Chapter III

INTERNATIONAL MORALITY:
THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE

BY A. C. BRADLEY

When I was invited to give a lecture in a series dealing with the present crisis in its ethical and philosophical aspects, I had been endeavouring to clear my own mind as to the basis of international morality, and also as to some proposals aimed at the diminution of war; and I thought that this endeavour might perhaps be of some use to others.[4] I say the ‘basis’ of international morality; not the question what in particular the duties of states to one another are, but the question whether states are moral agents at all, and, if so, in what sense. This question runs back into that of the nature of the state, and cannot help being more or less a philosophical one; but I aim only at the outline of an answer and at being intelligible rather than precisely accurate; and, the subject being large, I intend, without reference to opposing views, merely to expound, at any rate at first, a view that is mine only in the sense that long since it got into my head out of other peoples’, and to expound it without adding to every sentence the words ‘so far as I can see’. Perhaps you will be kind enough to supply them.

My second subject is not itself philosophical. Judgement on proposals for diminishing war requires good sense, some knowledge of the past and present, and some capacity for faith and hope about the future. These things are not philosophy; and yet one of them, good sense, might be called philosophy pretending not to know herself; and, in any case, reflection on the nature of the state may help one in estimating concrete schemes which cannot succeed unless they correspond fairly well with that nature.

I must begin with some prefatory explanations suggested by the phrase just used. First, the nature of the state appears, of course, in a variety of forms; and a city-state such as Athens is very unlike a nation-state such as France, and both are unlike a state, such as Austria-Hungary, which is not based on nationality, or, again, a federal union such as the United States of America. But, to save time, I propose to ignore these differences and to take a national state as typical. Next, the full nature of the state is realized but partially in any individual state, and very feebly in some; and therefore, when I say that the state is or does this or that, you may truly make the comment that _our_ state, or any other, is or does this in a very poor degree. And, lastly, I must point to what seems at first a curious fact. A state rests on, and, in a sense, only exists in, the minds and wills of its members, so that, if mind and will in all Frenchmen could suddenly vanish, the French state would do so too. And, further, the improvement of this state depends on the ideas of its members, and their will to make their ideas good. And yet what we call the ‘nature’ of the state does not depend on their thinking this or that, and if they think and will what conflicts with that nature they will not succeed. They will succeed only by developing further so much of that nature as is already developed in France or elsewhere. On the other hand, there can be no more fatal error than simply to identify the nature of the state with any development of it that has hitherto appeared. It only lives in realizing capacities still unfolded, and a state that does not advance goes back and, apart from any external violence, may even die.

If now we ask what the state is, we may say that it is the nation considered as an organized whole or individual. You have some millions of people, inhabiting a definite piece or pieces of the earth, and, for the most part, so united by blood, language, customs, traditions, and history, that they have a special character and so can more fully understand and count on one another, and can live together more easily and happily, than any chance collection of human beings could. Further, they are not a mere collection or aggregate, but form an organized whole, performing a multitude of different functions, which should, and more or less do, so complement and play into one another that they make a common life and produce a common good—a good shared by the members in degrees necessarily different, though not, one hopes, of necessity so very different as they everywhere now are. Finally (for so far we have not, strictly speaking, a state) the common life, mind, or will expresses itself formally in laws binding on all the members, and in acts explicitly done on behalf of the whole and in its name. It is in these laws, and still more in these acts, that the whole appears most plainly as individual or a single agent, over against its members taken severally, and over against other states. Hence we often identify the state with the particular organ through which it acts in this way, asking, for example, indifferently whether the state, or whether government, ought to own the railways. And this usage, though it leads to confusion if we forget that the state is the whole, points to the fact that it does not act _as_ the state except through the organ called (in a wide sense) the government.

Is the state then a moral agent? It can hardly be so with reference to other states, unless it is so with reference to itself; so that we may safely consider it at first as if it stood alone in the world.

What is the end or object for which the state exists—its reason to be? Aristotle, after his manner, replied in two words, ‘Good life’. We may expand a little and say ‘The best possible life of its members’, or ‘The fullest possible development in them of the forces and faculties of man’ (a Mazzinian formula), or ‘To make of human nature in them all that it has in it to become’ (which is more like Green’s language). These are various ways of expressing what is substantially the same idea. Suppose it true; then what has _morality_ to do with this end, the best life or the fullest realization of human capacities?

