Part 13 (1/2)
In this chapter I propose to discuss the effect of the same tendencies on international and inter-racial relations. But, as soon as one leaves the single State and deals with the interrelation of several States, one meets with the preliminary question, What is a State? Is the British Empire, or the Concert of Europe, one State or many? Every community in either area now exerts political influence on every other, and the telegraph and the steams.h.i.+p have abolished most of the older limitations on the further development and extension of that influence. Will the process of coalescence go on either in feeling or in const.i.tutional form, or are there any permanent causes tending to limit the geographical or racial sphere of effective political solidarity, and therefore the size and composition of States?
Aristotle, writing under the conditions of the ancient world, laid it down that a community whose population extended to a hundred thousand would no more be a State than would one whose population was confined to ten.[95] He based his argument on measurable facts as to the human senses and the human memory. The territory of a State must be 'visible as a whole' by one eye, and the a.s.sembly attended by all the full citizens must be able to hear one voice--which must be that of an actual man and not of the legendary Stentor. The governing officials must be able to remember the faces and characters of all their fellow citizens.[96] He did not ignore the fact that nearly all the world's surface as he knew it was occupied by States enormously larger than his rule allowed. But he denied that the great barbarian monarchies were in the truest sense 'States' at all.
[95] _Ethics_, IX., X. 3. [Greek: oute gar ek deka anthropon genoit' an polis, out' ek deka myriadon eti polis estin.]
[96] Aristotle, _Polit._, Bk. VII. ch. iv.
We ourselves are apt to forget that the facts on which Aristotle relied were both real and important. The history of the Greek and mediaeval City-States shows how effective a stimulus may be given to some of the highest activities and emotions of mankind when the whole environment of each citizen comes within the first-hand range of his senses and memory. It is now only here and there, in villages outside the main stream of civilisation, that men know the faces of their neighbours and see daily as part of one whole the fields and cottages in which they work and rest. Yet, even now, when a village is absorbed by a sprawling suburb or overwhelmed by the influx of a new industrial population, some of the older inhabitants feel that they are losing touch with the deeper realities of life.
A year ago I stood with a hard-walking and hard-thinking old Yorks.h.i.+re schoolmaster on the high moorland edge of Airedale. Opposite to us was the country-house where Charlotte Bronte was governess, and below us ran the railway, linking a string of manufacturing villages which already were beginning to stretch out towards each other, and threatened soon to extend through the valley an unbroken succession of tall chimneys and slate roofs. He told me how, within his memory, the old affection for place and home had disappeared from the district. I asked whether he thought that a new affection was possible, whether, now that men lived in the larger world of knowledge and inference, rather than in the narrower world of sight and hearing, a patriotism of books and maps might not appear which should be a better guide to life than the patriotism of the village street.
This he strongly denied; as the older feeling went, nothing, he said, had taken its place, or would take its place, but a naked and restless individualism, always seeking for personal satisfaction, and always missing it. And then, almost in the words of Morris and Ruskin, he began to urge that we should pay a cheap price if we could regain the true riches of life by forgetting steam and electricity, and returning to the agriculture of the mediaeval village and the handicrafts of the mediaeval town.
He knew and I knew that his plea was hopeless. Even under the old conditions the Greek and Italian and Flemish City-States perished, because they were too small to protect themselves against larger though less closely organised communities; and industrial progress is an invader even more irresistible than the armies of Macedon or Spain. For a constantly increasing proportion of the inhabitants of modern England there is now no place where in the old sense they 'live.' Nearly the whole of the cla.s.s engaged in the direction of English industry, and a rapidly increasing proportion of the manual workers, pa.s.s daily in tram or train between sleeping-place and working-place a hundred times more sights than their eyes can take in or their memory retain. They are, to use Mr. Wells's phrase, 'delocalised.'[97]
[97] _Mankind in the Making_, p. 406.
But now that we can no longer use the range of our senses as a basis for calculating the possible area of the civilised State, there might seem to be no facts at all which can be used for such a calculation. How can we fix the limits of effective intercommunication by steam or electricity, or the area which can be covered by such political expedients as representation and federalism? When Aristotle wished to ill.u.s.trate the relation of the size of the State to the powers of its citizens he compared it to a s.h.i.+p, which, he said, must not be too large to be handled by the muscles of actual men. 'A s.h.i.+p of two furlongs length would not be a s.h.i.+p at all.'[98] But the _Lusitania_ is already not very far from a furlong and a half in length, and no one can even guess what is the upward limit of size which the s.h.i.+p-builders of a generation hence will have reached. If once we a.s.sume that a State may be larger than the field of vision of a single man, then the merely mechanical difficulty of bringing the whole earth under a government as effective as that of the United States or the British Empire has already been overcome. If such a government is impossible, its impossibility must be due to the limits not of our senses and muscles but of our powers of imagination and sympathy.
[98] Aristotle, _Polit._, Bk. VII. ch. iv.
