Again it is necessary to call to mind that any momentous innovation which rests on popular sentiment will take time; that consequently anything like a plebiscite on the question today would scarcely give a safe index of what the decision is likely to be when presently put to the test; and that as things go just now, swiftly and urgent, any time-allowance counts at something more than its ordinary workday coefficient. What can apparently be said with some degree of confidence is that just now, during these two years past, sentiment has been moving in the direction indicated, and that any growing inclination of the kind is being strongly reenforced by a growing realisation that nothing but heroic remedies will avail at this juncture. If it comes to be currently recognised that a settled peace can be had only at the cost of eradicating privilege and royalty from the warlike nations, it would seem reasonable to expect, from their present state of mind, that the pacific nations will scarcely hesitate to apply that remedy,--provided always that the fortunes of war fall out as that measure would require, and provided also that the conflict lasts long enough and severe enough to let them make up their mind to anything so drastic.

There is a certain side issue bearing on this question of the ulterior probabilities of popular sentiment and national policy as to what is to be done with the warlike nations in the event that the allied nations who fight for neutrality have the disposal of such matters. This side issue may seem remote, and it may not unlikely be overlooked among the ma.s.s of graver and more tangible considerations. It was remarked above that the United Kingdom is one of the two chief pillars of the projected house of peace; and it may be added without serious fear of contradiction or annoyance that the United Kingdom is also the one among these pacific nations that comes nearest being capable, in the event of such an emergency, to take care of its own case single-handed. For better or worse, British adhesion to the project is indispensable, and the British are in a position virtually to name their own terms of adhesion. The British commonwealth--a very inclusive phrase in this connection--must form the core of the pacific league, if any, and British sentiment will have a very great place in the terms of its formation and in the terms which it will be inclined to offer the Imperial coalition at the settlement.

Now, it happens that the British community entered on this war as a democratic monarchy ruled and officered by a body of gentlemen--doubtless the most correct and admirable muster of gentlemen, of anything approaching its volume, that the modern world can show. But the war has turned out not to be a gentlemen's war. It has on the contrary been a war of technological exploits, reenforced with all the beastly devices of the heathen. It is a war in which all the specific traits of the well-bred and gently-minded man are a handicap; in which veracity, gallantry, humanity, liberality are conducive to nothing but defeat and humiliation. The death-rate among the British gentlemen-officers in the early months, and for many months, ran extravagantly high, for the most part because they were gallant gentlemen as well as officers imbued with the good, old cla.s.s spirit of _n.o.blesse oblige_, that has made half the tradition and more than half the working theory of the British officer in the field,--good, but old, hopelessly out of date. That generation of officers died, for the most part; being unfit to survive or to serve the purpose under these modern conditions of warfare, to which their enemy on the other hand had adapted themselves with easy facility from beforehand. The gentlemanly qualifications, and the material apparatus of gentility, and, it will perhaps have to be admitted, the gentlemen, have fallen into the background, or perhaps rather have measurably fallen into abeyance, among the officers of the line. There may be more doubt as to the state of things in respect of the gentility of the staff, but the best that can confidently be said is that it is a point in doubt.

It is hoped that one may say without offense that in the course of time the personnel has apparently worked down to the level of vulgarity defined by the ways and means of this modern warfare; which means the level on which runs a familiar acquaintance with large and complex mechanical apparatus, railway and highway transport and power, reenforced concrete, excavations and mud, more particularly mud, concealment and ambush, and unlimited deceit and ferocity. It is not precisely that persons of pedigree and gentle breeding have ceased to enter or seek entrance to employment as officers, still less that measures have been taken to restrain their doing so or to eliminate from the service those who have come into it--though there may present itself a doubt on this point as touches the more responsible discretionary positions--but only that the stock of suitable gentlemen, uncommonly large as it is, has been overdrawn; that those who have latterly gone into service, or stayed in, have perforce divested themselves of their gentility in some appreciable measure, particularly as regards cla.s.s distinction, and have fallen on their feet in the more commonplace role of common men.

Serviceability in this modern warfare is conditioned on much the same traits of temperament and training that make for usefulness in the modern industrial processes, where large-scale coordinations of movement and an effective familiarity with precise and far-reaching mechanical processes is an indispensable requirement,--indispensable in the same measure as the efficient conduct of this modern machine industry is indispensable. But the British gentleman, in so far as he runs true to type, is of no use to modern industry; quite the contrary, in fact.

Still, the British gentleman is, in point of heredity, the same thing over again as the British common man; so that, barring the misdirected training that makes him a gentleman, and which can largely be undone under urgent need and pressure, he can be made serviceable for such uses as the modern warfare requires. Meantime the very large demand for officers, and the insatiable demand for capable officers, has brought the experienced and capable common man into the case and is in a fair way to discredit gentility as a necessary qualification of field officers.

