable degree.
+They may be quasi-dynastic or pseudo-dynastic, but at this nearest
+approach to democracy they always, and unavoidably, include at least a
+circumlocution office of gentlefolk, in the way of a ministry and court
+establishment, whose place in the economy of the nation's affairs it is
+to adapt the run of these affairs to the needs of the kept classes.
+
+There need be no imputation of sinister designs to these gentlefolk, who
+so are elected by force of circumstances to guard and guide the nation's
+interests. As things go, it will doubtless commonly be found that they
+are as well-intentioned as need be. But a well-meaning gentleman of good
+antecedents means well in a gentlemanly way and in the light of good
+antecedents. Which comes unavoidably to an effectual bias in favor of
+those interests which honorable gentlemen of good antecedents have at
+heart. And among these interests are the interests of the kept classes,
+as contrasted with that common run of the population from which their
+keep is drawn.
+
+Under the auspices, even if they are only the histrionic and decorative
+auspices, of so decorous an article of institutional furniture as
+royalty, it follows of logical necessity that the personnel of the
+effectual government must also be drawn from the better classes, whose
+place and station and high repute will make their association with the
+First Gentleman of the Realm not too insufferably incongruous. And then,
+the popular habit of looking up to this First Gentleman with that
+deference that royalty commands, also conduces materially to the
+attendant habitual attitude of deference to gentility more at large.
+
+Even in so democratic a country, and with so exanimate a crown as is to
+be found in the United Kingdom, the royal establishment visibly, and
+doubtless very materially, conduces to the continued tenure of the
+effectual government by representatives of the kept classes; and it
+therefore counts with large effect toward the retardation of the
+country's further move in the direction of democratic insubordination
+and direct participation in the direction of affairs by the underbred,
+who finally pay the cost. And on the other hand, even so moderately
+royal an establishment as the Norwegian has apparently a sensible effect
+in the way of gathering the reins somewhat into the hands of the better
+classes, under circumstances of such meagerness as might be expected to
+preclude anything like a "better" class, in the conventional acceptation
+of that term. It would appear that even the extreme of pseudo-dynastic
+royalty, sterilised to the last degree, is something of an effectual
+hindrance to democratic rule, and in so far also a hindrance to the
+further continued neutralisation of nationalist pretensions, as also an
+effectual furtherance of upper-class rule for upper-class ends.
+
+Now, a government by well-meaning gentlemen-investors will, at the
+nearest, come no nearer representing the material needs and interests of
+the common run than a parable comes to representing the concrete facts
+which it hopes to illuminate. And as bears immediately on the point in
+hand, these gentlemanly administrators of the nation's affairs who so
+cluster about the throne, vacant though it may be of all but the bodily
+presence of majesty, are after all gentlemen, with a gentlemanly sense
+of punctilio touching the large proprieties and courtesies of political
+life. The national honor is a matter of punctilio, always; and out of
+the formal exigencies of the national honor arise grievances to be
+redressed; and it is grievances of this character that commonly afford
+the formal ground of a breach of the peace. An appeal on patriotic
+grounds of wounded national pride, to the common run who have no trained
+sense of punctilio, by the gentlemanly responsible class who have such a
+sense, backed by assurances that the national prestige or the national
+interests are at stake, will commonly bring a suitable response. It is
+scarcely necessary that the common run should know just what the stir is
+about, so long as they are informed by their trusted betters that there
+is a grievance to redress. In effect, it results that the democratic
+nation's affairs are administered by a syndicate composed of the least
+democratic class in the population.
+
+Excepting what is to be excepted, it will commonly hold true today that
+these gentlemanly governments are conducted in a commendably clean and
+upright fashion, with a conscious rectitude and a benevolent intention.
+But they are after all, in effect, class governments, and they
+unavoidably carry the bias of their class. The gentlemanly officials and
+law-givers come, in the main, from the kept classes, whose living comes
+to them in the way of income from investments, at home or in foreign
+parts, or from an equivalent source of accumulated wealth or official
+emolument. The bias resulting from this state of the case need not be of
+an intolerant character in order to bring its modicum of mischief into
+the national policy, as regards amicable relations with other
+nationalities. A slight bias running on a ground of conscious right and
+unbroken usage may go far. So, e.g., anyone of these gentlemanly
+governments is within its legitimate rights, or rather within its
+imperative duty, in defending the foreign investments of its citizens
+and enforcing due payment of its citizens' claims to income or principal
+of such property as they may hold in foreign parts; and it is within its
+ordinary lines of duty in making use of the nation's resources--that is
+to say of the common man and his means of livelihood--in enforcing such
+claims held by the investing classes. The community at large has no
+interest in the enforcement of such claims; it is evidently a class
+interest, and as evidently protected by a code of rights, duties and
+procedure that has grown out of a class bias, at the cost of the
+community at large.
+
+This bias favoring the interests of invested wealth may also, and indeed
+it commonly does, take the aggressive form of aggressively forwarding
+enterprise in investment abroad, particularly in commercially backward
+countries abroad, by extension of the national jurisdiction and the
+active countenancing of concessions in foreign parts, by subventions,
+or by creation of offices to bring suitable emoluments to the younger
+sons of deserving families. The protective tariffs to which recourse is
+sometimes had, are of the same general nature and purpose. Of course, it
+is in this latter, aggressive or excursive, issue of the well-to-do bias
+in favor of investment and invested wealth that its most pernicious
+effect on international relations is traceable.
+
+Free income, that is to say income not dependent on personal merit or
+exertion of any kind, is the breath of life to the kept classes; and as
+a corollary of the "First Law of Nature," therefore, the invested wealth
+which gives a legally equitable claim to such income has in their eyes
+all the sanctity that can be given by Natural Right. Investment--often
+spoken of euphemistically as "savings"--is consequently a meritorious
+act, conceived to be very serviceable to the community at large, and
+properly to be furthered by all available means. Invested wealth is so
+much added to the aggregate means at the community's disposal, it is
+believed. Of course, in point of fact, income from investment in the
+hands of these gentlefolk is a means of tracelessly consuming that much
+of the community's yearly product; but to the kept classes, who see the
+matter from the point of view of the recipient, the matter does not
+present itself in that light. To them it is the breath of life. Like
+other honorable men they are faithful to their bread; and by authentic
+tradition the common man, in whose disciplined preconceptions the kept
+classes are his indispensable betters, is also imbued with the
+uncritical faith that the invested wealth which enables these betters
+tracelessly to consume a due share of the yearly product is an addition
+to the aggregate means in hand.
+
+The advancement of commercial and other business enterprise beyond the
+national frontiers is consequently one of the duties not to be
+neglected, and with which no trifling can be tolerated. It is so bound
+up with national ideals, under any gentlemanly government, that any
+invasion or evasion of the rights of investors in foreign parts, or of
+other business involved in dealings with foreign parts, immediately
+involves not only the material interest of the nation but the national
+honour as well. Hence international jealousies and eventual embroilment.
+
+The constitutional monarchy that commonly covers a modern democratic
+community is accordingly a menace to the common peace, and any pacific
+league of neutrals will be laying up trouble and prospective defeat for
+itself in allowing such an institution to stand over in any instance.
+Acting with a free hand, if such a thing were possible, the projected
+league should logically eliminate all monarchical establishments,
+constitutional or otherwise, from among its federated nations. It is
+doubtless not within reason to look for such a move in the negotiations
+that are to initiate the projected league of neutrals; but the point is
+called to mind here chiefly as indicating one of the difficult passages
+which are to be faced in any attempted formation of such a league, as
+well as one of the abiding sources of international irritation with
+which the league's jurisdiction will be burdened so long as a decisive
+measure of the kind is not taken.
+
+The logic of the whole matter is simple enough, and the necessary
+measures to be taken to remedy it are no less simple--barring
+sentimental objections which will probably prove insuperable. A
+monarchy, even a sufficiently inane monarchy, carries the burden of a
+gentlemanly governmental establishment--a government by and for the
+kept classes; such a government will unavoidably direct the affairs of
+state with a view to income on invested wealth, and will see the
+material interests of the country only in so far as they present
+themselves under the form of investment and business enterprise designed
+to eventuate in investment; these are the only forms of material
+interest that give rise to international jealousies, discriminations and
+misunderstanding, at the same time that they are interests of
+individuals only and have no material use or value to the community at
+large. Given a monarchical establishment and the concomitant gentlemanly
+governmental corps, there is no avoiding this sinister prime mover of
+international rivalry, so long as the rights of invested wealth continue
+in popular apprehension to be held inviolable.
+
+Quite obviously there is a certain _tu quoque_ ready to the hand of
+these "gentlemen of the old school" who see in the constitutional
+monarchy a God-given shelter from the unreserved vulgarisation of life
+at the hands of the unblest and unbalanced underbred and underfed. The
+formally democratic nations, that have not retained even a
+pseudo-dynastic royalty, are not much more fortunately placed in respect
+of national discrimination in trade and investment. The American
+republic will obviously come into the comparison as the type-form of
+economic policy in a democratic commonwealth. There is little to choose
+between the economic policy pursued by such republics as France or
+America on the one side and their nearest counterparts among the
+constitutional monarchies on the other. It is even to be admitted out of
+hand that the comparison does no credit to democratic institutions as
+seen at work in these republics. They are, in fact, somewhat the crudest
+and most singularly foolish in their economic policy of any peoples in
+Christendom. And in view of the amazing facility with which these
+democratic commonwealths are always ready to delude themselves in
+everything that touches their national trade policies, it is obvious
+that any league of neutrals whose fortunes are in any degree contingent
+on their reasonable compliance with a call to neutralise their trade
+regulations for the sake of peace, will have need of all the persuasive
+power it can bring to bear.
+
+However, the powers of darkness have one less line of defense to shelter
+them and their work of malversation in these commonwealths than in the
+constitutional monarchies. The American national establishment, e.g.,
+which may be taken as a fairly characteristic type-form in this bearing,
+is a government of businessmen for business ends; and there is no tabu
+of axiomatic gentility or of certified pedigree to hedge about this
+working syndicate of business interests. So that it is all nearer by one
+remove to the disintegrating touch of the common man and his commonplace
+circumstances. The businesslike régime of these democratic politicians
+is as undeviating in its advocacy and aid of enterprise in pursuit of
+private gain under shelter of national discrimination as the
+circumstances will permit; and the circumstances will permit them to do
+much and go far; for the limits of popular gullibility in all things
+that touch the admirable feats of business enterprise are very wide in
+these countries. There is a sentimental popular belief running to the
+curious effect that because the citizens of such a commonwealth are
+ungraded equals before the law, therefore somehow they can all and
+several become wealthy by trading at the expense of their neighbours.
+
+Yet, the fact remains that there is only the one line of defense in
+these countries where the business interests have not the countenance of
+a time-honored order of gentlefolk, with the sanction of royalty in the
+background. And this fact is further enhanced by one of its immediate
+consequences. Proceeding upon the abounding faith which these peoples
+have in business enterprise as a universal solvent, the unreserved
+venality and greed of their businessmen--unhampered by the gentleman's
+_noblesse oblige_--have pushed the conversion of public law to private
+gain farther and more openly here than elsewhere. The outcome has been
+divers measures in restraint of trade or in furtherance of profitable
+abuses, of such a crass and flagrant character that if once the popular
+apprehension is touched by matter-of-fact reflection on the actualities
+of this businesslike policy the whole structure should reasonably be
+expected to crumble. If the present conjuncture of circumstances should,
+e.g., present to the American populace a choice between exclusion from
+the neutral league, and a consequent probable and dubious war of
+self-defense, on the one hand; as against entrance into the league, and
+security at the cost of relinquishing their national tariff in restraint
+of trade, on the other hand, it is always possible that the people might
+be brought to look their protective tariff in the face and recognise it
+for a commonplace conspiracy in restraint of trade, and so decide to
+shuffle it out of the way as a good riddance. And the rest of the
+Republic's businesslike policy of special favors would in such a case
+stand a chance of going in the discard along with the protective tariff,
+since the rest is of substantially the same disingenuous character.
+
+Not that anyone need entertain a confident expectation of such an
+exploit of common sense on the part of the American voters. There is
+little encouragement for such a hope in their past career of gullibility
+on this head. But this is again a point of difficulty to be faced in
+negotiations looking to such a pacific league of neutrals. Without a
+somewhat comprehensive neutralisation of national trade regulations, the
+outlook for lasting peace would be reduced by that much; there would be
+so much material for international jealousy and misunderstanding left
+standing over and requiring continued readjustment and compromise,
+always with the contingency of a breach that much nearer. The
+infatuation of the Americans with their protective tariff and other
+businesslike discriminations is a sufficiently serious matter in this
+connection, and it is always possible that their inability to give up
+this superstition might lead to their not adhering to this projected
+neutral league. Yet it is at least to be said that the longer the time
+that passes before active measures are taken toward the organisation of
+such a league--that is to say, in effect, the longer the great war
+lasts--the more amenable is the temper of the Americans likely to be,
+and the more reluctantly would they see themselves excluded. Should the
+war be protracted to some such length as appears to be promised by
+latterday pronunciamentos from the belligerents, or to something
+passably approaching such a duration; and should the Imperial designs
+and anomalous diplomacy of Japan continue to force themselves on the
+popular attention at the present rate; at the same time that the
+operations in Europe continue to demonstrate the excessive cost of
+defense against a well devised and resolute offensive; then it should
+reasonably be expected that the Americans might come to such a
+realisation of their own case as to let no minor considerations of trade
+discrimination stand in the way of their making common cause with the
+other pacific nations.
+
+It appears already to be realised in the most responsible quarter that
+America needs the succor of the other pacific nations, with a need that
+is not to be put away or put off; as it is also coming to be realised
+that the Imperial Powers are disturbers of the peace, by force of their
+Imperial character. Of course, the politicians who seek their own
+advantage in the nation's embarrassment are commonly unable to see the
+matter in that light. But it is also apparent that the popular sentiment
+is affected with the same apprehension, more and more as time passes and
+the aims and methods of the Imperial Powers become more patent.
+
+Hitherto the spokesmen of a pacific federation of nations have spoken
+for a league of such an (indeterminate) constitution as to leave all the
+federated nations undisturbed in all their conduct of their own affairs,
+domestic or international; probably for want of second thought as to the
+complications of copartnership between them in so grave and unwonted an
+enterprise. They have also spoken of America's share in the project as
+being that of an interested outsider, whose interest in any
+precautionary measures of this kind is in part a regard for his own
+tranquility as a disinterested neighbour, but in greater part a humane
+solicitude for the well-being of civilised mankind at large. In this
+view, somewhat self-complacent it is to be admitted, America is
+conceived to come into the case as initiator and guide, about whom the
+pacific nations are to cluster as some sort of queen-bee.
+
+Now, there is not a little verisimilitude in this conception of America
+as a sort of central office and a tower of strength in the projected
+federation of neutral nations, however pharisaical an appearance it may
+all have in the self-complacent utterances of patriotic Americans. The
+American republic is, after all, the greatest of the pacific nations of
+Christendom, in resources, population and industrial capacity; and it is
+also not to be denied that the temper of this large population is, on
+the whole, as pacific as that of any considerable people--outside of
+China. The adherence of the American republic would, in effect, double
+the mass and powers of the projected league, and would so place it
+beyond all hazard of defeat from without, or even of serious outside
+opposition to its aims.
+
+Yet it will not hold true that America is either disinterested or
+indispensable. The unenviable position of the indispensable belongs to
+the United Kingdom, and carries with it the customary suspicion of
+interested motives that attaches to the stronger party in a bargain. To
+America, on the other hand, the league is indispensable, as a refuge
+from otherwise inevitable dangers ahead; and it is only a question of a
+moderate allowance of time for the American voters to realise that
+without an adequate copartnership with the other pacific nations the
+outlook of the Republic is altogether precarious. Single-handed, America
+can not defend itself, except at a prohibitive cost; whereas in
+copartnership with these others the national defense becomes a virtually
+negligible matter. It is for America a choice between a policy of
+extravagant armament and aggressive diplomacy, with a doubtful issue, on
+the one side, and such abatement of national pretensions as would
+obviate bootless contention, on the other side.
+
+Yet, it must be admitted, the patriotic temper of the American people is
+of such a susceptible kind as to leave the issue in doubt. Not that the
+Americans will not endeavor to initiate some form of compact for the
+keeping of the peace, when hostilities are concluded; barring unforeseen
+contingencies, it is virtually a foregone conclusion that the attempt
+will be made, and that the Americans will take an active part in its
+promotion. But the doubt is as to their taking such a course as will
+lead to a compact of the kind needed to safeguard the peace of the
+country. The business interests have much to say in the counsels of the
+Americans, and these business interests look to short-term
+gains--American business interests particularly--to be derived from the
+country's necessities. It is likely to appear that the business
+interests, through representatives in Congress and elsewhere, will
+disapprove of any peace compact that does not involve an increase of the
+national armament and a prospective demand for munitions and an
+increased expenditure of the national funds.
+
+With or without the adherence of America, the pacific nations of Europe
+will doubtless endeavour to form a league or alliance designed to keep
+the peace. If America does not come into the arrangement it may well
+come to nothing much more than a further continued defensive alliance of
+the belligerent nations now opposed to the German coalition. In any case
+it is still a point in doubt whether the league so projected is to be
+merely a compact of defensive armament against a common enemy--in which
+case it will necessarily be transient, perhaps ephemeral--or a more
+inclusive coalition of a closer character designed to avoid any breach
+of the peace, by disarmament and by disallowance and disclaimer of such
+national pretensions and punctilio as the patriotic sentiment of the
+contracting parties will consent to dispense with. The nature of the
+resulting peace, therefore, as well as its chances of duration, will in
+great measure be conditioned on the fashion of peace-compact on which it
+is to rest; which will be conditioned in good part on the degree in
+which the warlike coalition under German Imperial control is effectually
+to be eliminated from the situation as a prospective disturber of the
+peace; which, in turn, is a question somewhat closely bound up with the
+further duration of the war, as has already been indicated in an earlier
+passage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+PEACE AND THE PRICE SYSTEM
+
+
+Evidently the conception of peace on which its various spokesmen are
+proceeding is by no means the same for all of them. In the current
+German conception, e.g., as seen in the utterances of its many and
+urgent spokesmen, peace appears to be of the general nature of a truce
+between nations, whose God-given destiny it is, in time, to adjust a
+claim to precedence by wager of battle. They will sometimes speak of it,
+euphemistically, with a view to conciliation, as "assurance of the
+national future," in which the national future is taken to mean an
+opportunity for the extension of the national dominion at the expense of
+some other national establishment. In the same connection one may recall
+the many eloquent passages on the State and its paramount place and
+value in the human economy. The State is useful for disturbing the
+peace. This German notion may confidently be set down as the lowest of
+the current conceptions of peace; or perhaps rather as the notion of
+peace reduced to the lowest terms at which it continues to be
+recognisable as such. Next beyond in that direction lies the notion of
+armistice; which differs from this conception of peace chiefly in
+connoting specifically a definite and relatively short interval between
+warlike operations.
+
+The conception of peace as being a period of preparation for war has
+many adherents outside the Fatherland, of course. Indeed, it has
+probably a wider vogue and a readier acceptance among men who interest
+themselves in questions of peace and war than any other. It goes hand in
+hand with that militant nationalism that is taken for granted,
+conventionally, as the common ground of those international relations
+that play a part in diplomatic intercourse. It is the diplomatist's
+_métier_ to talk war in parables of peace. This conception of peace as a
+precarious interval of preparation has come down to the present out of
+the feudal age and is, of course, best at home where the feudal range of
+preconceptions has suffered least dilapidation; and it carries the
+feudalistic presumption that all national establishments are competitors
+for dominion, after the scheme of Macchiavelli. The peace which is had
+on this footing, within the realm, is a peace of subjection, more or
+less pronounced according as the given national establishment is more or
+less on the militant order; a warlike organisation being necessarily of
+a servile character, in the same measure in which it is warlike.
+
+In much the same measure and with much the same limitations as the
+modern democratic nations have departed from the feudal system of civil
+relations and from the peculiar range of conceptions which characterise
+that system, they have also come in for a new or revised conception of
+peace. Instead of its being valued chiefly as a space of time in which
+to prepare for war, offensive or defensive, among these democratic and
+provisionally pacific nations it has come to stand in the common
+estimation as the normal and stable manner of life, good and commendable
+in its own right. These modern, pacific, commonwealths stand on the
+defensive, habitually. They are still pugnaciously national, but they
+have unlearned so much of the feudal preconceptions as to leave them in
+a defensive attitude, under the watch-word: Peace with honour. Their
+quasi-feudalistic national prestige is not to be trifled with, though it
+has lost so much of its fascination as ordinarily not to serve the
+purposes of an aggressive enterprise, at least not without some shrewd
+sophistication at the hands of militant politicians and their diplomatic
+agents. Of course, an exuberant patriotism may now and again take on the
+ancient barbarian vehemence and lead such a provisionally pacific nation
+into an aggressive raid against a helpless neighbour; but it remains
+characteristically true, after all, that these peoples look on the
+country's peace as the normal and ordinary course of things, which each
+nation is to take care of for itself and by its own force.
+
+The ideal of the nineteenth-century statesmen was to keep the peace by a
+balance of power; an unstable equilibrium of rivalries, in which it was
+recognised that eternal vigilance was the price of peace by
+equilibration. Since then, by force of the object-lesson of the
+twentieth-century wars, it has become evident that eternal vigilance
+will no longer keep the peace by equilibration, and the balance of power
+has become obsolete. At the same time things have so turned that an
+effective majority of the civilised nations now see their advantage in
+peace, without further opportunity to seek further dominion. These
+nations have also been falling into the shape of commonwealths, and so
+have lost something of their national spirit.
+
+With much reluctant hesitation and many misgivings, the statesmen of
+these pacific nations are accordingly busying themselves with schemes
+for keeping the peace on the unfamiliar footing of a stable equilibrium;
+the method preferred on the whole being an equilibration of
+make-believe, in imitation of the obsolete balance of power. There is a
+meticulous regard for national jealousies and discriminations, which it
+is thought necessary to keep intact. Of course, on any one of these
+slightly diversified plans of keeping the peace on a stable footing of
+copartnery among the pacific nations, national jealousies and national
+integrity no longer have any substantial meaning. But statesmen think
+and plan in terms of precedent; which comes to thinking and planning in
+terms of make-believe, when altered circumstances have made the
+precedents obsolete. So one comes to the singular proposal of the
+statesmen, that the peace is to be kept in concert among these pacific
+nations by a provision of force with which to break it at will. The
+peace that is to be kept on this footing of national discriminations and
+national armaments will necessarily be of a precarious kind; being, in
+effect, a statesmanlike imitation of the peace as it was once kept even
+more precariously by the pacific nations in severalty.
+
+Hitherto the movement toward peace has not gone beyond this conception
+of it, as a collusive safeguarding of national discrepancies by force of
+arms. Such a peace is necessarily precarious, partly because armed force
+is useful for breaking the peace, partly because the national
+discrepancies, by which these current peace-makers set such store, are a
+constant source of embroilment. What the peace-makers might logically be
+expected to concern themselves about would be the elimination of these
+discrepancies that make for embroilment. But what they actually seem
+concerned about is their preservation. A peace by collusive neglect of
+those remnants of feudalistic make-believe that still serve to divide
+the pacific nations has hitherto not seriously come under advisement.
+
+Evidently, hitherto, and for the calculable future, peace is a relative
+matter, a matter of more or less, whichever of the several working
+conceptions spoken of above may rule the case. Evidently, too, a peace
+designed to strengthen the national establishment against eventual war,
+will count to a different effect from a collusive peace of a defensive
+kind among the pacific peoples, designed by its projectors to conserve
+those national discrepancies on which patriotic statesmen like to dwell.
+Different from both would be the value of a peace by neglect of such
+useless national discriminations as now make for embroilment. A
+protracted season of peace should logically have a somewhat different
+cultural value according to the character of the public policy to be
+pursued under its cover. So that a safe and sane conservation of the
+received law and order should presumably best be effected under cover of
+a collusive peace of the defensive kind, which is designed to retain
+those national discrepancies intact that count for so much in the
+national life of today, both as a focus of patriotic sentiment and as an
+outlet for national expenditures. This plan would involve the least
+derangement of the received order among the democratic peoples, although
+the plan might itself undergo some change in the course of time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Among the singularities of the latterday situation, in this connection,
+and brought out by the experiences of the great war, is a close
+resemblance between latterday warlike operations and the ordinary
+processes of industry. Modern warfare and modern industry alike are
+carried on by technological processes subject to surveillance and
+direction by mechanical engineers, or perhaps rather experts in
+engineering science of the mechanistic kind. War is not now a matter of
+the stout heart and strong arm. Not that these attributes do not have
+their place and value in modern warfare; but they are no longer the
+chief or decisive factors in the case. The exploits that count in this
+warfare are technological exploits; exploits of technological science,
+industrial appliances, and technological training. As has been remarked
+before, it is no longer a gentlemen's war, and the gentleman, as such,
+is no better than a marplot in the game as it is played.
+
+Certain consequences follow from this state of the case. Technology and
+industrial experience, in large volume and at a high proficiency, are
+indispensable to the conduct of war on the modern plan, as well as a
+large, efficient and up-to-date industrial community and industrial
+plant to supply the necessary material of this warfare. At the same time
+the discipline of the campaign, as it impinges on the rank and file as
+well as on the very numerous body of officers and technicians, is not at
+cross purposes with the ordinary industrial employments of peace, or not
+in the same degree as has been the case in the past, even in the recent
+past. The experience of the campaign does not greatly unfit the men who
+survive for industrial uses; nor does it come in as a sheer interruption
+of their industrial training, or break the continuity of that range of
+habits of thought which modern industry of the technological order
+induces; not in the same degree as was the case under the conditions of
+war as carried on in the nineteenth century. The cultural, and
+particularly the technological, incidence of this modern warfare should
+evidently be appreciably different from what has been experienced in the
+past, and from what this past experience has induced students of these
+matters to look for among the psychological effects of warlike
+experience.
+
+It remains true that the discipline of the campaign, however impersonal
+it may tend to become, still inculcates personal subordination and
+unquestioning obedience; and yet the modern tactics and methods of
+fighting bear somewhat more on the individual's initiative, discretion,
+sagacity and self-possession than once would have been true. Doubtless
+the men who come out of this great war, the common men, will bring home
+an accentuated and acrimonious patriotism, a venomous hatred of the
+enemies whom they have missed killing; but it may reasonably be doubted
+if they come away with a correspondingly heightened admiration and
+affection for their betters who have failed to make good as foremen in
+charge of this teamwork in killing. The years of the war have been
+trying to the reputation of officials and officers, who have had to meet
+uncharted exigencies with not much better chance of guessing the way
+through than their subalterns have had.
+
+By and large, it is perhaps not to be doubted that the populace now
+under arms will return from the experience of the war with some net gain
+in loyalty to the nation's honour and in allegiance to their masters;
+particularly the German subjects,--the like is scarcely true for the
+British; but a doubt will present itself as to the magnitude of this net
+gain in subordination, or this net loss in self-possession. A doubt may
+be permitted as to whether the common man in the countries of the
+Imperial coalition, e.g., will, as the net outcome of this war
+experience, be in a perceptibly more pliable frame of mind as touches
+his obligations toward his betters and subservience to the irresponsible
+authority exercised by the various governmental agencies, than he was at
+the outbreak of the war. At that time, there is reason to believe, there
+was an ominous, though scarcely threatening, murmur of discontent
+beginning to be heard among the working classes of the industrial towns.
+It is fair to presume, however, that the servile discipline of the
+service and the vindictive patriotism bred of the fight should combine
+to render the populace of the Fatherland more amenable to the
+irresponsible rule of the Imperial dynasty and its subaltern royal
+establishments, in spite of any slight effect of a contrary character
+exercised by the training in technological methods and in self-reliance,
+with which this discipline of the service has been accompanied. As to
+the case of the British population, under arms or under compulsion of
+necessity at home, something has already been said in an earlier
+passage; and much will apparently depend, in their case, on the further
+duration of the war. The case of the other nationalities involved, both
+neutrals and belligerents, is even more obscure in this bearing, but it
+is also of less immediate consequence for the present argument.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The essentially feudal virtues of loyalty and bellicose patriotism would
+appear to have gained their great ascendency over all men's spirit
+within the Western civilisation by force of the peculiarly consistent
+character of the discipline of life under feudal conditions, whether in
+war or peace; and to the same uniformity of these forces that shaped the
+workday habits of thought among the feudal nations is apparently due
+that profound institutionalisation of the preconceptions of patriotism
+and loyalty, by force of which these preconceptions still hold the
+modern peoples in an unbreakable web of prejudice, after the conditions
+favoring their acquirement have in great part ceased to operate. These
+preconceptions of national solidarity and international enmity have come
+down from the past as an integral part of the unwritten constitution
+underlying all these modern nations, even those which have departed most
+widely from the manner of life to which the peoples owe these ancient
+preconceptions. Hitherto, or rather until recent times, the workday
+experience of these peoples has not seriously worked at cross purposes
+with the patriotic spirit and its bias of national animosity; and what
+discrepancy there has effectively been between the discipline of workday
+life and the received institutional preconceptions on this head, has
+hitherto been overborne by the unremitting inculcation of these virtues
+by interested politicians, priests and publicists, who speak habitually
+for the received order of things.
+
+That order of things which is known on its political and civil side as
+the feudal system, together with that era of the dynastic States which
+succeeds the feudal age technically so called, was, on its industrial or
+technological side, a system of trained man-power organised on a plan of
+subordination of man to man. On the whole, the scheme and logic of that
+life, whether in its political (warlike) or its industrial doings,
+whether in war or peace, runs on terms of personal capacity, proficiency
+and relations. The organisation of the forces engaged and the
+constraining rules according to which this organisation worked, were of
+the nature of personal relations, and the impersonal factors in the case
+were taken for granted. Politics and war were a field for personal
+valor, force and cunning, in practical effect a field for personal force
+and fraud. Industry was a field in which the routine of life, and its
+outcome, turned on "the skill, dexterity and judgment of the individual
+workman," in the words of Adam Smith.
+
+The feudal age passed, being done to death by handicraft industry,
+commercial traffic, gunpowder, and the state-making politicians. But the
+political States of the statemakers, the dynastic States as they may
+well be called, continued the conduct of political life on the personal
+plane of rivalry and jealousy between dynasties and between their
+States; and in spite of gunpowder and the new military engineering,
+warfare continued also to be, in the main and characteristically, a
+field in which man-power and personal qualities decided the outcome, by
+virtue of personal "skill, dexterity and judgment." Meantime industry
+and its technology by insensible degrees underwent a change in the
+direction of impersonalisation, particularly in those countries in which
+state-making and its warlike enterprise had ceased, or were ceasing, to
+be the chief interests and the controlling preconception of the people.
+
+The logic of the new, mechanical industry which has supplanted
+handicraft in these countries, is a mechanistic logic, which proceeds in
+terms of matter-of-fact strains, masses, velocities, and the like,
+instead of the "skill, dexterity and judgment" of personal agents. The
+new industry does not dispense with the personal agencies, nor can it
+even be said to minimise the need of skill, dexterity and judgment in
+the personal agents employed, but it does take them and their attributes
+for granted as in some sort a foregone premise to its main argument. The
+logic of the handicraft system took the impersonal agencies for granted;
+the machine industry takes the skill, dexterity and judgment of the
+workmen for granted. The processes of thought, and therefore the
+consistent habitual discipline, of the former ran in terms of the
+personal agents engaged, and of the personal relations of discretion,
+control and subordination necessary to the work; whereas the
+mechanistic logic of the modern technology, more and more consistently,
+runs in terms of the impersonal forces engaged, and inculcates an
+habitual predilection for matter-of-fact statement, and an habitual
+preconception that the findings of material science alone are
+conclusive.
+
+In those nations that have made up the advance guard of Western
+civilisation in its movement out of feudalism, the disintegrating effect
+of this matter-of-fact animus inculcated by the later state of the
+industrial arts has apparently acted effectively, in some degree, to
+discredit those preconceptions of personal discrimination on which
+dynastic rule is founded. But in no case has the discipline of this
+mechanistic technology yet wrought its perfect work or come to a
+definitive conclusion. Meantime war and politics have on the whole
+continued on the ancient plane; it may perhaps be fair to say that
+politics has so continued because warlike enterprise has continued still
+to be a matter of such personal forces as skill, dexterity and judgment,
+valor and cunning, personal force and fraud. Latterly, gradually, but
+increasingly, the technology of war, too, has been shifting to the
+mechanistic plane; until in the latest phases of it, somewhere about the
+turn of the century, it is evident that the logic of warfare too has
+come to be the same mechanistic logic that makes the modern state of the
+industrial arts.
+
+What, if anything, is due by consequence to overtake the political
+strategy and the political preconceptions of the new century, is a
+question that will obtrude itself, though with scant hope of finding a
+ready answer. It may even seem a rash, as well as an ungraceful,
+undertaking to inquire into the possible manner and degree of
+prospective decay to which the received political ideals and virtues
+would appear to be exposed by consequence of this derangement of the
+ancient discipline to which men have been subjected. So much, however,
+would seem evident, that the received virtues and ideals of patriotic
+animosity and national jealousy can best be guarded against untimely
+decay by resolutely holding to the formal observance of all outworn
+punctilios of national integrity and discrimination, in spite of their
+increasing disserviceability,--as would be done, e.g., or at least
+sought to be done, in the installation of a league of neutral nations to
+keep the peace and at the same time to safeguard those "national
+interests" whose only use is to divide these nations and keep them in a
+state of mutual envy and distrust.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Those peoples who are subject to the constraining governance of this
+modern state of the industrial arts, as all modern peoples are in much
+the same measure in which they are "modern," are, therefore, exposed to
+a workday discipline running at cross purposes with the received law and
+order as it takes effect in national affairs; and to this is to be added
+that, with warlike enterprise also shifted to this same
+mechanistic-technological ground, war can no longer be counted on so
+confidently as before to correct all the consequent drift away from the
+ancient landmarks of dynastic, pseudo-dynastic, and national enterprise
+in dominion.
+
+As has been noted above, modern warfare not only makes use of, and
+indeed depends on, the modern industrial technology at every turn of the
+operations in the field, but it draws on the ordinary industrial
+resources of the countries at war in a degree and with an urgency never
+equalled. No nation can hope to make a stand in modern warfare, much
+less to make headway in warlike enterprise, without the most
+thoroughgoing exploitation of the modern industrial arts. Which
+signifies for the purpose in hand that any Power that harbors an
+imperial ambition must take measures to let its underlying population
+acquire the ways and means of the modern machine industry, without
+reservation; which in turn signifies that popular education must be
+taken care of to such an extent as may be serviceable in this manner of
+industry and in the manner of life which this industrial system
+necessarily imposes; which signifies, of course, that only the
+thoroughly trained and thoroughly educated nations have a chance of
+holding their place as formidable Powers in this latterday phase of
+civilisation. What is needed is the training and education that go to
+make proficiency in the modern fashion of technology and in those
+material sciences that conduce to technological proficiency of this
+modern order. It is a matter of course that in these premises any
+appreciable illiteracy is an intolerable handicap. So is also any
+training which discourages habitual self-reliance and initiative, or
+which acts as a check on skepticism; for the skeptical frame of mind is
+a necessary part of the intellectual equipment that makes for advance,
+invention and understanding in the field of technological proficiency.
+
+But these requirements, imperatively necessary as a condition of warlike
+success, are at cross purposes with that unquestioning respect of
+persons and that spirit of abnegation that alone can hold a people to
+the political institutions of the old order and make them a willing
+instrument in the hands of the dynastic statesmen. The dynastic State is
+apparently caught in a dilemma. The necessary preparation for warlike
+enterprise on the modern plan can apparently be counted on, in the long
+run, to disintegrate the foundations of the dynastic State. But it is
+only in the long run that this effect can be counted on; and it is
+perhaps not securely to be counted on even in a moderately long run of
+things as they have run hitherto, if due precautions are taken by the
+interested statesmen,--as would seem to be indicated by the successful
+conservation of archaic traits in the German peoples during the past
+half century under the archaising rule of the Hohenzollern. It is a
+matter of habituation, which takes time, and which can at the same time
+be neutralised in some degree by indoctrination.
+
+Still, when all is told, it will probably have to be conceded that,
+e.g., such a nation as Russia will fall under this rule of inherent
+disability imposed by the necessary use of the modern industrial arts.
+Without a fairly full and free command of these modern industrial
+methods on the part of the Russian people, together with the virtual
+disappearance of illiteracy, and with the facile and far-reaching system
+of communication which it all involves, the Russian Imperial
+establishment would not be a formidable power or a serious menace to the
+pacific nations; and it is not easy to imagine how the Imperial
+establishment could retain its hold and its character under the
+conditions indicated.
+
+The case of Japan, taken by itself, rests on somewhat similar lines as
+these others. In time, and in this case the time-allowance should
+presumably not be anything very large, the Japanese people are likely to
+get an adequate command of the modern technology; which would, here as
+elsewhere, involve the virtual disappearance of the present high
+illiteracy, and the loss, in some passable measure, of the current
+superstitiously crass nationalism of that people. There are indications
+that something of that kind, and of quite disquieting dimensions, is
+already under way; though with no indication that any consequent
+disintegrating habits of thought have yet invaded the sacred close of
+Japanese patriotic devotion.
+
+Again, it is a question of time and habituation. With time and
+habituation the emperor may insensibly cease to be of divine pedigree,
+and the syndicate of statesmen who are doing business under his
+signature may consequently find their measures of Imperial expansion
+questioned by the people who pay the bills. But so long as the Imperial
+syndicate enjoy their present immunity from outside obstruction, and can
+accordingly carry on an uninterrupted campaign of cumulative predation
+in Korea, China and Manchuria, the patriotic infatuation is less likely
+to fall off, and by so much the decay of Japanese loyalty will be
+retarded. Yet, even if allowed anything that may seem at all probable in
+the way of a free hand for aggression against their hapless neighbours,
+the skepticism and insubordination to personal rule that seems
+inseparable in the long run from addiction to the modern industrial arts
+should be expected presently to overtake the Japanese spirit of loyal
+servitude. And the opportunity of Imperial Japan lies in the interval.
+So also does the menace of Imperial Japan as a presumptive disturber of
+the peace at large.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the cost of some unavoidable tedium, the argument as regards these
+and similar instances may be summarised. It appears, in the (possibly
+doubtful) light of the history of democratic institutions and of modern
+technology hitherto, as also from the logical character of this
+technology and its underlying material sciences, that consistent
+addiction to the peculiar habits of thought involved in its carrying on
+will presently induce a decay of those preconceptions in which dynastic
+government and national ambitions have their ground. Continued addiction
+to this modern scheme of industrial life should in time eventuate in a
+decay of militant nationalism, with a consequent lapse of warlike
+enterprise. At the same time, popular proficiency in the modern
+industrial arts, with all that that implies in the way of intelligence
+and information, is indispensable as a means to any successful warlike
+enterprise on the modern plan. The menace of warlike aggression from
+such dynastic States, e.g., as Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan is
+due to their having acquired a competent use of this modern technology,
+while they have not yet had time to lose that spirit of dynastic loyalty
+which they have carried over from an archaic order of things, out of
+which they have emerged at a very appreciably later period (last half of
+the nineteenth century) than those democratic peoples whose peace they
+now menace. As has been said, they have taken over this modern state of
+the industrial arts without having yet come in for the defects of its
+qualities. This modern technology, with its underlying material
+sciences, is a novel factor in the history of human culture, in that
+addiction to its use conduces to the decay of militant patriotism, at
+the same time that its employment so greatly enhances the warlike
+efficiency of even a pacific people, at need, that they can not be
+seriously molested by any other peoples, however valorous and numerous,
+who have not a competent use of this technology. A peace at large among
+the civilised nations, by loss of the militant temper through addiction
+to this manner of arts of peace, therefore, carries no risk of
+interruption by an inroad of warlike barbarians,--always provided that
+those existing archaic peoples who might pass muster as barbarians are
+brought into line with the pacific nations on a footing of peace and
+equality. The disparity in point of outlook as between the resulting
+peace at large by neglect of bootless animosities, on the one hand, and
+those historic instances of a peaceable civilisation that have been
+overwhelmed by warlike barbarian invasions, on the other hand, should be
+evident.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is always possible, indeed it would scarcely be surprising to find,
+that the projected league of neutrals or of nations bent on peace can
+not be brought to realisation at this juncture; perhaps not for a long
+time yet. But it should at the same time seem reasonable to expect that
+the drift toward a peaceable settlement of national discrepancies such
+as has been visible in history for some appreciable time past will, in
+the absence of unforeseen hindrances, work out to some such effect in
+the course of further experience under modern conditions. And whether
+the projected peace compact at its inception takes one form or another,
+provided it succeeds in its main purpose, the long-term drift of things
+under its rule should logically set toward some ulterior settlement of
+the general character of what has here been spoken of as a peace by
+neglect or by neutralisation of discrepancies.
+
+It should do so, in the absence of unforeseen contingencies; more
+particularly if there were no effectual factor of dissension included in
+the fabric of institutions within the nation. But there should also,
+e.g., be no difficulty in assenting to the forecast that when and if
+national peace and security are achieved and settled beyond recall, the
+discrepancy in fact between those who own the country's wealth and those
+who do not is presently due to come to an issue. Any attempt to forecast
+the form which this issue is to take, or the manner, incidents,
+adjuncts and sequelae of its determination, would be a bolder and a more
+ambiguous, undertaking. Hitherto attempts to bring this question to an
+issue have run aground on the real or fancied jeopardy to paramount
+national interests. How, if at all, this issue might affect national
+interests and international relations, would obviously depend in the
+first instance on the state of the given national establishment and the
+character of the international engagements entered into in the formation
+of this projected pacific league. It is always conceivable that the
+transactions involving so ubiquitous an issue might come to take on an
+international character and that they might touch the actual or fanciful
+interests of these diverse nations with such divergent effect as to
+bring on a rupture of the common understanding between them and of the
+peace-compact in which the common understanding is embodied.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the beginning, that is to say in the beginnings out of which this
+modern era of the Western civilisation has arisen, with its scheme of
+law and custom, there grew into the scheme of law and custom, by settled
+usage, a right of ownership and of contract in disposal of
+ownership,--which may or may not have been a salutary institutional
+arrangement on the whole, under the circumstances of the early days.
+With the later growth of handicraft and the petty trade in Western
+Europe this right of ownership and contract came to be insisted on,
+standardised under legal specifications, and secured against molestation
+by the governmental interests; more particularly and scrupulously among
+those peoples that have taken the lead in working out that system of
+free or popular institutions that marks the modern civilised nations. So
+it has come to be embodied in the common law of the modern world as an
+inviolable natural right. It has all the prescriptive force of legally
+authenticated immemorial custom.
+
+Under the system of handicraft and petty trade this right of property
+and free contract served the interest of the common man, at least in
+much of its incidence, and acted in its degree to shelter industrious
+and economical persons from hardship and indignity at the hands of their
+betters. There seems reason to believe, as is commonly believed, that so
+long as that relatively direct and simple scheme of industry and trade
+lasted, the right of ownership and contract was a salutary custom, in
+its bearing on the fortunes of the common man. It appears also, on the
+whole, to have been favorable to the fuller development of the
+handicraft technology, as well as to its eventual outgrowth into the new
+line of technological expedients and contrivances that presently gave
+rise to the machine industry and the large-scale business enterprise.
+
+The standard theories of economic science have assumed the rights of
+property and contract as axiomatic premises and ultimate terms of
+analysis; and their theories are commonly drawn in such a form as would
+fit the circumstances of the handicraft industry and the petty trade,
+and such as can be extended to any other economic situation by shrewd
+interpretation. These theories, as they run from Adam Smith down through
+the nineteenth century and later, appear tenable, on the whole, when
+taken to apply to the economic situation of that earlier time, in
+virtually all that they have to say on questions of wages, capital,
+savings, and the economy and efficiency of management and production by
+the methods of private enterprise resting on these rights of ownership
+and contract and governed by the pursuit of private gain. It is when
+these standard theories are sought to be applied to the later situation,
+which has outgrown the conditions of handicraft, that they appear
+nugatory or meretricious. The "competitive system" which these standard
+theories assume as a necessary condition of their own validity, and
+about which they are designed to form a defensive hedge, would, under
+those earlier conditions of small-scale enterprise and personal contact,
+appear to have been both a passably valid assumption as a premise and a
+passably expedient scheme of economic relations and traffic. At that
+period of its life-history it can not be said consistently to have
+worked hardship to the common man; rather the reverse. And the common
+man in that time appears to have had no misgivings about the excellence
+of the scheme or of that article of Natural Rights that underlies it.
+
+This complexion of things, as touches the effectual bearing of the
+institution of property and the ancient customary rights of ownership,
+has changed substantially since the time of Adam Smith. The "competitive
+system," which he looked to as the economic working-out of that "simple
+and obvious system of natural liberty" that always engaged his best
+affections, has in great measure ceased to operate as a routine of
+natural liberty, in fact; particularly in so far as touches the fortunes
+of the common man, the impecunious mass of the people. _De jure_, of
+course, the competitive system and its inviolable rights of ownership
+are a citadel of Natural Liberty; but _de facto_ the common man is now,
+and has for some time been, feeling the pinch of it. It is law, and
+doubtless it is good law, grounded in immemorial usage and authenticated
+with statute and precedent. But circumstances have so changed that this
+good old plan has in a degree become archaic, perhaps unprofitable, or
+even mischievous, on the whole, and especially as touches the conditions
+of life for the common man. At least, so the common man in these modern
+democratic and commercial countries is beginning to apprehend the
+matter.
+
+Some slight and summary characterisation of these changing circumstances
+that have affected the incidence of the rights of property during modern
+times may, therefore, not be out of place; with a view to seeing how far
+and why these rights may be due to come under advisement and possible
+revision, in case a state of settled peace should leave men's attention
+free to turn to these internal, as contrasted with national interests.
+
+Under that order of handicraft and petty trade that led to the
+standardisation of these rights of ownership in the accentuated form
+which belongs to them in modern law and custom, the common man had a
+practicable chance of free initiative and self-direction in his choice
+and pursuit of an occupation and a livelihood, in so far as rights of
+ownership bore on his case. At that period the workman was the main
+factor in industry and, in the main and characteristically, the question
+of his employment was a question of what he would do. The material
+equipment of industry--the "plant," as it has come to be called--was
+subject of ownership, then as now; but it was then a secondary factor
+and, notoriously, subsidiary to the immaterial equipment of skill,
+dexterity and judgment embodied in the person of the craftsman. The body
+of information, or general knowledge, requisite to a workmanlike
+proficiency as handicraftsman was sufficiently slight and simple to fall
+within the ordinary reach of the working class, without special
+schooling; and the material equipment necessary to the work, in the way
+of tools and appliances, was also slight enough, ordinarily, to bring it
+within the reach of the common man. The stress fell on the acquirement
+of that special personal skill, dexterity and judgment that would
+constitute the workman a master of his craft. Given a reasonable measure
+of pertinacity, the common man would be able to compass the material
+equipment needful to the pursuit of his craft, and so could make his way
+to a livelihood; and the inviolable right of ownership would then serve
+to secure him the product of his own industry, in provision for his own
+old-age and for a fair start in behalf of his children. At least in the
+popular conception, and presumably in some degree also in fact, the
+right of property so served as a guarantee of personal liberty and a
+basis of equality. And so its apologists still look on the institution.
+
+In a very appreciable degree this complexion of things and of popular
+conceptions has changed since then; although, as would be expected, the
+change in popular conceptions has not kept pace with the changing
+circumstances. In all the characteristic and controlling lines of
+industry the modern machine technology calls for a very considerable
+material equipment; so large an equipment, indeed, that this plant, as
+it is called, always represents a formidable amount of invested wealth;
+and also so large that it will, typically, employ a considerable number
+of workmen per unit of plant. On the transition to the machine
+technology the plant became the unit of operation, instead of the
+workman, as had previously been the case; and with the further
+development of this modern technology, during the past hundred and fifty
+years or so, the unit of operation and control has increasingly come to
+be not the individual or isolated plant but rather an articulated group
+of such plants working together as a balanced system and keeping pace in
+common, under a collective business management; and coincidently the
+individual workman has been falling into the position of an auxiliary
+factor, nearly into that of an article of supply, to be charged up as an
+item of operating expenses. Under this later and current system,
+discretion and initiative vest not in the workman but in the owners of
+the plant, if anywhere. So that at this point the right of ownership has
+ceased to be, in fact, a guarantee of personal liberty to the common
+man, and has come to be, or is coming to be, a guarantee of dependence.
+All of which engenders a feeling of unrest and insecurity, such as to
+instill a doubt in the mind of the common man as to the continued
+expediency of this arrangement and of the prescriptive rights of
+property on which the arrangement rests.
+
+There is also an insidious suggestion, carrying a sinister note of
+discredit, that comes in from ethnological science at this point; which
+is adapted still further to derange the common man's faith in this
+received institution of ownership and its control of the material
+equipment of industry. To students interested in human culture it is a
+matter of course that this material equipment is a means of utilising
+the state of the industrial arts; that it is useful in industry and
+profitable to its owners only because and in so far as it is a creation
+of the current technological knowledge and enables its owner to
+appropriate the usufruct of the current industrial arts. It is likewise
+a matter of course that this technological knowledge, that so enables
+the material equipment to serve the purposes of production and of
+private gain, is a free gift of the community at large to the owners of
+industrial plant; and, under latterday conditions, to them exclusively.
+The state of the industrial arts is a joint heritage of the community at
+large, but where, as in the modern countries, the work to be done by
+this technology requires a large material equipment, the usufruct of
+this joint heritage passes, in effect, into the hands of the owners of
+this large material equipment.
+
+These owners have, ordinarily, contributed nothing to the technology,
+the state of the industrial arts, from which their control of the
+material equipment of industry enables them to derive a gain. Indeed, no
+class or condition of men in the modern community--with the possible
+exception of politicians and the clergy--can conceivably contribute less
+to the community's store of technological knowledge than the large
+owners of invested wealth. By one of those singular inversions due to
+production being managed for private gain, it happens that these
+investors are not only not given to the increase and diffusion of
+technological knowledge, but they have a well-advised interest in
+retarding or defeating improvements in the industrial arts in detail.
+Improvements, innovations that heighten productive efficiency in the
+general line of production in which a given investment is placed, are
+commonly to be counted on to bring "obsolescence by supersession" to the
+plant already engaged in that line; and therefore to bring a decline in
+its income-yielding capacity, and so in its capital or investment value.
+
+Invested capital yields income because it enjoys the usufruct of the
+community's technological knowledge; it has an effectual monopoly of
+this usufruct because this machine technology requires large material
+appliances with which to do its work; the interest of the owners of
+established industrial plant will not tolerate innovations designed to
+supersede these appliances. The bearing of ownership on industry and on
+the fortunes of the common man is accordingly, in the main, the bearing
+which it has by virtue of its monopoly control of the industrial arts,
+and its consequent control of the conditions of employment and of the
+supply of vendible products. It takes effect chiefly by inhibition and
+privation; stoppage of production in case it brings no suitable profit
+to the investor, refusal of employment and of a livelihood to the
+workmen in case their product does not command a profitable price in the
+market.
+
+The expediency of so having the nation's industry managed on a footing
+of private ownership in the pursuit of private gain, by persons who can
+show no equitable personal claim to even the most modest livelihood, and
+whose habitual method of controlling industry is sabotage--refusal to
+let production go on except it affords them an unearned income--the
+expediency of all this is coming to be doubted by those who have to pay
+the cost of it. And it does not go far to lessen their doubts to find
+that the cost which they pay is commonly turned to no more urgent or
+useful purpose than a conspicuously wasteful consumption of
+superfluities by the captains of sabotage and their domestic
+establishments.
+
+This may not seem a veracious and adequate account of these matters; it
+may, in effect, fall short of the formulation: The truth, the whole
+truth, and nothing but the truth; nor does the question here turn on its
+adequacy as a statement of fact. Without prejudice to the question of
+its veracity and adequacy, it is believed to be such an account of these
+matters as will increasingly come easy and seem convincing to the common
+man who, in an ever increasing degree, finds himself pinched with
+privation and insecurity by a run of facts which will consistently bear
+this construction, and who perforce sees these facts from the prejudiced
+standpoint of a loser. To such a one, there is reason to believe, the
+view so outlined will seem all the more convincing the more attentively
+the pertinent facts and their bearing on his fortunes are considered.
+How far the contrary prejudice of those whose interest or training
+inclines them the other way may lead them to a different construction of
+these pertinent facts, does not concern the present argument; which has
+to do with this run of facts only as they bear on the prospective frame
+of mind of that unblest mass of the population who will have opportunity
+to present their proposals when peace at large shall have put national
+interests out of their preferential place in men's regard.
+
+At the risk of what may seem an excessively wide digression, there is
+something further to be said of the capitalistic sabotage spoken of
+above. The word has by usage come to have an altogether ungraceful air
+of disapproval. Yet it signifies nothing more vicious than a deliberate
+obstruction or retardation of industry, usually by legitimate means, for
+the sake of some personal or partisan advantage. This morally colorless
+meaning is all that is intended in its use here. It is extremely common
+in all industry that is designed to supply merchantable goods for the
+market. It is, in fact, the most ordinary and ubiquitous of all
+expedients in business enterprise that has to do with supplying the
+market, being always present in the businessman's necessary
+calculations; being not only a usual and convenient recourse but quite
+indispensable as an habitual measure of business sagacity. So that no
+personal blame can attach to its employment by any given businessman or
+business concern. It is only when measures of this nature are resorted
+to by employees, to gain some end of their own, that such conduct
+becomes (technically) reprehensible.
+
+Any businesslike management of industry is carried on for gain, which is
+to be got only on condition of meeting the terms of the market. The
+price system under which industrial business is carried on will not
+tolerate production in excess of the market demand, or without due
+regard to the expenses of production as determined by the market on the
+side of the supplies required. Hence any business concern must adjust
+its operations, by due acceleration, retardation or stoppage, to the
+market conditions, with a view to what the traffic will bear; that is to
+say, with a view to what will yield the largest obtainable net gain. So
+long as the price system rules, that is to say so long as industry is
+managed on investment for a profit, there is no escaping this necessity
+of adjusting the processes of industry to the requirements of a
+remunerative price; and this adjustment can be taken care of only by
+well-advised acceleration or curtailment of the processes of industry;
+which answers to the definition of sabotage. Wise business management,
+and more particularly what is spoken of as safe and sane business
+management, therefore, reduces itself in the main to a sagacious use of
+sabotage; that is to say a sagacious limitation of productive processes
+to something less than the productive capacity of the means in hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To anyone who is inclined to see these matters of usage in the light of
+their history and to appraise them as phenomena of habituation,
+adaptation and supersession in the sequence of cultural proliferation,
+there should be no difficulty in appreciating that this institution of
+ownership that makes the core of the modern institutional structure is
+a precipitate of custom, like any other item of use and wont; and that,
+like any other article of institutional furniture, it is subject to the
+contingencies of supersession and obsolescence. If prevalent habits of
+thought, enforced by the prevalent exigencies of life and livelihood,
+come to change in such a way as to make life under the rule imposed by
+this institution seem irksome, or intolerable, to the mass of the
+population; and if at the same time things turn in such a way as to
+leave no other and more urgent interest or exigency to take precedence
+of this one and hinder its being pushed to an issue; then it should
+reasonably follow that contention is due to arise between the unblest
+mass on whose life it is a burden and the classes who live by it. But it
+is, of course, impossible to state beforehand what will be the precise
+line of cleavage or what form the division between the two parties in
+interest will take. Yet it is contained in the premises that, barring
+unforeseen contingencies of a formidable magnitude, such a cleavage is
+due to follow as a logical sequel of an enduring peace at large. And it
+is also well within the possibilities of the case that this issue may
+work into an interruption or disruption of the peace between the
+nations.
+
+In this connection it may be called to mind that the existing
+governmental establishments in these pacific nations are, in all cases,
+in the hands of the beneficiary, or kept classes,--beneficiaries in the
+sense in which a distinction to that effect comes into the premises of
+the case at this point. The responsible officials and their chief
+administrative officers,--so much as may at all reasonably be called the
+"Government" or the "Administration,"--are quite invariably and
+characteristically drawn from these beneficiary classes; nobles,
+gentlemen, or business men, which all comes to the same thing for the
+purpose in hand; the point of it all being that the common man does not
+come within these precincts and does not share in these counsels that
+assume to guide the destiny of the nations.
+
+Of course, sporadically and ephemerally, a man out of the impecunious
+and undistinguished mass may now and again find his way within the
+gates; and more frequently will a professed "Man of the People" sit in
+council. But that the rule holds unbroken and inviolable is sufficiently
+evident in the fact that no community will let the emoluments of office
+for any of its responsible officials, even for those of a very scant
+responsibility, fall to the level of the habitual livelihood of the
+undistinguished populace, or indeed to fall below what is esteemed to be
+a seemly income for a gentleman. Should such an impecunious one be
+thrown up into a place of discretion in the government, he will
+forthwith cease to be a common man and will be inducted into the rank of
+gentleman,--so far as that feat can be achieved by taking thought or by
+assigning him an income adequate to a reputably expensive manner of
+life. So obvious is the antagonism between a vulgar station in life and
+a position of official trust, that many a "selfmade man" has advisedly
+taken recourse to governmental position, often at some appreciable cost,
+from no apparent motive other than its known efficacy as a Levitical
+corrective for a humble origin. And in point of fact, neither here nor
+there have the underbred majority hitherto learned to trust one of their
+own kind with governmental discretion; which has never yet, in the
+popular conviction, ceased to be a perquisite of the gently-bred and the
+well-to-do.
+
+Let it be presumed that this state of things will continue without
+substantial alteration, so far as regards the complexion of the
+governmental establishments of these pacific nations, and with such
+allowance for overstatement in the above characterisation as may seem
+called for. These governmental establishments are, by official position
+and by the character of their personnel, committed more or less
+consistently to the maintenance of the existing law and order. And
+should no substantial change overtake them as an effect of the war
+experience, the pacific league under discussion would be entered into by
+and between governments of this complexion. Should difficulties then
+arise between those who own and those who do not, in any one of these
+countries, it would become a nice question whether the compact to
+maintain the peace and national integrity of the several nations
+comprised in the league should be held to cover the case of internal
+dissensions and possible disorders partaking of the character of revolt
+against the established authorities or against the established
+provisions of law. A strike of the scope and character of the one
+recently threatened, and narrowly averted, on the American railroads,
+e.g., might easily give rise to disturbances sufficiently formidable to
+raise a question of the peace league's jurisdiction; particularly if
+such a disturbance should arise in a less orderly and less isolated
+country than the American republic; so as unavoidably to carry the
+effects of the disturbance across the national frontiers along the lines
+of industrial and commercial intercourse and correlation. It is always
+conceivable that a national government standing on a somewhat
+conservative maintenance of the received law and order might feel itself
+bound by its conception of the peace to make common cause with the
+keepers of established rights in neighboring states, particularly if
+the similar interests of their own nation were thought to be placed in
+jeopardy by the course of events.
+
+Antecedently it seems highly probable that the received rights of
+ownership and disposal of property, particularly of investment, will
+come up for advisement and revision so soon as a settled state of peace
+is achieved. And there should seem to be little doubt but this revision
+would go toward, or at least aim at the curtailment or abrogation of
+these rights; very much after the fashion in which the analogous vested
+rights of feudalism and the dynastic monarchy have been revised and in
+great part curtailed or abrogated in the advanced democratic countries.
+Not much can confidently be said as to the details of such a prospective
+revision of legal rights, but the analogy of that procedure by which
+these other vested rights have been reduced to a manageable disability,
+suggests that the method in the present case also would be by way of
+curtailment, abrogation and elimination. Here again, as in analogous
+movements of disuse and disestablishment, there would doubtless be much
+conservative apprehension as to the procuring of a competent substitute
+for the supplanted methods of doing what is no longer desirable to be
+done; but here as elsewhere, in a like conjuncture, the practicable way
+out would presumably be found to lie along the line of simple disuse and
+disallowance of class prerogative. Taken at its face value, without
+unavoidable prejudice out of the past, this question of a substitute to
+replace the current exploitation of the industrial arts for private gain
+by capitalistic sabotage is not altogether above a suspicion of
+drollery.
+
+Yet it is not to be overlooked that private enterprise on the basis of
+private ownership is the familiar and accepted method of conducting
+industrial affairs, and that it has the sanction of immemorial usage, in
+the eyes of the common man, and that it is reenforced with the urgency
+of life and death in the apprehension of the kept classes. It should
+accordingly be a possible outcome of such a peace as would put away
+international dissension, that the division of classes would come on in
+a new form, between those who stand on their ancient rights of
+exploitation and mastery, and those who are unwilling longer to submit.
+And it is quite within the possibilities of the case that the division
+of opinion on these matters might presently shift back to the old
+familiar ground of international hostilities; undertaken partly to put
+down civil disturbances in given countries, partly by the more archaic,
+or conservative, peoples to safeguard the institutions of the received
+law and order against inroads from the side of the iconoclastic ones.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the apprehension of those who are speaking for peace between the
+nations and planning for its realisation, the outlook is that of a
+return to, or a continuance of, the state of things before the great war
+came on, with peace and national security added, or with the danger of
+war eliminated. Nothing appreciable in the way of consequent innovation,
+certainly nothing of a serious character, is contemplated as being among
+the necessary consequences of such a move into peace and security.
+National integrity and autonomy are to be preserved on the received
+lines, and international division and discrimination is to be managed as
+before, and with the accustomed incidents of punctilio and pecuniary
+equilibration. Internationally speaking, there is to dawn an era of
+diplomacy without afterthought, whatever that might conceivably mean.
+
+There is much in the present situation that speaks for such an
+arrangement, particularly as an initial phase of the perpetual peace
+that is aimed at, whatever excursive variations might befall presently,
+in the course of years. The war experience in the belligerent countries
+and the alarm that has disturbed the neutral nations have visibly raised
+the pitch of patriotic solidarity in all these countries; and patriotism
+greatly favors the conservation of established use and wont; more
+particularly is it favorable to the established powers and policies of
+the national government. The patriotic spirit is not a spirit of
+innovation. The chances of survival, and indeed of stabilisation, for
+the accepted use and wont and for the traditional distinctions of class
+and prescriptive rights, should therefore seem favorable, at any rate in
+the first instance.
+
+Presuming, therefore, as the spokesmen of such a peace-compact are
+singularly ready to presume, that the era of peace and good-will which
+they have in view is to be of a piece with the most tranquil decades of
+the recent past, only more of the same kind, it becomes a question of
+immediate interest to the common man, as well as to all students of
+human culture, how the common man is to fare under this régime of law
+and order,--the mass of the population whose place it is to do what is
+to be done, and thereby to carry forward the civilisation of these
+pacific nations. It may not be out of place to recall, by way of
+parenthesis, that it is here taken for granted as a matter of course
+that all governmental establishments are necessarily conservative in all
+their dealings with this heritage of culture, except so far as they may
+be reactionary. Their office is the stabilisation of archaic
+institutions, the measure of archaism varying from one to another.
+
+With due stabilisation and with a sagacious administration of the
+established scheme of law and order, the common man should find himself
+working under conditions and to results of the familiar kind; but with
+the difference that, while legal usage and legal precedent remain
+unchanged, the state of the industrial arts can confidently be expected
+to continue its advance in the same general direction as before, while
+the population increases after the familiar fashion, and the investing
+business community pursues its accustomed quest of competitive gain and
+competitive spending in the familiar spirit and with cumulatively
+augmented means. Stabilisation of the received law and order will not
+touch these matters; and for the present it is assumed that these
+matters will not derange the received law and order. The assumption may
+seem a violent one to the students of human culture, but it is a simple
+matter of course to the statesmen.
+
+To this piping time of peace the nearest analogues in history would seem
+to be the Roman peace, say, of the days of the Antonines, and passably
+the British peace of the Victorian era. Changes in the scheme of law and
+order supervened in both of these instances, but the changes were, after
+all, neither unconscionably large nor were they of a subversive nature.
+The scheme of law and order, indeed, appears in neither instance to have
+changed so far as the altered circumstances would seem to have called
+for. To the common man the Roman peace appears to have been a peace by
+submission, not widely different from what the case of China has
+latterly brought to the appreciation of students. The Victorian peace,
+which can be appreciated more in detail, was of a more genial character,
+as regards the fortunes of the common man. It started from a reasonably
+low level of hardship and _de facto_ iniquity, and was occupied with
+many prudent endeavours to improve the lot of the unblest majority; but
+it is to be admitted that these prudent endeavours never caught up with
+the march of circumstances. Not that these prudent measures of
+amelioration were nugatory, but it is clear that they were not an
+altogether effectual corrective of the changes going on; they were, in
+effect, systematically so far in arrears as always to leave an uncovered
+margin of discontent with current conditions. It is a fact of history
+that very appreciable sections of the populace were approaching an
+attitude of revolt against what they considered to be intolerable
+conditions when that era closed. Much of what kept them within bounds,
+that is to say within legal bounds, was their continued loyalty to the
+nation; which was greatly, and for the purpose needfully, reenforced by
+a lively fear of warlike aggression from without. Now, under the
+projected _pax orbis terrarum_ all fear of invasion, it is hopefully
+believed, will be removed; and with the disappearance of this fear
+should also disappear the drag of national loyalty on the counsels of
+the underbred.
+
+If this British peace of the nineteenth century is to be taken as a
+significant indication of what may be looked for under a régime of peace
+at large, with due allowance for what is obviously necessary to be
+allowed for, then what is held in promise would appear to be an era of
+unexampled commercial prosperity, of investment and business enterprise
+on a scale hitherto not experienced. These developments will bring their
+necessary consequences affecting the life of the community, and some of
+the consequences it should be possible to foresee. The circumstances
+conditioning this prospective era of peace and prosperity will
+necessarily differ from the corresponding circumstances that
+conditioned the Victorian peace, and many of these points of difference
+it is also possible to forecast in outline with a fair degree of
+confidence. It is in the main these economic factors going to condition
+the civilisation of the promised future that will have to be depended on
+to give the cue to any student interested in the prospective unfolding
+of events.
+
+The scheme of law and order governing all modern nations, both in the
+conduct of their domestic affairs and in their national policies, is in
+its controlling elements the scheme worked out through British (and
+French) experience in the eighteenth century and earlier, as revised and
+further accommodated in the nineteenth century. Other peoples,
+particularly the Dutch, have of course had their part in the derivation
+and development of this modern scheme of institutional principles, but
+it has after all been a minor part; so that the scheme at large would
+not differ very materially, if indeed it should differ sensibly, from
+what it is, even if the contribution of these others had not been had.
+The backward nations, as e.g., Germany, Russia, Spain, etc., have of
+course contributed substantially nothing but retardation and
+maladjustment to this modern scheme of civil life; whatever may be due
+to students resident in those countries, in the way of scholarly
+formulation. This nineteenth century scheme it is proposed to carry over
+into the new era; and the responsible spokesmen of the projected new
+order appear to contemplate no provision touching this scheme of law and
+order, beyond the keeping of it intact in all substantial respects.
+
+When and in so far as the projected peace at large takes effect,
+international interests will necessarily fall somewhat into the
+background, as being no longer a matter of precarious equilibration,
+with heavy penalties in the balance; and diplomacy will consequently
+become even more of a make-believe than today--something after the
+fashion of a game of bluff played with irredeemable "chips." Commercial,
+that is to say business, enterprise will consequently come in for a more
+undivided attention and be carried on under conditions of greater
+security and of more comprehensive trade relations. The population of
+the pacified world may be expected to go on increasing somewhat as in
+the recent past; in which connection it is to be remarked that not more
+than one-half, presumably something less than one-half, of the available
+agricultural resources have been turned to account for the civilised
+world hitherto. The state of the industrial arts, including means of
+transport and communication, may be expected to develop farther in the
+same general direction as before, assuming always that peace conditions
+continue to hold. Popular intelligence, as it is called,--more properly
+popular education,--may be expected to suffer a further advance;
+necessarily so, since it is a necessary condition of any effectual
+advance in the industrial arts,--every appreciable technological advance
+presumes, as a requisite to its working-out in industry, an augmented
+state of information and of logical facility in the workmen under whose
+hands it is to take effect.
+
+Of the prescriptive rights carried over into the new era, under the
+received law and order, the rights of ownership alone may be expected to
+have any material significance for the routine of workday life; the
+other personal rights that once seemed urgent will for everyday purposes
+have passed into a state of half-forgotten matter-of-course. As now, but
+in an accentuated degree, the rights of ownership will, in effect,
+coincide and coalesce with the rights of investment and business
+management. The market--that is to say the rule of the price-system in
+all matters of production and livelihood--may be expected to gain in
+volume and inclusiveness; so that virtually all matters of industry and
+livelihood will turn on questions of market price, even beyond the
+degree in which that proposition holds today. The progressive extension
+and consolidation of investments, corporate solidarity, and business
+management may be expected to go forward on the accustomed lines, as
+illustrated by the course of things during the past few decades. Market
+conditions should accordingly, in a progressively increased degree, fall
+under the legitimate discretionary control of businessmen, or syndicates
+of businessmen, who have the disposal of large blocks of invested
+wealth,--"big business," as it is called, should reasonably be expected
+to grow bigger and to exercise an increasingly more unhampered control
+of market conditions, including the money market and the labor market.
+
+With such improvements in the industrial arts as may fairly be expected
+to come forward, and with the possible enhancement of industrial
+efficiency which should follow from a larger scale of organisation, a
+wider reach of transport and communication, and an increased
+population,--with these increasing advantages on the side of productive
+industry, the per-capita product as well as the total product should be
+increased in a notable degree, and the conditions of life should
+possibly become notably easier and more attractive, or at least more
+conducive to efficiency and personal comfort, for all concerned. Such
+would be the first and unguarded inference to be drawn from the premises
+of the case as they offer themselves in the large; and something of that
+kind is apparently what floats before the prophetic vision of the
+advocates of a league of nations for the maintenance of peace at large.
+These premises, and the inferences so drawn from them, may be further
+fortified and amplified in the same sense on considering that certain
+very material economies also become practicable, and should take effect
+"in the absence of disturbing causes," on the establishment of such a
+peace at large. It will of course occur to all thoughtful persons that
+armaments must be reduced, perhaps to a minimum, and that the cost of
+these things, in point of expenditures as well as of man-power spent in
+the service, would consequently fall off in a corresponding measure. So
+also, as slight further reflection will show, would the cost of the
+civil service presumably fall off very appreciably; more particularly
+the cost of this service per unit of service rendered. Some such climax
+of felicities might be looked for by hopeful persons, in the absence of
+disturbing causes.
+
+Under the new dispensation the standard of living, that is to say the
+standard of expenditure, would reasonably be expected to advance in a
+very appreciable degree, at least among the wealthy and well-to-do; and
+by pressure of imitative necessity a like effect would doubtless also be
+had among the undistinguished mass. It is not a question of the standard
+of living considered as a matter of the subsistence minimum, or even a
+standard of habitually prevalent creature comfort, particularly not
+among the wealthy and well-to-do. These latter classes have long since
+left all question of material comfort behind in their accepted standards
+of living and in the continued advance of these standards. For these
+classes who are often spoken of euphemistically as being "in easy
+circumstances," it is altogether a question of a standard of reputable
+expenditure, to be observed on pain of lost self-respect and of lost
+reputation at large. As has been remarked in an earlier passage, wants
+of this kind are indefinitely extensible. So that some doubt may well be
+entertained as to whether the higher productive efficiency spoken of
+will necessarily make the way of life easier, in view of this need of a
+higher standard of expenditure, even when due account is taken of the
+many economies which the new dispensation is expected to make
+practicable.
+
+One of the effects to be looked for would apparently be an increased
+pressure on the part of aspiring men to get into some line of business
+enterprise; since it is only in business, as contrasted with the
+industrial occupations, that anyone can hope to find the relatively
+large income required for such an expensive manner of life as will bring
+any degree of content to aspirants for pecuniary good repute. So it
+should follow that the number of businessmen and business concerns would
+increase up to the limit of what the traffic could support, and that the
+competition between these rival, and in a sense over-numerous, concerns
+would push the costs of competition to the like limit. In this respect
+the situation would be of much the same character as what it now is,
+with the difference that the limit of competitive expenditures would be
+rather higher than at present, to answer to the greater available margin
+of product that could be devoted to this use; and that the competing
+concerns would be somewhat more numerous, or at least that the aggregate
+expenditure on competitive enterprise would be somewhat larger; as,
+e.g., costs of advertising, salesmanship, strategic litigation,
+procuration of legislative and municipal grants and connivance, and the
+like.
+
+It is always conceivable, though it may scarcely seem probable, that
+these incidents of increased pressure of competition in business traffic
+might eventually take up all the slack, and leave no net margin of
+product over what is available under the less favorable conditions of
+industry that prevail today; more particularly when this increased
+competition for business gains is backed by an increased pressure of
+competitive spending for purposes of a reputable appearance. All this
+applies in retail trade and in such lines of industry and public service
+as partakes of the nature of retail trade, in the respect that
+salesmanship and the costs of salesmanship enter into their case in an
+appreciable measure; this is an extensive field, it is true, and
+incontinently growing more extensive with the later changes in the
+customary methods of marketing products; but it is by no means anything
+like the whole domain of industrial business, and by no means a field in
+which business is carried on without interference of a higher control
+from outside its own immediate limits.
+
+All this generously large and highly expensive and profitable field of
+trade and of trade-like industry, in which the businessmen in charge
+deal somewhat directly with a large body of customers, is always subject
+to limitations imposed by the condition of the market; and the condition
+of the market is in part not under the control of these businessmen, but
+is also in part controlled by large concerns in the background; which in
+their turn are after all also not precisely free agents; in fact not
+much more so than their cousins in the retail trade, being confined in
+all their motions by the constraint of the price-system that dominates
+the whole and gathers them all in its impersonal and inexorable net.
+
+There is a colloquial saying among businessmen, that they are not doing
+business for their health; which being interpreted means that they are
+doing business for a price. It is out of a discrepancy in price, between
+purchase and sale, or between transactions which come to the same result
+as purchase and sale, that the gains of business are drawn; and it is in
+terms of price that these gains are rated, amassed and funded. It is
+necessary, for a business concern to achieve a favorable balance in
+terms of price; and the larger the balance in terms of price the more
+successful the enterprise. Such a balance can not be achieved except by
+due regard to the conditions of the market, to the effect that dealings
+must not go on beyond what will yield a favorable balance in terms of
+price between income and outgo. As has already been remarked above, the
+prescriptive and indispensable recourse in all this conduct of business
+is sabotage, limitation of supply to bring a remunerative price result.
+
+The new dispensation offers two new factors bearing on this businesslike
+need of a sagacious sabotage, or rather it brings a change of
+coefficients in two factors already familiar in business management: a
+greater need, for gainful business, of resorting to such limitation of
+traffic; and a greater facility of ways and means for enforcing the
+needed restriction. So, it is confidently to be expected that in the
+prospective piping time of peace the advance in the industrial arts will
+continue at an accelerated rate; which may confidently be expected to
+affect the practicable increased production of merchantable goods; from
+which it follows that it will act to depress the prices of these goods;
+from which it follows that if a profitable business is to be done in the
+conduct of productive industry a greater degree of continence than
+before will have to be exercised in order not to let prices fall to an
+unprofitable figure; that is to say, the permissible output must be held
+short of the productive capacity of such industry by a wider margin than
+before. On the other hand, it is well known out of the experience of the
+past few decades that a larger coalition of invested capital,
+controlling a larger proportion of the output, can more effectually
+limit the supply to a salutary maximum, such as will afford reasonable
+profits. And with the new dispensation affording a freer scope for
+business enterprise on conditions of greater security, larger coalitions
+than before are due to come into bearing. So that the means will be at
+hand competently to meet this more urgent need of a stricter limitation
+of the output, in spite of any increased productive capacity conferred
+on the industrial community by any conceivable advance in the industrial
+arts. The outcome to be looked for should apparently be such an
+effectual recourse to capitalistic sabotage as will neutralise any added
+advantage that might otherwise accrue to the community from its
+continued improvements in technology.
+
+In spite of this singularly untoward conjuncture of circumstances to be
+looked for, there need be no serious apprehension that capitalistic
+sabotage, with a view to maintaining prices and the rate of profits,
+will go all the way, to the result indicated, at least not on the
+grounds so indicated alone. There is in the modern development of
+technology, and confidently to be counted on, a continued flow of new
+contrivances and expedients designed to supersede the old; and these are
+in fact successful, in greater or less measure, in finding their way
+into profitable use, on such terms as to displace older appliances,
+underbid them in the market, and render them obsolete or subject to
+recapitalisation on a lowered earning-capacity. So far as this
+unremitting flow of innovations has its effect, that is to say so far as
+it can not be hindered from having an effect, it acts to lower the
+effectual cost of products to the consumer. This effect is but a partial
+and somewhat uncertain one, but it is always to be counted in as a
+persistent factor, of uncertain magnitude, that will affect the results
+in the long run.
+
+As has just been spoken of above, large coalitions of invested wealth
+are more competent to maintain, or if need be to advance, prices than
+smaller coalitions acting in severalty, or even when acting in
+collusion. This state of the case has been well illustrated by the very
+successful conduct of such large business organisations during the past
+few decades; successful, that is, in earning large returns on the
+investments engaged. Under the new dispensation, as has already been
+remarked, coalitions should reasonably be expected to grow to a larger
+size and achieve a greater efficiency for the same purpose.
+
+The large gains of the large corporate coalitions are commonly ascribed
+by their promoters, and by sympathetic theoreticians of the ancient
+line, to economies of production made practicable by a larger scale of
+production; an explanation which is disingenuous only so far as it needs
+be. What is more visibly true on looking into the workings of these
+coalitions in detail is that they are enabled to maintain prices at a
+profitable, indeed at a strikingly profitable, level by such a control
+of the output as would be called sabotage if it were put in practice by
+interested workmen with a view to maintain wages. The effects of this
+sagacious sabotage become visible in the large earnings of these
+investments and the large gains which, now and again, accrue to their
+managers. Large fortunes commonly are of this derivation.
+
+In cases where no recapitalisation has been effected for a considerable
+series of years the yearly earnings of such businesslike coalitions have
+been known to approach fifty percent on the capitalised value. Commonly,
+however, when earnings rise to a striking figure, the business will be
+recapitalised on the basis of its earning-capacity, by issue of a stock
+dividend, by reincorporation in a new combination with an increased
+capitalisation, and the like. Such augmentation of capital not unusually
+has been spoken of by theoretical writers and publicists as an increase
+of the community's wealth, due to savings; an analysis of any given case
+is likely to show that its increased capital value represents an
+increasingly profitable procedure for securing a high price above cost,
+by stopping the available output short of the productive capacity of the
+industries involved. Loosely speaking, and within the limits of what the
+traffic will bear, the gains in such a case are proportioned to the
+deficiency by which the production or supply under control falls short
+of productive capacity. So that the capitalisation in the case comes to
+bear a rough proportion to the material loss which this organisation of
+sabotage is enabled to inflict on the community at large; and instead of
+its being a capitalisation of serviceable means of production it may,
+now and again, come to little else than a capitalisation of chartered
+sabotage.
+
+Under the new dispensation of peace and security at large this manner of
+capitalisation and business enterprise might reasonably be expected to
+gain something in scope and security of operation. Indeed, there are few
+things within the range of human interest on which an opinion may more
+confidently be formed beforehand. If the rights of property, in their
+extent and amplitude, are maintained intact as they are before the law
+today, the hold which business enterprise on the large scale now has on
+the affairs and fortunes of the community at large is bound to grow
+firmer and to be used more unreservedly for private advantage under the
+new conditions contemplated.
+
+The logical result should be an accelerated rate of accumulation of the
+country's wealth in the hands of a relatively very small class of
+wealthy owners, with a relatively inconsiderable semi-dependent middle
+class of the well-to-do, and with the mass of the population even more
+nearly destitute than they are today. At the same time it is scarcely to
+be avoided that this wholly dependent and impecunious mass of the
+population must be given an appreciably better education than they have
+today. The argument will return to the difficulties that are liable to
+arise out of this conjuncture of facts, in the way of discontent and
+possible disturbance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meantime, looking to the promise of the pacific future in the light of
+the pacific past, certain further consequences, particularly
+consequences of the economic order, that may reasonably be expected to
+follow will also merit attention. The experience of the Victorian peace
+is almost as pointed in its suggestion on this head as if it had been an
+experiment made _ad hoc_; but with the reservation that the scale of
+economic life, after all, was small in the Victorian era, and its pace
+was slack, compared with what the twentieth century should have to offer
+under suitable conditions of peace and pecuniary security. In the light
+of this most instructive modern instance, there should appear to be in
+prospect a growth of well-bred families resting on invested wealth and
+so living on unearned incomes; larger incomes and consequently a more
+imposingly well-bred body of gentlefolk, sustained and vouched for by a
+more munificent expenditure on superfluities, than the modern world has
+witnessed hitherto. Doubtless the resulting growth of gentlemen and
+gentlewomen would be as perfect after their kind as these unexampled
+opportunities of gentle breeding might be expected to engender; so that
+even their British precursors on the trail of respectability would fall
+somewhat into insignificance by comparison, whether in respect of
+gentlemanly qualities or in point of cost per unit.
+
+The moral, and even more particularly the aesthetic, value of such a
+line of gentlefolk, and of the culture which they may be expected to
+place on view,--this cultural side of the case, of course, is what one
+would prefer to dwell on, and on the spiritual gains that might be
+expected to accrue to humanity at large from the steady contemplation of
+this meritorious respectability so displayed at such a cost.
+
+But the prosaic necessity of the argument turns back to the economic and
+civil bearing of this prospective development, this virtual bifurcation
+of the pacified nation into a small number of gentlemen who own the
+community's wealth and consume its net product in the pursuit of
+gentility, on the one hand, and an unblest mass of the populace who do
+the community's work on a meager livelihood tapering down toward the
+subsistence minimum, on the other hand. Evidently, this prospective
+posture of affairs may seem "fraught with danger to the common weal," as
+a public spirited citizen might phrase it. Or, as it would be expressed
+in less eloquent words, it appears to comprise elements that should
+make for a change. At the same time it should be recalled, and the
+statement will command assent on slight reflection, that there is no
+avoiding substantially such a posture of affairs under the promised
+régime of peace and security, provided only that the price-system stands
+over intact, and the current rights of property continue to be held
+inviolate. If the known principles of competitive gain and competitive
+spending should need enforcement to that effect by an illustrative
+instance, the familiar history of the Victorian peace is sufficient to
+quiet all doubts.
+
+Of course, the resulting articulation of classes in the community will
+not be expected to fall into such simple lines of sheer contrast as this
+scheme would indicate. The class of gentlefolk, the legally constituted
+wasters, as they would be rated from the economic point of view, can not
+be expected personally to take care of so large a consumption of
+superfluities as this posture of affairs requires at their hands. They
+would, as the Victorian peace teaches, necessarily have the assistance
+of a trained corps of experts in unproductive consumption, the first and
+most immediate of whom would be those whom the genial phrasing of Adam
+Smith designates "menial servants." Beyond these would come the
+purveyors of superfluities, properly speaking, and the large, indeed
+redundant, class of tradespeople of high and low degree,--dependent in
+fact but with an illusion of semi-dependence; and farther out again the
+legal and other professional classes of the order of stewards, whose
+duty it will be to administer the sources of income and receive,
+apportion and disburse the revenues so devoted to a traceless
+extinguishment.
+
+There would, in other words, be something of a "substantial middle
+class," dependent on the wealthy and on their expenditure of wealth, but
+presumably imbued with the Victorian middle-class illusion that they are
+of some account in their own right. Under the due legal forms and
+sanctions this, somewhat voluminous, middle-class population would
+engage in the traffic which is their perquisite, and would continue to
+believe, in some passable fashion, that they touch the substance of
+things at something nearer than the second remove. They would in great
+part appear to be people of "independent means," and more particularly
+would they continue in the hope of so appearing and of some time making
+good the appearance. Hence their fancied, and therefore their
+sentimental, interest would fall out on the side of the established law
+and order; and they would accordingly be an element of stability in the
+commonwealth, and would throw in their weight, and their voice, to
+safeguard that private property and that fabric of prices and credit
+through which the "income stream" flows to the owners of preponderant
+invested wealth.
+
+Judged on the state of the situation as it runs in our time, and
+allowing for the heightened efficiency of large-scale investment and
+consolidated management under the prospective conditions of added
+pecuniary security, it is to be expected that the middle-class
+population with "independent means" should come in for a somewhat meager
+livelihood, provided that they work faithfully at their business of
+managing pecuniary traffic to the advantage of their pecuniary
+betters,--meager, that is to say, when allowance is made for the
+conventionally large expenditure on reputable appearances which is
+necessarily to be included in their standard of living. It lies in the
+nature of this system of large-scale investment and enterprise that the
+(pecuniarily) minor agencies engaged on a footing of ostensible
+independence will come in for only such a share in the aggregate gains
+of the community as it is expedient for the greater business interests
+to allow them as an incentive to go on with their work as purveyors of
+traffic to these greater business interests.
+
+The current, and still more this prospective, case of the
+quasi-self-directing middle class may fairly be illustrated by the case
+of the American farmers, of the past and present. The American farmer
+rejoices to be called "The Independent Farmer." He once was independent,
+in a meager and toil-worn fashion, in the days before the price-system
+had brought him and all his works into the compass of the market; but
+that was some time ago. He now works for the market, ordinarily at
+something like what is called a "living wage," provided he has
+"independent means" enough to enable him by steady application to earn a
+living wage; and of course, the market being controlled by the paramount
+investment interests in the background, his work, in effect, inures to
+their benefit; except so much as it may seem necessary to allow him as
+incentive to go on. Also of course, these paramount investment interests
+are in turn controlled in all their manoeuvres by the impersonal
+exigencies of the price-system, which permits no vagaries in violation
+of the rule that all traffic must show a balance of profit in terms of
+price.
+
+The Independent Farmer still continues to believe that in some occult
+sense he still is independent in what he will do and what not; or
+perhaps rather that he can by shrewd management retain or regain a
+tolerable measure of such independence, after the fashion of what is
+held to have been the posture of affairs in the days before the coming
+of corporation finance; or at least he believes that he ought to have,
+or to regain or reclaim, some appreciable measure of such independence;
+which ought then, by help of the "independent means" which he still
+treasures, to procure him an honest and assured livelihood in return for
+an honest year's work. Latterly he, that is the common run of the
+farmers, has been taking note of the fact that he is, as he apprehends
+it, at a disadvantage in the market; and he is now taking recourse to
+concerted action for the purpose of what might be called "rigging the
+market" to his own advantage. In this he overlooks the impregnable
+position which the party of the second part, the great investment
+interests, occupy; in fact, he is counting without his host. Hitherto he
+has not been convinced of his own helplessness. And with a fine fancy he
+still imagines that his own interest is on the side of the propertied
+and privileged classes; so that the farmer constituency is the chief
+pillar of conservative law and order, particularly in all that touches
+the inviolable rights of property and at every juncture where a division
+comes on between those who live by investment and those who live by
+work. In pecuniary effect, the ordinary American farmer, who legally
+owns a moderate farm of the common sort, belongs among those who work
+for a livelihood; such a livelihood as the investment interests find it
+worth while to allow him under the rule of what the traffic will bear;
+but in point of sentiment and class consciousness he clings to a belated
+stand on the side of those who draw a profit from his work.
+
+So it is also with the menial servants and the middle-class people of
+"independent means," who are, however, in a position to see more clearly
+their dependence on the owners of predominant wealth. And such, with a
+further accentuation of the anomaly, may reasonably be expected to be
+the further run of these relations under the promised régime of peace
+and security. The class of well-kept gentlefolk will scarcely be called
+on to stand alone, in case of a division between those who live by
+investment and those who live by work; inasmuch as, for the calculable
+future, it should seem a reasonable expectation that this very
+considerable fringe of dependents and pseudo-independents will abide by
+their time-tried principles of right and honest living, through good
+days and evil, and cast in their lot unreservedly with that reputable
+body to whom the control of trade and industry by investment assigns the
+usufruct of the community's productive powers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Something has already been said of the prospective breeding of pedigreed
+gentlefolk under the projected régime of peace. Pedigree, for the
+purpose in hand, is a pecuniary attribute and is, of course, a product
+of funded wealth, more or less ancient. Virtually ancient pedigree can
+be procured by well-advised expenditure on the conspicuous amenities;
+that is to say pedigree effectually competent as a background of current
+gentility. Gentlefolk of such syncopated pedigree may have to walk
+circumspectly, of course; but their being in this manner put on their
+good behavior should tend to heighten their effectual serviceability as
+gentlefolk, by inducing a single-mindedness of gentility beyond what can
+fairly be expected of those who are already secure in their tenure.
+
+Except conventionally, there is no hereditary difference between the
+standard gentlefolk and, say, their "menial servants," or the general
+population of the farms and the industrial towns. This is a
+well-established commonplace among ethnological students; which has, of
+course, nothing to say with respect to the conventionally distinct lines
+of descent of the "Best Families." These Best Families are nowise
+distinguishable from the common run in point of hereditary traits; the
+difference that makes the gentleman and the gentlewoman being wholly a
+matter of habituation during the individual's life-time. It is something
+of a distasteful necessity to call attention to this total absence of
+native difference between the well-born and the common, but it is a
+necessity of the argument in hand, and the recalling of it may,
+therefore, be overlooked for once in a way. There is no harm and no
+annoyance intended. The point of it all is that, on the premises which
+this state of the case affords, the body of gentlefolk created by such
+an accumulation of invested wealth will have no less of an effectual
+cultural value than they would have had if their virtually ancient
+pedigree had been actual.
+
+At this point, again, the experience of the Victorian peace and the
+functioning of its gentlefolk come in to indicate what may fairly be
+hoped for in this way under this prospective régime of peace at large.
+But with the difference that the scale of things is to be larger, the
+pace swifter, and the volume and dispersion of this prospective leisure
+class somewhat wider. The work of this leisure class--and there is
+neither paradox nor inconsistency in the phrase--should be patterned on
+the lines worked out by their prototypes of the Victorian time, but with
+some appreciable accentuation in the direction of what chiefly
+characterised the leisure class of that era of tranquility. The
+characteristic feature to which attention naturally turns at this
+suggestion is the tranquility that has marked that body of gentlefolk
+and their code of clean and honest living. Another word than
+"tranquility" might be hit upon to designate this characteristic animus,
+but any other word that should at all adequately serve the turn would
+carry a less felicitous suggestion of those upper-class virtues that
+have constituted the substantial worth of the Victorian gentleman. The
+conscious worth of these gentlefolk has been a beautifully complete
+achievement. It has been an achievement of "faith without works," of
+course; but, needless to say, that is as it should be, also of course.
+The place of gentlefolk in the economy of Nature is tracelessly to
+consume the community's net product, and in doing so to set a standard
+of decent expenditure for the others emulatively to work up to as near
+as may be. It is scarcely conceivable that this could have been done in
+a more unobtrusively efficient manner, or with a more austerely virtuous
+conviction of well-doing, than by the gentlefolk bred of the Victorian
+peace. So also, in turn, it is not to be believed that the prospective
+breed of gentlefolk derivable from the net product of the pacific
+nations under the promised régime of peace at large will prove in any
+degree less effective for the like ends. More will be required of them
+in the way of a traceless consumption of superfluities and an unexampled
+expensive standard of living. But this situation that so faces them may
+be construed as a larger opportunity, quite as well as a more difficult
+task.
+
+A theoretical exposition of the place and cultural value of a leisure
+class in modern life would scarcely be in place here; and it has also
+been set out in some detail elsewhere.[10] For the purpose in hand it
+may be sufficient to recall that the canons of taste and the standards
+of valuation worked out and inculcated by leisure-class life have in all
+ages run, with unbroken consistency, to pecuniary waste and personal
+futility. In its economic bearing, and particularly in its immediate
+bearing on the material well-being of the community at large, the
+leadership of the leisure class can scarcely be called by a less
+derogatory epithet than "untoward." But that is not the whole of the
+case, and the other side should be heard. The leisure-class life of
+tranquility, running detached as it does above the turmoil out of which
+the material of their sustenance is derived, enables a growth of all
+those virtues that mark, or make, the gentleman; and that affect the
+life of the underlying community throughout, pervasively, by imitation;
+leading to a standardisation of the everyday proprieties on a
+presumably, higher level of urbanity and integrity than might be
+expected to result in the absence of this prescriptive model.
+
+[Footnote 10: Cf. _The Theory of the Leisure Class_, especially ch.
+v.-ix. and xiv.]
+
+_Integer vitae scelerisque purus_, the gentleman of assured station
+turns a placid countenance to all those petty vexations of breadwinning
+that touch him not. Serenely and with an impassive fortitude he faces
+those common vicissitudes of life that are impotent to make or mar his
+material fortunes and that can neither impair his creature comforts nor
+put a slur on his good repute. So that without afterthought he deals
+fairly in all everyday conjunctures of give and take; for they are at
+the most inconsequential episodes to him, although the like might spell
+irremediable disaster to his impecunious counterfoil among the common
+men who have the community's work to do. In short, he is a gentleman, in
+the best acceptation of the word,--unavoidably, by force of
+circumstance. As such his example is of invaluable consequence to the
+underlying community of common folk, in that it keeps before their eyes
+an object lesson in habitual fortitude and visible integrity such as
+could scarcely have been created except under such shelter from those
+disturbances that would go to mar habitual fortitude and integrity.
+There can be little doubt but the high example of the Victorian
+gentlefolk has had much to do with stabilising the animus of the British
+common man on lines of integrity and fair play. What else and more in
+the way of habitual preconceptions he may, by competitive imitation, owe
+to the same high source is not immediately in question here.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Recalling once more that the canon of life whereby folk are gentlefolk
+sums itself up in the requirements of pecuniary waste and personal
+futility, and that these requirements are indefinitely extensible, at
+the same time that the management of the community's industry by
+investment for a profit enables the owners of invested wealth to divert
+to their own use the community's net product, wherewith to meet these
+requirements, it follows that the community at large which provides this
+output of product will be allowed so much as is required by their
+necessary standard of living,--with an unstable margin of error in the
+adjustment. This margin of error should tend continually to grow
+narrower as the businesslike management of industry grows more efficient
+with experience; but it will also continually be disturbed in the
+contrary sense by innovations of a technological nature that require
+continual readjustment. This margin is probably not to be got rid of,
+though it may be expected to become less considerable under more settled
+conditions.
+
+It should also not be overlooked that the standard of living here spoken
+of as necessarily to be allowed the working population by no means
+coincides with the "physical subsistence minimum," from which in fact it
+always departs by something appreciable. The necessary standard of
+living of the working community is in fact made up of two
+distinguishable factors: the subsistence minimum, and the requirements
+of decorously wasteful consumption--the "decencies of life." These
+decencies are no less requisite than the physical necessaries, in point
+of workday urgency, and their amount is a matter of use and wont. This
+composite standard of living is a practical minimum, below which
+consumption will not fall, except by a fluctuating margin of error; the
+effect being the same, in point of necessary consumption, as if it were
+all of the nature of a physical subsistence minimum.
+
+Loosely speaking, the arrangement should leave nothing appreciable over,
+after the requirements of genteel waste and of the workday standard of
+consumption have been met. From which in turn it should follow that the
+rest of what is comprised under the general caption of "culture" will
+find a place only in the interstices of leisure-class expenditure and
+only at the hands of aberrant members of the class of the gently-bred.
+The working population should have no effectual margin of time, energy
+or means for other pursuits than the day's work in the service of the
+price-system; so that aberrant individuals in this class, who might by
+native propensity incline, e.g., to pursue the sciences or the fine
+arts, should have (virtually) no chance to make good. It would be a
+virtual suppression of such native gifts among the common folk, not a
+definitive and all-inclusive suppression. The state of the case under
+the Victorian peace may, again, be taken in illustration of the point;
+although under the presumably more effectual control to be looked for in
+the pacific future the margin might reasonably be expected to run
+somewhat narrower, so that this virtual suppression of cultural talent
+among the common men should come nearer a complete suppression.
+
+The working of that free initiative that makes the advance of
+civilisation, and also the greater part of its conservation, would in
+effect be allowed only in the erratic members of the kept classes; where
+at the same time it would have to work against the side-draught of
+conventional usage, which discountenances any pursuit that is not
+visibly futile according to some accepted manner of futility. Now under
+the prospective perfect working of the price-system, bearers of the
+banners of civilisation could effectually be drawn only from the kept
+classes, the gentlefolk who alone would have the disposal of such free
+income as is required for work that has no pecuniary value. And
+numerically the gentlefolk are an inconsiderable fraction of the
+population. The supply of competently gifted bearers of the community's
+culture would accordingly be limited to such as could be drawn by
+self-selection from among this inconsiderable proportion of the
+community at large.
+
+It may be recalled that in point of heredity, and therefore in point of
+native fitness for the maintenance and advance of civilisation, there is
+no difference between the gentlefolk and the populace at large; or at
+least there is no difference of such a nature as to count in abatement
+of the proposition set down above. Some slight, but after all
+inconsequential, difference there may be, but such difference as there
+is, if any, rather counts against the gentlefolk as keepers of the
+cultural advance. The gentlefolk are derived from business; the
+gentleman represents a filial generation of the businessman; and if the
+class typically is gifted with any peculiar hereditary traits,
+therefore, they should presumably be such as typically mark the
+successful businessman--astute, prehensile, unscrupulous. For a
+generation or two, perhaps to the scriptural third and fourth
+generation, it is possible that a diluted rapacity and cunning may
+continue to mark the businessman's well-born descendants; but these are
+not serviceable traits for the conservation and advancement of the
+community's cultural heritage. So that no consideration of special
+hereditary fitness in the well-born need be entertained in this
+connection.
+
+As to the limitation imposed by the price-system on the supply of
+candidates suited by native gift for the human work of civilisation; it
+would no doubt, be putting the figure extravagantly high to say that the
+gentlefolk, properly speaking, comprise as much as ten percent of the
+total population; perhaps something less than one-half of that
+percentage would still seem a gross overstatement. But, to cover loose
+ends and vagrant cases, the gentlefolk may for the purpose be credited
+with so high a percentage of the total population. If ten percent be
+allowed, as an outside figure, it follows that the community's
+scientists, artists, scholars, and the like individuals given over to
+the workday pursuits of the human spirit, are by conventional
+restriction to be drawn from one-tenth of the current supply of persons
+suited by native gift for these pursuits. Or as it may also be
+expressed, in so far as the projected scheme takes effect it should
+result in the suppression of nine (or more) out of every ten persons
+available for the constructive work of civilisation. The cultural
+consequences to be looked for, therefore, should be quite markedly of
+the conservative order.
+
+Of course, in actual effect, the retardation or repression of
+civilisation by this means, as calculated on these premises, should
+reasonably be expected to count up to something appreciably more than
+nine-tenths of the gains that might presumably be achieved in the
+conceivable absence of the price-system and the régime of investment.
+All work of this kind has much of the character of teamwork; so that the
+efforts of isolated individuals count for little, and a few working in
+more or less of concert and understanding will count for proportionally
+much less than many working in concert. The endeavours of the
+individuals engaged count cumulatively, to such effect that doubling
+their forces will more than double the aggregate efficiency; and
+conversely, reducing the number will reduce the effectiveness of their
+work by something more than the simple numerical proportion. Indeed, an
+undue reduction of numbers in such a case may lead to the total defeat
+of the few that are left, and the best endeavours of a dwindling remnant
+may be wholly nugatory. There is needed a sense of community and
+solidarity, without which the assurance necessary to the work is bound
+to falter and dwindle out; and there is also needed a degree of popular
+countenance, not to be had by isolated individuals engaged in an
+unconventional pursuit of things that are neither to be classed as
+spendthrift decorum nor as merchantable goods. In this connection an
+isolated one does not count for one, and more than the critical minimum
+will count for several per capita. It is a case where the "minimal dose"
+is wholly inoperative.
+
+There is not a little reason to believe that consequent upon the
+installation of the projected régime of peace at large and secure
+investment the critical point in the repression of talent will very
+shortly be reached and passed, so that the principle of the "minimal
+dose" will come to apply. The point may readily be illustrated by the
+case of many British and American towns and neighbourhoods during the
+past few decades; where the dominant price-system and its commercial
+standards of truth and beauty have over-ruled all inclination to
+cultural sanity and put it definitively in abeyance. The cultural, or
+perhaps the conventional, residue left over in these cases where
+civilisation has gone stale through inefficiency of the minimal dose is
+not properly to be found fault with; it is of a blameless character,
+conventionally; nor is there any intention here to cast aspersion on the
+desolate. The like effects of the like causes are to be seen in the
+American colleges and universities, where business principles have
+supplanted the pursuit of learning, and where the commercialisation of
+aims, ideals, tastes, occupations and personnel is following much the
+same lines that have led so many of the country towns effectually
+outside the cultural pale. The American university or college is coming
+to be an outlier of the price-system, in point of aims, standards and
+personnel; hitherto the tradition of learning as a trait of
+civilisation, as distinct from business, has not been fully displaced,
+although it is now coming to face the passage of the minimal dose. The
+like, in a degree, is apparently true latterly for many English, and
+still more evidently for many German schools.
+
+In these various instances of what may be called dry-rot or local blight
+on the civilised world's culture the decline appears to be due not to a
+positive infection of a malignant sort, so much as to a failure of the
+active cultural ferment, which has fallen below the critical point of
+efficacy; perhaps through an unintended refusal of a livelihood to
+persons given over to cultivating the elements of civilisation; perhaps
+through the conventional disallowance of the pursuit of any other ends
+than competitive gain and competitive spending. Evidently it is
+something much more comprehensive in this nature that is reasonably to
+be looked for under the prospective régime of peace, in case the
+price-system gains that farther impetus and warrant which it should come
+in for if the rights of ownership and investment stand over intact, and
+so come to enjoy the benefit of a further improved state of the
+industrial arts and a further enlarged scale of operation and enhanced
+rate of turnover.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To turn back to the point from which this excursion branched off. It has
+been presumed all the while that the technological equipment, or the
+state of the industrial arts, must continue to advance under the
+conditions offered by this régime of peace at large. But the last few
+paragraphs will doubtless suggest that such a single-minded addiction to
+competitive gain and competitive spending as the stabilised and
+amplified price-system would enjoin, must lead to an effectual
+retardation, perhaps to a decline, of those material sciences on which
+modern technology draws; and that the state of the industrial arts
+should therefore cease to advance, if only the scheme of investment and
+businesslike sabotage can be made sufficiently secure. That such may be
+the outcome is a contingency which the argument will have to meet and to
+allow for; but it is after all a contingency that need not be expected
+to derange the sequence of events, except in the way of retardation.
+Even without further advance in technological expedients or in the
+relevant material sciences, there will still necessarily ensue an
+effectual advance in the industrial arts, in the sense that further
+organisation and enlargement of the material equipment and industrial
+processes on lines already securely known and not to be forgotten must
+bring an effectually enhanced efficiency of the industrial process as a
+whole.
+
+In illustration, it is scarcely to be assumed even as a tentative
+hypothesis that the system of transport and communication will not
+undergo extension and improvement on the lines already familiar, even in
+the absence of new technological contrivances. At the same time a
+continued increase of population is to be counted on; which has, for the
+purpose in hand, much the same effect as an advance in the industrial
+arts. Human contact and mutual understanding will necessarily grow wider
+and closer, and will have its effect on the habits of thought prevalent
+in the communities that are to live under the promised régime of peace.
+The system of transport and communication having to handle a more
+voluminous and exacting traffic, in the service of a larger and more
+compact population, will have to be organised and administered on
+mechanically drawn schedules of time, place, volume, velocity, and
+price, of a still more exacting accuracy than hitherto. The like will
+necessarily apply throughout the industrial occupations that employ
+extensive plant or processes, or that articulate with industrial
+processes of that nature; which will necessarily comprise a larger
+proportion of the industrial process at large than hitherto.
+
+As has already been remarked more than once in the course of the
+argument, a population that lives and does its work, and such play as is
+allowed it, in and by an exactingly articulate mechanical system of this
+kind will necessarily be an "intelligent" people, in the colloquial
+sense of the word; that is to say it will necessarily be a people that
+uses printed matter freely and that has some familiarity with the
+elements of those material sciences that underlie this mechanically
+organised system of appliances and processes. Such a population lives by
+and within the framework of the mechanistic logic, and is in a fair way
+to lose faith in any proposition that can not be stated convincingly in
+terms of this mechanistic logic. Superstitions are liable to lapse by
+neglect or disuse in such a community; that is to say propositions of a
+non-mechanistic complexion are liable to insensible disestablishment in
+such a case; "superstition" in these premises coming to signify whatever
+is not of this mechanistic, or "materialistic" character. An exception
+to this broad characterisation of non-mechanistic propositions as
+"superstition" would be matters that are of the nature of an immediate
+deliverance of the senses or of the aesthetic sensibilities.
+
+By a simile it might be said that what so falls under the caption of
+"superstition" in such a case is subject to decay by inanition. It
+should not be difficult to conceive the general course of such a decay
+of superstitions under this unremitting discipline of mechanistic habits
+of life. The recent past offers an illustration, in the unemotional
+progress of decay that has overtaken religious beliefs in the more
+civilised countries, and more particularly among the intellectually
+trained workmen of the mechanical industries. The elimination of such
+non-mechanistic propositions of the faith has been visibly going on, but
+it has not worked out on any uniform plan, nor has it overtaken any
+large or compact body of people consistently or abruptly, being of the
+nature of obsolescence rather than of set repudiation. But in a slack
+and unreflecting fashion the divestment has gone on until the aggregate
+effect is unmistakable.
+
+A similar divestment of superstitions is reasonably to be looked for
+also in that domain of preconceptions that lies between the supernatural
+and the mechanistic. Chief among these time-warped preconceptions--or
+superstitions--that so stand over out of the alien past among these
+democratic peoples is the institution of property. As is true of
+preconceptions touching the supernatural verities, so here too the
+article of use and wont in question will not bear formulation in
+mechanistic terms and is not congruous with that mechanistic logic that
+is incontinently bending the habits of thought of the common man more
+and more consistently to its own bent. There is, of course, the
+difference that while no class--apart from the servants of the
+church--have a material interest in the continued integrity of the
+articles of the supernatural faith, there is a strong and stubborn
+material interest bound up with the maintenance of this article of the
+pecuniary faith; and the class in whom this material interest vests are
+also, in effect, invested with the coercive powers of the law.
+
+The law, and the popular preconceptions that give the law its binding
+force, go to uphold the established usage and the established
+prerogatives on this head; and the disestablishment of the rights of
+property and investment therefore is not a simple matter of obsolescence
+through neglect. It may confidently be counted on that all the apparatus
+of the law and all the coercive agencies of law and order, will be
+brought in requisition to uphold the ancient rights of ownership,
+whenever any move is made toward their disallowance or restriction. But
+then, on the other hand, the movement to disallow or diminish the
+prerogatives of ownership is also not to take the innocuous shape of
+unstudied neglect. So soon, or rather so far, as the common man comes to
+realise that these rights of ownership and investment uniformly work to
+his material detriment, at the same time that he has lost the "will to
+believe" in any argument that does not run in terms of the mechanistic
+logic, it is reasonable to expect that he will take a stand on this
+matter; and it is more than likely that the stand taken will be of an
+uncompromising kind,--presumably something in the nature of the stand
+once taken by recalcitrant Englishmen in protest against the
+irresponsible rule of the Stuart sovereign. It is also not likely that
+the beneficiaries under these proprietary rights will yield their ground
+at all amicably; all the more since they are patently within their
+authentic rights in insisting on full discretion in the disposal of
+their own possessions; very much as Charles I or James II once were
+within their prescriptive right,--which had little to say in the
+outcome.
+
+Even apart from "time immemorial" and the patent authenticity of the
+institution, there were and are many cogent arguments to be alleged in
+favor of the position for which the Stuart sovereigns and their
+spokesmen contended. So there are and will be many, perhaps more, cogent
+reasons to be alleged for the maintenance of the established law and
+order in respect of the rights of ownership and investment. Not least
+urgent, nor least real, among these arguments is the puzzling question
+of what to put in the place of these rights and of the methods of
+control based on them, very much as the analogous question puzzled the
+public-spirited men of the Stuart times. All of which goes to argue that
+there may be expected to arise a conjuncture of perplexities and
+complications, as well as a division of interests and claims. To which
+should be added that the division is likely to come to a head so soon as
+the balance of forces between the two parties in interest becomes
+doubtful, so that either party comes to surmise that the success of its
+own aims may depend on its own efforts. And as happens where two
+antagonistic parties are each convinced of the justice of its cause, and
+in the absence of an umpire, the logical recourse is the wager of
+battle.
+
+Granting the premises, there should be no reasonable doubt as to this
+eventual cleavage between those who own and those who do not; and of the
+premises the only item that is not already an accomplished fact is the
+installation of peace at large. The rest of what goes into the argument
+is the well-known modern state of the industrial arts, and the equally
+well-known price-system; which, in combination, give its character to
+the modern state of business enterprise. It is only an unusually broad
+instance of an institutional arrangement which has in the course of time
+and changing conditions come to work at cross purposes with that
+underlying ground of institutional arrangements that takes form in the
+commonplace aphorism, Live and let live. With change setting in the
+direction familiar to all men today, it is only a question of limited
+time when the discrepancy will reach a critical pass, and the
+installation of peace may be counted on to hasten this course of things.
+
+That a decision will be sought by recourse to forcible measures, is also
+scarcely open to question; since the established law and order provides
+for a resort to coercion in the enforcement of these prescriptive
+rights, and since both parties in interest, in this as in other cases,
+are persuaded of the justice of their claims. A decision either way is
+an intolerable iniquity in the eyes of the losing side. History teaches
+that in such a quarrel the recourse has always been to force.
+
+History teaches also, but with an inflection of doubt, that the outworn
+institution in such a conjuncture faces disestablishment. At least, so
+men like to believe. What the experience of history does not leave in
+doubt is the grave damage, discomfort and shame incident to the
+displacement of such an institutional discrepancy by such recourse to
+force. What further appears to be clear in the premises, at least to the
+point of a strong presumption, is that in the present case the decision,
+or the choice, lies between two alternatives: either the price-system
+and its attendant business enterprise will yield and pass out; or the
+pacific nations will conserve their pecuniary scheme of law and order at
+the cost of returning to a war footing and letting their owners preserve
+the rights of ownership by force of arms.
+
+The reflection obviously suggests itself that this prospect of
+consequences to follow from the installation of peace at large might
+well be taken into account beforehand by those who are aiming to work
+out an enduring peace. It has appeared in the course of the argument
+that the preservation of the present pecuniary law and order, with all
+its incidents of ownership and investment, is incompatible with an
+unwarlike state of peace and security. This current scheme of
+investment, business, and sabotage, should have an appreciably better
+chance of survival in the long run if the present conditions of warlike
+preparation and national insecurity were maintained, or if the projected
+peace were left in a somewhat problematical state, sufficiently
+precarious to keep national animosities alert, and thereby to the
+neglect of domestic interests, particularly of such interests as touch
+the popular well-being. On the other hand, it has also appeared that the
+cause of peace and its perpetuation might be materially advanced if
+precautions were taken beforehand to put out of the way as much as may
+be of those discrepancies of interest and sentiment between nations and
+between classes which make for dissension and eventual hostilities.
+
+So, if the projectors of this peace at large are in any degree inclined
+to seek concessive terms on which the peace might hopefully be made
+enduring, it should evidently be part of their endeavours from the
+outset to put events in train for the present abatement and eventual
+abrogation of the rights of ownership and of the price-system in which
+these rights take effect. A hopeful beginning along this line would
+manifestly be the neutralisation of all pecuniary rights of citizenship,
+as has been indicated in an earlier passage. On the other hand, if peace
+is not desired at the cost of relinquishing the scheme of competitive
+gain and competitive spending, the promoters of peace should logically
+observe due precaution and move only so far in the direction of a
+peaceable settlement as would result in a sufficiently unstable
+equilibrium of mutual jealousies; such as might expeditiously be upset
+whenever discontent with pecuniary affairs should come to threaten this
+established scheme of pecuniary prerogatives.
+
+
+BOOKS BY THORSTEIN VEBLEN
+
+
+THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS
+
+THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE
+
+THE INSTINCT OF WORKMANSHIP
+
+IMPERIAL GERMANY
+AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
+
+THE NATURE OF PEACE
+AND THE TERMS OF ITS PERPETUATION
+
+THE HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace
+And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation, by Thorstein Veblen
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NATURE OF PEACE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 20694-8.txt or 20694-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/0/6/9/20694/
+
+Produced by Irma Špehar, Graeme Mackreth and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This
+file made using scans of public domain works at the
+University of Georgia.)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/20694-8.zip b/20694-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2ef7451
--- /dev/null
+++ b/20694-8.zip
diff --git a/20694-h.zip b/20694-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e405b2b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/20694-h.zip
diff --git a/20694-h/20694-h.htm b/20694-h/20694-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..28488fa
--- /dev/null
+++ b/20694-h/20694-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,11353 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation, by Thorstein Veblen.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         clear: both;
+         }
+    hr { width: 33%;
+	 margin-top: 2em;
+	 margin-bottom: 2em;
+         margin-left: auto;
+         margin-right: auto;
+         clear: both;
+       }
+
+
+    body{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+
+    .pagenum  { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+            /*  visibility: hidden;  */
+                position: absolute;
+                left: 92%;
+                font-size: smaller;
+                text-align: right;
+              } /* page numbers */
+
+
+    .blockquot{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;}
+
+
+    .bb       {border-bottom: solid 2px;}
+    .bl       {border-left: solid 2px;}
+    .bt       {border-top: solid 2px;}
+    .br       {border-right: solid 2px;}
+    .bbox     {border: solid 2px;}
+
+    .center   {text-align: center;}
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+    .u        {text-decoration: underline;}
+
+
+
+    .footnotes        {border: dashed 1px;}
+    .footnote         {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;}
+    .footnote .label  {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;}
+    .fnanchor         {vertical-align: super; font-size: .8em; text-decoration: none;}
+
+        // -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+    </style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The
+Terms Of Its Perpetuation, by Thorstein Veblen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation
+
+Author: Thorstein Veblen
+
+Release Date: February 27, 2007 [EBook #20694]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NATURE OF PEACE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Irma Špehar, Graeme Mackreth and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This
+file made using scans of public domain works at the
+University of Georgia.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<h3>
+AN INQUIRY INTO</h3>
+
+<h2>THE NATURE OF PEACE</h2>
+
+<h4>AND</h4>
+
+<h3>THE TERMS OF ITS PERPETUATION</h3>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3>THORSTEIN VEBLEN</h3>
+
+<p class='center' style="margin-top: 5em;"><small>
+New York<br />
+B.W. HUEBSCH<br />
+1919<br />
+<br />
+<i>All rights reserved</i></small>
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<p class='center' style="margin-bottom: 5em;"><small>
+<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1917.<br />
+By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.</span><br />
+<br />
+Published April, 1917:<br />
+Reprinted August, 1917.<br />
+<br />
+New edition published by<br />
+B.W. HUEBSCH.<br />
+January, 1919.</small>
+</p>
+<p>
+<!-- Page vii --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg vii]</span>
+</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>PREFACE</h3>
+
+
+<p>It is now some 122 years since Kant wrote the essay, <i>Zum ewigen
+Frieden</i>. Many things have happened since then, although the Peace to
+which he looked forward with a doubtful hope has not been among them.
+But many things have happened which the great critical philosopher, and
+no less critical spectator of human events, would have seen with
+interest. To Kant the quest of an enduring peace presented itself as an
+intrinsic human duty, rather than as a promising enterprise. Yet through
+all his analysis of its premises and of the terms on which it may be
+realised there runs a tenacious persuasion that, in the end, the r&eacute;gime
+of peace at large will be installed. Not as a deliberate achievement of
+human wisdom, so much as a work of Nature the Designer of
+things&mdash;<i>Natura daedala rerum</i>.</p>
+
+<p>To any attentive reader of Kant's memorable essay it will be apparent
+that the title of the following inquiry&mdash;On the nature of peace and the
+terms of its perpetuation&mdash;is a descriptive translation of the caption
+under which he wrote. That such should be the case will not, it is
+hoped, be accounted either an unseemly presumption or an undue
+inclination to work under a borrowed light. The aim and compass of any
+disinterested inquiry in these premises is still the same as it was in
+Kant's time; such, indeed, as he in great part made it,&mdash;viz., a
+systematic knowledge of things as they are. Nor is the light of Kant's
+leading to be dispensed with as touches<!-- Page viii --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg viii]</span> the ways and means of
+systematic knowledge, wherever the human realities are in question.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, many things have also changed since the date of Kant's essay.
+Among other changes are those that affect the direction of inquiry and
+the terms of systematic formulation. <i>Natura daedala rerum</i> is no longer
+allowed to go on her own recognizances, without divulging the ways and
+means of her workmanship. And it is such a line of extension that is
+here attempted, into a field of inquiry which in Kant's time still lay
+over the horizon of the future.</p>
+
+<p>The quest of perpetual peace at large is no less a paramount and
+intrinsic human duty today than it was, nor is it at all certain that
+its final accomplishment is nearer. But the question of its pursuit and
+of the conditions to be met in seeking this goal lies in a different
+shape today; and it is this question that concerns the inquiry which is
+here undertaken,&mdash;What are the terms on which peace at large may
+hopefully be installed and maintained? What, if anything, is there in
+the present situation that visibly makes for a realisation of these
+necessary terms within the calculable future? And what are the
+consequences presumably due to follow in the nearer future from the
+installation of such a peace at large? And the answer to these questions
+is here sought not in terms of what ought dutifully to be done toward
+the desired consummation, but rather in terms of those known factors of
+human behaviour that can be shown by analysis of experience to control
+the conduct of nations in conjunctures of this kind.</p>
+
+<p>February 1917
+<!-- Page ix --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg ix]</span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></h4>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Introductory: On the State and Its Relation To War<br />
+and Peace</span>                                                            <br />
+<br />
+The inquiry is not concerned with the intrinsic merits<br />
+of peace or war, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;But with the nature, causes and consequences of the<br />
+preconceptions favoring peace or war, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;A breach of the peace is an act of the government,<br />
+or State, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Patriotism is indispensable to furtherance of warlike<br />
+enterprise, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;All the peoples of Christendom are sufficiently patriotic, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Peace established by the State, an armistice&mdash;the State<br />
+is an instrumentality for making peace, not for perpetuating it, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The governmental establishments and their powers in all<br />
+the Christian nations are derived from the feudal establishments<br />
+of the Middle Ages, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Still retain the right of coercively controlling the actions<br />
+of their citizens, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Contrast of Icelandic Commonwealth, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The statecraft of the past half century has been<br />
+one of competitive preparedness, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Prussianised Germany has forced the pace in this<br />
+competitive preparedness, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;An avowedly predatory enterprise no longer meets<br />
+with approval, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;When a warlike enterprise has been entered upon, it<br />
+will have the support of popular sentiment even if it<br />
+is an aggressive war, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The moral indignation of both parties to the quarrel<br />
+is to be taken for granted, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The spiritual forces of any Christian nation may be<br />
+mobilised for war by either of two pleas: (1) The<br />
+preservation or furtherance of the community's material<br />
+interests, real or fancied, and (2) vindication of the<br />
+National Honour; as perhaps also perpetuation of the<br />
+national "Culture," <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.<br />
+</p>
+
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></h4>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">On The Nature and Uses Of Patriotism</span>                            <br />
+<br />
+The nature of Patriotism, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Is a spirit of Emulation, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<!-- Page x --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg x]</span>&mdash;Must seem moral, if only to a biased populace,<a href="#Page_33"> 33</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The common man is sufficiently patriotic but is hampered<br />
+with a sense of right and honest dealing, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Patriotism is at cross purposes with modern life, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Is an hereditary trait? <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Variety of racial stocks in Europe, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Patriotism a ubiquitous trait, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Patriotism disserviceable, yet men hold to it, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Cultural evolution of Europeans, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Growth of a sense of group solidarity, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Material interests of group falling into abeyance<br />
+as class divisions have grown up, until prestige<br />
+remains virtually the sole community interest, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Based upon warlike prowess, physical magnitude and<br />
+pecuniary traffic of country, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Interests of the master class are at cross purposes<br />
+with the fortunes of the common man, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Value of superiors is a "prestige value," <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The material benefits which this ruling class contribute<br />
+are: defense against aggression, and promotion of the<br />
+community's material gain, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The common defense is a remedy for evils due to the<br />
+patriotic spirit, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The common defense the usual blind behind which events<br />
+are put in train for eventual hostilities, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;All the nations of warring Europe convinced that they<br />
+are fighting a defensive war, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Which usually takes the form of a defense of the National<br />
+Honour, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Material welfare is of interest to the Dynastic statesman<br />
+only as it conduces to political success, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The policy of national economic self-sufficiency, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The chief material use of patriotism is its use to a<br />
+limited number of persons in their quest of private gain, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;And has the effect of dividing the nations on lines of<br />
+rivalry, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.<br />
+</p>
+
+<h4><a href="#Chapter_III">CHAPTER III</a></h4>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">On The Conditions of a Lasting Peace</span>                           <br />
+<br />
+The patriotic spirit of modern peoples is the abiding<br />
+source of contention among nations, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Hence any calculus of the Chances of Peace will be<br />
+a reckoning of forces which may be counted on to keep<br />
+a patriotic nation in an unstable equilibrium of peace, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The question of peace and war at large is a question of<br />
+peace and war among the Powers, which are of two contrasted<br />
+kinds: those which may safely be counted on spontaneously<br />
+to take the offensive and those which will fight on provocation, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;War not a question of equity but of opportunity, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The Imperial designs of Germany and Japan as the prospective<br />
+cause of war, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Peace can be maintained in two ways: submission to<br />
+their dominion, or elimination of these two Powers;<br />
+No middle course open, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<!-- Page xi --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg xi]</span>&mdash;Frame of mind of states; men and popular sentiment in<br />
+a Dynastic State, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Information, persuasion and reflection will not subdue<br />
+national animosities and jealousies; Peoples of Europe<br />
+are racially homogeneous along lines of climatic latitude, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;But loyalty is a matter of habituation, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Derivation and current state of German nationalism, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Contrasted with the animus of the citizens of a commonwealth,
+<a href="#Page_103">103</a><br /><br />&mdash;A neutral peace-compact may be practicable in the
+absence of Germany and Japan,<br /> but it has no chance in
+their presence, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The national life of Germany: the Intellectuals, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Summary of chapter, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.<br />
+</p>
+
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></h4>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Peace Without Honour</span>                                           <br />
+<br />
+Submission to the Imperial Power one of the conditions<br />
+precedent to a peaceful settlement, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Character of the projected tutelage, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Life under the <i>Pax Germanica</i> contrasted with<br />
+the Ottoman and Russian rule, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;China and biological and cultural success, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Difficulty of non-resistant subjection is of a psychological<br />
+order, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Patriotism of the bellicose kind is of the nature of<br />
+habit, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;And men may divest themselves of it, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;A decay of the bellicose national spirit must be of<br />
+the negative order, the disuse of the discipline out<br />
+of which it has arisen, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Submission to Imperial authorities necessitates<br />
+abeyance of national pride among the other peoples, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Pecuniary merits of the projected Imperial dominion, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Pecuniary class distinctions in the commonwealths and<br />
+the pecuniary burden on the common man, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Material conditions of life for the common man under<br />
+the modern rule of big business, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The competitive r&eacute;gime, "what the traffic will bear,"<br />
+and the life and labor of the common man, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Industrial sabotage by businessmen, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Contrasted with the Imperial usufruct and its material<br />
+advantages to the common man, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.<br />
+</p>
+
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></h4>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Peace and Neutrality</span>                                           <br />
+<br />
+Personal liberty, not creature comforts, the ulterior<br />
+springs of action of the common man of the democratic<br />
+nations, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;No change of spiritual state to be looked for in the<br />
+life-time of the oncoming generation, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<!-- Page xii --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg xii]</span>&mdash;The Dynastic spirit among the peoples of the Empire<br />
+will, under the discipline of modern economic conditions,<br />
+fall into decay, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Contrast of class divisions in Germany and England, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;National establishments are dependent for their<br />
+continuance upon preparation for hostilities, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The time required for the people of the Dynastic<br />
+States to unlearn their preconceptions will be longer<br />
+than the interval required for a new onset, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;There can be no neutral course between peace by<br />
+unconditional surrender and submission or peace by<br />
+the elimination of Imperial Germany and Japan, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Peace by submission not practicable for the modern<br />
+nations, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Neutralisation of citizenship, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Spontaneous move in that direction not to be looked for, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Its chances of success, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The course of events in America, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.<br />
+</p>
+
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a></h4>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Elimination of the Unfit</span>                                       <br />
+<br />
+A league of neutrals, its outline, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Need of security from aggression of Imperial Germany, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Inclusion of the Imperial States in the league, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Necessity of elimination of Imperial military clique, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Necessity of intermeddling in internal affairs of Germany even<br />
+if not acceptable to the German people, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Probability of pacific nations taking measures to insure peace, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>-298.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The British gentleman and his control of the English government, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The shifting of control out of the hands of the gentleman into<br />
+those of the underbred common man, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The war situation and its probable effect on popular habits<br />
+of thought in England, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The course of such events and their bearing on the chances<br />
+of a workable pacific league, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Conditions precedent to a successful pacific league<br />
+of neutrals, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Colonial possessions, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Neutralisation of trade relations, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Futility of economic boycott, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The terms of settlement, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The effect of the war and the chances of the British people<br />
+being able to meet the exigencies of peace, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Summary of the terms of settlement, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Constitutional monarchies and the British gentlemanly<br />
+government, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The American national establishment, a government<br />
+by businessmen, and its economic policy, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<!-- Page xiii --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg xiii]</span>
+&mdash;America and the league,<a href="#Page_294"> 294.</a><br />
+<br />
+</p>
+<h4><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a></h4>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Peace and the Price System</span>                                     <br />
+<br />
+The different conceptions of peace, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Psychological effects of the war, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The handicraft system and the machine industry,<br />
+and their psychological effect on political preconceptions, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The machine technology and the decay of patriotic loyalty, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Summary, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Ownership and the right of contract, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Standardised under handicraft system, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Ownership and the machine industry. <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Business control and sabotage, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Governments of pacific nations controlled by privileged classes, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Effect of peace on the economic situation, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Economic aspects of a r&eacute;gime of peace, especially as related<br />
+to the development of classes, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The analogy of the Victorian Peace, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The case of the American Farmer, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The leisure class, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The rising standard of living, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Culture, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;The eventual cleavage of classes, those who own and those<br />
+who do not, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Conditioned by peace at large, <a href="#Page_366">366</a>.<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;Necessary conditions of a lasting peace, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<h2>AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE OF PEACE AND THE TERMS OF ITS PERPETUATION</h2>
+<p>
+<!-- Page 1 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 1]</span>
+</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ON THE NATURE OF PEACE AND THE TERMS OF ITS PERPETUATION</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h4>
+
+<p class='center'><span class="smcap">Introductory: On the State and its Relation to War and Peace</span></p>
+
+
+<p>To many thoughtful men ripe in worldly wisdom it is known of a verity
+that war belongs indefeasibly in the Order of Nature. Contention, with
+manslaughter, is indispensable in human intercourse, at the same time
+that it conduces to the increase and diffusion of the manly virtues. So
+likewise, the unspoiled youth of the race, in the period of adolescence
+and aspiring manhood, also commonly share this gift of insight and back
+it with a generous commendation of all the martial qualities; and women
+of nubile age and no undue maturity gladly meet them half way.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, the mothers of the people are commonly unable to see
+the use of it all. It seems a waste of dear-bought human life, with a
+large sum of nothing to show for it. So also many men of an elderly
+turn, prematurely or otherwise, are ready to lend their countenance to
+the like disparaging appraisal; it may be that the spirit of prowess in
+them runs at too low a tension, or they may have outlived the more vivid
+appreciation of the spiritual values involved. There are many, also,
+with<!-- Page 2 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> a turn for exhortation, who find employment for their best
+faculties in attesting the well-known atrocities and futility of war.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, not infrequently such advocates of peace will devote their
+otherwise idle powers to this work of exhortation without stipend or
+subsidy. And they uniformly make good their contention that the
+currently accepted conception of the nature of war&mdash;General Sherman's
+formula&mdash;is substantially correct. All the while it is to be admitted
+that all this axiomatic exhortation has no visible effect on the course
+of events or on the popular temper touching warlike enterprise. Indeed,
+no equal volume of speech can be more incontrovertible or less
+convincing than the utterances of the peace advocates, whether
+subsidised or not. "War is Bloodier than Peace." This would doubtless be
+conceded without argument, but also without prejudice. Hitherto the
+pacifists' quest of a basis for enduring peace, it must be admitted, has
+brought home nothing tangible&mdash;with the qualification, of course, that
+the subsidised pacifists have come in for the subsidy. So that, after
+searching the recesses of their imagination, able-bodied pacifists whose
+loquacity has never been at fault hitherto have been brought to ask:
+"What Shall We Say?"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Under these circumstances it will not be out of place to inquire into
+the nature of this peace about which swings this wide orbit of opinion
+and argument. At the most, such an inquiry can be no more gratuitous and
+no more nugatory than the controversies that provoke it. The intrinsic
+merits of peace at large, as against those of warlike enterprise, it
+should be said, do not here come in question. That question lies in the
+domain of precon<!-- Page 3 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>ceived opinion, so that for the purposes of this
+inquiry it will have no significance except as a matter to be inquired
+into; the main point of the inquiry being the nature, causes and
+consequences of such a preconception favoring peace, and the
+circumstances that make for a contrary preconception in favor of war.</p>
+
+<p>By and large, any breach of the peace in modern times is an official act
+and can be taken only on initiative of the governmental establishment,
+the State. The national authorities may, of course, be driven to take
+such a step by pressure of warlike popular sentiment. Such, e.g., is
+presumed to have been the case in the United States' attack on Spain
+during the McKinley administration; but the more that comes to light of
+the intimate history of that episode, the more evident does it become
+that the popular war sentiment to which the administration yielded had
+been somewhat sedulously "mobilised" with a view to such yielding and
+such a breach. So also in the case of the Boer war, the move was made
+under sanction of a popular war spirit, which, again, did not come to a
+head without shrewd surveillance and direction. And so again in the
+current European war, in the case, e.g., of Germany, where the
+initiative was taken, the State plainly had the full support of popular
+sentiment, and may even be said to have precipitated the war in response
+to this urgent popular aspiration; and here again it is a matter of
+notoriety that the popular sentiment had long been sedulously nursed and
+"mobilised" to that effect, so that the populace was assiduously kept in
+spiritual readiness for such an event. The like is less evident as
+regards the United Kingdom, and perhaps also as regards the other
+Allies.<!-- Page 4 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And such appears to have been the common run of the facts as regards all
+the greater wars of the last one hundred years,&mdash;what may be called the
+"public" wars of this modern era, as contrasted with the "private" or
+administrative wars which have been carried on in a corner by one and
+another of the Great Powers against hapless barbarians, from time to
+time, in the course of administrative routine.</p>
+
+<p>It is also evident from the run of the facts as exemplified in these
+modern wars that while any breach of the peace takes place only on the
+initiative and at the discretion of the government, or State,<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> it is
+always requisite in furtherance of such warlike enterprise to cherish
+and eventually to mobilise popular sentiment in support of any warlike
+move. Due fomentation of a warlike animus is indispensable to the
+procuring and maintenance of a suitable equipment with which eventually
+to break the peace, as well as to ensure a diligent prosecution of such
+enterprise when once it has been undertaken. Such a spirit of militant
+patriotism as may serviceably be mobilised in support of warlike
+enterprise has accordingly been a condition precedent to any people's
+entry into the modern Concert of Nations. This Concert of Nations is a
+Concert of Powers, and it is only as a Power that any nation plays its
+part in the concert, all the while that "power" here means eventual
+warlike force.</p>
+
+<p>Such a people as the Chinese, e.g., not pervaded with an adequate
+patriotic spirit, comes into the Concert of Nations not as a Power but
+as a bone of contention. Not that the Chinese fall short in any of the
+qualities that con<!-- Page 5 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 5]</span>duce to efficiency and welfare in time of peace, but
+they appear, in effect, to lack that certain "solidarity of prowess" by
+virtue of which they should choose to be (collectively) formidable
+rather than (individually) fortunate and upright; and the modern
+civilised nations are not in a position, nor in a frame of mind, to
+tolerate a neighbor whose only claim on their consideration falls under
+the category of peace on earth and good-will among men. China appears
+hitherto not to have been a serviceable people for warlike ends, except
+in so far as the resources of that country have been taken over and
+converted to warlike uses by some alien power working to its own ends.
+Such have been the several alien dynasties that have seized upon that
+country from time to time and have achieved dominion by usufruct of its
+unwarlike forces. Such has been the nature of the Manchu empire of the
+recent past, and such is the evident purpose of the prospective Japanese
+usufruct of the same country and its populace. Meantime the Chinese
+people appear to be incorrigibly peaceable, being scarcely willing to
+fight in any concerted fashion even when driven into a corner by
+unprovoked aggression, as in the present juncture. Such a people is very
+exceptional. Among civilised nations there are, broadly speaking, none
+of that temper, with the sole exception of the Chinese,&mdash;if the Chinese
+are properly to be spoken of as a nation.</p>
+
+<p>Modern warfare makes such large and direct use of the industrial arts,
+and depends for its successful prosecution so largely on a voluminous
+and unremitting supply of civilian services and wrought goods, that any
+inoffensive and industrious people, such as the Chinese, could doubtless
+now be turned to good account by any warlike power that might have the
+disposal of their working<!-- Page 6 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> forces. To make their industrial efficiency
+count in this way toward warlike enterprise and imperial dominion, the
+usufruct of any such inoffensive and unpatriotic populace would have to
+fall into the hands of an alien governmental establishment. And no alien
+government resting on the support of a home population trained in the
+habits of democracy or given over to ideals of common honesty in
+national concerns could hopefully undertake the enterprise. This work of
+empire-building out of unwarlike materials could apparently be carried
+out only by some alien power hampered by no reserve of scruple, and
+backed by a servile populace of its own, imbued with an impeccable
+loyalty to its masters and with a suitably bellicose temper, as, e.g.,
+Imperial Japan or Imperial Germany.</p>
+
+<p>However, for the commonplace national enterprise the common run will do
+very well. Any populace imbued with a reasonable measure of patriotism
+will serve as ways and means to warlike enterprise under competent
+management, even if it is not habitually prone to a bellicose temper.
+Rightly managed, ordinary patriotic sentiment may readily be mobilised
+for warlike adventure by any reasonably adroit and single-minded body of
+statesmen,&mdash;of which there is abundant illustration. All the peoples of
+Christendom are possessed of a sufficiently alert sense of nationality,
+and by tradition and current usage all the national governments of
+Christendom are warlike establishments, at least in the defensive sense;
+and the distinction between the defensive and the offensive in
+international intrigue is a technical matter that offers no great
+difficulty. None of these nations is of such an incorrigibly peaceable
+temper that they can be counted on to keep the peace consistently in the
+ordinary course of events.<!-- Page 7 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Peace established by the State, or resting in the discretion of the
+State, is necessarily of the nature of an armistice, in effect
+terminable at will and on short notice. It is maintained only on
+conditions, stipulated by express convention or established by custom,
+and there is always the reservation, tacit or explicit, that recourse
+will be had to arms in case the "national interests" or the punctilios
+of international etiquette are traversed by the act or defection of any
+rival government or its subjects. The more nationally-minded the
+government or its subject populace, the readier the response to the call
+of any such opportunity for an unfolding of prowess. The most peaceable
+governmental policy of which Christendom has experience is a policy of
+"watchful waiting," with a jealous eye to the emergence of any occasion
+for national resentment; and the most irretrievably shameful dereliction
+of duty on the part of any civilised government would be its eventual
+insensibility to the appeal of a "just war." Under any governmental
+auspices, as the modern world knows governments, the keeping of the
+peace comes at its best under the precept, "Speak softly and carry a big
+stick." But the case for peace is more precarious than the wording of
+the aphorism would indicate, in as much as in practical fact the "big
+stick" is an obstacle to soft speech. Evidently, in the light of recent
+history, if the peace is to be kept it will have to come about
+irrespective of governmental management,&mdash;in spite of the State rather
+than by its good offices. At the best, the State, or the government, is
+an instrumentality for making peace, not for perpetuating it.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Anyone who is interested in the nature and derivation of governmental
+institutions and establishments in Eu<!-- Page 8 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 8]</span>rope, in any but the formal
+respect, should be able to satisfy his curiosity by looking over the
+shoulders of the professed students of Political Science. Quite properly
+and profitably that branch of scholarship is occupied with the authentic
+pedigree of these institutions, and with the documentary instruments in
+the case; since Political Science is, after all, a branch of theoretical
+jurisprudence and is concerned about a formally competent analysis of
+the recorded legal powers. The material circumstances from which these
+institutions once took their beginning, and the exigencies which have
+governed the rate and direction of their later growth and mutation, as
+well as the <i>de facto</i> bearing of the institutional scheme on the
+material welfare or the cultural fortunes of the given community,&mdash;while
+all these matters of fact may be germane to the speculations of
+Political Theory, they are not intrinsic to its premises, to the logical
+sequence of its inquiry, or to its theoretical findings. The like is
+also true, of course, as regards that system of habits of thought, that
+current frame of mind, in which any given institutional scheme
+necessarily is grounded, and without the continued support of which any
+given scheme of governmental institutions or policy would become
+nugatory and so would pass into the province of legal fiction. All these
+are not idle matters in the purview of the student of Political Science,
+but they remain after all substantially extraneous to the structure of
+political theory; and in so far as matters of this class are to be
+brought into the case at all, the specialists in the field can not
+fairly be expected to contribute anything beyond an occasional <i>obiter
+dictum</i>. There can be no discourteous presumption, therefore, in
+accepting the general theorems of current political theory without
+prejudice, and looking past<!-- Page 9 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> the received theoretical formulations for a
+view of the substantial grounds on which the governmental establishments
+have grown into shape, and the circumstances, material and spiritual,
+that surround their continued working and effect.</p>
+
+<p>By lineal descent the governmental establishments and the powers with
+which they are vested, in all the Christian nations, are derived from
+the feudal establishments of the Middle Ages; which, in turn, are of a
+predatory origin and of an irresponsible character.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> In nearly all
+instances, but more particularly among the nations that are accounted
+characteristically modern, the existing establishments have been greatly
+altered from the mediaeval pattern, by concessive adaptation to later
+exigencies or by a more or less revolutionary innovation. The degree of
+their modernity is (conventionally) measured, roughly, by the degree in
+which they have departed from the mediaeval pattern. Wherever the
+unavoidable concessions have been shrewdly made with a view to
+conserving the autonomy and irresponsibility of the governmental
+establishment, or the "State," and where the state of national sentiment
+has been led to favor this work of conservation, as, e.g., in the case
+of Austria, Spain or Prussia, there the modern outcome has been what may
+be called a Dynastic State. Where, on the other hand, the run of
+national sentiment has departed notably from the ancient holding ground
+of loyal abnegation, and has enforced a measure of revolutionary
+innovation, as in the case of France or of the English-speaking peoples,
+there the modern outcome has been an (ostensibly) democratic<!-- Page 10 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 10]</span>
+commonwealth of ungraded citizens. But the contrast so indicated is a
+contrast of divergent variants rather than of opposites. These two
+type-forms may be taken as the extreme and inclusive limits of variation
+among the governmental establishments with which the modern world is
+furnished.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p>
+
+<p>The effectual difference between these two theoretically contrasted
+types of governmental establishments is doubtless grave enough, and for
+many purposes it is consequential, but it is after all not of such a
+nature as need greatly detain the argument at this point. The two differ
+less, in effect, in that range of their functioning which comes in
+question here than in their bearing on the community's fortunes apart
+from questions of war and peace. In all cases there stand over in this
+bearing certain primary characteristics of the ancient r&eacute;gime, which all
+these modern establishments have in common, though not all in an equal
+degree of preservation and effectiveness. They are, e.g., all vested
+with certain attributes of "sovereignty." In all cases the citizen still
+proves on closer attention to be in some measure a "subject" of the
+State, in that he is invariably conceived to owe a "duty" to the
+constituted authorities in one respect and another. All civilised
+governments take cognizance of Treason, Sedition, and the like; and all
+good citizens are not only content but profoundly insistent on the clear
+duty of the citizen on this head. The bias of loyalty is not a matter on
+which argument is tolerated. By virtue of this bias of loyalty, or
+"civic duty"&mdash;which still has much of the color of feudal
+allegiance&mdash;the governmental establish<!-- Page 11 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>ment is within its rights in
+coercively controlling and directing the actions of the citizen, or
+subject, in those respects that so lie within his duty; as also in
+authoritatively turning his abilities to account for the purposes that
+so lie within the governmental discretion, as, e.g., the Common Defense.</p>
+
+<p>These rights and powers still remain to the governmental establishment
+even at the widest democratic departure from that ancient pattern of
+masterful tutelage and usufruct that marked the old-fashioned
+patrimonial State,&mdash;and that still marks the better preserved ones among
+its modern derivatives. And so intrinsic to these governmental
+establishments are these discretionary powers, and by so unfailing a
+popular bias are they still accounted a matter of course and of
+axiomatic necessity, that they have invariably been retained also among
+the attributes of those democratic governments that trace their origin
+to a revolutionary break with the old order.</p>
+
+<p>To many, all this will seem a pedantic taking note of commonplaces,&mdash;as
+if it were worth while remarking that the existing governments are
+vested with the indispensable attributes of government. Yet history
+records an instance at variance with this axiomatic rule, a rule which
+is held to be an unavoidable deliverance of common sense. And it is by
+no means an altogether unique instance. It may serve to show that these
+characteristic and unimpeachable powers that invest all current
+governmental establishments are, after all, to be rated as the marks of
+a particular species of governments, and not characteristics of the
+genus of governmental establishments at large. These powers answer to an
+acquired bias, not to an underlying trait of human nature; a matter of
+habit, not of heredity.<!-- Page 12 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Such an historical instance is the so-called Republic, or Commonwealth,
+of Iceland&mdash;tenth to thirteenth centuries. Its case is looked on by
+students of history as a spectacular anomaly, because it admitted none
+of these primary powers of government in its constituted authorities.
+And yet, for contrast with these matter-of-course preconceptions of
+these students of history, it is well to note that in the deliberations
+of those ancients who installed the Republic for the management of their
+joint concerns, any inclusion of such powers in its competency appears
+never to have been contemplated, not even to the extent of its being
+rejected. This singularity&mdash;as it would be rated by modern statesmen and
+students&mdash;was in no degree a new departure in state-making on the part
+of the founders of the Republic. They had no knowledge of such powers,
+duties and accountabilities, except as unwholesome features of a novel
+and alien scheme of irresponsible oppression that was sought to be
+imposed on them by Harald Fairhair, and which they incontinently made it
+their chief and immediate business to evade. They also set up no joint
+or collective establishment with powers for the Common Defense, nor does
+it appear that such a notion had occurred to them.</p>
+
+<p>In the history of its installation there is no hint that the men who set
+up this Icelandic Commonwealth had any sense of the need, or even of the
+feasibility, of such a coercive government as would be involved in
+concerted preparation for the common defense. Subjection to personal
+rule, or to official rule in any degree of attenuation, was not
+comprised in their traditional experience of citizenship; and it was
+necessarily out of the elements comprised in this traditional experience
+that the new structure would have to be built up. The new commonwealth<!-- Page 13 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 13]</span>
+was necessarily erected on the premises afforded by the received scheme
+of use and wont; and this received scheme had come down out of
+pre-feudal conditions, without having passed under the discipline of
+that r&eacute;gime of coercion which the feudal system had imposed on the rest
+of Europe, and so had established as an "immemorial usage" and a "second
+nature" among the populations of Christendom. The resulting character of
+the Icelandic Commonwealth is sufficiently striking when contrasted with
+the case of the English commonwealth of the seventeenth century, or the
+later French and American republics. These, all and several, came out of
+a protracted experience in feudalistic state-making and State policy;
+and the common defense&mdash;frequently on the offensive&mdash;with its necessary
+coercive machinery and its submissive loyalty, consequently would take
+the central place in the resulting civic structure.</p>
+
+<p>To close the tale of the Icelandic commonwealth it may be added that
+their republic of insubordinate citizens presently fell into default,
+systematic misuse, under the disorders brought on by an accumulation of
+wealth, and that it died of legal fiction and constitutional formalities
+after some experience at the hands of able and ambitious statesmen in
+contact with an alien government drawn on the coercive plan. The clay
+vessel failed to make good among the iron pots, and so proved its
+unfitness to survive in the world of Christian nations,&mdash;very much as
+the Chinese are today at the mercy of the defensive rapacity of the
+Powers.</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 15em;">
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And the mercy that we gave them</span><br />
+Was to sink them in the sea,<br />
+Down on the coast of High Barbarie.<br />
+<!-- Page 14 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>No doubt, it will be accepted as an axiomatic certainty that the
+establishment of a commonwealth after the fashion of the Icelandic
+Republic, without coercive authority or provision for the common
+defense, and without a sense of subordination or collective
+responsibility among its citizens, would be out of all question under
+existing circumstances of politics and international trade. Nor would
+such a commonwealth be workable on the scale and at the pace imposed by
+modern industrial and commercial conditions, even apart from
+international jealousy and ambitions, provided the sacred rights of
+ownership were to be maintained in something like their current shape.
+And yet something of a drift of popular sentiment, and indeed something
+of deliberate endeavour, setting in the direction of such a harmless and
+helpless national organisation is always visible in Western Europe,
+throughout modern times; particularly through the eighteenth and the
+early half of the nineteenth centuries; and more particularly among the
+English-speaking peoples and, with a difference, among the French. The
+Dutch and the Scandinavian countries answer more doubtfully to the same
+characterisation.</p>
+
+<p>The movement in question is known to history as the Liberal,
+Rationalistic, Humanitarian, or Individualistic departure. Its ideal,
+when formulated, is spoken of as the System of Natural Rights; and its
+goal in the way of a national establishment has been well characterised
+by its critics as the Police State, or the Night-Watchman State. The
+gains made in this direction, or perhaps better the inroads of this
+animus in national ideals, are plainly to be set down as a shift in the
+direction of peace and amity; but it is also plain that the shift of
+ground so initiated by this strain of sentiment has never reached<!-- Page 15 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 15]</span> a
+conclusion and never has taken effect in anything like an effectual
+working arrangement. Its practical consequences have been of the nature
+of abatement and defection in the pursuit of national ambitions and
+dynastic enterprise, rather than a creative work of installing any
+institutional furniture suitable to its own ends. It has in effect gone
+no farther than what would be called an incipient correction of abuses.
