Chapter II: 'economic' and 'moral' Motives in International Affairs

_The Great Illusion_ dealt--among other factors of international conflict--with the means by which the population of the world is driven to support itself; and studied the effect of those efforts to find sustenance upon the relations of States. It therefore dealt with economics.

On the strength of this, certain critics (like some of those quoted in the last chapter) who cannot possibly have read the book thoroughly, seem to have argued: If this book about war deals with 'economics,' it must deal with money and profits. To bring money and profits into a discussion of war is to imply that men fight for money, and won't fight if they don't get money from it; that war does not 'pay.' This is wicked and horrible. Let us denounce the writer for a shallow Hedonist and money-grubber....

As a matter of simple fact, as we shall see presently, the book was largely an attempt to show that the economic argument usually adduced for a particularly ruthless form of national selfishness was not a sound argument; that the commonly invoked justification for a selfish immoralism in Foreign Policy was a fallacy, an illusion. Yet the critics somehow managed to turn what was in fact an argument against national egoism into an argument for selfishness.

What was the political belief and the attitude towards life which _The Great Illusion_ challenged? And what was the counter principle which it advocated as a substitute therefore?

It challenged the theory that the vital interests of nations are conflicting, and that war is part of the inevitable struggle for life among them; the view that, in order to feed itself, a nation with an expanding population must conquer territory and so deprive others of the means of subsistence; the view that war is the 'struggle for bread.'[101] In other words, it challenged the economic excuse or justification for the 'sacred egoism' which is so largely the basis of the nationalist political philosophy, an excuse, which, as we shall see, the nationalist invokes if not to deny the moral law in the international field, at least to put the morality governing the relations of States on a very different plane from that which governs the relations of individuals. As against this doctrine _The Great Illusion_ advanced the proposition, among others, that the economic or biological assumption on which it is based is false; that the policy of political power which results from this assumption is economically unworkable, its benefits an illusion; that the amount of sustenance provided by the earth is not a fixed quantity so that what one nation can seize another loses, but is an expanding quantity, its amount depending mainly upon the efficiency with which men co-operate in their exploitation of Nature. As already pointed out, a hundred thousand Red Indians starved in a country where a hundred million modern Americans have abundance. The need for co-operation, and the faith on which alone it can be maintained, being indispensable to our common welfare, the violation of the social compact, international obligation, will be visited with penalties just as surely as are violations of the moral law in relations between individuals. The economic factor is not the sole or the largest element in human relations, but it is the one which occupies the largest place in public law and policy. (Of two contestants, each can retain his religion or literary preferences without depriving the other of like possessions; they cannot both retain the same piece of material property.) The economic problem is vital in the sense of dealing with the means by which we maintain life; and it is invoked as justification for the political immoralism of States. Until the confusions concerning it are cleared up, it will serve little purpose to analyse the other elements of conflict.

What justifies the assumption that the predatory egotism, sacred or profane, here implied, was an indispensable part of the pre-war political philosophy, explaining the great part of policy in the international field?[102]

First the facts: the whole history of international conflict in the decade or two which preceded the War; and the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. If you would find out the nature of a people's (or a statesman's) political morality, note their conduct when they have complete power to carry their desires into effect. The terms of peace, and the relations of the Allies with Russia, show a deliberate and avowed pre-occupation with sources of oil, iron, coal; with indemnities, investments, old debts; with Colonies, markets; the elimination of commercial rivals--with all these things to a degree very much greater and in a fashion much more direct than was assumed in _The Great Illusion_.

But the tendency had been evident in the conflicts which preceded the War. These conflicts, in so far as the Great Powers were concerned, had been in practically every case over territory, or roads to territory; over Madagascar, Egypt, Morocco, Korea, Mongolia; 'warm water' ports, the division of Africa, the partitioning of China, loans thereto and concessions therein; the Persian Gulf, the Bagdad Railway, the Panama Canal. Where the principle of nationality was denied by any Great Power it was generally because to recognise it might block access to the sea or raw materials, throw a barrier across the road to undeveloped territory.

