The Degradation of Policy

I

SOME years ago I had a conversation with a gifted Oriental, which turned mainly on the mental contrasts between East and West. On my side I was maintaining the familiar proposition that the mind of the East is ruled by custom and the mind of the West by science. My Oriental friend did not agree, and interrupted me with frequent disclaimers. At last, by way of illustrating my argument, I ventured to tell him the following story.

An Englishman resident in one of the hill districts of India was pondering the drain on his income caused by the number of servants which the customs of the country compelled him to employ. Six gardeners were required for the work of the small garden surrounding his bungalow. The waste of time and energy was prodigious. Every movement of the gardeners was regulated by custom, and much ceremony was observed. Among other things, all burdens were carried on the head, from a packet of letters to a sack of coals, and the six gardeners had no notion of carrying them in any other way. From the foundations of the world the head had been designed for burdens, and burdens for the head.

The Englishman conceived the idea of providing the gardeners with a wheelbarrow: it would enable him, he reckoned, to manage with one gardener the less; so he called them together and explained the new implement. Whereupon the head gardener stepped forward and informed the sahib in the name of them all that one wheelbarrow would be no good, but that six would be required: ‘for,’ said he, ‘we are men of different caste, and it is not lawful for us to use each others’ tools.’

This somewhat deranged the Englishman’s calculations. Nevertheless, the six wheelbarrows were provided. They might be useful in the neighborhood.

Not long afterward a car-load of coals for the use of the bungalow arrived at the station, and the Englishman resolved that the wheelbarrows, which the gardeners had so far refused to touch, should be started on their career. So he summoned them into his presence, repeated his explanations, and gave them strict orders to use the wheelbarrows. With one accord the six placed their hands on their foreheads, bowed to the ground, assured him that obedience to his commands was the delight, of their eyes and the sole object of their existence, and departed on their errand.

He did not see them depart, but not long afterward, looking out of his window, he saw them returning. The six were marching up the garden path in a slow and stately procession, one behind the other. They had got the coals. They had them in the wheelbarrows. But each of the six men was carrying his wheelbarrow on his head.

When I had finished the story, my Oriental friend remained silent for some minutes and then replied to the following effect.

‘Your story,’ he said, ‘is conceivably true, and certainly characteristic of the mind of the East. But the difference between East and West is not as great as you think. You too have your fixed ideas; you fall victims to them oftener than you know, and nothing will persuade you to abandon them till some terrible catastrophe overtakes the earth. In your gardens you carry burdens in all sorts of ways; but in your public life you have only one notion of the way they can be carried. You make “government” carry them all. Whatever requires doing, you think it can be done by voting, electing, making laws. From the foundation of the world “government” has been made for burdens and burdens for “government.” Even your churches are falling victims to this preposterous idea. Yes, you too are destined to carry everything on your heads, from a packet of letters to a sack of coals. You have carried the letters on your head for a long time; and after a few more strikes among your miners, you will be carrying the coals in the same manner. You call this “policy,” and it is your fixed idea, as custom is ours. And for my part,’ he added solemnly, ‘I prefer custom, which is an intelligible thing. But policy is a mystifying word and is often used to deceive the people and to make the greatest crimes look respectable. You are less scientific than you think.’

II

In times not long ago, when Comte and Herbert Spencer were the chief stars of the intellectual firmament, the question uppermost in high controversy was whether science or religion would become the dominant power in human affairs. So far as religion was concerned, the question seemed even then to have settled itself. Since the break-up of the authority of the Church in the sixteenth century, religion, whatever power it might retain in private life, had been steadily tending toward its present position as a negligible factor in high politics. Thus the way was open for a new guiding principle; it was clearly demanded, and the only question was as to the competence of science to perform the great task. General opinion was favorable to its claims. Science was the horse on which the Mid-Victorian spirit found itself more and more tempted to put its money. Largely through the influence of Spencer, we were entertained with the dream of a coming age when scientific principles and knowledge would regulate, not only the conduct of the individual man, but the conduct of states, of governments, of public affairs. A number of sciences designed for that end rapidly formed themselves, of which political economy held the key. Bentham constructed a science of law; Mill followed with a science of liberty; Walter Bagehot wrote The Science of Politics; and meanwhile Spencer was sketching his sociology as the coming synthesis of them all. We began to look forward to a reign of sociologists; we pictured the future candidate for Parliament as a man who had taken ‘honors’ in sociology, and Parliament itself as a great committee of sociological experts, legislating for a sociologically enlightened public, that would tolerate nothing which was not sociologically sound.

