Nationalism & internationalism; the culmination of modern history

Front matter

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Contents

I. The Federal Government — II. Creation of the Executive Departments and the Cabinet — III. Development of the Executive Departments and the Cabinet — IV. Status of the Heads of the Executive Departments collectively, as an Advisory Council or Cabinet — V. Status of the Heads of the Executive Departments individually, as Constitutional Officers of the Government — VI. Organization of the Executive Departments — VII. Functions of the Executive Departments in Maintaining a “More Perfect Union.’”’ The Departments of State, the Treasury, and the Interior — VIII. Functions of the Executive Departments in “Insuring Domestic Tranquility.” The Departments of War, the Navy, and Justice — IX. Functions of the Executive Departments in ‘‘Promoting the General Welfare.”” The Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor — X. Functions of the Executive Departments in Securing Certain of “‘The Blessings of Liberty.” The Post-Office Department — XI. The Chief Executives and the Development of the Executive Departments — XII. Probable Developments in the Federal Executive — Appendix — Index.

“‘What is needed is not only a study of the work of the separate government departments by themselves, but a general survey of the different departments and bureaus in their relation to each other; the overlapping of functions, the duplication of effort, the lack of codrdination, which is the admitted result of the manner in which departmental and governmental functions have often been expanded without systematic plan or correlation.””— From a report on the Institute of Government Research by President Frank J. Goodnow of Johns Hopkins University.

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Preface

HE purpose of this little book is to trace in broad

outline the development of two of the most powerful factors in modern history, both of which appear to have reached a culminating point in the Great War. These two factors are the nationalist and the internationalist movements. So far as I am aware, no attempt to survey the history of either as a whole has yet been made in English ; still less have both been dealt with in conjunction. Yet the two movements are intimately related. On the surface they appear to be mutually hostile. But they are not really so. It is only on the basis of triumphant nationalism, as the great Napoleon saw a hundred years ago, that an effective internationalism can be realised. It is only by means of an organised international system that the rights, and even the existence, of the weaker nationalities can be protected. The history of the two movements, when read in conjunction, very powerfully enforces these conclusions.

As the book was originally written it dealt also with two other great factors in modern history, the growth of self-government in Europe, and the ex-

8 PREFACE pansion of the dominion or influence of the European peoples over the world. The two essays dealing with these themes are omitted because they would have swollen the volume unduly ; if circumstances permit, they may appear in a subsequent volume. The short introductory essay was designed as an introduction to the complete series, but I have left it unaltered.

It is no part of my aim to play the part of a prophet, or to put forward vast constructive schemes for the future. Maps of a new Europe according to the national principle, and schemes of international organisation, have been published in abundance since the war began. I do not feel competent for such gigantic tasks; indeed, I am conscious of a certain presumption even in the more modest task which I have essayed, of presenting in a short compass and in a clear general view the essential historical data which are necessary to enable the ordinary citizen to approach with intelligence the consideration of these vast problems.

I have to thank my friends and colleagues, Miss B. A. Lees and Professor Tout, for reading the book in manuscript or proof.

R. M.

Tue University, MANCHESTER, May, 1916.

CONTENTS

PREFACE ; é ; PREAMBLE

I. THe Martn PRINCIPLES OF WESTERN CIVILISA- TION— 1. Law AND LIBERTY u. THe THREE ERAS OF WESTERN CIVILISA- TION . ; : ; ; ; .

II. NatTionaLism— I. THE MEANING OF NATIONALITY wm. Tue EMERGENCE OF THE First NATION- STATES. t ‘ ‘ , ur. Tur AGE or NATIONALISM, 1820-1878 Iv. THe Last MENACE TO NATIONAL FREEDOM

Ill. InNTERNATIONALISM— 1. THE CosMOPOLITAN IDEAL OF THE MIDDLE AGES AND ITS BREAKDOWN . ; u. THe DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL Ipra TO 1815. : ; ; , mut. Tae ATTEMPT TO FEDERATE EUROPE, 1815-1825 : : Iv. THe Proaress or INTERNATIONALISM, 1815-1914 : ; A : : v. THe Forces Hostite To THE INTER- NATIONAL IDEA ‘ CoNCLUSION INDEX : ‘ :

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PREAMBLE

MID the horror and carnage of the Great War, unparalleled in the annals of humanity, the

only consolation open to intelligent men is to keep their minds fixed upon the magnitude of the issues over which the conflict rages. When that is realised, not even this ocean of suffering seems too high a price for humanity to pay; for it becomes more plain, the more one ponders the matter, that we are at one of the most august and decisive turning points in the history of the world. To-day a complex of vital issues, far deeper than any of the immediate provoking causes of the war, far more momentous than even the fate of this great nation or that, awaits solution; and it is being decided whether the civilisation of Europe, which has now become the civilisation of the world, shall continue to advance in the directions which, in spite of many waverings or retardations, it has followed ever since what we call western civilisation was born ; or whether it shall be diverted into paths of development fundamentally the same as those which led the other great civilisations of the world, each in turn, after a brilliant efflorescence, to stagnation and decay.

