Wherever there is a considerable and deliberate reluctance to substitute arbitration for war, wherever these unsatisfactory pleas for war are put forward, we find a hypocritical concealment of real motives. If we would be practical we must candidly confront these motives, and we shall find that the most persistent and most dangerous of them is still the desire to gain territory. The spectacle of the decay of the Ottoman Empire and the apparent helplessness of the Balkan peoples had more to do with the militarism of European Powers than they were willing to admit. That source of temptation is now renewed, and most of the Powers have, or soon will have, all the territory they can reasonably desire. The further distribution of African territory could clearly be best controlled by an international court. There remains one Power that will still feel the lust of territory. Germany conspicuously thwarted in Europe the advance of the pacifist reform because, as the whole world now sees, it had an aggressive territorial ambition. We may assume that Austria will now be cured of its lawless and costly designs, and that Germany will remain the one unsated and discontented nation. But Europe will surely have the elementary wisdom of refusing to maintain its terrible burden on that account. It will pay us better to meet the real economic need of Germany by a generous colonial deal, and then to use the power of an international polity to destroy and prevent the revival of militarism in that country.
We should thus remove the last serious obstacle to the reform, and the work might advance rapidly. The tribunal, as I said, exists, and has had more experience than is generally realised. The Hague Conference of 1907 established a Prize Court, with permanent salaried judges, and an Arbitration Court. A large number of very grave quarrels have since been adjusted by this tribunal, and, as Professor Schücking observes, “more than a hundred contracts between States have been concluded in which, on each occasion, two States made the Arbitration Court obligatory.” But, largely owing to the opposition of Germany and the general apathy, the Court remained optional, and the Powers maintained their armies for the settlement of quarrels in the old barbaric manner. The next and last step is for all the Powers to recognise the Court as compulsory, and to furnish it with an executive (a small international army and navy) for the enforcement of its decisions. Our vast armies and navies then become superfluous and would be disbanded simultaneously, leaving only a small force in each country for the suppression of native aggression (with the consent of the Hague Court) and for use by the Court itself to enforce its verdicts or suppress illegal attempts to arm.
There is nothing Utopian or academic about this reform. A body of high-minded lawyers and statesmen have for years discussed the details of the scheme, and are ready to launch it whenever the various Governments are compelled by public opinion to adopt it. The immediate task is to create this pressure of public opinion. We may hope that, after our ghastly lesson in the price of the military method, we shall no longer be rebuffed with vapid phrases like: “Do not force the pace.” A business-man who talked nonsense of that kind would soon find his level. We need to conduct our national and international life on business-principles, to get rid as speedily as possible of a waste and disorder which are an outrage on the intelligence of the race. I look more confidently to business-men than to speech-making politicians and sentimental moralists for the triumph of the reform. Certain industries will, of course, be gravely dislocated, even annihilated, by the change; and vast bodies of additional workers will, in most countries, be thrown upon a crowded labour-market. From the abstract economical point of view it is only a question of transfer. Fifty millions which were spent on military industries will now be used in enlarging other industries or creating new. In reality there will be grave confusion; but that is due to the utterly disorganised nature of our industrial world, which I discuss later. In any case to allege this industrial difficulty as a serious reason against disarmament is a very singular piece of folly. The cost and trouble of adjusting this temporary dislocation would be infinitely less than the cost and trouble of a war.
We need, therefore, to persuade the public, which has borne its military yoke and endured the occasional lash of war with the placidity of a draught-ox—that is, candidly, how we shall appear in the social history of the future—that it may escape the yoke and the lash when it wills. Our Churches might make some atonement for a long and lamentable neglect of their duty by organising a really spirited collective campaign in this greatest of moral interests. The central educative body should, however, be quite unsectarian. I take it that an amalgamation of the various Peace Societies, strengthened by the adhesion of our commercial and industrial leaders, would form this central educative body. The present war would furnish it with a superb text and an unanswerable argument. It ought, in the circumstances, to capture each country in Europe more speedily than Cobden’s famous league captured England. The press would begin to assist at a certain stage of progress. Even the politicians would presently lend their oratory; especially as their prestige, at least in this country, would hardly survive a second strain such as this war has put on it. Every agency ought to be enlisted in impressing upon the public that, whatever other reforms may imply, here we ask no sacrifice; we indicate a way in which the community may, when it wills, rid itself of a stupendous burden and set free enormous resources for social improvement.
Reformers are widely, and with some reason, accused of being dreamy and unpractical. Here, at least, it will be seen that it is rather the public and the opponents of reform who are dreamy, romantic, and unpractical: that the reform itself is a business proposition of the most attractive and promising character. But let us be even more practical. To forecast the future is an interesting intellectual recreation; but to close one’s mind entirely against the possibilities and dangers of the future is positive folly. Let us glance at the future.
I have not the faintest hope that the Allied Powers will, as they ought to do, disarm Germany and Austria and then disarm themselves, when the war is over. Then Germany will concentrate all its marvellous power of organisation, dissimulation, and intrigue in a dream ofrevanche. The appalling incompetence displayed by what we may call, in the broadest sense, our Intelligence Department and our War Office will return, when the temporary accession of business-ability has been withdrawn from it. There will be no serious inquiry into our scandalous indolence in the early period of the war, our complete failure to forecast the conditions of war, and our heavy somnolence during Germany’s feverish preparations, although the documents published by the French Government show that, by 1913 at least, sharp-sighted foreign representatives saw clearly that war was, to put it moderately, highly probable. In point of fact, our authorities knew that war was gravely imminent. I happen to know, from a little breach of confidence, that our War Office secretly warned certain reservists in June 1914 (even before the Serajevo murder) to be ready. The men were ready, and have bornetheirshare superbly; but our authorities had to confess that, even after nine months’ experience of the war, they were immeasurably behind Germany in the production of the two vital necessaries of a modern war—machine-guns and high-explosive shells.
Our experts will return to this comfortable somnolence. There will be no serious inquiry. Politicians and their advisers will escape in a cloud of thrilling emotions and enthusiastic rhetoric. Persistent questioners, who are rudely impatient of party-discipline, will be snubbed and evaded. Any other questioners, not of the political world, will be ignored. We shall return to British dignity and placidity. Germany will work and intrigue as it never worked and intrigued before. There will be grave domestic trouble in Russia and, as in the case of Turkey, German representatives will think while British representatives play. The preparations may occupy ten years or twenty years, but they will proceed. The aim will be a war with Russia neutral or friendly to Germany. If it occurs ... One has only to imagine where we should be to-day if Germany had not made the error of abandoning the Bismarckian tradition.
Behind this is a further possibility. China is just as capable as Japan of learning the use of thirteen-inch guns and maxims. Sir Hiram Maxim, in fact, who knows both China and the gun, quite agrees with me on that. And China has, behind that stoical and almost childlike expression it presents to Europe, an acute memory that for thirty years we have treated it with flagrant injustice. It may take decades to undo the evil of ages of Manchu misgovernment and organise the resources of the country, but the day will come when an alert and powerful nation of 500,000,000 Orientals will press against its frontiers. We may remember that the Mongol banners have before now fluttered over Moscow and reached the Mediterranean. And the Mongols are not the only awakening people. We may yet see an anti-European combination from the Asiatic shore of the Pacific to the African shore of the Atlantic. These are some of the possibilities we hand on to our children if we do not in time abandon the military system.