There was no denial of this by those who treated of public affairs. Mr Lloyd George declared that England would be quite ready to go to war rather than have the Morocco question settled without reference to her. Famous writers like Mahan did not balk at conclusions like this:--

'It is the great amount of unexploited raw material in territories
politically backward, and now imperfectly possessed by the nominal
owners, which at the present moment constitutes the temptation and
the impulse to war of European States.'[103]

Nor to justify them thus:--

'More and more Germany needs the assured importation of raw
materials, and, where possible, control of regions productive of
such materials. More and more she requires assured markets, and
security as to the importation of food, since less and less
comparatively is produced within her own borders for her rapidly
increasing population. This all means security at sea.... Yet the
supremacy of Great Britain in European seas means a perpetually
latent control of German commerce.... The world has long been
accustomed to the idea of a predominant naval power, coupling it
accurately with the name of Great Britain: and it has been noted
that such power, when achieved, is commonly found associated with
commercial and industrial pre-eminence, the struggle for which is
now in progress between Great Britain and Germany. Such
pre-eminence forces a nation to seek markets, and, where possible,
to control them to its own advantage by preponderant force, the
ultimate expression of which is possession.... From this flow two
results: the attempt to possess, and the organisation of force by
which to maintain possession already achieved.... This statement is
simply a specific formulation of the general necessity stated;
itself an inevitable link in a chain of logical sequence: industry,
markets, control, navy, bases....[104]

Mr Spenser Wilkinson, of a corresponding English school, is just as definite:--

'The effect of growth is an expansion and an increase of power. It
necessarily affects the environment of the growing organisms; it
interferes with the _status quo_. Existing rights and interests are
disturbed by the fact of growth, which is itself a change. The
growing community finds itself hedged in by previously existing and
surviving conditions, and fettered by prescriptive rights. There
is, therefore, an exertion of force to overcome resistance. No
process of law or of arbitration can deal with this phenomenon,
because any tribunal administering a system of right or law must
base its decision upon the tradition of the past which has become
unsuited to the new conditions that have arisen. The growing State
is necessarily expansive or aggressive.'[105]

Even more decisive as a definite philosophy are the propositions of Mr Petre, who, writing on 'The Mandate of Humanity,' says:--

'The conscience of a State cannot, therefore, be as delicate, as
disinterested, as altruistic, as that of the noblest individuals.
The State exists primarily for its own people and only secondarily
for the rest of the world. Hence, given a dispute in which it feels
its rights and welfare to be at stake, it may, however erroneously,
set aside its moral obligations to international society in favour
of its obligations to the people for whom it exists.

'But no righteous conscience, it may be said, could give its
verdict against a solemn pledge taken and reciprocated; no
righteous conscience could, in a society of nations, declare
against the ends of that society. Indeed I think it could, and
sometimes would, if its sense of justice were outraged, if its duty
to those who were bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh came into
conflict with its duty to those who were not directly belonging to
it....

'The mechanism of a State exists mainly for its own preservation,
and cannot be turned against this, its legitimate end. The
conscience of a State will not traverse this main condition, and to
weaken its conscience is to weaken its life....

'The strong will not give way to the weak; the one who thinks
himself in the right will not yield to those whom he believes to be
in the wrong; the living generations will not be restrained by the
promises to a dead one; nature will not be controlled by
conventions.'[106]

It is the last note that gives the key to popular feeling about the scramble for territory. In _The Great Illusion_ whole pages of popular writing are quoted to show that the conception of the struggle as in truth the struggle for survival had firmly planted itself in the popular consciousness. One of the critics who is so severe upon the present writer for trying to undermine the economic foundation of that popular creed, Benjamin Kidd, himself testifies to the depth and sweep of this pseudo-Darwinism (he seems to think indeed that it is true Darwinism, which it is not, as Darwin himself pointed out). He declares that 'there is no precedent in the history of the human mind to compare with the saturnalia of the Western intellect' which followed the popularisation of what he regards as Darwin's case and I would regard as a distortion of it. Kidd says it 'touched the profoundest depth of the psychology of the West.' 'Everywhere throughout civilisation an almost inconceivable influence was given to the doctrine of the law of biological necessity in books of statecraft and war-craft, of expanding military empires.' 'Struggle for life,' 'a biological necessity,' 'survival of the fit,' had passed into popular use and had come to buttress popular feeling about the inevitability of war and its ultimate justification and the uselessness of organising the natives save on a basis of conflict.

