Britain at Bay

IV

ARBITRATION AND DISARMAMENT

To some people the place of war in the economy of nations appears to be unsatisfactory. They think war wicked and a world where it exists out of joint. Accordingly they devote themselves to suggestions for the abolition of war and for the discovery of some substitute for it. Two theories are common; the first, that arbitration can in every case be a substitute for war, the second that the hopes of peace would be increased by some general agreement for disarmament.

The idea of those who regard arbitration as a universal substitute for war appears to be that the relations between States can be put upon a basis resembling that of the relations between citizens in a settled and civilised country like our own. In Great Britain we are accustomed to a variety of means for settling disagreements between persons. There are the law courts, there are the cases in which recourse is had, with the sanction of the law courts, to the inquiry and decision of an arbitrator, and in all our sports we are accustomed to the presence of an umpire whose duty it is impartially to see that the rules of the game are observed and immediately to decide all points that might otherwise be doubtful.

The work of an umpire who sees that the rules of the game are observed is based upon the consent of the players of both sides. Without that consent there could be no game, and the consent will be found to be based upon the fact that all the players are brought up with similar traditions and with like views of the nature of the game. Where this unity does not exist, difficulties constantly arise, as is notoriously the case in international sports. The attempt has been made, with constantly increasing success, to mitigate the evils of war by the creation of institutions in some way analogous to that of the umpire in a game. The Declaration of London, recently published, is an agreement between the principal Powers to accept a series of rules concerning maritime war, to be administered by an International Prize Court.

The function of an arbitrator, usually to decide questions of fact and to assess compensation for inconvenience, most commonly the inconvenience occasioned to a private person by some necessary act of the State, also rests upon the consent of the parties, though in this case the consent is usually imposed upon them by the State through some legislative enactment or through the decision of a court. The action of a court of law, on the other hand, does not rest upon the consent of the parties. In a civil action the defendant may be and very often is unwilling to take any part in the proceedings. But he has no choice, and, whether he likes it or not, is bound by the decision of the court. For the court is the State acting in its judicial capacity with a view to insure that justice shall be done. The plaintiff alleges that the defendant has done him some wrong either by breach of contract or otherwise, and the verdict or judgment determines whether or not this is the case, and, if it is, what compensation is due. The judgment once given, the whole power of the State will be used to secure its execution.

The business of a criminal court is the punishment of offenders whom it is the function of the State to discover, to bring to trial, and, when convicted, to punish. The prisoner's consent is not asked, and the judgment of the court is supported by the whole power of the State.

In the international sphere there is no parallel to the action either of a civil or of a criminal court. Civil and criminal jurisdiction are attributes of sovereignty, and over two independent States there is no sovereign power. If, therefore, it is desired to institute between two States a situation analogous to that by which the subjects of a single Government are amenable to judicial tribunals, the proper way is to bring the two States under one sovereignty. This can be effected, and is constantly effected, by one of two methods. Either the two States federate and form a united State, or one of them conquers and annexes the other. The former process has been seen in modern times in the formation of the United States of America: the latter formed the substance of the history of civilisation during the first three centuries before Christ, when the Roman State successively conquered, annexed, and absorbed all the other then existing States surrounding the basin of the Mediterranean.

The history of no State justifies the belief that order and justice can successfully be maintained merely by the action of umpires and of arbitrators. Every State worth the name has had to rely upon civil and criminal courts and upon law enforced by its authority, that is, upon a series of principles of right expressed in legislation and upon an organisation of force for the purpose of carrying those principles into practical effect.

It appears, then, that so far from the experience of States justifying the view that it is wrong to employ force, the truth is that right or law, unless supported by force, is ineffective, that the objection in principle to any use of force involves anarchy, or the cessation of the State, and that the wish to substitute judicial tribunals for war as a means of settling disputes between State and State is a wish to amalgamate under a single Government all those States which are to benefit by the substitution.

The reasonable attitude with regard to arbitration is to accept it whenever the other side will accept it. But if the adversary refuses arbitration and insists upon using force, what course is open to any State but that of resisting force by force?

