IBRARY 
 
 IIVER ITY OF 
 :ALIF- ,,MIA 
 
 .AN Ll EGO 
 
 //
 
 Patriotism and Empire
 
 ffwblisber's announcements. 
 
 Is War Now Impossible? By I. BLOCK. 
 
 Edited by W. T. STEAD. (Vol. II. of the 
 
 ' Russian Library.') Maps and Diagrams. 
 Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 The Evolution of the Idea of Ood. An Inquiry 
 into the Origins of Religions. By GRANT 
 ALLEN. Demy 8vo. Buckram. 205. net. 
 
 [Second Edition. 
 
 The Human Machine: An Inquiry into the 
 
 Divinity of Human Faculty in its Bearings 
 
 upon Social Life, Religion, Education, and 
 
 Politics. By J. F. NISBET. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 [Second Edition. 
 
 The Philosophy of Greece, considered in its 
 relation to the Character and History of its 
 People. By A. W. BENN. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 Logic: Deductive and Inductive. By CARVETH 
 READ, M.A. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 The Psychology of Woman. By LAURA MAR- 
 HOLM. Translated by GEORGIA A. ETCHISON. 
 Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 The Case for Protection. By E. E. WILLIAMS. 
 With Diagrams. Crown 8vo. 55. 
 
 Russia in Asia : A Record and a Study. 1588- 
 1899. By ALEXIS KRAUSSE. With 2 Maps 
 in Colours and 10 specially drawn for the text. 
 Demy 8vo. 255. 
 
 Introduction to the History of Politics. By 
 
 JOHN M. ROBERTSON. [In preparation. 
 
 GRANT RICHARDS, 9, Henrietta Street, 
 Covent Garden, W.C,
 
 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN M. ROBERTSON 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 'THE SAXON AND THE CELT,' ETC. 
 
 London 
 
 Grant Richards 
 
 1899
 
 MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY, 
 
 WHO HAS WROUGHT FOR PEACE, TRUTH, JUSTICE 
 AND INTERNATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS 
 
 IN BOTH HEMISPHERES 
 
 DURING TWO GENERATIONS, 
 
 THESE PAGES ARE DEDICATED 
 
 WITH AFFECTION AND ESTEEM.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE SPRINGS OF PATRIOTISM AND MILITARISM I 
 
 PART II 
 THE MILITARIST REGIMEN - 71 
 
 PART III 
 THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF IMPERIALISM 138 
 
 ADDENDA - 205 
 
 INDEX ...... 20 6
 
 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 PART I 
 
 The Springs of Patriotism and 
 Militarism 
 
 I 
 
 HISTORY and poetry, we may be sure, will not 
 willingly let die the antique tale of the three 
 hundred who at Thermopylae held out for 
 Sparta against the Persian host, knowing that 
 there could be but one end, and facing it with 
 a stern exaltation, combing their long hair for 
 that, the last festival, and singing the while 
 
 ' Singing of death and of honour that cannot die.' 
 
 It is true, there are offsets. There was no 
 military wisdom in defending the pass after the 
 Persians had got behind it ; and if it was to be 
 defended, it should have been, as before, from 
 the narrows, not, as was finally done, by way 
 of a sortie. Between the tactics of Leonidas 
 
 I
 
 2 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 below and those of the Phocians above, we are 
 moved to say with Sir George Cox that ' the 
 generalship, if the story be true, is little better 
 than that of savages.' Nor are the three 
 hundred entitled to all the honours of the 
 fight, as fight, since there fought with them 
 seven hundred Thespians as brave as they, 
 and at least a thousand unconsidered helots, 
 who did their part like men. Nay, the good 
 Herodotus tells twice over that in all four 
 thousand men were slain on the Greek side 
 at Thermopylae, a statement which Bishop 
 Thirlwall gingerly accepts, and Mr. Grote 
 somewhat perturbedly seeks to explain away. 
 Then there were the Thebans, of whom many 
 were spared, as the story goes, on their asking 
 quarter. With four or five thousand men, to 
 say nothing of the thousands he had sent 
 home, Leonidas might have held the pass up 
 to starvation-point. On the whole, we must 
 suspect, with Sir George Cox, that the facts 
 of the case have not come down to us intact. 
 And when all is said, we know that in every 
 age and stage of human things, from the name- 
 less wars of savages to the most consummately 
 controlled campaigns of so-called civilization, 
 troops of men have died as hardily as those 
 commanded by Leonidas. Yet withal it is a 
 brave tale, and fit to typify an ideal.
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 3 
 
 Let it be freely agreed that when we come 
 to deal with men bearing themselves bravely 
 under the supreme test of conduct, the open 
 facing of death, whatever was to be said of 
 their action in bringing the crisis about, 
 censure is silenced. This or that war may 
 have been precipitated by arrogance or avarice, 
 obstinacy in injustice or insolent folly, but 
 when those on either side voluntarily put their 
 lives to the stake of the struggle, and the die 
 is thrown, we have passed from the region of 
 debate to that of contemplation, as fellow- 
 creatures looking on destiny and the eternal 
 vicissitude of things. So there will always be 
 for every man, at least ' while this machine is 
 to him,' an irreducible thrill before the spectacle 
 of free men going with a high heart to their 
 doom. It is the certainty of that thrill of 
 feeling that gives unchanging force to such 
 words as ' heroism.' There could not be a more 
 telling or a more typical exploitation of our 
 sensations in these matters than is accomplished 
 by M. Rostand in his heroic comedy of ' Cyrano 
 de Bergerac,' which, with its audaciously new 
 versification, its energetic unrealism, and its 
 magnificent management of the panache in 
 general, has lately won in France even such a 
 success as was its due in a nation so persistently 
 martial that it takes its sentimentalism almost
 
 4 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 solely in the form of fanfaronade. In a 
 
 superbly preposterous scene, M. Rostand 
 
 presents to us a corps of the half - starved 
 
 French besiegers, themselves besieged, of a 
 
 town held by the Spanish in Flanders. To 
 
 them comes, in the rapture of her love for the 
 
 author of the letters she has been receiving 
 
 daily as from her lover, the beautiful Roxane > 
 
 in her coach, crammed with provisions, the 
 
 chivalrous Spaniards having everywhere let it 
 
 pass their lines on her assurance that she was 
 
 going to see her lover. Such is war, on the 
 
 stage. 
 
 Just then, as it happens, the corps in question, 
 including both of Roxane's lovers, are awaiting 
 an assault in force which is pretty sure to 
 annihilate them, as it is to fall solely on their 
 trenches. So the starved Gascon cadets 
 hilariously eat and drink like schoolboys at 
 play ; and then the fighting begins, and the 
 known lover is brought in dead, killed by the 
 first shot ; and as the outworks are surmounted 
 by a host of Spaniards, astonished at the resist- 
 ance, and asking, ' Who are these men who 
 thus fight to the death ?' the superb Cyrano 
 and his band leap forward on the pikes, trolling 
 their song, ' Ce sont les cadets de Gascogne !' 
 So skilful is it all that, even in reading, our 
 smile at the fanfaronade is blended with a
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 5 
 
 swelling in the throat, and we may guess how 
 it touches hot heads and hot hearts in France. 
 To them it all stands for the love of country, 
 for the great name of France, for undying 
 patriotism, as well as for the pride of courage. 
 That is the end of the matter, even as with the 
 tale of the three hundred at Thermopylae. The 
 moral is that they died 'for Sparta and her 
 laws.' The thrill of sympathy with haughty 
 courage is carried to the account of a certain 
 assumed political virtue ; and the habit of mind 
 represented by this assumption gets all the 
 sanction of that strong and pure emotion. It 
 seems clear that ' patriotism/ whatsoever the 
 name may cover, must be the purest of 
 impulses because it is thus allied with the 
 purest of sympathetic feelings. Such is the 
 profound fallacy that it behoves us to dis- 
 entangle, in the light at once of the antecedents 
 and the consequences of what commonly passes 
 for ' patriotism.' 
 
 II 
 
 Go back as far as we will in history, by way 
 either of records or of inference from what 
 survives of the primitive, we find groups of 
 people united by what a recent sociologist 
 calls ' consciousness of kind,' and in virtue of
 
 6 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 that consciousness prepared to fight with other 
 groups. The two tendencies, the cohesion and 
 the repulsion, are strictly correlative ; each 
 involves the other. No law of human pro- 
 gression can well seem more sinister than this 
 primal interdependence of love and hate, of 
 good and evil, of union and destruction ; and 
 we shall do well to face the fact in all its 
 grimness at the outset of our questioning. It 
 was assuredly in no 'social compact' for 
 mere neighbourly reciprocity that those early 
 societies were rooted which have evolved 
 into great civilizations. Some marginal com- 
 munities there may be which wage no wars, 
 having enough ado to fight inclement Nature, 
 and which are held together by the mutual 
 good-will born of continuous collective need, 
 the stragglers being bound to perish ; but in 
 the average early tribe a main part of the 
 force of cohesion was the spontaneous hostility 
 to other tribes. 
 
 Primus in orbe, let us say, adapting the 
 disputed maxim concerning the making of 
 Gods, societates fecit timor fear first of alien 
 animals, it may be, and later of alien men ; but 
 the fear implied the hostile impulse all round ; 
 and the men of a society best knew that they 
 loved each other by dwelling on their joint 
 enmity to other societies. And the worst of
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 7 
 
 the fatality was that as societies developed 
 through the ages by way of survival of the 
 fittest, and the primitive gregarious instinct, 
 which is so sufficient in the primitive stage, 
 was gradually weakened by the individual 
 egoism which flourishes on the growth of 
 property, that old love-in-hate, or brotherhood 
 in warfare, became more and more palpably 
 the ruling and enduring force of union, the 
 main representative of the spirit of attraction, 
 and so inevitably took to itself all the sanctions 
 that the instincts of union had ever possessed. 
 The sense of passionate community of feeling 
 is too grateful not to be long cherished in the 
 last form in which individualistic disintegration 
 leaves it possible to an entire community ; a 
 community must be disintegrated indeed when, 
 hardened in the perpetual hostilities of the 
 normal competitive and progressive civilization, 
 and lacking any higher ideal of brotherhood, it 
 ceases even to relish the sympathy and synergy 
 that accrue to the state of international war. 
 In our own day we see the society in which 
 commercial competition is perhaps carried 
 furthest, responding with ecstasy to the appeal 
 of ' patriotism ' under the form of a war of 
 aggression on an ill-conducted neighbour. 
 The commercial egoist, bent throughout life 
 on besting all rivals, is seen to find a peculiar
 
 8 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 joy in the chance of an impassioned co-opera- 
 tion in the name of the common good. He 
 whose life's task has been to create burden- 
 some tariffs in his own favour, to undersell 
 and ruin his competitors, to keep down his 
 workmen's wages to enrich himself, is found 
 offering to equip at his own expense a 
 regiment of soldiers, as the expression of his 
 new-found delight in the notion of fellowship. 
 But it takes the old brute instinct of battle, of 
 hate, to work the change, and they who think 
 that, with that instinct asleep again, he will 
 continue zealous to promote the common weal 
 in normal life, are extravagantly astray. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Lest this should seem a perversely hard say- 
 ing, let us see for ourselves how the spirit called 
 patriotism has always correlated with the forces 
 of civic life. In the stormy generations in which 
 we find Roman history taking something like 
 clear shape among the receding mists of legend, 
 we find on one and the same scene the play of 
 an egoism which shrinks from no extremes of 
 tyranny within the society itself, and a vigour of 
 patriotism which shirks no effort for the main- 
 tenance of the State against others.
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 9 
 
 ' Then none was for a party, 
 Then all were for the State.' 
 
 So the great rhetorician makes his early Roman 
 sing, confessing the stress of faction already in 
 the days of the decemvirs. But if the song 
 were true, it could only be in the sense that 
 earlier egoism was not scientific enough to use 
 the machinery of faction ; for the sense in which 
 ' all were for the State,' as the learned rhetorician 
 incidentally makes known, was one consistent 
 with a constant readiness on the part of each 
 well-to-do citizen to enslave his poorer neigh- 
 bours for debt. We see the poor farmer going 
 loyally to the war, along with or under his richer 
 neighbour, helping him to defeat the traditional 
 enemy, and returning to be cast in bondage for 
 the debt he has been forced to incur after a 
 previous campaign forced, that is, by reason of 
 the fact that his farming went to ruin in his 
 absence, while the rich man's farm was tilled 
 by his slaves and managed by his bailiffs. No 
 enemy could have used the poor farmer worse ; 
 but the last thing he ever thought of the one 
 thing he never thought of was to make com- 
 mon cause with his similarly mishandled con- 
 gener in the rival State against the creditor 
 class who beggared both alike. That grotesque 
 acquiescence in a partnership from which the 
 poor man derived only the passing gratification
 
 io Patriotism and Empire 
 
 of a subterrational passion, while the rich man 
 got that and his riches as well, is a sufficient 
 proof of the strength of the habitual halluci- 
 nation. The nexus could indeed resent his 
 enslavement by his fellow-patriot ; but nothing 
 could alter his preconception of the sacredness 
 of patriotism that is, of the temper of enmity 
 till death towards the whole of the other group, 
 who at worst would but enslave him as a 
 penalty for fighting against them, and who had 
 never made any pretence of being his brothers. 
 Such are the psychological roots of the moral 
 phenomenon we are considering. 
 
 It does not concern us here to ask how the 
 Roman community as a whole drifted out of 
 that astonishing state of things into one of less 
 obviously unstable equilibrium : suffice it that 
 this practical definition of patriotism, as mere 
 negative community of malice, involving only 
 the necessary minimum of further co-operation 
 or fellow-feeling, is the burden of all history. 
 The ' three hundred ' at Thermopylae, as we 
 have incidentally seen, had no vestige of any 
 sentiment of normal fellowship with either their 
 helots or their subaltern farmer class, who 
 abroad fought shoulder to shoulder with them 
 against the hereditary foe, only to return to 
 subordination and grinding slavery at home, if 
 any return there were. Helots who might at
 
 Patriotism and Militarism n 
 
 any moment be treacherously massacred by their 
 brutal masters, on the score that they were dan- 
 gerously healthy and numerous, could nearly 
 always be relied on to fight valiantly against 
 some other set of slave-owners in their own 
 owners' interest. No sense of normal wrong 
 could quicken their intelligence to the point of 
 casting off the insane spell of the ancient ' con- 
 sciousness of kind.' 
 
 IV 
 
 But the hapless helots of Sparta and the 
 doomed yeomen of ancient Rome, we shall be 
 told, stood only for the patriotism of unintelli- 
 gence ; and there is a patriotism which is in- 
 telligent. Let it merely be noted, then, thus 
 far, how absolutely devoid of all true or con- 
 structive fellow-feeling on the part of the aris- 
 tocratic or ruling class was that concurrence of 
 passion which they regarded as patriotism ; and 
 how readily the passion broke out between 
 faction and faction at home, as soon as the ces- 
 sation of fear of invasion from without removed 
 the primary combining pressure. The question 
 now is, when and how and where the alleged 
 purification or rationalization of patriotism 
 began. 
 
 It would be tedious to disprove what few
 
 12 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 instructed people would affirm, that in medie- 
 val Europe matters went very much otherwise 
 than they did in Sparta and Rome ; or that 
 even in Athens the spirit of patriotism nor- 
 mally rose above a partnership in domination 
 over tribute-paying allies and a chronic sinking 
 of domestic hates in a more unreasoning hate 
 towards some other community. To that part- 
 nership, indeed, Pericles gave a constructive air 
 by his special policy ; but that policy itself had 
 its bitter domestic enemies ; and it is impossible 
 to show that it furthered fraternity in fostering 
 art and the pride of art and power. The best 
 case framable, perhaps, for a worthy patriotism 
 in past times, would be one drawn up from the 
 history of the Swiss cantons ; and that pleading 
 must perforce ignore the phase of mercenary 
 aggression, and dwell solely on the defensive 
 side of Swiss warfare. And, after all, it would 
 give little foothold to those who make much 
 of patriotism as a virtue in empires, where 
 the plea of necessary defence, however cus- 
 tomary, is derisory. If it is ever to be 
 shown that patriotism, while preserving the 
 primary character of a union in enmity, has 
 taken on the seemlier spirit of rational and 
 normal sympathy, the proof must be forth- 
 coming from modern politics, and, to be satis- 
 factory, must be in part producible from our
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 13 
 
 own affairs. The unwariest sentimentalist will 
 not now go back to the English patriotism 
 of the day of Henry V., whose unification of 
 his people in the conquest of France was so 
 promptly and duly followed by the inferno of 
 the Wars of the Roses. Even the rapturous 
 commemorators of the Armada, again, will 
 hardly claim that its repulse stood for aught 
 but the patriotism of oppugnancy. To modern 
 politics, then, let us come. 
 
 V 
 
 The last notable epoch of patriotic combination 
 in our history is that of the war with France, 
 begun in 1793 and carried on with intermissions 
 till the final fall of Napoleon in 1815. And 
 that epoch is still so near us in the spirit as well 
 as in time, its affairs were carried on so much in 
 the idiom of our own age and by our own Par- 
 liamentary methods, that it may specially well 
 serve us as a test case. About its political out- 
 come there is no question : it reduced to a 
 small scope the play of intellectual disunion, 
 in getting rid, for the moment, of the spirit of 
 innovation, of protest, of social and intellectual 
 criticism. Such a man as Coleridge, who in 
 the early years of the war was on the critical 
 side, but whose weaknesses steered him at
 
 14 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 length to that of convention and orthodoxy, 
 could give thanks that the war had this unifying 
 effect on the nation. And, indeed, though Fox 
 and the remnant of his adherents held steadily 
 to their general principle of peace and freedom, 
 to the extent even of absenting themselves from 
 the foregone proceedings of the House for 
 months, mere faction might be said to have dis- 
 appeared from the debates, and ' all were for 
 the State,' so to say. The one ideal was 
 enmity to France, enmity to the Revolution, 
 enmity to Napoleon ; and whatever ways of 
 thought were even distantly associated with the 
 revolutionary spirit and its French antecedents 
 were not merely discountenanced but defamed, 
 and not merely defamed but forcibly interfered 
 with, and wherever possible savagely punished ; 
 that is to say, the heightening of patriotism 
 meant a heightening of domestic malice where 
 any ground of strife survived. 
 
 This very suppression of the small minority, 
 to begin with, is visibly a long stride in that 
 backward movement which we shall see to be 
 a normal result of prolonged war in a nation 
 previously progressive. There is but one way, 
 be it repeated, in which a whole community 
 can be raised and bettered from within, and 
 that way begins in the free play of criticism, 
 of new thought as against the old. Right or
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 15 
 
 wrong, it must have a hearing ; the alternative 
 is not stand-still, but backing. And the sum of 
 the rule of gag in the patriotic England of the 
 Napoleonic age, whether we look at politics or 
 at literature, is just a lapse from a state of com- 
 parative advance and activity to one of paralysis 
 and retrogression. It is needless to frame anew 
 the indictment item by item, to recite the 
 tyrannies, the violences, the spoken and acted 
 brutalities, or to recall the kind of language 
 that stood for the voice of wisdom and authority 
 in the closing years of Pitt and in the epoch of 
 Lord Liverpool. To read the words spoken a 
 hundred years ago by judges engaged in trying 
 men for the offence of advocating political re- 
 forms is to hesitate over the premiss that that 
 age, after all, spoke our idiom and worked our 
 institutions. We seem for the moment to be re- 
 reading the sayings of Hate-Good in the 
 Pilgrims Progress. To let one instance stand 
 for a hundred, let the modern reader note the 
 handling given in Scotland in 1794 to William 
 Skirving, ' Secretary to the British Convention ' 
 of reformers. Skirving's spirit and aims are 
 set forth in his declaration before the Lord 
 Provost and Town Council of Edinburgh : 
 
 1 My lord, a long time ago I perceived that 
 the public mind in this country, as everywhere 
 else, was in a remarkable state of irritation. I
 
 1 6 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 sought to divert this irritation into some channel 
 which might moderate and regulate it. I urged, 
 to the utmost of my influence, the association 
 of the people, anxious to subject the public 
 irritation to the control of delegates chosen by 
 the people themselves, because of their greater 
 wisdom and prudence.' 
 
 This was the literal truth : the agitation was 
 absolutely orderly ; the sole reforms petitioned 
 for were universal suffrage and annual Parlia- 
 ments ; and the case for the prosecution con- 
 sisted in a shameless pretence that words of 
 warning to opponents as to the perils of the 
 war policy were threats of massacre ; that an 
 appeal for ' the peaceful restitution of their 
 rights' to the people was seditious, in that it 
 asserted they had been deprived of their natural 
 rights ; that there was ' nothing more seditious ' 
 than the adoption of the title ' British Conven- 
 tion of the People ' ; and that ' the purpose of 
 obtaining universal suffrage ' was, in other 
 words, ' the purpose of subverting the Govern- 
 ment of Great Britain.' Such were the pleas 
 of the Crown. The speech of the Lord Advo- 
 cate on the evidence is a mere string of in- 
 coherent innuendos, of which the most precise is 
 the assertion that universal suffrage would lead 
 to a repetition of the French Revolution ; and 
 the comments of the judges, one and all, con-
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 17 
 
 sisted in the most grossly malignant aggrava- 
 tions of the charge, after the jury had given 
 their verdict of Guilty. The speech of Lord 
 Dunsinnan is typical of all, and thus it ran : 
 
 ' My lords, this pannel has been found guilty, 
 by a verdict of his country, of a crime of a very 
 different nature, and of a more dangerous 
 tendency than those common crimes which 
 occur, and which are the daily subjects of trials 
 in this court. My lords, it is the crime of sedi- 
 tion. It has been proved that these persons 
 met for the purpose of subverting and altering 
 the constitution of this country, under the 
 pretence indeed of reform, but I say, really to 
 subvert the constitution of the country ; and, 
 my lords, from some other circumstances which 
 came out yesterday, in the evening, and upon 
 which the jury found him guilty ' [evidence 
 that Skirving's society had proposed to appoint 
 an emergency committee, to act in private, 
 and that there had been some talk of a possible 
 French invasion], ' I confess I shudder to think 
 of the horror that in certain events might have 
 arisen from the train which this man and his 
 accomplices had laid in different parts of this 
 country. Thank God they are disappointed ! 
 Thank God we are still in possession of the 
 laws to protect the constitution, and to establish 
 the security of the subjects of it !' 
 
 2
 
 1 8 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 The pretence of intended treason was ob- 
 viously a stratagem, since, if that could be 
 proved, the talk of subverting the constitution 
 was beside the case. The real gravamen was 
 simply the democratic attitude, and for that 
 Skirving was sentenced to fourteen years' 
 transportation. To this complexion had law 
 and justice been brought under the British 
 Constitution a hundred years ago, by the play 
 of that sentiment of national union for which 
 Coleridge later thanked God. 
 
 VI 
 
 It may be pleaded that these old judicial 
 ferocities, infamous as they are, belonged to a 
 period of intense strain and exasperation, in 
 which the ruling class were in constant fear of 
 such developments as they had seen in France ; 
 and that while their patriotism made them thus 
 savage towards those whom they regarded as 
 dangerous agitators, it did not stand for any 
 lack of due sympathy with their fellow-citizens. 
 Many people are thus ready to make excuses 
 for cold British savagery on the part of the 
 vowed guardians of pure justice, when they 
 can see naught but ground for perpetual vitu- 
 peration in the savageries to which the French 
 Revolution was driven by the very menaces
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 19 
 
 and conspiracies of its enemies. But let the 
 excuses pass, and let us come to a crucial test. 
 After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, all 
 reasonable fear of the revolutionary spirit as 
 such was at an end, in England above all 
 countries. Yet when, on the stoppage of the 
 war expenditure and of the special demand for 
 English products set up by the long disturb- 
 ance of all industry on the Continent, a great 
 distress fell upon industrial and agricultural 
 England, it only needed the appearance of the 
 suffering mass in the guise of famishing mal- 
 contents to arouse in the middle and upper 
 class even such a hatred for their own poor as 
 they had felt for the revolutionists of France. 
 Sympathy was their weakest sentiment, and 
 those who felt it were as nothing in weight and 
 numbers to the malignant well-to-do majority. 
 Twenty years of nominal national union in 
 enmity to another nation had left the wealthy 
 not more but less capable of beneficent fellow- 
 feeling for their own ' kind ' who had fought 
 the fight with them. The English aristocrat 
 had no more learned to care for his luckless 
 countrymen than had Coriolanus in republican 
 Rome. The old psychological process had had 
 the old result. A generation of indulgence for 
 the principle of enmity, with the usual growth 
 of militant fraternity ad hoc, had left society 
 
 2 2
 
 2O Patriotism and Empire 
 
 much less fraternal as regarded the works of 
 peace and mercy and building-up than it had 
 been a generation before. 
 
 The ' Peterloo ' massacre at Manchester, in 
 1819, served to exhibit the measure of fraternity 
 existing in the nation that had defeated Napo- 
 leon. When a vast meeting of unarmed and 
 orderly people had been brutally charged by 
 cavalry, who sabred not only men, but women 
 and children, Government and the Prince 
 Regent applauded the act ; and Lord Redesdale 
 affirmed in a public letter that ' every meeting 
 for radical reform was not merely a seditious 
 attempt to undermine the existing constitution 
 of government by bringing it into hatred and 
 contempt, but was an overt act of treasonable 
 conspiracy against that constitution of govern- 
 ment, including the King as its head.' If any- 
 one holds that our upper classes have outgrown 
 that temper, let him but recall the episode of 
 'Black Sunday' in 1887, when heads were 
 broken and life taken as wantonly, if not as 
 wildly, as in 1819 ; and when gangs of middle- 
 class men formed themselves into sets of special 
 constables, lusting for more head-breaking, as 
 zealously as any group of aristocrats ever swore 
 the oath against the demos in ancient Athens. 
 It was all sequent : in every case alike, hate 
 does but breed hate ; and an education in hating
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 21 
 
 a national enemy proves to be but a training 
 for callous or furious hostility at home. 
 
 Perhaps the most dramatic expression of the 
 process within the century is that supplied by 
 the Highland clearances which took place in 
 the years 1 8 1 5-20. The Highlands had supplied 
 in singular abundance, relatively to their popu- 
 lation, excellent troops for foreign service 
 throughout the war. When the war was over, 
 the disbanded soldiers could less than ever pay 
 high rents for their poor crofts on hill and glen 
 to their old landlords ; and these patriots of the 
 civilized sort had learned to regard high rents 
 as the chief end of landlordism. So, without a 
 word of sympathy from the aristocracy, whose 
 battle the helot clansmen had fought, without a 
 protective motion on the part of the Legislature, 
 the lingering tribes were rooted out of their 
 fatherland and shipped like cattle to Canada, or 
 wheresoever else they could be cast, to shift for 
 themselves. They had had their reward for 
 patriotism, their part in the drama of pseudo- 
 fraternity played once again by the primordial 
 spirit of hate. It is only too true that their 
 children remain ' loyal ' and ' patriotic,' in the 
 old sense, in their new homes. Such and so 
 irrational are ' loyalty ' and ' patriotism '; let 
 the amateur of both make the most of it.
 
 22 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 VII 
 
 It may help us further to a just notion of the 
 matter if we turn for a moment from our own 
 affairs to those of a country in which normal 
 patriotism has latterly played a great part, under 
 the guidance of a powerful statesman who has 
 lately passed away. Before the advent of 
 Bismarck the North-German States were, from 
 the imperialist point of view, pitiable because 
 ' disunited,' the assumption being that States 
 speaking the same language ought to be united, 
 not for any practical peaceful good that union 
 brings, but for the sake of the consciousness of 
 military power. Some Germans there were, 
 certainly, who rationally desired federal union 
 for the sake of the safeguard federation gives 
 against mutual strife, as well as for security 
 against invasion ; but how little that view of 
 the case counted for in the course of affairs was 
 soon clear. If union was in that sense good 
 for the North-German States, it was still better 
 as between them and Austria, which also is in 
 such large part German-speaking. But the 
 Bismarckian ideal of union leant no more 
 towards peace and goodwill than towards 
 democracy and constitutionalism. The new 
 union-maker knew all too well that the normal
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 23 
 
 instinctive man cares for union first and last as 
 a means to the gratification of the spirit of 
 conflict; that he is a friend because he is an 
 enemy ; that he can best love in order to hate ; 
 and that what he craves as regards foreign 
 States is not the sense of security but the 
 pride of pre-eminent power. So the new 
 apostle of brute force deliberately waged war 
 in order to build up the kind of patriotism 
 he wanted, and to swamp the party of reason 
 and criticism which hampered him. First he 
 wantonly attacked his weakest neighbour ; and 
 when he triumphed, the worse sort of his 
 countrymen became in increasing numbers 
 his partisans. That was the beginning of the 
 new German union and the new German 
 patriotism. The next step was to provoke to 
 war another and stronger neighbour, but one 
 known to be ill-prepared ; and out of the new 
 bloodshed there grew much more patriotism, 
 and more of the spirit of union the whole 
 movement being deliberately directed to the 
 aggrandisement of Bismarck's own State and 
 King. For even North-German unity in the 
 abstract he cared nothing ; he had avowed 
 that he would never consent to submerging 
 the identity of Prussia in a coalition : the only 
 permissible unity for him should be a unity of 
 which Prussia was the head, with her King
 
 24 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 glorified as Kaiser. The man's every ideal 
 was on the plane of the Middle Ages ; and he 
 succeeded because most men are still morally 
 and psychologically on the plane of the Middle 
 Ages, with but a veneer of modern science to 
 disguise them to themselves. After creating two 
 needless wars, he set himself to induce a third 
 the bloodiest and worst of all, again with a 
 neighbour whom he knew to be ill-prepared. 
 For his own part, being the one European 
 statesman who was all along deliberately schem- 
 ing evil, he was prepared for the utmost effort 
 and for every contingency. And now came 
 his crowning triumph. As one war had 
 enabled him to bring to a confederation under 
 Prussia the group of North-German States, 
 who otherwise would not have consented, so 
 the ecstasy of the pan-German triumph over 
 France carried the Allied States to the pitch of 
 hailing the Prussian King German Emperor. 
 It was never honest mutual goodwill that 
 wrought such a consummation : it was the 
 primeval lust of enmity and the flushed passion 
 of victory that brought about the symbolic 
 unification : the Germans had fraternized in 
 order to crush the French, and they sealed the 
 fraternization with crown and empire in the 
 pride of the achievement. 
 
 And this is really the supreme illustration of
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 25 
 
 the play of ' patriotism ' for the modern world. 
 Led thus brutally to wade through blood to 
 military and political union, the German nation 
 is regarded not only by its own majority, but 
 by the majority elsewhere, as having attained 
 the highest felicity in any nation's reach. That 
 a nation should make itself drunk with the 
 pride of power as a man makes himself drunk 
 with brandy this is acclaimed without mis- 
 giving as a glorious experience, fit to arouse 
 that ' envy of surrounding nations ' which in 
 previous platitude was the appanage of the 
 British Constitution. The mere proof of the 
 possession of superior power, a certificate which, 
 as regards individuals, passes among civilized 
 men as the ambition and the mark of the 
 pugilist, or, at best, of the mere duellist or the 
 mere athlete this attestation, made applicable 
 to one nation as against another, is held to 
 have in it something ethically ennobling ; and 
 the banal pride in it, dubbed ' patriotism/ passes 
 for an incontestable virtue. Here is our ethical 
 problem. 
 
