CHAPTER
XVIII
The Ideal
Solution –
A Free Grouping of Mankind
THESE
principles founded on the essential and constant tendencies of Nature in the
development of human life ought clearly to be the governing ideas in any
intelligent attempt at the unification of the human race. And it might so be
done if that unification could be realised after the manner of a Lycurgan
constitution or by the law of an ideal Manu, the perfect sage and king.
Attempted, as it will be, in very different fashion according to the desires,
passions and interests of great masses of men and guided by no better light
than the half- enlightened reason of the world's intellectuals and the
empirical opportunism of the world's statesmen and politicians, it is likely to
be done by a succession of confused experiments, recoils and returns,
resistances and persistences; it will progress in spite of human unreason in
the midst of a clamour of rival ideas and interests, stumble through a war of
principles, advance by a clash of vehement parties ending in more or less
clumsy compromises. It may even, as we have said, be managed in the most unideal, though not the most inconvenient method of all, by a certain amount of
violence, the domination of a few vast and powerful empires or even the
emergence of a single predominant World-Empire, a King-State that will be
accepted or will impose itself as the arbiter if not the ruler of mankind. Not
any intelligent principle, but necessity and convenience, not urgent light but
urgent power is likely to be the effective force in any political,
administrative and economic unification of the race.
Still,
though the ideal may not be immediately practicable, it is that to which our
action ought more and more to move. And if the best method cannot always be
employed, it is well to know the best method, so that in the strife of
principles and forces and interests something of it may enter into our dealings
with each
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other and mitigate the errors, stumblings and
sufferings which our ignorance and unreason compel us to pay as the price of
our; progress. In principle, then, the ideal unification of mankind would be a
system in which, as a first rule of common and harmonious life, the human
peoples would be allowed to form their own groupings according to their natural
divisions of locality, race, culture, economic convenience and not according to
the more violent accidents of history or the egoistic will of powerful nations
whose policy it must always be to compel the smaller or less timely organised
to serve their interests as dependents or obey their commands as subjects. The
present arrangement of the world has been worked out by economic forces, by
political diplomacies, treaties and purchases and by military violence without
regard to any moral principle or any general rule of the good of mankind. It
has served roughly certain ends of the World-Force in its development and
helped at much cost of bloodshed, suffering, cruelty, oppression and revolt to
bring humanity more together. Like all things that, though in them- selves
unideal, have been and have asserted themselves with force, it has had its
justification, not moral but biological, in the necessity of the rough methods
which Nature has to use with a half-animal mankind as with her animal creation.
But the great step of unification once taken, the artificial arrangements which
have resulted would no longer have any reason for existence. It would be so in
the first place because the convenience and good of the world at large and not
the satisfaction of the egoism, pride and greed of particular nations, would be
the object to be held in view, in the second because whatever legitimate claim
any nation might have upon others, such as necessities of economic well- being
and expansion, would be arranged for in a soundly organised world-union or
World-State no longer on the principle of strife and competition, but on a
principle of co-operation or mutual adjustment or at least of competition
regulated by law and equity and just interchange. Therefore no ground would
remain for forced and artificial groupings except that of historical tradition
or accomplished fact which would obviously have little weight in a great change
of world conditions impossible to achieve unless the race is prepared to break
hundreds of tradi-
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tions and unsettle the great majority of accomplished
facts.
The first
principle of human unity, groupings being necessary, should be a system of free
and natural groupings which would leave no room for internal discords,
incompatibilities and repression and revolt as between race and race or people
and people. For otherwise the World-State would be founded in part at least
upon a system of legalised injustice and repression or at the best upon a
principle of force and compulsion, however mitigated. Such a system would
contain dissatisfied elements eager to seize upon any hope of change and throw
their moral force and whatever material power they might still keep on the side of any velleities
that might appear in the race towards disorder, secession, dissolution of the
system and perhaps a return to the old order of things. Moral centres of revolt
would thus be preserved which, given the restlessness of the human mind, could
not fail to have, in periods favourable to them, a great power of contagion and
self-diffusion. In fact, any system which would appear to stereotype anomalies,
eternise injustice and inequality or rest permanently on a principle of
compulsion and forced subjection, could have no security and
would be condemned by its very nature to transience.