Arbitration has from the earliest times been preferred in most of those cases to which it was applicable, that is, in cases in which there was a basis of common view or common tradition sufficient to make agreement practicable. But wherever there has been a marked divergence of ideals or a different standard of right, there has been a tendency for each side to feel that to submit its conscience or its convictions of right, its sense of what is most sacred in life, to an outside judgment would involve a kind of moral suicide. In such cases every nation repudiates arbitration and prefers to be a martyr, in case of need, to its sense of justice. It is at least an open question whether the disappearance of this feeling would be a mark of progress or of degeneration. At any rate it is practically certain that the period when it will have disappeared cannot at present be foreseen.

The abolition of war, therefore, involves the abolition of independent States and their amalgamation into one. There are many who have hoped for this ideal, expressed by Tennyson when he dreamed of

"The Parliament of man, the Federation of the world."

That it is the ultimate destiny of mankind to be united under a single Government seems probable enough, but it is rash to assume that that result will be reached either by a process of peaceful negotiation, or by the spread of the imperfect methods of modern democratic government. The German Empire, with its population of sixty millions, educated by the State, disciplined by the State, relying on the State, and commanded by the State, is as potent in comparison with the less disciplined and less organised communities which surround it as was, in the third century before Christ, the Roman State in comparison with the disunited multitude of Greek cities, the commercial oligarchy of Carthage, and the half-civilised tribes of Gaul and Spain. Unless the other States of Europe can rouse themselves to a discipline as sound and to an organisation as subtle as those of Prussia and to the perception of a common purpose in the maintenance of their independence, the union of Europe under a single Government is more likely to be brought about by the conquering hand of Germany than by the extension of democratic institutions and of sentimental good understandings.

Proposals for disarmament stand on an entirely different footing from proposals to agree to arbitration. The State that disarms renounces to the extent of its disarmament the power to protect itself. Upon what other power is it suggested that it should rely? In the last analysis the suggestion amounts to a proposal for the abolition of the State, or its abandonment of its claim to represent the right. Those who propose agreements for disarmament imagine that the suggestion if adopted would lead to the establishment of peace. Have they considered the natural history of peace as one of the phenomena of the globe which we inhabit? The only peace of any value is that between civilised nations. It rests either upon the absence of dispute between them or upon an equilibrium of forces. During the last few centuries there has usually been at the end of a great European war a great European congress which has regulated for the time being the matters which were in dispute, and the treaty thus negotiated has remained for a long time the basis of the relations between the Powers. It is always a compromise, but a compromise more or less acceptable to all parties, in which they acquiesce until some change either by growth or decay makes the conditions irksome. Then comes a moment when one or more of the States is dissatisfied and wishes for a change. When that has happened the dissatisfied State attempts to bring about the change which it desires, but if the forces with which its wish is likely to be opposed are very great it may long acquiesce in a state of things most distasteful to it. Let there be a change in the balance of forces and the discontented State will seize the opportunity, will assert itself, and if resisted will use its forces to overcome opposition. A proposal for disarmament must necessarily be based upon the assumption that there is to be no change in the system, that the status quo is everywhere to be preserved. This amounts to a guarantee of the decaying and inefficient States against those which are growing and are more efficient. Such an arrangement would not tend to promote the welfare of mankind and will not be accepted by those nations that have confidence in their own future. That such a proposal should have been announced by a British Government is evidence not of the strength of Great Britain, not of a healthy condition of national life, but of inability to appreciate the changes which have been produced during the last century in the conditions of Europe and the consequent alteration in Great Britain's relative position among the great Powers. It was long ago remarked by the German historian Bernhardi that Great Britain was the first country in Europe to revive in the modern world the conception of the State. The feudal conception identified the State with the monarch. The English revolution of 1688 was an identification of the State with the Nation. But the nationalisation of the State, of which the example was set in 1688 by Great Britain, was carried out much more thoroughly by France in the period that followed the revolution of 1789; and in the great conflict which ensued between France and the European States the principal continental opponents of France were compelled to follow her example, and, in a far greater degree than has ever happened in England, to nationalise the State. It is to that struggle that we must turn if we are to understand the present condition of Europe and the relations of Great Britain to the European Powers.

V

THE NATIONALISATION OF WAR

The transformation of society of which the French Revolution was the most striking symptom produced a corresponding change in the character of war.

