In the industrial and financial stages of economic development new conditions arise which certainly must be taken into account in any theory of war. There are deep changes in national life. The moods of the city become a new force or a new factor in national life. Socialistic ideas and new aspects of nationalism and patriotism appear. There is a spirit of unrest; both pessimistic and optimistic tendencies in society are increased; the motive of power takes new forms, and there is a deep stirring of fundamental feelings and impulses. The crowd instincts, the old hunger motives, are felt beneath the surface of life. This is the effect of industrialism upon the psychic forces of peoples in their collective aspects. Nations also become as wholes more specialized in the industrial life; they are dependent upon one another as never before. All the ancient motives of commerce are stimulated, and the minds of nations revert to the old fears and the old romance connected with the thought of the seas. The growing interdependence of nations produces a peculiar and paradoxical condition. Competition in regard to markets arises, with all the complications and strains that we have seen in recent years. There are new motives of aggression, but at the same time the need and motives for peace are increased. Industries in general thrive best in an era of assured peace. They live upon the wealth and prosperity they themselves create. Intrigue, not force, is their proper weapon. Le Bon (42) says, that the desire to create markets was not the cause of the great war, because expansion went on very well in the time of peace. Germany had no aggressive designs except commercial designs we are told. Mach (95) tells us Germany's whole future, the success of her carefully laid plans for industrial development and supremacy, depended upon continued peace.

That such views of the relation of industry to war are in the main correct can hardly be doubted. Industrial relations create strains among nations, but when as a result of these strains war occurs it must be regarded as a disaster from the point of view of the industrial interests. Industry we say thrives upon the wealth that it creates. A war which destroys half the wealth of the world must be a calamity for all great industries except at the most a very few having peculiar relations to the activities of war.

But there is another aspect of the relations of industry to war. Industrialism as a great institution and movement of modern life becomes in itself a political power. Howe (100) says that with the end of Bismarck's wars personal wars and nationalistic wars came to an end. The old aristocracy of the land merged with the new aristocracy of wealth and this wealth has become the great political power in the world. But this is only a half truth. Industry has become a factor in the foreign relations of nations, and has become a power in politics, but the motives and powers we call political are exceedingly complex, and the interests of business, industry and finance are by no means the whole of or coincident with political interests. There are of course certain industries and financial interests which may even instigate wars, and some writers give them a high place among the causes of war. Especially the makers of munitions and armaments are credited with a baneful influence in the world. With their international understandings, their influence in legislative bodies, their control of newspapers, they are open to the charge of manipulating public sentiment, and bringing influence to bear upon governments. They are accused of equipping small countries and setting them against one another, of deliberately encouraging the race for military and naval supremacy. No one can doubt that their opportunities for trouble-making are many and enticing, but to think of these influences as anything more than the incidental and secondary causes of war seems to be a curious way of understanding history (100).

The inside history of the great financiering projects would no doubt give us some of the main clews to the present diplomatic relations of nations to one another. If we take into account the various intrigues in connection with the building of the Bagdad route, the financing of the Balkan States in their wars, the bargaining of the Powers in Turkey for financial concessions, the great business interests involved in the Russo-Japanese war, the loans to China and all the rest of the financial history of a few decades we should have in hand materials that no one could deny the importance of for an understanding of current history. Diplomacy has had added to its already complex duties the art of securing financial advantages. In general the art of this diplomacy is to secure these advantages without war, but there can be no doubt that financial relations have multiplied the points of contact and strain among peoples, and that these financial relations have become the main occasional causes of wars. Howe (100) thinks that surplus capital is to blame for a great many of the great disasters of modern times—that it destroyed Egyptian independence, led France into Morocco, Germany into Turkey, and into the farther East, embroiled the Balkan States; and that the great war has been a conflict over conflicting interests of Russia, England and Germany in Turkey. Under the guise of expansion of trade this invisible wealth has been exploiting the most vital interests of foreign countries. Veblen would go so far as to say that wars are government-made, that patriotism is exploited by governments in advance of pre-arranged hostilities to produce the spirit of war (97).

If we hold that these economic causes are now the most important causes of wars, it is easy to accept the conclusion that the most fundamental, and even perhaps the sole cause of war is the evil principle of ownership, as is actually maintained by many economists. If men in cliques, and men as individuals did not own privately great parts of the wealth of the world, these conflicts in which wealth and its distribution are the most vital interests would not take place. Many socialists, we know, hold these views, asserting that wars are due solely to industrial competition among nations, and to the fact that industrialism is based upon the wholly wrong principle of private ownership. Hullquist, a socialist, says that wars are likely to become more frequent and more violent as the capitalist system of production approaches its climax. The working classes, the socialists say, who have nothing permanent, are the natural enemies of war; the capitalists, who have much and want more, are constantly placing peace in jeopardy. The protective system of tariff also receives much abuse from these writers. Novicow (71) places the tariff system high among the causes of war. The belief that it is good to sell and bad to buy, he says, is the great trouble maker in the world. This was also the principle of Cobden the great English free-trader of the middle of the last century. The Manchester school of which he was the leader would do away with wars by making the world economically a unit.

Veblen (97) charges the price system with being a fundamental cause of war, and says that it must now come up for radical examination and perhaps modification. The theory of the rights of property and contract which have been taken as axiomatic premises by economic science may itself fail, or at least be thrown open to question. Either the price system will go, or there will be wars between nations in the future as there have been in the past, because of the need of protection of ownership rights, and because of the nationalism these rights create. To some extent these rights of property have been curtailed, Veblen remarks; the old feudalistic rights have in large part been annulled, and the world is at least owned by more people than was once the case. That these changes and readjustments of property rights will be carried still further he thinks there can be no doubt.

Stevens draws similar conclusions about the evil effects of property rights. The great war and all wars, he asserts, are based upon existing social conditions—upon the organization of the family, the school, the state, the church, upon the institution of property, with its corollaries of foreign markets and other industrial relations. Protection of trade, which works in the interest of the owner classes, indirect taxes which fall upon the consumer, the labor system by which, at the present time, the laborer receives but a small share of the profits, but must become when necessary the defender of the interests in which he does not share—all these things we hear being charged vigorously with being the causes of wars, including the recent great conflict. This system is blamed not only for our great international wars, but it is looked upon as the germ of wars to come, internal wars, when international wars shall have ceased, or temporarily have been abated. When, perhaps, the restrictions that assume that the gain of one country is the loss of another have satisfactorily been adjusted, the system that maintains that the capitalist can prosper only at the expense of the laborer will come up for final settlement (97).

All these views, from a psychological point of view, seem to be open to the criticism that they tend to consider the world one-sidedly and by a certain abstraction. They are dealing with a world governed only by economic laws. It is easy to construct these ideal worlds. They are simple and they lend themselves readily to the purposes of a political calculus. Finding economic motives in individual life, in the social life and in politics, and in history it is tempting both to explain the past and plan the future in terms of the entities and principles of economics. But after all it is only when we consider economic motives in their relations to all the motives behind human conduct that we are likely to see the economic motives in history in their true light. Then we shall very much doubt whether property has been in any real sense the cause of wars, or that the abrogation of property rights will be the means of establishing perpetual peace. We shall see that economic motives themselves are but aspects of deeper motives, and involve desire for objectives that are not sought for their material value, and also objectives that are not material at all. The process of development of present human society, so far back as we can see, and as far into the future as we can with any confidence predict, seems to contain as a necessity some form and degree of human slavery. This appears to be inherent in the fact itself of the existence of individual wills, having in any degree individual or personal interests as they must, and the impossibility of devising any social order or government that will give to the individual an ideal freedom, if such a conception be indeed possible at all. We may conjecture at least that in a world in which every trace of an economic motive had been removed, if this were possible, there would still be slavery of some kind, and the inexorable logic of individuality would in the end produce conflict and war.