This was
the principal weakness of the drift during the war towards the settlement of
the world on the basis of the actual status
quo that followed the recent world convulsion. Such a settlement must have
had the vice of fixing conditions which in their nature must be transient. It
would mean not only the rule of this or that nation over dissatisfied foreign
minorities but the supremacy of Europe over most of Asia and all Africa. A
league or incipient unity of the nations would be equivalent under such
conditions to the control of the enormous mass of man- kind by an oligarchy of
a few white races. Such could not be the principle of a long-enduring
settlement of the world. For then one of two alternatives would be inevitable.
A new system would have to support by law and force the existing condition of
things and resist any attempt at radical change; but this would lead to an
unnatural suppression of great natural and moral forces and in the end a
tremendous disorder, perhaps a world- shattering explosion. Or else some
genera11egislative authority
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and means of change would have to be established by
which the judgment and sentiment of mankind would be able to prevail over
imperialistic egoisms and which would enable the European, Asiatic and African
peoples now subject to make the claims of their growing self-consciousness felt
in the councils of the world.1 But such an authority, interfering
with the ego isms of great and powerful empires, would be difficult to
establish, slow to act and not by any means at ease in its exercise of power or
moral influence or likely to be peaceful or harmonious in its deliberations. It
would either reduce itself to a representative of the sentiments and interests
of a ruling oligarchy of great Powers or end in such movements of secession and
civil war between the States as settled the question of slavery in America.
There would be only one other possible issue, - that the liberal sentiments and principles at first aroused by
the war in Europe should become settled and permanent forces of action and
extend them- selves to the dealings of European nations with their non-
European dependencies. In other words, it must become a settled political
principle with European nations to change the character of their imperialism
and convert their empires as soon as might be from artificial into true
psychological unities.
But that
would end inevitably in the recognition of the principle we have advanced, the
arrangement. of the world in a system of free and natural and not as hitherto
of partly free and partly forced groupings. For a psychological unity could
only be assured by a free assent of nations now subject to their inclusion in
the imperial aggregate and the power of free assent would imply a power of free
dissent and separation. If owing to incompatibility of culture, temperament or
economic or other interest the psychological unity could not be established,
either such separation would be inevitable or else there might be a resort to
the old principle of force, a difficult matter when dealing with great masses
of men who must in the course of the new process have arrived at
self-consciousness and recovered their united in-
1
The League of Nations started with some dim
ideal of this kind; but even its first halting attempts at opposing imperial
egoisms ended in secession and avoided a civil war among its members only by
drawing back from its own commitments. In fact, it was never more than an
instrument subservient to the policy of a few great Powers.
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tellectual force and vitality. Imperial unities of this
kind must be admitted as a possible, but by no means an inevitable next step in
the human aggregation easier to realise than a united mankind in present
conditions; but such unities could have only two rational purposes, one as a
half-way house to the unity of all the nations of the world and an experiment
in administrative and economic confederation on a large scale, the other as a
means of habituating nations of different race, traditions, colour,
civilisation to dwell together in a common political family as the whole human
race would have to dwell in any scheme of unity which respected the principle
of variation and did not compel a dead level of uniformity. The imperial
heterogeneous unit has a value in Nature's processes only as a means towards
this greater unity and, where not maintained afterwards by some natural
attraction or by some miracle of entire fusion, - a thing improbable, if
possible, - would cease to exist once the greater unity was accomplished. On
this line of development also and indeed on any line of development the
principle of a free and natural grouping of peoples must be the eventual
conclusion, the final and perfect basis. It must be so, because on no other
foundation could the unification of mankind be secure or sound. And it must be
so, because once unification is firmly accomplished and war and jealous
national competition replaced by better methods of intercourse and mutual
adjustment, there can be no object in maintaining any other more artificial
system, and there- fore both reason and convenience would compel the change.
