Britain at Bay - Spenser Wilkinson
III.
FORCE AND RIGHT
"Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and
a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but
whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other
also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy
coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee
to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and
from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. Ye have
heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and
hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your enemies."
(Matt. v. 38-44).
If there are any among us who adopt these words as the governing rule of
their lives they will certainly cause no difficulty to the State in its
military policy whatever that may be, and will find their natural places
even in time of war to the public good. If the whole population were of
their way of thinking and acting there would be no need to discuss war.
An invader would not be resisted. His troops would be hospitably
entertained and treated with affection. No opposition would be made to
the change of Government which he would introduce, and the taxes which
he imposed would be cheerfully paid. But there would be no State, except
that created by the invader; and the problem of conduct for those
living the life described would arise when the State so set up issued
its ordinances requiring every able-bodied man to become a competent
soldier.
There are those who believe, or fancy they believe, that the words I
have quoted involve the principle that the use of force or of violence
between man and man, or between nation and nation, is wicked. To the man
who thinks it right to submit to any violence or to be killed rather
than to use violence in resistance, I have no reply to make. The world
cannot conquer him and fear has no hold upon him. But even he can carry
out his doctrine only to the extent of allowing himself to be
ill-treated, as I will now convince him. Many years ago the people of
South Lancashire were horrified by the facts reported in a trial for
murder. In a village on the outskirts of Bolton lived a young woman,
much liked and respected as a teacher in one of the Board schools. On
her way home from school she was accustomed to follow a footpath through
a lonely wood, and here one evening her body was found. She had been
strangled by a ruffian who had thought in this lonely place to have his
wicked will of her. She had resisted successfully and he had killed her
in the struggle. Fortunately the murderer was caught and the facts
ascertained from circumstantial evidence were confirmed by his
confession. Now, the question I have to ask of the man who takes his
stand on the passage I have quoted from the Gospel is: "What would have
been your duty if you had been walking through that wood and come upon
the girl struggling with the man who killed her?" This is a crucial
instance which, I submit, utterly destroys the doctrine that the use of
violence is in itself wrong. The right or wrong is not in the employment
of force but simply in the purpose for which it is used. What the case
establishes, I think, is that to use violence in resistance to violent
wrong is not only right but necessary.
The employment of force for the maintenance of right is the foundation
of all civilised human life, for it is the fundamental function of the
State, and apart from the State there is no civilisation, no life worth
living. The first business of the State is to protect the community
against violent interference from outside. This it does by requiring
from its subjects whatever personal service and whatever sacrifice of
property and of time may be necessary; and resistance to these demands,
as well as to any injunctions whatever laid by the State upon its
subjects, is unconditionally suppressed by force. The mark of the State
is sovereignty, or the identification of force and right, and the
measure of the perfection of the State is furnished by the completeness
of this identification. In the present condition of English political
thought it may be worth while to dwell for a few moments upon the
beneficent nature of this dual action of the State.
Within its jurisdiction the State maintains order and law and in this
way makes life worth living for its subjects. Order and law are the
necessary conditions of men's normal activities, of their industry, of
their ownership of whatever the State allows them to possess--for
outside of the State there is no ownership--of their leisure and of
their freedom to enjoy it. The State is even the basis of men's
characters, for it sets up and establishes a minimum standard of
conduct. Certain acts are defined as unlawful and punished as crimes.
Other acts, though not criminal, are yet so far subject to the
disapproval of the courts that the man who does them may have to
compensate those who suffer injury or damage in consequence of them.
These standards have a dual origin, in legislation and precedent.
Legislation is a formal expression of the agreement of the community
upon the definition of crimes, and common law has been produced by the
decisions of the courts in actions between man and man. Every case tried
in a civil court is a conflict between two parties, a struggle for
justice, the judgment being justice applied to the particular case. The
growth of English law has been through an endless series of conflicts,
and the law of to-day may be described as a line passing through a
series of points representing an infinite number of judgments, each the
decision of a conflict in court. For seven hundred years, with hardly an
interruption, every judgment of a court has been sustained by the force
of the State. The law thus produced, expressed in legislation and
interpreted by the courts, is the foundation of all English conduct and
character. Upon the basis thus laid there takes place a perpetual
evolution of higher standards. In the intercourse of a settled and
undisturbed community and of the many societies which it contains, arise
a number of standards of behaviour which each man catches as it were by
infection from the persons with whom he habitually associates and to
which he is obliged to conform, because if his conduct falls below them
his companions will have nothing to do with him. Every class of society
has its notions of what constitutes proper conduct and constrains its
members to carry on their lives, so far as they are open to inspection,
according to these notions. The standards tend constantly to improve.