+The highest rise, as well as the decline, of this movement lie within
+the nineteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>In point of time, the decay of this amiable conceit of <i>laissez-faire</i>
+in national policy coincides with the period of great advance in the
+technology of transport and communication in the nineteenth century.
+Perhaps, on a larger outlook, it should rather be said that the run of
+national ambitions and animosities had, in the eighteenth and nineteenth
+centuries, suffered a degree of decay through the diffusion of this
+sentimental predilection for Natural Liberty, and that this decline of
+the manlier aspirations was then arrested and corrected by help of these
+improvements in the technological situation; which enabled a closer and
+more coercive control to be exercised over larger areas, and at the same
+time enabled a more massive aggregate of warlike force to strike more
+effectively at a greater distance. This whole episode of the rise and
+decline of <i>laissez-faire</i> in modern history is perhaps best to be
+conceived as a transient weakening of nationalism, by neglect; rather
+than anything like the growth of a new and more humane ideal of national
+intercourse. Such would be the appraisal to be had at the hands of those
+who speak for a strenuous national life and for the arbitrament of
+sportsmanlike contention in human affairs. And the latterday growth of
+more militant aspirations,<!-- Page 16 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 16]</span> together with the more settled and sedulous
+attention to a development of control and of formidable armaments, such
+as followed on through the latter half of the nineteenth century, would
+then be rated as a resumption of those older aims and ideals that had
+been falling somewhat into abeyance in the slack-water days of
+Liberalism.</p>
+
+<p>There is much to be said for this latter view; and, indeed, much has
+been said for it, particularly by the spokesmen of imperialist politics.
+This bias of Natural Liberty has been associated in history with the
+English-speaking peoples, more intimately and more extensively than with
+any other. Not that this amiable conceit is in any peculiar degree a
+race characteristic of this group of peoples; nor even that the history
+of its rise and decline runs wholly within the linguistic frontiers
+indicated by this characterisation. The French and the Dutch have borne
+their share, and at an earlier day Italian sentiment and speculation
+lent its impulsion to the same genial drift of faith and aspiration.
+But, by historical accident, its center of gravity and of diffusion has
+lain with the English-speaking communities during the period when this
+bias made history and left its impress on the institutional scheme of
+the Western civilisation. By grace of what may, for the present purpose,
+be called historical accident, it happens that the interval of history
+during which the bias of Natural Liberty made visible headway was also a
+period during which these English-speaking peoples, among whom its
+effects are chiefly visible, were relatively secure from international
+disturbance, by force of inaccessibility. Little strain was put upon
+their sense of national solidarity or national prowess; so little,
+indeed, that there was some danger of their patriotic animosity falling
+into decay by disuse; and then they were<!-- Page 17 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 17]</span> also busy with other things.
+Peaceable intercourse, it is true, was relatively easy, active and
+far-reaching&mdash;eighteenth and nineteenth centuries&mdash;as compared with what
+had been the case before that time; but warlike intercourse on such a
+scale as would constitute a substantial menace to any large nation was
+nearly out of the question, so far as regards the English-speaking
+peoples. The available means of aggression, as touches the case of these
+particular communities, were visibly and consciously inadequate as
+compared with the means of defense. The means of internal or
+intra-national control or coercion were also less well provided by the
+state of the arts current at that time than the means of peaceable
+intercourse. These means of transport and communication were, at that
+stage of their development, less well suited for the purposes of
+far-reaching warlike strategy and the exercise of surveillance and
+coercion over large spaces than for the purposes of peaceable traffic.</p>
+
+<p>But the continued improvement in the means of communication during the
+nineteenth century presently upset that situation, and so presently
+began to neutralise the geographical quarantine which had hedged about
+these communities that were inclined to let well enough alone. The
+increasing speed and accuracy of movement in shipping, due to the
+successful introduction of steam, as well as the concomitant increasing
+size of the units of equipment, all runs to this effect and presently
+sets at naught the peace barriers of sea and weather. So also the
+development of railways and their increasing availability for strategic
+uses, together with the far-reaching coordination of movement made
+possible by their means and by the telegraph; all of which is further
+facilitated by the increasing mass and density of population.
+Improvements<!-- Page 18 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 18]</span> in the technology of arms and armament worked to the like
+effect, of setting the peace of any community on an increasingly
+precarious footing, through the advantage which this new technology gave
+to a ready equipment and a rapid mobilisation. The new state of the
+industrial arts serviceable for warlike enterprise put an increasingly
+heavy premium on readiness for offense or defense, but more particularly
+it all worked increasingly to the advantage of the offensive. It put the
+Fabian strategy out of date, and led to the doctrine of a defensive
+offense.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually it came true, with the continued advance in those industrial
+arts that lend themselves to strategic uses, and it came also to be
+realised, that no corner of the earth was any longer secure by mere
+favor of distance and natural difficulty, from eventual aggression at
+the hands of any provident and adventurous assailant,&mdash;even by help of a
+modicum of defensive precaution. The fear of aggression then came
+definitively to take the place of international good-will and became the
+chief motive in public policy, so fast and so far as the state of the
+industrial arts continued to incline the balance of advantage to the
+side of the aggressor. All of which served greatly to strengthen the
+hands of those statesmen who, by interest or temperament, were inclined
+to imperialistic enterprise. Since that period all armament has
+conventionally been accounted defensive, and all statesmen have
+professed that the common defense is their chief concern. Professedly
+all armament has been designed to keep the peace; so much of a shadow of
+the peaceable bias there still stands over.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout this latest phase of modern civilisation the avowed fear of
+aggression has served as apology, possibly as provocation in fact, to
+national armaments; and<!-- Page 19 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 19]</span> throughout the same period any analysis of the
+situation will finally run the chain of fear back to Prussia as the
+putative or actual, center of disturbance and apprehension. No doubt,
+Prussian armament has taken the lead and forced the pace among the
+nations of Christendom; but the Prussian policy, too, has been
+diligently covered with the same decorous plea of needful provision for
+the common defense and an unremitting solicitude for international
+peace,&mdash;to which has been added the canny afterthought of the "defensive
+offense."</p>
+
+<p>It is characteristic of this era of armed peace that in all these
+extensive preparations for breaking the peace any formal avowal of other
+than a defensive purpose has at all times been avoided as an
+insufferable breach of diplomatic decorum. It is likewise characteristic
+of the same era that armaments have unremittingly been increased, beyond
+anything previously known; and that all men have known all the while
+that the inevitable outcome of this avowedly defensive armament must
+eventually be war on an unprecedented scale and of unexampled ferocity.
+It would be neither charitable nor otherwise to the point to call
+attention to the reflection which this state of the case throws on the
+collective sagacity or the good faith of the statesmen who have had the
+management of affairs. It is not practicable to imagine how such an
+outcome as the present could have been brought about by any degree of
+stupidity or incapacity alone, nor is it easier to find evidence that
+the utmost sagacity of the statecraft engaged has had the slightest
+mitigating effect on the evil consummation to which the whole case has
+been brought. It has long been a commonplace among observers of public
+events that these professedly defensive warlike preparations have in
+effect been preparations<!-- Page 20 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> for breaking the peace; against which, at
+least ostensibly, a remedy had been sought in the preparation of still
+heavier armaments, with full realisation that more armament would
+unfailingly entail a more unsparing and more disastrous war,&mdash;which sums
+up the statecraft of the past half century.</p>
+
+<p>Prussia, and afterwards Prussianised Germany, has come in for the
+distinction of taking the lead and forcing the pace in this competitive
+preparation&mdash;or "preparedness"&mdash;for war in time of peace. That such has
+been the case appears in good part to be something of a fortuitous
+circumstance. The season of enterprising force and fraud to which that
+country owes its induction into the concert of nations is an episode of
+recent history; so recent, indeed, that the German nation has not yet
+had time to live it down and let it be forgotten; and the Imperial State
+is consequently burdened with an irritably uneasy sense of odium and an
+established reputation for unduly bad faith. From which it has followed,
+among other things, that the statesmen of the Empire have lived in the
+expectation of having their unforgotten derelictions brought home, and
+so have, on the one hand, found themselves unable to credit any pacific
+intentions professed by the neighboring Powers, while on the other hand
+they have been unable to gain credence for their own voluble professions
+of peace and amity. So it has come about that, by a fortuitous
+conjuncture of scarcely relevant circumstances, Prussia and the Empire
+have been thrown into the lead in the race of "preparedness" and have
+been led assiduously to hasten a breach which they could ill afford. It
+is, to say the least, extremely doubtful if the event would have been
+substantially different in the absence of that special provocation to
+com<!-- Page 21 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>petitive preparedness that has been injected into the situation by
+this German attitude; but the rate of approach to a warlike climax has
+doubtless been hastened by the anticipatory policy of preparedness which
+the Prussian dynasty has seen itself constrained to pursue. Eventually,
+the peculiar circumstances of its case&mdash;embarrassment at home and
+distaste and discredit abroad&mdash;have induced the Imperial State to take
+the line of a defensive offense, to take war by the forelock and
+retaliate on presumptive enemies for prospective grievances. But in any
+case, the progressive improvement in transport and communication, as
+well as in the special technology of warfare, backed by greatly enhanced
+facilities for indoctrinating the populace with militant
+nationalism,&mdash;these ways and means, working under the hand of patriotic
+statesmen must in course of the past century have brought the peace of
+Europe to so precarious a footing as would have provoked a material
+increase in the equipment for national defense; which would unavoidably
+have led to competitive armament and an enhanced international distrust
+and animosity, eventually culminating in hostilities.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It may well be that the plea of defensive preparation advanced by the
+statesmen, Prussian and others, in apology for competitive armaments is
+a diplomatic subterfuge,&mdash;there are indications that such has commonly
+been the case; but even if it commonly is visibly disingenuous, the need
+of making such a plea to cover more sinister designs is itself an
+evidence that an avowedly predatory enterprise no longer meets with the
+requisite popular approval. Even if an exception to this rule be
+admitted in the recent attitude of the German people, it is to be
+recalled that the exception was allowed to stand<!-- Page 22 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> only transiently, and
+that presently the avowal of a predatory design in this case was
+urgently disclaimed in the face of adversity. Even those who speak most
+fluently for the necessity of war, and for its merits as a needed
+discipline in the manly virtues, are constrained by the prevailing
+sentiment to deprecate its necessity.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is equally evident that when once a warlike enterprise has been
+entered upon so far as to commit the nation to hostilities, it will have
+the cordial support of popular sentiment even if it is patently an
+aggressive war. Indeed, it is quite a safe generalisation that when
+hostilities have once been got fairly under way by the interested
+statesmen, the patriotic sentiment of the nation may confidently be
+counted on to back the enterprise irrespective of the merits of the
+quarrel. But even if the national sentiment is in this way to be counted
+in as an incidental matter of course, it is also to be kept in mind in
+this connection that any quarrel so entered upon by any nation will
+forthwith come to have the moral approval of the community. Dissenters
+will of course be found, sporadically, who do not readily fall in with
+the prevailing animus; but as a general proposition it will still hold
+true that any such quarrel forthwith becomes a just quarrel in the eyes
+of those who have so been committed to it.</p>
+
+<p>A corollary following from this general theorem may be worth noting in
+the same connection. Any politician who succeeds in embroiling his
+country in a war, however nefarious, becomes a popular hero and is
+reputed a wise and righteous statesman, at least for the time being.
+Illustrative instances need perhaps not, and indeed can not gracefully,
+be named; most popular heroes and reputed statesmen belong in this
+class.<!-- Page 23 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Another corollary, which bears more immediately on the question in hand,
+follows also from the same general proposition: Since the ethical values
+involved in any given international contest are substantially of the
+nature of afterthought or accessory, they may safely be left on one side
+in any endeavour to understand or account for any given outbreak of
+hostilities. The moral indignation of both parties to the quarrel is to
+be taken for granted, as being the statesman's chief and necessary ways
+and means of bringing any warlike enterprise to a head and floating it
+to a creditable finish. It is a precipitate of the partisan animosity
+that inspires both parties and holds them to their duty of
+self-sacrifice and devastation, and at its best it will chiefly serve as
+a cloak of self-righteousness to extenuate any exceptionally profligate
+excursions in the conduct of hostilities.</p>
+
+<p>Any warlike enterprise that is hopefully to be entered on must have the
+moral sanction of the community, or of an effective majority in the
+community. It consequently becomes the first concern of the warlike
+statesman to put this moral force in train for the adventure on which he
+is bent. And there are two main lines of motivation by which the
+spiritual forces of any Christian nation may so be mobilised for warlike
+adventure: (1) The preservation or furtherance of the community's
+material interests, real or fancied, and (2) vindication of the national
+honour. To these should perhaps be added as a third, the advancement and
+perpetuation of the nation's "Culture;" that is to say, of its habitual
+scheme of use and wont. It is a nice question whether, in practical
+effect, the aspiration to perpetuate the national Culture is
+consistently to be distinguished from the vindication of the national
+honour. There is perhaps the distinction to<!-- Page 24 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 24]</span> be made that "the
+perpetuation of the national Culture" lends a readier countenance to
+gratuitous aggression and affords a broader cover for incidental
+atrocities, since the enemies of the national Culture will necessarily
+be conceived as an inferior and obstructive people, falling beneath the
+rules of commonplace decorum.</p>
+
+<p>Those material interests for which modern nations are in the habit of
+taking to arms are commonly of a fanciful character, in that they
+commonly have none but an imaginary net value to the community at large.
+Such are, e.g., the national trade or the increase of the national
+territory. These and the like may serve the warlike or dynastic
+ambitions of the nation's masters; they may also further the interests
+of office-holders, and more particularly of certain business houses or
+businessmen who stand to gain some small advantage by help of the powers
+in control; but it all signifies nothing more to the common man than an
+increased bill of governmental expense and a probable increase in the
+cost of living.</p>
+
+<p>That a nation's trade should be carried in vessels owned by its citizens
+or registered in its ports will doubtless have some sentimental value to
+the common run of its citizens, as is shown by the fact that
+disingenuous politicians always find it worth their while to appeal to
+this chauvinistic predilection. But it patently is all a completely idle
+question, in point of material advantage, to anyone but the owners of
+the vessels; and to these owners it is also of no material consequence
+under what flag their investments sail, except so far as the government
+in question may afford them some preferential opportunity for
+gain,&mdash;always at the cost of their fellow citizens. The like is equally
+true as regards the domicile and the national allegiance of the
+businessmen who buy<!-- Page 25 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 25]</span> and sell the country's imports and exports. The
+common man plainly has no slightest material interest in the nationality
+or the place of residence of those who conduct this traffic; though all
+the facts go to say that in some puzzle-headed way the common man
+commonly persuades himself that it does make some occult sort of
+difference to him; so that he is commonly willing to pay something
+substantial toward subsidising businessmen of his own nationality, in
+the way of a protective tariff and the like.</p>
+
+<p>The only material advantage to be derived from such a preferential trade
+policy arises in the case of international hostilities, in which case
+the home-owned vessels and merchants may on occasion count toward
+military readiness; although even in that connection their value is
+contingent and doubtful. But in this way they may contribute in their
+degree to a readiness to break off peaceable relations with other
+countries. It is only for warlike purposes, that is to say for the
+dynastic ambitions of warlike statesmen, that these preferential
+contrivances in economic policy have any substantial value; and even in
+that connection their expediency is always doubtful. They are a source
+of national jealousy, and they may on occasion become a help to military
+strategy when this national jealousy eventuates in hostilities.</p>
+
+<p>The run of the facts touching this matter of national trade policy is
+something as follows: At the instance of businessmen who stand to gain
+by it, and with the cordial support of popular sentiment, the
+constituted authorities sedulously further the increase of shipping and
+commerce under protection of the national power. At the same time they
+spend substance and diplomatic energy in an endeavor to extend the
+international market facilities open to the country's businessmen, with
+a view<!-- Page 26 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 26]</span> always to a preferential advantage in favor of these
+businessmen, also with the sentimental support of the common man and at
+his cost. To safeguard these commercial interests, as well as
+property-holdings of the nation's citizens in foreign parts, the nation
+maintains naval, military, consular and diplomatic establishments, at
+the common expense. The total gains derivable from these commercial and
+investment interests abroad, under favorable circumstances, will never
+by any chance equal the cost of the governmental apparatus installed to
+further and safeguard them. These gains, such as they are, go to the
+investors and businessmen engaged in these enterprises; while the costs
+incident to the adventure are borne almost wholly by the common man, who
+gets no gain from it all. Commonly, as in the case of a protective
+tariff or a preferential navigation law, the cost to the common man is
+altogether out of proportion to the gain which accrues to the
+businessmen for whose benefit he carries the burden. The only other
+class, besides the preferentially favored businessmen, who derive any
+material benefit from this arrangement is that of the office-holders who
+take care of this governmental traffic and draw something in the way of
+salaries and perquisites; and whose cost is defrayed by the common man,
+who remains an outsider in all but the payment of the bills. The common
+man is proud and glad to bear this burden for the benefit of his
+wealthier neighbors, and he does so with the singular conviction that in
+some occult manner he profits by it. All this is incredible, but it is
+everyday fact.</p>
+
+<p>In case it should happen that these business interests of the nation's
+businessmen interested in trade or investments abroad are jeopardised by
+a disturbance of any<!-- Page 27 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 27]</span> kind in these foreign parts in which these
+business interests lie, then it immediately becomes the urgent concern
+of the national authorities to use all means at hand for maintaining the
+gainful traffic of these businessmen undiminished, and the common man
+pays the cost. Should such an untoward situation go to such sinister
+lengths as to involve actual loss to these business interests or
+otherwise give rise to a tangible grievance, it becomes an affair of the
+national honour; whereupon no sense of proportion as between the
+material gains at stake and the cost of remedy or retaliation need
+longer be observed, since the national honour is beyond price. The
+motivation in the case shifts from the ground of material interest to
+the spiritual ground of the moral sentiments.</p>
+
+<p>In this connection "honour" is of course to be taken in the euphemistic
+sense which the term has under the <i>code duello</i> governing "affairs of
+honour." It carries no connotation of honesty, veracity, equity,
+liberality, or unselfishness. This national honour is of the nature of
+an intangible or immaterial asset, of course; it is a matter of
+prestige, a sportsmanlike conception; but that fact must not be taken to
+mean that it is of any the less substantial effect for purposes of a
+<i>casus belli</i> than the material assets of the community. Quite the
+contrary: "Who steals my purse, steals trash," etc. In point of fact, it
+will commonly happen that any material grievance must first be converted
+into terms of this spiritual capital, before it is effectually turned to
+account as a stimulus to warlike enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>Even among a people with so single an eye to the main chance as the
+American community it will be found true, on experiment or on review of
+the historical evidence, that an offense against the national honour
+commands a<!-- Page 28 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 28]</span> profounder and more unreserved resentment than any
+infraction of the rights of person or property simply. This has latterly
+been well shown in connection with the manoeuvres of the several
+European belligerents, designed to bend American neutrality to the
+service of one side or the other. Both parties have aimed to intimidate
+and cajole; but while the one party has taken recourse to effrontery and
+has made much and ostentatious use of threats and acts of violence
+against person and property, the other has constantly observed a
+deferential attitude toward American national self-esteem, even while
+engaged on a persistent infraction of American commercial rights. The
+first named line of diplomacy has convicted itself of miscarriage and
+has lost the strategic advantage, as against the none too adroit finesse
+of the other side. The statesmen of this European war power were so ill
+advised as to enter on a course of tentatively cumulative intimidation,
+by threats and experimentally graduated crimes against the property and
+persons of American citizens, with a view to coerce American cupidity
+and yet to avoid carrying these manoeuvres of terrorism far enough to
+arouse an unmanageable sense of outrage. The experiment has served to
+show that the breaking point in popular indignation will be reached
+before the terrorism has gone far enough to raise a serious question of
+pecuniary caution.</p>
+
+<p>This national honour, which so is rated a necessary of life, is an
+immaterial substance in a peculiarly high-wrought degree, being not only
+not physically tangible but also not even capable of adequate statement
+in pecuniary terms,&mdash;as would be the case with ordinary immaterial
+assets. It is true, where the point of grievance out of which a question
+of the national honour arises is a pe<!-- Page 29 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 29]</span>cuniary discrepancy, the national
+honour can not be satisfied without a pecuniary accounting; but it needs
+no argument to convince all right-minded persons that even at such a
+juncture the national honour that has been compromised is indefinitely
+and indefinably more than what can be made to appear on an accountant's
+page. It is a highly valued asset, or at least a valued possession, but
+it is of a metaphysical, not of a physical nature, and it is not known
+to serve any material or otherwise useful end apart from affording a
+practicable grievance consequent upon its infraction.</p>
+
+<p>This national honour is subject to injury in divers ways, and so may
+yield a fruitful grievance even apart from offences against the person
+or property of the nation's businessmen; as, e.g., through neglect or
+disregard of the conventional punctilios governing diplomatic
+intercourse, or by disrespect or contumelious speech touching the Flag,
+or the persons of national officials, particularly of such officials as
+have only a decorative use, or the costumes worn by such officials, or,
+again, by failure to observe the ritual prescribed for parading the
+national honour on stated occasions. When duly violated the national
+honour may duly be made whole again by similarly immaterial
+instrumentalities; as, e.g., by recital of an appropriate formula of
+words, by formal consumption of a stated quantity of ammunition in the
+way of a salute, by "dipping" an ensign, and the like,&mdash;procedure which
+can, of course, have none but a magical efficacy. The national honour,
+in short, moves in the realm of magic, and touches the frontiers of
+religion.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout this range of duties incumbent on the national defense, it
+will be noted, the offenses or discrepancies to be guarded against or
+corrected by recourse to<!-- Page 30 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 30]</span> arms have much of a ceremonial character.
+Whatever may be the material accidents that surround any given concrete
+grievance that comes up for appraisal and redress, in bringing the case
+into the arena for trial by combat it is the spiritual value of the
+offense that is played up and made the decisive ground of action,
+particularly in so far as appeal is made to the sensibilities of the
+common man, who will have to bear the cost of the adventure. And in such
+a case it will commonly happen that the common man is unable, without
+advice, to see that any given hostile act embodies a sacrilegious
+infraction of the national honour. He will at any such conjuncture
+scarcely rise to the pitch of moral indignation necessary to float a
+warlike reprisal, until the expert keepers of the Code come in to
+expound and certify the nature of the transgression. But when once the
+lesion to the national honour has been ascertained, appraised and duly
+exhibited by those persons whose place in the national economy it is to
+look after all that sort of thing, the common man will be found nowise
+behindhand about resenting the evil usage of which he so, by force of
+interpretation, has been a victim.<!-- Page 31 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h4>
+
+<p class='center'><span class="smcap">On the Nature and Uses of Patriotism</span></p>
+
+
+<p>Patriotism may be defined as a sense of partisan solidarity in respect
+of prestige. What the expert psychologists, and perhaps the experts in
+Political Science, might find it necessary to say in the course of an
+exhaustive analysis and definition of this human faculty would
+presumably be something more precise and more extensive. There is no
+inclination here to forestall definition, but only to identify and
+describe the concept that loosely underlies the colloquial use of this
+term, so far as seems necessary to an inquiry into the part played by
+the patriotic animus in the life of modern peoples, particularly as it
+bears on questions of war and peace.</p>
+
+<p>On any attempt to divest this concept of all extraneous or adventitious
+elements it will be found that such a sense of an undivided joint
+interest in a collective body of prestige will always remain as an
+irreducible minimum. This is the substantial core about which many and
+divers subsidiary interests cluster, but without which these other
+clustering interests and aspirations will not, jointly or severally,
+make up a working palladium of the patriotic spirit.</p>
+
+<p>It is true, seen in some other light or rated in some other bearing or
+connection, one and another of these other interests, ideals,
+aspirations, beatitudes, may well be adjudged nobler, wiser, possibly
+more urgent than the<!-- Page 32 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 32]</span> national prestige; but in the forum of patriotism
+all these other necessaries of human life&mdash;the glory of God and the good
+of man&mdash;rise by comparison only to the rank of subsidiaries,
+auxiliaries, amenities. He is an indifferent patriot who will let "life,
+liberty and the pursuit of happiness" cloud the issue and get in the way
+of the main business in hand.</p>
+
+<p>There once were, we are told, many hardy and enterprising spirits banded
+together along the Spanish Main for such like ends, just as there are in
+our day an even greater number of no less single-minded spirits bent on
+their own "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness," according to their
+light, in the money-markets of the modern world; but for all their
+admirable qualities and splendid achievements, their passionate quest of
+these amenities has not entitled these Gentlemen Adventurers to claim
+rank as patriots. The poet says:</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 5em;">
+"Strike for your altars and your fires!<br />
+Strike for the green graves of your sires!<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">God and your native land!"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But, again, a temperate scrutiny of the list of desiderata so enumerated
+in the poet's flight, will quickly bring out the fact that any or all of
+them might drop out of the situation without prejudice to the plain call
+of patriotic duty. In the last resort, when the patriotic spirit falls
+back on its naked self alone, it is not reflection on the merits of
+these good and beautiful things in Nature that gives him his cue and
+enforces the ultimate sacrifice. Indeed it is something infinitely more
+futile and infinitely more urgent,&mdash;provided only that the man is imbued
+with the due modicum of patriotic devotion; as, indeed, men commonly
+are. It is not faith, hope or charity that abide as the irreducible
+minimum of virtue in the patriot's<!-- Page 33 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> scheme of things; particularly not
+that charity that has once been highly spoken of as being the greatest
+of these. It may be that, viewed in the light of reason, as Doctor
+Katzenberger would say, patriotic devotion is the most futile thing in
+the world; but, for good or ill, the light of reason has nothing to do
+with the case,&mdash;no more than "The flowers that bloom in the spring."</p>
+
+<p>The patriotic spirit is a spirit of emulation, evidently, at the same
+time that it is emulation shot through with a sense of solidarity. It
+belongs under the general caption of sportsmanship, rather than of
+workmanship. Now, any enterprise in sportsmanship is bent on an
+invidious success, which must involve as its major purpose the defeat
+and humiliation of some competitor, whatever else may be comprised in
+its aim. Its aim is a differential gain, as against a rival; and the
+emulative spirit that comes under the head of patriotism commonly, if
+not invariably, seeks this differential advantage by injury of the rival
+rather than by an increase of home-bred well-being.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, well-being is altogether out of the perspective, except as
+underpinning for an edifice of national prestige. It is, at least, a
+safe generalisation that the patriotic sentiment never has been known to
+rise to the consummate pitch of enthusiastic abandon except when bent on
+some work of concerted malevolence. Patriotism is of a contentious
+complexion, and finds its full expression in no other outlet than
+warlike enterprise; its highest and final appeal is for the death,
+damage, discomfort and destruction of the party of the second part.</p>
+
+<p>It is not that the spirit of patriotism will tolerate no other
+sentiments bearing on matters of public interest, but only that it will
+tolerate none that traverse the call<!-- Page 34 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 34]</span> of the national prestige. Like
+other men, the patriot may be moved by many and divers other
+considerations, besides that of the national prestige; and these other
+considerations may be of the most genial and reasonable kind, or they
+may also be as foolish and mischievous as any comprised in the range of
+human infirmities. He may be a humanitarian given over to the kindliest
+solicitude for the common good, or a religious devotee hedged about in
+all his motions by the ever present fear of God, or taken up with
+artistic, scholarly or scientific pursuits; or, again, he may be a
+spendthrift devotee of profane dissipation, whether in the slums or on
+the higher levels of gentility, or he may be engaged on a rapacious
+quest of gain, as a businessman within the law or as a criminal without
+its benefit, or he may spend his best endeavors in advancing the
+interests of his class at the cost of the nation at large. All that is
+understood as a matter of course and is beside the point. In so far as
+he is a complete patriot these other interests will fall away from him
+when the one clear call of patriotic duty comes to enlist him in the
+cause of the national prestige. There is, indeed, nothing to hinder a
+bad citizen being a good patriot; nor does it follow that a good
+citizen&mdash;in other respects&mdash;may not be a very indifferent patriot.</p>
+
+<p>Many and various other preferences and considerations may coincide with
+the promptings of the patriotic spirit, and so may come in to coalesce
+with and fortify its driving force; and it is usual for patriotic men to
+seek support for their patriotic impulses in some reasoned purpose of
+this extraneous kind that is believed to be served by following the call
+of the national prestige,&mdash;it may be a presumptive increase and
+diffusion of culture at large, or the spread and enhancement of a
+presump<!-- Page 35 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 35]</span>tively estimable religious faith, or a prospective liberation of
+mankind from servitude to obnoxious masters and outworn institutions;
+or, again, it may be the increase of peace and material well-being among
+men, within the national frontiers or impartially throughout the
+civilised world. There are, substantially, none of the desirable things
+in this world that are not so counted on by some considerable body of
+patriots to be accomplished by the success of their own particular
+patriotic aspirations. What they will not come to an understanding about
+is the particular national ascendency with which the attainment of these
+admirable ends is conceived to be bound up.</p>
+
+<p>The ideals, needs and aims that so are brought into the patriotic
+argument to lend a color of rationality to the patriotic aspiration in
+any given case will of course be such ideals, needs and aims as are
+currently accepted and felt to be authentic and self-legitimating among
+the people in whose eyes the given patriotic enterprise is to find
+favor. So one finds that, e.g., among the followers of Islam, devout and
+resolute, the patriotic statesman (that is to say the politician who
+designs to make use of the popular patriotic fervor) will in the last
+resort appeal to the claims and injunctions of the faith. In a similar
+way the Prussian statesman bent on dynastic enterprise will conjure in
+the name of the dynasty and of culture and efficiency; or, if worse
+comes to worst, an outbreak will be decently covered with a plea of
+mortal peril and self-defense. Among English-speaking peoples much is to
+be gained by showing that the path of patriotic glory is at the same
+time the way of equal-handed justice under the rule of free
+institutions; at the same time, in a fully commercialised community,
+such as the English-speaking commonly are, material benefits in the<!-- Page 36 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 36]</span> way
+of trade will go far to sketch in a background of decency for any
+enterprise that looks to the enhancement of the national prestige.</p>
+
+<p>But any promise of gain, whether in the nation's material or immaterial
+assets, will not of itself carry full conviction to the commonplace
+modern citizen; or even to such modern citizens as are best endowed with
+a national spirit. By and large, and overlooking that appreciable
+contingent of morally defective citizens that is to be counted on in any
+hybrid population, it will hold true that no contemplated enterprise or
+line of policy will fully commend itself to the popular sense of merit
+and expediency until it is given a moral turn, so as to bring it to
+square with the dictates of right and honest dealing. On no terms short
+of this will it effectually coalesce with the patriotic aspiration. To
+give the fullest practical effect to the patriotic fervor that animates
+any modern nation, and so turn it to use in the most effective way, it
+is necessary to show that the demands of equity are involved in the
+case. Any cursory survey of modern historical events bearing on this
+point, among the civilised peoples, will bring out the fact that no
+concerted and sustained movement of the national spirit can be had
+without enlisting the community's moral convictions. The common man must
+be persuaded that right is on his side. "Thrice is he armed who knows
+his quarrel just." The grounds of this conviction may often be tawdry
+enough, but the conviction is a necessary factor in the case.</p>
+
+<p>The requisite moral sanction may be had on various grounds, and, on the
+whole, it is not an extremely difficult matter to arrange. In the
+simplest and not infrequent case it may turn on a question of equity in
+respect of trade or investment as between the citizens or subjects of
+the<!-- Page 37 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 37]</span> several rival nations; the Chinese "Open Door" affords as sordid an
+example as may be desired. Or it may be only an envious demand for a
+share in the world's material resources&mdash;"A Place in the Sun," as a
+picturesque phrase describes it; or "The Freedom of the Seas," as
+another equally vague and equally invidious demand for international
+equity phrases it. These demands are put forward with a color of
+demanding something in the way of equitable opportunity for the
+commonplace peaceable citizen; but quite plainly they have none but a
+fanciful bearing on the fortunes of the common man in time of peace, and
+they have a meaning to the nation only as a fighting unit; apart from
+their prestige value, these things are worth fighting for only as
+prospective means of fighting. The like appeal to the moral
+sensibilities may, again, be made in the way of a call to self-defense,
+under the rule of Live and let live; or it may also rest on the more
+tenuous obligation to safeguard the national integrity of a weaker
+neighbor, under a broader interpretation of the same equitable rule of
+Live and let live. But in one way or another it is necessary to set up
+the conviction that the promptings of patriotic ambition have the
+sanction of moral necessity.</p>
+
+<p>It is not that the line of national policy or patriotic enterprise so
+entered upon with the support of popular sentiment need be right and
+equitable as seen in dispassionate perspective from the outside, but
+only that it should be capable of being made to seem right and equitable
+to the biased populace whose moral convictions are requisite to its
+prosecution; which is quite another matter. Nor is it that any such
+patriotic enterprise is, in fact, entered on simply or mainly on these
+moral grounds that so are alleged in its justification, but only<!-- Page 38 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> that
+some such colorable ground of justification or extenuation is necessary
+to be alleged, and to be credited by popular belief.</p>
+
+<p>It is not that the common man is not sufficiently patriotic, but only
+that he is a patriot hampered with a plodding and uneasy sense of right
+and honest dealing, and that one must make up one's account with this
+moral bias in looking to any sustained and concerted action that draws
+on the sentiment of the common man for its carrying on. But the moral
+sense in the case may be somewhat easily satisfied with a modicum of
+equity, in case the patriotic bias of the people is well pronounced, or
+in case it is reenforced with a sufficient appeal to self-interest. In
+those cases where the national fervor rises to an excited pitch, even
+very attenuated considerations of right and justice, such as would under
+ordinary conditions doubtfully bear scrutiny as extenuating
+circumstances, may come to serve as moral authentication for any
+extravagant course of action to which the craving for national prestige
+may incite. The higher the pitch of patriotic fervor, the more tenuous
+and more thread-bare may be the requisite moral sanction. By cumulative
+excitation some very remarkable results have latterly been attained
+along this line.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Patriotism is evidently a spirit of particularism, of aliency and
+animosity between contrasted groups of persons; it lives on invidious
+comparison, and works out in mutual hindrance and jealousy between
+nations. It commonly goes the length of hindering intercourse and
+obstructing traffic that would patently serve the material and cultural
+well-being of both nationalities; and not<!-- Page 39 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 39]</span> infrequently, indeed
+normally, it eventuates in competitive damage to both.</p>
+
+<p>All this holds true in the world of modern civilisation, at the same
+time that the modern civilised scheme of life is, notoriously, of a
+cosmopolitan character, both in its cultural requirements and in its
+economic structure. Modern culture is drawn on too large a scale, is of
+too complex and multiform a character, requires the cooperation of too
+many and various lines of inquiry, experience and insight, to admit of
+its being confined within national frontiers, except at the cost of
+insufferable crippling and retardation. The science and scholarship that
+is the peculiar pride of civilised Christendom is not only
+international, but rather it is homogeneously cosmopolitan; so that in
+this bearing there are, in effect, no national frontiers; with the
+exception, of course, that in a season of patriotic intoxication, such
+as the current war has induced, even the scholars and scientists will be
+temporarily overset by their patriotic fervour. Indeed, with the best
+efforts of obscurantism and national jealousy to the contrary, it
+remains patently true that modern culture is the culture of Christendom
+at large, not the culture of one and another nation in severalty within
+the confines of Christendom. It is only as and in so far as they partake
+in and contribute to the general run of Western civilisation at large
+that the people of any one of these nations of Christendom can claim
+standing as a cultured nation; and even any distinctive variation from
+this general run of civilised life, such as may give a "local colour" of
+ideals, tastes and conventions, will, in point of cultural value, have
+to be rated as an idle detail, a species of lost motion, that serves no
+better purpose than a transient estrangement.<!-- Page 40 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 40]</span></p>
+
+<p>So also, the modern state of the industrial arts is of a like
+cosmopolitan character, in point of scale, specialisation, and the
+necessary use of diversified resources, of climate and raw materials.
+None of the countries of Europe, e.g., is competent to carry on its
+industry by modern technological methods without constantly drawing on
+resources outside of its national boundaries. Isolation in this
+industrial respect, exclusion from the world market, would mean
+intolerable loss of efficiency, more pronounced the more fully the given
+country has taken over this modern state of the industrial arts.
+Exclusion from the general body of outlying resources would seriously
+cripple any one or all of them, and effectually deprive them of the
+usufruct of this technology; and partial exclusion, by prohibitive or
+protective tariffs and the like, unavoidably results in a partial
+lowering of the efficiency of each, and therefore a reduction of the
+current well-being among them all together.</p>
+
+<p>Into this cultural and technological system of the modern world the
+patriotic spirit fits like dust in the eyes and sand in the bearings.
+Its net contribution to the outcome is obscuration, distrust, and
+retardation at every point where it touches the fortunes of modern
+mankind. Yet it is forever present in the counsels of the statesmen and
+in the affections of the common man, and it never ceases to command the
+regard of all men as the prime attribute of manhood and the final test
+of the desirable citizen. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that no
+other consideration is allowed in abatement of the claims of patriotic
+loyalty, and that such loyalty will be allowed to cover any multitude of
+sins. When the ancient philosopher described Man as a "political animal,"
+this, in effect, was what he affirmed; and today the<!-- Page 41 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> ancient maxim is as
+good as new. The patriotic spirit is at cross purposes with modern life,
+but in any test case it is found that the claims of life yield before
+those of patriotism; and any voice that dissents from this order of things
+is as a voice crying in the wilderness.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>To anyone who is inclined to moralise on the singular discrepancies of
+human life this state of the case will be fruitful of much profound
+speculation. The patriotic animus appears to be an enduring trait of
+human nature, an ancient heritage that has stood over unshorn from time
+immemorial, under the Mendelian rule of the stability of racial types.
+It is archaic, not amenable to elimination or enduring suppression, and
+apparently not appreciably to be mitigated by reflection, education,
+experience or selective breeding.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the historical period, and presumably through an incalculable
+period of the unrecorded past, patriotic manslaughter has consistently
+been weeding out of each successive generation of men the most patriotic
+among them; with the net result that the level of patriotic ardor today
+appears to be no lower than it ever was. At the same time, with the
+advance of population, of culture and of the industrial arts, patriotism
+has grown increasingly disserviceable; and it is to all appearance as
+ubiquitous and as powerful as ever, and is held in as high esteem.</p>
+
+<p>The continued prevalence of this archaic animus among the modern
+peoples, as well as the fact that it is universally placed high among
+the virtues, must be taken to argue that it is, in its elements, an
+hereditary trait, of the nature of an inborn impulsive propensity,
+rather than a product of habituation. It is, in substance, not
+something<!-- Page 42 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 42]</span> that can be learned and unlearned. From one generation to
+another, the allegiance may shift from one nationality to another, but
+the fact of unreflecting allegiance at large remains. And it all argues
+also that no sensible change has taken effect in the hereditary
+endowment of the race, at least in this respect, during the period known
+by record or by secure inference,&mdash;say, since the early Neolithic in
+Europe; and this in spite of the fact that there has all this while been
+opportunity for radical changes in the European population by
+cross-breeding, infiltration and displacement of the several racial
+stocks that go to make up this population. Hence, on slight reflection
+the inference has suggested itself and has gained acceptance that this
+trait of human nature must presumably have been serviceable to the
+peoples of the earlier time, on those levels of savagery or of the lower
+barbarism on which the ancestral stocks of the European population first
+made good their survival and proved their fitness to people that quarter
+of the earth. Such, indeed, is the common view; so common as to pass for
+matter-of-course, and therefore habitually to escape scrutiny.</p>
+
+<p>Still it need not follow, as more patient reflection will show. All the
+European peoples show much the same animus in this respect; whatever
+their past history may have been, and whatever the difference in past
+experience that might be conceived to have shaped their temperament. Any
+difference in the pitch of patriotic conceit and animosity, between the
+several nationalities or the several localities, is by no means wide,
+even in cases where the racial composition of the population is held to
+be very different, as, e.g., between the peoples on the Baltic seaboard
+and those on the Mediterranean. In point of fact, in this matter of
+patriotic animus there appears<!-- Page 43 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> to be a wider divergence,
+temperamentally, between individuals within any one of these communities
+than between the common run in any one community and the corresponding
+common run in any other. But even such divergence of individual temper
+in respect of patriotism as is to be met with, first and last, is after
+all surprisingly small in view of the scope for individual variation
+which this European population would seem to offer.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>These peoples of Europe, all and several, are hybrids compounded out of
+the same run of racial elements, but mixed in varying proportions. On
+any parallel of latitude&mdash;taken in the climatic rather than in the
+geometric sense&mdash;the racial composition of the west-European population
+will be much the same, virtually identical in effect, although always of
+a hybrid complexion; whereas on any parallel of longitude&mdash;also in the
+climatic sense&mdash;the racial composition will vary progressively, but
+always within the limits of the same general scheme of hybridisation,&mdash;the
+variation being a variation in the proportion in which the several racial
+elements are present in any given case. But in no case does a notable
+difference in racial composition coincide with a linguistic or national
+frontier. But in point of patriotic animus these European peoples are one
+as good as another, whether the comparison be traced on parallels of
+latitude or of longitude. And the inhabitants of each national territory,
+or of each detail locality, appear also to run surprisingly uniform in
+respect of their patriotic spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Heredity in any such community of hybrids will, superficially, appear to
+run somewhat haphazard. There will, of course, be no traceable
+difference between social or economic classes, in point of heredity,&mdash;as
+is visibly<!-- Page 44 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 44]</span> the case in Christendom. But variation&mdash;of an apparently
+haphazard description&mdash;will be large and ubiquitous among the
+individuals of such a populace. Indeed, it is a matter of course and of
+easy verification that individual variation within such a hybrid stock
+will greatly exceed the extreme differences that may subsist between the
+several racial types that have gone to produce the hybrid stock. Such is
+the case of the European peoples. The inhabitants vary greatly among
+themselves, both in physical and in mental traits, as would be expected;
+and the variation between individuals in point of patriotic animus
+should accordingly also be expected to be extremely wide,&mdash;should, in
+effect, greatly exceed the difference, if any, in this respect between
+the several racial elements engaged in the European population. Some
+appreciable difference in this respect there appears to be, between
+individuals; but individual divergence from the normal or average
+appears always to be of a sporadic sort,&mdash;it does not run on class
+lines, whether of occupation, status or property, nor does it run at all
+consistently from parent to child. When all is told the argument returns
+to the safe ground that these variations in point of patriotic animus
+are sporadic and inconsequential, and do not touch the general
+proposition that, one with another, the inhabitants of Europe and the
+European Colonies are sufficiently patriotic, and that the average
+endowment in this respect runs with consistent uniformity across all
+differences of time, place and circumstance. It would, in fact, be
+extremely hazardous to affirm that there is a sensible difference in the
+ordinary pitch of patriotic sentiment as between any two widely diverse
+samples of these hybrid populations, in spite of the fact that the
+diversity in visible physical traits may be quite pronounced.<!-- Page 45 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 45]</span></p>
+
+<p>In short, the conclusion seems safe, on the whole, that in this respect
+the several racial stocks that have gone to produce the existing
+populations of Christendom have all been endowed about as richly one as
+another. Patriotism appears to be a ubiquitous trait, at least among the
+races and peoples of Christendom. From which it should follow, that
+since there is, and has from the beginning been, no differential
+advantage favoring one racial stock or one fashion of hybrid as against
+another, in this matter of patriotic animus, there should also be no
+ground of selective survival or selective elimination on this account as
+between these several races and peoples. So that the undisturbed and
+undiminished prevalence of this trait among the European population,
+early or late, argues nothing as to its net serviceability or
+disserviceability under any of the varying conditions of culture and
+technology to which these Europeans have been subjected, first and last;
+except that it has, in any case, not proved so disserviceable under the
+conditions prevailing hitherto as to result in the extinction of these
+Europeans, one with another.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></p>
+
+<p>The patriotic frame of mind has been spoken of above as if it were an
+hereditary trait, something after the fashion of a Mendelian unit
+character. Doubtless this is not a competent account of the matter; but
+the present argument scarcely needs a closer analysis. Still, in a
+measure to quiet title and avoid annoyance, it may be noted that this
+patriotic animus is of the nature of a "frame of mind" rather than a
+Mendelian unit character;<!-- Page 46 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> that it so involves a concatenation of
+several impulsive propensities (presumably hereditary); and that both
+the concatenation and the special mode and amplitude of the response are
+a product of habituation, very largely of the nature of conventionalised
+use and wont. What is said above, therefore, goes little farther than
+saying that the underlying aptitudes requisite to this patriotic frame
+of mind are heritable, and that use and wont as bearing on this point
+run with sufficient uniformity to bring a passably uniform result. It
+may be added that in this concatenation spoken of there seems to be
+comprised, ordinarily, that sentimental attachment to habitat and custom
+that is called love of home, or in its accentuated expression,
+home-sickness; so also an invidious self-complacency, coupled with a
+gregarious bent which gives the invidious comparison a group content;
+and further, commonly if not invariably, a bent of abnegation,
+self-abasement, subservience, or whatever it may best be called, that
+inclines the bearer unreasoningly and unquestioningly to accept and
+serve a prescriptive ideal given by custom or by customary authority.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The conclusion would therefore provisionally run to the effect that
+under modern conditions the patriotic animus is wholly a disserviceable
+trait in the spiritual endowment of these peoples,&mdash;in so far as bears
+on the material conditions of life unequivocally, and as regards the
+cultural interests more at large presumptively; whereas there is no
+assured ground for a discriminating opinion as touches its possible
+utility or disutility at any remote period in the past. There is, of
+course, always room for the conservative estimate that, as the
+possession of this spiritual trait has not hitherto resulted in the
+extinc<!-- Page 47 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 47]</span>tion of the race, so it may also in the calculable future
+continue to bring no more grievous results than a degree of mischief,
+without even stopping or greatly retarding the increase of population.</p>
+
+<p>All this, of course, is intended to apply only so far as it goes. It
+must not be taken as intending to say any least word in derogation of
+those high qualities that inspire the patriotic citizen. In its
+economic, biological and cultural incidence patriotism appears to be an
+untoward trait of human nature; which has, of course, nothing to say as
+to its moral excellence, its aesthetic value, or its indispensability to
+a worthy life. No doubt, it is in all these respects deserving of all
+the esteem and encomiums that fall to its share. Indeed, its well-known
+moral and aesthetic value, as well as the reprobation that is visited on
+any shortcomings in this respect, signify, for the purposes of the
+present argument, nothing more than that the patriotic animus meets the
+unqualified approval of men because they are, all and several, infected
+with it. It is evidence of the ubiquitous, intimate and ineradicable
+presence of this quality in human nature; all the more since it
+continues untiringly to be held in the highest esteem in spite of the
+fact that a modicum of reflection should make its disserviceability
+plain to the meanest understanding. No higher praise of moral
+excellence, and no profounder test of loyalty, can be asked than this
+current unreserved commendation of a virtue that makes invariably for
+damage and discomfort. The virtuous impulse must be deep-seated and
+indefeasible that drives men incontinently to do good that evil may come
+of it. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him."<!-- Page 48 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the light&mdash;and it is a dim and wavering light&mdash;of the archaeological
+evidence, helped out by circumstantial evidence from such parallel or
+analogous instances as are afforded by existing communities on a
+comparable level of culture, one may venture more or less confidently on
+a reconstruction of the manner of life among the early Europeans, of
+early neolithic times and later.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> And so one may form some conception
+of the part played by this patriotic animus among those beginnings,
+when, if not the race, at least its institutions were young; and when
+the native temperament of these peoples was tried out and found fit to
+survive through the age-long and slow-moving eras of stone and bronze.
+In this connection, it appears safe to assume that since early neolithic
+times no sensible change has taken effect in the racial complexion of
+the European peoples; and therefore no sensible change in their
+spiritual and mental make-up. So that in respect of the spiritual
+elements that go to make up this patriotic animus the Europeans of today
+will be substantially identical with the Europeans of that early time.
+The like is true as regards those other traits of temperament that come
+in question here, as being included among the stable characteristics
+that still condition the life of these peoples under the altered
+circumstances of the modern age.</p>
+
+<p>The difference between prehistoric Europe and the present state of these
+peoples resolves itself on analysis into a difference in the state of
+the industrial arts, together with such institutional changes as have
+come on in the course of working out this advance in the industrial
+arts. The habits and the exigencies of life among these peoples have
+greatly changed; whereas in temper<!-- Page 49 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>ament and capacities the peoples that
+now live by and under the rule of this altered state of the industrial
+arts are the same as they were. It is to be noted, therefore, that the
+fact of their having successfully come through the long ages of
+prehistory by the use of this mental and spiritual endowment can not be
+taken to argue that these peoples are thereby fit to meet the exigencies
+of this later and gravely altered age; nor will it do to assume that
+because these peoples have themselves worked out this modern culture and
+its technology, therefore it must all be suitable for their use and
+conducive to their biological success. The single object lesson of the
+modern urban community, with its endless requirements in the way of
+sanitation, police, compulsory education, charities,&mdash;all this and many
+other discrepancies in modern life should enjoin caution on anyone who
+is inclined off-hand to hold that because modern men have created these
+conditions, therefore these must be the most suitable conditions of life
+for modern mankind.</p>
+
+<p>In the beginning, that is to say in the European beginning, men lived in
+small and close groups. Control was close within the group, and the
+necessity of subordinating individual gains and preferences to the
+common good was enjoined on the group by the exigencies of the case, on
+pain of common extinction. The situation and usages of existing Eskimo
+villages may serve to illustrate and enforce the argument on this head.
+The solidarity of sentiment necessary to support the requisite
+solidarity of action in the case would be a prime condition of survival
+in any racial stock exposed to the conditions which surrounded these
+early Europeans. This needful sense of solidarity would touch not simply
+or most imperatively the joint prestige of the group, but rather the
+joint ma<!-- Page 50 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 50]</span>terial interests; and would enforce a spirit of mutual support
+and dependence. Which would be rather helped than hindered by a jealous
+attitude of joint prestige; so long as no divergent interests of members
+within the group were in a position to turn this state of the common
+sentiment to their own particular advantage.</p>
+
+<p>This state of the case will have lasted for a relatively long time; long
+enough to have tested the fitness of these peoples for that manner of
+life,&mdash;longer, no doubt, than the interval that has elapsed since
+history began. Special interests&mdash;e.g., personal and family
+interests&mdash;will have been present and active in these days of the
+beginning; but so long as the group at large was small enough to admit
+of a close neighborly contact throughout its extent and throughout the
+workday routine of life, at the same time that it was too small and
+feeble to allow any appreciable dissipation of its joint energies in
+such pursuit of selfish gains as would run counter to the paramount
+business of the common livelihood, so long the sense of a common
+livelihood and a joint fortune would continue to hold any particularist
+ambitions effectually in check. Had it fallen out otherwise, the story
+of the group in question would have been ended, and another and more
+suitably endowed type of men would have taken the place vacated by its
+extinction.</p>
+
+<p>With a sensible advance in the industrial arts the scale of operations
+would grow larger, and the group more numerous and extensive. The margin
+between production and subsistence would also widen and admit additional
+scope for individual ambitions and personal gains. And as this process
+of growth and increasing productive efficiency went on, the control
+exercised by neighborly surveillance, through the sentiment of the
+common good<!-- Page 51 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> as against the self-seeking pursuits of individuals and
+sub-groups, would gradually slacken; until by progressive disuse it
+would fall into a degree of abeyance; to be called into exercise and
+incite to concerted action only in the face of unusual exigencies
+touching the common fortunes of the group at large, or on persuasion
+that the collective interest of the group at large was placed in
+jeopardy in the molestation of one and another of its members from
+without. The group's prestige at least would be felt to suffer in the
+defeat or discourtesy suffered by any of its members at the hands of any
+alien; and, under compulsion of the ancient sense of group solidarity,
+whatever material hardship or material gain might so fall to individual
+members in their dealings with the alien would pass easy scrutiny as
+material detriment or gain inuring to the group at large,&mdash;in the
+apprehension of men whose sense of community interest is inflamed with a
+jealous disposition to safeguard their joint prestige.</p>
+
+<p>With continued advance in the industrial arts the circumstances
+conditioning life will undergo a progressive change of such a character
+that the joint interest of the group at large, in the material respect,
+will progressively be less closely bound up with the material fortunes
+of any particular member or members; until in the course of time and
+change there will, in effect, in ordinary times be no general and
+inclusive community of material interest binding the members together in
+a common fortune and working for a common livelihood. As the rights of
+ownership begin to take effect, so that the ownership of property and
+the pursuit of a livelihood under the rules of ownership come to govern
+men's economic relations, these material concerns will cease to be a
+matter of undivided joint interest, and will fall into the shape of
+interest in<!-- Page 52 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 52]</span> severalty. So soon and so far as this institution of
+ownership or property takes effect, men's material interests cease to
+run on lines of group solidarity. Solely, or almost solely, in the
+exceptional case of defense against a predatory incursion from outside,
+do the members of the group have a common interest of a material kind.
+Progressively as the state of the arts advances, the industrial
+organisation advances to a larger scale and a more extensive
+specialisation, with increasing divergence among individual interests
+and individual fortunes; and intercourse over larger distances grows
+easier and makes a larger grouping practicable; which enables a larger,
+prompter and more effective mobilisation of forces with which to defend
+or assert any joint claims. But by the same move it also follows, or at
+least it appears uniformly to have followed in the European case, that
+the accumulation of property and the rights of ownership have
+progressively come into the first place among the material interests of
+these peoples; while anything like a community of usufruct has
+imperceptibly fallen into the background, and has presently gone
+virtually into abeyance, except as an eventual recourse <i>in extremis</i>
+for the common defense. Property rights have displaced community of
+usufruct; and invidious distinctions as between persons, sub-groups, and
+classes have displaced community of prestige in the workday routine of
+these peoples; and the distinctions between contrasted persons or
+classes have come to rest, in an ever increasing degree, directly or
+indirectly, on invidious comparisons in respect of pecuniary standing
+rather than on personal affiliation with the group at large.</p>
+
+<p>So, with the advance of the industrial arts a differentiation of a new
+character sets in and presently grows pro<!-- Page 53 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 53]</span>gressively more pronounced and
+more effectual, giving rise to a regrouping on lines that run regardless
+of those frontiers that divide one community from another for purposes
+of patriotic emulation. So far as it comes chiefly and typically in
+question here, this regrouping takes place on two distinct but somewhat
+related principles of contrast: that of wealth and poverty, and that of
+master and servant, or authority and obedience. The material interests
+of the population in this way come to be divided between the group of
+those who own and those who command, on the one hand, and of those who
+work and who obey, on the other hand.</p>
+
+<p>Neither of these two contrasted categories of persons have any direct
+material interest in the maintenance of the patriotic community; or at
+any rate no such interest as should reasonably induce them to spend
+their own time and substance in support of the political (patriotic)
+organisation within which they live. It is only in so far as one or
+another of these interests looks for a more than proportionate share in
+any prospective gain from the joint enterprise, that the group or class
+in question can reasonably be counted on to bear its share in the joint
+venture. And it is only when and in so far as their particular material
+or self-regarding interest is reenforced by patriotic conceit, that they
+can be counted on to spend themselves in furtherance of the patriotic
+enterprise, without the assurance of a more than proportionate share in
+any gains that may be held in prospect from any such joint enterprise;
+and it is only in its patriotic bearing that the political community
+continues to be a joint venture. That is to say, in more generalised
+terms, through the development of the rights of property, and of such
+like prescriptive claims of privilege and prerogative, it<!-- Page 54 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> has come
+about that other community interests have fallen away, until the
+collective prestige remains as virtually the sole community interest
+which can hold the sentiment of the group in a bond of solidarity.</p>
+
+<p>To one or another of these several interested groups or classes within
+the community the political organisation may work a benefit; but only to
+one or another, not to each and several, jointly or collectively. Since
+by no chance will the benefit derived from such joint enterprise on the
+part of the community at large equal the joint cost; in as much as all
+joint enterprise of the kind that looks to material advantage works by
+one or another method of inhibition and takes effect, if at all, by
+lowering the aggregate efficiency of the several countries concerned,
+with a view to the differential gain of one at the cost of another. So,
+e.g., a protective tariff is plainly a conspiracy in restraint of trade,
+with a view to benefit the conspirators by hindering their competitors.
+The aggregate cost to the community at large of such an enterprise in
+retardation is always more than the gains it brings to those who may
+benefit by it.</p>
+
+<p>In so speaking of the uses to which the common man's patriotic devotion
+may be turned, there is no intention to underrate its intrinsic value as
+a genial and generous trait of human nature. Doubtless it is best and
+chiefly to be appreciated as a spiritual quality that beautifies and
+ennobles its bearer, and that endows him with the full stature of
+manhood, quite irrespective of ulterior considerations. So it is to be
+conceded without argument that this patriotic animus is a highly
+meritorious frame of mind, and that it has an aesthetic value scarcely
+to be overstated in the farthest stretch of poetic license. But the
+question of its serviceability to the modern commu<!-- Page 55 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 55]</span>nity, in any other
+than this decorative respect, and particularly its serviceability to the
+current needs of the common man in such a modern community, is not
+touched by such an admission; nor does this recognition of its generous
+spiritual nature afford any help toward answering a further question as
+to how and with what effect this animus may be turned to account by
+anyone who is in position to make use of the forces which it sets free.</p>
+
+<p>Among Christian nations there still is, on the whole, a decided
+predilection for that ancient and authentic line of national repute that
+springs from warlike prowess. This repute for warlike prowess is what
+first comes to mind among civilised peoples when speaking of national
+greatness. And among those who have best preserved this warlike ideal of
+worth, the patriotic ambition is likely to converge on the prestige of
+their sovereign; so that it takes the concrete form of personal loyalty
+to a master, and so combines or coalesces with a servile habit of mind.</p>
+
+<p>But peace hath its victories no less renowned than war, it is said; and
+peaceable folk of a patriotic temper have learned to make the best of
+their meager case and have found self-complacency in these victories of
+the peaceable order. So it may broadly be affirmed that all nations look
+with complacency on their own peculiar Culture&mdash;the organised complex of
+habits of thought and of conduct by which their own routine of life is
+regulated&mdash;as being in some way worthier than the corresponding habits
+of their neighbors. The case of the German Culture has latterly come
+under a strong light in this way. But while it may be that no other
+nation has been so naive as to make a concerted profession of faith to
+the effect that their own particular way of life is altogether
+commendable and is the only fashion of civilisation that is<!-- Page 56 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 56]</span> fit to
+survive; yet it will scarcely be an extravagance to assert that in their
+own secret mind these others, too, are blest with much the same
+consciousness of unique worth. Conscious virtue of this kind is a good
+and sufficient ground for patriotic inflation, so far as it goes. It
+commonly does not go beyond a defensive attitude, however. Now and
+again, as in the latterday German animation on this head, these
+phenomena of national use and wont may come to command such a degree of
+popular admiration as will incite to an aggressive or proselyting
+campaign.</p>
+
+<p>In all this there is nothing of a self-seeking or covetous kind. The
+common man who so lends himself to the aggressive enhancement of the
+national Culture and its prestige has nothing of a material kind to gain
+from the increase of renown that so comes to his sovereign, his
+language, his countrymen's art or science, his dietary, or his God.
+There are no sordid motives in all this. These spiritual assets of
+self-complacency are, indeed, to be rated as grounds of high-minded
+patriotism without afterthought. These aspirations and enthusiasms would
+perhaps be rated as Quixotic by men whose horizon is bounded by the main
+chance; but they make up that substance of things hoped for that
+inflates those headlong patriotic animosities that stir universal
+admiration.</p>
+
+<p>So also, men find an invidious distinction in such matters of physical
+magnitude as their country's area, the number of its population, the
+size of its cities, the extent of its natural resources, its aggregate
+wealth and its wealth per capita, its merchant marine and its foreign
+trade. As a ground of invidious complacency these phenomena of physical
+magnitude and pecuniary traffic are no better and no worse than such
+immaterial assets as the majesty of the sovereign or the perfections of
+the<!-- Page 57 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> language. They are matters in which the common man is concerned
+only by the accident of domicile, and his only connection with these
+things is an imaginary joint interest in their impressiveness. To these
+things he has contributed substantially nothing, and from them he
+derives no other merit or advantage than a patriotic inflation. He takes
+pride in these things in an invidious way, and there is no good reason
+why he should not; just as there is also no good reason why he should,
+apart from the fact that the common man is so constituted that he,
+mysteriously, takes pride in these things that concern him not.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Of the several groups or classes of persons within the political
+frontiers, whose particular interests run systematically at cross
+purposes with those of the community at large under modern conditions,
+the class of masters, rulers, authorities,&mdash;or whatever term may seem
+most suitable to designate that category of persons whose characteristic
+occupation is to give orders and command deference,&mdash;of the several
+orders and conditions of men these are, in point of substantial motive
+and interest, most patently at variance with all the rest, or with the
+fortunes of the common man. The class will include civil and military
+authorities and whatever nobility there is of a prescriptive and
+privileged kind. The substantial interest of these classes in the common
+welfare is of the same kind as the interest which a parasite has in the
+well-being of his host; a sufficiently substantial interest, no doubt,
+but there is in this relation nothing like a community of interest. Any
+gain on the part of the community at large will materially serve the
+needs of this group of personages, only in so far as it may afford them
+a larger volume or a wider scope for what has in latterday col<!-- Page 58 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 58]</span>loquial
+phrase been called "graft." These personages are, of course, not to be
+spoken of with disrespect or with the slightest inflection of
+discourtesy. They are all honorable men. Indeed they afford the
+conventional pattern of human dignity and meritorious achievement, and
+the "Fountain of Honor" is found among them. The point of the argument
+is only that their material or other self-regarding interests are of
+such a nature as to be furthered by the material wealth of the
+community, and more particularly by the increasing volume of the body
+politic; but only with the proviso that this material wealth and this
+increment of power must accrue without anything like a corresponding
+cost to this class. At the same time, since this class of the superiors
+is in some degree a specialised organ of prestige, so that their value,
+and therefore their tenure, both in the eyes of the community and in
+their own eyes, is in the main a "prestige value" and a tenure by
+prestige; and since the prestige that invests their persons is a shadow
+cast by the putative worth of the community at large, it follows that
+their particular interest in the joint prestige is peculiarly alert and
+insistent. But it follows also that these personages cannot of their own
+substance or of their own motion contribute to this collective prestige
+in the same proportion in which it is necessary for them to draw on it
+in support of their own prestige value. It would, in other words, be a
+patent absurdity to call on any of the current ruling classes,
+dynasties, nobility, military and diplomatic corps, in any of the
+nations of Europe, e.g., to preserve their current dignity and command
+the deference that is currently accorded them, by recourse to their own
+powers and expenditure of their own substance, without the usufruct of
+the commonalty whose organ of dignity<!-- Page 59 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 59]</span> they are. The current prestige
+value which they enjoy is beyond their unaided powers to create or
+maintain, without the usufruct of the community. Such an enterprise does
+not lie within the premises of the case.</p>
+
+<p>In this bearing, therefore, the first concern with which these
+personages are necessarily occupied is the procurement and retention of
+a suitable usufruct in the material resources and good-will of a
+sufficiently large and industrious population. The requisite good-will
+in these premises is called loyalty, and its retention by the line of
+personages that so trade on prestige rests on a superinduced association
+of ideas, whereby the national honour comes to be confounded in popular
+apprehension with the prestige of these personages who have the keeping
+of it. But the potentates and the establishments, civil and military, on
+whom this prestige value rests will unavoidably come into invidious
+comparison with others of their kind; and, as invariably happens in
+matters of invidious comparison, the emulative needs of all the
+competitors for prestige are "indefinitely extensible," as the phrase of
+the economists has it. Each and several of them incontinently needs a
+further increment of prestige, and therefore also a further increment of
+the material assets in men and resources that are needful as ways and
+means to assert and augment the national honor.</p>
+
+<p>It is true, the notion that their prestige value is in any degree
+conditioned by the material circumstances and the popular imagination of
+the underlying nation is distasteful to many of these vicars of the
+national honour. They will incline rather to the persuasion that this
+prestige value is a distinctive attribute, of a unique order, intrinsic
+to their own persons. But, plainly, any such detached line of magnates,
+notables, kings and mandarins,<!-- Page 60 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> resting their notability on nothing more
+substantial than a slightly sub-normal intelligence and a moderately
+scrofulous habit of body could not long continue to command that eager
+deference that is accounted their due. Such a picture of majesty would
+be sadly out of drawing. There is little conviction and no great dignity
+to be drawn from the unaided pronouncement:</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 5em;">
+"We're here because,<br />
+We're here because,<br />
+We're here because<br />
+We're here,"<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>even when the doggerel is duly given the rhetorical benefit of a "Tenure
+by the Grace of God." The personages that carry this dignity require the
+backing of a determined and patriotic populace in support of their
+prestige value, and they commonly have no great difficulty in procuring
+it. And their prestige value is, in effect, proportioned to the volume
+of material resources and patriotic credulity that can be drawn on for
+its assertion. It is true, their draught on the requisite sentimental
+and pecuniary support is fortified with large claims of serviceability
+to the common good, and these claims are somewhat easily, indeed
+eagerly, conceded and acted upon; although the alleged benefit to the
+common good will scarcely be visible except in the light of glory shed
+by the blazing torch of patriotism.</p>
+
+<p>In so far as it is of a material nature the benefit which the
+constituted authorities so engage to contribute to the common good, or
+in other words to confer on the common man, falls under two heads:
+defense against aggression from without; and promotion of the
+community's material gain. It is to be presumed that the constituted<!-- Page 61 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
+authorities commonly believe more or less implicitly in their own
+professions in so professing to serve the needs of the common man in
+these respects. The common defense is a sufficiently grave matter, and
+doubtless it claims the best affections and endeavour of the citizen;
+but it is not a matter that should claim much attention at this point in
+the argument, as bearing on the service rendered the common man by the
+constituted authorities, taken one with another. Any given governmental
+establishment at home is useful in this respect only as against another
+governmental establishment elsewhere. So that on the slightest
+examination it resolves itself into a matter of competitive patriotic
+enterprise, as between the patriotic aspirations of different
+nationalities led by different governmental establishments; and the
+service so rendered by the constituted authorities in the aggregate
+takes on the character of a remedy for evils of their own creation. It
+is invariably a defense against the concerted aggressions of other
+patriots. Taken in the large, the common defense of any given nation
+becomes a detail of the competitive struggle between rival nationalities
+animated with a common spirit of patriotic enterprise and led by
+authorities constituted for this competitive purpose.</p>
+
+<p>Except on a broad basis of patriotic devotion, and except under the
+direction of an ambitious governmental establishment, no serious
+international aggression is to be had. The common defense, therefore, is
+to be taken as a remedy for evils arising out of the working of the
+patriotic spirit that animates mankind, as brought to bear under a
+discretionary authority; and in any balance to be struck between the
+utility and disutility of this patriotic spirit and of its service in
+the hands of the constituted authorities, it will have to be cancelled
+out as being at<!-- Page 62 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> the best a mitigation of some of the disorders brought
+on by the presence of national governments resting on patriotic loyalty
+at large.</p>
+
+<p>But this common defense is by no means a vacant rubric in any attempted
+account of modern national enterprise. It is the commonplace and
+conclusive plea of the dynastic statesmen and the aspiring warlords, and
+it is the usual blind behind which events are put in train for eventual
+hostilities. Preparation for the common defense also appears unfailingly
+to eventuate in hostilities. With more or less <i>bona fides</i> the
+statesmen and warriors plead the cause of the common defense, and with
+patriotic alacrity the common man lends himself to the enterprise aimed
+at under that cover. In proportion as the resulting equipment for
+defense grows great and becomes formidable, the range of items which a
+patriotically biased nation are ready to include among the claims to be
+defended grows incontinently larger, until by the overlapping of
+defensive claims between rival nationalities the distinction between
+defense and aggression disappears, except in the biased fancy of the
+rival patriots.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, no reflections are called for here on the current American
+campaign of "Preparedness." Except for the degree of hysteria it appears
+to differ in no substantial respect from the analogous course of
+auto-intoxication among the nationalities of Europe, which came to a
+head in the current European situation. It should conclusively serve the
+turn for any self-possessed observer to call to mind that all the
+civilised nations of warring Europe are, each and several, convinced
+that they are fighting a defensive war.</p>
+
+<p>The aspiration of all right-minded citizens is presumed to be "Peace
+with Honour." So that first, as well as last,<!-- Page 63 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> among those national
+interests that are to be defended, and in the service of which the
+substance and affections of the common man are enlisted under the aegis
+of the national prowess, comes the national prestige, as a matter of
+course. And the constituted authorities are doubtless sincere and
+single-minded in their endeavors to advance and defend the national
+honour, particularly those constituted authorities that hold their place
+of authority on grounds of fealty; since the national prestige in such a
+case coalesces with the prestige of the nation's ruler in much the same
+degree in which the national sovereignty devolves upon the person of its
+ruler. In so defending or advancing the national prestige, such a
+dynastic or autocratic overlord, together with the other privileged
+elements assisting and dependent on him, is occupied with his own
+interest; his own tenure is a tenure by prestige, and the security of
+his tenure lies in the continued maintenance of that popular fancy that
+invests his person with this national prestige and so constitutes him
+and his retinue of notables and personages its keeper.</p>
+
+<p>But it is uniformly insisted by the statesmen&mdash;potentates, notables,
+kings and mandarins&mdash;that this aegis of the national prowess in their
+hands covers also many interests of a more substantial and more tangible
+kind. These other, more tangible interests of the community have also a
+value of a direct and personal sort to the dynasty and its hierarchy of
+privileged subalterns, in that it is only by use of the material forces
+of the nation that the dynastic prestige can be advanced and maintained.
+The interest of such constituted authorities in the material welfare of
+the nation is consequently grave and insistent; but it is evidently an
+interest of a special kind and is subject to strict and peculiar
+limitations. The common good,<!-- Page 64 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> in the material respect, interests the
+dynastic statesman only as a means to dynastic ends; that is to say,
+only in so far as it can be turned to account in the achievement of
+dynastic aims. These aims are "The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory," as
+the sacred formula phrases the same conception in another bearing.</p>
+
+<p>That is to say, the material welfare of the nation is a means to the
+unfolding of the dynastic power; provided always that this material
+welfare is not allowed to run into such ramifications as will make the
+commonwealth an unwieldy instrument in the hands of the dynastic
+statesmen. National welfare is to the purpose only in so far as it
+conduces to political success, which is always a question of warlike
+success in the last resort. The limitation which this consideration
+imposes on the government's economic policy are such as will make the
+nation a self-sufficient or self-balanced economic commonwealth. It must
+be a self-balanced commonwealth at least in such measure as will make it
+self-sustaining in case of need, in all those matters that bear directly
+on warlike efficiency.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, no community can become fully self-sustaining under modern
+conditions, by use of the modern state of the industrial arts, except by
+recourse to such drastic measures of repression as would reduce its
+total efficiency in an altogether intolerable degree. This will hold
+true even of those nations who, like Russia or the United States, are
+possessed of extremely extensive territories and extremely large and
+varied resources; but it applies with greatly accentuated force to
+smaller and more scantily furnished territorial units. Peoples living
+under modern conditions and by use of the modern state of the industrial
+arts necessarily draw on all quarters of the habitable globe for
+materials and products which they can pro<!-- Page 65 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 65]</span>cure to the best advantage
+from outside their own special field so long as they are allowed access
+to these outlying sources of supply; and any arbitrary limitation on
+this freedom of traffic makes the conditions of life that much harder,
+and lowers the aggregate efficiency of the community by that much.
+National self-sufficiency is to be achieved only by a degree of economic
+isolation; and such a policy of economic isolation involves a degree of
+impoverishment and lowered efficiency, but it will also leave the nation
+readier for warlike enterprise on such a scale as its reduced efficiency
+will compass.</p>
+
+<p>So that the best that can be accomplished along this line by the
+dynastic statesmen is a shrewd compromise, embodying such a degree of
+isolation and inhibition as will leave the country passably
+self-sufficient in case of need, without lowering the national
+efficiency to such a point as to cripple its productive forces beyond
+what will be offset by the greater warlike readiness that is so
+attained. The point to which such a policy of isolation and sufficiency
+will necessarily be directed is that measure of inhibition that will
+yield the most facile and effective ways and means of warlike
+enterprise, the largest product of warlike effectiveness to be had on
+multiplying the nation's net efficiency into its readiness to take the
+field.</p>
+
+<p>Into any consideration of this tactical problem a certain subsidiary
+factor enters, in that the patriotic temper of the nation is always more
+or less affected by such an economic policy. The greater the degree of
+effectual isolation and discrimination embodied in the national policy,
+the greater will commonly be its effect on popular sentiment in the way
+of national animosity and spiritual self-sufficiency; which may be an
+asset of great value for the purposes of warlike enterprise.<!-- Page 66 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 66]</span></p>
+
+<p>Plainly, any dynastic statesman who should undertake to further the
+common welfare regardless of its serviceability for warlike enterprise
+would be defeating his own purpose. He would, in effect, go near to
+living up to his habitual professions touching international peace,
+instead of professing to live up to them, as the exigencies of his
+national enterprise now conventionally require him to do. In effect, he
+would be <i>functus officio</i>.</p>
+
+<p>There are two great administrative instruments available for this work
+of repression and national self-sufficiency at the hands of the
+imperialistic statesman: the protective tariff, and commercial
+subvention. The two are not consistently to be distinguished from one
+another at all points, and each runs out into a multifarious convolution
+of variegated details; but the principles involved are, after all,
+fairly neat and consistent. The former is of the nature of a conspiracy
+in restraint of trade by repression; the latter, a conspiracy to the
+like effect by subsidised monopoly; both alike act to check the pursuit
+of industry in given lines by artificially increasing the cost of
+production for given individuals or classes of producers, and both alike
+impose a more than proportionate cost on the community within which they
+take effect. Incidentally, both of these methods of inhibition bring a
+degree, though a less degree, of hardship, to the rest of the industrial
+world.</p>
+
+<p>All this is matter of course to all economic students, and it should,
+reasonably, be plain to all intelligent persons; but its voluble denial
+by interested parties, as well as the easy credulity with which
+patriotic citizens allow themselves to accept the sophistries offered in
+defense of these measures of inhibition, has made it seem worth while
+here to recall these commonplaces of economic science.<!-- Page 67 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The ground of this easy credulity is not so much infirmity of intellect
+as it is an exuberance of sentiment, although it may reasonably be
+believed that its more pronounced manifestations&mdash;as, e.g., the high
+protective tariff&mdash;can be had only by force of a formidable cooperation
+of the two. The patriotic animus is an invidious sentiment of joint
+prestige; and it needs no argument or documentation to bear out the
+affirmation that its bias will lend a color of merit and expediency to
+any proposed measure that can, however speciously, promise an increase
+of national power or prestige. So that when the statesmen propose a
+policy of inhibition and mitigated isolation on the professed ground
+that such a policy will strengthen the nation economically by making it
+economically self-supporting, as well as ready for any warlike
+adventure, the patriotic citizen views the proposed measures through the
+rosy haze of national aspirations and lets the will to believe persuade
+him that whatever conduces to a formidable national battle-front will
+also contribute to the common good. At the same time all these national
+conspiracies in restraint of trade are claimed, with more or less
+reason, to inflict more or less harm on rival nationalities with whom
+economic relations are curtailed; and patriotism being an invidious
+sentiment, the patriotic citizen finds comfort in the promise of
+mischief to these others, and is all the more prone to find all kinds of
+merit in proposals that look to such an invidious outcome. In any
+community imbued with an alert patriotic spirit, the fact that any given
+circumstance, occurrence or transaction can be turned to account as a
+means of invidious distinction or invidious discrimination against
+humanity beyond the national pale, will always go far to procure
+acceptance of it as being also an article<!-- Page 68 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 68]</span> of substantial profit to the
+community at large, even though the slightest unbiased scrutiny would
+find it of no ascertainable use in any other bearing than that of
+invidious mischief. And whatever will bear interpretation as an
+increment of the nation's power or prowess, in comparison with rival
+nationalities, will always be securely counted as an item of joint
+credit, and will be made to serve the collective conceit as an invidious
+distinction; and patriotic credulity will find it meritorious also in
+other respects.</p>
+
+<p>So, e.g., it is past conception that such a patent imbecility as a
+protective tariff should enlist the support of any ordinarily
+intelligent community except by the help of some such chauvinistic
+sophistry. So also, the various royal establishments of Europe, e.g.,
+afford an extreme but therefore all the more convincing illustration of
+the same logical fallacy. These establishments and personages are great
+and authentic repositories of national prestige, and they are therefore
+unreflectingly presumed by their several aggregations of subjects to be
+of some substantial use also in some other bearing; but it would be a
+highly diverting exhibition of credulity for any outsider to fall into
+that amazing misconception. But the like is manifestly true of
+commercial turnover and export trade among modern peoples; although on
+this head the infatuation is so ingrained and dogmatic that even a rank
+outsider is expected to accept the fallacy without reflection, on pain
+of being rated as unsafe or unsound. Such matters again, as the
+dimensions of the national territory, or the number of the population
+and the magnitude of the national resources, are still and have perhaps
+always been material for patriotic exultation, and are fatuously
+believed to have some great significance for the material for<!-- Page 69 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 69]</span>tunes of
+the common man; although it should be plain on slight reflection that
+under modern conditions of ownership, these things, one and all, are of
+no consequence to the common man except as articles of prestige to
+stimulate his civic pride. The only conjuncture under which these and
+the like national holdings can come to have a meaning as joint or
+collective assets would arise in case of a warlike adventure carried to
+such extremities as would summarily cancel vested rights of ownership
+and turn them to warlike uses. While the rights of ownership hold, the
+common man, who does not own these things, draws no profit from their
+inclusion in the national domain; indeed, he is at some cost to
+guarantee their safe tenure by their rightful owners.</p>
+
+<p>In so pursuing their quest of the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, by
+use of the national resources and by sanction of the national spirit,
+the constituted authorities also assume the guardianship of sundry
+material interests that are presumed to touch the common good; such as
+security of person and property in dealings with aliens, whether at home
+or abroad; security of investment and trade, and vindication of their
+citizens before the law in foreign parts; and, chiefly and ubiquitously,
+furtherance and extension of the national trade into foreign parts,
+particularly of the export trade, on terms advantageous to the traders
+of the nation.</p>
+
+<p>The last named of these advantages is the one on which stress is apt to
+fall in the argument of all those who advocate an unfolding of national
+power, as being a matter of vital material benefit to the common man.
+The other items indicated above, it is plain on the least reflection,
+are matters of slight if any material consequence to him. The common
+man&mdash;that is ninety-nine and a<!-- Page 70 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 70]</span> fraction in one hundred of the nation's
+common men&mdash;has no dealings with aliens in foreign parts, as capitalist,
+trader, missionary or wayfaring man, and has no occasion for security of
+person or property under circumstances that raise any remotest question
+of the national prowess or the national prestige; nor does he seek or
+aspire to trade to foreign parts on any terms, equitable or otherwise,
+or to invest capital among aliens under foreign rule, or to exploit
+concessions or take orders, for acceptance or delivery; nor, indeed,
+does he at all commonly come into even that degree of contact with
+abroad that is implied in the purchase of foreign securities. Virtually
+the sole occasion on which he comes in touch with the world beyond the
+frontier is when, and if, he goes away from home as an emigrant, and so
+ceases to enjoy the tutelage of the nation's constituted authorities.
+But the common man, in point of fact, is a home-keeping body, who
+touches foreign parts and aliens outside the national frontiers only at
+the second or third remove, if at all, in the occasional purchase of
+foreign products, or in the sale of goods that may find their way abroad
+after he has lost sight of them. The exception to this general rule
+would be found in the case of those under-sized nations that are too
+small to contain the traffic in which their commonplace population are
+engaged, and that have neither national prowess nor national prestige to
+fall back on in a conceivable case of need,&mdash;and whose citizens,
+individually, appear to be as fortunately placed in their workday
+foreign relations, without a background of prowess and prestige, as the
+citizens of the great powers who are most abundantly provided in these
+respects.</p>
+
+<p>With wholly negligible exceptions, these matters touch the needs or the
+sensibilities of the common man only<!-- Page 71 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 71]</span> through the channel of the
+national honour, which may be injured in the hardships suffered by his
+compatriots in foreign parts, or which may, again, be repaired or
+enhanced by the meritorious achievements of the same compatriots; of
+whose existence he will commonly have no other or more substantial
+evidence, and in whose traffic he has no share other than this vicarious
+suffering of vague and remote indignity or vainglory by force of the
+wholly fortuitous circumstance that they are (inscrutably) his
+compatriots. These immaterial goods of vicarious prestige are, of
+course, not to be undervalued, nor is the fact to be overlooked or
+minimised that they enter into the sum total of the common citizen's
+"psychic income," for whatever they may foot up to; but evidently their
+consideration takes us back to the immaterial category of prestige
+value, from which the argument just now was hopefully departing with a
+view to consideration of the common man's material interest in that
+national enterprise about which patriotic aspirations turn.</p>
+
+<p>These things, then, are matters in which the common man has an interest
+only as they have a prestige value. But there need be no question as to
+their touching his sensibilities and stirring him to action, and even to
+acts of bravery and self-sacrifice. Indignity or ill treatment of his
+compatriots in foreign parts, even when well deserved, as is not
+infrequently the case, are resented with a vehemence that is greatly to
+the common man's credit, and greatly also to the gain of those patriotic
+statesmen who find in such grievances their safest and most reliable raw
+materials for the production of international difficulty. That he will
+so respond to the stimulus of these, materially speaking irrelevant,
+vicissitudes of good or ill that touch the fortunes of his compatriots,
+as known to<!-- Page 72 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 72]</span> him by hearsay, bears witness, of course, to the high
+quality of his manhood; but it falls very far short of arguing that
+these promptings of his patriotic spirit have any value as traits that
+count toward his livelihood or his economic serviceability in the
+community in which he lives. It is all to his credit, and it goes to
+constitute him a desirable citizen, in the sense that he is properly
+amenable to the incitements of patriotic emulation; but it is none the
+less to be admitted, however reluctantly, that this trait of impulsively
+vicarious indignation or vainglory is neither materially profitable to
+himself nor an asset of the slightest economic value to the community in
+which he lives. Quite the contrary, in fact. So also is it true that the
+common man derives no material advantage from the national success along
+this line, though he commonly believes that it all somehow inures to his
+benefit. It would seem that an ingrown bias of community interest,
+blurred and driven by a jealously sensitive patriotic pride, bends his
+faith uncritically to match his inclination. His persuasion is a work of
+preconception rather than of perception.</p>
+
+<p>But the most substantial and most unqualified material benefit currently
+believed to be derivable from a large unfolding of national prowess and
+a wide extension of the national domain is an increased volume of the
+nation's foreign trade, particularly of the export trade. "Trade follows
+the Flag." And this larger trade and enhanced profit is presumed to
+inure to the joint benefit of the citizens. Such is the profession of
+faith of the sagacious statesmen and such is also the unreflecting
+belief of the common man.</p>
+
+<p>It may be left an open question if an unfolding of national prowess and
+prestige increases the nation's trade,<!-- Page 73 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 73]</span> whether in imports or in
+exports. There is no available evidence that it has any effect of the
+kind. What is not an open question is the patent fact that such an
+extension of trade confers no benefit on the common man, who is not
+engaged in the import or export business. More particularly does it
+yield him no advantage at all commensurate with the cost involved in any
+endeavour so to increase the volume of trade by increasing the nation's
+power and extending its dominion. The profits of trade go not to the
+common man at large but to the traders whose capital is invested; and it
+is a completely idle matter to the common citizen whether the traders
+who profit by the nation's trade are his compatriots or not.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></p>
+
+<p>The pacifist argument on the economic futility of national ambitions
+will commonly rest its case at this point; having shown as unreservedly
+as need be that national ambition and all its works belong of right
+under that rubric of the litany that speaks of Fire, Flood and
+Pestilence. But an hereditary bent of human nature is not to be put out
+of the way with an argument showing that it has its disutilities. So
+with the patriotic animus; it is a factor to be counted with, rather
+than to be exorcised.</p>
+
+<p>As has been remarked above, in the course of time and change the advance
+of the industrial arts and of the institutions of ownership have taken
+such a turn that the working system of industry and business no longer
+runs on national lines and, indeed, no longer takes account of national
+frontiers,&mdash;except in so far as the<!-- Page 74 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 74]</span> national policies and legislation,
+arbitrarily and partially, impose these frontiers on the workings of
+trade and industry. The effect of such regulation for political ends is,
+with wholly negligible exceptions, detrimental to the efficient working
+of the industrial system under modern conditions; and it is therefore
+detrimental to the material interests of the common citizen. But the
+case is not the same as regards the interests of the traders. Trade is a
+competitive affair, and it is to the advantage of the traders engaged in
+any given line of business to extend their own markets and to exclude
+competing traders. Competition may be the soul of trade, but monopoly is
+necessarily the aim of every trader. And the national organisation is of
+service to its traders in so far as it shelters them, wholly or partly,
+from the competition of traders of other nationalities, or in so far as
+it furthers their enterprise by subvention or similar privileges as
+against their competitors, whether at home or abroad. The gain that so
+comes to the nation's traders from any preferential advantage afforded
+them by national regulations, or from any discrimination against traders
+of foreign nationality, goes to the traders as private gain. It is of no
+benefit to any of their compatriots; since there is no community of
+usufruct that touches these gains of the traders. So far as concerns his
+material advantage, it is an idle matter to the common citizen whether
+he deals with traders of his own nationality or with aliens; both alike
+will aim to buy cheap and sell dear, and will charge him "what the
+traffic will bear." Nor does it matter to him whether the gains of this
+trade go to aliens or to his compatriots; in either case equally they
+immediately pass beyond his reach, and are equally removed from any
+touch of joint interest on his part. Being<!-- Page 75 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 75]</span> private property, under
+modern law and custom he has no use of them, whether a national frontier
+does or does not intervene between his domicile and that of their owner.</p>
+
+<p>These are facts that every man of sound mind knows and acts on without
+doubt or hesitation in his own workday affairs. He would scarcely even
+find amusement in so futile a proposal as that his neighbor should share
+his business profits with him for no better reason than that he is a
+compatriot. But when the matter is presented as a proposition in
+national policy and embroidered with an invocation of his patriotic
+loyalty the common citizen will commonly be found credulous enough to
+accept the sophistry without abatement. His archaic sense of group
+solidarity will still lead him at his own cost to favor his trading
+compatriots by the imposition of onerous trade regulations for their
+private advantage, and to interpose obstacles in the way of alien
+traders. All this ingenious policy of self-defeat is greatly helped out
+by the patriotic conceit of the citizens; who persuade themselves to see
+in it an accession to the power and prestige of their own nation and a
+disadvantage to rival nationalities. It is, indeed, more than doubtful
+if such a policy of self-defeat as is embodied in current international
+trade discriminations could be insinuated into the legislation of any
+civilized nation if the popular intelligence were not so clouded with
+patriotic animosity as to let a prospective detriment to their foreign
+neighbors count as a gain to themselves.</p>
+
+<p>So that the chief material use of the patriotic bent in modern
+populations, therefore, appears to be its use to a limited class of
+persons engaged in foreign trade, or in business that comes in
+competition with foreign industry. It serves their private gain by
+lending effectual counte<!-- Page 76 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>nance to such restraint of international trade
+as would not be tolerated within the national domain. In so doing it has
+also the secondary and more sinister effect of dividing the nations on
+lines of rivalry and setting up irreconcilable claims and ambitions, of
+no material value but of far-reaching effect in the way of provocation
+to further international estrangement and eventual breach of the peace.</p>
+
+<p>How all this falls in with the schemes of militant statesmen, and
+further reacts on the freedom and personal fortunes of the common man,
+is an extensive and intricate topic, though not an obscure one; and it
+has already been spoken of above, perhaps as fully as need be.<!-- Page 77 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="Chapter_III" id="Chapter_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h4>
+
+<p class='center'><span class="smcap">On the Conditions of a Lasting Peace</span></p>
+
+
+<p>The considerations set out in earlier chapters have made it appear that
+the patriotic spirit of modern peoples is the abiding source of
+contention among nations. Except for their patriotism a breach of the
+peace among modern peoples could not well be had. So much will doubtless
+be assented to as a matter of course. It is also a commonplace of
+current aphoristic wisdom that both parties to a warlike adventure in
+modern times stand to lose, materially; whatever nominal&mdash;that is to say
+political&mdash;gains may be made by one or the other. It has also appeared
+from these considerations recited in earlier passages that this
+patriotic spirit prevails throughout, among all civilised peoples, and
+that it pervades one nation about as ubiquitously as another. Nor is
+there much evidence of a weakening of this sinister proclivity with the
+passage of time or the continued advance in the arts of life. The only
+civilized nations that can be counted on as habitually peaceable are
+those who are so feeble or are so placed as to be cut off from hope of
+gain through contention. Vainglorious arrogance may run at a higher
+tension among the more backward and boorish nations; but it is not
+evident that the advance guard among the civilised peoples are imbued
+with a less complete national self-complacency. If the peace is to be
+kept, therefore, it will have to be kept by and between peoples made up,
+in effect,<!-- Page 78 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> of complete patriots; which comes near being a contradiction
+in terms. Patriotism is useful for breaking the peace, not for keeping
+it. It makes for national pretensions and international jealously and
+distrust, with warlike enterprise always in perspective; as a way to
+national gain or a recourse in case of need. And there is commonly no
+settled demarkation between these two contrasted needs that urge a
+patriotic people forever to keep one eye on the chance of a recourse to
+arms.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore any calculus of the Chances of Peace appears to become a
+reckoning of the forces which may be counted on to keep a patriotic
+nation in an unstable equilibrium of peace for the time being. As has
+just been remarked above, among civilised peoples only those nations can
+be counted on consistently to keep the peace who are so feeble or
+otherwise so placed as to be cut off from hope of national gain. And
+these can apparently be so counted on only as regards aggression, not as
+regards the national defense, and only in so far as they are not drawn
+into warlike enterprise, collectively, by their more competent
+neighbors. Even the feeblest and most futile of them feels in honour
+bound to take up arms in defense of such national pretensions as they
+still may harbour; and all of them harbour such pretensions. In certain
+extreme cases, which it might seem invidious to specify more explicitly,
+it is not easy to discover any specific reasons for the maintenance of a
+national establishment, apart from the vindication of certain national
+pretensions which would quietly lapse in the absence of a national
+establishment on whom their vindication is incumbent.</p>
+
+<p>Of the rest, the greater nations that are spoken of as Powers no such
+general statement will hold. These are<!-- Page 79 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> the peoples who stand, in
+matters of national concern, on their own initiative; and the question
+of peace and war at large is in effect, a question of peace and war
+among these Powers. They are not so numerous that they can be sifted
+into distinct classes, and yet they differ among themselves in such a
+way that they may, for the purpose in hand, fairly be ranged under two
+distinguishable if not contrasted heads: those which may safely be
+counted on spontaneously to take the offensive, and those which will
+fight on provocation. Typically of the former description are Germany
+and Japan. Of the latter are the French and British, and less
+confidently the American republic. In any summary statement of this kind
+Russia will have to be left on one side as a doubtful case, for reasons
+to which the argument may return at a later point; the prospective
+course of things in Russia is scarcely to be appraised on the ground of
+its past. Spain and Italy, being dubious Powers at the best, need not
+detain the argument; they are, in the nature of things, subsidiaries who
+wait on the main chance. And Austria, with whatever the name may cover,
+is for the immediate purpose to be counted under the head of Germany.</p>
+
+<p>There is no invidious comparison intended in so setting off these two
+classes of nations in contrast to one another. It is not a contrast of
+merit and demerit or of prestige. Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan
+are, in the nature of things as things go, bent in effect on a
+disturbance of the peace,&mdash;with a view to advance the cause of their own
+dominion. On a large view of the case, such as many German statesmen
+were in the habit of professing in the years preceding the great war, it
+may perhaps appear reasonable to say&mdash;as they were in the habit of
+saying&mdash;that these Imperial Powers are as well<!-- Page 80 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 80]</span> within the lines of fair
+and honest dealing in their campaign of aggression as the other Powers
+are in taking a defensive attitude against their aggression. Some sort
+of international equity has been pleaded in justification of their
+demand for an increased share of dominion. At least it has appeared that
+these Imperial statesmen have so persuaded themselves after very mature
+deliberation; and they have showed great concern to persuade others of
+the equity of their Imperial claim to something more than the law would
+allow. These sagacious, not to say astute, persons have not only reached
+a conviction to this effect, but they have become possessed of this
+conviction in such plenary fashion that, in the German case, they have
+come to admit exceptions or abatement of the claim only when and in so
+far as the campaign of equitable aggression on which they had entered
+has been proved impracticable by the fortunes of war.</p>
+
+<p>With some gift for casuistry one may, at least conceivably, hold that
+the felt need of Imperial self-aggrandisement may become so urgent as to
+justify, or at least to condone, forcible dispossession of weaker
+nationalities. This might, indeed it has, become a sufficiently
+perplexing question of casuistry, both as touches the punctilios of
+national honour and as regards an equitable division between rival
+Powers in respect of the material means of mastery. So in private life
+it may become a moot question&mdash;in point of equity&mdash;whether the craving
+of a kleptomaniac may not on occasion rise to such an intolerable pitch
+of avidity as to justify him in seizing whatever valuables he can safely
+lay hands on, to ease the discomfort of ungratified desire. In private
+life any such endeavour to better oneself at one's neighbors' cost is
+not commonly reprobated if it takes effect on a decently large<!-- Page 81 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> scale
+and shrewdly within the flexibilities of the law or with the connivance
+of its officers. Governing international endeavours of this class there
+is no law so inflexible that it can not be conveniently made over to fit
+particular circumstances. And in the absence of law the felt need of a
+formal justification will necessarily appeal to the unformulated
+equities of the case, with some such outcome as alluded to above. All
+that, of course, is for the diplomatists to take care of.</p>
+
+<p>But any speculation on the equities involved in the projected course of
+empire to which these two enterprising nations are committing themselves
+must run within the lines of diplomatic parable, and will have none but
+a speculative interest. It is not a matter of equity. Accepting the
+situation as it stands, it is evident that any peace can only have a
+qualified meaning, in the sense of armistice, so long as there is
+opportunity for national enterprise of the character on which these two
+enterprising national establishments are bent, and so long as these and
+the like national establishments remain. So, taking the peaceable
+professions of their spokesmen at a discount of one hundred percent, as
+one necessarily must, and looking to the circumstantial evidence of the
+case, it is abundantly plain that at least these two imperial Powers may
+be counted on consistently to manoeuvre for warlike advantage so long as
+any peace compact holds, and to break the peace so soon as the strategy
+of Imperial enterprise appears to require it.</p>
+
+<p>There has been much courteous make-believe of amiable and upright
+solicitude on this head the past few years, both in diplomatic
+intercourse and among men out of doors; and since make-believe is a
+matter of course in diplomatic intercourse it is right and seemly, of
+course,<!-- Page 82 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> that no overt recognition of unavowed facts should be allowed
+to traverse this run of make-believe within the precincts of diplomatic
+intercourse. But in any ingenuous inquiry into the nature of peace and
+the conditions of its maintenance there can be no harm in conveniently
+leaving the diplomatic make-believe on one side and looking to the
+circumstances that condition the case, rather than to the formal
+professions designed to mask the circumstances.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Chief among the relevant circumstances in the current situation are the
+imperial designs of Germany and Japan. These two national establishments
+are very much alike. So much so that for the present purpose a single
+line of analysis will passably cover both cases. The same line of
+analysis will also apply, with slight adaptation, to more than one of
+the other Powers, or near-Powers, of the modern world; but in so far as
+such is held to be the case, that is not a consideration that weakens
+the argument as applied to these two, which are to be taken as the
+consummate type-form of a species of national establishments. They are,
+between them, the best instance there is of what may be called a
+Dynastic State.</p>
+
+<p>Except as a possible corrective of internal disorders and discontent,
+neither of the two States "desires" war; but both are bent on dominion,
+and as the dominion aimed at is not to be had except by fighting for it,
+both in effect are incorrigibly bent on warlike enterprise. And in
+neither case will considerations of equity, humanity, decency, veracity,
+or the common good be allowed to trouble the quest of dominion. As lies
+in the nature of the dynastic State, imperial dominion, in the ambitions
+of both, is beyond price; so that no cost is too high so long<!-- Page 83 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 83]</span> as
+ultimate success attends the imperial enterprise. So much is commonplace
+knowledge among all men who are at all conversant with the facts.</p>
+
+<p>To anyone who harbors a lively sentimental prejudice for or against
+either or both of the two nations so spoken of, or for or against the
+manner of imperial enterprise to which both are committed, it may seem
+that what has just been said of them and their relation to the world's
+peace runs on something of a bias and conveys something of dispraise and
+reprobation. Such is not the intention, however, though the appearance
+is scarcely to be avoided. It is necessary for the purposes of the
+argument unambiguously to recognise the nature of these facts with which
+the inquiry is concerned; and any plain characterisation of the facts
+will unavoidably carry a fringe of suggestions of this character,
+because current speech is adapted for their reprobation. The point aimed
+at is not this inflection of approval or disapproval. The facts are to
+be taken impersonally for what they are worth in their causal bearing on
+the chance of peace or war; not at their sentimental value as traits of
+conduct to be appraised in point of their goodness or expediency.</p>
+
+<p>So seen without prejudice, then, if that may be, this Imperial
+enterprise of these two Powers is to be rated as the chief circumstance
+bearing on the chances of peace and conditioning the terms on which any
+peace plan must be drawn. Evidently, in the presence of these two
+Imperial Powers any peace compact will be in a precarious case; equally
+so whether either or both of them are parties to such compact or not. No
+engagement binds a dynastic statesman in case it turns out not to
+further the dynastic enterprise. The question then recurs: How may peace
+be maintained within the horizon of German or Japanese<!-- Page 84 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> ambitions? There
+are two obvious alternatives, neither of which promises an easy way out
+of the quandary in which the world's peace is placed by their presence:
+Submission to their dominion, or Elimination of these two Powers. Either
+alternative would offer a sufficiently deterrent outlook, and yet any
+project for devising some middle course of conciliation and amicable
+settlement, which shall be practicable and yet serve the turn, scarcely
+has anything better to promise. The several nations now engaged on a war
+with the greater of these Imperial Powers hold to a design of
+elimination, as being the only measure that merits hopeful
+consideration. The Imperial Power in distress bespeaks peace and
+good-will.</p>
+
+<p>Those advocates, whatever their nationality, who speak for negotiation
+with a view to a peace compact which is to embrace these States intact,
+are aiming, in effect, to put things in train for ultimate submission to
+the mastery of these Imperial Powers. In these premises an amicable
+settlement and a compact of perpetual peace will necessarily be
+equivalent to arranging a period of recuperation and recruiting for a
+new onset of dynastic enterprise. For, in the nature of the case, no
+compact binds the dynastic statesman, and no consideration other than
+the pursuit of Imperial dominion commands his attention.</p>
+
+<p>There is, of course, no intention to decry this single-mindedness that
+is habitually put in evidence by the dynastic statesmen. Nor should it
+be taken as evidence of moral obliquity in them. It is rather the result
+of a peculiar moral attitude or bent, habitual to such statesmen, and in
+its degree also habitual to their compatriots, and is indispensably
+involved in the Imperial frame of mind. The consummation of Imperial
+mastery being the<!-- Page 85 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 85]</span> highest and ubiquitously ulterior end of all
+endeavour, its pursuit not only relieves its votaries from the
+observance of any minor obligations that run counter to its needs, but
+it also imposes a moral obligation to make the most of any opportunity
+for profitable deceit and chicanery that may offer. In short, the
+dynastic statesman is under the governance of a higher morality, binding
+him to the service of his nation's ambition&mdash;or in point of fact, to the
+personal service of his dynastic master&mdash;to which it is his dutiful
+privilege loyally to devote all his powers of force and fraud.</p>
+
+<p>Democratically-minded persons, who are not moved by the call of loyalty
+to a gratuitous personal master, may have some difficulty in
+appreciating the force and the moral austerity of this spirit of
+devotion to an ideal of dynastic aggrandisement, and in seeing how its
+paramount exigence will set aside all meticulous scruples of personal
+rectitude and veracity, as being a shabby with-holding of service due.</p>
+
+<p>To such of these doubters as still have retained some remnants of their
+religious faith this attitude of loyalty may perhaps be made
+intelligible by calling to mind the analogous self-surrender of the
+religious devotee. And in this connection it may also be to the purpose
+to recall that in point of its genesis and derivation that unreserved
+self-abasement and surrender to the divine ends and guidance, which is
+the chief grace and glory of the true believer, is held by secular
+students of these matters to be only a sublimated analogue or
+counterfeit of this other dutiful abasement that constitutes loyalty to
+a temporal master. The deity is currently spoken of as The Heavenly
+King, under whose dominion no sinner has a right that He is bound to
+respect; very much after the<!-- Page 86 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 86]</span> fashion in which no subject of a dynastic
+state has a right which the State is bound to respect. Indeed, all these
+dynastic establishments that so seek the Kingdom, the Power and the
+Glory are surrounded with a penumbra of divinity, and it is commonly a
+bootless question where the dynastic powers end and the claims of
+divinity begin. There is something of a coalescence.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></p>
+
+<p>The Kaiser holds dominion by divine grace and is accountable to none but
+God, if to Him. The whole case is in a still better state of repair as
+touches the Japanese establishment, where the Emperor is a lineal
+descendant of the supreme deity, Amaterazu (<i>o mi Kami</i>), and where, by
+consequence, there is no line of cleavage between a divine and a secular
+mastery. Pursuant to this more unqualified authenticity of autocratic
+rule, there is also to be found in this case a correspondingly
+unqualified devotion in the subjects and an unqualified subservience to
+dynastic ends on the part of the officers of the crown. The coalescence
+of dynastic rule with the divine order is less complete in the German
+case, but all observers bear witness that it all goes far enough also in
+the German case. This state of things is recalled here as a means of
+making plain that the statesmen of these Imperial<!-- Page 87 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 87]</span> Powers must in the
+nature of the case, and without blame, be drawn out from under the
+customary restraint of those principles of vulgar morality that are
+embodied in the decalogue. It is not that the subject, or&mdash;what comes to
+the same thing&mdash;the servant of such a dynastic State may not be upright,
+veracious and humane in private life, but only that he must not be
+addicted to that sort of thing in such manner or degree as might hinder
+his usefulness for dynastic purposes. These matters of selfishly
+individual integrity and humanity have no weight as against the
+exigencies of the dynastic enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>These considerations may not satisfy all doubters as to the moral
+sufficiency of these motives that so suffice to decide the dynastic
+statesmen on their enterprise of aggression by force and fraud; but it
+should be evident that so long as these statesmen continue in the frame
+of mind spoken of, and so long as popular sentiment in these countries
+continues, as hitherto, to lend them effectual support in the pursuit of
+such Imperial enterprise, so long it must also remain true that no
+enduring peace can be maintained within the sweep of their Imperial
+ambition. Any peace compact would necessarily be, in effect, an
+armistice terminable at will and serving as a season of preparation to
+meet a deferred opportunity. For the peaceable nations it would, in
+effect, be a respite and a season of preparation for eventual submission
+to the Imperial rule.</p>
+
+<p>By advocates of such a negotiated compact of perpetual peace it has been
+argued that the populace underlying these Imperial Powers will readily
+be brought to realise the futility and inexpediency of such dynastic
+enterprise, if only the relevant facts are brought to their knowledge,
+and that so these Powers will be constrained to keep the<!-- Page 88 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> peace by
+default of popular support for their warlike projects. What is required,
+it is believed by these sanguine persons, is that information be
+competently conveyed to the common people of these warlike nations,
+showing them that they have nothing to apprehend in the way of
+aggression or oppressive measures from the side of their more peaceable
+neighbours; whereupon their warlike animus will give place to a
+reasonable and enlightened frame of mind. This argument runs tacitly or
+explicitly, on the premise that these peoples who have so
+enthusiastically lent themselves to the current warlike enterprise are
+fundamentally of the same racial complexion and endowed with the same
+human nature as their peaceable neighbours, who would be only too glad
+to keep the peace on any terms of tolerable security from aggression. If
+only a fair opportunity is offered for the interested peoples to come to
+an understanding, it is held, a good understanding will readily be
+reached; at least so far as to result in a reasonable willingness to
+submit questions in dispute to an intelligent canvass and an equitable
+arbitration.</p>
+
+<p>Projects for a negotiated peace compact, to include the dynastic States,
+can hold any prospect of a happy issue only if this line of argument, or
+its equivalent, is pertinent and conclusive; and the argument is to the
+point only in so far as its premises are sound and will carry as far as
+the desired conclusion. Therefore a more detailed attention to the
+premises on which it runs will be in place, before any project of the
+kind is allowed to pass inspection.</p>
+
+<p>As to homogeneity of race and endowment among the several nations in
+question, the ethnologists, who are competent to speak of that matter,
+are ready to assert that this<!-- Page 89 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> homogeneity goes much farther among the
+nations of Europe than any considerable number of peace advocates would
+be ready to claim. In point of race, and broadly speaking, there is
+substantially no difference between these warring nations, along any
+east-and-west line; while the progressive difference in racial
+complexion that is always met with along any north-and-south line,
+nowhere coincides with a national or linguistic frontier. In no case
+does a political division between these nations mark or depend on a
+difference of race or of hereditary endowment. And, to give full
+measure, it may be added that also in no case does a division of classes
+within any one of these nations, into noble and base, patrician and
+plebeian, lay and learned, innocent and vicious, mark or rest on any
+slightest traceable degree of difference in race or in heritable
+endowment. On the point of racial homogeneity there is no fault to find
+with the position taken.</p>
+
+<p>If the second postulate in this groundwork of premises on which the
+advocates of negotiable peace base their hopes were as well taken there
+need be no serious misgiving as to the practicability of such a plan.
+The plan counts on information, persuasion and reflection to subdue
+national animosities and jealousies, at least in such measure as would
+make them amenable to reason. The question of immediate interest on this
+head, therefore, would be as to how far this populace may be accessible
+to the contemplated line of persuasion. At present they are,
+notoriously, in a state of obsequious loyalty to the dynasty,
+single-minded devotion to the fortunes of the Fatherland, and
+uncompromising hatred of its enemies. In this frame of mind there is
+nothing that is new, except the degree of excitement. The animus, it
+will be recalled, was all there and on the alert when the call came, so
+that the<!-- Page 90 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 90]</span> excitement came on with the sweep of a conflagration on the
+first touch of a suitable stimulus. The German people at large was
+evidently in a highly unstable equilibrium, so that an unexampled
+enthusiasm of patriotic self-sacrifice followed immediately on the first
+incitement to manslaughter, very much as if the nation had been held
+under an hypnotic spell. One need only recall the volume of overbearing
+magniloquence that broke out all over the place in that beginning, when
+The Day was believed to be dawning.</p>
+
+<p>Such a popular frame of mind is not a transient episode, to be created
+at short notice and put aside for a parcel of salutary advice. The
+nation that will make such a massive concerted move with the alacrity
+shown in this instance must be living in a state of alert readiness for
+just such an onset. Yet this is not to be set down as anything in the
+way of a racial trait specifically distinguishing the German people from
+those other adjacent nationalities that are incapable of a similarly
+swift and massive response to the appeal of patriotism. These adjacent
+nationalities are racially identical with the German people, but they do
+not show the same warlike abandon in nearly the same degree.</p>
+
+<p>But for all that, it is a national trait, not to be acquired or put away
+by taking thought. It is just here that the line of definition runs: it
+is a national trait, not a racial one. It is not Nature, but it is
+Second Nature. But a national trait, while it is not heritable in the
+simple sense of that term, has the same semblance, or the same degree,
+of hereditary persistence that belongs to the national institutions,
+usages, conventionalities, beliefs, which distinguish the given nation
+from its neighbors. In this instance it may be said more specifically
+that this eager<!-- Page 91 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 91]</span> loyalty is a heritage of the German people at large in
+the same sense and with the same degree of permanence as the institution
+of an autocratic royalty has among them, or a privileged nobility.
+Indeed, it is the institutional counterfoil of these establishments. It
+is of an institutional character, just as the corresponding sense of
+national solidarity and patriotic devotion is among the neighboring
+peoples with whom the German nation comes in comparison. And an
+institution is an historical growth, with just so much of a character of
+permanence and continuity of transmission as is given it by the
+circumstances out of which it has grown. Any institution is a product of
+habit, or perhaps more accurately it is a body of habits of thought
+bearing on a given line of conduct, which prevails with such generality
+and uniformity throughout the group as to have become a matter of common
+sense.</p>
+
+<p>Such an article of institutional furniture is an outcome of usage, not
+of reflection or deliberate choice; and it has consequently a character
+of self-legitimation, so that it stands in the accredited scheme of
+things as intrinsically right and good, and not merely as a shrewdly
+chosen expedient <i>ad interim</i>. It affords a norm of life, inosculating
+with a multiplicity of other norms, with which it goes to make up a
+balanced scheme of ends, ways and means governing human conduct; and no
+one such institutional item, therefore, is materially to be disturbed,
+discarded or abated except at the cost of serious derangement to the
+balanced scheme of things in which it belongs as an integral
+constituent. Nor can such a detail norm of conduct and habitual
+propensity come into bearing and hold its place, except by force of
+habituation which is at the same time consonant with the common run of
+habituation to which the given community is subject. It follows<!-- Page 92 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 92]</span> that
+the more rigorous, comprehensive, unremitting and long-continued the
+habituation to which a given institutional principle owes its vogue, the
+more intimately and definitively will it be embedded in the common sense
+of the community, the less chance is there of its intrinsic necessity
+being effectually questioned or doubted, and the less chance is there of
+correcting it or abating its force in case circumstances should so
+change as to make its continued rule visibly inexpedient. Its abatement
+will be a work not of deliberation and design, but of defection through
+disuse.</p>
+
+<p>Not that reflection and sane counsel will count for nothing in these
+premises, but only that these exertions of intelligence will count for
+relatively very little by comparison with the run of habituation as
+enforced by the circumstances conditioning any given case; and further,
+that wise counsel and good resolutions can take effect in the way of
+amending any untoward institutional bent only by way of suitable
+habituation, and only at such a rate of change as the circumstances
+governing habituation will allow. It is, at the best, slow work to shift
+the settled lines of any community's scheme of common sense. Now,
+national solidarity, and more particularly an unquestioning loyalty to
+the sovereign and the dynasty, is a matter of course and of commonsense
+necessity with the German people. It is not necessary to call to mind
+that the Japanese nation, which has here been coupled with the German,
+are in the same case, only more so.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless it would be exceeding the premises to claim that it should
+necessarily take the German people as long-continued and as harsh a
+schooling to unlearn their excess of chauvinism, their servile stooping
+to gratuitous authority, and their eager subservience to the dynastic
+ambitions<!-- Page 93 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 93]</span> of their masters, as that which has in the course of history
+induced these habits in them. But it would seem reasonable to expect
+that there should have to be some measure of proportion between what it
+has cost them in time and experience to achieve their current frame of
+mind in this bearing and what it would cost to divest themselves of it.
+It is a question of how long a time and how exacting a discipline would
+be required so far to displace the current scheme of commonsense values
+and convictions in force in the Fatherland as to neutralise their
+current high-wrought principles of servility, loyalty and national
+animosity; and on the solution of this difficulty appear to depend the
+chances of success for any proposed peace compact to which the German
+nation shall be made a party, on terms of what is called an "honorable
+peace."</p>
+
+<p>The national, or rather the dynastic and warlike, animus of this people
+is of the essence of their social and political institutions. Without
+such a groundwork of popular sentiment neither the national
+establishment, nor the social order on which it rests and through which
+it works, could endure. And with this underlying national sentiment
+intact nothing but a dynastic establishment of a somewhat ruthless
+order, and no enduring system of law and order not based on universal
+submission to personal rule, could be installed. Both the popular animus
+and the correlative coercive scheme of law and order are of historical
+growth. Both have been learned, acquired, and are in no cogent sense
+original with the German people. But both alike and conjointly have come
+out of a very protracted, exacting and consistent discipline of mastery
+and subjection, running virtually unbroken over the centuries that have
+passed since the region that is now the Fatherland first passed under
+the predaceous rule of its<!-- Page 94 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> Teutonic invaders,&mdash;for no part of the
+"Fatherland" is held on other tenure than that of forcible seizure in
+ancient times by bands of invaders, with the negligible exception of
+Holstein and a slight extent of territory adjoining that province to the
+south and south-west. Since the time when such peoples as were overtaken
+in this region by the Germanic barbarian invasions, and were reduced to
+subjection and presently merged with their alien masters, the same
+general fashion of law and order that presently grew out of that
+barbarian conquest has continued to govern the life of those peoples,
+with relatively slight and intermittent relaxation of its rigors.
+Contrasted with its beginnings, in the shameful atrocities of the Dark
+Ages and the prehistoric phases of this German occupation, the later
+stages of this system of coercive law and order in the Fatherland will
+appear humane, not to say genial; but as compared with the degree of
+mitigation which the like order of things presently underwent elsewhere
+in western Europe, it has throughout the historical period preserved a
+remarkable degree of that character of arrogance and servility which it
+owes to its barbarian and predatory beginnings.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The initial stages of this Germanic occupation of the Fatherland are
+sufficiently obscure under the cloud of unrecorded antiquity that covers
+them; and then, an abundance of obscurantism has also been added by the
+vapours of misguided vanity that have surrounded so nearly all
+historical inquiry on the part of patriotic German scholars. Yet there
+are certain outstanding features in the case, in history and prehistory,
+that are too large or too notorious to be set aside or to be covered
+over, and these may suffice to show the run of circumstances which<!-- Page 95 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 95]</span> have
+surrounded the German peoples and shaped their civil and political
+institutions, and whose discipline has guided German habits of thought
+and preserved the German spirit of loyalty in the shape in which it
+underlies the dynastic State of the present day.</p>
+
+<p>Among the most engaging of those fables that make the conventional
+background of German history is the academic legend of a free
+agricultural village community made up of ungraded and masterless men.
+It is not necessary here to claim that such a village community never
+played a part in the remoter prehistoric experiences out of which the
+German people, or their ruling classes, came into the territory of the
+Fatherland; such a claim might divert the argument. But it is
+sufficiently patent to students of those matters today that no such
+community of free and ungraded men had any part in the Germanic
+beginnings; that is to say, in the early experiences of the Fatherland
+under German rule. The meager and ambiguous remarks of Tacitus on the
+state of domestic and civil economy among the inhabitants of Germany
+need no longer detain anyone, in the presence of the available
+archaeological and historical evidence. The circumstantial evidence of
+the prehistoric antiquities which touch this matter, as well as the
+slight allusions of historical records in antiquity, indicate
+unambiguously enough that when the Germanic immigrants moved into the
+territories of the Fatherland they moved in as invaders, or rather as
+marauders, and made themselves masters of the people already living on
+the land. And history quite as unambiguously declares that when the
+Fatherland first comes under its light it presents a dark and bloody
+ground of tumultuous contention and intrigue; where princes and
+princelings, captains of war and of<!-- Page 96 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 96]</span> rapine as well as the captains of
+superstition, spend the substance of an ignominiously sordid and servile
+populace in an endless round of mutual raiding, treachery,
+assassinations and supersession.</p>
+
+<p>Taken at their face value, the recorded stories of that early time would
+leave one to infer that the common people, whose industry supported this
+superstructure of sordid mastery, could have survived only by oversight.
+But touched as it is with poetic license and devoted to the admirable
+life of the master class&mdash;admirable in their own eyes and in those of
+their chroniclers, as undoubtedly also in the eyes of the subject
+populace&mdash;the history of that time doubtless plays up the notable
+exploits and fortunes of its conspicuous personages, somewhat to the
+neglect of the obscure vicissitudes of life and fortune among that human
+raw material by use of which the admirable feats of the master class
+were achieved, and about the use of which the dreary traffic of greed
+and crime went on among the masters.</p>
+
+<p>Of the later history, what covers, say, the last one thousand years,
+there is no need to speak at length. With transient, episodic,
+interruptions it is for the Fatherland a continuation out of these
+beginnings, leading out into a more settled system of subjection and
+mastery and a progressively increased scale of princely enterprise,
+resting on an increasingly useful and increasingly loyal populace. In
+all this later history the posture of things in the Fatherland is by no
+means unique, nor is it even strikingly peculiar, by contrast with the
+rest of western Europe, except in degree. It is of the same general kind
+as the rest of what has gone to make the historical advance of medieval
+and modern times; but it differs from the generality in a more sluggish
+movement and a more<!-- Page 97 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 97]</span> tenacious adherence to what would be rated as the
+untoward features of mediaevalism. The approach to a modern scheme of
+institutions and modern conceptions of life and of human values has been
+slow, and hitherto incomplete, as compared with those communities that
+have, for good or ill, gone farthest along the ways of modernity.
+Habituation to personal subjection and subservience under the rigorous
+and protracted discipline of standardised service and fealty has
+continued later, and with later and slighter mitigation, in the
+Fatherland; so as better to have conserved the spiritual attitude of the
+feudal order. Law and order in the Fatherland has in a higher degree
+continued to mean unquestioning obedience to a personal master and
+unquestioning subservience to the personal ambitions of the master. And
+since freedom, in the sense of discretionary initiative on the part of
+the common man, does not fit into the framework of such a system of
+dependence on personal authority and surveillance, any degree of such
+free initiative will be "licence" in the eyes of men bred into the
+framework of this system; whereas "liberty," as distinct from "licence,"
+is not a matter of initiative and self-direction, but of latitude in the
+service of a master. Hence no degree of curtailment in this delegated
+"liberty" will be resented or repudiated by popular indignation, so long
+as the master to whom service is due can give assurance that it is
+expedient for his purposes.</p>
+
+<p>The age-long course of experience and institutional discipline out of
+which the current German situation has come may be drawn schematically
+to the following effect: In the beginning a turmoil of conquest, rapine,
+servitude, and contention between rival bands of marauders and their
+captains, gradually, indeed imperceptibly, fell into<!-- Page 98 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 98]</span> lines of settled
+and conventionalised exploitation; with repeated interruptions due to
+new incursions and new combinations of rapacious chieftains. Out of it
+all in the course of time came a feudal r&eacute;gime, under which personal
+allegiance and service to petty chiefs was the sole and universal
+accredited bond of solidarity. As the outcome of further unremitting
+intrigue and contention among feudal chiefs, of high and low degree, the
+populace fell into larger parcels, under the hands of feudal lords of
+larger dominion, and the bias of allegiance and service came to hold
+with some degree of permanence and uniformity, or at least of
+consistency, over a considerable reach of country, including its
+inhabitants. With the rise of States came allegiance to a dynasty, as
+distinguished from the narrower and more ephemeral allegiance to the
+semi-detached person of a victorious prince; and the relative permanence
+of territorial frontiers under this rule gave room for an effectual
+recrudescence of the ancient propensity to a sentimental group
+solidarity; in which the accredited territorial limits of the dynastic
+dominion served to outline the group that so was felt to belong together
+under a joint dispensation and with something of a joint interest in
+matters of fame and fortune. As the same notion is more commonly and
+more suggestively expressed, a sense of nationality arose within the
+sweep of the dynastic rule. This sense of community interest that is
+called nationality so came in to reenforce the sense of allegiance to
+the dynastic establishment and so has coalesced with it to produce that
+high-wrought loyalty to the State, that draws equally on the sentiment
+of community interest in the nation and on the prescriptive docility to
+the dynastic head. The sense of national solidarity and of feudal
+loyalty and service have coalesced,<!-- Page 99 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 99]</span> to bring this people to that climax
+of patriotic devotion beyond which there lies no greater height along
+this way. But this is also as far as the German people have gone; and it
+is scarcely to be claimed that the Japanese have yet reached this stage;
+they would rather appear to be, essentially, subjects of the emperor,
+and only inchoately a Japanese nation. Of the German people it seems
+safe to say that they have achieved such a coalescence of unimpaired
+feudal fealty to a personal master and a full-blown sense of national
+solidarity, without any perceptible slackening in either strand of the
+double tie which so binds them in the service of the dynastic State.</p>
+
+<p>Germany, in other words, is somewhat in arrears, as compared with those
+Europeans that have gone farthest along this course of institutional
+growth, or perhaps rather institutional permutation. It is not that this
+retardation of the German people in this matter of national spirit is to
+be counted as an infirmity, assuredly not as a handicap in the pursuit
+of that national prestige on which all patriotic endeavour finally
+converges. For this purpose the failure to distinguish between the
+ambitions of the dynastic statesmen and the interests of the
+commonwealth is really a prodigious advantage, which their rivals, of
+more mature growth politically, have lost by atrophy of this same
+dynastic axiom of subservience. These others, of whom the French and the
+English-speaking peoples make up the greater part and may be taken as
+the typical instance, have had a different history, in part. The
+discipline of experience has left a somewhat different residue of habits
+of thought embedded in their institutional equipment and effective as
+axiomatic premises in their further apprehension of what is worth while,
+and why.<!-- Page 100 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 100]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is not that the difference between these two contrasted strains of
+the Western civilisation is either profound or very pronounced; it is
+perhaps rather to be stated as a difference of degree than of kind; a
+retardation of spiritual growth, in respect of the prevalent and
+controlling habits of thought on certain heads, in the one case as
+against the other. Therefore any attempt to speak with sufficient
+definition, so as to bring out this national difference of animus in any
+convincing way, will unavoidably have an appearance of overstatement, if
+not also of bias. And in any case, of course, it is not to be expected
+that the national difference here spoken for can be brought home to the
+apprehension of any unspoiled son of the Fatherland, since it does not
+lie within that perspective.</p>
+
+<p>It is not of the nature of a divergence, but rather a differential in
+point of cultural maturity, due to a differential in the rate of
+progression through that sequence of institutional phases through which
+the civilised peoples of Europe, jointly and severally, have been led by
+force of circumstance. In this movement out of the Dark Ages and onward,
+circumstances have fallen out differently for those Europeans that
+chanced to live within the confines of the Fatherland, different with
+such effect as to have in the present placed these others at a farther
+remove from the point of departure, leaving them furnished with less of
+that archaic frame of mind that is here in question. Possessed of less,
+but by no means shorn of all&mdash;perhaps not of the major part&mdash;of that
+barbaric heritage.</p>
+
+<p>Circumstances have so fallen out that these&mdash;typically the French and
+the English-speaking peoples&mdash;have left behind and partly forgotten that
+institutional phase in which the people of Imperial Germany now live and
+move<!-- Page 101 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 101]</span> and have their being. The French partly because they&mdash;that is the
+common people of the French lands&mdash;entered the procession with a very
+substantial lead, having never been put back to a point abreast of their
+neighbors across the Rhine, in that phase of European civilisation from
+which the peoples of the Fatherland tardily emerged into the feudal age.
+So, any student who shall set out to account for the visible lead which
+the French people still so obstinately maintain in the advance of
+European culture, will have to make up his account with this notable
+fact among the premises of his inquiry, that they have had a shorter
+course to cover and have therefore, in the sporting phrase, had the
+inside track. They measure from a higher datum line. Among the
+advantages which so have come, in a sense unearned, to the French
+people, is their uninterrupted retention, out of Roman&mdash;and perhaps
+pre-Roman&mdash;times, of the conception of a commonwealth, a community of
+men with joint and mutual interests apart from any superimposed
+dependence on a joint feudal superior. The French people therefore
+became a nation, with unobtrusive facility, so soon as circumstances
+permitted, and they are today the oldest "nation" in Europe. They
+therefore were prepared from long beforehand, with an adequate principle
+(habit of thought) of national cohesion and patriotic sentiment, to make
+the shift from a dynastic State to a national commonwealth whenever the
+occasion for such a move should arise; that is to say, whenever the
+dynastic State, by a suitable conjunction of infirmity and irksomeness,
+should pass the margin of tolerance in this people's outraged sense of
+national shame. The case of the German people in their latterday
+attitude toward dynastic vagaries may afford a term of comparison. These
+appear yet incapable of dis<!-- Page 102 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 102]</span>tinguishing between national shame and
+dynastic ambition.</p>
+
+<p>By a different course and on lines more nearly parallel with the
+life-history of the German peoples, the English-speaking peoples have
+reached what is for the present purpose much the same ground as the
+French, in that they too have made the shift from the dynastic State to
+the national commonwealth. The British started late, but the discipline
+of servitude and unmitigated personal rule in their case was relatively
+brief and relatively ineffectual; that is to say, as compared with what
+their German cousins had to endure and to learn in the like connection.
+So that the British never learned the lesson of dynastic loyalty fully
+by heart; at least not the populace; whatever may be true for the
+privileged classes, the gentlemen, whose interests were on the side of
+privilege and irresponsible mastery. Here as in the French case it was
+the habits of thought of the common man, not of the class of gentlemen,
+that made the obsolescence of the dynastic State a foregone conclusion
+and an easy matter&mdash;as one speaks of easy achievement in respect of
+matters of that magnitude. It is now some two and a half centuries since
+this shift in the national point of view overtook the English-speaking
+community. Perhaps it would be unfair to say that that period, or that
+period plus what further time may yet have to be added, marks the
+interval by which German habits of thought in these premises are in
+arrears, but it is not easy to find secure ground for a different and
+more moderate appraisal.</p>
+
+<p>The future, of course, is not to be measured in terms of the past, and
+the tempo of the present and of the calculable future is in many
+bearings very different from that which has ruled even in the recent
+historical past.<!-- Page 103 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> But then, on the other hand, habituation always
+requires time; more particularly such habituation as is to take effect
+throughout a populous nation and is counted on to work a displacement of
+a comprehensive institutional system and of a people's outlook on life.</p>
+
+<p>Germany is still a dynastic State. That is to say, its national
+establishment is, in effect, a self-appointed and irresponsible
+autocracy which holds the nation in usufruct, working through an
+appropriate bureaucratic organisation, and the people is imbued with
+that spirit of abnegation and devotion that is involved in their
+enthusiastically supporting a government of that character. Now, it is
+in the nature of a dynastic State to seek dominion, that being the whole
+of its nature. And a dynastic establishment which enjoys the unqualified
+usufruct of such resources as are placed at its disposal by the
+feudalistic loyalty of the German people runs no chance of keeping the
+peace, except on terms of the unconditional surrender of all those whom
+it may concern. No solemn engagement and no pious resolution has any
+weight in the balance against a cultural fatality of this magnitude.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>This account of the derivation and current state of German nationalism
+will of course appear biased to anyone who has been in the habit of
+rating German Culture high in all its bearings, and to whom at the same
+time the ideals of peace and liberty appeal. Indeed, such a critic,
+gifted with the due modicum of asperity, might well be provoked to call
+it all a more or less ingenious diatribe of partisan malice. But it can
+be so construed only by those who see the question at issue as a point
+of invidious distinction between this German animus on the one hand and
+the corresponding frame of mind of the<!-- Page 104 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 104]</span> neighboring peoples on the other
+hand. There may also appear to the captious to be some air of
+deprecation about the characterisation here offered of the past history
+of political traffic within the confines of the Fatherland. All of
+which, of course, touches neither the veracity of the characterisation
+nor the purpose with which so ungrateful a line of analysis and
+exposition has been entered upon. It is to be regretted if facts that
+may flutter the emotions of one and another among the sensitive and
+unreflecting can not be drawn into such an inquiry without having their
+cogency discounted beforehand on account of the sentimental value
+imputed to them. Of course no offense is intended and no invidious
+comparison is aimed at.</p>
+
+<p>Even if the point of it all were an invidious comparison it would
+immediately have to be admitted that the net showing in favor of these
+others, e.g., the French or the English-speaking peoples, is by no means
+so unreservedly to their credit as such a summary statement of the
+German case might seem to imply. As bearing on the chances of a peace
+contingent upon the temper of the contracting nationalities, it is by no
+means a foregone conclusion that such a peace compact would hold
+indefinitely even if it depended solely on the pacific animus of these
+others that have left the dynastic State behind. These others, in fact,
+are also not yet out of the woods. They may not have the same gift of
+gratuitous and irresponsible truculence as their German cousins, in the
+same alarming degree; but as was said in an earlier passage, they too
+are ready to fight on provocation. They are patriotic to a degree;
+indeed to such a degree that anything which visibly touches the national
+prestige will readily afford a <i>casus belli</i>. But it remains true that
+the popular temper among<!-- Page 105 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 105]</span> them is of the defensive order; perhaps of an
+unnecessarily enthusiastic defensive order, but after all in such a
+frame of mind as leaves them willing to let well enough alone, to live
+and let live.</p>
+
+<p>And herein appears to lie the decisive difference between those peoples
+whose patriotic affections center about the fortunes of an impersonal
+commonwealth and those in whom is superadded a fervent aspiration for
+dynastic ascendency. The latter may be counted on to break the peace
+when a promising opportunity offers.</p>
+
+<p>The contrast may be illustrated, though not so sharply as might be
+desirable, in the different temper shown by the British people in the
+Boer war on the one hand, as compared with the popularity of the
+French-Prussian war among the German people on the other hand. Both were
+aggressive wars, and both were substantially unprovoked. Diplomatically
+speaking, of course, sufficient provocation was found in either case, as
+how should it not? But in point of substantial provocation and of
+material inducement, both were about equally gratuitous. In either case
+the war could readily have been avoided without material detriment to
+the community and without perceptible lesion to the national honour.
+Both were "engineered" on grounds shamelessly manufactured <i>ad hoc</i> by
+interested parties; in the one case by a coterie of dynastic statesmen,
+in the other by a junta of commercial adventurers and imperialistic
+politicians. In neither case had the people any interest of gain or loss
+in the quarrel, except as it became a question of national prestige. But
+both the German and the British community bore the burden and fought the
+campaign to a successful issue for those interested parties who had
+precipitated the quarrel. The British people at large, it is true, bore
+the burden; which<!-- Page 106 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> comes near being all that can be said in the way of
+popular approval of this war, which political statesmen have since then
+rated as one of the most profitable enterprises in which the forces of
+the realm have been engaged. On the subject of this successful war the
+common man is still inclined to cover his uneasy sense of decency with a
+recital of extenuating circumstances. What parallels all this in the
+German case is an outbreak of patriotic abandon and an admirable spirit
+of unselfish sacrifice in furtherance of the dynastic prestige, an
+intoxication of patriotic blare culminating in the triumphant coronation
+at Versailles. Nor has the sober afterthought of the past forty-six
+years cast a perceptible shadow of doubt across the glorious memory of
+that patriotic debauch.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the difference of animus between a body of patriotic citizens in
+a modern commonwealth on the one hand and the loyal subjects of a
+dynastic State on the other hand. There need be no reflections on the
+intrinsic merits of either. Seen in dispassionate perspective from
+outside the turmoil, there is not much to choose, in point of sane and
+self-respecting manhood, between the sluggish and shamefaced abettor of
+a sordid national crime, and a ranting patriot who glories in serving as
+cat's-paw to a syndicate of unscrupulous politicians bent on dominion
+for dominion's sake. But the question here is not as to the relative
+merits or the relative manhood contents of the two contrasted types of
+patriot. Doubtless both and either have manhood enough and to spare; at
+least, so they say. But the point in question is the simpler and nowise
+invidious one, as to the availability of both or either for the
+perpetuation of the world's peace under a compact of vigilant
+neutrality. Plainly the German frame of mind admits of no neutrality;
+the quest of dominion<!-- Page 107 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 107]</span> is not compatible with neutrality, and the
+substantial core of German national life is still the quest of dominion
+under dynastic tutelage. How it stands with the spirit that has
+repeatedly come in sight in the international relations of the British
+community is a question harder to answer.</p>
+
+<p>It may be practicable to establish a peace of neutrals on the basis of
+such national spirit as prevails among these others&mdash;the French and
+English-speaking peoples, together with the minor nationalities that
+cluster about the North Sea&mdash;because their habitual attitude is that of
+neutrality, on the whole and with allowance for a bellicose minority in
+all these countries. By and large, these peoples have come to the
+tolerant attitude that finds expression in the maxim, Live and let live.
+But they are all and several sufficiently patriotic. It may, indeed,
+prove that they are more than sufficiently patriotic for the purposes of
+a neutral peace. They stand for peace, but it is "peace with honour;"
+which means, in more explicit terms, peace with undiminished national
+prestige. Now, national prestige is a very particular commodity, as has
+been set out in earlier passages of this inquiry; and a peace which is
+to be kept only on terms of a jealous maintenance of the national honour
+is likely to be in a somewhat precarious case. If, and when, the
+national honour is felt to require an enhanced national ascendancy, the
+case for a neutral peace immediately becomes critical. And the greater
+the number and diversity of pretensions and interests that are conceived
+to be bound up with the national honour, the more unstable will the
+resulting situation necessarily be.</p>
+
+<p>The upshot of all this recital of considerations appears to be that a
+neutral peace compact may, or it may not,<!-- Page 108 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> be practicable in the absence
+of such dynastic States as Germany and Japan; whereas it has no chance
+in the presence of these enterprising national establishments.</p>
+
+<p>No one will be readier or more voluble in exclaiming against the falsity
+of such a discrimination as is here attempted, between the democratic
+and the dynastic nations of the modern world, than the spokesmen of
+these dynastic Powers. No one is more outspoken in professions of
+universal peace and catholic amity than these same spokesmen of the
+dynastic Powers; and nowhere is there more urgent need of such
+professions. Official and "inspired" professions are, of course, to be
+overlooked; at least, so charity would dictate. But there have, in the
+historic present, been many professions of this character made also by
+credible spokesmen of the German, and perhaps of the Japanese, people,
+and in all sincerity. By way of parenthesis it should be said that this
+is not intended to apply to expressions of conviction and intention that
+have come out of Germany these two years past (December 1916). Without
+questioning the credibility of these witnesses that have borne witness
+to the pacific and genial quality of national sentiment in the German
+people, it will yet be in place to recall the run of facts in the
+national life of Germany in this historical present and the position of
+these spokesmen in the German community.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The German nation is of a peculiar composition in respect of its social
+structure. So far as bears on the question in hand, it is made up of
+three distinctive constituent factors, or perhaps rather categories or
+conditions of men. The populace is of course the main category, and in
+the last resort always the main and decisive factor. Next in<!-- Page 109 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 109]</span> point of
+consequence as well as of numbers and initiative is the personnel of the
+control,&mdash;the ruling class, the administration, the official community,
+the hierarchy of civil and political servants, or whatever designation
+may best suit; the category comprises that pyramidal superstructure of
+privilege and control whereof the sovereign is the apex, and in whom,
+under any dynastic rule, is in effect vested the usufruct of the
+populace. These two classes or conditions of men, the one of which
+orders and the other obeys, make up the working structure of the nation,
+and they also between them embody the national life and carry forward
+the national work and aim. Intermediate between them, or rather beside
+them and overlapping the commissure, is a third category whose life
+articulates loosely with both the others at the same time that it still
+runs along in a semi-detached way. This slighter but more visible, and
+particularly more audible, category is made up of the "Intellectuals,"
+as a late, and perhaps vulgar, designation would name them.</p>
+
+<p>These are they who chiefly communicate with the world outside, and at
+the same time they do what is academically called thinking. They are in
+intellectual contact and communication with the world at large, in a
+contact of give and take, and they think and talk in and about those
+concepts that go in under the caption of the humanities in the world at
+large. The category is large enough to constitute an intellectual
+community, indeed a community of somewhat formidable magnitude, taken in
+absolute terms, although in percentages of the population at large their
+numbers will foot up to only an inconsiderable figure. Their contact
+with the superior class spoken of above is fairly close, being a
+contact, in the main, of service on the one side and of control on the
+other. With the popu<!-- Page 110 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 110]</span>lace their contact and communion is relatively
+slight, the give and take in the case being neither intimate nor
+far-reaching. More particularly is there a well-kept limit of moderation
+on any work of indoctrination or intellectual guidance which this class
+may carry down among the people at large, dictated and enforced by
+dynastic expediency. This category, of the Intellectuals, is
+sufficiently large to live its own life within itself, without drawing
+on the spiritual life of the community at large, and of sufficiently
+substantial quality to carry its own peculiar scheme of intellectual
+conventions and verities. Of the great and highly meritorious place and
+work of these Intellectuals in the scheme of German culture it is
+needless to speak. What is to the point is that they are the accredited
+spokesmen of the German nation in all its commonplace communication with
+the rest of civilised Europe.</p>
+
+<p>The Intellectuals have spoken with conviction and sincerity of the
+spiritual state of the German people, but in so doing, and in so far as
+bears on the character of German nationalism, they have been in closer
+contact, intellectually and sympathetically, with the intellectual and
+spiritual life of civilised Europe at large than with the movements of
+the spirit among the German populace. And their canvassing of the
+concepts which so have come under their attention from over the national
+frontiers has been carried forward&mdash;so far, again, as bears on the
+questions that are here in point&mdash;with the German-dynastic principles,
+logic and mechanism of execution under their immediate observation and
+supplying the concrete materials for inquiry. Indeed, it holds true, by
+and large, that nothing else than this German-dynastic complement of
+ways and means has, or can effectually, come under their<!-- Page 111 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 111]</span> observation in
+such a degree of intimacy as to give body and definition to the somewhat
+abstract theorems on cultural aims and national preconceptions that have
+come to them from outside. In short, they have borrowed these
+theoretical formulations from abroad, without the concrete apparatus of
+ways and means in which these theorems are embodied in their foreign
+habitat, and have so found themselves construing these theoretical
+borrowings in the only concrete terms of which they have had first-hand
+and convincing knowledge. Such an outcome would be fairly unavoidable,
+inasmuch as these Intellectuals, however much they are, in the spirit,
+citizens of the cosmopolitan republic of knowledge and intelligence,
+they are after all, <i>in propria persona</i>, immediately and unremittingly
+subjects of the German-dynastic State; so that all their detail thinking
+on the aims, ways and means of life, in all its civil and political
+bearings, is unavoidably shaped by the unremitting discipline of their
+workday experience under this dynastic scheme. The outcome has been that
+while they have taken up, as they have understood them, the concepts
+that rule the civic life of these other, maturer nations, they have
+apprehended and developed these theorems of civic life in the terms and
+by the logic enforced in that system of control and surveillance known
+to them by workday experience,&mdash;the only empirical terms at hand.</p>
+
+<p>The apex of growth and the center of diffusion as regards the modern
+culture in respect of the ideals and logic of civic life&mdash;other phases
+of this culture than this its civil aspect do not concern the point here
+in question&mdash;this apex of growth and center of diffusion lie outside the
+Fatherland, in an environment alien to the German institutional scheme.
+Yet so intrinsic to the cultural drift<!-- Page 112 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 112]</span> of modern mankind are these aims
+and this logic, that in taking over and further enriching the
+intellectual heritage of this modern world the Intellectuals of the
+Fatherland have unavoidably also taken over those conceptions of civil
+initiative and masterless self-direction that rule the logic of life in
+a commonwealth of ungraded men. They have taken these over and
+assimilated them as best their experience would permit. But workday
+experience and its exigencies are stubborn things; and in this process
+of assimilation of these alien conceptions of right and honest living,
+it is the borrowed theorems concerning civic rights and duties that have
+undergone adaptation and revision, not the concrete system of ways and
+means in which these principles, so accepted, are to be put in practice.
+Necessarily so, since in the German scheme of law and order the major
+premise is the dynastic State, whereas the major premise of the modern
+civilised scheme of civic life is the absence of such an organ. So, the
+development and elaboration of these modern principles of civic
+liberty&mdash;and this elaboration has taken on formidable dimensions&mdash;under
+the hand of the German Intellectuals has uniformly run out into
+Pickwickian convolutions, greatly suggestive of a lost soul seeking a
+place to rest. With unquestionably serious purpose and untiring
+endeavour, they have sought to embody these modern civilised
+preconceptions in terms afforded by, or in terms compatible with, the
+institutions of the Fatherland; and they have been much concerned and
+magniloquently elated about the German spirit of freedom that so was to
+be brought to final and consummate realisation in the life of a free
+people. But at no point and in no case have either the proposals or
+their carrying out taken shape as a concrete application of the familiar
+principle of popular self-direc<!-- Page 113 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 113]</span>tion. It has always come to something in
+the way of a concessive or expedient mitigation of the antagonistic
+principle of personal authority. Where the forms of self-government or
+of individual self-direction have concessively been installed, under the
+Imperial rule, they have turned out to be an imitative structure with
+some shrewd provision for their coercion or inhibition at the discretion
+of an irresponsible authority.</p>
+
+<p>Neither the sound intelligence nor the good faith of these Intellectuals
+of the Fatherland is to be impugned. That the&mdash;necessarily vague and
+circumlocutory&mdash;expositions of civic institutions and popular liberty
+which they have so often and so largely promulgated should have been
+used as a serviceable blind of dynastic statecraft is not to be set down
+to their discredit. Circumstances over which they could have no control,
+since they were circumstances that shaped their own habits of thought,
+have placed it beyond their competence to apprehend or to formulate
+these alien principles (habits of thought) concretely in those alien
+institutional details and by the alien logic with which they could have
+no working acquaintance.</p>
+
+<p>To one and another this conception of cultural solidarity within the
+nation, and consequent cultural aliency between nations, due to the
+different habits of life and of thought enforced by the two diverse
+institutional systems, may be so far unfamiliar as to carry no
+conviction. It may accordingly not seem out of place to recall that the
+institutional system of any given community, particularly for any
+community living under a home-bred and time-tried system of its own,
+will necessarily be a balanced system of interdependent and mutually
+concordant parts working together in one comprehensive plan of law and
+order. Through such an institutional system, as, e.g.,<!-- Page 114 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 114]</span> the German
+Imperial organisation, there will run a degree of logical consistency,
+consonant with itself throughout, and exerting a consistent discipline
+throughout the community; whereby there is enforced a consistent drift
+or bent in the prevalent habits of life, and a correlative bent in the
+resulting habits of thought prevalent in the community. It is, in fact,
+this possession of a common scheme of use and wont, and a consequent
+common outlook and manner of thinking, that constitutes the most
+intrinsic bond of solidarity in any nationality, and that finally marks
+it off from any other.</p>
+
+<p>It is equally a matter of course that any other given community, living
+under the rule of a substantially different, or divergent, system of
+institutions, will be exposed to a course of workday discipline running
+to a different, perhaps divergent, effect; and that this other community
+will accordingly come in for a characteristically different discipline
+and fall under the rule of a different commonsense outlook. Where an
+institutional difference of this kind is somewhat large and consistent,
+so as to amount in effect to a discrepancy, as may fairly be said of the
+difference between Imperial Germany and its like on the one hand, and
+the English-speaking nations on the other hand, there the difference in
+everyday conceptions may readily make the two peoples mutually
+unintelligible to one another, on those points of institutional
+principle that are involved in the discrepancy. This is the state of the
+case as between the German people, including the Intellectuals, and the
+peoples against whom their preconceptions of national destiny have
+arrayed them. And the many vivid expressions of consternation,
+abhorrence and incredulity that have come out of this community of
+Intellectuals in the course of the past two years of trial<!-- Page 115 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 115]</span> and error,
+bear sufficient testimony to the rigorous constraint which these German
+preconceptions and their logic exercise over the Intellectuals, no less
+than over the populace.</p>
+
+<p>Conversely, of course, it is nearly as impracticable for those who have
+grown up under the discipline of democratic institutions to comprehend
+the habitual outlook of the commonplace German patriot on national
+interests and aims; not quite, perhaps, because the discipline of use
+and wont and indoctrination is neither so rigorous nor so consistent in
+their case. But there is, after all, prevalent among them a sufficiently
+evident logical inability to understand and appreciate the paramount
+need of national, that is to say dynastic, ascendancy that actuates all
+German patriots; just as these same patriots are similarly unable to
+consider national interests in any other light than that of dynastic
+ascendancy.</p>
+
+<p>Going simply on the face value of the available evidence, any outsider
+might easily fall into the error of believing that when the great
+adventure of the war opened up before them, as well as when presently
+the shock of baffled endeavour brought home its exasperating futility,
+the Intellectuals of the Fatherland distinguished themselves above all
+other classes and conditions of men in the exuberance of their patriotic
+abandon. Such a view would doubtless be almost wholly erroneous. It is
+not that the Intellectuals reached a substantially superior pitch of
+exaltation, but only that, being trained in the use of language, they
+were able to express their emotions with great facility. There seems no
+reason to believe that the populace fell short of the same measure in
+respect of their prevalent frame of mind.<!-- Page 116 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To return to the workings of the Imperial dynastic State and the forces
+engaged. It plainly appears that the Intellectuals are to be counted as
+supernumeraries, except so far as they serve as an instrument of
+publicity and indoctrination in the hands of the discretionary
+authorities. The working factors in the case are the dynastic
+organisation of control, direction and emolument, and the populace at
+large by use of whose substance the traffic in dynastic ascendancy and
+emolument is carried on. These two are in fairly good accord, on the
+ancient basis of feudal loyalty. Hitherto there is no evident ground for
+believing that this archaic tie that binds the populace to the dynastic
+ambitions has at all perceptibly weakened. And the possibility of
+dynastic Germany living at peace with the world under any compact,
+therefore translates itself into the possibility of the German people's
+unlearning its habitual deference and loyalty to the dynasty.</p>
+
+<p>As its acquirement has been a work of protracted habituation, so can its
+obsolescence also come about only through more or less protracted
+habituation under a system of use and wont of a different or divergent
+order. The elements of such a systematic discipline running to an effect
+at cross purposes with this patriotic animus are not absent from the
+current situation in the Fatherland; the discipline of the modern
+industrial system, for instance, runs to such a divergent effect; but
+this, and other conceivable forces which may reenforce it, will after
+all take time, if they are to work a decisive change in the current
+frame of mind of the patriotic German community. During the interval
+required for such a change in the national temper, the peace of the
+world would be conditioned on the inability of the dynastic State to
+break it. So that the chances of success for any<!-- Page 117 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 117]</span> neutral peace league
+will vary inversely as the available force of Imperial Germany, and it
+could be accounted secure only in the virtual elimination of the
+Imperial State as a national Power.</p>
+
+<p>If the gradual obsolescence of the spirit of militant loyalty in the
+German people, through disuse under a r&eacute;gime of peace, industry, self
+government and free trade, is to be the agency by force of which
+dynastic imperialism is to cease, the chance of a neutral peace will
+depend on the thoroughness with which such a r&eacute;gime of self-direction
+can be installed in this case, and on the space of time required for
+such obsolescence through disuse. Obviously, the installation of a
+workable r&eacute;gime of self-government on peaceable lines would in any case
+be a matter of great difficulty among a people whose past experience has
+so singularly incapacitated them for self-government; and obviously,
+too, the interval of time required to reach secure ground along this
+line of approach would be very considerable. Also, in view of these
+conditions, obviously, this scheme for maintaining the peace of nations
+by a compact of neutrals based on a compromise with an aspiring dynastic
+State resolves itself into the second of the two alternatives spoken of
+at the outset, viz., a neutral peace based on the elimination of Germany
+as a war power, together with the elimination of any materials suitable
+for the formation of a formidable coalition. And then, with Imperial
+Germany supposedly eliminated or pacified, there would still remain the
+Japanese establishment, to which all the arguments pertinent in the case
+of Germany will apply without abatement; except that, at least hitherto,
+the dynastic statesmen of Japan have not had the disposal of so massive
+a body of resources, in population, industry, or raw materials.<!-- Page 118 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h4>
+
+<p class='center'><span class="smcap">Peace Without Honour</span></p>
+
+
+<p>The argument therefore turns back to a choice between the two
+alternatives alluded to: peace in submission to the rule of the German
+dynastic establishment (and to Japan), or peace through elimination of
+these enterprising Powers. The former alternative, no doubt, is
+sufficiently unattractive, but it is not therefore to be put aside
+without a hearing. As goes without saying, it is repugnant to the
+patriotic sentiments of those peoples whom the Imperial German
+establishment have elected for submission. But if this unreflecting
+patriotic revulsion can once be made amenable to reason, there is always
+something to be said in favor of such a plan of peaceable submission, or
+at least in extenuation of it; and if it is kept in mind that the
+ulterior necessity of such submission must always remain in perspective
+as a condition precedent to a peaceful settlement, so long as one or
+both of these enterprising Powers remains intact, it will be seen that a
+sane appraisal of the merits of such a r&eacute;gime of peace is by no means
+uncalled for. For neither of these two Powers is there a conclusive
+issue of endeavour short of paramount dominion.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>There should also be some gain of insight and sobriety in recalling that
+the Intellectuals of the Fatherland, who have doubtless pondered this
+matter longer and more<!-- Page 119 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 119]</span> dispassionately than all other men, have spoken
+very highly of the merits of such a plan of universal submission to the
+rule of this German dynastic establishment. They had, no doubt, been
+considering the question both long and earnestly, as to what would, in
+the light of reason, eventually be to the best interest of those peoples
+whose manifest destiny was eventual tutelage under the Imperial crown;
+and there need also be no doubt that in that time (two years past) they
+therefore spoke advisedly and out of the fulness of the heart on this
+head. The pronouncements that came out of the community of Intellectuals
+in that season of unembarrassed elation and artless avowal are doubtless
+to be taken as an outcome of much thoughtful canvassing of what had best
+be done, not as an enforced compromise with untoward necessities but as
+the salutary course freely to be pursued with an eye single to the best
+good of all concerned.</p>
+
+<p>It is true, the captious have been led to speak slightingly of the many
+utterances of this tenure coming out of the community of Intellectuals,
+as, e.g., the lay sermons of Professor Ostwald dating back to that
+season; but no unprejudiced reader can well escape the persuasion that
+these, as well as the very considerable volume of similar pronouncements
+by many other men of eminent scholarship and notable for benevolent
+sentiments, are faithfully to be accepted as the expressions of a
+profound conviction and a consciously generous spirit. In so speaking of
+the advantages to be derived by any subject people from submission to
+the German Imperial rule, these Intellectuals are not to be construed as
+formulating the drift of vulgar patriotic sentiment among their
+compatriots at large, but rather as giving out the deliverances of their
+own more sensitive spirit and maturer delibera<!-- Page 120 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 120]</span>tion, as men who are in a
+position to see human affairs and interests in a larger perspective.
