[Footnote 1: The Nation, Sept. 19, 1914.]

[Footnote 2: Speech at the Queen's Hall, London, Sept. 19, 1914.]

It must be admitted, on the other hand, that there is a possibility of a period of reaction and torpor after the strain of the war; the country will be seriously impoverished, and there will be a heavy burden of taxation in spite of some probable relief from the burden of armaments. Still, social evils and injustices will be more obvious than ever. There will be many new national and imperial problems clamouring to be faced. The intellectual ferment which has had its source in the war will remain at work to widen the mental outlook and deepen the social consciousness. On the whole, it will probably be true to say that, though circumstances may postpone it, there will sooner or later arise a great movement pledged to cleanse our national life of those features which bar the way to human freedom and happiness.

It also seems undeniable that the deep interest taken by large numbers of people in the war will rouse them to a sense of the importance of problems of government and of foreign policy. The working men's committees on foreign affairs of half a century ago, which have left no trace behind them, may be revived in a new form, and the differentiation of economic and social questions from political and foreign problems may be obliterated. The importance of the gradually widening area of vision among the more thoughtful section of the people can hardly be exaggerated. In no respect is the broadening of outlook more discernible than in the sphere of imperial affairs. Hitherto the Empire to the working man has been regarded as almost mythical. In so far as it did exist, it was conceived as a happy hunting ground for the capitalist exploiter. The spontaneous assistance given to the mother country by the colonies and dependencies has convinced him of the reality of the Empire, and vaguely inspired him with a vision of its possibilities as a federation of free commonwealths. In other words, the British Empire, contrasted with that of Germany, is gradually being recognised as standing for Democracy, however imperfect its achievements may be up to the present. Consequently, the return of peace will see a deeper interest in imperial questions; indeed, it is not too much to say that there will be an imperial renaissance, born of a new patriotism, "clad in glittering white." The change of heart which is taking place in the people of this country, through the opening of the flood-gates of feeling and thought by the unsuspecting warrior in shining armour, may bring a new age comparable in its influence on civilisation with the great epochs of the past. To-day is seed-time. But the harvest will not be gathered without sweat and toil. The times are pregnant with great possibilities, but their realisation depends upon the united wisdom of the people.



BOOKS

In order to understand the machinery of international trade, reference should be made to Hartiey Withers' Money Changing (5s.), or Clare's A.B.C. of the Foreign Exchanges (3s.); an outline of the subject will be found in any good general text-book on Economics. On the financial situation, see articles on "Lombard Street in War" and "The War and Financial Exhaustion" (Round Table, September and December 1914); "War and the Financial System, August 1914," by J.M. Keynes (Economic Journal, September 1914); and articles in the New Statesman on "Why a Moratorium?" (August 15,1914), and "The Restoration of the Remittance Market" (August 29, 1914). Norman Angell's The Great Illusion (2s. 6d.) should be consulted for an examination of the relations between war and trade. The most accessible book dealing with the foreign trade of the European countries is the Statesman's Year-Book, published annually at 10s. 6d. The chapters reprinted from the Encyclopaedia Britannica are also useful. A valuable article on "The Economic Relations of the British and German Empires," by E. Crammond, appeared in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, July 1914. The same writer published an article on "The Economic Aspects of the War" in The Quarterly Review for October 1914 (6s.). A grasp of the economic development of Germany may be obtained from W.H. Dawson's Evolution of Modern Germany (5s.) and the same writer's Industrial Germany (Nation's Library, 1s.). Mr. F.W. Taylor's Scientific Management (5s.) and Miss J. Goldmark's Fatigue and Efficiency (8s.) explain scientific management. A short account is also given in Layton's Capital and Labour (Nation's Library, 1s.).

The course of unemployment in this country may be traced from the returns published each month in the Board of Trade Labour Gazette (monthly, 1d.). Proposals for dealing with possible and existing distress during the war are to be found in a pamphlet on The War and the Workers, by Sidney Webb (Fabian Society, 1d.). For the possible use of trade unions as a channel for the distribution of public assistance, see an article in The Nation for September 5, 1914, and Mr. G.D.H. Cole's article on "How to help the Cotton Operative" in The Nation for November 7, 1914. The same paper published two suggestive articles on "Relief or Maintenance?" (September 19 and October 3). The situation which has arisen in the woollen and worsted industries owing to the large demand for cloth for the troops is dealt with in an article on "The Government and Khaki," by Arthur Greenwood in The Nation for November 28, 1914. Reference may be made to the official White Paper on Distress; other official documents of note are the following:

"Separation allowances to the Wives and Children of Seamen, Marines, and Reservists." Cd. 7619. 1914. 1/2d. "Increased Rates of Separation Allowance for the Wives and Children of Soldiers." Cd. 7255. 1914. 1/2d. "Return of Papers relating to the Assistance rendered by the Treasury to Banks and Discount Houses since the Outbreak of War on August 4, 1914, and to the Questions of the Advisability of continuing or ending the Moratorium and of the Nature of the Banking Facilities now available." H.C. 457 of 1914. 1d. "Report, dated April 30, 1914, of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence on the Insurance of British Shipping in Time of War, to devise a scheme to ensure that, in case of war, British Steamships should not be generally laid up, and that Oversea Commerce should not be interrupted by reason of inability to cover war risks of Ships and Cargoes by Insurance, and which would also secure that the insurance rates should not be so high as to cause an excessive rise in prices." Cd. 7560. 1914. 2 1/2d.

The Government has issued a Manual of Emergency Legislation (3s. 6d.) containing the statutes, proclamations, orders in council, rules, regulations, and notifications used in consequence of the war; the appendices contain other documents (the Declarations of Paris and of London, the Hague Convention, etc.).



CHAPTER IX

GERMAN CULTURE AND THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH

"Peace cannot become a law of human society, except by passing through the struggle which will ground life and association on foundations of justice and liberty, on the wreck of every power which exists not for a principle but for a dynastic interest."—MAZZINI in 1867.

"The greatest triumph of our time, a triumph in a region loftier than that of electricity or steam, will be the enthronement of this idea of Public Right as the governing idea of European policy; as the common and precious inheritance of all lands, but superior to the passing opinion of any. The foremost among the nations will be that one which, by its conduct, shall gradually engender in the minds of the others a fixed belief that it is just."—GLADSTONE.

Sec.1. The Two Issues.—The War of 1914 is not simply a war between the Dual Alliance and the Triple Entente: it is, for Great Britain and Germany especially, a war of ideas—a conflict between two different and irreconcilable conceptions of government, society, and progress. An attempt will be made in this chapter to make clear what these conceptions are, and to discuss the issue between them as impartially as possible, from the point of view, not of either of the combatant Powers, but of human civilisation as a whole.

There are really two great controversies being fought out between Great Britain and Germany: one about the ends of national policy, and another about the means to be adopted towards those or any other ends. The latter is the issue raised by the German Chancellor's plea—not so unfamiliar on the lips of our own countrymen as we are now tempted to believe—that "Necessity knows no law." It is the issue of Law and "scraps of paper" against Force, against what some apologists have called "the Philosophy of Violence," but which, in its latest form, the French Ambassador has more aptly christened "the Pedantry of Barbarism." That issue has lately been brought home, in its full reality, to the British public from the course of events in Belgium and elsewhere, and need not here be elaborated. Further words would be wasted. A Power which recognises no obligation but force, and no law but the sword, which marks the path of its advance by organised terrorism and devastation, is the public enemy of the civilised world.

But it is a remarkable and significant fact that the policy in which this ruthless theory is embodied commands the enthusiastic and united support of the German nation. How can this be explained?

It must be remembered in the first place that the German public does not see the facts of the situation as we do. On the question of Belgian neutrality and the events which precipitated the British ultimatum, what we know to be a false version of the facts is current in Germany, as is evident from the published statements of the leaders of German thought and opinion, and it may be many years before its currency is displaced.

