«"i^ii:"!i;:ii' iM/. ^.'; The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924007373271 rary Evolution and empire, 3 1924 007 373 271 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE BY JOHN W. GRAHAM, M.A. PRINCIPAL OF DALTON HALL, THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER Author of " Tie Destruction of Daylight" PRBSENTEO BY HENRY H. MOSHER FUND NEW YORKYEAPX-Y MEETING RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS LONDON HEADLEY BROTHERS BISHOPSGATE HEADLEY BROTHERS, PRINTERS, BISHOFSGATE, E.G. ; AND ASHFORD, KENT. PREFACE The nucleus of the following chapters was read as a paper to the First Universal Peace Congress, held at Westminster Town Hall in 1890. Such portions of the paper as there was time to read fell on uncomprehending and obviously impatient ears. Such ideas were new and unacceptable in the Peace movement then. They had been gleaned from Herbert Spencer, John Fiske, D. G. Ritchie, Bagehot, and others. But I found that there was no room for them, and my MS. lay by for a long time as one of my failures. Of late years, how- ever, these ideas have become part of the texture of current thought. I have lectured often upon them, and finally contributed some of these chapters as articles in the Friendy the British Friendj the Inquirer, the Christian World, T. P.'s Weekly, and elsewhere. The Editors kindly PREFACE. permit re-publication. They were, however, written from the beginning as a continuous treatment of the subject, and they make a book, not a collection of essays. Since most of them were published, the subject has made a long leap with " The Great Illusion," to which I devote a chapter near the end. J. W. G. tApril^ 1912. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. WAR AND THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST - . _ - 9 II. WAR AS BUILDER OF NATIONS - 20 III. DESPOTISM AND WAR. I - 36 IV. DESPOTISM AND WAR. II - 50 V. WAR AND NATIONAL CHARACTER - 62 VI. INDUSTRIALISM AND NATIONAL CHARACTER - 73 VII. ARE THE TIMES RIPE FOR PEACE ? - 82 VIII. THE OBSOLESCENCE OF WAR 90 IX. EVOLUTION AND CONQUEST - - lOI X. THE PROBLEM OF EMPIRE BUILDING 115 XI. WHO PROFITS BY IMPERIALISM ? - 127 XII. THE DANGEROUS CLASSES 136 XIII. PEACE AND INDIVIDUALISM - - 150 XIV. TRADE, EMPIRE, AND WAR - - 158 XV. OUR BUSINESS EMPIRE IN SOUTH AFRICA - - - - 166 8 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XVI. IS EMPIRE GOOD AT THE BEST ? INDIA . _ . 175 XVII. THE NEXT MOVE OF IMPERIALISM — CHINA . . - . 185 XVIII. MODERN WEALTH AND WAR, " THE GREAT ILLUSION " I93 XIX. AN UNDERSTANDING WITH GERMANY 204 XX. FINAL 220 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE CHAPTER I WAR AND THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST The scientific doctrine of the struggle for existence leading to the survival of the fittest has now entered convincingly into the popular mind, but, as might be expected, has entered it in a very inaccurate form, and with a loosely expended application. Ijn its true shape the great doctrine of Darwin states that amongst animals and- plants, un- hindered by artificial regulations, varieties arise, (though no one really knows how), in each generation, that those individuals who are best qualified to get a living and leave off- spring will impress their characters, (or their tendencies to these characters), upon the next generaticin ; the less fitted for the environ- ment will die oft in competition with them ; and that so out of individuals of one species placed in differing circumstances, a variety of species has come into being?) It will be seen 10 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE that the " natural selection " tluj2,,,^^;ought about_ acta op^y, .by death ; it . provi d es th e negative check of ataryg-tisQ, and^^sease, and that only. It is therefore extremely slow in its application. It demands that its process shall ngtj je interfered with by sympa thy, humanity, or any force of mental action not pure ly^ egoist ic ; and it is a conflict between ind mduals~of the sanae' race."'" TKSfetnrtses a miiciness simple process when the struggle is removed from competing individuals to com- peting aggregates ; it becomes a further question then to ask how much of th e law is still applicable, and whether " natural selection_^stil3[ forms and. de velQpa.specjes . "In gregarious units like a hive of bees, the competitive unit is not the individual but the hive — ^hive survives against hive — and to the hive, not to the bees, the winning character- istics belong. Now, in the case of bees, the effectiveness of the whole as a honey accumu- lator has resulted in depriving most members of sex, the glory and crown of Ufe to animals, in causing the males to be stung to an early death, and a single overgrown insect to do all the egg-laying, which is probably a weary enslavement to her. So in the human hive or nation, unless we take care of the individual WAR AND SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST il he tends to becomej it may be, a sweated town worker, tied to a machine. There is no need either to glorify or to obey the law of natural selection under the idea that the truly fit, by any human standard, wiU sur- vive thereby. If the jungle be the scene of action, the Apostle Paul or Mr. Gladstone would not survive in the presence of a tiger, who would promptly prove his superior fit- ness for the environment. Crocodiles are " fit " for mud banks, and every kind of pestilent vermin has an appropriateness to its corrupt and rotting environment, even if that be the leavings of the tiger's feast. Let us attempt no more application of this law as a means of producing among men the survival of the excellent. Again, with regard to the whole life of man, a Kttle reflection w ill show that ci vilisation and co-operation have, ever since ttiedawn of morality, beenTsteadily eHnunating or putting into an ever remoter background the blind forces of natural ^selection by ,^ath. To give this old destructive law which rules the animal and vegetable world full scope<{there should be no attempt to keep alive the weakly, the aged, the cripple, the inebriate, the lunatic, the epileptic ; orphans should be remorselessly left 12 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE to perish as the children of parents who have failed in the struggle ; the action of parental care should be strictly limited to the time of helpless youth. Again, wealth should be dis- tributed in each generation afresh, ^d struggled for by strength and cunning, ^ur aristocracy is a crowning instance of our depar- ture from the law of survival by natural selection. The whole machinery and fabric of law exists in order to limit the efficacy of brute strife, under which stealing and murder must be allowed to figure^ T he law of surv ival by naturd sglgfitJQBJg. at war with every one of our most cherished institutions ; the Poor Law is itself a flat denial that it shall be valid among us ; every one of our humanitarian aspirations, every one of ou r social enthusiasms, everything that v^T^^^^as^eculiady lii«ni«l,«QI.a§ Jij^t the Divine, rep re§ents^areyolt,fro^ law under wMch prg^anic lif e Jtiadg^its first slow steps in the upward ni^rch. To connect the theory with any struggle by War, is, again, an irrelevance. The struggle for existence is not, as a rule, consciously a warfare ; it is much more by bearing and rear- ing children, rather than by military quaUties, that races survive. The Hindus have greatly WAR AND SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 13 increased in numbers through being conquered by the British. The Russians are slain and enslaved by their Government, but their large families maintain the race. Such is the case also, most strikingly, with the Poles, the Armenians, and the Jews, though the Poles and Armenians are unarmed and con- quered, and the Jews have no state to defend. The Armenians and the Jews have quaHties which in competition with other races give them the victory, but the quaUties are not ex- pressed in battalions or in Dreadnoughts, but in laborious lives, careful thrift, intellectual ability and large families. The average wealth of the Jews in London is four times that of the general population. If the acquisition of wealth is to be counted as a test of the power to survive, (which may, of course, be denied, and should be limited and qualified, but is currently assumed), it may be noted that the rich have small f amiUes, and the rich individuals are made richer because the families diminish and tend to die out. Multi- phcation of the race stops a.c( :\]irpn}aiion. It 1snoF^;B3GSa!5SiS>lSih^s:sltSLcan InaEe a living and httle more. It is difficult to see what test of " fitness the faculty of money-making would pass. It seems to be a 14 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE faculty by itself, not composed of virtue, or of industry, or of intellectual ability, or of bodily strength, or of vigorous spiritual Ufe, or of any particular compound of these. It is a queer compound of its own — sometimes amiable and sometimes not. It does not cause its possessor to survive, it acts against his fertility, and it does not necessarily make him fit for any other use. He cannot be said to be either specially agreeable, or specially brilliant, or specially forcible or adorable. He is in great danger of moral degradation, which his family wiU find stiU more difficult to escape. We must therefore look away from War and from great wealth for the qualities which now make for the success and well- being of a race. While nations still, doubtless, compete with one another as aggregates, it is no longer the case that equipment, fitness for the environ- ment, giving the faculty of persistence and growth, depends upon, or has much to do with^ conscious fighting ; nor that nowadays growth chiefly works by death, starvation or slaughter, which are the weapons of the law of natural selection. If species are still being made, if varieties of the human race are still tending to such differences as ultimately under differ- WAR AND SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 15 ent influences form separate species — and whether this is so or not is more a matter of classification than anything else — the causes which produce the differences are much more rapid and effectual than they were under the slow process of development by survival. Education, effort, conscious mental fore- casting of the future and memory of the lessons of the past, habit and practice, co-operation and organisation, these are the forces which have produced the modern European and American, and in ages long ago produced the Chinaman and the Hindu, yit will be shown later that miUtarism does not tend to survival, and that military States cultivate within themselves the germs of decay, and are certain-4o be left behind, off the main track of progress. \ I But before doing that we must trace from its {beginning the really guiding and dominant [motive of human Ufe, far more potent than feelfishness with its accompanying hatred and {Strife — I mean sympathy, a f ellow-feehng with others, leading to public spirit, self-sacrifice, co-operation, and all that is mightiest in civiHsed life. It is probable that here we are touching an arc of the greatest circle of uni- versal law within our ken. The beginning of i6 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE this faculty may be traced in those early organisms which were formed by the budding of offspring round a central cell. When it was found that a group of cells of this kind, united together for purposes of feeding and defence, was more efficient than the isolated cell, then those groups which most closely adhered one to another triumphed. This process and this law have been of increasing potency on an ever larger scale right through the story of biological evolution. Health and strength in the bodies of aU animals to-day depend upon the service of the cells of which they are composed, now highly specialised and formed of the union of groups of highly com- plex republics, or monarchies, or nationalities, or empires, of which the single cells are the individual citizens. Health depends upon the willing subordination of the individual to the welfare of the whole. We find, then, this process in the stages before man, but it is only when we come to the human family that the law reaches the level of consciousness and begins its rapid growth in power, with joy all the way and triumphant happiness at the end. The human miothgr was the first and greatest enemy who came to conquer the brute law of survival. WAR AND SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 17 We will take, as it is usual to take, the beginnings of anything which may truly be called humanity, at the time when man first stood erect with hands free from use in walking and began life in an upright posture. The number of things which he found he could do with his hands naturally set him thinking and contriving, and this seems to have begun his course of relatively rapid mental development. But the greatest change in the methods of creation came when man, under this probably rapid and certainly extensive growth of brain, reached self-consciousness, when he could watch himself at work, and reaUse how he was progressing. He could then consciously co- operate for his own benefit; he became an open- eyed servant of the Divine Creative Power, no longer its blind material. He began to save, to tame the horse and the ox and the sheep ; he enlisted the dog in his service, and clad himself in the skins of the beasts he slew. He built houses, and made the great discovery of fire. He learnt to write in pictures. When he need- ed mo£gjnxiscle, instead of waiting till in the course of ages natural selection produced a stronger arm, hg_use^a crowbar arid.began the long story of machinery. If his eye, later, needed help, he no longer waited for slow i8 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE death to kill off the men of ordinary vision and breed from the long-sighted ; he made the optic glass. Ever since man became man, his develop- ment has been almo§i_jsduil]x_mental. His chief physical changes have beenmlus hands, and in the changes in the hips and heels due to an upright position. But while our anatomy is strikingly like that of our nearest congeners, the modern civilised human brain is three times the weight of the largest ape's brain. The adult baboon has a brain equally de- veloped with that of the human infant four months before birth. Our brain surface, too, is greatly extended by corrugations, it is furrowed instead of smooth, its convolu- tions are more elaborate ; and there would appear, the biologists tell us, to be some rather close connection between brain surface and brain power. But cerebral development is slow in the individual. It cannot progress without ex- perience. Little chickens can run about at birth, but powers of thinking only come by having something to think about . Experience is wanted to make the thinker. So that the brain in a child grows only gradually. This lengthened the period of helpless infancy WAR AND SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 19 and guarded childhood, and the adolescence during which, with an adult body, the brain is still incomplete. Infancy and adolescence now occupy one third of life. This had for the race consequences of enormous import. It produced the home. This was the first nursery for the affections, the training-ground for all discipline and self- control. Here, among brothers and sisters, the individual learnt the beginnings of self- sacrifice, loyalty and service, — the dawn indeed of morality and pubUc spirit. The families which did not practise loyalty, did not stand shoulder to shoulder, deserted one another at critical moments to save their skins, these families were killed off under the constant fighting of early days. Here is the momentous dawn of the faculty of sympathy, beginning as it needs must, in a narrow sphere, but capable of expanding. Far beyond the time of our earliest human relics began that narrowing of the region of strife, that increase in the size of the striving unit, which has led in the civihsed world to a chronic state of peace, broken by occasional war on a large scale. CHAPTER II WAR AS BUILDER OF NATIONS We concluded the last chapter with the effect of the home on the faculties of man. With the establishment of the human family, lasting through life in a monogamous union, perpetually strengthened and consohdated by competition, and the chief stronghold for security through ages of strife, we have war itself producing within the family unit the capacity for loyalty and love. It is obvious and easy for us to follow the transition from the family to the family of families, from the clan to the tribe with its hereditary chief, still called Sire, its assembly of " fathers," its simple paternal organisation. These tribes, through ages of serviceable warfare, have been welded into great nations; the unit of strife has gradually increased in size, and within the unit there is peace. Where once war was at every man's door, and violence at every street corner, where every neighbouring WAR AS BUILDER OF NATIONS 21 hill held a robber's hold, we have reached a stage at which the centres of danger are to be found only in the half-dozen chancelleries of Europe. I am far from saying, and far further from beheving, that even thus we have marshalled all the chief forces which have evolved human nature and human society. In the background stands natural selection, and competition properly called cut-throat, lopping off erratic and weakly forms, though in less prominent action than those I have emphasized, viz. : — effort, use and wont, training, sympathy, helpfulness, society. But we have not mentioned yet the faith held by nearly all men in nearly all ages and places, that there is a commerce between us and a spiritual world above and behind us, with which our connection is not difficult and occasional, but was from the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. That is, that our origin is not wholly accounted for by flesh and blood, our pro- gress is not maintained in isolation, with our highest looking up into loneliness ; but that the human spirit receives direction from the Unseen, whence it came and whither it goes. It is the opinion of Alfred 22 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE Russel Wallace, Darwin's friendly rival, that such gifts as music and mathematics, of no use to the species for survival, cannot be due to natural selection, and point towards something far more potent and more deHcate which has gone to the making of man. A general Apologia for rehgion is beyond the scope of an essay on War. I only refer briefly to it, to show that what is, if true, the mightiest fact in human Ufe, is not for- gotten, while we are dealing chiefly with the operation of things visible. I trust the point has now been made, that evolution affords no warrant for war, on the ground that in the " struggle for existence " the "fittest" will survive. Evolutionists do not estimate the customs of one age by the standards of another. That is one of the gains of evolutionary thought. That which is utterly wrong to-day because it represents " a law in the members," is seen to have been right during the ages when it grew to be a law in the members. No institution or habit has become firmly established and has survived through centuries, unless it was found to be of value to the community and tended to its survival. Communities rid themselves, by natural WAR AS BUILDER OF NATIONS 23 selection or on purpose, of damaging habits before these acquire permanence. Our most' useless and injurious political institution was once of^ ^yice. The worst that can be said of it is that it is IqngouFoPSate, that it is old wfiodto^e^gruned away' 'To practise habits of this obsolete type is sinful, because it is retrogressive ; it is the undoing of the Divine creative doing. That is what we say of. slavery, ^:which was__an improvement on cannjbahsm. Men ate their prisoners before they domesticated them. We know not how many humanitarian reformers, aided doubtless by an economic argument, laboured for the establishment of slavery. Slavery also enabled for the first time a leisured class to arise, as in ancient Egypt and Chaldsea, or earher, and to begin civihzation. Similarly with polygamy and other early forms of marriage. They were better than none. They were regulative and peace-making in- stitutions, ar\alogous to_^£_xe£QgnitiQn_ of private property: ^\^^Ienmen went in large numbers to early death by fighting, polygamy was the best for the women and for the future of the race. But we have made a better discovery since, and polygamy to us would be sin. Despotism is now an enemy of human 24 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE welfare ; but it was an improvement on anarchy, and when a tribe was in perpetual war, was a necessary form of government. But despotism now might not untruly be called a form of " original sin." There may come a not distant day, when the present extremes of wealth and poverty, and much of our present treatment of animals, may go the way of these superseded barbarisms. So we gladly grant that war has had the chief share in the making of nations and states. It_^^p%-as.jweJiav£L.seen, a moral improvement upon " each man for himself." 'ut of the war of famiUes and clans came heir absorption into villages and settlements, nd the large tribes which we find at the awn of history. Out of conquest came malgamations into small nations, and then large ones. In this way all nationalities came into being. Where there has not been absorption there has been voluntary union /against an external enemy. In order the better to meet the Asiatic foe across the iEgean, the Ionian states joined in the Con- federacy of Delos, and formed the Athenian Empire. In war with Latium, Ramnians, Titians, and Luceres formed one Rome. During the wars of David the scattered tribes WAR AS BUILDER OF NATIONS 25 of Israel became united into one military empire, where " Gilead no more fought against Ephraim." Before that they had had, hke the tribe of Dan, their local worships, and had waged separate local war on Jebusite of Jerusalem, or Zidonian of Laish ; they had made no scruple of destroying fellow-IsraeUtes, the men of Benjamin or of Jabesh Gilead. T jie process of uni ting by conquest constitutes the mihtary side of early English, or indeed early ^trrop'ean history. "' ". loJaBUbaUiatli, fikiO&^gjj^gn." The nation which by superior fighting and stronger governing, absorbed its neighbours, became thereby able to absorb more. So that those nations which could not unite compactly for fighting purposes have perished. Athens and her confederacy were not compact enough. It was a premature Imperialism, and we had the Peloponnesian War, chronic strife, and a weakened Greece when Philip of Macedon came ; and so there never was a permanent Greek Empire in the Mediterranean, only the | half-Greek flash of Alexander's meteoric career. History falls back upon Rome, whose Samnite and Gallic Wars led, after all, to a united Italy, able to act as a unit against Hannibal. 26 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE Further : — every organ of civilized Govern- ment had its birth in military necessities. Kings were commanders in war. The council of war, like the povKr, of Homer, was the first ministry. The first popular assemblies were gatherings of the people in arms, hke the Comitia Centuriataof the Roman Quirites ; the earhest property was probably booty ; the earliest national revenue was the king's share thereof. The soldier class were the first land-owners. The Law Courts were developed out of the council of mihtary chiefs, like the Archons at Athens, and the Praetors at Rome. Out of the Curia Regis, the National Council of our Norman kings, our Parliament, our Cabinet, and all our Law Courts have been differentiated. When Government meant Uttle besides fighting, it was inevitable that all its machinery ishould be first developed for the carrying on of war. / In warfare the foundations of our strongest and best elements of character were laid. Virtue and valour were the same word. By pubhc necessities of village campaigns, men were led to abandon their family selfishness and isolation, and to serve the community. The rude necessities of obedience in the WAR AS BUILDER OF NATIONS 27 field, and the survival of the more dis- ciplined races gave our ancestors that first training from which all loyalty, allegiance and internal order have had their beneficent development. The vigilant eye, the cunning brain, and victorious patience in suffering, are the precious fruits of generations of war-ridden men. Long and grievous has been the travail of humanity. No wonder holy men of old invoked the help of the Lord of Hosts, and prayed for the utter destruction of their enemies, with full confidence in the Divine approval. But all this does not show that War is of permanent value. Once has been enough. The necessary lessons have been learnt. The vaccination of infancy need not be the daily pursuit of one's life. The restraints and punishments of school have, we hope, already sufiiciently served their purpose. It was painful and necessary for society to cut its teeth ; but it need not go on adding fresh sets all its Hfe, nor use offensively the set it has. Because property was once stolen goods, it need not prevent our retaining the institution of property, without the stealing. No evolutionist need grudge everything that can be said of our indebtedness to the 28 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE primitive habit of War, for he knows that customs, originally acquired because of their service to the race, become intrenched in habits of mind, in institutions and in vested interests, become sanctified by religious asso- ciation, and persist long after their utility is past. The nation, then, which is first ready to modify or abolish an effete custom, is a winner in the race, and the reformers who persuade their fellows to enter into psycho- logical freedom from dead traditions, are pioneers of evolution, and in the central track of progress. On what grounds, then, shall we urge that War is out-of-date, and no longer an5d;hing better than a psychological tendency, strongest in men most backward in development ? Has it achieved its objects, or is it still needed ? If not needed, it is obviously the greatest of all needless evils. The concentration of nationahties has pro- ceeded as far as it is well that it should proceed ; and indeed further. So far as nations can be made by War, they have been made. The great Powers of Europe are large enough units for national purposes. There is in them scope for great careers ; no man of WAR AS BUILDER OF NATIONS 29 genius will be prevented from widely serving his fellows by the too narrow bounds of his State. There are enough people speaking any of the leading European languages to form an audience for the promulgation of pohtical ideas, of religious regeneration, of artistic delight, of useful invention. We have all of us enough feUow citizens to prevent our minds from becoming parochial. Nor does any one, I think, hold that peace and security would be more assured if Ger- many absorbed Holland, or Switzerland were partitioned, or Portugal annexed to Spain. Nay, the process of absorption has already gone too far. The aching sores of Europe are due to the existence of conquered and absorbed nations. What an established peace there would be, what a release of local national activities, what beautiful varieties of cvilture and achievements, if words hke Poland, Finland, Alsace-Lorraine, Armenia, Crete, Trieste, Georgia were the names of free and happy provinces or countries ; joined, if joined at all, to larger empires, not by con- quest, but by free federation. For many centuries the process of amalgamation by War has been overdone. We may grant 30 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE gladly that the Norman Conquest was, however costly, in the long run a blessing to the England it created out of the rivalries of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. However desolating to France were the EngHsh in- vasions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a by-product of them was the union of the feudal provinces under one king at Paris. German unity was achieved in face of the French armies in 1 870-1, however little intended by Napoleon III. But it would be too much to say that that was the only way by which a long overdue German unity might have come into being. Had a more modern, more peaceful form of federa- tion come about, with a less marked Prussian hegemony, we know that Europe would have been spared the toxin of Bismarckian statesmanship and the ethical standards which have infected diplomacy in consequence of it. The Franco-German War has left installed at the heart of Europe the poUtical reaction of Prussia, and the mailed fist. Italian unity was not a conquest by absorp- tion, but the drawing together of a modern people against tyrants within and without. No doubt Cavour's diplomacy was greatly helped by his alliance with France and WAR AS BUILDER OF NATIONS 31 England in the Crimea ; the interested support of Louis Napoleon, however sinister, must not be ignored, nor the raid of Garibaldi upon Rome ; but as a whole the movement inspired by Mazzini, though it had to utilize force, was not initiated or consummated by; military conquerors. And, exactly in so far; as it is military, it has failed from the^' Mazzinian dream. The typical mihtary dominion over smaller units is the Turkish Empire. Here is military force, not redeemed or reinforced by anything else. It has blasted the East, caused many wars in Europe, been the bait of our cupidity and the shame of our Christianity, and stood at home for corruption, robbery, outrage and murder — for stagnation and ilUteracy — ^for depopulation and poverty — ^for every form of the degradation of souls — these four hundred years. Its redeemers, the Young Turks, have been careful to use the minimum of force necessary to depose a tyrant. Their whole spirit was humanitarian, and without it they could not have succeeded. Much depends on whether they remain faithful to their early ideal, or, as seems not unlikely, fall back upon militarism and Ottoman particularism. Europe waits in some anxiety, 32 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE for the old Turkish note is heard from Albania and alas ! from Armenia. South Africa is too near recent contro- versies to enable a tmited judgment to be given on whether the Boer War of the Imperialists was a necessary prelude to the South African Federation of the Liberals. Those advisers to whom we listen with most respect tell us that if we could have had patience till the day of Cecil Rhodes, Paul Kruger, Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Milner was past — ^tiU the