ioatisatbHww MittwBMtttmwiiirignoti (tcjiUiuu (mwi'iutiL l bJV-tatnfWMttrtwtmftMfmi i m w K ttmtm atg^tqi i(m4iaiiHh(ts«««iiHauiai6iHwaKi(«uiJii,Hf w (trotii±HiHi«i!ifi«KWttta»t^ BOUGHT WITH THB INCOME PROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OP 1S91 A iHJisi :: mji^ Digitized by Microsoft® Cornell University Library JV 1027.R64 1900 Patriotism and empire dmmyQUsm 366 This book was digitized by Microsoft Corporation in cooperation witli Cornell University Libraries, 2007. You may use and print this copy in limited quantity for your personal purposes, but may not distribute or provide access to it (or modified or partial versions of it) for revenue-generating or other commercial purposes. Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Empire Digitized by Microsoft® t>\xbl\&bef6 Bnnounccmente. Is War Now Impossible? By I. Bloch. Edited by W. T. Stead. (Vol. II. of the * Russian Library.') Maps and Diagrams. Crown 8vo. 6s. The Evolution of the Idea of God. An Inquiry into the Origins of Religions. By Grant Allen. Demy 8vo. Buckram. 20s. net, [Second EdiHon. The Human Machine: An Inquiry into the Divinity of Human Faculty in its Bearings upon Social Life, Religion, Education, and Politics. By J. F. Nisbet. Crown 8vo. 6s. [Second Edition. The Philosophy of Greece, considered in its relation to the Character and History of its People. By A. W. Benn. Crown 8vo. 6s. Log:ic : Deductive and Inductive. By Carveth Read, M.A. Crown 8vo. 6s. The Psychology of Woman. By Laura Mar- holm. Translated by Georgia A. Etchison. Crown 8vo. 6s. The Case for Protection. By E. E. Williams. With Diagrams. Crown 8vo. 5s. Russia in Asia : A Record and a Study. 1588- 1899. By Alexis Krausse, With 2 Maps in Colours and 10 specially drawn for the text. Demy 8vo. ass. Introduction to the History>f Politics. By John M. Robertson. [In preparation. Grant Richards, g, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, W.C. Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Empire BY JOHN M. ROBERTSON AUTHOR OF 'THE SAXON AND THE CELT,' ETC. SECOND EDITION London Grant Richards 1900 3i Digitized by Microsoft® First Edition, Octobeiu 1899. Second Edition J January, igoo. Digitized by Microsoft® MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY, WHO HAS WROUGHT FOR PEACE, TRUTH, JUSTICE AND INTERNATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS IN BOTH HEMISPHERES DURING TWO GENERATIONS, THESE PAGES ARE DEDICATED WITH AFFECTION AND ESTEEM. Digitized by Microsoft® Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021032366 Digitize by Microsoft® CONTENTS PART J PAGE THE SPRINGS OF PATRIOTISM AND MILITARISM I PART II THE MILITARIST REGIMEN 7 1 PART III THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF IMPERIALISM 1 38 ADDENDA '- 205 INDEX - - 206 Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Empire PART I The Springs of Patriotism and Militarism I History and poetry, we may be sure, will not willingly let die the antique tale of the three hundred who at Thermopylae held out for Sparta against the Persian host, knowing that there could be but one end, and facing it with a stern exaltation, combing their long hair for that, the last festival, and singing the while — ' Singing of death and of honour that cannot die.' It is true, there are offsets. There was no military wisdom in defending the pass after the Persians had got behind it ; and if it was to be * defended, it should have been, as before, from the narrows, not, as was finally done, by way of a sortie. Between the tactics of Leonidas I Digitized by Microsoft® 2 Patriotism and Empire below and those of the Phocians above, we are moved to say with Sir George Cox that ' the generalship, if the story be true, is little better than that of savages.' Nor are the three hundred entitled to all the honours of the fight, as fight, since there fought with them seven hundred' Thespians as brave as they, and at least a thousand unconsidered helots, who did their part like men. Nay, the good Herodotus tells twice over that in all four thousand men were slain on the Greek side at Thermopylae, a statement which Bishop Thirlwall gingerly accepts, and Mr. Grote somewhat perturbedly seeks to explain away. Then there were the Thebans, of whom many were spared, as the story goes, on their asking quarter. With four or five thousand men, to say nothing of the thousands he had sent home, Leonidas might have held the pass up to starvation-point. On the whole, we must suspect, with Sir George Cox, that the facts of the case have not come down to us intact. And when all is said, we know that in every age and stage of human things, from the name- less wars of savages to the most consummately controlled campaigns of so-called civilization, troops of men have died as hardily as those commanded, by Leonidas. Yet withal it is a. brave tale, and fit to typify an ideal. Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 3 Let it be freely agreed that when we come to deal with men bearing themselves bravely under the supreme test of conduct, the open facing of death, whatever was to be said of their action in bringing the crisis about, censure is silenced. This or that war may have been precipitated by arrogance or avarice, obstinacy in injustice or insolent folly, but when those on either side voluntarily put their lives to the stake of the struggle, and the die is thrown, we have passed from the region of debate to that of contemplation, as fellow- creatures looking on destiny and the eternal vicissitude of things. So there will always be for every man, at least ' while this machine is to him,' an irreducible thrill before the spectacle of free men going with a high heart to their doom. It is the certainty of that thrill of feeling that gives unchanging force to such words as ' heroism.' There could not be a more telling or a more typical exploitation of our sensations in these matters than is accomplished by M. Rostand in his heroic comedy of 'Cyrano de Bergerac,' which, with its audaciously new versification, its energetic unrealismi, and its magnificent management of the panache in general, has lately won in France' even such a success as was its due in a nation so persistently martial that it takes its sentimentalism almost Digitized by Microsoft® 4 Patriotism and Empire solely in the form of fanfaronade. In a superbly preposterous scene, M. Rostand presents to us a corps of the half-starved French besiegers, themselves besieged, of a town held by the Spanish in Flanders. To them comes, in the rapture of her love for the author of the letters she has been receiving daily as from her lover, the beautiful Roxane, in her coach, crammed with provisions, the chivalrous Spaniards having everywhere let it pass their lines on her assurance that she was going to see her lover. Such is war, on the stage. Just then, as it happens, the corps in question, including both of Roxane's lovers, are awaiting an assault in force which is pretty sure to annihilate them, as it is to fall solely on their trenches. So the starved Gascon cadets hilariously eat and drink like schoolboys at play; and then the fighting begins, and the known lover is brought in dead, killed by the first shot ; and as the outworks are surmounted by a host of Spaniards, astonished at the resist- ance, and asking, 'Who are these men who thus fight to the death?' the superb Cyrano and his band leap forward on the pikes, trolling their song, ' Ce sont les cadets de Gascogne !' So skilful is it all that, even in reading, our smile at the fanfaronade is blended with a Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 5 swelling in the throat ; and we may guess how it touches hot heads and hot hearts in France. To them it all stands for the love of country, for the great name of France, for undying patriotism, as well as for the pride of courage. That is the end of the matter, even as with the tale of the three hundred at Thermopylae. The moral is that they died ' for Sparta and her laws.' The thrill of sympathy with haughty courage is carried to the account of a certain assumed political virtue ; and the habit of mind represented by this assumption gets all the sanction of that strong and pure emotion. It seems clears that 'patriotism,' whatsoever the name may cover, must be the purest of impulses because it is thus allied with the purest of sympathetic feelings. Such is the profound fallacy that it behoves us to dis- entangle, in the light at once of the antecedents and the consequences of what commonly passes for ' patriotism.' II Go back as far as we will in history, by way either of records or of inference from what survives of the primitive, we find groups of people united by what a recent sociologist calls ' consciousness of kind,' and in virtue of Digitized by Microsoft® 6 Patriotism and Empire that consciousness prepared to fight with other groups. The two tendencies, the cohesion and the repulsion, are strictly correlative ; each involves the other. No law of human pro- gression can well seem more sinister than this primal interdependence of love and hate, of good and evil, of union and destruction ; and we shall do well to face the fact in all its grimness at the outset of our questioning. It was assuredly in no ' social compact ' for mere neighbourly reciprocity that those early societies were rooted which have evolved into great civilizations. Some marginal com- munities there may be which wage no wars, having enough ado to fight inclement Nature, and which are held together by the mutual good-will born of continuous collective need, the stragglers being bound to perish; but in the average early tribe a main part of the force of cohesion was the spontaneous hostility to other tribes. Primus in orbe, let us say, adapting the disputed maxim concerning the making of Gods, societates fecit timor — fear first of alien animals, it may be, and later of alien men ; but the fear implied the hostile impulse all round ; and the men of a society best knew that they loved each other by dwelling on their joint enmity to other societies. And the worst of Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 7 the fatality was that as societies developed through the ages by way of survival of the fittest ; and the primitive gregarious instinct, which is so sufficient in the primitive stage, was gradually weakened by the individual egoism which flourishes on the growth of property ; that old love-in-hate, or brotherhood in warfare, became more and more palpably the ruling and enduring force of union, the I main representative of the spirit of attraction, ] and so inevitably took to itself all the sanctions [ that the instincts of union had ever possessed. The sense of passionate communion of feeling is too grateful not to be long cherished in the last form in which individualistic disintegration leaves it possible to an entire society : a community must be disintegrated indeed when, v hardened in the perpetual hostilities of the usual competitive and progressive civilization, and lacking any higher ideal of brotherhood, it ceases even to relish the sympathy and synergy that accrue to the state of international war. In our own day we see the society in which commercial competition is perhaps carried furthest, responding with ecstasy to the appeal of ' patriotism ' under the form of a war of aggression on an ill-conducted neighbour. The commercial egoist, bent throughout life on besting all rivals, is seen to find a peculiar Digitized by Microsoft® 8 Patriotism and Empire joy in the chance of an impassioned co-opera- tion in the name of the common good. He whose life's task has been to create burden- some tariffs in his own favour, to undersell and ruin his competitors, to keep down his workmen's wages to enrich himself, is found offering to equip at his own expense a regiment of soldiers, as the expression of his new-found delight in the notion of fellowship. But it takes the old brute instinct of battle, of hate, to work the change, and they who think that, with that instinct asleep again, he will continue zealous to promote the common weal in normal life, are extravagantly astray. Ill Lest this should seem a perversely hard say- ing, let us see for ourselves how the spirit called patriotism has always correlated with the forces of civic life. I n the stormy generations in which we find Roman history taking something like clear shape among the receding mists of legend, we find on one and the same scene the play of an egoism which shrinks from no extremes of tyranny within the society itself, and a vigour of patriotism which shirks no effort for the main- tenance of the State against others. Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 9 ' Then none was for a party, Then all were for the State.' So the great rhetorician makes his early Roman sing, confessing the stress of faction already in the days of the decemvirs. But if the song were true, it could only be in the sense that earlier egoism was not scientific enough to use the machinery of faction ; for the sense in which ' all were for the State,' as the learned rhetorician incidentally makes known, was one consistent with a constant readiness on the part of each well-to-do citizen to enslave his poorer neigh- bours for debt. We see the poor farmer going loyally to the war, along with or under his richer neighbour, helping him to defeat the traditional enemy, and returning to be cast in bondage for the debt he has been forced to incur after a previous campaign — forced, that is, by reason of the fact that his farming went to ruin in his absence, while the rich man's farm was tilled by his slaves and managed by his bailiffs. No enemy could have used the poor farmer worse ; but the last thing he ever thought of — the one thing he never thought of — was to make com- mon cause with his similarly mishandled con- gener in the rival State against the creditor class who beggared both alike. That grotesque acquiescence in a partnership from which the poor man derived only the passing gratification Digitized by Microsoft® lo Patriotism and Empire of a subterrational passion, while the rich man got that and his ridies as -well, is a sufificient proof of the strength of the habitual halluci- nation. The nexus could indeed resent his enslavement by his fellow-patriot ; but nothing could alter his preconception of the sacredness of patriotism — that Is, of the temper of enmity till death towards the whole of the other group, who at worst would but enslave him as a penalty for fightiiig against them, and who had never made any pretence of being his brothers. Such are the psychological roots of the moral phenomenon we are considering. It does not concern us here to ask how the Roman community as a whole drifted out of that astonishing state of things into one of less obviously unstable equilibrium : suffice it that this practical definition of patriotism, as mere negative community of malice, involving only the necessary minimum of further co-operation or fellow-feeling, is the burden of all history. The ' three hundred ' at Thermopylae, as we have incidentally seen, had no vestige of any sentiment of normal fellowship with either their helots or their subaltern farmer class, who abroad fought shoulder to shoulder with them against the hereditary foe, only to return to subordination and grinding slavery at home, if any return there were. Helots who might at Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism II any moment be treacherously massacred by their brutal masters, on the score that they were dan- gerously healthy and numerous, could nearly always be relied on to fight valiantly against some other set of slave-owners in their own owners' interest. No sense of normal wrong could quicken their intelligence to the point of casting off the insane spell of the ancient ' con- sciousness of kind.' IV But the hapless helots of Sparta and the doomed yeomen of ancient Rome, we shall be told, stood only for the patriotism of unintelli- gence ; and there is a patriotism which is in- lelligent. Let it merely be noted, then, thus far, how absolutely devoid of all true or con- structive fellow-feeling on the part of the aris- tocratic or ruling class was that concurrence of passion which they regarded as patriotism ; and how readily the passion broke out between faction and faction at home, as soon as the ces- sation of fear of invasion from without removed the primary combining pressure. The question now is, when and how and where the alleged purification or rationalization of patriotism began. It would be tedious to disprove what few Digitized by Microsoft® 12 Patriotism and Empire instructed people would affirm, that in medie- val Europe matters went very much otherwise than they did in Sparta and Rome ; or that even in Athens the spirit of patriotism nor- mally arose above a partnership in domination over tribute-paying allies, and a chronic sinking of domestic hates in a more unreasoning hate towards some other community. To that part- nership, indeed, Pericles gave a constructive air by his special policy ; but that policy itself had its bitter domestic enemies ; and it is impossible to show that it furthered fraternity in fostering art and the pride of art and power. The best case framable, perhaps, for a worthy patriotism in past times, would be one drawn up from the history of the Swiss cantons ; and that pleading must perforce ignore the phase of mercenary aggression, and dwell solely on the defensive side of Swiss warfare. And, after all, it would give little foothold to those who make much of patriotism as a virtue in empires, where the plea of necessary defence, however cus- tomary, is derisory. If it is ever to be shown that patriotism, while preserving the primary character of a union in enmity, has taken on the seemlier spirit of rational and normal sympathy, the proof must be forth- coming from modern politics, and, to be satis- factory, must be in part producible from our Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 13 own affairs. The unwariest sentimentalist will not now go back to the English patriotism of the day of Henry V., whose unification of his people in the conquest of France was so promptly and duly followed by the inferno of the Wars of the Roses. Even the rapturous commemorators of the Armada, again, will hardly claim that its repulse stood for aught but the patriotism of oppugnancy. To modern politics, then, let us come. V The last notable epoch of patriotic combination in our history is that of the war with France, begun in 1 793 and carried on with intermissions till the final fall of Napoleon in 1815. And that epoch is still so near us in the spirit as well as in time, its affairs were carried on so much in the idiom of our own age and by our own Par- liamentary methods, that it may specially well serve us as a test case. About its poHtical out- come there is no question : it reduced to a small scope the play of intellectual disunion, in getting rid, for the moment, of the spirit of innovation, of protest, of social and intellectual criticism. Such a man as Coleridge, who in the early years of the war was on the critical side, but whose weaknesses steered him at Digitized by Microsoft® 14 Patriotism and Empire length to that of convention and orthodoxy, could give thanks that the war had this unifying effect on the nation. And, indeed, though Fox and the remnant of his adherents held steadily to their general principle of peace and freedom, to the extent even of absenting themselves from the foregone proceedings of the House for months, mere faction might be said to hawe dis- appeared from the debates, and 'all were for the State,' so to say. The one ideal was enmity to France, enmity to the Revolution, enmity to Napoleon ; and whatever ways of thought were even distantly associated with the revolutionary spirit and its French antecedents were not merely discountenanced but defamed, and not merely defamed but forcibly interfered with, and wherever possible savagely punished; that is to say, the heightening of patriotism meant a heightening of domestic malice where any ground of strife survived. This very suppression of the small minority, to begin with, is visibly a long stride in that backward movement which we shall see to be a normal result of prolonged war in a nation previously progressive. There is but one way,, be it repeated, in which a whole community can be raised and bettered from within, and that way begins in the free play of criticism, of new thought as against the old. Right or Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 15 wrong, it must have a hearing ; the alternative is not stand-still, but backing. And the sum of the rule of gag in the patriotic England of the Napoleonic age, whether we look at politics or at literature, is just a lapse from a state of com- parative advance and activity to. one of paralysis and retrogression. It is needless to frame anew the indictment, item by item, to recite the tyrannies, the violences, the spoken and acted brutalities^ or to reeaill the kind of language that stood for the voice of wisdomi and authority in the closing years of Pitt an^ m the epoch of Lord Liverpool. To read the words spoken a hundred years ago by judges engaged in trying men for the ofeace of advocating political re- forms is to hesitate over the premiss that that age, after all, spoke our idiom and worked our institutions. We seem for the moment to be re-reading the sayings of Hate- Good in the Pilgrim's Progress. To let one instance stand for a hundred, let the modem: reader note the handling given in Scotland in 1 794 to William- Skirving, ' Secretary to the British Convention ' of reformers. Skirving's spirit and aims are set forth in his declaration! before the Lord Provost and Town Council of Edinburgh : " My lord, a long time ago I perceived that the' public mind in- this country, as everywhere- else, was* in a remarkable state of irritation*. I Digitized by Microsoft® 1 6 Patriotism and Empire sought to divert this irritation into some channel which might moderate and regulate it. I urged, to the utmost of my influence, the association of the people, anxious to subject the public irritation to the control of delegates chosen by the people themselves, because of their greater wisdom and prudence.' This was the literal truth : the agitation was absolutely orderly ; the sole reforms petitioned for were universal suffrage and annual Parlia- ments ; and the case for the prosecution con- sisted in a shameless pretence that words of warning to opponents as to the perils of the war policy were threats of massacre ; that an appeal for 'the peaceful restitution of their rights ' to the people was seditious, in that it asserted they had been deprived of their natural rights ; that there was 'nothing more seditious ' than the adoption of the title * British Conven- tion of the People '; and that ' the purpose of obtaining universal suffrage ' was, in other words, ' the purpose of subverting the Govern- ment of Great Britain.' Such were the pleas of the Crown. The speech of the Lord Advo- cate on the evidence is a mere string of in- coherent innuendos, of which the most precise is the assertion that universal suffrage would lead to a repetition of the French Revolution ; and the comments of the judges, one and all, con- Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 17 sisted in the most grossly malignant aggrava- tions of the charge, after the jury had given their verdict of Guilty. The speech of Lord Dunsinnan is typical of all, and thus it ran : ' My lords, this pannel has been found guilty, by a verdict of his country, of a crime of a very different nature, and of a more dangerous tendency than those common crimes which occur, and which are the daily subjects of trials in this court. My lords, it is the crime of sedi- tion. It has been proved that these persons met for the purpose of subverting and altering the constitution of this country, under the pretence indeed of reform, but, I say, really to subvert the constitution of the country; and, my lords, from some