To that pass has it brought us. We writhe and groan under the terrible burden it lays on us, and we shrink from contemplating the future; yet we might cast off the burden and rid the future of peril when we will. We disavow the buccaneering spirit, and protest that we arm only in defence against each other; and one wonders whether to smile or weep at the obtuseness which prevents us from adopting a simple and humane means of defence instead of this exhausting barbarism. We “humanise” war, yet cling needlessly to the whole inhuman business. We are teaching the backward nations to arm,—we would gladly supply them with tutors and arms at any time,—and may be thus preparing a more colossal conflict than ever. Surely the man or woman of the twenty-first century will find us an enigma!
Let me close with a repetition of my protest against the misconstruction to which such a book as this is always exposed. I advocate no Utopian scheme, but one which some of the ablest lawyers, statesmen, and business-men in Europe have discussed for years and warmly endorsed. I have no wish to conceal technical difficulties under sentimental phrases, but these men, to whom I refer, are prepared to meet the difficulties. I regard the work of the soldier as honourable and worthy, as long as we impose the military system on each other; and at this particular juncture regret only that I am long past the age of bearing arms. I plead, as long as the system lasts, for unquestionable efficiency in national defence, whatever it cost. But I say that, in this military system, we are enthroning the hollowest and most ghastly sham that ever deluded humanity: that, when we have the courage or wisdom to strip it of its tinselled robes, we will shudder at sight of the gaunt frame of death which has ruled civilisation for so many thousand years: that nothing is wanting but the general will to dethrone this mockery of a god: and that, when we have abolished militarism and war, we shall advance along the way of social improvement with far lighter steps and vastly increased resources.
Whenwarfare is abolished, and men no longer peep at their foreign neighbours over hedges of bayonets, there will be a number of less important international absurdities to remove. Some three hundred years ago, we discovered that the earth was a globe. To-day we are appreciating that this globe is the property of the human race, and that the friendly co-operation of all branches of the race is extremely desirable. National efforts and sacrifices are undone by international waste and disorder. We begin to perceive this, and the most sober of us must look forward to a time when the scattered and antagonistic elements of the race will agree upon some graceful design of a City of Man, and unite in constructing it.
That familiar phrase, the Brotherhood of Men, sounds rather hollow in the ears of many. I am avoiding pretty phrases and disputable creeds and subtle philosophies—I am trying to keep in direct contact with the realities of life—and therefore I do not use it. But the sincere sentiment behind it, the feeling that we men and women do form one large family in possession of an immense and infinitely fertile estate, and that we will develop our property more advantageously for each of us if we act as though we were brothers, can hardly be challenged. The question of the exact expression of our relationship to each other may be left to poets and scientists.
Those lighter shams of patriotism, which I shall describe in this chapter as hampering the march of the race, will be recognised even by men who, with Carlyle or Nietzsche, refuse the title of brother to some of their fellows. We ourselves smile at them sometimes, and at the cheerfulness with which we endure the grave inconvenience they put on us; and they will certainly provoke the laughter of the scholars who will some day learnedly discuss the question whether we men and women of the twentieth century were or were not civilised. They have, it is true, a much more serious aspect; they are important auxiliaries of the war-god. On the whole, however, they are shams that we ought to kill with ridicule and bury with genial disdain. They are practices or institutions which we have plainly inherited from the barbaric past, when men were slaves of tradition, kingly or priestly, and dare hardly use their own intelligence on their own habits. In this age of ours, when we are at last becoming the masters, instead of the slaves, of our traditions, they are regarded by large bodies of men and women in every civilised country as stupid, anachronistic, and mischievous.
In fact, there is here again no serious difference of opinion. One has not to force one’s way through some controversial thicket before one can discover the correct path of reform. The way lies perfectly clear before us, and we can enter it at any time when we have the collective will to do so. One might again describe the proposal, not as a “reform”—since many people instinctively shrink from the word reform—but as a business proposition of the simplest and most profitable character. I speak of those false and antiquated freaks of patriotism which keep different groups of human beings speaking different languages, using different weights and measures, wrestling with each other’s mysterious coinage, collecting each other’s stamps, and stumbling against the many other irritating diversities which make one part of the earth “foreign” to another. It may seem to imply some lack of sense of proportion to pass from so grave a subject as war to these matters, but a very little reflection will show how closely they are connected.
The first and most ludicrous of them is the stubbornness with which each fragment of the race prides itself on having a language of its own. This confusion of tongues has irritated and inconvenienced and helped to exasperate against each other the various sections of the human community for thousands of years, although we could suppress it at will in half a generation. Millions of us have an acute and constant experience of the absurdity of the system. In our schools, where mind and body require the fullest possible attention during the few years of training, we devote a large proportion of the time to teaching children how the same idea may be expressed by half a dozen different sounds. The higher the class of school, the more valuable and skilled the teacher, the more time must be wasted in learning how ancient Greeks and Romans, or how Germans and French and Italians, have invented different sounds from ours for expressing the same ideas. The slenderness of the protest one hears against this polyglot system from educators themselves is amazing. They have, it is true, begun to rebel in large numbers against the teaching of dead languages, but comparatively few of them support the increasing demand for that adoption of a common tongue which would do so much for the advance of education.
Those whose parents did not happen to be wealthy enough in their youth to send them to schools which have the distinction of teaching “languages” are hampered in a hundred ways. If they travel, they must pay sycophantic waiters and couriers to give them a dim understanding of the human world through which they pass. Even in their own country they cannot order a dinner at any well-ordered restaurant without first studying a lengthy vocabulary of superfluous sounds, or without practising a dozen little hypocrisies to conceal their ignorance. In large colonial hotels, where hardly a single person who does not speak English is ever found, one receives a “menu” with the usual intimidating array of French phrases. “You ought to supply dictionaries with this sort of thing!” said an angry young squatter, taking a seat beside me in the Grand Hotel at Melbourne, to the waiter. If you are travelling for business, or even transacting business at home, you must have your foreign correspondents and agents; and with their aid you follow dimly the very interesting advances and experiments that are being made in your department abroad. Our Governments must pay more heavily for diplomatic and consular service. Our books and magazines make a parade of foreign phrases which have not yet become as familiar as English. Our shopkeepers add twenty-five per cent. to the cost of our linen by calling it “lingerie.” ...
We are tormented in a hundred ways, yet we contemplate this absurd muddle and waste with as resigned an air as if we still believed that the Almighty had, in a fit of temper, created the confusion of tongues at ancient Babel. So subtle and strong is the hold of custom on us that we rarely even ask ourselves whether this is a wise or an unalterable arrangement. We hear with indifference, if not with amusement, of societies which propose to adopt one international tongue in the place of this ridiculous confusion; we languidly picture to ourselves little groups of long-haired faddists meeting in bleak halls to attract our duller neighbours to the cultivation of one more innocent enthusiasm. We have not time for these things. When a sensible man has given adequate time to business and pleasure, he has, he says, no hours to spare for these idealistic luxuries. Yet a moment’s serious reflection would show us that the sole aim of these “faddists” is to make lifelesscrowded and laborious, to lighten our business and add to our pleasure, to introduce common-sense into a large part of our conduct. To such strange contradictions and absurdities does this resolve to resist innovation bring us.