 We shall have to consider later the results of 
 this embodiment of the idea and the sanction of 
 patriotism in the act of war and the institution 
 of armaments. Meanwhile, we are tracing it 
 to its psychological roots and connotations. 
 And we are already fully entitled to say that
 
 26 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 the whole processus is animalistic, and the 
 whole associations vulgar. In the supreme 
 case of Germany the vulgarity is fitly flagrant. 
 The Man of Blood and Iron, the Strong Man 
 of the Carlylean gospel, the brutal wielder of 
 brute force, was always a magnified flunkey, 
 changing his livery thrice a day, playing the 
 obedient giant to the King who signed the 
 letters and made the moves the giant dictated. 
 It is as ' true German servant of Wilhelm I.' 
 that in the end the giant ethically esteems 
 himself : not as the servant of Germany or the 
 German people ; still less of humanity ; least 
 of all as the self-realizing free spirit of German 
 philosophy. Where the giant prostrated him- 
 self, a fortiori Germany did ; and this genera- 
 tion has seen growing up in due progression 
 what a recalcitrant German spirit has described 
 as the cult of God the Father, God the Son, 
 and God the Grandson, which three in the 
 Grandson are one. It is perhaps not more 
 vulgar than the phenomena of royalism in 
 England : that, indeed, could hardly be ; but 
 it is more gross, more primitive as much more 
 aggressively offensive as German militarism is 
 more powerful than English. And patriotism 
 gilds it all. The personal tyranny of the 
 reigning Kaiser, a tyranny meaner than the 
 first Napoleon's, and much more inquisitorial
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 27 
 
 than that of the third, stands for the moral 
 whole created and symbolized by Sedan ; and 
 a great people mutely winces under a young 
 despot's whip in the name of the blood-bought 
 'unity' in which 'patriotism' still sees the 
 crowning good. Not for ever, surely perhaps 
 not for long ; since already the extremity of 
 the evil strengthens that systematic antagonism 
 which, in the name of Socialism, most pro- 
 foundly countervails mere patriotism and all its 
 works. That resistance, evoking as it does in 
 turn a bitterness of social ill-will against itself 
 not easily to be matched elsewhere, is the last 
 testimony to the futility of the patriotism of 
 enmity as a solvent of domestic division, and 
 as a builder-up of even civic fraternity. But it 
 is for the next century to reveal whether the 
 ancient insanity is not again to triumph, as it 
 did under the regimen of Bismarck, over the 
 higher aspirations of enlightened men in the 
 most laboriously thoughtful of modern nations. 
 Led by Bismarck, Germany's work has been to 
 turn back all social and political progress, and 
 to set up a systematic reign of militarism, which 
 means force as nearly mindless as is compatible 
 with successful direction, in place of what had 
 seemed a growing disregard for the lower 
 instincts, and a confused but gradually clarify- 
 ing ideal of international peace. The nation
 
 28 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 nominally the most philosophic has been made 
 to exemplify the most unphilosophic of all 
 political ideals. If the same nation should in 
 turn accomplish the most thorough undoing of 
 the reign of force and enmity, it will have 
 ground for a satisfaction as much nobler than 
 the old as the new results will be more blessed. 
 But in the meantime, with Bismarck dead, 
 Bismarckism still darkens our every vista ; and 
 States that had once seemed most alien to his 
 ideals seem grown capable of pursuing, if not of 
 realizing them. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Leaving, however, for later contemplation that 
 aspect of the matter, let us take one more view 
 of the nature of patriotism as seen operating 
 in our own politics. Those who habitually 
 make the assumption of the nobility and 
 beneficence of the instinct in its natural and 
 spontaneous form, as the assertion of the Will- 
 to-Live of a given community or race, might 
 be expected to acclaim it wherever it appears 
 in the affairs of other groups as well as 
 in their own. And the patriotism -mongers 
 of England do, as we have seen, applaud it 
 in Germany ; nay, they mostly applauded it 
 in Italy when Italians were struggling against
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 29 
 
 the Austro-Germans. Italy and Germany are 
 far off; besides, the Italians fought Austria, 
 which never had much attraction for England, 
 and the Germans fought the French, towards 
 whom many Englishmen still feel little good- 
 will having, it must be owned, no great en- 
 couragement thereto from the normal attitude 
 of the French journals. It is when we turn 
 to the case of Ireland that the ethical quality 
 of the patriotic instinct reveals itself. If 
 English patriots, so called, had in them any 
 pure sympathy for struggling patriotism as 
 such, any genuine moral inspiration for their 
 own instinct, they would recognise in Irish 
 nationalist aspirations the very virtue they 
 profess to revere. These are the very cir- 
 cumstances in which, from any point of view, 
 patriotism must in justice be reckoned sanative. 
 To the eye of the political rationalist, it is in 
 such a case a force whereby a people is com- 
 bined for its betterment, stimulated to a higher 
 level of moral self -consciousness, fired to a 
 joint effort which means no menace towards 
 any other people, but seeks sheer benefit 
 without any offset of destruction. Here, if 
 ever, should it have the endorsement of good 
 men. To the average patriot, again, the 
 desire of a people with common traditions and 
 common needs to secure as full a measure of
 
 30 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 self-rule as is posses: led by those with whom 
 they are in nominal union this should surely 
 figure as patriotism in its most attractive form, 
 unless it be that his sympathies are only to be 
 aroused by blood-letting or the effort thereto ; 
 by the plots of Poles and the insurrections of 
 Italians. But we know very well that the 
 average English patriot had no more considera- 
 tion for armed Fenianism than he has for 
 unarmed Nationalism. The utter egoism, the 
 unintelligent animalism of his instinct comes 
 out the moment another man's instinct clashes 
 with it. Patriotism for him means hatred of 
 other men's patriotism the moment they thereby 
 incommode him, albeit they only ask him to 
 give them in reality the rights he accords them 
 in name. Bitterly, nay, furiously, he vilifies 
 in them the passion he applauds in himself; 
 professing at times, perhaps, for once in a way 
 to apply to the whole question the test of 
 utility, but offering in its name only pleas 
 which are the expression of his own naive and 
 lawless egoism. 
 
 Scratch thus the patriot, and you find the 
 pirate ; test the devotee of freedom, and you 
 find the insolent oppressor. And to no one 
 who has much meditated on the normal 
 moralities of men is the upshot disconcerting. 
 What other outcome should there be from
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 31 
 
 the self-glorifying parade of a primeval instinct, 
 taken without purification by man from beast ? 
 If the braggart among men be an offence to 
 the civilized moral sense, how shall nations 
 satisfy the first principles of civilized ethics 
 when they set to themselves the pose and the 
 phrase of the braggart as a discipline and an 
 ideal ? Not from the thistles of the savage 
 prime shall be gathered the fruits of inter- 
 national civility. If men, as constituents of 
 nations, will not consent to think and reason 
 for the whole as they do for themselves and 
 each other singly, they must fatally, as nations, 
 remain at the moral level of the human animal, 
 scientific only for the work of mischief, licensing 
 itself to be brutal and irrational in mass while 
 claiming to denounce brutality and eliminate 
 unreason in the individual. And the individual 
 will all the while assuredly reflect the ideals of 
 the mass. 
 
 IX 
 
 In a recent work of realistic fiction, a study 
 of life in the criminal class in the East End 
 of London, there is presented, probably without 
 the author's knowledge, and doubtless without 
 his intention, a singularly clear vision of the 
 nature and operation of the passion of patriotism.
 
 32 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 The book in question is Mr. Arthur Morrison's 
 masterly story, A Child of the Jago, one of 
 those fictions which, exhibiting to most of us 
 a phase of life of which we have known nothing, 
 almost irresistibly convince us of their trust- 
 worthiness. Obviously, such an impression 
 ought on second thoughts to be revised ; and 
 one sees cause to suspect that Mr. Morrison's 
 picture of life in ' the Jago ' makes out that sort 
 of existence to be more symmetrical, more 
 sequent, more homogeneous in its kind, than 
 it really is, even as the novel of normal life 
 unduly simplifies that. But this criticism, 
 supposing it to be valid as against the structure 
 of Mr. Morrison's story, which is skilfully 
 composed in the contemporary impressionist 
 manner, does not, I think, affect that aspect 
 of it to which I am here calling notice. Here 
 the study is either wholly false or substantially 
 true. 
 
 ' The Jago,' it should be explained for any 
 reader of these pages who may not know the 
 book, is a certain group of old streets (now 
 demolished) in the Bethnal Green district, 
 inhabited mostly by habitual criminals. As 
 against the law-abiding and law -enforcing 
 world, this population is spontaneously united, 
 fraternal, and co-operative. The police are the 
 common enemy, to be lied to, baffled, and if
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 33 
 
 possible ' bashed,' when they cross the Jago 
 frontier. But this is what might have been 
 expected. What comes upon us as a revela- 
 tion, and yet as a luminously intelligible ex- 
 pression of natural law, is the fact that the 
 people of the Jago live in chronic feud with 
 those of a neighbouring group of streets, 
 generalized as ' Dove Lane/ whereof the in- 
 habitants differ only partially from them in 
 respect of not being all thieves, or not always 
 thieving. In this feud every 'Jago' is ready 
 at a moment's notice to fight in rank with his 
 neighbours against any body of Dove-Laners. 
 After a pitched battle has raged itself out, a 
 process sometimes taking several days, the feud 
 for a time slumbers, and may even be patched 
 up by a semi-formal treaty between the leading 
 spirits of both sides, who duly fraternize in a 
 representative public-house of either territory. 
 Peace will then last for an indefinite time, till 
 it shall be broken by a drunken brawl between 
 individuals of the two groups, or as a result of 
 a diffused feeling that it has lasted long enough, 
 and that the other side need beating. 
 
 But while the slum is thus united against the 
 ' natural enemy,' and the war-cry, ' Hold tight, 
 Jago,' will rally all the blackguards of the place 
 for the geographical conflict, ' the Jago ' has 
 a feud within itself, as furious and as frequent 
 
 3
 
 34 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 as that between Jago and Dove-Laner. Two 
 of the leading scoundrels of the Jago are Billy 
 Rann and Billy Leary, and all Jagory chroni- 
 cally divides into Rann and Leary factions, 
 which ' bash ' each other for days at a time as 
 zealously as if one of the sides were of Dove 
 Lane, the women going into the fray, and even 
 outdoing the males of their species in ferocity 
 of method. When a Rann-Leary battle has 
 raged itself out, or is curtailed by an act of 
 manslaughter that elicits the police, the factions 
 relapse into fraternity for awhile, and are ready 
 at due notice to make common cause against 
 the Dove-Laners. 
 
 And there is yet one more complication. 
 Now and then, when the thieving business is 
 depressed, the bulk of the manifold rascality 
 loafing about Jagodom will suddenly decide 
 on a filibustering raid through the main streets, 
 in the course of which every isolated inhabitant 
 found in the open is hustled, robbed, and if 
 need be ' bashed,' the proceeds of this ' crowded 
 hour of glorious life ' being divided as honour- 
 ably as may be, among the raiders. Jagoism 
 thus presents, in its one-horse hell, all the 
 variations undergone in normal society by the 
 animal instinct which figures now as egoism, 
 now as partisanism, now as patriotism. In the 
 Jago, as in the larger world, each is for himself,
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 35 
 
 and the devil is specially welcome to the hind- 
 most. But the Jago, like the average citizen, 
 is a social animal, prone to combination for a 
 purpose ; so he is ready for an occasional 
 syndicate of thievery, good for a whole fore- 
 noon, during which he will rob indifferently Jago 
 and Gentile. Again, he has his hereditary family 
 or feudal bias, and when a Rann-Leary row is 
 ' on ' he takes his part with all the alacrity of 
 a knight distinguishing between Guelph and 
 Ghibeline, or White Rose and Red. Finally, 
 though at a pinch he may ' bash ' his neighbour 
 or rob his neighbour's wife or child, he is a true, 
 loyal, patriotic Jago as against all Dove-Laners. 
 The question arises, In what respect is the 
 patriotism of the Jago less rational or less 
 respectable than the patriotism of the Jingo ? 
 And the answer must be that the only differ- 
 ence is one of social status and prestige. 
 Psychologically the two forms of feeling are 
 identical. Passing for moral inspirations of 
 the most unquestionable kind, they are equally 
 animal with the sympathies and animosities of 
 cats and dogs, and they are alike belied by the 
 daily life of those who exhibit them. When 
 bitter enemies join hands on the strength of a 
 common hatred for an enemy outside, they are 
 more or less confident that they are doing a 
 fine thing. They might as well glorify them- 
 
 32
 
 36 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 selves over the animosities which divide them 
 when the ' natural ' enemy is out of sight ; and, 
 indeed, they do so, though they reserve the 
 approving title of patriotism for the animosity 
 that is cherished in common. Once more, it is 
 not brotherhood, or sympathy, or goodwill that 
 unites the general population in a flush of 
 passion against another population : the 
 ostensible brotherhood of the moment is 
 merely a passing product of the union of 
 egoisms. The men who prate most of 
 patriotism and 'the Empire,' and who dwell 
 most habitually on our ' natural ' hostility to 
 Russia, or to Germany, or to France, are as 
 a rule conspicuous for their indifference to the 
 well-being of the mass of their fellow-country- 
 men, and for the virulence of their ill-feeling 
 towards those of another way of thinking in 
 politics. Animosity of one sort or the other is 
 the spring of all their politics. In a general 
 way, indeed, they desire good trade for the 
 country at large, and they rejoice when ' our ' 
 trade is in better case than that of other 
 countries ; but they would not move a ringer 
 so to alter the social structure that the working 
 mass should gain in wealth and comfort ; rather 
 they resent the workers' claim as they resent 
 foreign competition in land-grabbing. At most 
 they may help in times of special distress as do
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 37 
 
 the Jagos, who get up a ' break ' to finance a 
 brother thief newly out of gaol, and not yet 
 earning an income. But as regards anything 
 like all-round sympathy, they are positively 
 inferior to the Jagos, who are pretty much of 
 one class, and whose domestic feuds are in- 
 termittent, not steadfastly active jealousies. 
 
 It would seem, then, that the ' good ' society 
 has little cause to plume itself on its superiority 
 to the ' bad,' as regards the moral springs of its 
 international action. The inspiration of the 
 patriotic Jingo, however different in literary 
 colour, is just the inspiration of the blackguard 
 Jago as far away from reason, from self- 
 criticism, from the spirit of righteousness. 
 The maxim, ' our country, right or wrong,' is 
 but the wording of a sentiment which the Jago 
 acts upon without thinking that any formula is 
 necessary. And it would seem to be a safe 
 inference that while our polity turns largely on 
 ideals or principles which we hold in common 
 with burglars and bullies, our society will 
 continue to exhibit plain phases of the pre- 
 datory and brutish stages of civilization. 
 
 X 
 
 It maybe well, before leaving this side of the 
 matter, to take account of the possible protest
 
 38 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 that civilized patriotism has in it elements of 
 purely benevolent feeling, and that if not 
 strictly altruistic some may perhaps insist 
 that it is properly altruistic it is so far a 
 mental state of goodwill and aspiration, of 
 pleasure in good, and of natural admiration 
 and social sympathy, that it cannot reasonably 
 be likened even remotely to the instincts of 
 thieves and ruffians. Let it be observed on 
 this that the word ' patriotism ' means nothing if 
 not a specialization of our sympathies, a caring 
 much more for our own people than for any 
 other. It does not stand for the mere necessary 
 restriction of most of the display of our good- 
 will to those who are nearest us. We call 
 philanthropist the man who, while practically 
 most concerned with his own people, yet gives 
 out a doctrine or a precept framed in the 
 interest of all mankind ; the name of patriot 
 is normally and naturally given to the man 
 who either fights his own country's battle or 
 specially strives to put his country at an 
 advantage as against others. To say of the 
 philanthropist, as we may well do, that he is 
 the true patriot, is really to urge a moral 
 criticism on the lines of the present argument ; 
 it is not an agreement to make the word 
 ' patriotism ' mean something else than it 
 normally has done. As long as the thing, the
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 39 
 
 proclivity, subsists throughout the world, it 
 must have a name, and we are here employ- 
 ing that name at its ordinary value. 
 
 If, then, it be claimed for patriotism that it 
 involves certain quite laudable frames of mind, 
 the answer is that, to be patriotic at all, a mood 
 of benevolence must be distinctly restrictive 
 and exclusive that is, must connote a conscious 
 withholding of some goodwill from other com- 
 munities. But I can conceive its being argued 
 that a decent and cultured patriotism is rather 
 a giving out of special goodwill on the stimulus 
 of fellow-citizenship than a lessening of what 
 would otherwise be given to the foreigner ; that 
 it is not a subtraction from, but an addition to, 
 the total amount of human sympathy of which 
 the average man is capable. 
 
 Let this claim, then, be tested over a really 
 good example of cultured patriotism, which has 
 already come under general notice at the hands 
 of a champion of culture. It was in his latter 
 years that Mr. Matthew Arnold, discussing the 
 career and work of Tolstoy, thus delivered 
 himself on the subject of the sensitiveness and 
 self-consciousness of Americans : 
 
 ' But the Americans, as we know, are apt to set them at 
 rest in the manner of my friend Colonel Higginson of 
 Boston. " As I take it, Nature said some years since : 
 'Thus far the English is my best race, but we have had
 
 40 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 Englishmen enough ; we need something with a little more 
 buoyancy than the Englishman ; let us lighten the structure, 
 even at some peril in the process. Put in one drop more 
 of nervous fluid, and make the American.' With that drop 
 a new range of promise opened on the human race, and a 
 lighter, finer, more highly organized type of mankind was 
 born." People who by this sort of thing give rest to their 
 sensitive and busy self-consciousness may very well, per- 
 haps, be on their way to great material prosperity, to great 
 political power ; but they are scarcely on the right way to a 
 great literature, a serious art' 
 
 - This not unskilful attack might be met by, 
 let me also say, my friend Colonel Higginson 
 with a sufficiently effective tu quoque, in respect 
 of certain of Mr. Arnold's own indulgences in 
 patriotic elation. For it was Mr. Arnold who, 
 after many sound counsels to his countrymen 
 to take note of their shortcomings as beside 
 other Europeans, thus glorified the Church of 
 England in an essay on that institution : 
 
 ' Show me any other great Church of which a chief actor 
 and luminary has a sentence like this sentence, splendide 
 verax^ of Butler's : " Things are what they are, and the con- 
 sequences of them will be what they will be; why, then, 
 should we wish to be deceived ?" . . . Intensely Butlerian 
 as this sentence is, yet Butler came to it because he is 
 English, because at the bottom of his nature lay such a 
 fund of integrity.' 
 
 There is, of course, nothing out of the way 
 in this exhibition. Just as French writers, 
 Hugo among them, tell us complacently that it
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 41 
 
 is the special characteristic of Paris to be 
 ' steeped in good sense,' so do our English 
 writers chronically illustrate our good sense by 
 proclaiming it. Macaulay reminds us of ' that 
 masculine and full-grown robustness of mind, 
 that equally diffused intellectual health which, 
 if our national partiality does not mislead us, 
 has peculiarly characterized the great men of 
 England ;' and Mr. Leslie Stephen courageously 
 assures us that Swift and Dr. Johnson ' are alike 
 in that shrewd, humorous common-sense which 
 seems to be the special endowment of the 
 English race ' a precious proposition, fitly 
 proved. Arnold is but falling into line with 
 the immemorial national procession, wearing 
 the customary beatific smile with the customary 
 ineptitude. And if this sort of thing be per- 
 missible to an English critic without demur 
 from common-sense, Colonel Higginson must 
 be well within his rights in claiming for 
 Americans such a trifle as an extra drop of 
 vivacity. But when he reflects how much 
 more apt is such a claim on his side to be over- 
 crowed on the other by countervailing claims 
 than to be conceded in a spirit of teachable 
 modesty, he will perhaps grant me that even if 
 it were as true for the States in general as it 
 probably is for cultured Boston, it was after all 
 not quite worth pressing. No doubt he has
 
 42 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 the justification, urged by him in his searching 
 and intimately suggestive volume of papers on 
 The New World and the New Book, that 
 some Americans may still be the better of a 
 little encouragement to their self-respect under 
 the pressure of English assumptions an excuse 
 which was entirely lacking to Mr. Arnold, 
 on his own reiterated testimony. Colonel 
 Higginson's claim, too, is bottomed on a 
 great deal of Mr. Arnold's own criticism of 
 Anglo-Saxon density, as set forth, in particular, 
 in the essay On the Study of Celtic Litera- 
 ture. 
 
 But is not all this just a clinching proof of 
 the perverting influence of the patriotic senti- 
 ment ? That sentiment it was which, reviving 
 in the elderly English critic, made him at one 
 moment false to his own principles and his 
 earlier enlightened practice, to the point of an 
 absolutely absurd display of national vanity, 
 and at another moment made him un- 
 reflectively resent a much more reasonable 
 flight of nationalist self-satisfaction on the part 
 of a friendly American. 
 
 No good is done to anybody in England 
 or anywhere else, and certainly no healthy 
 discipline is given to the boaster's own in- 
 telligence, by such a boast as that about the 
 peculiarly Anglican character of the disposition
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 43 
 
 to avoid self-deception. But if that be granted 
 of Arnold's claim for Englishmen, it would 
 seem to follow that Colonel Higginson's claim 
 for Americans, however just, is not the most 
 educative of his judgments. If in itself it 
 could serve to hearten diffident Americans, the 
 service would be only the more likely to be 
 undone by Arnold's counter-sarcasm, which in 
 the terms of the case would be doubly dis- 
 heartening to such temperaments. Americans 
 in general, however, really do not need to be 
 encouraged to think well of themselves any 
 more than do Englishmen ; rather they have, 
 in the mass, like their kinsmen, self-satisfaction 
 to spare. To flatter them, then, is surely no 
 part of a wise American's business, not to say 
 of his duty. The more one meditates the 
 matter, the more one is moved to prescribe for 
 one's nation, as for one's self, the exercise of 
 self-criticism in preference to the exercise of 
 self-praise. If Shakespeare could see fit to 
 brood on his own deficiencies, 
 
 ' Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,' 
 
 the nations which read and acclaim him may 
 well take the same medicine for their collective 
 flatulences. For nervous depression there is 
 always handy the safe tonic of simple criticism 
 of the faults of other nations.
 
 44 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 There was a time, no doubt, when educated 
 Americans, as distinguished from ordinary 
 patriots, needed encouragement from their 
 men of culture to stand upon their intellectual 
 birthright. Poe, Emerson, and Whitman, from 
 their different standpoints saw the need and 
 ministered to it Poe pointing to the intellec- 
 tual weakness of the current English criticism, 
 before which Americans bowed ; Emerson dis- 
 tilling what was intellectually valid in the 
 patriotic sense of the Republic's importance ; 
 Whitman poetically transmuting patriotism into 
 something nobler and rarer. But observe, first, 
 the virtue, in all three of these writers, of the 
 saving grace of their intellectual motive, and 
 next the peril, in different cases, of the normal 
 patriotic motive working in the same direction. 
 Poe, though a little touched with local or 
 Southern prejudice, was incapable of mere 
 sentimental patriotism, and did but urge in- 
 dependence on his countrymen in regard to 
 English criticism, as he would have urged 
 it on any school of them as against the 
 Transcendentalists. Emerson was much less 
 of an emotionalist, much less of a vessel of 
 instinct, in his politics than in his philosophy ; 
 in reality he philosophized politics for his 
 fellow-republicans. Whitman, in some aspects 
 somewhat of an ' American Americanizing/
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 45 
 
 really struck a note which, intellectually, far 
 outsoars that of mere patriotism, and has 
 thus had scant welcome from American 
 patriots. 
 
 Very different in temperamental basis from 
 all of these utterances was Mr. Lowell's essay 
 On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, 
 where the chief inspiration was obviously the 
 predisposition to condescend in turn. Here 
 we have patriotic self- love retaliating on 
 foreign self-esteem, instinct clashing with in- 
 stinct, with the result of yielding much heat 
 and little light, though Lowell was much more 
 of a wit and of a humorist than any of the 
 others. Dialectically the essay is a marvel of 
 incoherence. Again and again it shows a full 
 cognizance of the fact that the foreign imper- 
 tinences complained of had always been well 
 matched by American impertinences ; that 
 democratic arrogance had always held its own 
 against aristocratic, boast for boast and insult 
 for insult ; yet the middle-aged man of letters 
 must needs fume, nay, foam, on behalf of the 
 geographical ' we,' even in the act of avowing 
 his incommunity with myriads of his neighbours. 
 In this allocution he treats with downright 
 anger propositions in regard to American life, 
 such as he has himself made in another essay ; 
 and much of his argument is a rebuttal of his
 
 46 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 own previous utterance.* The outcome is a 
 see-saw of splenetic admission and more 
 splenetic aspersion, logically amounting only 
 to the proposition ' You're another,' and fur- 
 nishing to the reflective reader no moral profit 
 whatsoever, save, it may be, that of having seen 
 how such matters ought not to be handled. 
 Even the quality of the writing, excellent as 
 Lowell's always is excellent in spite of an occa- 
 sional flaw ; excellent even in the too frequent 
 claptrap does not make amends for the bad 
 thinking. The soreness to which it so con- 
 fusedly testifies is the measure of the vanity of 
 the primary passion of patriotism at best, and of 
 its fatal potency, when sentimentally cherished, 
 to evict humour from the head no less than 
 good-humour from the heart. His resentment 
 of jocular foreign condescension never taught 
 Lowell to bate his jocular condescension to- 
 wards foreigners never, at least, in his 
 writings, where Celt and Teuton, French and 
 German, Scotch and English, are in turn joked 
 about with a robust complacency. Yet, how 
 grievously are his withers wrung by the chance 
 poke of the English pilgrim's staff! 
 
 * Compare the opening pages of the essay, A Great 
 Public Character with that above discussed, which im- 
 mediately precedes it in My Study Windows. But the 
 Condescension essay itself betrays the spirit divided against 
 itself.
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 47 
 
 There is yet another way of ' encouraging ' 
 the diffident American spirit, a way which has 
 one obvious advantage over Mr. Lowell's, but 
 which in turn is open to damaging criticism I 
 mean the attitude taken by Washington Irving 
 in a letter to Motley, as late as 1857. There 
 must have been already a good deal of pluck- 
 ing-up of heart in the States before the cosmo- 
 politan Irving could be moved to write thus : 
 
 ' You are properly sensible of the high calling of the 
 American press, that rising tribunal before which the 
 history of all nations is to be revised and rewritten, and the 
 judgment of past ages to be corrected or confirmed.' 
 
 The first and perhaps the worst trouble about 
 deliverances of this kind is that they are 
 extremely apt to elicit European ridicule of the 
 kind that Dickens poured out on American 
 self-praise in Martin Chuzzlewit, a book 
 which to this day counts for harm in English 
 popular culture. I will not, however, dwell on 
 that kind of rejoinder, much less echo it ; rather 
 let us seek for a judicial verdict from our 
 common-sense. Irving, one presumes, did not 
 by ' press ' mean merely ' newspaper press ': he 
 must have meant serious literature in general ; 
 so I will not raise the question whether 
 American journalism any more than European 
 has realized what used to be expected of it. If, 
 however, the proposition be taken in its most
 
 48 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 plausible sense, will it bear criticism ? Irving's 
 idea was that the democratic spirit could and 
 would fitly sit in judgment on feudal and 
 monarchic history, institutions, ethics, ideals. 
 So be it ; but what is to give the American 
 press a monopoly of that spirit, that tribunal ? 
 Mere political democracy, as thus far evolved in 
 the States, is a very imperfect rectification of 
 social inequality ; and a far profounder criticism 
 of the evils of the European past and present 
 has been latterly produced in Europe itself than 
 that hitherto current in the States. Marx and 
 Morris, surely, cut deeper than either Irving or 
 Motley dreamt of going; and their criticism 
 has thus far found much more acceptance in 
 old-world Germany and England than in the 
 States. The late Mr. Bellamy brilliantly took 
 up their parable ; but he seems to have had 
 more sympathizers, proportionally, in England 
 than in his own country. 
 
 All this, be it understood, is no impeachment 
 of the civilization of the United States. The 
 relative tardiness of Socialistic thought there is 
 simply the expression of the greater elasticity 
 there of the economic conditions for indi- 
 vidualism than in Europe. But it all goes to 
 suggest that the civilization of the future is 
 hardly likely to be a triumphal march of the 
 unchanged Republic, under President, Senate,
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 49 
 
 and Congress, far in advance of a forever 
 unchanged Europe, mostly monarchic and 
 aristocratic to the end. My honoured friend 
 Dr. Moncure Conway, nearly a generation ago, 
 urged upon his fellow-countrymen of the States 
 that their constitution exemplified certain 
 ' Republican Superstitions.' As a convinced 
 republican, I venture to say with him that in 
 the mere matter of constitution-making there is 
 much to be done before the States can satisfy 
 the tests of scientific democracy. How far are 
 we, then, from a state of things in which the 
 mere quality of being American can give any 
 criticism a precedence or prerogative in the 
 intellectual world ? When Irving wrote, the 
 impeachment of slavery in Dickens's American 
 Notes stood facile to the hand of any man who 
 cared to make the retort ; to-day, one fears, the 
 Socialists of Europe, under whatever rule they 
 live, will be hardly less ready than was Dickens 
 to repugn the notion of an American Supreme 
 Court in the world of ideas. Many of them, 
 indeed, would repugn it unintelligently, under- 
 valuing the factor they dismissed. The judg- 
 ment passed on American life by Huysmans, 
 that fine flower of old-world decadence, has 
 really less rational weight than the claim of 
 Irving. But there is only the more need that 
 we should all alike get over the nationalistic 
 
 4
 
 50 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 attitude, and drop all judgments which attribute 
 special powers and special impotences to given 
 communities as such. 
 
 Why cannot instructed men everywhere agree 
 to substitute for all other claims to jurisdic- 
 tion the claim of universal Reason ? Colonel 
 Higginson argues, justly enough, that for some 
 Americans ' cosmopolitanism ' comes to signify 
 just Europeanism ; that they do not stand for a 
 true cosmopolitanism even when asking for it. 
 Be it so ; is not the solution still a substitution 
 of a universal test for an avowed particularism ? 
 Is there any rest for the spirit of wisdom in a 
 nationalist self-exaltation ? Why should any of 
 us go on separately taking the old perverse 
 pleasure in the notion that the mass of mankind 
 will for ever be inferior in wit, wisdom, and 
 well-being to our own particular nation ? Is 
 there really any sane comfort for an instructed 
 American in believing that Europe will always 
 be feudal, undemocratic, ethically backward, as 
 compared with his own people? If his educa- 
 tion be worthy of the name, he has learned 
 much from living Europeans, and he is aware 
 that many living Europeans are as well fitted 
 to sit in judgment on American history as he 
 can be to sit in judgment on theirs. He cannot 
 well suppose that they are going meekly to 
 bow, for themselves and for Europe, under the
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 51 
 
 verdict of the amiable Irving. He will wish, 
 indeed, to see developed in America as large a 
 body of experts, of capable thinkers, as exists 
 in Europe, as the intelligent men of every 
 nation wish to see their own people make up 
 leeway in the matters in which they are back- 
 ward. But that very sense of intellectual parity 
 with other communities which is, or would be, 
 so comforting and sustaining to him, is it not 
 equally so to the others ? Why, then, should 
 he wish to see them deprived of it in the future? 
 The only intelligible reason why is just the old 
 passion of patriotism, a passion in itself the 
 potential solvent and negation of culture, in 
 the sense that it turns to naught the best fruits 
 thereof. In reality, the one kind of progress 
 which in these days would represent a moral 
 superiority on the part of any one civilized 
 nation over any other would be precisely the 
 subordination or subdual of the spirit of 
 patriotism by political reason. And that step 
 does not at the moment appear, in the terms of 
 the case, to be nearer accomplishment in the 
 New World than in the Old. Rather, the New 
 World has to pass, however much more rapidly, 
 through stages of error in which the Old has 
 long dwelt The problem, then, cannot be too 
 searchingly discussed, in either hemisphere, by 
 the lovers of light and of civilization. 
 
 42
 
 52 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 XI 
 
 As it happens, the people of the United States 
 are in a fair way to follow those of the United 
 Kingdom into a snare that is laid for all 
 peoples who can greatly enlarge their bounds 
 or their numbers. They are like to suffer, as 
 so many Englishmen have suffered, from the 
 giddiness that goes with sheer political ex- 
 tension. In England the malady, which a 
 generation ago had seemed in a way to be 
 cured, grows more offensively prevalent every 
 day, till the reaction seems overdue. And as 
 this trouble is manifestly a malignant form of 
 the old affection of patriotism, it calls for some 
 special notice in these pages. To put the case 
 shortly, if nationalism is bad, imperialism is 
 worse. If to intoxicate one's self on fatherland 
 be unwholesome, to grow drunken on empire is 
 pestilent. 
 
