The World in Chains Part 2

Eugenics?

In this brief investigation of the possible causes of war, it must be understood that what we want to find is what is called a "sufficient reason" for its continued existence. The armament trades may supply the means, the occasion, the stimulant, but their relation to it is not essentially causal. Many writers of another school have attempted to prove that the sufficient reason of war is a beneficent function of which they believe it to be capable. This imaginary function is none other than that of improving the race, and we may admit at once that, if there were the slightest scientific basis for such a belief, the bloodiest war would be morally justified, and it would be the religious duty of every individual to kill as many as possible of his fellows for the benefit of their descendants. But of course modern warfare so far from improving the race must sensibly exhaust it. In ancient Sparta, and generally whenever the conditions of warfare approximated to those of personal combat, courage and the allied characteristics of mental as well as of physical n.o.bility must have had a survival value; whereas in modern warfare which makes for the indiscriminate extermination of all combatants, the result is exactly reversed. Our semi-scientific militarists forget that the "survival of the fittest"[13] is in nature essentially a process of selective elimination; and modern war is a process of inverted selection which eliminates the brave, the adventurous and the healthy; precisely those members of the community who are best fitted to survive, that is to propagate their kind, in the ordinary environment of political life. Conscription, indeed, spreading a wider net than the voluntary system, may be described as an inst.i.tution for exposing the best citizens of a state to abnormal risks of annihilation. As a matter of historic fact we are told, though I don't know on what authority, that the Napoleonic wars, how much less deadly than our own, reduced by an inch the average height of the French nation.

So much, in brief, for the "scientific" justification of war. It is evident that by the eugenic argument war could be defended only if we agreed to send into battle precisely those men whom our recruiting officers disqualify. A good deal might be said, from the sociologist's point of view, in favour of a system of cathartic conscription which would rejuvenate England with a watchword of "The Unfit to the Trenches."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 13: They usually add to their mental confusion the elementary blunder of using the word "fittest" in a moral instead of in its biological sense.]

-- 3

Patriotism

If again there were any evidence to show that war and war alone kept alive the spirit of true patriotism, it would be less easy to denounce its manifold wickedness. For true patriotism, although like all pa.s.sionate emotion it involves a certain mental distortion, a slight disturbance of the rational orbit, is yet one of those happy diseases which relieve the colourlessness of strict normality. It is a magic, a glamour, of the nature of personal affection, which only great poetry can fully express, and volumes of bad poetry cannot quite destroy. It has besides a real political value, binding the State together, and giving it a stronger moral coherence than can be attained by any legal or const.i.tutional authority; a fact that is ill.u.s.trated by those distressful countries in which its limits are not conterminous with the political boundaries of the State. I am inclined to think that just because true patriotism is of the nature of a personal affection, it is an emotion that cannot be inspired by an empire, any more than personal affection can be inspired by a corporation or a joint-stock company.[14]

Certainly Imperialism more often gives rise to a sentimental wors.h.i.+p of force and a certain promiscuous l.u.s.t for mere extension of territory which are quite alien to the steady devotion of the patriot to the land he knows.[15]

Unless one be a poet, it is difficult, as may perhaps be gathered from the preceding paragraph, sufficiently to praise genuine patriotism without falling into vague rhetoric. But I submit that there is nothing to show that this political emotion is created, stimulated, or even discovered by war. Actually it seems that the reverse is the case, if one may judge by the fact that war is invariably accompanied by an overwhelming outbreak of every spurious form of patriotism that was ever invented by the devil to make an honest man ashamed of his country. True patriotism is a calm and lovely orientation of the spirit towards the vital beauty of England. It has no noisy manifestations and consequently one may not be able to find it among the crowds who shout most loudly for war.

One finds instead a sort of violent fever and calenture which not merely deflects, as any emotion may, but totally inhibits the rational operations of the mind. The newspapers supply a legion of witnesses.

Thus the _Evening Standard_ perorates against some pacificist lecturer (who had attempted to clear his views from all sorts of misrepresentations) with the magnificent comment that he had not "repudiated his remarks as to the pleasure which the tune of the Austrian National Anthem gave him."[16] But I should weary you were I to transcribe a t.i.the of the stupid remarks made by persons in authority under the influence of war. The record, I believe, in England is held at present by Mr. Bodkin, K.C.