By the Revolution the French people constituted itself the State, and the process was accompanied by so much passion and so much violence that it shortly involved the reconstituted nation in a quarrel with its neighbours the Germanic Empire and Prussia, which rapidly developed into a war between France and almost all the rest of Europe. The Revolution weakened and demoralised the French army and disorganised the navy, which it deprived of almost all its experienced officers. When the war began the regular army was supplemented by a great levy of volunteers. The mixed force thus formed, in spite of early successes, was unable to stand against the well-disciplined armies of Austria and Prussia, and as the war continued, while the French troops gained solidity and experience, their numbers had to be increased by a levy en masse or a compulsory drafting of all the men of a certain age into the army. In this way the army and the nation were identified as they had never been in modern Europe before, and in the fifth year of the war a leader was found in the person of General Bonaparte, who had imbued himself with the principles of the art of war, as they had been expounded by the best strategists of the old French army, and who had thus thought out with unprecedented lucidity the method of conducting campaigns. His mastery of the art of generalship was revealed by his success in 1796, and as the conflict with Europe continued, he became the leader and eventually the master of France. Under his impulse and guidance the French army, superior to them in numbers, organisation, and tactical skill, crushed one after another the more old-fashioned and smaller armies of the great continental Powers, with the result that the defeated armies, under the influence of national resentment after disaster, attempted to reorganise themselves upon the French model. The new Austrian army undertook its revenge too soon and was defeated in 1809; but the Prussian endeavour continued and bore fruit, after the French disasters in Russia of 1812, in the national rising in which Prussia, supported by Russia and Austria and assisted by the British operations in the Peninsula, overthrew the French Empire in 1814.

After the definitive peace, deferred by the hundred days, but finally forced upon France on the field of Waterloo, the Prussian Government continued to foster the school of war which it had founded in the period of humiliation. Prussian officers trained in that school tried to learn the lessons of the long period of war which they had passed through. What they discovered was that war between nations, as distinct from war between dynasties or royal houses, was a struggle for existence in which each adversary risked everything and in which success was to be expected only from the complete prostration of the enemy. In the long run, they said to themselves, the only defence consists in striking your adversary to the ground. That being the case, a nation must go into war, if war should become inevitable, with the maximum force which it can possibly produce, represented by its whole manhood of military age, thoroughly trained, organised, and equipped. The Prussian Government adhered to these ideas, to which full effect was given in 1866, when the Prussian army, reorganised in 1860, crushed in ten days the army of Austria, and in 1870 when, in a month from the first shot fired, it defeated one half of the French army at Gravelotte and captured the other half at Sedan. These events proved to all continental nations the necessity of adopting the system of the nation in arms and giving to their whole male population, up to the limits of possibility, the training and the organisation necessary for success in war.

The principle that war is a struggle for existence, and that the only effective defence consists in the destruction of the adversary's force, received during the age of Napoleon an even more absolute demonstration at sea than was possible on land. Great Britain, whether she would or no, was drawn into the European conflict. The neglect of the army and of the art of war into which, during the eighteenth century, her Governments had for the most part fallen, made it impracticable for her to take the decisive part which she had played in the days of William III. and of Marlborough in the struggle against the French army; her contributions to the land war were for the most part misdirected and futile. Her expeditions to Dunkirk, to Holland, and to Hanover embarrassed rather than materially assisted the cause of her allies. But her navy, favourably handicapped by the breakdown, due to the Revolution, of the French navy, eventually produced in the person of Nelson a leader who, like Napoleon, had made it the business of his life to understand the art of war. His victories, like Napoleon's, were decisive, and when he fell at Trafalgar the navies of continental Europe, which one after another had been pressed into the service of France, had all been destroyed.

Then were revealed the prodigious consequences of complete victory at sea, which were more immediate, more decisive, more far-reaching, more irrevocable than on land. The sea became during the continuance of the war the territory of Great Britain, the open highway along which her ships could pass, while it was closed to the ships of her adversaries. Across that secure sea a small army was sent to Spain to assist the national and heroic, though miserably organised, resistance made by the Spanish people against the French attempt at conquest. The British Government had at last found the right direction for such military force as it possessed. Sir John Moore's army brought Napoleon with a great force into the field, but it was able to retire to its own territory, the sea. The army under Wellington, handled with splendid judgment, had to wait long for its opportunity, which came when Napoleon with the Grand Army had plunged into the vast expanse of Russia. Wellington, marching from victory to victory, was then able to produce upon the general course of the war an effect out of all proportion to the strength of the force which he commanded or of that which directly opposed him.