Morality, or moral goodness, is, in the first place, a large part of this best life. To be self-controlled in regard to your desires and fears, to be just and generous and the like; to do your part as well as you can in the common life, in your functions, say, as a son, a neighbour, a friend, a carpenter, or a poet; and to do this, not merely because you happen to like it or because it pays you, but because it is right and good to do it:—something like this is to be morally good. And to be so is not a mere means to an end beyond it, but a great _part_ of the end, or best life, or realization of human nature.

It is not, however, the whole. To discover or re-discover truth, for example, and to make or re-make beauty, are certainly elements in the best life; and truth and beauty are not morality, nor yet mere means to it; they have an intrinsic value of their own. Moral goodness, therefore, though a large part of the best life, is not the whole. No: but it is the condition, the _sine qua non_, of these other parts. To discover truth, for example, is not a mere matter of natural gifts—it requires will, and a moral will. The investigator must undergo fatigue, renounce many pleasant things, sacrifice his pre-conceived ideas and his secret wish to reach a particular conclusion; and all this is morality, whether in other respects he is moral or not. And these are only examples. The same thing holds good over the whole of life, wherever there is action, inward or outward.

Thus it appears, first, that morality is a large part of the good life; and, secondly, that all those activities which in their special natures are not moral still fall within the moral sphere so far as will and character are concerned in them; and they cannot help being so concerned. But, if so, the end of the state, the best life, is a moral end, and the state a moral agent.

I said I would ignore objections; but there is an objection to this view so obvious and so dangerous that I dare not pass it by. ‘If the state had a moral end,’ it may be said, ‘it would not merely protect the life and property of the citizen, and then leave him free to live well or ill at his pleasure: it would enforce morality, or at any rate promote it by rewards and punishments. But it neither does this, nor do most of us think that it ought.’ Now even in England the state does much more than this objection supposes; but, leaving that alone, we may answer thus. The state, though its end is moral, does not enforce morality because it cannot. It can enforce actions _outwardly_ the same as moral actions; but to force a man to do them morally, to do them not because he must but because he approves them or thinks them his duty, is beyond the power, not only of the state, but of the whole universe. Moral action, like immoral, is free action; and to talk of enforcing it is to talk of a square circle. And, in the second place, the reason why, on the whole, the state abstains, so far as possible, from enforcing or promoting actions outwardly like moral ones, is itself a moral reason. To force or bribe a man to do what he ought to do freely and morally, tends in some degree to interfere with his doing it freely and morally. The state cannot help taking this risk to some extent; for it must maintain the necessary pre-requisites of good life, e. g. security of life and property. But it limits its compulsive action, not in order that people may freely live as badly as they please, but in order that they may freely live as well as they can.[5]

We have now reached the conclusion that, as regards itself or (it is the same thing) its members in their organic unity, the state is a moral agent. But is it one in the further sense that it has duties to other states, such duties that these other states have a moral right to their performance? Almost all of us, probably, will be disposed to answer Yes; yet, as soon as we begin to think about the question, we meet with facts and considerations that perplex us. Not three centuries ago a great philosopher could say that states are by nature enemies.[6] Bacon is often called our great English moralist; and Bacon, writing of the dealings of kings with their neighbours, tells us that only one general rule can be given in the matter, but ‘one that ever holdeth; which is, that Princes do keep due sentinel that none of their neighbours do overgrow so ... as they become more able to annoy them than they were’.[7] We may reassure ourselves by remembering that Bacon lived a long time ago and had studied Machiavelli to some purpose; yet we, in our own day, are not surprised if a subject of dispute between other nations is dismissed by our Government in the phrase, ‘It does not affect British interests’, a phrase which may _seem_ to imply that the duty of a state is simply and solely to itself. What it does imply, a moment’s thought will show us, is only that the state’s primary duty is that; and this inoffensive implication we may be ready to accept. And yet if a man saw two other men quarrelling in the street in a manner that threatened bloodshed, we should hardly think it moral in him to pass on with the remark, ‘It does not affect my interests’; we should think he ought at any rate to look for a policeman. This difficulty, again, we may remove by the just reflection that no policeman can be found for states, and in general that we cannot safely argue from the duties of a citizen to those of a nation. But then where will this reflection lead us? Citizens, perhaps we shall say, have duties to one another and to the state, and the state has duties to them, because they are members of this one community and share its one life, will, and good; but this moral community is the largest and highest that exists in the visible or actual world, what we call mankind being evidently not an organized whole but a mere scattered aggregate. Thus we may feel driven after all to conclude that the state is its own absolute end and has no duty except to itself. And if this conclusion still troubles us, we may consider that, at any rate, the state has a duty to itself in respect of its behaviour to other states; and we may even suspect that we are vexing ourselves with a mere question of words, since in any case a moral agent cannot have a duty to another which is not also a duty to itself.