 On the English side, the contagion is as- 
 siduously quickened by certain men of letters, 
 who combine a special gift of speech with the 
 ideals and the information of an average boy. 
 Singly and collectively, they stand for the type 
 of the Barbarian Sentimentalist. We may 
 take as the most distinguished members of the 
 school Mr. Kipling and Mr. Henley, the first
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 53 
 
 a briliant story-teller, who passes for a poet 
 with the unpoetical ; the second an admirable 
 artist in verse, who passes for a prophet with 
 the unprophetical, and for a politician with the 
 incapable of politics. It would be hard to find 
 two men of literary genius with less of rational 
 insight into the life-conditions of the political 
 organism to which they belong. To their 
 eyes, the stupendous problem of industrial 
 continuance, which is the problem of life for 
 millions of overdriven men, resolves itself into 
 a kind of military pageant, with occasional 
 fighting to lend it dignity ; and for them, 
 accordingly, all political philosophy begins and 
 ends in the literary picturesque. This is how 
 Mr. Henley prefaces a work on Imperialism by 
 one of his school : 
 
 'We have renewed our old pride in the Flag, our old 
 delight in the thought of a good thing done by a good man 
 of his hands, our old faith in the ambitions and traditions 
 of the race. I doubt, for instance, if outside politics (and, 
 perhaps, the Stock Exchange), there be a single Englishman 
 who does not rejoice in the triumph of Mr. Rhodes ; even 
 as I believe that there is none, inside or out of politics, 
 who does not feel the prouder for his kinship with Sir 
 Herbert Kitchener. And the reason is on the surface. To 
 the national conscience, drugged so long and so long 
 bewildered and bemused, such men as Rhodes and 
 Kitchener are heroic Englishmen. The one has added 
 some hundreds of thousands of square miles to the Empire, 
 and is neck-deep in the work of consolidating that he has
 
 54 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 got, and of taking more. The other is wiping out the great 
 dishonour that overtook us at Khartoum, at the same time 
 that he is " reaching down from the north " to Buluwayo, 
 and preparing the way of them that will change a place of 
 skulls into a province of peace. Both are great, and that is 
 much. But both are, after all, but types ; and that is more. 
 We know now, Mr. Kipling aiding, that all the world over 
 are thousands of the like temper, the like capacity for 
 government, the like impatience of anarchy ; and that all 
 the world over, these each one according to his vision 
 and his strength are doing Imperial work at Imperial 
 wages : the chance of a nameless death, the possibility of 
 distinction, the certainty that the effect is worth achieving, 
 and will surely be achieved.' 
 
 Observe that the peace-making imperial life 
 here preached and panegyrized depends for its 
 very existence on the continued supply of fight- 
 ing barbarism. Without barbarian territory to 
 steal and militant barbarians to shoot, the fabric 
 of tinfoil glory passes away as a peepshow. 
 Blessed are the powder-and-shot peacemakers, 
 for they shall always go on inheriting more 
 earth, is Mr. Henley's gospel. Our senti- 
 mentalist, himself a barbarian, proclaims a 
 Jehad against barbarism ; but without bar- 
 barism to fight he is at a dead stand. The 
 glorious task of the Imperialist, as here set 
 forth, consists in subduing the Soudan, and so 
 on ; but when there are no more Soudans to 
 subdue, in the terms of the case, ' Imperial 
 work ' is at an end, and there is nothing left for
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 55 
 
 the ' national conscience ' but to become once 
 more ' drugged, and bewildered, and bemused.' 
 By a series of Soudans only can we be annually 
 saved. So absolutely childish a gospel is 
 hardly a subject for serious argument, but it 
 is among the possibilities of our chaotic system 
 that such mindless rhodomontade may, in a 
 bad hour, turn the balance of political move- 
 ment from sanity to delirium. 
 
 The outstanding result of the conflict of the 
 hand-to-mouth Opportunisms into which both 
 Liberalism and Toryism have resolved them- 
 selves in England since Gladstone and Disraeli 
 took them in tutelage, is that none of our states- 
 men have any ostensible political philosophy at 
 all, save in so far as a few on the Liberal side 
 at times recall the lore of their early teachers. 
 Men who were at least trained in the Liberal 
 school are seen formulating theories of inter- 
 national action which might have been hatched 
 by Disraeli in one of his earlier romances. In 
 this state of things it needs only a sufficiently 
 evil conjuncture of circumstances to enable a 
 Moses of the Music-Hall, with perhaps a few 
 Aarons of the Areopagus, to start a Jingo 
 crusade in which the nation may march as 
 straight to dire disaster as ever did any host of 
 1 drugged, bemused, and bewildered ' fanatics 
 in the Dark Ages. Eloquent ignorance has
 
 56 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 wrought such things in the past, and may 
 compass them again. To rule or conserve an 
 empire in these days requires first and last 
 sound economic science, and a calm grasp of 
 the manifold lesson of political history. Our 
 energumens of empire, all the while, know as 
 much of economic science as did the Mahdi, 
 and are about as fit as he to instruct a civilized 
 people. 
 
 To what economic wisdom they can attain 
 when they put their inspiration and their in- 
 formation together may be gathered from an 
 indescribable article which appeared a year or 
 two ago in a leading English journal. The 
 writer undertook to set forth the contingent 
 destinies of Great Britain and Germany in the 
 matter of their commerce. Comparing the 
 commercial rivalry of the two nations with an 
 affectation of cynical impartiality, he pro- 
 nounces : 
 
 ' A million petty disputes build up the greatest cause of 
 war the world has ever seen. If Germany were extin- 
 guished to-morrow, the day after to-morrow there is not an 
 Englishman in the world who would not be the richer. 
 Nations have fought for years over a city or a right of suc- 
 cession ; must they not fight for two hundred and fifty million 
 pounds of yearly commerce ?' 
 
 This is the economic premiss, absolute 
 absurdity affirmed with absolute confidence,
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 57 
 
 the political economy of the Dark Ages 
 enounced with the glibness of the Pall Mall 
 paragraphist. He regards trade as a process 
 of securing tribute, and holds that the extinction 
 of one trading nation enriches the others to the 
 extent of its whole turnover as who should 
 say that an individual tradesman best adds to 
 his income by murdering his richest customers. 
 
 ' Prince Bismarck has long recognised what at length the 
 people of England are beginning to understand that in 
 Europe there are two great, irreconcilable, opposing forces, 
 two great nations who would make the whole world their 
 province, and who would levy from it the tribute of com- 
 merce.' 
 
 It may be that Prince Bismarck also 
 cherished that hallucination of the mess-room. 
 He, too, as we have said, held by the political 
 philosophy of the Dark Ages ; and we know 
 with what fury his brother-in-arms, Moltke, 
 saw the industrial prosperity of France and the 
 coincident distress in Germany after the war 
 milliards had been paid and pocketed. To 
 these two paladins it doubtless looked like 
 witchcraft. The worst of the matter is that 
 minds capable of this solution of the problem 
 of international trade are probably incapable of 
 mastering any other. It is of no avail to point 
 to such a one in England that with England 
 Germany does much more trade than with any
 
 58 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 other nation ; that Germany is the third-best of 
 England's customers, apart from India and 
 Australia ; that Anglo-German trade has in- 
 creased by millions in ten years ; that the 
 English imports from Germany exceed the 
 exports by several millions, showing that 
 Germany, like France and the United States, 
 pays England 'tribute' on English investments 
 in Germany, whereas the figures show that 
 British capital is annually being deported to 
 South Africa in excess of the returns ; that 
 Germany is a bigger customer for Britain than 
 South Africa and Canada together, and not far 
 below Australia ; and, finally, that Germany is 
 far less capacitated to intercept English trade 
 than are the United States, which far exceed 
 England in stores of coal and iron, whereas 
 Germany is in these our inferior, though, on 
 the other hand, the States pay an enormous 
 annual ' tribute ' on English investments. Our 
 medieval patriot, indeed, will not, even if he 
 assimilates the facts as to the United States, 
 propose that we should undertake to destroy 
 them in order to increase our incomes. His 
 medieval economics all the while are but a gloss 
 on his militarist instinct and his patriotism, 
 which together breed in him the desire to fight 
 Germany, because Germany irritates him, and 
 he thinks England can defeat her at sea. He
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 59 
 
 can vaguely realize that American naval power 
 is indefinitely expansible ; so the American 
 interception of British commerce must perforce 
 be permitted. But he believes he or ' we ' can 
 safely insult the Germans, and he thus proceeds 
 to do so : 
 
 'What Bismarck realized, and what we too may soon 
 come to see, is that not only is there the most real conflict 
 of interests between England and Germany, but that England 
 is the only Great Power who could fight Germany without 
 tremendous risk and without doubt of the issue. Her 
 partners in the Triple Alliance would be useless against 
 England : Austria, because she could do nothing ; Italy, 
 because she dare not lay herself open to attack by France. 
 The growth of Germany's fleet has done no more than to 
 make the blow of England fall on her more heavily. The 
 ships would soon be at the bottom of the sea or in convoy 
 to English ports; Hamburg and Bremen, the Kiel Canal 
 and the Baltic ports, would lie under the guns of England, 
 waiting until the indemnity were settled. Our work over, 
 we need not even be at the pains to alter Bismarck's words 
 to Ferry, and to say to France and Russia, " Seek some 
 compensation. Take inside Germany whatever you like : 
 you can have it." ' 
 
 And the article ends with ' Germaniam esse 
 delendam.' Thus are peace on earth, goodwill 
 among men, commerce, and the science of com- 
 merce, promoted among us by the imperial and 
 patriotic press. We can hear Mr. Henley 
 rejoicing at the promulgation of such a healing 
 and luminous gospel to his hitherto drugged,
 
 60 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 bemused, and bewildered countrymen ; and we 
 can imagine Mr. Kipling turning it into his 
 psalmodic verse, with its rhythms of the drum 
 and its modulations of the trumpet. 
 
 The people of the United States, clearly, 
 cannot be worse bemused by their megalo- 
 maniacs than are their kin beyond seas ; but 
 the malady being ' most incident ' to human 
 nature, they were bound to catch it. A certain 
 sort of megalomania belonged to the early 
 stage of Western expansion, the expansive 
 citizen being apt to feel that the greatness of 
 the continent in some way reflected greatness 
 on him. ' Even during our war,' wrote Lowell 
 in one of his dispassionate hours, ' in the midst 
 of that almost unrivalled stress of soul, were 
 not our speakers and newspapers so enslaved 
 to the vulgar habit as to boast ten times of the 
 thousands of square miles it covered with armed 
 men, for once that they alluded to the motive 
 that gave it all its meaning and splendour?' 
 Perhaps that phrase of the ' unrivalled stress of 
 soul ' was itself somewhat in the expansive 
 aquiline taste ; but the corrective thought is 
 medicinal ; and never more so than to-day, 
 when not a few Americans find in the prospect 
 of extra-American empire a welcome fillip to the 
 kind of imagination that had been jaded by 
 too much rhetoric in the key that Lowell
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 61 
 
 deprecated. It has come to this, that re- 
 publicans are acclaiming the principle of 
 * empire ' in modern Boston as eagerly as they 
 ever did in ancient Athens, and that citizens 
 of the vast United States are seriously insisting 
 on their national need for ' expansion.' 
 
 It cannot be too plainly said that if, as many 
 Americans seriously argue, their economic life 
 needs such expansion if the acquisition of 
 Cuba is necessitated by the mere exhaustion of 
 the field of profitable investment in the States 
 the game of democratic politics so far is up. 
 No European State has failed more completely 
 to place its industrial life on a sound basis that 
 the States must be held to have done if tha; 
 theorem be sound. If there is a positive need 
 in American affairs for expansion of territory, 
 Cuba and the Philippines can but stave off the 
 evil day, and the industrial failure of the 
 Republic is only a question of time. And to 
 whom is that conclusion credible ? 
 
 It is doubtless only too true that a number 
 of persons in the States may count on enriching 
 themselves by the annexation of new territory ; 
 but that their pecuniary gain should count as 
 the moral and political gain of the Republic ; 
 and that the future of the commonwealth should 
 be held to turn on such chronic expansion of its 
 realm this is, if possible, worse doctrine than
 
 62 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 the gospel of Mr. Henley. Yet when pro- 
 fessed Liberals and professed haters of 
 Liberalism in England are found at one in 
 egging on the new imperialists of the Republic, 
 it is not beyond the bounds of chance that the 
 mania may gather head. For the people of 
 the States, albeit they are no more 'Anglo- 
 Saxon ' than the motley population which 
 hypnotizes itself with that shibboleth in the 
 mother-country, are subject to all the visitations 
 of unwisdom \vhich follow the rest of mankind, 
 Britons included. Only their special circum- 
 stances have spared them certain phases in the 
 past ; and now that they are suddenly placed in 
 a new relation, reason must in that connection 
 fight for its own hand there as elsewhere. 
 There is no treasure of surplus sanity in the 
 life of a republic any more than in that of a 
 monarchy. The Spanish war has been taken 
 in the States just as wars are taken in Europe 
 a matter to be specially considered anon 
 and only a minority combats the new pride of 
 conquest. Unhappily, there is old as well as 
 new counsel in its favour ; for Lowell, of all 
 men, can be cited on the militarist side. ' We 
 have at length established,' he wrote a genera- 
 tion ago, ' our claim to the noblesse of the 
 sword, the first step still of every nation that 
 would make its entry into the best society of
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 63 
 
 history.' The premier pas in that case certainly 
 cost a good deal ; and it would appear to follow 
 that it is good business to take a few more, till 
 the States have all the evidence of noblesse 
 they want, and constitute as good society as 
 Turkey itself. When the patriot author of the 
 Biglow Papers can be cited to such purpose, it 
 is not strange, though it be sad, that some of 
 his successors in American letters should now 
 be found looking to military patriotism for the 
 sufficient inspiration of a truly American 
 literature. The blood of the volunteers, it 
 seems, is to be the seed of a new literary 
 church. Says one of that persuasion, in an 
 essay of which I have seen an extract : 
 
 ' When American life has become a unit in its moral and 
 spiritual aspiration, when local pride is swallowed up in 
 national pride, the American soil will be ready to produce 
 the great art, the great book. Until then no one can speak 
 for America as Homer spoke for Greece, Shakespeare for 
 England, Dante for Italy.' 
 
 Never was the judicial warning against giving 
 reasons for a judgment more pat than here. 
 What would otherwise be mere intangible 
 
 o 
 
 declamation, open to blame but outside argu- 
 ment, is delivered into our hands as false 
 history, false aesthetics, false sociology. For 
 Homer did not 'speak for Greece,' nor Shake- 
 speare for ' England,' nor Dante for ' Italy.'
 
 64 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 The Homeric epics, fruits of a life that was 
 hardly even an embryo of the Greece of the 
 world's memory, no more speak for civilized 
 Greece than does the Chanson de Roland for 
 France, or the Nibelungenlied for Germany ; 
 and Hawthorne already has ' spoken for 
 America/ in so far as that may be, much 
 more truly than Homer could possibly do for 
 the Greece of Pericles, or Shakespeare for 
 modern England. The vanity of the theorem 
 is flagrant when we remember that long after 
 Homer Greece was divided into a multitude of 
 States ; that most of the best of later Greek 
 literature was produced by Athens alone ; and 
 that Dante stood for one Italian faction in one 
 Italian city a faction at chronic war with its 
 rival, a city at chronic war with its nearest 
 neighbour. Did the great Greek tragedians 
 speak for Sparta ? or Plato for Thrace ? or 
 Sappho for Boeotia ? Dante did not even 
 dream of a federated Italy: his allegiance was 
 to an empire seated on alien soil. The dream 
 was dreamed by Machiavelli, who might indeed 
 be said to speak for the Italy of his day ; but 
 Italy in our own age has been united for a 
 generation, and Leopardi still remains her 
 greatest modern man of letters. 
 
 Union, verily, is better than strife, and cos- 
 mopolitanism than provincialism ; but mere
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 65 
 
 communal pride is not cosmopolitanism, not if 
 it be stretched to cover a hundred millions of 
 souls ; and so stretched it has less virtue for 
 literature than has Mireio's love for Provence. 
 It was not pride in Scotland that made Burns 
 a lyrist and a rustic Aristophanes ; there have 
 been millions of Bruce-worshippers and thistle- 
 flourishers since his day, whose nationalism has 
 only put them the further from great art. Nor 
 was it in the least degree any pride in England, 
 or any unity of aspiration with his fellows, that 
 made Shakespeare what he was. His patriotic 
 period is the period of his first-fruits ; and 
 to pretend that he ' speaks for England ' 
 in Hamlet and Lear and Othello, is to 
 invert the whole lesson of literary things. 
 One had supposed that it was adjudged his 
 supreme attainment to have spoken ' not for 
 an age, but for all time,' not for a nation but 
 for humanity, as did Sappho and Omar Khay- 
 yam, in whom we trace not a vestige of a 
 national consciousness. 
 
 This theme is worth thrashing out here and 
 now, on whatsoever provocation. The doctrine 
 that national pride yields literature of which 
 nations may be proud is an error of errors, a 
 falsity of falsities. It has some touch of 
 primary colour from the case of Virgil ; but
 
 66 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 the deification of Augustus and the thrill of 
 pride over Rome's mock-mission, 
 
 ' Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos,' 
 
 did not make Virgil a greater poet than the cos- 
 mopolitan and even didactic Lucretius, nor lend 
 the vibrant note of the pre-Augustan and way- 
 ward Catullus to imperialistic Horace. Far be 
 it from me to fall back on the formula that the 
 spirit of genius bloweth whither it listeth. 
 Rather, it blows where it can ; and the very 
 point of the issue is, that neither nationalism 
 nor provincialism, neither local nor continental 
 patriotism, as such, constitutes any favouring 
 soil for genius in the lack of the true socio- 
 logical conditions ; that, on the contrary, me- 
 galomaniacal and parochial patriotism alike are 
 in themselves noxious to great art. 
 
 It is noteworthy that our theorist did not add 
 ' Goethe for Germany ' to his examples. The 
 rebound of the idea would have been too jar- 
 ring to his case. Goethe and Schiller and 
 Herder at Weimar spoke, in their degrees, 
 not for Germany but for the civilized world ; 
 and though Goethe did in the Napoleonic time 
 wince at German subjection, and did later aspire 
 to a political union of Germany, he owed his 
 literary output to no patriotic inspiration, and 
 expressly protested against the idea of a cen-
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 67 
 
 tralized German Empire. Such an empire, or 
 something tending that way, has come, and 
 where now are the Goethes, the Schillers, the 
 Heines ? Sir Robert Morier well said of Bis- 
 marck, that he had made Germany great, but 
 made small the German. It is the bald fact 
 that, in well-nigh a generation of German pride 
 in German unity, we have seen not one great 
 German book, to speak either ' for ' Germany, 
 or to Europe. The vaunted charm has failed 
 utterly. Goethe it was who said that the time 
 has gone by for national literatures, and that the 
 literature of the future must be cosmopolitan. 
 Behold the strict fulfilment of his speech ! 
 
 It is indeed an express dishonour to litera- 
 ture to define it as being at its best an utterance 
 or outcome of that one of all the animal instincts 
 which has been the least sublimated in civilized 
 life. In contrast with the passion of love, the 
 passion of hate, on all its lines, remains nudely 
 barbarian ; and the false fraternity that grafts 
 on it is ethically the very lowest form of the 
 spirit of union. Not by voicing such elemen- 
 tary emotions has literature come to be a spring 
 of moral sustenance and joy to men. In the 
 oldest of the great epopees known to us, the 
 highest moments are manifestly those in which 
 the singer transcends the blinder passions of the 
 earlier prime, and looks from a height of grave 
 
 52
 
 68 Patriotism and. Empire 
 
 compassion on the clashing destinies of men. 
 Not the rage and triumph of Achilles, but the 
 trouble and the doom of Hector, Andromache's 
 penalty and Priam's pain, make noble for all 
 time the poems we call by the name of Homer. 
 Not the well-lost war-songs of Tyrtseus, but 
 the manifold sympathy of the tragic drama and 
 the brooding of the thinkers, lift Greek litera- 
 ture on high for the later nations. To think of 
 Dante and Montaigne, Cervantes and Shake- 
 speare and Goethe, Hawthorne and Leopardi, 
 as instruments to the very passion which would 
 most meanly circumscribe their realm, and most 
 utterly turn to naught their best desires, is to 
 blaspheme their genius. The spirit of con- 
 siderate speech was not evolved to be ' pro- 
 curess to the lords of hell.' 
 
 Let a bellicose patriotism qualify for supreme 
 literary renown, and literature is already lowered 
 to the level of the military band. Nothing, 
 indeed, is more intelligible in current culture- 
 evolution among us than the concurrence of 
 patriotism and imperialism in the ethic, with 
 gory sensationalism in the subject-matter, of 
 the prevailing type of fiction. Not subtlety, 
 but stimulation ; not character, but adventure ; 
 not psychology, but the shedding of blood ; 
 not thought, but bustle and excitement, are 
 the requirements to-day met by two English
 
 Patriotism and Militarism 69 
 
 fictionists out of three. The prime favourite is 
 Mr. Kipling, the best of whose later work is fatally 
 withheld from greatness by the now inveterate 
 intrusion of swagger a spirit destructive of all 
 artistic sincerity and devotion in his every 
 mental process, artistic or other ; and in such 
 well-knit rhetoric as his Recessional, a patriotic 
 public takes its devout delight as whole-heartedly 
 as it appreciated the nod and wink of the 
 Departmental Ditties and the jovial chorussing 
 of the Barrack-Room Ballads. The theology 
 is strictly worthy of the sociology. In the 
 Recessional, the patriot intones the lesson 
 that, since pride goeth before a fall, we do 
 well to assure Omnipotence that we are not 
 proud. It wants little that we offer up sacri- 
 fices of propitiation. For less ceremonial pur- 
 poses, we figure for ourselves in the rest of 
 the new gospel as the Dominant Race, beside 
 whom Baboos, Home Rulers, and Russians, 
 are as creeping things. And it is all very 
 good. The literary palate of patriotism suits 
 with its philosophy and ethic. Even in the 
 rank rodomontade of the Song of the Sword, 
 Mr. Henley is too much of an artist for the 
 maws he fain would glut ; but he and the rest 
 of the patriotic elect find their fit sociologist in 
 the painter of The Gadsbys ; as Dickens is still
 
 yo Patriotism and Empire 
 
 their ideal of a true novelist. Which things 
 are an allegory. 
 
 But such thoughts are by the way. It is 
 enough here to insist that, when the artist 
 would preach and the lyrist lead, they are 
 presuming on their place, and can no more 
 yield us great counsel than great art. Not 
 by the children of instinct and impulse shall 
 the knot of a great destiny be untied for man- 
 kind ; not from schoolboy fervours and vulgar 
 heats shall come the inspiration of a literature 
 worthy of a fully charted world. Let the lyrist, 
 if he will, sing his heats and hates, as he does 
 his loves and sorrows ; but let him not think for 
 that to rank, and let not those think to stand 
 as thinkers who rank him, with either the 
 trusted leaders or the pedestalled light-givers 
 of mankind. He has chosen his function, and 
 his place is assigned by the laws of an evolution 
 above his grasp.
 
 PART II 
 The Militarist Regimen 
 
 I 
 
 FROM the same animal roots with patriotism, 
 we have seen, spring the proclivities which in 
 these days we mark by the names of militarism 
 and imperialism. Hence their prosperity. 
 The enormous waste of treasure and power 
 which now proceeds continuously in the 
 armaments of the European nations could 
 never have been undertaken, and could still 
 less be maintained, on any mere calculation of 
 necessity such as is habitually alleged in 
 defence of each country's expenditure. The 
 impulse roots in malice, passion, and pride. 
 It is no genuine apprehension of attack that 
 prompts the successive efforts of all the leading 
 States to exceed or overtake each other's 
 armaments. In so far as panics are not set 
 up as so often among ourselves by the 
 deliberate strategy of the militarist interest and
 
 72 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 the special industrial interests which depend on 
 militarism, the sufficient motive is the blind 
 instinct to attain the complacency of power by 
 equality in its display. Nations compete in 
 that display very much as do parvenus in their 
 equipages. Each nation normally professes to 
 suspect offensive purposes on the part of its 
 neighbours, while repudiating any such purpose 
 on its own part ; but when the forms of peaceful 
 intercourse tend to force a choice between an 
 avowal of universal hypocrisy and one of 
 universal folly, the average militarist, shifting 
 his ground, undertakes to make out that the 
 institution of armaments is a good thing in 
 itself. From the defence of armaments to the 
 panegyric of war is but a step, and we have 
 had an abundance of both within the past year, 
 as a result of the sudden eirenicon of the Tsar 
 of Russia. 
 
 The locus classicus of such doctrinaires is the 
 saying of Moltke, to the effect that the hope of 
 universal peace is a dream, ' and not even a 
 beautiful dream.' Moltke was indeed a precious 
 authority on beautiful dreams ; and the record 
 of his rage at the swift recuperation of France 
 while Germany was plunged in industrial de- 
 pression through her very receipt of the French 
 indemnity, is the never-to-be-forgotten measure 
 of his political wisdom. He was eager, his
 
 The Militarist Regimen 73 
 
 own countrymen tell us, to pick a quarrel by 
 way of striking a new and more ruinous blow 
 at the neighbouring State. When such minds 
 can rank as oracles and framers of ideals for 
 bodies of civilized men, how far are we raised 
 above the ethics and the sociology of savages ? 
 
 That the gospel of Moltke is a good hearing 
 to many among us may be gathered from a 
 whole handful of review articles of the past 
 twelve months. Gentlemen whose ostensible 
 qualifications for political counsel are military 
 and other titles, and who are palpably in- 
 competent to conduct any argument coherently 
 for three consecutive steps, have informed us of 
 their contempt for the understandings of those 
 who cherish hopes of any measure of propor- 
 tional disarmament. Instead, however, of re- 
 ciprocating contempt with such reasoners, let us 
 follow closely for a moment the reasoning of one 
 writer, presumably competent from the militarist 
 standpoint, who as an experienced journalist 
 represents a good deal of public opinion. 
 
 War, according to this writer, is a form of 
 evil that in time must pass away. ' A period 
 will come,' he predicts, ' when militarism will 
 appear as unnatural as slavery now appears to 
 ourselves.'* He is at the same time satisfied, 
 
 * Article, ' Should Europe Disarm ?' by Sidney Low, in 
 Nineteenth Century, October, 1898.
 
 74 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 however, that, ' at least in our time,' it is not 
 an evil but a good, and he urges a variety of 
 reasons why we should cherish it. ' No people 
 has risen to greatness without its discipline ; 
 few have been able to develop the highest 
 excellence in art, science, learning, or industry, 
 except under its impulse. The great literary 
 ages are usually those which have followed 
 upon successful war. . . . The age of Pericles 
 was not one in which men knew nothing of 
 fighting, nor was the age of Dante, nor the 
 age of Elizabeth.' The thesis is not new, and 
 it may be worth while to consider it. At the 
 outset it may be noted that if for ' fighting ' and 
 'war 'we substituted 'pestilence,' or 'cruelty,' 
 or ' baseness,' the proposition would be equally 
 plausible. As there never has been a historic 
 age in which men ' knew nothing of fighting,' 
 the special connection of such knowledge with 
 the ages of Pericles and Dante and Elizabeth 
 is a species of sophism that merely impeaches 
 its framer. Could he show that great literary 
 and artistic and scientific movements always 
 concurred with special stresses of war, he 
 would go far to prove his case ; but no such 
 thesis can be sustained. Could he show, on 
 the other hand, that movements of the kind 
 under notice always occur immediately after 
 special stresses of war, and that wars always
 
 The Militarist Regimen 75 
 
 have such a sequel, though he would leave 
 open the inference that they stood for disgust 
 of war, he would be at least supporting the 
 claim that war somehow promoted intellectual 
 life. But he does not even attempt to prove 
 this, and, as a matter of fact, such a statement 
 would be wildly untrue. The section of ancient 
 Greece which paid most zealous heed to the 
 business of war throughout its whole history 
 was Sparta, of all Hellenic States the most 
 utterly devoid of art, letters, and philosophy. 
 The reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. 
 in England followed upon a long period of 
 desperate civil war ; but they were not dis- 
 tinguished by any great literary or artistic 
 developments. The renascence began in the 
 reign of Elizabeth long before the Armada, 
 and that episode can in no intelligible way be 
 causally connected with the performance of 
 Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon. Germany 
 was soon afterwards plunged in a war that 
 lasted thirty years, and German literature and 
 science well-nigh disappeared. In later France, 
 literature and science, vigorous at the accession 
 of Louis XIV., fell away during the period of 
 his successful wars, revived after the disasters 
 of the closing years of his reign, flourished 
 greatly during generations in which the nation 
 lost much and gained little by war, were
 
 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 eclipsed during the period of Napoleon, 
 recovered after his overthrow, and since the 
 greater overthrow of Sedan have been as 
 vigorous as ever. Modern English literature 
 is presumably to be held as flourishing in 
 the hands of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, 
 Thackeray, and science in the hands of 
 Darwin. Is such florescence, then, to be 
 attributed to the wretched episode of the 
 Crimea, the one considerable English war 
 between Waterloo and our own day ? 
 Germany has produced not one great im- 
 aginative writer of European importance since 
 Heine. Behold the efficacy of the successful 
 wars of 1866 and 1870! From warless 
 Scandinavia we have Ibsen ; Russia, after 
 the Crimea, produces the great fiction of Tour- 
 guenief, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. If successful 
 militarism be the secret, why does not 
 Germany do as much ? Why did not the 
 great period of American literature follow 
 instead of preceding the Civil War ? And 
 why, again, did not Latin literature revive 
 under Trajan or Severus, or at any other 
 point in the career of chronic military success 
 between the generation of Augustus and the 
 fourth century ? 
 
 The theorem, in fine, is an absolute fallacy : 
 it misses real causes and suggests unreal. But
 
 The Militarist Regimen 77 
 
 the militarist, swinging at random between the 
 eulogy of war and its deprecation, can shift to 
 the other leg, and argue that ' the great arma- 
 ments do not tend to promote war, but the 
 contrary.' Recollecting that in that case they 
 are thwarting what he has described as a great 
 civilizing force, he hastily adds that, after all, 
 they do not prevent war : ' the rare and brief, 
 if terrible, wars of modern times will supply 
 that occasional tonic of which the body politic 
 stands in need.' But then, again, armaments 
 are a tonic even without war. ' Meanwhile, 
 the careful and systematic preparation for the 
 possible conflict is an invaluable discipline which 
 seems ' only seems, though invaluable ( to 
 be required in an age when comfort is growing, 
 and religion ' alas ! with all the discipline 
 ' is losing its power to lift the spirits of men 
 above a grovelling materialism !' So we are to 
 get back to the spirituality of Dugald Dalgetty 
 by the way of the barrack and the machine- 
 gun. 
 