In all this, of course, religion had hardly a word to say; but the public had long been accustomed to that, and preferred, on the whole, that the pretense of religion should be abandoned in a region where everybody knew it had ceased to have effective power. On many grounds this dream of the coming reign of science was not unattractive, and, although it might appear ignoble when compared with the Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians, and although it drew upon itself the scorn of Ruskin and many a lashing sarcasm from Carlyle, one is still tempted to say of it that a worse thing might have happened to the world.

Be that as it may, the dream most assuredly has not come true; nor at the moment are the signs apparent that it will come true in the near future. The fact, is that a third power, which was active even while this debate was at its height, a power which is almost as little related to science as to religion, has risen into prominence and gained the ascendancy over both of them. This power is ‘policy.’ So far as the world can be said to be ruled by anything, — and it would be stretching compliments to say that it is, — this is the ruling power. What policy means may be hard to define, but it certainly means something of immense importance to the mind of the age — something, at all events, of immensely greater importance than either science or religion. It is policy that the public expects and respects; to policy it trusts its fortunes; on policy it stakes its hopes. Were it proved of a cabinet minister that he had neither science nor religion, few people would think much the worse of him. But what should we say if it were proved that he had no policy?

A well-known philanthropist who had sat in Parliament for many years once said to the present writer, ‘It is hard to keep one’s religion anywhere nowadays, hard in business, hard in the slums, hard at a dinner-party, hard sometimes in church; but the hardest place of all for me is in the House of Commons.'

Is it not a fact that we attach more importance to parliaments than to laboratories, and to prime ministers than to popes? Do we not spend far more time in making speeches than in saying our prayers? Are we not more excited about the secrets of cabinets than about the secrets of nature? In the speeches that are made on the eve of a general election, in the ‘platforms’ that are built, in the programmes put forward, in the promises made, how rarely you discover a trace of the scientific spirit, to say nothing of the religious! How seldom is science or religion so much as mentioned! How often the word ‘policy’ comes in! By policy we plan our New Jerusalems, and by voting we bring them into existence. Such is the orthodox credo of the day.

I am fully aware that this sharp distinction between policy on the one hand and science and religion on the other is what is commonly called ‘unphilosophical.’ I hear the reader reminding me that policy after all is only a name for the application in public affairs of truths which have a scientific or a religious basis, or perhaps both. This unquestionably is the true philosophical view of the matter. But the actual conduct of our public affairs does not reflect a philosophical view, and it is policy in being, and not the philosophy of politics, of which I am writing. Whatever theoretical connections may exist between policy, science, and religion, in practice they are divorced.

A striking example was recently afforded in the discussion about the feeding of Germany. This was generally approved, both by statesmen and by the newspaper press, though not without a good deal of previous hesitation, and with a certain shamefacedness when it came to the point. But, with a few notable exceptions, neither our statesmen nor our press supported the feeding of Germany on grounds that could be called either religious, moral, or scientific. It was a fine opportunity for them to show their religion, or their morals, or their science, if they had any one of the three. They were conspicuous by their absence. Again and again one read in speeches and leading articles, until the refrain became quite sickening, that Germany must indeed be fed, but not on moral grounds, not on sentimental grounds, not on humanitarian grounds, — as if any reference to these things would have immediately discredited the whole argument, — but on grounds of policy; which meant, of course, when translated from the language of the circumlocution office into plain speech, that unless we fed the victim up in good time, we should find him all skin and bones when he came to be roasted. A public spirit which argues or permits itself to be argued with in this way is as far removed from the spirit of science as it is from that of religion. Atrocious as such an argument would be from the point of view of St. Paul, it would be idiotic from that of Jeremy Bentham or Herbert Spencer.