Most people are, perhaps,—if they ever give a thought to the matter,—under the impression that it is a mountainous and impracticable task to introduce such a reform into the life of the world. It is, on the contrary, one of the simplest and most practicable reforms to which men could set their hands. It is even less controversial a measure than the abolition of war. There are few prejudices of our time which have not attracted the ingenuity of some faddist or other; but this is one of the few. More emphatically here than in the case of war, all that we need is the will of the majority to change our anachronistic practice. When one regards the entirely uncontroversial nature of the reform and the immense economy it will entail, it is hardly unreasonable to hope that this will of the majority may soon be secured.
I assume that, when we agree to direct our “Governments” to carry out this elementary improvement of international life, they will summon an international commission of philologists, educators, and commercial men, whose business it will be to create a new language. This step will not be taken until the voluntary movement for reform has reached such proportions as to arouse the interest of politicians; but in the end we rely on governmental action, as it is necessary to reform schools and Parliaments. This international commission will, no doubt, examine impartially such languages as Esperanto. Possibly these existing international tongues will be found more complex than an ideal language ought to be, and less attentive to the finer values of speech. For the simple purpose of expression it is possible to create a tongue far less complex than any in use in the civilised world to-day: a tongue that could be learned in a few months even by the untrained intelligence. It would proceed on the entirely opposite principle to that of modern word-makers: the principle, for instance, that changes “fireworks” into “pyrotechnics” (a piece of bad Greek for good English), or “gardening” into “horticulture.” The use of this debased Latin and Greek in science has a certain advantage under our present polyglot system, as it is an approach toward international agreement, but it is making more onerous than ever the burden of our languages. We want a simple means of expression and intercourse, with a power of expanding to meet the advance of thought and discovery without needing to run to such lengths as “diaminotrihydroxydodecanoic acid.” No existing national speech would meet the purpose, least of all English; but it would be advisable to have some regard to æsthetic interests in framing a new language, and the old tongues would supply a good deal of material in this regard. The success of the poet depends on qualities of words as well as qualities of imagination, and we have no wish, like Plato, to exclude poets from the ideal commonwealth. We should retain large numbers of these short expressive words.
Great numbers of people hesitate in face of this proposal because they feel that it is a very large innovation, however simple and indisputable it is in principle. They contemplate such things as a nervous child gazes on the sea from the steps of a bathing machine. Intellectually, a few such plunges would be of incalculable service to our generation. One can understand people hesitating before some disputed economic or political scheme, but to shrink from adopting plain and large reforms such as this is not a sign of health. We need to purge our sluggish imaginations of their prejudices, to brace our intellectual power, to take pride in our creativeness.
When the new international tongue is ready, a few years will suffice to make it prevail over the older languages in the leading countries which helped to set up the commission. It will become the one speech of the school, the press, commerce, law, government, and, possibly, the church. The travelling public will, as every Esperantist knows, at once discover the advantage. The commercial world will find it a splendid economy and a priceless boon to international trade. A man will be able to travel from London to Tokyo with as little difficulty as from Woolwich to Ealing; and it will be found that when the foreign tongue, which so instinctively suggests to us the uniform of an enemy, has disappeared, one of the worst obstacles to mutual good-feeling will be removed. When the Englishman can talk to the Berliner with perfect ease,—I assume that all beginnings of dialect would be suppressed as mercilessly as weeds in a well-kept garden,—just as a citizen of London now talks with a citizen of New York or Sydney, a very dangerous chasm will be bridged. It is quite certain that the calamitous attitude of modern Germany could not have proceeded to such a dangerous pitch if the Imperialist and other literature which is responsible for it had been intelligible to the whole of Europe. A few students of particular aspects of German life were more or less acquainted with it, and we refused to believe then. Now we discover, to our amazement, that a neighbouring nation has for decades been openly educated up to a pitch of unscrupulous aggression, and the world has been threatened with an incalculable catastrophe. I am not overlooking the real reasons for this development, but I say confidently that it would have been impossible if a national literature were not generally confined within the nation which produces it.
In the school the advantage would be very considerable. Our overstrained and bespectacled children would be spared several hours a day of their school-work or home-work. The whole ancient and modern-language section of the curriculum would be suppressed, and this suppression, with other reforms which I will describe later, would enlarge the teacher’s opportunity of giving real education and spare the pupil a great deal of devastating brain-fag. For the education of older people the gain would be almost as great. A Birmingham artisan could read the latest novel of d’Annunzio or latest play of Hauptmann without the assistance of expert or inexpert translators. All the older literature that is worth preserving would be translated by specially qualified interpreters into the new tongue, and the originals would then become the toys of leisured pedants. If, as I suggested, a proper attention to word-values were secured in the making of the new tongue, there is no reason why it should not express poetical sentiments as gracefully and pleasantly as any existing tongue.
Is there any Utopian element in this scheme? Most people will probably recognise that the only bit of utopianism in it is the expectation that the majority of any nation can be induced to adopt it. That might seem to justify one in using impatient language about the wisdom of the majority of us, but it is no reflection on the scheme itself. The reformer, however, is ill-advised in reflecting on the intelligence of his fellows. Carlyle’s “twenty-seven millions, mostly fools,” discovered in the end that all their follies, which he so vigorously denounced in hisLatter-Day Pamphlets, were more permanent and accurate than his “eternal verities.” It is usually want of leisure or immediate profit which alienates the public from schemes of reform. Possibly a scheme which so plainly promises more leisure to us and a very considerable profit may hope to win attention. The reform of spelling I, of course, take as an integral part of the scheme.
But this reform of international intercourse must take a more comprehensive shape than the mere suppression of this confusing plurality of tongues. It is just as foolish of us to maintain a plurality of weights and measures, of coinage and postage-stamps, of social and civic and juridical forms. Even if we confine our attention to the leading civilised nations, we find in these respects a confusion which outrages the elementary instincts of commercial life and lays a monstrous burden of superfluous trouble on us all. Travellers and business-men endure it year after year with the most amazing patience. Men who would be fired to instant action if they found a trace of such disorder in their domestic or commercial concerns resign themselves to this colossal muddle of international intercourse as calmly as if it were a providential and entirely sacred arrangement. I remember once passing rather rapidly from Lucerne to London, by way of Wiesbaden, Cologne, and Brussels: on another occasion by way of Cologne and Amsterdam. The hours one has to spend in calculating coinage (or lose the exchange-value), the worry expended in struggling for stamps or dinners in the less familiar tongues, the confusion of train-rules and street-usages and civic regulations, reflect a system of chaotic disorder; to say nothing of the “sizes” of boots or collars you need, the weight of tobacco or fruit, and so on.
All this is a portentous example of slavery to tradition, whether the tradition be reasonable or no. We have not the slightest regard for the historical development of this muddle and the peculiar folly of retaining it in our generation. Our earlier ancestors measured their woollens or their corn or their mead by the simple standards that are apt to occur to primitive peoples. Even, however, where the same standard occurred to, or commended itself to, different and remote communities, its vagueness was fatal. “A thousand paces” (amille, as the Romans said) seemed a fair reckoning for long distances, but the stretch varied, and we have Irish miles and German miles and English miles and nautical miles. Our ounces and yards and pints are as intelligent as most of the other things which the ancient Briton invented, but, being British, they seem sacred to us. A hundred years ago a far superior standard, the decimal system, was put before us, but our fathers felt that it smacked of the French Revolution and Napoleon and atheism. We smile at their prejudice, yet we have no greater disposition to alter our unintelligent ways. The German would be horrified at having to reckon his distances in kilometres. The British lion, the French or German or Russian or American eagle,—there is a marvellous love of that symbol of aspiration and progress,—or the rising sun of Japan, must have its own system of weights and measures and coins. Passing through a strip of Canada some months ago I had, from lack of the local stamps, to entrust my post to a kindly waitress; and was, of course, robbed. Of late years, Australia has patriotically resolved to have its own coins, and has fought parliamentary battles over its stamps.