other circumstances which came out yesterday, in the evening, and upon which the jury found him guilty' [evidence that Skirving's society had proposed to appoint an emergency committee, to act in private, and that there had been some talk of a possible French invasion], ' I confess I shudder to think of the horror that in certain events might have arisen from the train which this man and his accomplices had laid in different parts of this country. Thank God they are disappointed ! Thank God we are still in possession of the laws to protect the constitution, and to establish the security of the subjects of it !' Digitized by Microsoft® 1 8 Patriotism and Empire The pretence of intended treason was ob- viously a stratagem, since, if that could be proved, the talk of subverting the constitution was beside the case. The real gravamen was simply the democratic attitude, and for that Skirving was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation. To this complexion had law and justice been brought under the British Constitution a hundred years ago, by the play of that sentiment of national union for which Coleridge later thanked God. VI It may be pleaded that these old judicial ferocities, infamous as they are, belonged to a period of intense strain and exasperation, in which the ruling class were in constant fear of such developments as they had seen in France ; and that while their patriotism made them thus savage towards those whom they regarded as dangerous agitators, it did not stand for any lack of due sympathy with their fellow-citizens. Many people are ready thus to make excuses for cold British savagery on the part of the vowed guardians of pure justice, when they can see naught but ground for perpetual vitu- peration in the savageries to which the French Revolution was driven by the very menaces Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 19 and conspiracies of its enemies. But let the excuses pass, and let us come to a crucial test. After the defeat of Napoleon, in 1815, all reasonable fear of the revolutionary spirit as such was at an end, in England above all countries. Yet when, on the stoppage of the war expenditure and of the special demand for English products set up by the long disturb- ance of all industry on the Continent, a great distress fell upon industrial and agricultural England, it needed only the appearance of the suffering mass in the guise of famishing mal- contents to arouse in the middle and upper class even such a hatred for their own poor as they had felt for the revolutionists of France. Sympathy was their weakest sentiment, and those who felt it were as nothing in weight and numbers to the malignant well-to-do majority. Twenty years of nominal national union in enmity to another nation had left the wealthy not more but less capable of beneficent fellow- feeling for their own ' kind ' who had fought the fight with them. The English aristocrat had no more learned to care for his luckless countrymen than had Coriolanus in republican Rome. The old psychological process had had the old result. A generation of indulgence for the principle of enmity, with the usual growth of militant fraternity ad hoc, had left society 2 — 2 Digitized by Microsoft® 20 Patriotism and Empire much less fraternal as regarded the works of peace and mercy and building-up than it had been a generation before. The ' Peterloo ' massacre at Manchester, in 1819, served to exhibit the measure of fraternity existing in the nation that had defeated Napo- leon. When a vast meeting of unarmed and orderly people had been brutally charged by cavalry, who sabred not only men, but women and children. Government and the Prince Regent applauded the act ; and Lord Redesdale affirmed in a public letter that ' every meeting for radical reform was not merely a seditious attempt to undermine the existing constitution of government by bringing it into hatred and contempt, but was an overt act of treasonable conspiracy against that constitution of govern- ment, including the King as its head.' If any- one holds that our upper classes have outgrown that temper, let him but recall the episode of 'Black Sunday' in 1887, when heads were broken and life taken as wantonly, if not as wildly, as in 1819 ; and when gangs of middle- class men formed themselves into sets of special constables, lusting for more head-breaking, as zealously as any group of aristocrats ever swore the oath against the demos in ancient Athens. It was all sequent : in every case alike, hate does but breed hate; and an education in hating Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 21 a national enemy proves to be but a training for callous or furious hostility at home. Perhaps the most dramatic expression of the process within the century is that supplied by the Highland clearances which took place in the years 1815-20. The Highlands had supplied in singular abundance, relatively to their popu- lation, excellent troops for foreign service throughout the war. When the war was over, the disbanded soldiers could less than ever pay high rents for their poor crofts on hill and glen to their old landlords ; and these patriots of the civilized sort had learned to regard high rents as the chief end of landlordism. So, without a word of sympathy from the aristocracy whose battle the helot clansmen had fought, without a protective motion on the part of the Legislature, the lingering tribes were rooted out of their fatherland and shipped like cattle to Canada, or wheresoever else they could be cast, to shift for themselves. They had had their reward for patriotism, their part in the drama of pseudo- fraternity played once again by the primordial spirit of hate. It is only too true that their children remain ' loyal ' and ' patriotic,' in the old sense, in their new homes. Such and so irrational are ' loyalty ' and ' patriotism '; let the amateur of both make the most of it. Digitized by Microsoft® 22 Patriotism and Empire VII It may hejp us further to a just notion of the matter if we turn for a moment from our own affairs to those of a country in which normal patriotism has latterly played a great part, under the guidance of a powerful statesman who has lately passed away. Before the advent of Bismarck the North-German States were, from the imperialist point of view, pitiable because 'disunited,' the assumption being that States speaking the same language ought to be united, not for any practical peaceful good that union brings, but for the sake of the consciousness of military power. Some Germans there were, certainly, who rationally desired federal union for the sake of the safeguard federation gives against mutual strife, as well as for security against invasion ; but how little that view of the case counted for in the course of affairs was soon clear. If union was in that sense good for the North-German States, it was still better as between them and Austria, which also is in such large part German-speaking. But the Bismarckian ideal of union leant no more towards peace and goodwill than towards democracy and constitutionalism. The new union-maker knew all too well that the normal Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 23 instinctive man cares for union first and last as a means to the gratification of the spirit of conflict ; that he is a friend because he is an enemy ; that he can best love in order to hate ; and that what he craves as regards foreign States is not the sense of security but the pride of pre-eminent power. So the new apostle of brute force deliberately waged war in order to build up the kind of patriotism he wanted, and to swamp the party of reason and Criticism which hampered him. First he wantonly attacked his weakest neighbour ; and when he triumphed, the worse sort of his countrymen became in increasing numbers his partisans. That was the beginning of the new German union and the new German patriotism. The next step was to provoke to war another and stronger neighbour, but one known to be ill-prepared ; and out of the new bloodshed there grew much more patriotism, and more of the spirit of union — the whole movement being deliberately directed to the aggrandisement of Bismarck's own State and King. For even North-German unity in the abstract he cared nothing ; he had avowed that he would never consent to submerging the identity of Prussia in a coalition : the only permissible unity for him should be a unity of which Prussia was the head, with her King Digitized by Microsoft® 24 Patriotism and Empire glorified as Kaiser. The man's every ideal was on the plane of the Middle Ages ; and he succeeded because most men are still morally and psychologically on the plane of the Middle Ages, with but a veneer of modern science to disguise them to themselves. After creating two needless wars, he set himself to induce a third — the bloodiest and worst of all, again with a neighbour whom he knew to be ill-prepared. For his own part, being the one European statesman who was all along deliberately schem- ing evil, he was prepared for the utmost effort and for every contingency. And now came his crowning triumph. As one war had enabled him to bring to a confederation under Prussia the group of North-German States, who otherwise would not have consented, so the 'ecstasy of the pan-German triumph over France carried the Allied States to the pitch of hailing the Prussian King German Emperor. It was never honest mutual goodwill that wrought such a consummation : it was the primeval lust of enmity and the flushed passion of victory that brought about the symbolic synthesis : the Germans had fraternized in order to crush the French, and they sealed the fraternization with crown and empire in the pride of the achievement. And this is really the supreme illustration of Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 25 the play of ' patriotism ' for the modern world. Led thus brutally to wade through blood to military and political union, the German nation is regarded, not only by its own majority but by the majority elsewhere, as having attained the highest felicity in any nation's reach. That a nation should make itself drunk with the pride of power as a man makes himself drunk with brandy — this is acclaimed without mis- giving as a glorious experience, fit to arouse that 'envy of surrounding ilations' which in previous platitude was the appanage of the British Constitution. The mere proof of the possession of superior power, a certificate which, as regards individuals, passes among civilized men as the ambition and the mark of the pugilist, or, at best, of the mere duellist or the mere athlete — this attestation, made applicable to one nation as against another, is held to have in it something ethically ennobling ; and the banal pride in it, dubbed 'patriotism,' passes for an incontestable virtue. Here is our ethical problem. We shall have to consider later the results of this embodiment of the idea and the sanction of patriotism in the act of war and the institution of armaments. Meanwhile, we are tracing it to its psychological roots and connotations. And we are already fully entitled to say that Digitized by Microsoft® 26 Patriotism and Empire the whole processus is animalistic, and the whole associations vulgar. In the supreme case of Germany the vulgarity is fitly flagrant. The Man of Blood and Iron, the Strong Man of the Carlylean gospel, the brutal wielder of brute force, was always a magnified flunkey, changing his livery thrice a day, playing the obedient giant to the King who signed the letters and made the moves the giant dictated. It is as 'true German servant of Wilhelm I.' that in the end the giant ethically esteems himself : not as the servant of Germany or the German people ; still less of humanity ; least of all as the self-realizing free spirit of German philosophy. Where the giant prostrated him- self, a fortiori Germany did; and this genera- tion has seen growing up in due progression what a recalcitrant German spirit has described as the cult of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Grandson, which three in the Grandson; are one. It is perhaps not more vulgar than the phenomena of royalism in England : that, indeed, could hardly be ; but it is more gross, more primitive — as much more aggressively offensive as German militarism is more powerful than English. And patriotism gilds it all. The personal tyranny of the reigning Kaiser, a tyranny meaner than the first Napoleon's, and much more inquisitorial Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 27 than that of the third, stands for the moral whole created and symbolized by Sedan ; and a great people mutely winces under a young despot's whip in the name of the blood-bought ' unity ' in which ' patriotism ' still sees the crowning good. Not for ever, surely — perhaps not for long ; since already the extremity of the evil strengthens that systematic antagonism which, in the name of Socialism, most pro- foundly countervails mere patriotism and all its works. That resistance, evoking as it does in turn a bitterness of social ill-will against itself not easily to be matched elsewhere, is the last testimony to the futility of the patriotism of enmity as a solvent of domestic division, and as a builder-up of even civic fraternity. But it is for the next century to reveal whether the ancient insanity is not again to triumph, as it did under the regimen of Bismarck, over the higher aspirations of enlightened meoiin the most laboriously thoughtful of mode'^SllSations. Led by Bismarck, Germany's work has been to turn back all social and political progress, and to set up a systematic reign of militarism, which means force as nearly mindless as is compatible with successful direction, in place of what had seemed a growing disregard for the lower instincts, and a confused but gradually clarify- ing ideal of international peace. The nation Digitized by Microsoft® 2 8 Patriotism and Empire nominally the most philosophic has been made to exemplify the most unphilosophic of all political ideals. If the same nation should in turn accomplish the most thorough undoing of the reign of force and enmity, it will have ground for a satisfaction as much nobler than the old as the new results will be more blessed. But in the meantime, with Bismarck dead, Bismarckism still darkens our every vista ; and States that had once seemed most alien to his ideals seem grown capable of pursuing, if not of realizing them. VIII Leaving, however, for later contemplation that aspect of the matter, let us take one more view of the nature of patriotism as seen operating in our own politics. Those who habitually make the assumption of the nobility and beneficence of the instinct in its natural and spontaneous form, as the assertion of the Will- to-Live of a given community or race, might be expected to acclaim it wherever it appears — in the affairs of other groups as well as in their own. And the patriotism - mongers of England do, as we have seen, applaud it in Germany ; nay, they mostly applauded it in Italy when Italians were struggling against Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 29 the Austro-Germans. Italy and Germany are far off; besides, the Italians fought Austria, which never had much attraction for England, and the Germans fought the French, towards whom many Englishmen still feel little good- will — having, it must be owned, no great en- couragement thereto from the normal attitude of the French journals. It is when we turn ^ to the case of Ireland that the ethical quality of the patriotic instinct reveals itself. If English patriots, so called, had in them any pure sympathy for struggling patriotism as such, any genuine moral inspiration for their own instinct, they would recognise in Irish nationalist aspirations the very virtue they profess to revere. These are the very cir- cumstances in which, from any point of view, patriotism must in justice be reckoned sanative. To the eye of the political rationalist, it is in such a case a force whereby a people is com- bined for its betterment, stimulated to a higher i level of moral self-consciousness, fired to a , joint effort which means no menace towards any other people, but seeks sheer benefit without any offset of destruction. Here, if ever, should it have the endorsement of good men. To the average patriot, again, the desire of a people with common traditions and common needs to secure as full a measure of Digitized by Microsoft® 3© Patriotism and Empire self-rule as is possessed by those with whom they are in nominal union — this should surely figure as patriotism in its most attractive form, unless it be that his sympathies are only to be aroused by blood-letting or the effort thereto; by the plots of Poles and the insurrections of Italians. But we know very well that the average English patriot had no more considera- tion for armed Fenianism than he has for unarmed Nationalism. The utter egoism, the unintelligent animalism of his instinct comes out the moment another man's instinct clashes with it. Patriotism for him means hatred of other men's patriotism the moment they thereby incommode him, albeit they only ask him to give them in reality the rights he accords them in name. Bitterly, nay, furiously, he vilifies in them the passion he applauds in himself; professing at times, perhaps, for once in a way to apply to the whole question the test of utility, but offering in its name only pleas which are the expression of his own naive and lawless egoism. Scratch thus the patriot, and you find the pirate ; test the devotee of freedom, and you find the insolent oppressor. And to no one who has much meditated on the normal moralities of men is the upshot disconcerting. What other outcome should there be from Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 31 the self-glorifying parade of a primeval instinct, taken without purification by man from beast ? If the braggart among men be an offence to the civilized moral sense, how shall nations satisfy the first principles of civilized ethics when they set to themselves the pose and the phrase of the braggart as a discipline and an ideal ? Not from the thistles of the savage prime shall be gathered the fruits of inter- national civility. If men, as constituents of nations, will not consent to think and reason for the whole as they do for themselves and each other singly, they must fatally, as nations, remain at the moral level of the human animal, scientific only for the work of mischief, licensing itself to be brutal and irrational in mass while claiming to denounce brutality and eliminate unreason in the individual. And the individual will all the while assuredly reflect the ideals of the mass. IX In a recent work of realistic fiction, a study of life in the criminal class in the East End of London, there is presented, probably without the author's knowledge, and doubtless without his intention, a singularly clear vision of the nature and operation of the passion of patriotism. Digitized by Microsoft® 32 Patriotism and Empire The book in question is Mr. Arthur Morrison's masterly story, A Child of the Jago, one of those fictions which, exhibiting to most of us a phase of life of which we have known nothing, almost irresistibly convince us of their trust- worthiness. Obviously, such an impression ought on second thoughts to be revised ; and one sees cause to suspect that Mr. Morrison's picture of life in ' the Jago ' makes out that sort of existence to be more symmetrical, more sequent, more homogeneous in its kind, than it really is, even as the novel of normal life unduly simplifies that. But this criticism, supposing it to be valid as against the structure of Mr. Morrison's story, which is skilfully composed in the contemporary impressionist manner, does not, I think, affect that aspect of it to which I am here calling notice. Here the study is either wholly false or substantially true. ' The Jago,' it should be explained for any reader of these pages who may not know the book, is a certain group of old streets (now demolished) in the Bethnal Green district, inhabited mostly by habitual criminals. As against the law - abiding and law - enforcing world, this population is spontaneously united, fraternal, and co-operative^ The police are the common enemy, to be lied to, baffled, and if Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 33 possible ' bashed,' when they cross the Jago frontier. But this is what might have been expected. What comes upon us as a revela- tion, and yet as a luminously intelligible ex- pression of natural law, is the fact that the people of the Jago live in chronic feud with those of a neighbouring group of streets, generalized as ' Dove Lane,' whereof the in- habitants differ only partially from them in respect of not being all thieves, or not always thieving. In this feud every 'Jago' is ready at a moment's notice to fight in rank with his neighbours against any body of Dove-Laners. After a pitched battle has raged itself out, a process sometimes taking several days, the feud for a time slumbers, and may even be patched up by a semi-formal treaty between the leading spirits of both sides, who duly fraternize in a representative public-house of either territory. Peace will then last for an indefinite time, till it shall be broken by a drunken brawl between individuals of the two groups, or as a result of a diffused feeling that it has lasted long enough, and that the other side need beating. But while the slum is thus united against the ' natural enemy,' and the war-cry, ' Hold tight, Jago,' will rally all the blackguards of the place for the geographical conflict, 'the Jago' has a feud within itself, as furious and as frequent 3 Digitized by Microsoft® 34 Patriotism and Empire as that between Jago and Dove-Laner. Two of the leading scoundrels of the Jago are Billy Rann and Billy Leary, and all Jagory chroni- cally divides into Rann and Leary factions, which ' bash ' each other for days at a time as zealously as if one of the sides were of Dove Lane, the women going into the fray, and even outdoing the males of their species in ferocity of method. When a Rann- Leary battle has raged itself out, or is curtailed by an act of manslaughter that elicits the police, the factions relapse into fraternity for awhile, and are ready at due notice to make common cause against the Dove-Laners. And there is yet one more complication. Now and then, when the thieving business is depressed, the bulk of the manifold rascality loafing about Jagodom will suddenly decide on a filibustering raid through the main streets, in the course of which every isolated inhabitant found in the open is hustled, robbed, and if need be ' bashed,' the proceeds of this ' crowded hour of glorious life ' being divided as honour- ably as may be among the raiders. Jagoism thus presents, in its one-horse hell, all the variations undergone in normal society by the animal instinct which figures now as egoism, now as partisanism, now as patriotism. In the Jago, as in the larger world, each is for himself, Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 35 and the devil is specially welcome to the hind- most. But the Jago, like the average citizen, is a social animal, prone to combination — for a purpose ; so he is ready for an occasional syndicate of thievery, good for a whole fore- noon, during which he will rob indifferently Jago and Gentile. Again, he has his hereditary family or feudal bias, and when a Rann-Leary row is ' on ' he takes his part with all the alacrity of a knight distinguishing between Guelph and Ghibelline, or White Rose and Red. Finally, though at a pinch he may ' bash ' his neighbour or rob his neighbour's wife or child, he is a true, loyal, patriotic Jago as against all Dove-Laners. The question arises. In what respect is the patriotism of the Jago less rational or less respectable than the patriotism of the Jingo ? And the answer must be that the only differ- ence is one of social status and prestige. Psychologically the two forms of feeling are identical. Passing for moral inspirations of the most