Men form an ideal of behaviour by observing the conduct of the best of
their class, and in proportion as this ideal gains acceptance, find
themselves driven to adopt it for fear of the social ostracism which is
the modern equivalent of excommunication. Little by little what was at
first a rarely attained ideal becomes a part of good manners. It
established itself as custom and finally becomes part of the law.
Thus the State, in co-operation with the whole community, becomes the
educator of its people. Standards of conduct are formed slowly in the
best minds and exist at first merely in what Plato would have called
"the intellectual sphere," or in what would have been called at a later
date in Palestine the "kingdom of heaven." But the strongest impulse of
mankind is to realise its ideals. Its fervent prayer, which once uttered
can never cease, is "on earth as it is in heaven," and the ideals
developed in man's spiritual life gradually take shape in laws and
become prohibitions and injunctions backed by the forces of the State.
The State, however, is not an abstraction. For English people it means
the United Kingdom; and if an Englishman wants to realise what he owes
to his country let him look back through its history and see how all
that he values in the character of the men he most admires and all that
is best in himself has gradually been created and realised through the
ceaseless effort of his forefathers, carried on continuously from the
time when the first Englishman crossed the North Sea until the present
day. Other nations have their types of conduct, perhaps as good as our
own, but Englishmen value, and rightly value, the ideals particularly
associated with the life of their own country. Perhaps two of the
commonest expressions convey peculiarly English views of character. We
talk of "fair play" as the essence of just dealing between man and man.
It is a conception we have developed from the national games. We
describe ideal conduct as that of a gentleman. It is a condensation of
the best part of English history, and a search for a definition of the
function of Great Britain in the moral economy of the world will hardly
find a better answer than that it is to stamp upon every subject of the
King the character implied in these two expressions. Suppose the British
State to be overthrown or to drop from its place among the great Powers
of the world, these ideals of character would be discredited and their
place would be taken by others.
The justification of the constraint exercised by the State upon its own
citizens is the necessity for security, the obligation of self-defence,
which arises from the fact that outside the State there are other
States, each endowed like itself with sovereignty, each of them
maintaining by force its conception of right. The power of the State
over its own subjects is thus in the last resort a consequence of the
existence of other States. Upon the competition between them rests the
order of the world. It is a competition extending to every sphere of
life and in its acute form takes the shape of war, a struggle for
existence, for the mastery or for right.
IV.
ARBITRATION AND DISARMAMENT
To some people the place of war in the economy of nations appears to be
unsatisfactory. They think war wicked and a world where it exists out of
joint. Accordingly they devote themselves to suggestions for the
abolition of war and for the discovery of some substitute for it. Two
theories are common; the first, that arbitration can in every case be a
substitute for war, the second that the hopes of peace would be
increased by some general agreement for disarmament.
The idea of those who regard arbitration as a universal substitute for
war appears to be that the relations between States can be put upon a
basis resembling that of the relations between citizens in a settled and
civilised country like our own. In Great Britain we are accustomed to a
variety of means for settling disagreements between persons. There are
the law courts, there are the cases in which recourse is had, with the
sanction of the law courts, to the inquiry and decision of an
arbitrator, and in all our sports we are accustomed to the presence of
an umpire whose duty it is impartially to see that the rules of the
game are observed and immediately to decide all points that might
otherwise be doubtful.
The work of an umpire who sees that the rules of the game are observed
is based upon the consent of the players of both sides. Without that
consent there could be no game, and the consent will be found to be
based upon the fact that all the players are brought up with similar
traditions and with like views of the nature of the game. Where this
unity does not exist, difficulties constantly arise, as is notoriously
the case in international sports. The attempt has been made, with
constantly increasing success, to mitigate the evils of war by the
creation of institutions in some way analogous to that of the umpire in
a game. The Declaration of London, recently published, is an agreement
between the principal Powers to accept a series of rules concerning
maritime war, to be administered by an International Prize Court.
The function of an arbitrator, usually to decide questions of fact and
to assess compensation for inconvenience, most commonly the
inconvenience occasioned to a private person by some necessary act of
the State, also rests upon the consent of the parties, though in this
case the consent is usually imposed upon them by the State through some
legislative enactment or through the decision of a court. The action of
a court of law, on the other hand, does not rest upon the consent of the
parties. In a civil action the defendant may be and very often is
unwilling to take any part in the proceedings. But he has no choice,
and, whether he likes it or not, is bound by the decision of the court.
For the court is the State acting in its judicial capacity with a view
to insure that justice shall be done. The plaintiff alleges that the
defendant has done him some wrong either by breach of contract or
otherwise, and the verdict or judgment determines whether or not this is
the case, and, if it is, what compensation is due. The judgment once
given, the whole power of the State will be used to secure its
execution.