This difficulty should serve to remind us how defective the machinery of civilisation still is. One of the chief functions of law is, not merely to settle disputes and to enforce its decisions, but to ascertain the true facts on which alone a settlement can be based. The fact that no tribunal exists for ascertaining the true facts in disputes between sovereign governments shows how far mankind still is from an established "rule of law" in international affairs. Not only is the Hague powerless to give and, still more, to enforce its decision on the questions at issue between the European Powers. It has not even the machinery for ascertaining the facts of the case and bringing them to the notice of neutral governments and peoples in the name of civilisation as a whole.

But apart from divergent beliefs as to the facts, it is remarkable that thinking Germany should be in sympathy with the spirit and tone of German policy, which led, as it appears to us, by an inexorable logic to the violation of Belgian neutrality and the collision with Great Britain.

But the fact, we are told, admits of easy explanation. Thinking Germany has fallen a victim to the teachings of Treitschke and Nietzsche—Treitschke with his Macchiavellian doctrine that "Power is the end-all and be-all of a State," Nietzsche with his contempt for pity and the gentler virtues, his admiration for "valour," and his disdain for Christianity.

This explanation is too simple to fit the facts. It may satisfy those who know no more of Treitschke's brilliant and careful work than the extracts culled from his occasional writings by General von Bernhardi and the late Professor Cramb. It may gratify those who, with so many young German students, forget that Nietzsche, like many other prophets, wrote in allegory, and that when he spoke of valour he was thinking, not of "shining armour," but of spiritual conflicts. But careful enquirers, who would disdain to condemn Macaulay on passages selected by undiscriminating admirers from his Essays, or Carlyle for his frank admiration of Thor and Odin and the virtues of Valhalla, will ask for a more satisfying explanation. Even if all that were said about Treitschke and Nietzsche were true, it would still remain an unsolved question why they and their ideas should have taken intellectual Germany by storm. But it is not true. What is true, and what is far more serious, both for Great Britain and for Europe, is that men like Harnack, Eucken, and Wilamowitz, who would repudiate all intellectual kinship with Macchiavelli and Nietzsche—men who are leaders of European thought, and with whom and whose ideas we shall have to go on living in Europe—publicly support and encourage the policy and standpoint of a Government which, according to British ideas, has acted with criminal wickedness and folly, and so totally misunderstood the conduct and attitude of Great Britain as honestly to regard us as hypocritically treacherous to the highest interests of civilisation.

That is the real problem; and it is a far more complex and difficult one than if we had to do with a people which had consciously abandoned the Christian virtues or consciously embarked on a conspiracy against Belgium or Great Britain. The utter failure of even the most eminent Germans to grasp British politics, British institutions, and the British point of view points to a fundamental misunderstanding, a fundamental divergence of outlook, between the political ideals of the two countries. It is the conflict between these ideals which forms the second great issue between Germany and Great Britain; and on its outcome depends the future of human civilisation.

Sec.2. Culture.—What is the German ideal? What do German thinkers regard as Germany's contribution to human progress? The answer comes back with a monotonous reiteration which has already sickened us of the word. It is Kultur, or, as we translate it, culture. Germany's contribution to progress consists in the spread of her culture.

Kultur is a difficult word to interpret. It means "culture" and a great deal more besides. Its primary meaning, like that of "culture," is intellectual and aesthetic: when a German speaks of "Kultur" he is thinking of such things as language, literature, philosophy, education, art, science, and the like. Children in German schools are taught a subject called Kulturgeschichte (culture-history), and under that heading they are told about German literature, German philosophy and religion, German painting, German music and so on.

So far, the English and the German uses of the word roughly correspond. We should probably be surprised if we heard it said that Shakespeare had made a contribution to English "culture": but, on consideration, we should admit that he had, though we should not have chosen that way of speaking about him. But there is a further meaning in the word Kultur, which explains why it is so often on German lips. It means, not only the product of the intellect or imagination, but the product of the disciplined intellect and the disciplined imagination. Kultur has in it an element of order, of organisation, of civilisation. That is why the Germans regard the study of the "culture" of a country as part of the study of its history. English school children are beginning to be taught social and industrial history in addition to the kings and queens and battles and constitutions which used to form the staple of history lessons. They are being taught, that is, to see the history of their country, and of its civilisation, in the light of the life and livelihood of its common people. The German outlook is different. They look at their history in the light of the achievements of its great minds, which are regarded as being at once the proof and the justification of its civilisation. To the question, "What right have you to call yourselves a civilised country?" an Englishman would reply, "Look at the sort of people we are, and at the things we have done," and would point perhaps to the extracts from the letters of private soldiers printed in the newspapers, or to the story of the growth of the British Empire; a German would reply (as Germans are indeed replying now), "Look at our achievements in scholarship and science, at our universities, at our systems of education, at our literature, our music, and our painting; at our great men of thought and imagination: at Luther, Duerer, Goethe, Beethoven, Kant."

Kultur then means more than "culture": it means culture considered as the most important element in civilisation. It implies the disciplined education which alone, in the German view, makes the difference between the savage and the civilised man. It implies the heritage of intellectual possessions which, thanks to ordered institutions, a nation is able to hand down from generation to generation.

We are now beginning to see where the British and German attitudes towards society and civilisation diverge. Broadly, we may say that the first difference is that Germany thinks of civilisation in terms of intellect while we think of it in terms of character. Germany asks, "What do you know?" "What have you learnt?" and regards our prisoners as uncivilised because they cannot speak German, and Great Britain as a traitor to civilisation because she is allied with Russia, a people of ignorant peasants. We ask, "What have you done?" "What can you do?" and tend to undervalue the importance of systematic knowledge and intellectual application.

But we have found no reason as yet for a conflict of ideals. Many English writers, such as Matthew Arnold, have emphasised the importance of culture as against character; yet Matthew Arnold's views were widely different from those of the German professors of to-day. If their sense of the importance of culture stopped short at this point, we should have much to learn from Germany, as indeed we have, and no reason to oppose her. What is there then in the German admiration for culture which involves her in a conflict with British ideals?

Sec.3. Culture as a State Product.—The conflict arises out of the alliance between German culture and the German Government. What British public opinion resents, in the German attitude, is not culture in itself, about which it is little concerned, but what we feel to be its unnatural alliance with military power. It seems to us wicked and hypocritical for a government which proclaims the doctrine of the "mailed fist" and, like the ancient Spartans, glories in the perfecting of the machinery of war, to be at the same time protesting its devotion to culture, and posing as a patron of the peaceful arts. It is the Kaiser's speeches and the behaviour of the German Government which have put all of us out of heart with German talk about culture.

This brings us to a fundamental point of difference between the two peoples. The close association between culture and militarism, between the best minds of the nation and the mind of the Government, does not seem unnatural to a modern German at all. On the contrary, it seems the most natural thing in the world. It is the bedrock of the German system of national education. Culture to a German is not only a national possession; it is also, to a degree difficult for us to appreciate, a State product. It is a national possession deliberately handed on by the State from generation to generation, hall-marked and guaranteed, as it were, for the use of its citizens. When we use the word "culture" we speak of it as an attribute of individual men and women. Germans, on the other hand, think of it as belonging to nations as a whole, in virtue of their system of national education. That is why they are so sure that all Germans possess culture. They have all had it at school. And it is all the same brand of culture, because no other is taught. It is the culture with which the Government wishes its citizens to be equipped. That is why all Germans tend, not only to know the same facts (and a great many facts too), but to have a similar outlook on life and similar opinions about Goethe, Shakespeare and the German Navy. Culture, like military service, is a part of the State machinery.

Here we come upon the connecting link between culture and militarism. Both are parts of the great German system of State education. "Side by side with the influences of German education," wrote Dr. Sadler in 1901,[1] "are to be traced the influences of German military service. The two sets of influence interact on one another and intermingle. German education impregnates the German army with science. The German army predisposes German education to ideas of organisation and discipline. Military and educational discipline go hand in hand.... Both are preserved and fortified by law and custom, and by administrative arrangements skilfully devised to attain that end. But behind all the forms of organisation (which would quickly crumble away unless upheld by and expressing some spiritual force), behind both military and educational discipline, lies the fundamental principle adopted by Scharnhorst's Committee on Military organisation in Prussia in 1807: 'All the inhabitants of the State are its defenders by birth.'"