It may be said of course that men, and newspapers, are equally stupid in time of peace; and I fear that fundamentally this is true. War does not change their nature, but only brings to the bubbling surface the dregs and vileness and sc.u.m. War does not change any one's nature; and that is why it is vain to expect that under its influence those crowds will love their country who never loved anything before. But if war cannot create it may at least be supposed to discover and test the existent patriotism of the nation. And this supposition is corroborated at first sight by the realisation that hundreds of thousands, that actually millions of previously ordinary young men have implied by enlisting their willingness to die for England. One might, of course, reason that no individual recruit really believes he is going to be killed, that each boy thinks he will be one of the lucky ones who escape all the bullets unhurt to enjoy an honoured return, that recruiting would have failed entirely if the barracks were explicitly a grave and enlistment the certainty of violent death or mutilation. But somehow I don't think that would be a fair argument. It is more pertinent if less easy to remember that a readiness to die for one's country is not the highest form of political virtue. If it be, as it is, a solemn and wonderful thing to be willing to die for the salvation (_ex hypothesi_) of England, it must be much more wonderful and solemn to be willing to die in order slightly to increase the income of one's family. And every schoolboy knows that the Chinaman of the old regime was willing to have his head cut off for the payment of a few dollars to his next of kin. Let no one ever deny our soldiers the honour of their courage and n.o.bility; but the fact remains that the readiness to die for England is a less adequate test of patriotism than a readiness to live for England; and if the readiness to live for the State rather than for private interests had been for a hundred years a social virtue whose votaries could be numbered by the million, then indeed England would be to-day a nation worth dying for.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 14: If anyone were to suggest that this is disproved by the unparalleled n.o.bility of Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and Indians in the present campaign, I should reply that they are actuated by devotion not to the Empire but to England, not to the Company but to the Chairman of the Company. This may be a quibble, but I think the distinction is real. Anyhow, I leave it at that, as the point has no primary relevance.]

[Footnote 15: See below, Chapter IV, -- 5.]

[Footnote 16: The paragraph is worth preserving in its entirety: "Mr. W.

N. Ewer, who lectured at Finchley for the Union of Democratic Control, has explained that the report which we published of his speech is unfair, and that he is really in substantial agreement with Mr. Asquith.

This is disingenuous, and Mr. Ewer knows it is. He has not repudiated the correctness of the report, which stated that he dilated on the danger of British navalism, and declared that we must give up singing 'Rule Britannia!' nor has he repudiated his remarks as to the pleasure which the tune of the Austrian National Anthem gave him. Does he think that Mr. Asquith would substantially agree with that? Or the country?"--_The Evening Standard_, July 26, 1915.]

-- 4

The "Moral Test"

The theory that war is beneficial as a moral test, a furnace in which character is proved--_ut fulvum spectatur in ignibus aurum_--is that generally adopted by the Christian Churches, who may be said without disrespect to have taken every advantage of their founder's unique reference to the sword. I cannot help thinking that there is something fundamental in this ecclesiastical advocacy of war; that some psychological theory could be outlined to correlate this almost uniform advocacy with the facts that such religious men as Tennyson and Ruskin were among the loudest in their support of the Crimean War, that such a militarist as Rudyard Kipling in his best work (in _Kim_, in _Puck of Pook's Hill_ and the intercalated poems, in the most successful of his short stories) shows himself to be at heart a deeply religious mystic; and that in France the very active Clerical party, one consequence of a disestablished Church, is always closely supported by the Chauvinists.

In many cases, however, I have no doubt that the pious Christian, finding himself confronted with war, and not having the moral courage or the political detachment to condemn it, only applies automatically to its justification the arguments which he habitually uses to explain the existence of evil and pain. It is certain at least that the theories of war as a Moral Test or a School of Character bear a strong resemblance to the commonplaces of religious consolation which almost any good Christian will offer to the bereaved and afflicted. Any one who has seen an innocent friend slowly tortured to death by some vile disease will know the futility of the Christian defence (for these religious consolations amount theologically to a defence) that pain enn.o.bles the character and "proves" the moral courage of the sufferer.[17] The leading fallacy of the defence that war, or pain, is valuable as a moral test is akin to the common misunderstanding of the word "prove" in the saying that "the exception proves the rule"; the truth being that a strong and n.o.ble character, one of whose corollary qualities is a capacity to bear pain, is not less strong and n.o.ble if it is never called upon to exercise that capacity. The San Francisco earthquake was not a blessing in disguise because it happened to "test" and "prove" the strength and flexibility of modern American architecture.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 17: I cannot help reproducing here a letter which originally appeared in the _Manchester Guardian_ at the time of the Boer War, and is quoted by Mr. Norman Angell in _The Great Illusion_, p. 281.