Nations, like individuals, live, and they pass through certain stages that seem in a general way to be necessary phases of their development. During this process of development certain objects become, one after another, of the most vital concern because they are necessary to the satisfaction of the motives which guide the lives of these nations. But these objects are never so definitely marked off that they become to the exclusion of other motives the causes of wars. The social life is never so simple as this would imply. The past is always involved in the present. One after another certain types of economic objects-become more or less central in the interests of nations, but the minds of nations, like those of individuals, are always influenced by the tradition. Objects are desired with reference to the satisfaction of motives that represent complex and general desires. There are ideal objects as well as material objects; and the material object is often sought because of its possible use as a means of satisfying the desire for ideal values. First food, then land, then commerce, then industry, then wealth itself,—this has been the order in which economic values have become objects for the consciousness of people as groups, and have become involved in and more or less completely represent the relations among peoples we call political. That which is, relatively speaking, an object of necessity at one stage tends to become an ideal or romantic object of the next stage. The relations of economic objects to the desires of nations and to war are complex and not precisely what they may on the surface appear to be. Nations, like individuals, do not know what they need, and they do not even understand clearly what they desire. Their desires are complex: elementary economic motives, political motives, personal motives, the motives of industry and finance, the motive of power and the craving for certain states of consciousness all exist together, and to some extent antagonize one another. The present practical desire is confused by the traditional object. The will of a nation is a composite will, and its history is full of contradictory impulses, and also full of surprises. Nations often think they are fighting for economic reasons when their real motives are plainly to gain military distinction. The reputation is quite as satisfying as any material prosperity gained. There is an illusion and a delusion about it all. All these economic advantages that nations are always seeking have something unreal about them. Nations seek them long after they represent real values. Nations seek colonies when, if business is what they want, it could better be obtained nearer home. Finance looks for advantages overseas, when there are quite as safe investments at home paying quite as large profits. Nations have desires to do great things, not merely to live and prosper.

That is the way these economic problems of war appear, at least when they are examined in relation to other aspects of war and of society. These economic problems are merged into and subordinate to the political or the historical problems, and economic causes of war must be considered with reference to the psychological principles that are at the bottom of all social development.



CHAPTER X

POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL FACTORS

We think of political causes of war mainly as an aspect of the fact that nations desire always certain geographical objectives. These desires are represented in part by the policies of governments and leaders, but we must also think of nations as a whole as having desires, and as being moved by profound purposes. At once the question arises whether we shall think of these political objectives, and the wars the desires for them cause, as essentially the objects and the work of individuals. Do individuals in any real sense create history? This, of course, is a profound question and involves fundamental theories of history. Shall we accept the "great man" theory of history, and say that history is mainly the work of a few who are able to shape events with reference to policies of their own, or shall we think that forces that determine history reside rather in the instincts or desires of the common life of the people?

A psychological study of history inclines us to the belief that the forces that make history are mainly forces that do not exist as conscious purposes and are therefore not essentially political forces. One of the conditions of leadership seems to be that the leader shall seek his own personal ends and realize his own purposes for his country only within the field of the traditional and common objectives which are held by the people as a whole as their purpose in history. These are the materials with which the leader must work. Historically his work may seem decisive. Psychologically it is to be regarded as a complex effect of lawfully related social reactions. The motives of leader and people must have large common factors. The leader holds his power and his prestige by embodying in his own will and representing in his own conscious policies the will of the people and their idea of country as an historic entity. The leader is leader only in so far as he is recognized as representing the will of the "herd." As genius, this leader is manifestly creative, but the true genius in statesmanship is even rarer than genius elsewhere. The great leader is an artist. He must take certain vague or clear ambitions of the people, must accept the nation's historic objectives as the foundations of his policies, and working with these objects and desires make his own page of history. His glory and his prestige depend upon his fulfilling deep desires of his people. The forces with which he deals are plastic, but only within narrow limits. Leadership at best is a fragile thing. However autocratic the power, it is after all dependent upon the good will of the people, and the acceptance of the leader as one who is serving the interests of the people.

When we consider the nature and the objects of the ambitions and desires that the statesman or leader must fulfill, we see why the relations of ruler to people are difficult to understand. Nations do not know with clearness either what they desire or why at heart they desire the objectives that seem of most importance. People give economic and political reasons, but the consciousness of nations is subject to deep moods, and is influenced by remote events and traditions. Nations have generic desires as well as specific ones. They always crave empire; they all desire to have rank. They are always ambitious, jealous and watchful of one another. These general and more or less subconscious desires make their desires for specific objects intense, but they also make them peculiarly irrational. The heroic examples of history, hereditary emotions and the effects of specific events in the history of peoples complicate their politics, and often make rational politics impossible. Nations will not act in their own best interests, because they are governed by irrational motives. In this way certain disparities are often produced between the people and their practical statesmen, but history seems to show us that when these disparities exist in the region of fundamental desires and policies it is the leader who must yield. History seems to show us also that wars, coming in general out of the deeper motives of nations, do not belong to such an extent as is often supposed to the realm of politics. Political causes are often incidental causes and determine the time and place of wars but do not create them. Cramb (66) says that wars persist in spite of their unreason, because there is something transcendental that supports them, and this transcendental purpose is the desire for empire. Powers (75) says that nations fight for tangible things and also for intangible things. The tangible things are existence, commerce, independence, territory; nations also desire objects that are not useful, the worth of which consists in their satisfaction of taste. The ambition to own colonies, Powers thinks, is of this nature. Colonies are quite as much ornamental as they are useful. They convey the feeling and impression of power.

That these deep desires of nations as expressed in the ambition to reach certain geographical objectives are exceedingly strong, often if not always irrational, brutally arrogant and tenacious, the whole course of history teaches us. These desires are indeed the forces behind historical movements. They create politics and policies. War preexists in these irrational purposes. These purposes are charged with emotion, with prejudice, and tradition. It is with these motives that all practical politics must contend, and these motives are the forces that the statesman must use and make more rational.

The purposes of nations are usually if not always we say obscure and deep, existing in the form of ideals and tendencies, and likely to take the form of visions of empire wholly unrealizable. And yet there are always certain perfectly clear objectives upon which all the force of these half understood motives impinge. These objectives may or may not be economically rational or morally justifiable. We always know with certainty certain of these objectives for which any nation will if necessary fight. These objectives have often a long history behind them. They are surrounded by tradition, sincerely and even religiously sought. They are ideal objects which nations feel they have a right to possess. Every nation apparently believes itself the logical possessor of something it does not now hold (99). All peoples have their longings for these possessions, which are their vision of a greater self. These objects are often desired for reasons that are clear enough to all; but they are also often but the symbols of deeper desires. As such, nations act toward them with almost instinctive compulsion.

We may suppose that no great historical event is ever enacted that is not determined more by traditional desires than by conscious politics. A thousand years of strife have provided the motives for the great European war. Memories of time-honored objectives have arisen in the consciousness of many peoples, and these memories cannot be recalled without exciting passions that make all rational politics unavailing. Europe has been fighting over again her battles of the past, and at the moment of the present writing is carrying them into the conference of peace. The plans of statesmen and the intrigues of finance have but little success in contending against these forces. Since the leaders themselves are not free from the prejudices and the compulsion of traditions and the unconscious desires and deep impulses which move their people, they can with but dubious success bring international politics into the sphere of reason. They do not represent merely the selfish desires of their people. They are not merely spokesmen of the interests of class or individual. They are embodiments of the whole history of their nations.

All history, and all the present relations of nations to one another may, of course, be considered in terms of the desires for specific objectives caused by the imperial desires of peoples, these desires themselves being regarded as a sum of motives, the effects of past political relations, and containing both rational and irrational elements. The world is a vast field of stress in which the powers at work are national wills rather than political forces as the projects of rulers and the diplomats. These powers, when fully aroused, are quite beyond the control of statesmen acting in their ordinary capacities, and their final issues no historian ought now to try to predict. History has been full of surprises because of the nature of the forces which create history, and these surprises seem to have been sometimes the greatest for those who were most intimately concerned in making history. Events seldom run smoothly according to well laid plans.