[Footnote 1: Board of Education Special Reports, vol. ix. p. 43.]

At last we have reached the root of the matter. It is not German culture which is the source and centre of the ideas to which Great Britain is opposed: nor yet is it German militarism. Our real opponent is the system of training and education, out of which both German culture and German militarism spring. It is the organisation of German public life, and the "spiritual force" of which that organisation is the outward and visible expression.

Sec.4. German and British Ideals of Education.—Let us look at the German ideal more closely, for it is worthy of careful study. It is perhaps best expressed in words written in 1830 by Coleridge, who, like other well-known Englishmen of his day (and our own) was much under the influence of German ideas. Coleridge, in words quoted by Dr. Sadler, defines the purpose of national education as "to form and train up the people of the country to obedient, free, useful, and organisable subjects, citizens and patriots, living to the benefit of the State and prepared to die in its defence." In accordance with this conception Prussia was the first of the larger States in Europe to adopt a universal compulsory system of State education, and the first also to establish a universal system of military service for its young men. The rest of Europe perforce followed suit. Nearly every State in Europe has or professes to have a universal system of education, and every State except England has a system of universal military service. The Europe of schools and camps which we have known during the last half century is the most striking of all the victories of German "culture."

Discipline, efficiency, duty, obedience, public service; these are qualities that excite admiration everywhere—in the classroom, in the camp, and in the wider field of life. There is something almost monumentally impressive to the outsider in the German alliance of School and Army in the service of the State. Since the days of Sparta and Rome, there has been no such wonderful governmental disciplinary machine. It is not surprising that "German organisation" and "German methods" should have stimulated interest and emulation throughout the civilised world. Discipline seems to many to be just the one quality of which our drifting world is in need. "If this war had been postponed a hundred or even fifty years," writes a philosophic English observer in a private letter, "Prussia would have become our Rome, worshipping Shakespeare and Byron as Pompey or Tiberius worshipped Greek literature, and disciplining us. Hasn't it ever struck you what a close parallel there is between Germany and Rome?" (Here follows a list of bad qualities which is better omitted.) ... "The good side of it is the discipline; and the modern world, not having any power external to itself which it acknowledges, and no men (in masses) having yet succeeded in being a law to themselves, needs discipline above everything. I don't see where you will get it under these conditions unless you find some one with an abstract love of discipline for itself. And where will you find him except in Prussia? After all, it is a testimony to her that, unlovely as she is, she gives the law to Germany, and that the South German, though he dislikes her, accepts the law as good for him." And to show that he appreciates the full consequences of his words he adds: "If I had to live under Ramsay MacDonald (provided that he acted as he talks), or under Lieutenant von Foerstner" (the hero of Zabern), "odious as the latter is, for my soul's good I would choose him: for I think that in the end, I should be less likely to be irretrievably ruined."

Here is the Prussian point of view, expressed by a thoughtful Englishman with a wide experience of education, and a deep concern for the moral welfare of the nation. What have we, on the British side, to set up against his arguments?

In the first place we must draw attention to the writer's candour in admitting that a nation cannot adopt Prussianism piecemeal. It must take it as a whole, its lieutenants included, or not at all. Lieutenant von Foerstner is as typical a product of the Prussian system as the London policeman is of our own; and if we adopt Prussian or Spartan methods, we must run the risk of being ruled by him. "No other nation," says Dr. Sadler, "by imitating a little bit of German organisation can hope thus to achieve a true reproduction of the spirit of German institutions. The fabric of its organisation practically forms one whole. That is its merit and its danger. It must be taken all in all or else left unimitated. And it is not a mere matter of external organisation.... National institutions must grow out of the needs and character (and not least out of the weakness) of the nation which possesses them."

But, taking the system as a whole, there are, it seems to me, three great flaws in it—flaws so serious and vital as to make the word "education" as applied to it almost a misnomer. The Prussian system is unsatisfactory, firstly, because it confuses external discipline with self-control; secondly, because it confuses regimentation with corporate spirit; thirdly, because it conceives the nation's duty in terms of "culture" rather than of character.

Let us take these three points in detail.

The first object of national education is—not anything national at all, but simply education. It is the training of individual young people. It is the gradual leading-out (e-ducation), unfolding, expanding, of their mental and bodily powers, the helping of them to become, not soldiers, or missionaries of culture, or pioneers of Empire, or even British citizens, but simply human personalities. "The purpose of the Public Elementary School," say the opening words of our English code, "is to form and strengthen the character and to develop the intelligence of the children entrusted to it." In the performance of this task external discipline is no doubt necessary. Obedience and consideration for others are not learnt in a day. But the object of external discipline is to form habits of self-control which will enable their possessor to become an independent and self-respecting human being—and incidentally, a good citizen. "If I had to live under Ramsay MacDonald, or the Prussian Lieutenant," says our writer, "I would choose the latter, for my soul's good." But our British system of education does not proceed on the assumption that its pupils are destined to "live under" any one. Our ideal is that of the free man, trained in the exercise of his powers and in the command and control of his faculties, who, like Wordsworth's "Happy Warrior" (a poem which embodies the best British educational tradition):

... Through the heat of conflict, keeps the law In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw.

Neglect for the claims of human personality both amongst pupils and teachers is the chief danger of a State system of education. The State is always tempted to put its own claims first and those of its citizens second—to regard the citizen as existing for the State, instead of the State for its citizens. It is one of the ironies of history that no man was more alive to this danger than Wilhelm von Humboldt, the gifted creator of the Prussian system of education. As the motto of one of his writings he adopted the words, "Against the governmental mania, the most fatal disease of modern governments," and when, contrary to his own early principles, he undertook the organisation of Prussian education he insisted that "headmasters should be left as free a hand as possible in all matters of teaching and organisation." But the Prussian system was too strong for him and his successors, and his excellent principles now survive as no more than pious opinions. The fact is that in an undemocratic and feudal State such as Germany then was, and still largely is, respect for the personality of the individual is confined to the upper ranks of society.

"I do not know how it is in foreign countries," says one of Goethe's heroes,[1] "but in Germany it is only the nobleman who can secure a certain amount of universal or, if I may say so, personal education. An ordinary citizen can learn to earn his living and, at the most, train his intellect; but, do what he will, he loses his personality.... He is not asked, 'What are you?' but only, 'What have you? what attainments, what knowledge, what capacities, what fortune?' ... The nobleman is to act and to achieve. The common citizen is to carry out orders. He is to develop individual faculties, in order to become useful, and it is a fundamental assumption that there is no harmony in his being, nor indeed is any permissible, because, in order to make himself serviceable in one way, he is forced to neglect everything else. The blame for this distinction is not to be attributed to the adaptability of the nobleman or the weakness of the common citizen. It is due to the constitution of society itself." Much has changed in Germany since Goethe wrote these words, but they still ring true. And they have not been entirely without their echo in Great Britain itself.[2]

[Footnote 1: Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre, Book v. chapter iii.]

[Footnote 2: The contrast which has been drawn in the preceding pages, as working-class readers in particular will understand, is between the aims, not the achievements, of German and British education. The German aims are far more perfectly achieved in practice than the British. Neither the law nor the administration of British education can be acquitted of "neglect for the claims of human personality." The opening words of the English code, quoted on p. 359 above, are, alas! not a statement of fact but an aspiration. We have hardly yet begun in England to realise the possibilities of educational development along the lines of the British ideal, both as regards young people and adults. If we learn the lesson of the present crisis aright, the war, so far from being a set-back to educational progress, should provide a new stimulus for effort and development.]

But man cannot live for himself alone. He is a corporate being; and, personality or no personality, he has to fit into a world of fellow-men with similar human claims. The second charge against the German system is that it ignores the value of human fellowship. It regards the citizens of a country as "useful and organisable subjects" rather than as fellow-members of a democracy, bound together by all the various social ties of comradeship and intercourse.