We are now in a position to see the respective moral positions of the two protagonists.

The advocate of Political Theory No. 1, which an overwhelming preponderance of evidence shows to be the prevailing theory, says:--You Pacifists are asking us to commit national suicide; to sacrifice future generations to your political ideals. Now, as voters or statesmen we are trustees, we act for others. Sacrifice, suicide even, on behalf of an ideal, may be justified when we are sacrificing ourselves. But we cannot sacrifice others, our wards. Our first duty is to our own nation, our own children; to their national security and future welfare. It is regrettable if, by the conquests, wars, blockades, rendered necessary by those objects other people starve, and lose their national freedom and see their children die; but that is the hard necessity of life in a hard world.

Advocate of Political Theory No. 2 says:--I deny that the excuse of justification which you give for your cruelty to others is a valid excuse or justification. Pacifism does not ask you to sacrifice your people, to betray the interest of your wards. You will serve their interests best by the policy we advocate. Your children will not be more assured of their sustenance by these conquests that attempt to render the feeding of foreign children more difficult; yours will be less secure. By co-operating with those others instead of using your energies against them, the resultant wealth....

Advocate No. 1:--Wealth! Interest! You introduce your wretched economic calculations of interest into a question of Patriotism. You have the soul of a bagman concerned only to restore 'the blessed hour of tranquil money-getting,' and Sir William Robertson Nicoll shall denounce you in the _British Weekly_!

And the discussion usually ends with this moral flourish and gestures of melodramatic indignation.

But are they honest gestures? Here are the upholders of a certain position who say:--'In certain circumstances as when you are in a position of trustee, the only moral course, the only right course, is to be guided by the interests of your ward. Your duty then demands a calculation of advantage. You may not be generous at your ward's expense. This is the justification of the "sacred egoism" of the poet.'

If in that case a critic says: 'Very well. Let us consider what will be the best interests of your ward,' is it really open to the first party to explain in a paroxysm of moral indignation: 'You are making a shameful and disgraceful appeal to selfishness and avarice?'

This is not an attempt to answer one set of critics by quoting another set. The self-same people take those two attitudes. I have quoted above a passage of Admiral Mahan's in which he declares that nations can never be expected to act from any other motive than that of interest (a generalisation, by the way, from which I should most emphatically dissent). He goes on to declare that Governments 'must put first the rival interests of their own wards ... their own people,' and are thus pushed to the acquisition of markets by means of military predominance.

Very well. _The Great Illusion_ argued some of Admiral Mahan's propositions in terms of interest and advantage. And then, when he desired to demolish that argument, he did not hesitate in a long article in the _North American Review_ to write as follows:--

'The purpose of armaments, in the minds of those maintaining them,
is not primarily an economical advantage, in the sense of depriving
a neighbour State of its own, or fear of such consequences to
itself through the deliberate aggression of a rival having that
particular end in view.... The fundamental proposition of the book
is a mistake. Nations are under no illusion as to the
unprofitableness of war in itself.... The entire conception of the
work is itself an illusion, based upon a profound misreading of
human action. To regard the world as governed by self-interest only
is to live in a non-existent world, an ideal world, a world
possessed by an idea much less worthy than those which mankind, to
do it bare justice, persistently entertains.'[107]