Reform party had triumphed in the Transvaal, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had come into power in England, we should have saved our two hundred and twenty miUions of money, our 70,000 hves, and all the miserable oft-told tale of the war. The American Civil War of 1861 to 1865 is the last war consciously fought to maintain national unity, though German union was a by-product of the War of 1870-1 . Whether the union made by force was made in the most durable way, only the future can tell. The American nation raUies proudly round a flag and a Congress and President, but there is not yet a homogeneous race, or a single language, or a quiet consciousness as of a WAR AS BUILDER OF NATIONS 33 nation in its ancient home. National feeling is a treasure valued by patriots, who fly the flag on every school-house ; it is to immigrants a needful piece of edification. At best the Amprirgn civil wax . .3Ka&~.mi_^^hronism, caused by the vaster anachronism of negro slay^^fmr a Siddern"'demw;rac5r" is the only War that ever divided the sympathies and the practice of the Society of Friends. Some felt they nmst help. The concentration of nations is then, over- achieved, and the recent instances of it have brought with them a harvest of dragon's teeth, and are the chief cause of the present lack of stability among nations. Wars of actual conquest over dark races, or races with whom there is no question of absorption, demand separate treatment. That no further absorption can take place is due chiefly to the present development of sympathy — ^the growth of humanity. We cannot exterminate white or yeUow or brown men any more. We cannot kiU aU the men and enslave the women of a nation . Napoleon tried to absorb Venice ; but she is Itahan still. Poland is gone, but the Poles remain. The settlement of the Irish question by putting the island for five minutes under the 34 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE sea, or any equivalent thereof, is not practical politics. The only serious attempt of this kind in modern times was Abdul Hamid's unavailing attempt to wipe out the Armenians. And Abdul Hamid was not European and not really modern. All that conquerors can do is to adjust frontiers, pass coercion acts, proclaim martial law, execute leaders, tax ruthlessly, but not exterminate. I hardly know how far back to go to find an exterminated race. That sounds Irish and suggests Celts, but if I men- tioned the Ancient Britons the historians would fall upon me with glee amd mow me down with scythe-armed chariots. This growth in humanity which bars us from utilizing the savage's advantage of exter- mination, is seen in the way we treat our defeated foes. Abdul Hamid's hfe is spared. We pension Napoleon in St. Helena, and Arabi in Ceylon. Achilles would have dragged him in the dust behind his chariot thrice round his conquered capital — or Caesar have strangled him in the Mamertine prison at the end of a day of shame and jeering, even as he treated Vercingetorix, the noble Gaul. Com- pare the fate of the captive Andromache with that of the Empress Eugenie — or that of Hector's child Astyanax, thrown by order WAR AS BUILDER OF NATIONS 35 of Odysseus from the battlements of Troy, with the liberties and the military education allowed to the son of Eugenie. Marius and Pompey died by miserable violence, and their judicial sentences would have been not less cruel. Jefferson Davis, after a modern civil war, is allowed to write and publish long Memoirs, and to say what he likes in them. The conquered survive nowadays. The world has outgrown all use for War. It needs but short argument to convince every one that no further gain in the structure of our internal polity will result from con- tinued militancy. Constitutions made in days of war survive in peace their stormy birth. Parliaments, Cabinets, Kings, and Courts of Law are there and promise to stay. On the other hand, the directly evil effect of continued militarism upon domestic institu- tions is one of the strongest counts against it. This is much less noticed by our demo- cracy than it ought to be, and will be treated next. CHAPTER III DESPOTISM AND WAR. Let us now examine the characteristics of a nation chiefly organized for war, what we wiU call — ^after Herbert Spencer — ^the militant type of society. All societies began that way ; no society is quite out of the militant habit, though Great Britain and the United States, among Western nations, have least of it left in their constitution. There is, therefore, no lack of material to study. The other type is the industrial, in which the agricultural is included. Is then, the miUtant type of society likely to be a winner in the long run, or does it contain predominant features which lead either to failure or to conversion ? WiU it, that is, survive ? The essential principle governing such a state is that " if we fig ht we must win." There can be no half measures in war. No sacrifice necessary to " see it through " can be shirked. Victory is an absorbing necessity of the 56 DESPOTISM AND WAR 37 state's life which compels it to be blind to everything else. The consequences of victory, including moral consequences, are, in my view, genercJIy ultimately bad ; but this is a fact hidden and vehemently denied at the time. The consequences of defeat have become less bitter and abominable than in the days of the Assyrian conquests, but they are always the worst that current public opinion permits to a victor. " Death or victory " is the characteristic, the unfailing refrain of a military nation, and the deter- mining fact from which everything in its internal policy follows. Universal mihtary service is always aimed at, and a liability to it is usually achieved. Just so large an army is kept under the colours as the rest of the nation can maintain. Compare Lord Roberts in the House of Lords April 3rd, 1911 : " The German Chancellor, my Lords, after pointing out the impossibihty of applying in any practical way the proposals for the reduction of armaments, laid down as a maxim that, at the present stage of the world's history the armed forces of any nation or empire must have a distinct relation to the material resources of that nation or 38 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE empire. This position appears to me' as statesmanlike as it is unanswerable." If we were constantly fighting, this would come to mean bleeding to the last drop consistent with survival. The whole man- hood of the nation must constitute a trained reserve. In this way it can probably defeat a neighbour less thoroughly concentrated upon fighting, and so prevail. This charac- teristic, begun under the law of natural selection, has only been strengthened during the ages of purposeful development. For national security and victory individual loss must be counted gain. " A nation in arms " is an ideal derived appropriately enough from the infancy of nations, and monstrously intruding, in sinister reaction, into a modern industrial century. The number of men under arms in Europe is now counted by millions, whose labour brings forth no fruit of human well-being. Close and easy mastery of the rank and file by the miUtary heads is an element of military success. Habitual deference to the Government, and the loss of local initiative is another way of describing the same thing. Aristocracy is the normal form of militant governments, democracy is their harassing DESPOTISM AND WAR 39 and weakening foe. Society becomes stiff and unprogressive. Governments have a strong coercive apparatus. Martial law is not unfrequently proclaimed ; in any case the administration is pervasive, and dominant over the liberty of the individual. The Society is organized into well-marked grades, as nobles — burghers — ^traders — ^farmers ; and a class of slaves. Captives in war formed the basement of the social edifice in the days of slavery. Everyone has his place, knows it and keeps it. What ability may arise in the subordinate ranks is denied a career. These characteristics of the typical fighting nation are shown actually to exist by Herbert Spencer, in the chapter on " The Militant Tj^pe of Society " in his volume on " Pohtical Institutions " ; and I wiU give below some summary of his illustrations. It is, I am weU aware, a region where it is peculiarly easy to marshal facts to fit many divergent theories. The characteristics of large nations, such as the European Powers, are so manifold, and within the same nation, so contradictory, that much depends on your selection of what you regard as typical. It is difficult to make many safe assertions, with universal accept- ance, about even so homogeneous and weU- 40 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE established a race as our own ; and I believe it would be impossible truthfully to assert any general quality of all Americans. We English, for instance, are both reUgious emd worldly-minded, we are cultured and also Philistine, we are very rich and honeycombed with poverty, we are conservative and demo- cratic, we are very strongly both individualist and Sociahst. The clash of political ideas is always going on among us ; yet a great part of the nation has Mttle gift for politics. We are among the most moral of peoples, yet our critics find us both vicious and hypocritical. We are devoted to field sports, yet hve in towns. We can hardly be said to be either cruel or humane, and though predominantly an example of an industrial type of society, we yet have more wars than most nations, and far more conquests than any. Every nation, then, will show some traits of both the militant and the industrial type ; now the one influence and now the other has moulded her institutions. We have also to note some features as survivals. We can only hope to reach a broad generalization by carefully considering the true meaning of a large number of social facts. In the first place it will be agreed that the DESPOTISM AND WAR 41 overpowering need for victory in war, on pain of extinction, is a force so strong that it twists aside all the varying branches and shoots of development, as a tree on a cliff edge is perpetually blown in one direction by the wind, and grows so. The welfare of the individual is subordinated to the facility with which the Government can turn rapidly into the field all its available men, feed them by aid of all its available women and slaves or other unwarlike labourers, guard against schism or disloyalty or opposition by enforcing despotic authority, and using all the motives of superstition and of religion to produce reverence for the monarch, who is more or less closely identified with divinity and miraculous powers — ^and to whose pleasure and power wealth and life are extensively sacrificed. For the proof of these tendencies, Spencer elaborates facts from the modern negro state of Dahomey, the ancient Egyptian monarchy, the small Greek city of Sparta, the ancient Inca Empire in Peru, and the modern Empire of Russia. And he explains with much force that these peoples differ utterly in everything except their militant habit. They are of different sizes,- races, continents, stages of 42 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE civilization, and epochs of history. It is fair, therefore, to separate their one common quality as the cause of their stiff and elaborate pohtical organization, their despotism, the low-grade Hves of their toilers, the lack of political Uberty and personal initiative throughout the whole people. To give the facts which support this view of them would be to copy eight long pages of " Pohtical Institutions " ; to hint or sketch the details briefly would be unconvincing. I will select one, ancient Egypt, as the type. Sparta' f5 curious constitution is well known, the miU- tancy of Peru was traditional and not well ascertained in any detail ; Dahomey may be considered too savage to be instructive. Russia is elsewhere treated in these chapters. Concerning Egypt, Spencer says : — " But of Egypt its predominant militancy during remote unrecorded times is sufficiently impUed by the vast population of slaves who toiled to build the pyramids ; and its subse- quent continued militancy we are shown alike by the boasting records of its kings, and the delineations of their triumphs on its temple-walls. Along with this form of activity we have as before the god-descended ruler, limited in his powers only by the usages DESPOTISM AND WAR 43 transmitted from his divine ancestors, who was at once pohtical head, high priest, and commander-in-chief. Under him was a centralized organization, of which the civil part was arranged in classes and sub-classes as definite as were those of the militant part. Of the four great social divisions — ^priests, soldiers, traders, and common people, beneath whom came the slaves — ^the first contained more than a score different orders ; the second, some half-dozen beyond those constituted by mihtary grades ; the third, nearly a dozen ; and the fourth, a still greater number. Though within the ruling classes, the castes were not so rigorously defined as to prevent change of function in successive generations, yet Herodotus and Diodorus state that industrial occupations descended from father to son : ' every particular trade and manu- facture was carried on by its own craftsmen, and none changed from one trade to another.' How elaborate was the regimentation may be judged from the detailed accoimt of the staff of officers and workers engaged in one of their vast quarries : the numbers and kinds of functionaries parallehng those of an army. To support this highly developed regulative organization, civil, military, and sacerdotal. 44 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE (an organization which held exclusive posses- sion of the land), the lower classes laboured. 'Overseers were set over the wretched people, who were urged to hard work more by the punishment of the stick than word of warning.' And whether or not official oversight included domiciliary visits, it at any rate went to the extent of taking note of each family. ' Every man was reqmred, under pain of death, to give an account to the magistrate of how he earned his hvehhood.' " Women, slaves, serfs, the non-combatant part of the nation, are regarded primarily as the commissariat department of the army. They do not exist for themselves. Women are valued chiefly as the mothers of soldiers. Girl babies are exposed to death, as at Sparta, the typical miUtary state of ancient Greece. It is the non-miUtary nations, America, New Zealand, and other British Colonies, which first approach the question of giving women full citizenship ; then England, the least military of the larger European countries, preceded, however, by Finland and Norway, countries outside the swirl of the big empires. Mohammedanism, the fighting reUgion pre- eminently, and the religion of fighting races, is the most backward in its treatment of women. DESPOTISM AND WAR 45 I On a large view of English history it is possible to trace a connection between periods of absorbing war^ and periods of popular depression under severer tyranny than was normal. England became a unit within which reigned chronic peace, at the Norman Conquest ; and although baronial rebellions, attempts of rivals for the crown, and aggres- sion upon Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, pre- vented what we should now properly call steady peace within and without, and though the Constitution was on the whole, hke all others, of a militant type, still the country made progress in peaceful directions much more than did its neighbours. Scotland and Ireland were the scenes of tribal blood feuds. France belonged to a host of warring Dukes and Counts. There was no united Germany or Switzerland, or Italy. The result of these favourable circumstances was that under the three Edwards, in the fourteenth century, England had acquired a ParUament, and the right of self-taxation, and had free charters in its towns. ViUenage was dying out, and land was increasingly held under free tenure by payment of rent instead of personal service. The power of the monarch was limited by statutes of treasons. 46 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE National development was progressing with all the hope of a young nation, not yet mature, nor in our sense democratic, but weU on the way to freedom. Then came the disastrous Himdred Years' War with France, a war of ambition and useless vainglory. In the words of J. R. Green, it sapped the resources, and corrupted the temper of the people. It led to the period of reaction in the fifteenth century, when the towns lost their charters, Parliament its power, when the persecuting Church stifled Lollardry, and the hands of the clock of progress were moved back- wards. The loss of France, which was the inevitable end to the attempt to conquer it, weakened the Royal House ; and led to the Wars of the Roses. The consequences of those wars are commonplaces of EngUsh History examination papers. They produced the autocratic rule of Edward IV. and the Tudors, what Green calls " The New Monarchy." Their despotism was again en- forced by the invention of gunpowder and the fact that the King possessed the only train of cannon in the country. Through the long Stuart struggles, this despotism was not finally overthrown till 1688. It was noticeable that the • Constitutional lawyers DESPOTISM AND WAR 47 during the struggle of the seventeenth century, always appealed to Plantagenet, never to Tudor precedents. It was essentially the Tudor monarchy which they were en- gaged in overthrowing. As an incident in this struggle, on the other side of pohtics, the civil war produced the personal rule of the Protector, and as that was not a stable condition for England, it led to failure for the reformers of that generation. I do not know whether it would be fair to connect the campaigns of WiUiam III. and Marlborough with the Tory complexion of Enghsh politics under Queen Anne. The effect of wars of policy abroad is less than that of wars of life and death at home. But it is fairly clear that the warlike struggles with France, from the Seven Years' War till Waterloo, were direct causes of the oppressed state of the people during the Napoleonic period and the utter stagnation of reform. It was the age of the press gang, and for a while of conscription, the time of a cruel penal code, and of a grinding taxation. The poverty of the people was in its lowest recorded state. Government exercised a jealous supervision over newspapers, books, and pubUc meetings. Spies, suborned wit- 48 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE nesses, packed juries and the suspension of Habeas Corpus, perverted the administration of justice. When the reaction of exhaustion that followed the war was over, and we entered upon the long peace of the nineteenth century, we entered also upon the period of Hberty and reform which marked the age of Victoria. Catholic Emancipation, the Reformed Parlia- ment, the Poor Law, Free Trade, the right of combination, and a whole system which together spelt amelioration and liberty came with the peace. Capital punishment was restricted, public whipping, the pillory and the stocks abandoned ; and religious tests were abolished. The towns had self-govern- ment, and local life sprang up with the Municipal Reform Act. Ever since then, liberty has grown in years of peace and of an increasing industriahsm. Our wars, though numerous, have not been serious, they have been waged against dark races in distant regions, and have only affected English life in a moderate or at least bearable effect on taxation. I stop the review before the Boer War. I think that it is in no biassed reading of the long story of England that we conclude that DESPOTISM AND WAR 49 war and political reaction have been closely allied, and that liberty and humanity have blossomed in an atmosphere of peace. We are accustomed to recognise in the party of Tory aristocracy also the party of militarism. CHAPTER IV DESPOTISM AND WAR. — II The effect of militarism on civil life begins with producing absolutism in monarchy. Take two recent speeches by the Emperor of Germany, as illustrations. Every one knows that there are many more of the same type. Recruits, before the altar and the servant of God you have given me the oath of allegiance. You are too young to know the full meaning of what has been said, but your first care must be to obey implicitly all orders and directions. You have sworn fidelity to me, you are the children of my guard, you are my soldiers, you have surrendered yourselves to me body and soul. Only one enemy can exist for you — my enemy. With the present Socialist machinations, it may happen that I shall order you to shoot your own relatives, your brothers or even your parents — which God forbid — and then you are bound in duty implicitly to obey my orders. In preaching a sermon in the course of taking a service on board one of the German war- ships, the Emperor alluded to the danger of sudden death which they incurred " without ,50 DESPOTISM AND WAR 51 having time to think of their dear ones, their God, and their great war-lord" — an un- conscious chmax in the imperial mind. The Emperor is here speaking the primitive tongue of the savage, who deifies his chief, and who maintains loyalty to him at the risk of his life and the tribal safety. The ancient military instincts and habits of the Japanese, and the sacred autocracy of the Mikado are signs of one and the same quality. The tendency of the people to be ruled by the successful soldier is manifest still. Washington was repeatedly President, and so was Grant. Wellington was Prime Minister, however ill-fitted for that duty. Even our democracies, under the stress of wars, betray the symptoms and recur to the types of primitive tribal units . War has often been the resource of tottering governments, as the best way to silence sedition or hostile criticism, or to take the wind out of the sails of revolution. Napoleon III. did it in 1870 ; Disraeli in 1878, and Chamberlain in i8gg. What effect would a new war in Europe have upon democracy ? It would take from Englishmen their old age provision, their hope of insurance against poverty, their hope of a better education ; it would by 52 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE increasing the economic strain take the heart out of social hopeSj and divert attention from any issues that were not purely questions of livelihood. The connection between militarism and autocracy was plainly put by Bismarck himself. " We must give the King [of Prussia] the greatest power possible, in order that in case of need he may throw all the blood and iron into the scale." Discipline and obedience, the prime necessities in war, have to be taught in times of peace, and to become habitual. The curiously lax military habits of the free-born Americans in Cuba were an amusement to European drill-masters. Happily for them, they had no serious foes to meet there. Successful generals have been the founders of despotic dynasties. Such was the story of the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire, and even where the monarchy has been handed on by inheritance for some time, it feeds upon its own power and becomes more powerful. The strong ruler has the means of making himself stronger, and despotism propagates worse despotism. Sparta, the military type of the old world, was governed by the five Ephors, a close oligarchy, and DESPOTISM AND WAR 53 by having two kings, special precautions were taken against a military " tyranny," which would otherwise have been likely to supervene. In Germany, the forces of militarism and industrialism are now in vital conflict. This is the meaning, the main drift of German politics in our generation. The Franco - German war found and left Germany an old-fashioned military nation, agricultural chiefly, aristocratic and monarchical, feudal still on the whole, and with feeble repre- sentative institutions. But it was saved by the magnificent system of education which the patriots who began to rebuild Germany out of the Napoleonic ruin, Stein, Heine, Fichte, had created. Germany entered — ^as we are well aware — ^into the modern industrial competition. Wealth lay that way, and government and people applied their intelli- gence, their science and their industry to manufactures. Modern Germany has now every characteristic, for good and evil, that a vigorous industrialism produces. Among the chief of these is a great workmen's political party, Social Democratic, hostile to the military estabhshment and the Imperial pre- rogatives, friendly to other nations, particu- 34 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE larly to England, and not excluding France, struggling for a strong Parliament, and fight- ing against every increase in military ex- penditure. Militarism and autocracy contend together against the alliance of industriahsm and popular government. In Russia, which has never yet thrown off the barbaric military headship of a primitive type, we may see how deeply military neces- sities provide the motive for despotic action in internal affairs. The reUgious persecutions under the late M. Pobiedonostzeff, were frankly avowed by him to be political, not spiritucd, in their object. It was to unite all Russia in thought and worship, to make the country a machine in a single hand, ready to be put into action easily anywhere, that the Stundists, the Molokans, the Dukhobors and other sects suffered. And the machine had no philanthropic home purpose ; it was intended to push the frontiers forward, east and south, and to guard the west. The aggression upon the liberties of Finland, the faithless withdrawal of its autonomy, once defeated and now again renewed, was only too plainly arranged so as to add from 40,000 to 60^000 men to the homogeneous Russian army, ready for Manchuria or elsewhere. At the DESPOTISM AND WAR 55 present moment the miserable power of the degraded autocracy of Russia rests on Cossacks and Household troops. The army is the enemy of free Russia. The assertion which may possibly be most doubted of those which I have made, may be the statement that military regimentation and obedience have a tendency to go over into civil Ufe ; that militarism overflows into the civil service, in persons and in methods. In Germany the police are largely recruited from the time-expired non-commissioned officers, whose arrogant military habits con- tinue in the police force. Their duties are concerned not with disorder only, but with the expression of opinion dishked by the powers that be. At public meetings, of which the authorities must be notified, the speakers are flanked by a police official, a lieutenant, who is always a military man. He may close the meeting at any time by putting on his hat. Small official posts in the railway, revenue and postal services are part of the prospect held out to men to induce them to become non-commissioned officers. We shall remember the time in England when school inspectorships, examinerships in science and art, and other professional teaching posts were 56 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE filled with retired officers, to the discourage- ment, vexation, and at times amusement of the inspected profession. How would it do to appoint schoolmasters, compulsorily retired, to review troops and arrange sham fights ? AU this means the extension of the overbear- ing military manner among minor officials, a region where poUteness is much to be desired.* In Ireland, the one part of the British Isles where conquest is stiU felt, the police, the Royal Irish Constabulary, have regulations, dress, and firearms resembhng those of soldiers. It is in the economic conflicts which are part of modern business, that the army intrudes most fatally into civil hfe. In France and Germany it is the great support of the masters in such conflicts, and is em- ployed far more frequently than is ever found necessary here. The strike of 1910, on the French railways, was broken by the Govern- ment mobilizing the strikers as soldiers under the military oath and in fear of courts martial, and setting them to serve their economic masters and ruin their whole movement. How great is the effect of this terrorism of workmen on economic freedom can easily be * See E. Gale Thomas, on Conscription, p. 14. DESPOTISM AND WAR 57 realized. In Russia, the chief purpose of the army is to shoot people in the streets, or young girl students at prison windows ; the soldiers are of less service, apparently, against the Japanese. In Germany, under a stringent press law, anyone who " under- mines militar}' training or order, by word, writing, print or picture, to a -member of the active army or navy," is liable to imprison- ment.* Any criticism of the army may, without difficulty, be punished under this law. We know how the editors of Vorwdrts and other Social Democratic papers have suffered. One editor was prosecuted for inserting an advertisement of a pamphlet deaJing -with the ill-treatment of conscripts. It is, indeed, common knowledge that in Russia chronically, and in Germany not seldom, the freedom of the press is interfered with by Government. In the last analysis this is part of the macliinery by which it is sought to insure against any weakening of the unanimity with which the State should act as a fighting force. Our own press prose- cutions in Egypt and in India, which from time to time disturb Liberal sentiment at home, take place in countries where England * E. Gale Thomas, p. 15. 