The Prussian system, with its elaborate control and direction from above, dislikes the free play of human groupings, and discourages all spontaneous or unauthorised associations. Schoolboy "societies," for instance, are in Germany an evil to be deplored and extirpated, not, as with us, a symptom of health and vigour, to be sympathetically watched and encouraged. Instead, there is a direct inculcation of patriotism, a strenuous and methodical training of each unit for his place in the great State machine. We do not so read human nature. Our British tendency is to develop habits of service and responsibility through a devotion to smaller and more intimate associations, to build on a foundation of lesser loyalties and duties. We do not conceive it to be the function of the school to teach patriotism or to teach fellowship. Rather we hold that good education is fellowship, is citizenship, in the deepest meaning of those words; that to discover and to exercise the responsibilities of membership in a smaller body is the best training for a larger citizenship. A school, a ship, a club, a Trade Union, any free association of Englishmen, is all England in miniature. "To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society," said Burke long ago, "is the first principle, the germ, as it were, of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and mankind.... We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen. We pass on to our neighbourhoods, to our habitual provincial connections. These are inns and resting-places... so many images of the great country, in which the heart found something which it could fill."[1]

[Footnote 1: Reflections on the French Revolution, pp. 292, 494 (of vol. iii. of Collected Works, ed. 1899).]

There is one fairly safe test for a system of education: What do its victims think of it? "In Prussia," says Dr. Sadler, "a schoolboy seems to regard his school as he might regard a railway station—a convenient and necessary establishment, generally ugly to look at, but also, for its purpose efficient." The illustration is an apt one: for a Prussian school is too often, like a railway station, simply a point of departure, something to be got away from as soon as possible. "In England a boy who is at a good secondary school cares for it as an officer cares for his regiment or as a sailor cares for his ship," or, we may add, as a Boy Scout cares for his Troop.[1]

[Footnote 1: Special Reports, ix. p. 113. Dr. Sadler's article deals with secondary schools only. Unfortunately, no one can claim that the idea of fellowship is as prominent in English elementary schools, or even in all secondary schools, as the quotation might suggest.]

Democracy and discipline, fellowship and freedom, are in fact not incompatible at all. They are complementary: and each can only be at its best when it is sustained by the other. Only a disciplined and self-controlled people can be free to rule itself, and only a free people can know the full meaning and happiness of fellowship.

Sec.5. German and British Ideals of Civilisation.—Lastly, the German system regards national "culture" rather than national character as the chief element in civilisation and the justification of its claim to a dominant place in the world. This view is so strange to those who are used to present-day British institutions that it is hard to make clear what it means. Civilisation is a word which, with us, is often misused and often misunderstood. Sometimes we lightly identify it with motor cars and gramophones and other Western contrivances with which individual traders and travellers dazzle and bewilder the untutored savage. Yet we are seldom tempted to identify it, like the Germans, with anything narrowly national; and in our serious moments we recognise that it is too universal a force to be the appanage of either nations or individuals. For to us, when we ask ourselves its real meaning, civilisation stands for neither language nor culture nor anything intellectual at all. It stands for something moral and social and political. It means, in the first place, the establishment and enforcement of the Rule of Law, as against anarchy on the one hand and tyranny on the other; and, secondly, on the basis of order and justice, the task of making men fit for free institutions, the work of guiding and training them to recognise the obligations of citizenship, to subordinate their own personal interests or inclinations to the common welfare, the "commonwealth." That is what is meant when it is claimed that Great Britain has done a "civilising" work both in India and in backward Africa. The Germans reproach and despise us, we are told,[1] for our failure to spread "English culture" in India. That has not been the purpose of British rule, and Englishmen have been foolish in so far as they have presumed to attempt it: England has to learn from Indian culture as India from ours. But to have laid for India the foundations on which alone a stable society could rest, to have given her peace from foes without and security within, to have taught her, by example, the kinship of Power and Responsibility, to have awakened the social conscience and claimed the public services of Indians in the village, the district, the province, the nation, towards the community of which they feel themselves to be members, to have found India a continent, a chaos of tribes and castes, and to have helped her to become a nation—that is not a task of English culture: it is a task of civilisation.

[Footnote 1: For evidence of this see Cramb's Germany and England, p. 25.]

Law, Justice, Responsibility, Liberty, Citizenship—the words are abstractions, philosophers' phrases, destitute, it might seem, of living meaning and reality. There is no such thing as English Justice, English Liberty, English Responsibility. The qualities that go to the making of free and ordered institutions are not national but universal. They are no monopoly of Great Britain. They are free to be the attributes of any race or any nation. They belong to civilised humanity as a whole. They are part of the higher life of the human race.

As such the Germans, if they recognised them at all, probably regarded them. They could not see in them the binding power to keep a great community of nations together. They could not realise that Justice and Responsibility, if they rightly typify the character of British rule, must also typify the character of British rulers; and that community of character expressed in their institutions and worked into the fibre of their life may be a stronger bond between nations than any mere considerations of interest. Educated Indians would find it hard to explain exactly why, on the outbreak of the war, they found themselves eager to help to defend British rule. But it seems clear that what stirred them most was not any consideration of English as against German culture, or any merely material calculations, but a sudden realisation of the character of that new India which the union between Great Britain and India, between Western civilisation and Eastern culture, is bringing into being, and a sense of the indispensable need for the continuance of that partnership.[1]

[Footnote 1: The reader will again understand that it is British aims rather than British achievements which are spoken of. That British rule is indispensable to Indian civilisation is indeed a literal fact to which Indian opinion bears testimony; and it is the conduct and character of generations of British administrators which have helped to bring this sense of partnership about. But individual Englishmen in India are often far from understanding, or realising in practice, the purpose of British rule. Similarly, the growth of a sense of Indian nationality, particularly in the last few years, is a striking and important fact. But it would be unwise to underestimate the gigantic difficulties with which this growing national consciousness has to contend. The greatest of these is the prevalence of caste-divisions, rendering impossible the free fellowship and social intercourse which alone can be the foundation of a sense of common citizenship. Apart from this there are, according to the census, forty-three races in India, and twenty-three languages in ordinary use.]

It is just this intimate union between different nations for the furtherance of the tasks of civilisation which it seems so difficult for the German mind to understand. "Culture," with all its intimate associations, its appeal to language, to national history and traditions, and to instinctive patriotism, is so much simpler and warmer a conception: it seems so much easier to fight for Germany than to fight for Justice in the abstract, or for Justice embodied in the British Commonwealth. That is why even serious German thinkers, blinded by the idea of culture, expected the break-up of the British Empire. They could imagine Indians giving their lives for India, Boers for a Dutch South Africa, Irishmen for Ireland or Ulstermen for Ulster; but the deeper moral appeal which has thrilled through the whole Empire, down to its remotest island dependency, lay beyond their ken.

Let us look a little more closely at the German idea of national culture rather than national character as the chief element in civilisation. We shall see that it is directly contrary to the ideals which inspire and sustain the British Commonwealth, and practically prohibits that association of races and peoples at varying levels of social progress which is its peculiar task.

"Culture," in the German idea, is the justification of a nation's existence. Nationality has no other claim. Goethe, Luther, Kant, and Beethoven are Germany's title-deeds. A nation without a culture has no right to a "place in the sun." "History," says Wilamowitz in a lecture delivered in 1898, "knows nothing of any right to exist on the part of a people or a language without a culture. If a people becomes dependent on a foreign culture" (i.e. in the German idea, on a foreign civilisation) "it matters little if its lower classes speak a different language: they, too ... must eventually go over to the dominant language.... Wisely to further this necessary organic process is a blessing to all parties; violent haste will only curb it and cause reactions. Importunate insistence on Nationality has never anywhere brought true vitality into being, and often destroyed vitality; but the superior Culture which, sure of its inner strength, throws her doors wide open, can win men's hearts."[1] In the light of a passage like this, from the most distinguished representative of German humanism, it is easier to grasp the failure of educated Germany to understand the sequel of the South African War, or the aspirations of the Slav peoples, or to stigmatise the folly of their statesmen in Poland, Denmark, Alsace-Lorraine, and Belgium. "Importunate insistence on Nationality"—the words come home to us now with a new meaning when we learn that in Belgium, now perforce "dependent on a foreign culture," babies are registered under German names and newspapers printed in "the dominant language," and that already "forty newspaper vendors in Brussels have been sentenced to long terms of hard labour in German prisons for selling English, French, and Belgian newspapers."[2] "Our fearless German warriors," writes the leading German dramatist, Gerhart Hauptmann,[3] "are well aware of the reasons for which they have taken the field. No illiterates will be found among them. Many of them, besides shouldering their muskets, carry their Goethe's Faust, some work of Schopenhauer, a Bible, or a Homer in their knapsacks." Such is a serious German writer's idea of the way in which civilisation is diffused!