But the same process of discredit and elimination is also extending to the responsible officials who have the administration of things in hand.

Indeed, the course of vulgarisation among the responsible officials has now been under way for some appreciable time and with very perceptible effect, and the rate of displacement appears to be gathering velocity with every month that pa.s.ses. Here, as in the field operations, it also appears that gentlemanly methods, standards, preconceptions, and knowledge of men and things, is no longer to the purpose. Here, too, it is increasingly evident that this is not a gentlemen's war. And the traditional qualifications that have sufficed in the past, at least to the extent of enabling the British management to "muddle through," as they are proudly in the habit of saying,--these qualifications are of slight account in this technological conjuncture of the nation's fortunes. It would perhaps be an under-statement to say that these gentlemanly qualifications are no longer of any account, for the purpose immediately in hand, and it would doubtless not do to say that they are wholly and unreservedly disserviceable as things run today; but captious critics might find at least a precarious footing of argument on such a proposition.

Through the course of the nineteenth century the British government had progressively been taking on the complexion of a "gentlemen's agreement;" a government by gentlemen, for gentlemen, and of gentlemen, too, beyond what could well be alleged in any other known instance, though never wholly so. No government could be a government of gentlemen exclusively, since there is no pecuniary profit in gentlemen as such, and therefore no object in governing them; more particularly could there never be any incentive in it for gentlemen, whose livelihood is, in the nature of the case, drawn from some one else. A gentlemen's government can escape death by inanition only in so far as it serves the material interest of its cla.s.s, as contrasted with the underlying population from which the cla.s.s draws its livelihood. This British arrangement of a government by prudent and humane gentlemen with a view to the conservation of that state of things that best conduced to the material well-being of their own cla.s.s, has on the whole had the loyal support of the underlying populace, with an occasional floundering protest. But the protest has never taken the shape of an expressed distrust of gentlemen, considered as the staple ways and means of government; nor has the direction of affairs ever descended into the hands of any other or lower cla.s.s or condition of men.

On the whole, this British arrangement for the control of national affairs by a body of interested gentlemen-investors has been, and perhaps still is, just as well at home in the affectionate preconceptions of the nineteenth-century British as the corresponding German usufruct by self-appointed swaggering aristocrats has been among the underlying German population, or as the American arrangement of national control by business men for business ends. The British and the American arrangements run very much to the same substantial effect, of course, inasmuch as the British gentlemen represent, as a cla.s.s, the filial generations of a business community, and their aims and standards of conduct continue to be such as are enforced by the pecuniary interests on which their gentility is conditioned. They continue to draw the ways and means of a worthy life from businesslike arrangements of a "vested" character, made and provided with a view to their nourishment and repose. Their resulting usufruct of the community's productive efforts rests on a vested interest of a pecuniary sort, sanctioned by the sacred rights of property; very much as the a.n.a.logous German dynastic and aristocratic usufruct rests on personal prerogative, sanctioned by the sacred rights of authentic prescription, without afterthought. The two, it will be noted are very much alike, in effect, "under the skin." The great distinguishing mark being that the German usufructuary gentlemen are, in theory at least, gentlemen-adventurers of prowess and proud words, whose place in the world's economy it is to glorify G.o.d and disturb the peace; whereas their British a.n.a.logues are gentlemen-investors, of blameless propriety, whose place it is more simply to glorify G.o.d and enjoy Him forever.

All this arrangement of a usufruct with a view to the reputable consumption of the community's superfluous production has had the cordial support of British sentiment, perhaps fully as cordial as the German popular subservience in the corresponding German scheme; both being well embedded in the preconceptions of the common man. But the war has put it all to a rude test, and has called on the British gentlemen's executive committee to take over duties for which it was not designed.

The exigencies of this war of technological exploits have been almost wholly, and very insistently, of a character not contemplated in the const.i.tution of such an executive committee of gentlemen-investors designed to safeguard cla.s.s interests and promote their pecuniary cla.s.s advantage by a blamelessly inconspicuous and indirect management of national affairs. The methods are of the cla.s.s known colloquially among the vulgar-spoken American politicians as "p.u.s.s.yfooting" and "log-rolling"; but always with such circ.u.mstance of magnitude, authenticity and well-bred deference to precedent, as to give the resulting routine of subreption, trover and conversion, an air not only of benevolent consideration but of austere morality.

