Front matter (continued 5)

The English attitude, again, is characteristically seen in the method of dealing with homosexual practices and other similar sexual aberrations. Here, legally, England is closer to Germany than to modern France. No country in the world, it is often said, has preserved by tradition and even maintained by recent accretion such severe penalties against homosexual offences as England. Yet, unlike the Germans, the English do not actively prosecute in these cases and are usually content to leave the law in abeyance, so long as public order and decency are reasonably maintained. English people, like the French people, are by no means impressed by the advantages of the German system by which purely private scandals are made public scandals, to be set forth day after day in all their details before the court, and discussed excitedly by the whole population. Yet the English law in this matter is still very widely upheld. There are very many English people who think that the fact that homosexuality is disgusting to most people is a reason for punishing it with extreme severity. Yet disgust is a matter of taste, we cannot properly impart it into our laws; a disgusting person is not necessarily a criminal person, or we shall have to enact that many inmates of our hospitals and lunatic asylums be hanged. There is thus a fundamental inconsistency in the English method of dealing with immorality; it is made up of opposite views, some of them extreme in contrary directions. But by virtue of the national tendency to compromise, these conflicting tendencies work in a fairly harmonious manner. The result is that the general state of English morality—notwithstanding, and perhaps partly by reason of, its prudish anxiety to leave unpleasant matters alone—is at least as satisfactory as that of countries where much more logical and thorough methods are in favour.

In the United States we see yet another attitude towards immorality. It is, indeed, related to the English attitude, necessarily so, since the most ancient and fundamental element of it was carried over to America by the English Puritans, who cherished in the extreme form alike the English passion for individualism and the English fervour of religious idealism. These germs have been too potent for destruction even under all the new influences of American life. But they are not altogether in harmony with those influences, and the result has been that the American attitude towards immorality has sometimes looked rather like a caricature of the English method. The influx of a vast and racially confused population with the over-rapid development of urbanization which has necessarily followed, opens an immense field for idealistic individualism to attempt reforms. But this individualism has not been held in check by the English spirit of compromise, which is not a part of Puritanism, and it has thus tended alike to excess and to impotence. This result is brought about partly by facilities for individualistic legislation not voicing the tendencies of the whole population, and therefore fatally condemned to sterility, and partly by the fact that in a new and rapidly developed civilization it is impossible to secure an army of functionaries who may be trusted to deal with the regulation of delicate and complex moral questions in regard to which the community is not really agreed. The American police are generally admitted to be open with special frequency to the charge of ineffectiveness and venality. It is not so often realized that these defects are fostered by the impossible nature of the tasks which are imposed on the American police.

This aspect of the matter has been very clearly set forth by Dr. Fuld, of Columbia University, in his able and thorough book on police administration. [202] He shows that, though the American police system as a system has defects which need to be remedied, it is not true that the individual members of the American police forces are inferior to those of other countries; on the contrary, they are, in some respects, superior; it is not a large proportion which sells the right to break the law. [203] Their most serious defects are due to the impracticable laws and regulations made by inexperienced legislators. These laws and ordinances in many cases cannot possibly be enforced, and the weak police officers accept money from the citizen for not enforcing rules which in any case they could not enforce. "The American police forces," says Fuld, "have been corrupted almost solely by the statutes.... The real blame attaches not to the policeman who accepts a bribe temptingly offered him, nor to the bribe-giver who seeks by giving a bribe to make the best possible business arrangement, but rather to the law, which by giving the police a large and uncontrolled discretion in the enforcement of the law places a premium upon bribe-giving and bribe-taking." This state of things is rendered possible by the fact that the duties of the police are not confined to matters affecting crime and public order—matters which the whole community consider essential, and in regard to which any police negligence is counted a serious charge—but are extended to unessential matters which a considerable section of the community, including many of the police themselves, view with complete indifference. It is impossible to regard seriously a conspiracy to defeat laws which a large proportion of citizens regard as unnecessary or even foolish. It thus unfortunately comes about that the charge brought against the American police that "it sells the right to break the law" has not the same grave significance which it would have in most countries, for the rights purchased in America may in most countries be obtained without purchase. "An act ought to be made criminal," as Fuld rightly lays down, "only when it is socially expedient to punish its criminality.... The American people, or at least the American legislators, do not make this clear distinction between vice and crime. There seems to be a feeling in America that unless a vice is made a crime, the State countenances the vice and becomes a party to its commission. There are unfortunately a large number of men in the community who believe that they have satisfied the demands made upon them to lead a virtuous life by incorporating into some statute the condemnation of a particular vicious act as a crime." [204] This special characteristic of American laws, with its failure to distinguish between vice and crime, is clearly a legacy of the early Puritans. The Puritans carried over to New England independent autonomous laws of morality, and were contemptuous of external law. The sturdy pioneers of the first generation were faithful to that attitude, and were not even guilty of punishing witches. But, when the opportunity came, their descendants could not resist the temptation to erect an external law of morals, and, like the Calvinists of Geneva, they set up an inquisition backed by the secular arm. It was not until the days of Emerson that American Puritanism regained autonomous freedom and moved in the same air as Milton. But in the meantime the mischief had been done. Even to-day an inquisition of the mails has been established in the United States. It is said to be unconstitutional, and one can well believe that that is so, but none the less it flourishes under the protection of what a famous American has called "the never-ending audacity of elected persons." But to allow subordinate officials to masquerade in the Postal Department as familiars of the inquisition, in the supposed interests of public morals, is a dangerous policy. [205] Its deadening influence on national life cannot fail sooner or later to be realized by Americans. To moralize by statute is idle and unsatisfactory enough; but it is worse to attempt to moralize by the arbitrary dicta of minor government officials.

It is interesting to observe the methods which find favour in some parts of the United States for dealing with the trade in alcoholic liquors. Alcohol is, on the one hand, a poison; on the other hand, it is the basis of the national drinks of every civilized country. Every state has felt called upon to regulate its sale to more or less extent, in such a way that (1) in the interests of public health alcohol may not be too easily or too cheaply obtainable, that (2) the restraints on its sale may be a source of revenue to the State, and that (3) at the same time this regulation of the sale may not be a vexatious and useless attempt to interfere unduly with national customs. States have sought to attain these ends in various ways. The sale of alcohol may be made a State monopoly, as in Russia, or, again, it may be carried on under disinterested municipal or other control, as by the Gothenburg system of Sweden or the Samlag system of Norway. [206] In England the easier and more usual plan is adopted of heavily taxing the sale, with, in addition, various minor methods for restraining the sale of alcoholic drinks and attempting to improve the conditions under which they are sold.

In France an ingenious method of influencing the sale of alcohol has lately been adopted, in the interests of public health, which has proved completely successful. The French national drink is light wine, which may be procured in abundance, of excellent and wholesome quality and very cheaply, provided it is not heavily taxed. But of recent years there has been a tendency in France to consume in large quantity the heavy alcoholic spirits, often of a specially deleterious kind. The plan has been adopted of placing a very high duty on distilled beverages and reducing the duty on the light wines, as well as beer, so that a wholesome and genuine wine can be supplied to the consumer at as low a price as beer. As a result the French consumer has shown a preference for the cheap and wholesome wine which is really his national drink, and there is an enormous fall in the consumption of spirits. Whereas formerly the consumption of brandy in French towns amounted to seven or eight litres of absolute alcohol per head, it has now fallen in the large towns to 4.23 litres. [207]

In America, however, there is a tendency to deal with the sale of alcohol totally opposed to that which nearly everywhere prevails in Europe. When in Europe a man abandons the use of alcohol he makes no demand on his fellow men to follow his example, or, if he does, he is usually content to employ moral suasion to gain this end. But in the United States, where there is no single national drink, a large number of people have abandoned the use of alcohol, and have persuaded themselves that its use by other people is a vice, for it is not universally recognized that—"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live." Moreover, as in the United States the medieval confusion between vice and crime still subsists among a section of the population, being a part of the national tradition, it became easy to regard the drinking of alcohol as a crime and to make it punishable. Hence we have "Prohibition," which has prevailed in various States of the Union and is especially associated with Maine, where it was established in a crude form so long ago as 1846 and (except for a brief interval between 1856 and 1858) has prevailed until to-day. The law has never been effective. It has been made more and more stringent; the wildest excuses of arbitrary administration have been committed; scandals have constantly occurred; officials of iron will and determination have perished in the faith that if only they put enough energy into the task the law might, after all, be at last enforced. It was all in vain. It has always been easy in the cities of Maine for those to obtain alcohol who wished to obtain it. Finally, in 1911, by a direct Referendum, the majority by which the people of Maine are maintaining Prohibition has been brought down to 700 in a total poll of 120,000, while all the large towns have voted for the repeal of Prohibition by enormous majorities. The people of Maine are evidently becoming dimly conscious that it is worse than useless to make laws which no human power can enforce. "The result of the vote," writes Mr. Arthur Sherwell, an English social Reformer, not himself opposed to temperance legislation, "from every point of view, and not least from the point of view of temperance, is eminently unsatisfactory, and it unquestionably creates a position of great difficulty and embarrassment for the authorities. A majority of 700 in a total poll of 120,000 is clearly not a sufficient mandate for a drastic law which previous experience has conclusively shown cannot be enforced successfully in the urban districts of the State." Successful enforcement of prohibition on a State basis would appear to be hopeless. The history of Prohibition in Maine will for ever form an eloquent proof of the mischief which comes when the ancient ecclesiastical failure to distinguish between the sphere of morals and the sphere of law is perpetuated under the conditions of modern life. The attempt to force men to render unto Cæsar the things which are God's must always end thus.

