There, of course, we have the centre of gravity of the whole discussion. If we can abolish and dispense with the military system, our retention of it in the twentieth century is the most appalling sham and anachronism of which we are guilty. I do not enlarge on the cost of war. No one to-day can be insensible of it or suggest that any but the most imperious needs would justify us in retaining it. I assume also that, after the lamentable behaviour of Germany, none will question that there will be wars as long as militarism lasts, and that the cost and carnage will increase prodigiously.
The supreme point for us to realise is the comparative ease with which this greatest of reforms can be accomplished. We have no rival schools of economists or moralists or philosophers darkening counsel here. We do not await a genius to discover the path for us. A plain and seriously indisputable ideal is put before us: arbitration. A court for exercising it has already been established: the Hague Tribunal. Let the majority of people in the more powerful nations of the earth agree to submit every international difference to that or some other tribunal, and we have made an end of militarism and war.
If this seem a hasty or superficial view of a grave problem, reflect on the difficulties which a cautious or conservative thinker might allege. He would, I fancy, on sincere consideration, admit that the chief and most serious difficulty is not a reluctance based on specific reasons, but a general apathy due to want of reflection. I am not for a moment underrating the magnitude of the effort that will be required in overcoming this apathy, in creating the general will. In this respect, indeed, the pacifist reform is peculiarly hampered. Pessimistic people ask how we came to boast of moral progress in modern times when this military evil has become greater than ever. They do not reflect on the special conditions of the problem. In attacking almost every other evil—industrial injustice, say, or cruel sport, or a stupid penal code—we have to deal only with our own nation. We can carry the reform within our own frontiers, whatever other nations do. In the case of militarism we cannot. All the Great Powers, at least, must advance simultaneously. We have not to educate a nation, but a planet. Pacifists have at times given the impression—generally a wrong impression—that they forgot this; that they advocated disarmament or relaxation of armament in our own nation, whether other nations disarmed or no. In this way, and because many pacifists have weakly opposed or carped at England’s action in this very grave crisis, they have done harm by making humanitarianism seem unpractical, blindly sentimental, and dangerous. I need not repeat that I have not the least sympathy with that sort of pacifism. The reform must be international and thoroughly practical.
But this large task of planting a definite conviction in the minds of the majority in many nations does not conflict with what I said about the essential clearness and simplicity of the reform. If you set out to attack poverty or to reform marriage, you have first to settle very serious controversies about the way to do it. There is no such controversy here. There are, it is true, a few who still have in their veins some of the blood of the medieval swashbuckler. They say that, while a quarrel about territory might fitly be referred to a judge, an outrage on our national honour must be expiated by blood. The idea is purely barbaric. As if this river of human blood were not an immeasurably greater outrage than the heated words of a nervous diplomatist, or the jibes of a silly journalist, or the acts of an excited crowd, or the guilt of a couple of assassins! As if an international court could not devise some means of appeasing injured honour as well as of restoring injured rights! It is dreadful materialism, they say, to put honour in the scale with money. So men said in the clubs of London a century ago in defence of the duel, and we recognise in their pleas the lingering, more or less disguised, of a barbaric sentiment. Most of us recognise that same feature in this last apology for the duel of nations. If we can trust our individual honour to a mediocre magistrate or judge, or a still worse jury, we can certainly entrust our national honour to a group of the ablest and most impartial lawyers of the world. It is sheer distrust of justice to refuse it.
Here again history is wholly on the side of reform. Which of the great wars of the nineteenth century involved a point of honour that could not, with entire decency, have been submitted to arbitration? Was there such a point of honour in the Napoleonic wars? The Prusso-Danish? The Prusso-Austrian? The Italian? The American Civil War? The Franco-German? The Russo-Turkish? The South African? What point was involved in any of them that could not have been settled with far greater honour to the combatants and greater regard for justice by an impartial tribunal? In most cases they were really wars of aggression and expansion, like the war in which we are engaged. We may at least ask the men who hold that medieval idea of war to have—since they boast much of their courage—the elementary courage to say so.
There is no conceivable quarrel that cannot with perfect honour be submitted to arbitration. And the ostensible ground of this colossal struggle which is now exhausting Europe—the satisfaction due to Austria for the assassination of the Archduke—was pre-eminently a matter for a tribunal. The frivolity and insincerity with which these grave issues are sometimes met are, to put it on the lowest level, costly. Speaking in a London club some time ago, I urged this substitution of arbitration for war. My opponent frivolously observed that he was not sure that a court of great lawyers would be cheaper than war, and there were some who quite seriously applauded. Yet Europe had then actually expended about £2,000,000,000 in the preliminary stages of its great war!
Wherever there is a considerable and deliberate reluctance to substitute arbitration for war, wherever these unsatisfactory pleas for war are put forward, we find a hypocritical concealment of real motives. If we would be practical we must candidly confront these motives, and we shall find that the most persistent and most dangerous of them is still the desire to gain territory. The spectacle of the decay of the Ottoman Empire and the apparent helplessness of the Balkan peoples had more to do with the militarism of European Powers than they were willing to admit. That source of temptation is now renewed, and most of the Powers have, or soon will have, all the territory they can reasonably desire. The further distribution of African territory could clearly be best controlled by an international court. There remains one Power that will still feel the lust of territory. Germany conspicuously thwarted in Europe the advance of the pacifist reform because, as the whole world now sees, it had an aggressive territorial ambition. We may assume that Austria will now be cured of its lawless and costly designs, and that Germany will remain the one unsated and discontented nation. But Europe will surely have the elementary wisdom of refusing to maintain its terrible burden on that account. It will pay us better to meet the real economic need of Germany by a generous colonial deal, and then to use the power of an international polity to destroy and prevent the revival of militarism in that country.
We should thus remove the last serious obstacle to the reform, and the work might advance rapidly. The tribunal, as I said, exists, and has had more experience than is generally realised. The Hague Conference of 1907 established a Prize Court, with permanent salaried judges, and an Arbitration Court. A large number of very grave quarrels have since been adjusted by this tribunal, and, as Professor Schücking observes, “more than a hundred contracts between States have been concluded in which, on each occasion, two States made the Arbitration Court obligatory.” But, largely owing to the opposition of Germany and the general apathy, the Court remained optional, and the Powers maintained their armies for the settlement of quarrels in the old barbaric manner. The next and last step is for all the Powers to recognise the Court as compulsory, and to furnish it with an executive (a small international army and navy) for the enforcement of its decisions. Our vast armies and navies then become superfluous and would be disbanded simultaneously, leaving only a small force in each country for the suppression