Babylonia, Egypt, India, China, Mexico, and Peru—each of these has produced a remarkable civilisation ; each has passed into limbo, or into ineffectiveness, because, however remarkable its material, or even its intellectual, achievements, it lacked the vital principles which have made western civilisation perennially progressive, various, living, and strong. What are these vital principles of western civilisation, which have placed in its hands the destinies of the world? In what forms are they to-day being fought out? To these questions the following essay tries to provide some sort of answer.

I

THE MAIN PRINCIPLES OF WESTERN CIVILISATION

I

WO principles form the essence of western civilisation, and provide the main distinction between it and all the other civilisations which have preceded it, and have sometimes appeared to overshadow it.

The first of these principles is the belief in Law as something that ought to be obeyed not merely because it represents the arbitrary will of a master, human or divine, who has the power to punish its infraction, but because it represents in some real measure the organised will and conscience of the community, and because obedience is ultimately for the benefit both of the community and of the individual.

Once Law has come to be regarded in this way by a community, several consequences follow, which are always to be perceived at work, however obscurely and imperfectly, in every society of the western type, and which have seldom or never been operative (so far as our records can tell us) in the other types of civilisation which have existed on this planet.

The first of these consequences is that since Law is to be regarded not merely as the Will of the Strongest, but as an attempt to approximate to the rule of abstract justice, it is felt to be, not a fixed and unalterable thing, but something that grows and changes, and ought to go on growing and changing until it attains a perfect harmony with the highest moral inspirations of men. In Oriental societies, whether the body of law be derived from the mere edicts of conquerors, or be regarded as dictated by the will of the gods or of Allah or of Jahweh, each jot and tittle of it is commonly held to be sacred, just because it is the decree of power; to be obligatory not because it is just but merely because the power which decrees it is irresistible ; to be unchangeable except at the will of its author, which must mean little more than whim where the author is a human master, and must be unpredictable and difficult to recognise or determine where the author is supposaety to be divine.

Nor is this true only of Oriental societies. In all the primitive societies of the western peoples, also, until they came under the direct or indirect influence of Greece and Rome, this conception of Law, as something imposed by an external will, to be obeyed merely because it must be obeyed, and not because it is just, is to be found in operation. The primitive customs of the Germanic tribes were regarded as sacred because they came from their ancestors, who had them from the gods. When the freemen at the folk-courts (whose contribution to the growth of liberty has been absurdly exaggerated) declared the ‘custom of the folk,” what they really laid down was a set of often meaningless and irrational formule, which had to be employed because custom dictated them ; and it is among the Northmen of Iceland that we hear of a man so learned in the law that he alone knew the magic, unalterable, ancestral formule by which his own crimes could be tried, and therefore went unpunished. Such a conception is absolutely antithetical to the conception of Law as an approximation to justice and to Right Reason, which has come to be one of the vital principles of western civilisation.

A second consequence which flows from the idea of Law as not arbitrary and imposed by authority, but rational and capable of improvement, is that where this conception is accepted, Law is seen to be the child of Morality, not Morality the offspring of Law. Law, where it is progressive, as in the western societies, is always, with more or less success, striving to adapt itself to the varying and growing demands of public morality ; but always limps slowly and painfully behind, since it can only embody the “greatest common measure ”’ of the moral sense of a community, not the loftiest conceptions of its finest minds. Law is like a cumbrous engine of government, following behind the pioneers to organise and garrison new realms of moral obligation for humanity. When once this idea is grasped, however incompletely, when once it is seen that Law owes its validity mainly to the fact that it attempts to express the moral sense, it becomes plain that the obligation to obey it, though enforced by the police, is not due to that enforcement, but is ultimately the same as the obligation which requires obedience to demands not enforced by the police at all. To an honourable man, a promise is as binding as a contract ; that is to say, moral obligation is not limited by the sphere of law. It applies with equal potency to spheres which law has not yet conquered or organised, such as the sphere of inter-state relationship. And the assertion that there is no obligation of international morality because there is no international law enforcible by an inter-state police, with its implication that law derives its validity from force, is seen to be essentially a denial of the very conception of Law which is the vital principle of western civilisation. The conception of the ultimate necessity of an international law is the logical product of the western conception of the nature of law in itself. The Romans, who mainly contributed to establish our idea of Law in the world, had some sense of this also, as they showed by their attempt to work out, in practice as well as theory, a jus gentium or law of all peoples.