+Such, no doubt, would be their own sense of the matter.</p>
+
+<p>Reflection on the analogous case of the tutelage exercised by the
+American government over the subject Philippinos may contribute to a
+just and temperate view of what is intended in the r&eacute;gime of tutelage
+and submission so spoken for by the German Intellectuals,&mdash;and, it may
+be added, found good by the Imperial statesmen. There would, of course,
+be the difference, as against the case of the Philippinos, that whereas
+the American government is after all answerable, in the last resort and
+in a somewhat random fashion, to a popular opinion that runs on
+democratic preconceptions, the German Imperial establishment on the
+other hand is answerable to no one, except it be to God, who is
+conceived to stand in somewhat the relation of a silent partner, or a
+minority stockholder in this dynastic enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it should not be overlooked that any presumptive hard usage which
+the vassal peoples might look for at the hands of the German dynasty
+would necessarily be tempered with considerations of expediency as
+dictated by the exigencies of usufruct. The Imperial establishment has
+shown itself to be wise, indeed more wise than amiable, but wise at
+least in its intentions, in the use which it has made of subject peoples
+hitherto. It is true, a somewhat accentuated eagerness on the part of
+the Imperial establishment to get the maximum service in a minimum of
+time and at a minimum cost from these subject populations,&mdash;as, e.g., in
+Silesia and Poland, in Schleswig-Holstein, in Alsace-Lorraine, or in its
+African and Oceanic possessions,&mdash;has at times led to practices
+altogether dubious on humanitarian grounds, at the same<!-- Page 121 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 121]</span> time that in
+point of thrifty management they have gone beyond "what the traffic will
+bear." Yet it is not to be overlooked&mdash;and in this connection it is a
+point of some weight&mdash;that, so far as the predatory traditions of its
+statecraft will permit, the Imperial establishment has in all these
+matters been guided by a singularly unreserved attention to its own
+material advantage. Where its management in these premises has yielded a
+less profitable usufruct than the circumstances would reasonably admit,
+the failure has been due to an excess of cupidity rather than the
+reverse.</p>
+
+<p>The circumstantial evidence converges to the effect that the Imperial
+establishment may confidently be counted on to manage the affairs of its
+subject peoples with an eye single to its own material gain, and it may
+with equal confidence be counted on that in the long run no unadvised
+excesses will be practised. Of course, an excessive adventure in
+atrocity and predation, due to such human infirmity in its agents or in
+its directorate as has been shown in various recent episodes, is to be
+looked for now and again; but these phenomena would come in by way of
+fluctuating variations from the authentic routine, rather than as
+systematic features of it.</p>
+
+<p>That superfluity of naughtiness that has given character to the current
+German Imperial policy in Belgium, e.g., or that similarly has
+characterised the dealings of Imperial Japan in Korea during the late
+"benevolent assimilation" of that people into Japanese-Imperial
+usufruct, is not fairly to be taken to indicate what such an Imperial
+establishment may be expected to do with a subject people on a footing
+of settled and long-term exploitation. At the outset, in both instances,
+the policy of frightfulness was dictated by a well-advised view to<!-- Page 122 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 122]</span>
+economy of effort in reducing the subject people to an abject state of
+intimidation, according to the art of war as set forth in the manuals;
+whereas latterly the somewhat profligate excesses of the government of
+occupation&mdash;decently covered with diplomatic parables on benevolence and
+legality&mdash;have been dictated by military convenience, particularly by
+the need of forced labor and the desirability of a reduced population in
+the acquired territory. So also the "personally conducted" dealings with
+the Armenians by use of the Turks should probably also best be explained
+as an endeavour to reduce the numbers of an undesirable population
+beforehand, without incurring unnecessary blame. All these things are,
+at the most, misleading indications of what the Imperial policy would be
+like under settled conditions and in the absence of insubordination.</p>
+
+<p>By way of contrast, such as may serve to bring the specific traits of
+this prospective Imperial tutelage of nations into a better light, the
+Ottoman usufruct of the peoples of the Turkish dominions offers an
+instructive instance. The Ottoman tutelage is today spoken of by its
+apologists in terms substantially identical with the sketches of the
+future presented by hopeful German patriots in the early months of the
+current war. But as is so frequently the case in such circumstances,
+these expressions of the officers have to be understood in a diplomatic
+sense; not as touching the facts in any other than a formal way. It is
+sufficiently evident that the Ottoman management of its usufruct has
+throughout been ill-advised enough persistently to charge more than the
+traffic would bear, probably due in great part to lack of control over
+its agents or ramifications, by the central office. The Ottoman
+establishment has not observed, or<!-- Page 123 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 123]</span> enforced, the plain rules of economy
+in its utilisation of the subject peoples, and finds itself today
+bankrupt in consequence. What may afford more of a parallel to the
+prospective German tutelage of the nations is the procedure of the
+Japanese establishment in Korea, Manchuria, or China; which is also duly
+covered with an ostensibly decent screen of diplomatic parables, but the
+nature and purpose of which is overt enough in all respects but the
+nomenclature. It is not unlikely that even this Japanese usufruct and
+tutelage runs on somewhat less humane and complaisant lines than a
+well-advised economy of resources would dictate for the prospective
+German usufruct of the Western nations.</p>
+
+<p>There is the essential difference between the two cases that while Japan is
+over-populated, so that it becomes the part of a wise government to find
+additional lands for occupancy, and that so it is constrained by its
+imperial ambitions to displace much of the population in its subject
+territories, the Fatherland on the other hand is under-populated&mdash;notoriously,
+though not according to the letter of the  diplomatic parables on this
+head&mdash;and for the calculable future must continue to be under-populated;
+provided that the state of the industrial arts continues subject to change
+in the same general direction as hitherto, and provided that no radical
+change affects the German birth-rate. So, since the Imperial government has
+no need of new lands for occupancy by its home population, it will
+presumably be under no inducement to take measures looking to the partial
+depopulation of its subject territories.</p>
+
+<p>The case of Belgium and the measures looking to a reduction of its
+population may raise a doubt, but probably not a well taken doubt. It is
+rather that since it has<!-- Page 124 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> become evident that the territory can not be
+held, it is thought desirable to enrich the Fatherland with whatever
+property can be removed, and to consume the accumulated man-power of the
+Belgian people in the service of the war. It would appear that it is a
+war-measure, designed to make use of the enemy's resources for his
+defeat. Indeed, under conditions of settled occupation or subjection,
+any degree of such depopulation would entail an economic loss, and any
+well-considered administrative policy would therefore look to the
+maintenance of the inhabitants of the acquired territories in
+undiminished numbers and unimpaired serviceability.</p>
+
+<p>The resulting scheme of Imperial usufruct should accordingly be of a
+considerate, not to say in effect humane, character,&mdash;always provided
+that the requisite degree of submission and subservience ("law and
+order") can be enforced by a system of coercion so humane as not to
+reduce the number of the inhabitants or materially to lower their
+physical powers. Such would, by reasonable expectation, be the character
+of this projected Imperial tutelage and usufruct of the nations of
+Christendom. In its working-out this German project should accordingly
+differ very appreciably from the policy which its imperial ambitions
+have constrained the Japanese establishment to pursue in its dealings
+with the life and fortunes of its recently, and currently, acquired
+subject peoples.</p>
+
+<p>The better to appreciate in some concrete fashion what should, by
+reasonable expectation, be the terms on which life might so be carried
+on <i>sub pace germanica</i>, attention may be invited to certain typical
+instances of such peace by abnegation among contemporary peoples.
+Perhaps at the top of the list stands India, with its many and varied<!-- Page 125 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 125]</span>
+native peoples, subject to British tutelage, but, the British apologists
+say, not subject to British usufruct. The margin of tolerance in this
+instance is fairly wide, but its limits are sharply drawn. India is
+wanted and held, not for tribute or revenue to be paid into the Imperial
+treasury, nor even for exclusive trade privileges or preferences, but
+mainly as a preserve to provide official occupation and emoluments for
+British gentlemen not otherwise occupied or provided for; and
+secondarily as a means of safeguarding lucrative British investments,
+that is to say, investments by British capitalists of high and low
+degree. The current British professions on the subject of this
+occupation of India, and at times the shamefaced apology for it, is that
+the people of India suffer no hardship by this means; the resulting
+governmental establishment being no more onerous and no more expensive
+to them than any equally, or even any less, competent government of
+their own would necessarily be. The fact, however, remains, that India
+affords a much needed and very considerable net revenue to the class of
+British gentlemen, in the shape of official salaries and pensions, which
+the British gentry at large can on no account forego. Narrowed to these
+proportions it is readily conceivable that the British usufruct of India
+should rest with no extraordinary weight on the Indian people at large,
+however burdensome it may at times become to those classes who aspire to
+take over the usufruct in case the British establishment can be
+dislodged. This case evidently differs very appreciably from the
+projected German usufruct of neighboring countries in Europe.</p>
+
+<p>A case that may be more nearly in point would be that of any one of the
+countries subject to the Turkish rule in recent times; although these
+instances scarcely show just<!-- Page 126 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 126]</span> what to expect under the projected German
+r&eacute;gime. The Turkish rule has been notably inefficient, considered as a
+working system of dynastic usufruct; whereas it is confidently expected
+that the corresponding German system would show quite an exceptional
+degree of efficiency for the purpose. This Turkish inefficiency has had
+a two-fold effect, which should not appear in the German case. Through
+administrative abuses intended to serve the personal advantage of the
+irresponsible officials, the underlying peoples have suffered a
+progressive exhaustion and dilapidation; whereby the central authority,
+the dynastic establishment, has also grown progressively, cumulatively
+weaker and therefore less able to control its agents; and, in the second
+place, on the same grounds, in the pursuit of personal gain, and
+prompted by personal animosities, these irresponsible agents have
+persistently carried their measures of extortion beyond reasonable
+bounds,&mdash;that is to say beyond the bounds which a well considered plan
+of permanent usufruct would countenance. All this would be otherwise and
+more sensibly arranged under German Imperial auspices.</p>
+
+<p>One of the nations that have fallen under Turkish rule&mdash;and Turkish
+peace&mdash;affords a valuable illustration of a secondary point that is to
+be considered in connection with any plan of peace by submission. The
+Armenian people have in later time come partly under Russian dominion,
+and so have been exposed to the Russian system of bureaucratic
+exploitation; and the difference between Russian and Turkish Armenia is
+instructive. According to all credible&mdash;that is unofficial&mdash;accounts,
+conditions are perceptibly more tolerable in Russian Armenia. Well
+informed persons relate that the cause for this more lenient, or less
+extreme, administration of affairs under<!-- Page 127 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 127]</span> Russian officials is a
+selective death rate among them, such that a local official who
+persistently exceeds a certain ill-defined limit of tolerance is removed
+by what would under other circumstances be called an untimely death. No
+adequate remedy has been found, within the large limits which Russian
+bureaucratic administration habitually allows itself in questions of
+coercion. The Turk, on the other hand, less deterred by considerations
+of long-term expediency, and, it may be, less easily influenced by
+outside opinion on any point of humanity, has found a remedy in the
+systematic extirpation of any village in which an illicit death occurs.
+One will incline to presume that on this head the German Imperial
+procedure would be more after the Russian than after the Turkish
+pattern; although latterday circumstantial evidence will throw some
+sinister doubt on the reasonableness of such an expectation.</p>
+
+<p>It is plain, however, that the Turkish remedy for this form of
+insubordination is a wasteful means of keeping the peace. Plainly, to
+the home office, the High Command, the extinction of a village with its
+population is a more substantial loss than the unseasonable decease of
+one of its administrative agents; particularly when it is called to mind
+that such a decease will presumably follow only on such profligate
+excesses of naughtiness as are bound to be inexcusably unprofitable to
+the central authority. It may be left an open question how far a
+corrective of this nature can hopefully be looked to as applicable, in
+case of need, under the projected German Imperial usufruct.</p>
+
+<p>It may, I apprehend, be said without offense that there is no depth of
+depravity below the ordinary reach of the Russian bureaucracy; but this
+organisation finds itself<!-- Page 128 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 128]</span> constrained, after all, to use circumspection
+and set some limits on individual excursions beyond the bounds of
+decency and humanity, so soon as these excesses touch the common or
+joint interest of the organisation. Any excess of atrocity, beyond a
+certain margin of tolerance, on the part of any one of its members is
+likely to work pecuniary mischief to the rest; and then, the
+bureaucratic conduct of affairs is also, after all, in an uncertain
+degree subject to some surveillance by popular sentiment at home or
+abroad. The like appears not to hold true of the Turkish official
+organisation. The difference may be due to a less provident spirit among
+the latter, as already indicated. But a different tradition, perhaps an
+outgrowth of this lack of providence and of the consequent growth of a
+policy of "frightfulness," may also come in for a share in the outcome;
+and there is also a characteristic difference in point of religious
+convictions, which may go some way in the same direction. The followers
+of Islam appear on the whole to take the tenets of their faith at their
+face value&mdash;servile, intolerant and fanatic&mdash;whereas the Russian
+official class may perhaps without undue reproach be considered to have
+on the whole outlived the superstitious conceits to which they yield an
+expedient <i>pro forma</i> observance. So that when worse comes to worst, and
+the Turk finds himself at length with his back against the last
+consolations of the faith that makes all things straight, he has the
+assured knowledge that he is in the right as against the unbelievers;
+whereas the Russian bureaucrat in a like case only knows that he is in
+the wrong. The last extremity is a less conclusive argument to the man
+in whose apprehension it is not the last extremity. Again, there is some
+shadow of doubt falls on the question as to which of these is more
+nearly in the German Imperial spirit.<!-- Page 129 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 129]</span></p>
+
+<p>On the whole, the case of China is more to the point. By and large, the
+people of China, more particularly the people of the coastal-plains
+region, have for long habitually lived under a r&eacute;gime of peace by
+non-resistance. The peace has been broken transiently from time to time,
+and local disturbances have not been infrequent; but, taken by and
+large, the situation has habitually been of the peaceful order, on a
+ground of non-resisting submission. But this submission has not commonly
+been of a whole-hearted kind, and it has also commonly been associated
+with a degree of persistent sabotage; which has clogged and retarded the
+administration of governmental law and order, and has also been
+conducive to a large measure of irresponsible official corruption. The
+habitual scheme of things Chinese in this bearing may fairly be
+described as a peace of non-resistance tempered with sabotage and
+assassination. Such was the late Manchu r&eacute;gime, and there is no reason
+in China for expecting a substantially different outcome from the
+Japanese invasion that is now under way. The nature of this Japanese
+incursion should be sufficiently plain. It is an enterprise in
+statecraft after the order of Macchiavelli, Metternich, and Bismarck. Of
+course, the conciliatory fables given out by the diplomatic service, and
+by the other apologists, are to be taken at the normal discount of
+one-hundred percent. The relatively large current output of such fables
+may afford a hint as to the magnitude of the designs which the fables
+are intended to cover.</p>
+
+<p>The Chinese people have had a more extended experience in peace of this
+order than all others, and their case should accordingly be instructive
+beyond all others. Not that a European peace by non-resistance need be
+expected to run very closely on the Chinese lines, but there<!-- Page 130 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> should be
+a reasonable expectation that the large course of things would be
+somewhat on the same order in both cases. Neither the European
+traditions and habitual temperament nor the modern state of the
+industrial arts will permit one to look for anything like a close
+parallel in detail; but it remains true, when all is said, that the
+Chinese experience of peace under submission to alien masters affords
+the most instructive illustration of such a r&eacute;gime, as touches its
+practicability, its methods, its cultural value, and its effect on the
+fortunes of the subject peoples and of their masters.</p>
+
+<p>Now, it may be said by way of preliminary generalisation that the
+life-history of the Chinese people and their culture is altogether the
+most imposing achievement which the records of mankind have to show;
+whereas the history of their successive alien establishments of mastery
+and usufruct is an unbroken sequence of incredibly shameful
+episodes,&mdash;always beginning in unbounded power and vainglory, running by
+way of misrule, waste and debauchery, to an inglorious finish in abject
+corruption and imbecility. Always have the gains in civilisation,
+industry and in the arts, been made by the subject Chinese, and always
+have their alien masters contributed nothing to the outcome but misrule,
+waste, corruption and decay. And yet in the long run, with all this
+handicap and misrule, the Chinese people have held their place and made
+headway in those things to which men look with affection and esteem when
+they come to take stock of what things are worth while. It would be a
+hopeless task to count up how many dynasties of masterful barbarians,
+here and there, have meanwhile come up and played their ephemeral role
+of vainglorious nuisance and gone under<!-- Page 131 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> in shame and confusion, and
+dismissed with the invariable verdict of "Good Riddance!"</p>
+
+<p>It may at first sight seem a singular conjuncture of circumstances, but
+it is doubtless a consequence of the same conjuncture, that the Chinese
+people have also kept their hold through all history on the Chinese
+lands. They have lived and multiplied and continued to occupy the land,
+while their successive alien masters have come and gone. So that today,
+as the outcome of conquest, and of what would be rated as defeat, the
+people continue to be Chinese, with an unbroken pedigree as well as an
+unbroken line of home-bred culture running through all the ages of
+history. In the biological respect the Chinese plan of non-resistance
+has proved eminently successful.</p>
+
+<p>And, by the way, much the same, though not in the same degree, is true
+for the Armenian people; who have continued to hold their hill country
+through good days and evil, apparently without serious or enduring
+reduction of their numbers and without visible lapse into barbarism,
+while the successive disconnected dynasties of their conquering rulers
+have come and gone, leaving nothing but an ill name. "This fable
+teaches" that a diligent attention to the growing of crops and children
+is the sure and appointed way to the maintenance of a people and its
+culture even under the most adverse conditions, and that eventual death
+and shameful destruction inexorably wait on any "ruling race." Hitherto
+the rule has not failed. The rule, indeed, is grounded in the heritable
+traits of human nature, from which there is no escape.</p>
+
+<p>For its long-term biological success, as well as for the continued
+integrity of a people's culture, a peace of non-resistance, under good
+or evil auspices, is more to be desired than imperial dominion. But
+these things are not<!-- Page 132 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 132]</span> all that modern peoples live for, perhaps it is
+safe to say that in no case are these chief among the things for which
+civilised Europeans are willing to live. They urgently need also freedom
+to live their own life in their own way, or rather to live within the
+bonds of convention which they have come in for by use and wont, or at
+least they believe that such freedom is essential to any life that shall
+be quite worth while. So also they have a felt need of security from
+arbitrary interference in their pursuit of a livelihood and in the free
+control of their own pecuniary concerns. And they want a discretionary
+voice in the management of their joint interests, whether as a nation or
+in a minor civil group. In short, they want personal, pecuniary and
+political liberty, free from all direction or inhibition from without.
+They are also much concerned to maintain favorable economic conditions
+for themselves and their children. And last, but chiefly rather than
+least, they commonly are hide-bound patriots inspired with an
+intractable felt need of national prestige.</p>
+
+<p>It is an assemblage of peoples in such a frame of mind to whom the
+pacifists are proposing, in effect, a plan for eventual submission to an
+alien dynasty, under the form of a neutral peace compact to include the
+warlike Powers. There is little likelihood of such a scheme being found
+acceptable, with popular sentiment running as it now does in the
+countries concerned. And yet, if the brittle temper in which any such
+proposal is rejected by popular opinion in these countries today could
+be made to yield sufficiently to reflection and deliberate appraisal, it
+is by no means a foregone conclusion that its acceptance would not be
+the best way out of a critical situation. The cost of disabling and
+eliminating the warlike Power whose dominion is<!-- Page 133 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 133]</span> feared, or even of
+staving off the day of surrender, is evidently serious enough. The
+merits of the alternative should be open to argument, and should,
+indeed, be allowed due consideration. And any endeavour to present them
+without heat should presumably find a hearing. It appears to have been
+much of the fault of the pacifists who speak for the Peace League that
+they have failed or refused to recognise these ulterior consequences of
+the plan which they advocate; so that they appear either not to know
+what they are talking about, or to avoid talking about what they know.</p>
+
+<p>It will be evident from beforehand that the grave difficulty to be met
+in any advocacy of peace on terms of non-resistant subjection to an
+alien dynastic rule&mdash;"peace at any price"&mdash;is a difficulty of the
+psychological order. Whatever may be conceived to hold true for the
+Chinese people, such submission is repugnant to the sentiments of the
+Western peoples. Which in turn evidently is due to the prevalence of
+certain habitual preconceptions among modern civilised men,&mdash;certain
+acquired traits of temper and bias, of the nature of fixed ideas. That
+something in the way of a reasonably contented and useful life is
+possible under such a r&eacute;gime as is held in prospect, and even some
+tolerable degree of well-being, is made evident in the Chinese case. But
+the Chinese tolerance of such a r&eacute;gime goes to argue that they are
+charged with fewer preconceptions at variance with the exigencies of
+life under these conditions. So, it is commonly accepted, and presumably
+to be accepted, that the Chinese people at large have little if any
+effectual sense of nationality; their patriotism appears to be nearly a
+negligible quantity. This would appear to an outsider to have been their
+besetting weakness, to which their successful subjection by various and<!-- Page 134 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+sundry ambitious aliens has been due. But it appears also to have been
+the infirmity by grace of which this people have been obliged to learn
+the ways of submission, and so have had the fortune to outlive their
+alien masters, all and sundry, and to occupy the land and save the
+uncontaminated integrity of their long-lived civilisation.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Some account of the nature and uses of this spirit of patriotism that is
+held of so great account among Western nations has already been set out
+in an earlier passage. One or two points in the case, that bear on the
+argument here, may profitably be recalled. The patriotic spirit, or the
+tie of nationalism, is evidently of the nature of habit, whatever
+proclivity to the formation of such a habit may be native to mankind.
+More particularly is it a matter of habit&mdash;it might even be called a
+matter of fortuitous habit&mdash;what particular national establishment a
+given human subject will become attached to on reaching what is called
+"years of discretion" and so becoming a patriotic citizen.</p>
+
+<p>The analogy of the clam may not be convincing, but it may at least serve
+to suggest what may be the share played by habituation in the matter of
+national attachment. The young clam, after having passed the
+free-swimming phase of his life, as well as the period of attachment to
+the person of a carp or similar fish, drops to the bottom and attaches
+himself loosely in the place and station in life to which he has been
+led; and he loyally sticks to his particular patch of ooze and sand
+through good fortune and evil. It is, under Providence, something of a
+fortuitous matter where the given clam shall find a resting place for
+the sole of his foot, but it is also, after all, "his own, his native
+land" etc. It lies in the<!-- Page 135 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 135]</span> nature of a clam to attach himself after this
+fashion, loosely, to the bottom where he finds a living, and he would
+not be a "good clam and true" if he failed to do so; but the particular
+spot for which he forms this attachment is not of the essence of the
+case. At least, so they say.</p>
+
+<p>It may be, as good men appear to believe or know, that all men of sound,
+or at least those of average, mind will necessarily be of a patriotic
+temper and be attached by ties of loyalty to some particular national
+establishment, ordinarily the particular establishment which is formally
+identified with the land in which they live; although it is always
+possible that a given individual may be an alien in the land, and so may
+owe allegiance to and be ruled by a patriotic attachment to another
+national establishment, to which the conventionalities governing his
+special case have assigned him as his own proper nation. The analogy of
+the clam evidently does not cover the case. The patriotic citizen is
+attached to his own proper nationality not altogether by the accident of
+domicile, but rather by the conventions, legal or customary, which
+assign him to this or that national establishment according to certain
+principles of use and wont.</p>
+
+<p>Mere legal citizenship or allegiance does not decide the matter either;
+at least not by any means unavoidably; as appears in the case of the
+Chinese subject under Manchu or Japanese rule; and as appears perhaps
+more perspicuously in the case of the "hyphenate" American citizen,
+whose formal allegiance is to the nation in whose land he prefers to
+live, all the while that his patriotic affection centers on his
+spiritual Fatherland in whose fortunes he has none but a non-resident
+interest. Indeed, the particular national tie that will bind the
+affections<!-- Page 136 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 136]</span>&mdash;that is to say the effectual patriotic attachment&mdash;of any
+given individual may turn out on closer scrutiny to be neither that of
+domicile or of formal legal allegiance, nor that of putative origin or
+pedigree, but only a reflex of certain national animosities; which may
+also turn out on examination to rest on putative grounds&mdash;as illustrated
+by a subsidiary class of hyphenate American citizens whose affections
+have come to be bound up in the national fortunes of one foreign Power
+for the simple, but sufficient, reason that, on conventional grounds,
+they bear malice against another equally foreign Power.</p>
+
+<p>Evidently there is much sophistication, not to say conventionalised
+affectation, in all this national attachment and allegiance. It will
+perhaps not do to say that it is altogether a matter of sophistication.
+Yet it may not exceed the premises to say that the particular choice,
+the concrete incidence, of this national attachment is in any given case
+a matter of sophistication, largely tempered with fortuity. One is born
+into a given nationality&mdash;or, in case of dynastic allegiance, into
+service and devotion to a (fortuitously) given sovereign&mdash;or at least so
+it is commonly believed. Still one can without blame, and without
+excessive shame, shift one's allegiance on occasion. What is not
+countenanced among civilised men is to shift out of allegiance to any
+given nationality or dynasty without shifting into the like complication
+of gainless obligations somewhere else. Such a shifting of national or
+dynastic base is not quite reputable, though it is also not precisely
+disreputable. The difficulty in the case appears to be a moral
+difficulty, not a mental or a pecuniary one, and assuredly not a
+physical difficulty, since the relation in question is not a physical
+relation. It would appear to be of the moral order of things, in that
+sense of the term in which<!-- Page 137 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 137]</span> conventional proprieties are spoken of as
+moral. That is to say, it is a question of conforming to current
+expectations under a code of conventional proprieties. Like much of the
+conventional code of behavior this patriotic attachment has the benefit
+of standardised decorum, and its outward manifestations are enjoined by
+law. All of which goes to show how very seriously the whole matter is
+regarded.</p>
+
+<p>And yet it is also a matter of common notoriety that large aggregates of
+men, not to speak of sporadic individuals, will on occasion shift their
+allegiance with the most felicitous effect and with no sensible loss of
+self-respect or of their good name. Such a shift is to be seen in
+multiple in the German nation within the past half-century, when, for
+instance, the Hanoverians, the Saxons, and even the Holsteiners in very
+appreciable numbers, not to mention the subjects of minuscular
+principalities whose names have been forgotten in the shuffle, all
+became good and loyal subjects of the Empire and of the Imperial
+dynasty,&mdash;good and loyal without reservation, as has abundantly
+appeared. So likewise within a similar period the inhabitants of the
+Southern States repudiated their allegiance to the Union, putting in its
+place an equivalent loyalty to their new-made country; and then, when
+the new national establishment slipped out from under their feet they
+returned as whole-heartedly as need be to their earlier allegiance. In
+each of these moves, taken with deliberation, it is not to be doubted
+that this body of citizens have been moved by an unimpeachable spirit of
+patriotic honour. No one who is in any degree conversant with the facts
+is likely to question the declaration that it would be a perversion, not
+to say an inversion, of fact to rate their patriotic devotion to the
+Union today lower<!-- Page 138 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 138]</span> than that of any other section of the country or any
+other class or condition of men.</p>
+
+<p>But there is more, and in a sense worse, to be found along the same
+general line of evidence touching this sublimated sentiment of group
+solidarity that is called nationalism. The nation, of course, is large;
+the larger the better, it is believed. It is so large, indeed, that
+considered as a group or community of men living together it has no
+sensible degree of homogeneity in any of their material circumstances or
+interests; nor is anything more than an inconsiderable fraction of the
+aggregate population, territory, industry, or daily life known to any
+one of these patriotic citizens except by remote and highly dubious
+hearsay. The one secure point on which there is a (constructive)
+uniformity is the matter of national allegiance; which grows stronger
+and more confident with every increase in aggregate mass and volume. It
+is also not doubtful, e.g., that if the people of the British Dominions
+in North America should choose to throw in their national lot with the
+Union, all sections and classes, except those whose pecuniary interest
+in a protective tariff might be conceived to suffer, would presently
+welcome them; nor is it doubtful that American nationality would cover
+the new and larger aggregate as readily as the old. Much the same will
+hold true with respect to the other countries colonised under British
+auspices. And there is no conclusive reason for drawing the limit of
+admissible national extension at that point.</p>
+
+<p>So much, however, is fairly within the possibilities of the calculable
+future; its realisation would turn in great measure on the
+discontinuance of certain outworn or disserviceable institutional
+arrangements; as, e.g., the remnants of a decayed monarchy, and the
+legally protected<!-- Page 139 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 139]</span> vested interests of certain business enterprises and
+of certain office-holding classes. What more and farther might
+practicably be undertaken in this way, in the absence of marplot
+office-holders, office-seekers, sovereigns, priests and monopolistic
+business concerns sheltered under national animosities and restraints of
+trade, would be something not easy to assign a limit to. All the minor
+neutrals, that cluster about the North Sea, could unquestionably be
+drawn into such a composite nationality, in the absence, or with due
+disregard, of those classes, families and individuals whose pecuniary or
+invidious gain is dependent on or furthered by the existing division of
+these peoples.</p>
+
+<p>The projected defensive league of neutrals is, in effect, an inchoate
+coalescence of the kind. Its purpose is the safeguarding of the common
+peace and freedom, which is also the avowed purpose and justification of
+all those modern nations that have outlived the r&eacute;gime of dynastic
+ambition and so of enterprise in dominion for dominion's sake, and have
+passed into the neutral phase of nationality; or it should perhaps
+rather be said that such is the end of endeavour and the warrant of
+existence and power for these modern national establishments in so far
+as they have outlived and repudiated such ambitions of a dynastic or a
+quasi-dynastic order, and so have taken their place as intrinsically
+neutral commonwealths.</p>
+
+<p>It is only in the common defense (or in the defense of the like
+conditions of life for their fellowmen elsewhere) that the citizens of
+such a commonwealth can without shame entertain or put in evidence a
+spirit of patriotic solidarity; and it is only by specious and
+sophistical appeal to the national honour&mdash;a conceit surviving out of
+the dynastic past&mdash;that the populace of such a commonwealth can be
+stirred to anything beyond a defense of<!-- Page 140 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> their own proper liberties or
+the liberties of like-minded men elsewhere, in so far as they are not
+still imbued with something of the dynastic animus and the chauvinistic
+animosities which they have formally repudiated in repudiating the
+feudalistic principles of the dynastic State.</p>
+
+<p>The "nation," without the bond of dynastic loyalty, is after all a
+make-shift idea, an episodic half-way station in the sequence, and
+loyalty, in any proper sense, to the nation as such is so much of a
+make-believe, that in the absence of a common defense to be safeguarded
+any such patriotic conceit must lose popular assurance and, with the
+passing of generations, fall insensibly into abeyance as an archaic
+affectation. The pressure of danger from without is necessary to keep
+the national spirit alert and stubborn, in case the pressure from
+within, that comes of dynastic usufruct working for dominion, has been
+withdrawn. With further extension of the national boundaries, such that
+the danger of gratuitous infraction from without grows constantly less
+menacing, while the traditional r&eacute;gime of international animosities
+falls more and more remotely into the background, the spirit of
+nationalism is fairly on the way to obsolescence through disuse. In
+other words, the nation, as a commonwealth, being a partisan
+organisation for a defensive purpose, becomes <i>functa officio</i> in
+respect of its nationalism and its patriotic ties in somewhat the same
+measure as the national coalition grows to such a size that partisanship
+is displaced by a cosmopolitan security.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless the falling into abeyance through disuse of so pleasing a
+virtue as patriotic devotion will seem an impossibly distasteful
+consummation; and about tastes there is no disputing, but tastes are
+mainly creations of habit. Except for the disquieting name of the thing,
+there<!-- Page 141 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 141]</span> is today little stands in the way of a cosmopolitan order of
+human intercourse unobtrusively displacing national allegiance; except
+for vested interests in national offices and international
+discriminations, and except for those peoples among whom national life
+still is sufficiently bound up with dynastic ambition.</p>
+
+<p>In an earlier passage the patriotic spirit has been defined as a sense
+of partisan solidarity in point of prestige, and sufficient argument has
+been spent in confirming the definition and showing its implications.
+With the passing of all occasion for a partisan spirit as touches the
+common good, through coalescence of the parts between which partisan
+discrepancies have hitherto been kept up, there would also have passed
+all legitimate occasion for or provocation to an intoxication of
+invidious prestige on national lines,&mdash;and there is no prestige that is
+not of an invidious nature, that being, indeed, the whole of its nature.
+He would have to be a person of praeternatural patriotic sensibilities
+who could fall into an emotional state by reason of the national
+prestige of such a coalition commonwealth as would be made up, e.g., of
+the French and English-speaking peoples, together with those other
+neutrally and peaceably inclined European communities that are of a
+sufficiently mature order to have abjured dynastic ambitions of
+dominion, and perhaps including the Chinese people as well. Such a
+coalition may now fairly be said to be within speaking distance, and
+with its consummation, even in the inchoate shape of a defensive league
+of neutrals, the eventual abeyance of that national allegiance and
+national honour that bulks so large in the repertory of current
+eloquence would also come in prospect.<!-- Page 142 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All this is by no means saying that love of country, and of use and wont
+as it runs in one's home area and among one's own people, would suffer
+decay, or even abatement. The provocation to nostalgia would presumably
+be as good as ever. It is even conceivable that under such a
+(contemplated) r&eacute;gime of unconditional security, attachment to one's own
+habitat and social circumstances might grow to something more than is
+commonly seen in the precarious situation in which the chances of a
+quiet life are placed today. But nostalgia is not a bellicose distemper,
+nor does it make for gratuitous disturbance of peaceable alien peoples;
+neither is it the spirit in which men lend themselves to warlike
+enterprise looking to profitless dominion abroad. Men make patriotic
+sacrifices of life and substance in spite of home-sickness rather than
+by virtue of it.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The aim of this long digression has been to show that patriotism, of
+that bellicose kind that seeks satisfaction in inflicting damage and
+discomfort on the people of other nations, is not of the essence of
+human life; that it is of the nature of habit, induced by circumstances
+in the past and handed on by tradition and institutional arrangements
+into the present; and that men can, without mutilation, divest
+themselves of it, or perhaps rather be divested of it by force of
+circumstances which will set the current of habituation the contrary
+way.</p>
+
+<p>The change of habituation necessary to bring about such a decay of the
+bellicose national spirit would appear to be of a negative order, at
+least in the main. It would be an habituation to unconditional peace and
+security; in other words, to the absence of provocation, rather than a
+coercive training away from the bellicose temper. This bellicose temper,
+as it affects men collectively, appears to<!-- Page 143 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 143]</span> be an acquired trait; and it
+should logically disappear in time in the absence of those conditions by
+impact of which it has been acquired. Such obsolescence of patriotism,
+however, would not therefore come about abruptly or swiftly, since the
+patriotic spirit has by past use and wont, and by past indoctrination,
+been so thoroughly worked into the texture of the institutional fabric
+and into the commonsense taste and morality, that its effectual
+obsolescence will involve a somewhat comprehensive displacement and
+mutation throughout the range of institutions and popular conceits that
+have been handed down. And institutional changes take time, being
+creations of habit. Yet, again, there is the qualification to this last,
+that since the change in question appears to be a matter, not of
+acquiring a habit and confirming it in the shape of an article of
+general use and wont, but of forgetting what once was learned, the time
+and experience to be allowed for its decay need logically not equal that
+required for its acquirement, either in point of duration or in point of
+the strictness of discipline necessary to inculcate it.</p>
+
+<p>While the spirit of nationalism is such an acquired trait, and while it
+should therefore follow that the chief agency in divesting men of it
+must be disuse of the discipline out of which it has arisen, yet a
+positive, and even something of a drastic discipline to the contrary
+effect need not be altogether ineffectual in bringing about its
+obsolescence. The case of the Chinese people seems to argue something of
+the sort. Not that the Chinese are simply and neutrally unpatriotic;
+they appear also to be well charged with disloyalty to their alien
+rulers. But along with a sense of being on the defensive in their common
+concerns, there is also the fact that they appear not to be appreciably
+patriotic in the proper sense; they<!-- Page 144 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> are not greatly moved by a spirit
+of nationality. And this failure of the national spirit among them can
+scarcely be set down to a neutral disuse of that discipline which has on
+the other hand induced a militant nationalism in the peoples of
+Christendom; it should seem more probable, at least, that this relative
+absence of a national ambition is traceable in good part to its having
+been positively bred out of them by the stern repression of all such
+aspirations under the autocratic rule of their alien masters.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Peace on terms of submission and non-resistance to the ordinary
+exactions and rulings of those Imperial authorities to whom such
+submission may become necessary, then, will be contingent on the virtual
+abeyance of the spirit of national pride in the peoples who so are to
+come under Imperial rule. A sufficient, by no means necessarily a total,
+elimination or decadence of this proclivity will be the condition
+precedent of any practicable scheme for a general peace on this footing.
+How large an allowance of such animus these prospectively subject
+peoples might still carry, without thereby assuring the defeat of any
+such plan, would in great measure depend on the degree of clemency or
+rigor with which the superior authority might enforce its rule. It is
+not that a peace plan of this nature need precisely be considered to
+fall outside the limits of possibility, on account of this necessary
+condition, but it is at the best a manifestly doubtful matter. Advocates
+of a negotiated peace should not fail to keep in mind and make public
+that the plan which they advocate carries with it, as a sequel or
+secondary phase, such an unconditional surrender and a consequent r&eacute;gime
+of non-resistance, and that there still is grave doubt whether the
+peoples of these Western nations are at pres<!-- Page 145 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>ent in a sufficiently
+tolerant frame of mind, or can in the calculable future come in for such
+a tolerantly neutral attitude in point of national pride, as to submit
+in any passable fashion to any alien Imperial rule.</p>
+
+<p>If the spiritual difficulty presented by this prevalent spirit of
+national pride&mdash;sufficiently stubborn still, however inane a conceit it
+may seem on sober reflection&mdash;if this animus of factional
+insubordination could be overcome or in some passable measure be
+conciliated or abated, there is much to be said in favor of such a plan
+of peaceable submission to an extraneous and arbitrary authority, and
+therefore also for that plan of negotiated peace by means of which
+events would be put in train for its realisation.</p>
+
+<p>Any passably dispassionate consideration of the projected r&eacute;gime will
+come unavoidably to the conclusion that the prospectively subject
+peoples should have no legitimate apprehension of loss or disadvantage
+in the material respect. It is, of course, easy for an unreflecting
+person to jump to the conclusion that subjection to an alien power must
+bring grievous burdens, in the way of taxes and similar impositions. But
+reflection will immediately show that no appreciable increase, over the
+economic burdens already carried by the populace under their several
+national establishments, could come of such a move.</p>
+
+<p>As bearing on this question it is well to call to mind that the
+contemplated imperial dominion is designed to be very wide-reaching and
+with very ample powers. Its nearest historical analogue, of course, is
+the Roman imperial dominion&mdash;in the days of the Antonines&mdash;and that the
+nearest analogue to the projected German peace is the Roman peace, in
+the days of its best security. There is every warrant for the
+presumption that the contem<!-- Page 146 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 146]</span>plated Imperial dominion is to be
+substantially all-inclusive. Indeed there is no stopping place for the
+projected enterprise short of an all-inclusive dominion. And there will
+consequently be no really menacing outside power to be provided against.
+Consequently there will be but little provision necessary for the common
+defense, as compared, e.g., with the aggregate of such provision found
+necessary for self-defense on the part of the existing nations acting in
+severalty and each jealously guarding its own national integrity.
+Indeed, compared with the burden of competitive armament to which the
+peoples of Europe have been accustomed, the need of any armed force
+under the new r&eacute;gime should be an inconsiderable matter, even when there
+is added to the necessary modicum of defensive preparation the more
+imperative and weightier provision of force with which to keep the peace
+at home.</p>
+
+<p>Into the composition of this necessary modicum of armed force slight if
+any contingents of men would be drawn from the subject peoples, for the
+reason that no great numbers would be needed; as also because no devoted
+loyalty to the dynasty could reasonably be looked for among them, even
+if no positive insecurity were felt to be involved in their employment.
+On this head the projected scheme unambiguously commends itself as a
+measure of economy, both in respect of the pecuniary burdens demanded
+and as regards the personal annoyance of military service.</p>
+
+<p>As a further count, it is to be presumed that the burden of the Imperial
+government and its bureaucratic administration&mdash;what would be called the
+cost of maintenance and repairs of the dynastic establishment and its
+apparatus of control&mdash;would be borne by the subject peoples. Here again
+one is warranted in looking for a sub<!-- Page 147 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 147]</span>stantial economy to be effected by
+such a centralised authority, and a consequent lighter aggregate burden
+on the subjects. Doubtless, the "overhead charges" would not be reduced
+to their practicable minimum. Such a governmental establishment, with
+its bureaucratic personnel, its "civil list" and its privileged classes,
+would not be conducted on anything like a parsimonious footing. There is
+no reason to apprehend any touch of modesty in the exactions of such a
+dynastic establishment for itself or in behalf of its underlying
+hierarchy of gentlefolk.</p>
+
+<p>There is also to be counted in, in the concrete instance on which the
+argument here turns, a more or less considerable burden of contributions
+toward the maintenance and augmentation of that culture that has been
+the topic of so many encomiums. At this point it should be recalled that
+it is the pattern of Periclean Athens that is continually in mind in
+these encomiums. Which brings up, in this immediate connection, the
+dealings of Periclean Athens with the funds of the League, and the
+source as well as the destination of these surplus funds. Out of it all
+came the works on the Acropolis, together with much else of intellectual
+and artistic life that converged upon and radiated from this Athenian
+center of culture. The vista of <i>Denkm&auml;ler</i> that so opens to the vision
+of a courageous fancy is in itself such a substance of things hoped for
+as should stir the heart of all humane persons.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> The cost of this
+subvention of Culture would doubtless be appreciable, but those grave
+men who have spent most thought on this prospective cultural gain to be
+had from the projected Imperial rule appear to entertain no doubt as to
+its being worth all that it would cost.<!-- Page 148 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 148]</span></p>
+
+<p>Any one who is inclined to rate the prospective pecuniary costs and
+losses high would doubtless be able to find various and sundry items of
+minor importance to add to this short list of general categories on the
+side of cost; but such additional items, not fairly to be included under
+these general captions, would after all be of minor importance, in the
+aggregate or in detail, and would not appreciably affect the grand
+balance of pecuniary profit and loss to be taken account of in any
+appraisal of the projected Imperial r&eacute;gime. There should evidently be
+little ground to apprehend that its installation would entail a net loss
+or a net increase of pecuniary burdens. There is, of course, the
+ill-defined and scarcely definable item of expenditure under the general
+head of Gentility, Dignity, Distinction, Magnificence, or whatever term
+may seem suitable to designate that consumption of goods and services
+that goes to maintain the high repute of the Court and to keep the
+underlying gentlefolk in countenance. In its pecuniary incidence this
+line of (necessary) expenditure belongs under the rubric of Conspicuous
+Waste; and one will always have to face the disquieting flexibility of
+this item of expenditure. The consumptive demand of this kind is in an
+eminent degree "indefinitely extensible," as the phrasing of the
+economists would have it, and as various historical instances of courtly
+splendor and fashionable magnificence will abundantly substantiate.
+There is a constant proclivity to advance this conventional "standard of
+living" to the limit set by the available means; and yet these
+conventional necessities will ordinarily not, in the aggregate, take up
+all the available means; although now and again, as under the <i>Ancien
+R&eacute;gime</i>, and perhaps in Imperial Rome, the standard of splendid living
+may also exceed the current means in<!-- Page 149 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 149]</span> hand and lead to impoverishment of
+the underlying community.</p>
+
+<p>An analysis of the circumstances governing this flexibility of the
+conventional standard of living and of pecuniary magnificence can not be
+gone into here. In the case under consideration it will have to be left
+as an indeterminate but considerable item in the burden of cost which
+the projected Imperial rule may be counted on to impose on the
+underlying peoples. The cost of the Imperial court, nobility, and civil
+service, therefore, would be a matter of estimate, on which no close
+agreement would be expected; and yet, here as in an earlier connection,
+it seems a reasonable expectation that sufficient dignity and
+magnificence could be put in evidence by such a large-scale
+establishment at a lower aggregate cost than the aggregate of
+expenditures previously incurred for the like ends by various nations
+working in severalty and at cross purposes.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless it would be altogether a mistaken view of this production of
+dignity by means of a lavish expenditure on superfluities, to believe
+that the same principle of economy should apply here as was found
+applicable in the matter of armament for defense. With the installation
+of a collective national establishment, to include substantially all the
+previously competing nations, the need of defensive armament should in
+all reason decline to something very inconsiderable indeed. But it would
+be hasty to conclude that with the coalescence of these nations under
+one paramount control the need of creating notoriety and prestige for
+this resulting central establishment by the consumption of decorative
+superfluities would likewise decline. The need of such dignity and
+magnificence is only in part, perhaps a minor part, of a defensive
+character. For the<!-- Page 150 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> greater part, no doubt, the motive to this
+conspicuously wasteful consumption is personal vanity, in Imperial
+policy as well as in the private life of fashion,&mdash;or perhaps one should
+more deferentially say that it is a certain range of considerations
+which would be identified as personal vanity in case they were met with
+among men beneath the Imperial level. And so far as the creation of this
+form of "good-will" by this manner of advertising is traceable to such,
+or equivalent, motives of a personal incidence, the provocation to
+economy along this line would presumably not be a notable factor in the
+case. And one returns perforce to the principle already spoken of above,
+that the consumptive need of superfluities is indefinitely extensible,
+with the resulting inference that nothing conclusive is to be said as to
+the prospective magnitude of this item in the Imperial bill of expense,
+or of the consequent pecuniary burdens which it would impose on the
+underlying peoples.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>So far the argument has run on the pecuniary incidence of this projected
+Imperial dominion as it falls on the underlying community as a whole,
+with no attempt to discriminate between the divergent interests of the
+different classes and conditions of men that go to make up any modern
+community. The question in hand is a question of pecuniary burdens, and
+therefore of the pecuniary interests of these several distinguishable
+classes or conditions of men. In all these modern nations that now stand
+in the article of decision between peace by submission or a doubtful and
+melancholy alternative,&mdash;in all of them men are by statute and custom
+inviolably equal before the law, of course; they are ungraded and
+masterless men before the law. But these same peoples are also alike<!-- Page 151 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 151]</span> in
+the respect that pecuniary duties and obligations among them are
+similarly sacred and inviolable under the dispassionate findings of the
+law. This pecuniary equality is, in effect, an impersonal equality
+between pecuniary magnitudes; from which it follows that these citizens
+of the advanced nations are not ungraded men in the pecuniary respect;
+nor are they masterless, in so far as a greater pecuniary force will
+always, under this impersonal equality of the law, stand in a relation
+of mastery toward a lesser one.</p>
+
+<p>Class distinctions, except pecuniary distinctions, have fallen away. But
+all these modern nations are made up of pecuniary classes, differing
+from one another by minute gradations in the marginal cases, but
+falling, after all, and in the large, into two broadly and securely
+distinguishable pecuniary categories: those who have more and those who
+have less. Statisticians have been at pains to ascertain that a
+relatively very small numerical minority of the citizens in these modern
+nations own all but a relatively very small proportion of the aggregate
+wealth in the country. So that it appears quite safe to say that in such
+a country as America, e.g., something less than ten percent of the
+inhabitants own something more than ninety percent of the country's
+wealth. It would scarcely be a wild overstraining of its practical
+meaning to say that this population is made up of two classes: those who
+own the country's wealth, and those who do not. In strict accuracy, as
+before the law, this characterisation will not hold; whereas in
+practical effect, it is a sufficiently close approximation. This latter
+class, who have substantially no other than a fancied pecuniary interest
+in the nation's material fortunes, are the category often spoken of as
+The Common Man. It is not necessary, nor is it desired,<!-- Page 152 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 152]</span> to find a
+corresponding designation for the other category, those who own.</p>
+
+<p>The articulate recognition of this division into contrasted pecuniary
+classes or conditions, with correspondingly (at least potentially)
+divergent pecuniary interests, need imply no degree of approval or
+disapproval of the arrangement which is so recognised. The recognition
+of it is necessary to a perspicuous control of the argument, as bears on
+the possible systematic and inherent discrepancy among these men in
+respect of their material interests under the projected Imperial rule.
+Substantially, it is a distinction between those who have and those who
+have not, and in a question of prospective pecuniary loss the man who
+has nothing to lose is differently placed from the one who has. It would
+perhaps seem flippant, and possibly lacking in the courtesy due one's
+prospective lord paramount, to say with the poet, <i>Cantabit vacuus coram
+latrone viator</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But the whole case is not so simple. It is only so long as the projected
+pecuniary inroad is conceived as a simple sequestration of wealth in
+hand, that such a characterisation can be made to serve. The Imperial
+aim is not a passing act of pillage, but a perpetual usufruct; and the
+whole question takes on a different and more complex shape when it so
+touches the enduring conditions of life and livelihood. The citizen who
+has nothing, or who has no capitalisable source of unearned income, yet
+has a pecuniary interest in a livelihood to be gained from day to day,
+and he is yet vulnerable in the pecuniary respect in that his livelihood
+may with the utmost facility be laid under contribution by various and
+sundry well-tried contrivances. Indeed, the common man who depends for
+his livelihood on his daily earnings is in a more immediately<!-- Page 153 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 153]</span>
+precarious position than those who have something appreciable laid up
+against a rainy day, in the shape of a capitalised source of income.
+Only that it is still doubtful if his position is precarious in such a
+fashion as to lay him open to a notable increase of hardship, or to loss
+of the amenities of life, in the same relative degree as his well-to-do
+neighbour.</p>
+
+<p>In point of fact it may well be doubted if this common man has anything
+to apprehend in the way of added hardship or loss of creature comforts
+under the contemplated r&eacute;gime of Imperial tutelage. He would presumably
+find himself in a precarious case under the arbitrary and irresponsible
+authority of an alien master working through an alien master class. The
+doubt which presents itself is as to whether this common man would be
+more precariously placed, or would come in for a larger and surer sum of
+hard usage and scant living, under this projected order of things, than
+what he already is exposed to in his pecuniary relations with his
+well-to-do compatriots under the current system of law and order.</p>
+
+<p>Under this current r&eacute;gime of law and order, according to the equitable
+principles of Natural Rights, the man without means has no pecuniary
+rights which his well-to-do pecuniary master is bound to respect. This
+may have been an unintended, as it doubtless was an unforeseen, outcome
+of the move out of feudalism and prescriptive rights and immunities,
+into the system of individual liberty and manhood franchise; but as
+commonly happens in case of any substantial change in the scheme of
+institutional arrangements, unforeseen consequences come in along with
+those that have been intended. In that period of history when Western
+Europe was gathering that experience out of which the current habitual
+scheme<!-- Page 154 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 154]</span> of law and order has come, the right of property and free
+contract was a complement and safeguard to that individual initiative
+and masterless equality of men for which the spokesmen of the new era
+contended. That it is no longer so at every turn, or even in the main,
+in later time, is in great part due to changes of the pecuniary order,
+that have come on since then, and that seem not to have cast their
+shadow before.</p>
+
+<p>In all good faith, and with none but inconsequential reservations, the
+material fortunes of modern civilised men&mdash;together with much else&mdash;have
+so been placed on a pecuniary footing, with little to safeguard them at
+any point except the inalienable right of pecuniary self-direction and
+initiative, in an environment where virtually all the indispensable
+means of pecuniary self-direction and initiative are in the hands of
+that contracted category of owners spoken of above. A numerical
+minority&mdash;under ten percent of the population&mdash;constitutes a conclusive
+pecuniary majority&mdash;over ninety percent of the means&mdash;under a system of
+law and order that turns on the inalienable right of owners to dispose
+of the means in hand as may suit their convenience and profit,&mdash;always
+barring recourse to illegal force or fraud. There is, however, a very
+appreciable margin of legal recourse to force and of legally protected
+fraud available in case of need. Of course the expedients here referred
+to as legally available force and fraud in the defense of pecuniary
+rights and the pursuit of pecuniary gain are not force and fraud <i>de
+jure</i> but only <i>de facto</i>. They are further, and well known,
+illustrations of how the ulterior consequences of given institutional
+arrangements and given conventionalised principles (habits of thought)
+of conduct may in time come to run at cross purposes with the initial
+purpose<!-- Page 155 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 155]</span> that led to the acceptance of these institutions and to the
+confirmation and standardisation of these habitual norms of conduct. For
+the time being, however, they are "fundamentally and eternally right and
+good."</p>
+
+<p>Being a pecuniary majority&mdash;what may be called a majority of the
+corporate stock&mdash;of the nation, it is also fundamentally and eternally
+right and good that the pecuniary interests of the owners of the
+material means of life should rule unabated in all those matters of
+public policy that touch on the material fortunes of the community at
+large. Barring a slight and intermittent mutter of discontent, this
+arrangement has also the cordial approval of popular sentiment in these
+modern democratic nations. One need only recall the paramount importance
+which is popularly attached to the maintenance and extension of the
+nation's trade&mdash;for the use of the investors&mdash;or the perpetuation of a
+protective tariff&mdash;for the use of the protected business concerns&mdash;or,
+again, the scrupulous regard with which such a body of public servants
+as the Interstate Commerce Commission will safeguard the legitimate
+claim of the railway companies to a "reasonable" rate of earnings on the
+capitalised value of the presumed earning-capacity of their property.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Again, in view of the unaccustomed freedom with which it is here
+necessary to speak of these delicate matters, it may be in place to
+disclaim all intention to criticise the established arrangements on
+their merits as details of public policy. All that comes in question
+here, touching these and the like features of the established law and
+order, is the bearing of all this on the material fortunes of the common
+man under the current r&eacute;gime, as contrasted with what he would
+reasonably have to look for<!-- Page 156 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> under the projected r&eacute;gime of Imperial
+tutelage that would come in, consequent upon this national surrender to
+Imperial dominion.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In these democratic countries public policy is guided primarily by
+considerations of business expediency, and the administration, as well
+as the legislative power, is in the hands of businessmen, chosen
+avowedly on the ground of their businesslike principles and ability.
+There is no power in such a community that can over-rule the exigencies
+of business, nor would popular sentiment countenance any exercise of
+power that should traverse these exigencies, or that would act to
+restrain trade or discourage the pursuit of gain. An apparent exception
+to the rule occurs in wartime, when military exigencies may over-rule
+the current demands of business traffic; but the exception is in great
+part only apparent, in that the warlike operations are undertaken in
+whole or in part with a view to the protection or extension of business
+traffic.</p>
+
+<p>National surveillance and regulation of business traffic in these
+countries hitherto, ever since and in so far as the modern democratic
+order of things has taken effect, has uniformly been of the nature of
+interference with trade and investment in behalf of the nation's
+mercantile community at large, as seen in port and shipping regulations
+and in the consular service, or in behalf of particular favored groups
+or classes of business concerns, as in protective tariffs and subsidies.
+In all this national management of pecuniary affairs, under modern
+democratic principles, the common man comes into the case only as raw
+material of business traffic,&mdash;as consumer or as laborer. He is one of
+the industrial agencies by use of which the businessman who employs him
+supplies himself with<!-- Page 157 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 157]</span> goods for the market, or he is one of the units
+of consumptive demand that make up this market in which the business man
+sells his goods, and so "realises" on his investment. He is, of course,
+free, under modern principles of the democratic order, to deal or not to
+deal with this business community, whether as laborer or as consumer, or
+as small-scale producer engaged in purveying materials or services on
+terms defined by the community of business interests engaged on so large
+a scale as to count in their determination. That is to say, he is free
+<i>de jure</i> to take or leave the terms offered. <i>De facto</i> he is only free
+to take them&mdash;with inconsequential exceptions&mdash;the alternative being
+obsolescence by disuse, not to choose a harsher name for a distasteful
+eventuality.</p>
+
+<p>The general ground on which the business system, as it works under the
+over-ruling exigencies of the so-called "big business," so defines the
+terms of life for the common man, who works and buys, is the ground
+afforded by the principle of "charging what the traffic will bear;" that
+is to say, fixing the terms of hiring, buying and selling at such a
+figure as will yield the largest net return to the business concerns in
+whom, collectively or in severalty, the discretion vests. Discretion in
+these premises does not vest in any business concern that does not
+articulate with the system of "big business," or that does not dispose
+of resources sufficient to make it a formidable member of the system.
+Whether these concerns act in severalty or by collusion and conspiracy,
+in so defining the pecuniary terms of life for the community at large,
+is substantially an idle question, so far as bears on the material
+interest of the common man. The base-line is still what the traffic will
+bear, and it is still adhered to, so nearly as the human infirmity of
+the discretionary captains of industry will<!-- Page 158 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> admit, whether the due
+approximation to this base-line is reached by a process of competitive
+bidding or by collusive advisement.</p>
+
+<p>The generalisation so offered, touching the material conditions of life
+for the common man under the modern rule of big business, may seem
+unwarrantably broad. It may be worth while to take note of more than one
+point in qualification of it, chiefly to avoid the appearance of having
+overlooked any of the material circumstances of the case. The "system"
+of large business, working its material consequences through the system
+of large-scale industry, but more particularly by way of the large-scale
+and wide-reaching business of trade in the proper sense, draws into the
+net of its control all parts of the community and all its inhabitants,
+in some degree of dependence. But there is always, hitherto, an
+appreciable fraction of the inhabitants&mdash;as, e.g., outlying agricultural
+sections that are in a "backward" state&mdash;who are by no means closely
+bound in the orderly system of business, or closely dependent on the
+markets. They may be said to enjoy a degree of independence, by virtue
+of their foregoing as much as may be of the advantages offered by modern
+industrial specialisation. So also there are the minor and interstitial
+trades that are still carried on by handicraft methods; these, too, are
+still somewhat loosely held in the fabric of the business system. There
+is one thing and another in this way to be taken account of in any
+exhaustive survey, but the accounting for them will after all amount to
+nothing better than a gleaning of remnants and partial exceptions, such
+as will in no material degree derange the general proposition in hand.</p>
+
+<p>Again, there runs through the length and breadth of this business
+community a certain measure of incom<!-- Page 159 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 159]</span>petence or inefficiency of
+management, as seen from the point of view of the conceivable perfect
+working of the system as a whole. It may be due to a slack attention
+here and there; or to the exigencies of business strategy which may
+constrain given business concerns to an occasional attitude of "watchful
+waiting" in the hope of catching a rival off his guard; or to a lack of
+perfect mutual understanding among the discretionary businessmen, due
+sometimes to an over-careful guarding of trade secrets or advance
+information; or, as also happens, and quite excusably, to a lack of
+perfect mutual confidence among these businessmen, as to one another's
+entire good faith or good-will. The system is after all a competitive
+one, in the sense that each of the discretionary directors of business
+is working for his own pecuniary gain, whether in cooperation with his
+fellows or not. "An honest man will bear watching." As in other
+collusive organisations for gain, confederates are apt to fall out when
+it comes to a division of what is in hand. In one way and another the
+system is beset with inherent infirmities, which hinder its perfect
+work; and in so far it will fall short of the full realisation of that
+rule of business that inculcates charging what the traffic will bear,
+and also in so far the pressure which the modern system of business
+management brings to bear on the common man will also fall short of the
+last straw&mdash;perhaps even of the next-to-the-last. Again it turns out to
+be a question not of the failure of the general proposition as
+formulated, but rather as to the closeness of approximation to its
+theoretically perfect work. It may be remarked by the way that vigilant
+and impartial surveillance of this system of business enterprise by an
+external authority interested only in aggregate results, rather than in
+the differential gains<!-- Page 160 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 160]</span> of the interested individuals, might hopefully
+be counted on to correct some of these shortcomings which the system
+shows when running loose under the guidance of its own multifarious
+incentives.</p>
+
+<p>On the opposite side of the account, it is also worth noting that, while
+modern business management may now and again fall short of what the
+traffic will bear, it happens more commonly that its exactions will
+exceed that limit. This will particularly be true in businessmen's
+dealings with hired labour, as also and perhaps with equally
+far-reaching consequences in an excessive recourse to sophistications
+and adulterants and an excessively parsimonious provision for the
+safety, health or comfort of their customers&mdash;as, e.g., in passenger
+traffic by rail, water or tramway. The discrepancy to which attention is
+invited here is due to a discrepancy between business expediency, that
+is expediency for the purpose of gain by a given businessman, on the one
+hand, and serviceability to the common good, on the other hand. The
+business concern's interest in the traffic in which it engages is a
+short-term interest, or an interest in the short-term returns, as
+contrasted with the long-term or enduring interest which the community
+at large has in the public service over which any such given business
+concern disposes. The business incentive is that afforded by the
+prospective net pecuniary gain from the traffic, substantially an
+interest in profitable sales; while the community at large, or the
+common man that goes to make up such a community, has a material
+interest in this traffic only as regards the services rendered and the
+enduring effects that follow from it.</p>
+
+<p>The businessman has not, or at least is commonly not influenced by, any
+interest in the ulterior consequences<!-- Page 161 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 161]</span> of the transactions in which he
+is immediately engaged. This appears to hold true in an accentuated
+degree in the domain of that large-scale business that draws its gains
+from the large-scale modern industry and is managed on the modern
+footing of corporation finance. This modern fashion of business
+organisation and management apparently has led to a substantial
+shortening of the term over which any given investor maintains an
+effective interest in any given corporate enterprise, in which his
+investments may be placed for the time being. With the current practice
+of organising industrial and mercantile enterprises on a basis of
+vendible securities, and with the nearly complete exemption from
+personal responsibility and enduring personal attachment to any one
+corporate enterprise which this financial expedient has brought, it has
+come about that in the common run of cases the investor, as well as the
+directorate, in any given enterprise, has an interest only for the time
+being. The average term over which it is (pecuniarily) incumbent on the
+modern businessman to take account of the working of any given
+enterprise has shortened so far that the old-fashioned accountability,
+that once was depended on to dictate a sane and considerate management
+with a view to permanent good-will, has in great measure become
+inoperative.</p>
+
+<p>By and large, it seems unavoidable that the pecuniary interests of the
+businessmen on the one hand and the material interests of the community
+on the other hand are diverging in a more and more pronounced degree,
+due to institutional circumstances over which no prompt control can be
+had without immediate violation of that scheme of personal rights in
+which the constitution of modern democratic society is grounded. The
+quandary in which these communities find themselves, as an out<!-- Page 162 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 162]</span>come of
+their entrance upon "the simple and obvious system of Natural Liberty,"
+is shown in a large and instructive way by what is called "labor
+trouble," and in a more recondite but no less convincing fashion by the
+fortunes of the individual workman under the modern system.</p>
+
+<p>The cost of production of a modern workman has constantly increased,
+with the advance of the industrial arts. The period of preparation, of
+education and training, necessary to turn out competent workmen, has
+been increasing; and the period of full workmanlike efficiency has been
+shortening, in those industries that employ the delicate and exacting
+processes of the modern technology. The shortening of this working-life
+of the workman is due both to a lengthening of the necessary period of
+preparation, and to the demand of these processes for so full a use of
+the workman's forces that even the beginning of senescence will count as
+a serious disability,&mdash;in many occupations as a fatal disability. It is
+also a well ascertained fact that effectual old age will be brought on
+at an earlier period by overwork; overwork shortens the working
+life-time of the workman. Thorough speeding-up ("Scientific
+Management"?) will unduly shorten this working life-time, and so it may,
+somewhat readily, result in an uneconomical consumption of the
+community's man-power, by consuming the workmen at a higher rate of
+speed, a higher pressure, with a more rapid rate of deterioration, than
+would give the largest net output of product per unit of man-power
+available, or per unit of cost of production of such man-power.</p>
+
+<p>On this head the guiding incentives of the businessman and the material
+interest of the community at large&mdash;not to speak of the selfish interest
+of the individual workman<!-- Page 163 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 163]</span>&mdash;are systematically at variance. The cost of
+production of workmen does not fall on the business concern which
+employs them, at least not in such definite fashion as to make it appear
+that the given business concern or businessman has a material interest
+in the economical consumption of the man-power embodied in this given
+body of employees. Some slight and exceptional qualification of this
+statement is to be noted, in those cases where the processes in use are
+such as to require special training, not to be had except by a working
+habituation to these processes in the particular industrial plant in
+question. So far as such special training, to be had only as employees
+of the given concern, is a necessary part of the workman's equipment for
+this particular work, so far the given employer bears a share and an
+interest in the cost of production of the workmen employed; and so far,
+therefore, the employer has also a pecuniary interest in the economical
+use of his employees; which usually shows itself in the way of some
+special precautions being taken to prevent the departure of these
+workmen so long as there is a clear pecuniary loss involved in replacing
+them with men who have not yet had the special training required.
+Evidently this qualifying consideration covers no great proportion of
+the aggregate man-power consumed in industrial enterprises under
+business management. And apart from the instances, essentially
+exceptional, where such a special consideration comes in, the
+businessmen in charge will, quite excusably as things go, endeavour to
+consume the man-power of which they dispose in the persons of their
+employees, not at the rate that would be most economical to the
+community at large, in view of the cost of their replacement, nor at
+such a rate as would best suit the taste or the viability of the<!-- Page 164 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 164]</span>
+particular workman, but at such a rate as will yield the largest net
+pecuniary gain to the employer.</p>
+
+<p>There is on record an illustrative, and indeed an illustrious, instance
+of such cannily gainful consumption of man-power carried out
+systematically and with consistently profitable effect in one of the
+staple industries of the country. In this typical, though exceptionally
+thoroughgoing and lucrative enterprise, the set rule of the management
+was, to employ none but select workmen, in each respective line of work;
+to procure such select workmen and retain them by offering wages
+slightly over the ordinary standard; to work them at the highest pace
+and pressure attainable with such a picked body; and to discharge them
+on the first appearance of aging or of failing powers. In the rules of
+the management was also included the negative proviso that the concern
+assumed no responsibility for the subsequent fortunes of discharged
+workmen, in the way of pension, insurance or the like.</p>
+
+<p>This enterprise was highly successful and exceedingly profitable, even
+beyond the high average of profits among enterprises in the same line of
+business. Out of it came one of the greater and more illustrious
+fortunes that have been accumulated during the past century; a fortune
+which has enabled one of the most impressive and most gracious of this
+generation's many impressive philanthropists, never weary in well-doing;
+but who, through this cannily gainful consumption of man-power, has been
+placed in the singular position of being unable, in spite of avowedly
+unremitting endeavour, to push his continued disbursements in the
+service of humanity up to the figure of his current income. The case in
+question is one of the most meritorious known to the records of<!-- Page 165 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> modern
+business, and while it will conveniently serve to illustrate many an
+other, and perhaps more consequential truth come to realisation in the
+march of Triumphant Democracy, it will also serve to show the
+gainfulness of an unreservedly canny consumption of man-power with an
+eye single to one's own net gain in terms of money.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Evidently this is a point in the articulation of the modern economic
+system where a sufficiently ruthless outside authority, not actuated by
+a primary regard for the pecuniary interests of the employers, might
+conceivably with good effect enforce a more economical consumption of
+the country's man-power. It is not a matter on which one prefers to
+dwell, but it can do no harm to take note of the fact for once in a way,
+that these several national establishments of the democratic order, as
+they are now organised and administered, do somewhat uniformly and
+pervasively operate with an effectual view to the advantage of a class,
+so far as may plausibly be done. They are controlled by and administered
+in behalf of those elements of the population that, for the purpose in
+hand, make up a single loose-knit class,&mdash;the class that lives by income
+rather than by work. It may be called the class of the business
+interests, or of capital, or of gentlemen. It all comes to much the
+same, for the purpose in hand.</p>
+
+<p>The point in speaking of this contingent whose place in the economy of
+human affairs it is to consume, or to own, or to pursue a margin of
+profit, is simply that of contrasting this composite human contingent
+with the common man; whose numbers account for some nine-tenths or more
+of the community, while his class accounts for something less than
+one-tenth of the invested wealth,<!-- Page 166 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 166]</span> and appreciably less than that
+proportion of the discretionary national establishment,&mdash;the government,
+national or local, courts, attorneys, civil service, diplomatic and
+consular, military and naval. The arrangement may be called a
+gentlemen's government, if one would rather have it that way; but a
+gentleman is necessarily one who lives on free income from invested
+wealth&mdash;without such a source of free, that is to say unearned, income
+he becomes a decayed gentleman. Again, pushing the phrasing back a step
+farther toward the ground facts, there are those who would speak of the
+current establishments as "capitalistic;" but this term is out of line
+in that it fails to touch the human element in the case, and
+institutions, such as governmental establishments and their functioning,
+are after all nothing but the accustomed ways and means of human
+behaviour; so that "capitalistic" becomes a synonym for "businessmen's"
+government so soon as it is designated in terms of the driving
+incentives and the personnel. It is an organisation had with a view to
+the needs of business (i.e. pecuniary) enterprise, and is made up of
+businessmen and gentlemen, which comes to much the same, since a
+gentleman is only a businessman in the second or some later generation.
+Except for the slightly odious suggestion carried by the phrase, one
+might aptly say that the gentleman, in this bearing, is only a
+businessman gone to seed.</p>
+
+<p>By and large, and taking the matter naively at the simple face value of
+the material gain or loss involved, it should seem something of an idle
+question to the common man whether his collective affairs are to be
+managed by a home-bred line of businessmen and their successive filial
+generations of gentlemen, with a view to accelerate the velocity and
+increase the volume of com<!-- Page 167 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 167]</span>petitive gain and competitive spending, on
+the one hand, or by an alien line of officials, equally aloof from his
+common interests, and managing affairs with a view to the usufruct of
+his productive powers in furtherance of the Imperial dominion.</p>
+
+<p>Not that the good faith or the generous intentions of these governments
+of gentlemen is questioned or is in any degree questionable; what is
+here spoken of is only the practical effect of the policies which they
+pursue, doubtless with benevolent intentions and well-placed
+complacency. In effect, things being as they are today in the civilised
+world's industry and trade, it happens, as in some sort an unintended
+but all-inclusive accident, that the guidance of affairs by business
+principles works at cross purposes with the material interests of the
+common man.</p>
+
+<p>So ungraceful a view of the sacred core of this modern democratic
+organisation will need whatever evidence can be cited to keep it in
+countenance. Therefore indulgence is desired for one further count in
+this distasteful recital of ineptitudes inherent in this institutional
+scheme of civilised life. This count comes under the head of what may be
+called capitalistic sabotage. "Sabotage" is employed to designate a
+wilful retardation, interruption or obstruction of industry by
+peaceable, and ordinarily by legally defensible, measures. In its
+present application, particularly, there is no design to let the term
+denote or insinuate a recourse to any expedients or any line of conduct
+that is in any degree legally dubious, or that is even of questionable
+legitimacy.</p>
+
+<p>Sabotage so understood, as not comprising recourse to force or fraud, is
+a necessary and staple expedient of business management, and its
+employment is grounded in<!-- Page 168 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 168]</span> the elementary and indefeasible rights of
+ownership. It is simply that the businessman, like any other owner, is
+vested with the right freely to use or not to use his property for any
+given purpose. His decision, for reasons of his own, not to employ the
+property at his disposal in a particular way at a particular time, is
+well and blamelessly within his legitimate discretion, under the rights
+of property as universally accepted and defended by modern nations. In
+the particular instance of the American nation he is protected in this
+right by a constitutional provision that he must not be deprived of his
+property without due process of law. When the property at his disposal
+is in the shape of industrial plant or industrial material, means of
+transportation or stock of goods awaiting distribution, then his
+decision not to employ this property, or to limit its use to something
+less than full capacity, in the way for which it is adapted, becomes
+sabotage, normally and with negligible exceptions. In so doing he
+hinders, retards or obstructs the working of the country's industrial
+forces by so much. It is a matter of course and of absolute necessity to
+the conduct of business, that any discretionary businessman must be free
+to deal or not to deal in any given case; to limit or to withhold the
+equipment under his control, without reservation. Business discretion
+and business strategy, in fact, has no other means by which to work out
+its aims. So that, in effect, all business sagacity reduces itself in
+the last analysis to a judicious use of sabotage. Under modern
+conditions of large business, particularly, the relation of the
+discretionary businessman to industry is that of authoritative
+permission and of authoritative limitation or stoppage, and on his
+shrewd use of this authority depends the gainfulness of his enterprise.<!-- Page 169 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 169]</span></p>
+
+<p>If this authority were exercised with an eye single to the largest and
+most serviceable output of goods and services, or to the most economical
+use of the country's material resources and man-power, regardless of
+pecuniary consequences, the course of management so carried out would be
+not sabotage but industrial strategy. But business is carried on for
+pecuniary gain, not with an unreserved view to the largest and most
+serviceable output or to the economical use of resources. The volume and
+serviceability of the output must wait unreservedly on the very
+particular pecuniary question of what quantity and what degree of
+serviceability will yield the largest net return in terms of price.
+Uneconomical use of equipment, labor and resources is necessarily an
+everyday matter under these circumstances, as in the duplication of
+plant and processes between rival concerns, and in the wasteful use of
+all resources that do not involve expenditure on the part of the given
+concern.</p>
+
+<p>It has been the traditional dogma among economists and publicists in
+these modern communities that free competition between the businessmen
+in charge will indefeasibly act to bring the productiveness of industry
+to the highest practicable pitch and would lead to the most unreserved
+and vigilant endeavour to serve the community's material needs at all
+points. The reasons for the failure of this genial expectation,
+particularly under latterday business management, might be shown in some
+detail, if that were needed to enforce the argument as it runs in the
+present connection. But a summary indication of the commoner varieties
+and effects of sabotage as it is systematically applied in the
+businesslike conduct of industry will serve the purpose as well and with
+less waste of words and patience.<!-- Page 170 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 170]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is usual to notice, and not unusual to deplore the duplication of
+plant and appliances in many lines of industry, due to competitive
+management, as in factories engaged in the same class of manufacture, in
+parallel or otherwise competing railways and boat lines, in retail
+merchandising, and in some degree also in the wholesale trade. The
+result, of course, is sabotage; in the sense that this volume of
+appliances, materials and workmen are not employed to the best advantage
+for the community. One effect of the arrangement is an increased
+necessary cost of the goods and services supplied by these means. The
+reason for it is competition for gain to be got from the traffic. That
+all this is an untoward state of things is recognised on all hands; but
+no lively regret is commonly spent on the matter, since it is commonly
+recognised that under the circumstances there is no help for it except
+at the cost of a more untoward remedy.</p>
+
+<p>The competitive system having been tried and found good&mdash;or at least so
+it is assumed&mdash;it is felt that the system will have to be accepted with
+the defects of its qualities. Its characteristic qualities are held to
+be good, acceptable to the tastes of modern men whose habits of thought
+have been standardised in its terms; and it would be only reluctantly
+and by tardy concession that these modern men could bring themselves to
+give up that scheme of "Natural Liberty" within the framework of which
+runs this competitive system of business management and its wasteful
+manifolding of half-idle equipment and nugatory work. The common man, at
+the worst, comforts himself and his neighbour with the sage reflection
+that "It might have been worse." The businessmen, on the other hand,
+have also begun to take note of this<!-- Page 171 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 171]</span> systematic waste by duplication
+and consequent incompetence, and have taken counsel how to intercept the
+waste and divert it to their own profit. The businessmen's remedy is
+consolidation of competing concerns, and monopoly control.</p>
+
+<p>To the common man, with his preconceptions on the head of "restraint of
+trade," the proposed remedy seems more vicious than the evil it is
+designed to cure. The fault of the remedy plainly is not that the
+mismanagement of affairs due to competitive business can not be
+corrected by recourse to monopoly, but only that the community, it is
+presumed, would still suffer all the burdens and discomforts of the
+r&eacute;gime of competition and sabotage, with, possibly, further
+inconveniences and impositions at the hands of the businesslike
+monopoly; which, men are agreed, may fairly be depended on to use its
+advantage unsparingly under the business principle of charging what the
+traffic will bear.</p>
+
+<p>There is also this other singular phenomenon in this modern industrial
+world, that something not very far short of one-half the industrial
+equipment systematically lies idle for something approaching one-half
+the time, or is worked only to one-half its capacity half the time; not
+because of competition between these several industrial concerns, but
+because business conditions will not allow its continued productive use;
+because the volume of product that would be turned out if the equipment
+were working uninterruptedly at its full capacity could not be sold at
+remunerative prices. From time to time one establishment and another
+will shut down during a period of slack times, for the same reason.</p>
+
+<p>This state of things is singular only as seen from the point of view of
+the community's material interest, not<!-- Page 172 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 172]</span> that it is in any degree
+unfamiliar or that any serious fault is found with the captains of
+industry for so shutting off the industrial process and letting the
+industrial equipment lie waste. As all men know, the exigencies of
+business will not tolerate production to supply the community's needs
+under these circumstances; although, as is equally notorious, these
+slack times, when production of goods is unadvisable on grounds of
+business expediency, are commonly times of wide-spread privation, "hard
+times," in the community at large, when the failure of the supply is
+keenly felt.</p>
+
+<p>It is not that the captains of industry are at fault in so failing, or
+refusing, to supply the needs of the community under these
+circumstances, but only that they are helpless under the exigencies of
+business. They can not supply the goods except for a price, indeed not
+except for a remunerative price, a price which will add something to the
+capital values which they are venturing in their various enterprises. So
+long as the exigencies of price and of pecuniary gain rule the case,
+there is manifestly no escaping this enforced idleness of the country's
+productive forces.</p>
+
+<p>It may not be out of place also to remark, by way of parenthesis, that
+this highly productive state of the industrial arts, which is embodied
+in the industrial plant and processes that so are systematically and
+advisedly retarded or arrested under the rule of business, is at the
+same time the particular pride of civilised men and the most tangible
+achievement of the civilised world.</p>
+
+<p>A conservative estimate of this one item of capitalistic sabotage could
+scarcely appraise it at less than a twenty-five percent reduction from
+the normally possible productive capacity of the community, at an
+average over<!-- Page 173 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 173]</span> any considerable period; and a somewhat thorough review of
+the pertinent facts would probably persuade any impartial observer that,
+one year with another, such businesslike enforced idleness of plant and
+personnel lowers the actual output of the country's industry by
+something nearer fifty percent of its ordinary capacity when fully
+employed. To many, such an assertion may seem extravagant, but with
+further reflection on the well-known facts in the case it will seem less
+so in proportion as the unfamiliarity of it wears off.</p>
+
+<p>However, the point of attention in the case is not the precise, nor the
+approximate, percentages of this arrest and retardation, this partial
+neutralisation of modern improvements in the industrial arts; it is only
+the notorious fact that such arrest occurs, systematically and
+advisedly, under the rule of business exigencies, and that there is no
+corrective to be found for it that will comport with those fundamental
+articles of the democratic faith on which the businessmen necessarily
+proceed. Any effectual corrective would break the framework of
+democratic law and order, since it would have to traverse the
+inalienable right of men who are born free and equal, each freely to
+deal or not to deal in any pecuniary conjuncture that arises.</p>
+
+<p>But it is at the same time plain enough that this, in the larger sense
+untoward, discrepancy between productive capacity and current productive
+output can readily be corrected, in some appreciable degree at least, by
+any sufficient authority that shall undertake to control the country's
+industrial forces without regard to pecuniary profit and loss. Any
+authority competent to take over the control and regulate the conduct of
+the community's industry with a view to maximum output as counted by<!-- Page 174 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+weight and tale, rather than by net aggregate price-income over
+price-cost, can readily effect an appreciable increase in the effectual
+productive capacity; but it can be done only by violating that
+democratic order of things within which business enterprise runs. The
+several belligerent nations of Europe are showing that it can be done,
+that the sabotage of business enterprise can be put aside by
+sufficiently heroic measures. And they are also showing that they are
+all aware, and have always been aware, that the conduct of industry on
+business principles is incompetent to bring the largest practicable
+output of goods and services; incompetent to such a degree, indeed, as
+not to be tolerable in a season of desperate need, when the nation
+requires the full use of its productive forces, equipment and man-power,
+regardless of the pecuniary claims of individuals.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Now, the projected Imperial dominion is a power of the character
+required to bring a sufficient corrective to bear, in case of need, on
+this democratic situation in which the businessmen in charge necessarily
+manage the country's industry at cross purposes with the
+community's&mdash;that is the common man's&mdash;material interest. It is an
+extraneous power, to whom the continued pecuniary gain of these nations'
+businessmen is a minor consideration, a negligible consideration in case
+it shall appear that the Imperial usufruct of the underlying nation's
+productive forces is in any degree impaired by the businessmen's
+management of it for their own net gain. It is difficult to see on what
+grounds of self-interest such an Imperial government could consent to
+tolerate the continued management of these underlying nations'
+industries on business principles, that is to say on the principle of
+the<!-- Page 175 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 175]</span> maximum pecuniary gain to the businesslike managers; and recent
+experience seems to teach that no excessive, that is to say no
+inconvenient, degree of consideration for vested rights, and the like,
+would long embarrass the Imperial government in its administration of
+its usufruct.</p>
+
+<p>It should be a reasonable expectation that, without malice and with an
+unprejudiced view to its own usufruct of these underlying countries, the
+Imperial establishment would take due care that no systematically, and
+in its view gratuitously, uneconomical methods should continue in the
+ordinary conduct of their industry. Among other considerations of weight
+in this connection is the fact that a contented, well-fed, and not
+wantonly over-worked populace is a valuable asset in such a case.
+Similarly, by contraries, as an asset in usufruct to such an alien
+power, a large, wealthy, spendthrift, body of gentlefolk, held in high
+esteem by the common people, would have but a slight value, conceivably
+even a negative value, in such a case. A wise administration would
+presumably look to their abatement, rather than otherwise. At this point
+the material interest of the common man would seem to coincide with that
+of the Imperial establishment. Still, his preconceived notions of the
+wisdom and beneficence of his gentlefolk would presumably hinder his
+seeing the matter in that reasonable light.</p>
+
+<p>Under the paramount surveillance of such an alien power, guided solely
+by its own interest in the usufruct of the country and its population,
+it is to be presumed that class privileges and discrimination would be
+greatly abated if not altogether discontinued. The point is in some
+doubt, partly because this alien establishment whose dominion is in
+question is itself grounded in class prerogatives and discrimination,
+and so, not improbably,<!-- Page 176 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 176]</span> it would carry over into its supervision of the
+underlying nations something of a bias in favor of class privileges. And
+a similar order of things might also result by choice of a class-system
+as a convenient means of control and exploitation. The latter
+consideration is presumably the more cogent, since the Imperial
+establishment in question is already, by ancient habit, familiar with
+the method of control by class and privilege; and, indeed, unfamiliar
+with any other method. Such a government, which governs without
+effectual advice or formal consent of the governed, will almost
+necessarily rest its control of the country on an interested class, of
+sufficient strength and bound by sufficiently grave interest to abet the
+Imperial establishment effectually in all its adventures and
+enterprises.</p>
+
+<p>But such a privileged order, that is to be counted in to share dynastic
+usufruct and liabilities, in good days and evil, will be of a
+feudalistic complexion rather than something after the fashion of a
+modern business community doing business by investment and pecuniary
+finesse. It would still be a reasonable expectation that discrimination
+between pecuniary classes should fall away under this projected alien
+tutelage; more particularly all such discrimination as is designed to
+benefit any given class or interest at the cost of the whole, as, e.g.,
+protective tariffs, monopolistic concessions and immunities, engrossing
+of particular lines of material resources, and the like.</p>
+
+<p>The character of the economic policy to be pursued should not be
+difficult of apprehension, if only these underlying peoples are
+conceived as an estate in tail within the dynastic line of descent. The
+Imperial establishment which so is prospectively to take over the
+surveillance of these modern peoples under this projected enterprise<!-- Page 177 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 177]</span> in
+dominion, may all the more readily be conceived as handling its new and
+larger resources somewhat unreservedly as an estate to be administered
+with a shrewd eye to the main chance, since such has always been its
+relation to the peoples and territories whose usufruct it already
+enjoys. It is only that the circumstances of the case will admit a freer
+and more sagacious application of those principles of usufruct that lie
+at the root of the ancient Culture of the Fatherland.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>This excessively long, and yet incomplete, review of the presumptive
+material advantages to accrue to the common man under a r&eacute;gime of peace
+by unconditional surrender to an alien dynasty, brings the argument
+apparently to the conclusion that such an eventuality might be fortunate
+rather than the reverse; or at least that it has its compensations, even
+if it is not something to be desired. Such should particularly appear to
+be the presumption in case one is at all inclined to make much of the
+cultural gains to be brought in under the new r&eacute;gime. And more
+particularly should a policy of non-resistant submission to the
+projected new order seem expedient in view of the exceedingly high, not
+to say prohibitive, cost of resistance, or even of materially retarding
+its fulfillment.<!-- Page 178 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h4>
+
+<p class='center'><span class="smcap">Peace and Neutrality</span></p>
+
+
+<p>Considered simply on the face of the tangible material interests
+involved, the choice of the common man in these premises should seem
+very much of a foregone conclusion, if he could persuade himself to a
+sane and perspicuous consideration of these statistically apparent
+merits of the case alone. It is at least safely to be presumed that he
+has nothing to lose, in a material way, and there is reason to look for
+some slight gain in creature comforts and in security of life and limb,
+consequent upon the elimination, or at least the partial
+disestablishment, of pecuniary necessity as the sole bond and criterion
+of use and wont in economic concerns.</p>
+
+<p>But man lives not by bread alone. In point of fact, and particularly as
+touches the springs of action among that common run that do not
+habitually formulate their aspirations and convictions in extended and
+grammatically defensible documentary form, and the drift of whose
+impulses therefore is not masked or deflected by the illusive
+consistencies of set speech,&mdash;as touches the common run, particularly,
+it will hold true with quite an unacknowledged generality that the
+material means of life are, after all, means only; and that when the
+question of what things are worth while is brought to the final test, it
+is not these means, nor the life conditioned on these means, that are
+seen to serve as the decisive criterion; but always<!-- Page 179 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 179]</span> it is some
+ulterior, immaterial end, in the pursuit of which these material means
+find their ulterior ground of valuation. Neither the overt testimony nor
+the circumstantial evidence to this effect is unequivocal; but seen in
+due perspective, and regard being had chiefly to the springs of
+concerted action as shown in any massive movement of this common run of
+mankind, there is, after all, little room to question that the things
+which commend themselves as indefeasibly worth while are the things of
+the human spirit.</p>
+
+<p>These ideals, aspirations, aims, ends of endeavour, are by no means of a
+uniform or homogeneous character throughout the modern communities,
+still less throughout the civilised world, or throughout the checkered
+range of classes and conditions of men; but, with such frequency and
+amplitude that it must be taken as a major premise in any attempted
+insight into human behaviour, it will hold true that they are of a
+spiritual, immaterial nature.</p>
+
+<p>The caution may, parenthetically, not be out of place, that this
+characterisation of the ulterior springs of action as essentially not of
+the nature of creature comforts, need be taken in no wider extension
+than that which so is specifically given it. It will be found to apply
+as touches the conduct of the common run; what modification of it might
+be required to make it at all confidently applicable to the case of one
+and another of those classes into whose scheme of life creature comforts
+enter with more pronounced effect may be more of a delicate point. But
+since it is the behaviour, and the grounds of behaviour, of the common
+run that are here in question, the case of their betters in this respect
+may conveniently be left on one side.<!-- Page 180 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 180]</span></p>
+
+<p>The question in hand touches the behavior of the common man, taken in
+the aggregate, in face of the quandary into which circumstances have led
+him; since the question of what these modern peoples will do is after
+all a question of what the common man in the aggregate will do, of his
+own motion or by persuasion. His betters may be in a position to guide,
+persuade, cajole, mislead, and victimise him; for among the many
+singular conceits that beset the common man is the persuasion that his
+betters are in some way better than he, wiser, more beneficent. But the
+course that may so be chosen, with or without guidance or persuasion
+from the superior classes, as well as the persistence and energy with
+which this course is pursued, is conditioned on the frame of mind of the
+common run.</p>
+
+<p>Just what will be the nature and the concrete expression of these ideal
+aspirations that move the common run is a matter of habitual
+preconceptions; and habits of thought vary from one people to another
+according to the diversity of experience to which they have been
+exposed. Among the Western nations the national prestige has come to
+seem worth while as an ulterior end, perhaps beyond all else that is
+comprised in the secular scheme of things desirable to be had or to be
+achieved. And in the apprehension of such of them as have best preserved
+the habits of thought induced by a long experience in feudal subjection,
+the service of the sovereign or the dynasty still stands over as the
+substantial core of the cultural scheme, upon which sentiment and
+endeavour converge. In the past ages of the democratic peoples, as well
+as in the present-day use and wont among subjects of the dynastic
+States&mdash;as e.g., Japan or Germany&mdash;men are known to have resolutely
+risked, and lost, their life for<!-- Page 181 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 181]</span> the sake of the sovereign's renown, or
+even to save the sovereign's life; whereas, of course, even the
+slightest and most nebulous reflection would make it manifest that in
+point of net material utility the sovereign's decease is an idle matter
+as compared with the loss of an able-bodied workman. The sovereign may
+always be replaced, with some prospect of public advantage, or failing
+that, it should be remarked that a regency or inter-regnum will commonly
+be a season of relatively economical administration. Again, religious
+enthusiasm, and the furtherance of religious propaganda, may come to
+serve the same general purpose as these secular ideals, and will perhaps
+serve it just as well. Certain "principles," of personal liberty and of
+opportunity for creative self-direction and an intellectually worthy
+life, perhaps may also become the idols of the people, for which they
+will then be willing to risk their material fortune; and where this has
+happened, as among the democratic peoples of Christendom, it is not
+selfishly for their own personal opportunity to live untroubled under
+the light of these high principles that these opinionated men are ready
+to contend, but rather impersonally for the human right which under
+these principles is the due of all mankind, and particularly of the
+incoming and of later generations.</p>
+
+<p>On these and the like intangible ends the common man is set with such
+inveterate predilection that he will, on provocation, stick at nothing
+to put the project through. For such like ends the common man will lay
+down his life; at least, so they say. There may always be something of
+rhetorical affectation in it all; but, after all, there is sufficient
+evidence to hand of such substance and tenacity in the common man's hold
+on these ideal aspirations, on these idols of his human spirit, as to
+warrant the as<!-- Page 182 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 182]</span>sertion that he is, rather commonly, prepared to go to
+greater lengths in the furtherance of these immaterial gains that are to
+inure to someone else than for any personal end of his own, in the way
+of creature comforts or even of personal renown.</p>
+
+<p>For such ends the common man, in democratic Christendom is, on
+provocation, willing to die; or again, the patient and perhaps more
+far-seeing common man of pagan China is willing to live for these idols
+of an inveterate fancy, through endless contumely and hard usage. The
+conventional Chinese preconceptions, in the way of things that are worth
+while in their own right, appear to differ from those current in the
+Occident in such a way that the preconceived ideal is not to be realised
+except by way of continued life. The common man's accountability to the
+cause of humanity, in China, is of so intimately personal a character
+that he can meet it only by tenaciously holding his place in the
+sequence of generations; whereas among the peoples of Christendom there
+has arisen out of their contentious past a preconception to the effect
+that this human duty to mankind is of the nature of a debt, which can be
+cancelled by bankruptcy proceedings, so that the man who unprofitably
+dies fighting for the cause has thereby constructively paid the
+reckoning in full.</p>
+
+<p>Evidently, if the common man of these modern nations that are
+prospectively to be brought under tutelage of the Imperial government
+could be brought to the frame of mind that is habitual with his Chinese
+counterpart, there should be a fair hope that pacific counsels would
+prevail and that Christendom would so come in for a r&eacute;gime of peace by
+submission under this Imperial tutelage. But there are always these
+preconceptions of self-will and in<!-- Page 183 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 183]</span>subordination to be counted with
+among these nations, and there is the ancient habit of a contentious
+national solidarity in defense of the nation's prestige, more urgent
+among these peoples than any sentiment of solidarity with mankind at
+large, or any ulterior gain in civilisation that might come of continued
+discipline in the virtues of patience and diligence under distasteful
+circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>The occidental conception of manhood is in some considerable measure
+drawn in negative terms. So much so that whenever a question of the
+manly virtues comes under controversy it presently appears that at least
+the indispensable minimum, and indeed the ordinary marginal modicum, of
+what is requisite to a worthy manner of life is habitually formulated in
+terms of what not. This appearance is doubtless misleading if taken
+without the universally understood postulate on the basis of which
+negative demands are formulated. There is a good deal of what would be
+called historical accident in all this. The indispensable demands of
+this modern manhood take the form of refusal to obey extraneous
+authority on compulsion; of exemption from coercive direction and
+subservience; of insubordination, in short. But it is always understood
+as a matter of course that this insubordination is a refusal to submit
+to irresponsible or autocratic rule. Stated from the positive side it
+would be freedom from restraint by or obedience to any authority not
+constituted by express advice and consent of the governed. And as near
+as it may be formulated, when reduced to the irreducible minimum of
+concrete proviso, this is the final substance of things which neither
+shame nor honour will permit the modern civilised man to yield. To no
+arrangement for the abrogation of this minimum of free initiative and
+self-direction will he consent to be<!-- Page 184 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 184]</span> a party, whether it touches the
+conditions of life for his own people who are to come after, or as
+touches the fortunes of such aliens as are of a like mind on this head
+and are unable to make head against invasion of these human rights from
+outside.</p>
+
+<p>As has just been remarked, the negative form so often taken by these
+demands is something of an historical accident, due to the fact that
+these modern peoples came into their highly esteemed system of Natural
+Liberty out of an earlier system of positive checks on self-direction
+and initiative; a system, in effect, very much after the fashion of that
+Imperial jurisdiction that still prevails in the dynastic States&mdash;as,
+e.g., Germany or Japan&mdash;whose projected dominion is now the immediate
+object of apprehension and repugnance. How naively the negative
+formulation gained acceptance, and at the same time how intrinsic to the
+new dispensation was the aspiration for free initiative, appears in the
+confident assertion of its most genial spokesman, that when these
+positive checks are taken away, "The simple and obvious system of
+Natural Liberty establishes itself of its own accord."</p>
+
+<p>The common man, in these modern communities, shows a brittle temper when
+any overt move is made against this heritage of civil liberty. He may
+not be altogether well advised in respect of what liberties he will
+defend and what he will submit to; but the fact is to be counted with in
+any projected peace, that there is always this refractory residue of
+terms not open to negotiation or compromise. Now it also happens, also
+by historical accident, that these residual principles of civil liberty
+have come to blend and coalesce with a stubborn preconception of
+national integrity and national prestige. So that in the workday
+apprehension of the common man, not given to<!-- Page 185 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> analytic excursions, any
+infraction of the national integrity or any abatement of the national
+prestige has come to figure as an insufferable infringement on his
+personal liberty and on those principles of humanity that make up the
+categorical articles of the secular creed of Christendom. The fact may
+be patent on reflection that the common man's substantial interest in
+the national integrity is slight and elusive, and that in sober common
+sense the national prestige has something less than a neutral value to
+him; but this state of the substantially pertinent facts is not greatly
+of the essence of the case, since his preconceptions in these premises
+do not run to that effect, and since they are of too hard and fast a
+texture to suffer any serious abatement within such a space of time as
+can come in question here and now.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The outlook for a speedy settlement of the world's peace on a plan of
+unconditional surrender to the projected Imperial dominion seems
+unpromisingly dubious, in view of the stubborn temper shown by these
+modern peoples wherever their preconceived ideas of right and honest
+living appear to be in jeopardy; and the expediency of entering into any
+negotiated compact of diplomatic engagements and assurances designed to
+serve as groundwork to an eventual enterprise of that kind must
+therefore also be questionable in a high degree. It is even doubtful if
+any allowance of time can be counted on to bring these modern peoples to
+a more reasonable, more worldly-wise, frame of mind; so that they would
+come to see their interest in such an arrangement, or would divest
+themselves of their present stubborn and perhaps fantastic prejudice
+against an autocratic r&eacute;gime of the kind spoken for. At least for the
+present any such hope of<!-- Page 186 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 186]</span> a peaceable settlement seems illusive. What
+may be practicable in this way in the course of time is of course still
+more obscure; but argument on the premises which the present affords
+does not point to a substantially different outcome in the calculable
+future.</p>
+
+<p>For the immediate future&mdash;say, within the life-time of the oncoming
+generation&mdash;the spiritual state of the peoples concerned in this
+international quandary is not likely to undergo so radical a change as
+to seriously invalidate an argument that proceeds on the present lie of
+the land in this respect. Preconceptions are a work of habit impinging
+on a given temperamental bent; and where, as in these premises, the
+preconceptions have taken on an institutionalised form, have become
+conventionalised and commonly accepted, and so have been woven into the
+texture of popular common sense, they must needs be a work of protracted
+and comprehensive habituation impinging on a popular temperamental bent
+of so general a prevalence that it may be called congenital to the
+community at large. A heritable bent pervading the group within which
+inheritance runs, does not change, so long as the racial complexion of
+the group remains passably intact; a conventionalised, commonly
+established habit of mind will change only slowly, commonly not without
+the passing of at least one generation, and only by grace of a
+sufficiently searching and comprehensive discipline of experience. For
+good or ill, the current situation is to be counted on not to lose
+character over night or with a revolution of the seasons, so far as
+concerns these spiritual factors that make or mar the fortunes of
+nations.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time these spiritual assets, being of the nature of habit,
+are also bound to change character more or less radically, by insensible
+shifting of ground, but<!-- Page 187 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> incontinently,&mdash;provided only that the
+conditions of life, and therefore the discipline of experience, undergo
+any substantial change. So the immediate interest shifts to the
+presumptive rate and character of those changes that are in prospect,
+due to the unremitting change of circumstances under which these modern
+peoples live and to the discipline of which they are unavoidably
+exposed. For the present and for the immediate future the current state
+of things is a sufficiently stable basis of argument; but assurance as
+to the sufficiency of the premises afforded by the current state of
+things thins out in proportion as the perspective of the argument runs
+out into the succeeding years. The bearing of it all is two-fold, of
+course. This progressive, cumulative habituation under changing
+circumstances affects the case both of those democratic peoples whose
+fortunes are in the hazard, and also of those dynastic States by whom
+the projected enterprise in dominion is to be carried into effect.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The case of the two formidable dynastic States whose names have been
+coupled together in what has already been said is perhaps the more
+immediately interesting in the present connection. As matters stand, and
+in the measure in which they continue so to stand, the case of these is
+in no degree equivocal. The two dynastic establishments seek dominion,
+and indeed they seek nothing else, except incidentally to and in
+furtherance of the main quest. As has been remarked before, it lies in
+the nature of a dynastic State to seek dominion, that being the whole of
+its nature in so far as it runs true to form. But a dynastic State, like
+any other settled, institutionalised community of men, rests on and
+draws its effectual driving force from the habit of mind of its
+underlying community,<!-- Page 188 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 188]</span> the common man in the aggregate, his
+preconceptions and ideals as to what things are worth while. Without a
+suitable spiritual ground of this kind such a dynastic State passes out
+of the category of formidable Powers and into that of precarious
+despotism.</p>
+
+<p>In both of the two States here in question the dynastic establishment
+and its bodyguard of officials and gentlefolk may be counted on to
+persevere in the faith that now animates them, until an uneasy
+displacement of sentiment among the underlying populace may in time
+induce them judiciously to shift their footing. Like the ruling classes
+elsewhere, they are of a conservative temper and may be counted on so to
+continue. They are also not greatly exposed to the discipline of
+experience that makes for adaptive change in habits of life, and
+therefore in the correlated habits of thought. It is always the common
+man that is effectually reached by any exacting or wide-reaching change
+in the conditions of life. He is relatively unsheltered from any forces
+that make for adaptive change, as contrasted with the case of his
+betters; and however sluggish and reluctant may be his response to such
+discipline as makes for a displacement of outworn preconceptions, yet it
+is always out of the mass of this common humanity that those movements
+of disaffection and protest arise, which lead, on occasion, to any
+material realignment of the institutional fabric or to any substantial
+shift in the line of policy to be pursued under the guidance of their
+betters.</p>
+
+<p>The common mass of humanity, it may be said in parenthesis, is of course
+not a homogeneous body. Uncommon men, in point of native gifts of
+intelligence, sensibility, or personal force, will occur as frequently,
+in proportion to the aggregate numbers, among the common<!-- Page 189 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 189]</span> mass as among
+their betters. Since in any one of these nations of Christendom, with
+their all-inclusive hybridisation, the range, frequency and amplitude of
+variations in hereditary endowment is the same throughout all classes.
+Class differentiation is a matter of habit and convention; and in
+distinction from his betters the common man is common only in point of
+numbers and in point of the more general and more exacting conditions to
+which he is exposed. He is in a position to be more hardly ridden by the
+discipline of experience, and is at the same time held more consistently
+to such a body of preconceptions, and to such changes only in this body
+of preconceptions, as fall in with the drift of things in a larger mass
+of humanity. But all the while it is the discipline which impinges on
+the sensibilities of this common mass that shapes the spiritual attitude
+and temper of the community and so defines what may and what may not be
+undertaken by the constituted leaders. So that, in a way, these dynastic
+States are at the mercy of that popular sentiment whose creatures they
+are, and are subject to undesired changes of direction and efficiency in
+their endeavors, contingent on changes in the popular temper; over which
+they have only a partial, and on the whole a superficial control.</p>
+
+<p>A relatively powerful control and energetic direction of the popular
+temper is and has been exercised by these dynastic establishments, with
+a view to its utilisation in the pursuit of the dynastic enterprise; and
+much has visibly been accomplished in that way; chiefly, perhaps, by
+military discipline in subordination to personal authority, and also by
+an unsparing surveillance of popular education, with a view to fortify
+the preconceptions handed down from the passing order as well as to
+eliminate all subversive innovation. Yet in spite of all the
+well-con<!-- Page 190 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 190]</span>ceived and shrewdly managed endeavors of the German Imperial
+system in this direction, e.g., there has been evidence of an obscurely
+growing uneasiness, not to say disaffection, among the underlying mass.
+So much so that hasty observers, and perhaps biased, have reached the
+inference that one of the immediate contributory causes that led to the
+present war was the need of a heroic remedy to correct this untoward
+drift of sentiment.</p>
+
+<p>For the German people the government of the present dynastic incumbent
+has done all that could (humanly speaking) be expected in the way of
+endeavoring to conserve the passing order and to hold the popular
+imagination to the received feudalistic ideals of loyal service. And yet
+the peoples of the Empire are already caught in the net of that newer
+order which they are now endeavoring to break by force of arms. They are
+inextricably implicated in the cultural complex of Christendom; and
+within this Western culture those peoples to whom it fell to lead the
+exodus out of the Egypt of feudalism have come quite naturally to set
+the pace in all the larger conformities of civilised life. Within the
+confines of Christendom today, for good or ill, whatever usage or
+customary rule of conduct falls visibly short of the precedent set by
+these cultural pioneers is felt to fall beneath the prescriptive
+commonplace level of civilisation. Failure to adopt and make use of
+those tried institutional expedients on which these peoples of the
+advance guard have set their mark of authentication is today
+presumptively a mistake and an advantage foregone; and a people who are
+denied the benefit of these latterday ways and means of civic life are
+uneasy with a sense of grievance at the hands of their rulers. Besides
+which, the fashion in articles of institutional equipage so set by the
+authentic pioneers of<!-- Page 191 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 191]</span> culture has also come to be mandatory, as a
+punctilio of the governmental proprieties; so that no national
+establishment which aspires to a decorous appearance in the eyes of the
+civilised world can longer afford to be seen without them. The forms at
+least must be observed. Hence the "representative" and pseudo-representative
+institutions of these dynastic States.</p>
+
+<p>These dynastic States among the rest have partly followed the dictates
+of civilised fashion, partly yielded to the, more or less intelligent,
+solicitations of their subjects, or the spokesmen of their subjects, and
+have installed institutional apparatus of this modern pattern&mdash;more in
+point of form than of substance, perhaps. Yet in time the adoption of
+the forms is likely to have an effect, if changing circumstances favor
+their taking effect. Such has on the whole been the experience of those
+peoples who have gone before along this trail of political advance. As
+instance the growth of discretionary powers under the hands of
+parliamentary representatives in those cases where the movement has gone
+on longest and farthest; and these instances should not be considered
+idle, as intimations of what may presumptively be looked for under the
+Imperial establishments of Germany or Japan. It may be true that
+hitherto, along with the really considerable volume of imitative
+gestures of discretionary deliberation delegated to these parliamentary
+bodies, they have as regards all graver matters brought to their notice
+only been charged with a (limited) power to talk. It may be true that,
+for the present, on critical or weighty measures the parliamentary
+discretion extends no farther than respectfully to say: "<i>Ja wohl</i>!" But
+then, <i>Ja wohl</i> is also something; and there is no telling where it may
+all lead to in the long course of years. One has<!-- Page 192 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> a vague apprehension
+that this "<i>Ja wohl</i>!" may some day come to be a customarily necessary
+form of authentication, so that with-holding it (<i>Beh&uuml;t' es Gott</i>!) may
+even come to count as an effectual veto on measures so pointedly
+neglected. More particularly will the formalities of representation and
+self-government be likely to draw the substance of such like "free
+institutions" into the effectual conduct of public affairs if it turns
+out that the workday experiences of these people takes a turn more
+conducive to habits of insubordination than has been the case hitherto.</p>
+
+<p>Indications are, again, not wanting, that even in the Empire the
+discipline of workday experience is already diverging from that line
+that once trained the German subjects into the most loyal and unrepining
+subservience to dynastic ambitions. Of course, just now, under the
+shattering impact of warlike atrocities and patriotic clamour, the
+workday spirit of insubordination and critical scrutiny is gone out of
+sight and out of hearing.</p>
+
+<p>Something of this inchoate insubordination has showed itself repeatedly
+during the present reign, sufficient to provoke many shrewd protective
+measures on the side of the dynastic establishment, both by way of
+political strategy and by arbitrary control. Disregarding many minor and
+inconsequential divisions of opinion and counsel among the German people
+during this eventful reign, the political situation has been moving on
+the play of three, incipiently divergent, strains of interest and
+sentiment: (a) the dynasty (together with the Agrarians, of whom in a
+sense the dynasty is a part); (b) the businessmen, or commercial
+interest (including investors); and (c) the industrial workmen.
+Doubtless it would be easier to overstate than to indicate with any nice
+precision what<!-- Page 193 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 193]</span> has been the nature, and especially the degree, of this
+alienation of sentiment and divergence of conscious interest among these
+several elements. It is not that there has at any point been a
+perceptible faltering in respect of loyalty to the crown as such. But
+since the crown belongs, by origin, tradition, interest and spiritual
+identity, in the camp of the Agrarians, the situation has been such as
+would inevitably take on a character of disaffection toward the dynastic
+establishment, in the conceivable absence of that strong surviving
+sentiment of dynastic loyalty that still animates all classes and
+conditions of men in the Fatherland. It would accordingly, again, be an
+overstatement to say that the crown has been standing precariously at
+the apex of a political triangle, the other two corners of which are
+occupied by these two divided and potentially recalcitrant elements of
+the body politic, held apart by class antipathy and divergent pecuniary
+interest, and held in check by divided counsels; but something after
+that fashion is what would have resulted under similar conditions of
+strain in any community where the modern spirit of insubordination has
+taken effect in any large measure.</p>
+
+<p>Both of these elements of incipient disturbance in the dynastic economy,
+the modern commercial and working classes, are creatures of the new era;
+and they are systematically out of line with the received dynastic
+tradition of fealty, both in respect of their pecuniary interests and in
+respect of that discipline of experience to which their workday
+employment subjects them. They are substantially the same two classes or
+groupings that came forward in the modernisation of the British
+community, with a gradual segregation of interest and a consequent
+induced solidarity of class sentiment and class animosi<!-- Page 194 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 194]</span>ties. But with
+the difference that in the British case the movement of changing
+circumstances was slow enough to allow a fair degree of habituation to
+the altered economic conditions; whereas in the German case the move
+into modern economic conditions has been made so precipitately as to
+have carried the mediaeval frame of mind over virtually intact into this
+era of large business and machine industry. In the Fatherland the
+commercial and industrial classes have been called on to play their part
+without time to learn their lines.</p>
+
+<p>The case of the English-speaking peoples, who have gone over this course
+of experience in more consecutive fashion than any others, teaches that
+in the long run, if these modern economic conditions persist, one or the
+other or both of these creatures of the modern era must prevail, and
+must put the dynastic establishment out of commission; although the
+sequel has not yet been seen in this British case, and there is no
+ground afforded for inference as to which of the two will have the
+fortune to survive and be invested with the hegemony. Meantime the
+opportunity of the Imperial establishment to push its enterprise in
+dominion lies in the interval of time so required for the discipline of
+experience under modern conditions to work out through the growth of
+modern habits of thought into such modern (i.e. civilised) institutional
+forms and such settled principles of personal insubordination as will
+put any effectual dynastic establishment out of commission. The same
+interval of time, that must so be allowed for the decay of the dynastic
+spirit among the German people under the discipline of life by the
+methods of modern trade and industry, marks the period during which no
+peace compact will be practicable, except with the elimination of the
+Imperial establishment as a pos<!-- Page 195 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 195]</span>sible warlike power. All this, of
+course, applies to the case of Japan as well, with the difference that
+while the Japanese people are farther in arrears, they are also a
+smaller, less formidable body, more exposed to outside forces, and their
+mediaevalism is of a more archaic and therefore more precarious type.</p>
+
+<p>What length of time will be required for this decay of the dynastic
+spirit among the people of the Empire is, of course, impossible to say.
+The factors of the case are not of a character to admit anything like
+calculation of the rate of movement; but in the nature of the factors
+involved it is also contained that something of a movement in this
+direction is unavoidable, under Providence. As a preliminary
+consideration, these peoples of the Empire and its allies, as well as
+their enemies in the great war, will necessarily come out of their
+warlike experience in a more patriotic and more vindictive frame of mind
+than that in which they entered on this adventure. Fighting makes for
+malevolence. The war is itself to be counted as a set-back. A very large
+proportion of those who have lived through it will necessarily carry a
+warlike bent through life. By that much, whatever it may count for, the
+decay of the dynastic spirit&mdash;or the growth of tolerance and equity in
+national sentiment, if one chooses to put it that way&mdash;will be retarded
+from beforehand. So also the Imperial establishment, or whatever is left
+of it, may be counted on to do everything in its power to preserve the
+popular spirit of loyalty and national animosity, by all means at its
+disposal; since the Imperial establishment finally rests on the
+effectual body of national animosity. What hindrance will come in from
+this agency of retardation can at least vaguely be guessed at, in the
+light of<!-- Page 196 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> what has been accomplished in that way under the strenuously
+reactionary rule of the present reign.</p>
+
+<p>Again, there is the chance, as there always is a chance of human folly,
+that the neighboring peoples will undertake, whether jointly or
+severally, to restrict or prohibit trade relations between the people of
+the Empire and their enemies in the present war; thereby fomenting
+international animosity, as well as contributing directly to the
+economic readiness for war both on their own part and on that of the
+Empire. This is also, and in an eminent degree, an unknown factor in the
+case, on which not even a reasonable guess can be made beforehand. These
+are, all and several, reactionary agencies, factors of retardation,
+making for continuation of the current international situation of
+animosity, distrust, chicane, trade rivalry, competitive armament, and
+eventual warlike enterprise.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>To offset these agencies of conservatism there is nothing much that can
+be counted on but that slow, random, and essentially insidious working
+of habituation that tends to the obsolescence of the received
+preconceptions; partly by supplanting them with something new, but more
+effectually by their falling into disuse and decay. There is, it will
+have to be admitted, little of a positive character that can be done
+toward the installation of a r&eacute;gime of peace and good-will. The
+endeavours of the pacifists should suffice to convince any dispassionate
+observer of the substantial futility of creative efforts looking to such
+an end. Much can doubtless be done in the way of precautionary measures,
+mostly of a negative character, in the way especially of removing
+sources of infection and (possibly) of so sterilising the apparatus of
+national life that its working shall neither maintain animosities and
+in<!-- Page 197 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>terests at variance with the conditions of peace nor contribute to
+their spread and growth.</p>
+
+<p>There is necessarily little hope or prospect that any national
+establishment will contribute materially or in any direct way to the
+obsolescence of warlike sentiments and ambitions; since such
+establishments are designed for the making of war by keeping national
+jealousies intact, and their accepted place in affairs is that of
+preparation for eventual hostilities, defensive or offensive. Except for
+the contingency of eventual hostilities, no national establishment could
+be kept in countenance. They would all fall into the decay of desuetude,
+just as has happened to the dynastic establishments among those peoples
+who have (passably) lost the spirit of dynastic aggression.</p>
+
+<p>The modern industrial occupations, the modern technology, and that
+modern empirical science that runs so close to the frontiers of
+technology, all work at cross purposes with the received preconceptions
+of the nationalist order; and in a more pronounced degree they are at
+cross purposes with that dynastic order of preconceptions that converges
+on Imperial dominion. The like is true, with a difference, of the ways,
+means and routine of business enterprise as it is conducted in the
+commercialised communities of today. The working of these agencies runs
+to this effect not by way of deliberate and destructive antagonism, but
+almost wholly by force of systematic, though unintended and incidental,
+neglect of those values, standards, verities, and grounds of
+discrimination and conviction that make up the working realities of the
+national spirit and of dynastic ambition. The working concepts of this
+new, essentially mechanistic, order of human interests, do not
+necessarily clash with those of the old order, essentially the order of
+personages and<!-- Page 198 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 198]</span> personalities; the two are incommensurable, and they are
+incompatible only in the sense and degree implied in that state of the
+case. The profoundest and most meritorious truths of dynastic politics
+can on no provocation and by no sleight of hand be brought within the
+logic of that system of knowledge and appraisal of values by which the
+mechanistic technology proceeds. Within the premises of this modern
+mechanistic industry and science all the best values and verities of the
+dynastic order are simply "incompetent, irrelevant and impertinent."</p>
+
+<p>There is accordingly no unavoidable clash and no necessary friction
+between the two schemes of knowledge or the two habits of mind that
+characterise the two contrasted cultural eras. It is only that a given
+individual&mdash;call him the common man&mdash;will not be occupied with both of
+these incommensurable systems of logic and appreciation at the same time
+or bearing on the same point; and further that in proportion as his
+waking hours and his mental energy are fully occupied within the lines
+of one of these systems of knowledge, design and employment, in much the
+same measure he will necessarily neglect the other, and in time he will
+lose proficiency and interest in its pursuits and its conclusions. The
+man who is so held by his daily employment and his life-long attention
+within the range of habits of thought that are valid in the mechanistic
+technology, will, on an average and in the long run, lose his grip on
+the spiritual virtues of national prestige and dynastic primacy; "for
+they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they
+are spiritually discerned."</p>
+
+<p>Not that the adepts in this modern mechanistic system of knowledge and
+design may not also be very good patriots and devoted servants of the
+dynasty. The artless<!-- Page 199 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 199]</span> and, on the whole, spontaneous riot of dynastic
+avidity displayed to the astonished eyes of their fellow craftsmen in
+the neutral countries by the most eminent scientists of the Fatherland
+during the early months of the war should be sufficient warning that the
+archaic preconceptions do not hurriedly fly out of the window when the
+habits of thought of the mechanistic order come in at the door. But with
+the passage of time, pervasively, by imperceptible displacement, by the
+decay of habitual disuse, as well as by habitual occupation with these
+other and unrelated ways and means of knowledge and belief, dynastic
+loyalty and the like conceptions in the realm of religion and magic pass
+out of the field of attention and fall insensibly into the category of
+the lost arts. Particularly will this be true of the common man, who
+lives, somewhat characteristically, in the mass and in the present, and
+whose waking hours are somewhat fully occupied with what he has to do.</p>
+
+<p>With the commercial interests the Imperial establishment can probably
+make such terms as to induce their support of the dynastic enterprise,
+since they can apparently always be made to believe that an extension of
+the Imperial dominion will bring correspondingly increased opportunities
+of trade. It is doubtless a mistake, but it is commonly believed by the
+interested parties, which is just as good for the purpose as if it were
+true. And it should be added that in this, as in other instances of the
+quest of larger markets, the costs are to be paid by someone else than
+the presumed commercial beneficiaries; which brings the matter under the
+dearest principle known to businessmen: that of getting something for
+nothing. It will not be equally easy to keep the affections of the
+common man loyal to the dynastic enterprise when he<!-- Page 200 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 200]</span> begins to lose his
+grip on the archaic faith in dynastic dominion and comes to realise that
+he has also&mdash;individually and in the mass&mdash;no material interest even in
+the defense of the Fatherland, much less in the further extension of
+Imperial rule.</p>
+
+<p>But the time when this process of disillusionment and decay of ideals
+shall have gone far enough among the common run to afford no secure
+footing in popular sentiment for the contemplated Imperial
+enterprise,&mdash;this time is doubtless far in the future, as compared with
+the interval of preparation required for a new onset. Habituation takes
+time, particularly such habituation as can be counted on to derange the
+habitual bent of a great population in respect of their dearest
+preconceptions. It will take a very appreciable space of time even in
+the case of a populace so accessible to new habits of thought as the
+German people are by virtue of their slight percentage of illiteracy,
+the very large proportion engaged in those modern industries that
+constantly require some intelligent insight into mechanistic facts, the
+density of population and the adequate means of communication, and the
+extent to which the whole population is caught in the web of
+mechanically standardised processes that condition their daily life at
+every turn. As regards their technological situation, and their exposure
+to the discipline of industrial life, no other population of nearly the
+same volume is placed in a position so conducive to a rapid acquirement
+of the spirit of the modern era. But, also, no other people comparable
+with the population of the Fatherland has so large and well-knit a body
+of archaic preconceptions to unlearn. Their nearest analogue, of course,
+is the Japanese nation.<!-- Page 201 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 201]</span></p>
+
+<p>In all this there is, of course, no inclination to cast a slur on the
+German people. In point of racial characteristics there is no difference
+between them and their neighbours. And there is no reason to question
+their good intentions. Indeed, it may safely be asserted that no people
+is more consciously well-meaning than the children of the Fatherland. It
+is only that, with their archaic preconceptions of what is right and
+meritorious, their best intentions spell malevolence when projected into
+the civilised world as it stands today. And by no fault of theirs. Nor
+is it meant to be intimated that their rate of approach to the accepted
+Occidental standard of institutional maturity will be unduly slow or
+unduly reluctant, so soon as the pertinent facts of modern life begin
+effectively to shape their habits of thought. It is only that, human
+nature&mdash;and human second nature&mdash;being what it always has been, the rate
+of approach of the German people to a passably neutral complexion in
+matters of international animosity and aggression must necessarily be
+slow enough to allow ample time for the renewed preparation of a more
+unsparing and redoubtable endeavour on the part of the Imperial
+establishment.</p>
+
+<p>What makes this German Imperial establishment redoubtable, beyond
+comparison, is the very simple but also very grave combination of
+circumstances whereby the German people have acquired the use of the
+modern industrial arts in the highest state of efficiency, at the same
+time that they have retained unabated the fanatical loyalty of feudal
+barbarism.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> So long, and in so far, as this conjunction of forces
+holds there is no outlook<!-- Page 202 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> for peace except on the elimination of
+Germany as a power capable of disturbing the peace.</p>
+
+<p>It may seem invidious to speak so recurrently of the German Imperial
+establishment as the sole potential disturber of the peace in Europe.
+The reason for so singling out the Empire for this invidious
+distinction&mdash;of merit or demerit, as one may incline to take it&mdash;is that
+the facts run that way. There is, of course, other human material, and
+no small volume of it in the aggregate, that is of much the same
+character, and serviceable for the same purposes as the resources and
+man-power of the Empire. But this other material can come effectually
+into bearing as a means of disturbance only in so far as it clusters
+about the Imperial dynasty and marches under his banners. In so speaking
+of the Imperial establishment as the sole enemy of a European peace,
+therefore, these outlying others are taken for granted, very much as one
+takes the nimbus for granted in speaking of one of the greater saints of
+God.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>So the argument returns to the alternative: Peace by unconditional
+surrender and submission, or peace by elimination of Imperial Germany
+(and Japan). There is no middle course apparent. The old-fashioned&mdash;that
+is to say nineteenth-century&mdash;plan of competitive defensive armament and
+a balance of powers has been tried, and it has not proved to be a
+success, even so early in the twentieth century. This plan offers a
+substitute (<i>Ersatz</i>) for peace; but even as such it has become
+impracticable. The modern, or rather the current late-modern, state of
+the industrial arts does not tolerate it. Technological knowledge has
+thrown the advantage in military affairs definitively to the offensive,
+particularly to the<!-- Page 203 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> offensive that is prepared beforehand with the
+suitable appliances and with men ready matured in that rigorous and
+protracted training by which alone they can become competent to make
+warlike use of these suitable appliances provided by the modern
+technology. At the same time, and by grace of the same advance in
+technology, any well-designed offensive can effectually reach any given
+community, in spite of distance or of other natural obstacles. The era
+of defensive armaments and diplomatic equilibration, as a substitute for
+peace, has been definitively closed by the modern state of the
+industrial arts.</p>
+
+<p>Of the two alternatives spoken of above, the former&mdash;peace by submission
+under an alien dynasty&mdash;is presumably not a practicable solution, as has
+appeared in the course of the foregoing argument.</p>
+
+<p>The modern nations are not spiritually ripe for it. Whether they have
+reached even that stage of national sobriety, or neutrality, that would
+enable them to live at peace among themselves after elimination of the
+Imperial Powers is still open to an uneasy doubt. It would be by a
+precarious margin that they can be counted on so to keep the peace in
+the absence of provocation from without the pale. Their predilection for
+peace goes to no greater lengths than is implied in the formula: Peace
+with Honour; which assuredly does not cover a peace of non-resistance,
+and which, in effect, leaves the distinction between an offensive and a
+defensive war somewhat at loose ends. The national prestige is still a
+live asset in the mind of these peoples; and the limit of tolerance in
+respect of this patriotic animosity appears to be drawn appreciably
+closer than the formula cited above would necessarily presume. They will
+fight on provocation,<!-- Page 204 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 204]</span> and the degree of provocation required to upset
+the serenity of these sportsmanlike modern peoples is a point on which
+the shrewdest guesses may diverge. Still, opinion runs more and more
+consistently to the effect that if these modern&mdash;say the French and the
+English-speaking&mdash;peoples were left to their own devices the peace might
+fairly be counted on to be kept between them indefinitely, barring
+unforeseen contingencies.</p>
+
+<p>Experience teaches that warlike enterprise on a moderate scale and as a
+side interest is by no means incompatible with such a degree of neutral
+animus as these peoples have yet acquired,&mdash;e.g., the Spanish-American
+war, which was made in America, or the Boer war, which was made in
+England. But these wars, in spite of the dimensions which they presently
+took on, were after all of the nature of episodes,&mdash;the one chiefly an
+extension of sportsmanship, which engaged the best attention of only the
+more sportsmanlike elements, the other chiefly engineered by certain
+business interests with a callous view to getting something for nothing.
+Both episodes came to be serious enough, both in their immediate
+incidence and in their consequences; but neither commanded the
+deliberate and cordial support of the community at large. There is a
+meretricious air over both; and there is apparent a popular inclination
+to condone rather than to take pride in these <i>faits accomplis</i>. The one
+excursion was a product of sportsmanlike bravado, fed on boyish
+exuberance, fomented for mercenary objects by certain business interests
+and place-hunting politicians, and incited by meretricious newspapers
+with a view to increase their circulation. The other was set afoot by
+interested businessmen, backed by politicians, seconded by newspapers,
+and borne by the community<!-- Page 205 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> at large, in great part under
+misapprehension and stung by wounded pride.</p>
+
+<p>Opinions will diverge widely as to the chances of peace in a community
+of nations among whom episodes of this character, and of such
+dimensions, have been somewhat more than tolerated in the immediate
+past. But the consensus of opinion in these same countries appears to be
+setting with fair consistency to the persuasion that the popular spirit
+shown in these and in analogous conjunctures in the recent past gives
+warrant that peace is deliberately desired and is likely to be
+maintained, barring unforeseen contingencies.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In the large, the measures conducive to the perpetuation of peace, and
+necessary to be taken, are simple and obvious; and they are largely of a
+negative character, exploits of omission and neglect. Under modern
+conditions, and barring aggression from without, the peace is kept by
+avoiding the breaking of it. It does not break of itself,&mdash;in the
+absence of such national establishments as are organised with the sole
+ulterior view of warlike enterprise. A policy of peace is obviously a
+policy of avoidance,&mdash;avoidance of offense and of occasion for
+annoyance.</p>
+
+<p>What is required to insure the maintenance of peace among pacific
+nations is the neutralisation of all those human relations out of which
+international grievances are wont to arise. And what is necessary to
+assure a reasonable expectation of continued peace is the neutralisation
+of so much of these relations as the patriotic self-conceit and
+credulity of these peoples will permit. These two formulations are by no
+means identical; indeed, the disparity between what could advantageously
+be dispensed with in the way of national rights and pretensions, and<!-- Page 206 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 206]</span>
+what the common run of modern patriots could be induced to relinquish,
+is probably much larger than any sanguine person would like to believe.
+It should be plain on slight reflection that the greater part, indeed
+substantially the whole, of those material interests and demands that
+now engage the policy of the nations, and that serve on occasion to set
+them at variance, might be neutralised or relinquished out of hand,
+without detriment to any one of the peoples concerned.</p>
+
+<p>The greater part of these material interests over which the various
+national establishments keep watch and hold pretensions are, in point of
+historical derivation, a legacy from the princely politics of what is
+called the "Mercantilist" period; and they are uniformly of the nature
+of gratuitous interference or discrimination between the citizens of the
+given nation and outsiders. Except (doubtfully) in the English case,
+where mercantilist policies are commonly believed to have been adopted
+directly for the benefit of the commercial interest, measures of this
+nature are uniformly traceable to the endeavours of the crown and its
+officers to strengthen the finances of the prince and give him an
+advantage in warlike enterprise. They are kept up essentially for the
+same eventual end of preparation for war. So, e.g., protective tariffs,
+and the like discrimination in shipping, are still advocated as a means
+of making the nation self-supporting, self-contained, self-sufficient;
+with a view to readiness in the event of hostilities.</p>
+
+<p>A nation is in no degree better off in time of peace for being
+self-sufficient. In point of patent fact no nation can be industrially
+self-sufficient except at the cost of foregoing some of the economic
+advantages of that specialisation of industry which the modern state of
+the in<!-- Page 207 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 207]</span>dustrial arts enforces. In time of peace there is no benefit
+comes to the community at large from such restraint of trade with the
+outside world, or to any class or section of the community except those
+commercial concerns that are favored by the discrimination; and these
+invariably gain their special advantage at the cost of their
+compatriots. Discrimination in trade&mdash;export, import or shipping&mdash;has no
+more beneficial effect when carried out publicly by the national
+authorities than when effected surreptitiously and illegally by a
+private conspiracy in restraint of trade within a group of interested
+business concerns.</p>
+
+<p>Hitherto the common man has found it difficult to divest himself of an
+habitual delusion on this head, handed down out of the past and
+inculcated by interested politicians, to the effect that in some
+mysterious way he stands to gain by limiting his own opportunities. But
+the neutralisation of international trade, or the abrogation of all
+discrimination in trade, is the beginning of wisdom as touches the
+perpetuation of peace. The first effect of such a neutral policy would
+be wider and more intricately interlocking trade relations, coupled with
+a further specialisation and mutual dependence of industry between the
+several countries concerned; which would mean, in terms of international
+comity, a lessened readiness for warlike operations all around.</p>
+
+<p>It used to be an argument of the free-traders that the growth of
+international commercial relations under a free-trade policy would
+greatly conduce to a spirit of mutual understanding and forbearance
+between the nations. There may or may not be something appreciable in
+the contention; it has been doubted, and there is no considerable
+evidence to be had in support of it. But<!-- Page 208 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 208]</span> what is more to the point is
+the tangible fact that such specialisation of industry and consequent
+industrial interdependence would leave all parties to this relation less
+capable, materially and spiritually, to break off amicable relations. So
+again, in time of peace and except with a view to eventual hostilities,
+it would involve no loss, and presumably little pecuniary gain, to any
+country, locality, town or class, if all merchant shipping were
+registered indiscriminately under neutral colors and sailed under the
+neutral no-man's flag, responsible indiscriminately to the courts where
+they touched or where their business was transacted.</p>
+
+<p>Neither producers, shippers, merchants nor consumers have any slightest
+interest in the national allegiance of the carriers of their freight,
+except such as may artificially be induced by discriminatory shipping
+regulations. In all but the name&mdash;in time of peace&mdash;the world's merchant
+shipping already comes near being so neutralised, and the slight further
+simplification required to leave it on a neutral peace footing would be
+little else than a neglect of such vexatious discrimination as is still
+in force. If no nation could claim the allegiance, and therefore the
+usufruct, of any given item of merchant shipping in case of eventual
+hostilities, on account of the domicile of the owners or the port of
+registry, that would create a further handicap on eventual warlike
+enterprise and add so much to the margin of tolerance. At the same time,
+in the event of hostilities, shipping sailing under the neutral no-man's
+flag and subject to no national allegiance would enjoy such immunities
+as still inure to neutral shipping. It is true, neutrality has not
+carried many immunities lately.</p>
+
+<p>Cumulatively effective usage and the exigencies of a large, varied,
+shifting and extensive maritime trade have<!-- Page 209 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 209]</span> in the course of time
+brought merchant shipping to something approaching a neutral footing.
+For most, one might venture to say for virtually all, routine purposes
+of business and legal liability the merchant shipping comes under the
+jurisdiction of the local courts, without reservation. It is true, there
+still are formalities and reservations which enable questions arising
+out of incidents in the shipping trade to become subject of
+international conference and adjustment, but they are after all not such
+as would warrant the erection of national apparatus to take care of them
+in case they were not already covered by usage to that effect. The
+visible drift of usage toward neutralisation in merchant shipping, in
+maritime trade, and in international commercial transactions, together
+with the similarly visible feasibility of a closer approach to
+unreserved neutralisation of this whole range of traffic, suggests that
+much the same line of considerations should apply as regards the
+personal and pecuniary rights of citizens traveling or residing abroad.
+The extreme,&mdash;or, as seen from the present point of view, the
+ultimate&mdash;term in the relinquishment of national pretensions along this
+line would of course be the neutralisation of citizenship.</p>
+
+<p>This is not so sweeping a move as a patriotically-minded person might
+imagine on the first alarm, so far as touches the practical status of
+the ordinary citizen in his ordinary relations, and particularly among
+the English-speaking peoples. As an illustrative instance, citizenship
+has sat somewhat lightly on the denizens of the American republic, and
+with no evident damage to the community at large or to the inhabitants
+in detail. Naturalisation has been easy, and has been sought with no
+more eagerness, on the whole, than the notably low terms of its
+acquirement would indicate. Without loss or discomfort many<!-- Page 210 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 210]</span> law-abiding
+aliens have settled in this country and spent the greater part of a
+life-time under its laws without becoming citizens, and no one the worse
+or the wiser for it. Not infrequently the decisive inducement to
+naturalisation on the part of immigrant aliens has been, and is, the
+desirability of divesting themselves of their rights of citizenship in
+the country of their origin. Not that the privilege and dignity of
+citizenship, in this or in any other country, is to be held of little
+account. It is rather that under modern civilised conditions, and among
+a people governed by sentiments of humanity and equity, the stranger
+within our gates suffers no obloquy and no despiteful usage for being a
+stranger. It may be admitted that of late, with the fomentation of a
+more accentuated nationalism by politicians seeking a <i>raison d'&ecirc;tre</i>,
+additional difficulties have been created in the way of naturalisation
+and the like incidents. Still, when all is told of the average American
+citizen, <i>qua</i> citizen, there is not much to tell. The like is true
+throughout the English-speaking peoples, with inconsequential allowance
+for local color. A definitive neutralisation of citizenship within the
+range of these English-speaking countries would scarcely ripple the
+surface of things as they are&mdash;in time of peace.</p>
+
+<p>All of which has not touched the sore and sacred spot in the received
+scheme of citizenship and its rights and liabilities. It is in the event
+of hostilities that the liabilities of the citizen at home come into the
+foreground, and it is as a source of patriotic grievance looking to
+warlike retaliation that the rights of the citizen abroad chiefly come
+into the case.</p>
+
+<p>If, as was once, almost inaudibly, hinted by a well-regarded statesman,
+the national establishment should<!-- Page 211 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 211]</span> refuse to jeopardise the public peace
+for the safeguarding of the person and property of citizens who go out
+<i>in partes infidelium</i> on their own private concerns, and should so
+leave them under the uncurbed jurisdiction of the authorities in those
+countries into which they have intruded, the result might in many cases
+be hardship to such individuals. This would, of course, be true almost
+exclusively of such instances only as occur in such localities as are,
+temporarily or permanently, outside the pale of modern law and order.
+And, it may be in place to remark, instances of such hardship, with the
+accompanying hazard of national complications, would, no doubt, greatly
+diminish in frequency consequent upon the promulgation of such a
+disclaimer of national responsibility for the continued well-being of
+citizens who so expatriate themselves in the pursuit of their own
+advantage or amusement. Meantime, let it not seem inconsiderate to
+recall that to the community at large the deplorable case of such
+expatriates under hardship involves no loss or gain in the material
+respect; and that, except for the fortuitous circumstance of his being a
+compatriot, the given individual's personal or pecuniary fortune in
+foreign parts has no special claim on his compatriots' sympathy or
+assistance; from which it follows also that with the definitive
+neutralisation of citizenship as touches expatriates, the sympathy which
+is now somewhat unintelligently confined to such cases, on what may
+without offense be called extraneous grounds, would somewhat more
+impartially and humanely extend to fellowmen in distress, regardless of
+nativity or naturalisation.</p>
+
+<p>What is mainly to the point here, however, is the fact that if
+citizenship were so neutralised within the range of neutral countries
+here contemplated, one further source<!-- Page 212 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 212]</span> of provocation to international
+jealousy and distrust would drop out of the situation. And it is not
+easy to detect any element of material loss involved in such a move. In
+the material respect no individual would be any the worse off, with the
+doubtful and dubious exception of the expatriate fortune-hunter, who
+aims to fish safely in troubled waters at his compatriots' expense. But
+the case stands otherwise as regards the balance of immaterial assets.
+The scaffolding of much highly-prized sentiment would collapse, and the
+world of poetry and pageantry&mdash;particularly that of the tawdrier and
+more vendible poetry and pageantry&mdash;would be poorer by so much. The Man
+Without a Country would lose his pathetic appeal, or would at any rate
+lose much of it. It may be, of course, that in the sequel there would
+result no net loss even in respect of these immaterial assets of
+sentimental animation and patriotic self-complacency, but it is after
+all fairly certain that something would be lost, and it is by no means
+clear what if anything would come in to fill its place.</p>
+
+<p>An historical parallel may help to illustrate the point. In the movement
+out of what may be called the royal age of dynasties and chivalric
+service, those peoples who have moved out of that age and out of its
+spiritual atmosphere have lost much of the conscious magnanimity and
+conviction of merit that once characterised that order of things, as it
+still continues to characterise the prevalent habit of mind in the
+countries that still continue under the archaic order of dynastic
+mastery and service. But it is also to be noted that these peoples who
+so have moved out of the archaic order appear to be well content with
+this change of spiritual atmosphere, and they are even fairly well
+persuaded, in the common run, that the move<!-- Page 213 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> has brought them some net
+gain in the way of human dignity and neighbourly tolerance, such as to
+offset any loss incurred on the heroic and invidious side of life. Such
+is the tempering force of habit. Whereas, e.g., on the other hand, the
+peoples of these surviving dynastic States, to which it is necessary
+continually to recur, who have not yet moved out of that realm of
+heroics, find themselves unable to see anything in such a prospective
+shift but net loss and headlong decay of the spirit; that modicum of
+forbearance and equity that is requisite to the conduct of life in a
+community of ungraded masterless men is seen by these stouter stomachs
+as a loosening of the moral fiber and a loss of nerve.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>What is here tentatively projected under the phrase, "neutralization of
+citizenship," is only something a little more and farther along the same
+general line of movement which these more modern peoples have been
+following in all that sequence of institutional changes that has given
+them their present distinctive character of commonwealths, as contrasted
+with the dynastic States of the mediaeval order. What may be in
+prospect&mdash;if such a further move away from the mediaeval landmarks is to
+take effect&mdash;may best be seen in the light of the later moves in the
+same direction hitherto, more particularly as regards the moral and
+aesthetic merits at large of such an institutional mutation. As touches
+this last previous shifting of ground along this line, just spoken of,
+the case stands in this singular but significant posture, in respect of
+the spiritual values and valuations involved: These peoples who have,
+even in a doubtful measure, made this transition from the archaic
+institutional scheme, of fealty and dynastic exploit and coercion, to
+the newer scheme of<!-- Page 214 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 214]</span> the ungraded commonwealth, are convinced, to the
+point of martyrdom, that anything like a return to the old order is
+morally impossible as well as insufferably shameful and irksome; whereas
+those people, of the retarded division of the race, who have had no
+experience of this new order, are equally convinced that it is all quite
+incompatible with a worthy life.</p>
+
+<p>Evidently, there should be no disputing about tastes. Evidently, too,
+these retarded others will not move on into the later institutional
+phase, of the ungraded commonwealth, by preconceived choice; but only,
+if at all, by such schooling of experience as will bring them insensibly
+to that frame of mind out of which the ideal of the ungraded
+commonwealth emerges by easy generalisation of workday practice.
+Meantime, having not yet experienced that phase of sentiment and opinion
+on civic rights and immunities that is now occupied by their
+institutionally maturer neighbours, the subjects of the Imperial
+Fatherland, e.g., in spite of the most laudable intentions and the best
+endeavour, are, by failure of this experience, unable to comprehend
+either the ground of opposition to their well-meaning projects of
+dominion or the futility of trying to convert these their elder brothers
+to their own prescriptive acceptation of what is worth while. In time,
+and with experience, this retarded division of Christendom may come to
+the same perspective on matters of national usage and ideals as has been
+enforced on the more modern peoples by farther habituation. So, also, in
+time and with experience, if the drift of circumstance shall turn out to
+set that way, the further move away from mediaeval discriminations and
+constraint and into the unspectacular scheme of neutralisation may come
+to seem as right, good and beautiful as the democratic common<!-- Page 215 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 215]</span>wealth now
+seems to the English-speaking peoples, or as the Hohenzollern Imperial
+State now seems to the subjects of the Fatherland. There is, in effect,
+no disputing about tastes.</p>
+
+<p>There is little that is novel, and nothing that is to be rated as
+constructive innovation, in this sketch of what might not inaptly be
+called peace by neglect. The legal mind, which commonly takes the
+initiative in counsels on what to do, should scarcely be expected to
+look in that direction for a way out, or to see its way out in that
+direction in any case; so that it need occasion no surprise if the many
+current projects of pacification turn on ingenious and elaborate
+provisions of apparatus and procedure, rather than on that simpler line
+of expedients which the drift of circumstance, being not possessed of a
+legal mind, has employed in the sequence of institutional change
+hitherto. The legal mind that dominates in the current deliberations on
+peace is at home in exhaustive specifications and meticulous
+demarkations, and it is therefore prone to seek a remedy for the burden
+of supernumerary devices by recourse to further excesses of regulation.</p>
+
+<p>This trait of the legal mind is not a bad fault at the worst, and the
+quality in which this defect inheres is of the greatest moment in any
+project of constructive engineering on the legal and political plane.
+But it is less to the purpose, indeed it is at cross purposes, in such a
+conjuncture as the present; when the nations are held up in their quest
+of peace chiefly by an accumulation of institutional apparatus that has
+out-stayed its usefulness. It is the fortune even of good institutions
+to become imbecile with the change of conditioning circumstances, and it
+then becomes a question of their disestablishment, not<!-- Page 216 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 216]</span> of their
+rehabilitation. If there is anywhere a safe negative conclusion, it is
+that an institution grown mischievous by obsolescence need not be
+replaced by a substitute.</p>
+
+<p>Instances of such mischievous institutional arrangements, obsolete or in
+process of obsolescence, would be, e.g., the French monarchy of the
+ancient r&eacute;gime, the Spanish Inquisition, the British corn laws and the
+"rotten boroughs," the Barbary pirates, the Turkish rule in Armenia, the
+British crown, the German Imperial Dynasty, the European balance of
+powers, the Monroe Doctrine. In some sense, at least in the sense and
+degree implied in their selective survival, these various articles of
+institutional furniture, and many like them, have once presumably been
+suitable to some end, in the days of their origin and vigorous growth;
+and they have at least in some passable fashion met some felt want; but
+if they ever had a place and use in the human economy they have in time
+grown imbecile and mischievous by force of changing circumstances, and
+the question is not how to replace them with something else to the same
+purpose after their purpose is outworn. A man who loses a wart off the
+end of his nose does not apply to the <i>Ersatz</i> bureau for a convenient
+substitute.</p>
+
+<p>Now, a large proportion, perhaps even substantially the whole, of the
+existing apparatus of international rights, pretensions,
+discriminations, covenants and provisos, visibly fall in that class, in
+so far as concerns their material serviceability to the nation at large,
+and particularly as regards any other than a warlike purpose, offensive
+or defensive. Of course, the national dignity and diplomatic punctilio,
+and the like adjuncts and instrumentalities of the national honour, all
+have their prestige value; and they are not likely to be given up out of
+hand. In point<!-- Page 217 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 217]</span> of fact, however solicitous for a lasting peace these
+patriotically-minded modern peoples may be, it is doubtful if they could
+be persuaded to give up any appreciable share of these appurtenances of
+national jealousy even when their retention implies an imminent breach
+of the peace. Yet it is plain that the peace will be secure in direct
+proportion to the measure in which national discrimination and prestige
+are allowed to pass into nothingness and be forgot.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>By so much as it might amount to, such neutralisation of outstanding
+interests between these pacific nations should bring on a degree of
+coalescence of these nationalities. In effect, they are now held apart
+in many respects by measures of precaution against their coming to a
+common plan of use and wont. The degree of coalescence would scarcely be
+extreme; more particularly it could not well become onerous, since it
+would rest on convenience, inclination and the neglect of artificial
+discrepancies. The more intimate institutions of modern life, that
+govern human conduct locally and in detail, need not be affected, or not
+greatly affected, for better or worse. Yet something appreciable in that
+way might also fairly be looked for in time.</p>
+
+<p>The nature, reach and prescriptive force of this prospective coalescence
+through neutralisation may perhaps best be appreciated in the light of
+what has already come to pass, without design or mandatory guidance, in
+those lines of human interest where the national frontiers interpose no
+bar, or at least no decisive bar, whether by force of unconcern or
+through impotence. Fashions of dress, equipage and decorous usage, e.g.,
+run with some uniformity throughout these modern nations, and indeed<!-- Page 218 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 218]</span>
+with some degree of prescriptive force. There is, of course, nothing
+mandatory, in the simpler sense, about all this; nor is the degree of
+conformity extreme or uniform throughout. But it is a ready-made
+generalisation that only those communities are incorporated in this
+cosmopolitan coalescence of usage that are moved by their own
+incitement, and only so far as they have an effectually felt need of
+conformity in these premises. It is true, a dispassionate outsider, if
+such there be, would perhaps be struck by the degree of such painstaking
+conformity to canons of conduct which it frequently must cost serious
+effort even to ascertain in such detail as the case calls for.