Admiral Mahan was a writer of very great and deserved reputation, in the very first rank of those dealing with the relations of power to national politics, certainly incapable of any conscious dishonesty of opinion. Yet, as we have seen, his opinion on the most important fact of all about war--its ultimate purpose, and the reasons which justify it or provoke it--swings violently in absolute self-contradiction. And the flat contradiction here revealed shows--and this surely is the moral of such an incident--that he could never have put to himself detachedly, coldly, impartially the question: 'What do I really believe about the motives of nations in War? To what do the facts as a whole really point?' Had he done so, it might have been revealed to him that what really determined his opinion about the causes of war was a desire to justify the great profession of arms, to one side of which he had devoted his life and given years of earnest labour and study; to defend from some imputation of futility one of the most ancient of man's activities that calls for some at least of the sublimest of human qualities. If a widened idealism clearly discredited that ancient institution, he was prepared to show that an ineradicable conflict of national interests rendered it inevitable. If it was shown that war was irrelevant to those conflicts, or ineffective as a means of protecting the interests concerned, he was prepared to show that the motives pushing to war were not those of interest at all.

It may be said that none the less the thesis under discussion substitutes one selfish argument for another; tries by appealing to self-interest (the self-interest of a group or nation) to turn selfishness from a destructive result to a more social result. Its basis is self. Even that is not really true. For, first, that argument ignores the question of trusteeship; and, secondly, it involves a confusion between the motive of a given policy and the criterion by which its goodness or badness shall be tested.

How is one to deal with the claim of the 'mystic nationalist' (he exists abundantly even outside the Balkans) that the subjugation of some neighbouring nationalism is demanded by honour; that only the great State can be the really good State; that power--'majesty,' as the Oriental would say--is a thing good in itself?[108] There are ultimate questions as to what is good and what is bad that no argument can answer; ultimate values which cannot be discussed. But one can reduce those unarguable values to a minimum by appealing to certain social needs. A State which has plenty of food may not be a good State; but a State which cannot feed its population cannot be a good State, for in that case the citizens will be hungry, greedy, and violent.

In other words, certain social needs and certain social utilities--which we can all recognise as indispensables--furnish a ground of agreement for the common action without which no society can be established. And the need for such a criterion becomes more manifest as we learn more of the wonderful fashion in which we sublimate our motives. A country refuses to submit its dispute to arbitration, because its 'honour' is involved. Many books have been written to try and find out precisely what honour of this kind is. One of the best of them has decided that it is anything which a country cares to make it. It is never the presence of coal, or iron, or oil, which makes it imperative to retain a given territory: it is honour (as Italy's Foreign Minister explained when Italy went to war for the conquest of Tripoli). Unfortunately, rival States have also impulses of honour which compel them to claim the same undeveloped territory. Nothing can prove--or disprove--that honour, in such circumstances, is invoked by each or either of the parties concerned to make a piece of acquisitiveness or megalomania appear as fine to himself as possible: that, just because he has a lurking suspicion that all is not well with the operation, he seeks to justify it to himself with fine words that have a very vague content. But on this basis there can be no agreement. If, however, one shifts the discussion to the question of what is best for the social welfare of both, one can get a _modus vivendi_. For each to admit that he has no right so to use his power as to deprive the other of means of life, would be the beginning of a code which could be tested. Each might conceivably have that right to deprive the other of means of livelihood, if it were a choice between the lives of his own people or others.

The economic fact is the test of the ethical claim: if it really be true that we must withhold sources of food from others because otherwise our own would starve, there is some ethical justification for such use of our power. If such is not the fact, the whole moral issue is changed, and with it, to the degree to which it is mutually realised, the social outlook and attitude. The knowledge of interdependence is part, at least, of an attitude which makes the 'social sense'--the sense that one kind of arrangement is fair and workable, and another is not. To bring home the fact of this interdependence is not simply an appeal to selfishness: it is to reveal a method by which an apparently irreconcilable conflict of vital needs can be reconciled. The sense of interdependence, of the need of one for another, is part of the foundation of the very difficult art of living together.

Much mischief arises from the misunderstanding of the term 'economic motive.' Let us examine some further examples of this. One is a common confusion of terms: an economic motive may be the reverse of selfish. The long sustained efforts of parents to provide fittingly for their children--efforts continued, it may be, through half a lifetime--are certainly economic. Just as certainly they are not selfish in any exact sense of the term. Yet something like this confusion seems to overlie the discussion of economics in connection with war.

