III

THE SOCIETY OF NATIONS

You are all soldiers in one army God alone has the plan of battle, and He at length will unite you in a single camp, beneath a single banner.

MAZZINI, Duties of Man, ch. IV.

§ 12. BARBARIAN AND FOREIGNER-THE PROBLEM.

IN the Dialogue of Plato called the Statesman,* the leader of the discussion accuses his interlocutor of an error in classification. He is asked to explain. “The error," he says, was just as if someone who wanted to classify the human race were to divide them up after the fashion which prevails in this part of the world. Here they cut off the Hellenes as one species, and all the other species of mankind, which are innumerable and have no ties or common language, they include under the single name of barbarians; and because they have one name they are supposed to form a single species." Later he adds an illustration: "Some wise and understanding creature, such as a crane is reputed to be, might in imitation of you make a similar division, and set up cranes against all other animals, to their own

* 262-3. Jowett's Plato, Vol. IV., p. 458-9 (translation slightly altered).

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special glorification, at the same time jumbling together all the others, including man, under the appellation of brutes." The speaker was a visitor to Athens from one of the Greek settlements in Southern Italy, and perhaps he felt and resented the suspicion that one who came from those distant regions must be a barbarian, or at least soiled by contact with barbarians. He complains that this division into Greeks and barbarians is not a reasonable point of departure for the study of human affairs.

The citizen of every modern State performs a similar bisection or dichotomy upon the body of humanity. There are his own people and there are foreigners, the one familiar, intelligible, reasonable; the other strange, remote, incalculable, uncouth. Englishmen who go to live in places like South Africa, where races are mixed, are forced to attempt some rudimentary classification of the varied mass of foreigners. A coloured man is not a foreigner at all, but a black or a nigger, and among whites he recognises a main distinction between “ Dutchmen "and" Dagoes." But to the mass of men who have no contact with coloured races and do not live near a frontier, the supreme and overriding distinction, the point of departure in all thought that travels beyond their own Society, is the distinction between their own people and the foreigner. This distinction is in some ways more unreasonable than the one criticised in Plato's Dialogue. Greece or Hellas was not the name

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of any political unit, but stood for a civilisation, united by a common language, and scattered in small independent communities along the Mediterranean seaboard. The non-Greek populations, with which these communities were immediately in touch, were in general at a much lower level of social and political development. There was therefore some excuse for distrust and depreciation of the barbarian. There is no similar justification for the undertone of contempt with which the word foreigner is commonly used.*. And there is more danger in such an attitude for with us the distinction is political. Our countries are what Greece was not, solid and ambitious powers; on whose ability to live in peace and friendliness with one another the happiness of the western world largely turns. Thus the patriotism which binds men to the State has reinforced the sense of nationality which joins together men of common language and traditions: and the resulting divisions are embittered by the memories of rivalry and warfare, of the bluff and boasting, the deceit and double-dealing, of generations of patriotic statesmen. Instead of a comparatively innocent racial pride, justified on the whole by the facts, we have the sensitive vanities

*In the summer of 1914 an eminent English general, addressing a School O.T.C. after an inspection, told them that their hair was too long; it made them look like "foreigners or civilians.” In fact, of course, men's hair is habitually cut shorter in most European countries than in England.

and incompatible ambitions of a number of large communities, inter-dependent and inter-related in a thousand ways, but each jealously guarding its exclusiveness, each strong enough to be a potential danger to the rest, and each convinced that the cause of civilisation is bound up with its own prosperity and aggrandisement. It might seem that, as compared with the Greeks of the fourth century before Christ, we have lost, not gained; that the common dichotomy has only become more absurd and pernicious in the course of its history.

This sets the problem which we have now to face. Accepting patriotism as the duty to serve the State with a free man's service, accepting nationality as the determinant of State boundaries and as the natural complement and ally of democracy in government, we have to consider the resulting relations of the groups so constituted. There is, of course, a short way out of this difficulty. We are often urged to put aside patriotism and nationality as childish things, unfit for grown and educated men; we are told that until this is done there is no hope that any international organisation can be anything but a covert scramble for power between the nations.* But we are already committed to a different

*This appears to be a very widespread opinion, at any rate in the middle classes, at the present time, though of course the conclusion usually drawn is not that patriotism and nationality must go, but that international organisations have no future. More than once recently I have taken part in examinations in which questions raising this point have been set. At least nine out of ten of the schoolboy candidates thought patriotism a serious obstacle to a League of Nations.

view. We cannot see our way to dispensing either with patriotism or with nationality. If, therefore, we are to help to build a wider organisation than that of the nation-state, it must be a society of nations; and if such an organisation is to have real life and success, it must not merely not conflict with state-patriotism; it must actually enlist this patriotism in its service. We have to convince ourselves that patriotism and national feeling can help in the foundation of an international order, and that the traditional dichotomy, so far as it is necessarily involved in these attitudes, may at least be rendered harmless and inoffensive. In short, our question is this. Given nations, or political units approximating to nations, what sort of a world will they, or might they, form?

§ 13. THE BASIS OF GOVERNMENT. Two ALTERNATIVES FOR THE SOCIETY OF NATIONS.

It must be taken for granted that every nation will in the main seek its own prosperity and advancement. All that one can hope is that these will not be too crudely conceived. Actions of generosity or selfabnegation are quite conceivable, but they will always be exceptional. It is therefore absurd to suppose that an international order can be made by appeals to the moral feeling of mankind. This is not cynicism; it is common sense. Man cannot live by moral heroism;