+Doubtless, or at least presumably, conformity under the jurisdiction of
+the fashions, and in related provinces of decorum, is obligatory in a
+degree that need not be looked for throughout the scheme of use and wont
+at large, even under the advisedly established non-interference of the
+authorities. Still, on a point on which the evidence hitherto is
+extremely scant it is the part of discretion to hold no settled opinion.</p>
+
+<p>A more promising line of suggestion is probably that afforded by the
+current degree of contact and consistency among the modern nations in
+respect of science and scholarship, as also in the aesthetic or the
+industrial arts. Local color and local pride, with one thing and another
+in the way of special incitement or inhibition, may come in to vary the
+run of things, or to blur or hinder a common understanding and mutual
+furtherance and copartnery in these matters of taste and intellect. Yet
+it is scarcely misleading to speak of the peoples of Christendom as one
+community in these respects. The sciences and the arts are held as a
+joint stock among these peoples, in their elements, and measurably also
+in their working-out. It is<!-- Page 219 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> true, these interests and achievements of
+the race are not cultivated with the same assiduity or with identical
+effect throughout; but it is equally true that no effectual bar could
+profitably be interposed, or would be tolerated in the long run in this
+field, where men have had occasion to learn that unlimited collusion is
+more to the purpose than a clannish discrimination.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It is, no doubt, beyond reasonable hope that these democratic peoples
+could be brought forthwith to concerted action on the lines of such a
+plan of peace by neutralisation of all outstanding national pretensions.
+Both the French and the English-speaking peoples are too eagerly set on
+national aims and national prestige, to allow such a plan to come to a
+hearing, even if something of the kind should be spoken for by their
+most trusted leaders. By settled habit they are thinking in terms of
+nationality, and just now they are all under the handicap of an inflamed
+national pride. Advocacy of such a plan, of course, does not enter
+seriously into the purpose of this inquiry; which is concerned with the
+conditions under which peace is sought today, with the further
+conditions requisite to its perpetuation, and with the probable effects
+of such a peace on the fortunes of these peoples in case peace is
+established and effectually maintained.</p>
+
+<p>It is a reasonable question, and one to which a provisional answer may
+be found, whether the drift of circumstances in the present and for the
+immediate future may be counted on to set in the direction of a
+progressive neutralisation of the character spoken of above, and
+therefore possibly toward a perpetuation of that peace that is to follow
+the present season of war. So also is it an open and interesting
+question whether the drift in that direc<!-- Page 220 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 220]</span>tion, if such is the set of it,
+can be counted on to prove sufficiently swift and massive, so as not to
+be overtaken and overborne by the push of agencies that make for
+dissension and warlike enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>Anything like a categorical answer to these questions would have to be a
+work of vaticination or of effrontery,&mdash;possibly as much to the point
+the one as the other. But there are certain conditions precedent to a
+lasting peace as the outcome of events now in train, and there are
+certain definable contingencies conditioned on such current facts as the
+existing state of the industrial arts and the state of popular
+sentiment, together with the conjuncture of circumstances under which
+these factors will come into action.</p>
+
+<p>The state of the industrial arts, as it bears on the peace and its
+violation, has been spoken of above. It is of such a character that a
+judiciously prepared offensive launched by any Power of the first rank
+at an opportune time can reach and lay waste any given country of the
+habitable globe. The conclusive evidence of this is at hand, and it is
+the major premise underlying all current proposals and projects of
+peace, as well as the refusal of the nations now on the defensive to
+enter into negotiations looking to an "inconclusive peace." This state
+of the case is not commonly recognised in so many words, but it is well
+enough understood. So that all peace projects that shall hope to find a
+hearing must make up their account with it, and must show cause why they
+should be judged competent to balk any attempted offensive. In an
+inarticulate or inchoate fashion, perhaps, but none the less with
+ever-increasing certitude and increasing apprehension, this state of the
+case is also coming to be an article of popular "knowledge and belief,"
+wherever much or little<!-- Page 221 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> thought is spent on the outlook for peace. It
+has already had a visible effect in diminishing the exclusiveness of
+nationalities and turning the attention of the pacific peoples to the
+question of feasible ways and means of international cooperation in case
+of need; but it has not hitherto visibly lessened the militant spirit
+among these nations, nor has it lowered the tension of their national
+pride, at least not yet; rather the contrary, in fact.</p>
+
+<p>The effect, upon the popular temper, of this inchoate realisation of the
+fatality that so lies in the modern state of the industrial arts, varies
+from one country to another, according to the varying position in which
+they are placed, or in which they conceive themselves to be placed.
+Among the belligerent nations it has put the spur of fear to their need
+of concerted action as well as to their efforts to strengthen the
+national defense. But the state of opinion and sentiment abroad in the
+nation in time of war is no secure indication of what it will be after
+the return to peace. The American people, the largest and most
+immediately concerned of the neutral nations, should afford more
+significant evidence of the changes in the popular attitude likely to
+follow from a growing realisation of this state of the case, that the
+advantage has passed definitively to any well prepared and resolute
+offensive, and that no precautions of diplomacy and no practicable
+measures of defensive armament will any longer give security,&mdash;provided
+always that there is anywhere a national Power actuated by designs of
+imperial dominion.</p>
+
+<p>It is, of course, only little by little that the American people and
+their spokesmen have come to realise their own case under this
+late-modern situation, and hitherto only in an imperfect degree. Their
+first response to the stimulus has been a display of patriotic
+self-sufficiency<!-- Page 222 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 222]</span> and a move to put the national defense on a
+war-footing, such as would be competent to beat off all aggression.
+Those elements of the population who least realise the gravity of the
+situation, and who are at the same time commercially interested in
+measures of armament or in military preferment, have not begun to shift
+forward beyond this position of magniloquence and resolution; nor is
+there as yet much intimation that they see beyond it, although there is
+an ever-recurring hint that they in a degree appreciate the practical
+difficulty of persuading a pacific people to make adequate preparation
+beforehand, in equipment and trained man-power, for such a plan of
+self-sufficient self-defense. But increasingly among those who are, by
+force of temperament or insight or by lack of the pecuniary and the
+placeman's interest, less confident of an appeal to the nation's
+prowess, there is coming forward an evident persuasion that warlike
+preparations&mdash;"preparedness"&mdash;alone and carried through by the Republic
+in isolation, will scarcely serve the turn.</p>
+
+<p>There are at least two lines of argument, or of persuasion, running to
+the support of such a view; readiness for a warlike defense, by
+providing equipment and trained men, might prove a doubtfully effectual
+measure even when carried to the limit of tolerance that will always be
+reached presently in any democratic country; and then, too, there is
+hope of avoiding the necessity of such warlike preparation, at least in
+the same extreme degree, by means of some practicable working
+arrangement to be effected with other nations who are in the same case.
+Hitherto the farthest reach of these pacific schemes for maintaining the
+peace, or for the common defense, has taken the shape of a projected
+league of neutral nations to keep the peace by enforcement of specified
+interna<!-- Page 223 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 223]</span>tional police regulations or by compulsory arbitration of
+international disputes. It is extremely doubtful how far, if at all,
+popular sentiment of any effectual force falls in with this line of
+precautionary measures. Yet it is evident that popular sentiment, and
+popular apprehension, has been stirred profoundly by the events of the
+past two years, and the resulting change that is already visible in the
+prevailing sentiment as regards the national defense would argue that
+more far-reaching changes in the same connection are fairly to be looked
+for within a reasonable allowance of time.</p>
+
+<p>In this American case the balance of effectual public opinion hitherto
+is to all appearance quite in doubt, but it is also quite unsettled. The
+first response has been a display of patriotic emotion and national
+self-assertion. The further, later and presumably more deliberate,
+expressions of opinion carry a more obvious note of apprehension and
+less of stubborn or unreflecting national pride. It may be too early to
+anticipate a material shift of base, to a more neutral, or less
+exclusively national footing in matters of the common defense.</p>
+
+<p>The national administration has been moving at an accelerated rate in
+the direction not of national isolation and self-reliance resting on a
+warlike equipment formidable enough to make or break the peace at
+will&mdash;such as the more truculent and irresponsible among the politicians
+have spoken for&mdash;but rather in the direction of moderating or curtailing
+all national pretensions that are not of undoubted material consequence,
+and of seeking a common understanding and concerted action with those
+nationalities whose effectual interests in the matters of peace and war
+coincide with the American. The administration has grown visibly more
+pacific in the course of<!-- Page 224 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 224]</span> its exacting experience,&mdash;more resolutely, one
+might even say more aggressively pacific; but the point of chief
+attention in all this strategy of peace has also visibly been shifting
+somewhat from the maintenance of a running equilibrium between
+belligerents and a keeping of the peace from day to day, to the ulterior
+and altogether different question of what is best to be done toward a
+conclusive peace at the close of hostilities, and the ways and means of
+its subsequent perpetuation.</p>
+
+<p>This latter is, in effect, an altogether different question from that of
+preserving neutrality and amicable relations in the midst of importunate
+belligerents, and it may even, conceivably, perhaps not unlikely, come
+to involve a precautionary breach of the current peace and a taking of
+sides in the war with an urgent view to a conclusive outcome. It would
+be going too far to impute to the administration, at the present stage,
+such an aggressive attitude in its pursuit of a lasting peace as could
+be called a policy of defensive offense; but it will shock no one's
+sensibilities to say that such a policy, involving a taking of sides and
+a renouncing of national isolation, is visibly less remote from the
+counsels of the administration today than it has been at any earlier
+period.</p>
+
+<p>In this pacific attitude, increasingly urgent and increasingly
+far-reaching and apprehensive, the administration appears to be speaking
+for the common man rather than for the special interests or the
+privileged classes. Such would appear, on the face of the returns, to be
+the meaning of the late election. It is all the more significant on that
+account, since in the long run it is after all the common man that will
+have to pass on the expediency of any settled line of policy and to bear
+the material burden of carrying it into effect.<!-- Page 225 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 225]</span></p>
+
+<p>It may seem rash to presume that a popularly accredited administration
+in a democratic country must approximately reflect the effectual changes
+of popular sentiment and desire. Especially would it seem rash to anyone
+looking on from the point of view of an undemocratic nation, and
+therefore prone to see the surface fluctuations of excitement and
+shifting clamor. But those who are within the democratic pale will know
+that any administration in such a country, where official tenure and
+continued incumbency of the party rest on a popular vote,&mdash;any such
+administration is a political organisation and is guided by political
+expediency, in the tawdry sense of the phrase. Such a political
+situation has the defects of its qualities, as has been well and
+frequently expounded by its critics, but it has also the merits of its
+shortcomings. In a democracy of this modern order any incumbent of high
+office is necessarily something of a politician, quite indispensably so;
+and a politician at the same time necessarily is something of a
+demagogue. He yields to the popular drift, or to the set of opinion and
+demands among the effective majority on whom he leans; and he can not
+even appear to lead, though he may surreptitiously lead opinion in
+adroitly seeming to reflect it and obey it. Ostensible leadership, such
+as has been staged in this country from time to time, has turned out to
+be ostensible only. The politician must be adroit; but if he is also to
+be a statesman he must be something more. He is under the necessity of
+guessing accurately what the drift of events and opinion is going to be
+on the next reach ahead; and in taking coming events by the forelock he
+may be able to guide and shape the drift of opinion and sentiment
+somewhat to his own liking. But all the while he must keep within the
+lines of the long-term set of the<!-- Page 226 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 226]</span> current as it works out in the habits
+of thought of the common man.</p>
+
+<p>Such foresight and flexibility is necessary to continued survival, but
+flexibility of convictions alone does not meet the requirements. Indeed,
+it has been tried. It is only the minor politicians&mdash;the most numerous
+and long-lived, it is true&mdash;who can hold their place in the crevices of
+the party organisation, and get their livelihood from the business of
+party politics, without some power of vision and some hazard of
+forecast. It results from this state of the case that the drift of
+popular sentiment and the popular response to the stimulus of current
+events is reflected more faithfully and more promptly by the short-lived
+administrations of a democracy than by the stable and formally
+irresponsible governmental establishments of the older order. It should
+also be noted that these democratic administrations are in a less
+advantageous position for the purpose of guiding popular sentiment and
+shaping it to their own ends.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Now, it happens that at no period within the past half-century has the
+course of events moved with such celerity or with so grave a bearing on
+the common good and the prospective contingencies of national life as
+during the present administration. This apparent congruity of the
+administration's policy with the drift of popular feeling and belief
+will incline anyone to put a high rating on the administration's course
+of conduct, in international relations as well as in national measures
+that have a bearing on international relations, as indicating the course
+taken by sentiment and second thought in the community at large,&mdash;for,
+in effect, whether or not in set form, the community at large reflects
+on any matters of such gravity<!-- Page 227 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 227]</span> and urgency as to force themselves upon
+the attention of the common man.</p>
+
+<p>Two main lines of reflection have visibly been enforced on the
+administration by the course of events in the international field. There
+has been a growing apprehension, mounting in the later months to
+something like the rank of a settled conviction, that the Republic has
+been marked down for reduction to a vassal state by the dynastic Empire
+now engaged with its European adversaries. In so saying that the
+Republic has been marked down for subjection it is not intended to
+intimate that deliberate counsel has been had by the Imperial
+establishment on that prospective enterprise; still less that a
+resolution to such effect, with specification of ways and means, has
+been embodied in documentary form and deposited for future reference in
+the Imperial archives. All that is intended, and all that is necessary
+to imply, is that events are in train to such effect that the
+subjugation of the American republic will necessarily find its place in
+the sequence presently, provided that the present Imperial adventure is
+brought to a reasonably auspicious issue; though it does not follow that
+this particular enterprise need be counted on as the next large
+adventure in dominion to be undertaken when things again fall into
+promising shape. This latter point would, of course, depend on the
+conjuncture of circumstances, chief of which would have to be the
+exigencies of imperial dominion shaping the policy of the Empire's
+natural and necessary ally in the Far East. All this has evidently been
+coming more and more urgently into the workday deliberations of the
+American administration. Of course, it is not spoken of in set terms to
+this effect in official utterances, perhaps not even within doors; that
+sort of thing is not done.<!-- Page 228 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 228]</span> But it can do no harm to use downright
+expressions in a scientific discussion of these phenomena, with a view
+to understanding the current drift of things in this field.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond this is the similar apprehension, similarly though more slowly
+and reluctantly rising to the level of settled conviction, that the
+American commonwealth is not fit to take care of its own case
+single-handed. This apprehension is enforced more and more unmistakably
+with every month that passes on the theatre of war. And it is reenforced
+by the constantly more obvious reflection that the case of the American
+commonwealth in this matter is the same as that of the democratic
+countries of Europe, and of the other European colonies. It is not, or
+at least one may believe it is not yet, that in the patriotic
+apprehension of the common man, or of the administration which speaks
+for him, the resources of the country would be inadequate to meet any
+contingencies of the kind that might arise, whether in respect of
+industrial capacity or in point of man-power, if these resources were
+turned to this object with the same singleness of purpose and the same
+drastic procedure that marks the course of a national establishment
+guided by no considerations short of imperial dominion. The doubt
+presents itself rather as an apprehension that the cost would be
+extravagantly high, in all respects in which cost can be counted; which
+is presently seconded, on very slight reflection and review of
+experience, by recognition of the fact that a democracy is, in point of
+fact, not to be persuaded to stand under arms interminably in mere
+readiness for a contingency, however distasteful the contingency may be.</p>
+
+<p>In point of fact, a democratic commonwealth is moved by other interests
+in the main, and the common defense is a secondary consideration, not a
+primary interest,<!-- Page 229 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 229]</span>&mdash;unless in the exceptional case of a commonwealth so
+placed under the immediate threat of invasion as to have the common
+defense forced into the place of paramount consequence in its workday
+habits of thought. The American republic is not so placed. Anyone may
+satisfy himself by reasonable second thought that the people of this
+nation are not to be counted on to do their utmost in time of peace to
+prepare for war. They may be persuaded to do much more than has been
+their habit, and adventurous politicians may commit them to much more
+than the people at large would wish to undertake, but when all is done
+that can be counted on for a permanency, up to the limit of popular
+tolerance, it would be a bold guess that should place the result at more
+than one-half of what the country is capable of. Particularly would the
+people's patience balk at the extensive military training requisite to
+put the country in an adequate position of defense against a sudden and
+well-prepared offensive. It is otherwise with a dynastic State, to the
+directorate of which all other interests are necessarily secondary,
+subsidiary, and mainly to be considered only in so far as they are
+contributory to the nation's readiness for warlike enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>America at the same time is placed in an extra-hazardous position,
+between the two seas beyond which to either side lie the two Imperial
+Powers whose place in the modern economy of nations it is to disturb the
+peace in an insatiable quest of dominion. This position is no longer
+defensible in isolation, under the later state of the industrial arts,
+and the policy of isolation that has guided the national policy hitherto
+is therefore falling out of date. The question is as to the manner of
+its renunciation, rather than the fact of it. It may end in a defensive
+co<!-- Page 230 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 230]</span>partnership with other nations who are placed on the defensive by the
+same threatening situation, or it may end in a bootless struggle for
+independence, but the choice scarcely extends beyond this alternative.
+It will be said, of course, that America is competent to take care of
+itself and its Monroe doctrine in the future as in the past. But that
+view, spoken for cogently by thoughtful men and by politicians looking
+for party advantage, overlooks the fact that the modern technology has
+definitively thrown the advantage to the offensive, and that intervening
+seas can no longer be counted on as a decisive obstacle. On this latter
+head, what was reasonably true fifteen years ago is doubtful today, and
+it is in all reasonable expectation invalid for the situation fifteen
+years hence.</p>
+
+<p>The other peoples that are of a neutral temper may need the help of
+America sorely enough in their endeavours to keep the peace, but
+America's need of cooperation is sorer still, for the Republic is coming
+into a more precarious place than any of the others. America is also, at
+least potentially, the most democratic of the greater Powers, and is
+handicapped with all the disabilities of a democratic commonwealth in
+the face of war. America is also for the present, and perhaps for the
+calculable future, the most powerful of these greater Powers, in point
+of conceivably available resources, though not in actually available
+fighting-power; and the entrance of America unreservedly into a neutral
+league would consequently be decisive both of the purposes of the league
+and of its efficiency for the purpose; particularly if the
+neutralisation of interests among the members of the league were carried
+so far as to make withdrawal and independent action disadvantageous.<!-- Page 231 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 231]</span></p>
+
+<p>On the establishment of such a neutral league, with such neutralisation
+of national interests as would assure concerted action in time of
+stress, the need of armament on the part of the American republic would
+disappear, at least to the extent that no increase of armed force would
+be advisable. The strength of the Republic lies in its large and varied
+resources and the unequalled industrial capacity of its population,&mdash;a
+capacity which is today seriously hampered by untoward business
+interests and business methods sheltered under national discrimination,
+but which would come more nearly to its own so soon as these national
+discriminations were corrected or abrogated in the neutralisation of
+national pretensions. The neutrally-minded countries of Europe have been
+constrained to learn the art of modern war, as also to equip themselves
+with the necessary appliances, sufficient to meet all requirements for
+keeping the peace through such a period as can or need be taken into
+account,&mdash;provided the peace that is to come on the conclusion of the
+present war shall be placed on so "conclusive" a footing as will make it
+anything substantially more than a season of recuperation for that
+warlike Power about whose enterprise in dominion the whole question
+turns. Provided that suitably "substantial guarantees" of a reasonable
+quiescence on the part of this Imperial Power are had, there need be no
+increase of the American armament. Any increased armament would in that
+case amount to nothing better than an idle duplication of plant and
+personnel already on hand and sufficient to meet the requirements.</p>
+
+<p>To meet the contingencies had in view in its formation, such a league
+would have to be neutralised to the point that all pertinent national
+pretensions would fall into vir<!-- Page 232 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 232]</span>tual abeyance, so that all the necessary
+resources at the disposal of the federated nations would automatically
+come under the control of the league's appointed authorities without
+loss of time, whenever the need might arise. That is to say, national
+interests and pretensions would have to give way to a collective control
+sufficient to insure prompt and concerted action. In the face of such a
+neutral league Imperial Japan alone would be unable to make a really
+serious diversion or to entertain much hope of following up its quest of
+dominion. The Japanese Imperial establishment might even be persuaded
+peaceably to let its unoffending neighbours live their own life
+according to their own light. It is, indeed, possibly the apprehension
+of some such contingency that has hurried the rapacity of the Island
+Empire into the headlong indecencies of the past year or two.<!-- Page 233 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h4>
+
+<p class='center'><span class="smcap">Elimination of the Unfit</span></p>
+
+
+<p>It may seem early (January 1917) to offer a surmise as to what must be
+the manner of league into which the pacific nations are to enter and by
+which the peace will be kept, in case such a move is to be made. But the
+circumstances that are to urge such a line of action, and that will
+condition its carrying out in case it is entered on, have already come
+into bearing and should, on the whole, no longer be especially obscure
+to anyone who will let the facts of the case rather than his own
+predilections decide what he will believe. By and large, the pressure of
+these conditioning circumstances may be seen, and the line of least
+resistance under this pressure may be calculated, with due allowance of
+a margin of error owing to unknown contingencies of time and minor
+variables.</p>
+
+<p>Time is of the essence of the case. So that what would have been
+dismissed as idle vapour two years ago has already become subject of
+grave deliberation today, and may rise to paramount urgency that far
+hence. Time is needed to appreciate and get used to any innovation of
+appreciable gravity, particularly where the innovation depends in any
+degree on a change in public sentiment, as in this instance. The present
+outlook would seem to be that no excess of time is allowed in these
+premises; but it should also be noted that events are moving with
+unexampled celerity, and are impinging on the popular ap<!-- Page 234 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>prehension with
+unexampled force,&mdash;unexampled on such a scale. It is hoped that a
+recital of these circumstances that provoke to action along this line
+will not seem unwarrantably tedious, and that a tentative definition of
+the line of least resistance under pressure of these circumstances may
+not seem unwarrantably presumptuous.</p>
+
+<p>The major premise in the case is the felt need of security from
+aggression at the hands of Imperial Germany and its auxiliary Powers;
+seconded by an increasingly uneasy apprehension as to the prospective
+line of conduct on the part of Imperial Japan, bent on a similar quest
+of dominion. There is also the less articulate apprehension of what, if
+anything, may be expected from Imperial Russia; an obscure and scarcely
+definable factor, which comes into the calculation chiefly by way of
+reenforcing the urgency of the situation created by the dynastic
+ambitions of these other two Imperial States. Further, the pacific
+nations, the leading ones among them being the French and
+English-speaking peoples, are coming to recognise that no one among them
+can provide for its own security single-handed, even at the cost of
+their utmost endeavour in the way of what is latterly called
+"preparedness;" and they are at the same time unwilling to devote their
+force unreservedly to warlike preparation, having nothing to gain. The
+solution proposed is a league of the pacific nations, commonly spoken of
+at the present stage as a league to enforce peace, or less ambitiously
+as a league to enforce arbitration. The question being left somewhat at
+loose ends, whether the projected league is to include the two or three
+Imperial Powers whose pacific intentions are, euphemistically, open to
+doubt.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the outline of the project and its premises. An attempt to fill
+in this outline will, perhaps, conduce to<!-- Page 235 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 235]</span> an appreciation of what is
+sought and of what the conditioning circumstances will enforce in the
+course of its realisation. As touches the fear of aggression, it has
+already been indicated, perhaps with unnecessary iteration, that these
+two Imperial Powers are unable to relinquish the quest of dominion
+through warlike enterprise, because as dynastic States they have no
+other ulterior aim; as has abundantly appeared in the great volume of
+expository statements that have come out of the Fatherland the past few
+years, official, semi-official, inspired, and spontaneous. "Assurance of
+the nation's future" is not translatable into any other terms. The
+Imperial dynasty has no other ground to stand on, and can not give up
+the enterprise so long as it can muster force for any formidable
+diversion, to get anything in the way of dominion by seizure, threat or
+chicane.</p>
+
+<p>This is coming to be informally and loosely, but none the less
+definitively, realised by the pacific nations; and the realisation of it
+is gaining in clearness and assurance as time passes. And it is backed
+by the conviction that, in the nature of things, no engagement on the
+part of such a dynastic State has any slightest binding force, beyond
+the material constraint that would enforce it from the outside. So the
+demand has been diplomatically phrased as a demand for "substantial
+guarantees." Any gain in resources on the part of these Powers is to be
+counted as a gain in the ways and means of disturbing the peace, without
+reservation.</p>
+
+<p>The pacific nations include among them two large items, both of which
+are indispensable to the success of the project, the United States and
+the United Kingdom. The former brings in its train, virtually without
+exception or question, the other American republics, none of which<!-- Page 236 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 236]</span> can
+practicably go in or stay out except in company and collusion with the
+United States. The United Kingdom after the same fashion, and with
+scarcely less assurance, may be counted on to carry the British
+colonies. Evidently, without both of these groups the project would not
+even make a beginning. Beyond this is to be counted in as elements of
+strength, though scarcely indispensable, France, Belgium, the
+Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. The other west-European
+nations would in all probability be found in the league, although so far
+as regards its work and its fortunes their adhesion would scarcely be a
+matter of decisive consequence; they may therefore be left somewhat on
+one side in any consideration of the circumstances that would shape the
+league, its aims and its limitations. The Balkan states, in the wider
+acceptance, they that frequent the Sign of the Double Cross, are
+similarly negligible in respect of the organisation of such a league or
+its resources and the mutual concessions necessary to be made between
+its chief members. Russia is so doubtful a factor, particularly as
+regards its place and value in industry, culture and politics, in the
+near future, as to admit nothing much more than a doubt on what its
+relation to the situation will be. The evil intentions of the
+Imperial-bureaucratic establishment are probably no more to be
+questioned than the good intentions of the underlying peoples of Russia.
+China will have to be taken in, if for no other reason than the use to
+which the magnificent resources of that country would be turned by its
+Imperial neighbour in the absence of insurmountable interference from
+outside. But China will come in on any terms that include neutrality and
+security.<!-- Page 237 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The question then arises as to the Imperial Powers whose dynastic
+enterprise is primarily to be hedged against by such a league.
+Reflection will show that if the league is to effect any appreciable
+part of its purpose, these Powers will also be included in the league,
+or at least in its jurisdiction. A pacific league not including these
+Powers, or not extending its jurisdiction and surveillance to them and
+their conduct, would come to the same thing as a coalition of nations in
+two hostile groups, the one standing on the defensive against the
+warlike machinations of the other, and both groups bidding for the favor
+of those minor Powers whose traditions and current aspirations run to
+national (dynastic) aggrandizement by way of political intrigue. It
+would come to a more articulate and accentuated form of that balance of
+power that has latterly gone bankrupt in Europe, with the most corrupt
+and unreliable petty monarchies of eastern Europe vested with a casting
+vote; and it would also involve a system of competitive armaments of the
+same general character as what has also shown itself bankrupt. It would,
+in other words, mean a virtual return to the <i>status quo ante</i>, but with
+an overt recognition of its provisional character, and with the lines of
+division more sharply drawn. That is to say, it would amount to
+reinstating the situation which the projected league is intended to
+avert. It is evidently contained in the premises that the projected
+league must be all-inclusive, at least as regards its jurisdiction and
+surveillance. The argument will return to this point presently.</p>
+
+<p>The purpose of the projected league is peace and security, commonly
+spoken of under patriotic preconceptions as "national" peace and
+security. This will have to mean a competent enforcement of peace, on
+such a footing of<!-- Page 238 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 238]</span> overmastering force at the disposal of the associated
+pacific nations as to make security a matter of ordinary routine. It is
+true, the more genial spokesmen of the project are given to the view
+that what is to come of it all is a comity of neutral nations, amicably
+adjusting their own relations among themselves in a spirit of peace and
+good-will. But this view is over-sanguine, in that it overlooks the
+point that into this prospective comity of nations Imperial Germany (and
+Imperial Japan) fit like a drunken savage with a machine gun. It also
+overlooks the patent fatality that these two are bound to come into a
+coalition at the next turn, with whatever outside and subsidiary
+resources they can draw on; provided only that a reasonable opening for
+further enterprise presents itself. The league, in other terms, must be
+in a position to enforce peace by overmastering force, and to anticipate
+any move at cross purposes with the security of the pacific nations.</p>
+
+<p>This end can be reached by either one of two ways. If the dynastic
+States are left to their own devices, it will be incumbent on the
+associated nations to put in the field a standing force sufficient to
+prevent a recourse to arms; which means competitive armament and
+universal military rule. Or the dynastic States may be taken into
+partnership and placed under such surveillance and constraint as to
+practically disarm them; which would admit virtual disarmament of the
+federated nations. The former arrangement has nothing in its favour,
+except the possibility that no better or less irksome arrangement can be
+had under existing circumstances; that is to say that the pacific
+nations may not be able to bring these dynastic states to terms of
+disarmament under surveillance. They assuredly can not except by force;
+and<!-- Page 239 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> this is the precise point on which the continued hostilities in
+Europe turn today. In diplomatic parable the German Imperial spokesmen
+say that they can accept (or as they prefer to phrase it, grant) no
+terms that do not fully safeguard the Future of the Fatherland; and in
+similarly diplomatic parable the spokesmen of the Entente insist that
+Prussian militarism must be permanently put out of commission; but it
+all means the same thing, viz. that the Imperial establishment is to be
+(or is not to be) disabled beyond the possibility of its entering on a
+similar warlike enterprise again, when it has had time for recuperation.
+The dynastic statesmen, and the lay subjects of the Imperial
+establishment, are strenuously set on securing a fair opportunity for
+recuperation and a wiser endeavour to achieve that dominion which the
+present adventure promises to defeat; while the Entente want no
+recurrence, and are persuaded that a recurrence can be avoided only on
+the footing of a present collapse of the Imperial power and a
+scrupulously enforced prostration of it henceforth.</p>
+
+<p>Without the definitive collapse of the Imperial power no pacific league
+of nations can come to anything much more than armistice. On the basis
+of such a collapse the league may as well administer its affairs
+economically by way of an all-around reduction of armaments, as by the
+costlier and more irksome way of "preparedness." But a sensible
+reduction of armaments on the part of the neutral nations implies
+disarmament of the dynastic States. Which would involve a neutral
+surveillance of the affairs of these dynastic States in such detail and
+with such exercise of authority as would reduce their governments to the
+effective status of local administrative officials. Out of which, in
+turn, would arise complications that<!-- Page 240 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> would lead to necessary
+readjustments all along the line. It would involve the virtual, if not
+also the formal, abolition of the monarchy, since the monarchy has no
+other use than that of international war and intrigue; or at least it
+would involve the virtual abrogation of its powers, reducing it to the
+same status of <i>faineantise</i> as now characterises the British crown.
+Evidently this means a serious intermeddling in the domestic concerns
+and arrangements of the Fatherland, such as is not admissible under the
+democratic principle that any people must be left free to follow their
+own inclinations and devices in their own concerns; at the same time
+that this degree of interference is imperative if the peace is to be
+kept on any other footing than that of eternal vigilance and superior
+armed force, with a people whose own inclinations and devices are of the
+kind now grown familiar in the German case,&mdash;all of which also applies,
+with accentuation, in the case of Imperial Japan.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Some such policy of neutral surveillance in the affairs of these peoples
+whose pacific temper is under suspicion, is necessarily involved in a
+plan to enforce peace by concert of the pacific nations, and it will
+necessarily carry implications and farther issues, touching not only
+these supposedly recalcitrant peoples, but also as regards the pacific
+nations themselves. Assuming always that the prime purpose and
+consistent aim of the projected league is the peace and security of
+those pacific nations on whose initiative it is to be achieved, then it
+should be reasonable to assume that the course of procedure in its
+organisation, administration and further adaptations and adjustments
+must follow the logic of necessities leading to that end. He who wills
+the end must make up his account with the means.<!-- Page 241 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 241]</span></p>
+
+<p>The end in this case is peace and security; which means, for practical
+purposes, peace and good-will. Ill-will is not a secure foundation of
+peace. Even the military strategists of the Imperial establishment
+recommend a programme of "frightfulness" only as a convenient military
+expedient, essentially a provisional basis of tranquility. In the long
+run and as a permanent peace measure it is doubtless not to the point.
+Security is finally to be had among or between modern peoples only on
+the ground of a common understanding and an impartially common basis of
+equity, or something approaching that basis as nearly as circumstances
+will permit. Which means that in so far as the projected peace-compact
+is to take effect in any enduring way, and leave the federated nations
+some degree of freedom from persistent apprehension and animosity, as
+well as from habitual insecurity of life and limb, the league must not
+only be all-inclusive, but it must be inclusively uniform in all its
+requirements and regulations.</p>
+
+<p>The peoples of the quondam Imperial nations must come into the league on
+a footing of formal equality with the rest. This they can not do without
+the virtual abdication of their dynastic governmental establishments and
+a consequent shift to a democratic form of organisation, and a formal
+abrogation of class privileges and prerogatives.</p>
+
+<p>However, a virtual abdication or cancelment of the dynastic rule, such
+as to bring it formally into the same class with the British crown,
+would scarcely meet the requirements in the case of the German Imperial
+establishment; still more patently not in the case of Imperial Japan.
+If, following the outlines of the decayed British crown, one or the
+other of these Imperial establishments<!-- Page 242 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 242]</span> were by formal enactment reduced
+to a state of nominal desuetude, the effect would be very appreciably
+different from what happens in the British community, where the crown
+has lost its powers by failure of the requisite subordination on the
+part of the people, and not by a formal abdication of rights. In the
+German case, and even more in the Japanese case, the strength of the
+Imperial establishment lies in the unimpaired loyalty of the populace;
+which would remain nearly intact at the outset, and would thin out only
+by insensible degrees in the sequel; so that if only the Imperial
+establishment were left formally standing it would command the fealty of
+the common run in spite of any formal abrogation of its powers, and the
+course of things would, in effect, run as before the break. In effect,
+to bring about a shift to a democratic basis the dynastic slate would
+have to be wiped very clean indeed. And this shift would be
+indispensable to the successful conduct of such a pacific league of
+nations, since any other than an effectually democratic national
+establishment is to be counted on unfailingly to intrigue for dynastic
+aggrandizement, through good report and evil.</p>
+
+<p>In a case like that of Imperial Germany, with its federated States and
+subsidiaries, where royalty and nobility still are potent preconceptions
+investing the popular imagination, and where loyal abnegation in the
+presence of authority still is the chief and staple virtue of the common
+man,&mdash;in all such cases virtual abdication of the dynastic initiative
+under constitutional forms can be had only by a formal and scrupulously
+complete abrogation of all those legal and customary arrangements on
+which this irresponsible exercise of authority has rested and through
+which it has taken effect. Neutralisation in these in<!-- Page 243 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 243]</span>stances will mean
+reduction to an unqualified democratic footing; which will, at least at
+the outset, not be acceptable to the common people, and will be wholly
+intolerable to the ruling classes. Such a r&eacute;gime, therefore, while it is
+indispensable as a working basis for a neutral league of peace, would
+from the outset have to be enforced against the most desperate
+resistance of the ruling classes, headed by the dynastic statesmen and
+warlords, and backed by the stubborn loyalty of the subject populace. It
+would have to mean the end of things for the ruling classes and the most
+distasteful submission to an alien scheme of use and wont for the
+populace. And yet it is also an indispensable element in any scheme of
+pacification that aims at permanent peace and security. In time, it may
+well be believed, the people of the Fatherland might learn to do well
+enough without the gratuitous domination of their ruling classes, but at
+the outset it would be a heartfelt privation.</p>
+
+<p>It follows that a league to enforce peace would have to begin its r&eacute;gime
+with enforcing peace on terms of the unconditional surrender of the
+formidable warlike nations; which could be accomplished only by the
+absolute and irretrievable defeat of these Powers as they now stand. The
+question will, no doubt, present itself, Is the end worth the cost? That
+question can, of course, not be answered in absolute terms, inasmuch as
+it resolves itself into a question of taste and prepossession. An answer
+to it would also not be greatly to the purpose here, since it would have
+no particular bearing on the course of action likely to be pursued by
+these pacific nations in their quest of a settled peace. It is more to
+the point to ask what is likely to be the practical decision of these<!-- Page 244 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>
+peoples on that head when the question finally presents itself in a
+concrete form.</p>
+
+<p>Again it is necessary to call to mind that any momentous innovation
+which rests on popular sentiment will take time; that consequently
+anything like a pl&eacute;biscite on the question today would scarcely give a
+safe index of what the decision is likely to be when presently put to
+the test; and that as things go just now, swiftly and urgent, any
+time-allowance counts at something more than its ordinary workday
+coefficient. What can apparently be said with some degree of confidence
+is that just now, during these two years past, sentiment has been moving
+in the direction indicated, and that any growing inclination of the kind
+is being strongly reenforced by a growing realisation that nothing but
+heroic remedies will avail at this juncture. If it comes to be currently
+recognised that a settled peace can be had only at the cost of
+eradicating privilege and royalty from the warlike nations, it would
+seem reasonable to expect, from their present state of mind, that the
+pacific nations will scarcely hesitate to apply that remedy,&mdash;provided
+always that the fortunes of war fall out as that measure would require,
+and provided also that the conflict lasts long enough and severe enough
+to let them make up their mind to anything so drastic.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>There is a certain side issue bearing on this question of the ulterior
+probabilities of popular sentiment and national policy as to what is to
+be done with the warlike nations in the event that the allied nations
+who fight for neutrality have the disposal of such matters. This side
+issue may seem remote, and it may not unlikely be overlooked among the
+mass of graver and more tangible con<!-- Page 245 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 245]</span>siderations. It was remarked above
+that the United Kingdom is one of the two chief pillars of the projected
+house of peace; and it may be added without serious fear of
+contradiction or annoyance that the United Kingdom is also the one among
+these pacific nations that comes nearest being capable, in the event of
+such an emergency, to take care of its own case single-handed. For
+better or worse, British adhesion to the project is indispensable, and
+the British are in a position virtually to name their own terms of
+adhesion. The British commonwealth&mdash;a very inclusive phrase in this
+connection&mdash;must form the core of the pacific league, if any, and
+British sentiment will have a very great place in the terms of its
+formation and in the terms which it will be inclined to offer the
+Imperial coalition at the settlement.</p>
+
+<p>Now, it happens that the British community entered on this war as a
+democratic monarchy ruled and officered by a body of gentlemen&mdash;doubtless
+the most correct and admirable muster of gentlemen, of anything approaching
+its volume, that the modern world can show. But the war has turned out not
+to be a gentlemen's war. It has on the contrary been a war of technological
+exploits, reenforced with all the beastly devices of the heathen. It is a
+war in which all the specific traits of the well-bred and gently-minded man
+are a handicap; in which veracity, gallantry, humanity, liberality are
+conducive to nothing but defeat and humiliation. The death-rate among the
+British gentlemen-officers in the early months, and for many months, ran
+extravagantly high, for the most part because they were gallant
+gentlemen as well as officers imbued with the good, old class spirit of
+<i>noblesse oblige</i>, that has made half the tradition and more than half
+the working theory of the British officer in the field,&mdash;good,<!-- Page 246 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 246]</span> but old,
+hopelessly out of date. That generation of officers died, for the most
+part; being unfit to survive or to serve the purpose under these modern
+conditions of warfare, to which their enemy on the other hand had
+adapted themselves with easy facility from beforehand. The gentlemanly
+qualifications, and the material apparatus of gentility, and, it will
+perhaps have to be admitted, the gentlemen, have fallen into the
+background, or perhaps rather have measurably fallen into abeyance,
+among the officers of the line. There may be more doubt as to the state
+of things in respect of the gentility of the staff, but the best that
+can confidently be said is that it is a point in doubt.</p>
+
+<p>It is hoped that one may say without offense that in the course of time
+the personnel has apparently worked down to the level of vulgarity
+defined by the ways and means of this modern warfare; which means the
+level on which runs a familiar acquaintance with large and complex
+mechanical apparatus, railway and highway transport and power,
+reenforced concrete, excavations and mud, more particularly mud,
+concealment and ambush, and unlimited deceit and ferocity. It is not
+precisely that persons of pedigree and gentle breeding have ceased to
+enter or seek entrance to employment as officers, still less that
+measures have been taken to restrain their doing so or to eliminate from
+the service those who have come into it&mdash;though there may present itself
+a doubt on this point as touches the more responsible discretionary
+positions&mdash;but only that the stock of suitable gentlemen, uncommonly
+large as it is, has been overdrawn; that those who have latterly gone
+into service, or stayed in, have perforce divested themselves of their
+gentility in some appreciable measure, particularly as regards class
+distinction, and have fallen<!-- Page 247 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 247]</span> on their feet in the more commonplace role
+of common men.</p>
+
+<p>Serviceability in this modern warfare is conditioned on much the same
+traits of temperament and training that make for usefulness in the
+modern industrial processes, where large-scale coordinations of movement
+and an effective familiarity with precise and far-reaching mechanical
+processes is an indispensable requirement,&mdash;indispensable in the same
+measure as the efficient conduct of this modern machine industry is
+indispensable. But the British gentleman, in so far as he runs true to
+type, is of no use to modern industry; quite the contrary, in fact.
+Still, the British gentleman is, in point of heredity, the same thing
+over again as the British common man; so that, barring the misdirected
+training that makes him a gentleman, and which can largely be undone
+under urgent need and pressure, he can be made serviceable for such uses
+as the modern warfare requires. Meantime the very large demand for
+officers, and the insatiable demand for capable officers, has brought
+the experienced and capable common man into the case and is in a fair
+way to discredit gentility as a necessary qualification of field
+officers.</p>
+
+<p>But the same process of discredit and elimination is also extending to
+the responsible officials who have the administration of things in hand.
+Indeed, the course of vulgarisation among the responsible officials has
+now been under way for some appreciable time and with very perceptible
+effect, and the rate of displacement appears to be gathering velocity
+with every month that passes. Here, as in the field operations, it also
+appears that gentlemanly methods, standards, preconceptions, and
+knowledge of men and things, is no longer to the purpose. Here, too,<!-- Page 248 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 248]</span> it
+is increasingly evident that this is not a gentlemen's war. And the
+traditional qualifications that have sufficed in the past, at least to
+the extent of enabling the British management to "muddle through," as
+they are proudly in the habit of saying,&mdash;these qualifications are of
+slight account in this technological conjuncture of the nation's
+fortunes. It would perhaps be an under-statement to say that these
+gentlemanly qualifications are no longer of any account, for the purpose
+immediately in hand, and it would doubtless not do to say that they are
+wholly and unreservedly disserviceable as things run today; but captious
+critics might find at least a precarious footing of argument on such a
+proposition.</p>
+
+<p>Through the course of the nineteenth century the British government had
+progressively been taking on the complexion of a "gentlemen's
+agreement;" a government by gentlemen, for gentlemen, and of gentlemen,
+too, beyond what could well be alleged in any other known instance,
+though never wholly so. No government could be a government of gentlemen
+exclusively, since there is no pecuniary profit in gentlemen as such,
+and therefore no object in governing them; more particularly could there
+never be any incentive in it for gentlemen, whose livelihood is, in the
+nature of the case, drawn from some one else. A gentlemen's government
+can escape death by inanition only in so far as it serves the material
+interest of its class, as contrasted with the underlying population from
+which the class draws its livelihood. This British arrangement of a
+government by prudent and humane gentlemen with a view to the
+conservation of that state of things that best conduced to the material
+well-being of their own class, has on the whole had the loyal support of
+the underlying populace, with an occasional floundering<!-- Page 249 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 249]</span> protest. But
+the protest has never taken the shape of an expressed distrust of
+gentlemen, considered as the staple ways and means of government; nor
+has the direction of affairs ever descended into the hands of any other
+or lower class or condition of men.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, this British arrangement for the control of national
+affairs by a body of interested gentlemen-investors has been, and
+perhaps still is, just as well at home in the affectionate
+preconceptions of the nineteenth-century British as the corresponding
+German usufruct by self-appointed swaggering aristocrats has been among
+the underlying German population, or as the American arrangement of
+national control by business men for business ends. The British and the
+American arrangements run very much to the same substantial effect, of
+course, inasmuch as the British gentlemen represent, as a class, the
+filial generations of a business community, and their aims and standards
+of conduct continue to be such as are enforced by the pecuniary
+interests on which their gentility is conditioned. They continue to draw
+the ways and means of a worthy life from businesslike arrangements of a
+"vested" character, made and provided with a view to their nourishment
+and repose. Their resulting usufruct of the community's productive
+efforts rests on a vested interest of a pecuniary sort, sanctioned by
+the sacred rights of property; very much as the analogous German
+dynastic and aristocratic usufruct rests on personal prerogative,
+sanctioned by the sacred rights of authentic prescription, without
+afterthought. The two, it will be noted are very much alike, in effect,
+"under the skin." The great distinguishing mark being that the German
+usufructuary gentlemen are, in theory at least, gentlemen-adventurers of
+prowess and proud words, whose<!-- Page 250 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 250]</span> place in the world's economy it is to
+glorify God and disturb the peace; whereas their British analogues are
+gentlemen-investors, of blameless propriety, whose place it is more
+simply to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.</p>
+
+<p>All this arrangement of a usufruct with a view to the reputable
+consumption of the community's superfluous production has had the
+cordial support of British sentiment, perhaps fully as cordial as the
+German popular subservience in the corresponding German scheme; both
+being well embedded in the preconceptions of the common man. But the war
+has put it all to a rude test, and has called on the British gentlemen's
+executive committee to take over duties for which it was not designed.
+The exigencies of this war of technological exploits have been almost
+wholly, and very insistently, of a character not contemplated in the
+constitution of such an executive committee of gentlemen-investors
+designed to safeguard class interests and promote their pecuniary class
+advantage by a blamelessly inconspicuous and indirect management of
+national affairs. The methods are of the class known colloquially among
+the vulgar-spoken American politicians as "pussyfooting" and
+"log-rolling"; but always with such circumstance of magnitude,
+authenticity and well-bred deference to precedent, as to give the
+resulting routine of subreption, trover and conversion, an air not only
+of benevolent consideration but of austere morality.</p>
+
+<p>But the most austere courtesy and the most authentically dispassionate
+division of benefits will not meet the underbred exigencies of a war
+conducted on the mechanistic lines of the modern state of the industrial
+arts. So the blameless, and for the purpose imbecile, executive
+committee of gentlemen-investors has been insensibly los<!-- Page 251 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>ing the
+confidence and the countenance of the common man; who, when all is said,
+will always have to do what is to be done. The order of gentlemanly
+parleying and brokery has, therefore, with many apprehensions of
+calamity, been reluctantly and tardily giving ground before something
+that is of a visibly underbred order. Increasingly underbred, and
+thereby insensibly approaching the character of this war situation, but
+accepted with visible reluctance and apprehension both by the ruling
+class and by the underlying population. The urgent necessity of going to
+such a basis, and of working out the matter in hand by an unblushing
+recourse to that matter-of-fact logic of mechanical efficiency, which
+alone can touch the difficulties of the case, but which has no respect
+of persons,&mdash;this necessity has been present from the outset and has
+been vaguely apprehended for long past, but it is only tardily and after
+the chastening of heavy penalties on this gentlemanly imbecility that a
+substantial move in that direction has been made. It has required much
+British resolution to overcome the night-fear of going out into the
+unhallowed ground of matter-of-fact, where the farthest earlier
+excursions of the governmental agencies had taken them no farther than
+such financial transactions as are incident to the accomplishment of
+anything whatever in a commercial nation. And then, too, there is a
+pecuniary interest in being interested in financial transactions.</p>
+
+<p>This shifting of discretionary control out of the hands of the gentlemen
+into those of the underbred common run, who know how to do what is
+necessary to be done in the face of underbred exigencies, may
+conceivably go far when it has once been started, and it may go forward
+at an accelerated rate if the pressure of necessity lasts long enough.
+If time be given for habituation to<!-- Page 252 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> this manner of directorate in
+national affairs, so that the common man comes to realise how it is
+feasible to get along without gentlemen-investors holding the
+discretion, the outcome may conceivably be very grave. It is a point in
+doubt, but it is conceivable that in such a case the gentlemanly
+executive committee administering affairs in the light of the
+gentlemanly pecuniary interest, will not be fully reinstated in the
+discretionary control of the United Kingdom for an appreciable number of
+years after the return of peace. Possibly, even, the r&eacute;gime may be
+permanently deranged, and there is even a shadowy doubt possible to be
+entertained as to whether the vested pecuniary rights, on which the
+class of gentlemen rests, may not suffer some derangement, in case the
+control should pass into the hands of the underbred and unpropertied for
+so long a season as to let the common man get used to thinking that the
+vested interests and the sacred rights of gentility are so much ado
+about nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Such an outcome would be extreme, but as a remote contingency it is to
+be taken into account. The privileged classes of the United Kingdom
+should by this time be able to see the danger there may be for them and
+their vested interests, pecuniary and moral, in an excessive
+prolongation of the war; in such postponement of peace as would afford
+time for a popular realisation of their incompetence and
+disserviceability as touches the nation's material well-being under
+modern conditions. To let the nation's war experience work to such an
+outcome, the season of war would have to be prolonged beyond what either
+the hopes or the fears of the community have yet contemplated; but the
+point is after all worth noting, as being within the premises of the
+case, that there is herein a remote contingency of losing, at least for
+a time, that unformulated<!-- Page 253 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 253]</span> clause in the British constitution which has
+hitherto restricted the holding of responsible office to men of pedigree
+and of gentle breeding, or at least of very grave pecuniary weight; so
+grave as to make the incumbents virtual gentlemen, with a virtual
+pedigree, and with a virtual gentleman's accentuated sense of class
+interest. Should such an eventuality overtake British popular sentiment
+and belief there is also the remote contingency that the rights of
+ownership and investment would lose a degree of sanctity.</p>
+
+<p>It seems necessary to note a further, and in a sense more improbable,
+line of disintegration among modern fixed ideas. Among the best
+entrenched illusions of modern economic preconceptions, and in economic
+as well as legal theory, has been the indispensability of funds, and the
+hard and fast limitation of industrial operations by the supply or
+with-holding of funds. The war experience has hitherto gone tentatively
+to show that funds and financial transactions, of credit, bargain, sale
+and solvency, may be dispensed with under pressure of necessity; and
+apparently without seriously hindering that run of mechanical fact, on
+which interest in the present case necessarily centers, and which must
+be counted on to give the outcome. Latterly the case is clearing up a
+little further, on further experience and under further pressure of
+technological exigencies, to the effect that financial arrangements are
+indispensable in this connection only because and in so far as it has
+been arranged to consider them indispensable; as in international trade.
+They are an indispensable means of intermediation only in so far as
+pecuniary interests are to be furthered or safeguarded in the
+intermediation. When, as has happened with the belligerents in the
+present instance, the national establishment<!-- Page 254 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 254]</span> becomes substantially
+insolvent, it is beginning to appear that its affairs can be taken care
+of with less difficulty and with better effect without the use of
+financial expedients. Of course, it takes time to get used to doing
+things by the more direct method and without the accustomed
+circumlocution of accountancy, or the accustomed allowance for profits
+to go to interested parties who, under the financial r&eacute;gime, hold a
+power of discretionary permission in all matters that touch the use of
+the industrial arts. Under these urgent material exigencies, investment
+comes to have much of the appearance of a gratuitous drag and drain on
+the processes of industry.</p>
+
+<p>Here, again, is a sinister contingency; sinister, that is, for those
+vested rights of ownership by force of which the owners of "capital" are
+enabled to permit or withhold the use of the industrial arts by the
+community at large, on pain of privation in case the accustomed toll to
+the owners of capital is not paid. It is, of course, not intended to
+find fault with this arrangement; which has the sanction of "time
+immemorial" and of a settled persuasion that it lies at the root of all
+civilised life and intercourse. It is only that in case of extreme need
+this presumed indispensable expedient of industrial control has broken
+down, and that experience is proving it to be, in these premises, an
+item of borrowed trouble. Should experience continue to run on the same
+lines for an appreciable period and at a high tension, it is at least
+conceivable that the vested right of owners to employ unlimited sabotage
+in the quest of profits might fall so far into disrepute as to leave
+them under a qualified doubt on the return of "normal" conditions. The
+common man, in other words, who gathers nothing but privation and
+anxiety from the owners' discretionary sabotage, may conceivably stand
+to lose his<!-- Page 255 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> preconception that the vested rights of ownership are the
+cornerstone of his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The considerations recited in this lengthy excursion on the war
+situation and its probable effects on popular habits of thought in the
+United Kingdom go to say that when peace comes to be negotiated, with
+the United Kingdom as the chief constituent and weightiest spokesman of
+the allied nations and of the league of pacific neutrals, the
+representatives of British aims and opinions are likely to speak in a
+different, chastened, and disillusioned fashion, as contrasted with what
+the British attitude was at the beginning of hostilities. The
+gentlemanly British animus of arrogant self-sufficiency will have been
+somewhat sobered, perhaps somewhat subdued. Concession to the claims and
+pretensions of the other pacific nations is likely to go farther than
+might once have been expected, particularly in the way of concession to
+any demand for greater international comity and less international
+discrimination; essentially concession looking to a reduction of
+national pretensions and an incipient neutralisation of national
+interests. Coupled with this will presumably be a less conciliatory
+attitude toward the members of the dynastic coalition against whom the
+war has been fought, owing to a more mature realisation of the
+impossibility of a lasting peace negotiated with a Power whose
+substantial core is a warlike and irresponsible dynastic establishment.
+The peace negotiations are likely to run on a lower level of diplomatic
+deference to constituted authorities, and with more of a view to the
+interests and sentiments of the underlying population, than was evident
+in the futile negotiations had at the outbreak of hostilities. The
+gentle art of diplomacy, that engages the talents of exalted person<!-- Page 256 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 256]</span>ages
+and well-bred statesmen, has been somewhat discredited; and if it turns
+out that the vulgarisation of the directorate in the United Kingdom and
+its associated allies and neutrals will have time to go on to something
+like dominance and authenticity, then the deference which the spokesmen
+of these nations are likely to show for the prescriptive rights of
+dynasty, nobility, bureaucracy, or even of pecuniary aristocracy, in the
+countries that make up the party of the second part, may be expected to
+have shrunk appreciably, conceivably even to such precarious dimensions
+as to involve the virtual neglect or possible downright abrogation of
+them, in sum and substance.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, the chances of a successful pacific league of neutrals to come
+out of the current situation appear to be largely bound up with the
+degree of vulgarisation due to overtake the several directorates of the
+belligerent nations as well as the popular habits of thought in these
+and in the neutral countries, during the further course of the war. It
+is too broad a generalisation, perhaps, to say that the longer the war
+lasts the better are the chances of such a neutral temper in the
+interested nations as will make a pacific league practicable, but the
+contrary would appear a much less defensible proposition. It is, of
+course, the common man that has the least interest in warlike
+enterprise, if any, and it is at the same time the common man that bears
+the burden of such enterprise and has also the most immediate interest
+in keeping the peace. If, slowly and pervasively, in the course of hard
+experience, he learns to distrust the conduct of affairs by his betters,
+and learns at the same move to trust to his own class to do what is
+necessary and to leave undone what is not, his deference to his betters
+is likely to suffer a decline, such<!-- Page 257 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 257]</span> as should show itself in a somewhat
+unguarded recourse to democratic ways and means.</p>
+
+<p>In short, there is in this progressive vulgarisation of effectual use
+and wont and of sentiment, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, some
+slight ground for the hope, or the apprehension, that no peace will be
+made with the dynastic Powers of the second part until they cease to be
+dynastic Powers and take on the semblance of democratic commonwealths,
+with dynasties, royalties and privileged classes thrown in the discard.</p>
+
+<p>This would probably mean some prolongation of hostilities, until the
+dynasties and privileged classes had completely exhausted their
+available resources; and, by the same token, until the privileged
+classes in the more modern nations among the belligerents had also been
+displaced from direction and discretion by those underbred classes on
+whom it is incumbent to do what is to be done; or until a juncture were
+reached that comes passably near to such a situation. On the contingency
+of such a course of events and some such outcome appears also to hang
+the chance of a workable pacific league. Without further experience of
+the futility of upper-class and pecuniary control, to discredit
+precedent and constituted authority, it is scarcely conceivable, e.g.,
+that the victorious allies would go the length of coercively discarding
+the German Imperial dynasty and the kept classes that with it constitute
+the Imperial State, and of replacing it with a democratic organisation
+of the people in the shape of a modern commonwealth; and without a
+change of that nature, affecting that nation and such of its allies as
+would remain on the map, no league of pacific neutrals would be able to
+manage its affairs, even for a time, except on a war-footing that would
+involve a competitive armament<!-- Page 258 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> against future dynastic enterprises from
+the same quarter. Which comes to saying that a lasting peace is possible
+on no other terms than the disestablishment of the Imperial dynasty and
+the abrogation of all feudalistic remnants of privilege in the
+Fatherland and its allies, together with the reduction of those
+countries to the status of commonwealths made up of ungraded men.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It is easy to speculate on what the conditions precedent to such a
+pacific league of neutrals must of necessity be; but it is not therefore
+less difficult to make a shrewd guess as to the chances of these
+conditions being met. Of these conditions precedent, the chief and
+foremost, without which any other favorable circumstances are
+comparatively idle, is a considerable degree of neutralisation,
+extending to virtually all national interests and pretensions, but more
+particularly to all material and commercial interests of the federated
+peoples; and, indispensably and especially, such neutralisation would
+have to extend to the nations from whom aggression is now apprehended,
+as, e.g., the German people. But such neutralisation could not
+conceivably reach the Fatherland unless that nation were made over in
+the image of democracy, since the Imperial State is, by force of the
+terms, a warlike and unneutral power. This would seem to be the
+ostensibly concealed meaning of the allied governments in proclaiming
+that their aim is to break German militarism without doing harm to the
+German people.</p>
+
+<p>As touches the neutralisation of the democratically rehabilitated
+Fatherland, or in default of that, as touches the peace terms to be
+offered the Imperial government, the prime article among the
+stipulations would seem to be abolition of all trade discrimination
+against Germany or<!-- Page 259 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> by Germany against any other nationality. Such
+stipulation would, of course, cover all manner of trade
+discrimination,&mdash;e.g., import, export and excise tariff, harbor and
+registry dues, subsidy, patent right, copyright, trade mark, tax
+exemption whether partial or exclusive, investment preferences at home
+and abroad,&mdash;in short it would have to establish a thoroughgoing
+neutralisation of trade relations in the widest acceptation of the term,
+and to apply in perpetuity. The like applies, of course, to all that
+fringe of subsidiary and outlying peoples on whom Imperial Germany
+relies for much of its resources in any warlike enterprise. Such a move
+also disposes of the colonial question in a parenthesis, so far as
+regards any special bond of affiliation between the Empire, or the
+Fatherland, and any colonial possessions that are now thought desirable
+to be claimed. Under neutralisation, colonies would cease to be
+"colonial possessions," being necessarily included under the general
+abrogation of commercial discriminations, and also necessarily exempt
+from special taxation or specially favorable tax rates.</p>
+
+<p>Colonies there still would be, though it is not easy to imagine what
+would be the meaning of a "German Colony" in such a case. Colonies would
+be free communities, after the fashion of New Zealand or Australia, but
+with the further sterilisation of the bond between colony and mother
+country involved in the abolition of all appointive offices and all
+responsibility to the crown or the imperial government. Now, there are
+no German colonies in this simpler British sense of the term, which
+implies nothing more than community of blood, institutions and language,
+together with that sense of solidarity between the colony and the mother
+country which this community of pedigree and institutions will
+necessarily bring; but<!-- Page 260 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 260]</span> while there are today no German colonies, in the
+sense of the term so given, there is no reason to presume that no such
+German colonies would come into bearing under the conditions of this
+prospective r&eacute;gime of neutrality installed by such a pacific league,
+when backed by the league's guarantee that no colony from the Fatherland
+will be exposed to the eventual risk of coming under the discretionary
+tutelage of the German Imperial establishment and so falling into a
+relation of step-childhood to the Imperial dynasty.</p>
+
+<p>As is well known, and as has by way of superfluous commonplace been set
+forth by a sometime Colonial Secretary of the Empire, the decisive
+reason for there being no German colonies in existence is the
+consistently impossible colonial policy of the German government,
+looking to the usufruct of the colonies by the government, and the fear
+of further arbitrary control and nepotic discrimination at the pleasure
+of the self-seeking dynastic establishment. It is only under Imperial
+rule that no German colony, in this modern sense of the term, is
+possible; and only because Imperial rule does not admit of a free
+community being formed by colonists from the Fatherland; or of an
+ostensibly free community of that kind ever feeling secure from
+unsolicited interference with its affairs.</p>
+
+<p>The nearest approach to a German Colony, as contrasted with a "Colonial
+Possession," hitherto have been the very considerable, number of
+escaped German subjects who have settled in English-speaking or
+Latin-speaking countries, particularly in North and South America. And
+considering that the chief common trait among them is their successful
+evasion of the Imperial government's heavy hand, they show an admirable
+filial piety toward the<!-- Page 261 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 261]</span> Imperial establishment; though troubled with no
+slightest regret at having escaped from the Imperial surveillance and no
+slightest inclination to return to the shelter of the Imperial tutelage.
+A colloquialism&mdash;"hyphenate"&mdash;has latterly grown up to meet the need of
+a term to designate these evasive and yet patriotic colonists. It is
+scarcely misleading to say that the German-American hyphenate, e.g., in
+so far as he runs true to form, is still a German subject with his
+heart, but he is an American citizen with his head. All of which goes to
+argue that if the Fatherland were to fall into such a state of
+democratic tolerance that no recidivist need carry a defensive hyphen to
+shield him from the importunate attentions of the Imperial government,
+German colonies would also come into bearing; although, it is true, they
+would have no value to the German government.</p>
+
+<p>In the Imperial colonial policy colonies are conceived to stand to their
+Imperial guardian or master in a relation between that of a step-child
+and that of an indentured servant; to be dealt with summarily and at
+discretion and to be made use of without scruple. The like attitude
+toward colonies was once familiar matter-of-course with the British and
+Spanish statesmen. The British found the plan unprofitable, and also
+unworkable, and have given it up. The Spanish, having no political
+outlook but the dynastic one, could of course not see their way to
+relinquish the only purpose of their colonial enterprise, except in
+relinquishing their colonial possessions. The German (Imperial) colonial
+policy is and will be necessarily after the Spanish pattern, and
+necessarily, too, with the Spanish results.</p>
+
+<p>Under the projected neutral scheme there would be no colonial policy,
+and of course, no inducement to the ac<!-- Page 262 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 262]</span>quisition of colonies, since
+there would be no profit to be derived, or to be fancied, in the case.
+But while no country, as a commonwealth, has any material interest in
+the acquisition or maintenance of colonies, it is otherwise as regards
+the dynastic interests of an Imperial government; and it is also
+otherwise, at least in the belief of the interested parties, as regards
+special businessmen or business concerns who are in a position to gain
+something by help of national discrimination in their favor. As regards
+the pecuniary interests of favored businessmen or business concerns, and
+of investors favored by national discrimination in colonial relations,
+the case falls under the general caption of trade discrimination, and
+does not differ at all materially from such expedients as a protective
+tariff, a ship subsidy, or a bounty on exports. But as regards the
+warlike, that is to say dynastic, interest of an Imperial government the
+case stands somewhat different.</p>
+
+<p>Colonial Possessions in such a case yield no material benefit to the
+country at large, but their possession is a serviceable plea for warlike
+preparations with which to retain possession of the colonies in the face
+of eventualities, and it is also a serviceable means of stirring the
+national pride and keeping alive a suitable spirit of patriotic
+animosity. The material service actually to be derived from such
+possessions in the event of war is a point in doubt, with the
+probabilities apparently running against their being of any eventual net
+use. But there need be no question that such possessions, under the hand
+of any national establishment infected with imperial ambitions, are a
+fruitful source of diplomatic complications, excuses for armament,
+international grievances, and eventual aggression. A pacific league of
+neutrals can evidently not<!-- Page 263 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> tolerate the retention of colonial
+possessions by any dynastic State that may be drawn into the league or
+under its jurisdiction, as, e.g., the German Empire in case it should be
+left on an Imperial footing. Whereas, in case the German peoples are
+thrown back on a democratic status, as neutralised commonwealths without
+a crown or a military establishment, the question of their colonial
+possessions evidently falls vacant.</p>
+
+<p>As to the neutralisation of trade relations apart from the question of
+colonies, and as bears on the case of Germany under the projected
+jurisdiction of a pacific league of neutrals, the considerations to be
+taken account of are of much the same nature. As it would have to take
+effect, e.g., in the abolition of commercial and industrial
+discriminations between Germany and the pacific nations, such
+neutralisation would doubtless confer a lasting material benefit on the
+German people at large; and it is not easy to detect any loss or
+detriment to be derived from such a move so long as peace prevails.
+Protective, that is to say discriminating, export, import, or excise
+duties, harbor and registry dues, subsidies, tax exemptions and trade
+preferences, and all the like devices of interference with trade and
+industry, are unavoidably a hindrance to the material interests of any
+people on whom they are imposed or who impose these disabilities on
+themselves. So that exemption from these things by a comprehensive
+neutralisation of trade relations would immediately benefit all the
+nations concerned, in respect of their material well-being in times of
+peace. There is no exception and no abatement to be taken account of
+under this general statement, as is well known to all men who are
+conversant with these matters.<!-- Page 264 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 264]</span></p>
+
+<p>But it is otherwise as regards the dynastic interest in the case, and as
+regards any national interest in warlike enterprise. It is doubtless
+true that all restraint of trade between nations, and between classes or
+localities within the national frontiers, unavoidably acts to weaken and
+impoverish the people on whose economic activities this restraint is
+laid; and to the extent to which this effect is had it will also be true
+that the country which so is hindered in its work will have a less
+aggregate of resources to place at the disposal of its enterprising
+statesmen for imperialist ends. But these restraints may yet be useful
+for dynastic, that is to say warlike, ends by making the country more
+nearly a "self-contained economic whole." A country becomes a
+"self-contained economic whole" by mutilation, in cutting itself off
+from the industrial system in which industrially it belongs, but in
+which it is unwilling nationally to hold its place. National frontiers
+are industrial barriers. But as a result of such mutilation of its
+industrial life such a country is better able&mdash;it has been believed&mdash;to
+bear the shock of severing its international trade relations entirely,
+as is likely to happen in case of war.</p>
+
+<p>In a large country, such as America or Russia, which comprises within
+its national boundaries very extensive and very varied resources and a
+widely distributed and diversified population, the mischief suffered
+from restraints of trade that hinder industrial relations with the world
+at large will of course be proportionately lessened. Such a country
+comes nearer being a miniature industrial world; although none of the
+civilised nations, large or small, can carry on its ordinary industrial
+activities and its ordinary manner of life without drawing on foreign
+parts to some appreciable extent. But a country of small terri<!-- Page 265 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 265]</span>torial
+extent and of somewhat narrowly restricted natural resources, as, e.g.,
+Germany or France, can even by the most drastic measures of restraint
+and mutilation achieve only a very mediocre degree of industrial
+isolation and "self-sufficiency,"&mdash;as has, e.g., appeared in the present
+war. But in all cases, though in varying measure, the mitigated
+isolation so enforced by these restraints on trade will in their degree
+impair the country's industrial efficiency and lower the people's
+material well-being; yet, if the restrictions are shrewdly applied this
+partial isolation and partial "self-sufficiency" will go some way toward
+preparing the nation for the more thorough isolation that follows on the
+outbreak of hostilities.</p>
+
+<p>The present plight of the German people under war conditions may serve
+to show how nearly that end may be attained, and yet how inadequate even
+the most unreserved measures of industrial isolation must be in face of
+the fact that the modern state of the industrial arts necessarily draws
+on the collective resources of the world at large. It may well be
+doubted, on an impartial view, if the mutilation of the country's
+industrial system by such measures of isolation does not after all
+rather weaken the nation even for warlike ends; but then, the
+discretionary authorities in the dynastic States are always, and it may
+be presumed necessarily, hampered with obsolete theories handed down
+from that cameralistic age, when the little princes of the Fatherland
+were making dynastic history. So, e.g., the current, nineteenth and
+twentieth century, economic policy of the Prussian-Imperial statesmen is
+still drawn on lines within which Frederick II, called the Great, would
+have felt well at home.</p>
+
+<p>Like other preparation for hostilities this reduction of the country to
+the status of a self-contained economic or<!-- Page 266 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>ganisation is costly, but
+like other preparation for hostilities it also puts the nation in a
+position of greater readiness to break off friendly relations with its
+neighbors. It is a war measure, commonly spoken for by its advocates as
+a measure of self-defense; but whatever the merits of the
+self-defenders' contention, this measure is a war measure. As such it
+can reasonably claim no hearing in the counsels of a pacific league of
+neutrals, whose purpose it is to make war impracticable. Particularly
+can there be no reasonable question of admitting a policy of trade
+discrimination and isolation on the part of a nation which has, for
+purposes of warlike aggression, pursued such a policy in the past, and
+which it is the immediate purpose of the league to bind over to keep the
+peace.</p>
+
+<p>There has been a volume of loose talk spent on the justice and
+expediency of boycotting the trade of the peoples of the Empire after
+the return of peace, as a penalty and as a preventive measure designed
+to retard their recovery of strength with which to enter on a further
+warlike enterprise. Such a measure would necessarily be somewhat futile;
+since "Business is business," after all, and the practical limitations
+imposed on an unprofitable boycott by the moral necessity to buy cheap
+and sell dear that rests on all businessmen would surreptitiously
+mitigate it to the point of negligibility. It is inconceivable&mdash;or it
+would be inconceivable in the absence of imbecile politicians and
+self-seeking businessmen&mdash;that measures looking to the trade isolation
+of any one of these countries could be entertained as a point of policy
+to be pursued by a league of neutrals. And it is only in so far as
+patriotic jealousy and vindictive sentiments are allowed to displace the
+aspiration for peace and security, that such measures can claim
+consideration. Considered as a pen<!-- Page 267 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 267]</span>alty to be imposed on the erring
+nations who set this warlike adventure afoot, it should be sufficiently
+plain that such a measure as a trade boycott could not touch the chief
+offenders, or even their responsible abettors. It would, rather, play
+into the hands of the militarist interests by keeping alive the spirit
+of national jealousy and international hatred, out of which wars arise
+and without which warlike enterprise might hopefully be expected to
+disappear out of the scheme of human intercourse. The punishment would
+fall, as all economic burdens and disabilities must always fall, on the
+common man, the underlying population.</p>
+
+<p>The chief relation of this common run, this underlying population of
+German subjects, to the inception and pursuit of this Imperial warlike
+enterprise, is comprised in the fact that they are an underlying
+population of subjects, held in usufruct by the Imperial establishment
+and employed at will. It is true, they have lent themselves unreservedly
+to the uses for which the dynasty has use for them, and they have
+entered enthusiastically into the warlike adventure set afoot by the
+dynastic statesmen; but that they have done so is their misfortune
+rather than their fault. By use and wont and indoctrination they have
+for long been unremittingly, and helplessly, disciplined into a spirit
+of dynastic loyalty, national animosity and servile abnegation; until it
+would be nothing better than a pathetic inversion of all the equities of
+the case to visit the transgressions of their masters upon the common
+run; whose fault lies, after all, in their being an underlying
+population of subjects, who have not had a chance to reach that
+spiritual level on which they could properly be held accountable for the
+uses to which they are turned. It is true, men are ordinarily punished
+for their misfor<!-- Page 268 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 268]</span>tunes; but the warlike enterprise of the Imperial
+dynasty has already brought what might fairly be rated as a good measure
+of punishment on this underlying populace, whose chief fault and chief
+misfortune lies in an habitual servile abnegation of those traits of
+initiative and discretion in man that constitute him an agent
+susceptible of responsibility or retribution.</p>
+
+<p>It would be all the more of a pathetic mockery to visit the
+transgressions of their masters on these victims of circumstance and
+dynastic mendacity, since the conventionalities of international equity
+will scarcely permit the high responsible parties in the case to be
+chastised with any penalty harsher than a well-mannered figure of
+speech. To serve as a deterrent, the penalty must strike the point where
+vests the discretion; but servile use and wont is still too well intact
+in these premises to let any penalty touch the guilty core of a
+profligate dynasty. Under the wear and tear of continued war and its
+incident continued vulgarisation of the directorate and responsible
+staff among the pacific allies, the conventional respect of persons is
+likely to suffer appreciable dilapidation; but there need be no
+apprehension of such a loss of decent respect for personages as would
+compromise the creature comforts of that high syndicate of personages on
+whose initiative the Fatherland entered upon this enterprise in
+dominion.</p>
+
+<p>Bygone shortcomings and transgressions can have no reasonable place in
+the arrangements by which a pacific league of neutrals designs to keep
+the peace. Neither can bygone prerogatives and precedents of
+magnificence and of mastery, except in so far as they unavoidably must
+come into play through the inability of men to divest themselves of
+their ingrained preconceptions, by virtue of which<!-- Page 269 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> a Hohenzollern or a
+Hapsburger is something more formidable and more to be considered than a
+recruiting sergeant or a purveyor of light literature. The league can do
+its work of pacification only by elaborately forgetting differences and
+discrepancies of the kind that give rise to international grievances.
+Which is the same as saying that the neutralisation of national
+discriminations and pretensions will have to go all the way, if it is to
+serve. But this implies, as broadly as need be, that the pacific nations
+who make the league and provisionally administer its articles of
+agreement and jurisdiction, can not exempt themselves from any of the
+leveling measures of neutralisation to which the dynastic suspects among
+them are to be subject. It would mean a relinquishment of all those
+undemocratic institutional survivals out of which international
+grievances are wont to arise. As a certain Danish adage would have it,
+the neutrals of the league must all be shorn over the same comb.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>What is to be shorn over this one comb of neutralisation and democracy
+is all those who go into the pacific league of neutrals and all who come
+under its jurisdiction, whether of their own choice or by the
+necessities of the case. It is of the substance of the case that those
+peoples who have been employed in the campaigns of the German-Imperial
+coalition are to come in on terms of impartial equality with those who
+have held the ground against them; to come under the jurisdiction, and
+prospectively into the copartnery, of the league of neutrals&mdash;all on the
+presumption that the Imperial coalition will be brought to make peace on
+terms of unconditional surrender.</p>
+
+<p>Let it not seem presumptuous to venture on a recital of summary
+specifications intended to indicate the nature of<!-- Page 270 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 270]</span> those concrete
+measures which would logically be comprised in a scheme of pacification
+carried out with such a view to impartial equality among the peoples who
+are to make up the projected league. There is a significant turn of
+expression that recurs habitually in the formulation of terms put forth
+by the spokesmen of the Entente belligerents, where it is insisted that
+hostilities are carried on not against the German people or the other
+peoples associated with them, but only against the Imperial
+establishments and their culpable aids and abettors in the enterprise.
+So it is further insisted that there is no intention to bring pains and
+penalties on these peoples, who so have been made use of by their
+masters, but only on the culpable master class whose tools these peoples
+have been. And later, just now (January 1917), and from a responsible
+and disinterested spokesman for the pacific league, there comes the
+declaration that a lasting peace at the hands of such a league can be
+grounded only in a present "peace without victory."</p>
+
+<p>The mutual congruity of these two declarations need not imply collusion,
+but they are none the less complementary propositions and they are none
+the less indicative of a common trend of convictions among the men who
+are best able to speak for those pacific nations that are looked to as
+the mainstay of the prospective league. They both converge to the point
+that the objective to be achieved is not victory for the Entente
+belligerents but defeat for the German-Imperial coalition; that the
+peoples underlying the defeated governments are not to be dealt with as
+vanquished enemies but as fellows in undeserved misfortune brought on by
+their culpable masters; and that no advantage is designed to be taken of
+these peoples, and no gratuitous hardship to be imposed on them.<!-- Page 271 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 271]</span> Their
+masters are evidently to be put away, not as defeated antagonists but as
+a public nuisance to be provided against as may seem expedient for the
+peace and security of those nations whom they have been molesting.</p>
+
+<p>Taking this position as outlined, it should not be extremely difficult
+to forecast the general line of procedure which it would logically
+demand,&mdash;barring irrelevant regard for precedents and overheated
+resentment, and provided that the makers of these peace terms have a
+free hand and go to their work with an eye single to the establishment
+of an enduring peace. The case of Germany would be typical of all the
+rest; and the main items of the bill in this case would seem logically
+to run somewhat as follows:</p>
+
+<p>(1) The definitive elimination of the Imperial establishment, together
+with the monarchical establishments of the several states of the Empire
+and the privileged classes;</p>
+
+<p>(2) Removal or destruction of all warlike equipment, military and naval,
+defensive and offensive;</p>
+
+<p>(3) Cancelment of the public debt, of the Empire and of its
+members&mdash;creditors of the Empire being accounted accessory to the
+culpable enterprise of the Imperial government;</p>
+
+<p>(4) Confiscation of such industrial equipment and resources as have
+contributed to the carrying on of the war, as being also accessory;</p>
+
+<p>(5) Assumption by the league at large of all debts incurred, by the
+Entente belligerents or by neutrals, for the prosecution or by reason of
+the war, and distribution of the obligation so assumed, impartially
+among the members of the league, including the peoples of the defeated
+nations;<!-- Page 272 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 272]</span></p>
+
+<p>(6) Indemnification for all injury done to civilians in the invaded
+territories; the means for such indemnification to be procured by
+confiscation of all estates in the defeated countries exceeding a
+certain very modest maximum, calculated on the average of property
+owned, say, by the poorer three-fourths of the population,&mdash;the kept
+classes being properly accounted accessory to the Empire's culpable
+enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>The proposition to let the war debt be shared by all members of the
+league on a footing of impartial equality may seem novel, and perhaps
+extravagant. But all projects put forth for safeguarding the world's
+peace by a compact among the pacific nations run on the patent, though
+often tacit, avowal that the Entente belligerents are spending their
+substance and pledging their credit for the common cause. Among the
+Americans, the chief of the neutral nations, this is coming to be
+recognised more and more overtly. So that, in this instance at least, no
+insurmountable reluctance to take over their due share of the common
+burden should fairly be looked for, particularly when it appears that
+the projected league, if it is organised on a footing of neutrality,
+will relieve the republic of virtually all outlay for their own defense.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, there is, in all this, no temerarious intention to offer
+advice as to what should be done by those who have it to do, or even to
+sketch the necessary course which events are bound to take. As has been
+remarked in another passage, that would have to be a work of prophesy or
+of effrontery, both of which, it is hoped, lie equally beyond the
+horizon of this inquiry; which is occupied with the question of what
+conditions will logically have to be met in order to an enduring peace,
+not what will be the nature and outcome of negotiations entered into<!-- Page 273 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> by
+astute delegates pursuing the special advantage, each of his own nation.
+And yet the peremptory need of reaching some practicable arrangement
+whereby the peace may be kept, goes to say that even the most astute
+negotiations will in some degree be controlled by that need, and may
+reasonably be expected to make some approach to the simple and obvious
+requirements of the situation.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Therefore the argument returns to the United Kingdom and the probable
+limit of tolerance of that people, in respect of what they are likely to
+insist on as a necessary measure of democratisation in the nations of
+the second part, and what measure of national abnegation they are likely
+to accommodate themselves to. The United Kingdom is indispensable to the
+formation of a pacific league of neutrals. And the British terms of
+adhesion, or rather of initiation of such a league, therefore, will have
+to constitute the core of the structure, on which details may be
+adjusted and to which concessive adjustments will have to be made by all
+the rest. This is not saying that the projected league must or will be
+dominated by the United Kingdom or administered in the British interest.
+Indeed, it can not well be made to serve British particular interests in
+any appreciable degree, except at the cost of defeat to its main
+purpose; since the purposes of an enduring peace can be served only by
+an effectual neutralisation of national claims and interests. But it
+would mean that the neutralisation of national interests and
+discriminations to be effected would have to be drawn on lines
+acceptable to British taste in these matters, and would have to go
+approximately so far as would be dictated by the British notions of what
+is expedient, and not much farther. The pacific league of neutrals would
+have much of a British<!-- Page 274 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 274]</span> air, but "British" in this connection is to be
+taken as connoting the English-speaking countries rather than as
+applying to the United Kingdom alone; since the entrance of the British
+into the league would involve the entrance of the British colonies, and,
+indeed, of the American republic as well.</p>
+
+<p>The temper and outlook of this British community, therefore, becomes a
+matter of paramount importance in any attempted analysis of the
+situation resulting after the war, or of any prospective course of
+conduct to be entered on by the pacific nations. And the question
+touches not so much the temper and preconceptions of the British
+community as known in recent history, but rather as it is likely to be
+modified by the war experience. So that the practicability of a neutral
+league comes to turn, in great measure, on the effect which this war
+experience is having on the habits of thought of the British people, or
+on that section of the British population which will make up the
+effectual majority when the war closes. The grave interest that attaches
+to this question must serve as justification for pursuing it farther,
+even though there can be no promise of a definite or confident answer to
+be found beforehand.</p>
+
+<p>Certain general assertions may be made with some confidence. The
+experiences of the war, particularly among the immediate participants
+and among their immediate domestic connections&mdash;a large and increasing
+proportion of the people at large&mdash;are plainly impressing on them the
+uselessness and hardship of such a war. There can be no question but
+they are reaching a conviction that a war of this modern kind and scale
+is a thing to be avoided if possible. They are, no doubt, willing to go
+to very considerable lengths to make a repetition of it impossible, and<!-- Page 275 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 275]</span>
+they may reasonably be expected to go farther along that line before
+peace returns. But the lengths to which they are ready to go may be in
+the way of concessions, or in the way of contest and compulsion. There
+need be no doubt but a profound and vindictive resentment runs through
+the British community, and there is no reason to apprehend that this
+will be dissipated in the course of further hostilities; although it
+should fairly be expected to lose something of its earlier exuberant
+malevolence and indiscrimination, more particularly if hostilities
+continue for some time. It is not too much to expect, that this popular
+temper of resentment will demand something very tangible in the way of
+summary vengeance on those who have brought the hardships of war upon
+the nation.</p>
+
+<p>The manner of retribution which would meet the popular demand for
+"justice" to be done on the enemy is likely to be affected by the
+fortunes of war, as also the incidence of it. Should the governmental
+establishment and the discretion still vest in the gentlemanly classes
+at the close of hostilities, the retribution is likely to take the
+accustomed gentlemanly shape of pecuniary burdens imposed on the people
+of the defeated country, together with diplomatically specified
+surrender of territorial and colonial possessions, and the like; such as
+to leave the <i>de facto</i> enemy courteously on one side, and to yield
+something in the way of pecuniary benefit to the gentlemen-investors in
+charge, and something more in the way of new emoluments of office to the
+office-holding class included in the same order of gentlemen. The
+retribution in the case would manifestly fall on the underlying
+population in the defeated country, without seriously touching the
+responsible parties, and would leave the defeated nation with a new
+grievance to nourish its patriotic animosity and with<!-- Page 276 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 276]</span> a new incentive
+to a policy of watchful waiting for a chance of retaliation.</p>
+
+<p>But it is to be noted that under the stress of the war there is going
+forward in the British community a progressive displacement of
+gentlemanly standards and official procedure by standards and procedure
+of a visibly underbred character, a weakening of the hold of the
+gentlemanly classes on the control of affairs and a weakening of the
+hold which the sacred rights of property, investment and privilege have
+long had over the imagination of the British people. Should hostilities
+continue, and should the exigencies of the war situation continue to
+keep the futility of these sacred rights, as well as the fatuity of
+their possessors, in the public eye, after the same fashion as hitherto,
+it would not be altogether unreasonable to expect that the discretion
+would pass into the hands of the underbred, or into the hands of men
+immediately and urgently accountable to the underbred. In such a case,
+and with a constantly growing popular realisation that the directorate
+and responsible enemy in the war is the Imperial dynasty and its
+pedigreed aids and abettors, it is conceivable that the popular
+resentment would converge so effectually on these responsible
+instigators and directors of misfortune as to bring the incidence of the
+required retribution effectually to bear on them. The outcome might, not
+inconceivably, be the virtual erasure of the Imperial dynasty, together
+with the pedigreed-class rule on which it rests and the apparatus of
+irresponsible coercion through which it works, in the Fatherland and in
+its subsidiaries and dependencies.</p>
+
+<p>With a sufficiently urgent realisation of their need of peace and
+security, and with a realisation also that the way to avoid war is to
+avoid the ways and means of in<!-- Page 277 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 277]</span>ternational jealousy and of the national
+discriminations out of which international jealousy grows, it is
+conceivable that a government which should reflect the British temper
+and the British hopes might go so far in insisting on a neutralisation
+of the peoples of the Fatherland as would leave them without the
+dynastic apparatus with which warlike enterprise is set afoot, and so
+leave them also perforce in a pacific frame of mind. In time, in the
+absence of their dearly beloved leavings of feudalism, an enforced
+reliance on their own discretion and initiative, and an enforced respite
+from the rant and prance of warlike swagger, would reasonably be
+expected to grow into a popular habit. The German people are by no means
+less capable of tolerance and neighbourly decorum than their British or
+Scandinavian neighbours of the same blood,&mdash;if they can only be left to
+their own devices, untroubled by the maggoty conceit of national
+domination.</p>
+
+<p>There is no intention herewith to express an expectation that this
+out-and-out neutralisation of the Fatherland's international relations
+and of its dynastic government will come to pass on the return of peace,
+or that the German people will, as a precaution against recurrent
+Imperial rabies, be organised on a democratic pattern by constraint of
+the pacific nations of the league. The point is only that this measure
+of neutralisation appears to be the necessary condition, in the absence
+of which no such neutral league can succeed, and that so long as the war
+goes on there is something of a chance that the British community may in
+time reach a frame of mind combining such settled determination to
+safeguard the peace at all costs, with such a degree of disregard for
+outworn conventions, that their spokesmen in the negotiations may push
+the neutralisation of these peoples to that length.<!-- Page 278 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 278]</span></p>
+
+<p>The achievement of such an outcome would evidently take time as well as
+harsh experience, more time and harsher experience, perhaps, than one
+likes to contemplate.</p>
+
+<p>Most men, therefore, would scarcely rate the chance of such an outcome
+at all high. And yet it is to be called to mind that the war has lasted
+long and the effect of its demands and its experience has already gone
+far, and that the longer it lasts the greater are the chances of its
+prolongation and of its continued hardships, at least to the extent that
+with every month of war that passes the prospect of the allied nations
+making peace on any terms short of unconditional surrender grows less.
+And unconditional surrender is the first step in the direction of an
+unconditional dispossession of the Imperial establishment and its war
+prophets,&mdash;depending primarily on the state of mind of the British
+people at the time. And however unlikely, it is also always possible, as
+some contend, that in the course of further war experience the common
+man in the Fatherland may come to reflect on the use and value of the
+Imperial establishment, with the result of discarding and disowning it
+and all its works. Such an expectation would doubtless underrate the
+force of ancient habit, and would also involve a misapprehension of the
+psychological incidence of a warlike experience. The German people have
+substantially none of those preconceptions of independence and
+self-direction to go on, in the absence of which an effectual revulsion
+against dynastic rule can not come to pass.</p>
+
+<p>Embedded in the common sense of the British population at large is a
+certain large and somewhat sullen sense of fair dealing. In this they
+are not greatly different from their neighbours, if at all, except that
+the body of common<!-- Page 279 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 279]</span> sense in which this British sense of fair dealing
+lies embedded is a maturer fashion of common sense than that which
+serves to guide the workday life of many of their neighbours. And the
+maturity in question appears to be chiefly a matter of their having
+unlearned, divested themselves of, or been by force of disuse divested
+of, an exceptionally large proportion of that burden of untoward
+conceits which western Europe, and more particularly middle Europe, at
+large has carried over from the Middle Ages. They have had time and
+occasion to forget more of what the exigencies of modern life make it
+expedient to have forgotten. And yet they are reputed slow,
+conservative. But they have been well placed for losing much of what
+would be well lost.</p>
+
+<p>Among other things, their preconception of national animosity is not
+secure, in the absence of provocation. They are now again in a position
+to learn to do without some of the useless legacy out of the
+past,&mdash;useless, that is, for life as it runs today, however it may be
+rated in the setting in which it was all placed in that past out of
+which it has come. And the question is whether now, under the pressure
+of exigencies that make for a disestablishment of much cumbersome
+inherited apparatus for doing what need not be done, they will be ruled
+by their sense of expediency and of fair dealing to the extent of
+cancelling out of their own scheme of life so much of this legacy of
+conventional preconceptions as has now come visibly to hinder their own
+material well-being, and at the same time to defeat that peace and
+security for which they have shown themselves willing to fight. It is,
+of course, a simpler matter to fight than it is to put away a
+preconceived, even if it is a bootless, superstition; as, e.g., the
+prestige of hereditary wealth, hereditary gentil<!-- Page 280 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>ity, national
+vainglory, and perhaps especially national hatred. But if the school is
+hard enough and the discipline protracted enough there is no reason in
+the nature of things why the common run of the British people should not
+unlearn these futilities that once were the substance of things under an
+older and outworn order. They have already shown their capacity for
+divesting themselves of outworn institutional bonds, in discarding the
+main substance of dynastic rule; and when they now come to face the
+exigencies of this new situation it should cause no great surprise if
+they are able to see their way to do what further is necessary to meet
+these exigencies.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>At the hands of this British commonwealth the new situation requires the
+putting away of the German Imperial establishment and the military
+caste; the reduction of the German peoples to a footing of unreserved
+democracy with sufficient guarantees against national trade
+discriminations; surrender of all British tutelage over outlying
+possessions, except what may go to guarantee their local autonomy;
+cancelment of all extra-territorial pretensions of the several nations
+entering into the league; neutralisation of the several national
+establishments, to comprise virtual disarmament, as well as cancelment
+of all restrictions on trade and of all national defense of
+extra-territorial pecuniary claims and interests on the part of
+individual citizens. The naval control of the seas will best be left in
+British hands. No people has a graver or more immediate interest in the
+freedom and security of the sea-borne trade; and the United Kingdom has
+shown that it is to be trusted in that matter. And then it may well be
+that neither the national pride nor the apprehensions of the British
+people would allow them to surren<!-- Page 281 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>der it; whereas, if the league is to
+be formed it will have to be on terms to which the British people are
+willing to adhere. A certain provision of armed force will also be
+needed to keep the governments of unneutral nations in check,&mdash;and for
+the purpose in hand all effectively monarchical countries are to be
+counted as congenitally unneutral, whatever their formal professions and
+whether they are members of the league or not. Here again it will
+probably appear that the people of the United Kingdom, and of the
+English-speaking countries at large, will not consent to this armed
+force and its discretionary use passing out of British hands, or rather
+out of French-British hands; and here again the practical decision will
+have to wait on the choice of the British people, all the more because
+the British community has no longer an interest, real or fancied, in the
+coercive use of this force for their own particular ends. No other power
+is to be trusted, except France, and France is less well placed for the
+purpose and would assuredly also not covet so invidious an honour and so
+thankless an office.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The theory, i.e. the logical necessities, of such a pacific league of
+neutral nations is simple enough, in its elements. War is to be avoided
+by a policy of avoidance. Which signifies that the means and the motives
+to warlike enterprise and warlike provocation are to be put away, so far
+as may be. If what may be, in this respect, does not come up to the
+requirements of the case, the experiment, of course, will fail. The
+preliminary requirement,&mdash;elimination of the one formidable dynastic
+State in Europe,&mdash;has been spoken of. Its counterpart in the Far East
+will cease to be formidable on the decease of its natural ally in
+Central Europe, in so<!-- Page 282 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 282]</span> far as touches the case of such a projected
+league. The ever increasingly dubious empire of the Czar would appear to
+fall in the same category. So that the pacific league's fortunes would
+seem to turn on what may be called its domestic or internal
+arrangements.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the means of warlike enterprise, as well as of unadvised
+embroilment, is always in the last analysis the patriotic spirit of the
+nation. Given this patriotic spirit in sufficient measure, both the
+material equipment and the provocation to hostilities will easily be
+found. It should accordingly appear to be the first care of such a
+pacific league to reduce the sources of patriotic incitement to the
+practicable minimum. This can be done, in such measure as it can be done
+at all, by neutralisation of national pretensions. The finished outcome
+in this respect, such as would assure perpetual peace among the peoples
+concerned, would of course be an unconditional neutralisation of
+citizenship, as has already been indicated before. The question which,
+in effect, the spokesmen for a pacific league have to face is as to how
+nearly that outcome can be brought to pass. The rest of what they may
+undertake, or may come to by way of compromise and stipulation, is
+relatively immaterial and of relatively transient consequence.</p>
+
+<p>A neutralisation of citizenship has of course been afloat in a somewhat
+loose way in the projects of socialistic and other "undesirable"
+agitators, but nothing much has come of it. Nor have specific projects
+for its realisation been set afoot. That anything conclusive along that
+line could now be reached would seem extremely doubtful, in view of the
+ardent patriotic temper of all these peoples, heightened just now by the
+experience of war. Still, an undesigned and unguided drift in that
+direction has been visible<!-- Page 283 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 283]</span> in all those nations that are accounted the
+vanguard among modern civilised peoples, ever since the dynastic rule
+among them began to be displaced by a growth of "free" institutions,
+that is to say institutions resting on an accepted ground of
+insubordination and free initiative.</p>
+
+<p>The patriotism of these peoples, or their national spirit, is after all
+and at the best an attenuated and impersonalised remnant of dynastic
+loyalty, and it amounts after all, in effect, to nothing much else than
+a residual curtailment or partial atrophy of that democratic habit of
+mind that embodies itself in the formula: Live and let live. It is, no
+doubt, both an ancient and a very meritorious habit. It is easily
+acquired and hard to put away. The patriotic spirit and the national
+life (prestige) on which it centers are the subject of untiring eulogy;
+but hitherto its encomiasts have shown no cause and put forward no claim
+to believe that it all is of any slightest use for any purpose that does
+not take it and its paramount merit for granted. It is doubtless a very
+meritorious habit; at least so they all say. But under the circumstances
+of modern civilised life it is fruitful of no other net material result
+than damage and discomfort. Still it is virtually ubiquitous among
+civilised men, and in an admirable state of repair; and for the
+calculable future it is doubtless to be counted in as an enduring
+obstacle to a conclusive peace, a constant source of anxiety and
+unremitting care.</p>
+
+<p>The motives that work out through this national spirit, by use of this
+patriotic ardor, fall under two heads: dynastic ambition, and business
+enterprise. The two categories have the common trait that neither the
+one nor the other comprises anything that is of the slightest material
+benefit to the community at large; but both have<!-- Page 284 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 284]</span> at the same time a
+high prestige value in the conventional esteem of modern men. The
+relation of dynastic ambition to warlike enterprise, and the uses of
+that usufruct of the nation's resources and man-power which the nation's
+patriotism places at the disposal of the dynastic establishment, have
+already been spoken of at length above, perhaps at excessive length, in
+the recurrent discussion of the dynastic State and its quest of dominion
+for dominion's sake. What measures are necessary to be taken as regards
+the formidable dynastic States that threaten the peace, have also been
+outlined, perhaps with excessive freedom.</p>
+
+<p>But it remains to call attention to that mitigated form of dynastic rule
+called a constitutional monarchy. Instances of such a constitutional
+monarchy, designed to conserve the well-beloved abuses of dynastic rule
+under a cover of democratic formalities, or to bring in effectual
+democratic insubordination under cover of the ancient dignities of an
+outworn monarchical system,&mdash;the characterisation may run either way
+according to the fancy of the speaker, and to much the same practical
+effect in either case,&mdash;instances illustrative of this compromise
+monarchy at work today are to be had, as felicitously as anywhere, in
+the Balkan states; perhaps the case of Greece will be especially
+instructive. At the other, and far, end of the line will be found such
+other typical instances as the British, the Dutch, or, in pathetic and
+droll miniature, the Norwegian.</p>
+
+<p>There is, of course, a wide interval between the grotesque effrontery
+that wears the Hellenic crown and the undeviatingly decorous
+self-effacement of the Dutch sovereign; and yet there is something of a
+common complexion runs through the whole range of establishments,<!-- Page 285 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 285]</span> all
+the way from the quasi-dynastic to the pseudo-dynastic. For reasons
+unavoidable and persistent, though not inscribed in the constituent law,
+the governmental establishment associated with such a royal concern will
+be made up of persons drawn from the kept classes, the nobility or
+lesser gentlefolk, and will be imbued with the spirit of these "better"
+classes rather than that of the common run.</p>
+
+<p>With what may be uncanny shrewdness, or perhaps mere tropismatic
+response to the unreasoned stimulus of a "consciousness of kind," the
+British government&mdash;habitually a syndicate of gentlefolk&mdash;has uniformly
+insisted on the installation of a constitutional monarchy at the
+formation of every new national organisation in which that government
+has had a discretionary voice. And the many and various constitutional
+governments so established, commonly under British auspices in some
+degree, have invariably run true to form, in some appreciable degree.
+They may be quasi-dynastic or pseudo-dynastic, but at this nearest
+approach to democracy they always, and unavoidably, include at least a
+circumlocution office of gentlefolk, in the way of a ministry and court
+establishment, whose place in the economy of the nation's affairs it is
+to adapt the run of these affairs to the needs of the kept classes.</p>
+
+<p>There need be no imputation of sinister designs to these gentlefolk, who
+so are elected by force of circumstances to guard and guide the nation's
+interests. As things go, it will doubtless commonly be found that they
+are as well-intentioned as need be. But a well-meaning gentleman of good
+antecedents means well in a gentlemanly way and in the light of good
+antecedents. Which comes unavoidably to an effectual bias in favor of
+those interests<!-- Page 286 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 286]</span> which honorable gentlemen of good antecedents have at
+heart. And among these interests are the interests of the kept classes,
+as contrasted with that common run of the population from which their
+keep is drawn.</p>
+
+<p>Under the auspices, even if they are only the histrionic and decorative
+auspices, of so decorous an article of institutional furniture as
+royalty, it follows of logical necessity that the personnel of the
+effectual government must also be drawn from the better classes, whose
+place and station and high repute will make their association with the
+First Gentleman of the Realm not too insufferably incongruous. And then,
+the popular habit of looking up to this First Gentleman with that
+deference that royalty commands, also conduces materially to the
+attendant habitual attitude of deference to gentility more at large.</p>
+
+<p>Even in so democratic a country, and with so exanimate a crown as is to
+be found in the United Kingdom, the royal establishment visibly, and
+doubtless very materially, conduces to the continued tenure of the
+effectual government by representatives of the kept classes; and it
+therefore counts with large effect toward the retardation of the
+country's further move in the direction of democratic insubordination
+and direct participation in the direction of affairs by the underbred,
+who finally pay the cost. And on the other hand, even so moderately
+royal an establishment as the Norwegian has apparently a sensible effect
+in the way of gathering the reins somewhat into the hands of the better
+classes, under circumstances of such meagerness as might be expected to
+preclude anything like a "better" class, in the conventional acceptation
+of that term. It would appear that even the extreme of pseudo-dynastic
+royalty, sterilised to the last degree, is something of an effectual
+hindrance to democratic rule,<!-- Page 287 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 287]</span> and in so far also a hindrance to the
+further continued neutralisation of nationalist pretensions, as also an
+effectual furtherance of upper-class rule for upper-class ends.</p>
+
+<p>Now, a government by well-meaning gentlemen-investors will, at the
+nearest, come no nearer representing the material needs and interests of
+the common run than a parable comes to representing the concrete facts
+which it hopes to illuminate. And as bears immediately on the point in
+hand, these gentlemanly administrators of the nation's affairs who so
+cluster about the throne, vacant though it may be of all but the bodily
+presence of majesty, are after all gentlemen, with a gentlemanly sense
+of punctilio touching the large proprieties and courtesies of political
+life. The national honor is a matter of punctilio, always; and out of
+the formal exigencies of the national honor arise grievances to be
+redressed; and it is grievances of this character that commonly afford
+the formal ground of a breach of the peace. An appeal on patriotic
+grounds of wounded national pride, to the common run who have no trained
+sense of punctilio, by the gentlemanly responsible class who have such a
+sense, backed by assurances that the national prestige or the national
+interests are at stake, will commonly bring a suitable response. It is
+scarcely necessary that the common run should know just what the stir is
+about, so long as they are informed by their trusted betters that there
+is a grievance to redress. In effect, it results that the democratic
+nation's affairs are administered by a syndicate composed of the least
+democratic class in the population.</p>
+
+<p>Excepting what is to be excepted, it will commonly hold true today that
+these gentlemanly governments are<!-- Page 288 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 288]</span> conducted in a commendably clean and
+upright fashion, with a conscious rectitude and a benevolent intention.
+But they are after all, in effect, class governments, and they
+unavoidably carry the bias of their class. The gentlemanly officials and
+law-givers come, in the main, from the kept classes, whose living comes
+to them in the way of income from investments, at home or in foreign
+parts, or from an equivalent source of accumulated wealth or official
+emolument. The bias resulting from this state of the case need not be of
+an intolerant character in order to bring its modicum of mischief into
+the national policy, as regards amicable relations with other
+nationalities. A slight bias running on a ground of conscious right and
+unbroken usage may go far. So, e.g., anyone of these gentlemanly
+governments is within its legitimate rights, or rather within its
+imperative duty, in defending the foreign investments of its citizens
+and enforcing due payment of its citizens' claims to income or principal
+of such property as they may hold in foreign parts; and it is within its
+ordinary lines of duty in making use of the nation's resources&mdash;that is
+to say of the common man and his means of livelihood&mdash;in enforcing such
+claims held by the investing classes. The community at large has no
+interest in the enforcement of such claims; it is evidently a class
+interest, and as evidently protected by a code of rights, duties and
+procedure that has grown out of a class bias, at the cost of the
+community at large.</p>
+
+<p>This bias favoring the interests of invested wealth may also, and indeed
+it commonly does, take the aggressive form of aggressively forwarding
+enterprise in investment abroad, particularly in commercially backward
+countries abroad, by extension of the national jurisdiction and the
+active countenancing of concessions in foreign<!-- Page 289 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 289]</span> parts, by subventions,
+or by creation of offices to bring suitable emoluments to the younger
+sons of deserving families. The protective tariffs to which recourse is
+sometimes had, are of the same general nature and purpose. Of course, it
+is in this latter, aggressive or excursive, issue of the well-to-do bias
+in favor of investment and invested wealth that its most pernicious
+effect on international relations is traceable.</p>
+
+<p>Free income, that is to say income not dependent on personal merit or
+exertion of any kind, is the breath of life to the kept classes; and as
+a corollary of the "First Law of Nature," therefore, the invested wealth
+which gives a legally equitable claim to such income has in their eyes
+all the sanctity that can be given by Natural Right. Investment&mdash;often
+spoken of euphemistically as "savings"&mdash;is consequently a meritorious
+act, conceived to be very serviceable to the community at large, and
+properly to be furthered by all available means. Invested wealth is so
+much added to the aggregate means at the community's disposal, it is
+believed. Of course, in point of fact, income from investment in the
+hands of these gentlefolk is a means of tracelessly consuming that much
+of the community's yearly product; but to the kept classes, who see the
+matter from the point of view of the recipient, the matter does not
+present itself in that light. To them it is the breath of life. Like
+other honorable men they are faithful to their bread; and by authentic
+tradition the common man, in whose disciplined preconceptions the kept
+classes are his indispensable betters, is also imbued with the
+uncritical faith that the invested wealth which enables these betters
+tracelessly to consume a due share of the yearly product is an addition
+to the aggregate means in hand.<!-- Page 290 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 290]</span></p>
+
+<p>The advancement of commercial and other business enterprise beyond the
+national frontiers is consequently one of the duties not to be
+neglected, and with which no trifling can be tolerated. It is so bound
+up with national ideals, under any gentlemanly government, that any
+invasion or evasion of the rights of investors in foreign parts, or of
+other business involved in dealings with foreign parts, immediately
+involves not only the material interest of the nation but the national
+honour as well. Hence international jealousies and eventual embroilment.</p>
+
+<p>The constitutional monarchy that commonly covers a modern democratic
+community is accordingly a menace to the common peace, and any pacific
+league of neutrals will be laying up trouble and prospective defeat for
+itself in allowing such an institution to stand over in any instance.
+Acting with a free hand, if such a thing were possible, the projected
+league should logically eliminate all monarchical establishments,
+constitutional or otherwise, from among its federated nations. It is
+doubtless not within reason to look for such a move in the negotiations
+that are to initiate the projected league of neutrals; but the point is
+called to mind here chiefly as indicating one of the difficult passages
+which are to be faced in any attempted formation of such a league, as
+well as one of the abiding sources of international irritation with
+which the league's jurisdiction will be burdened so long as a decisive
+measure of the kind is not taken.</p>
+
+<p>The logic of the whole matter is simple enough, and the necessary
+measures to be taken to remedy it are no less simple&mdash;barring
+sentimental objections which will probably prove insuperable. A
+monarchy, even a sufficiently inane monarchy, carries the burden of a
+gentlemanly governmental establishment&mdash;a government by and<!-- Page 291 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 291]</span> for the
+kept classes; such a government will unavoidably direct the affairs of
+state with a view to income on invested wealth, and will see the
+material interests of the country only in so far as they present
+themselves under the form of investment and business enterprise designed
+to eventuate in investment; these are the only forms of material
+interest that give rise to international jealousies, discriminations and
+misunderstanding, at the same time that they are interests of
+individuals only and have no material use or value to the community at
+large. Given a monarchical establishment and the concomitant gentlemanly
+governmental corps, there is no avoiding this sinister prime mover of
+international rivalry, so long as the rights of invested wealth continue
+in popular apprehension to be held inviolable.</p>
+
+<p>Quite obviously there is a certain <i>tu quoque</i> ready to the hand of
+these "gentlemen of the old school" who see in the constitutional
+monarchy a God-given shelter from the unreserved vulgarisation of life
+at the hands of the unblest and unbalanced underbred and underfed. The
+formally democratic nations, that have not retained even a
+pseudo-dynastic royalty, are not much more fortunately placed in respect
+of national discrimination in trade and investment. The American
+republic will obviously come into the comparison as the type-form of
+economic policy in a democratic commonwealth. There is little to choose
+between the economic policy pursued by such republics as France or
+America on the one side and their nearest counterparts among the
+constitutional monarchies on the other. It is even to be admitted out of
+hand that the comparison does no credit to democratic institutions as
+seen at work in these republics. They are, in fact, somewhat the crudest
+and most singularly foolish in their<!-- Page 292 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> economic policy of any peoples in
+Christendom. And in view of the amazing facility with which these
+democratic commonwealths are always ready to delude themselves in
+everything that touches their national trade policies, it is obvious
+that any league of neutrals whose fortunes are in any degree contingent
+on their reasonable compliance with a call to neutralise their trade
+regulations for the sake of peace, will have need of all the persuasive
+power it can bring to bear.</p>
+
+<p>However, the powers of darkness have one less line of defense to shelter
+them and their work of malversation in these commonwealths than in the
+constitutional monarchies. The American national establishment, e.g.,
+which may be taken as a fairly characteristic type-form in this bearing,
+is a government of businessmen for business ends; and there is no tabu
+of axiomatic gentility or of certified pedigree to hedge about this
+working syndicate of business interests. So that it is all nearer by one
+remove to the disintegrating touch of the common man and his commonplace
+circumstances. The businesslike r&eacute;gime of these democratic politicians
+is as undeviating in its advocacy and aid of enterprise in pursuit of
+private gain under shelter of national discrimination as the
+circumstances will permit; and the circumstances will permit them to do
+much and go far; for the limits of popular gullibility in all things
+that touch the admirable feats of business enterprise are very wide in
+these countries. There is a sentimental popular belief running to the
+curious effect that because the citizens of such a commonwealth are
+ungraded equals before the law, therefore somehow they can all and
+several become wealthy by trading at the expense of their neighbours.<!-- Page 293 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 293]</span></p>
+
+<p>Yet, the fact remains that there is only the one line of defense in
+these countries where the business interests have not the countenance of
+a time-honored order of gentlefolk, with the sanction of royalty in the
+background. And this fact is further enhanced by one of its immediate
+consequences. Proceeding upon the abounding faith which these peoples
+have in business enterprise as a universal solvent, the unreserved
+venality and greed of their businessmen&mdash;unhampered by the gentleman's
+<i>noblesse oblige</i>&mdash;have pushed the conversion of public law to private
+gain farther and more openly here than elsewhere. The outcome has been
+divers measures in restraint of trade or in furtherance of profitable
+abuses, of such a crass and flagrant character that if once the popular
+apprehension is touched by matter-of-fact reflection on the actualities
+of this businesslike policy the whole structure should reasonably be
+expected to crumble. If the present conjuncture of circumstances should,
+e.g., present to the American populace a choice between exclusion from
+the neutral league, and a consequent probable and dubious war of
+self-defense, on the one hand; as against entrance into the league, and
+security at the cost of relinquishing their national tariff in restraint
+of trade, on the other hand, it is always possible that the people might
+be brought to look their protective tariff in the face and recognise it
+for a commonplace conspiracy in restraint of trade, and so decide to
+shuffle it out of the way as a good riddance. And the rest of the
+Republic's businesslike policy of special favors would in such a case
+stand a chance of going in the discard along with the protective tariff,
+since the rest is of substantially the same disingenuous character.<!-- Page 294 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Not that anyone need entertain a confident expectation of such an
+exploit of common sense on the part of the American voters. There is
+little encouragement for such a hope in their past career of gullibility
+on this head. But this is again a point of difficulty to be faced in
+negotiations looking to such a pacific league of neutrals. Without a
+somewhat comprehensive neutralisation of national trade regulations, the
+outlook for lasting peace would be reduced by that much; there would be
+so much material for international jealousy and misunderstanding left
+standing over and requiring continued readjustment and compromise,
+always with the contingency of a breach that much nearer. The
+infatuation of the Americans with their protective tariff and other
+businesslike discriminations is a sufficiently serious matter in this
+connection, and it is always possible that their inability to give up
+this superstition might lead to their not adhering to this projected
+neutral league. Yet it is at least to be said that the longer the time
+that passes before active measures are taken toward the organisation of
+such a league&mdash;that is to say, in effect, the longer the great war
+lasts&mdash;the more amenable is the temper of the Americans likely to be,
+and the more reluctantly would they see themselves excluded. Should the
+war be protracted to some such length as appears to be promised by
+latterday pronunciamentos from the belligerents, or to something
+passably approaching such a duration; and should the Imperial designs
+and anomalous diplomacy of Japan continue to force themselves on the
+popular attention at the present rate; at the same time that the
+operations in Europe continue to demonstrate the excessive cost of
+defense against a well devised and resolute offensive; then it should
+reasonably be expected that the Americans might come to<!-- Page 295 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 295]</span> such a
+realisation of their own case as to let no minor considerations of trade
+discrimination stand in the way of their making common cause with the
+other pacific nations.</p>
+
+<p>It appears already to be realised in the most responsible quarter that
+America needs the succor of the other pacific nations, with a need that
+is not to be put away or put off; as it is also coming to be realised
+that the Imperial Powers are disturbers of the peace, by force of their
+Imperial character. Of course, the politicians who seek their own
+advantage in the nation's embarrassment are commonly unable to see the
+matter in that light. But it is also apparent that the popular sentiment
+is affected with the same apprehension, more and more as time passes and
+the aims and methods of the Imperial Powers become more patent.</p>
+
+<p>Hitherto the spokesmen of a pacific federation of nations have spoken
+for a league of such an (indeterminate) constitution as to leave all the
+federated nations undisturbed in all their conduct of their own affairs,
+domestic or international; probably for want of second thought as to the
+complications of copartnership between them in so grave and unwonted an
+enterprise. They have also spoken of America's share in the project as
+being that of an interested outsider, whose interest in any
+precautionary measures of this kind is in part a regard for his own
+tranquility as a disinterested neighbour, but in greater part a humane
+solicitude for the well-being of civilised mankind at large. In this
+view, somewhat self-complacent it is to be admitted, America is
+conceived to come into the case as initiator and guide, about whom the
+pacific nations are to cluster as some sort of queen-bee.</p>
+
+<p>Now, there is not a little verisimilitude in this conception of America
+as a sort of central office and a tower<!-- Page 296 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 296]</span> of strength in the projected
+federation of neutral nations, however pharisaical an appearance it may
+all have in the self-complacent utterances of patriotic Americans. The
+American republic is, after all, the greatest of the pacific nations of
+Christendom, in resources, population and industrial capacity; and it is
+also not to be denied that the temper of this large population is, on
+the whole, as pacific as that of any considerable people&mdash;outside of
+China. The adherence of the American republic would, in effect, double
+the mass and powers of the projected league, and would so place it
+beyond all hazard of defeat from without, or even of serious outside
+opposition to its aims.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it will not hold true that America is either disinterested or
+indispensable. The unenviable position of the indispensable belongs to
+the United Kingdom, and carries with it the customary suspicion of
+interested motives that attaches to the stronger party in a bargain. To
+America, on the other hand, the league is indispensable, as a refuge
+from otherwise inevitable dangers ahead; and it is only a question of a
+moderate allowance of time for the American voters to realise that
+without an adequate copartnership with the other pacific nations the
+outlook of the Republic is altogether precarious. Single-handed, America
+can not defend itself, except at a prohibitive cost; whereas in
+copartnership with these others the national defense becomes a virtually
+negligible matter. It is for America a choice between a policy of
+extravagant armament and aggressive diplomacy, with a doubtful issue, on
+the one side, and such abatement of national pretensions as would
+obviate bootless contention, on the other side.<!-- Page 297 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 297]</span></p>
+
+<p>Yet, it must be admitted, the patriotic temper of the American people is
+of such a susceptible kind as to leave the issue in doubt. Not that the
+Americans will not endeavor to initiate some form of compact for the
+keeping of the peace, when hostilities are concluded; barring unforeseen
+contingencies, it is virtually a foregone conclusion that the attempt
+will be made, and that the Americans will take an active part in its
+promotion. But the doubt is as to their taking such a course as will
+lead to a compact of the kind needed to safeguard the peace of the
+country. The business interests have much to say in the counsels of the
+Americans, and these business interests look to short-term
+gains&mdash;American business interests particularly&mdash;to be derived from the
+country's necessities. It is likely to appear that the business
+interests, through representatives in Congress and elsewhere, will
+disapprove of any peace compact that does not involve an increase of the
+national armament and a prospective demand for munitions and an
+increased expenditure of the national funds.</p>
+
+<p>With or without the adherence of America, the pacific nations of Europe
+will doubtless endeavour to form a league or alliance designed to keep
+the peace. If America does not come into the arrangement it may well
+come to nothing much more than a further continued defensive alliance of
+the belligerent nations now opposed to the German coalition. In any case
+it is still a point in doubt whether the league so projected is to be
+merely a compact of defensive armament against a common enemy&mdash;in which
+case it will necessarily be transient, perhaps ephemeral&mdash;or a more
+inclusive coalition of a closer character designed to avoid any breach
+of the peace, by disarmament and by disallowance and disclaimer of such
+national pre<!-- Page 298 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 298]</span>tensions and punctilio as the patriotic sentiment of the
+contracting parties will consent to dispense with. The nature of the
+resulting peace, therefore, as well as its chances of duration, will in
+great measure be conditioned on the fashion of peace-compact on which it
+is to rest; which will be conditioned in good part on the degree in
+which the warlike coalition under German Imperial control is effectually
+to be eliminated from the situation as a prospective disturber of the
+peace; which, in turn, is a question somewhat closely bound up with the
+further duration of the war, as has already been indicated in an earlier
+passage.<!-- Page 299 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h4>
+
+<p class='center'><span class="smcap">Peace and the Price System</span></p>
+
+
+<p>Evidently the conception of peace on which its various spokesmen are
+proceeding is by no means the same for all of them. In the current
+German conception, e.g., as seen in the utterances of its many and
+urgent spokesmen, peace appears to be of the general nature of a truce
+between nations, whose God-given destiny it is, in time, to adjust a
+claim to precedence by wager of battle. They will sometimes speak of it,
+euphemistically, with a view to conciliation, as "assurance of the
+national future," in which the national future is taken to mean an
+opportunity for the extension of the national dominion at the expense of
+some other national establishment. In the same connection one may recall
+the many eloquent passages on the State and its paramount place and
+value in the human economy. The State is useful for disturbing the
+peace. This German notion may confidently be set down as the lowest of
+the current conceptions of peace; or perhaps rather as the notion of
+peace reduced to the lowest terms at which it continues to be
+recognisable as such. Next beyond in that direction lies the notion of
+armistice; which differs from this conception of peace chiefly in
+connoting specifically a definite and relatively short interval between
+warlike operations.</p>
+
+<p>The conception of peace as being a period of preparation for war has
+many adherents outside the Fatherland,<!-- Page 300 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 300]</span> of course. Indeed, it has
+probably a wider vogue and a readier acceptance among men who interest
+themselves in questions of peace and war than any other. It goes hand in
+hand with that militant nationalism that is taken for granted,
+conventionally, as the common ground of those international relations
+that play a part in diplomatic intercourse. It is the diplomatist's
+<i>m&eacute;tier</i> to talk war in parables of peace. This conception of peace as a
+precarious interval of preparation has come down to the present out of
+the feudal age and is, of course, best at home where the feudal range of
+preconceptions has suffered least dilapidation; and it carries the
+feudalistic presumption that all national establishments are competitors
+for dominion, after the scheme of Macchiavelli. The peace which is had
+on this footing, within the realm, is a peace of subjection, more or
+less pronounced according as the given national establishment is more or
+less on the militant order; a warlike organisation being necessarily of
+a servile character, in the same measure in which it is warlike.</p>
+
+<p>In much the same measure and with much the same limitations as the
+modern democratic nations have departed from the feudal system of civil
+relations and from the peculiar range of conceptions which characterise
+that system, they have also come in for a new or revised conception of
+peace. Instead of its being valued chiefly as a space of time in which
+to prepare for war, offensive or defensive, among these democratic and
+provisionally pacific nations it has come to stand in the common
+estimation as the normal and stable manner of life, good and commendable
+in its own right. These modern, pacific, commonwealths stand on the
+defensive, habitually. They are still pugnaciously national, but they
+have unlearned so much of the feudal preconceptions as to leave them in<!-- Page 301 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 301]</span>
+a defensive attitude, under the watch-word: Peace with honour. Their
+quasi-feudalistic national prestige is not to be trifled with, though it
+has lost so much of its fascination as ordinarily not to serve the
+purposes of an aggressive enterprise, at least not without some shrewd
+sophistication at the hands of militant politicians and their diplomatic
+agents. Of course, an exuberant patriotism may now and again take on the
+ancient barbarian vehemence and lead such a provisionally pacific nation
+into an aggressive raid against a helpless neighbour; but it remains
+characteristically true, after all, that these peoples look on the
+country's peace as the normal and ordinary course of things, which each
+nation is to take care of for itself and by its own force.</p>
+
+<p>The ideal of the nineteenth-century statesmen was to keep the peace by a
+balance of power; an unstable equilibrium of rivalries, in which it was
+recognised that eternal vigilance was the price of peace by
+equilibration. Since then, by force of the object-lesson of the
+twentieth-century wars, it has become evident that eternal vigilance
+will no longer keep the peace by equilibration, and the balance of power
+has become obsolete. At the same time things have so turned that an
+effective majority of the civilised nations now see their advantage in
+peace, without further opportunity to seek further dominion. These
+nations have also been falling into the shape of commonwealths, and so
+have lost something of their national spirit.</p>
+
+<p>With much reluctant hesitation and many misgivings, the statesmen of
+these pacific nations are accordingly busying themselves with schemes
+for keeping the peace on the unfamiliar footing of a stable equilibrium;
+the method preferred on the whole being an equilibration of
+make-believe, in imitation of the obsolete balance of power.<!-- Page 302 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 302]</span> There is a
+meticulous regard for national jealousies and discriminations, which it
+is thought necessary to keep intact. Of course, on any one of these
+slightly diversified plans of keeping the peace on a stable footing of
+copartnery among the pacific nations, national jealousies and national
+integrity no longer have any substantial meaning. But statesmen think
+and plan in terms of precedent; which comes to thinking and planning in
+terms of make-believe, when altered circumstances have made the
+precedents obsolete. So one comes to the singular proposal of the
+statesmen, that the peace is to be kept in concert among these pacific
+nations by a provision of force with which to break it at will. The
+peace that is to be kept on this footing of national discriminations and
+national armaments will necessarily be of a precarious kind; being, in
+effect, a statesmanlike imitation of the peace as it was once kept even
+more precariously by the pacific nations in severalty.</p>
+
+<p>Hitherto the movement toward peace has not gone beyond this conception
+of it, as a collusive safeguarding of national discrepancies by force of
+arms. Such a peace is necessarily precarious, partly because armed force
+is useful for breaking the peace, partly because the national
+discrepancies, by which these current peace-makers set such store, are a
+constant source of embroilment. What the peace-makers might logically be
+expected to concern themselves about would be the elimination of these
+discrepancies that make for embroilment. But what they actually seem
+concerned about is their preservation. A peace by collusive neglect of
+those remnants of feudalistic make-believe that still serve to divide
+the pacific nations has hitherto not seriously come under advisement.<!-- Page 303 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Evidently, hitherto, and for the calculable future, peace is a relative
+matter, a matter of more or less, whichever of the several working
+conceptions spoken of above may rule the case. Evidently, too, a peace
+designed to strengthen the national establishment against eventual war,
+will count to a different effect from a collusive peace of a defensive
+kind among the pacific peoples, designed by its projectors to conserve
+those national discrepancies on which patriotic statesmen like to dwell.
+Different from both would be the value of a peace by neglect of such
+useless national discriminations as now make for embroilment. A
+protracted season of peace should logically have a somewhat different
+cultural value according to the character of the public policy to be
+pursued under its cover. So that a safe and sane conservation of the
+received law and order should presumably best be effected under cover of
+a collusive peace of the defensive kind, which is designed to retain
+those national discrepancies intact that count for so much in the
+national life of today, both as a focus of patriotic sentiment and as an
+outlet for national expenditures. This plan would involve the least
+derangement of the received order among the democratic peoples, although
+the plan might itself undergo some change in the course of time.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Among the singularities of the latterday situation, in this connection,
+and brought out by the experiences of the great war, is a close
+resemblance between latterday warlike operations and the ordinary
+processes of industry. Modern warfare and modern industry alike are
+carried on by technological processes subject to surveillance and
+direction by mechanical engineers, or perhaps rather experts in
+engineering science of the mechanistic kind.<!-- Page 304 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 304]</span> War is not now a matter of
+the stout heart and strong arm. Not that these attributes do not have
+their place and value in modern warfare; but they are no longer the
+chief or decisive factors in the case. The exploits that count in this
+warfare are technological exploits; exploits of technological science,
+industrial appliances, and technological training. As has been remarked
+before, it is no longer a gentlemen's war, and the gentleman, as such,
+is no better than a marplot in the game as it is played.</p>
+
+<p>Certain consequences follow from this state of the case. Technology and
+industrial experience, in large volume and at a high proficiency, are
+indispensable to the conduct of war on the modern plan, as well as a
+large, efficient and up-to-date industrial community and industrial
+plant to supply the necessary material of this warfare. At the same time
+the discipline of the campaign, as it impinges on the rank and file as
+well as on the very numerous body of officers and technicians, is not at
+cross purposes with the ordinary industrial employments of peace, or not
+in the same degree as has been the case in the past, even in the recent
+past. The experience of the campaign does not greatly unfit the men who
+survive for industrial uses; nor does it come in as a sheer interruption
+of their industrial training, or break the continuity of that range of
+habits of thought which modern industry of the technological order
+induces; not in the same degree as was the case under the conditions of
+war as carried on in the nineteenth century. The cultural, and
+particularly the technological, incidence of this modern warfare should
+evidently be appreciably different from what has been experienced in the
+past, and from what this past experience has induced students of these
+matters to look for among the psychological effects of warlike
+experience.<!-- Page 305 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 305]</span></p>
+
+<p>It remains true that the discipline of the campaign, however impersonal
+it may tend to become, still inculcates personal subordination and
+unquestioning obedience; and yet the modern tactics and methods of
+fighting bear somewhat more on the individual's initiative, discretion,
+sagacity and self-possession than once would have been true. Doubtless
+the men who come out of this great war, the common men, will bring home
+an accentuated and acrimonious patriotism, a venomous hatred of the
+enemies whom they have missed killing; but it may reasonably be doubted
+if they come away with a correspondingly heightened admiration and
+affection for their betters who have failed to make good as foremen in
+charge of this teamwork in killing. The years of the war have been
+trying to the reputation of officials and officers, who have had to meet
+uncharted exigencies with not much better chance of guessing the way
+through than their subalterns have had.</p>
+
+<p>By and large, it is perhaps not to be doubted that the populace now
+under arms will return from the experience of the war with some net gain
+in loyalty to the nation's honour and in allegiance to their masters;
+particularly the German subjects,&mdash;the like is scarcely true for the
+British; but a doubt will present itself as to the magnitude of this net
+gain in subordination, or this net loss in self-possession. A doubt may
+be permitted as to whether the common man in the countries of the
+Imperial coalition, e.g., will, as the net outcome of this war
+experience, be in a perceptibly more pliable frame of mind as touches
+his obligations toward his betters and subservience to the irresponsible
+authority exercised by the various governmental agencies, than he was at
+the outbreak of the war. At that time, there is reason to believe, there
+was an ominous, though scarcely threatening, murmur of dis<!-- Page 306 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>content
+beginning to be heard among the working classes of the industrial towns.
+It is fair to presume, however, that the servile discipline of the
+service and the vindictive patriotism bred of the fight should combine
+to render the populace of the Fatherland more amenable to the
+irresponsible rule of the Imperial dynasty and its subaltern royal
+establishments, in spite of any slight effect of a contrary character
+exercised by the training in technological methods and in self-reliance,
+with which this discipline of the service has been accompanied. As to
+the case of the British population, under arms or under compulsion of
+necessity at home, something has already been said in an earlier
+passage; and much will apparently depend, in their case, on the further
+duration of the war. The case of the other nationalities involved, both
+neutrals and belligerents, is even more obscure in this bearing, but it
+is also of less immediate consequence for the present argument.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The essentially feudal virtues of loyalty and bellicose patriotism would
+appear to have gained their great ascendency over all men's spirit
+within the Western civilisation by force of the peculiarly consistent
+character of the discipline of life under feudal conditions, whether in
+war or peace; and to the same uniformity of these forces that shaped the
+workday habits of thought among the feudal nations is apparently due
+that profound institutionalisation of the preconceptions of patriotism
+and loyalty, by force of which these preconceptions still hold the
+modern peoples in an unbreakable web of prejudice, after the conditions
+favoring their acquirement have in great part ceased to operate. These
+preconceptions of national solidarity and international enmity have come
+down from<!-- Page 307 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 307]</span> the past as an integral part of the unwritten constitution
+underlying all these modern nations, even those which have departed most
+widely from the manner of life to which the peoples owe these ancient
+preconceptions. Hitherto, or rather until recent times, the workday
+experience of these peoples has not seriously worked at cross purposes
+with the patriotic spirit and its bias of national animosity; and what
+discrepancy there has effectively been between the discipline of workday
+life and the received institutional preconceptions on this head, has
+hitherto been overborne by the unremitting inculcation of these virtues
+by interested politicians, priests and publicists, who speak habitually
+for the received order of things.</p>
+
+<p>That order of things which is known on its political and civil side as
+the feudal system, together with that era of the dynastic States which
+succeeds the feudal age technically so called, was, on its industrial or
+technological side, a system of trained man-power organised on a plan of
+subordination of man to man. On the whole, the scheme and logic of that
+life, whether in its political (warlike) or its industrial doings,
+whether in war or peace, runs on terms of personal capacity, proficiency
+and relations. The organisation of the forces engaged and the
+constraining rules according to which this organisation worked, were of
+the nature of personal relations, and the impersonal factors in the case
+were taken for granted. Politics and war were a field for personal
+valor, force and cunning, in practical effect a field for personal force
+and fraud. Industry was a field in which the routine of life, and its
+outcome, turned on "the skill, dexterity and judgment of the individual
+workman," in the words of Adam Smith.<!-- Page 308 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 308]</span></p>
+
+<p>The feudal age passed, being done to death by handicraft industry,
+commercial traffic, gunpowder, and the state-making politicians. But the
+political States of the statemakers, the dynastic States as they may
+well be called, continued the conduct of political life on the personal
+plane of rivalry and jealousy between dynasties and between their
+States; and in spite of gunpowder and the new military engineering,
+warfare continued also to be, in the main and characteristically, a
+field in which man-power and personal qualities decided the outcome, by
+virtue of personal "skill, dexterity and judgment." Meantime industry
+and its technology by insensible degrees underwent a change in the
+direction of impersonalisation, particularly in those countries in which
+state-making and its warlike enterprise had ceased, or were ceasing, to
+be the chief interests and the controlling preconception of the people.</p>
+
+<p>The logic of the new, mechanical industry which has supplanted
+handicraft in these countries, is a mechanistic logic, which proceeds in
+terms of matter-of-fact strains, masses, velocities, and the like,
+instead of the "skill, dexterity and judgment" of personal agents. The
+new industry does not dispense with the personal agencies, nor can it
+even be said to minimise the need of skill, dexterity and judgment in
+the personal agents employed, but it does take them and their attributes
+for granted as in some sort a foregone premise to its main argument. The
+logic of the handicraft system took the impersonal agencies for granted;
+the machine industry takes the skill, dexterity and judgment of the
+workmen for granted. The processes of thought, and therefore the
+consistent habitual discipline, of the former ran in terms of the
+personal agents engaged, and of the personal relations of discretion,
+control and<!-- Page 309 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 309]</span> subordination necessary to the work; whereas the
+mechanistic logic of the modern technology, more and more consistently,
+runs in terms of the impersonal forces engaged, and inculcates an
+habitual predilection for matter-of-fact statement, and an habitual
+preconception that the findings of material science alone are
+conclusive.</p>
+
+<p>In those nations that have made up the advance guard of Western
+civilisation in its movement out of feudalism, the disintegrating effect
+of this matter-of-fact animus inculcated by the later state of the
+industrial arts has apparently acted effectively, in some degree, to
+discredit those preconceptions of personal discrimination on which
+dynastic rule is founded. But in no case has the discipline of this
+mechanistic technology yet wrought its perfect work or come to a
+definitive conclusion. Meantime war and politics have on the whole
+continued on the ancient plane; it may perhaps be fair to say that
+politics has so continued because warlike enterprise has continued still
+to be a matter of such personal forces as skill, dexterity and judgment,
+valor and cunning, personal force and fraud. Latterly, gradually, but
+increasingly, the technology of war, too, has been shifting to the
+mechanistic plane; until in the latest phases of it, somewhere about the
+turn of the century, it is evident that the logic of warfare too has
+come to be the same mechanistic logic that makes the modern state of the
+industrial arts.</p>
+
+<p>What, if anything, is due by consequence to overtake the political
+strategy and the political preconceptions of the new century, is a
+question that will obtrude itself, though with scant hope of finding a
+ready answer. It may even seem a rash, as well as an ungraceful,
+undertaking to inquire into the possible manner and degree of
+prospective decay to which the received political ideals and virtues<!-- Page 310 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+would appear to be exposed by consequence of this derangement of the
+ancient discipline to which men have been subjected. So much, however,
+would seem evident, that the received virtues and ideals of patriotic
+animosity and national jealousy can best be guarded against untimely
+decay by resolutely holding to the formal observance of all outworn
+punctilios of national integrity and discrimination, in spite of their
+increasing disserviceability,&mdash;as would be done, e.g., or at least
+sought to be done, in the installation of a league of neutral nations to
+keep the peace and at the same time to safeguard those "national
+interests" whose only use is to divide these nations and keep them in a
+state of mutual envy and distrust.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Those peoples who are subject to the constraining governance of this
+modern state of the industrial arts, as all modern peoples are in much
+the same measure in which they are "modern," are, therefore, exposed to
+a workday discipline running at cross purposes with the received law and
+order as it takes effect in national affairs; and to this is to be added
+that, with warlike enterprise also shifted to this same
+mechanistic-technological ground, war can no longer be counted on so
+confidently as before to correct all the consequent drift away from the
+ancient landmarks of dynastic, pseudo-dynastic, and national enterprise
+in dominion.</p>
+
+<p>As has been noted above, modern warfare not only makes use of, and
+indeed depends on, the modern industrial technology at every turn of the
+operations in the field, but it draws on the ordinary industrial
+resources of the countries at war in a degree and with an urgency never
+equalled. No nation can hope to make a stand in modern warfare, much
+less to make headway in warlike<!-- Page 311 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 311]</span> enterprise, without the most
+thoroughgoing exploitation of the modern industrial arts. Which
+signifies for the purpose in hand that any Power that harbors an
+imperial ambition must take measures to let its underlying population
+acquire the ways and means of the modern machine industry, without
+reservation; which in turn signifies that popular education must be
+taken care of to such an extent as may be serviceable in this manner of
+industry and in the manner of life which this industrial system
+necessarily imposes; which signifies, of course, that only the
+thoroughly trained and thoroughly educated nations have a chance of
+holding their place as formidable Powers in this latterday phase of
+civilisation. What is needed is the training and education that go to
+make proficiency in the modern fashion of technology and in those
+material sciences that conduce to technological proficiency of this
+modern order. It is a matter of course that in these premises any
+appreciable illiteracy is an intolerable handicap. So is also any
+training which discourages habitual self-reliance and initiative, or
+which acts as a check on skepticism; for the skeptical frame of mind is
+a necessary part of the intellectual equipment that makes for advance,
+invention and understanding in the field of technological proficiency.</p>
+
+<p>But these requirements, imperatively necessary as a condition of warlike
+success, are at cross purposes with that unquestioning respect of
+persons and that spirit of abnegation that alone can hold a people to
+the political institutions of the old order and make them a willing
+instrument in the hands of the dynastic statesmen. The dynastic State is
+apparently caught in a dilemma. The necessary preparation for warlike
+enterprise on the modern plan can apparently be counted on, in the long
+run, to disintegrate the<!-- Page 312 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 312]</span> foundations of the dynastic State. But it is
+only in the long run that this effect can be counted on; and it is
+perhaps not securely to be counted on even in a moderately long run of
+things as they have run hitherto, if due precautions are taken by the
+interested statesmen,&mdash;as would seem to be indicated by the successful
+conservation of archaic traits in the German peoples during the past
+half century under the archaising rule of the Hohenzollern. It is a
+matter of habituation, which takes time, and which can at the same time
+be neutralised in some degree by indoctrination.</p>
+
+<p>Still, when all is told, it will probably have to be conceded that,
+e.g., such a nation as Russia will fall under this rule of inherent
+disability imposed by the necessary use of the modern industrial arts.
+Without a fairly full and free command of these modern industrial
+methods on the part of the Russian people, together with the virtual
+disappearance of illiteracy, and with the facile and far-reaching system
+of communication which it all involves, the Russian Imperial
+establishment would not be a formidable power or a serious menace to the
+pacific nations; and it is not easy to imagine how the Imperial
+establishment could retain its hold and its character under the
+conditions indicated.</p>
+
+<p>The case of Japan, taken by itself, rests on somewhat similar lines as
+these others. In time, and in this case the time-allowance should
+presumably not be anything very large, the Japanese people are likely to
+get an adequate command of the modern technology; which would, here as
+elsewhere, involve the virtual disappearance of the present high
+illiteracy, and the loss, in some passable measure, of the current
+superstitiously crass nationalism of that people. There are indications
+that something of<!-- Page 313 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> that kind, and of quite disquieting dimensions, is
+already under way; though with no indication that any consequent
+disintegrating habits of thought have yet invaded the sacred close of
+Japanese patriotic devotion.</p>
+
+<p>Again, it is a question of time and habituation. With time and
+habituation the emperor may insensibly cease to be of divine pedigree,
+and the syndicate of statesmen who are doing business under his
+signature may consequently find their measures of Imperial expansion
+questioned by the people who pay the bills. But so long as the Imperial
+syndicate enjoy their present immunity from outside obstruction, and can
+accordingly carry on an uninterrupted campaign of cumulative predation
+in Korea, China and Manchuria, the patriotic infatuation is less likely
+to fall off, and by so much the decay of Japanese loyalty will be
+retarded. Yet, even if allowed anything that may seem at all probable in
+the way of a free hand for aggression against their hapless neighbours,
+the skepticism and insubordination to personal rule that seems
+inseparable in the long run from addiction to the modern industrial arts
+should be expected presently to overtake the Japanese spirit of loyal
+servitude. And the opportunity of Imperial Japan lies in the interval.
+So also does the menace of Imperial Japan as a presumptive disturber of
+the peace at large.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>At the cost of some unavoidable tedium, the argument as regards these
+and similar instances may be summarised. It appears, in the (possibly
+doubtful) light of the history of democratic institutions and of modern
+technology hitherto, as also from the logical character of this
+technology and its underlying material sciences, that consistent
+addiction to the peculiar habits of thought involved in its<!-- Page 314 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 314]</span> carrying on
+will presently induce a decay of those preconceptions in which dynastic
+government and national ambitions have their ground. Continued addiction
+to this modern scheme of industrial life should in time eventuate in a
+decay of militant nationalism, with a consequent lapse of warlike
+enterprise. At the same time, popular proficiency in the modern
+industrial arts, with all that that implies in the way of intelligence
+and information, is indispensable as a means to any successful warlike
+enterprise on the modern plan. The menace of warlike aggression from
+such dynastic States, e.g., as Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan is
+due to their having acquired a competent use of this modern technology,
+while they have not yet had time to lose that spirit of dynastic loyalty
+which they have carried over from an archaic order of things, out of
+which they have emerged at a very appreciably later period (last half of
+the nineteenth century) than those democratic peoples whose peace they
+now menace. As has been said, they have taken over this modern state of
+the industrial arts without having yet come in for the defects of its
+qualities. This modern technology, with its underlying material
+sciences, is a novel factor in the history of human culture, in that
+addiction to its use conduces to the decay of militant patriotism, at
+the same time that its employment so greatly enhances the warlike
+efficiency of even a pacific people, at need, that they can not be
+seriously molested by any other peoples, however valorous and numerous,
+who have not a competent use of this technology. A peace at large among
+the civilised nations, by loss of the militant temper through addiction
+to this manner of arts of peace, therefore, carries no risk of
+interruption by an inroad of warlike barbarians,&mdash;always provided that
+those existing archaic peoples who might pass<!-- Page 315 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> muster as barbarians are
+brought into line with the pacific nations on a footing of peace and
+equality. The disparity in point of outlook as between the resulting
+peace at large by neglect of bootless animosities, on the one hand, and
+those historic instances of a peaceable civilisation that have been
+overwhelmed by warlike barbarian invasions, on the other hand, should be
+evident.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It is always possible, indeed it would scarcely be surprising to find,
+that the projected league of neutrals or of nations bent on peace can
+not be brought to realisation at this juncture; perhaps not for a long
+time yet. But it should at the same time seem reasonable to expect that
+the drift toward a peaceable settlement of national discrepancies such
+as has been visible in history for some appreciable time past will, in
+the absence of unforeseen hindrances, work out to some such effect in
+the course of further experience under modern conditions. And whether
+the projected peace compact at its inception takes one form or another,
+provided it succeeds in its main purpose, the long-term drift of things
+under its rule should logically set toward some ulterior settlement of
+the general character of what has here been spoken of as a peace by
+neglect or by neutralisation of discrepancies.</p>
+
+<p>It should do so, in the absence of unforeseen contingencies; more
+particularly if there were no effectual factor of dissension included in
+the fabric of institutions within the nation. But there should also,
+e.g., be no difficulty in assenting to the forecast that when and if
+national peace and security are achieved and settled beyond recall, the
+discrepancy in fact between those who own the country's wealth and those
+who do not is presently due to come to an issue. Any attempt to forecast
+the form which this<!-- Page 316 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 316]</span> issue is to take, or the manner, incidents,
+adjuncts and sequelae of its determination, would be a bolder and a more
+ambiguous, undertaking. Hitherto attempts to bring this question to an
+issue have run aground on the real or fancied jeopardy to paramount
+national interests. How, if at all, this issue might affect national
+interests and international relations, would obviously depend in the
+first instance on the state of the given national establishment and the
+character of the international engagements entered into in the formation
+of this projected pacific league. It is always conceivable that the
+transactions involving so ubiquitous an issue might come to take on an
+international character and that they might touch the actual or fanciful
+interests of these diverse nations with such divergent effect as to
+bring on a rupture of the common understanding between them and of the
+peace-compact in which the common understanding is embodied.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In the beginning, that is to say in the beginnings out of which this
+modern era of the Western civilisation has arisen, with its scheme of
+law and custom, there grew into the scheme of law and custom, by settled
+usage, a right of ownership and of contract in disposal of
+ownership,&mdash;which may or may not have been a salutary institutional
+arrangement on the whole, under the circumstances of the early days.
+With the later growth of handicraft and the petty trade in Western
+Europe this right of ownership and contract came to be insisted on,
+standardised under legal specifications, and secured against molestation
+by the governmental interests; more particularly and scrupulously among
+those peoples that have taken the lead in working out that system of
+free or popular institutions that marks the modern civilised nations. So
+it<!-- Page 317 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 317]</span> has come to be embodied in the common law of the modern world as an
+inviolable natural right. It has all the prescriptive force of legally
+authenticated immemorial custom.</p>
+
+<p>Under the system of handicraft and petty trade this right of property
+and free contract served the interest of the common man, at least in
+much of its incidence, and acted in its degree to shelter industrious
+and economical persons from hardship and indignity at the hands of their
+betters. There seems reason to believe, as is commonly believed, that so
+long as that relatively direct and simple scheme of industry and trade
+lasted, the right of ownership and contract was a salutary custom, in
+its bearing on the fortunes of the common man. It appears also, on the
+whole, to have been favorable to the fuller development of the
+handicraft technology, as well as to its eventual outgrowth into the new
+line of technological expedients and contrivances that presently gave
+rise to the machine industry and the large-scale business enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>The standard theories of economic science have assumed the rights of
+property and contract as axiomatic premises and ultimate terms of
+analysis; and their theories are commonly drawn in such a form as would
+fit the circumstances of the handicraft industry and the petty trade,
+and such as can be extended to any other economic situation by shrewd
+interpretation. These theories, as they run from Adam Smith down through
+the nineteenth century and later, appear tenable, on the whole, when
+taken to apply to the economic situation of that earlier time, in
+virtually all that they have to say on questions of wages, capital,
+savings, and the economy and efficiency of management and production by
+the methods of private enterprise resting on these rights of ownership
+and contract and<!-- Page 318 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 318]</span> governed by the pursuit of private gain. It is when
+these standard theories are sought to be applied to the later situation,
+which has outgrown the conditions of handicraft, that they appear
+nugatory or meretricious. The "competitive system" which these standard
+theories assume as a necessary condition of their own validity, and
+about which they are designed to form a defensive hedge, would, under
+those earlier conditions of small-scale enterprise and personal contact,
+appear to have been both a passably valid assumption as a premise and a
+passably expedient scheme of economic relations and traffic. At that
+period of its life-history it can not be said consistently to have
+worked hardship to the common man; rather the reverse. And the common
+man in that time appears to have had no misgivings about the excellence
+of the scheme or of that article of Natural Rights that underlies it.</p>
+
+<p>This complexion of things, as touches the effectual bearing of the
+institution of property and the ancient customary rights of ownership,
+has changed substantially since the time of Adam Smith. The "competitive
+system," which he looked to as the economic working-out of that "simple
+and obvious system of natural liberty" that always engaged his best
+affections, has in great measure ceased to operate as a routine of
+natural liberty, in fact; particularly in so far as touches the fortunes
+of the common man, the impecunious mass of the people. <i>De jure</i>, of
+course, the competitive system and its inviolable rights of ownership
+are a citadel of Natural Liberty; but <i>de facto</i> the common man is now,
+and has for some time been, feeling the pinch of it. It is law, and
+doubtless it is good law, grounded in immemorial usage and authenticated
+with statute and precedent. But circumstances have so chang<!-- Page 319 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>ed that this
+good old plan has in a degree become archaic, perhaps unprofitable, or
+even mischievous, on the whole, and especially as touches the conditions
+of life for the common man. At least, so the common man in these modern
+democratic and commercial countries is beginning to apprehend the
+matter.</p>
+
+<p>Some slight and summary characterisation of these changing circumstances
+that have affected the incidence of the rights of property during modern
+times may, therefore, not be out of place; with a view to seeing how far
+and why these rights may be due to come under advisement and possible
+revision, in case a state of settled peace should leave men's attention
+free to turn to these internal, as contrasted with national interests.</p>
+
+<p>Under that order of handicraft and petty trade that led to the
+standardisation of these rights of ownership in the accentuated form
+which belongs to them in modern law and custom, the common man had a
+practicable chance of free initiative and self-direction in his choice
+and pursuit of an occupation and a livelihood, in so far as rights of
+ownership bore on his case. At that period the workman was the main
+factor in industry and, in the main and characteristically, the question
+of his employment was a question of what he would do. The material
+equipment of industry&mdash;the "plant," as it has come to be called&mdash;was
+subject of ownership, then as now; but it was then a secondary factor
+and, notoriously, subsidiary to the immaterial equipment of skill,
+dexterity and judgment embodied in the person of the craftsman. The body
+of information, or general knowledge, requisite to a workmanlike
+proficiency as handicraftsman was sufficiently slight and simple to fall
+within the ordinary reach of the working class, without special
+schooling; and the material<!-- Page 320 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> equipment necessary to the work, in the way
+of tools and appliances, was also slight enough, ordinarily, to bring it
+within the reach of the common man. The stress fell on the acquirement
+of that special personal skill, dexterity and judgment that would
+constitute the workman a master of his craft. Given a reasonable measure
+of pertinacity, the common man would be able to compass the material
+equipment needful to the pursuit of his craft, and so could make his way
+to a livelihood; and the inviolable right of ownership would then serve
+to secure him the product of his own industry, in provision for his own
+old-age and for a fair start in behalf of his children. At least in the
+popular conception, and presumably in some degree also in fact, the
+right of property so served as a guarantee of personal liberty and a
+basis of equality. And so its apologists still look on the institution.</p>
+
+<p>In a very appreciable degree this complexion of things and of popular
+conceptions has changed since then; although, as would be expected, the
+change in popular conceptions has not kept pace with the changing
+circumstances. In all the characteristic and controlling lines of
+industry the modern machine technology calls for a very considerable
+material equipment; so large an equipment, indeed, that this plant, as
+it is called, always represents a formidable amount of invested wealth;
+and also so large that it will, typically, employ a considerable number
+of workmen per unit of plant. On the transition to the machine
+technology the plant became the unit of operation, instead of the
+workman, as had previously been the case; and with the further
+development of this modern technology, during the past hundred and fifty
+years or so, the unit of operation and control has increasingly come to
+be not the individual or isolated plant but rather an articulated group
+<!-- Page 321 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 321]</span>
+of such plants working together as a balanced system and keeping pace in
+common, under a collective business management; and coincidently the
+individual workman has been falling into the position of an auxiliary
+factor, nearly into that of an article of supply, to be charged up as an
+item of operating expenses. Under this later and current system,
+discretion and initiative vest not in the workman but in the owners of
+the plant, if anywhere. So that at this point the right of ownership has
+ceased to be, in fact, a guarantee of personal liberty to the common
+man, and has come to be, or is coming to be, a guarantee of dependence.