38 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE is a military power, a conqueror sensitive to her sway over her subjects, and so acts in many ways at variance with the methods proper to the industrial organization of the homeland. Deportation of Indian reformers without trial, for the safety of the Govern- ment, miserable pretences at justice hke the Denshawi executions in Egypt, for the sake of prestige, show us in clear detail the striking difference between the mihtary and the industrial type of society ; here both types are fo\ind in the same Empire, and an Empire with which we are more familiar than with any other. The system of passports, by which liberty of movement is curtailed, has the closest possible connection with the military system. Its main object is to prevent working men and others from escaping from military service by clandestine removals and a false name. It puts every individual under the surveillance of the combined military and civil power, to whom removals must be reported. The effect of compulsory mihtary service, the central feature of a militant type of society, on civil life, is so extensive that it requires separate treatment. An obvious criticism must be met here. DESPOTISM AND WAR 59 If, as I have stated, militarism produces a strong autocracy, and if conscription is the typical feature of miUtancy, how does it happen that the republic of France is among conscriptionist countries ? The fact is that universal compulsory service in the modern sense was born in France, but it was in the France of Napoleon ■ the military tyrant, that it grew up . The first Conscription Bill became law in France in September, 1798. Napoleon has left it as his most enduring curse to the world. By 1871 the system was fixed by long habit on all the Continental states. That was the first date since which there has been a stable republic in France ; and under the circumstances of defeat and humiliation which beset her after the war, no Frenchman and no foreigner would expect her to diminish her army to a fraction of its previous size, and increase its costliness — two consequences of resort to voluntary service. The Republic has not yet had a chance of developing freely as a republic. It is a republic born out of war, and superimposed upon a vast mihtary entanglement. Nevertheless, there are signs that the French democracy is restive. Anti-mili- tarism under M. Herv^ has assumed in France 6o EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE its most extreme form — a form that in its wide cosmopolitanism abjures what usually goes under the great name of patriotism. There is wide discontent with mihtarism among the working class, who are good democrats. It actually caused a rebellion in the South among the wine growers. An interview in the Daily News with a French conscript, who detailed the dreadful experi- ences of his barrack life, proceeds : " Of course they are not cuffed, buffeted and kicked, as in Germany." This, so far as it goes, shows that there is a greater leaven of individual dignity in the republic than in the empire. We know also that the second republic was destroyed by the military coup d'etat of Napoleon III. — ^that military chiefs, Macmahon and Boulanger, have twice tried to overthrow the third republic, and set up a military dictatorship ; and that the revela- tions of the Drejrfus case have shown how much mihtary of&cers are tinged by treason to the present regime. A republic does not go well with a large conscript army. There is restlessness on both sides— due to a pohtical misfit. Ever5rwhere the strongly miUtary party is Imperial and aristocratic, and the DESPOTISM AND WAR 6i party of the peoplCj as Radicals, Labour men or Social Democrats, are instinctively hostile to military control, and the style of government which goes with it. M. Jaures, the able leader of the Social Democrats, wrote, in igii, a book entitled "La Nouvelle Arm^e," working out definitely with persuasive detail a plan of national training like the Swiss system, instead of the present conscript standing army. This, whilst it would be a retrograde step for Eng- land, would be a great security for the people against aggression by the rulers of France. It would substitute trained reserves for the youths now with the colours ; and these mature married men would not be drawn so easily from their homes and their work for foreign aggression, as is the present army. CHAPTER V WAR AND NATIONAL CHARACTER We will now ask what are the moral qualities which will emerge from long practice of war ? Beginning with early savage races, we find that success among them wiU go to those who always retaliate, who revenge every injury, and who survive by fear and by force. To forgive is a sign of weakness and a mark for the predatory. The dreadful cruelties of the conquering Assyrians, impaling their captives — or the hideous tortures by the Iroquois upon theirs — are instances of the ferocity caused by the operation of these tendencies. The tortures inflicted by the Morocco tribesmen are a measure of their primitive condition. Coming to later times, we find that the highest honour is still paid to personal prowess. The good man in Greece, kalos kagathos, was " the main of birth, wealth. WAR AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 63 influence and daring, whose arm is strong to destroy or to protect, whatever be the turn of his moral sentiments" : while the bad are " the poor, lowly and weak, from whose dis- positions, be they ever so virtuous, society has little to hope or to fear." In Latin, virtue and valour have the same word. In mediaeval Europe, the ideal of knighthood was the ideal of prowess ; but it might and did cover many collateral sins. Within the nation itself, " an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth " extended into the realm of law the maxims of warlike revenge. His fathers have slain thy fathers in war or in single strife, Thy fathers have slain his fathers, each taken a life for a life, Thy father hath slain his father. How long shall the murder last ? Go back to the Isle of Finn and suffer the past to be past. Among the Japanese maxims of revenge are closely entwined with the idea of honour. But illustrations might be found from almost any fighting country in any age . The quahties which lead to national safety and success must needs be the most desired and honoured. But the worst of it is that these passions of cruelty and revenge become sources of 64 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE pleasure, as does anything which gratifies the natural propensities of any creature. Hence comes the gloating upon suffering which has no survival value. Hence the Roman arena — the gored and mangled Chris- tians — ^the gladiator's death for sport ; hence the bedchamber of the King of Dahomey paved with the skulls of his enemies ; hence the burial of living victims in the foundations of chiefs' houses in Fiji ; hence the sportive massacres of helots by the young bloods of Sparta. War itself awakes the slumbering wild beast in men. No one who has once looted a town and worked his will on another man's home or family, is ever quite the same man again. He is hke a dog who has once worried a sheep. Long lasting wars bring all this out. The historian falters before the record of the latter half of the Thirty Years' War, in which brutaUsed soldiers worked wild ruin through the length and breadth of Germany. Private murder has been the habitual method of Roman Emperors, Russian Czars, and Ottoman Sultans in time of peace. Where cruel slaughter is a cause of con- gratulation to the slayer, enslavement and mere robbery are rather alleviations than otherwise. There is no security but force, for WAR AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 65 either liberty or property. At Sparta you might steal with honour, provided you were not found out with disgrace. Every man under the militant type of society has to spend much of his means, or his time and strength, in a perpetual effort to ensure safety and hvelihood. Barons and other warriors who maintained strongholds were looked to for protection, and collected vassals and serfs, who in return laboured for them, and produced the feudal aristocracies of Europe. Among these aristocracies of freebooters, it was inevitable that trade and labour should fall to the protected dependents, and be looked down upon. Once a nation has grown out of the grip of this mihtary necessity, these traders and labourers become the sustainers of the state, but when they need the warrior for protection they are despised by their master. Illustrations are needless. Again, the capacity for obedience to the sovereign is cultivated by all the forces that make for the secvu-ity of the state. Most primitive kings are said to be descended from the gods. M5rthology is full of such tales. We are told that the Fijian victims are buried aJive feeling joy over the honour conferred upon them. The fulsome insincerities of our 66 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE Royal addresses are striking survivals of this kind of sentiment, and savour of a dead order of things. This spirit of obedience runs through all the relations of the state. The father is a little king in his own house. The Patria potestas in early Rome included the power of life and death over every member of the family. This mental state of acquiescence and sub- mission saps private initiative, which finds extended scope only in non-political and non- commercial ways. There may be artists and poets of certain types in the most military countries, but Government does most of the social organizing, makes railways and bridges, arranges emigration, and taxes such business as it does not itself carry on. Wealth attracts the cupidity of officials ; and taxation is bound to be oppressive when the army and the civil service are so large. Red tape ties up everybody ; and the safe course for the discontented is to wait and acquiesce. Learning and study share the contempt of trade in quite primitive times. This intellectual lethargy, existing through- out the nation, is particularly marked in the army itself. There one virtue, obedience, one characteristic, unity, swallow up all others. WAR AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 67 " Theirs not to reason why." Soldiers tend to grow very much alike, in thoughts as in dress and deportment. What they will do in the way of shooting down their fellow- citizens in revolt or on strike, is a mighty testimony to the strength of corporate dis- cipline, and its effectiveness in limiting the fuU manhood of the soldier. He is no longer a free man ; and that fact has a pervasive effect on his whole character. For with freedom goes full responsibility, but special circumstances lead to a special morality. I am here speaking of the private soldier, the man imder orders. The commanders do not suffer in this way so much. Their obedience to the machine is modified by responsibihty. Revenge, ferocity, painful insecurity of life and property, contempt for labour and trade, submission to routine, lack of enter- prise — are these the qualities which lead to the perpetuation and maintenance of a race ? They have not arisen for that object ; and they do not conduce to it. They arise in circumstances dominated by a constant state of hostility among neighbours ; even then they are necessary evils. But if by any means this condition could be modified or 68 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE avoided, these characteristics would hinder success. In fact, nations organized to subdue one another are not organized to subdue the earth. Victory in war must be won at the cost of anything and everything. A single day of war may destroy the labour of years. The merchant is insecure, the coming of the investor is delayed for ages. He is repre- sented by the usurer of the Bible, the man of evil savour. Constant war frightens capital and kills workmen. Everyone works, actually or essentially, with a weapon in his hand for security. I mean that he may have to serve in the army, to build a fortified castle, to pay toU to a feudal protector, or heavy taxation to a Government. These things we debit to a society which wins in the end. But there are also losers who are utterly destroyed. Their ruined, forgotten cities may be explored in Mesopotamia, in East Africa, in the forests of Central America. The evolution formula is easy to apply. Since a miUtary society is ill-adapted for expansion, it will not survive, in comparison with societies more peaceful and industrial. Therefore the future is not to militant societies. This formula is clear and simple, but its applicabiUty depends on whether, WAR AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 69 (as may be doubted by our opponents), civilized mankind has at all emerged from the pure reign of force and of licence in capture ; .or whether the Powers of Europe are all still surrounded by enemies, watchful only for a weak place in their defences to break through and steal. This point will require separate treatment (p. 82). We turn now to the moral gains made by fighting : — ^the courage, the endurance, the patience, the loyalty, the cunning and the caution, which primitive men, through long ages, learnt in war. They are ours, and we have plenty of use for them in the most piping times of peace. We do not need war for the practice of them. Peace for most men does not mean idleness and luxury and soft sensuahty. These are the besetments only of the wealthy few, and of these few only a minority in any striking way succumb to them. Most of us lead strenuous days, as strenuous in peace as in war, and if less laborious and painful than a soldier's on campaign, much more so than a soldier's in the long wearisome years of barrack Hfe. By increasing our military force, we should be diminishing the number of the industrious, the burden-bearers of the nation, and at the 70 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE same time increasing their burden. The fact is that we have all enough to do and bear without adding to our pains for pure moral edification. So long as there are mine ex- plosions, mill fires, railway and motor acci- dents, so long as there are typhoid and consumption, liability to fevers and inflam- mation, so long as the mentally defective and the insane, the criminal and, above all, the drunkard and the pauper, are with us unredeemed, there is toil and trouble enough for all. The whole plea about moral discipline runs over into the comic. It is usually made by comfortable well placed advocates of the National Service League. Our poor, anaemic, underfed folk must, we are told, have more hardship to toughen their fibre. They are flabby, mentally and morally. Let them enlist and be hardened, get backbone and resemble Coeur de Lion. The lines have fallen to them in too pleasant places — they have a goodly heritage in excess, and it is bad for them. They want grit, we are told. Well— they live in rows of small streets, packed pretty close at night, they breathe smoke and sulphurous air, one-third of them do not get enough to eat, their babies die — ^in big WAR AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 71 towns nearly one in five in the first year. Mothers cannot afford to stop at home and bring up the children . The average age at death in the central areas of the big towns is under thirty years, not half the proper life of man. But, for the most part, they are brave and cheerful, neighbourly and helpful to one another, loyal and respectful where honour is deserved. They generally distrust parsons and (when they are well) doctors, they shudder at the mention of lawyers, their humour runs upon peers and policemen. The school teachers and the trade union secretaries are their guides, with an occasional parson or Adult School teacher for tutelary divinity ; and for the most part they do not get drunk. It is not they who want hardening. The worst of this plea about national character is that it diverts attention from the real social reforms : insurance against the unavoidable iUs of unemployment, sickness and destitute old age, the cleansing of the air from smoke, the hmitation of the drink trade, the improvement of the schools, the proper planning of towns and the provision of parks and playgrounds, the restoration of country hfe, and the great reUef from taxes which would follow the cessation of war. 72 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE The enthusiasm of service and the joy of sacrifice, which always dignify and not un- frequently actually adorn the waging of war, are fruits of ages of strife. The willingness to die for one's country is a noble passion, which, however developed in later times by Christianity and voluntary altruism, was hacked out first in rough outline by the sword. We shall never have a nobly successful Peace movement tiU it too is a movement of sacrifice, worked by men and women who are plainly voluntary servants of the State. An ignoble Peace movement, manned by cowards and slackers, we do not want. But I have never encountered such a movement, and I venture to think we can abide the challenge. CHAPTER VI INDUSTRIALISM AND NATIONAL CHARACTER The effect of freedom from militarism upon national character is one of the most impor- tant parts of our inquiry. It can only be treated as an affair of averages and general tendencies. Nothing can be stated as certain about an individual simply because he is a citizen of a military state or actually a soldier. People of every kind of character are to be found in every setting of circumstance or employment. Armies have had their heroes and their saints, as well as their bullies and their monsters : soldiers are to be found both modest and swaggering, both duU like a part of a machine, and free in initiative. r^Herbert Spencer (" Pol. Inst." p. 574) very properly turns for light to those simple primi- tive peoples, of whom the hills and jungles of India afford examples, who are unwarlike, and have been able in their mountains or their swamps, to escape aggression by 73 74 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE later conquering races. With remarkable uniformity, these tribes are found to be manly, independent and self-respecting, having escaped the servility needed by the elements of a fighting machine. They are found to be humane and sensitive to loss of life, honest in dealing and alive to the sacred- ness of property, chaste and domestic in habits, monogamous, treating women with honour, and children with care and reverence. There is no sacred duty of blood revenge, but a strong tendency to forgiveness of injuries, and a hatred of private violence. Honesty and veracity are assumed to be universal. Society is courteous and hospitable, and the power to assist others is what is chiefly valued in the possession of wealth. There is a great body of evidence to support these statements. The effect of peaceful labour upon character is best seen among these simple, small poUtical units. The results are less complicated than are the characteristics of large nations under forces difficult to disentangle. And there is no purely non-military state in Europe for us to examine. We can only inquire into the broad differences between the Britisher, the Colonial, the American, the Dutchman, and the Norseman on the one hand — and the INDUSTRIALISM 75 Frenchman, German, Italian and Russian on the other. It will not be doubted by many that the people of England and America respect themselves as free and independent citizens. Indeed that is too mild. " Every American," the gibe goes, "is as good as every other and a little better." The Englishman has a dogged determination to have his own way, and plenty of push. These countries abound in what are called " Self-made Men," the successful adventurers of commerce. Duelling was abandoned in these countries first. We play football M'here German students cut themselves with swords. An ti- Vivisection is a symptom of sympathetic feeling, with its strength in these non-military countries. Italy is a horror for its treatment of animals. Fulsome comphment to Emperor or Czar is common abroad, to an extent unknown in England. The doctrine of Divine right to rule, constantly enunciated by the rulers of Russia and Germany, has been destroyed in England for two-and-a-half centuries, and is the antithesis of American sentiment now and always. In the East is its natural home ; for every Eastern dynasty was once a race of conquering commanders. Forms survive the 76 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE sentiment that produced them, and it is difl&cult nowadays for anyone to go through state ceremonies and hear what are called loyal addresses with a grave mind, even if a grave face can be maintained. The control of the State over religion, which is exercised easily in Japan, and is maintained by persecution for military reasons in Russia, is of the slenderest and loosest kind in England, where the Estab- lished Church survives by the latitude in belief which it permits, and is wholly to seek in America and the Colonies. Republican France has now thrown over a State rehgion completely ; this is the proper sequel to the Revolution. Patriotism, imder an experience of constant wars, necessarily consists in " fighting for king and country," — supports " my country, right or wrong;" — ^and in such societies the strength and gain of one country are most easily measured in terms of the weakness and loss of her rivals. Patriotic feeling is all for destroying hf e and property abroad, and spend- ing money on armaments at home. If one talks to most Germans of the upper class, one finds this insistence on military supremacy upper- most in their thoughts of their country. INDUSTRIALISM 77 " Germany is surrounded by enemies," said a German University man to me the other day. " We must continue to keep 600,000 men under arms in peace, and three miUions trained for war. There are Danes, Poles, Frenchmen " : he was pohte enough not to include English. All this kind of patriotism is in its nature destructive and costly. But when the pressure of militarism is removed and a nation's mind is turned to peaceful industry, then patriotism leads the citizens to present Parks or hospitals to the pubhc, to work for the well-being of the poor, for the maintenance of a living wage, for educa- tion, and for aU kinds of benevolent imder- takings. The service of one's country is a service full of kindly acts and thoughts ; it becomes a spiritual training, motived not by hate but by love. The two kinds of patriotism exist, and inevitably conflict, with us. An industrial nation at home, we are an Empire abroad. And these clash. When it is a question of a war with Afghans, with Zulus, with Boers, Enghsh opinion is sharply divided ; and the militant calls the other kind of patriot a " Little Englander " ; a truer expression than he thinks. For it is this " Uttle " England, 78 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE our home, and the heart and centre of all our " far-flung " rule, this industrial England with all its glories and its achievements, that the Anti-War man stands for. He is the product of its home habits and home institutions. It was the Natal colonists, a group of isolated members of a conquering race, who persecuted Dinizulu by every kind of unjust justice. It is Anglo-Indian officials who advise the deporting of editors, and the home critics in industrial England disapprove. There is only too much evidence that some Indian native police are guilty of perverting justice, manufacturing crime, and torturing witnesses, and that their chiefs are unwiUing to bring them to justice for the sake of Government prestige. Where Imperialism comes in we have a change of standard. In Zanzibar' and Pemba we have the British Governors hostile to the abolition of the legal status of slavery, and successfully delaying complete hberty for thirteen years. On the Opium Commission we were stiU pro-opium, and a hindrance to the reform of China. Not till 1911 did the Anti-Opium agitation see its way to ultimate success. In Persia we are acting with the invading Russians for reasons of INDUSTRIALISM 79 Empire. On the Rand we introduce the Chinese under servile conditions. Our poli- tical entanglements have led us to a cautious policy towards the fate of the natives of the Congo. It may be said that most of these sins are wrongs done in the name of business, not of Empire. We are not rulers of China. But the opium trade is an imperial revenue question with us. We must not fail to draw a line of distinction between ordinary indus- trialismj in which our people are the workers, and that form of business which exists in exploiting, for our profit, the labour of native races on the Rand or elsewhere. This is more closely allied to imperialism than to peaceful industrialism. It either begins or proceeds by war, and surely ends in conquest. As the calling of a soldier becomes less need- ful, but remains equally costly, it comes to be held no more honourable than peaceful pur- suits. Trade is now done on a large scale by men held in high esteem. LaboUr is honour- able, even in the second son of a duke. We begin to say that we have two dangerous classes, the idle scum at the top and the idle dregs at the base of society. Some kind of work is an important factor in self-respect. Enlisting is an opening for the irregular, the 8o EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE unsteady, the rebel against society ; and is best done under the influence of drink. It is often also the resource of the defeated, the out-of-work ; it is the last refuge against destitution. I am not commending this condition of fighting such battles as we have with the morally and mentally feeblest of our people. I take it merely as a symptom of public opinion in an industrial state. Honesty is the soul of business, its necessary atmosphere, and the oil in its wheels. An industrial state of society needs it most ; its public opinion demands it in general self- defence ; it is as vital to trade as courage to war. Every day thousands of bargains are made on a barg word, and fixed by a pencil memorandum ; every day bills are paid which the law would find it hard to enforce. No one would claim that any human society is free from fraud. But while business scandals are occasional in time of peace, they grow like a crop wherever the cannon go. South Africa gave us a group of bad ones, and the German dockyards have just revealed another. Adulteration of army supplies, fortunes for contractors, swollen prices against the public finances, these are expected in every campaign. INDUSTRIALISM 8i There seems then good ground for believing that an industrial community, free from military influences, will exhibit independence of mind, regular domestic habits, tenderness to children, to animals, to the aged and weak ; it will favour popular discussion and free inquiry, will foster patriotism of the positively helpful, uncompetitive kind, will leave re- ligion to the individual, will respect trade and labour, and the sacredness of human life. This is combined with self-reliance, initiative and adventure ; and with a high standard of honesty. Humane and amiable sentiments have room to arise. If we compare the morals of our soldiers as described by their admirer and apologist Rudyard Kipling, the " single men in barricks " who " ain't no plaster saints" — ^with any well-informed description of Lancashire operatives, or Cumberland farmers, we note at once the contrast. It is the contrast between men spoiled and unspoiled. Few poems have ever been written more beautifully or more falsely than the hues in Tennyson's Maud, where Peace sitting under her olive is repre- sented as cheating in business, adulterating food, and oppressing the poor. CHAPTER VII ARE THE TIMES RIPE FOR PEACE ? In these chapters many reasons have been advanced tending to the conclusion that if industrialism can get under way, and the nations can once escape from chronic warfare, the industrial type will supersede the mihtary, and will survive at its expense. By gradual comparative decay — by conversion — or by mutual slaughter, military nations fade away. Has this time come ? We postponed this question from p. 69. Broadly, every one would agree that we live, not merely in an industrial age, but in such an orgy of industrial development as the world has never seen or imagined before. The history of mankind shows no such por- tentous growths as the great towns which cover both the earth and the sky within a radius of fifty miles round Manchester, and are said to house eight millions of people . The population of England, about three millions 9a ARE THE TIMES RIPE FOR PEACE ? 83 at the Norman Conquest, had only risen to five millions in six centuries ; but to thirty-seven millions in the two centuries since 1700, and it now stands at forty-two millions. The Victorian age has seen what was once a specially British industrialism spread over Europe. Belgium is more purely and more densely industrial than we are. The familiar chimneys, with their almost British smoke, may be seen in the Rhine Province, in Saxony, scattered indeed over all Germany. Lille, St. Etienne, Lyons, and many other names, recall the busy mills of France. The parts of Switzerland which we do not visit. Piedmont, Lombardy, and Venetia, and even Catalonia in backward Spain, have their looms and spindles and their many inventions. Russia attracts western capital to build works. All round Bombay, and by the Hooghly and the Nile, modern mills are bringing modern labour- problems to the fore. Japan is being trans- formed from a land of flowers to a land of factories, and needs Factory Acts more than we ever did. So much for the Old World, with its ancient quiet haunts. But over the ocean are eighty millions of Americans, anxious, too anxious for their happiness. 84 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE for industrial development, and already manu- facturing more iron than we do. And Canada and Australia show the family likeness faith- fully. The process which has called seventy- eight per cent, of our people into towns, and has drawn the Highland population to the Hamilton and Motherwell districts round Glasgow, to work in mines and ironworks, is only an advanced stage of a process going on all over the world. Even Burmah, Siam, Persia, and China are awaiting the new order. Now this new order is owing to peace, and demands more peace. It arose first in the countries least liable to invasion. Great Britain and America, due to their geographical position, were early relieved of internal wars, and were protected by the sea. They were able, earlier than the Continental Powers, to shake off the overshadowing military habit and to avoid falling under its iron organiza" tion. They have been, and such nations always would be, able to devote themselves to their internal well-being ; they multiply and progress, and enter into the less occupied regions of the world . While France, Germany and Spain were occupied in struggles for supremacy in Europe, we, with no doubt- ARE THE TIMES RIPE FOR PEACE ?. 85 ful frontiers, and protected by "the silver streak " of sea, have been at leisure to colonise the New World. Not more virtuous but more fortunate have we been than our Con- tinental neighbours. Still more fortunate has been the position of our eldest child, our separated household, the United States of America, and of our own Canadian and Australian fellow citizens. They can, if they choose, stand out wholly from militarism. Unfortunately Austraha has succumbed to military fear. She is afraid of Japan, and is organizing universal training and building a fleet. It is all very depressing, coming from a Labour majority. The States have bought their extensions of territory from Napoleon I. and from the Czar. Until recent years, they have employed their War Office in compiling weather charts, and if they will steadily avoid Empire, they may avoid the wars that Empire brings. They are at a critical epoch. But they too have fallen into the whirlpool of naval construction. Moreover, our case absolutely demands peace. Our great cities, undefended by any obsolete walls, even our coast towns liable to be bombarded from ships five to ten miles away, our costly municipal palaces and art 86 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE galleries, our factories fiUed with delicate machinery, our wealth accumulated in a net- work of railways and roads, in lovely country homes, and well tilled country sides — ^all this a campaign would break up and so ruin a society of unexampled wealth and compli- cation. The network of pipes and wires above and below, transmitting messages, water, light, and power, to every nucleus of far- penetrating business and every centre of domestic comfort, plant which a few minutes' bombardment would destroy in explosion and flame, is but a type of the connections of a society which is in stable equilibrium in peace, but would be torn up in war hke lace in a tempest. The unseen links of international- ism are not less strong nor less essential. We hve upon imports and by exports. Over three-quarters of our cotton goes abroad. Eighty per cent, of our corn and at least eighty per cent, of our bacon are imported. We should starve in any such war as we have yet seen. If the sea ceased to be safe, a convulsion in prices would, and a financial crisis might occur, which would produce echoing crises in New York, Berlin and Paris. Credit is inter-national because capital, like water, finds its level all over the world. ARE THE TIMES RIPE FOR PEACE ? 