But the most austere courtesy and the most authentically dispa.s.sionate division of benefits will not meet the underbred exigencies of a war conducted on the mechanistic lines of the modern state of the industrial arts. So the blameless, and for the purpose imbecile, executive committee of gentlemen-investors has been insensibly losing the confidence and the countenance of the common man; who, when all is said, will always have to do what is to be done. The order of gentlemanly parleying and brokery has, therefore, with many apprehensions of calamity, been reluctantly and tardily giving ground before something that is of a visibly underbred order. Increasingly underbred, and thereby insensibly approaching the character of this war situation, but accepted with visible reluctance and apprehension both by the ruling cla.s.s and by the underlying population. The urgent necessity of going to such a basis, and of working out the matter in hand by an unblushing recourse to that matter-of-fact logic of mechanical efficiency, which alone can touch the difficulties of the case, but which has no respect of persons,--this necessity has been present from the outset and has been vaguely apprehended for long past, but it is only tardily and after the chastening of heavy penalties on this gentlemanly imbecility that a substantial move in that direction has been made. It has required much British resolution to overcome the night-fear of going out into the unhallowed ground of matter-of-fact, where the farthest earlier excursions of the governmental agencies had taken them no farther than such financial transactions as are incident to the accomplishment of anything whatever in a commercial nation. And then, too, there is a pecuniary interest in being interested in financial transactions.

This shifting of discretionary control out of the hands of the gentlemen into those of the underbred common run, who know how to do what is necessary to be done in the face of underbred exigencies, may conceivably go far when it has once been started, and it may go forward at an accelerated rate if the pressure of necessity lasts long enough.

If time be given for habituation to this manner of directorate in national affairs, so that the common man comes to realise how it is feasible to get along without gentlemen-investors holding the discretion, the outcome may conceivably be very grave. It is a point in doubt, but it is conceivable that in such a case the gentlemanly executive committee administering affairs in the light of the gentlemanly pecuniary interest, will not be fully reinstated in the discretionary control of the United Kingdom for an appreciable number of years after the return of peace. Possibly, even, the regime may be permanently deranged, and there is even a shadowy doubt possible to be entertained as to whether the vested pecuniary rights, on which the cla.s.s of gentlemen rests, may not suffer some derangement, in case the control should pa.s.s into the hands of the underbred and unpropertied for so long a season as to let the common man get used to thinking that the vested interests and the sacred rights of gentility are so much ado about nothing.

Such an outcome would be extreme, but as a remote contingency it is to be taken into account. The privileged cla.s.ses of the United Kingdom should by this time be able to see the danger there may be for them and their vested interests, pecuniary and moral, in an excessive prolongation of the war; in such postponement of peace as would afford time for a popular realisation of their incompetence and disserviceability as touches the nation's material well-being under modern conditions. To let the nation's war experience work to such an outcome, the season of war would have to be prolonged beyond what either the hopes or the fears of the community have yet contemplated; but the point is after all worth noting, as being within the premises of the case, that there is herein a remote contingency of losing, at least for a time, that unformulated clause in the British const.i.tution which has. .h.i.therto restricted the holding of responsible office to men of pedigree and of gentle breeding, or at least of very grave pecuniary weight; so grave as to make the inc.u.mbents virtual gentlemen, with a virtual pedigree, and with a virtual gentleman's accentuated sense of cla.s.s interest. Should such an eventuality overtake British popular sentiment and belief there is also the remote contingency that the rights of ownership and investment would lose a degree of sanct.i.ty.

It seems necessary to note a further, and in a sense more improbable, line of disintegration among modern fixed ideas. Among the best entrenched illusions of modern economic preconceptions, and in economic as well as legal theory, has been the indispensability of funds, and the hard and fast limitation of industrial operations by the supply or with-holding of funds. The war experience has. .h.i.therto gone tentatively to show that funds and financial transactions, of credit, bargain, sale and solvency, may be dispensed with under pressure of necessity; and apparently without seriously hindering that run of mechanical fact, on which interest in the present case necessarily centers, and which must be counted on to give the outcome. Latterly the case is clearing up a little further, on further experience and under further pressure of technological exigencies, to the effect that financial arrangements are indispensable in this connection only because and in so far as it has been arranged to consider them indispensable; as in international trade.

They are an indispensable means of intermediation only in so far as pecuniary interests are to be furthered or safeguarded in the intermediation. When, as has happened with the belligerents in the present instance, the national establishment becomes substantially insolvent, it is beginning to appear that its affairs can be taken care of with less difficulty and with better effect without the use of financial expedients. Of course, it takes time to get used to doing things by the more direct method and without the accustomed circ.u.mlocution of accountancy, or the accustomed allowance for profits to go to interested parties who, under the financial regime, hold a power of discretionary permission in all matters that touch the use of the industrial arts. Under these urgent material exigencies, investment comes to have much of the appearance of a gratuitous drag and drain on the processes of industry.