"SIR,--I see that 'The Church's Duty in Regard to War' is to be discussed at the Church Congress. This is right. For a year the heads of our Church have been telling us what war is and does--that it is a school of character; that it sobers men, cleans them, strengthens them, knits their hearts; makes them brave, patient, humble, tender, p.r.o.ne to self-sacrifice. Watered by 'war's red rain,' one Bishop tells us, virtue grows; a cannonade, he points out, is an 'oratorio'--almost a form of wors.h.i.+p. True; and to the Church men look for help to save their souls from starving for lack of this good school, this kindly rain, this sacred music. Congresses are apt to lose themselves in wastes of words.

This one must not, surely cannot, so straight is the way to the goal. It has simply to draft and submit a new Collect for war in our time, and to call for the reverent but firm emendation, in the spirit of the best modern thought, of those pa.s.sages in Bible and Prayer Book by which even the truest of Christians and the best of men have at times been blinded to the duty of seeking war and ensuing it. Still, man's moral nature cannot, I admit, live by war alone; nor do I say with some that peace is wholly bad. Even amid the horrors of peace you will find little shoots of character fed by the gentle and timely rains of plague and famine, tempest and fire; simple lessons of patience and courage conned in the schools of typhus, gout, and stone; not oratorios, perhaps, but homely anthems and rude hymns played on knife and probe in the long winter nights. Far from me to 'sin our mercies,' or to call mere twilight dark.

Yet dark it may become; for remember that even these poor makes.h.i.+ft schools of character, these second-bests, these halting subst.i.tutes for war--remember that the efficiency of every one of them, be it hunger, accident, ignorance, sickness, or pain, is menaced by the intolerable strain of its struggles with secular doctors, plumbers, inventors, schoolmasters, and policemen. Every year thousands who would once have been braced and steeled by manly tussles with small-pox or diphtheria are robbed of that blessing by the great changes made in our drains.

Every year thousands of women and children must go their way bereft of the rich spiritual experience of the widow and the orphan."]

-- 5

Trade

I shall never forget the tones of hoa.r.s.e satisfaction with which a vendor of the _Evening News_ disturbed the twilight of a May evening in London, triumphantly proclaiming a "Great Troop Train Disaster." I had often noticed with what apparent joy the newspapers announced the sinking of a British cruiser; with what entirely neutral delight they welcomed or invented the report of Terrible Slaughter on either side.

But somehow that hoa.r.s.e and rufous man with the loose lip remained in my memory and became for me a type of one element in the population to which war was not unwelcome; the journalistic element that lives by exploiting the s.a.d.i.s.tic curiosity, the craving for mean excitements, and all the gladiatorial instinct of the modern world.[18] It soon became clear that the newspapers were not alone in the commercial exploitation of war. They were not even the worst offenders. The publishers were hurriedly producing volume after volume of faked memoirs badly written by imaginary governesses. The production of spurious memoirs and "autobiographies," even if they are skilfully composed, is always grossly immoral; and of the specimens occasioned by this war one may say that if they had been genuine it would have been possible to attribute the low morality of some Germanic princes to the literary style of the English governesses who had had a share in their education. The catchpenny manoeuvres of publishers are really only a branch of journalism,[19] and such trivial offences were not, after all, unexpected, because the very profession of journalism is to take advantage. But the journalist is a man of straw who shows which way the wind blows, and his raucous exultation over disaster was the manifest symbol of a commercial exploitation of war by tradesmen and speculators which soon became sensible from one end of belligerent Europe to the other. Like the Vali of Aleppo, I am not good at statistics. It is well known however without the a.s.sistance of a mathematician that in England during the winter of 1915, when the cost of living had already risen by nearly 50 per cent, wholesale dealers often kept provisions of all sorts rotting in their stores rather than break the artificial scarcity they had created; farmers would not sell fresh eggs when the price was twopence-halfpenny, because they knew that in a week or two the price for the same eggs would have risen to threepence. Here is a cartoon from a Hungarian paper[20] showing the bloated profiteer of The Sugar Trust laughing at the women who feebly attack his barricade of sugar loaves. I mention it here because it is sufficiently remote from English affairs, and because it happens to come to hand, and because it is a good fragment of evidence, there being no reason why sugar should be scarce in Hungary as an immediate result of the war. And from every country between England and Hungary, from every country in Europe, can be heard the same complaint, unmistakable but how much too feeble, the cry of the people who discover that one of the horrors of war is Trade.[21]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 18: Cf. the present writer's introduction to Whyte-Melville's _Gladiators_ in _Everyman's Library_, 1911.]