87 This underlying consciousness that war has become an unfit game for the present age is plainly predominant in Europe. Every war scare in Western Europe since Sedan, over forty years ago, has passed over us harmless. Nobody dared to "break the plate"; only the semi-barbaric Government of Russia has had its Turkish and its Japanese wars. The " indiscretions " of the Emperor of Germany are all in the direction of impulsive friendship to England. His Chancellor is friendly, and the Social Democrats in the Reichstag hold increasing power there. We are outspoken in friendliness with Russia, France, Italy, Portugal, and Japan. Do not all these things point to the times being in favour of peace ? The mills of God, however slowly, do ultimately grind exceeding small. The Hague Tribunal is in working order, and the European Concert has acted, however unsteadily, as a drag on the dogs of BeUona. The present policy of rival alliances, dangerous as it is for England, and discredit- able in its working, is intended by its authors as a safeguard of peace ; and the opposition to it in the most progressive circles in England will, in the end, we hope, extract its fangs before it is too late ; and leave alliances of 88 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE friendship with no hostile point to outsiders. The Government has, on this point, shown itself lagging behind the opinion of its supporters. It looks as though the psychological attitude of military expectancy and fear were surviving after the need for it had passed. This was bound to be so. Irritated minds, sedulously fostered memories of Sedan, or even Majuba, the vested interests of a miUtary class, the mere force of con- servatism, all prevent a prompt realization of the dawn of a better day. Only when war after war has been avoided because it would be too terrible, and trade has tied up the nations in friendUness and mutual need, will the states of Europe awake to the knowledge that war has been found to be obsolete. We Uve among survivals in every direction, from the House of Lords to the buttons on our coat tails. When we have reached the point where outward causes press for peace, and only an inherited psychology of fear and a habit of dominance cause us to pile up our modern armaments, we have certainly reached a stage in the story of evolution when the clock strikes the end of war. Nobody wants to go on. Who will carry us over the dead point ? ARE THE TIMES RIPE FOR PEACE ? 89 Who will give the hot heads and the fright- ened eyes a cold bath and a rub down, that they may see things differently ? We walk in fearsome night, with hand on trigger. When the smirise comes, we shall see that there is no robber. CHAPTER VIII THE OBSOLESCENCE OF WAR Our efforts for peace, based on utmost reason, and on obedience to an ideal for the maintenance of which, in other connections, churches chiefly exist, are met, silfently or otherwise, by the thought that it is all no use ; there has always been war, and there always wiU be. It is vain to knock one's head against the stone wall of the universe. The world, we are told, is built that way. But it is not hard to show that the world has in reality outgrown all fitness for war, that the gain from its practice in barbarous ages has become a loss at length unbearable. Once a campaign might be entered upon with little prospect of material ruin. Burnt huts could soon be replaced ; cattle were the most serious loss, and they might be recovered, or their equivalents. Trials of strength in plunder raids were entered upon as we arrange football matches or general elections. 90 THE OBSOLESCENCE OF WAR 91 But now we are gravely committed to the guardianship of the slowly accumulated property of ages of toil. Fed from abroad, clothed from abroad, our mills working up foreign material — we are dependent either upon peace or upon a kind of war not yet seen in the world for our daily bread and our daily wage. What is true of us is to a rather less extent true of our neighbours. If we cannot afford to cut off our foreign trade with them, neither can they theirs with us — ^for it benefits both. The recent history of Europe points in many ways to the thought that the day of war is passing away, even in face of the fresh com- petition in navies. Much that is encouraging has happened, has been apparently driven to happen. England and Russia, in spite of the Daily Mail's efforts, avoided war over the foohsh- ness on the Dogger Bank, France and Ger- many made peace at Algeciras, France and England are in genuine friendship, with Fashoda forgotten, the trouble with Russia over the Pamirs was finally settled, and the threatened quarrel with America over Venezuela was avoided. Every one of these subjects was worked up to the danger 92 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE zone by excitable papers. Norway and Sweden separated without war, and were aided by our friendly Government, Russia, the really unreUable powei in Europe, has been rendered temporarily helpless for serious offence by the Japanese abroad and the Revolution at home. The Sultan of Turkey, always a foreign body causing in- flammation, has been gently but firmly re- moved, and even the ambitions of Austria in Bosnia and those of Bulgaria for extension in " Eastern RoumeUa " have been gratified, rightly or wrongly, but without war. The attack on TripoU belongs to the class of im- perialistic expansions, only too prevalent still, and treated in later chapters. These things show that nobody wants war. Had any nation wanted it, there has been ample opportunity. Germany, our present bogey, has not had war of any kind since 1871, and there is ample sign that the French " Revanche," dating from 1871, against Germany has ceased to be a dominant motive, though the statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde remains garlanded, and the date at which it is to be regained stands blank. Between England and the United States there has arisen a general conviction that THE OBSOLESCENCE OF WAR 93 war is for ever impossible ; the links of business, blood and friendship are too many and too strong. Yet not a generation ago tension — a good deal of it Irish in origin — was common, and all the older American towns contain statues to men who fell in the two wars with England. The Republic has only had serious wars with the mother country, and its chief military glories are victories over us. But that, and bad history books, and Irish disaffection, have not withstood the spirit of the times which makes for Peace. Western Europe has stood armed and watchful since the lamentable seizure of Alsace-Lorraine by Bismarck. But none have dared to break the general peace. It has become less and less practicable — more and more costly — ^to do so. Why, then, continue to pile up armaments ? The diffi- culty is psychological, not material. It is the inward mind, not the outward circum- stances, that require to be altered. Outward circumstances almost compel Peace. We know we are under the dominion of a horrible enslavement ; we writhe under it. Sir Edward Grey admits that armaments are on the way to submerge civilization. Each piled-up million leaves the nations less secure. 94 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE We pay more premium annually for what is less and less a safe insurance. Nothing would so increase European confidence, said one of our leading statesmen lately, as to hear that England and Germany had agreed to diminish their fleets instead of increasing them. Those who would understand the problem of Anglo-German strain would do well to keep an eye on the writings of Professor Delbriick, the Editor of the Preussischer Jahrbucher, a leading German review, who writes from time to time in the Contemporary and else- where. He occupies the Chair of History at Berhn. He defends the existence of the German fleet, and explains that it is the German reply to England's jealous exclusion of Germany from all expansion abroad, that when she desired to foUow America, Holland, Portugal, or Japan in any capitahstic or imperial enterprise, she found herself always successfully baulked by England. We can note this without accepting its truth. It is doubtless much exaggerated. When, in order to meet England where alone England could be met, in weight and influ- ence, she organized her fleet, we know what lamentable consequences on both sides, and THE OBSOLESCENCE OF WAR 95 at what enormous cost this rivalry has gone on. He saySj what any reasonable man must see to be true, that they have no intention or wish to attack England, and remarks sensibly enough, that even a victory over England would be absolutely useless on account of the suspicion, vengeance and enmity of other states. They, he says, are merely on their defence with regard to their over-seas interests. His suggested solution of the difficulty is that we should cease to be suspicious of one another, that we should allow each other free scope, and reject the advice of those " poisoners of wells " on both sides of the seas, who inflame needless hostile feeUng. The most foolish ideas as to the intentions of England are rife even among intellectuals in Germany. A British dominion extending from Burmah to Cairo, absorbing Persia and Arabia with the sacred cities of Islam is (so they say), to join our " Cape to Cairo " dominion, and is supposed to be prac- tical politics in England ; and this, it is thought, is only preliminary to our absorption of China. There is room for a better understanding abroad of our real aims. Prof. Delbriick's article in his Review in March 1912, is of great interest to the student 96 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE of German imperialism. He says the Germans want a great, continuous consolidated African dominion, comparable to French or British possessions there. But the reason given for wanting it is instructive. It is not for surplus German population, for there is none. Industrial development can use all the German children born. Nor is it for trade profit. The professor sees that for money-making a German in a British colony does as well as an Englishman can. It is for the pure sentiment of domination ; to find a place where German planters and judges may rule over dark races as English- men do ; and in order that German children may see in the maps broad areas painted red, which I expect is the German imperial map- colour also. Empire has worn thin. There is nothing but the glaze left. We, of course, need not fear such an expansion. It would pay us well if all the African coast was dotted with flourishing German colonies. The people who would really su^er would be the German poor at home, whose money and whose sons had been taken to pay for the barren con- quests, or to maintain the armies whose function is to back aggressive diplomacy. Nor must we forget the murdered and de- THE OBSOLESCENCE OF WAR 97 moralised native. Stripped of sentiment, the proQeeding looks ugly all through. It is this psychological character of the cause of war — a scare, a fever, a fear, a love of mastery — ^that renders so misleading the popular maxim : "If you want peace prepare for war." For the preparation for war produces the required psychological situation — ^the fear, the eye on the enemy, the careful counting of ships, the proud consciousness of having the means of offence and defence. If circumstances really compelled, or pointed to the need of, constant miUtancy — if the nations were turbulent mountaineers living by Hfting cattle — ^if a long memory of in- juries made peace with honour impossible — if restless rebellion was a frequent incident in the history of a half-conquered people, if piracy habitually preyed upon commerce, if all the upper classes were warriors by profession, then it might be prudent to frighten your enemy into quietness by your elaborate preparation for war. But if, on the other hand, long-settled and wealthy nations, elaborately organized, with an accumulation of capital previously un- known in the world, bound by Unks of mutual dependence in trade, learning their science 98 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE in common, stud5nng religious and political problems together, honeycombed with inter- national associations, with room for colonial expansion elsewhere, with a considerable experience of arbitrations and conferences — if all things make for Peace, there is urgent need to avoid, above all, a sensitive jealousy, a balancing of calculated resources of des- tructive faculty, and the provision of armies and navies too costly never to be used, and of a military class anxious to justify its ex- pensive existence. " If you want war prepare for war " is less epigrammatic, but more truthful. There seems no doubt that the spirit of Divine Wisdom, which is always working in the world, and leading the race of man, in whom it dwells, and through whom it works, stage by stage to power and happiness — there is no doubt that this spirit, acting as the spirit of the age, is making strongly for arbitration instead of war. Arbitrations have become very numerous during the nineteenth century, some dealing with matters which brought the hot heads on both sides to the verge of war. And the first ten years of the twentieth century have seen a greatly increased number of settlements. THE OBSOLESCENCE OF WAR 99 far more than in any preceding similar period. Many nations are now under treaties of arbitration which automatically provide for the settlement of disputes in which the vital interest or honour of the nation is not said to be involved. The quality of the arbitrations also has improved since they began. Sir John Macdonell contributes an article to the Contemporary Review for June^ 1911, in which he shows the enormous improvement in fairness and in efficiency which the modern arbitration court shows over its predecessors. He refers to the five volumes of Moore's " Digests of Arbitration " in which the United States had a part. From Lord Sel- borne's " Memorials," he reveals something of the inside history of the Geneva award in the Alabama case. The back door timidly left open for cases in which honour may be said to be involved, is now to be shut if the American Senate can be wisely guided. It has had its day. Everyone knows that honour may be involved in every case if you insist on involving it. There were people who said that it was involved in the Alabama case, in the Newfoundland fisheries case, in the Oregon border case, the 100 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE Alaskan boundary case, and the Venezuelan case, but they were all successfully brought to a settlement. The real moral victory was when Gladstone, in face of a biassed court and a plainly exaggerated award, nevertheless accepted the Genevan decision. It is by such definite forward steps, by not timidly waiting for someone else's initiative, that the world progresses. And now, this year, we can rejoice in the settlement of the long-standing fisheries dispute with France in Newfoundland. The extreme hatreds between nations as oppressor and oppressed, which blocked progress in Europe in the nineteenth century, are now settled. Austria has been banished from Italy, and Turkey from Greece and the Balkan States. Our difficulties in Europe are internal and do not embitter international relationships. Moreover, as elsewhere pointed out, the international consciousness of work- men and of capitaUsts has already worked itself out into potent organizations. The classes realize that their interests are identical across the boundaries of states ; their real dangers, and the really hostile forces which count are all at home. CHAPTER IX EVOLUTION AND CONQUEST We will now apply the general conclusions we have reached from our study of the evolution of society to the immediate issue of Imperialism or Empire Building by our own country. It is widely believed in England that con- quest is a necessary process in the evolution of the race ; that the welfare of the world demands the rule of white races over dark ; that, in particular, of all the white races the British are the most capable empire builders ; at any rate, that certain necessary wars with our white rivals will clear up that issue in the only way provided by Nature, which, though for the time cruel and calamitous, is, if you take long views, beneficent. We have, during the eighteenth century, we are told, settled this world-issue with France, as we did during the seventeenth century with Holland and with Spain. Our task for the twentieth 102 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE century will be to face a conflict for empire with the Germans, and after that with the Russians, or possibly the Japanese or the Americans. In all this we or our conquerors will be the instruments of a Higher Power. We say this, keeping a blind eye on the type of man who is employed as the aggressive agent in our expansion. We are going to ennoble civilization by means of the prospector for gold, the slave raider, the owner of com- pounds. Robbery, slavery, forced or cruel toil and the elevating evolutionary efficacy of Christian whiskey have been in the past our chief outfit for beginning our march towards a regenerated plcinet. Here we meet but an outcrop of the widely occurring fact, our first answer, indeed, to the above plea, that the " fittest " to survive in and after a war of conquest is a low human type. We may be pretty good aggressors — our guns and our liquor our sedentary factory labour, our mines and our diseases, may be fairly effectual agents of subjugation ; but we are really not in it with Sennacherib or Tamerlane. We do not impale or crucify. Such philan- thropists as Pizarro and Sir John Hawkins were the real favourites of creative beneficence. We are greatly hampered by that degenerative EVOLUTION AND CONQUEST 103 symptom a creeping humanity ; sensibility to pain, to murder, and an objection to con- demning natives to lives of cruel misery is an obstacle standing greatly in the way of biological progress. We must drop our non- sense about educating and guiding the child races — yellow, brown and black — ^if we would really be the Chosen People. It is indeed easy to mock at the shallow stretching of a biological formula in order to cover with a glamour of scientific orthodoxy a Gospel of cruelty and greed. Appeals to the lower animal laws will naturally miss fire except in so far as we become lower animals again. The doctrine is not less preposterous when it states that the issue of a great European war or wars will automatically test which Western nation is to rule the world. The factors which determine victory in war are various, they are also fluctuating, and often accidental. They are not necessarily connected with physical or mental fitness for citizenship or government. The two ideals, indeed, are blankly antagonistic. The most successful killer of men can hardly be their most suc- cessful feeder, teacher or judge ; the quahties required are different. The fact, indeed, is 104 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE that a world still governed by the force and fraud which, mingled, make up war, would be nothing hut a repetition of the military empires whose rise, riches and fall make up so much of ancient history. Some of us have studied ancient history too exclusively. When conquest is mentioned we think of Joshua or Xerxes. Our studies of these have misled us if we draw analogies from them to the in- dustrial nations of to-day, large, long settled, well consolidated, whose people are bound by ties of intimate first-hand knowledge, within speaking distance of one another every day, dependent for part of their living upon peace- ful international trade, reading the same books, and on the same general level of development. I know of no case since the English conquest of Britain — and our Celtic fellow-citizens have every right to call that in question — where massacre may arguably have been the method of useful evolution, and no case since the Norman Conquest — which again may fairly be called in question — where a war of conquest has produced a greater and more efficient race. What is clear is that it turned York- shire into a wilderness, destroyed about one- third of the people, and delayed national EVOLUTION AND CONQUEST 105 progress for a century and a half. All the development of England since has not been caused but only hindered by the imperial desires of our kings and nobles and our modern financial speculators. Progress has been brought about, not by the soldier, but by the citizen, in the intervals of destructive and demoralizing war. The Imperialist is the victim of sentiment. It is not we friends of peace, but the wavers of the British flag and the painters of the map red, who are the real sentimentalists of to-day. Sentimentality is the oversplash of ill-guided or exaggerated emotion into the dry, clean vessels which contain things as they are. Here we have the nodding plumes, the martial song, the thin red line of heroes, filling the eye of our imagination, and making us forget the soldier's actual task of slaughter and enslave- ment. " A soul-blinding, heart-blurring business," Archibald Forbes, the great war correspondent, called it. Progress by sheer elimination gives the maximum of waste to the slowest and most uncertain of gains. Men have long ago learnt more scientific and economical methods. By effort, by co-operation, by education, by persistent habit and transmitted and pub- io6 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE lished results the race moves. Everything points to still closer co-operation between nations — to a growth in their common stock of ideas — ^to more frequent travel — ^perhaps to a common language for international uses — to a consciousness of the solidarity of labour — (capital is already international) — to many extensions of their influence upon one another by worthy human intercourse — to the common use of arbitration and even of law. But to all this the one enemy is ImperiaUsm. The peoples everywhere have no grudge against one another. Soldiers fraternise easily in moments of truce. The democracies would make no war if left to themselves. They are already far more united than their rulers allow them to appear to be. Our real national enemies are at home, in high places among us in business and society. The pretence that a noble type of man results from the elimination wrought by war is, I beUeve, one of the absurd ideas brought from their school-days by men who have not thought about anything social or political since. The really fit man physically is not the strong-armed, mighty-thewed Homeric hero, Ajax or Achilles, with legs like towers EVOLUTION AND CONQUEST 107 and eyes like the fierce lightnings of Jove, laying smaller men in the dust after their knees have trembled beneath them. The really fit man is he of good digestion, regular sleep, balanced nerves, normally healthy lungs and biceps, and a love for the open air. He also requires to be a skilled workman or trader, and to be industrious enough to earn his living. By sending our physically strongest young men, before they have left descendants, out to South Africa to die of enteric, or be marks for Boer ambuscades, is not to exercise beneficent selection. It does not save the best. The moment we touch actual modern conditions we see how irrelevant are primitive analogies. The element of personal prowess hardly exists in the great mechanical concourses of modern war. Personahty chiefly manifests itself in the gift of running away — an effective method of survival that. Indeed, the capacity for living and multiplying in a state of subjuga- tion, is, analogously, the most potent factor in survival in the world of conquerors and conquered which we are asked to imagine. Those of little spirit who are comfortable unfree, and those like the negro, who can adapt themselves to a servile condition in an io8 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE aKen land, are the victors in this kind of warlike struggle for survival. The warlike conquerors die out. The Spartan citizens became a mere handful at the close of the great period of Grecian history. Italy was denuded of Romans when the conquest of the world was consummated. The long strain of casualties in successful campaigns had told. But the Helots of Sparta were encouraged "to multiply, and Italy was worked by slave labour. Wars of conquest were fatal to both the great military civilizers of classic times. Exhausted Greece fell before Philip and Alexander ; and Rome became the Imperial home of millionaires and their slaves, largely foreign. The conflict for success and wealth in the world has in fact been transferred from the region of war to that of business. The true relation of Empire to trade and investment will occupy us more fuUy later. Here it may be enough to state for clearness one or two distinctions which are not always carefully kept in mind. First, business competition can only be called war, as it often is, by a metaphor, more misleading than useful. It is peaceful, often friendly, rivalry in useful activity, not hostility with a view to organized murder EVOLUTION AND CONQUEST 109 and robbery. The struggle for success and superiority is there, but it has been trans- ferred to a higher plane. It is no less keen, though it is less passionate than war. It tests and braces, and at any rate in its simpler and more individual forms — ^before the days of trusts — the better and more useful men succeeded. Peaceful labour, too, gives room for heroism. Some time ago a man whose duty it was to varnish the inside joints of the new water-pipes from Thirlmere to Man- chester, did not come up the manhole at breakfast-time. He was working no yards from the manhole. Three of his mates went down. As they crept up the forty-four inch pipe in the darkness they, too, became sick and faint with the varnish fumes. But a man was ahead, and must be reached. They held on hke heroes, dragged him back with them dead, as it proved. Two of them collapsed when they reached the manhole, but were restored. The man who stuck to his fatal and improper task till his senses failed, and the three rescuers, were engaged in a deed to match the soldier's best. These things are occurring, unrecorded and unrewarded, or inadequately recorded and rewarded, in the world of manufacture every week. Strife, then, re- no EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE mains, but on a higher level, moralized and not war. Secondly, the result of this industrial competition is probably very slightly, if at all, species-forming, in the sense taught by Darwin. Natural Selection works only by death and infertility, to form a new species. Starvation and bachelorhood are not closely connected now with business inefficiency, nor with a lapse into a lower or worse paid industrial stratum. It is conspicuously the successful who refuse to multiply. Also philanthropy and the Poor Law are against free Natural Selection. We become better qualified for business, for the most part not by the survival of the fittest, but by voluntary effort, training, tradition and in- herited habit, (if nowadays Weissman allows this to count). Finally, we succeed in business best by co-operation, not by competition. The work of our time seems to be to restrict the area of competition, to modify its rigours, and to find where we can a possible way out of it. Competitors are not allowed to adulterate, to work for excessive hours, to steal inven- tions, to pollute rivers or the air. That is, certain laws exist on these subjects, and, EVOLUTION AND CONQUEST iii though still imperfectly carried out, they count, and will count more as time goes on. Housing, feeding children, educating those who cannot afford to educate themselves, trade unions, benefit societies, co-operative societies, trusts, combines, garden cities, municipal libraries, picture galleries, milk supplies, are invasions of the co-operative principle upon pure competition. To enter on the still higher warfare, the war of ideas, would take us too far, but it completes the ascending cycle, and it is only competitive because it is purely co-operative. To look to the conquest of dark races as though it were still the centre of interest in the development of man, is indeed a far cry from this, and long out of date. It has no evolutionary value. We are beginning to apply the tests of eugenics to every public issue, and we do well. Heredity is coming to her own. Those who survive are the important ones for the next generation. They are to be the fathers. Does then war kill off the feeble ? Is there a medical test under which the physically fit are excluded from the dangers of military life that they may raise the next generation ? Are the tall men released from the army. 112 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE and only those below a certain limit of stature accepted ? We understand that even from the military training proposed by the National Service League, forty-eight per cent, are to be excused, most of them on medical grounds. But on what medical grounds ? Alas, on exactly wrong medical grounds from the point of view of the race. The drain of the best has told with terrible effect upon steadily miUtary nations ; in whom a ruthless selection of the unfit has gone on. The two instances of which we know the most are Imperial Rome and Napoleonic France. The ceaseless wars of Rome culminated in domestic massacres on a wholesale scale from the time of the Gracchi to the accession of Augustus. The civil slaughters organized by Marius and Cinna and Sulla must have gone far to destroy the best elements in Rome, so that even by the time of JuHus Caesar self-reliant soldiers were wanting. Dr. Otto Seeck in his " History of the Downfall of the Ancient World " ascribes the catastrophe to this cause. He says " Out of every hundred thousand strong men eighty thousand were slain, out of every hundred thousand weak- lings from ninety to ninety-five thousand EVOLUTION AND CONQUEST 113 were left to survive." Sir John Seeley says " Whatever the remote and ultimate cause may have been, the immediate cause to which the fall of the Empire can be traced, is the want of men." The cowards and the weak- hngs who remain, determine the next genera- tion. Dr. David Starr Jordan, the President of Leland Stanford Junior University, addressing the National Education Committee at Boston in July, 1910, spoke on the " Selec- tion of the Physically Unfit," urging this point. From his paper I have taken the above opinions. He quotes from Benjamin Franklin : "A standing army not only diminishes the population of the covmtry, but even the size and breed of the species. AH the most vigorous and stout and well- made men are to be found in the army." " Wars are not paid for in war time, the bill comes later." He also quotes from Novikow : " Always and ever war brings about the reversal of selection." He goes on to deal with the consequence of the slaughter wrought by Napoleon, who is supposed to have slain three million seventy thousand men, more than half of them French.