I have already pointed out[99] that the modern State must exist for the thoughts and feelings of its citizens, not as a fact of direct observation but as an ent.i.ty of the mind, a symbol, a personification, or an abstraction. The possible area of the State will depend, therefore, mainly on the facts which limit our creation and use of such ent.i.ties. Fifty years ago the statesmen who were reconstructing Europe on the basis of nationality thought that they had found the relevant facts in the causes which limit the physical and mental h.o.m.ogeneity of nations. A State, they thought, if it is to be effectively governed, must be a h.o.m.ogeneous 'nation,' because no citizen can imagine his State or make it the object of his political affection unless he believes in the existence of a national type to which the individual inhabitants of the State are a.s.similated; and he cannot continue to believe in the existence of such a type unless in fact his fellow-citizens are like each other and like himself in certain important respects. Bismarck deliberately limited the area of his intended German Empire by a quant.i.tative calculation as to the possibility of a.s.similating other Germans to the Prussian type. He always opposed the inclusion of Austria, and for a long time the inclusion of Bavaria, on the ground that while the Prussian type was strong enough to a.s.similate the Saxons and Hanoverians to itself, it would fail to a.s.similate Austrians and Bavarians. He said, for instance, in 1866: 'We cannot use these Ultramontanes, and we must not swallow more than we can digest.'[100]
[99] Part I. ch. ii. pp. 72, 73, and 77-81.
[100] _Bismarck_ (J.W. Headlam), p. 269.
Mazzini believed, with Bismarck, that no State could be well governed unless it consisted of a h.o.m.ogeneous nation. But Bismarck's policy of the artificial a.s.similation of the weaker by the stronger type seemed to him the vilest form of tyranny; and he based his own plans for the reconstruction of Europe upon the purpose of G.o.d, as revealed by the existing correspondence of national uniformities with geographical facts. 'G.o.d,' he said, 'divided humanity into distinct groups or nuclei upon the face of the earth.... Evil governments have disfigured the Divine design. Nevertheless you may still trace it, distinctly marked out--at least as far as Europe is concerned--by the course of the great rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and other geographical conditions.'[101]
[101] _Life, and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iv. (written 1858), p. 275.
Both Mazzini and Bismarck, therefore, opposed with all their strength the humanitarianism of the French Revolution, the philosophy which, as Canning said, 'reduced the nation into individuals in order afterwards to congregate them into mobs.'[102] Mazzini attacked the 'cosmopolitans,'
who preached that all men should love each other without distinction of nationality, on the ground that they were asking for a psychological impossibility. No man, he argued, can imagine, and therefore no one can love, mankind, if mankind means to him all the millions of individual human beings. Already in 1836 he denounced the original Carbonari for this reason: 'The cosmopolitan,' he then said, 'alone in the midst of the immense circle by which he is surrounded, whose boundaries extend beyond the limits of his vision; possessed of no other weapons than the consciousness of his rights (often misconceived) and his individual faculties--which, however powerful, are incapable of extending their activity over the whole sphere of application const.i.tuting the aim ...
has but two paths before him. He is compelled to choose between despotism and inertia.'[103] He quotes the Breton fisherman who, as he puts out to sea, prays to G.o.d, 'Help me my G.o.d! My boat is so small and Thy ocean so wide.'[104]
[102] Canning, _Life_ by Stapleton, p. 341 (speech at Liverpool, 1818).
[103] Mazzini, _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iii. p. 8.
[104] _Ibid._, vol. iv. p. 274.
For Mazzini the divinely indicated nation stood therefore between the individual man and the unimaginable mult.i.tude of the human race. A man could comprehend and love his nation because it consisted of beings like himself 'speaking the same language, gifted with the same tendencies and educated by the same historical tradition,'[105] and could be thought of as a single national ent.i.ty. The nation was 'the intermediate term between humanity and the individual,'[106] and man could only attain to the conception of humanity by picturing it to himself as a mosaic of h.o.m.ogeneous nations. 'Nations are the citizens of humanity as individuals are the citizens of the nation,'[107] and again, 'The pact of humanity cannot be signed by individuals, but only by free and equal peoples, possessing a name, a banner, and the consciousness of a distinct existence.'[108]
[105] _Ibid._, vol. iv. p. 276 (written 1858).
[106] _Ibid._, vol. v. p. 273.
[107] Mazzini, _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. v. p. 274 (written 1849).
[108] _Ibid_., vol. iii. p. 15 (written 1836).
Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck or by Mazzini, played a great and invaluable part in the development of the political consciousness of Europe during the nineteenth century. But it is becoming less and less possible to accept it as a solution for the problems of the twentieth century. We cannot now a.s.sert with Mazzini, that the 'indisputable tendency of our epoch' is towards a reconst.i.tution of Europe into a certain number of h.o.m.ogeneous national States 'as nearly as possible equal in population and extent'[109]