The World in Chains | Page 6

has actually
made its appearance, since these lines were written, in Professor Robert
Michels' Political Parties (Jarrold, 1916).]
[Footnote 9: Cf. Bernard Shaw, in Pease, History of the Fabian Society,
p. 268: "Sooner or later, unless democracy is to be discarded in a
reaction of disgust such as killed it in ancient Athens, democracy itself
will demand that only such men should be presented to its choice as
have proved themselves qualified for more serious and disinterested
work than 'stoking up' election meetings to momentary and foolish
excitement. Without qualified rulers a Socialist State is impossible."]
§ 11
Diplomacy not bad in itself

The real importance of diplomacy, as I have said, is in the fact that it is
a mitigation of primary ferocity, a symptom 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violence: and as such it points to a time when war may be superseded,
as personal combat has been superseded by litigation.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