 On this theme our militarist waxes eloquent. 
 ' The Cobdenite ideal of a State in which every 
 citizen is ceaselessly engaged in the ennobling 
 process of buying cheap and selling dear leaves 
 something to be desired. The accumulation 
 of riches, and the steady pursuit of material 
 comfort, do not tend to the development of the
 
 j8 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 highest type of character.' Is the militarist, 
 then, as a rule concerned to substitute a higher 
 structure of civic life for that which he thinks 
 fit to associate with the name of Richard 
 Cobden, who deplored it ? Yearnings he 
 would seem to have, not in his own natural 
 kind. ' Before we abolish the soldier on 
 economic grounds, we had better arrange for 
 the diffusion as well as the increase of wealth.' 
 Most true ; how, then, shall we begin ? Suppose 
 we sketch a programme of Old Age Pensions, 
 of nationalization, first of land, then of railways, 
 then of other industries, shall we have the 
 militarist's support ? Or has he another scheme 
 of his own ? He speaks sympathetically of 
 Tommy Atkins as so much better housed than 
 his civilian brothers ; and of the conscription in 
 Germany as a ' continuation school for the 
 people, for which we have no substitute in this 
 country.' Will the militarist vote, then, be 
 cast for a measure that aims at raising the 
 whole level of elementary education, and 
 rebuilding our industrial cities ? It is un- 
 pleasant to have to say it ; but there is not a 
 shadow of ground for believing that the flourish 
 about the diffusion of wealth and comfort and 
 culture is aught but a device to disparage peace 
 and peaceful life, to the end, not of mending 
 the latter, but of maintaining the regimen of
 
 The Militarist Regimen 79 
 
 the sword. The ' highest type of character ' is 
 to be formed not otherwise than by training the 
 helots of labour to disembowel dervishes. ' The 
 precision, the drilled alertness, and the ready 
 obedience of the men/ as seen in German 
 ironworks, ' are the qualities fostered by intelli- 
 gent military training. 1 What now becomes of 
 the disparagement of the competitive industrial 
 life, if armies are actually to be encouraged by 
 way of quickening the industrial pace ? And 
 what, again, becomes of the fling against the 
 Cobdenite ideal, when the theorist meets the 
 difficulty as to the poverty of Italy and Russia 
 by saying that they ' are, in any case, miserably 
 poor countries'? 'They have great natural 
 resources which have remained undeveloped 
 owing to the lack of capital and want of effi- 
 cient industrial enterprise/ In this conveni- 
 ent fashion, zealous commercialism figures as 
 an evil to be moderated by military expendi- 
 ture ; and the countries which suffer from their 
 military expenditure are told that their real 
 trouble is lack of zealous commercialism. To 
 cast out the Cobdenite ideal, you are to set up 
 an army ; to pay for an army, you are to set up 
 the Cobdenite ideal. 
 
 Continuing his appeal to his formerly flouted 
 Cobdenite, our sociologist argues that ' if a 
 conscription would restore to the English
 
 8o Patriotism and Empire 
 
 working man that superiority in the habits of 
 order, discipline, and steady industry which he 
 seems to be yielding to his foreign competitors, 
 it would be worth the cost.' It would thus 
 appear that the conscript countries have out- 
 Cobdened that Cobdenite ideal which conscrip- 
 tion was to resist ; they are beating us, if not 
 at selling dear, at least at selling. But, on the 
 other hand, it is implied that undrilled English 
 workmen had the superiority in question, with- 
 out any training, at a time when their rivals had 
 the same military training as now. How, then, 
 did they attain it ; and why should they not 
 retain it without conscription ? 
 
 Coming to the simple question of fact, we 
 are speedily compelled to note that in so far as 
 England is suffering from competition in the 
 iron trade, her successful rivals are not the 
 militarist nations but the United States, and 
 that rapid developments of machinery count 
 for a great deal more in the matter than any 
 training of the workers. We are thus left 
 inquiring with some emphasis whether the 
 militarist case has anything behind it but 
 reciprocally annihilative sophisms. The dis- 
 sertation before us yields nothing else, unless 
 it be the romantic appeal for a restoration of 
 the powerjof religion ' to lift the spirits of men 
 above a grovelling materialism ;' and here we
 
 The Militarist Regimen 81 
 
 are faced by the fatality that there is rather 
 more professed materialism in Russia, Germany, 
 France, and Italy than in either England or 
 the United States. It may seem brutal thus 
 to follow up an amiable sentimentalist with 
 logical tests ; but on his own principles strife 
 is a noble and elevating thing ; and we must 
 even strive bloodlessly when the other method 
 is closed. And as our militarist is clearly not 
 developing towards precision and drilled alert- 
 ness of the understanding, we can but credit 
 him, finally, with pleading in the old way for 
 the so-called military virtues precision, that 
 is, not in the use of productive tools, for that 
 would merely realize the Cobdenite ideal, but 
 in shooting ; drilled alertness, not of the mind, 
 but of the body, for the due promotion of 
 spirituality ; and the ready obedience of horses 
 and dogs to an outside will. Sic itur ad astra. 
 
 II 
 
 If such self-stultifying advocacy as this were 
 employed on behalf of any good or humane 
 cause, with what derision would it not be 
 greeted ! and to what deliquescence of ' senti- 
 mentalism ' would it not be held to point ! By 
 sentimentalism we all mean, I suppose, a kind 
 of dreaming which confuses fact with fancy, 
 
 6
 
 82 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 wishes with happenings ; but that there is a 
 barbarian as well as a civilized sentimentalism 
 is a truth necessarily hidden from the would-be 
 wise and prudent barbarian, though it may be 
 discerned by the babes and sucklings of social 
 science. Men with a taste for armaments, 
 piqued by censure, determine to follow their 
 bent, incidentally going about to offer us 
 estimates of the good effects of militarism on 
 life ; and all the while they are much further 
 from a judicial estimate than the most fanatical 
 devotee of peace, who really takes into account 
 the larger mass of social phenomena. In all 
 the militarist literature of the subject, German, 
 French, or English, you may look in vain for 
 anything more philosophical than a German 
 paralogism about surplus energy, a French 
 truism about the naturalness of strife,* or an 
 English falsism, such as that we have been 
 examining, about the sequence of literary 
 movements upon periods of war. The most 
 circumspect men on that side are driven back 
 on an ignoratio elenchi when they would reason. 
 Take, for instance, a passage in which one of 
 
 * The most strenuous exposition of that theme, however, 
 is the English Philosophy of War of Mr. James Ram 
 (1878), a work chiefly fitted to encourage every human 
 being to do whatever ill he pleases, on the score that 
 Nature is always so employed.
 
 The Militarist Regimen 83 
 
 the most esteemed of modern expert writers on 
 warfare, Captain Mahan, recently professes to 
 balance the pros and cons of the issue : 
 
 ' On the economical side there is the diminution of pro- 
 duction, the tax upon men's time and lives, the dis- 
 advantages or evils so dinned daily into our ears that there 
 is no need of repeating them here. But is there nothing to 
 the credit side of the account, even perhaps a balance in 
 their favour? Is it nothing, in an age when authority is 
 weakening and restraints are loosening, that the youth of a 
 nation passes through a school in which order, obedience, 
 and reverence are learned, where the body is systematically 
 developed, where ideals of self-surrender, of courage, of 
 manhood, are inculcated, necessarily, because fundamental 
 conditions of military success ? Is it nothing that masses 
 of youths out of the fields and streets are brought together, 
 mingled with others of higher intellectual antecedents, 
 taught to work and to act together, mind in contact with 
 mind, and carrying back into civil life that respect for 
 constituted authority which is urgently needed in these 
 days when lawlessness is erected into a religion ? It is a 
 suggestive lesson to watch the expression and movements 
 of a number of rustic conscripts undergoing their first drills, 
 and to contrast them with the finished result as seen in the 
 faces and bearing of the soldiers that throng the streets. A 
 military training is not the worst preparation for an active 
 life, any more than the years spent at college are time lost, 
 as another school of utilitarians insists. Is it nothing that 
 wars are less frequent, peace better secured, by the mutual 
 respect of nations for each other's strength ; and that, when 
 a convulsion does come, it passes rapidly, leaving the 
 ordinary course of events to resume sooner, and therefore 
 more easily? War now not only occurs more rarely, but 
 has rather the character of an occasional excess, from 
 
 62
 
 84 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 which recovery is easy. A century or more ago it was a 
 chronic disease. And withal, the military spirit, the pre- 
 paredness not merely the willingness, which is a different 
 thing to fight in a good cause, which is a distinct good, is 
 more widely diffused and more thoroughly possessed than 
 ever it was when the soldier was merely the paid man. It 
 is the nations now that are in arms, and not simply the 
 servants of the King.' 
 
 In a previous page of the same volume, 
 Captain Mahan had laid stress on the danger 
 to our civilization from barbarians who are 
 ' wholly alien ' to its spirit, and on the absolute 
 necessity, in this regard, of the ' attitude of 
 armed watchfulness between nations' in Europe ; 
 but in the passage before us he waives that 
 alleged necessity, which, if real, might be sup- 
 posed to supersede any other justification for 
 armaments, and considers rather the risk from 
 ' barbarians within,' by which expression he 
 apparently means Socialists. The gallant 
 author's conception of controversy may pass 
 undiscussed, but not so his professional theory 
 of social discipline. If militarists choose to 
 meddle with sociology, they must bide the 
 test, and this is how Captain Mahan's theorem 
 works out on analysis : 
 
 i. Militarism is of value as an efficient train- 
 ing for war ; and as such it involves the 
 learning of order, obedience, and reverence, 
 which are valuable to-day, when, with so much
 
 The Militarist Regimen 85 
 
 less of war than formerly, 'authority is loosen- 
 ing and restraints are weakening.' 
 
 2. But war, all the same, is a disease, and 
 last century it was ' a chronic disease.' The 
 state of health is that in which you so carefully 
 qualify yourself for the state of disease that you 
 are unprecedentedly fitted to catch it, but do not. 
 At the same time, while thus healthy, thus 
 unprecedentedly prepared to fight ' in a good 
 cause,' the ' nations in arms' exhibit the social 
 phenomena of weakening authority and loosen- 
 ing restraints, and ' lawlessness is erected into 
 a religion.' So that the law-abiding and 
 orderly ages were the chronically diseased 
 ages, and a training for the nations in 
 reverence and obedience coincides with a 
 maximum of systematic lawlessness. 
 
 This is a synthesis of Captain Mahan's own 
 propositions, so made as to show their logical 
 relation. If men in general were wont to 
 discard self-contradiction from their life- 
 philosophy as they discard it from matters of 
 business and machinery, there would be no 
 need to do more. Since, however, logically 
 false positions are not taken up on any logical 
 impulse, but stand for false foregone con- 
 victions, the reader so placed is not likely to 
 be shaken by the mere exposure of his in- 
 consistency. It is therefore incumbent on the
 
 86 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 opposition to fight out the case on the points 
 of fact. 
 
 The passage under notice asserts, implicitly 
 or explicitly, the following things : 
 
 1. Men of little education trained together 
 with more educated men in camps for war, 
 with or without actual war, acquire a respect 
 for constituted authority. 
 
 2. A military training is a good preparation 
 for civic life. 
 
 3. Under a system of general conscription, 
 the nations acquire a ' mutual respect for each 
 other's strength,' which makes war rarer than 
 formerly, when ' the soldier was merely the 
 paid man.' It also passes more quickly. 
 
 We have only to compare these propositions 
 with the historical facts to see that they are all 
 astray. In nearly all the leading European 
 States where conscription exists, it is notorious 
 that the training camp serves as a school for 
 Socialism, which develops a deep disrespect 
 for authority as at present constituted. Hear 
 the view of a conservative French politician, 
 M. Delafosse : 
 
 ' I consider obligatory military service, as it exists among 
 us, the worst agent of social disintegration and national 
 desolation. I am convinced that, if we permit it to 
 continue the ravages which it has already begun to produce, 
 in twenty years there will be no more society, no more
 
 The Militarist Regimen 87 
 
 army, nothing but the dust of a people, without bond or 
 cohesion. . . . From a social point of view, the effects 
 produced by obligatory military service, as we know it, are 
 infinitely perilous to the future of society. It produces a 
 rupture of equilibrium which is one of the great dangers of 
 the present hour, and I consider obligatory military service 
 as one of the most powerful agents of revolutionary 
 Socialism.'* 
 
 It may be that M. Delafosse, in his fear 
 of Socialism, which he shares with Captain 
 Mahan, puts a false face on the tendency even 
 of the revolutionary form : that is for the anti- 
 Socialist militarist to discuss. To promote 
 Socialism, as apart from revolution, is in the 
 eyes of the rest of us no discredit to barrack 
 life, but, at all events, the fact is the reverse of 
 Captain Mahan 's proposition. What is no less 
 to the purpose is the fact that in previous ages 
 camp life has made men at once amenable to 
 the rule of their general and potentially careless 
 of other constituted authority when that hap- 
 pened to clash with his. The legions of Caesar 
 learned no reverence for the State, and as little 
 did the troopers of Cromwell, who at his beck 
 overthrew the Parliament under whose authority 
 they had drawn the sword. The lesson is one 
 worth recalling by the democratic politics of 
 to-day. It is assumed, at Captain Mahan's 
 
 * Cited in ' Can We Disarm ?' by Joseph McCabe and 
 Georges Darrien. Heinemann, 1899.
 
 88 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 point of view, that we can all be armed to the 
 teeth, drilled to the toes, and constantly pre- 
 pared to fight ' in a good cause ' as if any 
 nation ever went to war feeling the cause was 
 bad without coming to blows save by way of 
 ' occasional excess,' though it is simply in- 
 conceivable that men would go on drilling for 
 a hundred years if the ' occasional excess ' did 
 not come as ' chronic disease ' to make the 
 preparation relevant. And, as a matter of 
 fact, war between the nations is not controlled 
 or determined by the mere practice of con- 
 scription, as Captain Mahan asserts. 
 
 In ancient Greece and Italy, military training 
 was universal, and before the supremacy of 
 Rome war was yet a ' chronic disease.' In 
 the post-Norman period, military training was 
 universal in England and Scotland, and their 
 wars were chronic down till the middle of the 
 sixteenth century, nor did the same conditions 
 avert three invasions of France by England 
 between 1339 and 1415. It is true that 
 Cromwell speedily turned the instrument of a 
 standing army and navy to the account of 
 wilful war ; but the decline thereafter of the 
 practice of general military training was not, 
 any more than in the period of Elizabeth and 
 James I., coincident with more war than had 
 gone on in the days of general militarism. It
 
 The Militarist Regimen 89 
 
 is true, again and let Captain Mahan's 
 compatriots note the circumstance that a paid 
 army is more readily available for expeditions 
 against weaker States than would be a purely 
 conscript force ; but mere conscription does not 
 discredit war. Napoleon's wars were made 
 with conscript troops, and modern Europe has 
 seen the Austro-French, the Crimean, the 
 Austro-Prussian, the Franco-German, and the 
 Russo-Turkish wars within one generation, a 
 record certainly not surpassed in the previous 
 century. As to the brevity of modern wars, it 
 has nothing to do with the general bearing of 
 arms by the nations. The Peloponnesian war 
 lasted twenty-seven years, and it followed on 
 a thirty years' peace. On the other hand, the 
 American Civil War was brought to an end by 
 the inequality of the combatants in resources. 
 If a modern war between well-matched States 
 should end speedily, it would not be because of 
 their fitness for fighting, but because the war 
 was so rapidly ruinous, or because men now 
 come more rapidly to reason a point calling 
 for more attention than militarists care to 
 give it. 
 
 If since 1880 the great nations have visibly 
 shrunk from anything like equal war, it is from 
 sheer rational perception of the horror and the 
 insanity of the course for which all militarism is
 
 90 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 a preparation. It is not a ' mutual respect ' so 
 much as simple knowledge and reflection 
 thereon. France and Germany know that if 
 they grapple again, both will ' bleed as white as 
 veal.' The rulers of Russia know that war 
 with any first-rate Power may bring the auto- 
 cracy to bankruptcy and ruin. But who will 
 predict that no fortuitous Armageddon shall 
 come of the competing rapacities of the Euro- 
 pean nations in China and Africa ? 
 
 Supposing it be otherwise : supposing a 
 whole generation to pass without the firing of 
 another shot by land or sea between civilized 
 peoples, our children will be very definitely 
 faced unless, indeed, it is progressively solved 
 in the interim by the problem, Is it worth the 
 while of civilized States to go on drilling men 
 for wars that are seen to be avoidable ? From 
 Captain Mahan's point of view, the answer 
 should be Yes. Camp drill, he argues, is a 
 good preparation for civic life. Now, it is a 
 priori inconceivable that training for an extinct 
 function can in perpetuity be the best prepara- 
 tion for a real function ; and in so far as the 
 plea for drill is merely a plea for bodily training, 
 the obvious answer is that where that is seen 
 to have been generally neglected the nations 
 can perfectly well provide for it without any 
 pretence of military drill. If undrilled rustics
 
 The Militarist Regimen 91 
 
 and mechanics are inferior in grace and activity 
 to drilled soldiers, these, on the other hand, are 
 not superior to undrilled gentlemen. The 
 point hardly bears discussing. To urge drill 
 as the only feasible means to the physical 
 education of rustics and artisans is to imply 
 that there is no hope of a vital betterment in 
 the lot of rustics and artisans as such. But the 
 very suggestion elicits the remembrance that 
 through the ages grinding toil for the poor has 
 been the fixed correlative of militarism. And 
 the conclusion that begins to emerge for us is 
 that the science which should solve the social 
 problem is not only never furthered, but for- 
 ever frustrated of growth, if not denied bare 
 birth, by the survival of the militarist ideal and 
 practice. Against the facile claim that military 
 training is a good preparative for civic life there 
 lies the tacit testimony of the whole history of 
 civilization, scientifically considered. We who 
 gainsay militarism desire nothing more than 
 the hearing of the issue. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It would be pedantic, perhaps, to set out 
 with much insistence on the fact that the higher 
 or non-barbarian civilization historically begins 
 with communities in which the trade of the
 
 92 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 soldier is specialized, as in ancient Egypt, and 
 whole classes are entirely withdrawn from 
 military service. It could still be answered 
 that ^Eschylus and Socrates bore arms, who 
 were of more value than many Egyptians ; and 
 though it is sociologically clear that the Greek 
 civilization, with its rule of military service for 
 all citizens, could never have flourished as it 
 did but for the seeds of culture it drew from 
 those of Egypt and Asia, the question thus far 
 remains open as between the advocates of 
 normal militarism and us who oppose them. 
 Let us, then, seek in the higher civilizations 
 themselves for the decisive data. 
 
 As between the different States of Greece, 
 there was diversity of devotion to the military 
 life, Sparta marking the acme of the cult, 
 Athens a more moderate passion. ' We do not 
 afflict ourselves with laborious training,' claimed 
 Pericles ; ' and yet, in the hour of trial, our 
 courage does not fail . . . ; we are as ready for 
 action as those who spend their lives in antici- 
 pating danger and preparing to meet it. So 
 much the greater is our gain.' What the 
 modern militarist will say on the matter we 
 need hardly consider ; he will scarcely seek to 
 exalt the barren and mindless militarism of 
 Sparta over the immeasurably richer life of 
 Athens ; though, on the militarist theory, the
 
 The Militarist Regimen 93 
 
 Spartan should be the greater civilization. But 
 supposing him to claim Athens as his golden 
 mean, let him show us wherein her measure of 
 militarism fitted her citizens the better for any- 
 thing but the fighting themselves provoked. 
 For what civil functions were her epheboi and 
 her marines prepared ? Not for wise decisions 
 in policy ; not for clearer thought in ethics ; not 
 for closer industry ; not for finer art. It was 
 after their maximum of military experience, 
 gained in the ruinous Peloponnesian war, that 
 their civic polity decayed past cure. A genera- 
 tion of venomous war had broken down alike 
 respect for constituted authority and belief in a 
 moral law ; till hatred had eaten up reason, and 
 war only ceased because of sheer loss of blood. 
 It is well to recall the judgment of Thucydides 
 on the temper bred by the war throughout 
 Greece : 
 
 ' When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who 
 followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and further, 
 and determined to outdo the report of all who had 
 preceded them, by the ingenuity of their enterprises and 
 the atrocity of their revenges. The meaning of words had 
 no longer the same relation to things, but were changed by 
 them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to 
 be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a 
 coward ; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness ; 
 to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was 
 the true quality of a man . . . the lover of violence was
 
 94 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 always trusted, and his opponent suspected. . . . He who 
 plotted from the first to have nothing to do with plots was 
 a breaker-up of parties and a poltroon who was afraid of 
 the enemy. In a word, he who could outstrip another in a 
 bad action was applauded ; and so was he who encouraged 
 to evil one who had no idea of it. ... Revenge was dearer 
 than self-preservation. Any agreements sworn to by either 
 party, when they could do nothing else, were binding just 
 as long as they were powerless. . . . Striving in every way 
 to overcome each other, they committed the most mon- 
 strous crimes; yet even these were surpassed by the 
 magnitude of their revenges. . . . Thus revolution gave 
 birth to every form of wickedness in Hellas. The 
 simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature 
 was laughed to scorn and disappeared. An attitude of 
 perfidious antagonism everywhere prevailed ; for there was 
 no word binding enough nor oath terrible enough to 
 reconcile enemies. . . . Inferior intellects generally 
 succeeded best.' 
 
 Such was the ' type of character ' moulded by 
 a generation of war in the highest civilization 
 of the ancient world, a land of democracies, in 
 which all citizens were trained to arms. A 
 better case for war could doubtless be made 
 out by taking the armies of later imperial Rome, 
 and looking only at the better types shaped by 
 them, the steadfast centurions, the magnanimous 
 generals like Agricola. But that was precisely 
 the sort of army that Captain Mahan disparages, 
 the army in which the soldier was only the paid 
 man. And, indeed, the common soldier in 
 them was made at best but a tough veteran, a
 
 The Militarist Regimen 95 
 
 stout gladiator. Still, it is hard to see his 
 moral inferiority to the men of the earlier ages, 
 who fought for Rome against the liberties of 
 every other Italian State, till at length the 
 totality of acquired faculty for civic life made 
 possible an inferno of domestic butchery, Sulla 
 outdoing the massacres of Marius, till the 
 
 a 
 
 republic swooned into peace, and grew fit for 
 the rule of the autocrat. 
 
 To get a justified opinion on the value of 
 militarism as a training for civic tasks, we may 
 either follow the general fortunes of any one of 
 the military empires of antiquity, or study the 
 great captains in their civic capacities. Any 
 other method must fall more or less short of 
 rational investigation. Now, every ancient 
 military State or empire of which we possess 
 the history does but present a story of more 
 or less rapid decadence. The seven successive 
 Oriental empires, the minor 'empires' of 
 Athens and Sparta, the Empire of Alexander 
 and his successors, that of Rome, those of her 
 conquerors, those of the Saracens, are so many 
 colossal proofs that the life of arms never 
 taught to any the secret of stable evolution. 
 The Eastern Roman Empire, with a standing 
 army and no militia, did indeed subsist pre- 
 cariously for a thousand years ; but the measure 
 of militarism which so far preserved it availed
 
 96 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 not a jot for progress in the arts or the science 
 of civic life. A system of conscription would 
 only have multiplied and worsened the risks of 
 inner strife. Machiavelli in later Italy, weary 
 of condottieri, pined for a return to the mili- 
 tarism of republican Rome ; but that could 
 only have led to a different species of subjection 
 from what actually befel, the empire of a 
 Borgia rather than the empire of Spain. It 
 was the universal soldiering of the earlier 
 Italian republics that led to the mercenary 
 armies of the later. The law of all militarism, 
 on the face of all history, is a law of decay. 
 
 And the lesson is, if possible, still clearer 
 when we consider the great commanders as 
 politicians. In the ancient world, Alexander, 
 Hannibal, and Caesar were the greatest of the 
 great ; and each and all were as powerless to 
 build up a durable polity as they were potent 
 to overthrow. Alexander's empire was a 
 political impossibility, momentarily made by a 
 convulsion of conquest ; its speedy disruption 
 was as inevitable as any process of nature. 
 The iron will and inhuman vigilance of Han- 
 nibal could maintain him with his alien host 
 in hostile Italy for fifteen years ; he could 
 manoeuvre a Roman host into a pen and slay 
 them like sheep ; but he could not cure the 
 corroding civic malady of Carthage ; nor was
 
 The Militarist Regimen 97 
 
 the mighty Julius a whit more gifted for the 
 healing of the cancer of Rome. He could but 
 ruin a republic, to make way for an empire 
 that fatally progressed to a ruin immeasurably 
 greater. 
 
 Here and there we may indeed find a worthy 
 captain, who could lead in war and shine in 
 peace. Timoleon and Alfred are noble names. 
 But such men do not test the issue : they were 
 warriors against their will ; champions of 
 struggling causes, not representatives of the 
 militarist ideal ; nor is there any reason to 
 regard them as deep-seeing statesmen, though 
 they won an honourable fame. The strict type 
 of military genius is Cromwell, who, by the 
 admission of his latest historian, to say nothing 
 of the plain facts of history, could only wield 
 force, and was impotent to plan a continuing 
 State. Of all great modern soldiers, Frederick 
 and Napoleon show most of faculty for civic 
 rule. But Frederick, the successful ruler of 
 the two, came to hate the life of war, whose arts 
 he had had painfully to learn ; nor did even 
 he build a polity that could of itself stand firm 
 after him ; while Napoleon's ruling hand stifled 
 thought and speech as effectively as it stimulated 
 lower activities, and his empire fell as swiftly 
 as it rose ; even as a generation served to bring 
 Frederick's iron machine to rust and wreck. 
 
 7
 
 98 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 Washington was more liberally wise ; but 
 he was no heaven-born soldier or lover of 
 camps ; and it is very significant for us in this 
 connection that the military element has never 
 once counted for good in American statesman- 
 ship. The first typical soldier in the Presi- 
 dential chair was Andrew Jackson, from whose 
 Presidency dates the system of spoils of office. 
 Of all modern soldiers, one of the most estim- 
 able as a man was General Grant ; but it is 
 confessed by his own party that he managed 
 ill as President. War had not fitted him for 
 civil life, with all his patience and integrity. 
 It is indeed said of Lincoln, I doubt not with 
 perfect justice, that he showed an admirable 
 judgment in military matters, and was posi- 
 tively superior to most of his generals. But 
 that is only saying that a masterly statesman 
 may judge sagaciously of plans of warfare ; it 
 is no proof that a training in actual warfare 
 would even have left him the masterly states- 
 man he was. Lincoln was prepared by a 
 purely civic life for a colossal civic problem, 
 which included a military problem : the man. 
 demonstrably prepared for a great civic problem 
 by a military life is still to seek. 
 
 Our own Wellington is almost, if not quite, 
 the negation of the needed instance. He had 
 wisdom enough and perhaps some non-
 
 The Militarist Regimen 99 
 
 military statesman in his place might have 
 shown less avowedly to yield to political 
 pressure rather than provoke civil war ; but 
 of guiding or constructive faculty he does not 
 seem to have shown a glimmer. The measure 
 of his independent civic wisdom is his protest 
 against facilities to third-class railway pas- 
 sengers, on the score that they were ' a 
 premium to the lower orders to go uselessly 
 wandering about the country.' Such maxims 
 do we receive from the victor of Waterloo. 
 And of Nelson, noting what is on record as 
 to his political intelligence, and his personality 
 as apart from his genius, we may gravely say 
 that he was fortunate, and we no less so, in the 
 time of his death. With his tyrannous pro- 
 clivities, his prestige, and his grievous lack of 
 human wisdom, he would have become, had he 
 survived Trafalgar, one of the most dangerous 
 political forces in English life. 
 
 Wellington, who by chance met and judged 
 him, and who was so far superior to him in the 
 faculty of personal balance, leaves little doubt 
 as to the great seaman's want of sense as a 
 man. They met, as the well-known narrative 
 of the Duke runs, in the Colonial Office : 
 
 ' He [Nelson] could not know who I was ; but he entered 
 at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversa- 
 tion, for it was almost all on his side, and all about himself, 
 
 72
 
 ioo Patriotism and Empire 
 
 and in, really, a style so vain and so silly as to surprise and 
 almost disgust me. I suppose something that I happened 
 to say may have made him guess that I was somebody, and 
 he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to 
 ask the office-keeper who I was, for when he came back 
 he was altogether a different man, both in manner and 
 matter .... In fact, he talked like an officer and a 
 statesman. . . . Luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that 
 he was really a very superior man ; but certainly a more 
 complete and sudden metamorphosis I never saw.'* 
 
 The superiority came out in talk on the 
 military situation, the balance of power and the 
 fighting chances. It was the old story : genius 
 for one function, and folly in the normal situa- 
 tions of life. 
 
 But a far more damaging record is the history 
 of Nelson's conduct towards the republicans of 
 Naples, as now placed beyond doubt by Italian 
 investigations, t Flattered to fever - point 
 never a difficult thing in his case by the King 
 and Queen of Sicily, he committed on their 
 behalf, but of his own zealous choice, an act of 
 infamous treachery. Finding that, just before 
 his arrival at Naples, the republican garrisons 
 had surrendered on a treaty of indemnity with 
 
 * Croker's Correspondence and Diaries, 1884, ii. 233 ; 
 Captain Mahan's Life of Nelson, ii. 322. 
 
 f See the English Historical Review, April, 1898 ; and 
 compare Captain Mahan's Life of Nelson, i. 430-444, where 
 Nelson is first defended without knowledge of the later 
 published Italian documents and afterwards partly blamed.
 
 The Militarist Regimen 101 
 
 the King's Vicar-General, Ruffo, and the com- 
 mander of the English squadron, he first pro- 
 posed to break the treaty ; and then, when the 
 Italian honourably and inflexibly refused, he 
 resorted to an act of fraud unparalleled in 
 modern military history. In the words of 
 Mr. F. P. Badham, 
 
 ' He made a feint of falling in with Ruffo's ideas, and in 
 carefully-studied words, intended to deceive, he promised 
 that he " would not oppose " the execution of the capitula- 
 tion. Once the garrisons were embarked Nelson laid hold 
 of the vessels, and made the republicans prisoners. In 
 fine, Nelson started with the premise that it did not matter 
 what one did with Jacobins, and with this all his subsequent 
 proceedings were in accordance. Under circumstances of 
 peculiar illegality and unfairness he kidnapped and hanged 
 the republican Admiral. He waited for more than a week, 
 making scarcely any effort, while Naples was exposed to the 
 unspeakable horrors of a sack by the convicts and bandits 
 whom Ruffo had recruited in Calabria. He delivered over 
 more than 8,000 prisoners to the royal vengeance. He 
 uttered no word of intercession while a Royalist Reign of 
 Terror, every whit as merciless as that of Arras and 
 Bordeaux, was established in Naples. And in all this, as 
 Captain Mahan has pointed out, his conduct was dictated 
 by no sort of English interest : he completely subordinated 
 his position as English representative to his allegiance to 
 Sicily.' 
 
 It has been asked whether or not Nelson was 
 incited to this infamy by Lady Hamilton, who, 
 furious as he against all republicans, and as 
 crazily devoted as he to the Sicilian crown, had
 
 io2 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 her mission from the Queen : ' Recommend 
 Lord Nelson to treat Naples as if it were a 
 rebel town in Ireland. Finally, a severity 
 exact, prompt, just : the same for the women, 
 and that without pity.' But Adam was as ready 
 for evil as his Eve. The man whose whole 
 rule of life for his midshipmen a rule tran- 
 scended, one hopes, by most of the men who 
 to-day sweep our streets was, ' Fear God, 
 honour the King, and hate a Frenchman as 
 you do the devil,' needed little prompting to 
 any act of savagery towards Jacobins. As 
 Mr. Badham puts it, 
 
 ' There was an anti-revolutionary fury, we must re- 
 member, as well as a revolutionary white Jacobinism as 
 well as red. Only a few months before the period under 
 discussion the murder of the French Ambassadors at 
 Rastadt had been condoned by monarchical Europe with a 
 mere shrug of the shoulders. And of this anti-revolutionary 
 fury Nelson had a peculiarly sharp attack. Republicans of 
 every shade are for him "infamous Jacobins, felons, infidels, 
 robbers and murderers," but " their measure of iniquity is 
 nearly full, and God is in the act of chastising them." To 
 another correspondent : "Your news of the hanging of the 
 thirteen Jacobins gave us great pleasure, and the three 
 priests will, I hope, soon dangle on the tree best adapted to 
 their weight of sins," the sentiment in this case being the 
 more remarkable from his knowing that at Procida, where 
 these thirteen had been condemned, prisoners were not 
 usually allowed to be present during trial. Again : " Our 
 friend T. had a present made him the other day of the head 
 of a Jacobin, and makes an excuse, the weather being hot,
 
 The Militarist Regimen 103 
 
 for not sending it here." On another occasion he even 
 stoops to : " Exact as degrading terms as it is in your power 
 to give. No covered waggons, no protection for rebels !" ' 
 
 Such a man was England's supreme Admiral. 
 And because this energumen had the genius 
 of naval strategy, and twice signally defeated 
 the naval enemy of the moment, we are still 
 called upon by our energumens of empire to 
 cherish his memory and hallow his name. To 
 such a code can patriotism bring us. And it is 
 with such examples before them that our 
 accomplished advocates of militarism can claim 
 for military life the merit of preparing men for 
 the civil. Probably few will dispute that the 
 naval exploits of Nelson might have been per- 
 formed by Paul Jones, had he been a British 
 Admiral. He had certainly the genius of naval 
 strategy, and a boundless courage. Well, the 
 biographers sum up that with it all he was a 
 man of inordinate vanity and detestable moral 
 character. With a much less faulty character, 
 it is not pleasant to think what part Nelson as 
 peer would have played in those English 
 domestic troubles which so swifty followed on 
 English victories. Enough for his career, in 
 the eye of a sane posterity, will be the acted 
 evil thereof.
 