However this may be, we shall find it worth while to dwell for a minute on the idea that the state has duties only to itself. If this idea were fully carried out it would lead, I believe, to just the same result as the view that states have duties to each other. For, as we have seen, the end of the state, and therefore the state’s own ‘interest’,[8] is nothing short of the best possible life of its members. Its independence is necessary to that life; power is necessary to it; wealth is necessary; even high spirit and a certain pride may be so; and times may come when a resolute assertion of its rights even by war is necessary. But the best possible life, including, permanently or on occasion, all these things, is much wider than any or all of them. None of them has value apart from it. Those of them which, like wealth and power, exist only in this or that degree, are of value only in the degree in which they really contribute to the best life, and in that life the goods of the soul rank, in value, first. An action of the state, therefore, which increases its wealth or power to the detriment of the character of its citizens cannot be in its interest, but is, on the contrary, a violation of its duty to itself. And so is any breach of promise to another state, any intentional injury to another, or any war upon another, which is inconsistent with that best life of its own citizens which is their one and only absolute interest. Hence we may say that a state can do no wrong to another which is not equally, or even more, a wrong to itself; that, if it rightly understands its duty to itself, it need consider nothing else; and that patriotism, in the true and complete meaning of the word, is the final and all-inclusive virtue. And if this view of the matter could really become the inspiration of a nation’s life, it would certainly have great advantages. It would make the nation realize that, next to the primary duty of maintaining the pre-requisites of its life, its main business is not to improve others—least of all by conquest—but to improve itself; and that to be grasping, inconsiderate, irritable, and meddlesome is no part of the best life. Or imagine for a moment that, when peace returns to England, we could retain undiminished that sense of unity and that self-devotion which have been evoked by war, and could use them wisely in all their strength, if only for ten years, to make England, morally and socially, all that it might be. Why, it might become, for itself, almost what Shakespeare called it, a ‘second Eden’, and, for others, a light to lighten the nations.

Thus the doctrine that a state has duties only to itself, if taken in its full sense, is far from being selfish or degrading. But then it is fatally easy to take it in its more obvious and its untrue sense; and we know too well how ideas, innocent and just in themselves, may be twisted into shapes that affront any unsophisticated conscience. Besides, this formula, even rightly construed, does not appear to suffice. To say that the so-called duty of a state to another is simply its duty to itself in respect of that other, would be satisfactory if that other were a tree or a lion; because my having a duty to another implies, in strictness, that this other has or may have a duty to me; and a tree or a lion, not being a rational agent, is incapable of duty, and, for the same reason, cannot be a member of a moral community. But the other state, like my own, is a rational being. The two have the same nature and the same end, the best possible life. That is common to them; and though it is by no means enough to make them members of an actual community in which the good of one is, in some degree, the good of another and of all, it surely is enough to give them, so far as they come in contact, and apart from obligations arising out of treaties between them, duties to one another and moral rights against one another. Indeed this seems to hold of all human beings, whether they belong to states or to lower forms of society. Slavery, for example, is now among civilized peoples universally admitted to be wrong, and states forbid their citizens to practise it. To whom then is it a wrong? To the enslaver himself, no doubt, but surely also to the slave. He—a negro, perhaps—is, like the enslaver, a rational being with a capacity for a best life. He proves it by his membership in a tribe, in which he has what, in effect, are rights and duties. His tribal morality differs from our civic morality; but what of that? It is enough to give him a claim against us to be left free to live as well as he can, and enough to make it our duty to him, if not to aid him, at least to leave him free.[9]