But particular instances need not be labored. To the least attentive observer it must be obvious that policy, as expressed in contemporary politics, is far too much at the mercy of caprice, ignorance, and passion, far too entangled in a net of intrigue, far too closely allied with Machiavellian arts, far too overlaid with the secondary interests of parties, far too deeply involved in the erratic fortunes of eminent persons, to be scientific in any intelligible sense of the term. The same reasons forbid us to connect it with religion; and if other reasons are wanted, they can be found. By their fruits ye shall know them. The fruits of religion are righteousness, joy, and peace. Are these fruits of policy ? They might have been if policy had grown up in the atmosphere of the Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians, and, to a lesser degree, if the political mind had been put to school under Herbert Spencer. As a matter of fact, our notions of policy have developed in other company and been moulded by very different influences. They express the ideals of an acquisitive society; they reflect the cupidity of nations, groups, and classes; they are compromised by vote-catching interests; they are entangled in the arts of electioneering; they are contaminated with every kind of personal and party ambition. The fruits are strife, — the war of minds, the war of interests, and finally the war of arms, — in short, the world as it exists to-day.

III

The men who lead the world to-day are, preëminently, politicians, the authors and the agents of ‘policy.’ We speak of leaders in art, of leaders in science, of leaders in religion; but the influence possessed by these, and the power they wield, are small compared with those of a ‘leading politician.’ By common consent the work of the politician, which consists in devising policies and making laws to correspond, is the work which counts, and on which the vital issues depend. Thus the political leader outranks all others in importance, and his followers far outnumber theirs. To the mere lover of fame, power, influence, there is no career so attractive as the political; none which offers such exciting adventures and such dazzling triumphs. Except for the great conqueror, who seldom makes his appearance in the modem world, there is no man so courted, so acclaimed, so fêted as the political leader: for once that the limelight shines upon the man of science, the artist, the poet, the sage: the philosopher, the saint, it shines a thousand times upon him. It is all very well to say, ‘Give me the making of the nation’s songs, and let who will make its laws’; but if you want a brilliant and exciting life, your name in all men’s mouths and crowds shouting at your heels, you had better leave the songs alone and get busy with political oratory. For one man who will sing your songs if you happen to be a great poet, there are a million who will read your speeches if you succeed in becoming a political leader. The political leader is the typical leader of the modern world; compared with him, all others are in relative obscurity; his leadership is the most widely acknowledged, and, if leadership is the object of your ambitions, politics is clearly your road.

And yet, in spite of the immense following which political leaders command, how seldom do we encounter one of them of whom we can say that his followers love him. One may express the relation between leader and followers in many terms, — terms of admiration, terms of respect, terms of fear, terms which one would apply to a useful implement, to an efficient piece of machinery, to a formidable weapon, — but the terms of love seem always out of place. This relationship is a curious subject of study. Even on a first inspection it reveals certain features which can hardly be cited as shining examples of moral beauty. I doubt if there is any class of men who are more frankly treated as tools than our political leaders. We have been told that man is an end unto himself, and that to treat him otherwise, to treat him as a tool for your own ends, is the greatest of crimes. It is the daily crime of the political world. There are parties in existence at this moment which declare themselves determined to root this crime out of our social life; and yet these same parties are distinguished by their extreme readiness to scrap their own leaders the moment they find others who seem likely to serve them better. With what utter heartlessness these operations are performed and how many examples of it might be collected from the last four years! Punch had a cartoon in which the German Kaiser was exhibited as throwing his chancellors one after another down a well. I doubt if there is a political leader in the whole world at the present moment who has not to face the risk that he will end his career by being thrown down a well at the hands of his present followers. The ethos of policy requires it to be so, and there is a mutual understanding between leaders and followers to that effect. The leader knows that he is not beloved; and the followers would only smile if they were told that their duty was to die rather than desert him. ‘That,’ they would say, ‘is sentiment, not policy. Without a well, and without the right to fling your leaders into it when they cease to be useful, policy cannot be maintained. It is all part of the game.’ But what a game! And what a world it would be if the spirit of the game became universal, were introduced into the League of Nations, and made the law of the government of mankind!

