A sociologist wrote to the Vali of Aleppo, asking: What are the imports of Aleppo? What is the nature of the water-supply? What is the birth-rate, and the death-rate?

The Vali replied: It is impossible for anyone to number the camels that kneel in the markets of Aleppo. The water is sufficient; no one ever dies of thirst in Aleppo. How many children shall be born in this great city is known only to Allah the compassionate, the merciful. And who would venture to inquire the tale of the dead? For it is revealed only to the Angels of death who shall be taken and who shall be left. O idle Frank, cease from your presumptuous questioning, and know that these things are not revealed to the children of men.

The Bustan of Mahmud Aga el-Arnauty.

Sec 1

The Armament Ring

What, in short, are the forces that make for the anachronistic survival of war apart of course from the defect that it is always with us, the habit of inertia, sometimes called Conservatism?

The obvious answer is not, I think, the correct one. At least it is correct as far as it goes, but leaves us very far from a complete explanation of this unpleasant survival. So scandalous is the interrelation of the armament firms which has developed the world’s trade in munitions and explosives into one obscene cartel; so cynical is the avidity with which their agents exchange their trade secrets, sell ships and guns, often by means of diplomatic blackmail, to friend or foe alike, and follow those pioneers of civilisation the missionary, the gin merchant and the procurer, into the wildest part of the earth; so absurd on the face of it is the practice of allowing the manufacture of armaments to remain in the hands of private companies; that it is very tempting to see in the great Armament Firms the principal if not the only cause of modern war. Examiners of German militarism, most of them stupid enough to quote Nietzsche, may be pardoned for emphasising the political influence of Krupp; and since every great Power has a more or less efficiently organised Krupp of its own, it would be permissible to suggest that war would be already obsolete but for the intensive cultivation it receives for the benefit of Krupp, Creusot, Elswick and the rest. But it would be wrong; our syllogism would have a badly undistributed middle. It is true that Krupp in particular, who is the actual owner of more than one popular German newspaper, and other armament firms in a smaller degree, exercise an enormous influence on national opinion, create their own markets by the threat of war, and would go bankrupt if wars should cease. You may also say that their shareholders live by prostituting the patriotism of their fellow-citizens: in short, you may denounce them with the most expensive rhetoric to be had without doing them any injustice. But the fact remains that their position with regard to war is exactly analogous to that of the great breweries with regard to drunkenness. They live by taking advantage of human weakness. It is quite accurate, therefore, to describe their earnings as immoral, but they are no more the cause of the immorality they exploit and undoubtedly encourage, than makers of seismological instruments are responsible for the occurrence of earthquakes. The interests of one trade alone, however powerful in itself, would never be strong enough to plunge a nation into war. They are, of course, accessories to the crime; but the militarism they are guilty of fostering has other primary explanations.

Sec 2

Eugenics?

In this brief investigation of the possible causes of war, it must be understood that what we want to find is what is called a “sufficient reason” for its continued existence. The armament trades may supply the means, the occasion, the stimulant, but their relation to it is not essentially causal. Many writers of another school have attempted to prove that the sufficient reason of war is a beneficent function of which they believe it to be capable. This imaginary function is none other than that of improving the race, and we may admit at once that, if there were the slightest scientific basis for such a belief, the bloodiest war would be morally justified, and it would be the religious duty of every individual to kill as many as possible of his fellows for the benefit of their descendants. But of course modern warfare so far from improving the race must sensibly exhaust it. In ancient Sparta, and generally whenever the conditions of warfare approximated to those of personal combat, courage and the allied characteristics of mental as well as of physical nobility must have had a survival value; whereas in modern warfare which makes for the indiscriminate extermination of all combatants, the result is exactly reversed. Our semi-scientific militarists forget that the “survival of the fittest" is in nature essentially a process of selective elimination; and modern war is a process of inverted selection which eliminates the brave, the adventurous and the healthy; precisely those members of the community who are best fitted to survive, that is to propagate their kind, in the ordinary environment of political life. Conscription, indeed, spreading a wider net than the voluntary system, may be described as an institution for exposing the best citizens of a state to abnormal risks of annihilation. As a matter of historic fact we are told, though I don’t know on what authority, that the Napoleonic wars, how much less deadly than our own, reduced by an inch the average height of the French nation.