Here, again, is a sinister contingency; sinister, that is, for those vested rights of ownership by force of which the owners of "capital" are enabled to permit or withhold the use of the industrial arts by the community at large, on pain of privation in case the accustomed toll to the owners of capital is not paid. It is, of course, not intended to find fault with this arrangement; which has the sanction of "time immemorial" and of a settled persuasion that it lies at the root of all civilised life and intercourse. It is only that in case of extreme need this presumed indispensable expedient of industrial control has broken down, and that experience is proving it to be, in these premises, an item of borrowed trouble. Should experience continue to run on the same lines for an appreciable period and at a high tension, it is at least conceivable that the vested right of owners to employ unlimited sabotage in the quest of profits might fall so far into disrepute as to leave them under a qualified doubt on the return of "normal" conditions. The common man, in other words, who gathers nothing but privation and anxiety from the owners' discretionary sabotage, may conceivably stand to lose his preconception that the vested rights of ownership are the cornerstone of his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

The considerations recited in this lengthy excursion on the war situation and its probable effects on popular habits of thought in the United Kingdom go to say that when peace comes to be negotiated, with the United Kingdom as the chief const.i.tuent and weightiest spokesman of the allied nations and of the league of pacific neutrals, the representatives of British aims and opinions are likely to speak in a different, chastened, and disillusioned fashion, as contrasted with what the British att.i.tude was at the beginning of hostilities. The gentlemanly British animus of arrogant self-sufficiency will have been somewhat sobered, perhaps somewhat subdued. Concession to the claims and pretensions of the other pacific nations is likely to go farther than might once have been expected, particularly in the way of concession to any demand for greater international comity and less international discrimination; essentially concession looking to a reduction of national pretensions and an incipient neutralisation of national interests. Coupled with this will presumably be a less conciliatory att.i.tude toward the members of the dynastic coalition against whom the war has been fought, owing to a more mature realisation of the impossibility of a lasting peace negotiated with a Power whose substantial core is a warlike and irresponsible dynastic establishment.

The peace negotiations are likely to run on a lower level of diplomatic deference to const.i.tuted authorities, and with more of a view to the interests and sentiments of the underlying population, than was evident in the futile negotiations had at the outbreak of hostilities. The gentle art of diplomacy, that engages the talents of exalted personages and well-bred statesmen, has been somewhat discredited; and if it turns out that the vulgarisation of the directorate in the United Kingdom and its a.s.sociated allies and neutrals will have time to go on to something like dominance and authenticity, then the deference which the spokesmen of these nations are likely to show for the prescriptive rights of dynasty, n.o.bility, bureaucracy, or even of pecuniary aristocracy, in the countries that make up the party of the second part, may be expected to have shrunk appreciably, conceivably even to such precarious dimensions as to involve the virtual neglect or possible downright abrogation of them, in sum and substance.

Indeed, the chances of a successful pacific league of neutrals to come out of the current situation appear to be largely bound up with the degree of vulgarisation due to overtake the several directorates of the belligerent nations as well as the popular habits of thought in these and in the neutral countries, during the further course of the war. It is too broad a generalisation, perhaps, to say that the longer the war lasts the better are the chances of such a neutral temper in the interested nations as will make a pacific league practicable, but the contrary would appear a much less defensible proposition. It is, of course, the common man that has the least interest in warlike enterprise, if any, and it is at the same time the common man that bears the burden of such enterprise and has also the most immediate interest in keeping the peace. If, slowly and pervasively, in the course of hard experience, he learns to distrust the conduct of affairs by his betters, and learns at the same move to trust to his own cla.s.s to do what is necessary and to leave undone what is not, his deference to his betters is likely to suffer a decline, such as should show itself in a somewhat unguarded recourse to democratic ways and means.

In short, there is in this progressive vulgarisation of effectual use and wont and of sentiment, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, some slight ground for the hope, or the apprehension, that no peace will be made with the dynastic Powers of the second part until they cease to be dynastic Powers and take on the semblance of democratic commonwealths, with dynasties, royalties and privileged cla.s.ses thrown in the discard.