We here encounter a feature which shows, perhaps, more clearly than anything else could do, the extent to which a policy-governed world has turned its back on the essential principle of all human relationships. Its typical leaders are used but not beloved. Our age has still to learn that of all the forces which combine a multitude of men into living and creative communities the utilitarian motive is precisely the weakest. Yet ‘policy’ has nothing else to offer. It has placed the typical form of modern leadership on a basis of utility, where leaders and followers alike are educated to regard one another reciprocally as tools. Can we believe for a moment that an ethos of this nature will ever yield the forces and the motives which are to build up a league of nations, a fraternity of free peoples, a community of mankind? What could we expect from a league so conceived but the reproduction, on a wider field, of the present political world, with all its pettinesses, its quarrels, its confusions, its Judas-betrayals, writ large?

The cry of ‘no sentiment’ is indeed a sinister thing, for it is the sure sign that the meanest sentiments are de facto in possession — the sentiments which set the world at variance with itself, the sentiments which prompt contemptible actions, the sentiments which drive men and nations to sell their souls, to desert their leaders, to abase themselves for thirty pieces of silver, or it may be for thirty thousand million. Is it not painfully clear that the knots into which policy has everywhere tied up the affairs of this suffering world will never be unraveled until some noble sentiment displaces the crowd of base ones now in possession? We are told that the world is hungering for great leaders. It hungers no less for great followers, without whom the great leaders are unthinkable. There will be neither the one nor the other until sentiment. gets its rights; until the devil, resuming his own, has flown away with our present conceptions of policy; until follower and leaders have ceased to regard each other as utilities; until nations can say to nations, ‘The Lord do so to me and more also if aught but death part thee and me.’

‘Impossible’ will be the comment of many. I can only reply that if it is impossible, the League of Nations is impossible also. If the ‘free peoples’ are incapable of rising to this level, either now or hereafter, they are incapable of building themselves into a loyal and living brotherhood. Not by the artful manipulation of low motives, but by a single high motive with immense driving power behind it; not by striking a common measure among the infinite forms of national self-seeking, but by resolutely turning our backs on the whole lot, will the nations reach the goal of mutual loyalty w’hich is their hearts’ desire. The peoples would do it if they had the chance; the politicians never will. The thing is not impossible.

IV

When all the lessons which the Great War has burned into the consciousness of mankind are gathered together, I believe they will be found to have combined in provoking a deep distrust of the official mind, a sense that the destinies of nations are not safe, and can never be safe, so long as they are at the mercy of the policies which the official mind originates and directs. More and more men are coming to view the war and all its horrors as the result, ultimately, of the attempt to rule the world in that manner; and to believe that, whatever refinements or improvements of it may be effected, they will merely shift the seat of strife, and not destroy its causes. Responsibility for the war may be distributed in various proportions and given various names, from downright criminality at one end to mere helplessness at the other; but wherever the head and front of the offending may have been, — and there is very little doubt on that point, — the belief has grown and is growing that the whole policy of the world is at the mercy of a group of false ideas and mistaken methods, of which strife and bloodshed are, sooner or later, the necessary outcome. This goes far deeper than any question as to the merits of democracy versus autocracy. The feeling is that, under the one system as under the other, statesmanship has lost touch with the great ideals of mankind, with the great motives of community life; that policy has degenerated into the manipulation of low motives; that diplomacy has become a thing apart from the true interests of nations, while nevertheless it holds them at its mercy for weal or woe, and in the long run for woe; that voting, elections, parliaments, law courts, and police, whether national or international, are not the last words that need to be spoken when the common good is in question.