The business of a criminal court is the punishment of offenders whom it
is the function of the State to discover, to bring to trial, and, when
convicted, to punish. The prisoner's consent is not asked, and the
judgment of the court is supported by the whole power of the State.
In the international sphere there is no parallel to the action either of
a civil or of a criminal court. Civil and criminal jurisdiction are
attributes of sovereignty, and over two independent States there is no
sovereign power. If, therefore, it is desired to institute between two
States a situation analogous to that by which the subjects of a single
Government are amenable to judicial tribunals, the proper way is to
bring the two States under one sovereignty. This can be effected, and is
constantly effected, by one of two methods. Either the two States
federate and form a united State, or one of them conquers and annexes
the other. The former process has been seen in modern times in the
formation of the United States of America: the latter formed the
substance of the history of civilisation during the first three
centuries before Christ, when the Roman State successively conquered,
annexed, and absorbed all the other then existing States surrounding the
basin of the Mediterranean.
The history of no State justifies the belief that order and justice can
successfully be maintained merely by the action of umpires and of
arbitrators. Every State worth the name has had to rely upon civil and
criminal courts and upon law enforced by its authority, that is, upon a
series of principles of right expressed in legislation and upon an
organisation of force for the purpose of carrying those principles into
practical effect.
It appears, then, that so far from the experience of States justifying
the view that it is wrong to employ force, the truth is that right or
law, unless supported by force, is ineffective, that the objection in
principle to any use of force involves anarchy, or the cessation of the
State, and that the wish to substitute judicial tribunals for war as a
means of settling disputes between State and State is a wish to
amalgamate under a single Government all those States which are to
benefit by the substitution.
The reasonable attitude with regard to arbitration is to accept it
whenever the other side will accept it. But if the adversary refuses
arbitration and insists upon using force, what course is open to any
State but that of resisting force by force?
Arbitration has from the earliest times been preferred in most of those
cases to which it was applicable, that is, in cases in which there was a
basis of common view or common tradition sufficient to make agreement
practicable. But wherever there has been a marked divergence of ideals
or a different standard of right, there has been a tendency for each
side to feel that to submit its conscience or its convictions of right,
its sense of what is most sacred in life, to an outside judgment would
involve a kind of moral suicide. In such cases every nation repudiates
arbitration and prefers to be a martyr, in case of need, to its sense of
justice. It is at least an open question whether the disappearance of
this feeling would be a mark of progress or of degeneration. At any rate
it is practically certain that the period when it will have disappeared
cannot at present be foreseen.
The abolition of war, therefore, involves the abolition of independent
States and their amalgamation into one. There are many who have hoped
for this ideal, expressed by Tennyson when he dreamed of
"The Parliament of man, the Federation of the world."
That it is the ultimate destiny of mankind to be united under a single
Government seems probable enough, but it is rash to assume that that
result will be reached either by a process of peaceful negotiation, or
by the spread of the imperfect methods of modern democratic government.
The German Empire, with its population of sixty millions, educated by
the State, disciplined by the State, relying on the State, and commanded
by the State, is as potent in comparison with the less disciplined and
less organised communities which surround it as was, in the third
century before Christ, the Roman State in comparison with the disunited
multitude of Greek cities, the commercial oligarchy of Carthage, and the
half-civilised tribes of Gaul and Spain. Unless the other States of
Europe can rouse themselves to a discipline as sound and to an
organisation as subtle as those of Prussia and to the perception of a
common purpose in the maintenance of their independence, the union of
Europe under a single Government is more likely to be brought about by
the conquering hand of Germany than by the extension of democratic
institutions and of sentimental good understandings.
Proposals for disarmament stand on an entirely different footing from
proposals to agree to arbitration. The State that disarms renounces to
the extent of its disarmament the power to protect itself. Upon what
other power is it suggested that it should rely? In the last analysis
the suggestion amounts to a proposal for the abolition of the State, or
its abandonment of its claim to represent the right. Those who propose
agreements for disarmament imagine that the suggestion if adopted would
lead to the establishment of peace. Have they considered the natural
history of peace as one of the phenomena of the globe which we inhabit?
The only peace of any value is that between civilised nations. It rests
either upon the absence of dispute between them or upon an equilibrium
of forces. During the last few centuries there has usually been at the
end of a great European war a great European congress which has
regulated for the time being the matters which were in dispute, and the
treaty thus negotiated has remained for a long time the basis of the
relations between the Powers. It is always a compromise, but a
compromise more or less acceptable to all parties, in which they
acquiesce until some change either by growth or decay makes the
conditions irksome. Then comes a moment when one or more of the States
is dissatisfied and wishes for a change. When that has happened the
dissatisfied State attempts to bring about the change which it desires,
but if the forces with which its wish is likely to be opposed are very
great it may long acquiesce in a state of things most distasteful to it.