This would probably mean some prolongation of hostilities, until the dynasties and privileged cla.s.ses had completely exhausted their available resources; and, by the same token, until the privileged cla.s.ses in the more modern nations among the belligerents had also been displaced from direction and discretion by those underbred cla.s.ses on whom it is inc.u.mbent to do what is to be done; or until a juncture were reached that comes pa.s.sably near to such a situation. On the contingency of such a course of events and some such outcome appears also to hang the chance of a workable pacific league. Without further experience of the futility of upper-cla.s.s and pecuniary control, to discredit precedent and const.i.tuted authority, it is scarcely conceivable, e.g., that the victorious allies would go the length of coercively discarding the German Imperial dynasty and the kept cla.s.ses that with it const.i.tute the Imperial State, and of replacing it with a democratic organisation of the people in the shape of a modern commonwealth; and without a change of that nature, affecting that nation and such of its allies as would remain on the map, no league of pacific neutrals would be able to manage its affairs, even for a time, except on a war-footing that would involve a compet.i.tive armament against future dynastic enterprises from the same quarter. Which comes to saying that a lasting peace is possible on no other terms than the disestablishment of the Imperial dynasty and the abrogation of all feudalistic remnants of privilege in the Fatherland and its allies, together with the reduction of those countries to the status of commonwealths made up of ungraded men.

It is easy to speculate on what the conditions precedent to such a pacific league of neutrals must of necessity be; but it is not therefore less difficult to make a shrewd guess as to the chances of these conditions being met. Of these conditions precedent, the chief and foremost, without which any other favorable circ.u.mstances are comparatively idle, is a considerable degree of neutralisation, extending to virtually all national interests and pretensions, but more particularly to all material and commercial interests of the federated peoples; and, indispensably and especially, such neutralisation would have to extend to the nations from whom aggression is now apprehended, as, e.g., the German people. But such neutralisation could not conceivably reach the Fatherland unless that nation were made over in the image of democracy, since the Imperial State is, by force of the terms, a warlike and unneutral power. This would seem to be the ostensibly concealed meaning of the allied governments in proclaiming that their aim is to break German militarism without doing harm to the German people.

As touches the neutralisation of the democratically rehabilitated Fatherland, or in default of that, as touches the peace terms to be offered the Imperial government, the prime article among the stipulations would seem to be abolition of all trade discrimination against Germany or by Germany against any other nationality. Such stipulation would, of course, cover all manner of trade discrimination,--e.g., import, export and excise tariff, harbor and registry dues, subsidy, patent right, copyright, trade mark, tax exemption whether partial or exclusive, investment preferences at home and abroad,--in short it would have to establish a thoroughgoing neutralisation of trade relations in the widest acceptation of the term, and to apply in perpetuity. The like applies, of course, to all that fringe of subsidiary and outlying peoples on whom Imperial Germany relies for much of its resources in any warlike enterprise. Such a move also disposes of the colonial question in a parenthesis, so far as regards any special bond of affiliation between the Empire, or the Fatherland, and any colonial possessions that are now thought desirable to be claimed. Under neutralisation, colonies would cease to be "colonial possessions," being necessarily included under the general abrogation of commercial discriminations, and also necessarily exempt from special taxation or specially favorable tax rates.

Colonies there still would be, though it is not easy to imagine what would be the meaning of a "German Colony" in such a case. Colonies would be free communities, after the fashion of New Zealand or Australia, but with the further sterilisation of the bond between colony and mother country involved in the abolition of all appointive offices and all responsibility to the crown or the imperial government. Now, there are no German colonies in this simpler British sense of the term, which implies nothing more than community of blood, inst.i.tutions and language, together with that sense of solidarity between the colony and the mother country which this community of pedigree and inst.i.tutions will necessarily bring; but while there are today no German colonies, in the sense of the term so given, there is no reason to presume that no such German colonies would come into bearing under the conditions of this prospective regime of neutrality installed by such a pacific league, when backed by the league's guarantee that no colony from the Fatherland will be exposed to the eventual risk of coming under the discretionary tutelage of the German Imperial establishment and so falling into a relation of step-childhood to the Imperial dynasty.

As is well known, and as has by way of superfluous commonplace been set forth by a sometime Colonial Secretary of the Empire, the decisive reason for there being no German colonies in existence is the consistently impossible colonial policy of the German government, looking to the usufruct of the colonies by the government, and the fear of further arbitrary control and nepotic discrimination at the pleasure of the self-seeking dynastic establishment. It is only under Imperial rule that no German colony, in this modern sense of the term, is possible; and only because Imperial rule does not admit of a free community being formed by colonists from the Fatherland; or of an ostensibly free community of that kind ever feeling secure from unsolicited interference with its affairs.

The nearest approach to a German Colony, as contrasted with a "Colonial Possession," hitherto have been the very considerable, number of escaped German subjects who have settled in English-speaking or Latin-speaking countries, particularly in North and South America. And considering that the chief common trait among them is their successful evasion of the Imperial government's heavy hand, they show an admirable filial piety toward the Imperial establishment; though troubled with no slightest regret at having escaped from the Imperial surveillance and no slightest inclination to return to the shelter of the Imperial tutelage.