Hence, a profound and universal unrest, taking forms, in certain countries, which threaten the very foundations of human society. Bolshevism, the summary name of all these movements, is the expression of a spirit which has lost confidence in the methods by which mankind has hitherto been ‘governed.’ The sources of this revolutionary spirit lie very deep. Taken at its face-value, it might appear to be directed against law and order; in reality, it is the refusal to accept as law and order what have hitherto passed muster as such. It is the demand for a new conception of law and a new conception of order. It is not impressed by the achievements of political progress up to date. Beneath the outward forms of order which ages of legislation have imposed on society it detects an inner chaos — the horrible confusion of a blind and purposeless life, which is bound sooner or later to break the feeble bonds which politicians create, and to express itself in war. In civilization, as we know it, the revolutionary spirit sees a piratical adventure with cupidity for its motive, and with internecine strife for its inevitable doom — an adventure essentially unworthy of the human race. With this conception before him, the revolutionary has naturally no respect either for the laws or for their makers. The laws he regards as so many expedients which experience has found to be efficacious in organizing cupidity. At bottom they are the expression of mutual distrust, primarily engendered by the nature of the enterprise on which all are engaged together. Hence he has no interest in the attempt to establish international law, and is either indifferent or actively hostile to present project s for a league of nations. He regards the League as an attempt at international acquisitiveness, as a paradoxical project for a world-syndicate of piracy. He reads the draft Covenant and finds it conceived in the old spirit of distrust, the spirit which the pursuit of material wealth cannot fail to engender. He sees the nations consulting together as to how best they may continue, as before, to pursue, to overtake, to divide the spoil. It is an attempt to integrate forces whose very nature is to fly asunder, to secure peace for an enterprise which is essentially one of strife.

Thus the revolutionary finds nothing to be gained by extending and perpetuating, in a league of nations, the political systems, methods, ideas, and traditions which, in his view, have brought upon the world the present sea of troubles. He distrusts, not only the systems, but still more the type of mind, of personality, of leadership which has become the recognized exponent of these things, and regards both the systems and the men who work them as not big enough, either morally or intellectually, for governing such a world as ours. Can it be that the revolutionary is dimly seeking after the Law of Love? Anyhow, he has lost the Love of Law, if Law is taken to mean what now passes muster as such. The political state, he declares, has reached the end of its development, and the federation of free peoples, now coming to birth, will not be a larger model of any of the existing states, or their common measure, but a community of a very different type. The next step forward will be in a new direction. So he thinks.

V

There are two courses open to the League of Nations. The first is to set about the task of crushing the spirit which I have described in the last section; and a multitude of counselors are already urging it to take this course. In that case the League of Peace must make ready for war. The ideas in question have acquired an immense currency, and they are neither to be denied nor to be trifled with. What the results of such a war would be, I should not like to predict. It is clear that it could not be maintained for long as a unitary enterprise on either side. Internal disruption would break up the forces of both parties, and immense confusion, in which empires would go to pieces, but without other discernible issue, would result.

The second course is that the League should make itself the interpreter and guide of the dim aspirations of which these things speak; that it should regulate its spirit and devise its form expressly for that purpose; that instead of basing itself on a refinement of the discredited policies of the past, it should become, in its corporate capacity, the organ of a new policy in consonance with the awakened conscience of mankind. This is not yielding to revolution; for, let it be noted, the forces of which I have spoken, infinitely dangerous when they are left unguided and uninterpreted, cease to be revolutionary just in so far as means are found for their orderly expression.