While France was engaged in her great continental struggle England was reaping, all over the world, the fruits of her naval victories. Of the colonies of her enemies she took as many as she wanted, though at the peace she returned most of them to their former owners. Of the world's trade she obtained something like a monopoly. The nineteenth century saw the British colonies grow up into so many nations and the British administration of India become a great empire. These developments are now seen to have been possible only through the security due to the fact that Great Britain, during the first half of the nineteenth century, had the only navy worth considering in the world, and that during the second half its strength greatly preponderated over that of any of the new navies which had been built or were building. No wonder that when in 1888 the American observer, Captain Mahan, published his volume "The Influence of Sea Power upon History," other nations besides the British read from that book the lesson that victory at sea carried with it a prosperity, an influence, and a greatness obtainable by no other means. It was natural for Englishmen to draw the moral which was slumbering in the national consciousness that England's independence, her empire, and her greatness depended upon her sea power. But it was equally natural that other nations should draw a different moral and should ask themselves why this tremendous prize, the primacy of nations and the first place in the world, should for ever belong to the inhabitants of a small island, a mere appendage to the continent of Europe.

This question we must try to answer. But before entering upon that inquiry I will ask the reader to note the great lesson of the age of Napoleon and of Nelson. It produced a change in the character of war, which enlarged itself from a mere dispute between Governments and became a struggle between nations. The instrument used was no longer a small standing army, but the able-bodied male population in arms. Great Britain indeed still retained her standing army, but for the time she threw her resources without stint into her navy and its success was decisive.

VI

THE BALANCE OF POWER

We have seen what a splendid prize was the result of British victory at sea, supplemented by British assistance to other Powers on land, a century ago. We have now to ask ourselves first of all how it came about that Great Britain was able to win it, and afterwards whether it was awarded once for all or was merely a challenge cup to be held only so long as there should be no competitor.

The answer to the first question is a matter of history. England was peculiarly favoured by fortune or by fate in the great struggles through which, during a period of three hundred years, she asserted and increased her superiority at sea until a century ago it became supremacy. She rarely had to fight alone. Her first adversary was Spain. In the conflict with Spain she had the assistance of the Dutch Provinces. When the Dutch were strong enough to become her maritime rivals she had for a time the co-operation of France. Then came a long period during which France was her antagonist. At the beginning of this epoch William III. accepted the British crown in order to be able to use the strength of England to defend his native country, Holland. His work was taken up by Marlborough, whose first great victory was won in co-operation with the Imperial commander, Prince Eugene. From that time on, each of the principal wars was a European war in which France was fighting both by sea and land, her armies being engaged against continental foes, while Great Britain could devote her energies almost exclusively to her navy. In the Seven Years' War it was the Prussian army which won the victories on land, while small British forces were enabled by the help of the navy to win an Empire from France in Canada, and to lay the foundations of the British Empire in India. In the war of American Independence, Great Britain for once stood alone, but this was the one conflict which contributed little or nothing towards establishing the ascendency of the British navy. Great Britain failed of her object because that ascendency was incomplete. Then came the wars of the French Revolution and Empire in which the British navy was the partner of the Austrian, Prussian, Russian, and Spanish armies.

These are the facts which we have to explain. We have to find out how it was that so many continental nations, whether they liked it or not, found themselves, in fighting their own battles, helping to bring about the British predominance at sea. It must be remembered that land warfare involves much heavier sacrifices of life than warfare at sea, and that though Great Britain no doubt spent great sums of money not merely in maintaining her navy but also in subsidising her allies, she could well afford to do so because the prosperity of her over-sea trade, due to her naval success, made her the richest country in Europe. The other nations that were her allies might not unnaturally feel that they had toiled and that Great Britain had gathered the increase. What is the explanation of a co-operation of which in the long run it might seem that one partner has had the principal benefit?