So much, in brief, for the “scientific” justification of war. It is evident that by the eugenic argument war could be defended only if we agreed to send into battle precisely those men whom our recruiting officers disqualify. A good deal might be said, from the sociologist’s point of view, in favour of a system of cathartic conscription which would rejuvenate England with a watchword of “The Unfit to the Trenches.”

Sec 3

Patriotism

If again there were any evidence to show that war and war alone kept alive the spirit of true patriotism, it would be less easy to denounce its manifold wickedness. For true patriotism, although like all passionate emotion it involves a certain mental distortion, a slight disturbance of the rational orbit, is yet one of those happy diseases which relieve the colourlessness of strict normality. It is a magic, a glamour, of the nature of personal affection, which only great poetry can fully express, and volumes of bad poetry cannot quite destroy. It has besides a real political value, binding the State together, and giving it a stronger moral coherence than can be attained by any legal or constitutional authority; a fact that is illustrated by those distressful countries in which its limits are not conterminous with the political boundaries of the State. I am inclined to think that just because true patriotism is of the nature of a personal affection, it is an emotion that cannot be inspired by an empire, any more than personal affection can be inspired by a corporation or a joint-stock company. Certainly Imperialism more often gives rise to a sentimental worship of force and a certain promiscuous lust for mere extension of territory which are quite alien to the steady devotion of the patriot to the land he knows.

Unless one be a poet, it is difficult, as may perhaps be gathered from the preceding paragraph, sufficiently to praise genuine patriotism without falling into vague rhetoric. But I submit that there is nothing to show that this political emotion is created, stimulated, or even discovered by war. Actually it seems that the reverse is the case, if one may judge by the fact that war is invariably accompanied by an overwhelming outbreak of every spurious form of patriotism that was ever invented by the devil to make an honest man ashamed of his country. True patriotism is a calm and lovely orientation of the spirit towards the vital beauty of England. It has no noisy manifestations and consequently one may not be able to find it among the crowds who shout most loudly for war.

One finds instead a sort of violent fever and calenture which not merely deflects, as any emotion may, but totally inhibits the rational operations of the mind. The newspapers supply a legion of witnesses.

Thus the Evening Standard perorates against some pacificist lecturer (who had attempted to clear his views from all sorts of misrepresentations) with the magnificent comment that he had not “repudiated his remarks as to the pleasure which the tune of the Austrian National Anthem gave him." But I should weary you were I to transcribe a tithe of the stupid remarks made by persons in authority under the influence of war. The record, I believe, in England is held at present by Mr. Bodkin, K.C.

It may be said of course that men, and newspapers, are equally stupid in time of peace; and I fear that fundamentally this is true. War does not change their nature, but only brings to the bubbling surface the dregs and vileness and scum. War does not change any one’s nature; and that is why it is vain to expect that under its influence those crowds will love their country who never loved anything before. But if war cannot create it may at least be supposed to discover and test the existent patriotism of the nation. And this supposition is corroborated at first sight by the realisation that hundreds of thousands, that actually millions of previously ordinary young men have implied by enlisting their willingness to die for England. One might, of course, reason that no individual recruit really believes he is going to be killed, that each boy thinks he will be one of the lucky ones who escape all the bullets unhurt to enjoy an honoured return, that recruiting would have failed entirely if the barracks were explicitly a grave and enlistment the certainty of violent death or mutilation. But somehow I don’t think that would be a fair argument. It is more pertinent if less easy to remember that a readiness to die for one’s country is not the highest form of political virtue. If it be, as it is, a solemn and wonderful thing to be willing to die for the salvation (ex hypothesi) of England, it must be much more wonderful and solemn to be willing to die in order slightly to increase the income of one’s family. And every schoolboy knows that the Chinaman of the old regime was willing to have his head cut off for the payment of a few dollars to his next of kin. Let no one ever deny our soldiers the honour of their courage and nobility; but the fact remains that the readiness to die for England is a less adequate test of patriotism than a readiness to live for England; and if the readiness to live for the State rather than for private interests had been for a hundred years a social virtue whose votaries could be numbered by the million, then indeed England would be to-day a nation worth dying for.