A colloquialism--"hyphenate"--has latterly grown up to meet the need of a term to designate these evasive and yet patriotic colonists. It is scarcely misleading to say that the German-American hyphenate, e.g., in so far as he runs true to form, is still a German subject with his heart, but he is an American citizen with his head. All of which goes to argue that if the Fatherland were to fall into such a state of democratic tolerance that no recidivist need carry a defensive hyphen to shield him from the importunate attentions of the Imperial government, German colonies would also come into bearing; although, it is true, they would have no value to the German government.

In the Imperial colonial policy colonies are conceived to stand to their Imperial guardian or master in a relation between that of a step-child and that of an indentured servant; to be dealt with summarily and at discretion and to be made use of without scruple. The like att.i.tude toward colonies was once familiar matter-of-course with the British and Spanish statesmen. The British found the plan unprofitable, and also unworkable, and have given it up. The Spanish, having no political outlook but the dynastic one, could of course not see their way to relinquish the only purpose of their colonial enterprise, except in relinquishing their colonial possessions. The German (Imperial) colonial policy is and will be necessarily after the Spanish pattern, and necessarily, too, with the Spanish results.

Under the projected neutral scheme there would be no colonial policy, and of course, no inducement to the acquisition of colonies, since there would be no profit to be derived, or to be fancied, in the case.

But while no country, as a commonwealth, has any material interest in the acquisition or maintenance of colonies, it is otherwise as regards the dynastic interests of an Imperial government; and it is also otherwise, at least in the belief of the interested parties, as regards special businessmen or business concerns who are in a position to gain something by help of national discrimination in their favor. As regards the pecuniary interests of favored businessmen or business concerns, and of investors favored by national discrimination in colonial relations, the case falls under the general caption of trade discrimination, and does not differ at all materially from such expedients as a protective tariff, a ship subsidy, or a bounty on exports. But as regards the warlike, that is to say dynastic, interest of an Imperial government the case stands somewhat different.

Colonial Possessions in such a case yield no material benefit to the country at large, but their possession is a serviceable plea for warlike preparations with which to retain possession of the colonies in the face of eventualities, and it is also a serviceable means of stirring the national pride and keeping alive a suitable spirit of patriotic animosity. The material service actually to be derived from such possessions in the event of war is a point in doubt, with the probabilities apparently running against their being of any eventual net use. But there need be no question that such possessions, under the hand of any national establishment infected with imperial ambitions, are a fruitful source of diplomatic complications, excuses for armament, international grievances, and eventual aggression. A pacific league of neutrals can evidently not tolerate the retention of colonial possessions by any dynastic State that may be drawn into the league or under its jurisdiction, as, e.g., the German Empire in case it should be left on an Imperial footing. Whereas, in case the German peoples are thrown back on a democratic status, as neutralised commonwealths without a crown or a military establishment, the question of their colonial possessions evidently falls vacant.

As to the neutralisation of trade relations apart from the question of colonies, and as bears on the case of Germany under the projected jurisdiction of a pacific league of neutrals, the considerations to be taken account of are of much the same nature. As it would have to take effect, e.g., in the abolition of commercial and industrial discriminations between Germany and the pacific nations, such neutralisation would doubtless confer a lasting material benefit on the German people at large; and it is not easy to detect any loss or detriment to be derived from such a move so long as peace prevails.

Protective, that is to say discriminating, export, import, or excise duties, harbor and registry dues, subsidies, tax exemptions and trade preferences, and all the like devices of interference with trade and industry, are unavoidably a hindrance to the material interests of any people on whom they are imposed or who impose these disabilities on themselves. So that exemption from these things by a comprehensive neutralisation of trade relations would immediately benefit all the nations concerned, in respect of their material well-being in times of peace. There is no exception and no abatement to be taken account of under this general statement, as is well known to all men who are conversant with these matters.

But it is otherwise as regards the dynastic interest in the case, and as regards any national interest in warlike enterprise. It is doubtless true that all restraint of trade between nations, and between cla.s.ses or localities within the national frontiers, unavoidably acts to weaken and impoverish the people on whose economic activities this restraint is laid; and to the extent to which this effect is had it will also be true that the country which so is hindered in its work will have a less aggregate of resources to place at the disposal of its enterprising statesmen for imperialist ends. But these restraints may yet be useful for dynastic, that is to say warlike, ends by making the country more nearly a "self-contained economic whole." A country becomes a "self-contained economic whole" by mutilation, in cutting itself off from the industrial system in which industrially it belongs, but in which it is unwilling nationally to hold its place. National frontiers are industrial barriers. But as a result of such mutilation of its industrial life such a country is better able--it has been believed--to bear the shock of severing its international trade relations entirely, as is likely to happen in case of war.