It would not fall within the scope of a psychological study of war to describe or analyze the complex system of strains that exist in the world to-day, and to point out the conditions that led to the great war would be for the most part unnecessary, since they must be obvious to all. The main items in such a study of history, however, may well be recalled to mind. One would need to show the effects of England's irresistible development through several centuries; the struggle for the control of the Mediterranean; Germany's efforts to extend her empire toward the East, and the closing of doors against Germany's advance; Russia's pressure upon the Teutonic peoples, the ancient and terrible dread of Russia on the part of the nations of Western Europe, the shadow under which Turkey, Germany, and England had lived because of the presence of the great Slavic state, with its mysticism, its dynastic ambitions and its great growth force, its need of open ports, and vital interest in the amalgamation of the South Slavic peoples, and the determination to own Constantinople and to succeed to the place of the Turkish Empire. We should need to take into account the long history of the struggle for colonies, the colonial trust of Russia, England and France, the ambitions of France for empire in Africa, the operations of French finance in the Balkans and elsewhere, Austria's aggressive hatred of Serbia, and her effort to prevent the revival of Poland, the conflicts of Germany and Austria with Italy in regard to the AEgean and the Adriatic and their shores, the fierce irredentism of Italy, and the ambitions of Italy that have brought her into conflict with the Teutonic powers and with Turkey, all the conflicting purposes and ambitions of Greece, Roumania, Bulgaria, and Serbia, and the added strain in the Balkans because of the vital interests of all the Great Powers there, and many other conflicts and causes of conflicts. These conflicts we see repeated in kind in the relations of Japan, China and Russia and the other powers interested in the geography of Asia, and in the waters of the Pacific, and once more in the growing strains between the East and the West (99).

Taking our world as we find it, and viewing the nature of nations in the light of their history and of their persistent antagonisms, one might readily believe that the causes of war and war itself will continue into a far future. No war, the pessimist might well argue, will destroy national vitality or neutralize the many points of strain. There may be great coalitions and even Leagues of Nations, but these may only make wars more terrible when they come. The friendship of nations will still be insecure and shifting. The great strategic points of the world will remain. Small countries will continue to be ambitious and jealous of one another. Island countries will still be faced by coasts that contain possibilities of danger. The Constantinoples and the Gibraltars will remain; Suez and Panama will be left, and Verdun will still be something more than a historic memory (99).

That these objectives might all be brought into a permanent state of equilibrium, by some ideal world politics, that nations ought to abandon their ideas of empire or at least see how crude these ideas are, how out of relation to our modern ideas of value, and how out of place in a practical world—all this we can readily understand, but who will expect nations to become very different from what they are now, and who shall say how many imperial eggs there are in the world yet to be hatched? There are many ways of justifying these ambitions—Germany justifies hers by reason, and the researches of her great historians—the Treitschkes and the Mommsens; Russia bases her claims upon her religion and her ethos; Japan brings her divinity and her traditions, her vitality and her intelligence; England offers her justice and above all her proved genius for government as a justification of empire. But after all, these desires for empire lie deeper than proof and reason can go. Poetic, dramatic and religious elements enter into them. There are geniuses among nations. The creative force in a nation is its life force, its essence and its reality. In some sense the desire to be an empire is the whole meaning of a nation, for without the ambition to be supreme, peoples, some of them, would be nothing. It is the vision of empire, however forlorn and hopeless, that keeps many nations alive, perhaps all. Nations seek to express in visible form the evidence of their inner and potential greatness. The historic and time-honored art of empire-building is the only art they know. Whether this is the tragedy of history, the world's fate and the condemnation of it to perpetual warfare—or is but a term in the logic by which nations rise to other and higher forms; or finally is a crime or a mistake which it is within the power of the will of man to abandon or amend—these are problems of the philosophy of history.

Historical Causes

Historical causes of war are in part the sequences of events that the political causes of war produce (political as the causes inherent in the wills of nations), and we must suppose they are mainly this. History, from this point of view, is the working out of the motives or the desires contained in these national wills. The causes of our late war, for example, are to be sought mainly in the wills of the great powers that are concerned in it. Economic forces, the laws of the growth of nations (both psychological and physical laws), the conditions of the geographical distributions of peoples over the earth—all these are involved in the cause of wars. There are also great personages whose actions must to some extent be considered apart from these general laws; these personages contribute factors to the causation of any given war that are not entirely inherent in the laws of growth or the psychology of nations. Shall we say also that there are fortuitous factors, historical causes that are not contained in any logic of human desires? Can we say, perhaps, that these fortuitous causes are indeed the main causes—in a word that wars are not desired, mainly, but are the product, indeed, either of the mere logic of chance, or of a design that transcends human will altogether? Are wars willed, or are they the results of the complex, the illogical and uncontrollable factors of the world's existence and movement? These may not be practical problems, but they are serious problems, since in the end they implicate the whole of philosophy.

What place shall we give, in the laws of history, to the sudden and chance turn of affairs; to the quick shift of the wheels of fortune; to the incidents, the accidents, the mis-judgments of rulers and the slips of the diplomats? Are wars after all a product of the logic of life, or are they mere fortuitous syntheses of events which in their particular combination make a total that is not involved, either as desire or as tendency, in the sum of the particulars that enter into the whole? How completely, in a word, do the interests and purposes of nations determine wars? May we speak of motives that always tend to produce wars, but never seem to will them?

History seems to show us that wars are less directly willed than we have sometimes supposed, and perhaps that there is a large element of chance in them as regards a given war at any time and in any place. War in general is inherent in, or is a natural effect of, the laws of development of nations. Wars as historical events are not completely describable in terms of these laws. It is the old contrast between the historical and the scientific explanation of things that appears here. Nations have deep and vague desires, we say. They want satisfaction of their honor; they crave a dramatic life, even military prestige and glory, but we do not often find war itself definitely willed. The desires of nations, we repeat, tend to be too fundamental to be specific. Their specific desires are indeed and for that reason likely to be contradictory. They desire both war and peace at the same time, and have interests that may be served by both. They live in indecision like individuals. Motives conflict. They hesitate, and doubt, and fear. They shrink from taking the plunge. It requires the sharp and clear event, the chance event, most often, to precipitate them into wars. It is always to-morrow that they are to wage wars. So wars do not usually occur by the rational plans and devices of any man or any historical sequences of men, we may believe, and it is a question whether wars are very often intended in a real sense by any one. Wars occur as crises in events. The strains that produce them are certainly inherent in the relations of nations at all times, and even in the motives of personal politics, but in general these relations as consciously governed relations are in the direction of seeking the greatest advantage with the least show of force. The conditions must all be present, both the match and the powder, before war can take place. There must be a condition of strain, having certain psychological features none of which can be missing, the condition being something complex and not readily analyzable, at any given time. In addition to these strains events must take place which, in all their appearances, are fortuitous.

One might argue from this that the cure of war consists in eternal watchfulness to see that the match does not touch the powder, that we must watch these events that precipitate wars and safeguard peoples from being affected by them. This, of course, is more or less the method of diplomacy; to some minds the league of nations is a device for doing this on a larger and more systematic scale. But when we study history and see what these war-causing incidents are, how numerous and how variable, we can see that diplomacy and statesmanship undertake an impossible task when they try to steer the world along its narrow historical course, with only historical landmarks for guides.

The war that is so vividly in mind now furnishes us with an illustration of the complexity of the causes of war, and allows us to see clearly contrasting views of the causal factors in great wars in general. We see here a closely fitting series of events, each in itself having but little reference to the great crisis, all fitting together, and for want of any one of which, if one takes the purely historical view, we might suppose the war would never have happened, or might have been postponed indefinitely. If Venezelos, to go back no further than that, had remained in Crete and had been content to be an island politician, would not the course of events in the Balkans have been very different? Out of his course came events which no one could have foreseen, but which, without similar actions on the part of individuals producing other links in the chain, would not have taken place. If some diplomat or some foreign office had made a decision slightly different from what was actually decided; if the three emperors had had a little more reliable information about one another; if the statisticians of the German service had computed a little better England's resources, and had put the moral factor into the sum—would the war have happened at all?

