The Great Illusion

Preface to the Fourth American Edition

If this, the fourth American edition, is bulkier than its predecessors, it is chiefly because the events of the last two years throw an interesting light upon the bearing of the book’s main thesis on actual world problems. I have, therefore, added an appendix dealing with certain criticisms based upon the nature of the first Balkan War, in the course of which I attempt to show just how the principles elaborated here have been working out in European politics.

That American interest in the problems here discussed is hardly less vital than that of Europe I am even more persuaded than when the first American edition of this book was issued in 1910. It is certain that opinion in America will not be equipped for dealing with her own problems arising out of her relations with the Spanish American states, with Japan, with the Philippines, unless it has some fair understanding of the principles with which this book deals. Its general interest even goes farther than this: no great community like that of modern America can remain indifferent to the drift of general opinion throughout the world on matters wrapped up with issues so important as those of war and peace.

That the tangible commercial and business interests of America are involved in these European events is obvious from the very factors of financial and commercial interdependence which form the basis of the argument.

That the interests of Americans are inextricably, if indirectly, bound up with those of Europe, has become increasingly clear as can be proved by the barest investigation of the trend of political thought in this country.

The thesis on its economic side is discussed in terms of the gravest problem which now faces European statesmanship, but these terms are also the living symbols of a principle of universal application, as true with reference to American conditions as to European. If I have not “localized” the discussion by using illustrations drawn from purely American cases, it is because these problems have not at present, in the United States, reached the acute stage that they have in Europe, and illustrations drawn from the conditions of an actual and pressing problem give to any discussion a reality which to some extent it might lose if discussed on the basis of more supposititious cases.

It so happens, however, that in the more abstract section of the discussion embraced in the second part, which I have termed the “Human Nature of the Case,” I have gone mainly to American authors for the statement of cases based on those illusions with which the book deals.

For this edition I have thought it worth while thoroughly to revise the whole of the book and to rewrite the chapter on the payment of the French Indemnity, in order to clear up a misunderstanding to which in its first form it gave rise. Part III has also been rewritten, in order to meet the changed form of criticism which has resulted from the discussion of this subject during the last year or two.

It is with very great regret that I have seen this book grow in bulk; but as it constitutes the statement of a thesis still revolutionary, it has to cover the whole ground of the discussion, sometimes in great detail. I have, however, adopted an arrangement and method of presentation by which, I trust, the increase in bulk will not render it less clear. The general arrangement is as follows:

The Synopsis is a very brief indication of the scope of the whole argument, which is not that war is impossible, but that it is futile—useless, even when completely victorious, as a means of securing those moral or material ends which represent the needs of modern civilized peoples; and that on a general realization of this truth depends the solution of the problem of armaments and warfare.

The general economic argument is summarized in Chapter III, Part I.

The moral, psychological, and biological argument is summarized in Chapter II, Part II.

The practical outcome—what should be our policy with reference to defence, why progress depends upon the improvement of public opinion and the best general methods of securing that—is discussed in Part III.

This method of treatment has involved some small repetition of fact and illustration, but the repetition is trifling in bulk—it does not amount in all to the value of more than three or four pages—and I have been more concerned to make the matter in hand clear to the reader than to observe all the literary canons. I may add that, apart from this, the process of condensation has been carried to its extreme limit for the character of data dealt with, and that those who desire to understand thoroughly the significance of the thesis with which the book deals—it is worth understanding—had really better read every line of it!

One personal word may perhaps be excused as explaining certain phraseology, which would seem to indicate that the author is of English nationality. He happens to be of English birth, but to have passed his youth and early manhood in the United States, having acquired American citizenship there. This I hope entitles him to use the collective “we” on both sides of the Atlantic. I may add that the last fifteen years have been passed mainly in Europe studying at first hand the problems here dealt with.