* * Another authority puts the total loss of life caused by Napoleon at eight millions. There are also other differing estimates. 114 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE "In his early campaigns the best of the nation in stature and strength was taken. At the end France was exhausted. In the Moscow campaign nearly six hundred thousand of his soldiers perished. For the campaigns of Leipzig and Waterloo he had to drag forth untrained youths below military age." In the generations that followed this wrong selection of parents the standard of height for the French Army has had to be repeatedly lowered. It is in the light of facts like these that we may ascribe the collapse of Greece in the generations that followed the Peloponnesian war, and the downfall of Spain in the seven- teenth century, to anti-selective slaughter. We have all been full of admiration for the marvellous valour of the Japanese in the recent war, and we may note that that war followed two centuries of peace, during which brave men were allowed to breed brave men. CHAPTER X THE PROBLEM OF EMPIRE BUILDING After ridding one's mind of various delu- sions, such as that Imperial conquest paves the way for the Gospel — that it is progressive civilization — that frequent wars are needed for keeping our backbone stiff, that war is the finest of sports, or that we have a divinely- given destiny to " reign or die " — after all these there remains one well-grounded de- fence of our presence in tropical lands. It is due to the fact that we have come to need their products. We could not now maintain European civilization without some at least of such products as these : cotton, silk, sugar, tea, coffee and cocoa, hard timijcT, rubber, spices, palm-oil, rice, such drugs as quinine, and numerous tropical fruits. There is nothing essentially wrong in demanding good conditions for the regular production of these things, and a Safe and business-hke trade in them. But the natives 115 ii6 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE are too indolent, their life too easy, to lead them to do the needful work. They have neither the business ability nor the industry. White men must settle as planters and traders, and therefore their lives and property must be protected. That is, some order-keeping force is necessary. Moreover, white labour cannot be imported, and so a proper colony made and children reared, on account of the climate. We are driven, therefore, to the establishment of plantations worked by more or less unwilling native labour under the manage- merit of white organizers. The native habits must be changed in many ways ; for imports must come in to pay for the exports, or partly to pay for them. So that the uses of finery, clothes, tools and liquor are shown to the impressionable native. Under the pressure of his need for a shiny top hat and a scarlet tie, the negro at home may be induced to work more or less every week. The situation is morally and politically perilous in the extreme. Regular work is as unnatural to the tropical native as sleeping out of doors is to us, in spite of the truth, which holds in the West, that punctuality is the method of business. The possession of power in money and in firearms in the hands PROBLEM OF EMPIRE BUILDING 117 of anxious and impatient traders who must harvest the crop and must fulfil their orders, and the helplessness of natives accustomed to forced labour for their chief too often combine to cause practical enslavement and systematic tyranny. This has been the early story of most of our trading depots and our Chartered Companies. Simply to leave them alone is to invite the abuses of the old East India Company, of the Congo State and of the cocoa islands. These abuses appear to be recrudescent now, in remote parts of Mexico, in rubber plantations on the Amazon, and even in Nevada, in the far west of the United States. Traders require ceaseless pubhc vigilance and effective control. But this cannot be exerted without some sort of sovereignty or protectorate. Hence the Empire has come into being ; by no large scheming, as the product of no man's vision, and no strong trend oi national pohcy ; but bit by bit, for business reasons. As I heard Seeley say, in his crowded Cambridge lecture- room, " We have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind." If once it could be understood that trade between any two nations is also good for a third ; that anything which makes two Ii8 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE nations richer makes them better customers to other nations ; that foreign trade is barter, and barter, organized in terms of money, may be between three or four dealers, not between two only ; that A may (in goods, of course), pay B, B pay C, C pay D, and D pay A back, and that at every stage there is a profit for both, and a benefit received, and good business done — ^if this bit of political economy, well known and rehably acceptable among all students, could be realized among politicians and citizens generally, then it would be seen that the orderly regu- lation of tropical productions was an inter- national interest : we might see our way to true progress for backward countries and peace and mutual gain. There need be little or no fresh conquests or tightening of European control. There has been too much already. We have gone in because we thought it paid to keep France, Russia or Germany out, and we have gone in thoroughly. But this national rivalry is sheer waste of power, from a trading point of view. Some such international management may be the first step towards the gendarmerie which the friends of peace have at times before their distant vision as the last coercive PROBLEM OF EMPIRE BUILDING 119 apparatus of an internationalized Europe against any criminal or barbarian state which breaks the comity of nations. It would be easier to organize an African force of " good Europeans " than a North Sea or Mediter- ranean force. The Congo State is in need of good Europeans now, as are Angola and Morocco. We have already gone so far in the process of separate national annexation that the handling would be difficult and delicate. But it should not be beyond the power of arrangement if a vivid idea of the evil character of Imperialism had laid hold of our people. Probably it will come some time as a sort of bye-product, unsuspected, and under some new name. This suggestion to internationalise what is left of the tropics can never, however, be more than a partial solution. It offers two defects. The first is that so much of the tropics is already annexed, and the nations who own them would be little likely to admit the authority of an international force in any except merely nominal protectorates or spheres of influence ; second, that the international policy may be itself bad, may take the colour of its worst components, or may be the mere tool of international 120 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE capital ; as we shall notice later, the Chinese experiment in this kind was a disgrace to civiUzation. We are not ready for such a force yet. At present it would be used to exploit Persia, Siam and perhaps China by mutual arrange- ment. The scheme of international control is only useful inasmuch as it would bring to an end the wars and rivalries of the present day, and permit of a much looser regime and less interference with the natives than the present proprietorship by jealous individual nations. It is really the spirit and purpose of our exploitation that needs to be purified. There have always been in the world, and there stUl are, plantations which are abodes of gentle- ness and filled with happy labour. There were many such before the war of liberation in Virginia and South Carolina. The govern- ment of Rajah Brooke at Sarawak has always been commended, and in Jamaica and other West Indian Islands the negroes are pros- perous and peaceful. We need not take the present lynchings and cruelties towards the blacks in the Southern States as a typical or universal practice. Where there is a will to do right by the natives, there has always PROBLEM OF EMPIRE BUILDING 121 hitherto been found a way. Annexations or spheres of influence really seen to be laborious trusteeships would be shorn of much of their evil. No doubt, also, any proposal for neutral- izing what we hold, or hope to hold, would meet with great opposition. Our people still beUeve that trade follows the flag. The truth is the other way round. The flag foUows trade, or, in other words, the British Army is called in to support the traders when their oppressions have raised a native revolt, or when disorder threatens their trade and their property. We begin with conces- sions, with obeisances to and deception of such dusky chiefs as Lobengula, and we end with war and annexation, great public ex- penditure, and afterwards a trade wholly inadequate, as a business speculation, to pay for the war of conquest. But then the tax- payer is led by the notion of British prestige which his newspapers give him to pay for the campaigns, and certain investors and com- pany promoters make what profit there is to be made from the trade. The extremely unprofitable nature of these acquisitions of tropical lands, particularly the recent ones, is well brought out in tables 122 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE of figures in Mr. J. A. Hobson's book, " Imperialism " (pp. 33-44), to which book I am much indebted throughout. He shows that too much is often made of our foreign as compared with our home trade. The latter is the preponderant and the expanding portion. The definite propositions he proves are these : Our foreign trade has remained for a generation about the same per head of the population. This represents a certain in- crease in quantity, as things are cheaper. But it in no way corresponds to the twenty per cent, increase in income per head during the same period. The benefit of that has been felt in the home trade. Our modern imperialist policy, with its vast additions to the Empire, has had no effect upon the determination of external trade. The proportion of our foreign trade which goes to or from our own possessions is the same as it was half a century ago, and has not materially varied. The total exports and imports between British possessions and the world as a whole have increased far more than their exports and imports to and from the United Kingdom ; that is, the dependence of the Empire on Great Britain for trade is rapidly diminishing. PROBLEM OF EMPIRE BUILDING 123 Professor Flux has shown that the growing part of our Colonial trade is with our self- governing Colonies j not with our new dominions over tropical races. So that, finally, the smallest, least valuable and most uncertain trade is that done with our new tropical possessions. That with India is steady but does not grow. Thus, however necessary some tropical trade may be, it is not the rock on which our prosperity is built. Moreover, all attempts by one country to exclude others from spheres of influence, besides being troublesome and wasteful, can- not in the end succeed in absorbing all the wealth to be extracted therefrom. Suppose that France annexed Siam, which, (we might assume), exported tea or hard heavy timber like teak to Europe, particularly to Great Britain, which drinks much tea and needs to make many dock-gates out of the teak. Siam, when a French possession, is closed by high tariffs to British imports, and French cottons and silks alone enter. They are paid for by what Siam has to export ; but France has little demand for teak and tea. These go as before to England, and England repays France, perhaps even with the cotton 124 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE and silks excluded from Siam — or it may be with quite other things. But we trade both ways as before. I have allowed for the necessity of some control of the tropics by Europeans ; though the need has been greatly exaggerated by interested parties. But one plea often made will not hold — viz., that we require an outlet for our surplus population. We have not now the birth-rate we used to have. It has been falUng for about thirty years, has dropped from about thirty-six to about twenty-seven per thousand in that period, and is still falling. It appears as though our population would become stationary, hke that of France, in about forty years. Germany, though beginning later, is following in our steps. The native-born Anglo-Americans are far gone in the same path. Immigration to England now balances emigration from it. It is true that we are far too crowded in England, and that emigration, particularly of women, is still needed. But our people emigrate to where they can hve — to Canada, Australia, New Zealand a;nd the United States, — ^not to Uganda or Nigeria. We have so far found no pubUc necessity for the recent expansions of our Empire. PROBLEM OF EMPIRE BUILDING 125 Few of us have any idea how rapidly that extension recently went on. Full particulars of these acquisitions are given by Mr. Hobson, from whom I take the following list of annexations, protectorates or spheres of in- infiuence made between 1870 and 1900. These thirty years have seen nearly the whole of our vast African dominions acquired. A large colony at the Cape, and a few small ones on the West Coast, have increased to a dominion nearly continuous from the Cape to Cairo. We govern Egypt and the Soudan, Uganda, Zanzibar, and Pemba, British East Africa, Somaliland, Rhodesia, the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, Bechuanaland, British Central Africa, Griqualand, Zululand, Nigeria, Ashanti, most of Lagos and Gambia. These form of themselves an empire too vast to organize, or to assimilate or to civilize. In the same period we have annexed Burmah and some provinces of Siam, and a few years earlier we had encroached upon Afghanistan and Baluchistan. Then there is the mainland of Hong Kong, North Borneo, Sarawak, British New Guinea, and Fiji. There is Socotra and Wei-hai-Wei, some Rajput States and Kashmir, and minor aggressions, all within the last generation. Most of these 126 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE were annexed in the Imperialist period which began with the Egyptian War and closed with the Boer War, 1884-1901. These are not, for the most part, lands which will ultimately be the homes of white settlers ; they are spheres of dominance over natives, some half savage, some having an ancient civilization, like Burmah. The area of those territories approaches five million square miles, and they are in- habited by eighty-eight milhon people. It is about one-third of the whole Empire, with nearly one-fourth of its population. Since the Boer war a halt has been called to the hot expansion of .the previous sixteen years. We were sated for the time, and have been trying to digest quietly since. But the hunger of capital for fresh outlets may be trusted to recur. CHAPTER XI WHO PROFITS BY IMPERIALISM ? It is not out of place to ask the usual pointed question, " Cui bono ? " For whose sake has all this conquest been made ? Englishmen do not generally realize that the generation just past covers the period of greatest extension in the history of our empire. We are apt to consider that that was mostly built up long ago, sometimes doubt- less by dishonourable and cruel means, and generally for purposes of trade ; but that now all that is over, the empire steady in extent and managed by civil servants of the highest character and ability. Let us ask why and for whose benefit this enormous aggression since 1870 has taken place. It will be difficult to show that, in the cant phrases, extending free institutions, elevating the people, or promoting the spread of Christianity, have had anything to do with it. 137 128 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE We went to Eg5rpt to secure the bond- holders who had speculated on the follies of the Khedive Ismail, and to guard the Suez Canal. We took the Soudan to secure Egypt ; the South African territories offered gold and diamonds ; Nigeria and East Africa could grow cotton ; Burmah was taken lest France should get it, and the Siamese states are prospective mining districts. Broadly, trade, markets, account for the rest. They have cost us one great war and many small ones. Bloodshed accompanied their annexation, and they have provoked a certain feeling of envy in other countries. They account for the strain with Germany. They gird us round with sensitive neighbours. Our soldiers have been slain by tens of thousands in acquiring them. War is the time of hurried contracts, of inevitable waste, — a helpless Government paying on the spot whatever it is asked. The pressure of orders for guns and powder, clothes, food, ships, transport of every kind, is most profitable to certain moneyed people. Finally comes the demand for capital to rebuild the waste places, and set the newly conquered or pacified country into order again. And thereafter there is a steadier trade for WHO PROFITS BY IMPERIALISM ? 129 somebody, as the natives begin to want clothes from Lancashire, ear-rings and look- ing-glasses from Birmingham, whiskey from Scotland. Meantime the tax-payer has been told that the honour of England is at stake, the prestige of the Empire in danger, and that the enemy is a barbarian Prince of unspeakable character and hostility to Christianity ; so he has become responsible for pa5dng the millions which have been absorbed by capitalists, in so far as they have not been destroyed. The wounded soldiers also come home with constitutions devastated by disease, have, probably, a pension, and join the pathetic army of the irregularly employed. Certain widows and orphans also contribute their gift to the Empire ; while Anglo-Jewish patriots have counted their profit by hundreds of thousands, some women in back streets begin to take in washing. But that is not the end. The other European powers have looked on. When they have very impulsive Emperors these send telegrams of congratulation to our enemy in the field, afterwards to be repented of. But they strengthen their navies ; they suspect us of vast designs on China — on Persia — on 130 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE Mesopotamia — on the Congo. We then strengthen our navy to match, and we have lurid dreams of all sorts. And every change of opinion or touch of panic sets the kettle boihng on the Stock Exchange, where the experts win, and brings orders to the engineers who make Dreadnoughts ; whilst our part is to follow the frank exhortation of the Jingo poet and " pay, pay, pay." Mr. J. A. Hobson in his valuable work on ImperiaUsm has contributed a far-reaching and drastic suggestion for this situation. He perceives that it is chiefly as a field for investment that the Empire exists and grows. How, then, would it do to stop this craving for investment by preventing the moneyed classes from having the money to invest ? How would it do to have it consumed at home instead, by stimulating the effective demand of our people for commodities, and by annex- ing blocks of capital for government service in the public welfare ? High wages and taxation of the wealthy for healing the sores of society would give a home demand for capital, strengthen the home market in every department, and build a stronger and happier race. Shall we not feed the school- children, insure against invaUdism, restore WHO PROFITS BY IMPERIALISM? 131 country life, rather than leave our tracks of burning farms and desolated cattle ranches in distant tropical lands, and spend forty- four millions a year on the Navy ? Thus social welfare and Imperialism are the two competing ways of living and spending our money, as a nation. Are we to fight for foreign markets, or are we to stimulate home markets, and turn part of the large fortunes into beneficent channels of social irrigation ? Whilst wages are determined on the present competitive system, however, improvements on any such large scale as is here discussed would be impracticable within a single life- time, and probably would never be realised. Only slow and gradual amelioration can be looked for, and there is no security that the wages of manual workers and the salaries of business and professional service may not really fall rather than rise. What social organization in the way of labour registries, insurance funds, accessible land and efficient education can do, will count but slightly in the way of consuming the vast savings of the rich. And to discuss any non-com- petitive plan of arranging payments on thorough-going socialistic lines is a plunge 132 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE too deep for this voyage. It is a subject, a political theory, and in practice a religion, by itself. Short of thus aboUshing Im- periaUsm by abolishing individual capitalistic enterprise altogether, there remains the plan of annexing a share of the errant millions in taxation, by a steeply graduated income tax and, most effectively, by death duties, or even ultimately by drastically hmiting bequests ; fixing (say) a maximum that may be bequeathed to any one beneficiary or by any one testator. We are far from such, a revo- lution as this last would imply. But we are on the way to meet and pay for Social Reform out of that surplus with which mischief is now made, the fuel feeding the engine of flame and massacre in the wilds of the world. Capital is doubtless essential to production — ^but the present day is one when capital, unmoralized, is a dangerous and explosive drug in the business market ; and it may add to our peace of mind when we apply a supertax to feed babies, that we are scotching the enemy of our race at both ends of the transaction — the transfer blesses the giver and the taker. Mr. Hobson points out that it is a curious feature of our civiUzation that far more people WHO PROFITS BY IMPERIALISM ? 133 are anxious to produce than are anxious to consume, that sellers wait on and compete for buyers everjnvhere, that there is always over-production in the sense that production is over the effective demand. We seem to have an excess of saving at one end of society, perpetually needing investment, and a defect of spending power at the other end weakening demand. If consumers had more power to consume we should balance these forces, and know a state of economic equilibrium. The total wealth of the world might not increase so fast. But less of it would go to waste. It would be intercepted by the worker before it accumulated in great reservoirs feeding Imperialist pipes. But if we could cure the waste of war and escape the waste of pampered wealth, what a different nation of producers we should be, — how efftcient, how much masters of our lives. The choice before such a nation would be large increase of wealth or large leisure for enjo5dng life. It is not meant that there should be no saving, and certainly foreign trade should survive. It is the excess of both these things that would be avoided. When the 134 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE profits of production go chiefly to men who work for them, and whose gains are moderate, and are fair as wages, those men have to be kept reasonably. They and their famihes turn up as good consumers to industry. But the great landlord, or investor, or holder of monopoly, who rakes in a hundred salaries to himself has only one family to support, and though he may indulge in excessive eating, drinking and shooting, and violent locomotion behind a ceaseless hoot and before a continuous cloud of dust, he cannot spend his income. Even if he gambles it away, it is not lost to the nation, only transferred. So that, under the present system, by which general well-being in moderate comfort is being changed for a barely living wage, or a competition salary in a large concern ; while a few rich men cry out for the invest- ment of the surplus they cannot use, and cheap production and unequal distribution increase, there will always be as a bye-product the outlet of Imperialism, and the extension at the pubUc expense of the opportunity for investment. The system of Trusts is the answer of productive capital to the competi- tion which cut down profits, perpetually produced more than could be sold at a profit. WHO PROFITS BY IMPERIALISM ? 135 and caused waste in touting and advertising. There was too much capital in the business to suit everybody. Then came the Trust. It shut up the weaker and less modern busi- ness, economized management, superseded advertisement, and so made a smaller amount of capital provide all that was demanded, and heaped up profits, once secure from competition. Observe the double effect here. We began with a glut of capital seeking investment. We end with a system both needing less and accumulating more. Thus the stream of capital, ever more congested, overflows its banks into the exploitation of new countries, creating a demand for clothing and drink and guns by the unclothed, abstemious and primitive dart-furnished native of wild countries. CHAPTER XII THE DANGEROUS CLASSES It is the custom with those who imbibed their ideas of war between nations at school from the Classics and from the Old Testament, and who have not thought it necessary to revise their conceptions in the light of modern facts — ^it is customary for such still to consider that some foreign nation may be our foe, as an individual may have an individual enemy ; whereas the danger and the hostility lie only between the rulers of two countries. An individual German and an individual Englishman show themselves on all available occasions perfectly friendly, but the workers in both nations have good need to view with alarm, as the truly dan- gerous classes, those who in each country profit by war. The lords of finance are, of these dangerous classes, the most potent, the most penetrating, and the most subtle. As negotiators of foreign loans, they naturally 136 THE DANGEROUS CLASSES 137 love the crises which endanger the life and property of the workers. As owners of capital it profits them if other people's capital is destroyed, for so there will be a greater demand and a higher interest for their own when the war is over and the wastes are rebuilt. Their sordid business interests taint every step in the growth of our empire. The great firms of armament manufacturers inevitably regard the tax-payer as their natural prey, and war panics as the drug by taking which the prey is to be delivered into their hands. Mischief makers they are by trade. That much we know, but that they are coming into intiniate and undesirable connection with those who have traded with them on behalf of the nation is not so well- known. The firms are adopting the policy of offering remunerative and honourable, but easy posts to men high in our Civil and Military Service on their retirement, at or in advance of their retiring age. Men who are in the secrets of the Government, who know the exact requirements and the exact idiosyn- crasies of those who buy for the nation have of late years been induced by tempting offers either to resign their Government posts and enter the service of the armament firms 138 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE at higher salaries, or to accept them on retire- ment. Now we find that two of the very highest of our officials, whose business it ought to have been, and doubtless has been, to check the commercial zeal of Armstrong, Whitworth and Co., to cut down their prices, to economize on the public behalf against them, have accepted posts on the directorate of that firm ; to be held along with their Government pensions. One, till recently Naval Secretary of the Defence Committee, must know all the private matters of our navy. Another civilian, as Permanent Secretary of the Treasury, was at the head of the department which controls expenditure. It is presumed that these men will have value in their new directorships, derived from their special knowledge of who has to be persuaded, of where there is most chance of placing an order, and what are our Government's ideas of price. There must be many other private matters, including intimate know- ledge of our relationships with foreign powers. The firm has works abroad in Italy and builds ships for any power, competitor or ally, as it may happen, of Great Britain. On the assumption that everything will be done in the most straightforward way there is great THE DANGEROUS CLASSES 139 danger to the State in this confusion between the duty which such men owe to the nation which has pensioned them, and to the firm which has found it to their interests to employ them as its skilled guides. There is no end to the subtlety and permeating power of wealth and social intimacy. It should never be possible for it to be to the interest of a civil servant in a responsible position to be personally friendly with firms like Armstrongs, or to have any reason for cultivating their friendship in anticipation of possible posts in their service hereafter. It would be untrue to say that financiers are always and everywhere for war. It all depends on their commitments, on the nature of their business, and on whether they stand directly to be among the few immediate gainers by the war. Firms, however, who can afford to stand the general depreciation, lapse of credit, and unsettlement which follows war, and which affects capital all the world over, may have such immediate chance of emolument as to outweigh possible losses. Ordinary fixed capital engaged in business must at all times be greatly endangered by the break-up of steady trade. It is only the capitalist, as loan-monger or mineral pro- I40 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE spector or adventurer in kindred under- takings, who is likeiy to upset the well-laden apple-cart of