An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation

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

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.