Sec 4

The “Moral Test”

The theory that war is beneficial as a moral test, a furnace in which character is proved ut fulvum spectatur in ignibus aurum is that generally adopted by the Christian Churches, who may be said without disrespect to have taken every advantage of their founder’s unique reference to the sword. I cannot help thinking that there is something fundamental in this ecclesiastical advocacy of war; that some psychological theory could be outlined to correlate this almost uniform advocacy with the facts that such religious men as Tennyson and Ruskin were among the loudest in their support of the Crimean War, that such a militarist as Rudyard Kipling in his best work (in Kim, in Puck of Pook’s Hill and the intercalated poems, in the most successful of his short stories) shows himself to be at heart a deeply religious mystic; and that in France the very active Clerical party, one consequence of a disestablished Church, is always closely supported by the Chauvinists. In many cases, however, I have no doubt that the pious Christian, finding himself confronted with war, and not having the moral courage or the political detachment to condemn it, only applies automatically to its justification the arguments which he habitually uses to explain the existence of evil and pain. It is certain at least that the theories of war as a Moral Test or a School of Character bear a strong resemblance to the commonplaces of religious consolation which almost any good Christian will offer to the bereaved and afflicted. Any one who has seen an innocent friend slowly tortured to death by some vile disease will know the futility of the Christian defence (for these religious consolations amount theologically to a defence) that pain ennobles the character and “proves” the moral courage of the sufferer. The leading fallacy of the defence that war, or pain, is valuable as a moral test is akin to the common misunderstanding of the word “prove” in the saying that “the exception proves the rule”; the truth being that a strong and noble character, one of whose corollary qualities is a capacity to bear pain, is not less strong and noble if it is never called upon to exercise that capacity. The San Francisco earthquake was not a blessing in disguise because it happened to “test” and “prove” the strength and flexibility of modern American architecture.

Sec 5

Trade

I shall never forget the tones of hoarse satisfaction with which a vendor of the Evening News disturbed the twilight of a May evening in London, triumphantly proclaiming a “Great Troop Train Disaster.” I had often noticed with what apparent joy the newspapers announced the sinking of a British cruiser; with what entirely neutral delight they welcomed or invented the report of Terrible Slaughter on either side. But somehow that hoarse and rufous man with the loose lip remained in my memory and became for me a type of one element in the population to which war was not unwelcome; the journalistic element that lives by exploiting the sadistic curiosity, the craving for mean excitements, and all the gladiatorial instinct of the modern world. It soon became clear that the newspapers were not alone in the commercial exploitation of war. They were not even the worst offenders. The publishers were hurriedly producing volume after volume of faked memoirs badly written by imaginary governesses. The production of spurious memoirs and “autobiographies,” even if they are skilfully composed, is always grossly immoral; and of the specimens occasioned by this war one may say that if they had been genuine it would have been possible to attribute the low morality of some Germanic princes to the literary style of the English governesses who had had a share in their education. The catchpenny manoeuvres of publishers are really only a branch of journalism, and such trivial offences were not, after all, unexpected, because the very profession of journalism is to take advantage. But the journalist is a man of straw who shows which way the wind blows, and his raucous exultation over disaster was the manifest symbol of a commercial exploitation of war by tradesmen and speculators which soon became sensible from one end of belligerent Europe to the other. Like the Vali of Aleppo, I am not good at statistics. It is well known however without the assistance of a mathematician that in England during the winter of 1915, when the cost of living had already risen by nearly 50 per cent, wholesale dealers often kept provisions of all sorts rotting in their stores rather than break the artificial scarcity they had created; farmers would not sell fresh eggs when the price was twopence-halfpenny, because they knew that in a week or two the price for the same eggs would have risen to threepence. Here is a cartoon from a Hungarian paper showing the bloated profiteer of The Sugar Trust laughing at the women who feebly attack his barricade of sugar loaves. I mention it here because it is sufficiently remote from English affairs, and because it happens to come to hand, and because it is a good fragment of evidence, there being no reason why sugar should be scarce in Hungary as an immediate result of the war. And from every country between England and Hungary, from every country in Europe, can be heard the same complaint, unmistakable but how much too feeble, the cry of the people who discover that one of the horrors of war is Trade.

Sec 6

Trade in Time of Peace

It would not however be correct to infer that the sacrifice of national welfare to commercial manoeuvres is a condition peculiar to war. Modern commerce is essentially an art; the art of making people pay more than they are worth for things which they do not require. And it is with all the selfishness of the artist that it performs its usual operations. Among all the unpublished detail of modern life hardly any class of facts is more disquieting than that of commercial procedure and achievement. The subject is too large to be reviewed in less than a volume; and I can do no more here than suggest a few instances that might be acquired by anyone who devotes his time to not reading the daily papers.