The duties which, on this showing, all men have to one another may now be few and elementary; and this may be said even of the duties of states to one another (over and above the unquestionable obligations arising from their treaties). But these duties are bound to grow in number and complexity, and the day perhaps may come when ‘mankind’ or ‘humanity’ will be no mere scattered aggregate, but an all-embracing organized community of members—if not states, still corporate bodies of some kind—united in pursuit of a common end, the best life of man. This life would be different in each body, a harmony, not a monotone; and the difference in each would be its special contribution to the whole. The members of each would still be more closely united with one another than with those of other bodies, and have duties to their own body that they had not to others; and these bodies, being human, could hardly fail sometimes to disagree. But none of them would dream of regarding itself as its sole or absolute end, and one may surely believe that they would not need to settle their differences by war. This community, at the best, must be far distant; but to keep it in view and, so far as possible, to feel and act as though it were already here, is, even in warring, to live inwardly in peace with your enemy, and, it may be, to lessen the distance by an hour or even a day.[10] And at least the pre-requisite of such a community—I mean the closer contact of mankind—is undeniably and rapidly being realized. Our own country makes itself a huge far-extending Empire. In the East Japan starts into sudden greatness. Africa is parcelled out among the states of Europe. The states of the world are bound together more and more by trade. There is another side, no doubt, to all these changes. In our Empire-making we did things we cannot justify, and the Empire made becomes an object of envy and a cause of war. The rise of Japan at once brings war in the East, and alarm and enmity in the Western hemisphere. The parcelling of Africa means the horrors of the Congo; and states bound together by trade fight one another with tariffs. Nevertheless these changes do visibly tend in one direction. Is it vain to hope that they move invisibly to one goal, moving there neither by accident nor mainly by the conscious purpose of men?

Meanwhile already we have in Europe a number of states, connected by almost perpetual contact, sharing to some extent a single type of civilization and morality, yet possessed of such distinct characters, and developing this type in such individual forms, that each of them brings to the common stock a contribution which no other can bring and which it is essential to preserve. What further duties they have to one another beyond that contribution I cannot discuss: I have to dwell on a different point. That these duties may be more extensive and positive than they are now generally recognized to be, one can well imagine; but I find it difficult to imagine that the primary and main duty of a state to other states can cease to be the contribution of its own best life. Yet to many minds this appears a selfish view. Openly or unconsciously they seem to demand that states should behave to one another like good men, or even like friends, or even like brothers. And the flagrant contradiction between such demands and the actual behaviour of states causes not only painful disappointment but an injurious dismay. Yet what is in fault here, perhaps, is not only, or even mainly, the behaviour of states, but something unreasonable in the demand.

I have not read General Bernhardi’s book since it first appeared, but I understand he says in it that the morality of a state cannot be the same as that of an individual. This assertion, if one may judge from a poem by Mr. Noyes and an article in one of our best weekly papers, is considered almost diabolical; and very likely the author draws from it false and immoral conclusions—one would expect him to. But surely the statement itself is perfectly sound. All moralities, of course, are the same, in the sense that they _are_ morality, or a doing of duty: but what acts in particular are the duties of a moral agent must depend on the nature of the agent and the position he occupies. The duty of my brother to help me, if need be, with his money, or to tell me that I am disgracing the family, does not therefore belong to every one here present. It may be of use to point out some differences between a state and an individual, which prevent them from having the same duties and even account for their sometimes doing what two reasonable men, practically speaking, never do—fighting one another.

If A and B, two reasonable Englishmen, cannot agree in interpreting their contract, they do not fall to blows, they go to arbitration or a court of law. If A vilifies B, the latter, if he thinks it of importance, can take A into court. If A tries to pick B’s pocket or assaults him, B may indeed use such force as is immediately necessary to protect his person or property, but no more; it is the business of the law to protect him and to punish A. This power, the law, has three obvious characteristics. It purports to be, and in a good state is, the expression of that reason and right will which is common to A and B, as distinguished from their personal feelings and passions. It is perfectly impartial in regard to A and B. And, lastly, it is a power, against which they are powerless. Whatever they may think of its decision, it will enforce it.