+All of which engenders a feeling of unrest and insecurity, such as to
+instill a doubt in the mind of the common man as to the continued
+expediency of this arrangement and of the prescriptive rights of
+property on which the arrangement rests.</p>
+
+<p>There is also an insidious suggestion, carrying a sinister note of
+discredit, that comes in from ethnological science at this point; which
+is adapted still further to derange the common man's faith in this
+received institution of ownership and its control of the material
+equipment of industry. To students interested in human culture it is a
+matter of course that this material equipment is a means of utilising
+the state of the industrial arts; that it is useful in industry and
+profitable to its owners only because and in so far as it is a creation
+of the current technological knowledge and enables its owner to
+appropriate the usufruct of the current industrial arts. It is likewise
+a matter of course that this technological knowledge, that so enables
+the material equipment to serve the purposes of production and of
+private gain, is a free gift of the community at large to the owners of
+industrial plant;<!-- Page 322 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> and, under latterday conditions, to them exclusively.
+The state of the industrial arts is a joint heritage of the community at
+large, but where, as in the modern countries, the work to be done by
+this technology requires a large material equipment, the usufruct of
+this joint heritage passes, in effect, into the hands of the owners of
+this large material equipment.</p>
+
+<p>These owners have, ordinarily, contributed nothing to the technology,
+the state of the industrial arts, from which their control of the
+material equipment of industry enables them to derive a gain. Indeed, no
+class or condition of men in the modern community&mdash;with the possible
+exception of politicians and the clergy&mdash;can conceivably contribute less
+to the community's store of technological knowledge than the large
+owners of invested wealth. By one of those singular inversions due to
+production being managed for private gain, it happens that these
+investors are not only not given to the increase and diffusion of
+technological knowledge, but they have a well-advised interest in
+retarding or defeating improvements in the industrial arts in detail.
+Improvements, innovations that heighten productive efficiency in the
+general line of production in which a given investment is placed, are
+commonly to be counted on to bring "obsolescence by supersession" to the
+plant already engaged in that line; and therefore to bring a decline in
+its income-yielding capacity, and so in its capital or investment value.</p>
+
+<p>Invested capital yields income because it enjoys the usufruct of the
+community's technological knowledge; it has an effectual monopoly of
+this usufruct because this machine technology requires large material
+appliances with which to do its work; the interest of the owners of
+established industrial plant will not tolerate innovations de<!-- Page 323 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 323]</span>signed to
+supersede these appliances. The bearing of ownership on industry and on
+the fortunes of the common man is accordingly, in the main, the bearing
+which it has by virtue of its monopoly control of the industrial arts,
+and its consequent control of the conditions of employment and of the
+supply of vendible products. It takes effect chiefly by inhibition and
+privation; stoppage of production in case it brings no suitable profit
+to the investor, refusal of employment and of a livelihood to the
+workmen in case their product does not command a profitable price in the
+market.</p>
+
+<p>The expediency of so having the nation's industry managed on a footing
+of private ownership in the pursuit of private gain, by persons who can
+show no equitable personal claim to even the most modest livelihood, and
+whose habitual method of controlling industry is sabotage&mdash;refusal to
+let production go on except it affords them an unearned income&mdash;the
+expediency of all this is coming to be doubted by those who have to pay
+the cost of it. And it does not go far to lessen their doubts to find
+that the cost which they pay is commonly turned to no more urgent or
+useful purpose than a conspicuously wasteful consumption of
+superfluities by the captains of sabotage and their domestic
+establishments.</p>
+
+<p>This may not seem a veracious and adequate account of these matters; it
+may, in effect, fall short of the formulation: The truth, the whole
+truth, and nothing but the truth; nor does the question here turn on its
+adequacy as a statement of fact. Without prejudice to the question of
+its veracity and adequacy, it is believed to be such an account of these
+matters as will increasingly come easy and seem convincing to the common
+man who, in an ever increasing degree, finds himself pinched with
+privation and<!-- Page 324 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 324]</span> insecurity by a run of facts which will consistently bear
+this construction, and who perforce sees these facts from the prejudiced
+standpoint of a loser. To such a one, there is reason to believe, the
+view so outlined will seem all the more convincing the more attentively
+the pertinent facts and their bearing on his fortunes are considered.
+How far the contrary prejudice of those whose interest or training
+inclines them the other way may lead them to a different construction of
+these pertinent facts, does not concern the present argument; which has
+to do with this run of facts only as they bear on the prospective frame
+of mind of that unblest mass of the population who will have opportunity
+to present their proposals when peace at large shall have put national
+interests out of their preferential place in men's regard.</p>
+
+<p>At the risk of what may seem an excessively wide digression, there is
+something further to be said of the capitalistic sabotage spoken of
+above. The word has by usage come to have an altogether ungraceful air
+of disapproval. Yet it signifies nothing more vicious than a deliberate
+obstruction or retardation of industry, usually by legitimate means, for
+the sake of some personal or partisan advantage. This morally colorless
+meaning is all that is intended in its use here. It is extremely common
+in all industry that is designed to supply merchantable goods for the
+market. It is, in fact, the most ordinary and ubiquitous of all
+expedients in business enterprise that has to do with supplying the
+market, being always present in the businessman's necessary
+calculations; being not only a usual and convenient recourse but quite
+indispensable as an habitual measure of business sagacity. So that no
+personal blame can attach to its employment by any given businessman or
+business concern. It is only when measures<!-- Page 325 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 325]</span> of this nature are resorted
+to by employees, to gain some end of their own, that such conduct
+becomes (technically) reprehensible.</p>
+
+<p>Any businesslike management of industry is carried on for gain, which is
+to be got only on condition of meeting the terms of the market. The
+price system under which industrial business is carried on will not
+tolerate production in excess of the market demand, or without due
+regard to the expenses of production as determined by the market on the
+side of the supplies required. Hence any business concern must adjust
+its operations, by due acceleration, retardation or stoppage, to the
+market conditions, with a view to what the traffic will bear; that is to
+say, with a view to what will yield the largest obtainable net gain. So
+long as the price system rules, that is to say so long as industry is
+managed on investment for a profit, there is no escaping this necessity
+of adjusting the processes of industry to the requirements of a
+remunerative price; and this adjustment can be taken care of only by
+well-advised acceleration or curtailment of the processes of industry;
+which answers to the definition of sabotage. Wise business management,
+and more particularly what is spoken of as safe and sane business
+management, therefore, reduces itself in the main to a sagacious use of
+sabotage; that is to say a sagacious limitation of productive processes
+to something less than the productive capacity of the means in hand.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>To anyone who is inclined to see these matters of usage in the light of
+their history and to appraise them as phenomena of habituation,
+adaptation and supersession in the sequence of cultural proliferation,
+there should be no difficulty in appreciating that this institution of
+ownership<!-- Page 326 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> that makes the core of the modern institutional structure is
+a precipitate of custom, like any other item of use and wont; and that,
+like any other article of institutional furniture, it is subject to the
+contingencies of supersession and obsolescence. If prevalent habits of
+thought, enforced by the prevalent exigencies of life and livelihood,
+come to change in such a way as to make life under the rule imposed by
+this institution seem irksome, or intolerable, to the mass of the
+population; and if at the same time things turn in such a way as to
+leave no other and more urgent interest or exigency to take precedence
+of this one and hinder its being pushed to an issue; then it should
+reasonably follow that contention is due to arise between the unblest
+mass on whose life it is a burden and the classes who live by it. But it
+is, of course, impossible to state beforehand what will be the precise
+line of cleavage or what form the division between the two parties in
+interest will take. Yet it is contained in the premises that, barring
+unforeseen contingencies of a formidable magnitude, such a cleavage is
+due to follow as a logical sequel of an enduring peace at large. And it
+is also well within the possibilities of the case that this issue may
+work into an interruption or disruption of the peace between the
+nations.</p>
+
+<p>In this connection it may be called to mind that the existing
+governmental establishments in these pacific nations are, in all cases,
+in the hands of the beneficiary, or kept classes,&mdash;beneficiaries in the
+sense in which a distinction to that effect comes into the premises of
+the case at this point. The responsible officials and their chief
+administrative officers,&mdash;so much as may at all reasonably be called the
+"Government" or the "Administration,"&mdash;are quite invariably and
+characteristically drawn from these<!-- Page 327 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 327]</span> beneficiary classes; nobles,
+gentlemen, or business men, which all comes to the same thing for the
+purpose in hand; the point of it all being that the common man does not
+come within these precincts and does not share in these counsels that
+assume to guide the destiny of the nations.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, sporadically and ephemerally, a man out of the impecunious
+and undistinguished mass may now and again find his way within the
+gates; and more frequently will a professed "Man of the People" sit in
+council. But that the rule holds unbroken and inviolable is sufficiently
+evident in the fact that no community will let the emoluments of office
+for any of its responsible officials, even for those of a very scant
+responsibility, fall to the level of the habitual livelihood of the
+undistinguished populace, or indeed to fall below what is esteemed to be
+a seemly income for a gentleman. Should such an impecunious one be
+thrown up into a place of discretion in the government, he will
+forthwith cease to be a common man and will be inducted into the rank of
+gentleman,&mdash;so far as that feat can be achieved by taking thought or by
+assigning him an income adequate to a reputably expensive manner of
+life. So obvious is the antagonism between a vulgar station in life and
+a position of official trust, that many a "selfmade man" has advisedly
+taken recourse to governmental position, often at some appreciable cost,
+from no apparent motive other than its known efficacy as a Levitical
+corrective for a humble origin. And in point of fact, neither here nor
+there have the underbred majority hitherto learned to trust one of their
+own kind with governmental discretion; which has never yet, in the
+popular conviction, ceased to be a perquisite of the gently-bred and the
+well-to-do.<!-- Page 328 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Let it be presumed that this state of things will continue without
+substantial alteration, so far as regards the complexion of the
+governmental establishments of these pacific nations, and with such
+allowance for overstatement in the above characterisation as may seem
+called for. These governmental establishments are, by official position
+and by the character of their personnel, committed more or less
+consistently to the maintenance of the existing law and order. And
+should no substantial change overtake them as an effect of the war
+experience, the pacific league under discussion would be entered into by
+and between governments of this complexion. Should difficulties then
+arise between those who own and those who do not, in any one of these
+countries, it would become a nice question whether the compact to
+maintain the peace and national integrity of the several nations
+comprised in the league should be held to cover the case of internal
+dissensions and possible disorders partaking of the character of revolt
+against the established authorities or against the established
+provisions of law. A strike of the scope and character of the one
+recently threatened, and narrowly averted, on the American railroads,
+e.g., might easily give rise to disturbances sufficiently formidable to
+raise a question of the peace league's jurisdiction; particularly if
+such a disturbance should arise in a less orderly and less isolated
+country than the American republic; so as unavoidably to carry the
+effects of the disturbance across the national frontiers along the lines
+of industrial and commercial intercourse and correlation. It is always
+conceivable that a national government standing on a somewhat
+conservative maintenance of the received law and order might feel itself
+bound by its conception of the peace to make common cause with the
+keepers of estab<!-- Page 329 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 329]</span>lished rights in neighboring states, particularly if
+the similar interests of their own nation were thought to be placed in
+jeopardy by the course of events.</p>
+
+<p>Antecedently it seems highly probable that the received rights of
+ownership and disposal of property, particularly of investment, will
+come up for advisement and revision so soon as a settled state of peace
+is achieved. And there should seem to be little doubt but this revision
+would go toward, or at least aim at the curtailment or abrogation of
+these rights; very much after the fashion in which the analogous vested
+rights of feudalism and the dynastic monarchy have been revised and in
+great part curtailed or abrogated in the advanced democratic countries.
+Not much can confidently be said as to the details of such a prospective
+revision of legal rights, but the analogy of that procedure by which
+these other vested rights have been reduced to a manageable disability,
+suggests that the method in the present case also would be by way of
+curtailment, abrogation and elimination. Here again, as in analogous
+movements of disuse and disestablishment, there would doubtless be much
+conservative apprehension as to the procuring of a competent substitute
+for the supplanted methods of doing what is no longer desirable to be
+done; but here as elsewhere, in a like conjuncture, the practicable way
+out would presumably be found to lie along the line of simple disuse and
+disallowance of class prerogative. Taken at its face value, without
+unavoidable prejudice out of the past, this question of a substitute to
+replace the current exploitation of the industrial arts for private gain
+by capitalistic sabotage is not altogether above a suspicion of
+drollery.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is not to be overlooked that private enterprise on the basis of
+private ownership is the familiar and ac<!-- Page 330 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span>cepted method of conducting
+industrial affairs, and that it has the sanction of immemorial usage, in
+the eyes of the common man, and that it is reenforced with the urgency
+of life and death in the apprehension of the kept classes. It should
+accordingly be a possible outcome of such a peace as would put away
+international dissension, that the division of classes would come on in
+a new form, between those who stand on their ancient rights of
+exploitation and mastery, and those who are unwilling longer to submit.
+And it is quite within the possibilities of the case that the division
+of opinion on these matters might presently shift back to the old
+familiar ground of international hostilities; undertaken partly to put
+down civil disturbances in given countries, partly by the more archaic,
+or conservative, peoples to safeguard the institutions of the received
+law and order against inroads from the side of the iconoclastic ones.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In the apprehension of those who are speaking for peace between the
+nations and planning for its realisation, the outlook is that of a
+return to, or a continuance of, the state of things before the great war
+came on, with peace and national security added, or with the danger of
+war eliminated. Nothing appreciable in the way of consequent innovation,
+certainly nothing of a serious character, is contemplated as being among
+the necessary consequences of such a move into peace and security.
+National integrity and autonomy are to be preserved on the received
+lines, and international division and discrimination is to be managed as
+before, and with the accustomed incidents of punctilio and pecuniary
+equilibration. Internationally speaking, there is to dawn an era of
+diplomacy without afterthought, whatever that might conceivably mean.<!-- Page 331 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 331]</span></p>
+
+<p>There is much in the present situation that speaks for such an
+arrangement, particularly as an initial phase of the perpetual peace
+that is aimed at, whatever excursive variations might befall presently,
+in the course of years. The war experience in the belligerent countries
+and the alarm that has disturbed the neutral nations have visibly raised
+the pitch of patriotic solidarity in all these countries; and patriotism
+greatly favors the conservation of established use and wont; more
+particularly is it favorable to the established powers and policies of
+the national government. The patriotic spirit is not a spirit of
+innovation. The chances of survival, and indeed of stabilisation, for
+the accepted use and wont and for the traditional distinctions of class
+and prescriptive rights, should therefore seem favorable, at any rate in
+the first instance.</p>
+
+<p>Presuming, therefore, as the spokesmen of such a peace-compact are
+singularly ready to presume, that the era of peace and good-will which
+they have in view is to be of a piece with the most tranquil decades of
+the recent past, only more of the same kind, it becomes a question of
+immediate interest to the common man, as well as to all students of
+human culture, how the common man is to fare under this r&eacute;gime of law
+and order,&mdash;the mass of the population whose place it is to do what is
+to be done, and thereby to carry forward the civilisation of these
+pacific nations. It may not be out of place to recall, by way of
+parenthesis, that it is here taken for granted as a matter of course
+that all governmental establishments are necessarily conservative in all
+their dealings with this heritage of culture, except so far as they may
+be reactionary. Their office is the stabilisation of archaic
+institutions, the measure of archaism varying from one to another.<!-- Page 332 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 332]</span></p>
+
+<p>With due stabilisation and with a sagacious administration of the
+established scheme of law and order, the common man should find himself
+working under conditions and to results of the familiar kind; but with
+the difference that, while legal usage and legal precedent remain
+unchanged, the state of the industrial arts can confidently be expected
+to continue its advance in the same general direction as before, while
+the population increases after the familiar fashion, and the investing
+business community pursues its accustomed quest of competitive gain and
+competitive spending in the familiar spirit and with cumulatively
+augmented means. Stabilisation of the received law and order will not
+touch these matters; and for the present it is assumed that these
+matters will not derange the received law and order. The assumption may
+seem a violent one to the students of human culture, but it is a simple
+matter of course to the statesmen.</p>
+
+<p>To this piping time of peace the nearest analogues in history would seem
+to be the Roman peace, say, of the days of the Antonines, and passably
+the British peace of the Victorian era. Changes in the scheme of law and
+order supervened in both of these instances, but the changes were, after
+all, neither unconscionably large nor were they of a subversive nature.
+The scheme of law and order, indeed, appears in neither instance to have
+changed so far as the altered circumstances would seem to have called
+for. To the common man the Roman peace appears to have been a peace by
+submission, not widely different from what the case of China has
+latterly brought to the appreciation of students. The Victorian peace,
+which can be appreciated more in detail, was of a more genial character,
+as regards the fortunes of the common man. It started from a reasonably
+low level of hardship<!-- Page 333 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 333]</span> and <i>de facto</i> iniquity, and was occupied with
+many prudent endeavours to improve the lot of the unblest majority; but
+it is to be admitted that these prudent endeavours never caught up with
+the march of circumstances. Not that these prudent measures of
+amelioration were nugatory, but it is clear that they were not an
+altogether effectual corrective of the changes going on; they were, in
+effect, systematically so far in arrears as always to leave an uncovered
+margin of discontent with current conditions. It is a fact of history
+that very appreciable sections of the populace were approaching an
+attitude of revolt against what they considered to be intolerable
+conditions when that era closed. Much of what kept them within bounds,
+that is to say within legal bounds, was their continued loyalty to the
+nation; which was greatly, and for the purpose needfully, reenforced by
+a lively fear of warlike aggression from without. Now, under the
+projected <i>pax orbis terrarum</i> all fear of invasion, it is hopefully
+believed, will be removed; and with the disappearance of this fear
+should also disappear the drag of national loyalty on the counsels of
+the underbred.</p>
+
+<p>If this British peace of the nineteenth century is to be taken as a
+significant indication of what may be looked for under a r&eacute;gime of peace
+at large, with due allowance for what is obviously necessary to be
+allowed for, then what is held in promise would appear to be an era of
+unexampled commercial prosperity, of investment and business enterprise
+on a scale hitherto not experienced. These developments will bring their
+necessary consequences affecting the life of the community, and some of
+the consequences it should be possible to foresee. The circumstances
+conditioning this prospective era of peace and prosperity will
+necessarily differ from the corresponding<!-- Page 334 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 334]</span> circumstances that
+conditioned the Victorian peace, and many of these points of difference
+it is also possible to forecast in outline with a fair degree of
+confidence. It is in the main these economic factors going to condition
+the civilisation of the promised future that will have to be depended on
+to give the cue to any student interested in the prospective unfolding
+of events.</p>
+
+<p>The scheme of law and order governing all modern nations, both in the
+conduct of their domestic affairs and in their national policies, is in
+its controlling elements the scheme worked out through British (and
+French) experience in the eighteenth century and earlier, as revised and
+further accommodated in the nineteenth century. Other peoples,
+particularly the Dutch, have of course had their part in the derivation
+and development of this modern scheme of institutional principles, but
+it has after all been a minor part; so that the scheme at large would
+not differ very materially, if indeed it should differ sensibly, from
+what it is, even if the contribution of these others had not been had.
+The backward nations, as e.g., Germany, Russia, Spain, etc., have of
+course contributed substantially nothing but retardation and
+maladjustment to this modern scheme of civil life; whatever may be due
+to students resident in those countries, in the way of scholarly
+formulation. This nineteenth century scheme it is proposed to carry over
+into the new era; and the responsible spokesmen of the projected new
+order appear to contemplate no provision touching this scheme of law and
+order, beyond the keeping of it intact in all substantial respects.</p>
+
+<p>When and in so far as the projected peace at large takes effect,
+international interests will necessarily fall somewhat into the
+background, as being no longer a matter of<!-- Page 335 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 335]</span> precarious equilibration,
+with heavy penalties in the balance; and diplomacy will consequently
+become even more of a make-believe than today&mdash;something after the
+fashion of a game of bluff played with irredeemable "chips." Commercial,
+that is to say business, enterprise will consequently come in for a more
+undivided attention and be carried on under conditions of greater
+security and of more comprehensive trade relations. The population of
+the pacified world may be expected to go on increasing somewhat as in
+the recent past; in which connection it is to be remarked that not more
+than one-half, presumably something less than one-half, of the available
+agricultural resources have been turned to account for the civilised
+world hitherto. The state of the industrial arts, including means of
+transport and communication, may be expected to develop farther in the
+same general direction as before, assuming always that peace conditions
+continue to hold. Popular intelligence, as it is called,&mdash;more properly
+popular education,&mdash;may be expected to suffer a further advance;
+necessarily so, since it is a necessary condition of any effectual
+advance in the industrial arts,&mdash;every appreciable technological advance
+presumes, as a requisite to its working-out in industry, an augmented
+state of information and of logical facility in the workmen under whose
+hands it is to take effect.</p>
+
+<p>Of the prescriptive rights carried over into the new era, under the
+received law and order, the rights of ownership alone may be expected to
+have any material significance for the routine of workday life; the
+other personal rights that once seemed urgent will for everyday purposes
+have passed into a state of half-forgotten matter-of-course. As now, but
+in an accentuated degree, the rights of ownership will, in effect,
+coincide and coalesce with the<!-- Page 336 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 336]</span> rights of investment and business
+management. The market&mdash;that is to say the rule of the price-system in
+all matters of production and livelihood&mdash;may be expected to gain in
+volume and inclusiveness; so that virtually all matters of industry and
+livelihood will turn on questions of market price, even beyond the
+degree in which that proposition holds today. The progressive extension
+and consolidation of investments, corporate solidarity, and business
+management may be expected to go forward on the accustomed lines, as
+illustrated by the course of things during the past few decades. Market
+conditions should accordingly, in a progressively increased degree, fall
+under the legitimate discretionary control of businessmen, or syndicates
+of businessmen, who have the disposal of large blocks of invested
+wealth,&mdash;"big business," as it is called, should reasonably be expected
+to grow bigger and to exercise an increasingly more unhampered control
+of market conditions, including the money market and the labor market.</p>
+
+<p>With such improvements in the industrial arts as may fairly be expected
+to come forward, and with the possible enhancement of industrial
+efficiency which should follow from a larger scale of organisation, a
+wider reach of transport and communication, and an increased
+population,&mdash;with these increasing advantages on the side of productive
+industry, the per-capita product as well as the total product should be
+increased in a notable degree, and the conditions of life should
+possibly become notably easier and more attractive, or at least more
+conducive to efficiency and personal comfort, for all concerned. Such
+would be the first and unguarded inference to be drawn from the premises
+of the case as they offer themselves in the large; and something of that
+kind is apparently what<!-- Page 337 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 337]</span> floats before the prophetic vision of the
+advocates of a league of nations for the maintenance of peace at large.
+These premises, and the inferences so drawn from them, may be further
+fortified and amplified in the same sense on considering that certain
+very material economies also become practicable, and should take effect
+"in the absence of disturbing causes," on the establishment of such a
+peace at large. It will of course occur to all thoughtful persons that
+armaments must be reduced, perhaps to a minimum, and that the cost of
+these things, in point of expenditures as well as of man-power spent in
+the service, would consequently fall off in a corresponding measure. So
+also, as slight further reflection will show, would the cost of the
+civil service presumably fall off very appreciably; more particularly
+the cost of this service per unit of service rendered. Some such climax
+of felicities might be looked for by hopeful persons, in the absence of
+disturbing causes.</p>
+
+<p>Under the new dispensation the standard of living, that is to say the
+standard of expenditure, would reasonably be expected to advance in a
+very appreciable degree, at least among the wealthy and well-to-do; and
+by pressure of imitative necessity a like effect would doubtless also be
+had among the undistinguished mass. It is not a question of the standard
+of living considered as a matter of the subsistence minimum, or even a
+standard of habitually prevalent creature comfort, particularly not
+among the wealthy and well-to-do. These latter classes have long since
+left all question of material comfort behind in their accepted standards
+of living and in the continued advance of these standards. For these
+classes who are often spoken of euphemistically as being "in easy
+circumstances," it is altogether a question of a standard of re<!-- Page 338 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 338]</span>putable
+expenditure, to be observed on pain of lost self-respect and of lost
+reputation at large. As has been remarked in an earlier passage, wants
+of this kind are indefinitely extensible. So that some doubt may well be
+entertained as to whether the higher productive efficiency spoken of
+will necessarily make the way of life easier, in view of this need of a
+higher standard of expenditure, even when due account is taken of the
+many economies which the new dispensation is expected to make
+practicable.</p>
+
+<p>One of the effects to be looked for would apparently be an increased
+pressure on the part of aspiring men to get into some line of business
+enterprise; since it is only in business, as contrasted with the
+industrial occupations, that anyone can hope to find the relatively
+large income required for such an expensive manner of life as will bring
+any degree of content to aspirants for pecuniary good repute. So it
+should follow that the number of businessmen and business concerns would
+increase up to the limit of what the traffic could support, and that the
+competition between these rival, and in a sense over-numerous, concerns
+would push the costs of competition to the like limit. In this respect
+the situation would be of much the same character as what it now is,
+with the difference that the limit of competitive expenditures would be
+rather higher than at present, to answer to the greater available margin
+of product that could be devoted to this use; and that the competing
+concerns would be somewhat more numerous, or at least that the aggregate
+expenditure on competitive enterprise would be somewhat larger; as,
+e.g., costs of advertising, salesmanship, strategic litigation,
+procuration of legislative and municipal grants and connivance, and the
+like.<!-- Page 339 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 339]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is always conceivable, though it may scarcely seem probable, that
+these incidents of increased pressure of competition in business traffic
+might eventually take up all the slack, and leave no net margin of
+product over what is available under the less favorable conditions of
+industry that prevail today; more particularly when this increased
+competition for business gains is backed by an increased pressure of
+competitive spending for purposes of a reputable appearance. All this
+applies in retail trade and in such lines of industry and public service
+as partakes of the nature of retail trade, in the respect that
+salesmanship and the costs of salesmanship enter into their case in an
+appreciable measure; this is an extensive field, it is true, and
+incontinently growing more extensive with the later changes in the
+customary methods of marketing products; but it is by no means anything
+like the whole domain of industrial business, and by no means a field in
+which business is carried on without interference of a higher control
+from outside its own immediate limits.</p>
+
+<p>All this generously large and highly expensive and profitable field of
+trade and of trade-like industry, in which the businessmen in charge
+deal somewhat directly with a large body of customers, is always subject
+to limitations imposed by the condition of the market; and the condition
+of the market is in part not under the control of these businessmen, but
+is also in part controlled by large concerns in the background; which in
+their turn are after all also not precisely free agents; in fact not
+much more so than their cousins in the retail trade, being confined in
+all their motions by the constraint of the price-system that dominates
+the whole and gathers them all in its impersonal and inexorable net.<!-- Page 340 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 340]</span></p>
+
+<p>There is a colloquial saying among businessmen, that they are not doing
+business for their health; which being interpreted means that they are
+doing business for a price. It is out of a discrepancy in price, between
+purchase and sale, or between transactions which come to the same result
+as purchase and sale, that the gains of business are drawn; and it is in
+terms of price that these gains are rated, amassed and funded. It is
+necessary, for a business concern to achieve a favorable balance in
+terms of price; and the larger the balance in terms of price the more
+successful the enterprise. Such a balance can not be achieved except by
+due regard to the conditions of the market, to the effect that dealings
+must not go on beyond what will yield a favorable balance in terms of
+price between income and outgo. As has already been remarked above, the
+prescriptive and indispensable recourse in all this conduct of business
+is sabotage, limitation of supply to bring a remunerative price result.</p>
+
+<p>The new dispensation offers two new factors bearing on this businesslike
+need of a sagacious sabotage, or rather it brings a change of
+coefficients in two factors already familiar in business management: a
+greater need, for gainful business, of resorting to such limitation of
+traffic; and a greater facility of ways and means for enforcing the
+needed restriction. So, it is confidently to be expected that in the
+prospective piping time of peace the advance in the industrial arts will
+continue at an accelerated rate; which may confidently be expected to
+affect the practicable increased production of merchantable goods; from
+which it follows that it will act to depress the prices of these goods;
+from which it follows that if a profitable business is to be done in the
+conduct<!-- Page 341 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 341]</span> of productive industry a greater degree of continence than
+before will have to be exercised in order not to let prices fall to an
+unprofitable figure; that is to say, the permissible output must be held
+short of the productive capacity of such industry by a wider margin than
+before. On the other hand, it is well known out of the experience of the
+past few decades that a larger coalition of invested capital,
+controlling a larger proportion of the output, can more effectually
+limit the supply to a salutary maximum, such as will afford reasonable
+profits. And with the new dispensation affording a freer scope for
+business enterprise on conditions of greater security, larger coalitions
+than before are due to come into bearing. So that the means will be at
+hand competently to meet this more urgent need of a stricter limitation
+of the output, in spite of any increased productive capacity conferred
+on the industrial community by any conceivable advance in the industrial
+arts. The outcome to be looked for should apparently be such an
+effectual recourse to capitalistic sabotage as will neutralise any added
+advantage that might otherwise accrue to the community from its
+continued improvements in technology.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of this singularly untoward conjuncture of circumstances to be
+looked for, there need be no serious apprehension that capitalistic
+sabotage, with a view to maintaining prices and the rate of profits,
+will go all the way, to the result indicated, at least not on the
+grounds so indicated alone. There is in the modern development of
+technology, and confidently to be counted on, a continued flow of new
+contrivances and expedients designed to supersede the old; and these are
+in fact successful, in greater or less measure, in finding their way
+into profitable use, on such terms as to displace older appliances,<!-- Page 342 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 342]</span>
+underbid them in the market, and render them obsolete or subject to
+recapitalisation on a lowered earning-capacity. So far as this
+unremitting flow of innovations has its effect, that is to say so far as
+it can not be hindered from having an effect, it acts to lower the
+effectual cost of products to the consumer. This effect is but a partial
+and somewhat uncertain one, but it is always to be counted in as a
+persistent factor, of uncertain magnitude, that will affect the results
+in the long run.</p>
+
+<p>As has just been spoken of above, large coalitions of invested wealth
+are more competent to maintain, or if need be to advance, prices than
+smaller coalitions acting in severalty, or even when acting in
+collusion. This state of the case has been well illustrated by the very
+successful conduct of such large business organisations during the past
+few decades; successful, that is, in earning large returns on the
+investments engaged. Under the new dispensation, as has already been
+remarked, coalitions should reasonably be expected to grow to a larger
+size and achieve a greater efficiency for the same purpose.</p>
+
+<p>The large gains of the large corporate coalitions are commonly ascribed
+by their promoters, and by sympathetic theoreticians of the ancient
+line, to economies of production made practicable by a larger scale of
+production; an explanation which is disingenuous only so far as it needs
+be. What is more visibly true on looking into the workings of these
+coalitions in detail is that they are enabled to maintain prices at a
+profitable, indeed at a strikingly profitable, level by such a control
+of the output as would be called sabotage if it were put in practice by
+interested workmen with a view to maintain wages. The effects of this
+sagacious sabotage become visible in the large earnings of these
+investments and the large gains<!-- Page 343 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 343]</span> which, now and again, accrue to their
+managers. Large fortunes commonly are of this derivation.</p>
+
+<p>In cases where no recapitalisation has been effected for a considerable
+series of years the yearly earnings of such businesslike coalitions have
+been known to approach fifty percent on the capitalised value. Commonly,
+however, when earnings rise to a striking figure, the business will be
+recapitalised on the basis of its earning-capacity, by issue of a stock
+dividend, by reincorporation in a new combination with an increased
+capitalisation, and the like. Such augmentation of capital not unusually
+has been spoken of by theoretical writers and publicists as an increase
+of the community's wealth, due to savings; an analysis of any given case
+is likely to show that its increased capital value represents an
+increasingly profitable procedure for securing a high price above cost,
+by stopping the available output short of the productive capacity of the
+industries involved. Loosely speaking, and within the limits of what the
+traffic will bear, the gains in such a case are proportioned to the
+deficiency by which the production or supply under control falls short
+of productive capacity. So that the capitalisation in the case comes to
+bear a rough proportion to the material loss which this organisation of
+sabotage is enabled to inflict on the community at large; and instead of
+its being a capitalisation of serviceable means of production it may,
+now and again, come to little else than a capitalisation of chartered
+sabotage.</p>
+
+<p>Under the new dispensation of peace and security at large this manner of
+capitalisation and business enterprise might reasonably be expected to
+gain something in scope and security of operation. Indeed, there are few
+things within the range of human interest on which an opinion<!-- Page 344 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> may more
+confidently be formed beforehand. If the rights of property, in their
+extent and amplitude, are maintained intact as they are before the law
+today, the hold which business enterprise on the large scale now has on
+the affairs and fortunes of the community at large is bound to grow
+firmer and to be used more unreservedly for private advantage under the
+new conditions contemplated.</p>
+
+<p>The logical result should be an accelerated rate of accumulation of the
+country's wealth in the hands of a relatively very small class of
+wealthy owners, with a relatively inconsiderable semi-dependent middle
+class of the well-to-do, and with the mass of the population even more
+nearly destitute than they are today. At the same time it is scarcely to
+be avoided that this wholly dependent and impecunious mass of the
+population must be given an appreciably better education than they have
+today. The argument will return to the difficulties that are liable to
+arise out of this conjuncture of facts, in the way of discontent and
+possible disturbance.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Meantime, looking to the promise of the pacific future in the light of
+the pacific past, certain further consequences, particularly
+consequences of the economic order, that may reasonably be expected to
+follow will also merit attention. The experience of the Victorian peace
+is almost as pointed in its suggestion on this head as if it had been an
+experiment made <i>ad hoc</i>; but with the reservation that the scale of
+economic life, after all, was small in the Victorian era, and its pace
+was slack, compared with what the twentieth century should have to offer
+under suitable conditions of peace and pecuniary security. In the light
+of this most instructive modern instance,<!-- Page 345 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 345]</span> there should appear to be in
+prospect a growth of well-bred families resting on invested wealth and
+so living on unearned incomes; larger incomes and consequently a more
+imposingly well-bred body of gentlefolk, sustained and vouched for by a
+more munificent expenditure on superfluities, than the modern world has
+witnessed hitherto. Doubtless the resulting growth of gentlemen and
+gentlewomen would be as perfect after their kind as these unexampled
+opportunities of gentle breeding might be expected to engender; so that
+even their British precursors on the trail of respectability would fall
+somewhat into insignificance by comparison, whether in respect of
+gentlemanly qualities or in point of cost per unit.</p>
+
+<p>The moral, and even more particularly the aesthetic, value of such a
+line of gentlefolk, and of the culture which they may be expected to
+place on view,&mdash;this cultural side of the case, of course, is what one
+would prefer to dwell on, and on the spiritual gains that might be
+expected to accrue to humanity at large from the steady contemplation of
+this meritorious respectability so displayed at such a cost.</p>
+
+<p>But the prosaic necessity of the argument turns back to the economic and
+civil bearing of this prospective development, this virtual bifurcation
+of the pacified nation into a small number of gentlemen who own the
+community's wealth and consume its net product in the pursuit of
+gentility, on the one hand, and an unblest mass of the populace who do
+the community's work on a meager livelihood tapering down toward the
+subsistence minimum, on the other hand. Evidently, this prospective
+posture of affairs may seem "fraught with danger to the common weal," as
+a public spirited citizen might phrase it. Or, as it would be expressed
+in less eloquent words, it<!-- Page 346 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 346]</span> appears to comprise elements that should
+make for a change. At the same time it should be recalled, and the
+statement will command assent on slight reflection, that there is no
+avoiding substantially such a posture of affairs under the promised
+r&eacute;gime of peace and security, provided only that the price-system stands
+over intact, and the current rights of property continue to be held
+inviolate. If the known principles of competitive gain and competitive
+spending should need enforcement to that effect by an illustrative
+instance, the familiar history of the Victorian peace is sufficient to
+quiet all doubts.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, the resulting articulation of classes in the community will
+not be expected to fall into such simple lines of sheer contrast as this
+scheme would indicate. The class of gentlefolk, the legally constituted
+wasters, as they would be rated from the economic point of view, can not
+be expected personally to take care of so large a consumption of
+superfluities as this posture of affairs requires at their hands. They
+would, as the Victorian peace teaches, necessarily have the assistance
+of a trained corps of experts in unproductive consumption, the first and
+most immediate of whom would be those whom the genial phrasing of Adam
+Smith designates "menial servants." Beyond these would come the
+purveyors of superfluities, properly speaking, and the large, indeed
+redundant, class of tradespeople of high and low degree,&mdash;dependent in
+fact but with an illusion of semi-dependence; and farther out again the
+legal and other professional classes of the order of stewards, whose
+duty it will be to administer the sources of income and receive,
+apportion and disburse the revenues so devoted to a traceless
+extinguishment.<!-- Page 347 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 347]</span></p>
+
+<p>There would, in other words, be something of a "substantial middle
+class," dependent on the wealthy and on their expenditure of wealth, but
+presumably imbued with the Victorian middle-class illusion that they are
+of some account in their own right. Under the due legal forms and
+sanctions this, somewhat voluminous, middle-class population would
+engage in the traffic which is their perquisite, and would continue to
+believe, in some passable fashion, that they touch the substance of
+things at something nearer than the second remove. They would in great
+part appear to be people of "independent means," and more particularly
+would they continue in the hope of so appearing and of some time making
+good the appearance. Hence their fancied, and therefore their
+sentimental, interest would fall out on the side of the established law
+and order; and they would accordingly be an element of stability in the
+commonwealth, and would throw in their weight, and their voice, to
+safeguard that private property and that fabric of prices and credit
+through which the "income stream" flows to the owners of preponderant
+invested wealth.</p>
+
+<p>Judged on the state of the situation as it runs in our time, and
+allowing for the heightened efficiency of large-scale investment and
+consolidated management under the prospective conditions of added
+pecuniary security, it is to be expected that the middle-class
+population with "independent means" should come in for a somewhat meager
+livelihood, provided that they work faithfully at their business of
+managing pecuniary traffic to the advantage of their pecuniary
+betters,&mdash;meager, that is to say, when allowance is made for the
+conventionally large expenditure on reputable appearances which is
+necessarily to be included in their standard of living. It lies in the
+nature<!-- Page 348 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span> of this system of large-scale investment and enterprise that the
+(pecuniarily) minor agencies engaged on a footing of ostensible
+independence will come in for only such a share in the aggregate gains
+of the community as it is expedient for the greater business interests
+to allow them as an incentive to go on with their work as purveyors of
+traffic to these greater business interests.</p>
+
+<p>The current, and still more this prospective, case of the
+quasi-self-directing middle class may fairly be illustrated by the case
+of the American farmers, of the past and present. The American farmer
+rejoices to be called "The Independent Farmer." He once was independent,
+in a meager and toil-worn fashion, in the days before the price-system
+had brought him and all his works into the compass of the market; but
+that was some time ago. He now works for the market, ordinarily at
+something like what is called a "living wage," provided he has
+"independent means" enough to enable him by steady application to earn a
+living wage; and of course, the market being controlled by the paramount
+investment interests in the background, his work, in effect, inures to
+their benefit; except so much as it may seem necessary to allow him as
+incentive to go on. Also of course, these paramount investment interests
+are in turn controlled in all their manoeuvres by the impersonal
+exigencies of the price-system, which permits no vagaries in violation
+of the rule that all traffic must show a balance of profit in terms of
+price.</p>
+
+<p>The Independent Farmer still continues to believe that in some occult
+sense he still is independent in what he will do and what not; or
+perhaps rather that he can by shrewd management retain or regain a
+tolerable measure of such independence, after the fashion of what is
+held to have<!-- Page 349 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 349]</span> been the posture of affairs in the days before the coming
+of corporation finance; or at least he believes that he ought to have,
+or to regain or reclaim, some appreciable measure of such independence;
+which ought then, by help of the "independent means" which he still
+treasures, to procure him an honest and assured livelihood in return for
+an honest year's work. Latterly he, that is the common run of the
+farmers, has been taking note of the fact that he is, as he apprehends
+it, at a disadvantage in the market; and he is now taking recourse to
+concerted action for the purpose of what might be called "rigging the
+market" to his own advantage. In this he overlooks the impregnable
+position which the party of the second part, the great investment
+interests, occupy; in fact, he is counting without his host. Hitherto he
+has not been convinced of his own helplessness. And with a fine fancy he
+still imagines that his own interest is on the side of the propertied
+and privileged classes; so that the farmer constituency is the chief
+pillar of conservative law and order, particularly in all that touches
+the inviolable rights of property and at every juncture where a division
+comes on between those who live by investment and those who live by
+work. In pecuniary effect, the ordinary American farmer, who legally
+owns a moderate farm of the common sort, belongs among those who work
+for a livelihood; such a livelihood as the investment interests find it
+worth while to allow him under the rule of what the traffic will bear;
+but in point of sentiment and class consciousness he clings to a belated
+stand on the side of those who draw a profit from his work.</p>
+
+<p>So it is also with the menial servants and the middle-class people of
+"independent means," who are, however, in a position to see more clearly
+their dependence on the<!-- Page 350 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> owners of predominant wealth. And such, with a
+further accentuation of the anomaly, may reasonably be expected to be
+the further run of these relations under the promised r&eacute;gime of peace
+and security. The class of well-kept gentlefolk will scarcely be called
+on to stand alone, in case of a division between those who live by
+investment and those who live by work; inasmuch as, for the calculable
+future, it should seem a reasonable expectation that this very
+considerable fringe of dependents and pseudo-independents will abide by
+their time-tried principles of right and honest living, through good
+days and evil, and cast in their lot unreservedly with that reputable
+body to whom the control of trade and industry by investment assigns the
+usufruct of the community's productive powers.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Something has already been said of the prospective breeding of pedigreed
+gentlefolk under the projected r&eacute;gime of peace. Pedigree, for the
+purpose in hand, is a pecuniary attribute and is, of course, a product
+of funded wealth, more or less ancient. Virtually ancient pedigree can
+be procured by well-advised expenditure on the conspicuous amenities;
+that is to say pedigree effectually competent as a background of current
+gentility. Gentlefolk of such syncopated pedigree may have to walk
+circumspectly, of course; but their being in this manner put on their
+good behavior should tend to heighten their effectual serviceability as
+gentlefolk, by inducing a single-mindedness of gentility beyond what can
+fairly be expected of those who are already secure in their tenure.</p>
+
+<p>Except conventionally, there is no hereditary difference between the
+standard gentlefolk and, say, their "menial servants," or the general
+population of the farms<!-- Page 351 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 351]</span> and the industrial towns. This is a
+well-established commonplace among ethnological students; which has, of
+course, nothing to say with respect to the conventionally distinct lines
+of descent of the "Best Families." These Best Families are nowise
+distinguishable from the common run in point of hereditary traits; the
+difference that makes the gentleman and the gentlewoman being wholly a
+matter of habituation during the individual's life-time. It is something
+of a distasteful necessity to call attention to this total absence of
+native difference between the well-born and the common, but it is a
+necessity of the argument in hand, and the recalling of it may,
+therefore, be overlooked for once in a way. There is no harm and no
+annoyance intended. The point of it all is that, on the premises which
+this state of the case affords, the body of gentlefolk created by such
+an accumulation of invested wealth will have no less of an effectual
+cultural value than they would have had if their virtually ancient
+pedigree had been actual.</p>
+
+<p>At this point, again, the experience of the Victorian peace and the
+functioning of its gentlefolk come in to indicate what may fairly be
+hoped for in this way under this prospective r&eacute;gime of peace at large.
+But with the difference that the scale of things is to be larger, the
+pace swifter, and the volume and dispersion of this prospective leisure
+class somewhat wider. The work of this leisure class&mdash;and there is
+neither paradox nor inconsistency in the phrase&mdash;should be patterned on
+the lines worked out by their prototypes of the Victorian time, but with
+some appreciable accentuation in the direction of what chiefly
+characterised the leisure class of that era of tranquility. The
+characteristic feature to which attention naturally turns at this
+suggestion is the tranquility<!-- Page 352 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 352]</span> that has marked that body of gentlefolk
+and their code of clean and honest living. Another word than
+"tranquility" might be hit upon to designate this characteristic animus,
+but any other word that should at all adequately serve the turn would
+carry a less felicitous suggestion of those upper-class virtues that
+have constituted the substantial worth of the Victorian gentleman. The
+conscious worth of these gentlefolk has been a beautifully complete
+achievement. It has been an achievement of "faith without works," of
+course; but, needless to say, that is as it should be, also of course.
+The place of gentlefolk in the economy of Nature is tracelessly to
+consume the community's net product, and in doing so to set a standard
+of decent expenditure for the others emulatively to work up to as near
+as may be. It is scarcely conceivable that this could have been done in
+a more unobtrusively efficient manner, or with a more austerely virtuous
+conviction of well-doing, than by the gentlefolk bred of the Victorian
+peace. So also, in turn, it is not to be believed that the prospective
+breed of gentlefolk derivable from the net product of the pacific
+nations under the promised r&eacute;gime of peace at large will prove in any
+degree less effective for the like ends. More will be required of them
+in the way of a traceless consumption of superfluities and an unexampled
+expensive standard of living. But this situation that so faces them may
+be construed as a larger opportunity, quite as well as a more difficult
+task.</p>
+
+<p>A theoretical exposition of the place and cultural value of a leisure
+class in modern life would scarcely be in place here; and it has also
+been set out in some detail elsewhere.<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> For the purpose in hand it
+may be sufficient to<!-- Page 353 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 353]</span> recall that the canons of taste and the standards
+of valuation worked out and inculcated by leisure-class life have in all
+ages run, with unbroken consistency, to pecuniary waste and personal
+futility. In its economic bearing, and particularly in its immediate
+bearing on the material well-being of the community at large, the
+leadership of the leisure class can scarcely be called by a less
+derogatory epithet than "untoward." But that is not the whole of the
+case, and the other side should be heard. The leisure-class life of
+tranquility, running detached as it does above the turmoil out of which
+the material of their sustenance is derived, enables a growth of all
+those virtues that mark, or make, the gentleman; and that affect the
+life of the underlying community throughout, pervasively, by imitation;
+leading to a standardisation of the everyday proprieties on a
+presumably, higher level of urbanity and integrity than might be
+expected to result in the absence of this prescriptive model.</p>
+
+<p><i>Integer vitae scelerisque purus</i>, the gentleman of assured station
+turns a placid countenance to all those petty vexations of breadwinning
+that touch him not. Serenely and with an impassive fortitude he faces
+those common vicissitudes of life that are impotent to make or mar his
+material fortunes and that can neither impair his creature comforts nor
+put a slur on his good repute. So that without afterthought he deals
+fairly in all everyday conjunctures of give and take; for they are at
+the most inconsequential episodes to him, although the like might spell
+irremediable disaster to his impecunious counterfoil among the common
+men who have the community's work to do. In short, he is a gentleman, in
+the best acceptation of the word,&mdash;unavoidably, by force of
+circumstance. As such his example is of invaluable consequence to the<!-- Page 354 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span>
+underlying community of common folk, in that it keeps before their eyes
+an object lesson in habitual fortitude and visible integrity such as
+could scarcely have been created except under such shelter from those
+disturbances that would go to mar habitual fortitude and integrity.
+There can be little doubt but the high example of the Victorian
+gentlefolk has had much to do with stabilising the animus of the British
+common man on lines of integrity and fair play. What else and more in
+the way of habitual preconceptions he may, by competitive imitation, owe
+to the same high source is not immediately in question here.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Recalling once more that the canon of life whereby folk are gentlefolk
+sums itself up in the requirements of pecuniary waste and personal
+futility, and that these requirements are indefinitely extensible, at
+the same time that the management of the community's industry by
+investment for a profit enables the owners of invested wealth to divert
+to their own use the community's net product, wherewith to meet these
+requirements, it follows that the community at large which provides this
+output of product will be allowed so much as is required by their
+necessary standard of living,&mdash;with an unstable margin of error in the
+adjustment. This margin of error should tend continually to grow
+narrower as the businesslike management of industry grows more efficient
+with experience; but it will also continually be disturbed in the
+contrary sense by innovations of a technological nature that require
+continual readjustment. This margin is probably not to be got rid of,
+though it may be expected to become less considerable under more settled
+conditions.<!-- Page 355 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It should also not be overlooked that the standard of living here spoken
+of as necessarily to be allowed the working population by no means
+coincides with the "physical subsistence minimum," from which in fact it
+always departs by something appreciable. The necessary standard of
+living of the working community is in fact made up of two
+distinguishable factors: the subsistence minimum, and the requirements
+of decorously wasteful consumption&mdash;the "decencies of life." These
+decencies are no less requisite than the physical necessaries, in point
+of workday urgency, and their amount is a matter of use and wont. This
+composite standard of living is a practical minimum, below which
+consumption will not fall, except by a fluctuating margin of error; the
+effect being the same, in point of necessary consumption, as if it were
+all of the nature of a physical subsistence minimum.</p>
+
+<p>Loosely speaking, the arrangement should leave nothing appreciable over,
+after the requirements of genteel waste and of the workday standard of
+consumption have been met. From which in turn it should follow that the
+rest of what is comprised under the general caption of "culture" will
+find a place only in the interstices of leisure-class expenditure and
+only at the hands of aberrant members of the class of the gently-bred.
+The working population should have no effectual margin of time, energy
+or means for other pursuits than the day's work in the service of the
+price-system; so that aberrant individuals in this class, who might by
+native propensity incline, e.g., to pursue the sciences or the fine
+arts, should have (virtually) no chance to make good. It would be a
+virtual suppression of such native gifts among the common folk, not a
+definitive and all-inclusive suppression. The state of<!-- Page 356 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 356]</span> the case under
+the Victorian peace may, again, be taken in illustration of the point;
+although under the presumably more effectual control to be looked for in
+the pacific future the margin might reasonably be expected to run
+somewhat narrower, so that this virtual suppression of cultural talent
+among the common men should come nearer a complete suppression.</p>
+
+<p>The working of that free initiative that makes the advance of
+civilisation, and also the greater part of its conservation, would in
+effect be allowed only in the erratic members of the kept classes; where
+at the same time it would have to work against the side-draught of
+conventional usage, which discountenances any pursuit that is not
+visibly futile according to some accepted manner of futility. Now under
+the prospective perfect working of the price-system, bearers of the
+banners of civilisation could effectually be drawn only from the kept
+classes, the gentlefolk who alone would have the disposal of such free
+income as is required for work that has no pecuniary value. And
+numerically the gentlefolk are an inconsiderable fraction of the
+population. The supply of competently gifted bearers of the community's
+culture would accordingly be limited to such as could be drawn by
+self-selection from among this inconsiderable proportion of the
+community at large.</p>
+
+<p>It may be recalled that in point of heredity, and therefore in point of
+native fitness for the maintenance and advance of civilisation, there is
+no difference between the gentlefolk and the populace at large; or at
+least there is no difference of such a nature as to count in abatement
+of the proposition set down above. Some slight, but after all
+inconsequential, difference there may be, but such difference as there
+is, if any, rather counts against the<!-- Page 357 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 357]</span> gentlefolk as keepers of the
+cultural advance. The gentlefolk are derived from business; the
+gentleman represents a filial generation of the businessman; and if the
+class typically is gifted with any peculiar hereditary traits,
+therefore, they should presumably be such as typically mark the
+successful businessman&mdash;astute, prehensile, unscrupulous. For a
+generation or two, perhaps to the scriptural third and fourth
+generation, it is possible that a diluted rapacity and cunning may
+continue to mark the businessman's well-born descendants; but these are
+not serviceable traits for the conservation and advancement of the
+community's cultural heritage. So that no consideration of special
+hereditary fitness in the well-born need be entertained in this
+connection.</p>
+
+<p>As to the limitation imposed by the price-system on the supply of
+candidates suited by native gift for the human work of civilisation; it
+would no doubt, be putting the figure extravagantly high to say that the
+gentlefolk, properly speaking, comprise as much as ten percent of the
+total population; perhaps something less than one-half of that
+percentage would still seem a gross overstatement. But, to cover loose
+ends and vagrant cases, the gentlefolk may for the purpose be credited
+with so high a percentage of the total population. If ten percent be
+allowed, as an outside figure, it follows that the community's
+scientists, artists, scholars, and the like individuals given over to
+the workday pursuits of the human spirit, are by conventional
+restriction to be drawn from one-tenth of the current supply of persons
+suited by native gift for these pursuits. Or as it may also be
+expressed, in so far as the projected scheme takes effect it should
+result in the suppression of nine (or more) out of every ten persons
+available for the constructive work of civilisa<!-- Page 358 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 358]</span>tion. The cultural
+consequences to be looked for, therefore, should be quite markedly of
+the conservative order.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, in actual effect, the retardation or repression of
+civilisation by this means, as calculated on these premises, should
+reasonably be expected to count up to something appreciably more than
+nine-tenths of the gains that might presumably be achieved in the
+conceivable absence of the price-system and the r&eacute;gime of investment.
+All work of this kind has much of the character of teamwork; so that the
+efforts of isolated individuals count for little, and a few working in
+more or less of concert and understanding will count for proportionally
+much less than many working in concert. The endeavours of the
+individuals engaged count cumulatively, to such effect that doubling
+their forces will more than double the aggregate efficiency; and
+conversely, reducing the number will reduce the effectiveness of their
+work by something more than the simple numerical proportion. Indeed, an
+undue reduction of numbers in such a case may lead to the total defeat
+of the few that are left, and the best endeavours of a dwindling remnant
+may be wholly nugatory. There is needed a sense of community and
+solidarity, without which the assurance necessary to the work is bound
+to falter and dwindle out; and there is also needed a degree of popular
+countenance, not to be had by isolated individuals engaged in an
+unconventional pursuit of things that are neither to be classed as
+spendthrift decorum nor as merchantable goods. In this connection an
+isolated one does not count for one, and more than the critical minimum
+will count for several per capita. It is a case where the "minimal dose"
+is wholly inoperative.</p>
+
+<p>There is not a little reason to believe that consequent upon the
+installation of the projected r&eacute;gime of peace<!-- Page 359 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 359]</span> at large and secure
+investment the critical point in the repression of talent will very
+shortly be reached and passed, so that the principle of the "minimal
+dose" will come to apply. The point may readily be illustrated by the
+case of many British and American towns and neighbourhoods during the
+past few decades; where the dominant price-system and its commercial
+standards of truth and beauty have over-ruled all inclination to
+cultural sanity and put it definitively in abeyance. The cultural, or
+perhaps the conventional, residue left over in these cases where
+civilisation has gone stale through inefficiency of the minimal dose is
+not properly to be found fault with; it is of a blameless character,
+conventionally; nor is there any intention here to cast aspersion on the
+desolate. The like effects of the like causes are to be seen in the
+American colleges and universities, where business principles have
+supplanted the pursuit of learning, and where the commercialisation of
+aims, ideals, tastes, occupations and personnel is following much the
+same lines that have led so many of the country towns effectually
+outside the cultural pale. The American university or college is coming
+to be an outlier of the price-system, in point of aims, standards and
+personnel; hitherto the tradition of learning as a trait of
+civilisation, as distinct from business, has not been fully displaced,
+although it is now coming to face the passage of the minimal dose. The
+like, in a degree, is apparently true latterly for many English, and
+still more evidently for many German schools.</p>
+
+<p>In these various instances of what may be called dry-rot or local blight
+on the civilised world's culture the decline appears to be due not to a
+positive infection of a malignant sort, so much as to a failure of the
+active cultural ferment, which has fallen below the critical point<!-- Page 360 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> of
+efficacy; perhaps through an unintended refusal of a livelihood to
+persons given over to cultivating the elements of civilisation; perhaps
+through the conventional disallowance of the pursuit of any other ends
+than competitive gain and competitive spending. Evidently it is
+something much more comprehensive in this nature that is reasonably to
+be looked for under the prospective r&eacute;gime of peace, in case the
+price-system gains that farther impetus and warrant which it should come
+in for if the rights of ownership and investment stand over intact, and
+so come to enjoy the benefit of a further improved state of the
+industrial arts and a further enlarged scale of operation and enhanced
+rate of turnover.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>To turn back to the point from which this excursion branched off. It has
+been presumed all the while that the technological equipment, or the
+state of the industrial arts, must continue to advance under the
+conditions offered by this r&eacute;gime of peace at large. But the last few
+paragraphs will doubtless suggest that such a single-minded addiction to
+competitive gain and competitive spending as the stabilised and
+amplified price-system would enjoin, must lead to an effectual
+retardation, perhaps to a decline, of those material sciences on which
+modern technology draws; and that the state of the industrial arts
+should therefore cease to advance, if only the scheme of investment and
+businesslike sabotage can be made sufficiently secure. That such may be
+the outcome is a contingency which the argument will have to meet and to
+allow for; but it is after all a contingency that need not be expected
+to derange the sequence of events, except in the way of retardation.
+Even without further advance in technological expedients or in the<!-- Page 361 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 361]</span>
+relevant material sciences, there will still necessarily ensue an
+effectual advance in the industrial arts, in the sense that further
+organisation and enlargement of the material equipment and industrial
+processes on lines already securely known and not to be forgotten must
+bring an effectually enhanced efficiency of the industrial process as a
+whole.</p>
+
+<p>In illustration, it is scarcely to be assumed even as a tentative
+hypothesis that the system of transport and communication will not
+undergo extension and improvement on the lines already familiar, even in
+the absence of new technological contrivances. At the same time a
+continued increase of population is to be counted on; which has, for the
+purpose in hand, much the same effect as an advance in the industrial
+arts. Human contact and mutual understanding will necessarily grow wider
+and closer, and will have its effect on the habits of thought prevalent
+in the communities that are to live under the promised r&eacute;gime of peace.
+The system of transport and communication having to handle a more
+voluminous and exacting traffic, in the service of a larger and more
+compact population, will have to be organised and administered on
+mechanically drawn schedules of time, place, volume, velocity, and
+price, of a still more exacting accuracy than hitherto. The like will
+necessarily apply throughout the industrial occupations that employ
+extensive plant or processes, or that articulate with industrial
+processes of that nature; which will necessarily comprise a larger
+proportion of the industrial process at large than hitherto.</p>
+
+<p>As has already been remarked more than once in the course of the
+argument, a population that lives and does its work, and such play as is
+allowed it, in and by an exactingly articulate mechanical system of this
+kind will<!-- Page 362 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 362]</span> necessarily be an "intelligent" people, in the colloquial
+sense of the word; that is to say it will necessarily be a people that
+uses printed matter freely and that has some familiarity with the
+elements of those material sciences that underlie this mechanically
+organised system of appliances and processes. Such a population lives by
+and within the framework of the mechanistic logic, and is in a fair way
+to lose faith in any proposition that can not be stated convincingly in
+terms of this mechanistic logic. Superstitions are liable to lapse by
+neglect or disuse in such a community; that is to say propositions of a
+non-mechanistic complexion are liable to insensible disestablishment in
+such a case; "superstition" in these premises coming to signify whatever
+is not of this mechanistic, or "materialistic" character. An exception
+to this broad characterisation of non-mechanistic propositions as
+"superstition" would be matters that are of the nature of an immediate
+deliverance of the senses or of the aesthetic sensibilities.</p>
+
+<p>By a simile it might be said that what so falls under the caption of
+"superstition" in such a case is subject to decay by inanition. It
+should not be difficult to conceive the general course of such a decay
+of superstitions under this unremitting discipline of mechanistic habits
+of life. The recent past offers an illustration, in the unemotional
+progress of decay that has overtaken religious beliefs in the more
+civilised countries, and more particularly among the intellectually
+trained workmen of the mechanical industries. The elimination of such
+non-mechanistic propositions of the faith has been visibly going on, but
+it has not worked out on any uniform plan, nor has it overtaken any
+large or compact body of people consistently or abruptly, being of the
+nature of obsolescence rather<!-- Page 363 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 363]</span> than of set repudiation. But in a slack
+and unreflecting fashion the divestment has gone on until the aggregate
+effect is unmistakable.</p>
+
+<p>A similar divestment of superstitions is reasonably to be looked for
+also in that domain of preconceptions that lies between the supernatural
+and the mechanistic. Chief among these time-warped preconceptions&mdash;or
+superstitions&mdash;that so stand over out of the alien past among these
+democratic peoples is the institution of property. As is true of
+preconceptions touching the supernatural verities, so here too the
+article of use and wont in question will not bear formulation in
+mechanistic terms and is not congruous with that mechanistic logic that
+is incontinently bending the habits of thought of the common man more
+and more consistently to its own bent. There is, of course, the
+difference that while no class&mdash;apart from the servants of the
+church&mdash;have a material interest in the continued integrity of the
+articles of the supernatural faith, there is a strong and stubborn
+material interest bound up with the maintenance of this article of the
+pecuniary faith; and the class in whom this material interest vests are
+also, in effect, invested with the coercive powers of the law.</p>
+
+<p>The law, and the popular preconceptions that give the law its binding
+force, go to uphold the established usage and the established
+prerogatives on this head; and the disestablishment of the rights of
+property and investment therefore is not a simple matter of obsolescence
+through neglect. It may confidently be counted on that all the apparatus
+of the law and all the coercive agencies of law and order, will be
+brought in requisition to uphold the ancient rights of ownership,
+whenever any move is made toward their disallowance or restriction. But
+then,<!-- Page 364 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 364]</span> on the other hand, the movement to disallow or diminish the
+prerogatives of ownership is also not to take the innocuous shape of
+unstudied neglect. So soon, or rather so far, as the common man comes to
+realise that these rights of ownership and investment uniformly work to
+his material detriment, at the same time that he has lost the "will to
+believe" in any argument that does not run in terms of the mechanistic
+logic, it is reasonable to expect that he will take a stand on this
+matter; and it is more than likely that the stand taken will be of an
+uncompromising kind,&mdash;presumably something in the nature of the stand
+once taken by recalcitrant Englishmen in protest against the
+irresponsible rule of the Stuart sovereign. It is also not likely that
+the beneficiaries under these proprietary rights will yield their ground
+at all amicably; all the more since they are patently within their
+authentic rights in insisting on full discretion in the disposal of
+their own possessions; very much as Charles I or James II once were
+within their prescriptive right,&mdash;which had little to say in the
+outcome.</p>
+
+<p>Even apart from "time immemorial" and the patent authenticity of the
+institution, there were and are many cogent arguments to be alleged in
+favor of the position for which the Stuart sovereigns and their
+spokesmen contended. So there are and will be many, perhaps more, cogent
+reasons to be alleged for the maintenance of the established law and
+order in respect of the rights of ownership and investment. Not least
+urgent, nor least real, among these arguments is the puzzling question
+of what to put in the place of these rights and of the methods of
+control based on them, very much as the analogous question puzzled the
+public-spirited men of the Stuart times. All of which goes to argue that
+there may<!-- Page 365 --><span class='pagenum'>[Pg 365]</span> be expected to arise a conjuncture of perplexities and
+complications, as well as a division of interests and claims. To which
+should be added that the division is likely to come to a head so soon as
+the balance of forces between the two parties in interest becomes
+doubtful, so that either party comes to surmise that the success of its
+own aims may depend on its own efforts. And as happens where two
+antagonistic parties are each convinced of the justice of its cause, and
+in the absence of an umpire, the logical recourse is the wager of
+battle.</p>
+
+<p>Granting the premises, there should be no reasonable doubt as to this
+eventual cleavage between those who own and those who do not; and of the
+premises the only item that is not already an accomplished fact is the
+installation of peace at large. The rest of what goes into the argument
+is the well-known modern state of the industrial arts, and the equally
+well-known price-system; which, in combination, give its character to
+the modern state of business enterprise. It is only an unusually broad
+instance of an institutional arrangement which has in the course of time
+and changing conditions come to work at cross purposes with that
+underlying ground of institutional arrangements that takes form in the
+commonplace aphorism, Live and let live. With change setting in the
+direction familiar to all men today, it is only a question of limited
+time when the discrepancy will reach a critical pass, and the
+installation of peace may be counted on to hasten this course of things.</p>
+
+<p>That a decision will be sought by recourse to forcible measures, is also
+scarcely open to question; since the established law and order provides
+for a resort to coercion in the enforcement of these prescriptive
+rights, and since both parties in interest, in this as in other cases,
+are<!-- Page 366 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> persuaded of the justice of their claims. A decision either way is
+an intolerable iniquity in the eyes of the losing side. History teaches
+that in such a quarrel the recourse has always been to force.</p>
+
+<p>History teaches also, but with an inflection of doubt, that the outworn
+institution in such a conjuncture faces disestablishment. At least, so
+men like to believe. What the experience of history does not leave in
+doubt is the grave damage, discomfort and shame incident to the
+displacement of such an institutional discrepancy by such recourse to
+force. What further appears to be clear in the premises, at least to the
+point of a strong presumption, is that in the present case the decision,
+or the choice, lies between two alternatives: either the price-system
+and its attendant business enterprise will yield and pass out; or the
+pacific nations will conserve their pecuniary scheme of law and order at
+the cost of returning to a war footing and letting their owners preserve
+the rights of ownership by force of arms.</p>
+
+<p>The reflection obviously suggests itself that this prospect of
+consequences to follow from the installation of peace at large might
+well be taken into account beforehand by those who are aiming to work
+out an enduring peace. It has appeared in the course of the argument
+that the preservation of the present pecuniary law and order, with all
+its incidents of ownership and investment, is incompatible with an
+unwarlike state of peace and security. This current scheme of
+investment, business, and sabotage, should have an appreciably better
+chance of survival in the long run if the present conditions of warlike
+preparation and national insecurity were maintained, or if the projected
+peace were left in a somewhat problematical state, sufficiently
+precarious to keep national animosi<!-- Page 367 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span>ties alert, and thereby to the
+neglect of domestic interests, particularly of such interests as touch
+the popular well-being. On the other hand, it has also appeared that the
+cause of peace and its perpetuation might be materially advanced if
+precautions were taken beforehand to put out of the way as much as may
+be of those discrepancies of interest and sentiment between nations and
+between classes which make for dissension and eventual hostilities.</p>
+
+<p>So, if the projectors of this peace at large are in any degree inclined
+to seek concessive terms on which the peace might hopefully be made
+enduring, it should evidently be part of their endeavours from the
+outset to put events in train for the present abatement and eventual
+abrogation of the rights of ownership and of the price-system in which
+these rights take effect. A hopeful beginning along this line would
+manifestly be the neutralisation of all pecuniary rights of citizenship,
+as has been indicated in an earlier passage. On the other hand, if peace
+is not desired at the cost of relinquishing the scheme of competitive
+gain and competitive spending, the promoters of peace should logically
+observe due precaution and move only so far in the direction of a
+peaceable settlement as would result in a sufficiently unstable
+equilibrium of mutual jealousies; such as might expeditiously be upset
+whenever discontent with pecuniary affairs should come to threaten this
+established scheme of pecuniary prerogatives.</p>
+
+<h4>Footnotes</h4>
+<div class='footnotes'>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> A modern nation constitutes a State only in respect of or
+with ulterior bearing on the question of International peace or war.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> The partial and dubious exception of the Scandinavian
+countries or of Switzerland need raise no question on this head.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Cf., e.g., Eduard Meyer, <i>England: its political
+organisation and development</i>. ch. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> For a more extended discussion of this matter, cf.
+<i>Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution</i>, ch. i. and
+Supplementary Notes i. and ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Cf. <i>Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution</i>, as
+above.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> All this, which should be plain without demonstration, has
+been repeatedly shown in the expositions of various peace advocates,
+typically by Mr. Angell.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> "To us the state is the most indispensable as well as the
+highest requisite to our earthly existence.... All individualistic
+endeavor ... must be unreservedly subordinated to this lofty claim....
+The state ... eventually is of infinitely more value than the sum of all
+the individuals within its jurisdiction." "This conception of the state,
+which is as much a part of our life as is the blood in our veins, is
+nowhere to be found in the English Constitution, and is quite foreign to
+English thought, and to that of America as well."&mdash;Eduard Meyer,
+<i>England, its Political Organisation and Development and the War against
+Germany</i>, translated by H.S. White. Boston 1916. pp. 30-31.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> <i>Denk 'mall</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> For an extended discussion of this point, see <i>Imperial
+Germany and the Industrial Revolution</i>, especially ch. v. and vi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> Cf. <i>The Theory of the Leisure Class</i>, especially ch.
+v.-ix. and xiv.</p></div></div>
+<h3>BOOKS BY THORSTEIN VEBLEN</h3>
+
+
+<p class='center' style='margin-bottom: 15em;'>
+THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS<br />
+<br />
+THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE<br />
+<br />
+THE INSTINCT OF WORKMANSHIP<br />
+<br />
+IMPERIAL GERMANY<br />
+AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION<br />
+<br />
+THE NATURE OF PEACE<br />
+AND THE TERMS OF ITS PERPETUATION<br />
+<br />
+THE HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA<br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace
+And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation, by Thorstein Veblen
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NATURE OF PEACE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 20694-h.htm or 20694-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/0/6/9/20694/
+
+Produced by Irma Špehar, Graeme Mackreth and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This
+file made using scans of public domain works at the
+University of Georgia.)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/20694-page-images.zip b/20694-page-images.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..27f3bea
--- /dev/null
+++ b/20694-page-images.zip
diff --git a/20694.txt b/20694.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..89bba5f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/20694.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11237 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The
+Terms Of Its Perpetuation, by Thorstein Veblen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation
+
+Author: Thorstein Veblen
+
+Release Date: February 27, 2007 [EBook #20694]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NATURE OF PEACE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Irma Spehar, Graeme Mackreth and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This
+file made using scans of public domain works at the
+University of Georgia.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+AN INQUIRY INTO
+
+THE NATURE OF PEACE
+
+AND
+
+THE TERMS OF ITS PERPETUATION
+
+BY
+
+THORSTEIN VEBLEN
+
+
+New York
+B.W. HUEBSCH
+1919
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1917.
+BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+
+Published April, 1917:
+Reprinted August, 1917.
+
+New edition published by
+B.W. HUEBSCH.
+January, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+It is now some 122 years since Kant wrote the essay, _Zum ewigen
+Frieden_. Many things have happened since then, although the Peace to
+which he looked forward with a doubtful hope has not been among them.
+But many things have happened which the great critical philosopher, and
+no less critical spectator of human events, would have seen with
+interest. To Kant the quest of an enduring peace presented itself as an
+intrinsic human duty, rather than as a promising enterprise. Yet through
+all his analysis of its premises and of the terms on which it may be
+realised there runs a tenacious persuasion that, in the end, the regime
+of peace at large will be installed. Not as a deliberate achievement of
+human wisdom, so much as a work of Nature the Designer of
+things--_Natura daedala rerum_.
+
+To any attentive reader of Kant's memorable essay it will be apparent
+that the title of the following inquiry--On the nature of peace and the
+terms of its perpetuation--is a descriptive translation of the caption
+under which he wrote. That such should be the case will not, it is
+hoped, be accounted either an unseemly presumption or an undue
+inclination to work under a borrowed light. The aim and compass of any
+disinterested inquiry in these premises is still the same as it was in
+Kant's time; such, indeed, as he in great part made it,--viz., a
+systematic knowledge of things as they are. Nor is the light of Kant's
+leading to be dispensed with as touches the ways and means of
+systematic knowledge, wherever the human realities are in question.
+
+Meantime, many things have also changed since the date of Kant's essay.
+Among other changes are those that affect the direction of inquiry and
+the terms of systematic formulation. _Natura daedala rerum_ is no longer
+allowed to go on her own recognizances, without divulging the ways and
+means of her workmanship. And it is such a line of extension that is
+here attempted, into a field of inquiry which in Kant's time still lay
+over the horizon of the future.
+
+The quest of perpetual peace at large is no less a paramount and
+intrinsic human duty today than it was, nor is it at all certain that
+its final accomplishment is nearer. But the question of its pursuit and
+of the conditions to be met in seeking this goal lies in a different
+shape today; and it is this question that concerns the inquiry which is
+here undertaken,--What are the terms on which peace at large may
+hopefully be installed and maintained? What, if anything, is there in
+the present situation that visibly makes for a realisation of these
+necessary terms within the calculable future? And what are the
+consequences presumably due to follow in the nearer future from the
+installation of such a peace at large? And the answer to these questions
+is here sought not in terms of what ought dutifully to be done toward
+the desired consummation, but rather in terms of those known factors of
+human behaviour that can be shown by analysis of experience to control
+the conduct of nations in conjunctures of this kind.
+
+February 1917
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTORY: ON THE STATE AND ITS RELATION TO WAR
+AND PEACE                                                            1
+
+The inquiry is not concerned with the intrinsic merits
+of peace or war, 2.
+
+--But with the nature, causes and consequences of the
+preconceptions favoring peace or war, 3.
+
+--A breach of the peace is an act of the government,
+or State, 3.
+
+--Patriotism is indispensable to furtherance of warlike
+enterprise, 4.
+
+--All the peoples of Christendom are sufficiently patriotic, 6.
+
+--Peace established by the State, an armistice--the State
+is an instrumentality for making peace, not for perpetuating it, 7.
+
+--The governmental establishments and their powers in all
+the Christian nations are derived from the feudal establishments
+of the Middle Ages, 9.
+
+--Still retain the right of coercively controlling the actions
+of their citizens, 11.
+
+--Contrast of Icelandic Commonwealth, 12.
+
+--The statecraft of the past half century has been
+one of competitive preparedness, 14.
+
+--Prussianised Germany has forced the pace in this
+competitive preparedness, 20.
+
+--An avowedly predatory enterprise no longer meets
+with approval, 21.
+
+--When a warlike enterprise has been entered upon, it
+will have the support of popular sentiment even if it
+is an aggressive war, 22.
+
+--The moral indignation of both parties to the quarrel
+is to be taken for granted, 23.
+
+--The spiritual forces of any Christian nation may be
+mobilised for war by either of two pleas: (1) The
+preservation or furtherance of the community's material
+interests, real or fancied, and (2) vindication of the
+National Honour; as perhaps also perpetuation of the
+national "Culture," 23.
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ON THE NATURE AND USES OF PATRIOTISM                                31
+
+The nature of Patriotism, 31.
+
+--Is a spirit of Emulation, 33.
+
+--Must seem moral, if only to a biased populace, 33.
+
+--The common man is sufficiently patriotic but is hampered
+with a sense of right and honest dealing, 38.
+
+--Patriotism is at cross purposes with modern life, 38.
+
+--Is an hereditary trait? 41.
+
+--Variety of racial stocks in Europe, 43.
+
+--Patriotism a ubiquitous trait, 43.
+
+--Patriotism disserviceable, yet men hold to it, 46.
+
+--Cultural evolution of Europeans, 48.
+
+--Growth of a sense of group solidarity, 49.
+
+--Material interests of group falling into abeyance
+as class divisions have grown up, until prestige
+remains virtually the sole community interest, 51.
+
+--Based upon warlike prowess, physical magnitude and
+pecuniary traffic of country, 54.
+
+--Interests of the master class are at cross purposes
+with the fortunes of the common man, 57.
+
+--Value of superiors is a "prestige value," 57.
+
+--The material benefits which this ruling class contribute
+are: defense against aggression, and promotion of the
+community's material gain, 60.
+
+--The common defense is a remedy for evils due to the
+patriotic spirit, 61.
+
+--The common defense the usual blind behind which events
+are put in train for eventual hostilities, 62.
+
+--All the nations of warring Europe convinced that they
+are fighting a defensive war, 62.
+
+--Which usually takes the form of a defense of the National
+Honour, 63.
+
+--Material welfare is of interest to the Dynastic statesman
+only as it conduces to political success, 64.
+
+--The policy of national economic self-sufficiency, 67.
+
+--The chief material use of patriotism is its use to a
+limited number of persons in their quest of private gain, 67.
+
+--And has the effect of dividing the nations on lines of
+rivalry, 76.
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ON THE CONDITIONS OF A LASTING PEACE                                77
+
+The patriotic spirit of modern peoples is the abiding
+source of contention among nations, 77.
+
+--Hence any calculus of the Chances of Peace will be
+a reckoning of forces which may be counted on to keep
+a patriotic nation in an unstable equilibrium of peace, 78.
+
+--The question of peace and war at large is a question of
+peace and war among the Powers, which are of two contrasted
+kinds: those which may safely be counted on spontaneously
+to take the offensive and those which will fight on provocation, 79.
+
+--War not a question of equity but of opportunity, 81.
+
+--The Imperial designs of Germany and Japan as the prospective
+cause of war, 82.
+
+--Peace can be maintained in two ways: submission to
+their dominion, or elimination of these two Powers;
+No middle course open, 84.
+
+--Frame of mind of states; men and popular sentiment in
+a Dynastic State, 84.
+
+--Information, persuasion and reflection will not subdue
+national animosities and jealousies; Peoples of Europe
+are racially homogeneous along lines of climatic latitude, 88.
+
+--But loyalty is a matter of habituation, 89.
+
+--Derivation and current state of German nationalism, 94.
+
+--Contrasted with the animus of the citizens of a commonwealth,
+103;--A neutral peace-compact may be practicable in the
+absence of Germany and Japan, but it has no chance in
+their presence, 106.
+
+--The national life of Germany: the Intellectuals, 108.
+
+--Summary of chapter, 116.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+PEACE WITHOUT HONOUR                                               118
+
+Submission to the Imperial Power one of the conditions
+precedent to a peaceful settlement, 118.
+
+--Character of the projected tutelage, 118.
+
+--Life under the _Pax Germanica_ contrasted with
+the Ottoman and Russian rule, 124.
+
+--China and biological and cultural success, 130.
+
+--Difficulty of non-resistant subjection is of a psychological
+order, 131.
+
+--Patriotism of the bellicose kind is of the nature of
+habit, 134.
+
+--And men may divest themselves of it, 140.
+
+--A decay of the bellicose national spirit must be of
+the negative order, the disuse of the discipline out
+of which it has arisen, 142.
+
+--Submission to Imperial authorities necessitates
+abeyance of national pride among the other peoples, 144.
+
+--Pecuniary merits of the projected Imperial dominion, 145.
+
+--Pecuniary class distinctions in the commonwealths and
+the pecuniary burden on the common man, 150.
+
+--Material conditions of life for the common man under
+the modern rule of big business, 156.
+
+--The competitive regime, "what the traffic will bear,"
+and the life and labor of the common man, 158.
+
+--Industrial sabotage by businessmen, 165.
+
+--Contrasted with the Imperial usufruct and its material
+advantages to the common man, 174.
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+PEACE AND NEUTRALITY                                               178
+
+Personal liberty, not creature comforts, the ulterior
+springs of action of the common man of the democratic
+nations, 178.
+
+--No change of spiritual state to be looked for in the
+life-time of the oncoming generation, 185.
+
+--The Dynastic spirit among the peoples of the Empire
+will, under the discipline of modern economic conditions,
+fall into decay, 187.
+
+--Contrast of class divisions in Germany and England, 192.
+
+--National establishments are dependent for their
+continuance upon preparation for hostilities, 196.
+
+--The time required for the people of the Dynastic
+States to unlearn their preconceptions will be longer
+than the interval required for a new onset, 197.
+
+--There can be no neutral course between peace by
+unconditional surrender and submission or peace by
+the elimination of Imperial Germany and Japan, 202.
+
+--Peace by submission not practicable for the modern
+nations, 203.
+
+--Neutralisation of citizenship, 205.
+
+--Spontaneous move in that direction not to be looked for, 213.
+
+--Its chances of success, 219.
+
+--The course of events in America, 221.
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+ELIMINATION OF THE UNFIT                                           233
+
+A league of neutrals, its outline, 233.
+
+--Need of security from aggression of Imperial Germany, 234.
+
+--Inclusion of the Imperial States in the league, 237.
+
+--Necessity of elimination of Imperial military clique, 239.
+
+--Necessity of intermeddling in internal affairs of Germany even
+if not acceptable to the German people, 240.
+
+--Probability of pacific nations taking measures to insure peace, 244-298.
+
+--The British gentleman and his control of the English government, 244.
+
+--The shifting of control out of the hands of the gentleman into
+those of the underbred common man, 251.
+
+--The war situation and its probable effect on popular habits
+of thought in England, 252.
+
+--The course of such events and their bearing on the chances
+of a workable pacific league, 255.
+
+--Conditions precedent to a successful pacific league
+of neutrals, 258.
+
+--Colonial possessions, 259.
+
+--Neutralisation of trade relations, 263.
+
+--Futility of economic boycott, 266.
+
+--The terms of settlement, 269.
+
+--The effect of the war and the chances of the British people
+being able to meet the exigencies of peace, 273.
+
+--Summary of the terms of settlement, 280.
+
+--Constitutional monarchies and the British gentlemanly
+government, 281.
+
+--The American national establishment, a government
+by businessmen, and its economic policy, 292.
+
+--America and the league, 294.
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+PEACE AND THE PRICE SYSTEM                                         299
+
+The different conceptions of peace, 299.
+
+--Psychological effects of the war, 303.
+
+--The handicraft system and the machine industry,
+and their psychological effect on political preconceptions, 306.
+
+--The machine technology and the decay of patriotic loyalty, 310.
+
+--Summary, 313.
+
+--Ownership and the right of contract, 315.
+
+--Standardised under handicraft system, 319.
+
+--Ownership and the machine industry. 320.
+
+--Business control and sabotage, 322.
+
+--Governments of pacific nations controlled by privileged classes, 326.
+
+--Effect of peace on the economic situation, 328.
+
+--Economic aspects of a regime of peace, especially as related
+to the development of classes, 330.
+
+--The analogy of the Victorian Peace, 344.
+
+--The case of the American Farmer, 348.
+
+--The leisure class, 350.
+
+--The rising standard of living, 354.
+
+--Culture, 355.
+
+--The eventual cleavage of classes, those who own and those
+who do not, 360.
+
+--Conditioned by peace at large, 366.
+
+--Necessary conditions of a lasting peace, 367.
+
+
+AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE OF PEACE AND THE TERMS OF ITS PERPETUATION
+
+
+
+
+ON THE NATURE OF PEACE AND THE TERMS OF ITS PERPETUATION
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTORY: ON THE STATE AND ITS RELATION TO WAR AND PEACE
+
+
+To many thoughtful men ripe in worldly wisdom it is known of a verity
+that war belongs indefeasibly in the Order of Nature. Contention, with
+manslaughter, is indispensable in human intercourse, at the same time
+that it conduces to the increase and diffusion of the manly virtues. So
+likewise, the unspoiled youth of the race, in the period of adolescence
+and aspiring manhood, also commonly share this gift of insight and back
+it with a generous commendation of all the martial qualities; and women
+of nubile age and no undue maturity gladly meet them half way.
+
+On the other hand, the mothers of the people are commonly unable to see
+the use of it all. It seems a waste of dear-bought human life, with a
+large sum of nothing to show for it. So also many men of an elderly
+turn, prematurely or otherwise, are ready to lend their countenance to
+the like disparaging appraisal; it may be that the spirit of prowess in
+them runs at too low a tension, or they may have outlived the more vivid
+appreciation of the spiritual values involved. There are many, also,
+with a turn for exhortation, who find employment for their best
+faculties in attesting the well-known atrocities and futility of war.
+
+Indeed, not infrequently such advocates of peace will devote their
+otherwise idle powers to this work of exhortation without stipend or
+subsidy. And they uniformly make good their contention that the
+currently accepted conception of the nature of war--General Sherman's
+formula--is substantially correct. All the while it is to be admitted
+that all this axiomatic exhortation has no visible effect on the course
+of events or on the popular temper touching warlike enterprise. Indeed,
+no equal volume of speech can be more incontrovertible or less
+convincing than the utterances of the peace advocates, whether
+subsidised or not. "War is Bloodier than Peace." This would doubtless be
+conceded without argument, but also without prejudice. Hitherto the
+pacifists' quest of a basis for enduring peace, it must be admitted, has
+brought home nothing tangible--with the qualification, of course, that
+the subsidised pacifists have come in for the subsidy. So that, after
+searching the recesses of their imagination, able-bodied pacifists whose
+loquacity has never been at fault hitherto have been brought to ask:
+"What Shall We Say?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Under these circumstances it will not be out of place to inquire into
+the nature of this peace about which swings this wide orbit of opinion
+and argument. At the most, such an inquiry can be no more gratuitous and
+no more nugatory than the controversies that provoke it. The intrinsic
+merits of peace at large, as against those of warlike enterprise, it
+should be said, do not here come in question. That question lies in the
+domain of preconceived opinion, so that for the purposes of this
+inquiry it will have no significance except as a matter to be inquired
+into; the main point of the inquiry being the nature, causes and
+consequences of such a preconception favoring peace, and the
+circumstances that make for a contrary preconception in favor of war.
+
+By and large, any breach of the peace in modern times is an official act
+and can be taken only on initiative of the governmental establishment,
+the State. The national authorities may, of course, be driven to take
+such a step by pressure of warlike popular sentiment. Such, e.g., is
+presumed to have been the case in the United States' attack on Spain
+during the McKinley administration; but the more that comes to light of
+the intimate history of that episode, the more evident does it become
+that the popular war sentiment to which the administration yielded had
+been somewhat sedulously "mobilised" with a view to such yielding and
+such a breach. So also in the case of the Boer war, the move was made
+under sanction of a popular war spirit, which, again, did not come to a
+head without shrewd surveillance and direction. And so again in the
+current European war, in the case, e.g., of Germany, where the
+initiative was taken, the State plainly had the full support of popular
+sentiment, and may even be said to have precipitated the war in response
+to this urgent popular aspiration; and here again it is a matter of
+notoriety that the popular sentiment had long been sedulously nursed and
+"mobilised" to that effect, so that the populace was assiduously kept in
+spiritual readiness for such an event. The like is less evident as
+regards the United Kingdom, and perhaps also as regards the other
+Allies.
+
+And such appears to have been the common run of the facts as regards all
+the greater wars of the last one hundred years,--what may be called the
+"public" wars of this modern era, as contrasted with the "private" or
+administrative wars which have been carried on in a corner by one and
+another of the Great Powers against hapless barbarians, from time to
+time, in the course of administrative routine.
+
+It is also evident from the run of the facts as exemplified in these
+modern wars that while any breach of the peace takes place only on the
+initiative and at the discretion of the government, or State,[1] it is
+always requisite in furtherance of such warlike enterprise to cherish
+and eventually to mobilise popular sentiment in support of any warlike
+move. Due fomentation of a warlike animus is indispensable to the
+procuring and maintenance of a suitable equipment with which eventually
+to break the peace, as well as to ensure a diligent prosecution of such
+enterprise when once it has been undertaken. Such a spirit of militant
+patriotism as may serviceably be mobilised in support of warlike
+enterprise has accordingly been a condition precedent to any people's
+entry into the modern Concert of Nations. This Concert of Nations is a
+Concert of Powers, and it is only as a Power that any nation plays its
+part in the concert, all the while that "power" here means eventual
+warlike force.
+
+[Footnote 1: A modern nation constitutes a State only in respect of or
+with ulterior bearing on the question of International peace or war.]
+
+Such a people as the Chinese, e.g., not pervaded with an adequate
+patriotic spirit, comes into the Concert of Nations not as a Power but
+as a bone of contention. Not that the Chinese fall short in any of the
+qualities that conduce to efficiency and welfare in time of peace, but
+they appear, in effect, to lack that certain "solidarity of prowess" by
+virtue of which they should choose to be (collectively) formidable
+rather than (individually) fortunate and upright; and the modern
+civilised nations are not in a position, nor in a frame of mind, to
+tolerate a neighbor whose only claim on their consideration falls under
+the category of peace on earth and good-will among men. China appears
+hitherto not to have been a serviceable people for warlike ends, except
+in so far as the resources of that country have been taken over and
+converted to warlike uses by some alien power working to its own ends.
+Such have been the several alien dynasties that have seized upon that
+country from time to time and have achieved dominion by usufruct of its
+unwarlike forces. Such has been the nature of the Manchu empire of the
+recent past, and such is the evident purpose of the prospective Japanese
+usufruct of the same country and its populace. Meantime the Chinese
+people appear to be incorrigibly peaceable, being scarcely willing to
+fight in any concerted fashion even when driven into a corner by
+unprovoked aggression, as in the present juncture. Such a people is very
+exceptional. Among civilised nations there are, broadly speaking, none
+of that temper, with the sole exception of the Chinese,--if the Chinese
+are properly to be spoken of as a nation.
+
+Modern warfare makes such large and direct use of the industrial arts,
+and depends for its successful prosecution so largely on a voluminous
+and unremitting supply of civilian services and wrought goods, that any
+inoffensive and industrious people, such as the Chinese, could doubtless
+now be turned to good account by any warlike power that might have the
+disposal of their working forces. To make their industrial efficiency
+count in this way toward warlike enterprise and imperial dominion, the
+usufruct of any such inoffensive and unpatriotic populace would have to
+fall into the hands of an alien governmental establishment. And no alien
+government resting on the support of a home population trained in the
+habits of democracy or given over to ideals of common honesty in
+national concerns could hopefully undertake the enterprise. This work of
+empire-building out of unwarlike materials could apparently be carried
+out only by some alien power hampered by no reserve of scruple, and
+backed by a servile populace of its own, imbued with an impeccable
+loyalty to its masters and with a suitably bellicose temper, as, e.g.,
+Imperial Japan or Imperial Germany.
+
+However, for the commonplace national enterprise the common run will do
+very well. Any populace imbued with a reasonable measure of patriotism
+will serve as ways and means to warlike enterprise under competent
+management, even if it is not habitually prone to a bellicose temper.
+Rightly managed, ordinary patriotic sentiment may readily be mobilised
+for warlike adventure by any reasonably adroit and single-minded body of
+statesmen,--of which there is abundant illustration. All the peoples of
+Christendom are possessed of a sufficiently alert sense of nationality,
+and by tradition and current usage all the national governments of
+Christendom are warlike establishments, at least in the defensive sense;
+and the distinction between the defensive and the offensive in
+international intrigue is a technical matter that offers no great
+difficulty. None of these nations is of such an incorrigibly peaceable
+temper that they can be counted on to keep the peace consistently in the
+ordinary course of events.
+
+Peace established by the State, or resting in the discretion of the
+State, is necessarily of the nature of an armistice, in effect
+terminable at will and on short notice. It is maintained only on
+conditions, stipulated by express convention or established by custom,
+and there is always the reservation, tacit or explicit, that recourse
+will be had to arms in case the "national interests" or the punctilios
+of international etiquette are traversed by the act or defection of any
+rival government or its subjects. The more nationally-minded the
+government or its subject populace, the readier the response to the call
+of any such opportunity for an unfolding of prowess. The most peaceable
+governmental policy of which Christendom has experience is a policy of
+"watchful waiting," with a jealous eye to the emergence of any occasion
+for national resentment; and the most irretrievably shameful dereliction
+of duty on the part of any civilised government would be its eventual
+insensibility to the appeal of a "just war." Under any governmental
+auspices, as the modern world knows governments, the keeping of the
+peace comes at its best under the precept, "Speak softly and carry a big
+stick." But the case for peace is more precarious than the wording of
+the aphorism would indicate, in as much as in practical fact the "big
+stick" is an obstacle to soft speech. Evidently, in the light of recent
+history, if the peace is to be kept it will have to come about
+irrespective of governmental management,--in spite of the State rather
+than by its good offices. At the best, the State, or the government, is
+an instrumentality for making peace, not for perpetuating it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Anyone who is interested in the nature and derivation of governmental
+institutions and establishments in Europe, in any but the formal
+respect, should be able to satisfy his curiosity by looking over the
+shoulders of the professed students of Political Science. Quite properly
+and profitably that branch of scholarship is occupied with the authentic
+pedigree of these institutions, and with the documentary instruments in
+the case; since Political Science is, after all, a branch of theoretical
+jurisprudence and is concerned about a formally competent analysis of
+the recorded legal powers. The material circumstances from which these
+institutions once took their beginning, and the exigencies which have
+governed the rate and direction of their later growth and mutation, as
+well as the _de facto_ bearing of the institutional scheme on the
+material welfare or the cultural fortunes of the given community,--while
+all these matters of fact may be germane to the speculations of
+Political Theory, they are not intrinsic to its premises, to the logical
+sequence of its inquiry, or to its theoretical findings. The like is
+also true, of course, as regards that system of habits of thought, that
+current frame of mind, in which any given institutional scheme
+necessarily is grounded, and without the continued support of which any
+given scheme of governmental institutions or policy would become
+nugatory and so would pass into the province of legal fiction. All these
+are not idle matters in the purview of the student of Political Science,
+but they remain after all substantially extraneous to the structure of
+political theory; and in so far as matters of this class are to be
+brought into the case at all, the specialists in the field can not
+fairly be expected to contribute anything beyond an occasional _obiter
+dictum_. There can be no discourteous presumption, therefore, in
+accepting the general theorems of current political theory without
+prejudice, and looking past the received theoretical formulations for a
+view of the substantial grounds on which the governmental establishments
+have grown into shape, and the circumstances, material and spiritual,
+that surround their continued working and effect.
+
+By lineal descent the governmental establishments and the powers with
+which they are vested, in all the Christian nations, are derived from
+the feudal establishments of the Middle Ages; which, in turn, are of a
+predatory origin and of an irresponsible character.[2] In nearly all
+instances, but more particularly among the nations that are accounted
+characteristically modern, the existing establishments have been greatly
+altered from the mediaeval pattern, by concessive adaptation to later
+exigencies or by a more or less revolutionary innovation. The degree of
+their modernity is (conventionally) measured, roughly, by the degree in
+which they have departed from the mediaeval pattern. Wherever the
+unavoidable concessions have been shrewdly made with a view to
+conserving the autonomy and irresponsibility of the governmental
+establishment, or the "State," and where the state of national sentiment
+has been led to favor this work of conservation, as, e.g., in the case
+of Austria, Spain or Prussia, there the modern outcome has been what may
+be called a Dynastic State. Where, on the other hand, the run of
+national sentiment has departed notably from the ancient holding ground
+of loyal abnegation, and has enforced a measure of revolutionary
+innovation, as in the case of France or of the English-speaking peoples,
+there the modern outcome has been an (ostensibly) democratic
+commonwealth of ungraded citizens. But the contrast so indicated is a
+contrast of divergent variants rather than of opposites. These two
+type-forms may be taken as the extreme and inclusive limits of variation
+among the governmental establishments with which the modern world is
+furnished.[3]
+
+[Footnote 2: The partial and dubious exception of the Scandinavian
+countries or of Switzerland need raise no question on this head.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Cf., e.g., Eduard Meyer, _England: its political
+organisation and development_. ch. ii.]
+
+The effectual difference between these two theoretically contrasted
+types of governmental establishments is doubtless grave enough, and for
+many purposes it is consequential, but it is after all not of such a
+nature as need greatly detain the argument at this point. The two differ
+less, in effect, in that range of their functioning which comes in
+question here than in their bearing on the community's fortunes apart
+from questions of war and peace. In all cases there stand over in this
+bearing certain primary characteristics of the ancient regime, which all
+these modern establishments have in common, though not all in an equal
+degree of preservation and effectiveness. They are, e.g., all vested
+with certain attributes of "sovereignty." In all cases the citizen still
+proves on closer attention to be in some measure a "subject" of the
+State, in that he is invariably conceived to owe a "duty" to the
+constituted authorities in one respect and another. All civilised
+governments take cognizance of Treason, Sedition, and the like; and all
+good citizens are not only content but profoundly insistent on the clear
+duty of the citizen on this head. The bias of loyalty is not a matter on
+which argument is tolerated. By virtue of this bias of loyalty, or
+"civic duty"--which still has much of the color of feudal
+allegiance--the governmental establishment is within its rights in
+coercively controlling and directing the actions of the citizen, or
+subject, in those respects that so lie within his duty; as also in
+authoritatively turning his abilities to account for the purposes that
+so lie within the governmental discretion, as, e.g., the Common Defense.
+
+These rights and powers still remain to the governmental establishment
+even at the widest democratic departure from that ancient pattern of
+masterful tutelage and usufruct that marked the old-fashioned
+patrimonial State,--and that still marks the better preserved ones among
+its modern derivatives. And so intrinsic to these governmental
+establishments are these discretionary powers, and by so unfailing a
+popular bias are they still accounted a matter of course and of
+axiomatic necessity, that they have invariably been retained also among
+the attributes of those democratic governments that trace their origin
+to a revolutionary break with the old order.
+
+To many, all this will seem a pedantic taking note of commonplaces,--as
+if it were worth while remarking that the existing governments are
+vested with the indispensable attributes of government. Yet history
+records an instance at variance with this axiomatic rule, a rule which
+is held to be an unavoidable deliverance of common sense. And it is by
+no means an altogether unique instance. It may serve to show that these
+characteristic and unimpeachable powers that invest all current
+governmental establishments are, after all, to be rated as the marks of
+a particular species of governments, and not characteristics of the
+genus of governmental establishments at large. These powers answer to an
+acquired bias, not to an underlying trait of human nature; a matter of
+habit, not of heredity.
+
+Such an historical instance is the so-called Republic, or Commonwealth,
+of Iceland--tenth to thirteenth centuries. Its case is looked on by
+students of history as a spectacular anomaly, because it admitted none
+of these primary powers of government in its constituted authorities.
+And yet, for contrast with these matter-of-course preconceptions of
+these students of history, it is well to note that in the deliberations
+of those ancients who installed the Republic for the management of their
+joint concerns, any inclusion of such powers in its competency appears
+never to have been contemplated, not even to the extent of its being
+rejected. This singularity--as it would be rated by modern statesmen and
+students--was in no degree a new departure in state-making on the part
+of the founders of the Republic. They had no knowledge of such powers,
+duties and accountabilities, except as unwholesome features of a novel
+and alien scheme of irresponsible oppression that was sought to be
+imposed on them by Harald Fairhair, and which they incontinently made it
+their chief and immediate business to evade. They also set up no joint
+or collective establishment with powers for the Common Defense, nor does
+it appear that such a notion had occurred to them.
+
+In the history of its installation there is no hint that the men who set
+up this Icelandic Commonwealth had any sense of the need, or even of the
+feasibility, of such a coercive government as would be involved in
+concerted preparation for the common defense. Subjection to personal
+rule, or to official rule in any degree of attenuation, was not
+comprised in their traditional experience of citizenship; and it was
+necessarily out of the elements comprised in this traditional experience
+that the new structure would have to be built up. The new commonwealth
+was necessarily erected on the premises afforded by the received scheme
+of use and wont; and this received scheme had come down out of
+pre-feudal conditions, without having passed under the discipline of
+that regime of coercion which the feudal system had imposed on the rest
+of Europe, and so had established as an "immemorial usage" and a "second
+nature" among the populations of Christendom. The resulting character of
+the Icelandic Commonwealth is sufficiently striking when contrasted with
+the case of the English commonwealth of the seventeenth century, or the
+later French and American republics. These, all and several, came out of
+a protracted experience in feudalistic state-making and State policy;
+and the common defense--frequently on the offensive--with its necessary
+coercive machinery and its submissive loyalty, consequently would take
+the central place in the resulting civic structure.
+
+To close the tale of the Icelandic commonwealth it may be added that
+their republic of insubordinate citizens presently fell into default,
+systematic misuse, under the disorders brought on by an accumulation of
+wealth, and that it died of legal fiction and constitutional formalities
+after some experience at the hands of able and ambitious statesmen in
+contact with an alien government drawn on the coercive plan. The clay
+vessel failed to make good among the iron pots, and so proved its
+unfitness to survive in the world of Christian nations,--very much as
+the Chinese are today at the mercy of the defensive rapacity of the
+Powers.
+
+     And the mercy that we gave them
+   Was to sink them in the sea,
+   Down on the coast of High Barbarie.
+
+No doubt, it will be accepted as an axiomatic certainty that the
+establishment of a commonwealth after the fashion of the Icelandic
+Republic, without coercive authority or provision for the common
+defense, and without a sense of subordination or collective
+responsibility among its citizens, would be out of all question under
+existing circumstances of politics and international trade. Nor would
+such a commonwealth be workable on the scale and at the pace imposed by
+modern industrial and commercial conditions, even apart from
+international jealousy and ambitions, provided the sacred rights of
+ownership were to be maintained in something like their current shape.
+And yet something of a drift of popular sentiment, and indeed something
+of deliberate endeavour, setting in the direction of such a harmless and
+helpless national organisation is always visible in Western Europe,
+throughout modern times; particularly through the eighteenth and the
+early half of the nineteenth centuries; and more particularly among the
+English-speaking peoples and, with a difference, among the French. The
+Dutch and the Scandinavian countries answer more doubtfully to the same
+characterisation.
+
+The movement in question is known to history as the Liberal,
+Rationalistic, Humanitarian, or Individualistic departure. Its ideal,
+when formulated, is spoken of as the System of Natural Rights; and its
+goal in the way of a national establishment has been well characterised
+by its critics as the Police State, or the Night-Watchman State. The
+gains made in this direction, or perhaps better the inroads of this
+animus in national ideals, are plainly to be set down as a shift in the
+direction of peace and amity; but it is also plain that the shift of
+ground so initiated by this strain of sentiment has never reached a
+conclusion and never has taken effect in anything like an effectual
+working arrangement. Its practical consequences have been of the nature
+of abatement and defection in the pursuit of national ambitions and
+dynastic enterprise, rather than a creative work of installing any
+institutional furniture suitable to its own ends. It has in effect gone
+no farther than what would be called an incipient correction of abuses.
+The highest rise, as well as the decline, of this movement lie within
+the nineteenth century.
+
+In point of time, the decay of this amiable conceit of _laissez-faire_
+in national policy coincides with the period of great advance in the
+technology of transport and communication in the nineteenth century.
+Perhaps, on a larger outlook, it should rather be said that the run of
+national ambitions and animosities had, in the eighteenth and nineteenth
+centuries, suffered a degree of decay through the diffusion of this
+sentimental predilection for Natural Liberty, and that this decline of
+the manlier aspirations was then arrested and corrected by help of these
+improvements in the technological situation; which enabled a closer and
+more coercive control to be exercised over larger areas, and at the same
+time enabled a more massive aggregate of warlike force to strike more
+effectively at a greater distance. This whole episode of the rise and
+decline of _laissez-faire_ in modern history is perhaps best to be
+conceived as a transient weakening of nationalism, by neglect; rather
+than anything like the growth of a new and more humane ideal of national
+intercourse. Such would be the appraisal to be had at the hands of those
+who speak for a strenuous national life and for the arbitrament of
+sportsmanlike contention in human affairs. And the latterday growth of
+more militant aspirations, together with the more settled and sedulous
+attention to a development of control and of formidable armaments, such
+as followed on through the latter half of the nineteenth century, would
+then be rated as a resumption of those older aims and ideals that had
+been falling somewhat into abeyance in the slack-water days of
+Liberalism.
+
+There is much to be said for this latter view; and, indeed, much has
+been said for it, particularly by the spokesmen of imperialist politics.
+This bias of Natural Liberty has been associated in history with the
+English-speaking peoples, more intimately and more extensively than with
+any other. Not that this amiable conceit is in any peculiar degree a
+race characteristic of this group of peoples; nor even that the history
+of its rise and decline runs wholly within the linguistic frontiers
+indicated by this characterisation. The French and the Dutch have borne
+their share, and at an earlier day Italian sentiment and speculation
+lent its impulsion to the same genial drift of faith and aspiration.
+But, by historical accident, its center of gravity and of diffusion has
+lain with the English-speaking communities during the period when this
+bias made history and left its impress on the institutional scheme of
+the Western civilisation. By grace of what may, for the present purpose,
+be called historical accident, it happens that the interval of history
+during which the bias of Natural Liberty made visible headway was also a
+period during which these English-speaking peoples, among whom its
+effects are chiefly visible, were relatively secure from international
+disturbance, by force of inaccessibility. Little strain was put upon
+their sense of national solidarity or national prowess; so little,
+indeed, that there was some danger of their patriotic animosity falling
+into decay by disuse; and then they were also busy with other things.
+Peaceable intercourse, it is true, was relatively easy, active and
+far-reaching--eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--as compared with what
+had been the case before that time; but warlike intercourse on such a
+scale as would constitute a substantial menace to any large nation was
+nearly out of the question, so far as regards the English-speaking
+peoples. The available means of aggression, as touches the case of these
+particular communities, were visibly and consciously inadequate as
+compared with the means of defense. The means of internal or
+intra-national control or coercion were also less well provided by the
+state of the arts current at that time than the means of peaceable
+intercourse. These means of transport and communication were, at that
+stage of their development, less well suited for the purposes of
+far-reaching warlike strategy and the exercise of surveillance and
+coercion over large spaces than for the purposes of peaceable traffic.
+
+But the continued improvement in the means of communication during the
+nineteenth century presently upset that situation, and so presently
+began to neutralise the geographical quarantine which had hedged about
+these communities that were inclined to let well enough alone. The
+increasing speed and accuracy of movement in shipping, due to the
+successful introduction of steam, as well as the concomitant increasing
+size of the units of equipment, all runs to this effect and presently
+sets at naught the peace barriers of sea and weather. So also the
+development of railways and their increasing availability for strategic
+uses, together with the far-reaching coordination of movement made
+possible by their means and by the telegraph; all of which is further
+facilitated by the increasing mass and density of population.
+Improvements in the technology of arms and armament worked to the like
+effect, of setting the peace of any community on an increasingly
+precarious footing, through the advantage which this new technology gave
+to a ready equipment and a rapid mobilisation. The new state of the
+industrial arts serviceable for warlike enterprise put an increasingly
+heavy premium on readiness for offense or defense, but more particularly
+it all worked increasingly to the advantage of the offensive. It put the
+Fabian strategy out of date, and led to the doctrine of a defensive
+offense.
+
+Gradually it came true, with the continued advance in those industrial
+arts that lend themselves to strategic uses, and it came also to be
+realised, that no corner of the earth was any longer secure by mere
+favor of distance and natural difficulty, from eventual aggression at
+the hands of any provident and adventurous assailant,--even by help of a
+modicum of defensive precaution. The fear of aggression then came
+definitively to take the place of international good-will and became the
+chief motive in public policy, so fast and so far as the state of the
+industrial arts continued to incline the balance of advantage to the
+side of the aggressor. All of which served greatly to strengthen the
+hands of those statesmen who, by interest or temperament, were inclined
+to imperialistic enterprise. Since that period all armament has
+conventionally been accounted defensive, and all statesmen have
+professed that the common defense is their chief concern. Professedly
+all armament has been designed to keep the peace; so much of a shadow of
+the peaceable bias there still stands over.
+
+Throughout this latest phase of modern civilisation the avowed fear of
+aggression has served as apology, possibly as provocation in fact, to
+national armaments; and throughout the same period any analysis of the
+situation will finally run the chain of fear back to Prussia as the
+putative or actual, center of disturbance and apprehension. No doubt,
+Prussian armament has taken the lead and forced the pace among the
+nations of Christendom; but the Prussian policy, too, has been
+diligently covered with the same decorous plea of needful provision for
+the common defense and an unremitting solicitude for international
+peace,--to which has been added the canny afterthought of the "defensive
+offense."
+
+It is characteristic of this era of armed peace that in all these
+extensive preparations for breaking the peace any formal avowal of other
+than a defensive purpose has at all times been avoided as an
+insufferable breach of diplomatic decorum. It is likewise characteristic
+of the same era that armaments have unremittingly been increased, beyond
+anything previously known; and that all men have known all the while
+that the inevitable outcome of this avowedly defensive armament must
+eventually be war on an unprecedented scale and of unexampled ferocity.
+It would be neither charitable nor otherwise to the point to call
+attention to the reflection which this state of the case throws on the
+collective sagacity or the good faith of the statesmen who have had the
+management of affairs. It is not practicable to imagine how such an
+outcome as the present could have been brought about by any degree of
+stupidity or incapacity alone, nor is it easier to find evidence that
+the utmost sagacity of the statecraft engaged has had the slightest
+mitigating effect on the evil consummation to which the whole case has
+been brought. It has long been a commonplace among observers of public
+events that these professedly defensive warlike preparations have in
+effect been preparations for breaking the peace; against which, at
+least ostensibly, a remedy had been sought in the preparation of still
+heavier armaments, with full realisation that more armament would
+unfailingly entail a more unsparing and more disastrous war,--which sums
+up the statecraft of the past half century.
+
+Prussia, and afterwards Prussianised Germany, has come in for the
+distinction of taking the lead and forcing the pace in this competitive
+preparation--or "preparedness"--for war in time of peace. That such has
+been the case appears in good part to be something of a fortuitous
+circumstance. The season of enterprising force and fraud to which that
+country owes its induction into the concert of nations is an episode of
+recent history; so recent, indeed, that the German nation has not yet
+had time to live it down and let it be forgotten; and the Imperial State
+is consequently burdened with an irritably uneasy sense of odium and an
+established reputation for unduly bad faith. From which it has followed,
+among other things, that the statesmen of the Empire have lived in the
+expectation of having their unforgotten derelictions brought home, and
+so have, on the one hand, found themselves unable to credit any pacific
+intentions professed by the neighboring Powers, while on the other hand
+they have been unable to gain credence for their own voluble professions
+of peace and amity. So it has come about that, by a fortuitous
+conjuncture of scarcely relevant circumstances, Prussia and the Empire
+have been thrown into the lead in the race of "preparedness" and have
+been led assiduously to hasten a breach which they could ill afford. It
+is, to say the least, extremely doubtful if the event would have been
+substantially different in the absence of that special provocation to
+competitive preparedness that has been injected into the situation by
+this German attitude; but the rate of approach to a warlike climax has
+doubtless been hastened by the anticipatory policy of preparedness which
+the Prussian dynasty has seen itself constrained to pursue. Eventually,
+the peculiar circumstances of its case--embarrassment at home and
+distaste and discredit abroad--have induced the Imperial State to take
+the line of a defensive offense, to take war by the forelock and
+retaliate on presumptive enemies for prospective grievances. But in any
+case, the progressive improvement in transport and communication, as
+well as in the special technology of warfare, backed by greatly enhanced
+facilities for indoctrinating the populace with militant
+nationalism,--these ways and means, working under the hand of patriotic
+statesmen must in course of the past century have brought the peace of
+Europe to so precarious a footing as would have provoked a material
+increase in the equipment for national defense; which would unavoidably
+have led to competitive armament and an enhanced international distrust
+and animosity, eventually culminating in hostilities.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may well be that the plea of defensive preparation advanced by the
+statesmen, Prussian and others, in apology for competitive armaments is
+a diplomatic subterfuge,--there are indications that such has commonly
+been the case; but even if it commonly is visibly disingenuous, the need
+of making such a plea to cover more sinister designs is itself an
+evidence that an avowedly predatory enterprise no longer meets with the
+requisite popular approval. Even if an exception to this rule be
+admitted in the recent attitude of the German people, it is to be
+recalled that the exception was allowed to stand only transiently, and
+that presently the avowal of a predatory design in this case was
+urgently disclaimed in the face of adversity. Even those who speak most
+fluently for the necessity of war, and for its merits as a needed
+discipline in the manly virtues, are constrained by the prevailing
+sentiment to deprecate its necessity.
+
+Yet it is equally evident that when once a warlike enterprise has been
+entered upon so far as to commit the nation to hostilities, it will have
+the cordial support of popular sentiment even if it is patently an
+aggressive war. Indeed, it is quite a safe generalisation that when
+hostilities have once been got fairly under way by the interested
+statesmen, the patriotic sentiment of the nation may confidently be
+counted on to back the enterprise irrespective of the merits of the
+quarrel. But even if the national sentiment is in this way to be counted
+in as an incidental matter of course, it is also to be kept in mind in
+this connection that any quarrel so entered upon by any nation will
+forthwith come to have the moral approval of the community. Dissenters
+will of course be found, sporadically, who do not readily fall in with
+the prevailing animus; but as a general proposition it will still hold
+true that any such quarrel forthwith becomes a just quarrel in the eyes
+of those who have so been committed to it.
+
+A corollary following from this general theorem may be worth noting in
+the same connection. Any politician who succeeds in embroiling his
+country in a war, however nefarious, becomes a popular hero and is
+reputed a wise and righteous statesman, at least for the time being.
+Illustrative instances need perhaps not, and indeed can not gracefully,
+be named; most popular heroes and reputed statesmen belong in this
+class.
+
+Another corollary, which bears more immediately on the question in hand,
+follows also from the same general proposition: Since the ethical values
+involved in any given international contest are substantially of the
+nature of afterthought or accessory, they may safely be left on one side
+in any endeavour to understand or account for any given outbreak of
+hostilities. The moral indignation of both parties to the quarrel is to
+be taken for granted, as being the statesman's chief and necessary ways
+and means of bringing any warlike enterprise to a head and floating it
+to a creditable finish. It is a precipitate of the partisan animosity
+that inspires both parties and holds them to their duty of
+self-sacrifice and devastation, and at its best it will chiefly serve as
+a cloak of self-righteousness to extenuate any exceptionally profligate
+excursions in the conduct of hostilities.
+
+Any warlike enterprise that is hopefully to be entered on must have the
+moral sanction of the community, or of an effective majority in the
+community. It consequently becomes the first concern of the warlike
+statesman to put this moral force in train for the adventure on which he
+is bent. And there are two main lines of motivation by which the
+spiritual forces of any Christian nation may so be mobilised for warlike
+adventure: (1) The preservation or furtherance of the community's
+material interests, real or fancied, and (2) vindication of the national
+honour. To these should perhaps be added as a third, the advancement and
+perpetuation of the nation's "Culture;" that is to say, of its habitual
+scheme of use and wont. It is a nice question whether, in practical
+effect, the aspiration to perpetuate the national Culture is
+consistently to be distinguished from the vindication of the national
+honour. There is perhaps the distinction to be made that "the
+perpetuation of the national Culture" lends a readier countenance to
+gratuitous aggression and affords a broader cover for incidental
+atrocities, since the enemies of the national Culture will necessarily
+be conceived as an inferior and obstructive people, falling beneath the
+rules of commonplace decorum.
+
+Those material interests for which modern nations are in the habit of
+taking to arms are commonly of a fanciful character, in that they
+commonly have none but an imaginary net value to the community at large.
+Such are, e.g., the national trade or the increase of the national
+territory. These and the like may serve the warlike or dynastic
+ambitions of the nation's masters; they may also further the interests
+of office-holders, and more particularly of certain business houses or
+businessmen who stand to gain some small advantage by help of the powers
+in control; but it all signifies nothing more to the common man than an
+increased bill of governmental expense and a probable increase in the
+cost of living.
+
+That a nation's trade should be carried in vessels owned by its citizens
+or registered in its ports will doubtless have some sentimental value to
+the common run of its citizens, as is shown by the fact that
+disingenuous politicians always find it worth their while to appeal to
+this chauvinistic predilection. But it patently is all a completely idle
+question, in point of material advantage, to anyone but the owners of
+the vessels; and to these owners it is also of no material consequence
+under what flag their investments sail, except so far as the government
+in question may afford them some preferential opportunity for
+gain,--always at the cost of their fellow citizens. The like is equally
+true as regards the domicile and the national allegiance of the
+businessmen who buy and sell the country's imports and exports. The
+common man plainly has no slightest material interest in the nationality
+or the place of residence of those who conduct this traffic; though all
+the facts go to say that in some puzzle-headed way the common man
+commonly persuades himself that it does make some occult sort of
+difference to him; so that he is commonly willing to pay something
+substantial toward subsidising businessmen of his own nationality, in
+the way of a protective tariff and the like.
+
+The only material advantage to be derived from such a preferential trade
+policy arises in the case of international hostilities, in which case
+the home-owned vessels and merchants may on occasion count toward
+military readiness; although even in that connection their value is
+contingent and doubtful. But in this way they may contribute in their
+degree to a readiness to break off peaceable relations with other
+countries. It is only for warlike purposes, that is to say for the
+dynastic ambitions of warlike statesmen, that these preferential
+contrivances in economic policy have any substantial value; and even in
+that connection their expediency is always doubtful. They are a source
+of national jealousy, and they may on occasion become a help to military
+strategy when this national jealousy eventuates in hostilities.
+
+The run of the facts touching this matter of national trade policy is
+something as follows: At the instance of businessmen who stand to gain
+by it, and with the cordial support of popular sentiment, the
+constituted authorities sedulously further the increase of shipping and
+commerce under protection of the national power. At the same time they
+spend substance and diplomatic energy in an endeavor to extend the
+international market facilities open to the country's businessmen, with
+a view always to a preferential advantage in favor of these
+businessmen, also with the sentimental support of the common man and at
+his cost. To safeguard these commercial interests, as well as
+property-holdings of the nation's citizens in foreign parts, the nation
+maintains naval, military, consular and diplomatic establishments, at
+the common expense. The total gains derivable from these commercial and
+investment interests abroad, under favorable circumstances, will never
+by any chance equal the cost of the governmental apparatus installed to
+further and safeguard them. These gains, such as they are, go to the
+investors and businessmen engaged in these enterprises; while the costs
+incident to the adventure are borne almost wholly by the common man, who
+gets no gain from it all. Commonly, as in the case of a protective
+tariff or a preferential navigation law, the cost to the common man is
+altogether out of proportion to the gain which accrues to the
+businessmen for whose benefit he carries the burden. The only other
+class, besides the preferentially favored businessmen, who derive any
+material benefit from this arrangement is that of the office-holders who
+take care of this governmental traffic and draw something in the way of
+salaries and perquisites; and whose cost is defrayed by the common man,
+who remains an outsider in all but the payment of the bills. The common
+man is proud and glad to bear this burden for the benefit of his
+wealthier neighbors, and he does so with the singular conviction that in
+some occult manner he profits by it. All this is incredible, but it is
+everyday fact.
+
+In case it should happen that these business interests of the nation's
+businessmen interested in trade or investments abroad are jeopardised by
+a disturbance of any kind in these foreign parts in which these
+business interests lie, then it immediately becomes the urgent concern
+of the national authorities to use all means at hand for maintaining the
+gainful traffic of these businessmen undiminished, and the common man
+pays the cost. Should such an untoward situation go to such sinister
+lengths as to involve actual loss to these business interests or
+otherwise give rise to a tangible grievance, it becomes an affair of the
+national honour; whereupon no sense of proportion as between the
+material gains at stake and the cost of remedy or retaliation need
+longer be observed, since the national honour is beyond price. The
+motivation in the case shifts from the ground of material interest to
+the spiritual ground of the moral sentiments.
+
+In this connection "honour" is of course to be taken in the euphemistic
+sense which the term has under the _code duello_ governing "affairs of
+honour." It carries no connotation of honesty, veracity, equity,
+liberality, or unselfishness. This national honour is of the nature of
+an intangible or immaterial asset, of course; it is a matter of
+prestige, a sportsmanlike conception; but that fact must not be taken to
+mean that it is of any the less substantial effect for purposes of a
+_casus belli_ than the material assets of the community. Quite the
+contrary: "Who steals my purse, steals trash," etc. In point of fact, it
+will commonly happen that any material grievance must first be converted
+into terms of this spiritual capital, before it is effectually turned to
+account as a stimulus to warlike enterprise.
+
+Even among a people with so single an eye to the main chance as the
+American community it will be found true, on experiment or on review of
+the historical evidence, that an offense against the national honour
+commands a profounder and more unreserved resentment than any
+infraction of the rights of person or property simply. This has latterly
+been well shown in connection with the manoeuvres of the several
+European belligerents, designed to bend American neutrality to the
+service of one side or the other. Both parties have aimed to intimidate
+and cajole; but while the one party has taken recourse to effrontery and
+has made much and ostentatious use of threats and acts of violence
+against person and property, the other has constantly observed a
+deferential attitude toward American national self-esteem, even while
+engaged on a persistent infraction of American commercial rights. The
+first named line of diplomacy has convicted itself of miscarriage and
+has lost the strategic advantage, as against the none too adroit finesse
+of the other side. The statesmen of this European war power were so ill
+advised as to enter on a course of tentatively cumulative intimidation,
+by threats and experimentally graduated crimes against the property and
+persons of American citizens, with a view to coerce American cupidity
+and yet to avoid carrying these manoeuvres of terrorism far enough to
+arouse an unmanageable sense of outrage. The experiment has served to
+show that the breaking point in popular indignation will be reached
+before the terrorism has gone far enough to raise a serious question of
+pecuniary caution.
+
+This national honour, which so is rated a necessary of life, is an
+immaterial substance in a peculiarly high-wrought degree, being not only
+not physically tangible but also not even capable of adequate statement
+in pecuniary terms,--as would be the case with ordinary immaterial
+assets. It is true, where the point of grievance out of which a question
+of the national honour arises is a pecuniary discrepancy, the national
+honour can not be satisfied without a pecuniary accounting; but it needs
+no argument to convince all right-minded persons that even at such a
+juncture the national honour that has been compromised is indefinitely
+and indefinably more than what can be made to appear on an accountant's
+page. It is a highly valued asset, or at least a valued possession, but
+it is of a metaphysical, not of a physical nature, and it is not known
+to serve any material or otherwise useful end apart from affording a
+practicable grievance consequent upon its infraction.
+
+This national honour is subject to injury in divers ways, and so may
+yield a fruitful grievance even apart from offences against the person
+or property of the nation's businessmen; as, e.g., through neglect or
+disregard of the conventional punctilios governing diplomatic
+intercourse, or by disrespect or contumelious speech touching the Flag,
+or the persons of national officials, particularly of such officials as
+have only a decorative use, or the costumes worn by such officials, or,
+again, by failure to observe the ritual prescribed for parading the
+national honour on stated occasions. When duly violated the national
+honour may duly be made whole again by similarly immaterial
+instrumentalities; as, e.g., by recital of an appropriate formula of
+words, by formal consumption of a stated quantity of ammunition in the
+way of a salute, by "dipping" an ensign, and the like,--procedure which
+can, of course, have none but a magical efficacy. The national honour,
+in short, moves in the realm of magic, and touches the frontiers of
+religion.
+
+Throughout this range of duties incumbent on the national defense, it
+will be noted, the offenses or discrepancies to be guarded against or
+corrected by recourse to arms have much of a ceremonial character.
+Whatever may be the material accidents that surround any given concrete
+grievance that comes up for appraisal and redress, in bringing the case
+into the arena for trial by combat it is the spiritual value of the
+offense that is played up and made the decisive ground of action,
+particularly in so far as appeal is made to the sensibilities of the
+common man, who will have to bear the cost of the adventure. And in such
+a case it will commonly happen that the common man is unable, without
+advice, to see that any given hostile act embodies a sacrilegious
+infraction of the national honour. He will at any such conjuncture
+scarcely rise to the pitch of moral indignation necessary to float a
+warlike reprisal, until the expert keepers of the Code come in to
+expound and certify the nature of the transgression. But when once the
+lesion to the national honour has been ascertained, appraised and duly
+exhibited by those persons whose place in the national economy it is to
+look after all that sort of thing, the common man will be found nowise
+behindhand about resenting the evil usage of which he so, by force of
+interpretation, has been a victim.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ON THE NATURE AND USES OF PATRIOTISM
+
+
+Patriotism may be defined as a sense of partisan solidarity in respect
+of prestige. What the expert psychologists, and perhaps the experts in
+Political Science, might find it necessary to say in the course of an
+exhaustive analysis and definition of this human faculty would
+presumably be something more precise and more extensive. There is no
+inclination here to forestall definition, but only to identify and
+describe the concept that loosely underlies the colloquial use of this
+term, so far as seems necessary to an inquiry into the part played by
+the patriotic animus in the life of modern peoples, particularly as it
+bears on questions of war and peace.
+
+On any attempt to divest this concept of all extraneous or adventitious
+elements it will be found that such a sense of an undivided joint
+interest in a collective body of prestige will always remain as an
+irreducible minimum. This is the substantial core about which many and
+divers subsidiary interests cluster, but without which these other
+clustering interests and aspirations will not, jointly or severally,
+make up a working palladium of the patriotic spirit.
+
+It is true, seen in some other light or rated in some other bearing or
+connection, one and another of these other interests, ideals,
+aspirations, beatitudes, may well be adjudged nobler, wiser, possibly
+more urgent than the national prestige; but in the forum of patriotism
+all these other necessaries of human life--the glory of God and the good
+of man--rise by comparison only to the rank of subsidiaries,
+auxiliaries, amenities. He is an indifferent patriot who will let "life,
+liberty and the pursuit of happiness" cloud the issue and get in the way
+of the main business in hand.
+
+There once were, we are told, many hardy and enterprising spirits banded
+together along the Spanish Main for such like ends, just as there are in
+our day an even greater number of no less single-minded spirits bent on
+their own "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness," according to their
+light, in the money-markets of the modern world; but for all their
+admirable qualities and splendid achievements, their passionate quest of
+these amenities has not entitled these Gentlemen Adventurers to claim
+rank as patriots. The poet says:
+
+   "Strike for your altars and your fires!
+   Strike for the green graves of your sires!
+     God and your native land!"
+
+But, again, a temperate scrutiny of the list of desiderata so enumerated
+in the poet's flight, will quickly bring out the fact that any or all of
+them might drop out of the situation without prejudice to the plain call
+of patriotic duty. In the last resort, when the patriotic spirit falls
+back on its naked self alone, it is not reflection on the merits of
+these good and beautiful things in Nature that gives him his cue and
+enforces the ultimate sacrifice. Indeed it is something infinitely more
+futile and infinitely more urgent,--provided only that the man is imbued
+with the due modicum of patriotic devotion; as, indeed, men commonly
+are. It is not faith, hope or charity that abide as the irreducible
+minimum of virtue in the patriot's scheme of things; particularly not
+that charity that has once been highly spoken of as being the greatest
+of these. It may be that, viewed in the light of reason, as Doctor
+Katzenberger would say, patriotic devotion is the most futile thing in
+the world; but, for good or ill, the light of reason has nothing to do
+with the case,--no more than "The flowers that bloom in the spring."
+
+The patriotic spirit is a spirit of emulation, evidently, at the same
+time that it is emulation shot through with a sense of solidarity. It
+belongs under the general caption of sportsmanship, rather than of
+workmanship. Now, any enterprise in sportsmanship is bent on an
+invidious success, which must involve as its major purpose the defeat
+and humiliation of some competitor, whatever else may be comprised in
+its aim. Its aim is a differential gain, as against a rival; and the
+emulative spirit that comes under the head of patriotism commonly, if
+not invariably, seeks this differential advantage by injury of the rival
+rather than by an increase of home-bred well-being.
+
+Indeed, well-being is altogether out of the perspective, except as
+underpinning for an edifice of national prestige. It is, at least, a
+safe generalisation that the patriotic sentiment never has been known to
+rise to the consummate pitch of enthusiastic abandon except when bent on
+some work of concerted malevolence. Patriotism is of a contentious
+complexion, and finds its full expression in no other outlet than
+warlike enterprise; its highest and final appeal is for the death,
+damage, discomfort and destruction of the party of the second part.
+
+It is not that the spirit of patriotism will tolerate no other
+sentiments bearing on matters of public interest, but only that it will
+tolerate none that traverse the call of the national prestige. Like
+other men, the patriot may be moved by many and divers other
+considerations, besides that of the national prestige; and these other
+considerations may be of the most genial and reasonable kind, or they
+may also be as foolish and mischievous as any comprised in the range of
+human infirmities. He may be a humanitarian given over to the kindliest
+solicitude for the common good, or a religious devotee hedged about in
+all his motions by the ever present fear of God, or taken up with
+artistic, scholarly or scientific pursuits; or, again, he may be a
+spendthrift devotee of profane dissipation, whether in the slums or on
+the higher levels of gentility, or he may be engaged on a rapacious
+quest of gain, as a businessman within the law or as a criminal without
+its benefit, or he may spend his best endeavors in advancing the
+interests of his class at the cost of the nation at large. All that is
+understood as a matter of course and is beside the point. In so far as
+he is a complete patriot these other interests will fall away from him
+when the one clear call of patriotic duty comes to enlist him in the
+cause of the national prestige. There is, indeed, nothing to hinder a
+bad citizen being a good patriot; nor does it follow that a good
+citizen--in other respects--may not be a very indifferent patriot.
+
+Many and various other preferences and considerations may coincide with
+the promptings of the patriotic spirit, and so may come in to coalesce
+with and fortify its driving force; and it is usual for patriotic men to
+seek support for their patriotic impulses in some reasoned purpose of
+this extraneous kind that is believed to be served by following the call
+of the national prestige,--it may be a presumptive increase and
+diffusion of culture at large, or the spread and enhancement of a
+presumptively estimable religious faith, or a prospective liberation of
+mankind from servitude to obnoxious masters and outworn institutions;
+or, again, it may be the increase of peace and material well-being among
+men, within the national frontiers or impartially throughout the
+civilised world. There are, substantially, none of the desirable things
+in this world that are not so counted on by some considerable body of
+patriots to be accomplished by the success of their own particular
+patriotic aspirations. What they will not come to an understanding about
+is the particular national ascendency with which the attainment of these
+admirable ends is conceived to be bound up.
+
+The ideals, needs and aims that so are brought into the patriotic
+argument to lend a color of rationality to the patriotic aspiration in
+any given case will of course be such ideals, needs and aims as are
+currently accepted and felt to be authentic and self-legitimating among
+the people in whose eyes the given patriotic enterprise is to find
+favor. So one finds that, e.g., among the followers of Islam, devout and
+resolute, the patriotic statesman (that is to say the politician who
+designs to make use of the popular patriotic fervor) will in the last
+resort appeal to the claims and injunctions of the faith. In a similar
+way the Prussian statesman bent on dynastic enterprise will conjure in
+the name of the dynasty and of culture and efficiency; or, if worse
+comes to worst, an outbreak will be decently covered with a plea of
+mortal peril and self-defense. Among English-speaking peoples much is to
+be gained by showing that the path of patriotic glory is at the same
+time the way of equal-handed justice under the rule of free
+institutions; at the same time, in a fully commercialised community,
+such as the English-speaking commonly are, material benefits in the way
+of trade will go far to sketch in a background of decency for any
+enterprise that looks to the enhancement of the national prestige.
+
+But any promise of gain, whether in the nation's material or immaterial
+assets, will not of itself carry full conviction to the commonplace
+modern citizen; or even to such modern citizens as are best endowed with
+a national spirit. By and large, and overlooking that appreciable
+contingent of morally defective citizens that is to be counted on in any
+hybrid population, it will hold true that no contemplated enterprise or
+line of policy will fully commend itself to the popular sense of merit
+and expediency until it is given a moral turn, so as to bring it to
+square with the dictates of right and honest dealing. On no terms short
+of this will it effectually coalesce with the patriotic aspiration. To
+give the fullest practical effect to the patriotic fervor that animates
+any modern nation, and so turn it to use in the most effective way, it
+is necessary to show that the demands of equity are involved in the
+case. Any cursory survey of modern historical events bearing on this
+point, among the civilised peoples, will bring out the fact that no
+concerted and sustained movement of the national spirit can be had
+without enlisting the community's moral convictions. The common man must
+be persuaded that right is on his side. "Thrice is he armed who knows
+his quarrel just." The grounds of this conviction may often be tawdry
+enough, but the conviction is a necessary factor in the case.
+
+The requisite moral sanction may be had on various grounds, and, on the
+whole, it is not an extremely difficult matter to arrange. In the
+simplest and not infrequent case it may turn on a question of equity in
+respect of trade or investment as between the citizens or subjects of
+the several rival nations; the Chinese "Open Door" affords as sordid an
+example as may be desired. Or it may be only an envious demand for a
+share in the world's material resources--"A Place in the Sun," as a
+picturesque phrase describes it; or "The Freedom of the Seas," as
+another equally vague and equally invidious demand for international
+equity phrases it. These demands are put forward with a color of
+demanding something in the way of equitable opportunity for the
+commonplace peaceable citizen; but quite plainly they have none but a
+fanciful bearing on the fortunes of the common man in time of peace, and
+they have a meaning to the nation only as a fighting unit; apart from
+their prestige value, these things are worth fighting for only as
+prospective means of fighting. The like appeal to the moral
+sensibilities may, again, be made in the way of a call to self-defense,
+under the rule of Live and let live; or it may also rest on the more
+tenuous obligation to safeguard the national integrity of a weaker
+neighbor, under a broader interpretation of the same equitable rule of
+Live and let live. But in one way or another it is necessary to set up
+the conviction that the promptings of patriotic ambition have the
+sanction of moral necessity.
+
+It is not that the line of national policy or patriotic enterprise so
+entered upon with the support of popular sentiment need be right and
+equitable as seen in dispassionate perspective from the outside, but
+only that it should be capable of being made to seem right and equitable
+to the biased populace whose moral convictions are requisite to its
+prosecution; which is quite another matter. Nor is it that any such
+patriotic enterprise is, in fact, entered on simply or mainly on these
+moral grounds that so are alleged in its justification, but only that
+some such colorable ground of justification or extenuation is necessary
+to be alleged, and to be credited by popular belief.
+
+It is not that the common man is not sufficiently patriotic, but only
+that he is a patriot hampered with a plodding and uneasy sense of right
+and honest dealing, and that one must make up one's account with this
+moral bias in looking to any sustained and concerted action that draws
+on the sentiment of the common man for its carrying on. But the moral
+sense in the case may be somewhat easily satisfied with a modicum of
+equity, in case the patriotic bias of the people is well pronounced, or
+in case it is reenforced with a sufficient appeal to self-interest. In
+those cases where the national fervor rises to an excited pitch, even
+very attenuated considerations of right and justice, such as would under
+ordinary conditions doubtfully bear scrutiny as extenuating
+circumstances, may come to serve as moral authentication for any
+extravagant course of action to which the craving for national prestige
+may incite. The higher the pitch of patriotic fervor, the more tenuous
+and more thread-bare may be the requisite moral sanction. By cumulative
+excitation some very remarkable results have latterly been attained
+along this line.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Patriotism is evidently a spirit of particularism, of aliency and
+animosity between contrasted groups of persons; it lives on invidious
+comparison, and works out in mutual hindrance and jealousy between
+nations. It commonly goes the length of hindering intercourse and
+obstructing traffic that would patently serve the material and cultural
+well-being of both nationalities; and not infrequently, indeed
+normally, it eventuates in competitive damage to both.
+
+All this holds true in the world of modern civilisation, at the same
+time that the modern civilised scheme of life is, notoriously, of a
+cosmopolitan character, both in its cultural requirements and in its
+economic structure. Modern culture is drawn on too large a scale, is of
+too complex and multiform a character, requires the cooperation of too
+many and various lines of inquiry, experience and insight, to admit of
+its being confined within national frontiers, except at the cost of
+insufferable crippling and retardation. The science and scholarship that
+is the peculiar pride of civilised Christendom is not only
+international, but rather it is homogeneously cosmopolitan; so that in
+this bearing there are, in effect, no national frontiers; with the
+exception, of course, that in a season of patriotic intoxication, such
+as the current war has induced, even the scholars and scientists will be
+temporarily overset by their patriotic fervour. Indeed, with the best
+efforts of obscurantism and national jealousy to the contrary, it
+remains patently true that modern culture is the culture of Christendom
+at large, not the culture of one and another nation in severalty within
+the confines of Christendom. It is only as and in so far as they partake
+in and contribute to the general run of Western civilisation at large
+that the people of any one of these nations of Christendom can claim
+standing as a cultured nation; and even any distinctive variation from
+this general run of civilised life, such as may give a "local colour" of
+ideals, tastes and conventions, will, in point of cultural value, have
+to be rated as an idle detail, a species of lost motion, that serves no
+better purpose than a transient estrangement.
+
+So also, the modern state of the industrial arts is of a like
+cosmopolitan character, in point of scale, specialisation, and the
+necessary use of diversified resources, of climate and raw materials.
+None of the countries of Europe, e.g., is competent to carry on its
+industry by modern technological methods without constantly drawing on
+resources outside of its national boundaries. Isolation in this
+industrial respect, exclusion from the world market, would mean
+intolerable loss of efficiency, more pronounced the more fully the given
+country has taken over this modern state of the industrial arts.
+Exclusion from the general body of outlying resources would seriously
+cripple any one or all of them, and effectually deprive them of the
+usufruct of this technology; and partial exclusion, by prohibitive or
+protective tariffs and the like, unavoidably results in a partial
+lowering of the efficiency of each, and therefore a reduction of the
+current well-being among them all together.
+
+Into this cultural and technological system of the modern world the
+patriotic spirit fits like dust in the eyes and sand in the bearings.
+Its net contribution to the outcome is obscuration, distrust, and
+retardation at every point where it touches the fortunes of modern
+mankind. Yet it is forever present in the counsels of the statesmen and
+in the affections of the common man, and it never ceases to command the
+regard of all men as the prime attribute of manhood and the final test
+of the desirable citizen. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that no
+other consideration is allowed in abatement of the claims of patriotic
+loyalty, and that such loyalty will be allowed to cover any multitude of
+sins. When the ancient philosopher described Man as a "political animal,"
+this, in effect, was what he affirmed; and today the ancient maxim is as
+good as new. The patriotic spirit is at cross purposes with modern life,
+but in any test case it is found that the claims of life yield before
+those of patriotism; and any voice that dissents from this order of things
+is as a voice crying in the wilderness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To anyone who is inclined to moralise on the singular discrepancies of
+human life this state of the case will be fruitful of much profound
+speculation. The patriotic animus appears to be an enduring trait of
+human nature, an ancient heritage that has stood over unshorn from time
+immemorial, under the Mendelian rule of the stability of racial types.
+It is archaic, not amenable to elimination or enduring suppression, and
+apparently not appreciably to be mitigated by reflection, education,
+experience or selective breeding.
+
+Throughout the historical period, and presumably through an incalculable
+period of the unrecorded past, patriotic manslaughter has consistently
+been weeding out of each successive generation of men the most patriotic
+among them; with the net result that the level of patriotic ardor today
+appears to be no lower than it ever was. At the same time, with the
+advance of population, of culture and of the industrial arts, patriotism
+has grown increasingly disserviceable; and it is to all appearance as
+ubiquitous and as powerful as ever, and is held in as high esteem.
+
+The continued prevalence of this archaic animus among the modern
+peoples, as well as the fact that it is universally placed high among
+the virtues, must be taken to argue that it is, in its elements, an
+hereditary trait, of the nature of an inborn impulsive propensity,
+rather than a product of habituation. It is, in substance, not
+something that can be learned and unlearned. From one generation to
+another, the allegiance may shift from one nationality to another, but
+the fact of unreflecting allegiance at large remains. And it all argues
+also that no sensible change has taken effect in the hereditary
+endowment of the race, at least in this respect, during the period known
+by record or by secure inference,--say, since the early Neolithic in
+Europe; and this in spite of the fact that there has all this while been
+opportunity for radical changes in the European population by
+cross-breeding, infiltration and displacement of the several racial
+stocks that go to make up this population. Hence, on slight reflection
+the inference has suggested itself and has gained acceptance that this
+trait of human nature must presumably have been serviceable to the
+peoples of the earlier time, on those levels of savagery or of the lower
+barbarism on which the ancestral stocks of the European population first
+made good their survival and proved their fitness to people that quarter
+of the earth. Such, indeed, is the common view; so common as to pass for
+matter-of-course, and therefore habitually to escape scrutiny.
+
+Still it need not follow, as more patient reflection will show. All the
+European peoples show much the same animus in this respect; whatever
+their past history may have been, and whatever the difference in past
+experience that might be conceived to have shaped their temperament. Any
+difference in the pitch of patriotic conceit and animosity, between the
+several nationalities or the several localities, is by no means wide,
+even in cases where the racial composition of the population is held to
+be very different, as, e.g., between the peoples on the Baltic seaboard
+and those on the Mediterranean. In point of fact, in this matter of
+patriotic animus there appears to be a wider divergence,
+temperamentally, between individuals within any one of these communities
+than between the common run in any one community and the corresponding
+common run in any other. But even such divergence of individual temper
+in respect of patriotism as is to be met with, first and last, is after
+all surprisingly small in view of the scope for individual variation
+which this European population would seem to offer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These peoples of Europe, all and several, are hybrids compounded out of
+the same run of racial elements, but mixed in varying proportions. On
+any parallel of latitude--taken in the climatic rather than in the
+geometric sense--the racial composition of the west-European population
+will be much the same, virtually identical in effect, although always of
+a hybrid complexion; whereas on any parallel of longitude--also in the
+climatic sense--the racial composition will vary progressively, but
+always within the limits of the same general scheme of hybridisation,--the
+variation being a variation in the proportion in which the several racial
+elements are present in any given case. But in no case does a notable
+difference in racial composition coincide with a linguistic or national
+frontier. But in point of patriotic animus these European peoples are one
+as good as another, whether the comparison be traced on parallels of
+latitude or of longitude. And the inhabitants of each national territory,
+or of each detail locality, appear also to run surprisingly uniform in
+respect of their patriotic spirit.
+
+Heredity in any such community of hybrids will, superficially, appear to
+run somewhat haphazard. There will, of course, be no traceable
+difference between social or economic classes, in point of heredity,--as
+is visibly the case in Christendom. But variation--of an apparently
+haphazard description--will be large and ubiquitous among the
+individuals of such a populace. Indeed, it is a matter of course and of
+easy verification that individual variation within such a hybrid stock
+will greatly exceed the extreme differences that may subsist between the
+several racial types that have gone to produce the hybrid stock. Such is
+the case of the European peoples. The inhabitants vary greatly among
+themselves, both in physical and in mental traits, as would be expected;
+and the variation between individuals in point of patriotic animus
+should accordingly also be expected to be extremely wide,--should, in
+effect, greatly exceed the difference, if any, in this respect between
+the several racial elements engaged in the European population. Some
+appreciable difference in this respect there appears to be, between
+individuals; but individual divergence from the normal or average
+appears always to be of a sporadic sort,--it does not run on class
+lines, whether of occupation, status or property, nor does it run at all
+consistently from parent to child. When all is told the argument returns
+to the safe ground that these variations in point of patriotic animus
+are sporadic and inconsequential, and do not touch the general
+proposition that, one with another, the inhabitants of Europe and the
+European Colonies are sufficiently patriotic, and that the average
+endowment in this respect runs with consistent uniformity across all
+differences of time, place and circumstance. It would, in fact, be
+extremely hazardous to affirm that there is a sensible difference in the
+ordinary pitch of patriotic sentiment as between any two widely diverse
+samples of these hybrid populations, in spite of the fact that the
+diversity in visible physical traits may be quite pronounced.
+
+In short, the conclusion seems safe, on the whole, that in this respect
+the several racial stocks that have gone to produce the existing
+populations of Christendom have all been endowed about as richly one as
+another. Patriotism appears to be a ubiquitous trait, at least among the
+races and peoples of Christendom. From which it should follow, that
+since there is, and has from the beginning been, no differential
+advantage favoring one racial stock or one fashion of hybrid as against
+another, in this matter of patriotic animus, there should also be no
+ground of selective survival or selective elimination on this account as
+between these several races and peoples. So that the undisturbed and
+undiminished prevalence of this trait among the European population,
+early or late, argues nothing as to its net serviceability or
+disserviceability under any of the varying conditions of culture and
+technology to which these Europeans have been subjected, first and last;
+except that it has, in any case, not proved so disserviceable under the
+conditions prevailing hitherto as to result in the extinction of these
+Europeans, one with another.[4]
+
+[Footnote 4: For a more extended discussion of this matter, cf.
+_Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution_, ch. i. and
+Supplementary Notes i. and ii.]
+
+The patriotic frame of mind has been spoken of above as if it were an
+hereditary trait, something after the fashion of a Mendelian unit
+character. Doubtless this is not a competent account of the matter; but
+the present argument scarcely needs a closer analysis. Still, in a
+measure to quiet title and avoid annoyance, it may be noted that this
+patriotic animus is of the nature of a "frame of mind" rather than a
+Mendelian unit character; that it so involves a concatenation of
+several impulsive propensities (presumably hereditary); and that both
+the concatenation and the special mode and amplitude of the response are
+a product of habituation, very largely of the nature of conventionalised
+use and wont. What is said above, therefore, goes little farther than
+saying that the underlying aptitudes requisite to this patriotic frame
+of mind are heritable, and that use and wont as bearing on this point
+run with sufficient uniformity to bring a passably uniform result. It
+may be added that in this concatenation spoken of there seems to be
+comprised, ordinarily, that sentimental attachment to habitat and custom
+that is called love of home, or in its accentuated expression,
+home-sickness; so also an invidious self-complacency, coupled with a
+gregarious bent which gives the invidious comparison a group content;
+and further, commonly if not invariably, a bent of abnegation,
+self-abasement, subservience, or whatever it may best be called, that
+inclines the bearer unreasoningly and unquestioningly to accept and
+serve a prescriptive ideal given by custom or by customary authority.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The conclusion would therefore provisionally run to the effect that
+under modern conditions the patriotic animus is wholly a disserviceable
+trait in the spiritual endowment of these peoples,--in so far as bears
+on the material conditions of life unequivocally, and as regards the
+cultural interests more at large presumptively; whereas there is no
+assured ground for a discriminating opinion as touches its possible
+utility or disutility at any remote period in the past. There is, of
+course, always room for the conservative estimate that, as the
+possession of this spiritual trait has not hitherto resulted in the
+extinction of the race, so it may also in the calculable future
+continue to bring no more grievous results than a degree of mischief,
+without even stopping or greatly retarding the increase of population.
+
+All this, of course, is intended to apply only so far as it goes. It
+must not be taken as intending to say any least word in derogation of
+those high qualities that inspire the patriotic citizen. In its
+economic, biological and cultural incidence patriotism appears to be an
+untoward trait of human nature; which has, of course, nothing to say as
+to its moral excellence, its aesthetic value, or its indispensability to
+a worthy life. No doubt, it is in all these respects deserving of all
+the esteem and encomiums that fall to its share. Indeed, its well-known
+moral and aesthetic value, as well as the reprobation that is visited on
+any shortcomings in this respect, signify, for the purposes of the
+present argument, nothing more than that the patriotic animus meets the
+unqualified approval of men because they are, all and several, infected
+with it. It is evidence of the ubiquitous, intimate and ineradicable
+presence of this quality in human nature; all the more since it
+continues untiringly to be held in the highest esteem in spite of the
+fact that a modicum of reflection should make its disserviceability
+plain to the meanest understanding. No higher praise of moral
+excellence, and no profounder test of loyalty, can be asked than this
+current unreserved commendation of a virtue that makes invariably for
+damage and discomfort. The virtuous impulse must be deep-seated and
+indefeasible that drives men incontinently to do good that evil may come
+of it. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him."
+
+In the light--and it is a dim and wavering light--of the archaeological
+evidence, helped out by circumstantial evidence from such parallel or
+analogous instances as are afforded by existing communities on a
+comparable level of culture, one may venture more or less confidently on
+a reconstruction of the manner of life among the early Europeans, of
+early neolithic times and later.[5] And so one may form some conception
+of the part played by this patriotic animus among those beginnings,
+when, if not the race, at least its institutions were young; and when
+the native temperament of these peoples was tried out and found fit to
+survive through the age-long and slow-moving eras of stone and bronze.
+In this connection, it appears safe to assume that since early neolithic
+times no sensible change has taken effect in the racial complexion of
+the European peoples; and therefore no sensible change in their
+spiritual and mental make-up. So that in respect of the spiritual
+elements that go to make up this patriotic animus the Europeans of today
+will be substantially identical with the Europeans of that early time.