unquestionable kind, they are equally animal with the sympathies and animosities of cats and dogs, and they are alike belied by the daily life of those who exhibit them. When bitter enemies join hands on the strength of a common hatred for an enemy outside, thej'^ are more or less confident that they are doing a fine thing. They might as well glorify them- 3—2 Digitized by Microsoft® 36 Patriotism and Empire selves over the animosities which divide them when the ' natural ' enemy is out of sight ; and, indeed, they do so, though they reserve the approving title of patriotism for the animosity that is cherished in common. Once more, it is v/ not brotherhood, or sympathy, or goodwill that unites the general population in a flush of passion against another population : the ostensible brotherhood of the moment is merely a passing product of the union of egoisms. The men who prate most of patriotism and 'the Empire,' and who dwell most habitually on our ' natural ' hostility to Russia, or to Germany, or to France, are as a rule conspicuous for their indifference to the well-being of the mass of their fellow-country- men, and for the virulence of their ill-feeling towards those of another way of thinking in ^ politics. Animosity of one sort or the other is the spring of all their politics. In a general way, indeed, they desire good trade for the country at large, and they rejoice when ' our ' trade is in better case than that of other countries, but they would not move a finger so to alter the social structure that the working mass should gain in wealth and comfort ; rather they resent the workers' claim as they resent foreign competition in land-grabbing. At most they may help in times of special distress as do Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 37 the Jagos, who get up a ' break ' to finance a brother thief newly out of gaol, and not yet earning an income. But as regards anything like all-round sympathy they are positively inferior to the Jagos, who are pretty much of one class, and whose domestic feuds are in- termittent, not steadfastly active jealousies. It would seem, then, that the ' good ' society has little cause to plume itself on its superiority to the ' bad,' as regards the moral springs of its international action. The inspiration of the patriotic Jingo, however different in literary colour, is just the inspiration of the blackguard J ago — as far away from reason, from self- criticism, from the spirit of righteousness. The maxim, ' our country, right or wrong,' is but the wording of a sentiment which the Jago acts upon without thinking that any formula is necessary. And it would seem to be a safe inference that while our polity turns largely on ideals or principles which we hold in common with burglars and bullies, our society will continue to exhibit plain phases of the pre- datory and brutish stages of civilization. X It may be well, before leaving this side of the matter, to take account of the possible protest Digitized by Microsoft® 38 Patriotism and Empire that civilized patriotism has in it elements of purely benevolent feeling, and that if not strictly altruistic — some may perhaps insist that it is properly altruistic — it is so far a mental state of goodwill and aspiration, of pleasure in good, and of natural admiration and social sympathy, that it cannot reasonably be likened even remotely to the instincts of thieves and ruffians. Let it be observed on this that the word ' patriotism ' means nothing if not a specialization of our sympathies, a caring much more for our own people than for any other. It does not stand for the mere necessary restriction of most of the display of our good- will to those who are nearest us. We call philanthropist the man who, while practically most concerned with his own people, yet gives out a doctrine or a precept framed in the interest of all mankind ; the name of patriot is normally and naturally given to the man who either fights his own country's battle or specially strives to put his country at an advantage as against others. To say of the philanthropist, as we may well do, that he is the true patriot, is really to urge a moral criticism on the lines of the present argument ; it is not an agreement to make the word ' patriotism ' mean something else than it normally has done. As long as the thing, the Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 39 proclivity, subsists throughout the world, it must have a name, and we are here employ- ing that name at its ordinary value. If, then, it be claimed for patriotism that it ^ involves certain quite laudable frames of mind, the answer is that, to be patriotic at all, a mood of benevolence must be distinctly restrictive and exclusive — that is, must connote a conscious withholding of some goodwill from other com- munities. But I can conceive its being argued that a decent and cultured patriotism is rather a giving out of special goodwill on the stimulus of fellow-citizenship than a lessening of what would otherwise be given to the foreigner ; that it is not a subtraction from, but an addition to, the total amount of human sympathy of which the average man is capable. Let this claim, then, be tested over a really good example of cultured patriotism, which has already come under general notice at the hands of a champion of culture. It was in his latter years that Mr. Matthew Arnold, discussing the career and work of Tolstoy, thus delivered himself on the subject of the sensitiveness and self-consciousness of Americans : ' But the Americans, as we know, are apt to set them at rest in the manner of my friend Colonel Higginson of Boston. "As I take it, Nature said some years since: ' Thus far the English is my best race, but we have had Digitized by Microsoft® 40 Patriotism and Empire Englishmen enough ; we need something with a little more buoyancy than the Englishman ; let us lighten the structure, even at some peril in the process. Put in one drop more of nervous fluid, and make the American.' With that drop a new range of promise opened on the human race, and a lighter, finer, more highly organized type of mankind was born." People who by this sort of thing give rest to their sensitive and busy self-consciousness may very well, per- haps, be on their way to great material prosperity, to great political power ; but they are scarcely on the right way to a great literature, a serious art.' This not unskilful attack might be met by, let me also say, my friend Colonel Higginson with a sufficiently effective tu quoque, in respect of certain of Mr. Arnold's own indulgences in patriotic elation. For it was Mr. Arnold who, after many sound counsels to his countrymen to take note of their shortcomings as beside other Europeans, thus glorified the Church of England in an essay on that institution : ' Show me any other great Church of which a chief actor and luminary has a sentence like this sentence, splendide verax, of Butler's : " Things are what they are, and the con- sequences of them will be what they will be ; why, then, should we wish to be deceived ?" . . . Intensely Butlerian as this sentence is, yet Butler came to it because he is EngUsh, because at the bottom of his nature lay such a fund of integrity.' There is, of course, nothing out of the way in this exhibition. Just as French writers, Hugo among them, tell us complacently that it Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 41 is the special characteristic of Paris to be 'steeped in good sense,' so do our English writers chronically illustrate our good sense by- proclaiming it. Macaulay reminds us of ' that masculine and full-grown robustness of mind, that equally diffused intellectual health which, if our national partiality does not mislead us, has peculiarly characterized the great men of England ;' and Mr. Leslie Stephen courageously assures us that Swift and Dr. Johnson ' are alike in that shrewd, humorous common-sense which seems to be the special endowment of the English race ' — a precious proposition, fitly proved. Arnold is but falling into line with the immemorial national procession, wearing the customary beatific smile with the customary ineptitude. And if this sort of thing be per- missible to an English critic without demur from common-sense. Colonel Higginson must be well within his rights in claiming for Americans such a trifle as an extra drop of vivacity. But when he reflects how much more apt is such a claim on his side to be over- crowed on the other by countervailing claims than to be conceded in a spirit of teachable modesty, he will perhaps grant me that even if it were as true for the States in general as it probably is for cultured Boston, it was after all not quite worth pressing. No doubt he has Digitized by Microsoft® 42 Patriotism and Empire the justification, urged by him in his searching and intimately suggestive volume of papers on The New World and the New Book, that some Americans may still be the better of a little encouragement to their self-respect under the pressure of English assumptions — an excuse which was entirely lacking to Mr. Arnold, on his own reiterated testimony. Colonel Higginson's claim, too, is bottomed on a great deal of Mr. Arnold's own criticism of Anglo-Saxon density, as set forth, in particular, in the essay On the Study of Celtic Litera- ture. But is not all this just a clinching proof of the perverting influence of the patriotic senti- ment ? That sentiment it was which, reviving in the elderly English critic, made him at one moment false to his own principles and his earlier enlightened practice, to the point of an absolutely absurd display of national vanity, and at another moment made him un- reflectively resent a much more reasonable flight of nationalist self-satisfaction on the part of a friendly American. No good is done to anybody in England or anywhere else, and certainly no healthy discipline is given to the boaster's own in- telligence, by such a boast as that about the peculiarly Anglican character of the disposition Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 43 to avoid self-deception. But if that be granted of Arnold's claim for Englishmen, it would seem to follow that Colonel Higginson's claim for Americans, however just, is not the most educative of his judgments. If in itself it could serve to hearten diffident Americans, the service would be only the more likely to be undone by Arnold's counter-sarcasm, which in the terms of the case would be doubly dis- heartening to such temperaments. Americans in general, however, really do not need to be encouraged to think well of themselves any more than do Englishmen ; rather they have, in the mass, like their kinsmen, self-satisfaction to spare. To flatter them, then, is surely no part of a wise American's business, not to say of his duty. The more one meditates the 1 matter, the more one is moved to prescribe for one's nation, as for one's self, the exercise of self-criticism in preference to the exercise of self-praise. If Shakespeare could see fit to brood on his own deficiencies, ' Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,' the nations which read and acclaim him may well take the same medicine for their collective flatulences. For nervous depression there is always handy the safe tonic of simple criticism of the faults of other nations. Digitized by Microsoft® J 44 Patriotism and Empire There was a time, no doubt, when educated Americans, as distinguished from ordinary patriots, needed encouragement from their men of culture to stand upon their intellectual birthright. Poe, Emerson, and Whitman, from their different standpoints saw the need and ministered to it — Poe pointing to the intellec- tual weakness of the current English criticism, before which Americans bowed ; Emerson dis- tilling what was intellectually valid in the patriotic sense of the Republic's importance ; Whitman poetically transmuting patriotism into something nobler and rarer. But observe first the virtue, in all three of these writers, of the saving grace of their intellectual motive, and next the peril, in different cases, of the normal patriotic motive working in the same direction. Poe, though a little touched with local or Southern prejudice, was incapable of mere sentimental patriotism, and did but urge in- dependence on his countrymen in regard to English criticism, as he would have urged it on any school of them as against the Transcendentalists. Emerson was much less of an emotionalist, much less of a vessel of instinct, in his politics than in his philosophy ; in reality he philosophized politics for his fellow-republicans. Whitman, in some aspects somewhat of an ' American Americanizing,' Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 45 really struck a note which intellectually far outsoars that of mere patriotism, and has thus had scant welcome from American patriots. Very different in temperamental basis from all of these utterances was Mr. Lowell's essay On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, where the chief inspiration was obviously the predisposition to condescend in turn. Here we have patriotic self - love retaliating on foreign self-esteem, instinct clashing with in- stinct, with the result of yielding much heat and little light, though Lowell was much more of a wit and of a humorist than any of the others. Dialectically the essay is a marvel of incoherence. Again and again it shows a full cognizance of the fact that the foreign imper- tinences complained of had always been well matched by American impertinences ; that democratic arrogance had always held its own against aristocratic, boast for boast and insult for insult ; yet the middle-aged man of letters must needs fume, nay, foam, on behalf of the geographical ' we,' even in the act of avowing his incommunity with myriads of his neighbours. In this allocution he treats with downright anger propositions in regard to American life, such as he has himself made in another essay ; and much of his argument is a rebuttal of his Digitized by Microsoft® 46 Patriotism and Empire own previous utterance.* The outcome is a see-saw of .splenetic admission and more splenetic aspersion, logically amounting only to the proposition ' You're another,' and fur- nishing to the reflective reader no moral profit whatsoever, save, it may be, that of having seen how such matters ought not to be handled. Even the quality of the writing, excellent as Lowell's always is — excellent in spite of an occa- sional flaw ; excellent even in the too frequent claptrap — does not make amends for the bad thinking. The soreness to which it so con- fusedly testifies is the measure of the vanity of the primary passion of patriotism at best, and of its fatal potency, when sentimentally cherished, to evict humour from the head no less than good-humour from the heart. His resentment of jocular foreign condescension never taught Lowell to bate his jocular condescension to- wards foreigners^ — never, at least, in his writings, where Celt and Teuton, French and German, Scotch and English, are in turn joked about with a robust complacency. Yet, how grievously are his withers wrung by the chance poke of the English pilgrim's staff ! * Compare the opening pages of the essay, A Great Public Character, with that above discussed, which im- mediately precedes it in My Study Windows. But the Condescension essay taken singly betrays the spirit divided against itself. Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 47 There is yet another way of ' encouraging ' the diffident American spirit, a way which has one obvious advantage over Mr. Lowell's, but which in turn is open to damaging criticism — I mean the attitude taken by Washington Irving in a letter to Motley, as late as 1857, There must have been already a good deal of pluck- ing-up of heart in the States before the cosmo- politan Irving could be moved to write thus : 'You are properly sensible of the high calling of the American press, that rising tribunal before which the history of all nations is to be revised and rewritten, and the judgment of past ages to be corrected or confirmed.' The first and perhaps the worst trouble about deliverances of this kind is that they are extremely apt to elicit European ridicule of the kind that Dickens poured out on American self-praise in Martin Chuzzlewit, a book which to this day counts for harm in English popular culture. I will not, however, dwell on that kind of rejoinder, much less echo it ; rather let us seek for a judicial verdict from our common-sense. Irving, one presumes, did not by ' press ' mean merely ' newspaper press ': he must have meant serious literature in general ; so I will not raise the question whether American journalism any more than European has realized what used to be expected of it. If, however, the proposition be taken in its most Digitized by Microsoft® 48 Patriotism and Empire plausible sense, will it bear criticism ? Irving's idea was that the democratic spirit could and would fitly sit in judgment on feudal and monarchic history, institutions, ethics, ideals. So be it ; but what is to give the American press a monopoly of that spirit, that tribunal ? Mere political democracy, as thus far evolved in the States, is a very imperfect rectification of social inequality ; and a far profounder criticism of the evils of the European past and present has been latterly produced in Europe itself than that hitherto current in the States. Marx and Morris, surely, cut deeper than either Irving or Motley dreamt of going ; and their criticism has thus far found much more acceptance in old-world Germany and England than in the States. The late Mr. Bellamy brilliantly took up their parable ; but he seems to have had more sympathizers, proportionally, in England than in his own country. All this, be it understood, is no impeachment of the civilization of the United States. The relative tardiness of Socialistic thought there is simply the expression of the greater elasticity there of the economic conditions for indi- vidualism than in Europe. But it all goes to suggest that the civilization of the future is hardly likely to be a triumphal march of the unchanged Republic, under President, Senate, Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 49 and Congress, far in advance of a forever unchanged Europe, mostly monarchic and aristocratic to the end. My honoured friend Dr. Moncure Conway, nearly a generation ago, urged upon his fellow-countrymen of the States that their constitution exemplified certain ' Republican Superstitions.' As a convinced republican, I venture to saj' with him that in the mere matter of constitution-making there is much to be done before the States can satisfy the tests of scientific democracy. How far are we, then, from a state of things in which the mere quality of being American can give any criticism a precedence or prerogative in the intellectual world ? When Irving wrote, the impeachment of slavery in Dickens's American Notes stood facile to the hand of any man who cared to make the retort ; to-day, one fears, the Socialists of Europe, under whatever rule they live, will be hardly less ready than was Dickens to repugn the notion of an American Supreme Court in the world of ideas. Many of them, indeed, would repugn it unintelligently, under- valuing the factor they dismissed. The judg- ment passed on American life by Huysmans, that fine flower of old-world decadence, has really less rational weight than the claim of Irving. But there is only the more need that we should all alike get over the nationalistic 4 Digitized by Microsoft® 5© Patriotism and Empire attitude, and drop all judgments which attribute special powers and special impotences to given communities as such. Why cannot instructed men everywhere agree to substitute for all other claims to jurisdic- tion the claim of universal Reason ? Colonel Higginson argues, justly enough, that for some Americans * cosmopolitanism ' comes to signify just Europeanism ; that they do not stand for a true cosmopolitanism even when . asking for it. Be it so ; is not the solution still a substitution of a universal test for an avowed particularism ? Is there any rest for the spirit of wisdom in a nationalist self-exaltation ? Why should any of us go on separately taking the old perverse pleasure in the notion that the mass of mankind will for ever be inferior in wit, wisdom, and well-being to our own particular nation ? Is there really any sane comfort for an instructed American in believing that Europe will always be feudal, undemocratic, ethically backward, as compared with his own people ? If his educa- tion be worthy of the name, he has learned much from living Europeans, and he is aware that many living Europeans are as well fitted to sit in judgment on American history as he can be to sit in judgment on theirs. He cannot well suppose that they are going meekly to bow, for themselves and for Europe, under the Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 51 verdict of the amiable Irving. He will wish, indeed, to see developed in America as large a body of experts, of capable thinkers, as exists in Europe, even as the intelligent men of every nation wish to see their own people make up leeway in the matters in which they are back- ward. But that very sense of intellectual parity with other communities which is, or would be, so comforting and sustaining to him, is it not equally so to the others ? Why then should he wish to see them deprived of it in the future? The only intelligible reason why is just the old passion of patriotism, a passion in itself the potential solvent and negation of culture, in the sense that it turns to naught the best fruits thereof. In reality, the one kind of progress which in these days would represent a moral superiority on the part of any one civilized nation over any other would be precisely the subordination or subdual of the spirit of patriotism by political reason. And that step does not at the moment appear, in the terms of the case, to be nearer accomplishment in the New World than in the Old. Rather, the New World has to pass, however much more rapidly, through stages of error in which the Old has long dwelt. The problem, then, cannot be too searchingly discussed, in either hemisphere, by the lovers of light and of civilization. 