In this direction, of course, lies the chaos of history and its madness—and also its philosophy. We may be driven on the one hand to think of all history as a matter of the chance relations of individuals and of detached particular events, having significance as a series but never planned or controlled as a whole, or we may resort to the opposite way of thinking, and say that all of history, in every particular and detail, is divinely planned and prearranged, and each event fits into a rational whole. This, of course, is our final problem of history, we say, as it is the final problem of every question that considers life as concrete events having value precisely as the particular sequence that it is—when we view life historically, in a word, rather than by the methods of the quantitative sciences, or by the genetic methods such as are used mainly in the psychological sciences, and which we may say stand between history and the sciences of matter.



CHAPTER XI

THE SYNTHESIS OF CAUSES

It appears to be no very difficult matter to discover causes of war, and indeed a considerable number of causes. In fact the problem seems to yield an embarrassment of riches, especially if our chief interest happens to be a practical one, and we wish to find the causes of war in order to see how they may be controlled. We might even have discovered all the causes of war and still be as far as before from any real understanding of the cause of war. Unless one can know the relative importance of the causes, and the manner in which the causes combine to produce wars; unless the results give in some way a synthetic view of the causes of war, show dominating causes, or reveal a total cause which is not merely a summation of stimuli, but is both a necessary and a sufficient situation for the production of war; unless we have shown some fundamental cause and movement in the social order, we are still left in search of the cause of war.

We have, indeed, found a number of causes of war, but at the same time the causes have not appeared to exist as separate causes. We are always catching sight of a movement in the development of nations and of the world—of certain fundamental motives, the most basic of all, the most general, being the motive of power. These causes of war do not appear, however, to be of the nature of a chain, giving us the impression that in order to break the habit of war, all we need do is to discover the weakest link in the chain of causes, break the chain there, and so interrupt the whole mechanism of war-making in the world. Above all, although fortuitous events as causes of war must not be overlooked, war is not continually being made anew by the appearance again and again of accidental situations, which are thus to be regarded as the cause of war.

War is, first of all, a natural expression of the social life, resting primarily upon the fact of the existence, universally, of groups of individuals acting as units. But here cause and effect are lost in one another. Conflict cements the group, and the existence of the group, again, is the cause of conflict. War is an aspect of the social solidarity of the group acting under certain conditions, and these conditions are the presence of deep desires that can, in general, be satisfied only by the exertion of force on the part of communities acting as wholes.

These primitive motives and moods of war that we find in the nature of the social group itself, emerge finally in three aspects of the life of nations, and it is these aspects of the life of nations that appear to us as the causes of war. They are not separate and independent features of the social life, and it is in part only for the sake of convenience that they are sharply separated at all. They are all at bottom manifestations of the motive of power that runs through all history, and all the social and individual life. On one side this motive appears in moods and impulses that we called the "intoxication" moods and impulses. National honor was found to be another effect of it. The political motives of war are its concrete expression. These motives all together—all being but phases of a deep, powerful energy and purpose, are the source of the main movement in history out of which war comes. In this movement all the motives of the social life are always present and active at the same time. The good and the bad of national life are phases of a single purpose and are not two contrasted principles or moments. The past is always contained in the present.

War, then, is the result of certain motives which are fundamental to the group life. It is a natural form in which, given a certain degree of intelligence and of complexity of the social life, these motives express themselves. All the motives and forms of expression are present in germ at least from the beginning of the development of the social life. Considering the whole history of war we see that it is a part of a very complex movement in human society, and yet that no war appears to be the final term of a process of inexorable logic. Taking history as a whole, we see that the natural laws involved and the nature of the social consciousness make a state of war from time to time highly probable, but war is not a necessary consequence of any natural law. Nations are self-conscious personalities. Perhaps in the future they may change their ways, abandon voluntarily their desires, subject themselves to discipline, or deliberately invent a plan of international relations that will have the effect of eliminating war from their lives altogether.

It is always dangerous, but at the same time it is always tempting to try to explain national life, or all life and history, in terms of the individual and his experience. Once more, however, we may yield to that temptation and say that the world to-day is in a stage of development which has many traits that show its relation in some very significant ways to certain undeveloped conditions found in individuals, which in fact always appear as phases of the life of all individuals in some degree and form. Nations have acquired a high degree of subjectivism, partly on account of the geographical conditions under which they have lived, and the many barriers between nations due to difference of origin and of language, and the fundamental emotions of fear and jealousy which, as we have seen, play so large a part in the life and conduct of groups. Nations, however close to one another, have remained isolated in spirit; they have lacked both the initiative and the means for becoming definitely related to one another in purposive and sustained activities. Therefore all their relations have remained highly emotional, subjective, influenced by mysticism, filled with hatred and fear, hero worship and illusion. Nations have lacked both the power, and we might say, the organs, for externalizing their spirit. They have dreamed dreams and played plays, and followed their illusions of empire. Even their wars have not, until perhaps now, become wholly real and serious in a measure commensurate with their powers and resources. The present war more than any other, and more than any other event in history, represents an escape on the part of nations from their subjectivism, and a beginning, it may be, of the realization of a more mature, or shall we say more normal conception of the world. Nations have played at being great and have really produced but little true greatness. Now, let us say, their dream is over. We see that these nations can no longer play. Their wooden weapons have at last been turned to steel. They can fight no longer indeed without destroying one another. They must now live in practical and moral relations, give up their bright dreams of empire after the old heroic order, and be content to be imperial (if they are born to be imperial) by performing distinguished service in the world, by their own genius of leadership. There is work in the world for nations to do; there are empires of the spirit, it may be, greater than have yet been dreamed of in the nations' childish philosophies of life. The consciousness of nations contains, it may be, unsuspected powers, suppressed in the past by narrow nationalism, by fear, habit and convention. These powers may now, if ever, blossom forth; they have been wasted too long in patriotic feeling and in idle dreamery. They must now show what they can do in a practical world that will have no more of mere assertions.

The world stands to-day balanced between two ideals. Human spirit, the spirit of nations, is a free and plastic force; it is also a sum of motives and desires; but most fundamentally of all it is a growing, living, creative and personal spirit. It still clings to its luxuries of feeling, to its provincial life, it is still fascinated by its beautiful romance of empire. On the other hand we see the stirring of a new idea. A new world arises, less dramatic in its appeal than the old world, but a world appealing by its practical problems both to the will and to the intellect. Shall we yield to the fascination of the old romance and go back to our hero worship; or shall we be inspired now by this vision of a new and greater social order, create out of our own powers of imagination the forms this world must assume if it is to appeal to the deepest feelings of all peoples, and make this new world real by our own intelligence and determination?

We stand to-day at a dramatic moment in history; a more dramatic moment than when the victory itself hung in the balance. Perhaps our sense of responsibility for the future is an illusion; perhaps we are driven by an inexorable logic of history, and we do not after all choose what our world shall be. But certainly the sense of human power in the world has never been greater than now nor seemed better justified; nor, if we are deceived, has the reality ever been more out of harmony with the ambitions of man.



PART II

THE EDUCATIONAL FACTOR IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONS



CHAPTER I

EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS OF THE DAY

Education, like all other institutions, has been charged, we know, with having contributed its share to the causes of the war. The Prussian school system, we have been told, was mainly a school of war; all the emotions and ideas necessary to produce morbid nationalism, distorted views of history, and a belief in and a love of war were there fostered and deliberately cultivated. There is, of course, some truth in this; it is a truth that is deceiving, however, if we regard it as at all indicating the true relation between education and practical affairs. If the school was a factor in the late war, such a creative effect of education appears to be rare in history. In general it is the negative effect of the school that is most conspicuous. It is what the school has not done to prevent war, what it has failed to do in not bringing nations out of their perverted nationalism into a life of more practical relationship with one another that really best characterizes the school.

It is difficult or impossible for us now, of course, to perceive what the war has done—in what way, all in all, the future will be different from the past. It is very easy and natural to look at everything dramatically now, see revolution everywhere and believe that all institutions are now to be radically changed. Or, going to the other extreme, we may become cynical, and say that, human nature being unchangeable, we shall soon settle down into the old routine and we shall see presently that nothing revolutionizing has transpired. Some will say, and indeed are saying that education must now be entirely remodeled; some will think that education had best go on as before—that nothing has happened certainly to require any new philosophy of the school, or any profound change in its form. We see these two tendencies in many phases of our present situation: in politics, in education, and in the business world.