The institution of a natural system of grouping would become as much a matter
of course as the administrative arrangement of a country according to its
natural provinces. And it would be as much a necessity of reason or convenience
as the regard necessarily paid in any system of devolution or free federation
to race or national sentiment or long-established local unities. Other
considerations might modify the application of the principle, but there would
be none that could be strong enough to abrogate it.
The natural
unit in such a grouping is the nation, because that is the basis natural
evolution has firmly created and seems indeed to have provided with a view to
the greater unity. Unless,
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therefore, unification is put off to a much later date
of our history and in the meanwhile the national principle of aggregation loses
its force and vitality and is dissolved in some other, the free and natural
nation-unit and perhaps the nation-group would be the just and living support
of a sound and harmonious world-system. Race still counts and would enter in as
an element, but only as a subordinate element. In certain groupings it would
predominate and be decisive; in others it would be set at nought partly by a
historic and national sentiment overriding differences of language and race,
partly by economic and other relations created by local contact or geographical
oneness. Cultural unity would count, but need not in all cases prevail; even
the united force of race and culture might not be sufficiently strong to be
decisive.
The
examples of this complexity are everywhere. Switzer- land belongs by language,
race and culture and even by affinities of sentiment to different national
aggregations, two of sentiment and culture, the Latin and the Teutonic, three
of race and language, the German, French and Italian, and these differences
worked sufficiently to bewilder and divide Swiss sympathies in the clash of
nations; but the decisive feeling overriding all others is the sentiment of
Helvetian nationality and that would seem to forbid now and always any idea of
a voluntary partition or dissolution of Switzerland's long-standing natural,
local and historic unity. Alsace belongs predominantly by race, language and early
history to a Germanic union, but the German appealed in vain to these titles
and laboured in vain to change Alsace- Lorraine into Elsass- Lothringen; the
living sentiments and affinities of the people, national, historical, cultural,
bound it still to France. Canada and Australia have no geographical connection
with the British Isles or with each other and the former would seem to belong
by predestination to an American group-unity; but certainly, in the absence of
a change of sentiment not now easily foreseen, both would prefer to belong to a
British grouping rather than the one fuse itself into an increasingly
cosmopolitan American nation or the other stand apart as an Australasian union.
On the other hand, the Slavonic and Latin elements of Austro-Hungary, though
they belonged by
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history, geographical position and economic convenience
to that empire, moved strongly towards separation and, where local sentiments
permitted, to union with their racial, cultural and linguistic kin. If Austria had
dealt with her Slav subjects as with the Magyars or had been able to build a
national culture of her own out of her German, Slav, Magyar and Italian
elements, it would have been otherwise and her unity would have been ~, secure
against all external forces of disruption. Race, language, local relations and
economic convenience are powerful factors, but what decides must be a dominant
psychological element that makes
for union. To that subtler force all others, however restless they may be, must
succumb; however much they may seek for free particularist expression and
self-possession within a larger unity, they must needs subordinate themselves
to the more powerful attraction.