But if A and B are states, how do they stand? If they differ in interpreting their treaty, or in fixing what sum A should pay to B for an unintentional injury, they, like citizens, can go, in one way or another, to arbitration. The arbiter, it is true, has no power to enforce his decision, but that need not matter much, since A and B would hardly have gone to him if they did not mean to abide by it. This, however, is a narrow field. When the question concerns an assault of A on B, or what they call their vital interests or even their honour (which is not merely their private feeling but their repute and weight in the world), where will they find an embodied reason with its perfect impartiality? Seldom, if ever, in other states, either severally or combined, when each of these others has its likes and dislikes to A and B, and vital interests of its own, connected positively or negatively with theirs. And even if this problem were surmounted and the impartial arbiter found, his decision, so far from having overwhelming force behind it, has or may have none at all except that of public opinion. Of course it does not follow that B’s duty must be war, but it does follow that you cannot find his duty by examining the duties of an individual.

Take a second difference. You, an individual citizen, have interests in a special sense your own. But you may well think it your duty to injure some of them; to be poor when you might be well off; to leave many of your capacities undeveloped that you may do good through the disproportionate growth of one or two; even to weaken your health and shorten your life for some worthy object; nay, if need be, to risk it or throw it away for the life of another. Asked to justify your conduct, you might answer perhaps that your life is but one of forty million English lives, that what you lose others gain, and that there are plenty to take your place. But England, your state, _is_ forty million lives. For it to surrender _its_ interest, to make itself poor, weak, or maimed, is to do that to forty millions, many of them children. How then can it have the same duty that you have; and how can its normal primary duty help being its duty to itself? Nor is this all. It, your country, is not merely these forty millions, any more than an oak is the leaves of this year. Your country’s span of life is not a little threescore years and ten. Its honour is the honour of its countless dead, and both its honour and its welfare are those of its innumerable sons and daughters yet to be. How can it, the state of this year, a mere trustee, have the same right and duty to sacrifice that welfare that you have to sacrifice yours? And even this, again, is not all. You can sacrifice yours, for you are but one of forty millions. But how many states are there in the world? Not a hundred, I imagine.[11] And, out of these, how many whose value to mankind is equal to the value of your state? Let us be modest and say ‘six’. Well, but if your country had only a hundred inhabitants, and only six of them were as useful as you, your right and duty to injure or risk your life would undergo a prodigious change. I do not say it would vanish, nor that a state cannot have such a duty; but the question whether such a duty has arisen cannot be settled by comparison with the duties of a citizen.

I trust I have not seemed to be championing either national selfishness[12] or war. No one can be more convinced that it is sometimes the duty of a state to forgo an advantage, to run a risk, and even to injure itself in some degree, in order to help another actively or allow another to develop itself, if (I must add) it is satisfied that this is to the advantage of mankind. And, as to war, I should like to say briefly how I regard it (which it would be absurd to do if I thought this view a merely personal one). Certainly I believe that a war may be right and therefore a duty; and I do not see how to maintain that an offensive war can _never_ be so. Nor could I for a moment admit—what is often taken for granted—that peace is an unconditional good. Nothing is so except the best possible life; and peace, though it is the normal foundation of that, is no more. Hence, when I ask myself whether I wish for the total disappearance of war, I answer ‘Yes, if, or when, uninterrupted peace can perform the office and generate the good of war’. There are wars almost entirely evil; but war, on the whole, may roughly be compared with tragedy—I mean the tragic actions and sufferings portrayed by great poets. If things had to be classed roughly as good and evil, war and tragedy would be placed among the evils. But if the disappearance of either meant the disappearance, or even a lowering, of those noble and glorious energies of the soul which appear in both and are in part the cause of both, the life of perpetual peace would be a poor thing, superficially less terrible perhaps than the present life, but much less great and good. Nor, if I may say so, do I understand how this view can seem heathenish to any one who believes that suffering, and even wrong, have some meaning in the world.