The often-imagined visitor from another planet would not be so much surprised at this extraordinary and costly muddle of patriotic shams as at our faculty for progress in commerce and industry amidst it all. We seem to be quite blind to the larger applications of our modern doctrine of efficiency. Regarded as an economic system, which it really is, the international arrangement of our civilised world is full of crudities which are more worthy of a Papuan pedlar. The contrast between the methods of a large Chicago store or a British or German engineering-business and the methods we retain in far larger and more important concerns will one day be a subject of amazement. The evil of which I am speaking eats into the very heart of an industrial and commercial system which prides itself on its order, economy, and efficiency. Yet this comprehensive muddle is contemplated almost without protest by business-men. If it were merely the leisure hours of travellers which were dissipated in this abstruse study of foreign tongues and coins and customs, we might merely deplore proverbial vagaries of taste. But the abuse is immeasurably greater than this; the advantage we should gain by this scheme of unification can scarcely be calculated. One would think that the reform was really difficult to achieve, or lay under the frown of some imposing school of theologians or moralists or economists!
I omit from the list of perversities whatever is the subject of serious economic controversy. Such things as national tariffs, for instance. However arguable the question may be in England, even the free-trader usually appreciates in such a country as Australia the plea for a protective tariff. There is, at all events, a very serious controversy on the general issue, and it would not be expedient to include among plain reforms any scheme of universal free-trade or universal protection. It is enough to point out that certain obvious, stupid, and mischievous survivals of old conditions gravely hamper our international intercourse. The prestige of our civilisation, as well as a common-sense view of our interest, demand that we shall suppress them. More disputable reforms may be considered afterwards. Our usual method is, one fears, to discuss the more disputable reforms first.
It is difficult to conceive any plea being put forward on behalf of these irrational old customs, but a sufficiently ingenious and superficial apologist might claim that patriotism bids us maintain them. There is no doubt that the work of reform will have to proceed over the bodies of a number of the pettier patriots. No one can suppose that the task of unification will be accomplished without friction. German professors and Bulgarian politicians will protest against this pernicious cosmopolitan spirit, this horrible wish to denationalise us, this tampering with the sources of national energy. Ardent Irishmen and Welshmen will form very talkative associations for the defence of “the grand old tongue.” Rival languages will be put forward, and Esperanto will strain its hitherto respectable resources in denouncing Volapük or the new official speech. French and English and German savants will heatedly press the claims of ideal words in their respective languages to be taken over, and pamphleteers will discuss whether Herr Professor Doktor Schmidt did or did not contribute more suggestions than Professor Smith. A higher criticism of the new language will spread its pale growth like a parasitic fungus.
What is patriotism? In the sense in which the word is still widely, if not generally, understood, it stands for a sentiment that belongs essentially to a pre-rational age and cannot survive unchanged in a rational age. This does not mean that a rational age has no place for sentiments; it means that the sentiments must not affront reason. We cannot at once pride ourselves on being paragons of common-sense, yet slaves to a sentiment which common-sense must not examine too closely. Loyalty to that larger national family to which we belong: cordial and generous support of its interests: sacrifice, if need be, for its just ambitions: pride in its worthy achievements, even in its worthier superiorities—these are useful and intelligible sentiments, and it is not unreasonable to make a flag the visible symbol of these just interests and achievements. But a blind and undiscriminating devotion to flag or king, a glorification of our national family above others in the roystering fashion of the Middle Ages, a refusal to ask if the demands of our rulers are just or if the interests we are pressed to support are sound and equitable, an obstinate pride in a thing because it is British or German, whether it be wise or no—these are sentiments entirely at variance with the best spirit of our age. We may recognise that even the crude old patriotism has contributed much to the advance of civilisation. This gathering of men into rival national groups has forced the pace, and has at times developed noble qualities. But we must admit also that the same patriotism has inspired hundreds of unjust and stupid wars, and has maintained on their thrones kings and queens who ought to have been dismissed with ignominy.
The progress of civilisation does not entail the suppression, but the refinement, of sentiment, as is very plainly seen in the supposed implications of patriotism. When it is urged that these absurd national diversities of speech and coinage must be sustained on the ground of patriotism, we ask at once which sound element of patriotism could demand such an anachronism? It is, surely, only the spurious medieval sentiment that could dictate so utter an absurdity! Will the interests of England be endangered because we remove a very serious burden from its economic life and its educational activity? Shall we be less prosperous, less happy, less respected, for correcting an antiquated and foolish practice? These things, we may reflect, were not stupid at the time when they were developed. The resolute patriot may, if he wills, take pride in the relative ingenuity of the people who invented them. Each separate national system was the outcome of special conditions, and the slender commerce between the different communities at the time they were developed did not require a rigorous international standard. One bartered by the piece or the lump. But it is sheer folly to ignore the modern transformation of international life: to fancy that our unwillingness to exert ourselves, even for our own advantage, may be ascribed to some lofty virtue.
It need hardly be said that I am not cherishing a dream of spreading at once over the entire planet a uniformity of language and coins and standards. The leading civilised nations might, within a few years, adopt such a scheme; and a certain number of the smaller and less advanced nations, which aspire to membership of the civilised group, would probably accept the reform speedily enough. On the other hand, the permeation of the lower races with our ideas would be a slow and difficult process: a part of that general task of civilising the whole race which we have sooner or later to confront. This difficulty does not at all affect the advantage we should gain by adopting a scheme of unification within the family of civilised nations, and it cannot be pleaded as a reason for postponement. But all the reforms I have hitherto discussed will, when they have spread over the more highly organised countries, find a temporary check in this chaotic jumble of peoples on the fringe of civilisation, and it may be useful to discuss the principles which ought to inform our attitude toward them.
Our generation looks out upon these backward branches of the race, not only with a finer sentiment and a stricter regard for principle than any previous generation did, but with a very much clearer knowledge of their meaning. We may, of course, be faithless to our principles in cases: we may casuistically wrap a piece of frank buccaneering of the old type in hypocritical humanitarian phrases. The general attitude is, however, more enlightened, as these pieces of hypocrisy themselves show. We may or may not hold the doctrine of universal brotherhood; at least we understand the true relation of these more backward races to ourselves, and we are in a much better position to determine our right and our duties. We have advanced considerably since, little more than half a century ago, a stern moralist like Carlyle could defend black-slavery and denounce as “a gospel of dirt” the scientific revelation which threw light and hope on inferior types of manhood.