In a large country, such as America or Russia, which comprises within its national boundaries very extensive and very varied resources and a widely distributed and diversified population, the mischief suffered from restraints of trade that hinder industrial relations with the world at large will of course be proportionately lessened. Such a country comes nearer being a miniature industrial world; although none of the civilised nations, large or small, can carry on its ordinary industrial activities and its ordinary manner of life without drawing on foreign parts to some appreciable extent. But a country of small territorial extent and of somewhat narrowly restricted natural resources, as, e.g., Germany or France, can even by the most drastic measures of restraint and mutilation achieve only a very mediocre degree of industrial isolation and "self-sufficiency,"--as has, e.g., appeared in the present war. But in all cases, though in varying measure, the mitigated isolation so enforced by these restraints on trade will in their degree impair the country's industrial efficiency and lower the people's material well-being; yet, if the restrictions are shrewdly applied this partial isolation and partial "self-sufficiency" will go some way toward preparing the nation for the more thorough isolation that follows on the outbreak of hostilities.

The present plight of the German people under war conditions may serve to show how nearly that end may be attained, and yet how inadequate even the most unreserved measures of industrial isolation must be in face of the fact that the modern state of the industrial arts necessarily draws on the collective resources of the world at large. It may well be doubted, on an impartial view, if the mutilation of the country's industrial system by such measures of isolation does not after all rather weaken the nation even for warlike ends; but then, the discretionary authorities in the dynastic States are always, and it may be presumed necessarily, hampered with obsolete theories handed down from that cameralistic age, when the little princes of the Fatherland were making dynastic history. So, e.g., the current, nineteenth and twentieth century, economic policy of the Prussian-Imperial statesmen is still drawn on lines within which Frederick II, called the Great, would have felt well at home.

Like other preparation for hostilities this reduction of the country to the status of a self-contained economic organisation is costly, but like other preparation for hostilities it also puts the nation in a position of greater readiness to break off friendly relations with its neighbors. It is a war measure, commonly spoken for by its advocates as a measure of self-defense; but whatever the merits of the self-defenders' contention, this measure is a war measure. As such it can reasonably claim no hearing in the counsels of a pacific league of neutrals, whose purpose it is to make war impracticable. Particularly can there be no reasonable question of admitting a policy of trade discrimination and isolation on the part of a nation which has, for purposes of warlike aggression, pursued such a policy in the past, and which it is the immediate purpose of the league to bind over to keep the peace.

There has been a volume of loose talk spent on the justice and expediency of boycotting the trade of the peoples of the Empire after the return of peace, as a penalty and as a preventive measure designed to r.e.t.a.r.d their recovery of strength with which to enter on a further warlike enterprise. Such a measure would necessarily be somewhat futile; since "Business is business," after all, and the practical limitations imposed on an unprofitable boycott by the moral necessity to buy cheap and sell dear that rests on all businessmen would surrept.i.tiously mitigate it to the point of negligibility. It is inconceivable--or it would be inconceivable in the absence of imbecile politicians and self-seeking businessmen--that measures looking to the trade isolation of any one of these countries could be entertained as a point of policy to be pursued by a league of neutrals. And it is only in so far as patriotic jealousy and vindictive sentiments are allowed to displace the aspiration for peace and security, that such measures can claim consideration. Considered as a penalty to be imposed on the erring nations who set this warlike adventure afoot, it should be sufficiently plain that such a measure as a trade boycott could not touch the chief offenders, or even their responsible abettors. It would, rather, play into the hands of the militarist interests by keeping alive the spirit of national jealousy and international hatred, out of which wars arise and without which warlike enterprise might hopefully be expected to disappear out of the scheme of human intercourse. The punishment would fall, as all economic burdens and disabilities must always fall, on the common man, the underlying population.

The chief relation of this common run, this underlying population of German subjects, to the inception and pursuit of this Imperial warlike enterprise, is comprised in the fact that they are an underlying population of subjects, held in usufruct by the Imperial establishment and employed at will. It is true, they have lent themselves unreservedly to the uses for which the dynasty has use for them, and they have entered enthusiastically into the warlike adventure set afoot by the dynastic statesmen; but that they have done so is their misfortune rather than their fault. By use and wont and indoctrination they have for long been unremittingly, and helplessly, disciplined into a spirit of dynastic loyalty, national animosity and servile abnegation; until it would be nothing better than a pathetic inversion of all the equities of the case to visit the transgressions of their masters upon the common run; whose fault lies, after all, in their being an underlying population of subjects, who have not had a chance to reach that spiritual level on which they could properly be held accountable for the uses to which they are turned. It is true, men are ordinarily punished for their misfortunes; but the warlike enterprise of the Imperial dynasty has already brought what might fairly be rated as a good measure of punishment on this underlying populace, whose chief fault and chief misfortune lies in an habitual servile abnegation of those traits of initiative and discretion in man that const.i.tute him an agent susceptible of responsibility or retribution.