trade. Nevertheless it is a serious peril that the public is so much at the mercy of concentrated floating capital, which owns no nationaUty, is willingly lent to both sides, and out of general loss may earn private profit. Let us count up now, besides the above, our other dangerous classes. The Services themselves, with their aristocratic relatives, constitute a danger, not among the greatest, but not wisely forgotten. No one likes to kick his heels in barrack mess-rooms all his Ufe, or to attend only to the swabbing of decks already clean. Professional chances, promotion, self-respect, and laudable zeal in the public service, all make a declaration of war a joy to of&cers in the army and navy. Then there are the newspapers. War time is their harvest. People buy two or three editions a day, particularly if the posters lie. The subject is exciting of itself, and easy to write about. To pander to the street excitement endears a writer to the crowd. Popularity comes to the patriot editor whose armchair is the seat of war. Every paper which fights for peace, does so THE DANGEROUS CLASSES 141 to its financial loss in just the days dangerous to the maintenance of peace. There are times when all the papers are against a war which is in no danger of breaking out. Like pneumonia and other fevers, the war fever works by crises. It is just then that cool heads and good will to others are needed, to ward off the danger till the cold fit comes back. The high-class newspapers who keep war correspondents say that wars do not pay them, that news is too expensive, and that it is costly to meet a sudden temporary demand. All trades have a tendency to dwell upon their costs and to be silent about their profits, and we may well beheve, as in other businesses, that there are papers which make, and papers which lose, money. The very need for popu- larity, however, may drive a paper to feed the fire in days of public conflagration. It is, at any rate, serious that our journalism should be so largely in the hands of syndicates of purely commercial mind, not in the hands of conscientious professional advisers. It is common knowledge that it is these syndicate papers which in fact do preach war and print realistic serials of imaginary German invasions. Nor is Europe free from the direct influence of 142 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE the armament firms. Krupps own a German Conservative newspaper. Why ? How much the yellow press really counts in politics is hard to say. The General Election of 1906 was won in face of them. Neverthe- less, they are bound to tell. Say the same things, emphasize the same aspect, omit the same facts, disparage the same men day after day, and the drip drop, drip drop of it sinks into most of our easy minds. To resist it requires effort and thought, and a man reads a paper at a time when he does not want to think hard. A war and a war scare are the only means by which our people as a whole have ever been fooled for party ends : so there has been brought out one of our few fire-eating socialists — Mr. Robert Blatchford, the editor of the Clarion. His letters on Germany in the Daily Mail were written and introduced with every kind of pomp and egoistic tom- tom, but a column and a half of fierce writing leaves one with any subject matter worth mentioning still to seek. What are Mr. Blatchford's quaUfications ? Beginning life as a brush maker, and then enUsting, he made his first success as a literary man, by a vivid accovmt in the Sunday Chronicle of his Hfe in the army. His in- THE DANGEROUS CLASSES 143 fluence depends upon a style of plain and rugged sincerity J ignoring small obstacles, disdaining accuracy and careful statement, untroubled by any extensive knowledge of facts, and going straight to the point. But his mind is wholly untrained ; he has never acquired a sense of proportion, nor the abihty to see both sides, nor any fine dis- crimination. The result is that he produced a book on Sociahsm called " Merrie England," full of crude errors, of ignorance of the elements of economics, and of mistakes of fact. He followed it up by a work on Christianity, in which it may be briefly said that he showed that his ignorance of the subject was profound. We now have the delicate and comphcated problem of European diplomacy and the aims of states- men hacked out by this blunt chisel. Mr. Blatchford is capable of seeing in the fact that England and Germany are trade rivals, a cause for war and invasion, not realizing that the weapons of business are efficiency and cheapness, and a condition of success to keep your customers wealthy. He recog- nises that Dover and the English fleet can bar the exit from German ports, though why he should drag in Gibraltar one cannot see ; 144 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE does he think that the German empire touches the Mediterranean ? Instead, however, of recognising in this geographical position a reason for the existence of a German fleet, he is preposterous enough to suggest that the Germans have at once said, " Therefore let us take Dover." It may be briefly said that the same ignorance of human nature and of economics, which has marked all his writings, runs through every one of his garrulous paragraphs of panic. One cannot but feel that this psychological moment, with the war strain calling every- where for relief, is such that the Press of Europe might, if patriotic and wishful to guide the nations well, succeed in destro57ing the military fears of kings and chancellors, and might bring about alliances, disarma- ment, and public confidence in Europe. Our papers are not known as yet as organs of private interest, though some have been so from time to time. The mine-owners bought up before the war every paper in South Africa except one owned by a sturdy young Quaker who held on. We have all a duty to support the papers of the peacemakers. The subtle influence of the wealthy firms who make battleships and war material^ is THE DANGEROUS CLASSES 145 pervading ; and is sinister treason against the nation. Who filled the Government in March, 1909, with false alarms ? A man who dealt in the gun-mountings of battle- ships claims with apparent success that he did, and that he has had to suffer for it since in his business career. The engineering trade was very slack at the time, retrenchments were the rule ; eight Dread- noughts would put life into it in many eager quarters. There was a suit of great instructiveness tried in Manchester some years ago, and reported in the papers there. A firm who made ironclads were sued by an agent of theirs for more commission. The revelation of their business methods was so enlightening to the pubUc that they settled the case out of court after a day's hearing. But it appeared that this man, travelling about the world as a particularly well-provided and well-informed gentleman, got into confidential relations with the War Offices of countries in the East and in South America, and alarmed them about their neighbour's secret preparations. He would explain to Chile, (say), that Peru was ordering an ironclad and that they would do well to be similarly prepared. The same treatment 10 146 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE was also applied to Peru ; an order hum- bugged out of one, readily produced one from the other. Besides other commissions and allowances, this messenger of sordid war got heavy pay for each new ironclad ordered. Such people will leave no stone unturned to find some avenue for frightening those who frightened the Cabinet in 1909 ; we know now how erroneous it all was. The only proper epithet to use for these, our national enemies, is the word " Traitor." " Two nations," says Ruskin, " may go mad and fight hke harlots, God help them ; but you who hand them carving knives off the tables, that you may pick up a dropped sixpence, what mercy is there for you ?" Lastly, it is a curious thing that music hall poUtics are always imperiahst, or " jingo " to speak accurately. It looks as if music hall audiences were, for the most part, of that way of thinking. They are young and irresponsible, many of them too young to pay any taxes that they are aware of, or to be married and responsible for families. They constitute a rather noisy crowd. They matter very little, and need hardly count in comparison with those influential classes whose immediate interests are hostile to THE DANGEROUS CLASSES 147 Peace ; but they wave flags and make a brave show. Against these capitalists, officers, news- papers, manufacturers of material, giddy jingoes, — ^sections influential, unseen, or noisily prevalent, — against interests stimu- lated by all the strength of personal profit, there has stood only the unorganized multi- tude, the quiet people who suffer by war and pay for it, but can only make themselves felt at a General Election. They can defeat a war ministry after a war is over and the harm is done. They cannot stop a threat- ened war, nor intervene effectually at the critical moment when the Cabinet is coming to its decision. There is also the closest alliance and understanding between those who want Protection and those who want ImperiaUsm. For the great national expenditure necessary for conquest must somehow be obtained from the general public— by a " broadened basis of taxation." It would be little use to push trade and investment by costly processes of war, if one had to pay the bill out of taxes on property or income- — land taxes and super- taxes and death duties. It is better to get them from articles in common use — tea, sugar. 148 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE bread, ordinary household necessities. More- over they are better paid in a hidden manner, by Protective duties. Customs and Excise are the natural support of Imperialist finance. Thus arises a double gain. Home manu- facturers are protected and their prices kept high ; and the consumers' money is used to obtain foreign markets for them in Ashantee or South Africa. Restriction on foreign trade is a clear consequence of constant militarism. When wars are frequent, trade routes are liable to interruption and traders to uncertainty and loss. Jealousy of the foreigner is an active motive, and an unwillingness to allow him to make a profit out of us is a desire natural to those ignorant of poUtical economy. A self-sufficing empire is the military idea. So that a protective tariff is one of the commonest accompaniments of militarism ; and of course, in the other direction, free trade, by binding separate peoples together by economic ties of mutual dependence and a common profit, makes miHtarism abomin- able in the eyes of open-eyed nations. How much jealousy of the foreigner, how Uttle appreciation of the fact that what is good for him is good also for us, goes to the THE DANGEROUS CLASSES 149 protectionist propaganda, every reader of their organs knows. Protection, that is, is the result of militarism, and itself a cause of further national isolation. Protection is in strong contrast to the idea of nobility in national relations. Tariffs are all mean advantages. There is true cowardice in hiding behind a Tariff wall. Public debts, moreover, are a magnificent resource for surplus capital, and a fountain of profit to the firms who float them. They also give the creditors power over Khedive or Shah, and make a useful doorway in, for future use. ' Against the selfish particularism of these interested patriots, the forces of peace are also now happily organized. The inter- national Trade Union organization, which is a non-political body, has five million members, or about one-half the Trade Unionists in the world, and an office in Berhn ; it cuts right across national boun- daries, for it represents a closer bond of union and of need than does citizenship of the same state. Its policy is already to organize international labour to prevent war. This was passed by a unanimous vote at its Congress at Paris in 1909. CHAPTER XIII PEACE AND INDIVIDUALISM Much is said in an earlier chapter of the extent to which Government regulation is a feature of a military state, and a large individualism the result of the absence of any necessity for war. But it must not be supposed, therefore, that a laissez-faire industrialism is the last word of society, and that govern- ment is a waning institution. The age we live in is full of government activity. Laissez- faire has only been the motto of a necessary stage in industrial growth. But the whole motive and purpose of the new State activities of this age and, we hope, the following ages, are for the good of the people individually. Their aim is not to exploit the individual for the safety and power of the State, but to exploit or utilize the State for the benefit of the individual. They are socialistic, not im- perialistic, in aim and purpose. Where a military State slew infant girls, we fight infant 150 PEACE AND INDIVIDUALISM 151 mortality. Where in India as conquerors we build military railroads, in England and Ireland we make light railways for the people's food and trade. Sparta fed the aristocratic soldier citizens at a common table ; our common tables are at the Council Schools for the underfed. The State must not be confined as a dangerous force to a narrow sphere. It must be converted. From a system of coercive co-operation, by which the war leaders enslaved the citizens, it must become fhe voluntary co-operation of a free people for its welfare, particularly for the welfare of those who most need guardianship. The days of enthusiasm for Individuahsm are over ; Herbert Spencer's teaching on this point falls now on unheeding ears ; the isolation of Mr. Harold Cox in the House of Commons and his final electoral defeat is a marked illustration of the distance we have moved from the reformers of half a century ago — ^the famous Manchester School. But we must never confuse the State action of Bismarck with that of the humanitarian Socialists who are gradually permeating our pohtics. Unfortunately, Herbert Spencer never made this distinction ; he places 152 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE state banking and post office business, the endowment of research and the registration of teachers, the poor law and state insurance, in the same category of condemna- tion with compulsory military service, pass- ports, drill and a tariff. This increase of Government activity means, no doubt, the increasing importance of the expert in administration, with more numerous and more important Government officials. To combine efficiency, or expert control, with democratic hberty, is the chief home problem ahead. The way in which untrained Town Councillors will deferentially look up to the Borough Surveyor, the Chief Constable or the Town Clerk, is very marked in many places. In others, the expert is treated jealously as an undemocratic person. Probably, if we knew it, many Cabinet Ministers are similarly in the hands of their highly trained and experienced officials, the cream of the Universities to begin with, and now the seniors and selected heads of an official hier- archy with omniscience under their immacul- ate hats ; in whom the sense of running the Empire for its good has become habitual. ImperiaUsm also breeds its officials. But they are masterful rulers by training. When PEACE AND INDIVIDUALISM 153 they come back to England they are by instinct enemies of democracy. Our present returned Proconsuls — ^Lord Curzon, Lord Milner and Lord Cromer — are all on the side of property and privilege, indeed, they are among the ablest leaders of that party. The only way to save liberty in an era of growing officialism is to keep our experts engaged in saving the poor, fighting poverty, organizing schools, homes, clubs, public- houses ; in fact, to eschew Imperialism as the inevitable trainer of officials with the instinct of domination. If it be true that Empire-building is from its inception to its conclusion a class interest ; and if its motive is to make rich people richer, and influential people more influential ; and if all this is done at the cost of the general public as tax-payers and at the risk of the lives of common people as soldiers ; and if the wealth of the nation so lavishly poured out on fleets and armies, is pound for pound, so much deducted from the fund for the war against poverty ; and if further war and even unsettlement in our relations with Foreign Powers distract the mind of the Government and people from home reforms, silence for the time the voices of reformers, 154 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE deafen the ears of their audiences, and raise up into public notice generals and admirals instead of the organizers of peace ; if war itself tends to produce aristocracy and personal rule in the State : then, surely, it is clear that the staying of the hand of the Empire builders, and the consequent removal of military burdens from our backs, is central in the task of democracy. The working class are the only people who will cure the evil of war, and the working class leaders, both in Parliament and in the Churches of the common people, must lead here. Notably they do so already. This is as truly a labour question as though it were one of wages. Now the ultimate weapon in labour dis- putes is the strike. Before we reach that as an undesirable last resort we use mass meetings and resolutions and negotiations, we influence public opinion, we entrust delegates with plenary powers of arrange- ment. I think a somewhat similar order of events, including the last and final sanction, should be the attitude of working people towards war. They should use their votes, and their meetings should pass resolutions, and their members of Parliament should bring pressure upon the Government, and PEACE AND INDIVIDUALISM 155 they should persuade by the usual methods of persuasion ; but behind it all there should be the possibility of a strike against war. This would only differ from the strikes we know in that it would be international. If there were a sufficiently powerful and united International Trade Union Congress with an Executive able to meet at short notice, they could stop a war as fast as a loan-monger could make one. A general railway strike would keep the soldiers and their food harmlessly and helplessly at home ; no more would be needed ; humanity would have struck a blow against its age- long oppressor, and Imperialism would learn that its colleague Labour was in the end the master. Movements in this direction are already working among the armies of France, and possibly other Continental countries. However extreme such a policy undoubtedly is, I cannot see any effectual way of stopping the march of those who have their heels upon our throats, than one which has a possible strike as its final weapon. The Paris International Conference of Trade Unions has already unanimously voted its sympathy with the Spanish workmen who struck at Barcelona against the Moroccan war. 156 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE So far from the peaceful industrial state being a home for thorough-going indi- vidualism, in* which every man may do with his weaker fellows according to his power and their weakness, we find that the thorough-going Sociahst party is at all times, and in all countries, the implacable foe of war, which it would hardly be if Peace were individuaUstic. SociaUsm is international. Since 1900 there has been an International Socialist Congress, with a permanent office in Brussels. In 1907 they voted in favour of stopping war by International Trade Union intervention; and they have not been satisfied with reso- lutions. The following paragraph from Mr. Norman Angell's book, " The Great Illusion," will surprise many and delight every friend of peace. During the Morocco crisis the French and German Socialists were in daily communication, and the line taken by the Socialist party in the French Parliament and the Social Democrats in the Reichstag was predeter- mined by a conference between the two. In the same way there was a conference between the Austrian and Italian Socialists at Trieste when Austro-Italian rela- tions became strained. Again, there was the same co-operation between the Swedish and Norwegian Socialists when war was threatened between those two countries. But international Socialism has gone PEACE AND INDIVIDUALISM 157 farther ; it is notorious that ministerial tactics in France were directly modified as the result of the decision taken by the Intemalional Socialist Congress at Amsterdam, in which the line to be taken by the French Socialists was there laid down. In other words, the policy of the French Ministry was being dictated as much by Socialists in Germany, and in Belgium, as by its own supporters in France. CHAPTER XIV TRADEj EMPIRE AND WAR The new-found hope of the end of all risk of war with America has lifted the whole world a step higher. We take a larger breath in a clearer air than we did before. In practice, as we know, a war with America has been out of the region of practical politics for a generation, but the hope that never again can the folly of a discredited Government in either country lead us helplessly to the suicide of our race, is a new ground for quietness and confidence. We hope that the veto of the Senate may be found removable. But more than this we have our hope, shared by President Taft and Sir Edward Grey, and doubtless also by Mr. Balfour, that the glorious example may not be lost upon nations less happily placed, and that a method may have been found on which the workers of the world may seize for their liberation from the "present European strain. What is the obstacle to the formation of U8 TRADE, EMPIRE AND WAR 159 a Treaty of Peace between England and Germany ? There is not at the present moment, full as the world is of folly, any single actual cause of disagreement. Neither nation thinks of invading the other. Some people forget that we are no longer living in the time of Hengist and Horsa, or even of William the Conqueror, when the unsettled tribes of Europe were trying to find their permanent home. No nation thinks of in- vading. They all think of being invaded. So the silent fortresses stand along the European frontiers with their watchful garrisons ; but no gun has spoken since Sedan. On the whole the conscript armies of the continent do not exist to invade but to repel invasion. Whence then is the source of the European strain ? It lies in the ambitions of the Great Powers to occupy the land of states which are weak or small or very old. It is questions like these which have threatened to disturb European peace during the last generation. The affair of Fashoda nearly sent England and France to war for the possession of Central Africa. The affair of the Pamirs at one time threatened war with Russia for the possession of Central Asia. The Venezuela trouble i6o EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE dealt with a remote boundary, the Algeciras tension was concerned with exploiting Morocco. A railway in the valley of the Euphrates has long been a subject of delicate negotiation. The recent friction over the annexation of Bosnia was caused by one of the few unsettled problems left nearer home, and the Dogger Bank incident stands by itself as a mere accident due to stupidity or drink. Broadly speaking, it is jealousy caused by foreign aggression which is costing Europe its present burden. That these forces are still the directing forces of Empire, one can see from the fact that present disputes concern themselves with railways at Bagdad, loans and banks in Teheran, or mining concessions in Morocco. The investor explains the Empire. Whatever benefits to Christianity, security for missionary effort or for life and property in the long run accompany our foreign con- quests, and happily these advantages do come when the devastation and slaughter are over, it cannot be maintained that it is with objects like these that we ever attack a dark race. The private memoirs of such potentates as Lobengula, Dinizulu, Prempeh, TRADE, EMPIRE AND WAR i6i or Theebaw the last King of Burmah would form strange Sunday reading in Missionary magazines. The story is on lines like these. Certain speculative prospectors, financed from the West End of London, grovel to the feet of the Great Black Man, bearing muskets and gaudily striped cottons, dolls' houses and Jews' harps as presents, and so obtain a concession, the right to work a mine, or grow cotton or rubber, or to deal in palm oil. When the bargain is struck the chief provides forced labour in the usual way for the white man, and business is begun. Half-a-dozen white masters, armed with guns and money, and as many hundreds of dark labourers, unaccustomed to regular hours, paid as little as possible, thrashed and ill-treated as a matter of routine, make up the staff and employees. Occasionally, in order to maintain discipline or relieve the angry feelings of an Englishman with his nerves upset by the conditions of his life in that climate, a native is shot. Their women are not always let alone. Oppression can hardly fail to become the order of the day, where fear and greed and risk meet helplessness. Disturbances follow, the premises are burnt, 11 i62 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE white men are killed or flee for their lives. The telegraph to England is set in motion, and the newspapers in London streets shout the outbreak. " Civis Romanus sum " is freely quoted. An expedition is called for and goes, to avenge the dead or rescue the prisoners, in any case to restore order. The investor is again willing to provide the five or ten millions which may be spent, and delighted to float a loan. The army is glad of a relief from its tedium, and officers hope for service and promotion. The expedition goes, burns the villages and captures the King, leaves some rows of English graves, and brings back an umbrella or a golden stool from the dusky treasuries. There is now security for extended business, companies are floated in the land recently annexed, a fresh outlet is found for investment, (mark this at every stage), forced labour in the European sense is established on a larger scale ; at home some decorations and pensions are granted, a por- tion of the map is painted red. Our Euro- pean rivals meantime look on at our proceed- ings with jealousy, and extend their navy or make little business aggressions of their own to keep up with us. A slightly larger army or navy is henceforth maintained. TRADE, EMPIRE AND WAR 163 The sordid origin of Empire needs no re- search into distant time; it is going on to- day. Morocco is at present one of the victims, and Tripoli and Persia the others. We shall remember that France, under Delcasse, nearly came to blows with Germany a few years ago over Morocco, in a European war, with per- haps an irrecoverable loss to the civilization of the world ; but France jdelded. It appeared afterwards that mining concessions in Morocco were being competed for by the German firm of Krupp and the French firm of Schneider, a name not very French, and again suggesting the cosmopolitan character of business. Contemporarily with the cessa- tion of this rivalry came the cessation of diplomatic strain. The two companies agreed to divide the spoil, and jointly exploit the minersd resources of Morocco and Algeria. There was no further need for the death of conscripts. If we pursue this strange phenomenon fur- ther it may indeed move us to pity for our race, for these firms want the iron to make cannon, and the states want the cannon for defence against one another at Strasburg and at Metz, and all along the Rhine, at fortresses, profit- able to the contractors, costly to the workers, i64 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE and potentially fatal to the soldiers of both countries. But can anything of the^nd be behind the sinister partnership between Russia and Great Britain in partitioning their areas of influence and planting Russian soldiers in Persia ? It appears that though that country is poor and has no mines, yet the Russian troops are posted along a district which is to be traversed by a new line of rail- way. Certain Russian banks with the support of the Russian Premier and with other European connections, are to build an overland route to India as a rival to the Bagdad route, avoiding the crossing of the strait at Constantinople and the sail down the Persian gulf. We are to enter our sleep- ing carriage at Calais and be in Bombay in a week. Meantime great profits are expected to the promoters ; for their sakes Russia and England must garrison countries so insecure as Persia and Baluchistan, and for that end the newly-won liberties of Persia, and the hopes of a noble race, are to be suppressed. How cynical the whole thing is, when we remember the trouble at which we have been to guard India from aggression by Russia, We have comforted ourselves with the thought that miles of mountains and desert block the TRADE. EMPIRE AND WAR 165 way. And so they do, but they will no longer block it when the deserts are traversed by a railway, garrison-guarded, and the overland path from Russia to India is traversed every day. This may be quite right ; but we have fought three Afghan wars on an entirely different hypothesis, and it is about Persia that one thinks chiefly now. CHAPTER XV OUR BUSINESS EMPIRE IN SOUTH AFRICA The Empires of the world, however glorious in dominion, and conscientious in adminis- tration during their later and quieter years, have always been mere robbery to begin with ; for they all represent a change of ownership of that which cannot be bought or sold — the land, life and liberty of a nation or of a savage tribe. In primitive times such conquests may have made for progress, or they may not. The conquests of the Huns and Turks did not. We mostly hear, however, only the conquerors' account of the matter, and we estimate our own Empire from our own people's account of it. But in fact, no motive more glorious than trade and investment has led us on to Empire. We are traders first and go on to be civilizers some time later. The latest, and therefore presumably the most enlightened, of our empire-building BUSINESS EMPIRE IN SOUTH AFRICA 167 adventures shows the methods of sordid empire in a single clear case, which I believe to be a type containing all the usual features. We began with mining for gold and diamonds with large investments of capital, and with native labour, servile and sent down by the chiefs, but not actually enslaved. There was thus no opening made for a per- manent white population, but only for great fortunes by cosmopohtan capitalists under the English flag and the British taxpayers' protection. There was local difficulty with a stiff and rather stupid colony of Boer farmers — Kruger objected to Sunday labour and to the ways of mining camps, he once expelled five hundred prostitutes from Johannesburg, he had memories of the Great Trek of his boyhood, to escape British methods of government, he had successfully