The World in Chains | Page 6

of readiness to negotiate, a recognition of the fact that disputes need not be settled by immediate violence: and as such it points to a time when war may be superseded, as personal combat has been superseded by litigation. The man who puts a quarrel with his neighbour into the hands of a legal representative is a stage higher in social civilisation than the man who fights it out at sight. Diplomats are the legal representatives of nations--only there is no supernational court before which they can state their case.
Of course, it is perfectly true that the ultimate sanction of diplomacy is always force, that international negotiations may always be resolved into a series of polite threats, and that the envoy of the small and weak nation rarely has any influence. Indeed there are few less enviable situations than that of the minister of a very small State at the court of a very large one. But the mere fact that force is their sanction does not ipso facto dispose of diplomatic and arbitrational methods. We all know that the force at the disposal of the Sovereign is the ultimate sanction of Law. But that force never has to be fully exerted because there is a common consent to respect the Law and its officers.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 10: Cf. Webb, Industrial Democracy, p. 718.]
§ 12
Manners no Substitute for Morals
The real difference between legal methods and the methods of diplomacy (in which I here include international conversations of every sort) is that the latter take place, as it were, in a vacuum. There is no Sovereign, no common denominator, no unifying system in which both parties are related by their common obligations. They exist and act in two separate moral spheres, and no real intercourse is possible between them. For all their ambassadors and diplomatic conferences the nations of Europe are only wolves with good manners. And manners, as we all know, are no substitute for morals.
§ 13
War a Moral Anachronism
Thus we come back to our thesis that war is not only possible but inevitable so long as the extent of the moral sphere is conterminous with the frontiers of the State. But merely to explain laboriously that all this organised killing is not really a paradox but the natural accompaniment of a certain stage of moral development, and to leave it at that, would be rather to exaggerate our philosophic detachment. The point is that we are long past the stage of regarding any but our fellow-subjects as moral outlaws. For some years, to say the least, it has been generally received that the sphere of morality is co-extensive with mankind. In spite of certain lingering exceptions, it is to-day a commonplace of thought that every human being on the earth is our colleague in civilisation; is a member that is of the human race, which finding itself on this earth has got somehow to make the best of it; is a shareholder in the human asset of self-consciousness which we are called upon to exploit. It would certainly be hard to find a man of what we have called enlightened opinions who would not profess, whatever his private feelings, that it is as great a crime to kill a Hottentot or a Jew as to kill an Englishman. With certain lingering exceptions then we already regard the foreigner as a member of our own moral system. The moral sphere has already extended or is at least in course of extension to its ultimate limits: and war is a survival from the penultimate stage of morality. War, to put it mildly, is a moral anachronism. War between European nations is civil war. Logically all war should be recognised at once, at any rate by enlightened opinion, as the crime, the disaster, the ultimate disgrace that it obviously is. Why then do we cling to the implications of a system that we have grown out of? Why do we affect the limitation of boundaries that have been already extended? Or is our prison so lovely that though the walls fall down we refuse to walk out into the air?
CHAPTER II
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