[Footnote 1: Speeches and Lectures, pp. 147-148 (1913 edition).]

[Footnote 2: Daily Papers, October 12, 1914 (Exchange Telegram from Rotterdam).]

[Footnote 3: Letter quoted in the Westminster Gazette.]

With such a philosophy of human progress as this, German thinkers and statesmen look out into the future and behold nothing but conflict—eternal conflict between rival national "cultures," each seeking to impose its domination. "In the struggle between Nationalities," writes Prince Buelow,[1] in defence of his Polish policy, putting into a cruder form the philosophy of Wilamowitz, "one nation is the hammer and the other the anvil; one is the victor and the other the vanquished. It is a law of life and development in history that where two national civilisations meet they fight for supremacy."

[Footnote 1: Imperial Germany, p. 245 (1st ed.).]

Here we have the necessary and logical result of the philosophy of culture. In the struggle between cultures no collaboration, no compromise even, is possible. German is German: Flemish is Flemish: Polish is Polish: French is French. Who is to decide which is the "more civilised," which is the fitter to survive? Force alone can settle the issue. A Luther and Goethe may be the puppets pitted in a contest of culture against Maeterlinck and Victor Hugo. But it is Krupp and Zeppelin and the War-Lord that pull the strings. As Wilamowitz reminds us, it was the Roman legions, not Virgil and Horace, that stamped out the Celtic languages and romanised Western Europe. It is the German army, two thousand years later, that is to germanise it. It is an old, old theory; Prussia did not invent it, nor even Rome. "You know as well as we do," said the Athenians in 416 B.C. to the representatives of a small people of that day,[1] "that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must"; and they went on, like the Kaiser, to claim the favour of the gods, "neither our pretensions nor our conduct being in any way contrary to what men believe of the gods, or practise amongst themselves." There is, in fact, to be no Law between Nations but the Rule of the Stronger.

[Footnote 1: Thucydides, Book v. 89 and 105.]

Sec.6. The Principle of the Commonwealth.—Such seems to many the meaning of the present European situation—a stern conflict between nations and cultures, to be decided by force of arms. The bridges between the nations seem broken down, and no one can tell when they will be repaired. The hopes that had gathered round international movements, the cosmopolitan dreams of common action between the peoples across the barriers of States and Governments, seem to have vanished into limbo; and the enthusiastic dreamers of yesterday are the disillusioned soldiers and spectators of to-day. Nationality, that strange, inarticulate, unanalysable force that can call all men to her tents in the hour of crisis and danger, seems to have overthrown the international forces of to-day, the Socialists, the Pacifists, and, strongest of all, the Capitalists, as it overthrew Napoleon and his dreams of Empire a hundred years ago. What Law is there but force that can decide the issue between nation and nation? And, in the absence of a Law, what becomes of all our hopes for international action, for the future of civilisation and the higher life of the human race?

But in truth the disillusionment is as premature as the hopes that preceded it. We are still far off from the World-State and the World-Law which formed the misty ideal of cosmopolitan thinkers. But only those who are blind to the true course of human progress can fail to see that the day of the Nation-State is even now drawing to a close in the West. There is in fact at present working in the world a higher Law and a better patriotism than that of single nations and cultures, a Law and a patriotism that override and transcend the claims of Nationality in a greater, a more compelling, and a more universal appeal. The great States or Powers of to-day, Great Britain, the United States, France, and (if they had eyes to sec it) Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, are not Nation-States but composite States—States compacted of many nationalities united together by a common citizenship and a common law. Great Britain, the United States, the German Empire, and Austria-Hungary bear in their very names the reminder of the diverse elements of which they are composed; but France with her great African Empire, and Russia with her multitudinous populations, from Poland to the Pacific, from Finland to the Caucasus, are equally composite. In each of these great States nations have been united under a common law; and where the wisdom of the central government has not "broken the bruised reed or quenched the smoking flax" of national life, the nations have been not only willing but anxious to join in the work of their State. Nations, like men, were made not to compete but to work together; and it is so easy, so simple, to win their good-hearted devotion. It takes all sorts of men, says the old proverb, to make a world. It takes all sorts of nations to make a modern State. "The combination of different nations in one State is as necessary a condition of civilised life as the combination of men in society. ... It is in the cauldron of the State that the fusion takes place by which the vigour, the knowledge, and the capacity of one portion of mankind may be communicated to another.... If we take the establishment of liberty for the realisation of moral duties to be the end of civil society, we must conclude that those States are substantially the most perfect which, like the British and Austrian Empires, include various distinct nationalities without oppressing them." So wrote Lord Acton, the great Catholic historian, fifty years ago, when the watchwords of Nationality were on all men's lips, adding, in words that were prophetic of the failure of the Austrian and the progress of the British Commonwealth of Nations: "The coexistence of several nations under the same State is a test as well as the best security of its freedom. It is also one of the chief instruments of civilisation; and, as such, it is in the natural and providential order, and indicates a state of greater advancement than the national unity which is the ideal of modern liberalism."[1]

[Footnote 1: Essay on Nationality, in The History of Freedom and other Essays, pp. 290, 298.]

Of the Great Powers which between them control the destinies of civilisation Great Britain is at once the freest, the largest, and the most various. If the State is a "cauldron" for mingling "the vigour, the knowledge, and the capacity" of the portions of mankind—or if, to use an apter metaphor, it is a body whose perfection consists in the very variety of the functions of its several members—there has never been on the earth a political organism like the British Empire. Its 433 million inhabitants, from Great Britain to Polynesia, from India and Egypt to Central Africa, are drawn from every division of the human race. Cut a section through mankind, and in every layer there will be British citizens, living under the jurisdiction of British law. Here is something to hearten those who have looked in vain to the Hague. While international law has been brought to a standstill through the absence of a common will and a common executive, Great Britain has thrown a girdle of law around the globe.

Sec.7. The Future of Civilisation.—What hopes dare we cherish, in this hour of conflict, for the future of civilisation?

The great, the supreme task of human politics and statesmanship is to extend the sphere of Law. Let others labour to make men cultured or virtuous or happy. These are the tasks of the teacher, the priest, and the common man. The statesman's task is simpler. It is to enfold them in a jurisdiction which will enable them to live the life of their souls' choice. The State, said the Greek philosophers, is the foundation of the good life; but its crown rises far above mere citizenship. "There where the State ends," cries Nietzsche,[1] echoing Aristotle and the great tradition of civilised political thought, "there men begin. There, where the State ends, look thither, my brothers! Do you not see the rainbow and the bridge to the Overman?" Ever since organised society began, the standards of the individual, the ideals of priest and teacher, the doctrines of religion and morality, have outstripped the practice of statesmanship. For the polestar of the statesman has not been love, but law. His not the task of exhorting men to love one another, but the simpler duty of enforcing the law, "Thou shalt not kill." And in that simple, strenuous, necessary task statesmen and political thinkers have watched the slow extension of the power of Law, from the family to the tribe, from the tribe to the city, from the city to the nation, from the nation to the Commonwealth. When will Law take its next extension? When will warfare, which is murder between individuals and "rebellion" between groups of citizens, be equally preventable between nations by the common law of the world?

[Footnote 1: Also sprach Zarathustra, Speech xi. (end).]

The answer is simple. When the world has a common will, and has created a common government to express and enforce that will.