resisted one attempt at annexation, he objected to his people being outnumbered by the new mining population. On the other hand he was not personally incorruptible. Cecil Rhodes and Dr. Jameson determined to get him and his out of the way. Hostile feeling was provoked in England by the lying telegram saying that English women and children were in danger at Johannesburg, i68 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE and the Raid was run for which the telegram had been hatched. This enHghtening attack on the freedom and peace of the Transvaal was only in word disowned at home. Cecil Rhodes was exculpated in Parhament by Chamberlain, and the Boers then began their serious preparations for defence, for both English parties had white-washed their enemy. Then came the Milner-Chamberlain diplomacy and the war ; — South Africa was desolated — tens of thousands were slain and £220,000,000 were spent without glory. The yearly payment of interest on the added debt, depreciation in Consols, and the stagnating reaction on trade at home, must be included in the total cost of this Imperialistic adventure. The enemy this time was an unusual one ; so we have, instead of a crown colony, a free Parliamentary government, with the Boer majority neces- sarily in power, under the ministry of General Botha. Boer ideas rule. The natives are excluded from the franchise in all the new states. The resident British Indians are persecuted and others are kept out, in spite of the principles held at home, and really in contempt of the idea of a British Empire. The whole is a story of l5^ng, of greed and BUSINESS EMPIRE IN SOUTH AFRICA 169 of pride, on the part of the principals, of sorrow and suffering by the British pubUc and by the Boer and British soldiers, and the conclusion is ridiculous from the point of view of conquest, or of the spread of enlightened British ideas, democratic and humanitarian. Our behaviour in South Africa is the test of what we are equal to in dealing with lower or simpler races. To obtain regular, abun- dant and cheap black labour to work the gold and diamond mines has been the single object of Europeans there. To that end we have separated the natives from their land in recent and well-known instances ; chiefly in order that, deprived of any other way of maintaining themselves, they may be com- pelled to work at the mines. So long as they had their kraals and their farms and their cattle, it was open to them to take three months on the Rand when the pay suited them, and return with their wages to their famiUes and their old habits. They were thus in the same position as the English workman would be if he had access to land, and could at any time take to its cultivation when unemployed or underpaid. Of all the ways of raising wages, here or elsewhere, this way is the safest, the healthiest, and the 170 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE most effectual. The English system of land ownership is the worst obstacle in the way of raising English wages. So the pohcy of the Johannesburg mine owners is to get the natives from their homes and their farming, and to settle them, without chief, or tribe, or land, or cattle, in huts near the mines ; whither they can bring their famiUes, and breed a continuous succession of mine labourers. They would live in the company's huts at monopoly rents, buy in the company's or some allied company's stores at monopoly prices, and be paid wages which would be decided by the allied employers, i.e., the Chamber of Mines, dominated already by a single concern, the Eckstein interests. They could not refuse or strike ; they would have no alternative. Pass-laws would be used to prevent their migration, white courts would punish riots, and a legislature in which they are never to have votes would support whatever conduced to the prosperity of the owners of the mines. We have here the sort of hopeless serfdom which results from an ImperiaUsm with commercial aims. The benefits of Western civilization, Christianity and education, do not appear on the private minutes of the directors of the Mining syndi- BUSINESS EMPIRE IN SOUTH AFRICA 171 cates. The mine owners in German West Africa, confronted by a wages dispute, cut off food and water from their black labourers on strike in October, 1910. The only way by which a European con- nection would have benefited the natives would have been by improving their agricul- ture, and setting, in the neighbourhood of their kraals, an object lesson of decent civilized family life, lived on the land. We should do as the most enlightened missionaries do. Johannesburg Christianity, as exhibited by the habits of the fortune-hunters of the Rand, themselves away from their homes, and hoping some time to leave the country with a share of its riches, is probably felt by the Bantus to be the faith of a savage tribe, horribly decadent but cursedly clever. AU hard and dangerous work in South Africa is done by the natives. If anyone has to venture into a dangerous hole with perhaps bad gas or perhaps a lion in it, the native is sent. The whites are parasites on labour, and a steady tendency to languor and de- moralization due to parasitism is felt by those who go out there. But it would be very difficult to absorb South Africa by commercial conquest without becoming parasitic. Even 172 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE an international control would be no better, for the mine owners are international already themselves. England is their adopted coun- try in many cases. A sordid empire, however European, would end in the same way. The Basutoland Protectorate, the condition of Khama's country, and the work of Sir George Taubman Goldie in Nigeria and Sir Harry Johnstone in Nyassaland, are examples of what can be done in Africa on other than sordid Hnes. Here, at the back of the minds of capable administrators, was a sense of public well-being, not desire for profits for speculators in gold and diamonds. In these regions there has been no legislation Uke the Glen Grey Act, which imposed a money tax on all who did not spend three months a year at the mines — a tax which they had no money to pay except by hiring themselves out. They use no money and need none in their kraals. The steaUng of native cattle, the use of prisoners as mine labourers after a bogus rising in Bechuanaland, and the whole Hut Tax poUcy are among the devices for practically forcing the native farmer to take to mining for the profit of European employers. But such costs as those of the Boer war are BUSINESS EMPIRE IN SOUTH AFRICA 173 no adequate measure of what the speculator owes to the taxpayer. Our army exists to be ready for wars for the maintenance and particularly for the extension of this profit- mongering Empire. No one really antici- pates that any European Power would attack England except on account of some foreign rivalry in aggression in far away lands. Our great and enormously increasing military burden is therefore due to Imperi^sm ; and is to be debited to that party of unpatriotic financiers. And their demands are not glutted. Now the army can only be voluntarily in- creased by raising heavily the rate of pay, so as to appeal to a better paid class. This added expense we shrink from. Universal military service is therefore possible, and with it a poor average of town bred fighting material, unless we can check our Imperialists. The only other plan is to fight by the help of negroes or Basutos in India or America, Ghoorkas or Afghans in South Africa, and in general to maintain an Empire by arming and drilling and taking to foreign lands as cheap mercenaries our subject dark races. We have already gone as far on this perilous 174 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE and downhill path as is considered safe. Thus from a military point of view we are risking the stability of our Empire by further following on this sordid way. 97 CHAPTER XVT IS EMPIRE GOOD AT THE BEST ? I AM driven to the conclusion, more by in- stinct than demonstration, that the conquest of one nation by another is, as a general law, an evil thing ; and that we have to go back nearly a thousand years before we come to any doubtful exceptions, whose ultimate good may be held to have balanced their immediate evil. Conquest can hardly fail to cause the death of the bravest and best of the conquered race, and the gloomy hatred of the survivors, in whom outward obedience and civility is only the cloak for concealed passion . "A conquered race for generations ' ' is a phrase we use for excusing lying and deceit in any people. Their life is either one of recurring failure in revolt or of dull, hopeless acquiescence. To the conquerors there comes pride and generally tyranny and self-indul- gence, the maintenance of watchful armies, the trampling down in others of the Uberty 175 176 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE they claim themselves^ the consciousness of living on a volcano. The conquering nation is occupied more with domination than with internal progress. Its home standards of liberty are imperilled. Its foreign politics are complicated by the task of maintaining its dominion. A state of friction is set up on both sides which is sheer waste, inflammation, and pain, I believe that the British Empire is the least harmful, and has the least net balance of evil over good of any that we know of. We think we compare favourably with Baby- lon, with Athens or Rome, with Holland or Spain or Russia. We have done many good things. But India is still poor under our rule, its government is costly ; it is still a victim to famine, — through poverty in bad years — and to plague — ^in spite of our anti- toxin method of dealing with it. India controls our politics ; our recent wars, Afghan, Egyptian, Crimean, Chinese, all our Russian policy and our Japanese policy, are for the preservation of the Indian Empire. Much of our military burden is due to the same cause. I admire my fellow-countrymen's work in India ; and am grateful for the order they maintain. Our education is in the IS EMPIRE GOOD AT THE BEST ? 177 direction of making a self-conscious nation- ality out of the mixed and warring races of the Peninsula. But the future is still full of doubt and peril. We cannot leave India ; but many of us hope we can restore the country gradually to such freedom within the Empire as the people may be able to bear. Anglo-Indian opinion is, however, against the grant of a Constitution. Our Empire is still unstable. We have not converted the people to Western ways. If we left India most observers think the people would relapse into suttee, infantidde, the restrengthening of caste, public corrup- tion and probably a series of wars. But this is not what we have hoped. We appear to ourselves in our more com- placent temper as merely honourable trustees for infant races, as bearing nobly the white man's burden ; we are the weary Titan serving mankind by manifest destiny of heaven. We wish to lead the Egyptian and the Hindoo to Western institutions, to give them on some far future day a Parliament. It is generally admitted, with that frank modesty which becomes us so well, that our methods of acquiring our Empire in the past have not always been just or merciful, or even 178 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE honourable ; but that these things cannot really be done with rose water, and that bloodshed and massacre are quite of the past. Moreover, if we had not conquered India, the French would, and they would not have done it as well as we have. Nevertheless, our record as conquerors in India is one which at times violated the rules of conduct which at home we profess. It would need a long volume to prove or set out the grounds for this opinion, which depends on detail. Against our aggressions there has been a continuity of protest at home. Let us take a single instance, the fomenting of the second Burmese War in 1852 : on which Richard Cobden at the time wrote a careful pamphlet, based on the Parliamentary Papers, from which the facts may be reliably gathered. Two English sea captains were accused by some native British subjects before the Governor of the King of Burmah, at Rangoon, of certain acts of oppression. Whether the accusations were true or false we do not know ; no independent investigation has yet been made. The captains were detained some days, fined, and let go, in ordinary process of local law. They complained to the Governor-General of India, Lord Dalhousie. IS EMPIRE. GOOD AT THE BEST? 179 He sent Commodore Lambert with three warships to investigate and report. The Commodore, instead of obeying his instruc- tions, took an aggressive Une, communicated on his own authority with the King of Burmah and had the Governor deposed by the King — who was terrified, and only desired peace and submission. In treating with the next Governor he broke all Burmese etiquette by sending to him a deputation of inferior officers without pre-arrangement, at noon, when Burmese governors are at their siesta. These men rode on horseback into the Governor's compound — another probably un- intentional breach of good manners — and demanded to see him. He declined with all politeness to see them — i.e., his servants brought word that he was asleep, the equiva- lent of " not at home " — they would take a letter or arrange another call. The breach of dignity involved in this unsolicited inter- view with subordinates is no doubt childish, but real to the Governor. The muddle resulted in the Enghsh deputation staying out in the sun for a quarter of an hour. This terrible inconvenience or insult, for which at any rate the King at Ava was not respon- sible, was the cause of the Burmese war. r8o EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE The English Commodore seized a royal war vessel and dragged it down the river past the Burmese fortifications. These fired on the captors of the vessel, but the British easily silenced the Burmese guns, sank every vessel, and killed 300 people. At every point in the detailed story the British are overbearing and exceed their superiors' orders — ^the Burmese try to give up and to be submissive and friendly. But our policy has never been the Roman policy of favouring the weak and warring down the proud, as Virgil proudly teUs. We have been great at fighting the weak. The Bur- mese campaign was an affair of toy soldiers, and Lower Burmah was annexed. The one recent exception to this weakness of our foe was the war with the Boers, and even there we were woefully deceived about the strength of our enemy. Those who recall the diplomacy of Chamberlain and Milner before that war, with " the sands running out," and the hope- less interview on the franchise for Outlanders in the Transvaal between Kruger and Milner, will remember how it was we who made peace impossible, and refused to enter the doors to peace made wide open for us. To return to the main question. Why the IS EMPIRE GOOD AT THE BEST ? i8i instability of India ? The Indian Govern- ment has made a careful inquiry into the discontent, and has published its result. The best informed men on the spot believe that the trouble is not mainly economic, but what they call sentimental ; that is, it is patriotism, not poverty, that is the trouble. The discontent is among the educated class, and is a revolt of the spirit against the best managed foreign domination. This is an incurable evil, but our Civil servants are advised by the Viceroy in Council to consult and make friends with Hindoos of standing in their neighbourhoods, to seek to persuade and win them over, to enhst their co-operation, to rid them of the fallacy that England makes a steady money drain on India. This is wise advice ; but it will be very difficult to take, and it is late in the day. The conscious- ness of being conquerors and conquered has, for the safety of the Empire, to be maintained without any misunderstanding. Mr. Mackar- ness recently printed in the Nation, and in a pamphlet, circumstantial stories of the bribery common among the native police, of their torture of witnesses, and their false trumped up charges. But the responsible men have not been punished or disgraced ; i82 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE not assuredly because our Indian adminis- trators do not loathe corruption and torture, but because they dare not, for what they regard as necessary prestige, disgrace the Police Department of the Government in the eyes of natives. Subject to this most neces- sary exposure not taking place, the Govern- ment are willing to do what they can. But they attack Mr. Mackarness as no friend to his covintry, and suppress his pamphlet. The opinion of the Government, is, as stated above, that the discontent is chiefly pure patriotism and not due to poverty. But the sight and knowledge of poverty may be the efficient cause of patriotic ardour ; and the half-fed ryot is not the one who is able to make his views articulate. We hear, constantly, statements of widespread economic unrest also, due to congestion of population, to the sway of the money- lender, and to the social misfit which results from an imported city civilization being organized at great centres of population among a peasajitry stiU in a primitive economic stage. In the Anglicised cities are banks, factories, luxurious stores, rapid transit, financiers, professional men, and merchant princes. In the fields the ryot tills IS EMPIRE GOOD AT THE BEST ? 183 by heiiid a little patch of ground round his well, a village commune is mostly self- sufficing and has little use for coined money. This old, and no doubt wasteful and inefficient, economy has in Europe gradually evolved into commerce as we know it. But the Industrial Revolution even in England brought great hardship ; much more a revolution imposed from without, rapidly. It makes not for growth, but for catastrophe. Our legislation is now just and our aim benevolent. But it has not always been so. We put an export tax on native manufactures to prevent them being sold in England, while compelling free entrance for our own machine-made products into India. These two forces have destroyed the beau- tiful hand-woven fabrics which the natives made at their homes with immemorial skill. We have crowded the people into the Bombay mills instead, where they make the coarser cotton into the cheap stuff we know. We have also done something to destroy the self-governing village community, which is the basis of Indian society. We tax the individual, in good Western fashion, not the village. Our courts deal with the individual claimant or transgressor, not with the local i84 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE headman. All this is due to the incursion of an alien civilization, worked by the ablest and best intentioned set of men on this planet, with many triumphs to their credit. The unrest, irritabihty, and want of clear hght on the future, which we find after a century and a half of Empire under the best conditions, is what most of all convinces me of the truth of the statement with which I began, that all Empire is bad. CHAPTER XVII THE NEXT MOVE OF IMPERIALISM It is little good crying over spilt milk, or tr5^ng to undo conquests. The shattered ruins of nations can rarely be restored, nor conquerors dispossessed without a new chaos of blood and waste. The Empire will not be seriously diminished. It will be indeed won- derful if it does not continue to increase. But we may look ahead and guard ourselves against the private interests which will recklessly drive us, if they can, into new responsibiUties and new wars. The great danger of the future is the oppor- tunity which exists in a region greater than Africa, greater than India, viz. : — among the 400 millions of China. In China is a quarter of the population of the earth, laborious, unwarlike, thrifty, able to live on starvation wages, as Europe understands them, and able to make a great margin of profit for a European employer. Here a vast hive of 185 1 86 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE working bees appears to be awaiting the bene- ficent co-operation of the drones. And what is to prevent it ? Until recently, mutual jealousy among the Powers has alone kept them from their prey. The record of our past in China is little but a record of evil, culminating in wars to compel the rulers of China to admit opium to poison her people for our profit. Till igii Great Britain kept on demanding all her treaty rights in continuing the import of the drug, when Pekin and the local Mandarins were prepared to suppress it, and wonderfully succeeded in' doing so. We have agreed to diminish the importation by ten per cent, per annum, and we stuck to our bargain, though China was prepared to go much faster, and in three years had reduced her output by seventy-five per cent. Our Government was plainly the agent of merchants, and of the Inland revenue which arises out of our Govern- ment opium monopoly in Bengal. Finally better terms were granted. The Government of India had made by 191 1 all the profit expected on the ten year period, through the high prices scarcity had brought, and promised finally to let go her hold in two years time, if China could on her side complete her THE NEXT MOVE OF IMPERIALISM 187 abolition by then. The march of the alUed Powers from Tientsin to Pekin and back after the sack of the legations was an orgy of murder and reckless horror not equalled in modern records. Already we have trans- formed China under our " Christian " in- fluence and example from being an entirely peaceful country into one dependent for defence against Europe upon the great army which she is creating. In China the military man and his violent ways have been looked down upon. The moral powers of persuasion and tradition rule the free village communities. The central Government, as is natural in a nation at peace, with no foreign complications, makes but little impression on the people, and costs but httle in taxation. The method of govern- ment is local, and is locally democratic. But Europe has changed all that. We have driven China to arm ; and brought militarism, and all the coercive central power which goes with it, to feed on the industries of China, materiahze her ideals, alter her estimate of values, and create a regime of despotism and standards of force. The Chinese have decided that they will not be exploited by Western capital without long and san- i88 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE guinary war with modern weapons. The prospect for them and for us is serious, and may even be critical. Conquest and annexa- tion, for financial profit to investors, with European complications and an extended repetition of the eighteenth century struggle with France, are real and serious possibilities before us, quite able to fill the twentieth century with poverty at home. Nor will a united aggression by Europe be a blessing to anybody. It seems more Ukely that the international forces of capitcd may prefer to work that way. War in Europe is become too costly and deadly. Spheres of influence and international invasions and indemnities have already begun. Russia has taken Northern Mongolia unless civiUzed Europe can stop her. What would be the effect in China ? She may borrow capital herself, take to manu- facturing, and repay her debts with her goods. The overrunning of our markets by cheap Chinese goods, if she ever took seriously to machine industry, goods made by Chinese in China — or by European firms there — would go far to ruin the British workman in the competed trades, while all the time he is pa5dng in taxes the cost of the wars which THE NEXT MOVE OF IMPERIALISM 189 may have led to the exploitation of the cheap labour of China. Of course, we should meet it somehow. You cannot import without exporting ; but Chinese competition in many trades would wonderfully dislocate our manufactures. In the industrial world we are no match for the Chinese in the lower grades of labour. Mr. Hobson suggests (" Imperialism," p. 330) that China might not need or take our manu- factures in payment for the cheap goods she might send ; but might for long lend us money in exchange, and hold control over our capital, becoming in turn the capitalist country which we are now. Whether by military force, or by a clever diplomacy which sets her enemies to fight among themselves, or by estabhshing a machine industry of her own in competition with Europe, China on her defence may cause us grave peril. The reckless importation of Chinese labour to work the South African mines instead of white men was a very clear case of Imperiahst patriotism. No one would object absolutely to increas- ing our trade with China. Interchange of commodities between an increasingly com- fortable body of consumers in Europe, and a Chinese people making by European machine igo EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE methods larger supplies of goods, and exchanging them peacefully, is the best prospect ahead ; with no interference by Goverment, no wars, no concessions to foreign syndicates backed by arms. Whether factory towns in lieu of village communities, and the rise of a new wealthy class, would ever be favoured by the rulers of China is very doubtful. And they must be allowed to please themselves. They have always been more open than is supposed to European ideas, and they are now hungry for them. But it is European capitalist control that they dread ; and what would amount to the destruction of a great and old civilization, with consequent unsettlement and moral degradation. The fact is that China is fast reforming herself. In sanitation, in education, in police, in dealing with destitution and unemplo5anent and in the struggle with opium, the Chinese officials, sprung largely from the people, are regenerating the nation, and raising it from the inertia of a thousand years. If they can cure their habit of official bribery, and produce unselfish statesmen, they wiU win. Both in India and China the reaction of Empire upon missionary work is great and THE NEXT MOVE OF IMPERIALISM 191 disastrous. It would be a blessing to China at the present time if it could be rescued from the materialism to which there is a strong tendency in the people, and which is all that is left to them now that their old religions have faded before Western methods of thought. There is an extraordinarily open door in China now for intelligent missionary work ; but it is handicapped because it has to come from people of the same hated nation as compels the Chinese to degrade themselves with opium, and is a constant aggressor at their ports. How is it Ukely that a self- respecting Chinaman who loves his country can adopt the religion of the "foreign devils ? " The extra-territorial rights by which foreigners and natives within the prescribed treaty areas are exempted from Chinese courts is a constant humihation. The lamentable claim made in the treaties for freedom for converts from the local laws of their country, putting them instead under foreign protection, whilst it is a direct incitement to adopt Christianity from selfish motives, is not easily distinguish- able from other forms of imperialism. Who can wonder that there are riots against the missionaries ? We do not let Christianity have a chance in China, and the Protestant 192 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE missionaries themselves feel it strongly, and wish to be free from extra-territorial " privi- leges." Nor do we in India. The mission- aries there are necessarily identified with the ruling race, and when the old-fashioned missionary added to his English habits and social connections an extensive ignorance of Eastern religious writings, the handicap on missions in India was well nigh overwhelming. CHAPTER XVIII MODERN WEALTH AND WAR — THE GREAT ILLUSION The economic unfitness and predatory use- lessness of war in modern times have been already alluded to briefly in previous chapters. But since they were written the writer who calls himself Norman AngeU has placed the world in his debt, and initiated a new epoch of thought by his " Europe's Optical Illusion " of 1909, followed by an extension and reprint under the title " The Great Illusion " in 1910, It is doubtful whether, since the "Origin of Species," so many bubbles have been burst, and so definitely plain a step in thought been made" by any single work. No book on the subject since then can do other than take arcoimt of what is now and will increasingly be henceforth current coin of knowledge. The book points to the entire separateness of material welfare, trade and personal .91 13 194 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE property — ^from conquest, victory and any- thing that war can do to enrich a conqueror. The credit economy which has superseded coinage in international commerce is a single organization all over the civilized world. It is like a spider's web, which if broken in one place is broken altogether. The pillage of London would destroy securities owned in Germany or New York. A bank crisis in Threadneedle Street would not only scatter bankruptcies throughout England, but would topple over credit in every Bourse in Europe and America, stop the payment of wages in silver mines in Nevada, rubber plantations, in Malacca, and iron works at Crefeld. The commercial classes and workmen of Germany, if that be our enemy, would demand peace or make a Revolution. The fact is that it is not externally obvious nowadays where any- thing is owned, still less where it is insured. People who live in large country houses in the Lake District or on the Surrey Downs do not live on a share of the produce of the neigh- bouring fields, but on Argentine railways, Alaskan gold, or land increments in New York City. We are all members one of another. Any one who remembers so recent an event as the American bank crisis of 1907 knows MODERN WEALTH AND WAR 195 not only that the collapse of credit threw five million American workmen out of employ- ment, but brought down estabhshed houses in Manchester and London. Nowadays a war which threatens credit is Uke one nerve- centre in the body warring against another, We Enghsh are said to have two thousand miUions of money invested abroad.* If we had to sell property or call in much of that money, every American Railway and European Government stock would find itself depreciated ; and traders everywhere would be unable to pay up. MiUions of this property is in Germany, which has been a heavy borrower from England ; but Germans could not reahze and pay. In addition, fifty millions of imports to Germany and sixty milUons of exports would, under present naval arrangements, be stopped by a war between the two nations ; with what misery to both, as producer and as consumers, it is easy to visualize. Only the most au- dacious support of one another could keep our banks sound. It is certain that while the Daily Mail's German armies were converging on York, banks at Frankfort and Berlin would be telegraphing help to Lombard * ilulhall in " Dictionary of Political Economy." 