+The like is true as regards those other traits of temperament that come
+in question here, as being included among the stable characteristics
+that still condition the life of these peoples under the altered
+circumstances of the modern age.
+
+[Footnote 5: Cf. _Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution_, as
+above.]
+
+The difference between prehistoric Europe and the present state of these
+peoples resolves itself on analysis into a difference in the state of
+the industrial arts, together with such institutional changes as have
+come on in the course of working out this advance in the industrial
+arts. The habits and the exigencies of life among these peoples have
+greatly changed; whereas in temperament and capacities the peoples that
+now live by and under the rule of this altered state of the industrial
+arts are the same as they were. It is to be noted, therefore, that the
+fact of their having successfully come through the long ages of
+prehistory by the use of this mental and spiritual endowment can not be
+taken to argue that these peoples are thereby fit to meet the exigencies
+of this later and gravely altered age; nor will it do to assume that
+because these peoples have themselves worked out this modern culture and
+its technology, therefore it must all be suitable for their use and
+conducive to their biological success. The single object lesson of the
+modern urban community, with its endless requirements in the way of
+sanitation, police, compulsory education, charities,--all this and many
+other discrepancies in modern life should enjoin caution on anyone who
+is inclined off-hand to hold that because modern men have created these
+conditions, therefore these must be the most suitable conditions of life
+for modern mankind.
+
+In the beginning, that is to say in the European beginning, men lived in
+small and close groups. Control was close within the group, and the
+necessity of subordinating individual gains and preferences to the
+common good was enjoined on the group by the exigencies of the case, on
+pain of common extinction. The situation and usages of existing Eskimo
+villages may serve to illustrate and enforce the argument on this head.
+The solidarity of sentiment necessary to support the requisite
+solidarity of action in the case would be a prime condition of survival
+in any racial stock exposed to the conditions which surrounded these
+early Europeans. This needful sense of solidarity would touch not simply
+or most imperatively the joint prestige of the group, but rather the
+joint material interests; and would enforce a spirit of mutual support
+and dependence. Which would be rather helped than hindered by a jealous
+attitude of joint prestige; so long as no divergent interests of members
+within the group were in a position to turn this state of the common
+sentiment to their own particular advantage.
+
+This state of the case will have lasted for a relatively long time; long
+enough to have tested the fitness of these peoples for that manner of
+life,--longer, no doubt, than the interval that has elapsed since
+history began. Special interests--e.g., personal and family
+interests--will have been present and active in these days of the
+beginning; but so long as the group at large was small enough to admit
+of a close neighborly contact throughout its extent and throughout the
+workday routine of life, at the same time that it was too small and
+feeble to allow any appreciable dissipation of its joint energies in
+such pursuit of selfish gains as would run counter to the paramount
+business of the common livelihood, so long the sense of a common
+livelihood and a joint fortune would continue to hold any particularist
+ambitions effectually in check. Had it fallen out otherwise, the story
+of the group in question would have been ended, and another and more
+suitably endowed type of men would have taken the place vacated by its
+extinction.
+
+With a sensible advance in the industrial arts the scale of operations
+would grow larger, and the group more numerous and extensive. The margin
+between production and subsistence would also widen and admit additional
+scope for individual ambitions and personal gains. And as this process
+of growth and increasing productive efficiency went on, the control
+exercised by neighborly surveillance, through the sentiment of the
+common good as against the self-seeking pursuits of individuals and
+sub-groups, would gradually slacken; until by progressive disuse it
+would fall into a degree of abeyance; to be called into exercise and
+incite to concerted action only in the face of unusual exigencies
+touching the common fortunes of the group at large, or on persuasion
+that the collective interest of the group at large was placed in
+jeopardy in the molestation of one and another of its members from
+without. The group's prestige at least would be felt to suffer in the
+defeat or discourtesy suffered by any of its members at the hands of any
+alien; and, under compulsion of the ancient sense of group solidarity,
+whatever material hardship or material gain might so fall to individual
+members in their dealings with the alien would pass easy scrutiny as
+material detriment or gain inuring to the group at large,--in the
+apprehension of men whose sense of community interest is inflamed with a
+jealous disposition to safeguard their joint prestige.
+
+With continued advance in the industrial arts the circumstances
+conditioning life will undergo a progressive change of such a character
+that the joint interest of the group at large, in the material respect,
+will progressively be less closely bound up with the material fortunes
+of any particular member or members; until in the course of time and
+change there will, in effect, in ordinary times be no general and
+inclusive community of material interest binding the members together in
+a common fortune and working for a common livelihood. As the rights of
+ownership begin to take effect, so that the ownership of property and
+the pursuit of a livelihood under the rules of ownership come to govern
+men's economic relations, these material concerns will cease to be a
+matter of undivided joint interest, and will fall into the shape of
+interest in severalty. So soon and so far as this institution of
+ownership or property takes effect, men's material interests cease to
+run on lines of group solidarity. Solely, or almost solely, in the
+exceptional case of defense against a predatory incursion from outside,
+do the members of the group have a common interest of a material kind.
+Progressively as the state of the arts advances, the industrial
+organisation advances to a larger scale and a more extensive
+specialisation, with increasing divergence among individual interests
+and individual fortunes; and intercourse over larger distances grows
+easier and makes a larger grouping practicable; which enables a larger,
+prompter and more effective mobilisation of forces with which to defend
+or assert any joint claims. But by the same move it also follows, or at
+least it appears uniformly to have followed in the European case, that
+the accumulation of property and the rights of ownership have
+progressively come into the first place among the material interests of
+these peoples; while anything like a community of usufruct has
+imperceptibly fallen into the background, and has presently gone
+virtually into abeyance, except as an eventual recourse _in extremis_
+for the common defense. Property rights have displaced community of
+usufruct; and invidious distinctions as between persons, sub-groups, and
+classes have displaced community of prestige in the workday routine of
+these peoples; and the distinctions between contrasted persons or
+classes have come to rest, in an ever increasing degree, directly or
+indirectly, on invidious comparisons in respect of pecuniary standing
+rather than on personal affiliation with the group at large.
+
+So, with the advance of the industrial arts a differentiation of a new
+character sets in and presently grows progressively more pronounced and
+more effectual, giving rise to a regrouping on lines that run regardless
+of those frontiers that divide one community from another for purposes
+of patriotic emulation. So far as it comes chiefly and typically in
+question here, this regrouping takes place on two distinct but somewhat
+related principles of contrast: that of wealth and poverty, and that of
+master and servant, or authority and obedience. The material interests
+of the population in this way come to be divided between the group of
+those who own and those who command, on the one hand, and of those who
+work and who obey, on the other hand.
+
+Neither of these two contrasted categories of persons have any direct
+material interest in the maintenance of the patriotic community; or at
+any rate no such interest as should reasonably induce them to spend
+their own time and substance in support of the political (patriotic)
+organisation within which they live. It is only in so far as one or
+another of these interests looks for a more than proportionate share in
+any prospective gain from the joint enterprise, that the group or class
+in question can reasonably be counted on to bear its share in the joint
+venture. And it is only when and in so far as their particular material
+or self-regarding interest is reenforced by patriotic conceit, that they
+can be counted on to spend themselves in furtherance of the patriotic
+enterprise, without the assurance of a more than proportionate share in
+any gains that may be held in prospect from any such joint enterprise;
+and it is only in its patriotic bearing that the political community
+continues to be a joint venture. That is to say, in more generalised
+terms, through the development of the rights of property, and of such
+like prescriptive claims of privilege and prerogative, it has come
+about that other community interests have fallen away, until the
+collective prestige remains as virtually the sole community interest
+which can hold the sentiment of the group in a bond of solidarity.
+
+To one or another of these several interested groups or classes within
+the community the political organisation may work a benefit; but only to
+one or another, not to each and several, jointly or collectively. Since
+by no chance will the benefit derived from such joint enterprise on the
+part of the community at large equal the joint cost; in as much as all
+joint enterprise of the kind that looks to material advantage works by
+one or another method of inhibition and takes effect, if at all, by
+lowering the aggregate efficiency of the several countries concerned,
+with a view to the differential gain of one at the cost of another. So,
+e.g., a protective tariff is plainly a conspiracy in restraint of trade,
+with a view to benefit the conspirators by hindering their competitors.
+The aggregate cost to the community at large of such an enterprise in
+retardation is always more than the gains it brings to those who may
+benefit by it.
+
+In so speaking of the uses to which the common man's patriotic devotion
+may be turned, there is no intention to underrate its intrinsic value as
+a genial and generous trait of human nature. Doubtless it is best and
+chiefly to be appreciated as a spiritual quality that beautifies and
+ennobles its bearer, and that endows him with the full stature of
+manhood, quite irrespective of ulterior considerations. So it is to be
+conceded without argument that this patriotic animus is a highly
+meritorious frame of mind, and that it has an aesthetic value scarcely
+to be overstated in the farthest stretch of poetic license. But the
+question of its serviceability to the modern community, in any other
+than this decorative respect, and particularly its serviceability to the
+current needs of the common man in such a modern community, is not
+touched by such an admission; nor does this recognition of its generous
+spiritual nature afford any help toward answering a further question as
+to how and with what effect this animus may be turned to account by
+anyone who is in position to make use of the forces which it sets free.
+
+Among Christian nations there still is, on the whole, a decided
+predilection for that ancient and authentic line of national repute that
+springs from warlike prowess. This repute for warlike prowess is what
+first comes to mind among civilised peoples when speaking of national
+greatness. And among those who have best preserved this warlike ideal of
+worth, the patriotic ambition is likely to converge on the prestige of
+their sovereign; so that it takes the concrete form of personal loyalty
+to a master, and so combines or coalesces with a servile habit of mind.
+
+But peace hath its victories no less renowned than war, it is said; and
+peaceable folk of a patriotic temper have learned to make the best of
+their meager case and have found self-complacency in these victories of
+the peaceable order. So it may broadly be affirmed that all nations look
+with complacency on their own peculiar Culture--the organised complex of
+habits of thought and of conduct by which their own routine of life is
+regulated--as being in some way worthier than the corresponding habits
+of their neighbors. The case of the German Culture has latterly come
+under a strong light in this way. But while it may be that no other
+nation has been so naive as to make a concerted profession of faith to
+the effect that their own particular way of life is altogether
+commendable and is the only fashion of civilisation that is fit to
+survive; yet it will scarcely be an extravagance to assert that in their
+own secret mind these others, too, are blest with much the same
+consciousness of unique worth. Conscious virtue of this kind is a good
+and sufficient ground for patriotic inflation, so far as it goes. It
+commonly does not go beyond a defensive attitude, however. Now and
+again, as in the latterday German animation on this head, these
+phenomena of national use and wont may come to command such a degree of
+popular admiration as will incite to an aggressive or proselyting
+campaign.
+
+In all this there is nothing of a self-seeking or covetous kind. The
+common man who so lends himself to the aggressive enhancement of the
+national Culture and its prestige has nothing of a material kind to gain
+from the increase of renown that so comes to his sovereign, his
+language, his countrymen's art or science, his dietary, or his God.
+There are no sordid motives in all this. These spiritual assets of
+self-complacency are, indeed, to be rated as grounds of high-minded
+patriotism without afterthought. These aspirations and enthusiasms would
+perhaps be rated as Quixotic by men whose horizon is bounded by the main
+chance; but they make up that substance of things hoped for that
+inflates those headlong patriotic animosities that stir universal
+admiration.
+
+So also, men find an invidious distinction in such matters of physical
+magnitude as their country's area, the number of its population, the
+size of its cities, the extent of its natural resources, its aggregate
+wealth and its wealth per capita, its merchant marine and its foreign
+trade. As a ground of invidious complacency these phenomena of physical
+magnitude and pecuniary traffic are no better and no worse than such
+immaterial assets as the majesty of the sovereign or the perfections of
+the language. They are matters in which the common man is concerned
+only by the accident of domicile, and his only connection with these
+things is an imaginary joint interest in their impressiveness. To these
+things he has contributed substantially nothing, and from them he
+derives no other merit or advantage than a patriotic inflation. He takes
+pride in these things in an invidious way, and there is no good reason
+why he should not; just as there is also no good reason why he should,
+apart from the fact that the common man is so constituted that he,
+mysteriously, takes pride in these things that concern him not.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of the several groups or classes of persons within the political
+frontiers, whose particular interests run systematically at cross
+purposes with those of the community at large under modern conditions,
+the class of masters, rulers, authorities,--or whatever term may seem
+most suitable to designate that category of persons whose characteristic
+occupation is to give orders and command deference,--of the several
+orders and conditions of men these are, in point of substantial motive
+and interest, most patently at variance with all the rest, or with the
+fortunes of the common man. The class will include civil and military
+authorities and whatever nobility there is of a prescriptive and
+privileged kind. The substantial interest of these classes in the common
+welfare is of the same kind as the interest which a parasite has in the
+well-being of his host; a sufficiently substantial interest, no doubt,
+but there is in this relation nothing like a community of interest. Any
+gain on the part of the community at large will materially serve the
+needs of this group of personages, only in so far as it may afford them
+a larger volume or a wider scope for what has in latterday colloquial
+phrase been called "graft." These personages are, of course, not to be
+spoken of with disrespect or with the slightest inflection of
+discourtesy. They are all honorable men. Indeed they afford the
+conventional pattern of human dignity and meritorious achievement, and
+the "Fountain of Honor" is found among them. The point of the argument
+is only that their material or other self-regarding interests are of
+such a nature as to be furthered by the material wealth of the
+community, and more particularly by the increasing volume of the body
+politic; but only with the proviso that this material wealth and this
+increment of power must accrue without anything like a corresponding
+cost to this class. At the same time, since this class of the superiors
+is in some degree a specialised organ of prestige, so that their value,
+and therefore their tenure, both in the eyes of the community and in
+their own eyes, is in the main a "prestige value" and a tenure by
+prestige; and since the prestige that invests their persons is a shadow
+cast by the putative worth of the community at large, it follows that
+their particular interest in the joint prestige is peculiarly alert and
+insistent. But it follows also that these personages cannot of their own
+substance or of their own motion contribute to this collective prestige
+in the same proportion in which it is necessary for them to draw on it
+in support of their own prestige value. It would, in other words, be a
+patent absurdity to call on any of the current ruling classes,
+dynasties, nobility, military and diplomatic corps, in any of the
+nations of Europe, e.g., to preserve their current dignity and command
+the deference that is currently accorded them, by recourse to their own
+powers and expenditure of their own substance, without the usufruct of
+the commonalty whose organ of dignity they are. The current prestige
+value which they enjoy is beyond their unaided powers to create or
+maintain, without the usufruct of the community. Such an enterprise does
+not lie within the premises of the case.
+
+In this bearing, therefore, the first concern with which these
+personages are necessarily occupied is the procurement and retention of
+a suitable usufruct in the material resources and good-will of a
+sufficiently large and industrious population. The requisite good-will
+in these premises is called loyalty, and its retention by the line of
+personages that so trade on prestige rests on a superinduced association
+of ideas, whereby the national honour comes to be confounded in popular
+apprehension with the prestige of these personages who have the keeping
+of it. But the potentates and the establishments, civil and military, on
+whom this prestige value rests will unavoidably come into invidious
+comparison with others of their kind; and, as invariably happens in
+matters of invidious comparison, the emulative needs of all the
+competitors for prestige are "indefinitely extensible," as the phrase of
+the economists has it. Each and several of them incontinently needs a
+further increment of prestige, and therefore also a further increment of
+the material assets in men and resources that are needful as ways and
+means to assert and augment the national honor.
+
+It is true, the notion that their prestige value is in any degree
+conditioned by the material circumstances and the popular imagination of
+the underlying nation is distasteful to many of these vicars of the
+national honour. They will incline rather to the persuasion that this
+prestige value is a distinctive attribute, of a unique order, intrinsic
+to their own persons. But, plainly, any such detached line of magnates,
+notables, kings and mandarins, resting their notability on nothing more
+substantial than a slightly sub-normal intelligence and a moderately
+scrofulous habit of body could not long continue to command that eager
+deference that is accounted their due. Such a picture of majesty would
+be sadly out of drawing. There is little conviction and no great dignity
+to be drawn from the unaided pronouncement:
+
+   "We're here because,
+   We're here because,
+   We're here because
+   We're here,"
+
+even when the doggerel is duly given the rhetorical benefit of a "Tenure
+by the Grace of God." The personages that carry this dignity require the
+backing of a determined and patriotic populace in support of their
+prestige value, and they commonly have no great difficulty in procuring
+it. And their prestige value is, in effect, proportioned to the volume
+of material resources and patriotic credulity that can be drawn on for
+its assertion. It is true, their draught on the requisite sentimental
+and pecuniary support is fortified with large claims of serviceability
+to the common good, and these claims are somewhat easily, indeed
+eagerly, conceded and acted upon; although the alleged benefit to the
+common good will scarcely be visible except in the light of glory shed
+by the blazing torch of patriotism.
+
+In so far as it is of a material nature the benefit which the
+constituted authorities so engage to contribute to the common good, or
+in other words to confer on the common man, falls under two heads:
+defense against aggression from without; and promotion of the
+community's material gain. It is to be presumed that the constituted
+authorities commonly believe more or less implicitly in their own
+professions in so professing to serve the needs of the common man in
+these respects. The common defense is a sufficiently grave matter, and
+doubtless it claims the best affections and endeavour of the citizen;
+but it is not a matter that should claim much attention at this point in
+the argument, as bearing on the service rendered the common man by the
+constituted authorities, taken one with another. Any given governmental
+establishment at home is useful in this respect only as against another
+governmental establishment elsewhere. So that on the slightest
+examination it resolves itself into a matter of competitive patriotic
+enterprise, as between the patriotic aspirations of different
+nationalities led by different governmental establishments; and the
+service so rendered by the constituted authorities in the aggregate
+takes on the character of a remedy for evils of their own creation. It
+is invariably a defense against the concerted aggressions of other
+patriots. Taken in the large, the common defense of any given nation
+becomes a detail of the competitive struggle between rival nationalities
+animated with a common spirit of patriotic enterprise and led by
+authorities constituted for this competitive purpose.
+
+Except on a broad basis of patriotic devotion, and except under the
+direction of an ambitious governmental establishment, no serious
+international aggression is to be had. The common defense, therefore, is
+to be taken as a remedy for evils arising out of the working of the
+patriotic spirit that animates mankind, as brought to bear under a
+discretionary authority; and in any balance to be struck between the
+utility and disutility of this patriotic spirit and of its service in
+the hands of the constituted authorities, it will have to be cancelled
+out as being at the best a mitigation of some of the disorders brought
+on by the presence of national governments resting on patriotic loyalty
+at large.
+
+But this common defense is by no means a vacant rubric in any attempted
+account of modern national enterprise. It is the commonplace and
+conclusive plea of the dynastic statesmen and the aspiring warlords, and
+it is the usual blind behind which events are put in train for eventual
+hostilities. Preparation for the common defense also appears unfailingly
+to eventuate in hostilities. With more or less _bona fides_ the
+statesmen and warriors plead the cause of the common defense, and with
+patriotic alacrity the common man lends himself to the enterprise aimed
+at under that cover. In proportion as the resulting equipment for
+defense grows great and becomes formidable, the range of items which a
+patriotically biased nation are ready to include among the claims to be
+defended grows incontinently larger, until by the overlapping of
+defensive claims between rival nationalities the distinction between
+defense and aggression disappears, except in the biased fancy of the
+rival patriots.
+
+Of course, no reflections are called for here on the current American
+campaign of "Preparedness." Except for the degree of hysteria it appears
+to differ in no substantial respect from the analogous course of
+auto-intoxication among the nationalities of Europe, which came to a
+head in the current European situation. It should conclusively serve the
+turn for any self-possessed observer to call to mind that all the
+civilised nations of warring Europe are, each and several, convinced
+that they are fighting a defensive war.
+
+The aspiration of all right-minded citizens is presumed to be "Peace
+with Honour." So that first, as well as last, among those national
+interests that are to be defended, and in the service of which the
+substance and affections of the common man are enlisted under the aegis
+of the national prowess, comes the national prestige, as a matter of
+course. And the constituted authorities are doubtless sincere and
+single-minded in their endeavors to advance and defend the national
+honour, particularly those constituted authorities that hold their place
+of authority on grounds of fealty; since the national prestige in such a
+case coalesces with the prestige of the nation's ruler in much the same
+degree in which the national sovereignty devolves upon the person of its
+ruler. In so defending or advancing the national prestige, such a
+dynastic or autocratic overlord, together with the other privileged
+elements assisting and dependent on him, is occupied with his own
+interest; his own tenure is a tenure by prestige, and the security of
+his tenure lies in the continued maintenance of that popular fancy that
+invests his person with this national prestige and so constitutes him
+and his retinue of notables and personages its keeper.
+
+But it is uniformly insisted by the statesmen--potentates, notables,
+kings and mandarins--that this aegis of the national prowess in their
+hands covers also many interests of a more substantial and more tangible
+kind. These other, more tangible interests of the community have also a
+value of a direct and personal sort to the dynasty and its hierarchy of
+privileged subalterns, in that it is only by use of the material forces
+of the nation that the dynastic prestige can be advanced and maintained.
+The interest of such constituted authorities in the material welfare of
+the nation is consequently grave and insistent; but it is evidently an
+interest of a special kind and is subject to strict and peculiar
+limitations. The common good, in the material respect, interests the
+dynastic statesman only as a means to dynastic ends; that is to say,
+only in so far as it can be turned to account in the achievement of
+dynastic aims. These aims are "The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory," as
+the sacred formula phrases the same conception in another bearing.
+
+That is to say, the material welfare of the nation is a means to the
+unfolding of the dynastic power; provided always that this material
+welfare is not allowed to run into such ramifications as will make the
+commonwealth an unwieldy instrument in the hands of the dynastic
+statesmen. National welfare is to the purpose only in so far as it
+conduces to political success, which is always a question of warlike
+success in the last resort. The limitation which this consideration
+imposes on the government's economic policy are such as will make the
+nation a self-sufficient or self-balanced economic commonwealth. It must
+be a self-balanced commonwealth at least in such measure as will make it
+self-sustaining in case of need, in all those matters that bear directly
+on warlike efficiency.
+
+Of course, no community can become fully self-sustaining under modern
+conditions, by use of the modern state of the industrial arts, except by
+recourse to such drastic measures of repression as would reduce its
+total efficiency in an altogether intolerable degree. This will hold
+true even of those nations who, like Russia or the United States, are
+possessed of extremely extensive territories and extremely large and
+varied resources; but it applies with greatly accentuated force to
+smaller and more scantily furnished territorial units. Peoples living
+under modern conditions and by use of the modern state of the industrial
+arts necessarily draw on all quarters of the habitable globe for
+materials and products which they can procure to the best advantage
+from outside their own special field so long as they are allowed access
+to these outlying sources of supply; and any arbitrary limitation on
+this freedom of traffic makes the conditions of life that much harder,
+and lowers the aggregate efficiency of the community by that much.
+National self-sufficiency is to be achieved only by a degree of economic
+isolation; and such a policy of economic isolation involves a degree of
+impoverishment and lowered efficiency, but it will also leave the nation
+readier for warlike enterprise on such a scale as its reduced efficiency
+will compass.
+
+So that the best that can be accomplished along this line by the
+dynastic statesmen is a shrewd compromise, embodying such a degree of
+isolation and inhibition as will leave the country passably
+self-sufficient in case of need, without lowering the national
+efficiency to such a point as to cripple its productive forces beyond
+what will be offset by the greater warlike readiness that is so
+attained. The point to which such a policy of isolation and sufficiency
+will necessarily be directed is that measure of inhibition that will
+yield the most facile and effective ways and means of warlike
+enterprise, the largest product of warlike effectiveness to be had on
+multiplying the nation's net efficiency into its readiness to take the
+field.
+
+Into any consideration of this tactical problem a certain subsidiary
+factor enters, in that the patriotic temper of the nation is always more
+or less affected by such an economic policy. The greater the degree of
+effectual isolation and discrimination embodied in the national policy,
+the greater will commonly be its effect on popular sentiment in the way
+of national animosity and spiritual self-sufficiency; which may be an
+asset of great value for the purposes of warlike enterprise.
+
+Plainly, any dynastic statesman who should undertake to further the
+common welfare regardless of its serviceability for warlike enterprise
+would be defeating his own purpose. He would, in effect, go near to
+living up to his habitual professions touching international peace,
+instead of professing to live up to them, as the exigencies of his
+national enterprise now conventionally require him to do. In effect, he
+would be _functus officio_.
+
+There are two great administrative instruments available for this work
+of repression and national self-sufficiency at the hands of the
+imperialistic statesman: the protective tariff, and commercial
+subvention. The two are not consistently to be distinguished from one
+another at all points, and each runs out into a multifarious convolution
+of variegated details; but the principles involved are, after all,
+fairly neat and consistent. The former is of the nature of a conspiracy
+in restraint of trade by repression; the latter, a conspiracy to the
+like effect by subsidised monopoly; both alike act to check the pursuit
+of industry in given lines by artificially increasing the cost of
+production for given individuals or classes of producers, and both alike
+impose a more than proportionate cost on the community within which they
+take effect. Incidentally, both of these methods of inhibition bring a
+degree, though a less degree, of hardship, to the rest of the industrial
+world.
+
+All this is matter of course to all economic students, and it should,
+reasonably, be plain to all intelligent persons; but its voluble denial
+by interested parties, as well as the easy credulity with which
+patriotic citizens allow themselves to accept the sophistries offered in
+defense of these measures of inhibition, has made it seem worth while
+here to recall these commonplaces of economic science.
+
+The ground of this easy credulity is not so much infirmity of intellect
+as it is an exuberance of sentiment, although it may reasonably be
+believed that its more pronounced manifestations--as, e.g., the high
+protective tariff--can be had only by force of a formidable cooperation
+of the two. The patriotic animus is an invidious sentiment of joint
+prestige; and it needs no argument or documentation to bear out the
+affirmation that its bias will lend a color of merit and expediency to
+any proposed measure that can, however speciously, promise an increase
+of national power or prestige. So that when the statesmen propose a
+policy of inhibition and mitigated isolation on the professed ground
+that such a policy will strengthen the nation economically by making it
+economically self-supporting, as well as ready for any warlike
+adventure, the patriotic citizen views the proposed measures through the
+rosy haze of national aspirations and lets the will to believe persuade
+him that whatever conduces to a formidable national battle-front will
+also contribute to the common good. At the same time all these national
+conspiracies in restraint of trade are claimed, with more or less
+reason, to inflict more or less harm on rival nationalities with whom
+economic relations are curtailed; and patriotism being an invidious
+sentiment, the patriotic citizen finds comfort in the promise of
+mischief to these others, and is all the more prone to find all kinds of
+merit in proposals that look to such an invidious outcome. In any
+community imbued with an alert patriotic spirit, the fact that any given
+circumstance, occurrence or transaction can be turned to account as a
+means of invidious distinction or invidious discrimination against
+humanity beyond the national pale, will always go far to procure
+acceptance of it as being also an article of substantial profit to the
+community at large, even though the slightest unbiased scrutiny would
+find it of no ascertainable use in any other bearing than that of
+invidious mischief. And whatever will bear interpretation as an
+increment of the nation's power or prowess, in comparison with rival
+nationalities, will always be securely counted as an item of joint
+credit, and will be made to serve the collective conceit as an invidious
+distinction; and patriotic credulity will find it meritorious also in
+other respects.
+
+So, e.g., it is past conception that such a patent imbecility as a
+protective tariff should enlist the support of any ordinarily
+intelligent community except by the help of some such chauvinistic
+sophistry. So also, the various royal establishments of Europe, e.g.,
+afford an extreme but therefore all the more convincing illustration of
+the same logical fallacy. These establishments and personages are great
+and authentic repositories of national prestige, and they are therefore
+unreflectingly presumed by their several aggregations of subjects to be
+of some substantial use also in some other bearing; but it would be a
+highly diverting exhibition of credulity for any outsider to fall into
+that amazing misconception. But the like is manifestly true of
+commercial turnover and export trade among modern peoples; although on
+this head the infatuation is so ingrained and dogmatic that even a rank
+outsider is expected to accept the fallacy without reflection, on pain
+of being rated as unsafe or unsound. Such matters again, as the
+dimensions of the national territory, or the number of the population
+and the magnitude of the national resources, are still and have perhaps
+always been material for patriotic exultation, and are fatuously
+believed to have some great significance for the material fortunes of
+the common man; although it should be plain on slight reflection that
+under modern conditions of ownership, these things, one and all, are of
+no consequence to the common man except as articles of prestige to
+stimulate his civic pride. The only conjuncture under which these and
+the like national holdings can come to have a meaning as joint or
+collective assets would arise in case of a warlike adventure carried to
+such extremities as would summarily cancel vested rights of ownership
+and turn them to warlike uses. While the rights of ownership hold, the
+common man, who does not own these things, draws no profit from their
+inclusion in the national domain; indeed, he is at some cost to
+guarantee their safe tenure by their rightful owners.
+
+In so pursuing their quest of the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, by
+use of the national resources and by sanction of the national spirit,
+the constituted authorities also assume the guardianship of sundry
+material interests that are presumed to touch the common good; such as
+security of person and property in dealings with aliens, whether at home
+or abroad; security of investment and trade, and vindication of their
+citizens before the law in foreign parts; and, chiefly and ubiquitously,
+furtherance and extension of the national trade into foreign parts,
+particularly of the export trade, on terms advantageous to the traders
+of the nation.
+
+The last named of these advantages is the one on which stress is apt to
+fall in the argument of all those who advocate an unfolding of national
+power, as being a matter of vital material benefit to the common man.
+The other items indicated above, it is plain on the least reflection,
+are matters of slight if any material consequence to him. The common
+man--that is ninety-nine and a fraction in one hundred of the nation's
+common men--has no dealings with aliens in foreign parts, as capitalist,
+trader, missionary or wayfaring man, and has no occasion for security of
+person or property under circumstances that raise any remotest question
+of the national prowess or the national prestige; nor does he seek or
+aspire to trade to foreign parts on any terms, equitable or otherwise,
+or to invest capital among aliens under foreign rule, or to exploit
+concessions or take orders, for acceptance or delivery; nor, indeed,
+does he at all commonly come into even that degree of contact with
+abroad that is implied in the purchase of foreign securities. Virtually
+the sole occasion on which he comes in touch with the world beyond the
+frontier is when, and if, he goes away from home as an emigrant, and so
+ceases to enjoy the tutelage of the nation's constituted authorities.
+But the common man, in point of fact, is a home-keeping body, who
+touches foreign parts and aliens outside the national frontiers only at
+the second or third remove, if at all, in the occasional purchase of
+foreign products, or in the sale of goods that may find their way abroad
+after he has lost sight of them. The exception to this general rule
+would be found in the case of those under-sized nations that are too
+small to contain the traffic in which their commonplace population are
+engaged, and that have neither national prowess nor national prestige to
+fall back on in a conceivable case of need,--and whose citizens,
+individually, appear to be as fortunately placed in their workday
+foreign relations, without a background of prowess and prestige, as the
+citizens of the great powers who are most abundantly provided in these
+respects.
+
+With wholly negligible exceptions, these matters touch the needs or the
+sensibilities of the common man only through the channel of the
+national honour, which may be injured in the hardships suffered by his
+compatriots in foreign parts, or which may, again, be repaired or
+enhanced by the meritorious achievements of the same compatriots; of
+whose existence he will commonly have no other or more substantial
+evidence, and in whose traffic he has no share other than this vicarious
+suffering of vague and remote indignity or vainglory by force of the
+wholly fortuitous circumstance that they are (inscrutably) his
+compatriots. These immaterial goods of vicarious prestige are, of
+course, not to be undervalued, nor is the fact to be overlooked or
+minimised that they enter into the sum total of the common citizen's
+"psychic income," for whatever they may foot up to; but evidently their
+consideration takes us back to the immaterial category of prestige
+value, from which the argument just now was hopefully departing with a
+view to consideration of the common man's material interest in that
+national enterprise about which patriotic aspirations turn.
+
+These things, then, are matters in which the common man has an interest
+only as they have a prestige value. But there need be no question as to
+their touching his sensibilities and stirring him to action, and even to
+acts of bravery and self-sacrifice. Indignity or ill treatment of his
+compatriots in foreign parts, even when well deserved, as is not
+infrequently the case, are resented with a vehemence that is greatly to
+the common man's credit, and greatly also to the gain of those patriotic
+statesmen who find in such grievances their safest and most reliable raw
+materials for the production of international difficulty. That he will
+so respond to the stimulus of these, materially speaking irrelevant,
+vicissitudes of good or ill that touch the fortunes of his compatriots,
+as known to him by hearsay, bears witness, of course, to the high
+quality of his manhood; but it falls very far short of arguing that
+these promptings of his patriotic spirit have any value as traits that
+count toward his livelihood or his economic serviceability in the
+community in which he lives. It is all to his credit, and it goes to
+constitute him a desirable citizen, in the sense that he is properly
+amenable to the incitements of patriotic emulation; but it is none the
+less to be admitted, however reluctantly, that this trait of impulsively
+vicarious indignation or vainglory is neither materially profitable to
+himself nor an asset of the slightest economic value to the community in
+which he lives. Quite the contrary, in fact. So also is it true that the
+common man derives no material advantage from the national success along
+this line, though he commonly believes that it all somehow inures to his
+benefit. It would seem that an ingrown bias of community interest,
+blurred and driven by a jealously sensitive patriotic pride, bends his
+faith uncritically to match his inclination. His persuasion is a work of
+preconception rather than of perception.
+
+But the most substantial and most unqualified material benefit currently
+believed to be derivable from a large unfolding of national prowess and
+a wide extension of the national domain is an increased volume of the
+nation's foreign trade, particularly of the export trade. "Trade follows
+the Flag." And this larger trade and enhanced profit is presumed to
+inure to the joint benefit of the citizens. Such is the profession of
+faith of the sagacious statesmen and such is also the unreflecting
+belief of the common man.
+
+It may be left an open question if an unfolding of national prowess and
+prestige increases the nation's trade, whether in imports or in
+exports. There is no available evidence that it has any effect of the
+kind. What is not an open question is the patent fact that such an
+extension of trade confers no benefit on the common man, who is not
+engaged in the import or export business. More particularly does it
+yield him no advantage at all commensurate with the cost involved in any
+endeavour so to increase the volume of trade by increasing the nation's
+power and extending its dominion. The profits of trade go not to the
+common man at large but to the traders whose capital is invested; and it
+is a completely idle matter to the common citizen whether the traders
+who profit by the nation's trade are his compatriots or not.[6]
+
+[Footnote 6: All this, which should be plain without demonstration, has
+been repeatedly shown in the expositions of various peace advocates,
+typically by Mr. Angell.]
+
+The pacifist argument on the economic futility of national ambitions
+will commonly rest its case at this point; having shown as unreservedly
+as need be that national ambition and all its works belong of right
+under that rubric of the litany that speaks of Fire, Flood and
+Pestilence. But an hereditary bent of human nature is not to be put out
+of the way with an argument showing that it has its disutilities. So
+with the patriotic animus; it is a factor to be counted with, rather
+than to be exorcised.
+
+As has been remarked above, in the course of time and change the advance
+of the industrial arts and of the institutions of ownership have taken
+such a turn that the working system of industry and business no longer
+runs on national lines and, indeed, no longer takes account of national
+frontiers,--except in so far as the national policies and legislation,
+arbitrarily and partially, impose these frontiers on the workings of
+trade and industry. The effect of such regulation for political ends is,
+with wholly negligible exceptions, detrimental to the efficient working
+of the industrial system under modern conditions; and it is therefore
+detrimental to the material interests of the common citizen. But the
+case is not the same as regards the interests of the traders. Trade is a
+competitive affair, and it is to the advantage of the traders engaged in
+any given line of business to extend their own markets and to exclude
+competing traders. Competition may be the soul of trade, but monopoly is
+necessarily the aim of every trader. And the national organisation is of
+service to its traders in so far as it shelters them, wholly or partly,
+from the competition of traders of other nationalities, or in so far as
+it furthers their enterprise by subvention or similar privileges as
+against their competitors, whether at home or abroad. The gain that so
+comes to the nation's traders from any preferential advantage afforded
+them by national regulations, or from any discrimination against traders
+of foreign nationality, goes to the traders as private gain. It is of no
+benefit to any of their compatriots; since there is no community of
+usufruct that touches these gains of the traders. So far as concerns his
+material advantage, it is an idle matter to the common citizen whether
+he deals with traders of his own nationality or with aliens; both alike
+will aim to buy cheap and sell dear, and will charge him "what the
+traffic will bear." Nor does it matter to him whether the gains of this
+trade go to aliens or to his compatriots; in either case equally they
+immediately pass beyond his reach, and are equally removed from any
+touch of joint interest on his part. Being private property, under
+modern law and custom he has no use of them, whether a national frontier
+does or does not intervene between his domicile and that of their owner.
+
+These are facts that every man of sound mind knows and acts on without
+doubt or hesitation in his own workday affairs. He would scarcely even
+find amusement in so futile a proposal as that his neighbor should share
+his business profits with him for no better reason than that he is a
+compatriot. But when the matter is presented as a proposition in
+national policy and embroidered with an invocation of his patriotic
+loyalty the common citizen will commonly be found credulous enough to
+accept the sophistry without abatement. His archaic sense of group
+solidarity will still lead him at his own cost to favor his trading
+compatriots by the imposition of onerous trade regulations for their
+private advantage, and to interpose obstacles in the way of alien
+traders. All this ingenious policy of self-defeat is greatly helped out
+by the patriotic conceit of the citizens; who persuade themselves to see
+in it an accession to the power and prestige of their own nation and a
+disadvantage to rival nationalities. It is, indeed, more than doubtful
+if such a policy of self-defeat as is embodied in current international
+trade discriminations could be insinuated into the legislation of any
+civilized nation if the popular intelligence were not so clouded with
+patriotic animosity as to let a prospective detriment to their foreign
+neighbors count as a gain to themselves.
+
+So that the chief material use of the patriotic bent in modern
+populations, therefore, appears to be its use to a limited class of
+persons engaged in foreign trade, or in business that comes in
+competition with foreign industry. It serves their private gain by
+lending effectual countenance to such restraint of international trade
+as would not be tolerated within the national domain. In so doing it has
+also the secondary and more sinister effect of dividing the nations on
+lines of rivalry and setting up irreconcilable claims and ambitions, of
+no material value but of far-reaching effect in the way of provocation
+to further international estrangement and eventual breach of the peace.
+
+How all this falls in with the schemes of militant statesmen, and
+further reacts on the freedom and personal fortunes of the common man,
+is an extensive and intricate topic, though not an obscure one; and it
+has already been spoken of above, perhaps as fully as need be.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ON THE CONDITIONS OF A LASTING PEACE
+
+
+The considerations set out in earlier chapters have made it appear that
+the patriotic spirit of modern peoples is the abiding source of
+contention among nations. Except for their patriotism a breach of the
+peace among modern peoples could not well be had. So much will doubtless
+be assented to as a matter of course. It is also a commonplace of
+current aphoristic wisdom that both parties to a warlike adventure in
+modern times stand to lose, materially; whatever nominal--that is to say
+political--gains may be made by one or the other. It has also appeared
+from these considerations recited in earlier passages that this
+patriotic spirit prevails throughout, among all civilised peoples, and
+that it pervades one nation about as ubiquitously as another. Nor is
+there much evidence of a weakening of this sinister proclivity with the
+passage of time or the continued advance in the arts of life. The only
+civilized nations that can be counted on as habitually peaceable are
+those who are so feeble or are so placed as to be cut off from hope of
+gain through contention. Vainglorious arrogance may run at a higher
+tension among the more backward and boorish nations; but it is not
+evident that the advance guard among the civilised peoples are imbued
+with a less complete national self-complacency. If the peace is to be
+kept, therefore, it will have to be kept by and between peoples made up,
+in effect, of complete patriots; which comes near being a contradiction
+in terms. Patriotism is useful for breaking the peace, not for keeping
+it. It makes for national pretensions and international jealously and
+distrust, with warlike enterprise always in perspective; as a way to
+national gain or a recourse in case of need. And there is commonly no
+settled demarkation between these two contrasted needs that urge a
+patriotic people forever to keep one eye on the chance of a recourse to
+arms.
+
+Therefore any calculus of the Chances of Peace appears to become a
+reckoning of the forces which may be counted on to keep a patriotic
+nation in an unstable equilibrium of peace for the time being. As has
+just been remarked above, among civilised peoples only those nations can
+be counted on consistently to keep the peace who are so feeble or
+otherwise so placed as to be cut off from hope of national gain. And
+these can apparently be so counted on only as regards aggression, not as
+regards the national defense, and only in so far as they are not drawn
+into warlike enterprise, collectively, by their more competent
+neighbors. Even the feeblest and most futile of them feels in honour
+bound to take up arms in defense of such national pretensions as they
+still may harbour; and all of them harbour such pretensions. In certain
+extreme cases, which it might seem invidious to specify more explicitly,
+it is not easy to discover any specific reasons for the maintenance of a
+national establishment, apart from the vindication of certain national
+pretensions which would quietly lapse in the absence of a national
+establishment on whom their vindication is incumbent.
+
+Of the rest, the greater nations that are spoken of as Powers no such
+general statement will hold. These are the peoples who stand, in
+matters of national concern, on their own initiative; and the question
+of peace and war at large is in effect, a question of peace and war
+among these Powers. They are not so numerous that they can be sifted
+into distinct classes, and yet they differ among themselves in such a
+way that they may, for the purpose in hand, fairly be ranged under two
+distinguishable if not contrasted heads: those which may safely be
+counted on spontaneously to take the offensive, and those which will
+fight on provocation. Typically of the former description are Germany
+and Japan. Of the latter are the French and British, and less
+confidently the American republic. In any summary statement of this kind
+Russia will have to be left on one side as a doubtful case, for reasons
+to which the argument may return at a later point; the prospective
+course of things in Russia is scarcely to be appraised on the ground of
+its past. Spain and Italy, being dubious Powers at the best, need not
+detain the argument; they are, in the nature of things, subsidiaries who
+wait on the main chance. And Austria, with whatever the name may cover,
+is for the immediate purpose to be counted under the head of Germany.
+
+There is no invidious comparison intended in so setting off these two
+classes of nations in contrast to one another. It is not a contrast of
+merit and demerit or of prestige. Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan
+are, in the nature of things as things go, bent in effect on a
+disturbance of the peace,--with a view to advance the cause of their own
+dominion. On a large view of the case, such as many German statesmen
+were in the habit of professing in the years preceding the great war, it
+may perhaps appear reasonable to say--as they were in the habit of
+saying--that these Imperial Powers are as well within the lines of fair
+and honest dealing in their campaign of aggression as the other Powers
+are in taking a defensive attitude against their aggression. Some sort
+of international equity has been pleaded in justification of their
+demand for an increased share of dominion. At least it has appeared that
+these Imperial statesmen have so persuaded themselves after very mature
+deliberation; and they have showed great concern to persuade others of
+the equity of their Imperial claim to something more than the law would
+allow. These sagacious, not to say astute, persons have not only reached
+a conviction to this effect, but they have become possessed of this
+conviction in such plenary fashion that, in the German case, they have
+come to admit exceptions or abatement of the claim only when and in so
+far as the campaign of equitable aggression on which they had entered
+has been proved impracticable by the fortunes of war.
+
+With some gift for casuistry one may, at least conceivably, hold that
+the felt need of Imperial self-aggrandisement may become so urgent as to
+justify, or at least to condone, forcible dispossession of weaker
+nationalities. This might, indeed it has, become a sufficiently
+perplexing question of casuistry, both as touches the punctilios of
+national honour and as regards an equitable division between rival
+Powers in respect of the material means of mastery. So in private life
+it may become a moot question--in point of equity--whether the craving
+of a kleptomaniac may not on occasion rise to such an intolerable pitch
+of avidity as to justify him in seizing whatever valuables he can safely
+lay hands on, to ease the discomfort of ungratified desire. In private
+life any such endeavour to better oneself at one's neighbors' cost is
+not commonly reprobated if it takes effect on a decently large scale
+and shrewdly within the flexibilities of the law or with the connivance
+of its officers. Governing international endeavours of this class there
+is no law so inflexible that it can not be conveniently made over to fit
+particular circumstances. And in the absence of law the felt need of a
+formal justification will necessarily appeal to the unformulated
+equities of the case, with some such outcome as alluded to above. All
+that, of course, is for the diplomatists to take care of.
+
+But any speculation on the equities involved in the projected course of
+empire to which these two enterprising nations are committing themselves
+must run within the lines of diplomatic parable, and will have none but
+a speculative interest. It is not a matter of equity. Accepting the
+situation as it stands, it is evident that any peace can only have a
+qualified meaning, in the sense of armistice, so long as there is
+opportunity for national enterprise of the character on which these two
+enterprising national establishments are bent, and so long as these and
+the like national establishments remain. So, taking the peaceable
+professions of their spokesmen at a discount of one hundred percent, as
+one necessarily must, and looking to the circumstantial evidence of the
+case, it is abundantly plain that at least these two imperial Powers may
+be counted on consistently to manoeuvre for warlike advantage so long as
+any peace compact holds, and to break the peace so soon as the strategy
+of Imperial enterprise appears to require it.
+
+There has been much courteous make-believe of amiable and upright
+solicitude on this head the past few years, both in diplomatic
+intercourse and among men out of doors; and since make-believe is a
+matter of course in diplomatic intercourse it is right and seemly, of
+course, that no overt recognition of unavowed facts should be allowed
+to traverse this run of make-believe within the precincts of diplomatic
+intercourse. But in any ingenuous inquiry into the nature of peace and
+the conditions of its maintenance there can be no harm in conveniently
+leaving the diplomatic make-believe on one side and looking to the
+circumstances that condition the case, rather than to the formal
+professions designed to mask the circumstances.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Chief among the relevant circumstances in the current situation are the
+imperial designs of Germany and Japan. These two national establishments
+are very much alike. So much so that for the present purpose a single
+line of analysis will passably cover both cases. The same line of
+analysis will also apply, with slight adaptation, to more than one of
+the other Powers, or near-Powers, of the modern world; but in so far as
+such is held to be the case, that is not a consideration that weakens
+the argument as applied to these two, which are to be taken as the
+consummate type-form of a species of national establishments. They are,
+between them, the best instance there is of what may be called a
+Dynastic State.
+
+Except as a possible corrective of internal disorders and discontent,
+neither of the two States "desires" war; but both are bent on dominion,
+and as the dominion aimed at is not to be had except by fighting for it,
+both in effect are incorrigibly bent on warlike enterprise. And in
+neither case will considerations of equity, humanity, decency, veracity,
+or the common good be allowed to trouble the quest of dominion. As lies
+in the nature of the dynastic State, imperial dominion, in the ambitions
+of both, is beyond price; so that no cost is too high so long as
+ultimate success attends the imperial enterprise. So much is commonplace
+knowledge among all men who are at all conversant with the facts.
+
+To anyone who harbors a lively sentimental prejudice for or against
+either or both of the two nations so spoken of, or for or against the
+manner of imperial enterprise to which both are committed, it may seem
+that what has just been said of them and their relation to the world's
+peace runs on something of a bias and conveys something of dispraise and
+reprobation. Such is not the intention, however, though the appearance
+is scarcely to be avoided. It is necessary for the purposes of the
+argument unambiguously to recognise the nature of these facts with which
+the inquiry is concerned; and any plain characterisation of the facts
+will unavoidably carry a fringe of suggestions of this character,
+because current speech is adapted for their reprobation. The point aimed
+at is not this inflection of approval or disapproval. The facts are to
+be taken impersonally for what they are worth in their causal bearing on
+the chance of peace or war; not at their sentimental value as traits of
+conduct to be appraised in point of their goodness or expediency.
+
+So seen without prejudice, then, if that may be, this Imperial
+enterprise of these two Powers is to be rated as the chief circumstance
+bearing on the chances of peace and conditioning the terms on which any
+peace plan must be drawn. Evidently, in the presence of these two
+Imperial Powers any peace compact will be in a precarious case; equally
+so whether either or both of them are parties to such compact or not. No
+engagement binds a dynastic statesman in case it turns out not to
+further the dynastic enterprise. The question then recurs: How may peace
+be maintained within the horizon of German or Japanese ambitions? There
+are two obvious alternatives, neither of which promises an easy way out
+of the quandary in which the world's peace is placed by their presence:
+Submission to their dominion, or Elimination of these two Powers. Either
+alternative would offer a sufficiently deterrent outlook, and yet any
+project for devising some middle course of conciliation and amicable
+settlement, which shall be practicable and yet serve the turn, scarcely
+has anything better to promise. The several nations now engaged on a war
+with the greater of these Imperial Powers hold to a design of
+elimination, as being the only measure that merits hopeful
+consideration. The Imperial Power in distress bespeaks peace and
+good-will.
+
+Those advocates, whatever their nationality, who speak for negotiation
+with a view to a peace compact which is to embrace these States intact,
+are aiming, in effect, to put things in train for ultimate submission to
+the mastery of these Imperial Powers. In these premises an amicable
+settlement and a compact of perpetual peace will necessarily be
+equivalent to arranging a period of recuperation and recruiting for a
+new onset of dynastic enterprise. For, in the nature of the case, no
+compact binds the dynastic statesman, and no consideration other than
+the pursuit of Imperial dominion commands his attention.
+
+There is, of course, no intention to decry this single-mindedness that
+is habitually put in evidence by the dynastic statesmen. Nor should it
+be taken as evidence of moral obliquity in them. It is rather the result
+of a peculiar moral attitude or bent, habitual to such statesmen, and in
+its degree also habitual to their compatriots, and is indispensably
+involved in the Imperial frame of mind. The consummation of Imperial
+mastery being the highest and ubiquitously ulterior end of all
+endeavour, its pursuit not only relieves its votaries from the
+observance of any minor obligations that run counter to its needs, but
+it also imposes a moral obligation to make the most of any opportunity
+for profitable deceit and chicanery that may offer. In short, the
+dynastic statesman is under the governance of a higher morality, binding
+him to the service of his nation's ambition--or in point of fact, to the
+personal service of his dynastic master--to which it is his dutiful
+privilege loyally to devote all his powers of force and fraud.
+
+Democratically-minded persons, who are not moved by the call of loyalty
+to a gratuitous personal master, may have some difficulty in
+appreciating the force and the moral austerity of this spirit of
+devotion to an ideal of dynastic aggrandisement, and in seeing how its
+paramount exigence will set aside all meticulous scruples of personal
+rectitude and veracity, as being a shabby with-holding of service due.
+
+To such of these doubters as still have retained some remnants of their
+religious faith this attitude of loyalty may perhaps be made
+intelligible by calling to mind the analogous self-surrender of the
+religious devotee. And in this connection it may also be to the purpose
+to recall that in point of its genesis and derivation that unreserved
+self-abasement and surrender to the divine ends and guidance, which is
+the chief grace and glory of the true believer, is held by secular
+students of these matters to be only a sublimated analogue or
+counterfeit of this other dutiful abasement that constitutes loyalty to
+a temporal master. The deity is currently spoken of as The Heavenly
+King, under whose dominion no sinner has a right that He is bound to
+respect; very much after the fashion in which no subject of a dynastic
+state has a right which the State is bound to respect. Indeed, all these
+dynastic establishments that so seek the Kingdom, the Power and the
+Glory are surrounded with a penumbra of divinity, and it is commonly a
+bootless question where the dynastic powers end and the claims of
+divinity begin. There is something of a coalescence.[7]
+
+[Footnote 7: "To us the state is the most indispensable as well as the
+highest requisite to our earthly existence.... All individualistic
+endeavor ... must be unreservedly subordinated to this lofty claim....
+The state ... eventually is of infinitely more value than the sum of all
+the individuals within its jurisdiction." "This conception of the state,
+which is as much a part of our life as is the blood in our veins, is
+nowhere to be found in the English Constitution, and is quite foreign to
+English thought, and to that of America as well."--Eduard Meyer,
+_England, its Political Organisation and Development and the War against
+Germany_, translated by H.S. White. Boston 1916. pp. 30-31.]
+
+The Kaiser holds dominion by divine grace and is accountable to none but
+God, if to Him. The whole case is in a still better state of repair as
+touches the Japanese establishment, where the Emperor is a lineal
+descendant of the supreme deity, Amaterazu (_o mi Kami_), and where, by
+consequence, there is no line of cleavage between a divine and a secular
+mastery. Pursuant to this more unqualified authenticity of autocratic
+rule, there is also to be found in this case a correspondingly
+unqualified devotion in the subjects and an unqualified subservience to
+dynastic ends on the part of the officers of the crown. The coalescence
+of dynastic rule with the divine order is less complete in the German
+case, but all observers bear witness that it all goes far enough also in
+the German case. This state of things is recalled here as a means of
+making plain that the statesmen of these Imperial Powers must in the
+nature of the case, and without blame, be drawn out from under the
+customary restraint of those principles of vulgar morality that are
+embodied in the decalogue. It is not that the subject, or--what comes to
+the same thing--the servant of such a dynastic State may not be upright,
+veracious and humane in private life, but only that he must not be
+addicted to that sort of thing in such manner or degree as might hinder
+his usefulness for dynastic purposes. These matters of selfishly
+individual integrity and humanity have no weight as against the
+exigencies of the dynastic enterprise.
+
+These considerations may not satisfy all doubters as to the moral
+sufficiency of these motives that so suffice to decide the dynastic
+statesmen on their enterprise of aggression by force and fraud; but it
+should be evident that so long as these statesmen continue in the frame
+of mind spoken of, and so long as popular sentiment in these countries
+continues, as hitherto, to lend them effectual support in the pursuit of
+such Imperial enterprise, so long it must also remain true that no
+enduring peace can be maintained within the sweep of their Imperial
+ambition. Any peace compact would necessarily be, in effect, an
+armistice terminable at will and serving as a season of preparation to
+meet a deferred opportunity. For the peaceable nations it would, in
+effect, be a respite and a season of preparation for eventual submission
+to the Imperial rule.
+
+By advocates of such a negotiated compact of perpetual peace it has been
+argued that the populace underlying these Imperial Powers will readily
+be brought to realise the futility and inexpediency of such dynastic
+enterprise, if only the relevant facts are brought to their knowledge,
+and that so these Powers will be constrained to keep the peace by
+default of popular support for their warlike projects. What is required,
+it is believed by these sanguine persons, is that information be
+competently conveyed to the common people of these warlike nations,
+showing them that they have nothing to apprehend in the way of
+aggression or oppressive measures from the side of their more peaceable
+neighbours; whereupon their warlike animus will give place to a
+reasonable and enlightened frame of mind. This argument runs tacitly or
+explicitly, on the premise that these peoples who have so
+enthusiastically lent themselves to the current warlike enterprise are
+fundamentally of the same racial complexion and endowed with the same
+human nature as their peaceable neighbours, who would be only too glad
+to keep the peace on any terms of tolerable security from aggression. If
+only a fair opportunity is offered for the interested peoples to come to
+an understanding, it is held, a good understanding will readily be
+reached; at least so far as to result in a reasonable willingness to
+submit questions in dispute to an intelligent canvass and an equitable
+arbitration.
+
+Projects for a negotiated peace compact, to include the dynastic States,
+can hold any prospect of a happy issue only if this line of argument, or
+its equivalent, is pertinent and conclusive; and the argument is to the
+point only in so far as its premises are sound and will carry as far as
+the desired conclusion. Therefore a more detailed attention to the
+premises on which it runs will be in place, before any project of the
+kind is allowed to pass inspection.
+
+As to homogeneity of race and endowment among the several nations in
+question, the ethnologists, who are competent to speak of that matter,
+are ready to assert that this homogeneity goes much farther among the
+nations of Europe than any considerable number of peace advocates would
+be ready to claim. In point of race, and broadly speaking, there is
+substantially no difference between these warring nations, along any
+east-and-west line; while the progressive difference in racial
+complexion that is always met with along any north-and-south line,
+nowhere coincides with a national or linguistic frontier. In no case
+does a political division between these nations mark or depend on a
+difference of race or of hereditary endowment. And, to give full
+measure, it may be added that also in no case does a division of classes
+within any one of these nations, into noble and base, patrician and
+plebeian, lay and learned, innocent and vicious, mark or rest on any
+slightest traceable degree of difference in race or in heritable
+endowment. On the point of racial homogeneity there is no fault to find
+with the position taken.
+
+If the second postulate in this groundwork of premises on which the
+advocates of negotiable peace base their hopes were as well taken there
+need be no serious misgiving as to the practicability of such a plan.
+The plan counts on information, persuasion and reflection to subdue
+national animosities and jealousies, at least in such measure as would
+make them amenable to reason. The question of immediate interest on this
+head, therefore, would be as to how far this populace may be accessible
+to the contemplated line of persuasion. At present they are,
+notoriously, in a state of obsequious loyalty to the dynasty,
+single-minded devotion to the fortunes of the Fatherland, and
+uncompromising hatred of its enemies. In this frame of mind there is
+nothing that is new, except the degree of excitement. The animus, it
+will be recalled, was all there and on the alert when the call came, so
+that the excitement came on with the sweep of a conflagration on the
+first touch of a suitable stimulus. The German people at large was
+evidently in a highly unstable equilibrium, so that an unexampled
+enthusiasm of patriotic self-sacrifice followed immediately on the first
+incitement to manslaughter, very much as if the nation had been held
+under an hypnotic spell. One need only recall the volume of overbearing
+magniloquence that broke out all over the place in that beginning, when
+The Day was believed to be dawning.
+
+Such a popular frame of mind is not a transient episode, to be created
+at short notice and put aside for a parcel of salutary advice. The
+nation that will make such a massive concerted move with the alacrity
+shown in this instance must be living in a state of alert readiness for
+just such an onset. Yet this is not to be set down as anything in the
+way of a racial trait specifically distinguishing the German people from
+those other adjacent nationalities that are incapable of a similarly
+swift and massive response to the appeal of patriotism. These adjacent
+nationalities are racially identical with the German people, but they do
+not show the same warlike abandon in nearly the same degree.
+
+But for all that, it is a national trait, not to be acquired or put away
+by taking thought. It is just here that the line of definition runs: it
+is a national trait, not a racial one. It is not Nature, but it is
+Second Nature. But a national trait, while it is not heritable in the
+simple sense of that term, has the same semblance, or the same degree,
+of hereditary persistence that belongs to the national institutions,
+usages, conventionalities, beliefs, which distinguish the given nation
+from its neighbors. In this instance it may be said more specifically
+that this eager loyalty is a heritage of the German people at large in
+the same sense and with the same degree of permanence as the institution
+of an autocratic royalty has among them, or a privileged nobility.
+Indeed, it is the institutional counterfoil of these establishments. It
+is of an institutional character, just as the corresponding sense of
+national solidarity and patriotic devotion is among the neighboring
+peoples with whom the German nation comes in comparison. And an
+institution is an historical growth, with just so much of a character of
+permanence and continuity of transmission as is given it by the
+circumstances out of which it has grown. Any institution is a product of
+habit, or perhaps more accurately it is a body of habits of thought
+bearing on a given line of conduct, which prevails with such generality
+and uniformity throughout the group as to have become a matter of common
+sense.
+
+Such an article of institutional furniture is an outcome of usage, not
+of reflection or deliberate choice; and it has consequently a character
+of self-legitimation, so that it stands in the accredited scheme of
+things as intrinsically right and good, and not merely as a shrewdly
+chosen expedient _ad interim_. It affords a norm of life, inosculating
+with a multiplicity of other norms, with which it goes to make up a
+balanced scheme of ends, ways and means governing human conduct; and no
+one such institutional item, therefore, is materially to be disturbed,
+discarded or abated except at the cost of serious derangement to the
+balanced scheme of things in which it belongs as an integral
+constituent. Nor can such a detail norm of conduct and habitual
+propensity come into bearing and hold its place, except by force of
+habituation which is at the same time consonant with the common run of
+habituation to which the given community is subject. It follows that
+the more rigorous, comprehensive, unremitting and long-continued the
+habituation to which a given institutional principle owes its vogue, the
+more intimately and definitively will it be embedded in the common sense
+of the community, the less chance is there of its intrinsic necessity
+being effectually questioned or doubted, and the less chance is there of
+correcting it or abating its force in case circumstances should so
+change as to make its continued rule visibly inexpedient. Its abatement
+will be a work not of deliberation and design, but of defection through
+disuse.
+
+Not that reflection and sane counsel will count for nothing in these
+premises, but only that these exertions of intelligence will count for
+relatively very little by comparison with the run of habituation as
+enforced by the circumstances conditioning any given case; and further,
+that wise counsel and good resolutions can take effect in the way of
+amending any untoward institutional bent only by way of suitable
+habituation, and only at such a rate of change as the circumstances
+governing habituation will allow. It is, at the best, slow work to shift
+the settled lines of any community's scheme of common sense. Now,
+national solidarity, and more particularly an unquestioning loyalty to
+the sovereign and the dynasty, is a matter of course and of commonsense
+necessity with the German people. It is not necessary to call to mind
+that the Japanese nation, which has here been coupled with the German,
+are in the same case, only more so.
+
+Doubtless it would be exceeding the premises to claim that it should
+necessarily take the German people as long-continued and as harsh a
+schooling to unlearn their excess of chauvinism, their servile stooping
+to gratuitous authority, and their eager subservience to the dynastic
+ambitions of their masters, as that which has in the course of history
+induced these habits in them. But it would seem reasonable to expect
+that there should have to be some measure of proportion between what it
+has cost them in time and experience to achieve their current frame of
+mind in this bearing and what it would cost to divest themselves of it.
+It is a question of how long a time and how exacting a discipline would
+be required so far to displace the current scheme of commonsense values
+and convictions in force in the Fatherland as to neutralise their
+current high-wrought principles of servility, loyalty and national
+animosity; and on the solution of this difficulty appear to depend the
+chances of success for any proposed peace compact to which the German
+nation shall be made a party, on terms of what is called an "honorable
+peace."
+
+The national, or rather the dynastic and warlike, animus of this people
+is of the essence of their social and political institutions. Without
+such a groundwork of popular sentiment neither the national
+establishment, nor the social order on which it rests and through which
+it works, could endure. And with this underlying national sentiment
+intact nothing but a dynastic establishment of a somewhat ruthless
+order, and no enduring system of law and order not based on universal
+submission to personal rule, could be installed. Both the popular animus
+and the correlative coercive scheme of law and order are of historical
+growth. Both have been learned, acquired, and are in no cogent sense
+original with the German people. But both alike and conjointly have come
+out of a very protracted, exacting and consistent discipline of mastery
+and subjection, running virtually unbroken over the centuries that have
+passed since the region that is now the Fatherland first passed under
+the predaceous rule of its Teutonic invaders,--for no part of the
+"Fatherland" is held on other tenure than that of forcible seizure in
+ancient times by bands of invaders, with the negligible exception of
+Holstein and a slight extent of territory adjoining that province to the
+south and south-west. Since the time when such peoples as were overtaken
+in this region by the Germanic barbarian invasions, and were reduced to
+subjection and presently merged with their alien masters, the same
+general fashion of law and order that presently grew out of that
+barbarian conquest has continued to govern the life of those peoples,
+with relatively slight and intermittent relaxation of its rigors.
+Contrasted with its beginnings, in the shameful atrocities of the Dark
+Ages and the prehistoric phases of this German occupation, the later
+stages of this system of coercive law and order in the Fatherland will
+appear humane, not to say genial; but as compared with the degree of
+mitigation which the like order of things presently underwent elsewhere
+in western Europe, it has throughout the historical period preserved a
+remarkable degree of that character of arrogance and servility which it
+owes to its barbarian and predatory beginnings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The initial stages of this Germanic occupation of the Fatherland are
+sufficiently obscure under the cloud of unrecorded antiquity that covers
+them; and then, an abundance of obscurantism has also been added by the
+vapours of misguided vanity that have surrounded so nearly all
+historical inquiry on the part of patriotic German scholars. Yet there
+are certain outstanding features in the case, in history and prehistory,
+that are too large or too notorious to be set aside or to be covered
+over, and these may suffice to show the run of circumstances which have
+surrounded the German peoples and shaped their civil and political
+institutions, and whose discipline has guided German habits of thought
+and preserved the German spirit of loyalty in the shape in which it
+underlies the dynastic State of the present day.
+
+Among the most engaging of those fables that make the conventional
+background of German history is the academic legend of a free
+agricultural village community made up of ungraded and masterless men.
+It is not necessary here to claim that such a village community never
+played a part in the remoter prehistoric experiences out of which the
+German people, or their ruling classes, came into the territory of the
+Fatherland; such a claim might divert the argument. But it is
+sufficiently patent to students of those matters today that no such
+community of free and ungraded men had any part in the Germanic
+beginnings; that is to say, in the early experiences of the Fatherland
+under German rule. The meager and ambiguous remarks of Tacitus on the
+state of domestic and civil economy among the inhabitants of Germany
+need no longer detain anyone, in the presence of the available
+archaeological and historical evidence. The circumstantial evidence of
+the prehistoric antiquities which touch this matter, as well as the
+slight allusions of historical records in antiquity, indicate
+unambiguously enough that when the Germanic immigrants moved into the
+territories of the Fatherland they moved in as invaders, or rather as
+marauders, and made themselves masters of the people already living on
+the land. And history quite as unambiguously declares that when the
+Fatherland first comes under its light it presents a dark and bloody
+ground of tumultuous contention and intrigue; where princes and
+princelings, captains of war and of rapine as well as the captains of
+superstition, spend the substance of an ignominiously sordid and servile
+populace in an endless round of mutual raiding, treachery,
+assassinations and supersession.
+
+Taken at their face value, the recorded stories of that early time would
+leave one to infer that the common people, whose industry supported this
+superstructure of sordid mastery, could have survived only by oversight.
+But touched as it is with poetic license and devoted to the admirable
+life of the master class--admirable in their own eyes and in those of
+their chroniclers, as undoubtedly also in the eyes of the subject
+populace--the history of that time doubtless plays up the notable
+exploits and fortunes of its conspicuous personages, somewhat to the
+neglect of the obscure vicissitudes of life and fortune among that human
+raw material by use of which the admirable feats of the master class
+were achieved, and about the use of which the dreary traffic of greed
+and crime went on among the masters.
+
+Of the later history, what covers, say, the last one thousand years,
+there is no need to speak at length. With transient, episodic,
+interruptions it is for the Fatherland a continuation out of these
+beginnings, leading out into a more settled system of subjection and
+mastery and a progressively increased scale of princely enterprise,
+resting on an increasingly useful and increasingly loyal populace. In
+all this later history the posture of things in the Fatherland is by no
+means unique, nor is it even strikingly peculiar, by contrast with the
+rest of western Europe, except in degree. It is of the same general kind
+as the rest of what has gone to make the historical advance of medieval
+and modern times; but it differs from the generality in a more sluggish
+movement and a more tenacious adherence to what would be rated as the
+untoward features of mediaevalism. The approach to a modern scheme of
+institutions and modern conceptions of life and of human values has been
+slow, and hitherto incomplete, as compared with those communities that
+have, for good or ill, gone farthest along the ways of modernity.
+Habituation to personal subjection and subservience under the rigorous
+and protracted discipline of standardised service and fealty has
+continued later, and with later and slighter mitigation, in the
+Fatherland; so as better to have conserved the spiritual attitude of the
+feudal order. Law and order in the Fatherland has in a higher degree
+continued to mean unquestioning obedience to a personal master and
+unquestioning subservience to the personal ambitions of the master. And
+since freedom, in the sense of discretionary initiative on the part of
+the common man, does not fit into the framework of such a system of
+dependence on personal authority and surveillance, any degree of such
+free initiative will be "licence" in the eyes of men bred into the
+framework of this system; whereas "liberty," as distinct from "licence,"
+is not a matter of initiative and self-direction, but of latitude in the
+service of a master. Hence no degree of curtailment in this delegated
+"liberty" will be resented or repudiated by popular indignation, so long
+as the master to whom service is due can give assurance that it is
+expedient for his purposes.
+
+The age-long course of experience and institutional discipline out of
+which the current German situation has come may be drawn schematically
+to the following effect: In the beginning a turmoil of conquest, rapine,
+servitude, and contention between rival bands of marauders and their
+captains, gradually, indeed imperceptibly, fell into lines of settled
+and conventionalised exploitation; with repeated interruptions due to
+new incursions and new combinations of rapacious chieftains. Out of it
+all in the course of time came a feudal regime, under which personal
+allegiance and service to petty chiefs was the sole and universal
+accredited bond of solidarity. As the outcome of further unremitting
+intrigue and contention among feudal chiefs, of high and low degree, the
+populace fell into larger parcels, under the hands of feudal lords of
+larger dominion, and the bias of allegiance and service came to hold
+with some degree of permanence and uniformity, or at least of
+consistency, over a considerable reach of country, including its
+inhabitants. With the rise of States came allegiance to a dynasty, as
+distinguished from the narrower and more ephemeral allegiance to the
+semi-detached person of a victorious prince; and the relative permanence
+of territorial frontiers under this rule gave room for an effectual
+recrudescence of the ancient propensity to a sentimental group
+solidarity; in which the accredited territorial limits of the dynastic
+dominion served to outline the group that so was felt to belong together
+under a joint dispensation and with something of a joint interest in
+matters of fame and fortune. As the same notion is more commonly and
+more suggestively expressed, a sense of nationality arose within the
+sweep of the dynastic rule. This sense of community interest that is
+called nationality so came in to reenforce the sense of allegiance to
+the dynastic establishment and so has coalesced with it to produce that
+high-wrought loyalty to the State, that draws equally on the sentiment
+of community interest in the nation and on the prescriptive docility to
+the dynastic head. The sense of national solidarity and of feudal
+loyalty and service have coalesced, to bring this people to that climax
+of patriotic devotion beyond which there lies no greater height along
+this way. But this is also as far as the German people have gone; and it
+is scarcely to be claimed that the Japanese have yet reached this stage;
+they would rather appear to be, essentially, subjects of the emperor,
+and only inchoately a Japanese nation. Of the German people it seems
+safe to say that they have achieved such a coalescence of unimpaired
+feudal fealty to a personal master and a full-blown sense of national
+solidarity, without any perceptible slackening in either strand of the
+double tie which so binds them in the service of the dynastic State.
+
+Germany, in other words, is somewhat in arrears, as compared with those
+Europeans that have gone farthest along this course of institutional
+growth, or perhaps rather institutional permutation. It is not that this
+retardation of the German people in this matter of national spirit is to
+be counted as an infirmity, assuredly not as a handicap in the pursuit
+of that national prestige on which all patriotic endeavour finally
+converges. For this purpose the failure to distinguish between the
+ambitions of the dynastic statesmen and the interests of the
+commonwealth is really a prodigious advantage, which their rivals, of
+more mature growth politically, have lost by atrophy of this same
+dynastic axiom of subservience. These others, of whom the French and the
+English-speaking peoples make up the greater part and may be taken as
+the typical instance, have had a different history, in part. The
+discipline of experience has left a somewhat different residue of habits
+of thought embedded in their institutional equipment and effective as
+axiomatic premises in their further apprehension of what is worth while,
+and why.
+
+It is not that the difference between these two contrasted strains of
+the Western civilisation is either profound or very pronounced; it is
+perhaps rather to be stated as a difference of degree than of kind; a
+retardation of spiritual growth, in respect of the prevalent and
+controlling habits of thought on certain heads, in the one case as
+against the other. Therefore any attempt to speak with sufficient
+definition, so as to bring out this national difference of animus in any
+convincing way, will unavoidably have an appearance of overstatement, if
+not also of bias. And in any case, of course, it is not to be expected
+that the national difference here spoken for can be brought home to the
+apprehension of any unspoiled son of the Fatherland, since it does not
+lie within that perspective.
+
+It is not of the nature of a divergence, but rather a differential in
+point of cultural maturity, due to a differential in the rate of
+progression through that sequence of institutional phases through which
+the civilised peoples of Europe, jointly and severally, have been led by
+force of circumstance. In this movement out of the Dark Ages and onward,
+circumstances have fallen out differently for those Europeans that
+chanced to live within the confines of the Fatherland, different with
+such effect as to have in the present placed these others at a farther
+remove from the point of departure, leaving them furnished with less of
+that archaic frame of mind that is here in question. Possessed of less,
+but by no means shorn of all--perhaps not of the major part--of that
+barbaric heritage.
+
+Circumstances have so fallen out that these--typically the French and
+the English-speaking peoples--have left behind and partly forgotten that
+institutional phase in which the people of Imperial Germany now live and
+move and have their being. The French partly because they--that is the
+common people of the French lands--entered the procession with a very
+substantial lead, having never been put back to a point abreast of their
+neighbors across the Rhine, in that phase of European civilisation from
+which the peoples of the Fatherland tardily emerged into the feudal age.
+So, any student who shall set out to account for the visible lead which
+the French people still so obstinately maintain in the advance of
+European culture, will have to make up his account with this notable
+fact among the premises of his inquiry, that they have had a shorter
+course to cover and have therefore, in the sporting phrase, had the
+inside track. They measure from a higher datum line. Among the
+advantages which so have come, in a sense unearned, to the French
+people, is their uninterrupted retention, out of Roman--and perhaps
+pre-Roman--times, of the conception of a commonwealth, a community of
+men with joint and mutual interests apart from any superimposed
+dependence on a joint feudal superior. The French people therefore
+became a nation, with unobtrusive facility, so soon as circumstances
+permitted, and they are today the oldest "nation" in Europe. They
+therefore were prepared from long beforehand, with an adequate principle
+(habit of thought) of national cohesion and patriotic sentiment, to make
+the shift from a dynastic State to a national commonwealth whenever the
+occasion for such a move should arise; that is to say, whenever the
+dynastic State, by a suitable conjunction of infirmity and irksomeness,
+should pass the margin of tolerance in this people's outraged sense of
+national shame. The case of the German people in their latterday
+attitude toward dynastic vagaries may afford a term of comparison. These
+appear yet incapable of distinguishing between national shame and
+dynastic ambition.
+
+By a different course and on lines more nearly parallel with the
+life-history of the German peoples, the English-speaking peoples have
+reached what is for the present purpose much the same ground as the
+French, in that they too have made the shift from the dynastic State to
+the national commonwealth. The British started late, but the discipline
+of servitude and unmitigated personal rule in their case was relatively
+brief and relatively ineffectual; that is to say, as compared with what
+their German cousins had to endure and to learn in the like connection.
+So that the British never learned the lesson of dynastic loyalty fully
+by heart; at least not the populace; whatever may be true for the
+privileged classes, the gentlemen, whose interests were on the side of
+privilege and irresponsible mastery. Here as in the French case it was
+the habits of thought of the common man, not of the class of gentlemen,
+that made the obsolescence of the dynastic State a foregone conclusion
+and an easy matter--as one speaks of easy achievement in respect of
+matters of that magnitude. It is now some two and a half centuries since
+this shift in the national point of view overtook the English-speaking
+community. Perhaps it would be unfair to say that that period, or that
+period plus what further time may yet have to be added, marks the
+interval by which German habits of thought in these premises are in
+arrears, but it is not easy to find secure ground for a different and
+more moderate appraisal.
+
+The future, of course, is not to be measured in terms of the past, and
+the tempo of the present and of the calculable future is in many
+bearings very different from that which has ruled even in the recent
+historical past. But then, on the other hand, habituation always
+requires time; more particularly such habituation as is to take effect
+throughout a populous nation and is counted on to work a displacement of
+a comprehensive institutional system and of a people's outlook on life.
+
+Germany is still a dynastic State. That is to say, its national
+establishment is, in effect, a self-appointed and irresponsible
+autocracy which holds the nation in usufruct, working through an
+appropriate bureaucratic organisation, and the people is imbued with
+that spirit of abnegation and devotion that is involved in their
+enthusiastically supporting a government of that character. Now, it is
+in the nature of a dynastic State to seek dominion, that being the whole
+of its nature. And a dynastic establishment which enjoys the unqualified
+usufruct of such resources as are placed at its disposal by the
+feudalistic loyalty of the German people runs no chance of keeping the
+peace, except on terms of the unconditional surrender of all those whom
+it may concern. No solemn engagement and no pious resolution has any
+weight in the balance against a cultural fatality of this magnitude.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This account of the derivation and current state of German nationalism
+will of course appear biased to anyone who has been in the habit of
+rating German Culture high in all its bearings, and to whom at the same
+time the ideals of peace and liberty appeal. Indeed, such a critic,
+gifted with the due modicum of asperity, might well be provoked to call
+it all a more or less ingenious diatribe of partisan malice. But it can
+be so construed only by those who see the question at issue as a point
+of invidious distinction between this German animus on the one hand and
+the corresponding frame of mind of the neighboring peoples on the other
+hand. There may also appear to the captious to be some air of
+deprecation about the characterisation here offered of the past history
+of political traffic within the confines of the Fatherland. All of
+which, of course, touches neither the veracity of the characterisation
+nor the purpose with which so ungrateful a line of analysis and
+exposition has been entered upon. It is to be regretted if facts that
+may flutter the emotions of one and another among the sensitive and
+unreflecting can not be drawn into such an inquiry without having their
+cogency discounted beforehand on account of the sentimental value
+imputed to them. Of course no offense is intended and no invidious
+comparison is aimed at.
+
+Even if the point of it all were an invidious comparison it would
+immediately have to be admitted that the net showing in favor of these
+others, e.g., the French or the English-speaking peoples, is by no means
+so unreservedly to their credit as such a summary statement of the
+German case might seem to imply. As bearing on the chances of a peace
+contingent upon the temper of the contracting nationalities, it is by no
+means a foregone conclusion that such a peace compact would hold
+indefinitely even if it depended solely on the pacific animus of these
+others that have left the dynastic State behind. These others, in fact,
+are also not yet out of the woods. They may not have the same gift of
+gratuitous and irresponsible truculence as their German cousins, in the
+same alarming degree; but as was said in an earlier passage, they too
+are ready to fight on provocation. They are patriotic to a degree;
+indeed to such a degree that anything which visibly touches the national
+prestige will readily afford a _casus belli_. But it remains true that
+the popular temper among them is of the defensive order; perhaps of an
+unnecessarily enthusiastic defensive order, but after all in such a
+frame of mind as leaves them willing to let well enough alone, to live
+and let live.
+
+And herein appears to lie the decisive difference between those peoples
+whose patriotic affections center about the fortunes of an impersonal
+commonwealth and those in whom is superadded a fervent aspiration for
+dynastic ascendency. The latter may be counted on to break the peace
+when a promising opportunity offers.
+
+The contrast may be illustrated, though not so sharply as might be
+desirable, in the different temper shown by the British people in the
+Boer war on the one hand, as compared with the popularity of the
+French-Prussian war among the German people on the other hand. Both were
+aggressive wars, and both were substantially unprovoked. Diplomatically
+speaking, of course, sufficient provocation was found in either case, as
+how should it not? But in point of substantial provocation and of
+material inducement, both were about equally gratuitous. In either case
+the war could readily have been avoided without material detriment to
+the community and without perceptible lesion to the national honour.
+Both were "engineered" on grounds shamelessly manufactured _ad hoc_ by
+interested parties; in the one case by a coterie of dynastic statesmen,
+in the other by a junta of commercial adventurers and imperialistic
+politicians. In neither case had the people any interest of gain or loss
+in the quarrel, except as it became a question of national prestige. But
+both the German and the British community bore the burden and fought the
+campaign to a successful issue for those interested parties who had
+precipitated the quarrel. The British people at large, it is true, bore
+the burden; which comes near being all that can be said in the way of
+popular approval of this war, which political statesmen have since then
+rated as one of the most profitable enterprises in which the forces of
+the realm have been engaged. On the subject of this successful war the
+common man is still inclined to cover his uneasy sense of decency with a
+recital of extenuating circumstances. What parallels all this in the
+German case is an outbreak of patriotic abandon and an admirable spirit
+of unselfish sacrifice in furtherance of the dynastic prestige, an
+intoxication of patriotic blare culminating in the triumphant coronation
+at Versailles. Nor has the sober afterthought of the past forty-six
+years cast a perceptible shadow of doubt across the glorious memory of
+that patriotic debauch.
+
+Such is the difference of animus between a body of patriotic citizens in
+a modern commonwealth on the one hand and the loyal subjects of a
+dynastic State on the other hand. There need be no reflections on the
+intrinsic merits of either. Seen in dispassionate perspective from
+outside the turmoil, there is not much to choose, in point of sane and
+self-respecting manhood, between the sluggish and shamefaced abettor of
+a sordid national crime, and a ranting patriot who glories in serving as
+cat's-paw to a syndicate of unscrupulous politicians bent on dominion
+for dominion's sake. But the question here is not as to the relative
+merits or the relative manhood contents of the two contrasted types of
+patriot. Doubtless both and either have manhood enough and to spare; at
+least, so they say. But the point in question is the simpler and nowise
+invidious one, as to the availability of both or either for the
+perpetuation of the world's peace under a compact of vigilant
+neutrality. Plainly the German frame of mind admits of no neutrality;
+the quest of dominion is not compatible with neutrality, and the
+substantial core of German national life is still the quest of dominion
+under dynastic tutelage. How it stands with the spirit that has
+repeatedly come in sight in the international relations of the British
+community is a question harder to answer.
+
+It may be practicable to establish a peace of neutrals on the basis of
+such national spirit as prevails among these others--the French and
+English-speaking peoples, together with the minor nationalities that
+cluster about the North Sea--because their habitual attitude is that of
+neutrality, on the whole and with allowance for a bellicose minority in
+all these countries. By and large, these peoples have come to the
+tolerant attitude that finds expression in the maxim, Live and let live.
+But they are all and several sufficiently patriotic. It may, indeed,
+prove that they are more than sufficiently patriotic for the purposes of
+a neutral peace. They stand for peace, but it is "peace with honour;"
+which means, in more explicit terms, peace with undiminished national
+prestige. Now, national prestige is a very particular commodity, as has
+been set out in earlier passages of this inquiry; and a peace which is
+to be kept only on terms of a jealous maintenance of the national honour
+is likely to be in a somewhat precarious case. If, and when, the
+national honour is felt to require an enhanced national ascendancy, the
+case for a neutral peace immediately becomes critical. And the greater
+the number and diversity of pretensions and interests that are conceived
+to be bound up with the national honour, the more unstable will the
+resulting situation necessarily be.
+
+The upshot of all this recital of considerations appears to be that a
+neutral peace compact may, or it may not, be practicable in the absence
+of such dynastic States as Germany and Japan; whereas it has no chance
+in the presence of these enterprising national establishments.
+
+No one will be readier or more voluble in exclaiming against the falsity
+of such a discrimination as is here attempted, between the democratic
+and the dynastic nations of the modern world, than the spokesmen of
+these dynastic Powers. No one is more outspoken in professions of
+universal peace and catholic amity than these same spokesmen of the
+dynastic Powers; and nowhere is there more urgent need of such
+professions. Official and "inspired" professions are, of course, to be
+overlooked; at least, so charity would dictate. But there have, in the
+historic present, been many professions of this character made also by
+credible spokesmen of the German, and perhaps of the Japanese, people,
+and in all sincerity. By way of parenthesis it should be said that this
+is not intended to apply to expressions of conviction and intention that
+have come out of Germany these two years past (December 1916). Without
+questioning the credibility of these witnesses that have borne witness
+to the pacific and genial quality of national sentiment in the German
+people, it will yet be in place to recall the run of facts in the
+national life of Germany in this historical present and the position of
+these spokesmen in the German community.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The German nation is of a peculiar composition in respect of its social
+structure. So far as bears on the question in hand, it is made up of
+three distinctive constituent factors, or perhaps rather categories or
+conditions of men. The populace is of course the main category, and in
+the last resort always the main and decisive factor. Next in point of
+consequence as well as of numbers and initiative is the personnel of the
+control,--the ruling class, the administration, the official community,
+the hierarchy of civil and political servants, or whatever designation
+may best suit; the category comprises that pyramidal superstructure of
+privilege and control whereof the sovereign is the apex, and in whom,
+under any dynastic rule, is in effect vested the usufruct of the
+populace. These two classes or conditions of men, the one of which
+orders and the other obeys, make up the working structure of the nation,
+and they also between them embody the national life and carry forward
+the national work and aim. Intermediate between them, or rather beside
+them and overlapping the commissure, is a third category whose life
+articulates loosely with both the others at the same time that it still
+runs along in a semi-detached way. This slighter but more visible, and
+particularly more audible, category is made up of the "Intellectuals,"
+as a late, and perhaps vulgar, designation would name them.
+
+These are they who chiefly communicate with the world outside, and at
+the same time they do what is academically called thinking. They are in
+intellectual contact and communication with the world at large, in a
+contact of give and take, and they think and talk in and about those
+concepts that go in under the caption of the humanities in the world at
+large. The category is large enough to constitute an intellectual
+community, indeed a community of somewhat formidable magnitude, taken in
+absolute terms, although in percentages of the population at large their
+numbers will foot up to only an inconsiderable figure. Their contact
+with the superior class spoken of above is fairly close, being a
+contact, in the main, of service on the one side and of control on the
+other. With the populace their contact and communion is relatively
+slight, the give and take in the case being neither intimate nor
+far-reaching. More particularly is there a well-kept limit of moderation
+on any work of indoctrination or intellectual guidance which this class
+may carry down among the people at large, dictated and enforced by
+dynastic expediency. This category, of the Intellectuals, is
+sufficiently large to live its own life within itself, without drawing
+on the spiritual life of the community at large, and of sufficiently
+substantial quality to carry its own peculiar scheme of intellectual
+conventions and verities. Of the great and highly meritorious place and
+work of these Intellectuals in the scheme of German culture it is
+needless to speak. What is to the point is that they are the accredited
+spokesmen of the German nation in all its commonplace communication with
+the rest of civilised Europe.
+
+The Intellectuals have spoken with conviction and sincerity of the
+spiritual state of the German people, but in so doing, and in so far as
+bears on the character of German nationalism, they have been in closer
+contact, intellectually and sympathetically, with the intellectual and
+spiritual life of civilised Europe at large than with the movements of
+the spirit among the German populace. And their canvassing of the
+concepts which so have come under their attention from over the national
+frontiers has been carried forward--so far, again, as bears on the
+questions that are here in point--with the German-dynastic principles,
+logic and mechanism of execution under their immediate observation and
+supplying the concrete materials for inquiry. Indeed, it holds true, by
+and large, that nothing else than this German-dynastic complement of
+ways and means has, or can effectually, come under their observation in
+such a degree of intimacy as to give body and definition to the somewhat
+abstract theorems on cultural aims and national preconceptions that have
+come to them from outside. In short, they have borrowed these
+theoretical formulations from abroad, without the concrete apparatus of
+ways and means in which these theorems are embodied in their foreign
+habitat, and have so found themselves construing these theoretical
+borrowings in the only concrete terms of which they have had first-hand
+and convincing knowledge. Such an outcome would be fairly unavoidable,
+inasmuch as these Intellectuals, however much they are, in the spirit,
+citizens of the cosmopolitan republic of knowledge and intelligence,
+they are after all, _in propria persona_, immediately and unremittingly
+subjects of the German-dynastic State; so that all their detail thinking
+on the aims, ways and means of life, in all its civil and political
+bearings, is unavoidably shaped by the unremitting discipline of their
+workday experience under this dynastic scheme. The outcome has been that
+while they have taken up, as they have understood them, the concepts
+that rule the civic life of these other, maturer nations, they have
+apprehended and developed these theorems of civic life in the terms and
+by the logic enforced in that system of control and surveillance known
+to them by workday experience,--the only empirical terms at hand.
+
+The apex of growth and the center of diffusion as regards the modern
+culture in respect of the ideals and logic of civic life--other phases
+of this culture than this its civil aspect do not concern the point here
+in question--this apex of growth and center of diffusion lie outside the
+Fatherland, in an environment alien to the German institutional scheme.
+Yet so intrinsic to the cultural drift of modern mankind are these aims
+and this logic, that in taking over and further enriching the
+intellectual heritage of this modern world the Intellectuals of the
+Fatherland have unavoidably also taken over those conceptions of civil
+initiative and masterless self-direction that rule the logic of life in
+a commonwealth of ungraded men. They have taken these over and
+assimilated them as best their experience would permit. But workday
+experience and its exigencies are stubborn things; and in this process
+of assimilation of these alien conceptions of right and honest living,
+it is the borrowed theorems concerning civic rights and duties that have
+undergone adaptation and revision, not the concrete system of ways and
+means in which these principles, so accepted, are to be put in practice.
+Necessarily so, since in the German scheme of law and order the major
+premise is the dynastic State, whereas the major premise of the modern
+civilised scheme of civic life is the absence of such an organ. So, the
+development and elaboration of these modern principles of civic
+liberty--and this elaboration has taken on formidable dimensions--under
+the hand of the German Intellectuals has uniformly run out into
+Pickwickian convolutions, greatly suggestive of a lost soul seeking a
+place to rest. With unquestionably serious purpose and untiring
+endeavour, they have sought to embody these modern civilised
+preconceptions in terms afforded by, or in terms compatible with, the
+institutions of the Fatherland; and they have been much concerned and
+magniloquently elated about the German spirit of freedom that so was to
+be brought to final and consummate realisation in the life of a free
+people. But at no point and in no case have either the proposals or
+their carrying out taken shape as a concrete application of the familiar
+principle of popular self-direction. It has always come to something in
+the way of a concessive or expedient mitigation of the antagonistic
+principle of personal authority. Where the forms of self-government or
+of individual self-direction have concessively been installed, under the
+Imperial rule, they have turned out to be an imitative structure with
+some shrewd provision for their coercion or inhibition at the discretion
+of an irresponsible authority.
+
+Neither the sound intelligence nor the good faith of these Intellectuals
+of the Fatherland is to be impugned. That the--necessarily vague and
+circumlocutory--expositions of civic institutions and popular liberty
+which they have so often and so largely promulgated should have been
+used as a serviceable blind of dynastic statecraft is not to be set down
+to their discredit. Circumstances over which they could have no control,
+since they were circumstances that shaped their own habits of thought,
+have placed it beyond their competence to apprehend or to formulate
+these alien principles (habits of thought) concretely in those alien
+institutional details and by the alien logic with which they could have
+no working acquaintance.
+
+To one and another this conception of cultural solidarity within the
+nation, and consequent cultural aliency between nations, due to the
+different habits of life and of thought enforced by the two diverse
+institutional systems, may be so far unfamiliar as to carry no
+conviction. It may accordingly not seem out of place to recall that the
+institutional system of any given community, particularly for any
+community living under a home-bred and time-tried system of its own,
+will necessarily be a balanced system of interdependent and mutually
+concordant parts working together in one comprehensive plan of law and
+order. Through such an institutional system, as, e.g., the German
+Imperial organisation, there will run a degree of logical consistency,
+consonant with itself throughout, and exerting a consistent discipline
+throughout the community; whereby there is enforced a consistent drift
+or bent in the prevalent habits of life, and a correlative bent in the
+resulting habits of thought prevalent in the community. It is, in fact,
+this possession of a common scheme of use and wont, and a consequent
+common outlook and manner of thinking, that constitutes the most
+intrinsic bond of solidarity in any nationality, and that finally marks
+it off from any other.
+
+It is equally a matter of course that any other given community, living
+under the rule of a substantially different, or divergent, system of
+institutions, will be exposed to a course of workday discipline running
+to a different, perhaps divergent, effect; and that this other community
+will accordingly come in for a characteristically different discipline
+and fall under the rule of a different commonsense outlook. Where an
+institutional difference of this kind is somewhat large and consistent,
+so as to amount in effect to a discrepancy, as may fairly be said of the
+difference between Imperial Germany and its like on the one hand, and
+the English-speaking nations on the other hand, there the difference in
+everyday conceptions may readily make the two peoples mutually
+unintelligible to one another, on those points of institutional
+principle that are involved in the discrepancy. This is the state of the
+case as between the German people, including the Intellectuals, and the
+peoples against whom their preconceptions of national destiny have
+arrayed them. And the many vivid expressions of consternation,
+abhorrence and incredulity that have come out of this community of
+Intellectuals in the course of the past two years of trial and error,
+bear sufficient testimony to the rigorous constraint which these German
+preconceptions and their logic exercise over the Intellectuals, no less
+than over the populace.
+
+Conversely, of course, it is nearly as impracticable for those who have
+grown up under the discipline of democratic institutions to comprehend
+the habitual outlook of the commonplace German patriot on national
+interests and aims; not quite, perhaps, because the discipline of use
+and wont and indoctrination is neither so rigorous nor so consistent in
+their case. But there is, after all, prevalent among them a sufficiently
+evident logical inability to understand and appreciate the paramount
+need of national, that is to say dynastic, ascendancy that actuates all
+German patriots; just as these same patriots are similarly unable to
+consider national interests in any other light than that of dynastic
+ascendancy.
+
+Going simply on the face value of the available evidence, any outsider
+might easily fall into the error of believing that when the great
+adventure of the war opened up before them, as well as when presently
+the shock of baffled endeavour brought home its exasperating futility,
+the Intellectuals of the Fatherland distinguished themselves above all
+other classes and conditions of men in the exuberance of their patriotic
+abandon. Such a view would doubtless be almost wholly erroneous. It is
+not that the Intellectuals reached a substantially superior pitch of
+exaltation, but only that, being trained in the use of language, they
+were able to express their emotions with great facility. There seems no
+reason to believe that the populace fell short of the same measure in
+respect of their prevalent frame of mind.
+
+To return to the workings of the Imperial dynastic State and the forces
+engaged. It plainly appears that the Intellectuals are to be counted as
+supernumeraries, except so far as they serve as an instrument of
+publicity and indoctrination in the hands of the discretionary
+authorities. The working factors in the case are the dynastic
+organisation of control, direction and emolument, and the populace at
+large by use of whose substance the traffic in dynastic ascendancy and
+emolument is carried on. These two are in fairly good accord, on the
+ancient basis of feudal loyalty. Hitherto there is no evident ground for
+believing that this archaic tie that binds the populace to the dynastic
+ambitions has at all perceptibly weakened. And the possibility of
+dynastic Germany living at peace with the world under any compact,
+therefore translates itself into the possibility of the German people's
+unlearning its habitual deference and loyalty to the dynasty.
+
+As its acquirement has been a work of protracted habituation, so can its
+obsolescence also come about only through more or less protracted
+habituation under a system of use and wont of a different or divergent
+order. The elements of such a systematic discipline running to an effect
+at cross purposes with this patriotic animus are not absent from the
+current situation in the Fatherland; the discipline of the modern
+industrial system, for instance, runs to such a divergent effect; but
+this, and other conceivable forces which may reenforce it, will after
+all take time, if they are to work a decisive change in the current
+frame of mind of the patriotic German community. During the interval
+required for such a change in the national temper, the peace of the
+world would be conditioned on the inability of the dynastic State to
+break it. So that the chances of success for any neutral peace league
+will vary inversely as the available force of Imperial Germany, and it
+could be accounted secure only in the virtual elimination of the
+Imperial State as a national Power.
+
+If the gradual obsolescence of the spirit of militant loyalty in the
+German people, through disuse under a regime of peace, industry, self
+government and free trade, is to be the agency by force of which
+dynastic imperialism is to cease, the chance of a neutral peace will
+depend on the thoroughness with which such a regime of self-direction
+can be installed in this case, and on the space of time required for
+such obsolescence through disuse. Obviously, the installation of a
+workable regime of self-government on peaceable lines would in any case
+be a matter of great difficulty among a people whose past experience has
+so singularly incapacitated them for self-government; and obviously,
+too, the interval of time required to reach secure ground along this
+line of approach would be very considerable. Also, in view of these
+conditions, obviously, this scheme for maintaining the peace of nations
+by a compact of neutrals based on a compromise with an aspiring dynastic
+State resolves itself into the second of the two alternatives spoken of
+at the outset, viz., a neutral peace based on the elimination of Germany
+as a war power, together with the elimination of any materials suitable
+for the formation of a formidable coalition. And then, with Imperial
+Germany supposedly eliminated or pacified, there would still remain the
+Japanese establishment, to which all the arguments pertinent in the case
+of Germany will apply without abatement; except that, at least hitherto,
+the dynastic statesmen of Japan have not had the disposal of so massive
+a body of resources, in population, industry, or raw materials.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+PEACE WITHOUT HONOUR
+
+
+The argument therefore turns back to a choice between the two
+alternatives alluded to: peace in submission to the rule of the German
+dynastic establishment (and to Japan), or peace through elimination of
+these enterprising Powers. The former alternative, no doubt, is
+sufficiently unattractive, but it is not therefore to be put aside
+without a hearing. As goes without saying, it is repugnant to the
+patriotic sentiments of those peoples whom the Imperial German
+establishment have elected for submission. But if this unreflecting
+patriotic revulsion can once be made amenable to reason, there is always
+something to be said in favor of such a plan of peaceable submission, or
+at least in extenuation of it; and if it is kept in mind that the
+ulterior necessity of such submission must always remain in perspective
+as a condition precedent to a peaceful settlement, so long as one or
+both of these enterprising Powers remains intact, it will be seen that a
+sane appraisal of the merits of such a regime of peace is by no means
+uncalled for. For neither of these two Powers is there a conclusive
+issue of endeavour short of paramount dominion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There should also be some gain of insight and sobriety in recalling that
+the Intellectuals of the Fatherland, who have doubtless pondered this
+matter longer and more dispassionately than all other men, have spoken
+very highly of the merits of such a plan of universal submission to the
+rule of this German dynastic establishment. They had, no doubt, been
+considering the question both long and earnestly, as to what would, in
+the light of reason, eventually be to the best interest of those peoples
+whose manifest destiny was eventual tutelage under the Imperial crown;
+and there need also be no doubt that in that time (two years past) they
+therefore spoke advisedly and out of the fulness of the heart on this
+head. The pronouncements that came out of the community of Intellectuals
+in that season of unembarrassed elation and artless avowal are doubtless
+to be taken as an outcome of much thoughtful canvassing of what had best
+be done, not as an enforced compromise with untoward necessities but as
+the salutary course freely to be pursued with an eye single to the best
+good of all concerned.
+
+It is true, the captious have been led to speak slightingly of the many
+utterances of this tenure coming out of the community of Intellectuals,
+as, e.g., the lay sermons of Professor Ostwald dating back to that
+season; but no unprejudiced reader can well escape the persuasion that
+these, as well as the very considerable volume of similar pronouncements
+by many other men of eminent scholarship and notable for benevolent
+sentiments, are faithfully to be accepted as the expressions of a
+profound conviction and a consciously generous spirit. In so speaking of
+the advantages to be derived by any subject people from submission to
+the German Imperial rule, these Intellectuals are not to be construed as
+formulating the drift of vulgar patriotic sentiment among their
+compatriots at large, but rather as giving out the deliverances of their
+own more sensitive spirit and maturer deliberation, as men who are in a
+position to see human affairs and interests in a larger perspective.
+Such, no doubt, would be their own sense of the matter.
+
+Reflection on the analogous case of the tutelage exercised by the
+American government over the subject Philippinos may contribute to a
+just and temperate view of what is intended in the regime of tutelage
+and submission so spoken for by the German Intellectuals,--and, it may
+be added, found good by the Imperial statesmen. There would, of course,
+be the difference, as against the case of the Philippinos, that whereas
+the American government is after all answerable, in the last resort and
+in a somewhat random fashion, to a popular opinion that runs on
+democratic preconceptions, the German Imperial establishment on the
+other hand is answerable to no one, except it be to God, who is
+conceived to stand in somewhat the relation of a silent partner, or a
+minority stockholder in this dynastic enterprise.
+
+Yet it should not be overlooked that any presumptive hard usage which
+the vassal peoples might look for at the hands of the German dynasty
+would necessarily be tempered with considerations of expediency as
+dictated by the exigencies of usufruct. The Imperial establishment has
+shown itself to be wise, indeed more wise than amiable, but wise at
+least in its intentions, in the use which it has made of subject peoples
+hitherto. It is true, a somewhat accentuated eagerness on the part of
+the Imperial establishment to get the maximum service in a minimum of
+time and at a minimum cost from these subject populations,--as, e.g., in
+Silesia and Poland, in Schleswig-Holstein, in Alsace-Lorraine, or in its
+African and Oceanic possessions,--has at times led to practices
+altogether dubious on humanitarian grounds, at the same time that in
+point of thrifty management they have gone beyond "what the traffic will
+bear." Yet it is not to be overlooked--and in this connection it is a
+point of some weight--that, so far as the predatory traditions of its
+statecraft will permit, the Imperial establishment has in all these
+matters been guided by a singularly unreserved attention to its own
+material advantage. Where its management in these premises has yielded a
+less profitable usufruct than the circumstances would reasonably admit,
+the failure has been due to an excess of cupidity rather than the
+reverse.
+
+The circumstantial evidence converges to the effect that the Imperial
+establishment may confidently be counted on to manage the affairs of its
+subject peoples with an eye single to its own material gain, and it may
+with equal confidence be counted on that in the long run no unadvised
+excesses will be practised. Of course, an excessive adventure in
+atrocity and predation, due to such human infirmity in its agents or in
+its directorate as has been shown in various recent episodes, is to be
+looked for now and again; but these phenomena would come in by way of
+fluctuating variations from the authentic routine, rather than as
+systematic features of it.
+
+That superfluity of naughtiness that has given character to the current
+German Imperial policy in Belgium, e.g., or that similarly has
+characterised the dealings of Imperial Japan in Korea during the late
+"benevolent assimilation" of that people into Japanese-Imperial
+usufruct, is not fairly to be taken to indicate what such an Imperial
+establishment may be expected to do with a subject people on a footing
+of settled and long-term exploitation. At the outset, in both instances,
+the policy of frightfulness was dictated by a well-advised view to
+economy of effort in reducing the subject people to an abject state of
+intimidation, according to the art of war as set forth in the manuals;
+whereas latterly the somewhat profligate excesses of the government of
+occupation--decently covered with diplomatic parables on benevolence and
+legality--have been dictated by military convenience, particularly by
+the need of forced labor and the desirability of a reduced population in
+the acquired territory. So also the "personally conducted" dealings with
+the Armenians by use of the Turks should probably also best be explained
+as an endeavour to reduce the numbers of an undesirable population
+beforehand, without incurring unnecessary blame. All these things are,
+at the most, misleading indications of what the Imperial policy would be
+like under settled conditions and in the absence of insubordination.
+
+By way of contrast, such as may serve to bring the specific traits of
+this prospective Imperial tutelage of nations into a better light, the
+Ottoman usufruct of the peoples of the Turkish dominions offers an
+instructive instance. The Ottoman tutelage is today spoken of by its
+apologists in terms substantially identical with the sketches of the
+future presented by hopeful German patriots in the early months of the
+current war. But as is so frequently the case in such circumstances,
+these expressions of the officers have to be understood in a diplomatic
+sense; not as touching the facts in any other than a formal way. It is
+sufficiently evident that the Ottoman management of its usufruct has
+throughout been ill-advised enough persistently to charge more than the
+traffic would bear, probably due in great part to lack of control over
+its agents or ramifications, by the central office. The Ottoman
+establishment has not observed, or enforced, the plain rules of economy
+in its utilisation of the subject peoples, and finds itself today
+bankrupt in consequence. What may afford more of a parallel to the
+prospective German tutelage of the nations is the procedure of the
+Japanese establishment in Korea, Manchuria, or China; which is also duly
+covered with an ostensibly decent screen of diplomatic parables, but the
+nature and purpose of which is overt enough in all respects but the
+nomenclature. It is not unlikely that even this Japanese usufruct and
+tutelage runs on somewhat less humane and complaisant lines than a
+well-advised economy of resources would dictate for the prospective
+German usufruct of the Western nations.
+
+There is the essential difference between the two cases that while Japan
+is over-populated, so that it becomes the part of a wise government to
+find additional lands for occupancy, and that so it is constrained by its
+imperial ambitions to displace much of the population in its subject
+territories, the Fatherland on the other hand is under-populated--
+notoriously, though not according to the letter of the diplomatic
+parables on this head--and for the calculable future must continue to be
+under-populated; provided that the state of the industrial arts
+continues subject to change in the same general direction as hitherto,
+and provided that no radical change affects the German birth-rate. So,
+since the Imperial government has no need of new lands for occupancy by
+its home population, it will presumably be under no inducement to take
+measures looking to the partial depopulation of its subject territories.
+
+The case of Belgium and the measures looking to a reduction of its
+population may raise a doubt, but probably not a well taken doubt. It is
+rather that since it has become evident that the territory can not be
+held, it is thought desirable to enrich the Fatherland with whatever
+property can be removed, and to consume the accumulated man-power of the
+Belgian people in the service of the war. It would appear that it is a
+war-measure, designed to make use of the enemy's resources for his
+defeat. Indeed, under conditions of settled occupation or subjection,
+any degree of such depopulation would entail an economic loss, and any
+well-considered administrative policy would therefore look to the
+maintenance of the inhabitants of the acquired territories in
+undiminished numbers and unimpaired serviceability.
+
+The resulting scheme of Imperial usufruct should accordingly be of a
+considerate, not to say in effect humane, character,--always provided
+that the requisite degree of submission and subservience ("law and
+order") can be enforced by a system of coercion so humane as not to
+reduce the number of the inhabitants or materially to lower their
+physical powers. Such would, by reasonable expectation, be the character
+of this projected Imperial tutelage and usufruct of the nations of
+Christendom. In its working-out this German project should accordingly
+differ very appreciably from the policy which its imperial ambitions
+have constrained the Japanese establishment to pursue in its dealings
+with the life and fortunes of its recently, and currently, acquired
+subject peoples.
+
+The better to appreciate in some concrete fashion what should, by
+reasonable expectation, be the terms on which life might so be carried
+on _sub pace germanica_, attention may be invited to certain typical
+instances of such peace by abnegation among contemporary peoples.
+Perhaps at the top of the list stands India, with its many and varied
+native peoples, subject to British tutelage, but, the British apologists
+say, not subject to British usufruct. The margin of tolerance in this
+instance is fairly wide, but its limits are sharply drawn. India is
+wanted and held, not for tribute or revenue to be paid into the Imperial
+treasury, nor even for exclusive trade privileges or preferences, but
+mainly as a preserve to provide official occupation and emoluments for
+British gentlemen not otherwise occupied or provided for; and
+secondarily as a means of safeguarding lucrative British investments,
+that is to say, investments by British capitalists of high and low
+degree. The current British professions on the subject of this
+occupation of India, and at times the shamefaced apology for it, is that
+the people of India suffer no hardship by this means; the resulting
+governmental establishment being no more onerous and no more expensive
+to them than any equally, or even any less, competent government of
+their own would necessarily be. The fact, however, remains, that India
+affords a much needed and very considerable net revenue to the class of
+British gentlemen, in the shape of official salaries and pensions, which
+the British gentry at large can on no account forego. Narrowed to these
+proportions it is readily conceivable that the British usufruct of India
+should rest with no extraordinary weight on the Indian people at large,
+however burdensome it may at times become to those classes who aspire to
+take over the usufruct in case the British establishment can be
+dislodged. This case evidently differs very appreciably from the
+projected German usufruct of neighboring countries in Europe.
+
+A case that may be more nearly in point would be that of any one of the
+countries subject to the Turkish rule in recent times; although these
+instances scarcely show just what to expect under the projected German
+regime. The Turkish rule has been notably inefficient, considered as a
+working system of dynastic usufruct; whereas it is confidently expected
+that the corresponding German system would show quite an exceptional
+degree of efficiency for the purpose. This Turkish inefficiency has had
+a two-fold effect, which should not appear in the German case. Through
+administrative abuses intended to serve the personal advantage of the
+irresponsible officials, the underlying peoples have suffered a
+progressive exhaustion and dilapidation; whereby the central authority,
+the dynastic establishment, has also grown progressively, cumulatively
+weaker and therefore less able to control its agents; and, in the second
+place, on the same grounds, in the pursuit of personal gain, and
+prompted by personal animosities, these irresponsible agents have
+persistently carried their measures of extortion beyond reasonable
+bounds,--that is to say beyond the bounds which a well considered plan
+of permanent usufruct would countenance. All this would be otherwise and
+more sensibly arranged under German Imperial auspices.
+
+One of the nations that have fallen under Turkish rule--and Turkish
+peace--affords a valuable illustration of a secondary point that is to
+be considered in connection with any plan of peace by submission. The
+Armenian people have in later time come partly under Russian dominion,
+and so have been exposed to the Russian system of bureaucratic
+exploitation; and the difference between Russian and Turkish Armenia is
+instructive. According to all credible--that is unofficial--accounts,
+conditions are perceptibly more tolerable in Russian Armenia. Well
+informed persons relate that the cause for this more lenient, or less
+extreme, administration of affairs under Russian officials is a
+selective death rate among them, such that a local official who
+persistently exceeds a certain ill-defined limit of tolerance is removed
+by what would under other circumstances be called an untimely death. No
+adequate remedy has been found, within the large limits which Russian
+bureaucratic administration habitually allows itself in questions of
+coercion. The Turk, on the other hand, less deterred by considerations
+of long-term expediency, and, it may be, less easily influenced by
+outside opinion on any point of humanity, has found a remedy in the
+systematic extirpation of any village in which an illicit death occurs.
+One will incline to presume that on this head the German Imperial
+procedure would be more after the Russian than after the Turkish
+pattern; although latterday circumstantial evidence will throw some
+sinister doubt on the reasonableness of such an expectation.
+
+It is plain, however, that the Turkish remedy for this form of
+insubordination is a wasteful means of keeping the peace. Plainly, to
+the home office, the High Command, the extinction of a village with its
+population is a more substantial loss than the unseasonable decease of
+one of its administrative agents; particularly when it is called to mind
+that such a decease will presumably follow only on such profligate
+excesses of naughtiness as are bound to be inexcusably unprofitable to
+the central authority. It may be left an open question how far a
+corrective of this nature can hopefully be looked to as applicable, in
+case of need, under the projected German Imperial usufruct.
+
+It may, I apprehend, be said without offense that there is no depth of
+depravity below the ordinary reach of the Russian bureaucracy; but this
+organisation finds itself constrained, after all, to use circumspection
+and set some limits on individual excursions beyond the bounds of
+decency and humanity, so soon as these excesses touch the common or
+joint interest of the organisation. Any excess of atrocity, beyond a
+certain margin of tolerance, on the part of any one of its members is
+likely to work pecuniary mischief to the rest; and then, the
+bureaucratic conduct of affairs is also, after all, in an uncertain
+degree subject to some surveillance by popular sentiment at home or
+abroad. The like appears not to hold true of the Turkish official
+organisation. The difference may be due to a less provident spirit among
+the latter, as already indicated. But a different tradition, perhaps an
+outgrowth of this lack of providence and of the consequent growth of a
+policy of "frightfulness," may also come in for a share in the outcome;
+and there is also a characteristic difference in point of religious
+convictions, which may go some way in the same direction. The followers
+of Islam appear on the whole to take the tenets of their faith at their
+face value--servile, intolerant and fanatic--whereas the Russian
+official class may perhaps without undue reproach be considered to have
+on the whole outlived the superstitious conceits to which they yield an
+expedient _pro forma_ observance. So that when worse comes to worst, and
+the Turk finds himself at length with his back against the last
+consolations of the faith that makes all things straight, he has the
+assured knowledge that he is in the right as against the unbelievers;
+whereas the Russian bureaucrat in a like case only knows that he is in
+the wrong. The last extremity is a less conclusive argument to the man
+in whose apprehension it is not the last extremity. Again, there is some
+shadow of doubt falls on the question as to which of these is more
+nearly in the German Imperial spirit.
+
+On the whole, the case of China is more to the point. By and large, the
+people of China, more particularly the people of the coastal-plains
+region, have for long habitually lived under a regime of peace by
+non-resistance. The peace has been broken transiently from time to time,
+and local disturbances have not been infrequent; but, taken by and
+large, the situation has habitually been of the peaceful order, on a
+ground of non-resisting submission. But this submission has not commonly
+been of a whole-hearted kind, and it has also commonly been associated
+with a degree of persistent sabotage; which has clogged and retarded the
+administration of governmental law and order, and has also been
+conducive to a large measure of irresponsible official corruption. The
+habitual scheme of things Chinese in this bearing may fairly be
+described as a peace of non-resistance tempered with sabotage and
+assassination. Such was the late Manchu regime, and there is no reason
+in China for expecting a substantially different outcome from the
+Japanese invasion that is now under way. The nature of this Japanese
+incursion should be sufficiently plain. It is an enterprise in
+statecraft after the order of Macchiavelli, Metternich, and Bismarck. Of
+course, the conciliatory fables given out by the diplomatic service, and
+by the other apologists, are to be taken at the normal discount of
+one-hundred percent. The relatively large current output of such fables
+may afford a hint as to the magnitude of the designs which the fables
+are intended to cover.
+
+The Chinese people have had a more extended experience in peace of this
+order than all others, and their case should accordingly be instructive
+beyond all others. Not that a European peace by non-resistance need be
+expected to run very closely on the Chinese lines, but there should be
+a reasonable expectation that the large course of things would be
+somewhat on the same order in both cases. Neither the European
+traditions and habitual temperament nor the modern state of the
+industrial arts will permit one to look for anything like a close
+parallel in detail; but it remains true, when all is said, that the
+Chinese experience of peace under submission to alien masters affords
+the most instructive illustration of such a regime, as touches its
+practicability, its methods, its cultural value, and its effect on the
+fortunes of the subject peoples and of their masters.
+
+Now, it may be said by way of preliminary generalisation that the
+life-history of the Chinese people and their culture is altogether the
+most imposing achievement which the records of mankind have to show;
+whereas the history of their successive alien establishments of mastery
+and usufruct is an unbroken sequence of incredibly shameful
+episodes,--always beginning in unbounded power and vainglory, running by
+way of misrule, waste and debauchery, to an inglorious finish in abject
+corruption and imbecility. Always have the gains in civilisation,
+industry and in the arts, been made by the subject Chinese, and always
+have their alien masters contributed nothing to the outcome but misrule,
+waste, corruption and decay. And yet in the long run, with all this
+handicap and misrule, the Chinese people have held their place and made
+headway in those things to which men look with affection and esteem when
+they come to take stock of what things are worth while. It would be a
+hopeless task to count up how many dynasties of masterful barbarians,
+here and there, have meanwhile come up and played their ephemeral role
+of vainglorious nuisance and gone under in shame and confusion, and
+dismissed with the invariable verdict of "Good Riddance!"
+
+It may at first sight seem a singular conjuncture of circumstances, but
+it is doubtless a consequence of the same conjuncture, that the Chinese
+people have also kept their hold through all history on the Chinese
+lands. They have lived and multiplied and continued to occupy the land,
+while their successive alien masters have come and gone. So that today,
+as the outcome of conquest, and of what would be rated as defeat, the
+people continue to be Chinese, with an unbroken pedigree as well as an
+unbroken line of home-bred culture running through all the ages of
+history. In the biological respect the Chinese plan of non-resistance
+has proved eminently successful.
+
+And, by the way, much the same, though not in the same degree, is true
+for the Armenian people; who have continued to hold their hill country
+through good days and evil, apparently without serious or enduring
+reduction of their numbers and without visible lapse into barbarism,
+while the successive disconnected dynasties of their conquering rulers
+have come and gone, leaving nothing but an ill name. "This fable
+teaches" that a diligent attention to the growing of crops and children
+is the sure and appointed way to the maintenance of a people and its
+culture even under the most adverse conditions, and that eventual death
+and shameful destruction inexorably wait on any "ruling race." Hitherto
+the rule has not failed. The rule, indeed, is grounded in the heritable
+traits of human nature, from which there is no escape.
+
+For its long-term biological success, as well as for the continued
+integrity of a people's culture, a peace of non-resistance, under good
+or evil auspices, is more to be desired than imperial dominion. But
+these things are not all that modern peoples live for, perhaps it is
+safe to say that in no case are these chief among the things for which
+civilised Europeans are willing to live. They urgently need also freedom
+to live their own life in their own way, or rather to live within the
+bonds of convention which they have come in for by use and wont, or at
+least they believe that such freedom is essential to any life that shall
+be quite worth while. So also they have a felt need of security from
+arbitrary interference in their pursuit of a livelihood and in the free
+control of their own pecuniary concerns. And they want a discretionary
+voice in the management of their joint interests, whether as a nation or
+in a minor civil group. In short, they want personal, pecuniary and
+political liberty, free from all direction or inhibition from without.
+They are also much concerned to maintain favorable economic conditions
+for themselves and their children. And last, but chiefly rather than
+least, they commonly are hide-bound patriots inspired with an
+intractable felt need of national prestige.
+
+It is an assemblage of peoples in such a frame of mind to whom the
+pacifists are proposing, in effect, a plan for eventual submission to an
+alien dynasty, under the form of a neutral peace compact to include the
+warlike Powers. There is little likelihood of such a scheme being found
+acceptable, with popular sentiment running as it now does in the
+countries concerned. And yet, if the brittle temper in which any such
+proposal is rejected by popular opinion in these countries today could
+be made to yield sufficiently to reflection and deliberate appraisal, it
+is by no means a foregone conclusion that its acceptance would not be
+the best way out of a critical situation. The cost of disabling and
+eliminating the warlike Power whose dominion is feared, or even of
+staving off the day of surrender, is evidently serious enough. The
+merits of the alternative should be open to argument, and should,
+indeed, be allowed due consideration. And any endeavour to present them
+without heat should presumably find a hearing. It appears to have been
+much of the fault of the pacifists who speak for the Peace League that
+they have failed or refused to recognise these ulterior consequences of
+the plan which they advocate; so that they appear either not to know
+what they are talking about, or to avoid talking about what they know.
+
+It will be evident from beforehand that the grave difficulty to be met
+in any advocacy of peace on terms of non-resistant subjection to an
+alien dynastic rule--"peace at any price"--is a difficulty of the
+psychological order. Whatever may be conceived to hold true for the
+Chinese people, such submission is repugnant to the sentiments of the
+Western peoples. Which in turn evidently is due to the prevalence of
+certain habitual preconceptions among modern civilised men,--certain
+acquired traits of temper and bias, of the nature of fixed ideas. That
+something in the way of a reasonably contented and useful life is
+possible under such a regime as is held in prospect, and even some
+tolerable degree of well-being, is made evident in the Chinese case. But
+the Chinese tolerance of such a regime goes to argue that they are
+charged with fewer preconceptions at variance with the exigencies of
+life under these conditions. So, it is commonly accepted, and presumably
+to be accepted, that the Chinese people at large have little if any
+effectual sense of nationality; their patriotism appears to be nearly a
+negligible quantity. This would appear to an outsider to have been their
+besetting weakness, to which their successful subjection by various and
+sundry ambitious aliens has been due. But it appears also to have been
+the infirmity by grace of which this people have been obliged to learn
+the ways of submission, and so have had the fortune to outlive their
+alien masters, all and sundry, and to occupy the land and save the
+uncontaminated integrity of their long-lived civilisation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some account of the nature and uses of this spirit of patriotism that is
+held of so great account among Western nations has already been set out
+in an earlier passage. One or two points in the case, that bear on the
+argument here, may profitably be recalled. The patriotic spirit, or the
+tie of nationalism, is evidently of the nature of habit, whatever
+proclivity to the formation of such a habit may be native to mankind.
+More particularly is it a matter of habit--it might even be called a
+matter of fortuitous habit--what particular national establishment a
+given human subject will become attached to on reaching what is called
+"years of discretion" and so becoming a patriotic citizen.
+
+The analogy of the clam may not be convincing, but it may at least serve
+to suggest what may be the share played by habituation in the matter of
+national attachment. The young clam, after having passed the
+free-swimming phase of his life, as well as the period of attachment to
+the person of a carp or similar fish, drops to the bottom and attaches
+himself loosely in the place and station in life to which he has been
+led; and he loyally sticks to his particular patch of ooze and sand
+through good fortune and evil. It is, under Providence, something of a
+fortuitous matter where the given clam shall find a resting place for
+the sole of his foot, but it is also, after all, "his own, his native
+land" etc. It lies in the nature of a clam to attach himself after this
+fashion, loosely, to the bottom where he finds a living, and he would
+not be a "good clam and true" if he failed to do so; but the particular
+spot for which he forms this attachment is not of the essence of the
+case. At least, so they say.
+
+It may be, as good men appear to believe or know, that all men of sound,
+or at least those of average, mind will necessarily be of a patriotic
+temper and be attached by ties of loyalty to some particular national
+establishment, ordinarily the particular establishment which is formally
+identified with the land in which they live; although it is always
+possible that a given individual may be an alien in the land, and so may
+owe allegiance to and be ruled by a patriotic attachment to another
+national establishment, to which the conventionalities governing his
+special case have assigned him as his own proper nation. The analogy of
+the clam evidently does not cover the case. The patriotic citizen is
+attached to his own proper nationality not altogether by the accident of
+domicile, but rather by the conventions, legal or customary, which
+assign him to this or that national establishment according to certain
+principles of use and wont.
+
+Mere legal citizenship or allegiance does not decide the matter either;
+at least not by any means unavoidably; as appears in the case of the
+Chinese subject under Manchu or Japanese rule; and as appears perhaps
+more perspicuously in the case of the "hyphenate" American citizen,
+whose formal allegiance is to the nation in whose land he prefers to
+live, all the while that his patriotic affection centers on his
+spiritual Fatherland in whose fortunes he has none but a non-resident
+interest. Indeed, the particular national tie that will bind the
+affections--that is to say the effectual patriotic attachment--of any
+given individual may turn out on closer scrutiny to be neither that of
+domicile or of formal legal allegiance, nor that of putative origin or
+pedigree, but only a reflex of certain national animosities; which may
+also turn out on examination to rest on putative grounds--as illustrated
+by a subsidiary class of hyphenate American citizens whose affections
+have come to be bound up in the national fortunes of one foreign Power
+for the simple, but sufficient, reason that, on conventional grounds,
+they bear malice against another equally foreign Power.
+
+Evidently there is much sophistication, not to say conventionalised
+affectation, in all this national attachment and allegiance. It will
+perhaps not do to say that it is altogether a matter of sophistication.
+Yet it may not exceed the premises to say that the particular choice,
+the concrete incidence, of this national attachment is in any given case
+a matter of sophistication, largely tempered with fortuity. One is born
+into a given nationality--or, in case of dynastic allegiance, into
+service and devotion to a (fortuitously) given sovereign--or at least so
+it is commonly believed. Still one can without blame, and without
+excessive shame, shift one's allegiance on occasion. What is not
+countenanced among civilised men is to shift out of allegiance to any
+given nationality or dynasty without shifting into the like complication
+of gainless obligations somewhere else. Such a shifting of national or
+dynastic base is not quite reputable, though it is also not precisely
+disreputable. The difficulty in the case appears to be a moral
+difficulty, not a mental or a pecuniary one, and assuredly not a
+physical difficulty, since the relation in question is not a physical
+relation. It would appear to be of the moral order of things, in that
+sense of the term in which conventional proprieties are spoken of as
+moral. That is to say, it is a question of conforming to current
+expectations under a code of conventional proprieties. Like much of the
+conventional code of behavior this patriotic attachment has the benefit
+of standardised decorum, and its outward manifestations are enjoined by
+law. All of which goes to show how very seriously the whole matter is
+regarded.
+
+And yet it is also a matter of common notoriety that large aggregates of
+men, not to speak of sporadic individuals, will on occasion shift their
+allegiance with the most felicitous effect and with no sensible loss of
+self-respect or of their good name. Such a shift is to be seen in
+multiple in the German nation within the past half-century, when, for
+instance, the Hanoverians, the Saxons, and even the Holsteiners in very
+appreciable numbers, not to mention the subjects of minuscular
+principalities whose names have been forgotten in the shuffle, all
+became good and loyal subjects of the Empire and of the Imperial
+dynasty,--good and loyal without reservation, as has abundantly
+appeared. So likewise within a similar period the inhabitants of the
+Southern States repudiated their allegiance to the Union, putting in its
+place an equivalent loyalty to their new-made country; and then, when
+the new national establishment slipped out from under their feet they
+returned as whole-heartedly as need be to their earlier allegiance. In
+each of these moves, taken with deliberation, it is not to be doubted
+that this body of citizens have been moved by an unimpeachable spirit of
+patriotic honour. No one who is in any degree conversant with the facts
+is likely to question the declaration that it would be a perversion, not
+to say an inversion, of fact to rate their patriotic devotion to the
+Union today lower than that of any other section of the country or any
+other class or condition of men.
+
+But there is more, and in a sense worse, to be found along the same
+general line of evidence touching this sublimated sentiment of group
+solidarity that is called nationalism. The nation, of course, is large;
+the larger the better, it is believed. It is so large, indeed, that
+considered as a group or community of men living together it has no
+sensible degree of homogeneity in any of their material circumstances or
+interests; nor is anything more than an inconsiderable fraction of the
+aggregate population, territory, industry, or daily life known to any
+one of these patriotic citizens except by remote and highly dubious
+hearsay. The one secure point on which there is a (constructive)
+uniformity is the matter of national allegiance; which grows stronger
+and more confident with every increase in aggregate mass and volume. It
+is also not doubtful, e.g., that if the people of the British Dominions
+in North America should choose to throw in their national lot with the
+Union, all sections and classes, except those whose pecuniary interest
+in a protective tariff might be conceived to suffer, would presently
+welcome them; nor is it doubtful that American nationality would cover
+the new and larger aggregate as readily as the old. Much the same will
+hold true with respect to the other countries colonised under British
+auspices. And there is no conclusive reason for drawing the limit of
+admissible national extension at that point.
+
+So much, however, is fairly within the possibilities of the calculable
+future; its realisation would turn in great measure on the
+discontinuance of certain outworn or disserviceable institutional
+arrangements; as, e.g., the remnants of a decayed monarchy, and the
+legally protected vested interests of certain business enterprises and
+of certain office-holding classes. What more and farther might
+practicably be undertaken in this way, in the absence of marplot
+office-holders, office-seekers, sovereigns, priests and monopolistic
+business concerns sheltered under national animosities and restraints of
+trade, would be something not easy to assign a limit to. All the minor
+neutrals, that cluster about the North Sea, could unquestionably be
+drawn into such a composite nationality, in the absence, or with due
+disregard, of those classes, families and individuals whose pecuniary or
+invidious gain is dependent on or furthered by the existing division of
+these peoples.
+
+The projected defensive league of neutrals is, in effect, an inchoate
+coalescence of the kind. Its purpose is the safeguarding of the common
+peace and freedom, which is also the avowed purpose and justification of
+all those modern nations that have outlived the regime of dynastic
+ambition and so of enterprise in dominion for dominion's sake, and have
+passed into the neutral phase of nationality; or it should perhaps
+rather be said that such is the end of endeavour and the warrant of
+existence and power for these modern national establishments in so far
+as they have outlived and repudiated such ambitions of a dynastic or a
+quasi-dynastic order, and so have taken their place as intrinsically
+neutral commonwealths.
+
+It is only in the common defense (or in the defense of the like
+conditions of life for their fellowmen elsewhere) that the citizens of
+such a commonwealth can without shame entertain or put in evidence a
+spirit of patriotic solidarity; and it is only by specious and
+sophistical appeal to the national honour--a conceit surviving out of
+the dynastic past--that the populace of such a commonwealth can be
+stirred to anything beyond a defense of their own proper liberties or
+the liberties of like-minded men elsewhere, in so far as they are not
+still imbued with something of the dynastic animus and the chauvinistic
+animosities which they have formally repudiated in repudiating the
+feudalistic principles of the dynastic State.
+
+The "nation," without the bond of dynastic loyalty, is after all a
+make-shift idea, an episodic half-way station in the sequence, and
+loyalty, in any proper sense, to the nation as such is so much of a
+make-believe, that in the absence of a common defense to be safeguarded
+any such patriotic conceit must lose popular assurance and, with the
+passing of generations, fall insensibly into abeyance as an archaic
+affectation. The pressure of danger from without is necessary to keep
+the national spirit alert and stubborn, in case the pressure from
+within, that comes of dynastic usufruct working for dominion, has been
+withdrawn. With further extension of the national boundaries, such that
+the danger of gratuitous infraction from without grows constantly less
+menacing, while the traditional regime of international animosities
+falls more and more remotely into the background, the spirit of
+nationalism is fairly on the way to obsolescence through disuse. In
+other words, the nation, as a commonwealth, being a partisan
+organisation for a defensive purpose, becomes _functa officio_ in
+respect of its nationalism and its patriotic ties in somewhat the same
+measure as the national coalition grows to such a size that partisanship
+is displaced by a cosmopolitan security.
+
+Doubtless the falling into abeyance through disuse of so pleasing a
+virtue as patriotic devotion will seem an impossibly distasteful
+consummation; and about tastes there is no disputing, but tastes are
+mainly creations of habit. Except for the disquieting name of the thing,
+there is today little stands in the way of a cosmopolitan order of
+human intercourse unobtrusively displacing national allegiance; except
+for vested interests in national offices and international
+discriminations, and except for those peoples among whom national life
+still is sufficiently bound up with dynastic ambition.
+
+In an earlier passage the patriotic spirit has been defined as a sense
+of partisan solidarity in point of prestige, and sufficient argument has
+been spent in confirming the definition and showing its implications.
+With the passing of all occasion for a partisan spirit as touches the
+common good, through coalescence of the parts between which partisan
+discrepancies have hitherto been kept up, there would also have passed
+all legitimate occasion for or provocation to an intoxication of
+invidious prestige on national lines,--and there is no prestige that is
+not of an invidious nature, that being, indeed, the whole of its nature.
+He would have to be a person of praeternatural patriotic sensibilities
+who could fall into an emotional state by reason of the national
+prestige of such a coalition commonwealth as would be made up, e.g., of
+the French and English-speaking peoples, together with those other
+neutrally and peaceably inclined European communities that are of a
+sufficiently mature order to have abjured dynastic ambitions of
+dominion, and perhaps including the Chinese people as well. Such a
+coalition may now fairly be said to be within speaking distance, and
+with its consummation, even in the inchoate shape of a defensive league
+of neutrals, the eventual abeyance of that national allegiance and
+national honour that bulks so large in the repertory of current
+eloquence would also come in prospect.
+
+All this is by no means saying that love of country, and of use and wont
+as it runs in one's home area and among one's own people, would suffer
+decay, or even abatement. The provocation to nostalgia would presumably
+be as good as ever. It is even conceivable that under such a
+(contemplated) regime of unconditional security, attachment to one's own
+habitat and social circumstances might grow to something more than is
+commonly seen in the precarious situation in which the chances of a
+quiet life are placed today. But nostalgia is not a bellicose distemper,
+nor does it make for gratuitous disturbance of peaceable alien peoples;
+neither is it the spirit in which men lend themselves to warlike
+enterprise looking to profitless dominion abroad. Men make patriotic
+sacrifices of life and substance in spite of home-sickness rather than
+by virtue of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The aim of this long digression has been to show that patriotism, of
+that bellicose kind that seeks satisfaction in inflicting damage and
+discomfort on the people of other nations, is not of the essence of
+human life; that it is of the nature of habit, induced by circumstances
+in the past and handed on by tradition and institutional arrangements
+into the present; and that men can, without mutilation, divest
+themselves of it, or perhaps rather be divested of it by force of
+circumstances which will set the current of habituation the contrary
+way.
+
+The change of habituation necessary to bring about such a decay of the
+bellicose national spirit would appear to be of a negative order, at
+least in the main. It would be an habituation to unconditional peace and
+security; in other words, to the absence of provocation, rather than a
+coercive training away from the bellicose temper. This bellicose temper,
+as it affects men collectively, appears to be an acquired trait; and it
+should logically disappear in time in the absence of those conditions by
+impact of which it has been acquired. Such obsolescence of patriotism,
+however, would not therefore come about abruptly or swiftly, since the
+patriotic spirit has by past use and wont, and by past indoctrination,
+been so thoroughly worked into the texture of the institutional fabric
+and into the commonsense taste and morality, that its effectual
+obsolescence will involve a somewhat comprehensive displacement and
+mutation throughout the range of institutions and popular conceits that
+have been handed down. And institutional changes take time, being
+creations of habit. Yet, again, there is the qualification to this last,
+that since the change in question appears to be a matter, not of
+acquiring a habit and confirming it in the shape of an article of
+general use and wont, but of forgetting what once was learned, the time
+and experience to be allowed for its decay need logically not equal that
+required for its acquirement, either in point of duration or in point of
+the strictness of discipline necessary to inculcate it.
+
+While the spirit of nationalism is such an acquired trait, and while it
+should therefore follow that the chief agency in divesting men of it
+must be disuse of the discipline out of which it has arisen, yet a
+positive, and even something of a drastic discipline to the contrary
+effect need not be altogether ineffectual in bringing about its
+obsolescence. The case of the Chinese people seems to argue something of
+the sort. Not that the Chinese are simply and neutrally unpatriotic;
+they appear also to be well charged with disloyalty to their alien
+rulers. But along with a sense of being on the defensive in their common
+concerns, there is also the fact that they appear not to be appreciably
+patriotic in the proper sense; they are not greatly moved by a spirit
+of nationality. And this failure of the national spirit among them can
+scarcely be set down to a neutral disuse of that discipline which has on
+the other hand induced a militant nationalism in the peoples of
+Christendom; it should seem more probable, at least, that this relative
+absence of a national ambition is traceable in good part to its having
+been positively bred out of them by the stern repression of all such
+aspirations under the autocratic rule of their alien masters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Peace on terms of submission and non-resistance to the ordinary
+exactions and rulings of those Imperial authorities to whom such
+submission may become necessary, then, will be contingent on the virtual
+abeyance of the spirit of national pride in the peoples who so are to
+come under Imperial rule. A sufficient, by no means necessarily a total,
+elimination or decadence of this proclivity will be the condition
+precedent of any practicable scheme for a general peace on this footing.
+How large an allowance of such animus these prospectively subject
+peoples might still carry, without thereby assuring the defeat of any
+such plan, would in great measure depend on the degree of clemency or
+rigor with which the superior authority might enforce its rule. It is
+not that a peace plan of this nature need precisely be considered to
+fall outside the limits of possibility, on account of this necessary
+condition, but it is at the best a manifestly doubtful matter. Advocates
+of a negotiated peace should not fail to keep in mind and make public
+that the plan which they advocate carries with it, as a sequel or
+secondary phase, such an unconditional surrender and a consequent regime
+of non-resistance, and that there still is grave doubt whether the
+peoples of these Western nations are at present in a sufficiently
+tolerant frame of mind, or can in the calculable future come in for such
+a tolerantly neutral attitude in point of national pride, as to submit
+in any passable fashion to any alien Imperial rule.
+
+If the spiritual difficulty presented by this prevalent spirit of
+national pride--sufficiently stubborn still, however inane a conceit it
+may seem on sober reflection--if this animus of factional
+insubordination could be overcome or in some passable measure be
+conciliated or abated, there is much to be said in favor of such a plan
+of peaceable submission to an extraneous and arbitrary authority, and
+therefore also for that plan of negotiated peace by means of which
+events would be put in train for its realisation.
+
+Any passably dispassionate consideration of the projected regime will
+come unavoidably to the conclusion that the prospectively subject
+peoples should have no legitimate apprehension of loss or disadvantage
+in the material respect. It is, of course, easy for an unreflecting
+person to jump to the conclusion that subjection to an alien power must
+bring grievous burdens, in the way of taxes and similar impositions. But
+reflection will immediately show that no appreciable increase, over the
+economic burdens already carried by the populace under their several
+national establishments, could come of such a move.
+
+As bearing on this question it is well to call to mind that the
+contemplated imperial dominion is designed to be very wide-reaching and
+with very ample powers. Its nearest historical analogue, of course, is
+the Roman imperial dominion--in the days of the Antonines--and that the
+nearest analogue to the projected German peace is the Roman peace, in
+the days of its best security. There is every warrant for the
+presumption that the contemplated Imperial dominion is to be
+substantially all-inclusive. Indeed there is no stopping place for the
+projected enterprise short of an all-inclusive dominion. And there will
+consequently be no really menacing outside power to be provided against.
+Consequently there will be but little provision necessary for the common
+defense, as compared, e.g., with the aggregate of such provision found
+necessary for self-defense on the part of the existing nations acting in
+severalty and each jealously guarding its own national integrity.
+Indeed, compared with the burden of competitive armament to which the
+peoples of Europe have been accustomed, the need of any armed force
+under the new regime should be an inconsiderable matter, even when there
+is added to the necessary modicum of defensive preparation the more
+imperative and weightier provision of force with which to keep the peace
+at home.
+
+Into the composition of this necessary modicum of armed force slight if
+any contingents of men would be drawn from the subject peoples, for the
+reason that no great numbers would be needed; as also because no devoted
+loyalty to the dynasty could reasonably be looked for among them, even
+if no positive insecurity were felt to be involved in their employment.
+On this head the projected scheme unambiguously commends itself as a
+measure of economy, both in respect of the pecuniary burdens demanded
+and as regards the personal annoyance of military service.
+
+As a further count, it is to be presumed that the burden of the Imperial
+government and its bureaucratic administration--what would be called the
+cost of maintenance and repairs of the dynastic establishment and its
+apparatus of control--would be borne by the subject peoples. Here again
+one is warranted in looking for a substantial economy to be effected by
+such a centralised authority, and a consequent lighter aggregate burden
+on the subjects. Doubtless, the "overhead charges" would not be reduced
+to their practicable minimum. Such a governmental establishment, with
+its bureaucratic personnel, its "civil list" and its privileged classes,
+would not be conducted on anything like a parsimonious footing. There is
+no reason to apprehend any touch of modesty in the exactions of such a
+dynastic establishment for itself or in behalf of its underlying
+hierarchy of gentlefolk.
+
+There is also to be counted in, in the concrete instance on which the
+argument here turns, a more or less considerable burden of contributions
+toward the maintenance and augmentation of that culture that has been
+the topic of so many encomiums. At this point it should be recalled that
+it is the pattern of Periclean Athens that is continually in mind in
+these encomiums. Which brings up, in this immediate connection, the
+dealings of Periclean Athens with the funds of the League, and the
+source as well as the destination of these surplus funds. Out of it all
+came the works on the Acropolis, together with much else of intellectual
+and artistic life that converged upon and radiated from this Athenian
+center of culture. The vista of _Denkmaeler_ that so opens to the vision
+of a courageous fancy is in itself such a substance of things hoped for
+as should stir the heart of all humane persons.[8] The cost of this
+subvention of Culture would doubtless be appreciable, but those grave
+men who have spent most thought on this prospective cultural gain to be
+had from the projected Imperial rule appear to entertain no doubt as to
+its being worth all that it would cost.
+
+[Footnote 8: _Denk 'mall_]
+
+Any one who is inclined to rate the prospective pecuniary costs and
+losses high would doubtless be able to find various and sundry items of
+minor importance to add to this short list of general categories on the
+side of cost; but such additional items, not fairly to be included under
+these general captions, would after all be of minor importance, in the
+aggregate or in detail, and would not appreciably affect the grand
+balance of pecuniary profit and loss to be taken account of in any
+appraisal of the projected Imperial regime. There should evidently be
+little ground to apprehend that its installation would entail a net loss
+or a net increase of pecuniary burdens. There is, of course, the
+ill-defined and scarcely definable item of expenditure under the general
+head of Gentility, Dignity, Distinction, Magnificence, or whatever term
+may seem suitable to designate that consumption of goods and services
+that goes to maintain the high repute of the Court and to keep the
+underlying gentlefolk in countenance. In its pecuniary incidence this
+line of (necessary) expenditure belongs under the rubric of Conspicuous
+Waste; and one will always have to face the disquieting flexibility of
+this item of expenditure. The consumptive demand of this kind is in an
+eminent degree "indefinitely extensible," as the phrasing of the
+economists would have it, and as various historical instances of courtly
+splendor and fashionable magnificence will abundantly substantiate.
+There is a constant proclivity to advance this conventional "standard of
+living" to the limit set by the available means; and yet these
+conventional necessities will ordinarily not, in the aggregate, take up
+all the available means; although now and again, as under the _Ancien
+Regime_, and perhaps in Imperial Rome, the standard of splendid living
+may also exceed the current means in hand and lead to impoverishment of
+the underlying community.
+
+An analysis of the circumstances governing this flexibility of the
+conventional standard of living and of pecuniary magnificence can not be
+gone into here. In the case under consideration it will have to be left
+as an indeterminate but considerable item in the burden of cost which
+the projected Imperial rule may be counted on to impose on the
+underlying peoples. The cost of the Imperial court, nobility, and civil
+service, therefore, would be a matter of estimate, on which no close
+agreement would be expected; and yet, here as in an earlier connection,
+it seems a reasonable expectation that sufficient dignity and
+magnificence could be put in evidence by such a large-scale
+establishment at a lower aggregate cost than the aggregate of
+expenditures previously incurred for the like ends by various nations
+working in severalty and at cross purposes.
+
+Doubtless it would be altogether a mistaken view of this production of
+dignity by means of a lavish expenditure on superfluities, to believe
+that the same principle of economy should apply here as was found
+applicable in the matter of armament for defense. With the installation
+of a collective national establishment, to include substantially all the
+previously competing nations, the need of defensive armament should in
+all reason decline to something very inconsiderable indeed. But it would
+be hasty to conclude that with the coalescence of these nations under
+one paramount control the need of creating notoriety and prestige for
+this resulting central establishment by the consumption of decorative
+superfluities would likewise decline. The need of such dignity and
+magnificence is only in part, perhaps a minor part, of a defensive
+character. For the greater part, no doubt, the motive to this
+conspicuously wasteful consumption is personal vanity, in Imperial
+policy as well as in the private life of fashion,--or perhaps one should
+more deferentially say that it is a certain range of considerations
+which would be identified as personal vanity in case they were met with
+among men beneath the Imperial level. And so far as the creation of this
+form of "good-will" by this manner of advertising is traceable to such,
+or equivalent, motives of a personal incidence, the provocation to
+economy along this line would presumably not be a notable factor in the
+case. And one returns perforce to the principle already spoken of above,
+that the consumptive need of superfluities is indefinitely extensible,
+with the resulting inference that nothing conclusive is to be said as to
+the prospective magnitude of this item in the Imperial bill of expense,
+or of the consequent pecuniary burdens which it would impose on the
+underlying peoples.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So far the argument has run on the pecuniary incidence of this projected
+Imperial dominion as it falls on the underlying community as a whole,
+with no attempt to discriminate between the divergent interests of the
+different classes and conditions of men that go to make up any modern
+community. The question in hand is a question of pecuniary burdens, and
+therefore of the pecuniary interests of these several distinguishable
+classes or conditions of men. In all these modern nations that now stand
+in the article of decision between peace by submission or a doubtful and
+melancholy alternative,--in all of them men are by statute and custom
+inviolably equal before the law, of course; they are ungraded and
+masterless men before the law. But these same peoples are also alike in
+the respect that pecuniary duties and obligations among them are
+similarly sacred and inviolable under the dispassionate findings of the
+law. This pecuniary equality is, in effect, an impersonal equality
+between pecuniary magnitudes; from which it follows that these citizens
+of the advanced nations are not ungraded men in the pecuniary respect;
+nor are they masterless, in so far as a greater pecuniary force will
+always, under this impersonal equality of the law, stand in a relation
+of mastery toward a lesser one.
+
+Class distinctions, except pecuniary distinctions, have fallen away. But
+all these modern nations are made up of pecuniary classes, differing
+from one another by minute gradations in the marginal cases, but
+falling, after all, and in the large, into two broadly and securely
+distinguishable pecuniary categories: those who have more and those who
+have less. Statisticians have been at pains to ascertain that a
+relatively very small numerical minority of the citizens in these modern
+nations own all but a relatively very small proportion of the aggregate
+wealth in the country. So that it appears quite safe to say that in such
+a country as America, e.g., something less than ten percent of the
+inhabitants own something more than ninety percent of the country's
+wealth. It would scarcely be a wild overstraining of its practical
+meaning to say that this population is made up of two classes: those who
+own the country's wealth, and those who do not. In strict accuracy, as
+before the law, this characterisation will not hold; whereas in
+practical effect, it is a sufficiently close approximation. This latter
+class, who have substantially no other than a fancied pecuniary interest
+in the nation's material fortunes, are the category often spoken of as
+The Common Man. It is not necessary, nor is it desired, to find a
+corresponding designation for the other category, those who own.
+
+The articulate recognition of this division into contrasted pecuniary
+classes or conditions, with correspondingly (at least potentially)
+divergent pecuniary interests, need imply no degree of approval or
+disapproval of the arrangement which is so recognised. The recognition
+of it is necessary to a perspicuous control of the argument, as bears on
+the possible systematic and inherent discrepancy among these men in
+respect of their material interests under the projected Imperial rule.
+Substantially, it is a distinction between those who have and those who
+have not, and in a question of prospective pecuniary loss the man who
+has nothing to lose is differently placed from the one who has. It would
+perhaps seem flippant, and possibly lacking in the courtesy due one's
+prospective lord paramount, to say with the poet, _Cantabit vacuus coram
+latrone viator_.
+
+But the whole case is not so simple. It is only so long as the projected
+pecuniary inroad is conceived as a simple sequestration of wealth in
+hand, that such a characterisation can be made to serve. The Imperial
+aim is not a passing act of pillage, but a perpetual usufruct; and the
+whole question takes on a different and more complex shape when it so
+touches the enduring conditions of life and livelihood. The citizen who
+has nothing, or who has no capitalisable source of unearned income, yet
+has a pecuniary interest in a livelihood to be gained from day to day,
+and he is yet vulnerable in the pecuniary respect in that his livelihood
+may with the utmost facility be laid under contribution by various and
+sundry well-tried contrivances. Indeed, the common man who depends for
+his livelihood on his daily earnings is in a more immediately
+precarious position than those who have something appreciable laid up
+against a rainy day, in the shape of a capitalised source of income.
+Only that it is still doubtful if his position is precarious in such a
+fashion as to lay him open to a notable increase of hardship, or to loss
+of the amenities of life, in the same relative degree as his well-to-do
+neighbour.
+
+In point of fact it may well be doubted if this common man has anything
+to apprehend in the way of added hardship or loss of creature comforts
+under the contemplated regime of Imperial tutelage. He would presumably
+find himself in a precarious case under the arbitrary and irresponsible
+authority of an alien master working through an alien master class. The
+doubt which presents itself is as to whether this common man would be
+more precariously placed, or would come in for a larger and surer sum of
+hard usage and scant living, under this projected order of things, than
+what he already is exposed to in his pecuniary relations with his
+well-to-do compatriots under the current system of law and order.
+
+Under this current regime of law and order, according to the equitable
+principles of Natural Rights, the man without means has no pecuniary
+rights which his well-to-do pecuniary master is bound to respect. This
+may have been an unintended, as it doubtless was an unforeseen, outcome
+of the move out of feudalism and prescriptive rights and immunities,
+into the system of individual liberty and manhood franchise; but as
+commonly happens in case of any substantial change in the scheme of
+institutional arrangements, unforeseen consequences come in along with
+those that have been intended. In that period of history when Western
+Europe was gathering that experience out of which the current habitual
+scheme of law and order has come, the right of property and free
+contract was a complement and safeguard to that individual initiative
+and masterless equality of men for which the spokesmen of the new era
+contended. That it is no longer so at every turn, or even in the main,
+in later time, is in great part due to changes of the pecuniary order,
+that have come on since then, and that seem not to have cast their
+shadow before.