4—2 Digitized by Microsoft® 52 Patriotism and Empire XI As it happens, the people of the United States are in a fair way to follow those of the United Kingdom into a snare that is laid for all peoples who can greatly enlarge their bounds or their numbers. They are like to suffer, as so many Englishmen have suffered, from the giddiness that goes with sheer political ex- tension. In England the malady, which a generation ago had seemed in a way to be cured, grows more offensively prevalent every day, till the reaction seems overdue. And as this trouble is manifestly a malignant form of the old affection of patriotism, it calls for some / special notice in these pages. To put the case shortly, if nationalism is bad, imperialism is worse. If to intoxicate one's self on fatherland be unwholesome, to grow drunken on empire is pestilent. On the English side, the contagion is as- siduously quickened by certain men of letters, who combine a special gift of speech with the ideals and the information of an average boy. Singly and collectively, they stand for the type ^ of the Barbarian Sentimentalist. We may take as the most distinguished members of the school Mr. Kipling and Mr. Henley, the first Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 53 a brilliant story-teller, who passes for a poet with the unpoetical ; the second an admirable artist in verse, who passes for a prophet with the unprophetical, and for a politician with the incapable of politics. It would be hard to find two men of literary genius with less of rational insight into the life-conditions of the political organism to which they belong. To their eyes, the stupendous problem of industrial continuance, which is the problem of life for millions of overdriven men, resolves itself into a kind of military pageant, with occasional fighting to lend it dignity ; and for them, accordingly, all political philosophy begins and ends in the literary picturesque. This is how Mr. Henley prefaces a work on Imperialism by one of his school : 'We have renewed our old pride in the Flag, our old delight in the thought of a good thing done by a good man of his hands, our old faith in the ambitions and traditions of the race. I doubt, for instance, if outside politics (and, perhaps, the Stock Exchange), there be a single Englishman who does not rejoice in the triumph of Mr. Rhodes ; even as I believe that there is none, inside or out of politics, who does not feel the prouder for his kinship with Sir Herbert Kitchener. And the reason is on the surface. To the national conscience, drugged so long and so long bewildered and bemused, such men as Rhodes and Kitchener are heroic Englishmen. The one has added some hundreds of thousands of square miles to the Empire, and is neck-deep in the work of consolidating that he has Digitized by Microsoft® 54 Patriotism and Empire got, and of taking more. The other is wiping out the great dishonour that overtook us at Khartoum, at the same time that he is " reaching down from the north " to Buluwayo, and preparing the way of them that will change a place of skulls into a province of peace. Both are great, and that is much. But both are, after all, but types ; and that is more. We know now, Mr. Kipling aiding, that all the world over are thousands of the like temper, the like capacity for government, the like impatience of anarchy ; and that all the world over, these — each one according to his vision and his strength — are doing Imperial work at Imperial wages : the chance of a nameless death, the possibility of distinction, the certainty that the effect is worth achieving, and will surely be achieved.' Observe that the peace-making imperial life here preached and panegyrized depends for its very existence on the continued supply of fight- ing barbarism. Without barbarian territory to steal and militant barbarians to shoot, the fabric of tinfoil glory passes away as a peepshow. Blessed are the powder-and-shot peacemakers, for they shall always go on inheriting more earth, is Mr. Henley's gospel. Our senti- mentalist, himself a barbarian, proclaims a Jehad against barbarism ; but without bar- barism to fight he is at a dead stand. The glorious task of the Imperialist, as here set forth, consists in subduing the Soudan, and so on ; but when there are no more Soudans to subdue, in the terms of the case, ' Imperial work ' is at an end^ and there is nothing left for Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 55 the ' national conscience ' but to become once more 'drugged, and bewildered, and bemused.' By a series of Soudans only can we be annually saved. So absolutely childish a gospel is hardly a subject for serious argument, but it is among the possibilities of our chaotic system that such mindless rodomontade may, in a bad hour, turn the balance of political move- ment from sanity to delirium. The outstanding result of the conflict of the hand-to-mouth Opportunisms into which both Liberalism and Toryism have resolved them- selves in England since Gladstone and Disraeli took them in tutelage, is that none of our states- men have any ostensible political philosophy at all, save in so far as a few on the Liberal side at times recall the lore of their early teachers. Men who were at least trained in the Liberal school are seen formulating theories of inter- national action which might have been hatched by Disraeli in one of his earlier romances. In this state of things it needs only a sufficiently evil conjuncture of circumstances to enable a Moses of the Music-Hall, with perhaps a few Aarons of the Areopagus, to start a Jingo crusade in which the nation may march as straight to dire disaster as ever did any host of ' drugged, bemused, and bewildered ' fanatics iQ' the Dark Ages, Eloquent ignorance has Digitized by Microsoft® 56 Patriotism and Empire wrought such things in the past, and may compass them again. To rule or conserve an empire in these days requires first and last sound economic science, and a calm grasp of the manifold lesson of political history. Our energumens of empire, all the while, know as much of economic science as did the Mahdi, and are about as fit as he to instruct a civilized people. To what economic wisdom they can attain when they put their inspiration and their in- formation together may be gathered from an indescribable article which appeared a year or two ago in a leading English journal. The writer undertook to set forth the contingent destinies of Great Britain and Germany in the matter of their commerce. Comparing the commercial rivalry of the two nations with an affectation of cynical impartiality, he pro- nounces : ' A million petty disputes build up the greatest cause of war the world has ever seen. If Germany were extin- guished to-morrow, the day after to-morrow there is not an Englishman in the world who would not be the richer. Nations have fought for years over a city or a right of suc- cession; must they not fight for two hundred and fifty million pounds of yearly commerce ?' This is the economic premiss, absolute absurdity affirmed with absolute confidence; Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 57 the political economy of the Dark Ages enounced with the glibness of the Pall Mall paragraphist. He regards trade as a process of securing tribute, and holds that the extinction of one trading nation enriches the others to the extent of its whole turnover — as who should say that an individual tradesman best adds to his income by murdering his richest customers, ' Prince Bismarck has long recognised what at length the people of England are beginning to understand — that in Europe there are two great, irreconcilable, opposing forces, two great nations who would make the whole world their province, and who would levy from it the tribute of com- merce.' It may be that Prince Bismarck also cherished that hallucination of the mess-room. He, too, as we have said, held by the political philosophy of the Dark Ages ; and we know with what fury his brother-in-arms, Moltke, saw the industrial prosperity of France and the coincident distress in Germany after the war milliards had been paid and pocketed. To those two paladins it doubtless looked like witchcraft. The worst of the matter is that minds capable of this solution of the problem of international trade are probably incapable of mastering any other. It is of no avail to point to such a one in England that with England Germany does much more trade than with any Digitized by Microsoft® 58 Patriotism and Empire other nation ; that Germany is the third-best of England's customers, apart from India and Australia ; that Anglo-German trade has in- creased by millions in ten years ; that the English imports from Germany exceed the exports by several millions, showing that Germany, like France and the United States, pays England 'tribute' on English investments in Germany, whereas the figures show that British capital is annually being deported to South Africa in excess of the returns ; that Germany is a bigger customer for Britain than South Africa and Canada together, and not far below Australia ; and, finally, that Germany is far less capacitated to intercept English trade than are the United States, which far exceed England in stores of coal and iron, whereas Germany is in these our inferior ; though, on the other hand, the States pay an enormous annual ' tribute ' on English investments. Our medieval patriot, indeed, will not, even if he assimilates the facts as to the United States, propose that we should undertake to destroy them in order to increase our incomes. His medieval economics all the while are but a gloss on his militarist instinct and his patriotism, which together breed in him the desire to fight Germany because Germany irritates him and he thinks England can defeat her at sea. He Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 59 can vaguely realize that American naval power is indefinitely expansible ; so the American interception of British commerce must perforce be permitted. But he believes he or ' we ' can safely insult the Germans, and he thus proceeds to do so : 'What Bismarck realized, and what we too may soon come to see, is that not only is there the most real conflict of interests between England and Germany, but that England is the only Great Power who could fight Germany without tremendous risk and without 'doubt of the issue. Her partners in the Triple Alliance would be useless against England : Austria, because she could do nothing ; Italy, because she dare not lay herself open to attack by France. The growth of Germany's fleet has done no more than to make the blow of England fall on her more heavily. The ships would soon be at the bottom of the sea or in convoy to English ports; Hamburg and Bremen, the Kiel Canal and the Baltic ports, would lie under the guns of England, waiting until the indemnity were settled. Our work over, we need not even be at the pains to alter Bismarck's words to Ferry, and to say to France and Russia, " Seek some compensation. Take inside Germany whatever you like: you can have it." ' And the article ends with ' Germaniam esse delendam.' Thus are peace on earth, goodwill among men, commerce, and the science of com- merce, promoted among us by the imperial and patriotic press. We can hear Mr. Henley rejoicing at the promulgation of such a healing and luminous gospel to his hitherto 'drugged, Digitized by Microsoft® 6o Patriotism and Empire bemused, and bewildered ' countrymen ; and we can imagine Mr. Kipling turning it into his psalmodic verse, with its rhythms of the drum and its modulations of the trumpet. The people of the United States, clearly, cannot be worse bemused by their megalo- maniacs than are their kin beyond seas ; but the malady being ' most incident ' to human nature, they were bound to catch it. A certain sort of megalomania belonged to the early stage of Western expansion, the expansive citizen being apt to feel that the greatness of the continent in some way reflected greatness on him. ' Even during our war,' wrote Lowell in one of his dispassionate hours, ' in the midst of that almost unrivalled stress of soul, were not our speakers and newspapers so enslaved to the vulgar habit as to boast ten times of the thousands of square miles it covered with armed men, for once that they alluded to the motive that gave it all its meaning and splendour ?' Perhaps that phrase of the ' unrivalled stress of soul ' was itself somewhat in the expansive aquiline taste ; but the corrective thought is medicinal ; and never more so than to-day, when not a few Americans find in the prospect of extra-American empire a welcome fillip to the kind of imagination that had been jaded by too much rhetoric in the key that Lowell Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 6i deprecated. It has come to this, that re- publicans are acclaiming the principle of ' empire ' in modern Boston as eagerly as they ever did in ancient Athens, and that citizens of the vast United States are seriously insisting on their national need for ' expansion.' It cannot be too plainly said that if, as many Americans seriously argue, their economic life needs such expansion — if the acquisition of Cuba is necessitated by the mere exhaustion of the field of profitable investment in the States — the game of democratic politics so far is up. No European State has failed more completely to place its industrial life on a sound basis than the States must be held to have done if that theorem be sound. If there is a positive need in American affairs for expansion of territory, Cuba and the Philippines can but stave off the evil day, and the industrial failure of the Republic is only a question of time.. And to whom is that conclusion credible ? It is doubtless only too true that a number of persons in the States may count on enriching themselves by the annexation of new territory ; but that their pecuniary gain should count as the moral and political gain of the Republic ; and that the future of the commonwealth should be held to turn on such chronic expansion of its realm — this is, if possible, worse doctrine than Digitized by Microsoft® 62 Patriotism and Empire the gospel of Mr. Henley. Yet when pro- fessed Liberals and professed haters of Liberalism in England are found at one in egging on the new imperialists of the Republic, it is not beyond the bounds of chance that the mania may gather head. For the people of the States, albeit they are no more 'Anglo- Saxon ' than the motley population which hypnotizes itself with that shibboleth in the mother-country, are subject to all the visitations of unwisdom which follow the rest of mankind, Britons included. Only their special circum- stances have spared them certain phases in the past ; and now that they are suddenly placed in a new relation, reason must in that connection fight for its own hand there as elsewhere. There is no treasure of surplus sanity in the life of a republic any more than in that of a monarchy. The Spanish war has been taken in the States just as wars are taken in Europe — a matter to be specially considered anon — and only a minority combats the new pride of conquest. Unhappily, there is old as well as new counsel in its favour ; for Lowell, of all men, can be cited on the militarist side. ' We have at length established,' he wrote a genera- tion ago, 'our claim to the noblesse of the sword, the first step still of every nation that would make its entry into the best society of Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 63 history.' The. premier pas in that case certainly- cost a good deal ; and it would appear to follow that it is good business to take a few more, till the States have all the evidence of noblesse they want, and constitute as good society as Turkey itself. When the patriot author of the Biglow Papers can be cited to such purpose, it is not strange, though it be sad, that some of his successors in American letters should now be found looking to military patriotism for the sufficient inspiration of a truly American literature. The blood of the volunteers, it seems, is to be the seed of a new literary church. Says one of that persuasion, in an essay of which I have seen an extract : ' When American life has become a unit in its moral and spiritual aspiration, when local pride is swallowed up in national pride, the American soil will be ready to produce the great art, the great book. Until then no one can speak for America as Homer spoke for Greece, Shakespeare for England, Dante for Italy.' Never was the judicial warning against giving reasons for a judgment more pat than here. What would otherwise be mere intangible declamation, open to blame but outside argu- ment, is delivered into our hands as false history, false aesthetics, false sociology. For Homer did not ' speak for Greece,' nor Shake- speare for ' England,' nor Dante for ' Italy.' Digitized by Microsoft® 64 Patriotism and Empire The Homeric epics, fruits of a life that was hardly even an embryo of the Greece of the world's memory, no more speak for civilized Greece than does the Chanson de Roland for France, or the Nibelungenlied for Germany ; and Hawthorne already has ' spoken for America,' in so far as that may be, much more truly than Homer could possibly do for the Greece of Pericles, or Shakespeare for modern England. The vanity of the theorem is flagrant when we remember that long after Homer Greece was divided into a multitude of States ; that most of the best of later Greek literature was produced by Athens alone ; and that Dante stood for one Italian faction in one Italian city — a faction at chronic war with its rival, a city at chronic war with its nearest neighbour. Did the great Greek tragedians speak for Sparta ? or Plato for Thrace ? or Sappho for Boeotia ? Dante did not even dream of a federated Italy : his allegiance was to an empire seated on alien soil. The dream was dreamed by Machiavelli, who might indeed be said to speak for the Italy of his day ; but Italy in our own age has been united for a generation, and Leopardi still remains her greatest modern man of letters. Union, verily, is better than strife, and cos- mopolitanism than provincialism ; but mere Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 65 communal pride is not cosmopolitanism, not if it be stretched to cover a hundred millions of souls ; and so stretched it has less virtue for literature than has Mireio's love for Provence. It was not pride in Scotland that made Burns a lyrist and a rustic Aristophanes ; there have been millions of Bruce-worshippers and thistle- flourishers since his day, whose nationalism has only put them the further from great art. Nor was it in the least degree any pride in England, or any unity of aspiration with his fellows, that made Shakespeare what he was. His patriotic period is the period of his first-fruits ; and to pretend that he * speaks for England ' in Hamlet and Lear and Othello, is to invert the whole lesson of literary things. One had supposed that it was adjudged his supreme attainment to have spoken 'not for an age, but for all time/ not for a nation but for humanity, as did Sappho and Omar Khay- yam, in whom we trace not a vestige of a national consciousness. This theme is worth thrashing out here and now, on whatsoever provocation. The doctrine that national pride yields literature of which nations may be proud is an error of errors, a falsity of falsities. It has some touch of primary colour from the case of Virgil; but 5 Digitized by Microsoft® 66 Patriotism and Empire the deification of Augustus and the thrill of pride over Rome's mock-mission, ' Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos,' did not make Virgil a greater poet than the cos- mopolitan and even didactic Lucretius, nor lend the vibrant note of the pre- Augustan and way- ward Catullus to imperialistic Horace. Far be it from me to fall back on the formula that the spirit of genius bloweth whither it listeth. Rather, it blows where it can ; and the very point of the issue is, that neither nationalism nor provincialism, neither local nor continental patriotism, as such, constitutes any favouring soil for genius in the lack of the true socio- logical conditions ; that, on the contrary, me- galomaniacal and parochial patriotism alike are in themselves noxious to great art. It is noteworthy that our theorist did not add ' Goethe for Germany ' to his examples. The rebound of the idea would have been too jar- ring to his case. Goethe and Schiller and Herder at Weimar spoke, in their degrees, not for Germany but for the civilized world ; and though Goethe did in the Napoleonic time wince at German subjection, and did later aspire to a political union of Germany, he owed his literary output to no patriotic inspiration, and expressly protested against the idea of a cen- Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 67 tralized German Empire. Such an empire, or something tending that way, has come, and where now are the Goethes, the Schillers, the Heines ? Sir Robert Morier well said of Bis- marck, that he had made Germany great, but made small the German. It is the bald fact that, in well-nigh a generation of German pride in German unity, we have seen not one great German book, to speak either ' for ' Germany, or to Europe. The vaunted charm has failed utterly. Goethe it was who said that the time has gone by for national literatures, and that the literature of the future must be cosmopolitan. Behold the strict fulfilment of his speech ! It is indeed an express dishonour to litera- ture to define it as being at its best an utterance or outcome of that one of all the animal instincts which has been the least sublimated in civilized life. In contrast with the passion of love, the passion of hate on all its lines remains nudely barbarian; and the false fraternity that grafts on it is ethically the very lowest form of the spirit of union. Not by voicing such elemen- tary emotions has literature come to be a spring of moral sustenance and joy to men. In the oldest of the great epopees known to us, the highest moments are manifestly those in which the singer transcends the blinder passions of the earlier prime, and looks from a height of grave 5—2 Digitized by Microsoft® 68 Patriotism and Empire compassion on the clashing destinies of men. Not the rage and triumph of Achilles, but the trouble and the doom of Hector, Andromache's penalty and Priam's pain, make noble for all time the poems we call by the name of Homer. Not the well-lost war-songs of Tyrtaeus, but the manifold sympathy of the tragic drama and the brooding of the thinkers, lift Greek litera- ture on high for the later nations. To think of Dante and Montaigne, Cervantes and Shake- speare and Goethe, Hawthorne and Leopardi, as instruments to the very passion which would most meanly circumscribe their realm, and most utterly turn to naught their best desires, is to blaspheme their genius. The spirit of con- siderate speech was not evolved to be ' pro- curess to the lords of hell.' Let a bellicose patriotism qualify for supreme literary renown, and literature is already lowered to the level of the military band. Nothing, indeed, is more intelligible in current culture- evolution among us than the concurrence of patriotism and imperialism in the ethic, with gory sensationalism in the subject-matter, of the prevailing type of fiction. Not subtlety, but stimulation ; not character, but adventure ; not psychology, but the shedding of blood ; not thought, but bustle and excitement, are the requirements to-day met by two English Digitized by Microsoft® Patriotism and Militarism 69 fictionists out of three. The prime favourite is Mr. Kipling, thebest of whose laterwork is fatally withheld from greatness by the now inveterate intrusion of swagger — a spirit destructive of all artistic sincerity and devotion — in his every mental process, artistic or other ; and in such well-knit rhetoric as his Recessional a patriotic public takes its devout delight as whole-heartedly as it appreciated the nod and wink of the Departmental Ditties and the jovial chorusing of the Barrack-Room Ballads. The theology is strictly worthy of the sociology. In the Recessional^ the patriot intones the lesson that, since pride goeth before a fall, we do well to assure Omnipotence that we are not proud. It wants little that we offer up sacri- fices of propitiation. For less ceremonial pur- poses, we figure for ourselves in the rest of the new gospel as the Dominant Race, beside whom Baboos, Home Rulers, and Russians, are as creeping things. And it is all very good. The literary palate of patriotism suits with its philosophy and ethic. Even in the rank rodomontade of the Song of the Sword, Mr. Henley is too much of an artist for the maws he fain would glut ; but he and the rest of the patriotic elect find their fit sociologist in the painter of The Gadsbys ; as Dickens is still Digitized by Microsoft® 7© Patriotism and Empire their ideal of a true novelist. Which things are an allegory. But such thoughts are by the way. It is enough here to insist that, when the artist would preach and the lyrist lead, they are presuming on their place, and can no more yield us great counsel than great art. Not by the children of instinct and impulse shall the knot of a great destiny be untied for man- kind ; not from schoolboy fervours and vulgar heats shall come the inspiration of a literature worthy of a fully charted world. Let the lyrist, if he will, sing his heats and hates, as he does his loves and sorrows ; but let him not think for that to rank, and let not those think to stand as thinkers who rank him, with either the trusted leaders or the pedestalled light-givers of mankind. He has chosen his function, and his place is assigned by the laws of an evolution above his grasp. Digitized by Microsoft® PART II The Militarist Regimen I From the same animal roots with patriotism, we have seen, spring the proclivities which in these days we mark by the names of militarism and imperialism. Hence their prosperity. The enormous waste of treasure and power which now proceeds continuously in the armaments of the European nations could never have been undertaken, and could still less be maintained, on any mere calculation of necessity such as is habitually alleged in defence of each country's expenditure. The impulse roots in malice, passion, and pride. It is no genuine apprehension of attack that prompts the successive efforts of all the leading States to exceed or overtake each other's armaments. In so far as panics are not set up — as so often among ourselves — by the deliberate strategy of the militarist interest and Digitized by Microsoft® 72 Patriotism and Empire the special industrial interests which depend on militarism, the sufficient motive is the blind instinct to attain the complacency of power by- equality in its display. Nations compete in that display very much as do parvenus in their equipages. Each nation normally professes to suspect offensive purposes on the part of its neighbours, while repudiating any such purpose on its own part ; but when the forms of peaceful intercourse tend to force a choice between an avowal of universal hypocrisy and one of universal folly, the average militarist, shifting his ground, undertakes to make out that the institution of armaments is a good thing in itself. From the defence of armaments to the panegyric of war is but a step, and we have n had an abundance of both within the past year, as a result of the sudden eirenicon of the Tsar of Russia. The /ocus classicus of such doctrinaires is the saying of Moltke, to the effect that the hope of universal peace is a dream, ' and not even a beautiful dream.' Moltke was indeed a precious authority on beautiful dreams ; and the record of his rage at the swift recuperation of France while Germany was plunged in industrial de- pression through her very receipt of the French indemnity, is the never-to-be-forgotten measure of his political wisdom. He was eager, his Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 73 own countrymen tell us, to pick a quarrel by- way of striking a new and more ruinous blow at the neighbouring State. When such minds can rank as oracles and framers of ideals for bodies of civilized men, how far are we raised above the ethics and the sociology of savages ? That the gospel of Moltke is a good hearing to many among us may be gathered from a whole handful of review articles of the past twelve months. Gentlemen whose ostensible qualifications for political counsel are military and other titles, and who are palpably in- competent to conduct any argument coherently for three consecutive steps, have informed us of their contempt for the understandings of those who cherish hopes of any measure of propor- tional disarmament. Instead, however, of re- ciprocating contempt with such reasoners, let us follow closely for a moment the reasoning of one writer, presumably competent from the militarist standpoint, who as an experienced journalist represents a good deal of public opinion. War, according to this writer, is a form of evil that in time must pass away, 'A period will come,' he predicts, ' when militarism will appear as unnatural as slavery now appears to ourselves.'