In the sphere of science and invention, of industry and economics, as Norman Angell and others have taught us, the world is already one Great Society. For the merchant, the banker, and the stockbroker political frontiers have been broken down. Trade and industry respond to the reactions of a single, world-wide, nervous system. Shocks and panics pass as freely as airmen over borders and custom-houses. And not "big business" only, but the humblest citizen, in his search for a livelihood, finds himself caught in the meshes of the same world-wide network. "The widow who takes in washing," says Graham Wallas,[1] in his deep and searching analysis of our contemporary life, "fails or succeeds according to her skill in choosing starch or soda or a wringing machine under the influence of half a dozen competing world-schemes of advertisement.... The English factory girl who is urged to join her Union, the tired old Scotch gatekeeper with a few pounds to invest, the Galician peasant when the emigration agent calls, the artisan in a French provincial town whose industry is threatened by a new invention, all know that unless they find their way among world-wide facts, which only reach them through misleading words, they will be crushed." The Industrial Revolution of the past century, steam-power and electricity, the railway and the telegraph, have knit mankind together, and made the world one place.

[Footnote 1: The Great Society (1914), p. 4.]

But this new Great Society is as yet formless and inarticulate. It is not only devoid of common leadership and a common government; it lacks even the beginnings of a common will, a common emotion, and a common consciousness. Of the Great Society, consciously or unconsciously, we must all perforce be members; but of the Great State, the great World-Commonwealth, we do not yet discern the rudiments. The economic organisation of the world has outstripped the development of its citizenship and government: the economic man, with his farsighted vision and scientific control of the resources of the world, must sit by and see the work of his hands laid in ashes by contending governments and peoples. No man can say how many generations must pass before the platitudes of the market and the exchange pass into the current language of politics.

Sec.8. The Two Roads of Advance: Inter-State Action and Common Citizenship.—In the great work which lies before the statesmen and peoples of the world for the extension of law and common citizenship and the prevention of war there are two parallel lines of advance.

One road lies through the development of what is known as International, but should more properly be called Inter-State Law, through the revival, on a firmer and broader foundation, of the Concert of Europe conceived by the Congress of Vienna just a hundred years ago—itself a revival, on a secular basis, of the great mediaeval ideal of an international Christendom, held together by Christian Law and Christian ideals. That ideal faded away for ever at the Reformation, which grouped Europe into independent sovereign States ruled by men responsible to no one outside their own borders. It will never be revived on an ecclesiastical basis. Can we hope for its revival on a basis of modern democracy, modern nationality, and modern educated public opinion? Can Inter-State Law, hitherto a mere shadow of the majestic name it bears, almost a matter of convention and etiquette, with no permanent tribunal to interpret it, and no government to enforce it, be enthroned with the necessary powers to maintain justice between the peoples and governments of the world?

Such a Law the statesmen of Great Britain and Russia sought to impose on Europe in 1815, to maintain a state of affairs which history has shown to have been intolerable to the European peoples. There are those who hope that the task can be resumed, on a better basis, at the next Congress. "Shall we try again," writes Professor Gilbert Murray,[1] "to achieve Castlereagh's and Alexander's ideal of a permanent Concert, pledged to make collective war upon the peace-breaker? Surely we must. We must, at all costs and in spite of all difficulties, because the alternative means such unspeakable failure. We must learn to agree, we civilised nations of Europe, or else we must perish. I believe that the chief council of wisdom here is to be sure to go far enough. We need a permanent Concert, perhaps a permanent Common Council, in which every awkward problem can be dealt with before it has time to grow dangerous, and in which outvoted minorities must accustom themselves to giving way."

[Footnote 1: Hibbert Journal, Oct. 1914, p. 77.]

Other utterances by public men, such as Mr. Roosevelt and our own Prime Minister, might be cited in the same sense; but Professor Murray's has been chosen because he has had the courage to grasp the nettle. In his words the true position is quite clearly set forth. If Inter-State Law is to become a reality we must "be sure to go far enough." There is no half-way house between Law and no Law, between Government and no Government, between Responsibility and no Responsibility. If the new Concert is to be effective it must be able to compel the submission of all "awkward problems" and causes of quarrel to its permanent Tribunal at the Hague or elsewhere; and it must be able to enforce the decision of its tribunal, employing for the purpose, if necessary, the armed forces of the signatory Powers as an international police. "Out-voted minorities must accustom themselves to giving way." It is a bland and easy phrase; but it involves the whole question of world-government. "Men must accustom themselves not to demand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," the earliest law-givers might have said, when the State first intervened between individuals to make itself responsible for public order. Peace between the Powers, as between individuals, is, no doubt, a habit to which cantankerous Powers "must accustom themselves." But they will be sure to do so if there is a Law, armed with the force to be their schoolmaster towards peaceable habits. In other words, they will do so because they have surrendered one of the most vital elements in the independent life of a State—the right of conducting its own policy—to the jurisdiction of a higher Power. An Inter-State Concert, with a Judiciary of its own and an Army and Navy under its own orders, is, in fact, not an Inter-State Concert at all; it is a new State: it is, in fact, the World-State. There is no middle course between Law and no Law: and the essence of Statehood, as we have seen, is a Common Law.

Will this new State have the other attributes of Government—a Common Legislature and a Common Executive—as well as a Common Judiciary? Let us go back to Professor Murray's words. He speaks of "outvoted minorities." Let us suppose the refractory country to be Great Britain, outvoted on some question relating to sea-power. Of whom will the outvoted minority consist? Of the British members on the "Common Council" of the Concert. But the question at once arises, what are the credentials of these British members? Whom do they represent? To whom are they responsible? If they are the representatives of the British people and responsible to the democracy which sent them, how can they be expected to "accustom themselves to giving way"—perhaps to a majority composed of the representatives of undemocratic governments? Their responsibility is, not to the Concert, but to their own Government and people. They are not the minority members of a democratically-elected Council of their own fellow-citizens. They are the minority members of a heterogeneous Council towards which they owe no allegiance and recognise no binding responsibility. There is no half-way house between Citizenship and no Citizenship, between Responsibility and no Responsibility. No man and no community can serve two masters. When the point of conflict arises men and nations have to make the choice where their duty lies. Not the representatives of Great Britain on the International Concert, but the people of Great Britain themselves would have to decide whether their real allegiance, as citizens, was due to the World-State or to their own Commonwealth: they would find themselves at the same awful parting of the ways which confronted the people of the Southern States in 1861. When at the outbreak of the Civil War General Lee was offered by Lincoln the Commandership of the Northern armies and refused it, to become the Commander-in-Chief on the side of the South, he did so because "he believed," as he told Congress after the war, "that the act of Virginia in withdrawing herself from the United States carried him along with it as a citizen of Virginia, and that her laws and acts were binding on him." In other words, unless the proposed Common Council is to be made something more than a Council of the delegates of sovereign States (as the Southern States believed themselves to be till 1861), a deadlock sooner or later is almost inevitable, and the terrible and difficult question—so familiar to Americans and recently to ourselves on the smaller stage of Ulster—of the right of secession and the coercion of minorities will arise. But if the Common Council is framed in accordance with a Constitution which binds its representatives to accept its decisions and obey its government, then the World-State, with a World-Executive, will already have come into being. There will be no more war, but only Rebellion and Treason.

Such is the real meaning of proposals to give a binding sanction to the decisions of an Inter-State Concert. Anything short of this—treaties and arbitration-agreements based upon inter-State arrangements without any executive to enforce them—may give relief for a time and pave the way for further progress, but can in itself provide no permanent security, no satisfactory justification for the neglect of defensive measures by the various sovereign governments on behalf of their peoples. Mr. Bryan, for the United States, has within the last eighteen months concluded twenty-six general arbitration treaties with different Governments, and may yet succeed in his ambition of signing treaties with all the remainder. Yet no one imagines that, when the immunity of the United States from attack is guaranteed by the promise of every Government in the world, America will rely for her defence upon those promises alone.