 IO4 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 IV 
 
 To some on first challenge all this may seem 
 to be mere special pleading, if not something 
 worse. When we reflect what multitudes of 
 men have unquestionably remained honourable 
 and chivalrous gentlemen after a longer or 
 shorter military or naval life, there may well 
 seem to be something of perversity in an argu- 
 ment which dwells mainly on the seamy side 
 of the careers of great commanders and military 
 States. And it is possible, of course, to make 
 out the case against militarism onesidedly. 
 Some onesidedness there is, perhaps, in the 
 remarkable work of M. Hamonon Le Militaire 
 Professionel, which, some years before the out- 
 break of the Dreyfus scandal, arraigned the 
 army as a school of lawlessness. It is not diffi- 
 cult to pick from military biography stories 
 enough of fraud and rapine, baseness and 
 egoism, to make out a black case. 
 
 As everyday life, however, presents the same 
 features, to the knowledge of every man of the 
 world, there is a risk of fallacy in reasoning 
 from the symptoms to the special environment. 
 One might make out a similar case against 
 University professors, men of science, scholars, 
 artists ; an American inquirer has actually
 
 The Militarist Regimen 105 
 
 undertaken to prove, by a laborious research, 
 that the clergy in the United States furnish a 
 larger percentage of crime of all kinds than any 
 other of the learned professions nay, than the 
 general population. It might plausibly be 
 argued, on the other hand, that certain types 
 tend to gravitate to certain professions ; but 
 here again we are faced by the fact that there 
 are honourable men in all. The real issue, 
 therefore, is that above examined the value of 
 a military training as a preparation for civic 
 life, or for any other than purely military 
 functions. It is perfectly fair, then, to form an 
 opinion on the historic evidence as to the fate 
 of fighting peoples and the statesmanship of 
 great captains. Ensign Newcome leaves the 
 army Colonel Newcome, a more admirable 
 gentleman than he was when he entered it ; but 
 the process of mellowing would have gone on 
 quite as well outside. Regimental life does not 
 make saints out of sinners, or gentle spirits out 
 of egoists. Rather the question rises whether 
 even the Colonel Newcomes do not miss a 
 needed intellectual discipline ; and when we 
 come to the rank and file, there is hardly any 
 question at all. Complaisant publicists tell us 
 in private how useful is the army as a training- 
 school for coachmen and valets ; how it takes 
 slouching and turbulent types and makes them
 
 io6 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 shaven, upright, orderly, biddable, and respect- 
 able. It may be so : there is no institution 
 which does not yield some relative good ; and it 
 would be unfeeling to refuse to rejoice with the 
 plutocrat in his possession of a steady coach- 
 man. But we are considering the total in- 
 fluence of the trade of arms, and meeting apolo- 
 gists who say it is good for all, not merely for 
 a recalcitrant residuum ; and we are further 
 arguing from the point of view that the domi- 
 nance of the militarist ideal is one of the main 
 hindrances to a social science which would pro- 
 vide other ways of humanizing the defective types. 
 Now, for every larrikin that the army licks 
 into vertical shape it turns two potentially 
 average minds, capable of development, into 
 superior forms of domestic animal, without 
 intellectual initiative, and without the desire to 
 have it. A model veteran is as often as not a 
 model child in intelligence ; and the veterans 
 who are not models hardly help the militarist 
 case. But we may put a more general test, 
 asking of the institution as a whole, whether a 
 habitual practice of blind obedience is con- 
 ceivably productive of good judgment in any- 
 thing. The necessarily negative answer points 
 to the most charitable view that can well be 
 taken of the conduct of the French military 
 authorities in the Dreyfus case.
 
 The Militarist Regimen 107 
 
 Reading one revelation after another of 
 shameful fraud on the part of some, and in- 
 credible shallowness of judgment on the part of 
 others, we begin to ask whether the French 
 staff is mainly composed of knaves and fools. 
 The answer is, first, that in an army the knaves, 
 be they few or many, are far more potent than 
 elsewhere, just because of the nature of the 
 system ; and secondly, that they accordingly 
 have less difficulty than elsewhere in making 
 fools of the honest men, who there are made less 
 competent than elsewhere to detect knavery. 
 No lay jury could commit such a travesty of 
 justice as was accomplished by the court-martial 
 on Dreyfus ; and no lay institution would dare 
 to resort to such a campaign of subterfuge and 
 suppression to cover an error as was under- 
 taken by the French staff. 
 
 Such an episode is a specific fruit of 
 militarism. Only national conceit can lead 
 Englishmen and Germans to believe that a 
 similar case is impossible in their armies ; 
 indeed, some Germans readily avow that 
 analogous cases are privately known to have 
 occurred in Germany, where it would be im- 
 possible to have them reopened. Bismarck 
 would have scoffed at the thought of letting 
 a court-martial's injustice be exposed ; and it is 
 to be remembered that one of the first intima-
 
 io8 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 tions made by English correspondents of the 
 movement to reopen the Dreyfus case was 
 accompanied by an emphatic opinion that it 
 was better to let even an innocent man suffer 
 than to set up an army scandal. It is the 
 irreducible aversion of uncorrupted men to 
 such a doctrine that has made possible the 
 climaxing protest in France and elsewhere. 
 And in this connection it is worth while to 
 note how the moral courage needed to begin 
 it was found only among civilians. To Emile 
 Zola go all the foremost honours of the fight. 
 No soldier dared face the suborned multitude 
 as did he ; not till the defence had waxed 
 powerful in prestige as well as in moral force 
 did an officer come forward to aid it. It is not 
 on the battle-field or the drill-ground that men 
 learn, if it be ever learned, the lonely courage 
 that faces domestic hatred and the hiss of the 
 crowd ; and where such courage is needed 
 in the strifes of civil life, it will assuredly be 
 none the scarcer for the stopping of the school 
 of the slayer. 
 
 If, however, it be urged that military men 
 are not fairly to be suspected of lack of moral 
 courage because their sense of discipline keeps 
 them out of a movement which impeaches 
 their superiors, we may rest content on the 
 position that they are proved to be weakened
 
 The Militarist Regimen 109 
 
 by their training- for the exercise of judgment 
 in matters equally open to the verdict of 
 laymen and to theirs. This is the upshot of 
 the recent discussion among ourselves as to the 
 fitness of Lord Kitchener's conduct in desecrat- 
 ing the tomb of the Mahdi at Khartoum. It 
 is made clear by the very arguments of the 
 defence that the act one of military politics 
 was a lapse from common-sense as well as from 
 decency. One set of apologists tells us that 
 the fanatics had to be disabused of their notion 
 that the Mahdi had ascended bodily to heaven ; 
 another set tell us that if the body had been 
 left in the tomb, the same fanatics would be 
 sure to make pilgrimages thither, and pilgrim- 
 ages might lead to revolts. As if Christians 
 had not made nine crusades to recover and 
 keep the tomb of their prophet in the full 
 belief that there was no body there, and in the 
 full knowledge that it had been desecrated for 
 ages by two races of unbelievers ! The surest 
 way to undermine the Mahdi's prestige would 
 plainly have been to show that the conquerors 
 had no fear of it, and attached no more im- 
 portance to his tomb than to any other. By 
 rifling his tomb and insulting his corpse, they 
 have done their best to renew the fanaticism 
 which they had half discredited by simply 
 defeating it. We are finally told that the act
 
 no Patriotism and Empire 
 
 had been advised by Mohammedan officers. It 
 was what the Turks would have done in such 
 a case. Need more be said ? 
 
 V 
 
 We shall be called back, perhaps, to the 
 contention that there is civic value in a military 
 training which stops short of actual war a 
 moral value that outgoes the mere physical 
 gain to a volunteer from camping out. It is 
 somewhat odd that this plea should be urged 
 precisely among the peoples who have no 
 conscript system, no universal militarism ; and 
 one is moved to ask whether Captain Mahan, 
 for instance, really supposes the youth of 
 France, Germany, Russia, Italy, and Turkey, 
 to be at once more law-abiding, more 
 thoughtful in politics, and more fit for industry 
 and commerce, than the youth of the United 
 States and England. Such appears to be the 
 implication, and it is a surprising one. Those 
 of us who have discussed the point with educated 
 but non-official Frenchmen and Germans who 
 have done their due drills, are not often met 
 by any such opinion. In France, it may be 
 confidently asserted, there grows, step for step 
 with the advance in the efficiency of education, 
 a conviction that the years spent in military
 
 The Militarist Regimen 1 1 1 
 
 training are a wretched waste of time ; and the 
 commonest feeling among the better-educated 
 men during their term of service is one of 
 contempt towards the officers who voluntarily 
 embrace such a profession. Some small 
 countervailing benefit there may be in the 
 contact of the less-educated men with their 
 superiors, but I do not find that good and 
 close observers attach much weight to such an 
 influence from their own experience. They do 
 not find the backward types amenable to it ; 
 and on the face of the case it is clear that 
 such influence must at best be a poor make- 
 shift for a culture that ought to have been 
 undergone in boyhood. You give a boy a bad 
 schooling, take him away half taught, set him 
 to hard work in his growing years, and then 
 claim to give him a physical and moral boon 
 by drilling him for certain terms in the company 
 of other youths, of whom a few are more 
 fortunate. As a deliberately chosen scheme, it 
 seems hardly less than farcical. If we are to 
 plan at all for social betterment, we had need 
 plan some worthier method than this. 
 
 Turning to the special case of Germany, 
 where, barring perhaps Turkey, militarism is 
 at its maximum for scope and thoroughness, let 
 us put another test. Germany is still, on the 
 whole, the most highly educated nation, and in
 
 H2 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 the past its writers have had a great influence 
 on the moral judgment of the rest of Europe. 
 Kant, Schiller, Herder, Goethe, the Humboldts, 
 Herbart, Richter, Fichte, Frobel, Schleier- 
 macher, Raumer, Feuerbach, Gervinus, Vogt, 
 Bluntschli, Marx, Lassalle, Wagner, Freiligrath, 
 Heine all these, to name no others, had in 
 their various ways a specifically moral influence 
 in Europe, over and above their vogue on other 
 grounds. But while German specialism still 
 ranks at least as high as any in most depart- 
 ments of pure research, who now recognises 
 any moral impact from the later German 
 literature ? We are concerned to know what 
 Germans think on most points of learning and 
 science, but who greatly cares what view a 
 German of the majority takes on any question 
 of right or wrong ? Who, save a militarist, 
 respects any German ideals save those of 
 Socialism, which are the negation of militarism 
 and Bismarckism ? It is the bare truth that 
 German ethical opinion has no longer the 
 slightest prestige, and the reason is the double 
 one that the ruling German ideal has lost all 
 virtue to the deeper moral sense of men, and 
 that the leading German writers of these days 
 make no impression of moral inspiration. To 
 a thinking reader, unswayed by a foregone 
 theory, Mommsen is seen to have become the
 
 The Militarist Regimen 113 
 
 mere immoral mouthpiece of the Bismarckian 
 ideal, a partisan degraded by race prejudice 
 below the level of worthy historiography in 
 short, a false historian, however erudite. 
 Scholarship is one thing, and moral weight 
 another. There is positively not one well- 
 known German historian since Burckhardt and 
 Dollinger whose opinion on any moral issue 
 need give us pause. From Russia come the 
 moral ideas of Tchernichevsky, Dostoievsky, 
 Tolstoy ; from Scandinavia, those of Ibsen and 
 Bjornson ; from France, those of Guyau, Zola, 
 and, till the other day, Renan ; but from 
 Germany, apart from academic systems which 
 miss the general mind, what ? The one recent 
 German writer whose moral ideas have arrested 
 European attention is Nietzsche, the revolt^ 
 the most un-German of Germans ; and he is 
 impressive precisely because, whether in the 
 really high ethic of his earlier work, as the 
 Zarathustra^ or in the wildly wandering 
 doctrine of the years of his decadence, he 
 stands for something freer, purer, and sincerer 
 than the official gospel of German imperialism. 
 Now, this state of things is unintelligible 
 save as a product of the system of Bismarck, 
 the reign of Moltke, the modern millennium of 
 the drill-sergeant. Either the acceptance of 
 that regimen has paralyzed the German spirit 
 
 8
 
 ii4 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 on the moral side, or the better German minds 
 dare not speak out. That they dare not is 
 asserted by those who ought to know ; ethical 
 teachers are said to find themselves morally 
 gagged. But that implies a moral prostration 
 of the general mind around them ; and such a 
 prostration can result only from the stringent 
 operation of forces that were absent or only 
 half-grown in the Germany of half a century 
 ago rabid militarism, nationalism, monarchism, 
 imperialism, Chauvinism, servile bureaucracy. 
 A dramatic episode of a few years ago brought 
 out in a flash the depth of the transformation. 
 In some restaurant, an officer collided some- 
 how with a civilian, and, feeling himself affronted, 
 drew his sword. The civilian ran away, but 
 the officer pursued, overtook him, and ran him 
 through. So went the reports, which further 
 stated that the Kaiser, on being consulted, held 
 the officer blameless, and expressed a hope 
 that his officers would always thus prove 
 themselves the guardians of their own honour. 
 Right or wrong, the story is let pass without 
 question by typical military men. I once 
 spoke of it, in another country, to an experi- 
 enced Prussian officer, and received the 
 emphatic and serious answer, ' Ah, that was 
 honour !' For him, the question was so settled ; 
 it was a matter of honour for an armed man to
 
 The Militarist Regimen 115 
 
 slay an unarmed, who fled from him. One can 
 but say that such honour stands rooted in 
 dishonour, and that the ethical ideals of a 
 nation where this one passes current can count 
 for nothing with free men anywhere. 
 
 Only a long reign of militarism, the eternal 
 adversary of right feeling, could bring such a 
 people to such a pass. In a future age, unless 
 haply we are all already in full decadence, it 
 will be reckoned a sufficient measure of the 
 worsening power of militarist imperialism that 
 within the first ten years of the present Kaiser's 
 reign the prosecutions for lese-majeste were 
 counted by thousands, and included many lads 
 in their teens. The evils of commercialism 
 are indeed many and deep ; but in so far as 
 they are proximately natural, as results of an 
 ingrained system that to most of the sufferers 
 seems unchangeable, they do not demoralize 
 and paralyze as do the evils of a tyranny 
 imposed from without, resting on naked force 
 and the mere habit of submission, and re- 
 movable by an act of national will if the will 
 were there. There are few displays of self- 
 satisfaction more fatuous than those of the 
 German professors who to-day felicitate them- 
 selves and their pupils on an imagined superiority 
 of virtue and viability in the Teutonic over the 
 ' Latin ' races. They who suppose that mere 
 
 82
 
 n6 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 study, mere thoroughness of specialism, can 
 make valid men out of subjects who dare not 
 so much as jest in each other's hearing at 
 the foibles of their Emperor, are already on 
 the way to Byzantine conditions. Better fifty 
 years of factious Paris than a cycle of Philip- 
 pine Madrid ; thrice better when Paris alone 
 breeds the Velasquez. 
 
 If philosophizing militarists, German or other, 
 were given to viewing comprehensively the 
 relevant facts, they would be struck by the 
 circumstance that the European country which 
 to-day shows least of progressive virtue is 
 relatively the most militarized. Turkey, glared 
 upon by envious Christian eyes at every point 
 of her horizon, misgoverned, fanatical, im- 
 poverished, ignorant, yet maintains an army 
 that, relatively to her resources, is immense in 
 numbers, and obstinately efficient for its purpose. 
 The one continuous national effort made by 
 Turkey is military, unless we reckon as national 
 the almost universal support given to Islam. 
 Where other States spend more or less freely 
 on public schools, Universities, technical educa- 
 tion, the arts, and sanitation, as well as arma- 
 ments, Turkish public expenditure is practically 
 concentrated on military schools, barracks, 
 warships, and war material, with or without 
 proportional pay to troops. It would puzzle
 
 The Militarist Regimen 117 
 
 our militarists to detect the resulting civilization 
 in the lives of Kurds and Bashi-Bazouks, or in 
 any habits of skilled industry ; though there 
 seems to be plenty of respect for a constituted 
 authority that deserves none. The apologists 
 would seem here to be driven to the argument 
 that for Turkey militarism is a necessary evil. 
 If, indeed, any Government in Europe can 
 justly offer the plea, it is the Turkish. But 
 here, at last, we come to the truth that 
 militarism is an evil ; and if only that could be 
 brought home to the general consciousness of 
 Europe, the plea of necessity would not long 
 avail. 
 
 VI 
 
 With the case of Turkey under our eyes, and 
 the successive sophisms of militarism at length 
 wheeled out of the ring, we come to close 
 quarters on the counter-theory that war is 
 an evil of evils, and that the perpetual prepara- 
 tion for it cannot yield a balance of good. One 
 leaves the direct impeachment to the last, 
 because it is meat and drink to the militarist to 
 be met by that while he is full of his undissected 
 sophisms, conscious of anti-sentimentalism, and 
 confident that it is mere sentimentalism that is 
 opposed to him. It has by this time become
 
 n8 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 fairly clear that he is himself the typical senti- 
 mentalist, the true visionary, the amateur in 
 logic, and the tyro in sociology. And it is 
 now for him to see to the defence of his last 
 ditch. 
 
 That war is somehow a test and evocation of 
 true manhood is the ethical assumption that 
 underlies all of the apologies. As held by 
 Mr. Ruskin and others who have acclaimed 
 war without understanding it, the doctrine rests 
 upon the notion that war is essentially a trial of 
 strength, of endurance, of fortitude. That it is 
 this in some measure, like racing and leaping, 
 is true ; but that it is so first and last is the 
 delusion of men who have never studied it, or 
 the sophism of men who have. There never 
 was a time when war did not tend to turn upon 
 special cunning or special advantage, rather 
 than upon the fair trial of strengths. In the 
 warfare of savages, the differentiation is towards 
 ambuscade and nocturnal surprise devices 
 which when successful, our militarist will 
 infallibly tell us, amount to superiority, and 
 convict the vanquished of inferiority, in vigil- 
 ance, which is a form of strength. Thus does 
 the unfair, the furtive, the merely cunning, 
 begin to figure as a military virtue from the 
 start of the ethical discussion. 
 
 When the furtive virtues are developed all
 
 The Militarist Regimen 119 
 
 round, however, through the survival of the 
 furtive fittest, advantage must be sought in 
 other ways ; and, after some development of 
 drill and discipline, a new species of weapon is 
 the likeliest new departure. The combatant 
 with the better weapon develops his moral man- 
 hood by that means, and the less inventive is 
 wiped out as being less manly. As time goes 
 on, successful manhood tends to consist, belike, 
 in improving the weapons of defence, and the 
 better man is he with the better breastplate, 
 before which the heart untainted will fare ill. 
 If Shakespeare ever penned the imbecility, 
 ' Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just 
 (and the verse- tests are all against the attribu- 
 tion) ' why, then, the less Shakespeare he.' 
 Here, happily, the militarist and we of the 
 opposition are at one. The Greek victory over 
 the Persians at Platsea seems to have been due 
 in part to superior discipline, but mainly to the 
 wearing of defensive armour, a safeguard which 
 the Greeks in their own previous wars had 
 forced on each other. Every step in the 
 development of war is primarily an effort of 
 one combatant to get the better of the other 
 by an unforeseen trick ; and the question is 
 whether such an evolution is decently to be 
 described as a testing and evocation of true 
 manhood.
 
 i2o Patriotism and Empire 
 
 At certain stages, the normal tussle may for 
 a time come very near being an unskilfully 
 honest trial of strength. Before the Battle of 
 Leuctra, the Greeks seem to have gone out to 
 fight each other without any anxious regard to 
 superiority in numbers, and with pretty nearly 
 equal weapons. They drew up in opposite 
 lines, came together, and straightforwardly 
 hewed at each other in a way that we can 
 agree with the modern militarist in regarding 
 as unintelligent. Save insofar as the Spartans 
 practised a constant and strenuous discipline, 
 they were all merely testing their manhood 
 in the fashion of bulls and stags, not to say 
 cats and dogs. But at the Battle of Leuctra, 
 Epaminondas had an inspiration. He saw that 
 by dividing one half of his line in blocks and 
 moving them diagonally towards the remoter 
 end of the enemy's line, while the other half 
 of his marched on it in a straight advance, he 
 struck that half of the enemy a twofold blow,* 
 and could so destroy it ; whereafter, with only 
 the slight loss he had incurred in fighting one 
 half of the enemy with two to one, he could 
 
 * Mr. Grote oddly supposed that Epaminondas won by 
 keeping his centre and right ' comparatively out of action,' 
 while his left, in deep formation, fought the Spartan right. 
 The whole point of the plan was that the Theban centre and 
 right should follow up the blow of the left.
 
 The Militarist Regimen 121 
 
 attack the other half with nearly the same 
 advantage. 
 
 In its origin, the manoeuvre was rather moral 
 than scientific. The part of the Spartan line 
 at which Epaminondas first struck was made 
 up of the Spartan troops proper ; he knew that 
 if he annihilated them their allies would make 
 no great fight. Were it not for this racial or 
 moral motive, reinforced by the fear that the 
 dreaded Spartan hoplites might overthrow an 
 equal body of his own troops, he might never 
 have dreamt of such a stratagem ; and only 
 the slackness of the allies, with perhaps the 
 use of his cavalry in checking them, left him 
 free to overwhelm the Spartan right. 
 
 Such was, broadly speaking, the fortuitous 
 beginning of scientific tactics. Epaminondas 1 
 device was adapted by a hundred later com- 
 manders, as by Frederick at Leuthen, and by 
 Napoleon, with perhaps greater subtlety, at 
 Ligny. The sentimental militarist is committed 
 to calling these strategic successes evocations 
 of manhood ; the unsentimental civilian is 
 moved, on the other hand, to regard them as 
 at best victories of fox over wolf, of adroitness 
 over mere courage. We might as well see a 
 test of manhood in the strife of an unadvised 
 layman with an unscrupulous attorney. Critical 
 admiration we may give to the finesse and
 
 122 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 ingenuity of the victor, but the less said about 
 ethical implications the better. 
 
 In simple fact, then, we find that the so-called 
 Cobdenite ideal is almost chivalrous in com- 
 parison with the ideal of calculated war. The 
 word ' chivalry ' comes to us from a time when 
 knight was supposed to meet knight with no 
 thought save of a fair trial of strength, with 
 haply some intervention of deity. But we 
 have only to note the evolution of the knight's 
 armour to see how preoccupied he was with 
 the betterment of his chances. Nay ; outside 
 of the knightly class he never had a grain of 
 scruple in riding down the unarmoured foot- 
 man. The business of the medieval general 
 was to neutralize the knight's advantage, 
 whether by archery, by the ring of spears, or 
 by pits and calthrops. The English boy is 
 taught to glow at the thought of the advantage 
 his ancestors had over the French in their use 
 of the bow ; the Scotch boy learns to rejoice 
 in the foresight with which Bruce at Bannock- 
 burn kept five hundred horse ready to hurl on 
 the English archers, and dug pits and laid 
 spikes in them for the English knighthood. 
 Thus is our manhood attuned to higher issues. 
 
 The question for the cold-blooded civilian is, 
 How can the sentimental man of war get any 
 pleasure in the thought of the trick or ad-
 
 The Militarist Regimen 123 
 
 vantage which enabled him to win the battle ? 
 Pride in one's speed or strength is intelligible, 
 though not admirable ; but pride in having 
 won a race by tripping a competitor pride 
 which in a genuine trial of strength would 
 demonstrate baseness how does it become 
 manly in anything that pretends to be a trial 
 of strength ? The pretence is an imposture. 
 ' All is fair,' so runs the adage, ' in love and 
 war ' in the battle, that is, of men, and also in 
 the battle of the sexes, as regarded by the men 
 who approve of the other. The moral ad- 
 vantage would appear still to lie with com- 
 merce. The story of a manufacturer who ruins 
 a hundred poorer producers by temporarily 
 underselling them is still unpleasant to the ear 
 of the smoking-room ; it is only when the 
 principle is applied to warfare, and the danger- 
 ously courageous inferior races are mowed 
 down with machine-guns, that we thrill with 
 entire satisfaction. 
 
 Perhaps the best way to undermine senti- 
 mentalism about war would just be a general 
 course of instruction in naval and field tactics ; 
 for though the man of war must needs senti- 
 mentalize in order to sustain his self-respect, 
 the instructed civilian is apt to lose taste for 
 the thing. The mere explanation of tactics 
 is singularly disenchanting. In that modestly
 
 124 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 entertaining- work, The Life of Captain R. W. 
 Eastwick, there is a plain and unvarnished 
 account of how, in the year 1799, the English 
 frigate La Sibylle, commanded by Captain 
 Edward Cook, son of the circumnavigator, 
 captured the French frigate La Forte. The 
 English ship carried forty-four guns, and wa^ 
 very fully manned ; the French carried fifty 
 guns, but was greatly undermanned, having 
 sent off many drafts of her crew with prizes. 
 Coming up by night, the English ship covered 
 her guns and lights, and, not firing when fired 
 upon, contrived to make the Frenchmen believe 
 she was an Indiaman. Not till within two 
 cables' length did the Sibylle suddenly unmask 
 her lights and open fire. The crew of La Forte 
 did their best ; but their vessel being abnor- 
 mally high in build, her guns could not be so 
 laid as to come to bear on her assailant at such 
 close quarters, while the lower ship sent every 
 broadside easily to its mark. For an hour and 
 forty minutes the unequal fight lasted, till on 
 the La Forte out of three hundred there were 
 fifty -five killed, including the Admiral, the 
 Captain, and the first, second, and third Lieu- 
 tenants, with eighty-five wounded, while on the 
 English vessel there were only fifteen killed 
 and wounded, the enemy's fire having mostly 
 gone over the heads of the crew. Then the
 
 The Militarist Regimen 125 
 
 last French officer, a boy, struck his colours ; 
 and good Captain Eastwick, who has honestly 
 noted all the facts, tells how he, a prisoner on 
 the French ship, exulted in the cheer of the 
 victors. ' It filled the welkin with a glorious 
 sound which recorded the accomplishment of a 
 great deed, and I felt my heart beat faster, and 
 my blood go rushing through my veins with 
 pride.' 
 
 Such are in sooth the greatest deeds of war 
 successes in beating an opponent whose 
 hands are virtually tied behind his back. The 
 English Captain was fatally wounded ; and when 
 he died soon after at Calcutta, the East India 
 Company gave him a monument in Westminster 
 Abbey, whereon it can still be read that, ' after 
 a long and well-contested engagement,' he had 
 captured a French frigate of ' very superior 
 force.' Knowing how one such glorious victory 
 has been attained, the civilian mind grows 
 somewhat hardened concerning others. The 
 Battle of the Nile, for another instance, was 
 made known to many of us in our school-books 
 as a 'brave story' that 'can never die of age.' 
 But the school-books did not enlarge much on 
 tactics ; and perhaps, if they had, we should 
 not at that age have been disillusioned by the 
 explanation. What happened, as we learn in 
 later life, was that Nelson, finding the French
 
 126 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 fleet anchored fairly close inshore, wrought a 
 stroke of strategic genius by sending some of 
 his ships between the enemy's line and the 
 shore, and the rest on the outside ; thus putting 
 eight of his to five of the enemy, and in some 
 cases three to one, the others being unprepared 
 to move ; and so destroying first one half and 
 then the other. It was brilliant strategy, one 
 more variant of the move of Epaminondas ; but 
 to exult in it when one knows how it was done, 
 and to look on the result as a noble evocation 
 of manhood, is not easy to the unsentimental 
 landsman. There remains, of course, the senti- 
 mental landsman, who the other day figured in 
 his old character in the United States, bestow- 
 ing on an Admiral who beat a wooden fleet with 
 an ironclad fleet as high praise as ever was 
 given to any of his predecessors. Still, other 
 landsmen were found to wince. 
 
 The principle of being always two to one 
 is manifestly prudent, nay, scientific, but not 
 romantic. And that is the gist of war, accord- 
 ing to Napoleon, one of its mightiest masters. 
 The business, as he summarized it, consists in 
 so marching on your enemy that you outnumber 
 him at the point of battle, and do him the 
 maximum possible injury. We can but say, 
 inverting the Frenchman's comment on the 
 charge of the Light Brigade, Ce nest pas mag-
 
 The Militarist Regimen 127 
 
 nifique ; et cest la guerre. That which is 
 morally magnificent is not war, and that which 
 is war is not magnificent. 
 
 VII 
 
 'Not magnificent' is indeed a mild way of 
 describing war as we now begin to know it 
 those of us, that is, who have either seen it or 
 can realize it when competently described, or, 
 perhaps one should say, who are willing 'to 
 know what that is that they tacitly or actively 
 conserve. M. Verestchagin has recently told 
 us how f a very well-known Prussian general 
 advised the Emperor Alexander II. to have all 
 my military paintings burned as objects of a 
 most pernicious kind.' That general was well 
 advised, from a professional point of view. A 
 wide circulation of truthful pictures of battle- 
 fields would make it painfully hard to keep up 
 the conventional enthusiasm about fighting ; 
 and if the after-battle photographs taken in the 
 American Civil War had been generally familiar 
 to the people of the States, there would have 
 been less promptitude about the attack on 
 Spain. In the scarcity or absence of pictures, 
 however, there begin to accumulate a certain 
 number of word-pictures, and it is well to have 
 some of these in view when we form our
 
 128 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 opinions about the moral value of militarism. 
 The sentimentalists, of course, would have it 
 otherwise : for them war is ennobled by being 
 abstracted ; but we must respectfully insist upon 
 their having the courage of their opinions. 
 
 A notion of the real significance of war 
 begins to be brought home to the civilized 
 world by the works of some of the artists who 
 have done most to make fiction deserve the 
 praise of being the highest truth. It is, indeed, 
 denied of M. Zola that his truth is sufficiently 
 representative ; but I doubt whether those who 
 thus impugn his realism will apply their ob- 
 jection to his great epic, La Debacle. However 
 that may be, and however Tolstoy's pictures of 
 war may be held to be discounted by his gospel 
 of non-resistance, it will not be denied by 
 many outside of the school of Mr. Henley that 
 Thackeray is the truest painter of life and 
 character in English fiction ; and it is from him, 
 the creator of Colonel Newcome, that there 
 comes the demand : ' Why does the stately 
 muse of history, that delights in recording the 
 valour of heroes and the grandeur of conquest, 
 leave out these scenes, so brutal, mean, and 
 degrading, that yet form by far the greatest 
 part of the drama of war ?' the 'burning farms, 
 wasted fields, shrieking women, slaughtered 
 sons and fathers, and drunken soldiery cursing
 
 The Militarist Regimen 129 
 
 and carousing in the midst of tears, terror, and 
 murder.' It is from him, too, that we get this 
 vignette of Esmond's experience in one of the 
 campaigns of Marlborough, in a raid on Artois 
 and Picardy : 
 
 1 The wretched towns of the defenceless provinces, whose 
 young men had been drafted away into the French armies, 
 which year after year the insatiable war devoured, were 
 left at our mercy ; and our orders were to show them none. 
 We found places garrisoned by invalids and children and 
 women ; poor as they were, and as the costs of this 
 miserable war had made them, our commission was to rob 
 these almost starving wretches to tear the food out of 
 their granaries and strip them of their rags. 'Twas an 
 expedition of rapine and murder we were sent on : our 
 soldiers did deeds such as an honest man must blush to 
 remember. We brought back money and provisions in 
 quantity to the Duke's camp ; there had been no one to 
 resist us ; and yet who dares to tell with what murder and 
 violence, with what brutal cruelty, outrage, insult, that 
 ignoble booty had been ravished from the innocent and 
 miserable victims of the war ?' 
 