Preface

The present volume is the outcome of a large pamphlet published in Europe at the end of last year entitled Europe’s Optical Illusion. The interest that the pamphlet created and the character of the discussion provoked throughout Europe persuaded me that its subject-matter was worth fuller and more detailed treatment than then given it. Herewith the result of that conviction. The thesis on its economic side is discussed in the terms of the gravest problem which now faces European statesmanship, but these terms are also the living symbols of a principle of universal application, as true with reference to American conditions as to European. If I have not “localized” the discussion by using illustrations drawn from purely American cases, it is because these problems have not at present in the United States reached the acute stage that they have in Europe, and illustrations drawn from the conditions of an actual and pressing problem give to any discussion a reality which to some extent it might lose if discussed on the basis of more suppositious cases.

It so happens, however, that in the more abstract section of the discussion embraced in the second part, which I have termed the “Human Nature of the Case,” I have gone mainly to American authors for the statement of cases based on those illusions with which the book deals.

Synopsis

What are the fundamental motives that explain the present rivalry of armaments in Europe, notably the Anglo-German? Each nation pleads the need for defence; but this implies that someone is likely to attack, and has therefore a presumed interest in so doing. What are the motives which each State thus fears its neighbors may obey?

They are based on the universal assumption that a nation, in order to find outlets for expanding population and increasing industry, or simply to ensure the best conditions possible for its people, is necessarily pushed to territorial expansion and the exercise of political force against others (German naval competition is assumed to be the expression of the growing need of an expanding population for a larger place in the world, a need which will find a realization in the conquest of English Colonies or trade, unless these are defended); it is assumed, therefore, that a nation’s relative prosperity is broadly determined by its political power; that nations being competing units, advantage, in the last resort, goes to the possessor of preponderant military force, the weaker going to the wall, as in the other forms of the struggle for life.

The author challenges this whole doctrine. He attempts to show that it belongs to a stage of development out of which we have passed; that the commerce and industry of a people no longer depend upon the expansion of its political frontiers; that a nation’s political and economic frontiers do not now necessarily coincide; that military power is socially and economically futile, and can have no relation to the prosperity of the people exercising it; that it is impossible for one nation to seize by force the wealth or trade of another—to enrich itself by subjugating, or imposing its will by force on another; that, in short, war, even when victorious, can no longer achieve those aims for which peoples strive.

He establishes this apparent paradox, in so far as the economic problem is concerned, by showing that wealth in the economically civilized world is founded upon credit and commercial contract (these being the outgrowth of an economic interdependence due to the increasing division of labor and greatly developed communication). If credit and commercial contract are tampered with in an attempt at confiscation, the credit-dependent wealth is undermined, and its collapse involves that of the conqueror; so that if conquest is not to be self-injurious it must respect the enemy’s property, in which case it becomes economically futile. Thus the wealth of conquered territory remains in the hands of the population of such territory. When Germany annexed Alsatia, no individual German secured a single mark’s worth of Alsatian property as the spoils of war. Conquest in the modern world is a process of multiplying by x, and then obtaining the original figure by dividing by x. For a modern nation to add to its territory no more adds to the wealth of the people of such nation than it would add to the wealth of Londoners if the City of London were to annex the county of Hertford.

The author also shows that international finance has become so interdependent and so interwoven with trade and industry that the intangibility of an enemy’s property extends to his trade. It results that political and military power can in reality do nothing for trade; the individual merchants and manufacturers of small nations, exercising no such power, compete successfully with those of the great. Swiss and Belgian merchants drive English from the British Colonial market; Norway has, relatively to population, a greater mercantile marine than Great Britain; the public credit (as a rough-and-ready indication, among others, of security and wealth) of small States possessing no political power often stands higher than that of the Great Powers of Europe, Belgian Three percents standing at 96, and German at 82; Norwegian Three and a Half percents at 102, and Russian Three and a Half percents at 81.

The forces which have brought about the economic futility of military power have also rendered it futile as a means of enforcing a nation’s moral ideals or imposing social institutions upon a conquered people. Germany could not turn Canada or Australia into German colonies—i.e., stamp out their language, law, literature, traditions, etc.—by “capturing” them. The necessary security in their material possessions enjoyed by the inhabitants of such conquered provinces, quick intercommunication by a cheap press, widely-read literature, enable even small communities to become articulate and effectively to defend their special social or moral possessions, even when military conquest has been complete. The fight for ideals can no longer take the form of fight between nations, because the lines of division on moral questions are within the nations themselves and intersect the political frontiers. There is no modern State which is completely Catholic or Protestant, or liberal or autocratic, or aristocratic or democratic, or socialist or individualist; the moral and spiritual struggles of the modern world go on between citizens of the same State in unconscious intellectual cooperation with corresponding groups in other States, not between the public powers of rival States.

