Essays in Liberalism. Various
would be willing to take the risk of war which the Balance of Power involves. But most of those who use the phrase are unconscious of these motives, and use it as they use many another phrase, simply because they know not what it means. For, assuredly, no sane person who had examined the Balance of Power, as it existed before the war, could ever advocate it as a means of peace.
Indeed, whenever there has been the prospect of a practical Balance of Power, its votaries have shown by their action that they knew their creed was nonsense. The late war, for instance, might have been ended in 1916 on the basis of a Balance of Power. There were a few who believed that that was the best solution; but they were not our latter-day believers in the Balance of Power. Their cry was all for a fight to a finish and a total destruction of the Balance of Power by an overwhelming victory for the Allies, and their one regret is that a final blow by Marshal Foch did not destroy the last vestige of a German army. What is the point of expressing belief in the Balance of Power when you indignantly repudiate your own doctrine on every occasion on which you might be able to give it effect? And what is the point of the present advocacy of the Balance of Power by those who think themselves neither visionaries nor blind? Do they wish to restore the military strength of Germany and of Russia and to see an Alliance between them confronting a Franco-British union, compelled thereby to be militarist too? Is it really that they wish to be militarists and that the League of Nations, with its promise of peace, retrenchment, and reform, is to them a greater evil than the Balance of Power?
Where the Line is Drawn
There is yet another fatal objection to the Balance of Power due to the change in circumstances since the days of Castlereagh. He could afford to think only of Europe, but we have to think of the world; and if our specific has any value it must be of world-wide application. We cannot proclaim the virtues of the Balance of Power and then propose to limit it to the land or to any particular continent. Now, did our believers in the Balance of Power ever wish to see power balanced anywhere else than on the continent of Europe? That, if we studied history in any other language than our own, we should know was the gibe which other peoples flung at our addiction to the Balance of Power. We wanted, they said, to see a Balance of Power on the continent of Europe, to see one half of Europe equally matched against the other, because the more anxiously Continental States were absorbed in maintaining their Balance of Power, the keener would be their competition for our favour, and the freer would be our hands to do what we liked in the rest of the world.
Was that a baseless slander? Let us test it with a question or two. Did we ever want a Balance of Power at sea? British supremacy, with a two-to-one or at least a sixteen-to-ten standard was, I fancy, our minimum requirement. Is British supremacy what we mean by a Balance of Power? Again, did we ever desire a Balance of Power in Africa, America, or Asia? We may have talked of it sometimes, but only when we were the weaker party and feared that another might claim in those continents the sort of Balance of Power we claimed on the sea. We never spoke of the Balance of Power in the interests of any nation except ourselves and an occasional ally. We cannot speak in those terms to-day. If we demand a Balance of Power on land, we must expect others to claim it at sea; if we urge it on Europe as a means of peace, we cannot object if others turn our own argument against us in other quarters of the globe; and wherever you have a Balance of Power you will have a race for armaments and the fear of war.
The Balance of Power is, in fact, becoming as obsolete as the Monopoly of Power enjoyed by the Roman Empire. It is a bankrupt policy which went into liquidation in 1914, and the high court of public opinion demands a reconstruction. The principle of that reconstruction was stated by President Wilson, a great seer whose ultimate fame will survive the obloquy in which he has been involved by the exigencies of American party-politics and the short-sightedness of public opinion in Europe. We want, he said, a Community of Power, and its organ must be the League of Nations. Nations must begin to co-operate and cease to counteract.
I am not advocating the League of Nations except in the limited way of attempting to show that the Balance of Power is impossible as an alternative unless you can re-create the conditions of a century ago, restore the individual independence of a number of fairly equal Powers, and guarantee the commonwealth of nations against privy conspiracy and sedition in the form of separate groups and alliances. But there is one supreme advantage in a Community of Power, provided it remains a reality, and that is that it need never be used. Its mere existence would be sufficient to ensure the peace; for no rebel State would care to challenge the inevitable defeat and retribution which a Community of Power could inflict. It has even been urged, and I believe it myself, that Germany would never have invaded Belgium had she been sure that Great Britain, and still less had she thought that America, would intervene. It was the Balance of Power that provoked the war, and it was the absence of a Community of Power which made it possible.
Basis of Security
But no one who thinks that power—whether a Monopoly, a Balance, or even a Community of Power is the ultimate guardian angel of our peace, has the root of the matter in him. Men, said Burke, are not governed primarily by laws, still less by force; and behind all power stands opinion. To believe in public opinion rather than in might excludes the believer from the regular forces of militarism and condemns him as a visionary and blind. For advocates of the Balance of Power bear a striking resemblance to the Potsdam school; and even so moderate a German as the late Dr. Rathenau declared in his unregenerate days before the war that Germans were not in the habit of reckoning with public opinion. Nevertheless, there is a frontier in the world which for a century and more has enjoyed a security which all the armaments of Prussian militarism could not give the German Fatherland; and the absolute security of that frontier rests not upon a monopoly nor a community, still less upon a balance of power, but on the opinion held on both sides of that frontier that all power is irrational and futile as a guarantee of peace between civilised or Christian people.
Let us look at that frontier for a moment. It is in its way the most wonderful thing on earth, and it holds a light to lighten the nations and to guide our feet into the way of peace. It runs, of course, between the Dominion of Canada and the United States of America across the great lakes and three thousand miles of prairie; and from the military and strategic point of view it is probably the worst frontier in the world. Why then is it secure? Is it because of any monopoly or community or balance of power? Is it because the United States and the British Empire are under a common government, or because there is along that frontier a nicely-balanced distribution of military strength? No, it is secure, not in spite of the absence of force, but because of the absence of force; and if you want to destroy the peace of that frontier from end to end, all you need to do is to send a regiment to protect it, launch a Dreadnought on those lakes, and establish a balance of power. For every regiment or warship on one side will produce a regiment or warship on the other; and then your race for armaments will begin, and the poison will spread until the whole of America becomes like Europe, an armed camp of victims to the theory of strategic frontiers and of the Balance of Power.
Those theories, their application, and their consequences recently cost the world thirty million casualties and thousands of millions of pounds within a brief five years, and yet left the frontiers of Europe less secure than they were before. Three thousand miles of frontier in North America have in more than a hundred years cost us hardly a life, or a limb, or a penny. As we put those details side by side we realise quantula regitur mundus sapientia—with how little wisdom do men rule the world. Yet the truth was told us long ago that he that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city, and we might have learnt by our experience of the peace that the only conquest that really pays is the conquest of oneself.
The real peace of that North American frontier is due to no conquest of Americans by Canadians or of Canadians by Americans, but to their conquest of themselves and of that foolish pride of “heathen folk who put their trust in reeking tube and iron shard.” Let us face the facts, whatever the visionaries and the blind may say. So be it. The war is a fact, and so is the desolation it has wrought. But that Anglo-American frontier is also a fact, and so is that century of peace which happily followed upon the resolution to depend for the defence of that frontier on moral restraint instead of on military force. Verily, peace hath her victories not less renowned than those of war.
The Alternative
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