* He is at the same time satisfied, * Article, ' Should Europe Disarm ?' by Sidney Low, in Nineteenth Century, October, 1898. Digitized by Microsoft® 74 Patriotism and Empire however, that ' at least in our time ' it is not an evil but a good, and he urges a variety of reasons why we should cherish it. ' No people , has risen to greatness without its discipline ; few have been able to develop the highest excellence in art, science, learning, or industry, except under its impulse. The great literary ages are usually those which have followed upon successful war. . . . The age of Pericles was not one in which men knew nothing of fighting, nor was the age of Dante, nor the age of Elizabeth.' The thesis is not new, and it may be worth while to consider it. At the outset it may be noted that if for ' fighting ' and 'war' we substituted 'pestilence,' or 'cruelty,' or ' baseness,' the proposition would be equally plausible. As there never has been a historic age in which men ' knew nothing of fighting,' the special connection of such knowledge with the ages of Pericles and Dante and Elizabeth is a species of sophism that merely impeaches its framer. Could he show that great literary and artistic and scientific movements always concurred with special stresses of war, he would go far to prove his case ; but no such thesis can be sustained. Could he show, on the other hand, that movements of the kind under notice always occur immediately after special stresses of war, and that wars always Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 75 have such a sequel, though he would leave open the inference that they stood for disgust of war, he would be at least supporting the claim that war somehow promoted intellectual life. But he does not even attempt to prove this, and as a matter of fact such a statement would be wildly untrue. The section of ancient Greece which paid most zealous heed to the business of war throughout its whole history was Sparta, of all Hellenic States the most utterly devoid of art, letters, and philosophy. The reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. in England followed upon a long period of desperate civil war ; but they were not dis- tinguished by any great literary or artistic developments. The renascence began in the reign of Elizabeth long before the Armada, and that episode can in no intelligible way be causally connected with the performance of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon. Germany was soon afterwards plunged in a war that lasted thirty years, and German literature and science well-nigh disappeared. In later France, literature and science, vigorous at the accession of Louis XIV., fell away during the period of his successful wars, revived after the disasters of the closing years of his reign, flourished greatly during generations in which the nation lost much and gained little by war, were Digitized by Microsoft® 76 Patriotism and Empire eclipsed during the period of Napoleon, recovered after his overthrow, and since the greater overthrow of Sedan have been as vigorous as ever. Modern English literature is presumably to be held as flourishing in the hands of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Thackeray, and science in the hands of Darwin. Is such florescence, then, to be attributed to the wretched episode of the Crimea, the one considerable English war between Waterloo and our own day ? Germany has produced not one great im- aginative writer of European importance since Heine. Behold the efficacy of the successful wars of 1866 and 1870! From warless Scandinavia we have Ibsen ; Russia, after the Crimea, produces the great fiction of Tour- guenief, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. If successful militarism be the secret, why does not Germany do as much ? Why did not the great period of American literature follow instead of preceding the Civil War ? And why, again, did not Latin literature revive under Trajan or Severus, or at any other point in the career of chronic military success between the generation of Augustus and the fourth century ? The theorem, in fine, is an absolute fallacy : it misses real causes and suggests unreal. But Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 77 the militarist, swinging at random between the eulogy of war and its deprecation, can shift to the other leg, and argue that ' the great arma- ments do not tend to promote war, but the contrary.' Recollecting that in that case they are thwarting what he has described as a great civilizing force, he hastily adds that, after all, they do not prevent war : ' the rare and brief, if terrible, wars of modern times will supply that occasional tonic of which the body politic stands in need.' But then, again, armaments are a tonic even without war. ' Meanwhile, the careful and systematic preparation for the possible conflict is an invaluable discipline which seems ' — only seems, though invaluable — ' to be required in an age when comfort is growing, and religion ' — alas ! with all the discipline — ' is losing its power to lift the spirits of men above a grovelling materialism !' So we are to get back to the spirituality of Dugald Dalgetty by the way of the barrack and the machine- gun- On this theme our militarist waxes eloquent. ' The Cobdenite ideal of a State in which every citizen is ceaselessly engaged in the ennobling process of buying cheap and selling dear, leaves something to be desired. The accumulation of riches, and the steady pursuit of material comfort, do not tend to the development of the Digitized by Microsoft® 78 Patriotism and Empire highest type of character.' Is the militarist, then, as a rule concerned to substitute a higher structure of civic life for that which he thinks fit to associate with the name of Richard Cobden, who deplored it ? Yearnings he would seem to have, not in his own natural kind. • Before we abolish the soldier on economic grounds, we had better arrange for the diffusion as well as the increase of wealth.' Most true ; how then shall we begin ? Suppose we sketch a programme of Old Age Pensions, of nationalization, first of land, then of railways, then of other industries, shall we have the militarist's support ? Or has he another scheme of his own .■' He speaks sympathetically of Tommy Atkins as so much better housed than his civilian brothers ; and of the conscription in Germany as a 'continuation school for the people, for which we have no substitute in this country.' Will the militarist vote, then, be cast for a measure that aims at raising the whole level of elementary education, and rebuilding our industrial cities ? It is un- pleasant to have to say it ; but there is not a shadow of ground for believing that the flourish about the diffusion of wealth and comfort and culture is aught but a device to disparage peace and peaceful life, to the end, not of mending the latter, but of maintaining the regimen of Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 79 the sword. The ' highest type of character ' is to be formed not otherwise than by training the helots of labour to disembowel dervishes. ' The precision, the drilled alertness, and the ready obedience of the men,' as seen in German ironworks, ' are the qualities fostered by intelli- gent military training.' What now becomes of the disparagement of the competitive industrial life, if armies are actually to be encouraged by way of quickening the industrial pace ? And what, again, becomes of the fling against the Cobdenite ideal, when the theorist meets the difficulty as to the poverty of Italy and Russia by saying that they ' are in any case miserably poor countries '? ' They have great natural resources which have remained undeveloped owing to the lack of capital and want of effi- cient industrial enterprise.' In this conveni- ent fashion, zealous commercialism figures as an evil to be moderated by military expendi- ture ; and the countries which suffer from their military expenditure are told that their real trouble is lack of zealous commercialism. To cast out the Cobdenite ideal, you are to set up an army ; to pay for an army, you are to set up the Cobdenite ideal. Continuing his appeal to his formerly flouted Cobdenite, our sociologist argues that 'if a conscription would restore to the English Digitized by Microsoft® 8o Patriotism and Empire working man that superiority in the habits of order, discipline, and steady industry which he seems to be yielding to his foreign competitors, it would be worth the cost.' It would thus appear that the conscript countries have out- Cobdened that Cobdenite ideal which conscrip- tion was to resist ; they are beating us, if not at selling dear, at least at selling. But, on the other hand, it is implied that undrilled English workmen had the superiority in question, with- out any training, at a time when their rivals had the same military training as now. How, then, did they attain it ; and why should they not retain it without conscription ? Coming to the simple question of fact, we are speedily compelled to note that in so far as England is suffering from competition in the iron trade, her successful rivals are not the militarist nations but the United States, and that rapid developments of machinery count for a great deal more in the matter than any training of the workers. We are thus left inquiring with some emphasis whether the militarist case has anything behind it but reciprocally annihilative sophisms. The dis- sertation before us yields nothing else, unless it be the romantic appeal for a restoration of the power of religion ' to lift the spirits of men above a grovelling materialism ;' and here we Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 8i are faced by the fatality that there is rather more professed materiahsm in Russia, Germany, France, and Italy than in either England or the United States. It may seem brutal thus to follow up an amiable sentimentalist with logical tests ; but on his own principles strife is a noble and elevating thing; and we must even strive bloodlessly when the other method is closed. And as our militarist is clearly not developing towards precision and drilled alert- ness of the understanding, we can but credit him, finally, with pleading in the old way for the so-called military virtues — precision, that is, not in the use of productive tools, for that would merely realize the Cobdenite ideal, but in shooting ; drilled alertness, not of the mind, but of the body, for the due promotion of spirituality ; and the ready obedience of horses and dogs to an outside will. Sic itur ad astra. II If such self-stultifying advocacy as this were employed on behalf of any good or humane cause, with what derision would it not be greeted ! and to what deliquescence of ' senti- mentalism ' would it not be held to point ! By sentimentalism we all mean, I suppose, a kind of dreaming which confuses fact with fancy, 6 Digitized by Microsoft® 82 Patriotism and Empire wishes with happenings ; but that there is a barbarian as well as a civilized sentimentalism is a truth necessarily hidden from the would-be wise and prudent barbarian, though it may be discerned by the babes and sucklings of social science. Men with a taste for armaments, piqued by censure, determine to follow their bent, incidentally going about to offer us estimates of the good effects of militarism on life ; and all the while they are much further from a judicial estimate than the most fanatical devotee of peace, who really takes into account the larger mass of social phenomena. In all the militarist literature of the subject, German, French, or English, you may look in vain for anything more philosophical than a German paralogism about surplus energy, a French truism about the naturalness of strife,* or an English falsism, such as that we have been examining, about the sequence of literary movements upon periods of war. The most circumspect men on that side are driven back on an ignoratio elenchi when they would reason. Take, for instance, a passage in which one of * The most strenuous exposition of that theme, however, is the English Philosophy of War of Mr. James Ram (1878), a work chiefly fitted to encourage every human being to do whatever ill he pleases, on the score that Nature is always so employed. Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 83 the most esteemed of modern expert writers on warfare, Captain Mahan, recently professes to balance the pros and cons of the issue : ' On the economical side there is the diminution of pro- duction, the tax upon men's time and lives, the dis- advantages or evils so dinned daily into our ears that there is no need of repeating them here. But is there nothing to the credit side of the account, even perhaps a balance in their favour? Is it nothing, in an age when authority is weakening and restraints are loosening, that the youth of a nation passes through a school in which order, obedience, and reverence are learned, where the body is systematically developed, where ideals of self-surrender, of courage, of manhood, are inculcated, necessarily, because fundamental conditions of military success ? Is it nothing that masses of youths out of the fields and streets are brought together, mingled with others of higher intellectual antecedents, taught to work and to act together, mind in contact with mind, and carrying back into civil life that respect for constituted authority which is urgently needed in these days when lawlessness is erected into a religion ? It is a suggestive lesson to watch the expression and movements of a number of rustic conscripts undergoing their first drills, and to contrast them with the finished result as seen in the faces and bearing of the soldiers that throng the streets. A military training is not the worst preparation for an active life, any more than the years spent at college are time lost, as another school of utilitarians insists. Is it nothing that wars are less frequent, peace better secured, by the mutual respect of nations for each other's strength ; and that, when a convulsion does come, it passes rapidly, leaving the ordinary course of events to resume sooner, and therefore more easily ? War now not only occurs more rarely, but has rather the character of an occasional excess, from 6—2 Digitized by Microsoft® 84 Patriotism and Empire which recovery is easy. A century or more ago it was a chronic disease. And withal, the military spirit, the pre- paredness — not merely the wilUngness, which is a different thing — to fight in a good cause, which is a distinct good, is more widely diffused and more thoroughly possessed than ever it was when the soldier was merely the paid man. It is the nations now that are in arms, and not simply the servants of the King.' In a previous page of the same volume. Captain Mahan had laid stress on the danger to our civilization from barbarians who are ' wholly alien ' to its spirit, and on the absolute necessity, in this regard, of the 'attitude of armed watchfulness between nations' in Europe; but in the passage before us he waives that alleged necessity, which, if real, might be sup- posed to supersede any other justification for armaments, and considers rather the risk from ' barbarians within,' by which expression he apparently means Socialists. The gallant author's conception of controversy may pass undiscussed, but not so his professional theory of social discipline. If militarists choose to meddle with sociology, they must bide the test, and this is how Captain Mahan's theorem works out on analysis : I, Militarism is of value as an efficient train- ing for war ; and as such it involves the learning of order, obedience, and reverence, which are valuable to-day, when, with so much Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 85 less of war than formerly, ' authority is loosen- ing and restraints are weakening.' 2. But war, all the same, is a disease, and last century it was ' a chronic disease.' The state of health is that in which you so carefully qualify yourself for the state of disease that you are unprecedentedly fitted to catch it, but do not. At the same time, while thus healthy, thus unprecedentedly prepared to fight 'in a good cause,' the 'nations in arms' exhibit the social phenomena of weakening authority and loosen- ing restraints, and ' lawlessness is erected into a religion.' So that the law-abiding and orderly ages were the chronically diseased ages, and a training for the nations in reverence and obedience coincides with a maximum of systematic lawlessness. This is a synthesis of Captain Mahan's own propositions, so made as to show their logical relation. If men in general were wont to discard self-contradiction from their life- philosophy as they discard it from matters of business and machinery, there would be no need to do more. Since, however, logically false positions are not taken up on any logical impulse, but stand for false foregone con- victions, the reader so placed is not likely to be shaken by the mere exposure of his in- consistency. It is therefore incumbent on the Digitized by Microsoft® 86 Patriotism and Empire opposition to fight out the case on the points of fact. The passage under notice asserts, implicitly or explicitly, the following things : 1. Men of little education trained together with more educated men in camps for war, with or without actual war, acquire a respect for constituted authority. 2. A military training is a good preparation for civic life. 3. Under a system of general conscription, the nations acquire a ' mutual respect for each other's strength,' which makes war rarer than formerly, when ' the soldier was merely the paid man.' It also passes more quickly. We have only to compare these propositions with the historical facts to see that they are all astray. In nearly all the leading European States where conscription exists, it is notorious that the training camp serves as a school for Socialism, which develops a deep disrespect for authority as at present constituted. Hear the view of a conservative French politician, M. Delafosse : ' I consider obligatory military service, as it exists among us, the worst agent of social disintegration and national desolation. I am convinced that, if we permit it to continue the ravages which it has already begun to produce, in twenty years there will be no more society, no more Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 87 army, nothing but the dust of a people, without bond or cohesion. . . . From a social point of view, the effects produced by obligatory mihtary service, as we know it, are infinitely perilous to the future of society. It produces a rupture of equilibrium which is one of the great dangers of the present hour, and I consider obligatory military service as one of the most powerful agents of revolutionary Sociahsm.'