Save in his Sunday moods, the whole thing makes him angry. It appeals to him as “unfair,” in that he is asked by his own countrymen to do something that they apparently do not ask of foreigners; it appears to him as unmanly, in that he is asked to surrender the advantage which his strength has secured him in favor of a somewhat emasculate ideal.
The patriot feels that his moral intention is every bit as sincere as that of the pacifist—that, indeed, patriotism is a finer moral ideal than pacifism. The difference between the pacifist and the advocate of realpolitik is an intellectual and not a moral one at all, and the assumption of superior morality which the former sometimes makes does the cause which he has at heart infinite harm. Until the pacifist can show that the employment of military force fails to secure material advantage, the common man will, in ordinary times, continue to believe that the militarist has a moral sanction as great as that underlying pacifism.
It may seem gratuitously ungracious to suggest that the very elevation which has marked peace propaganda in the past should have been the very thing that has sometimes stood in the way of its success. But such a phenomenon is not new in human development. There was as much good intention in the world of religious warfare and oppression as there is in ours. Indeed, the very earnestness of the men who burnt, tortured, and imprisoned and stamped out human thought with the very best motives, was precisely the factor which stood in the way of improvement.
Improvement came finally, not from better intention, but from an acuter use of the intelligence of men, from hard mental work.
So long as we assume that high motive, a better moral tone is all that is needed in international relations, and that an understanding of these problems will in some wonderful way come of itself, without hard and systematic intellectual effort, we shall make little headway.
Good feeling and kindliness and a ready emotion are among the most precious things in life, but they are qualities possessed by some of the most retrograde nations in the world, because in them they are not coupled with the homely quality of hard work, in which one may include hard thinking. This last is the real price of progress, and we shall make none of worth unless we pay it.
A word or two as to the role of “friendship” in international relations. Courtesy and a certain measure of good faith are essential elements wherever civilized men come in direct contact; without them organized society would go to pieces. But these invaluable elements never yet of themselves settled real differences; they merely render the other factors of adjustment possible. Why should one expect courtesy and good-fellowship to settle grave political differences between English and Germans when they altogether fail to settle such differences between English and English? What should we say of a statesman professing to be serious who suggested that all would be well between President Wilson and the lobbyists concerning the tariff, between the Democrats and Republicans on protection, between the millionaire and the day laborer on the question of the income tax, and a thousand and one other things—that all these knotty problems would disappear, if only the respective protagonists could be persuaded to take lunch together? Is it not a little childish?
Yet I am bound to admit that a whole school of persons who deal with international problems would have us believe that all international differences would disappear if only we could have enough junketings, dinner-parties, exchange visits of clergymen, and whatnot. These things have immense use in so far as they facilitate discussion and the elucidation of the policy in which the rivalry has its birth, and to that extent only. But if they are not vehicles of intellectual comprehension, if the parties go away with as little understanding of the factors and nature of international relationship as they had before such meetings took place, they have served no purpose whatsoever.
The work of the world does not get done merely by being good friends with everybody; the problems of international diplomacy are not to be solved merely by a sort of international picnic; that would make the world too easy a place to live in.
However ungracious it may seem, it is nevertheless dangerous to allow to go unchallenged the notion that the cultivation of “friendship and affection” between nations, irrespective of the other factors affecting their relationship, can ever seriously modify international politics. The matter is of grave importance, because so much good effort is spent in putting the cart before the horse, and attempting to create an operative factor out of a sentiment that can never be constant and positive one way or the other, since it must in the nature of things be largely artificial. It is a psychological impossibility in any ordinary workaday circumstances to have any special feeling of affection for a hundred or sixty or forty millions of people, composed of infinitely diverse elements, good, bad, and indifferent, noble and mean, pleasing and unpleasing, whom, moreover, we have never seen and never shall see. It is too large an order. We might as well be asked to entertain feelings of affection for the Tropic of Capricorn. As I have already hinted, we have no particular affection for the great mass of our own countrymen—your lobbyist enthusiast for Mr. Wilson, your railroad striker for the employer of labor, your Suffragette for your anti-Suffragette, and so on ad infinitum. Patriotism has nothing to do with it. The patriot is often the person who had the heartiest detestation for a large mass of his fellow-countrymen. Consider any anti-administration literature. As an English instance a glance at Mr. Leo Maxse’s monthly masterpieces of epithet-making, or at what the pan-Germans have to say of their own Empire and Government