The chief difference is that we now see the true relation of the lower races to the higher. It is false to say, as Carlyle did, that some races were created with higher gifts than others, and were therefore divinely appointed as the master-races. The notion is as absurd as the old and profitable legend of the laying of a primitive curse on Ham and his black descendants. Difference of geographical conditions is the chief clue to the unequal development of the various branches of the race. I have in various works developed this theme and will not linger over it here. You have at the start the same human material and capacities in all the scattered groups. But some have been for ages isolated from the stimulating contact of races with a different or a higher culture, and this is the essential condition of advance. Others have, by sheer chance, been so situated that they enjoyed this stimulation in an extraordinary degree. On this principle we can understand the birth of civilisation in that fermenting mass of peoples which settled between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf ages ago, and the direction of the advancing stream of culture, partly eastward to India and China, but mainly in the more favourable north-western direction.
It is, therefore, no difference of aboriginal outfit, but a difference in the chances of migration and situation, which accounts for the cultural diversity of races. Yet we must not at once infer that any lower race can, on this account, be drawn from its isolation and lifted to the higher level. There is reason to believe that a race loses its educability if it remains unprogressive for too long a period. The physiological reason may be that the skull closes firmly, at a relatively early age, over the brain in a people in which expansion of brain after puberty has not been encouraged. Take the three “lower races” of Australasia. The Tasmanian was one of the oldest and least cultured branches of the human family, and he died out within a century after contact with the whites. The Maori of New Zealand is the most recent and most advanced of the three aboriginal races. With the Polynesian, he is closely related to the European or Caucasic race, and is certainly educable. The Australian black comes between the two in culture and in the period of his isolation. Australian scientific men who have made the most sympathetic efforts to uplift the black tell me that they have failed, and the race seems to be doomed.
These scientific principles have discredited the old legendary notions about the lower races, but we must not as yet make dogmas of them. Nothing but candid and careful experience will show which races are educable and which ineducable. It is very probable that such peoples as the wild Veddahs of Ceylon, the Aetas of the Philippines, the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, and some of the Central African groups, will prove ineducable. Other races which have been considered “savage” are already proving educable, either as a body or in large numbers of instances. Many peoples have not been tested at all. We are only just at the fringe of this vast and interesting problem.
In regard to the races which, after humane and thorough experiment, prove entirely ineducable, the solution does not offer much difficulty. Once their primitive habits are disturbed, and they begin to live on a pension allotted them by the European nations which have seized their territory, they gradually die out. A very good case may be established by those writers who hold that races which cling incurably to barbarism ought to be painlessly extirpated, or prevented from multiplying. Such races as the Australian blacks are quite familiar with a process of sterilisation which does not interfere with their enjoyment of life. On the other hand, the life led by these domesticated but ineducable savages is hardly worth preserving at all. However, as they are disappearing, one need not press that point. The claim of sane humanitarians, that we have no right to interfere with their conditions and seize their territory, is quite unsound. The human family has a right to see large fertile regions of the earth developed. Who regrets to-day that the Amerinds were pensioned in order to find room for Canada and the United States and Brazil and Argentina? Who does not see the advantage of peopling Australia with a fine and advancing civilisation of (eventually) twenty or thirty million progressive whites instead of a few hundred thousand miserable aboriginals?
At the other end of the scale we have, as I said, peoples who are most probably or certainly educable. At a hazard one might instance the Thibetans and Siberian Mongolians, the Koreans, the Maoris and Polynesians, the Lapps (of the same blood as the Finns), and a large number of Asiatic and African peoples. We must keep in mind the high civilisation reached by the Amerinds of Peru, whereas their modern descendants, the Quichwas, seem so negligible. In Africa there is a vast amount of experiment and classification to do, and already the pure Bantu races are furnishing scores of men who are susceptible of a university education. I know several of them who are as competent and well-educated as the average English university man.
Has the white race a duty (“the white man’s burden”) to attempt to civilise the coloured races? I speak in general terms, of course. It is sheer insolence to regard the Chinese or Burmese—one must not mention the Japanese—as lower races. Now, speaking in the abstract, as a matter of general moral principle, the white has no clear duty to civilise the coloured races. The sentiment of brotherhood may inspire a feeling of duty in some, but one cannot build firmly on that phrase. It is, however, not an abstract ethical question. The white men have, in point of fact, spread over the globe, and they are in a fair way to occupy all the territory on which the coloured races (except the Chinese and Japanese and Burmese) were settled. Only an attitude of general unscrupulousness could ignore the obligation which this seizure of territory implies. England and Germany have, for instance, occupied the islands of the Pacific and made their inhabitants a “subject race.” They have done this, not only with a gross lack of discrimination between the Polynesian (who is certainly educable) and the much lower Melanesian, but with a quite cynical idea of the “civilising” process. The work has been left to sailors and travellers, who have decimated the population by spirits and syphilis, or to the crudities of Christian missionaries. The joy of native life has been killed, and the enforcement of clothing (which the natives naturally cast off in the cooler evening, when the sensitive European was not able to see them) has led to an appalling amount of pneumonia and phthisis. We have done much to turn a wonderfully happy and healthy people into a gin-drinking swaddled caricature of a Bank Holiday crowd.
But the lists of our crimes in dealing with the lower races need not be given here. If we white people are to go out among the more backward coloured races, and to profess that we are assuming the paternal function of administering their territory, we must act on some principle. It is rather late in the history of the world to send out civilising expeditions which consist of missionaries presenting copies of the Sermon on the Mount, and soldiers and merchants who, in flagrant contradiction to the Sermon on the Mount, exploit the natives and appropriate their soil. There must be a serious attempt to educate them, and then an elimination of the unfit. Africa will prove a formidable region for this discriminating work. The Mohammedans themselves have already proved that many of its peoples are capable of culture.
We have a special problem in our treatment of races which, like the Hindus and Egyptians, have already been drawn into the white system. Let us be quite candid with ourselves in this matter. We appropriated their territory for our advantage, not theirs, and our professed modern sentiments are compelling us to say that we are not in possession of their territory in their interest. We protect the Hindu from native despots, the Egyptian from a cruel Mahdi or Pacha, the retired official tells you. However, I do not propose that we should investigate the title-deeds of all our existing empires as regards their oversea possessions; nor do I in the least advocate the dismemberment of such large unities as the British Empire. But the principle on which some would stake our existence in India or Egypt, the maxim that “What we have we hold,”—which is often illustrated by a picture of a particularly stupid-looking bull-dog guarding the British flag,—is the first principle of the pickpocket and the burglar. Modern sentiment has to grant colonial empires a sort of “Bula de Composicion,” such as the Spanish Church, for a consideration, grants to pickpockets. The best compromise is that the peoples which are to-day linked in empires should remain linked; not as dominant and subject peoples, but as sister-nations working out the destiny of the race according to the highest standards. This implies that, as they assimilate Western culture (as the Hindus are quite rapidly doing), they shall be more and more entrusted with the administration of their own countries. The very different situation of colonies need not be discussed. When Australia and Canada find, if they ever do find, that it is to their interest to set up complete independence, they will not cut the cable: they will cast it off as calmly and confidently as they now cast off the cable of an Orient liner on the quays at Sydney.
Along these lines we may forecast the future, and very slow, drafting of the more backward peoples into the homogeneous family of the more civilised races. The unification of languages, coinage, etc., will be gradually extended to them. But it is not my purpose in this work to contemplate remote tasks and contingencies. A great and practicable reform lies at our doors. The overwhelming majority of the race are already incorporated in civilised nations, and the work of organisation amongst these is urgent and comparatively easy. I am not advocating a fantastic and lofty scheme for which one needs to be prepared by the acceptance of advanced humanitarian sentiments. What I am pleading for is the application to international life of our treasured maxims of common-sense and efficiency. Those simple and indisputable maxims condemn in the most stringent terms the patriotic shams which we suffer to perplex and burden our life. Let us run the planet on recognised business-principles.