 Thackeray and Zola are likely to be long 
 read ; but the unsentimental sociologist may 
 do well to recall to his antagonists a more 
 ephemeral utterance, that, namely, in which the 
 Times correspondent briefly pictured the Battle 
 of Sedan : 
 
 ' Let your readers fancy masses of coloured rags glued 
 together with blood and brains, and pinned into strange 
 shapes by fragments of bones. Let them conceive men's 
 
 9
 
 130 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 bodies without heads, legs without bodies, heaps of human 
 entrails attached to red and blue cloth, and disembowelled 
 corpses in uniform, bodies lying about in all attitudes, and 
 skulls shattered, faces blown off, hips smashed, bones, flesh, 
 and gay clothing all pounded together as if brayed in a 
 mortar, extending for miles, not very thick in any one 
 place, but recurring perpetually for weary hours ; and then 
 they cannot, with the most vivid imagination, come up to 
 the sickening reality of that butchery.' 
 
 That the production of such effects as these, 
 the battering of so many myriads of human 
 beings into immeasurable dung, should rank as 
 a splendid activity, a test and evocation of the 
 highest manhood, is surely a remarkable proof 
 of the power of sentimentalism and claptrap in 
 human affairs. That the scientific control of 
 the business stands for a considerable mental 
 activity is, indeed, not to be disputed ; and it is 
 intelligible that men should find the science of 
 the matter interesting, though it seems odd that 
 any should find it pleasant. But if it be again 
 pretended that this form of mental exercise 
 counts for anything in solving any other sort 
 of human problem than those on which it is 
 primarily exercised, one must plainly say that 
 the claim is a piece of quackery. The mere 
 combination of military genius with superior 
 intellectual powers of any other kind is rather 
 the exception than the rule. Even the sane 
 and accomplished Caesar has not left us a
 
 The Militarist Regimen 131 
 
 memorable thought, any more than a plan for 
 human guidance ; and Alexander could never 
 have made a name in any path of peace. The 
 normal concomitant of military capacity is 
 simple steadiness of judgment and action, never 
 depth of insight into any social or other non- 
 military problem. Napoleon's ideas on eco- 
 nomics were childish to the last. Frederick, 
 most philosophic of Kings, was but a vigorous 
 repeater of the ideas of his teachers. Washing- 
 ton was a man of commonplace understanding, 
 unique only in his tenacity of purpose. Crom- 
 well was an ordinary fanatic in everything but 
 administrative faculty ; as a constructive poli- 
 tician he was naught. Maryborough, one of 
 the supreme captains of modern history, was 
 in peace a dullard, and was almost devoid of 
 the moral sense. Wellington and Nelson, so 
 different in temperament, were alike in being 
 Philistines of the Philistines. Lee and Grant, 
 exceptionally likeable men both, would in all 
 likelihood never have been heard of but for the 
 Civil War. Moltke is a modern superstition. 
 He never fought against a great general or a 
 really well-appointed army ; and that his ideals 
 should be held up to our respect is the measure 
 of the intellectual indigence of those who share 
 them. 
 
 Let the experts make as much as they will 
 
 92
 
 132 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 of their science ; but let them know that as to 
 the moral side of their vocation a good many of 
 their contemporaries emphatically endorse the 
 words of one who has seen war and handled its 
 abominations, and who does not deal in word- 
 painting : 
 
 ' I can understand that men find a pleasure in studying 
 the art of fighting, as they do in playing a game of chess ; 
 and I have allowed in my own case the fascination which 
 even its horrid reality is capable of exercising over me. 
 But for the man who deems it a pleasure and a glory to use 
 the science of war as a weapon wherewith to annihilate 
 thousands of human beings, for the delusion called 
 ' prestige ' or in the game of politics, I would have him to 
 know that it is a foul and monstrous thing, full of hideous 
 suffering, cruelty and injustice, with nothing to redeem it 
 save the courage whereby such miseries are endured. 1 * 
 
 VIII 
 
 In fine, if the militarist ideal and the practice 
 of war are to subsist in the future as in the 
 past, mankind will have something like a 
 sufficient proof that the belief in moral progress 
 is a hallucination ; that what happens is only a 
 change in the rhythm of evil. Military per- 
 sistence in the habit of thanking God for every 
 successful massacre of what are alleged to be 
 
 * Dr. C. E. Ryan, With an Ambulance during the 
 Franco-German War, 1896, p. 254.
 
 The Militarist Regimen 133 
 
 God's creatures begins to bring the evil more 
 directly home to the modern intelligence, instead 
 of glozing it as of old. Ethics apart, it is too 
 revolting to mere common-sense. The reign 
 of the old ideal is strictly the reign of stupidity ; 
 and the resort to the old practice is stupidity in 
 action, whatever intelligence be brought to bear 
 on the ultima ratio. To realize the sheer in- 
 tellectual incoherence of the minds that make 
 for war, it suffices to read one sequent and 
 careful study of the politico-military history of 
 one nation in one generation, the Down with 
 your Arms of the Baroness von Suttner. One 
 of the leading articles in the creed of our 
 sentimentalists is the unfitness of women for 
 political life. But a woman has been too much 
 for the militarist party, so far as logic goes, in 
 one of the leading military States. Her work 
 is the demonstration of their political incom- 
 petence, their intellectual shallowness, their 
 puerile instability of thought and purpose. 
 
 That the politics of peace, of anti-militarism, 
 are intricate and obscure is only too true : that 
 is one of the conditions of the prosperity of 
 militarism. It is perfectly true that merely to 
 abolish or greatly reduce armies, were that 
 speedily possible, would create a new economic 
 problem, or worsen an old one, in place of the 
 moral problem grappled with. In so far as
 
 134 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 there are sentimentalists of peace who do not 
 realize that a genuine social science is not a 
 simpler but a harder thing than the science of 
 war, the cause of peace is ill bestead. If the 
 social righteousness of the rational does not 
 transcend the social righteousness of the senti- 
 mentalists of slaughter, there is no hope for 
 social sanity. Rather, the friends of peace and 
 reason must base their campaign against war 
 on a scheme of social science, seeing in 
 militarism not only a substantive evil, but a 
 profound vitiation of the industrial problem. 
 Instead of taking that up with an eye to a 
 permanent provision for labour and a maximi- 
 zation of real wealth, we are being led by our 
 patriots into a more and more precarious infla- 
 tion of industry by way of an increasing 
 expenditure that creates no wealth whatever, 
 and in reality adds to the mass of parasitic life. 
 Certainly the problems of society hang together. 
 But that is no reason for keeping on a course 
 which essentially aggravates all of them. 
 
 It is not proposed here, when the comparing 
 of counsels on the subject has but begun, to 
 offer a detailed scheme of action towards the 
 gradual withdrawal of armaments, the substitu- 
 tion of a rational machinery for the settlement 
 of national differences, and the simultaneous 
 provision for a sound in place of an unsound
 
 The Militarist Regimen 135 
 
 development of industry. But the common - 
 sense lines of a method of proportional disarma- 
 ment are not hard to sketch. Assuming the 
 scheme of arbitration agreed on at the Hague 
 Conference to be a sufficient beginning on that 
 line, the friends of peace have next to agree on 
 a balance of naval power as between the six or 
 seven leading naval Powers, the balance to be 
 struck not as they at present stand, when some 
 are overtaking the special efforts of the others, 
 but in terms of an average of their relative 
 strength during, say, thirty years, or any other 
 considerable term which may be agreed on. A 
 given relative strength being settled, every 
 nation could without misgiving limit itself to 
 merely replacing, in terms of agreed - on 
 standards of fighting force, the ships chronically 
 lost in the edifying manoeuvres of peace ; or, it 
 might be, the decay or loss of certain ships 
 might be made a basis for a proportional 
 dismantling of vessels by other Powers. With 
 average good faith, and with freedom of mutual 
 inspection allowed to all the Powers concerned, 
 the scheme could be worked well enough, if 
 only there were the will. 
 
 Then, given the operation of such a scheme 
 of naval restriction, the same principles might 
 just as easily be applied to the restriction of 
 armies, making, say, the year 1875 the date
 
 136 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 from which to calculate the relative strength of 
 the chief European Powers. It is known that 
 Bismarck many years ago was ready to consider 
 a scheme of proportional disarmament ; and 
 though he had by the annexation of Alsace- 
 Lorraine put the worst of all possible obstacles 
 in the way of such an adjustment, as between 
 Germany and France, it is not impossible that 
 the growing spirit of Socialism among the 
 workers of both nations may evolve a com- 
 promise in the coming century. If not, it will 
 not be the elite of the workers who are 
 responsible, but the exploiting class which 
 everywhere sees in militarism the surest check 
 to democratic aspirations, and which to that 
 end fans continuously all the embers of old hate 
 among the peoples. 
 
 To abolish war, then, there must first be a 
 war of ideas. Yet if the saner spirits through- 
 out the world would but strive for a generation 
 to promote peace with a tithe of the energy that 
 in nearly every State has been incessantly spent 
 on war and its works since the dawn of history, 
 the issue would not be doubtful. Certainly it 
 is a tremendous ' if.' The other year we saw 
 the civilized United States, after a relatively 
 trifling effort to promote peace and quietness 
 in Cuba, zealously spend enormous sums and 
 immeasurable effort to add systematic destruc-
 
 The Militarist Regimen 137 
 
 tion to the long record of Cuban evil. Thus 
 are civilized men still constituted ; and their 
 political ethic must change ere their fortunes 
 do. Let the peacemakers look to it. Their 
 work is not to evoke for peace any such burst 
 of blind emotion as is so easily evoked for war, 
 but to build up mankind in a spirit of reason 
 a task for a lifetime.
 
 PART III 
 
 The Theory and Practice of 
 Imperialism 
 
 I 
 
 IT is when we come to the outstanding political 
 problem of the period the problem signalized 
 by the word Imperialism that all our issues 
 come into their clearest light. Patriotism, 
 conventionally defined as love of country, now 
 turns out rather obviously to stand for love of 
 more country ; and the militarism urged upon 
 us as a fountain of domestic virtues comes out 
 once for all, in our own case, as a needed instru- 
 ment of foreign expansion. The three ideals 
 are solidary. But a special set of pleadings 
 emerges on the new issue ; and in relation to 
 it the others take on special phases. 
 
 No change in the drift of British politics 
 since 1870, perhaps, is more marked than that 
 set up in the prevailing tone of allusion to the 
 colonies and dependencies of the State. It is
 
 Imperialism 139 
 
 since Mr. Gladstone's death, however, that the 
 tide has flowed highest. In the years of 
 Disraeli's ascendancy, from 1874 to 1880, the 
 ' imperial idea ' had indeed been swiftly and 
 successfully grown, to the point even of over- 
 shadowing Gladstonian Liberalism. On a 
 policy of naked aggression, ungilded by any 
 clear appeal to commercial interests, the adroit 
 leader of the Right was able to detach vote 
 after vote in the House from his rival's side ; 
 and we know that he at length believed he 
 had thrust Gladstone out of power for twenty 
 years. The crushing overthrow he met with 
 in 1880 was the decisive measure of the rela- 
 tive strength of the two men as creators of 
 opinion. What Disraeli had done was to 
 exploit the normal temper of Chauvinism on 
 such opportunities as then came in his way ; 
 and as a party policy, morals apart, his course 
 was quite astutely chosen. There was no 
 better way to play off elemental force against 
 elemental force ; and only the thorough ade- 
 quacy of Gladstone to the contest, with his gift 
 of evoking and even creating equally strong and 
 simple instinct on a higher plane, made possible 
 so severe a check to so prosperous a movement. 
 The two men spontaneously adjusted themselves 
 to each other's strength and weakness a thing 
 not seen in our politics since, and perhaps not
 
 140 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 again to be seen ; since the days of one-man- 
 leadership would appear to be almost over. 
 
 A powerful national tendency that has not 
 discredited itself, however, is not to be destroyed 
 in politics by merely pitting against it in one 
 election a contrary tendency : the check is only 
 temporary, and the struggle is but postponed, 
 with a probability meanwhile of gain in strength 
 to the checked movement. The state of 
 political culture which had made possible the 
 accession to the Disraelian policy of a score 
 of Liberal votes in the House, and of several 
 journals in the Metropolis, was not changed. 
 Gladstone was an inspirer and commander 
 rather than an educator ; he had really no con- 
 structive ideal fitted to oust the other, and he 
 was hardly settled in office when he found him- 
 self carried into strictly Disraelian courses. Of 
 each and all of them he duly repented ; but his 
 lapse was the expression at once of his practical 
 empiricism and of the real strength of the 
 forces he had seemed to conquer. They con- 
 sisted, roughly speaking, of (i) the 'service' 
 interests, which since his own abolition of pur- 
 chase in 1871 had become knit as never before 
 with the middle class ; (2) the specifically capi- 
 talist interests, which were directly involved in 
 Egypt, and were already reaching out towards 
 South Africa; (3) the general trading interests,
 
 Imperialism 141 
 
 which spontaneously leant to ' expansion ' as a 
 way of widening the market ; (4) the temper of 
 national pride developed in the latter-day com- 
 mercial aristocracy and rich middle class, as of 
 old in the aristocracies of feudalism, and of the 
 landlord system of last century. The forcing 
 forward of the Home Rule issue by the skill 
 and strength of Parnell in 1885-86, and the 
 energy with which Gladstone fought it up till 
 1893, kept that issue in the forefront, and called 
 off to it the forces of imperialism, which were 
 now nearly all arrayed on the side of Unionism, 
 and were thus organized on a new tactical 
 basis. But when the defeat of Home Rule 
 was followed by the withdrawal and death of 
 Gladstone, and his lieutenants, for lack of a 
 common ideal, decided to keep no constructive 
 policy whatever before the nation, imperialism 
 inevitably began to carry all before it. 
 
 A nation, roughly speaking, must be ruled 
 either by moral ideals or by appetite ; by the 
 critical spirit or by the acquisitive spirit, by its 
 reformers or by its self-seekers. Often, indeed, 
 the latter types hold each other in balance, and 
 so arrive at compromises ; but if one side is for 
 the time torpid, the other is sure to be doubly 
 active. Many of the reforms of the last seventy 
 years have represented the coincidence, in a 
 measure, of appetite and moral ideal, as in the
 
 142 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 combination of employers and workers to over- 
 throw the Corn Laws ; many others represented 
 the coincidence of moral ideals with party 
 interests, as in Disraeli's Household Franchise 
 Bill and Gladstone's act of Irish Disestablish- 
 ment. 
 
 In other instances, decisions taken on 
 grounds of party tactic came to be held on the 
 tenure of the moral ideal which best justified 
 them. But if neither party interest nor class 
 interest supplies a platform on which a moral 
 ideal can stand, and no party will determine to 
 build up its interest round such an ideal, it is 
 hard to see how the reign of appetite is to be 
 curtailed. The interests which have no rag of 
 higher morality to cover them need but put on 
 the draperies of immemorial instinct, national 
 egoism, and pseudo-philosophy, in order to sit 
 in the chair of rule. Such a dominion is now 
 in process of creation ; and just as in the days 
 of Palmerston and Disraeli professed Liberals 
 were found leaning to the doctrines of swagger 
 and conquest, so at present, when Liberal 
 leaders disclaim them, professed organs of 
 Liberalism announce that ' we ' do not share the 
 abstract objection to expansion. Imperialism, 
 in short, is the prevailing fashion of political 
 thought. And as its enthronement infallibly 
 means an increasing plague of militarism, and
 
 Imperialism 143 
 
 a fresh florescence of the spurious ethic of 
 patriotism on the lowest planes, it behoves us 
 to consider narrowly its pedigree and its pre- 
 tensions. 
 
 II 
 
 Some dispute has arisen in England over the 
 claim of some professed Liberals, that there is 
 a ' true ' as against a ' false ' imperialism, and 
 that what they affect is the true. Compre- 
 hensively speaking, the asserted difference is 
 that between the view that ' empire ' as thus far 
 evolved is a very fine thing, and the view that 
 a very fine thing ought to be still further deve- 
 loped. Obviously, those who take up the latter 
 position have an advantage. England has been 
 'expanding' during a century and a half, and it 
 is implied by the party of 'true' imperialism 
 that the expansion has been a profitable and 
 laudable process ; why then, on that view, 
 should it not continue ? Why not aim at a 
 British China as well as a British India ? It 
 seems to be supposed that if the empire-build- 
 ing of the past be pronounced aught but bene- 
 ficial, the critic is committed to advising the 
 immediate evacuation of India, a course which, 
 as will be elaborately and gravely explained to 
 him, would plunge India in anarchy. Of that
 
 144 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 very obvious proposition, however, we may 
 make a common ground for a somewhat more 
 extended theory of imperial policy. 
 
 That India must for an indefinite time con- 
 tinue to be administered by the British State is 
 a truth in no way affected by any opinion we 
 may form (i) of the process of its acquisition, 
 (2) of the effect of its possession on British 
 civilization, or (3) of the effect of British or any 
 other rule in perpetuity on Indian civilization. 
 If, then, the ' true ' or ' sane ' imperialism 
 consist broadly in the determination to go on 
 ruling India as far as possible for its own good, 
 we may, as true or sane imperialists, discuss all 
 three questions ; and by such inquiry we may 
 conceivably reach a justification for the refusal 
 to attempt, say, duplicating our Asiatic empire 
 in China. Many of our politicians instinctively 
 feel that the policy of extension is blind and 
 ultimately fatal, but beyond quoting Augustus 
 and Trajan they attempt no sociological 
 analysis, and, as aforesaid, they feel committed 
 to speaking of the existing empire as a thing 
 wholly glorious. They have thus no principle 
 or ideal to set against the ideal which the ex- 
 pansionists claim to sanction by that very 
 attitude ; and in practical politics their principle 
 of staying as we are is well-nigh hopeless. To 
 argue that we have already secured just the
 
 Imperialism 145 
 
 right amount of beneficent empire, no more 
 and no less, is nugatory as against men who 
 say we cannot have too much of a good thing. 
 The ' sane ' imperialist, then, if he would hinder 
 further expansion, must make out a case against 
 that ideal of imperialism which primes expan- 
 sionism ; and if he does this, he will find that 
 he must condemn the theory of imperialism in 
 the lump, while recognising the exigencies of 
 the situation it has thus far created. Empire 
 is one thing, and imperialww another. The 
 latter term may with special fitness stand for 
 the ideal which not merely accepts made empire 
 and makes the best of it, but holds the pursuit 
 of empire to be either at all times, or specially 
 at the present time, a course scientifically advis- 
 able in the interests of free and rationally 
 governed nations. It is in this fit and natural 
 sense of the term that it is here henceforth 
 discussed. 
 
 Ill 
 
 And first as to the pedigree of the principle 
 and the practice. The average citizen who 
 talks of empire is not very clearly conscious 
 that he uses a word which properly means 
 ' rule ' rule over other communities than his 
 own. As applied in the phrase 'our colonial 
 
 10
 
 146 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 empire/ it is already diverted to a merely 
 geographical sense, seeing that the colonies 
 neither pay tribute to, nor receive laws from, 
 the mother-country. Even the Sovereign is 
 'Empress' only of India, though the con- 
 venience of the expression ' the British Empire ' 
 has fixed it in use for the whole connections 
 and possessions of the United Kingdom. But 
 it is the more important to remember the 
 historical meaning of empire, seeing that it is 
 at empire, in a slight modification of the 
 historical sense, that imperialism aims. 
 
 The significant thing is that, to say nothing 
 of the most ancient known military empires, 
 which grew out of the conquest of city by city, 
 the most expressly * free ' or democratic of the 
 communities of historic Greece coveted empire 
 from the instant it became possible to her. It 
 was the determination of Athens to coerce her 
 allies, already made subservient to her gain by 
 the spending of their quota on her public 
 works, that provoked the Peloponnesian War, 
 which brought her empire to an end. And 
 that her policy of imperialism was politically 
 fatal remains clear whether or not we argue 
 that any other course was then conceivable for 
 her statesmen. Either Athens must dominate 
 all Greece by becoming a purely military power 
 like Rome, in which case her democracy and
 
 Imperialism 147 
 
 her culture must go by the board, or she must 
 be ruinously beaten back to her separate status. 
 It was indeed to the loss of her empire that 
 she owed the fresh growth of her culture in the 
 generation after the war, whereas Sparta, having 
 evolved none but militarist institutions, was as 
 bare of intellectual life after the fall of her 
 empire as she had been before. But the 
 principle of empire once admitted, in the lack 
 of the wisdom that could see its universal 
 fatality, there was in store for Hellas nothing 
 but one convulsive and coercive military unifica- 
 tion after another, down to the advent of the 
 Roman. After the rule of Athens, the rule of 
 Sparta ; after that, again, a limited Athenian 
 rule, got by triumph over the Olynthian con- 
 federacy; then the Macedonian rule, based on 
 the military experience of Thebes ; then, on 
 Alexander's death, the new swarm of Hel- 
 lenistic empires ; then the advent of the 
 Roman, doomed to the same dissolution. In 
 every instance the progression is one of social 
 disintegration under the guise of military 
 advance : decay of public spirit in Athens ; 
 decay of the Spartan ideal in Sparta itself; 
 decay of vigour in the post - Alexandrian 
 empires ; decay of class cohesion in Rome ; 
 decay of the whole Roman system under the 
 autocracy. 
 
 10 2
 
 148 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 Not that there would have been no social 
 problem but for imperialism ; on the contrary, 
 the Periclean system is seen to stave off the 
 social problem at Athens for the time being ; 
 but the process is merely one of evading the 
 Sphinx riddle till the Sphinx's claws have 
 clutched. From first to last imperialism 
 conforms to that formula. Instead of solving 
 the social problem by science, each community 
 in turn strives to set up unity for its clashing 
 classes of parasite and drudge by making them 
 collectively parasitic upon other communities. 
 The plan, of course, is not clear. The initial 
 motives are instinctively military, and in the 
 case of Macedon the social problem has not 
 yet clearly arisen ; but for all alike the question 
 in time becomes one of sheer self-maintenance 
 by conquest and domination. Athenian empire 
 began with the ' glorious ' repulse of the 
 Persians ; and in this ancient triumph the de- 
 generate Greeks went on glorying long after 
 the Romans had put them under the yoke. 
 But the curse of militarism ensues all the same, 
 whether its installation come by way of defence 
 or of aggression. The triumph of the Syra- 
 cusans over the tyrannizing Athenians was fol- 
 lowed by the tyranny of their own Dionysii ; 
 the pride of Marathon and Salamis was the 
 prologue to the fall of the Peirsean walls ; and
 
 Imperialism 149 
 
 had there been no Persian War, the Athenian 
 Empire and its ruin need never have been. 
 The social problem might or might not have 
 been solved, but at least it could hardly have 
 failed to be faced by later Solons. 
 
 As it was, democracy was distracted in the 
 direct ratio of the military stress. The social 
 problem bears a slow solution ; military problems 
 do not. Always the choice is being forced 
 between some honest incompetent Nicias and 
 some capable dishonest Alcibiades : the non- 
 democratic enemy has always the possible 
 advantage in singleness of policy, and though 
 the democracy tends to produce the larger crop 
 of capacity, the democratic method can least 
 well utilize it. Thus in the second empire of 
 Athens ' we see her sending out general after 
 general to recover some ancient possession or 
 to put down some new enemy, and in almost 
 every case accusing the general, on his return, 
 of inefficiency, negligence, or treachery, and 
 visiting these offences either with a severe fine 
 or more commonly with death.' Thus arises 
 the opportunity of Philip or of Alexander, of 
 the skilful plotter or of the great captain. 
 Democracy must fall ; and though the first 
 sequel of its fall be a free play of its remaining 
 energy in the intellectual life, the blight of 
 autocracy ere long destroys that, and we have
 
 150 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 left only the mindless and soulless peace of 
 pretorian-guarded Rome. 
 
 Subjectively considered, the course is no less 
 clear. It begins in the spirit of injustice ; the 
 lust for rule over others on the part of the man 
 who claims freedom for himself; the demand 
 for tribute by the man who hated to pay tribute. 
 Common honesty as between city and city 
 would have excluded the possibility of empire ; 
 but seeing that even the measure of honesty 
 that subsisted between citizen and citizen was 
 but a conventional marking out of the lines on 
 which one citizen should be free to live idly by 
 another's labour, it was above the moral range 
 of the group to discern the dishonesty of seeking 
 to draw a common revenue from the resources 
 of another community. A Socrates in the 
 earlier day of Pericles could have pointed out 
 that the policy of extortion as against other 
 cities could only make enemies to the plunder- 
 ing city ; and if the Socratic method had then 
 elicited the truth that such extortion was only 
 an application to intercivic policy of the private 
 practice of the men who constituted the cities, 
 the Socratic inference would only have been 
 the clearer all round. That inference the 
 Greeks could not draw. It remains to be seen 
 whether it can be drawn by the nations of the 
 twentieth century of the Christian era.
 
 Imperialism 151 
 
 IV 
 
 One of the most unpromising symptoms of 
 our case is the uncomprehending way in which 
 the British imperialist always scans the story 
 of ancient Rome. Noting the decadence which 
 is the upshot of the whole, he seems to suppose 
 that somehow Christianity will avail to save 
 later empires from the same fate, though Rome 
 was Christianized during the decline ; or that 
 haply the elimination of chattel slavery will 
 avert decay, though Christian Spain was free 
 from chattel slavery at home ; or that indus- 
 trialism will avail, though the Moors and the 
 Florentines were tolerably industrial. Any 
 theory will serve to burke the truth that the 
 special cause of decay is just empire. 
 
 Yet, as regards Rome, the sequence is as 
 obvious as any in human affairs. In the post- 
 regal period the spirit of patriotism enabled the 
 ruling class to turn the whole fighting power 
 of the community to the oppression of neigh- 
 bouring States ; and the social problem, always 
 being raised by the utter egoism of the ex- 
 ploiting upper class, was chronically staved off, 
 essentially at the expense of the subjugated 
 neighbours, by way of the planting of Roman 
 colonies on their soil, and formally by granting
 
 152 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 one political privilege after another to the 
 plebeians. The patrician reluctance to make 
 such concessions was extreme. Twelve years 
 after the first Secession of the Plebs, Spurius 
 Cassius (B.C. 486) paid with his life for pro- 
 posing, as Consul, to distribute some public 
 land among needy citizens, and to draw State 
 rents from the rest. The nobles saw in the 
 public land their proper patrimony. Thirteen 
 years later a tribune was murdered ; and seven- 
 teen more years elapsed before the Icilian law 
 could be passed distributing some land at Rome 
 to poor citizens. Political strife between plebs 
 and patriciate continued to alternate with the 
 wars in which they were united ; and a new line 
 of cleavage and adjustment began in the paying 
 of the soldiers, while the nearer neighbours, the 
 Latins, had to be admitted to some Roman 
 privileges. Still, the social evil remained un- 
 cured ; and after many Roman and Latin 
 colonies had temporarily relieved the strain, 
 there were passed by plebeian pressure (B.C. 367) 
 the Licinian laws, relieving debtors of interest, 
 limiting estates, and calling on landlords to 
 employ a certain proportion of free labour. 
 Such laws could not be enforced ; but now, in 
 virtue of fresh conquest, the unprivileged 
 Roman class could so force its claims on the 
 aristocracy that they were by degrees sub-
 
 Imperialism 153 
 
 stantially blended in a community of exploita- 
 tion of other States. A new populace infallibly 
 grew up in place of the old ; but henceforth 
 the stuff of the populace, bred under the code 
 of national plunder, yielded no material capable 
 of valid initiative. 
 
 The consolidated Romans could now wage an 
 imperialistic war with the rival Samnites, who 
 had preceded them as overrunners of Southern 
 Italy, and the nearer Latins, who pushed their 
 claims to Roman privileges ; and after genera- 
 tions of war, breeding a whole caste of trained 
 captains and administrators, all Italy became 
 Roman (B.C. 266) on various conditions of sub- 
 jection. Thus imperialized, the conquering 
 State rapidly proceeded to foreign war and new 
 conquest, the ancient Roman farmer class all 
 the while dying out ; the popular element in 
 the government disappearing in favour of the 
 Senate ; foreign tribute coming in to enrich the 
 latter ; and gladiatorial games arising to amuse 
 the imperialized populace. Twenty-three years 
 of war with Carthage might be said to fix the 
 Roman destiny of conquest ; and diplomacy, 
 as well as the Illyrian War, introduced the 
 Senate into the affairs of the Greeks. 
 
 Thus far, needless to say, it was a matter of 
 course that Rome should be militarist, were it 
 only as against the barbarians of the North ; so
 
 154 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 that there could be no question of pause on 
 the part of the administrative class. Between 
 barbarians, Carthaginians, and the Kings of the 
 Alexandrian succession, it was a struggle for 
 conquest on all hands. Our business is not to 
 censure the Roman Senate fora policy of which 
 no man could then impeach the general wisdom, 
 but to note how, in an age of struggle for empire, 
 the successful State was demoralized in the 
 ratio of its success ; and then to ask whether a 
 modern State does sanely to aim at empire 
 when no such destiny is in any sense forced 
 upon it. Within a generation of the subdual 
 of Italy, a Roman literature, imitative of the 
 Greek, had begun. In two centuries of aristo- 
 cratico-republican imperialism, as in a hotbed 
 of artificial stimulus and protection, that litera- 
 ture had reached its high-water mark ; and 
 thenceforth, under autocratic imperialism, it 
 decayed as rapidly as it rose, till, the brains 
 being out, the empire in the West fell before a 
 rabble of barbarians. Men fix their gaze on 
 the roll of early conquests, the final triumph 
 over Carthage, the acquisition of Spain and 
 Sicily, the defeats of Macedon and of Antiochus, 
 the controlling of the East, the acquisition of 
 Greece ; but they will not see that every gain 
 was a step nearer the break-up of the Republic. 
 To say nothing of the incessant influx of alien
 
 Imperialism 155 
 
 slaves, ousting the native stock, every fresh 
 evasion of the ever-renewed social problem 
 meant a further step towards the state of 
 quarrel among the ruling class themselves ; 
 every acquiescence of the common people in a 
 solution by way of outside plunder lowered 
 them nearer the status of a pleading proletariat. 
 The imperial people was ipso facto a community 
 diseased ; and wherever they imposed their 
 rule they infected with decay the subject 
 States. 
 
 Let it be asked how the decay could any- 
 where have been arrested without modification 
 of the ideal of empire, and the fatality will 
 exhibit itself at any point of approach. The 
 senators, it is clear, ought to have aimed at 
 preserving a free farmer class, instead of seek- 
 ing for large estates tilled by slaves. But the 
 senators were seekers of plunder and dominion 
 abroad, and how should they love fraternity 
 and freedom at home ? They should have 
 preserved agriculture, as a way of checking the 
 depopulation of Italy. But they had conquered 
 better grain-lands than Italy ; and when they 
 could extort grain as tribute, or grow it cheaply 
 in Sicily by slave labour and sell it in Rome at 
 a profit, how should they concern themselves 
 about home agriculture and population ? They 
 were personally comfortable enough. It would
 
 156 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 have been well to renounce the importation of 
 hordes of alien slaves, who loved Rome little 
 and could not be trusted to fight for her. But 
 then, slave labour served their luxurious wants ; 
 and their patriotism meant readiness to fight 
 and conquer and plunder in Rome's name, not 
 self-denial to keep Rome sound. The less 
 cynical complained of the decay of public spirit. 
 But when had public spirit meant anything but 
 seeking one's own interest through the State's ? 
 It was only a question of new methods of self- 
 seeking. Legal restraints passed into disregard ; 
 how should conquerors, educated in coercion of 
 the conquered, retain the habit of abiding by 
 law ? 
 