A third consequence of the western view of Law is that since it exists not merely as the arbitrary will of a higher power, but for the common advantage and the common protection of all, it is the duty of every man to co-operate in its enforcement. It is not a blind power to be placated or evaded, but a common interest to be protected and maintained. Cases may and do arise, of course, in which the demands of law may seem to the individual to be hostile to the higher requirements of his own conscience ; and in these cases there emerges that bracing conflict of obligations out of which progress comes. Yet these cases are sufficiently rare not to invalidate the generalisation that, in the western view, no people can be called fully civilised until there is widely diffused among its members the sense of their obligation, not merely to obey the Law, but to obey it willingly and to co-operate in enforcing and maintaining it. Perhaps one of the most striking contrasts between the peoples who have fully absorbed the ideas of western civilisation, and those who have not, is the comparative weakness of this sense of obligation among the latter. In India, for example, it appears that, among a large proportion of the population, this sense of obligation scarcely yet exists. Habituated through tens of centuries to obey merely because they must, and to think of courts of law as mere expressions of the arbitrary will of the master, they are still, in many grades of society, prone to think of the Law as something that it is legitimate to evade whenever it is possible ; there is a temptation to admire, rather than to reprobate, those who have skill in evading it; and when a man finds himself in the courts he still too often thinks of his case as a trial of wits, and, whether he be in the right or in the wrong, fabricates evidence without hesitation or scruple. To obey the law of the state has not yet become, for such a man, a moral obligation, because he does not yet instinctively feel that the maintenance of the law is a common interest ; B but obedience to the sometimes quite formal and irrational demands of his religion is a moral obligation, because it is required-by the gods. For him, therefore, Law is not the offspring of morality, drawing its ultimate sanction from the moral obligation ; but, on the contrary, morality is the child of Law, and consists in keeping square with the behests of authority ; and since a breach of these behests is a more dangerous thing, and also more difficult to conceal, in the case of the orders of the gods than in the case of the orders of men, his religious duties, however formal, have more sacredness for him than his civic or legal duties. That is one of the deepest contrasts between the eastern and the western mind.

A fourth consequence of the western view of Law is that since Law is the concern of all, and should be continually modified in order to bring it into accord with the moral sense of the community, the whole community, or at any rate the wisest members of it, ought to have a hand in making the Law. Accordingly in all the western communities, in a greater or less degree, there have been demands for, and experiments in, the co-operation of the communities in the making of Law, and therefore in the conduct of government. There have been, of course, the widest differences as to whether this co-operation is indeed advantageous, and as to how it can best be put into effect. But in the world of western civilisation the argument for or against various forms of law-making machinery has nearly always turned on the question how the best and most reasonable laws can be made ; even the apologists of despotism—for example, the advocates of the benevolent autocracy of the eighteenth century—have most often based their argument on the claim that the Enlightened Monarch can better assure the triumph of Right Reason in Law than the ignorant crowd, or a prejudiced class. In communities which have not fallen under the influence of western civilisation, neither the claim for a common share in the making of laws, nor even the arguments by which the repudiation of that claim has been justified in the West, have ever made themselves heard. And this is natural; because only the West has ever conceived of Law as being anything other than the arbitrary will of authority.

This, then, is the first distinctive note of western civilisation : that Law exists for the benefit of the community, and not merely for the benefit or by the will of a superior authority; that it is an attempt to embody the precepts of morality, and is therefore not the source of morality ; that it is a growing and changing thing; that its ultimate sanction is the same as the sanction of other moral obligations, namely, the enlarging conscience of mankind; that it is the first duty of the good citizen not merely to obey but to help in enforcing the law; and that because the law embodies the common conscience and also the common interest, there are prima facie reasons why the community should co-operate in the making as well as in the enforcement of law.

The second distinctive conception of western civilisation is the belief in Liberty as one of the ultimately desirable things, and the highest glory of manhood. Because Liberty is a living spirit, and not a dead formula, it evades exact definition, and the struggle to attain it has taken infinitely variable and often mutually inconsistent forms. But the assertion of it always rests implicitly in the claim of an inherent right, residing in the individual or in the group, to be guided by its own inner light in making the most of its life, its opportunities, and its powers of thought. Liberty of conscience, or the right to govern one’s actions by one’s highest moral conceptions, undeterred by vexatious restrictions of law, custom, or opinion ; liberty of thought, or the right to follow fearlessly the guidance of reason without respect to the conventions or prejudices of the herd, even though they be embodied in law; political liberty, or the right to be free from the dictation of arbitrary authority, and the right to share in the making of the laws :—these are the supreme demands which the spirit of Liberty makes.