But those who think thus about war are not therefore champions of war. They may believe that it does lie in man’s power slowly by degrees to gain in peace all the good of war; that it is monstrous to call war an end in itself, or even, if we speak strictly, one of the purposes of the state; that many wars, perhaps most, have been, so far as we can see, needless and therefore, in their origin, wholly wrong; and that the diminution of war is assuredly to be desired and pursued. And so I hasten to a few remarks on the second subject of the lecture.

This subject is not the conditions of the peace to which we are looking forward—no safe matter for public discussion even by persons more competent than I. And, further, the proposals, or rather the one proposal of which there is time to speak, belong—in my view at least—to a future more or less distant, and in any case subsequent to the period when, as we trust, the feelings produced by this war will be dying away. For we surely cannot imagine that any ambitious scheme can work unless it has behind it positive goodwill as well as a desire to avoid the evils of war.

Let us assume, and so dismiss, as a thing which seems clearly coming to be in principle admitted, the duty of states to observe international law,[13] and to refer to arbitration in some form such matters as may safely be so referred; and I will merely remind the despondent that the progress towards that admission during the last fifty or even twenty years has been nothing less than immense. Even in this matter, no doubt, much remains to be done; but what is desired is much more than this. It is an arrangement or institution likely to diminish the chances of war about the more difficult and dangerous questions: for example the question, not of the complicity of Serbian officials in the murder of the Archduke, but whether Serbia was pursuing a policy, or encouraging a movement, aimed at the integrity of Austria-Hungary; a question which, I imagine, neither state would have cared to submit to a court unless it had been pretty sure what the decision would be. And, if we recall the differences pointed out between an individual and a state, it seems clear that what is wanted is something like that state-law which stands above individuals, something which, at its best, is an embodiment of reason, perfectly impartial, and possessed of overwhelming force.

The idea of a United States, or Confederation, of Europe has been mooted for some centuries.[14] Kant took it up a hundred and twenty years ago, and drew the outline of a scheme in his essay on _Perpetual Peace_. It was a favourite idea with Mazzini. And it is now coming into the foreground in various shapes, of which the following is perhaps the most definite. The states of Europe, by federation or without it, would form a permanent council to decide all international differences, arbitrable or other, and, if necessary, to carry out the decision through an armed force, to which in some agreed way their several armies would contribute. But, considering the overwhelming power of the Union as compared with that of a recalcitrant state, this necessity, it is thought, would never, or at any rate very rarely, arise.

Just because this idea is so attractive and appears so hopeful, I propose to pass by its obvious advantages and to touch on some of its difficulties and dangers; but I must first mention a variation in the scheme, due to a sense of one of these dangers. Seeley, soon after the Franco-German War (_Macmillan’s Magazine_, March, 1871), considered the United States idea, with results which may be thus condensed. (1) The Union must be a federation, and a close one, as close as that of the United States of America. (2) No state must possess an armed force of its own: the only army would be that of the Federation. (3) Existing states would never consent to this provision; but a long and unremitting propaganda among all the populations (for it is to _them_ that peace is all-important) might quite possibly compel their governments to adopt the scheme. ‘Possibly’, I say to myself, ‘it might, but nothing else would; and if the populations ever acquired so unanimous and resolute a will for peace, surely the need of a Union would have disappeared, and, with states remaining as separate as they are now, the chances of war would be as much diminished as they can be.’ Therefore, without discussing the feasibility of Seeley’s plan, or its desirability (which is far from indubitable), I go on to some remarks on the unmodified scheme.

1. Since the Union would deal with all disputes, and not only with what may be called legal ones, could all its states have equal voices in the council? Where vital interests are concerned, can one ask or expect that a fifty-million state should have no more votes than a five-million one? Surely not. In any case, whatever the voting-arrangements of the council might be, it seems wellnigh certain that these disputes would in effect be settled, I do not say in the interest of the Great Powers, but by them.

2. When a decree unfavourable to a powerful state (or more than one) was felt by it to touch deeply its honour or interests, there would always be danger of its trying to elude the requirements laid on it, and an equal danger that other states would shut their eyes to this attempt rather than enforce the decree at the cost of all the evils of war. It is vain to imagine that states would constantly put their duty to Europe in front of their duty to their own people.