Thereforms I have so far advocated have one peculiar characteristic. They are urgent, easy to grasp, indisputable in principle, and enormously advantageous; but they need international co-operation, and we are only just beginning to form those friendly international contacts which may lead to agreement. Hence it is that, although very contentious reforms have already been realised, these linger, as we say, outside the range of practical politics. But this very phrase reminds us at once of another fundamental irregularity of our life. The man who thinks a proposal dismissed because it is not within the range of practical politics illustrates admirably the indolence of mind which I am assailing. If a useful and economical device were put before him in his business-capacity, and he were told that his business had no room for it, he would at once ask what was wrong with the business. I am contending all through for the application of this progressive spirit to larger concerns than stores or workshops. If our political system, to which we entrust these large concerns, absolutely ignores some of our finest chances of profit, there is something wrong with the system. Our servants are not doing what they are paid to do.
As I have already briefly contended, our recent experience furnishes a very ghastly confirmation of this suspicion. The British Empire will survive the dangers that beset it, though it will be deeply impaired economically, for two fundamental reasons: the Allies have double the population of the Central European Powers, and they have, including in this respect the United States, far larger ultimate resources in material and money. The fact that we do eventually muddle through will, one fears, content the majority of our people, but the thoughtful patriot will ask two questions. How many hundred millions has our slowness in mobilising our resources cost us, by protracting the war? And what is likely to be the fate of the British Empire if, with a similar slackness, it has at some later date to meet a numerically equal and far more alert enemy?
Let me briefly recount the facts which show that our national business has been grossly mismanaged. Can any person look back on all the facts which are now public property and say that our soldiers and statesmen were innocent in not perceiving the grave possibility of war with Germany at any time in the last three years? That, however, will scarcely be said: the readiness of our fleet is a sufficient reply. We know further that the general character of the war was foreseen. England was to help France and Belgium, on French or Belgian soil. England’s co-operation on land was, as events have shown, vitally necessary. Yet the unpreparedness of Britain for a great continental campaign was entirely scandalous. No doubt there would have been a risk in openly enlarging the army or creating great stores of material. Germany would, in its unamiable way, have asked questions. Tender-hearted Members of Parliament would have denounced our provocative proceedings. But a preparation of plans, a census of our resources, a scheme for the immediate enlistment of the business-ability of the country and the full use of all our industrial machinery—these and a dozen other most important measures could have been taken in this country as safely and secretly as they were in Germany. Not only were they not taken, but the military preparations were actually relaxed. It has transpired, and is not disputed, that our great Arsenal was only partially occupied; and Mr. A. Chamberlain has publicly stated that Kynochs had for the year 1914—the expected year of war—a Government order two-thirds less than they are capable of executing in a week, and do now execute in a week.
The second fact is the remarkable failure to forecast the conditions of the war. If it be urged that a layman cannot judge how far such a failure is culpable, the answer is prompt: the German authorities, who had had no more experience of war than we, did forecast the conditions. Their minute and energetic elaboration of the whole scheme of the war contrasts extraordinarily with the sluggish and conventional ease of our authorities.
The third and gravest fact is our appalling and costly slowness in mobilising our resources when the war began. Six months after the outbreak of war I went over a very large engineering shop in the north. Out of hundreds of men only a score or two were engaged on war-material: and one of the two objects on which this mere handful of men were engaged has proved to be wholly valueless. At that time, and for months afterwards, the workers of Britain were encouraged in their easy ways, and the bulk of the manufacturers were encouraged to go on with their usual business, by official assurances that no greater effort was needed. When our disgusted soldiers sent us a message that, not “the weather,” but a scandalous shortage of ammunition and machine-guns kept them back, the Prime Minister, quoting the “highest available authority,” publicly declared this to be untrue. We were asked rather to admire the way in which we had dispatched the greatest expeditionary force known in history: as if the enormous progress of modern times did not make this superiority a matter of course. When criticism increased, we cried for the gag and the public prosecutor, and we garlanded the portraits of the very men who had disgraced us; and we agreed to the retention or promotion of incompetent men, on obvious party-grounds.
Happily one minister had the grit and patriotism to call to his aid a group of business-men, and the facts could no longer be concealed. Mr. Lloyd George admitted that since the beginning of the war, we had increased a thousandfold our production of munitions, yet were still far behind the Germans and far short of our needs; and at last, eleven months after the outbreak of war, we began to organise, or at least to ascertain, our resources. Again we loudly congratulated ourselves on our energy. We cried shame on all critics and pessimists and people who wanted more. We fancied ourselves in the character of Atlas, taking the whole burden on our massive shoulders, to spare our weaker Allies. But the sinister light which this late increase of output threw on the first six months, or more, of indolent incompetence was quite disregarded. We genially overlooked the fact that the delay of our advance was costing us nearly a hundred millions a month. We allowed less prominent affairs to be conducted with the same indolent insufficiency. The most absurdly inadequate measures were taken to control the prices of food and coal, and scarcely a thought was given to the tremendous economic problem which will confront us when the war is over, or to the means of recouping ourselves by a systematic promotion of our oversea-trade.
In a word, the magnificent organisation and ordered national devotion of the German people make the conduct of England during the first year of the war seem clumsy, lazy, and full of danger for the future. For this the chief blame quite obviously falls on our statesmen. English soldiers have at least been second to none in the field: English artisans have, since the need was acknowledged, worked magnificently. It is the directing brain that was sluggish and incompetent. The magnitude of the sudden task does not excuse our rulers, nor does the very large service that was actually done—which I do not for a moment overlook—lessen the scandal. If a political machine does not know how to enlarge itself in less than twelve months to meet a new and very urgent task, especially a task that it ought to have foreseen, it is unfit to control our national destiny. Our governmental system has proved itself most dangerously and mischievously unfit to meet such a national emergency, and this catastrophic experience may encourage the reader to examine with patience the criticisms which I propose to pass on it.
Here again we submit to the tyranny of a largely obsolete tradition. When the story of the development of human institutions can be written with a detachment of which we are yet incapable, one of the strangest pages will be that which tells of the evolution of Church and State. From the early days when some exceptionally powerful warrior is raised on his shield and saluted as chief or king, and when some weird individual earns the repute of being able to control or propitiate the mighty powers of the environing world, government and religion steadily advance to a commanding position in the life of the people. The two men of power, the king and the priest, must have establishments in accord with their value to the tribe, and the palace and the temple rise in spacious dignity above the mean cluster of huts. Time after time the race turns to examine the tradition which has been so deeply impressed on it, and kings and gods are cast from their thrones; but new dynasties always arise. Of Rome, no less than of Thebes or Nineveh, it is the monuments of kings and gods that survive. Only a few centuries ago the European city consisted mainly of two institutions: the palace and the cathedral. The bulk of the citizens huddled in squalid fever-stricken houses beyond the fringe of the estates of their secular and priestly rulers.