This classification by strata involves necessarily a redirection of human pugnacity, based rather on the rivalry of classes and interests than on State divisions. War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest; it involves the survival of the less fit. The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man’s advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy.

The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; they represent the decaying human element. The diminishing role of physical force in all spheres of human activity carries with it profound psychological modifications.

These tendencies, mainly the outcome of purely modern conditions (e.g. rapidity of communication), have rendered the problems of modern international politics profoundly and essentially different from the ancient; yet our ideas are still dominated by the principles and axioms, images and terminology of the bygone days.

The author urges that these little-recognized facts may be utilized for the solution of the armament difficulty on at present untried lines—by such modification of opinion in Europe that much of the present motive to aggression will cease to be operative, and by thus diminishing the risk of attack, diminishing to the same extent the need for defence. He shows how such a political reformation is within the scope of practical politics, and the methods which should be employed to bring it about.

Part I

The Economics of the Case

It is generally admitted that the present rivalry in armaments in Europe—notably such as that now in progress between England and Germany—cannot go on in its present form indefinitely. The net result of each side meeting the efforts of the other with similar efforts is that at the end of a given period the relative position of each is what it was originally, and the enormous sacrifices of both have gone for nothing. If as between England and Germany it is claimed that England is in a position to maintain the lead because she has the money, Germany can retort that she is in a position to maintain the lead because she has the population, which must, in the case of a highly organized European nation, in the end mean money. Meanwhile, neither side can yield to the other, as the one so doing would, it is felt, be placed at the mercy of the other, a situation which neither will accept.

There are two current solutions which are offered as a means of egress from this impasse. There is that of the smaller party, regarded in both countries for the most part as one of dreamers and doctrinaires, who hope to solve the problem by a resort to general disarmament, or, at least, a limitation of armament by agreement. And there is that of the larger, which is esteemed the more practical party, of those who are persuaded that the present state of rivalry and recurrent irritation is bound to culminate in an armed conflict, which, by definitely reducing one or other of the parties to a position of manifest inferiority, will settle the thing for at least some time, until after a longer or shorter period a state of relative equilibrium is established, and the whole process will be recommenced da capo.

This second solution is, on the whole, accepted as one of the laws of life: one of the hard facts of existence which men of ordinary courage take as all in the day’s work. And in every country those favoring the other solution are looked upon either as people who fail to realize the hard facts of the world in which they live, or as people less concerned with the security of their country than with upholding a somewhat emasculate ideal; ready to weaken the defences of their own country on no better assurance than that the prospective enemy will not be so wicked as to attack them.

To this the virile man is apt to oppose the law of conflict. Most of what the nineteenth century has taught us of the evolution of life on the planet is pressed into the service of this struggle-for-life philosophy. We are reminded of the survival of the fittest, that the weakest go to the wall, and that all life, sentient and non-sentient, is but a life of battle. The sacrifice involved in armament is the price which nations pay for their safety and for their political power. The power of England has been the main condition of her past industrial success; her trade has been extensive and her merchants rich, because she has been able to make her political and military force felt, and to exercise her influence among all the nations of the world. If she has dominated the commerce of the world, it is because her unconquered navy has dominated, and continues to dominate, all the avenues of commerce. This is the currently accepted argument.