It is impossible, we may repeat, to make wholly safe judgments now about the future, but still something must in the meantime be done. We must either stand still or go forward—or backward; we must act either with a theory or without one. The school is involved in this necessity. There is a new content of history that we cannot ignore, but must in some way teach. We must say something about the war; current events can hardly be kept out of the school, and to understand current events there must be a wider content of history than we have had in the past. There are new, or at least disturbed, conditions in the industrial and in all the social life, and these conditions cannot fail to have some effect upon the school. The school must adjust itself to them, and it must surely take into account new needs that have arisen. Patriotism may need to be taught now, or taught in a different manner. There is a problem of war and peace, the question of what ideals of national life we are to convey. Internationalism demands some recognition on the part of the school. It seems probable, therefore, and even necessary that a new interest in the function of education will be felt and must be aroused. Must we not indeed now examine once more all the foundations upon which our ideas about education rest? Certainly there will never be a more favorable time, or more reasons for such a task.

It is the impending internationalism, or the idea of internationalism now so vividly put before us all, that most incites new thought about education, and about all the means of controlling the ideas and feelings of the people. We hear much about reconstruction and readjustment, and these terms obviously imply the old ways and the old institutions. But internationalism is something new, having many possibilities; it means new relations among peoples; it opens up new practical fields and new phases of sociology and economics. It is because of this new phase of the social life and social consciousness of man, we might suppose, that education is most likely to be affected in its foundations, so that no mere readjustment will be enough. A new politics and a new science of nations appear, and we cannot fail to see that there is at the present time something decidedly lacking in education; that there is a larger life perhaps for which our present ways of educating children would not sufficiently prepare, and that to prepare for this larger life something more would be needed than an added subject in the curriculum. This is because internationalism is not simply more of something we have already; it is a turn in the road, and a turn which, it can hardly be denied, will finally affect all institutions. If internationalism has come to stay, it will need, and it must have, powerful support from all educational forces. It will need something more than support; education must produce creative habits of mind, which shall make and nourish new relations in the world, and it must make people intelligent, so that they can understand what the new and larger relations mean and what must be accomplished by them.

A casual observation of the educational situation might indicate that education is limited in two ways, so far as being a means of meeting our present needs is concerned. It is lacking in power; it treats children and youths still in a fragmentary way, and the process of learning is somewhat detached from the totality of living. There is a lack of richness of content, and a lack of responsiveness in the school to the stirring life outside the school. If we may say that history now turns a new page, and that society stands at a change of tide, education is also in a peculiar and interesting position. The school may, from now on, if our view of it be at all just, be expected to do one of two things: it may settle down to a relatively successful work, in a limited sphere of usefulness, training children well, especially fitting them to enter into our present social order; or, on the other hand, the school may now become a much greater power, and may seize hold upon fundamental things in life and society under the stimulus of new conditions—find a way to a deeper philosophy, a more consistent theory, attain a more exalted mood and higher purpose, and become a far more potent factor in civilization.

That education will remain unaffected in profound ways by the war, is difficult to believe. One may very readily, as we say, see these impending changes in too dramatic a way, and begin to talk about profound upheavals and ideals that certainly will never be realized (and we ought to guard against this easy idealizing, which leaves human nature out of the reckoning); still we cannot but feel that in some way a new dimension has been added to the social life as a result of the war, and that education, in dealing with this greater society, must itself be raised to a higher power. If we think, educationally speaking, in terms of a world at all, rather than in terms of individuals, or communities, families and nations, we are quickly impressed by the sense of living in a new order of educational problems, and possessing, it may be, a new variety of self-consciousness. Nations in this new view are thought of as parts of a world, as having many external relations, whereas formerly almost all education has had reference at the most to the internal life of nations. Patriotism has been the expression of its most distant horizon.

If we believe that anything new is about to be realized in education, it might seem natural to begin to think about changes from the standpoint and in the terms of the old chapters and topics. We might ask what this or that subject of the curriculum means or must produce that it did not mean and did not produce before; or we might consider the old and the new requirements in the education of the feelings, the will, the intellect; or we might take any other of the educational categories as a basis for a discussion of the philosophy of the school. These programs, however, do not seem to be very inspiring. Would it not be better now to try to distinguish the main fields of life and the main interests in regard to which new questions and new needs have arisen, and see what changes in our educational thought are really demanded by them? On such a plan, internationalism itself would first demand attention, and indeed most of all. In a sense all questions about education must now be considered with reference to internationalism in some way. Then there are the problems already raised during the war and widely discussed, about the teaching of patriotism. Patriotism becomes a new educational problem, a chapter in our theory of education, in which we become conscious of ourselves in a new way, and are aware of our larger field and changed conditions. There are questions, too, about the teaching of the lessons of the war, what we shall think about war in general as a good or an evil, how we shall conceive peace and its values. Changes are taking place in government, and in our ideas of government, and governments are being put to new tests. Political education can hardly fail to be now one of our most serious concerns. Democracy appears to be our great word; the control and education of the democratic forces and the democratic spirit becomes an urgent need. Industry acquires new meanings; we must take up again all the theory of industrial education, for we have seen of late that industry contains possibilities of evil we did not before understand. Social problems arise in changed forms. The new world-idea or world-consciousness becomes an educational problem of the social life. Class difference can never again be ignored as it has been in the past in the schools. Moral, religious and aesthetic education seems to have a different place in the school, just to the extent that all life has become more serious on account of the war. These demands made upon the deepest elements of the psychic life suggest the need once more of a new philosophy of education, or, at the least, a greatly increased recognition and application of the philosophy we already have.

Before the war there was a sense of security and the feeling that our education was adequate to meet all demands. We were proud of our educational system. Our democratic ideals, people said, were safe in the hands of the public school. Industrial education was meeting fairly well the needs of the industrial life. There were no very pressing class problems. The troubles of capital and labor, although always threatening, seemed to demand no educational interference. The religious problem was temporarily not acute. Aesthetic forms had been attended to in the curriculum sufficiently to meet the demands of the day. Hygiene and physical education and individual attention seemed to be making rapid advances. All of these had been influenced by the scientific methods of treating educational questions. On the whole we seemed to have a good school. But now the question must be asked whether this school of yesterday will be adequate to meet the needs of to-morrow; whether new conditions do not call for new thought, new philosophy, new schools. These things of course cannot be had for the asking. We cannot give orders to genius to produce them for us. But a generation that does not hope for them, we might suspect of not having realized what the war has cost. For so great a price paid have we not a right to expect much in return, especially if we are willing to regard the war as a lesson rather than as a debt to us, and bend all our energies to make it count for a better civilization?

We may already see in a general way what the effect of the war is to be upon the mind of the educator. The journals begin to be filled with plans for the participation of the school in the work of reconstruction. There are many suggestions for the improvement of the school. Industrial education, the classics, history, military education, social education are all being discussed. Evidently many minds are at work. Some of them, indeed many of them, are apparently most concerned about what changes we shall make at once in the day's work of the school. Many wish to know what we are going to do now with Latin, or history, and how we can improve the method of teaching in this or that particular. But there are some deeper notes. Thinkers are asking elementary questions about the whole of human nature. They wish to know what the original nature of man is, and what the limits of our control over human nature are. Such books as Hocking's "Human Nature and its Re-making" and Russell's "Principles of Social Reconstruction," which grapple with the basic problems of human life, are signs of the times. No one can yet predict what the final result of the increased intellectual ardor that has come out of the war will be, but it seems certain that that striving of the mind which has made the literature of the war so remarkable a page in the history of the human spirit will continue, and in the field of education as elsewhere in the practical life there will be new vitality and earnestness.