The distribution and exchange of commodities are necessary to the existence of the State; so necessary that it might be supposed that their regulation would be one of the primary functions of government. Proper systems of distribution and exchange correspond to the digestive processes of the body, on which depend the proper nutrition of all the parts and the real prosperity of the State as a whole; yet any comprehensive plan for their control is still regarded as the most unattainable dream of Utopia, and they are left to carry on as best they can in the interstices of private acquisitiveness. National well-being is not to be measured by mere volume of trade, which is the means and not the essence of prosperity; and prosperity can certainly never exist when equitable distribution is hindered by a sort of fatty degeneration of capitalism. But trade in itself is a necessary aliment of the State, and its abuses ought not to be beyond remedy.

A few of these abuses are fairly obvious without a full inquiry, and may be illustrated here because their existence in time of peace may throw light on the operations of trade in belligerent states, and indirectly, by suggesting a few of the results of war, may lead us to some of its motives and occasions. Such abuses may be most easily identified in opposition to the national rights which they infringe.

Sec 7

Duties of Commerce to the State

The State has a primary right to be fairly served. Prices should not be arbitrarily raised by any wholesale merchant who happens to be in a position to do so, or by any cartel of dealers in league for that purpose. Prices should be regulated by the cost of production, and should not be an indication of demand; they should rise beyond the cost of production augmented by a fair profit only when the supply is insufficient (production not being artificially restrained) to meet some abnormal demand, and only as a means of checking and regulating the excessive demand. We find instead that any dealer or group of dealers will raise their prices almost absent-mindedly as soon as they are in a position to meet a demand which cannot be postponed. Thus it is that governments are habitually overcharged in all their contracts and purchases; because governments have neither the time nor the opportunity for casual dealings, and because they do not undertake such transactions at all unless their absolute necessity has already been decided. So at the beginning of the war English warehouses were full of all sorts of commodities required by the governments of the Allies; but the urgency of war prevented any sort of bargaining; and the private merchants took advantage of the situation to the amount of about two hundred per cent. At present however I am dealing with trade in time of peace and I must not flavour the ordinary facts with any consideration of War Office contracts. It is enough to state the fact that in ordinary times the private tradesman regards a special demand as an opportunity for raising prices rather than as the stimulus of supply; a rule which is most easily detected in the experience of Government departments.

The State, through its individual citizens, has a primary right to obtain the particular commodity which it happens to prefer, without restrictions imposed for the benefit of any particular tradesman. We find instead that the ordinary purchaser no longer has any effective, or selective, demand. He has to buy what he is given. The informal organisation of the Trust system, primarily a financial operation, has involved the whole market in a network of interdependent industries. The sale of the finished product is controlled and restricted by the vendors of the raw material. Corn is imported by shipbuilders; ships are built by iron merchants; iron furnaces are controlled by coal owners, and coal mines are secured by money-lenders.

The system of the tied house, originally an indigenous corruption of the liquor trade, is being extended to every industry in the land. We can no longer buy the bread we like, but have to eat whatever by-product least interferes with the miller’s profits.

The consumer’s loss of any power of effective demand would not necessarily be of national importance, if at least there were any guarantee that the unique commodity offered by the average trust system were genuine and of good quality. One of the State’s most elementary rights is that of ensuring to its citizens a pure supply of elementary commodities. Yet Commerce has taken no steps, even in its own interests, to suppress the horrid arts of adulteration, in which the motives of the thief usurp the methods of the poisoner, with results which may be inferred from the meagre chronicles of the analyst.

Education is the life of the State. It is therefore of the gravest importance that Commerce should in no circumstances whatever be allowed to interfere with the education of the future citizens. Yet, before the war, in spite of the legislation of the last fifty years, no less than a quarter of a million children of school age were exempted from school attendance for employment in various occupations. Even apart from such improper exemptions the “School Age” fixed by law in itself gives quite insufficient protection. The brain of a girl hardly begins to wake up, or take any natural interest in the acquisition of general ideas, before she comes to puberty. But all over London girls of thirteen or fourteen leave school and are sent by their mothers to earn half a crown a week matching patterns or sewing on sequins.

