American World Policies. Walter Edward Weyl
To kill or starve is the eternal choice. Since population increases faster than food, war becomes inevitable, for the tribe that hunts on our land, and eats our food, is our hereditary enemy. To pastoral nations, war is equally necessary, unless babies and old people are to be ruthlessly sacrificed. To fill new mouths larger flocks are necessary, to feed larger flocks new pastures are required; and there is only one way to obtain fresh pastures. There comes a period of drought, and the hunger-maddened nation, accompanied by its flocks, hurls itself suddenly upon feebler agricultural peoples, destroying empires and founding them. These are the great Völkerwanderungen, the restless migrations of mobile pastoral nations in search of food. It is the eternal bloody quest.
Nor are agricultural populations immune. Not only must they defend their patches of cultivated land, but, as numbers increase, must strike out for new lands. When the growing population makes conditions intolerable, youths are chosen, perhaps by religious rites, to adventure, sword in hand, and carve out new territory or die fighting. There are always more than there is place for, and it is always possible for a young Fortinbras to shark up "a list of lawless resolutes for food and diet, to some enterprise that hath a stomach in 't." All the interminable battling of the early Middle Ages reveals this effort of fecund agricultural populations to solve the problem of over-breeding by slaughter.
Even the Crusades partake of this economic character. Among the Crusaders were exalted souls, who wished to rescue their Lord's sepulchre, but there were many more who dreamed of free lands, gold and silver, and the beautiful women of the Orient. The religious motive was present; it was strong and intolerant, though it did not in the later Crusades prevent Christians from attacking Christians. At bottom, however, certain strong economic factors forced on the struggle. There had been famine in Lorraine and pestilence from Flanders to Bohemia, and all the discontent, hunger and ambition of western Europe answered to Urbano's call. "A stream of emigration set towards the East, such as would in modern times flow towards a newly discovered gold-field—a stream carrying in its turbid waters much refuse, tramps and bankrupts, camp-followers and hucksters, fugitive monks and escaped villains, and marked by the same motley grouping, the same fever of life, the same alternations of affluence and beggary, which mark the rush for a gold-field to-day."1 Not until it was seen that they no longer paid did the Crusades end; not heavenly but earthly motives inspired most of these soldiers of Christ. It was business, the business of a crudely organised, over-populated, agricultural Europe.
Even with the development of commerce, the motive does not change in character, though its form becomes different. All through history we find maritime cities and states fighting for the control of trade routes, the exploitation of markets and peoples, the right to sell goods and keep competitors from selling. Athens, Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Holland, England—it is all the same story. Undoubtedly, with the development of commerce, wealth takes a new form. Land is no longer the sole wealth, and successful warriors need no longer be paid in land and live off the land, as they are forced to do in every feudal society. A money economy, a conversion of values into money, changes the technique of war by creating professional mercenary armies. But the business goes on as before. Rival groups fight for a monopoly of trade as they once fought for land. There is still not enough to go around, and no way of deciding between rival claimants except by the arbitrament of war.
Perhaps it will be objected that an analysis of war such as this leaves us merely with the dead body of facts while killing the soul of truth. Surely, it may be urged, war is more than a sordid calculation; a Roland or Bayard does not weigh his danger against booty. Of course that is so. Economic motive is only the skeleton of war; the flesh and skin are of a totally different texture. Idealism, nobility, heroism exist in war, and are no less sincere because based upon the gross facts of economic necessity and desire. Without such idealism, manufactured or evolved, you can no more win wars, especially in these latter days, than without ammunition. Idealism is a weapon with which we kill our enemies. Yet if we read our history rightly, we shall find less of this luminous nobility among warriors than our annalists pretend. The Greeks of the Trojan War were not patriots but free-booters. Those great English sailors, Drake, Morgan and the rest, who ravaged the Caribbean and smashed the Spanish sea-power, were pirates, unashamed of their piracy. As for the heroic warriors of the Scotch border, would they not to-day be jailed as cattle-thieves? Look where you will, at the great wars and at the blood-tracked colonising movements of history, and always you will find two kinds of men: the stone-blind idealist, and the crass, open-eyed, fleshly man. One fights for ideals, the other for something else worth fighting for. Both, however, are in reality impelled by economic motive, working upon them either directly and consciously, or transmuted into ideals through the medium of a people's thought.
Nor does this fighting for things, to be obtained only by fighting, involve moral turpitude. Nothing could be more grotesque than the moralistic tone in which we industrious moderns lecture the ancient fighting peoples. They did what we do, gained the things they wanted in the only way they could. Men will fight or work rather than starve, and whether they fight or work depends upon which, in the given circumstances, is the feasible mode of accumulation. Perhaps these peoples loved fighting and praised fighting more than we do. But as fighting was their métier and the measure of their success, their minds, like their muscles, became habituated, and their morality discovered virtue to be the thing at which the moralists were adept. Nothing can be wrong that is necessary to survival. Warfare is not immoral until there is an alternative.
Such an alternative might easily have arisen with the vast impetus given to accumulation by the discovery of America and of the new route to the East. But these events not only did not end but actually intensified war, while bringing out more sharply its preponderatingly economic character. For three generations Europe was enmeshed in the Italian wars, in which great rival nations sought to control Italian wealth and the dominion of the Mediterranean. There followed the so-called religious wars, in which Sweden played for control of the Baltic, Holland for the East Indian colonies, and England for trade supremacy, while Catholic France, to strengthen her position at the expense of Austria, came to the aid of Protestant Germany. For another century, from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the Peace of Paris in 1763, there was a succession of commercial wars, in which England wrested from Holland and then from France the mastery of the sea as well as the control of Asia and America. During all this period the rising commercial classes of England were brutally "upon the make." Markets were gained in America and valuable commercial rights obtained from Portugal, while in the famous contract, known as the "Assiento," English merchants secured from Spain the lucrative privilege of shipping one hundred and forty-four thousand negro slaves to the Spanish colonies of America. Of such was the texture of the complex European diplomacy that held the world in war.
In all these conflicts there was precious little idealism. The astute councillors of Elizabeth, of James, of Louis XIV, did not waste their august sovereign's time upon discourses concerning Britain's honour and the grandeur of France, but talked trade, privileges, monopolies, colonies to be exploited, money to be made. So too the Napoleonic Wars, those great conflicts between democracy and absolutism, reveal themselves as a continuation of the commercial wars of the eighteenth century. It was all the same process, the ranging of the nations, as formerly of tribes and of cities, for the conquest, first, of the means to live, and, second, of a preferred economic position in the world.
Such is the business of war, and it is the oldest business in the world. It is aided by patriotism, prejudice, uncharitableness and a whole calendar of ugly tribal virtues, which enjoin us to love the means by which we get and hate the men from whom we take. It is aided by racial scorn, a thing as deep as life, yet subject on the whole to that more impelling factor, economic motive. The history of war and peace is a history of the overriding of sentimental considerations by imperious economic needs. During the Revolutionary War, no love was lost between the rigid, race-conscious Englishman and the despised red-skin, yet both joined hands to scalp Americans in the lonely settlements along our frontier. To-day German and Turk, Italian and Russian, Frenchman and Senegambian, Briton and Japanese, love each other at least temporarily because pursuing like interests. Not that the influence of race and nationality upon those mutual repulsions which lead to war can be brushed aside in a paragraph. They are potent, modifying factors, with a certain independence of action, and serving, with regard to economic motives, as accelerators, intensifiers or, to
Ernest Barker. Crusades. Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, Vol. VII, p. 526.