Let there be a change in the balance of forces and the discontented
State will seize the opportunity, will assert itself, and if resisted
will use its forces to overcome opposition. A proposal for disarmament
must necessarily be based upon the assumption that there is to be no
change in the system, that the _status quo_ is everywhere to be
preserved. This amounts to a guarantee of the decaying and inefficient
States against those which are growing and are more efficient. Such an
arrangement would not tend to promote the welfare of mankind and will
not be accepted by those nations that have confidence in their own
future. That such a proposal should have been announced by a British
Government is evidence not of the strength of Great Britain, not of a
healthy condition of national life, but of inability to appreciate the
changes which have been produced during the last century in the
conditions of Europe and the consequent alteration in Great Britain's
relative position among the great Powers. It was long ago remarked by
the German historian Bernhardi that Great Britain was the first country
in Europe to revive in the modern world the conception of the State. The
feudal conception identified the State with the monarch. The English
revolution of 1688 was an identification of the State with the Nation.
But the nationalisation of the State, of which the example was set in
1688 by Great Britain, was carried out much more thoroughly by France in
the period that followed the revolution of 1789; and in the great
conflict which ensued between France and the European States the
principal continental opponents of France were compelled to follow her
example, and, in a far greater degree than has ever happened in England,
to nationalise the State. It is to that struggle that we must turn if we
are to understand the present condition of Europe and the relations of
Great Britain to the European Powers.
V.
THE NATIONALISATION OF WAR
The transformation of society of which the French Revolution was the
most striking symptom produced a corresponding change in the character
of war.
By the Revolution the French people constituted itself the State, and
the process was accompanied by so much passion and so much violence that
it shortly involved the reconstituted nation in a quarrel with its
neighbours the Germanic Empire and Prussia, which rapidly developed into
a war between France and almost all the rest of Europe. The Revolution
weakened and demoralised the French army and disorganised the navy,
which it deprived of almost all its experienced officers. When the war
began the regular army was supplemented by a great levy of volunteers.
The mixed force thus formed, in spite of early successes, was unable to
stand against the well-disciplined armies of Austria and Prussia, and as
the war continued, while the French troops gained solidity and
experience, their numbers had to be increased by a levy _en masse_ or a
compulsory drafting of all the men of a certain age into the army. In
this way the army and the nation were identified as they had never been
in modern Europe before, and in the fifth year of the war a leader was
found in the person of General Bonaparte, who had imbued himself with
the principles of the art of war, as they had been expounded by the best
strategists of the old French army, and who had thus thought out with
unprecedented lucidity the method of conducting campaigns. His mastery
of the art of generalship was revealed by his success in 1796, and as
the conflict with Europe continued, he became the leader and eventually
the master of France. Under his impulse and guidance the French army,
superior to them in numbers, organisation, and tactical skill, crushed
one after another the more old-fashioned and smaller armies of the great
continental Powers, with the result that the defeated armies, under the
influence of national resentment after disaster, attempted to reorganise
themselves upon the French model. The new Austrian army undertook its
revenge too soon and was defeated in 1809; but the Prussian endeavour
continued and bore fruit, after the French disasters in Russia of 1812,
in the national rising in which Prussia, supported by Russia and Austria
and assisted by the British operations in the Peninsula, overthrew the
French Empire in 1814.
After the definitive peace, deferred by the hundred days, but finally
forced upon France on the field of Waterloo, the Prussian Government
continued to foster the school of war which it had founded in the period
of humiliation. Prussian officers trained in that school tried to learn
the lessons of the long period of war which they had passed through.
What they discovered was that war between nations, as distinct from war
between dynasties or royal houses, was a struggle for existence in which
each adversary risked everything and in which success was to be expected
only from the complete prostration of the enemy. In the long run, they
said to themselves, the only defence consists in striking your adversary
to the ground. That being the case, a nation must go into war, if war
should become inevitable, with the maximum force which it can possibly
produce, represented by its whole manhood of military age, thoroughly
trained, organised, and equipped. The Prussian Government adhered to
these ideas, to which full effect was given in 1866, when the Prussian
army, reorganised in 1860, crushed in ten days the army of Austria, and
in 1870 when, in a month from the first shot fired, it defeated one half
of the French army at Gravelotte and captured the other half at Sedan.
These events proved to all continental nations the necessity of adopting
the system of the nation in arms and giving to their whole male
population, up to the limits of possibility, the training and the
organisation necessary for success in war.