In these matters we witness in America the survival of an ancient tradition. The early Puritans were individualists, it is true, but their individualism took a theocratic form, and, in the name of God, they looked upon crimes and vices equally and indistinguishably as sins. We see exactly the same point of view in the Penitentials of the ninth century, which were ecclesiastical codes dealing, exactly in the same spirit and in the same way, with crime and with vice, recognizing nothing but a certain difference in degree between murder and masturbation. In the ninth century, and even much later, in Calvin's Geneva and Cotton Mather's New England, it was possible to carry into practice this theocratic conception of the unity of vices and crimes and the punishment as sins of both alike, for the community generally accepted that point of view. But that is very far from being the case in the United States of to-day. The result is that in America in this respect we find a condition of things analogous to that which existed in France, before the Revolution remoulded the laws in accordance with the temperament of the nation. Laws and regulations of the medieval kind, for the moral ordering of the smallest details of life, are still enacted in America, but they are regarded with growing contempt by the community and even by the administrators of the laws. It is realized that such minute inquisition into the citizen's private life can only be effectively carried out where the citizen himself recognizes the divine right of the inquisitor. But the theocratic conception of life no longer corresponds to American ideas or American customs; this minute moral legislation rests on a basis which in the course of centuries has become rotten. Thus it has come about that nowhere in the world is there so great an anxiety to place the moral regulation of social affairs in the hands of the police; nowhere are the police more incapable of carrying out such regulation.

When we thus bear in mind the historical aspect of the matter we can understand how it has come about that the individualistic idealist in America has been much more resolute than in England to effect reforms, much more determined that they shall be very thorough and extreme reforms, and, especially, much more eager to embody his moral aspirations in legal statutes. But his tasks are bigger than in England, because of the vast, unstable, heterogeneous and crude population he has to deal with, and because, at the same time, he has no firmly established centralized and reliable police instrument whereby to effect his reforms. The fiery American moral idealist is determined to set out for the Kingdom of Heaven at once, but every steed he mounts proves broken-winded, and speedily drops down by the wayside. Don Quixote sets the lance at rest and digs his spurs into Rosinante's flanks, but he fails to realize that, in our modern world, he will never bear him anywhere near the foe.

If we wish to see a totally different national method of regarding immorality we may turn to Russia. Here also we find idealism at work, but it is not the same kind of idealism, since, far from desiring to express itself by force, its essential basis is an absolute disbelief in force. Russia, like France, has inherited from an ancient ecclesiastical domination an extremely severe code of regulations against immorality and all sexual aberrations, but, unlike France, it has not cast them off in order to mould the laws in accordance with national temperament. The essence of the Russian attitude in these matters is a sympathy with the individual which is stronger than any antipathy aroused by his immoral acts; his act is a misfortune rather than a sin or a crime. We may observe this attitude in the kindly and helpful fashion in which the Russian assists along the streets his fellow-man who has drunk too much vodka, and, on a higher plane, we see the same spirit of forgiving human tenderness in the Russian novelists, most clearly in the greatest and most typically national, in Dostoieffsky and in Tolstoy. The harsh rigidity of the old Russian laws had not the slightest influence, either in changing this national attitude or in diminishing the prevalence, at the very least as great as elsewhere, of sexual laxity or sexual aberration. Nowadays, as Russia attains national self-consciousness, these laws against immorality are being slowly remoulded in accordance with the national temperament, and in some respects—as in its attitude towards homosexuality and the introduction in 1907 of what is practically divorce by mutual consent—they allow a freedom and latitude scarcely equalled in any other country. [208]

Undoubtedly there is, within certain limits, mutual action and reaction in these matters among nations. Thus the influence of France has led to the abolition of the penalty against homosexual practices in many countries, notably Holland, Spain, Portugal, and, more recently, Italy, while even in Germany there is a strong and influential party, among legal as well as medical authorities, in favour of taking the same step. On the other hand, France has in some matters of detail departed from her general principle in these matters, and has, for instance—without doubt in an altogether justifiable manner—taken part in the international movement against what is called the white slave trade. This mutual reaction of nations is well recognized by the more alert and progressive minds in every country, jealous of any undue interference with liberty. When, for instance, a Bill is introduced in the English Parliament for promoting inquisitorial and vexatious interference with matters that are not within the sphere of legislation it is eagerly discussed in Germany before even its existence is known to most people in England, not so much out of interest in English Affairs as from a sensitive dread that English example may affect German legislation. [209]

Not only, indeed, have we to recognize the existence of these clearly marked and profound differences in legislative reaction to immorality. We have also to realize that at different periods there are general movements, to some extent overpassing national bounds, of rise and of fall in this reaction.

A sudden impulse seizes on a community, and spreads to other communities, to attempt to suppress some form of immorality by law. Such attempts, as we know, have always ended in failure or worse than failure, for laws against immorality are either not carried out, or, if they are carried out, it is at once realized that new evils are created worse than the original evils, and the laws speedily fall into abeyance or are repealed. That has been repeatedly seen, and is well illustrated by the history of prostitution, a sexual manifestation which for two thousand years all sorts of persons in authority have sought to suppress off-hand by law or by administrative fiat. From the time when Christianity gained full political power, prostitution has again and again been prohibited, under the severest penalties, but always in vain. The mightiest emperors—Theodosius, Valentinian, Justinian, Karl the Great, St. Louis, Frederick Barbarossa—all had occasion to discover that might was here in vain, and worse than in vain, that they could not always obey their own moral ordinances, still less coerce their subjects into doing so, and that even so far as, on the surface, they were successful they produced results more pernicious than the evils they sought to suppress. The best known and one of the most vigorous of these attempts was that of the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna; but all the cruelty and injustice of that energetic effort, and all the stringent, ridiculous, and brutal regulations it involved—its prohibition of short dresses, its inspection of billiard-rooms, its handcuffing of waitresses, its whippings and its tortures—proved useless and worse than useless, and were soon quietly dropped. [210] No more fortunate were more recent municipal attempts in England and America (Portsmouth, Pittsburgh, New York, etc.) to suppress prostitution off-hand; for the most part they collapsed even in a few days.

The history of the legal attempts to suppress homosexuality shows the same results. It may even be said to show more, for when the laws against homosexuality are relaxed or abolished, homosexuality becomes, not perhaps less prevalent (in so far as it is a congenital anomaly we cannot expect its prevalence to be influenced by law), but certainly less conspicuous and ostentatious. In France, under the Bourbons, the sexual invert was a sacrilegious criminal who could legally be burnt at the stake, but homosexuality flourished openly in the highest circles, and some of the kings were themselves notoriously inverted. Since the Code Napoléon was introduced homosexual acts, per se, have never been an offence, yet instead of flourishing more vigorously, homosexuality has so far receded into the background that some observers regard it as very rare in France. In Germany and England, on the other hand, where the antiquated laws against this perversion still prevail, homosexuality is extremely prominent, and its right to exist is vigorously championed. The law cannot suppress these impulses and passions; it can only sting them into active rebellion. [211]

But although it has invariably been seen that all attempts to make men moral by law are doomed to disappointment, spasmodic attempts to do so are continually being made afresh. No doubt those who make these attempts are but a small minority, people whose good intentions are not accompanied by knowledge either of history or of the world. But though a minority they can often gain a free field for their activities. The reason is plain. No public man likes to take up a position which his enemies may interpret as favourable to vice and probably due to an anxiety to secure legal opportunities for his own enjoyment of vice. This consideration especially applies to professional politicians. A Member of Parliament, who must cultivate an immaculately pure reputation, feels that he is also bound to record by his vote how anxious he is to suppress other people's immorality. Thus the philistine and the hypocrite join hands with the simple-minded idealist. Very few are left to point out that, however desirable it is to prevent immorality, that end can never be attained by law.