To find such means is, I venture to think, the paramount business which a league of nations should undertake. But they will not be found so long as the nations are treated as wealth-seeking units, and ingenuity is confined to devising the machinery which is to check the sordid scramble at the point where it threatens to break out into war. The negative ideal of not fighting is preposterously inadequate for the League of Nations, not only because it lacks all positive content, but still more because it involves the absurdity of imposing peace on motives whose very nature is to fight, while the motives themselves are left in being to chafe at their new restraints. A league so occupied would merely sit upon the chief safety-valve of the modern state; for it is a fact, deplore it as we may, that war has hitherto been the only means the wealth-making empires of the world possessed for letting off, at intervals, the explosive forces that are for ever being generated by ‘something rotten’ in the state of acquisitive society. To be worthy of the ideals which have called it into being, to be worthy even of its name, the League must abandon this ground altogether and concern itself directly with the things that give value, meaning, and dignity to human life. Save in so far as it is able to propose for the nations in concert some higher object than any single state has ever proposed for itself, the world has no use for it. Its true function is to give meaning to what has hitherto been the meaningless life of industrial civilization, to lift it out of the slough of its sordid motives, and to set it at last on the path to the City of God. Granting, what I would not deny, that the first task is to placate the present storm, by making the best peace the circumstances permit, of, yet in the terms of that peace, in the manner of its imposition, in the gesture with which the deed is accompanied, the whole world is looking for signs that a new and higher motive is coming to birth. It is precisely at this point that a single noble sentiment, a single generous impulse, a single magnanimous word, would count for more as a peacemaking force than would the most skillful adjustments of rival interests and the most formidable penalties against breakers of the peace that the political draughtsman could devise. If none of this appears, if the new ‘policy’ is nothing more than a new tune played on the old strings of low national motives, we shall soon have reason to wish that the League of Nations had never been heard of. The greatest opportunity which statesmanship has ever had for regaining the lost confidence of the peoples will have been thrown away, and the political mind, as it now exists, will have finally demonstrated its incompetence for the task of governing the world. After which the deluge.

VI

It is no doubt inevitable that the League of Nations should begin its existence on the political plane, as an instrument. designed for restraining the forces that hurt and destroy, as an experiment in ‘government’ working by the familiar modes of voting, elections, parliaments, law courts, and police. It might conceivably have begun otherwise, — for example, in a form more analogous to the Church than to the political state, — and unquestionably it would have begun in that manner but for certain accidents of history. But the facts of the situation must be accepted, and it is idle to speculate on what would have happened if the League had originated more from the desire of the nations to save their souls and less from the desire to guard or increase their wealth.

But though the way lies through politics, the goal is beyond them, and it is impossible that the start should be rightly made unless the goal is kept steadily in view. The political arrangements in which the enterprise begins must have a form, character, and spirit of their own, determined by the nature of the ultimate object to which they are intended to lead up. This object is not merely to restrain the forces that make for war, but to do a far greater thing — to liberate the forces that make for peace. In all nations there are at this moment immense reserves of these forces, repressed or misdirected or totally unused, but waiting to be enlisted and combined for common achievement in the manifold arts, interests, and pursuits that give man his true vocation on this planet. This work of liberation, enlistment, and redirection, conceived as a coöperative task on a world-wide basis, is the true function of a league of nations. To form it for any purpose less than this is to form it in vain.

Such a conception, remote as it may seem from the problems of the hour, has immense value in helping us to solve them. It defines the spirit in which the beginning must be made. Granting that the beginning must take the form of some treaty, or other political instrument, this must be conceived in a spirit conformable to the end. Magnanimity is demanded at the outset, while meanness, rapacity, and revenge are ruled out as absolutely fatal. An arrangement, however ingeniously contrived, which lacks the first quality and displays the others, is off the track a league of nations has to follow. A league of conquerors, for example, dominated by the habits of mind which conquest invariably engenders, cannot, under any conceivable circumstances, develop into a genuine fraternity of free peoples: it would be a false start, and its psychology, to say nothing of its morals, would condemn it. Even as keeper of the peace, a league of conquerors will not succeed. Nor do we make its failure the less assured by baptizing it a league of nations.