Speaking broadly, I do not believe that men ever go to war from a cold calculation of advantage or profit. I never have believed it. It seems to me an obvious and childish misreading of human psychology. I cannot see how it is possible to imagine a man laying down his life on the battle-field for personal gain. Nations do not fight for their money or interests, they fight for their rights, or what they believe to be their rights. The very gallant men who triumphed at Bull Run or Chancellorsville were not fighting for the profits on slave-labour: they were fighting for what they believed to be their independence: the rights, as they would have said, to self-government or, as we should now say, of self-determination. Yet it was a conflict which arose out of slave labour: an economic question. Now the most elementary of all rights, in the sense of the first right which a people will claim, is the right to existence--the right of a population to bread and a decent livelihood.[109] For that nations certainly will fight. Yet, as we see, it is a right which arises out of an economic need or conflict. We have seen how it works as a factor in our own foreign policy: as a compelling motive for the command of the sea. We believe that the feeding of these islands depends upon it: that if we lost it our children might die in the streets and the lack of food compel us to an ignominious surrender. It is this relation of vital food supply to preponderant sea power which has caused us to tolerate no challenge to the latter. We know the part which the growth of the German Navy played in shaping Anglo-Continental relations before the War; the part which any challenge to our naval preponderance has always played in determining our foreign policy. The command of the sea, with all that that means in the way of having built up a tradition, a battle-cry in politics, has certainly bound up with it this life and death fact of feeding our population. That is to say it is an economic need. Yet the determination of some millions of Englishmen to fight for this right to life, to die rather than see the daily bread of their people in jeopardy, would be adequately described by some phrase about Englishmen going to war because it 'paid.' It would be a silly or dishonest gibe. Yet that is precisely the kind of gibe that I have had to face these fifteen years in attempting to disentangle the forces and motives underlying international conflict.

What picture is summoned to our minds by the word 'economics' in relation to war? To the critics whose indignation is so excited at the introduction of the subject at all into the discussion of war--and they include, unhappily, some of the great names of English literature--'economic' seems to carry no picture but that of an obese Semitic stockbroker, in quaking fear for his profits. This view cannot be said to imply either much imagination or much sense of reality. For among the stockbrokers, the usurers, those closest to financial manipulation and in touch with financial changes, are to be found some groups numerically small, who are more likely to gain than to lose by war; and the present writer has never suggested the contrary.

But the 'economic futility' of war expresses itself otherwise: in half a Continent unable to feed or clothe or warm itself; millions rendered neurotic, abnormal, hysterical by malnutrition, disease, and anxiety; millions rendered greedy, selfish, and violent by the constant strain of hunger; resulting in 'social unrest' that threatens more and more to become sheer chaos and confusion: the dissolution and disintegration of society. Everywhere, in the cities, are the children who cry and who are not fed, who raise shrunken arms to our statesmen who talk with pride[110] of their stern measures of 'rigorous' blockade. Rickety and dying children, and undying hate for us, their murderers, in the hearts of their mothers--these are the human realities of the 'economics of war.'

The desire to prevent these things, to bring about an order that would render possible both patriotism and mercy, would save us from the dreadful dilemma of feeding our own children only by the torture and death of others equally innocent--the effort to this end is represented as a mere appeal to selfishness and avarice, something mean and ignoble, a degradation of human motive.

'These theoretical dilemmas do not state accurately the real conditions of politics,' the reader may object. 'No one proposes to inflict famine as a means of enforcing our policy' ... 'England does not make war on women and children.'

Not one man or woman in a million, English or other, would wittingly inflict the suffering of starvation upon a single child, if the child were visible to his eyes, present in his mind, and if the simple human fact were not obscured by the much more complex and artificial facts that have gathered round our conceptions of patriotism. The heaviest indictment of the military-nationalist philosophy we are discussing is that it manages successfully to cover up human realities by dehumanising abstractions. From the moment that the child becomes a part of that abstraction--'Russia,' 'Austria,' 'Germany'--it loses its human identity, and becomes merely an impersonal part of the political problem of the struggle of our nation with others. The inverted moral alchemy, by which the golden instinct that we associate with so much of direct human contact is transformed into the leaden cruelty of nationalist hate and high statecraft, has been dealt with at the close of Part I. When in tones of moral indignation it is declared that Englishmen 'do not make war on women and children,' we must face the truth and say that Englishmen, like all peoples, do make such war.

