fatal, not merely to justice, but to sincerity, to intellectual rectitude, to the capacity to see the truth objectively. It explains why we can, at the end of a war, excuse or espouse the very policies which the war was waged to make impossible.

CHAPTER VI (pp. 169-198)

THE ALTERNATIVE RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT

INSTINCT, being co-terminous with all animal life, is a motive of conduct immeasurably older and more deeply rooted than reasoning based on experience. So long as the instinctive, ‘natural’ action succeeds, or appears to succeed in its object, we do not trouble to examine the results of instinct or to reason. Only failure causes us to do that.

We have seen that the pugnacities, gregariousness, group partisanship embodied in patriotism, give a strong emotional push to domination, the assertion of our power over others as a means of settling our relations with them. Physical coercion marks all the early methods in politics (as in autocracy and feudalism), in economics (as in slavery), and even in the relations of the sexes.

But we try other methods (and manage to restrain our impulse sufficiently) when we really discover that force won’t work. When we find we cannot coerce a man but still need his service, we offer him inducements, bargain with him, enter a contract. This is the result of realising that we really need him, and cannot compel him. That is the history of the development from status to contract.

Stable international co-operation cannot come in any other way. Not until we realise the failure of national coercive power for indispensable ends (like the food of our people) shall we cease to idealise power and to put our intensest political emotions, like those of patriotism, behind it.

The alternative to preponderance is partnership of power. Both may imply the employment of force (as in policing), but the latter makes force the instrument of a conscious social purpose, offering to the rival that challenges the force (as in the case of the individual criminal within the nation) the same rights as those claimed by the users of force. Force as employed by competitive nationalism does not do this. It says ‘You or me,’ not ‘You and me.’ The method of social co-operation may fail temporarily; but it has the perpetual opportunity of success. It succeeds the moment that the two parties both accept it. But the other method is bound to fail; the two parties cannot both accept it. Both cannot be masters. Both can be partners.

The failure of preponderant power on a nationalist basis for indispensable ends would be self-evident but for the push of the instincts which warp our judgment.

Yet faith in the social method is the condition of its success. It is a choice of risks. We distrust and arm. Others, then, are entitled also to distrust; their arming is our justification for distrusting them. The policy of suspicion justifies itself. To allay suspicion we must accept the risk of trust. That, too, will justify itself.

Man’s future depends on making the better choice, for either the distrust or the faith will justify itself. His judgment will not be fit to make that choice if it is warped by the passions of pugnacity and hate that we have cultivated as part of the apparatus of war.

CHAPTER VII (pp. 199-251)

THE SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT

IF our instinctive pugnacities and hates are uncontrollable, and they dictate conduct, no more is to be said. We are the helpless victims of outside forces, and may as well surrender. But many who urge this most insistently in the case of our patriotic pugnacities obviously do not believe it: their demands for the suppression of ‘defeatist’ propaganda during the War, their support of war-time propaganda for the maintenance of morale, their present fears of the ‘deadly infection’ of Bolshevist ideas, indicate, on the contrary, a very real belief that feelings can be subject to an extremely rapid modification or redirection. In human society mere instinct has always been modified or directed in some measure by taboos, traditions, conventions, constituting a social discipline. The character of that discipline is largely determined by some sense of social need, developed as the result of the suggestion of transmitted ideas, discussions, intellectual ferment.

The feeling which made the Treaty inevitable was the result of a partly unconscious but also partly conscious propaganda of war half-truths, built up on a sub-structure of deeply rooted nationalist conceptions. The systematic exploitation of German atrocities, and the systematic suppression of similar Allied offences, the systematic suppression of every good deed done by our enemy, constituted a monstrous half-truth. It had the effect of fortifying the conception of the enemy people as a single person; its complete collective responsibility. Any one of them—child, woman, invalid—could properly be punished (by famine, say) for any other’s guilt. Peace became a problem of repressing or destroying this entirely bad person by a combination of nations entirely good.

This falsified the nature of the problem, gave free rein to natural and instinctive retaliations, obscured the simplest human realities, and rendered possible ferocious cruelty on the part of the Allies. There would have been in any case a strong tendency to ignore even the facts which in Allied interest should have been considered. In the best circumstances it would have been extremely difficult to put through a Wilsonian (type 1918) policy, involving restraint of the sacred egoisms, the impulsive retaliations, the desire for dominion inherent in ‘intense’ nationalisms. The efficiency of the machinery by which the Governments for the purpose of war formed the mind of the nation, made it out of the question.

If ever the passions which gather around the patriotisms disrupting and Balkanising Europe are to be disciplined or directed by a better social tradition, we must face without pretence or self-deception the results which show the real nature of the older political moralities. We must tell truths that disturb strong prejudices.

THE   FRUITS   OF   VICTORY

CHAPTER I

OUR DAILY BREAD

I

The relation of certain economic facts to Britain’s independence and Social Peace

POLITICAL instinct in England, particularly in the shaping of naval policy, has always recognised the intimate relation which must exist between an uninterrupted flow of food to these shores and the preservation of national independence. An enemy in a position to stop that flow would enjoy not merely an economic but a political power over us—the power to starve us into ignominious submission to his will.

The fact has, of course, for generations been the main argument for Britain’s right to maintain unquestioned command of the sea. In the discussions before the War concerning the German challenge to our naval power, it was again and again pointed out that Britain’s position was very special: what is a matter of life and death for her had no equivalent importance for other powers. And it was when the Kaiser announced that Germany’s future was upon the sea that British fear became acute! The instinct of self-preservation became aroused by the thought of the possible possession in