In a remarkable article contributed to the Harvard Theological Review, Dr. F. G. Peabody draws the distinction between peace-making and peacekeeping, and reminds us that the blessing of the Gospel is pronounced on the peace-makers. Indeed, the two things are by no means the same, although often confused. They employ different methods and have different ideals, of which the ideal of the peace-maker is incomparably the higher. While the peace-keeper is engaged with the negative object of preventing strife, the peace-maker has the positive aim of promoting fellowship. ‘Thou shalt not fight,’ is the motto of the one; ‘thou shalt coöperate,’ is the motto of the other. The methods of the peace-keeper invariably end in the resort to law courts and police; the peace-maker, on the other hand, works by a method which has a law of its own but dispenses with both lawyers and policemen. His work includes all that the peace-keeper sets out to accomplish, and a great deal more. He says nothing about peacekeeping, and may seem at first sight to be indifferent to it; but by engaging men in positive coöperations, he sets their relations on a footing where the peace is kept automatically. In this he shows himself a good psychologist. For while, broadly speaking, all men and all nations desire to be at peace with one another, none of them desires to be kept at peace by the rest; or, more strictly speaking, while some are willing to play the part of peace-keepers to the others, all are unwilling that others should play the part of peace-keepers to them. Thus, by its very nature, peace-keeping is an irritating topic, which can hardly be introduced without sowing the seeds of recalcitrancy and discord. Most of the great conquerors of the world have loved to exhibit themselves in the role of peacekeepers, and most of the great wars have originated from the notions which such men entertain of the methods by which peace is to be kept.

So the peace-maker avoids this dangerous topic as much as he can. He promotes the idea of mutual service; he enriches the world with the arts of cooperation; he invents devices for bearing the common burden; he institutes communities of knowledge; he founds schools, and would, if he had his way, turn the whole world into a university of high achievement, where men and nations might learn day by day their need of each others’ help. His manners correspond to his methods. He is neither artful nor repressive, but frank, pitiful, and magnanimous; for he knows how true it is of nations, as of individuals, that tout savoir est tout pardonner. Such is the peace-maker, and it is only by following him that the world will ever be kept, at peace.

The great weakness of the whole propaganda behind the project for a league of nations lies in the fact that it has seldom risen beyond the level of the peace-keeping conception. A fatality, born of our limited notions of policy, has confined thought to this lower ground. Hence it is that the League, backed though it be by the desire of all nations to be at peace, has to reckon with the unwillingness of every nation to be kept, at peace by the others; an unwillingness which is clearly revealed in the tendency of each of the Great Powers to make some exception in its own favor, — sea-power for Britain, the Monroe Doctrine for America, and so on, — which leaves it virtually the master of its own actions. Whether or not America would consent to aid in keeping the peace of Europe (and the point seems doubtful at the moment),

I take it as certain that she would never consent to be kept at peace by Europe if her own honor and ideals, as she interprets them to herself, required her to go to war. Nor would Europe in similar circumstances suffer herself to be kept at peace by America. How could any nation which has reached moral maturity enter into such an engagement? And how can the morally mature nations impose it on the morally immature, unless at the same time they reciprocally impose it upon one another? Material interests apart, such a concession, made by a mature nation, would be tantamount to the loss of its sovereign right to be, in the last resort, the author of its own conduct.

Clearly another way must be found; and the way indicated is that of the peace-maker. As a mere peace-keeping institution in the sense indicated, the League of Nations is doomed to be a disastrous failure; for it will provoke far more quarrels than it will either prevent or allay. Not until we conceive its functions in terms of peace-making, shall we begin to understand what it is we have set ourselves to accomplish.