 Thus, within a century and a generation of 
 the subdual of Italy a century which saw the 
 mighty effort of Hannibal and its end the 
 imperial Republic had but arrived at being a 
 scene of aristocratic wealth and plebeian poverty 
 on a larger scale, with outside Italy clamorous, 
 impoverished, unfriendly, and with no faculty 
 left to cure the evil. The two Gracchi in their 
 tragic way exhibited the futility of the method 
 of force, the inability of the military spirit, even 
 when beneficently bent, to apply any other. 
 The first based himself on the selfish Roman 
 populace, who would not make common cause 
 with the Italian peoples ; the second, with
 
 Imperialism 157 
 
 larger views and capacity, based himself on the 
 claim of the Italians to equality ; both alike 
 had against them the main mass of the selfish 
 and furious nobility ; and both duly paid the 
 penalty. But Caius ere he died had called out 
 a new force of cleavage by making the middle- 
 class equites, the money-lenders and tax-farmers, 
 a counterpoise to the Senate. As posterity put 
 it, he ' made the Republic double-headed.' He 
 would have overthrown the whole system ; and 
 with his constructive energies he might have 
 built up a new and mightier empire, whose down- 
 fall might have been longer delayed. As it 
 was, his brother and he had only pointed the 
 way to the rule of the sword in civil dissension. 
 Henceforth the throes of the convulsion come 
 fast : after Marius, as servant-master of the 
 troubled State, comes the bloodier Sulla ; and 
 had not Caesar overthrown all, Pompeius had, 
 with no very different sequel. For persistent 
 empire in the end infallibly brings the imperator, 
 be the process slow or speedy ; and with the 
 imperator comes in due time the decadence of 
 empire, the humiliation and paralysis of the 
 spirit that had aspired to humiliate its kind.
 
 158 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 V 
 
 Not once in a thousand years does the lesson 
 seem to have dawned on any people. After all 
 the imperialisms of the Middle Ages, we find 
 the citizens of free Florence, as late as Savona- 
 rola, no less bent on empire than those of 
 Periclean Athens. Because they had once 
 held in subjection the neighbouring city of Pisa, 
 they would rule Pisa to the end, at whatever 
 cost of blood and enmity, denying her the in- 
 dependence they claimed for themselves. 
 Machiavelli and Savonaralo are two opposed 
 extremes of type : the one a subtle rationalist, 
 the other a Puritan fanatic ; but both alike 
 stood by the dogma of dominion over Pisa. 
 We might say that a Florence with such an 
 ethic did not deserve to remain free ; but it 
 may be more to the purpose to note that 
 she could not. Her little empire was the 
 millstone round her neck in the struggle for 
 survival. 
 
 Nearer our own life, we find the England of 
 the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries all for 
 empire over France. The men who at home 
 had chronically to struggle for their own 
 liberties were at all times ready to be united in
 
 Imperialism 159 
 
 a project for subverting- other people's ; and no 
 experience of the infallible sequence of evil 
 could cast out the spirit which dictated the 
 aggression, though as time went on it became 
 less feasible. Not in medieval history is to be 
 found a more perfect illustration of the curse 
 of empire than the sequel to the conquest of 
 France by Henry V. The steps are the old 
 series, quickened and complicated : first, evasion 
 of home problems by patriotic attack on a 
 neighbour ; second, triumph ; third, division 
 and decadence on the scene of conquest ; fourth, 
 gross demoralization, humiliating defeat, infamy, 
 expulsion, end of empire ; fifth, civil war at 
 home, with utter demoralization, lasting until 
 the military class is exhausted ; sixth, the 
 advent of a new dynasty of imperators. During 
 a century of empire, defeat, effort towards new 
 empire, and loss thereof, feudal England pro- 
 duced not one lasting name in literature ; nay, 
 it took another hundred years of comparative 
 peace to raise letters to the height at which 
 Chaucer had left them. 
 
 In that interval there had arisen the first 
 modern empire which rivalled in range and 
 power that of ancient Rome. Spain, bred to 
 arms by the long struggle with the Moors, 
 added province to province, heritage to heri- 
 tage, conquest to conquest, till her King held
 
 160 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 in thrall Peru and Mexico, Italy and the 
 Netherlands, 
 
 ' Tunis and Oran, and the Philippines, 
 And all the fair spice-islands of the East.' 
 
 And never did the sheer possession of empire 
 more signally entail decadence, paralysis, ruin. 
 Much was due, assuredly, to the monstrous 
 cancer of the Inquisition ; but then it was the 
 ideal of empire, rooted from the first in the 
 feud with Islam, that at length made possible 
 the special supremacy of the Inquisition in 
 Spain. Religious tyranny stayed its feet on 
 the necks of conquered Mexico and Peru ; and 
 among the better Spanish brains struck down 
 by the Church when they would advance on 
 her doctrine, there can have been few who had 
 not exulted in their country's conquest and 
 dominion over the heathen beyond seas. 
 Empire, once more, had made the imperator ; 
 and imperator and priest, going hand-in-hand, 
 alike drawing the gold supplied by the con- 
 quered lands, could strangle every effort at new 
 thought and new faith. 
 
 Englishmen, in the eternal way of national 
 vanity, set it down to their stock that they 
 developed differently. But had England pos- 
 sessed the same empire, and been able so to 
 live on extorted bullion, the same sequence
 
 Imperialism 161 
 
 could perfectly well have arisen in her case. It 
 was the possession of foreign mines of gold and 
 silver, and other forms of unearned wealth, that 
 atrophied the industry as well as the intelligence 
 of Spain ; the intellectual disease furthering the 
 other, above all when the Church's insanity 
 availed to expel the Moriscoes. Not a nation 
 in Europe but would have clutched joyously at 
 the same deadly possession. But the England 
 which could beat off the great Spanish Empire 
 at the very acme of its power was the ' Little 
 England ' of Elizabeth, the England of Shake- 
 speare and Spenser and Bacon, so trivial a 
 territory now in the eyes of the patriots of the 
 England of Mr. Kipling ! 
 
 Had England been able, again, to play 
 the part played in Europe by France under 
 Louis XIV., there was in her the spirit to do it. 
 Cromwell at his death had launched on a policy 
 of reckless imperialism, attacking Spain by 
 choice as being weaker and more easy to 
 plunder than France ; and had he lived, forced 
 as he was to seek revenue by conquest, he might 
 have gone far. But dynastic interests and strifes 
 kept England out of the field while France, 
 passing rapidly from a standing army of eighty 
 thousand to one of four hundred thousand, reaped 
 victory, glory, empire, decadence, and exhaus- 
 tion, till the Little England of Anne could 
 
 ii
 
 1 62 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 humiliate her, as Elizabeth's had humiliated 
 Spain. The strife of dynasties and parties in 
 England prevented the pressing of her advan- 
 tage ; but her day of empire was to come. It 
 began, broadly speaking, under the first Pitt ; 
 and, with waxings and wanings of the spirit of 
 militarism and conquest, it has subsisted till our 
 day, and will subsist yet a while. Because her 
 fortune thus far is better and her state healthier 
 than those reached by Spain in the seventeenth 
 century and France in the eighteenth, her sons 
 assume that for her there is no fatality in 
 empire, no law of decay. Let us then nar- 
 rowly scan her special problem. 
 
 VI 
 
 The one circumstance which greatly differ- 
 ences England's empire from those of Rome 
 and Spain is her advance in industry step for 
 step with her advance in empire. This im- 
 mensely important difference is plainly due, not 
 to any quality of race or special wisdom of 
 policy, but, after the political antecedents, to 
 the natural conditions on which her industries 
 specially rest. These are abundance of coal 
 and iron. Before empire could become a 
 source of national income, at a time when 
 normal commerce had set up commercial and
 
 Imperialism 163 
 
 industrial ideals, and when the other leading 
 European States had their energies otherwise 
 occupied, first a series of mechanical inventions, 
 and soon after the application of steam to 
 machinery in general, set her people upon 
 using their coal and iron to an extent that 
 began a new industrial era. Her empire was 
 thus from the first rather subservient to her 
 industry than subversive of it. Where Rome 
 and Spain became entirely parasitic, she con- 
 tinued to be productive ; and though latterly 
 her land has begun to pass out of cultivation 
 like that of imperial Rome, and her imports 
 greatly to exceed her exports, like those of 
 imperial Spain, the order of causation is so 
 essentially different that thus far her power is 
 not impaired. But a clear order of causation 
 there is, and the study of it reveals the probable 
 sequel. 
 
 Cromwell's policy having been arrested, 
 English empire broadly begins with the 
 dominance of Chatham, and in his hands the 
 policy of empire was the natural sequence to 
 the older policy of combination against France. 
 Walpole, for dynastic reasons a convinced 
 believer in peace, held by his alliance with 
 France, and opposed a war with Spain even 
 after those two thrones had made a private 
 compact to undermine England's commercial 
 
 II 2
 
 164 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 power. It was the Spanish policy of trade 
 monopoly that at length forced war, at the 
 instance of the commercial classes, on the un- 
 willing Walpole in 1739. Habitual English 
 smuggling, in breach of the Spanish monopoly 
 of Spanish-American trade, was naturally met 
 by the Spaniards with measures of search and 
 punishment ; and resentment of these was the 
 immediate motive of a war by which, of course, 
 the trading class hoped either to capture the 
 monopoly or break it down. Needless to say, 
 the English were as much bent on monopoly 
 for themselves, wherever possible, as the 
 Spaniards; and when in 1725 the Austrian 
 Emperor, as titular head of the Holy Roman 
 Empire, gave a trade charter to an Ostend 
 East India Company, the English and Dutch 
 Governments had alike protested. For the 
 rest, Spain had in 1718 striven to abet the 
 Stuart Pretender, and national conscience 
 was nowhere scrupulous about making war. 
 Walpole and his French contemporary, 
 Cardinal Fleury, had been almost the only 
 European statesmen of their age who really 
 sought peace and ensued it. In Spain, after 
 the Peace of Utrecht, Cardinal Alberoni had 
 the wisdom and the fortune to break down the 
 internal restraints on trade, and the immunity 
 of the nobles and clergy from taxation ; but in
 
 Imperialism 165 
 
 him the ideal of empire dominated all others, 
 and he had turned all the gain to fresh ag- 
 gression. 
 
 The war which began in 1739, and which, 
 by embroiling England with France, led to 
 their later struggle for empire in Canada and 
 India, might have sufficed to discredit the 
 policy which made it. After nine years of 
 strife, in which England, as ally of Austria, 
 fought the futile battles of Dettingen and 
 Fontenoy, and the no less futile naval battle of 
 Toulon, everything returned to the status quo 
 ante bellum, with the question of trade ab- 
 solutely hung up. The Powers had merely 
 exhausted each other; and in 1755, having 
 recruited, they resumed their grapple. On 
 the side of England, in the strenuous hands of 
 Pitt, the new war was at once much less 
 commercial in motive, and more propitious to 
 the lower commercialism in practice. He is 
 the best of the modern imperialists, a proud 
 seeker of national honour rather than gain, and 
 an inspirer of the same temper in his country- 
 men. Collective gain-seeking, in fact, was as 
 yet a lust without collective intelligence. The 
 Spanish War had been, as we have seen, a 
 noisy futility ; and Law's Mississippi Bubble in 
 France, and the South Sea Bubble in England, 
 had demonstrated only the immensity and im-
 
 1 66 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 becility of the appetite for unearned gain, a 
 thing Pitt never sought for himself, and was 
 not concerned to help others to seek. There 
 was probably more of systematic commercial 
 purpose in the counsels of France, whose 
 empire fell in Canada and India not more 
 through want of coherent administration than 
 through the insupportableness of the strain of 
 a first-rate land war against Frederick in 
 Europe, along with that of a first-rate naval 
 war against England. Pitt's policy of enor- 
 mous subsidies to Frederick was not that of 
 a seeker of money gain. It is the more im- 
 portant to note that imperialism in this, its 
 most grandiose form, does but in the end 
 subserve nevertheless the dominion of wealth 
 and the spirit of self-seeking. 
 
 Walpole had reduced the National Debt in 
 1739 to forty-seven millions ; in 1748, at the 
 Peace, it stood at seventy-seven millions ; in 
 1763, after the Seven Years' War, it had 
 reached one hundred and thirty-nine millions. 
 The vital meaning was that to the extent of the 
 interest on that sum a parasitic class was now 
 definitely added to English life ; and no idealism 
 on Pitt's part could hinder the sequence of evil. 
 Systematic Parliamentary bribery, involving the 
 buying and selling of seats outside, had been 
 begun by Walpole ; Newcastle continued it at
 
 Imperialism 167 
 
 Pitt's side ; and after Pitt's fall the method 
 was carried further than ever under the hand of 
 the King. System for system, that of England 
 had already grown as corrupt as that of later 
 republican Rome ; and the saving force was in 
 no sense empire for the class now enriched 
 from India was at least as corrupt and corrupt- 
 ing as any but the increase in industry which 
 proceeded in virtue of the natural conditions. 
 While the upper classes scrambled shamelessly 
 for unearned spoils, real wealth was still forth- 
 coming at the hands of those grimy heathen 
 colliers and pallid factory hands among whom 
 Wesley and Whitefield went evangelizing. 
 
 What could come of mere empire was first 
 seen in the loss of the American colonies, as 
 soon as imperialist finance was applied to them. 
 So far had imperialism gone that (apart from 
 the few typified by Chatham, who thought first 
 and last of keeping the empire united to make 
 head against France, and the few typified by 
 Burke, who further looked to the question of 
 trade) Englishmen in general certainly approved 
 of coercing the colonists. And but that their 
 hands were full in Europe, where they were 
 fighting France, Spain, and Holland, and in 
 India, where they were fighting Hyder Ali, 
 the King and his Ministers might have carried 
 their point in America for the time being,
 
 1 68 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 leaving the reaping of the whirlwind there for 
 the next generation. With the National Debt 
 increasing by annual leaps, with war on their 
 hands in three continents, they still had the 
 support of many for the new declaration of war 
 against Holland in 1780, because in the City 
 ' the spirit of gaming had seized all ranks, and 
 nothing was thought of but privateering.' It 
 was in the worst spirit of plunder that the 
 Dutch War was waged, and it was well for 
 England that the triumph of the colonies altered 
 her course. 
 
 The severance was precipitated by the King's 
 stupidity ; but it was only a question of time. 
 Seen as a humiliation by all her rivals, it was 
 for England in reality a wholesome rebuff; and 
 though the upper-class hatred and fear of de- 
 mocracy could soon afterwards plunge England 
 in war with republican France, her imperialism 
 had been for the time checked at its roots in 
 popular feeling. Practically, it was still a Little 
 England that finally baffled Napoleon, as for- 
 merly Louis XIV. and Philip II. The wealth 
 accruing from India was as nothing for purposes 
 of warfare : it was only by means of monstrous 
 additions to her already immense debt that the 
 younger Pitt was able to play his father's game ; 
 and those additions were made possible only 
 by the still more rapidly increasing industry of
 
 Imperialism 169 
 
 the nation. And it was the renewed industry 
 of France which, after the termination of her 
 Napoleonic empire, brought to her a renewal 
 of wealth and culture and civilization. Not 
 plunder and violence, but labour and peaceful 
 commerce, were the creative forces for both 
 nations, loaded as they were with the debts of 
 their wars of mutual frustration. 
 
 VII 
 
 After Waterloo, it seems to have been 
 realized by the intelligence of Europe that mili- 
 tarism and imperialism had alike pierced the 
 hands that leant on them. As against the 
 former chronic death-grapple for some arbitrary 
 'balance of power,' even Conservatives held by 
 non-intervention ; and the loss of the colonies 
 to England, no less than the decadence of 
 Spain, had shown the vanity of foreign pos- 
 sessions. In England, the old arrogance for a 
 time bade fair to cut off Canada ; but the new 
 spirit was strong enough to avert extremities, 
 and a relatively ethical if sociologically empirical 
 belief in the virtue of industry as the right 
 ground of a nation's greatness took for the 
 time the place of the dream of prestige and the 
 passion of racial enmity. With Cobden figuring 
 as a national and even as an international force,
 
 170 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 a sane ideal of civilization seemed at least to 
 be shaping itself. Macaulay, writing on Clive 
 in 1840, professed astonishment at the apathy 
 of his generation to the story of the rise of 
 British empire in India. An Anglo-Indian 
 Liberal, writing just after the Indian Mutiny, 
 sharply retorted that the reason was plain 
 enough, though Macaulay would not confess it. 
 Englishmen, he said, were ashamed of the 
 story a comment possible only at a time when 
 imperialism was in low repute. After the 
 Crimean War it probably went still lower, in 
 Macaulay's despite, with the credit of militarism 
 in general ; for no war had ever been more 
 flagrantly convicted of stupidity alike in the 
 deciding and the waging. Among thinking 
 people, the one countervailing thought was that 
 wrought up by Tennyson in his Maud the 
 ignobleness of so much of the life of peace as 
 carried on by those who decried war. 
 
 And herein lay, not, certainly, a rational 
 defence of militarism, but a clue to the funda- 
 mental evil which made militarism still possible : 
 the ancient schism of rich and poor, which had 
 broken out afresh in England ere the Waterloo 
 bonfires were cold, and which in France had at 
 last made the way for the Second Empire. 
 Industry and its abstract ideal, the honest 
 rendering of service for service, had so far
 
 Imperialism 171 
 
 withstood all the social maladies set up by the 
 evil ideals of the near past ; but it brought its 
 own, or, rather, it did but alter the incidence of 
 the oldest social malady of all. Under industry 
 as under feudalism, barbarism, Greek demo- 
 cracy and Roman aristocracy, the ultimate 
 success, the practical ideal, is still the power to 
 live luxuriously without rendering any service. 
 Speaking not deductively and ethically, but 
 inductively and historically, we may safely say 
 that the definite preponderance of that ideal in 
 any State is the beginning of the end. The 
 preponderance of the reverse ideal would a 
 fortiori be the beginning of a new life, but from 
 such preponderance every State is yet far. In 
 France, the moneyed class could overthrow the 
 mid-century republic, after the republic had 
 overthrown the moneyed class's monarchy ; and 
 significantly enough the new empire revived 
 militarism to the uttermost of its power, though 
 it intelligently enough encouraged industrialism 
 at the same time, by way of pacifying its prole- 
 tariate. Striving to check discontent by more 
 imperialism, it went down as every empire one 
 day must; but in the Third Republic as in the 
 others the social problem presses hard and 
 steadily. Hence, though that problem is visibly 
 much aggravated by militarism, there arises a 
 source of motive power for militarism over and
 
 172 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 above the still unslain spirit of racial enmity. 
 In England, with differences of time in the hot 
 fit and cold fit, the same contagions work to 
 similar effect ; and in Germany the discord 
 between the ideal of empire and that of 
 Socialism is full of evil promise. 
 
 It behoves us, however, to analyze in particu- 
 lar our own problem. Here, latterly, the strife 
 of classes has been on the whole less marked 
 than in Germany and France, the movement of 
 imperialism having rather forestalled than fol- 
 lowed industrial pressure. Pressure there has 
 been ; but the relative elasticity of English trade 
 conditions, turning as they largely do on the 
 readily alterable rate of coal-supply, has thus 
 far averted a crisis. The crisis, however, lies 
 ahead ; and in the imperialist movement is to 
 be seen a half-instinctive reckoning on it. It 
 is seemingly felt on all hands that, between 
 competition and the expanding power of ma- 
 chinery, our trade is within sight of its limits ; 
 that the existing field of investment is all laid 
 out, and that in some creation of ' new markets' 
 his to be found te only cure that the case admits 
 of. A leading statesman has put the idea in 
 the memorable proposition that we must ' open 
 up new markets in the waste places of the 
 earth.' In that egregious saying lies implicit 
 all the commercial theory of the situation. The
 
 Imperialism 173 
 
 primary object is not to buy, but to sell, and 
 receive goods in return to sell again ; all to the 
 end of heaping up more capital for investment. 
 Our own toilers are not to do more consuming, 
 to begin with : it is not their lot that is in 
 question ; at most it is assumed that they 
 can prosper only through the prosperity of 
 capital. 
 
 How far a distinct conception of this kind is 
 a primary stimulus to imperialism we need not 
 inquire. Without doubt, the mere pride and 
 passion of nation and race are still the prime 
 factors with many, as in the case of the Dis- 
 raelian imperialism of 1876-80. But the con- 
 cept of commercial interest does emerge more 
 and more distinctly, and it is to it, finally, that 
 appeal has to be made to carry the point against 
 criticism. We have specially to consider, then, 
 the elements of the commercial argument, taken 
 with and without the notable profession of dis- 
 interested zeal for the welfare of the human 
 race, or at least of the lower races, which 
 commonly embroiders it. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Shortly put, the imperialist's case is that 
 expansion of ' the empire ' is necessary
 
 174 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 (1) To provide openings for the emigration 
 of our superfluous population ; and 
 
 (2) To ' open up fresh markets.' 
 
 When answered that we need not own our 
 markets, and that trade normally goes on be- 
 tween different States, he answers, 
 
 (3) That ' trade follows the flag.' 
 Incidentally he is apt to point to the benefits 
 
 bestowed by British rule on the natives of 
 India and Egypt; and he is at times led by 
 the exigencies of argument to affirm that the 
 bestowal of such benefits is his and his nation's 
 master passion ; though the previous propo- 
 sitions might be supposed to invalidate it for 
 the intelligence even of the lowest races con- 
 cerned. It is fit, however, that the pleas should 
 be weighed singly as well as in collocation. 
 
 And first as to the formula about scope for 
 emigration. Only actual observation could 
 convince one that this plea is ever used in 
 good faith, so nakedly does it collide with the 
 notorious statistical facts. A glance at the 
 Registrar-General's returns shows us that year 
 by year from two to six times as many British 
 emigrants pass to the United States as to all 
 the colonies together. Between 1853 and 1897 
 there emigrated from these islands nearly eight 
 and a half millions of British and Irish-born 
 subjects ; and of these, over five and a half
 
 Imperialism 175 
 
 millions went to the States, against little more 
 than two millions who went to British colonies. 
 The emigration figures for 1895 stand : 
 
 United States . . . 195,632 
 Australasia .... 10,809 
 British North America 22,357 
 
 six going to the republic for one that went to 
 the colonies. 
 
 Furthermore, the regions in which alone 
 there is any ostensible prospect of ' expansion ' 
 in the near future are precisely those which 
 offer least outlet for genuine emigration : to wit, 
 China, uncolonized Africa, and parts of South 
 America. Those, then, who first put forward 
 the ' outlet ' plea were either ignorant doctri- 
 naires who did not seek the most elementary in- 
 formation on the issue on which they offered 
 counsel, or persons who had not the excuse of 
 ignorance. It belongs to normal human nature, 
 however, tnat worthless arguments, once floated, 
 should be caught at by people conscious of 
 having no other, and therefore glad to believe 
 in any put in their way ; and one sees this im- 
 pudent absurdity gravely vended in reputable 
 Liberal journals, and by citizens incapable of 
 framing the frauds they endorse. Thus does 
 imperialism make headway. 
 
 But supposing that the desired expansion
 
 176 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 were really a means of relief to surplus popula- 
 tion, the theory on which such relief was sought 
 would be only the clearer an illustration of the 
 hand-to-mouth ideal involved. It is implied 
 that there is to be no social science, no control 
 of population by reason and knowledge, no 
 provision for it at home by better use of the 
 land ; nothing but a fatal drift of blind instinct 
 and blind competition so long as emigration 
 can take place, and after that the deluge. And 
 as other nations, in the terms of the theory, 
 must be mostly in the same case, our ideal is 
 to let the deluge fall on them. The Germans, 
 with an increasing and largely poor population, 
 partly profess the same belief in colonies as 
 outlets ; the French, with a stationary and 
 therefore a less poor population, seek colonies 
 where they do not colonize, and hardly pretend 
 to do so. The struggle for life, then, lies 
 between such States as Germany and England ; 
 and all other European peoples Spaniards, 
 Italians, Swiss, Dutch, Scandinavians are on 
 the new population theory doomed to speedy 
 misery, Russia escaping for the time in virtue 
 of her vast territory. Meantime England and 
 Germany must fight to the death ; and the sur- 
 viving nation will go on till, even the States 
 being full, the human race goes to ruin for want 
 of the sense to restrain its rate of breeding.
 
 Imperialism 177 
 
 Such is, in its logical development, the social 
 Welt-Anschauung that rules the hour. 
 
 To turn from the theory to the facts is to 
 realize once for all the character of imperialist 
 sociology. It is a tissue of false conclusions 
 from falser premisses. Germans, like Britons, 
 are found emigrating wholesale to the United 
 States. Of 224,000 German emigrants between 
 1893 an d 1897, 195,000 went thither; and so 
 long as emigration is the accepted solution of 
 the problem, it is there open to them as to 
 anybody else. Italians emigrate alike to North 
 and South America, settling in myriads under 
 alien flags, while their misgoverned motherland 
 spends blood and treasure in a senseless clutch 
 at waste places about Abyssinia. Swiss, Dutch, 
 and Scandinavians either limit their families or 
 emigrate to the all-receiving United States. 
 The claim, in short, that this one country must 
 for its own preservation from distress head off 
 all others in confiscating territory from the 
 lower races, is a rather weak variation on the 
 classic plea of the Wolf versus the Lamb. 
 
 Putting aside, then, the ' pasteboard portico ' 
 of the pseudo-Malthusian theory, we come to 
 the real motives : (i) The primary desire of the 
 speculative commercial class for new grounds 
 in which to buy cheap and sell dear ; (2) the 
 suffusive instinct of spoliation and dominion 
 
 12
 
 178 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 which, on the part of the services and the 
 general public, backs them up ; and (3) the 
 sinister interest of those industrial sections 
 which thrive on the production of war material. 
 It would be hard to conceive a more mindless 
 system of social evolution than that presupposed 
 by the resort, at this time of day, to the early 
 ideal that trade is best to be pushed by barter 
 with semi-barbarians. In the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries, as temporarily in ancient 
 times, the pursuit and proffer of exotic products 
 enlarged commerce and consumption and the 
 arts of life. In our own day we have found 
 that, with an ever - increasing production of 
 export and import goods, there is no propor- 
 tionate heightening of consumption and of the 
 arts of life among the mass of the people. The 
 true problem, then, is not to induce more un- 
 civilized people to buy our products and pay 
 for them with theirs, but to increase the con- 
 suming power of the producing masses already 
 interchanging. A raising of the standard of 
 comfort among our own mass, a substitution of 
 decent conditions for hideous misery among 
 the lower strata of the imperial State, would 
 at once widen markets in an indefinitely pro- 
 gressive degree ; while no amount of expansion 
 in Asia and Africa, as things now go, can 
 conceivably lessen our own normal rate of
 
 Imperialism 179 
 
 pauperism. Nay, the imperialist implicitly 
 claims that such expansion will alone avert 
 an increase in our imperial pauperism. How 
 perfectly insane, then, or how grossly sectarian, 
 by his own showing, is the ideal he would have 
 us embrace! Imperial England has propor- 
 tionally more and worse poverty than almost 
 empireless France ; much more than Switzer- 
 land, Holland, and Scandinavia. Such are the 
 fruits of imperialism ; and the prescription is, 
 More imperialism I 
 
 It will at this stage be argued, perhaps, that 
 English industrialism, centring as it does on 
 the process of exhausting the coal-supply, is 
 incurably artificial as compared with that of 
 most other countries ; that we must ' dree our 
 weird'; and that the way to do so is just to 
 keep up the pace till, with the end of superiority 
 in coal, the game is up, and our empire and 
 civilization crumble together. That some such 
 notion is behind some of our imperialism is 
 likely enough ; it would in fact be the soundest 
 possible statement of the imperialist case in 
 terms of imperialist practice and economics, 
 though the majority would probably be loath to 
 avow as much. But supposing the case to be 
 put with such hardy cynicism, or, let us say, 
 pessimism, the answer is again plain. If 
 English civilization is in a way to fall to de- 
 
 12 2
 
 180 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 cadence as soon as the coal is gone and on 
 the present lines it must infallibly so fall it is 
 the business of sane Englishmen, not to quicken 
 the pace and hasten the ruin, but to substitute 
 sound bases for the unsound as carefully, yet as 
 quickly, as may be. 
 
 As matters stand, the experts promise us 
 some fifty years more of fairly abundant coal 
 and iron, and then a closing of most of our 
 blast furnaces. The crisis may come even 
 sooner ; for if the immense mineral resources 
 of the United States are developed with modern 
 rapidity, that competition alone might suffice 
 to ruin the English trade before coal has 
 actually become scarce. Meantime, the very 
 policy of expansion itself may destroy the home 
 industry it is professedly undertaken to further. 
 Already the cheap labour of India and Japan 
 is made the basis for a new competition with 
 British manufactures ; and our politicians are 
 found staying themselves on the unspeakable 
 theory that the radical cure would be bi- 
 metallism, since that would put our currency 
 on all fours with the Eastern. Let the ' break- 
 up of China' only go on as our European 
 plotters would wish, or let China merely develop 
 in Japanese fashion, and the unmeasured coal 
 and iron deposits of the Chinese territory, with 
 the enormous mass of cheap Chinese labour,
 
 Imperialism 1 8 1 
 
 may rapidly be brought into the competitive 
 field. In that case British capital will go 
 whither it can find most profitable employment; 
 and as population, under the present social 
 system, must needs pass away when industrial 
 demand falls off, the empire of England will 
 be a tale that has been told. All of these 
 developments are perfectly likely on the face 
 of the case, yet not a word of them do we hear 
 from the patriots and politicians who hound on 
 the people to further empire. Not a finger, all 
 the while, do they move to give England once 
 again that root in agriculture which should save 
 her from becoming a deserted dust-heap while 
 France and Spain haply grow richer and happier 
 in virtue of their enduring relation to the forces 
 of production. And not a hint, finally, is 
 breathed of the possible bequest of an immense 
 National Debt to a generation stripped of the 
 sources of wealth which encouraged and enabled 
 their unscrupulous predecessors to incur it. 
 
 The relevant sense, then, in which trade 
 ' follows the flag ' is this : that the flag is the 
 means by which the gamblers of trade can best 
 find their way to new grounds of exploitation, 
 leaving the seat of ' empire ' at home to sink, it 
 may be, like a deserted ship. Doubtless there 
 is a temporary alternative. Denuded of pro- 
 ductive industries, and therefore of industrial
 
 1 82 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 population, England may for a time remain a 
 seat of empire as did Italy until the transference 
 of the Roman centre to Constantinople. Her 
 soil would be owned and divided as pleasure- 
 ground among an aristocracy of capitalists, who 
 would employ simply the labour needed for 
 their own service, their incomes being drawn 
 from investments or industries in other regions. 
 With their wealth they might for a time buy 
 army and navy enough for the control of their 
 subject territories, were these menaced, and they 
 might somehow pay or compound for the interest 
 on the National Debt ; or they might be spared 
 that outlay by a regimen of peace. But either 
 way, the duration of the empire, as British, 
 would be a mere question of time. No empire 
 can long subsist as such when the sources of its 
 wealth are outside of its proper soil. As we 
 have seen, the one decisive difference of con- 
 ditions between the British Empire and those 
 of Rome and Spain is the possession of an 
 adequate source of real wealth and power in its 
 home industry. Once that is gone, decadence 
 must follow in the one case as in the others. 
 
 It would perhaps not be far wrong to say 
 that commercial decadence is already begun 
 when the cry that ' trade follows the flag ' is 
 used to work up the home population to some 
 scheme of ' imperial federation ' under which
 
 Imperialism 183 
 
 the resources of the colonies may be drawn 
 upon for the forcible expansion and mainten- 
 ance of empire against rivals. When British 
 trade was in a state of energetic expansion, no 
 such cry was heard. In those days it was 
 taken for granted that in the future, as in the 
 past, trade would naturally go on between 
 different nations, and that Britain was com- 
 petent to trade with the subjects of other flags, 
 as they with each other. Hundreds of consular 
 reports, however, attest that in recent years 
 British trade is being headed off in many 
 foreign countries by the more intelligent com- 
 petition of Continental traders, who take pains 
 to meet special demand where the English 
 trader will not. Perhaps, after all, it is sheer 
 prosperity that has made him careless ; but 
 there are other possibilities. English life for a 
 generation back has become in every decade 
 more thoroughly leavened with the spirit of 
 gambling ; and that spirit normally tends to 
 cast out the methods of scrupulous industry. 
 More and more, for twenty years back, has 
 stock-jobbing enterprise run either to semi- 
 fraudulent domestic undertakings or to foreign 
 mining adventures, which proceed upon no 
 proved knowledge and cater for no sound 
 demand. And so far as is yet seen, the ex- 
 ploitation of South Africa, which is for the
 
 184 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 present the chief theatre of imperialist instincts 
 and interests, is doing no more for human 
 needs than the gold -mining of the past in 
 California, where one of the permanent results 
 was the destruction of great areas of cultivable 
 land. 
 