* It may be that M. Delafosse, in his fear of Socialism, which he shares with Captain Mahan, puts a false face on the tendency even of the revolutionary form : that is for the anti- Socialist militarist to discuss. To promote Socialism, as apart from revolution, is in the eyes of the rest of us no discredit to barrack life, but at all events the fact is the reverse of Captain Mahan's proposition. What is no less to the purpose is the fact that in previous ages camp life has made men at once amenable to the rule of their general and potentially careless of other constituted authority when that hap- pened to clash with his. The legions of Caesar learned no reverence for the State, and as little did the troopers of Cromwell, who at his beck overthrew the Parliament under whose authority they had drawn the sword. The lesson is one worth recalling by the democratic polities of to-day. It is assumed, at Captain Mahan's * Cited in ' Can We Disarm ?' by Joseph McCabe and Georges Darrien. Heinemann, 1899. Digitized by Microsoft® 88 Patriotism and Empire point of view, that we can all be armed to the teeth, drilled to the toes, and constantly pre- pared to fight ' in a good cause ' — as if any nation ever went to war feeling the cause was bad — without coming to blows save by way of 'occasional excess,' though it is simply in- conceivable that men would go on drilling for a hundred years if the ' occasional excess ' did not come as ' chronic disease ' to make the preparation relevant. And, as a matter of fact, war between the nations is not controlled or determined by the mere practice of con- scription, as Captain Mahan asserts. In ancient Greece and Italy, military training was universal, and before the supremacy of Rome war was yet a 'chronic disease.' In the post-Norman period, military training was universal in England and Scotland, and their wars were chronic down till the middle of the sixteenth century, nor did the same conditions avert three invasions of France by England between 1339 and 14 15. It is true that Cromwell speedily turned the instrument of a standing army and navy to the account of wilful war ; but the decline thereafter of the practice of general military training was not, any more than in the period of Elizabeth and James I., coincident with more war than had gone on in the days of general militarism. It Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 89 is true, again — and let Captain Mahan's compatriots note the circumstance — that a paid army is more readily available for expeditions against weaker States than would be a purely conscript force ; but mere conscription does not discredit war. Napoleon's wars were made with conscript troops ; and modern Europe has seen the Austro - French, the Crimean, the Austro-Prussian, the Franco-German, and the Russo-Turkish wars within one generation, a record certainly not surpassed in the previous century. As to the brevity of modern wars, it has nothing to do with the general bearing of arms by the nations. The Peloponnesian war lasted twenty-seven years, and it followed on a thirty years' peace. On the other hand, the American Civil War was brought to an end by the inequality of the combatants in resources. If a modern war between well-matched States should end speedily, it would not be because of their fitness for fighting, but because the war was so rapidly ruinous, or because men now come more rapidly to reason — a point calling for more attention than militarists care to give it. If since 1880 the great nations have visibly shrunk from anything like equal war, it is from sheer rational perception of the horror and the insanity of the course for which all militarism is Digitized by Microsoft® go Patriotism and Empire a preparation. It is not a ' mutual respect ' so much as simple knowledge and reflection thereon. France and Germany know that if they grapple again, both will ' bleed as white as veal.' The rulers of Russia know that war with any first-rate Power may bring the auto- cracy to bankruptcy and ruin. But who will predict that no fortuitous Armageddon shall come of the competing rapacities of the Euro- pean nations in China and Africa ? Supposing it be otherwise : supposing a whole generation to pass without the firing of another shot by land or sea between civilized peoples, our children will be very definitely faced — unless, indeed, it is progressively solved in the interim — by the problem. Is it worth the while of civilized States to go on drilling men for wars that are seen to be avoidable ? From Captain Mahan's point of view, the answer should be Yes. Camp drill, he argues, is a good preparation for civic life. Now, it is a priori inconceivable that training for an extinct function can in perpetuity be the best prepara- tion for a real function ; and in so far as the plea for drill is merely a plea for bodily training, the obvious answer is that where that is seen to have been generally neglected the nations can perfectly well provide for it without any pretence of military drill. If undrilled rustics Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 91 and mechanics are inferior in grace and activity to drilled soldiers, these, on the other hand, are not superior to undrilled gentlemen. The point hardly bears discussing. To urge drill as the only feasible means to the physical education of rustics and artisans is to imply that there is no hope of a vital betterment in the lot of rustics and artisans as such. But the very suggestion elicits the remembrance that through the ages grinding toil for the poor has been the fixed correlative of militarism. And the conclusion that begins to emerge for us is that the science which should solve the social problem is not only never furthered, but for- ever frustrated of growth, if not denied bare birth, by the survival of the militarist ideal and practice. Against the facile claim that military training is a good preparative for civic life there lies the tacit testimony of the whole history of civilization, scientifically considered. We who gainsay militarism desire nothing more than the hearing of the issue. Ill It would be pedantic, perhaps, to set out with much insistence on the fact that the higher or non-barbarian civilization historically begins with communities in which the trade of the Digitized by Microsoft® 92 Patriotism and Empire soldier is specialized, as in ancient Egypt, and whole classes are entirely withdrawn from military service. It could still be answered that yEschylus and Socrates bore arms, who were of more value than many Egyptians ; and though it is sociologically clear that the Greek civilization, with its rule of military service for all citizens, could never have flourished as it did but for the seeds of culture it drew from those of Egypt and Asia, the question thus far remains open as between the advocates of normal militarism and us who oppose them. Let us then seek in the higher civilizations themselves for the decisive data. As between the different States of Greece, there was diversity of devotion to the military life, Sparta marking the acme of the cult, Athens a more moderate passion. ' We do not afflict ourselves with laborious training,' claimed Pericles ; ' and yet, in the hour of trial, our courage does not fail . . . ; we are as ready for action as those who spend their lives in antici- pating danger and preparing to meet it. So much the greater is our gain.' What the modern militarist will say on the matter we need hardly consider ; he will scarcely seek to exalt the barren and mindless militarism of Sparta over the immeasurably richer life of Athens ; though, on the militarist theory, the Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 93 Spartan should be the greater civilization. But supposing him to claim Athens as his golden mean, let him show us wherein her measure of militarism fitted her citizens the better for any- thing but the fighting themselves provoked. For what civil functions were her epheboi and her marines prepared ? Not for wise decisions in policy ; not for clearer thought in ethics ; not for closer industry; not for finer art. It was after their maximum of military experience, gained in the ruinous Peloponnesian war, that their civic polity decayed past cure. A genera- tion of venomous war had broken down alike respect for constituted authority and belief in a moral law ; till hatred had eaten up reason, and war only ceased because of sheer loss of blood. It is well to recall the judgment of Thucydides on the temper bred by the war throughout Greece : ' When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and further, and determined to outdo the report of all who had preceded them, by the ingenuity of their enterprises and the atrocity of their revenges. The meanings of words had no longer the same relation to things, but were changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness j to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quaUty of a man ... the lover of violence was Digitized by Microsoft® 94 Patriotism and Empire always trusted, and his opponent suspected. . . . He who plotted from the first to have nothing to do with plots was a breaker-up of parties and a poltroon who was afraid of the enemy. In a word, he who could outstrip another in a bad action was applauded ; and so was he who encouraged to evil one who had no idea of it. . . . Revenge was dearer than self-preservation. Any agreements sworn to by either party, when they could do nothing else, were binding just as long as they were powerless. . . . Striving in every way to overcome each other, they committed the most mon- strous crimes ; yet even these were surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges. . . . Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Hellas. The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared. An attitude of perfidious antagonism everywhere prevailed ; for there was no word binding enough nor oath terrible enough to reconcile enemies. . . . Inferior intellects generally succeeded best.' Such was the ' type of character ' moulded by a generation of war in the highest civiHzation of the ancient world, a land of democracies, in which all citizens were trained to arms. A better case for war could doubtless be made out by taking the armies of later imperial Rome, and looking only at the better types shaped by them, the steadfast centurions, the magnanimous generals like Agricola. But that was precisely the sort of army that Captain Mahan disparages, the army in which the soldier was only the paid man. And indeed the common soldier in them was made at best but a tough veteran, a Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 95 stout gladiator. Still, it is hard to see his moral inferiority to the men of the earlier ages, who fought for Rome against the liberties of every other Italian State, till at length the totality of acquired faculty for civic life made possible an inferno of domestic butchery, Sulla outdoing the massacres of Marius, till the republic swooned into peace, and grew fit for the rule of the autocrat. To get a justified opinion on the value of militarism as a training for civic tasks, we may either follow the general fortunes of any one of the military empires of antiquity, or study the great captains in their civic capacities. Any other method must fall more or less short of rational investigation. Now, every ancient military State or empire of which we possess the history does but present a story of more or less rapid decadence. The seven successive Oriental empires, the minor ' empires ' of Athens and Sparta, the empire of Alexander and his successors, that of Rome, those of her conquerors, those of the Saracens, are so many colossal proofs that the life of arms never taught to any the secret of stable evolution. The Eastern Roman Empire, with a standing army and no militia, did indeed subsist pre- cariously for a thousand years ; but the measure of militarism which so far preserved it availed Digitized by Microsoft® 96 Patriotism and Empire not a jot for progress in the arts or the science of civic life. A system of conscription would only have multiplied and worsened the risks of inner strife. Machiavelli* in later Italy, weary of condottieri, pined for a return to the mili- tarism of republican Rome ; but that could only have led to a different species of subjection from what actually befel — the empire of a Borgia rather than the empire of Spain. It was the universal soldiering of the earlier Italian republics that led to the mercenary armies of the later. The law of all militarism, on the face of all history, is a law of decay. And the lesson is if possible still clearer when we consider the great commanders as politicians. In the ancient world, Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar were the greatest of the great ; and each and all were as powerless to build up a durable polity as they were potent to overthrow. Alexander's empire was a political impossibility, momentarily made by a convulsion of conquest ; its speedy disruption was as inevitable as any process of nature. The iron will and inhuman vigilance of Han- nibal could maintain him with his alien host in hostile Italy for fifteen years ; he could manoeuvre a Roman host into a pen and slay them like sheep ; but he could not cure the corroding civic malady of Carthage ; nor was Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 97 the mighty Julius a whit more gifted for the healing of the cancer of Rome. He could but ruin a republic, to make way for an empire that fatally progressed to a ruin immeasurably greater. Here and there we may indeed find a worthy captain, who could lead in war and shine in peace. Timoleon and Alfred are noble names. But such men do not test the issue : they were warriors against their will ; champions of struggling causes, not representatives of the militarist ideal ; nor is there any reason to regard them as deep-seeing statesmen, though they won an honourable fame. The strict type of military genius is Cromwell, who, by the admission of his latest historian, to say nothing of the plain facts of history, could only wield force, and was impotent to plan a continuing State. Of all great modern soldiers, Frederick and Napoleon show most of faculty for civic rule. But Frederick, the successful ruler of the two, came to hate the life of war, whose arts he had had painfully to learn ; nor did even he build a polity that could of itself stand firm after him ; while Napoleon's ruling hand stifled thought and speech as effectively as it stimulated lower activities, and his empire fell as swiftly as it rose ; even as a generation served to bring Frederick's iron machine to rust and wreck. 7 Digitized by Microsoft® 98 Patriotism and Empire Washington was more liberally wise ; but he was no heaven-born soldier or lover of camps ; and it is very significant for us in this connection that the military element has never once counted for good in American statesman- ship. The first typical soldier in the Presi- dential chair was Andrew Jackson, from whose Presidency dates the system of spoils of office. Of all modern soldiers, one of the most estim- able as a man was General Grant ; but it is confessed by his own party that he managed ill as President. War had not fitted him for civil life, with all his patience and integrity. It is indeed said of Lincoln, I doubt not with perfect justice, that he showed an admirable judgment in military matters, and was posi- tively superior to most of his generals. But that is only saying that a masterly statesman may judge sagaciously of plans of warfare ; it is no proof that a training in actual warfare would even have left him the masterly states- man he was. Lincoln was prepared by a purely civic life for a colossal civic problem, which included a military problem : the man demonstrably prepared for a great civic problem by a military life is still to seek. Our own Wellington is almost, if not quite, the negation of the needed instance. He had wisdom enough — and perhaps some non- Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 99 military statesmen in his place might have shown less — avowedly to yield to political pressure rather than provoke civil war ; but of guiding or constructive faculty he does not seem to have shown a glimmer. The measure of his independent civic wisdom is his protest against facilities to third-class railway pas- sengers, on the score that they were ' a premium to the lower orders to go uselessly wandering about the country.' Such maxims do we receive from the victor of Waterloo. And of Nelson, noting what is on record as to his political intelligence, and his personality as apart from his genius, we may gravely say that he was fortunate, and we no less so, in the time of his death. With his tyrannous pro- clivities, his prestige, and his grievous lack of human wisdom, he would have become, had he survived Trafalgar, one of the most dangerous political forces in English life. Wellington, who by chance met and judged him, and who was so far superior to him in the faculty of personal balance, leaves little doubt as to the great seaman's want of sense as a man. They met, as the well-known narrative of the Duke runs, in the Colonial Office : ' He [Nelson] could not know who I was ; but he entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversa- tion, for it was almost all on his side, and all about himself, 7—2 Digitized by Microsoft® loo Patriotism and Empire and in, really, a style so vain and so silly as to surprise and almost disgust me. I suppose something that I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody, and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the office-keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a different man, both in manner and matter .... In fact, he talked like an officer and a statesman. . . . Luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior man ; but certainly a more complete and sudden metamorphosis I never saw.'* The superiority came out in talk on the military situation, the balance of power and the fighting chances. It was the old story : genius for one function, and folly in the normal situa- tions of life. But a far more damaging record is the history of Nelson's conduct towards the republicans of Naples, as now placed beyond doubt by Italian investigations.! Flattered to fever -point — never a difficult thing in his case — by the King and Queen of Sicily, he committed on their behalf, but of his own zealous choice, an act of infamous treachery. Finding that, just before his arrival at Naples, the republican garrisons had surrendered on a treaty of indemnity with * Croker's Correspondence and Diaries, 1884, ii. 233; Captain Mahan's Life of Nelson, ii. 322. t See the English Historical Review, April, 1898; and compare Captain Mahan's Life of Nelson, i. 430-444, where -Nelson is first defended — without knowledge of the later published Italian documents — and afterwards partly blamed. Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen loi the King's Vicar- General, Rufifo, and the com- mander of the English squadron, he first pro- posed to break the treaty ; and then, when the Italian honourably and inflexibly refused, he resorted to an act of fraud unparalleled in modern military history. In the words of Mr. F. P. Badham, ' He made a feint of falling in with Ruffo's ideas, and in carefully-studied words, intended to deceive, he promised that he " would not oppose " the execution of the capitula- tion. Once the garrisons were embarked Nelson laid hold of the vessels, and made the republicans prisoners. In fine, Nelson started with the premise that it did not matter what one did with Jacobins, and with this all his subsequent proceedings were in accordance. Under circumstances of peculiar illegality and unfairness he kidnapped and hanged the republican Admiral. He waited for more than a week, making scarcely any effort, while Naples was exposed to the unspeakable horrors of a sack by the convicts and bandits whom Ruffo had recruited in Calabria. He delivered over more than 8,000 prisoners to the royal vengeance. He uttered no word of intercession while a Royalist Reign of Terror, every whit as merciless as that of Arras and Bordeaux, was established in Naples. And in all this, as Captain Mahan has pointed out, his conduct was dictated by no sort of English interest : he completely subordinated his position as English representative to his allegiance to Sicily.' It has been asked whether or not Nelson was incited to this infamy by Lady Hamilton, who, furious as he against all republicans, and as crazily devoted as he to the Sicilian crown, had Digitized by Microsoft® I02 Patriotism and Empire her mission from the Queen : ' Recommend Lord Nelson to treat Naples as if it were a rebel town in Ireland, Finally, a severity exact, prompt, just : the same for the women, and that without pity.' But Adam was as ready for evil as his Eve. The man whose whole rule of life for his midshipmen — a rule tran- scended, one hopes, by most of the men who to-day sweep our streets — was, ' Fear God, honour the King, and hate a Frenchman as you do the devil,' needed little prompting to any act of savagery towards Jacobins. As Mr, Badham puts it, 'There was an anti-revolutionary fury, we must re- member, as well as a revolutionary — white Jacobinism as well as red. Only a few months before the period under discussion the murder of the French Ambassadors at Rastadt had been condoned by monarchical Europe with a mere shrug of the shoulders. And of this anti-revolutionary fury Nelson had a peculiarly sharp attack. Republicans of every shade are for him " infamous Jacobins, felons, infidels, robbers and murderers," but " their measure of iniquity is nearly full, and God is in the act of chastising them." To another correspondent : " Your news of the hanging of the thirteen Jacobins gave us great pleasure, and the three priests will, I hope, soon dangle on the.tree best adapted to their weight of sins," the sentiment in this case being the more remarkable from his knowing that at Procida, where these thirteen had been condemned, prisoners were not usually allowed to be present during trial. Again : " Our friend T. had a present made him the other day of the head of a Jacobin, and makes an excuse, the weather being hot. Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 103 for not sending it here." On another occasion he even stoops to : " Exact as degrading terms as it is in your power to give. No covered waggons, no protection for rebels !" ' Such a man was England's supreme Admiral. And because this energumen had the genius of naval strategy, and twice signally defeated the naval enemy of the moment, we are still called upon by our energumens of empire to cherish his memory and hallow his name. To such a code can patriotism bring us. And it is with such examples before them that our accomplished advocates of militarism can claim for military life the merit of preparing men for the civil. Probably few will dispute that the naval exploits of Nelson might have been per- formed by Paul Jones, had he been a British Admiral, He had certainly the genius of naval strategy, and a boundless courage. Well, the biographers sum up that with it all he was a man of inordinate vanity and detestable moral character. With a much less faulty character, it is not pleasant to think what part Nelson as peer would have played in those English domestic troubles which so swiftly followed on English victories. Enough for his career, in the eye of a sane posterity, will be the acted evil thereof. Digitized by Microsoft® I04 Patriotism and Empire IV To some on first challenge all this may seem to be mere special pleading, if not something worse. When we reflect what multitudes of men have unquestionably remained honourable and chivalrous gentlemen after a longer or shorter military or naval life, there may well seem to be something of perversity in an argu- ment which dwells mainly on the seamy side of the careers of great commanders and military States. And it is possible, of course, to make out the case against militarism onesidedly. Some onesidedness there is, perhaps, in the remarkable work of M. Hamon on LeMilitaire Professionel, which, some years before the out- break of the Dreyfus scandal, arraigned the army as a school of lawlessness. It is not diffi- cult to pick from military biography stories enough of fraud and rapine, baseness and egoism, to make out a black case. As everyday life, however, presents the same features, to the knowledge of every man of the world, there is a risk of fallacy in reasoning from the symptoms to the special environment. One might make out a similar case against University professors, men of science, scholars, artists ; an American inquirer has actually Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 105 undertaken to prove, by a laborious research, that the clergy in the United States furnish a larger percentage of crime of all kinds than any other of the learned professions — nay, than the general population. It might plausibly be argued, on the other hand, that certain types tend to gravitate to certain professions ; but here again we are faced by the fact that there are honourable men in all. The real issue, therefore, is that above examined — the value of a military training as a preparation for civic life, or for any other than purely military functions. It is perfectly fair, then, to form an opinion on the historic evidence as to the fate of fighting peoples and the statesmanship of great captains. Ensign Newcome leaves the army Colonel Newcome, a more admirable gentleman than he was when he entered it ; but the process of mellowing would have gone on quite as well outside. Regimental life does not make saints out of sinners, or gentle spirits out of egoists. Rather the question rises whether even the Colonel Newcomes do not miss a needed intellectual discipline ; and when we come to the rank and file, there is hardly any question at all. Complaisant publicists tell us in private how useful is the army as a training- school for coachmen and valets ; how it takes slouching and turbulent types and makes them Digitized by Microsoft® io6 Patriotism and Empire shaven, upright, orderly, biddable, and respect- able. It may be so : there is no institution which does not yield some relative good ; and it would be unfeeling to refuse to rejoice with the plutocrat in his possession of a steady coach- man. But we are considering the total in- fluence of the trade of arms, and meeting apolo- gists who say it is good for all, not merely for a recalcitrant residuum ; and we are further arguing from the point of view that the domi- nance of the militarist ideal is one of the main hindrances to a social science which would pro- vide other ways of humanizing the lower types. Now, for every larrikin that the army licks into vertical shape it turns two potentially average minds, capable of development, into superior forms of domestic animal, without intellectual initiative, and without the desire to have it. A model veteran is as often as not a model child in intelligence ; and the veterans who are not models hardly help the militarist case. But we may put a more general test, asking of the institution as a whole, whether a habitual practice of blind obedience is con- ceivably productive of good judgment in any- thing. The necessarily negative answer points to the most charitable view that can well be taken of the conduct of the French military authorities in the Dreyfus case. Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 107 Reading one revelation after another of shameful fraud on the part of some, and in- credible shallowness of judgment on the part of others, we begin to ask whether the French staff is mainly composed of knaves and fools. The answer is, first, that in an army the knaves, be they few or many, are far more potent than elsewhere, just because of the nature of the system ; and secondly, that they accordingly have less difficulty than elsewhere in making fools of the honest men, who there are made less competent than elsewhere to detect knavery. No lay jury could commit such a travesty of justice as was accomplished by the court-martial on Dreyfus ; and no lay institution would dare to resort to such a campaign of subterfuge and suppression to cover an error as was under- taken by the French staff. Such an episode is a specific fruit of militarism. Only national conceit can lead Englishmen and Germans to believe that a similar case is impossible in their armies ; indeed, some Germans readily avow that analogous cases are privately known to have occurred in Germany, where it would be im- possible to have them reopened. Bismarck would have scoffed at the thought of letting a court-martials injustice be exposed ; and it is to be remembered that one of the first intima- Digitized by Microsoft® io8 Patriotism and Empire tions made by English correspondents of the movement to reopen the Dreyfus case was accompanied by an emphatic opinion that it was better to let even an innocent man suffer than to set up an army scandal. It is the irreducible aversion of uncorrupted men to such a doctrine that has made possible the climaxing protest in France and elsewhere. And in this connection it is worth while to note how the moral courage needed to begin it was found only among civilians. To Emile Zola go all the foremost honours of the fight. No soldier dared face the suborned multitude as did he ; not till the defence had waxed powerful in prestige as well as in moral force did an officer come forward to aid it. It is not on the battle-field or the drill-ground that men learn, if it be ever learned, the lonely courage that faces corporate hatred and the hiss of the crowd; and where such courage is needed in the strifes of civil life, it will assuredly be none the scarcer for the stopping of the school of the slayer. If, however, it be urged that military men are not fairly to be suspected of lack of moral courage because their sense of discipline keeps them out of a movement which impeaches their superiors, we may rest content on the position that they are proved to be weakened Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 109 by their training for the exercise of judgment in matters equally open to the verdict of laymen and to theirs. This is the upshot of the recent discussion among ourselves as to the fitness of Lord Kitchener's conduct in desecrat- ing the tomb of the Mahdi at Khartoum. It is made clear by the very arguments of the defence that the act — one of military politics^ was a lapse from common-sense as well as from decency. One set of apologists tells us that the fanatics had to be disabused of their notion that the Mahdi had ascended bodily to heaven ; another set tells us that if the body had been left in the tomb, the same fanatics would be sure to make pilgrimages thither, and pilgrim- ages might lead to revolts. As if Christians had not made nine crusades to recover and keep the tomb of their Prophet in the full belief that there was no body there, and in the full knowledge that it had been desecrated for ages by two races of unbelievers ! The surest way to undermine the Mahdi's prestige would plainly have been to show that the conquerors had no fear of it, and attached no more im- portance to his tomb than to any other. By rifling his tomb and insulting his corpse, they have done their best to renew the fanaticism which they had half discredited by simply defeating it. We are finally told that the act Digitized by Microsoft® no Patriotism and Empire had been advised by Mohammedan officers. It was what the Turks would have done in such a case. Need more be said ? We shall be called back, perhaps, to the contention that there is civic value in a military training which stops short of actual war — a moral value that outgoes the mere physical gain to alvolunteer from camping out. It is somewhat odd that this plea should be urged precisely among the peoples who have no conscript system, no universal militarism ; and one is moved to ask whether Captain Mahan, for instance, really supposes the youth of France, Germany, Russia, Italy, and Turkey, to be at once more law-abiding, more thoughtful in politics, and more fit for industry and commerce, than the youth of the United States and England. Such appears to be the implication, and it is a surprising one. Those of us who have discussed the point with educated but non -official Frenchmen and Germans who have done their due drills, are not often met by any such opinion. In France, it may be confidently asserted, there grows, step for step with the advance in the efficiency of education, a conviction that the years spent in military Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen in training are a wretched waste of time ; and the commonest feeling among the better-educated men during their term of service is one of contempt towards the officers who vokintarily embrace such a profession. Some small countervailing benefit there may be in the contact of the less-educated men with their superiors, but I do not find that good and close observers attach much weight to such an influence from their own experience. They do not find the backward types amenable to it ; and on the face of the case it is clear that such influence must at best be a poor make- shift for a culture that ought to have been undergone in boyhood. You give a boy a bad schooling, take him away half taught, set him to hard work in his growing years, and then claim to give him a physical and moral boon by drilling him for certain terms in the company of other youths, of whom a few are more fortunate. As a deliberately chosen scheme, it seems hardly less than farcical. If we are to plan at all for social betterment, we had need plan some worthier method than this. Turning to the special case of Germany, where, barring perhaps Turkey, militarism is at its maximum for scope and thoroughness, let us put another test. Germany is still, on the whole, the most highly educated nation, and in Digitized by Microsoft® 112 Patriotism and Empire the past its writers have had a great influence on the moral judgment of the rest of Europe. Kant, Schiller, Herder, Goethe, the Humboldts, Herbart, Richter, Fichte, Frobel, Schleier- macher, Raumer, Feuerbach, Gervinus, Vogt, Bluntschli, Marx, Lassalle, Wagner, Freiligrath, Heine — all these, to name no others, had in their various ways a specifically moral influence in Europe, over and above their vogue on other grounds. But while German specialism still ranks at least as high as any in most depart- ments of pure research, who now recognises any moral impact from the later German literature ? We are concerned to know what Germans think on most points of learning and science, but who greatly cares what view a German of the majority takes on any question of right or wrong ? Who, save a militarist, respects any German ideals save those of Socialism, which are the negation of militarism and Bismarckism ? It is the bare truth that German ethical opinion has no longer the slightest prestige ; and the reason is the double one that the ruling German ideal has lost all virtue to the deeper moral sense of men, and that the leading German writers of these days make no impression of moral inspiration. To a thinking reader, unswayed by a foregone theory, Mommsen is seen to have become the Digitized by Microsoft® The Militarist Regimen 113 mere immoral mouthpiece of the Bismarcl• latter term may with special fitness stand for the ideal which not merely accepts made empire and makes the best of it, but holds the pursuit of empire to be either at all times, or specially at the present time, a course scientifically advis- able in the interests of free and rationally governed nations. It is in this fit and natura^ sense of the term that it is here henceforth discussed. Ill And first as to the pedigree of the principle and the practice. The average citizen who talks of empire is not very clearly conscious that he uses a word which properly means • rule ' — rule over other communities than his own. As applied in the phrase ' our colonial 10 Digitized by Microsoft® 146 Patriotism and Empire empire,' it is already diverted to a merely geographical sense, seeing that the colonies neither pay tribute to, nor receive laws from, the mother-country. Even the Sovereign is 'Empress' only of India, though the con- venience of the expression 'the British Empire' has fixed it in use for the whole connections and possessions of the United Kingdom. But it is the more important to remember the historical meaning of empire, seeing that it is at empire, in a slight modification of the historical sense, that imperialism aims. .The significant thing is that, to say nothing of the most ancient known military empires, which grew out of the conquest of city by city, the most expressly ' free ' or democratic of the communities of historic Greece coveted empire from the instant it became possible to her. It was the determination of Athens to coerce her allies, already made subservient to her gain by the spending of their quota on her public works, that provoked the Peloponnesian War, which brought her empire to an end. And that her policy of imperialism was politically fatal remains clear whether or not we argue that any other course was then conceivable for her statesmen. Either Athens must dominate all Greece by becoming a purely military power like Rome, in which case her democracy and Digitized by Microsoft® Imperialism 147 her culture must go by the board, or she must be ruinously beaten back to her separate status. It was indeed to the loss of her empire that she owed the fresh growth of her culture in the gfeneration after the war, whereas Sparta, having evolved none but militarist institutions, was as bare of intellectual life after the fall of her empire as she had been before. But the principle of empire once admitted, in the lack of the wisdom that could see its universal fatality, there was in store for Hellas nothing « but one convulsive and coercive military unifica- tion after another, down to the advent of the Roman. After the rule of Athens, the rule of Sparta; after that, again, a limited Athenian rule, got by triumph over the Olynthian con- federacy ; then the Macedonian rule, based on the military experience of Thebes ; then, on Alexander's death, the new swarm of Hel- lenistic empires ; then the advent of the Roman, doomed to the same dissolution. In every instance the progression is one of social disintegration under the guise of military advance : decay of public spirit in Athens ; decay of the Spartan ideal in Sparta itself; decay of vigour in the post - Alexandrian empires ; decay of class cohesion in Rome ; decay of the whole Roman system under the autocracy, 10 — 2 Digitized by Microsoft® 148 Patriotism and Empire Not that there would have been no social problem but for imperialism : on the contrary, the Periclean system is seen to stave off the social problem at Athens for the time being ; but the process is merely one of evading the Sphinx riddle till the Sphinx's claws have clutched. From first to last imperialism conforms to that formula. Instead of solving the social problem by science, each community in turn strives to set up unity for its clashing classes of parasite and drudge by making them collectively parasitic upon other communities. The plan, of course, is not clear. The initial motives are instinctively military, and in the case of Macedon the social problem has not yet clearly arisen ; but for all alike the question in time becomes one of sheer self-maintenance by conquest and domination. Athenian empire began with the ' glorious ' repulse of the Persians ; and in this ancient triumph the de- generate Greeks went on glorying long after the Romans had put them under the yoke. But the curse of militarism ensues all the same, whether its installation come by way of defence or of aggression. The triumph of the Syra- cusans over the tyrannizing Athenians was fol- lowed by the tyranny of their own Dionysii ; the pride of Marathon and Salamis was the prologue to the fall of the Peiraean walls ; and Digitized by Microsoft® Imperialism 149 had there been no Persian War, the Athenian Empire and its ruin need never have been. The social problem might or might not have been solved, but at least it could hardly have failed to be faced by later Solons. As it was, democracy was distracted in the direct ratio of the military stress. The social problem bears a slow solution; military problems do not. Always the choice is being forced between some honest incompetent Nicias and some capable dishonest Alcibiades : the non- democratic enemy has always the possible advantage in singleness of policy, and though the democracy tends to produce the larger crop of capacity, the democratic method can least well utilize it. Thus in the second empire of Athens ' we see her sending out general after general to recover some ancient possession or to put down some new enemy, and in almost every case accusing the general, on his return, of inefficiency, negligence, or treachery, and visiting these offences either with a severe fine or more commonly with death.' Thus arises the opportunity of Philip or of Alexander, of the skilful plotter or of the great captain. Democracy must fall ; and though the first sequel of its fall be a free play of its remaining energy in the intellectual life, the blight of autocracy ere long destroys that, and we have Digitized by Microsoft® 150 Patriotism and Empire left only the mindless and soulless peace of pretorian-guarded Rome. Subjectively considered, the course is no less clear. It begins in the spirit of injustice ; the lust for rule over others on the part of the man who claims freedom for himself; the demand for tribute by the man who hated to pay tribute. Common honesty as between city and city would have excluded the possibility of empire ; but seeing that even the measure of honesty that subsisted between citizen and citizen was but a conventional marking out of the lines on which one citizen should be free to live idly by another's labour, it was above the moral range of the group to discern the dishonesty of seeking to draw a common revenue from the resources of another community. A Socrates in the earlier day of Pericles could have pointed out that the policy of extortion as against other cities could only make enemies to the plunder- ing city ; and if the Socratic method had then elicited the truth that such extortion was only an application to intercivic policy of the private practice of the men who constituted the cities, the Socratic inference would only have been the clearer all round. That inference the Greeks could not draw. It remains to be seen whether it can be drawn by the nations of the twentieth century of the Christian era. Digitized by Microsoft® Imperialism 151 IV One of the most unpromising symptoms of our case is the uncomprehending way in which the British imperialist always scans the story of ancient Rome. Noting the decadence which is the upshot of the whole, he seems to suppose that somehow Christianity will avail to save later empires from the same fate, though Rome was Christianized during the decline ; or that haply the elimination of chattel slavery will avert decay, though Christian Spain was free from chattel slavery at home ; or that indus- trialism will avail, though the Moors and the Florentines were tolerably industrial. Any theory will serve to burke the truth that the special cause of decay is just empire. Yet, as regards Rome, the sequence is as obvious as any in human affairs. In the post- regal period the spirit of patriotism enabled the ruling class to turn the whole fighting power of the community to the oppression of neigh- bouring States ; and the social problem, always being raised by the utter egoism of the ex- ploiting upper class, was chronically staved off, essentially at the expense of the subjugated neighbours, by way of the planting of Roman colonies on their soil, and formally by granting Digitized by Microsoft® 152 Patriotism and Empire one political privilege after another to the plebeians. The patrician reluctance to make such concessions was extreme. Twelve years after the first Secession of the Plebs, Spurius Cassius (B.C. 486) paid with his life for pro- posing, as Consul, to distribute some public land among needy citizens, and to draw State rents from the rest. The nobles saw in the public land their proper patrimony. Thirteen years later a tribune was murdered ; and seven- teen more years elapsed before the Icilian law could be passed distributing some land at Rome to poor citizens. Political strife between plebs and patriciate continued to alternate with the wars in which they were united; and a new line of cleavage and adjustment began in the paying of the soldiers ; while the nearer neighbours, the Latins, had to be admitted to some Roman privileges. Still, the social evil remained un- cured ; and after many Roman and Latin colonies had temporarily relieved the strain, there were passed by plebeian pressure (b.c. 367) the Licinian laws, relieving debtors of interest, limiting estates, and calling on landlords to employ a certain proportion of free labour. Such laws could not be enforced ; but now, in virtue of fresh conquest, the unprivileged Roman class could so force its claims on the aristocracy that they were by degrees sub- Digitized by Microsoft® Imperialism 153 stantially blended in a community of exploita- tion of other States. A new populace infallibly grew up in place of the old ; but henceforth the stuff of the populace, bred under the code of national plunder, yielded no material capably of valid initiative. The consolidated Romans could now wage an imperialistic war with the rival Samnites, who had preceded them as overrunners of Southern Italy, and the nearer Latins, who pushed their claims to Roman privileges ; and after genera- tions of war, breeding a whole caste of trained captains and administrators, all Italy became Roman (b.c. 266) on various conditions of sub- jection. Thus imperialized, the conquering State rapidly proceeded to foreign war and new conquest, the ancient Roman farmer class all the while dying out ; the popular element in the government disappearing in favour of the Senate ; foreign tribute coming in to enrich the latter ; and gladiatorial games arising to amuse the imperialized populace. Twenty-three years of war with Carthage might be said to fix the Roman destiny of conquest ; and diplomacy, as well as the Illyrian War, introduced the Senate into the affairs of the Greeks. Thus far, needless to say, it was a matter of course that Rome should be militarist, were it only as against the barbarians of the North ; so Digitized by Microsoft® 154 Patriotism and Empire that there could be no question of pause on the part of the administrative class. Between barbarians, Carthaginians, and the Kings of the Alexandrian succession, it was a struggle for conquest on all hands. Our business is not to censure the Roman Senate for a policy of which no man could then impeach the general wisdom, but to note how, in an age of struggle for empire, the successful State was demoralized in the ratio of its success ; and then to ask whether a modern State does sanely to aim at empire when no such destiny is in any sense forced upon it. Within a generation of the subdual of Italy, a Roman literature, imitative of the Greek, had begun. In two centuries of aristo- cratico-republican imperialism, as in a hotbed of artificial stimulus and protection, that litera- ture had reached its high-water mark ; and thenceforth, under autocratic imperialism, it decayed as rapidly as it rose, till, the brains being out, the empire in the West fell before a rabble of barbarians. Men fix their gaze on the roll of early conquests, the final triumph over Carthage, the acquisition of Spain and Sicily, the defeats of Macedon and of An;tiochus, the controlling of the East, the acquisition of Greece ; but they will not see that every gain was a step nearer the break-up of the Republic. To say nothing of the incessant influx of alien Digitized by Microsoft® Imperialism 155 slaves, ousting the native stock, every fresh evasion of the ever-renewed social problem meant a further step towards the state of quarrel among the ruling class themselves ; every acquiescence of the common people in a solution by way of outside plunder lowered them nearer the status of a pleading proletariat. The imperial people was ipso facto a community diseased ; and wherever they imposed their rule they infected with decay the subject , States. Let it be asked how the decay could any- where have been arrested without modification of the ideal of empire, and the fatality will exhibit itself at any point of approach. The senators, it is clear, ought to have aimed at preserving a free farmer class, instead of seek- ing for large estates tilled by slaves. But the , senators were seekers of plunder and dominion i abroad, and how should they love fraternity and freedom at home ? They should have preserved agriculture, as a way of checking the depopulation of Italy. But they had conquered better grain-lands than Italy ; and when they could extort grain as tribute, or grow it cheaply in Sicily by slave labour and sell it in Rome at a profit, how should they concern themselves about home agriculture and population ? They were personally comfortable enough. It would Digitized by Microsoft® 156 Patriotism arid Empire have been well to renounce the importation of hordes of alien slaves, who loved Rome little and could not be trusted to fight for her. But then, slave labour served their luxurious wants ; and their patriotism meant readiness to fight and conquer and plunder in Rome's name, not self-denial to keep Rome sound. The less cynical complained of the decay of public spirit. But when had public spirit meant anything but seeking one's own interest through the State's ? It was only a question