During the past ten years one of these waves of enthusiasm for the moralization of the public by law has been sweeping across Europe and America. Its energy is scarcely yet exhausted, and it may therefore be worthwhile to call attention to it. The movement has shown special activity in Germany, in Holland, in England, in the United States, and is traceable in a minor degree in many other countries. In Germany the Lex Heintze in 1900 was an indication of the appearance of this movement, while various scandals have had the result of attracting an exaggerated amount of attention to questions of immorality and of tightening the rigour of the law, though as Germany already holds moral matters in a very complex web of regulations it can scarcely be said that the new movement has here found any large field of activity. In Holland it is different. Holland is one of the traditional lands of freedom; it was the home of independent intellect, of free religion, of autonomous morals, when every other country in Europe was closed to these manifestations of the spirit, and something of the same tradition has always inspired its habits of thought, even when they have been largely Puritanic. So that there was here a clear field for the movement to work in, and it has found expression, of a very thorough character indeed, in the new so-called "Morals Law" which was passed in 1911 after several weeks' discussion. Undoubtedly this law contains excellent features; thus the agents of the "white slave trade," who have hitherto been especially active in Holland, are now threatened with five years' imprisonment. Here we are concerned with what may fairly be regarded as crime and rightly punishable as such. But excellent provisions like these are lost to sight in a great number of other paragraphs which are at best useless and ridiculous, and at worst vexatious and mischievous in their attempts to limit the free play of civilization. Thus we find that a year's imprisonment, or a heavy fine, threatens any one who exposes any object or writing which "offends decency," a provision which enabled a policeman to enter an art-pottery shop in Amsterdam and remove a piece of porcelain on which he detected an insufficiently clothed human figure. Yet this paragraph of the law had been passed with scarcely any opposition. Another provision of this law deals extensively with the difficult and complicated question of the "age of consent" for girls, which it raises to the age of twenty-one, making intercourse with a girl under twenty-one an offence punishable by four years' imprisonment. It is generally regarded as desirable that chastity should be preserved until adult age is well established. But as soon as sexual maturity is attained—which is long before what we conventionally regard as the adult age, and earlier in girls than in boys—it is impossible to dismiss the question of personal responsibility. A girl over sixteen, and still more when she is over twenty, is a developed human being on the sexual side; she is capable of seducing as well as of being seduced; she is often more mature than the youth of corresponding age; to instruct her in sexual hygiene, to train her to responsibility, is the proper task of morals. But to treat her as an irresponsible child, and to regard the act of interfering with her chastity when her consent has been given, as on a level with an assault on an innocent child merely introduces confusion. It must often be unjust to the male partner in the act; it is always demoralizing and degrading to the girl whom it aims at "protecting"; above all, it reduces what ought to be an extremely serious crime to the level of a merely nominal offence when it punishes one of two practically mature persons for engaging with full knowledge and deliberation in an act which, however undesirable, is altogether according to Nature. There is here a fatal confusion between a crime and an action which is at the worst morally reprehensible and only properly combated by moral methods.

These objections are not of a purely abstract or theoretical character. They are based on the practical outcome of such enactments. Thus in the State of New York the "age of consent" was in former days thirteen years. It was advanced to fourteen and afterwards to sixteen. This is the extreme limit to which it may prudently be raised, and the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which had taken the chief part in obtaining these changes in the law, was content to stop at this point. But without seeking the approval of this Society, another body, the White Cross and Social Purity League, took the matter in hand, and succeeded in passing an amendment to the law which raised the age of consent to eighteen. What has been the result? The Committee of Fourteen, who are not witnesses hostile to moral legislation, state that "since the amendment went into effect making the age of consent eighteen years there have been few successful prosecutions. The laws are practically inoperative so far as the age clause is concerned." Juries naturally require clear evidence that a rape has been committed when the case concerns a grown-up girl in the full possession of her faculties, possibly even a clandestine prostitute. Moreover, as rape in the first degree involves the punishment of imprisonment for twenty years, there is a disinclination to convict a man unless the case is a very bad one. One judge, indeed, has asserted that he will not give any man the full penalty under the present law, so long as he is on the bench. The natural result of stretching the law to undue limits is to weaken it. Instead of being, as it should be, an extremely serious crime, rape loses in a large proportion of cases the opprobrium which rightly belongs to it. It is, therefore, a matter for regret that in some English dominions there is a tendency to raise the "age of consent" to an unduly high limit. In New South Wales the Girls' Protection Act has placed the age of consent at sixteen, and in the case of offences by guardians, schoolmasters, or employers at seventeen years, notwithstanding the vigorous opposition of a distinguished medical member of the Legislative Council (the Hon. J.M. Creed), who presented the arguments against so high an age. Not a single prosecution has so far occurred under this Act.

In England the force of the moral legislation wave has been felt, but it has been largely broken against the conservative traditions of the country, which make all legislation, good or bad, very difficult. A lengthy, elaborate and high-strung Prevention of Immorality Bill was introduced in the House of Commons by a group of Nonconformists mainly on the Liberal side. This Bill was very largely on the lines of the Dutch law already mentioned; it proposed to raise the age of consent to nineteen; making intercourse with a girl under that age felony, punishable by five years' penal servitude, and any attempt at such intercourse by two years' imprisonment. Such a measure would be, it may be noted, peculiarly illogical and inconsistent in England and Scotland, in both of which countries (though their laws in these matters are independent) even a girl of twelve is legally regarded as sufficiently mature and responsible to take to herself a husband. At one moment the Bill seemed to have a chance of becoming law, but a group of enlightened and independent Liberals, realizing that such a measure would introduce intolerable social conditions, organized resistance and prevented the acceptance of the Bill.

The chief organization in England at the present time for the promotion of public morality is the National Council of Public Morals, which is a very influential body, with many able and distinguished supporters. Law-enforced morality, however, constitutes but a very small part of the reforms advocated by this organization, which is far more concerned with the home, the school, the Church, and the influences which operate in those spheres. It has lately to a considerable extent joined hands with the workers in the eugenic movement, advocating sexual hygiene and racial betterment, thus allying itself with one of the most hopeful movements of our day. Certainly there may be some amount of zeal not according to knowledge in the activities of the National Council of Public Morals, but there is also very much that is genuinely enlightened, and the very fact that the Council includes representatives from so many fields of action and so many schools of thought largely saves it from running into practical excesses. Its influence on the whole is beneficial, because, although it may not be altogether averse to moral legislation, it recognizes that the policeman is a very feeble guide in these matters, and that the fundamental and essential way of bettering the public morality is by enlightening the private conscience.

In the United States conditions have been very favourable, as we have seen, for the attempt to achieve social reform by moral legislation, and nowhere else in the world has it been so clearly demonstrated that such attempts not only fail to cure the evils they are aimed at, but tend to further evils far worse than those aimed at. A famous example is furnished by the so-called "Raines Law" of New York. This Act was passed in 1896, and was intended to regulate the sale of alcoholic liquor in all its phases throughout the State. The grounds for bringing it forward were that the number of drinking saloons was excessive, that there was no fixed licensing fee, that too much discretionary power was allowed to the local commissioner; while, above all, the would-be Puritanic legislators wished so far as possible to suppress the drinking of alcoholic liquors on Sunday. To achieve these objects the licensing fee was raised to four times its usual amount previously to this enactment; heavy penalties, including the forfeiture of a large surety-bond, were established, and more surely to prevent Sunday drinking only hotels, not ordinary drinking bars, were allowed, with many stringent restrictions, to sell drink on that day. In order that there should be no mistake, it was set forth in the Act that the hotel must be a real hotel with at least ten properly furnished bedrooms. The legislators clearly thought that they had done a fine piece of work. "Seldom," wrote the Committee of Fourteen, who are by no means out of sympathy with the aims of this legislation, "has a law intended to regulate one evil resulted in so aggravated a phase of another evil directly traceable to its provisions." [212]

In the first place, the passing of this law alarmed the saloon keepers; they realized that it had them in a very tight grip, and they suspected that it might be strictly enforced. They came to the conclusion, therefore, that their best policy would be to accept the law and to conform themselves to its provisions by converting their drinking bars into real hotels, with ten properly furnished bedrooms, kitchen, and dining-room. The immediate result was the preparation of ten thousand bedrooms, for which there was of course no real demand, and by 1905 there were 1407 certificated hotels in Manhattan and the Bronx alone, about 1150 of these hotels having probably been created by the Raines Law.

But something had to be done with all these bedrooms, properly furnished according to law, for it was necessary to meet the heavy expenses incurred under the new conditions created by the law. The remedy was fairly obvious. These bedrooms were excellently adapted to serve as places of assignation and houses of prostitution. Many hotel proprietors became practically brothel keepers, the women in some cases becoming boarders in the hotels; and saloons and hotels have entered into a kind of alliance for their mutual benefit, and are sometimes indeed under the same management. When a hotel is thus run in the interests of prostitution it has what may be regarded as a staff of women in the neighbouring streets. In some districts of New York it is found that practically all the prostitutes on the street are connected with some Raines Law hotel. These wise moral legislators of New York thought they were placing a penalty on Sunday drinking; what they have really done is to place a premium on prostitution [213].

