The Fruits of Victory. Norman Angell
of Europe, and brings us to the problem of the pressure of population in the older civilisations upon the[Pg ] means of subsistence. That “biological pressure” is certain, in some circumstances, to raise for America questions of immigration, of relations generally with foreign countries, of defence, which American statesmanship will have to take into account in the form of definite legislation that will go on to American Statute books. Or, take the general problem of the economic reconstruction of Europe, with which the book is so largely occupied. That happens to bear, not merely on the expansion of American trade, the creation of new markets, that is, and on the recovery of American debts, but upon the preservation of markets for cotton, wheat, meat and other products, to which large American communities have in the past looked, and do still look, for their prosperity and even for their solvency. Again, dealing with the manner in which the War has affected the economic organisation of the European society, the writer has been led to describe the process by which preparation for modern war has come to mean, to an increasing degree, control by the government of the national resources as a whole, thus setting up strong tendencies towards a form of State Socialism. To America, herself facing a more far-reaching organisation of the national resources for military purposes than she has known in the past, the analysis of such a process is certainly of very direct concern. Not less so is the story of the relation of revolutionary forces in the industrial struggle—“Bolshevism”—to the tendencies so initiated or stimulated.
One could go on expanding this theme indefinitely, and write a whole book about America’s concern in these things. But surely in these days it would be a book of platitudes, elaborately pointing out the obvious. Yet an American critic of these pages in their European form warns me that I must be careful to show their interest for American readers.
Their main interest for the American is not in the kind of relationship just indicated, very considerable and immediate as that happens to be. Their chief interest is in this: they[Pg ] attempt an analysis of the ultimate forces of policies in Western society; of the interrelation of fundamental economic needs and of predominant political ideas—public opinion, with its constituent elements of “human nature,” social—or anti-social—instinct, the tradition of Patriotism and Nationalism, the mechanism of the modern Press. It is suggested in these pages that some of the main factors of political action, the dominant motives of political conduct, are still grossly neglected by “practical statesmen”; and that the statesmen still treat as remote and irrelevant certain moral forces which recent events have shown to have very great and immediate practical importance. (A number of cases are discussed in which practical and realist European statesmen have seen their plans touching the stability of alliances, the creation of international credit, the issuing of international loans, indemnities, a “new world” generally, all this frustrated because in drawing them up they ignored the invisible but final factor of public feeling and temper, which the whole time they were modifying or creating, thus unconsciously undermining the edifices they were so painfully creating. Time and again in the last few years practical men of affairs in Europe have found themselves the helpless victims of a state of feeling or opinion which they so little understood that they had often themselves unknowingly created it.)
In such hard realities as the exaction of an indemnity, we see governments forced to policies which can only make their task more difficult, but which they are compelled to adopt in order to placate electoral opinion, or to repel an opposition which would exploit some prevailing prejudice or emotion.
To understand the nature of forces which must determine America’s main domestic and foreign policies—as they have determined those of Western Society in Europe during the last generation—is surely an “American interest”; though indeed, in neglecting the significance of those “hidden currents flowing continually beneath the surface of political history,” American students of politics would be following much European precedent. Although public opinion and feeling are the raw material with which statesmen deal, it is still considered irrelevant and academic to study the constituent elements of that raw material.
Americans are sufficiently detached from Europe to see that in the way of a better unification of that Continent for the purposes of its own economic and moral restoration stand disruptive forces of “Balkanisation,” a development of the spirit of Nationalism which the statesmen for years have encouraged and exploited. The American of to-day speaks of the Balkanisation of Europe just as the Englishman of two or three years ago spoke of the Balkanisation of the Continent, of the wrangles of Poles, Czecho-Slovaks, Hungarians, Rumanians, Italians, Jugo-Slavs. And the attitude of both Englishman and American are alike in this: to the Englishman, watching the squabbles of all the little new States and the breaking out of all the little new wars, there seemed at work in that spectacle forces so suicidal that they could never in any degree touch his own political problems; the American to-day, watching British policy in Ireland or French policy towards Germany, feels that in such conflict are moral forces that could never produce similar paralysis in American policy. “Why,” asks the confident American, “does England bring such unnecessary trouble upon herself by her military conduct in Ireland? Why does France keep three-fourths of a Continent still in ferment, making reparations more and more remote”? Americans have a very strong feeling that they could not be guilty of the Irish mess, or of prolonging the confusion which threatens to bring Europe’s civilisation to utter collapse. How comes it that the English people, so genuinely and so sincerely horrified at the thought of what a Bissing could do in Belgium, unable to understand how the German people could tolerate a government guilty of such things, somehow find that their own British Government is doing very similar things in Cork and Balbriggan; and finding it, simply acquiesce? To the American the indefensibility of British conduct is plain. “America could never be guilty of it.” To the Englishman just now, the indefensibility of French conduct is plain. The policy which France is following is seen to be suicidal from the point of view of French interests. The Englishman is sure that “English political sense” would never tolerate it in an English government.
The situation suggests this question: would Americans deny that England in the past has shown very great political genius, or that the French people are alert, open-minded, “realist,” intelligent? Recalling what England has done in the way of the establishment of great free communities, the flexibility and “practicalness” of her imperial policy, what France has contributed to democracy and European organisation, can we explain the present difficulties of Europe by the absence, on the part of Englishmen or Frenchmen, or other Europeans, of a political intelligence granted only so far in the world’s history to Americans? In other words, do Americans seriously argue that the moral forces which have wrought such havoc in the foreign policy of European States could never threaten the foreign policy of America? Does the American plead that the circumstances which warp an Englishman’s or Frenchman’s judgment could never warp an American’s? Or that he could never find himself in similar circumstances? As a matter of fact, of course, that is precisely what the American—like the Englishman or Frenchman or Italian in an analogous case—does plead. To have suggested five years ago to an Englishman that his own generals in India or Ireland would copy Bissing, would have been deemed too preposterous even for anger: but then equally, to Americans, supporting in their millions in 1916 the League to Enforce Peace, would the idea have seemed preposterous that a few years later America, having the power to take the lead in a Peace League, would refuse to do so, and would herself be demanding, as the result of participation in a war to end war, greater armament than ever—as protection against Great Britain.
I suggest that if an English government can be led to sanction and defend in Ireland the identical things which shocked the world when committed in Belgium by Germans, if France to-day threatens Europe with a military hegemony not less mischievous than that which America determined to destroy, the causes of those things must be sought, not in the special wickedness of this or that nation, but in forces which may operate among any people.
One peculiarity of the prevailing political mind stands out. It is evident that a sensible, humane and intelligent people, even with historical political sense, can quite often fail to realise how one step of policy, taken willingly, must lead to the taking of other steps which they detest. If Mr. Lloyd George is supporting France, if the French Government is proclaiming policies which it knows to be disastrous, but which any French Government must offer to its people or perish, it is because