3. There would always be danger of secret combinations of individual states in pursuit of what they thought their common interests over against the interests of the rest; a danger therefore that things would either drift back to their present position or else lead to civil war in the Union. Some people appear to have forgotten that there was ever civil war in the American Union; but ugly facts do not vanish by being ignored, and we have to remember too that the European Union would consist of states differing in race or nationality far more than the American states.

4. Europe is not the world. There is, for example, a western hemisphere. Would the American Union be willing to join the European, and so to entangle itself in our disputes? And, if it were, would many European states care to give it the chance? Scarcely, unless it became what some writers apparently imagine it to be already, an eminently peace-loving, self-sacrificing, and scrupulous Power.

Let us suppose, then, that it stayed outside. In that case, war between it and one or more of the European states would not, presumably, be held to involve the rest. And yet the success of the European Union would depend a good deal on the growth of a special European feeling which does not now exist; and, just as the growth of national feeling has brought great dangers with it, so, though doubtless in smaller measure, would the growth of that European feeling. And in the West, we must remember, we have not only the United States but the Monroe doctrine. The possibility I am pointing to is a frightful one, and, some will say, too frightful to be realized. And so they said, a year ago, of a possibility which at this moment is an appalling fact.

It should be needless to refer to similar risks arising from the greatness of Japan, a possible revival of China, the facts that Russia extends into Asia and that the other great European Powers have colonies or dependencies outside Europe. When the idea of a European Union was first broached, the dangers of which I have lately been speaking were not yet in sight.

5. There is still another, and a very grave one. History is a continual change, and, as we all hope and some of us believe, the change is, in the main, a progress. But is it not probable, to say the least, that to a European Union the easiest and the most tempting course would generally be to discourage change and maintain the _status quo_? And if its first or chief object were peace, would it not seem right in doing this? Yet if such a Union had been formed a century ago, and had not soon been broken by the secession of England and France, would it not certainly have discouraged and even resisted most of the changes that we now think good—changes, let us remember, made largely by insurrection and war? We know what the Holy Alliance actually did and wanted to do. Well, we may feel fairly secure that the European Union would not resemble it in supporting mere ‘legitimacy’, but can we feel secure that, in the very interest of law and peace, it would never ‘haply be found fighting against God’; or, if that phrase is objected to, let us say ‘fighting against changes that are necessary for the progress of mankind’?[15]

The difficulties and dangers now mentioned (and there may well be others) are formidable. To meet and surmount them would tax, no doubt, the foresight and skill of statesmen, and the goodwill of populations which cannot be expected to have foresight and skill. But they do not appear to be more than dangers and difficulties, nor does the ideal of a United States (not necessarily a federation) seem to conflict with anything fundamental in the nature of the state; while both the course of history and the minds of men do seem to have been moving for some time in this direction. On the other hand, as has been suggested already, any attempt to realize that ideal in the immediate future would almost certainly be vain and, if vain, highly dangerous; and there are reasons not yet mentioned for fearing that the time when it could succeed must be distant. Must we not accept what Mazzini used to say of such an ideal—that it could not be made real until two pre-requisites had been attained?[16]

The map of Europe must first be re-drawn, he said, so that the divisions of states correspond with those of nationality. A deliverance like this must be taken somewhat loosely. It did not mean for Mazzini that the Union of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland must be dissolved, or that the German Empire must cease to exist; and we are told that there are ethnical unities in the south-east of Europe which are geographically so distributed that they could not form single states. But, any really necessary qualification being admitted, the general statement appears sound. The sentiment of nationality has unquestionably been one of the chief causes of unrest and war in Europe ever since the Powers established in 1815 a system based on legitimacy. And this sentiment, which is not a sentiment but a passion and almost a religious faith, shows not the slightest sign of dying away. It has wellnigh destroyed the Turkish Empire in Europe, in Mazzini’s view one of the two main obstacles to progress. The other was the Austrian Empire; and the working of that same passion in Serbia may have initiated the dissolution of that Empire too.