[Footnote 19: It was certainly, for example, the Headline Instinct which caused Mr. John Lane, a publisher of some repute, to impose on Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer's novel _The Saddest Story_, one of the most remarkable novels of the century, such an absurdly irrelevant t.i.tle as _The Good Soldier_. _The Good Soldier_ was published in April, 1915. The evidence that the publisher must have changed the t.i.tle just before publication is that an instalment of it had appeared serially as _The Saddest Story_ in the summer of 1914, and that as _The Saddest Story_ it actually figured in Mr. John Lane's catalogue at the end of the book.]

[Footnote 20: _Matyas Diak_ of Budapest.]

-- 6

Trade in Time of Peace

It would not however be correct to infer that the sacrifice of national welfare to commercial manoeuvres is a condition peculiar to war.

Modern commerce is essentially an art; the art of making people pay more than they are worth for things which they do not require. And it is with all the selfishness of the artist that it performs its usual operations.

Among all the unpublished detail of modern life hardly any cla.s.s of facts is more disquieting than that of commercial procedure and achievement. The subject is too large to be reviewed in less than a volume; and I can do no more here than suggest a few instances that might be acquired by anyone who devotes his time to not reading the daily papers.

The distribution and exchange of commodities are necessary to the existence of the State; so necessary that it might be supposed that their regulation would be one of the primary functions of government.

Proper systems of distribution and exchange correspond to the digestive processes of the body, on which depend the proper nutrition of all the parts and the real prosperity of the State as a whole; yet any comprehensive plan for their control is still regarded as the most unattainable dream of Utopia, and they are left to carry on as best they can in the interstices of private acquisitiveness. National well-being is not to be measured by mere volume of trade, which is the means and not the essence of prosperity;[22] and prosperity can certainly never exist when equitable distribution is hindered by a sort of fatty degeneration of capitalism. But trade in itself is a necessary aliment of the State, and its abuses ought not to be beyond remedy.

A few of these abuses are fairly obvious without a full inquiry, and may be ill.u.s.trated here because their existence in time of peace may throw light on the operations of trade in belligerent states, and indirectly, by suggesting a few of the results of war, may lead us to some of its motives and occasions. Such abuses may be most easily identified in opposition to the national rights which they infringe.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 21: So in Germany the fixing of maximum prices for pigs and potatoes was immediately followed by an almost complete withdrawal from the market of potatoes and pigs--the German farmers refused to sell except at their own inflated prices. Cf. quotations from the German Press in _The New Statesman_ of January 29, 1916.]

[Footnote 22: "Ces choses sont plutot des moyens que l'on emploie pour travailler a faire prosperer l'Etat qu'ils ne sont l'essence de sa prosperite."--Rousseau, _Political Writings_, I, 345 (C. E. Vaughan's edition).]

-- 7

Duties of Commerce to the State

The State has a primary right to be fairly served. Prices should not be arbitrarily raised by any wholesale merchant who happens to be in a position to do so, or by any cartel of dealers in league for that purpose. Prices should be regulated by the cost of production, and should not be an indication of demand; they should rise beyond the cost of production augmented by a fair profit only when the supply is insufficient (production not being artificially restrained) to meet some abnormal demand, and only as a means of checking and regulating the excessive demand. We find instead that any dealer or group of dealers will raise their prices almost absent-mindedly as soon as they are in a position to meet a demand which cannot be postponed. Thus it is that governments are habitually overcharged in all their contracts and purchases; because governments have neither the time nor the opportunity for casual dealings, and because they do not undertake such transactions at all unless their absolute necessity has already been decided.[23] So at the beginning of the war English warehouses were full of all sorts of commodities required by the governments of the Allies; but the urgency of war prevented any sort of bargaining; and the private merchants took advantage of the situation to the amount of about two hundred per cent.

At present however I am dealing with trade in time of peace and I must not flavour the ordinary facts with any consideration of War Office contracts. It is enough to state the fact that in ordinary times the private tradesman regards a special demand as an opportunity for raising prices rather than as the stimulus of supply; a rule which is most easily detected in the experience of Government departments.

The State, through its individual citizens, has a primary right to obtain the particular commodity which it happens to prefer, without restrictions imposed for the benefit of any particular tradesman. We find instead that the ordinary purchaser no longer has any effective, or selective, demand. He has to buy what he is given. The informal organisation of the Trust system, primarily a financial operation,[24]

has involved the whole market in a network of interdependent industries.