It would be all the more of a pathetic mockery to visit the transgressions of their masters on these victims of circ.u.mstance and dynastic mendacity, since the conventionalities of international equity will scarcely permit the high responsible parties in the case to be chastised with any penalty harsher than a well-mannered figure of speech. To serve as a deterrent, the penalty must strike the point where vests the discretion; but servile use and wont is still too well intact in these premises to let any penalty touch the guilty core of a profligate dynasty. Under the wear and tear of continued war and its incident continued vulgarisation of the directorate and responsible staff among the pacific allies, the conventional respect of persons is likely to suffer appreciable dilapidation; but there need be no apprehension of such a loss of decent respect for personages as would compromise the creature comforts of that high syndicate of personages on whose initiative the Fatherland entered upon this enterprise in dominion.

Bygone shortcomings and transgressions can have no reasonable place in the arrangements by which a pacific league of neutrals designs to keep the peace. Neither can bygone prerogatives and precedents of magnificence and of mastery, except in so far as they unavoidably must come into play through the inability of men to divest themselves of their ingrained preconceptions, by virtue of which a Hohenzollern or a Hapsburger is something more formidable and more to be considered than a recruiting sergeant or a purveyor of light literature. The league can do its work of pacification only by elaborately forgetting differences and discrepancies of the kind that give rise to international grievances.

Which is the same as saying that the neutralisation of national discriminations and pretensions will have to go all the way, if it is to serve. But this implies, as broadly as need be, that the pacific nations who make the league and provisionally administer its articles of agreement and jurisdiction, can not exempt themselves from any of the leveling measures of neutralisation to which the dynastic suspects among them are to be subject. It would mean a relinquishment of all those undemocratic inst.i.tutional survivals out of which international grievances are wont to arise. As a certain Danish adage would have it, the neutrals of the league must all be shorn over the same comb.

What is to be shorn over this one comb of neutralisation and democracy is all those who go into the pacific league of neutrals and all who come under its jurisdiction, whether of their own choice or by the necessities of the case. It is of the substance of the case that those peoples who have been employed in the campaigns of the German-Imperial coalition are to come in on terms of impartial equality with those who have held the ground against them; to come under the jurisdiction, and prospectively into the copartnery, of the league of neutrals--all on the presumption that the Imperial coalition will be brought to make peace on terms of unconditional surrender.

Let it not seem presumptuous to venture on a recital of summary specifications intended to indicate the nature of those concrete measures which would logically be comprised in a scheme of pacification carried out with such a view to impartial equality among the peoples who are to make up the projected league. There is a significant turn of expression that recurs habitually in the formulation of terms put forth by the spokesmen of the Entente belligerents, where it is insisted that hostilities are carried on not against the German people or the other peoples a.s.sociated with them, but only against the Imperial establishments and their culpable aids and abettors in the enterprise.

So it is further insisted that there is no intention to bring pains and penalties on these peoples, who so have been made use of by their masters, but only on the culpable master cla.s.s whose tools these peoples have been. And later, just now (January 1917), and from a responsible and disinterested spokesman for the pacific league, there comes the declaration that a lasting peace at the hands of such a league can be grounded only in a present "peace without victory."

The mutual congruity of these two declarations need not imply collusion, but they are none the less complementary propositions and they are none the less indicative of a common trend of convictions among the men who are best able to speak for those pacific nations that are looked to as the mainstay of the prospective league. They both converge to the point that the objective to be achieved is not victory for the Entente belligerents but defeat for the German-Imperial coalition; that the peoples underlying the defeated governments are not to be dealt with as vanquished enemies but as fellows in undeserved misfortune brought on by their culpable masters; and that no advantage is designed to be taken of these peoples, and no gratuitous hardship to be imposed on them. Their masters are evidently to be put away, not as defeated antagonists but as a public nuisance to be provided against as may seem expedient for the peace and security of those nations whom they have been molesting.

Taking this position as outlined, it should not be extremely difficult to forecast the general line of procedure which it would logically demand,--barring irrelevant regard for precedents and overheated resentment, and provided that the makers of these peace terms have a free hand and go to their work with an eye single to the establishment of an enduring peace. The case of Germany would be typical of all the rest; and the main items of the bill in this case would seem logically to run somewhat as follows:

(1) The definitive elimination of the Imperial establishment, together with the monarchical establishments of the several states of the Empire and the privileged cla.s.ses;

(2) Removal or destruction of all warlike equipment, military and naval, defensive and offensive;