CHAPTER II

INTERNATIONALISM AND THE SCHOOL

If we take a serious and an optimistic view of education as a social institution, and think of it at all as standing in functional relationships with the social life as a whole, we must conclude that internationalism as a new movement and idea, and the school as an institution in which changes in the social order are reflected (but in which also changes in the social order are created) are closely related. Adjustment is a relatively easy matter; it is the conception of the school as a creative factor that challenges our best efforts. Let us think of the school as a workshop in which there must be created the forces by which we must make a desired and an otherwise unrealizable future come to pass and we have a new and inspiring view of education. The school perhaps must do even more than educate the forces; it must help even to create the vision itself by which the future is to be directed. The school becomes, so to speak, the working hypothesis of civilisation. In it the ideas and the desires by which nations live must be made to take shape.

The idea of internationalism implies certain changes in the external relations of nations which, whatever the form internationalism will take on its political side, are not difficult to perceive. These in turn imply internal changes. We might readily outline or psychologically analyze what could be called the mood of internationalism, in order to see its relations to education. It contains a number of factors, more or less related to one another. First, there is a recognition of a world of growing, living historical entities which we call nations; and this recognition implies new understanding and an enrichment of knowledge. Second, there is a change in the consciousness of nations, slow but visible, by which they become more willing to investigate freely and fairly their own place in history, understand their own desires, functions, virtues, faults, the value of their culture and civilization. Without such an attitude all talk of internationalism in any real sense is idle. Third, there is a new and different practical interest. We begin to conceive our world as a world of complex practical relations, and this idea of a practical world is likely to become one of the leading thoughts of the future. Fourth, by extending, so to speak, this idea of a world of practical relations, we idealize a world in which there is a common interest in great international achievements,—a world devoted more than it is now to cooerdinated efforts to accelerate progress, more conscious of the needs of a distant future, perhaps, or even of an ideal of universal efficiency as a means of realizing some one world purpose or many good purposes. This is not now, as it once might have been called, merely an Utopian dream. In some slight degree it is already being accomplished. Fifth, social and moral feelings are widened in scope, and must be still further extended; it is in the form of the democratic spirit, that these feelings must find expression. And this democratic spirit is on one side practical, but it is also something more than the emergence of the common mind; it is the aristocratic idea carried out universally that we look forward to, an enthusiasm for all true values, a mood and activity in which all people participate. Sixth, there is a necessary attitude toward world organization or world government, according to which we think of world government or world organization as a means of accomplishing results which fulfill fundamental desires and purposes of the peoples of the earth; as a growing structure, something to be added to and improved. Seventh, if so general a tendency and demand may be made clear, there is a philosophical mood, which must be made a part of the ideal and the attitude of the future, if that future is to realize even the practical hopes of the world. This philosophical attitude is first of all a way of living comprehensively and more universally, in the world both of facts and of ideas. It means a less provincial and a more widely enriched life for all. It means also an ability to choose the good not according to preconceptions and narrow principles, but according to the wisdom contained in the experience and the selective powers of mankind as a whole. This means a life in which men live, so to speak, more collectively.

These factors of the idea of internationalism, whatever we may think of the possibility of their realization, make in their totality an educational problem: they are specifications, so to speak, laid before us for the making of a new educational product. If we say that it is useless to think of such things, we are saying merely that it is useless to hope to be a factor in conscious evolution, or that the world as a whole has no purpose and no goal. If we believe education has any function in the larger work of the world, educational philosophy must take these things into account, see how they may be created or sustained, and how they can be made to work together to help bring to pass the kind of future men are talking so much about.

I. The Essential World Idea

Our present situation has plainly made it necessary for us to understand the world in which we live far better than we have in the past, and to be willing to make more dispassionate judgments about it. For better or for worse we have entered upon a new stage of history, in which heavy responsibilities fall upon all peoples, and upon none more than upon ourselves. Enlightenment beyond all our present understanding is a necessity. We have been peculiarly isolated and separated from the world's affairs; now we are peculiarly involved. We have, however, one great and unusual advantage. In our case it is ignorance rather than prejudice that we must overcome in ourselves. The world feels this and recognizes the unusual place this gives us. We have no thousand years of continuous strife to distort our historical perspective. We out to be able to be just interpreters of the history of the world. Our universities ought to be the greatest centers of historical learning, and as a people we should feel ourselves called upon above all other people to know the world.

As a nation we pass out of a local into a broader political field. We become citizens of a world, but this world is no mere habitation of individuals who are to be affiliated with one another. It is a world of national wills. Internationalism is first of all a recognition of the legitimate desires of nations. But such a recognition of the legitimate desires of nations cannot be effected merely by spreading abroad good will. A widespread education in the meaning of history must first be made the foundation of international justice in the minds of the people. Current history and future events seen in the light of all history, of history as the science and story of all human experience, become our chief intellectual interest to-day. The war has taught us how little the people in the world know bout the world as a whole. All history thus far has been local history. Everywhere there tends to be the prejudice in some degree that comes from the private need of using history for political ends. Unless we can now put history, real history, at the head of our sciences, the war will have failed of a great result, whatever in particular, in a political way, it may have accomplished.

With such an understanding of what is to be meant by history we say, if that seems an adequate way of expressing it, that the teaching of history becomes one of the fundamental problems of the educational work of the day. It might be better to say that living in the historical spirit is demanded as a way of salvation of the world. However, adding geography and economics to history we have a content that must somehow be taught in the schools. History, as the most concrete science of the actual world in which we live, now seems to have become a new center for the curriculum. Hitherto we have tended to regard history too lightly, as the story of the world; now there must be a deeper view of it. We must have an understanding of the motives and the desires of peoples; history must not only be broader and more comprehensive but more penetrating and psychological. It is the purposes of nations, working themselves out in their history, that we must understand. There must no longer be great unknown places on the earth. Germany, Russia, Japan must not continue to be mysteries. National psychology must be made a part of historical interpretation. This new history must be the means of showing us our world in a more total view than we have thus far had of it, so that we may better discern the continuity, if there be one, behind the detached movements and multiplicity of facts presented by the world's story; for perhaps, in this way, we should better understand what the future is to produce, and what, more important still, it ought to be made to produce.

The need first of all is for a continuation of the interest inspired by the war—an interest showing itself in the form of an universal interest in all history, and an intensive investigation of history. We need now, indeed, the most comprehensive study of the world that has ever been conceived or dreamed of by man. This is the duty of the historians. This new history must show us what nations are at heart, what they desire, what they can do. Such an understanding of nations is, we say, the real beginning of internationalism. It is a necessary foundation for it, if internationalism is to be anything more than a merely practical, prudential or political arrangement among nations. In the school-room eventually, and indeed beginning now, there is demanded a readjustment of interest by which history takes a new and more central place. We must endeavor to give the new generation a world-idea. And upon the nature and clearness of this world-idea much, in the future, will depend.

Such a demand upon the school opens once more, of course, all the old problems of the teaching of history. All the dreary questions of the precise order in which history should be taught—whether backwards or forwards, local first or the reverse, may be brought up if one chooses to do so. But after all, these questions are not very fruitful. What we need most is the historical spirit. We want a dramatic presentation of the world's whole story, by which the true meaning of history is conveyed. The methods of art must be added to the methods of fact. A persuasive use of the materials of history must be made. This means a change finally, perhaps, not only in the methods of teaching history, but in the whole mood and spirit of the school. Methods are likely to adapt themselves to necessity. Certainly the slow methods of presenting facts, sometimes if not generally employed, the tedious lingering upon details, seems wholly out of place. We need a broader outlook in history. Even the young child must have a more comprehensive world-idea, some sense of the whole of the great world in which he lives. This is one of the instances, it may be, in which we must set about breaking up any recapitulatory order, natural to the child, which suggests an advance from the local to the more general and wider knowledge. The universal interests of the day so strongly affect the child, the social consciousness so dominates the individual consciousness that even the natural law of development must to some extent yield if necessary. This social consciousness, the interests and purposes expressed in the child's social environment, present the experience of the adult world dramatically and intensively, exerting as we might say, a creative power upon the mind. That indeed is precisely what the higher teaching, whether in the form of art, or in the form of vivid experience, conveyed though the practical life does everywhere in education.