The fact that Germany has of late come to the front as an industrial nation, making giant strides in general prosperity and well-being, is deemed also to be the result of her military successes and the increasing political power which she is coming to exercise in Continental Europe. These things, alike in England and in Germany, are accepted as the axioms of the problem, as the citations given in the next chapter sufficiently prove. I am not aware that a single authority of note, at least in the world of workaday politics, has ever challenged or disputed them. Even those who have occupied prominent positions in the propaganda of peace are at one with the veriest fire-eaters on this point. Mr. W. T. Stead was one of the leaders of the big navy party in England. Mr. Frederic Harrison, who all his life had been known as the philosopher protagonist of peace, declared recently that, if England allowed Germany to get ahead of her in the race for armaments, “famine, social anarchy, incalculable chaos in the industrial and financial world, would be the inevitable result. Britain may live on … but before she began to live freely again she would have to lose half her population, which she could not feed, and all her overseas Empire, which she could not defend. … How idle are fine words about retrenchment, peace, and brotherhood, whilst we lie open to the risk of unutterable ruin, to a deadly fight for national existence, to war in its most destructive and cruel form.” On the other side we have friendly critics of England, like Professor von Schulze-Gaevernitz, writing: “We want our [i.e. Germany’s] navy in order to confine the commercial rivalry of England within innocuous limits, and to deter the sober sense of the English people from the extremely threatening thought of attack upon us. … The German navy is a condition of our bare existence and independence, like the daily bread on which we depend not only for ourselves, but for our children.”

Confronted by a situation of this sort, one is bound to feel that the ordinary argument of the pacifist entirely breaks down; and it breaks down for a very simple reason. He himself accepts the premise which has just been indicated—viz., that the victorious party in the struggle for political predominance gains some material advantage over the party which is conquered. The proposition even to the pacifist seems so self-evident that he makes no effort to combat it. He pleads his case otherwise. “It cannot be denied, of course,” says one peace advocate, “that the thief does secure some material advantage by his theft. What we plead is that if the two parties were to devote to honest labor the time and energy devoted to preying upon each other, the permanent gain would more than offset the occasional booty.”

Some pacifists go further, and take the ground that there is a conflict between the natural law and the moral law, and that we must choose the moral even to our hurt. Thus Mr. Edward Grubb writes:

Self-preservation is not the final law for nations any more than for individuals. … The progress of humanity may demand the extinction (in this world) of the individual, and it may demand also the example and the inspiration of a martyr nation. So long as the Divine providence has need of us, Christian faith requires that we shall trust for our safety to the unseen but real forces of right dealing, truthfulness, and love; but, should the will of God demand it, we must be prepared, as Jeremiah taught his nation long ago, to give up even our national life for furthering those great ends “to which the whole creation moves.”

This may be “fanaticism,” but, if so, it is the fanaticism of Christ and of the prophets, and we are willing to take our places along with them.1

The foregoing is really the keynote of much pacifist propaganda. In our own day, Count Tolstoy has even expressed anger at the suggestion that any reaction against militarism, on other than moral grounds, can be efficacious.

The peace advocate pleads for “altruism” in international relationships, and in so doing admits that successful war may be to the interest, though the immoral interest, of the victorious party. That is why the “inhumanity” of war bulks so largely in his propaganda, and why he dwells so much upon its horrors and cruelties.

It thus results that the workaday world and those engaged in the rough and tumble of practical politics have come to look upon the peace ideal as a counsel of perfection, which may one day be attained when human nature, as the common phrase is, has been improved out of existence, but not while human nature remains what it is. While it remains possible to seize a tangible advantage by a man’s strong right arm the advantage will be seized, and woe betide the man who cannot defend himself.

Nor is this philosophy of force either as conscienceless, as brutal, or as ruthless as its common statement would make it appear. We know that in the world as it exists today, in spheres other than those of international rivalry, the race is to the strong, and the weak get scant consideration. Industrialism and commercialism are as full of cruelties as war itself—cruelties, indeed, that are longer drawn out, more refined, though less apparent, and, it may be, appealing less to the common imagination than those of war. With whatever reticence we may put the philosophy into words, we all feel that conflict of interests in this world is inevitable, and that what is an incident of our daily lives should not be shirked as a condition of those occasional titanic conflicts which mould the history of the world.

The virile man doubts whether he ought to be moved by the plea of the “inhumanity” of war. The masculine mind accepts suffering, death itself, as a risk which we are all prepared to run even in the most unheroic forms of moneymaking; none of us refuses to use the railway train because of the occasional smash, to travel because of the occasional shipwreck, and so on. Indeed, peaceful industry demands a heavier toll even in blood than does a war, fact which the casualty statistics in railroading, fishing, mining and seamanship, eloquently attest; while such peaceful industries as fishing and shipping are the cause of as much brutality.2 The peaceful administration of the tropics takes as heavy a toll in the health and lives of good men, and much of it, as in the West of Africa, involves, unhappily, a moral deterioration of human character as great as that which can be put to the account of war.