An attempt of a different kind to strike a blow at once at alcohol and at prostitution has been made in Chicago, with equally unsatisfactory results. Drink and prostitution are connected, so intimately connected, indeed, that no attempt to separate them can ever be more than superficially successful even with the most minute inquisition by the police, least of all by police officers, who, in Chicago, we are officially told, are themselves sometimes found, when in uniform and on duty, drinking among prostitutes in "saloons." On May 1, 1910, the Chicago General Superintendent of Police made a rule prohibiting the sale of liquor in houses of prostitution. On the surface this rule has in most cases been observed (though only on the surface, as the field-workers of the Chicago Vice Commission easily discovered), and a blow was thus dealt to those houses which derive a large profit from the sale of drinks on account of the high price at which they retail them. Yet even so far as the rule has been obeyed, and not evaded, has it effected any good? On this point we may trust the evidence of the Vice Commissioners of Chicago, a municipal body appointed by the Mayor and City Council, and not anxious to discredit the actions of their Police Superintendent. "As to the benefits derived from this order, either to the inmates or the public, opinions differ," they write. "It is undoubtedly true that the result of the order has been to scatter the prostitutes over a wide territory and to transfer the sale of liquor carried on heretofore in houses to the near-by saloon-keepers, and to flats and residential sections, but it is an open question whether it has resulted in the lessening of either of the two evils of prostitution and drink." [214] That is a mild statement of the results. It may be noted that there are over seven thousand drinking saloons in Chicago, so that the transfer is not difficult, while the migration to flats—of which an enormous number have been taken for purposes of prostitution (five hundred in one district alone) since this rule came into force—may indeed enable the prostitute to live a freer and more humanizing life, but in no faintest degree diminishes the prevalence of prostitution. From the narrow police standpoint, indeed, the change is a disadvantage, for it shelters the prostitute from observation, and involves an entirely new readjustment to new conditions.

It cannot be said that either the State of New York or the city of Chicago has been in any degree more fortunate in its attempts at moral legislation against prostitution than against drinking. As we should expect, the laws of New York regard prostitution and the prostitute with an eye of extreme severity. Every prostitute in New York, by virtue of the mere fact that she is a prostitute, is technically termed a "vagrant." As such she is liable to be committed to the workhouse for a term not exceeding six months; the owner of houses where she lives may be heavily fined, as she herself may be for living in them, and the keeper of a disorderly house may be imprisoned and the disorderly house suppressed. It is not clear that the large number of prostitutes in New York have been diminished by so much as a single unit, but from time to time attempts are made in some district or another by an unusually energetic official to put the laws into execution, and it is then possible to study the results. When disorderly houses are suppressed on a large scale, there are naturally a great number of prostitutes who have to find homes elsewhere in order to carry on their business. On one occasion, under the auspices of District-Attorney Jerome, it is stated by the Committee of Fourteen that eight hundred women were reported to be turned out into the street in a single night. For many there are the Raines Law hotels. A great many others take refuge in tenement houses. Such houses in congested districts are crowded with families, and with these the prostitute is necessarily brought into close contact. Consequently the seeds of physical and mental disorder which she may bear about her are disseminated in a much more fruitful soil than they were before. Moreover, she is compelled by the laws to exert very great energy in the pursuit of her profession. As it is an offence to harbour her she has to pay twice as high a rent as other people would have to pay for the same rooms. She may have to pay the police to refrain from molesting her, as well as others to protect her from molestation. She is surrounded by people whom the law encourages to prey upon her. She is compelled to exert her energies at highest tension to earn the very large sums which are necessary, not to gain profits for herself, but to feed all the sharks who are eager to grab what is given to her. The blind or perverse zeal of the moral legislators not only intensifies the evils it aims at curing, but it introduces a whole crop of new evils.

How large these sums are we may estimate by the investigation made by the Vice Commissioners of Chicago. They conclude after careful inquiry that the annual profits of prostitution in the city of Chicago alone amount to between fifteen to sixteen million dollars, and they regard this as "an ultra-conservative estimate." It is true that not all this actually passes through the women's hands and it includes the sales of drinks. If we confine ourselves strictly to the earnings of the girls themselves it is found to work out at an average for each girl of thirteen hundred dollars per annum. This is more than four times as much as the ordinary shop-girl can earn in Chicago by her brains, virtue, and other good qualities. But it is not too much for the prostitute's needs; she is compelled to earn so large an income because the active hostility of society, the law, and the police facilitates the task of all those persons—and they are many—who desire to prey upon her. Thus society, the law, and the police gain nothing for morals by their hostility to the prostitute. On the contrary, they give strength and stability to the very vice they nominally profess to fight against. This is shown in the vital matter of the high rents which it is possible to obtain where prostitution is concerned. These high rents are the direct result of legal and police enactments against the prostitute. Remove these enactments and the rents would automatically fall. The enactments maintain the high rents and so ensure that the mighty protection of capital is on the side of prostitution; the property brings in an exorbitant rate of interest on the capital invested, and all the forces of sound business are concerned in maintaining rents. So gross is the ignorance of the would-be moral legislators—or, some may think, so skilful their duplicity—that the methods by which they profess to fight against immorality are the surest methods for enabling immorality not merely to exist—which it would in any case—but to flourish. A vigorous campaign is initiated against immorality. On the surface it is successful. Morality triumphs. But, it may be, in the end we are reminded of the saying of M. Desmaisons in one of Remy de Gourmont's witty and profound Dialogues des Amateurs: "Quand la morale triomphe il se passe des choses très vilaines."

The reason why the "triumphs" of legislative and administrative morality are really such ignominious failures must now be clear, but may again be repeated. It is because on matters of morals there is no unanimity of opinion as there is in regard to crime. There is always a large section of the community which feels tolerant towards, and even practises, acts which another section, it may be quite reasonably, stigmatizes as "immoral." Such conditions are highly favourable for the exercise of moral influence; they are quite unsuitable for legislative action, which cannot possibly be brought to bear against a large minority, perhaps even majority, of otherwise law-abiding citizens. In the matter of prostitution, for instance, the Vice Commissioners of Chicago state emphatically the need for "constant and persistent repression" leading on to "absolute annihilation of prostitution." They recommend the appointment of a "Morals Commission" to suppress disorderly houses, and to prosecute their keepers, their inmates, and their patrons; they further recommend the establishment of a "Morals Court" of vaguely large scope. Among the other recommendations of the Commissioners—and there are ninety-seven such recommendations—we find the establishment of a municipal farm, to which prostitutes can be "committed on an indeterminate sentence"; a "special morals police squad"; instructions to the police to send home all unattended boys and girls under sixteen at 9 p.m.; no seats in the parks to be in shade; searchlights to be set up at night to enable the police to see what the public are doing, and so on. The scheme, it will be seen, combines the methods of Calvin in Geneva with those of Maria Theresa in Vienna. [215]

The reason why any such high-handed repression of immorality by force is as impracticable in Chicago as elsewhere is revealed in the excellent picture of the conditions furnished by the Vice Commissioners themselves. They estimate that the prostitutes in disorderly houses known to the police—leaving out of account all prostitutes in flats, rooms, hotels and houses of assignation, and also taking no note of clandestine prostitutes—receive 15,180 visits from men daily, or 5,540,700 per annum. They consider further that the men in question may be one-fourth of the adult male population (800,000 in the city itself, leaving the surrounding district out of the reckoning), and they rightly insist that this estimate cannot possibly cover all the facts. Yet it never occurs to the Vice Commissioners that in thus proposing to brand one-third or even only one quarter of the adult male population as criminals, and as such to prosecute them actively, is to propose an absurd impossibility.

It is not by any means only in the United States that an object lesson in the foolishness of attempting to make people moral by force is set up before the world. It has often been set up before, and at the present day it is illustrated in exactly the same way in Germany. Unlike as are the police systems and the national temperaments of Germany and the United States, in this matter social reformers tell exactly the same story. They report that the German laws and ordinances against immorality increase and support the very evil they profess to attack. Thus by making it criminal to shelter, even though not for purposes of gain, unmarried lovers, even when they intend to marry, the respectable girl is forced into the position of the prostitute, and as such she becomes subject to an endless amount of police regulation and police control. Landlords are encouraged to live on her activities, charging very high rates to indemnify themselves for the risks they run by harbouring her. She, in her turn, to meet the exorbitant demands which the law and the police encourage the whole environment to make upon her, is forced to exercise her profession with the greatest activity, and to acquire the maximum of profit. Law and the police have forged the same vicious circle. [216]

The illustrations thus furnished by Germany, Holland, England, and the United States, will probably suffice to show that there really is at the present time a wave of feeling in favour of the notion that it is possible to promote public morals by force of law. It only remains to observe that the recognition of the futility of such attempts by no means necessarily involves a pessimistic conservatism. To point out that prostitution never has been, and never can be, abolished by law, is by no means to affirm that it is an evil which must endure for ever and that no influence can affect it. But we have to realize, in the first place, that prostitution belongs to that sphere of human impulses in which mere external police ordinances count for comparatively little, and that, in the second place, even in the more potent field of true morals, which has nothing to do with moral legislation, prostitution is so subtly and deeply rooted that it can only be affected by influences which bear on all our methods of thought and feeling and all our social custom. It is far from being an isolated manifestation; it is, for instance, closely related to marriage; any reforms in prostitution, therefore, can only follow a reform in our marriage system. But prostitution is also related to economics, and when it is realized how much has to be altogether changed in our whole social system to secure even an approximate abolition of prostitution it becomes doubtful whether many people are willing to pay the price of removing the "social evil" they find it so easy to deplore. They are prepared to appoint Commissions; they have no objection to offer up a prayer; they are willing to pass laws and issue police regulations which are known to be useless. At that point their ardour ends.