An action in public policy--the proclamation of the blockade, or the confiscation of so much tonnage, or the cession of territory, or the refusal of a loan--these things are remote and vague; not only is the relation between results and causes remote and sometimes difficult to establish, but the results themselves are invisible and far away. And when the results of a policy are remote, and can be slurred over in our minds, we are perfectly ready to apply, logically and ruthlessly, the most ferocious of political theories. It is of supreme importance then what those theories happen to be. When the issue of war and peace hangs in the balance, the beam may well be kicked one way or the other by our general political philosophy, these somewhat vague and hazy notions about life being a struggle, and nature red of tooth and claw, about wars being part of the cosmic process, sanctioned by professors and bishops and writers. It may well be these vague notions that lead us to acquiesce in the blockade or the newest war. The typhus or the rickets do not kill or maim any the less because we do not in our minds connect those results with the political abstractions that we bandy about so lightly. And we touch there the greatest service which a more 'economic' treatment of European problems may perform. If the Treaty of Versailles had been more economic it would also have been a more humane and human document. If there had been more of Mr Keynes and less of M. Clemenceau, there would have been not only more food in the world, but more kindliness; not only less famine, but less hate; not only more life, but a better way of life; those living would have been nearer to understanding and discarding the way of death.

Let us summarise the points so far made with reference to the 'economic' motive.

We need not accept any hard and fast (and in the view of the present writer, unsound) doctrine of economic determinism, in order to admit the truth of the following:--

1. Until economic difficulties are so far solved as to give the mass of the people the means of secure and tolerable physical existence, economic considerations and motives will tend to exclude all others. The way to give the spiritual a fair chance with ordinary men and women is not to be magnificently superior to their economic difficulties, but to find a solution for them. Until the economic dilemma is solved, no solution of moral difficulties will be adequate. If you want to get rid of the economic preoccupation, you must solve the worst of the economic problem.

2. In the same way the solution of the economic conflict between nations will not of itself suffice to establish peace; but no peace is possible until that conflict is solved. That makes it of sufficient importance.

3. The 'economic' problem involved in international politics the use of political power for economic ends--is also one of Right, including the most elemental of all rights, that to exist.

4. The answer which we give to that question of Right will depend upon our answer to the actual query of _The Great Illusion_: must a country of expanding population expand its territory or trade by means of its political power, in order to live? Is the political struggle for territory a struggle for bread?

5. If we take the view that the truth is contained in neither an unqualified affirmative nor an unqualified negative, then all the more is it necessary that the interdependence of peoples, the necessity for a truly international economy, should become a commonplace. A wider realisation of those facts would help to create that pre-disposition necessary for a belief in the workability of voluntary co-operation, a belief which must precede any successful attempt to make such co-operation the basis of an international order.

6. The economic argument of _The Great Illusion_, if valid, destroys the pseudo-scientific justification for political immoralism, the doctrine of State necessity, which has marked so much of classical statecraft.

7. The main defects of the Treaty of Versailles are due to the pressure of a public opinion obsessed by just those ideas of nations as persons, of conflicting interests, which _The Great Illusion_ attempted to destroy. If the Treaty had been inspired by the ideas of interdependence of interest, it would have been not only more in the interests of the Allies, but morally sounder, providing a better ethical basis for future peace.

8. To go on ignoring the economic unity and interdependence of Europe, to refuse to subject nationalist pugnacities to that needed unity because 'economics' are sordid, is to refuse to face the needs of human life, and the forces that shape it. Such an attitude, while professing moral elevation, involves a denial of the right of others to live. Its worst defect, perhaps, is that its heroics are fatal to intellectual rectitude, to truth. No society built upon such foundations can stand.