+
+In all good faith, and with none but inconsequential reservations, the
+material fortunes of modern civilised men--together with much else--have
+so been placed on a pecuniary footing, with little to safeguard them at
+any point except the inalienable right of pecuniary self-direction and
+initiative, in an environment where virtually all the indispensable
+means of pecuniary self-direction and initiative are in the hands of
+that contracted category of owners spoken of above. A numerical
+minority--under ten percent of the population--constitutes a conclusive
+pecuniary majority--over ninety percent of the means--under a system of
+law and order that turns on the inalienable right of owners to dispose
+of the means in hand as may suit their convenience and profit,--always
+barring recourse to illegal force or fraud. There is, however, a very
+appreciable margin of legal recourse to force and of legally protected
+fraud available in case of need. Of course the expedients here referred
+to as legally available force and fraud in the defense of pecuniary
+rights and the pursuit of pecuniary gain are not force and fraud _de
+jure_ but only _de facto_. They are further, and well known,
+illustrations of how the ulterior consequences of given institutional
+arrangements and given conventionalised principles (habits of thought)
+of conduct may in time come to run at cross purposes with the initial
+purpose that led to the acceptance of these institutions and to the
+confirmation and standardisation of these habitual norms of conduct. For
+the time being, however, they are "fundamentally and eternally right and
+good."
+
+Being a pecuniary majority--what may be called a majority of the
+corporate stock--of the nation, it is also fundamentally and eternally
+right and good that the pecuniary interests of the owners of the
+material means of life should rule unabated in all those matters of
+public policy that touch on the material fortunes of the community at
+large. Barring a slight and intermittent mutter of discontent, this
+arrangement has also the cordial approval of popular sentiment in these
+modern democratic nations. One need only recall the paramount importance
+which is popularly attached to the maintenance and extension of the
+nation's trade--for the use of the investors--or the perpetuation of a
+protective tariff--for the use of the protected business concerns--or,
+again, the scrupulous regard with which such a body of public servants
+as the Interstate Commerce Commission will safeguard the legitimate
+claim of the railway companies to a "reasonable" rate of earnings on the
+capitalised value of the presumed earning-capacity of their property.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again, in view of the unaccustomed freedom with which it is here
+necessary to speak of these delicate matters, it may be in place to
+disclaim all intention to criticise the established arrangements on
+their merits as details of public policy. All that comes in question
+here, touching these and the like features of the established law and
+order, is the bearing of all this on the material fortunes of the common
+man under the current regime, as contrasted with what he would
+reasonably have to look for under the projected regime of Imperial
+tutelage that would come in, consequent upon this national surrender to
+Imperial dominion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In these democratic countries public policy is guided primarily by
+considerations of business expediency, and the administration, as well
+as the legislative power, is in the hands of businessmen, chosen
+avowedly on the ground of their businesslike principles and ability.
+There is no power in such a community that can over-rule the exigencies
+of business, nor would popular sentiment countenance any exercise of
+power that should traverse these exigencies, or that would act to
+restrain trade or discourage the pursuit of gain. An apparent exception
+to the rule occurs in wartime, when military exigencies may over-rule
+the current demands of business traffic; but the exception is in great
+part only apparent, in that the warlike operations are undertaken in
+whole or in part with a view to the protection or extension of business
+traffic.
+
+National surveillance and regulation of business traffic in these
+countries hitherto, ever since and in so far as the modern democratic
+order of things has taken effect, has uniformly been of the nature of
+interference with trade and investment in behalf of the nation's
+mercantile community at large, as seen in port and shipping regulations
+and in the consular service, or in behalf of particular favored groups
+or classes of business concerns, as in protective tariffs and subsidies.
+In all this national management of pecuniary affairs, under modern
+democratic principles, the common man comes into the case only as raw
+material of business traffic,--as consumer or as laborer. He is one of
+the industrial agencies by use of which the businessman who employs him
+supplies himself with goods for the market, or he is one of the units
+of consumptive demand that make up this market in which the business man
+sells his goods, and so "realises" on his investment. He is, of course,
+free, under modern principles of the democratic order, to deal or not to
+deal with this business community, whether as laborer or as consumer, or
+as small-scale producer engaged in purveying materials or services on
+terms defined by the community of business interests engaged on so large
+a scale as to count in their determination. That is to say, he is free
+_de jure_ to take or leave the terms offered. _De facto_ he is only free
+to take them--with inconsequential exceptions--the alternative being
+obsolescence by disuse, not to choose a harsher name for a distasteful
+eventuality.
+
+The general ground on which the business system, as it works under the
+over-ruling exigencies of the so-called "big business," so defines the
+terms of life for the common man, who works and buys, is the ground
+afforded by the principle of "charging what the traffic will bear;" that
+is to say, fixing the terms of hiring, buying and selling at such a
+figure as will yield the largest net return to the business concerns in
+whom, collectively or in severalty, the discretion vests. Discretion in
+these premises does not vest in any business concern that does not
+articulate with the system of "big business," or that does not dispose
+of resources sufficient to make it a formidable member of the system.
+Whether these concerns act in severalty or by collusion and conspiracy,
+in so defining the pecuniary terms of life for the community at large,
+is substantially an idle question, so far as bears on the material
+interest of the common man. The base-line is still what the traffic will
+bear, and it is still adhered to, so nearly as the human infirmity of
+the discretionary captains of industry will admit, whether the due
+approximation to this base-line is reached by a process of competitive
+bidding or by collusive advisement.
+
+The generalisation so offered, touching the material conditions of life
+for the common man under the modern rule of big business, may seem
+unwarrantably broad. It may be worth while to take note of more than one
+point in qualification of it, chiefly to avoid the appearance of having
+overlooked any of the material circumstances of the case. The "system"
+of large business, working its material consequences through the system
+of large-scale industry, but more particularly by way of the large-scale
+and wide-reaching business of trade in the proper sense, draws into the
+net of its control all parts of the community and all its inhabitants,
+in some degree of dependence. But there is always, hitherto, an
+appreciable fraction of the inhabitants--as, e.g., outlying agricultural
+sections that are in a "backward" state--who are by no means closely
+bound in the orderly system of business, or closely dependent on the
+markets. They may be said to enjoy a degree of independence, by virtue
+of their foregoing as much as may be of the advantages offered by modern
+industrial specialisation. So also there are the minor and interstitial
+trades that are still carried on by handicraft methods; these, too, are
+still somewhat loosely held in the fabric of the business system. There
+is one thing and another in this way to be taken account of in any
+exhaustive survey, but the accounting for them will after all amount to
+nothing better than a gleaning of remnants and partial exceptions, such
+as will in no material degree derange the general proposition in hand.
+
+Again, there runs through the length and breadth of this business
+community a certain measure of incompetence or inefficiency of
+management, as seen from the point of view of the conceivable perfect
+working of the system as a whole. It may be due to a slack attention
+here and there; or to the exigencies of business strategy which may
+constrain given business concerns to an occasional attitude of "watchful
+waiting" in the hope of catching a rival off his guard; or to a lack of
+perfect mutual understanding among the discretionary businessmen, due
+sometimes to an over-careful guarding of trade secrets or advance
+information; or, as also happens, and quite excusably, to a lack of
+perfect mutual confidence among these businessmen, as to one another's
+entire good faith or good-will. The system is after all a competitive
+one, in the sense that each of the discretionary directors of business
+is working for his own pecuniary gain, whether in cooperation with his
+fellows or not. "An honest man will bear watching." As in other
+collusive organisations for gain, confederates are apt to fall out when
+it comes to a division of what is in hand. In one way and another the
+system is beset with inherent infirmities, which hinder its perfect
+work; and in so far it will fall short of the full realisation of that
+rule of business that inculcates charging what the traffic will bear,
+and also in so far the pressure which the modern system of business
+management brings to bear on the common man will also fall short of the
+last straw--perhaps even of the next-to-the-last. Again it turns out to
+be a question not of the failure of the general proposition as
+formulated, but rather as to the closeness of approximation to its
+theoretically perfect work. It may be remarked by the way that vigilant
+and impartial surveillance of this system of business enterprise by an
+external authority interested only in aggregate results, rather than in
+the differential gains of the interested individuals, might hopefully
+be counted on to correct some of these shortcomings which the system
+shows when running loose under the guidance of its own multifarious
+incentives.
+
+On the opposite side of the account, it is also worth noting that, while
+modern business management may now and again fall short of what the
+traffic will bear, it happens more commonly that its exactions will
+exceed that limit. This will particularly be true in businessmen's
+dealings with hired labour, as also and perhaps with equally
+far-reaching consequences in an excessive recourse to sophistications
+and adulterants and an excessively parsimonious provision for the
+safety, health or comfort of their customers--as, e.g., in passenger
+traffic by rail, water or tramway. The discrepancy to which attention is
+invited here is due to a discrepancy between business expediency, that
+is expediency for the purpose of gain by a given businessman, on the one
+hand, and serviceability to the common good, on the other hand. The
+business concern's interest in the traffic in which it engages is a
+short-term interest, or an interest in the short-term returns, as
+contrasted with the long-term or enduring interest which the community
+at large has in the public service over which any such given business
+concern disposes. The business incentive is that afforded by the
+prospective net pecuniary gain from the traffic, substantially an
+interest in profitable sales; while the community at large, or the
+common man that goes to make up such a community, has a material
+interest in this traffic only as regards the services rendered and the
+enduring effects that follow from it.
+
+The businessman has not, or at least is commonly not influenced by, any
+interest in the ulterior consequences of the transactions in which he
+is immediately engaged. This appears to hold true in an accentuated
+degree in the domain of that large-scale business that draws its gains
+from the large-scale modern industry and is managed on the modern
+footing of corporation finance. This modern fashion of business
+organisation and management apparently has led to a substantial
+shortening of the term over which any given investor maintains an
+effective interest in any given corporate enterprise, in which his
+investments may be placed for the time being. With the current practice
+of organising industrial and mercantile enterprises on a basis of
+vendible securities, and with the nearly complete exemption from
+personal responsibility and enduring personal attachment to any one
+corporate enterprise which this financial expedient has brought, it has
+come about that in the common run of cases the investor, as well as the
+directorate, in any given enterprise, has an interest only for the time
+being. The average term over which it is (pecuniarily) incumbent on the
+modern businessman to take account of the working of any given
+enterprise has shortened so far that the old-fashioned accountability,
+that once was depended on to dictate a sane and considerate management
+with a view to permanent good-will, has in great measure become
+inoperative.
+
+By and large, it seems unavoidable that the pecuniary interests of the
+businessmen on the one hand and the material interests of the community
+on the other hand are diverging in a more and more pronounced degree,
+due to institutional circumstances over which no prompt control can be
+had without immediate violation of that scheme of personal rights in
+which the constitution of modern democratic society is grounded. The
+quandary in which these communities find themselves, as an outcome of
+their entrance upon "the simple and obvious system of Natural Liberty,"
+is shown in a large and instructive way by what is called "labor
+trouble," and in a more recondite but no less convincing fashion by the
+fortunes of the individual workman under the modern system.
+
+The cost of production of a modern workman has constantly increased,
+with the advance of the industrial arts. The period of preparation, of
+education and training, necessary to turn out competent workmen, has
+been increasing; and the period of full workmanlike efficiency has been
+shortening, in those industries that employ the delicate and exacting
+processes of the modern technology. The shortening of this working-life
+of the workman is due both to a lengthening of the necessary period of
+preparation, and to the demand of these processes for so full a use of
+the workman's forces that even the beginning of senescence will count as
+a serious disability,--in many occupations as a fatal disability. It is
+also a well ascertained fact that effectual old age will be brought on
+at an earlier period by overwork; overwork shortens the working
+life-time of the workman. Thorough speeding-up ("Scientific
+Management"?) will unduly shorten this working life-time, and so it may,
+somewhat readily, result in an uneconomical consumption of the
+community's man-power, by consuming the workmen at a higher rate of
+speed, a higher pressure, with a more rapid rate of deterioration, than
+would give the largest net output of product per unit of man-power
+available, or per unit of cost of production of such man-power.
+
+On this head the guiding incentives of the businessman and the material
+interest of the community at large--not to speak of the selfish interest
+of the individual workman--are systematically at variance. The cost of
+production of workmen does not fall on the business concern which
+employs them, at least not in such definite fashion as to make it appear
+that the given business concern or businessman has a material interest
+in the economical consumption of the man-power embodied in this given
+body of employees. Some slight and exceptional qualification of this
+statement is to be noted, in those cases where the processes in use are
+such as to require special training, not to be had except by a working
+habituation to these processes in the particular industrial plant in
+question. So far as such special training, to be had only as employees
+of the given concern, is a necessary part of the workman's equipment for
+this particular work, so far the given employer bears a share and an
+interest in the cost of production of the workmen employed; and so far,
+therefore, the employer has also a pecuniary interest in the economical
+use of his employees; which usually shows itself in the way of some
+special precautions being taken to prevent the departure of these
+workmen so long as there is a clear pecuniary loss involved in replacing
+them with men who have not yet had the special training required.
+Evidently this qualifying consideration covers no great proportion of
+the aggregate man-power consumed in industrial enterprises under
+business management. And apart from the instances, essentially
+exceptional, where such a special consideration comes in, the
+businessmen in charge will, quite excusably as things go, endeavour to
+consume the man-power of which they dispose in the persons of their
+employees, not at the rate that would be most economical to the
+community at large, in view of the cost of their replacement, nor at
+such a rate as would best suit the taste or the viability of the
+particular workman, but at such a rate as will yield the largest net
+pecuniary gain to the employer.
+
+There is on record an illustrative, and indeed an illustrious, instance
+of such cannily gainful consumption of man-power carried out
+systematically and with consistently profitable effect in one of the
+staple industries of the country. In this typical, though exceptionally
+thoroughgoing and lucrative enterprise, the set rule of the management
+was, to employ none but select workmen, in each respective line of work;
+to procure such select workmen and retain them by offering wages
+slightly over the ordinary standard; to work them at the highest pace
+and pressure attainable with such a picked body; and to discharge them
+on the first appearance of aging or of failing powers. In the rules of
+the management was also included the negative proviso that the concern
+assumed no responsibility for the subsequent fortunes of discharged
+workmen, in the way of pension, insurance or the like.
+
+This enterprise was highly successful and exceedingly profitable, even
+beyond the high average of profits among enterprises in the same line of
+business. Out of it came one of the greater and more illustrious
+fortunes that have been accumulated during the past century; a fortune
+which has enabled one of the most impressive and most gracious of this
+generation's many impressive philanthropists, never weary in well-doing;
+but who, through this cannily gainful consumption of man-power, has been
+placed in the singular position of being unable, in spite of avowedly
+unremitting endeavour, to push his continued disbursements in the
+service of humanity up to the figure of his current income. The case in
+question is one of the most meritorious known to the records of modern
+business, and while it will conveniently serve to illustrate many an
+other, and perhaps more consequential truth come to realisation in the
+march of Triumphant Democracy, it will also serve to show the
+gainfulness of an unreservedly canny consumption of man-power with an
+eye single to one's own net gain in terms of money.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Evidently this is a point in the articulation of the modern economic
+system where a sufficiently ruthless outside authority, not actuated by
+a primary regard for the pecuniary interests of the employers, might
+conceivably with good effect enforce a more economical consumption of
+the country's man-power. It is not a matter on which one prefers to
+dwell, but it can do no harm to take note of the fact for once in a way,
+that these several national establishments of the democratic order, as
+they are now organised and administered, do somewhat uniformly and
+pervasively operate with an effectual view to the advantage of a class,
+so far as may plausibly be done. They are controlled by and administered
+in behalf of those elements of the population that, for the purpose in
+hand, make up a single loose-knit class,--the class that lives by income
+rather than by work. It may be called the class of the business
+interests, or of capital, or of gentlemen. It all comes to much the
+same, for the purpose in hand.
+
+The point in speaking of this contingent whose place in the economy of
+human affairs it is to consume, or to own, or to pursue a margin of
+profit, is simply that of contrasting this composite human contingent
+with the common man; whose numbers account for some nine-tenths or more
+of the community, while his class accounts for something less than
+one-tenth of the invested wealth, and appreciably less than that
+proportion of the discretionary national establishment,--the government,
+national or local, courts, attorneys, civil service, diplomatic and
+consular, military and naval. The arrangement may be called a
+gentlemen's government, if one would rather have it that way; but a
+gentleman is necessarily one who lives on free income from invested
+wealth--without such a source of free, that is to say unearned, income
+he becomes a decayed gentleman. Again, pushing the phrasing back a step
+farther toward the ground facts, there are those who would speak of the
+current establishments as "capitalistic;" but this term is out of line
+in that it fails to touch the human element in the case, and
+institutions, such as governmental establishments and their functioning,
+are after all nothing but the accustomed ways and means of human
+behaviour; so that "capitalistic" becomes a synonym for "businessmen's"
+government so soon as it is designated in terms of the driving
+incentives and the personnel. It is an organisation had with a view to
+the needs of business (i.e. pecuniary) enterprise, and is made up of
+businessmen and gentlemen, which comes to much the same, since a
+gentleman is only a businessman in the second or some later generation.
+Except for the slightly odious suggestion carried by the phrase, one
+might aptly say that the gentleman, in this bearing, is only a
+businessman gone to seed.
+
+By and large, and taking the matter naively at the simple face value of
+the material gain or loss involved, it should seem something of an idle
+question to the common man whether his collective affairs are to be
+managed by a home-bred line of businessmen and their successive filial
+generations of gentlemen, with a view to accelerate the velocity and
+increase the volume of competitive gain and competitive spending, on
+the one hand, or by an alien line of officials, equally aloof from his
+common interests, and managing affairs with a view to the usufruct of
+his productive powers in furtherance of the Imperial dominion.
+
+Not that the good faith or the generous intentions of these governments
+of gentlemen is questioned or is in any degree questionable; what is
+here spoken of is only the practical effect of the policies which they
+pursue, doubtless with benevolent intentions and well-placed
+complacency. In effect, things being as they are today in the civilised
+world's industry and trade, it happens, as in some sort an unintended
+but all-inclusive accident, that the guidance of affairs by business
+principles works at cross purposes with the material interests of the
+common man.
+
+So ungraceful a view of the sacred core of this modern democratic
+organisation will need whatever evidence can be cited to keep it in
+countenance. Therefore indulgence is desired for one further count in
+this distasteful recital of ineptitudes inherent in this institutional
+scheme of civilised life. This count comes under the head of what may be
+called capitalistic sabotage. "Sabotage" is employed to designate a
+wilful retardation, interruption or obstruction of industry by
+peaceable, and ordinarily by legally defensible, measures. In its
+present application, particularly, there is no design to let the term
+denote or insinuate a recourse to any expedients or any line of conduct
+that is in any degree legally dubious, or that is even of questionable
+legitimacy.
+
+Sabotage so understood, as not comprising recourse to force or fraud, is
+a necessary and staple expedient of business management, and its
+employment is grounded in the elementary and indefeasible rights of
+ownership. It is simply that the businessman, like any other owner, is
+vested with the right freely to use or not to use his property for any
+given purpose. His decision, for reasons of his own, not to employ the
+property at his disposal in a particular way at a particular time, is
+well and blamelessly within his legitimate discretion, under the rights
+of property as universally accepted and defended by modern nations. In
+the particular instance of the American nation he is protected in this
+right by a constitutional provision that he must not be deprived of his
+property without due process of law. When the property at his disposal
+is in the shape of industrial plant or industrial material, means of
+transportation or stock of goods awaiting distribution, then his
+decision not to employ this property, or to limit its use to something
+less than full capacity, in the way for which it is adapted, becomes
+sabotage, normally and with negligible exceptions. In so doing he
+hinders, retards or obstructs the working of the country's industrial
+forces by so much. It is a matter of course and of absolute necessity to
+the conduct of business, that any discretionary businessman must be free
+to deal or not to deal in any given case; to limit or to withhold the
+equipment under his control, without reservation. Business discretion
+and business strategy, in fact, has no other means by which to work out
+its aims. So that, in effect, all business sagacity reduces itself in
+the last analysis to a judicious use of sabotage. Under modern
+conditions of large business, particularly, the relation of the
+discretionary businessman to industry is that of authoritative
+permission and of authoritative limitation or stoppage, and on his
+shrewd use of this authority depends the gainfulness of his enterprise.
+
+If this authority were exercised with an eye single to the largest and
+most serviceable output of goods and services, or to the most economical
+use of the country's material resources and man-power, regardless of
+pecuniary consequences, the course of management so carried out would be
+not sabotage but industrial strategy. But business is carried on for
+pecuniary gain, not with an unreserved view to the largest and most
+serviceable output or to the economical use of resources. The volume and
+serviceability of the output must wait unreservedly on the very
+particular pecuniary question of what quantity and what degree of
+serviceability will yield the largest net return in terms of price.
+Uneconomical use of equipment, labor and resources is necessarily an
+everyday matter under these circumstances, as in the duplication of
+plant and processes between rival concerns, and in the wasteful use of
+all resources that do not involve expenditure on the part of the given
+concern.
+
+It has been the traditional dogma among economists and publicists in
+these modern communities that free competition between the businessmen
+in charge will indefeasibly act to bring the productiveness of industry
+to the highest practicable pitch and would lead to the most unreserved
+and vigilant endeavour to serve the community's material needs at all
+points. The reasons for the failure of this genial expectation,
+particularly under latterday business management, might be shown in some
+detail, if that were needed to enforce the argument as it runs in the
+present connection. But a summary indication of the commoner varieties
+and effects of sabotage as it is systematically applied in the
+businesslike conduct of industry will serve the purpose as well and with
+less waste of words and patience.
+
+It is usual to notice, and not unusual to deplore the duplication of
+plant and appliances in many lines of industry, due to competitive
+management, as in factories engaged in the same class of manufacture, in
+parallel or otherwise competing railways and boat lines, in retail
+merchandising, and in some degree also in the wholesale trade. The
+result, of course, is sabotage; in the sense that this volume of
+appliances, materials and workmen are not employed to the best advantage
+for the community. One effect of the arrangement is an increased
+necessary cost of the goods and services supplied by these means. The
+reason for it is competition for gain to be got from the traffic. That
+all this is an untoward state of things is recognised on all hands; but
+no lively regret is commonly spent on the matter, since it is commonly
+recognised that under the circumstances there is no help for it except
+at the cost of a more untoward remedy.
+
+The competitive system having been tried and found good--or at least so
+it is assumed--it is felt that the system will have to be accepted with
+the defects of its qualities. Its characteristic qualities are held to
+be good, acceptable to the tastes of modern men whose habits of thought
+have been standardised in its terms; and it would be only reluctantly
+and by tardy concession that these modern men could bring themselves to
+give up that scheme of "Natural Liberty" within the framework of which
+runs this competitive system of business management and its wasteful
+manifolding of half-idle equipment and nugatory work. The common man, at
+the worst, comforts himself and his neighbour with the sage reflection
+that "It might have been worse." The businessmen, on the other hand,
+have also begun to take note of this systematic waste by duplication
+and consequent incompetence, and have taken counsel how to intercept the
+waste and divert it to their own profit. The businessmen's remedy is
+consolidation of competing concerns, and monopoly control.
+
+To the common man, with his preconceptions on the head of "restraint of
+trade," the proposed remedy seems more vicious than the evil it is
+designed to cure. The fault of the remedy plainly is not that the
+mismanagement of affairs due to competitive business can not be
+corrected by recourse to monopoly, but only that the community, it is
+presumed, would still suffer all the burdens and discomforts of the
+regime of competition and sabotage, with, possibly, further
+inconveniences and impositions at the hands of the businesslike
+monopoly; which, men are agreed, may fairly be depended on to use its
+advantage unsparingly under the business principle of charging what the
+traffic will bear.
+
+There is also this other singular phenomenon in this modern industrial
+world, that something not very far short of one-half the industrial
+equipment systematically lies idle for something approaching one-half
+the time, or is worked only to one-half its capacity half the time; not
+because of competition between these several industrial concerns, but
+because business conditions will not allow its continued productive use;
+because the volume of product that would be turned out if the equipment
+were working uninterruptedly at its full capacity could not be sold at
+remunerative prices. From time to time one establishment and another
+will shut down during a period of slack times, for the same reason.
+
+This state of things is singular only as seen from the point of view of
+the community's material interest, not that it is in any degree
+unfamiliar or that any serious fault is found with the captains of
+industry for so shutting off the industrial process and letting the
+industrial equipment lie waste. As all men know, the exigencies of
+business will not tolerate production to supply the community's needs
+under these circumstances; although, as is equally notorious, these
+slack times, when production of goods is unadvisable on grounds of
+business expediency, are commonly times of wide-spread privation, "hard
+times," in the community at large, when the failure of the supply is
+keenly felt.
+
+It is not that the captains of industry are at fault in so failing, or
+refusing, to supply the needs of the community under these
+circumstances, but only that they are helpless under the exigencies of
+business. They can not supply the goods except for a price, indeed not
+except for a remunerative price, a price which will add something to the
+capital values which they are venturing in their various enterprises. So
+long as the exigencies of price and of pecuniary gain rule the case,
+there is manifestly no escaping this enforced idleness of the country's
+productive forces.
+
+It may not be out of place also to remark, by way of parenthesis, that
+this highly productive state of the industrial arts, which is embodied
+in the industrial plant and processes that so are systematically and
+advisedly retarded or arrested under the rule of business, is at the
+same time the particular pride of civilised men and the most tangible
+achievement of the civilised world.
+
+A conservative estimate of this one item of capitalistic sabotage could
+scarcely appraise it at less than a twenty-five percent reduction from
+the normally possible productive capacity of the community, at an
+average over any considerable period; and a somewhat thorough review of
+the pertinent facts would probably persuade any impartial observer that,
+one year with another, such businesslike enforced idleness of plant and
+personnel lowers the actual output of the country's industry by
+something nearer fifty percent of its ordinary capacity when fully
+employed. To many, such an assertion may seem extravagant, but with
+further reflection on the well-known facts in the case it will seem less
+so in proportion as the unfamiliarity of it wears off.
+
+However, the point of attention in the case is not the precise, nor the
+approximate, percentages of this arrest and retardation, this partial
+neutralisation of modern improvements in the industrial arts; it is only
+the notorious fact that such arrest occurs, systematically and
+advisedly, under the rule of business exigencies, and that there is no
+corrective to be found for it that will comport with those fundamental
+articles of the democratic faith on which the businessmen necessarily
+proceed. Any effectual corrective would break the framework of
+democratic law and order, since it would have to traverse the
+inalienable right of men who are born free and equal, each freely to
+deal or not to deal in any pecuniary conjuncture that arises.
+
+But it is at the same time plain enough that this, in the larger sense
+untoward, discrepancy between productive capacity and current productive
+output can readily be corrected, in some appreciable degree at least, by
+any sufficient authority that shall undertake to control the country's
+industrial forces without regard to pecuniary profit and loss. Any
+authority competent to take over the control and regulate the conduct of
+the community's industry with a view to maximum output as counted by
+weight and tale, rather than by net aggregate price-income over
+price-cost, can readily effect an appreciable increase in the effectual
+productive capacity; but it can be done only by violating that
+democratic order of things within which business enterprise runs. The
+several belligerent nations of Europe are showing that it can be done,
+that the sabotage of business enterprise can be put aside by
+sufficiently heroic measures. And they are also showing that they are
+all aware, and have always been aware, that the conduct of industry on
+business principles is incompetent to bring the largest practicable
+output of goods and services; incompetent to such a degree, indeed, as
+not to be tolerable in a season of desperate need, when the nation
+requires the full use of its productive forces, equipment and man-power,
+regardless of the pecuniary claims of individuals.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, the projected Imperial dominion is a power of the character
+required to bring a sufficient corrective to bear, in case of need, on
+this democratic situation in which the businessmen in charge necessarily
+manage the country's industry at cross purposes with the
+community's--that is the common man's--material interest. It is an
+extraneous power, to whom the continued pecuniary gain of these nations'
+businessmen is a minor consideration, a negligible consideration in case
+it shall appear that the Imperial usufruct of the underlying nation's
+productive forces is in any degree impaired by the businessmen's
+management of it for their own net gain. It is difficult to see on what
+grounds of self-interest such an Imperial government could consent to
+tolerate the continued management of these underlying nations'
+industries on business principles, that is to say on the principle of
+the maximum pecuniary gain to the businesslike managers; and recent
+experience seems to teach that no excessive, that is to say no
+inconvenient, degree of consideration for vested rights, and the like,
+would long embarrass the Imperial government in its administration of
+its usufruct.
+
+It should be a reasonable expectation that, without malice and with an
+unprejudiced view to its own usufruct of these underlying countries, the
+Imperial establishment would take due care that no systematically, and
+in its view gratuitously, uneconomical methods should continue in the
+ordinary conduct of their industry. Among other considerations of weight
+in this connection is the fact that a contented, well-fed, and not
+wantonly over-worked populace is a valuable asset in such a case.
+Similarly, by contraries, as an asset in usufruct to such an alien
+power, a large, wealthy, spendthrift, body of gentlefolk, held in high
+esteem by the common people, would have but a slight value, conceivably
+even a negative value, in such a case. A wise administration would
+presumably look to their abatement, rather than otherwise. At this point
+the material interest of the common man would seem to coincide with that
+of the Imperial establishment. Still, his preconceived notions of the
+wisdom and beneficence of his gentlefolk would presumably hinder his
+seeing the matter in that reasonable light.
+
+Under the paramount surveillance of such an alien power, guided solely
+by its own interest in the usufruct of the country and its population,
+it is to be presumed that class privileges and discrimination would be
+greatly abated if not altogether discontinued. The point is in some
+doubt, partly because this alien establishment whose dominion is in
+question is itself grounded in class prerogatives and discrimination,
+and so, not improbably, it would carry over into its supervision of the
+underlying nations something of a bias in favor of class privileges. And
+a similar order of things might also result by choice of a class-system
+as a convenient means of control and exploitation. The latter
+consideration is presumably the more cogent, since the Imperial
+establishment in question is already, by ancient habit, familiar with
+the method of control by class and privilege; and, indeed, unfamiliar
+with any other method. Such a government, which governs without
+effectual advice or formal consent of the governed, will almost
+necessarily rest its control of the country on an interested class, of
+sufficient strength and bound by sufficiently grave interest to abet the
+Imperial establishment effectually in all its adventures and
+enterprises.
+
+But such a privileged order, that is to be counted in to share dynastic
+usufruct and liabilities, in good days and evil, will be of a
+feudalistic complexion rather than something after the fashion of a
+modern business community doing business by investment and pecuniary
+finesse. It would still be a reasonable expectation that discrimination
+between pecuniary classes should fall away under this projected alien
+tutelage; more particularly all such discrimination as is designed to
+benefit any given class or interest at the cost of the whole, as, e.g.,
+protective tariffs, monopolistic concessions and immunities, engrossing
+of particular lines of material resources, and the like.
+
+The character of the economic policy to be pursued should not be
+difficult of apprehension, if only these underlying peoples are
+conceived as an estate in tail within the dynastic line of descent. The
+Imperial establishment which so is prospectively to take over the
+surveillance of these modern peoples under this projected enterprise in
+dominion, may all the more readily be conceived as handling its new and
+larger resources somewhat unreservedly as an estate to be administered
+with a shrewd eye to the main chance, since such has always been its
+relation to the peoples and territories whose usufruct it already
+enjoys. It is only that the circumstances of the case will admit a freer
+and more sagacious application of those principles of usufruct that lie
+at the root of the ancient Culture of the Fatherland.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This excessively long, and yet incomplete, review of the presumptive
+material advantages to accrue to the common man under a regime of peace
+by unconditional surrender to an alien dynasty, brings the argument
+apparently to the conclusion that such an eventuality might be fortunate
+rather than the reverse; or at least that it has its compensations, even
+if it is not something to be desired. Such should particularly appear to
+be the presumption in case one is at all inclined to make much of the
+cultural gains to be brought in under the new regime. And more
+particularly should a policy of non-resistant submission to the
+projected new order seem expedient in view of the exceedingly high, not
+to say prohibitive, cost of resistance, or even of materially retarding
+its fulfillment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+PEACE AND NEUTRALITY
+
+
+Considered simply on the face of the tangible material interests
+involved, the choice of the common man in these premises should seem
+very much of a foregone conclusion, if he could persuade himself to a
+sane and perspicuous consideration of these statistically apparent
+merits of the case alone. It is at least safely to be presumed that he
+has nothing to lose, in a material way, and there is reason to look for
+some slight gain in creature comforts and in security of life and limb,
+consequent upon the elimination, or at least the partial
+disestablishment, of pecuniary necessity as the sole bond and criterion
+of use and wont in economic concerns.
+
+But man lives not by bread alone. In point of fact, and particularly as
+touches the springs of action among that common run that do not
+habitually formulate their aspirations and convictions in extended and
+grammatically defensible documentary form, and the drift of whose
+impulses therefore is not masked or deflected by the illusive
+consistencies of set speech,--as touches the common run, particularly,
+it will hold true with quite an unacknowledged generality that the
+material means of life are, after all, means only; and that when the
+question of what things are worth while is brought to the final test, it
+is not these means, nor the life conditioned on these means, that are
+seen to serve as the decisive criterion; but always it is some
+ulterior, immaterial end, in the pursuit of which these material means
+find their ulterior ground of valuation. Neither the overt testimony nor
+the circumstantial evidence to this effect is unequivocal; but seen in
+due perspective, and regard being had chiefly to the springs of
+concerted action as shown in any massive movement of this common run of
+mankind, there is, after all, little room to question that the things
+which commend themselves as indefeasibly worth while are the things of
+the human spirit.
+
+These ideals, aspirations, aims, ends of endeavour, are by no means of a
+uniform or homogeneous character throughout the modern communities,
+still less throughout the civilised world, or throughout the checkered
+range of classes and conditions of men; but, with such frequency and
+amplitude that it must be taken as a major premise in any attempted
+insight into human behaviour, it will hold true that they are of a
+spiritual, immaterial nature.
+
+The caution may, parenthetically, not be out of place, that this
+characterisation of the ulterior springs of action as essentially not of
+the nature of creature comforts, need be taken in no wider extension
+than that which so is specifically given it. It will be found to apply
+as touches the conduct of the common run; what modification of it might
+be required to make it at all confidently applicable to the case of one
+and another of those classes into whose scheme of life creature comforts
+enter with more pronounced effect may be more of a delicate point. But
+since it is the behaviour, and the grounds of behaviour, of the common
+run that are here in question, the case of their betters in this respect
+may conveniently be left on one side.
+
+The question in hand touches the behavior of the common man, taken in
+the aggregate, in face of the quandary into which circumstances have led
+him; since the question of what these modern peoples will do is after
+all a question of what the common man in the aggregate will do, of his
+own motion or by persuasion. His betters may be in a position to guide,
+persuade, cajole, mislead, and victimise him; for among the many
+singular conceits that beset the common man is the persuasion that his
+betters are in some way better than he, wiser, more beneficent. But the
+course that may so be chosen, with or without guidance or persuasion
+from the superior classes, as well as the persistence and energy with
+which this course is pursued, is conditioned on the frame of mind of the
+common run.
+
+Just what will be the nature and the concrete expression of these ideal
+aspirations that move the common run is a matter of habitual
+preconceptions; and habits of thought vary from one people to another
+according to the diversity of experience to which they have been
+exposed. Among the Western nations the national prestige has come to
+seem worth while as an ulterior end, perhaps beyond all else that is
+comprised in the secular scheme of things desirable to be had or to be
+achieved. And in the apprehension of such of them as have best preserved
+the habits of thought induced by a long experience in feudal subjection,
+the service of the sovereign or the dynasty still stands over as the
+substantial core of the cultural scheme, upon which sentiment and
+endeavour converge. In the past ages of the democratic peoples, as well
+as in the present-day use and wont among subjects of the dynastic
+States--as e.g., Japan or Germany--men are known to have resolutely
+risked, and lost, their life for the sake of the sovereign's renown, or
+even to save the sovereign's life; whereas, of course, even the
+slightest and most nebulous reflection would make it manifest that in
+point of net material utility the sovereign's decease is an idle matter
+as compared with the loss of an able-bodied workman. The sovereign may
+always be replaced, with some prospect of public advantage, or failing
+that, it should be remarked that a regency or inter-regnum will commonly
+be a season of relatively economical administration. Again, religious
+enthusiasm, and the furtherance of religious propaganda, may come to
+serve the same general purpose as these secular ideals, and will perhaps
+serve it just as well. Certain "principles," of personal liberty and of
+opportunity for creative self-direction and an intellectually worthy
+life, perhaps may also become the idols of the people, for which they
+will then be willing to risk their material fortune; and where this has
+happened, as among the democratic peoples of Christendom, it is not
+selfishly for their own personal opportunity to live untroubled under
+the light of these high principles that these opinionated men are ready
+to contend, but rather impersonally for the human right which under
+these principles is the due of all mankind, and particularly of the
+incoming and of later generations.
+
+On these and the like intangible ends the common man is set with such
+inveterate predilection that he will, on provocation, stick at nothing
+to put the project through. For such like ends the common man will lay
+down his life; at least, so they say. There may always be something of
+rhetorical affectation in it all; but, after all, there is sufficient
+evidence to hand of such substance and tenacity in the common man's hold
+on these ideal aspirations, on these idols of his human spirit, as to
+warrant the assertion that he is, rather commonly, prepared to go to
+greater lengths in the furtherance of these immaterial gains that are to
+inure to someone else than for any personal end of his own, in the way
+of creature comforts or even of personal renown.
+
+For such ends the common man, in democratic Christendom is, on
+provocation, willing to die; or again, the patient and perhaps more
+far-seeing common man of pagan China is willing to live for these idols
+of an inveterate fancy, through endless contumely and hard usage. The
+conventional Chinese preconceptions, in the way of things that are worth
+while in their own right, appear to differ from those current in the
+Occident in such a way that the preconceived ideal is not to be realised
+except by way of continued life. The common man's accountability to the
+cause of humanity, in China, is of so intimately personal a character
+that he can meet it only by tenaciously holding his place in the
+sequence of generations; whereas among the peoples of Christendom there
+has arisen out of their contentious past a preconception to the effect
+that this human duty to mankind is of the nature of a debt, which can be
+cancelled by bankruptcy proceedings, so that the man who unprofitably
+dies fighting for the cause has thereby constructively paid the
+reckoning in full.
+
+Evidently, if the common man of these modern nations that are
+prospectively to be brought under tutelage of the Imperial government
+could be brought to the frame of mind that is habitual with his Chinese
+counterpart, there should be a fair hope that pacific counsels would
+prevail and that Christendom would so come in for a regime of peace by
+submission under this Imperial tutelage. But there are always these
+preconceptions of self-will and insubordination to be counted with
+among these nations, and there is the ancient habit of a contentious
+national solidarity in defense of the nation's prestige, more urgent
+among these peoples than any sentiment of solidarity with mankind at
+large, or any ulterior gain in civilisation that might come of continued
+discipline in the virtues of patience and diligence under distasteful
+circumstances.
+
+The occidental conception of manhood is in some considerable measure
+drawn in negative terms. So much so that whenever a question of the
+manly virtues comes under controversy it presently appears that at least
+the indispensable minimum, and indeed the ordinary marginal modicum, of
+what is requisite to a worthy manner of life is habitually formulated in
+terms of what not. This appearance is doubtless misleading if taken
+without the universally understood postulate on the basis of which
+negative demands are formulated. There is a good deal of what would be
+called historical accident in all this. The indispensable demands of
+this modern manhood take the form of refusal to obey extraneous
+authority on compulsion; of exemption from coercive direction and
+subservience; of insubordination, in short. But it is always understood
+as a matter of course that this insubordination is a refusal to submit
+to irresponsible or autocratic rule. Stated from the positive side it
+would be freedom from restraint by or obedience to any authority not
+constituted by express advice and consent of the governed. And as near
+as it may be formulated, when reduced to the irreducible minimum of
+concrete proviso, this is the final substance of things which neither
+shame nor honour will permit the modern civilised man to yield. To no
+arrangement for the abrogation of this minimum of free initiative and
+self-direction will he consent to be a party, whether it touches the
+conditions of life for his own people who are to come after, or as
+touches the fortunes of such aliens as are of a like mind on this head
+and are unable to make head against invasion of these human rights from
+outside.
+
+As has just been remarked, the negative form so often taken by these
+demands is something of an historical accident, due to the fact that
+these modern peoples came into their highly esteemed system of Natural
+Liberty out of an earlier system of positive checks on self-direction
+and initiative; a system, in effect, very much after the fashion of that
+Imperial jurisdiction that still prevails in the dynastic States--as,
+e.g., Germany or Japan--whose projected dominion is now the immediate
+object of apprehension and repugnance. How naively the negative
+formulation gained acceptance, and at the same time how intrinsic to the
+new dispensation was the aspiration for free initiative, appears in the
+confident assertion of its most genial spokesman, that when these
+positive checks are taken away, "The simple and obvious system of
+Natural Liberty establishes itself of its own accord."
+
+The common man, in these modern communities, shows a brittle temper when
+any overt move is made against this heritage of civil liberty. He may
+not be altogether well advised in respect of what liberties he will
+defend and what he will submit to; but the fact is to be counted with in
+any projected peace, that there is always this refractory residue of
+terms not open to negotiation or compromise. Now it also happens, also
+by historical accident, that these residual principles of civil liberty
+have come to blend and coalesce with a stubborn preconception of
+national integrity and national prestige. So that in the workday
+apprehension of the common man, not given to analytic excursions, any
+infraction of the national integrity or any abatement of the national
+prestige has come to figure as an insufferable infringement on his
+personal liberty and on those principles of humanity that make up the
+categorical articles of the secular creed of Christendom. The fact may
+be patent on reflection that the common man's substantial interest in
+the national integrity is slight and elusive, and that in sober common
+sense the national prestige has something less than a neutral value to
+him; but this state of the substantially pertinent facts is not greatly
+of the essence of the case, since his preconceptions in these premises
+do not run to that effect, and since they are of too hard and fast a
+texture to suffer any serious abatement within such a space of time as
+can come in question here and now.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The outlook for a speedy settlement of the world's peace on a plan of
+unconditional surrender to the projected Imperial dominion seems
+unpromisingly dubious, in view of the stubborn temper shown by these
+modern peoples wherever their preconceived ideas of right and honest
+living appear to be in jeopardy; and the expediency of entering into any
+negotiated compact of diplomatic engagements and assurances designed to
+serve as groundwork to an eventual enterprise of that kind must
+therefore also be questionable in a high degree. It is even doubtful if
+any allowance of time can be counted on to bring these modern peoples to
+a more reasonable, more worldly-wise, frame of mind; so that they would
+come to see their interest in such an arrangement, or would divest
+themselves of their present stubborn and perhaps fantastic prejudice
+against an autocratic regime of the kind spoken for. At least for the
+present any such hope of a peaceable settlement seems illusive. What
+may be practicable in this way in the course of time is of course still
+more obscure; but argument on the premises which the present affords
+does not point to a substantially different outcome in the calculable
+future.
+
+For the immediate future--say, within the life-time of the oncoming
+generation--the spiritual state of the peoples concerned in this
+international quandary is not likely to undergo so radical a change as
+to seriously invalidate an argument that proceeds on the present lie of
+the land in this respect. Preconceptions are a work of habit impinging
+on a given temperamental bent; and where, as in these premises, the
+preconceptions have taken on an institutionalised form, have become
+conventionalised and commonly accepted, and so have been woven into the
+texture of popular common sense, they must needs be a work of protracted
+and comprehensive habituation impinging on a popular temperamental bent
+of so general a prevalence that it may be called congenital to the
+community at large. A heritable bent pervading the group within which
+inheritance runs, does not change, so long as the racial complexion of
+the group remains passably intact; a conventionalised, commonly
+established habit of mind will change only slowly, commonly not without
+the passing of at least one generation, and only by grace of a
+sufficiently searching and comprehensive discipline of experience. For
+good or ill, the current situation is to be counted on not to lose
+character over night or with a revolution of the seasons, so far as
+concerns these spiritual factors that make or mar the fortunes of
+nations.
+
+At the same time these spiritual assets, being of the nature of habit,
+are also bound to change character more or less radically, by insensible
+shifting of ground, but incontinently,--provided only that the
+conditions of life, and therefore the discipline of experience, undergo
+any substantial change. So the immediate interest shifts to the
+presumptive rate and character of those changes that are in prospect,
+due to the unremitting change of circumstances under which these modern
+peoples live and to the discipline of which they are unavoidably
+exposed. For the present and for the immediate future the current state
+of things is a sufficiently stable basis of argument; but assurance as
+to the sufficiency of the premises afforded by the current state of
+things thins out in proportion as the perspective of the argument runs
+out into the succeeding years. The bearing of it all is two-fold, of
+course. This progressive, cumulative habituation under changing
+circumstances affects the case both of those democratic peoples whose
+fortunes are in the hazard, and also of those dynastic States by whom
+the projected enterprise in dominion is to be carried into effect.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The case of the two formidable dynastic States whose names have been
+coupled together in what has already been said is perhaps the more
+immediately interesting in the present connection. As matters stand, and
+in the measure in which they continue so to stand, the case of these is
+in no degree equivocal. The two dynastic establishments seek dominion,
+and indeed they seek nothing else, except incidentally to and in
+furtherance of the main quest. As has been remarked before, it lies in
+the nature of a dynastic State to seek dominion, that being the whole of
+its nature in so far as it runs true to form. But a dynastic State, like
+any other settled, institutionalised community of men, rests on and
+draws its effectual driving force from the habit of mind of its
+underlying community, the common man in the aggregate, his
+preconceptions and ideals as to what things are worth while. Without a
+suitable spiritual ground of this kind such a dynastic State passes out
+of the category of formidable Powers and into that of precarious
+despotism.
+
+In both of the two States here in question the dynastic establishment
+and its bodyguard of officials and gentlefolk may be counted on to
+persevere in the faith that now animates them, until an uneasy
+displacement of sentiment among the underlying populace may in time
+induce them judiciously to shift their footing. Like the ruling classes
+elsewhere, they are of a conservative temper and may be counted on so to
+continue. They are also not greatly exposed to the discipline of
+experience that makes for adaptive change in habits of life, and
+therefore in the correlated habits of thought. It is always the common
+man that is effectually reached by any exacting or wide-reaching change
+in the conditions of life. He is relatively unsheltered from any forces
+that make for adaptive change, as contrasted with the case of his
+betters; and however sluggish and reluctant may be his response to such
+discipline as makes for a displacement of outworn preconceptions, yet it
+is always out of the mass of this common humanity that those movements
+of disaffection and protest arise, which lead, on occasion, to any
+material realignment of the institutional fabric or to any substantial
+shift in the line of policy to be pursued under the guidance of their
+betters.
+
+The common mass of humanity, it may be said in parenthesis, is of course
+not a homogeneous body. Uncommon men, in point of native gifts of
+intelligence, sensibility, or personal force, will occur as frequently,
+in proportion to the aggregate numbers, among the common mass as among
+their betters. Since in any one of these nations of Christendom, with
+their all-inclusive hybridisation, the range, frequency and amplitude of
+variations in hereditary endowment is the same throughout all classes.
+Class differentiation is a matter of habit and convention; and in
+distinction from his betters the common man is common only in point of
+numbers and in point of the more general and more exacting conditions to
+which he is exposed. He is in a position to be more hardly ridden by the
+discipline of experience, and is at the same time held more consistently
+to such a body of preconceptions, and to such changes only in this body
+of preconceptions, as fall in with the drift of things in a larger mass
+of humanity. But all the while it is the discipline which impinges on
+the sensibilities of this common mass that shapes the spiritual attitude
+and temper of the community and so defines what may and what may not be
+undertaken by the constituted leaders. So that, in a way, these dynastic
+States are at the mercy of that popular sentiment whose creatures they
+are, and are subject to undesired changes of direction and efficiency in
+their endeavors, contingent on changes in the popular temper; over which
+they have only a partial, and on the whole a superficial control.
+
+A relatively powerful control and energetic direction of the popular
+temper is and has been exercised by these dynastic establishments, with
+a view to its utilisation in the pursuit of the dynastic enterprise; and
+much has visibly been accomplished in that way; chiefly, perhaps, by
+military discipline in subordination to personal authority, and also by
+an unsparing surveillance of popular education, with a view to fortify
+the preconceptions handed down from the passing order as well as to
+eliminate all subversive innovation. Yet in spite of all the
+well-conceived and shrewdly managed endeavors of the German Imperial
+system in this direction, e.g., there has been evidence of an obscurely
+growing uneasiness, not to say disaffection, among the underlying mass.
+So much so that hasty observers, and perhaps biased, have reached the
+inference that one of the immediate contributory causes that led to the
+present war was the need of a heroic remedy to correct this untoward
+drift of sentiment.
+
+For the German people the government of the present dynastic incumbent
+has done all that could (humanly speaking) be expected in the way of
+endeavoring to conserve the passing order and to hold the popular
+imagination to the received feudalistic ideals of loyal service. And yet
+the peoples of the Empire are already caught in the net of that newer
+order which they are now endeavoring to break by force of arms. They are
+inextricably implicated in the cultural complex of Christendom; and
+within this Western culture those peoples to whom it fell to lead the
+exodus out of the Egypt of feudalism have come quite naturally to set
+the pace in all the larger conformities of civilised life. Within the
+confines of Christendom today, for good or ill, whatever usage or
+customary rule of conduct falls visibly short of the precedent set by
+these cultural pioneers is felt to fall beneath the prescriptive
+commonplace level of civilisation. Failure to adopt and make use of
+those tried institutional expedients on which these peoples of the
+advance guard have set their mark of authentication is today
+presumptively a mistake and an advantage foregone; and a people who are
+denied the benefit of these latterday ways and means of civic life are
+uneasy with a sense of grievance at the hands of their rulers. Besides
+which, the fashion in articles of institutional equipage so set by the
+authentic pioneers of culture has also come to be mandatory, as a
+punctilio of the governmental proprieties; so that no national
+establishment which aspires to a decorous appearance in the eyes of the
+civilised world can longer afford to be seen without them. The forms at
+least must be observed. Hence the "representative" and
+pseudo-representative institutions of these dynastic States.
+
+These dynastic States among the rest have partly followed the dictates
+of civilised fashion, partly yielded to the, more or less intelligent,
+solicitations of their subjects, or the spokesmen of their subjects, and
+have installed institutional apparatus of this modern pattern--more in
+point of form than of substance, perhaps. Yet in time the adoption of
+the forms is likely to have an effect, if changing circumstances favor
+their taking effect. Such has on the whole been the experience of those
+peoples who have gone before along this trail of political advance. As
+instance the growth of discretionary powers under the hands of
+parliamentary representatives in those cases where the movement has gone
+on longest and farthest; and these instances should not be considered
+idle, as intimations of what may presumptively be looked for under the
+Imperial establishments of Germany or Japan. It may be true that
+hitherto, along with the really considerable volume of imitative
+gestures of discretionary deliberation delegated to these parliamentary
+bodies, they have as regards all graver matters brought to their notice
+only been charged with a (limited) power to talk. It may be true that,
+for the present, on critical or weighty measures the parliamentary
+discretion extends no farther than respectfully to say: "_Ja wohl_!" But
+then, _Ja wohl_ is also something; and there is no telling where it may
+all lead to in the long course of years. One has a vague apprehension
+that this "_Ja wohl_!" may some day come to be a customarily necessary
+form of authentication, so that with-holding it (_Behuet' es Gott_!) may
+even come to count as an effectual veto on measures so pointedly
+neglected. More particularly will the formalities of representation and
+self-government be likely to draw the substance of such like "free
+institutions" into the effectual conduct of public affairs if it turns
+out that the workday experiences of these people takes a turn more
+conducive to habits of insubordination than has been the case hitherto.
+
+Indications are, again, not wanting, that even in the Empire the
+discipline of workday experience is already diverging from that line
+that once trained the German subjects into the most loyal and unrepining
+subservience to dynastic ambitions. Of course, just now, under the
+shattering impact of warlike atrocities and patriotic clamour, the
+workday spirit of insubordination and critical scrutiny is gone out of
+sight and out of hearing.
+
+Something of this inchoate insubordination has showed itself repeatedly
+during the present reign, sufficient to provoke many shrewd protective
+measures on the side of the dynastic establishment, both by way of
+political strategy and by arbitrary control. Disregarding many minor and
+inconsequential divisions of opinion and counsel among the German people
+during this eventful reign, the political situation has been moving on
+the play of three, incipiently divergent, strains of interest and
+sentiment: (a) the dynasty (together with the Agrarians, of whom in a
+sense the dynasty is a part); (b) the businessmen, or commercial
+interest (including investors); and (c) the industrial workmen.
+Doubtless it would be easier to overstate than to indicate with any nice
+precision what has been the nature, and especially the degree, of this
+alienation of sentiment and divergence of conscious interest among these
+several elements. It is not that there has at any point been a
+perceptible faltering in respect of loyalty to the crown as such. But
+since the crown belongs, by origin, tradition, interest and spiritual
+identity, in the camp of the Agrarians, the situation has been such as
+would inevitably take on a character of disaffection toward the dynastic
+establishment, in the conceivable absence of that strong surviving
+sentiment of dynastic loyalty that still animates all classes and
+conditions of men in the Fatherland. It would accordingly, again, be an
+overstatement to say that the crown has been standing precariously at
+the apex of a political triangle, the other two corners of which are
+occupied by these two divided and potentially recalcitrant elements of
+the body politic, held apart by class antipathy and divergent pecuniary
+interest, and held in check by divided counsels; but something after
+that fashion is what would have resulted under similar conditions of
+strain in any community where the modern spirit of insubordination has
+taken effect in any large measure.
+
+Both of these elements of incipient disturbance in the dynastic economy,
+the modern commercial and working classes, are creatures of the new era;
+and they are systematically out of line with the received dynastic
+tradition of fealty, both in respect of their pecuniary interests and in
+respect of that discipline of experience to which their workday
+employment subjects them. They are substantially the same two classes or
+groupings that came forward in the modernisation of the British
+community, with a gradual segregation of interest and a consequent
+induced solidarity of class sentiment and class animosities. But with
+the difference that in the British case the movement of changing
+circumstances was slow enough to allow a fair degree of habituation to
+the altered economic conditions; whereas in the German case the move
+into modern economic conditions has been made so precipitately as to
+have carried the mediaeval frame of mind over virtually intact into this
+era of large business and machine industry. In the Fatherland the
+commercial and industrial classes have been called on to play their part
+without time to learn their lines.
+
+The case of the English-speaking peoples, who have gone over this course
+of experience in more consecutive fashion than any others, teaches that
+in the long run, if these modern economic conditions persist, one or the
+other or both of these creatures of the modern era must prevail, and
+must put the dynastic establishment out of commission; although the
+sequel has not yet been seen in this British case, and there is no
+ground afforded for inference as to which of the two will have the
+fortune to survive and be invested with the hegemony. Meantime the
+opportunity of the Imperial establishment to push its enterprise in
+dominion lies in the interval of time so required for the discipline of
+experience under modern conditions to work out through the growth of
+modern habits of thought into such modern (i.e. civilised) institutional
+forms and such settled principles of personal insubordination as will
+put any effectual dynastic establishment out of commission. The same
+interval of time, that must so be allowed for the decay of the dynastic
+spirit among the German people under the discipline of life by the
+methods of modern trade and industry, marks the period during which no
+peace compact will be practicable, except with the elimination of the
+Imperial establishment as a possible warlike power. All this, of
+course, applies to the case of Japan as well, with the difference that
+while the Japanese people are farther in arrears, they are also a
+smaller, less formidable body, more exposed to outside forces, and their
+mediaevalism is of a more archaic and therefore more precarious type.
+
+What length of time will be required for this decay of the dynastic
+spirit among the people of the Empire is, of course, impossible to say.
+The factors of the case are not of a character to admit anything like
+calculation of the rate of movement; but in the nature of the factors
+involved it is also contained that something of a movement in this
+direction is unavoidable, under Providence. As a preliminary
+consideration, these peoples of the Empire and its allies, as well as
+their enemies in the great war, will necessarily come out of their
+warlike experience in a more patriotic and more vindictive frame of mind
+than that in which they entered on this adventure. Fighting makes for
+malevolence. The war is itself to be counted as a set-back. A very large
+proportion of those who have lived through it will necessarily carry a
+warlike bent through life. By that much, whatever it may count for, the
+decay of the dynastic spirit--or the growth of tolerance and equity in
+national sentiment, if one chooses to put it that way--will be retarded
+from beforehand. So also the Imperial establishment, or whatever is left
+of it, may be counted on to do everything in its power to preserve the
+popular spirit of loyalty and national animosity, by all means at its
+disposal; since the Imperial establishment finally rests on the
+effectual body of national animosity. What hindrance will come in from
+this agency of retardation can at least vaguely be guessed at, in the
+light of what has been accomplished in that way under the strenuously
+reactionary rule of the present reign.
+
+Again, there is the chance, as there always is a chance of human folly,
+that the neighboring peoples will undertake, whether jointly or
+severally, to restrict or prohibit trade relations between the people of
+the Empire and their enemies in the present war; thereby fomenting
+international animosity, as well as contributing directly to the
+economic readiness for war both on their own part and on that of the
+Empire. This is also, and in an eminent degree, an unknown factor in the
+case, on which not even a reasonable guess can be made beforehand. These
+are, all and several, reactionary agencies, factors of retardation,
+making for continuation of the current international situation of
+animosity, distrust, chicane, trade rivalry, competitive armament, and
+eventual warlike enterprise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To offset these agencies of conservatism there is nothing much that can
+be counted on but that slow, random, and essentially insidious working
+of habituation that tends to the obsolescence of the received
+preconceptions; partly by supplanting them with something new, but more
+effectually by their falling into disuse and decay. There is, it will
+have to be admitted, little of a positive character that can be done
+toward the installation of a regime of peace and good-will. The
+endeavours of the pacifists should suffice to convince any dispassionate
+observer of the substantial futility of creative efforts looking to such
+an end. Much can doubtless be done in the way of precautionary measures,
+mostly of a negative character, in the way especially of removing
+sources of infection and (possibly) of so sterilising the apparatus of
+national life that its working shall neither maintain animosities and
+interests at variance with the conditions of peace nor contribute to
+their spread and growth.
+
+There is necessarily little hope or prospect that any national
+establishment will contribute materially or in any direct way to the
+obsolescence of warlike sentiments and ambitions; since such
+establishments are designed for the making of war by keeping national
+jealousies intact, and their accepted place in affairs is that of
+preparation for eventual hostilities, defensive or offensive. Except for
+the contingency of eventual hostilities, no national establishment could
+be kept in countenance. They would all fall into the decay of desuetude,
+just as has happened to the dynastic establishments among those peoples
+who have (passably) lost the spirit of dynastic aggression.
+
+The modern industrial occupations, the modern technology, and that
+modern empirical science that runs so close to the frontiers of
+technology, all work at cross purposes with the received preconceptions
+of the nationalist order; and in a more pronounced degree they are at
+cross purposes with that dynastic order of preconceptions that converges
+on Imperial dominion. The like is true, with a difference, of the ways,
+means and routine of business enterprise as it is conducted in the
+commercialised communities of today. The working of these agencies runs
+to this effect not by way of deliberate and destructive antagonism, but
+almost wholly by force of systematic, though unintended and incidental,
+neglect of those values, standards, verities, and grounds of
+discrimination and conviction that make up the working realities of the
+national spirit and of dynastic ambition. The working concepts of this
+new, essentially mechanistic, order of human interests, do not
+necessarily clash with those of the old order, essentially the order of
+personages and personalities; the two are incommensurable, and they are
+incompatible only in the sense and degree implied in that state of the
+case. The profoundest and most meritorious truths of dynastic politics
+can on no provocation and by no sleight of hand be brought within the
+logic of that system of knowledge and appraisal of values by which the
+mechanistic technology proceeds. Within the premises of this modern
+mechanistic industry and science all the best values and verities of the
+dynastic order are simply "incompetent, irrelevant and impertinent."
+
+There is accordingly no unavoidable clash and no necessary friction
+between the two schemes of knowledge or the two habits of mind that
+characterise the two contrasted cultural eras. It is only that a given
+individual--call him the common man--will not be occupied with both of
+these incommensurable systems of logic and appreciation at the same time
+or bearing on the same point; and further that in proportion as his
+waking hours and his mental energy are fully occupied within the lines
+of one of these systems of knowledge, design and employment, in much the
+same measure he will necessarily neglect the other, and in time he will
+lose proficiency and interest in its pursuits and its conclusions. The
+man who is so held by his daily employment and his life-long attention
+within the range of habits of thought that are valid in the mechanistic
+technology, will, on an average and in the long run, lose his grip on
+the spiritual virtues of national prestige and dynastic primacy; "for
+they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they
+are spiritually discerned."
+
+Not that the adepts in this modern mechanistic system of knowledge and
+design may not also be very good patriots and devoted servants of the
+dynasty. The artless and, on the whole, spontaneous riot of dynastic
+avidity displayed to the astonished eyes of their fellow craftsmen in
+the neutral countries by the most eminent scientists of the Fatherland
+during the early months of the war should be sufficient warning that the
+archaic preconceptions do not hurriedly fly out of the window when the
+habits of thought of the mechanistic order come in at the door. But with
+the passage of time, pervasively, by imperceptible displacement, by the
+decay of habitual disuse, as well as by habitual occupation with these
+other and unrelated ways and means of knowledge and belief, dynastic
+loyalty and the like conceptions in the realm of religion and magic pass
+out of the field of attention and fall insensibly into the category of
+the lost arts. Particularly will this be true of the common man, who
+lives, somewhat characteristically, in the mass and in the present, and
+whose waking hours are somewhat fully occupied with what he has to do.
+
+With the commercial interests the Imperial establishment can probably
+make such terms as to induce their support of the dynastic enterprise,
+since they can apparently always be made to believe that an extension of
+the Imperial dominion will bring correspondingly increased opportunities
+of trade. It is doubtless a mistake, but it is commonly believed by the
+interested parties, which is just as good for the purpose as if it were
+true. And it should be added that in this, as in other instances of the
+quest of larger markets, the costs are to be paid by someone else than
+the presumed commercial beneficiaries; which brings the matter under the
+dearest principle known to businessmen: that of getting something for
+nothing. It will not be equally easy to keep the affections of the
+common man loyal to the dynastic enterprise when he begins to lose his
+grip on the archaic faith in dynastic dominion and comes to realise that
+he has also--individually and in the mass--no material interest even in
+the defense of the Fatherland, much less in the further extension of
+Imperial rule.
+
+But the time when this process of disillusionment and decay of ideals
+shall have gone far enough among the common run to afford no secure
+footing in popular sentiment for the contemplated Imperial
+enterprise,--this time is doubtless far in the future, as compared with
+the interval of preparation required for a new onset. Habituation takes
+time, particularly such habituation as can be counted on to derange the
+habitual bent of a great population in respect of their dearest
+preconceptions. It will take a very appreciable space of time even in
+the case of a populace so accessible to new habits of thought as the
+German people are by virtue of their slight percentage of illiteracy,
+the very large proportion engaged in those modern industries that
+constantly require some intelligent insight into mechanistic facts, the
+density of population and the adequate means of communication, and the
+extent to which the whole population is caught in the web of
+mechanically standardised processes that condition their daily life at
+every turn. As regards their technological situation, and their exposure
+to the discipline of industrial life, no other population of nearly the
+same volume is placed in a position so conducive to a rapid acquirement
+of the spirit of the modern era. But, also, no other people comparable
+with the population of the Fatherland has so large and well-knit a body
+of archaic preconceptions to unlearn. Their nearest analogue, of course,
+is the Japanese nation.
+
+In all this there is, of course, no inclination to cast a slur on the
+German people. In point of racial characteristics there is no difference
+between them and their neighbours. And there is no reason to question
+their good intentions. Indeed, it may safely be asserted that no people
+is more consciously well-meaning than the children of the Fatherland. It
+is only that, with their archaic preconceptions of what is right and
+meritorious, their best intentions spell malevolence when projected into
+the civilised world as it stands today. And by no fault of theirs. Nor
+is it meant to be intimated that their rate of approach to the accepted
+Occidental standard of institutional maturity will be unduly slow or
+unduly reluctant, so soon as the pertinent facts of modern life begin
+effectively to shape their habits of thought. It is only that, human
+nature--and human second nature--being what it always has been, the rate
+of approach of the German people to a passably neutral complexion in
+matters of international animosity and aggression must necessarily be
+slow enough to allow ample time for the renewed preparation of a more
+unsparing and redoubtable endeavour on the part of the Imperial
+establishment.
+
+What makes this German Imperial establishment redoubtable, beyond
+comparison, is the very simple but also very grave combination of
+circumstances whereby the German people have acquired the use of the
+modern industrial arts in the highest state of efficiency, at the same
+time that they have retained unabated the fanatical loyalty of feudal
+barbarism.[9] So long, and in so far, as this conjunction of forces
+holds there is no outlook for peace except on the elimination of
+Germany as a power capable of disturbing the peace.
+
+[Footnote 9: For an extended discussion of this point, see _Imperial
+Germany and the Industrial Revolution_, especially ch. v. and vi.]
+
+It may seem invidious to speak so recurrently of the German Imperial
+establishment as the sole potential disturber of the peace in Europe.
+The reason for so singling out the Empire for this invidious
+distinction--of merit or demerit, as one may incline to take it--is that
+the facts run that way. There is, of course, other human material, and
+no small volume of it in the aggregate, that is of much the same
+character, and serviceable for the same purposes as the resources and
+man-power of the Empire. But this other material can come effectually
+into bearing as a means of disturbance only in so far as it clusters
+about the Imperial dynasty and marches under his banners. In so speaking
+of the Imperial establishment as the sole enemy of a European peace,
+therefore, these outlying others are taken for granted, very much as one
+takes the nimbus for granted in speaking of one of the greater saints of
+God.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So the argument returns to the alternative: Peace by unconditional
+surrender and submission, or peace by elimination of Imperial Germany
+(and Japan). There is no middle course apparent. The old-fashioned--that
+is to say nineteenth-century--plan of competitive defensive armament and
+a balance of powers has been tried, and it has not proved to be a
+success, even so early in the twentieth century. This plan offers a
+substitute (_Ersatz_) for peace; but even as such it has become
+impracticable. The modern, or rather the current late-modern, state of
+the industrial arts does not tolerate it. Technological knowledge has
+thrown the advantage in military affairs definitively to the offensive,
+particularly to the offensive that is prepared beforehand with the
+suitable appliances and with men ready matured in that rigorous and
+protracted training by which alone they can become competent to make
+warlike use of these suitable appliances provided by the modern
+technology. At the same time, and by grace of the same advance in
+technology, any well-designed offensive can effectually reach any given
+community, in spite of distance or of other natural obstacles. The era
+of defensive armaments and diplomatic equilibration, as a substitute for
+peace, has been definitively closed by the modern state of the
+industrial arts.
+
+Of the two alternatives spoken of above, the former--peace by submission
+under an alien dynasty--is presumably not a practicable solution, as has
+appeared in the course of the foregoing argument.
+
+The modern nations are not spiritually ripe for it. Whether they have
+reached even that stage of national sobriety, or neutrality, that would
+enable them to live at peace among themselves after elimination of the
+Imperial Powers is still open to an uneasy doubt. It would be by a
+precarious margin that they can be counted on so to keep the peace in
+the absence of provocation from without the pale. Their predilection for
+peace goes to no greater lengths than is implied in the formula: Peace
+with Honour; which assuredly does not cover a peace of non-resistance,
+and which, in effect, leaves the distinction between an offensive and a
+defensive war somewhat at loose ends. The national prestige is still a
+live asset in the mind of these peoples; and the limit of tolerance in
+respect of this patriotic animosity appears to be drawn appreciably
+closer than the formula cited above would necessarily presume. They will
+fight on provocation, and the degree of provocation required to upset
+the serenity of these sportsmanlike modern peoples is a point on which
+the shrewdest guesses may diverge. Still, opinion runs more and more
+consistently to the effect that if these modern--say the French and the
+English-speaking--peoples were left to their own devices the peace might
+fairly be counted on to be kept between them indefinitely, barring
+unforeseen contingencies.
+
+Experience teaches that warlike enterprise on a moderate scale and as a
+side interest is by no means incompatible with such a degree of neutral
+animus as these peoples have yet acquired,--e.g., the Spanish-American
+war, which was made in America, or the Boer war, which was made in
+England. But these wars, in spite of the dimensions which they presently
+took on, were after all of the nature of episodes,--the one chiefly an
+extension of sportsmanship, which engaged the best attention of only the
+more sportsmanlike elements, the other chiefly engineered by certain
+business interests with a callous view to getting something for nothing.
+Both episodes came to be serious enough, both in their immediate
+incidence and in their consequences; but neither commanded the
+deliberate and cordial support of the community at large. There is a
+meretricious air over both; and there is apparent a popular inclination
+to condone rather than to take pride in these _faits accomplis_. The one
+excursion was a product of sportsmanlike bravado, fed on boyish
+exuberance, fomented for mercenary objects by certain business interests
+and place-hunting politicians, and incited by meretricious newspapers
+with a view to increase their circulation. The other was set afoot by
+interested businessmen, backed by politicians, seconded by newspapers,
+and borne by the community at large, in great part under
+misapprehension and stung by wounded pride.
+
+Opinions will diverge widely as to the chances of peace in a community
+of nations among whom episodes of this character, and of such
+dimensions, have been somewhat more than tolerated in the immediate
+past. But the consensus of opinion in these same countries appears to be
+setting with fair consistency to the persuasion that the popular spirit
+shown in these and in analogous conjunctures in the recent past gives
+warrant that peace is deliberately desired and is likely to be
+maintained, barring unforeseen contingencies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the large, the measures conducive to the perpetuation of peace, and
+necessary to be taken, are simple and obvious; and they are largely of a
+negative character, exploits of omission and neglect. Under modern
+conditions, and barring aggression from without, the peace is kept by
+avoiding the breaking of it. It does not break of itself,--in the
+absence of such national establishments as are organised with the sole
+ulterior view of warlike enterprise. A policy of peace is obviously a
+policy of avoidance,--avoidance of offense and of occasion for
+annoyance.
+
+What is required to insure the maintenance of peace among pacific
+nations is the neutralisation of all those human relations out of which
+international grievances are wont to arise. And what is necessary to
+assure a reasonable expectation of continued peace is the neutralisation
+of so much of these relations as the patriotic self-conceit and
+credulity of these peoples will permit. These two formulations are by no
+means identical; indeed, the disparity between what could advantageously
+be dispensed with in the way of national rights and pretensions, and
+what the common run of modern patriots could be induced to relinquish,
+is probably much larger than any sanguine person would like to believe.
+It should be plain on slight reflection that the greater part, indeed
+substantially the whole, of those material interests and demands that
+now engage the policy of the nations, and that serve on occasion to set
+them at variance, might be neutralised or relinquished out of hand,
+without detriment to any one of the peoples concerned.
+
+The greater part of these material interests over which the various
+national establishments keep watch and hold pretensions are, in point of
+historical derivation, a legacy from the princely politics of what is
+called the "Mercantilist" period; and they are uniformly of the nature
+of gratuitous interference or discrimination between the citizens of the
+given nation and outsiders. Except (doubtfully) in the English case,
+where mercantilist policies are commonly believed to have been adopted
+directly for the benefit of the commercial interest, measures of this
+nature are uniformly traceable to the endeavours of the crown and its
+officers to strengthen the finances of the prince and give him an
+advantage in warlike enterprise. They are kept up essentially for the
+same eventual end of preparation for war. So, e.g., protective tariffs,
+and the like discrimination in shipping, are still advocated as a means
+of making the nation self-supporting, self-contained, self-sufficient;
+with a view to readiness in the event of hostilities.
+
+A nation is in no degree better off in time of peace for being
+self-sufficient. In point of patent fact no nation can be industrially
+self-sufficient except at the cost of foregoing some of the economic
+advantages of that specialisation of industry which the modern state of
+the industrial arts enforces. In time of peace there is no benefit
+comes to the community at large from such restraint of trade with the
+outside world, or to any class or section of the community except those
+commercial concerns that are favored by the discrimination; and these
+invariably gain their special advantage at the cost of their
+compatriots. Discrimination in trade--export, import or shipping--has no
+more beneficial effect when carried out publicly by the national
+authorities than when effected surreptitiously and illegally by a
+private conspiracy in restraint of trade within a group of interested
+business concerns.
+
+Hitherto the common man has found it difficult to divest himself of an
+habitual delusion on this head, handed down out of the past and
+inculcated by interested politicians, to the effect that in some
+mysterious way he stands to gain by limiting his own opportunities. But
+the neutralisation of international trade, or the abrogation of all
+discrimination in trade, is the beginning of wisdom as touches the
+perpetuation of peace. The first effect of such a neutral policy would
+be wider and more intricately interlocking trade relations, coupled with
+a further specialisation and mutual dependence of industry between the
+several countries concerned; which would mean, in terms of international
+comity, a lessened readiness for warlike operations all around.
+
+It used to be an argument of the free-traders that the growth of
+international commercial relations under a free-trade policy would
+greatly conduce to a spirit of mutual understanding and forbearance
+between the nations. There may or may not be something appreciable in
+the contention; it has been doubted, and there is no considerable
+evidence to be had in support of it. But what is more to the point is
+the tangible fact that such specialisation of industry and consequent
+industrial interdependence would leave all parties to this relation less
+capable, materially and spiritually, to break off amicable relations. So
+again, in time of peace and except with a view to eventual hostilities,
+it would involve no loss, and presumably little pecuniary gain, to any
+country, locality, town or class, if all merchant shipping were
+registered indiscriminately under neutral colors and sailed under the
+neutral no-man's flag, responsible indiscriminately to the courts where
+they touched or where their business was transacted.
+
+Neither producers, shippers, merchants nor consumers have any slightest
+interest in the national allegiance of the carriers of their freight,
+except such as may artificially be induced by discriminatory shipping
+regulations. In all but the name--in time of peace--the world's merchant
+shipping already comes near being so neutralised, and the slight further
+simplification required to leave it on a neutral peace footing would be
+little else than a neglect of such vexatious discrimination as is still
+in force. If no nation could claim the allegiance, and therefore the
+usufruct, of any given item of merchant shipping in case of eventual
+hostilities, on account of the domicile of the owners or the port of
+registry, that would create a further handicap on eventual warlike
+enterprise and add so much to the margin of tolerance. At the same time,
+in the event of hostilities, shipping sailing under the neutral no-man's
+flag and subject to no national allegiance would enjoy such immunities
+as still inure to neutral shipping. It is true, neutrality has not
+carried many immunities lately.
+
+Cumulatively effective usage and the exigencies of a large, varied,
+shifting and extensive maritime trade have in the course of time
+brought merchant shipping to something approaching a neutral footing.
+For most, one might venture to say for virtually all, routine purposes
+of business and legal liability the merchant shipping comes under the
+jurisdiction of the local courts, without reservation. It is true, there
+still are formalities and reservations which enable questions arising
+out of incidents in the shipping trade to become subject of
+international conference and adjustment, but they are after all not such
+as would warrant the erection of national apparatus to take care of them
+in case they were not already covered by usage to that effect. The
+visible drift of usage toward neutralisation in merchant shipping, in
+maritime trade, and in international commercial transactions, together
+with the similarly visible feasibility of a closer approach to
+unreserved neutralisation of this whole range of traffic, suggests that
+much the same line of considerations should apply as regards the
+personal and pecuniary rights of citizens traveling or residing abroad.
+The extreme,--or, as seen from the present point of view, the
+ultimate--term in the relinquishment of national pretensions along this
+line would of course be the neutralisation of citizenship.
+
+This is not so sweeping a move as a patriotically-minded person might
+imagine on the first alarm, so far as touches the practical status of
+the ordinary citizen in his ordinary relations, and particularly among
+the English-speaking peoples. As an illustrative instance, citizenship
+has sat somewhat lightly on the denizens of the American republic, and
+with no evident damage to the community at large or to the inhabitants
+in detail. Naturalisation has been easy, and has been sought with no
+more eagerness, on the whole, than the notably low terms of its
+acquirement would indicate. Without loss or discomfort many law-abiding
+aliens have settled in this country and spent the greater part of a
+life-time under its laws without becoming citizens, and no one the worse
+or the wiser for it. Not infrequently the decisive inducement to
+naturalisation on the part of immigrant aliens has been, and is, the
+desirability of divesting themselves of their rights of citizenship in
+the country of their origin. Not that the privilege and dignity of
+citizenship, in this or in any other country, is to be held of little
+account. It is rather that under modern civilised conditions, and among
+a people governed by sentiments of humanity and equity, the stranger
+within our gates suffers no obloquy and no despiteful usage for being a
+stranger. It may be admitted that of late, with the fomentation of a
+more accentuated nationalism by politicians seeking a _raison d'etre_,
+additional difficulties have been created in the way of naturalisation
+and the like incidents. Still, when all is told of the average American
+citizen, _qua_ citizen, there is not much to tell. The like is true
+throughout the English-speaking peoples, with inconsequential allowance
+for local color. A definitive neutralisation of citizenship within the
+range of these English-speaking countries would scarcely ripple the
+surface of things as they are--in time of peace.
+
+All of which has not touched the sore and sacred spot in the received
+scheme of citizenship and its rights and liabilities. It is in the event
+of hostilities that the liabilities of the citizen at home come into the
+foreground, and it is as a source of patriotic grievance looking to
+warlike retaliation that the rights of the citizen abroad chiefly come
+into the case.
+
+If, as was once, almost inaudibly, hinted by a well-regarded statesman,
+the national establishment should refuse to jeopardise the public peace
+for the safeguarding of the person and property of citizens who go out
+_in partes infidelium_ on their own private concerns, and should so
+leave them under the uncurbed jurisdiction of the authorities in those
+countries into which they have intruded, the result might in many cases
+be hardship to such individuals. This would, of course, be true almost
+exclusively of such instances only as occur in such localities as are,
+temporarily or permanently, outside the pale of modern law and order.
+And, it may be in place to remark, instances of such hardship, with the
+accompanying hazard of national complications, would, no doubt, greatly
+diminish in frequency consequent upon the promulgation of such a
+disclaimer of national responsibility for the continued well-being of
+citizens who so expatriate themselves in the pursuit of their own
+advantage or amusement. Meantime, let it not seem inconsiderate to
+recall that to the community at large the deplorable case of such
+expatriates under hardship involves no loss or gain in the material
+respect; and that, except for the fortuitous circumstance of his being a
+compatriot, the given individual's personal or pecuniary fortune in
+foreign parts has no special claim on his compatriots' sympathy or
+assistance; from which it follows also that with the definitive
+neutralisation of citizenship as touches expatriates, the sympathy which
+is now somewhat unintelligently confined to such cases, on what may
+without offense be called extraneous grounds, would somewhat more
+impartially and humanely extend to fellowmen in distress, regardless of
+nativity or naturalisation.
+
+What is mainly to the point here, however, is the fact that if
+citizenship were so neutralised within the range of neutral countries
+here contemplated, one further source of provocation to international
+jealousy and distrust would drop out of the situation. And it is not
+easy to detect any element of material loss involved in such a move. In
+the material respect no individual would be any the worse off, with the
+doubtful and dubious exception of the expatriate fortune-hunter, who
+aims to fish safely in troubled waters at his compatriots' expense. But
+the case stands otherwise as regards the balance of immaterial assets.
+The scaffolding of much highly-prized sentiment would collapse, and the
+world of poetry and pageantry--particularly that of the tawdrier and
+more vendible poetry and pageantry--would be poorer by so much. The Man
+Without a Country would lose his pathetic appeal, or would at any rate
+lose much of it. It may be, of course, that in the sequel there would
+result no net loss even in respect of these immaterial assets of
+sentimental animation and patriotic self-complacency, but it is after
+all fairly certain that something would be lost, and it is by no means
+clear what if anything would come in to fill its place.
+
+An historical parallel may help to illustrate the point. In the movement
+out of what may be called the royal age of dynasties and chivalric
+service, those peoples who have moved out of that age and out of its
+spiritual atmosphere have lost much of the conscious magnanimity and
+conviction of merit that once characterised that order of things, as it
+still continues to characterise the prevalent habit of mind in the
+countries that still continue under the archaic order of dynastic
+mastery and service. But it is also to be noted that these peoples who
+so have moved out of the archaic order appear to be well content with
+this change of spiritual atmosphere, and they are even fairly well
+persuaded, in the common run, that the move has brought them some net
+gain in the way of human dignity and neighbourly tolerance, such as to
+offset any loss incurred on the heroic and invidious side of life. Such
+is the tempering force of habit. Whereas, e.g., on the other hand, the
+peoples of these surviving dynastic States, to which it is necessary
+continually to recur, who have not yet moved out of that realm of
+heroics, find themselves unable to see anything in such a prospective
+shift but net loss and headlong decay of the spirit; that modicum of
+forbearance and equity that is requisite to the conduct of life in a
+community of ungraded masterless men is seen by these stouter stomachs
+as a loosening of the moral fiber and a loss of nerve.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What is here tentatively projected under the phrase, "neutralization of
+citizenship," is only something a little more and farther along the same
+general line of movement which these more modern peoples have been
+following in all that sequence of institutional changes that has given
+them their present distinctive character of commonwealths, as contrasted
+with the dynastic States of the mediaeval order. What may be in
+prospect--if such a further move away from the mediaeval landmarks is to
+take effect--may best be seen in the light of the later moves in the
+same direction hitherto, more particularly as regards the moral and
+aesthetic merits at large of such an institutional mutation. As touches
+this last previous shifting of ground along this line, just spoken of,
+the case stands in this singular but significant posture, in respect of
+the spiritual values and valuations involved: These peoples who have,
+even in a doubtful measure, made this transition from the archaic
+institutional scheme, of fealty and dynastic exploit and coercion, to
+the newer scheme of the ungraded commonwealth, are convinced, to the
+point of martyrdom, that anything like a return to the old order is
+morally impossible as well as insufferably shameful and irksome; whereas
+those people, of the retarded division of the race, who have had no
+experience of this new order, are equally convinced that it is all quite
+incompatible with a worthy life.
+
+Evidently, there should be no disputing about tastes. Evidently, too,
+these retarded others will not move on into the later institutional
+phase, of the ungraded commonwealth, by preconceived choice; but only,
+if at all, by such schooling of experience as will bring them insensibly
+to that frame of mind out of which the ideal of the ungraded
+commonwealth emerges by easy generalisation of workday practice.
+Meantime, having not yet experienced that phase of sentiment and opinion
+on civic rights and immunities that is now occupied by their
+institutionally maturer neighbours, the subjects of the Imperial
+Fatherland, e.g., in spite of the most laudable intentions and the best
+endeavour, are, by failure of this experience, unable to comprehend
+either the ground of opposition to their well-meaning projects of
+dominion or the futility of trying to convert these their elder brothers
+to their own prescriptive acceptation of what is worth while. In time,
+and with experience, this retarded division of Christendom may come to
+the same perspective on matters of national usage and ideals as has been
+enforced on the more modern peoples by farther habituation. So, also, in
+time and with experience, if the drift of circumstance shall turn out to
+set that way, the further move away from mediaeval discriminations and
+constraint and into the unspectacular scheme of neutralisation may come
+to seem as right, good and beautiful as the democratic commonwealth now
+seems to the English-speaking peoples, or as the Hohenzollern Imperial
+State now seems to the subjects of the Fatherland. There is, in effect,
+no disputing about tastes.
+
+There is little that is novel, and nothing that is to be rated as
+constructive innovation, in this sketch of what might not inaptly be
+called peace by neglect. The legal mind, which commonly takes the
+initiative in counsels on what to do, should scarcely be expected to
+look in that direction for a way out, or to see its way out in that
+direction in any case; so that it need occasion no surprise if the many
+current projects of pacification turn on ingenious and elaborate
+provisions of apparatus and procedure, rather than on that simpler line
+of expedients which the drift of circumstance, being not possessed of a
+legal mind, has employed in the sequence of institutional change
+hitherto. The legal mind that dominates in the current deliberations on
+peace is at home in exhaustive specifications and meticulous
+demarkations, and it is therefore prone to seek a remedy for the burden
+of supernumerary devices by recourse to further excesses of regulation.
+
+This trait of the legal mind is not a bad fault at the worst, and the
+quality in which this defect inheres is of the greatest moment in any
+project of constructive engineering on the legal and political plane.
+But it is less to the purpose, indeed it is at cross purposes, in such a
+conjuncture as the present; when the nations are held up in their quest
+of peace chiefly by an accumulation of institutional apparatus that has
+out-stayed its usefulness. It is the fortune even of good institutions
+to become imbecile with the change of conditioning circumstances, and it
+then becomes a question of their disestablishment, not of their
+rehabilitation. If there is anywhere a safe negative conclusion, it is
+that an institution grown mischievous by obsolescence need not be
+replaced by a substitute.
+
+Instances of such mischievous institutional arrangements, obsolete or in
+process of obsolescence, would be, e.g., the French monarchy of the
+ancient regime, the Spanish Inquisition, the British corn laws and the
+"rotten boroughs," the Barbary pirates, the Turkish rule in Armenia, the
+British crown, the German Imperial Dynasty, the European balance of
+powers, the Monroe Doctrine. In some sense, at least in the sense and
+degree implied in their selective survival, these various articles of
+institutional furniture, and many like them, have once presumably been
+suitable to some end, in the days of their origin and vigorous growth;
+and they have at least in some passable fashion met some felt want; but
+if they ever had a place and use in the human economy they have in time
+grown imbecile and mischievous by force of changing circumstances, and
+the question is not how to replace them with something else to the same
+purpose after their purpose is outworn. A man who loses a wart off the
+end of his nose does not apply to the _Ersatz_ bureau for a convenient
+substitute.
+
+Now, a large proportion, perhaps even substantially the whole, of the
+existing apparatus of international rights, pretensions,
+discriminations, covenants and provisos, visibly fall in that class, in
+so far as concerns their material serviceability to the nation at large,
+and particularly as regards any other than a warlike purpose, offensive
+or defensive. Of course, the national dignity and diplomatic punctilio,
+and the like adjuncts and instrumentalities of the national honour, all
+have their prestige value; and they are not likely to be given up out of
+hand. In point of fact, however solicitous for a lasting peace these
+patriotically-minded modern peoples may be, it is doubtful if they could
+be persuaded to give up any appreciable share of these appurtenances of
+national jealousy even when their retention implies an imminent breach
+of the peace. Yet it is plain that the peace will be secure in direct
+proportion to the measure in which national discrimination and prestige
+are allowed to pass into nothingness and be forgot.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By so much as it might amount to, such neutralisation of outstanding
+interests between these pacific nations should bring on a degree of
+coalescence of these nationalities. In effect, they are now held apart
+in many respects by measures of precaution against their coming to a
+common plan of use and wont. The degree of coalescence would scarcely be
+extreme; more particularly it could not well become onerous, since it
+would rest on convenience, inclination and the neglect of artificial
+discrepancies. The more intimate institutions of modern life, that
+govern human conduct locally and in detail, need not be affected, or not
+greatly affected, for better or worse. Yet something appreciable in that
+way might also fairly be looked for in time.
+
+The nature, reach and prescriptive force of this prospective coalescence
+through neutralisation may perhaps best be appreciated in the light of
+what has already come to pass, without design or mandatory guidance, in
+those lines of human interest where the national frontiers interpose no
+bar, or at least no decisive bar, whether by force of unconcern or
+through impotence. Fashions of dress, equipage and decorous usage, e.g.,
+run with some uniformity throughout these modern nations, and indeed
+with some degree of prescriptive force. There is, of course, nothing
+mandatory, in the simpler sense, about all this; nor is the degree of
+conformity extreme or uniform throughout. But it is a ready-made
+generalisation that only those communities are incorporated in this
+cosmopolitan coalescence of usage that are moved by their own
+incitement, and only so far as they have an effectually felt need of
+conformity in these premises. It is true, a dispassionate outsider, if
+such there be, would perhaps be struck by the degree of such painstaking
+conformity to canons of conduct which it frequently must cost serious
+effort even to ascertain in such detail as the case calls for.
+Doubtless, or at least presumably, conformity under the jurisdiction of
+the fashions, and in related provinces of decorum, is obligatory in a
+degree that need not be looked for throughout the scheme of use and wont
+at large, even under the advisedly established non-interference of the
+authorities. Still, on a point on which the evidence hitherto is
+extremely scant it is the part of discretion to hold no settled opinion.
+
+A more promising line of suggestion is probably that afforded by the
+current degree of contact and consistency among the modern nations in
+respect of science and scholarship, as also in the aesthetic or the
+industrial arts. Local color and local pride, with one thing and another
+in the way of special incitement or inhibition, may come in to vary the
+run of things, or to blur or hinder a common understanding and mutual
+furtherance and copartnery in these matters of taste and intellect. Yet
+it is scarcely misleading to speak of the peoples of Christendom as one
+community in these respects. The sciences and the arts are held as a
+joint stock among these peoples, in their elements, and measurably also
+in their working-out. It is true, these interests and achievements of
+the race are not cultivated with the same assiduity or with identical
+effect throughout; but it is equally true that no effectual bar could
+profitably be interposed, or would be tolerated in the long run in this
+field, where men have had occasion to learn that unlimited collusion is
+more to the purpose than a clannish discrimination.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is, no doubt, beyond reasonable hope that these democratic peoples
+could be brought forthwith to concerted action on the lines of such a
+plan of peace by neutralisation of all outstanding national pretensions.
+Both the French and the English-speaking peoples are too eagerly set on
+national aims and national prestige, to allow such a plan to come to a
+hearing, even if something of the kind should be spoken for by their
+most trusted leaders. By settled habit they are thinking in terms of
+nationality, and just now they are all under the handicap of an inflamed
+national pride. Advocacy of such a plan, of course, does not enter
+seriously into the purpose of this inquiry; which is concerned with the
+conditions under which peace is sought today, with the further
+conditions requisite to its perpetuation, and with the probable effects
+of such a peace on the fortunes of these peoples in case peace is
+established and effectually maintained.
+
+It is a reasonable question, and one to which a provisional answer may
+be found, whether the drift of circumstances in the present and for the
+immediate future may be counted on to set in the direction of a
+progressive neutralisation of the character spoken of above, and
+therefore possibly toward a perpetuation of that peace that is to follow
+the present season of war. So also is it an open and interesting
+question whether the drift in that direction, if such is the set of it,
+can be counted on to prove sufficiently swift and massive, so as not to
+be overtaken and overborne by the push of agencies that make for
+dissension and warlike enterprise.
+
+Anything like a categorical answer to these questions would have to be a
+work of vaticination or of effrontery,--possibly as much to the point
+the one as the other. But there are certain conditions precedent to a
+lasting peace as the outcome of events now in train, and there are
+certain definable contingencies conditioned on such current facts as the
+existing state of the industrial arts and the state of popular
+sentiment, together with the conjuncture of circumstances under which
+these factors will come into action.
+
+The state of the industrial arts, as it bears on the peace and its
+violation, has been spoken of above. It is of such a character that a
+judiciously prepared offensive launched by any Power of the first rank
+at an opportune time can reach and lay waste any given country of the
+habitable globe. The conclusive evidence of this is at hand, and it is
+the major premise underlying all current proposals and projects of
+peace, as well as the refusal of the nations now on the defensive to
+enter into negotiations looking to an "inconclusive peace." This state
+of the case is not commonly recognised in so many words, but it is well
+enough understood. So that all peace projects that shall hope to find a
+hearing must make up their account with it, and must show cause why they
+should be judged competent to balk any attempted offensive. In an
+inarticulate or inchoate fashion, perhaps, but none the less with
+ever-increasing certitude and increasing apprehension, this state of the
+case is also coming to be an article of popular "knowledge and belief,"
+wherever much or little thought is spent on the outlook for peace. It
+has already had a visible effect in diminishing the exclusiveness of
+nationalities and turning the attention of the pacific peoples to the
+question of feasible ways and means of international cooperation in case
+of need; but it has not hitherto visibly lessened the militant spirit
+among these nations, nor has it lowered the tension of their national
+pride, at least not yet; rather the contrary, in fact.
+
+The effect, upon the popular temper, of this inchoate realisation of the
+fatality that so lies in the modern state of the industrial arts, varies
+from one country to another, according to the varying position in which
+they are placed, or in which they conceive themselves to be placed.
+Among the belligerent nations it has put the spur of fear to their need
+of concerted action as well as to their efforts to strengthen the
+national defense. But the state of opinion and sentiment abroad in the
+nation in time of war is no secure indication of what it will be after
+the return to peace. The American people, the largest and most
+immediately concerned of the neutral nations, should afford more
+significant evidence of the changes in the popular attitude likely to
+follow from a growing realisation of this state of the case, that the
+advantage has passed definitively to any well prepared and resolute
+offensive, and that no precautions of diplomacy and no practicable
+measures of defensive armament will any longer give security,--provided
+always that there is anywhere a national Power actuated by designs of
+imperial dominion.
+
+It is, of course, only little by little that the American people and
+their spokesmen have come to realise their own case under this
+late-modern situation, and hitherto only in an imperfect degree. Their
+first response to the stimulus has been a display of patriotic
+self-sufficiency and a move to put the national defense on a
+war-footing, such as would be competent to beat off all aggression.
+Those elements of the population who least realise the gravity of the
+situation, and who are at the same time commercially interested in
+measures of armament or in military preferment, have not begun to shift
+forward beyond this position of magniloquence and resolution; nor is
+there as yet much intimation that they see beyond it, although there is
+an ever-recurring hint that they in a degree appreciate the practical
+difficulty of persuading a pacific people to make adequate preparation
+beforehand, in equipment and trained man-power, for such a plan of
+self-sufficient self-defense. But increasingly among those who are, by
+force of temperament or insight or by lack of the pecuniary and the
+placeman's interest, less confident of an appeal to the nation's
+prowess, there is coming forward an evident persuasion that warlike
+preparations--"preparedness"--alone and carried through by the Republic
+in isolation, will scarcely serve the turn.
+
+There are at least two lines of argument, or of persuasion, running to
+the support of such a view; readiness for a warlike defense, by
+providing equipment and trained men, might prove a doubtfully effectual
+measure even when carried to the limit of tolerance that will always be
+reached presently in any democratic country; and then, too, there is
+hope of avoiding the necessity of such warlike preparation, at least in
+the same extreme degree, by means of some practicable working
+arrangement to be effected with other nations who are in the same case.
+Hitherto the farthest reach of these pacific schemes for maintaining the
+peace, or for the common defense, has taken the shape of a projected
+league of neutral nations to keep the peace by enforcement of specified
+international police regulations or by compulsory arbitration of
+international disputes. It is extremely doubtful how far, if at all,
+popular sentiment of any effectual force falls in with this line of
+precautionary measures. Yet it is evident that popular sentiment, and
+popular apprehension, has been stirred profoundly by the events of the
+past two years, and the resulting change that is already visible in the
+prevailing sentiment as regards the national defense would argue that
+more far-reaching changes in the same connection are fairly to be looked
+for within a reasonable allowance of time.
+
+In this American case the balance of effectual public opinion hitherto
+is to all appearance quite in doubt, but it is also quite unsettled. The
+first response has been a display of patriotic emotion and national
+self-assertion. The further, later and presumably more deliberate,
+expressions of opinion carry a more obvious note of apprehension and
+less of stubborn or unreflecting national pride. It may be too early to
+anticipate a material shift of base, to a more neutral, or less
+exclusively national footing in matters of the common defense.
+
+The national administration has been moving at an accelerated rate in
+the direction not of national isolation and self-reliance resting on a
+warlike equipment formidable enough to make or break the peace at
+will--such as the more truculent and irresponsible among the politicians
+have spoken for--but rather in the direction of moderating or curtailing
+all national pretensions that are not of undoubted material consequence,
+and of seeking a common understanding and concerted action with those
+nationalities whose effectual interests in the matters of peace and war
+coincide with the American. The administration has grown visibly more
+pacific in the course of its exacting experience,--more resolutely, one
+might even say more aggressively pacific; but the point of chief
+attention in all this strategy of peace has also visibly been shifting
+somewhat from the maintenance of a running equilibrium between
+belligerents and a keeping of the peace from day to day, to the ulterior
+and altogether different question of what is best to be done toward a
+conclusive peace at the close of hostilities, and the ways and means of
+its subsequent perpetuation.
+
+This latter is, in effect, an altogether different question from that of
+preserving neutrality and amicable relations in the midst of importunate
+belligerents, and it may even, conceivably, perhaps not unlikely, come
+to involve a precautionary breach of the current peace and a taking of
+sides in the war with an urgent view to a conclusive outcome. It would
+be going too far to impute to the administration, at the present stage,
+such an aggressive attitude in its pursuit of a lasting peace as could
+be called a policy of defensive offense; but it will shock no one's
+sensibilities to say that such a policy, involving a taking of sides and
+a renouncing of national isolation, is visibly less remote from the
+counsels of the administration today than it has been at any earlier
+period.
+
+In this pacific attitude, increasingly urgent and increasingly
+far-reaching and apprehensive, the administration appears to be speaking
+for the common man rather than for the special interests or the
+privileged classes. Such would appear, on the face of the returns, to be
+the meaning of the late election. It is all the more significant on that
+account, since in the long run it is after all the common man that will
+have to pass on the expediency of any settled line of policy and to bear
+the material burden of carrying it into effect.
+
+It may seem rash to presume that a popularly accredited administration
+in a democratic country must approximately reflect the effectual changes
+of popular sentiment and desire. Especially would it seem rash to anyone
+looking on from the point of view of an undemocratic nation, and
+therefore prone to see the surface fluctuations of excitement and
+shifting clamor. But those who are within the democratic pale will know
+that any administration in such a country, where official tenure and
+continued incumbency of the party rest on a popular vote,--any such
+administration is a political organisation and is guided by political
+expediency, in the tawdry sense of the phrase. Such a political
+situation has the defects of its qualities, as has been well and
+frequently expounded by its critics, but it has also the merits of its
+shortcomings. In a democracy of this modern order any incumbent of high
+office is necessarily something of a politician, quite indispensably so;
+and a politician at the same time necessarily is something of a
+demagogue. He yields to the popular drift, or to the set of opinion and
+demands among the effective majority on whom he leans; and he can not
+even appear to lead, though he may surreptitiously lead opinion in
+adroitly seeming to reflect it and obey it. Ostensible leadership, such
+as has been staged in this country from time to time, has turned out to
+be ostensible only. The politician must be adroit; but if he is also to
+be a statesman he must be something more. He is under the necessity of
+guessing accurately what the drift of events and opinion is going to be
+on the next reach ahead; and in taking coming events by the forelock he
+may be able to guide and shape the drift of opinion and sentiment
+somewhat to his own liking. But all the while he must keep within the
+lines of the long-term set of the current as it works out in the habits
+of thought of the common man.
+
+Such foresight and flexibility is necessary to continued survival, but
+flexibility of convictions alone does not meet the requirements. Indeed,
+it has been tried. It is only the minor politicians--the most numerous
+and long-lived, it is true--who can hold their place in the crevices of
+the party organisation, and get their livelihood from the business of
+party politics, without some power of vision and some hazard of
+forecast. It results from this state of the case that the drift of
+popular sentiment and the popular response to the stimulus of current
+events is reflected more faithfully and more promptly by the short-lived
+administrations of a democracy than by the stable and formally
+irresponsible governmental establishments of the older order. It should
+also be noted that these democratic administrations are in a less
+advantageous position for the purpose of guiding popular sentiment and
+shaping it to their own ends.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, it happens that at no period within the past half-century has the
+course of events moved with such celerity or with so grave a bearing on
+the common good and the prospective contingencies of national life as
+during the present administration. This apparent congruity of the
+administration's policy with the drift of popular feeling and belief
+will incline anyone to put a high rating on the administration's course
+of conduct, in international relations as well as in national measures
+that have a bearing on international relations, as indicating the course
+taken by sentiment and second thought in the community at large,--for,
+in effect, whether or not in set form, the community at large reflects
+on any matters of such gravity and urgency as to force themselves upon
+the attention of the common man.
+
+Two main lines of reflection have visibly been enforced on the
+administration by the course of events in the international field. There
+has been a growing apprehension, mounting in the later months to
+something like the rank of a settled conviction, that the Republic has
+been marked down for reduction to a vassal state by the dynastic Empire
+now engaged with its European adversaries. In so saying that the
+Republic has been marked down for subjection it is not intended to
+intimate that deliberate counsel has been had by the Imperial
+establishment on that prospective enterprise; still less that a
+resolution to such effect, with specification of ways and means, has
+been embodied in documentary form and deposited for future reference in
+the Imperial archives. All that is intended, and all that is necessary
+to imply, is that events are in train to such effect that the
+subjugation of the American republic will necessarily find its place in
+the sequence presently, provided that the present Imperial adventure is
+brought to a reasonably auspicious issue; though it does not follow that
+this particular enterprise need be counted on as the next large
+adventure in dominion to be undertaken when things again fall into
+promising shape. This latter point would, of course, depend on the
+conjuncture of circumstances, chief of which would have to be the
+exigencies of imperial dominion shaping the policy of the Empire's
+natural and necessary ally in the Far East. All this has evidently been
+coming more and more urgently into the workday deliberations of the
+American administration. Of course, it is not spoken of in set terms to
+this effect in official utterances, perhaps not even within doors; that
+sort of thing is not done. But it can do no harm to use downright
+expressions in a scientific discussion of these phenomena, with a view
+to understanding the current drift of things in this field.
+
+Beyond this is the similar apprehension, similarly though more slowly
+and reluctantly rising to the level of settled conviction, that the
+American commonwealth is not fit to take care of its own case
+single-handed. This apprehension is enforced more and more unmistakably
+with every month that passes on the theatre of war. And it is reenforced
+by the constantly more obvious reflection that the case of the American
+commonwealth in this matter is the same as that of the democratic
+countries of Europe, and of the other European colonies. It is not, or
+at least one may believe it is not yet, that in the patriotic
+apprehension of the common man, or of the administration which speaks
+for him, the resources of the country would be inadequate to meet any
+contingencies of the kind that might arise, whether in respect of
+industrial capacity or in point of man-power, if these resources were
+turned to this object with the same singleness of purpose and the same
+drastic procedure that marks the course of a national establishment
+guided by no considerations short of imperial dominion. The doubt
+presents itself rather as an apprehension that the cost would be
+extravagantly high, in all respects in which cost can be counted; which
+is presently seconded, on very slight reflection and review of
+experience, by recognition of the fact that a democracy is, in point of
+fact, not to be persuaded to stand under arms interminably in mere
+readiness for a contingency, however distasteful the contingency may be.
+
+In point of fact, a democratic commonwealth is moved by other interests
+in the main, and the common defense is a secondary consideration, not a
+primary interest,--unless in the exceptional case of a commonwealth so
+placed under the immediate threat of invasion as to have the common
+defense forced into the place of paramount consequence in its workday
+habits of thought. The American republic is not so placed. Anyone may
+satisfy himself by reasonable second thought that the people of this
+nation are not to be counted on to do their utmost in time of peace to
+prepare for war. They may be persuaded to do much more than has been
+their habit, and adventurous politicians may commit them to much more
+than the people at large would wish to undertake, but when all is done
+that can be counted on for a permanency, up to the limit of popular
+tolerance, it would be a bold guess that should place the result at more
+than one-half of what the country is capable of. Particularly would the
+people's patience balk at the extensive military training requisite to
+put the country in an adequate position of defense against a sudden and
+well-prepared offensive. It is otherwise with a dynastic State, to the
+directorate of which all other interests are necessarily secondary,
+subsidiary, and mainly to be considered only in so far as they are
+contributory to the nation's readiness for warlike enterprise.
+
+America at the same time is placed in an extra-hazardous position,
+between the two seas beyond which to either side lie the two Imperial
+Powers whose place in the modern economy of nations it is to disturb the
+peace in an insatiable quest of dominion. This position is no longer
+defensible in isolation, under the later state of the industrial arts,
+and the policy of isolation that has guided the national policy hitherto
+is therefore falling out of date. The question is as to the manner of
+its renunciation, rather than the fact of it. It may end in a defensive
+copartnership with other nations who are placed on the defensive by the
+same threatening situation, or it may end in a bootless struggle for
+independence, but the choice scarcely extends beyond this alternative.
+It will be said, of course, that America is competent to take care of
+itself and its Monroe doctrine in the future as in the past. But that
+view, spoken for cogently by thoughtful men and by politicians looking
+for party advantage, overlooks the fact that the modern technology has
+definitively thrown the advantage to the offensive, and that intervening
+seas can no longer be counted on as a decisive obstacle. On this latter
+head, what was reasonably true fifteen years ago is doubtful today, and
+it is in all reasonable expectation invalid for the situation fifteen
+years hence.
+
+The other peoples that are of a neutral temper may need the help of
+America sorely enough in their endeavours to keep the peace, but
+America's need of cooperation is sorer still, for the Republic is coming
+into a more precarious place than any of the others. America is also, at
+least potentially, the most democratic of the greater Powers, and is
+handicapped with all the disabilities of a democratic commonwealth in
+the face of war. America is also for the present, and perhaps for the
+calculable future, the most powerful of these greater Powers, in point
+of conceivably available resources, though not in actually available
+fighting-power; and the entrance of America unreservedly into a neutral
+league would consequently be decisive both of the purposes of the league
+and of its efficiency for the purpose; particularly if the
+neutralisation of interests among the members of the league were carried
+so far as to make withdrawal and independent action disadvantageous.
+
+On the establishment of such a neutral league, with such neutralisation
+of national interests as would assure concerted action in time of
+stress, the need of armament on the part of the American republic would
+disappear, at least to the extent that no increase of armed force would
+be advisable. The strength of the Republic lies in its large and varied
+resources and the unequalled industrial capacity of its population,--a
+capacity which is today seriously hampered by untoward business
+interests and business methods sheltered under national discrimination,
+but which would come more nearly to its own so soon as these national
+discriminations were corrected or abrogated in the neutralisation of
+national pretensions. The neutrally-minded countries of Europe have been
+constrained to learn the art of modern war, as also to equip themselves
+with the necessary appliances, sufficient to meet all requirements for
+keeping the peace through such a period as can or need be taken into
+account,--provided the peace that is to come on the conclusion of the
+present war shall be placed on so "conclusive" a footing as will make it
+anything substantially more than a season of recuperation for that
+warlike Power about whose enterprise in dominion the whole question
+turns. Provided that suitably "substantial guarantees" of a reasonable
+quiescence on the part of this Imperial Power are had, there need be no
+increase of the American armament. Any increased armament would in that
+case amount to nothing better than an idle duplication of plant and
+personnel already on hand and sufficient to meet the requirements.
+
+To meet the contingencies had in view in its formation, such a league
+would have to be neutralised to the point that all pertinent national
+pretensions would fall into virtual abeyance, so that all the necessary
+resources at the disposal of the federated nations would automatically
+come under the control of the league's appointed authorities without
+loss of time, whenever the need might arise. That is to say, national
+interests and pretensions would have to give way to a collective control
+sufficient to insure prompt and concerted action. In the face of such a
+neutral league Imperial Japan alone would be unable to make a really
+serious diversion or to entertain much hope of following up its quest of
+dominion. The Japanese Imperial establishment might even be persuaded
+peaceably to let its unoffending neighbours live their own life
+according to their own light. It is, indeed, possibly the apprehension
+of some such contingency that has hurried the rapacity of the Island
+Empire into the headlong indecencies of the past year or two.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+ELIMINATION OF THE UNFIT
+
+
+It may seem early (January 1917) to offer a surmise as to what must be
+the manner of league into which the pacific nations are to enter and by
+which the peace will be kept, in case such a move is to be made. But the
+circumstances that are to urge such a line of action, and that will
+condition its carrying out in case it is entered on, have already come
+into bearing and should, on the whole, no longer be especially obscure
+to anyone who will let the facts of the case rather than his own
+predilections decide what he will believe. By and large, the pressure of
+these conditioning circumstances may be seen, and the line of least
+resistance under this pressure may be calculated, with due allowance of
+a margin of error owing to unknown contingencies of time and minor
+variables.
+
+Time is of the essence of the case. So that what would have been
+dismissed as idle vapour two years ago has already become subject of
+grave deliberation today, and may rise to paramount urgency that far
+hence. Time is needed to appreciate and get used to any innovation of
+appreciable gravity, particularly where the innovation depends in any
+degree on a change in public sentiment, as in this instance. The present
+outlook would seem to be that no excess of time is allowed in these
+premises; but it should also be noted that events are moving with
+unexampled celerity, and are impinging on the popular apprehension with
+unexampled force,--unexampled on such a scale. It is hoped that a
+recital of these circumstances that provoke to action along this line
+will not seem unwarrantably tedious, and that a tentative definition of
+the line of least resistance under pressure of these circumstances may
+not seem unwarrantably presumptuous.
+
+The major premise in the case is the felt need of security from
+aggression at the hands of Imperial Germany and its auxiliary Powers;
+seconded by an increasingly uneasy apprehension as to the prospective
+line of conduct on the part of Imperial Japan, bent on a similar quest
+of dominion. There is also the less articulate apprehension of what, if
+anything, may be expected from Imperial Russia; an obscure and scarcely
+definable factor, which comes into the calculation chiefly by way of
+reenforcing the urgency of the situation created by the dynastic
+ambitions of these other two Imperial States. Further, the pacific
+nations, the leading ones among them being the French and
+English-speaking peoples, are coming to recognise that no one among them
+can provide for its own security single-handed, even at the cost of
+their utmost endeavour in the way of what is latterly called
+"preparedness;" and they are at the same time unwilling to devote their
+force unreservedly to warlike preparation, having nothing to gain. The
+solution proposed is a league of the pacific nations, commonly spoken of
+at the present stage as a league to enforce peace, or less ambitiously
+as a league to enforce arbitration. The question being left somewhat at
+loose ends, whether the projected league is to include the two or three
+Imperial Powers whose pacific intentions are, euphemistically, open to
+doubt.
+
+Such is the outline of the project and its premises. An attempt to fill
+in this outline will, perhaps, conduce to an appreciation of what is
+sought and of what the conditioning circumstances will enforce in the
+course of its realisation. As touches the fear of aggression, it has
+already been indicated, perhaps with unnecessary iteration, that these
+two Imperial Powers are unable to relinquish the quest of dominion
+through warlike enterprise, because as dynastic States they have no
+other ulterior aim; as has abundantly appeared in the great volume of
+expository statements that have come out of the Fatherland the past few
+years, official, semi-official, inspired, and spontaneous. "Assurance of
+the nation's future" is not translatable into any other terms. The
+Imperial dynasty has no other ground to stand on, and can not give up
+the enterprise so long as it can muster force for any formidable
+diversion, to get anything in the way of dominion by seizure, threat or
+chicane.
+
+This is coming to be informally and loosely, but none the less
+definitively, realised by the pacific nations; and the realisation of it
+is gaining in clearness and assurance as time passes. And it is backed
+by the conviction that, in the nature of things, no engagement on the
+part of such a dynastic State has any slightest binding force, beyond
+the material constraint that would enforce it from the outside. So the
+demand has been diplomatically phrased as a demand for "substantial
+guarantees." Any gain in resources on the part of these Powers is to be
+counted as a gain in the ways and means of disturbing the peace, without
+reservation.
+
+The pacific nations include among them two large items, both of which
+are indispensable to the success of the project, the United States and
+the United Kingdom. The former brings in its train, virtually without
+exception or question, the other American republics, none of which can
+practicably go in or stay out except in company and collusion with the
+United States. The United Kingdom after the same fashion, and with
+scarcely less assurance, may be counted on to carry the British
+colonies. Evidently, without both of these groups the project would not
+even make a beginning. Beyond this is to be counted in as elements of
+strength, though scarcely indispensable, France, Belgium, the
+Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. The other west-European
+nations would in all probability be found in the league, although so far
+as regards its work and its fortunes their adhesion would scarcely be a
+matter of decisive consequence; they may therefore be left somewhat on
+one side in any consideration of the circumstances that would shape the
+league, its aims and its limitations. The Balkan states, in the wider
+acceptance, they that frequent the Sign of the Double Cross, are
+similarly negligible in respect of the organisation of such a league or
+its resources and the mutual concessions necessary to be made between
+its chief members. Russia is so doubtful a factor, particularly as
+regards its place and value in industry, culture and politics, in the
+near future, as to admit nothing much more than a doubt on what its
+relation to the situation will be. The evil intentions of the
+Imperial-bureaucratic establishment are probably no more to be
+questioned than the good intentions of the underlying peoples of Russia.
+China will have to be taken in, if for no other reason than the use to
+which the magnificent resources of that country would be turned by its
+Imperial neighbour in the absence of insurmountable interference from
+outside. But China will come in on any terms that include neutrality and
+security.
+
+The question then arises as to the Imperial Powers whose dynastic
+enterprise is primarily to be hedged against by such a league.
+Reflection will show that if the league is to effect any appreciable
+part of its purpose, these Powers will also be included in the league,
+or at least in its jurisdiction. A pacific league not including these
+Powers, or not extending its jurisdiction and surveillance to them and
+their conduct, would come to the same thing as a coalition of nations in
+two hostile groups, the one standing on the defensive against the
+warlike machinations of the other, and both groups bidding for the favor
+of those minor Powers whose traditions and current aspirations run to
+national (dynastic) aggrandizement by way of political intrigue. It
+would come to a more articulate and accentuated form of that balance of
+power that has latterly gone bankrupt in Europe, with the most corrupt
+and unreliable petty monarchies of eastern Europe vested with a casting
+vote; and it would also involve a system of competitive armaments of the
+same general character as what has also shown itself bankrupt. It would,
+in other words, mean a virtual return to the _status quo ante_, but with
+an overt recognition of its provisional character, and with the lines of
+division more sharply drawn. That is to say, it would amount to
+reinstating the situation which the projected league is intended to
+avert. It is evidently contained in the premises that the projected
+league must be all-inclusive, at least as regards its jurisdiction and
+surveillance. The argument will return to this point presently.
+
+The purpose of the projected league is peace and security, commonly
+spoken of under patriotic preconceptions as "national" peace and
+security. This will have to mean a competent enforcement of peace, on
+such a footing of overmastering force at the disposal of the associated
+pacific nations as to make security a matter of ordinary routine. It is
+true, the more genial spokesmen of the project are given to the view
+that what is to come of it all is a comity of neutral nations, amicably
+adjusting their own relations among themselves in a spirit of peace and
+good-will. But this view is over-sanguine, in that it overlooks the
+point that into this prospective comity of nations Imperial Germany (and
+Imperial Japan) fit like a drunken savage with a machine gun. It also
+overlooks the patent fatality that these two are bound to come into a
+coalition at the next turn, with whatever outside and subsidiary
+resources they can draw on; provided only that a reasonable opening for
+further enterprise presents itself. The league, in other terms, must be
+in a position to enforce peace by overmastering force, and to anticipate
+any move at cross purposes with the security of the pacific nations.
+
+This end can be reached by either one of two ways. If the dynastic
+States are left to their own devices, it will be incumbent on the
+associated nations to put in the field a standing force sufficient to
+prevent a recourse to arms; which means competitive armament and
+universal military rule. Or the dynastic States may be taken into
+partnership and placed under such surveillance and constraint as to
+practically disarm them; which would admit virtual disarmament of the
+federated nations. The former arrangement has nothing in its favour,
+except the possibility that no better or less irksome arrangement can be
+had under existing circumstances; that is to say that the pacific
+nations may not be able to bring these dynastic states to terms of
+disarmament under surveillance. They assuredly can not except by force;
+and this is the precise point on which the continued hostilities in
+Europe turn today. In diplomatic parable the German Imperial spokesmen
+say that they can accept (or as they prefer to phrase it, grant) no
+terms that do not fully safeguard the Future of the Fatherland; and in
+similarly diplomatic parable the spokesmen of the Entente insist that
+Prussian militarism must be permanently put out of commission; but it
+all means the same thing, viz. that the Imperial establishment is to be
+(or is not to be) disabled beyond the possibility of its entering on a
+similar warlike enterprise again, when it has had time for recuperation.
+The dynastic statesmen, and the lay subjects of the Imperial
+establishment, are strenuously set on securing a fair opportunity for
+recuperation and a wiser endeavour to achieve that dominion which the
+present adventure promises to defeat; while the Entente want no
+recurrence, and are persuaded that a recurrence can be avoided only on
+the footing of a present collapse of the Imperial power and a
+scrupulously enforced prostration of it henceforth.
+
+Without the definitive collapse of the Imperial power no pacific league
+of nations can come to anything much more than armistice. On the basis
+of such a collapse the league may as well administer its affairs
+economically by way of an all-around reduction of armaments, as by the
+costlier and more irksome way of "preparedness." But a sensible
+reduction of armaments on the part of the neutral nations implies
+disarmament of the dynastic States. Which would involve a neutral
+surveillance of the affairs of these dynastic States in such detail and
+with such exercise of authority as would reduce their governments to the
+effective status of local administrative officials. Out of which, in
+turn, would arise complications that would lead to necessary
+readjustments all along the line. It would involve the virtual, if not
+also the formal, abolition of the monarchy, since the monarchy has no
+other use than that of international war and intrigue; or at least it
+would involve the virtual abrogation of its powers, reducing it to the
+same status of _faineantise_ as now characterises the British crown.
+Evidently this means a serious intermeddling in the domestic concerns
+and arrangements of the Fatherland, such as is not admissible under the
+democratic principle that any people must be left free to follow their
+own inclinations and devices in their own concerns; at the same time
+that this degree of interference is imperative if the peace is to be
+kept on any other footing than that of eternal vigilance and superior
+armed force, with a people whose own inclinations and devices are of the
+kind now grown familiar in the German case,--all of which also applies,
+with accentuation, in the case of Imperial Japan.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some such policy of neutral surveillance in the affairs of these peoples
+whose pacific temper is under suspicion, is necessarily involved in a
+plan to enforce peace by concert of the pacific nations, and it will
+necessarily carry implications and farther issues, touching not only
+these supposedly recalcitrant peoples, but also as regards the pacific
+nations themselves. Assuming always that the prime purpose and
+consistent aim of the projected league is the peace and security of
+those pacific nations on whose initiative it is to be achieved, then it
+should be reasonable to assume that the course of procedure in its
+organisation, administration and further adaptations and adjustments
+must follow the logic of necessities leading to that end. He who wills
+the end must make up his account with the means.
+
+The end in this case is peace and security; which means, for practical
+purposes, peace and good-will. Ill-will is not a secure foundation of
+peace. Even the military strategists of the Imperial establishment
+recommend a programme of "frightfulness" only as a convenient military
+expedient, essentially a provisional basis of tranquility. In the long
+run and as a permanent peace measure it is doubtless not to the point.
+Security is finally to be had among or between modern peoples only on
+the ground of a common understanding and an impartially common basis of
+equity, or something approaching that basis as nearly as circumstances
+will permit. Which means that in so far as the projected peace-compact
+is to take effect in any enduring way, and leave the federated nations
+some degree of freedom from persistent apprehension and animosity, as
+well as from habitual insecurity of life and limb, the league must not
+only be all-inclusive, but it must be inclusively uniform in all its
+requirements and regulations.
+
+The peoples of the quondam Imperial nations must come into the league on
+a footing of formal equality with the rest. This they can not do without
+the virtual abdication of their dynastic governmental establishments and
+a consequent shift to a democratic form of organisation, and a formal
+abrogation of class privileges and prerogatives.
+
+However, a virtual abdication or cancelment of the dynastic rule, such
+as to bring it formally into the same class with the British crown,
+would scarcely meet the requirements in the case of the German Imperial
+establishment; still more patently not in the case of Imperial Japan.
+If, following the outlines of the decayed British crown, one or the
+other of these Imperial establishments were by formal enactment reduced
+to a state of nominal desuetude, the effect would be very appreciably
+different from what happens in the British community, where the crown
+has lost its powers by failure of the requisite subordination on the
+part of the people, and not by a formal abdication of rights. In the
+German case, and even more in the Japanese case, the strength of the
+Imperial establishment lies in the unimpaired loyalty of the populace;
+which would remain nearly intact at the outset, and would thin out only
+by insensible degrees in the sequel; so that if only the Imperial
+establishment were left formally standing it would command the fealty of
+the common run in spite of any formal abrogation of its powers, and the
+course of things would, in effect, run as before the break. In effect,
+to bring about a shift to a democratic basis the dynastic slate would
+have to be wiped very clean indeed. And this shift would be
+indispensable to the successful conduct of such a pacific league of
+nations, since any other than an effectually democratic national
+establishment is to be counted on unfailingly to intrigue for dynastic
+aggrandizement, through good report and evil.
+
+In a case like that of Imperial Germany, with its federated States and
+subsidiaries, where royalty and nobility still are potent preconceptions
+investing the popular imagination, and where loyal abnegation in the
+presence of authority still is the chief and staple virtue of the common
+man,--in all such cases virtual abdication of the dynastic initiative
+under constitutional forms can be had only by a formal and scrupulously
+complete abrogation of all those legal and customary arrangements on
+which this irresponsible exercise of authority has rested and through
+which it has taken effect. Neutralisation in these instances will mean
+reduction to an unqualified democratic footing; which will, at least at
+the outset, not be acceptable to the common people, and will be wholly
+intolerable to the ruling classes. Such a regime, therefore, while it is
+indispensable as a working basis for a neutral league of peace, would
+from the outset have to be enforced against the most desperate
+resistance of the ruling classes, headed by the dynastic statesmen and
+warlords, and backed by the stubborn loyalty of the subject populace. It
+would have to mean the end of things for the ruling classes and the most
+distasteful submission to an alien scheme of use and wont for the
+populace. And yet it is also an indispensable element in any scheme of
+pacification that aims at permanent peace and security. In time, it may
+well be believed, the people of the Fatherland might learn to do well
+enough without the gratuitous domination of their ruling classes, but at
+the outset it would be a heartfelt privation.
+
+It follows that a league to enforce peace would have to begin its regime
+with enforcing peace on terms of the unconditional surrender of the
+formidable warlike nations; which could be accomplished only by the
+absolute and irretrievable defeat of these Powers as they now stand. The
+question will, no doubt, present itself, Is the end worth the cost? That
+question can, of course, not be answered in absolute terms, inasmuch as
+it resolves itself into a question of taste and prepossession. An answer
+to it would also not be greatly to the purpose here, since it would have
+no particular bearing on the course of action likely to be pursued by
+these pacific nations in their quest of a settled peace. It is more to
+the point to ask what is likely to be the practical decision of these
+peoples on that head when the question finally presents itself in a
+concrete form.
+
+Again it is necessary to call to mind that any momentous innovation
+which rests on popular sentiment will take time; that consequently
+anything like a plebiscite on the question today would scarcely give a
+safe index of what the decision is likely to be when presently put to
+the test; and that as things go just now, swiftly and urgent, any
+time-allowance counts at something more than its ordinary workday
+coefficient. What can apparently be said with some degree of confidence
+is that just now, during these two years past, sentiment has been moving
+in the direction indicated, and that any growing inclination of the kind
+is being strongly reenforced by a growing realisation that nothing but
+heroic remedies will avail at this juncture. If it comes to be currently
+recognised that a settled peace can be had only at the cost of
+eradicating privilege and royalty from the warlike nations, it would
+seem reasonable to expect, from their present state of mind, that the
+pacific nations will scarcely hesitate to apply that remedy,--provided
+always that the fortunes of war fall out as that measure would require,
+and provided also that the conflict lasts long enough and severe enough
+to let them make up their mind to anything so drastic.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is a certain side issue bearing on this question of the ulterior
+probabilities of popular sentiment and national policy as to what is to
+be done with the warlike nations in the event that the allied nations
+who fight for neutrality have the disposal of such matters. This side
+issue may seem remote, and it may not unlikely be overlooked among the
+mass of graver and more tangible considerations. It was remarked above
+that the United Kingdom is one of the two chief pillars of the projected
+house of peace; and it may be added without serious fear of
+contradiction or annoyance that the United Kingdom is also the one among
+these pacific nations that comes nearest being capable, in the event of
+such an emergency, to take care of its own case single-handed. For
+better or worse, British adhesion to the project is indispensable, and
+the British are in a position virtually to name their own terms of
+adhesion. The British commonwealth--a very inclusive phrase in this
+connection--must form the core of the pacific league, if any, and
+British sentiment will have a very great place in the terms of its
+formation and in the terms which it will be inclined to offer the
+Imperial coalition at the settlement.
+
+Now, it happens that the British community entered on this war as a
+democratic monarchy ruled and officered by a body of gentlemen--doubtless
+the most correct and admirable muster of gentlemen, of anything approaching
+its volume, that the modern world can show. But the war has turned out not
+to be a gentlemen's war. It has on the contrary been a war of technological
+exploits, reenforced with all the beastly devices of the heathen. It is a
+war in which all the specific traits of the well-bred and gently-minded man
+are a handicap; in which veracity, gallantry, humanity, liberality are
+conducive to nothing but defeat and humiliation. The death-rate among the
+British gentlemen-officers in the early months, and for many months, ran
+extravagantly high, for the most part because they were gallant
+gentlemen as well as officers imbued with the good, old class spirit of
+_noblesse oblige_, that has made half the tradition and more than half
+the working theory of the British officer in the field,--good, but old,
+hopelessly out of date. That generation of officers died, for the most
+part; being unfit to survive or to serve the purpose under these modern
+conditions of warfare, to which their enemy on the other hand had
+adapted themselves with easy facility from beforehand. The gentlemanly
+qualifications, and the material apparatus of gentility, and, it will
+perhaps have to be admitted, the gentlemen, have fallen into the
+background, or perhaps rather have measurably fallen into abeyance,
+among the officers of the line. There may be more doubt as to the state
+of things in respect of the gentility of the staff, but the best that
+can confidently be said is that it is a point in doubt.
+
+It is hoped that one may say without offense that in the course of time
+the personnel has apparently worked down to the level of vulgarity
+defined by the ways and means of this modern warfare; which means the
+level on which runs a familiar acquaintance with large and complex
+mechanical apparatus, railway and highway transport and power,
+reenforced concrete, excavations and mud, more particularly mud,
+concealment and ambush, and unlimited deceit and ferocity. It is not
+precisely that persons of pedigree and gentle breeding have ceased to
+enter or seek entrance to employment as officers, still less that
+measures have been taken to restrain their doing so or to eliminate from
+the service those who have come into it--though there may present itself
+a doubt on this point as touches the more responsible discretionary
+positions--but only that the stock of suitable gentlemen, uncommonly
+large as it is, has been overdrawn; that those who have latterly gone
+into service, or stayed in, have perforce divested themselves of their
+gentility in some appreciable measure, particularly as regards class
+distinction, and have fallen on their feet in the more commonplace role
+of common men.
+
+Serviceability in this modern warfare is conditioned on much the same
+traits of temperament and training that make for usefulness in the
+modern industrial processes, where large-scale coordinations of movement
+and an effective familiarity with precise and far-reaching mechanical
+processes is an indispensable requirement,--indispensable in the same
+measure as the efficient conduct of this modern machine industry is
+indispensable. But the British gentleman, in so far as he runs true to
+type, is of no use to modern industry; quite the contrary, in fact.
+Still, the British gentleman is, in point of heredity, the same thing
+over again as the British common man; so that, barring the misdirected
+training that makes him a gentleman, and which can largely be undone
+under urgent need and pressure, he can be made serviceable for such uses
+as the modern warfare requires. Meantime the very large demand for
+officers, and the insatiable demand for capable officers, has brought
+the experienced and capable common man into the case and is in a fair
+way to discredit gentility as a necessary qualification of field
+officers.
+
+But the same process of discredit and elimination is also extending to
+the responsible officials who have the administration of things in hand.
+Indeed, the course of vulgarisation among the responsible officials has
+now been under way for some appreciable time and with very perceptible
+effect, and the rate of displacement appears to be gathering velocity
+with every month that passes. Here, as in the field operations, it also
+appears that gentlemanly methods, standards, preconceptions, and
+knowledge of men and things, is no longer to the purpose. Here, too, it
+is increasingly evident that this is not a gentlemen's war. And the
+traditional qualifications that have sufficed in the past, at least to
+the extent of enabling the British management to "muddle through," as
+they are proudly in the habit of saying,--these qualifications are of
+slight account in this technological conjuncture of the nation's
+fortunes. It would perhaps be an under-statement to say that these
+gentlemanly qualifications are no longer of any account, for the purpose
+immediately in hand, and it would doubtless not do to say that they are
+wholly and unreservedly disserviceable as things run today; but captious
+critics might find at least a precarious footing of argument on such a
+proposition.
+
+Through the course of the nineteenth century the British government had
+progressively been taking on the complexion of a "gentlemen's
+agreement;" a government by gentlemen, for gentlemen, and of gentlemen,
+too, beyond what could well be alleged in any other known instance,
+though never wholly so. No government could be a government of gentlemen
+exclusively, since there is no pecuniary profit in gentlemen as such,
+and therefore no object in governing them; more particularly could there
+never be any incentive in it for gentlemen, whose livelihood is, in the
+nature of the case, drawn from some one else. A gentlemen's government
+can escape death by inanition only in so far as it serves the material
+interest of its class, as contrasted with the underlying population from
+which the class draws its livelihood. This British arrangement of a
+government by prudent and humane gentlemen with a view to the
+conservation of that state of things that best conduced to the material
+well-being of their own class, has on the whole had the loyal support of
+the underlying populace, with an occasional floundering protest. But
+the protest has never taken the shape of an expressed distrust of
+gentlemen, considered as the staple ways and means of government; nor
+has the direction of affairs ever descended into the hands of any other
+or lower class or condition of men.
+
+On the whole, this British arrangement for the control of national
+affairs by a body of interested gentlemen-investors has been, and
+perhaps still is, just as well at home in the affectionate
+preconceptions of the nineteenth-century British as the corresponding
+German usufruct by self-appointed swaggering aristocrats has been among
+the underlying German population, or as the American arrangement of
+national control by business men for business ends. The British and the
+American arrangements run very much to the same substantial effect, of
+course, inasmuch as the British gentlemen represent, as a class, the
+filial generations of a business community, and their aims and standards
+of conduct continue to be such as are enforced by the pecuniary
+interests on which their gentility is conditioned. They continue to draw
+the ways and means of a worthy life from businesslike arrangements of a
+"vested" character, made and provided with a view to their nourishment
+and repose. Their resulting usufruct of the community's productive
+efforts rests on a vested interest of a pecuniary sort, sanctioned by
+the sacred rights of property; very much as the analogous German
+dynastic and aristocratic usufruct rests on personal prerogative,
+sanctioned by the sacred rights of authentic prescription, without
+afterthought. The two, it will be noted are very much alike, in effect,
+"under the skin." The great distinguishing mark being that the German
+usufructuary gentlemen are, in theory at least, gentlemen-adventurers of
+prowess and proud words, whose place in the world's economy it is to
+glorify God and disturb the peace; whereas their British analogues are
+gentlemen-investors, of blameless propriety, whose place it is more
+simply to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
+
+All this arrangement of a usufruct with a view to the reputable
+consumption of the community's superfluous production has had the
+cordial support of British sentiment, perhaps fully as cordial as the
+German popular subservience in the corresponding German scheme; both
+being well embedded in the preconceptions of the common man. But the war
+has put it all to a rude test, and has called on the British gentlemen's
+executive committee to take over duties for which it was not designed.
+The exigencies of this war of technological exploits have been almost
+wholly, and very insistently, of a character not contemplated in the
+constitution of such an executive committee of gentlemen-investors
+designed to safeguard class interests and promote their pecuniary class
+advantage by a blamelessly inconspicuous and indirect management of
+national affairs. The methods are of the class known colloquially among
+the vulgar-spoken American politicians as "pussyfooting" and
+"log-rolling"; but always with such circumstance of magnitude,
+authenticity and well-bred deference to precedent, as to give the
+resulting routine of subreption, trover and conversion, an air not only
+of benevolent consideration but of austere morality.
+
+But the most austere courtesy and the most authentically dispassionate
+division of benefits will not meet the underbred exigencies of a war
+conducted on the mechanistic lines of the modern state of the industrial
+arts. So the blameless, and for the purpose imbecile, executive
+committee of gentlemen-investors has been insensibly losing the
+confidence and the countenance of the common man; who, when all is said,
+will always have to do what is to be done. The order of gentlemanly
+parleying and brokery has, therefore, with many apprehensions of
+calamity, been reluctantly and tardily giving ground before something
+that is of a visibly underbred order. Increasingly underbred, and
+thereby insensibly approaching the character of this war situation, but
+accepted with visible reluctance and apprehension both by the ruling
+class and by the underlying population. The urgent necessity of going to
+such a basis, and of working out the matter in hand by an unblushing
+recourse to that matter-of-fact logic of mechanical efficiency, which
+alone can touch the difficulties of the case, but which has no respect
+of persons,--this necessity has been present from the outset and has
+been vaguely apprehended for long past, but it is only tardily and after
+the chastening of heavy penalties on this gentlemanly imbecility that a
+substantial move in that direction has been made. It has required much
+British resolution to overcome the night-fear of going out into the
+unhallowed ground of matter-of-fact, where the farthest earlier
+excursions of the governmental agencies had taken them no farther than
+such financial transactions as are incident to the accomplishment of
+anything whatever in a commercial nation. And then, too, there is a
+pecuniary interest in being interested in financial transactions.
+
+This shifting of discretionary control out of the hands of the gentlemen
+into those of the underbred common run, who know how to do what is
+necessary to be done in the face of underbred exigencies, may
+conceivably go far when it has once been started, and it may go forward
+at an accelerated rate if the pressure of necessity lasts long enough.
+If time be given for habituation to this manner of directorate in
+national affairs, so that the common man comes to realise how it is
+feasible to get along without gentlemen-investors holding the
+discretion, the outcome may conceivably be very grave. It is a point in
+doubt, but it is conceivable that in such a case the gentlemanly
+executive committee administering affairs in the light of the
+gentlemanly pecuniary interest, will not be fully reinstated in the
+discretionary control of the United Kingdom for an appreciable number of
+years after the return of peace. Possibly, even, the regime may be
+permanently deranged, and there is even a shadowy doubt possible to be
+entertained as to whether the vested pecuniary rights, on which the
+class of gentlemen rests, may not suffer some derangement, in case the
+control should pass into the hands of the underbred and unpropertied for
+so long a season as to let the common man get used to thinking that the
+vested interests and the sacred rights of gentility are so much ado
+about nothing.
+
+Such an outcome would be extreme, but as a remote contingency it is to
+be taken into account. The privileged classes of the United Kingdom
+should by this time be able to see the danger there may be for them and
+their vested interests, pecuniary and moral, in an excessive
+prolongation of the war; in such postponement of peace as would afford
+time for a popular realisation of their incompetence and
+disserviceability as touches the nation's material well-being under
+modern conditions. To let the nation's war experience work to such an
+outcome, the season of war would have to be prolonged beyond what either
+the hopes or the fears of the community have yet contemplated; but the
+point is after all worth noting, as being within the premises of the
+case, that there is herein a remote contingency of losing, at least for
+a time, that unformulated clause in the British constitution which has
+hitherto restricted the holding of responsible office to men of pedigree
+and of gentle breeding, or at least of very grave pecuniary weight; so
+grave as to make the incumbents virtual gentlemen, with a virtual
+pedigree, and with a virtual gentleman's accentuated sense of class
+interest. Should such an eventuality overtake British popular sentiment
+and belief there is also the remote contingency that the rights of
+ownership and investment would lose a degree of sanctity.
+
+It seems necessary to note a further, and in a sense more improbable,
+line of disintegration among modern fixed ideas. Among the best
+entrenched illusions of modern economic preconceptions, and in economic
+as well as legal theory, has been the indispensability of funds, and the
+hard and fast limitation of industrial operations by the supply or
+with-holding of funds. The war experience has hitherto gone tentatively
+to show that funds and financial transactions, of credit, bargain, sale
+and solvency, may be dispensed with under pressure of necessity; and
+apparently without seriously hindering that run of mechanical fact, on
+which interest in the present case necessarily centers, and which must
+be counted on to give the outcome. Latterly the case is clearing up a
+little further, on further experience and under further pressure of
+technological exigencies, to the effect that financial arrangements are
+indispensable in this connection only because and in so far as it has
+been arranged to consider them indispensable; as in international trade.
+They are an indispensable means of intermediation only in so far as
+pecuniary interests are to be furthered or safeguarded in the
+intermediation. When, as has happened with the belligerents in the
+present instance, the national establishment becomes substantially
+insolvent, it is beginning to appear that its affairs can be taken care
+of with less difficulty and with better effect without the use of
+financial expedients. Of course, it takes time to get used to doing
+things by the more direct method and without the accustomed
+circumlocution of accountancy, or the accustomed allowance for profits
+to go to interested parties who, under the financial regime, hold a
+power of discretionary permission in all matters that touch the use of
+the industrial arts. Under these urgent material exigencies, investment
+comes to have much of the appearance of a gratuitous drag and drain on
+the processes of industry.
+
+Here, again, is a sinister contingency; sinister, that is, for those
+vested rights of ownership by force of which the owners of "capital" are
+enabled to permit or withhold the use of the industrial arts by the
+community at large, on pain of privation in case the accustomed toll to
+the owners of capital is not paid. It is, of course, not intended to
+find fault with this arrangement; which has the sanction of "time
+immemorial" and of a settled persuasion that it lies at the root of all
+civilised life and intercourse. It is only that in case of extreme need
+this presumed indispensable expedient of industrial control has broken
+down, and that experience is proving it to be, in these premises, an
+item of borrowed trouble. Should experience continue to run on the same
+lines for an appreciable period and at a high tension, it is at least
+conceivable that the vested right of owners to employ unlimited sabotage
+in the quest of profits might fall so far into disrepute as to leave
+them under a qualified doubt on the return of "normal" conditions. The
+common man, in other words, who gathers nothing but privation and
+anxiety from the owners' discretionary sabotage, may conceivably stand
+to lose his preconception that the vested rights of ownership are the
+cornerstone of his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The considerations recited in this lengthy excursion on the war
+situation and its probable effects on popular habits of thought in the
+United Kingdom go to say that when peace comes to be negotiated, with
+the United Kingdom as the chief constituent and weightiest spokesman of
+the allied nations and of the league of pacific neutrals, the
+representatives of British aims and opinions are likely to speak in a
+different, chastened, and disillusioned fashion, as contrasted with what
+the British attitude was at the beginning of hostilities. The
+gentlemanly British animus of arrogant self-sufficiency will have been
+somewhat sobered, perhaps somewhat subdued. Concession to the claims and
+pretensions of the other pacific nations is likely to go farther than
+might once have been expected, particularly in the way of concession to
+any demand for greater international comity and less international
+discrimination; essentially concession looking to a reduction of
+national pretensions and an incipient neutralisation of national
+interests. Coupled with this will presumably be a less conciliatory
+attitude toward the members of the dynastic coalition against whom the
+war has been fought, owing to a more mature realisation of the
+impossibility of a lasting peace negotiated with a Power whose
+substantial core is a warlike and irresponsible dynastic establishment.
+The peace negotiations are likely to run on a lower level of diplomatic
+deference to constituted authorities, and with more of a view to the
+interests and sentiments of the underlying population, than was evident
+in the futile negotiations had at the outbreak of hostilities. The
+gentle art of diplomacy, that engages the talents of exalted personages
+and well-bred statesmen, has been somewhat discredited; and if it turns
+out that the vulgarisation of the directorate in the United Kingdom and
+its associated allies and neutrals will have time to go on to something
+like dominance and authenticity, then the deference which the spokesmen
+of these nations are likely to show for the prescriptive rights of
+dynasty, nobility, bureaucracy, or even of pecuniary aristocracy, in the
+countries that make up the party of the second part, may be expected to
+have shrunk appreciably, conceivably even to such precarious dimensions
+as to involve the virtual neglect or possible downright abrogation of
+them, in sum and substance.
+
+Indeed, the chances of a successful pacific league of neutrals to come
+out of the current situation appear to be largely bound up with the
+degree of vulgarisation due to overtake the several directorates of the
+belligerent nations as well as the popular habits of thought in these
+and in the neutral countries, during the further course of the war. It
+is too broad a generalisation, perhaps, to say that the longer the war
+lasts the better are the chances of such a neutral temper in the
+interested nations as will make a pacific league practicable, but the
+contrary would appear a much less defensible proposition. It is, of
+course, the common man that has the least interest in warlike
+enterprise, if any, and it is at the same time the common man that bears
+the burden of such enterprise and has also the most immediate interest
+in keeping the peace. If, slowly and pervasively, in the course of hard
+experience, he learns to distrust the conduct of affairs by his betters,
+and learns at the same move to trust to his own class to do what is
+necessary and to leave undone what is not, his deference to his betters
+is likely to suffer a decline, such as should show itself in a somewhat
+unguarded recourse to democratic ways and means.
+
+In short, there is in this progressive vulgarisation of effectual use
+and wont and of sentiment, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, some
+slight ground for the hope, or the apprehension, that no peace will be
+made with the dynastic Powers of the second part until they cease to be
+dynastic Powers and take on the semblance of democratic commonwealths,
+with dynasties, royalties and privileged classes thrown in the discard.
+
+This would probably mean some prolongation of hostilities, until the
+dynasties and privileged classes had completely exhausted their
+available resources; and, by the same token, until the privileged
+classes in the more modern nations among the belligerents had also been
+displaced from direction and discretion by those underbred classes on
+whom it is incumbent to do what is to be done; or until a juncture were
+reached that comes passably near to such a situation. On the contingency
+of such a course of events and some such outcome appears also to hang
+the chance of a workable pacific league. Without further experience of
+the futility of upper-class and pecuniary control, to discredit
+precedent and constituted authority, it is scarcely conceivable, e.g.,
+that the victorious allies would go the length of coercively discarding
+the German Imperial dynasty and the kept classes that with it constitute
+the Imperial State, and of replacing it with a democratic organisation
+of the people in the shape of a modern commonwealth; and without a
+change of that nature, affecting that nation and such of its allies as
+would remain on the map, no league of pacific neutrals would be able to
+manage its affairs, even for a time, except on a war-footing that would
+involve a competitive armament against future dynastic enterprises from
+the same quarter. Which comes to saying that a lasting peace is possible
+on no other terms than the disestablishment of the Imperial dynasty and
+the abrogation of all feudalistic remnants of privilege in the
+Fatherland and its allies, together with the reduction of those
+countries to the status of commonwealths made up of ungraded men.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is easy to speculate on what the conditions precedent to such a
+pacific league of neutrals must of necessity be; but it is not therefore
+less difficult to make a shrewd guess as to the chances of these
+conditions being met. Of these conditions precedent, the chief and
+foremost, without which any other favorable circumstances are
+comparatively idle, is a considerable degree of neutralisation,
+extending to virtually all national interests and pretensions, but more
+particularly to all material and commercial interests of the federated
+peoples; and, indispensably and especially, such neutralisation would
+have to extend to the nations from whom aggression is now apprehended,
+as, e.g., the German people. But such neutralisation could not
+conceivably reach the Fatherland unless that nation were made over in
+the image of democracy, since the Imperial State is, by force of the
+terms, a warlike and unneutral power. This would seem to be the
+ostensibly concealed meaning of the allied governments in proclaiming
+that their aim is to break German militarism without doing harm to the
+German people.
+
+As touches the neutralisation of the democratically rehabilitated
+Fatherland, or in default of that, as touches the peace terms to be
+offered the Imperial government, the prime article among the
+stipulations would seem to be abolition of all trade discrimination
+against Germany or by Germany against any other nationality. Such
+stipulation would, of course, cover all manner of trade
+discrimination,--e.g., import, export and excise tariff, harbor and
+registry dues, subsidy, patent right, copyright, trade mark, tax
+exemption whether partial or exclusive, investment preferences at home
+and abroad,--in short it would have to establish a thoroughgoing
+neutralisation of trade relations in the widest acceptation of the term,
+and to apply in perpetuity. The like applies, of course, to all that
+fringe of subsidiary and outlying peoples on whom Imperial Germany
+relies for much of its resources in any warlike enterprise. Such a move
+also disposes of the colonial question in a parenthesis, so far as
+regards any special bond of affiliation between the Empire, or the
+Fatherland, and any colonial possessions that are now thought desirable
+to be claimed. Under neutralisation, colonies would cease to be
+"colonial possessions," being necessarily included under the general
+abrogation of commercial discriminations, and also necessarily exempt
+from special taxation or specially favorable tax rates.
+
+Colonies there still would be, though it is not easy to imagine what
+would be the meaning of a "German Colony" in such a case. Colonies would
+be free communities, after the fashion of New Zealand or Australia, but
+with the further sterilisation of the bond between colony and mother
+country involved in the abolition of all appointive offices and all
+responsibility to the crown or the imperial government. Now, there are
+no German colonies in this simpler British sense of the term, which
+implies nothing more than community of blood, institutions and language,
+together with that sense of solidarity between the colony and the mother
+country which this community of pedigree and institutions will
+necessarily bring; but while there are today no German colonies, in the
+sense of the term so given, there is no reason to presume that no such
+German colonies would come into bearing under the conditions of this
+prospective regime of neutrality installed by such a pacific league,
+when backed by the league's guarantee that no colony from the Fatherland
+will be exposed to the eventual risk of coming under the discretionary
+tutelage of the German Imperial establishment and so falling into a
+relation of step-childhood to the Imperial dynasty.
+
+As is well known, and as has by way of superfluous commonplace been set
+forth by a sometime Colonial Secretary of the Empire, the decisive
+reason for there being no German colonies in existence is the
+consistently impossible colonial policy of the German government,
+looking to the usufruct of the colonies by the government, and the fear
+of further arbitrary control and nepotic discrimination at the pleasure
+of the self-seeking dynastic establishment. It is only under Imperial
+rule that no German colony, in this modern sense of the term, is
+possible; and only because Imperial rule does not admit of a free
+community being formed by colonists from the Fatherland; or of an
+ostensibly free community of that kind ever feeling secure from
+unsolicited interference with its affairs.
+
+The nearest approach to a German Colony, as contrasted with a "Colonial
+Possession," hitherto have been the very considerable, number of
+escaped German subjects who have settled in English-speaking or
+Latin-speaking countries, particularly in North and South America. And
+considering that the chief common trait among them is their successful
+evasion of the Imperial government's heavy hand, they show an admirable
+filial piety toward the Imperial establishment; though troubled with no
+slightest regret at having escaped from the Imperial surveillance and no
+slightest inclination to return to the shelter of the Imperial tutelage.