If it is impossible to guard the community by statute against the central evil of prostitution, still more hopeless is it to attempt the legal suppression of all the multitudinous minor provocations of the sexual impulse offered by civilization. Let it be assumed that only by such suppression, and not by frankly meeting and fighting temptations, can character be formed, yet it would be absolutely impossible to suppress more than a fraction of the things that would need to be suppressed. "There is almost no feature, article of dress, attitude, act," Dr. Stanley Hall has truly remarked, "or even animal, or perhaps object in nature, that may not have to some morbid soul specialized erogenic and erethic power." If, therefore, we wish to suppress the sexually suggestive and the possibly obscene we are bound to suppress the whole world, beginning with the human race, for if we once enter on that path there is no definite point at which we can logically stop. The truth is, as Mr. Theodore Schroeder has so repeatedly insisted, [217] that "obscenity" is subjective; it cannot reside in an object, but only in the impure mind which is influenced by the object. In this matter Mr. Schroeder is simply the follower, at an interval, of St. Paul. We must work not on the object, but on the impure mind affected by the object. If the impure heart is not suppressed it is useless to suppress the impure object, while if the heart is renewed the whole task is achieved. Certainly there are books, pictures, and other things in life so unclean that they can never be pure even to the purest, but these things by their loathsomeness are harmless to all healthy minds; they can only corrupt minds which are corrupt already. Unfortunately, when ignorant police officials and custom-house officers are entrusted with the task of searching for the obscene, it is not to these things that their attention is exclusively directed. Such persons, it seems, cannot distinguish between these things and the noblest productions of human art and intellect, and the law has proved powerless to set them right; in all civilized countries the list is indeed formidable of the splendid and inspiring productions, from the Bible downwards, which officials or the law courts have been pleased to declare "obscene." So that while the task of moralizing the community by force must absolutely fail of its object, it may at the same time suffice to effect much mischief.

It is one of the ironies of history that the passion for extinguishing immorality by law and administration should have arisen in what used to be called Christendom. For Christianity is precisely the most brilliant proof the world has ever seen of the truth that immorality cannot so be suppressed. From the standpoint of classic Rome Christianity was an aggressive attack on Roman morality from every side. It was not so only in appearance, but in reality, as modern historians fully recognize. [218] Merely as a new religion Christianity would have been received with calm indifference, even with a certain welcome, as other new religions were received. But Christianity denied the supremacy of the State, carried on an anti-military propaganda in the army, openly flouted established social conventions, loosened family life, preached and practised asceticism to an age that was already painfully aware that, above all things, it needed men. The fatal though doubtless inevitable step was taken of attempting to suppress the potent poison of this manifold immorality by force. The triumph of Christianity was largely due to the fine qualities which were brought out by that annealing process, and the splendid prestige which the process itself assured. Yet the method of warfare which it had so brilliantly proved to be worthless was speedily adopted by Christianity itself, and is even yet, at intervals, spasmodically applied.

That these attempts should have such results as we see is not surprising when we remember that even movements, at the outset, mainly inspired by moral energy, rather than by faith in moral legislation, when that energy becomes reckless, violent and intolerant, lead in the end to results altogether opposed to the aims of those who initiated them. It was thus that Luther has permanently fortified the position of the Popes whom he assailed, and that the Reformation produced the Counter-Reformation, a movement as formidable and as enduring as that which it countered. When Luther appeared all that was rigid and inhuman in the Church was slowly dissolving, certainly not without an inevitable sediment of immorality, yet the solution was in the highest degree favourable to the development of the freer and larger conceptions of life, the expansion of science and art and philosophy, which at that moment was pre-eminently necessary for the progress of civilisation, and, indirectly, therefore, for the progress of morals. [219] The violence of the Reformation not only resulted in a new tyranny for its own adherents—calling in turn for fresh reformations by Puritans, Quakers, Deists, and Freethinkers—but it re-established, and even to-day continues to support, that very tyranny of the old Church against which it was a protest.

When we try to regulate the morals of men on the same uniform pattern we have to remember that we are touching the most subtle, intimate, and incalculable springs of action. It is useless to apply the crude methods of "suppression" and "annihilation" to these complex and indestructible forces. When Charles V retired in weariness from the greatest throne in the world to the solitude of the monastery at Yuste, he occupied his leisure for some weeks in trying to regulate two clocks. It proved very difficult. One day, it is recorded, he turned to his assistant and said: "To think that I attempted to force the reason and conscience of thousands of men into one mould, and I cannot make two clocks agree!" Wisdom comes to the rulers of men, sometimes, usually when they have ceased to be rulers. It comes to the moral legislators not otherwise than it comes to the immoral persons they legislate against. "I act first," the French thief said; "then I think."

It seems to some people almost a paradox to assert that immorality should not be encountered by physical force. The same people would willingly admit that it is hopeless to rout a modern army with bows and arrows, even with the support of a fanfare of trumpets. Yet that metaphor, as we have seen, altogether fails to represent the inadequacy of law in the face of immorality. We are concerned with a method of fighting which is not merely inadequate, but, as has been demonstrated many times during the last two thousand years, actually fortifies and even dignifies the foe it professes to attack. But the failure of physical force to suppress the spiritual evil of immorality by no means indicates that a like failure would attend the more rational tactics of opposing a spiritual force by spiritual force. The virility of our morals is not proved by any weak attempt to call in the aid of the secular arm of law or the ecclesiastical arm of theology. If a morality cannot by its own proper virtue hold its opposing immorality in check then there is something wrong with that morality. It runs the risk of encountering a fresh and more vigorous movement of morality. Men begin to think that, if not the whole truth, there is yet a real element of truth in the assertion of Nietzsche: "We believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter's art and devilry of every kind, everything wicked, tyrannical, predatory and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite." [220] To ignore altogether the affirmation of that opposing morality, it may be, would be to breed a race of weaklings, fatally doomed to succumb helplessly to the first breath of temptation.

Although we are passing through a wave of moral legislation, there are yet indications that a sounder movement is coming into action. The demand for the teaching of sexual hygiene which parents, teachers, and physicians in Germany, the United States and elsewhere, are now striving to formulate and to supply will, if it is wisely carried out, effect far more for public morals than all the legislation in the world. Inconsistently enough, some of those who clamour for moral legislation also advocate the teaching of sexual hygiene. But there is no room for compromise or combination here. A training in sexual hygiene has no meaning if it is not a training, for men and women alike, in personal and social responsibility, in the right to know and to discriminate, and in so doing to attain self-conquest. A generation thus trained to self-respect and to respect for others has no use for a web of official regulations to protect its feeble and cloistered virtues from possible visions of evil, and an army of police to conduct it homewards at 9 p.m. Nor, on the other hand, can any reliable sense of social responsibility ever be developed in such an unwholesome atmosphere of petty moral officialdom. The two methods of moralization are radically antagonistic. There can be no doubt which of them we ought to pursue if we really desire to breed a firmly-fibred, clean-minded, and self-reliant race of manly men and womanly women.

X

THE WAR AGAINST WAR

Why the Problem of War is specially urgent To-day—The Beneficial Effects of War in Barbarous Ages—Civilization renders the Ultimate Disappearance of War Inevitable—The Introduction of Law in disputes between Individuals involves the Introduction of Law in disputes between Nations—But there must be Force behind Law—Henry IV's Attempt to Confederate Europe—Every International Tribunal of Arbitration must be able to enforce its Decisions—The Influences making for the Abolition of Warfare—(1) Growth of International Opinion—(2) International Financial Development—(3) The Decreasing Pressure of Population—(4) The Natural Exhaustion of the Warlike Spirit—(5) The Spread of Anti-military Doctrines—(6) The overgrowth of Armaments—(7) The Dominance of Social Reform—War Incompatible with an Advanced Civilization—Nations as Trustees for Humanity—The Impossibility of Disarmament—The Necessity of Force to ensure Peace—The Federated State of the Future—The Decay of War still leaves the Possibilities of Daring and Heroism.