The modern age, with its inconvenient questions and its bold speech, arrives. Commerce develops, and the palace and cathedral disappear, in the forest of soaring buildings. When the roofs of the new commerce and the new commoner rise to a level with the roof of the palace or the cathedral, when men are no longer overshadowed by the old powers, the imagination is released. The divine right of kings goes in a fury of revolutionary flame: kings must henceforth rule by human right and answer at a human tribunal, which is more exacting and alert than the old tribunal. Yet the power of the dead tradition is amazing. In England men still bow reverently when the king addresses them as “my subjects” and talks of “my empire”: still crown every entertainment, spiritual or gastronomic, with fervent aspirations which would lead an ill-informed spectator to imagine that they regarded the king’s health as mystically connected with the health of the nation: still describe bishops and the heads of families which have been sufficiently long idle and wealthy as their “lords.”
These archæological survivals are, no doubt, innocuous, if irritating. The more serious feature is that they help to make so many people insensible of the miserable compromises we endure in our reorganised State. They are part of that superabundant ash which clogs and dulls the fire of the nation’s life. The nineteenth century, rightly and inevitably, adopted a democratic scheme of public administration. It was seen that, if the king were not so close a friend of the Almighty as had been supposed, there was no visible reason why the destinies of the nation should be entrusted to his judgment: which was, as a rule, not humanly impressive. Luckily, certain nations had won the right to do a good deal of talking before the king came to a decision, or the right to hold Parliaments, and Europe generally adopted this model. The Parliament House now towered upward in the city, and it did the real business of directing the nation’s affairs. The king became a kind of grand seal for the measures enacted by Parliament. Some nations, the number of which is increasing, regarded the seal as a costly and avoidable luxury, and abolished it: some kept the king, with all his stately language and pretty robes and sparkling jewellery, and abolished the “lords”: some kept the king and the lords, but deprived them of real power. The English nation, which is famous for its common-sense, its audacity, and its ability, belongs to the last group. It invented that remarkable phrase, “self-government”: which ingeniously preserves the fiction that someone has a right to govern other people, yet conciliates the modern spirit by intimating that the people really govern their governors.
Into the extraordinary confusion of forms and formulæ which has resulted from this compromise it would be waste of time to enter. Does it really matter that we allow our king to put on our coins a flattering portrait of himself, with an intimation that he rules as “by the grace of God”? He is quite conscious that he rules us—if his melodramatic relation to us may be called ruling—on the understanding that he never contradicts us. We are not now knocked on the head, except by an intoxicated patriot, if we refuse to stand while our neighbours chant their insincere incantation about his health: we go, not to the Tower, but to the ordinary law-court, if we mention his personal frailties; and the portentous seriousness with which he takes his robes and his formulæ injures none, and amuses many. No doubt, slovenly mental habits are always to be deplored, yet these things are not in themselves important enough to be included in a list of serious reforms. What we do need to examine critically is this scheme of self-government by which we now manage our national affairs: very badly, it appears.
This political machinery is divided into two sections: municipal government and national government. The former, from which every element of “government” except the name has departed, need not be considered at length. It consists of groups of citizens who are understood to excel in public spirit and self-sacrifice, so that they devote a large part of their time to the unpaid service of their fellow-citizens. Every few years a man, of whom you had probably never heard before, calls to implore you, with a quite painful humility and courtesy, to allow him to discharge this self-denying function. The next day another man, of whom also you had never heard before, calls to inform you, in discreet language, that his rival is a spendthrift, a rogue, or a fool; and thatheis the man to represent you with due regard to economy and with absolute disinterestedness. You probably refrain from voting for either, since you have not the abundant leisure of a libel-court. Your streets will somehow get paved, and your children schooled, and you will pay the bill. But you may discover after a time that the air is thick with charges of “jobbery,” or that some local councillor has been promoted to the higher and more lucrative political world on the ground of “many years’ experience of local administration.”
If you happen to live in the Metropolis, where the intelligence of the nation is clotted, so to say, you find municipal life even more complex than this. The eager rivals who solicit the honour of doing your work for nothing are divided into bitterly hostile schools. Each school spends hundreds of thousands of pounds in a periodical effort to convince you that the other school is going to swindle you. Each plasters the wall with repulsive typical portraits of its exponents, and you see yourself depicted as a weak and amiable, but small-witted, figure (or, perhaps, as a burly and very stupid-looking farmer), whose pockets are being picked. Each produces a most exact statistical proof that its opponents have actually picked your pockets, and that the “reds” or “blues” are the only people with a really disinterested desire to spend some hours every day in the gratuitous discharge of public duties. They spend great sums of money every few years for the purpose of securing this thankless burden and facing the vituperation of their opponents. You seek illumination in the press, and you find, in rival journals, a mass of contradictory statements and mutual accusations of lying. However, the system is thoroughly British in its encouragement of individual action and public spirit, and you overtook all the direct and indirect corruption it fosters.
What is a man to do? One can at least search very rigorously the credentials and the public action of the man who “solicits your vote,” and encourage the appearance of really independent and fine-spirited men and women. I have, naturally, described the broad features and general abuses of the system, but there are, of course, large numbers of men in it who are sincerely disinterested. In the main, however, municipal politics is tainted and complicated by the party-system of the large political world, and to this we may turn.
That section of the political machine which controls national affairs is obviously of the first importance. On its working rests the grave issue of peace or war; to it is entrusted, in the last resort, the great task of educating the nation; and through it alone can we secure any of those numerous reforms which are to undo the tyranny of shams and abolish so much avoidable misery and confusion. One ought therefore to be gratified to see how large a place politics occupies in the public mind, which is otherwise so little inclined to serious matters, and in the public press, which so faithfully mirrors the thought of the nation: to see how the prominent or eloquent politician surpasses in public esteem the greatest artist or scientist, and even rivals in popularity the prettiest actress of the hour: to see that four-fifths of our public honours are reserved for politicians and statesmen, and for those less gifted but more wealthy men who give them practical support. Unhappily, when one looks closely into this apotheosis of politics, one finds that its merit is merely superficial: that a very large proportion of the more thoughtful people in every civilised community look on politics with disdain, and that some of the more independent of our politicians confess that one must almost lay aside one’s honesty and ideals on entering the political world.
A series of grave struggles and threats of civil war in the first half of the nineteenth century inaugurated the present political phase in Europe. It transpired after Waterloo that the English parliamentary system, in which our statesmen took such pride, was a hollow and corrupt sham. A comparatively few wealthy landowners controlled the nation, and bought votes for their nominees. After some years of agitation the working men of the great manufacturing centres formed armies and threatened to force the doors of Westminster at the point of the pike. This elicited a system of restricted, but real, popular representation. Later enlargements of the franchise improved the system, and to-day some six or seven million adult males elect our legislators. Until recently this scheme was largely frustrated by the power of a non-elected House to suppress any measure which did not please a privileged minority, but this is now materially modified. Six million free and adult representatives of the nation appoint and control the men who make our laws, and direct the king how to act.
But in practice this admirable theory becomes a mockery and an illusion. It may be taken as a Euclidean postulate that out of six million people of any civilised nation four or five millions will be—shall we say?—somnolent: not from want of brain, but from want of constant exercise of it. A very earnest idealist of the last century, Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, proposed that, for the great efficiency of our political machinery, every elector should, before he received a vote, be compelled to pass an examination in political economy and constitutional history. Since few Members of Parliament, to say nothing of voters, would have passed the examination, the proposal was rejected, and the education of the voter was left to the interested political parties and to the press which supported them, or was supported by them. The result was that two rival organisations, roughly corresponding to the two attitudes of the modern mind toward new ideas (progressive and conservative), gradually increased in wealth and power until they were able to control the electorate and exclude from representation every finer shade of political thought. The machinery by which this is done does not leap to the eyes, as the French say, and the average elector proudly contrasts our political system with that of most other nations.