We do not yet know what history, taught thus dramatically and intimately, under the stimulus of the greatest events of all time might do for the mind of the child or for all the future of the world. We have never had the most favorable conditions for the teaching of universal history. We have been obliged to create interest. History has been taught externally, from the standpoint of a far-away observer. Now history may and must be taught more as it is lived. The world has become more real to every one; this sense of reality of a world of historical entities must be made to persist. We must not go back to our unreal and intellectualized history. The spirit of the nations must be made to live again, so to speak, in the minds of the coming generation. What each nation stands for, its ethos, its personality, must be made clear. Powers says that all governments and all nations are sincere. It is the soul of nations, then, their own realization of themselves that must be made the real object of history. We must go back of the individual and the event at least, to the desires that have made history what it is; we must see why events have taken place, and while sacrificing nothing of our own principles and standards, understand and feel what the principles and the nature of these widely differing nations really are. For the actual teaching of history, it is likely that the story, carried to its highest point of art, will still be the chief method. But pictorial art must be heavily drawn upon, and all the resources of symbolic art, as we pass from the lower to the higher stages in education, or, we had perhaps better say, as we try more and more to convey moods and the spirit of nations and epochs and to appeal to the deep motives in the subconscious life of the individual. Plainly there is much work to do in the investigation and the teaching of history for every grade and department of the educational system, from the government and the higher universities to the teacher of the young child. It is an age of history, a day in which all sciences have as one of their tasks to aid in the understanding of history. In the broader world and the universal life which the idea and the reality of internationalism has opened up to us, all must live in some way, if only in imagination. History is a part of the necessary equipment for that life.

II. The Reeducation of National Desires

The second factor in internationalism is also, on its educational side, related to a knowledge of history. This is the attitude which peoples must take toward their own purposes and ambitions. We must begin to speak of the education of national consciousness. This process of the education of nations must be such as will teach peoples to surrender certain visions most of them have in regard to a future which cannot now be realized. The content of the desires of nations must now be changed. The future of many peoples will depend upon the extent to which they can remain progressive and enthusiastic without the stimulus of imperialistic ambitions.

Considering our own situation in America, it seems plain that we have confronting us a serious educational problem, that of imparting to the rising generation and of acquiring for ourselves, a better understanding of the meaning and place of our country in the world, and a more earnest interest in its functions and its welfare. This requires something more than a teaching of American history. It is time for us to take stock of all our material and all our spiritual possessions. We need perhaps to discover what our ideals really are and what the ideas and the forces are that have made our history what it has been; and what in the future we are likely to do and to be, and ought to do and be. We must question deeply at this time our own soul; we must look to our institutions, our literature and our art for an understanding of ourselves.

This more profound knowledge of ourselves must be made the basis of our especial educational philosophy. Here is the most urgent of all our educational problems. Education is, or should be, a process by which national character is constantly being molded. In the school the nation must learn much that cannot be read in books. It must learn to believe things that cannot be proved, or perhaps even definitely formulated as truth. The soul of the nation must be subjected, in a word, to some kind of spiritual leadership. Constructive statesmanship must be felt as an influence in the school. The problem is really nothing less than that of educating and forming national character. Now that we stand less alone as a nation our character cannot safely be left so much to chance and to the effects of our favorable environment and our original stock of virtues. We cannot continue to be so naive and so unconscious of our country as we have been. What we are and what we must do as a people, we say, ought to be better understood. We should bring these ideals of ours out of the mists of partisan thinking and give them more definite shape, and at the same time translate them into the language of sincere living. National honor ought to be made a clearer idea. We ought at least to be sure it contains the idea of honesty. Such prejudices as our history has encouraged in us must be recognized, and computed in our personal equation. These prejudices we certainly harbor—in regard to our own particular type of government, our culture and education, our freedom and our democracy and our security. Every nation appears to have its own idols, its concealments and its self-deceptions, its belief in its own supremacy and divine mission, and its innocent faith in its own mores. To overcome such narrowness and perversion without introducing worse faults is a difficult problem of education. In either direction there appear to be real dangers. A nation steeped in provincial ways, plunged as we are now into the midst of world politics, has difficulties lying before it compared to which contributing a decisive military power is small. There are dangers in standing aloof from other peoples. But if we surrender too readily our prejudices and homespun ways, and too rapidly absorb influences from without, we shall be no safer, for carried too far, that would mean to lose our mission and our vision. There appears to be, moreover, no safe and easy middle course which we can follow. Our only course seems to be clearly to understand ourselves, rise above our limitations and difficulties, turn our faults into virtues, and make ourselves secure by our own inner worth and power.

Plainly there are difficult problems ahead of the teachers of American history. They must not inculcate suspicion and fear, but they must not present our security in a false light. They must not inspire the war-like spirit and imperialistic ambitions, but they must do nothing to lessen our seriousness of purpose and enthusiasm for the future. They must not teach national vanity, but they must not on the other hand encourage a spirit which is in any way over-critical and cynical or supercilious. There must be political wisdom on the part of the people but not a sophisticated state of mind. These teachers must inspire a wholesome pride, without creating an inflamed sense of honor such as has caused so many wars. They must make clear the virtue and the individuality of our own national life, but in doing this they must not disparage the foreign and give rise to prejudice and antagonism. How to establish us still more firmly in our own essential traits and philosophy of life without making us conceited and closed to good influences from without; how to give us a strong sense of solidarity without the attendant sense of opposition to everything outside the group is a part of our educational work which, in a broad sense, falls to the teacher of history.

The central problem of the education of national consciousness, in our view, is to make desires more conscious and to subject them to discipline and the influence of the best ideals of American life. MacCurdy says that by making instincts conscious we take a great step in advance. That we should say is true, if we make them conscious in the right way, and do not try to substitute rational principles for them. But we need to go further; we must not only understand and control the impulses of aggression, jealousy, fear and the like that have played such a sinister part in history, but we must know more about those complex and subtile things we call moods, which are really the main forces in modern life. These moods are accumulations and repositories of interests and desires, and they must be appreciated by all who as educators, undertake to direct the forces in our national life. These desires must be made more definitely conscious everywhere, and be subjected to influence and education. It is not simply institutions, organizations and factions that must be watched and controlled, just because these are the more obvious and most easily affected expressions of tendencies and desires, but all the subtile feelings or moods which are the raw materials, so to speak, of future conduct, ideals, and institutions.

Here comes to view, of course, our whole problem of assimilation of heterogeneous elements. Favored by our geographical position, and by the fortunate success and the great suggestive power of the ideal of liberty with which our history began, America has had, as we all realize, thus far an unusual career. We have been able to assimilate foreign elements with great rapidity. We may not be so fortunate in the future. Distances which have severed our new peoples from their old ties have become strangely shortened by the war. Our problems of adjustment have become more subtile and complex. The necessity of succeeding in unifying our population is more urgent. Therefore our future development, as a nation, becomes to a greater extent a process of conscious direction; what we have done naively and by sheer force of our powers of growth, we must do now, it is likely, more deliberately and efficiently.

We have before us in America the highly important and by no means easy task of harmonizing, under new conditions, all sorts of forces and desires by directing them in ways and toward ends which cannot now be wholly determined. There is both a psychological and a pedagogical aspect of the situation. Psychology must perform for American life something very much like a psycho-analysis; we should expect to see as a result of the war a greatly increased interest, on the part of the American people, in themselves; self-understanding and self-interpretation, we should suppose, would be advanced; all the sciences of human nature we should think would be called upon to help us to make a new American history and to formulate the purposes of our national life.

On the pedagogical side we might expect reasonably to see a deepened sincerity on the part of all who in any way stand in the position of teachers. We are dependent upon leaders in a democratic country, and all leaders in whatever place in society would now, one might hope, feel a heightened sense of duty, both to understand and to influence American life, to represent in their own persons and teachings the highest ideals, and indeed to become truly creative forces in society. Boutroux says that Germany is a product of an external phenomenon—education. America, we should say, must become more and more a product of an internal phenomenon—education. That is, the forces that will continue to shape our country must be in the form of leadership growing out of the best impulses and the true meaning of our civilization. No forces will make of us something we are not by nature; our strength must continue to come from within, but it is the aristocratic spirit, the aristocracy of genius in the fields of intellect, morality and art that must of course have the fullest opportunity to influence all our institutions, even the school room.