There are, no doubt, special reasons why at the present time war and the armaments of war should appear an intolerable burden which must be thrown off as soon as possible if the task of social hygiene is not to be seriously impeded. But the abolition of the ancient method of settling international disputes by warfare is not a problem which depends for its solution on the conditions of the moment. It is implicit in the natural development of the process of civilization. At one stage, no doubt, warfare plays an important part in constituting states and so, indirectly, in promoting civilization. But civilization tends slowly but surely to substitute for war in the later stages of this process the methods of law, or, in any case, methods which, while not always unobjectionable, avoid the necessity for any breach of the peace. [221] As soon, indeed, as in primitive society two individuals engage in a dispute which they are compelled to settle not by physical force but by a resort to an impartial tribunal, the thin end of the wedge is introduced, and the ultimate destruction of war becomes merely a matter of time. If it is unreasonable for two individuals to fight it is unreasonable for two groups of individuals to fight. [222]

The difficulty has been that while it is quite easy for an ordered society to compel two individuals to settle their differences before a tribunal, in accordance with abstractly determined principles of law and reason, it is a vastly more difficult matter to compel two groups of individuals so to settle their differences. A large part of the history of all the great European countries has consisted in the progressive conquest and pacification of small but often bellicose states outside, and even inside, their own borders. [223] This is the case even within a community. Hobbes, writing in the midst of a civil war, went so far as to lay down that the "final cause" of a commonwealth is nothing else but the abolition of "that miserable condition of war which is necessarily consequent to the natural passions of men when there is no visible power to keep them in awe." Yet we see to-day that even within our highly civilized communities there is not always any adequately awful power to prevent employers and employed from engaging in what is little better than a civil war, nor even to bind them to accept the decision of an impartial tribunal they may have been persuaded to appeal to. The smallest state can compel its individual citizens to keep the peace; a large state can compel a small state to do so; but hitherto there has been no guarantee possible that large states, or even large compact groups within the state, should themselves keep the peace. They commit what injustice they please, for there is no visible power to keep them in awe. We have attained a condition in which a state is able to enforce a legal and peaceful attitude in its own individual citizens towards each other. The state is the guardian of its citizens' peace, but the old problem recurs: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

It is obvious that this difficulty increases as the size of states increases. To compel a small state to keep the peace by absorbing it if it fails to do so is always an easy and even tempting process to a neighbouring larger state. This process was once carried out on a complete scale, when practically the whole known world was brought under the sway of Rome. "War has ceased," Plutarch was able to declare in the days of the Roman Empire, and, though himself an enthusiastic Greek, he was unbounded in his admiration of the beneficence of the majestic Pax Romana, and never tempted by any narrow spirit of patriotism to desire the restoration of his own country's glories. But the Roman organization broke up, and no single state will ever be strong enough to restore it.

Any attempt to establish orderly legal relationships between states must, therefore, be carried out by the harmonious co-operation of those states. At the end of the sixteenth century a great French statesman, Sully, inspired Henry IV with a scheme of a Council of Confederated European Christian States; each of these states, fifteen in number, was to send four representatives to the Council, which was to sit at Metz or Cologne and regulate the differences between the constituent states of the Confederation. The army of the Confederation was to be maintained in common, and used chiefly to keep the peace, to prevent one sovereign from interfering with any other, and also, if necessary, to repel invasion of barbarians from without. The scheme was arranged in concert with Queen Elizabeth, and twelve of the fifteen Powers had already promised their active co-operation when the assassination of Henry destroyed the whole plan. Such a Confederation was easier to arrange then than it is now, but probably it was more difficult to maintain, and it can scarcely be said that at that date the times were ripe for so advanced a scheme. [224]

To-day the interests of small states are so closely identified with peace that it is seldom difficult to exert pressure on them to maintain it. It is quite another matter with the large states. The fact that during the past half century so much has been done by the larger states to aid the cause of international arbitration, and to submit disputes to international tribunals, shows how powerful the motives for avoiding war are nowadays becoming. But the fact, also, that no country hitherto has abandoned its liberty of withdrawing from peaceful arbitration any question involving "national honour" shows that there is no constituted power strong enough to control large states. For the reservation of questions of national honour from the sphere of law is as absurd as would be any corresponding limitation by individuals of their liability for their acts before the law; it is as though a man were to say: "If I commit a theft I am willing to appear before the court, and will probably pay the penalty demanded; but if it is a question of murder, then my vital interests are at stake, and I deny altogether the right of the court to intervene." It is a reservation fatal to peace, and could not be accepted if pleaded at the bar of any international tribunal with the power to enforce its decisions. "Imagine," says Edward Jenks, in his History of Politics, "a modern judge 'persuading' Mr. William Sikes to 'make it up' with the relatives of his victim, and, on his remaining obdurate, leaving the two families to fight the matter out." Yet that is what was in some degree done in England until medieval times as regards individual crimes, and it is what is still done as regards national crimes, in so far as the appeal to arbitration is limited and voluntary. The proposals, therefore—though not yet accepted by any Government—lately mooted in the United States, in England, and in France, to submit international disputes, without reservation, to an impartial tribunal represent an advance of peculiar significance.

The abolition of collective fighting is so desirable an extension of the abolition of individual fighting, and its introduction has waited so long the establishment of some high compelling power—for the influence of the Religion of Peace has in this matter been less than nil—that it is evident that only the coincidence of very powerful and peculiar factors could have brought the question into the region of practical politics in our own time. There are several such factors, most of which have been developing during a long period, but none have been clearly recognized until recent years. It may be worth while to indicate the great forces now warring against war.

(1) Growth of International Opinion. There can be no doubt whatever that during recent years, and especially in the more democratic countries, an international consensus of public opinion has gradually grown up, making itself the voice, like a Greek chorus, of an abstract justice. It is quite true that of this justice, as of justice generally, it may be said that it has wide limits. Renan declared once, in a famous allocution, that "what is called indulgence is, most often, only justice," and, at the other extreme, Remy de Gourmont has said that "injustice is sometimes a part of justice;" in other words, there are varying circumstances in which justice may properly be tempered either with mercy or with severity. In any case, and however it may be qualified; a popular international voice generously pronouncing itself in favour of justice, and resonantly condemning any Government which clashes against justice, is now a factor of the international situation. It is, moreover, tending to become a factor having a certain influence on affairs. This was the case during the South African War, when England, by offending this international sense of justice, fell into a discredit which had many actual unpleasant results and narrowly escaped, there is some reason to believe, proving still more serious. The same voice was heard with dramatically sudden and startling effect when Ferrer was shot at Barcelona. Ferrer was a person absolutely unknown to the man in the street; he was indeed little more than a name even to those who knew Spain; few could be sure, except by a kind of intuition, that he was the innocent victim of a judicial murder, for it is only now that the fact is being slowly placed beyond dispute. Yet immediately after Ferrer was shot within the walls of Monjuich a great shout of indignation was raised, with almost magical suddenness and harmony, throughout the civilized world, from Italy to Belgium, from England to Argentina. Moreover, this voice was so decisive and so loud that it acted like those legendary trumpet-blasts which shattered the walls of Jericho; in a few days the Spanish Government, with a powerful minister at its head, had fallen. The significance of this event we cannot easily overestimate. For the first time in history, the voice of international public opinion, unsupported by pressure, political, social, or diplomatic, proved potent enough to avenge an act of injustice by destroying a Government. A new force has appeared in the world, and it tends to operate against those countries which are guilty of injustice, whether that injustice is exerted against a State or even only against a single obscure individual. The modern developments of telegraphy and the Press—unfavourable as the Press is in many respects to the cause of international harmony—have placed in the hands of peace this new weapon against war.

(2) International Financial Development. There is another international force which expresses itself in the same sense. The voice of abstract justice raised against war is fortified by the voice of concrete self-interest. The interests of the propertied classes, and therefore of the masses dependent upon them, are to-day so widely distributed throughout the world that whenever any country is plunged into a disastrous war there arises in every other country, especially in rich and prosperous lands with most at stake, a voice of self-interest in harmony with the voice of justice. It is sometimes said that wars are in the interest of capital, and of capital alone, and that they are engineered by capitalists masquerading under imposing humanitarian disguises. That is doubtless true to the extent that every war cannot fail to benefit some section of the capitalistic world, which will therefore favour it, but it is true to that extent only. The old notion that war and the acquisition of territories encouraged trade by opening up new markets has proved fallacious. The extension of trade is a matter of tariffs rather than of war, and in any case the trade of a country with its own acquisitions by conquest is a comparatively insignificant portion of its total trade. But even if the financial advantages of war were much greater than they are, they would be more than compensated by the disadvantages which nowadays attend war. International financial relationships have come to constitute a network of interests so vast, so complicated, so sensitive, that the whole thrills responsively to any disturbing touch, and no one can say beforehand what widespread damage may not be done by shock even at a single point. When a country is at war its commerce is at once disorganized, that is to say that its shipping, and the shipping of all the countries that carry its freights, is thrown out of gear to a degree that often cannot fail to be internationally disastrous. Foreign countries cannot send in the imports that lie on their wharves for the belligerent country, nor can they get out of it the exports they need for their own maintenance or luxury. Moreover, all the foreign money invested in the belligerent country is depreciated and imperilled. The international voice of trade and finance is, therefore, to-day mainly on the side of peace.

It must be added that this voice is not, as it might seem, a selfish voice only. It is justifiable not only in immediate international interests, but even in the ultimate interests of the belligerent country, and not less so if that country should prove victorious. So far as business and money are concerned, a country gains nothing by a successful war, even though that war involves the acquisition of immense new provinces; after a great war a conquered country may possess more financial stability than its conqueror, and both may stand lower in this respect than some other country which is internationally guaranteed against war. Such points as these have of late been ably argued by Norman Angell in his remarkable book, The Great Illusion, and for the most part convincingly illustrated. [225] As was long since said, the ancients cried, Væ victis! We have learnt to cry, Væ victoribus!