More generally, the State is entitled to demand from Commerce that it should co-operate sincerely with the other elements in the State in pursuing the real objects of civilisation, inspired by an altruistic regard for the whole of which it is a part, that is by what is really “enlightened self-interest”; by what Plato has called Temperance and Mr. H. G. Wells “a sense of the State." We find instead that the trader has “day and night held on indignantly” in his disastrous hunt for markets, destroying by accident or design whatever amenity in the world does not contribute to his “one aim, one business, one desire.”

After all, in our present pre-occupation with the horrors of war, we must not exaggerate their extent. War at its maddest rivals but cannot, at present, surpass the mortality caused by tuberculosis, alcoholism and syphilis, which peaceful Commerce, hand in hand with Christianity, carries into the remotest parts of the earth. Some reader may have noticed by this time that I am not a collector of statistics, but gather my illustrations as I go from any scrap of paper that comes to hand. It is a lazy trick; but at any rate one escapes the fallacy of over-elaborated evidence, by calling as witness the man who happens to be in the street at the moment. So at this point I happen to notice in the Manchester Guardian an extract from the report of the Resident Commissioner in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate. This is what it says of the natives:

The cotton smock for women and the cotton trousers and shirts for men, which in the mind of the people seem now so indispensable to professed Christianity, while reducing the endurance of the skin, render it the more susceptible to the chills which wet clothing engenders. The result is colds, pneumonia, influenza eventually tuberculosis.

We may notice a not unexpected coincidence which the Resident Commissioner apparently omits to mention. It is that “professed Christianity,” by insisting on the propriety of cotton garments for the islanders hitherto well clad in a film of coco-nut oil and a “riri or kilt of finely worked leaves,” is conferring a very appreciable benefit on the Manchester trade in “cotton goods.” “Our colonial markets have steadily grown,” says the Encyclopædia, “and will yearly become of greater value.” ...

On the same day as the issue of the Manchester Guardian just quoted there appeared in the Times Literary Supplement a review of Canon C. H. Robinson’s History of Christian Missions, “a very sound introduction to a vast and fascinating study.” From this I gather that

there are few stories more romantic than the founding of the Uganda Christian Church in British East Africa. At first progress was very slow, and ... in 1890 there were scarcely 200 baptized Christians in the country; yet by 1913 those associated with the Christian Churches were little short of half a million.

So before Europe has shown many signs of convalescence, Africa is already virulently infected. And “our markets will yearly become of greater value.”

Sec 8

Restricted Sphere of Government corresponding to Restricted Sphere of Morality

But to return to our sheep, or rather to those who fleece them, there is one cardinal proof that trade, in so far as it depends on private enterprise, is a danger to the State, and is recognised as such. It is that as soon as war comes, the nation in danger instinctively adopts whatever measure of Socialism can be introduced during the temporary inhibition of capitalistic methods. The actual coming of war induces a brief panic in the marketplace, and during this momentary paralysis of private acquisitors the State makes a desperate attempt to subdue their activities to its own needs. By the mere instinct of self-preservation it clutches at some rudiment of Socialism, and makes a diffident gesture in the direction of nationalisation (of the railways, for instance). But the capitalists of England can point with pride to the fact that they very soon pulled themselves together. I hope to show in the following chapter that by the time the war was in full swing they had made it their own, and had banished every trace of socialism, with the relics of sanity and truth, to the confines of the Labour press.

But still the danger was for the moment realised, and the attempt was made, the desperate and unsuccessful attempt to pull and squeeze and bind the institutions of capitalism into an organised system of political obligations. It failed because the very abuses and intempérances of our commercial system are a sign that the sphere of government has not expanded with the growing complications of the modern community. Nevertheless the attempt was made: but no corresponding effort is being made to extend the system of moral obligations in which we live.

For it is just as the sphere of morality is unduly restricted and fails to correspond to the needs of humanity, that, on the political plane, the unduly restricted sphere of government has never been extended to include all the interrelations of industrial citizenship. Capitalism is a survival of the penultimate stage of political development, as war is a survival of the penultimate stage of morality.

The attempts both spasmodic and continuous to extend the sphere of government, which now begin to affect nearly all serious legislation, must remain incomplete without an analogous and indeed corollary expansion of the moral system which will involve the obsolescence of war.