For this very reason the basic
principle adopted must be a free grouping and not that of some abstract or
practical rule or principle of historic tradition or actual status imposed Upon
the nations. It is easy to build up a system in the mind and propose to erect
it on foundations which would be at first sight rational and convenient. At
first sight it would seem that the unity of mankind could most rationally and
conveniently arrange itself upon the basis of a European grouping, an Asiatic
grouping, an American grouping, with two or three sub-groups in' America, Latin
and English-speaking, three in Asia, the Mongolian, Indian and West-Asian, with
Moslem North Africa perhaps as a natural annexe to the third of these, four in
Europe, the Latin, Slavonic, Teutonic and Anglo-Celtic, the latter with the
colonies that still chose to adhere to it, while Central and Southern Africa
might be left to develop under present conditions but with the more humane and
progressive principles upon which the sentiment of a united humanity would
insist. Certain of the actual and obvious difficulties might not be of great
importance under a better system of things. We know, for instance, that nations
closely connected by every apparent tie, are actually divided by stronger
antipathies than those more ideative and less actual which separate them from peoples
who have with them no tie of affinity. Mongolian Japan and Mongo-
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lian China are sharply divided from each other in
sentiment; Arab and Turk and Persian, although one in Islamic religion and
culture, would not, if their present sentiments towards each other persisted,
make an entirely happy family. Scandinavian Norway and Sweden had everything to
draw them together and perpetuate their union, - except a strong, if irrational sentiment which made the
continuance of that union impossible. But these antipathies really persist only
so long as there is some actual unfriendly pressure or sense of subjugation or
domination or fear of the oppression of the individuality of one by the other;
once that is removed they would be likely to disappear. It is notable, for
instance, that, since the separation of Norway and Sweden, the three
Scandinavian States have been increasingly disposed to act together and regard
themselves as a natural grouping in Europe. The long antipathy of the Irish and
English nations is declining in the actuality of a juster though still imper-
fect relation between those two national individualities, as the antipathy of
Austrian and Magyar gave way when once a just relation had been established
between the two kingdoms. It is easily conceivable therefore that with a system
in which the causes of hostility would disappear, natural affinities would
prevail and a grouping of the kind imagined might become more easily
practicable. It is arguable also that the trend of mankind under a great stress
of tendency towards unification would naturally move to the creation of such a
symmetry. It may be that a great change and revolution in the world would
power- fully and rapidly abolish all the obstacles, as the obstacles of the old
regime to a uniform democratic system were abolished in France by the French
Revolution. But any such arrangement would be quite impracticable unless and
until the actual sentiments of the peoples corresponded with these systems of
rational convenience: the state of the world is at present far removed from any
such ideal correspondence.
The idea of
a new basis founded on the principle of national sentiment seemed at one time
to be taking within a limited field the shape of a practical proposition. It
was confined to a European resettlement and even there it was only to be
imposed by the logic of war and force upon defeated empires. The others
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proposed to recognise it for themselves only in a
restricted form, Russia by the concession of autonomy to Poland, England by
Home Rule in Ireland and a federation with her colonies, while other denials of
the principle were still to persist and even perhaps one or two new denials of it to be established in
obedience to imperial ambitions and exigencies. A name even was given to this
new principle and for a time the idea of self-determination received an
official sanction and almost figured as a gospel. However imperfect the
application, this practical enforcement of it, if effected, would have meant
the physical birth and infancy of a new ideal and would have held forth to the
hopes of mankind the prospect of its eventual application in a larger field
until it came to be universalised. Even if the victory if of the Allies
put an end to these high professions, it is no longer possible to consider this
ideal of a rearrangement of the world on the basis of free national groupings
as an impossible dream, an altogether chimerical ideal.
Still, the
forces against it are considerable and it is idle to hope that they will be
overcome except after long and difficult struggles. National and imperial
egoism is the first and most powerful of the contrary forces. To give up the
instinct of domination and the desire still to be rulers and supreme where rule
and supremacy have been the reward of past efforts, to sacrifice the advantages
of a commercial exploitation of dependencies and colonies which can only be
assured by the confirmation of dominance and supremacy, to face disinterestedly
the emergence into free national activity of vigorous and some- times enormous
masses of men, once subjects and. passive means of self-enrichment but
henceforth to be powerful equals and perhaps formidable rivals, is too great a
demand upon egoistic human nature to be easily and spontaneously conceded, where
concession is not forced upon the mind by actual necessity or the hope of some
great and palpable gain that will compensate the immediate and visible loss.
There is, too, the claim of Europe, not yet renounced, to hold the rest of the
world in the interests of civilisation, by which is meant European
civilisation, and to insist upon its acceptance as a condition for the
admission of Asiatic races to any kind of equality or freedom. This
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claim which is destined soon to lose all its force in
Asia, has still a strong justification in the actual state of the African
continent. For the present let us note that it works strongly against a wider
recognition of the new-born ideal and that until the problems it raises are
resolved, the settlement of the world on any such. ideal principle must wait
upon the evolution of new forces and the coming to a head both in Asia and
Europe of yet un- accomplished spiritual, intellectual and material
revolutions.1
1
These revolutions have now happened and these
obstacles, though not yet entirely, have faded or are fading out of existence.
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