It may, indeed, be added that the general tendency of war—putting aside peoples altogether lacking in stamina—is to moralize the conquered and to demoralise the conquerors. This effect is seen alike on the material and the spiritual sides. Conquest brings self-conceit and intolerance, the reckless inflation and dissipation of energies. Defeat brings prudence and concentration; it ennobles and fortifies. All the glorious victories of the first Napoleon achieved less for France than the crushing defeat of the third Napoleon. The triumphs left enfeeblement; the defeat acted as a strong tonic which is still working beneficently to-day. The corresponding reverse process has been at work in Germany: the German soil that Napoleon ploughed yielded a Moltke and a Bismarck, [226] while to-day, however mistakenly, the German Press is crying out that only another war—it ought in honesty to say an unsuccessful war—can restore the nation's flaccid muscle. It is yet too early to see the results of the Russo-Japanese War, but already there are signs that by industrial overstrain and the repression of individual thought Japan is threatening to enfeeble the physique and to destroy the high spirit of the indomitable men to whom she owed her triumph.

(3) The Decreasing Pressure of Population. It was at one time commonly said, and is still sometimes repeated, that the pressure of over-population is the chief cause of wars. That is a statement which requires a very great deal of qualification. It is, indeed, possible that the great hordes of warlike barbarians from the North and the East which invaded Europe in early times, sometimes more or less overwhelming the civilized world, were the result of a rise in the birth-rate and an excess of population beyond the means of subsistence. But this is far from certain, for we know absolutely nothing concerning the birth-rate of these invading peoples either before or during the period of their incursions. Again, it is certain that, in modern times, a high and rising birth-rate presents a favourable condition for war. A war distracts attention from the domestic disturbances and economic wretchedness which a too rapid growth of population necessarily produces, while at the same time tending to draw away and destroy the surplus population which causes this disturbance and wretchedness. Yet there are other ways of meeting this over-population beside the crude method of war. Social reform and emigration furnish equally effective and much more humane methods of counteracting such pressure. No doubt the over-population resulting from an excessively high birth-rate, when not met, as it tends to be, by a correspondingly high death-rate from disease, may be regarded as a predisposing cause of war, but to assert that it is the pre-eminent cause is to go far beyond the evidence at present available.

To whatever degree, however, it may have been potent in causing war in the past, it is certain that the pressure of population as a cause of war will be eliminated in the future. The only nations nowadays that can afford to make war on the grand scale are the wealthy and civilized nations. But civilization excludes a high birth-rate: there has never been any exception to that law, nor can we conceive any exceptions, for it is more than a social law; it is a biological law. Russia, a still imperfectly civilized country, stands apart in having a very high birth-rate, but it also has a very high death-rate, and even should it happen that in Russia improved social conditions lower the death-rate before affecting the birth-rate, there is still ample room within Russian territory for the consequent increase of population. Among all the other nations which are considered to threaten the world's peace, the birth-rate is rapidly falling. This is so, for instance, as regards England and Germany. Germany, especially, it was once thought—though in actual fact Germany has not fought for over forty years—had an interest in going to war in order to find an outlet for her surplus population, compelled, in the absence of suitable German colonies, to sacrifice its patriotism and lose its nationality by emigrating to foreign countries. But the German birth-rate is falling, German emigration is decreasing, and the immense growth of German industry is easily able to absorb the new generation. Thus the declining birth-rate of civilized lands will alone largely serve in the end to eliminate warfare, partly by removing one of its causes, partly because the increased value of human life will make war too costly.

(4) The Natural Exhaustion of the Warlike Spirit. It is a remarkable tendency of the warlike spirit—frequently emphasized in recent years by the distinguished zoologist, President D.S. Jordan, who here follows Novikov [227]—that it tends to exterminate itself. Fighting stocks, and peoples largely made up of fighting stocks, are naturally killed out, and the field is left to the unwarlike. It is only the prudent, those who fight and run away, who live to fight another day; and they transmit their prudence to their offspring. Great Britain is a conspicuous example of a land which, being an island, was necessarily peopled by predatory and piratical invaders. A long series of warlike and adventurous peoples—Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans—built up England and imparted to it their spirit. The English were, it was said, "a people for whom pain and death are nothing, and who only fear hunger and boredom." But for over eight hundred years they have never been reinforced by new invaders, and the inevitable consequences have followed. There has been a gradual killing out of the warlike stocks, a process immensely accelerated during the nineteenth century by a vast emigration of the more adventurous elements in the population, pressed out of the overcrowded country by the reckless and unchecked increase of the population which occurred during the first three-quarters of that century. The result is that the English (except sometimes when they happen to be journalists) cannot now be described as a warlike people. Old legends tell of British heroes who, when their legs were hacked away, still fought upon the stumps. Modern poets feel that to picture a British warrior of to-day in this attitude would be somewhat far-fetched. The historian of the South African War points out, again and again, that the British leaders showed a singular lack of the fighting spirit. During that war English generals seldom cared to engage the enemy's forces except when their own forces greatly outnumbered them, and on many occasions they surrendered immediately they realized that they were themselves outnumbered. Those reckless Englishmen who boldly sailed out from their little island to face the Spanish Armada were long ago exterminated; an admirably prudent and cautious race has been left alive.

It is the same story elsewhere. The French long cherished the tradition of military glory, and no country has fought so much. We see the result to-day. In no country is the attitude of the intellectual classes so calm and so reasonable on the subject of war, and nowhere is the popular hostility to war so strongly marked. [228] Spain furnishes another instance which is even still more decisive. The Spanish were of old a pre-eminently warlike people, capable of enduring all hardships, never fearing to face death. Their aggressively warlike and adventurous spirit sent them to death all over the world. It cannot be said, even to-day, that the Spaniards have lost their old tenacity and hardness of fibre, but their passion for war and adventure was killed out three centuries ago.

In all these and the like cases there has been a process of selective breeding, eliminating the soldierly stocks and leaving the others to breed the race. The men who so loved fighting that they fought till they died had few chances of propagating their own warlike impulses. The men who fought and ran away, the men who never fought at all, were the men who created the new generation and transmitted to it their own traditions.

This selective process, moreover, has not merely acted automatically; it has been furthered by social opinion and social pressure, sometimes very drastically expressed. Thus in the England of the Plantagenets there grew up a class called "gentlemen"—not, as has sometimes been supposed, a definitely defined class, though they were originally of good birth—whose chief characteristic was that they were good fighting men, and sought fortune by fighting. The "premier gentleman" of England, according to Sir George Sitwell, and an entirely typical representative of his class, was a certain glorious hero who fought with Talbot at Agincourt, and also, as the unearthing of obscure documents shows, at other times indulged in housebreaking, and in wounding with intent to kill, and in "procuring the murder of one Thomas Page, who was cut to pieces while on his knees begging for his life." There, evidently, was a state of society highly favourable to the warlike man, highly unfavourable to the unwarlike man whom he slew in his wrath. Nowadays, however, there has been a revaluation of these old values. The cowardly and no doubt plebeian Thomas Page, multiplied by the million, has succeeded in hoisting himself into the saddle, and he revenges himself by discrediting, hunting into the slums, and finally hanging, every descendant he can find of the premier gentleman of Agincourt.

It must be added that the advocates of the advantages of war are not entitled to claim this process of selective breeding as one of the advantages of war. It is quite true that war is incompatible with a high civilization, and must in the end be superseded. But this method of suppressing it is too thorough. It involves not merely the extermination of the fighting spirit, but of many excellent qualities, physical and moral, which are associated with the fighting spirit. Benjamin Franklin seems to have been the first to point out that "a standing army diminishes the size and breed of the human species." Almost in Franklin's lifetime that was demonstrated on a wholesale scale, for there seems little reason to doubt that the size and stature of the French nation have been permanently diminished by the constant levies of young recruits, the flower of the population, whom Napoleon sent out to death in their first manhood and still childless. Fine physical breed involves also fine qualities of virility and daring which are needed for other purposes than fighting. In so far as the selective breeding of war kills these out, its results are imperfect, and could be better attained by less radical methods.

(5) The Growth of the Anti-Military Spirit. The decay of the warlike spirit by the breeding out of fighting stocks has in recent years been reinforced by a more acute influence of which in the near future we shall certainly hear more. This is the spirit of anti-militarism. This spirit is an inevitable result of the decay of the fighting spirit. In a certain sense it is also complementary to it. The survival of non-fighting stocks by the destruction of the fighting stocks works most effectually in countries having a professional army. The anti-military spirit, on the contrary, works effectually in countries having a national army in which it is compulsory for all young citizens to serve, for it is only in such countries that the anti-militarist can, by refusing to serve, take an influential position as a martyr in the cause of peace.