Beside these peace sacrifices the “price of war” is trivial, and it is felt that the trustees of a nation’s interests ought not to shrink from paying that price should the efficient protection of those interests demand it. If the common man is prepared, as we know he is, to risk his life in a dozen dangerous trades and professions for no object higher than that of improving his position or increasing his income, why should the statesman shrink from such sacrifices as the average war demands, if thereby the great interests which have been confided to him can be advanced? If it be true, as even the pacifist admits that it may be true, that the tangible material interests of a nation can be advanced by warfare; if, in other words, warfare can play some large part in the protection of the interests of humanity, the rulers of a courageous people are justified in disregarding the suffering and the sacrifice that it may involve.

Of course, the pacifist falls back upon the moral plea: we have no right to take by force. But here again the common sense of ordinary humanity does not follow the peace advocate. If the individual manufacturer is entitled to use all the advantages which great financial and industrial resources may give him against a less powerful competitor, if he is entitled, as under our present industrial scheme he is entitled, to overcome competition by a costly and perfected organization of manufacture, of advertisement, of salesmanship, in a trade in which poorer men gain their livelihood, why should not the nation be entitled to overcome the rivalry of other nations by utilizing the force of its public services? It is a commonplace of industrial competition that the “big man” takes advantage of all the weaknesses of the small man—his narrow means, his ill-health even—to undermine and to undersell. If it were true that industrial competition were always merciful, and national or political competition always cruel, the plea of the peace man might be unanswerable; but we know, as a matter of fact, that this is not the case, and, returning to our starting-point, the common man feels that he is obliged to accept the world as he finds it, that struggle and warfare, in one form or another, are among the conditions of life, conditions which he did not make. Moreover he is not at all sure that the warfare of arms is necessarily either the hardest or the most cruel form of that struggle which exists throughout the universe. In any case, he is willing to take the risks, because he feels that military predominance gives him a real and tangible advantage, a material advantage translatable into terms of general social well-being, by enlarged commercial opportunities, wider markets, protection against the aggression of commercial rivals, and so on. He faces the risk of war in the same spirit as that in which a sailor or a fisherman faces the risk of drowning, or a miner that of the choke damp, or a doctor that of a fatal disease, because he would rather take the supreme risk than accept for himself and his dependents a lower situation, a narrower and meaner existence, with complete safety. He also asks whether the lower path is altogether free from risks. If he knows much of life he knows that in very many circumstances the bolder way is the safer way.

That is why it is that the peace propaganda has so signally failed, and why the public opinion of the countries of Europe, far from restraining the tendency of their Governments to increase armaments, is pushing them into still greater expenditure. It is universally assumed that national power means national wealth, national advantage; that expanding territory means increased opportunity for industry; that the strong nation can guarantee opportunities for its citizens that the weak nation cannot. The Englishman, for instance, believes that his wealth is largely the result of his political power, of his political domination, mainly of his sea power; that Germany with her expanding population must feel cramped; that she must fight for elbow-room; and that if he does not defend himself he will illustrate that universal law which makes of every stomach a graveyard. He has a natural preference for being the diner rather than the dinner. As it is universally admitted that wealth and prosperity and well-being go with strength and power and national greatness, he intends, so long as he is able, to maintain that strength and power and greatness, and not to yield it even in the name of altruism. And he will not yield it, because should he do so it would be simply to replace British power and greatness by the power and greatness of some other nation, which he feels sure would do no more for the well-being of civilization as a whole than he is prepared to do. He is persuaded that he can no more yield in the competition of armaments, than as a business man or as a manufacturer he could yield in commercial competition to his rival; that he must fight out his salvation under conditions as he finds them, since he did not make them, and since he cannot change them.

Admitting his premises—and these premises are the universally accepted axioms of international politics the world over—who shall say that he is wrong?