196 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE Street. The foot cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of thee." Europe contains, as its happiest countries, some small states whose independence is guaranteed by treaty, not by arms. These are Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. How the mere names call up dignity and cleanhness and pubUc well-being. How free and democratic these states are. How pleasant their populations ; how well-educated and intelligent. They have mounted one step higher in development than the great miUtary powers — Russia, Austria, Germany, Italy, France and Turkey. Their national credit stands higher. " Those who know " count the nationality which rehes on treaties sounder than the one whose safety hes in shining armour. The plain lesson is that the drain of great fleets and armies upon the finances does not pay for itself in added security. It represents a net loss. The insurance premium is too high for the risk. People have, due to the imperfections of their education, ideas of booty and capture dating from days when the King of Ass5aia took away the vessels of gold and of silver from the temple of Jehovah and the palace of MODERN WEALTH AND WAR 197 Hezekiah. What wealth can be taken now ? Private plunder is forbidden, but were the treasures of Bond Street gone the true wealth of England would remain. You cannot trans- plant four hundred thousand Lancashire mill girls, nor the South Wales coal field, to the banks of the Rhine. Enghshmen, generally, are not individually richer — ^with official exceptions — ^for their far-flung empire. Neither would any other people be, who at vast expense, took any of it from us. The British colonies are no source of profit to the mother country through their loose political tie. It would be impossible to conquer or hold them ; and no use. One has only to imagine Germany attacking South Africa or Canada, to see the folly of the idea. We had all we could do, with the British colonists on our side, to overcome the Boers. What when the whole of South Africa is combined against an invader, and every year a larger South Africa ? Nor has Germany any volun- tarily enlisted troops. She cannot send con- scripts abroad on wars of conquest, to go to the ends of the earth and stay as long as they are wanted. Conscripts are for home defence ; they are a short-range army. No Government would venture to send them igS EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE abroad a quarter of a million at a time. On the unfitness of conscription for distant campaigns of conquest there seems to be general miUtary agreement. This single consideration makes a Russian occupation of India impracticable, even if she could conquer it. Without the possibility of tribute the annual cost of holding any large British colony contrary to the will of its inhabitants would reduce any European power to ruin. Lord Roberts, in his Facts and Fallacies, not only hves in alarm about Russia in Afghanistan and Germany in Belgium, but also about the frontier of 3,000 miles which separates Canada from the United States. We are to make mihtary preparation for that preposterous contingency. It is the agreed absence of all military safeguards which makes that frontier the safest in the world. No fortress marks the long, straight line of that artificial boundary; even the custom houses are being happily reduced in importance ; no gunboat spoils the peace of the Great Lakes, and no one over there is afraid. Indeed that is at present the centre of the hope of the world. On one point "The Great Illusion," in MODERN WEALTH AND WAR 199 the chapter on "The Indemnity Futility" tries to prove too much. Indeed the author has admitted that he is only using an argu- ment to meet the Protectionists ; but to meet one fallacy by another is not profitable, and future editions will, I understand, admit that an indemnity really does transmit from the people of one country to that of another the amount imposed. At the same time Norman Angell shows quite securely that the effects will be disconcerting. It will lead either to a general rise in prices in a country receiving so much bullion, or to ruin to the home trades working in competition with the imports which would be the alternative way of re- ceiving the indemnity. Probably both results would ensue. A higher range of prices would, as the next stage, stifle the export trade of the victorious country. Nor would any indemnity make war pay, when you consider the years of armed peace before and (still more) after, full of costly preparation, the diversion of the labourer into standing armies, and the immediate loss of hfe and treasure during the campaigns. The notion that a great state is richer than a small one, compared with its needs, is again derived from our school histories of 200 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE ancient times. Only in having a larger area from which to draw soldiers can any advan- tage be won by conquest ; and this at the cost of many soldiers' lives to begin with. Increased revenue is balanced by more extensive administration. Above all, no citizen is richer. Is a Finn enriched by becoming a Russian citizen ? He thinks far otherwise. The great empires are the areas of European poverty. Again, even if she could do it, what advantage would Germany gain by drawing money from Alsace Lorraine, impoverishing one of her own provinces for the benefit of the others. It may be said safely, that, counting aU the armies and fortresses since kept up for forty years, so largely on its account, Germany has never made so bad a speculation. We did not gain by annexing the Boer Republics in 1901. Our real gain was by the self-government we gave in 1909. That restored us to peace and confidence. Some similar application of the principle of freedom under " suzerainty " might by this time have come about by agreement and mutual confidence, and the war been saved. The latter and larger portion of the " Great Illusion " argues for peace on sociological MODERN WEALTH AND WAR 201 grounds, and is in general harmony with most of this little book. The chapter on the " Ownership " of colonies is one of the clearest and most salu- tary in the book. We, taught by our one foolish attempt at coercing our colonies between 1775 and 1783, now give complete locd Uberty and essential independence to our colonies where white men live. But we do not all realize how extremely sUght the Imperial connection is. They are not even bound to join us in war. The new navies and armies which are unfortunately coming into existence in Canada and Australia are only to be joined with the forces of the mother country if the colony so decides. Both sides are agreed on this. What sort of an Empire is this, in the historical use of the word ? Hostile tariffs against us on the part of our colonies have long been famihar to us, and any favour which we have received at their hands has been purely voluntary and calcu- lated in their own interests. We are not even permitted to enforce our own principles of Government in the treatment of the natives whom our fellow citizens, the Boer majority in South Africa, exclude from the franchise. The gods must laugh as they see this as the 203 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE result of the South African war. It was one of the alleged causes for which we fought. Neither Australia nor British Columbia re- ceive their Imperial feUow-citizens from India within their borders, and Natal treats those she has with humiliation. Again, what sort of an Empire is this ? " Civis Romanus sum " is a sentiment which does not belong to the confederacy of states into which our race has expanded. Ottawa makes, on her own behalf, a reciprocity agreement with Washington, and the British Ambassador gives all the help he can . The Commonwealth of Australia establishes compulsory military service in fiat defiance of the opinion of the Mother Land. Can this be called empire ? Ask Caesar Augustus. What sort of advan- tage could any foreign power obtain from colonies over whom their own Home Government exercises a purely nominal control ? On pages 96-99 there is a beautiful analysis of the suggested attempt by an imaginary conqueror to put a fifty per cent, tax on the South African mines. Norman Angell derides the ordinary ethical Peace advocacy as practically futile. I think he is wrong or, at least, that there is a defence. MODERN WEALTH AND WAR 203 For, however slow or deferred in its harvest, this work done on the human conscience is abiding, and is to be our stand-by whenever self-interest, in any group of men, points to war, as assuredly, to a group, it has done and will again. CHAPTER XIX AN UNDERSTANDING WITH GERMANY There is urgent need to revise entirely our relations with Germany, which, in spite of many friendly visits on both sides, were never so perilous as they are now. It is well that the Government shoiild understand that a war with Germany, or the serious risk of one, would be a calamity greater in magni- tude than, indeed of a different order of magnitude from, the postponement of Irish Home Rule, Welsh DisestabUshment, Adult Suffrage, a Reformed House of Lords, an Education and a Licensing Bill — to count up all the possible benefits we may obtain at home from this Government. For we are dragged into policies of shameful degradation by our alliance, for such it appears to be, with France and Russia. Never did England, to the best of my memory, descend so low as she has done in permitting her ally to rob Persia of her freedom. We 204 AN UNDERSTANDING WITH GERMANY 205 have abandoned a friend in her need, and with that our now only historic humanity and chivalry, risking as well the aJlegiance of the Indian Mussulmans and putting Lancashire trade with Northern Persia under a prohibitive Russian tariff. We drink this cup of humiliation to keep the Russian Government, little better as it is than organized brigandage to its own people as well as abroad, from an approach to Germany. Why, then, this initial jealousy of the kindred nation oi the Germans ? It dates from the building of the German Navy, and was started by that policy. What is the diplomacy in which Germans wished to figure, and in which they complain that England has steadily opposed them ? It was nothing magnificent, nothing dynastic, nothing European. We have not a single conflicting interest in the domain of high politics. It is such things as the Bagdad Railway, railways in China, mining con- cessions in Morocco, the right to buy or otherwise take badly owned or weakly owned lands in Africa, to acquire (say) Mozambique or Angola, if Portugal can be bought or pushed out. There is nothing but com- 2o6 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE mercial rivalry between us. The Germans want concessions from dusky potentates in the tropics, "places in the sun." Their financiers, when talking of patriotism and a fleet, are thinking of cotton fields and rubber plantations. This rivalry is childish and preposterous for two plain reasons. The first is that we do not want more territory or more concessions. " We want to develop those we have." We urgently need pause properly to organise, what we sometimes call to civilize and sometimes to exploit, the vast regions acquired in the Eg5rptian and th^e Boer Wars, and in the period between them. The second is that the more of other territories Germany acquires or develops, the better for us. All this trade jealousy against a nation which maintains the " open door," is simple ignorance or forgetfulness of ele- mentary economic facts. Trade does not follow the flag, it follows cheapness and quality. Supppse Germany were substituted for Portugal along the coast of Angola in Western Africa ; and that, in consequence, instead of stagnation existing, rubber and cotton were produced by German planters and German capital. Those goods will go to AN UNDERSTANDING WITH GERMANY 207 where there is an effective demand for them. The cotton will be Ijirgely used in Lancashire, some of the rubber will make EngUsh tyres. To pay for these, EngHsh manufactures will go out ; perhaps to Angola, perhaps to Germany, or to somewhere else in the process of inter- national many-staged exchange. But trade in always means trade out ; each transaction benefits both parties, and Britain and all the world stand to gain, as well as Germany. If German ships were in every sea, and Geiman colonies dotted Africa, and German traders did good business in China, it would pay us well. Against all this the French colonies block trade by tariffs ; but even then we gain some indirect one-sided profit. If France cannot buy all the colonial products herself, we buy them, and perhaps pay France and France pays the colony under its prefer- ential import system. But to favour the high French and the high Russian tariff S5retems against German colonial free trade is sheer lack of enhghtened self-interest on our part. There is, therefore, no reason in the nature of things why a friendly understanding should not be begun with Germany, on the basis (i) of letting one another alone in foreign 2o8 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE expansion ; (2) of restoring the Concert of Europe in'dealing with questions European; £ind (3) after that there should be Httle diffi- culty in achieving a voluntary stay of the race in armaments. These three objects all have doubtless their difficulties and compHcations ; but since there is no ultimate conffict of interests or principles, it should not be beyond the power of goodwill to work out an agreement. With regard to the cessation of our niinous but unsuccessful attempts to outspend each other in navies, we have something to offer. We can declare the immunity of private commerce in time of war. Our people and our commercial classes particularly, would gain untold security ; and the Germans would find it stiU more welcome. With this granted, the longed-for understanding about " Dreadnoughts " would come of itself. Probably it had better be an unofficial or a merely diplomatic arrangement rather than a binding contract in terms of definite totals of expenditure, difficult for a foreigner to supervise, and galling to submit to foreign supervision. There are some of our people, who have been tmder the daily drip-drop of the sensa- AN UNDERSTANDING WITH GERMANY 209 tional Press, who would consider all this a walk into the spider's parlour by a simple minded fly. They believe that Germans are brutal and aggressive, definitely aiming at an absorption of British dominions, that the aggressions and consolidations by which German unity was effected between 1864 and 1871 are hkely to be repeated in the founding of a world empire in the next decade. These Enghshmen are living fifty years too late. Home unity is an essential, empire an evil luxury. The Germans are people very hke ourselves ; busy, keen, intelligent, poor for the most part. Can we understand such a people as ourselves entering upon a long world-war which would throw them into poverty and unemployment, and kiU and maim them by the hundred thousand ? At one end of society the Emperor is the best friend we have in Germany. Prof. Delbriick says that now he is our only friend. When Mr. Churchill's speech on the Naval Esti- mates in March, 1912, produced a ferment of wrath in the German Press, a semi-official paragraph in the Cologne Gazette next day dissipated it. At the other end the working class party of Social Democrats is strong enough to keep 14 2IO EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE the upper class from any such chimerical course. The business classes would for the most part add their powerful hostihty to war. The dangerous classes are the professional men and the landed gentry, besides those who make armaments and those who hold commissions. The consequences of a war with Germany have only been realized as yet by few. Suppose that the fleet fails in completely clearing the seas, and our food is partly held up, scarcity would fall upon the poor in less than a month, and upon every one in two months or three. Supposing, however, that after a brief period of uncertainty, the German fleet was sunk or "bottled," and imports were but Uttle obstructed, prices would stiU be high. Insurance premiums, risks, speculative profits, and large demands for the forces would com- bine to cause deamess. Then it is presumed that our trade with Germany would cease. It would undoubtedly with our present naval practice. If, however, private cargoes were immune, I am not sure that the interests of both parties would not lead trade to go on much as before, and payments to be met. If not, however, and over fifty miUions of trade out, and sixty miUions in were cut off, AN UNDERSTANDING WITH GERMANY 211 there would be financial houses in bankruptcy whose German payments had failed, and miUs in the north lying idle. How far insolvency would spread, and how soon panic would begin, are matters not to be rigidly prophesied. If the war continued long, as it might, seeing that the tiger and the crocodile would find it hard to come to grips, panic would come in the end. The sequence to be feared would be a few large bank failures, the legal issue of unlimited paper after a suspension of the Bank Charter Act, a depre- ciated currency, demands for money by the Government, Consols issued at 65, securities thrown into the market by the banks, a general fall in stocks, and finally if panic arose there might even have to be a general legalized stoppage or " moratorium " of all banks, and with that a stoppage in the blood of the circulatory system of trade, no wages or salaries, a stoppage of railways, and with the collapse of credit, that of society and the civihzation which depends upon it. These terrible sequences are always possibiUties, and in the long run a stronger word might be used, if the war lasted some years. We have had in Western Europe no such great war since credit assumed its present 212 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE dimensions, so we do not know for certain what will happen. The effect we are sure of would be to throw away the progress and the earnings of many generations, erect once more crude standards of force, and put back civilization and social reform indefinitely. Meanwhile, probably, neither nation could finally and fully defeat the other. The masses would force peace on the Governments with nothing really settled. A bitter and hateful memory would keep alive a more fixed standing feud than we have now. The forces making for peace in the world are so strong that if we can get past the present period of tension there may be a durable peace in Europe, and no more great wars at all. To sum up : An early understanding in a thoroughly cordial spirit is needed with Germany, against whom no political grievance exists, and no war has by us ever been waged. This should be made with or without the assistance of Sir Edward Grey. PubUc resentment and suspicion must be allayed, lest any trifling error of temper should land us in an indecisive war, destructive of all that we value as a nation. The present system of rival alliances has led us into wickedness and AN UNDERSTANDING WITH GERMANY 213 inhumanity in Persia, neglect of the security of the Indian frontier, and of the allegiance of the most powerful of our Indian subjects, and the setting up of tariffs hostile to our- selves when Russia has absorbed Northern Persia. In spite of the Anglo- Japanese treaty guaranteeing the integrity of China, Russia is absorbing the Chinese province of Northern Mongolia, and it is announced, will there re-introduce the growth of the opium poppy, and thus checkmate the wonderful Chinese reform. If true, nothing could be more wicked than this. The jealousy at the root of it all is an economic fallacy, forgetting that all trade is helpful to other trade, and that international trade is barter. The immunity of private commerce would safeguard both nations, cripple war, and begin the needed friendly intercourse with a people very like ourselves. Compared with this great object, party ties and respect for the personal character of a minister are of little weight. What Europe longs for is an original states- man with the mind of Bright, a character formed by the combination of a great ideal with practical wisdom, who will dare, as Gladstone dared over the Alabama arbitration, 214 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE to go a little beyond public opinion, to put a stop to a process which, while it admittedly leaves us no more secure, is, as Sir Edward Grey himself described it, " bleeding Us to death in time of peace." It appears as though no member of the present Government has been found able to step into the succession of the two great men I have named. The Liberal Government lets " I dare not " wait upon " I would " ; it has its Imperialist wing, There is a call for a great man, freed from personal ambition, caring not for a career, but highly placed where his work will tell. Nothing could be better than the following paragraph : — " The spectacle of naval armaments which the nations of Christendom afford at the present time will, no doubt; excite the curiosity and wonder of future generations. Here are seen all the polite peoples of the world, as if moved by a spontaneous impulse, devoting every year an immense and ever-growing proportion of their wealth and manhood, and of their scientific knowledge, to the construc- tion of gigantic military machinery which is obsolescent as soon as it is created, which falls to pieces almost as soon as put together, which has to be continually renewed and AN UNDERSTANDING WITH GERMANY 215 replenished upon an ever larger scale, which drains the coffers of every Government, which flouts the needs of every people, which is intended to be the means of protection against dangers which have perhaps no other origin than in the mutual fears and suspicions of men. The most hopeful interpretation which can be placed upon this strange spectacle is that naval and mihtary rivalries are the modem substitutes for what in eariier ages would have been actual war, and just as credit transactions have largely superseded cash payments, so the jealousies of nations are sometimes decided by the mere possession of war power without the necessity iot its actual employment. If that were true, the grand folly of the twentieth century may be found to wear a less unamiable aspect. Still we can not conceal from ourselves that we Uve in an age of incipient violence and deep-seated unrest. The utihty of war even to the victor may in most cases be an illusion. Certainly all wars would be destitute of any possible advantage to the British Empire." But this is taken from a speech by Mr. Winston Churchill in March, 1912, in which he follows the old bitter round of rivalry, 2i6 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE and asks for forty-four millions for the Navy. If some word coiild come from Germany, clenching his offer of a year's hoUday from ship-building, if some such mutual adjustment arose out of the Haldane negotiations, how a great shout of Uberation would arise from the masses of Europe, broken only by the gloom of the armament firms. A joint circular to this effect, sent round from Great Britain and Germany to the other naval powers, now building smaller fleets, would be sure to receive from them a joyous welcome. After a year of such peace, most of the nations would ask for a second. They are, as a rule, piUng up debt to pay for the ships. Germany only maintains her armaments by " loans and muddle," and each attempt by a strong and honest financier to raise the money by taxation is defeated by his fall. The Socialists will not tax food, the Centre and the Right will not agree to an inheritance tax. The temptation to be wise and strong, and have done with the waste is really very great. Nor is history without successful records of disarmament. No frontier in the world is so secure as the 3,000 miles between Canada and the United States. That was once AN UNDERSTANDING WITH GERMANY 217 guarded by a hundred forts, and by warships on the Great Lakes; but by the treaties of 1814-1817, at the conclusion of our last war with America, it was decided to disarm the frontier on both sides. If this wise solution had not been found, where now would be the wealth of Canada and America, or their peace of mind ? It is within recent memory that Chile and Argentina adopted the same policy on their frontier, stopped their frontier wars, and raised their joint statue to Peace on the Andes. The reaUy safe and prosperous nations of Europe, the nations whose civilization is stepping ahead, who can spend money on schools and on Social Reform, are the warless lands of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and Switzerland. Their security is guaranteed by the moral force of treaties, backed up, no doubt, by the potentiahty of force. So, indeed, would be, in the piresent age of the world, the moral force of any agree- ment England and Germany might make. We are speaking of immediate practical rehef , not of an ultimate ideal of trust and peace throughout the world. Nevertheless, if armaments are to battles what credit is to cash, the parallel will not be 2i8 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE complete till moral credit is added to barracks and fleets, as it is added in commerce to the gold reserve in the Bank of England, con- fidence in one another already rules the relations between the United Kingdom and the United States. We are approaching it with Italy, Portugal, Scandinavia, Belgium, HoUand and France. Germany is worthy that we should do this to her, and we are worthy that she should do it to us. We are at present offering to Germany the honour of being first to make a definite offer. In so doing we have dropped our claim to any moral pre-eminence we may have thought we had. Surely, however, such a movement in England is really easier than it would be in Germany. We are less impregnated with military ideas than they are. I am well aware that one overture of ours in that direc- tion has been unsuccessful, but now that confidential communications are being made, surely the cleverness of diplomacy, if it exists, could open the door again. We are strong enough, and we can, if necessary, build quickly enough, to be free from the accusation of fear. The following is the relative strength of our fleets in 1911, taken from the Navy AN UNDERSTANDING WITH GERMANY 219 The (small) League Annual by the Editor Economist: — Britain. Germany. Dreadnoughts 12 to 5 Prae-dreadnoughts 40 (large) to 20 Armoured Cruisers 34 to 9 Smaller Cruisers 96 to 41 First Class Des- troyers 61 to 18 Submarines 83 to 36 CHAPTER XX FINAL Can there ever be any war in the future which either self-interest or high principle can approve ? Any new type or family of wars ? We have toiled and suffered through the wars for survival, for barbaric empire and consolidation of nations, the slave-wars for dynasties. King's games with their subjects' lives, the spiritual slave wars for religion, when the priests did similarly after their kind, and now we are seeing through the real character of the capitalists' wars, the trade wars of the present time. What conflicts are left ? The conflict between capital and labour is left. Ever richer are the lords of trade, apparently stationary is just now the opera- tive. According to figures collected by Mr. Chiozza Money and others his real wages are at present falling. While general retail prices have risen about eighteen per cent., wages FINAL 221 have only increased twelve and a half per cent., in the last fifteen years, among certain selected trades, protected by unions. There is a general belief that in unskilled, unprotected trades nomined wages have increased very httle indeed in spite of raised prices. Mean- time the average income of the income-tax payer has increased by thirty-four per cent., from which some slight deduction may be made for more pertinacious collection. Things are moving towards a final conflict for bread and recreation. Panem et cir censes again, indeed. But there seems to me to be httle danger that these battles will be fought by bullets and shell. There are more effective ways. We have passed already beyond the possibihty of bringing cannon to quench a strike, or burning a colliery village. The combatants are better trained than that. Both are adepts at "peaceful" fighting. Both appeal to independent popular sym- pathy, and receive much. Moreover the parties are not clearly divisible. There are many small working employers. And the shop-keeping, business, and professional classes and countless wielders of office pens, would be able to stop civil war. Nor can nationahty so die out that an army of 222 EVOLUTION AND EMPIRE French or German workmen would be welcomed by their English comrades, and take part with them in an attack on factories or on the Houses of Parhament. I conclude that when we have removed the capitaUst adventurer from the saddle the war horse will be ridden no longer. A BOOK OF STIMULATING THOUGHT. Men of the Spirit. By DUGALD MACFADYEN. Demy 8vo. 200 pages. 2/6 net. Postage 4d. HOW has the spirit of Christianity ex- pressed itself in the world since the days of its Founder ? This is the question which Mr. Macfadyen seeks to answer, and in reading this illuminating book we find ourselves witnesses of another chapter of the great book of progress by evolution. It is a fascinating subject, and the author has the gift of carrying his reader with him to the last act of the great drama as seen in the social conscience of the people. The Manchester Guardian says : " The facts are set out with a keen insight, a trenchancy of phrase and a definiteness of criticism which must have made them stimulating to the original hearers." The Baptist Times says : " The style is clear and lively ; at times epigrammatic. There are not a few fine thoughts finely and tersely expressed." Headley Bros., Bishopsgate, London, E.C. The Religion of Life Series. Edited by RUFUS M. JONES, M.A., D.Litt. The purpose of this series is to present in small compass and convenient form some of the living thoughts of the Christian Mystics of all ages. Special attention is given to the contributions of Quaker writers. Many of the passages are noteworthy for the beauty of their thought and the reality of the faith they give evidence of. The first five volumes are ready. 1. A Little Book of Selections fpom the Children of the Light. By Rufus M. Jones, M.A., D.Litt. 2. Isaac Penlngton : Selections fpom his Writings and Letters. By Henry Bryan Binns. 3. William Penn : Selections from his Writings. By Isaac Sharfless. 4. Sir Thomas Browne : Selections from his Writings. By Lewis Townsend. 5. Clement of Alexandria : Selections from his Writings. By Rufus M. Jones, M.A., D.Litt. Cloth gilt, Is. 6d. net. Leather gilt, 2s, 6d. net. Postage 2d. Headley Bros., Bishopsgate, London, E.G. 1. I I I •') ) I I