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

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.

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.