Now it is obvious that the claims of Law and Liberty, those twin presiding goddesses of western civilisation, must often come in conflict: indeed, the unending conflict between them is the heart and essence of western history, and has given it its vitality and significance, for it is the strife after Liberty that keeps Law alive and progressive, as the western mind demands that it should be; and it is the restraint of Law that prevents the eager claim for Liberty from ending in mere chaos. In all ages and all countries of the West, this strife is and has been unending, and men are divided everywhere by temperament into the worshippers of Law, who are conservatives, and the worshippers of Liberty, who are liberals.

Nevertheless the two are interdependent ; Law in the western sense cannot exist without some degree of liberty, and Liberty cannot exist except under the protection and support of Law. This interdependence of Law and Liberty has indeed always been a clearly realised conception in the communities which have accepted western civilisation.

In a real sense it may be said that liberty has never truly existed outside of the realms of western civilisation.

Where law is only the arbitrary will of a master, freedom of thought and freedom of conscience can be permitted only in so far as they do not endanger his interests, and if they exist at all, exist only on sufferance ; where law is regarded as simply the unexplained and unchangeable will of the Divine Power, neither freedom of conscience nor freedom of thought can be tolerated. Often, indeed, a despot state has allowed a large degree of actual liberty to its subjects, because it was too stupid or too indifferent to interfere with them, as the Turks left their Christian subjects free to follow their own faith. But in such cases, even divine liberty can produce little fruit ; and this because it does not rest upon and is not supported by Law, but exists only by virtue of a contemptuous indifference. Liberty must be positive, not merely negative ; and thrives better upon active hostility than upon mere neglect. As for political liberty, that is a conception utterly inconsistent with any but the western idea of the meaning of Law; and therefore the dream and vision of political liberty has never even dawned upon any of the peoples of the world until they have come into contact with western civilisation. So it can in a real sense be said with truth that the idea of Liberty is as exclusively and peculiarly the possession of the western world as the western idea of Law; and that no western society has ever played a part in history in which the conception of Liberty has not co-existed with the conception of Law. Law and Liberty, these two, the one the bones and sinews, the other the blood and glowing flesh and senses, are the body of western civilisation. And out of the union and interaction of these two arises the possibility of Progress; which, as a permanent state, is only maintained by the health-giving conflict of these two vital principles.

II THE THREE ERAS OF WESTERN CIVILISATION

It is possible to distinguish three great eras or phases in the history of western civilisation: the third is perhaps now coming to an end, and a new era is perhaps being born, in the travail of the Great War.

In the first era, which we call Ancient History, western civilisation had its birth and first development, and the place of its birth was Greece. For Greece invented the ideal of human liberty. Among her thinkers real intellectual liberty obtained its first full opportunity, and produced results so glorious that their morning splendours seem to outshine all the achievements of later ages. In the tiny seed-plots of her little city-states, political liberty also blossomed forth in such a variety of forms, such a prolific abundance of experiment, that their history has remained a treasure-house of political experience for all time. And this was because, under the inspiration of intellectual liberty, the thinkers and statesmen of Greece first worked out the western theory of Law as a rational thing whose aim was the embodiment of the moral sense of men, and shook themselves free both of the arbitrary dictates of despots, and of the equally deadening sway of custom and tradition. Nowhere in western literature will you find a more limpidly clear exposition of the fundamental difference between the western idea of Law, and that of all other civilisations, than in the Republic of Plato. In that immortal dialogue, which may be called, so far as regards this theme, the very Bible of western civilisation, Glaucon, Adeimantus, and Thrasymachus are the exponents of the doctrine held by the greater part of the world, that Law is only the Will of the Strongest, and that the essence of the state is Power. Socrates is the prophet of the essential western conception that the essence of the state is Justice, that Law is an approximation, more or less perfect, to the demands of justice, and that the aim of the state ought to be to give the fullest and most appropriate development to the powers of each of its members. Despite the extreme rigidity of Plato’s scheme for securing this perfect development of all men’s powers, which would in fact have amounted to a denial of liberty, here is a proclamation of the very ideal which underlies every claim of the spirit of liberty. And mark that for Plato it is only by a system of Law in perfect accord with the demands of Justice, or the moral sense of men, that the opportunity for the full development of all the citizens’ faculties, which is the purpose of Liberty, can be secured. Here, therefore, is also proclaimed the interdependence of law and liberty.