So to organize our educational system that it shall be thrown wide open to all new and good influences; so to conduct the school that it shall be immediately responsive to these influences, is one of the most urgent needs of the internal life of the nation. This, rather than the introduction of any new content into the school is now our chief need. Some of these influences must be personal, belonging to the present. Some belong to the past. We must make American history, poetry, oratory, science, art and philosophy serve more completely than they do now the ideals and the right ambitions of the nation. This is the way we must both bring the past to fuller realization and also create new life which shall make amends for the deficiencies of the past.

III. Practical Interests

The foundation of internationalism, in our view, is the recognition of the legitimate desires and needs of peoples. The desires of peoples when educated should become interests in the performance of all normal functions of national life. The functions are practical; they take the form of many commonplace and daily activities. The recognition of the legitimacy of the desires of nations implies, or at least naturally leads to, cooeperation in their accomplishment. It is very probable, therefore, and it appears to be required in any internationalism that is more than a name, that there shall be in the future wide cooeperation in the performance of various activities by international organizations and agreements. If this is to be the order of the future, new educational efforts will be demanded, and there must be different methods and different points of view in several phases of our educational system, for now all education is devised with reference to an autonomous state of the nation.

If practical cooeperation becomes a part of our plan of international organization in the future, we shall see many problems in applied economics and industry taken up for far more serious consideration than has been possible hitherto. Some of these problems, attacked even on a national scale, have seemed hopeless, but when viewed in their international aspects and with a prospect of international interest and effort they seem very different. There are many such problems toward the solution of which education must contribute a large part. We might mention the food problem of the world as typical, and point to the present world-wide interest and cooeperation as an indication of what may come in the future in regard to all the problems of production and distribution of necessities, if we really mean anything by our internationalism. Apparently we hold within our hands the means of alleviating most, if not all, the destitution of the world. Organization and education in efficiency are the necessary and the sufficient weapons.

So we may conclude that an efficient method of educating peoples in the work of food production, and in the habit of conserving necessities would make a wide change in the economic condition of the world. Organization which shall include in some way the service of all children, will add still more to efficiency, and will contribute an educational factor of great importance. In such ways we may to an unlimited extent increase the available energies of the world, and make possible, if we will, the further increase and expansion of the human race. Such a possibility and such an ideal give a totally new meaning to much of the fundamental work of education. All our departments and accessories of the educational system that have anything to do with the elemental occupations acquire a new interest and importance from this point of view.

The whole field of industry offers now, indeed, a broader educational opportunity. Children's hands are ready to do many things that will increase the happiness and the powers of the children themselves and at the same time add to the world's prosperity. Children must, of course, not be exploited in tasks that belong to the adult, but there is a proper place for practical organization of children in the world's work, and a potential helpfulness in children in the larger affairs of society that has not yet been drawn upon, although surely we have seen, during the years of the war, what children might accomplish. It is above all in its relations to universal social feeling that such practical education and use of childhood are most significant. Out of the practical activities, moral results could hardly fail to come. It is not too much to expect that the children of the world may sometime be so organized that the power of childish enthusiasm, raised to we know not what degree by the suggestive force of such world-wide relations as are now possible, may quickly be turned to the accomplishment of great tasks,—doing its part in the service, the conservation, the self denial, that any serious interest in internationalism will in the future with but little doubt make necessary.

Education that shall take into account the principles of efficiency and economy as applied to universal problems will be a great advance upon any teaching hitherto done in the interest of internationalism. It is through practical activity and interest, suggesting and requiring restraint and cooeperation, arousing imagination and the dramatic impulses, that fruitful and permanent social affiliations of nations with one another will be likely to be made. We may safely assume, in fact, that firm affiliations can be made only in some such way. Internationalism, from this point of view, is at bottom not a political problem, but an educational problem. The world will be united only through the mediation of its daily practical needs. The motives for such union are themselves commonplace. Moral intentions are represented also, and world crises make the conditions ripe for such cooerdination of interests, but they do not alone produce the definite organization without which the world will continue to be, as Dickinson calls Europe, a society in the state of anarchy.



CHAPTER III

INTERNATIONALISM AND THE SCHOOL (continued)

IV. The Higher Industry

It is in the higher forms of practical cooeperative activity and in the intellectual processes, the interests and social feelings accompanying them that we should expect to see elaborated and made more ideal the internationalism that has first been put to work in the service of the world at a lower level. There is work to do that appeals to profound motives and feelings. The great engineering projects that await us, the work of exploring, colonizing and the like in which universal interest and cooeperation are necessary fascinate the mind. These things satisfy the dramatic instinct, and they may prove to be in the future an actual substitute for war, as James hoped. The educational opportunities of this theme, at least, are great. Any nation that expects to play a great part in the world's politics must expect to do much in the world's service. These nations must be prepared in every possible way to contribute greatly to the material improvement of the earth. To this end technical education, all along the line, must be kept at a high point of efficiency. Inventive thought in all mechanical fields will certainly be a large factor in the culture values of peoples in the future. When we see what four years of war have accomplished in the way of giving us control over material forces, we may realize what, with the continuation of a powerful incentive, might be done in the arts of peace. These great practical needs have also, as we say, their power of appeal to all the profound motives of the social life. We must make use of this appeal. All the power of the strong story of the day's work must be turned upon this educational problem. All industry, indeed, must be made more dramatic, as it can be under the inspiration of the larger industrial life which the idea of internationalism opens up before us. Industry must be made more satisfying to the fundamental motives of the individual, while at the same time it is made more efficient, and more social. The new generation must be filled with the romance of the world's work. Only by presenting to young and plastic minds the ideal features of work shall we be able to harmonize the individual and the social will. Only so, perhaps, in an industrial age shall we be able to escape from being destroyed by industrialism. Anything that will introduce art and imagination into work, anything that will even brighten a little the dull moods of toil will help both to prepare the way for the wider world relations we talk about, and to prevent the most destructive elements and moods of industrialism gaining the upper hand.

V. The Democratic Spirit

We must eventually think of internationalism on its educational side as most fundamentally a question of developing in the world the international spirit. We might quite naturally think of this as the education of social feeling or of the social instinct. This is, however, not the most productive attitude toward the situation, in our view, simply because when we think of the education of the feelings we are likely to be satisfied with the principles of an old static philosophy of life and of the school. Moral and social feelings, we believe, grow best in a practical medium. We cannot expand social feeling at will, or produce a democratic spirit by some simple process of education. When we try to extend social feeling too far we make the moral life insincere. To try to expand social feeling and moral interest so as to make it include the foreign, to try to love our enemies in advance of all aesthetic and practical relations with the foreign seems futile. Distance must first be eliminated by imagination. Social and moral codes must be founded upon intimate relations. External and distant relations among peoples make for diplomatic forms and a hypocritical morality. These are substitutes for social feeling. These purely social relations of nations (like those of individuals) always hide enmity and jealousy. We cannot expect, therefore, to create a moral spirit in the relations of peoples to one another by teaching alone. We cannot hope to change individualism to altruism merely by exciting feeling. Our main effort must be directed toward establishing ethical relations, rather than to stimulating moral sentiments.

It seems useless to preach universal brotherhood either to the child who lacks entirely the content of experience to make such sentiments real, or to the working masses who now lack enthusiasm in all the social relations. At least to depend upon such teaching to create international spirit is futile. Love for mankind is too ideal and too remote, as yet, to arouse deep and sincere impulses and feelings. All teaching, therefore, whether in the school or elsewhere that is directed exclusively or especially to the moral aspects of peace, altruistic behavior and internationalism, seems to-day, to say the least, peculiarly inadequate. Our spirit in education must be broadly humanistic, and must indeed lay deep foundations for all moral and social relations, but in so far as it ends in being cultural and hortatory it can have no deep and lasting effect.