In discussing proposals for a European Council, then, we must be quite sure to face all that it means. But let us not reject Professor Murray's suggestion off-hand because of its inherent difficulties: for that men should be discussing such schemes at all marks a significant advance in our political thought. Only let us be quite clear as to what they presuppose. They presuppose the supremacy, in the collective mind of civilised mankind, of Law over Force, a definite supremacy of what may be called the civilian as against the military ideal, not in a majority of States, but in every State powerful enough to defy coercion. They presuppose a world map definitely settled on lines satisfactory to the national aspirations of the peoples. They presuppose a status quo which is not simply maintained, like that after 1815, because it is a legal fact and its disturbance would be inconvenient to the existing rulers, but because it is inherently equitable.[1] They presuppose a similar democratic basis of citizenship and representation among the component States. They presuppose, lastly, an educated public opinion incomparably less selfish, less ignorant, less unsteady, less materialistic, and less narrowly national than has been prevalent hitherto. Let us work and hope for these things: let us use our best efforts to remove misunderstandings and promote a sense of common responsibilities and common trusteeship for civilisation between the peoples of all the various sovereign States; but meanwhile let us work also, with better hopes of immediate if less ambitious successes, along the other parallel road of advance.

[Footnote 1: The same applies to proposals for ensuring permanent peace in the industrial sphere. Neither capital nor labour will abide by "scraps of paper" if they do not feel the status quo (i.e. the conditions under which wage-contracts are made) to be equitable and inherently just.]

The other road may seem, in this hour of dreams and disaster, of extremes of hope and disillusionment, a long and tedious track: it is the old slow high road of civilisation, not the short cut across the fields. It looks forward to abiding results, not through the mechanical co-operation of governments, but through the growth of an organic citizenship, through the education of the nations themselves to a sense of common duty and a common life. It looks forward, not to the definite establishment, in our day, of the World-State, but only to the definite refutation of the wicked theory of the mutual incompatibility of nations. It looks forward to the expression in the outward order of the world's government of what we may call "the Principle of the Commonwealth," of Lord Acton's great principle of the State composed of free nations, of the State as a living body which lives through the organic union and free activity of its several national members. And it finds its immediate field of action in the deepening and extension of the obligations of citizenship among the peoples of the great, free, just, peace-loving, supra-national Commonwealths whose patriotism has been built up, not by precept and doctrine, but on a firm foundation of older loyalties.

The principle of the Commonwealth is not a European principle: it is a world-principle. It does not proceed upon the expectation of a United States of Europe; for all the Great Powers of Europe except Austria-Hungary (and some of the smaller, such as Holland, Belgium, and Portugal) are extra-European Powers also. Indeed if we contract our view, with Gladstone and Bismarck and the statesmen of the last generation, to European issues alone, we shall be ignoring the chief political problem of our age—the contact of races and nations with wide varieties of social experience and at different levels of civilisation. It is this great and insistent problem (call it the problem of East and West, or the problem of the colour-line) in all its difficult ramifications, political, social, and, above all, economic, which makes the development of the principle of the Commonwealth the most pressing political need of our age. For the problems arising out of the contact of races and nations can never be adjusted either by the wise action of individuals or by conflict and warfare; they can only be solved by fair and deliberate statesmanship within the bosom of a single State, through the recognition by both parties of a higher claim than their own sectional interest—the claim of a common citizenship and the interest of civilisation.[1] It is here, in the union and collaboration of diverse races and peoples, that the principle of the Commonwealth finds its peculiar field of operation. Without this principle, and without its expression, however imperfect, in the British Empire, the world would be in chaos to-day.

[Footnote 1: The most recent example of this is the settlement of the very difficult dispute between India and South Africa.]

We cannot predict the political development of the various Great Powers who between them control the destinies of civilisation. We cannot estimate the degree or the manner in which France, freed at last from nearer preoccupations, will seek to embody in her vast dominion the great civilising principles for which her republic stands. We cannot foretell the issue of the conflict of ideas which has swayed to and fro in Russia between the British and the Prussian method of dealing with the problem of nationality. Germany, Italy, Japan—here, too, we are faced by enigmas. One other great Commonwealth remains besides the British. Upon the United States already lies the responsibility, voluntarily assumed and, except during a time of internal crisis,[1] successfully discharged, of securing peace from external foes for scores of millions of inhabitants of the American continent. Yet with the progress of events her responsibilities must yearly enlarge: for both the immigrant nationalities within and the world-problems without her borders seem to summon her to a deeper education and to wider obligations.

[Footnote 1: French occupation of Mexico, 1862, during the American Civil War, when the Monroe Doctrine was temporarily in abeyance.]

But upon the vast, ramifying, and inchoate Commonwealth of Great Britain lies the heaviest responsibility. It is a task unequally shared between those of her citizens who are capable of discharging it. Her task within the Commonwealth is to maintain the common character and ideals and to adjust the mutual relations of one quarter of the human race. Her task without is to throw her weight into the scales of peace, and to uphold and develop the standard and validity of inter-State agreements. It is a task which requires, even at this time of crisis, when, by the common sentiment of her citizens, the real nature and purpose of the Commonwealth have become clear to us, the active thoughts of all political students. For to bring home to all within her borders who bear rule and responsibility, from the village headman in India and Nigeria, the Basutu chief and the South Sea potentate, to the public opinion of Great Britain and the self-governing Dominions, the nature of the British Commonwealth, and the character of its citizenship and ideals, and to study how those ideals may be better expressed in its working institutions and executive government—that is a task to which the present crisis beckons the minds of British citizens, a task which Britain owes not only to herself but to mankind.

Note.—A friendly critic who saw this chapter in MS. remarked: "I think the author has been very successful in ignoring some of the shady methods by which the British Empire has been extended." The criticism is not strictly relevant to the subject of the chapter, but as it may occur to other readers it may be well to deal with it in a brief note. I would answer:

(1) The "shady methods" of which he speaks were not the result of British Imperialism, or of a desire for conquest on the part of the British State. They were the result, melancholy but inevitable, of the contact of individuals and races at different levels of development. This contact between the stronger and the weaker (which can be illustrated from what is said about the sandalwood traders in the New Hebrides on p. 215 above) was the direct result of the explorations of the sixteenth century, which threw the seas of the world open to Western pioneers and traders. The extension of the authority of Western governments (Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British), and the collisions between them, followed inevitably on the activities of their citizens, as has been pointed out on p. 216 above. All the Western governments have made mistakes in dealing with this unfamiliar situation; but the wise course for democratic public opinion, instead of railing at "Imperialism," would seem to be to familiarise itself with its problems and control its injurious tendencies.

(2) In any case, the mistakes of the past do not entitle us to wash our hands of responsibilities in the present. This war has shown that the non-self-governing parts of the Commonwealth are not, as our enemies supposed, a weakness to Great Britain in time of trouble, but a strength. In other words, whatever may have happened in the past, Great Britain has now won the consent of the ruled to the fact—not necessarily to the methods—of British rule. To use what is doubtless unduly constitutional language, we are now faced in India and elsewhere, not with a Revolutionary Movement, but with an Opposition. That is a great incentive to further development.



BOOKS

THE PHILOSOPHY OF VIOLENCE

BERNHARDI, Germany and the Next War (2s.), has become familiar. But this is only one application of a doctrine which has found expression in many spheres, as, for example, in the writings of the French Syndicalists, who claim to be copying the methods of Capitalism, and the principles of Bergson's philosophy—with what justification must be left to the reader to determine. See G. SOREL, Reflexions sur la Violence (Paris, Marcel Riviere, 1910, 5 francs), and Sorel's other writings. "Bernhardi-ism" is, in fact, not a German product: it has been before the public for some years under the name of "militancy," in connection with various causes, though it has never been put into execution on so tremendous a scale as by the Prussian Government. Nor is its philosophical basis to be found only, if at all, in Nietzsche.

KULTUR

The insistence on "Culture" as the main factor in the life and development of peoples is to be found in practically every German history, and in a great many non-German writers. It has received an additional vogue from the development of the study of Sociology, which naturally seeks out, in tracing the development of societies in the past, the elements which lend themselves to measurement and description, and these are inevitably, from the nature of the evidence, rather "cultural" than moral. It would be invidious to mention instances.

EDUCATION

For Dr. SADLER'S articles see p. 119, above. See also PAULSEN, German Education: Past and Present. 1908. 5s. net.