Candidly, we may take some pride in the contrast. The struggles and sacrifices of our fathers have won for us a system which is far superior to that which has hitherto prevailed in Russia, to the despotic medievalism of Prussia, to the grave insincerity of Spanish political life, to the confusion and occasional corruption of French or Italian politics, to the remarkable activity which precedes a presidential election in the United States. Our political life is relatively free from large corruption. I happened to be in New Zealand when the “Marconi Scandal” was agitating England, and I remember politicians of that progressive little land smiling at the word “scandal” and hinting that they were more adventurous. Some of our discontent is, no doubt, due to women writers who magnify the evil in order to persuade us to enlist their refining influence. I do not, in fact, think that Mr. Belloc and Mr. Cecil Chesterton have proved some of the graver charges which they brought in their indictment of our “servile State.” It will need something more than a list of matrimonial connections to persuade us that Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill were in the habit of meeting, amiably and clandestinely, Mr. Bonar Law and Mr. F. E. Smith for the collusive arrangement of our laws.
Yet there is enough in the familiar criticisms of our political machinery to justify one in saying that the political sham is, even now, intolerable. What, candidly, is the procedure? A general election is announced, and two men call, or send agents, to solicit the honour of representing you in Parliament. In the district in which I write at the moment one candidate is a wealthy and muddle-headed Liberal: the other is a wealthy and (politically) equally muddle-headed Conservative. Neither of them has the remotest idea of representing my national wishes,—they would blush to be suspected of it,—and neither has ever spoken in Parliament; so I have never yet voted.
But I am an eccentric man. Let us take a normal case. You notice, as a rule, that during the few years before the election a wealthy man has been openly suffered, or directed from his party-headquarters, to “nurse” the constituency. Hundreds will cast votes for him solely because they fear a withdrawal of his subscriptions to their chapels and football clubs, and of his open-handed philanthropy. As the election approaches, another candidate appears. He also is, as a rule, a wealthy man, and he spends between one and two thousand pounds in disturbing the judgment and inflaming the emotions of the voters. Pictorial posters, which might have adorned the walls of some Pyrenean cavern in the Old Stone Age, are massed near the doors of some dark “committee room” or spread over the town. The brain struggles feebly with the contradictory statements of orators and journals. And on the day of the election the two wealthy rivals for the honour of printing M.P. on their cards, and the duty of voting as they are directed by their superiors, flood the district, although it has an excellent tram-service, with expensive cars and carriages, to take the tired working man to the poll.
Possibly one of the candidates is not a wealthy man, and you begin to speculate on the source of his thousand pounds, or even three hundred pounds. Very few voters do inquire, of course; most of them would be surprised to know how much a man spends in soliciting the honour of representing them—he has usually a great contempt for them—in Parliament. The more inquisitive voter, however, would discover that the poorer candidate is in a special sense the representative of a particular party, and he would touch the fringe of a peculiar and ingenious system. I happened one day to mention to a friend certain advanced opinions of a Member of Parliament. “That,” he said grimly, “will interest my father-in-law; he finances Mr. ——.” Through the party-organisation this wealthy and highly respectable manufacturer paid the election expenses and part of the income—Members of Parliament had not then a salary—of candidates or Members in various remote towns. The manufacturer, or the various manufacturers who do this sort of thing, will eventually be knighted or baronetted; their sons will have a chance of a secretaryship, or even of Cabinet rank. The secretly subsidised Member will go to Westminster, an automatic voter. In fact, since a candidate must generally have the sanction of the central organisation of one or other party before he can venture to solicit votes, even wealth does not usually relieve him of the party-tyranny.
What, then, is the party? It is not so much a creed as a wealthy and powerful organisation. Once it was a group of men who happened to have the same ideas. By a natural evolution of organisation—one sees the same thing in the evolution of Churches—it has become rather a machine for impressing those ideas on men. In a sense, it is an oligarchy. We must remember such facts as the dismissal of Mr. Balfour, and the powerlessness of Mr. Asquith to get rid of a certain Minister whom he disliked. The power of the front-benchers is not absolute. But on the whole the party is an aristocracy of wealthy men, titled men, and able men, which rules the country for a term of years. Its leading agents are the Ministers and Whips: the body of the party is an association for carrying out its will, and for adding the attractions of parochial entertainment and cheap club-life to the more austere cult of ideas. Its revenue is, to a great extent, secret; but the annual lists of honours reveal very plainly that it conducts an unblushing traffic in such things. The reasons allied in the published list are often too ludicrous for words. Privately one can often ascertain the exact price.
With this wealth the party-aristocracy controls the electoral campaign and the elected Members. It has, further, at its disposal a large number of highly paid positions, or functions which lead to highly paid positions, or profitable little occasional jobs, or political pensions, or a Civil List (which is grossly abused), and so on. These it dangles before the eyes of impecunious or ambitious critics. Here are two facts within my slender personal knowledge of these matters. A very influential Socialist (my informant) was invited to a small dinner of the party-aristocrats and diplomatically informed that he might be useful in office: another drastic critic was assured by a Cabinet Minister, through a mutual friend (my informant), that nothing would be done for him until he ceased to criticise.
The system is, on both sides of the House, corrupt, demoralising, and intensely prejudicial to the interests of the country. We found its danger during the South African War, and we perceive it far more plainly to-day. What ought to be the brightest intellectual fire in the land is sluggish, choked with ash, served often with inferior material. The permanent departments of State which depend on it are correspondingly sluggish. In an emergency it—after a humiliating trial of its own ability—turns to business-men. Its whole tradition and procedure are abominable. Men who are poor and independent may bruise their shins on the doors in vain. Men of no ability are promoted, even to peerages and the Cabinet, because their fathers contributed much to the party’s purse or prestige, and they themselves will at least be loyal. Men who raise critical voices in the House are snubbed and suppressed: men who criticise outside are safely ignored. The ablest and the most sincere men in the party—men like Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Lloyd George—acquiesce in all this.
The electoral system and the procedure of the House of Commons are designed to protect this monstrous scheme. The large fee which is exacted of candidates and the very large sums which wealthy men are allowed to spend on elections intimidate able and independent, but impecunious, men. The election is spread over a week or two in order to give wealthy men, who may be relied upon to support the constitutional parties, an opportunity of voting in several constituencies, and in order that Ministers may give more aid to their weaker supporters. For the polling-day Saturday is avoided as much as possible, because on that day a larger percentage of the workers would vote, and they are apt to vote against the constitutional parties. Cars and carriages are permitted because the candidates of the workers will easily be surpassed in this well-known advantage by candidates of the great parties. Minorities are hopelessly excluded from representation, such as they would have under a system of proportional representation, because they would send to the House a number of independent Members who would disturb all the calculations of the Whip and all the tricks of party-government. Under a system of proportional representation it would be quite easy for some scores of able and earnest men to secure election at very small cost, by merely circulating declarations of their views; but this, or a grave increase of the Labour Members, would wreck the party-system, and therefore the most democratic of our orthodox politicians maintain all the abuses and injustices of our system.