of new methods of self- seeking. Legal restraints passed into disregard; how should conquerors, educated in coercion of the conquered, retain the habit of abiding by law ? Thus, within a century and a generation of the subdual of Italy — a century which saw the mighty effort of Hannibal and its end — the imperial Republic had but arrived at being a scene of aristocratic wealth and plebeian poverty on a larger scale, with outside Italy clamorous, impoverished, unfriendly, and with no faculty left to cure the evil. The two Gracchi in their tragic way exhibited the futility of the method of force, the inability of the military spirit, even when beneficently bent, to apply any other. The first based himself on the selfish Roman populace, who would not make common cause with the Italian peoples ; the second, with Digitized by Microsoft® Imperialism 157 larger views and capacity, based himself on the claim of the Italians to equality ; both alike had against them the main mass of the selfish and furious nobility ; and both duly paid the penalty. But Caius ere he died had called out a new force of cleavage by making the middle- class equites, the money-lenders and tax-farmers, a counterpoise to the Senate. As posterity put it, he ' made the Republic double-headed.' He would have overthrown the whole system ; and with his constructive energies he might have built up a new and mightier empire, whose down- fall might have been longer delayed. As it was, his brother and he had only pointed the way to the rule of the sword in civil dissension. Henceforth the throes of the convulsion come fast : after Marius, as servant-master of the troubled State, comes the bloodier Sulla ; and had not Caesar overthrown all, Pompeius had, with no very different sequel. For persistent empire in the end infallibly brings the imperator, be the process slow or speedy ; and with the imperator comes in due time the decadence of empire, the humiliation and paralysis of the spirit that had aspired to humiliate its kind. Digitized by Microsoft® 158 Patriotism and Empire Not once in a thousand years does the lesson seem to have dawned on any people. After all the imperialisms of the Middle Ages, we find the citizens of free Florence, as late as Savona- rola, no less bent on empire than those of Periclean Athens. Because they had once held in subjection the neighbouring city of Pisa, they would rule Pisa to the end, at whatever cost of blood and enmity," denying her the in- dependence they claimed for themselves. Machiavelli and Savonarola are two opposed extremes of type : the one a subtle rationalist, the other a Puritan fanatic ; but both alike stood by the dogma of dominion over Pisa. We might say that a Florence with such an ethic did not deserve to remain free ; but it may be more to the purpose to note that she could not. Her little empire was the millstone round her neck in the struggle for survival. Nearer our own life, we find the England of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries all for empire over France. The men who at home had chronically to struggle for their own liberties were at all times ready to be united in Digitized by Microsoft® Imperialism 159 a project for subverting other people's ; and no experience of the inflalible sequence of evil could cast out the spirit which dictated the aggression, though as time went on that became less feasible. Not in medieval history is to be found a more perfect illustration of the curse of empire than the sequel to the conquest of France by Henry V. The steps are the old series, quickened and complicated : first, evasion of home problems by patriotic attack on a neighbour ; second, triumph ; third, division and decadence on the scene of conquest ; fourth, gross demoralization, humiliating defeat, infamy, expulsion, end of empire ; fifth, civil war at home, with utter demoralization, lasting until the military class is exhausted ; sixth, the advent of a new dynasty of imperators. During a century of empire, defeat, effort towards new empire, and loss thereof, feudal England pro- duced not one lasting name in literature ; nay, it took another hundred years of comparative peace to raise letters to the height at which Chaucer had left them. In that interval there had arisen the first modern empire which rivalled in range and power that of ancient Rome. Spain, bred to arms by the long struggle with the Moors, added province to province, heritage to heri- tage, conquest to conquest, till her King held Digitized by Microsoft® i6o Patriotism and Empire in thrall Peru and Mexico, Italy and the Netherlands, ' Tunis and Oran, and the Philippines, And all the fair spice-islands of the East.' And never did the sheer possession of empire more signally entail decadence, paralysis, ruin. Much was due, assuredly, to the monstrous cancer of the Inquisition ; but then it was the ideal of empire, rooted from the first in the feud with Islam, that at length made possible the special supremacy of the Inquisition in Spain. Religious tyranny stayed its feet on the necks of conquered Mexico and Peru ; and among the better Spanish brains struck down by the Church when they would advance on her doctrine, there can have been few who had not exulted in their country's conquest and dominion over the heathen beyond seas. Empire, once more, had made the imperator ; and imperator and priest, going hand-in-hand, alike drawing the gold supplied by the con- quered lands, could strangle every effort at new thought and new faith. Englishmen, in the eternal way of national vanity, set it down to their stock that they developed differently. But had England pos- sessed the same empire, and been able so to live on extorted bullion, the same sequence Digitized by Microsoft® Imperialism 1 6 1 could perfectly well have arisen in her case. It was the possession of foreign mines of gold and silver, and other forms of unearned wealth, that atrophied the industry as well as the intelligence of Spain ; the intellectual disease furthering the other, above all when the Church's insanity availed to expel the Moriscoes. Not a nation in Europe but would have clutched joyously at the same deadly possession. But the England which could beat off the great Spanish Empire at the very acme of its power was the ' Little England ' of Elizabeth, the England of Shake- speare and Spenser and Bacon, so trivial a territory now in the eyes of the patriots of the England of Mr. Kipling I Had England been able, again, to play the part played in Europe by France under Louis XIV., there was in her the spirit to do it. Cromwell at his death had launched on a policy of reckless imperialism, attacking Spain by choice as being weaker and more easy to plunder than France ; and had he lived, forced as he was to seek revenue by conquest, he might have gone far. But dynastic interests and strifes kept England out of the field while France, passing rapidly from a standing army of eighty thousand to one of four hundred thousand, reaped victory, glory, empire, decadence, and ex- haustion, till the Little England of Anne could II Digitized by Microsoft® 1 62 Patriotism and Empire humiliate her, as Elizabeth's had humiliated Spain. The strife of dynasties and parties in England prevented the pressing of her advan- tage ; but her day of empire was to come. It began, broadly speaking, under the first Pitt ; and, with waxings and wanings of the spirit of militarism and conquest, it has subsisted till our day, and will subsist yet a while. Because her fortune thus far is better and her state healthier than those reached by Spain in the seventeenth century and France in the eighteenth, her sons assume that for her there is no fatality in empire, no law of decay. Let us then nar- rowly scan her special problem. VI The one circumstance which greatly differ- ences England's empire from those of Rome and Spain is her advance in industry step for step with her advance in empire. This im- mensely important difference is plainly due, not to any quality of race or special wisdom of policy, but, after the political antecedents, to the natural conditions on which her industries specially rest. These consist in abundance of coal and iron. Before empire could become a source of national income, at a time when normal commerce had set up commercial and Digitized by Microsoft® Imperialism 163 industrial ideals, and when the other leading European States had their energies otherwise occupied, first a series of mechanical inventions, and soon after the application of steam to machinery in general, set her people upon using their coal and iron to an extent that began a new industrial era. Her empire was v/ thus from the first rather subservient to her industry than subversive of it. Where Rome and Spain became entirely parasitic, she con- tinued to be productive ; and though latterly her land has begun to pass out of cultivation like that of imperial Rome, and her imports greatly to exceed her exports, like those of imperial Spain, the order of causation is so essentially different that thus far her power is not impaired. But a clear order of causation there is, and the study of it reveals the probable sequel. Cromwell's policy having been arrested, English empire broadly begins with the dominance of Chatham ; and in his hands the policy of empire was the natural sequence to the older policy of combination against France. Walpole, for dynastic reasons a convinced believer in peace, held by his alliance with France, and opposed a war with Spain even after those two thrones had made a private compact to undermine England's commercial II — 2 Digitized by Microsoft® 164 Patriotism and Empire power. It was the Spanish policy of trade monopoly that at length forced war, at the instance of the commercial classes, on the un- willing Walpole in 1739. Habitual English smuggling, in breach of the Spanish monopoly of Spanish-American trade, was naturally met by the Spaniards with measures of search and punishment ; and resentment of these was the immediate motive of a war by which, of course, the trading class hoped either to capture the monopoly or break it down. Needless to say, the English were as much bent on monopoly for themselveis, wherever possible, as the Spaniards; and when in 1725 the Austrian Emperor, as titular head of the Holy Roman Empire, gave a trade charter to an Ostend East India Company, the English and Dutch Governments had alike protested. For the rest, Spain had in 1718 striven to abet the Stuart Pretender, and national conscience was nowhere scrupulous about making war. Walpole and his French contemporary, Cardinal Fleury, had been almost the only European statesmen of their age who really sought peace and ensued it. In Spain, after the Peace of Utrecht, Cardinal Alberoni had the wisdom and the fortune to break down the internal restraints on trade, and the immunity of the nobles and clergy from taxation ; but in Digitized by Microsoft® Imperialism 165 him the ideal of empire dominated all others, and he had turned all the gain to fresh ag- gression. The war which began in 1739, and which, by embroiling England with France, led to their later struggle for empire in Canada and India, might have sufficed to discredit the policy which made it. After nine years of strife, in which England, as ally of Austria, fought the futile battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy, and the no less futile naval battle of Toulon, everything returned to the status quo ante bellum, with the question of trade ab- solutely hung up. The Powers had merely exhausted each other; and in 1755, having recruited, they resumed their grapple. On the side of England, in the strenuous hands of Pitt, the new war was at once much less commercial in motive, and more propitious to the lower commercialism in practice. He is the best of the modern imperialists, a proud seeker of national honour rather than gain, and an inspirer of the same temper in his country- men. Collective gain-seeking, in fact, was as yet a lust without collective intelligence. The Spanish War had been, as we have seen, a noisy futility ; and Law's Mississippi Bubble in France, and the South Sea Bubble in England, had demonstrated only the immensity and im- Digitized by Microsoft® 1 66 Patriotism and Empire becility of the appetite for unearned gain, a thing Pitt never sought for himself, and was not concerned to help others to seek. There was probably more of systematic commercial purpose in the counsels of France, whose empire fell in Canada and India not more through want of coherent administration than through the insupportableness of the strain of a first-rate land war against Frederick in Europe, along with that of a first-rate naval war against England. Pitt's policy of enor- mous subsidies to Frederick was not that of a seeker of money gain. It is the more im- portant to note that imperialism in this, its most grandiose form, does but in the end subserve nevertheless the dominion of wealth and the spirit of self-seeking. Walpole had reduced the National Debt in 1739 to forty-seven millions; in 1748, at the Peace, it stood at seventy-seven millions ; in 1763, after the Seven Years' War, it had reached one hundred and thirty-nine millions. The vital meaning was that to the extent of the interest on that sum a parasitic class was now definitely added to English life ; and no idealism on Pitt's part could hinder the sequence of evil. Systematic Parliamentary bribery, involving the buying and selling of seats outside, had been begun by Walpole ; Newcastle continued it at Digitized by Microsoft® Imperialism 167 Pitt's side ; and after Pitt's fall the method was carried further than ever under the hand of the King. System for system, that of England had already grown as corrupt as that of later republican Rome ; and the saving force was in no sense empire — for the class now enriched from India was at least as corrupt and corrupt- ing as any — but the increase in industry which proceeded in virtue of the natural conditions. While the upper classes scrambled shamelessly for unearned spoils, real wealth was still forth- coming at the hands of those grimy heathen colliers and pallid factory hands among whom Wesley and Whitefield went evangelizing. What could come of mere empire was first seen in the loss of the American colonies, as soon as imperialist finance was applied to them. So far had imperialism gone that (apart from the few typified by Chatham, who thought first and last of keeping the empire united to make head against France ; and the few typified by Burke, who further looked to the question of trade) Englishmen in general certainly approved of coercing the colonists. And but that their hands were full in Europe, where they were fighting France, Spain, and Holland, and in India, where they were fighting Hyder Ali, the King and his Ministers might have carried their point in America for the time being, Digitized by Microsoft® y i68 Patriotism and Empire leaving the reaping of the whirlwind there for the next generation. With the National Debt increasing by annual leaps, with war on their hands in three continents, they still had the support of many for the new declaration of war against Holland in 1780, because in the City ' the spirit of gaming had seized all ranks, and nothing was thought of but privateering.' It was in the worst spirit of plunder that the Dutch War was waged, and it was well for England that the triumph of the colonies altered her course. The severance was precipitated by the King's stupidity ; but it was only a question of time. Seen as a humiliation by all her rivals, it was for England in reality a wholesome rebuff; and though the upper-class hatred and fear of de- mocracy could soon afterwards plunge England in war with republican France, her imperialism had been for the time checked at its roots in popular feeling. Practically, it was still a Little England that finally baffled Napoleon, as for- merly Louis XIV. and Philip II. The wealth accruing from India was as nothing for purposes of warfare : it was only by means of monstrous additions to her already immense debt that the younger Pitt was able to play his father's game ; and those additions were made possible only by the still more rapidly increasing industry of Digitized by Microsoft® Imperialism 169 the nation. And it was the renewed industry of France which, after the termination of her Napoleonic empire, brought to her a renewal of wealth and culture and civilization. Not plunder and violence, but labour and peaceful commerce, were the creative forces for both nations, loaded as they were with the debts of their wars of mutual frustration. VII After Waterloo, it seems to have been realized by the intelligence of Europe that mili- tarism and imperialism had alike pierced the hands that leant on them. As against the former chronic death-grapple for some arbitrary 'balance of power,' even Conservatives held by non-intervention ; and the loss of the colonies to England, no less than the decadence of Spain, had shown the vanity of foreign pos- sessions. In England, the old arrogance for a time bade fair to cut off Canada ; but the new spirit was strong enough to avert extremities, and a relatively ethical if sociologically empirical belief in the virtue of industry as the right ground of a nation's greatness took, for the time the place of the dream of prestige and the passion of racial enmity. With Cobden figuring as a national and even as an international force, Digitized by Microsoft® lyo Patriotism and Empire a sane ideal of civilization seemed at least to be shaping itself. Macaulay, writing on Clive in 1840, professed astonishment at the apathy of his generation to the story of the rise of British empire in India. An Anglo-Indian Liberal, writing just after the Indian Mutiny, sharply retorted that the reason was plain enough, though Macaulay would not confess it. Englishmen, he said, were ashamed of the story — a comment possible only at a time when imperialism was in low repute. After the Crimean War it probably went still lower, in Macaulay's despite, with the credit of militarism in general ; for no war had ever been more flagrantly convicted of stupidity alike in the deciding and the waging. Among thinking people, the one countervailing thought was that wrought up by Tennyson in his Maud — the ignobleness of so much of the life of peace as carried on by those who decried war. And herein lay, not, certainly, a rational defence of militarism, but a clue to the funda- mental evil which made militarism still possible : the ancient schism of rich and poor, which had broken out afresh in England ere the Waterloo bonfires were cold, and which in France had at last made the way for the Second Empire. Industry and its abstract ideal, the honest r rendering of service for service, had so far Digitized by Microsoft® Imperialism 171 withstood all the social maladies set up by the evil ideals of the near past ; but it brought its own, or rather it did but alter the incidence of the oldest social malady of all. Under industry as under feudalism, barbarism, Greek demo- cracy and Roman aristocracy, the ultimate success, the practical ideal, is still the power to live luxuriously without rendering any service. Speaking not deductively and ethically, but inductively and historically, we may safely say that the definite preponderance of that ideal in any State is the beginning of the end. The preponderance of the reverse ideal would a fortioH be the beginning of a new life, but from such preponderance every State is yet far. In France, the moneyed class could overthrow the mid-century republic, after the republic had overthrown the moneyed class's monarchy ; and significantly enough the new empire revived militarism to the uttermost of its power, though it intelligently enough encouraged industrialism at the same time, by way of pacifying its prole- tariate. Striving to check discontent by more imperialism, it went down as every empire one day must ; but in the Third Republic as in the others the social problem presses hard and steadily. Hence, though that problem is visibly much aggravated by militarism, there arises a source of motive power for militarism over and Digitized by Microsoft® 172 Patriotism and Empire above the still unslain spirit of racial enmity. In England, with differences of time in the hot fit and cold fit, the same contagions work to similar effect ; and in Germa'ny the discord between the ideal of empire and that of Socialism is full of evil promise. It behoves us, however, to analyze in particu- lar our own problem. Here, latterly, the strife of classes has been on the whole less marked than in Germany and France, the movement of imperialism having rather forestalled than fol- lowed industrial pressure. Pressure there has been ; but the relative elasticity of English trade conditions, turning as they largely do on the readily alterable rate of coal-supply, has thus far averted a crisis. The crisis, however, lies ahead ; and in the imperialist movement is to be seen a half-instinctive reckoning on it. It is seemingly felt on all hands that, between competition and the expanding power of ma- chinery, our trade is within sight of its limits ; that the existing field of investment is all laid out ; and that in some creation of ' new markets ' is to be found the only cure that the case admits of. A leading statesman has put the idea in the memorable proposition that we must ' open up new markets in the waste places of the earth.' In that egregious saying lies implicit all the commercial theory of the situation. The Digitized by Microsoft® Imperialism 173 primary object is not to buy, but to sell, and receive goods in return to sell again ; all to the end of heaping up more capital for investment. Our own toilers are not to do more consuming, to begin with : it is not their lot that is in question ; at most it is assumed that they can prosper only through the prosperity of • capital. How far a distinct conception of this kind is a primary stimulus to imperialism we need not inquire. Without doubt, the mere pride and passion of nation and race are still the prime factors with many, as in the case of the Dis- raelian imperialism of 1876-80. But the con- i/ cept of commercial interest does emerge more and more distinctly, and it is to it, finally, that appeal has to be made to carry the point against criticism. We have specially to consider, then, the elements of the commercial argument, taken with and without the notable profession of dis- interested zeal for the welfare of the human race, or at least of the lower races, which commonly embroiders it. VIII Shortly put, the imperialist's case is that expansion of * the empire ' is necessary — Digitized by Microsoft® 174 Patriotism and Empire (i) To provide openings for the emigration of our superfluous population ; and (2) To ' open up fresh markets.' When answered that we need not own our markets, and that trade normally goes on be- tween different States, he answers (3) That ' trade follows the flag.' Incidentally he is apt to point to the benefits bestowed by British rule on the natives of India and Egypt ; and he is at times led by the exigencies of argument to affirm that the bestowal of such benefits is his and his nation's master passion ; though the previous propo- sitions might be supposed to invalidate it for the intelligence even of the lowest races con- cerned. It is fit, however, that the pleas should be weighed singly as well as in collocation. And first as to the formula about scope for emigration. Only actual observation could convince one that this plea is ever used in good faith, so nakedly does it collide with the notorious statistical facts. A glance at the Registrar-General's returns shows us that year by year from two to six times as many British emigrants pass to the United States as to all the colonies together. Between 1853 and 1897 there emigrated from these islands nearly eight and a half millions of British and Irish-born subjects ; and of these, over five and a half Digitized by Microsoft® vTP?inaV>i itftiiit .