+A colloquialism--"hyphenate"--has latterly grown up to meet the need of
+a term to designate these evasive and yet patriotic colonists. It is
+scarcely misleading to say that the German-American hyphenate, e.g., in
+so far as he runs true to form, is still a German subject with his
+heart, but he is an American citizen with his head. All of which goes to
+argue that if the Fatherland were to fall into such a state of
+democratic tolerance that no recidivist need carry a defensive hyphen to
+shield him from the importunate attentions of the Imperial government,
+German colonies would also come into bearing; although, it is true, they
+would have no value to the German government.
+
+In the Imperial colonial policy colonies are conceived to stand to their
+Imperial guardian or master in a relation between that of a step-child
+and that of an indentured servant; to be dealt with summarily and at
+discretion and to be made use of without scruple. The like attitude
+toward colonies was once familiar matter-of-course with the British and
+Spanish statesmen. The British found the plan unprofitable, and also
+unworkable, and have given it up. The Spanish, having no political
+outlook but the dynastic one, could of course not see their way to
+relinquish the only purpose of their colonial enterprise, except in
+relinquishing their colonial possessions. The German (Imperial) colonial
+policy is and will be necessarily after the Spanish pattern, and
+necessarily, too, with the Spanish results.
+
+Under the projected neutral scheme there would be no colonial policy,
+and of course, no inducement to the acquisition of colonies, since
+there would be no profit to be derived, or to be fancied, in the case.
+But while no country, as a commonwealth, has any material interest in
+the acquisition or maintenance of colonies, it is otherwise as regards
+the dynastic interests of an Imperial government; and it is also
+otherwise, at least in the belief of the interested parties, as regards
+special businessmen or business concerns who are in a position to gain
+something by help of national discrimination in their favor. As regards
+the pecuniary interests of favored businessmen or business concerns, and
+of investors favored by national discrimination in colonial relations,
+the case falls under the general caption of trade discrimination, and
+does not differ at all materially from such expedients as a protective
+tariff, a ship subsidy, or a bounty on exports. But as regards the
+warlike, that is to say dynastic, interest of an Imperial government the
+case stands somewhat different.
+
+Colonial Possessions in such a case yield no material benefit to the
+country at large, but their possession is a serviceable plea for warlike
+preparations with which to retain possession of the colonies in the face
+of eventualities, and it is also a serviceable means of stirring the
+national pride and keeping alive a suitable spirit of patriotic
+animosity. The material service actually to be derived from such
+possessions in the event of war is a point in doubt, with the
+probabilities apparently running against their being of any eventual net
+use. But there need be no question that such possessions, under the hand
+of any national establishment infected with imperial ambitions, are a
+fruitful source of diplomatic complications, excuses for armament,
+international grievances, and eventual aggression. A pacific league of
+neutrals can evidently not tolerate the retention of colonial
+possessions by any dynastic State that may be drawn into the league or
+under its jurisdiction, as, e.g., the German Empire in case it should be
+left on an Imperial footing. Whereas, in case the German peoples are
+thrown back on a democratic status, as neutralised commonwealths without
+a crown or a military establishment, the question of their colonial
+possessions evidently falls vacant.
+
+As to the neutralisation of trade relations apart from the question of
+colonies, and as bears on the case of Germany under the projected
+jurisdiction of a pacific league of neutrals, the considerations to be
+taken account of are of much the same nature. As it would have to take
+effect, e.g., in the abolition of commercial and industrial
+discriminations between Germany and the pacific nations, such
+neutralisation would doubtless confer a lasting material benefit on the
+German people at large; and it is not easy to detect any loss or
+detriment to be derived from such a move so long as peace prevails.
+Protective, that is to say discriminating, export, import, or excise
+duties, harbor and registry dues, subsidies, tax exemptions and trade
+preferences, and all the like devices of interference with trade and
+industry, are unavoidably a hindrance to the material interests of any
+people on whom they are imposed or who impose these disabilities on
+themselves. So that exemption from these things by a comprehensive
+neutralisation of trade relations would immediately benefit all the
+nations concerned, in respect of their material well-being in times of
+peace. There is no exception and no abatement to be taken account of
+under this general statement, as is well known to all men who are
+conversant with these matters.
+
+But it is otherwise as regards the dynastic interest in the case, and as
+regards any national interest in warlike enterprise. It is doubtless
+true that all restraint of trade between nations, and between classes or
+localities within the national frontiers, unavoidably acts to weaken and
+impoverish the people on whose economic activities this restraint is
+laid; and to the extent to which this effect is had it will also be true
+that the country which so is hindered in its work will have a less
+aggregate of resources to place at the disposal of its enterprising
+statesmen for imperialist ends. But these restraints may yet be useful
+for dynastic, that is to say warlike, ends by making the country more
+nearly a "self-contained economic whole." A country becomes a
+"self-contained economic whole" by mutilation, in cutting itself off
+from the industrial system in which industrially it belongs, but in
+which it is unwilling nationally to hold its place. National frontiers
+are industrial barriers. But as a result of such mutilation of its
+industrial life such a country is better able--it has been believed--to
+bear the shock of severing its international trade relations entirely,
+as is likely to happen in case of war.
+
+In a large country, such as America or Russia, which comprises within
+its national boundaries very extensive and very varied resources and a
+widely distributed and diversified population, the mischief suffered
+from restraints of trade that hinder industrial relations with the world
+at large will of course be proportionately lessened. Such a country
+comes nearer being a miniature industrial world; although none of the
+civilised nations, large or small, can carry on its ordinary industrial
+activities and its ordinary manner of life without drawing on foreign
+parts to some appreciable extent. But a country of small territorial
+extent and of somewhat narrowly restricted natural resources, as, e.g.,
+Germany or France, can even by the most drastic measures of restraint
+and mutilation achieve only a very mediocre degree of industrial
+isolation and "self-sufficiency,"--as has, e.g., appeared in the present
+war. But in all cases, though in varying measure, the mitigated
+isolation so enforced by these restraints on trade will in their degree
+impair the country's industrial efficiency and lower the people's
+material well-being; yet, if the restrictions are shrewdly applied this
+partial isolation and partial "self-sufficiency" will go some way toward
+preparing the nation for the more thorough isolation that follows on the
+outbreak of hostilities.
+
+The present plight of the German people under war conditions may serve
+to show how nearly that end may be attained, and yet how inadequate even
+the most unreserved measures of industrial isolation must be in face of
+the fact that the modern state of the industrial arts necessarily draws
+on the collective resources of the world at large. It may well be
+doubted, on an impartial view, if the mutilation of the country's
+industrial system by such measures of isolation does not after all
+rather weaken the nation even for warlike ends; but then, the
+discretionary authorities in the dynastic States are always, and it may
+be presumed necessarily, hampered with obsolete theories handed down
+from that cameralistic age, when the little princes of the Fatherland
+were making dynastic history. So, e.g., the current, nineteenth and
+twentieth century, economic policy of the Prussian-Imperial statesmen is
+still drawn on lines within which Frederick II, called the Great, would
+have felt well at home.
+
+Like other preparation for hostilities this reduction of the country to
+the status of a self-contained economic organisation is costly, but
+like other preparation for hostilities it also puts the nation in a
+position of greater readiness to break off friendly relations with its
+neighbors. It is a war measure, commonly spoken for by its advocates as
+a measure of self-defense; but whatever the merits of the
+self-defenders' contention, this measure is a war measure. As such it
+can reasonably claim no hearing in the counsels of a pacific league of
+neutrals, whose purpose it is to make war impracticable. Particularly
+can there be no reasonable question of admitting a policy of trade
+discrimination and isolation on the part of a nation which has, for
+purposes of warlike aggression, pursued such a policy in the past, and
+which it is the immediate purpose of the league to bind over to keep the
+peace.
+
+There has been a volume of loose talk spent on the justice and
+expediency of boycotting the trade of the peoples of the Empire after
+the return of peace, as a penalty and as a preventive measure designed
+to retard their recovery of strength with which to enter on a further
+warlike enterprise. Such a measure would necessarily be somewhat futile;
+since "Business is business," after all, and the practical limitations
+imposed on an unprofitable boycott by the moral necessity to buy cheap
+and sell dear that rests on all businessmen would surreptitiously
+mitigate it to the point of negligibility. It is inconceivable--or it
+would be inconceivable in the absence of imbecile politicians and
+self-seeking businessmen--that measures looking to the trade isolation
+of any one of these countries could be entertained as a point of policy
+to be pursued by a league of neutrals. And it is only in so far as
+patriotic jealousy and vindictive sentiments are allowed to displace the
+aspiration for peace and security, that such measures can claim
+consideration. Considered as a penalty to be imposed on the erring
+nations who set this warlike adventure afoot, it should be sufficiently
+plain that such a measure as a trade boycott could not touch the chief
+offenders, or even their responsible abettors. It would, rather, play
+into the hands of the militarist interests by keeping alive the spirit
+of national jealousy and international hatred, out of which wars arise
+and without which warlike enterprise might hopefully be expected to
+disappear out of the scheme of human intercourse. The punishment would
+fall, as all economic burdens and disabilities must always fall, on the
+common man, the underlying population.
+
+The chief relation of this common run, this underlying population of
+German subjects, to the inception and pursuit of this Imperial warlike
+enterprise, is comprised in the fact that they are an underlying
+population of subjects, held in usufruct by the Imperial establishment
+and employed at will. It is true, they have lent themselves unreservedly
+to the uses for which the dynasty has use for them, and they have
+entered enthusiastically into the warlike adventure set afoot by the
+dynastic statesmen; but that they have done so is their misfortune
+rather than their fault. By use and wont and indoctrination they have
+for long been unremittingly, and helplessly, disciplined into a spirit
+of dynastic loyalty, national animosity and servile abnegation; until it
+would be nothing better than a pathetic inversion of all the equities of
+the case to visit the transgressions of their masters upon the common
+run; whose fault lies, after all, in their being an underlying
+population of subjects, who have not had a chance to reach that
+spiritual level on which they could properly be held accountable for the
+uses to which they are turned. It is true, men are ordinarily punished
+for their misfortunes; but the warlike enterprise of the Imperial
+dynasty has already brought what might fairly be rated as a good measure
+of punishment on this underlying populace, whose chief fault and chief
+misfortune lies in an habitual servile abnegation of those traits of
+initiative and discretion in man that constitute him an agent
+susceptible of responsibility or retribution.
+
+It would be all the more of a pathetic mockery to visit the
+transgressions of their masters on these victims of circumstance and
+dynastic mendacity, since the conventionalities of international equity
+will scarcely permit the high responsible parties in the case to be
+chastised with any penalty harsher than a well-mannered figure of
+speech. To serve as a deterrent, the penalty must strike the point where
+vests the discretion; but servile use and wont is still too well intact
+in these premises to let any penalty touch the guilty core of a
+profligate dynasty. Under the wear and tear of continued war and its
+incident continued vulgarisation of the directorate and responsible
+staff among the pacific allies, the conventional respect of persons is
+likely to suffer appreciable dilapidation; but there need be no
+apprehension of such a loss of decent respect for personages as would
+compromise the creature comforts of that high syndicate of personages on
+whose initiative the Fatherland entered upon this enterprise in
+dominion.
+
+Bygone shortcomings and transgressions can have no reasonable place in
+the arrangements by which a pacific league of neutrals designs to keep
+the peace. Neither can bygone prerogatives and precedents of
+magnificence and of mastery, except in so far as they unavoidably must
+come into play through the inability of men to divest themselves of
+their ingrained preconceptions, by virtue of which a Hohenzollern or a
+Hapsburger is something more formidable and more to be considered than a
+recruiting sergeant or a purveyor of light literature. The league can do
+its work of pacification only by elaborately forgetting differences and
+discrepancies of the kind that give rise to international grievances.
+Which is the same as saying that the neutralisation of national
+discriminations and pretensions will have to go all the way, if it is to
+serve. But this implies, as broadly as need be, that the pacific nations
+who make the league and provisionally administer its articles of
+agreement and jurisdiction, can not exempt themselves from any of the
+leveling measures of neutralisation to which the dynastic suspects among
+them are to be subject. It would mean a relinquishment of all those
+undemocratic institutional survivals out of which international
+grievances are wont to arise. As a certain Danish adage would have it,
+the neutrals of the league must all be shorn over the same comb.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What is to be shorn over this one comb of neutralisation and democracy
+is all those who go into the pacific league of neutrals and all who come
+under its jurisdiction, whether of their own choice or by the
+necessities of the case. It is of the substance of the case that those
+peoples who have been employed in the campaigns of the German-Imperial
+coalition are to come in on terms of impartial equality with those who
+have held the ground against them; to come under the jurisdiction, and
+prospectively into the copartnery, of the league of neutrals--all on the
+presumption that the Imperial coalition will be brought to make peace on
+terms of unconditional surrender.
+
+Let it not seem presumptuous to venture on a recital of summary
+specifications intended to indicate the nature of those concrete
+measures which would logically be comprised in a scheme of pacification
+carried out with such a view to impartial equality among the peoples who
+are to make up the projected league. There is a significant turn of
+expression that recurs habitually in the formulation of terms put forth
+by the spokesmen of the Entente belligerents, where it is insisted that
+hostilities are carried on not against the German people or the other
+peoples associated with them, but only against the Imperial
+establishments and their culpable aids and abettors in the enterprise.
+So it is further insisted that there is no intention to bring pains and
+penalties on these peoples, who so have been made use of by their
+masters, but only on the culpable master class whose tools these peoples
+have been. And later, just now (January 1917), and from a responsible
+and disinterested spokesman for the pacific league, there comes the
+declaration that a lasting peace at the hands of such a league can be
+grounded only in a present "peace without victory."
+
+The mutual congruity of these two declarations need not imply collusion,
+but they are none the less complementary propositions and they are none
+the less indicative of a common trend of convictions among the men who
+are best able to speak for those pacific nations that are looked to as
+the mainstay of the prospective league. They both converge to the point
+that the objective to be achieved is not victory for the Entente
+belligerents but defeat for the German-Imperial coalition; that the
+peoples underlying the defeated governments are not to be dealt with as
+vanquished enemies but as fellows in undeserved misfortune brought on by
+their culpable masters; and that no advantage is designed to be taken of
+these peoples, and no gratuitous hardship to be imposed on them. Their
+masters are evidently to be put away, not as defeated antagonists but as
+a public nuisance to be provided against as may seem expedient for the
+peace and security of those nations whom they have been molesting.
+
+Taking this position as outlined, it should not be extremely difficult
+to forecast the general line of procedure which it would logically
+demand,--barring irrelevant regard for precedents and overheated
+resentment, and provided that the makers of these peace terms have a
+free hand and go to their work with an eye single to the establishment
+of an enduring peace. The case of Germany would be typical of all the
+rest; and the main items of the bill in this case would seem logically
+to run somewhat as follows:
+
+(1) The definitive elimination of the Imperial establishment, together
+with the monarchical establishments of the several states of the Empire
+and the privileged classes;
+
+(2) Removal or destruction of all warlike equipment, military and naval,
+defensive and offensive;
+
+(3) Cancelment of the public debt, of the Empire and of its
+members--creditors of the Empire being accounted accessory to the
+culpable enterprise of the Imperial government;
+
+(4) Confiscation of such industrial equipment and resources as have
+contributed to the carrying on of the war, as being also accessory;
+
+(5) Assumption by the league at large of all debts incurred, by the
+Entente belligerents or by neutrals, for the prosecution or by reason of
+the war, and distribution of the obligation so assumed, impartially
+among the members of the league, including the peoples of the defeated
+nations;
+
+(6) Indemnification for all injury done to civilians in the invaded
+territories; the means for such indemnification to be procured by
+confiscation of all estates in the defeated countries exceeding a
+certain very modest maximum, calculated on the average of property
+owned, say, by the poorer three-fourths of the population,--the kept
+classes being properly accounted accessory to the Empire's culpable
+enterprise.
+
+The proposition to let the war debt be shared by all members of the
+league on a footing of impartial equality may seem novel, and perhaps
+extravagant. But all projects put forth for safeguarding the world's
+peace by a compact among the pacific nations run on the patent, though
+often tacit, avowal that the Entente belligerents are spending their
+substance and pledging their credit for the common cause. Among the
+Americans, the chief of the neutral nations, this is coming to be
+recognised more and more overtly. So that, in this instance at least, no
+insurmountable reluctance to take over their due share of the common
+burden should fairly be looked for, particularly when it appears that
+the projected league, if it is organised on a footing of neutrality,
+will relieve the republic of virtually all outlay for their own defense.
+
+Of course, there is, in all this, no temerarious intention to offer
+advice as to what should be done by those who have it to do, or even to
+sketch the necessary course which events are bound to take. As has been
+remarked in another passage, that would have to be a work of prophesy or
+of effrontery, both of which, it is hoped, lie equally beyond the
+horizon of this inquiry; which is occupied with the question of what
+conditions will logically have to be met in order to an enduring peace,
+not what will be the nature and outcome of negotiations entered into by
+astute delegates pursuing the special advantage, each of his own nation.
+And yet the peremptory need of reaching some practicable arrangement
+whereby the peace may be kept, goes to say that even the most astute
+negotiations will in some degree be controlled by that need, and may
+reasonably be expected to make some approach to the simple and obvious
+requirements of the situation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Therefore the argument returns to the United Kingdom and the probable
+limit of tolerance of that people, in respect of what they are likely to
+insist on as a necessary measure of democratisation in the nations of
+the second part, and what measure of national abnegation they are likely
+to accommodate themselves to. The United Kingdom is indispensable to the
+formation of a pacific league of neutrals. And the British terms of
+adhesion, or rather of initiation of such a league, therefore, will have
+to constitute the core of the structure, on which details may be
+adjusted and to which concessive adjustments will have to be made by all
+the rest. This is not saying that the projected league must or will be
+dominated by the United Kingdom or administered in the British interest.
+Indeed, it can not well be made to serve British particular interests in
+any appreciable degree, except at the cost of defeat to its main
+purpose; since the purposes of an enduring peace can be served only by
+an effectual neutralisation of national claims and interests. But it
+would mean that the neutralisation of national interests and
+discriminations to be effected would have to be drawn on lines
+acceptable to British taste in these matters, and would have to go
+approximately so far as would be dictated by the British notions of what
+is expedient, and not much farther. The pacific league of neutrals would
+have much of a British air, but "British" in this connection is to be
+taken as connoting the English-speaking countries rather than as
+applying to the United Kingdom alone; since the entrance of the British
+into the league would involve the entrance of the British colonies, and,
+indeed, of the American republic as well.
+
+The temper and outlook of this British community, therefore, becomes a
+matter of paramount importance in any attempted analysis of the
+situation resulting after the war, or of any prospective course of
+conduct to be entered on by the pacific nations. And the question
+touches not so much the temper and preconceptions of the British
+community as known in recent history, but rather as it is likely to be
+modified by the war experience. So that the practicability of a neutral
+league comes to turn, in great measure, on the effect which this war
+experience is having on the habits of thought of the British people, or
+on that section of the British population which will make up the
+effectual majority when the war closes. The grave interest that attaches
+to this question must serve as justification for pursuing it farther,
+even though there can be no promise of a definite or confident answer to
+be found beforehand.
+
+Certain general assertions may be made with some confidence. The
+experiences of the war, particularly among the immediate participants
+and among their immediate domestic connections--a large and increasing
+proportion of the people at large--are plainly impressing on them the
+uselessness and hardship of such a war. There can be no question but
+they are reaching a conviction that a war of this modern kind and scale
+is a thing to be avoided if possible. They are, no doubt, willing to go
+to very considerable lengths to make a repetition of it impossible, and
+they may reasonably be expected to go farther along that line before
+peace returns. But the lengths to which they are ready to go may be in
+the way of concessions, or in the way of contest and compulsion. There
+need be no doubt but a profound and vindictive resentment runs through
+the British community, and there is no reason to apprehend that this
+will be dissipated in the course of further hostilities; although it
+should fairly be expected to lose something of its earlier exuberant
+malevolence and indiscrimination, more particularly if hostilities
+continue for some time. It is not too much to expect, that this popular
+temper of resentment will demand something very tangible in the way of
+summary vengeance on those who have brought the hardships of war upon
+the nation.
+
+The manner of retribution which would meet the popular demand for
+"justice" to be done on the enemy is likely to be affected by the
+fortunes of war, as also the incidence of it. Should the governmental
+establishment and the discretion still vest in the gentlemanly classes
+at the close of hostilities, the retribution is likely to take the
+accustomed gentlemanly shape of pecuniary burdens imposed on the people
+of the defeated country, together with diplomatically specified
+surrender of territorial and colonial possessions, and the like; such as
+to leave the _de facto_ enemy courteously on one side, and to yield
+something in the way of pecuniary benefit to the gentlemen-investors in
+charge, and something more in the way of new emoluments of office to the
+office-holding class included in the same order of gentlemen. The
+retribution in the case would manifestly fall on the underlying
+population in the defeated country, without seriously touching the
+responsible parties, and would leave the defeated nation with a new
+grievance to nourish its patriotic animosity and with a new incentive
+to a policy of watchful waiting for a chance of retaliation.
+
+But it is to be noted that under the stress of the war there is going
+forward in the British community a progressive displacement of
+gentlemanly standards and official procedure by standards and procedure
+of a visibly underbred character, a weakening of the hold of the
+gentlemanly classes on the control of affairs and a weakening of the
+hold which the sacred rights of property, investment and privilege have
+long had over the imagination of the British people. Should hostilities
+continue, and should the exigencies of the war situation continue to
+keep the futility of these sacred rights, as well as the fatuity of
+their possessors, in the public eye, after the same fashion as hitherto,
+it would not be altogether unreasonable to expect that the discretion
+would pass into the hands of the underbred, or into the hands of men
+immediately and urgently accountable to the underbred. In such a case,
+and with a constantly growing popular realisation that the directorate
+and responsible enemy in the war is the Imperial dynasty and its
+pedigreed aids and abettors, it is conceivable that the popular
+resentment would converge so effectually on these responsible
+instigators and directors of misfortune as to bring the incidence of the
+required retribution effectually to bear on them. The outcome might, not
+inconceivably, be the virtual erasure of the Imperial dynasty, together
+with the pedigreed-class rule on which it rests and the apparatus of
+irresponsible coercion through which it works, in the Fatherland and in
+its subsidiaries and dependencies.
+
+With a sufficiently urgent realisation of their need of peace and
+security, and with a realisation also that the way to avoid war is to
+avoid the ways and means of international jealousy and of the national
+discriminations out of which international jealousy grows, it is
+conceivable that a government which should reflect the British temper
+and the British hopes might go so far in insisting on a neutralisation
+of the peoples of the Fatherland as would leave them without the
+dynastic apparatus with which warlike enterprise is set afoot, and so
+leave them also perforce in a pacific frame of mind. In time, in the
+absence of their dearly beloved leavings of feudalism, an enforced
+reliance on their own discretion and initiative, and an enforced respite
+from the rant and prance of warlike swagger, would reasonably be
+expected to grow into a popular habit. The German people are by no means
+less capable of tolerance and neighbourly decorum than their British or
+Scandinavian neighbours of the same blood,--if they can only be left to
+their own devices, untroubled by the maggoty conceit of national
+domination.
+
+There is no intention herewith to express an expectation that this
+out-and-out neutralisation of the Fatherland's international relations
+and of its dynastic government will come to pass on the return of peace,
+or that the German people will, as a precaution against recurrent
+Imperial rabies, be organised on a democratic pattern by constraint of
+the pacific nations of the league. The point is only that this measure
+of neutralisation appears to be the necessary condition, in the absence
+of which no such neutral league can succeed, and that so long as the war
+goes on there is something of a chance that the British community may in
+time reach a frame of mind combining such settled determination to
+safeguard the peace at all costs, with such a degree of disregard for
+outworn conventions, that their spokesmen in the negotiations may push
+the neutralisation of these peoples to that length.
+
+The achievement of such an outcome would evidently take time as well as
+harsh experience, more time and harsher experience, perhaps, than one
+likes to contemplate.
+
+Most men, therefore, would scarcely rate the chance of such an outcome
+at all high. And yet it is to be called to mind that the war has lasted
+long and the effect of its demands and its experience has already gone
+far, and that the longer it lasts the greater are the chances of its
+prolongation and of its continued hardships, at least to the extent that
+with every month of war that passes the prospect of the allied nations
+making peace on any terms short of unconditional surrender grows less.
+And unconditional surrender is the first step in the direction of an
+unconditional dispossession of the Imperial establishment and its war
+prophets,--depending primarily on the state of mind of the British
+people at the time. And however unlikely, it is also always possible, as
+some contend, that in the course of further war experience the common
+man in the Fatherland may come to reflect on the use and value of the
+Imperial establishment, with the result of discarding and disowning it
+and all its works. Such an expectation would doubtless underrate the
+force of ancient habit, and would also involve a misapprehension of the
+psychological incidence of a warlike experience. The German people have
+substantially none of those preconceptions of independence and
+self-direction to go on, in the absence of which an effectual revulsion
+against dynastic rule can not come to pass.
+
+Embedded in the common sense of the British population at large is a
+certain large and somewhat sullen sense of fair dealing. In this they
+are not greatly different from their neighbours, if at all, except that
+the body of common sense in which this British sense of fair dealing
+lies embedded is a maturer fashion of common sense than that which
+serves to guide the workday life of many of their neighbours. And the
+maturity in question appears to be chiefly a matter of their having
+unlearned, divested themselves of, or been by force of disuse divested
+of, an exceptionally large proportion of that burden of untoward
+conceits which western Europe, and more particularly middle Europe, at
+large has carried over from the Middle Ages. They have had time and
+occasion to forget more of what the exigencies of modern life make it
+expedient to have forgotten. And yet they are reputed slow,
+conservative. But they have been well placed for losing much of what
+would be well lost.
+
+Among other things, their preconception of national animosity is not
+secure, in the absence of provocation. They are now again in a position
+to learn to do without some of the useless legacy out of the
+past,--useless, that is, for life as it runs today, however it may be
+rated in the setting in which it was all placed in that past out of
+which it has come. And the question is whether now, under the pressure
+of exigencies that make for a disestablishment of much cumbersome
+inherited apparatus for doing what need not be done, they will be ruled
+by their sense of expediency and of fair dealing to the extent of
+cancelling out of their own scheme of life so much of this legacy of
+conventional preconceptions as has now come visibly to hinder their own
+material well-being, and at the same time to defeat that peace and
+security for which they have shown themselves willing to fight. It is,
+of course, a simpler matter to fight than it is to put away a
+preconceived, even if it is a bootless, superstition; as, e.g., the
+prestige of hereditary wealth, hereditary gentility, national
+vainglory, and perhaps especially national hatred. But if the school is
+hard enough and the discipline protracted enough there is no reason in
+the nature of things why the common run of the British people should not
+unlearn these futilities that once were the substance of things under an
+older and outworn order. They have already shown their capacity for
+divesting themselves of outworn institutional bonds, in discarding the
+main substance of dynastic rule; and when they now come to face the
+exigencies of this new situation it should cause no great surprise if
+they are able to see their way to do what further is necessary to meet
+these exigencies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the hands of this British commonwealth the new situation requires the
+putting away of the German Imperial establishment and the military
+caste; the reduction of the German peoples to a footing of unreserved
+democracy with sufficient guarantees against national trade
+discriminations; surrender of all British tutelage over outlying
+possessions, except what may go to guarantee their local autonomy;
+cancelment of all extra-territorial pretensions of the several nations
+entering into the league; neutralisation of the several national
+establishments, to comprise virtual disarmament, as well as cancelment
+of all restrictions on trade and of all national defense of
+extra-territorial pecuniary claims and interests on the part of
+individual citizens. The naval control of the seas will best be left in
+British hands. No people has a graver or more immediate interest in the
+freedom and security of the sea-borne trade; and the United Kingdom has
+shown that it is to be trusted in that matter. And then it may well be
+that neither the national pride nor the apprehensions of the British
+people would allow them to surrender it; whereas, if the league is to
+be formed it will have to be on terms to which the British people are
+willing to adhere. A certain provision of armed force will also be
+needed to keep the governments of unneutral nations in check,--and for
+the purpose in hand all effectively monarchical countries are to be
+counted as congenitally unneutral, whatever their formal professions and
+whether they are members of the league or not. Here again it will
+probably appear that the people of the United Kingdom, and of the
+English-speaking countries at large, will not consent to this armed
+force and its discretionary use passing out of British hands, or rather
+out of French-British hands; and here again the practical decision will
+have to wait on the choice of the British people, all the more because
+the British community has no longer an interest, real or fancied, in the
+coercive use of this force for their own particular ends. No other power
+is to be trusted, except France, and France is less well placed for the
+purpose and would assuredly also not covet so invidious an honour and so
+thankless an office.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The theory, i.e. the logical necessities, of such a pacific league of
+neutral nations is simple enough, in its elements. War is to be avoided
+by a policy of avoidance. Which signifies that the means and the motives
+to warlike enterprise and warlike provocation are to be put away, so far
+as may be. If what may be, in this respect, does not come up to the
+requirements of the case, the experiment, of course, will fail. The
+preliminary requirement,--elimination of the one formidable dynastic
+State in Europe,--has been spoken of. Its counterpart in the Far East
+will cease to be formidable on the decease of its natural ally in
+Central Europe, in so far as touches the case of such a projected
+league. The ever increasingly dubious empire of the Czar would appear to
+fall in the same category. So that the pacific league's fortunes would
+seem to turn on what may be called its domestic or internal
+arrangements.
+
+Now, the means of warlike enterprise, as well as of unadvised
+embroilment, is always in the last analysis the patriotic spirit of the
+nation. Given this patriotic spirit in sufficient measure, both the
+material equipment and the provocation to hostilities will easily be
+found. It should accordingly appear to be the first care of such a
+pacific league to reduce the sources of patriotic incitement to the
+practicable minimum. This can be done, in such measure as it can be done
+at all, by neutralisation of national pretensions. The finished outcome
+in this respect, such as would assure perpetual peace among the peoples
+concerned, would of course be an unconditional neutralisation of
+citizenship, as has already been indicated before. The question which,
+in effect, the spokesmen for a pacific league have to face is as to how
+nearly that outcome can be brought to pass. The rest of what they may
+undertake, or may come to by way of compromise and stipulation, is
+relatively immaterial and of relatively transient consequence.
+
+A neutralisation of citizenship has of course been afloat in a somewhat
+loose way in the projects of socialistic and other "undesirable"
+agitators, but nothing much has come of it. Nor have specific projects
+for its realisation been set afoot. That anything conclusive along that
+line could now be reached would seem extremely doubtful, in view of the
+ardent patriotic temper of all these peoples, heightened just now by the
+experience of war. Still, an undesigned and unguided drift in that
+direction has been visible in all those nations that are accounted the
+vanguard among modern civilised peoples, ever since the dynastic rule
+among them began to be displaced by a growth of "free" institutions,
+that is to say institutions resting on an accepted ground of
+insubordination and free initiative.
+
+The patriotism of these peoples, or their national spirit, is after all
+and at the best an attenuated and impersonalised remnant of dynastic
+loyalty, and it amounts after all, in effect, to nothing much else than
+a residual curtailment or partial atrophy of that democratic habit of
+mind that embodies itself in the formula: Live and let live. It is, no
+doubt, both an ancient and a very meritorious habit. It is easily
+acquired and hard to put away. The patriotic spirit and the national
+life (prestige) on which it centers are the subject of untiring eulogy;
+but hitherto its encomiasts have shown no cause and put forward no claim
+to believe that it all is of any slightest use for any purpose that does
+not take it and its paramount merit for granted. It is doubtless a very
+meritorious habit; at least so they all say. But under the circumstances
+of modern civilised life it is fruitful of no other net material result
+than damage and discomfort. Still it is virtually ubiquitous among
+civilised men, and in an admirable state of repair; and for the
+calculable future it is doubtless to be counted in as an enduring
+obstacle to a conclusive peace, a constant source of anxiety and
+unremitting care.
+
+The motives that work out through this national spirit, by use of this
+patriotic ardor, fall under two heads: dynastic ambition, and business
+enterprise. The two categories have the common trait that neither the
+one nor the other comprises anything that is of the slightest material
+benefit to the community at large; but both have at the same time a
+high prestige value in the conventional esteem of modern men. The
+relation of dynastic ambition to warlike enterprise, and the uses of
+that usufruct of the nation's resources and man-power which the nation's
+patriotism places at the disposal of the dynastic establishment, have
+already been spoken of at length above, perhaps at excessive length, in
+the recurrent discussion of the dynastic State and its quest of dominion
+for dominion's sake. What measures are necessary to be taken as regards
+the formidable dynastic States that threaten the peace, have also been
+outlined, perhaps with excessive freedom.
+
+But it remains to call attention to that mitigated form of dynastic rule
+called a constitutional monarchy. Instances of such a constitutional
+monarchy, designed to conserve the well-beloved abuses of dynastic rule
+under a cover of democratic formalities, or to bring in effectual
+democratic insubordination under cover of the ancient dignities of an
+outworn monarchical system,--the characterisation may run either way
+according to the fancy of the speaker, and to much the same practical
+effect in either case,--instances illustrative of this compromise
+monarchy at work today are to be had, as felicitously as anywhere, in
+the Balkan states; perhaps the case of Greece will be especially
+instructive. At the other, and far, end of the line will be found such
+other typical instances as the British, the Dutch, or, in pathetic and
+droll miniature, the Norwegian.
+
+There is, of course, a wide interval between the grotesque effrontery
+that wears the Hellenic crown and the undeviatingly decorous
+self-effacement of the Dutch sovereign; and yet there is something of a
+common complexion runs through the whole range of establishments, all
+the way from the quasi-dynastic to the pseudo-dynastic. For reasons
+unavoidable and persistent, though not inscribed in the constituent law,
+the governmental establishment associated with such a royal concern will
+be made up of persons drawn from the kept classes, the nobility or
+lesser gentlefolk, and will be imbued with the spirit of these "better"
+classes rather than that of the common run.
+
+With what may be uncanny shrewdness, or perhaps mere tropismatic
+response to the unreasoned stimulus of a "consciousness of kind," the
+British government--habitually a syndicate of gentlefolk--has uniformly
+insisted on the installation of a constitutional monarchy at the
+formation of every new national organisation in which that government
+has had a discretionary voice. And the many and various constitutional
+governments so established, commonly under British auspices in some
+degree, have invariably run true to form, in some appreciable degree.
+They may be quasi-dynastic or pseudo-dynastic, but at this nearest
+approach to democracy they always, and unavoidably, include at least a
+circumlocution office of gentlefolk, in the way of a ministry and court
+establishment, whose place in the economy of the nation's affairs it is
+to adapt the run of these affairs to the needs of the kept classes.
+
+There need be no imputation of sinister designs to these gentlefolk, who
+so are elected by force of circumstances to guard and guide the nation's
+interests. As things go, it will doubtless commonly be found that they
+are as well-intentioned as need be. But a well-meaning gentleman of good
+antecedents means well in a gentlemanly way and in the light of good
+antecedents. Which comes unavoidably to an effectual bias in favor of
+those interests which honorable gentlemen of good antecedents have at
+heart. And among these interests are the interests of the kept classes,
+as contrasted with that common run of the population from which their
+keep is drawn.
+
+Under the auspices, even if they are only the histrionic and decorative
+auspices, of so decorous an article of institutional furniture as
+royalty, it follows of logical necessity that the personnel of the
+effectual government must also be drawn from the better classes, whose
+place and station and high repute will make their association with the
+First Gentleman of the Realm not too insufferably incongruous. And then,
+the popular habit of looking up to this First Gentleman with that
+deference that royalty commands, also conduces materially to the
+attendant habitual attitude of deference to gentility more at large.
+
+Even in so democratic a country, and with so exanimate a crown as is to
+be found in the United Kingdom, the royal establishment visibly, and
+doubtless very materially, conduces to the continued tenure of the
+effectual government by representatives of the kept classes; and it
+therefore counts with large effect toward the retardation of the
+country's further move in the direction of democratic insubordination
+and direct participation in the direction of affairs by the underbred,
+who finally pay the cost. And on the other hand, even so moderately
+royal an establishment as the Norwegian has apparently a sensible effect
+in the way of gathering the reins somewhat into the hands of the better
+classes, under circumstances of such meagerness as might be expected to
+preclude anything like a "better" class, in the conventional acceptation
+of that term. It would appear that even the extreme of pseudo-dynastic
+royalty, sterilised to the last degree, is something of an effectual
+hindrance to democratic rule, and in so far also a hindrance to the
+further continued neutralisation of nationalist pretensions, as also an
+effectual furtherance of upper-class rule for upper-class ends.
+
+Now, a government by well-meaning gentlemen-investors will, at the
+nearest, come no nearer representing the material needs and interests of
+the common run than a parable comes to representing the concrete facts
+which it hopes to illuminate. And as bears immediately on the point in
+hand, these gentlemanly administrators of the nation's affairs who so
+cluster about the throne, vacant though it may be of all but the bodily
+presence of majesty, are after all gentlemen, with a gentlemanly sense
+of punctilio touching the large proprieties and courtesies of political
+life. The national honor is a matter of punctilio, always; and out of
+the formal exigencies of the national honor arise grievances to be
+redressed; and it is grievances of this character that commonly afford
+the formal ground of a breach of the peace. An appeal on patriotic
+grounds of wounded national pride, to the common run who have no trained
+sense of punctilio, by the gentlemanly responsible class who have such a
+sense, backed by assurances that the national prestige or the national
+interests are at stake, will commonly bring a suitable response. It is
+scarcely necessary that the common run should know just what the stir is
+about, so long as they are informed by their trusted betters that there
+is a grievance to redress. In effect, it results that the democratic
+nation's affairs are administered by a syndicate composed of the least
+democratic class in the population.
+
+Excepting what is to be excepted, it will commonly hold true today that
+these gentlemanly governments are conducted in a commendably clean and
+upright fashion, with a conscious rectitude and a benevolent intention.
+But they are after all, in effect, class governments, and they
+unavoidably carry the bias of their class. The gentlemanly officials and
+law-givers come, in the main, from the kept classes, whose living comes
+to them in the way of income from investments, at home or in foreign
+parts, or from an equivalent source of accumulated wealth or official
+emolument. The bias resulting from this state of the case need not be of
+an intolerant character in order to bring its modicum of mischief into
+the national policy, as regards amicable relations with other
+nationalities. A slight bias running on a ground of conscious right and
+unbroken usage may go far. So, e.g., anyone of these gentlemanly
+governments is within its legitimate rights, or rather within its
+imperative duty, in defending the foreign investments of its citizens
+and enforcing due payment of its citizens' claims to income or principal
+of such property as they may hold in foreign parts; and it is within its
+ordinary lines of duty in making use of the nation's resources--that is
+to say of the common man and his means of livelihood--in enforcing such
+claims held by the investing classes. The community at large has no
+interest in the enforcement of such claims; it is evidently a class
+interest, and as evidently protected by a code of rights, duties and
+procedure that has grown out of a class bias, at the cost of the
+community at large.
+
+This bias favoring the interests of invested wealth may also, and indeed
+it commonly does, take the aggressive form of aggressively forwarding
+enterprise in investment abroad, particularly in commercially backward
+countries abroad, by extension of the national jurisdiction and the
+active countenancing of concessions in foreign parts, by subventions,
+or by creation of offices to bring suitable emoluments to the younger
+sons of deserving families. The protective tariffs to which recourse is
+sometimes had, are of the same general nature and purpose. Of course, it
+is in this latter, aggressive or excursive, issue of the well-to-do bias
+in favor of investment and invested wealth that its most pernicious
+effect on international relations is traceable.
+
+Free income, that is to say income not dependent on personal merit or
+exertion of any kind, is the breath of life to the kept classes; and as
+a corollary of the "First Law of Nature," therefore, the invested wealth
+which gives a legally equitable claim to such income has in their eyes
+all the sanctity that can be given by Natural Right. Investment--often
+spoken of euphemistically as "savings"--is consequently a meritorious
+act, conceived to be very serviceable to the community at large, and
+properly to be furthered by all available means. Invested wealth is so
+much added to the aggregate means at the community's disposal, it is
+believed. Of course, in point of fact, income from investment in the
+hands of these gentlefolk is a means of tracelessly consuming that much
+of the community's yearly product; but to the kept classes, who see the
+matter from the point of view of the recipient, the matter does not
+present itself in that light. To them it is the breath of life. Like
+other honorable men they are faithful to their bread; and by authentic
+tradition the common man, in whose disciplined preconceptions the kept
+classes are his indispensable betters, is also imbued with the
+uncritical faith that the invested wealth which enables these betters
+tracelessly to consume a due share of the yearly product is an addition
+to the aggregate means in hand.
+
+The advancement of commercial and other business enterprise beyond the
+national frontiers is consequently one of the duties not to be
+neglected, and with which no trifling can be tolerated. It is so bound
+up with national ideals, under any gentlemanly government, that any
+invasion or evasion of the rights of investors in foreign parts, or of
+other business involved in dealings with foreign parts, immediately
+involves not only the material interest of the nation but the national
+honour as well. Hence international jealousies and eventual embroilment.
+
+The constitutional monarchy that commonly covers a modern democratic
+community is accordingly a menace to the common peace, and any pacific
+league of neutrals will be laying up trouble and prospective defeat for
+itself in allowing such an institution to stand over in any instance.
+Acting with a free hand, if such a thing were possible, the projected
+league should logically eliminate all monarchical establishments,
+constitutional or otherwise, from among its federated nations. It is
+doubtless not within reason to look for such a move in the negotiations
+that are to initiate the projected league of neutrals; but the point is
+called to mind here chiefly as indicating one of the difficult passages
+which are to be faced in any attempted formation of such a league, as
+well as one of the abiding sources of international irritation with
+which the league's jurisdiction will be burdened so long as a decisive
+measure of the kind is not taken.
+
+The logic of the whole matter is simple enough, and the necessary
+measures to be taken to remedy it are no less simple--barring
+sentimental objections which will probably prove insuperable. A
+monarchy, even a sufficiently inane monarchy, carries the burden of a
+gentlemanly governmental establishment--a government by and for the
+kept classes; such a government will unavoidably direct the affairs of
+state with a view to income on invested wealth, and will see the
+material interests of the country only in so far as they present
+themselves under the form of investment and business enterprise designed
+to eventuate in investment; these are the only forms of material
+interest that give rise to international jealousies, discriminations and
+misunderstanding, at the same time that they are interests of
+individuals only and have no material use or value to the community at
+large. Given a monarchical establishment and the concomitant gentlemanly
+governmental corps, there is no avoiding this sinister prime mover of
+international rivalry, so long as the rights of invested wealth continue
+in popular apprehension to be held inviolable.
+
+Quite obviously there is a certain _tu quoque_ ready to the hand of
+these "gentlemen of the old school" who see in the constitutional
+monarchy a God-given shelter from the unreserved vulgarisation of life
+at the hands of the unblest and unbalanced underbred and underfed. The
+formally democratic nations, that have not retained even a
+pseudo-dynastic royalty, are not much more fortunately placed in respect
+of national discrimination in trade and investment. The American
+republic will obviously come into the comparison as the type-form of
+economic policy in a democratic commonwealth. There is little to choose
+between the economic policy pursued by such republics as France or
+America on the one side and their nearest counterparts among the
+constitutional monarchies on the other. It is even to be admitted out of
+hand that the comparison does no credit to democratic institutions as
+seen at work in these republics. They are, in fact, somewhat the crudest
+and most singularly foolish in their economic policy of any peoples in
+Christendom. And in view of the amazing facility with which these
+democratic commonwealths are always ready to delude themselves in
+everything that touches their national trade policies, it is obvious
+that any league of neutrals whose fortunes are in any degree contingent
+on their reasonable compliance with a call to neutralise their trade
+regulations for the sake of peace, will have need of all the persuasive
+power it can bring to bear.
+
+However, the powers of darkness have one less line of defense to shelter
+them and their work of malversation in these commonwealths than in the
+constitutional monarchies. The American national establishment, e.g.,
+which may be taken as a fairly characteristic type-form in this bearing,
+is a government of businessmen for business ends; and there is no tabu
+of axiomatic gentility or of certified pedigree to hedge about this
+working syndicate of business interests. So that it is all nearer by one
+remove to the disintegrating touch of the common man and his commonplace
+circumstances. The businesslike regime of these democratic politicians
+is as undeviating in its advocacy and aid of enterprise in pursuit of
+private gain under shelter of national discrimination as the
+circumstances will permit; and the circumstances will permit them to do
+much and go far; for the limits of popular gullibility in all things
+that touch the admirable feats of business enterprise are very wide in
+these countries. There is a sentimental popular belief running to the
+curious effect that because the citizens of such a commonwealth are
+ungraded equals before the law, therefore somehow they can all and
+several become wealthy by trading at the expense of their neighbours.
+
+Yet, the fact remains that there is only the one line of defense in
+these countries where the business interests have not the countenance of
+a time-honored order of gentlefolk, with the sanction of royalty in the
+background. And this fact is further enhanced by one of its immediate
+consequences. Proceeding upon the abounding faith which these peoples
+have in business enterprise as a universal solvent, the unreserved
+venality and greed of their businessmen--unhampered by the gentleman's
+_noblesse oblige_--have pushed the conversion of public law to private
+gain farther and more openly here than elsewhere. The outcome has been
+divers measures in restraint of trade or in furtherance of profitable
+abuses, of such a crass and flagrant character that if once the popular
+apprehension is touched by matter-of-fact reflection on the actualities
+of this businesslike policy the whole structure should reasonably be
+expected to crumble. If the present conjuncture of circumstances should,
+e.g., present to the American populace a choice between exclusion from
+the neutral league, and a consequent probable and dubious war of
+self-defense, on the one hand; as against entrance into the league, and
+security at the cost of relinquishing their national tariff in restraint
+of trade, on the other hand, it is always possible that the people might
+be brought to look their protective tariff in the face and recognise it
+for a commonplace conspiracy in restraint of trade, and so decide to
+shuffle it out of the way as a good riddance. And the rest of the
+Republic's businesslike policy of special favors would in such a case
+stand a chance of going in the discard along with the protective tariff,
+since the rest is of substantially the same disingenuous character.
+
+Not that anyone need entertain a confident expectation of such an
+exploit of common sense on the part of the American voters. There is
+little encouragement for such a hope in their past career of gullibility
+on this head. But this is again a point of difficulty to be faced in
+negotiations looking to such a pacific league of neutrals. Without a
+somewhat comprehensive neutralisation of national trade regulations, the
+outlook for lasting peace would be reduced by that much; there would be
+so much material for international jealousy and misunderstanding left
+standing over and requiring continued readjustment and compromise,
+always with the contingency of a breach that much nearer. The
+infatuation of the Americans with their protective tariff and other
+businesslike discriminations is a sufficiently serious matter in this
+connection, and it is always possible that their inability to give up
+this superstition might lead to their not adhering to this projected
+neutral league. Yet it is at least to be said that the longer the time
+that passes before active measures are taken toward the organisation of
+such a league--that is to say, in effect, the longer the great war
+lasts--the more amenable is the temper of the Americans likely to be,
+and the more reluctantly would they see themselves excluded. Should the
+war be protracted to some such length as appears to be promised by
+latterday pronunciamentos from the belligerents, or to something
+passably approaching such a duration; and should the Imperial designs
+and anomalous diplomacy of Japan continue to force themselves on the
+popular attention at the present rate; at the same time that the
+operations in Europe continue to demonstrate the excessive cost of
+defense against a well devised and resolute offensive; then it should
+reasonably be expected that the Americans might come to such a
+realisation of their own case as to let no minor considerations of trade
+discrimination stand in the way of their making common cause with the
+other pacific nations.
+
+It appears already to be realised in the most responsible quarter that
+America needs the succor of the other pacific nations, with a need that
+is not to be put away or put off; as it is also coming to be realised
+that the Imperial Powers are disturbers of the peace, by force of their
+Imperial character. Of course, the politicians who seek their own
+advantage in the nation's embarrassment are commonly unable to see the
+matter in that light. But it is also apparent that the popular sentiment
+is affected with the same apprehension, more and more as time passes and
+the aims and methods of the Imperial Powers become more patent.
+
+Hitherto the spokesmen of a pacific federation of nations have spoken
+for a league of such an (indeterminate) constitution as to leave all the
+federated nations undisturbed in all their conduct of their own affairs,
+domestic or international; probably for want of second thought as to the
+complications of copartnership between them in so grave and unwonted an
+enterprise. They have also spoken of America's share in the project as
+being that of an interested outsider, whose interest in any
+precautionary measures of this kind is in part a regard for his own
+tranquility as a disinterested neighbour, but in greater part a humane
+solicitude for the well-being of civilised mankind at large. In this
+view, somewhat self-complacent it is to be admitted, America is
+conceived to come into the case as initiator and guide, about whom the
+pacific nations are to cluster as some sort of queen-bee.
+
+Now, there is not a little verisimilitude in this conception of America
+as a sort of central office and a tower of strength in the projected
+federation of neutral nations, however pharisaical an appearance it may
+all have in the self-complacent utterances of patriotic Americans. The
+American republic is, after all, the greatest of the pacific nations of
+Christendom, in resources, population and industrial capacity; and it is
+also not to be denied that the temper of this large population is, on
+the whole, as pacific as that of any considerable people--outside of
+China. The adherence of the American republic would, in effect, double
+the mass and powers of the projected league, and would so place it
+beyond all hazard of defeat from without, or even of serious outside
+opposition to its aims.
+
+Yet it will not hold true that America is either disinterested or
+indispensable. The unenviable position of the indispensable belongs to
+the United Kingdom, and carries with it the customary suspicion of
+interested motives that attaches to the stronger party in a bargain. To
+America, on the other hand, the league is indispensable, as a refuge
+from otherwise inevitable dangers ahead; and it is only a question of a
+moderate allowance of time for the American voters to realise that
+without an adequate copartnership with the other pacific nations the
+outlook of the Republic is altogether precarious. Single-handed, America
+can not defend itself, except at a prohibitive cost; whereas in
+copartnership with these others the national defense becomes a virtually
+negligible matter. It is for America a choice between a policy of
+extravagant armament and aggressive diplomacy, with a doubtful issue, on
+the one side, and such abatement of national pretensions as would
+obviate bootless contention, on the other side.
+
+Yet, it must be admitted, the patriotic temper of the American people is
+of such a susceptible kind as to leave the issue in doubt. Not that the
+Americans will not endeavor to initiate some form of compact for the
+keeping of the peace, when hostilities are concluded; barring unforeseen
+contingencies, it is virtually a foregone conclusion that the attempt
+will be made, and that the Americans will take an active part in its
+promotion. But the doubt is as to their taking such a course as will
+lead to a compact of the kind needed to safeguard the peace of the
+country. The business interests have much to say in the counsels of the
+Americans, and these business interests look to short-term
+gains--American business interests particularly--to be derived from the
+country's necessities. It is likely to appear that the business
+interests, through representatives in Congress and elsewhere, will
+disapprove of any peace compact that does not involve an increase of the
+national armament and a prospective demand for munitions and an
+increased expenditure of the national funds.
+
+With or without the adherence of America, the pacific nations of Europe
+will doubtless endeavour to form a league or alliance designed to keep
+the peace. If America does not come into the arrangement it may well
+come to nothing much more than a further continued defensive alliance of
+the belligerent nations now opposed to the German coalition. In any case
+it is still a point in doubt whether the league so projected is to be
+merely a compact of defensive armament against a common enemy--in which
+case it will necessarily be transient, perhaps ephemeral--or a more
+inclusive coalition of a closer character designed to avoid any breach
+of the peace, by disarmament and by disallowance and disclaimer of such
+national pretensions and punctilio as the patriotic sentiment of the
+contracting parties will consent to dispense with. The nature of the
+resulting peace, therefore, as well as its chances of duration, will in
+great measure be conditioned on the fashion of peace-compact on which it
+is to rest; which will be conditioned in good part on the degree in
+which the warlike coalition under German Imperial control is effectually
+to be eliminated from the situation as a prospective disturber of the
+peace; which, in turn, is a question somewhat closely bound up with the
+further duration of the war, as has already been indicated in an earlier
+passage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+PEACE AND THE PRICE SYSTEM
+
+
+Evidently the conception of peace on which its various spokesmen are
+proceeding is by no means the same for all of them. In the current
+German conception, e.g., as seen in the utterances of its many and
+urgent spokesmen, peace appears to be of the general nature of a truce
+between nations, whose God-given destiny it is, in time, to adjust a
+claim to precedence by wager of battle. They will sometimes speak of it,
+euphemistically, with a view to conciliation, as "assurance of the
+national future," in which the national future is taken to mean an
+opportunity for the extension of the national dominion at the expense of
+some other national establishment. In the same connection one may recall
+the many eloquent passages on the State and its paramount place and
+value in the human economy. The State is useful for disturbing the
+peace. This German notion may confidently be set down as the lowest of
+the current conceptions of peace; or perhaps rather as the notion of
+peace reduced to the lowest terms at which it continues to be
+recognisable as such. Next beyond in that direction lies the notion of
+armistice; which differs from this conception of peace chiefly in
+connoting specifically a definite and relatively short interval between
+warlike operations.
+
+The conception of peace as being a period of preparation for war has
+many adherents outside the Fatherland, of course. Indeed, it has
+probably a wider vogue and a readier acceptance among men who interest
+themselves in questions of peace and war than any other. It goes hand in
+hand with that militant nationalism that is taken for granted,
+conventionally, as the common ground of those international relations
+that play a part in diplomatic intercourse. It is the diplomatist's
+_metier_ to talk war in parables of peace. This conception of peace as a
+precarious interval of preparation has come down to the present out of
+the feudal age and is, of course, best at home where the feudal range of
+preconceptions has suffered least dilapidation; and it carries the
+feudalistic presumption that all national establishments are competitors
+for dominion, after the scheme of Macchiavelli. The peace which is had
+on this footing, within the realm, is a peace of subjection, more or
+less pronounced according as the given national establishment is more or
+less on the militant order; a warlike organisation being necessarily of
+a servile character, in the same measure in which it is warlike.
+
+In much the same measure and with much the same limitations as the
+modern democratic nations have departed from the feudal system of civil
+relations and from the peculiar range of conceptions which characterise
+that system, they have also come in for a new or revised conception of
+peace. Instead of its being valued chiefly as a space of time in which
+to prepare for war, offensive or defensive, among these democratic and
+provisionally pacific nations it has come to stand in the common
+estimation as the normal and stable manner of life, good and commendable
+in its own right. These modern, pacific, commonwealths stand on the
+defensive, habitually. They are still pugnaciously national, but they
+have unlearned so much of the feudal preconceptions as to leave them in
+a defensive attitude, under the watch-word: Peace with honour. Their
+quasi-feudalistic national prestige is not to be trifled with, though it
+has lost so much of its fascination as ordinarily not to serve the
+purposes of an aggressive enterprise, at least not without some shrewd
+sophistication at the hands of militant politicians and their diplomatic
+agents. Of course, an exuberant patriotism may now and again take on the
+ancient barbarian vehemence and lead such a provisionally pacific nation
+into an aggressive raid against a helpless neighbour; but it remains
+characteristically true, after all, that these peoples look on the
+country's peace as the normal and ordinary course of things, which each
+nation is to take care of for itself and by its own force.
+
+The ideal of the nineteenth-century statesmen was to keep the peace by a
+balance of power; an unstable equilibrium of rivalries, in which it was
+recognised that eternal vigilance was the price of peace by
+equilibration. Since then, by force of the object-lesson of the
+twentieth-century wars, it has become evident that eternal vigilance
+will no longer keep the peace by equilibration, and the balance of power
+has become obsolete. At the same time things have so turned that an
+effective majority of the civilised nations now see their advantage in
+peace, without further opportunity to seek further dominion. These
+nations have also been falling into the shape of commonwealths, and so
+have lost something of their national spirit.
+
+With much reluctant hesitation and many misgivings, the statesmen of
+these pacific nations are accordingly busying themselves with schemes
+for keeping the peace on the unfamiliar footing of a stable equilibrium;
+the method preferred on the whole being an equilibration of
+make-believe, in imitation of the obsolete balance of power. There is a
+meticulous regard for national jealousies and discriminations, which it
+is thought necessary to keep intact. Of course, on any one of these
+slightly diversified plans of keeping the peace on a stable footing of
+copartnery among the pacific nations, national jealousies and national
+integrity no longer have any substantial meaning. But statesmen think
+and plan in terms of precedent; which comes to thinking and planning in
+terms of make-believe, when altered circumstances have made the
+precedents obsolete. So one comes to the singular proposal of the
+statesmen, that the peace is to be kept in concert among these pacific
+nations by a provision of force with which to break it at will. The
+peace that is to be kept on this footing of national discriminations and
+national armaments will necessarily be of a precarious kind; being, in
+effect, a statesmanlike imitation of the peace as it was once kept even
+more precariously by the pacific nations in severalty.
+
+Hitherto the movement toward peace has not gone beyond this conception
+of it, as a collusive safeguarding of national discrepancies by force of
+arms. Such a peace is necessarily precarious, partly because armed force
+is useful for breaking the peace, partly because the national
+discrepancies, by which these current peace-makers set such store, are a
+constant source of embroilment. What the peace-makers might logically be
+expected to concern themselves about would be the elimination of these
+discrepancies that make for embroilment. But what they actually seem
+concerned about is their preservation. A peace by collusive neglect of
+those remnants of feudalistic make-believe that still serve to divide
+the pacific nations has hitherto not seriously come under advisement.
+
+Evidently, hitherto, and for the calculable future, peace is a relative
+matter, a matter of more or less, whichever of the several working
+conceptions spoken of above may rule the case. Evidently, too, a peace
+designed to strengthen the national establishment against eventual war,
+will count to a different effect from a collusive peace of a defensive
+kind among the pacific peoples, designed by its projectors to conserve
+those national discrepancies on which patriotic statesmen like to dwell.
+Different from both would be the value of a peace by neglect of such
+useless national discriminations as now make for embroilment. A
+protracted season of peace should logically have a somewhat different
+cultural value according to the character of the public policy to be
+pursued under its cover. So that a safe and sane conservation of the
+received law and order should presumably best be effected under cover of
+a collusive peace of the defensive kind, which is designed to retain
+those national discrepancies intact that count for so much in the
+national life of today, both as a focus of patriotic sentiment and as an
+outlet for national expenditures. This plan would involve the least
+derangement of the received order among the democratic peoples, although
+the plan might itself undergo some change in the course of time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Among the singularities of the latterday situation, in this connection,
+and brought out by the experiences of the great war, is a close
+resemblance between latterday warlike operations and the ordinary
+processes of industry. Modern warfare and modern industry alike are
+carried on by technological processes subject to surveillance and
+direction by mechanical engineers, or perhaps rather experts in
+engineering science of the mechanistic kind. War is not now a matter of
+the stout heart and strong arm. Not that these attributes do not have
+their place and value in modern warfare; but they are no longer the
+chief or decisive factors in the case. The exploits that count in this
+warfare are technological exploits; exploits of technological science,
+industrial appliances, and technological training. As has been remarked
+before, it is no longer a gentlemen's war, and the gentleman, as such,
+is no better than a marplot in the game as it is played.
+
+Certain consequences follow from this state of the case. Technology and
+industrial experience, in large volume and at a high proficiency, are
+indispensable to the conduct of war on the modern plan, as well as a
+large, efficient and up-to-date industrial community and industrial
+plant to supply the necessary material of this warfare. At the same time
+the discipline of the campaign, as it impinges on the rank and file as
+well as on the very numerous body of officers and technicians, is not at
+cross purposes with the ordinary industrial employments of peace, or not
+in the same degree as has been the case in the past, even in the recent
+past. The experience of the campaign does not greatly unfit the men who
+survive for industrial uses; nor does it come in as a sheer interruption
+of their industrial training, or break the continuity of that range of
+habits of thought which modern industry of the technological order
+induces; not in the same degree as was the case under the conditions of
+war as carried on in the nineteenth century. The cultural, and
+particularly the technological, incidence of this modern warfare should
+evidently be appreciably different from what has been experienced in the
+past, and from what this past experience has induced students of these
+matters to look for among the psychological effects of warlike
+experience.
+
+It remains true that the discipline of the campaign, however impersonal
+it may tend to become, still inculcates personal subordination and
+unquestioning obedience; and yet the modern tactics and methods of
+fighting bear somewhat more on the individual's initiative, discretion,
+sagacity and self-possession than once would have been true. Doubtless
+the men who come out of this great war, the common men, will bring home
+an accentuated and acrimonious patriotism, a venomous hatred of the
+enemies whom they have missed killing; but it may reasonably be doubted
+if they come away with a correspondingly heightened admiration and
+affection for their betters who have failed to make good as foremen in
+charge of this teamwork in killing. The years of the war have been
+trying to the reputation of officials and officers, who have had to meet
+uncharted exigencies with not much better chance of guessing the way
+through than their subalterns have had.
+
+By and large, it is perhaps not to be doubted that the populace now
+under arms will return from the experience of the war with some net gain
+in loyalty to the nation's honour and in allegiance to their masters;
+particularly the German subjects,--the like is scarcely true for the
+British; but a doubt will present itself as to the magnitude of this net
+gain in subordination, or this net loss in self-possession. A doubt may
+be permitted as to whether the common man in the countries of the
+Imperial coalition, e.g., will, as the net outcome of this war
+experience, be in a perceptibly more pliable frame of mind as touches
+his obligations toward his betters and subservience to the irresponsible
+authority exercised by the various governmental agencies, than he was at
+the outbreak of the war. At that time, there is reason to believe, there
+was an ominous, though scarcely threatening, murmur of discontent
+beginning to be heard among the working classes of the industrial towns.
+It is fair to presume, however, that the servile discipline of the
+service and the vindictive patriotism bred of the fight should combine
+to render the populace of the Fatherland more amenable to the
+irresponsible rule of the Imperial dynasty and its subaltern royal
+establishments, in spite of any slight effect of a contrary character
+exercised by the training in technological methods and in self-reliance,
+with which this discipline of the service has been accompanied. As to
+the case of the British population, under arms or under compulsion of
+necessity at home, something has already been said in an earlier
+passage; and much will apparently depend, in their case, on the further
+duration of the war. The case of the other nationalities involved, both
+neutrals and belligerents, is even more obscure in this bearing, but it
+is also of less immediate consequence for the present argument.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The essentially feudal virtues of loyalty and bellicose patriotism would
+appear to have gained their great ascendency over all men's spirit
+within the Western civilisation by force of the peculiarly consistent
+character of the discipline of life under feudal conditions, whether in
+war or peace; and to the same uniformity of these forces that shaped the
+workday habits of thought among the feudal nations is apparently due
+that profound institutionalisation of the preconceptions of patriotism
+and loyalty, by force of which these preconceptions still hold the
+modern peoples in an unbreakable web of prejudice, after the conditions
+favoring their acquirement have in great part ceased to operate. These
+preconceptions of national solidarity and international enmity have come
+down from the past as an integral part of the unwritten constitution
+underlying all these modern nations, even those which have departed most
+widely from the manner of life to which the peoples owe these ancient
+preconceptions. Hitherto, or rather until recent times, the workday
+experience of these peoples has not seriously worked at cross purposes
+with the patriotic spirit and its bias of national animosity; and what
+discrepancy there has effectively been between the discipline of workday
+life and the received institutional preconceptions on this head, has
+hitherto been overborne by the unremitting inculcation of these virtues
+by interested politicians, priests and publicists, who speak habitually
+for the received order of things.
+
+That order of things which is known on its political and civil side as
+the feudal system, together with that era of the dynastic States which
+succeeds the feudal age technically so called, was, on its industrial or
+technological side, a system of trained man-power organised on a plan of
+subordination of man to man. On the whole, the scheme and logic of that
+life, whether in its political (warlike) or its industrial doings,
+whether in war or peace, runs on terms of personal capacity, proficiency
+and relations. The organisation of the forces engaged and the
+constraining rules according to which this organisation worked, were of
+the nature of personal relations, and the impersonal factors in the case
+were taken for granted. Politics and war were a field for personal
+valor, force and cunning, in practical effect a field for personal force
+and fraud. Industry was a field in which the routine of life, and its
+outcome, turned on "the skill, dexterity and judgment of the individual
+workman," in the words of Adam Smith.
+
+The feudal age passed, being done to death by handicraft industry,
+commercial traffic, gunpowder, and the state-making politicians. But the
+political States of the statemakers, the dynastic States as they may
+well be called, continued the conduct of political life on the personal
+plane of rivalry and jealousy between dynasties and between their
+States; and in spite of gunpowder and the new military engineering,
+warfare continued also to be, in the main and characteristically, a
+field in which man-power and personal qualities decided the outcome, by
+virtue of personal "skill, dexterity and judgment." Meantime industry
+and its technology by insensible degrees underwent a change in the
+direction of impersonalisation, particularly in those countries in which
+state-making and its warlike enterprise had ceased, or were ceasing, to
+be the chief interests and the controlling preconception of the people.
+
+The logic of the new, mechanical industry which has supplanted
+handicraft in these countries, is a mechanistic logic, which proceeds in
+terms of matter-of-fact strains, masses, velocities, and the like,
+instead of the "skill, dexterity and judgment" of personal agents. The
+new industry does not dispense with the personal agencies, nor can it
+even be said to minimise the need of skill, dexterity and judgment in
+the personal agents employed, but it does take them and their attributes
+for granted as in some sort a foregone premise to its main argument. The
+logic of the handicraft system took the impersonal agencies for granted;
+the machine industry takes the skill, dexterity and judgment of the
+workmen for granted. The processes of thought, and therefore the
+consistent habitual discipline, of the former ran in terms of the
+personal agents engaged, and of the personal relations of discretion,
+control and subordination necessary to the work; whereas the
+mechanistic logic of the modern technology, more and more consistently,
+runs in terms of the impersonal forces engaged, and inculcates an
+habitual predilection for matter-of-fact statement, and an habitual
+preconception that the findings of material science alone are
+conclusive.
+
+In those nations that have made up the advance guard of Western
+civilisation in its movement out of feudalism, the disintegrating effect
+of this matter-of-fact animus inculcated by the later state of the
+industrial arts has apparently acted effectively, in some degree, to
+discredit those preconceptions of personal discrimination on which
+dynastic rule is founded. But in no case has the discipline of this
+mechanistic technology yet wrought its perfect work or come to a
+definitive conclusion. Meantime war and politics have on the whole
+continued on the ancient plane; it may perhaps be fair to say that
+politics has so continued because warlike enterprise has continued still
+to be a matter of such personal forces as skill, dexterity and judgment,
+valor and cunning, personal force and fraud. Latterly, gradually, but
+increasingly, the technology of war, too, has been shifting to the
+mechanistic plane; until in the latest phases of it, somewhere about the
+turn of the century, it is evident that the logic of warfare too has
+come to be the same mechanistic logic that makes the modern state of the
+industrial arts.
+
+What, if anything, is due by consequence to overtake the political
+strategy and the political preconceptions of the new century, is a
+question that will obtrude itself, though with scant hope of finding a
+ready answer. It may even seem a rash, as well as an ungraceful,
+undertaking to inquire into the possible manner and degree of
+prospective decay to which the received political ideals and virtues
+would appear to be exposed by consequence of this derangement of the
+ancient discipline to which men have been subjected. So much, however,
+would seem evident, that the received virtues and ideals of patriotic
+animosity and national jealousy can best be guarded against untimely
+decay by resolutely holding to the formal observance of all outworn
+punctilios of national integrity and discrimination, in spite of their
+increasing disserviceability,--as would be done, e.g., or at least
+sought to be done, in the installation of a league of neutral nations to
+keep the peace and at the same time to safeguard those "national
+interests" whose only use is to divide these nations and keep them in a
+state of mutual envy and distrust.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Those peoples who are subject to the constraining governance of this
+modern state of the industrial arts, as all modern peoples are in much
+the same measure in which they are "modern," are, therefore, exposed to
+a workday discipline running at cross purposes with the received law and
+order as it takes effect in national affairs; and to this is to be added
+that, with warlike enterprise also shifted to this same
+mechanistic-technological ground, war can no longer be counted on so
+confidently as before to correct all the consequent drift away from the
+ancient landmarks of dynastic, pseudo-dynastic, and national enterprise
+in dominion.
+
+As has been noted above, modern warfare not only makes use of, and
+indeed depends on, the modern industrial technology at every turn of the
+operations in the field, but it draws on the ordinary industrial
+resources of the countries at war in a degree and with an urgency never
+equalled. No nation can hope to make a stand in modern warfare, much
+less to make headway in warlike enterprise, without the most
+thoroughgoing exploitation of the modern industrial arts. Which
+signifies for the purpose in hand that any Power that harbors an
+imperial ambition must take measures to let its underlying population
+acquire the ways and means of the modern machine industry, without
+reservation; which in turn signifies that popular education must be
+taken care of to such an extent as may be serviceable in this manner of
+industry and in the manner of life which this industrial system
+necessarily imposes; which signifies, of course, that only the
+thoroughly trained and thoroughly educated nations have a chance of
+holding their place as formidable Powers in this latterday phase of
+civilisation. What is needed is the training and education that go to
+make proficiency in the modern fashion of technology and in those
+material sciences that conduce to technological proficiency of this
+modern order. It is a matter of course that in these premises any
+appreciable illiteracy is an intolerable handicap. So is also any
+training which discourages habitual self-reliance and initiative, or
+which acts as a check on skepticism; for the skeptical frame of mind is
+a necessary part of the intellectual equipment that makes for advance,
+invention and understanding in the field of technological proficiency.
+
+But these requirements, imperatively necessary as a condition of warlike
+success, are at cross purposes with that unquestioning respect of
+persons and that spirit of abnegation that alone can hold a people to
+the political institutions of the old order and make them a willing
+instrument in the hands of the dynastic statesmen. The dynastic State is
+apparently caught in a dilemma. The necessary preparation for warlike
+enterprise on the modern plan can apparently be counted on, in the long
+run, to disintegrate the foundations of the dynastic State. But it is
+only in the long run that this effect can be counted on; and it is
+perhaps not securely to be counted on even in a moderately long run of
+things as they have run hitherto, if due precautions are taken by the
+interested statesmen,--as would seem to be indicated by the successful
+conservation of archaic traits in the German peoples during the past
+half century under the archaising rule of the Hohenzollern. It is a
+matter of habituation, which takes time, and which can at the same time
+be neutralised in some degree by indoctrination.
+
+Still, when all is told, it will probably have to be conceded that,
+e.g., such a nation as Russia will fall under this rule of inherent
+disability imposed by the necessary use of the modern industrial arts.
+Without a fairly full and free command of these modern industrial
+methods on the part of the Russian people, together with the virtual
+disappearance of illiteracy, and with the facile and far-reaching system
+of communication which it all involves, the Russian Imperial
+establishment would not be a formidable power or a serious menace to the
+pacific nations; and it is not easy to imagine how the Imperial
+establishment could retain its hold and its character under the
+conditions indicated.
+
+The case of Japan, taken by itself, rests on somewhat similar lines as
+these others. In time, and in this case the time-allowance should
+presumably not be anything very large, the Japanese people are likely to
+get an adequate command of the modern technology; which would, here as
+elsewhere, involve the virtual disappearance of the present high
+illiteracy, and the loss, in some passable measure, of the current
+superstitiously crass nationalism of that people. There are indications
+that something of that kind, and of quite disquieting dimensions, is
+already under way; though with no indication that any consequent
+disintegrating habits of thought have yet invaded the sacred close of
+Japanese patriotic devotion.
+
+Again, it is a question of time and habituation. With time and
+habituation the emperor may insensibly cease to be of divine pedigree,
+and the syndicate of statesmen who are doing business under his
+signature may consequently find their measures of Imperial expansion
+questioned by the people who pay the bills. But so long as the Imperial
+syndicate enjoy their present immunity from outside obstruction, and can
+accordingly carry on an uninterrupted campaign of cumulative predation
+in Korea, China and Manchuria, the patriotic infatuation is less likely
+to fall off, and by so much the decay of Japanese loyalty will be
+retarded. Yet, even if allowed anything that may seem at all probable in
+the way of a free hand for aggression against their hapless neighbours,
+the skepticism and insubordination to personal rule that seems
+inseparable in the long run from addiction to the modern industrial arts
+should be expected presently to overtake the Japanese spirit of loyal
+servitude. And the opportunity of Imperial Japan lies in the interval.
+So also does the menace of Imperial Japan as a presumptive disturber of
+the peace at large.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the cost of some unavoidable tedium, the argument as regards these
+and similar instances may be summarised. It appears, in the (possibly
+doubtful) light of the history of democratic institutions and of modern
+technology hitherto, as also from the logical character of this
+technology and its underlying material sciences, that consistent
+addiction to the peculiar habits of thought involved in its carrying on
+will presently induce a decay of those preconceptions in which dynastic
+government and national ambitions have their ground. Continued addiction
+to this modern scheme of industrial life should in time eventuate in a
+decay of militant nationalism, with a consequent lapse of warlike
+enterprise. At the same time, popular proficiency in the modern
+industrial arts, with all that that implies in the way of intelligence
+and information, is indispensable as a means to any successful warlike
+enterprise on the modern plan. The menace of warlike aggression from
+such dynastic States, e.g., as Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan is
+due to their having acquired a competent use of this modern technology,
+while they have not yet had time to lose that spirit of dynastic loyalty
+which they have carried over from an archaic order of things, out of
+which they have emerged at a very appreciably later period (last half of
+the nineteenth century) than those democratic peoples whose peace they
+now menace. As has been said, they have taken over this modern state of
+the industrial arts without having yet come in for the defects of its
+qualities. This modern technology, with its underlying material
+sciences, is a novel factor in the history of human culture, in that
+addiction to its use conduces to the decay of militant patriotism, at
+the same time that its employment so greatly enhances the warlike
+efficiency of even a pacific people, at need, that they can not be
+seriously molested by any other peoples, however valorous and numerous,
+who have not a competent use of this technology. A peace at large among
+the civilised nations, by loss of the militant temper through addiction
+to this manner of arts of peace, therefore, carries no risk of
+interruption by an inroad of warlike barbarians,--always provided that
+those existing archaic peoples who might pass muster as barbarians are
+brought into line with the pacific nations on a footing of peace and
+equality. The disparity in point of outlook as between the resulting
+peace at large by neglect of bootless animosities, on the one hand, and
+those historic instances of a peaceable civilisation that have been
+overwhelmed by warlike barbarian invasions, on the other hand, should be
+evident.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is always possible, indeed it would scarcely be surprising to find,
+that the projected league of neutrals or of nations bent on peace can
+not be brought to realisation at this juncture; perhaps not for a long
+time yet. But it should at the same time seem reasonable to expect that
+the drift toward a peaceable settlement of national discrepancies such
+as has been visible in history for some appreciable time past will, in
+the absence of unforeseen hindrances, work out to some such effect in
+the course of further experience under modern conditions. And whether
+the projected peace compact at its inception takes one form or another,
+provided it succeeds in its main purpose, the long-term drift of things
+under its rule should logically set toward some ulterior settlement of
+the general character of what has here been spoken of as a peace by
+neglect or by neutralisation of discrepancies.
+
+It should do so, in the absence of unforeseen contingencies; more
+particularly if there were no effectual factor of dissension included in
+the fabric of institutions within the nation. But there should also,
+e.g., be no difficulty in assenting to the forecast that when and if
+national peace and security are achieved and settled beyond recall, the
+discrepancy in fact between those who own the country's wealth and those
+who do not is presently due to come to an issue. Any attempt to forecast
+the form which this issue is to take, or the manner, incidents,
+adjuncts and sequelae of its determination, would be a bolder and a more
+ambiguous, undertaking. Hitherto attempts to bring this question to an
+issue have run aground on the real or fancied jeopardy to paramount
+national interests. How, if at all, this issue might affect national
+interests and international relations, would obviously depend in the
+first instance on the state of the given national establishment and the
+character of the international engagements entered into in the formation
+of this projected pacific league. It is always conceivable that the
+transactions involving so ubiquitous an issue might come to take on an
+international character and that they might touch the actual or fanciful
+interests of these diverse nations with such divergent effect as to
+bring on a rupture of the common understanding between them and of the
+peace-compact in which the common understanding is embodied.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the beginning, that is to say in the beginnings out of which this
+modern era of the Western civilisation has arisen, with its scheme of
+law and custom, there grew into the scheme of law and custom, by settled
+usage, a right of ownership and of contract in disposal of
+ownership,--which may or may not have been a salutary institutional
+arrangement on the whole, under the circumstances of the early days.
+With the later growth of handicraft and the petty trade in Western
+Europe this right of ownership and contract came to be insisted on,
+standardised under legal specifications, and secured against molestation
+by the governmental interests; more particularly and scrupulously among
+those peoples that have taken the lead in working out that system of
+free or popular institutions that marks the modern civilised nations. So
+it has come to be embodied in the common law of the modern world as an
+inviolable natural right. It has all the prescriptive force of legally
+authenticated immemorial custom.
+
+Under the system of handicraft and petty trade this right of property
+and free contract served the interest of the common man, at least in
+much of its incidence, and acted in its degree to shelter industrious
+and economical persons from hardship and indignity at the hands of their
+betters. There seems reason to believe, as is commonly believed, that so
+long as that relatively direct and simple scheme of industry and trade
+lasted, the right of ownership and contract was a salutary custom, in
+its bearing on the fortunes of the common man. It appears also, on the
+whole, to have been favorable to the fuller development of the
+handicraft technology, as well as to its eventual outgrowth into the new
+line of technological expedients and contrivances that presently gave
+rise to the machine industry and the large-scale business enterprise.
+
+The standard theories of economic science have assumed the rights of
+property and contract as axiomatic premises and ultimate terms of
+analysis; and their theories are commonly drawn in such a form as would
+fit the circumstances of the handicraft industry and the petty trade,
+and such as can be extended to any other economic situation by shrewd
+interpretation. These theories, as they run from Adam Smith down through
+the nineteenth century and later, appear tenable, on the whole, when
+taken to apply to the economic situation of that earlier time, in
+virtually all that they have to say on questions of wages, capital,
+savings, and the economy and efficiency of management and production by
+the methods of private enterprise resting on these rights of ownership
+and contract and governed by the pursuit of private gain. It is when
+these standard theories are sought to be applied to the later situation,
+which has outgrown the conditions of handicraft, that they appear
+nugatory or meretricious. The "competitive system" which these standard
+theories assume as a necessary condition of their own validity, and
+about which they are designed to form a defensive hedge, would, under
+those earlier conditions of small-scale enterprise and personal contact,
+appear to have been both a passably valid assumption as a premise and a
+passably expedient scheme of economic relations and traffic. At that
+period of its life-history it can not be said consistently to have
+worked hardship to the common man; rather the reverse. And the common
+man in that time appears to have had no misgivings about the excellence
+of the scheme or of that article of Natural Rights that underlies it.
+
+This complexion of things, as touches the effectual bearing of the
+institution of property and the ancient customary rights of ownership,
+has changed substantially since the time of Adam Smith. The "competitive
+system," which he looked to as the economic working-out of that "simple
+and obvious system of natural liberty" that always engaged his best
+affections, has in great measure ceased to operate as a routine of
+natural liberty, in fact; particularly in so far as touches the fortunes
+of the common man, the impecunious mass of the people. _De jure_, of
+course, the competitive system and its inviolable rights of ownership
+are a citadel of Natural Liberty; but _de facto_ the common man is now,
+and has for some time been, feeling the pinch of it. It is law, and
+doubtless it is good law, grounded in immemorial usage and authenticated
+with statute and precedent. But circumstances have so changed that this
+good old plan has in a degree become archaic, perhaps unprofitable, or
+even mischievous, on the whole, and especially as touches the conditions
+of life for the common man. At least, so the common man in these modern
+democratic and commercial countries is beginning to apprehend the
+matter.
+
+Some slight and summary characterisation of these changing circumstances
+that have affected the incidence of the rights of property during modern
+times may, therefore, not be out of place; with a view to seeing how far
+and why these rights may be due to come under advisement and possible
+revision, in case a state of settled peace should leave men's attention
+free to turn to these internal, as contrasted with national interests.
+
+Under that order of handicraft and petty trade that led to the
+standardisation of these rights of ownership in the accentuated form
+which belongs to them in modern law and custom, the common man had a
+practicable chance of free initiative and self-direction in his choice
+and pursuit of an occupation and a livelihood, in so far as rights of
+ownership bore on his case. At that period the workman was the main
+factor in industry and, in the main and characteristically, the question
+of his employment was a question of what he would do. The material
+equipment of industry--the "plant," as it has come to be called--was
+subject of ownership, then as now; but it was then a secondary factor
+and, notoriously, subsidiary to the immaterial equipment of skill,
+dexterity and judgment embodied in the person of the craftsman. The body
+of information, or general knowledge, requisite to a workmanlike
+proficiency as handicraftsman was sufficiently slight and simple to fall
+within the ordinary reach of the working class, without special
+schooling; and the material equipment necessary to the work, in the way
+of tools and appliances, was also slight enough, ordinarily, to bring it
+within the reach of the common man. The stress fell on the acquirement
+of that special personal skill, dexterity and judgment that would
+constitute the workman a master of his craft. Given a reasonable measure
+of pertinacity, the common man would be able to compass the material
+equipment needful to the pursuit of his craft, and so could make his way
+to a livelihood; and the inviolable right of ownership would then serve
+to secure him the product of his own industry, in provision for his own
+old-age and for a fair start in behalf of his children. At least in the
+popular conception, and presumably in some degree also in fact, the
+right of property so served as a guarantee of personal liberty and a
+basis of equality. And so its apologists still look on the institution.
+
+In a very appreciable degree this complexion of things and of popular
+conceptions has changed since then; although, as would be expected, the
+change in popular conceptions has not kept pace with the changing
+circumstances. In all the characteristic and controlling lines of
+industry the modern machine technology calls for a very considerable
+material equipment; so large an equipment, indeed, that this plant, as
+it is called, always represents a formidable amount of invested wealth;
+and also so large that it will, typically, employ a considerable number
+of workmen per unit of plant. On the transition to the machine
+technology the plant became the unit of operation, instead of the
+workman, as had previously been the case; and with the further
+development of this modern technology, during the past hundred and fifty
+years or so, the unit of operation and control has increasingly come to
+be not the individual or isolated plant but rather an articulated group
+of such plants working together as a balanced system and keeping pace in
+common, under a collective business management; and coincidently the
+individual workman has been falling into the position of an auxiliary
+factor, nearly into that of an article of supply, to be charged up as an
+item of operating expenses. Under this later and current system,
+discretion and initiative vest not in the workman but in the owners of
+the plant, if anywhere. So that at this point the right of ownership has
+ceased to be, in fact, a guarantee of personal liberty to the common
+man, and has come to be, or is coming to be, a guarantee of dependence.
+All of which engenders a feeling of unrest and insecurity, such as to
+instill a doubt in the mind of the common man as to the continued
+expediency of this arrangement and of the prescriptive rights of
+property on which the arrangement rests.
+
+There is also an insidious suggestion, carrying a sinister note of
+discredit, that comes in from ethnological science at this point; which
+is adapted still further to derange the common man's faith in this
+received institution of ownership and its control of the material
+equipment of industry. To students interested in human culture it is a
+matter of course that this material equipment is a means of utilising
+the state of the industrial arts; that it is useful in industry and
+profitable to its owners only because and in so far as it is a creation
+of the current technological knowledge and enables its owner to
+appropriate the usufruct of the current industrial arts. It is likewise
+a matter of course that this technological knowledge, that so enables
+the material equipment to serve the purposes of production and of
+private gain, is a free gift of the community at large to the owners of
+industrial plant; and, under latterday conditions, to them exclusively.
+The state of the industrial arts is a joint heritage of the community at
+large, but where, as in the modern countries, the work to be done by
+this technology requires a large material equipment, the usufruct of
+this joint heritage passes, in effect, into the hands of the owners of
+this large material equipment.
+
+These owners have, ordinarily, contributed nothing to the technology,
+the state of the industrial arts, from which their control of the
+material equipment of industry enables them to derive a gain. Indeed, no
+class or condition of men in the modern community--with the possible
+exception of politicians and the clergy--can conceivably contribute less
+to the community's store of technological knowledge than the large
+owners of invested wealth. By one of those singular inversions due to
+production being managed for private gain, it happens that these
+investors are not only not given to the increase and diffusion of
+technological knowledge, but they have a well-advised interest in
+retarding or defeating improvements in the industrial arts in detail.
+Improvements, innovations that heighten productive efficiency in the
+general line of production in which a given investment is placed, are
+commonly to be counted on to bring "obsolescence by supersession" to the
+plant already engaged in that line; and therefore to bring a decline in
+its income-yielding capacity, and so in its capital or investment value.
+
+Invested capital yields income because it enjoys the usufruct of the
+community's technological knowledge; it has an effectual monopoly of
+this usufruct because this machine technology requires large material
+appliances with which to do its work; the interest of the owners of
+established industrial plant will not tolerate innovations designed to
+supersede these appliances. The bearing of ownership on industry and on
+the fortunes of the common man is accordingly, in the main, the bearing
+which it has by virtue of its monopoly control of the industrial arts,
+and its consequent control of the conditions of employment and of the
+supply of vendible products. It takes effect chiefly by inhibition and
+privation; stoppage of production in case it brings no suitable profit
+to the investor, refusal of employment and of a livelihood to the
+workmen in case their product does not command a profitable price in the
+market.
+
+The expediency of so having the nation's industry managed on a footing
+of private ownership in the pursuit of private gain, by persons who can
+show no equitable personal claim to even the most modest livelihood, and
+whose habitual method of controlling industry is sabotage--refusal to
+let production go on except it affords them an unearned income--the
+expediency of all this is coming to be doubted by those who have to pay
+the cost of it. And it does not go far to lessen their doubts to find
+that the cost which they pay is commonly turned to no more urgent or
+useful purpose than a conspicuously wasteful consumption of
+superfluities by the captains of sabotage and their domestic
+establishments.
+
+This may not seem a veracious and adequate account of these matters; it
+may, in effect, fall short of the formulation: The truth, the whole
+truth, and nothing but the truth; nor does the question here turn on its
+adequacy as a statement of fact. Without prejudice to the question of
+its veracity and adequacy, it is believed to be such an account of these
+matters as will increasingly come easy and seem convincing to the common
+man who, in an ever increasing degree, finds himself pinched with
+privation and insecurity by a run of facts which will consistently bear
+this construction, and who perforce sees these facts from the prejudiced
+standpoint of a loser. To such a one, there is reason to believe, the
+view so outlined will seem all the more convincing the more attentively
+the pertinent facts and their bearing on his fortunes are considered.
+How far the contrary prejudice of those whose interest or training
+inclines them the other way may lead them to a different construction of
+these pertinent facts, does not concern the present argument; which has
+to do with this run of facts only as they bear on the prospective frame
+of mind of that unblest mass of the population who will have opportunity
+to present their proposals when peace at large shall have put national
+interests out of their preferential place in men's regard.
+
+At the risk of what may seem an excessively wide digression, there is
+something further to be said of the capitalistic sabotage spoken of
+above. The word has by usage come to have an altogether ungraceful air
+of disapproval. Yet it signifies nothing more vicious than a deliberate
+obstruction or retardation of industry, usually by legitimate means, for
+the sake of some personal or partisan advantage. This morally colorless
+meaning is all that is intended in its use here. It is extremely common
+in all industry that is designed to supply merchantable goods for the
+market. It is, in fact, the most ordinary and ubiquitous of all
+expedients in business enterprise that has to do with supplying the
+market, being always present in the businessman's necessary
+calculations; being not only a usual and convenient recourse but quite
+indispensable as an habitual measure of business sagacity. So that no
+personal blame can attach to its employment by any given businessman or
+business concern. It is only when measures of this nature are resorted
+to by employees, to gain some end of their own, that such conduct
+becomes (technically) reprehensible.
+
+Any businesslike management of industry is carried on for gain, which is
+to be got only on condition of meeting the terms of the market. The
+price system under which industrial business is carried on will not
+tolerate production in excess of the market demand, or without due
+regard to the expenses of production as determined by the market on the
+side of the supplies required. Hence any business concern must adjust
+its operations, by due acceleration, retardation or stoppage, to the
+market conditions, with a view to what the traffic will bear; that is to
+say, with a view to what will yield the largest obtainable net gain. So
+long as the price system rules, that is to say so long as industry is
+managed on investment for a profit, there is no escaping this necessity
+of adjusting the processes of industry to the requirements of a
+remunerative price; and this adjustment can be taken care of only by
+well-advised acceleration or curtailment of the processes of industry;
+which answers to the definition of sabotage. Wise business management,
+and more particularly what is spoken of as safe and sane business
+management, therefore, reduces itself in the main to a sagacious use of
+sabotage; that is to say a sagacious limitation of productive processes
+to something less than the productive capacity of the means in hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To anyone who is inclined to see these matters of usage in the light of
+their history and to appraise them as phenomena of habituation,
+adaptation and supersession in the sequence of cultural proliferation,
+there should be no difficulty in appreciating that this institution of
+ownership that makes the core of the modern institutional structure is
+a precipitate of custom, like any other item of use and wont; and that,
+like any other article of institutional furniture, it is subject to the
+contingencies of supersession and obsolescence. If prevalent habits of
+thought, enforced by the prevalent exigencies of life and livelihood,
+come to change in such a way as to make life under the rule imposed by
+this institution seem irksome, or intolerable, to the mass of the
+population; and if at the same time things turn in such a way as to
+leave no other and more urgent interest or exigency to take precedence
+of this one and hinder its being pushed to an issue; then it should
+reasonably follow that contention is due to arise between the unblest
+mass on whose life it is a burden and the classes who live by it. But it
+is, of course, impossible to state beforehand what will be the precise
+line of cleavage or what form the division between the two parties in
+interest will take. Yet it is contained in the premises that, barring
+unforeseen contingencies of a formidable magnitude, such a cleavage is
+due to follow as a logical sequel of an enduring peace at large. And it
+is also well within the possibilities of the case that this issue may
+work into an interruption or disruption of the peace between the
+nations.
+
+In this connection it may be called to mind that the existing
+governmental establishments in these pacific nations are, in all cases,
+in the hands of the beneficiary, or kept classes,--beneficiaries in the
+sense in which a distinction to that effect comes into the premises of
+the case at this point. The responsible officials and their chief
+administrative officers,--so much as may at all reasonably be called the
+"Government" or the "Administration,"--are quite invariably and
+characteristically drawn from these beneficiary classes; nobles,
+gentlemen, or business men, which all comes to the same thing for the
+purpose in hand; the point of it all being that the common man does not
+come within these precincts and does not share in these counsels that
+assume to guide the destiny of the nations.
+
+Of course, sporadically and ephemerally, a man out of the impecunious
+and undistinguished mass may now and again find his way within the
+gates; and more frequently will a professed "Man of the People" sit in
+council. But that the rule holds unbroken and inviolable is sufficiently
+evident in the fact that no community will let the emoluments of office
+for any of its responsible officials, even for those of a very scant
+responsibility, fall to the level of the habitual livelihood of the
+undistinguished populace, or indeed to fall below what is esteemed to be
+a seemly income for a gentleman. Should such an impecunious one be
+thrown up into a place of discretion in the government, he will
+forthwith cease to be a common man and will be inducted into the rank of
+gentleman,--so far as that feat can be achieved by taking thought or by
+assigning him an income adequate to a reputably expensive manner of
+life. So obvious is the antagonism between a vulgar station in life and
+a position of official trust, that many a "selfmade man" has advisedly
+taken recourse to governmental position, often at some appreciable cost,
+from no apparent motive other than its known efficacy as a Levitical
+corrective for a humble origin. And in point of fact, neither here nor
+there have the underbred majority hitherto learned to trust one of their
+own kind with governmental discretion; which has never yet, in the
+popular conviction, ceased to be a perquisite of the gently-bred and the
+well-to-do.
+
+Let it be presumed that this state of things will continue without
+substantial alteration, so far as regards the complexion of the
+governmental establishments of these pacific nations, and with such
+allowance for overstatement in the above characterisation as may seem
+called for. These governmental establishments are, by official position
+and by the character of their personnel, committed more or less
+consistently to the maintenance of the existing law and order. And
+should no substantial change overtake them as an effect of the war
+experience, the pacific league under discussion would be entered into by
+and between governments of this complexion. Should difficulties then
+arise between those who own and those who do not, in any one of these
+countries, it would become a nice question whether the compact to
+maintain the peace and national integrity of the several nations
+comprised in the league should be held to cover the case of internal
+dissensions and possible disorders partaking of the character of revolt
+against the established authorities or against the established
+provisions of law. A strike of the scope and character of the one
+recently threatened, and narrowly averted, on the American railroads,
+e.g., might easily give rise to disturbances sufficiently formidable to
+raise a question of the peace league's jurisdiction; particularly if
+such a disturbance should arise in a less orderly and less isolated
+country than the American republic; so as unavoidably to carry the
+effects of the disturbance across the national frontiers along the lines
+of industrial and commercial intercourse and correlation. It is always
+conceivable that a national government standing on a somewhat
+conservative maintenance of the received law and order might feel itself
+bound by its conception of the peace to make common cause with the
+keepers of established rights in neighboring states, particularly if
+the similar interests of their own nation were thought to be placed in
+jeopardy by the course of events.
+
+Antecedently it seems highly probable that the received rights of
+ownership and disposal of property, particularly of investment, will
+come up for advisement and revision so soon as a settled state of peace
+is achieved. And there should seem to be little doubt but this revision
+would go toward, or at least aim at the curtailment or abrogation of
+these rights; very much after the fashion in which the analogous vested
+rights of feudalism and the dynastic monarchy have been revised and in
+great part curtailed or abrogated in the advanced democratic countries.
+Not much can confidently be said as to the details of such a prospective
+revision of legal rights, but the analogy of that procedure by which
+these other vested rights have been reduced to a manageable disability,
+suggests that the method in the present case also would be by way of
+curtailment, abrogation and elimination. Here again, as in analogous
+movements of disuse and disestablishment, there would doubtless be much
+conservative apprehension as to the procuring of a competent substitute
+for the supplanted methods of doing what is no longer desirable to be
+done; but here as elsewhere, in a like conjuncture, the practicable way
+out would presumably be found to lie along the line of simple disuse and
+disallowance of class prerogative. Taken at its face value, without
+unavoidable prejudice out of the past, this question of a substitute to
+replace the current exploitation of the industrial arts for private gain
+by capitalistic sabotage is not altogether above a suspicion of
+drollery.
+
+Yet it is not to be overlooked that private enterprise on the basis of
+private ownership is the familiar and accepted method of conducting
+industrial affairs, and that it has the sanction of immemorial usage, in
+the eyes of the common man, and that it is reenforced with the urgency
+of life and death in the apprehension of the kept classes. It should
+accordingly be a possible outcome of such a peace as would put away
+international dissension, that the division of classes would come on in
+a new form, between those who stand on their ancient rights of
+exploitation and mastery, and those who are unwilling longer to submit.
+And it is quite within the possibilities of the case that the division
+of opinion on these matters might presently shift back to the old
+familiar ground of international hostilities; undertaken partly to put
+down civil disturbances in given countries, partly by the more archaic,
+or conservative, peoples to safeguard the institutions of the received
+law and order against inroads from the side of the iconoclastic ones.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the apprehension of those who are speaking for peace between the
+nations and planning for its realisation, the outlook is that of a
+return to, or a continuance of, the state of things before the great war
+came on, with peace and national security added, or with the danger of
+war eliminated. Nothing appreciable in the way of consequent innovation,
+certainly nothing of a serious character, is contemplated as being among
+the necessary consequences of such a move into peace and security.
+National integrity and autonomy are to be preserved on the received
+lines, and international division and discrimination is to be managed as
+before, and with the accustomed incidents of punctilio and pecuniary
+equilibration. Internationally speaking, there is to dawn an era of
+diplomacy without afterthought, whatever that might conceivably mean.
+
+There is much in the present situation that speaks for such an
+arrangement, particularly as an initial phase of the perpetual peace
+that is aimed at, whatever excursive variations might befall presently,
+in the course of years. The war experience in the belligerent countries
+and the alarm that has disturbed the neutral nations have visibly raised
+the pitch of patriotic solidarity in all these countries; and patriotism
+greatly favors the conservation of established use and wont; more
+particularly is it favorable to the established powers and policies of
+the national government. The patriotic spirit is not a spirit of
+innovation. The chances of survival, and indeed of stabilisation, for
+the accepted use and wont and for the traditional distinctions of class
+and prescriptive rights, should therefore seem favorable, at any rate in
+the first instance.
+
+Presuming, therefore, as the spokesmen of such a peace-compact are
+singularly ready to presume, that the era of peace and good-will which
+they have in view is to be of a piece with the most tranquil decades of
+the recent past, only more of the same kind, it becomes a question of
+immediate interest to the common man, as well as to all students of
+human culture, how the common man is to fare under this regime of law
+and order,--the mass of the population whose place it is to do what is
+to be done, and thereby to carry forward the civilisation of these
+pacific nations. It may not be out of place to recall, by way of
+parenthesis, that it is here taken for granted as a matter of course
+that all governmental establishments are necessarily conservative in all
+their dealings with this heritage of culture, except so far as they may
+be reactionary. Their office is the stabilisation of archaic
+institutions, the measure of archaism varying from one to another.
+
+With due stabilisation and with a sagacious administration of the
+established scheme of law and order, the common man should find himself
+working under conditions and to results of the familiar kind; but with
+the difference that, while legal usage and legal precedent remain
+unchanged, the state of the industrial arts can confidently be expected
+to continue its advance in the same general direction as before, while
+the population increases after the familiar fashion, and the investing
+business community pursues its accustomed quest of competitive gain and
+competitive spending in the familiar spirit and with cumulatively
+augmented means. Stabilisation of the received law and order will not
+touch these matters; and for the present it is assumed that these
+matters will not derange the received law and order. The assumption may
+seem a violent one to the students of human culture, but it is a simple
+matter of course to the statesmen.
+
+To this piping time of peace the nearest analogues in history would seem
+to be the Roman peace, say, of the days of the Antonines, and passably
+the British peace of the Victorian era. Changes in the scheme of law and
+order supervened in both of these instances, but the changes were, after
+all, neither unconscionably large nor were they of a subversive nature.
+The scheme of law and order, indeed, appears in neither instance to have
+changed so far as the altered circumstances would seem to have called
+for. To the common man the Roman peace appears to have been a peace by
+submission, not widely different from what the case of China has
+latterly brought to the appreciation of students. The Victorian peace,
+which can be appreciated more in detail, was of a more genial character,
+as regards the fortunes of the common man. It started from a reasonably
+low level of hardship and _de facto_ iniquity, and was occupied with
+many prudent endeavours to improve the lot of the unblest majority; but
+it is to be admitted that these prudent endeavours never caught up with
+the march of circumstances. Not that these prudent measures of
+amelioration were nugatory, but it is clear that they were not an
+altogether effectual corrective of the changes going on; they were, in
+effect, systematically so far in arrears as always to leave an uncovered
+margin of discontent with current conditions. It is a fact of history
+that very appreciable sections of the populace were approaching an
+attitude of revolt against what they considered to be intolerable
+conditions when that era closed. Much of what kept them within bounds,
+that is to say within legal bounds, was their continued loyalty to the
+nation; which was greatly, and for the purpose needfully, reenforced by
+a lively fear of warlike aggression from without. Now, under the
+projected _pax orbis terrarum_ all fear of invasion, it is hopefully
+believed, will be removed; and with the disappearance of this fear
+should also disappear the drag of national loyalty on the counsels of
+the underbred.
+
+If this British peace of the nineteenth century is to be taken as a
+significant indication of what may be looked for under a regime of peace
+at large, with due allowance for what is obviously necessary to be
+allowed for, then what is held in promise would appear to be an era of
+unexampled commercial prosperity, of investment and business enterprise
+on a scale hitherto not experienced. These developments will bring their
+necessary consequences affecting the life of the community, and some of
+the consequences it should be possible to foresee. The circumstances
+conditioning this prospective era of peace and prosperity will
+necessarily differ from the corresponding circumstances that
+conditioned the Victorian peace, and many of these points of difference
+it is also possible to forecast in outline with a fair degree of
+confidence. It is in the main these economic factors going to condition
+the civilisation of the promised future that will have to be depended on
+to give the cue to any student interested in the prospective unfolding
+of events.
+
+The scheme of law and order governing all modern nations, both in the
+conduct of their domestic affairs and in their national policies, is in
+its controlling elements the scheme worked out through British (and
+French) experience in the eighteenth century and earlier, as revised and
+further accommodated in the nineteenth century. Other peoples,
+particularly the Dutch, have of course had their part in the derivation
+and development of this modern scheme of institutional principles, but
+it has after all been a minor part; so that the scheme at large would
+not differ very materially, if indeed it should differ sensibly, from
+what it is, even if the contribution of these others had not been had.
+The backward nations, as e.g., Germany, Russia, Spain, etc., have of
+course contributed substantially nothing but retardation and
+maladjustment to this modern scheme of civil life; whatever may be due
+to students resident in those countries, in the way of scholarly
+formulation. This nineteenth century scheme it is proposed to carry over
+into the new era; and the responsible spokesmen of the projected new
+order appear to contemplate no provision touching this scheme of law and
+order, beyond the keeping of it intact in all substantial respects.
+
+When and in so far as the projected peace at large takes effect,
+international interests will necessarily fall somewhat into the
+background, as being no longer a matter of precarious equilibration,
+with heavy penalties in the balance; and diplomacy will consequently
+become even more of a make-believe than today--something after the
+fashion of a game of bluff played with irredeemable "chips." Commercial,
+that is to say business, enterprise will consequently come in for a more
+undivided attention and be carried on under conditions of greater
+security and of more comprehensive trade relations. The population of
+the pacified world may be expected to go on increasing somewhat as in
+the recent past; in which connection it is to be remarked that not more
+than one-half, presumably something less than one-half, of the available
+agricultural resources have been turned to account for the civilised
+world hitherto. The state of the industrial arts, including means of
+transport and communication, may be expected to develop farther in the
+same general direction as before, assuming always that peace conditions
+continue to hold. Popular intelligence, as it is called,--more properly
+popular education,--may be expected to suffer a further advance;
+necessarily so, since it is a necessary condition of any effectual
+advance in the industrial arts,--every appreciable technological advance
+presumes, as a requisite to its working-out in industry, an augmented
+state of information and of logical facility in the workmen under whose
+hands it is to take effect.
+
+Of the prescriptive rights carried over into the new era, under the
+received law and order, the rights of ownership alone may be expected to
+have any material significance for the routine of workday life; the
+other personal rights that once seemed urgent will for everyday purposes
+have passed into a state of half-forgotten matter-of-course. As now, but
+in an accentuated degree, the rights of ownership will, in effect,
+coincide and coalesce with the rights of investment and business
+management. The market--that is to say the rule of the price-system in
+all matters of production and livelihood--may be expected to gain in
+volume and inclusiveness; so that virtually all matters of industry and
+livelihood will turn on questions of market price, even beyond the
+degree in which that proposition holds today. The progressive extension
+and consolidation of investments, corporate solidarity, and business
+management may be expected to go forward on the accustomed lines, as
+illustrated by the course of things during the past few decades. Market
+conditions should accordingly, in a progressively increased degree, fall
+under the legitimate discretionary control of businessmen, or syndicates
+of businessmen, who have the disposal of large blocks of invested
+wealth,--"big business," as it is called, should reasonably be expected
+to grow bigger and to exercise an increasingly more unhampered control
+of market conditions, including the money market and the labor market.
+
+With such improvements in the industrial arts as may fairly be expected
+to come forward, and with the possible enhancement of industrial
+efficiency which should follow from a larger scale of organisation, a
+wider reach of transport and communication, and an increased
+population,--with these increasing advantages on the side of productive
+industry, the per-capita product as well as the total product should be
+increased in a notable degree, and the conditions of life should
+possibly become notably easier and more attractive, or at least more
+conducive to efficiency and personal comfort, for all concerned. Such
+would be the first and unguarded inference to be drawn from the premises
+of the case as they offer themselves in the large; and something of that
+kind is apparently what floats before the prophetic vision of the
+advocates of a league of nations for the maintenance of peace at large.
+These premises, and the inferences so drawn from them, may be further
+fortified and amplified in the same sense on considering that certain
+very material economies also become practicable, and should take effect
+"in the absence of disturbing causes," on the establishment of such a
+peace at large. It will of course occur to all thoughtful persons that
+armaments must be reduced, perhaps to a minimum, and that the cost of
+these things, in point of expenditures as well as of man-power spent in
+the service, would consequently fall off in a corresponding measure. So
+also, as slight further reflection will show, would the cost of the
+civil service presumably fall off very appreciably; more particularly
+the cost of this service per unit of service rendered. Some such climax
+of felicities might be looked for by hopeful persons, in the absence of
+disturbing causes.
+
+Under the new dispensation the standard of living, that is to say the
+standard of expenditure, would reasonably be expected to advance in a
+very appreciable degree, at least among the wealthy and well-to-do; and
+by pressure of imitative necessity a like effect would doubtless also be
+had among the undistinguished mass. It is not a question of the standard
+of living considered as a matter of the subsistence minimum, or even a
+standard of habitually prevalent creature comfort, particularly not
+among the wealthy and well-to-do. These latter classes have long since
+left all question of material comfort behind in their accepted standards
+of living and in the continued advance of these standards. For these
+classes who are often spoken of euphemistically as being "in easy
+circumstances," it is altogether a question of a standard of reputable
+expenditure, to be observed on pain of lost self-respect and of lost
+reputation at large. As has been remarked in an earlier passage, wants
+of this kind are indefinitely extensible. So that some doubt may well be
+entertained as to whether the higher productive efficiency spoken of
+will necessarily make the way of life easier, in view of this need of a
+higher standard of expenditure, even when due account is taken of the
+many economies which the new dispensation is expected to make
+practicable.
+
+One of the effects to be looked for would apparently be an increased
+pressure on the part of aspiring men to get into some line of business
+enterprise; since it is only in business, as contrasted with the
+industrial occupations, that anyone can hope to find the relatively
+large income required for such an expensive manner of life as will bring
+any degree of content to aspirants for pecuniary good repute. So it
+should follow that the number of businessmen and business concerns would
+increase up to the limit of what the traffic could support, and that the
+competition between these rival, and in a sense over-numerous, concerns
+would push the costs of competition to the like limit. In this respect
+the situation would be of much the same character as what it now is,
+with the difference that the limit of competitive expenditures would be
+rather higher than at present, to answer to the greater available margin
+of product that could be devoted to this use; and that the competing
+concerns would be somewhat more numerous, or at least that the aggregate
+expenditure on competitive enterprise would be somewhat larger; as,
+e.g., costs of advertising, salesmanship, strategic litigation,
+procuration of legislative and municipal grants and connivance, and the
+like.
+
+It is always conceivable, though it may scarcely seem probable, that
+these incidents of increased pressure of competition in business traffic
+might eventually take up all the slack, and leave no net margin of
+product over what is available under the less favorable conditions of
+industry that prevail today; more particularly when this increased
+competition for business gains is backed by an increased pressure of
+competitive spending for purposes of a reputable appearance. All this
+applies in retail trade and in such lines of industry and public service
+as partakes of the nature of retail trade, in the respect that
+salesmanship and the costs of salesmanship enter into their case in an
+appreciable measure; this is an extensive field, it is true, and
+incontinently growing more extensive with the later changes in the
+customary methods of marketing products; but it is by no means anything
+like the whole domain of industrial business, and by no means a field in
+which business is carried on without interference of a higher control
+from outside its own immediate limits.
+
+All this generously large and highly expensive and profitable field of
+trade and of trade-like industry, in which the businessmen in charge
+deal somewhat directly with a large body of customers, is always subject
+to limitations imposed by the condition of the market; and the condition
+of the market is in part not under the control of these businessmen, but
+is also in part controlled by large concerns in the background; which in
+their turn are after all also not precisely free agents; in fact not
+much more so than their cousins in the retail trade, being confined in
+all their motions by the constraint of the price-system that dominates
+the whole and gathers them all in its impersonal and inexorable net.
+
+There is a colloquial saying among businessmen, that they are not doing
+business for their health; which being interpreted means that they are
+doing business for a price. It is out of a discrepancy in price, between
+purchase and sale, or between transactions which come to the same result
+as purchase and sale, that the gains of business are drawn; and it is in
+terms of price that these gains are rated, amassed and funded. It is
+necessary, for a business concern to achieve a favorable balance in
+terms of price; and the larger the balance in terms of price the more
+successful the enterprise. Such a balance can not be achieved except by
+due regard to the conditions of the market, to the effect that dealings
+must not go on beyond what will yield a favorable balance in terms of
+price between income and outgo. As has already been remarked above, the
+prescriptive and indispensable recourse in all this conduct of business
+is sabotage, limitation of supply to bring a remunerative price result.
+
+The new dispensation offers two new factors bearing on this businesslike
+need of a sagacious sabotage, or rather it brings a change of
+coefficients in two factors already familiar in business management: a
+greater need, for gainful business, of resorting to such limitation of
+traffic; and a greater facility of ways and means for enforcing the
+needed restriction. So, it is confidently to be expected that in the
+prospective piping time of peace the advance in the industrial arts will
+continue at an accelerated rate; which may confidently be expected to
+affect the practicable increased production of merchantable goods; from
+which it follows that it will act to depress the prices of these goods;
+from which it follows that if a profitable business is to be done in the
+conduct of productive industry a greater degree of continence than
+before will have to be exercised in order not to let prices fall to an
+unprofitable figure; that is to say, the permissible output must be held
+short of the productive capacity of such industry by a wider margin than
+before. On the other hand, it is well known out of the experience of the
+past few decades that a larger coalition of invested capital,
+controlling a larger proportion of the output, can more effectually
+limit the supply to a salutary maximum, such as will afford reasonable
+profits. And with the new dispensation affording a freer scope for
+business enterprise on conditions of greater security, larger coalitions
+than before are due to come into bearing. So that the means will be at
+hand competently to meet this more urgent need of a stricter limitation
+of the output, in spite of any increased productive capacity conferred
+on the industrial community by any conceivable advance in the industrial
+arts. The outcome to be looked for should apparently be such an
+effectual recourse to capitalistic sabotage as will neutralise any added
+advantage that might otherwise accrue to the community from its
+continued improvements in technology.
+
+In spite of this singularly untoward conjuncture of circumstances to be
+looked for, there need be no serious apprehension that capitalistic
+sabotage, with a view to maintaining prices and the rate of profits,
+will go all the way, to the result indicated, at least not on the
+grounds so indicated alone. There is in the modern development of
+technology, and confidently to be counted on, a continued flow of new
+contrivances and expedients designed to supersede the old; and these are
+in fact successful, in greater or less measure, in finding their way
+into profitable use, on such terms as to displace older appliances,
+underbid them in the market, and render them obsolete or subject to
+recapitalisation on a lowered earning-capacity. So far as this
+unremitting flow of innovations has its effect, that is to say so far as
+it can not be hindered from having an effect, it acts to lower the
+effectual cost of products to the consumer. This effect is but a partial
+and somewhat uncertain one, but it is always to be counted in as a
+persistent factor, of uncertain magnitude, that will affect the results
+in the long run.
+
+As has just been spoken of above, large coalitions of invested wealth
+are more competent to maintain, or if need be to advance, prices than
+smaller coalitions acting in severalty, or even when acting in
+collusion. This state of the case has been well illustrated by the very
+successful conduct of such large business organisations during the past
+few decades; successful, that is, in earning large returns on the
+investments engaged. Under the new dispensation, as has already been
+remarked, coalitions should reasonably be expected to grow to a larger
+size and achieve a greater efficiency for the same purpose.
+
+The large gains of the large corporate coalitions are commonly ascribed
+by their promoters, and by sympathetic theoreticians of the ancient
+line, to economies of production made practicable by a larger scale of
+production; an explanation which is disingenuous only so far as it needs
+be. What is more visibly true on looking into the workings of these
+coalitions in detail is that they are enabled to maintain prices at a
+profitable, indeed at a strikingly profitable, level by such a control
+of the output as would be called sabotage if it were put in practice by
+interested workmen with a view to maintain wages. The effects of this
+sagacious sabotage become visible in the large earnings of these
+investments and the large gains which, now and again, accrue to their
+managers. Large fortunes commonly are of this derivation.
+
+In cases where no recapitalisation has been effected for a considerable
+series of years the yearly earnings of such businesslike coalitions have
+been known to approach fifty percent on the capitalised value. Commonly,
+however, when earnings rise to a striking figure, the business will be
+recapitalised on the basis of its earning-capacity, by issue of a stock
+dividend, by reincorporation in a new combination with an increased
+capitalisation, and the like. Such augmentation of capital not unusually
+has been spoken of by theoretical writers and publicists as an increase
+of the community's wealth, due to savings; an analysis of any given case
+is likely to show that its increased capital value represents an
+increasingly profitable procedure for securing a high price above cost,
+by stopping the available output short of the productive capacity of the
+industries involved. Loosely speaking, and within the limits of what the
+traffic will bear, the gains in such a case are proportioned to the
+deficiency by which the production or supply under control falls short
+of productive capacity. So that the capitalisation in the case comes to
+bear a rough proportion to the material loss which this organisation of
+sabotage is enabled to inflict on the community at large; and instead of
+its being a capitalisation of serviceable means of production it may,
+now and again, come to little else than a capitalisation of chartered
+sabotage.
+
+Under the new dispensation of peace and security at large this manner of
+capitalisation and business enterprise might reasonably be expected to
+gain something in scope and security of operation. Indeed, there are few
+things within the range of human interest on which an opinion may more
+confidently be formed beforehand. If the rights of property, in their
+extent and amplitude, are maintained intact as they are before the law
+today, the hold which business enterprise on the large scale now has on
+the affairs and fortunes of the community at large is bound to grow
+firmer and to be used more unreservedly for private advantage under the
+new conditions contemplated.
+
+The logical result should be an accelerated rate of accumulation of the
+country's wealth in the hands of a relatively very small class of
+wealthy owners, with a relatively inconsiderable semi-dependent middle
+class of the well-to-do, and with the mass of the population even more
+nearly destitute than they are today. At the same time it is scarcely to
+be avoided that this wholly dependent and impecunious mass of the
+population must be given an appreciably better education than they have
+today. The argument will return to the difficulties that are liable to
+arise out of this conjuncture of facts, in the way of discontent and
+possible disturbance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meantime, looking to the promise of the pacific future in the light of
+the pacific past, certain further consequences, particularly
+consequences of the economic order, that may reasonably be expected to
+follow will also merit attention. The experience of the Victorian peace
+is almost as pointed in its suggestion on this head as if it had been an
+experiment made _ad hoc_; but with the reservation that the scale of
+economic life, after all, was small in the Victorian era, and its pace
+was slack, compared with what the twentieth century should have to offer
+under suitable conditions of peace and pecuniary security. In the light
+of this most instructive modern instance, there should appear to be in
+prospect a growth of well-bred families resting on invested wealth and
+so living on unearned incomes; larger incomes and consequently a more
+imposingly well-bred body of gentlefolk, sustained and vouched for by a
+more munificent expenditure on superfluities, than the modern world has
+witnessed hitherto. Doubtless the resulting growth of gentlemen and
+gentlewomen would be as perfect after their kind as these unexampled
+opportunities of gentle breeding might be expected to engender; so that
+even their British precursors on the trail of respectability would fall
+somewhat into insignificance by comparison, whether in respect of
+gentlemanly qualities or in point of cost per unit.
+
+The moral, and even more particularly the aesthetic, value of such a
+line of gentlefolk, and of the culture which they may be expected to
+place on view,--this cultural side of the case, of course, is what one
+would prefer to dwell on, and on the spiritual gains that might be
+expected to accrue to humanity at large from the steady contemplation of
+this meritorious respectability so displayed at such a cost.
+
+But the prosaic necessity of the argument turns back to the economic and
+civil bearing of this prospective development, this virtual bifurcation
+of the pacified nation into a small number of gentlemen who own the
+community's wealth and consume its net product in the pursuit of
+gentility, on the one hand, and an unblest mass of the populace who do
+the community's work on a meager livelihood tapering down toward the
+subsistence minimum, on the other hand. Evidently, this prospective
+posture of affairs may seem "fraught with danger to the common weal," as
+a public spirited citizen might phrase it. Or, as it would be expressed
+in less eloquent words, it appears to comprise elements that should
+make for a change. At the same time it should be recalled, and the
+statement will command assent on slight reflection, that there is no
+avoiding substantially such a posture of affairs under the promised
+regime of peace and security, provided only that the price-system stands
+over intact, and the current rights of property continue to be held
+inviolate. If the known principles of competitive gain and competitive
+spending should need enforcement to that effect by an illustrative
+instance, the familiar history of the Victorian peace is sufficient to
+quiet all doubts.
+
+Of course, the resulting articulation of classes in the community will
+not be expected to fall into such simple lines of sheer contrast as this
+scheme would indicate. The class of gentlefolk, the legally constituted
+wasters, as they would be rated from the economic point of view, can not
+be expected personally to take care of so large a consumption of
+superfluities as this posture of affairs requires at their hands. They
+would, as the Victorian peace teaches, necessarily have the assistance
+of a trained corps of experts in unproductive consumption, the first and
+most immediate of whom would be those whom the genial phrasing of Adam
+Smith designates "menial servants." Beyond these would come the
+purveyors of superfluities, properly speaking, and the large, indeed
+redundant, class of tradespeople of high and low degree,--dependent in
+fact but with an illusion of semi-dependence; and farther out again the
+legal and other professional classes of the order of stewards, whose
+duty it will be to administer the sources of income and receive,
+apportion and disburse the revenues so devoted to a traceless
+extinguishment.
+
+There would, in other words, be something of a "substantial middle
+class," dependent on the wealthy and on their expenditure of wealth, but
+presumably imbued with the Victorian middle-class illusion that they are
+of some account in their own right. Under the due legal forms and
+sanctions this, somewhat voluminous, middle-class population would
+engage in the traffic which is their perquisite, and would continue to
+believe, in some passable fashion, that they touch the substance of
+things at something nearer than the second remove. They would in great
+part appear to be people of "independent means," and more particularly
+would they continue in the hope of so appearing and of some time making
+good the appearance. Hence their fancied, and therefore their
+sentimental, interest would fall out on the side of the established law
+and order; and they would accordingly be an element of stability in the
+commonwealth, and would throw in their weight, and their voice, to
+safeguard that private property and that fabric of prices and credit
+through which the "income stream" flows to the owners of preponderant
+invested wealth.
+
+Judged on the state of the situation as it runs in our time, and
+allowing for the heightened efficiency of large-scale investment and
+consolidated management under the prospective conditions of added
+pecuniary security, it is to be expected that the middle-class
+population with "independent means" should come in for a somewhat meager
+livelihood, provided that they work faithfully at their business of
+managing pecuniary traffic to the advantage of their pecuniary
+betters,--meager, that is to say, when allowance is made for the
+conventionally large expenditure on reputable appearances which is
+necessarily to be included in their standard of living. It lies in the
+nature of this system of large-scale investment and enterprise that the
+(pecuniarily) minor agencies engaged on a footing of ostensible
+independence will come in for only such a share in the aggregate gains
+of the community as it is expedient for the greater business interests
+to allow them as an incentive to go on with their work as purveyors of
+traffic to these greater business interests.
+
+The current, and still more this prospective, case of the
+quasi-self-directing middle class may fairly be illustrated by the case
+of the American farmers, of the past and present. The American farmer
+rejoices to be called "The Independent Farmer." He once was independent,
+in a meager and toil-worn fashion, in the days before the price-system
+had brought him and all his works into the compass of the market; but
+that was some time ago. He now works for the market, ordinarily at
+something like what is called a "living wage," provided he has
+"independent means" enough to enable him by steady application to earn a
+living wage; and of course, the market being controlled by the paramount
+investment interests in the background, his work, in effect, inures to
+their benefit; except so much as it may seem necessary to allow him as
+incentive to go on. Also of course, these paramount investment interests
+are in turn controlled in all their manoeuvres by the impersonal
+exigencies of the price-system, which permits no vagaries in violation
+of the rule that all traffic must show a balance of profit in terms of
+price.
+
+The Independent Farmer still continues to believe that in some occult
+sense he still is independent in what he will do and what not; or
+perhaps rather that he can by shrewd management retain or regain a
+tolerable measure of such independence, after the fashion of what is
+held to have been the posture of affairs in the days before the coming
+of corporation finance; or at least he believes that he ought to have,
+or to regain or reclaim, some appreciable measure of such independence;
+which ought then, by help of the "independent means" which he still
+treasures, to procure him an honest and assured livelihood in return for
+an honest year's work. Latterly he, that is the common run of the
+farmers, has been taking note of the fact that he is, as he apprehends
+it, at a disadvantage in the market; and he is now taking recourse to
+concerted action for the purpose of what might be called "rigging the
+market" to his own advantage. In this he overlooks the impregnable
+position which the party of the second part, the great investment
+interests, occupy; in fact, he is counting without his host. Hitherto he
+has not been convinced of his own helplessness. And with a fine fancy he
+still imagines that his own interest is on the side of the propertied
+and privileged classes; so that the farmer constituency is the chief
+pillar of conservative law and order, particularly in all that touches
+the inviolable rights of property and at every juncture where a division
+comes on between those who live by investment and those who live by
+work. In pecuniary effect, the ordinary American farmer, who legally
+owns a moderate farm of the common sort, belongs among those who work
+for a livelihood; such a livelihood as the investment interests find it
+worth while to allow him under the rule of what the traffic will bear;
+but in point of sentiment and class consciousness he clings to a belated
+stand on the side of those who draw a profit from his work.
+
+So it is also with the menial servants and the middle-class people of
+"independent means," who are, however, in a position to see more clearly
+their dependence on the owners of predominant wealth. And such, with a
+further accentuation of the anomaly, may reasonably be expected to be
+the further run of these relations under the promised regime of peace
+and security. The class of well-kept gentlefolk will scarcely be called
+on to stand alone, in case of a division between those who live by
+investment and those who live by work; inasmuch as, for the calculable
+future, it should seem a reasonable expectation that this very
+considerable fringe of dependents and pseudo-independents will abide by
+their time-tried principles of right and honest living, through good
+days and evil, and cast in their lot unreservedly with that reputable
+body to whom the control of trade and industry by investment assigns the
+usufruct of the community's productive powers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Something has already been said of the prospective breeding of pedigreed
+gentlefolk under the projected regime of peace. Pedigree, for the
+purpose in hand, is a pecuniary attribute and is, of course, a product
+of funded wealth, more or less ancient. Virtually ancient pedigree can
+be procured by well-advised expenditure on the conspicuous amenities;
+that is to say pedigree effectually competent as a background of current
+gentility. Gentlefolk of such syncopated pedigree may have to walk
+circumspectly, of course; but their being in this manner put on their
+good behavior should tend to heighten their effectual serviceability as
+gentlefolk, by inducing a single-mindedness of gentility beyond what can
+fairly be expected of those who are already secure in their tenure.
+
+Except conventionally, there is no hereditary difference between the
+standard gentlefolk and, say, their "menial servants," or the general
+population of the farms and the industrial towns. This is a
+well-established commonplace among ethnological students; which has, of
+course, nothing to say with respect to the conventionally distinct lines
+of descent of the "Best Families." These Best Families are nowise
+distinguishable from the common run in point of hereditary traits; the
+difference that makes the gentleman and the gentlewoman being wholly a
+matter of habituation during the individual's life-time. It is something
+of a distasteful necessity to call attention to this total absence of
+native difference between the well-born and the common, but it is a
+necessity of the argument in hand, and the recalling of it may,
+therefore, be overlooked for once in a way. There is no harm and no
+annoyance intended. The point of it all is that, on the premises which
+this state of the case affords, the body of gentlefolk created by such
+an accumulation of invested wealth will have no less of an effectual
+cultural value than they would have had if their virtually ancient
+pedigree had been actual.
+
+At this point, again, the experience of the Victorian peace and the
+functioning of its gentlefolk come in to indicate what may fairly be
+hoped for in this way under this prospective regime of peace at large.
+But with the difference that the scale of things is to be larger, the
+pace swifter, and the volume and dispersion of this prospective leisure
+class somewhat wider. The work of this leisure class--and there is
+neither paradox nor inconsistency in the phrase--should be patterned on
+the lines worked out by their prototypes of the Victorian time, but with
+some appreciable accentuation in the direction of what chiefly
+characterised the leisure class of that era of tranquility. The
+characteristic feature to which attention naturally turns at this
+suggestion is the tranquility that has marked that body of gentlefolk
+and their code of clean and honest living. Another word than
+"tranquility" might be hit upon to designate this characteristic animus,
+but any other word that should at all adequately serve the turn would
+carry a less felicitous suggestion of those upper-class virtues that
+have constituted the substantial worth of the Victorian gentleman. The
+conscious worth of these gentlefolk has been a beautifully complete
+achievement. It has been an achievement of "faith without works," of
+course; but, needless to say, that is as it should be, also of course.
+The place of gentlefolk in the economy of Nature is tracelessly to
+consume the community's net product, and in doing so to set a standard
+of decent expenditure for the others emulatively to work up to as near
+as may be. It is scarcely conceivable that this could have been done in
+a more unobtrusively efficient manner, or with a more austerely virtuous
+conviction of well-doing, than by the gentlefolk bred of the Victorian
+peace. So also, in turn, it is not to be believed that the prospective
+breed of gentlefolk derivable from the net product of the pacific
+nations under the promised regime of peace at large will prove in any
+degree less effective for the like ends. More will be required of them
+in the way of a traceless consumption of superfluities and an unexampled
+expensive standard of living. But this situation that so faces them may
+be construed as a larger opportunity, quite as well as a more difficult
+task.
+
+A theoretical exposition of the place and cultural value of a leisure
+class in modern life would scarcely be in place here; and it has also
+been set out in some detail elsewhere.[10] For the purpose in hand it
+may be sufficient to recall that the canons of taste and the standards
+of valuation worked out and inculcated by leisure-class life have in all
+ages run, with unbroken consistency, to pecuniary waste and personal
+futility. In its economic bearing, and particularly in its immediate
+bearing on the material well-being of the community at large, the
+leadership of the leisure class can scarcely be called by a less
+derogatory epithet than "untoward." But that is not the whole of the
+case, and the other side should be heard. The leisure-class life of
+tranquility, running detached as it does above the turmoil out of which
+the material of their sustenance is derived, enables a growth of all
+those virtues that mark, or make, the gentleman; and that affect the
+life of the underlying community throughout, pervasively, by imitation;
+leading to a standardisation of the everyday proprieties on a
+presumably, higher level of urbanity and integrity than might be
+expected to result in the absence of this prescriptive model.
+
+[Footnote 10: Cf. _The Theory of the Leisure Class_, especially ch.
+v.-ix. and xiv.]
+
+_Integer vitae scelerisque purus_, the gentleman of assured station
+turns a placid countenance to all those petty vexations of breadwinning
+that touch him not. Serenely and with an impassive fortitude he faces
+those common vicissitudes of life that are impotent to make or mar his
+material fortunes and that can neither impair his creature comforts nor
+put a slur on his good repute. So that without afterthought he deals
+fairly in all everyday conjunctures of give and take; for they are at
+the most inconsequential episodes to him, although the like might spell
+irremediable disaster to his impecunious counterfoil among the common
+men who have the community's work to do. In short, he is a gentleman, in
+the best acceptation of the word,--unavoidably, by force of
+circumstance. As such his example is of invaluable consequence to the
+underlying community of common folk, in that it keeps before their eyes
+an object lesson in habitual fortitude and visible integrity such as
+could scarcely have been created except under such shelter from those
+disturbances that would go to mar habitual fortitude and integrity.
+There can be little doubt but the high example of the Victorian
+gentlefolk has had much to do with stabilising the animus of the British
+common man on lines of integrity and fair play. What else and more in
+the way of habitual preconceptions he may, by competitive imitation, owe
+to the same high source is not immediately in question here.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Recalling once more that the canon of life whereby folk are gentlefolk
+sums itself up in the requirements of pecuniary waste and personal
+futility, and that these requirements are indefinitely extensible, at
+the same time that the management of the community's industry by
+investment for a profit enables the owners of invested wealth to divert
+to their own use the community's net product, wherewith to meet these
+requirements, it follows that the community at large which provides this
+output of product will be allowed so much as is required by their
+necessary standard of living,--with an unstable margin of error in the
+adjustment. This margin of error should tend continually to grow
+narrower as the businesslike management of industry grows more efficient
+with experience; but it will also continually be disturbed in the
+contrary sense by innovations of a technological nature that require
+continual readjustment. This margin is probably not to be got rid of,
+though it may be expected to become less considerable under more settled
+conditions.
+
+It should also not be overlooked that the standard of living here spoken
+of as necessarily to be allowed the working population by no means
+coincides with the "physical subsistence minimum," from which in fact it
+always departs by something appreciable. The necessary standard of
+living of the working community is in fact made up of two
+distinguishable factors: the subsistence minimum, and the requirements
+of decorously wasteful consumption--the "decencies of life." These
+decencies are no less requisite than the physical necessaries, in point
+of workday urgency, and their amount is a matter of use and wont. This
+composite standard of living is a practical minimum, below which
+consumption will not fall, except by a fluctuating margin of error; the
+effect being the same, in point of necessary consumption, as if it were
+all of the nature of a physical subsistence minimum.
+
+Loosely speaking, the arrangement should leave nothing appreciable over,
+after the requirements of genteel waste and of the workday standard of
+consumption have been met. From which in turn it should follow that the
+rest of what is comprised under the general caption of "culture" will
+find a place only in the interstices of leisure-class expenditure and
+only at the hands of aberrant members of the class of the gently-bred.
+The working population should have no effectual margin of time, energy
+or means for other pursuits than the day's work in the service of the
+price-system; so that aberrant individuals in this class, who might by
+native propensity incline, e.g., to pursue the sciences or the fine
+arts, should have (virtually) no chance to make good. It would be a
+virtual suppression of such native gifts among the common folk, not a
+definitive and all-inclusive suppression. The state of the case under
+the Victorian peace may, again, be taken in illustration of the point;
+although under the presumably more effectual control to be looked for in
+the pacific future the margin might reasonably be expected to run
+somewhat narrower, so that this virtual suppression of cultural talent
+among the common men should come nearer a complete suppression.
+
+The working of that free initiative that makes the advance of
+civilisation, and also the greater part of its conservation, would in
+effect be allowed only in the erratic members of the kept classes; where
+at the same time it would have to work against the side-draught of
+conventional usage, which discountenances any pursuit that is not
+visibly futile according to some accepted manner of futility. Now under
+the prospective perfect working of the price-system, bearers of the
+banners of civilisation could effectually be drawn only from the kept
+classes, the gentlefolk who alone would have the disposal of such free
+income as is required for work that has no pecuniary value. And
+numerically the gentlefolk are an inconsiderable fraction of the
+population. The supply of competently gifted bearers of the community's
+culture would accordingly be limited to such as could be drawn by
+self-selection from among this inconsiderable proportion of the
+community at large.
+
+It may be recalled that in point of heredity, and therefore in point of
+native fitness for the maintenance and advance of civilisation, there is
+no difference between the gentlefolk and the populace at large; or at
+least there is no difference of such a nature as to count in abatement
+of the proposition set down above. Some slight, but after all
+inconsequential, difference there may be, but such difference as there
+is, if any, rather counts against the gentlefolk as keepers of the
+cultural advance. The gentlefolk are derived from business; the
+gentleman represents a filial generation of the businessman; and if the
+class typically is gifted with any peculiar hereditary traits,
+therefore, they should presumably be such as typically mark the
+successful businessman--astute, prehensile, unscrupulous. For a
+generation or two, perhaps to the scriptural third and fourth
+generation, it is possible that a diluted rapacity and cunning may
+continue to mark the businessman's well-born descendants; but these are
+not serviceable traits for the conservation and advancement of the
+community's cultural heritage. So that no consideration of special
+hereditary fitness in the well-born need be entertained in this
+connection.
+
+As to the limitation imposed by the price-system on the supply of
+candidates suited by native gift for the human work of civilisation; it
+would no doubt, be putting the figure extravagantly high to say that the
+gentlefolk, properly speaking, comprise as much as ten percent of the
+total population; perhaps something less than one-half of that
+percentage would still seem a gross overstatement. But, to cover loose
+ends and vagrant cases, the gentlefolk may for the purpose be credited
+with so high a percentage of the total population. If ten percent be
+allowed, as an outside figure, it follows that the community's
+scientists, artists, scholars, and the like individuals given over to
+the workday pursuits of the human spirit, are by conventional
+restriction to be drawn from one-tenth of the current supply of persons
+suited by native gift for these pursuits. Or as it may also be
+expressed, in so far as the projected scheme takes effect it should
+result in the suppression of nine (or more) out of every ten persons
+available for the constructive work of civilisation. The cultural
+consequences to be looked for, therefore, should be quite markedly of
+the conservative order.
+
+Of course, in actual effect, the retardation or repression of
+civilisation by this means, as calculated on these premises, should
+reasonably be expected to count up to something appreciably more than
+nine-tenths of the gains that might presumably be achieved in the
+conceivable absence of the price-system and the regime of investment.
+All work of this kind has much of the character of teamwork; so that the
+efforts of isolated individuals count for little, and a few working in
+more or less of concert and understanding will count for proportionally
+much less than many working in concert. The endeavours of the
+individuals engaged count cumulatively, to such effect that doubling
+their forces will more than double the aggregate efficiency; and
+conversely, reducing the number will reduce the effectiveness of their
+work by something more than the simple numerical proportion. Indeed, an
+undue reduction of numbers in such a case may lead to the total defeat
+of the few that are left, and the best endeavours of a dwindling remnant
+may be wholly nugatory. There is needed a sense of community and
+solidarity, without which the assurance necessary to the work is bound
+to falter and dwindle out; and there is also needed a degree of popular
+countenance, not to be had by isolated individuals engaged in an
+unconventional pursuit of things that are neither to be classed as
+spendthrift decorum nor as merchantable goods. In this connection an
+isolated one does not count for one, and more than the critical minimum
+will count for several per capita. It is a case where the "minimal dose"
+is wholly inoperative.
+
+There is not a little reason to believe that consequent upon the
+installation of the projected regime of peace at large and secure
+investment the critical point in the repression of talent will very
+shortly be reached and passed, so that the principle of the "minimal
+dose" will come to apply. The point may readily be illustrated by the
+case of many British and American towns and neighbourhoods during the
+past few decades; where the dominant price-system and its commercial
+standards of truth and beauty have over-ruled all inclination to
+cultural sanity and put it definitively in abeyance. The cultural, or
+perhaps the conventional, residue left over in these cases where
+civilisation has gone stale through inefficiency of the minimal dose is
+not properly to be found fault with; it is of a blameless character,
+conventionally; nor is there any intention here to cast aspersion on the
+desolate. The like effects of the like causes are to be seen in the
+American colleges and universities, where business principles have
+supplanted the pursuit of learning, and where the commercialisation of
+aims, ideals, tastes, occupations and personnel is following much the
+same lines that have led so many of the country towns effectually
+outside the cultural pale. The American university or college is coming
+to be an outlier of the price-system, in point of aims, standards and
+personnel; hitherto the tradition of learning as a trait of
+civilisation, as distinct from business, has not been fully displaced,
+although it is now coming to face the passage of the minimal dose. The
+like, in a degree, is apparently true latterly for many English, and
+still more evidently for many German schools.
+
+In these various instances of what may be called dry-rot or local blight
+on the civilised world's culture the decline appears to be due not to a
+positive infection of a malignant sort, so much as to a failure of the
+active cultural ferment, which has fallen below the critical point of
+efficacy; perhaps through an unintended refusal of a livelihood to
+persons given over to cultivating the elements of civilisation; perhaps
+through the conventional disallowance of the pursuit of any other ends
+than competitive gain and competitive spending. Evidently it is
+something much more comprehensive in this nature that is reasonably to
+be looked for under the prospective regime of peace, in case the
+price-system gains that farther impetus and warrant which it should come
+in for if the rights of ownership and investment stand over intact, and
+so come to enjoy the benefit of a further improved state of the
+industrial arts and a further enlarged scale of operation and enhanced
+rate of turnover.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To turn back to the point from which this excursion branched off. It has
+been presumed all the while that the technological equipment, or the
+state of the industrial arts, must continue to advance under the
+conditions offered by this regime of peace at large. But the last few
+paragraphs will doubtless suggest that such a single-minded addiction to
+competitive gain and competitive spending as the stabilised and
+amplified price-system would enjoin, must lead to an effectual
+retardation, perhaps to a decline, of those material sciences on which
+modern technology draws; and that the state of the industrial arts
+should therefore cease to advance, if only the scheme of investment and
+businesslike sabotage can be made sufficiently secure. That such may be
+the outcome is a contingency which the argument will have to meet and to
+allow for; but it is after all a contingency that need not be expected
+to derange the sequence of events, except in the way of retardation.
+Even without further advance in technological expedients or in the
+relevant material sciences, there will still necessarily ensue an
+effectual advance in the industrial arts, in the sense that further
+organisation and enlargement of the material equipment and industrial
+processes on lines already securely known and not to be forgotten must
+bring an effectually enhanced efficiency of the industrial process as a
+whole.
+
+In illustration, it is scarcely to be assumed even as a tentative
+hypothesis that the system of transport and communication will not
+undergo extension and improvement on the lines already familiar, even in
+the absence of new technological contrivances. At the same time a
+continued increase of population is to be counted on; which has, for the
+purpose in hand, much the same effect as an advance in the industrial
+arts. Human contact and mutual understanding will necessarily grow wider
+and closer, and will have its effect on the habits of thought prevalent
+in the communities that are to live under the promised regime of peace.
+The system of transport and communication having to handle a more
+voluminous and exacting traffic, in the service of a larger and more
+compact population, will have to be organised and administered on
+mechanically drawn schedules of time, place, volume, velocity, and
+price, of a still more exacting accuracy than hitherto. The like will
+necessarily apply throughout the industrial occupations that employ
+extensive plant or processes, or that articulate with industrial
+processes of that nature; which will necessarily comprise a larger
+proportion of the industrial process at large than hitherto.
+
+As has already been remarked more than once in the course of the
+argument, a population that lives and does its work, and such play as is
+allowed it, in and by an exactingly articulate mechanical system of this
+kind will necessarily be an "intelligent" people, in the colloquial
+sense of the word; that is to say it will necessarily be a people that
+uses printed matter freely and that has some familiarity with the
+elements of those material sciences that underlie this mechanically
+organised system of appliances and processes. Such a population lives by
+and within the framework of the mechanistic logic, and is in a fair way
+to lose faith in any proposition that can not be stated convincingly in
+terms of this mechanistic logic. Superstitions are liable to lapse by
+neglect or disuse in such a community; that is to say propositions of a
+non-mechanistic complexion are liable to insensible disestablishment in
+such a case; "superstition" in these premises coming to signify whatever
+is not of this mechanistic, or "materialistic" character. An exception
+to this broad characterisation of non-mechanistic propositions as
+"superstition" would be matters that are of the nature of an immediate
+deliverance of the senses or of the aesthetic sensibilities.
+
+By a simile it might be said that what so falls under the caption of
+"superstition" in such a case is subject to decay by inanition. It
+should not be difficult to conceive the general course of such a decay
+of superstitions under this unremitting discipline of mechanistic habits
+of life. The recent past offers an illustration, in the unemotional
+progress of decay that has overtaken religious beliefs in the more
+civilised countries, and more particularly among the intellectually
+trained workmen of the mechanical industries. The elimination of such
+non-mechanistic propositions of the faith has been visibly going on, but
+it has not worked out on any uniform plan, nor has it overtaken any
+large or compact body of people consistently or abruptly, being of the
+nature of obsolescence rather than of set repudiation. But in a slack
+and unreflecting fashion the divestment has gone on until the aggregate
+effect is unmistakable.
+
+A similar divestment of superstitions is reasonably to be looked for
+also in that domain of preconceptions that lies between the supernatural
+and the mechanistic. Chief among these time-warped preconceptions--or
+superstitions--that so stand over out of the alien past among these
+democratic peoples is the institution of property. As is true of
+preconceptions touching the supernatural verities, so here too the
+article of use and wont in question will not bear formulation in
+mechanistic terms and is not congruous with that mechanistic logic that
+is incontinently bending the habits of thought of the common man more
+and more consistently to its own bent. There is, of course, the
+difference that while no class--apart from the servants of the
+church--have a material interest in the continued integrity of the
+articles of the supernatural faith, there is a strong and stubborn
+material interest bound up with the maintenance of this article of the
+pecuniary faith; and the class in whom this material interest vests are
+also, in effect, invested with the coercive powers of the law.
+
+The law, and the popular preconceptions that give the law its binding
+force, go to uphold the established usage and the established
+prerogatives on this head; and the disestablishment of the rights of
+property and investment therefore is not a simple matter of obsolescence
+through neglect. It may confidently be counted on that all the apparatus
+of the law and all the coercive agencies of law and order, will be
+brought in requisition to uphold the ancient rights of ownership,
+whenever any move is made toward their disallowance or restriction. But
+then, on the other hand, the movement to disallow or diminish the
+prerogatives of ownership is also not to take the innocuous shape of
+unstudied neglect. So soon, or rather so far, as the common man comes to
+realise that these rights of ownership and investment uniformly work to
+his material detriment, at the same time that he has lost the "will to
+believe" in any argument that does not run in terms of the mechanistic
+logic, it is reasonable to expect that he will take a stand on this
+matter; and it is more than likely that the stand taken will be of an
+uncompromising kind,--presumably something in the nature of the stand
+once taken by recalcitrant Englishmen in protest against the
+irresponsible rule of the Stuart sovereign. It is also not likely that
+the beneficiaries under these proprietary rights will yield their ground
+at all amicably; all the more since they are patently within their
+authentic rights in insisting on full discretion in the disposal of
+their own possessions; very much as Charles I or James II once were
+within their prescriptive right,--which had little to say in the
+outcome.
+
+Even apart from "time immemorial" and the patent authenticity of the
+institution, there were and are many cogent arguments to be alleged in
+favor of the position for which the Stuart sovereigns and their
+spokesmen contended. So there are and will be many, perhaps more, cogent
+reasons to be alleged for the maintenance of the established law and
+order in respect of the rights of ownership and investment. Not least
+urgent, nor least real, among these arguments is the puzzling question
+of what to put in the place of these rights and of the methods of
+control based on them, very much as the analogous question puzzled the
+public-spirited men of the Stuart times. All of which goes to argue that
+there may be expected to arise a conjuncture of perplexities and
+complications, as well as a division of interests and claims. To which
+should be added that the division is likely to come to a head so soon as
+the balance of forces between the two parties in interest becomes
+doubtful, so that either party comes to surmise that the success of its
+own aims may depend on its own efforts. And as happens where two
+antagonistic parties are each convinced of the justice of its cause, and
+in the absence of an umpire, the logical recourse is the wager of
+battle.
+
+Granting the premises, there should be no reasonable doubt as to this
+eventual cleavage between those who own and those who do not; and of the
+premises the only item that is not already an accomplished fact is the
+installation of peace at large. The rest of what goes into the argument
+is the well-known modern state of the industrial arts, and the equally
+well-known price-system; which, in combination, give its character to
+the modern state of business enterprise. It is only an unusually broad
+instance of an institutional arrangement which has in the course of time
+and changing conditions come to work at cross purposes with that
+underlying ground of institutional arrangements that takes form in the
+commonplace aphorism, Live and let live. With change setting in the
+direction familiar to all men today, it is only a question of limited
+time when the discrepancy will reach a critical pass, and the
+installation of peace may be counted on to hasten this course of things.
+
+That a decision will be sought by recourse to forcible measures, is also
+scarcely open to question; since the established law and order provides
+for a resort to coercion in the enforcement of these prescriptive
+rights, and since both parties in interest, in this as in other cases,
+are persuaded of the justice of their claims. A decision either way is
+an intolerable iniquity in the eyes of the losing side. History teaches
+that in such a quarrel the recourse has always been to force.
+
+History teaches also, but with an inflection of doubt, that the outworn
+institution in such a conjuncture faces disestablishment. At least, so
+men like to believe. What the experience of history does not leave in
+doubt is the grave damage, discomfort and shame incident to the
+displacement of such an institutional discrepancy by such recourse to
+force. What further appears to be clear in the premises, at least to the
+point of a strong presumption, is that in the present case the decision,
+or the choice, lies between two alternatives: either the price-system
+and its attendant business enterprise will yield and pass out; or the
+pacific nations will conserve their pecuniary scheme of law and order at
+the cost of returning to a war footing and letting their owners preserve
+the rights of ownership by force of arms.
+
+The reflection obviously suggests itself that this prospect of
+consequences to follow from the installation of peace at large might
+well be taken into account beforehand by those who are aiming to work
+out an enduring peace. It has appeared in the course of the argument
+that the preservation of the present pecuniary law and order, with all
+its incidents of ownership and investment, is incompatible with an
+unwarlike state of peace and security. This current scheme of
+investment, business, and sabotage, should have an appreciably better
+chance of survival in the long run if the present conditions of warlike
+preparation and national insecurity were maintained, or if the projected
+peace were left in a somewhat problematical state, sufficiently
+precarious to keep national animosities alert, and thereby to the
+neglect of domestic interests, particularly of such interests as touch
+the popular well-being. On the other hand, it has also appeared that the
+cause of peace and its perpetuation might be materially advanced if
+precautions were taken beforehand to put out of the way as much as may
+be of those discrepancies of interest and sentiment between nations and
+between classes which make for dissension and eventual hostilities.
+
+So, if the projectors of this peace at large are in any degree inclined
+to seek concessive terms on which the peace might hopefully be made
+enduring, it should evidently be part of their endeavours from the
+outset to put events in train for the present abatement and eventual
+abrogation of the rights of ownership and of the price-system in which
+these rights take effect. A hopeful beginning along this line would
+manifestly be the neutralisation of all pecuniary rights of citizenship,
+as has been indicated in an earlier passage. On the other hand, if peace
+is not desired at the cost of relinquishing the scheme of competitive
+gain and competitive spending, the promoters of peace should logically
+observe due precaution and move only so far in the direction of a
+peaceable settlement as would result in a sufficiently unstable
+equilibrium of mutual jealousies; such as might expeditiously be upset
+whenever discontent with pecuniary affairs should come to threaten this
+established scheme of pecuniary prerogatives.
+
+
+BOOKS BY THORSTEIN VEBLEN
+
+
+THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS
+
+THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE
+
+THE INSTINCT OF WORKMANSHIP
+
+IMPERIAL GERMANY
+AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
+
+THE NATURE OF PEACE
+AND THE TERMS OF ITS PERPETUATION
+
+THE HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace
+And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation, by Thorstein Veblen
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NATURE OF PEACE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 20694.txt or 20694.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/0/6/9/20694/
+
+Produced by Irma Spehar, Graeme Mackreth and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This
+file made using scans of public domain works at the
+University of Georgia.)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/20694.zip b/20694.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7ac3c02
--- /dev/null
+++ b/20694.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6cbc7ec
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #20694 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20694)