We shall not greatly err if, for the time being, we dismiss political considerations from our minds and think of the League as an enterprise in international education, whose first business is to introduce the elements of mutual trust, understanding, and good-will into the prevailing chaos of barbaric motives. Frankly, I would attach more importance to such a scheme as t hat proposed by Mr. Brailsford for the establishment of international universities, open to all classes and especially to the workers, than to the most formidable machinery for policing the world, if only because it strikes the note of education,indicates the need of creating the international mind, and so carries us away from the ground dominated by the malign spirit of traditional diplomacy and the arts of the politician. Four hundred years ago Europe was far more of a living unity than it has been since; and it owed its unity in no small measure to the splendid influence of the men who went forth into all lands from its international universities, where they had been educated as citizens of the world. The same tiling might be repeated to-day on an immensely vaster scale. Nor would patriotism suffer the smallest loss.

Again, taking a wider view, if we think of the League as the beginning of a concerted crusade by all nations against the inhuman mechanism, the base acq uisitiveness, the low morals and vile habits of mind which are now covered by the word ‘policy’; if we think of it as an effort to dismiss the standard of quantity and erect the standard of quality over the whole field of industrial life, and so provide man with a vocation that is worthy of him, — the world-organ of a revolution against the reign of cupidity, ugliness, squalor, — in short, a redemptive and not a mere preventive enterprise, do we not see in a movement so conceived guaranties of peace a thousand times more effectual than any crusade against war can promise — indeed, the only guaranties which a world awakening from the spirit of covetousness could possibly accept as valid ?

Anything which moves on these lines may be welcomed, and hailed as the dawn of a new day. The march of events will doubtless provide many opportunities. Possibly, nay probably, we may find ourselves before long in presence of a threat to the whole fabric of industrial civilization due to the humiliating fact that the follies of the world have brought it to the brink of a financial precipice. Even that may be a blessing in disguise. Coöperation forced upon the nations by the need to save themselves from this calamity, may prove the beginning of cooperation in endless other forms. And yet it were better not to wait until action is forced upon them by the march of events.

We need a league of ideas to furnish the League of Nations with aim, spirit, and form: the religious idea, the moral, the educational, the economic, and — let it be granted — the political. Ot this mixed company the political idea is not the one that I would select as destined to play the chief part in founding a brotherhood of free peoples. Under happier auspices the political idea might indeed have become the summary of all the rest. It has not. It has degenerated, until the word ‘policy,’ on the lips of nine persons out of ten who use it, conveys no higher conception than the astute adjustment of selfish motives. Such a conception, whatever use it may have in other spheres, and whatever skill in draughtmanship it may command in this, is utterly inadequate for the work of reconciliation and fraternity. In this connection it is worse than useless: it is disastrous; and if allowed to dominate the councils of the nations at this juncture, it may be trusted to wake the sleeping dogs of three continents.

Yet, alas, it is the obsession of the official mind; the fetish of all the vested interests in the world. But it has proved a broken reed in every great crisis of history; and though the nations have suffered their destinies to fall into its power, it is profoundly distrusted. Men are learning to know it for what it is, and every deeper tendency of the age is in revolt against its domination.

The idea is widely prevalent that, because the problem of pacification is so vast, so complex, so involved in selfish interests and dangerous passions, it will tolerate no moral idealism, but must be solved by strict and exclusive regard to policy. This article is intended to suggest a precisely opposite conclusion. Just because the problem is so vast, so complex, so involved in selfish interests and dangerous passions, I plead that moral idealism is the only force that can save us. We are in the presence of an immense entanglement which must be cut through by the sword of the spirit. We are in deep waters, and the astute political mind is utterly out of its depth. The whole world is crying out for moral idealism; the demand for a league of nations is the expression of its desire. We wait for this highest thing as they that wait for the morning; and whenever the gleams of it appear on the horizon, as they do from time to time, there is a deep response from the hearts of millions, and the hopes revive which ‘policy’ has well-nigh crushed.