Among the leading nations, it is in France that the spirit of anti-militarism has taken the deepest hold of the people, though in some smaller lands, notably among the obstinately peaceable inhabitants of Holland, the same spirit also flourishes. Hervé, who is a leader of the insurrectional socialists, as they are commonly called in opposition to the purely parliamentary socialists led by Jaurès,—though the insurrectional socialists also use parliamentary methods,—may be regarded as the most conspicuous champion of anti-militarism, and many of his followers have suffered imprisonment as the penalty of their convictions. In France the peasant proprietors in the country and the organized workers in the town are alike sympathetic to anti-militarism. The syndicalists, or labour unionists with the Confédération Générale du Travail as their central organization, are not usually anxious to imitate what they consider the unduly timid methods of English trade unionists; [229] they tend to be revolutionary and anti-military. The Congress of delegates of French Trade Unions, held at Toulouse in 1910, passed the significant resolution that "a declaration of war should be followed by the declaration of a general revolutionary strike." The same tendency, though in a less radical form, is becoming international, and the great International Socialist Congress at Copenhagen has passed a resolution instructing the International Bureau to "take the opinion of the organized workers of the world on the utility of a general strike in preventing war." [230] Even the English working classes are slowly coming into line. At a Conference of Labour Delegates, held at Leicester in 1911, to consider the Copenhagen resolution, the policy of the anti-military general strike was defeated by only a narrow majority, on the ground that it required further consideration, and might be detrimental to political action; but as most of the leaders are in favour of the strike policy there can be no doubt that this method of combating war will shortly be the accepted policy of the English Labour movement. In carrying out such a policy the Labour Party expects much help from the growing social and political power of women. The most influential literary advocate of the Peace movement, and one of the earliest, has been a woman, the Baroness Bertha von Suttner, and it is held to be incredible that the wives and mothers of the people will use their power to support an institution which represents the most brutal method of destroying their husbands and sons. "The cause of woman," says Novikov, "is the cause of peace." "We pay the first cost on all human life," says Olive Schreiner. [231]

The anti-militarist, as things are at present, exposes himself not only to the penalty of imprisonment, but also to obloquy. He has virtually refused to take up arms in defence of his country; he has sinned against patriotism. This accusation has led to a counter-accusation directed against the very idea of patriotism. Here the writings of Tolstoy, with their poignant and searching appeals for the cause of humanity as against the cause of patriotism, have undoubtedly served the anti-militarists well, and wherever the war against war is being urged, even so far as Japan, Tolstoy has furnished some of its keenest weapons. Moreover, in so far as anti-militarism is advocated by the workers, they claim that international interests have already effaced and superseded the narrower interests of patriotism. In refusing to fight, the workers of a country are simply declaring their loyalty to fellow-workers on the other side of the frontier, a loyalty which has stronger claims on them, they hold, than any patriotism which simply means loyalty to capitalists; geographical frontiers are giving place to economic frontiers, which now alone serve to separate enemies. And if, as seems probable, when the next attempt is made at a great European war, the order for mobilization is immediately followed in both countries by the declaration of a general strike, there will be nothing to say against such a declaration even from the standpoint of the narrowest patriotism, although there may be much to say on other grounds against the policy of the general strike. [232]

If we realize what is going on around us, it is easy to see that the anti-militarist movement is rapidly reaching a stage when it will be easily able, even unaided, to paralyse any war immediately and automatically. The pioneers in the movement have played the same part as was played in the seventeenth century by the Quakers. In the name of the Bible and their own consciences, the Quakers refused to recognize the right of any secular authority to compel them to worship or to fight; they gained what they struggled for, and now all men honour their memories. In the name of justice and human fraternity, the anti-militarists are to-day taking the like course and suffering the like penalties. To-morrow, they also will be revered as heroes and martyrs.

(6) The Over-growth of Armaments. The hostile forces so far enumerated have converged slowly on to war from such various directions that they may be said to have surrounded and isolated it; its ultimate surrender can only be a matter of time. Of late, however, a new factor has appeared, of so urgent a character that it is fast rendering the question of the abolition of war acute: the over-growth of armaments. This is, practically, a modern factor in the situation, and while it is, on the surface, a luxury due to the large surplus of wealth in great modern states, it is also, if we look a little deeper, intimately connected with that decay of the warlike spirit due to selective breeding. It is the weak and timid woman who looks nervously under the bed for the burglar who is the last person she really desires to meet, and it is old, rich, and unwarlike nations which take the lead in laboriously protecting themselves against enemies of whom there is no sign in any quarter. Within the last half-century only have the nations of the world begun to compete with each other in this timorous and costly rivalry. In the warlike days of old, armaments in time of peace consisted in little more than solid walls for defence, a supply of weapons stored away here and there, sometimes in a room attached to the parish church, and occasional martial exercises with the sword or the bow, which were little more than an amusement. The true fighting man trusted to his own strong right arm rather than to armaments, and considered that he was himself a match for any half-dozen of the enemy. Even in actual time of war it was often difficult to find either zeal or money to supply the munitions of war. The Diary of the industrious Pepys, who achieved so much for the English navy, shows that the care of the country's ships mainly depended on a few unimportant officials who had the greatest trouble in the world to secure attention to the most urgent and immediate needs.

A very difficult state of things prevails to-day. The existence of a party having for its watchword the cry for retrenchment and economy is scarcely possible in a modern state. All the leading political parties in every great state—if we leave aside the party of Labour—are equally eager to pile up the expenditure on armaments. It is the boast of each party, not that it spends less, but more, than its rivals on this source of expenditure, now the chief in every large state. Moreover, every new step in expenditure involves a still further step; each new improvement in attack or defence must immediately be answered by corresponding or better improvements on the part of rival powers, if they are not to be outclassed. Every year these moves and counter-moves necessarily become more extensive, more complex, more costly; while each counter-move involves the obsolescence of the improvements achieved by the previous move, so that the waste of energy and money keeps pace with the expenditure. It is well recognized that there is absolutely no possible limit to this process and its constantly increasing acceleration.

There is no need to illustrate this point, for it is familiar to all. Any newspaper will furnish facts and figures vividly exemplifying some aspect of the matter. For while only a handful of persons in any country are sincerely anxious under present conditions to reduce the colossal sums every year wasted on the unproductive work of armament; an increasing interest in the matter testifies to a vague alarm and anxiety concerning the ultimate issue. For it is felt that an inevitable crisis lies at the end of the path down which the nations are now moving.

Thus, from this point of view, the end of war is being attained by a process radically opposite to that by which in the social as well as in the physical organism ancient structures and functions are outgrown. The usual process is a gradual recession to a merely vestigial state. But here what may perhaps be the same ultimate result is being reached by the more alarming method of over-inflation and threatening collapse. It is an alarming process because those huge and heavily armed monsters of primeval days who furnish the zoological types corresponding to our modern over-armed states, themselves died out from the world when their unwieldy armament had reached its final point of expansion. Will our own modern states, one wonders, more fortunately succeed in escaping from the tough hides that ever more closely constrict them, and finally save their souls alive?

(7) The Dominance of Social Reform. The final factor in the situation is the growing dominance of the process of social reform. On the one hand, the increasing complexity of social organisation renders necessary a correspondingly increasing expenditure of money in diminishing its friction and aiding its elaboration; on the other hand, the still more rapidly increasing demands of armament render it ever more difficult to devote money to such social purposes. Everywhere even the most elementary provision for the finer breeding and higher well-being of a country's citizens is postponed to the clamour for ever new armaments. The situation thus created is rapidly becoming intolerable.

It is not alone the future of civilization which is for ever menaced by the possibility of war; the past of civilization, with all the precious embodiments of its traditions, is even more fatally imperilled. As the world grows older and the ages recede, the richer, the more precious, the more fragile, become the ancient heirlooms of humanity. They constitute the final symbols of human glory; they cannot be too carefully guarded, too highly valued. But all the other dangers that threaten their integrity and safety, if put together, do not equal war. No land that has ever been a cradle of civilization but bears witness to this sad truth. All the sacred citadels, the glories of humanity,—Jerusalem and Athens, Rome and Constantinople,—have been ravaged by war, and, in every case, their ruin has been a disaster that can never be repaired. If we turn to the minor glories of more modern ages, the special treasure of England has been its parish churches, a treasure of unique charm in the world and the embodiment of the people's spirit: to-day in their battered and irreparable condition they are the monuments of a Civil War waged all over the country with ruthless religious ferocity. Spain, again, was a land which had stored up, during long centuries, nearly the whole of its accumulated possessions in every art, sacred and secular, of fabulous value, within the walls of its great fortress-like cathedrals; Napoleon's soldiers over-ran the land, and brought with them rapine and destruction; so that in many a shrine, as at Montserrat, we still can see how in a few days they turned a Paradise into a desert. It is not only the West that has suffered. In China the rarest and loveliest wares and fabrics that the hand of man has wrought were stored in the Imperial Palace of Pekin; the savage military hordes of the West broke in less than a century ago and recklessly trampled down and fired all that they could not loot. In every such case the loss is final; the exquisite incarnation of some stage in the soul of man that is for ever gone is permanently diminished, deformed, or annihilated.