According to Mazzini, the second pre-requisite of a United States was that all the states concerned should have become democratic. Kant, using another terminology, had said the same thing. What is in question here is, surely, not chiefly the ‘democratization’ of foreign policy and diplomacy, about which much nonsense is being written just now, and some good sense.[17] When we call a state democratic, and when we use the word in a strictly political sense, we mean, roughly speaking, that it has a very large electorate, and that the power which acts for the state really represents, and is responsible to, this electorate. And, though we may feel less confident than Mazzini was, that democracies would always be friendly and never more pugnacious than nobles or kings, most of us perhaps will agree that the prospects of peace will not be greatly improved so long as the power to make war rests, openly or otherwise, either with an autocrat, wise and good or foolish and ill-willed, as chance may determine, or with representatives of sectional interests, social, military, bureaucratic, or financial, all of which, though in varying degrees, are separable from national interests and provide motives for unnecessary wars. Only it must be remembered that a state is not democratic merely because its government fairly represents the nation. In this war, for example, the German Government appears to represent the German people as fully as our Government does ours. Yet Germany is in no sense democratic, and England, politically, is.[18]

This brings me to a last word. Perhaps some of my hearers, listening to the earlier part of this lecture, may have said to themselves: ‘Why this theorizing about the nature of the state and its exalted mission? It is just what has brought the Germans to worship force and to glorify to themselves their desire for domination.’ This particular charge against German philosophy is in the fashion, and, although a proper discussion of it is out of the question here, I should like to refer to it.

Even if it had much truth, we English are not Germans, and intoxication by ideas is not exactly a failing of the English—nor even of the Scotch, who do reverence intellect. But the truth in this charge is not great. What has led, apparently, a large number of Germans to the strange, perverted state of mind we witness, is surely not, in the main, ideas, philosophical or other, but first and foremost what has happened to Germany. After being for long years, even for centuries, a ‘Hamlet among the nations’; great, that is to say, in the purely spiritual spheres of religion, philosophy, music, poetry, but, to all appearance, incapable in the world of political action, she found herself on a sudden, five-and-forty years ago, the most powerful state in Europe. She owed this, too, in the main, not to a long and arduous effort of her peoples (for that would have had a different effect), but to a merely military force enlarged and perfected by the unconstitutional action of a statesman and a king. And on the success of this military force and of a Machiavellian diplomacy in creating the Empire there followed (what also was to a large extent new) an immense increase in industrial and commercial activity, in wealth, and in population. It would be no great wonder, I think, if any people’s head were turned by such a change.

Next to this chief cause comes the fact (as, on the testimony of others, I suppose it to be) that the views and feelings thus generated concerning the greatness and the future of Germany have been for years assiduously fostered in the people through an admirably efficient system of university and school education.[19]

Now what has philosophy had to do with the ideas so instilled, and with other ideas that have gone to produce a perverted ideal and state of mind? Something, no doubt, but of that something very little belongs to the great philosophers. A leading German historian, I am told, criticizes Plato and Aristotle because they say almost nothing about the state’s being essentially _might_. Perhaps they thought this undeniable fact too obvious to need emphasis; but in any case the same criticism might be passed on Kant and Hegel. It is true that in Hegel’s _Rechtsphilosophie_ there are a few expressions which, taken in isolation and exaggerated as a philosopher’s ideas are apt to be, might do harm; but in all its pages, while there is much about will and the will for good, there is little enough about force.[20] Germany’s greatest philosopher since Hegel, I suppose, is Lotze, a teacher about as likely as Mill or Green to encourage the worship of force. Indeed, so far as I know, the only philosopher who is, in a degree worth notice, responsible for that worship is Nietzsche, who was neither an admirer of the Prussian state nor by any means a great philosopher. He was, however, a man of genius, with a poetic imagination and an admirable style; and in Germany that is a thing rarer than a philosopher and, to the mass of readers, much more dangerous. If he could have written as Kant wrote he would scarcely have done much mischief. Nobody could bear to read Kant who was not bent on finding truth, but truth is not the quarry that Nietzsche’s thousands of readers hunt.

If Germany were doomed to win this war, she might continue—for how long, we cannot tell—to be the victim of a perverse ideal. But any Englishman who reveres and loves that soul of her which speaks in her music, philosophy, and poetry, must desire her total defeat for her own sake as well as for his country’s and the world’s. It is incredible that that soul is dead, and that anguish would not wake it from its evil dream.