Such a condition of things, if the common jargon of high politics means anything, is preposterous. It takes nearly all meaning out of most that we hear about “primordial needs” and the rest of it.
As a matter of fact, we touch here one of the vital confusions, which is at the bottom of most of the present political trouble between nations, and shows the power of the old ideas and the old phraseology.
In the days of the sailing ship and the lumbering wagon dragging slowly over all but impassable roads, for one country to derive any considerable profit from another it had practically to administer it politically. But the compound steam-engine, the railway, the telegraph, have profoundly modified the elements of the whole problem. In the modern world political dominion is playing a more and more effaced role as a factor in commerce; the nonpolitical factors have in practice made it all but inoperative. It is the case with every modern nation, actually, that the outside territories which it exploits most successfully are precisely those of which it does not “own” a foot. Even with the most characteristically colonial of all—Great Britain—the greater part of her overseas trade is done with countries which she makes no attempt to “own,” control, coerce, or dominate—and incidentally she has ceased to do any of those things with her Colonies.
Millions of Germans in Prussia and Westphalia derive profit or make their living out of countries to which their political dominion in no way extends. The modern German exploits South America by remaining at home. Where, forsaking this principle, he attempts to work through political power, he approaches futility. German Colonies are Colonies pour rire. The Government has to bribe Germans to go to them; her trade with them is microscopic; and if the twenty millions who have been added to Germany’s population since the war had had to depend on their country’s political conquest, they would have had to starve. What feeds them are countries which Germany has never “owned,” and never hopes to “own”: Brazil, Argentina, the United States, India, Australia, Canada, Russia, France, and England. (Germany, which never spent a mark on its political conquest, today draws more tribute from South America than does Spain, which has poured out mountains of treasure and oceans of blood in its conquest.) These are Germany’s real Colonies. Yet the immense interests which they represent, of really primordial concern to Germany, without which so many of her people would be actually without food, are for the diplomats and the soldiers quite secondary ones; the immense trade which they represent owes nothing to the diplomat, to Agadir incidents, to Dreadnoughts: it is the unaided work of the merchant and the manufacturer. All this diplomatic and military conflict and rivalry, this waste of wealth, the unspeakable foulness which Tripoli is revealing, are reserved for things which both sides to the quarrel could sacrifice, not merely without loss, but with profit. And Italy, whose statesmen have been faithful to all the old “axioms” (Heaven save the mark!) will discover it rapidly enough. Even her defenders are ceasing now to urge that she can possibly derive any real benefit from this colossal ineptitude.
Is it not time that the man in the street—verily, I believe, less deluded by diplomatic jargon than his betters, less the slave of an obsolete phraseology—insisted that the experts in the high places acquired some sense of the reality of things, of proportions, some sense of figures, a little knowledge of industrial history, of the real processes of human cooperation?
But are we to assume that the extension of a European nation’s authority overseas can never be worth while; or that it could, or should, never be the occasion for conflict between nations; or that the role of, say, England in India or Egypt, is neither useful nor profitable?
In the second part of this book I have attempted to uncover the general principle—which sadly needs establishing in politics—serving to indicate clearly the advantageous and disadvantageous employment of force. Because force plays an undoubted role in human development and cooperation, it is sweepingly concluded that military force and the struggle between groups must always be a normal feature of human society.
To a critic, who maintained that the armies of the world were necessary and justifiable on the same grounds as the police forces of the world (“Even in communities such as London, where, in our civic capacity, we have nearly realized all your ideals, we still maintain and are constantly improving our police force”), I replied:
When we learn that London, instead of using its police for the running in of burglars and “drunks,” is using them to lead an attack on Birmingham for the purpose of capturing that city as part of a policy of “municipal expansion,” or “Civic Imperialism,” or “Pan-Londonism,” or whatnot; or is using its force to repel an attack by the Birmingham police acting as the result of a similar policy on the part of the Birmingham patriots—when that happens you can safely approximate a police force to a European army. But until it does, it is quite evident that the two—the army and the police force—have in reality diametrically opposed roles. The police exist as an instrument of social cooperation; the armies as the natural outcome of the quaint illusion that though one city could never enrich itself by “capturing” or “subjugating” another, in some unexplained way one country can enrich itself by capturing or subjugating another.
In the existing condition of things in England this illustration covers the whole case; the citizens of London would have no imaginable interest in “conquering” Birmingham, or vice versa. But suppose there arose in the cities of the North such a condition of disorder that London could