 In any case, the notion that our trade is to 
 fall back more and more on our colonies and 
 ' possessions ' for the future is at once an 
 economic fallacy and a moral retrogression. 
 If it were true that we grow less capable of 
 trading with foreign peoples, it would be a 
 thing to be ashamed of rather than to boast 
 about ; and our statesmen, instead of pluming 
 themselves on such a mark of insularity, ought 
 to strive hard to wipe it out. If economic 
 science had not gone so completely out of 
 fashion among them since Cobden's day, they 
 would see that even the competition of other 
 nations with British trade in foreign fields ought 
 in natural course to lead to British gain. 
 Great commercial rivals remain great potential 
 customers. Germany, France, and the United 
 States continue to offer us their special products ; 
 and in ordinary course they can be paid for 
 these only by our products. If, then, our 
 statesmen and our traders believe in the con- 
 tinuance of our productivity as they affect to do, 
 they should look to increased trade with our
 
 Imperialism 185 
 
 rivals themselves as a compensation for their 
 competition with us in outside markets. 
 
 But it becomes increasingly doubtful whether 
 our predominant class any longer believes 
 either in a continuance of our productivity or 
 in the scientific principle of Free-trade the 
 scientific principle, that is, as distinct from the 
 demand that, say, Russia shall not be allowed 
 to secure new ports unless she opens them to 
 our commerce. The suggestion of an imperial 
 federation with a tariff favouring all goods pro- 
 duced within the empire is already a repudia- 
 tion of the Free-trade principle ; and it is, more- 
 over, a resort to a policy which this country 
 refused to permit to China in the past. British 
 trade was forced upon China at the cannon's 
 mouth when her statesmen desired to make a 
 ring-fence round their empire. On the new 
 theory, it is our cue to make such a ring-fence 
 for ourselves. And to whose gain ? To the 
 gain of capitalists in particular, since the mass 
 of consumers are to pay more for their goods 
 in the name of empire. 
 
 Such a policy may please the majority in the 
 mother-country, so completely does the invest- 
 ing and exporting interest at present rule our 
 counsels ; but that it can captivate the mass of 
 the colonists is hard to believe. In any event, 
 the resort to it would at once create a capital
 
 1 86 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 difficulty all round, through the forced rivalry 
 of the United States. A differential tariff 
 against the States in Canada would be answered 
 by a worse tariff against Canada in the States ; 
 and the existing industrial difficulties of Canada 
 would be made unbearable. Some perception 
 of this appears to be implied in the vague talk 
 about an Anglo - American or ' pan - Anglo- 
 Saxon ' alliance, which for the moment has 
 superseded talk about imperial federation. It 
 is a vain dream. In the nature of things there 
 can be no ' pan-Anglo-Saxon alliance,' even if 
 the imperialists of England should grow rational 
 enough to conciliate the hostile Irish element 
 in America and Australia by granting Home 
 Rule to Ireland. The republic and the 
 monarchy cannot join, save for purposes of 
 common-sense diplomacy. The thought of 
 their doing so is but a sentimental outcome of 
 their sinister joint jubilation over the defeat of 
 Spain in the recent American war of aggres- 
 sion. In the lamentably familiar fashion, the 
 spirit of malevolence ministers for the moment 
 to the spirit of union ; but never in human 
 history has that ministry meant any durable 
 fraternity. In each State singly, the schism of 
 class interest survives all collusions for national 
 strife ; and till that sore is healed, though, 
 haply, there may be abstinence from the
 
 Imperialism 187 
 
 supreme stupidity of war, there will be no vital 
 union among separate States. It would be 
 strange indeed if the mass of the people in the 
 colonies should consent to burden themselves 
 with an imperial expenditure for the mainten- 
 ance of the system which makes life in the 
 mother-country so hard for myriads that they 
 must needs become colonists. 
 
 IX 
 
 We come back, then, to the vital aspect of 
 imperialism for the mass of the working popula- 
 tion. The only interests really furthered by 
 fresh expansion are those of the speculative 
 trading class, the speculative capitalist class, 
 the military and naval services, the indus- 
 trial class which supplies war material, and 
 generally those who look to an imperial civil 
 service as a means of employment for them- 
 selves and their kin. What is more, the 
 present imperialist policy deliberately subsidizes 
 those interests. Parliament has of late years 
 voted huge naval expenditures on the express 
 ground that they are necessary to promote the 
 interests of British commerce. These votes 
 have been granted at times when the un- 
 employed working population was abnormally 
 small. Let, however, the same Parliament be
 
 1 88 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 asked to vote a tithe of the sums in question 
 for the relief of masses of unemployed men, and 
 the appeal would be rejected without debate, 
 on the score that such provision is outside the 
 proper functions of Parliament. The proper 
 function of Parliament, as now conceived, is to 
 spend as many millions as possible in the 
 interests of the moneyed and well-to-do minority, 
 while toiling men at the last extremity are left 
 to the niggard operations of the machinery for 
 supporting paupers. The supreme effort bids 
 fair to be made not for the production or 
 diffusion of real wealth, but for the barren 
 enterprise of gold-mining, in the interest of 
 which it is that we are now being embroiled in 
 South Africa, the single one of our ' possessions ' 
 which annually absorbs more wealth than it 
 returns. Such has been the course of imperial- 
 ism in the past ; such will it ever be. 
 
 As against all the sophistries we have passed 
 under review, the central truth falls to be stated 
 thus : imperial expansion is substantially a 
 device on the part of the moneyed class, 
 primarily to further its own chances, secondarily 
 to put off the day of reckoning as between 
 capital and labour. It does not and cannot 
 bring a socially just solution any nearer : it 
 does but secure a possible extension of employ- 
 ment for labour on the old terms. In so far,
 
 Imperialism 189 
 
 then, as labour is led by any or all of the 
 sophisms of imperialist patriotism, it is gulled 
 to its own ultimate perdition. While imperialism 
 prospers, there will be no vital social reform ; 
 and reactionary Ministers have begun to see 
 that by playing the game of militarist imperial- 
 ism they can safely push aside the appeal for 
 such reform. One of the first sequelae of the 
 triumph of Omdurman was the definite repudia- 
 tion of Ministerial promises in the direction of 
 Old Age Pensions. Prestige so won could be 
 set against democratic displeasure. All the 
 while Old Age Pensions, as contemplated from 
 the imperialist point of view, were to be no 
 vital innovation ; they were conceived, not as 
 a first step towards the right distribution of 
 wealth and the rectification of industrial evil by 
 maximizing consumption, but rather as a mere 
 dole to mitigate the sordid sorrow of pauperized 
 old age. The Roman Empire did more for its 
 worthless city population of idlers when it gave 
 them bread and games. Yet even this con- 
 templated dole is flinched from when there is 
 reason to think that it can be withheld without 
 party disaster. It is felt to be more important 
 to subsidize the Church and the landlords, as 
 the steadiest backers of the imperialist party. 
 
 Under greater pressure, pensions may one 
 day come from the same hands, in the same
 
 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 spirit, for the same end. Meantime it is 
 thought to be sufficient to assure the proletary 
 that he is an heir of empire ; that he is one of 
 a dominant race ; that he shares in ' our pos- 
 sessions ;' that, like Osric in the play, he is 
 ' spacious in the possession of dirt.' If the 
 British proletary be really impressible by such 
 appeals, he is fit for the fate that befalls him 
 as fit as the Romans who lent themselves to 
 the enslaving of their neighbours at the call of 
 their patrons. But it is the barest justice to 
 him to say that it has never been he who 
 prated of possessions and domination and 
 empire ; though some who claim to speak in 
 his name may do so. One finds a professed 
 Socialist candidate for Parliament, one, too, of 
 good standing, reported as telling a meeting of 
 labour-electors that 
 
 'He firmly believed in what had been termed the 
 mission of the English peoples. We had a genius for 
 conquest and colonization not possessed, or at least not 
 manifested, by any people of modern times. He believed 
 that it was imperative that we should expand our borders.' 
 
 To this pass has it come : the professed 
 champion of the rights of man taking pride in 
 conquest ; the professed disciple of economic col- 
 lectivism playing the game of the land-grabbing 
 capitalist, and declaring that our industrial 
 problem cannot be solved within our own
 
 Imperialism 191 
 
 borders, that we must seize other people's 
 territory and exploit them and it. The signifi- 
 cance of the position comes out more fully when 
 we remember that the same expansionist 
 formula was put forth by public men in the 
 United States as a special justification for the 
 attack on Cuba. The people of the enormous 
 territory of the Republic, it was averred, 
 needed to expand their borders : the margins 
 of profitable enterprise had been reached : they 
 must grab more territory. 
 
 If the claim be true and on the imperialist 
 principle it must be true everywhere sooner or 
 later the game of democratic civilization, I 
 repeat, is virtually up, and the Socialist is only 
 one more charlatan. If the people of the States 
 cannot win well - being within their present 
 borders they will never win it. Cuba and the 
 Philippines in that aspect are but a passing 
 meal to the Sphinx : to-morrow conclusions 
 must be tried with the Latin republics for 
 South America, or with Russia and England 
 for the richer plains of Asia ; and the end in 
 sight is an Armageddon of international piracy. 
 In the name of common-sense and common 
 honesty, come what may, let it at least be told on 
 the housetops, and let who will hear, that the 
 whole doctrine is an insensate superstition, that 
 its economic belongs to the life of the redskins
 
 192 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 and its sociology to the civilization of Tamer- 
 lane. 
 
 X 
 
 Our imperialistic Socialist, be it noted, is 
 seized by a scruple after he lays down the 
 ethic of expansion, and goes on in a singularly 
 different strain : 
 
 ' But, nevertheless, he affirmed the necessity of a 
 changed ideal in the prosecution of our territorial ambition 
 and desires. He believed that we should enter upon the 
 comparatively uncivilized portions of the earth not for the 
 purpose of getting so much as of giving. And, further- 
 more, our gifts should not be, as largely they had been 
 hitherto, the vices and miseries of an outworn civilization, 
 but the benefits and blessings of civilization in its highest 
 and purest sense. (Cheers.)' 
 
 The cheers almost suggest that the orator 
 had heard growls at his previous proposition, 
 and was fain to strike instantly a different key. 
 We have a mission for conquest and civilization, 
 but we have displayed it ' largely ' by giving to 
 the conquered * the vices and miseries of an 
 outworn civilization.' How then, in the name 
 of reason, is our outworn civilization in the 
 future to give anything else ? And if we are 
 to cherish our territorial ambitions on the score 
 that it is * imperative that we should expand 
 our borders,' how, in the name of plausibility,
 
 Imperialism 193 
 
 are we to go about the business ' not for the 
 purpose of getting so much as of giving ?' Is 
 it the giving that is imperative ? Or are we 
 merely getting a lame and impotent Socialist 
 adaptation of the gospel given to the Birming- 
 ham jewellers, that it is our mission to ' civilize 
 the tropics/ but for their sake as much as for 
 ours ? 
 
 To civilize the tropics ! With our own race 
 riddled with the leprosy of decivilization, pre- 
 senting to the eyes that will see, in warren 
 after warren of putrid misery, a life that the 
 zoologist declares to be immeasurably more 
 ignoble than that of the lowest savage whose 
 ways he has scanned ! If a fraction of what 
 has been preached in the name of Socialism 
 be true, the conditions of life for millions in 
 England are an infamy, and the whole structure 
 of society is an infinite injustice, whereby the 
 luckless wear their lives out in making wealth 
 for those who neither toil nor spin. And how 
 should such a society yield to any subject 
 society ' the benefits and blessings of civiliza- 
 tion in the highest and purest sense' ? Is it by 
 turning Japan, the land once of Flowers, into a 
 duplicate of Lancashire, and covering China 
 with the cinder hills and sulphurous reek of the 
 Black Country ? Our lyrist of trumpet and 
 drum has hinted at the tropics as a region 
 
 13
 
 194 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 ' where the best is as the worst.' We are to 
 make it better, it seems, by making Caliban 
 duly subservient to Mammon. 
 
 The whole fantasy is a moral imposture. 
 Our Socialist, it is comforting to note, feels the 
 ground giving way beneath his feet : 
 
 ' He would especially give to all such countries the 
 power and opportunity of exercising the powers of local 
 self-government. The manner in which we governed India, 
 for example, in the interests of the Indian officials, and 
 without sufficient regard to the genius and needs of the 
 Indian peoples, formed, in his judgment, one of the gravest 
 national scandals of recent times. In the pursuit of such a 
 policy we were our own worst enemy. Those of our 
 colonies which had received representative institutions at our 
 hands were the most loyal of all our possessions. (Cheers.)' 
 
 By this time his imperialism must have an 
 evil odour to the nostrils that dilated over his 
 preamble. He will be told by the 'sane 'as 
 well as the other imperialist that he calumniates 
 our Indian rule, and that he knows not whereof 
 he speaks when he talks of giving local govern- 
 ment to India. It is indeed hard to guess what 
 part of the empire he had in mind when he 
 grew elate over our mission, if India be ruled 
 as he says. But in his singular five minutes' 
 progress he has reached the answer to the 
 most plausible plea that can ever be framed 
 for empire. No race is really raised, no com- 
 munity is really bettered, while it is held in
 
 Imperialism 195 
 
 subjection, and no man and no class are really 
 raised by putting others below them. The 
 Romans in their day could claim, relatively to 
 their lights, their status and ethic, as much as 
 can the British in theirs ; and the Roman im- 
 perialist poet could find a rhetoric for the 
 official ideal on which his successors have not 
 improved. 
 
 ' Pads imponere morem ' 
 
 was for him the mission of Rome ; and in 
 certain aspects the work was as wonderfully 
 done as anything achieved in modern times. 
 But not one of the protected subjected races 
 was made fit by Roman rule to rule itself. 
 Rome itself was by the process made unfit ; 
 and that said, all is said. For if the would-be 
 civilizer does not raise his subjects to worthy 
 manhood, he himself infallibly falls below it. 
 And if, on the other hand, he does so raise 
 them, what becomes of his empire ? Let him 
 choose his horn. 
 
 Let our devious Socialist take one step 
 more, and he will reach the right lesson for 
 his hearers. The other imperialists have no 
 thought of giving self-government to India ; 
 they have scoffed at every step in the move- 
 ment of the Indian National Congress, and 
 they hate the ends at which it aims. They are 
 
 132
 
 196 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 exasperated at the suggestion that the Indian 
 Civil Service should be gradually filled with 
 natives ; where would be the imperial profit of 
 such an evolution ? What of the annihilated 
 English incomes ? Rather they will make 
 Anglo-Indian rule yet more imperial, and 
 develop yet further a new imperial caste in the 
 administration of Egypt, and, haply, one day, 
 of China. And then they may hope, not un- 
 reasonably, that the irritating pretensions of 
 democracy at home will be with little pains 
 suppressible, and the Radical voter tamed. 
 They may even hope to see the whole system 
 under the due control of an imperator, the 
 surest bar to subversive legislation. Such 
 would be the natural evolution, now as ever. 
 The Socialist who thinks to find in an im- 
 perialist and militarist bureaucracy a means to 
 socialistic equity, is by several degrees more 
 optimistic than the Russian Nihilists who 
 thought through the conversion of their 
 bureaucracy to carry their ideal. 
 
 XI 
 
 It becomes irksome to deal further with a 
 pretence of altruism which collapses even in 
 the stating ; but it is rather pressingly needful 
 to contrast the pretence squarely with the
 
 Imperialism 197 
 
 temper which its framers all the while avow 
 towards their civilized neighbours. We are 
 the friends, it is claimed, of the lower races at 
 least, of those of them who definitely come 
 under our rule and when the finger is pointed 
 to the countless infamies of the colonial hand- 
 ling of Maories and Basutos, it is answered 
 that these outrages, uncontrollable where 
 colonists are left a free hand, can best be 
 put down by an imperial system such as now 
 works in India. Considering that the colonists 
 represent the normal attitude of the conqueror 
 towards the lower races, and considering^ 
 further, that within a few years we have seen 
 press-gagging laws enforced in India in a way 
 that would not at least, not yet be tolerated 
 at home, the claim is sufficiently suspect from 
 the start. But supposing it to pass, to what 
 view of international relations does it lead ? 
 In the terms of the case, our first business is 
 to distance the European nations in trade, in 
 power, in prestige. Empire being a good 
 thing for all, we are yet to leave them as little 
 as possible. We are to take satisfaction in 
 their inferiority to us as traders and producers ; 
 and it is as sand in our eyes when we see 
 them gaining on us in the race. An imperialist 
 emissary tells gleefully that he has prevented 
 any concessions being made to the French in
 
 198 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 China ; and his countrymen in council applaud 
 him, trusting that he has helped to keep France 
 poor and to make us rich. As we have seen, an 
 imperialistic economist of the Tamerlane school 
 holds that we are bound to fight Germany one 
 day to the death for the trade of the world ; 
 and our pious singer of the White Man's 
 Burden hates the whole Russian race with a 
 frenzy of indecent fury that throws a lurid 
 light on the ethic of his prayers to Deity. 
 What then becomes of the general pretence 
 of imperialistic beneficence ? What would be 
 the value, were it genuine, of a sympathy that 
 was tendered to the lower races and the tropic 
 lands on the condition of being compensated 
 for by bitter ill-will and jealousy towards the 
 higher races with whom we have broken bread 
 and shared culture ? Of what value to the 
 general deed of man would be a spirit even of 
 protective beneficence towards Hindus on the 
 part of an Anglo- Indian Civil Service that was 
 all the while to be animalized by a savage 
 hatred of Russia as the predestinate enemy ? 
 
 It is all vain, where it is not vile. The des- 
 potism that practises an Egyptian beneficence 
 by way of better extorting the usury on our 
 bonds ; the despotism that, after squandering 
 famine funds in lawless frontier wars, rules 
 India with some increase of concern for native
 
 Imperialism 199 
 
 good, lest Russia haply intervene all this is no 
 justification of the theory of empire at its best ; 
 and the ingrained duplicity of ideal it involves 
 should be our warning against thinking to 
 endure by it for ever. It seems to be reck- 
 oned a marvel by themselves, that Englishmen 
 in the nineteenth century should at last ad- 
 minister better than Orientals of a previous age. 
 It would be their dishonour if they did not; 
 and such modern progress is no vindication 
 of an imperialist ideal in perpetuity. Ideal 
 citizens of a free country are not to be bred by 
 ruling over the unfree, were they thrice picked 
 for character and culture. Some of them may 
 gain many things the high virtues, it may be, 
 of patience and self-control under provocation, 
 as well as the faculty for various administrative 
 action but the due wisdom for the life of 
 equality is not to be learned in the life of 
 inequality. The Anglo-Indian who strives and 
 aims to bring the natives under him a little 
 nearer self-rule is indeed doing as high a work 
 as any done on the planet ; but not one Anglo- 
 Indian in ten seems to have any such thought. 
 Nor does Anglo-Indian official experience, as a 
 rule, yield us any help toward scientific politics 
 at home. On the other hand, the conscious- 
 ness that India, with the inconceivable poverty 
 of its masses of cheap life, serves as a pay-chest
 
 2OO Patriotism and Empire 
 
 for thousands of well-nurtured Englishmen, 
 must in itself be sociologically demoralizing, if 
 it does not move the beneficiaries to desire a 
 higher state of things. Such a relation never 
 was and never will be permanently good for any 
 race, ruling or ruled. But the simple biological 
 fact that Englishmen cannot breed in India for 
 two generations might alone serve to convince 
 thinking men that British empire there cannot 
 be permanent, and that a wise policy would 
 consist in preparing for the inevitable change, 
 rather than in defying it. It may or may not have 
 been of the fundamental natural fact that Carlyle 
 was thinking when he told his English hearers 
 that ' India must go one day.' But then Car- 
 lyle's context consisted in the proposition that 
 Shakespeare was for English-speaking men a 
 greater possession than India; and as this 
 would at once mark him a Little Englander 
 in the eyes of the large-thoughted school of 
 Osric, whose Shakespeare is Mr. Kipling, it is 
 by that sage formula disposed of. 
 
 This megalomania, which regards relative 
 smallness of territory as a ground for contempt, 
 gives a new clue to that hatred for Russia of 
 which Mr. Kipling is the foremost propagator. 
 Our imperialist Russophobes must be gnawed 
 hourly by the worst of pangs, when they reflect 
 that Russian territory in Europe and Asia
 
 Imperialism 201 
 
 outbulks British ; and the thought that little 
 Scandinavia can be made great by literature 
 must appear to them as preposterous as the 
 opinion that little Athens availed more for 
 human enlightenment than imperial Rome. 
 There is no use in arguing with the snob, 
 whether he be the snob national or the snob 
 social ; and it is visibly a mere adaptation of the 
 snob's code that yields us the Big Englander. 
 But it is necessary to point out what he is 
 bringing us to. Of Bismarck, as before noted, 
 it has been said that he made Germany great, 
 but made small the German. But it does 
 not need a Bismarck to do that for any nation, 
 as regards the latter half of the process at 
 least. It only needs that its members should 
 count it a littleness to seek greatness within 
 rather than without, and should believe it 
 possible to make themselves great Englanders 
 by making an externally great England. 
 Accept for a generation the ideal of those who 
 hold a nation great in the measure of its 
 acreage, and who scout the idea that a small 
 country can be worth belonging to, and you 
 will have a country not worth belonging to for 
 two-thirds of its people. We always come 
 back to that.
 
 2O2 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 XII 
 
 Our indictment is now outlined and argued ; 
 and it is not at the end of an indictment that a 
 counter-ideal is best to be set forth. But lest 
 it be supposed that the counter-ideal is not 
 capable of clear definition, that may be curtly 
 outlined in contrast. 
 
 As thus : Against, a policy of racial swagger, 
 external force, expansion, gold - mining, and 
 other exploitation of filched territory, a policy 
 of scientific social development, to the end of a 
 maximization of real wealth and a better dis- 
 tribution thereof. 
 
 As against an ever-increasing expenditure on 
 naval armaments, which merely forces to similar 
 and countervailing expenditure the neighbour 
 States who feel themselves menaced by it, ex- 
 penditure in bettering the lives of our wealth- 
 makers, and in educating their children for 
 further betterment. 
 
 As against a mechanical concept of union, 
 involving eternal ill-will to England from Irish- 
 men throughout the world, an intelligent federa- 
 tion of the sections of the Mother State, with 
 Home Rule to all who need it. 
 
 As against the Roman ideal of perpetual 
 domination in India and Egypt, the ideal of a
 
 Imperialism 203 
 
 loyal development of their peoples, however 
 slowly so it be surely, towards freedom and 
 self-government. 
 
 As against a perpetual overbreeding which 
 drives out yearly an army of exiles, a rational 
 control of population in all classes. 
 
 As against a shiftless drift towards the head-- 
 long downfall of empire and population when 
 our coal-supply is exhausted, a rational con- 
 struction of alternate bases for a sounder civili- 
 zation, whose fruits may haply be beauty and 
 not ashes. 
 
 And lastly, as against a barbarian cult, which 
 alternately chants a hypocritical hymn of pro- 
 pitiation to a God of War and bares venomous 
 fangs towards the rival worshippers of the 
 same deity, an ethic of reason and fraternity, 
 of human goodwill, that guards against super- 
 naturalist vitiations. 
 
 In fine, wisdom and righteousness for a 
 nation are not vitally different from what we 
 esteem as wisdom and righteousness in indi- 
 vidual men. And that nation which thinks to 
 prosper by inverting the principles of stable 
 human relation, by calling rapine righteousness 
 and profligacy prudence, will but illustrate 
 sooner or later the fatality of natural law. On 
 such lines no nation as such can survive. . The 
 conclusion is not one of a too ideal ethic : it is
 
 204 Patriotism and Empire 
 
 the lesson read to us in age after age, in 
 civilization after civilization, by empire after 
 empire that has left only its ruins behind 
 to warn us against the errors by which it 
 perished.
 
 ADDENDA 
 
 Note to pages 100-103. 
 
 SINCE these pages were written there has appeared a second 
 edition of Captain Mahan's Life of Nelson, in which the 
 case against the hero is more fully dealt with by his 
 biographer, the Italian evidence being now taken up. The 
 revised vindication is, however, rebutted afresh by Mr. 
 Badham in the Athenaum of July i, 1899. Captain Mahan 
 replies in the same journal, July 8, to small purpose. 
 
 Note to page 109. 
 
 I am reminded that ' Algeria, in the early times of the 
 French occupation, saw arise, every spring, fanatics who 
 declared themselves invulnerable and sent by God to drive 
 out the infidels ; next year their death was forgotten, and 
 their successors found no less faith ' (Renan, Vie de Jesus, 
 chap. iv.). The completest obliteration of any one Mahdi 
 is thus no hindrance to others following in his steps, and 
 the Soudan episode is thus doubly gratuitous in the light of 
 French experience in Algeria. 
 
 Note to page 1 84. 
 
 In regard to the proposition that 'trade follows the flag,' 
 it is worth noting that British trade with the Argentine 
 Republic is greater than British trade proper with all the 
 colonies of South and East Africa ; and is besides profit- 
 able, whereas that is not. In 1896 our imports from South 
 and East Africa were under five and a half millions, while 
 our exports thither were over fourteen millions. To the 
 Argentine Republic, in the same year, we exported over six 
 and a half millions, importing nearly nine millions. With 
 variations of quantity, these proportions generally hold.
 
 INDEX 
 
 AFRICA, South, 183, 184, 205 
 
 Alberoni, 164 
 
 Alexander, 131 
 
 Alfred, 97 
 
 Anglo-Saxonism, 62, 186 
 
 Arnold, 39 
 
 Athens, 92, 93, 146-150 
 
 Badham, F. P., 101, IO2, 205 
 Bellamy, 48 
 
 Beneficence, imperialist, 192-200 
 Bismarck, 22-28, 57, 59, 107, 113 
 Byzantium, 95 
 
 Caesar, 87, 97, 130, 131 
 
 Canada, 169 
 
 Carlyle, 200 
 
 Chatham, Lord, 163-167 
 
 China, 90, 143, 144, 175, 180, 185, 
 
 193 
 
 Class subsidies, 187-189 
 Coal-supply, 172, 180 
 Coleridge, 13, 18 
 Colonial justice, 197 
 Consciousness of kind, 5 
 Con way, Dr. M., 49 
 Cook, Captain E., 124, 125 
 Cox, Sir G., 2 
 Crimean War, 76 
 Cromwell, 87, 97, 131, 161, 163 
 Cuban War, 7, 8, 61, 126, 136, 186, 
 191 
 
 Dante, 63 
 
 Debt, National, 166, 168, 181, 182 
 
 Delafosse, 86, 87 
 
 Dickens, 47, 49 
 
 Disarmament, 134-136 
 Disraeli, 55, 139, 140, 142 
 Dreyfus case, 104, 106-108 
 
 Eastwick, Captain, 124, 125 
 
 Economics, 56, 167, 174-188 
 
 Egyptian civilization, 92 
 
 Emerson, 44 
 
 Emigration, 174-177 
 
 Empires, ancient, 95 
 
 English history, 13-21, 88, 158, 
 
 159, 161 
 
 Epaminondas, 120, 121 
 Expansionism, 52, 173-182, 191 
 
 Flag, trade and, 174, 205 
 
 Fleury, 164 
 
 Florence, 151, 158 
 
 Fox, 14 
 
 Frederick, 97, 121, 131 
 
 Free-trade, 185 
 
 French culture, 113 
 
 history, 161, 165, 166, 169, 171 
 
 militarism, 106-108, no 
 
 resources, 181 
 
 Revolution, 13-18 
 
 German developments, 22-28, 57, 
 
 107, 111-116, 177 
 Germany and England, 5^-59 
 Gladstone, 55, 139-142 
 Gracchi, the, 156, 157 
 Grant, 98, 131 
 
 Greek history, 2, 89, 119, 146-150 
 Grote, 2, 1 20 n. 
 
 Hamon, 104
 
 Hannibal. 96, 156 
 Hawthorne, 64 
 Henley, 52-55, 59, 62 
 Higginson, Colonel, 39-43 
 Highland clearances, 21 
 Homer, 63, 64 
 Hugo, 40 
 Huysmans, 49 
 
 Imperialism, 138-204 
 
 India, 144, 170, 180, 194-200 
 
 Irish nationalism, 28-30, 186, 202 
 
 Irving, Washington, 47 
 
 Italy, 28, 29, 177 
 
 Jackson, 98 
 'Jago,' the, 31-37 
 Japan, 180, 193 
 Johnson, Dr., 41 
 Jones, Paul, 103 
 
 Kipling, 52-55, 60, 161, 193, 198, 
 
 200 
 Kitchener, 53, 109 
 
 Lee, 131 
 
 Leopardi, 64 
 
 Lincoln, 98 
 
 Literature and patriotism, 63 
 
 'Little England,' 161, 168 
 
 Lowell, 45, 46, 62, 63 
 
 Macaulay, 41, 170 
 
 Machiavelli, 64, 96, 158 
 
 Mahan, 83-91, 94, icon., no, 205 
 
 Mahdism, 109, 205 
 
 Marius, 95 
 
 Marlborough, 131 
 
 Marx, 48 
 
 Megalomania, 200, 201 
 
 Militarism, 71-137 
 
 Moltke, 57, 113, 131 
 
 Mommsen, 112, 113 
 
 Moors, 151 
 
 Morris, 48 
 
 Motley, 47, 48 
 
 Napoleon, 97, 121, 126, 131 
 Natural enemies, 36 
 Nelson, 99-103, 131, 205 
 Newcome, Colonel, 105 
 Nietzsche, 113 
 
 207 
 
 Nihilism, 197 
 
 Nile, Battle of the, 125, 126 
 
 Old-age pensions, 189 
 Opportunism, 55 
 Osric, ideal of, 190, 200 
 
 Palmerston, 142 
 
 Patriotism, 1-70, 155, 156, 161 
 
 Peloponnesian War, 89, 93, 146 
 
 Pericles, 12, 148 
 
 Poe, 44 
 
 Population question, 176, 203 
 
 Poverty, English, 179 
 
 Ram, J., 82, n. 
 
 Religion, militarist, 132, 198, 203 
 
 Rhodes, Mr., 53 
 
 Roman history, 8-10, 147, 150, 
 
 151-157, 162, 182, 189, 195 
 Rostand, 3-5 
 Russian culture, 113 
 Ryan, Dr. C. .,132 
 
 Savonarola, 158 
 
 Scandinavian life, 113 
 
 Sedan, Battle of, 129, 130 
 
 Sentimentalism, 8l 
 
 Shakespeare, 63, 64, 119, 200 
 
 Skirving, 15-18 
 
 Social problem, 9, 19, 48, 6l, 78, 
 
 86, 91, 172, 173, 178-182, 187, 
 
 1 88, 193, 202, 203 
 Socialism, 48, 84, 136, 190, 193 
 Socrates, 150 
 
 Spain, 151, 159-164, 181 182 
 Sparta, I, 2, 10, n, 92, 93, 121, 
 
 147 
 
 Stephen, L., 41 
 Sulla, 95 
 
 Suttner, Baroness, 133 
 Swiss history, 12 
 
 Tennyson, 170 
 Thackeray, 128, 129 
 Thermopylae, I, 2, 5, 10 
 Thirlwall, 2 
 Thucydides, 93 
 Timoleon, 97 
 Trade, English, 183 
 Turkey, 116, 117
 
 208 
 
 Index 
 
 Unionism, 141 
 
 United States, 7, 8, 39-51, 58, 60- 
 64, 89, 126, 127, 136, 175, 177 
 
 Verestchagin, 127 
 Walpole, 163-166 
 
 War, 118 
 
 Washington, 98, 131 
 Wellington, 98-100, 131 
 Whitman, 44 
 
 Zola, 128, 129 
 
 THE END. 
 
 BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.
 
 University of California 
 
 SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 
 
 Return this material to the library 
 
 from which it was borrowed. 
 
 CI 39 
 
 UCSD Libr.
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A 000676628 1