But although Greece was the birthplace of western civilisation, her tiny city-states were too weak to give it the security under which it could take root ; the very brilliance of their life meant that the flames were burning too fiercely, and died down almost as swiftly as they had burst forth ; and the Greek conviction that there was an impassable gulf between Hellas and the barbarism of the outer world formed an obstacle in the way of the expansion of the pregnant new conceptions of Law and Liberty. When Greek influence was expanded over the east under the Macedonian kings, it was only the products of the Greek culture, not its inner spirit, that were spread abroad. Had it depended upon the Greeks alone, western civilisation might not long have survived its brilliant childhood. But the slower and more prosaic genius of Rome took on the task. With the Romans the western conception of law was not the product of theory but of practical experience. Starting with the universal primitive idea of the Law as a sacred inheritance, belonging only to those who were of the Blood (the

Patricians)—a divine, irrational mystery given by the gods of the clan—they burst the shackles of this idea, from which the most of humanity never escaped, when they were faced with the necessity of embodying patricians and plebeians in the same organic state ; and having thus begun the rational adaptation of their Laws to circumstances, they pursued this course with extraordinary success, and gradually wrought out a system of Law so flexible that it was easily applicable to the needs of all the societies which were incorporated in the Roman Empire, and so manifestly just and reasonable that it was readily accepted by them. Its flexibility was due mainly to the fact that during the ' period of growth the Romans permitted a large degree of local autonomy to their subjects, and tolerated great variations of local usage and custom. But this is only another way of saying that Liberty was allowed to exist under the protection of Law ; and it was this Liberty, this variety of type, which accounted for the progressive and _ intelligent character of Roman government. Thus the Romans were able to include within the realm of western civilisation the whole of the Mediterranean lands. Just when this process was completed, the Christian religion appeared. Born among an eastern people, Christianity was destined to be the religion of western civilisation, because it incorporated in its very essence the conceptions of rational law, and of liberty dependent upon law. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath ”?: here, in the very words of Christ Himself, is the western idea that Law must justify itself to Reason, the western repudiation of the validity of any mandate that rests merely upon the assertion of authority. “‘ Thy service is perfect freedom ”’: here is the clearest possible affirmation of the interdependence of Law and Liberty—the assertion that willing obedience to the highest law we can recognise is the only sure path to Liberty. Hence there was an inherent affinity between Christianity and western civilisation; and hence the new religion easily conquered all the lands in which that civilisation was rooted, but failed to establish itself elsewhere.

For a space of four hundred years Rome gave peace and unity to the whole civilised world, such as it had never enjoyed before, and has never enjoyed since. But almost from the moment of its establishment, the Roman dominion began to decay. And the reason for this was, mainly, that Law got the upper hand of Liberty, and that the variety of types of life out of which progress comes was progressively overcome by the pressure of a too efficient, too logical, dominating Kultur. There were, of course, many other contributing causes of the decline of the Roman Empire ; but the root cause was that the life-giving balance and conflict between Law and Liberty were more and more lost as the centralised power of the Emperors and their officials increased.

With the downfall of the Empire before the inrush of the barbarians in the fifth century of the Christian era, the first or Mediterranean age of the history of western civilisation came to an end; and for a time it seemed that the essential ideas to which Greeks and Romans had given birth were lost to humanity. For amid the welter of German barbarism there was neither Law nor Liberty any longer. The conception of Law among these savages was simply the universal primitive conception of a body of customs that must be obeyed because it was imposed by ancestral usage, or by the mandate of the gods ; their conception of Liberty meant no more than the right to work their will upon their neighbours or subjects. But the memory of Rome and its laws was too august and too deeply rooted to perish. During the Dark Ages, down to the eleventh century, the essential ideas of western civilisation were kept alive, even if only in a rudimentary form, by the Church. Its influence impressed upon even the barbarians the idea that there is a moral law higher than mere physical might, a moral law whose spiritual sanctions are in the long run more powerful than those of brute force, and are not impaired by the temporary victories of force. Still more, the influence of the Church impressed upon Europe a conviction of the essential and indestructible unity of western civilisation, a unity due to its common inheritance of the traditions of Rome, and its common belief in the doctrines of a religion which had embedded in it (however much obscured) the idea of the interdependence of law and liberty. Europe clung with touching obstinacy to this belief in the unity of civilisation, and its common subjection to the same moral laws: the belief was embodied partly in the pallid shadow of the Holy Roman Empire, but far more effectively in the spiritual supremacy of the