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE COMMONWEALTH

The best philosophical book on the relations of advanced and backward races is The Basis of Ascendancy: a Discussion of certain Principles of Public Policy involved in the Development of the Southern States, by EDGAR GARDNER MURPHY (a clergyman living at Montgomery, Alabama) (1909, 6s. net). Though written with reference to the peculiar American problem, the book has a far wider significance. There is no good book which covers the ground either on India or the British Empire. E.R. BEVAN'S little volume on Indian Nationalism (2s. 6d. net) may be mentioned. An article on India and the Empire in the Round Table for September 1912 is also worth mention (and worth reprinting).

THE GREAT SOCIETY

WALLAS, The Great Society (1914, 7s. 6d. net), and NORMAN ANGELL, The Great Illusion (1910, 2s. 6d. net), are the standard works—the former as a psychologist and a philosopher, the latter as a pamphleteer with a very acute vision within a limited field.

INTERNATIONAL LAW

See LINDSAY, The War against War (Oxford pamphlets, 2d.), a model of clear argument, so far as it goes. Also ALISON PHILLIPS, The Confederation of Europe: A Study of the European Alliance, 1813-1823, as an Experiment in the International Organisation of Peace, (1914, 7s. 6d. net), the best book on the Congress of Vienna and the problems connected with it, especially on the subject of an International Tribunal and Universal Peace. The Prime Minister's speeches will be familiar. See also Mr. Roosevelt's pamphlet on the United States and the Hague Convention (Newnes, 2d.).

MONROE DOCTRINE

See an article by L.S. ROWE in the Political Quarterly, October 1914.

INDEX

Accepting houses Acton, Lord Adalia Adrianople Adriatic, Serb access to Aegean Aehrenthal, Count Agadir crisis Agram Agriculture, German Albania Albion, perfidious Alexander I., Tsar Alexander II. Alexander III. Alexander, King of Serbia Alexandretta Alsace-Lorraine American Jews Angell, Mr. Norman Antivari Arab movement Armaments Army, Austro-Hungarian Arnold, Matthew Asia Minor Asquith, Mr. Athenians Auffenberg, General Australia Austria, genesis of Austrian Note to Serbia Austrian Question Azev

Baden Balance of Power Balkan League situation wars Ballads, Serb Ballplatz Banat of Temesvar Bank of England Baring, Maurice Bebel, August Belgium Belgrade Berchtold, Count Berlin, Congress of Bernhardi, General Bessarabia Bethmann-Hollveg Bismarck Bobrikoff, General Bohemia Bojana river Bosnia Bosnian annexation Brandenburg Britain, aims of Britain and Germany Brunswick Brussa Bucarest, Treaty of Budapest Bukovina Bulgaria Buelow, Prince Bund, Jewish Byzantium

Cabrinovic Canadian trade Carbonari Carinthia Carlyle Carniola Castlereagh Catherine II. Catholic Church Cattaro Cavour Centre party Cetinje Charlemagne Charles Albert Charles V. Charles the Bold Charles, King of Roumania Cilicia Civil War, American Coalition, Serbo-Croat Cobden Coleridge Colonies, German Comenius Committee of Union and Progress Commonwealth, a European Concert of Europe Conscription Constantine, King Constantinople Constitution, German Consular service Cotton industry Cramb, Professor Credit Crimean War Croatia Culture Cuvaj Cyprus Czechs

Dalmatia Danzig Dardanelles Debreczen Delegations Democracy Denmark Diplomatic Service Disraeli Dmowski, M. Dobrudja Dostoieffsky Downing Street Draga, Queen Dual System Duma Dvorak

Economic policy Education Enver Pasha Epirus Eucken, Rudolf Eugene, Prince Europe, map of

Federalism in Austria Fenelon Ferdinand, King of Bulgaria Fichte Finance, Haute Finland Flemings Flensburg Florence Foreign Office Foreign Policy Forgach, Count Foerstner, Lieutenant von Francis Ferdinand, Archduke assassination, Francis Joseph Frankfurt, Diet of Frederick III. Frederick the Great Fremdenblatt, article French Revolution Constitution Friedjung Trial

Galicia Garibaldi German Confederation Germanisation German Navy Germans in Austria Goethe Gogol Gold reserve Gore, Bishop Graham, Stephen Greece Grey, Sir Edward Grosswardein

Habsburg, House of Haeckel Hague Congress Conventions Hanotaux, Gabriel Hanover Hanseatic League Harnack Harvey, T.E. Hauptmann, Gerhart Heine Hermannstadt Herzl, Theodor Hohenzollern, House of Holland Holy Alliance Synod Humboldt, Wilhelm von Hungarian Constitution electoral system Hungary, kingdom of Hurban, Svetozar Hus, John

Ibsen Industry and war Inter-State Law Ionian Islands Ipek Ireland Irredentism, Italian Islam Istria, Italian culture in Dalmatia Italy Ivan the Terrible Izvolsky

Jena, battle of Jerusalem Jews Joseph II. Jugoslavia Junkers

Kara George Karageorgevitch dynasty Karlowitz Kavala Kennard, Dr. Khalifate Kiel Canal Konieh Koeniggraetz Koenigsberg Konrad von Hoetzendorf Kosovo, battle of Kossuth Kosziusko

Landmarks Lebanon Legitimacy Leipzig, battle of Leopold I., Emperor Leopold II Leopold I. of Belgium Lessing Lloyd George, Mr. Lodz Louis XIV. Luxemburg

Macara, Sir Charles Macedonia Magyarisation Magyars Maria Theresa Marienburg Marx, Karl Masaryk, Professor Maximilian I Mazurian lakes Mazzini Metkovic Metternich Metz Michael, Prince Milan, King Militarism Military Frontiers Mill, On Liberty Milosh Obrenovitch Mohacs Moltke Monastir Montenegro Moscow Murray, Gilbert

Napoleon Napoleon III. Napoleonic Wars Nationalities, Hungarian Law of Nationality, idea of false conceptions of Nazim Pasha Nemanja dynasty Neusatz (Novi Sad) New Guinea Nicholas II. Nicholas, Grand Duke Nietzsche Nihilism Norway Novara

Obrenovitch dynasty Orthodox Church

Palermo Palestine Pan-Germans Panslavism Peter the Great Peter, King of Serbia Petrograd Piedmont Pig War Pius IX. Plevna Pobiedonostsev Pola Poland Poles, Austrian Prussian Police state Polish Partition Ponsonby, Mr. A. Posen Prague Princip, murderer Protestantism in Germany Prussia Prussian education Pushkin

Radicalism Radkersburg Ragusa Ramsay MacDonald, Mr. Reichstag, German Relief Fund, National Revolution, French of 1848 Russian Reynolds, Rothay Rhodes Rolland, Romain Roosevelt, President Roumania Roumanians of Hungary Rousseau Russia and Prussia Russian Church Russification Russo-Japanese War Ruthenes

Sadler, Dr. Salonica Samoa Sarajevo Sarolea, Dr. Savoy, House of Saxons in Transylvania Schleswig-Holstein School strikes Schurz, Carl Scotland Scott Serbia Serbo-Croat unity Serb Patriarchate Sicilies, Two Silesia Silistria Slav and Teuton Slavophilism Slavs of Austria Slovak Academy Slovaks Slovenes Smyrna Social effects of war Socialism, State Socialists, German Sombart, Professor Southern Slavs State aid Stephen Dushan Stock Exchange Stolypin Sugar Commission Sweden Swinburne Switzerland Sybel Syria Szekels

Teutonic Knights Tirol Tisza, Count Tomanovic, Dr. Trade effects of war Traders, South Sea Trade Unions and war Transylvania Treitschke Trentino Trieste Triple Alliance Entente Tripoli Tschirschky Turkification Turks

Ukraine Ulster Unemployment Ungvar Uniate Church Universal Suffrage

Valona Vardar valley Vatican Venice Victor Emanuel II. Vienna Congress of Violence, Philosophy of Virginia Vistula Voltaire

Wallas, Graham Walloons Warsaw, Grand-Duchy of Weimar Wells, H.G. Westphalia Wied, William of Wilamowitz-Moellendorff William I. William II. William I. of Holland W.E.A. World-Policy, German Wordsworth Wuertemberg

Young Turks

Zabern Zionism Zollverein Zvonomir

THE END